Transcript for:
Exploring Team Fortress 2's Server Blight Phenomenon

Team Fortress 2 is a really good game. Like a really good game. I don't like how they react to this though. I don't like how Oh god. Oh god. Just run. I got to get out of [Music] here. Oh crap. [Music] Oh, look [Music] it. All right [Music] then. Try to escape. Then this guy. This guy. I'm disguised as this guy. How does he How did he manage to get ahead of me? And it's clear from the way people talk about it that there may never be another game like it. I mean, there's quite a few popular new hero shooters on the market. What is this? Like, for example, Overwatch 2 for all three people that are still playing that game. And of course, Marvel Rivals. And yet, to this day, you still see new fan-made content for TF2 all the time. Yep, there is definitely some fan content out there. Oh, [ __ ] Oh. And today I want to talk about a very special piece of this ongoing fandom surrounding what many consider to be a dead game. And you know, not dead just because it went free to play and invited the horde of pause. I'm talking about how no server in Team Fortress 2 is safe, especially the ones that are completely empty. Before we can jump into the madness that is the new server blight story, I want to zoom in a little closer on why something like this is dropping in late 2024. you know, long after the player base of TF2 has dwindled considerably. Don't get me wrong, the numbers TF2 does still manage to pull are really impressive. But how does it do it? What's so enthralling about this game that it's managed to capture its audience some 18 years after its release? Why is the fan story centering on such a cartoony game so dark and gruesome? Look, stick with me here because I promise the answer to all of these questions is going to wrap into how I see the server blight, both in terms of story and what I think are some of its clear [Music] inspirations. We also have some absolutely insane merch to go along with this series. You know, if you've ever wanted to feel like you were trapped in a video game alone with something haunting you, we have two designs that can be bought as either a poster or a t-shirt. They're incredibly limited, and buying one directly helps me to be able to make videos like this instead of the uh the the other channel. Now, if you do purchase one, you'll probably be bullied because you're wearing YouTuber merch, which to be fair is deserved. If you want to watch more content that isn't slop, I also have a podcast on the side where I scream with a bunch of people inside a retirement home. Listen to the [ __ ] wind. It is breaking through the windows. Are you sure someone's not just throwing bricks at your window? You think they're throwing bricks from the ground 300 ft up. Link to that is in the description. Now, it might sound silly to ask something like, "What is Team Fortress 2?" But for those not in the loop, that's the people that will unironically call Fortnite nostalgic, you might go and look up Team Fortress 2 on Google only to find Team Fortress 1. See, the thing is, as creative as Team Fortress 2 is, Team Fortress 1 looks nothing alike. That's because Team Fortress was actually a Quake mod and later ported to Quake World. It was so popular even within the Quake community of the mid to late '9s that in 1998 Gabe Null, the Zeus of PC gaming, sought to hire the developers of the mod just so they could port it to HalfLife 1. This would be a way to show the creative power of the Half-Life development kit. And now look at Valve. They don't even make any games. They just collect the tax on Steam. That's not all though. This port of QTF or Quake Team Fortress was going to be so expansive that it would be deserving of the title Team Fortress 2, a true successor that stood entirely on its own merits. There was just one thing. Making video games is hard. Really hard. The team wanted TF2 to be more than just a feature update, but there was still the gap to fill in terms of having a functional port of Team Fortress to HalfLife. And thus, Team Fortress Classic was born. It was released on April 1st, 1999, but this port was far from an April Fool's joke. TFC was everything QTF was and more, given the space to be its own thing. Team Fortress Classic looked a lot better than QTF did, at least for the time. But the team would still want a much bigger sequel project. And this is where the, you know, you know the funny meme, uh, 9 years in development. Get it? Get it? If you understood the reference, you're an old head. Welcome to Team Fortress 2. After 9 years in development, hopefully it will have been worth the wait. TF2 would see many iterations before it became the game that we're familiar with. I do want to go on a little tangent here. I've always thought that Valve is one of the most interesting companies in the world when they, you know, used to make games. As a teenager, I would spend countless hours playing on my own because I had no friends through games like Left 4 Dead, listening to the audio devlogs and how they'd talk about how certain things worked in the world. Like for example, in the original Left 4 Dead, they would use bodies to actually have visual storytelling without the need for a cut scene. This covered body is an example of how we tell a story in the levels without using any words or overt storytelling. We wanted to show that there are other people in the world that are survivors like you. We figured most people wouldn't survive very long and you'd come across their bodies. But we needed a way to set these apart from all the dead ragdolls of the common infected. By simply covering a body with a blanket or a sheet, it becomes really obvious that this guy had a buddy, a friend. And when he went down, his friend had compassion and covered him up. This also tells a story about the state of the world that they wouldn't want to go out and bury the body. They couldn't expose themselves to infected, so they'd have the bodies right there with them, but covered. Sometimes you'll see a covered body right outside a checkpoint. So, it's like they were in a safe area, and maybe during the night, their buddy died from his wounds. So, the next morning, the other survivors didn't really want the body in there with them. So they directed outside. This was the best they could do for the guy. Back when it was planned to be a direct sequel to QTF, Team Fortress 2 existed as Team Fortress 2: Brotherhood of Arms. And it also had a very realistic art direction. Remember how every single video game that was released in the late 2000s was really gloomy and usually had some kind of like piss filter. Yeah, it was pretty much that. A lot of dev time went into this game to try and release it in 2000 and then typical Valve delaying the game later 2001, but it'd be cancelled before it ever saw the light of day. Yeah, imagine if your game got cancelled and no one ever saw it or or they just never give a release date ever. Yeah, that's funny, right? So, why did they scrap it? Well, something you might have noticed just looking at old footage is how noticeably less distinct the classes feel. The game has issues with making classes feel recognizable, and that's just too big of a problem for a shooter where every class has an entirely different function. Imagine if the sniper and the medic had similar outfits. It'd be really hard to tell them apart. You wouldn't be able to single out a healer, for example, and you'd be screwed over in a match. This is actually something that the developers of Team Fortress 2 were completely aware of. And I even this this lives rent free in my head. I'm not sure why. There's a developer node you could find in Team Fortress 2 and they specifically say that they wanted every single character to be recognizable just from a silhouette alone. Characters are the most important piece of art in a multiplayer game. So that is where we spent most of our effort. We developed a read hierarchy for player models, prioritizing the information that players needed to be able to read merely by looking at the model. Our hierarchy was this. First, what team they're on, second, what class they're playing, and third what weapon they're wielding. Team readability was addressed by adopting an overall color palette for each team, picking warm colors for red and cool colors for blue. Class readability was addressed through the character silhouette. Unique silhouette and animation shapes are more identifiable at far distances and across a broader range of light levels than any amount of other visual detail in the model. Finally, the weapon was highlighted through the textures. The areas of highest contrast, which attract players eyes, are all focused around the chest area of our character models, right where they hold the weapon. In addition, the subtle gradient from darkness around the character's feet to the bright areas around the chest also helps draw the player's eyes to the weapons. The original version was too complicated as well. There were elements that just don't exist today, like the idea of the commander, a class that would have a bird's eye view of the map, and they'd be able to place structures, provide support, and give possible orders. Basically, the equivalent of a Discord mod, but they actually had some kind of power. It was removed due to its passive nature. And this was smart, as it's hard to imagine a world where either it was super fun to give orders to people who didn't want to listen to you, or very fun to be the people who don't want to listen to the orders. I mentioned this in particular because the idea of one person deciding what the major objectives the player should be performing is, you know, pretty alien to games, but also that will be a lot more relevant later. So, for now, just file away the idea of a multiplayer game where you take orders from someone. Funnily enough, a commander node similar to this was actually available to a few Battlefield titles like Battlefield 2, 2142, and most notoriously Battlefield 4 and Hardline. And as weird as it looks, this whole concept is really interesting because for the latter titles, you could actually play it using only your tablet or your phone. So you can multitask like how every infant has Roblox on their iPad with a Tik Tok tab opened on the top right corner. So sometime after TF2 BOA, God, that that is a mouthful. No wonder that game died. After that was scrapped, they tried to remedy the readability with Team Fortress 2 Invasion. We really didn't see much of this game in the official terms, but in October of 2003, Valve suffered a major hack that had files for HalfLife 2, which was scheduled for release in the next year and early builds of Counter-Strike Source and Team Fortress 2. And I don't mean the kind of leaks we get today where it's just like, you know, someone says something on Twitter. I mean, there were full character models from TF2 Invasion. I could talk for hours about how crazy this hack is, and don't worry, I won't. But it's important to bring up because otherwise we wouldn't really know much about TF2 Invasion. The reason why I'm going over the entire history of TF2, apart from to, you know, make the video longer so YouTube pays me more, is also because of the fact that people think that Valve are this magical company that everything they touch instantly turns to gold. But me giving the history of Team Fortress 2, it just shows how many different iterations they had to go through until they got the masterpiece that is Team Fortress 2. Well, I say it's a masterpiece. They still have the soldier, you know, absolutely dog water class. All you got to do is look down, press mouse one. Oh, random crit. Random crit. Common pre-fire. Four rockets per clip. By the way, very normal. Also, remember that Far Cry 3 video I did a couple of years ago? Could you imagine if Jason Brody had four rockets per clip before having to reload? Yeah, that'd be really fair. So, was the 2003 hack why Team Fortress 2 Invasion was scrapped? Did we know too much about the game before it dropped for it to garner the same excitement? Maybe. But it probably has to do with the intent for it to be a much more complicated game than quake Team Fortress or Team Fortress Classic. At some point, the scope of the game ballooned. Okay, wrong wrong choice of words. At some point, the scope of the game got to a point of being confusing and they had to yet again go back to the drawing board. Now, long since the release of the actual real TF2 that everyone still plays today, we found out more about TF2 through interviews with Gabe Newell and other people who had knowledge of TF2's previous versions. And it's really funny because if you look back on what they were saying, they trashed these games. They absolutely hated them. So, all this to say that the version of TF2 we're so familiar with basically didn't start to even come together until 2005. That was through numerous concept arts that have been made public since its release. It's clear that they wanted to make something with the spirit of Team Fortress Classic, but also distinctly recognizable. And again, like I mentioned earlier, this is why the game had such varied silhouettes. You can recognize every single class in the game just from looking at the shape of them. It's funny because when TF2 came out, it was so different from Quake appearance-wise that people thought it was some kind of Looney Tunes class shooter. No. But now, looking at most class shooters that exist, they've adopted TF2's format. And when it finally released in 2007, it was a massive hit. It was so successful that a sequel was never made, and the game is now barely getting updated. The rise of Team Fortress 2 horror is a larger topic that we could individually dive into without even analyzing the server blight story. But I want to expand on people's tendency on what they find scary elements in innocent things. One trope that's becoming much more common nowadays is being in a server where you're completely on your own. The same as how people would load up Construct and Garry's mod. And despite the game having absolutely no players, no threats unless they spawn something in or have questionable mods, they will still never ever go into that dark room because maybe there could be something in there, the Nether. But again, this subversion of turning something innocent into something scary. This has happened time and time again across a multitude of different genres and formats from both games, TV, and I think when it comes to internet culture, a lot of it can be primarily traced back to sharing creepy pastas. Okay. All right. I I get it. I I say creepy pasta. You think of Oh. Oh, Le Ben round Sonic with le black eyes. So scary. Oh my god. Is that Jeff the Killer? And and they put they put Jeff the Killer and Slenderman man in the same map and now they're double teaming me. Now the reason why I'm talking about creepy pastas. Please stay with me here. I I get it. Okay. You think of creepy pasta, you instantly imagine, oh the scary face of le dog. I'm actually looking at the creepy pastas