Trivia / Empires SMP

• Acting for Two:
  • In Season 1, Scott notably plays both his POV character of the same name and Xornoth. This leads to an interesting moment where character-Scott shows offense that the demon speaks in the same accent as him, when they have the same voice actor and content creator counterpart in reality.
  • Season 2:
    • Sausage plays both the Protector of Sanctuary of the same name and Dark Sausage, a Literal Split Personality of his Season 1 counterpart. Interestingly, both characters are POV characters, and their fight is animated rather than presented in the usual Minecraft game format.
    • By virtue of the Hermitcraft crossover, resident Hermit False plays personas on both servers, resulting in a rather odd Doppelgänger Crossover.
    • Pearl is more of a complicated case, as one of the resident Hermits during Season 1 and a cross-season Posthumous Character afterward — she plays Farmer Queen Pearl of Gilded Helianthia in Season 1, St. Pearl in the ALSMP and Season 2, and Hermitcraft Pearl during the crossover event. Her perspective of the crossover suggests that like with Sausage, reincarnation is involved on her part.
    • Martyn InTheLittleWood both plays the Old Sheriff Roswell Jameson XVI and voices the evil king of Sausage's old kingdom.
    • OwengeJuice both plays his llama-turned-human character and voices Hermes as an adult.
    • The alternate versions of Sausage in his finale are played by other server-members — Angel Sausage by Oli, Gravital Sausage by fWhip, Lord Sausage by Gem, and Half-Wither Sausage by Joel. However, all of them are still voiced by cc!Sausage, and they are fundamentally alternate incarnations of the same soul.
• Approval of God: As with many other Minecraft-based series, content creators on the SMP often look for things like fanart, fan songs and fan animations, and will like them on their social media accounts or leave comments on the things they really enjoy, respectively, and some artwork and certain YouTube comments suggestions have been directly given shout-outs in videos.
• Ascended Fanon:
  • In Season 1, several common fan headcanons have been either acknowledged or made canon, such as Rose-blings (Gem and Fwhip being siblings) and Sea-blings (Lizzie and Jimmy being siblings), as well as Flower Husbands (Scott and Jimmy's marriage in the 3rd Life SMP) being a past life.
  • In Season 2, Pixlriffs' chosen mount being dodos for the symbolism of bringing the extinct to life again is confirmed to have originated from the fandom, and according to the Hermitcraft Recap (Season 9 Week 36), the Hermits' in-game design being shorter than the Empires rulers is too taken from popular fan interpretation.
• Blooper:
  • Season 1:
    • The end of Gem's Episode 14 features some behind the scenes, including bloopers from the fight and aftermath of her and Sausage's battle.
    • Again in Gem's Episode 20: the scene where Scott fixes the ice in the Crystal Cliffs gets interrupted by pillagers, and Katherine fails several times to throw the anti-corruption potion ingredients into the cauldron, much to the amusement of Gem and Fwhip.
  • Season 2:
    • Gem's Episode 3 features her hearing whispers calling for her while stumbling across a cavern near her empire lit with Will-o'-the-Wisp flames... then a Skeleton spawns in the cave, interrupting the scene and forcing Gem to briefly break character.
      Gem: Ay! (kill the Skeleton in two hits) It's my lore. Get outta here.
    • The Courtroom Episode over the Toy Barn is chock-full of moments where the content creators involved set aside the scene to chuckle over the situation they put their characters into.
    • A scene involving Hermes in Sausage's 15th episode were filmed with the invisible armour texture pack on, causing him to look like an armour stand figure again.
    • Katherine's 9th episode ends with some bloopers after The Stinger, including Jimmy corpsing a little too much in a serious scene and Lizzie being caught spying on Joey and Katherine.
• The Danza: Most of the perspective characters share their names with their content creator counterparts, throughout both seasons.
• Dear Negative Reader: Not a whole section of the fandom, but in Season 2, Sausage and Jimmy spend a minute on stream making fun of a YouTube commenter accusing Sausage of "cultural appropriation"... of his own culture.
• Defictionalization: Jimmy eventually turned his Empires S2 character into a plushie, which means you can now have one of Joel's "unauthorized" Sheriff toys in real life.
