Fanon / Empires SMP

Due to the nature of the work and the medium, all spoilers are unmarked on this page.

Due to being a fairly large fandom spanning multiple social media platforms, it's inevitable for several popular fan interpretations of the Empires SMP to pop up.

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

General

Worldbuilding

• Several popular fan interpretations delve deeply into the worldbuilding of the Empires world, crafting intricate cultural details (like Crazy Cultural Comparisons) and sometimes even entire Conlangs for each of the empires. This is typically more prominent in Season 1, where most of the empires have a pre-established history (unlike Season 2).
• Branching off of the conlanging and historical side of the fandom, there are a number of fanfic writers who decide that the canonical Eternal English is overrated and defenestrate it from their continuities altogether, instead implementing realistic Language Drift into their headcanons and stories.

Other

• Even though he isn't a member of the server at all, if he appears in a fan-work, Jack Manifold is almost universally portrayed to be living in whatever empire Scott is ruling over (especially in Season 1), mainly due to their content creator counterparts being house-mates for a period of time in real life.

Season 1

General Dynamics/Multiple Characters

• Many character relationship dynamics were common throughout fandom interpretation, such as Rose-blings (Gem and fWhip being siblings, as both are redheads whose empires are closely allied with each other) and Sea-blings (Jimmy and Lizzie being siblings), both of which have since been canonized.
• Among the Rose-blings, it's not uncommon to see them being depicted as Half-Identical Twins, occasionally with one (or even both) of them being transgender. This is supported by cc!Gem saying that her character is the same height as fWhip's character, matching because they're twins.
• The Rivendellian Siblings:
  • Popular interpretation in the fandom goes that Scott and Xornoth are twins, even if there is no canonical evidence for this outside of sibling-hood. It's possible that the headcanon is rooted in the two characters being voiced by the same content creator.
  • An interesting trend is the idea that at least one of the two is not going by their birth name, due to the Aerith and Bob situation in the source material. The reason behind this depends on the fan-work, which can vary from cultural reasons to one or both being transgender.
• It's common belief that the Sea-blings experienced a growth spurt during their transformation from their human-esque to demigod forms, with Lizzie experiencing the growth spurt during her canonical transformation, growing from an unknown (but presumably still tall) height to her canonical 10 feet. Similarly, it's not uncommon for fans to depict Jimmy as much taller than his canon height of 6'5", especially after experiencing a transformation of his own (which never happens in canon).

Character-specific

• While Aeor the giant stag god is canonically a God of Good, his limited presence in the plotline outside of the backstory allows for diverse interpretation.
  • While there are some fan depictions of him who are benevolent and kind as hinted in canon, others take him to be a Well-Intentioned Extremist-type who may or may not be benevolent at heart. The latter interpretation often goes hand in hand with headcanons in relation to some form of religious trauma.
  • Even less favourable depictions of him tend to involve a heavy dose of Written by the Winners in the canonical myth-books, and/or portray him to be selfish and petty enough to keep the cycle of the champions going at the expense of said champions… especially considering all canonical iterations of the champions are siblings.
• In canon, Joel doesn't believe in Xornoth's existence, with the meta reason being his content creator counterpart's "lorephobia", so to speak. Some fans have taken to explain this as magic straight-up malfunctioning in Joel's presence, which may or may not be a supernatural ability in its own right, and if it is a power, it varies by the depiction if Joel is aware he has this power.
• After the release of Empires: the Musical, many fans have decided to honour Lizzie's last request as the Ocean Queen by incorporating her legacy into the server mythos between seasons. This can range from her final records being rediscovered by archaeologists and historians, to old legends being told about her and her history.
• Due to Pix disappearing just before the season finale, fans often take it to mean that Pixandra survived the Apocalypse How and Pix was left to mourn the losses After the End.
• Sausage is sometimes portrayed as Childhood Friends with the Rose-blings or even their sibling or cousin in some fan-works. If not them, then he would typically have this dynamic with Pearl.
• Scott, being one of the more lore-heavy characters, gets his fair share of popular headcanons:
  • Many fan-works depict Scott as a Winged Humanoid, with his snowy owl Elytra wings being actual wings.
  • Some fans additionally give him actual deer antlers, even though they only manifest as an optional headdress in canon. The most common explanation for this is that either the headdress somehow fused into his head after he found it, or he started growing them after finding them. An offhand comment from Sausage in canon, saying he doesn't want to get gored by any antlers for kissing Jimmy once, further supports this depiction.
  • In terms of backstory:
    • Multiple fanfics have speculated that prior to Xornoth's corruption, Scott may have been a Rebel Prince who rejected the etiquette of royalty, and was not actually trained in ruling before Xornoth's corruption into evil, i.e. being the Foolish Sibling to Xornoth's Responsible Sibling. The latter is rooted in the fact that he's the younger sibling and thus, in popular interpretation, not directly in line to the throne, with even occasional jokes that he was meant to play trophy husband to whichever ruler he might have ended up marrying before everything went out the window.
    • A not-unheard of alternative to the above is that Scott was determined (or designated) to be Aeor's Champion from the start and was raised into rulership, while Xornoth was cast aside and demonized to the point of Then Let Me Be Evil.
    • A fair few fan-works speculate that Scott ascended to the throne as the equivalent of a teenager or younger. Although there was little canon backing to this in the initial series, Empires: the Musical dubiously implies it through a one-off line about how Xornoth went to "Demon High School".
  • Personality-wise, Scott sometimes gets a dose of Adaptational Seriousness into having a Sugar-and-Ice Personality and generally following protocol and etiquette (often having been trained to be this by older, stuffier "advisors"), though he's more of a mellow and friendly Stepford Smiler with an occasional silly streak in canon.
• The jury is still out on whether Scott and Xornoth's parents were kind and loving, or strict Well-Intentioned Extremists, or downright neglectful and/or abusive. Fan depictions of them tend to be one of the three, sometimes with the second and third variants used in conjunction, though the little we know about them in canon seems to lean towards the the first option.

