3rd Life | Last Life | Double Life | Limited Life | Secret Life
Note: Unless otherwise specified, all tropes pertain to the characters, not the content creators that play them.
- Accidental Aesop: Those who defy the rules/expectations come out on top in the end. Grian, the winner of 3rd Life, racked up the highest kill count on the server before turning Red; Scott, the winner of Last Life, was the only player to refuse to kill anyone as the Boogeyman, Pearl, the winner of Double Life, was a loner where most others paired with their soulmates; Martyn, the winner of Limited Life, killed the two other players in the battle by betraying both as they set up for the final battle (likely due to influence from the Watchers, the in-universe creators of the Life series); and Scar, the winner of Secret Life, wins after people thinks he won't win, due to making many enemies from having secret tasks that require him to act in an antagonistic manner.
- Alternative Character Interpretation:
- One interpretation of Scott's self-sacrificial tendencies dating as far back as Last Life is him having suffered so much in grief over his loved ones that he'd rather be mourned than mourn for others again.
- Much like the Evolution SMP, the Watchers are alternatively depicted as either malicious (as with the canonical "Eyes and Ears" lore) or having Blue-and-Orange Morality, with the latter interpretation running dominant if the viewers and fandom are referring to themselves as Watchers (as the characters were originally conceived in Evo), e.g. the fandom chanting for blood and betting on whether Jimmy would die first again, which would make for a good story but would mean more suffering for the characters.
- Common Crossover:
- With the Dream SMP, which also has a similar plot mechanism of three "canon" lives for a character by default. There's a plethora of Tumblr posts dedicated to re-illustrating scenes and characters from Dream SMP into the Life SMP structure.
- With Empires SMP. 3rd Life is already quasi-canon to Season 1 of Empires due to a canonically confirmed Reincarnation Romance coupled with creator overlap, and cc!Grian briefly visited the server during the season as a guest. As for Season 2, due to an overlap in uploading schedule with Double Life and character themes (Jimmy's empire being Wild West-themed and his character being the Sheriff of the place), AUs where Tango is present in Tumble Town, either having woken up there after dying in DLSMP or already existing as a character there, are arguably a Fandom-Specific Plot in their own right; which naturally culminates into a very heartfelt and very canonical reunion between the two thanks to the Rift connecting Hermitcraft to Empires.
- Common Knowledge: Jimmy has never once been the first death in a proper Life season. That title belongs to Scar (Third Life), Grian (Last Life), Tango (Double Life), Skizz (Limited Life), and Martyn (Secret Life). Jimmy is famous for being the first perma-death of the first four seasons and that seems to be where the mix-up stems from. This misconception is even perpetuated by the content creators themselves. On Day 1 of Limited Life, Martyn says "I bet you Timmy is so excited he's not the first to die" in reaction to Skizz's second death. On the same day, Grian also says that Jimmy was the one to die first in every previous season, but it's unclear if he was referring to perma-deaths or overall deaths. Jimmy was the first to die in Real Life, but that was a one-off, not a full season.
- Fan Nickname:
- Stemming from before the series was properly titled the Life series, many fans refer to the series as "Traffic SMP" or "Traffic Life SMP", as the colours of the life system bear a great resemblance to traffic lights.
- The Life series cast are often nicknamed "the Lifers", more commonly as content creators rather than the characters they portray.
- In common parlance, each of the seasons are shortened to their first letters to form initialisms, i.e. 3LSMP, DLSMP, SLSMP, etc. For Last Life and Limited Life, due to sharing initialisms, Last Life is LLSMP and Limited Life is given a different name to differentiate it from Last Life, such as "LiLSMP" or "LimLSMP", or "24LSMP" to represent how 24 hours to live translates to approximately 24 lives.
- Fanon: Has been relegated to its own page.
- Friendly Fandoms:
- Within the Minecraft Multiverse:
- Life SMP fans are often very friendly with other Minecraft roleplay fanbases like Empires SMP, Dream SMP and Hermitcraft due to the similarity in content and, in the case of Empires and Hermitcraft, the overlap of creators who play on both servers.note
- There's also a significant overlap with fans of the Evolution SMP (more commonly known as Evo), an SMP that ran from October 2017 to November 2018, due to creator overlap.note It helps that Martyn's POV of Last Life canonizes the Watchers from Evo to the Life series, confirming that they are part of a Shared Universe in the "Eyes and Ears" continuity.
- For external fandoms:
- Many fan animatics of the Life series are set to songs by The Crane Wives, and many of the band's music videos have at least one person announcing their joy at falling in love with them through "block men animatics".
- Sparkbird's music is fairly popular in the Life series fandom, so much that 20% of the playlists in their short "10 fandom-related playlists my songs are on"
are related to the Life series in some way. It has reached a point where they have, at minimum, watched 3rd Life from multiple perspectives as of late 2023 and even started to assign their own songs to the characters.
