Blog / Sandsverse

Wares for sale!^note From top to bottom: Seymour, Elmer and Horace.

From The Earliest Point Of Actuality

There Sprung A Force Wholly Unknown And Invisible,

And In The Ancient Days Of Long-Past Cosmoses

It Plapped Upon The Warm Sands Of A Nameless Place

The Babyboy Seymour,

Who Looked Upon His Realm And Said:

I Am He Who Reaps The Dividend;

I Am Demiurge And Babyboy,

Whose Power Is Without Measure,

And I Am Just A Cute Little Creature

And That Is Simply The Truth.

- Seymour

"Happy Birthday Everybody I Fuck My Wife In Minecraft"

- Elmer

How does one describe the Sandsverse? There are many ways to go about it: a loosely-affiliated collection of blogs dedicated to surreal shitposting, a loosely-affiliated collection of blogs dedicated to a bunch of Talking Animals yelling typo-laden insults at each other, or a loosely-affiliated collection of blogs ran by immeasurably powerful and ancient gods.

In any case, it is a loosely-affiliated collection of blogs hosted on Tumblr, each supposedly owned by an animal selling some sort of product (for which reason they're often known as "merchants" or "vendors"). They share some common traits, such as a posting style mostly similar to incoherent yelling, Insane Troll Logic and a bizarre writing syntax. Most of their content is composed of nonsensical humor (and the occasional charity drive), but sifting through their long, long archives an overlaying lore becomes gradually clearer and clearer. One thing is certain, and that is that the merchants aren't ordinary animals.

There are numerous merchants (mostly due to Follow the Leader) but the three most important are Seymour the tapir, Elmer the proboscis monkey, and Horace the boar. These three are the originals and most of the Sandsverse lore revolves around them. Their blogs are here, here, and here, respectively.

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Sands Verse Contaimbs Examples Off:

