#calls this a short discussion. puts long post. kekw

[morning-glory215]

a small Discussion

(Please assume that I am referring to characters throughout this post - as a blanket statement here)

I’ve (+ many of my discord friends, hello Home Home) noticed something. Tumblr isn’t safe from Dream apologism; it’s got a different brand from Twitter, and it takes the form of my high school English essays. Y’know the ones, where you need two thousand words and you’re only at 500. So you crack open the good ol’ thesaurus and throw out any narrative discussion, in lieu of bullshitting your way through it.

Add in some condescending fuckery and ta-da! Your run-of-the-mill Dream apologist Tumblr/Twitter take. 

Joking aside, there’s this idea I’ve seen arching across nearly every Dream apologist post; that he had/has little to no control from around the Revolution, up to now. That he was the puppet being controlled (by who? Wilbur? Tommy?) and that he never meant anything he did! He was being forced into it! Dream, to many, was a hapless victim being pulled along by the whims of his servermates. He isn’t a villain (he is), he isn’t a tyrant (he sure wanted to be!) and his hand was forced to punish L’Manburg/Tommy/Tubbo/whoever-the-’villain’-of-the-week-is (it was never forced). 

This all just so… reductive of his character?

Dream is, narratively (and yes, the SMP has a narrative that is driven by conflict) the villain. He is the overarching force the protagonists fight/fought against. Actions made by Dream, of his own volition, drive the plot along - even without him present his actions are felt. In the most literal sense, Dream is the villain. He tried to become a tyrant through using attachments against people.

How quickly one forgets, willingly or not willingly, the Hall of Attachments (evil) in his Stereotypical Evil Villain Lair (evil).

Depriving the villain of nuance, that he had full control of his actions, by claiming his critics/antis deprive him of nuance by assigning him a narrative role is counterintuitive. Dream apologists claim they’re winning his nuance back, while in the same breath taking it away. Dream is interesting because he’s so sinister and evil and fucked up; what makes him so interesting is because he’s so calculating. I roleplay Dream pretty regularly, and I hate him because he’s so slimy. Don’t take it away by framing him as the victim, when he made it pretty clear (before the Prison, because I think he’s trying to garner sympathy) that he was Top Dog. He was the predator, everyone else was his prey.

He has always seen himself as the apex predator. Everyone else is his little game.

So let’s move onto my OTHER gripe with Dream apologists. They often have to put every character under the sun against him, in apparent attempts to highlight how victimized he is. Everyone is against him and that must mean he is being targeted for no reason. This post won’t even touch upon Tommy’s Exile with Dream much, but I think that whole plotline could eviscerate that point on the spot. Most Dream apologists like to employ what I call Higher Level Headcanons (coined by me, please pay me royalties if used! /j); they take the in-betweens of canon, extrapolate to such a degree it isn’t canon, and then call it canon. They take moments of “weakness” Dream has shown, often to win sympathy and make his victims try to placate him, and use that to show that other characters have wounded him to such degrees he’s just forced to hurt them.

Tommy gets this treatment the most (and arguably, George and Sap too) but who’s next? 

Wilbur.

Dream apologists love to mix these two up. Wilbur is the manipulative villain, and Dream is the one backed into corners. Who was it that took a look at an obviously erratic exiled man and decided to arm him? Was it Wilbur? No, it was Dream; Dream has always hated L’Manburg, Dream has never liked them because they growled at his bite during the Revolution. Who has always held the physical upperground, who punched when he was called names? If there was a weakness to exploit, Dream dug his grimy fingers in and pulled. Wilbur is, and I say this lovingly, a coward. 

When he was backed into a corner, Wilbur often floundered. He doesn’t like violence and only resorted to it in his darkest moments. Wilbur did, and does, the things he did because he felt caged and cornered and his entire world was crumbling before him. He says fucked up shit now because he has nothing to lose but Tommy now. Wilbur is a scared, lonely and broken soul. He's a modern tragedy in the way that he had little control over his fate.

Dream is a Classical tragedy in the sense that he set himself fully up for failure. He saw the warning signs, he knew the full scope of his actions and cursed the Gods anyways. This isn’t to say you’re a bad person for seeing yourself in some of his actions or that him being a villain demonizes you for liking him. How often do we see people upholding other traditional villains in media? 

Overall, this post is less telling Dream apologists they’re terrible people and more so about picking apart some iffy shit I’ve been seeing floating around in that community. Thank you for reading!