Airrec

do you guys ever think about how c!quackity LIKED the torture. Like straight-up admitted to liking it. Fully with his whole chest embraced sadism. Doesn't regret it. Never recants any of this out loud. Never opens the door to the possibility that he was wrong.

Tortures a guy for three months straight, then shrugs and goes back to his day job.

c!Tommy is not the primary reason that either c!Sam or c!Quackity decide to abuse or torture c!Dream. Tommy is a justification that they both use, to different extents and at different times.

The operative impetus that kicks off the torture is NOT Tommy's death: it is Tommy's REVIVAL.

// dsmp rp

Some thoughts about manipulation:

yeahhh found it

start of the interaction:

reacting to their expressions of fear:

kill + revive:

don't hit me:

just you and me, no one's coming:

no one would know that you died:

where's sam/where are your friends:

i'm going to make every day a living hell:

playing games:

and of course:

“One of us has an axe and the other doesn’t.”/“Whatever you have, I have more.”

“I’m swinging this thing all around you. One hit and you’re done.”/“I’m just toying with you, Tommy. Like I probably could have killed you by now if I really wanted to. It’s just fun.”

Remember when c!Quackity asked c!Technoblade out on a date and got so rejected to the point where Techno didn’t even consider the possibility of them going out and sounded quite disgusted at the idea of going on a pizza date with him and after hearing all this Quackity still decided to ask him out AGAIN less than two months later?

The real reason behind the creation of the butcher army btw

remember how c!techno lied to c!quackity and said he needed to visit c!dream because he owed him a dinner from last time?

The jealousy that must have been seeping through Quackity’s veins in that moment ICBBB

c!Quackity, in prison, dramatic and tearful as he points at c!Dream: WHAT DOES HE HAVE THAT I DON'T?! c!Techno, not understanding the question: adhd...?

// dsmp rp

I've seen a lot of takes involving Quackity having a sense of righteous justice about his own actions, and while I definitely agree to some extent, I think its significance tends to get overplayed. Quackity, in general, has few illusions about what he is.

In the past, it was different. Quackity clearly thought he was in the right during the Butcher Army era, at least for the most part, even if he knew certain actions were extreme (raids, executions, etc). The same can be said about his quest to overthrow tyranny, no matter the cost. Wilbur, Schlatt, Dream—they didn't play fair, so Quackity couldn't either, if he wanted justice to prevail. His measures were justified under the assumption that his enemies were worse. He was an underdog, and he did what was necessary for his survival, and for the survival of his friends, and didn't that make him a hero?

But Doomsday and the disk finale were the breaking point, and his attitude shifted. Nothing changed about the way he looks back on his past—throughout Las Nevadas, he still paints the picture of himself as a victim—but going forward, he seems to gain a new sense of self-awareness, and he thrives on it. He knows the Las Nevadas contract is exploitative; he leaves part of it out when recruiting Purpled because he knows he'll be able to see through it. He tricks Tubbo into handing over the outpost. He keeps visiting the prison long after what could possibly be considered justified. Sam tells him they haven't done anything bad, and Quackity laughs. These aren't actions that he can label as clearly as "necessary"—they are for the furthering of his own goals.

The message has changed. It is no longer "I need to do this to survive", it's "I need to do this to succeed."

@frostycola​ and @levlies889​ have inspired me to continue quackicle truthing

/rp dsmp

This conversation is eliding an extremely important motivation for Dream’s torture: namely, that both Quackity and Sam sincerely thought he DESERVED IT. (And it’s extra ironic because it starts with Dream telling Sam—and perhaps affirming to himself—that he didn’t, that no one does.)

And

Dream continues his insistence on characterizing Sam’s (and Quackity’s! to some extent) motivations as rational. As financial. As professional. As motivations that Dream himself might have shared, in their shoes.

But he knows as well as Sam does that that wasn’t the case. He knows Sam and Quackity thought he deserved it. He knows Sam wanted him under control, he knows Quackity wanted him to suffer, he knows they both enjoyed it, because they’ve both said so to his face.

How much of this mischaracterization is Dream doing for Sam’s benefit? How much for his own? How much determination is it taking for Dream to stand in his cell and look at Sam and say, “I didn’t deserve it,” and know Sam disagrees with him? How much, further, is it taking for Dream to say, I can understand and appreciate your motivations, when he knows how poisonous and personal their hatred is?

exam: quackity, on karl + sapnap

Okay, hear me out: Pandora’s Box | Vault | the Prison in general as an eldritch genius loci.

