this page is for me more than anything else, because everything about grief says that you need to feel the emotions in order to deal with it, but grief is so hard to feel because it doesn't go away, you just jump between the stages of grief being sad and angry and guilty and even acceptance isn't relief, just an emptiness for you to fill.
i don't remember exactly when i first found technoblade, but i do remember how.
i have been watching minecraft youtubers since late 2013 but over time, i was drifting from the fandom. despite that, most of my online friends were still massive mcyt nerds (love u guys) and in 2020, i started hearing about this popular new thing called DreamSMP. I never wanted to get into it, to me, i had done my time, i watched shadow of israphel, i watched the blackrock chronicles and getting into another minecraft roleplay fandom just felt like too much effort, especially since this one seemed to mostly be happening through streams rather than videos and nothing ever fit my timezones.
i watched as dsmp grew and grew and i'll watch names and fanart and snippets of lore pop up, tommyinnit, wilbur and of course familiar ones like dream from the manhunt videos i used to watch. Still, i watched from the sidelines.
then, a school mate, not someone i was close to or even really friends but someone i wanted to know more about slipped up and showed a fanart of wilbur soot during club practice, assuming no one would recognise it, except i did.
i jokingly called them out but suddenly, it seemed like maybe watching some dsmp might help me make a new friend. i started looking around, pulling up videos of names i keep hearing, dream, wilbur, tommyinnit and it was fine, i would watch a few minutes but i just couldn't bring myself to care about any of these people. there was so much happening and i was overwhelmed by all the content. Then i found technoblade, just a simple video talking about the time his college had found his youtube channel and i remember giggling at his despair and embarrassment and he just seemed so funny and yet so relatable at the same time.
Honestly i didn't even care about dsmp anymore. i just wanted to watch more of this guy, talking about his daily life and his first world struggles dramatically. I watched his popular skywars videos, bedwars and every video just made me so happy at his stupid dry humor and i was so amazed at how this kid, (he's my age but i was watching older videos from when he was 17) seemed to see the world in such a unique way. Caring about technoblade also meant that I could actually sit through his dsmp and other livestreams and it was like nothing i had ever experienced in my life.
Techno called his chat voices, and honestly the way fandom portrays the voices really isn't too far from the truth. Watching dsmp streams genuinely made you feel like you were a part of something, the chants, the laughter, the teasing of the streamer, it was almost like being in a hivemind and it felt like nothing could go wrong. Techno would send us to hijack mcc twitter votes and anything techno asked for, we would get done. It was the best of times and i would lay in my bed, almost giddy from happiness.
It took a while, but i started becoming a part of technoblade's fandom over time. I used to draw fanart for the yogscast so this wasn't too hard to get back into, i would draw doodles of technoblade and tweet about things during the livestream and over time, i became part of technotwt. i was never a big name, lets be honest, even the silly animatics i made only ever grew my youtube channel to about 600 subscribers but it was enough for me. I remember when my one of my animatics hit 10k views and you know what, I see why techno says he would betray his country for confetti.
Then it was early 2021, dreamsmp was bigger than ever and with every giant fandom on twitter came the toxicity. My name started appearing on blocklists, my friends were receiving death threats and everywhere I looked, the general atmosphere was the same. If you liked Technoblade, you were scum, the worst person to ever walk this earth for daring to support someone so 'evil'. Even people I used to see creating fanworks for techno started saying that they wouldn't support him and people were pestering him, his friends and the people around, trying to get an answer from him. I watched as Techno gave up on twitter, switching to updating his discord status rather than tweet and it made me laugh so hard. even then, in moments where we were lost and tired and beaten down, techno had found a way to make us laugh.
i never looked away from techno, i wasn't new to drama and the things they tried to use to drag techno down just made me roll my eyes most times, but i knew this was a tough time for so many of his fans. still, the toxicity grew and the fandom shrunk. it's hard to exist in a space where your existence is hated and your notifications were full of death threats. But among the people who stayed, the sense of community was stronger than ever. Like the weeds that grew in a tornado, 2021 technotwt was small, but we defended our friends with nothing but sharpened teeth.
i gained friends in the technotwt that stayed, i would play minecraft with them and join twitter group chats. we had group chats named penogc, public enemy number one as we made light of the hate that surrounded us. We were surviving out of spite and we would donate to charities under techno's name, like a desperate sign that they could never break us. i even joined the technotwtnewspaper as an editor/writer when it first started, spending most of my time hunting down screenshots before my mental health dived and i ghosted them. I still feel terrible about that. i did get to apologise eventually but sometimes i still fear that i would be hated for it. well, the consequences of my own actions are mine to face.
