Web Video / Empires SMP

Due to the nature of the work and medium, all spoilers for the episodes and livestreams of Empires are unmarked. However, spoilers for Empires: the Musical remain marked. You Have Been Warned.

The Season 1 Emperors in a rare moment of peace.^note Top row: Pearlescent Moon, Gemini Tay, fWhip, Jimmy Solidarity, Mythical Sausage, Joey Graceffa. Bottom row: Shrub Berry, Scott Smajor, Joel Smallishbeans, Katherine Elizabeth, Lizzie LDShadowLady. Not pictured: Pixlriffs, Xornoth.

Empires SMP is a Minecraft roleplay server run by fWhip. True to its name, the series is about a group of empires, each run by a different Minecraft YouTuber, with its own aesthetics and theme. The twelve empires interact by forming trade deals and alliances, and, of course, going to war.

When the story started, the premise was very basic, and while there was interpersonal and international conflict, it was all relatively self-contained. However, this changed with the addition of magic, supernatural entities and prophecies, making the server feel more like a Dungeons & Dragons campaign than a Minecraft server.

The SMP officially started on June 12th, 2021, and ended its first season on January 29th, 2022. LDShadowLady's perspective of Season 1 has been adapted into Empires: The Musical (Ocean Queen Edition), a machinima and partly-animated musical; the musical premiered on Lizzie's YouTube channel on June 19th, 2022, and the link to it can be found here. Its second season started on June 25th, 2022 and ended between April 30th, 2023 (Katherine) and May 2023, depending on the perspective.

Note: Unless otherwise specified, all tropes pertain to the characters, not the content creators that play them.

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Tropes found in Empires SMP include:

General

• Blonde, Brunette, Redhead: The women of the SMP have hair colours befitting this combination:
  • Season 1 is a borderline example, with Pearl's hair colour being somewhere between dirty blonde and light brown, Katherine and Shrub being brunettes with dark brown to black hair, and Gem and Lizzie being the redheads (though the latter has pink hair).
  • Season 2 plays this more directly, with False stepping in as the resident blonde in Pearl's place.
• Character Overlap: Due to Canon Welding with other series, characters played by the same content creators tend to see some form of overlap. In chronological order of the series:
  • Downplayed in the case of Scott and Jimmy in Season 1, who aren't necessarily the same character per se, but hold Past-Life Memories to at least some degree to their 3rd Life counterparts. Scott's case is made more murky by the whole Champion of Aeor side, and it's unconfirmed whether Joel (who took part in the same series) is a reincarnation of his 3rd Life counterpart too.
  • Sausage from Afterlife SMP is fundamentally the same character as the Sausage from Empires Season 1, with a dose of Laser-Guided Amnesia. Similarly, Saint Pearl is the same character as Pearl the farmer queen from Empires Season 1.
    TheMythicalSausage: (in response to a YouTube comment) Empires s1 me was the same character in Afterlife after some time passed into trying to "fix" my reality of season 1....
    
