#it's such a comforting and yet deeply and fundamentally uncomfy concept

[shadeswift99]

i cant believe my comfort tumblr is the void /lh- anyways may i have a spare vague void writing? idk they make me feel oddly comfy- you dont have to tho- thanks in advance shade!

This is a good ask because it made me think about the Void all morning, and that makes me happy :)

Really, if you think about it, there isn't any reason why the Void should be any more alarming than lava or fire. Both cause death, both destroy items...so why does the Void have that combination of tantalizing emptiness and unsettling pull that neither fire or lava have? As much lore and mythology as I could assign to it to try and make myself feel better, I think, in the basic setting of Minecraft, it's really mostly about knowledge.

When a player spawns, they are essentially an island in a massive sea of unknowns waiting to be explored. They have a deficit of knowledge - they don't know why they're there, they don't know how to survive, they have only the vaguest idea of who they are... Their entire existence is about discovering these things, how the world around them works and how they fit into it. They learn by trial and error and by the slim knowledge left behind for them by civilizations long passed into dust. They learn how to keep themselves safe and fed, how to navigate, how to harness magic and even access other dimensions. By the time the player gets to the End, they are well familiar with the pattern: discover something you do not know, and apply all your effort and ingenuity to it until you do know it. That's the nature of humanity, both inside and outside of the game. A person and an unknown can only exist in the same space for so long before the unknown is no longer a mystery. Minecraft works as a game because it contains enough possibility that the player will never run out of unknowns to pursue or challenges to overcome.

But then...the player encounters the Void. They look into it and see emptiness, absolute nothingness, to a degree that they have never experienced before. It has no end, it has no bottom, no edge, and yet no beginning - you can fall forever and still meet only air, never hitting the "source" of the darkness you see. We call it the Void for convenience only. It is a label to try to define a thing that by definition does not exist.

The player looks into the Void, and their human brain immediately tries to categorize it as an unknown. It is new, and strange, and there is much to be discovered about it...right? That's how everything they have encountered in their world so far has worked. It must have a hidden meaning or function or effect. Something lives in it, or you can gather it, or it is an enemy, or a passageway, or a threat, or an ally, a resource...but the longer the player looks into it, the more they realize that it is not any of these things. The only thing it is is

Not.

And that makes the player vastly, horribly uncomfortable. For a mind that has spent its entire existence pushing to know more, to run up against a nothingness like this, to find an actual end in the End - they just can't accept that! The only thing more uneasy to a human being than an unknown is a space where there is simply nothing to know. And no matter how much meaning I try to pack into it to sooth the unease, no matter how many theories that player staring over the edge tries to throw into that endless abyss of thin air and static, the Void will remain just that: Void. Null. Nothing. A thing that by all rights should be dismissed as inconsequential, but still lives in the backs of the minds of those who are near it - not a question with no answer, but a host of scraped-together answers with no question, only stillness.

As a writer, I could spend thousands of words to describe it and still never get close...because I am moving in the wrong direction.

After you read this, sit in silence. That will paint a better picture of nonexistence than all the knowledge in the Universe ever could.