this is crazy timing, because just today mage was liveblogging season 3 rek being. what i definitely wouldn’t describe as non-violent. anyways, short answer, no. long answer, also no. because yes, rek isn’t someone who’s driven by pure violence, but that doesn’t make him non-violent, or peaceful. at rek’s core, he pursues fun. he wants to do what he finds to be fun, and if there’s no percieved reason why he shouldn’t do it (such as it directly hurting his team, or hurting other people’s content), he’ll just follow his whims. i’ve made a post about this before; nowadays, rek doesn’t find pvp— the lifesteal smp kit— to be fun, or engaging to him, so he doesn’t really fight. that wasn’t always the case, though; rek’s literal sole reason for joining decimation was “i just wanna kill people”. he has absolutely zero qualms with being violent, and in the past he’s been more than willing to be very violent in his ways if it’s something fun for him.
Do you have any fic with good rekrap characterisation that you would recommand? Or that you personaly really like?
right off the bat, i love ian’s s7 blue ice study and en’s naa rapiers study, as well as pidge’s pov-other s7 rek study and their s3 rek study. i also definitely recommend fox_kat’s s5 fast forward study, thatapolloguy’s lavendershine aus fic, and trafficpose’s (technically diamond duo?) wrestling au study. i think the only other fic i’d recommend for characterization isn’t really a rek fic, sadly.
one of the big reasons why i like apocalypse’s end arc (or more specifically sb and rek’s) so much is in big part because of its sense of ephemeral freedom, if that makes sense? because— this is lifesteal, right, a server that’s built itself on constant danger and that’s beat neverending wariness into its players until they wear it like a second skin. the server’s gimmick alone inherently breeds competition and conflict, even without taking into account the players on it and how their differences affect their actions and relationships with others. when watching a lifesteal stream, when on lifesteal, there will always be that sort of danger lurking in the background, the potential to be jumped or trapped or hunted. but— during the end arc, even if it was only for a little while, that wasn’t the case.
it’s an obvious byproduct of sealing back up the end behind you; for almost a full month, team apocalypse were the sole inhabitants of the end. but this respite, this sense of safety, is such a change of pace from how lifesteal usually is, especially in regards to apocalypse. in season 7, apocalypse was a team that was hunted from nearly day 1. they had what, under than two days before the hunt for their orbital really kicked into play? and then past that, once they’d succeeded in their plan— in minute’s own words, “we’re gonna have an infinite target on our backs”. and they did! people were constantly mistrustful of apoc no matter what, they were blacklisted from things like the end item events, and, just like minute said, every member of apocalypse became a kill-on-sight target to a lot of people. not even just kill-on-sight; they were being hunted down. and it’s not like apoc didn’t know this would end up happening, didn’t account for it in their lists of pros and cons, and didn’t throw that worry to the wind anyways. but it still makes this sudden freedom to be such a novelty, really, something almost jarring in how peaceful it is. at the same time, though, it’s nice.
yes, this is lifesteal, and its inherent conflicts and heart culture— all of which need people— are so integral to it, and to its success as a server. and these are all things i love about it! but there’s just something about how rek built a beautiful base in the end, turning the main end island from plain to a beautifully decorated— aboveground!— base, making it a colourful whirl of greens and purples and pinks. hell, he made paths. there’s something about apocalypse’s end civilization, about its custom-designed and custom-built floating island made not just of plain endstone, but trimmed with obsidian at the bottom, blending all the way up into a carefully chosen gradient to its main body, and there’s something about its white castle, the outside still lovingly trimmed and detailed even in its unfinished state, and its inside much the same, a true base all out in the open. and, especially to me, there’s something in how the entirety of the lived-in end is filled to the brim with both rek and sb, the way rek’s storage systems are all labeled with named items for sb, the way sb contributes to end civ’s castle in the way he’s confident in by building farms and getting resources for rek and making the base functional, the way sb’s fountain tnt duper has a large green-stained glass front panel because rek had said he wanted to see the tnt fall in, the way they casually keep everything of theirs together, leaving around shulkers of gifts and materials and whatever they feel like at the time, really, because what’s mine is yours. what rek and sb built was less a base and more a home, something that is otherwise never truly possible on a server like lifesteal. throughout that one month, the two of them poured in their heart and soul to build something that they knew was so fleeting— and yet they built something all the more beautiful for it.
