#spacebomb

-mcytegg :3

THANK YOU!!! Sorry for being evil and putting a second essay in the tags that makes it hit the tag limit but alas that’s just my nature, I’m glad you enjoyed it!! Thinking about them so much now that I’m watching Season 5, there is something wrong with Planetlord that is also wrong with Mapicc and I love them for it. Killing someone over and over and over and banning them off the server is an act of affection

Gonna be honest, it’s a little embarrassing how many times I’ve scrapped and rewritten my response to this ask trying to articulate more of my thoughts. Mapicc and Planet are such fascinating characters and there’s so much to explore with them from S4 to Wormhole to S5 and my last post didn’t even scratch the surface of it all. Despite their similarities, the roles they inhabit (and the roles they are socially permitted to inhabit) are often opposites. Even in S6, after S5 peeled back a lot of the illusions about who they both were, the amount of support they’re expected to need and their perceived competence on their own are so far on the different ends of the scale that neither of them are treated quite right, even by Bacon and Zam who were both there to witness everything that happened last season. The fact that on the surface Mapicc fits very neatly into a traditionally masculine image of power and violence while Planet distinctly does not is so important when thinking about them and analyzing them and that’s kind of where I hit a wall where I am in my VODwatching because analyzing this part of them is kind of delicate despite how much I want to say more. There’s no real separating the way Lifesteal’s culture surrounding violence and attachment inherently favors or idolizes typically cishet masculine/patriarchal traits from the fact that this is a server made by and consisting primarily of teenage boys and young men who aren’t, to our current knowledge, queer in any capacity and who inevitably have internalized biases that inform their behavior regardless of their genuine and enthusiastic support for queer people. I’ve only just finished the first month and a half of S5 and from a combination of what I’ve heard and what I’ve seen so far, this season is going to deal a lot in… fuck how do I word this. I don’t know. It comes off of the Wormhole where Mapicc and Spoke’s raw power and brutality triumphed over specifically Planetlord’s sentimental attachment towards their team and rejection of Lifesteal’s emphasis on selfish violence for individual gain and the season starts maintaining those violent, masculine ideals about how things should be to an even greater degree than they’d existed before the Wormhole before, brick by brick, failure and weakness and attachment and the inevitability of care force certain players to reevaluate them and their own ideas about themself. There’s a lot in here about the harm of like… violent, toxically masculine, heavily repressed environments and gradually unlearning and challenging those ideas in an environment that inherently favors them and I think a lot is going to change but being so early in the season means a lot of what I would have to say is gonna sound. Harsh. Because I think early S5 is Mapicc at his worst and Planet arguably there or close to it. The way S4 validated Mapicc and his newfound weakness make him *mean* and in the same way he used to weaponize ableism against Zam in Season Four despite knowing Zam’s paranoia was founded, he weaponizes like… toxic masculinity and subtly homophobic language against Bacon and Planet to cut Bacon off from Planet and demean Planet as an opponent despite not being a homophobic person or honestly, in my opinion, believing everything he’s saying.

There’s a third layer to Mapicc’s ire towards Planet and that’s that it’s emasculating to lose to Planetlord, in part because of their reputation as bad but also in part because, like I mentioned earlier, Planet is not the archetypal masculine server powerhouse; Planet is Planet. It shows in the way others talk about them, Planet is considered specifically “creepy” and “weird” as opposed to scary, Mapicc talks about how Planet “thinks he’s a little sweat this season” as if for some reason Planet is interloper in the position they’ve earned themself, Parrot and Mapicc talk about how it’s uniquely infuriating to lose to Planet specifically, and there’s an emphasis not just on beating him but taking him down a peg or putting him in his place. It’s not unlike the way Vitalasy was treated in comparison to Spoke, simultaneously villainized (more justifiably in Planet’s case) and mocked. There’s a stark difference in the response Planet receives from Spoke when he openly talks about Bacon and Jaron compared to the response Bacon receives from Mapicc and Parrot for letting his feelings towards Planet slip. Spoke is very blunt about the reality of the situation and will readily tell Planet that 3HT is dead, but he never mocks Planet for caring about them and tends to indulge Planet’s wants and emotions. Mapicc and Parrot aren’t nearly that kind and there’s a specific tone to the way they treat Bacon in these moments that reinforce very cishet masculine ideals about emotions. I mentioned it in that first post, but during that day one moment where Bacon is considering calling with Planet, Parrot and Mapicc specifically accuse him of trusting Planet more than them, folding to Planet at the first opportunity, and being disloyal. The mere act of having a conversation with Planet is a betrayal that shows how weak he is, giving in to Planet immediately, and the idea that he trusts them is treated as ridiculous despite him spending a year teamed with Planet and only days teamed with Gucci Gang, reinforcing the idea that Bacon would be wrong to hold on to his past with them. When Bacon keeps calling Parrot “Planet” he’s called sad for it. It’s pathetic that he still has that familiarity with them. Bacon cannot express any lingering affection for Planet without being degraded for it, hence why he starts to go silent when the topic comes up, and when you combine that with the specific way Mapicc insults Planet, you get an ugly little picture of toxic masculinity and homophobia within the Gucci Gang.

