caligulalotus - Tumblr blog

caligulalotus · 13 days

Text

hi op! first things first, jaylen sweep. second things second, your explanation! i'll do the short version first, and under the cut i'll include a longer section that explains jaylen's place in it better.

so! blaseball was a video game/simulator run by the game company the game band from july of 2020 to june of last year. the game was a fantasy baseball simulator that combined elements of fandom, ttrpgs, and just plain video games to create an extremely unique experience.

blaseball was played on blaseball.com. in order to play, you would sign up for the website and choose a team to be a "fan" of. there were 24 teams with a varied number of players you could chose between. once you chose a team, you could watch your team and all the other ones play games on the website and bet on these games in order to earn coins (in game currency, blaseball did not include any microtransactions, to be clear.) each season of blaseball was made up of 99 games. every team would play a game every hour, on the hour, from monday to friday. after the regular season concluded, qualifying teams would move into the post season, culminating in the championship that played out sometime on saturday.

another extremely important aspect of blaseball was the election. as you earned coins, you could buy things from the shop, mostly things that helped you earn more coins. but you could also buy votes. votes could be used in this aforementioned election during which you could either cast votes to win buffs for your team/players and/or debuffs for other teams/their players. you could also cast votes in "decrees" which would change the rules of the game, which is where jaylen comes in, though that will go under the cut.

the fandom/ttrpg aspect of playing blaseball came in with the characters themselves. every blaseball player was represented by text on a screen and little else. they had stats about how good they were at the game, and later on they got things like a pre-game ritual and a coffee style to better identify them, but for a long time, players were just their names. as such, fans were allowed and encouraged to build these players into whatever their hearts desired. there is a wiki that collected the more popular interpretations of pretty much every character (of which there are many) if you'd like to take a look at jaylen's page, or anyone else's.

now. about jaylen. and elections. (btw, as i said above, fans were allowed to interpret characters to be anything they wanted. the most prominent interpretation of jaylen, particularly after she was resurrected, had her as a person using she/her pronouns, but this was far from everyone's perception of her. like, there are a ton of screenshots of people referring to her with he/him pronouns from before my time in the fandom. both because i interpret her as such and because it's the interpretation that the person who sent propaganda had, i'm going to be using she/her pronouns here.)

the first election blaseball ever had included three rule changing decrees, only one of which is important. that decree was titled "open the forbidden book". unlike the other decrees, it had no description about what this decree would do, just the sentence "it is forbidden". despite numerous warnings against this course of action, a whopping 60% of the fanbase chose to open the book (this is whopping, for blaseball. it's hard to get majorities.)

upon the opening of the book, numerous things happened as punishment. it was forbidden after all! one of these things was the creation of solar eclipses and rogue umpires. solar eclipses were the first weather condition blaseball games could be played during, and for the next two seasons, it would be the only one. during solar eclipses, there was a chance that an umpire would go rogue and incinerate a player. this is exactly what it sounds like, and it would take the player off of their team and out of play entirely, replacing them with someone new.

the first victim of incineration was the best player in the league at the time, chosen to be the first victim because she was the best, jaylen hotdogfingers. jaylen was a pitcher for the seattle garages at the time, and no one was particularly happy about their star pitcher getting smote, but at the time, there was nothing to be done about it.

but when season 6 came around, the game band introduced a new mechanic: idols. everyone could now choose a player to "idol" and buy different items that would give you money when your idol did x thing. you could idol any player that you had the page of, since it was just a button on their page you needed to press. as fans discovered a few days into the season, this also included dead players.

after confirming this was a feature and not a bug that would be shortly patched out, the fans hatched a plan. during season 6, there was a blessing called "lottery pick", which stated that the team who won would steal the 14th player on the idol board. fans got the link to jaylen's player page (which was not very easy, back then, as the search function didn't exist yet, and players who weren't on teams were otherwise very difficult to find). fans idol'd jaylen at shot her up to the 14th spot on the board within hours, where she stayed until the election closed on sunday.

