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[seal-fan]

Sara chidouin is transgender

Proof: also she canonically struggles with feeling too brusque and Joe helps her accept herself despite that! She has a weird relationship with her parents trying to make her into something she doesn't want to be. She gets harassed by a man who thinks she's like literally the devil or something and then he tries to kill her. She is also upset when Gin thinks she's a boy in chapter 1.

Ok so maybe none of that is proof but it's my headcanon and I get to choose who is trans

[seal-fan]

[seal-fan]

I know a lot of people are disappointed in how sympathetic to Dream Tommy's ending was. But honestly I think the ending overall was definitely a repudiation of both Dream and Punz! Tommy and Tubbo achieve what they set out to do. It's bittersweet, because the ending provides hope that the situation could have been resolved peacefully, but the intention was always to prevent Dream and Punz from achieving their dream of immortality and immense power. Dream and Punz are killed and can't be revived. They lose.

And why does Dream lose? For one thing, he underestimated Tubbo. The disc finale makes it clear how little regard Dream had for Tubbo, and how he saw people as chess pieces in his pursuit of power. Dream's fatal flaw is that he doesn't really understand or care about most other people. He's self obsessed and above all can't tolerate losing and not having his way, and that results in his perspective being warped. Tommy is important because he resists Dream's authority consistently, and Dream believes that resistance needs to be broken. Tubbo isn't important because he doesn't provide that resistance, or anything that interests Dream personally. But he's wrong! Tubbo is a person with his own motivations, goals and desires just like Dream. And while he isn't a fighter like Dream, he is very talented at redstone technology. Dream doesn't seem to have any idea what's coming and I think this is because he didn't understand Tubbo at all or at least underestimated him very greatly.

Dream also loses because of the flaws in his mentality. He believes that the ends justify the means, so no matter what harm he inflicts to others, it doesn't matter. But the entire core of morality is that when you hurt people that's bad, and when you help people that's good. Obviously things aren't that simple, but by embracing the idea that it's okay to harm people for little reasons like experimentation or intimidation or even fun - depending on how cynically you view Dream's character - you throw away your humanity. And in the end, when you hurt people, it comes back to bite you! Dream is incredibly selfish and horrible to Tommy and Tubbo throughout the story and that directly leads to Tommy being willing to die to stop his plans. Burning bridges is a bad strategy because no matter how smart you think you are it is never possible to control all the variables. Dream and Punz plan to seize power on their own and ignore the motivations and desires of everyone else on the server, but things don't work out that way.

I also wanted to take some time to think about Punz's character because obviously there isn't that much there. But since he's also involved in murder and experimentation in pursuit of immortality, he probably believes Dream is the only person capable of understanding him. He clearly does care about power a LOT, and it makes sense from a self motivated perspective for him to revive Dream, but I also think that from the ending, Punz has grown attached to Dream. He defends their ideology and tells Tommy that he is Dream's friend directly. It's likely that after isolating himself for so long, Punz wanted connection deeply. Even if you try and reject things like society, morality and attachments, as long as you're human you need people to care about. Dream provides that for Punz.

But Dream pretty clearly doesn't care about Punz in the same way! He scribbles George's name on the walls. His motivation is to make things simple again, so he can live together with George and Sapnap. He's left them behind in his pursuit of power but those are still his connections, people he cares about the most. Obviously Sapnap is against Dream but from what Tommy said in the ending, George doesn't talk to Dream anymore either. When Punz asks if he is Dream's friend, Dream is silent. It's an awkward moment, but it makes sense. Punz is following Dream out of loyalty and a sense that Dream is the only person he has. But Dream is motivated out of a sense to return to simpler times, and is simply using messy means to get there which he doesn't seem all that happy about. Punz is what he has, but George is what he wants.

In other words, murder and torture isn't a great foundation for a relationship!

[seal-fan]

does anyone else feel like the dream smp is just... like, constantly hopeless? like, overwhelmingly so. like, oh, dream is great at pvp and he never loses and he literally cannot die and controls life and death. and he’s also super evil and an abuser and the narrative comuppance for everything he does is simply. not happening. i know there are a couple more streams left but the smp has a track record of things either going badly, or seeming like they will go well but in a shocking twist they actually went badly (disc finale)

like, can’t we just have happiness or something

[seal-fan]

The Memorandum is so mysterious! If the point of it is that the Death Game is meant to replicate the Memorandum, that doesn’t really make sense to me. First of all, according to Midori Joe was added to balance the win rates. Joe should have been in from the start if the Death Game was trying to replicate the death game, because Sara has to lose her best friend in the first Main Game. This could potentially be a lie (although this would raise some interesting questions about the simulations - like, what were they really for? If they were just meant to manipulate the participants, wouldn’t it be more useful to make up fake numbers?) but it’s also true that the Memorandum goes completely off track in the second Main Game. I used to think maybe the ‘man whose views most aligned with hers’ and ‘boy even younger than her’ could refer to Nao and Kanna. But from a deleted scene it’s clear that the ‘man whose views most aligned with hers’ is Keiji! Even though the game had been following the script exactly up to this point, for whatever reason it diverges here and it doesn’t seem to matter? Like, the Death Game just continues as normal.

But what else could the Memorandum be for? How do we explain the fact that it predicts the outcome of the Russian Roulette and the first Main Game perfectly? Could that really be just a coincidence?

The best I can guess is that someone - maybe the Man in the Memorandum - is an influential member of ASUNARO, and is influencing events in their favour in order to affect the outcome of the game, but is not open to everyone about their plans and other members of ASUNARO have a different goal - such as to find an ideal leader for their organisation, perhaps? If this is the case, maybe in the Sou Lives route they could get the opportunity to put the route ‘back on track’ by killing Gin and Keiji in the third main game, and having Sara ‘die’ by becoming a doll in the finale. I’m not sure how exactly this would work though.