• Aborted Arc: In 2017 and 2018, serious stuff went down in the Sandsverse on February 15th. On that date in 2019, what appeared to be an Oz-themed event started, but as of December it hasn't gone anywhere. Yet.
• Aerith and Bob: Seymour, Elmer, Horace... and Morbitum.
• After the End: According to Seymour, the Sandsverse succeeds ours, after it has been destroyed in some cataclysm that was possibly caused by Elmer.
• Affably Evil: ROLL the elephant seal may be a murderous lunatic who's obsessed with crushing things to death, but he's also quite friendly.
• The Alleged Car: Elmer loves his truck.
• All Myths Are True: This seems to be the case when it comes to monsters. Ghouls, ghosts, spectres, wendigos, skinwalkers, the Mothman, Baba Yaga, goblins, Koopas, Gruntilda, Muppets...
  • It also extends beyond monsters. Morbitum is friends with Homer Simpson, and Horace has a soft spot for hobbits.
• All There in the Manual: Seymour and Elmer posted several videos explaining the lore of the Sandsverse, including "The Truth", ""Call to Actions", and the "Dicta". Unfortunately, the first two are fairly incomprehensible, and they all suffer from a raging case of Unreliable Narrator.
• Alternate Reality Game: The whole thing could be considered one, but a more overt, if brief example was run in early 2017 in the form of the Breach.
  • And again in early 2018 with the Lent Incident.
• Animalistic Abomination: Seymour, Elmer and Horace are all impossibly old and supremely powerful. Seymour claims to have created the entire Sandsverse (though given his huge ego it's possible he's an Unreliable Narrator) and Elmer has reset time on at least one occasion. Horace seems to act as a warden of reality, protecting it from outside intruders. It's unclear if the less important "non-canon" merchants also qualify.
• Archive Panic: Seymour's blog, the second blog to activate (following Morbitum), made its first post in 2014, soon joined by Elmer and then Horace. They are very active, so you'll be there for a while.
• Arc Words: "He came early" pops up very often during the Breach.
  • "I'm four."
  • "Happy day."
• Artistic License – Biology: Elmer is repeatedly referred to as "Ape". Proboscis monkeys are not apes, they're Old World monkeys. But then again, biological accuracy isn't exactly a priority here.
  • One of Seymour's "cosigns" (cousins), Aethelric the Traitor, is represented with a Palorchestes.◊ Palorchestes were not actually tapirs, but a very similar-looking genus of marsupials.
• Assassination Attempt: Elmer has made numerous attempts on Horace's life, often using rather comical methods such as tricking him into crawling into his oven and offering him cyanide-laced potato salad. All of them have failed, either due to Horace being too smart to trick or simply because he's Made of Iron.
• Assimilation Plot: This seems to be E.L.M.E.R's final goal in the climax of the Lent Incident.
• As the Good Book Says...: Parodied. Upon somebody asking Seymour to write an essay about tapirs for them, Seymour replies with a short essay, complete with citations. The cited sources are the American Bible Society's "New Testament of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ", the King James Bible, and a picture book titled "Animal quack-ups: foolish and funny jokes about animals".
• Badass Boast: Horace is fond of these even in his more jocular moods, but when he gets serious during the Breach, he lets loose a particularly amazing one.
  Im gonna show Him The Biggest Fire Hes Ever seen
• Badass Crew: During his short tenure in the army, Elmer joined up with an impressive platoon of other primate soldiers.
• Bad Liar: Elmer after failing to murder Horace here.
  Elmer: Horace I Think There Is Something Stuck In My Oven And I Cant Reach It Because I Am Not Fat Fuck Enough. Will You Climb Inside And Have A Look
  Horace: Yes Ape Of Gourse I Will Um Actually No I Wont Because Um Um Um Your Cook Me?
  Elmer: No
• Battle Rapping: Attempted by Elmer to hilarious effect here.
• Been There, Shaped History: Seymour and Gerold visited the Hittites, interfered in the Trojan War, and ate the engineers aboard the Titanic. Horace was there for Pompeii, the sinking of the Titanic, the Chernobyl disaster, and Elmer's New Year Party.
• Berserk Button: Horace absolutely hates Elmer and the mere mention of the monkey sends him into a frothing rage.
  • Do not ever ask Seymour about Aethelric the Traitor.
  • He also doesn't take nicely to having his existence questioned.
  • And, whatever you do, don't smænch his tumpus.
  • But most of all, do not not not EVER sell sands. That's his business.
  • Morbitum really doesn't like Beastie Boys.
  • And don't let him catch you messing with the Muppets, which are real, especially Wembley Fraggle.
• Beware the Silly Ones: Whatever Elmer's true form is, it's more powerful, intelligent, and hostile than the zany proboscis monkey it's been trapped in. And Seymour's is apparently even worse.
• Big Eater: There's pretty much nothing that Gerold won't eat, up to and including other vendors and even an entire Honda dealership.
• Bizarre Alien Reproduction: Rather than having mothers and fathers, Fraggles have franguses and dreadbabies.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: It is implied that the reason for the vendors' extremely weird content is that their thought processes are completely alien from ours.
• Body Horror: Elmer leaving his physical body during Lent is described in loving detail.
  ELMER’S HEAD SPLITS OPEN. HIS BODY TURNS TO CHARCOAL. HIS BLOOD BOILS AWAY IN AN INSTANT, HIS EYES TURN INTO TWO GLASS BEADS, AND HE CRUMBLES INTO NOTHING.
• Butt-Monkey: Seymour's cosign Gerold takes a lot of abuse from Seymour.
• Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": The word "funny" seems to have a radically different meaning in Sands Vernacular as it does in regular English, seeing as it is almost always brought up in the context of extremely powerful or destructive things. The best example is probably this verse from the Third Dictum:
  "And Seymour Showed Horace
  Many Shapes Of Great Power,
  And Sharp-Edged Equations
  To Sever The Voices
