Compliance: Complications with the Prime War
Many things have been said about the Prime Path Conflict/War, about both c! and cc! actions. Plenty of critique has been given, but one thing stood out to me as lacking discussion and it can be summarised as:
Forced compliance is no real compliance.
Let me elaborate. The basic events of the Prime War go as follows:
C!Bad decides to redesign the Prime path, the public road of the server so to speak. C!Tommy sees the new design and is unhappy, destroying part of it. Bad in response to this covers Tommy’s property in obsidian. He puts down signs saying that if Tommy agrees to leave the path alone the obsidian would be removed by Bad himself. We all know how this one ends, with Tommy refusing and bombing Bad’s house as revenge. This in turn aggravates Bad who seeks pay back.
It would be easy to say that Tommy should have just agreed to the demands and that him bombing Bad’s home was an unequal response. But was it really?
Bad modified a public work to which he had as much right as any member of the server. So any member should have just as much right to change the design again. Upon the destruction of his path design he went after personal property, only after that Tommy responded in kind. Yet, that is not even the point I am focusing on here.
Bad’s argument is that Tommy’s house remained intact under the obsidian so he caused no real harm. Looking at the circumstances that seems a little too convenient. Tommy’s land was covered in a layer of one of the hardest to break blocks as well as a multiple block depth. To any person this is a massive time investment to remove (even Phil with a Netherite pickaxe only managed to remove a part of it after about an hour of mining). Tommy isn’t any person though. He barely has any tools never mind good enough ones for this task.
Faced with a task as overwhelming as this one, Tommy even considers abandoning his home all together, something he hasn’t done no matter how intense the damage done in prior altercations or pranks.
Bad’s offer is not merely an offer, it is a demand. Tommy is forced to comply or struggle to gain access to his own property for a long time if at all. This doesn’t even take into consideration the meta element that cc!Tommy rarely streams more than an hour and usually streams about once a week or so. To expect him to be able and/or willing to invest hours into a cleanup project is a little odd. Consequently, what Bad puts forward isn’t a choice, at least not a real one. If you present two choices but one is not actually viable, that is as if there was no choice at all. Forcing compliance effectively pushes your opponent to either agree with you or face the consequences all while you can claim the moral high ground. “You didn’t need to lash out, you had a choice!” Yeah, a choice to put up and shut up or face another escalation.
