They even have the same initials... :(

[placeblocks]

I'm not entirely sure how to phrase this, but it occurred to me earlier and I just wanted the thoughts of the community... I'm just not sure how to phrase it, especially because part of my thoughts on it are coming from a "That'd make a good fanfic" vs. completely based in reality. So take that with a grain of salt, but here's the question/thought: do you think Guude in any way regrets inviting GenerikB to the server? Although I think everyone loves Genny, and he's a great addition to the server with funny ideas and plots, I can't help but think that his introduction has helped speed up the demise of OOG. Bdubs now has an easy someone he clicks with really well on the server to play with all the time, who has his schedule, and who is interested and available to play the way he wants to play. In some ways, it feels like Genny has "replaced" Guude for Bdubs. (Quite literally, too. We are getting a B-Team adventure map/CTM thing and no more OOG.) Do you think when Guude met him at PlayOnCon and revised is opinion of him he had any idea this is how it'd go? (Be nice, let this guy on you misjudged... get sort of walked all over and cut out of your own headlining series in thanks...)

I don't think Guude is quite that jealous or petty, especially compared to a fanfic world where Guude and Bdubs are actually in a relationship vs. real life where Guude is well aware that Bdubs needs to make money and the B-Team sells and Genny is available to record, etc., etc., etc. He might be jealous or, more likely, sad he can't join/play as much, but I think he "gets it" to some degree. But in terms of fanfic, I find it an interesting thought... I DUNNO. But when I mentally put myself into Guude shoes, thinking, "How would I feel if I were him?" there is a lot of sadness and a level of resentment/bitterness because of the scheduling conflicts, and yet Bdubs is putting out all this tons of content with this other person... :(

Comments

[isi]

The B Team's kinda like the new OOG, particularly in terms of how iconic they've become. And in fanfic world (because I dare not make actual judgments about heavy topics like this when I don't know the real world people involved), I think it makes sense to view the B Team's rapid rise to popularity as coming at the expense of OOG. BdoubleO had a nice thing going with Guude for a while, then maybe things got a little harder to keep going, and then he gets a new opportunity with Generik and he takes it, putting more into the new B Team arrangement than trying to reconnect with Guude. Part of it could be avoidance, that moving forward with his new buddy is just easier than trying to work through whatever tangle of communication issues he has with Guude at this point.

As for Guude, my portrayals of him would have him as mostly trying to be understanding that it's circumstance and not on purpose, but not helping being some degree of bitter underneath. And the bit about him regretting adding Genny is an angle I hadn't thought of before. It's definitely possible.

[placeblocks]

Do you think that in terms of fanfic this means Guude and Bdubs have broken up and Bdubs is now with Genny, or do you think they're still together? Because, and I think this is interesting, as close as the B-Team is, I don't get the shipping level from them that I get from Guude/Bdubs at all. I'm not sure if that's because Genny's character is a toothless old man, or if they just don't have the same sort of shippy chemistry that Guude/Bdubs do...

[isi]

Since both of them have said separately that "OOG is dead," that pretty much means breakup to me, if things have gotten difficult enough that they're not even going to try anymore. As for Bdubs and Genny, I actually have picked up on a little bit of shippiness between them (I saw in a livestream that Genny's desktop background is some fanart of the two of them with a heart), though obviously it's not really the same kind of relationship that OOG was. There have been discussions before of how business oriented Bdubs has been in terms of managing his channel, and the B Team is kind of like an extension of that, since their goals are typically make more power and money. I see the B Team as a normal friendship turned into a sort of business, which may or may not come with other benefits on the side.

[placeblocks]

It feels a bit break-upish to me, too, but at the same time I don't feel like OOG is all that is Guude/Bdubs. I guess time will tell, but for instance, I could see them doing a UHC pairs again, or something...

The idea of B-Team as "Friends with benefits" makes a lot of sense. Business partners first, but something on the side...

