So Anti’s back. Time to hyperfocus
Today’s episode of Hyperfocus is on what Anti says.
So for any of you who are extremely confused (I was too until I did some hardcore searching), Anti made his grand return in the intro for Jack’s PAX East panel. The reason you may be seeing so many phone- recorded videos is because Jack told people to record it on their phones. But... Was it Jack?
We’ll get to that in a minute.
First, let’s start with Anti’s first words, a voiceover on nothing. “Did you miss me?”
Sound familiar? Oh, yeah.
Dark said it when he came back. I’m willing to bet Anti got similar reactions. I, at least, reacted the same way for both: a little flailing, a little fangirling, and repeating, “Yes, yes I did.”
“Look at you all just sitting there, you all thought I was gone. Not worrying about anything. You all thought I was gone, but I’ve been here this entire time, keeping an eye on things.”
Anti, like Dark, wants us to pay attention. The difference here is that while Dark feeds off our attention and needs it (see: “You just need to let me in”), Anti simply craves the attention. As soon as the spotlight was off of him, he got jealous. He lashed out, because he wants to be seen again.
And when he says “I’ve been here this entire time,” that goes along with a lot of theories centered around the idea that Anti really did get rid of Jack on Halloween, and that Anti has just been pretending this entire time. Every glitch and Anti sighting between then and now has been Jack trying to get our attention.
Anti insults us. “Look at you all just sitting there.” He makes us feel at fault. He says we should have been worried. Flashback to Halloween, when he says “This is your fault.” He blames us.
But he’s been here the entire time, which leads me back to what I said above about Jack telling us to record with our phones. Was it Jack? My theory is, no. If Anti claims to have been here this entire time, there has not been a single moment that it has been Jack since before Halloween.
Moreover, I think Anti wanted a record of his reappearance, but in a chaotic way. This wasn’t in a video uploaded to Jack’s channel, it was an intro to a live event. Multiple people record this on their phones and share it on Tumblr, and the entire fandom is thrown into confusion and chaos.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure it was Anti.
“You stopped paying attention. Well, I hope you’re happy. You’ve found someone new. You threw me aside. Someone to replace me.”
I wanted Dark and Anti to get along, but this right here makes me think that if they ever did meet, it would not be good.
Dark said he’d been “Pushed aside, replaced, mocked.” Most people agree that he was referring to Anti here. Anti had been getting most of the attention, and Dark was a little mad about it. But when Dark got to us, when we let him in on Valentine’s, it satiated his need for attention. He believed that he wouldn’t have to deal with Anti anymore, because he came back.
Anti, on the other hand, not only said “Betrayal, neglect, mistake,” he also said this very cryptic little phrase: “cheap imitator.”
Most people, again, agree that after Dark came back, Anti got jealous once again. But instead of saying he’d been pushed aside, replaced, and mocked, he’d been betrayed and neglected. By us. He believes that by even looking at Dark, we’ve betrayed and neglected him. He calls Dark a mistake, and a cheap imitator. Not good.
But then this. “You’ve found someone new. You threw me aside. Someone to replace me.”
Again, the only thing I could imagine he is talking about is Dark. We turned to Dark, and Anti is not happy.
“I’m not going anywhere. I’m always there, always watching. You can’t get rid of me.”
This goes back to above, where Anti says he’s always been there. Not much else to say about this, other than he’s always watching.
He sees everything we do. How we react to him, how we react to Dark. He sees every little headcanon we cook up. And he really doesn’t care what we say. Like Fall Out Boy said, “I don’t care what you think as long as it’s about me.”
Here’s a big difference between Anti and Dark. Dark needs us to trust him and even like him for his plans to play out. Anti, on the other hand, just wants us to watch. He doesn’t care about controlling us, because he believes he can do anything on his own. We can’t get rid of him. When he says that, he shows that he truly doesn’t care what we think as long as we pay more attention to him than Dark.
The first thing that popped into my head was Mark’s Raspy Hill video, which was arguably an early Darkiplier appearance. Although it isn’t canonical or acknowledged by Mark, we all kind of understand it to be Dark. (Sidenote, even back then, before Dark had concrete characteristics, we can still see him trying to make us trust him. More on that if you want it. Hmu.) In that video, Dark says, “Enjoy your stay.”
Enjoy is the key word here. I don’t think either Dark or Anti truly meant that they want us to enjoy in the common sense of the word. They meant to pay attention, and don’t try to leave. No matter what, the show is going to be worth watching.
Edit: I’ve been reminded of Natewantstobattle’s Sister Location song “Enjoy the Show” featuring Jack and HOW COULD I FORGET. And, yeah, maybe Anti threw that little reference in there for kicks and giggles. Anti likes showing up in horror games, doesn’t he? I highly doubt that Anti was making direct reference to Dark, and it’s entirely possible that he was referencing the song “Enjoy the Show,” but at this point it’s impossible to separate Anti and Dark completely. There is undeniable interaction between the two.
Oh, and the sliced neck? Yeah, kind of confirms that Jack is gone. Anti has been in control since Halloween.
And the gauges? Most likely a canonical character trait. Makes Anti edgier.
