#winners pov zine

[alienssstufff]

HOW DID I GET HERE // NICK OF TIME

My parts for the @bdubszine ! Love that guy to death it’s been a pleasure to work on such a project ^_^!!! These pieces come in a set and are dedicated to his Hermitcraft S7 POV (left page) and 3rd Life POV (right page)

[ ZINE LINK ]

[ notes undercut ]

HOW DID I GET HERE (hcs7)

This page was the winner of 6 other compositions (censored — one day they will be posted in their own time). It takes direct inspiration by the theming of Bdubs’ HCS7 thumbnails in the comic-book style, particularly the episode Bdubs get his iconic big beautiful eyes and smile x]

IN THE NICK OF TIME (3L)

In another universe- the right portion of the set would have been a continuation of the S7 theme, imitating that of an actual magazine spread with recaps and shit (rejected— too much research u_u)

The happenings of HCS7 and 3L overlap, and I wanted to visually show that mirror transition between the two series. The 3L page for that reason was harder to manage without being too different or too underwhelming to its HC37 counterpart. This page is dedicated to his season finale POV of 3rd Life ft Day 1 Crew (and Tango)

[inthelittlezine]

Say hello to the InTheLittleZine organizer, @anpanbun

Pronouns: she/her

Anpan has been insane over Martyn Inthelittlewood since circa 2012, and its really reared its head in the last year or so. You can count on her bad sleep schedule being even worse until this zine gets made!

Next up is @kingtheghast

Pronouns: she/he/they

Ghast is an artist and designer who loves doing character art. Sometimes, they draw minecraft youtubers. Maybe more than sometimes. Okay maybe all the time-

(Quick note, I couldn't have gotten this zine off the ground without Ghast's help <3 -Anpan)

Meet our second Art Mod, @maggymations (pfp credit @/sofi1z)

Pronouns: she/her

Maggy, mostly called Mags, is an artist and (sometimes) animator that has only been in the mcyt fandom since around 6 months ago. She’s always open to meeting new people and is super excited to get the zine up and running!

Introducing the first half of our writing mod team, @phosphorus-noodles

Pronouns: she/they

Hello everybody! Phosphorus Noodles also known as Pho has been following Martyn's work since 3rd Life and is very proud of themself for correctly predicting the winner's pov of Limited Life from day one.

Here's the other half of our writing mod team, @ilexdiapason

Pronouns: they/them

Ilex has had the lyrics to "Screw The Nether" memorised since it was released. They currently show no signs of kicking Martyn out from where he's been living in their head rent-free since then.

Say hi to @tinjap!

Pronouns: she/her

Tinja's favourite things in the world are drawing silly little pictures, doing silly little crafts, collecting silly little things and thinking silly little thoughts about Martyn.

Last but certainly not least, its @contravictoire

Pronouns: they/them

Vic loves Evo SMP maybe a bit too much for their own good, and you can catch them obsessing over Martyn's Eyes and Ears lore at all times! (You didn't hear it here at the ITLZ, but they are also a big PearlescentMoon and TangoTek fan!)

[bao3bei4]

a girl is a witch: on umineko ep 4

as promised, i wrote a zine on any topic the winner of my raffle wanted. and um. bee wanted umineko. after a long time rereading it, i realized that i only really wanted to talk about one episode. here it is:

As Kathryn Bond Stockton, to whom this zine owes a great debt, writes in The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, “The child is precisely who we are not and, in fact, never were. It is the act of adults looking back.” (5) This is not to say that there are not people who are young, but rather that the figure of the child and the idea of childhood are culturally constructed, and have been so relatively recently. What “the child” is, is a question of retrospect, determined by adults. Ange, most precisely, and her retrospective POV on both her own childhood and the events of Rokkenjima Island in 1986 introduce this framing. The act of looking back and constructing a narrative around that past —including one of innocence and not-knowing—is central to Umineko’s overall story. It is not an overstatement then, to say that the novel is in many ways about childhood and our construction of it. This zine, therefore, is an investigation of what uncomfortable truths about childhood Umineko reveals. Or at least, some of what it says on the topic in Episode 4, “Alliance of the Golden Witch.” 

