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autistic | aac user | canine therian

It's a very bittersweet topic to me, and something I still love dearly (even though I don't support a lot of the members anymore). I feel like having experienced the dsmp in real time makes me lucky, in a way. Even if you can manage to find enough archived vods and watch it all start-to-finish now, you'll still miss out on the interactive parts. The fandom being alive and well.

Being in the chats, participating in the election, watching lore in real time, seeing all the fanart come out after big streams, theorizing with other fans, reading fanfiction, roleplaying, the inside jokes and memes. Constant new fan content. A constant, thriving community. That was a big part of the appeal, and it's mostly gone now.

I know I'll never get to experience the peak of the dsmp again, and that's hard to accept. The dsmp was a "once in a lifetime" type of thing, and I didn't realize that until it was over. No group of people will ever make a story like that ever again. They can try (and some have), but they'll always fail, because trying to recreate something isn't the same as creating it naturally.

The dsmp wasn't planned to go how it did. The characters were still fluid, real people. The lore and "scripts" were still mostly improvised. Nobody was trying to make something like they ended up making.

It was an improvised mess, created by a group of friends, playing a game together. And that is where a lot of its original charm came from. You can't recreate that.