Do you have any thoughts on Rek during earlier seasons (S2-S4)? I can struggle to pin down his character, and the recent uptick in text posts, clips, and tagged reblogs (along with the answers to my ask) from you and others help a lot in avoiding some common misconceptions. However, a lot of these focus on his S6 and S7, and his past character also is difficult to me. Is there anything that you’d say was of note, and/or any reason there’s less talk about it?
i think we just talk more from s6 and s7 because there are actually streams to analyze LMAO. s2-s4 is rough because of how little they've been documented and also how the majority of things we can analyze about rek comes from other people's videos (and streams, when applicable), but we gotta work with what we've got, and about a month or so ago i actually did watch every single s2 video for the sole purpose of seeing what s2 rek was like, so i've got a couple tidbits about that lol
(just typed everything. i'm putting this under a readmore i yapped way too much LMAO)
for a couple of interesting things from s2:
parrot and spoke were threatening to kill clutch, who had just joined the server that day. clutch asked rek, who was in the vc, for help, but when he showed up, he started threatening him alongside parrot and spoke
came up with the plan for jaron to pretend to be him when scamming clown; he's a pretty good liar even though he says he doesn't like lying and thinks he's bad at acting
rigged m.o.b's old base with spoke (SPOKE: right when we come through their front door, we need to just yell at them like, "hey, we don't want violence, we just wanna talk." / REK: [laughs] until we blow up their base.)
stole zam's among us statue and left her a series of riddles to follow in order to get it back, creating the scavenger hunt while he was undercover in her detective agency pretending to help her solve the clues at the same time
pretended to not know about the anvils poafa tried to kill him with after poafa used the trap on leo, despite the fact that he had gone back and secretly stolen about half of them
pulled the cake lag trap under m.o.b tower to help poggies win the fight against m.o.b, but never actually joined the fight himself
fought in the finale alongside poggies despite not actually knowing why they were fighting in the first place (literally sent a message in chat saying "does anyone know why we're fighting?") and being underprepared (REK: i'm down to my last piece of mutton! how am i supposed to fight these kids?!), but from all the footage i've looked through it seemed like he went deathless and was holding his own pretty well—he popped three of mapicc's (at least i think it was mapicc. it's really hard to tell their voices apart sometimes) totems while he only popped once. at some point he also asked if anyone had "copious amounts of tnt," as if the 1000 withers weren't blowing things up enough already
there's a couple more things, like rek helping jaron with a flying machine to strand someone in the end, helping poafa and mapicc rig a trap with tnt, vitalasy showing rek the 1000 dogs he was gonna bring to the prom even though they weren't teamed or even really allied in the slightest, clutch getting rek to help him build his void trap, zam paying rek to build a trap intended to trap herself and somehow managing to kill parrot with it instead...
he has a very strange team relationship in s2, as after poggies disbanded he's seen getting along with members of every team that hated them, but old poggies members—namely parrot and spoke—still got him to help with their traps, like the cake lag trap and parrot showing him his void trap. two of his enemies have even expressed liking him, only really targeting him out of his association with poggies: clown, deciding to trap rek instead of outright killing him (REK: what's my guarantee you won't kill me if i just give you my armor right now? / CLOWN: parker, parker. i like you, parker, alright? this is not about you, it's about something else. i don't wanna hurt you.); mapicc, fighting him in the finale (MAPICC: kill rek! i like him, but kill him!). it's a sentiment that still carries through to this day—people have never enjoyed killing him because they like him and they tend to avoid it if at all possible, and rek gets to take advantage of it by being granted leniency from his enemies and neutral parties, and gaining information that he can then use to keep himself alive. notably, he doesn't yet have that same sense of team loyalty that'll eventually become his entire thing after he rejoins lifesteal; he's not gonna outright betray his team by any means (at least not on purpose), but he's not necessarily dedicated to them, not in the way he was with the sticklers and apocalypse. he's an opportunist; he'll take whatever he can get and make the most of it. consequently, though, this leads to him feeling distant from his teams. for example, he joins poggies in the finale and fights alongside them, but he doesn't stick around long enough for all of poggies to kill themselves together, nor did he even know what they were fighting for. he also wasn't there for their biggest fights, at most playing support or watching from the sidelines. he was on the team, but he didn't really feel part of it.