We read Episode 4 with a focus on Maria, being as she is the ultimate child of Umineko, the most “childish” child against which all the other children are contrasted. In the fashion of Stockton, moreover, we read her as a queer child in three respects: the child who is delayed, the child who is haunted, and the child who kills. 

Maria is cast as a delayed child. Let’s rewind just a little bit before we dive into her portrayal in Episode 4. In Episode 2, Eva mockingly asks Rosa, “By the way, Rosa, how old did Maria-chan turn this year?” after Maria explains witch lore. Kyrie attempts to write it off as a product of Maria’s age. But Rosa responds, “Maria has already graduated from that age.” Rosa, at various points in the story, punishes Maria for her attachment to her toys, her verbal tics, and her fantastic beliefs, all of which Rosa believes Maria should have outgrown and no longer need. And compared to other children, Maria is similarly portrayed as delayed: 

Compared to the other kids in her class, Maria onee-chan's tempo was always a little slow. Her sensibilities and ways of viewing things were a little peculiar... and a little too idiosyncratic for her to blend in.

Maria is not alone in this delay. As the narrator comments with regard to Beatrice, “Did she show absolutely no signs of lacking sleep because she was young, or because she had the mind of a little kid?” In the very same conversation, Battler is painted with the same brush. Ronove comments, "Hmm, well, that's right. That man's a bit too trusting for his age, isn't he?" He finally casts Battler in even more hyperbolic terms that highlight his simultaneous youth and sexuality: “You violated the purity of one never deceived since the time of his birth, as well as his rosebud-like innocence, all to your heart's content.” So Maria, Beatrice, and Battler are all young for their age, whatever that might mean. 

Childhood, as Stockton sees it, is a legally enforced delay, a stage in which the trappings of a normative heterosexual adult life are deliberately held off-limits. So to be a delayed child is to reject the specter of that life entirely, to borrow Stockton’s concept, to grow sideways rather than grow “up.”  

And Maria’s delay makes her haunted. Battler explains at the beginning of Episode 1: 

...I hear that everyone can feel the supernatural, but that it weakens with age. In that case, Maria, being the most juvenile of us all, still possesses that perception of something that we lost because we got older... I wonder if that something is giving her a warning.

This reinforces Maria as the most childish, but also makes childishness a source of ghostly power. The most obvious manifestation of a haunting within Umineko is Beatrice, the sinister figure that the family finds themselves tormented by. But there are others—another ghost in the novel: the 19th person, who may or may not be Beatrice as well. A ghost is the repetition of the past in the present. Might we not say the same thing about a child? The child functions as our imagination of our own pasts, made living flesh embodied by your own continuous presence as well as the living young people who exist today. So it is perhaps unsurprising that the next stranger in the family is Maria herself, who becomes a ghostly apparition too, as she haunts Ange via the diary. 

Ange begins to enter Maria’s world, learning both the story of her everyday life as well as being inducted into the alliance of witches. Maria, as a ghost child, is doubly past made present. Umineko, therefore, suggests that the past is crying out. There has been a great injustice done, and the family has suppressed it. In this view, Maria becomes an avenger. Thus she also becomes the final queer child, the child who has adult desires—to kill. 

Let’s take a brief detour into the theories of Donald Winnicott. The two that are most relevant to us are, first, the concept of the “good-enough mother” and, second, the “false self.” The good-enough mother’s task is to be good-enough, as you might guess. She must provide for the infant and mirror the infant’s face back to them, but she must also disillusion the infant so their initial impression of omnipotence is broken. That is, the infant must learn that by crying they summon the breast, which they come to perceive as part of themself, but they must also eventually be prepared to be disappointed by its absence and learn that it is part of the mother, separate from them. A good mother, a good-enough mother, must disappoint her children. 

