#ok you know what i cant let this languish in the drafts anymore

[bellshazes]

if you have a sword and you need somebody to fall on it, bdubs is your guy. and he does it so well - boom go the boomers, vying for post-mayoral power against cub in an endearingly pathetic way, whatever the nho was and his enthusiasm for being a heel, the LL enchanting table nonsense, "I always... empty my inventory before I sleep," and so on and so on. he's so good at being exuberant and expressive about it that things like the magma cube death loop at the new spawn area in s7 - certainly genuine and unscripted - aren't that different from other more RP-ish outbursts. he gives off the impression of a guy who will, well, blow himself up every time the boomers do a job, you know? of course, it's Bdubs. that's just how he is.

he's got a habit of antagonizing people into putting swords around for him to fall on as well. bdubs was repeatedly paranoid of tango getting back at him in hermitcraft forthe LL kill. he brings it up on multiple occasions, and tango says "that was in another world" but I get the impression that's part of why tango does the whole bit about going to bdubs' moon base and then taking adequate for his space mission; bdubs was not always there for him, but he's obviously not talking about s7 there. bdubs does this plenty in LL. scar is a frequent target because there's a guy who's even more likely to become his own victim, so they are each of them getting back at each other and falling on their own swords in the process and laughing it off. the feud with doc leads to a great moment of this when the gambling machine he makes for keralis breaks and bankrupts him; oh, redstone with bdubs, comic karmic justice for trying to exploit a friend. (he marries a cow in his single player world in order to acquire a horse from an NPC he also voices - he will invent swords to fall on, for flavor.)

Bdubs carries himself generally like a hothead who'll angrily storm off a cliff and do a looney tunes double take as he realizes he's suspended in air, right before he falls to his doom. and that's not untrue! but what's really devastating is the moments where you begin to suspect that maybe he saw the cliff's edge and walked off anyway.

it's one thing to realize on some level that bdubs is letting himself be robbed of his clocks because it's a better bit that way, or that his narcissistic "perfect redstone" comments emphasize how un-perfect it is to hide the fact that he's actually pretty alright at it.

it's really another to see him spend the last episode of s8 cheerfully ignoring the impending doom, and then for him to deliberately insert a shot of him watching the moon fall into the boilerplate end animation, so we all know eventually he couldn't ignore it anymore, when it was too late, that he watched it happen. and then to have a totally contrasting bit in tango's episode where he talks about wanting to escape and tango not being there for bdubs when he needed him, so either he was hiding something from tango (wanted the world to himself) or hiding something from us (scared as hell).

and in last life, the red lives all kind of take bdubs' defense of etho as goofy. here is bdoubleo, about to run off the cliff like he always does; he never realizes he's wrong until he's already dead, but that's bdubs for you. he had done pretty much that, dying to the wither as etho encouraged a retreat - but the punchline here is, now they fear etho who "soloed a wither" and pity bdubs, lonely again. but bdubs knows when he's being reckless! he is capable of playing smarter or more carefully but if his friends ask him to fall on a sword, well.