#so you look as simpleminded and bizarre to the villager as the villager looks to you

[paradoxbeta]

Who wants a bit of Minecraft spec bio?

In my headcanon for Minecraft the majority of mobs share a very recent common ancestor with a slime-mold adjacent organism called the "root node," meaning most mobs (villagers, illagers, skeletons, zombies, mooshrooms, others) are fungoid/plantoid-appearing creatures.

Villagers are among the most complex of them all, boasting an intricate method of expression through extendable facial "petals" (thin, mostly transparent membranes) that shift in color, pattern, and intensity to express a vast and dynamic field of emotions. The protrusions on their head resembling eyebrows and a nose light up in patterns to convey information. Conversation is occasionally emphasized by vocal cues (the iconic "hrms").

While impossible to translate standard villager conversation into something intelligible to humans without advanced technology, Steve is the most "fluent in villager," with a baseline understanding of what different colors mean on a villager's petals and even dyed paper cards to replicate the expressions himself. He also has established a rudimentary sign language with the nearby village.

Steve works with a certain villager he's nicknamed The Language Guy, or "TLG," to propose new signs or revise existing ones. TLG distributes language updates to the village when they happen. TLG is the most "fluent in human," so they are the village's Steve equivalent when it comes to diplomacy with humans. They are also working on writing a book with every established sign and its definition. Since villagers don't have a written language yet, it consists of easily interpreted pictograms.

Humans and villagers have rather shallow avenues of communication due to their complete lack of intuition about each other's natures. However, due to their frequent interactions, TLG and Steve are very close friends for creatures with a compatibility gap bigger than the Grand Canyon.

Alex would really like to learn about all of this, but she's not quite got the hang of it yet.