BUENAS NOCHES & FUCK AI

So, with all that said. Let's go over a couple things we know.

This Minecraft world (maybe all of Minecraft) is the King's "domain," but it is also, explicitly, his prison. He is stuck, and he needs to be released. He seems to have a great deal of control over this world he's locked in, but it is not infinite power. As Derek says, Minecraft is still a game, and the game has certain ways that it works, certain limitations that are concrete and others that can be messed with. It has it's own consistent internal logic. We know the King cannot change that - Derek would not have been able to escape otherwise. Beyond this, the King seems to have some minor control over people actively playing in his world (projecting infinite knowledge into Derek's mind, trying to make him fall asleep, successfully knocking out Avery), but not a ton.

Now, with that in mind. How are Avery and Derek playing in the same world at the same time?

This is supposedly a single-player world. Now, that's the easy fix - not only are there ways for a single-player world to be opened to other players (like local play and whatnot), but this is something, presumably, within the King's domain. It's his world, he can choose to connect both of them at the same time if he so desires it. What seems likely to me is that Derek was just the catalyst to get Avery into the world, and then Derek just didn't log off so he never got disconnected. (We'll come back to that.)

No, the bigger question is this: How are Avery and Derek playing in the same world at the same time when Avery has Derek's laptop?

I can tell you from personal experience that Minecraft worlds are saved to specific devices and not accounts. But we are told - multiple times in SFAWTDE - that Avery is playing on Derek's old laptop that he found in a storage locker. I'm sure there are ways to transfer them, maybe Derek had a PC as well and had that world saved to both somehow (even though it just came pre-downloaded when he installed Minecraft). I saw someone suggest that Derek is on a PC setup while Avery has his laptop, and that seems to fix this, right? Wrong.

Let's consider a couple things. Number one, Derek cannot look away from his screen. If he was playing on his laptop, there is no way that he could've been away from it (and the world) long enough to have it put in a storage locker somewhere for Avery to find.

Number two, how did Avery get the laptop in the first place? Regardless of whether or not Derek was playing on it, how the hell did it wind up in Avery's hands? The only explanation we've been given is that Avery "found it in a storage locker." Which means either it had been abandoned in an open storage locker and he just took it, the storage locker was closed and he broke it open and stole it, or (what I find the most likely because both of those seem strange,) someone gave/sold it to him while they were getting rid of stuff from the locker. If either of those first two options are the case, then wouldn't Derek have been looking for his stolen/missing laptop? If it's the last one, why would someone sell it if he was still alive?

Moving on for a second, the timing is also strange. We know DAWTDE takes place during New Years Eve, as Avery mentions it a couple times. The footage was only uploaded to Avery's channel in March, as I've seen people point out. Avery's original "weird book i did NOT write" video was uploaded October 18th. Derek's videos were uploaded to that Google Drive folder from SFAWTDE on October 1st or 2nd (it says "modified" on the 1st but "created" on the 2nd???) and interestingly his note about exploring the tunnel he found was added October 16th. That one I'm taking to be just a real life/behind the scenes error, as it makes no sense for him to write that so calmly after everything, and only two days before Avery's video was posted, but that leaves us with about a two week gap from Derek's discovery (or at least uploading his footage) and Avery having his laptop and finding the mine and the book.

Once we get to Derek's footage in DAWTDE, it seems to pick up pretty fast after where he ended in SFAWTDE - at least, from his perspective. And sure, maybe he's been surviving off smoothies or whatever, but I doubt he had enough to last two whole months.

So what exactly is the timeline here? Derek hasn't been able to look away from his screen. He seems to have been on his laptop at the time, but Avery has it now, simultaneously. It's New Years Eve, but this all happened to Derek back in early October, maybe late September.

I think Avery's timeline is the correct one. Because there's something that appears in a couple of cosmic horror stories, and elsewhere in media: a brain in a jar. Often, the brain does not know that it is only a brain in a jar, and finding out such drives it to madness. Often, their own perception is as if they're living more or less normally. Maybe with some limitations.

