Serverblight

A player named dicksalot (real name Aaron) was playing a normal Team Fortress 2 casual game but stumbles upon a seemingly empty idle server from the first stage of Thunder Mountain he loads up. What he didn't realize was that something was lurking inside this server, and soon it begins to spread throughout the rest of the game, with the goal of assimilating everyone who encounters it...

Tropes for specific episodes should go on the Recap pages.

Provides examples of:

• Achilles' Heel: The entity can only mimic what it's heard and imitates those it has assimilated, which gives an easy tell to those infected by it. It briefly figures out how to bypass this weakness in the third installment, by selectively using what it heard of Matt's voice after it entered the server to fool Aaron, but it first gives itself away by repeating Matt's "What?" line three times unable to change the inflection. It also appears to be bound by the rules of the game, as it is unable to do anything about kill barriers, such as those found at the bottom of cliffs, and fall damage and the player's weapons can still harm it and its proxies.
• And I Must Scream: The players assimilated by the Serverblight aren't "gone" per se. While heading to the UFO pit, Aaron and Matt encounter JonyDany12 from the previous episode; his leg is grotesquely extended to the RED Team's spawn room, but he's still alive and somewhat conscious as Jony questions if he's in Heaven and wonders why it's so cold due to laying in the snow. Aaron tries to put Jony out of his misery, but he's spooked into running when the Serverblight emerges from the spawn room. The creators later uploaded two images to the channel's community tab: one showing Jony and another depicting a fishhook on a line. "PUPPET" confirms this, being told from the point of view of a player who has been assimilated. Unlike most examples, it's implied that they still have some degree of control over their body. However, they have no way to prevent the Body Horror that is inflicted on them and are tortured into compliance by the Serverblight, which seems to take sadistic pleasure in crushing their resistance.
• Ankle Drag: In "Awareness", the Serverblight grabs gods_god by the ankle on the Doublecross bridge, pulling him down to his certain death and leaving Nexos all alone.
• Anti-Escape Mechanism: When the Serverblight takes over a server, players cannot manually disconnect nor use killbinds to escape. There are certain conditions that a player must achieve in order to disconnect from the game: either dying in an area it can't access (such as kill barriers or areas out of bounds from the map) or completing the objective for the current game. It is currently unknown if the entity can stop a player from escaping via Alt+F4 or turning off their computer or router as while Matt before being assimilated does suggest the former option to Aaron, Aaron is either too paranoid or understandably too panicked to risk trying while being chased down by his assimilated friend and the other proxies as he makes a desperate dash to the UFO pit's kill barrier. A rare deviation from these rules is seen in "Migration" where it lets JonyDany12 disconnect, but in doing so, gives the Serverblight the ability to exit the server and spread across other player-filled servers.
• Anthology Series: The series frequently alternates between the story of Aaron as the primary protagonist, and an anthology of episodes following other random players and their encounters with the Serverblight, usually featured as one-off protagonists.
• Arc Words: "Why can't I disconnect?" (or some variation thereof), used to announce the Serverblight's presence in the server, as players are unable to leave the game unless they jump into an out-of-bounds area or win the match.
• Bait-and-Switch: The beginning of "Awareness" goes this way, with gods_god and Greymatter talking to Nexos, who is weirdly quiet and, when found by gods_god, he turns around slowly to look at him, for a moment implying that he was a proxy before being swiftly revealed that he just couldn't find the button to activate voice chat thanks to his inexperience with playing Team Fortress 2.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: Killing yourself is the best (and usually only) way to escape the entity. However, it seems that you must also make sure your body is inaccessible to the entity. This is usually accomplished by throwing yourself off a cliff into a kill barrier.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • In "Awareness", Nexos narrowly avoids getting assimilated by the Serverblight and successfully escapes Doublecross after capturing the Intelligence. However, gods_god and Greymatter don't make it, while the map resets with the Severblight still in it. The video ends right as two more players enter the server, unaware of the horrors awaiting them.