• Fake American: While Scott normally speaks with a Scottish accent, he puts on an American accent while singing, as heard during "Deal with Destiny". He said in a later livestream that he and Lizzie actually recorded a version of "Deal with Destiny" where he sang with his Scottish accent, but agreed that the American version sounded better.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: In Season 2, Shelby encountering a glitch and breaking a chunk in her world from it is integrated into her character's storyline/arc as expulsion from school for being too "dangerous to society" for causing such an accident.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Due to the limitations of Minecraft, characters with canon heights are portrayed to be the same standard player height of 1.8 blocks (1.8 metres, or roughly 5'11"). This is especially egregious when it comes to non-human characters who are much taller or shorter than the standard height, though thankfully, most of the human characters are around the 6-foot range in Season 1. In Season 2, Joel makes a point of lampshading this, that while his in-game character has actually entered Scott's house, in-universe, he's just poked his head through.
  • Overall, there are plenty of items and mobs used throughout the series that are not in Minecraft as a game; in-game, most of them are just renamed items or mobs with custom textures. For example, most of the custom mounts are retextured horses, and Shelby's Flying Broomstick in Season 2 is a retextured shield coupled with invisible Elytra wings.
  • Season 2 features many ruins-type builds that actually have to be built by players because it's impossible for them to be naturally generating, hence Pix the Game Master having to construct the Greatbridge very early in the season in an area few used to pass/look to create the effect that it had always been there.
  • Hermes, Joel and Sausage's Phlebotinum Child, is depicted in-game as an armour stand wearing a Shulker head and purple-dyed leather armour (or retextured outfits). The animated segment of Sausage's 45th episode, however, uses the common fan interpretation of a small, blond boy with a purple streak in his hair.
• Inspiration for the Work: In Season 2, the Ancient Capital which Pix is investigating/reconstructing has structuring elements inspired by Elden Ring, while Pirate Joe's rebuilt port is inspired by the Night Market in Stardew Valley. The Panda district of Animalia is, in turn, based on the Mage Quarter from World of Warcraft.
• Official Fan-Submitted Content:
  • Season 1: Several of the lore-books for Mythland were written by members of the community. The Fanart Shack in the Cod Empire also records the names of fan-artists whom Jimmy has given an out-of-character shout-out to in episodes.
  • Season 2: Some of the resident name ideas (for both NPCs and locations) in Sanctuary are submitted through the comments section of Sausage's episodes, who actively asks the fandom to give lore ideas for stories (e.g. Empires-sonas of fans, worldbuilding, etc.) in his 17th episode. Likewise, fWhip canonizes some fans' Empires-sonas as residents of Gobland from his 13th episode and onward, and Lizzie sells books written by the fandom in her Animalian bookstores.
• The Other Darrin: Xornoth is normally voiced by Scott, but the non-corrupted version of him in the afterlife-scene is voiced by fellow YouTuber Tycer, and the musical version of him is voiced by Pokopom, who was involved in the musical's production.
• Queer Character, Queer Actor: Inverted, in a sense. If a content creator involved in the SMP is LGBTQ+ (which would be 5 out of 14), it is often assumed that their character counterpart is also LGBTQ+ by the nature of Minecraft roleplays.
• Real-Life Relative: cc!Joel and cc!Lizzie are married in real life, while StardewMaddie, who is credited with the backing vocals of the musical, is Lizzie's younger sister in real life.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: In Season 1:
  • Despite having the closest personal connection and the most interpersonal drama, Scott and Xornoth never actually interact with one another until their final battle (though Xornoth does watch Scott from a distance on occasion). This is explained as Xornoth not wanting to risk accidentally killing Scott since that would kill him as well, but in reality it's simply because they're played by the same guy, and the format of improv roleplay doesn't really lend itself to direct interaction between two characters played by the same actor.
  • During a livestream, Scott said that he wanted his Season 1 finale to include a battle between him and Xornoth using their ice and fire magic respectively. However, this turned out to be way too hard to implement in Minecraft, and the end result would've looked clunky even if they had managed to pull it off, so instead it's explained that since fire melts ice, Scott can't use his powers when he's near Xornoth.
• Tribute to Fido: Several of the content creators have incorporated their real-life pets as characters throughout the series.
  • In both seasons and all his other series, Sausage has an incarnation of his real-life Yorkie dog, Bubbles. In-universe, they form an inter-dimensional network. A clone of her is later kept in the Landarium of the Ocean Empire in Season 1.
  • In both seasons, Jimmy has a cat named Norman after his older real-life cat, with the Season 2 incarnation acting as his Deputy.
  • In Season 1, Shrub keeps a black cat named Lord of the Stars. They are named after Shelby's real-life cat named Starlord.
