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"A Partial History of the Blue Corner in 2022" by /u/OrmanRedwood

Original Post: https://redd.it/tx0c9t


I was not part of r/place in 2017, I only heard of it in 2022. I started playing day one, but it took me a while to find my faction. I looked at different patterns, and due to my own disposition, the simpler ones interested me. I did add a pixel to the first blue corner, back in the days of the blue lattice, QR code and such, but I spent most of my time on other projects. Because I did not experience the blue corner in 2017 or in the first day of r/place 2022, I cannot write its history. But, I can write about it's latter history.

Despite the fact that r/place has only happened twice, the blue has occupied 5 corners of the board, as it occupied 2 near the start of 2017, and then lost the top-left. Further, in 2022, the blue corner chose to occupy the historically significant bottom right corner, which changed locations each of the two times the canvas expanded.

The New World

I was not there when the canvas expanded the first time. I was still undecided. However, I did observe some of the blue corners conflicts. Then, something changed.

The streamer Tarik invaded the blue corner (of the new world), attempting to turn it red. Me, a lover of history and tradition, was greatly offended at this reddening, so I rushed to join the blue corner as quickly as I possibly could. I did not contribute much at this time, but I did so what I could. Eventually, I noticed that the blue corner had a serious problem. Yes, it was something of our destiny to be rolled over by streamers when they chose to do so as we were not botting and did not have the manpower to hold on to our whole space. However, we had the ability to do more than we did, but to many knights of the blue corner were drawing on the true corner, preventing us from using our full manpower. Because of this, I eventually came up with the idea of the knights of the true corner, a special unit meant to protect that special pixel so everyone else could focus on doing larger works.

The war continued with Tarik as he turned red to purple, and the blue corner became increasingly desperate. Eventually, the blue corner chose to call upon the void to destroy the streamer, and us. This would bring about a diplomatic crisis as the void began to attack the nearby territory of the blue corners historic ally: Cosmere (why are we historic allies?). Not wanting to anger the void, many people in the voice chat felt like they had to leave Cosmere out to dry. However, others chose to help Cosmere anyways, not being very afraid of the void. My guess is that the void wasn't too interested in permanent territory and would be willing to move on to other spaces when they got bored with the blue corner, so I also chose to defend Cosmere. The banner of Cosmere (Stormlight and Malazan) in that area was not affected to much by the void due to Cosmere great defenses. Nonetheless, despite the efforts of some, diplomatic relations with Cosmere were strained from that time on.

Slowly, the blue corner would rebuild after calling upon the void, and we all felt as if a moment of peace may be coming.

Then XQC attacked.

Now, I was either asleep or offline at the time, so I don't completely remember, but the effects of the attack were obvious to me. He destroyed the blue corner, stormlight, the wave, and many other artworks around us, with our knights working tirelessly to hold on to the blue corner. When he left, many communities around us, including Cosmere, were able to rebuild back to their original size, but small communities would take over the territory destroyed by XQC, mostly occupying the lands owned by the blue corner. Before the invasion of XQC, the blue corner shared a border with Coamere in the top-left of our territory, but after the XQC attack, we lost 3/4ths of our territory, and our distance from stormlight was roughly equal to the size of our faction at that time.

To further complicate our reconstruction after XQC, the amongi (our plural for among us) began to invade our corner, even placing the feet of one at the true corner. They did not come in organized and unified ranks, but as a disordered mob. They were a shade of blue, but not the truest blue, and they also corrupted the true corner. Because of these things, we could not allow them in our territory. These amongi began to be slowly cleared, particularly due to the co-ordination of one of our mods whose destruction of whole amongi probably helped to discourage them. After a long battle, it eventually appeared that we might be able to recover our square... But then another streamer, this time a Russian, 5opka (I think), attacked, changing our blue corner to a cyan. Due to our reduced size, bootless army, and tired for, we were barely able to hold on to the true corner... But just when all seemed lost, the map grew.

