Sandsverse

About

Sandsverse is a community of Tumblr bloggers who post as animal merchants with a shitpost style of text. After starting as a joke between a few bloggers in 2014, many others attempted to join in the universe, which led to the creation of a lore surrounding the subculture. The popularity of the spread lead the original members to go on hiatus. Interest in the subculture spiked after a brief Alternate Reality Game was run by the original members in February 2017.

Origin

On September 23rd, 2014, Tumblr account sandsvendor100 made its first post^[1] introducing its character, Seymour the Tapir, who sells sands. This marked the first entry into the Sandsverse.

Shortly after Seymour's debut, other blogs appeared contributing to the universe. Some of the first entrants to the universe include fruitsoftheape100, which is home of Elmer the fruit-selling proboscis monkey, fishboy100, home of a gravels and salts-selling fish, and boarofthenorth100, home of Horace.^[2]

Spread

In the middle of July 2015, there was a massive influx of Sandsverse blogs, leading to the original members to go on hiatus. According to the account behind melman100,^[3] another one of the "canon members" of the Sandsverse:

"(On July 18th), traffic started picking up immensely, and I gained a ton of followers. I don’t know what happened to start it, I think it had something to do Elmer, but there was a giant boom in vendor activity. at first a few other chill vendors like richhoneytrader100 showed up and interacted with the older blogs. after the first several hours or so of these two days it was like a new vendor was popping up every minute… there ended up being a giant influx of vendors who sort of diluted the humor of the whole thing, as most of them followed the exact same basic formula. the founders of the whole thing started talking about how weird (for lack of a better word) it had all gotten, and put the original blogs on hiatus so the activity could die down."

The massive spread of the Sandsverse led it to being a full-fledged Tumblr subculture with dozens of "non-canon" blogs^[4] posting in a similar vein to sandsvendor100. This led to the creation of a Fandom Wikia^[2][4] which tracked the blogs and the lore of each popular animal merchant.

One of the blogs that emerged during the surge, cupsnake100, started The Earth Is a Cup / Explain on July 19th, 2015.

2017 ARG / "Breach Detected"

On February 15th, 2017, sandsverse100 updated with a post that read "Evening all! It’s me, Seymour. Just eating a nice head of lettuce with my cousin Gerold, and that’s all there is to it! Thank you."^[5] The post, in particular the proper grammar and friendly relationship with the character "Gerold," whom Seymour usually berates, seemed extremely out of character for his style. He continued posting in a friendly, grammatically-proper manner, which set off suspicion in the Sandsverse universe that something was awry. In particular, Seymour continually used the phrases "17 days" and "He came early!" with seemingly little context. Elmer the proboscis monkey also began adopting Seymour's new style. On the same day, when asked what was going on, he replied with a picture of Zhdun, setting off speculation that Zhdun was who was being referenced with the "He Came Early!" posts.

Horace the Boar then posted a video, since deleted on his account, that implied an alien entity (Zhdun) had taken over the original Sandsverse accounts and was making crude parodies (shown below).

User gayscreaming^[6] uploaded an image he'd drawn documenting the events of the day. The ordeal wrapped up by the following day, as all the posters began posting in their original style. According to fruitsoftheape100,^[7] Horace had activated a kind of failsafe that eradicated the alien entity. User wronskaian^[8] summed up the events thusly:

So, to recap:
Zhdun, an extra dimensional entity, destined to arrive on March 4th, arrived tonight, 17 days early, and breached into the Sandsverse.
It then proceeded to take over all of the main Sandsverse blogs except for boarofthenorth100 and replace their vendors with hideous parodies of the originals.
Horace then detonated some kind of fail safe, apparently destroying himself while temporarily freeing the others of Zhdun’s control and allowing them to make a last ditch effort to stop him.
Wild

A Tumblr devoted to archiving the events, breachdetected,^[9] was created on February 16th.

Search Interest

External References