#it’s in the way i wrote a dsmp fic while hating the fuck out of dream

[shootingthe-stars]

new fic!! (kind of not rly)

helloo i’m back after months and i recently started reworking a fic i made years ago because i’m kinda lacking in a hyperfixation rn. i know my following is not really the target audience but if u are interested in this sort of thing checking it out would be really appreciated!

[faebriel]

ok ok I'm insane and couldn't pick one so have two (no need to answer both if you don't want to)

“You talk to him.” Not kindly, but he does.

“I’m used to him,” he shoots back. “I’m the only person who is.”

That makes Niki feel something, some uncomfortable tug in her chest. She mentally kicks herself. It’s not jealousy, she reminds herself, because despite the near-cliff jumping and the long nights without food and the nuclear fallout that has punctuated her last few months, being jealous of Tommy would be the least reasonable thing she’s allowed herself to be, maybe ever.

“You don’t believe me,” Tommy says flatly. “You never - eugh.” He cuts himself off with another ragged sigh, running a hand down his face. “Look, Niki, it’s - we were all together in Pogtopia, right? But I was there first. With him. And you didn’t see the start of it, it was horrible, and I’m glad no one else saw the beginning of it either but it was still just so shit and he kept saying all these terrible things about Tubbo and Fundy and you and,” he takes a shaky breath, “then, when I died, I saw him.”

Her breath catches in her throat.

Well, the voice in the back of her head whistles. If you were still wondering about all this afterlife bullshit, if you want to know where you’re going after your third life, here you go.

and

“You didn’t even - this isn’t about L’Manberg, Wilbur!” Niki shouts.

And then he stops, breathing hard, and he looks at Niki the same way he does whenever her voice is being drowned out in a crowd - the way he does when he wants to hear her, when he wants to know what she has to say.

“What else is there?” he asks.

Niki freezes. Stock still, unable to move, unable to breathe, ice threading its way through her gut, her chest, her shoulders, chilled down to the bone. With slow-dawning horror, she can feel hot tears welling up behind her eyes, sitting in her throat, threatening to spill over into a sob. She swallows - to keep her cool, to stay calm, to keep it together -

And then, something in her chest just snaps.

“You said you’d come back for me!” she cries, and her voice hitches on the lump of tears at the back of her throat and god, she sounds absolutely pathetic. Wilbur’s face softens immediately, which somehow just makes her feel even worse. “In Manberg. When Schlatt put me in prison, and you and Tommy were in Pogtopia, you said you’d break me out when it was safe. I waited for weeks , Wilbur. It was… it was horrible.”

“Niki…” a kaleidoscope of emotions flicker across his face, and he seems unsure which to settle on. “We got you out though, right? After the festival.”

“You looked for the button first,” she says quietly, and he stills.

Her sniffling sounds embarrassingly loud against the quiet background of night.

thank you sm!!! i’m gonna put these under the cut because they got a little long sorry (tw for discussion of suicidal ideation)

to preface: tommy is kind of the accidental but incredibly necessary invisible support beam for niki and wilbur’s making amends in bitter. niki cannot accept wilbur’s actions and apology without first acknowledging her own actions and making steps towards an apology, because otherwise it kind of falls flat? in that ending scene niki finally gets what wilbur is feeling and wilbur finally gets that someone else knows how he feels (it’s not perfect 100% yet, but…. that’ll get explored later)

onto the actual snippet! “tommy talks to wilbur - not kindly, but he does” was very important to me! tommy has stuck by wilbur ever since pogtopia, but the tragedy is that he is not equipped to deal with wilbur’s issues, and it shows. wilbur’s first stream after revival depicts this really clearly, where tommy tails wilbur around the whole time but insults him, is still stuck on calling him the villain, physically fights him at some point, etc. on one hand this isn’t healthy but on the other hand tommy is actually around, which is more than can be said for basically any other ally wilbur has had on the dsmp, maybe excluding his dad, who literally killed him lmfao.

