This is 7 am Bumble ramblings special but I’ll never get over how nothing in Schlatt’s arc could have saved him. There was nothing anyone could have done. Nothing. Even if you liked Schlatt, even if you were a fan of his. Even if you supported all his choices. There was never anything that could have been done.
There’s a growing feeling of dread as you watch his decline through other people’s eyes.
Jeering eyes. People who laugh and scoff when he can’t run or speak without coughing. People who roll their eyes when he can’t swim properly or jump well. People who call him stupid for not knowing how enderchests work.
He slowly grows sicker. He starts drinking more just to sleep. He gets paranoid. Erratic. In the beginning his manipulations of Quackity and others are overt and threatening to keep his power in place but despite being someone they don’t seem scared of his air of authority keeps his cabinet in line far longer than it had any right to, really. Toward the end he’s just unpredictable and angry, constantly ill and hungover and drunk.
C!Schlatt isn’t stupid. If he doesn’t already know, he at least suspects that his entire inner circle are disloyal. He tries anyways.
I’m not saying he’s a good president. He’s not,and I have no delusions about that.
But he’s a sick man who clearly used to hold some amount of sway, who used to be friends with the entire server. And the entire server showed up to watch him die without lifting a finger.
How fucked up is that?
I know it’s for the narrative. I know. But it absolutely kills me inside, this idea that someone you had any good memory with at all, that you could plot to kill them and then watch them die without a single shred of pity for them as they gasp.
How do you spend months interacting with someone you hate and not at least care that they die with some dignity if nothing else because they’re a human you knew personally? How can you not at the very least pity them? Feel sympathy for their pain even if you don’t feel any compassion for them? Were his sins that grave?
Can you imagine being so thoroughly unloved and disliked and mocked and reviled that nobody cares when you died. Can you imagine being so bereft of any care, fuck, pity, even, that when your heart suddenly seizes in a roomful of enemies who used to be your friends and you struggle to draw a breath that the people around you still laugh before they realize it's stopped beating. Because when they do, they cheer.
What did you do to deserve this? What did you do.
Nobody even steps forward to catch you when you fall, your body already cold, nobody even bothers to make sure your fresh corpse doesn't unceremoniously crash into the dirt.
What did you do??
They cheer while the crumpled thing that used to be you lays on the floor of a dessicated old drug van, and the only thing pretty about it is the shine of the broken glass bottle that slipped from your nerveless hand.
What did you do.
You won an election.
You were coarse and rude and unkind. You were difficult, difficult to care about, but that didn’t mean that someone shouldn’t have at least cared enough to save you. To help you. To remember that you were human.
You were just human.
You were just human.
You were wrong, and you were doomed either to your own body or to die at someone else’s hand.
You were doomed.
You were doomed.
You were doomed.