I wonder if Guude thinks they've broken up, but Bdubs doesn't quite realize it yet... man. I wanted more Guude/Beef, but not like this. :(

[isi]

Perhaps there is more to Guude/Bdubs, but it's too early to tell. Maybe if there is another team UHC like you said, maybe we'll see what that is. Or maybe Minecon (though so many other people are going besides Guude and Bdubs, so who knows how much they'll actually interact there?).

Re: Guude/Beef: I'm just going to give a preemptive apology for whatever I do to the OOG ship in the upcoming parts of my fic. There's just too much potential angst that I have to play it up a little. ;_;

[placeblocks]

Ahaha, well that's part of the beauty of fanfic--you really can explore things that you can't otherwise. :)

[guiltyshirts]

I can see Guude having a lot of conflicting feelings about the whole thing. Genny is a great guy and contributes a lot, but at the same times Bdubs has basically left OOG for the B-Team. They're completely inseparable right now. Cocktail Tuesday is always B-Team. They're even doing adventure maps - I admit that stung me a bit. :(

I'm sure Guude wants Bdubs to be happy, but still misses him. Would he blame himself for not being more available? Have his trust issues led him to cut Bdubs off completely, which is why we're seeing no interaction *at all* from them? I honestly don't know. They don't seem to even talk about each other unless it was to answer 'Where's OOG?'

Anyone else recall a comment on reddit that mentioned they don't even seem to like each others' videos anymore? The only response was 'Don't start drama!'

In the real world, I honestly hope they're all happy and there's just things we don't see which make it understandable.

Okay, a purely practical consideration that isn't all stream-of-thought from me: Is the B-Team going to be in danger of burning out from the sheer amount of things they do? Will there be a point when they fall as quickly as they rose?

[placeblocks]

Bdubs has shocked me with his lack of burnout ability, so I'm not sure that he will. Of course anything is possible, but considering the level of videos he was putting out while working a fulltime job, I feel like he can keep up Minecraft stuff almost indefinitely now that he doesn't have his real life job. I guess we'll see... I suppose one good thing for them is that they don't even have to plan/script stuff. They just get on camera together and it's comedy gold. It seems very effortless for them.

But when you say it stung you to see the B-Team doing a map together, it made me realize how shocked I was that we got one too while OOG is dying, and it's like... well, if I feel that way, how must Guude feel? And I don't want to speculate about how things are IRL because we don't know these people, but the lines ARE so blurred I find that I do sometimes end up mixing the two. Because what happens IRL does affect what happens "in character" or "in game" or however you want to distinguish the two...

[guiltyshirts]

I'm thinking more of audience burnout - will there be so much B-Team that people feel oversaturated and watch something else? Like eating your favourite meal all the time, you get sick of it eventually.

Them doing the adventure map just stood out to me because Deathly Trails didn't get finished. :/

[mindcrack_love]

And now I have to wonder how much of it is that Deathly Trails as a map is just not very well made (it's a Legendary ripoff, and not even a good one at that, extremely unbalanced and filled with the sort of "cheap tricks" good mapmapkers like three_two, Amlup, and Vetches avoid) and OOG feel like they HAVE to finish Deathly Trails before starting something new.

[koalaed]

I got the impression from Guude and Bdubs that they found Deathly Trails more frustrating than fun a lot of the time, which I personally feel may have contributed to its demise (because the main draw is just to have OOG together, even though the map seems not nearly as fun as their previous projects). OOG's apparent belief that they needed to finish DT before moving to a more enjoyable map is why it didn't surprise me that Bdubs wanted to start another map, even if it was with someone else because of Guude's time constraints.

[placeblocks]

You do make a good point about DT not being a good map, but we left off with them in a pretty good position. They've got tons of iron now, for instance, so I feel like if they just DID another recording session it'd go fairly well. I'm hoping that once Minecon is over and Guude gets the babysitter during the day like he's mentioned, things will change and we'll all look back on this and laugh a bit...

[theropod]

I hope you're right. Even if they never record again together, it'd be good to know they're still friends, you know?

