SHE MISSED EVERYTHING it's so funny to me. XD She's over here having a road trip adventure with her writer buddy, and collecting building materials, and chattering about how she's gonna build this and that and the other thing and Cleo's gonna be so happy--
Meanwhile everyone else is experiencing The Horrors.
vPearl doesn't know what genre she's in and it's protecting her better than any plot armor in the world. Antiplot armor. She's gonna be the final girl just because the story forgot she was there.
Empires Joel wishes he had the lore-deflection powers of vPearl.
(but we do know now that her family isn't dead and that they probably aren't werewolves, which is great.)
What is a song you associate with the hermits? 👀 And also an unpopular opinion?
Hermits in general? I mean... could it be anything other than the legendary Hermit Gang ft. Team S.T.A.R. - The Super Weapon (elybeatmaker Remix)?? XD
(plays this on repeat again)
Unpopular opinion -- it's not unpopular on this site, buuuuut... The hermits should pay less attention to Reddit. It's like only reading the 1-3-star reviews on a book.
Red. Gripping your forearms just a little bit. V!Legundo. Yeah. Red,
YEAH. THE GUY.
I just.
Look, I love Legs already okay, he's so much fun to watch, his editing is on point. And putting the 100 days guy in the "survive and don't die to monsters" world is just really fun.
But. He's. He's a MAN OF SCIENCE. He's told us so a thousand times. Everything has an explanation. Everything can be explained. There's no supernatural reason for any of this... it's not zombies, it's rabies. Skeletons? Um. Not sure, but... probably rabies. It's not a blood moon, it's an eclipse. Um. Every night is an eclipse. It's not magic or consecration it's just superstition and maybe electricity.
And then he gets a book -- and he doesn't really want it, I think he halfway gets confused between "Give it to Martyn, Martyn doesn't want it, now Martyn does want it, do I want it, I don't want it -- HECK FINE I'll read it--"
And now. And now the doctor man. The man of reason. The man of science.
He can banish the undead with supernatural light.
How's he supposed to process that?? Where in his training did he learn that? (there had to be something. somewhere. Assuming he really is a doctor, which is a totally different discussion.)
The man of science can throw magic light from his hands.
He needs to study this. He needs to... he's got to figure this out.
the pattering of feet approaches you rapidly. i too am normal about vampires legundo and coming closer. what say you ~@betweenlands
I need him to have a laboratory and to start experimenting on people.
I need him to refuse to believe in magic.
I need him to be so dangerous to himself and to everyone else because magic can't be real which means this must be in your brain and hey come here I just wanna take a peek. sit down in my lab. pay no attention to the How To Perform Lobotomies for Dummies open on the workbench.
I want him to be even more dangerous than the vampires because the vampires just want to survive and turn the others but Legundo has to force the world back into the box he thinks it came out of and if it doesn't fit he's gonna carve it down until it does. No better recipe for a mad scientist.
...Alternatively I want him to go "Oh. Okay. Magic is real. Cool. Probably should start running scientific tests to sus out the vampires, because heaven knows Avid isn't going to be logical about this." XD
RED!! I wanted to drop in and talk VSMP and I got distracted with reblogs. Hi Red!!
How are you looking at the beacons? On one hand I think it's funny to have capture-the-flag built into the ~✨lore✨~ but, on the other, of course there are ways of taking that seriously; I'm curious about what you've been shaping it into in your daydreaming thus far. My only thought as of now is coopting miasma from pre-germ theory medicine to be an actual thing (separate from microorganisms).
okay i need you to know that I read this ask right before I went to bed last night and I've literally been percolating it for twelve hours. XD Soooo... this is gonna be a long one.
Okay, here's my thesis: a) The beacons are soulstuff, which can be consecrated or defiled by the energy of those around them b) If the rules of consecrating beacons of soulstuff extend to living players, they might actually represent the basis for a vampirism cure.
Aaaand... okay that's a lot to unpack. Warning: long post incoming.
Let's take this a step at a time. First off, let's establish what a beacon is in vanilla minecraft: a nether star surrounded by glass. And what is a nether star? It's what drops from a wither, arguably the most undead of the undead mobs in the game. The wither is the embodiment of undeath, probably because it's created not only from the charred skulls of three undead withering skeletons, but also from however many souls are represented by four cubic metres of soulsand.
I don't think it's too much of a stretch of interpreting/headcanoning vanilla minecraft mechanics to suggest that a nether star is the purified, concentrated soulstuff left over from defeating an undead creature made up of so many souls. All the soulscraps that were left, crushed together in the heat of the wither's belly, all the undeath drawn out of them to power this horrific monster... and when the heart drops, only those tiny pieces of purified soul remain.
And we use it to mine blocks faster smh /silly
Additionally, a beacon requires a base of valuable blocks and to be fed with a scrap of valuable ore in order to power up to its full potential. Most people use iron, since it's generally one of the easiest to come up with in bulk.
Okay, with that established, let's take it back to VSMP.
In this world, they don't have iron, they have silver. Silver is itself resistant to undead but it can be overcome (apparently silver armor and weapons don't do anything special when wielded against vampires). So let's suggest that the beacon bases are made of silver blocks and fed a silver ingot to power up. (I know there's a bit of wobbliness here, because supposedly vampires can't stand on a silver block and the vampires definitely can crouch around the beacons, but forget the actual gameplay and let's lore for a moment lol)
There's also another magical lore element to pull in: the holy spirits. So far, we haven't had much information about what or who they are, and until someone loredrops otherwise, I'm honestly assuming that they're just vague handwavium explanations for why the players can get their own magical abilities.
