#entityredacted

Sir I mean no offence but I'm pretty sure he's dead

im sure most of you have already heard the basics but like. i don't care. so anyways. (discord friends will have heard most of this lol). using c!Branzy to be very clear

this whole au starts from me wanting villain!branzy. and then i realized that clown works really well as a hero. because the thing is that the difference between clown and branzy is that c!Clown is percieved as a villain but if given the choice he'd be more of a hero, and c!Branzy is percieved as a good guy but if given the choice he'd be more of a villain.

See, c!Branzy's really a trickster. He's dangerous because he doesn't seem dangerous. Hear me out. We all know he's not a great PVPer. We've all seen the clips and read the fics and we know he's famous for being the weakling of the server. But the thing that's very easy to forget is that c!Branzy doesn't need to be a good PVPer to be competent. He's very, very good at a few other things that I'd say are almost more useful than PVP.

First off, he's very good with traps and redstone, and everyone picks up on that one because of the casino. It's what most people would say that c!Branzy brings to a partnership between c!Clown and c!Branzy, after all. This makes him an interesting enough villain, but his real talent, the thing that makes him so interesting to me is something else.

Because traps are great and all, but they're useless if you can't get people to buy into them. As you'll see time and time again if you watch enough Lifesteal, the best-engineered traps are useless if you can't be convincing enough. And that's why c!Branzy is so dangerous: because he's very, very good at tricking people.

c!Branzy knows when people don't see him as a threat, and he uses that against them. Even more interestingly, he knows when people do see him as a threat, and he uses that against them equally as well. With c!Vitalasy in the funhouse, he knows that c!Vitalasy sees him as an ally, as Not A Threat. And so c!Vitalasy trusts him, and by extension, the funhouse. This may seem like a bad example, because c!Branzy betrayed c!Vitalasy, right? We'll come back to this later. But for now, we're moving on to Echocraft.

In one of his Echocraft videos, c!Branzy traps c!Rek with a house that's rigged to blow up. Simple. Here's the catch. He tells c!Rek to flick a lever. This lever will actually turn off the trap, but c!Rek doesn't know that, and Branzy knows this. c!Branzy's been trying to trap c!Rek for a while; c!Rek isn't going to trust him. So c!Rek is not going to flick an obviously trapped lever (In the end, c!Rek does blow up, if you were wondering).

It's these kinds of mind games that make c!Branzy so dangerous. He's also a very good liar, and he has no remorse in betraying his friends. See: Vitalasy. c!Branzy can say 'I'm so sorry' all he wants, but he's not regretful. Not really. Maybe he hides behind fear of c!Clown as an excuse, but c!Branzy does nothing to try to make up for this. He never goes back to c!Vitalasy, never tries to get back on his side.

He betrays c!Rek, too, by the way- his other closest ally besides c!Clown. He doesn't have a single friend he hasn't trapped or betrayed. c!Branzy is loyal to no one besides himself, and he is dangerous because of it. That's why I love the idea of c!Clown being afraid of c!Branzy instead of the other way around- because Branzy is not dangerous in a way c!Clown can predict. c!Clown knows PVP, he knows how to fight. But c!Branzy knows how to lie and trick and decieve and there is nothing stopping him from betraying Clown too.

c!Branzy is unpredictable in a way that no other Lifestealer is. Others' motives are simple: revenge, or power, or greed. But c!Branzy? You can't fit him into a neat little box. You can't predict who he'll team with, or what he'll try to do. He's just not powerful enough against anyone else.

This... was not the post I meant to make. But we are here now and I don't particularly want to keep going now, so in conclusion:

No that's absolutely fine! You're right, "arranged marriage au" is simpler. It is also very much a general tag. I wanted a specific tag for my specific au that I could group it all under so that it would be easily locatable and, on the off chance that anyone wanted to follow the tag, they could do so without following every single arranged marriage au in every single fandom everyone ever posts on tumblr XD

It's basically the same reason I have the "rain rambles" tag for my original posts. Organization and access.

At the time I started planning the au enough to need a tag for it I still hadn't named it (It does have a name now, "Marriage of State") but at this point its easier to stick with the pre-existing tag because I have it auto-tagged for mobile and use Xkit on desktop and have all my tag bundles saved. (This is also why I have such regular art reblogs, when I'm browsing on mobile I just save art I like to my drafts and then go back and tag it later on desktop and queue it up.)

You're terrifying to me for some reason (affectionate)

this is kind of what I expected LOL

/j