#maq rambles

I have several feelings on minecraft horror and the current meta.

A lot of minecraft horror and args have gotten... stale. Big scary unbeatable monster. In your world without you knowing. Corrupting your world. Killing your player character. Yada yada.

*yawn* all that jack. Minecraft horror like herobrine, the OG herobrine (who was actually said to originally be feminine but transitioned to be male. Transmasc herobrine is canon) used to stand for something. It fed on the idea that the world was empty, yet... it wasn't. There was a ghost in your singleplayer, causing little things that don't generate naturally. Putting you on edge, thinking you see someone or something out of the corner of your eye.

Minecraft horror boomer rant aside, SFAWTDE is a refreshing change of pace.

It does many things I like to see in ARGs for minecraft:

- It has an entirely vanilla experience. Yes, worldedit was used, but there are no modded in entities.

- speaking of entities; you never see what is following d3rlord3. d3rlord3 never sees what is following him. We, by all means, do not know what was following d3rlord3. Nobody does.

- no jumpscares. Not a single one. Instead, the fear is generated by the unknown.

The fear of the unknown is executed amazingly well in SFAWTDE. d3rlord3 dives headfirst into a map he doesn’t recognize, taking route after route where he doesn't know where it leads. Every action he takes, and every decision he makes, while calculated in nature, he still recognizes that there isn't a single one where he knows what is ahead.

Sure, he finds his way through the maze, he solves the cipher, and he straight up uses his pick to break through the door. He was able to figure out where the signs pointed to. He was able to know there was an entrance under a tree.

But did he ever expect any of it? The terrain was not natural.

Trees don't grow underground unless it's a modded in region, the implication of it being unmodded and vanilla makes a tree get you on edge. The blocks placed were not natural either. Smooth tuff and smooth andesite aren't natural terrain.

Not a single place in this video exists in vanilla, down to the very houses the village was comprised of.

He went into this blind. He could not have known what was there.

Not to mention that the censor bars were used unsparingly. We didn't even see d3rlord3's name up until right before he went into that dark black hall, and saw something completely censored out behind that yellow gate.

Only d3rlord3 knows what he saw. We do not.

It's this fear of something unknowable that puts one on edge. It is a real fear that everyone has struggled with at some point in time.

The references to The King in Yellow, the poem behind the cipher being the first opening poem you read in the book, d3rlord3's very name being der lord 3, der = the in german, lord, 3 is yellow in ROYGBIV, literally meaning The King Yellow, the abandoned village having yellow everywhere, including the fountain being constructed of sandstone, a very yellowy block; it is everywhere. You can dig for even more. It's there.

Wifies took The King in Yellow and redefined the horror meta.

Now, time for my personal theory on what all the references MEAN:

The Book within the book, The King in Yellow, hinged itself on people reading it and wanting to re-enact the play to fulfill the prophecy. This falls flat on its face in modern times; books are rarely ever read physically (THOUGH I WOULD LIKE FOR PEOPLE TO READ MORE PHYSICAL BOOKS AND SAVE THEM. PHYSICAL MEDIA IS IMPORTANT.) anymore. So, The King in Yellow shifted, and adapted. It lodges itself into a well known game, and plants a seed.

A seed that grows into a world found by d3rlord3. A seed that makes d3rlord3 write that note before knowing he is about to go mad with information he isn't supposed to know. A sapling that Avery finds on an abandoned laptop.