#skeppy just gets it and understands that he can be his own cc and have his own merit
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xomoosexo · 1 year ago
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munchymc crew will have each other’s backs forever, regardless of how close they may or may not actually be….dream and skeppy go way back he used to edit for skeppy before he did youtube himself, he literally bought out skeppy’s failing merch company, skeppy being a drolo is my favorite thing ever
LITERALLY!!! THEY SUPPORT EACH OTHER BECAUSE THEYVE BEEN THERE FOR EACH OTHER!!!!
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itsfeckinwimdy · 3 years ago
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Camellia - Part One
Pairings: Mcyt's + characters x reader (Separate) (Romantic + Platonic)
Included: c!Awesamdude, c!Badboyhalo, cc!Dreamwastaken, c!DreamXD, c!Foolish Gamers, cc!GeorgeNotFound, cc!Jack Manifold, cc!Karl Jacobs, and cc!Niki Nihachu.
Reader pronouns: n/a (They/Them).
Summary: How Mcyt's/dsmp characters would hold your hand.
Word count: 1.0k (1095 words)
Warnings: Mentions of a fear of crowded spaces.
DSMP Masterlist / Part Two
Published: 16/09/2021
A/n - this is formatted slightly different to usual as I really don't have much time or motivation to write at the moment, sorry.
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Awesamdude:
Sam was a big fan of holding hands.
He tended to grip your hand tightly in his, not too tight that it was cutting off circulation or hurting you, but in a firm grip so that either of you could accidentally let go.
Sometimes he would mess with your fingers as well or simply bring your hand up to place a chaste kiss on the back of it.
Holding your hand helped to ground him and focus on you rather than the negative thoughts that came with being the warden of the prison.
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Badboyhalo:
With how excited the demon could get sometimes, you had to choose your moments of when to hold his hand because otherwise, you might just end up being accidentally dragged or lifted off the ground.
This led to the two of you deciding that linking your pinkie fingers would be a lot easier than the full-on handhold.
This would mean that you didn't have to worry about Bad waving his hands in excitement as it was easy to slip your pinkie out of his.
During the night though, Bad would always hold your hands in his wholly as a way to make up for the daytime compromise.
This demon boy was soft for you and would do anything to keep you happy.
And Skeppy of course.
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Dreamwastaken:
Dream likes to grip your hand tight in his.
He likes to entwine his fingers between yours and absentmindedly stroke his thumb across the back of your hand.
He tends to mess with your fingers as well and if you wear rings that can spin, then he ends up spinning them around.
If he doesn't thread his fingers with yours and instead holds your hand 'normally', he ends up squeezing your hand, well mainly your knuckles, causing them to sometimes click or for you to let go of his hand. Sometimes he can squeeze a bit too hard which he always apologises for.
He finds it reassuring to hold your hand. Whether that be in crowded spaces so he doesn't lose you or in the comfort of your own home as a reminder that you're there for him and he's there for you.
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Dream XD:
Dream XD didn’t understand the concept of handholding at first, just like other human concepts.
This just meant you could show him multiple different ways to hold his hand.
Because this man is so tall, you tended to hold one of his hands in both of your's because his hands are so big. I mean, he is a giant god.
This would lead to you holding onto his fingers rather than trying to grab his full hand because you simply couldn’t.
After a while, the god began to understand the gesture as a form of affection and started to offer his hand to you for you to hold all of the time.
If this immortal being could blush you bet he was.
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Foolish Gamers:
Foolish was never big on the whole holding hands thing, but then again, he was a 20ft giant whose significant other was at a mere mortals height.
In fact, his hand is the entire height of your body when he is his usual size.
On the occasions that he has a mortal size for a long enough period of time for the two of you to actually hold hands, Foolish tends to just like pinkies, or two fingers rather than your entire hand.
This is usually because he is trying to carry lots of stuff at any given time. Just because he's human-size doesn't mean that he'll stop working or building.
On the off chance that he's not pushing himself too hard, he will hold your hand fully in his for about 5 maybe 10 minutes at the most before complaining that his hand was too warm and sweaty and ultimately letting go.
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Georgenotfound:
George loved holding your hand.
Because of how constipated with feelings he could be, George liked to show you that he did care about you by holding your hand whenever he could.
It didn't matter to him how you held hands, just that you did and that you knew that he was trying to tell you that he care about you.
A lot of the time, it would end up with George lacing his fingers with yours so that if you were busy typing or editing, you could still sort of use that hand on the keyboard.
Also, it was his favourite way to hold your hand.
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Jack Manifold (platonic):
Jack doesn't have an aversion to holding hands with his friends, but he just prefers not to.
However, because the two of you had known each other for so long, Jack knew that you liked to hold someone's hand as a comfort thing.
Also so you could try and steal the person's rings or bracelets they had on. Well, ‘borrow’ because you would always end up giving their belongings back.
Anyway, Jack would just let you grab onto and hold his hand.
Whether you would lace your fingers with his, or hold his hand fully in his, grab onto his arm with one hand as well, or just slippy lace a couple of fingers together.
Jack was okay with holding your hand.
And as long as you were happy then Jack was happy.
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Karl Jacobs:
This man's love language was touch so you bet he would take any opportunity to hold your hand.
He would try to hold both of your hands at any point in time, even placing his hands over the back of yours and lacing his fingers if you were working on anything just so he could hold onto you.
Karl’s favourite way to hold your hand was to lace his fingers with yours or to hold it normally so that he would mess with any rings or bracelets you were wearing that day.
He would always bring the back of your hand up to his face and kiss on the back of it to show his appreciation for you.
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Niki Nihachu:
Niki loved to hold your hand. It was one of her favourite things to do.
She would always lace her fingers with yours, letting you mess with her fingers or vice versa.
She tended to wear rings on her fingers and would always let you mess with them, whether it was just you wanting something to play with or if you needed to fiddle with something because you were too anxious or overstimulated by your surroundings.
Niki knew what it was like and would always give your hand a comforting squeeze in so that you knew she was still there.
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mellointheory · 4 years ago
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The Eggpire, and why they are the coolest villain group in the SMP
The Eggpire is personally one of my favorite groups of people on the entire smp. The Eggpire I’m currently referring to consists of Ponk, Bad, Antfrost, Punz, and Skeppy. They’re the ones who are clearly working for the Crimson, and are generally percieved by others in the SMP as corrupted. 
Part of why I love them so much is their clear alignment. They are perhaps the most obvious ‘villains’ in the current season. There’s no moral greyness with them, only the tragedy of the consumed as they serve their master. They’re predictable, and you can tell others view them as a threat. Don’t break the vines, don’t disrespect the egg, avoid them at all cost.
The Eggpire is also currently winning in the “group” part of “group dynamic”. There are other alliances on the SMP, but it has been a while since one solid group of people were working together to defend or protect something. Even in the Doomsday War the defenders of L’Manburg were conflicted--Niki burned the tree herself, Eret was working with people who he had betrayed once before, Punz was an active spy. The Eggpire has a solid foundation of people working together, and their internal workings are interesting. Every member has their own specific role.
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Badboyhalo, the Corrupter
Bad, despite what he says about there being no hierarchy within the Eggpire, calls all the shots. He is the largest threat and the start of the Crimson’s spread. He found the Egg, brought others to it, protected it when the vines first began to surface. He takes the most active role in the corruption of others and trying to further the Eggpire’s goals. He’s one of the main three fighters in the Eggpire, and the other two tend to follow his lead and let him speak.
Bad being a demonic creature himself adds an extra layer of awesome to his character. While he was uncorrupted his soul jar (Skeppy) was taken by the Egg, and the...bathwater stream happened. That was a hot mess, HOWEVER, afterwards it actually became kind of cool. Bad saying that “no matter what he could do, he couldn’t fix Skeppy”, implies that his character is in fact capable of magic and was trying, over and over, to return his best friend to who he was originally and kept messing up. Only after his actions failed did he willingly corrupt himself and become the main villain of the Egg arc.
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Antfrost, the Caretaker
Antfrost...I absolutely adore corrupted!Antfrost. He was the first person, after Bad, to become attached to the Egg. He was ruthless before he was turned--he even suggested killing Skeppy in order to remove the corruption from him. Now he’s actively serving an eldrich abomination. He follows Bad around silently and writes messages to people in languages they can’t understand. He’s a “professional hunter” (that scene gave me chills) and Bad’s righthand man.
Before the Crimson Antfrost ran an animal sanctuary. He’s still keeping an eye on the animals, but now most of his attention seems to have transferred to the Egg. He seems to have the most active affection for the egg, making sure to feed it and even kissing it once. The aesthetic of a chaotic evil catboy in a nice suit who has no moral compass but does have an undeniable fondness for the Bloodvines growing everywhere is just... *chefs kiss*
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Punz, the Guard
Punz, as a character is very well done. He’s been one of the most chill on the server for a while, only actively involving himself in conflicts when A) one of his pets has died, or B) Dream told him to. He’s loyal; once he has a directive he will accomplish it. Dream himself knew if he hired Punz to guard L’Manburg, Punz would guard L’Manburg and kill anyone who left the walls for as long as Dream wanted him to.
Now Punz is guarding the Egg itself. He isn’t as actively threatening as Bad and Ant--he was able to have a completely normal conversation with Tommy, for example, while Tommy is actively terrified of Bad and Ant. Punz is only a danger when he’s called to be, otherwise he’s just a chill guy who doesn’t seem concerned that he has red eyes, or that the thing he’s working for is actively spreading across the entire server.
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Ponk, the Voice
Ponk spent a lot of time around the Egg. He even planted a seed in his own casino, named it, and yet managed to turn it into something else. He was left on top of it for days, and came out completely unscathed. He originally began working with the Eggpire purely for pain au’ chocolate and bought contacts from Amazon in order to blend in with them. He doesn’t give a shit.
Correction: he didn’t give a shit until his boyfriend cheated on him. Ponk got corrupted purely out of spite and facilitated the beginning of a war between the Egg and the server’s local builder god. He’s a semi-psychic amputee and the caretaker of a graveyard. He has the most unique interaction with the Egg.
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Skeppy, the Heart
Skeppy is Badboyhalo’s living soul jar and probably the most wholly corrupted in the entire server. He spent an entire day inside the Egg and came out with no desires except for it. We’ve seen him the least out of every Eggpire member, but he’s had the most effect on the plot. He’s the Crimson’s leverage over Badboyhalo. If being logged out means a character is canonically asleep, then Skeppy has been sleeping for months. Practically in a coma, until the Egg needs him.
cc!Skeppy says that they have more planned for his character, so I’m very much looking forward to seeing what will happen when the Egg decides it needs him. He was probably the weakest Eggpire member, but who knows what he’s capable of now?
The Crimson Itself:
The Crimson is a problem you can’t get rid of. The bloodvines spread without anyone being near them; they grow back as soon as they’ve been cut. Just hurting the Egg can kill you, although they retconned Sam’s death due to Crimson damage. To quote Badboyhalo: “If you break the Egg, it bites you back.”
The absolute coolest thing about the entire Egg arc, in my opinion, is how hard it is to keep an eye on the big picture. We as viewers get wrapped up in what’s happening right now. Hannah was trapped in the Egg, now she’s escaped. There were vines in Sam’s base, now they were broken. The Eggpire attacked Foolish’s base, then he scared them away. Then you pull back and remember, it is just a an egg. We have no idea what its plans are, or what it’s capable of. Someday comes the Red Banquet, and that’s when the real storm breaks.
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comradeboyhalo · 3 years ago
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the 2nd pet war, aka a goldmine for sapnap, punz, and badlands analysis
The stream can be viewed here (Sam’s pov, starts 3 hours in). Full disclaimer, I made this originally to talk about the Badlands, but added bullets about Sapnap and Punz after rewatching the stream. The war occurred during the Pogtopia arc, so it’s pre-nov 16 and pre-egg arc. Also, this is insanely long under the cut.
The war starts when Ant steals a panda from Punz, which Sapnap and Sam were helping to escort. The panda then accidentally dies from Punz’s thorns, and it escalates to a war.
Sam’s loyalty to the Badlands is established right off the bat. He switches to the Badlands’ side quickly, despite being very upset that Ant and Bad engaged in a war while underprepared. The moment Sapnap starts attacking Bad, he runs for pots.
This loyalty is even more impressive considering Ant and Bad didn’t trust Sam to help initially. Sam barely holds a grudge against this, and helps anyway.
Ant gives the panda immediately back when Sapnap starts killing Bad and types “leave Bad alone” in chat. During negotiations, he also hits Punz away from Bad simply because he looks threatening.  (#1 bbh shooter)
Bad goes on the warpath the moment the Skeppy statue gets griefed. This is when Punz hesitates, but ultimately goes along with war. 
Also the way Sapnap just pushes all the blame on Bad instead of Ant….egg lore, anyone?
Ant: Punz killed the panda, they’re just dumb I guess
Punz is MUCH less bloodthirsty than Sapnap. It’s pretty clear that Punz is more upset about the panda’s death, while Sapnap is just eager to get revenge and kill people.
This battle also has copious amounts of stream sniping (from both ends) and combat logging (from everyone but Sapnap, who can’t combat log on the server).
Badlands are wayy less geared but Sam’s trident is so OP that it distracts Punz for majority of the battle. This will later spark Ant and Bad to get their own tridents, which leads them as the only people besides Techno to own tridents (hence their official flag having a trident). Now, of course, pretty much everyone has one.
The use of potions and communication through in game messages is very much a Badlands style of fighting. 
Sapnap: “Punz, you’ve always been my most powerful ally. well, you and Dream” 
Punz canonically grieves by being the cameraman for Sapnap’s destruction ???
Sam’s threats when Sapnap held Fran hostage is the first time we really see a darker side to him and he is dark with those threats.
Bad takes the de facto leader position in negotiations and, in typical Badboyhalo fashion, is both eloquent and extremely stubborn. 
Bad’s negotiation is actually really fun to listen to, because he’s really saying the same things as everyone else, but just in a calmer tone and with professional words. It brings back the “words have power” argument of early L’manberg and c!Quackity. Sapnap and Punz’s argument is solid and honestly a lot of fans agreed that they were in the right, but they just ended up letting Bad lay out the terms for everyone.
“It’s so dumb to argue with you, Bad, you never admit you’re wrong” sibling moment, cc!Sapnap just made this REAL 
They broke character a lot during negotiations and it’s honestly nice to see because during the early improv rp days, the lines still blurred a lot between character and cc.
Sam betraying Sapnap/Punz for the pet war and betraying Tubbo for the L’manberg war feels very much in tune for his character. He still views these people as friends, the Badlands just have to come first.
Punz was very much trying to distance himself from Sapnap’s actions to defend himself. Tbe Badlands, on the other hand, covered for each other even when they disagreed with their actions. Bad calls Punz out on this, actually, for not taking responsibility for his allies.
Bad views the Skeppy statue as the same value as Fran’s life, mainly because he built it together with Skeppy.
Sam  views the entire server as collateral damage for Fran, which has definitely changed in light of the prison and his survivor’s guilt.
Pretty much everyone thought Bad was overreacting over the statue, which is completely understandable, but it really stands out now since everyone thought Bad was overreacting over Red!Skeppy as well.
Bad ends up fixing Punz’s beacon that he broke out of revenge for his statue. While they fix it together, Ant and Sapnap just start whaling on each other as Sam/Punz/Bad watch in confusion. (Sam and Bad still end up helping Ant despite this bc Badlands are loyal yknow)
Ant is the most distrustful out of the three, as well as the most vengeful, which is a great contrast from the person who is building an animal sanctuary. 
