#errorryx evil hours

if you're a minecraft streamer/youtuber, you have to be aware that a large portion of your audience is teenagers. you have a responsibility there, even if it's uncomfortable for you to think about. you don't have a right to take advantage of them, no matter how innocuous it seems. no matter how many of your friends and colleagues are doing it. no matter how normalized it is in the creator spheres you occupy.

there's a lot of talk about parasocial relationships, from a lot of creators whose understanding of them seems to be "fans doing things that make me uncomfortable." this definition ignores the kind of parasocial relationships that many creators actively encourage—the kind that benefit them at the emotional expense of the young people they influence. a lot of creators seem to want an audience that agrees with everything they say and even takes an active role in ensuring the wider community follows all the rules and never does anything "weird."

the fact is, if you seek to control your audience beyond reasonable accommodation (keeping inappropriate things out of main tags and such), you are implicitly encouraging your fans to attack eachother over the rules you've set. and in many cases, like this recent one, you're explicitly telling them to do so. pitting your audience against eachother for your own benefit. it's manipulative, controlling, and completely unacceptable.

the world is not kind to transfems, and the systems of oppression in place do not want people to become transfem. so transfemininity is discouraged from all angles. if you can keep a trans woman from realizing who she is, she'll never have the tools or understanding to speak up against the transmisogyny she experiences. it's extremely difficult for transfems to get to a point where they can realize who they are, because everyone and everything around them encourages them to stay a man.

contributing to this environment is not a neutral action. it is just as much of an influencing force as truthing* is. if you talk about how nice it is to see cis men feeling comfortable in their masculinity to occasionally express femininity, or complain when people say that a certain person could be transfem because it's pressuring them, you are also putting pressure on that person. you're pressuring them in the same way as the rest of the world: to stay in the closet, to stay a man, to not consider transfemininity as an option.

you don't know for certain whether someone is a closeted transfem. if you're proudly proclaiming that you like them just the way they are, that it's okay to never cross the line from ally to he/they nonbinary to explicitly transfeminine, you can't be sure whether you're contributing to keeping a trans woman in the closet or not.

that's not to say there's a right answer all the time. it's an extremely complicated issue, and in certain cases truthing* has obviously done more harm than good. but there are also instances where it has helped. it depends on who's doing it and what agendas they might have. my point here is that it's nuanced, and pressure goes both directions, and one of those directions is also enforced by our transphobic society.

—

the closest we get to a true family dynamic is the soulmate pairs of double life. it's very very telling that scott and cleo are the ones to take a stand and insist on estrangement, considering scott's general m.o. of intentionally cultivating obligation, and the artificially constructed family that cleo ends up leading the very next season. because certain people in a family benefit greatly from this obligation, and have influence over others. power and hierarchy are inherent to the family structure, and the members at the top of that hierarchy are the ones with the most choice in the matter—the ones who organized the family in the first place. the soulmate pairs start everyone out on a level playing field, and while that power can be leveraged against your partner, the obligation is the same for everyone. no one gets the luxury of choice. no one is given the position of power by default.

if we look at the obligation of family under a kinder light, we can see that a family, at its best, is a guaranteed support system, a safe place to fall back on. bdubs' limlife construction of the family is undoubtedly inspired by the ideals of support and safety, the way cleo looked out for him and scar from the very beginning. he places himself in the position of less power because he feels safe with cleo as the head of household, trusting them not to abuse their position. (a little sidenote: etho reluctantly playing the role of the deadbeat dad is an interesting inversion of what is traditionally the most powerful role in the family.)

when grian and gem invoke the family in past life, they place themselves as parents, equal partners and co-leaders, with pearl as their unstable dependent—their "moody teenage daughter." the implied nuclear family model is a fascinating parallel to how the team came about in the first place—grian had the idea, sought out gem and brought her on board, and the two of them facilitated the acquisition of pearl together. gem came into the game with pre-existing sway over pearl, and grian developed his own over the course of the season.

pearl's position as the daughter is a way for grian and gem to assert and enforce the team hierarchy. pearl's input is reduced to that of a teenager who rebels for rebellion's sake. their experience in the world is limited, and parental control is necessary to keep them from getting into trouble. none but the most defiant of teenagers are immune to the demands of their parents, and the threat of authority, of familial obligation, is a powerful force to coerce them into obedience.

when scott is manipulating apo into becoming a vampire in ep3, he presents her with a false choice. apo shows up to the meeting alone, refusing to victimize another human to save herself, and so the stakes are understood by both of them as follows: either scott turns apo, or he kills them without turning them. this is the crux of the dilemma he uses to manipulate her into "choosing" vampirism.

in terms of the actual game mechanics, however, a vampire killing a human without turning them would be very difficult, and may even be canonically impossible to do. in this mod, killing has been replaced by the turning mechanic: if a vampire delivers the killing blow to a human, this automatically turns them into a vampire. the only exception to this rule is a mistake—it's when martyn falls off the bridge while running from scott, and dies to fall damage rather than to scott directly. on a meta level, this death clearly isn't an intended outcome, so it doesn't count. in-universe, it's played off as martyn being seriously injured, falling unconscious, and apo "carrying" him back home off-screen.

scott, who insists on metagaming multiple times in the same episode, is well aware of this. in fact, by presenting this threat to apo, this is yet another act of metagaming! it's a subtle one, but knowing scott, it's hard to believe this wasn't on his mind.

apokuna, being one half of pow creations themself, is almost certainly also aware of this on a meta level, but she's serious about this rp shit. so apo the character has to take this at face value. she can't call scott's bluff; they have no reason to believe he's bluffing. on top of that, it would make for a really lame conclusion to the scene if she just ran away and didn't let scott kill her. (if the roles were reversed, i'm almost certain scott would choose to run away, but that's neither here nor there.)

essentially, apo's fate is sealed the second she shows up to that meeting. but scott could have accomplished this anyway without the empty threat. so why did he bother? well, scott recognizes in apo a legitimate threat to his current position of power. the second apo said they know scott likes to play games, he knew he had to pull out all the stops to not just turn her, but to make sure she walks away defeated and discouraged from making another power play. apo got him dead to rights, and he even admitted the truth in front of her, that he only likes playing games he can win.