The Realm (personal opinion); dead dove: do not eat, look at tags
DISCLAIMERS: English is not my native language. This is my big rant and it focused on my feelings and opinions.
A lot of negativity about realm, real-life war and death mentions, please be careful, don't read if negative stuff about admins/streamers/chatters/twitter users might hurt you.
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I watched realm from the very beginning (missed 4 or 5 starting days but watched all this vods of my main pov) and stopped watching it completely around two weeks ago. This post is my opinions on realm-related things that made me love (firstly) and hate (lastly) this server.
First of all - ValhallaMMO is one of the best things i've ever found in Minecraft. This plugin gave me so much joy and nostalgia for old grindy games that i enjoyed. Great respect and gratitude to Athlaeos as main dev of plugin and JustAHuman as "Realm dev" and all other tech admins who kept the server running. They did amazing job and created one of the best plugins in my opinion. There is some minor issues with balancing and bugs, but overall for me it was a perfect alternative to "that" dungeon-hunting mod from "that" "person".
Then, i found a lot of new content creators. Even if a lot of them isn't really my cup of tea i still found some creators who gave me joy and whimsy in this months.
But seeing realm state today and comparing it to the start of the server i couldn't say it aged well. Now, i think, the peak state of the server was probably the first Ball and i would be really happy if it was the end of this server, because stuff that happened next wasn't even close as good in my opinion.
Now going to things that i hated about the realm. First of all, lore. No, THE LORE. Not like personal lore of characters that creators were playing, but general SERVER LORE. It was cool when it wasn't really forced by admins, when players could choose to not be involved in it. First corruption arc was cool because admins and creators don't really force anyone to play the lore. I enjoyed Foolish and others goofying about incubating Ros in corruption box, i enjoyed Aimsey "researching" corruption, i enjoyed Sneeg and Philza dgafing about it. But after that more and more arcs are feeling forced and unnecessary.
Here i want to talk about "green-blue war" which hadn't happened and i don't really know but i want to believe that my chat message input was taken in consideration when this "storyline" was abandoned. It is very personal to me. Too personal to be fair. We all need to remember that we are living in real world. And when doing roleplay content you really want to avoid very close similarities to real world events, especially when a lot of people could get hurt through it. And this storyline was very familiar to me and probably to millions people near me. Conflict with very unbalanced power levels driven fully by more powerful side. No reasons for conflict except will of one or two persons on one side. Attempts to prevent it in a lot of ways from other side. Threats to basically destroy other side if obviously impossible conditions are not met. If you dive out of minecraft roleplay and look to the Eastern Europe you would see exactly this. I can't name anything directly because it would cost me up to 15 years in jail or fine up to 63000 dollars. But still, more than 1 million lives was taken in this conflict already and who knows how many more will be taken. And some creators almost brought it to minecraft roleplay. It hurts. It really hurts that on fourth year of full-scale war in Europe a lot of europeans and americans choose to became so oblivious. I just hope in two years from now there won't be any minecraft servers where creators would try to imitate Gaza War (sorry if this war has other, more correct name, quick googling didn't gave me other good options).
(Also, excluding similarities to real life, did someone saw blue faction after this?)
Now, coming to less personal stuff. There was episode of Imp&Skizz podcast with fWhip where they talked about lore on the servers. And there was a point about interaction between creators on the lore servers which i'm very agree with. If creators don't want to limit their interactions with each other then lore shouldn't be centered around their characters. Buildings, world, stories but not characters. And in my opinion, at some point realm lore became so character-centric that it became almost impossible to justify in-game interactions between creators without breaking the immersion. Like when tr!Aimsey and tr!Ros or tr!Ros and tr!Pangi had conflicts and there wasn't much sense in hanging together in call/just speaking. Creators literally had to constantly remind community about "out-of-lore conversations" (which didn't really help anyway).
Oh, community. The passionate realm community of amazing artists, writers, editors and other creative people (you are all amazing and cool and joyous and whimsical, this is not about you). And also viewers of certain streamers. And some certain viewers of other streamers. And a lot of twitter users. After watching Ros and Aimsey almost every stream calling to not send hate to anyone and then coming to twitter and see so many awful posts about them was hard. But what really got me is when in Bekyamon's chat some bbh viewers tried to explain tr!Ros motives about blowing the yellow castle and it was not just completely wrong motives but they were so certain about their rightness.
Coming back to lore. You know, some streamers don't want their lore to be interrupted by someone else's lore. Even saying it out loud that they don't wanna die (in game) for someone else's lore. And then we have legendary peace treaty. Remember, when yellow-green war was about to start. There was meeting, about new faction and how to make them safe in this war, and how red faction should not exist anymore. We know, that yellow team (Ros particularly) planned a lot of lore around this war. And then Tubbo log on, and said peace treaty is necessary because:
1. admins need time to fix bleeding bug
2. red team are going to become "so much powerful" very soon
3. orange team need protection to avoid getting into crossfire
Lets see what happened after this "peace treaty". Bug wasn't fixed, no updates to red faction, orange team got punished by peace treaty (Watermunch accidentally killing Tubbo and being reset). Nice. Admins and Tubbo ruined yellow lore to achieve quite literally nothing. Okay, end of Owen arc are kinda used this peace treaty, but i'm pretty sure it could end the similar way without peace treaty.
This part is my completely unproven assumptions. Let me be clear, I do think, that green team (or bbh personally, which is my assumption) asked Tubbo directly or through admins and in some way force them to implement peace treaty to avoid war with kinda competent opponent. Which would make sense in first weeks of the realm when yellow faction had much more people (including high level people) than green faction, but wouldn't make any sense when number of peoples in faction were around the same.
Now about snails. Snails were added exclusively to prevent grinding in the same spot (Clown's enchanting blaze farm). Which make sense. But then there were a lot of changes to make them involved in lore which is absolutely fine. And then Tubbo and admins made some things that were awfully implemented in my opinion. Let me say, stream where Ros were constantly attacked by "snail is hungry" notification was awful. I never want to see anything like this again. I have no idea how Ros could possibly not end stream after first minute of this extremely loud cacophony and flashy snail at half of your screen. This was the stream when i lose a lot of respect to Tubbo and non-dev admins. Even if streamers or other viewers found it funny - i saw it like quite literally bullying person who couldn't do anything to stop it. It was awful and i wouldn't tolerate it at all.
Here is a bit more personal thing again. There goes Ros' "homophobia" bit. You know that bit isn't going well when you have to explain multiple (a lot of) times that it is a bit. And if you insist on same bit for like few month it became not just unfunny but annoying. Especially when it is kinda hot topic. Especially when character OR creator never show any signs of actual homophobia. And what is worse is how much effort twitter people (especially notionslime as big realm-content related twitter account) put into make this a thing. It was the bit where i stopped watching realm completely. I don't wanna be in community where homophobia considers a joke and where community spread "joking" accusations of being homophobic into wide spaces like twitter. I live in country where a lot of LGBTQ+ people couldn't speak about themselves being LGBTQ+ because it is punishable by a fine from 2500 to 5000 dollars. And then i see narrative about "homophobia" addressed to one of the kindest streamers i've known. Nah, thank you, i can't openly support LGBTQ+ people in my country, so let me please at least watch streamers who could openly support it without having to explain to my other LGBTQ+-friendly friends that streamer i watch isn't really homophobic.
This was my big rant, it was important for me to rant about it. Now i'm gonna go touch some grass and dgaf about realm. And i recommend it to everyone tbh. Good luck, have fun.