this whole issue is exacerbated by the fact that tommy believes that he is the only person who properly understands wilbur, the only person who gets what happened to him, and feels like wilbur is generally his burden to bear. he failed to stop wilbur from both 1. hurting other people and 2. killing himself after the pogtopia-manberg war - and he doesn’t trust wilbur not to do either of those things again, so he’s stuck hovering around wilbur while wilbur is inadvertently setting off his own trauma and feeling responsible for any way he might fuck up and hating that but not wanting to leave. tommy’s memory isn’t perfect and he isn’t a perfect narrator, what he remembers from pogtopia the most were the scariest parts and that’s understandable but it means he’s holding wilbur to the worst expectations of behaviour (and he does so very vocally). the others showed up later, sure, but in tommy’s eyes he’s the only one who saw wilbur’s descent, and by the time they showed up wilbur had already changed irreversably. tommy tries to rationalise this by splitting the ‘different wilburs’ apart from each other in his head (he does this in canon too - there’s one quote from like late 2020 where he says he and tubbo need to keep on going for who wilbur used to be, not who he became, even though they’re,, the same person), and no one challenges that perspective, so he just keeps doing it even though it’s not healthy for him or wilbur.

and then limbo happened and, oh geez, THAT didn’t help jhfaskjjfsa

tommy is on a bit of a knife edge with niki in this fic. niki’s in this state of “ok, he’s annoying whatever, i’m moving on”, but all tommy knows is that she tried to kill him that one time, disappeared off the face of the map, joined a book club with two people who definitely do not like him, and now is just acting weirdly mellow and polite. she is not someone he wants near wilbur bc what the fuck is she gonna do? what is he gonna do? who knows. he’s frustrated that niki doesn’t seem to acknowledge how he’s feeling (especially bc once upon a time she would have been someone he trusted to acknowledge them - they were friends, they fought together) and he’s taking a big step by telling someone about his concerns here, especially bc tommy doesn’t really like talking about them at all. he wouldn’t be saying absolutely anything to niki if he didn’t truly believe she should stay away from wilbur, even if he’s wrong about him. (sometimes i think i write tommy as a little too emotionally mature here but it all goes out the window when wilbur’s brought up. idk if that balances it out)

ok onto niki: this is the first she has actually heard of limbo! she’s only just come around to the fact that resurrection is possible at all. death is kind of a touchy subject for niki both in general and re: wilbur in the fic - she’s coming off of a period in her life where suicidal ideation was, uh, a big thing (whether you want to read that into canon or not is subjective, that’s just the angle i went with in this fic). the sudden existence of a life after death, miserable as it is - and whether she really believes in such a place, when it only exists in tommy and wilbur’s words - that is a lot of information for her to absorb all at once. death is a weird connection point for tommy and niki here, coming right off of the fact that they’ve just acknowledged each other having those problems - tommy, out of, yknow, altruism, would very much like to keep niki out of that place, and niki is quietly reckoning with the fact that that is where she would have sent him. the concept of limbo from the perspective of a character with no experience of it, even secondhand, is so interesting to me like what kind of eldritch location would you feel like you’re living in asghjkl

(also - i gotta be honest the jealousy angle here but mostly when she’s talking later about dream not deserving wilbur’s companionship kinda came out after this post came across my dash while writing. whoops /j)

-

fun fact, this is the very first snippet of bitter that i ever wrote! all the way back in may!! this is like the moment of the fic - it's where the miscommunication that niki and wilbur have been having is shattered entirely - and so sticking the landing was uhhh kinda important to me lol.