Also, the fact that Ant is building a sanctuary for animals, but ends up stealing an animal for the kicks, which leads to its death is perfect irony.
at one point, Techno afks by the spider spawner and lags the server
Bad, after Sapnap claims Techno is on his side: i don’t think you understand what side Techno’s on. I dont think anyone understands what side Techno’s on
the Badlands come out as the winners, and it’s counted as the Badlands’ first win as an official faction.
At the end, the Badlands promise to get Punz a new panda, which leads to this stream I highly recommend. It contains the “Manburg, Pogtopia, who cares?” line as well as just god tier vibes
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bunybunn · 2 years ago
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hey i partially agreed with your last post so i really don’t wanna start some crazy debate here, but you said that dream not being a one dimensional villain is good or whatever idk and while technically i agree that one dimensional villains are usually not great, i do think in this case it doesn’t apply
c!dream was entirely supposed to be just plain evil, dream said that himself some time after the battle for the discs i think ? so ages ago, but still
he never had those motives if you look at his history, he „gave up his attachments“ or whatever on purpose because he wanted to not be bound to anything, making him allpowerful in his mind (a quote that comes to mind here is the whole „i don’t give a fuck about spirit“ monolog)
but tbf i’m not 100% sure what was even said last stream because i do not plan on watching it properly but i am interested to hear what you think ok have a good day
Ah you see the fun thing about c!Dream is technically he never was or was meant to be one dimensional villain. The thing about him is that more often then not you don't see his perspective and you don't really know his reason beyond what you saw on stream you were watching and if that stream was Tommy's you usually don't get much from that. However on other streams you could get some interesting bits, for example Skeppy joining the smp stream gave us nice insight why c!Dream was against L'Manberg (basically making place where only few choosen can join breaks the community and is pretty rude and useless) or a lot of c!Punz lore streams. Also you have cc!Dream literally talking about his character. All that was there but during this final lore stream it was finally said to us very clearly. With that in mind and with the fact that c!Dream is the The End Justifies the Means person you can probably better understand why he was willing to go as far as he did.
All characters on dsmp are extremely human they are not fully good people but they all have their own reasons and depth.
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pinkseas · 3 years ago
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bads frustration with the vines being cleaned up, “so disappointing, its all in preparation” god you can HEAR it and how upset he is im so. im so. im Not sane
the red banquet advertising LMAO was nervous but  i feel better now. 
no but the way bbh is still borderline fond of quackity even while corrupt. the way he shows little to no mercy to ANYONE he used to care about, towards his own friends, especially those going against the egg, and comparatively he’s so much easier on quackity, trying so hard to make him understand, really trying not to hurt him. god
remembering what the basement used to look like is SO jarring. one of my first ever streams i remember seeing it virtually untouched, i think one statue mightve been red ??? and NOTHING else. its so. its So.
i know the whole thing with nether blocks being used is mostly because of how well the colors all work and the lava but MAN does it make me think. especially considering my favorite nether worldbuilding has to do with the nether itself being one massive sentient being netherrack flesh walls etc etc idk !!!!! makes me Think. love it so bad
they built it all so nicely starts crying. “i wonder if we have enough seats for everyone” i know they literally murder bitches but STARTS CRYING
egg please dont speak backwards when i dont have access to what youre really saying Thank You
bads frustration the way he cows with whatever its saying “I know! i know. you dont have to say it anymore” WHAT IS IT SAYING IM SOOOO. im so.
i still swear the shroomlights around it make it look like petals unfurling
“eggactly according to plan” i hate it here. god it really is still them. like i know thats mostly cc bbh but im Choosing to interpret it as the characters still being themselves even with the eggs influence. Man.
“theyre gonna have no other choice but to love it!” hmmm. 
bad exasperation with skeppy. crying in a different way now
officially pausing my quiet bloodvines playlist in the background to really hear this god help me
“i wanna be next to the egg” NO inflection, completely monotone. everyone was affected differently but for the most part they kept their personalities and emotions- skeppy is just. almost gone. no emotion, no care, nothing but wanting the egg. it makes me SO curious about how the egg works and what it does i swear
“we both know theres nothing wrong with the egg and the eggs great and all” the way bad is literally only here for skeppy i am GOING to cry. i cant even remember what extent is or isnt canon i just know in my mind bad broke free of its influence, is probably far more resistant to it now, and is still there because his best friend loves the egg and he wants his best friend back. god.
still caring for and being worried about skeppy but at this point its so far in and hes starting to get more frustrated/give up hope
“lets go for a walk” literally just wanting to spend time with him GOD. how is there another 20 minutes im gonna Die
skeppy being so far gone and just. not giving a damn. its so jarring but also ive only seen skeppy like this? my 2nd or 3rd stream was BBH and puffy trying to get skeppy back to himself after he’d first been corrupted, the one where they had that little underground house and the big skeppy face in the wall and bad was upset because skeppy wasnt his best friend anymore. but i think i vaguely recall him at least pretending to be a bit more emotional or cheerful, in a cynical sort of way ?? and now its. total carelessness and apathy.
“all of this, all of this is for him, and its so frustrating. i know that egg is not evil and everything and everyone is just misunderstanding it” GENUINELY cant tell if this is genuine or just him convincing himself. like obviously the egg is awful but we never learned its actual intentions. obviously the banquet was mostly death but i really, really have to wonder. there are SO many things 
“i dont like how much time he spends by it now, he literally just hangs out by it” implying the slow build of him hanging around the egg itself more and more and how its making him worse. obviously being physically close to the egg is REALLY bad and corrupts you much faster but i have to wonder if part of it is also skeppy becoming more corrupt the more the others serve the egg ??? idk idk idk thats NOT a full thought
SKEPPY ABLE TO REPAIR IT i did not know that. holy shit
the skeppy “do you wanna take a picture? i mean you keep looking at me” its cruel but god. he’s really still in there too its not full apathy hes not fully gone just wildly fucking corrupt. GOD.
bad sounds So Sad he cares so much more about skeppy than the egg holy shit. step aside c!clingyduo 
skeppy being VERY aware of the egg and area and what has and hasnt been touched.... so in tune with it.... i love it here
NOT THE OLD STATUES BAD PLEASE. “yeah. i look good.” SKEPPY.......... ohhhh my god and bad saying it looked better before. fuck. Fuck. 
i have a weird thought/hc about the egg running off of wishes or willpower of those corrupt or something and skeppy wanting his friends to be safe and abandon him so the egg can die vs bad just wanting skeppy and it working horribly. skeppy being more and more cold and corrupt as hes trying to drive bad to abandon him, bad pushing closer JUST wanting his friend, both fueling the egg up until bad finally gives up, decides its not worth it, and inadvertently frees them both. and it REALLY doesnt have much ground in canon but this is fueling it just a little bit. skeppy REALLY doesnt want bad talking to him.
 bad not giving a damn or even flinching or moving anytime he gets burned
BAD SHIFTING AND BEING SO EXCITED WHEN SKEPPY MIGHT TAKE THE WALK EVEN THOUGH ITS JUST TO GET LEFT ALONE. NAURRRRRRRRR. JUMPING UP AND DOWN AS SKEPPY ACTUALLY MOVES. FUCK.
bad literally praising the egg vs telling it to shush when he just wants to be around skeppy GODDDDD
okay skeppy interrupting the egg made me assume he couldnt hear it but that solidifies it i think. he couldve been doing the threatening “who are you talkign to” as in who are you daring to shut up but i genuinely think he cant hear it, it doesnt seem like he was being more threatening until he realized bad WAS talking about the egg
skeppy also not giving a damn about the burning in spite of having No armor and definitely taking damage, “i like how it feels” ohhhh my god. bads tired, quiet “of course you do” FUCK ME
skeppy getting all dramatic about the dance and bad shutting him down LMAO
bad REALLY trying to get skeppy to spend less time around the egg, “do you think thats like, good for you?” its all for skeppy everything is for skeppy fr. 
TELLING THE EGG TO SHUT UP AGAIN. 
“okay done come back” no hesitation, bad still arguing every time because hes still fighting for him in any way he can
“It’s not about power, it’s not about control, I’m your FRIEND Skeppy” “I mean, you can think that” holy SHIT. cant tel if skeppys voice sounded more apathetic or more sad. it almost sounded sad but i might be imagining things 
“What, that egg, that egg is gonna be your FRIEND?” GODDDDDDDDDD
“The egg is more than life itself, dont you understand? dont you feel it? no, you wouldnt understand” eyes WIDE open
“youd rather hang out on this egg than on me??” giggling thank you bbh for the slip up i once again feel better now
“Skeppy, tell me im your friend right now” the way theyre arguing i have NO clue whats in skeppys head right now but bad being so furious and fed up and desperate, EVERYTHING hes done with this egg has been for skeppy, every bit of it for their friendship, and now skeppy is saying every bit of that effort and everything hes done has been for nothing because they arent even friends.
 the talk of sacrifice ohhhhh my god. oh my god. oh my God. this whole conversation is so. holy shit.
“i just dont want you next to THAT” the way hes willing to spend so much time with/around the egg but even now doesnt want skeppy near it. fuck.
THE SELFISH TALK... STEP ASIDE C!CLINGYDUO
the way selfish prob hits so hard because in his mind he PROBABLY hates this is hurting so many people making so many sacrifices ALL for skeppy and their friendship, not at all for him, ohhhh my god. theyre both right and theyre both a little wrong and i hate it im soooo
“IT’S JUST A STUPID EGG SKEPPY” he literally does not like the egg he literally hates the egg he doesnt care for it every single thing has been for skeppy hes not FULLY under his influence he does it for skeppy. THE FUCKING HORROR IN HIS VOICE AS HE GASPED AND SKEPPY DIED IM SO. IM SO. IM SO.
the “what happened, what did i do” the way THAT in itself was so influenced by the egg, maybe consciously maybe not but definitely by the MONTHS of serving bad did all for skeppy im so. im so. im sooooo. 
i cannot for the LIFE of me tell what is going on in that ending 
“please actually answer me. bad?” holy shit.hjoly shit. holy shit., 
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n3s0 · 4 years ago
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hi i’m going to discuss the doomsday war streams and overall the conclusion of what i’d consider season 3 of the dream smp because hyperfixation go brrrrr 
(for clarity sake: season 1 is from when l’manberg defects from the dream smp to when wilbur decides to host an election. season 2 is from swag2020 vs pog2020 to the manberg vs pogtopia war on nov 16th. season 3 is from the start of tubbo’s presidency to the jan 6th doomsday war.) 
tldr: i definitely think the cc’s can look on what happened this season and improve greatly. that’s not to say this wasn’t a good season, there are a lot of things they’ve improved since season 1, but there are also things they can improve on in the future. this season was lacking a connecting thread or goal and it made it feel disjointed and left character’s in limbo. a way to fix that could be either scripting the story more strictly, fixing communication problems and/or making the plot into more self contained but slightly overlapping stories.
i think my biggest problem with this season was the fact that it felt so disjointed. one of the best things about the first season is the consistent plot line: l’manberg is trying to win independence. you had eret’s betrayal, dream’s tyranny, wilbur and tommy’s whole dynamic, and an underlying subplot with the disc war, but it all ultimately connected to l’manberg’s fight for independence. it’s what makes the first season so good and that kind of consistent plot is missing in this season. 
even the second season had the main plot of taking back manberg. there was wilbur’s insanity, but that tied back to the elections. there was tension between tubbo and tommy, but it tied back to the elections. even the badlands tied back to bad, ant, skeppy, and sam deciding they’re done with manberg AND pogtopia and deciding to stoke the fire. it all tied back and character’s had weeks to slowly develop with the setting. 
this season you had techno retiring, ghostbur reconciling with fundy, tubbo’s presidency, whatever was going on with schlatt and quackity?, george is king?, el rapid mexican l’manberg that whole thing, tommy’s exile, el rapids fighting dream smp/eret’s kingship?, the butcher army, techno UNretiring and teaming with tommy, tommy using techno to get his discs back, techno using tommy to destroy l’manberg, the prison, the bloodvines, and probably more im forgetting. there was a LOT going on, even techno and wilbur have ooc acknowledged this. and in my opinion it was just too much. character’s weren’t given enough time to develop naturally and the pacing had to go fast enough to fit all the plot into it, leaving little time for the character’s relationships to develop with the plot. 
most notably this is a problem with character’s like niki, fundy, ranboo (though not too bad with his character) and eret. eret had worked hard on a redemption arc and then had to go back to being king because george didn’t want to be involved (then changed his mind which...okay) which really fucked up all of the development he spent a LOT of time on during the second season. niki had to jump from siding with tubbo and tommy against wilbur’s insanity to suddenly tubbo’s president and her character just...can’t know that wilbur is dead for some reason? and now she needs content so she has to scrap together an anti-hero plot for herself. fundy’s works a little better i feel, with his lowkey insanity arc he’s having as of now, but the problem with him is he didn’t get enough lowkey plot moments to show his character’s devolution from neglected to vengeful. ranboo was thrown head first into the plot and while he’s doing an AMAZING job of keeping himself afloat, he just hasn’t had enough time to make his character’s mental decline seem believable, at least to me. not enought has happened to his character for it to work out, due to pacing. all of these character’s are AMAZING concepts but the fact that they feel so inconsistent can be related back to the fact that there really wasn’t any time given to let character’s slowly develop and change, and instead they had to cram all of their character development into the first 30 mins of a plot important stream.
and i will offer a counterargument here of the fact that season 3 is when wilbur’s writing stopped and also was when it really started catching a large audiences’ interest. so naturally more people wanted to be involved and due to the nature of the way this story is told, where each character is an actual CC who needs content and can’t just be a background support character, there HAS to be a lot going on for everyone to get their slice. and i think that’s the ultimate downfall of using this medium to tell a story. you NEED those background characters, the characters that don’t have to be 3 dimensional, the characters that don’t need to be there for everything and get their lines in. so i can’t fault them for having a clunky story when it has to be that way to be fair. 
ultimately i still really enjoy the story, and i hope this doesn’t sound too nitpicky. it’s downfall, of everyone having to be an important character, is also what makes it so good! don’t like the “main character”? go watch someone else, who’s the main character of their own POV of the story. every single character is incredibly complex and has their own unique set of motivations, goals, and traits. it works really well with the running theme of history, and how not only does it repeat itself through miscommunication and ignorance but also how the opinion on events changes from who’s telling the story. the fact that you can tell every CC genuinely cares about their character also really does show in the acting and writing and just everything about the server and story. the flaws of the story are very easy to look over because of just how much time and care all of them put into this server and it really helps the story. an okay story written by passionate people with always be better than an amazing one written by apathetic storywriters; and the smp’s story is definitely more than just okay, at least to me. 
i didn’t want to write this just to complain and then offer no solution, so i do have a few ideas on how i’d like to see this fixed or at least improved. they actually already somewhat do this, but i feel like they could start breaking up the plot more. similarly to how there was the bloodvines plot going on at the same time as tommy’s exile plot, i feel like they could take a chunk of say 5-10 members and they each have their semi-contained plot. especially with l’manberg now destroyed, the thing that way tying a lot of the members together, it would be easier to do this. there can be connecting threads through the stories, like how tubbo and fundy would see the bloodvines or bad would visit tommy in exile, but ultimately not every character has to be involved in everyone else’s story. 
say you have tubbo, tommy, quackity, fundy, ghostbur, and dream for one plot of trying to get the discs back and making dream revive ghostbur. at the same time you can have techno, phil, ranboo, dream, and sam dealing with the prison and techno or someone being put in the prison with dream manipulating ranboo through his memories. bad, ant, sam, puffy, and skeppy can continue with the egg. eret, fundy, niki, and ghostbur work through the trauma they’ve gained from everything with l’manberg and their interpersonal relationships. similarly to how karl is doing the tales of the SMP right now, these storylines are self contained but characters can overlap and therefore so can relationships. 
my other solution would honestly be to just work on the seemingly lack of communication. make sure everyone is getting the content they need (with people having to understand that not everyone is going to get the animatic worthy lines every stream, and not everyone gets to play a huge part in each event.) however this entails having a much more concrete script, which highkey removes the charm of the smp. it also means that inevitably someone is going to not be getting good content, or content at all, and that’s not fun or good for anyone. ultimately i’d like to see an improvement on the communication for the plot (niki feeling excluded, george and eret not being told about important events, communicating when people are trying to have genuine canon important speeches and not BMing them (cough cough tubbo at niki about her taxes cough cough techno during tubbo and tommys reunion)) and that doesn’t necessarily have to mean a fully fleshed out script. 
in the end, what everyone on this server has managed to do with this storyline is something that’s genuinely impacted me! it’s opened my eyes to new ways stories can be told and this fandom is the first big one i’ve been in since probably fucking voltron or homestuck in the mid-2010s. i love what the CCs have managed to do, and while i think this was a healthy amount of criticism for the story i in no way want to demean just how much passion and effort the CCs put into this server. none of these people are professional story writers or actors so the amount of talent we’ve seen is astonishing. this is simply me expressing what i think the problems are, because every story has problems, especially one that’s being made with such a unique medium like improv roleplay streaming. if you have anything you wanna add please feel free to add to this post or reply! i’d love to see :) thank you for reading if you made it this far lmao
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mariaiscrafting · 4 years ago
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What if I’m Latino and want to draw sapnap as Latino as well? Is neurodivegent headcanons for the dream team okay but this isn’t?