now. We've got uh oh my is that game end squidwood. People are intimately familiar with the game to the point where a person's favorite class to play may even be their favorite class from a personality angle. Much like how the sniper, like every Australian I've ever met, throws piss at you and shouts racial slurs. Or how people that play as the scout usually have a hyper autistic fixation with the popular streamer Germa. Or my personal favorite, the pyro. If you play as the pyro, you're either a degenerate or a furry. I basically said the same word twice. This familiarity, this love for what TF2 is, is precisely why the server blight is so effective. Even if you don't play TF2 through cultural ambitious osmosis. Even if you don't play TF2 through cultural osmosis, you probably grow more familiar with it than you'd think. You may know about my incident that never happened, Germa sounding like the scout, or TF2's funny yet steeply priced hat system. I'm pretty sure there's more people that know about the rampant butt situation in Team Fortress 2 than have actually played the game. But the game at this point is pretty set in stone. The last major update, Jungle Inferno, released it 2017. God, I'm rotten. And though it remains a cultural touchstone online, the player base has waned more and more as the game has lost support. Now, we have gotten a new comic, but you know, it might be a long time before we see anything new for the game itself. And at this point, it's just stacking on top of a game that came out 18 years ago. Most games these days don't even manage to last a third of that time. This is the part where I meant to make a Concord joke, but I'll do you one better. Meet Your Maker. This was actually a really fun game where you could invade someone else's base to get their loot and then leave. And simultaneously, you could also make your own base to defend against an attacker. At the time of recording, there's around 10 people playing this game. I think one of the main reasons it died is because no matter how good your base was, jobless sweats would keep brute forcing it until they found a way to beat it. And no, I'm not salty because I lost every single base that I made. The server blight is a direct counter to what is known about Team Fortress 2. There's little to no humor in it. It's a deeply serious story that works within a similar framework to old machinimas. The format is familiar, but the execution isn't. The whole story has a very gruesome, creepy vibe, which plays in direct contrast to Team Fortress 2's cartoony and expressive art style, the absence of players, the music, the way that only one player actually talks in the voice channel. It all feels very out of the ordinary for TF2 fan content, especially the last one because if you ever spoke in game in Team Fortress 2, you would get a reply, but it's probably from a bot tried to sell you a dodgy hat. But this story feels too thematically put together to be a totally original story. This is where we back up yet again to talk about a huge moment in internet culture during the 2000s, even into today. Creepy pastas. First, we need to define such a garbage nonsense word. Seriously, you might already know what it means, but go and talk to your parents about what a creepy pasta is. They they will have no clue what you're talking about. I'll be honest, I tried looking up creepy pasta on Google images. The first result is Sainsbury spooky pasta, 400 g for £150, and it's out of stock. The word creepy pasta came about in roughly 2007, derived from the word copy pasta. Copy pastas are still going strong today and are so unfunny they have an entire subreddit dedicated to them. One of the current top posts on the copyp pasta subreddit at the time of recording is, "Does liking boobs make me a lesbian?" And the worst thing is that was probably posted by a straight man. Now, while copy pastas were meant to be spammed everywhere in a semi-sarcastic, snide form, creepy pastas are copy pastas made with the intent to unsettle or scare the reader. The history of creepy pastas are a little bit more complex than the word itself, though. Creepy chain emails. The '9s were very similar in format. Often spreading urban legends or straight up misinformation. But often the format was very similar to what would later become creepy pastas. Here's one such example. Warning. Keep reading or you will die. Even if you only look at the word warning. Once there was a girl named Clarissa. She was 10 years old and she lived in a psychiatric hospital because she killed her mother and father. He got so bad that he went to kill all the staff in the hospital so that the government would decide that the best idea was to get rid of it. So they set up a special room to kill her as humanely as possible. But the machine did not work. What they were using went wrong and she remained seated in agony for hours until she died. Now, every week, the day of his death, he returns with the person who reads this letter. On a Monday night at 12 a.m., he crawls to your room and kills you slowly, cutting you off and watching you bleed to death. Now, send this to another 10 images on this site and he will chase someone who does not. This is not false. Apparently, if you copy and paste this into 10 comments in the next 10 minutes, you will have the best day of your life tomorrow. They will kiss you or invite you to leave. If you break this chain, you will see a little dead girl in your room tonight. Well, it's not exactly master level storytelling. But, you know, today the equivalent we get is that that really annoying one. Hi, my name is Common Winstead. You know, the worst thing is I can't even play the entirety of that one because someone was like petty enough to copy. Now, again, keep in mind this was the early days of the internet. And despite reading like a bart that's trying to get your Discord Nitro at the time, this had people in a grip. The internet was so new and the thought someone would just lie or make things up, that wasn't a thing. and it still isn't today. You wouldn't lie on the internet, would you? This format of small scary stories would continue over time, but the earliest solid examples of what we know as creepy pastas originate from either 4chan or just entirely independent blogs. One of the foremost examples of this early internet scary story being the infamous. This story was told from the perspective of a hobbyist caved digger's personal blog and his trouble with getting into increasingly claustrophobic spaces where he might not be alone. The story line is amazing and it features some really discomforting pictures. And if you haven't read or listened to a reading of it, you definitely should. As the genre proliferated, a specific sort of creepy pasta began to grow in popularity. The video game creepy pasta. Ooh, what if you got a haunted copy of Sonic the Hedgehog where he kills all of his friends. All of this sounds pretty silly or convoluted in retrospect, but it was incredibly popular at the time, and there's still a lot of interest in this specific kind of horror. Creepy pastas expanded on the scope of their themes. And to analyze server blight properly, we need to look at older stories that establish tropes relevant to my theory of what's happening in this new TF2 animation. Now, it's easy to write these early stories off as cringe, and honestly, they are, but they reach for some major themes that are executed much better in this animated series that make it feel familiar and nostalgic. Despite being a new and ongoing series, the way the server blight tells its narrative makes it feel familiar, but not entirely derivative in a way that's irritating. There's a lot of similar elements in other stories like John Carpet as the thing or creepy pastas we'll talk about after getting into server blight story, but the focus across the wider narrative is not so much on any one individual and giving us pieces of how the server blight functions as a monster. Despite being an entirely visual experience up until its latest entry, The Puppet, the Server Bllight Animations that exist so far feel more like SCP entries. What I mean by this is a similar anthology of stories that can be found on the SCP Foundation wiki. If you're not familiar, SCP entries are stories about various monsters that have been contained or in some cases lost or only documented. All done by a fictional organization known as the SCP Foundation. It's not entirely important to ramble about the laws surrounding the Foundation, as long as you understand that it's a shadowy group not connected to one government. This gives the freedom of entries to be from any corner of the world. SCPs are just anomalous in nature, and it doesn't necessarily have to be a spooky scary monster, with some of the more outlandish entries being on objects, places, or entities from beyond our dimension. We can talk about how ridiculous some of these are, like for example, the SCP joint. That is a real thing, by the way. But after we recap the server blight story, we'll compare and contrast the most similar SCP entries to Server Blight. But for now, I've yapped on enough. I want to go over the events of this story so we can establish facts about how this digital monster operates. [Music] Server Blight. The server blight narrative is told over the course of four videos at the time of recording. These are the empty server, the migration, server blight, and puppet. We're going to break down each one individually and tie what's going on to other things to maybe get a better understanding of what's happening here, or at the very least talk about how this feels like one of the first great internet horror stories in quite a while with it succeeding in many places where others don't. There are already other similar videos out there that have done a great job, like the one from Intricate Labs, that give a more direct recap of the story, but the goal here isn't just to do that, but tie themes and concepts of server bllight back to their cultural roots in other creepy pasta or horror media that might have inspired them. [Music] The empty server centers on a blue sniper player, Dixelot. Is that Is that really his name? I'm I'm trying to keep a serious tone. Okay. All right. Dixelot enters a mostly empty match of TF2. As he loads in, he asks, "What's up, guys?" and is promptly told by user Gillyuit to game end himself. So, yeah, this is pretty typical of any TF2 public match. So, it's fair to understand why he might not think much of it. As Dixelot walks around the map, he realizes that he is one of the only few players. There aren't any normal sounds of a fight, just his movement and the music. Right as Dixelot inquires, where y'all at? A spy wanders out of the shadows and runs off the cliff behind our protagonist. After game ending himself, this spy player disconnects from the game. Dixelot assumes this to be an act of shame or maybe some sort of rage quit and moves on. You're suck. As he turns around, an red scout runs across the map in front of him. He takes aim down his scope, fires a shot, but misses. The red scout stops dead in their tracks, and looks directly at him, nodding in the sort of way people do with their mouse when they're talking in the in-game voice channel. This is actually a really common thing, by the way, especially in early Halo machinima. You know how in Red Versus Blue it was just a bunch of guys wearing helmets, so they had to move the camera up and down to reenact that they're talking. You're making that up. Now, this scout seems to be pretty much asking for it. Thinking not much of it, our protagonist takes the easy head shot. This time, the player doesn't disconnect. He types, "Man, y'all are bad." and is once again instructed by Gillyuit to game himself in chat. Hey yo, chill the [ __ ] out. Yo, you sitting there playing with the After running around the red side of the map a bit more, he gazes across the map to a dead heavy player. At this point, he's irritated and goes to disconnect, but realizes either that he simply can't or that the button does nothing. As he runs around the map more, he comes across a red engineer. The red engineer is Gillysuit, and he immediately once again instructs Dixelot to game end himself. As he does this, the player model of the engineer animates as though he is actually speaking in game. As he asks how this is even possible, the engineer grabs his knife from his hand. The engineer instructs him to leave while he still can. Despite that, Dixel art can't disconnect from the game. The engineer runs off with his knife up some nearby stairs and he turns around to realize that a heavy player is standing just outside of the nearest doorway. Only his arm is visible and from his hand extends an extra finger. As it twitches, Dixelot bolts upstairs to run away and discovers the body of the engineer who seems to have used the knife to game end himself. written in his blood on the walls as simple instructions. Don't let it take you alive. Dixelot jumps from the building's second floor open window as he's chased by the distorted heavy player. It shouts altered lines, begging for assistance as it bounds up the stairs after him. Need some help. Oddly, as it hits the floor, the sound effect for taking full damage can be heard. Dixelot runs away from the now completely disfigured heavy player, dashing off the cliff the spy player had done earlier before, finally disconnecting from the game. The extended arms of the creature reach over the cliff, shaking and still using heavy lines to beg for help. The game then crashes. We're given very little direct confirmation about what we're seeing over the course of the animation, but it establishes some key components of the narrative that are going to be important to keep in mind as we go further and talk about my theories of what this thing really is. you know, no pun intended to the John Carpenter film. This story isn't being told within the boundaries of the in-game world of TF2. This is meant to be a real server. Dixel art acts like any player would, right down to the super ironic Steam name. This is extremely similar in nature to how creepy pastas surrounding video games will frequently center on a very average relatable protagonist. Usually to emphasize that the real focus of the story is the distortion in the game itself. Many game mechanics are still present within the story, namely the text chat being the primary method of communication, the server updates in chat, and the full damage both the player character and the creature itself endure after jumping from the second story window. Like creepy pastas of the past, the story is told from the perspective that this thing could really be out there somewhere. And there's a small chance that if you boot up TF2, you might actually run into it. I got to find that guy. But right now, we don't really have much in the way of what it is right now. But one thing we do know is that the monster is still subject to the game's mechanics. It seems that when Dixelot was able to finally leave the game, he actually escaped the monster. The