wilbur's entire being in this fic is basically consumed by L'Manberg - he equates his self worth to it entirely. in his eyes, everyone (rightfully) hates him because of what he did to L'Manberg, because L'Manberg was corrupted and he himself with it, etc. niki tries to tell herself this, and while it definitely does form part of her issues with him, it was the betrayal that causes her this much pain - that he seemingly brushed her and their friendship off entirely when he supposedly left her for dead in manberg. because here is what we as the audience know: wilbur couldn’t leave niki in trouble when he heard her life was in danger, even when he was trying to find the button (pretty much the only thing he sees himself as having left at this point) and so he returned. here is what it looks like from niki’s perspective: wilbur told her to wait in manberg until it was safe to come to pogtopia, laid the place with TNT, went to blow up the place, and only returned when he couldn’t find the detonator (and then the first thing she saw him do in pogtopia was encourage the pit behaviour but that’s not what we’re talking about asdfgh). that is massive miscommunication and it’s been brewing between them for months - to make a quirky little reference to the title, niki has been carrying that anger with her so long it's gone bitter. it was never just about l’manberg with niki - not that anger, not her and wilbur’s friendship (hence the little flashback earlier in the fic, bc niki’s relationship to anarchism and statehood or statelessness juxtaposed with her friendships with wilbur and eret - she loves l’manberg bc she loves wilbur, but she loves eret too and those national ties don’t undermine that - is Real Interesting to me) - so when wilbur asks what else there could possibly be (because in his mind, what else could she have bothered staying around for?), she just fucking breaks.

“Niki freezes. Stock still, unable to move, unable to breathe, ice threading its way through her gut...with slow-dawning horror, she can feel hot tears welling up behind her eyes” - prose discussion time! heat and cold are two big throughlines in this fic - particularly for niki, cold is what she is. admittedly when i started with it i mostly wanted to subvert hot = angry and cold = dead but i kinda ended up enjoying this take on it for what it is instead of just as a subversion (also i like the idea of revived people running hot, their bodies r working hard to keep em going). she’s holding onto her feelings and refusing to deal with them, she’s frozen over. descriptions of cold are key to niki’s mental state throughout the fic - cold weight on her chest, feelings of frostbite when she and wilbur hug the first time, ice cold water during the dinner scene, waking up in the cold flat, etc. this was an attempt at describing a more visceral feeling of like, when you’re really mad and you can just feel the adrenaline running through your veins. always felt more cold than hot to me. when she starts to cry, the facade she’s been putting on is finally thawing out and cracking the ice she’s buried her feelings under. (also gives an excuse to write warm comforting hugs towards the end /hj). it’s a loss, it’s catharsis, it’s a whole mess.

and ofc this is all news to wilbur and he feels terrible, because as unintentional as it was, he really really hurt her - because the destruction of l’manberg fucking sucked but above all else wilbur hurt the people he loved because they loved him so much and not in spite of it, because they cared about him so deeply and his death was a massive blow to them. this hasn’t even dawned on him, because how could it? he respects deeply niki (lowkey respects her opinion more than his own at this point) so he has to listen, because it’s niki (“and he looks at Niki the same way he does whenever her voice is being drowned out in a crowd - the way he does when he wants to hear her, when he wants to know what she has to say” - because he does), and what she says fucking floors him. in his eyes, he failed her by putting her in danger and then by destroying her home - the idea that she valued him and their friendship so much flies entirely over his head until this moment, and he is forced to re-evaluate the mindset that has motivated him since… basically since pogtopia! the way i write wilbur is like… yes, he’s one of niki’s closest friends and he’s more aware of her insecurities and issues than most (which is why he does always take the time to listen to her, etc) but he does over-idealise her a bit. tbf, i think he does to some extent with everyone (calling tubbo strong on the anniversary stream, for example). also the fact that he really wasn’t around for niki’s lowest moments as a character! he still thinks of her the way she was in l’manberg - confident, steadfast, respected - and this moment shatters that for him as he realises exactly what effect he and his death had on her and everyone else, not just by his actions, but because they loved him and cared for him so deeply.

sorry that this got horrifically long!! and thank you so much for sending snippets in <3333

[lnterjection]

Regarding canon!Techon, VoS!Techno, and anarchy

Someone told me the way Techno’s anarchy ideals were presented in Chapter 34 of Valley of Serenity (wherein he admitted “I can want anarchy to be the predominant reality because it benefits me the most while also understanding that it would not be the best thing for most other people”) were, to quote - “All wrong here. Have you watched any of the syndicate streams? Cuz its clear techno actually believes in anarchy and that it's good for people. I understand he's missing some of the development from post pogtopia to the syndicate due to this being canon divergent, but that doesn't change the fact he's always actually believed in his anarchist ideals.”

