#ok actualky that’s the long version that’s basically my whole thing about their motives

[fogwitchoftheevermore]

hello hi idk if you're taking asks but. but I am fascinated by your watcher headcanons and I would Love to hear your thoughts about listeners *pleading face*

HIIIII I AM ABSOLUTELY TAKING ASKS. also i saw what you were talking about in the reblogs of that post and also really enjoyed your whole thing about the war i love when minecraft lore is relevant to this stuff.

everyone be so thankful mobile lets you do read more nowadays because this would be a nightmare if it didn’t.

also!! brief discussion of eye trauma below the cut! it’s nothing in depth but it is right there.

ok so we’re splitting the listeners talk into “full” and “partial” listeners again because it’s the best descriptors for these categories i’ve got even though i think it sounds stupid.

full listeners account for 99.9% of the listener population. listeners, unlike the watchers, cannot be born because of the circumstances of their creation. if you don’t know, the listeners were created when some watchers observing and running evos got particularly disgruntled with how the other watchers were running things (this is explicitly cannon!). to me, this group started with small stuff then realized they could get real weird with their rebellion and did just that.

full listeners, in order to create themselves, have to completely cut off their sight in some way. sometimes they've gouged out their eyes, sometimes they're wearing permanent blindfolds, sometimes they straight up don't have eyes! oftentimes no matter which option it is they wear the blindfold anyways, just because they recognize that without it they’re very off putting to look at.

both full watchers and listeners lack the senses of touch and smell, and even taste is more of an abstract concept than an actual sense for them, leaving only sight and hearing. the listners cut off one of their two real senses in an attempt to cut themselves off from the watchers and while this definitely works, it also makes existing far harder. mcyt is not made for listening to, let's be honest.

listeners, like watchers, feed off emotions, but they require far more to sustain themselves to compensate for the lack of sight. they don't try to avoid eating negative emotions, like a partial watcher might, but they don't usually try to create more to eat, no matter how delicious they may find them. this is less because of any care for the players and more due to the fact that listeners are less powerful than watchers by default. they should have full access to the same power set the watchers have, and they do, but because so much of their food and energy goes towards just sustaining life, they find it much more difficult to do what the watchers do. this is compounded even further by the fact that the watchers don’t want them to do their thing and are actively pushing them out. this doesn’t mean getting things done is impossible for them, far from it! but it does mean it’s significantly harder, and they don’t have time or energy to waste on making people sad right now.

full listeners can be created out of players, but the listeners don't usually go looking to create them, because numbers isn't what they need just yet. right now they're just trying to figure out an actual plan of action to take against the watchers. however, they know they'll need the numbers eventually, so if you ask, they're not going to turn you down. becoming a full listener, as is the case when becoming a full watcher, very quickly distances you from everything that made you you when you were a player. you lose your ability to connect to players rather quickly because everything about how you exist is so radically different, and your memories of ever being a player are quickly overtaken by the constant information intake being a full watcher or listener mandates.

full listeners interact more frequently with players than full watchers do, but find it harder to influence them and to bridge the gap between the planes they exist on to make their speech not rhyme and be actually comprehensible. the listeners talk so weirdly because it takes up too much energy to do it another way.

partial listeners... are not supposed to exist. and maybe they don't? they'd theoretically function how partial watchers do- a player who can still interact with the world(s) as a player, but also has some of the powers of a listener. however, listeners don't really have powers other than whatever the "moving between the place they live and the place the players live" thing is. listeners also don't really want partial listeners, as they find no use for them. their entire deal is working against the watchers, so what could they need with someone who, in their eyes (heh), cannot understand the watchers in the same way they do?

however, while you can request/be convinced to become a listener or watcher, i think there’s also an option to brute force it. technically, if someone was powerful and stupid enough, they could force their way into being a partial watcher or a partial listener... for fun? again, you have to be a little stupid to do this because it is insane person behavior, but it's fun to leave the option open. (whenever i think about the time sausage said that he definitely wasn’t a watcher when he was memorializing liml and then followed it up with a remark about how we just need to listen i think about the partial listeners thing. if anyone would brute force their way into this it would be him.)