I’ll admit, the lines are blurred with Dream SMP characters because they are both characters and representative of real people. If you want, I can talk about the various levels of Problematic™ that are involved in this question, and since I’m bored and procrastinating, let’s get into it:
First off, there is, actually a history of Tumblr fanartists in particular drawing traditionally white characters as POC and getting backlash for it, so honestly, I’m not totally agains the practice. Frankly, drawing classic characters as POC when they haven’t really been confirmed as any race - just assumed to be the default of white - isn’t a bad thing. One such example is Hermione, who many fanartists have depicted as black, with curly hair or an afro. Because Hermione’s character and story are not intrinsically tied to any particular cultural or explicit details that would make it logically flawed to hc her as non-white, there’s really nothing wrong with this.
This is different from the opposite because it is a way for non-white audiencemembers to drive home the point that non-white Americans/Europeans are, in many ways, just like their white counterparts. That is to say, whether Hermione is black or white doesn’t change who she is; she can be a white English lady or a black English lady, but being black doesn’t necessarily mean she would act any differently or be a totally different person. It is a means to combat the assumption that any American/European character whose culture isn’t explictly brought up by the creator of a work is white.
This isn’t the same as the opposite - portraying POC characters as white - because the latter is a form of whitewashing. When you portray assumed-white characters as POC, you are not erasing anything from that character, while portraying POC characters as white erases their culture, the visibility of that ethnic group/race, and any details the creator of the content might have included in their story about that character. That’s why films are criticized for casting white actors to play POC characters, and artists are criticized for lightening character’s skin tones or erasing physical features of theirs that can be attributed to their ethnic/racial identity.
Now the question with portraying Sapnap as Latino is, is this wrong, exactly? I’d like to preface by saying that everything I’ve said about portraying Sapnap as Latino has been purely my opinion. At the end of the day, I’m not an expert on racial theory or art; I’m just a poli sci major who’s taken a couple courses on racism and has talked and learned a bit about POC in media. You can come to whatever conclusions you like, at the end of the day, and portray him however you like, love.
As I see it, there are several reasons portraying Sapnap as Latino is Problematic™. First off, Sapnap and other white members of the Dream SMP already have problems with recognizing POC and the implications of POC within the SMP. Sapnap has actually answered a donation before by saying that he’s not 100% white because he’s part-Greek, completely unironically and without recognizing why him saying that was wrong. Imo, this indicates a lack of understanding for what it really means to be a POC in Western countries that so many white people exhibit. Being a person of color in Western Europe, the US, Canada, Australia, etc., means functioning within a society where you have to battle with yourself everyday your own, multiple, and seemingly contradictory identities. It means functioning within a society where you have to navigate the crossroads of oppression within you must survive. White people who falsely claim that they aren’t white like this simply don’t understand or are even aware of exactly what it means to be shaped by the oppression of being a person of color. They believe that being a person of color, beyond occassionally experiencing explicit racism, is just a label and a tie to one’s ancestry, when it’s much more beyond that. And the thing is, Sapnap can’t claim that label because he simply hasn’t gone through the lived experience of a POC in the United States. And that’s fine. It’s fine to be white, and to just be a little ignorant to your whiteness. I’m not attacking Sapnap by pointing this all out, I’m just stating facts.
Secondly, this would mean that a 100% white person is essentially playing the role of a Latino character, which is already a far-too common practice in film and TV showmaking. Then again, I will admit that a counter-argument can be made here, in that, headcanons are not actually canon to the Dream SMP plot. For example, Ranboo has told his audience he’s fine with viewers headcanon’ing his character as nonbinary, even though Ranboo himself is cisgender. This is an ambiguous aspect of his character that can be manipulated however the viewers like since there has been nothing within the canon to refute it, so far. However, it would be a different matter entirely if Ranboo, a cisgender man, attempted to write his character as a nonbinary person and then act out that nonbinary character himself. That would actually be unjust and kinda fucked. Now, along a similar vein, one could argue that audiencemembers headcanon’ing Sapnap as Latino isn’t really a bad thing since it isn’t Sapnap himself trying to portray what he believes a Latino character would be like. So I get the potential counter-argument there.
Thirdly, my main problem with this whole drawing Sapnap as Latino ordeal is the hypocrisy of it all. Far too often within this fandom, I see fanartists and writers erase Quackity’s ethnic identity, whitewashing him in their art or completely disregarding his race in their work. And while one could argue that the lack of focus in this fandom on Skeppy can be explained by his infrequent streams and departure from the SMP lore, Ponk is rarely drawn or written about, and he streams regularly and always has something going on with his character, in side plots or otherwise. I just find it lowkey absurd that this fandom thirsts for a Latino character so bad that it has to portray Sapnap, who is played by a white actor, as Latino, when there are other POC whose identities are either disregarded or the characters as a whole ignored.
Fourth, my main question, at the end of the day, is, why are we not advocating for more POC in the SMP? Why headcanon characters as POC, when they could literally just make an effort to uplift more POC CCs, who are highly marginalized within the streamer and Youtube communities? I’m Latinx too, mate, and I’d fucking love more POC characters to fall in love with, but Sapnap isn’t the one to fill that hole.
Regarding other sorts of headcanons and how those relate to headcanon’ing characters as different races: my thoughts on this are way too complicated, at the moment. But to sum it up as concisely as possible: a) I am not neurodivergent, as far as I know, so I cannot do the subject nearly as much justice as a neurodivergent person could; b) my thoughts still kinda align with the same thought process as race - that it’s useful to hc characters as neurodivergent because it helps to break stigmas that ND people are so vastly different from neurotypical people that traditionally-assumed neurotypical people couldn’t possibly actually be ND; c) I would still advocate for more ND representation in the SMP, rather than try to warp the neurotypical people’s characters to fit into that yearn for representation that I so desire; d) there actually are ND people on the SMP - a couple of people with ADHD, as far as I know - who do exhibit ND characteristics in their characters/lore, as well, so frankly, why not give those characters ND hc’s?
Anyways, this was so much longer than I wanted it to be and I still don’t know if I fully articulated my take on the subject properly. It’s really just too complicated a subject to be applied to Dream SMP fanart, so my conclusion is: Imma diss people for drawing Sapnap as Latino when Quackity is RIGHT THERE, and you can draw him however the hell you like. At the end of the day, we’re both just people obsessing over block men, and there’s no significant harm  that will come from either of our opinions or your artwork. I hope this was a satisfying answer, and seriously, thank you for getting me to write this all out because it actually made me realize that I’m not as fully against the idea as I thought I was <3
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justalads · 4 years ago
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yeah dude i don’t mind the new thread, i probably should have thought about that. and i can absolutely cut up my stuff! sorry it was difficult to read.
this is long and stupid and repetitive and took me like five days but i had fun! links are fine, i attach a few here as well.
if i remember correctly, your friend is the one who produced the “is dream a hero” video? tell them it was really well produced, even if i disagreed with some of the ideas! i admire how they were able to wrap up their thoughts! (i also think you had a hand in the writing of that too? so that’s sick!) /gen
(i wasn’t putting the rp indicators here but yeah no all of it is rp unless marked as outside cc comment and yes also /lh)
(also, i first want to make clear that all discussion of characters here is and has been of events that took place before the prison, unless they happened afterwards (like the sapnap thing) as the prison is a different thing entirely. this is in efforts to understand what led up to it. especially wanted to make that clear after quackity’s last lore stream because Oh Man. oh m a n.)
i’ll get to the wilbur stuff later, it seems like a different conversation.
“i don’t think i entirely get your point about it making sense for him to progress like this.”
so what i mean about it “making sense” that dream became like that is that it kind of does, you know? i’m saying that the desires were always there. not that he was always willing to go so far for them, or even that they were as strong as they ended up being! after all, there’s a difference between declaring war to reclaim land and people, and making a vault in order to take things that were important to people.
what he always did possess is a sort of “ownership” of the server. and this was probably founded from the fact that it was, you know, his server. he wanted l’manburg back because he didn’t like that people came onto his server and then said he couldn’t have something. and that’s one of his primary points in his conversation with skeppy: the analogy he uses of someone coming into his house and saying he can’t have a table.
and later, in the vault, this is the reason he gives for wanting control: that it is his server. he tells tommy it isn’t supposed to be fair, it doesn’t need to be fair, because fairness implies equality, and he doesn’t see everyone else as having equal claim to the server. so that’s what i mean when i say the signs were always there: his statements match up and paint a path through the story. true, you don’t just “become” a bad person. there’s no reason for him to suddenly get all weird and want ultimate control, if he was completely neutral and peaceful in the beginning. this is why his character is decently written!
and since the potential was there in the first place, that’s what gave him the ability to or put him in danger of doing what he did.
so yeah, it’s true that his spiral was not only his fault, because even someone who thinks they own something is not going to just jump to the lengths that he did. he had other experiences, and saw how other people worked, and then was met by pushback from people when he wanted them all to do what he said. because his house analogy is lacking something: he owns the house, but everyone else lives there too.
it may be “his” server in that he pays upkeep fees, but that doesn’t mean he deserves control over everything that happens on it! if your roommate goes “i want this table and you can’t have it”, even if the house belongs to you, it’s kind of weird to go “no you can’t have it, it’s mine”. especially if all the roommate wants the table for is so they can play monopoly or something with their group. and even more so if the roommate will let you play monopoly if you want to (remember the embassy?), and if you can just buy a new table then what’s the point in getting upset over the one?
i just think you put a lot more of the responsibility on other characters. saying that all they did was villainize him and treat him as pure evil and break his boundaries is wrong because one, no, that’s not all they did, it’s exaggerated, and two, he was also doing things to them! it did not come out of nowhere! and clearly, his mindset didn’t come from nothing, so a personal flaw contributed to it! people who are innocent and care too much about others and are then mistreated do not do what dream did, and we know this because there is a character very similar to that: ranboo.
(i could talk about this for a super long time honestly. it’s very interesting how close they are, and since enderwalk ranboo is just ranboo with all his memories and he helped dream... there’s clearly something that happened that he’s forgotten that’s very important.)
hates conflict, tries to mediate things, cares about the people he loves to a fault. and we don’t see him running around and telling people they can’t build nations because it “divides people”! he has also been hurt and betrayed, but he still recognizes his responsibility to respect others and their agency. the difference between dream and ranboo is that one, dream has a spine, and two, dream thinks of the server as his. dream’s belief is one of the driving causes of his actions.
it’s true that nobody deserves to lose half their friends at once. it’s also true that before he declared war, nobody had any actual negative feelings towards him. they made fun of him for saying his side had more women. he made fun of them for having none. it was playful banter. that’s the thing about the hot dog stream: the tone is incredibly light. wilbur soot, known dramatic idiot, decided he was going to go play capitalism on a minecraft server. both tommy and wilbur at that point had been making various stupid attempts to gain “power”. and none of this was treated seriously, because others were doing the same kinds of things.
you know how many times tommy logged on and got involved in small petty conflicts? pretty much none of them are mentioned in canon again, because at this point, there wasn’t even much of a canon to get involved in. the smp at this point was a place for people to go and do bits. and invoking wilbur’s joke hatred of tommy and those like him seems a little unfair. wilbur’s main bit was calling tommy an annoying child. when wilbur was stealing the blaze rods, it was not an actual attempt to get power because it was not treated as such by anyone, it was treated with the exact seriousness that it deserved: sapnap and tubbo declared themselves the “police”.
what kind of actual control is going to come from taking blaze rods, especially on a server where you can just go get more? and it’s not like theft is really a crime on the server. everyone else chose to play into the bit.
it’s like now, when tommy shows up with a new idea and people who don’t like him start claiming that this is proof that he never learned anything and he was actually bad all along. the church prime thing, l’sandburg, any time he steals something or is rude to jack manifold. because although semi-lore is fun, sometimes people treat it as serious lore when parts of it are not intended to be and then use it to imply things about the characters that don’t line up with canon.
that’s kinda off topic so i’ll get back to the main points
“i’d like to ask you to once again watch the actual stream.”
i mean, yeah. i did watch the stream. i don’t know a lot about george, and i prefaced my thoughts at the start by saying that. obviously attempting to catch up after isn’t as good as knowing the context and plot, (this sounds sarcastic but it is genuine i’m sorry sjhksjs) but i do want to offer this: it’s an opportunity to look at the plot in a different way. you say that you are on dream’s side in this scene, and while having that bias alone isn’t bad, i think it’s a good idea to attempt to see the other side. that’s what i’ve been doing while going back and forth with you; examining my own bias and attempting to look past it, and explain why it’s there.
so dream kicks george off the throne. and you say that it’s not bad that dream does it, because george’s monarchy was already a figurehead. you know, i don’t see this as being any better? this means that when dream made george king, he already did it with the fact that george wasn’t really in charge in dream’s mind, meaning that dream was, you know, the ultimate authority. that is a power dynamic. dream has control over who is king of his faction.
when you watch the stream where dream makes george king originally, dream doesn’t really let him know that his power isn’t real. that’s the problem with this situation: the presence of a power dynamic alone is not the issue, it’s the fact that dream was misleading about its presence. dream just tells him “you’re king.” in fact, dream demonstrates more control over eret, by telling them just that they can’t be in charge anymore and george is king now. he tells them to take off their crown, to which they protest because it’s a layer on their skin and it would show their eyes, something they’re uncomfortable with. dream says “i need you to do it. you gotta do it. i mean, i’m not asking you, we have three of us here.”
they physically threaten eret. and by the way, the reason that dream thought eret had “betrayed” the greater smp? eret was attempting to help pogtopia and make things right with the people of l’manburg, something you claim was also dream’s wish during this time (he had switched over to manburg at this point). dream told eret that the king had a duty to remain neutral.
it is only then, when dream tells eret to remain neutral on things, that dream tells eret that the act of being king means nothing. this is where the “what makes you king” quote coms from, by the way. dream has the ultimate control over who is king. but whenever he makes someone king, he doesn’t tell them that. and when dream leaves, eret fully realizes this and admits that dream’s right: they don’t have any power. so what was the point of betraying l’manburg?
if there was no power with being king, why did george accept it? why was there even a king in the first place? the only reason eret agreed to betray l’manburg in the first place was because dream offered them power.
when dream confronts eret about remaining neutral, dream says “my plan is that there’s no manburg, there’s no l’manburg, there’s no pogtopia, there’s just dream smp and there’s dream smp everywhere. and that’s been my plan since the very beginning, i’ve never wavered on that. that’s why i had you betray them, and that’s why i gave you kingship, because i felt like you’d be a good king because you’re neutral.”
ignoring the fact that he’s twisting why he made eret king (they were on the side of l’manburg and he tempted them away), he also claims that his faction only has been his goal since the beginning. this will be important later.
cc!eret confirmed in a twitter thread on their alt that their character was possibly the longest victim of dream’s manipulation.
and finally, watching the stream where dream dethrones george, the thing sticking out to me is how dream is phrasing it. he says that george should step down because people are attacking him, and dream isn’t always going to be able to protect him. and then he says this.