I think Derek is a brain in a jar. I think he's dead in the real world, and some part of him - his soul, his essence, a copy of his brain, who knows - is now trapped in this Minecraft world, just like the King. At most, he seems able to get to his Google Drive a couple times, through a lot of pain, so maybe he's confined to the laptop as a whole. That would explain how he's able to be in the world at the same time as Avery, on the same device.

But I can go deeper. I can get crazier. I said I thought this was the "bad end," so let me explain what I think by that.

The King claims that he wanted Avery as a vessel, and Derek was just a means of getting him to the world and then was left as a loose end. I don't think that's quite true, but I'll come back to that. I accept that Derek's way of defeating the King was inspired by/a reference to Gravity Falls, but am I wrong to say that it feels... too easy? Something conclusive for us, a nice bittersweet wrap-up to the story.

The thing is, there's another player in this story. One that does not seem obvious, but is absolutely integral: Wifies.

He is more than just a narrator, more than just a passive presence watching everything happen and explaining it to us. I've seen people theorize that the King wanted Avery because he had a YouTube channel, but Avery's channel was tiny before SFAWTDE came out. We don't see a subscriber count, but at the time of SFAWTDE came out, "GODLY GAME OF SKYWARS" had 10 views and "weird book i did NOT write" had 4. Even as of DAWTDE, "weird book i did NOT write" only had 1.5k views. Sure, now it has a couple million, maybe the King knew all that would happen, but I have a different idea.

I'm not certain what Wifies' subscriber count was before, but it was somewhere between 2 and 3 million (as the video "3 million subscriber channel reveal" on his second channel, Twifies, came out after SFAWTDE). That is a much, MUCH bigger reach than Avery has even now. And what better way to entice a YouTuber with a focus on uncovering mysteries - be they hidden Minecraft lore or ARGs - then with a mystery to uncover? Derek even knows that Wifies will be looking into and reporting on the events, leaving the link in the chat to his part of the footage. Because someone wants to make sure he sees it, that he gets the whole story.

I think the real target of all this was Wifies, and from there - us. The audience. The people who have created a ravenous fanbase over this epic, moving tragedy that no one expected out of an ARG. ARGs are fictional, obviously, but I think in the metafiction of these two videos, it's all fabricated. This was all made for him - this was all made for us.

Because that's the thing about eldritch horror. Very, very rarely are you met with a real victory. At best, you get a delay of the inevitable. You averted the apocalypse today, but it will come some other time, long after you are gone. Derek's victory over the King, reference though it may be, is too easy, too final, for an eldritch horror story. The King literally says "do you think I would leave the instructions to my ruin in my own domain?" in response to the doors, but that logic applies to the spell, too. It's not even very hidden. And furthermore, how did Avery catch up with Derek at the very end? That's never sat right with me. Derek did tell the King to be a more convincing Avery next time. There has to be more. And if the King - the all-knowning entity - can lead Derek along while tricking him into thinking he's outsmarting Him, can lead Avery through the world right where He wants him while letting him think he's progressing, then why can't he trick us?

And that leads me to my last point: how the fuck did the King not know about Derek getting into that secret place? How the fuck did the King not know the spell was hidden there? How do you beat an all-knowing entity?

Most of the time, you don't.

I don't think that this was a victory.

Now, I started writing this back in April 2026. I forgot about it for a little bit and am finishing it now in August, a little over a week after Wifies latest video, The Search For The Leviathan, came out. I understand that is part of a different series of interconnected ARGs (the Vex Syndicate I think I saw it called?) but I don't actually know much about that yet.

But I know that world he explores at the end sure has a lot of yellow. And I know that passing out sounds a lot like what happened to Derek. So I wonder if it's not still part of this series. If it's not the King trying to assert further control over Wifies - after all, he's the direct protagonist this time, and not just a bystander. But I'm not sure, and maybe that's been disproven by the Vex Syndicate thing, but I don't know.