But consider the case of a not-good-enough mother. What happens when the child must learn to manage the connection with their parents, rather than the other way around? Winnicott argues that the false self develops, as protection against the mother and the world. But “In situations in which what is expected is a whole person the False Self has some essential lacking,” he writes. The false self is not a real person. It is what you learn to become to fit what your mother gives you, rather than what you want. 

"I wasn't acknowledged by Mama either, was I...? So the broken Maria won't be fixed either..."

Why might a mother be not-good-enough? In Selma Fraiberg, Edna Adelson, and Vivian Shapiro’s “Ghosts in the Nursery,” they ask why a mother cannot hear her baby’s cries. 

The answer to the clinical question is already suggested in the mother's story. This is a mother whose own cries have not been heard. There were, we thought, two crying children in the living room. The mother's distant voice, her remoteness and remove we saw as defenses against grief and intolerable pain…

Episode 2’s Tea Party excavates some of Rosa’s intolerable pain. Beatrice asks her, “How far back must I trace the deep wounds in your heart in order to heal them?” She answers her own question upon tracing Rosa’s past: 

...This is... deep... quite deep indeed. Sometimes, wounds close up while a fragment of foreign matter remains inside. Even when such wounds appear to have healed, they continue to throb for all eternity. Sometimes, you have to open the wound once more in order to heal it completely."

Rosa describes how she was punished by her siblings for arbitrary or nonexistent infractions, both by hitting and by breaking her toys. She comments that she never understood why she was being punished. These became the same punishments she enacted upon Maria, most obviously the destruction of Sakutarou. But there is a difference between the two of them. Rosa’s abuse was at her older siblings’ hands, and Maria’s was at her mother’s. As a result, Rosa actually characterizes her own abuse as simple lateral violence: 

It's common for unfair things to happen between kids. And you mustn't hold onto grudges for such things forever. With time, those memories get buried away, and forgetting them bit by bit is supposed to be part of growing up and becoming an adult. So becoming an adult is the same as separating yourself from all those memories.

But it inhibited her development all the same: “And because of that. No matter how much time passed, Rosa couldn't become an adult.” So perhaps, at least in Rosa’s eyes, the violence she commits against her daughter is simple unfairness at worst and justified at best, the way her siblings’ might have been against her. 

Rosa’s complex relationship to adulthood comes to a head shortly after. She squirms at the cannibalistic revenge Beatrice sets up for her. But she only reaches her breaking point when Maria is next to be prepared as food. So she is ultimately adult in the sense that she is both a perpetrator of abuse, and someone who also finally chose not to continue it at the Tea Party. 

Maria also tries to break the cycle of abuse from the powerful to powerless by turning the violence back onto her mother. She becomes Freud’s child, the one with murderous desires towards their parent. At first, it seems like this might finally heal her, or at least distract her. 

Then would the repeated murder of her mother purify her soul...? Would even this wasteful murder save her soul, at least a little bit...? This endless torture... might have become a slight diversion from her sad, unrewarded life. After all, it seemed that she'd finally been able to regain her smile.

As Maria herself says, “Since it's gotten so fun, I'm somehow starting to feel that I could forgive you...! Hey, Beato, this is a veeery strange feeling...! Why? Why am I starting to feel like I can forgive Mama?!" Catharsis, in this view, could be achieved by reenacting the trauma from the perpetrator’s side. Maria simply needed to become her mother. By identifying with the aggressor, she is able to repress the negative affect that she herself experienced. So Maria comes to identify with Rosa, and Rosa’s strange in-between state. 

This is not the only reason that it is not so simple, incidentally, in Umineko as “children are good and adults are bad.” Both Ange and Maria are bullied by other children. Ange characterizes childhood by cruelness of character, actually, when she comments that her bullies are “as innocent and cruel as you'd expect from kids of that age.” Maria, as you might expect, takes an optimistic view of this bullying, telling a story about a scenario in which everyone can bully one child, who takes all the suffering that might otherwise be distributed among their peers. Even magic, associated with childhood, is not even uncomplicatedly good. Rosa is cast as a “black witch,” capable of immense harm. 