  • As a parody of the first episode, "A HAUNTED HALLOWEEN SPECIAL" ends in a more funny note, with pibble 2 avoiding assimilation thanks to his internet connection failing as he was being perused by a very pissed off Serverblight, but still, there's a very high chance that the other three uninfected players that were still on the server (пивной грузовик, Yourmom.com and Great Glue) could have been taken afterwards.
  • In "Manipulation", SailerMan is revealed to be Evil All Along, and tries to sacrifice both Aaron, and four fans of his, to the Blight for the purpose of using their assimilations to become rich on YouTube. While his plan successfully dooms three of his fans, which included Nexos, to the fate of a proxy, Aaron and the last fan, Rubicon, avoid that fate thanks to the surprising return of Breadolphin, who decides to join Aaron in his mission after previously rejecting the offer in "Reflection".
• Body Horror: The unknown entity that lives on "Empty" servers consumes player corpses and adds them to a growing amalgamation of... things. This all gets elaborated on in "PUPPET" from the perspective of an assimilated Sniper player. His monologue gives a lot of details about not knowing which body parts are truly his, and feeling them stretched, mutilated, and longer than they should be.
• Body Motifs:
  • Hands serve as the Serverblight's motif. The first glimpse we get of the Serverblight is a six-fingered Heavy hand and shots of it often focus on its elongated hands and Creepy Long Fingers reaching out. The motif gets even stronger in the third video, where two of its victims have hands emerge from their mouths and even more in the fifth, which ends with an assimilated Heavy’s hands reaching out to cocoon and assimilate a helpless Spy. In "Conviction", SAVIOR, an insane victim of the Serverblight who still retains some of his mental wherewithal, note how the extention of Proxies' fingers in his words resemble the blooming of angel wings
  • Faces serve as the sign of when things start to go downhill to the players, as the moment the camera focuses on the players' faces up close, we're not long to expect an imminent and gradual Synchronization of the players' expressions into their player models, and soon enough they're bound to hit trouble. Starting in "Awareness", faces also become a secondary motif associated with the Serverblight, specifically multiples of multiplied heads all clipped through each other.
• Breather Episode: Compared to most episodes of the series, "Doubt" is this, it's about Aaron/dicksalot trying to warn players about the Serverblight's existence and nobody believing him, and even the Serverblight showing up in the server is surprisingly pretty tame as it's not here to assimilate anyone... but to just mess with Aaron using CLASSIC for whatever reason.
• Broken Record: Two of them are uttered by the Serverblight using the words of its victims:
  • "I'm having so much fun!" as GUILLIESUIT's corpse is attempting to break his own head open. This seems to have been intentional as a way to make curious/confused players come searching, as JohyDany12 expressing horror and confusion in the chat upon seeing this sight causes it to stop and its main body to charge out of hiding.
  • "we go together" as scubamaster96 is overtaken and begins to turn on the main duo. Due to what the Serverblight does, it becomes a very topical and fitting mantra for the Serverblight to make him repeat.
• Butt-Monkey: Played for Horror. Of all the classes the Serverblight has assimilated, Heavy players tend to be the most common, due to the fact that Heavy is the slowest class in the game and thus flat-out incapable of outrunning it like other classes are. And most Heavy players aren't aware they're in danger until it's too late...
• Canon Discontinuity: Per the description and Two Idiot Germans' pinned comment on YouTube, "A HAUNTED HALLOWEEN SPECIAL" is non-canon, serving only as a parody video where the creators poke fun at themselves to celebrate the series' anniversary.
  Solomon: You didn't think this was actually canon, right? ;)
• Celebrity Paradox: In "Doubt", soil dismisses dicksalot's claims as "ricter[sic] overtime slop". This is a nod to Richter Overtime, a YouTuber who reviews content based on Valve games and who gave the series one of its first big popularity boosts, but since he has already made a video discussing Serverblight it creates an intriguing recursion and raises the question of whether the video exists in-universe.
• Creepy Long Fingers: Often a key mark of the Serverblight, if it shows its horrifically distorted fingers, it usually signifies things rapidly going downhill for any hapless player, as they're about to be caught. Syrenix's avatar as he's being assimilated by the Serverblight starts growing said elongated distorted fingers as the process completes.