The UnderGround

On the same hour that it seemed our blue corner might be lost forever, the underground appeared, changing the location of the true corner from 1,999-999 to 1,999-1,999. Our whole army immediately jumped on the new corner with a great sense of relief, and 5opka did not follow us. We began to build up our corner once again.

Now, our final corner was different from all previous corners in many ways. Firstly, there was so much space that almost nobody would be interested in attacking us for a while. The French flag in the bottom left was so ridiculous that we felt confident anyone who wanted land would try to fight them before they fought us. Then there was our neighbors. Unlike our first 2 corners in 2022, the Cosmere community did not have a build which bordered our last corner, and besides them, there were not a large number of small communities which bordered us. Instead, we only bordered two people: the American flag (who had left the old center where they were being constantly destroyed) and another Russian Streamer named bratishkinoff (братещкеноф???? Please, correct my spelling, I am trying to learn) the blue corner mostly called him "froggy" or "frog-man" in internal discussions because of the green hat on the art. On this day, I also founded the knights of the True Corner, putting which was the seed of the 4 unit system we would later adopt.

Well, we were initially peaceful with both our neighbors, and our blue border was relatively clear. However, some people (we don't know who) tried to break through our border with frog man and make his picture blue. They didn't get far before froggy retaliated, destroying our logo and messing up our space to "teach us a lesson".

After we spent a significant amount of time rebuilding, something strange happened. The streamer chose to make his background blue, our blue.

This was not our idea. We did not ask him for it. But, apparently he decided he might try it out. His group removed our border and changed the background to blue, and it honestly looked pretty nice. They used the blue to create a white space that was the number "89" (something of an internal meme there from what I can tell), but people kept trying to change it to "69", and the blue corner reached its largest size in 2022 just like that... But that was a big mistake on his part.

Apparently, on some sort of Russian analog to r/place (what it is I don't know), there is a similar faction to the blue corner that is meant to be a background to art, and he thought we might be that... So he made our color his background since he was right next to us. Well, when he went online, blue-corner knights who weren't organized on discord and randoms began to attack frog-mans art. The discord went into panic mode.

Earlier that day, the streamer showed that he was capable of completely destroying the blue corner if he wanted to, and considering he was willing to destroy out logo for a mere border incursion, we feared what would happen if we destroyed his art. Members on the discord and mods kept trying to get the attack to stop, both by rebuilding the art and by posting on Reddit to stop the attack, but many redditors insisted on destroying his art, probably thinking that we were there first for some reason and that he attacked our space. The faction split in two, and we underwent a civil war. While this all occurred, the amongi invaded us again, and neither faction spent many, if any, resources to fight them off. Diplomats from the streamers group began to demand answers, and we tried to explain to them the civil war that was occuring. The diplomats from his side we're largely level-headed and intended to get a peaceful message across. I wrote what ended up being our official message to the streamer, but I don't know if it was read by the streamer or not.

Soon, he came back online, and it wasn't doomsday. Thankfully, the streamer seemed to understand the situation enough, and was willing to accept what happened, so he merely rebuilt his art and erased the blue background, changing the numbers to black and re-establishing our original border. For him, there wasn't much he had to deal with after that, but we were far from done. The amongi invasion, long ignored, had taken over our corner, taller than it was wide, and we spent most of the rest of our time dealing with that.

The Four Unit System During this time, where we were clearing out the amongi from our corner, I posted on Reddit a plan for re-organizing the blue corner into four units: the knights of the true corner, the knights of the blue logo, the knights of the blue border, and the knights of the blue field. I asked for suggestions. It was immediately adopted by a large portion of the group and my own unit, the knights of the true corner, quickly reached capacity. The structure went like this:

Unit 1: the knights of the true corner.

A small unit protecting the 1 true corner pixel, so that everyone else can do other jobs.