    "No Comment" on what happened before I got to Afterlife...and After I got to see Pearl in the season finale of Afterlife..... :)^note What happened before Sausage got to Afterlife has since been revealed in Sausage's Season 2 Episode 37.
  • Oli's ALSMP finale segues into his first episode of Empires Season 2, confirming the two are the same character.
  • During the Hermitcraft crossover, it's revealed that Gem of Empires Season 2 is the same character as Hermitcraft-Gem.
  • Shelby's Empires Season 2 finale ends with her receiving a letter ten years after the events of the SMP, the contents of which are revealed at the start of the WitchCraft SMP to be an invitation to the Witch Trials, thus linking the two servers.
• Construction Is Awesome: With most (if not all) of the players being good builders, it's unsurprising to see beautiful buildings and structures on the server regardless of season, ranging from Simple, yet Awesome starter houses and shops to intricate megabases, huge XP farms, and in-universe ruins.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character: While many of the characters often retain traits of the creators themselves throughout the seasons, some of the character counterparts may be fairly different in aesthetics, attitudes, and/or abilities:
  • Gem: In Season 1, she's a wizard who works in magical education and rules over The Magocracy; in Season 2, she issues a Ban on Magic in her empire.
  • Joel: In Season 1, he's aggressively distant from the main plotline and "lore"; in Season 2, he regularly engages in it (albeit in a confusing manner) and ascends to become one of the Lore Gods in the end.
  • Lizzie: In Season 1, she rules over the seas; in Season 2, she has a strong fear of water and avoids it whenever she can.
  • Sausage: In Season 1, he's The Dragon and highly ambitious; in Season 2, he's an All-Loving Hero who cares little for power in fear that he might abuse it. In this case, it's actually justified to a degree, since Lord Sausage had his more violent and villainous tendencies yanked out into a Literal Split Personality before being reincarnated into Protector Sausage in Season 2.
  • Scott: In Season 1, he's a fairly responsible ruler with an arguable case of supernaturally-induced gifted kid trauma, who sends himself into Self-Imposed Exile out of fear of hurting those around him; in Season 2, he's a carefree Lovable Rogue who cannot care less about laws and rules.
• Cool Crown: The Emperor's Crown — a golden coronet with twelve multicoloured inlaid jewels, infused with the essence of each of the Season 1 empires — is the crown-est of crowns, marking the player who has the authority to make a rule that every other player must follow. It was initially thought to be destroyed in the Rapture during the explosion of the Grimlands, but it's found hidden behind the Madre de Girasoles mural in the Catacombs and re-enters circulation in Season 2 as the King's Crown.
• Death Is Cheap: Seeing as this is Minecraft (but not a hardcore world), this is a given. When someone dies, they respawn at the last bed they slept in. That is, excluding the Season 1 finale...
• Dysfunction Junction: The Empires SMP is considerably more lighthearted than, say, the Dream SMP, but it doesn't stop the dark plotlines and backstories either.
  • In Season 1, at least a third of the main cast goes through some form of trauma even before the events of the series: Lizzie and Jimmy have prophecy-induced Identity Amnesia with implicit Backstory Horror, Shrub fled to the Empires server after her home dimension was corrupted by the Big Bad who was banished there^note and accidentally brings the villain back to the Empires world with her and is possibly the Last of Her Kind, and Scott was forced to step up as king after his older sibling got corrupted by the resident God of Evil, murdered their parents, and was banished to Shrub's home dimension. Oh, and that's not going into the series ending in an Apocalypse How where everyone else who hasn't been traumatized yet gets traumatized as well.
  • The Season 2 characters don't have it much better either: False had her memory wiped and was banished to the Empires world by her sister under the belief that she was dangerous, though the details are murky, Joel has alleged to be the Last of His Kind as gods, Katherine's kingdom was cursed to deteriorate from the time of her birth and is implied been blamed for it for years for the "crime" of being born, Oli's the Sole Survivor of an adjacent server who gets "isekai'd" to the Empires world where his friends seemingly don't recognize him anymore, Sausage is a Genocide Survivor with Past-Life Memories as his Season 1 incarnation whose closest friends died in his arms and spent the remainder of his life trying and failing to save her by time- and dimension-travelling, among other traumatic incidents, and Shelby has been kicked out of school and branded a criminal for a complete and utter magical accident.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Oli TheOrionSound converses with Lizzie in the song "Prismarine" from Season 1's musical adaptation. He later joins the ranks of the rulers in Season 2.
• Eternal English: There have been multiple instances across the series that suggest little to no linguistic drift over the millennia that the series is supposed to take place across.
  • In Season 1, several ancient books are written in modern English in spite of them being supposed to be centuries- or millennia-old texts.
  • In Season 2, Shelby is able to read a message-sign which was placed in a decimated area over a thousand years prior to the events of the season. Later, Dark Sausage is able to communicate with everyone else without any problems in spite of being distanced from anyone and everyone for a thousand years.
• Gemstone Motifs: Both the Crystal Cliffs of Season 1 and the Kingdom of Animalia of Season 2 are associated with amethyst, as one of the primary exports of the two empires.
• Genius Loci:
  • In Season 1, the Overgrown is a sentient being and can communicate with Katherine directly, as she's its guardian.
  • In Season 2, the Magic of Sanctuary, a carryover from Sausage's unnamed old kingdom, shapes the land, constructs relevant infrastructure, and gives gifts in accordance to the people's needs and desires.
• The Good Kingdom: All of the empires are run by fundamentally decent people, even if they sometimes don't get along.
• Horse of a Different Color: Almost literally in both seasons, since characters' custom mounts are simply retextured horses in-game.
  • In Season 1, Gnomes are said to ride into battle on wolves. In individual cases, Pearl has her Suspiciously Shiny Goose, which hatched from an egg Lizzie tried to scam her with, and Scott has a stag that was gifted to him by his patron deity. Joey's raptors also serve as this, having been transformed from horses.
  • In Season 2, there are the Gobland boars, Gem's bear Apollo, Pix's dodos, Shelby's giant frog, and Sausage's mythical jaguar Gaia.
• Klingon Promotion: To become the Emperor of the server, a ruler must find a way to obtain the Crown from the ruler in possession with it. This can range from the current Emperor giving it away by a competition directly, to someone stealing it, to... of course, someone murdering the current Emperor.
  • In Season 1, Scott obtains the Crown after murdering Jimmy for it with potions, while fWhip cheats at Katherine's challenge to directly kill her for it.
  • In Season 2, Gem invokes it by challenging all prospective server-members to a Duel to the Death for the Crown (which Katherine wins), while Katherine loses the Crown to fWhip after falling into his stalagmite-filled Pit Trap, then Joel murders fWhip for the Crown as payback for allegedly stealing his brand.
• Love Triangle:
  • A small one occurs in the background of the Season 1 plot, with both Scott and Sausage holding a torch for (or being implied to do so) for Jimmy. Both are at least somewhat aware of this.^note In Scott's case, if his content creator counterpart adding Break-Up Songs to his official Flower Husbands playlist on Spotify and changing the playlist cover to fanart of his character crying around the time Sausage kissed Jimmy once was anything to go by. Jimmy himself also seems somewhat aware of this, but not so much that a subplot brews because of this. As of the season finale, the romantic plot threads are left dangling, as no one gets a happy ending.^note It ends with Jimmy fleeing the lands of the Empires out of guilt for unrelated reasons, Sausage spending the remainder of his mortal life trying to revive Pearl and later joining the ALSMP (revealed in Season 2), and Scott being literally dead, albeit living in a Personalized Afterlife.
  • In Season 2, there's one of the variant, involving Shelby and Pirate Joe both being interested in Princess Katherine, who has seemed friendly with Shelby and considers Pirate Joe an Abhorrent Admirer at the time. The two end up duking it out in a Duel to the Death at the Festival of the Rift; in spite of this, Katherine makes it clear that she's too busy with rebuilding her kingdom to consider any romances for the time being, and the triangle ends with all three of them on amicable terms. While Pirate Joe and Shelby proceed to antagonize each other later in the season, they manage to become friends again by the series finales, and Shelby and Katherine have a Maybe Ever After.
• Namedworld and Namedland: The Grimlands and Mythland for Season 1, Gobland for Season 2.
• Non-Heteronormative Society: Exactly no one has batted an eye at flirting or relationships among the same gender in the Empires world, regardless of season. It probably helps that 5 of the 14 main content creators involved are openly LGBTQ+ themselves, as well as some of the server guests.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted completely and utterly to high Heaven.
  • Two of the content creators share similar names — Joel and Joey, so their respective characters have very similar names as well.^note Just to add to the confusion, Joe Hills from Hermitcraft gets involved in Season 2. To a lesser extent, there's also Lizzie and Katherine (Elizabeth), but thankfully, both of them are almost universally called by the first part of their names, so there's there's no confusion.
  • Inter-season-wise, all but two of the perspective characters of Season 2 have Season 1 counterparts; even though they are practically different characters (Season 1 allusions aside), most of the Season 2 characters still share names with Season 1 characters.^note The main exceptions are Pearl (Season 1 only), False and Oli (Season 2 only), and Shubble's character goes by "Shrub" in Season 1 and "Shelby" in Season 2. What doesn't help is that the Afterlife SMP is canon and is a series that involves heavy amounts of creator overlap with Empires. It's left ambiguous how the ALSMP counterparts of the Empires characters (apart from Oli and Season 1 Sausage) are distinct from their Empires counterparts — they share the same names and presumably have similar appearances and voices, but are each individuals in their own right. Sausage's Season 2 character lore hints that reincarnation is at play and there is a Significant Name Overlap.
  • Season 1: In the Ocean Empire, there was Pearl the Librarian Villager... not to be confused with Pearlescent Moon, the ruler of Gilded Helianthia, who is usually known as Pearl.
• Precious Puppy: In both seasons so far, Sausage has an in-universe incarnation of his real-life dog Bubbles as his companion.
• Red String of Fate: Implied. In Season 1, the first prophecy in "The Book Of Prophecies, Past & Future" states, "Kindred spirits will find each other and unite once more in this world, as they do in every other world." While who these "kindred spirits" are aren't identified in any of the source material, given the recurring trend for the characters to explain past series as reincarnation, and the real-life friendships of the content creators leading to frequent collaborations, it hints at an eternal cycle of Reincarnation Friendships across the seasons for the Empires server-members.
• Reincarnation: A mechanism present throughout the series, and a plot point in Season 2.
  • A few characters explain Mythology Gags as the manifestation of Past-Life Memories.
  • In Season 1, reincarnation is one of the backbones to the main plotline, as Aeor and Exor's champions' souls simply move from host to host when one passes on.
  • In Season 2, a brief montage in Sausage's 12th episode heavily implies that the Season 2 incarnations of the rulers are reincarnations of their Season 1 counterparts, and Canon Welding with the Afterlife SMP implies that their respective ALSMP counterparts are somehow thrown into the mess as well. Sausage is explicitly stated to be a reincarnation, and while it's not confirmed on anyone else's parts yet, Dark Sausage certainly thinks witch Shelby and goblin fWhip look familiar.
• Reincarnation Friendship: Implied. No matter the season or the empire they rule over, the Empires rulers still share alliances and remain friends with each other, rivalries aside. However, Sausage is the only proven case of "Season 1 ruler and/or ALSMP counterpart reincarnates as Season 2 ruler" and Oli is a special case, so whether it applies to the other rulers is still up for debate (Sausage seems to think so, at least).
• Reincarnation-Identifying Trait: Implied by proxy. When characters from different seasons and series share a content creator counterpart, the drift between the series is usually explained as reincarnation. As a result, reincarnated characters usually have a similar name, voice, and even physical appearance to their past lives' incarnations. It's even a plot point that Dark Sausage, a Literal Split Personality of Lord Sausage of Mythland, looks almost identical to Protector of Sanctuary Sausage.
• Resurgent Empire:
  • In Season 1, Joey's primary aim was to rebuild the Lost Empire's temples and find the elemental totems in order to restore harmony to the world after they fell into ruin.
  • In Season 2, after suffering from an earthquake around the time of Katherine's birth and deteriorating for years, Katherine aims to "restore the light" of GlimmerGrove and return it to its former glory from the time before she was born.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: Zig-zagged depending on season.
  • In Season 1, all of the empires' rulers qualify as this, with many of them being skilled builders who participate in international affairs like trade and defend their respective lands against enemies and various threats.
  • It's generally subverted in Season 2, where most of the rulers in question do not hold or even claim noble titles; Katherine is the only ruler who has a legitimate royal title and plays this trope straight by being a tailor and moonlighting as a Hunter of Monsters.
• Shared Universe: While both seasons of Empires take place in the same universe/continuity, it also branches out into other series' universes.
  • The most notable example is with Afterlife SMP due to Character Overlap, and the series takes place sometime between the two seasons, much like how the content creators' upload schedules line up in real life.
  • 3rd Life is canon to Empires due to reincarnation as of Season 1, while Double Life is referenced several times in Season 2, even though not all of its participants remember its events. By virtue of its connection to the Life SMP, it's dubious but possible that Evolution SMP has some sort of relation to Empires outside of creator overlap.
  • X Life SMP, a spiritual predecessor of ALSMP, has been mentioned in passing a couple of times in both Seasons 1 and 2, though these mainly manifest in the form of Mythology Gags and have so far had little overall impact on the plot.
  • In Season 2, the "crystal cave" or rift that opened up in a cliff-face near the Greatbridge has been confirmed to be the other side of the Rift from Hermitcraft Season 9, which leads to members of Hermitcraft visiting the Empires world as guests and eventually vice versa. Joel has also been known earlier in the season to make a Shout-Out to Season 8 of Hermitcraft, attributing a prank idea to Grian in that season. On Twitter, the content creators involved refer to this as the "Minecraft Multiverse".
  • The WitchCraft SMP chronologically takes place after Empires Season 2. However, there are chronological inconsistencies on how long there is between each perspective: Shelby's perspective states that WCSMP takes place in the same universe as Empires, with Shelby being the same character throughout; Joey's character stated that he was a pirate in a past life, suggesting at least a lifetime in between the series; and nothing has been confirmed on Scott's end.
• Sliding Scale of Silliness vs. Seriousness: It heavily depends on the season and the perspective.
  • Season 1: While the series starts off silly, things really start to skew towards the serious side when Xornoth comes into the picture. Characters who are heavily connected to that plotline, like Scott and Shrub, tend to have more serious episodes and intensive character arcs, while those who aren't, like Joel, tend to have sillier series. Other characters with individual character arcs also tend to have more serious moments, like Lizzie.
  • Season 2: Without much of an overarching plotline across the server, the season is comparatively more silly than Season 1, and characters tend to have less intensive character arcs — the main exceptions are Sausage and Shelby, and to a slightly smaller extent, False, Joey, and Katherine. Moreover, a significant chunk of the season is dedicated to a crossover with Hermitcraft, which takes its roleplay far less seriously and is usually on the silly end of the scale.
• She Is the King: Any female ruler who wears the Emperor's Crown is this. While they are sometimes called Empresses, mainly in informal contexts, fWhip's official rulebook on the Crown and the games in which it circulates refers to any ruler who possesses the Crown as an "Emperor" regardless of their gender. In Season 2, this is averted as all female rulers who wear the Crown are called Queens and not Kings.
• Sixth Ranger:
  • Season 1 started with 10 members (and thus 10 empires) on the server, with Joey (the Lost Empire) and Shrub (the Undergrove) joining a little later in the series. Empires-wise, Mangrovia, or the Empire of the Viewers, is constructed in the second half of the season during the Love Tropics '21 charity stream; despite being officially the 13th empire, as it was constructed by about half of the server-members, it has no official ruler and little impact on the overall plotline.
  • In Season 2, while technically having arrived in the world earlier than everyone else, Oli has so far been the last server-member to join the line-up with his empire, the Olipelago.
• Speaks Fluent Animal:
  • Season 1:
    • The Sea-blings Lizzie and Jimmy can understand aquatic creatures like axolotls and fish. Justified as it's revealed that they're both demigods of some sort and the children of an ancient sea monster, indicating this is likely genetic.
    • While owls are typically used as carrier pigeons by Rivendell's citizens, Scott can understand and directly talk to owls as well.
    • Shrub can speak to and understand her wolves.
  • In Season 2, the ability to speak to animals is one of Sausage's "gifts" from when his old kingdom was around that stuck with him.
• Standard Fantasy Races: While most of the inhabitants of the server are human (or are assumed to be human anyway), there are some exceptions.
  • In Season 1, Scott and his people are elves, Shrub is a gnome, Xornoth is an elf-turned-demon, Lizzie and Jimmy are demigods, and the Ancient Elven Library mentions the existence of a Dwarf population as well^note Referring to the backstory of the Rune Blade, for context.
  • In Season 2, fWhip is a goblin (or as his content creator describes, "a little green skrunkly dude"). Lizzie is some sort of Cat Folk, Sausage's adopted father Eddie is a Harengon (a species of rabbit people), and other unnamed varieties of anthropomorphic animal people are found throughout Critter City; so far, we've seen foxes, frogs, pandas, and bats.
• Switching P.O.V.: Every player in the series has uploaded their perspective of the events that unfolded to YouTube, and optionally livestreamed them on Twitch or YouTube, allowing viewers to watch the series from whichever perspective they like.
• Whole-Plot Reference: Mainly applicable to individual character arcs.
  • For Season 1, when Scott said he wanted an "Elsa Arc", he got exactly what he asked for, down and including accidentally hurting a loved one (coincidentally also a redhead) through Power Incontinence and (temporarily) fleeing the kingdom to live in an ice castle.
  • In Season 2, Jimmy is not a toy, thank you very much. Unfortunately for him, literally every other character is trying to get him to accept this as a fact of life for him. Sound a bit familiar? The content creators think so too.