Brief history: genius loci come from classical Roman religion, and was used to mean a (protective, usually) spirit of a place or location. In Western usage, this term has evolved to also encompass a particular feel or atmosphere of a place. More recently the term has become a trope namer for something not-uncommonly found in the horror genre: an intelligent or sapient location, such as Kurouzu-cho in Junji Ito’s Uzumaki, or the Overlook Hotel in Stephen King’s The Shining. 

Oftentimes, this portrayal of the concept is malevolent or eldritch in nature, and seeks essentially to lure, trap, and then feed on its victims. (Note: not all modern portrayals of this trope belong to the horror genre, but a self-aware place that could potentially do anything tends to lend the mind towards fear, and rather understandably.)

So, what about Pandora? Well… 

The myth of Pandora’s Box has a few versions, but most follow the pattern of Pandora, a human woman, being entrusted with a pithos - a large storage jar (nowadays mostly portrayed as a box due to a 16th century translation error that has persisted) - that she must not under any circumstances open. As is the way with Greek myths, she opens it, and all the evils in the world are released to wreak havoc, save one item in the jar: hope, which remained trapped inside.

Now, coming away from the real world context, imagine this: the Prison as an eldritch, malevolent genius loci. In keeping with the way they called its most secure cell Pandora’s Vault, let’s say it feeds on hope. Specifically, hope that is crushed, hope that never escapes, the pain of having everything torn away. Oh, it likes pain as well, it enjoys torment and torture, dying hopes and dying dreams, the way its prisoners slowly lose their sense of time and sense of identity and sense of a future - their hope - and are drained entirely by its dark halls and bloody cells.

Think of that thing on the map of the Dream SMP. It’s huge. It’s dark. It’s the most eye-catching thing around. It’s been the centrepiece of so many character arcs or has played a significant role in them. It pulls and preys on someone who desires safety, who desires to lock something away, and then its blueprints appear in their mind. They build it. And they come.

It’s bigger than you think it is, complicated and spiralling - maze-like, one could say; one could get lost forever in here - and no one’s ever quite sure where the heck you got all those resources. Netherite blocks for a bridge? Lava lakes and chains and deepslate everywhere, notoriously tedious to mine? It looks like nothing else around; your eyes want to avert when it meets your gaze.

The way it feels like it’s staring back at you. Like it’s assessing. The gaping maw of its insides. The way it’s unarguably hungry. It’s eating the corpses before they know that they are corpses. The searching gaze of the Warden, less and less like themselves and more and more like something else. Every place needs an avatar, after all.

The way that it seems more alive the more screams echo down its halls; perhaps they’ve been echoing for centuries. In the cell - in Pandora’s Vault, where it keeps its most precious thing - Dream thinks he’s going insane. He dreams of being eaten alive by his own creation, and maybe he’s not far wrong.  Every room is a mouth.

The way that hope never escapes as the lid snaps shut, every single time. Pandora’s Vault fears no destruction, by thermonuclear warhead or TNT, Wither or fire. 

It’s older than all of those, born from fear and the way people try to destroy that which makes them afraid, to lock up and look away and never think about the seething hatred and agony they leave behind, content to look away from that which festers, from that which grows so hungry it will devour itself and then turn into a black hole, devouring everything.

And it’ll come back. It always comes back. 

It can be patient that way.

I think about this all the time it literally haunts me. It’s the physical manifestation of fear and suffering. It’s the embodiment of the abject. It’s unknowable. It’s unfathomable. Sam is drawn back to it - he joyfully exclaims “I can go back now!” when Tommy and Tubbo hand over the keycards. Dream is drawn back to it; he makes it his home and hey, maybe it was always meant to be! Maybe he intended that - or maybe he didn’t. Doesn’t matter; it’s all the same now. Tommy is drawn back to it, ostensibly because to him it is an architectural representation of the scariest person he knows, the monster under his bed. One by one, it entraps them.

Vault as predator. Vault as cosmic horror. Maybe it’s physically escapable (Technoblade proved that) but it’s narratively inescapable. It’s a motif that eats people.

But the thing that really makes me insane about the prison is that it’s a monster that had to be made. They made it on purpose. It’s not some ancient evil, it’s not like the egg, it’s not a primordial horror that’s always been around. The prison was created on purpose. There was a time before the prison, but there will never be a time after. It’s not ancient, but it’s omnipotent all the same. They made it that way. Once it’s been built and used, there is no going back. The community that built and maintained and tolerated this place can never go back to being what it was before it decided that it needed a place to lock people up and hurt them and make them invisible.