but while his loyalties were different, what does stay the same is his fondness for chaos. "kind" and "nice" and "sweet" have all been words that color other players' perceptions of him, but have never really fit his actual actions on the server; he's been a fan of destruction and deception since the day he first logged on, and he tends to get away with it because people like him too much to target him—"yeah, he's associated with the enemy team and i'll attack him if i have to, but it's rekrap2! who could ever hurt dear, sweet rekrap2? i'd feel too bad about it!" morality has never been a factor in his decision-making either; it doesn't matter if something was morally evil or morally good, only whether or not it was fun or interesting, and most often the things that are fun and interesting on lifesteal involve chaos. i can't count the amount of times he's done something purely because he found it funny, and i would list some recent season examples because i think about those the most but i'm trying to stay on topic lmao
(it's hard to say this about s2-s4 because of how little we see so these are recent examples but i just really wanted to say it anyway: this isn't to say that rek doesn't have moments where he's just nice for the sake of it. he helps clear a lot of wardens out of spawn in s6 and he gives pili, jojo, and pangi birthday presents in s7, and while it is just his real self being nice, it has the added effect of contributing to his overall image of being nice on lifesteal, which continues to disincentivize people from targeting him. not that he's completely immune, of course, but sometimes i think about the way zam and pentar completely forgot that there was a reason rek didn't have an elytra, saying that "[he] could probably make a deal [for one].")
what's also really funny about s2 is that i'd argue this is the season that actually started his reputation of being untrappable—there was leo's first armor stand trap where he tried to convince rek he wanted to trap clown, the second armor stand trap in the gameshow that spep was involved with, and poafa's anvil trap, all of which seemingly happened in fairly quick succession.
which leads us into s3. everyone and their damn mother tunnel visions on s3 diamondduo and ignores every other thing that happens, so i'm not gonna open that can of worms (but i will say that there was a moment before zam recruited rek to join her side for the wall war, where she said something about keeping up his untrappable streak, and rek had mentioned that it wasn't the traps that scared him, it was the expectation of maintaining his reputation that was what really stressed him out the most. to reference s7 again, right before he rolled up to jojo's birthday party, upon the chat saying that it might be a trap, he just said, "well, then it's an opportunity to escape." you're gonna look me in the eye and tell me that he fears for his life when he sees traps as "opportunities"?? and also when rek walked into subz's trap and subz had asked whether he wanted the harder, more dangerous challenge or the easier, less dangerous one, rek had just responded with, "which one's more fun?" danger isn't necessarily a deterrent for him when he has the confidence in himself to be able to survive it).
instead, what i will say is that rek embraces chaos even more in this season compared to the last, being recruited by clown to join the dirties and chaos faction, and then later joining decimation, participating in much more pvp than he did in s2 and frankly thriving in it; he was skilled at both candycrushing and cartpvp, being so good at the latter that players had genuinely been scared to fight him. he killed clown at the very beginning of the season (saying that it was something he'd been trying to do for three months last season), and killed branzy twice after accidentally betraying his team (he did say he felt really bad about it, but he also didn't exactly hesitate, especially when terrain was literally right next to branzy the second time). he was also more than happy to help zam with her door-selling business trap, but when it failed to kill clutch, he played dumb and pretended like he didn't even know the trap existed despite literally sitting at the bottom of the spike pit waiting to kill people. he says "yo what's up zam!" when she logs in as he's literally with decimation about to spawntrap her.