monster is trapped in the server. Or maybe it has the ability to go from server to server. But as long as he's not in the actual game, he might be safe. See, we're not left with a clear answer of what's happening inside the TF2 server, but it's clear either the game itself has created this entity or it's been put into the game by whoever created the server. The user ghillie suit seems morally abstract in nature with the repeated instructions in chat for the users to, you know, game themselves. It almost seems like a warning or if you're dicks a lot, you know, an average community server. But he also doesn't move like a player character. The name almost implies the function of the player itself. The actual word ghillie suit means a camouflage suit, which get used in a multitude of games. Like for example, that one Call of Duty mission where you're crawling around in the grass and sniping people, or if you're a disgusting sweat in Day Z, where you're prone for 7 hours straight just to kill two people. The point I'm trying to make is this user could be camouflaging somehow, hiding amongst the facade of a slowly dying user base to take advantage of people's interest and fear. I don't mean to say that TF2 is actually dying. I've already established that it's got tens of thousands of players on it daily. But in this context where the server has no people in it and say there's no one familiar online, it makes the story much more unsettling. The migration gives us more of an idea what the entity inside the game might be, albeit left a bit abstract still. It's disturbingly short and with the story only being told through game chat and the visuals, you're left with making your own interpretation about the ending. Where is server? The map is the same and the game hasn't changed. We're still in the same server and it's only been moments since Dixelot jumped off the edge of the map and thankfully disconnected. A red engineer spawns in with a hat on. Gillysuit sends another message in the chat. I'm having so much fun. The red engineer stops to respond, giving us the first clarification of his name, Johnny Danny 12. This name is noticeably less ironic than the first user. He responds, "Good for you." and quickly sets up his sentry. Despite this being a TF2 horror series, it is probably the nicest interaction ever documented on that game. As Johnny Danny 12 finishes setting up his turret, he begins to look around. There's a consistent thudding above him. Gilly suit doesn't send a different response in chat, instead repeatedly pasting, "I'm having so much fun." Johnny messages, "Are there any bad guys?" misspelling the word there. The reason why I'm pointing that out is because Danny could be a young player. I mean, his name is Johnny Danny 12. He was probably born in 2012, making him the oldest free-to-play player on record. As he runs upstairs to look for other players, he only stops to send a simple shut up in chat. As Gillysuit continues to spam the same message over and over, you get this horrible feeling that Dixelot being able to disconnect from the server was a blessing. As Johnny runs around, he turns and stops when he discovers the source of the thudding. Another red engineer repeatedly bashing his head against the floor with a smile on his face. Stunned, he quickly types, "What is that?" You can see the panic in the message, not even being able to use the space properly. He's then approached by a vibrating stretching mass of vertrices and polygons begging for help. As he turns to run away, he disconnects and the creature stops in place and then disappears. It lets out another distorted heavy line. Thank you. Thank you. As it disappears, several usernames disconnect from the server, some being from the last animation, but the last being Ghillie Suit. Now, this animation is incredibly short. It's only about 2 and 1/2 minutes long, but it's also very effective at giving us a bunch of smaller pieces to work with. For one thing, the protagonist of this episode, Johnny Danny 12, is lacking the irony of the first protagonist. He's similarly relatable, but in a way, he feels more naive from his messages, earnest focus on the objective, which is not really common in multiplayer games. It's clear he's lacking in anything but genuine interest in the game itself. Very little is said, but his frantic way of typing and small errors almost lend themselves to the idea that, you know, he could be a zoomer. This interpretation is actually so popular the creators made a joke video acknowledging it. Now, more importantly, there's some other things we can now gather about this entity inside the game. It's aware of what's happening around it, and it seems to be trying to gather as many players together as possible. The entity is a mess of horribly mashed together corners and ends of different character models in game. And when it disconnects from the server at the end, a total of seven usernames leave the chat. It seems to have learned from Johnny Danny 12 to move from server to server as implied by the way it thanks Johnny after he leaves the game. The entity can now leave the server which is terrifying. In the original video we thought it was trapped to the singular server. And also Gillysuit who seemed to be warning and trying to help Dixelot in the original video has now been compromised and is part of the entity. He was giving genuine advice to Dixelot. If you game end yourself, you're able to leave the server. But despite that, Johnny was also able to leave the server despite the fact that he never actually gameended himself. If anything, he stood still for a second, almost like his game crashed. But the title of the episode is the empty server migration. Almost like the server is being refreshed. Maybe with Johnny Danny leaving to go to another server, the entity is able to use him to be able to join a new one. The shot of when Johnny Danny leaves, and I'm going to use this with quotation marks, leaves the server is purposely ambiguous. Was the entity actually able to make contact with him and possibly infect him? Or was he just able to escape? That question, for better or for worse, is answered in the Titler episode, Server [Music] Blight. The next animation, Server Blight, is a bit different in tone. The kill feed here is active, and our latest protagonist is actually voiced. Yeah, man. He reads a message from another user, Drain Damage. I'm assuming no correlation to the musical group Drain Gang. [Music] It's really great ending to the album. When he reads the message in the chat, it's very familiar. [ __ ] kill yourself. Yeah, you thought I was going to say gay men the entire video. Forget that. Is it okay if I touch you? Hopefully the YouTube reviewer doesn't watch this deep in the video and give me limited ads. [ __ ] tells me [ __ ] [ __ ] pyro mains. As our protagonist angrily reads this message aloud in the voice channel, we can find out his username. Hector on. He asks a member of his team who is presumably his friend Aaron to switch to soldier so they can carry the game. This is probably the most accurate representation of normal Team Fortress 2 in Server Blight because when you switch to the soldier, you don't really need to try anymore. Okay. All right. I drop it. I won. This animation feels a bit more like your typical TF2 animation as it shows dynamic cuts of them going for kills as the chat fills with requests for trades and Korean yo Squid Game from the Squid Game. This is much more familiar. This is what public servers with randoms really feels like. As they get more kills, the feed fills up with names, some familiar. It becomes evident that the friend Aaron is Dixelot and this foreshadows that something is very quickly off. Hector follows a heavy player, Scuba Master 96. As he gains kill after kill, the chat fills up with messages confused about how he isn't dead, presumably because he's taken more damage than what should actually be possible. As the game ends and the red team wins, Hector's character dies on the victory screen. Aaron asks him how he does kill binds, a feature commonly used in TF2 to just quickly reset your position to change characters or to mess around. From the interaction, we can gather that whatever this distortion that got Gillies and maybe Johnny Danny was. Aaron seems to just be hopping in between community servers with his friends like some people often did before TF2 got overrun with butts for a bit. One guy, Aaron, we're going to get stomped. No one plays these community servers, man. Let's play casual. Hector, irritated, asks why he can't just play casual instead of having to be on a team with just Scuba Master 96. Before Aaron can give a response more detailed than nah nah, 11 names join the chat, including the familiar ghillie suit. As the names fill, Aaron frantically types in the chat that they have to leave. Someone who just joined. What do you mean? He won't tell Hector why other than he recognizes the username in chat. Given the scenario, most people would probably just listen to their friends if something like this happened. But as before, Hector can't leave the server. Aaron asks to killbind and then begins using rockets to self-damage. This implies perhaps the console commands aren't working anymore. Hector, still calmly taking the position of someone a bit more online and level-headed. Let's [ __ ] this guy up. Insists they just hard carried the last match and that it would take more than some simple script to beat them. To him, it's a very dumb game. You could just always F4, right? As they change loadouts and agree to just win the game and move on. Yes. Scuba Master 96 sullenly types, we go together in the chat, idiot. As they push the cart, the server is devoid of the 11 players who should have just joined the game. Hector, just like a real team player, splits from the cart to get a stray kill, despite Aaron asking him not to. Uh, yeah, we should. I'm getting that Uber. As he kills an enemy scout, the player's username enters the feed. Direction Z. Another familiar name if you were paying attention to the kill feed in previous videos, but otherwise faceless beyond his choice at the character selection screen before he lost his way. There's a subtle hint at what's to come here. But if this is your first time watching, I won't spill the beans just yet. Or the hats. Get it? TF2 analogy. Aaron asks Hector if he's all right with him catching wind that something is definitely wrong. Eight. What? Yeah, that's The eerie silence is broken by distant gunfire, maybe from an altercation with Scuba Master 96. As Hector and Aaron return to the cart to push it through the next objective with no resistance, more gunfire rings out in the distance. Something is definitely off. Hector and Aaron leave the cart to check on Scuba Master, finding him away in a far-off corner of the map, staring at a wall like it's a scene from the Blair Witch Project. Yo, Heavy. As Hector tries to get his attention, he once again reiterates in chat, "We go together." He slowly turns around. Aaron quickly suggests that the pair should leave the area in chat. As the heavy faces them, he swallows the model of a hand that seemed like it may have just been reaching towards them. Although he's standing right before them, the messages that are reiterated in chat denote that Scuba Master 96 is dead in game. Aaron and Hector begin to run away from the heavy as it sprints towards them, beginning to shout distorted heavy lines, begging for help. Just as before, the messages are repeated in chat despite the chase continuing as Scuba Master closes in on Hector and Aaron. They narrowly managed to vote kick him from the server before being grabbed. Aaron insists that they have to leave the map, even if it means jumping off the edge. From this point, it's kind of unclear what's going on. Before, it was agreed that they could just force quit the game, end the task, and then move on. But it seems like they're now completely stuck here. On their way to the nearest pit to jump into, they find an enemy demo man bashing his head against a wall. If anything, probably in reference to a really infamous scene in the first Dead Space game where you could find a survivor repeatedly bashing his head until he collapsed onto the ground. Hector stops to investigate before Aaron asks him to stop, insisting that this is some sort of trick by the distortion. They keep heading around the map to the pit. As they reach the outside area, a familiar red engineer with a hat on is laying sideways on the floor. His player model is connected to what looks like a thread made of stretched and deformed digital flesh of his leg. His username enters chat with a small message, Johnny Danny 12. Is this heaven? The message, as all of his others, is a bit naive, but very genuine, almost as if he's physically laying in the snow of the game. Somehow able to feel the environment around him. As his player model pulses in a slightly unnatural manner, familiar to the way any game acts when a character's animations glitch, he asks in chat again, "Why is it so cold?" Whatever is happening to Johnny here, it's literally for him. You can't write this moment off as out of step tonally with the rest of the story. As with everything else, something is distinctly wrong. And this moment is taken entirely seriously by the narrative. No matter how chronically online Hector might be or how familiar Aaron is with what's been happening on this community server. Now, look, I get it. A lot of people use VR chat a little bit too much to the point that they sleep in game and then wake up and have like distortions with reality somehow. But this experience seems to be real for Johnny. Somehow, he's been removed from our world and became a part of the game. and he's only been given a fraction of his mental faculties as the entity's grip loosens on him while it looks to consume more unsuspecting victims just looking to play the game. As Johnny lays on the ground, Aaron changes his weapon, almost as if to affirm he understands what's happening and he wants to end what's going on for Johnny in the only way he knows how to within the game. He approaches the spot Johnny is laying and a nearby hatch door flies open as a pulsing mass of arms and fingers stretches towards him. It becomes evident that Johnny is nothing more than a worm on the end of a fish hook tied to a string of his own virtual synapses and skin. He's bait for the monster to get Hector and Aaron. As Aaron's player model stares for the shocked expression, Hector dashes behind him towards the cliff. Only now can we see what they're looking at. The demo man from before with two extra arms poking out of his shoulders and a second head sprouting from his neck. As they run away from the deformed player, Aaron stops to fire a rocket at him. It splits the monster into pieces, but before the shot shifts to where Aaron is running to. The pieces slide across the floor as if to imply that they are returning to a larger host. Hector and Aaron stop at the familiar upstairs area from a previous animation. This being the place on the map