• Creepypasta: Instead of being fully animated, some episodes (designated as "Serverblight Stories") are instead told entirely through text and audio (with some still-image visual aids) in the style of a classic creepypasta ostensibly posing as an internet post of some kind.
• Developing Doomed Characters: Several installments begin with the players simply having fun playing a normal game of Team Fortress 2 before they encounter the Serverblight, allowing the audience to get a feel for their personality and how they play the game (e.g. Hector0n is a reckless battle Medic, Breadolphin is a Dead Ringer/Ambassador Spy who nonetheless likes to get a little silly, such as when he reciprocates a killbind from a Scout player).
• Downer Ending: So far, the closest any installments have ended on a positive note are "Conviction" and "Manipulation", but they both qualify as a Bittersweet Ending. However, things get progressively worse.
  • "PUPPET" is told from the perspective of an assimilated player so he's doomed from the start, but his revelations further highlight the horrific nature of the Serverblight. Its victims are still alive to an extent, and it takes immense pleasure in crushing their will as it uses their bodies to perpetuate the infection.
  • "PROXY" is told from the perspective of a friend of one of the assimilated victims, so things are already dark from the start, but the ending is not better. The narrator reveals that, since the day his friend Marc/Sigismund0 was assimilated by the Serverblight, not only the thing has been harrassing him through their Steam DMs in an attempt to make him go back to TF2, but also that he has been suffering from terrifying hallucinations since Marc's assimilation, implying that the Serverblight's influence is starting to significantly affect the real world.
  • "Doubt" ends with Aaron's warnings about the Serverblight being dismissed by JAGGED_X and Soil as "Creepypasta slop" before the Serverblight itself sends CLASSIC to the server to taunt Aaron, freeing the poor man from its control long enough for him to whisper a cry for help before he gets killed by one of the trains on Well.
  • "CONSUMPTION" is essentially SAVIOR's origin story, so it ends up with the Foregone Conclusion of him being assimilated by the Serverblight before joining forces with it under the delusional belief that the Digital Abomination is an angel, and that it has turned him into one of God's prophets.
• Driven to Suicide: The Serverblight prevents anyone from leaving the server; disconnecting from the menu doesn't work, and killbinding won't work, either. The only way to escape short of completing the map's objective to end the current game and force a server reset is by killing yourself in-game, but you have to do it in a specific way by dying in an area where the Serverblight can't get to your body. A RED Scout named "directionz" lets Aaron headshot him, and a RED Engineer named "GUILLIESUIT" uses Aaron's Tribalman's Shiv to commit suicide. However, they still couldn't leave, and the Serverblight later assimilated their bodies. So far, the only proven way of leaving the server and preventing assimilation is by jumping off the edge of a map and hitting the death barrier at the bottom, like the cliffs at Stage 1 of Thunder Mountain or the UFO pit at the Excavation Site of Snowycoast. This is how Aaron successfully escaped both times, as he managed to jump off the map and die at the bottom while the Serverblight and its "offshoots" couldn't follow him.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: "PUPPET", because of being the first video that is part of the "Serverblight Stories" sub-category of the series, is the only one of them who doesn't have the "A SERVERBLIGHT Story" subtitle on it, instead having "A Team Fortress 2 Creepypasta" as its subtitle.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: Aaron explains about how the Serverblight baits and mimics people. All Matt responds with is a confused “What?”. Aaron explains some more, he gets the same response out of Matt. Aaron then explains how it mimics voices it’s already heard. The same exact “What?” comes out of Matt for the 3rd time; Aaron finally puts the pieces together.
• Expy: The Serverblight is primarily influenced by SCP-610, the Flesh That Hates. Both are highly infectious, eldritch organisms that spread on contact, and they don't need the host to be alive so long as they have access to the body. Once infected, players will aggressively attempt to assimilate others, much like those infected by 610. While containment is possible in theory, so long as no players enter the server it's inhabiting, it's difficult to escape once one joins due to the specific circumstances players have to follow to escape, which isn't unlike the special containment procedures used by the Foundation. The only real parallel missing from the Serverblight is that there doesn't seem to be any real deeper meaning to its existence, as SCP-610 was eventually revealed to be an extension of the morally-grey religious society known as Sarkicism or the Nälkä. Instead, the Serverblight, using SAVIOR, invents a sort of Religious Horror element on its own as a lure and plays the role of a god desiring worshippers, which itself is an inversion of the relationship between Sarkicism's main deity Yaldaboath and the religion's followers.
