#dreaming discourse

[puirell]

feels like a good time to bring this back

[elevenqueer]

recently had a dream that dan and phil both changed their pronouns to "phey/phem" on all of their social media. i think i'm too far gone

[orbch]

dsmp quackcicle they make me want to launch myself off of the tallest building in the world

[stemms]

I could never understand people who treat DSMP like a dead fandom or feel ashamed of still adoring this piece of media in 2024. After all, isn’t the whole point of enjoying any story to keep it in your heart for years instead of forgetting about it the moment it loses its popularity? How did classical literature or old movies/series survive and remain appreciated until today, for example? The DSMP fandom is alive because there still are people who deeply care about the characters, and it will keep on living until there’s at least one person passionate about it.

It is true that the DSMP fandom was bigger in 2020-2022, but it’s also important to remember the quality of the fanbase at the time. I remember seeing so much more harassment, especially directed towards people interested in portraying c!Prime’s canonically abusive dynamic without even exploring the aspect of /p physical affection; many people were forced to deactivate their accounts because of the insane amount of toxic reactions. There were also A Lot of people incapable of understanding that CC’s characters weren’t supposed to represent their real life personalities, which either led to certain CC’s harassment for being “horrible people” or to misinterpretation of certain characters (e.g. c!Dream, c!George, c!Sapnap, c!Quackity, or c!Sam), a huge amount of poor lore comprehension, leading to Lots of victim-blaming and abuse apologism.

Now that DSMP is over and less popular, a significant amount of people responsible for the fandom’s poor reputation is gone, and people who genuinely understand the characters and simply want to discuss and/or create content for their hyperfixation in peace, stayed. Of course, this fandom isn’t perfect or entirely free of Weird™ people, but there’s certainly less toxicity, and it’s all that matters.

The next time you feel ashamed of still enjoying DSMP, try to remind yourself of the wonderful memories, excitement, creativity boost, and friends it brought you, and focus on the fact that this story will remain alive for as long as you let it.

[faerygardens]

I think the only reason dream hasn’t unleashed a twitlonger yet is because he knows the minute he does philza minecraft will go in for the kill

[conarcoin]

the concept of "lore" ruined discussion of mcrp because like. people use it to mean some kind of weird hybrid of plotline and worldbuilding but ONLY if the server is drama-focused otherwise it doesn't count i guess.

so you get people saying like. hermitcraft isn't a lore server. smplive isn't a lore server. sdmp isn't a lore server. and it's like yeah this is true because "lore server" is a meaningless slop category you guys made up. they very much have plotlines and worldbuilding though 💀

[dykecubes]

I just find it interesting that a multiple women on the dsmp have come forward about facing misogyny behind the scenes and talked very frequently about being ignored or not being supported by the male content creators on the server but it wasn’t until Connor backed up their allegations of misogyny that dream started freaking out about it and dream fans decided that this misogyny didn’t actually happen

[xoxo-ren-xoxo]

It will never stop being funny to me that all the big dreamsmp creators turned out either

horrible law-breaking levels of terrible

not evil but just kind of sad to watch

genuinely funny and based

Like yeah over here we have the felons, over here we have the art theft and bad merch controversies, over here we have guy who is a proud faggot now and guy who told logan paul to kill himself

[cloverstellar]

insane to me that some people still think that you can say ctommy and cdream are separate and should be viewed separately narratively speaking when a big chunk of the dsmp’s story was driven through cdream’s obsession with ctommy. no im not saying cdream was in the right but its no fun to see people water them down to just cdream using ctommy as a side piece and less like an objective he had to conquer and subdue to fit his regime. or turn around and say ctommy’s story did not revolve much around the abuse he sustained from that in the same breath because it DID and. man. man

[one-time-i-dreamt]

There was discourse where people were saying that it was ableist of David to kill Goliath.

[bugflies00]

sorry this is referencing a few month old post/s you made about the dream situation and a question you’d asked about dream stans, you can delete this msg if you want since it’s not as relevant anymore. Again I’m sorry if this is weird or you don’t gaf (that’s fair bc who does lol)

TW for grooming and dream being fucking gross. You can just scroll fast and delete if you don’t want to read or deal with this, I understand that

-

To preface Im about Tommy’s age now, when I was 15-17, used to be a huge dream stan, and I was very vocal about defending him online. —I was extremely parasocial and weird, and looking back on it I really regret how I acted.

So. Idk how much people who weren’t stans of his saw, but dream- as stupid as it sounds- was our friend.