Season 1

• Aborted Arc: The conflict between Scott and fWhip was set up as a major point of political tension, with fWhip angry that Scott hurt his sister, and Scott angry that fWhip attacked Rivendell in retaliation. However, it never really went anywhere, and Scott and fWhip quietly returned to being on amicable terms.
• Aerith and Bob:
  • The crossing of screen names and real life names means that rulers named Katherine, Joey, and Scott exist alongside ones named Sausage, fWhip, and Pix.
  • The three sibling pairs that exist on the server also have shades of this. There's one pair with two relatively strange names (Gem and fWhip), one with two regular names (Lizzie and Jimmy), and one with a regular and a strange name (Scott and Xornoth).
• Animal Jingoism: Cod and salmon are enemies to each other, and it's never quite confirmed why. However, come the finale and it's Played for Horror, since an attempt at resolving this enmity/rivalry ends in the whole world going down with them.
• Apocalypse How — Class 0: Season 1 ends this way. Jimmy and fWhip trying to create a new Codfather head overloads the machine they were using, and the entirety of the Grimlands is completely destroyed in the explosion. The debris catapulted into the sky lands on the neighboring Empires, destroying the Lost Empire and heavily damaging the Crystal Cliffs. The heat from the blast sparks a wildfire that spreads to the Undergrove and Gilded Helianthia, burning them both to the ground. There's a massive earthquake that cracks the Mezalian Matral Palace in half and tears rifts into the ground, sparking more fires and killing all life in the Overgrown. The water vanishes from the Cod and Ocean Empires, causing its citizens to either die of suffocation or flee for deeper water. While Rivendell was largely spared from the explosion damage, the earthquake was the last push Xornoth needed to break out of the crystal, and he proceeds to tear the city apart with corruption vines. Mythland was also mostly spared, but was instead overrun by Blood Sheep. In the end, Scott commits suicide in order to stop Xornoth, Pearl dies as the empire her lifeforce is tied to burns to the ground, Lizzie loses her memory and leaves the server in confusion, Joel undergoes Death by Despair after seeing his palace being destroyed, and the rest leave their homes either by choice or by force, and start over somewhere else. The Musical refers to this as "the Rapture"; overall, 11 of the 12 empires have experienced severe damage while 1 in 4 of their rulers have been Killed Off for Real.
• Arcadia: The Undergrove is located in a forest and has a mushroom aesthetic, while Gilded Helianthia is primarily entirely around agricultural production.
• Attack Backfire: Of the light-hearted variant. Early in the series, as a result of Escalating War, Pix and Jimmy prank Sausage by letting loose two ravagers named Lawnmower and Bulldozer in his wheat fields.^note They originally planned to get a third named "Tractor", but they lost the name-tag while collecting the ravagers. While this initially annoys Sausage due to crop destruction, he takes them as a gift and makes plans to make the ravagers assets to Mythland's army.
• Bothering by the Book: In response to Joey killing one of her villagers to get the Crown from her, Lizzie follows Joey's rule to bring him horses as tribute to the letter by breeding about 200 horses in a pit at the edge of the Lost Empire, then unleashing them all upon the empire. The plan initially seemed to have backfired, as Joey planned on using the horse-tributes to make a velociraptor army, but the real-life result of having 200 horses in a small space in a video game double-subverts it.
  Lizzie: Marvellous. There are so many horses here now; Joey might think he can build an army with all of these horses, but I don't know how he's gonna do anything with this amount of lag.
• Cain and Abel: Scott and Xornoth are brothers, whose patrons are Aeor and Exor respectively. While Scott is the benevolent ruler of Rivendell who tries to stay out of conflict as much as possible, Xornoth is a demon who actively spreads the Corruption and tries to invoke eternal winter across the entire world. This rivalry started before they were even born, beginning with their ancestors, Alinar and Conal.
• Can't Live Without You: One of the prophesies Scott found in the ancient Elven library implied that if either he or Xornoth are killed, the other will die as well.
  Twin souls trapped in an endless battle since the beginning of time, chaos and order, light and dark, hot and cold. One cannot exist without the other, for if one soul dies, the other is sure to follow.
  • Scott eventually exploits this in the Season 1 finale, using the Rune Blade to take down Xornoth once and for all... by taking himself out of the equation.
• Cartesian Karma: Downplayed. Post-Xornoth Sausage is given several tasks to do by Gem and fWhip to earn back his place in the Wither Rose Alliance, however he is eventually let back in.
• City on the Water:
  • Parts of the Cod Empire are built over the swamp and the sea. Similarly, most of the structures of the Ocean Empire are built on giant, artificial lily pads. Since the two empires' rulers are Sea-blings, it's likely this doubles as an example of Shared Family Quirks.
  • The 13th empire, Mangrovia, is built over a lake in the southern part of the jungle southeast of the world spawn.
• Collector of the Strange:
  • Katherine, the sweet queen of the flowery kingdom of House Blossom, is a prolific collector of severed heads. A few other rulers also collect heads, including Jimmy and Scott, but Katherine's collection is the biggest by far.
  • Pixl and Fwhip also both collect a specific kind of ore: Emerald Ore in Pix's case, and Deepslate Redstone Ore in Fwhip's.
• Common Tongue: English, which is off-handedly referred to as "Common" by Scott. Quite handy for a world with rulers who can communicate with animals and have their own regional tongues.
• Company Cross References: Early in the series, Jimmy gifts Scott a Pufferish of Peace, referencing the same misnamed pufferfish from the 3rd Life SMP.
• Cosmic Keystone: The Ender Dragon turns out to be one. When Sausage, Joey and Pixl kill her, it has predictably poor consequences.
• Crystal Prison: Scott and Gem manage to trap Xornoth in one, but it doesn't last when it shatters in the earthquake during the Rapture, releasing Xornoth once again.
• Curse Cut Short: The end of Joel's first season has him drop the beginnings of an F-bomb once he sees the Matral Palace cracked in half.
  Joel: I can't see anything wrong whatshow– (spots the broken palace) WHAT THE F–
• The Diss Track: Joel writes one about fWhip with Jimmy backing him up, which is ultimately intended to be friendly and ends in a request for peace between the empires. It's apparently noteworthy enough to have an entire prophecy dedicated to it.
  Words spat through vicious mockery will sound strangely melodious from the mouth of a Mezelean.
• Dragon Rider: In the midst of the Rapture, Gem, fWhip, and their pets leave the lands of Empires to start over far away by riding on the back of one of Gem's guardian dragons.
• Due to the Dead: Pixandria contains The Vigil, a monument that holds a candle to represent every time one of the players dies.
• Ear Worm: Possibly in a Leaning on the Fourth Wall way; apparently, "Deal With Destiny" has been stuck in both Jimmy and Sausage's heads for a while since the episode containing the song was released.
• Endless Winter: Xornoth is supposed to bring one upon the world.
• Egg MacGuffin: The dragon egg, which was kept in the possession of Gem. It later hatched to become the baby dragon Violet.
• Ermine Cape Effect: Several empires fall under this trope due to limits of Minecraft skins. Subverted by the rulers whose main outfit is relatively informal, such as Katherine, Shubble, and Jimmy. Pixl mentions after he gets his new skin for Lizzie and Joel's wedding that he'd want a less formal skin to contrast with his finery, although he never does.
• Escalating War: The initial feud between Jimmy and Sausage at the start of the series mainly started with them stealing from each other, and later pranking each other's empires and bases.^note To be clear, Jimmy first stole baking supplies, farm animals, and an enchanted book from Sausage, Sausage retaliated by stealing Jimmy's "The Greatest Song In The World" '13' music disc, Jimmy and Pix let loose a couple of ravagers on Sausage's fields, and Sausage turns Jimmy's house into a salmon fish-tank. It was finally resolved by fWhip using TNT to create a ravine between the two's empires to end the inter-empire feud, and him and Gem mediating a trade of three golden apples for Jimmy's '13' disc back. Of course, the non-serious aspect of this came in hindsight due to Cerebus Syndrome... once the demon showed up, nothing to do with stolen music discs.
• Exact Words: The third prophecy in "The Book Of Prophecies, Past & Future" reads, "A prosperous land shall be laid to waste. Streets will run red before the spires are toppled." In the season finale, the streets running red is revealed to not be caused by flowing blood, but a rain of Blood Sheep.
• Eye Colour Change:
  • After the accidental outburst Scott had with his ice powers, his eye color changes from a dark, grey-ish blue to bright, electric blue.
  • After Joey allies himself with Xornoth, his eyes go from green to red.
• Fantastic Racism: While it's mostly in the background and never really touched upon, some of the non-human emperors do experience the occasional prejudice or stereotyping. For example, Joey constantly refers to Shrub (a gnome) as "Fungus" or "Fungus girl", and Sausage specifically likes to bring up the fact that Scott is an elf whenever it looks like he's done something wrong.
• Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: Gem and Lizzie are the Responsible siblings to fWhip and Jimmy's Foolish siblings, respectively.
  • The second case only really works by relativity. Lizzie is certainly more competent and responsible than Jimmy, but considering that she once ate a magical artifact without even thinking of the consequences, didn't know what a birthday was for years, and often trends towards chaotic, it's hard to call her responsible in general.
• Forced Sleep: When Joey's attempt to talk Gem and Scott into voluntarily going with him doesn't work, Sausage uses a splash potion to induce this to capture them. Joey uses the same potion again to kidnap Shrub later in the season.
• Foreshadowing: In the livestream where Jimmy first visits an End City^note Also known as shortly before the "Why am I in Scott's room?" moment, Lizzie comments in the in-game chat that "we should try to complete all of them [the advancements] some time". This is exactly what she does in her perspective of the season finale (at least, before the Rapture started).
• Green-Eyed Monster: It was jealousy of Aeor's notoriety that drove Exor to villainy, which distantly kicks off the main plot.
• Head-in-the-Sand Management: Initially. One of the early ways for the rulers to deal with Xornoth's Corruption was to ignore it or to throw the pieces in a box in the middle of nowhere, where it would take time for it to spread back to their empires even if it spread from the box. It's explained that this helps them to buy time for investigating how to remove the Corruption permanently, and they went as far as to joke that the Corruption returning to their lands would be a problem for their future selves to deal with. It's safe to say that it didn't last, forcing the rulers to come up with new ways to deal with the Corruption.
• Heroic Suicide: After Xornoth is accidentally released from the crystal in the Apocalypse How, Scott is captured by him, and Xornoth gloats that he's going to trap Scott in a crystal, then force him to watch as he slaughters everyone else in front of him. Scott, knowing he won't be able to get to Xornoth to beat him in a fight again, pulls out the Rune Blade and stabs himself through the chest, killing both himself and Xornoth.
