Rise In Violence

or, what happened in Apocalypse Take 2

"you know what would be fun?

if we put out the sun

we're coming to get you"

- The Garages, Fight Gods, Season 3-4 siesta

(reality-distorting blessings that look real cool in fan-art were haphazardly conferred on this text by sam kabo ashwell)

On Day 113 of Season 10, Tot Fox put out the sun. It was a Saturday.

The Baltimore Crabs were about to complete a 3-0 sweep of the Charleston Shoe Thieves in the Internet League Series, and they'd run up the score, 9 to 0. Tot Fox hit a single, batting in Silvaire Roadhouse, and triggered a paracausal event in which the moon was swallowed, the sun collapsed, and the Crabs' ten runs were consumed by a Black Hole (because runs, as it turns out, are physical objects). And as with many apocalypses, the sun's destruction was just the overture.

Blaseball has been leading up to the culmination of a bunch of threads for a while now. Let's rewind to the start of Season 10 and see how we progressed to an act of deicide. (If you’re new to blaseball and have come in during the siesta, you want to rewind way further than that. Start here, read through the rest chronologically, and just know that modifiers, which aren’t even mentioned in Season 3, changed the game.)

While everyone was still catching their breath from the Peanut's defeat of the Shoe Thieves, blaseball returned to its familiar relentless pace. Season 9's election was a busy one, filled with effects which would have major impacts on Season 10. The Decrees for Season 9 were a return to the enigmatic: all were Forecasts of the games' weather events: Eclipse, Blooddrain, Birds, Peanuts, Feedback, and Reverb. After the events of Season 9, Day X, we had a better idea of the storm that was coming. 

We got to pick three weather effects—the only weather we would get in the coming season. We voted for Blooddrain, Birds, and—to my surprise—Eclipse. Blooddrain is fun—it lets players steal stars from other players—and has caused a number of funny emergent moments, like the pitching machine drinking blood, so it's no surprise we voted for that. Birds is also a fairly well-liked weather; we'd seen birds peck Shelled players free, and with the Peanut firmly established as our primary antagonist, that was always going to be popular. Eclipse weather kills players. Player death makes for some amazing stories and I'm glad it's in the game, but a lot of why that works is because we never asked for it. Incineration was a consequence of the Book opening, which we did vote for, but we didn't knowingly choose that mechanic over other, safer options. But by Season 10, apparently some fans would rather see their favorite players burn than be swapped to another team. It's probably for the best that fans of real life sports aren't offered this choice. 

As a bonus feature of the new Forecast condition, three players on every team received a special modifier, one corresponding to each of the three weather conditions. This was enormously cool: the affected players got not just a mechanical bonus, but one with strong aesthetic and narrative connotations that made them richer as characters. Fire Eater made players immune to Incineration; when Paula Mason, formerly of the Chicago Firefighters, received that blessing, it felt apropos. Siphon felt like the most noticeable of them, but maybe that's just because Richmond Harrison received it and promptly developed a powerful thirst, especially for Garages blood. This led to a number of new interpretations: that Richmond Harrison went from "big like a friend" to "big like a tick swollen from blood", or that his neotenous axolotl form might be metamorphosing into a much less friend-shaped mature stage. Also, Jaylen, undead revenant now in a milder phase, got Friend to Crows: a good "this pitcher is terrifying" power that doesn't actually kill anyone, but is a gift to fan-artists everywhere. 

These effects had wide-ranging consequences—some of them shaking out rather differently than we'd assumed. The Shoe Thieves carried curses from their run-in with the Peanut that we figured might neutralize them. Flinch in particular looked devastating: its text reads "Hitters with Flinch cannot swing until a strike has been thrown in the At Bat". But in an actual game this wasn't as bad as it seemed—they were effectively playing more conservatively, swinging less at bad pitches as well as good, and thus earning more balls and more walks. Their kicks were, in fact, made for walking. Meanwhile, Shoe Thieves pitchers were burdened with the Mild modifier: occasionally they would throw a Mild pitch, which was an automatic ball, and any runners on base would advance. This is another one of blaseball's Mild/Wild jokes: in baseball a wild pitch in baseball is one which the catcher is unable to retrieve, such that while chasing it down at least one baserunner advances. The mechanical effect is very similar, but the theming is uniquely blaseball.