  • In both Season 2 and Hermitcraft as a whole, Scar keeps a Minecraft incarnation of his real-life pet cat, Jellie, as a companion. It helps that Minecraft has incorporated his cat into the game itself since the 1.14 update as Official Fan-Submitted Content.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Season 1:
    • According to Scott, the Xornoth-arc was meant to last much longer, and included multiple intersecting plotlines where Scott, Gem, Katherine and Shrub searched for a way to imprison Xornoth, Jimmy got kidnapped by Joey and rescued by Scott as repayment for when Jimmy saved him, Xornoth got unsuccessfully imprisoned and spent about two months in self-imposed exile while building up his powers, and a climactic final battle that would end in Xornoth's death. However, some of the other server members were not enjoying the arc, and so they collectively decided to wrap things up much quicker.
    • According to fWhip and Sausage, cc!fWhip was inspired by Castlevania to construct the Grimlands in its current build style, and his character was initially going to be a vampire, hence the 'count' title. The commissioned custom gear textures for the character are still present in the resource pack the content creators used, but since said gear designs were yoinked for the Xornoth-arc, fWhip decided against the route as he didn't want his character to be Corrupted.
  • Season 2:
    • Shelby's backup plan for her character was to be a pirate king instead of a witch. Joey took the idea for himself eventually; the original plan for his character was to be an extraterrestrial of sorts.
    • The original plotline for Tortoise, Shelby's frog familiar, is that he was a cursed human played by Wilbur Soot whom she turns back into a human, but finds him so annoying that she turns him back into a frog.
    • cc!Shelby also originally planned for her character to have a confrontation with Headmaster Nowls, being summoned by the Council of Witches to "answer for her crimes"; it ends with her threatening Nowls to leave her alone so she can keep helping others voluntarily, warping out by opening a rift, and continuing to live in the Evermoore and never returning to the Witching World again. Of course, this is ultimately not how everything turns out.
    • The evil king of Sausage's old kingdom was originally planned to be played by Rendog. However, since he wasn't available, Martyn InTheLittleWood stepped up due to him (1) already being whitelisted on the SMP, and (2) having a similarly dramatic flair.
• Word of Gay:
  • Shelby has confirmed that all characters she has played are asexual (like she is in real life). While Shrub's romantic orientation isn't stated initially, she's later confirmed to be aromantic and open to romance, while Witch Shelby of Season 2 is biromantic and demisexual.
  • For Season 2, Pirate Joe has been confirmed to be bi in response to a fan. After this, his in-episode incarnation claims to be "piratesexual" and doesn't give a flip about the gender of someone he's attracted to, as long as that person is a pirate.
• Word of God:
  • For Season 1, all of the perspective characters' heights are listed in this video on Lizzie's second channel, with the most characters being around the 6-foot range (save for a few usually non-human outliers). The video is summarized as follows:
    • 10' (304.8cm): Lizzie
    • 6'8" (203.2cm): Scott
    • 6'5" (195.58cm): Jimmy
    • 6' (182.88cm): fWhip and Gem (due to being twins), Joey, Pix, and Sausage (specified to be "a thicc 6 feet")
    • 5'11" (180.34cm): Pearl
    • 5'9" (175.26cm): Joel
    • 5'4" (162.56cm): Katherine
    • 4'3" (129.54cm): Shrub
  • In the intro to Joel's first Season 2 episode, it's stated that his Season 1 character "died from sadness after seeing his palace be cut in half" off-screen, with additional jokes that he was Too Cool to Live, while his fate was left ambiguous in his Season 1 finale.
  • cc!Sausage confirms on Twitter that his character's D&D character class is a Druid.
• Write What You Know: In Season 2, Dawn's atmosphere and culture is inspired by Newfoundland, Canada, where cc!Gem grew up and lives. Similarly, while Sanctuary (and adjacent lore) is heavily inspired by Encanto in terms of architecture and worldbuilding, the fact cc!Sausage is Latino (Cuban-American, specifically) helps add to the authenticity.
• You Might Remember Me from...:
  • For Season 1, fWhip, Gem, Jimmy, Joel, Joey, Katherine, Lizzie, Scott, and Shelby were all returning members of the preceding X Life SMP.
  • In Season 2, every player aside from False and Oli are returnees from Season 1, though Oli was also on X Life.
  • Gem, Pearl, and later False are all members of Hermitcraft as of their joining, while Pixlriffs narrates the Hermitcraft Recap Companion Show.

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