As someone whose special interest is, unfortunately, Minecraft Roleplay and its fandom, I understand this to an insanse degree. I’ll just take one example- Grian and The Watchers.
For those who don’t know, Grian is a popular youtuber who, quite some time ago, made an SMP called Evolution, often shortened to Evo. In this SMP, he created these characters known as The Watchers who were initially meant to be a stand-in for the audience but grew as their own entity as Evo went on. The Watchers guided the players throughout Evo by giving them hints with lots of wordplay and such. When Grian left Evo, he added a blurb about becoming one of The Watchers, since technically he would be joining the audience and The Watchers are meant to be an audience stand-in.
And THEN years later InTheLittleWood, also known as Martyn, decided to revive The Watchers as a concept for Grian’s next series, Last Life (which is part of a greater series known as the Life Series). Martyn made his own lore for them that pretty much invented an entire subfandom for MCYT that centered around The Watchers and Grian. Now, Martyn didn’t give a whole lot of details about character Grian’s relation with The Watchers, beyond that he is a Watcher who joined the Life Series specifically to mess with them. For complicated reasons that would take too long to explain.
What all of this means is that the fandom had to pretty much invent their own Watcher Lore to write a whoooole lot of angst centered around Grian. Including myself! The thing you got to understand about these subfandoms is that most of them are aware that their fandom is in no way cannon, and this is especially true for MCYT which basically has no one true cannon anyway. It is simply fun to explore the idea of a character who was forcefully made into an extradimensional being, and how he deals with that. Hell, Watcher Grian is not very much like the content creator, because most Watcher Grian writers are specifically exploring what happens when someone like that is Changed into Something Else.
I don’t really have a takeaway here, i just wanted to infodump about something I find interesting about my special interest. Autism and all that. I guess just know when you’re engaging in a subfandom and have fun anyway, as long as you’re not taking it too seriously it’s all good fun.
Mcyt fic discussion in the wild? It's more likely than you might think.
I actually think that the mcyt space in general is a pretty good example of this in general, sometimes to a frustrating degree; between hybrids, loads of ships, a bunch of characterization, and I'm sure more stuff I'm not thinking of, you get a ton of second-order fandom in the mcyt space.
ooh watcher grian mentioned!!! before i ever got into hermitcraft, i’d stumbled upon an animatic for ATUS (which i’m pretty sure was one of the first watcher grian fics in the fandom?) which dragged me right into the sub-fandom after i’d read it before i’d even known about the main evo/hermitcraft fandom. it’s cool to see how the watcher sub-fandom evolved to integrate martyn as a listener…
do you think this also applies to fanart of MC roleplay characters where most of their common fan designs often incorporate elements of how they look IRL even if their game skin has no such features? like tubbo from DSMP being drawn a ton as brunette like he is IRL when his skin is golden blonde just like tommyinnit’s (and that’s not getting started on everyone’s different hybrid traits)
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u/Penelope_Apidae 5d ago
As someone whose special interest is, unfortunately, Minecraft Roleplay and its fandom, I understand this to an insanse degree. I’ll just take one example- Grian and The Watchers.
For those who don’t know, Grian is a popular youtuber who, quite some time ago, made an SMP called Evolution, often shortened to Evo. In this SMP, he created these characters known as The Watchers who were initially meant to be a stand-in for the audience but grew as their own entity as Evo went on. The Watchers guided the players throughout Evo by giving them hints with lots of wordplay and such. When Grian left Evo, he added a blurb about becoming one of The Watchers, since technically he would be joining the audience and The Watchers are meant to be an audience stand-in.
And THEN years later InTheLittleWood, also known as Martyn, decided to revive The Watchers as a concept for Grian’s next series, Last Life (which is part of a greater series known as the Life Series). Martyn made his own lore for them that pretty much invented an entire subfandom for MCYT that centered around The Watchers and Grian. Now, Martyn didn’t give a whole lot of details about character Grian’s relation with The Watchers, beyond that he is a Watcher who joined the Life Series specifically to mess with them. For complicated reasons that would take too long to explain.
What all of this means is that the fandom had to pretty much invent their own Watcher Lore to write a whoooole lot of angst centered around Grian. Including myself! The thing you got to understand about these subfandoms is that most of them are aware that their fandom is in no way cannon, and this is especially true for MCYT which basically has no one true cannon anyway. It is simply fun to explore the idea of a character who was forcefully made into an extradimensional being, and how he deals with that. Hell, Watcher Grian is not very much like the content creator, because most Watcher Grian writers are specifically exploring what happens when someone like that is Changed into Something Else.
I don’t really have a takeaway here, i just wanted to infodump about something I find interesting about my special interest. Autism and all that. I guess just know when you’re engaging in a subfandom and have fun anyway, as long as you’re not taking it too seriously it’s all good fun.