Anyway, this is a longwinded way of saying that we are skeptical that you can break the cycle of violence with more violence, that growing up or not growing up can deal with the problem of childhood as violent. And we must believe that that problem can be addressed. As “Ghosts” puts it, “Then we must reflect that if history predicted with fidelity, the human family itself would have long ago been drowned in its own oppressive past. The race improves.” Now the argument can be made that the Ushiromiyas are indeed drowning in their own oppressive past. But we also know something more hopeful. It doesn’t have to be that way: 

Truth is unfixed and changes its form every time it's witnessed. By the way it's perceived... in other words, depending on the person who perceives it, a single truth becomes different truths. And truths of the past are painted over by truths of the future…

The act of interpretation can be an act of love. My identification with Maria as a queer child experiencing a queer childhood can be meaningful in itself. Queer children are children that “should not exist.” As Max Fox writes, children ostensibly have “fixed gender but no sexuality,” so they can be cis but not gay. So if I claim Maria as a queer child anyway, if I speak her into existence, if even I want her to exist at all, something very powerful can happen. We can see childhood as life in microcosm—or even just life—rather than something that is a rupture with adulthood. 

What I want to argue here is that the end of the Question arc already answers the great "mystery" of the series by showing that there is an existential and inherent battle in the family between love and violence. Now, love, like “the child” is not an unvarnishedly positive thing. Love is also cast as immaturity, underdevelopment, and childishness. To borrow Sophie Lewis’ quotation of Madeline Lane-McKinley, “‘innocent’ is code for powerless – a way to fetishize the child as both dependent and sub-human”. Love is not an easy choice. Umineko vests a lot in “the child” and “love” without necessarily idealizing either. The story, to me, is about the myriad ways you can choose to cope with the intrinsic horror of the family. 

So on that note, let’s conclude by talking about Beatrice. Like Maria, Beatrice is delayed. She haunts the island. And she most certainly kills. Unlike Maria, however, she is not nine years old. But for most intents and purposes, we can say that judgments about Maria can also apply to Beatrice. Beatrice being a figure of love as well as a queer child is something that can seem counterintuitive at first. But from Maria, we know that children can do anything. Children can even break the cycle—but of course, so too can adults. As Ange speculates: 

So I'm sure... If Maria onee-chan had had children in the future... She probably wouldn't have pushed the pain that had been forced on her onto her children. That chain of pain and sadness that stretched back for who knows how long, which she couldn't understand and which she had inherited, which had been forced onto her... Maria onee-chan cut it with her magic.

What is Beatrice cutting with her magic? 

In the end, magic is more complex than love alone. To quote Ange at the close of the chapter, “Magic is made of love and sadness and anger. No matter how cruel a witch Beatrice might have been, the source of her magic is exactly the same.” To be a queer child, to be a witch, whatever you want to call it, is constituted by love in the face of suffering, love in the face of family, pain in the face of love. No matter how fantastic the events of Umineko, magic therefore exists in the world we live in. 

----------

okay also footnote just because i have anxiety: i’m NOT saying that killing people makes you gay. i would love if that was true though it seems so fun to kiss girls. 

[morningstarzine]

TEAM INTRODUCTIONS

Moderators

Our moderators are a dedicated team managing and organising the zine. If you have any questions about the zine itself, we're here to help.

Ellis Benji (she/her) is the zine's organiser and art mod. She's a playful multimedia illustrator & general creative, and an enthusiastic (if busy) zine participant. She's contributed to Hermitzine 8, Trafficzine 5, and Bdubszine, as well as moderating professional wrestling fanzine Moonsault.

