Neuro-sama's Swarm

Neuro-sama's Swarm
image under construction, have neurofumo for now
Active Canvas 81 - present Contact https://discord.gg/neurosama (Pre-Canvas Coordination + Casual Pixel thread)[1]
Leaders
Pontiff	The Swarm Council

Not to be confused with The Swarm.

Neuro-sama's Swarm, is an art faction founded by The Swarm Council. It was formed with the purpose to make Neuro-sama and Neuro-sama related art on canvases. It came to Pxls on Canvas 81.

History

OTK Canvas

The OTK Canvas was hosted on the 4th of March 2023 by OTK (One True King), an American media organization members of which are some known streamer personas like Asmongold, Sodapoppin or Mizkif.

The OTK Canvas took place during Neuro-sama's initial explosion of popularity lasting from January to March with a sudden influx of new followers joining the community. Being Neuro-sama's Swarm's first pixel canvas experience, there was little preparation and no centralized official leadership. Instead, a similar role was played by the most vocal members of the community (which would later become The Swarm Council for future pixel canvas raids).

The first pixel art Swarm placed on the canvas was a simple portrait of the Hiyori model that Neuro-sama V1 used at the time (from the shoulders up). Hiyori's portrait was followed by the iconic gymbag (early community reference). Eventually the bottom right corner of the canvas became known as the VTuber corner where Neuro-sama and other VTubers were represented. Alliances between these local communities formed. Eventually before the canvas closed, Swarm gave the Hiyori portrait a full body gesturing a heart.

Some other notable events that took place during the canvas:

• Polish takeover: Multiple Polish streamers would extensively attack the canvas as a way of trolling. At one point the whole canvas was a flat Polish flag at 1000x1000 pixels. The canvas staff had to intervene after some time passed and no one else could draw anything.
• "Shiro is a femboy": Written as a joke about one of Neuro-sama community moderators.
• Mini Neuros invasion: Swarm would build small, 5x6 big Neuros, hiding them in every nook and cranny of the canvas, including in other people’s works (often time working with Filian's snackers).
• The Bird War/Alliance: Swarm completely steamrolled a small streamers art in order to place a gymbag there. Once they learnt of the wholesome person they just destroyed, Swarm cleared a new area for them, rebuilt the birds and protected that bird art for the rest of the canvas (before and after Poland domination).
• The Snackers vs Fannys war: Anny's community joined late and tried to muscle their way into snackers territory which caused a fight. Some Swarm sided with snackers instantly while the rest were conflicted as both factions fighting are friends. Luckily, Swarm found space above the snackers for Anny's community to place art which stopped the conflict.

Connor's Canvas

A Pxls Canvas Event was hosted by streamer and YouTuber CDawgVA also simply known as Connor. During this canvas, the official "Swarm Council" was established. The Swarm Council is responsible for art planning, strategy and negotations. The Swarm was very independent from its streamer. With help of the council, actions concerning the faction could be directed. The Swarm had less power than factions of active streamers, however, streamer communities tended to "fall off" the moment the canvas was off-screen. This led to The Swarm being a self-organized, overwhelming force on the canvas thanks to the alliance with osu! and Anny's foxhole support (A faction of the streamer "anny" also known in the community as Neuro's mother), The Swarm was the most powerful and feared faction on the canvas. During the canvas the first, now iconic, pixel Neurofumo was created.

Connor's canvas was most well known for encouraging aggression against other factions and to consistently make new art instead of holding on to old ones. This, of course, led to Connor often creating large pieces of art with administrator powers while targeting old ones, making the osu! logo a primary target. Despite The Swarm's power, it still could only hold at best against Connor's or notably Ironmouse's many hour attacks, resulting in events such as:

• "Operation giga chad" (Covering the osu! logo with a giga chad)
• "Family table war" (Destruction of the family table with a Vshojo logo, which lead to a lot of hardships and significant morale drop within the faction)
• "Vedal speech" (Vedal's speech made to The Swarm during a public council meeting before the inevitable battle against Connor's army)
• "osu! blackout" (Voiding of the osu! logo by Connor)