Now, while I hadn’t considered this specifically before writing the chapter, I had considered enough of the factors surrounding Techno’s characterization in both canon and Valley of Serenity to respond with this:

Ironically, Techno's lore streams are the only ones that I've consistently watched. He's literally the only person where I've watched every bit of lore he's streamed.

And I came to this mindset for Techno in this fic specifically because I believe the events after Nov 16 in canon, of the Butcher Army, the Community House debacle with Tommy betraying him, and Doomsday were huge influences in how much he believes in the good of anarchy for the common person. Remember, he was willing to retire and let go of the whole anarchy thing to live in peace for a while, after seeing the disaster that was Nov 16th. It's only after S2 he starts gathering up people to form the Syndicate, committing fully to his ideology. Before he was content to chill in the Arctic with Phil.

With this background I have three points of contention to make-

Firstly, something I've always found interesting about Techno's character is how his anarchy thing might clash with the people he cares about. More specifically, I always wondered "if Techno was forced to choose between upholding anarchy and Phil, who or what would he choose?" Post Season 2 Techno I'm unsure of, but given the limited amount of lore from Season 1 about Techno I'm going off of to build his character, I'm writing his character arc in this fic to be him coming to the realization that he cares more about his family's wellbeing more than he does anarchy or upholding his whole blood god thing. It's a realization that Techno would have needed to spend months with his family again, living with them, to make and have him commit to. Techno back in Nov 16 would have been unsure what he would have picked.

Secondly, we don't have confirmation about where Techno got his anarchist ideals from, which is important because motivation is important. We know at this point in canon he strongly believes in them for real, but we're not given backstory on why that it. There's hints and theories, some of which are far more plausible than others - I've chosen to set the root of his anarchy belief in what he says in this chapter - governments are the only ones strong enough to take him down as an organized group of power. Governments have tried to take him down and nearly succeeded - that's what the Butcher Army was. That event was what brought him out of retirement to turn L'Manberg into L'Hole. And Techno in canon is reinforced in the belief that anarchy's best for everyone because of what it did to Phil and Tommy. He sees how both of them were hurt by L'Manberg's system of power, something that once again Techno in this fic didn't experience. We don't know what's happened in his backstory to make him stand on his anarchy thing, but that also means we don't know how easily Pogtopia Techno would have been convinced to give up on it. He believes it, but why and how much? I've made my choice of interpretation in this fic precisely because we don't know, and his canon decision to go into retirement was what influenced my writing here. I genuinely believe if L'Manberg hadn't attacked in, but instead turned out to be a functioning government like they could have been, his anarchy spiel about bad government is for at least other people, if not himself, would have subsided. But that's not the sort of plot that runs a livestream, is it?

Thirdly - and this ties into point 2 - probably at some point in canon Techno's past government has wronged him and he's seen government repeatedly wrong other people, hence his beliefs that again, the Butcher Army and New L'Manberg under Tubbo only strengthened when it had the chance to subside them. You could even draw allusions back to his skyblock series and take the quote "If skyblock has told me anything, it is that if you have a problem, the answer is slavery" to mean that he's seen the governmentally structured system of skyblock drag its players into an endless, pointless competing grind whilst also committing mass slave-related atrocities, which would be one of the more plausible backstories for Techno and explain where his anarchy ideals might have developed. But we're still operating canon Techno under the rules of the Dream SMP, and the Dream SMP's world is very much not the world presented in Valley of Serenity.

