inactive

It's at this point that I think their dynamic is really established as an imbalanced one. From the start, it's pretty much guaranteed that Wilbur is going to win. Everyone knows it. Everyone breathes it. Not only that, but from Quackity's perspective, it seems like no one particularly cares about Wilbur's blatant corruption, not in any way that matters. After all, he won their independence! He's the hero of the people! For Quackity, someone who decided to run in the first place to oppose corruption, it's a huge slap in the face.

From that point, it spirals. Quackity is humiliated during the debates; he's not as well-spoken as Wilbur, not as sure-sounding, and his points about "teaching people to be kind to each other" are brushed off as laughably naive. They talk about it afterwards, and Wilbur tells Quackity that there is no peace without power, and there is no peace without violence. Quackity doesn't believe him yet.

They are not equals. In most interactions they have, Wilbur is talking down to Quackity like he's his subordinate rather than his political rival, and Quackity definitely internalizes it. The humiliation deepens. His own running mate sleeps through the election. The humiliation deepens. His only hope is to make a deal with the devil, and he does so without second thought, for the chance at having something over Wilbur. It works. Then it backfires. Now Quackity is being associated with the cruel regime that Wilbur is condemning as hoardes of followers flock to his side at Pogtopia, and Quackity is still stuck with Schlatt, abandoned and talked over and kicked into the dirt over and over and over again. The humiliation deepens.

I think what Quackity feels towards Wilbur is something like resentment, something like jealousy, and all of it merges with his embarrassment and his self-loathing to become a horrible form of admiration. Wilbur can rig an election, blow up his own fucking country, and still be praised. As Quackity picks up the scraps Wilbur left behind and tries hopelessly to piece them back together, working without glory or recognition, people still speak Wilbur's name like he was a god among men, the only chance they had at freedom, "if only he never went mad."

But Wilbur is dead now, and Quackity is alive. Maybe, finally, it can be his turn. He thinks back on everything that went wrong and he remembers what Wilbur told him about power and violence, and this time he knows it's true because he saw Wilbur succeed. He puts it to the test. He forms a group to bring Techno to justice and he loses a life and he loses an eye. He forces the formation a new nation where his friends can be safe and it's ripped apart before his eyes and his friends abandon him anyway. And this, this, is too much humiliation for one man to handle. Wilbur wasn't wrong, far from it—the problem, as always, lies with Quackity. Clearly, he isn't going far enough.

The way I see it, the beginning of the Las Nevadas arc is the beginning of Quackity's lifelong obsession with burying the past. He doesn't regret anything that happened, because it was all essential to him becoming the newer, better person his is today. He's not naive and he's not weak, not like he was back then. He's not the side character from Wilbur's story. But thinking about that person makes him horribly uncomfortable and ashamed, so he tries not to, and he makes sure other people aren't thinking about it either.

The new identity he crafts for himself is not only modeled on Wilbur, but also on Dream, Schlatt, and everyone else who used their power against him. It's a weird little paradox he creates: all of these players are gone now, but Quackity is bringing them with him, even while he simultaneously refuses to dwell on their history. He rants about how Dream abused the power of attachments to control the server, and in the same conversation, Quackity decides to abuse the power of attachments to control the server. But Wilbur, arguably, left the most impact. Everything Wilbur ever said, everything he ever did—Quackity treats it all as lessons, and he learns fast. If Wilbur says he will have to torture then Quackity will become a torturer. If Wilbur uses manipulation and coercion to draw people in then Quackity will do the same.

It's worth mentioning, though, that their styles of manipulation have some key differences. Wilbur's greatest asset was his charisma, and from this, he was able to craft his perfect illusion for L'Manberg: a nation so peaceful that no armor should be worn within its walls, oppressed under Dream's brutal authoritarian rule. The message was that everyone had to stand together (under Wilbur's leadership, naturally) in order to stand a chance against their shared enemies. Wilbur also had the benefit of being the first person to create a nation independent of the Greater SMP, which couldn't hurt in making his cause more appealing.