i can't really say more as i haven't written notes on every s3 video yet, but ian also talks about his whole party vs policy perspective, which is indicative of how he treats teams and alliances from s2-s4—and that's pretty telling, isn't it? he doesn't particularly care about who he teams with, just that he's teaming with people who he agrees with...and it's important to remember that among those teams are the dirties (fighting against the cleansers who were using an exploit to kill people quickly, with their goal being to equalize everyone on the server back to 10 hearts), chaos faction (fighting both the dirties and the cleansers, with their goal being to hoard all the hearts for themselves and getting his own heart count to 20—which is something he has famously never cared about; he instead was just "having fun killing people and stealing their hearts"), and decimation (banning everyone off the server to bring them to s4).
then, when he had his fun killing people with decimation, he decided to make zam kill him, banning himself off the server on the day of the finale and giving the enemy team 20 hearts.
this marked the true start of an interesting theme that would kind of follow rek into every season afterwards (with the exception of s7. if i had a nickel for every time an mcsr ranked event coincided with a major lifesteal event, i'd have a couple of them), that being his lack of purpose and aimlessness followed by banning himself off the server completely. there's the aforementioned s3, s5 where he didn't even give anyone else time to say goodbye before he jumped in the void, and s6 where it was very much an accident but he found it so funny that he didn't even care, even though he'd just forever altered the trajectory of woogie's life. i have no idea if he banned himself when he left in s4, but his aimlessness definitely haunted him the entire time he was there instead of just at the end of the season.
s4 is the fuzziest for me on account of the fact that rek left halfway through so i don't really have much to analyze here, but there is something i wanna mention that we never and probably will never get an answer to, and if it's gonna haunt me until the end of time then i want it to haunt at least five other people too.
in parrot's movie-length video of his time on lifesteal, there's a part where rek and clown meet up with him to talk. clown says that he and rek want to duo up in order to do something separate from the nppp, but in order to do that they wanted permission for rek to be able to wear pants. parrot grants them permission through the use of clown's pants pass—as he was already specially allowed to wear pants—by splitting it in half, meaning that if one of them had lost their half, they'd immediately become an enemy to the nppp (though that being said, the nppp were never gonna go after clown for breaking the pants rule, so all the danger here was just with rek).
sometime later on one of clown's streams, he and rek are planning to break into a prison at spawn and farm the prisoners inside for hearts, but this doesn't end up working as every cow within a 1000 block radius of spawn had been killed, meaning they couldn't get past the elder guardians' mining fatigue. while they were traipsing around looking for cows, though, they talked about "something secret" they had planned, but decided not to talk about any details, wanting to leave it for their videos (that neither of them ever ended up making, by the way).
back to parrot's video, he wanted to get the pants pass from clown and rek in order to survive a duel he had planned. upon asking rek, however, he simply dodges the question (REK: do you think i have the pass on me right now? / PARROT: ...yes? / REK: okay. well, it was nice talking to you.) and leaves. when parrot asks clown, he says "this no longer has a linked brother, so it's completely useless now" and gives parrot his half of the pass. as far as i know, this is the last we ever see of rek in s4.
what happened to rek's half of the pass? i don't know. what were clown and rek planning that necessitated them working with just the two of them separate from nppp? i don't fucking know. and i wish i knew So Badly.
anyway i think that's kinda it. i've been writing this thing for so long that i feel like this just turned into me yapping incomprehensively about stuff rather than actual analysis, but hopefully you got something from all of it LMAO. it's really hard to figure out the intricacies of rekrap2, but as someone who's been trying to study this guy's character obsessively for the past 9 months or so, you just gotta remember that he's less risk-averse than most people think, not nearly as paranoid, loves chasing thrills and fun and interesting things, and his favorite type of lie is a white lie.
every time i think about rek and mane’s vague as fuck conversation about the tunnels after mane’s arrow cannon death during season 6 (clip and transcript below), i bemoan that they weren’t still in the main vc with kab, hannah, bacon, and clown, because a conversation like this would be very interesting and very fun to be listening to with absolutely no context, imo.