“and i think you’ll just be targeted if you’re the king. and you want to be able to like, get revenge on tommy and stuff, right? so we can work together.”
i kind of wish he didn’t bring up tommy. i kind of wish his main goal at this time wasn’t just going after tommy because he thought tommy was the root of all the problems. and i think this kind of highlights a little bit that when dream built the walls around l’manburg again, it wasn’t just because he was “defending george” or anything, because i don’t think george really cared that much? dream was using the fact that it was george’s house that blew up in order to go after tommy.
after this line, the others all kind of gang up on dream, true. it’s partially for the joke, as evidenced by quackity’s “THE GIRLS ARE FIGHTING!”, but it’s also kind of them being, you know, legitimately angry at his character. and it’s funny that it’s sapnap who leads it. sapnap brings up what dream said, that he doesn’t care about anything except for the disks. dream says that he didn’t mean it, and then george says “then why did you say it?” so dream saying that clearly hurt them, and he can’t just push it off by saying he didn’t mean it once.
and in the end, george doesn’t even agree before dream makes eret king again! george and sapnap are trying to have a conversation with dream about how they feel they’ve been treated, and dream brushes it off with “maybe this isn’t a good time to bring it up,” before ultimately ignoring what they’re both saying because in his mind he has a good enough reason and it doesn’t matter what george thinks.
dream is in the act of passing power over to eret, and george says “i’m still king. i’m literally right here.” dream shushes him. dream also implies that the reason george is getting attacked is because he backs up everything dream says, reducing george down to an extension of his own will or calling him a follower. dream accuses sapnap of trying to divide him and george, and sapnap says this: “i’m not dividing anyone, i stand by george. he’s my king but most importantly he’s my friend.” dream replies that george is his friend but not his king.
i just sort of want to show you the other side here. george and sapnap weren’t just running around instigating conflict any more than dream was. and although george didn’t do anything as king, it meant something to him, because it was a symbol of the trust he thought dream had for him. dream saying he was taking it away for his own good meant he didn’t even trust george to protect himself. he was treating him like a child.
(the things i said under this paragraph about dream when i’m talking about the dethroning to when i move on to the spirit thing are things that i do think, but a lot of it is more emotional than actual evidence or analysis. some of it isn’t really meant to be a real argument, just my opinion, and so you don’t need to try and prove it wrong because it’s not a fair response to your argument. i’m aware it’s biased lol you can call me on that if you want)
and then when george is silent, listening to everyone debate whether he deserves this or not, dream accuses him of only pretending to be sad. it’s true that he was pretending to cry, but i don’t think that warranted dream telling him he’s “acting like a baby” and that he was a bad king.
sapnap and george had a real point, and dream ignored them. he hadn’t addressed the things he had said that hurt them, and so they raised legitimate grievances with him! dream doesn’t treat their concerns as important, and talks down to george in particular.
ignoring the fact that sapnap and george were also hurting is kind of hypocritical. you’re right, “abandonment hurts you, no matter if the people have good reasons for it or not”. dream said the spirit thing before sapnap did any sort of real leaving him. and dream’s reasons were definitely not good. i have no idea why you got the idea that george is so awful. he was walking around with his head down. the only one also calling him things like manipulative and a drama queen is, well, dream.
basically: (/hj) george: :(dream: you are attempting to emotionally manipulate me
butternut is a master of psychological manipulation
anywayso sapnap, george and quackity felt betrayed there. they left, and went to mexican l’manburg to try and console george. and then dream shoots quackity and kills him, and tries to attack the others as well. it’s worth noting that quackity also had a reason to be upset at dream: dream’s treatment of l’manburg. dream then shows up and calls george a tyrant. dream never listens to what george says during this, he just continues saying what he already said. dream taking the kingship away from george hurt him more than letting him stay would have.
watching this is painful, because it’s making me realize just how much dream doesn’t actually care what his friends think! he says he cares, and he might think he cares, but then he calls them babies and liars and tyrants. his argument with george here reads like something awful. he’s using the excuse of “caring about him” in order to undermine and insult him, and take the moral high ground. dream essentially tells george that he didn’t make george king out of any respect for him, it was just random. he doesn’t treat his friends well during this scene. i don’t think it’s unreasonable for them to get angry.
when quackity, after sitting in silence for the entire conversation, says he disagrees, dream tells him that he’s just dumb. doesn’t wait to hear his reasons, doesn’t value his opinion, because dream is so sure that he’s right and he knows what’s best for the server, and by extension, everyone.
other interesting things: dream brings tommy into it again by saying he’s what causes all the problems on the server. dream tells quackity to think about what tubbo would think about him picking this fight. dream says that george would probably do anything he told him to do. his entire position is “you guys can think whatever you want, but it won’t change anything.” genuinely, tell me how this is them abandoning him? and when they do drift away later, tell me why they don’t have a reason to? dream doesn’t respect them! he takes their friendship for granted!
“would you consider it justified for all of tommy’s friends (even tubbo who he’s been close with for so long) to abandon him just because he’s said basically the same thing about the discs - like three times?”
thank you for bringing up the disk thing. do you really think that tommy and dream acted the same when saying that an item held more worth than their friends?
think about what the disks symbolize. control over tommy. tommy wants them back because they are a sign of dream having power over him! tommy doesn’t want his abuser having power over him! and yeah! it was a messed up thing for him to say to tubbo that the disks were worth more than him, but he apologized! he understood that what he said hurt tubbo, and he tried to rebuild the relationship! tommy took responsibility for what he said, and tried to be better. notice how afterwards, he was willing to sacrifice anything for the safety of his friends? notice how in the vault he told dream to take the disks and do whatever he wanted with them, when dream switched from threatening the disks to threatening the life of tubbo?
and what do the disks mean to dream? they mean power over tommy. the disks have no power over dream. they are a tool that he can use to hurt and control tommy. and he never apologized for this, because he wasn’t sorry. sapnap told dream that this hurt him, and all dream said was that he didn’t mean it. who is he lying to, then? tommy or sapnap? it was so important to dream that he had ultimate control over the life of someone else that he almost drove them to take their own life. i’m sorry, but this comparison sucks.
people gave dream a chance. people gave him a lot of chances. the disregard he showed for others is disgusting, especially towards his friends, and even more so towards those who he didn’t like. my problem is that though you repeat that you don’t “blame” others for what they did, you still hold them to more responsibility than you’re willing to hold him to, or at least that’s what it seems like. i’ve been investigating the other side through this whole process. and yeah, there are definitely places where i was wrong. but sometimes i do not understand, and maybe that means i should just give up on trying to understand those places. if other people can see things i can’t, maybe we agree to disagree.
i legitimately cannot see dream being the person who was treated the worst here, but let me know if i’m misrepresenting you.
i’m sorry that i sound angry, and i’m not really upset at you, but the comparison of what dream said and what tommy said set me off.
“no one having respect for him as a person”
people did respect dream, man. he was the leader of his faction. he had a lot of power. his friends trusted him to be a good friend to them. but he didn’t feel like he had an obligation to do that, yeah? and you only get respect if you give it, so they stopped respecting them because he hurt them. he didn’t learn any hard lessons about violence being the only way because he never stopped to consider another way. when faced with a problem, his options were for the problem to go away or he would make it go away: surrender or die.
during the stream where he sets up the walls with sapnap, his message is the same throughout: wipe them out. no mercy. burn their land to the ground, leave no survivors. there’s no love in war. children get hurt in war. this is a warning shot, he says, as he fires into their land. as sapnap burns down tubbo’s house and chat spams “no mercy”. they don’t show mercy because mercy is weak, and they are powerful.
one day i’m gonna write a thing that talks about the greater smp like how people talk about early l’manburg because oh boy
i’d like to see evidence of dream learning that violence is the only way, and only being able to protect himself through fighting. i don’t remember this happening, i remember him generally choosing violence as the first option.
“dream didn’t have an arising god complex.”
a god complex means more than just saying “i’m a god.” there was buildup because that’s how characters work. tommy was also trapped in the prison, and he didn’t suddenly get a god complex at the slightest bit of power, did he? the definition of a god complex is “an unshakable belief characterized by consistently inflated feelings of personal ability, privilege, or infallibility.” dream cannot admit when he is wrong. he feels as if he has a right to the control of the server, and that grows into a state of obsession. and when he’s taking tubbo and tommy down into the vault, he mocks them for thinking he was weak or that he didn’t think ahead.
once dream knew he had control over death, the complex reached its peak, and that’s when he actually admits it. characters that antagonize others already possess traits that contribute to their arc.
and hey, i know that cc!dream says his character is blocked off emotionally. i also know that he’s been given a lot of chances to apologize to people, to be sorry, to admit fault, even in small situations. did dream show remorse during exile? did dream sound like he was being “forced” to isolate and control tommy, or did he sound like an abusive parent scolding a kid for something? when dream beat tommy and tubbo and took them down to the vault, did he sound sorry? the thing about subtext is that it has to actually be there, no matter how quiet, at least a little bit. listen to dream arguing with quackity after george was dethroned and tell me he sees himself as anything other than right.
a few one off lines are not enough evidence to wipe out the rest of his character’s development.
he sounds sorry once he is faced with direct consequences, because that is the only time he is held responsible for his actions.
it’s also a weak argument to say that something is happening when, as you said, we don’t see his pov. it is fair to say that i don’t know if it’s not happening, and that’s a good point. cc!dream’s comments about his character being closed off emotionally can mean a lot of things. for instance, they could mean that his character is willing to do this to himself in order to get control. or it could mean something else entirely, i don’t know. basing an entire fact about a character off something we don’t see at all doesn’t tell us anything useful about the character, and i apologize for doing that.
i guess my reason for saying that was that i don’t see evidence of him trying to get better during pogtopia. if we don’t see signs of him being sorry or attempting to treat other people better, why should we assume that he was doing those things?
“yes, and none of c!dream’s “friends” ever did.”
dream’s friends supported him until he abandoned them and disrespected them. his time in the prison is a consequence of his time out of the prison, albeit an unfair one.
“dream didn’t hurt george.”
dream’s disrespect of george is what hurt him. dream didn’t apologize for it, he didn’t attempt to understand what george was feeling, and he didn’t look for a compromise. and yeah, it was beckerson in the vault. he had a space for mars, he just hadn’t collected it yet. so yes, dream did betray sapnap. if you have legitimate evidence of sapnap doing something that made dream actually upset, before the vault, i’d like to see it. (there might be something lol i’m sorry i’m Very Bad on his lore but from what i’ve investigated i didn’t find anything really important.)
i don’t think puffy saying “this person does bad things” is her dismissing their trauma. and the eggpire and her have both hurt each other. puffy isn’t the Trauma Designator of the server. if there’s an instance of her straight up saying that someone doesn’t have trauma then i missed it.
“she’s another one c!dream was attached to and who failed to ever reach out to him”
i don’t see evidence of this? there was the one stream where the relationship was established, but after that he never tried to seek her out. he doesn’t even talk about her. it’s not a failure from her to not reach out to him, if their connection is light at best. i honestly feel like she was more attached to him than he was to her.
“like she’s doing something extra by being a decent person.”
she’s saying he didn’t deserve to see her because he did bad things! she still cares about someone who has done bad things, but she recognizes that those things are bad. she’s saying the punishment for what he’s done should involve not seeing her, personally, and i think she should be able to make that decision? she doesn’t endorse the rest of his punishment, because she doesn’t know what it entails.
she helped him by thinking he was in the right. she helped him by even trying to understand him, when everyone else could not. she gave him the help that she could by being on his side, by being friendly to him, and after she realized he was wrong she could not do that because he was off preparing the vault! and she had other things to worry about! “could have” is useless because it can mean anything! tommy “could have” not burned george’s house down. would it have mattered, when dream already had it out for him? no!
dream took anyone being close to him for granted. he did not give anything back to them once he started going down the path. if he did something bad to them, and they were angry, that was it for him. he did not attempt to fix the bond, like other characters do when they hurt someone they care about.
“i never said anything negative about them other than describing things they did that had a negative effect.”
here’s my main point: we don’t know they had a negative effect.
you criticize the characters for not taking an action that we do not know the implications of. everyone could have been super nice and worried about dream and that could have changed nothing. that’s why i think the criticism is unwarranted.
their crime is inattention to a situation that some of them did not even know was happening. that’s like saying that techno is “responsible” for some of the pain of tommy’s exile, because he did nothing to stop it. that’s like saying that quackity or tommy “should have” removed the tnt from the button room under l’manburg.
i just don’t get the point of the criticism. because it can apply to any character in any situation, you know? we could say that eret taking back the kingship from george enabled dream into taking more control over his friends, and that eret should have stopped him. we could say that skeppy telling dream he was wrong about l’manburg pushed him further into the role of the bad guy. if you aren’t being negative about the characters, then why bring it up in the first place?
“truly believe they did all those things” they didn’t do anything. if you’re talking about the “actual consequences and effect it had on him as a character”, you have to look at what affects his character.
we can say “sapnap should not have said this to dream”. because that is something sapnap actually did, directly to dream’s face, and it is something that visibly affected dream. considering the conditions of the prison, it is an inhumane thing to say. that’s something i would call reasonable to consider when analyzing dream’s character.
but puffy talking to herself, writing her own thoughts and reactions down? that does not impact dream in any way! and i think puffy thinking internally that dream is a bad person (when she has been given adequate reason to think so) has a lot less impact on Real Plot Events than the stuff that dream actually did.
what is her “fault” here? what harm did she do? what am i excusing? what did she do wrong, and how is the effect of her specifically visible in dream’s actions? he hasn’t mentioned her in months, and it’s my perspective that if he cared, we would know.
if a tree falls in the forest when nobody is around, does it make any noise? that thread doesn’t actually seem to be assigning any fault to puffy, it’s just saying that hearing that kind of thing hurts.
(also, the person who wrote the thread saying “i told you so” is going to have nobody to tell it to. we all already know dream is going to be violent when he gets out, because he told tommy he would hunt down and take revenge on the things he loves. but he’s not going to be violent because puffy didn’t visit him.)
“another person he cared about who didn’t prove to care about him enough to stop him from spiralling or try help at all.”
how did puffy not care about him? what did she do before the vault that showed that? how did she specifically abandon him, by actions of her own will and not of consequences of his? for supposedly caring about her, dream did pretty much nothing to show it.
“we might have to agree to disagree”
we would disagree if that was my point, but it’s not. because that’s not what the characters did. they didn’t all abandon him, as i’ve said. he says that he cut ties with them, but if you say he’s lying when he says that you can disregard it, i guess. and five to six people are definitely not responsible for him. again, you’re critical of them for an action they didn’t take, and in some cases it was impossible for them to take like with tommy, who certainly didn’t abandon him, as hard as he tried to.