the garages, jaylen's old team, won lottery pick, and jaylen was swapped by pure RNG for fellow pitcher mike townsend. mike was sent to the shadows, which is kinda like the reserve but i won't get into the specifics here. jaylen returned with two modifiers: "returned", which stated that at the end of every election, there was a chance she would be returned to death, and "debt", which simply said that she had a debt to pay.

jaylen was also followed out of death by a god, the monitor, who monitored the hall of flame, a new place where all the dead players had apparently been this whole time. if we gave him peanuts he let us see the all the dead players in a long list. i digress.

in jaylen's first game back from the dead, she did something never before seen: hit a player with a pitch. the player received a modifier that would fade after 9 (in game) days called "unstable". it came with no description other than "this player is unstable". this was... nerve wracking! soon enough, fans discovered what unstable did when it reaped it's first victim. unstable players had significantly higher chance of being incinerated during a solar eclipse, and if they were incinerated, their instability would spread to another player currently on the field. uh oh! this is when jaylen kills 12 people over the course of a season.

jaylen then went on to have a few more misadventures with her debt that i won't explain for the sake of time because they don't involve her committing murder. but it all came to a head in season 10. by then, jaylen had lost her debt, but there was a bigger threat on the horizon, the shelled one, another god, was threatening to destroy the world.

at the end of season 10, his team of handpicked players were going to return for one last chance for us to prove ourselves against them in a game between his pods and the season 10 champions. we needed to do something, and that something involved plans laid by a whole lot of entities that we had to follow along with. one step in that plan was killing jaylen again, which we did (even though we didn't know that's what we were doing at the time).

when the fight between the shelled one and the season 10 champions finally came, the shelled one absolutley swept, and all seemed lost until the monitor, the guy from earlier, showed up with his new team made up entirely of dead players. one of those players, and the one pitching, was jaylen. jaylen and the rest of hall stars played a grueling game against the shelled one and his pods that finally culminated in his death via the monitor literally eating him. not a joke. not an exaggeration.

at the end of the game, all of the hall stars were released from the grip of blaseball and the hall of flame, but jaylen, who had switched teams throughout the game and ended it on the shelled one's team, fell back to earth with the rest of the pods to live again. jaylen then went on to have a long list of misadventures and nightmares and sometimes even good times for the following 14 seasons of blaseball before the world ended and took her with it.

and that is my treatise on why you should vote for jaylen. she did all that. for you. and also there's a lot of really good music about her by the band the garages that you should check out.

Round 1

Note: before voting for the first option please leave a detailed explanation of what Blaseball even is in the notes, cause I have no idea. Also votes for the first option count for Jaylen Hotdogfingers

Propaganda Under The Cut

Jaylen Hotdogfingers:

The greatest came-back-wrong character ever. She's the mayor of Seattle. She's was the best pitcher in the league. She was murdered by an umpire in an act of divine retribution for the fanbase's transgression. The fanbase exploited game mechanics to bring her back to life. Immediately she murdered 12 people. She died again and got revived a second time as part of a team of undead players that killed god. She's a really awful batter. She has, like, 16 songs written about her and they're all really good. I thought about her every single day for a period of six consecutive months. I love her.

I'll be real. I'm an outsider to the Blaseball fandom. I don't understand it. I think they've crowdfunded characters from fictionalized fucked-up Baseball stats and a dream. I love seeing what the fuck they're doing in their eldritch sandbox just so much.

Bruce Wayne (Batman):

he's babygirl your honour! single father of 6 (ish), world's least likable manwhore, he's obsessive and mean and cares a lot and is an asshole

he’s a whore. he’s batman. he’s terrified of bats. he’ll fuck villains he’ll fuck heroes he’ll fuck any consenting adult. he’s a dad. he’s traumatised. he beats the shit out of people. he can do anything with enough prep time. he creeps people out on purpose. he lives and dies by the bit. he is everything to me. truly the character of all time

178 notes · View notes