Quackity doesn't have any of this. With the server already fractured upon Las Nevadas's creation, he instead focuses on the more individualized elements of his people's citizenship. Wealth, land, personal glory, and a whole lot of other promises he can't keep. The message isn't "join so we can help each other," it's "join so you can help yourself." And Quackity sells this message in very questionable ways! He destroys property; he facilitates murder and threatens it again. Why not, right? Violence is power, and all that. High risk, high reward. He's a gambler at heart. But this mindset sets Las Nevadas apart from L'Manberg in some serious and detrimental ways—namely that the people under Quackity's control are only there because they want to gain something from him. There is no loyalty here, no anthem to sing with fond memories of the good old days. The only thing that binds them to Las Nevadas is a flimsy contract that some people didn't even sign. When Quackity's sweet words run dry, he'll have nothing left to give them. It's a ticking time bomb.

The thing is, I don't think Quackity fully realizes his mistake. I think Las Nevadas is a genuine attempt to mirror Wilbur's L'Manberg, with a failure to understand why L'Manberg worked. That's the difference between them: Wilbur, to some extent, appears to be aware of the web he's weaving, and how difficult it will be for others to break free from it later down the line. Quackity, on the other hand, lives in the moment. He talks obsessively about his legacy, but that legacy is built on the foundations of a series of impulsive decisions, each one creating more and more cracks until eventually the whole thing will collapse.

And then Wilbur comes back. This is bad.

Wilbur, essentially, has stood as the physical embodiment of the past that Quackity is trying to bury. Wilbur is where it all started going wrong. Wilbur's goddamn unfinished symphony. All that shame, resentment, doubt, it was all Wilbur. Wilbur started him down this path, and so Quackity wrote him a letter and left it on his grave and closed that chapter of his life for good. Well, now that letter is in Wilbur's hands, and he's arrived on Quackity's doorstep, back to his usual power plays and demeaning comments like has nothing even changed, like no time has passed at all.

This is where that idea of perception becomes so important—because, in reality, Wilbur and Quackity's power dynamic has completely flipped. Quackity is now the one with a nation of his own, an army at his command, while Wilbur is left with nothing. But neither of them acts like this is the case! If Wilbur's greatest asset was always his charisma then he's sure as hell going to use it here, and he's going to assert himself as someone who is still to be listened to. Saying you're powerful isn't so different from it being true. And as someone who always looked down on Quackity, intentionally or not, I think it's really hard for Wilbur to see Quackity succeeding where he no longer is. Las Nevadas is supposed to be L'Manberg, and he can recognize it immediately. He can't be outdone like this. Not only is it humiliating for his life's work to be so blatantly copied, but it's also an affront to Wilbur's legacy. If new countries can grow when L'Manberg is dead and gone, then why should L'Manberg be remembered? Why should Wilbur be remembered? He has no other choice but to insert himself into the equation. Not to mention, he already knows that Quackity respects him; he told him himself. Wilbur can work with this.

For Quackity, it's also easy to fall back into that old line of thinking. Two things he knows about Wilbur: that he is powerful, and that he is unstable, which instantly flags him as a threat. Being dangerous, being feared, is a kind of power in itself, and Quackity has a lot to be afraid of these days. He stands to lose more than he ever did before. If Wilbur is acting like he has power, then maybe he does, and any time Wilbur has had power in the past has meant that the power is definitively not Quackity's. It's only meant pain for him. And yet, the admiration remains: Wilbur's revival comes at a time when Quackity's life is changing very quickly and very drastically. He's trying to balance the arrivals of the new Las Nevadas members, Slime's mentoring, the casino, the Egg, the prison, Techno, and his relationship with Kinoko, and he will soon also have to deal with the outpost land disputes. He's relatively new to this whole leadership thing, and it's become overwhelming faster than he anticipated. Wilbur has experience with this. He's smart. Quackity can work with this.

But instead of working together, their relationship becomes a constant race to outdo each other, followed by what are frankly pretty pathetic attempts at acting superior and unaffected. This, I would say, it more important for Wilbur than it is for Quackity. Quackity has a life, he has so many better things to be doing, he doesn't need this distraction. But for Wilbur, ruining Quackity's plans for his nation becomes as much an obsession as a psychological necessity. It's as if he's trying to prove to Quackity that he's still powerful, but in doing so, he admits that he needs Quackity's approval. And if Las Nevadas is a reflection of L'Manberg, then Quackity is a reflection of Wilbur—which means that Wilbur is essentially trying to demonstrate his current worth to his younger, more successful self.