- Within the Minecraft Multiverse:
- Hilarious in Hindsight: At the start of every season, as with other series, cc!Jimmy runs the cast through the BrantSteele Hunger Games simulator for fun. Pearl and Martyn win in the Seasons 3 and 4 simulations, respectively. Guess who wins in those seasons of the Life series?
- Idiosyncratic Ship Naming: Outside of canonical alliance names. In the fandom, the names can be used platonically or romantically.
- In 3rd Life, Grian and Scar are called "Desert Duo" due to them setting up their base in the desert biome of the map, while Scott and Jimmy are called the "Flower Husbands" after settling in a Flower Forest biome together and being married in-universe. These 'duo names' carry across beyond 3rd Life, with the former keeping their dynamic name for Double Life and the latter carrying across to Empires SMP Season 1note .
- To fit with the "aha!" running joke of the Southlands and the fact Martyn and Mumbo are married in Last Life, their ship name is "Ahasbands", from 'aha' and 'husbands'. Some fans also refer to them as "Redwood", from 'redstone' and Martyn's IGN.
- In Double Life, Scott, Cleo, Martyn, and Pearl are called the "Divorce Quartet", "Divorce Fource", or variations thereof due to the soulbound pairs falling out with each other on the first episode and their resultant dynamic being shaped by this.
- Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Grian, apparently. A Tumblr user put together statistics of monogamous Life ships from Archive of Our Own and revealed that Grian has at least one fic shipping him with every member with the exception of Lizzie as of January 2024.
- Memetic Mutation: Has been relegated to its own page.
- Misaimed Fandom: A small subset of the fandom thinks of the Life series as a genuine competition between the creators, as opposed to being the series for fun, interaction, and content that it actually is. As a result, they may be easily annoyed at the creators' play-styles and strategies, even from an out-of-universe standpoint, and make social media posts complaining about how the players are not taking things seriously "as they should be".
- Moral Event Horizon: In the "Eyes and Ears" continuity, the Watchers have crossed it before the series even starts, kidnapping players from various worlds to throw them into an endless cycle of Deadly Games and feast on the negative emotions elicited. However, what might as well cement it is revealed in Martyn's post-Secret Life lore stream, where they forcibly keep Scar alive as the Sole Survivor, unlike the previous winners who all died at their season's end, to let him Go Mad from the Isolation in a ruined world, eventually turning a normally cheery (if devious) man into a broken husk over the course of a season and afterward. The fact they'll eventually remove the emotional impact of the season during the "recovery" period between seasons doesn't erase the fact they actually do this at some point in the series.
- One True Threesome:
- "Clethubs" (Cleo, Etho, and Bdubs) is quite loved on Tumblr. The ship began in 3rd Life and has remained popular ever since.
- The "Flower Ranchers" (Scott, Jimmy, and Tango), to balance out both "Flower Husbands" from 3rd Life and "Team Rancher" from Double Life. While there are occasional conflicts, a fan poll on Tumblr reveals that shippers are fairly evenly split and many are horrified about having to choose between the ships.
- Some fans have started to throw Martyn into the mix as well due to the Mean Gills' dynamic in Limited Life, and everything goes downhill from there.
- The Logical Extreme after Martyn is, naturally, the Tangled Family Tree/Love Dodecahedron which consists of pretty much the entire Minecraft content creation community and their OCs.
- Poly Bad Boys/Smallidarian (SmallishBeans, Solidarity, and Grian) come from the Bad Boys alliance in Limited Life. Bizarrely, cc!Jimmy has a post-canon sponsored YouTube short supporting this.
- Portmanteau Couple Name: Primarily reserved for more shippy variants of character dynamics, though they're sometimes used platonically as well.
- In both 3rd Life and Double Life, for a more romantic-coded variant of 'Desert Duo' (Grian and Scar), there's 'Scarian'.
- For 3rd Life and extending onward, Martyn and Ren are sometimes called "Treebark" based around a pun on their screen-names, InTheLittleWood and RenDog, respectively. Non-shippers typically stick to their faction name, 'Renchanting', or the variant portmanteau spelling 'Renchantyn'.
- Lizzie and Joel, who are married in real life, are called "Jizzie". Yes, really. They were the ones to coin the name. Some fans opt for alternative variations like "ShadowBeans" instead to avoid the implications of the original name.
- In Last Life, Cleo and Lizzie are known as "ShadowRot" as they're ZombieCleo and LDShadowLady, respectively.
- In Double Life, while Jimmy and Tango go with 'Team Rancher' in canon, one of the more romantic-coded duo names for their characters is "SolidariTek".
- In Limited Life, the most popular alternative to the 'Mean Gills' (Scott and Martyn) is "Majorwood", which is based on their screen-names (and by extension, their real-life surnames), but also alludes to… the Greater MCYT fandom's (and their affiliated creators') particular sense of humour. "Scottyn" is used by other parts of the fandom as a safe-for-work alternative.
