for me a big highlight from this stream was forever following jaiden and roier home for that brief moment. he was so kind, so considerate in offering to organize the funeral — and then respecting their wishes when they denied. forever stressed one last time how willing he was to help if they needed anything at all, offered his condolences and went away to allow them that moment for themselves
today we saw, not for the first time, how danger seems to lurk in every corner of the server. we also saw, also not for the first time, the beauty and strength of community. how even grief isn’t a crushing burden, if only there are enough people to help carry it. the federation may have won here, but i have no doubt in my heart the islanders will rise!!!!
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im sorry it’s still getting to me that the qsmp is a story that relies so heavily on the characters having compassion and acknowledging each other’s humanity and then they turn around and limit q!quackity’s ability to access complex communication — arguably one of the only skills that set humans apart from other animals
they have stripped away most, if not all of his context-specific memories and made it so he can hardly connect with other people at the moment. human communication is contextual in nature and q!quackity can’t even comprehend some of the cues he’s being given right now. because they have been forcefully taken from him
on top of that, his (visual, at the very least) language processing is fucked. he doesn’t seem to RECOGNIZE written text to the point he’s unable to read at all. there’s also cognitive dissonance between his intention to write and his ability to assemble words properly. currently, q!quackity cant read or write and this makes a great part of his communication very vulnerable. he relies on others to read/write to him and be transparent because he literally cannot verify any of it
the federation have taken this human, social being and knowingly hindered his ability to interact with the world around him. a world he knew!!!!! — its an attempt of dehumanization to the likes we hadn’t yet seen applied within the story. it’s a big twist and its CRUEL. and its so interesting i cant even be mad about it
the book with the coordinates is getting to me so bad elquackity baited quackity in with two of the things he seeks out the most -> 1) family and meaningful interpersonal connections - starting it out by calling him "brother" was foul even with the quotations. even with the implication they're not even related at all. just the nod to a relationship between them feels so evil when for so much of his life on the island quackity has complained about loneliness and tried to approach others in any way he can...
and then there's the rest of the letter, 2) promising to help him with his lost memories. elq says he can help him REMEMBER, and even takes some responsibility over what happened to q. elq acknowledges his suffering and appeals to their similarities when asking for a bit of quackity's trust. "but i hope you trust me based on the principle that we're forever united. we have each other's face and the same name. after everything... it would be hard to separate us from each other." like quackity wouldn't move mountains for identity and identification, new or regained.
he lays it all out like that and asks quackity, if he can find it within his heart to comply, to meet him at certain coordinates. quackity, of course, goes. it couldnt have happened any other way.
elquackity is a showy antagonist. he stomps his feet when things dont go his way. he cusses people out and storms out of rooms. he blows up buildings and kidnaps kids. he threatens and pulls out swords. everyone knows this.
but sometimes he's at his cruelest with little details like this.
thinking of the players’ memories of their lives before the island which are very hazy save for specific instances, i might have a theory on why their recollection of the past is so fucked,
it seems to me the federation DID attempt to wipe all of their memories previous to their arrival on the island, and it also seems like it didn’t fully work, or at least not in the way they expected it to.
see, wilbur and phil remember each other. they KNOW they’re family, somehow, despite losing some of the finer details. same thing for spreen and missa.
similarly, spreen, missa, roier and mariana all have vague memories of each other. they’re able to recall past anecdotes and speak about them like it’s something common to all four, with only minor confusion at times. whatever bond it was they had before boarding the trains, it’s still with them. fragmented and vague, but there.