You can find her at @shootingst4rpress, or on her beloved website, https://shootingstarpress.xyz/. Her favourite Minecraft Youtuber is FalseSymmetry.

Zephaniah Grains (it/they) is the writing mod for this zine! It's also a writer, ttrpg designer, and stage manager. On the fandom projects front, it production manages and vocal directs the From The Archives podfic project, wrote for and edited the Scarland Artbook, and contributed writing to both Hermitzine 8 and Trafficzine 4. And is modding a few other zines-in-the-works! Keep an eye out.

Zeph doesn't have any social media, but you can find its writing on its cowriter's ao3 account, Sixteenthdays. It has normal feelings about Minecraft Youtuber ZombieCleo.

A10 (he/she) is the social media and art mod! She is a french animation student that probably spends more time working on zines than school assignments. His previous projects include modding the 8th edition of Hermitzine, and participating in many other mcyt zines as a contributor.

You can find him as some variation of @boxbug on most platforms: tumblr, instagram, and youtube. Picking a favorite is hard, but in terms of watch time it is, without a doubt, Pearlescentmoon!

Marzo (she/her) is the editing and layout mod for Morning Star. As a professional graphic designer, she loves bringing design elements into the illustration-dominated MCYT fandom space, especially within group projects like zines! Her zine experience spans several mcyt fandoms, including Hermitcraft with Hermitzine, DSMP with SAFEGUARD, MCC with the Winner’s POV zine, the Life Series with Trafficzine, and Empires with Empiropedia.

You can find her art and design on her tumblr, as well as her writing on Ao3. She’s decided to pick Stressmonster up and put her in her pocket. She’s not currently willing to share.

Watt Volt (he/its) is a writing mod and a finance mod for Morning Star. Self-described as an amateur poet, he loves all things literature! This, of course, includes dedicated fanworks, whether that be prose, poetry, or even theorizing and long-form discussions. You might recognize it from the Hermitzine mod team as the writing mod there, too!

You'll find him over on tumblr or twitter, but it's prone to scuttling under a rock when approached. (Bring a piece of paper that has the name "ivorycello" on it and it'll be more than happy to see you!

Bax (He/She) is a finance mod for Morning Star. He has a passions for illustration, graphic design, cosplay, print production, and of course, project organization! Currently, Bax is also running The Hermit Arcana: a Hermitcraft Tarot Card Zine, and has contributed/is contributing to zines such as the MCSR Tarot zine and Hermitcraft Season Zine.

You can find him on tumblr and twitter, and he also sometimes streams on twitch! He’s a huge fan of ZombieCleo and her very normal, very comfy recording setup.

Experts

The MCYT fandom is big, so our Experts assist the moderators with knowledge about the many fandoms we feature.

Blods (she/they) is the Aimsey consultant for Morning Star. They are a hobby artist with a love of horror, medieval literature and portraiture. They have previously worked on Hermitzine 8 and the Scarland Artbook, she was also commissioned by Aimsey to create a poster for their project, “Hope for an endless sunset”.

You can find Blods yelling about Aimsey’s various projects, QSMP, hermits and the Welsh language on twitter and tumblr. They promise to be very normal if you ask them about the ARG variants of Guqqie and Aimsey.

Rott (he/him) is the QSMP consultant for this zine. He is a video editor and rpg/podcast enthusiast who dedicates a lot time to watching VODs in languages he may or may not understand! While this is his first zine, he is the sound director of From The Archives, a Hermitcraft podfic project.

You can occasionally find him on twitter but he's mostly lurking in the shadows of qsmpblr and can be summoned for the low low price of mentioning vampires (he promises not to bite). Favorites are hard but he just thinks oiBagi and f1nn5ter are neat :)

Elo (she/her) is the Dsmp consultant for this zine. She's an animation student who is way too busy to be active on social media. Somehow, she's still an active anon on Tumblr for Tina <3. She spent a good chunk of her adult years watching every possible Dsmp lore point of view to create theories and is now in retirement, only helping to make statistics for competitive mc events.