• Fate Worse than Death: Explained during "PUPPET", which features a Sniper player’s inner monologue detailing what happens to the consciousness of the assimilated. Being trapped in a state of purgatory and being helplessly forced to watch your in-game body be used. All the pain is felt, including mutilated stretched limbs, feelings of other bodies attached to yours, and the burning of pixels. And all he can do is scream out for nobody to hear.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In the first episode, Breadolphin jumps off a cliff and then promptly disconnects, which is one of the only known ways to escape the Serverblight.
  • Also in the same episode, directionz nods his head in affirmation just before dicksalot shoots him, indicating that players on the same server as the Serverblight can move in ways they normally can't.
  • In the third episode, there are small hints that reveal Matt was assimilated after attempting to melee directionz. You might remember that directionz was the very same Scout from "The Empty Server", meaning there's a good chance he’s carrying the Serverblight. When Aaron finds him, Matt's arms are very subtly jittering and the voice chat marker above his head is off-center and not synched with his voice, staying active for just too long after he stops speaking. From then on, he's unusually calm in the face of the horror unfolding around them, his face barely changing at all and rarely in focus by the camera while Aaron's Soldier avatar is emoting constantly, and a sharp-eared viewer will even recognize that he's reusing voice lines in the exact same intonation.
  • Also, in the third episode, as Aaron and Matt run towards the UFO pit to disconnect, a health pack and a ammo crate are shown respawning in the background as they pass by, despite the fact that, at this point they should be the only remaining human players in the infected server. This is the only hint towards the reveal in "PUPPET" that there was a third uninfected player still stuck in the server, who had kept themselves hidden from everyone via the Spy's watch.
• The Game Plays You: The longer a player spends in a Serverblight-infected server, the more they'll synchronize with the game, to the point where they start seeing themselves in it and their chat messages become mouthed by the characters they're playing. Eventually this becomes so strong that the player won't be able to look away from their screen. Another way of transmitting this phenomenon in an infected server is via healthpacks.
• Genre Throwback: In many ways, Serverblight is a pastiche of many different "haunted video game" creepypastas and urban legends from the 2000s and 2010s reinvented for the modern day. It's the story of some kind of Digital Abomination infesting Team Fortress 2 servers and slowly learning how to perfectly mimic humans, all told through various different eyewitness accounts and without a lot of recurring characters.
• The Good, the Bad, and the Evil: With Manipulation, the series is developing into this. We have the good with Aaron trying to get a faction to combat the Serverblight and save those assimilated, SailerMan as the bad, who simply wants to profit off the Blight even if it gets his fans assimilated, and of course, the Serverbligh being the evil, who simply wants to assimilate everyone who plays the game.
• Halloween Episode: "A HAUNTED HALLOWEEN SPECIAL", if you couldn't tell from the name, was released on Halloween 2025 and takes place during Team Fortress 2's annual "Scream Fortress" Holiday Mode event. The map featured in the video is Gorge Event, the Halloween Mode version of the normal Gorge Attack/Defense map.
• Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesday: The series begins around Halloween when the Serverblight first makes itself known.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Most of the mainline episodes follow a naming scheme of ending with "-ion" ("Assimilation", Reflection", "Conviction", etc.)
• Imposter Forgot One Detail:
  • The entity attempts to take dicksalot off-guard in the first episode by taking the form of a Heavy and hiding most of its body behind a doorframe, but even if GUILLIESUIT running off in a panic at noticing its approach hadn't tripped alarm bells, the visible Heavy hand has six fingers and the "Heavy" uses a distorted voice line ("Come over here.") belonging to the Medic.
  • Aaron may have realized that the entity already subsumed his friend, but what solidifies it is that when mimicking, it misplaced the voice chat icon off center of its head while leaving it up too long after speaking for Aaron to see it.