Fifth Base was surreal in a very blaseball way. It originated as a decree that inexplicably hadn't passed in Season 7, but was interesting enough to The Game Band that it was brought back as a bubble blessing: something that affects all teams in one division subleague, or penalizes every team not in that division subleague. The Baltimore Crabs received it, ensuring that every team not in the Wild High division would have to run an extra base before scoring. This also created Quadruple hits, as well as the possibility that home runs could rack up more points. It was suggested—and confirmed at least by the Commissioner, who may not be the most reliable source—that the fourth base was a lot further away from home, and thus harder to run to. I'm not sure if stats bear this out, but it seems to track. Watching a game swap from five bases to the traditional four depending on if a Wild High team was pitching or fielding was incredibly funny, and caused several discussions about whether the fifth base was removed between innings or simply ignored.

But that's not all; Blessings were a very rich source of narrative this season. The Lovers fittingly received Love Blood type, which allowed them to Charm their opponents into voluntary strikeouts and walks. The Garages campaigned for Out of the Shadows and Secret Weapon, both of which they received. (Campaigning isn't a guarantee: teams have taken to making propaganda convincing other discord server players that their team "deserves" a blessing, so that other teams will put their votes towards something else, but blessings are random and a team having the highest number of votes only makes it likely, not guaranteed, that they'll get it.) My sense is that the Garages hoped Secret Weapon would maximize Mike Townsend in the Shadows, but it hit the previously-unknown Shadows player Goodwin Morin, and instead of maximizing their pitching, it maximized their...everything. Out of the Shadows—which swaps active players with players hidden in the Shadows—initially swapped two hitters, instead of two pitchers; when the mistake was pointed out and fixed, the previous swap remained, but Mike did in fact return: the point of going for the blessing in the first place. (He was swapped with Ortiz Morse, who was, well, kind of the Canadian Mike Townsend: a terrible pitcher sad-boy whose team loved them a lot. Losing them to the Garages had already been hard for the Moists.) The problem was that the maximized Goodwin Morin was still in the shadows, and Mike Townsend still kind of sucked. Oops.

Finally, Downsizing hit the Tacos, of all teams, and Wyatt Dovenpart was sent to the Shadows, which shortened the already-truncated Tacos roster even further. They did benefit triply from the Tigers receiving Tag Team Pitching, the Moist Talkers receiving Tag Team Hitting, and the Sunbeams getting Mutually Arising, all of which increased the Tacos' pitching and hitting by 10% and overall stats by 2%. The result was this chopped-down, lopsided, one-pitcher team, which was surprisingly really very good. The Tacos ended up making their first-ever playoffs—where they promptly got swept by the Wild Card Sunbeams, who had [checks notes] the second-worst record in the league that season. You live by the weird, you die by the weird.

The season itself was defined by the Weather: the looming storm. As a result of more games being played in Solar Eclipse weather, incinerations were inevitable: but actually way less frequent than you might expect, given the doubled frequency of Eclipses. The incineration of Annie Roland on day 39 hit the Yellowstone Magic hard: Annie was a formidable 4 star hitter, and had survived not one but two Jaylen beans in the era when Jaylen's pitches caused Instability. Watching games with Annie and Jaylen felt white-knuckle: Annie would never back down, and instead of getting out as soon as possible (and thus getting off the field, where she would be safe from incineration), she insisted on getting on base. Annie was a fearless player, and to lose her to a wholly random incineration, when she'd survived the targeted variety twice, stung hard.

But Blooddrain, and especially players with the Siphon modifier, was the real star of the show. Overall there were 99 instances of a player siphoning stars from another; a full 10% of those were Richardson Games. Richmond Harrison had a particular thirst for Seattle Garages' blood, a fact which I know because my editor is eternally salty over it. (It was even more frustrating because Ortiz Morse, the Garages' Siphon player, had been sent to the Shadows immediately after in exchange for Mike Townsend, as previously mentioned.) Because the weather-related blessings were so widespread, didn't favor any particular team and were relatively low impact, they weren't huge news—but they did give a lot of players a little extra flavor, which resonated more if it was a player you were already invested in.

