#C!wilbur critical

[cosmic-finn]

Hello dsmpblr is this a safe space to express my dislike for tntduo? Like it does sound like a fun dynamic, I love enemies to lovers but I could never see them in a relationship. I could just never see love coming from that relationship, not a healthy one at least. Like I could see Quackity gravitating toward Wilbur because abuse victims tend to gravitate toward abusers, but I could never see them dating. Fundy probably told Quackity about how bad of a dad Wilbur was, and that probably permanently tainted Quackity’s view on Wilbur. And I’m just gonna be so honest Wilbur gives off homophobic vibes.

[call-me-apple]

It still boggles my mind that OG L'Manburg era c!Wilbur wasn't widely regarded as a villain he is such a fucking slimy asshole it's incredible like the man plans to "use the TommyInnits of the world" to build himself an industry and calls Tubbo "clay to be molded" in the very first stream he decided to be a danger to society from the get-go.

[cdroloisms]

On the note of c!Dream and the Revolution and L’manburg in particular, I actually wanted to touch on another argument that I see sometimes that I’ve been thinking about lately re. L’manburg’s legitimacy. Because among some groups that are more L’manburg-positive, one take that I feel is decently common is the idea that L’manburg couldn’t be a government because it was only four, five, six people, that the size of the group meant that it was functionally incapable of the power attributed to it. In this, the assertion tends to be that because L’manburg is small, the power it holds is meaningless; it doesn’t have the power and provisions backing it that a regular “government” has, so L’manburg is fundamentally no different from a group of friends that believe in the same thing and therefore work together. The argument, here, seems to be that because the power of L’manburg as a government is manufactured, the power doesn’t actually exist in any meaningful way. 

And the thing about L’manburg to me is that, well, the power being manufactured is...the point? Like. The whole point is that L’manburg doesn’t actually have jack shit to base itself off of, the whole point is that L’manburg is founded on a lie and writes itself into being treated as a legitimate entity through scapegoating other people in a story. That’s the reason why the mythos exists! The mythos needs to exist because it’s the foundation of L’manburg’s existence. Why does L’manburg exist? Because they were ~fighting against oppression~. Why does c!Wilbur have the power to do X, Y, and Z? Because if you’re opposing him you’re on the side of traitors and tyrants and enemies and get out of his fucking country. Just because L’manburg’s existing as a nation and government and what have you is illogical doesn’t prevent it from being treated as a legitimate country and government etc, because in the end people treated it as legitimate and therefore it had real power not only over its own land, but later on over how the entire server operated--see everyone being swept up in the elections, Manberg vs. Pogtopia, etc. 

(What’s especially funny to me about this take is that in a lot of ways, it really reminds me of c!Dream’s opinion of L’manburg during the Revolution. Because while c!Dream definitely saw L’manburg as a threat in terms of the people who were declaring war against him, in terms of the...actual ideology? The whole government thing, “we’re going to be a separate server”? It’s pretty clear that c!Dream thinks that all of that makes NO SENSE WHATSOEVER. He calls L’manburg a “delusional small part” of the server because from his perspective, what the fuck do you MEAN you’re a government now? What do you mean you’re a separate country--scratch that, what do you mean you’re a separate SERVER? Game rules? Whitelist? What the fuck?? You’re a group of people threatening violence because you have a grudge against me, not revolutionaries fighting a nonexistent oppressive rulership like holy shit I’ve NEVER EVEN MET YOU BEFORE? c!Dream approaches L’manburg’s shit as illegitimate and ridiculous and nonsensical from the get go, because yeah, I mean--they’re literally just a small group of people, not the government they claim to be or that they claim they want to form, or whatever. But things...don’t stay that way.) 