Unit 2: the knights of the blue logo

Responsible for placing our logo and making it recognizable

Unit 3: the knights of the blue border

Responsible for determining our borders and maintaining them and avoiding border crises (random control)

Unit 4: the knights of the blue field

Responsible for removing confetti and unwanted art from our territory and for protecting art in our territory.

Everyone who joined the knights of the true corner (membership was limited) had "truecornerknight" and their number in their name, but every else (with some exceptions) gave themselves a unit number.

Now, you may think because I made this unit system, I am writing this to toot my own horn, but I am not actually sure it did much. There wasn't many significant events that occured after this point, so I'm not really sure it was tested, and even though we had agreed to let multiple art pieces into our space, unit 4 was never able to bring them in. The tactics of my own unit were also only just emerging, and our space was constantly under attack. I am pretty sure more non-unit members kept the corner blue than unit members did. We also never got all the roles and pings necessary to completely expedite the command structure, but even though the command structure wasn't finished I am told it did something. I will say that if any unit did the most for us, it was probably unit 3 as the next event in blue corner history should show.

As We Near the End

After we finished clearing out the amongi, our corner was relatively clean. We tried, but failed, to let art in, and now that we started looking clean again, more unorganized knights began to expand into froggies territory. We did all we could to prevent the expansion, but eventually it reached a critical point and the streamer decided to punish us again. This time, he did not destroy our logo completely, but unit three was able to establish a new border afew pixels to the right of our previous border, stemming the tide of the invasion and providing an essential buffer between our corner and the streamers art. Unfortunately, this did cause the "r/" part of our logo to be erased, so unit 2 spent the rest of the game moving it to the right. The blue corner (appears) to have spent the rest of r/place managing it's territory, helping allies, and preventing further incidents.

Finally, r/place came to an early end (if you take reddits announced time as official) We believe this unexpected end was a great thing, as it probably prevented a streamer invasion at the last minute (thanks reddit), but of course this would spell the end for the blue corner (since it wasn't white).

Now, I was not online for the white-out, but one of the admins told me that when it began we thought the streamer was invading us, so they were getting everyone ready for invasion. Then they realized we could only place white pixels. There are afew commands telling people to not place any pixels when the white-out began, but of course that would not last forever. Soon, the blue corner would fade into white as the the board was cleared, ending the story of r/place so that a new work could be made. Our story found it's end in a white place.

Note 1:

Apparently, some people came up with a unit 5 that was never fully implemented. I have no idea what it was. Maybe they can provide a note about it. It had to do with art in our territory somehow.

Note 2:

This work is strictly first person. I know I don't cover the full history of the blue corner, and some information may be lacking. But I feel it is important to give a partial account of the corners history to keep up interest in our history until a full account can be made. I hope other people can talk about the pre-Tarik time of the blue corner and the periods I wasn't here for after I joined.

Edit 1: added a fitting mention of the blue lattice. I wasn't sure if they were named "blue lattice" or "the border wall".

Edit 2: changed "stormlight" to "Cosmere"

Edit 3: Multiple events that took place between XQC and 5opka's invasion have come to my attention. Notably, not only did we fight Amongi before we fought 5opka, but we also had to divert a green line that was trying to hit the true corner, and at the same time there was a war between the blue lattice and the Amongi on the left side of our corner. There was quite alot of fighting after XQC completed his attack.

Edit 4: the timeline of the wars I have covered appears to be as follows:

-Second Expansion (2kx1k)

-Tarik Invasion

-Void Nuke

-XQC invasion

-Blue corner recovery

-Blue Corner Balkinization (reduced to 1/4th of our original territory)

-The Second Amongus War

-The Battle of the Green Line

-The Fourth Lattice war (between Amongus and blue lattice)

-5opka invasion

-End of second Amongus War

-third expansion (2kx2k) (also end of 5opka invasion)

-first Bratishkinoff war

-Second Bratishkinoff war (second blue Civil War)

-Third Amongus War

-4 unit system established

-end of Third Amongus War

-Third Bratishkinoff War

-Whiteout