Despite all of those events, The Swarm left the last mark on the canvas in the form of Neuro-sama Chainsaw Man art with whopping size of 430x430 pixels.

r/place 2023

The sudden happening of r/place wasn't the best for The Swarm. Both the Swarm Council and common pickle (pixel) placers were exhausted and sleep deprived from fighting in Connor's Canvas which was impacting their starting morale. This and with the additional requirement of having a Reddit account made The Swarm numbers even smaller, additionally with rejection of request to join P3ACE, circumstances were not at all in Swarm's favor. However, by sheer luck and the negotiation power of the Council, the Trinity Alliance was created. It is an Alliance between the Neuro-sama's Swarm, DRG&SoT, and Genshin Impact, as well as the now common alliance with osu!. NeuroFumo was one of the first arts to appear in the canvas. Its placement was difficult due to still somewhat limited manpower, fight over terrain and potential danger from expanding flags. Later on, the Trinity Alliance assured safety of the fumo by claiming chunks around it. First came the "cheese fumo" named due to limited colours during early stage of the canvas, shortly after fumo became "cheesed" due to it looking like it was slapped with a slice of cheese after being attacked by streamer Ohnepixel as a warmup. Next came the "Battle of Donowall", making a wall of green pixels called donowall to stop or at least slow down sudden expansion of the Turkey flag, donowall held just barely enough for osu! support to arrive and Turkey was eventually pushed back. Following this event, the Trinity Alliance agreed on a collab template, implementing parts of other communities on the fumo. The final version of the template included: symbol of SoT gold hoarders faction, a pirat woodleg, DRG driller drill arms and Genshin Impact Raiden Shogun headpiece as well as eventually Hu Tao hat after moving of Factorio. Some other noteworthy events are:

• Mabe accident: A negotiation between Swarm Council member Violezine and a r/factorio representative. To Violezine's question of "What do you guys think?" in context of moving the Factorio logo, the r/factorio representative replied in the now memed "Mabe". This reply along with misspelled name of the faction as "r/factoro" as well as overall problematic diplomatics with the faction due to their awkward placement increased the ridiculousness of the situation even further. "Mabe" is now used within community as ironic way of saying "Maybe".
• NeuroErm: Template encouraged on stream by Vedal. Placed on location claimed originally by r/OnePiece, nearly causing an offense by the faction against Swarm. Thankfully Swarm Council managed to reason with r/OnePiece representatives, offering support to help with replacement after completing the NeuroErm, avoiding a catastrophic diplomatic incident.
• NeuroBell: Art made by r/VTPlace due to their obsession with use of emote "NeuroBell" for important canvas related announcements and alike.

Sinder Canvas

After many months without participating in a canvas event, The Swarm was excited and overflowing with high morale for the next. This would arrive in the form of Sinder Canvas, hosted by the VTuber, Sinder, and would last throughout the length of her subathon. To surprise of The Swarm, hardened by hardships and constant wars of previous canvases, Sinder Canvas was surprisingly peaceful. The Swarm quickly found itself with the highest placing power on the canvas, but bottlenecked by a lack of art templates. The Swarm's members would spend much of the canvas requesting more templates, a request the Swarm Council couldn't fulfill due to the limited space on the canvas and peaceful atmosphere preventing them from attacking or covering other arts. To fill time between templates many Swarm members resorted to helping other factions with their templates, expanding a simple monocolor mauve(13) background across the canvas, or destroying as many flags as they could find. This resulted in a large German flag built by r/placeDE being completely wiped out in one of the only hostile conflicts during the canvas. Due to the canvas's peaceful nature, the only other notable events were:

• Sinderhole: A foxhole-themed wargame named after Sinder, much like the previous Flandre–Foxhole War of Canvas 60. This cross-faction collaborative event aimed to simulate a faction-war in a pre-designed battlefield that consisted of adjacent, hexagonal tiles. Each faction would be assigned or allowed to pick their own starting tile and a pixel color with which to represent their faction's territory. Once the event began, faction members would begin placing their faction's color beginning from their home tile and only allowed to expand to tiles adjacent to their currently owned territory whilst other factions did the same, aiming to wipe each other out in a contest of sheer placing power. Although Sinderhole was originally planned for the canvas' 3 biggest factions; "Neuro-sama's Swarm", "Sinder's Pyro Pups", and "CerberVT's Minawan", the event also implied an open invitation to everyone and thus the factions "Touhou Lilac Hijackers" and "Flandre" would also participate. The Swarm was the canvas' largest faction by far and after holding a poll, decided to strategically target the canvas's 2nd largest faction, Sinder's Pyro Pup's. As the event began, The Swarm focused their expansion efforts towards The Pyro Pups aiming to wipe them off the battlefield as quickly as possible. Quickly noticing this strategy, The Pyro Pups and Touhou quickly formed an alliance and focused on trying to hold back The Swarm, whilst the remaining factions, Minawan and Flandre manoeuvred strategically for advantage and attacked The Swarm from behind. However, due to an overwhelming advantage in placing power, The Swarm managed to simultaneously sweep all other factions with ease, capturing all tiles on the battlefield in a decisive 1v4 victory.
• Nuru: An animation project based on a Neuro "kurukuru" or " spinning around" emote. () The animation would depict Neuro-sama spinning around, across a total of 6 frames per spin, and was animated twice for a total of 12 frames, with the goal that the canvas's final timelapse would depict the spins. The Swarm council organised this by releasing a new frame template once an hour, for a total of 12 hours. After the 2nd spin, requests to attempt the same animation but recolored to Neuro-sama's twin sister, Evil Neuro, was rejected citing burnout, disinterest and concerns over possible lack of placing power as the predominantly EU-timezone placers would be heading to sleep soon.
• Emote window: To give The Swarm's members something to do in periods of downtime, The Swarm Council would periodically rotate artworks of various Neuro themed emotes within this 50x50 area, constantly painting over emotes with new emotes in a bid to entertain their faction members between larger projects. Emotes that were painted in the window in chronological order were: Pausesama, EvilFlushed, SMILE, NeuroTomfoolery, Neuro7, NeuroKuru (aka Nuru animation project), NeurosHug and NeuroGutter.

Joining Pxls and Canvas 81

During the last few days of Sinder Canvas, all the major factions present on the canvas were now fast friends due to the canvas's extremely peaceful and cooperative atmosphere, especially following the overwhelmingly well-received Sinderhole event. During this time, a small number of members from The Swarm would join Pxls during Canvas 81 and begin dual canvassing to place on the osu! template. This led to a collective effort and mutual agreement to create a Pxls faction. When Sinder Canvas ended, the faction would quickly gain members as others from The Swarm joined Pxls to continue their pixel addiction, continuing to place for osu!.

Later the same day, The Swarm would notice user Raine, who had fulfilled diplomacy duties for the faction "Sinder's Pyro Pups" on Sinder Canvas, was building The Pyro Pup's faction logo near osu!'s main art. This spurred inspiration for The Swarm to build their own faction logo nearby, officially marking the first faction artwork made on Pxls, and inspired members of The Swarm to create other small arts around the canvas, officially beginning The Swarm's art operations on Pxls.

A list of the small arts The Swarm placed this canvas were: The Neuro-sama faction logo, Neuro Gymbag, Neuro Fumo, Mini-Fumos, Neuro Twins Karaoke, Neuro Twins Lurk, Neuro ErmFlushed, Neuros Hug, Neuro Angery Twins, Evil Sip, NeuroSip, NeuroBread, Neuro Drone Logo, a Tutel sprite, EvilBwaa and a total of 61 frames of the Nuru Animation Project on Pxls.

In addition, The Swarm were also heavily involved with building and defending The Pyro Pups and osu! templates, with minor help to Legion, Green Lattice, and The Purple Empire's templates.