• Impossible Task: In the finale before the Apocalypse How, Scott tells Lizzie she can have his armor if she gets every achievement in the game, thinking that she'll never be able to do it. She does.
• Killed Off for Real: Among the twelve rulers, in spite of the usual respawn mechanism of non-hardcore Minecraft, three of them have been killed permanently in the Cruel Twist Ending — Scott via Heroic Suicide, Pearl when her kingdom that her life force is connected to burns to the ground, and Joel through Death by Despair.
• Lampshade Hanging: fWhip explaining the Grimlands' forge to Pixl after the latter comes asking for new netherite gear. Showing off the Xornoth lava heat source, the salmon redstone filteration system, the ancient debris smeltery, the wall of random buttons, and the giant anvil in the centre, before pointing out the smithing tables in the floor.
  fWhip: And then, the actual things we use are these smithing tables right here because– uhh– it's Minecraft.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia:
  • One of the prophecies in "The Book Of Prophecies, Past & Future" foretold that if two ancient sea-dwellers were to leave the ocean behind, they were doomed to forget their true self and their past. This proves to be true for Jimmy and Lizzie, who forgot each other's existence and their Sea-bling relationship because they left the water. It's not until about midway through the series when they find out about this relationship again.
  • This occurs once again in the Season 1 finale. In the midst of the Apocalypse How scenario, the oceans which Lizzie rules over drain, and Lizzie herself ends up losing her Ocean's Blessing and her memories in one fell swoop — possibly as a reference to the aforementioned prophecy, causing her to leave the server in confusion.
• The Magic Comes Back: Downplayed. Magic was always present in the setting, but killing the Ender Dragon unleashes Xornoth and causes magic to become much more potent and widespread.
• The Magocracy: Crystal Cliffs is inhabited almost entirely by magic users, and led by Gem, who is a wizard.
• Martial Pacifist: Any of the more peaceful rulers, like Gem, Katherine, Scott, and Shubble, fall under this trope, as they are plenty willing to take up arms to deal with a bigger threat — all four of them are heavily involved in the Xornoth arc.
• Musical Episode: Lizzie's Episode 18, "The Blue Axolotl", features a duet between her and Scott titled "Deal With Destiny", which takes up about a third of the episode run-time.^note For anyone asking, it's a Lizzie POV exclusive; Scott's episode had already ended and his next episode features a "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer about the musical number. The song itself covers the two characters making a trade between two valuable items, believing themselves to be scamming the other in the trade, only for the items they each traded for to be vital to their respective character arcs later in the series.
• North Is Cold, South Is Hot: Inverted regarding the known world of the Empires, where the Pixandrian desert and Mezalean badlands are located in the north, and the southernmost empires are tucked away in snowy mountains. However, the official map zig-zags this, as an uninhabited badlands biome is located in the southwest, but in the setting's defense, Minecraft world generation doesn't really conform to directional conventions.
• Old, New, Borrowed and Blue: Lizzie chooses to follow this tradition for her wedding in her episode "Royal Wedding", and spends about half the episode seeking such objects with help from the fellow women on the server.
• Posthumous Sibling: A non-traditional example due to non-human convention. A book on Ocean Folklore states that while an ancient sea monster laid a clutch of eggs and died, "[i]n time, all but two of the eggs were destroyed", meaning Lizzie and Jimmy technically had several (potential) siblings that died before they were even born.
• Practically Different Generations: Being born from the same clutch of eggs, Lizzie and Jimmy are technically fraternal twins, but are centuries apart in terms of chronological age. However, since both of them are demigods to some degree, it's likely that it works differently for them, and they're both mentally young adults nonetheless.
• Prisoner Exchange: After Joey kidnaps Lizzie's axolotl knight Sir Strawberry and Lizzie fails to find him in the Lost Empire, Lizzie kidnaps and imprisons the Tiger Blood Prince in return and arranges one such exchange in the desert west of the Ocean Empire, near Pixandria. Both sides then proceed to sabotage the exchange by hiring Sausage as an assassin to kill the other ruler, which are contracts he is more than willing to fulfill.
• Random Species Offspring: Scott and Xornoth are supposedly biological brothers (or at least, their ancestors were). This despite the fact that Scott is elven, and looks mostly human aside from the Pointy Ears, while Xornoth is a demon, with jet black skin, glowing eyes that change color depending on how powerful he is, a massive set of horns, and a wide, glowing mouth. Putting them side by side, they don't even look like they originated on the same planet.
  • Later subverted. As Scott's Season 1 finale epilogue shows, an uncorrupted Xornoth looks relatively similar to his brother, indicating that it was him being Corrupted that turned his appearance demonic. This is supported by the story of Alinar and Conal, where Conal's appearance too became Corrupted as he was driven towards anger and hatred.
• Really 700 Years Old:
  • According to an old letter from her to Jimmy, Lizzie protected the egg that he hatched from "for hundreds of years". Lizzie later describes herself as a "thousand-year-old fish goddess".
  • While it's not clear how old he is exactly, Scott has claimed to have lived in Rivendell for centuries, meaning he's likely hundreds, if not thousands of years old, despite looking like a young adult.
  • Shrub is 116, which for her species, is akin to being a teenager.
• Reincarnation Romance: A minor cross-series example; the "Flower Husbands" have been confirmed to be a past life, and the two fall for each other again in the season, though they don't get married this time.
• Rescue Romance: While there's definitely an element of Reincarnation Romance in play, Scott's first prominent interaction with Jimmy throughout the season was being rescued from a dungeon by him, and his way of paying Jimmy back is to build a love tunnel and take him on a date. Out-of-universe, refer to his back-to-back episodes' titles "I was taken Prisoner..." (19) and "So I took Him on a Date..." (20).
  Scott: So... you know how, like, the other day, you like, saved me from my impending doom?
  Jimmy: Well, yeah. Yeah.
  Scott: And then I said I would like, make it up to you? (stammering) Would you... maybe like to– I don't know, like, go on a date with me?
• Ruling Couple: Joel and Lizzie. While Joey refers to their marriage in-universe as "the union between two empires" while officiating it, both of them rule their respective lands in their own right from before marriage, and continue to do so afterward.
• Running Gag: It's a recurring joke among the Wither Rose Alliance, and by extension, the rest of the server to tease Gem about her big wizard hat.
• Sea Monster: The Sea-blings' parent is described to be "a monstrous creature" in the folk-tales they are mentioned in, with "the head of a codfish and a body like a salamander, four small webbed feet and a long tail". The Sea-blings themselves arguably fall between this category and 'demigod', though they seem to appear much more humanoid than their parent.
• Sequel Hook: Possibly through "The Book Of Prophecies, Past & Future", as less than half of the book's contents have been revealed, and most of the prophecies are still yet to be fulfilled. Most of those pages turn out to be blank, at least out-of-universe.
  • Ultimately subverted. The plot of Season 2 is mostly independent from that of Season 1... though it doesn't stop the WMG on the fandom's part.
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: Jimmy and fWhip initially appeared to be this to each other due to the conflicts of cod versus salmon, but this "species rivalry" later proves to be much more dangerous and sinister.
  • It's first Played for Drama before the series began, as the salmon "invading the ocean" caused Jimmy to no longer "be the same", prompting Lizzie to "venture onto the land" to find the source of this and most likely causing the Sea-blings' prophesized Laser-Guided Amnesia. (Yes, the amnesia was part of a prophecy.)
  • At the end of the series, when the two teamed up to try to create a new Codfather head, another prophecy rears its ugly head, and... well, here's what the second prophecy said:
    The resolution of a neverending feud brings unimaginable chaos that will destroy the world.
• Soul-Cutting Blade: The Rune Blade, technically called the "Rune Sword" in-game, which can sever a victim's soul from their body and send the victim to an afterlife of the wielder's own choosing. The Dwarves who created it believed it to be too dangerous in the fear that souls severed with the sword would be trapped in eternal hells, but it was stolen the night before it was set to be destroyed, and people had been searching for it since. It turns out to be a Chekhov's Gun for the finale.
• There Are No Therapists: Heavily alluded to, considering about a third of the cast goes through some form of trauma even before the end of the world, and at least one of those characters ends up carrying those mental health issues to the grave. Gem attempts to defy this by making plans to have an in-school therapist for her Wizarding School, and while Sausage advertises himself as a therapist after Lizzie and Joey's Prisoner Exchange, it's suffice to say that he is quite in need of therapy himself.
• Tomes of Prophecy and Fate: "The Book Of Prophecies, Past & Future", which was discovered by Gem, Katherine, and Scott in the Ancient Elven Library, and another copy is currently in Lizzie's possession. So far, only 26 of the 57 prophecies have had their contents revealed, and only about half of them have been fulfilled as of the finale.
• Truly Single Parent: Implied. The Sea-blings' parent is stated to have experienced "centuries of loneliness" before laying a certain clutch of eggs before dying, and is never mentioned to have a partner. In a world of gods and mortals, it can probably be handwaved that the ocean gods that the sea monster "called upon" had something to do with this.
• Try to Fit That on a Business Card:
  • Fwhip's full title is Count Fwhip of the Grimlands, Ruler of Darkness, Tinkerer, Alchemist, Patented Creator of Explosives, Humble Farmer, Delver of the Nether, Lord of Eastvale.
  • Joel's full title is King of Mezalea, Slayer of Horses, Ruler of Jeremy, Collector of Sand, Seller of Terracotta, and Leader of Clones.
  • Katherine's full title is Lady Katherine of House Blossom, Guardian of the Overgrown, Protector of the Great Grass Field, Collector of Heads, Breaker of Leads, and Mother of Sheep.
  • Sausage's full title is King Sausage, Ruler of Mythland, Tamer of Wolves, Keeper of Iron, Summoner of Beasts, Sorcerer Supreme, Master Assassin, Slayer of Cod, and The One True King.
• Wacky Marriage Proposal: In the Empires continuity, Joel proposes to Lizzie by taking her out on a boat ride to the sea between their respective empires, getting her to stand on a sea lantern in the water, and dropping the scaffolding holding up concrete powder blocks to form a golden ring with a diamond (made from concrete blocks as the powder clumps together in the water) surrounding the sea lantern she was standing on. Like in real life, she says yes.
• Wedding Episode: Joel and Lizzie get married in the series, much like their real-life counterparts. The other rulers all attend the wedding to celebrate this, though there is a plot reason for this — Xornoth can be seen at the wedding as well, and while he doesn't crash it in the sense of interrupting it to cause chaos, the plotline starts picking up from around that point in time.