BUT if we wanted to make them actually make sense... we could suggest that they are the souls of the departed who were not turned to undead. Perhaps the holy spirits are the souls of the citizens of Oakhurst, the ones who were not turned by the vampires. And they are seeing these new arrivals and doing their best to protect these people from the threat of the undead.
But if the holy spirits are the consecrated dead, vampires are the defiled undead, and beacons are purified soulstuff taken from the destroyed undead, that suggests something:
That souls can change state.
If players can be turned by the vampires and become undead, and beacons/soulstuff can be purified, consecrated, and/or desecrated, the only player unaccounted for on the board is the vampires.
And this is where I really go out on a limb. There is no canon evidence (yet) for a cure. The best we've got is Avid's opening animatic where it appears he may have been attempting to come up with a cure for his partner (sister?), and then Legundo's insistence to Owen that he's a doctor, he can help. He can cure them.
Great story content, however it may simply be like I think werewolves are: part of the world, but not part of the mechanics.
BUT. The creators have said that they want VSMP to be a slower-moving, deliberately-told story. It's possible that the mechanic exists, but hasn't been introduced to the story yet.
What would that look like? Maybe it's some variation on the vanilla zombie cure -- a silvered apple instead of a gold one? Or maybe it has something more directly to do with the beacons.
Beacons can give status effects, after all, and could theoretically stand in for a traditional potion of weakness. What if all of the beacons were consecrated, and a vampire, weakened down to three hearts or less, was forced to eat a silvered apple?
Or maybe you just have everyone crouch around a vampire and consecrate them with the Powers of Friendship and Soulstuff.
But. Either way. The only remaining question I have about the beacons is: Who installed them?
That's the big question, right? We don't truly have the full story of Oakhurst yet, or what happened 200 years ago. We have scraps, and differing versions, but they're all from unreliable narrators who are either potentially not remembering right, or else deliberately obscuring facts.
Who remained after the plague/curse/attack/purge? Was there someone who remained who perhaps gathered the undead souls of villagers who had been turned, and purified them to craft the beacons? Were the beacons possibly a relic of the vampire hunters Owen spoke of (assuming there really were such people, which seems questionable)?
Or were they part of whatever ritual put Scott to sleep for so long? In which case, they would predate the 200 year ago fall of Oakhurst and Owen's experiences there. (And if that's the case, I do honestly start going DEEP down the worldbuilding rabbit trail and asking how they put Scott to sleep and what the method was and if it was supposed to be forever and if not how long it was supposed to last and--and then I need to stop because it's probably not that deep lol)
So I don't know where the beacons came from. Or really what they ARE. And I don't know if the lore will ever tell us. All of this is a lot of conjecture pulling from vanilla mechanics and what little solid lore we do have.
But I think that it's safe to say the beacons are made of soulstuff, and I think it's possible that there is a cure for the vampires. Whether or not those things are related remain to be seen, and there's a non-zero chance that a huge lore drop might completely invalidate this entire essay in a week, lol.
Only watched Pearl's Pov today, Need to watch others, but
Holy shit Pearl has missed all the chaos this time around huh? She has been totally and fully just.
Fine.
Missed ALL the chaos!
She wanna hunt werewolves, her family ISNT dead just 'lost'
Hobby is working out, therefor she be buff,
Just . Alot of info, Somehow misses any and all vampire stuff.
Goes out alone MULTIPLE TIMES to get wood, Somehow turns out completely fine just worrying everyone else around her.
Now knowledge that Diamonds can't be made into armour or weapons in this town, Only tools. She got half a stack of diamonds, for... Hoes, Shovels, Axes, and pickaxes i guess. .. Atleast she can technically give to others too if she wants to later?
Pearl is going to be my next watch this evening because I desperately need to see what the heck the chaos of everything looked like from her skipping-through-the-forest perspective. XD
I will come back to this after I've seen her ep, actually, because the bit you put here is Giving Me An Idea but I don't know if it actually holds up lol
But maybe "seeing is believing" IS a good title -- because she hasn't seen anything. So thus, she doesn't believe it, and she won't until she sees it for herself. Honestly, this kind of puts her in a similar position to being the last yellow in a Life series: she's the only unknown, the only unallied element in this world. Both sides are going to be seeking her out, one to protect her, and one to hunt her.
I don't envy Pearl's next session -- she's been Little Red Riding Hood before but this time she's not also the wolf. Not yet anyway.
Cleo just confirmed in their premier chat for episode 5 that: one, permadeath is now on for the vampires smp. And two; some mechanics has been changed due to story reasons in episode 6.
re: your tags on the ao3 bookmark post, the entire discord is organized into categories by fandom and then further separated into gen + ship channels for each one, as well as to-read channels for storing unread fics so i dont clog up my browser tabs 😂😂😂😂 the formatting itself shows the title, author, link, summary, word count, chapters/works, and a space for various emojis i use for finding specific content (ie: first kisses, background romance, etc) :] i also have an emoji named "fave" so i can search up my favorite fics at any point either in a given fandom OR just in general. I am EXTREMELY normal about all of this💥💥💥
this is genuinely genius and I am in awe
i've been using private bookmarks on Ao3 to save in-progress fics and it's so clunky... This gives me so many better ideas.