where Aaron first initially ran into the engineer Gillysuit as he was playing the sniper. Aaron seems to have put a bit together as he explains to Hector that the entity is baiting them and learning to take advantage of people. What? What? Hector just keeps asking what in confusion as Aaron explains that it's just repeating voice lines it heard in game. Hector repeats what he has said in the voice channel in the exact same tone. What? As though he is physically being controlled his keyboard somehow or someone is playing a recording of his voice. Suck me off, man. As Aaron turns around, he looks up to see that the speech bubble for the voice chat is placed incorrectly above Hector's head. What's actually happening becomes immediately apparent from the moment Hector stepped away to chase the scout. Direction Z. What? He was consumed by the blight. Similarly to the other possessed players, Hector's character model distorts and its mouth opens as a hand reaches from inside the mouth towards Aaron. Again, the fingers stretch, distort, and vibrate in a glitchy manner. The hands of the medic himself reach towards Aaron. Aaron begins to run, and as he does this time, instead of a distorted character's voice, it's instead Hector's. Stop. [Music] Whatever this thing is inside the game is, it has already divided Hector's spirit from his physical body. Maybe his mind left his physical body at the keyboard. An empty corpse that simply lost the player it was inside. Aaron finally manages to dash off a cliff on the map outside the room. And he apologizes in chat before he's able to at least disconnect from the server. The medic's model slowly puts itself back together. the stretched and tearing ends of the model forcing themselves back and the hand pushing its way into the throat of the medic. As more names enter the chat, the model of the medic smiles and the screen cuts to black. There's only one final piece of this story to look at, but before we do, we're given so much in this animation that we have to talk about it. For one thing, its title also finally gives us the name for this creature within the game that's consuming the souls of the players it manages to come into contact with. Server Blight. In this name, we're able to theorize a bit more about what's happening. From the get-go, we're given hints that the server blight exists entirely in game. In the first animation, the empty server, when its function was a bit more abstract, one thing was clear. It's still subject to the rules of the game. When it was chasing Aaron or Dixelot as it were, it took full damage in the same way he did when he jumped out of a window. It also only uses voice lines from the game to speak. That is until later on when it can use the voices of players as well. The blight is also distinctly driven towards the purpose I mentioned before, consuming more players. Anytime it interacts with another player, it either displays joy in having users as part of its digital mass or is attempting to coersse or hunt a player so that they can become part of what seems to be a digital consciousness, but at the same time a physically restrained hive mind. The way characters either stretch or reach some off-screen larger body or have distortions hidden within them is evident of one of the blight's most frightening elements. Its ability to pretend to be multiple players at once or take control over multiple players. Much like how many games control butts, the blight takes command of its victim's positions and the things they're doing. But when it isn't directly doing so, it seems as though its victims may have some control or awareness over themselves. If the blight were some self-aware function of TF2 itself, maybe it is aware of the affforementioned commander position. And this is why it uses the guise of being on one team or another to control its victims. This is evident across all of the animations as the victims display different levels of awareness. In the empty server, it's unclear whether Gillisuit himself is directing Aaron to kill himself or it's the blight doing so. The idea that it's the blight runs counter to the story as killing yourself in the game seems to be the only way to avoid the blight. [Music] Ky a further clue to this is in the following story the migration isn't it called server migration when Gilly suit reaches towards Johnny Danny 12. This isn't done in the same way that a distorted player tends to reach out towards other users. Gilly suit's fingers and arms don't distort or stretch out in ways despite the blight being directly behind him about to run over his body with its pulsating mass of digital limbs. The pieces of info here and there that we've been given through subtext wouldn't suggest this is one of the blight's PS for more users. Instead, this seems like whatever was left of the mind of this actual player, Gillisu, is reaching out to Johnny Danny 12 for help, as though he was physically there. From very early on, it's established that the blight is able to literally render its victim's souls from their body. Since I'm in here, I might as well pick up something for myself. But elements across the videos suggest that you aren't totally assimilated into the blight's consciousness immediately, but rather it holds a loose grip on you to animate you like a puppet. The virtual aberration pulls you in different directions and forces your body to say things it heard and do stuff that it wants so it can assimilate more people. Through the change in Scuba Master 96's messages that denote that he is in fact dead, it's possible that being the living soul inside the character is entirely physical and users suffer until they spiritually can't handle the stress of being torn, stretched, and pulled across the server. This idea of an aberration infecting a game and going from one user to the next is done in a much more subtle manner than the means of the creepy pastas long since passed. If anything, the blight spreads like a virus trying to infect as many players as possible. But viruses in the real world aren't inherently evil. They just want to infect people to survive. They have no concept of morality. You could say that the server blight is similar. It's just some kind of life form or malfformation that wants to survive, to thrive, and to spread itself. But at the same time, it's hard to argue against that when again in the latest episode, the medic has such a sinister grin. [Music] almost like it's taking enjoyment in this process. Another quick thing to mention before moving on to the last part is the dramatic irony of the name ghillie suit. I already briefly touched on it, but a ghillie suit is used to blend into the background of an environment, so you aren't seen by people or possibly the animals that you're trying to hunt. It is most commonly used for hunting. And to me, it seems like an acknowledgement by the story that the blight isn't some complex malicious hacker actively playing the game. [Music] [Applause] [Music] It's a digital algorithm of some kind, a program, a bot, a piece of the game itself looking to consume people as prey. You could make the argument that the blight is a hunter for sport, but I personally think this drive to assimilate players is very animallike. The instinct is to assimilate, and over the course of the animations, the blight learns to hunt more effectively. [Music] We'll take more time to focus on the different characters in Server Blight, but first I want to take a look at the last piece we've been given of the narrative for now. Puppet is much more direct about its creepy pasta inspirations. Wearing the monk here proudly in its YouTube title. The format is also much closer to old video game creepy pastas, as it's a first person monologue told from the perspective of the person haunted by the entity in a game we're familiar with. But because this is the voice of Hector from the last animation, we're given a much more established and personal look at how Hector's familiarity with TF2 as a game didn't actually save him from the server blight. This is an angle repeatedly used in Creepy Pasters, and one that I'll touch on a bit more in a moment when I finish talking about the events of the server blight story. But bear in mind the theme of two close friends that are devoted fans of the game that is continuously hunting or tormenting them somehow. Given that context, we see a firsthand account from Hector of what's happened to his body, and it's deeply unsettling with the context of everything we've seen firsthand. To interpret the most important parts, I think it's best to let it play and analyze the smaller details. Everything feels like it's been building up to this video. I open my eyes. I don't remember falling asleep. It's dark, quiet. I feel numb. I don't remember how I got here. I don't remember much. I was at home, safe. What was I doing? There's a sound. Something shifts in the darkness surrounding me. I call out. The voice I hear doesn't belong to me. No one responds. The feeling gradually returns to my limbs. My body feels disoriented. I try to stand, but I'm stuck. Soft, immovable walls all around me. I call out again. How did I get here? I was at home by myself. Another sound. The walls contort around me. Gravity inverts as I'm turned upside down. Something is pressing into my neck now. It feels like a hand. I try to move my arms. They aren't where they're supposed to be. My right hand is too far away. My left hand is moving on the wrong side of my body. What's happening? Another sound above me. A gurgling moan like a person in pain. There's something very familiar about the voice. Am I laying under a pile of bodies? I call out to them, but my mouth won't make the right sounds. The hand pressing into my neck is starting to hurt as sensation returns to my body. Or is it my body? My legs feel too long. My shoulders too broad. Where am I? Everything jolts again. I'm moving now as my entire prison slowly crawls forward like a centipede lumbering on a 100 legs. With every step, a sharp knee stabs into my abdomen. And I can feel cold breath on my left palm. Oh god, I'm freezing. The biting cold startles my returning senses enough to make me shiver. Where am I? In this pile of bodies or a pile of corpses. Everything shuddters. We hit the ground. I hear a dozen voices groaning in pain. I'm one of them. Fingers dig into my neck. The world rearranges again. I'm laying on my side now. There's an opening in the wall in front of me. Light shines through. What is it? Through the tiny crack in the wall. I see the distinct photocopy textures of Team Fortress 2. I can see pastel blues and snow and stone. What's happening here? Another pained moan. I can see my surroundings now. All red cloth and tor skin. Arms and legs and torsos and faces all bent and stretched and squirming. Growing fingers pierce the flesh on my neck. We're moving now. Scuttling towards the tunnel in the center of the map. Something pulls us along. knitting together a dozen digital bodies to build itself up. I can feel its writhing influence all over my body, pulling my limbs apart, distorting my form. My arms are too long, my legs have too many joints. I am being rebuilt according to some otherworldly blueprint. Our mass forces itself into the tunnel. I can make out something standing on the other end. Another player, I remember, a spy, helpless, staring back at our mass. Something smiles behind my head and all our constituent parts start to scream for help. We barrel down the tunnel as I feel its fingers enter my body. They split and a thousand parasitic tendrils wrap around my mind. It wants me to go along with it to move and scream like the others. I resist. It smile widens behind my head. It savors my resistance. And then I feel a million burning pixels sear my flesh. And I scream for it. The text is very direct about what's happening here, but there are some conflicts with what I allege to be the function and motivation of the server blight. I want to address these and also cover some of the new pieces of info that we're given with. Puppet confirms something that's been evident until now, but hasn't been confirmed due to the story lacking a central narrator. Who are you people? The blight's assimilated users aren't just hacked or being controlled by the server, manipulating the characters positions and animations. Instead, the server blight requires the spirit or the soul of the players it takes so it can faithfully recreate their mannerisms. This starts with simple voice lines but evolves to the blight creating a full recreation of Hector's voice in Server Blight. The animation where he's assimilated and his friend Aaron once again narrowly avoids the blight. The assimilated users may all still be alive or are tortured until they aren't able to hold on to their own individual identities anymore, dying a death of the personal self as they forgot who they were. One particular aspect of this that feels particularly intentional is what's being implied by the name server blight. The back half of the word is blight. And that's interesting to look at on its own. Blight most commonly is a plant disease that follows the growth of fungus. Blight is not like the sort of cannivorous predators that hunt weak and defenseless animals. Blight is devoid of thoughts or intent. It's a sickness. And if it's allowed to spread to every cell in a plant, it will cause it to rot until growth isn't possible and the entire plant dies. Often times, this rot creates a perfect environment for fungal growth to spread to other plant material and continue to wreak havoc. I want to talk a lot more about my theory on what the server blight is because it's been on my mind constantly. The rest of the video is going to be me just expounding. Expounding? Is expounding even a word? The rest of the video is entirely going to be me expounding upon how it's a lot like The Thing or other stories about an intelligent monster. But I want to talk more about how the server blight isn't entirely like The Thing as well. To my perspective, the server blight can't just be some sort of malicious entity inside TF2, hellbent on torturing players for the sake of it. The idea of it all just being a vague idea of fun or something else leaves me pretty unsatisfied. Even with the text in the puppet suggesting that there is an intelligent entity at play here, it's only physically controlling the people it assimilated through somehow searing the digital nerves like a red hot puppet on strings. I believe that this is really an organic function of its desire to spread by any means possible and not an extension of the creature's desire to torture for the sake of it. Take the following quote from the end of the video. There's a repeated illusion to the idea that the serverblite is an entity that takes joy in the suffering. And maybe it purely is for the abstract idea that an Eldrich horror would just love torture. But I still do think it's deeper than that. I think the motivation of the blight is taking advantage of the way TF2 was overrun with butts. But I think the story is trying to apply a