Empires: the Musical

• Adaptation Distillation: The musical glosses over several plot points in the Empires Season 1 storyline, e.g. the Ender Dragon fight that released Xornoth in the first place, which might have something to do with Lizzie being relatively distant from the main lore and storyline of the series… which turns out to be the actual reason for this, as the ending reveals Lizzie the character is the Narrator All Along.
• Blatant Lies: In "Prismarine", when Lizzie announces that she has built a "death-trap Guardian farm" to help her gather prismarine for her palace, Oli asks her, "How'd that go?" Lizzie replies with "Like a charm"… as the screen shows her getting killed by a Guardian in-game.
• Changing Chorus:
  • "The Great Salmon Scam" describes the titular scam as "the Great, Great Salmon Scam", but when the scam ultimately backfires on Lizzie in the end, the song ends with it being called "the not-so-Great Salmon Scam".
  • "The Crown, Pt. 1" and "The Crown, Pt. 2" have their chorus change depending on who's wearing the Crown at the time in the storyline.
• Curse Cut Short: The first verse in "Your Old Friend Xornoth" by the narrator (presumably Maddie, according to the credits) ends with one.
  Scott's in the library getting kinda wise
  Says he's got a plan for XorXor's demise
  Xorny doesn't care, though,
  Says he isn't scared, so
  Read a book, try your luck
  Xorny really doesn't give a–
• Forced Dance Partner: As a more metaphorical interpretation of canon events, "It Takes Two to Tango" features Xornoth corrupting Sausage and Joey to join his side while tormenting Shrub and Scott. In each segment for the music video, Xornoth decides to drag his victim along to dance; it's questionable how voluntary the former two have it, since they become corrupted, but the latter two are clearly uncomfortable with the arrangement.
• Foreshadowing: The end of "The Great Salmon Scam" features the line "The Cod War may continue for a long, long time". The Sitcom Arch-Nemesis status between Jimmy and fWhip continues as a background event/joke for the rest of the musical until "Happy Ever After" where they finally reach a compromise… a compromise foretold in a prophecy that leads to a Class Zero Apocalypse How.
• Fun with Homophones: "Reel Love" contains a couple of bilingual puns while Joel was doing a love confession:
  Joel: In Japan, they call it koi (恋)–
  Lizzie: Isn't that (鯉) a type of fish?
  Joel: Italians say amore–^note The Italian word is pronounced roughly the same as "a moray".
  Lizzie: That's a type of eel.
• Hard-Work Montage: "Prismarine" focuses on Lizzie's early efforts to build her Ocean Empire from scratch, from her first Lily-Pad Platform to the Prisma Palace. Overall, it covers the events in her first seven episodes.
• "The Hero Sucks" Song: "Your Old Friend Xornoth" has several verses dedicated to Xornoth bragging about his accomplishments and ambitions, while the rest is dedicated to making fun of Scott, from thinking "[he] could catch [Xornoth] in a little bit of glass" (which is actually what happens at the end of the song) to mentioning he allegedly didn't show up to Xornoth's graduation.
• Hurricane of Puns: "Reel Love" features several puns between fish and romance, while "Water You Thinking" is the very embodiment of the trope due to it being adapted from Lizzie's Ocean Tours.
• In the Blood: The last quarter of "It Takes Two to Tango" has Xornoth trying to corrupt Scott into evil because it was "in [his] blood" as the two are brothers. It's actually zig-zagged in the source material, as Xornoth was the outlier in the family that got corrupted into evil himself, while their parents and Scott are, for the most part and as far as we know, relatively reasonable people.
• Let's Duet: While the musical mainly has Lizzie sing solos throughout her perspective (with a Villain Song cut in from Xornoth), there are a couple of duets — "Reel Love" (with Joel) and "Deal With Destiny" (with Scott, from canon). Xornoth's second Villain Song, "Your Old Friend Xornoth", also gets interrupted every couple of verses by the narrator.
• Literally Loving Thy Neighbor: It's noted in both the musical and the episode it's based on that Joel and Lizzie, ruling over neighbouring empires, would naturally grow close enough to fall for each other.
• The Musical: For Lizzie's perspective of Season 1, of which "Deal With Destiny" is incorporated into.
• Narrator All Along: The ending sequence, "Oceans Blessings", reveals that Empires Lizzie is the narrator, who is recounting and recording her story before she undergoes her canonical Death of Personality.
• Old, New, Borrowed and Blue: Lizzie chooses to follow this tradition for her wedding and seeks such objects with help from the fellow women on the server in the song "Something Old, Something New".
• Once Upon a Time: How the introductory poem/prologue "The Ocean Queen" starts.
• Prongs of Poseidon: In the introductory poem/prologue "The Ocean Queen", the storybook shows Lizzie holding a trident as she expresses her dream of becoming the Ocean Queen and ruling over all bodies of water.
• Pun-Based Title:
  • The song "Reel Love" is an obvious one on 'real love' and reels, as in the fishing term. The song itself also features quite a bit of wordplay surrounding love and fish.
  • "Water You Thinking" is another obvious one on 'What are you thinking?' and water. Being adapted from the episode "Ocean Tours", which in itself is already a Hurricane of Puns, it's only natural for its title to be punny too.
• "Ray of Hope" Ending: While Empires Season 1 ends with a Downer Ending or a Bittersweet Ending at best, with Lizzie being in the former category, the ending plot twist of the musical shows that Lizzie is the Narrator All Along and manages to record down her story before undergoing her canonical Death of Personality, implying someone in the future might be able to learn and remember Lizzie and her story when she herself cannot, as well as the audience, whom she pleas to remember her.
• Revenge Ballad: "The Stand-Off" is about Joey stealing Sir Strawberry, one of Lizzie's axolotls, and Lizzie taking revenge by kidnapping the Tiger Blood Prince in return and declaring an exchange of kidnapees, while secretly hiring Sausage as an assassin to kill Joey at the exchange. The revenge part is deconstructed as per canon, as Joey got the same idea and Sausage ended up killing both Joey and Lizzie at the exchange as their respective deals required.
  Lizzie: We both got what we wanted and we got what we deserved
  In our selfishness we both forgot to self-preserve
  And so a double murder somehow brought us back together
  And now our pair of empires can live in peace forever…
  (spoken) …Right?
• Tempting Fate: There are plenty of instances scattered across the musical, but the most obvious one is in "Happy Ever After", where Lizzie mentions that various new aspects of her life and those of her friends and husband are "meant to last forever". Considering the very next song is titled "The Rapture", this obviously doesn't happen.
• Title: The Adaptation: Empires: The Musical.
• Villain Song: Xornoth gets "It Takes Two to Tango" as he torments Shrub and Scott, and corrupts Sausage and Joey. He also gets "Your Old Friend Xornoth", which is about his ambition to Take Over the World as well as him smack-talking his younger brother, who is trying to stop him.
• You Can't Fight Fate: In "Unimaginable Chaos", one of the prophecies in "The Book Of Prophecies, Past & Future" is fulfilled, causing Lizzie to grow paranoid that the prophecy about the end of the world will be fulfilled too in the near future. She tries to ignore it by trying to move on with her life in "Happy Ever After"… which is immediately followed by "The Rapture".