Like the whole point is that in the end, it doesn’t matter that c!Wilbur shouldn’t have been able to stick a flag in a piece of land, declare it as his own, make all these arbitrary rules about who could or couldn’t go inside and what they had to do and declare himself leader over these people and leverage joining his little club to keep them from opposing him and use all of that to threaten conflict against a guy he literally never even met before. Because...he did! And with the mythos established, no one challenged that. L’manburg’s policies and power and legitimacy and leadership and what the leader could and couldn’t do were all based in literally nothing and that didn’t matter because people acted like it was a real thing, so it became real. c!Dream fighting against L’manburg and discrediting its legitimacy at the beginning is part of what gives L’manburg legitimacy because the revolution ends up being used as the foundational story that made L’manburg a Real Thing. The elections and c!Quackity challenging c!Wilbur by running against him when the elections were originally rigged ends up reinforcing L’manburg’s legitimacy as the elections become a Real Thing and the leader of L’manburg as established by the elections are a Real Thing, etc. As long as people buy into L’manburg, as long as it’s TREATED as a real entity, then it remains real because that’s what people believe (which is part of why doomsday and L’manburg like, dying required the people within it to become disillusioned w/ the country so they didn’t feel inclined to rebuild it again.) 

People treated L’manburg as a real entity with real power, which gave it real power over people. Nothing should’ve been in place that allowed c!Wilbur to declare a rigged election, or c!Schlatt to execute the Red Festival, or c!Tubbo to create an extrajudicial army that put c!Phil under house arrest and would extend its influence outside of its own land to kidnap c!Techno’s pet and execute him. The reality of the consequences of L’manburg do not depend on whether or not it should’ve logistically had the power to back up what it was trying to do but whether or not people actually treated it like it did, and they did. Just because L’manburg shouldn’t have been capable of acting like a government doesn’t mean that people didn’t treat it as a government the entire time--from its conception to its death, L’manburg was given a lot of power and influence comparable to that of a government because of what was granted to it that allowed the leader of the faction to do a lot of things without challenge or argument “for the country” both to people within the country’s borders and outside of it, and this very real power and influence wasn’t challenged or disturbed because people believed that it had a right to exist. 

YES L’manburg was manufactured! YES that power didn’t make any sense! YES the legitimacy that L’manburg had as a government entity was basically a fucking crapshoot based on jack shit, and yes it had real power anyway. At the end of the day L’manburg was always treated w/ a level of power and legitimacy beyond just being a Group Of People, and therefore that power and legitimacy became real. L’manburg was a government because people treated it as one. L’manburg was powerful and legitimate and free and independent because that’s what the story said, and everyone believed the story, and that’s what’s important moreso than the logic of whether or not it had enough people to actually “be” a government in the first place.

[feralsylph]

Lmanburg could have been the best narrative on what it's like to lose a family member to cult mentality and surviving a cult. We could have had cult leader c!wilbur. We could have had c!tommy struggle with the fact that his brother wants to hurt people and puppet people to soothe his own ego. We could have had it all. L'mancult could have been something, we could have had jonestown 2.0.

.

.

.

Also, as a historian, I can tell you that Lmanburg is not a Hamilton AU, it's British colonialism.

[imsosocold]

DSMP but you’re a reluctant traitor to Manburg

[barzfrommarz]

RIP ladyddanger you were never afraid to say the truth

[cloffmoff]

been working on this for a little bit and thought ‘tumblr would like it!’ so here you guys go, happy birthday c!tommy the favorite character ever <33 im nowhere near an animator lol, just some guy with inspiration and flipaclip

[spacerambles]

c!wilbur having an instant fever dream about killing c!dream vs c!niki helping to break c!dream out of the prison

[w3ndytheraccoon]

C!Tommy is my favourite character, however, that doesn’t mean he gets a pass.

In simple word, C!Tommy is a narcissist, or atleast show alot of narcissistic traits. Self importance ? Check. Entitled to some degree ? Check. Arrogant ? Check. Jealous easily ? Check. Rarely believe something is his fault ? Check.

( Obviously, just because someone has some of these traits, that doesn’t mean that they’re a narcissist or a bad person, it depends on the context )

Now, I guess you can say that since Tommy is canonically 16, being a narcissist is expected, because most 16 years old is a self - centred asshole. But like I said many times, just because it’s justified, that doesn’t mean it’s okay.

Tommy has show signs of a narcissist ( Arrogant, entitled ) ever since he joined, and as the lore progresses, he starts to show more. It even gets worse when he got mad because he can’t fathom the fact Tubbo has a life out of him. He threatened to kill Michael for fuck’s sake ( I still love reading about them bonding tho ) !