See, my decision - very conscious, deliberate, developed decision - to worldbuild Valley of Serenity in a way that's more akin to a fantasy world in the midst of their equivalent of the Age of Exploration instead of modeling it off how the Dream SMP worlds has definitely also influenced the way I plan the character developments in this fic. Valley of Serenity's world has nations, economies, established ethnic groups and populations and cultures and systems and thousands of years worth of history. L'Manberg started out as a city-state with some surrounding farmland area that had its own history and a decently sized population before Wilbur got there. The Dream SMP canon, meanwhile, has none of that established. You could argue there were civilians on the sideline that just aren't named, or that the Twitch viewers are just civilian in this world because Wilbur did the whole election thing (something that becomes increasingly unlikely each time a new streamer canonizes their stream chat as something that is decidedly not a country's population), but there's no canonical establishment for any of that. I don't think there is any hidden population of nameless background people in the DSMP lore. The lore makes far more sense without it, even with all the "political" drama. It would explain how people keep forming and abandoning and destroying new countries every other week and just.. getting away with it, and how Dream is able to spend so much time obsessing over one child in exile if he really has a country he's supposed to be the shadowmaster of, and how the whole clusterfuck of the Quackity Karl Sapnap marriage is even possible.

In a world like that, it's plausible for Techno's anarchy to be defensible to him, and to the other members of the Syndicate. However, in Valley of Serenity's world, his anarchy view makes absolutely zero sense, given how government is basically a natural result of humans settlings down to farm in large groups together. Most of DSMP's people can decide to just quit and wander off to live alone for the rest of their lives, no problem, but in a world like VoS or the real world? They are very fucked and so stay in large groups, which then, as history shows, results in some authority being assigned to a group of people to administrate things once the group becomes large enough... and boom. Government, and the start of civilization.

The only way for Techno in Valley of Serenity's universe to plausibly believe in the government stuff, especially after all those talks he had with Wilbur about L'Manberg, would be for me to write him as a completely idiot who's utterly unaware of how governments actually work.

If there's one thing I hate it's writing Techno as an idiot. The same Techno who dominated MCM and Skyblock and prepared for weeks for battle against L'Manberg and managed to successfully build a hidden piston door concealing wither skulls and had the foresight to write a will with "instructions" for Phil because he knew the prison was likely a trap and who has enough battle strategy to defeat Dream and also know not to trust him and thought up contingency plans to escape the Butcher army with the totems and who regularly makes the most intelligent, witty, sarcastic and well-timed remarks with dialogue - Techno is not an idiot. He is far, far from it. In the DSMP universe his anarchy ideals would be defended. In VoS'? Absolutely not. And if Techno has any amount of sense at all in this universe, which he does, he knows it too. I made a choice when I wrote this fic's world the way I did, and I'm am committed to seeing the choice through. Part of the reason why I did it? It was because I wanted to explore the way events like L'Manberg and Pogtopia would have affected the characters in their beliefs and trauma in a realistic setting of war and rebellion and political battles, and DSMP's world was just not a good conduit for that. Places like Sanctuary and arcs like Tubbo's struggles back in L'Manberg wouldn't be able to exist if I didn't go down this route, note to mention how wrong it felt to me to write Wilbur's presidency heavily affecting him when the people he's presiding over is just his friends. Everything would have felt cheaper, faker, more simulated if it had been in a world with Minecraft and DSMP rules. I knew this would require some reinterpretation of certain characters' motivations, but it was worth it to me to give their recovery a sense of weight and realism I felt the DSMP world wouldn't have been able to deliver. (I'm not making any point on how realistic or "heavy" DSMP does its trauma - livestreaming is a vastly different medium than writing and some points here would need to be translated differently when applied to livestream, just as a good book doesn't always make a good movie).

Hence, combined with points 1 and 2, the differing characterization between canon Techno and here.

It's important to note that Techno, Phil, Tommy, and Wilbur are a family unit here in a way that's been completely disproven in canon. They have a backstory that ties them together. This has also definitely influenced Techno's priorities and nudged him towards the path of conscious realization about his anarchy thing here, though it's not a point because it doesn't factor too much into the relevant mentality of Techno's character in terms of how much he believes in the anarchy thing.

So yeah, I hope this clears up some stuff for you! Or that you understand at least why I made the decision with Techno's character.

there were definitely typos in this reply. no im not going back to reread and fix them.