DeagleDad420
kiwifarms.net
The purpose of this thread will be to try and understand what the fuck is actually going on in Tupacalypse and what is going on in Eli's head, and to ask some good questions so we can theorize better.
So, we pretty much know Jace/Tyce's motives, psyche, etc... but we know very little about Eli. He's an enigma in that his vlogging style is both far less informative and far less rambly than either Jace or Tyce's. Tyce and Jace can talk about nothing for a long period of time in ways that are very revealing. Eli does not posess that. His vlogs are always very short, nearly all of them are out of context, the camerawork is garbage, he doesn't do a good job explaining anything - etc etc etc. In order to make ANY sense of it beyond some sort of stream-of-consciousness stoner comedy, Eli's works have to be taken together as one cohesive story, because they're all interdependant in a way. He doesn't set the stage or give the audience the benefit of exposition like Jace or Tyce do. He just fucking records without thinking and lets the viewer put the pieces together.
So basically none of have any fucking clue what is going on, myself included sometimes. Even though I've had contact with him on numerous occasions, there are still fucking huge gaps that I have no idea how to even begin to fill. None of this stuff ever contradicts itself, but it just lacks obvious explanations.
BUT that doesn't mean these vlogs are vapid. Not by a long shot. They're inscrutable as fuck, a comedy version of the 36 Lessons of Vivec, but there's a shitload of information and depth here if you read/watch closely. In typical Eli/Deagle Nation fashion, none of it is actually presented in a way that makes it appear remotely legible or even believable.
But the sheer interconnectedness and breadth of Eli's crazy little paradigm of "conspiricy" does show that he has actually put effort into thinking about his situation and "mission"; even if the conclusions he arrived at were absurd, we should try to think about how he arrived at these conclusions. Watching that video was the impetus for writing all of this, because it made me realize that there's probably a nugget of coherence somewhere in that drug-addled incoherent fucking nightmare of a story.
After sitting down and re-watching all of the videos in order I think I'm finally beginning to understand how Eli's mind works a little bit better, but take this all with a grain of salt because I'm more of a Jace expert, and we don't know much about Eli.
Nonetheless I'm going to try my best because the only way I was even able to get such a grasp on Jace is by careful analysis. If any of this seems wrong/dumb, please point it out. We don't understand Eli nearly as well as we understand Jace, so that's necessary. Anyway, let's get granular with this shit.
I'm going to make my first textwall about Eli's current psychological state, to try and understand the foundation for some of his behaviors, before I get into my theories of how those specific behaviors actually came into play.
Immediately when we were introduced to Eli, we knew he was very dumb and suggestible and that he was a willing agent in Jace's insanity. I.E. he made the perfect pawn for Jace. We now know that on top of that, he's a spoiled richboy fuckup who has probably never even been outside of Massachusetts before going to Israel, his parents effectively tried to disown him at some point, etc etc - this all suggests he was very sheltered his whole life, and he really isn't prepared to face any adversity or stress.
Now, take him and place him in a foreign country which is totally alien to him. The first few videos he made were literally just him saying "Holy shit, there's actually Muslims here." He couldn't even tell the difference between Muslims and Jews (he still slips it up occasionally even now - to him they're all the same) and most of the first week or two he's just wandering around going "
this is weird" and staring at random things in dumbfounded awe and confusion. He had no fucking idea that he was supposed to even exchange his US Dollars for "Islams". He literally sleepwalked right past the currency exchange place at the airport. He was so fucking unprepared for this experience it's mindblowing.
Past that first few days, Eli begins to develop a crippling paranoia. He thinks everyone is out to kill him. This is caused by several factors all acting together:
So, why would Jace do this? Well, I THINK that - aside from the obvious objectives of "stop terrorism" - Jace is living vicariously through Eli. He's set Eli up in a perfect position, the position that he wants Stryker to be in: overseas in the Middle East, in the enemy's territory, with an impossible mission, surrounded by bad guys on all sides. To Jace - or rather Stryker - that's a perfect situation to fantasize about. It's ideal. Jace is getting off on Eli's situation by re-imagining Eli as Stryker. And the circumstances Jace has set up surrounding Eli are so fucking powerful, they are indirectly shaping his behavior so he acts like Stryker.