And the whole “ Me and Tubbo vs Dream “ always gets on my nerves. Yes, Tommy has been hurt by Dream but he’s not the only one. What about Sapnap and Geogre who have to watch their close friend spiral ? What about Puffy who lost her fucking son and felt responsible for how he turn out ? What about Ranboo ? What about Niki and Jack and Fundy who lost their home when he blew up L’ manberg ? What about Vikkstar & Lazarbeam ? Dream has hurt almost everyone, not just Tommy, yet he believes he’s the only one.

Not to mentioned, he claims Tubbo is his bestfriend, yet hesitate when he’s asked to choose between him and the discs. Tommy has been an asshole to Tubbo and Tubbo has also been an asshole to Tommy times to times ( I will cover this more for when Tubbo’s post comes ). C!ClingyDuo is a shitshow (and when you include Ranboo and make it C!BenchTrio, it gets even worse ), they’re both bad for eachother. Sure, there are times where they act like actual, healthy friends, but half the times, their “ friendship “ is held together by shared trauma.

While Tubbo is treated like something comparable to the fucking discs, Ranboo is seen as an obstacle half the times. Yeah, Tommy covered for him when they burnt Geogre’s house, but that’s it. After that, whenever Tommy is with Ranboo, he’s just a tad bit more hostile and he always show jealousy when Ranboo and Tubbo are together. Like C!ClingyDuo, C!AlliumDuo is also toxic as hell and is barely being held together by the fact they have a mutual friend ( Tubbo ).

Don’t even get me start on Jack. I joined the fandom relatively late ( Post Prison Arc ), when the fandom’s opinions start shifting, and Tommy became a baby who can’t do anything wrong, so Jack’s death was pretty much brush over. It doesn’t help that I learn the lore solely through fan content, and as I said, opinions start shifting and Jack’s death got no acknowledgement. I didn’t even know why he was so mad at Tommy until a few weeks ago when I read a fanfic ( On Temporizing by LuckyMagicBelle ). No one in the fandom and the lore acknowledge it except Jack and maybe Niki, not even Tommy himself.

And that’s not even talking about all the casual crimes he commit, which I will not be getting into, because I’m pretty sure everyone have commit atleast 3 casually crimes at this point.

( Putting this just incase. Like in the one I made about Dream, just because Tommy is an asshole sometimes, that doesn’t mean the shit that happened to him is okay. And how he turns out is realistic imo, because I know that if I went through what he did, I’ll come out worse. But still, a flaw is flaw, and this is a call out post. He is child and someone should’ve show him how to be better, not let him continue to be like this )

Conclusion : C!Tommy is an actual war criminal that is in no way, shape or form innocent, yet most the fandom ignore that because they woobified him. He’s an asshole sometimes and it’s fine to be paranoid after the shit he went through but he needs to understand that Dream isn’t always out to get him. Also, C!BenchTrio needs to split up, have some therapy and spent some times for themselves before they’re ready to be friends again.

I still love him and will defend him with my dying breath though.

Edit : Y’all, I just saw a post that said C!tommy is a accurate portrayal of an abused victim, and now I can’t tell which of my points are actually him being an ass and which one is me being insensitive / overreacting and not realising that he’s intended to be written that way to be accurate. Please tell me because I do not want to offend anyone-

[its-target-official]

i am trying to read sbi fics.

and of fucking course people are discontinuing their fics because of the whole wilbur situation. which i understand.

but some of these people do not unDERSTAND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CHARACTER AND CONTENT CREATOR.

if you say "i'm not writing a story with an abuser in it," you are just fundamentally wrong. because while CONTENT CREATOR wilbur soot did, apparently, abuse someone, CHARACTER wilbur did not. (well, mostly.)

now if you are writing something about the real life people, yes, this makes sense.

god.

i do not want to hear anything about the situation and/or your opinions.

[nocinovae]

I have many feelings on the situation around abuse and power dynamics and assault that are coming to light at the moment. For the most part I feel that other peoples rage and statements are worded better. Though I had some thoughts and as someone who enjoyed psychoanalyzing fictional characters I have some realizations about c!Wilbur that I think some people will appreciate. Other than that Support and Listen to Victim. Don’t Put Streamers on Pedestals.

I hate how much I and so many people loved c!Wilbur for being a morally flawed traumatized mentally ill character.

