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Hiya chat! I made a new sheet. All these are now available :) I won't be active still however I do need to post this as my PC just broke and I had to buy new parts. And now I’m broke and Desperate. Thank you so much…!

Would you explain your statement that Searching For A World That Doesn't Exist and Destroying A World That Doesn't Exist is about why the concept of 'intelligence' is fundamentally flawed and ultimately useless?

I can see the parts of the story that highlight the concept of intelligence as "a topic of discussion" (for lack of a better word in my vocabulary), but I can't seem to make them come together into that statement/moral/interpretation you presented?

Can you help me see it? I am very interested in this and want to be able to understand!

so this is a topic that i, as someone who is intellectually disabled, feel very strongly about but cant actually articulate very well. ill try my best, but i can't guarantee you'll come away understanding my interpreration. i'll also admit that i'm only working from the direct canon of both videos, and haven't sought out any of wilfe's various lore dumps

that in mind...

for starters, i read avery as someone who's intellectually disabled. maybe i'm projecting, but, like, that's the nature of storytelling. you're going to see yourself in characters, and you're also going to not see yourself in characters. you use the bits you recognize to find common ground with the bits you don't

but throughout dawtde, avery struggles with his intelligence and self worth. he idolizes d3rlord3, who is very traditionally smart and doesn't struggle with any of the puzzle solving and arg bullshit expected of him, either solving or bypassing it as needed

avery, meanwhile, has to have the puzzles spelled out for him and even then doesn't get it. when met with arg bullshit in the form of the obelisk, he deems it unsolvable and ignores it. when he gets to the shadow tower puzzle, he struggles with it for a long time before finally deciding to take a page from d3rlord3's book, bypass the puzzle, and punch right through the netherite block

i don't think it's a reach to say that avery sees his life as inherently less valuable than d3rlord3's because d3rlord3 is "smarter" than him

and yet, going back to d3rlord3, the "smart" one, the puzzle solver, the one avery looks up to so much.. and we find that knowledge, perhaps the most clear-cut, stereotypical marker of intelligence ever made, was and is directly his undoing. d3rlord3 knows everything, everything a person could possibly know, about himself, about avery, about the world. and its killing him. when avery meets him, d3rlord3 is living on borrowed time, unable to leave his computer without the totality of what he knows causing him blinding, disabling pain.

d3rlord3 is book smart and good at solving puzzles, all the sorts of things that make you good at an iq test, and it leads him to his destruction

there are some other things i could point to here, like avery's 12 hour gardening livestream. the way it completely empties him out of his sense of self and free will. the fact that avery is implied to be the perfect "empty" vessel, and how you could argue about whether "empty" refers to avery lacking those traditional markers of intelligence, or whether it refers to the empty state bestowed on him by the book

unfortunately, im completely out of steam, so this is the best you can get. what i can say is that i think these videos are, at the very least, about how being "smart" isnt all its cracked up to be

and dawtde then takes those concepts and flips them on their head

d3rlord3, as reward for his intelligence, has been given endless knowledge and suffers endlessly for it. if he was unable to solve those puzzles, he might not have met that fate

avery, meanwhile, struggles deeply with his self-worth and unintelligence, struggles with his agency, looks up desperately to d3rlord3 and wants desperately to be like him. if he was someone as "smart" as he wants to be, he mightve been able to outplay d3rlord3 and take on the role of vessel

both of them are deeply unhappy and struggling in the roles the fandom would be inclined to give them. i think its really adds to the theming

if someone was to be coming from the ableist, dare i say eugenicist, perspective (one that id argue avery shares) that d3rlord3's life is more valuable than his, will contribute more "good" to the world, because of his intelligence, the ending might come off as... well, not great, thats for sure

but the story wouldnt have worked if avery didnt survive. even if he found a way to stop the king at the cost of his life, it still wouldnt have worked. because the point is that avery's life has as much value as d3rlord3's. the point is that d3rlord3, with infinite knowledge at his fingertips, found avery, who has none of it, to still be someone worth saving

"intelligence" doesnt save d3rlord3. "unintelligence" doesnt doom avery.