Season 2

• Accent Depundent: In-universe. In Season 2, there have been a couple of jokes about the Law going up against the Lore. The two words are homophonic in certain non-rhotic accents (such as Jimmy's and Joel's, the two concerned in this in the first place), which has lead to at least one mix-up between the two words by those who don't speak with such accents (e.g. Joey).
• Amazing Technicolor World: Many of the empires are built with very colourful construction palettes, but Chromia, being the land that exports dyes, takes the cake as even its founder/ruler describes it to be like "Disney on an acid trip".
• Anachronism Stew: An Ancient Greek-style civilization (Stratos) and a western town (Tumble Town) co-existing? It's more likely than you think. cc!Scott hand-waves it due to Empires having a fantasy setting.^note As for the 'handcuffs' question in the clip, modern ones used in law enforcement were invented in 1879, which historically overlaps with the last decade or so of the Wild West. Regarding the context behind the question... don't ask.
• Armed with Canon: Most likely Played for Laughs since all the creators are friends in real life, but multiple player-characters have actively tried to mess with the "lore" of their server-mates, which is how the Whole-Plot Reference to Toy Story happened in the first place.
• Author Tract: In-universe. Lizzie's book "Rebellion 101", which she distributes to the residents of Lower Stratos, starts off neutrally and tells the reader how to identify an evil overlord, but the instructions on how to rebel against the overlord pointedly reveals what she thinks of the "divine" ruler of the kingdom next door.
  The first step is to recogn[i]se the tricks your overlord uses to make you submit.
  Then it's time to burn down the temples and statues.
  Finally, tell your overlord that his muscles are puny and his godly powers are silly. This will destroy the overlord from the inside and finally free you from their oppressive power.
• Ban on Magic:
  • The Council of Witches apparently has restrictions on which people are allowed to be witches and use magic, and rogue witches, i.e. those not under their jurisdiction (like expelled students from the Great Witches Academy who continue to use magic), can be put into prison. The Witching World as a whole also as a general rule against using magic on non-witches, though it is unclear how much this is enforced.
  • This is Played for Horror in Sausage's Dark and Troubled Past, where the ruler of his old kingdom wanted the power of Magic so greatly that he's willing to drain it from not just the lands, but from the people as well so that only he can use and abuse the power that comes with it.
• Beneath the Earth: Gobland is far below a mountain, in a giant Dripstone Cave.
• Better Partner Assertion: Before the Festival of the Rift, Pirate Joe visits Shelby in the Evermoore, threatening her not to go to the Festival because Katherine would be there, which eventually devolves into him arguing that Katherine prefers him to Shelby since she sought out his help in obtaining several mob heads with his Channeling trident. When Shelby refuses to be deterred by his threats and shows up, cue Pirate Joe declaring a Duel to the Death for Katherine's hand in the arena.
• Beware the Skull Base: Skeletron's fortress which Pirate Joe raids in his 9th episode is shaped like a skull with a gold tooth.
• Bewitched Amphibians: Discussed. Lizzie initially assumes that the frogs and toads native to the Evermoore were transfigured to become them by Shelby, but Shelby explains to her that they're naturally animals. Scott also brings up this trope later in the series, saying he's heard of this happening before.
• Bilingual Dialogue: This occasionally happens between Sausage and his server-mates, usually at the latter's request. Deconstructed since most of the time, the server-mates in question are not Spanish speakers and only understand basic phrases or vocabulary at most, leading to some fairly one-sided conversations. Once Keralis is on the server for the crossover event, it devolves into bilingual conversations which, according to Romance language-speaking fans in the comments section, involve some "cursed" and questionable content that allegedly test the YouTube limits.
• Blow That Horn: Ever since different variants of Goat Horns were added to Minecraft, the player-characters have been having a lot of fun with each variant and often use it for signaling.
  • fWhip obtains a Seek goat horn^note The variant that makes the same sound as when a Pillager raid starts on a Village in his first episode and uses it as a Horn of Summoning to bring all the rulers together to investigate the opened End portal. Its role is reprised during the Hermitcraft crossover, when fWhip blows the horn to summon the rest of the Empires server to collectively attempt to stop the Hermits from going home.
  • Sausage and Gem both had a Sing goat horn and use it to symbolize their empires' alliance. So far, Sausage has lost his original one during an adventuring fiasco in the Ancient City, but has since had it replaced, while Gem's was inadvertently stolen by Oli when he visited the Tavern in Dawn.
  • Sausage also gifts a Dream goat horn to Joel via Hermes, in typical Sausage fashion.
• Brought Down to Normal: The rulers and creatures of the Empires world carry all sorts of fantastic properties with them, from items with custom textures, to having superhuman abilities, to being of outright fantastic races. After passing through the Rift into Hermitcraft, however, these fantastic properties quickly disappear, turning anthropomorphic foxes into regular-animal foxes, Goblins into humans, and hats with custom textures vanish into the aether. When they return to the Empires world, however, they return to their "normal" selves.
• Campfire Character Exploration: In Pixl's intro to his first episode, he alludes to this trope, mentioning that many stories start around a campfire, and Empires Season 2 itself started as a gathering of the twelve rulers around a campfire before they each set off to build their own empires.
  Pixl: [...] But until then, there are still secrets to the past yet to be uncovered, and it is here that our tale truly begins, around a campfire, as these stories often start.
• Canon Welding: Courtesy of Oli, who canonizes the Afterlife SMP to the events of Season 2 as his character's origin story, and by extension canonizes it to Season 1 to some degree. Sausage's post-Season 1 ending also canonizes the ALSMP to the timeline.
• Chekhov's Gun: A non-serious example so far. While Stratos is built to be a series of floating continents and islands due to Joel being a god of the skies, they prove to be an invaluable sniping roost after fWhip lures a Warden to the surface.
• City of Gold:
  • Thanks to Joel's Zombified Piglin-based gold and XP farm on the Nether roof, Stratos prominently uses blocks of gold as a decorative building material. It also incorporates oxidized copper blocks into its build palette.
  • The Gobland-Animalia joint gunpowder farm has spawn platforms constructed from amethyst blocks.
• Company Cross References:
  • Some references have been made to Season 1 of Empires.^note They qualify as Mythology Gags due to Season 2 being a Distant Sequel as well as the slightly meta nature of some of the jokes. For instance, when Jimmy finds a Sheriff's Hat in a mineshaft chest, he feels that it was a "deal with destiny", and when Sausage gifts fWhip a cod and a salmon (cue wincing), fWhip throws the cod into lava, declaring salmon to be the superior fish. Many other jokes related to Empires: The Musical and its songs have been made by the content creators throughout their videos and livestreams. This extends to the Hermitcraft crossover: while taking several of the visiting Hermits to visit GlimmerGrove, Scott remarks that Pearl does seem like the kind of person to fight a demon.
  • At the start of the series, when fWhip declares that the End portal in the Stronghold has been opened, many of the rulers believe it to be a trap, with Joey outright declaring it to sound like "a Lizzie trap". Considering Lizzie has, as of then recently, made a trap involving an End portal, this is not a surprising conclusion to come to.
  • Several to the Life SMP, due to the timing of the series' release dates, as well as the Hermitcraft crossover:
    • During his and Katherine's first official meeting, Jimmy mentions having had "a couple of things with curses" himself. With the timing of the meeting in real life in mind, putting the 'diamonds in a fossil' incident aside, it's possible he might be referring to a certain other series where he's alleged to be "cursed".
    • At the end of an early August 2022 livestream, when fWhip brings a Warden to the surface, Joel's first instinct is to grab his fishing rod... it's almost as if he'd once brought down a Warden with the tool before...
    • During the crossover, Scar is aware of the Life series, Tango and Jimmy remember Double Life, Joel makes a reference to "the Red King" (i.e. 3rd Life), and Impulse knows of Scott even before the events of the crossover. However, the extent to how much everyone remembers the series varies, as Scott only finds Pearl "oddly familiar" (and doesn't remember Impulse at all) and Pearl seems mostly unaware.
    • In Jimmy's finale, the Old Sheriff digs straight down under Animalia, joking that he's a bad boy. The episode was released about three weeks after the conclusion of Limited Life, where Jimmy and Joel did indeed dig straight down on Day 1 of the series as a faction known as "the Bad Boys".^note The Old Sheriff is played by Martyn InTheLittleWood; he would know.
    • Long after the crossover's ending, Sausage's finale features him receiving a message from Bdubs in the latter's church, which ends with Bdubs retreating because his "mom" is calling for him; Sausage wonders if he's speaking to Cleo. Cleo actually is the Team Mom of Bdubs' faction in Limited Life, which was filmed concurrently to the third act of Empires Season 2, but it's unclear how Sausage would know about this since he's not on the Life series himself.
  • There have also been several nods to the X Life SMP:
    • Joel tries to ask Lizzie to be his lawyer for the Toy Barn court case as apparently, she'd done so before. However, this time, she turns down the case.
    • The most glaring example would be Donkey Jeremy and the revival of Jeremyism in Stratos. On a related note, when Sausage first meets Donkey Jeremy, he's confused when the donkey explicitly mentions X-Life.^note For context, while 10 of the 14 Empires content creators were part of the X-Life server, Sausage was not one of them (alongside Pearl, Pixlriffs, and False).
• Compete for the Maiden's Hand: Invoked by Sausage, fuelling on the gossip and drama of the Pirate Joe–Katherine–Shelby Love Triangle, who constructs a fighting arena at the Festival of the Rift so the two could duke it out. Pirate Joe, in turn, challenges Shelby to a battle to the death in the arena... a duel which Katherine herself does not authorize.
  Pix: (passes some sweet berries to Gem) I'm glad I brought Skittles.
• Compliment Backfire: fWhip compliments Jimmy for using simple words to fit in "the Sheriff vibe" after they and Scar agree to simply call Critter City of Animalia "City". However, Jimmy misinterprets the compliment as an insult and Scar attacks fWhip with an axe for disrespecting Jimmy.
  Jimmy: Did you just called me "simple"? (starts laughing)
  (Scar attacks fWhip, who is laughing)
  Scar: Respect the Sheriff! (fWhip flies away)
  Jimmy: Yeah! Yeah, Scar!
  Scar: (shouting) OFF WITH YOU!
  Jimmy: Nice!
• Cosmic Motifs: Gem's empire, Dawn, is themed around the sun and is evidently named for it.
• Courtroom Episode: There's a couple of episodes dedicated to Jimmy suing Joel for making the Toy Barn to sell toys in his likeness over copyright infringement (of all crimes), unauthorized use of one's image, and defamation of character.
• Creator Cameo: The artist who created the artwork for Sausage's Origins Episode, Sabira^note name pronounced "SAB-ra", makes a brief cameo in the first panel of the animatic.
  floweroflaurelin: (on Tumblr) The figure in orange in the background of the first image is me!! My empiressona is canon! 😁 (…I really hope I escaped the Night of Great Purge 😳)
• Crossover: With Season 9 of Hermitcraft, no thanks to a certain purple Rift opening up near the world spawn...
• Crystal Ball: Lizzie uses a fake one (really a Sculk-textured player head in-game) for her Fortune Teller stand at the Festival of the Rift. However, even though Lizzie herself is a Phony Psychic, according to Scott and his Aura Vision, the "crystal ball" she uses gives off a soft glow of its own...
• Culture Clash: During the crossover with Hermitcraft, some of the visiting Hermits make intention to trade with diamonds as currency, but on Empires, this system is mostly left by the wayside in favour of an extensive barter system using the main export of one's own empire, which said empire has a trading monopoly over. Gem, being a member of both servers (in the Character Overlap sense, unlike False), and Pixl, who is familiar enough with Hermitcraft affairs, are well-reheased enough in both trading systems to explain this to the Hermits they come across.
• Cuteness Proximity:
  • Many of the player-characters' first response to finding Frogs in the mangrove swamp is to get distracted from whatever they're doing — usually collecting resources from the biome — to coo over them.
  • During a livestream, Joel uses a splash Revealing Potion to turn Jimmy half the size of a normal player. Every single player-character in the area^note (other than Joel, there's also Scott, fWhip, and Sausage) proceeds to spend the next couple of minutes cooing over the shocked and very ticked-off Sheriff. When this happens again during the crossover event, thanks to fWhip and Sausage, the Hermits too react accordingly (excluding Hermit-False, whose first response is attempted murder in order to pass the Tag hat in her possession to someone else).