supernatural reasoning for such an event. The server blight is consuming the souls of players and taking their usernames to further its one sole purpose, to spread and assimilate more. I don't think this is an extension of a malicious intent or a wish to harm for the sake of it. I think that when it started, the blight was growing all on its own inside the empty server from the first two animations. Perhaps, like other creepy pasta, this is an extension of the game somehow growing to be self-aware in some way. I'm going to shift now to talking about the horror the server blight is reminiscent of, but I'm also going to contrast specific elements from those stories that make it clear to me that the blight is not entirely like one monster or another. All right, let's jump into it for real. You're caught up now. I could just yap at you about all the other good horror series that this reminds me of, but I can also talk about the events in these stories or canonical descriptions of the monsters in them. This makes the Blight an entirely new kind of monster. Up front, I do want to warn you that there'll be some minor spoilers for NES Godzilla creepy pasta, which came out 13 years ago, and also major spoilers for The Thing, which came out 42 years ago. So, I I mean, to be fair, you've you've probably had enough time to catch up on both of these. Now, I've been alluding to The Thing constantly because of how undeniably similar it is to Server Blight. From here on out, I'm going to establish what I consider to be major tenets of the way the server blight thinks and support those with excerpts from other stories that contrast with the blight in a way that make it apparent that just because it thinks doesn't mean it feels. Just like an NPC who acts happy when they do the thing that they're designed to. All right, screw you. Maybe the blight is merely designed to delight in performing its function. I'm the Joker, baby. Perhaps the blight is designed to pretend as though it enjoys fulfilling its purpose of assimilating players. This is a really dense concept to actually pick apart. So, let's extrapolated to stories that have a more established conversation surrounding them. I know I'm human. And if you were all these things, then you'd just attack me right now. So, if the blight is intelligent enough to imitate people and even pantomime emotions like distress or delight, why am I convinced that it doesn't feel that even in its clear self-awareness or direct delight to tormenting its victims? I can be so certain this being doesn't have a truly human understanding of emotion. There's one thing we can do that they can't. Empathize with the suffering of another living creature. There's one simple theme in The Thing that supports this. The Thing is intelligent, and the movie spends its entire runtime beating into you that it's not just self-aware. It knows enough about feelings to constantly stay ahead of the main cast of the film. Surprise! Freaking Now, I am getting a bit ahead of myself before we can talk about why The Thing and Server Blight aren't totally synonymous. Let's establish an understanding of the setting the former takes place in. If in talking about this any of you think, "Wow, that sounds really cool." This sucks, man. I really do insist that you pause the video and spend like $6 or something to find a copy of the thing to watch. Wow, they have it canned. It really is way too good at establishing an atmosphere of anxiety for your first exposure to be a YouTuber talking about it. I'll give you as little as possible to understand the monster. But you're seriously doing yourself a disservice if you don't watch it first and then soak it in. But let's be real, you're watching a YouTube video, bro. You're probably not even watching it. You're probably watching on your second monitor while you're playing Six Siege and scrolling TikTok at the same time. And then you complain on Twitter about how your attention is absolutely cooked. The thing centers around a North Americun research base in Antarctica and the sudden contact of its crew with an intelligent extraterrestrial being capable of imitating the cells of any creature that it assimilates. The movie mostly centers around how the main character McCriedi the helicopter pilot tries to avoid the thing. Damn it, child. Torch it. And how his ability to communicate with his co-workers deteriorates. We just landed in Antarctica and we're going to survive the next 50 hours here. We're literally [Music] We're going to focus on some of the other team members that either get the most screen time or are very clearly assimilated. Where's Blair? However, there are many moving parts to this story. And also to establish all 12 of the crew members just so a timeline of events makes sense. Aside from McCriedy, who we already mentioned, there's Clark the dog handler, Blair, the foremost scientist character, and his assistant biologist, Fuches, the mechanics, Child, who later went on to play the arbiter in Halo. You must abide. We trade one villain for another. I'm coming. And his stoner assistant, Palmer Norris, the geologist. Bennings, the meteorologist. In the beginning, Dr. Copper, the site medic and physician. fire. Gary, the commander who acts as a sort of site leader. He was gay, Gary. Nolles, the cook, and finally, Windows, the radio operator. Still with me? No. All right, don't worry. We're going to focus more on the confirmed assimilations in the film. There are specific moments in The Thing that make it clear when the victims are assimilated. They're gone. There's no more element of personal awareness or control. The Thing has a surprisingly deep understanding of social dynamics and how to manipulate people. Emergency meeting right in the front of that table. That I don't like that guy. Back off. Much of the film is spent making it clear how good it is at imitating life. Lungs, kidneys, liver, [Music] intestines seem to be normal. The thing is an extraterrestrial being that can assimilate with the cells of any organism it comes into contact with. At the start of the movie, there is a very obviously infected dog being chased around the Antarctic wilderness by some Norwegians shooting at it in a helicopter, which is also how the prequel film The Thing, also called The Thing, in 2011 ended. Uh, don't watch that film, by the way. It it sucks. The dog wanders into the American's camp as it's running from the helicopter. And because of a language barrier, the Norwegians are unable to communicate why they're so hellbent on killing the dog. In a panic, the helicopter is blown up by a stray grenade one of the pilots is carrying and the surviving one realizes that the American crew clearly don't understand how dire the situation is. He begins to open fire, but because of his absolutely horrendous aim, he misses the dog and shoots the person that it was licking. I'd like to point out, by the way, he's using the G3 SG1, literally the most expensive sniper in Counter-Strike 2. And yet, he still missed. The Americans understandably misinterpret his actions as needlessly hostile, and he's shot dead by the research site's commander, Gary. Gary isn't really relevant to the other parts I'm going to mention. So, all you have to do is remember that he led the research site before the thing shown up from here. Again, like I said, I'm going to avoid spoiling major events of the movie and talk about a few confirmed victims of the monster, mostly to see that, you know, how the monster got to the site. A lot of the focus of this film is not much of The Thing and more so the interpersonal fallout between the crew. There are multiple scenes in the movie that are just arguments about who got infected. And it's a reminder that The Thing is a blueprint for so many other monsters. I mean, just for comparison, The Thing has a run time of just under 2 hours. But yet, the best part of the film, The Monster, only has around 15 minutes of screen time. Which reminds me of another video I covered, Far Cry 3, where one of the best aspects of that game, Vas, only had around 20 minutes of screen time. No. And that's a game that takes anywhere between 15 to 20 hours to complete. Sometimes less really is more. Now, most importantly, the first confirmed human victim of the thing out of the North American crew is the meteorologist we mentioned before, Bennings. Prior to his on-screen assimilation, there are hints that other members aren't actually human anymore. Let me be. How long were you alone with that dog? I don't know, an hour. hour and a half maybe. What the hell are you looking at me like that for? But we're not focusing on the mystery as much as the things function. This is pure nonsense. Doesn't prove a thing. One thing I will say, I am so sick of people doing the thing theories and saying, "Oh, but but child, shut the [ __ ] up. He didn't have any cold breath at the end. That that means he's the thing." Despite the fact that the game, which is a direct continuation of the film and confirmed cannon by John Carpenter, already explained that that isn't the case. After the Norwegians attack, they investigate their base and find a bunch of old tapes and a horribly disfigured body with two faces. Autopsy reveals that it still has human organs. And given the nature of the site as a research facility, they initially decide to archive the body. Through happen stance, Bennings is left alone with the body right after he ironically calls it the find of the century. We ought to just burn these things. Can't burn the find of the century. That's going to win somebody the Nobel Prize. We then see him dragged away by the thing. And the next time the crew are able to find him, his arms are beginning to disfigure. And when he opens his mouth, only a demonic shriek comes out. Instead of everyone being immediately on edge, they approach the thing with the hope of understanding it. And this is why there are basically two autopsy scenes very close together prior [Applause] to [ __ ] going south. One thing I want to stop to analyze here is the clear difference between the server blight and the thing in nature. The thing is not limited to typical organic laws of alive and dead. The part of the thing that infects Bennings comes from the burned remains found at the Norwegian research site shown shortly before Bennings is killed. We see human organs physically removed from the splitface corpse. the thing comes from as well. From this, we know that at the very least, the thing doesn't need these organs to stay alive. The blight, on the other hand, has to abide by strict game mechanics in multiple ways. Though it can move servers, as of right now, the implication is still largely that it's restricted to the individual server it's on. And so far, the moderation tools within the game still work. despite the blight's ability to keep players from leaving and the farther much more fantastic concept of users being ripped from their bodies somehow and also the fact that the blight can apparently be kicked from the game, but we don't actually know where it goes afterwards. If anything, it could be kicked out to contaminate another server. The main element that sort of ties the server blight to the thing in function here is the very clearly similar splitfaced demo man that gets blown up in the serverlight animations only to slither across the floor. It feels important to note that the pieces slither across the floor as if to rejoin a larger, more threatening mass to attack again. Whereas the thing infects other organisms. They've sort of become like a worm that's been cut in half. I had to use the scene from The Thing remake there because it was a perfect analogy, even though I don't like that film. There's the initial mass the thing comes from and other beings it's infected. They're individually intelligent rather than having a direct constant physical connection to each other. The serverlight often appears limited in this way or as if the victims have to become a mass for some reason. Multiple times in the story, we see stretched pieces of the character that seems to go beyond our perspective, as if direct connection is the ultimate goal of server blight. As we talk more about the thing, it will become evident that it just wants to spread and divide. Whereas the goal of the server blight feels like it's rolling up a big ball of users who can be split from the pile to roll up more victims and return to the central heap of souls. When Hector splits off to kill the scout and is clearly infected. Also note the reuse of the wa line when Aaron approaches him and when his speech bubble is placed wrong and the demo man attacks Aaron. They're entirely separate from the central mass of the blight unlike Johnny Danny 12. And then in the next story puppet Hector is inside a mound of digital bodies. There are still other themes to pull from the kill scenes in the thing which look amazing. And this was all done with practical effect. The group sort of devolves into a panic after this. Anyone messes with me and the whole camp goes. Blair, one of the men who performs the autopsy on the splitface corpse, completely loses his [ __ ] and the group has to lock him in a tool shed in complete solitude just to keep him from attacking them out of distrust. Or perhaps a higher delusion that if he kills everyone there and himself, he'll save the rest of the world from a worse face. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. No, no, no, no, no. No. Despite evidence already suggesting that the thing is not limited to our understanding of death, he's so committed to this idea that before he starts to try and kill the crew, he destroys the helicopter's control panel. And this completely isolates the crew from the rest of the world. But again, in this film, so many assimilations happen offcreen with no hints. So, was he really trying to save everyone? Or was he already infected by the thing? Or was it trying to cut off connection from the outside world so it had an easier chance to thrive only to actually call in any kind of support when it felt ready, which would be assimilating the entire camp? I also want to mention, by the way, The Thing is not a comedy film at all, but there is one hilarious scene where he's asked if he's okay, and you can literally see a noose in the background. I'm all right. I'm much better. Are you sure? Right as the crew are beginning to formulate blood tests to determine who is infected, they discover the site's blood bank was sabotaged, every sample of uncontaminated blood for testing has been stabbed by someone, all pulling together on the floor, ruining the possibility of the initial goal of mixing blood with another sample from every crew member to see if there's an abnormal reaction. This makes it evident that not only is the thing likely among the men already, but it's also staying ahead of them, as if it understands its own weaknesses before the crew have even begun to process them. I don't think Cerlight displays this to quite this extent. Instead, just lashing out in a primal manner up until it begins using Hector's voice to talk. What? There's more of an element in the latter story of the monster learning about its own functions. The server blight is only beginning to learn, but the thing may already be far beyond our intelligence. From here, it's not even clear who is and isn't assimilated anymore. There's not even a way to figure out definitively who sabotaged the bloodbank based on the film's perspective. The only thing that we do know 100% is there's still at least one person in the group who isn't assimilated. You and Palmer tie everybody down real tight. What for? For your health. For your health? Because if they all were, the thing won and there'd be nothing to fight over anymore. And if you were all these things, then you just attack me right now. So some of you are still human. This thing doesn't want to show itself. It wants to hide inside an imitation. It'll fight if it has to. But it's vulnerable out in the open. If it takes us over, then it has no more enemies. Nobody left to kill it. And then it's one. We can spend all day arguing about what really happened in the thing's runtime, but we need to establish an agreed infection timeline so that I can actually relate the infections back to the blight and how they differ and hopefully finish this video in time before anyone's lost interest in it. So, of the 12, we know that Bennings was assimilated when he died. Prior to his death, there's a scene of the dog wandering into the room with an unknown crew member. Given the silhouette, Norris, Palmer, Windows, all make most sense given the shape. But given that Palmer's outfit doesn't totally match and Windows is later exonerated from being the one infected, it's likely we can assume that Norris is the first one infected prior to the splitface thing trying to assimilate Bennings. Two days pass. We know this as we're shown a scene of McCriedi recording a tape before he says as much. I'm going to hide this tape when I'm finished. If none of us make it, at least there'll be some kind of record. Storm's been hitting us hard now for 48 hours. We still have nothing to go on. The exact same tape you can find in the direct continuation of the thing video game. I'm going to hide this tape when I'm finished. If none of us make it, at least there'll be some kind of a record. The storm's been hitting us pretty hard now for 48 hours. We still have nothing to go on. One other thing, they think it rips through your clothes when it takes you over. Windows found some shredded long johns, but the name tag was missing. They could be anybody's. We're all very tired. There's nothing else I can do. Just wait. RJ McCriedi, helicopter pilot, US Outpost North 31. The person closest to understanding the thing other than Blair is his assistant Fuches, who we're shown to be studying the thing late into the night of the second day since Blair was locked up. The events surrounding Fuch's death are really strange as we're not shown them. This is a totally offscreen death again, which has happened many times in Server Blight. Fuches follows a figure in the darkness outside only to find a piece of mccy's torn uniform in the snow. I believe this is left to be a herring by the thing itself. as McCre's actions don't necessarily align with the motivation that makes sense for the thing and for the purpose of this timeline we're going to assume that this is a piece of evidence left either by the Palmer thing or the Norris thing to confuse Fuches and attempt to assimilate him something the thing and the server blight do have in common is social engineering manipulating people around them so he can get close to them or at least isolate them so taking them over is easier and much less resistance. One scene that perfectly shows how the thing tries to socially engineer people is when Norris, who is infected at the time, has what seems to be a heart attack. No one knows he's infected, but it's on purpose to make the entire situation around him. The Thing is panicked and scared, and it wants to take control of the situation. A lot of people like to talk about Dead Space and how the necromorphs are terrifying, a bunch of bodies converging together to the point that they turn into a literal moon just to eat other planets. But the weakness of the necromorphs is you have to die for your body to be used. I mean, sure, the marker can make you go insane. You can end up killing people, killing yourself, but again, it still needs just your body. It can't use live flesh to become a necromorph. The reason why the thing is terrifying is you never know who's actually infected because it assimilates. It doesn't take over. We still don't even know nearly 50 years after the film came out if you are still you. Are you trapped inside a huge body of flesh like the account in Server Blight? Or are you completely gone and now the alien has taken your place, but still using all your memories and mannerisms to perfectly emulate you? I want to come back inside. Don't you understand it? I'm all right. I'm much better. The thing only has one known weakness, which is fire. Fire will burn the flesh. Fire will burn the blood. And we know as well the thing wants to exist as a single entity. It is similar to the server blight, how it wants to gain as much mass as possible. But its one weakness compared to the server blight is each individual cell wants to survive. When the characters later find out they can use fire to test infected blood, they realize that the blood will self-report on its host. That's because it wants to survive, even if that means giving up whoever it's owned to. The reason why we can't gauge with the server blight if it operates in the same way is because so far no one's been able to damage it. No one's been able to do anything significant to the blight. They've only really been able to escape it, and that's the best outcome. We don't even know if it has a weakness to fire. Yep, that's right. This entire video was a huge shill for Meet the Pyro. The last thing I want to talk about before I tie it back to the blight and the most visceral and infamous scene of the [Applause] movie, one of the characters, McCriedi, has broken back into the base. He's not trusted by anyone because The Thing at every turn has tried to implicate that McCriedi is infected. Like for example, leaving a coat with his name tag near basically a crime scene. McCriedes has windows use a scalpel to take blood samples from every crew member into separate petri dishes. He uses the blowtorrch to heat up a stripped wire and then places the red hot wire into a sample of blood. His theory being that contaminated blood will try to survive in some way. Watching Norris in there gave me the idea that Maybe every part of him was a hole. Every little piece was an individual animal with a built-in desire to protect its own life. It'll try and survive. Crawl away from a hot needle. Say, if the separated parts of the thing are like worms, and they operate individually and intelligently, even on the smallest scale, then the blood itself will fight to survive, unlike the blood of a real human. He goes through the group starting with Windows who isn't tied up and then himself to show that he isn't a monster. Child, who a moment ago seems to have already made peace with dying at Mac's hands, remarks that this test is [ __ ] It's a crack of [ __ ] Mac then continues to go through the group testing the blood of the corpses of other members, but their blood doesn't react. And Child sarcastically comments that that would make Mac a murderer. And Clark was human, huh? Which makes you a murderer, don't it? Because earlier on in the film, he killed someone out of [Music] self-defense. Mac ignores this insult and instead reaches for the petri dish with Palmer's blood in it. Gary, fed up with being restrained, agrees with Child's that McCriedi's test proves nothing. This is pure nonsense. Doesn't prove a thing. He bites back, saying that he thought Gary would say something like that, which is why he's testing the other's blood first. We'll do you last. He moves to put the hot wire in Palmer's blood sample. And as he does, the blood bursts from the petri dish, shrieking in pain and hitting the floor. The thing, as terrifying as it is, does show multiple weaknesses. I already talked about how every cell wants to survive to the point that it will actually betray its own host. But also, after they do the blood test and the infected host is revealed, the thing transforms. It's self-reporting. Like, it's trapped. It's tied down. But it's only doing that and giving away its position because it's scared. It doesn't know what else to do. It knows it's been found out because its blood tried to avoid the fire to survive on its own. And the host will die. So, it transforms and tries to infect and do as much damage as possible. The saddest part of this scene is one of the characters windows has to die because he's came into contact with the thing. He still seems human, pretty injured, and covered in blood, but that blood is contamination, so he has to die. Oh yeah, remember that joke I made earlier with Blair saying that that was the only comedic moment in the film? No, there's actually two when Gary wants to get out after the thing has basically killed multiple people. I know you gentlemen have been through a lot. But when you find the time, I'd rather not spend the rest of this winter tied to this [ __ ] couch. Okay, I'm going to stop yapping about the thing because I don't want to turn this into like a kill count video, but explaining the context of the actual monster related deaths in the thing is necessary to compare them to the server blight's victims. If we contrast these moments in the film with server blight, the few times that the thing reveals itself, for example, Benning's death, the failure to resuscitate Norris, and the blood test scene, the thing is mostly on the defense. This is entirely distinct from the repeated moments in server blight where the victims are shown to be connected to the main mass somehow or even the remains of the division like the deformed demo man having more interest in returning to a stronger more powerful hole rather than adopting the thing strategy of defense by any means necessary. But also on the flip side, the thing might do this as well. But it's also hard to gauge because the thing is much more oppressed in the film. It's against a lot of guys with a lot of flamethrowers. Meanwhile, in server blight, it's usually one to two players going up against 11 or 12 infected hosts. And also, they have no understanding of how it works or how to beat it. Apart from, I guess, vote kicking them. But again, you're not really going to be able to vote kick every single infected host in serverly, are you? You know what? Maybe we should bring those sniper spin bers back. They'd probably be the only thing to stop them. Additionally, because the server bllightly is entirely digital, it doesn't have quite the same finesse that the thing does in imitating human emotion. There isn't a single moment in the thing where the facade slips. The only times in the film we directly know someone's infected is because the thing is scared, it slips up when trying to kill or assimilate someone. And also, when it's directly found out, like for example, with the blood test. These creatures are similar, but not one in the same. When the thing reveals itself, it's either an attempt to survive or the one time we see Bennings assimilated. The Blight, on the other hand, makes mistakes in its imitations of players. The Heavy with the deformed fingers and the Demo Man with the split face are not evidence of organic imitation like The Thing. It's a video game. There's no need for that. The bodies aren't real, and yet the blight treats them as though they are. And it's not perfect at puppeteering the bodies of its victims. Also, if we go back to the original video, we can see the engineer warning a player, almost like they still have some kind of self-control. Meanwhile, in The Thing, when you're assimilated, it's over. There's never a point where a character screams saying, "Kill me." Or, "It's infected me. Help! Help me!" Once the thing has contaminated you, it's obvious that you'll never know until it's completely taken you over. There's no transitionary period. Meanwhile, in Server Blight, we see that half the time. Almost like whatever's infected a player can't even contain itself in the body of the player, sprouting out into multiple limbs, giving away its position immediately. But it's not much of a problem for it because at the minute, no one knows how to fight it. Much more impressive as well is the blight's explicit ability to pull the consciousness of users it comes into contact with into the game, seemingly leaving them unable to leave the server and return to the physical world. But remember, the blight is limited by the game's own mechanics, and it doesn't seem to have total control over everything. Hector and Aaron were still able to vote kick part of the blight that attacked them. The thing isn't restricted to our understanding of life and death. But maybe the server blight is limited to what life and death might mean in TF2 itself. Maybe there's a utility in putting the consciousness of the users inside the characters they play before consuming them. If the blight was in direct control in the way the thing presumably was all the time, then maybe a piece of it would have really died when the demo man was blown to bits, perhaps the conscious soul of that user was lost and the digital flesh that became their prison needed them to animate somehow. There's a short story called The Things that was wrote by Peter Watts. It isn't canon, by the way. It is entirely fanfiction, but it gives a perspective to the thing that we never actually saw in the film. A perspective from the thing itself. I'll leave a link so you can read the story yourself, but it uses specific quotes like, "I have assimilated a thousand worlds stronger than this, but never one so strange, showing that Earth isn't the first place that it spread." And also another quote, "No, I shed my flesh with thinking cancer." It mentions in the story that it could watch the dreams and nightmares of its hosts. It fully integrated into them. In the opening, it refers to itself as being Blair, being copper, being childs, but also saying that the names don't matter. They're placeholders. All biomass is interchangeable. Even mentioning that when it was burned, when it was exposed, the world attacked it. Not humans, not mccriedi, not childs, but the world. It also goes on to say, "And how could these skins be so empty when I moved in?" Implying that it knows what it's doing. It's taking a host over, but almost talking about humans like they have so much potential, but it's just a mess of fibers, neurons, synapses, bone. Humans have nowhere near as much potential as what this organism does, and it's fully aware of that. This separates the thing and server blight so much because the thing has to infiltrate, but the server blight, it owns whatever server it invades. The players have no chance of fighting