The type of villain to enjoy in media but in a “I like them as a bad person. They fill the role they were written for very well.”

We took them as a “this is a bad person to enjoy through media” character. He showed the experience of how trauma and mental illness can effect relationship and morals.

I felt like I could take him as a caricature, an exaggerated form of many of my own insecurities and dark parts of myself.

BUT NO All c!Wilbur was was a self insert character of the writer’s desire for control and power over the people around him. Same with any of his other “characters” that we all thought were meant to be satire dark comedy of disgusting men in the world.

And he let us all believe this. It’s ironic the way he literally had his self insert pity oc kill himself after not having his apology accepted for all the harm he caused. How he was so distraught with having to actually work for redeeming himself more than just his words that his actions that he thought would resolved that was killing himself for a second time.

All the nuance and grey area I loved saw in c!Wilbur has been destroyed with the truth we all now see in William Gold. And that goes for so all of his artwork.

At least with this new lense on the artist we can take another view of his art and see deeper into the truth of What a Disgusting Piece of Shit this man is.

[hiraethade]

Man, I need to stay off Twitter.

[blockofhoney]

y'know i haven't actually drawn c!wilbur doing guir whole mimic thing which. I Really Should Do At Some Point

[lena-thinks-too-much]

I think to a degree, c!techno gaslight himself into justifying the scapegoat. like techno probably fully believed that it was pogtopia and Tommy's actions that took it this far even though he was always planning on doing it. idk how to word it clearly but point is, regardless of the justification and whether that was valid or not, techno thought he was in the right.

c! Techno's morality is the most intriguing clusterfuck of a hot mess

So.

With c!Wilbur’s apologies to c!Techno, and Techno’s claims of being lied to about Pogtopia’s plans on reinstating L’manburg as a country, and how he was betrayed. Let me remind you of a moment. 

A conversation between c!Techno and c!BBH which occurred before Tubbo and Quackity told Techno about their plans on reinstating the L’manburg government, and before there was a war, and most certainly before this ‘surprise’ betrayal of them reinstating a government and assigning a president. 

Badboyhalo was talking to Technoblade about the Badlands. He was talking about if Techno would be okay with an anarchist group [the Badlands], and questioned what Techno’s plans are. 

Techno states that he’s fine with an anarchy, that he’s not okay with killing cats, and then he states this;

"I want to leave a smoking crater from which not only will Manberg never recover, but from which no new country can rise in its place. History will FORGET that a country ever existed in this area."

Again. This is before each and every excuse c!Techno has given to Tommy, Wilbur, Quackity, Tubbo, literally everyone, on why he’d set withers on this place. 

He claims he was betrayed by them reinstating government. He claims that Wilbur had lied to him and that he didn’t know about them planning to reinstate L’manburg. Despite evidence of Quackity and Tubbo literally telling him.

But maybe you can brush it off on he wasn’t listening, or he didn’t take them seriously. 

But this absolutely proves that he was planning on blowing this place up regardless of whether they reinstated government or not. This is evidence is before Quackity and Tubbo tell him. This is before the war. This is before the betrayal. He was already planning on blowing the place to smithereens even before Dream had offered and egged him on. He was never going to let this place go peacefully. He was never going to give a new government a chance of being peaceful. It was deemed corrupt before it's creation.

And this behavior is repeated with Doomsday when Tommy works with him. In his To-Do List, he had always had 'destroy L’manburg' listed at the top. Every time Tommy would say he didn’t want to destroy L’manburg, or said he just wanted his discs he didn’t want revenge, Techno would change subjects until he stopped bringing it up all together (vocally, to Tommy. visually he’d highlight the destroy line in the list to chat every time he opened up the book). 

It didn’t matter, it would have never mattered. Doomsday was going to happen no matter what. Dream planned on destroying the place, Techno planned on destroying the place. There would have been no way to convince them otherwise, and Tommy had tried every time it was brought up. It just so happened that a perfect opportunity and cover arose for it to happen then and there.

Tommy’s “betrayal” of Techno by siding with Tubbo (mind you, he’d done so because he realized he no longer wanted to play this cycle of revenge, and he didn’t want to be a bad person, and he didn’t want to hurt his best friend. He chose Tubbo over Techno, just as Techno would’ve chosen Phil over everything in the same situation). 