  Of Certain And Uncertain Thoughts,
  And Funny Words
  That Sublimate The Mind
  To A Single Blinding Point,
  Like A Star,
  But Not Unlike A Furious Scream."
  • Of course, this makes Elmer's claim of being a "Funby Monkey" much Harsher in Hindsight.
• Carnivore Confusion: Seymour and his cosigns are repeatedly shown eating meat, despite tapirs being herbivores. When this is brought up, Seymour usually responds with rude insults.
• Catchphrase: Elmer is fond of saying "gunch". It's apparently a swear word, but its exact meaning is uncertain.
• Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon: Elmer lets out a rather unusual death threat at Seymour here.
  TAPIR I WILL COVER YOU’RE IN LETTUCE AND FEED YOU TO THE SNAILS
• Disproportionate Retribution: Morbitum sells massive amounts of sand (which would be usually Seymour's product) to Gerold. In retaliation, Seymour kills him.
• Domain Holder: According to the Dicta, Seymour's godlike power only extends to the Sands. Once he also destroyed Elmer's Jungle but the monkey built a new one protected from Seymour. It's unclear if Seymour has power in Horace's domain.
• Eagleland: Seymour wants you to man up.
• Eldritch Abomination: Whatever it was that caused the Breach was definitely this, seeing as it came from outside the Sands and effortlessly replaced Seymour and Elmer with grotesque parodies of themselves.
  • A lesser example would be Aethelric the Traitor, a tapir "cosign" (cousin) of Seymour who wanders the void and could apparently destroy Seymour if he wished so.
  • Elmer himself, when unbound from his physical body, is a very horrifying example of this.
• Epileptic Trees: The fanbase is notoriously prone to this, due to the hazy mythology which is only occasionally hinted at by the vendors, as well as the completely unpredictable ARG events. It's just as likely for some seemingly perfectly harmless joke to be an important detail of the plot as it is for a post mentioning "Sky Temple Ziggurat-Ships Armed With Type Sixteen Karmic Blaster Cannons" to be just some throwaway bit of weirdness.
• Eviler than Thou: Despite threatening to destroy the entirety of the Human race, E.L.M.E.R makes it clear Seymour is a far greater threat to everything there is, being terrified of him escaping the Sandsverse as well.
• Follow the Leader: Such a large amount of fanmade vendor blogs popped up back when the Sandsverse first became popular that the canon blogs decided to lay low for a while until the hype died down a little. A few dozen non-canon blogs are still in operation, though most have stopped posting and the fanbase concerns themselves more with theorizing and "depiction" these days. Some of the non-canon vendors are fairly conventional by Sandsverse standards, while others... not so much.
• For the Evulz: ROLL only kills for the sake of his own pleasure.
• Felony Misdemeanor: Elmer gets conscripted into the army for the crime of having chapped lips.
• Forced Transformation: ROLL and the other elephant seals were once tapirs and "cosigns" of Seymour, but were transformed and banished to the Sidereal Sea for "working without vigor and playing without gaiety".
  • Some of E.L.M.E.R.'s dialogue during Lent suggests that all' the inhabitants of the Sandsverse are this, having been trapped in weak animal forms. Except Morbitum, who seems to just be retired.
• Fun with Acronyms: Comes up during the Lent Incident. E.L.M.E.R. stands for Every Living Monkey Exacts Revenge.
  • Morbitum puts a sweet twist on the same acronym just before returning Elmer to normal.
  Morbitum: Even Lost Monkeys Eventually Return
• Go-Karting with Bowser: Seymour, Gerold, Horace, and Elmer once went golfing together.
• Hostile Show Takeover: The Breach saw ZHDUN, a hostile deity from beyond the Sands, invade and replace Elmer and Seymour with strange doppelgangers.
  • Happens again during the Lent Incident, where Elmer achieves a body-less existence and attempts to kill the Earth (as in, the real planet Earth outside the Sandsverse).
• Improbably Female Cast: Inverted. So far, all canon characters with a blog are male. The only female characters known are Griselda and Soundcloud, two of Elmer's nieces, who are only mentioned rarely.
• Insistent Terminology: Fan Art is consistently referred to as "Depiction".
• Interface Screw: Seymour has broken Tumblr's interface on multiple occasions, at one point making a post from 1969. His caption sums it up perfectly.
  "There Are No Rules Anymore"
• Jesus Was Way Cool: According to Seymour, at least.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: The Breach and The Lent Incident saw the normally-silly inhabitants of the Sandsverse get proactive.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!": The Lent Incident causes every character not directly involved in the proceedings, such as ROLL, to go into hiding.
• The Merch: Both Seymour and Elmer sell real T-shirts.
• Mood Whiplash: The dramatic storyline involving Elmer's Lent is immediately followed up by Seymour enthusing about pee.
• Noodle Incident: E.L.M.E.R. did... something that got him exiled from some higher power, banished to the Sandsverse, and transformed into a proboscis monkey. Whatever it is, he claims that he is responsible for creating life in the universe.
• One-Gender Race: According to Seymour, all tapirs are boys.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Expect bad things to happen whenever one of the merchants drops their funky writing style.
• The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: When the chips are down, it falls to Morbitum the frog to defeat Elmer, who stands poised to wipe out all life on Earth.
• Outside-Context Problem: ZHDUN was this during the Breach, having come from outside the Sands completely unexpected.
• Percussive Prevention: Morbitum defeats E.L.M.E.R., a massively powerful Eldritch Abomination, by... whacking him in the face with a log.
• Perfectly Cromulent Word: Smænch, gunch... it's something of a hallmark.
• Pirate Girl: At one point, Seymour runs afoul of a "Pirate Women" and is forced to pay protection money.
• Pre-Asskicking One-Liner: Morbitum gets a pretty awesome one during Lent.

