Explodingmelons
Explodingmelons is an extremely active and involved player from England who joined EMC on the 17th of April 2019, merely 6 days after the beginning of the Flooding Era (side note: he joined after browsing Minecraft Servers, not because of a YouTube Video.) He is responsible for various architectural works within France and operates the highly successful business of Melon & Sons. He lives in a large Manor called La Capitolium located in Toulouse where all of his server possessions are located, including his Trident, Totem of Undying, the storage room for M&S which contains vast amounts of valuables and an enormous amount of resources, mostly for building. Being moderately well known, explodingmelons primarily interacts with players within France and players he has met and befriended from various other Nations although he does talk with others in global from time to time. He often takes charge of National Projects within France and spends a large amount of time in Paris constructing and designing many of the buildings there. explodingmelons is in what is best described as the 'French Inner Circle', the small group of elite Frenchies who govern France.
History
The Beginning
Upon joining the server, melons' initially wanted to create the town of Bristol, his home town, and join Britain (typical newfag). Having travelled by boat for about 15 minutes he realised you could join a town and tp, so he joined the British town of Hull. Upon the sight of Hull, he decided it would be best to immediately leave and join London until he could create Bristol. After having met and befriended another player called DrRainbowPancake (now Sphagette) who also happened to be British irl, they tried to create Bristol, until they found out it was too close to the towns around them. Having not been talked to by anyone in Britain other than FutureLemon who asked 'why are you in my town?', he didn't feel overly welcomed in Britain, so he looked to France to create his and DrRainbow's town, which was far less claimed over. DrRainbow was then given their collective gold, 64g total, to create a town in France. So DrRainbowPancake created a town called New_Cannes in the south of France over the ruins of the fallen town of Toulouse. Over the next few weeks they would collect enough g to claim an area of 6x5 chunks and surrounded the claims with a small, simple medieval wall. In may, the mayor of New_Cannes, DrRainbowPancake, was convinced to change the name of the town to Toulouse by melons and the few other members of France they had interacted with. And so, from humble beginnings, began the existance of explodingmelons on the server.
The Early Months
To begin with, explodingmelons was only interested in having a small, humble town and existing as a minor on the server, it would only remain this way for about a month. To the north of their town was the town of Limoges, an older yet inactive town which was due to fall, this lead to melons camping out in Limoges until it fell, leading to the acquisition of around 20 double chests of loot, some valuable some basic (early months when resources were limited for them,) and the creation of a tradition and way of life for explodingmelons, raiding. Merely a week later the decision was made to make a claim arm north and claim the houses of the fallen town, leading to the infamous nickname within France for Toulouse: e l o n g a t e town due to its unusual length compared to its width (still only 6 chunks wide at its widest point.) During this time, the server had become infested with toyfags making queue extremely long, it looked like melons may not be able to continue playing for much longer. That was until cactusinapumpkin bought priority as a gift for melons (melons wasn't able to pay for priority himself at the time,) making him ever grateful and forever in debt to cactus for his actions. In may, what was at the time a tragedy struck the Town, DrRainbowPancake was logged out from his account and couldn't log back in due to not knowing his password or the email he used, so he created a new account and joined Toulouse, but not for long until he left to create a new town, leaving melons as the sole person running the town whilst a dead account held the rank of Mayor. Eventually, after some mishaps, melons was able to become mayor of Toulouse, and grow it little by little every so often out of his own pocket, which he was lucky to have gold at the best of times. From then on until June, little would happen to explodingmelons, recruiting players, interacting with other Frenchies, raiding fallen towns, watching the server get overrun by Youtube-fags, y'know, just the regular. During this time he met CaptianCaliber, now known as Barvaux, who would go on to be a major influence and friend for melons. At some point in may, sign shops were fixed and players were able to create new shops for the first time in ages, leading to the creation of Paris Shop, the predecessor of Melon & Sons. Towards the end of May melons assisted ImperialFishy in the creation of the westgang wall by creating the East Gate, this was the first time melons built something outside of his own town.
Versailles & Acceptance into the Nobility
In early June, Caliber proposed to create the Palace of Versailles in Paris, something melons was moderately interested in. melons proposed to assist Caliber in his effort to construct Versailles as he was 'good at building the same thing over and over.' At this point in time, melons was not an architect, at all. All his previous builds had been around par at best, and shite at worst, the Versailles Project would change this for it wasn't long before melons was assisting in planning out how the designs would be placed, and soon he was creating his own designs for Versailles: the Garden Façade. This gained the attention of a number of players within France, including Emperor Optimus_Trajan, and would kick start melons' career in architecture. With an immense amount of effort and resources devoted to the Versailles Project by melons among other things including server and political activity, Trajan made the decision to make melons a French Noble, back when the Nobility was a big thing in France, and give him control of the County of Occitania after Someone_Better, the previous Count of Occitania, left to take over control of the French Colony of SouthPole from 32Vache. Occitania would quickly grow large enough to become a Duchy, meaning melons' title was soon changed again to 'Duke explodingmelons of Occitania.' Work on Versailles continued and melons rebranded Paris Shop to Melon & Sons and moved his business to a new location in Paris within the then-new Paris Shopping District. During August, he personally funded the town of Nice, owned by Caliber, in exchange for being permitted to create a warship in Nice. This would greatly help Nice to grow and develop and allowed Caliber to focus on creating builds within his town, widely regarded within France as one of the most beautiful towns in France which further increased Caliber's popularity with other Frenchies.