Individual Empires

• There is a general tendency for House Blossom to act like a Fictional United Nations through its relative pacifism and alliances with most of the other empires, and "House Blossom meetings" are common enough in fanfiction to be a Fandom-Specific Plot framing device in their own right à la World Conferences in Hetalia. That being said, in canon, while Katherine has made plans for such an alliance to exist, it only happens towards the end of the series and not from the start, and even with that, few of the rulers actually respond to her recruitment riddle test.
• Originating from a popular fandom Discord server, the idea of "Elven Courting Rituals" involves killing one's target of affections in a show of strength and capability, because "infinite lives means wierd shit like that is bound to pop up" [sic]. Naturally, the idea snowballed from there and has since become fairly common on the Season 1 Flower Husbands shipping side of the fandom.

Season 2

General Dynamics/Multiple Characters

• Popular depiction goes that Pix and Scott have some sort of Order Versus Chaos rivalry, with the former being the methodological, scholarly archaeologist-historian, and the latter being a tomb-robbing "collector" who likely couldn't care less for excavation protocol, which would put them at odds against each other. In Season 2 canon, there has been an incident where Scott robs Pix's museum for "adventure collectibles", including his beloved deepslate emerald ore block, but beyond that, it hasn't escalated to a full-on rivalry just yet.

Characters-specific

• The most popular design traits for Hermes is a blond child with a purple streak in his hair and purple eyes, due to his in-game appearance of having a Shulker head, while the dyed hair streak is meant to match Joel's. Alternatively, he may have brown hair instead to match both of his fathers. The blond interpretation is later merged as Ascended Fanon when the animated segment of Sausage's 45th episode depicts him as such.
• Several fan-works depict Joel of Season 2 to be the same character as his Season 1 counterpart who ascended to godhood somehow and chose to distance himself from the events of Season 1 out of grief and/or guilt. Although this is arguably jossed by Joel the content creator at the start of the series, who claimed the Mezalean king suffered from Death by Despair off-camera at the end of Season 1, these fans tend to take this statement to be a case of That Man Is Dead, i.e. it being Metaphorically True as opposed to literally true.
• At least as of the start of the series, although Pix is not meant to play a large role in the plot, his character is often interpreted to be either an immortal prophet or spirit of sorts who remembers the events of Season 1, or an Unfazed Everyman archaeologist-historian who gets wrapped up in the chaotic world of gods and mortals while trying to write a thesis.
• Scott is often drawn with long hair, sometimes tied into a long braid. It's a popular enough headcanon for the content creator to explicitly joss the design; the character canonically has short hair.

Individual Empires

• There's a lot of speculation that the mesa Tumble Town is located in used to be where Mezalea once stood, or its people are descended from Mezaleans in some way. The latter interpretation is tentatively confirmed in Pix's Season 2 finale.
• In a similar way to the above, there's much speculation that the swamp the Cod Empire occupied eventually became the Evermoore. It's eventually jossed, given the Evermoore is revealed to be the Gnomes' homeland.

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