+ cellbit and felps, mike and pac, lifelong friends who have naturally kept their mutual fondness. they couldn’t tell you how they met, that specific memory long out of reach, but in the back of their minds they know they’re supposed to stay together. that being separated means something is very wrong.
there’s even cases like bbh and foolish, so devoted to orbiting each other they overrule the federation’s best efforts and reclaim their natural places — both of them remember being in similar positions before, in different worlds, different eras, or so they say. philza and fit have something like this, also.
none of these examples have access to the entirety of their past shared history. they don’t know how it began, how they came to find each other, where they’re going next. all they know is the now — how it is, how it feels.
this leads me to believe, that despite aiming to get rid of their memories in full, the federation was unable to erase certain connections from the players’ hearts and minds. however it is they’re doing it, the method isn’t failsafe and it can’t completely override deep impressions such as family and close friends. the islanders’ memories of love and care live on within them through these little jagged pieces, vestiges of what they have already been — someone’s child, someone’s brother, someone’s lover!
*on a dimmer note . for my local tntduoers. lets take all of this and think about the implications….. since its been established that wilbur has vague memories of quackity, who meanwhile claims to not remember him at all <3
tilin is bobby’s sparring partner. a friend and a frenemy and someone who spends the night when her father isn’t around to tuck her in.
they fight a lot. still, bobby thinks she knows he holds her dear in his heart. or he hopes so, because tilin goes for a stroll with uncle slimecicle and doesn’t come back. he can no longer tell her.
bobby helps his papa build a grave and a memorial shaped like the bow on her head. tilin’s apa doesn’t hear of it until the next day. bobby is right there when the news break.
later on, bobby watches juanaflippa die by her mama’s sword. it’s an unfortunate accident. it’s supposed to be an adventure. there’s monsters all around and his papa is yelling, they’re all yelling. juanaflippa doesn’t get up. death by backswing is death nonetheless, and eggs are bound to crack. they’re children and they’re breakable and by now they should all know there’s no such thing as too much caution.
bobby has two lives left. papa takes him home and tries to put him to sleep. for the first time, he doesn’t feel as safe.
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picturing baby jaiden, elquackity (who just went by quackity, at the time) and foolish sitting around a table at the big colorful room in the federation facility. projects blue bird, duckling and goldfish, respectively.
they like drawing and doing the tasks they're asked to, even if sometimes they're odd. they're surrounded by labs, and there's lots of writing and reading. it's okay. the bears are friendly enough and soothe their questions if they have them -- one way or another. their caretakers and each other are all they've ever known.
fast forward twenty years or so. the three of them are finally out in the world. jaiden, fully-grown and flaunting the very same blue wingspan she used to dream of. foolish, now a shark. and elquackity. the one who got held back, and the only one who remembers.
the other two have had their brains picked. scraped free of white walls and any memory of growing up. it's part of the task. the greatest, most important one they've ever been entrusted with.
they're nearly strangers. they can't exactly count on each other anymore. still, somehow, it's like they gravitate. in the absence of facts, the heart makes do. the bird and the shark band together. circling each other until they wind up on the same doorstep they started in, albeit unknowingly. the bears welcome them in silence. it's a greeting, but they don't know it yet.
elquackity has it harder -- an untouched mind is a heavy burden to bear, here. his job is simple: act the part you've been given. this means taking over someone else's memories, even though he still has his own. he's pretending times two, and he's not even doing that good of a job.
nevertheless, the experiment carries on. it's much bigger than any of them.
watching his once friends from afar, always far, elquackity wonders if he'll ever be able to truly enjoy the island.
(rant about linguistics, aphasia and q!quackity’s impairments post-memory loss!!! to anyone who knows more about any of this, PLEASE add on or dm me id love to learn if anyones into neurolinguistics or anything of the sort)
ive been digging deeper into q!quackity’s condition (because I quite literally CAN’T stop thinking abou it) + taking note of his symptoms/behavior and it seems like what he’s dealing with could be called alexia (acquired inability to read) with agraphia (acquired inability to write), which are types of general aphasia, except i still need to know MORE about his production and comprehension i need to get in there!!!!!
