one of the things i love the most about dsmp is the fact that no one has the same version of it. the most obvious example is which streamer's POV you watched, but it goes way beyond that because mcrp requires a level of suspension of disbelief and also of filling in the gaps, fleshening things out, in order to make it usable for fancontent.
for example, the fact that apart from the minecraft skin there is no actual guideline for how to see the characters, hence the dsmp creaturification of fan designs we've been over a million times. but it's not just that!!
the fandom also has so many different relations to time in the dsmp. some take the canon timeline but then you run into problems like c!fundy's age — so then either he's actually a 20 year old that c!wilbur adopted and treats like a baby, or perhaps fox hybrids have a very abrupt exponential growth spurt, or perhaps l'manberg wasn't a few months but a few years!
and then this brings into question the matter of scale — how populated is the server? is it truly only the actual streamers/characters, and so when we talk about a "war" do we really just mean like 10 people fighting each other with swords? or perhaps there's a couple dozen, unnamed, background characters? and i've seen people increase the scale even more! make l'manberg a real, albeit obviously small and budding, country-city of a few hundred inhabitants, that perhaps grows into a lifesize scale fortified city during new l'manberg.
and then everything takes on such a different tone. if theres 30 people on the server, the final control room was a betrayal and destruction of friendships, november 16th was the grief and anger for a friend and the symbolic destruction of the country, and doomsday was another symbolic show of whose alliances everyone values, and the weariness of having to rebuild it. if there's a few thousand people? all of those were massacres.
how can we even be talking about the same characters when for some of us the worst they've done is blow up some houses with no cost of lives, and for others they have razed to the ground actual nations? depending on how you read it and how much you flesh it out, dsmp is either mainly about symbols and interpersonal relationships, or it can be some game of thrones shit. it's completely fucking mental. i'm so in love with it