[mindcrack_love]

This was something I thought about earlier - how Genny has always had a different take on LPing than Guude, with more "character" and "plot" and less "confession", and how disorienting that is for Guude, who sometimes mistook those things for dishonesty. (See his initial reaction to Joe Hills. Joe acknowledges the accent is overplayed - not entirely fake, but not totally honest either - because he comes from a background of stand-up comedy and that's the kind of character he likes to play on stage. Guude's reaction is all "fuck that guy, he's lying to his audience", which was never Joe's intention.) They meet at Play On Con and Guude realizes he likes the person underneath the Happy Hermit LPer and decides to give him a chance - and then Genny reverts to his typical Happy Hermit self, exactly the sort of thing Guude was never into in the first place. He overblows a bit of mischief into an entire plotted affair that ends with the Trial - which, for all of its fun, was frankly a little awkward and sloppily done at points, and no other Mindcracker would have been "offended" enough by Etho's trolling to make the whole thing necessary. (And in the process, Genny strengthens a friendship with Bdubs that theoretically was a long time coming - Genny did make Bdubs' "Rocky" UHC5 intro, months before Play On Con - but had lain dormant because Bdubs' focus was Mindcrack and now they had an excuse to interact.)

So maybe there is regret - this is what happens when you let these kinds of people on the server? This is what happens in the perfect storm, between Guude's increased exhaustion and Bdubs' network-frenzied ascent?

I do have to wonder some other things though.

* If Guude is so exhausted and frantic to record pre-Minecon, why take a trip to Alabama? I know he likes the guys at Dead Workers Party, but it seems a bit excessive, don't you think?
* How are the other Hermits reacting? Am I the only one who thinks that if Genny had never joined Mindcrack, he'd be doing more with them? Why haven't we seen another Battle Royale after Doc's special edition one? If Guude is bitter/regretful/sad that OOG is no longer a thing, is Keralis sad/bitter/regretful that Bo-Buddies was never a thing even though all the pieces were there?

[placeblocks]

It's definitely true that Bdubs and Genny were friends before Genny joined Mindcrack, so it's not totally unsurprising that they'd pair up, but I doubt that Guude thought it'd go anything like this. And once again it's hard to speculate between real life and 'in game' in this situation.

- Do we know when Guude booked the plane to Alabama? Perhaps it was before he knew how stressed he'd be? I don't know anything about The Shaft, but do you think he went for networking purposes? That'd be the main reason I'd think you'd go in person--because you'll leave a much longer-lasting impression being there in person. Or possibly because they do Facecam he thought more viewers would sub to him from it or something?

- I also don't know much about HermitCraft, but I do wonder that, as well. Has Genny's production of Hermit Craft videos been affected by his output of Mindcrack stuff?

[mindcrack_love]

I don't think Genny has been making fewer Hermitcraft videos per se (though maybe it went from Hermitcraft every day to Hermitcraft and Mindcrack alternating every other day), but I wonder more about the other stuff. Would he be playing Herobrine's Mansion with Keralis (or if he wanted someone with PvE experience, Joe Hills)? Borderlands 2 with Hypno and Cubehamster and Cilantro (or some other Hermit trio)? Would there have been another Battle Royale season during UHC8? Would more Hermits have joined the server beyond Aurelian and Dinnerbone?

[damnreddit]

I'm fine with speculating about all of this stuff for fanfic purposes, but when it touches on the guys' real lives like this I think it's important to at least acknowledge the facts that can be known. Like guiltyshirts talking about them not talking about each other ... while that's true as far as I know post-"end of OOG", it definitely was not true prior to that, as I can be quite confident being the person who posted two BwBOO episodes from very shortly before then in which he spoke of Guude very fondly. And mindcrack_love speculating talking about the Trial business when as far as I can tell Guude really enjoyed recording that. (Wasn't he one of the people who said it was more fun than he'd expected?)

There's other stuff too but I'm being enough of a crankypants. I'm so not a fan of amplifying drama, though. The one thing I have always held to with this fandom is that these guys are basically decent people and should be given the benefit of the doubt in their personal interactions that they're not trying to hurt each other.