• Distant Sequel: According to the intro of Sausage's first episode, Season 2 is set over a thousand years after the events of Season 1, and those events have become so distant that the two seasons' storylines are thus far virtually independent from each other.
  • There's still a couple of Continuity Nods to Season 1 in the series, though. For instance, in her 5th episode, Shelby uses "an old spell from the Gnomes", who had apparently disappeared thousands of years before Season 2, to create a Villager-sprite using mangrove wood.
    Shelby: Somebody's gotta keep their magic alive.
  • In spite of this, there remains a deep connection to Season 2, mainly through Pearl's omnipresence as a deified Posthumous Character and Sausage's "visions" of the past.
  • Pix's Season 2 finale explains the circumstances after the Rapture and onto Season 2: the people from the Wither Rose Alliance, Rivendell, and Pixandria migrated to build the Ancient Capital which has since fallen into ruin, the people of the Overgrown settled in what would become Chromia, the Mezaleans settled a new badlands, and the Fish People of the Cod and Ocean Empires expanded upon an affinity for stone and became Gobland.
• Doppelgänger Crossover: Thanks to the Hermitcraft crossover, as False and Gem play on both, Pearl participated in the first season of Empires, and Pix narrates the Hermitcraft Recap Companion Show, which is acknowledged by the Hermits themselves.
  • False is an odd case, as Hermit-False later claims Empires-False to be her Evil Twin and their storylines are driven by this. Shelby lampshades it when she meets Hermit-False and says she reminds her of someone she knows, and several other rulers and Hermits proceed to mistake the other server's False for their own False.
  • Subverted with Gem, who is revealed to be the same person as Hermit-Gem.
  • Pearl of the Empires-verse is a distant god in Season 2 and any resemblances between her and Pearl the Hermit is treated as entirely coincidental, though it's later suggested that Pearl from Empires Season 1 reincarnated as Hermit-Pearl and she's able to maintain a Reincarnation Friendship with Sausage in the crossover and beyond.
  • Played with for Pix, as the Hermits in turn instantly recognize him for being the Recap's narrator and troll him based on this, while Pix can only comment that "his cover's blown".
• Dress Code: Katherine and Gem's princess tea party requires everyone to show up wearing a dress, or risk being kicked out.
• Egging: In revenge for fWhip's "Thank You for Coming to My Wedding" Warden prank, Joel scatters eight hidden redstone-powered, egg-dispensing cannons throughout Gobland. It doesn't take long for the entire empire to become swamped with chickens. Since this is Minecraft, it's essentially a mechanical glitter-bomb in function and no permanent damage is done to anything except for fWhip's psyche, as he's left to clean out the dispensers for hours after the incident, and the leftover eggs and chicken carcasses for the rest of the series.
• Enchanted Forest: The Evermoore is a thick, swampy woodland filled with mangrove trees that are said to be good for containing and amplifying magic. It's also said to have cursed fog that claims the souls of travellers who don't make it out of it alive.
• Enemy Mine: Jimmy and Pirate Joe are initially at odds due to 1) being on opposing sides of the law, and 2) a trade dispute over gunpowder exports. While the latter dispute has been resolved, Pirate Joe makes plans to continue the partnership to take down Joel, their shared enemy.
• Exact Words: Several people have attempted to invoke this in Multi Tag, due to being assigned particularly tricky methods to kill people while they are It.
  • After her plan to kill Oli with a dripstone stalagmite fell through (as Oli had good enough gear to survive the fall), Hermit-False makes plans for her and the other Hermits to kill an Empires-member with a firework-loaded crossbow named "False with Dripstone" to fulfill her Tag requirement. It's subverted as that plan didn't go off with a bang as initially expected, for whatever reason, and ultimately Oli volunteers to be the next Tagged player to get killed with the old-fashioned and intended method out of sympathy, due to how difficult it is to do so at all.
  • While Scott's original plan to kill a Hermit with a berry bush resembles fWhip's, as both involve minigames played on low health and the backup plan if the Hermit playing it survives is to manually shove them into the botanical method of murder, he makes a second contigency plan by renaming his diamond sword "Berry Bush" just in case the original plans fall through. Ultimately subverted in that they do not, in fact, fall through.
• Exposition Beam: Some animals have the ability to telepathically communicate briefly with humans. So far, this list includes Dirk the pig from Animalia, Sir Piggles, and an unnamed rabbit living near the "Circle of Rebirth".
• Flying Broomstick: Witches use these for transportation. Shelby makes a passing nod to people vacuuming instead of using brooms (at least for cleaning), and jokes about using a Swiffer as a modern-day equivalent.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: While Mythology Gags to Season 1 are mostly kept to the start of the series (excluding Sausage's POV, where Season 1 events hold a pivotal role in his character arc), there are a couple of split-second references to Season 1 in some of the Season 2 finales:
  • In his epilogue, one of the locations Scott and Owen explore is a tomb-cavern with a suspiciously familiar antler mural and with gold blocks embedded in its walls.
  • When Lizzie follows the "Map of the Lost Trident" to complete her collection, the place she finds the trident in question is a coastal house built half in Mezalean style and half in that of the Prisma Palace, with azalea bushes and coral planted outside and a sign which reads "Keep Calm and Kill Horses" inside. Additionally, the chest where the trident is found also contains (among other things) an enchanted netherite sword named "The Mezalean King's Horse & Chicken Destroyer", an enchanted bow named "Twitchy little ferret, aren't you, Malfoy?", three axolotls in buckets, and a book and quill with unknown contents.
• Friends Turned Romantic Rivals: Pirate Joe and Shelby used to get along fairly well, being trade partners bordered only by the ocean, and the latter had the former's respect for having the gall to steal from him. That is, until both of them found out (through a mutual friend, Sausage) that the other is romantically interested in Princess Katherine. Even after the Love Triangle is resolved, Pirate Joe is still keen on antagonizing Shelby, at least until Joey's finale where they make up.
• Frivolous Lawsuit: Jimmy attempts to sue Joel for "copyright infringement" over the Sheriff toys in the Toy Barn, and Joel attempts to counter-sue him back for currently-unstated charges.^note For reference, it's Episode 9 for Jimmy POV, and Episode 12 for Joel POV.
• Funny Background Event: While Pirate Joe is rescuing his crew-mate Pete and settling him in Eversea, Joel can be seen shooting himself repeatedly to obtain Sheriff toys (i.e. player-heads), with his death messages popping up in the in-game chat every so often.
• Futureshadowing: In Sausage's 10th episode, he stumbles across a "Base Camp Alpha" in the Frozen Peaks biome overlooking Stratos near Sanctuary, and is immensely confused and unnerved by the grave for "Sausage" there; in earlier episodes in both his and other perspectives, several signs can be found in the Deep Dark and Ancient City. Oli's debut video, released after Sausage's episode, reveals that he built the camp, the signs were left by him while exploring the biome/structure after looting the chests, being knocked down into the caverns by an overzealous goat, and the grave is for his dog (whom he named after Sausage's ALSMP counterpart) who was killed by an accidentally-summoned Warden. Oh, and the Ender Dragon being defeated by the first episode? That was Oli too.
• Giant Corpse World: According to Pixl in the intro of his first episode, this is part of the historian-endorsed Creation Myth of the world.
  Pixl: In a long-lost age before records truly began, our world was built by Titans, beings of impossible size whose bodies fell to Earth and became the biomes we know. Their bones became the rocks, shaped into vast caverns by the arches of their ribs. Their blood ran downward into the darkest depths of the world, imbuing it with untold riches, magic, and danger; and from their fallen forms, civilization flourished.
• Hellgate: A purple crystal cave has opened up in a cliff-face near the Greatbridge, growing larger and larger over the course of days, and all that has been sent through has not returned to the world of Empires. Following the Festival of the Rift, it's revealed to be a portal, connected with Season 9 of Hermitcraft.
• The Hilarity of Hats: During the crossover event, the Hermits start a game of "Multi(verse) Tag" where a player must kill another player from the other server by a strange and difficult method chosen at random by a machine, and the Tagged player must wear a very large, off-kilter, pastel jester's hat to designate themself to be in the role. So far, the hat has gone from Grian (by Void), to Lizzie (by lightning strike), to Hermit-False (by dripstone stalagmite or stalactite), to Oli (by End crystal), to Scar (by fireworks), to Jimmy (by fall damage), to Pearl (by Warden), to fWhip (by cactus), to Impulse (by anvils), to Scott (by berry bush), to Jevin (by suffocation), to Sausage (by "Intentional Game Design", i.e. bed explosion in the Nether or End), to Cleo.
• Humanity's Wake: Not quite 'humanity' as in humans, but several sapient species have been suspected to have gone extinct sometime between Seasons 1 and 2.
  • Gnomes have seemingly gone extinct, and Shelby the Witch continues to practise what she knows about their magic to preserve it. In this case, it is justified as Shrub was already suspected to be the Last of Her Kind by the time Season 1 took place, and the species' disappearance plays heavily into the lore of the Evermoore.
  • More surprisingly, Sausage has made an off-handed comment about how he thinks Elves might be extinct on the Empires server as he's never met one there before. The existence of Elven Empires-sonas technically disproves this theory, but due to their limited impact on the ongoings of the world, the Elven population being whittled down by time and possibly other factors between Seasons 1 and 2 is still functionally the case.
• I Just Want to Have Friends: Played for Drama. Once Grumbot is reconstructed on the Empires' side of the Rift, several of the rulers conspire to prevent the Hermits from returning to their home dimension because they want the Hermits to hang out with them forever. One of these attempts includes directly covering up the Rift as a gaslighting attempt. It doesn't work, and eventually ends with the Empires rulers scrambling into the Rift after the Hermits. Talk about a crossover...
• Innocent Innuendo: A Running Gag is that whenever Joel drops off their 'Shulker child' Hermes at Sausage's place in their "joint custody agreement", Hermes' message explaining his gift has another meaning to it. For the first of many examples, Joel gifts Sausage a Protection III enchanted book with the following message.
  Hello Father
  I care about you
  Please use
  protection!
• Jolly Roger:
  • Pirate Joe's Arch-Enemy, Skeletron, uses a banner based on the Jolly Roger — a white skull wearing a red bandanna over a black background. It's somewhat justified in his case, since Skeletron is a living skeleton.
  • Zig-zagged for Pirate Joe himself.
    • The banner design Sausage made for his empire, Eversea, was a Jolly Roger flag, but Pirate Joe disliked it at first as it reminded him of Skeletron. When he confronts Sausage on this, Sausage justifies his initial design by Breaking the Fourth Wall, lampshading the ubiquity of the Jolly Roger flag as pirate iconography. Pirate Joe ends up adopting a different banner for Eversea — one with an anchor design.
      Sausage: Well, the thing is– this is the thing. This is– you know, when you look up 'pirate' in the Wikipedia, and you put 'pirate flag' in– right next to [it], this thing shows up!
    • However, in spite of his differing flag/banner design, Pirate Joe eventually decides to reclaim the skull-and-crossbones from Skeletron and incorporates them into the design of his Elytra-wings and some of his builds.
• Loony Laws: One of the Sheriff's initial laws of the Empires lands is that one is not allowed to steal or try on another person's hat. The former part is justified, given how some members of the server have attempted to disrespect Jimmy's (supposed) authority by stealing his hat, but the latter part is taken seriously by just about no one else; Scott has once explicitly questioned whether trying on another person's hat with their consent and express permission is allowed. The law has since been rescinded after a civil discussion with Joel to end the inter-ruler rivalry.
• Love Dodecahedron: Due to the sheer amount of flirting throughout the season, the only player-characters who have been spared from the horrors of the Empires "polycule" have been Gem, False, and Pix. And that is before the Hermits came through...