against it, at least none that we know yet. Meanwhile, the thing is much more dubious. But I could only wear the body. I could find no memories to absorb, no experiences, no comprehension. Survival depended on blending in. And it was not enough to merely look like this world. I had to act like it. And for the first time in living memory, I did not know how. One moment that's really interesting in this story as well is the thing talking about empathy. If it has any compassion or understanding of what it's doing, taking life. Empathy is inevitable. Of course, one can't mimic the sparks and chemical reactions that motivate the flesh without also feeling them to some extent. But this was different. These intuitions flickered within me, yet somehow hovered beyond my reach. My skins wandered the halls and the cryptic symbols on every surface. Laundry shed. Welcome to the clubhouse. This side up almost made a kind of sense. That circular artifact hanging on the wall was a clock. It measured the passage of time. The world's eyes flitted here and there, and I skimmed peacemeal nom nomlatcher. What the [ __ ] is that word? Queer ass. And I skimmed peacemeal nmanllete from his mind. By taking over other organisms, the thing learns everything about them, their experiences, and it does understand. It knows that it's killing and it's taking over, but it just sees it as a means to survive. I wouldn't say the thing has guilt for what it's doing, but it's still completely aware of the process. It also mentions one point saying Palmer dying that the rest might live, almost implying that when Palmer was found out, it gave itself up on purpose to possibly protect other individuals that were assimilated. But again, this kind of does go against the theory that the thing wants to survive no matter the cost. This is kind of why it's fanfiction and not canon. Also, the fact that it says it infected childs and we established in the video game he wasn't. If anything, the creature seems to think of itself as higher than humans, and that's why they need to die. Those insisted souls, those tumors, hiding away in their bony caverns, folded in on themselves. I knew they couldn't hide forever. This monstrous anatomy had only slowed communion, not stopped it. Notice how the thing refers to taking people over as communion, which by definition is the sharing or exchanging of intimate thoughts and feelings, especially on a mental or spiritual level. If anything, it sounds exactly like how the grave mind would talk in the Halo series, which was another parasitic organism that wanted to try to consume as much life as possible to assimilate it. The grave mind and the flood itself was definitely inspired by The Thing. By the way, towards the end of the short story, The Thing contemplates what humanity actually is after being found out, exposed, and part of it being killed multiple times. It doesn't respect humans in any way, but only thinks that it's so good at dealing out pain because it's had to suffer with it its entire cycle. I was so blind, so quick to blame. But the violence I've suffered at the hands of these things reflects no great evil. They're simply so used to pain, so blinded by disability that they literally can't conceive of any other existence. When every nerve is whipped raw, you lash out at even the lightest touch. It won't be easy. They won't understand. tortured, incomplete, they're not able to understand. Offered the great whole, they see the loss of the lesser. Offered communion, they only see extinction. If anything, these couple of sentences to me relate the thing directly to the necromorph wanting to become a bigger piece of a hole. The necromorphs in Dead Space aren't evil. They don't take any joy or pleasure in killing people. It's just a means to an end. They solely wanted to create convergence, the movement towards a greater union. But the thing also speaks with anxiety, with caution, knowing that at any point it can be completely exposed. I must be careful. I must use this newfound ability to hide. Other things will come here eventually. And it doesn't matter whether they find me living or dead. What matters is they find something like themselves to take back home. So, I will keep up appearances. I will work behind the scenes. I will save them from the inside or their unimaginable loneliness will never end. These poor savages will never embrace salvation. I will have to rape it into them. Yep. Thanks for listening to me read an audio book, guys. I have the reading comprehension of BJ Blasowitz in the second Wolfenstein game. I will whack off cuz I installed a fat mod for the character. So, The Thing here is obviously talking about wanting to enlighten humanity by wanting to show them a greater meaning of existence. Some of us can be incredibly lonely or isolated, and The Thing wants to converge everyone so that loneliness doesn't exist anymore, which sounds like a great thing, unless you don't want to be part of a fleshy, writhing mass of tendrils. And again, if you haven't noticed, this is why pretty much any video game or film that has some kind of sentient virus follows this pathway of the thing by trying to converge to create a greater hole. I mean, I'll be honest, the only examples I can think of right now is Halo and Dead Space, and they both kind of fell off a bit. So, the biggest problem between server blight and the thing is we know so much more about the thing and how it's worked. It's been dug into so much more. There are so many different theories and interests. They could all be right or they could all be wrong. It's so ambiguous. But at least more people are talking about that with the server blight. There's a lot less going on here. I mean, there's four YouTube videos up at the time of recording compared to a near 2hour film and also a near 2-hour film prequel. That sucked. Now, I do also want to add because I have been hopping on about The Thing video game a little bit. It came out in 2002 and like I said is a direct continuation from the original film and it is confirmed to be canon. In the first level, you do find Child's body because at the end of the film it was just McCriedi and Child's and you didn't know if one of them was infected or both or neither of them. A lot of people have had theories about this, like for example, you can't see Child's breath while he's breathing out even though you literally can in the scene if you watch closely. There's been theories about this for decades, and the game basically squashed that by you finding Child's corpse in the first level. But I do want to add here, there is a chance that Child could still be infected because The Thing is known to hide in the cold and go dormant until it's activated again. And when you play this level, you don't have access to the flamethrower, which is the only way in the video game and in the films to kill the thing properly. So, there could still be a chance that Child's is infected and he's gone dormant. But I'll be honest, I'll kind of just chalk it up to he wasn't infected and just froze to death. Let me back up a bit. Recall the way that the server blight's victims repeatedly still display a degree of consciousness. Gillisu reaches for Aaron when he's chased by the blight in a manner that's different from when the other models stretch and distort and reach for contact with a player. When Hector and Aaron find Johnny laying in the snow, he seems to be sharing his own present thoughts in chat and feeling the environment of the game as though he's really there. Hector also displays consciousness after he's assimilated both in the puppet, being a firsthand recount of what assimilation is like, but also in a way that he begs Aaron to not leave him when the blight reveals itself in a similar manner to the Palmer thing. Assimilated characters in The Thing, Palmer, Norris, and Bennings, don't display any elements of their own individuality in the moments that they're clearly no longer human. The Thing has consumed them completely. Benning's scream is inhuman. Norris is already dead when his body becomes the monsters, and Palmer doesn't cry for help or struggle during the blood test scene. His body just betrays its form the very instant danger becomes evident for the thing. The server blight is restricted to our understanding of how TF2 works so far. But the thing is not restricted to our understanding of how real life works. When the thing takes someone, presumably from the moment it happens, that person is gone. The thing is playing the role of pretending to be that person. Perhaps the memories of the person within stay inside somehow, and the thing can read their memories and learn their personalities in a matter of mere moments. We're not sure how long the process is for the thing to take someone over. In the entire franchise, only one character has been caught mid transformation, Bennings. So, we know at least some kind of gore is involved. But much like server blight, when someone is contaminated, infected, or taken over, the process seems to be incredibly quick, taking minutes at most. There's still one piece of the puzzle that's still kind of confusing. If I'm convinced that the blight is devoid of any human emotion and that it's purely an algorithm teaching itself to keep TF2 players from ever leaving, then why does it show apparent delight in the suffering of Hector's resistance in the puppet? Rather, he feels what he interprets from it to be joy as it torments him into moving in ways he can't control. Even if this piece of code or whatever it is is self-aware, the game doesn't grow the capacity to feel. So, it has to be something much more sinister. This fragment of TF2's code that has somehow morphed into something beyond our understanding is merely designed in the same manner that any NPC with a specific purpose is. So, let me set up an analogy here. You know how the bots are oddly animated for an FPS game? I don't mean the literal way they move. Instead, I mean the way they act. These bots taunt. They taunt a lot. They'll perform group taunts with you. Enemy bots can taunt you when they kill you. But would you actually call this display an emotion? you wouldn't. These bots are designed to act this way when they do specific things. They don't actually get excited when they kill you. They perform what we understand to be the actions of a player who's happy. This is the same manner in which the blight's victims misinterpret its intent as gleeful malice. The blight was designed to delight in its goal, but it's not physical. You can't actually program emotions into something, only words and actions that feel convincing enough. A good comparison here is one of my favorite games, Fear or First Encounter Assault Recon. They'll talk when they have you suppressed. If you've killed someone in their squad, it all seems really convincing, like they're an actually efficient squad, but it's just lines of dialogue, but that tricks you into thinking that they're a serious force to be reckoned with. I mean, they are if you play on the hardest difficulty, where basically a stray cough one-shotss you. There's one last piece of the puzzle I want to close this theory off before we talk about everything. everything. I mentioned it earlier. Yeah, that's right. Creepy pastas. I know I've said the word a lot. All right, I get it. Oh, spooky face. Oh, but to tie it all together, I want to talk about the plot of the NES Godzilla creepy pasta and how different it is to the blight. As I personally believe this is a monster that is actually written with the intent of feeling, so to speak. This creepy pasta basically revolves around a copy of the NES version of Godzilla that's got self-awareness. Somehow this version of the game is able to personalize the experience for the person playing it, and the torment that follows is not so fantastic or hard to grasp in the way that it is in Server Blight. The protagonist of the story is never swallowed by the game or worried that the game will kill him somehow, maggot. but he's deeply invested in the fact that a game he's intimately familiar with is incorrect when he goes to play it. So why is this happening? The game is haunted by an entity called Red that seems to have familiarity with the protagonist's past. It's able to inject the game with elements that otherwise didn't happen. And there are multiple hellish sequences where the monster chases Godzilla only to unhinge its jaw and swallow the monster whole. These levels are entirely absent from the real game. And the first time the protagonist beats these levels, he's disturbed when he realizes Red seemingly understands that he is inside a game. I readied myself as best I could. I started the level and seeing that it was basically the same as the first, I didn't waste a millisecond before I started hauling ass. I'm hauling ass. I soon encountered obstacles in the form of the ground tile suspended in air. Most of them you could jump over or destroy. Others you had to crouch under. About 40 seconds into it, I heard the horrible bellowing roar and saw the spider beast following close behind me. Stacks of obstacles barely slowed it down. It would back up and then charge its way through them, smashing them to bits. And when the smaller obstacles got in its way, it would expand its jaws and swallow them whole. I was afraid, but with fast thinking and faster button pressing, I escaped him yet again. I felt really excited and so I laughed and said, "Not this time, asshole." I decided to take a screen cap to celebrate. But when I said that sentence just before the level ended, the monster did something that made my blood run cold. It looked at me. Hello. I really do recommend you look up the full story of Godzilla NES. You can call it dated, you can call it cringe, but it did come out basically 13 years ago. So, you know, this short excerpt is able to communicate things about the monster that make it evident that unlike the blight, it thinks and feels in a capacity that a person would. This moment is read, displaying frustration. And over the course of the story, it also displays direct hatred or malice for the protagonist, and that's different from the blight, even if they sometimes say similar things. So given this and the more dated stories I don't feel like touching on, we have the framework of what a truly self-aware entity that exists inside a game feels like. Red isn't anywhere in a normal NES copy of Godzilla. This distortion is entirely new to this game where the blight is built using existing assets from the game. NES Godzilla is a disturbing story with many more subtle clues that Red is watching the player in his life outside of when he's playing the game. The server bllightly isn't like Red. It may recognize Aaron, but it's not personally tormenting him. Unless he happens to accidentally enter the server it's already on. Right, I've done the creepy pasta comparison. I've done the film comparison. How can I make this video any worse? Oh, I know. Let's do an SCP comparison. By the way, if you don't know what SCP is, thank God you clearly go outside. In short, it's