#why am i censoring their names? dont like em hope it helps

[ilexdiapason]

the period of dream smp narrative progression commonly understood as "season 1" took place between the agreement of w/lbur s//t and tommyinnit's characters cwilbur and ctommy to create a potion selling business together, and the infamous november 16th detonation of l'manberg by the former's hand. w/lbur was known to write treatments for narratively significant livestreams (hereafter known as "lore streams"), documents which outlined the salient events of the evening and gave the participants an idea of what should be accomplished during the events of the day. after the death of cwilbur, in the wake of the aforementioned november 16th explosion, w/lbur s//t declared that he would take a step back from being so hands-on and directorial with the narrative of the dream smp, and left the planning of "season 2" (which at the time had barely begun) up to his coworkers, including dr//mwastaken and technoblade.

however, w/lbur s//t introduced the character of ghostbur in the latter half of november 2020, giving himself an excuse to continue logging on to the dream smp and roleplaying with his friends despite having killed his character off days before. he set this era of roleplay apart from the cwilbur he'd played previously by never actually streaming his own perspective of events. ghostbur was exclusively seen through the eyes of others, which thematically aided the idea that nobody knew the real cwilbur, only the many masks he'd presented to many different people during his lifetime. ghostbur tried and failed to assert himself as a different person to "alivebur", and part of what made that such an unsuccessful endeavour was that we couldn't see ghostbur's pov, so we didn't know if his thought patterns were truly different to cwilbur's.

however, this consistent fact about ghostbur - the fact that we did not see his pov - was negated in january 2021, when we got the first and only ghostbur lore stream. it began shortly after the events of doomsday: ctechno, cphil, and cdream had ravaged l'manberg down to rubble, far far worse than the november 16th explosion, using more withers and tnt duping technology.

w/lbur s//t went live for about half an hour that evening, fully in character as ghostbur. he spoke to cphil and ctommy about the events of the day, angrily chastising cphil for likely allowing friend the sheep to die even though he knew how much it meant to ghostbur, and expressing to ctommy that he no longer wanted to exist in the state he was in, and would rather "alivebur" was revived. it was an outburst of negative emotion that was rarely seen from ghostbur, who characterised himself by his consistent optimism, trust, and insistence on forgetting all of the terrible things his living counterpart had done.

w/lbur s//t would not stream again on the dream smp until the day of the revival lore stream in may, four months later. this means that, in six months of consistent roleplaying as ghostbur on the dream smp, we only saw it live from his perspective once.

in this essay, i argue that w/lbur s//t planned to never stream ghostbur's perspective, but that the concept and execution of the doomsday lore stream left him so angry at the direction that his colleagues were taking with their story-writing that he was spurred to log in specifically so he could yell at philza for writing the character of cphil this way, and i will not be taking criticism on this position,