Tommy’s “betrayal” of Techno was used as a scapegoat reasoning for his destruction, turning a plan that would’ve happened no matter what, into a ‘lesson’ to be ‘taught’ and an ‘act’ of ‘revenge’. 

This is exactly the same as what happened on November 16th. Wilbur was the only official ‘traitor’ to L’manburg deemed by Dream, as Wilbur had been the one on this spiral and dead set plan to blow the place up, egged on and encouraged by Dream. He had no idea about withers, or that Techno had betrayed them in the first place until recently. He had no idea. He still doesn't even know they had a part in Doomsday. He still thinks it was all his fault.

Techno on the other hand, had known before there could have even been talks of betrayal, or before Wilbur could have even ‘lied’ to him. His mind was already made up. 

Pogtopia’s “betrayal” of Techno was used as a scapegoat reasoning for his deadset plans of destruction, that was planned far in advance of the war. 

They are scapegoats that he still uses to this day, and has even built upon adding details such as adding that Wilbur and Tommy had deliberately lied to him, or had deliberately tried to hurt him, which is simply false. In both of these situations, he’s planned from the beginning what he had wanted to do, regardless of how these “betrayals” made him feel. 

***This post is tagged appropriately with critical tags, so if you don’t want to see or hear c!techno critical, you should block the tags. This isn’t a post for debate or argument, it’s an analysis and well, critical post. That’s the point. Thank you. 💛

[barzfrommarz]

BOOOOO GET OFF THE STAGE 🍅🍅🍅🍅🍅🍅🍅

second pic was the post right under the first screenshot. How can you be this slow why the fuck do you think he switched up on c!dream???

[theminecraftbox]

I think that the reality of c!Quackity's failures sometimes get conflated with a sense that they stem from, as you say, some conflict with a different inner nature, rather than from his fundamental inability to address his problems with something other than the exercise of power.

c!Quackity thinks that that if he'd had more power, and that if he gets more power, he can fix the things he doesn't like about his life. He's wrong about that, pragmatically and narratively.

Quackity's not effective at torturing Dream into giving him the revive book, but this isn't because he's failing at the concept of torture. This is because he's failing at identifying that application of violence does not actually equate to accomplishing his goals.

I think this is pretty interesting when Quackity is set against characters with much more internal conflict in their goals and perspectives.

Hot take: c!Quackity is a character with almost painfully straightforward motivations, neuroses, ambitions, and insecurities. He is not a guy with hidden depths, he is a guy who's totally willing to bash your head in on the concrete floor of the shallow end of the swimming pool for daring to point that out.

!!! thiiiiiis tbh. guy wants power and he wants to fuck over the people that fucked him over, and said fucking him over oftentimes is Painfully just not that big of a deal and not that much about him like, at all. (see: being banned from lmanburg sucked, yeah, but also lmanburg was banning half the fucking server from their ranks as it was founded on the ideal of being the cool kids club, and his ensuing Thing With Wilbur for like literal years that spawned off of that is hard NOT to categorize as an overreaction to being told "u cant join our club." yes, technoblade setting off a couple of withers was something obviously upsetting to the lmanburgians at the time, but errr secret army made to drag people not even in your country to get them executed literally with an aesthetic theme around butchers bc the guy you hate is a pig is ... ? his deal with dream is painfully parasocial, and dream is downright charitable towards el rapids considering the debacles that were dethronement and mexican lmanburg.) there's really just not that much that's particularly nuanced or complicated imo about his whole Revenge and Power schtick and his whole wanting to be the next big fucking thing yadayadayada--and it's interesting to me bc i've seen that shallowness be used to defang him (in the idea that it implies that he can't be that dangerous) or otherwise seen people Dig Deep into his character in a similar effort to prove that he's actually-deep-down-really-good-which-is-why-he's-bad-at-being-bad, that the shallowness is symptomatic of some contradictory inner depths that he's closed himself off from, when id generally say that c!q can be pretty fucking dangerous BECAUSE of the fact that there's a lot that's pretty fucking straightforward, he's got a point he wants to fucking prove and little to nothing holding him back, especially when you're defenseless in a box at his mercy