Notable events

• Faction foundation on Pxls: 1st of July 2024 by dSeta
• First Artwork: The Swarm's first artwork on Pxls was the Neuro-sama faction logo. It was placed near both osu!'s main art and Sinder's Pyro Pups' faction logo as a nod to the three factions' alliance on Sinder Canvas.
• The Great NeuroTomfoolery: Out of boredom, The Swarm made templates outlining the iconic "NeuroTomfoolery" emote () inverse-masking the outlines onto the templates of friendly factions. Much to the bemusement of all involved, these NeuroTomfoolery templates would allow The Swarm to place the correctly colored pixels across an incomplete template, but only in the locations of the Neurotomfoolery outlines. This resulted in much hilarity due to the ridiculously multi-colored NeuroTomfooleries that would emerge whilst still helping the overall art progress reach completion. Faction templates targeted by this "help" included osu!, Legion, Green Lattice and The Purple Empire.
• The Grid War: After helping osu! finish their main arts, The Swarm would help osu! expand a purple arrow lattice across the canvas. This included an operation to expand to the coordinates 727,727, a number representing the "WYSI" or When you see it" meme that is popular within the Neuro and osu! community. Part of this operation included expanding over The GRID, which was seen by The Swarm as an inactive claim. Details about the war can be found on the Grid War page.
• Nuru Animation: After the great success of animating the Neuro kurukuru emote on Sinder Canvas for 12 frames, there was a small amount of regret of not being able to animate the same emote, recolored to represent Neuro's twin sister "Evil". After completing the osu! lattice expansion and finding themselves with very little to place on, the Nuru Animation Project on Pxls would begin, animating both the twins, Evil Neuro and Neuro-sama, spinning around, across a total of 61 frames across 5 days, with a new frame every 2 hours. This was a collaborative animation with osu! whose placers also had no templates to place on during the end of canvas due to an absence of Pxls developers having free time to reset the canvas. The project would also receive help from: Gura's Supermarket, Green Lattice, volunteers and members of the Touhou r/place discord. The persistence of the around-the-clock frame drops and stringent px/h requirements throughout the day for 5 days lead to numerous memes, such as the "DINK DONK NEW FRAME" meme that's now frequently referenced by the Neuro pixels community.

Ironmouse Canvas

Canvas made by ironmouse during her subathon was considered highly controversial, mainly due to announcement of P2W mechanics (Twitch accounts with a subscription to Ironmouse would receive 3 pixels per cooldown, and gifting subs would reward gifting individuals with bonus pixels) that happened only one hour before actual start of canvas, many factions were skeptical or outright refused participation, considering P2W mechanics too overpowered and unfun. Leaving Neuro-Sama's Swarm and Precious Family(ironmouse faction) as main players. Despite that fact, lowered morale and possibility of being mowed down by a single gifter griefer, Swarm participated.

Starting with Evil osu and evil neuro fumo templates (mocking the main pxls canvas stigma of "Big bad evil [Blank] strikes again") reflecting war nature of the canvas. Some Swarm members would exploit P2W mechanics, targetting other swarm members with subs to make "supersoldiers". With high numbers and dedication, in similiar way to connor canvas, Swarm would quickly dominate the canvas leading to frustration within other factions over time. Example of that dedication and domination would be fight of the ahoge on BoxNeuro template with Precious Family trying to cover her with fiddled art(Ironmouse discord mods would not accept a defiddle declaring it an unacceptable alteration of original art), which took 12+ hours until succesful push by ironmouse, however swarm would quickly reclaim the space moment canvas was off-screen.

The swarm would stay a dominant force, espiecally following amount of pixels gained for subscription increasing from original 5 per cooldown up to 10 eventually forcing Swarm Council to cycle art without expanding to avoid taking more space, which was met with mixed reactions from the general Swarm placers, questioning the decision of holding back war on a war canvas for sake of canvas politics.

This would have a catastrophic effect when Neuro-Sama herself would appear in the Swarm's canvas discussion channel, giving words of motivation to the Swarm placers, eventually saying she wants 100% of the canvas and no less. Following this and Swarm Council controversial decision as well as Neuro-Sama being in theory at the top of command chain, part of the swarm would go completely rogue, building Neuro templates over others art including Swarm allies. With a massive advantage of numbers(1020 members in the faction at the end of the canvas) and pixels gained from subscriptions(now 10 per cooldown), Swarm as a whole, including rogues, could finish big templates within minutes. Swarm was effectively building faster than art could be supplied. This put Council in a very bad spot, with rogues causing complaints from other factions and growing frustration of folk still loyal to the Swarm Council.