a collaborative writing project. It's a fictional universe where anomalies are contained and then studied. Some are friendly. Oh, what the like the joint that you can smoke. Man, I love Latinos. And then others aren't so friendly, like the big alligator that's really hard to kill, or the Teletubby that snaps your neck if you blink or look away, and the old man that touches you. He also puts you in a pocket dimension, but mostly he touches you. The reason why I'm talking about the SCP Foundation is because I believe that 610 is the most similar to server blight. It's dubbed the flesh that hates. Due to the vast area of infection SCP 610 covers, containment is impossible. Isolation of the area has proved far more effective, and permission has been granted by the Russian government to establish a perimeter to keep people out of these areas under the guise of military operations. SCP 610 appears to be a contagious skin disease. At first, with symptoms including rash, itching, and increased skin sensitivity. Within 3 hours, the disease will cause blemishes resembling heavy scar tissue to form in the chest and arm area, spreading to the legs and back within an additional hour, consuming the victim completely within 5 hours. Exposure to higher temperatures vastly decreases the time for the contagion to spread, and complete infections have been recorded occurring in as little as 5 minutes. After the completion of the infection occurs, the victim's life functions will cease for approximately 3 minutes, after which they will restart at two to three times the active rate of a normal human. Following this, the scar tissue on the victims will start to move on its own accord and grow at a rapid rate. Normal human features start to disappear at this point under the infection, and the path of mutation appears to be largely random. Subjects observed in this stage of infection have been recorded as growing three or more limbs, such as arms or legs. The head may become misshapen and elongate or widen out and parts of the subject may split open from which additional branches of flesh will grow. The duration of this stage of infection is unknown and not all subjects appear to progress to the later stages. Observation of life infected by SCP 610 by staff is impossible. Those infected with the disease immediately seek out aid as natural human impulse, resulting in unintended. Those infected past the scar tissue phase actively and aggressively attempt to infect anyone approaching them within an undefined area. It has been established that should an infected be capable of sight and observe an uninfected, it will proceed toward them. If the infected has lost the ability of sight, a range of approximately 30 m is considered safe. So 610 is a bit both like the thing and the server blight, but missing their self-aware elements. This is a monster that's unthinking. Its infection is spread through direct contact and the simple act of sharing air with an infected individual is enough to cause 610 to spread. This is the thing removed of its agency and made entirely a viral or fungal threat. If you wanted to consider a version of an assimilation monster that isn't self-aware, this is what it looks like. Affected individuals aren't maliciously tricking other people who aren't infected. They infect them by virtue of seeking care for the rashes that form from becoming part of 610. The Thing instead does this through deception, and the blight does it through its supernatural control over the TF2 server it's on. Now, this was meant to be where we wrap things up and piece together the point of what I've been talking about for however many hours, but in the making of this video, probably because it's so overly long, the latest server light animation dropped. The main focus of this one is pretty obvious from the name, assimilation. [Music] The video opens with a match happening on the Dust Bowl map. This is odd, but we'll talk why a little bit further in. The match itself looks fairly normal, but the charade is thin. At this point, we know why we're here. The viewer is left just to wonder how many of these players are digital puppets animated by this rogue self-aware code. The only confirmation that someone here is still a human player is the camera zooming out of the match to our newest protagonist. He's playing the game on a laptop in what appears to be a garage or mommy's basement. You know, typical TF2 player. The chat feels pretty authentic so far. People are still managing to fling insults over their language barriers. Our protagonist called Sirin picks blue spy. Well, if anyone's getting rolled up into the big virtual catamaria bodies, at least it's a spy mane, right? Off to visit your mother. Good riddance. as he's walking around looking to kill whoever seems the most unexpected. Not a totally unusual thing to do when you're playing a spy, but what's odd is the way this match looks. The gameplay is off. And if you're on the ball, you'll probably know where this is going. Sirin turns around to see a sniper player staring dead at him. He doesn't know it, but this is our first confirmation that everything happening in this match is a facade. This sniper can see our protagonist despite the fact that he's in disguise and fully cloaked. And if you knew what was best, this would be the first sign to try to leave, assuming it's not already too late. I mean, we know people can't leave the game, but just close the laptop and walk away, little bro. Nothing's happened yet. Instead, our protagonist moves out of the way of the sniper and runs off, seemingly unsettled. But unsure of what he's dealing with, he gets his first kill. As he's walking around, still completely focused on getting another easy spy kill, Sirinex briefly glances at his hands. It's only for a moment, but he has a brief hallucination of his hands being the same as the spy. The spy that he's playing as. The only time Sirin speaks audibly in this video, his voice comes out of the spy's mouth. What the [ __ ] Not the voice chat. Somehow, the line between our realm and the game has already been severed. We've seen this before in other animations. This correlation between the player's body and their character. In the same way, Sirinix is speaking through the spy. Time to shower. Oh [Music] yeah. Sirinex asks in chat what's wrong with the server, but this is only confirmation from the blight that it's time to set its hooks into his body. If anything, this makes me think that the server blight needs time to infect players. It can't do it immediately. Because if it could, if you immediately join the server, you'd probably just be grabbed at spawn. Wrong guy. I think it needs time to infect players, whether that's through a Wi-Fi connection or through the code of the server itself. So that's why the game looked seemingly normal on the outset, only for the facade to be quickly broken from the sniper looking directly at him. And now, unfortunately, because he's already speaking through his character, we know that it's probably too late for him to leave the game. As he rounds the corner invisible again, our worst fears are confirmed. Not a single user on this server is natural. Everyone that was there before is now facing Sirinex, regardless of team. It seems that it's too late. This whole match has been a huge choreographed dance. the arguments in chat, the off-kilter gameplay, everything. Worst of all, the blight has control of the server now entirely. Everything here has been carefully arranged, including the map. There's no cliffs on Dust Bowl to jump off. There are ravines where you can take full damage, but it's a very slow process. And if anything, the blight has gotten better at imitating the chat. Again, it doesn't illustrate any true emotion, but it does show the capacity to learn. The fabric of reality, or at least his perception of it, is falling apart around Sirinex. He's running from everyone in the match now. And as he makes it to one of the long hallways to get a reprieve, he tries to leave the match. He's unsuccessful no matter how many times he tries. Sirinex glances over his shoulder. The same halls he's standing in in game stretches before him. How can you leave somewhere you already are? What does this even mean? Is his body somehow in Dust Bowl? Whatever's happening, it's breaking the fabric between the game and reality itself. In his desperation to leave, SironX runs to the enemy point in hopes that he can capture it and end the game somehow. When he touches it, though, it's being contested. No one's here. But no one's here. That doesn't make sense. He glances down to see a massive stretched hand using its long, glitchy fingers to just barely keep Sirinex from accomplishing his goal. Yet another way, this entry shows us the blight has a more intimate understanding of how to keep its victims from escaping like Aaron did. The moment Zerinx joined, there was no hope. The massive deformed hand uses the map architecture to pull a larger body along the floor. The misshapen face of the heavy player it used is attached to it. And when it speaks in chat, it's the same heavy from the earlier animation. Scuba Master 96 saying, "We go together." Sirinex is surrounded as the bots from earlier catch up to him from behind and the monster approaches him in front. He's frozen in shock, still unsure of what's unfolding before him. This was supposed to be fun, but the only fun to be had is the artificial pleasure the blight will have stringing up Sirinex's digital corpse. Elongated fingers stretch and envelop Serinex's body, both his and the spies. The transformation is complete. Somehow, Sirinex and the spy are now one in the same. His username doesn't even matter anymore. There was never anywhere to run. That was the point. Sirinex has been caught and he's fated simply to be bait to be used to hook in another player. This thing knows TF2 better than we ever could because it's a part of TF2. Its goal is to keep people from ever leaving. And this whole animation is just to accentuate how much better that it's gotten at it. The video closes on Sirinex's lifeless empty body. If our souls or egos get to ascend to some peaceful afterlife, this man we don't even know the real name of has been robbed of that. The scariest thing that this episode shows us is if you die in the game, you die in real life. Okay, I'd like to think that Sirinex has just been put into a coma and then there'll be an episode where everyone gets released and there's a happy ending, but look at him. His eyes are glassed over and he's bleeding. He is definitely dead. And it really makes you think, what does the server blight plan next? What happens if it manages to get hold of every single player in Team Fortress 2? Maybe as an assimilated player trying to then infect people in the real world. Again, unlike The Thing, we still don't know this creature's weakness. It doesn't seem to have any. But what I wanted to try to do here is talk about the narrative of server blight and also take in the context of its kills and compare them to the monster kills in The Thing to formulate a theory about why the blight is doing this. The serverlight is not a truly self-aware being capable of emotion. The most prevalent of these emotions, it's designed to imitate being the delight its victims feel from the monster when they resist. But again, I still personally feel that the server blight is some piece of TF2's code that's gone rogue, simply trying to keep players from leaving. And this would be a perfect theory because TF2 is an aged game. It has been around for decades. Maybe this code sprang from an anxiety of trying to keep players and stop them from leaving and interacting with other games and forgetting about it. But again, I don't think it's outwardly malicious. When it seems happy, like for example, the end of the server blight animation or the last few sentences of the puppet, this is mirrored in the way that video game NPCs pretend to be in delight when you use them for the thing that they are intended for. Indeed, server blight is the most direct form of evil an NPC ever thought up with the supernatural ability to suck players into the game itself. But it isn't motivated by a love for torment. This monster is a small part of TF2 locked away in the metaphorical jungle of its hundreds of community servers. Somewhere, there is a piece of TF2 that's still alive, hunting for players, but unable to process or care for the suffering it forces on them. It mirrors the diverted fan base of experienced players who missed the days of TF2 long past and that have showered it in praise for the best part of 20 years. The problem with serverly is this is a piece of Team Fortress that is designed to miss you [Music] too. Servy is hard to pin down because it's an ongoing series and we know so little about it. It has no outward weaknesses apart from the game itself. I think the only way to stop the infection is unfortunately to shut down TF2 entirely. But maybe this is where the series stem from. TF2 is getting a lot of hate at the minute. At the time of recording, a 4hour video dropped by Zesty Jesus talking about how broken the entire game is. competitive mode will steamroll players, mass abandonments, forced graphics settings, Valve's matchmaker not being able to keep up with the huge influx of players, a broken casual mode, the matchmaker setting up misbalances, the death of community servers by removing them from search to prioritize casual mode, the huge network of cheaters everyone as snipers. And the way the matchmaking works, cheaters just pile in. You could get multiple cheaters in a single lobby. It's almost like serverlight was a direct retaliation to this. the hatred of bad actors crippling the game servers, much like how the server blight contaminates every server it touches. The only weakness we've seen of the server blight is one entity being kicked from the game. But if you're two players and your entire team is full of cheating snipers, how can you kick them? They'll just vote no every time. Much like how when the server blight overwhelms you, there's really nothing you can do apart from leave the game. [ __ ] leave. actually played on private servers where people did book readings and kind of made this whole social thing about it. Then they added this competitive structure to it. That whole you're going to go for this match and then it's over and then it's going to go away and you got to go queue up again. I just really killed the game for me. Thank you for watching. People have been asking me to cover games on this channel that aren't video games, like how I used to talk about films and TV shows. So instead, I talked about a video game that I didn't play. I do want to say as well, definitely go support the creators, Two Idiot Germans. the series wouldn't be possible without them. And I'm pretty sure that they're working on more episodes of this series already. By the way, just as a disclaimer, if any theories I mentioned turned out to be true, I want 50% royalties. [Music] [Applause] A 2008 Toyota Corolla. Soft is one sweet rise.