If you want to force her to talk, ask her about animation, Tina, Sylvee, or even Hannah, she may come out of hiding.

[chrisrin]

My final piece for the @winnerspovzine ! Made in collaboration with @harvocel​

Go check out the full zine if you haven’t already! It’s completely free to download. 

[winnerspovzine]

The Winner’s POV fanzine is officially OUT! You can download it for completely FREE!

ft. 50+ artists, spreads of all the winning MCC teams, and more!

[boxbug]

• THE CHAMPIONS OF MCC20 •

My piece for @winnerspovzine - done in collaboration with @revancy who knocked it out fo the park!

You can get the zine for FREE just by clicking on this link! Every piece is amazing, I can’t get enough of it. Trust me, even if you don’t know what mcc is, it’s a treat for the eyes.

A huge thank you to the mods for all their hard work, this was an amazing project to work on and I am genuinely honored to have been a part of it.

[avyene]

★MCC 8 CHAMPIONS ★ - For Winner’s Pov Zine

I collaborated with @iownfish for @winnerspovzine AND LOOK AT THIS !! It was such an amazing zine to work on and wow the end results is mind blowing !

I did the individuals ;) crunchy details 👌

Added some sparkles to Fish’s designs (mostly details and colors)

AND DID YOU KNOW THAT THE ZINE IS ENTIRELY FREE ??? WOW o(^o^)o

[septictech]

mcc's 22nd winners for the @winnerspovzine!

this spread was a collab between me and the wonderful @ingapotejtoo! :D

the zine is out NOW and it is completely FREE to view and download!

[floweroflaurelin]

My piece for @winnerspovzine! I worked with @/found2fast on Twitter to do the winners of MCC 5 and we had a blast! A whole bunch of artists did really incredible work for this project so make sure you go check it out 😁😁✨

You can get the full zine for free right here! https://winnerspovzine.gumroad.com/l/zine

[zylisticart]

Winner's POV MCC 9 Blue Bats

Hello! So big surprise I guess (lol) but I'm part of @winnerspovzine where I did the MCC 9 Blue Bats page with @martuzzio !!! Here's our piece!

And here's a closeup of my side!

I was originally going for a manga vibe, but the shadows got too intense and it turned into a Marvel/DC comic instead, lol.

Make sure to support the zine itself! It's filled with amazing artists who all did amazingly!

Check out the zine HERE!!! Remember that it's 100% free and run by fans, for fans, so it takes 0 monetary gain!!! Hope you like it!

[mansaarchive]

My MCC6 page in the MCC Winner's POV Zine! (@winnerspovzine)

It was so much fun to work on and i'm so proud of the zine outcome! Thank you for the opportunity to work on the zine it was an honor!

If you know any of the CCs with tumblr feel free to tag them! (please don't spam them though)

You can get the Zine here for free!

[aroaceacacia]

a preview of the piece myself and @unnecessaryredstone worked on together for @winnerspovzine!

[draw-at-dawn]

My contribution to the @winnerspovzine !! I had so much fun drawing this group pose of the MCC7 winners alongside my partner, @RoryyPollie (on Twitter) who did an amazing job on his portion! Send some love to him and the other zine artists 💚

You can find the full zine FREE here!

https://winnerspovzine.gumroad.com/l/zine

@theeretblr (I think eret is the only person with tumblr here, even so, apologies for the tag! But this zine is really special)

[chrisrin]

OH WHAT’S THIS? A LITTLE ZINE PREVIEW PERCHANCE? @winnerspovzine

[winnerspovzine]

Winner’s POV Zine - Interest Check Now Open!

📩 Interest Check Open! 📩   👑 Winner's POV is an MCC-themed fan zine highlighting all the winning teams of past Minecraft Championships!

⚔️Please fill out the interest check here! ⚔️Form will close on April 3rd.

https://forms.gle/T9aVLPhNukzk69M36