He had bath calls with us, sleep calls with us, he told us in depth about his personal life and his health issues and his trauma and his moods and his habits and just basically everything. Most of his interactions with us was through his discord, and then someone in the fandom would stream his discord calls for people who weren’t there. A running joke was that dream had a parasocial relationship with us. there was absolutely no gap between creator and fan, he followed me more than once, he brought fans onto his discord streams and talked with them and he knew a good amount of us by name. He called us cute and talked about how much we all (as individuals) meant to him,

when drama happened he’d usually either do a space/call or go on his private and vent to us, there were I think two separate times he’d have full panic attacks over drama happening, and we’d have to talk him down. He also would, when responding to callouts or accusations, use arguments that his fans were making.

He did this during almost all his pitfalls, including the grooming allegations, his wording was often taken word for word from tweets by people I was friends with. I dropped him after the initial allegations, but for a while after i still checked in bc i was really hoping he’d be innocent (he wasn’t) and i can confirm he still does this. He also regularly dmed his fans, mostly his black fans, to ask for “help” on being less racist.

I don’t use the word “grooming” lightly, but dream was and is absolutely grooming his audience. Thats why dream stans seem so cult-like these days. The amount of guiltripping, lying, forcing an us vs them mentality, and manipulation I saw this man pull was actually sick. He’d frequently, privately, to us, vent about tommy or quackity, and about how “all his friends hated him” and “we were all he had left” (legit, not joking). He is extremely good at emotional blackmail, he is good at making his fans hate other creators and turn on them, he is very good at utilizing his tears and using wording that he knows will make his mostly teenage fanbase think he’s a good kind person.

He wants to impress on his fans that he really was just a kind person, the only kind person and the only voice of reason. That’s why when the Cantu thing happened, he started posting “messages” of him being so kind to the Uber driver. He needs his fans to think he’s a kind and loving person, and that Tommy and quackity and literally everyone who’s pulled away from him was just a fake friend who couldn’t be trusted. He somehow was always, always the one being fucked over.

I remember when I told my friend about dream (this friend had a completely neutral opinion on him and barely knew the guy beyond his manhunts) and he told me that sounded like grooming.

He gradually isolated his (primarily young, female) fanbase using private accounts, discord calls, Snapchat, and whatever else. He got extremely personal with us far beyond the level any creator should be, he used kindness and flattery (like calling us “mature”. Also legit) to make us feel genuinely loved by him, again, NOT in the way a creator loves their fans. In the way a friend loves their friends, even in the way a partner loves their partner. He lashed out at us and had panic attacks when we did criticize him, he used tactics to make us think he was always right and good, and more than that, make all his detractors seem like terrible people out to get him AND us, he played himself out to be the perpetual victim and used carefully cut clips and emotional manipulation (like how he brought up his ~poor innocent family~ when harassing quackity. Weaponizing trauma like that was something he did ALL THE TIME to us whenever he was criticized.) in order to use us against people he didn’t like, making us take the bullet for him.

He uses his kindness and supposed goodness as a weapon, he used Tommy’s own trauma around doxxing against him when Tommy dared to criticize him (“I supported you when you were getting doxxed, yet you won’t do the same for me?”)

He used trauma to relate to his audience, making us feel like he was the only person who got it.

It’ll sound stupid, but it was genuinely really scarring. The way he made me and my friends feel was so confusing. I often found myself feeling used and violated, but also like I was in debt to him. I dreaded when he’d have fans on call, I dreaded him but also he felt like all I had. The tone of him and the fandom was that “we have to defend him at all costs, they’re out to get him and we’re the last line of support he has”. It was embarrassing, it was stressful, it was horrible. I wasted so much fucking time and energy on him.

it was really traumatic and distressing, especially as a teenager who’d already been at a vulnerable point and used him as an escape originally. I know that sounds melodramatic but I mean it.

He is a groomer through and through. He’s barely getting any new fans, but he’s barely losing any either bc the grasp he has on them is so tight.

Worst of all, if you leave the fandom, you’ll lose your friends and become an enemy. He encourages that behaviour and that mentality. He encourages harassment of his ex-friends, he encourages harassment of anyone who doesn’t like him. He wants you to feel like he’s the only good person, and like he’s the only one who will care about you. And I know at least in my experience that the way I acted when I was a fan of his did genuinely cause me to feel alienated in my social life. I lost friends, I felt like I couldn’t talk to anyone “safely”. That’s how he wants his fans to feel, because at some point he really is all you have.

