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blogjuicyhere · 6 months ago

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honestly, there's probably a lot you can say abt c!dream in terms of losing even when he wins. because, tbh, this is...consistent.

c!dream is very intelligent and very good at PVP and these are well-established traits from the beginning of the server. he is skilled at thinking strategically and therefore is often able to navigate unfavorable situations to him in order to successfully achieve some goal of his. in terms of achieving goals, c!Dream isn't half bad in the slightest! but how do these goals actually work out for him?

in the revolution, c!dream successfully leads his side to victory while minimizing damage to his own people (and, sometimes, minimizing damage across the board: see him telling his men to hold fire to allow lmanburgians to retrieve their items.) the most amount of risk to anyone on his side is during the duel, where he ended up on half a heart to determine the end result of the war. and it's quite undeniable that c!dream wins the war--he gets to set the terms of the peace, gives them "technical" independence as he planned to from the start but says that he and the rest of the Dream SMP will view them as constituents of the greater server and gets both discs after c!tommy offers them willingly. by all means, on paper, a glowing success.

only time passes and as others treat l'manburg as independent, he is forced to do the same. "suck it green boy" becomes one of the most common catchphrases of the server when the independence that was granted them in the book that this statement was written was. literally given to them out of c!dream's mercy? and not out of their victory? he loses both discs AND significant leverage against himself due to various conflicts that involved people stealing from him and/or blackmailing him when he literally wasn't doing anything. l'manburg's ranks have swelled and the story established by it and its independence has long since drowned out any other perspective on the war.

then, in manberg/pogtopia, c!dream enters into the conflict from the perspective of wanting c!schlatt out of power. later on, remaining loyal to c!wilbur, he helps him to successfully pull off the plot to blow up L'manburg and also manages to obtain the revive book through a brief alliance with c!Schlatt. once again, his goals were successfully pulled off in no small part due to his strategizing.

and yet, in the long run, what does c!dream really gain? the revive book is something he evidently didn't know about until the trade with c!Schlatt, and the knowledge of it fucking destroys him. with both c!Schlatt and c!Wilbur dead, he immediately ends up as enemy number one, something c!Wilbur himself states later on. c!Dream, who had never really had any particularly stable alliances pre-manberg anyway, comes out the other side of November 16th even more alone than he had been before, publicly distrusted (not that he was ever really trusted, even by Pogtopia before he officially starts working against them because of the revive book, something that the content creator himself has stated was created purely to explain why c!Dream would switch sides.) the destruction of L'manburg is merely temporary. the plan to blow up L'manburg was c!wilbur's in creation, and considering how open c!Dream is about disliking c!Schlatt, I really hesitate to think that he was going out of his way to ally with guy unless he himself intentionally revealed the revive book to this end (like. c!schlatt is a smart guy, bro.)

c!dream is "secretive" about just about nothing at this time, besides I guess his actually helping Pogtopia (if you can call this guy telling the fucking Manberg cabinet that it's L'manburg, not Manberg, being secretive el em ay oh)--he's open about helping c!Wilbur with the TNT (and c!Wilbur you know, makes a point of doing it in front of an audience both times he asks c!Dream for TNT as well) in Vassal and then on November 6th, and that exact stream is also where he literally walks in the middle of Pogtopia to say hey guys. I'm Betraying You Now. like ???

everything he gains at this time culminates to 1) he helps c!Wilbur successfully pull off a plan that c!Wilbur himself came up with and wanted to pull off and does, to some degree, pressure c!Dream into agreeing with him about--even if c!Dream was going to give him the TNT no matter what, he does display a measure of resistance during Vassal Speech (whether or not you believe this resistance was genuine) and c!Wilbur responds to that by kinda threatening him. So. and 2) he gets the revive book by acting in service to a guy that was clearly established as someone he disliked and feared, and that book is also something that we KNOW scared the shit out of him and like ended up prompting a paranoid spiral that ends with him creating a whole goddamn prison to put himself inside. soooooooo. you know. and all of this is happening at the same time that his losses end up turning into "by the time november 16th rolls around and is over and done with most people either want him dead or are very very close to wanting him dead, cheers!"