When I left the newspaper was also when I left twitter. I could tell that all of the hate was getting to me and I wanted to take myself out of the equation for a bit. I needed to protect my sanity and the hate on twitter was slowly dragging me down. I still loved techno obviously, so I moved to tumblr instead, hoping to join the community there. Sometimes I regret that, sometimes I wish I stayed. tumblr was my home, where i grew up but technotwt was the family i found. I returned to twitter a few months later, missing my friends but things were different. there were many new faces to see and new friends to make, but i still miss the friends that never returned.
i was so stupid, i was so so very stupid. i'm not the most optimistic of people, i've been left behind by my closest friends enough that sometimes i go into friendships expecting it not to last. i always believed that having less hope meant i wouldn't be hit as hard by disappointment. i'm not even a child, i was 22, the same age as techno when he found out so i don't know why i was so god damn stupid. i was devastated when techno first announced that he had cancer obviously but in my brain, this was just another one of those struggles that he was going to shrug off. i dont know why or how but in my brain, that was the only thing that made sense. techno was going to raise so much money for sarcoma and maybe after he beats cancer, he would make dumb jokes about it and poke fun at the world that thought they could possibly drag him down.
i remember thinking that my lack of a reaction was something wrong with me. i got one of my technotwt friends to recommend me a sad movie and i watched it and finally sobbed but as i cried, all i was screaming for was techno to get better.
when the odds were against him, when the admins of competitions would change rules again and again just to nerf him, when people on twitter turned on him, when he was dragged into a fight with dream for 100,000 dollars, when he suffered for all of these things, he still beat the odds with nothing but wit and determination. that was what techno was. in one of his older videos, he talked about his philosophy in life and he mentioned how if there was the slightest chance that he could be extraordinary, even if it could mean failure, he would always take the chance.
the breaks between techno's uploads got longer and longer and still, i figured it was just that abysmal upload schedule he often joked about. with no content to latch onto, i also spent a little less time on technotwt, just living my own life while waiting for the next upload
i woke up to messages from so many people, people from my school, my best friends and even my online friends. checking in, offering support. my friends were texting me, telling me not to watch the video, asking me to get food first, to sit down and be safe. at the top of it all, a notification from technoblade. so long nerds. i knew, but i still couldn't believe it. I made myself some tea, all i could stomach and sat down to watch the video.
i felt empty watching the video. i didn't cry, i just sat there and i remember my brain going, oh fuck, i need to reach out to the younger technoblade fans that i know from twitter. some of them were barely 14. so i made my rounds, texting, checking in, sending love. I texted all my friends back, thanking them for thinking of me and then i opened twitter.
love. anger. devastation. there was so much grief. i had been so alone in my thoughts and here was everyone else who was just like me. people who loved his content, people who had found safety in him and people who looked up to him. everyone was falling and i was falling with them. I cried so hard. For almost two weeks, i cried every moment i was alone and since my family happened to be out of the country, i had a lot of time to cry. The stages of grief do not care for your logic. I was sad, i was angry i was empty i was in denial i was so god damn guilty.
why didn't i know better, why didn't i find him earlier in his career, why wasn't i there more, why was i so caught off guard? people online talked about how they knew things were bad, hell multiple people in my circles had been sent his orbituary days before by people trying to still drag technotwt down even then. if i had been more active on technotwt then, would i have known earlier? if i had been less stupid, would i have not believed in his words blindly? i was angry at myself, i was angry at the world i was angry at him even though, because, despite the fact, that he was so young. he was my age but he was six months younger than me and i needed these emotions to stop. it hurt so much all the time and the only thing that kept me going was the fact that i had found him at some point, that i had two short years to find his content and look up to him.
for three weeks straight, i worked on my longest animatic to exist, putting as much love and effort into it as I could. i used one of the tribute songs people had made for techno that called out to me and i made an animatic of my favourite technoblade moments and a bunch of his friends whom i was sure missed him so much too. the video was never popular, but its existence and the work i put in was so important to me. the fact that it made even one or two people cry, that we could weep together for our hero was all that mattered.
it felt like time had stopped even as people started moving on. before techno's death, i considered myself someone who enjoyed introspection but now, i couldn't be with my own thoughts for 10 minutes without crying. it was fine, there was no lack of youtube videos to consume and fill the silence. i watched old technoblade videos, and other youtubers that i used to watch. even as qsmp started, the new season of hermitcraft, again and again, new minecraft servers and youtubers popped up, gaining fame and dying down, i couldn't bring myself to watch a different minecraft youtuber. something in me feared i would forget the grief. it felt like i was constantly either distracting myself, or falling into the depths of grief and i didn't know how to be with myself anymore.
years passed and slowly, time was moving again. there are still things i can't see myself letting go just yet. my technoblade membership still sits, now at 62 months at the time of writing. most of the tshirts i own are technoblade merch and i still take part in technoblade related fan events when I can.
grief sucks. it still sucks it always sucks im so fucking tired of grieving because there is no end, there is no happy ending and i dont think the hurt ever goes away. i dont know if i want it to. but grief is something i have to face and atleast i don't have to face it alone.
i miss technoblade