Those weather-related modifiers that caught so much of our attention early in the season were clearly a sign to fans, but of what, we weren't initially sure. Similar icons appeared on the Idol board at slots 3, 6, 9, 12, 15 and 18, along with a Feedback icon at slot 14—a narratively loaded number in blaseball, as it's both the number of players on a team and the number of the Idol leaderboard that brought Jaylen back in the first place. The Idol board itself was reset—the Commissioner tweeted "FEEDBACK DETECTED", a standard announcement of a shakeup involving team shuffling. This was a pretty clear sign that the Idol board was going to be important: the obvious reason to reset the board was to limit the effect of idle accounts and make it easier to manipulate rankings. But manipulate in what way, we weren't sure; early week propaganda efforts were overcomplicated and unpersuasive. We'd been on a bit of an information overload around the end of Season 9, and we had a lot of clues and no obvious way to resolve them. We did know that we were going to have to fight the Shelled One's Pods again at the end of the season. The players it shelled and drafted had not returned to their original teams. The Peanut's recruitment—based on shelling top-tier Idols—was designed to create a super team: the most beloved, high-performing, all-star team in all of blaseball, granted divine power and turned into our antagonists. Except—remember the Snackrifice? When the Tacos shelled all of their pitchers so they couldn't play blaseball, and for play to continue they had to be given a pitching machine? Most of those players were fairly lackluster, because the Tacos suck. It's as though you called up MVPs and fan favorites from across major league baseball, and then rounded out the team with the pitching rotation from the 1896 Williamsport Demorest Bicycle Boys. 

The only real clues we had were the Monitor lackadaisically saying "tell me next time" after showing up too late in the aftermath of the Season 9 boss battle, and (in retrospect) the season being subtitled "Backdraft". A blue line appeared in the Hall of Flame beneath the fourteenth player, leading to a lot of speculation: fourteen players makes a team, and the Hall is the Monitor's domain, but until late in the week, it really wasn't clear to most if the Monitor was raising a team to fight the Peanut or if the next boss fight would be the Internet Series winners against the Hall team.

But on Thursday, the Microphone offered some clarification. (The Microphone, in case you have very understandably forgotten, is an oracular twitter account which speaks in the voice of former Tacos player Wyatt Mason.) The Microphone implored us to "Remember", and then retweeted a series of its previous utterances. One purpose was to make them accessible to screen readers, but to me there was a fairly clear message. As clear as we get in blaseball.

Incinerated players, of course, were still here: not just present in the code but visible in the Hall. (Blaseball's cosmology is, as ever, idiosyncratic; and additional planes of existence seem to get jammed on every couple of weeks or so.) The only verb we could apply to them was "tribute": giving them our peanuts. This hunch also made several other things clear: the season title of Backdraft could be about Incineration fire, but of course this is also a "draft back", of returning players to some as-yet-unknown purpose.

I wasn't the only one having these thoughts. While the Hades Tigers furiously conferred, the Baltimore Crabs were preparing an experiment. One of their players, Tillman Henderson, had recently been incinerated. Tillman's fanlore persona was a swaggering, entertainingly awful douchebag: a sort of midpoint between Jack Sparrow and Post Malone. When he was incinerated, the Crabs' response was essentially "of fucking course Tillman Henderson gets incinerated in the middle of the night in the US when hardly anyone's around, thanks a lot". So they figured he was the perfect guinea-pig to test a theory about the slots on the Idol board.

The Crabs Idolized Tillman until he appeared on the board, and then until he reached spot 18. And then, at last, something happened: the Blooddrain icon next to the slot turned the glowing blue of the Monitor. For the first time, Tillman Henderson was useful.