The Vault is old. Older than a lot of things, but not primordial. Not from before people came around.

The Vault is eldritch and born from human fear and human anger and human suffering, from darkness that people created on purpose and then looked away from, too weak and too fearful to see that which they had created, to gaze upon their reflections.

The black mirror. The black hole. The shadow underneath that grows when it’s fed, when it goes unrecognised, when people won’t shine the light because they fear to see what’s in the darkness. All that pain has to go somewhere. 

Humanity’s mistakes have always come back to haunt them; people say that history echoes. This echo has been reverberating for a long time, and will do so for a long time to come.

It’s hungry. They’re hungry. You’re hungry. Hunger is a foundational, primitive force, older than a lot of things, older, even, than the Vault. It wants to be fed, but it will never be satisfied. 

Build me, it says. Feed me, it means. 

I am born from that which you will not face within yourself. From that which so many would not face within themselves. I grew and grew and grew, and now I am what I am what I am. 

You can’t escape me. Not forever. I am that which clings, that which haunts, that which is your ending but itself never ends. You’ll never be what you were before.

You built me. You invited me in. And that which comes in will make a home, scrape you clean, hollow you out. Even if you destroy me, turn to dust every piece of rubble, you will never ever be the same after. 

What better horror than that which is, ultimately, man-made?

The Vault knows its denizens well.

I don’t want to be alone, whispers Dream’s soul. But he is. And the isolation curls so beautifully around him, the walls of obsidian and the rush of lava muting the outside world, warding it off like a salt circle, but this is no protection. 

The obsidian cries the tears that Dream will not. The lava hisses pain and fury and thinks to burn others and burn itself and slowly cool into that same obsidian when it strikes against the river of sorrow flooding the land, fear and wrath and grief frozen and immortalised forever. Loneliness becomes Dream, makes him beautiful.

You are mine to keep, says the Vault.

I fear not being in control, murmurs Sam’s heart. And so he isn’t, not really. His control is a child’s game, a bloody one, pulling the wings off flies and watching them stumble about, slowly dying. A sandpit in a playground, piled up high and decorated with pebbles, and sat at the top is the king of the castle. This power is temporary, transient, fragile. The house built on the sand will not stand strong against the wind, the rain, time. 

The Vault adores its Warden. Sam can have his control for a while, think that everything is within it, the prison a snowglobe on his desk that he can shake as he likes, just to watch the glitter unsettle and resettle. Encapsulated in this perfect world, he does not see how it’s driving him to tie himself in knots just to keep it how he wants it. Perfection is unattainable, and yet it’s so often sought. This is easy to take advantage of. Sam’s a good Warden.

You are mine to control, says the Vault.

I want to go home, breathes Ranboo’s mind. He never will. They’ve already been taken, already crossed the border, been sent over the river and eaten the pomegranate seeds and taken into himself the sustenance of the dead. They stand there in his cell, waiting, waiting, waiting, and he is standing in his grave, but he doesn’t know it, not yet. 

The Vault likes it when they don’t leave it, when they never manage to leave physically. Not that they ever truly escape, but a predator enjoys the allure of prey that do not see the trap as it snaps around them, do not make it flash its signals and draw them back. Ranboo stands in his cell, in their grave, in a mouth. Death is one slip away, down the throat.

You are already home, says the Vault.

I fear being unable to change, admits Quackity. This is an interesting one; most fear change more than they do re-creation, but Quackity has reinvented himself many times over, stepped into many costumes, put on many faces, and stagnation is his worry. No, deeper: to not be his own creator.

The Vault croons over this friend-lover-leader-politician-follower-enemy-torturer. The artifice of the self is an intriguing thing, and it does so love the pain that Quackity echoes in his every step, his own, others’, blood welling in the footprints sunk into the mud of the land. Quackity invented himself into a part of the Vault, and now he cannot shuck off this role.

You are my creation, says the Vault.

I don’t want to die, they all beg. This is the oldest fear, born from a long, long time ago; the Vault knows it well. How to use it, how to drag it out, how to make someone fear and revere it. It can make death a better place, if it wishes. Or a worse one. One who has been consumed still has to go somewhere, after all.

Life and death, fear and anger, joy and grief - they all circle around, chasing their own tails. The Vault knows this well, too. It takes it all, everything. The Vault has been used in many ways, built by hundreds of hands hundreds of times. By the time the mouth closes, they belong to the Vault in turn.

You are mine, says the Vault. It doesn’t need to provide further clarification.