“his manipulation is the clumsiest thing i’ve ever seen”
i mean i don’t really find it funny that dream was “bad” at manipulation. and clearly it was powerful enough to work on multiple people, and if he was that ineffective at it it wouldn’t have worked. but i understand what you’re saying, although i disagree with your take on wilbur.
it’s true that wilbur’s smart, but this is again saying things about stuff we can’t prove. if you look at the context of wilbur’s actions next to everyone else’s, they seem pretty tame. and he can play a morally grey character without the intent being that the character was seriously manipulative all along. although i guess it’s nice to think that you’ve solved the code, if “solving the code” means “the majority of everyone else is wrong” then you may want to take a step back.
i think the principle of occam’s razor sort of applies here, and especially applies later to the conversion between dream and wilbur. unless there is strong, strong evidence for a theory that sort of goes against stuff, there may be a better explanation. i’ve scrapped like fifty theories because of this dude hskhdksjs
the things i said at the start about tommy and wilbur’s grabs for power not being serious still do apply, and so does the fact that at the start of the roleplay, the cc’s didn’t see their characters as that separate from themselves. i think it would be kind of weird for cc!wilbur’s intent to be genuine manipulation of his actual friends all along, especially when he wasn’t playing it as a bit.
“that’s precisely what he did and how he got them to side with him in the war.”
nope. he didn’t tell anyone they “needed” to to anything. anyone who joined the country joined of their own free will, and nobody joined during the war, just before and after.
wilbur didn’t really “recruit” tommy so much as they were on a team of causing small arguments. wilbur joined and he and tommy went to go scam people together, while tommy told him about the various other little schemes he had been running. and i don’t really think he was intending to do a real takeover, which is why i called it “weak”. the man told people that potions give you diarrhea. does that sound like the work of a mastermind? no, because it’s the self proclaimed “crime boy”. and that “drug empire” got shut down pretty quick for something that was supposed to last a long time.
“just put “revolution” instead of “business” as a guise of what he was actually doing.”
l’manburg was not the drug empire under a different name. l’manburg was about separation from the greater smp, admittedly because they felt that being stopped from selling drugs was a bad thing, but then they pretty much completely dropped the drugs and the empire throughout the wall vod.
so when he was recruiting people like fundy, he was doing it with the intent of getting them to make drugs with him. he says nothing about dream when fundy joins his drug empire. and yeah, he lied to him originally, but it didn’t work. fundy visited the van and saw through wilbur (and tommy)’s story, and then he decided to join, on his own. because he wanted to make drugs.
a quote from the wall vod: “we’re starting a revolution, not a war.”
there was no targeted hatred towards dream until he approached them. and i would say the most “evidence” that wilbur was trying to go after dream in any way is the infamous “what’s tyrannical mean” moment. the thing about that moment is that taking a single moment and using it to define an entire period is unfair. it’s not like that’s a turning point, and after that they solely go after dream. they don’t. i agree that you have to watch the actions of wilbur, and his actions at the time were geared towards becoming independent and progressing the condition of l’manburg.
wilbur is honest with eret when they join that they are committing crimes. eret joins because “haha americans bad”. meanwhile, dream is in chat telling eret that there are “three defectors from the kingdom”.
“the only reason people disbelieve this is not because it doesn’t align with canon, but because they assume he’s lying for the sole reason that it doesn’t align with the way they see canon.”
if what revivedbur said agreed with canon, people wouldn’t be pointing out that it doesn’t. watch back the hot dog stream, the wall stream, the first war stream, even the stream after that when niki joins. look at how wilbur speaks, and also look at how he acts. it does not match up with all of what revivedbur says.
early wilbur is naive. he thinks he’s doing the right thing, so he therefore concludes the people against him are wrong. the only fighting back that l’manburg does before war is declared is killing alyssa (and this was tommy’s idea, wilbur was discouraging killing her), because they thought she set the fire. once she told them she didn’t, they gave her back the stuff they thought they had. tubbo still had her pickaxe, but didn’t realize. and for this? the people of the greater smp hunted him down, trapped him in a box, and killed him as well as killing tommy, who tried to save tubbo.
wilbur scolded tommy for killing alyssa. wilbur wanted to focus on building the nation, on declaring independence, and actively ignored the other side. he writes the declaration and he believes in everything it stands for! half the things in there are things that the other people of l’manburg yelled out, that he wrote in as they were being fired on by the greater smp. it comes from all the people.
the declaration of war from the greater smp pretty much says “sometimes you just gotta kill some people, you know?”
i am not disagreeing with you that after the first war, wilbur fell into corruption. it’s implied greatly that this is partially a consequence of the first war, and also partially stems from his fierce protectiveness of l’manburg.
also, if you’re saying that you have never and will never believe wilbur, i would urge you to re-examine that. it’s hard to avoid bias when you refuse to take most things that someone says as truth. i am also curious how you came to this conclusion as you began to watch the smp (if you never believed him at all) and who’s perspective you were watching.
“according to his actions and all known laws of logic” according to the streams and vods that very much still exist, and his actions in them, no, he wasn’t lying since the beginning. did he tell lies? yes, everyone did. was he being untruthful about his devotion to l’manburg when he took arrows for it and died for it? no. it’s pretty clear to see when you watch the vod. his actions speak louder than his words.
so no, it doesn’t make sense for him to be lying since the beginning. it doesn’t make sense that revivedbur’s ideals are a switch from how he was even right before he died, so we cannot trust his memory and his morals to remain intact! the man was alone for thirteen years, speaking of torture.
“he thought l'manberg his and no one else’s, a weapon of power for him to use however he pleases. unlike dream who destroyed himself bit by bit trying to take back what he cares about, because it was not power, but people - wilbur saw no more worth in it and destroyed it instead.”
hmm. i’ll come back to this later.
a point- not everything cc!wilbur says about his character is negative. a lot of his commentary on his character came after his death, so it encompasses his spiral. i will again suggest that you listen to “eight” by sleeping at last. it’s true he can play a morally complex character, because he does, but he does not play an intentional antagonist the entire time, even in “secret”.
“i was just talking about how hypocritical and downright ridiculous his later accusations are, which you didn’t address.”
how are his later accusations hypocritical? wilbur calls him a tyrant in the moment, yeah. wilbur thinks that he should be able to do whatever he wants, and since it’s the dream smp, he assumes dream is the leader. dream never contradicts this, by the way. wilbur writes in the declaration of independence that “in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one to dissolve the bonds which bind us. disregarding of this truth is nothing short of tyranny.” so that’s what he considers tyranny. when he got stopped from selling drugs and tommy got arrested, he didn’t yell “tyranny”.
mistreatment of citizens by authority and denial of independence is tyranny. dream and the people of the greater smp hurt and attack the people of l’manburg throughout the wall stream. importantly, since they denied l’manburg independence, the people they were firing and attacking were their own citizens in their eyes. mistreatment of citizens is cruel. upon hearing that l’manburg existed, they became even more tyrannical. thus when wilbur writes this in the book, as they are being fired on, he believes this to be true because it is.
“despite there being no evidence” watch the wall vod. think about the definition of tyranny, and even the different definitions of tyranny.
“a capitalistic empire on dream’s land” so wilbur did have reason for thinking dream was the leader, yes? because it was his land? his “house”? how dream said they were taking back the land that was rightfully theirs? how he called them “traitors to the kingdom”? ignoring the fact that once again, wilbur did not say anything negative towards dream until dream showed up and insulted l’manburg.
wilbur’s form of lying and deception for the drug empire was the norm for the server at the time. we don’t see him pulling this sort of exaggerated bit once he gets into l’manburg, because he’s idealistic and he really believes in it. if you watch tommy’s stream where wilbur first proposes the country, he jokingly says the reason he’s making it is because “americans ruin bits”. also during that stream, tommy asks if they’re making a drug empire, and wilbur says that no, they’re making a nation where drugs are legal.
“didn’t even do that much” hmm. no, i’m pretty sure he and the people of the greater smp did do the stuff wilbur accused them of. one, he wasn’t directly accusing dream, (because. his problem wasn’t with dream specifically.) and two, the things he said in the declaration did happen?
“they have robbed us.”
to be fair everyone on the server did that lol
“imprisoned us.”
tommy was imprisoned for the drugs and for other things he was involved in, and tubbo was trapped and murdered for a thing he didn’t even know he had
“threatened us.”
they were fired on multiple times when building l’manburg, they were threatened with consequences for the drug stuff, they told them in pretty clear terms that they were prepared to kill them instead of letting them be independent. the day of the war, dream and sapnap burned down all the trees around l’manburg and lavacast walls around it, saying it was a “warning”.
“killed many of our men.”
again, true. tommy and tubbo in particular died a lot during this time.
so since these things really did happen, how is wilbur lying about them?
“the people he was accusing of being tyrannical were very selective”
one, he accused sapnap of being an american, and it was the americans that were going for them. you don’t need to protect people that aren’t being hurt. most of his reasoning for “no americans” during this time was that anti-mask protests were happening in america, and he was making fun of them. two, the others imprisoned tommy, which does not count as “self defense in an anarchist society”. they accepted tubbo because he was european, and because he was willing to work for the nation like the rest of them. sapnap just wanted a drug dealer.
“dream’s “no factions” thing he had going on also included no government by default, showcased by him having problems with people starting countries.”
if there was no government, why did dream never point this out when wilbur said he was seceding? the server is dream’s faction! he doesn’t want “no factions”, he wants only his faction. dream refers to the server multiple times as a nation, and even a kingdom. anarchist societies don’t have prisons. the prison and the police is a system. if you have an anarchist society, but two specific people are going around arresting people, them going “oh but there’s no government” doesn’t take away the fact that they’re creating a hierarchy, using their own power? they also never claimed that there was no government.
everything that dream said later in the conversation with skeppy also lines up with this. ignoring the fact that there was a monarchy established because it “didn’t have any real power” is disregarding the fact that one, it was there, and two, that there was someone around with enough power to establish it in the first place. i don’t know how to say this any clearer. anarchist places do not have kings.
and anarchy is not the only thing that fits. it wasn’t designed to be a geopolitical drama, they just made the mistake of letting wilbur soot onto the server. so they didn’t need to have a name for the system, because the system was “do whatever you want”, including establishing authority.
“dream had all the reasons to believe they were aggressive and was fully justified in declaring war.”
dream didn’t declare war because alyssa was attacked. he had done stuff to them before that happened, and they got back all of her stuff (again, not by asking and trying to work it out, but by kidnapping someone who genuinely believed they were innocent and killing them as they begged for help.) dream started the official conflict because he declared war. he also started the unofficial conflict. he didn’t think they were aggressive, he thought they were weak.
“if he thought he was being mistreated he could just stop trying to mistreat others”
what, because he had any sort of power? he did stop mistreating others. l’manburg legitimately did nothing to intentionally hurt anyone, and tommy killing alyssa doesn’t count because that was his decision and revenge was already paid out for that. so wilbur stopped scamming people, built the walls to contain his country (he said that they needed nothing outside the walls at some point) and then was attacked multiple times. his mistreatment didn’t stop.
“it was supposed to be his l'manberg.”
wilbur didn’t destroy it because it was supposed to be his and it got away from him, that’s why he held the election: to try and restore peace through attempting to rig the election. he destroyed it because “the thing i built this nation for doesn’t exist anymore”, meaning the freedom it originally granted to its citizens was gone under schlatt. meaning the policy of no violence and using words was ruined. if the thing he built this nation for was power, this would make no sense. he could have taken power so easily. he passed off the presidency.
“something worth having power over” is something important. it is something that can be good for lots of people, and the power over it is what makes it safe. it’s worth having power over because when others, like schlatt, take that power, it is no longer safe.
violence and tyranny had become so much a part of l’manburg that wilbur felt the freedom and peace was gone. so when he blows it up, and says “my l’manburg”, he means it can no longer be used for evil. “my unfinished symphony, forever unfinished”. he saves it for himself by destroying it. so yes, he is being selfish, but not to ruin it for other people. he takes it into his own hands to weed out the fighting, and by doing so takes himself with it. his vision was never complete, because the wars had taught him that the only true freedom, the only true victory (“i won.”) for him was in death. (and then that turned out to be wrong.)
there’s a reddit post https://www.reddit.com/r/dreamsmp/comments/kapznr/wilbur_has_been_proven_right/
that explains this a little better than i can, and cc!wilbur commented on it “any truers???” so i think it can be counted as reliable.
this full quote from cc!wilbur about his character is very interesting. i’ll transcribe it here:
“i decided i was going to make a breaking bad style roleplay, where me and tommy would be drug dealers. and uh, one thing lead to another and i’m the president of a nation losing it due to my own insolence and uh, short sighted naivety. basically disregard for my fellow citizens who i claim to love so much. and a, and a dark, twisted understanding of what is possession. and what is, what is my right.”
i like this quote a lot because it highlights the initial traits that caused his spiral. it also places him as kind of similar to dream. the reason he lost the presidency is that he got too cocky. and the reason his spiral was so selfish is that it was all he could see— when his earlier vision of freedom was shattered by the first war, he didn’t know how to adapt and so became attached to power as it now felt like the only way to keep what mattered to him.
this is emphasized in his conversation with quackity during his second lore stream: that there was a drastic change between the person who made l’manburg and the person running for president. this quote matches up very well with the election arc. wilbur’s motives were different before the election, and they were different after.
once he had the freedom that he wanted, he became scared of losing it and that is what pushed him down. “if i can’t have it, no one can” is on the surface about the power, but the lament for what he once had (freedom in a country without tyranny) is there. that’s why he became so power-oriented. if he did not have control of l’manburg, it could be used to go against his original vision and it would be better off gone.
another good piece of information is cc!wilbur’s comment on his dnd alignment post, where he says this:
“wilbur is on the border of chaotic and neutral evil. wilbur, in his chaotic sense, is a crazy man who wants to blow up his old nation and kill his friends. but, more realistically, in his neutral sense, wilbur is the archetype of a man who had great power and who lost it all due to his own poor choices and negligence who sees destruction as his ratification.”
note the “realistically”.
he feels as if he owes it to l’manburg at the end to blow it up, and he didn’t mind taking himself with it as he thought that nobody cared about him anymore and he didn’t have any more to give.
(related to this, in the dnd alignment post, cc!wilbur places season 1 dream as chaotic evil and says his only motive is chaos. firstly, this would only apply to season one, and although cc!wilbur was working with cc!dream and everyone else to write the plot here, i wonder why he says this instead of saying anything else about dream’s motives. this seems to disagree pretty severely with what you think, but it also disagrees with what even i think about dream during this time.)
revivedbur comes back and has plans because he regrets his past. he hates that he gave up that easily. and he could absolutely lie about his past actions! there is no reason to ignore the contents of an entire war because someone who was alone for thirteen years says it!
“shouldn’t have it” doesn’t mean he was lying when he said he wanted it. he was just wrong, which he knew when he blew up l’manburg and that’s part of why he did it.
“they said they “fought with words”, like that doesn’t sound like a peaceful solution, more like a different approach, and it was because that is what they did”
they said the words thing a lot of times, and most of the time it was used as a “tommy don’t attack that person.” and “fighting with words” is arguing, it is replacing the trauma of real battle with talking it out. l’manburg did stick very closely to their motto of words over violence. look at the contents of the first war.
and once war was declared, wilbur was enthusiastic for it. sounds suspicious from someone claiming to not want war, right? he said it was a chance for them to prove themselves, to prove they could rule themselves. he also said that if they could defend themselves it would be proof. he never went “time to attack them”, and when he said he didn’t want a war in the past he meant that he didn’t want to start one. his being enthusiastic about the war ties into his naivety about running a country. it was also an acceptance in a way, no? it meant that the greater smp saw them as something worth declaring war on.
and it’s heartbreaking seeing him so excited to prove himself, because we know that the experience of the war is what lead to his spiral and his cynicism as president. we know that a few weeks later, he’s going to be crying into his pillow every night.
for the clip, i kind of don’t know what to say. i don’t think this is a clear condemnation of the entirety of l’manburg’s beginnings, but i do think that i was probably reaching a bit with trying to interpret it. there are definitely a lot of ways to see that, though.
no, he showed it in the first war and he clearly said it. i don’t think somebody who wants to mess with dream is going to not even think about him until he shows up, and even after then largely ignore him until he declares war.