Once the Crabs confirmed that Tillman being in any marked slot (except the microphone at 14) produced the effect, it seemed pretty clear that these were slots for dead players—and that, probably, we were going to be bestowing blessings on the Hall team. Furious negotiations began. There were 6 slots, and 14 Hall players above the line. Not every player would receive a modifier. In the end, choices were made based on historical importance and narrative resonance: Caligula Lotus was the player whose incineration allowed us to discover necromancy; Landry Violence's incineration became an iconic moment in the game. The Tigers and Crabs negotiated so that the two Eclipse slots would go to Landry and Tillman, respectively, which isn't something I'd have envisioned back in Season 4. It's nice to see the league come together for shenanigans.

Or at least, that's how the plan circulated was supposed to go.

Right before the countdown to the regular season's end, there were fluctuations. Getting a half-dozen players into precise spots on the Idols board is tricky, especially if not everyone's down with the plan. When the dust settled, we discovered that Thomas Dracaena rather than Randall Marijuana had received the Blooddrain blessing, while Sunbeams player Hahn Fox had got the Friend to Crows slot we'd planned for Sebastian Telephone. As I understand it, some fanlore holds that Thomas Dracaena is a vampire (who claims not to be a vampire? It's very confusing), and the New York Millennials wanted him to receive the Siphon modifier so that he could drink blood. (I have no idea whether Hahn Fox fans had a motive here, or if this was just a random outcome of a rapidly fluctuating board.) Unfortunately for us all, in contrast to the Season 9 random weather modifiers, the Idols-board modifiers were set to disappear at the end of the season, so Dracaena would only have this postseason to reap the benefits (as it turned out, he never used it). It had been made abundantly clear that a regular team stood no chance against the Shelled One's Pods; these blessings were probably meant to even the playing field, and we'd only managed to get four out of six.

During such a chaotic time, it took us a bit to notice that there had been...a swap. As part of the plan, we'd moved Jaylen to the Microphone slot, even though no one was really sure what it did. But 14 on the Idol board was a narratively significant slot for her, and there was some player speculation that she was connected to the Microphone along with NaN and Sixpack Dogwalker. After the dust cleared and the lag settled down, instead of Jaylen at spot 14, there sat—and none of us could believe it—Tillman Henderson, recently incinerated resident troll of the Baltimore Crabs. How had this happened? It was tremendously unclear, because Jaylen's so entangled with the game's narrative threads and mechanics: it felt like it could have been any one of them.

The Mic slot Feedbacked the player in the slot with the 14th player in the Hall of Flame: giving us the opportunity to add one living player to the Hall team. But that's not the direction we took. Due to some last-minute concerns among the Tigers that Yazmin Mason might not remain above the blue line, some fans tributed peanuts to her, raising her from 14 to 13, and dropping Tillman Henderson into the fateful place. The first time we'd brought someone back from the dead, it had been a huge moment of community planning and catharsis. This time it was an accident and a joke.

Tillman Henderson had been a pretty decent batter, at least according to his stats; his awful persona was confined to Crab fanlore. But he was a 1.5 star pitcher, and that's the lineup spot he swapped into on the Shoe Thieves, Jaylen's previous team. Suddenly a blameless team had their ace replaced with a truly terrible pitcher, in both senses of the word. The Crabs sprang into action to explain to the Shoe Thieves just who they'd been saddled with. The main Discord broke into a communal riff of all the sorts of low-key irritating things that they could think of to blame on Tillman Henderson as a communal affirmation of narrative meaning as a way of dealing with change.

But Tillman coming back wasn't the worst thing that could have happened. We learned—much, much later, on the inaugural Inside a Blaseball Q&A stream—how close we came to disaster. Yazmin Mason might have been in slot 14 on my recollection, but if Crabs fans hadn't poured a bunch of peanuts into getting Tillman Henderson as high as possible (Tillman Henderson's preferred state), then the person in slot 14 could have been Mclaughlin Scorpler. 

Society for Internet Blaseball Research 🔮 @SIBROfficial

The Feedback may have swapped the Hall of Flame #14 spots. We are verifying.

You may remember Scorpler from the very blaseball order-of-precedence Season 5 elections blessings that saw him receive a fireproof jacket, then immediately discard it for soundproof headphones, which made him immune to Feedback. He'd been fluctuating wildly all week, rising as high as 11 at one point. If he had been in slot 14 when Jaylen was supposed to return, she would have missed out on rejoining the Hall Stars. And—as will soon become clear—the Hall Stars were really going to need a star pitcher. 

