Thread by @tsawac

@emshort okay. grand overview: peanuts are mostly useless, except that they are both a Original Sin whose corruption brought the first grand adversary to blaseball, and the means by which our memory of the beloved dead became the power that saved us

@emshort we don't quite know what the original purpose of Peanuts was, but it got thrown out almost immediately when site hacks enabled some players to get infinite Peanuts and also negative infinite Peanuts

@emshort this was Peanut Fraud, and caused the Shelled One to manifest; the Shelled One was a big angry Peanut who demanded our tribute, yelled at us a lot, trapped players in Peanut shells, and was in general the big bad of the Discipline Era

@emshort so players in blaseball die sometimes, and for a long time they just disappeared, not listed anywhere. you could find them by player ID numbers but it wasn't foregrounded

when we committed Necromancy (not hacking this time, but a clever twisting of the rules) that changed

@emshort in addition to resurrecting Jaylen Hotdogfingers, necromancy drew the attention of the Hall Monitor, a chthonic squid who watches over the Hall of Flame - the land of the dead

@emshort the Monitor likes to eat peanuts, and we offer peanuts to the dead via the Monitor; these peanuts are recorded in the Hall of Flame and form a sort of all-time leaderboard of dead players

@emshort for a long time this had no clear in-game purpose, it was just a way of paying tribute, and mourning, and perhaps saying that *your* dead fave was more important

@emshort BUT later on the Shelled One stepped up his game, and recruited a bunch of mind-controlled players to fight for him on a super-team that fought against the season champions. (With lots of 'you are fighting a god, actually' bonuses. Utterly wrecking them. Not even close.)

@emshort And the following season the Hall Monitor raised a team of the highest-placed stars in the Hall of Flame - the Hall Stars - to fight the Peanut

and the peanuts we had tributed to them became their Team Spirit - their hit points, effectively

@emshort in the previous game, amid many other insults, the Peanut had taunted us with WHERE IS YOUR SPIRIT

and here was the answer: all the little candles we had collectively burned for the dead, not expecting anything out of it, tiny acts of remembrance and love

@emshort we do not know if Peanuts will ever be useful again, but you can still offer them in the Hall, and people still do