I Am Once Again Watching 3rd Life

FOR REAL! They're so underrated!! Every time we come back to them the world eats me alive and I fall in love with the characters all over again. It's such a a delight

HEEY, ARE THERE PEOPLE WHO KNOW WONDLA?! GUYS, I'VE BEEN READING WONDLA BOOKS FOR A LONG TIME, AND MY GOD, I REALLY WANT TO TALK ABOUT THEM WITH SOMEONE.. (I'm telling you right away, I've known this fandom for 5-4 years somewhere)

createmod shenanigans. thanks to tango for having the coolest skin ever for this series.

i've drawn SO many mechanical arms (mostly because of doc lmao) but this one just slays so hard to this day. i need more steampunk hermitcraft content so i have an excuse for more gold accents.

fish

Carmen and Player's relationship was such a great representation of online as well as just good platonic friendships in general !! It makes me so happy !!

See, I think what made them stand out to me are these incredibly realistic, relatively smol but amazing! details that I don't see that much in media:

- they're ! online ! friends ! And I love that they think of themselves as best friends; that it doesn't get invalidated just because they don't see each other in person often. Yes, it's not the same as getting to see them in person, but online friendships are still REAL friendships.

- the age gap; it's not that big of an age gap, but it's pretty obvious that Carmen is supposed to be somewhere in her early 20s while Player is a teenager. Okay, first of all, disclaimer: I'm not saying kids should be friends with random adults on the internet. But, most of the time, especially in kids' shows, the "best friends" characters are depicted as being the same age. Usually this is because the setting might be a school, or because they're catering to a certain age demographic and they want all their characters to be at that age to make them seem more appealing. Still, in real life, you can be best friends with someone outside your age group, and I don't often see that represented very often in modern media marketed towards kids.

- they don't have much in common when they first meet (at least, as far as they know of). This is something that isn't as rare in fiction for me as a viewer/reader, but I still love seeing it when characters come from completely different backgrounds and personalities and likes/dislikes and they just... work well together. It's so beautiful.

As someone who grew up homeschooled and constantly made friends with people who were older or younger than me, people who went to different schools, people who lived in a completely different world from me, and yes, people I met or became closer with online, I really connected with Carmen and Player's friendship! and I'm so grateful for it. When Carmen told him "you mean the world to me" I just broke aisndodjjrnjfnf--

🐔

badtimeswithscar is my favorite character i completely made up in my head

to me he is basically just a mob who can shapeshift to look like a guy. he’s still uncanny looking. but it fools a lot of people at first glance do not be fooled it is a decoy

The fundamental problem with Scar and Grian when it comes to forming alliances is a difference of expectations. Grian is a tactician. He assumes that in a war or a big multiplayer game, you need to get yourself a loyal team. Anybody who is on your team is your buddy, anybody who isn't on your team is your enemy. That is the only way to win. Anybody who won't pick a side is not to be trusted, and he is surprised and annoyed if someone won't make their allegiances clear.

Scar, on the other hand, is a diplomat. He never thinks about forming a team because his assumption is that everyone he meets is going to be nice to him. His charisma is high enough that this is true way more often than not. Even when he is being a chaos gremlin, he tends to get away with it for much longer than he probably ought to because he is funny and charming and just a little bit intimidating. He doesn't consider people he makes deals with to be teammates because he doesn't see the world in terms of teams, but as a network of shifting relationships. He is surprised and annoyed when the web starts getting sticky, with various friends starting to want him to fight other friends.

Grian believes that loyalty deserves loyalty, and that if you are someone's teammate you protect each other no matter how you feel. Scar believes that friendship is what it is, and that relationships can ebb and flow with time and circumstance. Note that in Third Life, newly-red Scar seeks to reestablish a friendship rather than confirm that Grian is still loyal to him, and that in Double Life, Grian justifies his secret soulmate by rationalizing that the relationship will in the end also benefit Scar by keeping them safe. Note also that in Last Life and Double Life Scar wanted to live alone but work together and Grian was not at all on board with that because you can trade and borrow and joke from separate bases but you can't really protect one another.

There is always going to be friction in their alliances because Scar wants a buddy and Grian wants a teammate and those two things are not always compatible at all. It's going to be the same thing with Hermitopia because the more Grian tries to loop Scar into the team, the harder Scar is going to fight to get away, while at the same time Scar is very unlikely to actually take sides against the Hermits because they are his friends. Neither of them can get what they want from each other because neither of them have figured out how to make the other understand what it actually is.

Maybe they need another panda sanctuary. I hear that's good for communication.

My dad and I once had a disagreement over him using the adage "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger."

I said, "That's just not true. Sometimes what doesn't kill you leaves you brittle and injured or traumatized."

He stopped and thought about that for a while. He came back later, and said, "It's like wood glue."

He pointed to my bookshelf, which he helped me salvage a while ago. He said, "Do you remember how I explained that, once we used the wood glue on them, the shelves would actually be stronger than they were before they broke?"

I did.

"But before we used the wood glue, those shelves were broken. They couldn't hold up shit. If you had put books on them, they would have collapsed. And that wood glue had to set awhile. If we put anything on them too early, they would have collapsed just the same as if we'd never fixed them at all. You've got to give these things time to set."

It sounded like a pretty good metaphor to me, but one thing I did pick up on was that whatever broke those shelves, that's not the thing that made them stronger. That just broke them. It was being fixed that made them stronger. It was the glue.

So my dad and I agreed, what doesn't kill you doesn't actually make you stronger, but healing does. And if you feel like healing hasn't made you stronger than you were before, you're probably not done healing. You've got to give these things time to set.

10v1 RANCHERS REVENGE PIECE FOR @trafficzine

3rd Volume Soulbound edition - worked on this with the wonderful fantastic amazing @brick-rolled !!!

may you see the full thing for FREE with your eyeballs HERE

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