The postseason itself felt like a bit of a rote prelude to the real action, and I'm (probably) not just saying that because the Hades Tigers didn't make the playoffs. We had the not-actually-nerfed Shoe Thieves in one division and the Baltimore Crabs in the other, and once the Shoe Thieves rallied from a 2-game deficit against the Kansas City Breath Mints to clinch a Mild League Championship spot, a playoff rematch ending in Crab Ascension felt fairly inevitable. We'd already had the "underdog beats overwhelming favorite in grueling fight" story; having the favorites get tougher (the Crabs got 5th Base; the Thieves got mildly cursed) and sweep the underdogs was always going to be an anticlimax. And that's what we got. As the Internet League Series went on, the score gap between the Shoe Thieves and the Crabs widened. Where in the first game the Shoe Thieves had rallied from being down by 8 to finish on a 7-10 loss, the second game saw them score no points. With their Flinch modifiers firing frequently, and with the boss battle hanging over all of our heads, it wasn't much of a stretch to imagine the Shoe Thieves' low scores as a manifestation of their reluctance to go through last week's ordeal again.

The third game was similarly one-sided—at least until the Crabs racked up 9 runs and, as previously mentioned, Tot Fox's single drove Silvaire Roadhouse home, causing the moon to collapse and the blaseball cosmology's first recorded Black Hole to form. It felt like a mass hallucination, an almost-too-perfect opening act. It felt as if something had broken not just the state of play (the game score was reset to 0-0) but the universe.

(We suspected this was a feature going live too early—Joel frantically trying to get ahead of implementing the next season's chosen Decree, and having it misfire right as our anticipation was building up and our expectations were focused on the next game. Blaseball incorporates and works through its bugs, rather than walking them back: BETA is displayed next to the game's name, almost an alternate subtitle to the Discipline Era, and catastrophic bugs like the Wyatt Masoning and Peanut Fraud are integrated into the narrative. Blaseball's bugs become features, and it works because—as The Game Band acknowledges—this is a story about the weirdness and inhumanity of messy, broken systems.)

We were expecting big shocking events, yes, but this was a stark reminder that in blaseball, however much you're anticipating, you're going to be surprised. The sun getting swallowed is a very apocalyptic-battle kind of event—it's a core element of Ragnarok—and so it was a really fortuitous moment that's been reflected in a lot of art since then. It also makes a nice bookend to the Discipline Era, which began with Eclipses, but we can talk about that later when we get Sun 2.

The Crabs won, the Emergency Alert message played, and the Peanut arrived. It mocked us: 

(The Peanut delivered each line in succession; I'm editing them together here like this to capture the sense of seeing it as dialogue in real-time.)

And then Wyatt Quitter immediately one-shotted the Crabs out of the game. We'd known that no Internet League team was going to have any hope against the Pods, but the Shoe Thieves had hung on for several innings. So watching the Crabs, who had just clinched their third Internet League Championship and set themselves up to be the first Ascension team, get immediately knocked out by two-star Tacos batter Wyatt Quitter, was extremely funny. The Crabs were a huge powerhouse that had risen from the worst team in the league in Season 1 to a juggernaut, and the Tacos are a scrappy, chaotic mess who do badly and don't give a damn. The Crabs had moved heaven and earth to be the first team to Ascend; the Tacos had fucked around and shelled all of their pitchers to see what happened. Wyatt Quitter, in particular, was there due to being shelled completely at random by a falling peanut. (They’re also often depicted as a small, cute, scrappy, and more or less mundane femme human with no particular cosmic powers.) It was peak blaseball to watch the most chaotic and randomly-recruited player on the Pods team immediately obliterating the most performance-focused team in the game; it was also a neat fast-forward through a repeat of the spectacle we'd just watched the week before to get to the anticipated <eucatastrophe / Götterdämmerung / shitshow>. 