• Magic Versus Science: Downplayed in the Hermitcraft crossover, with Empires representing the Magic side of the equation and Hermitcraft representing the Science side. The Hermits tend to use more industrialized and technologically advanced redstone contraptions for resource farms, demonstrated most prominently by Hermitopia's mass amounts of resources. On the other hand, the Empires rulers tend to use smaller scales of production and have access to powerful magical/supernatural abilities, with False being the main exception due to being originally from Hermitcraft. It's downplayed in that while there is a mild rivalry^note In that the Hermits' large-scale resource farms posed a threat to the monopolies and bartering economy of the Empires server, the rulers and Hermits are capable at adapting to new environments when switching servers and collaborating with each other towards shared goals.
• Meaningful Name: Many of the empires have these.
  • Gem's empire, Dawn, has a name which is very indicative of its Cosmic Motifs.
  • While the name for Joel's empire, 'Stratos', means "army" in Ancient Greek, it also alludes to the 'stratosphere', a layer of the atmosphere, and Joel is (apparently) a Physical God of the skies, making the stratosphere a part of his domain.
  • Lizzie's empire, Animalia, shares its name with the biological kingdom of animal-kind.
  • The name of Scott's empire, 'Chromia', is a reference to him incorporating heterochromia into his character design^note which is, let's be honest, probably the only 'hetero' thing about him. It can also be taken as a reference to one of his eyes being colored chrome-yellow or to the word 'polychrome' (multicolored).
• Medium Blending:
  • Katherine and Sausage's backstory sequences (in their respective Episodes 1 and 9) are portrayed as artwork with voiceovers as opposed to the usual Minecraftian medium of the episodes, with Katherine's being a comic and Sausage's being a series of semi-realistic animated images. Shelby's vision of the destruction of the Gnomes' homeland is too rendered with artwork, though without a voiceover.
  • Oli's 3rd episode and Sausage's 45th episode end with blocky animations by prominent fan animator Luke_animations, straying away from its usual block game medium due to Minecraft game limitations.
• Origins Episode:
  • Parts of Scott's backstory, more specifically, the origin of his Supernatural Gold Eye, is covered in his 6th episode "Stories of the Past...".
  • Sausage's Dark and Troubled Past is covered in his 9th episode, "MY ORIGIN STORY!!!".
• Our Fairies Are Different: According to the Forgotten Fairies book that Katherine owns, the Allays are fairies with a love for helping others, who were tricked and stolen from their homeland by an evil witch and held captive by her Pillager minions at outposts. She also refers to Vexes as fairies, though their semi-mythological backstory remains unknown.
• Painting the Frost on Windows: Played for Laughs. Apparently, thunder is caused by Joel, the resident sky god, clapping his "cheeks". Take from that what you will.
• Papa Wolf: Both Joel and Sausage adore their phlebotinum child, Hermes, and refuse to take any insults towards him lightly. Jimmy gets killed for insulting Hermes within their earshot at the Festival of the Rift.
• Platonic Co-Parenting: Joel and Sausage share custody of their adopted child, Hermes. However, while the two have made some flirty comments, their relationship is ultimately platonic.
• Posthumous Character: The guardian deity over the Catacombs, later confirmed to be Saint Pearl, the Farmer Queen of Gilded Helianthia, who has Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence sometime between Season 1 and the Afterlife series. While she was Killed Off for Real in the Season 1 finale, her post-mortem, deified self is quite heavily entwined with the plot of Season 2 and the ALSMP.
• Power Glows: Magical items and beings can glow with Technicolor Magic, but the glow is only visible to a certain few with Aura Vision.
• Precursors: Pix's role as the Historian is to investigate them and their creations. Out-of-universe, he's also the one who builds the creations in question as the Game Master who focuses on worldbuilding over character-building.
• Princesses Rule: Gem and Katherine are the leaders of their respective empires, and both go by the title of Princess rather than Queen. In Katherine's defense, she has Invisible Parents who are the King and Queen of their land.
• Pyrrhic Victory: fWhip's quest to retrieve a Swift Sneak III enchanted book from the Ancient City succeeds... at the cost of everyone else losing their gear by dying to the Warden so many times that most of their best items that they brought with them despawned.
• Religious and Mythological Theme Naming:
  • Hermes, Joel and Sausage's Phlebotinum Child, is named after the Greek messenger and trickster god from Classical Mythology, and he mainly serves as a messenger between his two "parents". Both of his parents and his honorary aunt also bring him along to cause mischief and prank other members of the server. His pet cat is named 'Athena' because "she just looks kinda wise".
  • Gem's bear mount Apollo is evidentially named after the Greco-Roman solar deity, among many other aspects. Do bear in mind that Gem's empire is called Dawn.
• Running Gag:
  • Episodes being paused for the server-members to start Breaking the Fourth Wall and call whatever's happening "lore", which especially applies for Joel, or any other content creator who doesn't take the roleplay as seriously.
  • Whenever Joel drops Hermes off at Sanctuary, he almost always leaves a message for Sausage (via Hermes) alongside the gift and the child... that is, a suggestively-worded message relating to the nature of the gift. Sausage often does it back when dropping Hermes off at Stratos.
  • Tumble Town's chronic gunpowder shortage, in spite of it being its main export. More than one ruler has been motivated to start their own Creeper farm as a result of this.
• Set Behind the Scenes: Of the Breaking the Fourth Wall variety; as the resident Game Master, some of Pix's episodes depict the behind-the-scenes to other characters' lore, mainly concerning the creation of the sets in the game.
• Shout-Out:
  • In Scott's first episode, while constructing his third Nether portal with the 'water bucket and lava pool' method, he "embrace[s] the speedrunner music" and plays it over the footage in the hopes he doesn't mess it up.
  • The architectural style of Sanctuary is explicitly inspired by the movie Encanto.
  • Jimmy's horse Bullseye is named after the character from Toy Story. Later episodes involve many other content creators, especially Joel, trolling Jimmy about this by comparing him to Woody, which eventually devolves into a Whole-Plot Reference to the film.^note cc!Joel goes as far as to headcanon Jimmy's character to be a toy that doesn't know he's a toy, and yes, "headcanon" was the word he used.
  • When Sausage gifts a stack of yellow star fireworks to Joel at the end of his fifth episode, his message quotes the lyrics of Katy Perry's song "Firework".
  • While fWhip's Warden is making its way to the surface in Stratos, Lizzie blows a Goat Horn, which Pixl jokes to be her "rallying the Clans".
  • Joel's lag-inducing boat spam prank on Joey as retaliation for stealing the Stratos-sphere is lifted directly out of Hermitcraft Season 8, with Joel directly crediting Grian for the idea in his episode.
  • During the Hermitcraft crossover event, upon being invited into Shelby's house, Tango references a story of two lost kids in the woods entering a strange witch's house, to which Shelby jokingly replies that she has candy.
  • After Jevin rejects the Sun religion, Hermit-False half-jokingly calls Gem away to "fight some aliens", while both are wearing sunglasses.
  • On the Hermitcraft side, while partaking in the "Pulled Pork" Zedvancement, Oli named his pig 'Ham Solo'.
• Significant Name Overlap: Between the Season 2 and Afterlife SMP character counterparts — in a meta sense, due to being played by the same content creators, the counterparts go by the same names (or at least similar names), and are implied to have similar appearances and voices in-universe. This has caused a lot of confusion between Oli and the rest of the server; since Oli hails from ALSMP, he's inclined to see everyone else as their ALSMP counterparts rather than their ESMP counterparts, and has no clue that all the rulers on Empires are different people from his old friends. It's later implied that the two series' counterparts are connected via reincarnation, as this is the case for Sausage.
• So Proud of You: In somewhat morally dubious ways, by the nature of the characters themselves.
  • Pirate Joe says that Shelby earned his respect and made him proud by having the courage to steal from him. It's unknown if he has retracted this statement since their relationship soured.
  • When Lizzie catches Hermes building a miniature redstone and slime-block trampoline in the Critter City tavern after she left him unattended, while she's initially concerned, she also expresses pride in him being a intelligent and chaotic little gremlin.
  • During the Hermitcraft crossover, Pirate Joe expresses pride towards ZombieCleo and Xisumavoid as fellow pirates for killing him in revenge for killing their "fat parrot" Reginald, much to Cleo's confusion.
• Start My Own: Due to the chronic Tumble Town gunpowder shortage, several characters have resolved to make their own Creeper farms.
  • Pre-crossover, Pirate Joe is the first to start his own farm in Eversea, which is far more efficient than the Tumble Town one and in a more advantageous location, due to its proximity to the sprawling lands of Sanctuary as well as the Forgotten Cove. In spite of merging productions with Tumble Town as a trade agreement, it doesn't fix the situation much.
  • Post-crossover, fWhip and Lizzie eventually grow so tired of this shortage that they make their own joint farm together, for Gobland and Animalia. It also proves to be much more efficient than Tumble Town's.
• Swapped Roles: Shortly after the Hermits' arrival in the Empires world, Grian and Impulse track down Pixlriffs and narrate at him in the fashion of the Hermitcraft Recap, which Pixlriffs provides the voiceover for.
• Switching P.O.V.: Sausage's 42nd and 43rd episodes are presented in this fashion, switching between regular-Sausage and Dark Sausage.
• Trapped in Another World: Season 2 of Empires has had its fair share of isekai protagonists, so to speak.
  • This is first heavily implied for False, a Dimensional Traveler who woke up in the Empires world one day. While she started out the series biding her time until she can find her way home, she has gradually settled into the world of Empires and built a new home for herself there. The crossover reveals that her home world was, in fact, Hermitcraft.
  • Oli enters the Empires world by sailing from a "Far Side" Island after falling from Heaven in the Afterlife SMP; when he tries to sail back to the island where he landed, he finds that it was located just beyond the border of the Empires world, meaning he's unable to return to the ALSMP.
  • Exaggerated during the Rift incident; after about half of the active Hermitcraft cast (about as many players there are on Empires, for the record) crosses the portal into the Empires world, they find that they are unable to return to their home server due to complications with the Rift, which is made of purple glass on the Empires end, as well as the portal breaking on the Hermitcraft end.
  • Defied during the latter half of the crossover; the Empires rulers and Hermits quickly take notice when the Rift on the Hermits' end starts shrinking, and rush for the rulers to leave before the Rift becomes completely inaccessible.
• Weather-Control Machine: The campfire at the world spawn; putting out the normal fire with a shovel turns it to soul fire and can create thunderstorms. So far, this has mainly been utilized to obtain Creeper heads for a specific banner pattern.
• Wham Episode:
  • The Festival of the Rift, as it ends with a message being sent through the Rift into the Empires world, proving that it's a portal of some sort that connects it to elsewhere. This is immediately followed by the arrival of the Hermits from Hermitcraft Season 9.
  • Sausage's 28th episode, where one of his dimension-hopping visions transports him to the alternate Season 1 world... where Dark Sausage was banished to, thus hailing the return of Dark Sausage and formally establishing a connection between the inter-seasonal counterparts.
  • Shelby's 16th episode. While she wakes up deep in the Evermoore at the end of the previous episode, in this one, she finds a decimated mushroom field with a sign attached to an old Nether portal, saying, "We're in here, Shrub. Come find us." She immediately starts having visions of what appears to be Xornoth terrorizing the Gnomes' home world. Hence, the old Gnomes plotline from the previous season is picked up again.
  • The Hermits' return to their home world, as most of the Empires rulers decide the best course of action is to follow the Hermits through to Hermitcraft.
• Wholesome Crossdresser: Exaggerated. At Gem and Katherine's Princess Tea Party, every attendee is required to show up in a dress, or be kicked out and shamed across the server, regardless of their gender. Not only does every male server-member show up (which would be 8/13 of the main cast), but they are quite enthusiastic (or at least neutral) about it, and a couple of them have canonically worn dresses of their own volition before.
• Who's on First?: When Sausage first introduces Pirate Joe to Gem, he mistakes her presence for her having treasures and jewels due to her name.
• The Wild West: Tumble Town, ruled by Jimmy the Sheriff, is based around this theme.
• Will-o'-the-Wisp: They appear in Gem's episodes as plumes of blue soul fire, which she believes can lead her to her fate.
• Worldbuilding: As the out-of-universe Game Master, Pix's perspective focuses on this and his investigations of the Empires world and its history.

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