And like. This sounds really bad. I need to emphasize that this isn’t meant as neg or criticism of Mapicc, whether as a character or especially a content creator. For one, I like that he’s like this, it makes him interesting, but more importantly, he changes! Mapicc is no longer like this in Season 6, which means something happens that changes him, but I haven’t seen that yet, which leaves my analysis of the two of them incomplete and ugly in a way that I don’t think is fair to Mapicc, but which I think is still important to explore. And it’s not like Planet doesn’t use the subconscious perception of queerness (or typically queer-coded traits) as not necessarily bad but lesser in some of the things he says or does, but I’ve only seen a tiny bit of that and only know about other instances through things I’ve heard and it’s always going to be different coming from Planet compared to anyone else because Planet is bi, so that’s another thing that’s just incomplete due to being so early in the season and just not being able to analyze. Their fundamental similarities make them incredible foils because the places where they’re different make certain aspects of the server and the people around them stand out all the clearer. This is a vital part of comparing them but it also means that as much as I desperately desperately want to yap about the two of them and all the depths of my opinions on their arcs and relationships and places in the story, it’s so touchy that I just don’t feel equipped to dig into it without all the necessary context and a lot of note-taking.

This also applies to the way I tend to think about lsBacon though the lens of him as a gay character dealing with immense internalized homophobia and why despite, again, how much I want to talk about it, three months is honestly a super generous guess for when I can actually dig at it because I just don’t think I have the context right now to do it justice and there’s no way to talk about it without touching on biases and beliefs held by the creators outside of the story and I want to be very careful in how I explore that. Like there is so much i want to talk about— the way he’s backslid from S4 to S6 and the way S5 and Mapicc specifically shape his ideas about how things *should* be long after they’ve been teamed (I have not seen enough to say this with any confidence so it’s literally me just spitballing but from some of the things I’ve heard about S6 Bacon’s relationship with Planet, I get a feeling that he’s trying to emulate Mapicc as an Ideal Lifesteal Teammate in certain ways despite the fact that Planet wants *him* not Mapicc. But maybe im talking out my ass) and the way so much of his story revolves around how he handles his love for Planet and how Planet is consistently the person able to pull the most emotion from him and force him into being open but how it’s rarely shared with Planet directly and the way Cali Girls and his relationships with Zam, Hannah, and Kab (despite her departure) all contribute to him getting out of that mindset and, expanding on that, how the relationships in which Bacon is able to be the most vulnerable (not necessarily the ones he holds dearest) are the ones he shares with people who either cannot or simply don’t care to achieve the Lifesteal Ideal of male power and violence (S4 3HT, Zam through all Seasons, Hannah, Kab), but also how he interacts with the ways Mapicc can be interpreted as queer and the mass of complexities in that relationship and the way S5 was in a lot of ways more homoerotic than S4 and how all of that plays with the comparison between what shows of intimacy are allowed and which aren’t, what displays of affection or attraction are ‘safe’ and which are not, and just the ways Bacon and Mapicc are simultaneous the best and worst people for eachother because of this environment they’re in and what that means for the both of them and their relationships to Zam and Planet and even beyond that Everything about his views on Subz and relationship with him in S4 and S6— but I feel like if I get further than just mentioning them, I am going to hit the wall of either not having watched enough or not having taken the appropriate time to talk about things as carefully as they need to be. But god do I want to talk about it. Hence why I have been rewriting this for days trying to talk about it before ultimately giving up. The Team Awesome - Three Heart Trio torment nexus is so interesting and complicated and cool and I wish I could say more but alas thinking about them for too long will make me explode into a fine red mist.