But it was also grimly funny, because it was a stark reminder of just how fucked we might be. It was pretty obvious, if you'd been following the Idol board's cues via the Monitor-blue glow activated icons, that there would be a Hall vs. Pods matchup. But only 4 of the potential 6 playing-field-evening modifiers had gone to Hall players, and we didn't know how much we'd need them. The same foreboding text for Emergency Alerts informed us that something was coming.

This was the introduction of the Hall Stars—this exact name had been floated in hypothetical discussion about a Monitor team, but this was the first confirmation. (Team motto: Hey now, you're a Hall Star. Incidentally, I would like to know who to incinerate for that). The Hall Stars, like the Shelled One's Pods, had a number of modifiers in addition to Squiddish. While some, like Chaotic and Tribute, were immediately understandable, others like Loyalty weren't as clear. It was evident, though, that they should improve the Hall Stars' odds—and a clear signal that this was not a run-of-the-mill blaseball team, but one backed by a chthonic power.

As the Peanut sputtered its outrage, a new game began, with the recently-redeemed Jaylen Hotdogfingers pitching for the Hall of Flame team. Notably, Jaylen is the only player to face the Peanut on Day X twice: the first time as the Shoe Thieves' pitcher holding off the Pods, which marked her face-turn. Now, the revenant pitcher had returned to the Hall with the rest of the dead, and was, once again, our best hope against our longtime adversary.

Our team—and it was our team, composed of the 14 Deceased players we'd collectively decided to honor. We began with 148,609,129 Spirit, which was much higher than the Pods' 29,918,000, but the Pods had a lot of unique modifiers which all seemed like big important force-multipliers, but which were difficult to assess because we'd only seen them in one game prior to this. The effect was chaotic, in that there were too many factors and complexities at play for us to readily understand why something would happen or predict an outcome. It didn't feel arbitrary to me, though—it felt overwhelming. The Game Band is very adroit at the use of game mechanics, individually and en masse, as rhetorical signal.

Because of the sheer number of multi-factorial elements in play, and because every player on the Hall Stars meant something significant to those who had paid tribute, this game was flooded with deeply intense moments of high drama, narrative payoff, and catharsis. Everyone's experience of the game was different: everyone was pre-invested in different characters, and able to link their actions on the field to established feelings and narratives. Beyond even that, the site was straining under the number of people watching. The site didn't show every play to everyone; the Peanut's taunts sometimes were delayed enough that a Hall Stars player cancelled them out while they were appearing. Stephen's said that blaseball is roguelike oral tradition before, and Season 10, Day X is the best example you could possibly have of this. There are game logs and VODs, yes, but they're not more real than the memory of yelling at the screen, or the story's reprocessing in art and music and excited conversations.

So, while acknowledging that I cannot tell every story here, I'm going to talk about some dramatic moments that stood out to me. Initially, the game felt just as grueling and dire as it had in Season 9, when the Shoe Thieves stood no chance. Jaylen Flickered back and forth, swapping pitching slots with former Crab Axel Trololol as the Peanut accused the Hall Stars of cheating. And she absolutely was: because the Hall Stars had Loyalty, which gave anyone leaving the team the Saboteur modifier, Jaylen had a chance of intentionally failing when pitching for the Pods. That, alone, wasn't enough: but in the 2nd, when the Hall Stars hit home run after home run, it began to feel like victory was possible. When Caligula Lotus, beloved Boston Flowers player whose incineration had given us the idea for Necromancy back in Season 5, hit a solo home run, it knocked the Pods' health bar into the yellow for the first time, and it seemed—incredibly—that we were ahead, that we were going to pull this off. But anyone who's watched blaseball knows not to trust a second-inning lead. 

And, then, in the bottom of the third inning, right off a Dominic Marijuana home run, Sebastian Telephone was incinerated. Some popular fanlore holds that Sebastian and Jessica are siblings, because the last name is already pretty uncommon; the drama of heel-turned Jessica Telephone facing off against her deceased brother was already a big deal. It knocked the Hall Stars' health bar down, but—because the Hall Stars had the modifier Squiddish—he was replaced by a random Hall of Flame player. 