MANE
Wait, so— Rek and Chief, what were you guys doing?
REK
(tongue click) I mean, I don’t really wanna say— Well. You can- you can guess, Mane. [MANE: Oh, yeah. Okay.] I think you know what we were up to.
MANE
Is that what Chief was doing as well?
REK / CHIEF
Yeah. / Yes, yes, yes.
MANE
Ohhkay. Can I see the additions?
[pause]
REK
Later, yeah.
CHIEF
…Yeah. Not in the current scenario.
MANE
Why not now?
REK
(laughing slightly) Because we’re in a call with ECorridor? and Flame?
rek and possesssiveness is so interesting to think about to me, because i don’t think it’s something you’d really assume about or associate with him, even with more general insight into his character. but, like, he does display possessiveness, in both his words and his actions. it’s in a lot of things, too, all of which i think are indicative about rek. like, the most common examples i can think of are ones related to teams; take rek telling zam that “now [sb]’s real teammate is here” upon joining their voice chat during season 7. rek has a habit of referring to other people on his “team” as his, either by calling them “my boy” / “my boy [name]” (eg: “don’t mess with my boy ash”, “don’t do my boy 4c like that”, “my boy theo”), or just “my”, like when he went “what’s happening to my pangi?” (why did he. say this). he’s also referred to the tunnels in season 6 as “his tunnels”, and the end arc castle in season 7 as “his castle”. but he does this with things that aren’t so clear and cut dry to be his, too— take his recent “hiding in my enemies’ base” video, where when talking about killing ferre, he says that he hadn’t wanted to fight anyone, but that “he’s preventing me from getting to my villagers”. these are ferre’s villagers, in ferre’s base, mind you. like okay rekrap2. sure
BRANZY: Absolutely, yessir.
CLOWN: Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you, as Rekrap would say. Pretty sure he says that.
BRANZY: Thank you, thank you, thank you. Brrrotherrr! Thank you!
CLOWN: (laughs) Does he say that?
BRANZY: (laughing) Yeah, yeah. He's the first person I've heard say "brrrotherrr." (CLOWN, laughing: Really? That's so--) Can't get it out of my head now whenever I hear him talk.
CLOWN: Actually? I can't imagine him saying "brother" like that.
BRANZY: Yeah. Brrrotherrr!
CLOWN: Brother! (laughs) Nice. Good ol' Rekrap.
BRANZY: Good ol' Rekrap.
BRANZY: Does SB, uh, react well to surprises? Like, my bar is-- if you surprise Rek with a good surprise? Oh man, there's no greater feeling.
CLOWN: Ohh, no, he will not react like Rek.
BRANZY: Oh, okay, well that's fine.
CLOWN: There's no competing with Rek; he has the single greatest reactions.
BRANZY: He really does, doesn't he?
CLOWN: Yeah, he does.
sometimes i remember rek telling minute “oh no there’s a very good chance we could die. like, for sure. but come back to the island, now, though, minute, so if we die we die to-” and cutting himself off before he finishes saying “we die together” and then i go insane for the next hour
never getting over this day 1 (day 3) figure 8 clip of rek guessing exactly what 4c was doing while they’re completely seperated and in opposite ends of the nether. mind you they are both actively competing to get to the end first, and 4c has been explicitly trying to talk as vague as possible so rek won’t figure out where he is, track him down, and kill him. if i was in this scenario and rek said this to me i would genuinely tweak
4C
Wait, is this actually about to break? No way. (muttering) Oh my godd.
REK
What, your axe from killing endermen?
4C
[stopping dead]
N-no, no, no. (nervously laughing) How would you know that?
REK
Do you have an iron axe? [4C freezes] I thought you would be rocking a diamond one.
