rekrap2, as a character, is not paranoid.
when you think about rek’s character, chances are that if you have any thoughts on it, it’s that his paranoia is his big thing, something that’s a core part of him. the truth is, though, that rek isn’t— and was never— truly paranoid.
“but what about the entirety of season 3? what about his reputation as untrappable?”
for one, which is just something smaller i see people get wrong and is definitely fair if you’re only watching rek videos since it’s a bit difficult to garner the exact timeline: the arc of people trying to trap rek wasn’t actually that long. it didn’t start from the beginning of the season, and it definitely wasn’t season-wide; from the end of the season with decimation and the republic, to the princezam empire and the wall war, and even going all the way to the cleansing, trapping rek was no longer a “thing”.
for two, and my main point: rek’s words and actions aren’t those of a paranoid person.
i see people cite how he acted during season 3 as the primary example for why rek is paranoid, and throughout the arc rek was cautious, yes, but it was always justified. just to list off a few examples:
rek hadn’t been distrustful of vitalasy until the failed dripstone cannon when he went to vi’s meeting. he didn’t trust vitalasy in their next meeting (which is the normal response to someone killing you), and from then on he found evidence of vi trying to trap him again and again. also, he watched vi say he would kill rek to his chat.
despite parrot betraying him in the very beginning of the season and trying to kill him before the end fight even happened, rek hadn’t been distrustful of parrot until he quite literally told rek that he was part of the attempt to trap rek in the end. only from then on did he truly question parrot and his actions— and yet, when given a choice between getting away safely and leaving parrot to die to subz or coming out from where he was hiding into the walls of his castle to help parrot fight, he didn’t hesitate to leave his hiding place. he didn’t hesitate to jump up behind subz and start attacking. this is something i’ll come back to later.
paranoia is irrational suspicion, the unfounded belief that everyone is out to get you when they’re not. in rek’s case, they were. what people tend to take as paranoia is just rek exhibiting reasonable caution— and, honestly, most of the time his caution wasn’t reasonable enough.
rek was always cautious of any traps. but rek never stayed away from traps, not if he could help it. this one is partially due to rek’s real-life views on content, and also just partially because of his curiosity. take parrot’s video, for example, where subz brought rek to two extremely suspicious holes in the ground and told rek to choose one and jump in. and rek does! it’s not like he didn’t know it was probably a trap, the same way that it wasn’t that he just didn’t know when people were trying to trap him. his reputation as “untrappable” came from a mixture of caution and luck, not paranoia.
when i mentioned parrot, i talked about how rek had still come out to save him from subz, and there’s two things i have to say about this.
the first point comes from something that stood out to me against the characterization of rek as essentially a paranoid wreck, back when i was first getting into lifesteal. that notion didn’t match up with how rek acted in zam’s tree pilgramage stream (which happened during the trap arc), because he just wasn’t wary of parrot at all. zam even makes a comment on this to parrot, asking “haven’t you tried to kill this guy like two times”? but rek showed no signs of suspecting parrot had a trap, despite parrot being the one to lead their group to the coordinates. the most wary rek acted was when they were going through the nether portal back to the overworld coordinates, and only because he was worried that the other team had trapped it.
the other point i wanted to bring up with rek’s actions— saving parrot— is that it wasn’t just a one-time “swallow your fear” sort of thing; his actions are consistent. branzy and his plan to test rek by trapping himself is the perfect example: branzy and rek are on opposite teams, and branzy has been trying to trap and kill rek this entire time. he intentionally starts out by messaging rek in an ominous manner, and keeps being intentionally suspicious throughout showing rek to see if rek will still put his trust in branzy. and rek is very much suspicious, yes, but when branzy asks rek to trust him and stay standing directly in one place, he does. when branzy makes his grand speech to rek about how if his best friend rek is still in there, rek would “risk his own life in order to save branzy”, rek is already jumping from one gravel block to another to get to branzy before he even finishes the words.
“that’s season 3, but what about other seasons?”
to be honest, i don’t see as much of a reason for people to use the newer seasons as an example for rek being paranoid; i feel it’s mostly because of his existing reputation, a sort of confirmation bias.
yes, in season 6 he built escape tunnels into his starter base and started doing clownpierce checks, but he wasn’t being paranoid. for instance, he didn’t accept any gear that lifestealers offered to give him, and he set up his starter base aboveground in a village, right in the open. in the face of that, his multiple escape routes are completely reasonable, maybe even too little. and yes, the clownpierce checks were funnily named, but as the season went on they were less for checking for clownpierce specifically and more for checking his surroundings if he thought there might be someone nearby, which is just a reasonable thing to do on a server like lifesteal.
i don’t think there’s too much to be said about season 7, but there’s also not much that needs to be said. rek built his base directly under a nether portal and directly part of a stronghold, with the stone covering the entrance from the portal being only a block thick, leading to his base getting found, and him getting jumped and loosing all of his gear and items. ouch.
it’s true that lifesteal has its own fair share of paranoid players— take poafa as an example, who was completely convinced that rek was flying above to search for him and kill him while the two of them were having a chat, or pili, who built his base so out in the depths of the ocean that nobody would ever find his base unless it was leaked— but despite his reputation amongst both the playerbase and the lifestealers themselves, rekrap2 is not one of them.
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