Scrap Murphy is a name I didn't know before this. The fan wiki tells me that he played on the New York Millennials until he was incinerated halfway through Season 2—the first season of incinerations. He was a one-star pitcher. And now he rose to join his teammates, adding 250,869 Spirit to the team. Fans had quietly been paying tribute to players, even players most of us had never heard of or didn't care about: a quiet act of faith that ultimately came to fruition at the most dire, and necessary, of moments. It's a magnificent metaphor about what it means to care for each other: you do the work not because you know for a fact you will be rewarded, but because you take an action, quietly and with hope that it will mean something to someone someday, even if you can't see what. I will also note that Scrap's Spirit indicates that someone had been going around donating peanuts to every dead player so that their Tribute total ended in 69. Nice.

Scrap Murphy immediately hit a home run. Also nice. 

This is, incidentally, around the time when we noticed the presence of the Monitor—at first just a faint, ghostly outline behind the Peanut and the weather effects. I was watching the game on video chat with Sam Kabo Ashwell and Amal El-Mohtar, and when I saw the Monitor appear, I screamed and pointed it out. Amal's screen, however, was set at a different contrast, and so we spent breathless moments explaining to her what we were seeing, that the Monitor was coming, that we might finally get to see it eat that nut. Collective anticipation; communal storytelling.

And then—okay, this is the moment that really got me. Landry Violence, who I touched on briefly in my initial blaseball primer. Landry Violence was a four-star batter for the Hades Tigers from the very start of Internet League Blaseball, and quickly became a team favorite. Back then, the Tigers were the dominant team, both on the field and socially: in addition to the rest of their strong lineup, they had the maxed-out batter and top-tier fan-favorite Jessica Telephone. Coming into the Season 3 playoffs and a strong contender for the championship title, the Tigers had so far not suffered any of the incinerations that had swept the rest of the League. Until the second game of the championship series, against the New York Millennials, when Landry Violence was incinerated. Paula Turnip, who replaced him, went on to be a strong player in her own right, and the Tigers rallied to take the series. Fan chants of "do it for violence" turned to "rest in violence", which in turn spread so widely through the league that it became the official subtitle of Season 8.  Various players across many teams are, fanlore-wise, claimed to be carriers of the Spirit of Violence; RIV is the standard form of respect for a dead player. Landry was popular because he was a fitting symbol for turning a painful loss into fuel for anger and struggle. Fans from across the league who loved the legend of Landry Violence tributed their peanuts; he was second in the Hall only to the Kansas City Breath Mints' beloved Boyfriend Monreal. 

From the moment we realized we could—and should—give dead Hall players modifiers via the Idol board, there was a debate about which players should receive modifiers. This is another example of Sam Kabo Ashwell's "it's like shooting fish in a barrel, but everyone has to hold the shotgun" principle; there is never complete consensus on any plan in blaseball. The legend of Landry Violence was well-known enough for enough people to rally behind placing him in an Eclipse spot, which we expected would correspond to Fire Eater—and that's what he got. By the bottom of the 8th, we were hoping for any advantage. The Pods' health bar had been knocked into the red, but percentage-wise, there wasn't much separating the two teams. The modifiers would have been useful at this moment: we actually hadn't seen the Idol board modifiers pay off for much of the game, but even if we had, there was so much chaos, they'd have been easy to miss. 

Emmett Internet stepped up to bat, and then suddenly, we had our second incineration event of the game. Or more precisely, a rogue umpire tried to incinerate Landry Violence, but Landry Violence ate the flame. This gave them the Magmatic modifier, which in addition to being an enormously cool image, guarantees a home run on the player's next at-bat. (We'd seen this happen a few times earlier in the season.) This is an incredible image for the Spirit of Violence, animated for one last fight against the greatest evil of the Era, refusing to be incinerated again, consuming and powered by the flame. It's a payoff that spans almost the entire era of blaseball, involved multiple teams' coordination, and required possibly hundreds to thousands of people's effort. And because I'd been there from the beginning, watching as this story took root and spread from the Tigers' own discord channel to a league-wide ritual phrase, this was a much hoped-for and deeply satisfying catharsis—the more so because it was never guaranteed.