Morbitum: O dear sweet Pest…To crush you like a little bug, that is what fate would have me do. But… Fate has got many threads… and... Even Lost Monkeys Eventually Return

• Precision F-Strike: Horace's reaction to Elmer trying to kill him with cyanide-laced potato salad has to be seen to be believed.
• Ret-Gone: After the conclusion of the Breach, all related posts were deleted from the main Sandsverse blogs due to Elmer resetting time to before it occured. Thankfully, however, some fans have archived them in time.
  • The same thing happened during Elmer's Lent, although no time reset occurred this time. The events have been removed from Elmer's blog, but only because he does not remember them.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: The Lent Incident in early 2018 revealed Elmer to be this, twice in a row. For one, he's trapped in the Sandsverse and unable to get out, and for two he's trapped inside the body of a proboscis monkey which seals away his frightening abilities and true personality. According to him, Seymour is a similar case, but even more dangerous.
• Severely Specialized Store: Each merchant sells one thing, and one thing only. The product in question tends to be totally useless.
  • Seymour, for some ungodly reason, sells sand.
  • Elmer sells fruit. This makes him both the only merchant whose business resembles a real shop, and the only merchant whose wares show some variation.
  • Horace sells ice.
  • ROLL sells crushing. For a fee, he'll crush anything you want.
  • Fishboy used to sell gravel.
• Shout-Out: IN THE DESERT, ELMER WALKS.
  • Horace's Badass Boast above is one to The Protomen song "Light Up The Night" ('[...]it's gonna be the biggest fire they've ever seen'); the song is later playing when he detonates the fail-safe.
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: Elmer and Seymour vacillate between this and Vitriolic Best Buds. Horace, on the other hand, despises Elmer.
• Slept Through the Apocalypse: Horace took a nap during most of Lent. At one point he woke up, saw what was happening, and went back to sleep.
• Smash Cut: Elmer turns into a cute little ball of dough.
• Strange-Syntax Speaker: Most citizens of the Sands speak in a dialect known as "Standard Sands Vernacular". It's very distinctive, to say the least.
• Superpowered Evil Side: A series of nonsensical events leads to Elmer offering his body to St. Anthony for Lent... reawakening his "true" form who attempts to end all life on Earth.
• Surreal Humor: The bread and butter of the Sandsverse. It takes some time to get used to the merchants'... unconventional style of posting.
• Theme Naming: All merchant blogs have URLs that end in the number 100. Blogs affiliated with the Sandsverse that aren't merchants are exempt from this rule.
• The Theocracy: The Brood holds regular masses where they sit enraptured in silence and worship tubers. Seymour exploits this occasion to steal those very same tubers.
• Title Drop: Seymour's blog is titled "These Sands".
• Toilet Humor: It crops up every so often.
• Tome of Eldritch Lore: The Book of Shapes, mentioned by Seymour in The Truth. Apparently the Book is housed in a "Grand Library", and when Elmer will read it, the Sandsverse shall end. It's possibly the same book as the "Book Bearing No Words, But, Perhaps, Bearing Other Things" mentioned in the last stanzas of the Fourth Dictum, which supposedly contains the "Last Value" at the end of numbers.
• Try to Fit That on a Business Card: In the Four Dicta, it's revealed that both Seymour, Elmer and Horace have really bombastic and grandiose (but weird) titles.
  • Seymour, He Who Reaps The Dividend, Demiurge And Babyboy, Whose Power Is Without Measure.
  • Elmer, He Who Ushers In The Impulse To Exist, The Intruding Presence And The Agitator-Of-Rule.
  • Horace, He Who Comes From A Frozen Depth, A Panaceum And A Warden.
• The Unpronouncable: This is how to pronounce Seymour's name.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: Skinwalkers, one of Horace's many foes, are naturally capable of this. At one point one even puts on a (rather unconvincing) boar form to impersonate him.
• Weird Crossover: Not only do all manner of mythical beings, creatures and cryptids appear to be real in the Sandsverse, but so do the Koopas from Super Mario Bros., Gruntilda from Banjo-Kazooie and every single Muppet.
• Wham Line: "Hi, everyone. Today is Thursday, February fifteenth, and I'm pleased as punch to announce that I've gained the power of human speech."
  • Morbitum is usually unbothered about lore, but one day, he dropped an absolute bomb: "A dream you had just yesterday is now the troubled land i have exiled 3 mice to live in and in the distant future maybe there will be a 4th". The implication? The three main characters, Horace, Seymour and Elmer, already known to be imprisoned gods, were all imprisoned by Morbitum in a world he built from the imaginations of humanity, already established to be long-extinct - which explains all the monsters and pop-culture characters.
• Whole-Plot Reference: The Oz incident appears to be this, though it seems to have never received a conclusion.
• Wiki Vandal: Seymour, at least twice.
• With Catlike Tread: Seymour would like to let you know that you will not see him coming.

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He came early.