“yes, it was worth something to wilbur, and that worth was power.”
question: power over what? power for what purpose? how did he use that power?
if it was only worth having power over, then why did he give it up? why didn’t he just kill schlatt in the first place? again i think the reddit post addresses a lot of this. original l’manburg was worth more to wilbur than power because he was willing to surrender when his life and his friend’s lives were threatened, and he told tommy it was not worth it to enter a duel and sacrifice his own life for it. after the war, he cared about power over it in order to keep peace, and then he realized that his own desire for power caused him to abandon his morals and he attempted to destroy it all.
“the greater smp did represent anarchy and peace.”
i just don’t think the ideals of the early smp line up with anarchy, and especially not dream’s actions later. he believes in forced peace, and unity under his terms although that belief is more gradual.
“see you tell me you didn’t fall for propaganda and then say this.”
it’s not “falling for propaganda” to watch the streams and interpret them. “propaganda” is defined as an attempt to spread information, often of a misleading nature. it’s what wilbur used during his presidential campaign, it’s what everyone used during the election. i do not base my opinion of his character off things that have been said about him after the fact. i watched the content when it happened.
so what about the facts that one, he wanted peace at the start, and two, that he cared about protecting his nation and the people he cared about is propaganda? it is information that i believe to be true based on my own analyzing of his actions during that time.
wilbur never says this as an attempt to lie to anyone. he wanted peace if it meant he could have freedom, but he would not attack anyone for freedom, he would defend it once he had established it. he wasn’t trying to establish an empire after the drug van stream (he says this in the vod where he discusses his plans for l’manburg with tommy) and the actions of the greater smp were tyrannical. what happened is that later, after the first war, he lost faith in peace because people continued to attack him!
“he did create division for his own benefit the way i see it.”
can you explain the “benefit” that division would give him? because like i said, his goal was his own personal freedom. he wasn’t attempting to divide people, he was reacting to mistreatment, whether perceived or real. and more often than not, people asked to join him, he didn’t try to convince them.
“yeah wilbur said it genuinely to tubbo when he first brought him armor”
as i was going through the old vods, i did find the origin of that quote! there’s something funny about it though. notice how he says it and then never does anything about it? and how nobody from l’manburg acts on it? because you have to look at his actions, something you emphasized that i agree with. they have more weight than his words. he also said “wanna kiss” to dream, so i don’t think this really counts as “proof” of an ulterior motive, because he said a lot of things.
“you see a pattern already?”
the “pattern” i see of his reactions to conflict in his nation is that he didn’t want to assert control in order to oppress people, he wanted to assert control to keep the peace, by rigging the election so that he had “legitimate” authority. was it a hypocritical? yeah! it reminds me of what dream was doing, too: placing his goal of peace over his wish for freedom of everyone.
the difference is that dream didn’t have any reserves about “starting an army and asserting dominance over his own people because they didn’t respect his authority and he was irritated by it”. weird that that can be used to describe dream as well, huh?
this is also after the first war, where wilbur learned a very important lesson! and it’s right before he realizes he’d become what he had tried to destroy. the other person who acts like this never realized this, though. it’s because he was never trying to destroy it. just saying.
“the friendships inside of it could’ve existed without, and would’ve probably been better off without being stained by war”
wilbur did not consider making l’manburg as a severing of relationships between the two nations. he even expresses neutrality towards some members of the greater smp. wilbur didn’t “make people think” they needed l’manburg, he saw it as a thing to devote yourself to, an ideology. he did not force others to think this way, although he encouraged it. people ended up sacrificing a lot for that (against their will sometimes), and so they became attached to it.
“the original dream smp was this but actually true instead of just being a front.”
ah yes, the dream smp with absolutely no hierarchies. nothing like mister “my house” at all. no “my land”, no “my server”, no “the king has no power”, no “it’s the dream smp”. /s
“wilbur didn’t fear for anyone’s safety”
hmm, no, wilbur did fear for everyone’s safety. you know, when they were being attacked continuously throughout the war? and when he finally surrendered because they were being threatened and killed?
“the dream smp was already safe”
dream and sapnap need better ways to “keep the server safe” than by blowing up people who wanted to go off and do their own thing and posed no threat to the greater server.
i don’t know how to provide “evidence” that dream and the others attacked l’manburg? the evidence is the fact that they did. again, wilbur’s initial goal was not conflict with the greater smp, it was emancipation. when tubbo was taken hostage and killed, shot at, robbed multiple times of materials it had taken him hours to get, and had his old house burned down simply because he was part of l’manburg, those were the reasons that tubbo ever fired a shot at them in the first place!
when wilbur lead his people out on the first day of the war, it was to negotiate. they dodged the arrows and went to the embassy, where they were then trapped and driven back into tommy’s house. it was then that they fought back. self defense. i don’t know what else to tell you.
“trying to end the war as soon as he could” is kind of misleading, because it implies that he hated the violence. he just wanted to win as soon as he could. he didn’t care what he had to do to win it. no mercy.
the dream smp was not freedom because when you try to leave freedom, it doesn’t hunt you down and try to destroy you. anarchy doesn’t call you a traitor when you leave. and yeah, dream was real friendly to tommy when he continued the disk war when it first settled. and of course when your friends join a different nation, the most logical course of action is to murder them repeatedly! /s
the definition of anarchy includes personal freedom, the exact thing wilbur wanted. anarchy does not include authority, it is firmly opposed to it. i think i would place the early greater smp as more of a stateless society, if i had to put a name on it (again, i am extremely wary to do that because it wasn’t written as anything with a name). a stateless society is one of the goals of anarchism, but does not encompass the entire belief.
dream’s main motivation was that he didn’t want anyone being independent. it didn’t matter who was leading it.
and i’m sorry, but you can’t just take away evidence by saying “he was lying” when there is no proof he is? if you take this conversation at face value it makes more sense!
“both sides had their losses and were ready to harm the other” what did the greater smp lose. its people? its land? there was other land, and the people could still remain friends. some of them did. dream even says before this that yeah, l’manburg is losing. and wilbur here is attempting to downplay that loss, claiming they’re on even ground because that’s what he wants to happen. he is trying to appear stronger than he really is. he’s bluffing, but it doesn’t work.
i don’t like saying “nobody’s the victim” here when one side was getting absolutely whaled on by the other. wilbur has the ability to be genuine, and he does. if he was trying to “play” the victim, he would exaggerate the damage his side had suffered. his words and his actions match up, and this is a pretty different circumstance from him doing a bit. he is a victim. that’s just straight up true.
i’m not surprised that you think this way, as you’ve said you were on dream’s side since the start, but i’d like to once again ask you to examine where you got these perceptions.
dream offering them “chances” was just offering them surrender. that’s not merciful, and it’s not fair, either. and he may not have wanted to hurt them, but he sure didn’t mind doing it. wilbur wasn’t sewing some kind of anti-dream propaganda in his nation while the battle was going on, the hatred for dream came from the fact that he was attacking all of them.
“colonize” is a bad word choice for what l’manburg was. nobody was living on that land before they got there. the land should have belonged to nobody, so why did dream get so mad about “his” land being taken? what about that specific area was so important to him, when he did have the ability to visit?
wilbur was pacifist, he was not the instigator, again i have to say i can’t offer up proof if you’re convinced that he was lying. when he fought back later it was in self defense. please watch the vods. and recognize that wilbur’s actions election era are consequences of his experiences revolution era.
i genuinely don’t understand what you mean by comparing this to exile. please rephrase your point. if you’re comparing what dream did to tommy to wilbur trying to stop dream from hurting him and his people more i have to say that’s a... questionable take. it’s probably a bad idea to make exile comparisons if you’re going to use them to victim-blame.
“i mean, what other choice was there?”
no, dream had a lot of choices. he did not offer them a peaceful way out. he declared war and then he attacked. it was then that he told them many times to surrender. and no, wilbur didn’t push them to go and die, evidenced again by the times he used himself as a distraction so that they could run, and that he didn’t want tommy to do the duel but ultimately respected his decision and his freedom.
“dream constantly asked them to give up instead of fighting.”
dream has a responsibility to not attack kids. dream also has a responsibility to attempt any sort of peaceful negotiation. tubbo was boxed and murdered before war was declared, and tubbo personally had done straight up nothing to the people of the greater smp, and he didn’t even know why he died until tommy saw that alyssa’s pickaxe was mixed in with his stuff.
if wilbur claimed to wish to prevent violence, and then he did, or at least attempted to, i don’t know why you think it’s untrue. calling someone a rude name is not equal to murder. “verbally violent” means pretty much nothing and was coming from both sides.
“there’s a theory wilbur legitimately thinks dream selfish”
i mean, yeah. i think that kind of sums it up. wilbur was appealing to dream’s personal goals. i don’t see how he was shut down though. he already helped pogtopia, so him being asked to further help someone from pogtopia shows that they trusted him enough to tell him the plan.
i’ve watched the clip a lot of times and i think that the meaning can be ambiguous. i am using dream’s other actions during that time to determine how much of an effect i think it had on him. i don’t think he got “shut down” in any sort of meaningful way here.
“he didn’t seem to hold even that against him as he tried to help get back l’manberg with him.”
if dream didn’t hold the disk thing against tommy then, he sure decided to get mad about it later (he brings it up when arguing with quackity), despite the fact that he had also re-opened the conflict in the past.
“i believe they had genuinely been friends once.”
sure, i think they were friends before dream did what he did with the disks, and allies during early pogtopia. dream still decided to switch sides and team with manburg because schlatt offered him the book. this is, ironically, dream abandoning tommy.
“he has a sense of responsibility (not control) over the people on his smp.”
i think it can be responsibility and control. most of the responsibility is misguided, and lots of it is just actual control. i don’t know where you’re getting a lot of this.
and i do not know where you got that his fatal flaw was caring too much? he “cares” in the way of having control! he doesn’t care about the well being of others as long as he thinks he’s right. i’m just saying that he sure could have walked away, because he did just that later when he sided with schlatt. it’s not a speculation about his character when it’s something that he did.
him walking away did not entail complete surrender to wilbur. there were a lot of other things he could have done, but i don’t want to get into “could have”’s as i don’t really think there’s a point. wilbur was attempting to convince him, yeah, but that didn’t mean it was true. we know that wilbur was lying about wanting ambition.
also, i don’t think dream was allied with pogtopia because he liked them or he was trying to be better or anything. he said in “tyrant” that it’s because schlatt was worse, and wilbur didn’t have any ambition to expand.
“maybe you misunderstood something i said, but no, he definitely didn’t.”
okay, so since dream didn’t think wilbur was a villain, wilbur was not “pressuring him” into becoming one by helping him. my point was that dream didn’t think that, and wilbur didn’t care. sorry for not making that clear, i was asking a rhetorical question.
“yeah, they are. and dream was villanized.”
oh boy. vilify: to utter slanderous and abusive statements against, to defame.
(i probably should have been saying vilify instead of villainize because they mean the same thing but i straight up did not know it was a word, sorry lol)
slanderous means false and malicious. abusive means offensive and insulting. defamation is things that are not true.
if somebody says, “this guy punched me.” that would not be vilifying them. it is a true statement with a neutral tone. if they add “he is a bad person”, that could possibly be seen as abusive, as it is insulting, but the point of vilifying someone is that you are making them out to be someone they’re not. it involves the use of lies and continuous exaggerated language. slanderous and abusive. abusive only is not enough to classify something as vilifying.
someone reacting to something dream did by calling him a name is not vilifying him. it is true that he did the thing, and it is also true that the person saying it believes it. it is rare that someone criticizes him without real reason or goes overboard (the person who really does this as far as i can remember is tommy), and when tommy does so it is almost always reciprocated. so we have dream and tommy constantly vilifying each other, and other people saying negative things about dream and sometimes vilifying him, if they lie about it. he sometimes vilifies them.
my point is that vilification is not wilbur telling niki, “dream burnt tubbo’s house down”, despite the fact that he calls dream a bad guy. it’s not slanderous because it is true. dream assisted sapnap with the act. vilification is not tommy explaining to ranboo what was happening during exile, or telling dream that dream makes him worse. “someone calling someone out for hurting them” implies truth, and it doesn’t necessarily imply abusive language, but it doesn’t matter because it’s true.
maybe we were going off different definitions of vilify. but when we’re accusing characters who are victims of abuse and manipulation, we need to be careful with what we accuse them of.
anyway
wilbur saying he wanted to use the tommys of the world was left in the drug van stream. tommy himself was pushing a lot of the “dream bad” stuff because he had more experience with him. when tommy was confused during those two scenes, it was because he believed that wilbur respected him, and wilbur working with or idolizing someone who had hurt tommy in the past was a contradiction to that belief. wilbur does not question tommy’s anger during the vassal scene because he doesn’t care that dream is bad, and when he is revived he either does not believe it or does not want to acknowledge it. revivedbur cares a whole lot more about power for the sake of power than wilbur ever did.
again, tommy isn’t stupid. he has his own reasons for not liking dream, and the disconnect comes from a place of trusting wilbur.
by the way, wilbur left the vc before saying that tommy didn’t care. he was talking to himself (and chat). and he was more fearful that tommy was leaving than angry. plus, he didn’t actually force tommy to give up his house: there was miscommunication between them and the embassy was the power tower in the end. wilbur just wanted confirmation that tommy would spend time in l’manburg. it’s true that he went about it in a bad way, though.
he didn’t push patriotism onto them, they were also excited about the country. there were other scenes beside the tyrant scene, and the amount of times wilbur had to tell tommy to shut up about how great the country is is a lot higher than the one time he had them call dream a tyrant.
true, that scene is before pogtopia. it’s also after the war for independence. i am not saying that wilbur should have said any of that stuff. i’m just pointing out that it wasn’t always like that.
also i do not really see “you’re never gonna be president” as a taunt or manipulation or anything. i think wilbur genuinely believed that having tommy in charge of the country would one, get them into more conflicts, and two, mess up tommy mentally. being the president sucked and wilbur knew that. wilbur was not kind to tommy. but a lot of stuff that’s pointed at as manipulative is pretty clearly wilbur’s own paranoia spilling over in a desire to protect tommy, ie saying that tubbo would betray them. wilbur genuinely thought that and he was trying to warn tommy.
“tommy, when i said you’d never be president, it wasn’t a challenge. it’s true. you’re never going to be president.”
tommy’s life has been hard, that’s true. not disagreeing with you there. but not every adult has been using him the whole time. and if you’re looking for fault, i would personally look at the guy who killed him three times first, just saying. other things had impacts but there’s a clear scale.
“tommy formed an attachment to them as a result of the disc war, not the other way around.”
so yeah, initially it was a shallow trade: the disks for the armor. once that conflict was resolved, and tommy apologized, that should have been the end of it, yeah? especially since tommy now had a stronger connection to the disks? that would have been nice.
the problem is that dream took them back for no reason. because he did, he went back and dug up tommy’s whole front yard and spawned months of conflict after. having “leverage” over someone like that is kinda messed up! it’s not like tommy was going around committing mass murder every tuesday, he got in scraps with other people on the server who also committed petty crimes. so i can’t really blame tommy for wanting them back, even though he stole them.
and if dream didn’t care about the disks, why did he later use it as “proof” that tommy caused all the trouble on the server? if they were so worthless to him that he gave them to skeppy, why did it matter that tommy stole them?
i don’t know what you mean about this being the only way dream could control people. the amount of genuine fear other characters felt when he logged on was there for a long time. he held a lot of power on the server, and a lot of his control was physical, evidenced by exile in particular but also the wars.
when he did ultimately use connections to control people, that was still a bad thing.
