uhhhhhh

the moment i saw him i felt the need to draw him HE'S SOOO SILLYYYY HE PEWPEWS STARS HOW COOL IS THATTT

His speed is Mach 20+

He's Aurora and Lumine's new recruit! A young Swap variant since their last Swap retired.

tw/// slight blood

my problem with most rek depictions is there's a general unwillingness to look past commonly established fanon tropes and traits that everyone just seems to agree on, which is a shame, honestly, because there is a lot to rek underneath the common depictions of "paranoid crying mess" and "branzy's straight-man bestie" and "angel that can do no wrong" which are completely untrue. i admit, i also fell victim to them when i was first starting to watch rek, so i don't think that's something to be ashamed of if you're (like a general audience You, not you specifically anon) at a point where you don't know a lot yet. it took me a lot of discussion, watching, and comparing what i saw in fanworks to really put together a picture of what rek feels like as a character.

but it also feels like nobody wants to do that, either. i'm not 100% sure why that's the case; i have my theories, and i can go into them if asked, but they add up to the fact that rekrap as a character seems to just exist on the periphery of lifesteal to the point of being forgotten despite somehow being universally loved as a creator. nobody really cares about rek as a character.

but there's so much rekrap fanfiction out there, one might argue. unfortunately, there is a lot of fanfiction with rek tagged, but the amount of fic that actually discusses rek as a character realistically in that tag is laughably little. number one offender: clownzy fanfiction that shoves rek into the role of "oh my gosh branzy, don't flirt with clown, that's such a bad idea". number two offender: clownzy fanfiction that shoves rek into the role of "oh my gosh i'm so scared, branzy and clown are gonna torture me". number three offender— okay, you get the point. in a decently large portion of fanfiction, rek is never given a role where he as a character has any narrative meaning or character development, because he is never considered as a character any further than just being an accessory to clownzy. and people keep perpetuating these depictions because it's convenient to have a character that's close to branzy that can provide commentary about the situation. it's convenient that there's an innocent little rekrap who is scared of the weird freaky yaoi stuff that clownzy are doing to emphasise that clownzy are weird and freaky about it. and because it's so common, people accept it as fanon and never question it any further because they never need rekrap2 specifically, they just want a character that fills one of those super convenient roles.

don't get me wrong, i love chaostrio. their interactions, especially at the start of s3, in the pirate video, and in branzy's chicken minigame series show off so many things about rek and how rek loves to play minecraft that prove that he's not just an accessory to either clown or branzy in their canon relationship, but there's never anything about how rek would gladly die to test branzy's new cool killing machine for fun. there are so many videos out there, my favourite being Specifically naa s2, which highlight rek and clown's relationship in contrast to how they're usually portrayed in clownzy fanfiction, and yet i have to struggle to find a fic where clown shows rek the amount of respect he does in lifesteal s2/3/6/7.

a lot of other fics have a pitfall where they take a lot of inspiration from his irl self and then extrapolate that grossly into "nice guy who would never do anything wrong". this would be a kinda acceptable line to follow if you were writing rpf, but he's always specified as a character, so it just goes back to people falling into the trap of what's common in fanon and never looking further. and the solution to that is as easy as watching his s7 orbital strike cannon video to see how much he just loves messing around and trolling people and blowing things up as part of the evil team! rek is indeed nice to people, but he's also Unsettling and he's Selfish, and people seem to just gloss over that completely.

basically: it gets tiring when it's literally everything you see, because the vast majority of fics don't even represent how rek really works (and this is Specifically targetted at lifesteal fics; it's the most common setting and he acts differently there compared to everywhere else) at all. so many depictions of rek are stuck permanently in s3, and mage does explain it better than me and gives more examples, so for more details visit his post or siri's, but the gist is that people have never Accurately represented his approach to lifesteal (see: "jumping people as practice", s6 relationships w kab, derap, flame, s7 relationship w apoc vs pili), how he reacts to unexpected things or things that he is worried/anxious about (he's very much a "go with the flow" guy), or his thoughts about dying and being trapped (see: his video about terrain trapping him, and how he's ended s3/5/6). siri also has a wonderful post about paranoia with a lot of commentary in the tags that i highly recommend. i understand that it can be hard to figure out what to watch first (or that it's hard to access without knowing exactly when these things are relevant), but i would direct anyone who wants to know more to siri and her watchlist. she's always willing to answer any good faith questions about rek and probably knows the most about rek out of the four of us.

if i'm being completely honest, then the short answer is that it annoys me.