And that’s why dream stans are still sticking around. It’s at the point where the only way they’ll leave is on their own volition, and the more publicly fucked shit he does, the less hope I have that they’ll do that.

i don’t have much to add but i agree, and several people i know who used to be big dream fans also agreed that there was a heavily insidious ‘us vs them’ atmosphere

[the-final-sif]

Dream's Response Summary

Dream posted a response to various accusations, covering just about everything ever because he was done with this shit. I've done my best to summarize it here, but I recommend going and watching his whole video. This is going to be extremely summarized for readability and I'm only going to cover stuff I consider serious so anything about speedrunning is getting skipped.

The tl:dr is: Dream never groomed anyone or had inappropriate contact with anyone underage, he provided proof that one accuser flat out lied, and the other ""accusation"" was from a third party who was never involved. The actual supposed victim released a statement that they were never groomed, nor a victim in any way, never was asked about someone sharing information about them, and wants everyone to shut the fuck up.

Police were never actually contacted, both twitter accounts were lying about doing so to make their claims seem real. Also the supposed snapchat video shown is a very obvious fake.

He covers Manatreed, the run down is the guy was a childhood best friend he grew up with and who was struggling with homelessness. Dream helped him, and never knew about the battery charge (Manatreed had lied to him about it). When Dream spoke to Manatreed's ex girlfriend, she was very clear she never wanted any of this publicly out there, that she was happy that Dream had been helping Manatreed and she wanted the best for him.

Dream still doesn't know exactly what happened with that situation, he has since lost contract with Manatreed, all he knows is he was trying to help a childhood friend and got lied to.

The first allegation from Oxy/Anastasia, he's extremely clear they only ever messaged in twitter dms and he disproves the claim about the texts/tik tok. He has a google voice number hooked up to his tik tok account for obvious reasons, and she was showing imessage texts. This is not possible, which means she was lying.

As part of this, Dream scrolls through his twitter dms and shows he responds to fans all the time and talks to people in his community from all over. He also shows how he's friends with and has hired people that were fans of his, including people like Foolish.

He discusses Amanda, the two of them messaged on instagram back when he was a much smaller creator. He showed/posted the transcript of the two of them talking about normal stuff. They had been messaging since 2020. He did attempt to post a complete transcript of those messages, but she had deleted some of her messages and he doesn't have a way to recover them.

Dream explains that Instagram has a "feature" where if you ever reply to someone, then you literally cannot remove their ability to message you without blocking them. Something I did not know about instagram and which is fucking wild.

Since he replied to her in 2020, that meant she could message him forever and her notifications would be constantly showing up for him. He attempted to delete her messages/her ability to message him back in 2021 and showed proof of this, but realized he couldn't. Dream also in doing so accidentally deleted the context to her messages that she was a fan and basically everything prior to 2021.

Since he didn't remember her (what with the prior messages deleted), she was dmnig him from her personal account without fan content on it and was talking about being a streamer, he assumed she was a smaller streamer he knew and was talking to her as such.

They were talking about music so he gave her his personal snapchat to talk and because he wanted to get some feedback on a new song he was working on. He wanted to send the song via snapchat so he could be reasonably sure it'd stay private.

Dream categorically denies any sexting with Amanda or sexual messaging at all, he goes through why she most likely did this (he had been ignoring her messages and made a new snapchat with only close friends). He also downloaded his own data (something Amanda refused to/failed to do), went through the snapchat logs and did see some messages, but never saw either of his supposed compliments to her.

Amanda claimed Dream deleted her dms and that's why she couldn't provide any of the evidence she claimed she had, but Dream showed those same DMs very clearly undeleted. The dms were never deleted and she lied as an excuse.

Amanda lied about going to the police. Dream had his lawyers file a bunch of requests, and track down the police station that she went to based on the photo. They filed every request possible for any information with this police station, and there was no record of Amanda visiting the station or any records relating to Dream whatsoever. So either she lied about filing anything, or she told a story such that the police filed literally no paperwork whatsoever about the situation. Not even a report.

Dream sent the police station a copy of his own drivers license and Amanda's information so they could contact him if anything did come up, and nothing ever did. Nothing was filed, nobody cared.

Dream got swatted several times as a result of online harassment, including his family, and the harassment was overwhelming and awful for him.

He addresses the gumball situation, he showed up to a birthday party for a friend, gumball's VA was there and kept getting aggressive with him. While on facetime with some friends, Cantu ended up hitting Dream to impress them. Dream was obviously put off by this, but at the end of the night people ended up ubering together and Dream ended up in an uber with Cantu. He thought it'd be fine since other people were involved.