“his friend’s house got burnt down and he wanted the person who did it to be held accountable?”
okay, george’s house got burned down. do you remember the initial punishment that dream proposed? probation for tommy until he was eighteen. and when dream was arguing with his friends, he pointed out that the only reason l’manburg was being held hostage for tommy’s crime was that tommy was involved in the government. he said that if tommy hadn’t been involved in the government, he probably would have just hunted him down and killed him.
that’s not “holding someone accountable”. that’s not even close.
“he was taught this from experience”
the leather from the horse was used to blackmail him after he had already started doing that to people. you know how tommy mimicks him? that’s what was going on (still bad that he did it but like. come on.) so that may have been the push that caused dream to cut his own connections (so that nobody could ever do that to him again, and he would have no chance of failure), but it didn’t just happen to him for no reason: it was a behavior he taught someone else.
“he did genuinely think he was a villain before the war”
tommy called dream a lot of stuff before the war, and most of it was unprompted by wilbur. a lot of it was also, like you said, two friends joking around. just because wilbur taught him a new word (he didn’t really tell him what it meant though) doesn’t mean he was manipulated into using it all the time or something. and i’m pretty sure tommy got a decent definition of tyranny later, when the greater smp decided to attack l’manburg before anything went down.
“it’s just a character acknowledging what people who looked deeper into the narrative already knew.”
what i’m saying is that narratively, wilbur has an extremely good reason to be biased right now. taking anything he says as truth doesn’t solidify an interpretation as truth. there has to be enough evidence to actually back the entire thing up in the first place, and i’m just not seeing “wilbur was always going for power and division” as solidified by his actions during the first war.
and again, tommy’s not stupid, and the entire time tommy is yelling at him! tommy knows something is off! if people also in the story are saying “this isn’t right”, i feel like they’d know? tommy was also part of l’manburg, he has an opinion too. so when he says “we founded l’manburg because we knew dream was the bad guy”, he’s talking about why he did it. and he brings up a good point: “you say you did it to stick it to the man, but you’re idolizing dream, who is the man”. (paraphrased i don’t know his exact words but this was his point) this shows that wilbur’s motives have changed, even from what revivedbur will say.
that first analysis has some Opinions. oh man.
i don’t know man i’m just going to point some things out:
-the person who wrote the thread pulling the “child” card makes me laugh because tommy had committed more crimes than wilbur at that point. ah yes tommy innit innocent child being horribly dragged into a giant war by evil wilbur /s
-wilbur did not call dream a tyrant before dream showed up and made fun of their land
-wilbur did not legitimately think dream a tyrant when he told tommy and tubbo to call him that. neither, really, did tommy and tubbo. it was a joke. like infinite women. like dream saying “i’m evil” when he was blowing up creepers on their land before the battle. like dream and sapnap being all “down with the british”.
-their attitude on that changed when the greater smp begin exhibiting tyrannical behavior (before war was declared!).
-“having tommy and tubbo fight his battles and build his walls” is just untrue
-the l’manburg anthem was, one, not written by wilbur (he commissioned someone to do it on fiver) , and two, was written after the first war. they sing it in the stream where niki joins. so yeah, at that point, they did emancipate from the brutality and tyranny of their rulers! it doesn’t say who the rulers are (therefore it’s. not blaming solely dream.) but pretty much all of them were brutal!
-also oh my god this thread has a lot of things that wilbur just straight up didn’t say (or do).
-“would rather die than submit to your tyrannical rule” is a quote from the speech wilbur gives before dream lights the tnt. dream had done stuff to them at that point. this is out of context.
-i don’t want to seriously critique this thread because a lot of it seems more like something emotional than an attempt to start conversation, and i can’t really go against that.
-the main argument, that dream did nothing before being irreversibly forced into the role of the villain does not really match up with what happened. -there’s a lot less of people calling dream a villain than people seem to remember.
-and also, dream was lying about wanting l’manburg to be something. he says to eret a few days later the quote that i included a while back, that his goal has always been for there to be one faction: the dream smp. note that at this point he’s officially on manburg’s “side” now. he also says he has never wavered on this from the beginning. so he’s either continuing his manipulation of eret and lying to them, or he’s just saying that he wants l’manburg to be something to wilbur and tommy to try to get them to trust him. and hearing him yell “YES!” after the explosion? i’m inclined to think it’s the latter.
okay, so then looking at the second analysis:
-once again, calling wilbur a colonizer? there is a definition of that word that matches up with his actions, but that definition is something establishing itself in a place. by that definition, everyone on the server is a colonizer. so calling just wilbur that seems... a bit weird, considering that the common definition does not match up with what he did.
-“got his entire side killed” ignores the fact that it was Dream And His Friends Who Killed Them hghfnjgnfm
dream: wow wilbur you’re bad at this war thing
wilbur: please stop killing us
dream: how could you do this to your people
wilbur: you??? declared war???
dream: no you don’t understand i had a really good reas—
sorry sorry i’m just. yeah
-also this thread reminded me that “tyrant” exists and yeah, i do see your point that dream did care about tommy (a little bit). i just wonder why he turned against him again? and why dream is willing to admit here that l’manburg was peaceful, and also that wilbur was not like schlatt in some key ways?
-and again i don’t see wilbur calling dream a villain during the vassal scene.
-some of this thread is just speculation. i’m not going to consider “wilbur may manipulate dream in the future because they had a conversation in the past” because i don’t think it holds any value to examining the past. the important part is the breakdown of the vassal scene.
-i’ve already said what i think about the vassal scene. dream wasn’t getting tossed around during that. just because he’s quiet doesn’t mean he’s being manipulated? and wilbur isn’t going “you think this”, he’s asking dream what he thinks by paraphrasing what wilbur’s heard from him before, and adjusts it once dream corrects him. i do think this one is more open to interpretation though; this is just my opinion and it doesn’t have a lot of stuff to back it up lol but i’m not convinced either side has much evidence
and the third analysis:
-dream had no idea what kind of government they were setting up there. he didn’t ask, so he wouldn’t know if it was a dictatorship. and again he was allowed on the land, he just never built the embassy. the “no americans” rule was weakly enforced during the first war, and the reason wilbur got so serious about it later is that the americans were the ones who went after him and killed everyone during the war! so he had a reason to want them off. objectively a bad reason? maybe
-it would be cool if dream said “hey don’t do this here’s why” instead of stomping off during negotiations and then coming back to beat them up and declare war. he didn’t though
-the problem people have with greater smp vs. l’manburg is scale. the greater smp was quite literally infinite, and l’manburg was a small space. there wasn’t anything important in l’manburg that other server members needed to get to. people could still leave to visit their friends. they didn’t legitimately hate americans. but nooo, you can’t have the table because it’s my table. what if you do something bad with the table? remember when you tried to sell people “better air” for three dollars and then took someone’s air conditioning? you just want power! i’m going to go bring back rubber bands to pelt you with.
anywAys moving on
no, i do agree with you on the sam stuff. for some reason i was under the impression that cc!sam was uncomfortable with being depicted as torturing dream a while back, but with the stuff happening with quackity now, i’m reasonably sure that doesn’t apply. they don’t retcon stuff that was intentional but there may have been something taken back a few months ago before they planned this.
but yeah, clearly the prison stuff is awful and messed up. that’s why i noted the thing at the start of the reply: i am in no way saying that anything sam or quackity have done to dream since prison hasn’t affected him. these are things that i see as having visible impacts on the character.
i understand that it’s frustrating to hear that used as an excuse, but i wasn’t using it that way. i was pointing out that neither of them deserve it. during the vault stream, dream tells tommy that his plan is to put him in the prison. he says that exile was “perfect”, and the only issue was that tommy could get away. putting him in the prison fixes that.
so yeah, what dream was planning to do to tommy is different than what’s happening to him. but the reasons that other people wanted dream in the prison match why he wanted tommy in there: like you said, it’s a vault. it’s so he can store him and use him later, to give attachments and thus power and control over others.
tommy’s original plan was to kill dream. ultimately, he didn’t want him to suffer more, he wanted him gone. nobody on the server knew yet that death was limbo, and tommy probably thought it was mercy for someone like dream. dream was the one who brought up the book, as an attempt to save himself. he will say whatever he needs to say to avoid death, because anyone would (except someone like wilbur who’s. accepted his role. you know?) so he’s the one who reduced himself down the the book, saying if he goes, so does it. that’s when sam suggests the prison.
true, the arc is dark. this is where sam’s actions become corrupted and he loses sight of some of the responsibility he claims to have. it’s also the arc where dream lied to tommy that he had changed, and pressured him into staying by saying he was his friend. it’s the arc where dream kills tommy, and doesn’t allow sam to come get his body for days. it’s the arc where dream gets even worse, whether because of his time in the prison or because of his peaked god complex, probably both.
and again, my problem is that criticizing characters for actions they didn’t take is pointless. it tells you not much about the character, and considering the circumstances of what dream had done it does make sense for none of them to step in! they are looking at the fact that dream had an entire vault dedicated to controlling them. they are seeing that dream was fully prepared to murder tubbo and lock tommy away forever to be used. they are witnessing tommy giving dream exactly what he got.
so “acknowledging” this does nothing useful! we do not see these actions (or lack of) specifically affecting dream. i can tell you what dream told people he was doing, and it matches up with things he had done in the past, and there are moments he denies the narrative that you say drove him to do this. but i can’t really prove anything when you say he’s lying here because it fits how you interpret the story.
it’s what you’re saying people are doing to revivedbur: saying he’s lying without any proof, when with him there is evidence and he has the motive to lie. when revivedbur lies, tommy calls him on it. tommy doesn’t call dream on it. i’ve laid out why i think it’s not true, and i’ve seen stuff in early canon that directly contradicts what revivedbur says. occam’s razor! many pieces of evidence versus a few statements from someone who at that point commonly lied about things like that.
dream standing by while tommy and the other citizens get killed in l’manburg by his own orders isn’t very peaceful or non-tyrannical of him. tommy was enforcing an eye for an eye, and to be honest? i don’t think “kill your abuser” is such a terrible message to send, despite the fact that we know that tommy’s coping mechanisms come from a bad source. and tommy was far from free of what dream did to him, as evidenced by later when he again attempts to mirror what dream had done to him in the past.
yeah, i read your analysis of the interaction. that’s not the only interpretation. skeppy doesn’t call him the villain. he is repeating back to dream the actions that dream took, and dream tells him he’s making him sound bad. skeppy wasn’t influenced by any “propaganda” you think l’manburg was putting out while they were getting murdered. skeppy was an outsider who was calling it as he saw it.
and if other people saw what dream was doing as bad, maybe he was... doing bad things? for bad reasons? skeppy was critical of dream for his actions. talking over somebody does not certify it as “twisting words”. skeppy was accusing him of doing the actions, like “so you did this? you started the war?”. dream was defending the logic behind his actions, like “well i did it because.”
basically
skeppy: hey it’s kind of. messed up that you killed a bunch of people. you know? you kind of just attacked them out of nowhere
dream: no no no you don’t understand. i had a really good reason
skeppy: i don’t see a reason?
dream: you’re making it seem like i didn’t have to do this
skeppy: you d i d n ‘ t
and skeppy didn’t finish the conversation with “you’re lying” or “you don’t know what you’re talking about”, he just told him he was wrong! as in his actions were cruel and needless! “people must have hated coming to your house”.
okay, name one? puffy. sam. punz? he did cut them off, he straight up told tommy he did it, and making a place in the vault for fran when sam had done nothing but work with him? and they didn’t “show up ready to kill him”, they showed up to see what he was doing. so he tells tommy he abandoned them, and indirectly tells them with the spirit scene. sapnap and george noticed this, and called him on it, but he just said he didn’t mean it?
if dream “wasn’t as close” with sam/puffy/punz, why are we putting responsibility on them for his actions.
so sapnap and george walked away from him, but because he did something to them. and puffy didn’t abandon him. punz didn’t abandon him, punz got paid off because that’s what punz cares about: money. he’s a mercenary.
using “they left him first” for sapnap and george doesn’t allow for why they left him: because he wasn’t treating them fairly. he isn’t their parent, he’s their friend, and he wasn’t acting like it.
“he was hurt and abandoned to the point” “he ended up hurting people doesn’t negate the fact he was hurt himself first” “the environment they all were a part of pushed him this far, and that’s just what happened”
so you’re saying it’s right that the reason dream did bad things to people is because bad things were done to him first? because dream was definitely the one who got attacked first during l’manburg. because he just cared so much about george that he kicked someone out of society just to defend his honor. /s and then, because his real purpose was protecting george, he went back and tried to make things right with george because it wasn’t about tommy? oh wait, he didn’t. he focused on only tommy. because george’s house was an excuse.
“that’s just what happened” is a bad take on “people got abused”. the fact is that dream started a lot of the conflict. looking at the retaliation and self-defense that people did towards him and saying “he got hurt a bunch that’s why he did the later bad stuff” completely negates that he started it? and his “retribution” was always exponentially worse than the actual crime committed?
dude, i’m just trying to point out that the story says he cut people off. yeah, he was hurt at times, but that is not an explanation for what he did. it’s not even a logical cause, because we do not see it affect his character. the subtext has gotta be there.
“circle of violence” does apply (not all of them, though). but in this situation, it’s a kid stealing someone’s lunch money, and then the other kid breaks their nose. the first kid punches the kid, the second kid puts them in the hospital. when the retribution dream gave was always worse than whatever happened to him, the issue is not “look at the people hurting him”, it’s “stop him from hurting people”!
so clearly dream needs some kind of therapy (not from puffy though i’m not letting him near her /hj), because just killing him would be a permanent solution but it would upset people who like his character. the prison is awful and not going to work. my personal solution for him is to send him out somewhere a long way away, so that nobody he’s hurt has to see him again. maybe people that wanted to go with him could, and it would be like a new smp. but when that idea was proposed, tommy said darkly that he was always going to come back. maybe it’ll be the solution in the future. who knows.
if the mistakes were unintentional, why criticize the characters for them? and what about “the environment” besides the other people changed how dream thought? a lot of it was internal.
we have him exiling tommy as a weird, desperate plea for friends when he very much could have gone back and spoken to the people who were his friends. we have him continuously saying that tommy causes all the problems, and he needs to be “restrained” or “controlled” or whatever other excuse he came up with for taking away a person’s free will.
we have him obsessing over the disks, and we know it’s not about the disks, it’s about power over tommy and power in general. he says this in the vault. his progression is towards a twisted sense of possession, same as wilbur, oddly enough. but they are different in that wilbur is possessive over the idea of freedom that he created with l’manburg (and having power over that) and dream is possessive over control over all.
wilbur’s idea is ruined. he tied his sense of self to the nation and when it was used for corruption (kind of by him and mostly by others) he saw himself as corrupted and decided to take them both out so that they couldn’t hurt anyone. he admits his own fault to the point of self destruction.
dream’s idea is threatened. other people live there, other people want to do things, and so he becomes so attached to the idea that it’s his server and he will do anything to control opposition. he cannot admit his fault unless forced to.
wilbur would do anything to control a tool of power, because he wanted to not use it as that tool. wilbur wanted anarchy at the end. he says so in his last presidential speech. his naive views about freedom from the start of the server had worn off, as he saw people use power as a tool in a way that he had never intended or meant to use it.
wilbur created the election so that he would have an actual authority over the land, and he could stop the fighting of its citizens. he thought he knew better, kind of like dream did. this is when his motives get the most twisted and selfish, he wanted peace so bad that he would take away freedom for it (like dream). but when he lost, he accepted it, and that’s the difference. he saw the desire for control in his own actions, and hated himself for it. that’s why he wanted to blow up l’manburg, to take away the tool for power and the person who had been tempted to use it.
wilbur was a good leader in the political sense (dream admits this in “tyrant”) but when he stands before the rubble of l’manburg and calls it his, he’s saying that his rule would only lead to destruction. anyone’s rule would. power corrupts. l’manburg ruined is his l’manburg, it’s his original vision of complete freedom laid out before him.
so then, you would say, dream was right, yeah? he didn’t want l’manburg. but wilbur before he explodes l’manburg doesn’t like dream. he thinks dream’s right in that factions lead to oppression, no matter how good the intentions, but he also knows that dream was a little too willing to hurt them and that dream doesn’t believe this. dream does not want anarchy, he wants chaos but only if it gives him control. he treats the smp like his country, and once again, power corrupts.
went off there, sorry. dream and wilbur are similar but different in some very important ways.
sapnap had been hurt by dream before the vault, and as dream didn’t see himself as in the wrong, he didn’t reach out. sapnap was with pogtopia because tommy had shown him more kindness than dream, and that was originally dream’s side. dream just turned on them for the book.
and sapnap also witnessed dream mocking tubbo, making fun of tommy, exposing ranboo. he heard dream going off about how tubbo was so stupid for thinking dream was his friend, for thinking dream cared about him. why would sapnap side with dream if dream was showing no signs of even wanting him? sapnap accused dream of that, and dream did not listen to him. he could not see the other side: he was so convinced that he was right. we do not know if sapnap went into the vault with the intent of killing dream. i’m pretty sure most of them were there to see if what tommy had said was true. and then, sapnap saw that it was.
nobody abandoned him because of the vault because he had already abandoned them. they just made it mutual. it being a “consequence” of stuff doesn’t make it any less of a messed up, power hungry thing to do, and some of them had done nothing to him before he decided he needed to control them. he was planning to use friend to control ghostbur, who he had already taken advantage of and tried to kill once.
