hii i discovered your au today and immediately read every single bit of lord you’ve written and now i want to find the fix you mentioned, but the tags in the master list don’t show it so just wondering what authors or titles i should be looking for <33

hello new mutual!!! i love your art sm

alright, final part of Watcher/Listener Lore 101: the fanon

so, it's important to know that a LOT of what fans consider the "lore" is in fact based on fanon! a lot of influence on modern day watcher grian headcanons in particular stems from the fic "and the universe shifts" aka ATUS. this fic is how we got the common depiction of the watchers as abusive or manipulative towards grian, and him being traumatized by their treatment. it's also the origin of watchers being depicted with masks over the eyes!

other watcher grian fanon features that you might see:

and there are many more i'm probably forgetting about! fandom watcher depictions are all over the place, and everyone sorta chooses how much of the canon from evo/martyn's lore they choose to incorporate into their headcanons. at the end of the day, other than watching evo, and maybe looking into martyn's lore breakdowns, the best place to start learning about it is just check out the ao3 tags. read some of the popular fic, or the not so popular fic, check out the commonalities and differences in how watchers are portrayed, and synthesize that into your own version that makes you happy! if you want some fic recommendations, i'm happy to provide.

anyhow, sorry for clogging your inbox with that absolute infodump, hope it ends up being remotely helpful!

Watcher/Listener Lore 101, continued: Martyn InTheLittleWood edition

so, martyn's lore surrounding the watchers and listeners is, as he describes it, his own sort of AU of the life series. it ties in with his vtuber/datastream lore (which i'm not quite as familiar with, so i won't get into too much). but basically! in martyn's lore, the lifers are trapped in this continuing cycle of death games because the watchers put them there. this is because the watchers feed on players' emotions! and while any emotions will do, as martyn explains it, intense negative emotions are 1) the easiest to provoke, and 2) the tastiest. hence, the death game in which the players are trapped and forced to kill each other and betray each other, all so the watchers can harvest their trauma.

as for the listeners' role: i THINK it's a martyn lore thing that the evolutionists were able to escape from evo with the help of the listeners. however don't quote me on this, it might just be common fanon. but basically, according to martyn, the listeners are the same "type" of being as the watchers, but they're opposed and sort of silently warring with the watchers in the background. martyn the character himself isn't even super aware of all this; he's had some conversations with the watchers before (see: his last life pov), but apparently doesn't remember them.

as for grian: he was indeed taken to be a watcher at the end of evo. however, in martyn's lore, he defected from the watchers before coming fully into his power, and now he's just as trapped as the rest of the players. iirc, grian is not aware of the listeners, but he does silently work against the watchers in his own sort of way; apparently, the way he uses his unique brand of mischief to make people laugh and be more lighthearted during the death games sorta sours the taste of all the negative emotions that the watchers want to be feeding on.

i'm certain there are elements of martyn's lore i'm forgetting, and he has a whole slew of essentially his own headcanon explanations for how certain events in the life series incorporate into his lore. for more info, i'd check the "eyesandears" tag on his blog, or if you search his vods channel you can look up his post-series lore breakdowns!

next ask will be about the last piece of the puzzle, which is about watcher fanon. however it'll probably be many hours from now because my lunch break is ending.

ok you asked for it, here's my version of Watcher/Listener Lore 101 (contains evo spoilers if you don't want those):

evo smp was in fact the originating point of the watchers. as you'll have seen, the watchers were originally conceptualized by grian as a way to give a story element to the updates; they were the ones responsible for creating the update portals, and they would leave riddles and clues guiding the players towards them. and as you'll see, they weren't so much direct villains as they were simply capricious godlike figures seemingly with their own agendas.

however, something else you'll see throughout evo is that the watchers could be very harshly and arbitrarily punishing towards the players for breaking certain "rules"; examples include the time they put obsidian over all of grian's chests as punishment for his greed, or the time they destroyed the property police's base with a meteor for taking taurtis's vacant seat as mayor.

fast forward to the end of grian's series: after finally reaching the update that introduced the end, the evo gang all teamed up to beat the dragon, only when they hop through the portal instead of all going to the same end, they're separated and each have to face the dragon on their own. after beating the dragon and going through the portal, the watchers speak to everyone through a modified end poem in which they reminisce about the memories the players made on the server, and then basically say "btw we're taking grian and he's becoming one of us". at the end of this dialogue, grian joins the two voices and bids farewell to the evolutionists, saying that he's sad to go but looks forward to watching what they'll do. hence, we get Watcher Grian.

(a note on this: grian revealed later, when he was a guest on pixlriffs and joel duggan's podcast The Spawn Chunks, that the "watchers" were meant to be like a metaphor/allegory for the audience, i.e. the actual watchers of the series. they were arbitrarily punishing because audience comments could be extremely harsh when ccs didn't follow expectations, and they took grian at the end because he was ending his series, and thus would become a watcher as opposed to a player on the server.)

as for the origin of the listeners: they were a force similar to the watchers, but i believe they only really interacted directly with martyn and jimmy. i'm a little rusty on the timeline as it's been a while and i haven't watched either of their evo series in full, but iirc the listeners first cropped up not terribly long before the dragon fight. martyn and jimmy discovered a mysterious symbol and messages containing the phrase "there are those who watch. we are those who listen." and basically the listeners told them to wait for further instructions.

after the dragon fight, the evolutionists minus grian were sent back to the overworld, but found themselves thousands of blocks from spawn. they were essentially told by the watchers that they had to start completely fresh with a new spawn; they could bring some of their old stuff, but only whatever they could carry on them.

however, jimmy was for some reason NOT sent to this new spawn, and instead was left back at the old spawn where all of the buildings they'd made there were broken down and decaying. jimmy, alone at the old spawn, found a message from the listeners, who expressed that they found the watchers' decree too harsh, and wanted to help the evolutionists by giving all the players ender chests, allowing them to almost double their carrying capacity. thus we get this impression that the listeners are opposed to the watchers, and are more merciful towards the players.

after that, there's not a whole lot else from canon. evo as a series sorta fizzled out over time rather than coming to a firm conclusion. thus, the rest of the watcher/listener lore comes from either fanon, or from martyn's life series/vtuber lore. WHICH I WILL CONTINUE ON IN A SECOND ASK.