[koalaed]

Very well said. I meant to comment about this earlier, but I had trouble phrasing my thoughts clearly in a way that wouldn't cause offense. Luckily, you posted the perfect comment about it, so I can just point at what you said and say, "Yup, this is how I feel on the issue!"

In addition to what you said, I think this sort of speculation is fun when it comes to fanfic plotting - but we need to keep in mind that these are real people we're speculating about, and I think we should be careful not to project our own feelings on issues onto their real lives when we don't know nearly the full story on these issues.

[isi]

Exactly why I specify "in fanfic world" and not wanting to make actual, real world judgments in my response. I don't know any of these people and don't actually know how they feel about any of this beyond what I can gather from their videos, so all my speculation is typically based around my made up representations of the guys rather than what I think they actually feel. The last thing I want to do is cause or facilitate drama, and as a general rule I will always assume that no one on the server intends to hurt someone else.

Lines between fiction and reality; you have to squint to see them sometimes, but I'm trying to make sure they're there. <_<

[guiltyshirts]

Absolutely and I apologise if I've been over-speculative on the issue. I find things very hard to articulate sometimes, particularly when it's all complicated. I know we don't know everything, and I don't want to claim anything as fact, I'm just... trying to get a picture out of how it feels and looks from here, if that makes sense?

(This took me about 20 minutes and much deleting and I still don't know if I'm saying it right.)

[placeblocks]

For what it's worth, I think we're all coming from the same place with regards to the speculation... we all know we can't really say anything about real life, outside of a little speculation, but the lines DO get crossed in this fandom since everything affects everything else. But even in my initial post I was like "I DONT KNOW HOW TO SAY THIS SO IT COMES ACROSS RIGHT" because of said blurring, but I did want to discuss it. Anyway. :) I think a lot of us feel similarly about the whole introduction of Genny, sad as it is.

But I was having another thought earlier today and it basically went, "Well, this is a lot cleaner--Bdubs/Genny, Pause/Millbee, Beef/Guude... vs. Millbee-Pause-Beef, Beef-Guude-Bdubs-Genny...

[guiltyshirts]

Yeah, that.

[placeblocks]

I do definitely want to separate the two, though the lines do cross/blur like this sometimes, too.

It's also weird, because I don't think there has been a falling out between Bdubs and Guude at all. I think Bdubs adores Guude and will forever be thankful to him for giving him the opportunity to do this sort of thing full time. They may not be seeing eye-to-eye on scheduling things or something these days, but I truly do not think it's stemming from an argument or anything. (Though of course, full disclaimer, I do not know anything for sure.) But I think Bdubs genuinely loves Guude (in a platonic way IRL), and that he is a kind-hearted man and doesn't want to hurt Guude. But I also think that he's putting his business opportunities first, and I totally get that.

Here's a question, though--do you think if Guude had all the freetime in the world that he'd be part of the B-Team? He was asked to be their lawyer, so it's clear there was some attempts to include him. Once again blurring the speculation lines... But I feel like the B-Team's style of play isn't really Guude's style. I think he'd join in on occasion, but I don't know that I think he'd be doing it regularly even if he was on Mindcrack all the time. (Once again, full disclaimer--there's no way to know for sure.)

I really don't mean to start or stir drama in any event. I just have feels and want discussion, and you can't do this on the Reddit. (Also, in terms of fanfic/character development, this stuff is somewhat important.)

[isi]

I think you're right about Guude and the B Team's playstyles not really meshing enough for him to be a proper member. But he did throw himself in the gallows after them at the end of the trial, so there's some amount of connection that would motivate him to do some things with them, if only it's wanting to be near BdoubleO.

[placeblocks]

This makes me so sad. It's like Guude wants to play, but keeps getting left behind. I've been in that position IRL with friends and know how sucky it feels, even when I know they're not doing it maliciously, and it's illogical to think they'll "wait" until the three hours I have free to hang out. So you can't blame them, but you're still nevertheless sad...