then obviously, there's everything from november 16th to the staged disc finale. again, we see c!Dream pulling strategic plays left and right and achieving the goals he has--at this point, often through, uh, less than savory means. through political bullshit with NLM and well, exile, he manages to get the disc during green festival; through helping c!Techno against the butcher army, he manages to obtain a favor; through stuff involving the enderwalk and some kinda deal that im p sure has remained unspecified, he manages to get Cat from c!Skeppy; through experiments with c!Punz, he gets information on the revive book; through green festival, obtaining both discs (and therefore no longer needing to act in terms of political interests with NLM), and establishing common ground with c!Techno, he's able to destroy L'manburg through Doomsday; through having the discs + everyone hating his guts because of Green Festival, Doomsday, and to be fair everyone literally just hating his guts from the outset, he is able to ensure the security of c!Punz, the revive book, and himself by locking himself in prison. A lot of different moving parts, a lot of different goals, a lot of running around the server to get what he needs to get done done at the right times in the right ways, and he manages to con the server and put himself exactly where he wanted to be.

and yet?? and yet??? sure, he pulls off what he wants to pull off, sure he achieves his goals, but in terms of actually winning? he's paranoid and the paranoia just keeps getting worse. the threats to his life and the amount of enemies that want him dead just keep growing in numbers. he finally gets lmanburg blown up for good but you know there's going to be like 4 more factions on this server by the time he gets imprisoned. his friends ditch him and then try to kill him when he clumsily tries to communicate that he's trying to protect them because of the paranoia he has about everyone hating his guts, he explicitly identifies the reasons for people's hatred as having a lot to do with manberg/pogtopia arc where he ends up helping two dead men that aren't around for people to hate anymore, he pulls off staged finale and puts himself in a prison that ends up shattering himself.

like he achieves his goals--even if we're talking about the prison, even if we're talking about the time where things most thoroughly go awry for him because of c!sam's betrayal, you can't say that he didn't achieve what he intended. c!sam kept him alive, and would do anything to keep him alive--he might've been wrong about a lot, but he wasn't wrong about that. and yet. AND YET.

c!dream achieves his goals but where does he end up? miserable and afraid of literally damn near everything and losing his whole mind in the exact prison that he constructed to keep himself safe when in a paranoid spiral about a hostile world that suddenly made so much less sense than he was used to--alone.

like. wdym doesn't lose all he does is lose literally everything he ever had like 😭😭😭😭😭

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blogjuicyhere · 6 months ago

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been thinking about post-prison c!dream again and i feel like ... characterizations of him after pandora smtimes can lean vindictive. and it's not like there's no proof for this being the case, lol, this man has quite a few angry speeches post-prison about getting his Revenge! and such, and obviously has Feelings about the whole being left to rot and be tortured thing. that being said, i think it's worth pointing out how what a character thinks they believe and what their actions show can have some...pretty apparent discrepancies, and i think that c!dream's stated desires to take his revenge as well as a "us against them, you're either with me or against me" viewpoint of the server as a whole don't necessarily match up with his behavior post-prison

for one, i think it's worth pointing out how often c!dream's anger in these cases is obviously emotional to the point of incoherence--it's often been stated that his speech in the logstedshire chase scene screams of projection in the midst of a panic attack, which, i mean? yeah? he's making assumptions about what c!tommy thinks and basically repeating what c!quackity said in that cell almost word for word and making the kill-and-revive-you-over-and-over-and-over threat that he definitely wasn't going to go through with (though, is kind of interesting retrospectively considering we know that he literally did that to himself). then there's his rant to c!sam in daedalus one which literally includes his threatening c!sam with c!quackity, a claim so absurd that c!sam himself points it out as making no sense. and then there's his speech with c!quackity where he says he's going to torture...las nevadas? as in, the country? dream that's. dream it's a country. it can't feel pain. dream.

in this, a clear pattern is established where a lot of these angry threats are...bluffs. hot air. even if c!dream is genuine when he makes these threats, they're really not plausible (like, uh, please tell me how youre gonna convince quackity to torture sam for you king.) and it's not like c!dream doesn't have a pattern of being A Whole Lotta Bark when you have him in a position where he feels cornered, either. but with this, there's a precedent that's established where c!dream's threats, particularly threats where he's literally just listing shit out like that, should be taken with a grain of salt. less evidence of true plans and more an attempt to bare his teeth at you until you back the fuck away.

of course, this in itself isn't enough to claim that all of his claims of more vindictive actions should be dismissed. that being said, across the board, when you look at c!dream's actual actions post-prison...well, the amount of actual revenge this guy gets is. very small. very small. in fact, contrary to what one might think due to his paranoia and the huge breach of trust that had happened as a result of the prison, c!dream actually seems quite willing to establish connections with other people--friendly interactions, even alliances to a certain degree. looking at the following list of interactions w/ people post-prison:

He immediately gives the axe of peace to c!Techno in Snowchester after they part ways at the Arctic Commune--though the lack of favors between them indicates that there's no real explicit reason to call on each other in the immediate future, he does show very clearly that their parting hasn't made himself unwilling to cooperate with c!Techno at all.

