#derap

goodbye, zam. we hardly knew you.

There’s something wrong with them methinks

And as a Zam main, that's so annoying bc when Zam goes sleuthing it's a slow build up and his natural naivety makes it delightful to uncover things, but Derap just instantly comes to a conclusion and it's right so many times. And he never doubts himself.

Derap is almost always wrong about the emotional motivations, the interpersonal reasonings for things, but when it comes to "who did this" or "what is this person planning" he's always right. Like a stupid amount of times. And even with the emotional motivators usually he ends up with the right conclusion but for the wrong reasons.

And that's so interesting to have a character like that. And it hurts him far more than it helps him. Like with the subz wardens, him detectiving out what subz was up to gave him such a big head that he was the one to solve everything that he failed to ever include or count anyone else's contribution to stopping the wardens.

Or realizing Zam gave Bacon hearts made him so much more paranoid of Zam, and the timing of that with the Truman show and Mapicc's creakings made it even worse. And then evidently he never properly allowed himself to process his thoughts on that reality, just let it sit pent up until he went to Minutetech.

And like, the most recent example of how much he was like "i told you guys spoke was up to something!! we should never have been fighting mapicc" (paraphrase) in the finale.

He has this massive need to be right, and it's backed up with a genuine ability to be right, but it shots himself in the foot bc he isn't the only member to be able to understand and read the flow of the server. And one of the marks of an old gen player is that they might know that someone is up to something but until that person logs on and actually does something, the sleuthing has no real outlet and that's okay. Instead of ego, it's just keeping it in the back of the mind.

So even if they know what might happen, they continue to play the server based on what is right in front of them, dealing with the conflicts that are actively brewing and allowing them to take their time even if it "makes more sense" to make up and be friends bc there's a bigger threat looming. None of that matters to old players.