Winsweep: Hitman, Protector, Antagonist

Winsweep has the most complete arc on Content SMP, and it's a straight line down. Every stage is a reasonable response to the previous one, and the endpoint is a man with a bucket list and nobody to fight.

Stage one: the contractor

He debuts running a hitman service. On a server full of people with grudges, that's a business rather than a moral position — he has no side and no stake.

Then he gets attached. He learns the server's history, and having learned it, decides the place is worth protecting — specifically from RAT.

Given what the history contains, this is a defensible read. RAT had destroyed the End Portals, hidden one, run the Easter Slaughter, and accidentally caused a permanent death at Bonesburrow. Someone concluding that this person is the problem is not being unreasonable.

Diansu grants him administrative control of Bonesburrow — the settlement The Mason willed away before dying. Winsweep now has a cause and a jurisdiction.

Stage two: the injuries

Two things happen close together, and they're the pivot.

Luxintrus tears out his right eye during an episode of losing control of her body, damaging his mask. She isn't in control. That distinction matters to us and not at all to him.

Then the Airship Expedition. RAT lures Mouthpiece aboard the Freebird and blows it up. RAT and Astronyu escape. Luxintrus and Winsweep hunt him down, kill him, take his gear. Winsweep takes Rattenheim.

He wins. RAT loses everything and exiles himself to the Log Cabin.

And the victory breaks him. Plagued by the betrayal, Winsweep begins to lose his sanity, feeling he can't protect the server any more.

That's the most interesting thing about him. He achieved the objective, and it didn't hold. The cause was never really the point — the cause was the container.

Stage three: the party

So he tries to take the server properly.

The Masquerade is a plan to poison everyone who backed RAT at Bonesburrow. To get the list, he manipulates Luxintrus into naming them.

RAT crashes it, and with Luxintrus and SillviaTV kills him. Diansu dies in the crossfire — and comes back with the idea for an Oceanan world government, which he takes to Viceroy Boolean. Winsweep's failed coup is where the successful one is conceived.

Winsweep hides in the wreck of the Freebird and starts building Smilies 2 to bait Voidiable back. While he works, he hallucinates RAT and Luxintrus.

Note the first hallucination. It arrives here and it recurs at the very end.

Stage four: the bargain

The Manhunt. Zombiedwarf ambushes him; he escapes, shelters in Bonesburrow, and finds a book of coordinates in a hidden chamber.

Luxintrus catches him leaving, and the two of them follow the coordinates into Mouthpiece's Lair together — which, given their history, is a remarkable thing to do.

There he bargains for the Lesser Divinity, over her explicit warning. He tests it on a pig. Then he permanently kills Zombiedwarf and Voidiable, and leaves a compass at the Log Cabin pointing RAT and Luxintrus at the graves.

This is where the argument he arrived with dies. He came to protect the server from RAT. He has now permanently erased two people who had nothing to do with RAT, in revenge for an ambush he escaped unharmed, using a weapon he was told not to take.

Stage five: the fish

Markhett. Luxintrus hosts a festival that doubles as a trap, seventeen warden heads deep. Winsweep walks into the Vault and dies in it.

Not permanently — just humiliatingly. And that's what turns him. He starts taking her things one at a time, beginning with her pet fish, Jemmie.

The man who had a cause now has a grudge and a hostage strategy. Jemmie recurs: threatened to force her cooperation at Smilies, returned as a reward for the lie that traps him in Neverend, and finally released into the ocean by Luxintrus so he can never be used against her again.

Stage six: the sentence

He allies with Oceana as a mercenary at The World's Faire, beats Luxintrus one-on-one, and takes Markhett. FortunaEl reveals herself to him in the Vault. He works the End Portal investigation with Noxintrus, kidnaps Astronyu, interrogates Luxintrus.

Then the trap. He, Noxintrus and Talon follow Luxintrus through the third End Portal and are stranded in Neverend for six months. Killed on layer three by Grandgousiers, separated from the others, and in isolation until the end.

He comes out and immediately threatens Talon and Noxintrus into silence.

Stage seven: the vote and the win

At The Vote, he blackmails Sillvia and makes the End Portal secret public. The server votes on whether he lives or dies by Charter.

He is voted to live.

Then The Funeral: Asai gives him the Divine Dominance to permanently kill RAT and Lux. RAT and Lux build Defile to stop him.

Luxintrus sacrifices her existence to save RAT.

Winsweep wins.

Stage eight: nothing

Can Anyone Stop Me? — he searches for a rival to fill the void Luxintrus left. He doesn't find one.

The Bucket List — six months of stalling. Meeting people. Working through a list of things to do. Hallucinating Talon. Exploring the server to its fullest.

That's the ending. Not a defeat — a win, followed by half a year of a man with a god-killing artefact and absolutely nothing to point it at, walking around a server he once swore to protect, seeing it properly for the first time, talking to someone who isn't there.

He hallucinated RAT and Luxintrus after the Masquerade, when he'd lost. He hallucinates Talon at the end, when he's won. It's the same symptom either way.

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Facts drawn from the community-run Content SMP Wiki (CC BY-SA 4.0), written up independently.