“people do not decide to isolate themselves for no reason.”
true, people don’t cut themselves off for no reason. the reason was power and control. i once again have to emphasize that nobody forced him into this: it was a spiral. other people didn’t do everything “first”. the small taste he got of his own medicine was a poor mimic thrown at him by someone he had done terrible things to. he started spiraling before the spirit scene happened. and if people are telling him he can’t achieve peace, maybe they’re just... right? did he go up to someone and go “i don’t know how to make this server peaceful :(“? because if he did, and if they then pointed at his long list of war crimes and told him not like this, i don’t really see that as anything more than a consequence for things he had already done.
someone can lie about what they want. maybe he did originally want peace, or maybe he was lying to himself that he did. l’manburg did not invite war. he wanted unity above peace, and that “unity” dissolved into “control”.
it was a defense so that nobody could control him the way he was going to control them. cutting himself off was out of fear, yeah. collecting everyone else’s items? power and control. he says this a ton of times, sometimes not even out loud.
i did rewatch the vault vod. that’s how i got all the quotes of him stating his motives. i’m not saying it was a healthy thing to do at all. i never said dream was mentally healthy, i said he had a god complex and he was obsessed with control. someone’s bad mental state can hurt others as well as themself, and they’re still responsible for the others.
“he lists his reason for starting the war as them declaring independence, so i don’t think it really matters when the official document was sent.”
it does matter a little bit, actually. they were already attacking l’manburg before official war was declared. they also attacked them during the peace period. wilbur wrote the declaration as he was standing on the roof of the caravan, being shot at by the greater smp.
a country becomes independent when it officially declares itself to be independent. they were still united; it was tyranny.
when dream saw that l’manburg was writing the declaration, he scrambled to declare war. he had reopened and started other conflicts in the past, and involved himself in places he did not need to be. it’s true that a response is a response, but you cannot treat all responses the same way. quackity’s “response” to the things dream had done (killing tommy among those) was to torture him. we do not consider that good, or fair, or “just a response”, we consider it cruel and unusual punishment.
the greater smp fulfilled the words that wilbur had not yet written in the document, and that’s because they weren’t a prophesy, they were a history.
“...would be completely honest about in front of his biggest enemy. /s”
i don’t see evidence that dream wasn’t being honest. what did he have to lose by it? tommy could do nothing to hurt him. so yep, he would be honest about it. and he’s listed his reasons as power before. he also has the ability to tell the truth about his motives.
dream does not see tommy that way. he sees him as someone whose only positive contribution to the server is attachment. he tells tommy that evil is relative, and to dream, tommy is the evil one. in fact, he says that tommy is evil lots of times. he only says that tommy sees himself as a hero when he’s trying to convince him to let him kill his friend. dream is using tommy’s black and white perception to get him to do what dream wants. he only says tommy sees himself as the hero, not that dream sees him that way. dream does not care about who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy, because he’s not idealistic like wilbur and he’s not a kid like tommy.
him making a joke about building the prison with a “little bit of evil” doesn’t matter because next line he says that tommy’s evil to him. dream isn’t playing the villain, cc!dream is. cc!dream is playing a character that is antagonistic towards others, and he plays into it and jokes around with it, as other people playing antagonistic roles have in the past. cc!wilbur does this a lot during the election and pogtopia. cc!techno hints at it with his “ah yes, blowing up a country, we must be the good guys”.
it may sound like a character because someone’s playing it, but it’s not dream. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0DjwebiLc
this video in response to the one by your friend matches up with some of my points here, but it’s also framed like an english class. it is an interesting meta argument, and one that i would say i partially agree with, but as we’re not really arguing on terms of meta it does not act as a general opposition to your argument. the intent of the authors does not dictate how you see the story, but it can help with interpretation of it.
dream’s words during the vault scene sure do line up with his actions for the months before that. so yeah, no discredit to cc!dream. he’s playing his character. and it’s not like he’s unwilling to make him sympathetic. he’s done so in the past (and is doing so now) and the fact that he does not do it during the vault, and downplays the tragic part of it (him losing his friends) sure makes it seem like the main point here isn’t “poor dream”, it’s “poor tommy”. they’re telling a story. it has a moral.
dream being reserved about his plans may be shown in the fact that nobody knew about the vault (except punz i think?) until dream was ready to put it into play. he generally is quiet about what he wants, he just cares a lot about it and will do a lot to get it. he’s not one for speeches unless he’s trying to make a point. the point here being that tommy is trapped. dream’s capable of explaining his thoughts. tommy asks him why and invites him to share, so he does.
i want to clarify that if you want to interpret this another way, i don’t care and i’m not trying to change your mind on any of this. i feel kind of bad that i came onto your post and started a debate in the first place. my only real problem was the criticism of other characters that i felt was unnecessary, after that i just wanted to talk about lore. canon can be different depending on who you see, you don’t have any responsibility to change your mind. i just want to sort of illustrate the other side.
conflicts dream has started besides the vault? okay.
-reopening the disk war by digging up the hidden disks-declaring war on l’manburg the first time-blowing up the community house (or having it done for him)-attacking l’manburg again with techno and phil
(didn’t start really, but inserted himself into when it wasn’t his business:)-helped pogtopia-gave wilbur tnt-sided with manburg in the fight-built walls around l’manburg-demanded tommy be punished-took personal responsibility for exile and used it as a way to isolate tommy
there’s also this:
posthttps://stellocchia.tumblr.com/post/651520417197178880/you-know-what-i-feel-more-refreshed-now-so
that describes things dream has done in general. the tone of the post is biased, but the actions were canon. some of these may be “retribution” but they sure were uncalled for.
so when he exiled tommy, that was about “unity”? big happy family except for one guy because “he causes all the problems”? it doesn’t matter whether he believed he was in the right for his motives. the vault does not make sense for peace or unity. it is a twisted, controlled unity. what i’m saying is that he uses peace as an excuse for his actions. he had to exile tommy, tommy would have just gotten worse. he had to declare war on l’manburg, it was a necessary evil. because nothing screams “peace” like declaring war and killing the other side, right?
those may be his actual motives in the early scenes, and he thinks he’s doing the right thing. this changes with the vault. he no longer uses this as an excuse, his “excuse” is that he has a right to it. his self proclaimed motive is power and control, and unity through that. so why not accept that as his motive when he says it there?
the thing some people buy is that he was correct somehow, when he wasn’t. you don’t think this, which is good, i just didn’t know if you did. he did not just want peace and unity. maybe he thought he did, at some point, but his actions are antithetical to those values.
“becoming a control freak as a result of feeling the loss of control over your own circumstances isn’t equal to dehumanizing the people you’re trying to control.”
nah dude he absolutely dehumanized them and took away their agency? he describes tommy as a pet and a tool, minutes before he switches and describes himself as the book. this could also be used to make an interesting point on how he sees people as their values, in item form. so he’s using one item to control another. tubbo’s a pawn, tommy’s a tool, techno’s a weapon, he’s the book.
he calls george a baby, and makes decisions for him. by planning to using the items to control the people, he was prepared to take away their freedom and agency by emotionally manipulating them. he did this to tommy. agency is the capacity of someone to act. he takes away that ability in order to have control.
he’s not just a control freak over his own life, the problem is that he does it to others. again, we’re talking true freedom here: the ability to do anything, even things that we would consider morally wrong. he takes away george’s power, which is revealed to be nothing. he then swiftly turns and tells him that if he tries to overthrow eret, he would be a tyrant. not acknowledging that dream just overthrew a king and stated in a new one, he hypocritically calls george the tyrant for planning to do that.
(i didn’t even notice this until now, but it’s actually interesting: dream is extremely hypocritical here, unless, of course, he sees himself as having more claim to who is king. now why would he think that? a hierarchy, perhaps?)
“which is understandable seeing as you’ve said already you never tried to look deeper into him, but it’s incorrect nonetheless.”
i said that before this i had not attempted to examine his character in a sympathetic light. that’s what i’ve been doing. his wish to “fix” his home is really just a wish to control his home, which is pretty evident when you look at right before exile. the smp was peaceful then. tommy had committed petty crimes before, and george didn’t even really care about the house. it was minimal damage. dream jumped at the opportunity to convince everyone else that tommy was the real problem (speaking of propaganda and vilifying).
and “he was getting better until the sixteenth” disregards that he threatened eret, enabled wilbur (however you interpret that, he still enabled him), and sided with schlatt for power reasons even though he said he would help pogtopia. giving pogtopia some stuff doesn’t make him the “good guy” because pogtopia were not the good guys! that’s the point! he sided with them because wilbur had less ambition than schlatt, and therefore posed less of a threat to the greater smp! he wasn’t helping them just purely out of the goodness of his heart. he didn’t think schlatt was right, he abandoned him very quickly, but he could have just taken the book and dipped. he fought in the war. he took the book for personal gain and he placed that above the trust of pogtopia.
“he wasn’t on a power trip at all, he didn’t have a god complex up until the prison stripped him of all his dignity and then threw an opportunity at him, and he wasn’t trying to prove anything to anyone.”
power trip: an activity or way of behaving that makes a person feel powerful
exile and the vault. there are a few quotes that emphasize this.
dream’s god complex was already there in the vault. that’s why he was scared enough of being controlled that he shut everyone else away: he wanted to secure himself even more as the sole power.
and exactly. he wasn’t proving anything to anyone else, he was proving it to himself. therefore he also wasn’t trying to “prove” he was big and bad and evil and irredeemable, he was trying to feel confident about his own power!
if he doesn’t care if he’s thought as of evil, why did it supposedly drive him into the spiral? if he stopped caring about it, that would also explain why he was indifferent towards it (because he was indifferent towards it, every time someone called him that, indifferent or angry). he didn’t think he was evil because he thought he had a right to what he was doing. so he pushed himself into wanting more control, after seeing something he identified as a problem: tommy. you’re right that that’s part of what makes him tragic: that he stopped caring about what he owed to anyone else. that’s why he hurt them.
“it’s likely and fits perfectly into his character arc in canon.”
people who are emotionally repressed still show emotions, they just don’t show them as often. dream shows emotions but he does not show the specific emotion that would give evidence to this theory. i’m saying that claiming something is deeply rooted in his character (not the emotional repression, that’s confirmed) when he shows no sign of it doesn’t line up with canon. it’s more of a theory than an analysis.
“it is good storytelling because cc!wilbur pulls it off brilliantly.”
cc!wilbur still played a complex character! his behavior changed significantly after the war, but there is evidence that he was a certain way during the war. his character grew from that point but my argument is that he was not always a liar about important things and that he genuinely believed in the values he formed l’manburg for. if you want to watch wilbur being power hungry and hypocritical, rewatch the election arc.
actions, not words. cc!wilbur pointed out hypocritical things his character said, but that just shows he was playing a flawed character. people using the wall thing as some kind of proof that he was evil is stupid because part of the idea behind the wall was poking fun at america. it was “look, this is what you guys do”.
his early character was passionate and naive. cc!wilbur was aware of this. he was still a chaotic crimeboy, the nation was founded on drugs. but not everything he did was “for chaos” because again, he played a multi-dimensional character. he can make jokes about politics.
“his main support system left by themselves.”
i’ve already explained why i think dream broke most of his own bonds. again, there’s textual evidence to support this and actions as well that line up with it. and lots of people were willing to help dream. he didn’t murder all those people by himself.
“it also seems you’re strongly biased against c!dream, which, to be fair, the majority of the fandom is.”
it’s true my bias is against dream. it’s also true that my reasons for that bias are backed up by moments in the story where he clearly states his intentions, and a lot of the evidence to the contrary is, to me, one-off moments that can be interpreted in many ways. a lot of the bias also comes from the fact that he did pretty bad things and i’ve been watching this for a long time. this post
https://miss-match01.tumblr.com/post/652381600995295232/i-feel-like-the-main-thing-i-personally-disagree
is pretty much what i’m saying, i guess. i’m completely fine with continuing! i’m not genuinely attempting to change your mind on dream, because i’m not going for your emotions regarding him. i am explaining why i think what i think (and also my emotions sometimes sorry) and showing where in the story i got those ideas. that’s part of why i reached out originally: to attempt to explain to you a perspective that you can’t see, and it’s what you’ve been doing as well. i just want to talk about the different interpretations and understand the strong biases that are in place for every scenario.
so no, don’t feel bad for sharing your interpretations: i did ask and i am interested.
and no, i’m sorry, i don’t have discord. i also kind of feel that we’re not really getting anywhere. if you want to seek out an individual thing so we can go at it (writing smaller bits back and forth and going into more detail), i would also be fine with that because it is easier than both of us writing increasingly lengthy rambles. in fact i think you’re probably right that we may be able to get somewhere hshksjsk
but i know that it’d be a lot harder than in real time so again, if you have other stuff that’s more important i completely get it!
in the hope of progress instead of just talking about lore i enjoy, here is my interpretation of our main points of discussion, so that we can go at them one at a time instead of like, you know, this. if there are any i miss, or things that are unclear, feel free to add them! and thanks for taking the time to think about this and respond! if you’re busy or have other stuff to do i completely understand if you want to drop it.
-early l’manburg wilbur
-season 1 dream
-starting conflicts and appropriate responses
-vilification and propaganda
-rest of season 1 wilbur
-dream’s mindset season 2
-what counts as abandoning
-peace, freedom, unity, control and power
-the kingship and power of the greater smp
-dream’s relationship with his allies
-tyranny and governments
-meta of the story (author’s intent vs. interpretations)
-biases and emotions
~ Lad 2
@justalads hi, hello! made a new post because didn't want to clog up everything with a suuper long string of reblogs, so i hope you don't mind!
also, i'm sorry to ask you this, but i have trouble focusing - in your next reply, would you maybe mind cutting up the big paragraphs into smaller ones? i'm nd and it's extremely difficult to concentrate at long strings of text like that, which is why i usually cut up everything i say into chunks :]
(actually had to have my friend cut up your last reply because he's a v fast reader, shoutout ani lmao)
anyways, let's continue the debate i say because there's a lot to still talk about in my opinion as well
/dsmp /rp, and of course all /lh
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