Think about it: Eli has become just as delusional, paranoid, and neurotic as the unmedicated, scary, "I AM COMMANDER STRYKER" persona of Jace, but he's done it in a FRACTION of the time Jace took to decline this rapidly, Eli has done it overnight. We don't know how crazy Eli was before this, but holy fuck, if he wasn't a full COMMANDER STRYKER style lunatic BEFORE Tupacalypse, he definitely is now. Just take a look at these two tweets:
Aside from the contextual clues of spelling style and Twitter handles, would you be able to guess which one was STRYKER and which was Eli? It's almost exactly the same fucking tweet. Eli is becoming the next Jace and he doesn't even realize it.
I'm not going to give Jace enough credit (or think him evil enough) to do this on purpose - he just wanted to live his fantasy through someone else, he didn't want to actually shape them into Stryker - but it is definitely a side effect. If everything in your environment is screaming at you to adapt in a certain way, your choices are to adapt or die. Eli chose to adapt.
Of course, he could have just gone to the Embassy and gone home, or called his parents or something, but Jace had already planted the seed in his mind that if he disobeyed the mission parameters, Jace would call the fucking Israeli police on him. Eli literally said "I DONT WANT TO DIE HERE" on Twitter in response to this threat. He is absolutely petrified. By the time Jace made this threat - two weeks or so in - Eli had already seen enough to become thoroughly paranoid and convinced that him "dying here" was actually totally feasible. Jace's threat hit home. Eli bought it, once again, he drank the Kool-Aid and now here we are 100 days later with a video comparable to the Hater Hitlist.
The extent of Jace's gradual brainwashing is obvious when you look at his latest video. Right off the bat, it's obvious that a lot of Eli's theories about the "conspiricy" are scaffold ed by Jace's pre-existing theories (or delusions) that have been slowly fed to him over time. Keep in mind that Eli doesn't speak Hebrew and his only social contact is Jace: he's in a really creepy stockholm syndrome/captive audience situation right now and Jace's insanity will probably make a lot of sense to him given what I've said above.
The most obvious example is the "Obama arming Mexican cartels" which Jace talked about constantly on Fact Zone, how he believes Obama is trying to give the Mexican cartels guns so the U.S. will be invaded by Mexico (Something he very likely got from the plot of COD: Ghosts) Eli echoes this entire theory verbatim without even adding any detail or bothering to explain it. He assumes the viewer is already familiar with Jace's theories so he doesn't bother (we'll see that a lot going forward) This (taken with other stuff he says) implies three things: 1. this "manifesto" was not even meant to be understood by a newcomer, 2. Eli is just so deluged in crazy that he believes Jace's conspiracy theories are self-evident because it's all he has fucking heard for 3 months, and/or 3. Eli is too lazy to explain them and thinks everything he says will be taken for granted because after all, he's a FRONTLINE JOURNALIST (and a shitty vlogger)
I want to get this on the table first before I begin getting more specific, but in my next post I'm going to talk a little more about his conspiracy manifesto video.
Some of the stuff he says is easy to see how he thinks that (james bond music because he compares himself to a secret agent, the Hamsa symbol on the shirt would easily appear to vaguely resemble an all-seeing eye if you're a sheltered, paranoid idiot like Eli and you don't know that religions symbolism like that is almost uniform) Some of it is totally fucking inscrutable because we're probably lacking information ("aryan states", the entire White Pride thing, thinking Israel is "a state for islams", the ambiguous connection between Israel/Nazi Germany) and some of it is just sheltered naivete talking (he basically all but says "I am not familiar with this currency or who the guy on the Shekel bill is, so therefore it's scary and weird") In any case I want to examine his web of insanity further, but right now I've already typed too much.
With that being said:
The purpose of this thread will be to try and understand what the fuck is actually going on in Tupacalypse and what is going on in Eli's head, and to ask some good questions so we can theorize better.
Have fun.
So, we pretty much know Jace/Tyce's motives, psyche, etc... but we know very little about Eli. He's an enigma in that his vlogging style is both far less informative and far less rambly than either Jace or Tyce's. Tyce and Jace can talk about nothing for a long period of time in ways that are very revealing. Eli does not posess that. His vlogs are always very short, nearly all of them are out of context, the camerawork is garbage, he doesn't do a good job explaining anything - etc etc etc. In order to make ANY sense of it beyond some sort of stream-of-consciousness stoner comedy, Eli's works have to be taken together as one cohesive story, because they're all interdependant in a way. He doesn't set the stage or give the audience the benefit of exposition like Jace or Tyce do. He just fucking records without thinking and lets the viewer put the pieces together.
So basically none of have any fucking clue what is going on, myself included sometimes. Even though I've had contact with him on numerous occasions, there are still fucking huge gaps that I have no idea how to even begin to fill. None of this stuff ever contradicts itself, but it just lacks obvious explanations.
