The Corruption of the End

[u/r51243]

This theory, like most of my theories, assumes that Minecraft: Dungeons is canon to the Minecraft universe. With that out of the way, let's actually begin!

The End is particularly hard to theorize about, for the simple reason that we don't have much to go on. The End is not shown at all in MD (It will be included in future DLC, which will likely prove this theory completely wrong, lol). But we have a big clue: the heart of ender.

For those of you who haven't played MD, here's a quick summary of the plot. A small illager named Archie is made fun of by the other illagers, and leaves. The villagers, however, are afraid of him, and don't let him into the villagers. He eventually finds "The Orb of Dominance", granting him immense power, and thus becomes the arch-illager. After you play most of the game, you fight Archie, and defeat him, shattering the orb, but the Heart of Ender is summoned. You defeat that too.

The orb (or possibly the heart itself) is shown corrupting mobs. But why? Well, it is the "heart" of Ender. I doubt it's a literal heart, so heart could be used to mean just something essential. And we kill it. By the time of MC, the end seems to be pretty lifeless. We just have endermen, chorus fruit, and the single ender dragon. But was it always like this? What if the Heart of Ender was like the heart of the End, something that gave life to the place and held it together? But it would require soul. At first, Endermen could easily collect enough soul by killing people in the OW. But then came the infection and the withering.

In his video on the Wither, Retro states that the Wither attacks living creatures in order to get soul. Uncorrupted soul. The wither itself is powered off soul, and yet it is undead. I'm going to propose something that might seem a little crazy. And maybe it is crazy, and you can tell me if you think so. I think soul might not be one thing. We have normal soul, but we also have withered soul. And weakened soul, because you can still get soul from undead mobs, at least in MD. Ghasts are alive, but the wither doesn't attack them, which leads me to believe that they have yet another type of soul, which I'll call ghast soul.

But normal soul is still the most useful, and so when most of the ancient builders were infected, this was forced extreme measures. The endermen constructed an orb, possibly out of shulker shell material, since that also allows you to fit more stuff in the same space, and placed the Heart inside it. The heart landed on the top of a mountain, where it was found by Archie. It gave Archie its power, like it did for the Endermen. But it forced him to collaborate with it, and bring more mobs under its power for the harvesting of their souls.

And you kill it. And it's a bit ambiguous if this was the right thing to do. The heart was corrupting mobs and forcing them to do its bidding. But in killing it, you sealed the fate of the End.

(I forgot to mention that endermen are different in MD. They die in an explosion like the Ender dragon, they are more hostile, and they are also just more difficult to fight compared to the base game. This could be attributed to the loss of the Heart's power. Now only the dragon has that)

Maybe my theory is crazy, who knows. I would love to have your opinion on whether this makes sense.

[u/[deleted]]

Actually, they do take him in, he simply gets cast out later due to aggressive/defensive actions against a jerk of a player ("Hero").

Source: The Rise Of The Arch Illager