The rest of the game was filled with these, too, and the final moment of victory wasn't exempt. Peanut Bong was chased off the field by a flock of crows, which dropped the Pods under 3 million Spirit. It would only take a few more good hits. Workman Gloom, famous for hitting a home run directly after his incineration, hit another off a sabotage-pitching Jaylen Hotdogfingers. Tyreek Olive struck out. With the opposing team's Spirit below a million, we held our breaths. And then Dominic Marijuana hit a home run, dropping the Pods to zero and heralding the arrival of the Monitor. 

Millennials fans may have felt a personal exultation at one of their own striking the final blow, but the moment of victory, like the rest I've mentioned, was one of collective joy. The Monitor arrived, and, as we had been begging it to do for seasons by this point, cronched down on our loathsome adversary.

The end of the game provided a brief respite, before we could really understand all of its consequences: we were all too busy processing just what had happened, and could only speculate about what came next. A lot happened during the next day's elections, which I'll pick up next time. But for the Hall Stars players, their story is at an end, and I want to finish with that. That was part of the deal Wyatt made, after all. We'll leave the fine print on it for later. (There is a lot of fine print. Much of it is redacted.)

As part of the aforementioned deal, the elections decided the fate of the god-touched players of the now-disbanded Pods and Hall Stars. The Pods fell back to earth at random, landing on new teams, but the Hall Stars were Released. They no longer appeared in the Hall of Flame, lost the Deceased modifier, were unable to be Idolized or Tributed: though their database entries are still technically accessible, they were gone from blaseball entirely. One more thing: their Soulscream, the multi-letter arrangement of mostly vowels that is an expression of a player's Fate number, was renamed to their Soulsong. We've talked about the Peanut's taunts as a reincorporation of a musical theme; this feels akin to that. This feels like a minor-to-major key-change; a long-recurring motif of internal anguish transmuted to a paean.  

None of this is anything we've seen before, or that we were prepared for, but it felt both meaningful and earned. The Hall Stars fight was close: our team racked up an absurd number of home runs, the number of which would shatter records in any Internet League game, and it was still barely enough to hang on. If anything more had gone wrong: if Jaylen hadn't swapped and played Saboteur, if Scrap Murphy's Spirit hadn't been added to the Hall Stars after Sebastian Telephone's incineration, if we'd shelled more superstars instead of Snackrificing, if Landry Violence hadn't become Magmatic, then the Hall Stars could have lost. This haunts me, the more so because I haven't really seen the community grapple much with that possibility, and maybe that's understandable: victory feels good. But that victory would ring hollow if it were kayfabe, and blaseball has never shied away from going hard. If we'd lost, I have no doubt that The Game Band would have told an interesting story from it, and I'm sure it would have been Extremely Bad News. The world of internet league blaseball is a horror, even if at times a cheerfully absurdist one: players are routinely incinerated, have their blood replaced with arcane substances when they join new teams, have their bodies distorted and transformed in order to gain marginal advantages in play. No one should want to play blaseball. And so it was another kind of triumph that our most beloved players, incinerated too soon, rose to steal victory in the hour of our greatest need, and had their pointless, arbitrary deaths given redemptive meaning.

There's not a lot of grace or mercy in blaseball, despite what the Blaseball Gods claim on the website's loading page. We've just passed through the Discipline Era. And yet, arising from Wyatt's deal—which we were told is a bad deal but the only one around—we have this. The first era is a story that we've all been participating in, to some degree or another—even if you only experience blaseball through this newsletter, you are participating in the cultural event of blaseball. I am, admittedly, more invested than many: blaseball hits on my interest in meaningful stories arising out of unpredictable game mechanics, and there have been so many over the course of the Discipline Era. But this one is the most meaningful to me: it pays off the work we've done and the stories we've told; it acknowledges our effort; it shifts into a new key—one we don't get to hear often in this game.

Narratively, Release is a mystery. But mechanically it’s clear: Released players cannot be Idolized or interacted with in any way. They’re gone; they aren’t returning, at least not through any player effort. "Wherever you are," the Microphone said, "I hope you get to rest."