BUT that doesn't mean these vlogs are vapid. Not by a long shot. They're inscrutable as fuck, a comedy version of the 36 Lessons of Vivec, but there's a shitload of information and depth here if you read/watch closely. In typical Eli/Deagle Nation fashion, none of it is actually presented in a way that makes it appear remotely legible or even believable.
But the sheer interconnectedness and breadth of Eli's crazy little paradigm of "conspiricy" does show that he has actually put effort into thinking about his situation and "mission"; even if the conclusions he arrived at were absurd, we should try to think about how he arrived at these conclusions. Watching that video was the impetus for writing all of this, because it made me realize that there's probably a nugget of coherence somewhere in that drug-addled incoherent fucking nightmare of a story.
After sitting down and re-watching all of the videos in order I think I'm finally beginning to understand how Eli's mind works a little bit better, but take this all with a grain of salt because I'm more of a Jace expert, and we don't know much about Eli.
Nonetheless I'm going to try my best because the only way I was even able to get such a grasp on Jace is by careful analysis. If any of this seems wrong/dumb, please point it out. We don't understand Eli nearly as well as we understand Jace, so that's necessary. Anyway, let's get granular with this shit.
I'm going to make my first textwall about Eli's current psychological state, to try and understand the foundation for some of his behaviors, before I get into my theories of how those specific behaviors actually came into play.
Immediately when we were introduced to Eli, we knew he was very dumb and suggestible and that he was a willing agent in Jace's insanity. I.E. he made the perfect pawn for Jace. We now know that on top of that, he's a spoiled richboy fuckup who has probably never even been outside of Massachusetts before going to Israel, his parents effectively tried to disown him at some point, etc etc - this all suggests he was very sheltered his whole life, and he really isn't prepared to face any adversity or stress.
Now, take him and place him in a foreign country which is totally alien to him. The first few videos he made were literally just him saying "Holy shit, there's actually Muslims here." He couldn't even tell the difference between Muslims and Jews (he still slips it up occasionally even now - to him they're all the same) and most of the first week or two he's just wandering around going "
this is weird" and staring at random things in dumbfounded awe and confusion. He had no fucking idea that he was supposed to even exchange his US Dollars for "Islams". He literally sleepwalked right past the currency exchange place at the airport. He was so fucking unprepared for this experience it's mindblowing.Past that first few days, Eli begins to develop a crippling paranoia. He thinks everyone is out to kill him. This is caused by several factors all acting together:
- Jace is constantly telling him to be stealthy, telling him not give away his position, telling him insane stories about how he (Jace) barely survived horrific attacks in the night, etc... remember, this is his ONLY social contact.
- There is an entire internet forum filled with people who spent the first two weeks of this shit mapping out his every move. You are currently reading said internet forum.
- His Twitter, his only other observable social contact besides Jace, is also filled with people telling him they're going to kill him, posting pictures of the hostel he's staying in, threatening him overtly, saying he's going to die, etc, etc etc...
- He already feels so clueless, helpless and confused (because it's an alien land to him) that it wouldn't be hard to scare the fuck out of him.
- NONE of the people around him are capable of telling him the truth. He doesn't speak Hebrew. There's no-one there to say "Dude, you're not being followed."
- Furthermore, given how weird he acts, it wouldn't be impossible to say that Eli is actually shunned in some way in Israeli society, given that he dresses in a makeshift Muslim burqa as a disguise (see "paranoia") and Muslims are NOT treated well in Israel - he would be looked at as either a crazy person or a filthy Muslim. The body language, the looks people give him, etc, would all inform Eli that "YOU ARE NOT WELCOME HERE."
- Eli is literally forced by Jace to connect dots that aren't even there and to publish his insanity on YouTube. If he doesn't give Jace "intel", he doesn't get enough money to even sleep in a fucking hotel or buy food.
So, why would Jace do this? Well, I THINK that - aside from the obvious objectives of "stop terrorism" - Jace is living vicariously through Eli. He's set Eli up in a perfect position, the position that he wants Stryker to be in: overseas in the Middle East, in the enemy's territory, with an impossible mission, surrounded by bad guys on all sides. To Jace - or rather Stryker - that's a perfect situation to fantasize about. It's ideal. Jace is getting off on Eli's situation by re-imagining Eli as Stryker. And the circumstances Jace has set up surrounding Eli are so fucking powerful, they are indirectly shaping his behavior so he acts like Stryker.