  • When Nexos taunts at Sigismund0, the Serverblight taunts back, albeit using the Scout's default melee taunt (mimicking Nexos' own taunt) instead of the Soldier's. Even if it wasn't already the wrong character's taunt, the Soldier still has its rocket launcher equipped instead of its melee.
• It Won't Turn Off: It's impossible to disconnect from a server the Serverblight is occupying once you've entered. The only way for a player to escape at this point is to kill themselves by dying in a way that takes them off the map, such as jumping off a cliff on Thundermountain or Snowycoast or ragdolling over the fence near Sawmill's spawn. This means the Serverblight is especially deadly on maps where it's impossible to do something like this, such as Dustbowl. It's also possible to escape by getting the server to change altogether via ending the match, but that requires capturing the objective, which is extremely slow (and the Serverblight even seems to be aware of this and knows how to stop it, as seen in "Assimilation". Nexos has more luck with this tactic on Doublecross, a Capture the Flag map, since you can't physically block people from capping the intelligence outside of killing them).
• Logical Weakness: The entity is seemingly forced to conform to the rules of Team Fortress 2, except for its ability to prevent disconnecting. TF2 being a Hero Shooter, this means that the Serverblight largely relies on psychological warfare to stop opposite-team players from shooting its proxies to death. An even more effective tactic is kicking its proxies via the bot-prevention voting system, but this is by no means a permanent fix, and may even have inadvertently helped the Serverblight spread; scubamaster96 returns in "Assimilation" after being kicked in "SERVERBLIGHT". It's also hinted that the entity can't outright prevent the current game from being ended, thus allowing players to escape via disconnect, if some player(s) win the game through the intended means of capturing the objective as attempted by Syrenix and later successfully proven by Nexos. This is, of course, dependent on which game mode is being played due to the differing means (and specifically differing speeds) of capping said objective.
• Media Transmigration: Played for Horror. Players on the same server as the entity gradually begin to behave less like characters in a video game and more like real people, being able to move and emote in ways the normal game characters can't.
• Medium Blending: Most of the story takes place inside of TF2 itself (represented by Source Filmmaker animations), but there are certain scenes that instead take place in live-action to represent things happening outside of the game, like Syrenix's death or Aaron going to check on Matt's apartment.
• Mood Whiplash: Played for Horror; seeing as this takes place in a multiplayer game, people's usernames aren't exactly going to gel well with the horror angle, with the main character being known only as "dicksalot" until the third installment. This makes the swerves into horror more jarring and realistic since it gives the impression someone like you could run into this thing.
• The Most Dangerous Video Game: Downplayed. Team Fortress 2 only becomes a dangerous game if you encounter the Serverblight. Otherwise it seems that game still works just fine when the Serverblight isn't in the server.
• My Rules Are Not Your Rules: Zigzagged. Bodies assimilated by the Serverblight are still treated as players by the game, meaning they can still be damaged and killed by attacks from players on the opposing team, although since its Touch of Death isn't treated as an attack, the Serverblight can infect players regardless of team. The entity also seems to take fall damage and refuses to enter any area with a death plane. However, it appears to still be able to manipulate the bodies of its hosts even if the game considers them to be dead, as shown by scubamaster96, directionz and SnoWDooM.
• Nothing Is Scarier: Downplayed. The series makes an effort never to show the entity's amalgamated form in full, usually relying on the noises it makes and the sheer paralyzing terror of those seeing it off-screen to sell its horror. However, from the brief glimpses provided in thumbnails and the videos themselves, the entity appears to be a grotesque fusion of all the classes' body parts, featuring many fused arms, legs, and torsos adorned with massive, elongated, extra fingers.
• Oh, Crap!: Aaron panics when he notices a flood of new "players" joining the RED Team during the second round of Payload on Snowycoast; he quickly recognizes them as the same group he encountered on Thunder Mountain, which had been taken over by the Serverblight, and realizes the entity has arrived. He has an even bigger one when his friend Matt starts repeating voice dialogue, realizing that he's been taken over by the Serverblight.