it seems like he could be experiencing literal/verbal alexia with agraphia, which would mean he can’t recognize written letters or symbols at all and that is why he’s unable to read (this is all very tentative… all i have to go off of is my psycholinguistics class and as many academic articles as i can read). from what ive seen, q!q hasn’t actually tried to read any signs out loud, there’s no verbal attempt or production of speech which would make sense if he really can’t recognize the alphabet. BUT. what bothers me is that he can speak spanish with no issues. since spanish has a high proximity between phonology and orthography, theory says people who are able to speak it should be able to read and write the phonemes. and he can’t — or hasn’t tried. THAT makes me think he Can recognize the letters themselves
to confirm this i would really like to see him try to spell…. Or just name a letter! if its confirmed he CAN recognize individual letters, then id say what we’re looking at is more like pure alexia (without agraphia) — only a reading impairment, which would cause him to be unable to Arrange the letters in a sensical order. Its tough to check any of this w minecraft as a medium…. with a keyboard (or, in rp, on a communicator/in chat) it’s kind of impossible to know if he’s clicking at random or actually Trying to seek specific letters. but ill say that the way he sometimes dictates what he’s intending to write makes me think he DOES have the visual of each letter in his mind, and just struggles to order them or accurately transpose them
its also interesting to me how theres no sign of a speech impediment. q!q could speak fine from the very first moment we saw him. all hesitation was modal/owed to circumstance and not actually tied to his production of speech. i think that has more to do with the memory part of things! it could be that the extend of his memory alteration only goes as far as his writing and reading do. speech and comprehension come first in regular human development, and those are the faculties he has kept mostly unaltered. there could also be an argument to make about this pointing spanish as his first language (like cc!quackity) and english as his second, which would explain the dissonance between his production in one language and the other — but given that last stream he did express knowledge of english, idk if its relevant
i dont know much about the actual anatomy of things but i think it’s interesting that most aphasia cases are caused by lesions on the left temporal-parietal lobe. AND that its also possible for aphasia to be caused by head trauma like a hard hit to the head or deprival of oxygen (due to drowning? food for thought).
psa i know the situation in canon could be a lot less deep than im trying to make it. i get that. i dont expect the writers team to have researched the symptoms to this extent, but i enjoy discussing it. this is part of my major and a big area of interest for me so i find it really fun :) ill keep reading on this topic as much as i can and reblog w more of my musings if i find more relevant info. baseline qsmp team please let me in i need to study q!q under a microscope (lovingly)
only once has he called for help. when his body was lost and his items unreachable. bimbo came to him and gave him tools and armor. all diamond. (bimbo also wished him good luck. this, however, spreen never knew about.)
there are other guests it likes, sure. there’s an argument to be made here, that it cares about all of them to an extent, and that might even be the truth. spreen is still a bit different, though.
for one, he never tries to leave the island. bimbo watches him, as a good host should, as he goes on adventure after adventure far away from the mainland. spreen always returns. doesn’t question the dungeons, and disregards the strange mobs he comes in contact with. it’s like it doesn’t matter, and bimbo thinks he’s so right! it does not.
spreen has an egg, ramón, who he cares for every once in a while. he feeds it and sometimes he plays along with whatever tomfoolery it decides to engage in. he also has a house, or the foundation of one, and bimbo approves of that as well. an unfinished project is bound to anchor him for longer.
spreen doesn’t break the rules on purpose often, and is polite about it when he does. bimbo appreciates niceness, despite it all, and spreen tells it he will provide information if needed. like they’re buddies! and he doesn’t even ask questions, like everyone else has defaulted to. spreen explains himself and waits on an answer. he keeps his distance, and keeps his peace.
spreen doesn’t care about the federation. spreen doesn’t care about the rails or the wall. he doesn’t even care about where bimbo goes after it leaves. he is the first person who has not tried to follow it. he appreciates bimbo’s gifts.
spreen cares about the island. he cares about his plans and his farms (illegal, yes. bimbo will overlook it just this once) and his penchant for new experiences. he’s happy here.
spreen is bimbo’s favorite guest, and it’s its job to ensure it stays that way.