Think about it: Eli has become just as delusional, paranoid, and neurotic as the unmedicated, scary, "I AM COMMANDER STRYKER" persona of Jace, but he's done it in a FRACTION of the time Jace took to decline this rapidly, Eli has done it overnight. We don't know how crazy Eli was before this, but holy fuck, if he wasn't a full COMMANDER STRYKER style lunatic BEFORE Tupacalypse, he definitely is now. Just take a look at these two tweets:
Aside from the contextual clues of spelling style and Twitter handles, would you be able to guess which one was STRYKER and which was Eli? It's almost exactly the same fucking tweet. Eli is becoming the next Jace and he doesn't even realize it.
I'm not going to give Jace enough credit (or think him evil enough) to do this on purpose - he just wanted to live his fantasy through someone else, he didn't want to actually shape them into Stryker - but it is definitely a side effect. If everything in your environment is screaming at you to adapt in a certain way, your choices are to adapt or die. Eli chose to adapt.
Of course, he could have just gone to the Embassy and gone home, or called his parents or something, but Jace had already planted the seed in his mind that if he disobeyed the mission parameters, Jace would call the fucking Israeli police on him. Eli literally said "I DONT WANT TO DIE HERE" on Twitter in response to this threat. He is absolutely petrified. By the time Jace made this threat - two weeks or so in - Eli had already seen enough to become thoroughly paranoid and convinced that him "dying here" was actually totally feasible. Jace's threat hit home. Eli bought it, once again, he drank the Kool-Aid and now here we are 100 days later with a video comparable to the Hater Hitlist.
The extent of Jace's gradual brainwashing is obvious when you look at his latest video. Right off the bat, it's obvious that a lot of Eli's theories about the "conspiricy" are scaffold ed by Jace's pre-existing theories (or delusions) that have been slowly fed to him over time. Keep in mind that Eli doesn't speak Hebrew and his only social contact is Jace: he's in a really creepy stockholm syndrome/captive audience situation right now and Jace's insanity will probably make a lot of sense to him given what I've said above.
The most obvious example is the "Obama arming Mexican cartels" which Jace talked about constantly on Fact Zone, how he believes Obama is trying to give the Mexican cartels guns so the U.S. will be invaded by Mexico (Something he very likely got from the plot of COD: Ghosts) Eli echoes this entire theory verbatim without even adding any detail or bothering to explain it. He assumes the viewer is already familiar with Jace's theories so he doesn't bother (we'll see that a lot going forward) This (taken with other stuff he says) implies three things: 1. this "manifesto" was not even meant to be understood by a newcomer, 2. Eli is just so deluged in crazy that he believes Jace's conspiracy theories are self-evident because it's all he has fucking heard for 3 months, and/or 3. Eli is too lazy to explain them and thinks everything he says will be taken for granted because after all, he's a FRONTLINE JOURNALIST (and a shitty vlogger)
I want to get this on the table first before I begin getting more specific, but in my next post I'm going to talk a little more about his conspiracy manifesto video.
Some of the stuff he says is easy to see how he thinks that (james bond music because he compares himself to a secret agent, the Hamsa symbol on the shirt would easily appear to vaguely resemble an all-seeing eye if you're a sheltered, paranoid idiot like Eli and you don't know that religions symbolism like that is almost uniform) Some of it is totally fucking inscrutable because we're probably lacking information ("aryan states", the entire White Pride thing, thinking Israel is "a state for islams", the ambiguous connection between Israel/Nazi Germany) and some of it is just sheltered naivete talking (he basically all but says "I am not familiar with this currency or who the guy on the Shekel bill is, so therefore it's scary and weird") In any case I want to examine his web of insanity further, but right now I've already typed too much.
With that being said:
The purpose of this thread will be to try and understand what the fuck is actually going on in Tupacalypse and what is going on in Eli's head, and to ask some good questions so we can theorize better.
Have fun.
to start with. I think he had a similar view to Tyce (and to a lesser extent Colby) where he saw Jace as both a crazy paranoid loser with weed to share and his esteemed commander hunted by an international terrorist cell. People are more than capable of holding contradictory beliefs, especially if they spend most their time high. I think Eli could see how retarded stuff like the Tupacalaypse was, but at the same time he wanted to believe because it was better than real life and as with Tyce he will take anything -shit like internet trolls- as proof Jace is right. And he might have his own postmodern millennial paranoia that he can feed into the narrative, like Tyce and the skeleton hating liberal media.