• Our Zombies Are Different: Serverblight proxies display a lot of typical zombie tropes when they go on the offensive, charging their target with their bare hands in an attempt to spread an infection that will convert them into another proxy. They're even able to move and attack when the game considers them to be dead.
• P.O.V. Sequel: "MONSTER found in tf2" presents the events of Reflection from SailerMan's perspective, in a TF2 gameplay video posted on his channel.
• Running Gag: In the span of "A HAUNTED HALLOWEEN SPECIAL", Pibble has a habit of repeatedly saying "Phew. That was a close one.", even saying it one last time when a connection issue inadvertedly saves him from the Serverblight.
• Self-Parody: "A Haunted Halloween Special" is a parodic retake of the first episode, with the protagonist, pibble 2, being a clueless idiot who keeps missing the warning signs something is wrong (such as being scared of his chicken nuggets burning rather than the fact he can't disconnect), the person trying to warn him to leave being a swear-happy player whose point is obfuscated by their tendency to do so, and the Entity quickly losing patience when pibble 2 doesn't think it's scary.
• Shout-Out: Has its own page.
• Synchronization: The Serverblight is able to cause this just by being on the same server as other players. The Team Fortress 2 characters gradually become more expressive the more the player is on the server, with their reactions to what's happening in front of them likely mirroring their players. In the first video, the Engineer that GUILLIESUIT is playing as is able to move in a much more human like way; with his mouth moving in tandem with what's being written in the chat, even able to take Aaron's melee weapon off his Sniper, and write a message in blood warning Aaron not to let it take him alive. Players have been shown to type while they're moving while the Serverblight is on the server, which should otherwise be impossible, implying they're actually talking and their words are showing up in the chat. In the third episode, special focus is given to how Aaron's Soldier avatar begins to emote and act like an actual person (gripping his weapon tensely as he gets more unnerved and his mouth moving alongside what he types in the chat), while the fact that Matt's Medic avatar is not emoting and his mouth isn't moving alongside his voice chat is a sign that he's been assimilated and the Serverblight isn't quite able to fake human behavior.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: A multitude of the TF2 players unknowingly make fatal mistakes that end up costing the lives of others.
  • Both dicksalot and directionz are at fault for directionz's assimilation. When dicksalot tries shooting him, directionz likely gets the idea that being shot would be good enough to escape. He ends up being wrong. And dicksalot shooting him just means Serverblight takes him later. Had directionz kept following after Breadolphin, he would’ve survived. This isn't even mentioning the fact that directionz is then used to assimilate Matt in the third episode.
  • GUILLESUIT knew you had to kill yourself, but seemed unaware that he had to jump into a death plane to not be assimilated. Not mentioning the possible many people he gave that (not entirely wrong but still missing context) advice to, but that also means his corpse is taken right after he kills himself with the Tribalman's Shiv, which gives Serverblight a body to lure in and assimilate JonyDany12.
  • JonyDany12 himself, had he never joined the server during "Migration", he would've never let it escape onto other servers. Or at the very least, would've delayed it by a little, and more importantly, would've saved his life.
  • gods_god from "Awareness" teaches Nexos how to taunt. And ends up, by proxy, also teaching the Serverblight how to taunt because it was listening in.
• Whole-Plot Reference: "PROXY" is clearly heavily inspired by the classic creepypasta "My Dead Girlfriend Keeps Messaging Me on Facebook", as it deals with someone close to the narrator dying and then continuing to communicate with them through recycled messages before disturbingly developing unique ones later on.
• Word-Salad Horror: Because the Serverblight can only communicate through messages that have already been sent in TF2's in-game chat and the game is a very casual and usually nonserious game, a lot of the messages it ends up repurposing are deeply unserious but become highly sinister in context, especially when they're heavily repeated.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: JonyDany12 successfully escapes the server in the second episode, but only because the Serverblight let him go so it could hitch a ride to another server with more players. Come the third episode, Jony is revealed to have been assimilated, along with other players he inadvertently doomed.
• You Cannot Grasp the True Form: The Serverblight has no confirmed true form, instead it's consists of assimilated Team Fortress 2 mercenaries bodies.

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