#sounds like you just hadnt seen this stuff yet which is very fair lol

[hiding-in-the-vault]

As the author of that aita post, and an avid cDream theorizer who arrived late to fandom and have been back-watching vods and reading all the dreblr lore posts I can, i would love to hear your critique of my understanding of cDream's motivations. I am looking at it as a young man whose family abandoned him and didn't listen to his desperate attempts to fix what he saw going wrong, with a healthy helping of 'oh no death is permanent what do' and 'nothing I try goes right' on the side until he settles on the 'unite everyone against me and put me somewhere I will be protected' plan which backfires spectacularly against him when Sam betrays him.

But please, any thoughts?

I do agree with a lot of that! Definitely a case of "I tried, it didn't work, let's try something else, got nothing to lose, it'll be worth it in the end" situation. But this simply comes down to how much content you've back-watched by now. I was once eking on the 'unite everyone against me' mentality, but streams much later in prove that wasn't quite it- specifically, the Daedalus arc and discduo finale.

If you hadn't gotten to these yet, here's your spoiler warning lmao

Before all that, might I point out that c!Dream, while unwell <3, is smart and he knows having everyone team up a single time isn't going to fix their problems, which is proven after he's put into prison and the server becomes arguably even more chaotic. At this point, I think he had long lost hope of anyone being reasonable; the damage had been done. Dream's goal of being placed there was a temporary one, mostly to keep him safe from the many people who hated his guts. Which- yes, Sam absolutely betrayed him there. Dream trusted him to stick to the rules they set, and he suffered for it. (cries they were friends once;-;)

Dream always intended to escape, which is why he was saving the Techno favor, And he had stated to Punz in the breakout stream that the plan got delayed.

It all comes back to the revive book; his and Punz's experiments that offset the balance of the world- according to them- and their intent to fix that. Tbf I do need to rewatch the finale vods, but my stance on it is that their mentions of 'killing everyone to make everyone immortal' or however they put it, is basically resetting the world and removing the 3 life system, so it would be back to what's considered Normal. Vanilla Minecraft. The prison was just another step towards that, not an end goal. A distraction.

Also backtracking to the aita post, you're not wrong about Dream killing Tommy to get him removed from the prison, but there's more to it. Dream killed Tommy to prove the revive book worked, first and foremost. He had suffered a week in that cell with him, and didn't snap until Tommy said "I dont think the revive book is real." Because that is the one thing that has kept Dream alive. If anyone doubts that, he's a dead man. So he kills Tommy, revives him, and now everyone will know that they can't just get rid of him :D ! yayy