Cantu dropped his phone out the window made the uber driver pull over to look for it and got in trouble with the police. The uber driver tried to talk to Cantu about handling the police in the future, and Cantu started calling the uber driver slurs and claiming the uber driver had "down syndrome".

Dream got involved, trying to defend the uber driver, and Cantu threatened to kill him and called him slurs. Later Cantu apologized and Dream wanted to forgive him. Only later, Cantu started spreading lies about him and calling him a pedophile, so Dream realized the apology wasn't sincere and called him out for his behavior.

The third party who had been filming all of this saw what Cantu was doing lying about Dream and trying to claim none of this happened. They reached out to Dream and gave him the actual video as proof of what happened. Cantu tried to threaten them out of sending Dream the video of what happened, but they ignored him and sent them anyways. Dream also had the uber driver in his video backing up what he said.

Finally, the Jamie Allegations

Jamie is a mutual friend of several people that Dream knew, she did not post the allegations, she was never contacted about any of this she made an explicit statement that she was never groomed or a victim in any way.

Dream and Jamie meet prior to Dream being a youtuber on bbh's minecraft server, they were both fans of Skeppy. Which is why Jamie was followed by Dream, Skeppy, Vurb and some other youtubers in their friend group.

Jamie is still active online and put out her own statement, the person in the screenshots never gave permission for any of this to be put out, and they are very clear that the messages were taken out of context and that the claims made are false. The person in the screens is clear Dream is not a groomer, they never accused him of that, and that the twitter account is lying.

The snapchat video shown is very obviously fake, because snapchat just magically opens itself, there's no finger or button use interacting with the screen.

The burner account never actually contacted the police, Dream records him calling to the department they claimed to contact, and the person answering is very clear they have no contact from this person.

The supposed recent document posted is a fake convo of someone using a fake twitter account to talk to "Jamie", Jamie did not talk to them and it's just fake.

All of this was incredibly damaging for Jamie, who had no idea what was going on, and was getting harassed/stalked/having her irls contact.

Dream has also faced waves of harassment over obviously fake allegations, people have just been taking them at face value. He also shows how easy it is to fake these things as I have done.

He's been swatted, harassed, his family has been swatted and harassed, he's been scared for his own safety several times. It's been awful for him, and all based on fake shit. He's not stepping back from minecraft, but he is stepping back from twitter and no longer engaging with people behaving this way.

Also his ping pong record was undefeated.

[lacystar]

You’ve heard of main characters. You’ve heard of background characters. But in 2021, ranboo invented a brand new type of character: one that is simultaneously a main character while also being completely unnecessary to the plot.

[ingravinoveritas]

I know we've all seen and discussed The Kiss so many times by now, but it's nearly the one-year anniversary of GO 2 and ever since I saw this slow motion gif and this clip, it's felt like watching it all over again with fresh eyes.

Everything about this is so breathtaking on so many levels. The way Michael's eyebrows raise, the way he seems to almost lift himself into the kiss, like he was physically bringing himself closer to David's/Crowley's lips, and how they very nearly melt into each other even as they're trying not to. You can almost see their hearts leaping close together, as if something powerful is happening as much within them as without.

It reminds me of episode one and the angel-that-would-be-Crowley snapping his fingers and saying "Let there be light." Four little words, one simple gesture, and a whole universe that wasn't there before exploded into being. Sparks flying, in more ways than one...

And I love it. I love that this kiss is so incredible that we are still talking about it one year later, and that it will forever be one of the most gorgeously searing kisses ever committed to film. I love that we have this kiss specifically because it was Michael and David in these roles, and the once-in-a-lifetime chemistry between them.

There are film kisses, and then there are film kisses, and almost nothing I have ever seen on screen comes close to this, or ever will. I am so, so grateful to Michael and David for giving this to us, and to each other...

[extra-stout-stories]

Feedist creatives, what was your first work related to the kink? Do you still have it?

When I was young I wrote a story about a near-future SF setting where everyone was fat. The protagonist was trying to become the fattest boy in his class so that the fattest girl in his class would be his girlfriend. I don't think I really knew what "girlfriend" meant; this was before puberty, which was when I realized that my feelings about fat people and weight gain were sexual, and long before I discovered that feedism was a kink. Sadly, the floppy disk with this story is long since lost to time, but as I think about my development as a feedist and my own changing body image, I really wish I still had it so I could get that glimpse into the workings of my mind at that time.

[rat-rosemary]

"I wish there was more queer mcyts"

You guys couldn't handle Dream