Punz is self-evident--he speaks with his ally and reaffirms that the plan is still on track (a plan made before the negative effects that prison had on his. uh .everything)

The aforementioned conflict with c!Tommy, where he makes a lot of threats in ways that seem like a pretty damn deliberate mirror of c!Quackity and makes no effort to follow through on, particularly in tems of the killing-and-reviving shit and keeping tommy in exile and whatever else he was saying there

The interaction with Sapnap, where he is clearly gauging c!Sapnap's reaction and flees shortly after things appear to grow in hostility, once again making overtures at a threat that he will never follow up on (even considering he could very easily follow Sapnap to find Kinoko and could as such attack it quite simply even with just, a couple flint & steels tbh)

An interaction with Eryn where he makes no effort to be hostile at any point, hiding behind his shield and then exchanging items when Eryn offers them. The entire time, c!Dream's actions are defensive and purposefully nonthreatening and at no point does he attempt to engage a fight--even when not asked for payment, he gives a valuable item in exchange. Clearly more an attempt to be friendly than any outright hostility, though he is also obviously wary.

Daedalus also quite self-explanatory--again, it should be emphasized that letting Sam go in any capacity with any lives is explicitly an act of mercy. Left alone, Sam would have died in the prison for good; he set his spawn in the prison, a fact Dream would've known when he escorted him out. He makes a lot of threats, including some that are quite incoherent, and at the end he kills Sam once and then escorts him out of the prison grounds alive. Interestingly enough, conversations in Daedalus also seem pretty explicitly from a perspective of trying to get c!Sam to understand him in some respects--like, c!Dream isn't seeking division here. Even in consideration of the fact that he needed to get the keycards, c!Dream's continued emphasis on trying to get c!Sam to see him is...interesting, in view of how much of what went wrong being explicitly because of c!Sam's betrayal.

He warns Bad and Skeppy away from the prison shortly after beginning to reside there on a permanent basis. He gives them quite a sum of gifts (iirc, a block of netherite and a totem of undying) despite firing arrows at them; even though he has a reason to be aggressive towards c!Bad as one of the prison guards (something both c!Bad and c!Skeppy point out) he makes no effort to kill them and outright gives them valuable items while warning them to stay away from the prison

scrapped lore, whenever it was meant to happen, was an obvious "revenge" attempt against quackity...which goes, badly. a clue into the State that he was in in terms of his revenge quests. also, whatever interaction he has with c!wilbur later, obviously c!Wilbur doesn't end up worse for wear physically from it.

In inconsolable differences, c!Dream is more preoccupied with keeping a "feeling" of power over c!Wilbur over taking outright control over the room and therefore complies with c!Wilbur's orders. He does attack, but despite having more than the necessary means to kill both c!Wilbur and c!Tommy while he's there, does not do so. Neither does he manage to keep them trapped in the prison, something that he absolutely could've done if he so chose. Instead, he values a (imaginary) symbol of his continued alliance with c!Wilbur over any kind of hostile action, imprisonment, or killing of either person (and explicitly values c!Wilbur's life over just about everything, there.)

In his interaction with c!Foolish, he's outright trying to get c!Foolish to consider him beyond what other people have said about him. He's trying to establish some form of an alliance and offers...well, quite a lot in order to have one (in order to have a five minute warning of c!Quackity's location. like, he's putting himself in c!Foolish's service quite explicitly here, offering to become his hitman or bodyguard). He's obviously wary, but also obviously trying to be friendly and largely interacts with c!Foolish by trying to establish a rapport, not by trying to threaten him into something or attack him in any way. Even with c!Sam, the amount of outright threatening behavior from c!Dream isn't all that large--mostly, he's being petty? You could make an argument about c!Dream's vague threat to c!Sam's island, but clearly Sam loses no lives from Dream in any interaction they might have after they leave the summer home.

I consider the whole interaction with c!Aimsey canon bc literally everyone was playing as their characters there--c!Dream outright goes out of his way to try and protect a total stranger here with no obvious personal benefit. He literally inserts himself into the conflict to try and prevent c!Aimsey's death, which is kinda wild for someone to do as someone who allegedly wants people to die on the server. He attacks (and even kills c!George) c!snf here, but it's all in a scene where they get distracted from their whole "blowing shit up" moment because they want to chase c!Dream, and c!Dream specifically uses very little melee combat here--a lot of ranged stuff, which is far from his specific specialty. Further, there's a scene in this fight where c!Dream is acting entirely defensively, backed up against a wall with his shield in front of him as c!snf attack, and at the end he just runs away--all behavior that doesn't seem to be about killing anyone or profiting from anyone's deaths in any way.