the long answer is that i think a vast majority of the fandom is still stuck characterizing a version of how he was in s3, and by "a version" i mean people have projected what they expect rek to act like in the situations he finds himself in, which just turns him into some kind of scared, cowering animal who doesn't know how to handle the shenanigans that happen on lifesteal, despite the fact that he has never acted that way. people make him out to be "innocent" and "pure", someone who can only act as the straight-man (and i don't mean straight as in het just to be clear, because i know someone's gonna be thinking that), someone oh-so-pitiful who needs to be saved, and overall just... woobifies him, to be frank.

i think when people think of rekrap2, they only think of s3 diamond duo. they don't think of the dirties, or chaos faction, or decimation. they don't think about his approach to pvp in early s6, they don't think about n&a, they don't think about how he's ended every season since s3, they don't think about his contributions to apocalypse, they don't think about the way he acts with those who are in his team vs those who are not, they don't think about the way he carries himself, they don't think about what his moral compass actually looks like with the evidence on hand.

and i understand i may be coming across a bit harsh (and i am, because at the end of the day it's all for fun or whatever, people aren't gonna share the same characterizations blah blah blah, i get it), but i have seen so, so, so few fanworks that are actually about him compared to the ones that just have him "around," and the ones that are almost always draw from the exact same moments in a season that's about four years old at this point, reiterating the same characterizations that make me want to rip my hair out because they just aren't him and never have been. the amount of fics i've read that actually made me think "that's rekrap" doesn't even break two digits, and i've combed through literally his entire tag. rek, in the vast majority of fics i've read of him, simply just exists to react rather than take action.

this is a difficult question for me to answer, not because i don’t have very strong opinions— believe me, i do— but because i have a 1.5k draft about basically this exact thing, so i’m keeping this brief, especially since the others will probably give longer answers. i highly dislike both.

when people say they like rek, it’s not meant in the same way as for other lifestealers, and the vast majority of his fans neither critically think about him nor critically consume his content. this means that people don’t actually understand his character or even have a character to “give him”. in an attempt at having a character that’s more than just a blank slate, everybody then either 1. latches onto the first misconception of a “character trait” they can push onto him, which in his case is his “paranoia”— i talk about this more here; 2. takes the surface-level view of him as a person as nothing more than always nice, wholesome, and innocent, and conflates it with the character of him on lifesteal (because rek does have a character on lifesteal, regardless of its intentionality); or 3. both.

—

REK [zooming in on BING tower] Oh, this looks kinda cool. Interesting. They’re making spawn look actually somewhat cool. [circling the mass of islands surrounding spawn with his mouse] I feel like we should just nuke this entire island. That would be kinda cool.

—

PILI [talking about a build at spawn he's proud of] I can't wait to see it destroyed. (laughs)

REK You can't wait to see it— (laughing) No, I wouldn't destroy it, Pili!

PILI (laughing) Oh, I dunno, you just like— just a feeling. Nothing's permanent, nothing's permanent.

—

PILI Rek, let's kill Divine Intervention. (small laugh) Let's nuke Divine Intervention, honestly at this point, please.

REK (muttering) Can we pleasee. I wanna nuke them. That'd be awesome.

—

if i'm being completely honest, then the short answer is that it annoys me.

the long answer is that i think a vast majority of the fandom is still stuck characterizing a version of how he was in s3, and by "a version" i mean people have projected what they expect rek to act like in the situations he finds himself in, which just turns him into some kind of scared, cowering animal who doesn't know how to handle the shenanigans that happen on lifesteal, despite the fact that he has never acted that way. people make him out to be "innocent" and "pure", someone who can only act as the straight-man (and i don't mean straight as in het just to be clear, because i know someone's gonna be thinking that), someone oh-so-pitiful who needs to be saved, and overall just... woobifies him, to be frank.

i think when people think of rekrap2, they only think of s3 diamond duo. they don't think of the dirties, or chaos faction, or decimation. they don't think about his approach to pvp in early s6, they don't think about n&a, they don't think about how he's ended every season since s3, they don't think about his contributions to apocalypse, they don't think about the way he acts with those who are in his team vs those who are not, they don't think about the way he carries himself, they don't think about what his moral compass actually looks like with the evidence on hand.

and i understand i may be coming across a bit harsh (and i am, because at the end of the day it's all for fun or whatever, people aren't gonna share the same characterizations blah blah blah, i get it), but i have seen so, so, so few fanworks that are actually about him compared to the ones that just have him "around," and the ones that are almost always draw from the exact same moments in a season that's about four years old at this point, reiterating the same characterizations that make me want to rip my hair out because they just aren't him and never have been. the amount of fics i've read that actually made me think "that's rekrap" doesn't even break two digits, and i've combed through literally his entire tag. rek, in the vast majority of fics i've read of him, simply just exists to react rather than take action.