LN5, threats similarly nonsensical, and he dips as soon as things start going south. For all of his seeming confidence, he's not the one that continues the chase in an attempt to kill c!Quackity, and the fight evidently freaks him out considering how he ends up not realizing he's being stalked by c!Tommy and then hides in the prison for a solid while (while still being stalked by c!Tommy)

Despite apparently wanting them to decide who to die in the saw trap (which had a premise that is frankly, quite hard to believe), c!clingy are given the exact items that could've facilitated their escape. He certainly could've killed both or one at any point in time, even if he wanted a message to be spread to the server (something easily done with one guy)--instead, he monologues at them, then conveniently leaves so that they can get away (and they could've with the literal items he gave them if tommy didn't burn their food.) When c!Tommy returns the following day, c!Dream makes it clear he expected both of them to have gotten out

Despite being clearly unable to stand c!Tommy, blaming him for most if not all of his problems on the server, and outright saying to c!Tommy that c!Tommy would never agree to help him (after they had a shouting match literally one day ago), gives quite the sales pitch to get c!Tommy on the same page as them.

I'm probably missing stuff, but you get my point--even when presented golden opportunities to kill off a player post-prison, c!Dream doesn't take it. He outright spares c!Sam when he could've easily died from the Revengers' tactic. When meeting with strangers, he prioritizes establishing a friendly rapport with them through things like gifts over, in his distrust, treating them badly so that they're scared of him and therefore don't fuck with him yadayada. His behavior, instead of exuding an aura of anger and vengeance and vying for destruction, tends to send a message of trying to be outright unthreatening, please-don't-attack-me. He's not going everywhere holding his big fuck off axe, he's seeing a new person and ducking behind his shield.

Oftentimes, I feel like this quote is pulled or paraphrased from No Way Home to show how c!Dream has become distrusting of people, vindictive, post-prison

And if that means we have to kill everybody— and ev— everybody that doesn't wanna go along with what me and Punz have to say? Everyone that doesn't want to figure it out? Then, fine! You can be simple-minded and you can die simple-minded. But! If you wanna actually know what's going on in this world, and you wanna fix it, and make it the best that we can be, and live forever? Then they can join us.

And while I'm not saying we should dismiss the whole quote as just being disingenous bluffing, I think when taken into the context of post-prison c!Dream's actions (or, well, c!Dream's actions as a whole) as well as his actions in the finale itself (such as his appealing to c!Tommy in the next stream), rather than putting the emphasis on the idea of "everyone who disagrees with me should die," c!Dream seems far more preoccupied with the idea of trying to find people who are willing to work with him to "fix" everything. People who will help him make it so that they can "live forever"--a desire he expresses in the fourth finale stream as well.

like, it's not to say that c!dream isn't vengeful. he is. i mean, i'd say moreso than vengeful, he's angry--just like how a lot of his overtures at friendliness are so deeply rooted in fear. the prison made him angry and the prison made him scared, and the anger has to be repurposed into revenge because revenge is power that he certainly didn't have when he was on his knees begging for mercy. but far from being closed off and unwilling to work with other people post-prison due to his experiences in Pandora (which. would make sense. i mean. like, he was left in there, and tortured, and betrayed. anger and revenge and a general distrust towards everyone and a desire to destroy a world that condemned him would be very easy to understand in this scenario), i'd say c!dream's interactions with people post-prison scream of a general lack of a desire to actually go through with killing people. hell, he even revives c!tommy--c!tommy! who just killed him! who c!dream outright blames for like, basically ruining his life! when revivals are literally apparently destabilizing the universe!--shortly after killing him. generally, he meets people who are dealing with him aggressively with a desire to flee moreso than with murderous intent (in genuine finale 2, for example, this guy was sure more focused on running the fuck away than he was on killing either of c!clingy), and even moreso deals with other people on the server by acting defensively and even in a manner that seems deliberately designed to get them to be more willing to work with him, or at least deal with him in a friendly way. despite his paranoia and how deeply pandora cut as a betrayal and his obvious wariness towards all people as a result (there's hardly a single interaction on the list above, after all, that doesn't have c!dream's obvious fear of people leaking all over the damn carpet), he seems to be much more focused on the idea of finding possible allies than he is on the idea of killing everyone possible.

which, i mean, makes sense. as he himself states:

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