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theenderwalker · 2 years

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Ranboo’s Relationships (and how they change between states) An exploration and an explanation of Ranboo’s People Skills

“TommyInnit is to the Enderwalk State as Dream is to Ranboo’s Waking State”

Wait, what? Stick with me here--I promise I’ll explain exactly what that means, and why it matters. I’m gonna spend some time looking at the differences between Ranboo’s “awake” and enderwalking states, and then the similarities, and how this impacts his social dynamics in either state. (spoiler alert, it’s almost entirely differences within or because of social dynamics!) From this, I’ll explore exactly how his opinions of people tend to stay the same between states, despite the differences in relationships (and why those differences are deliberate). And then, we can look at the exceptions to this--that is to say, Tommy and Dream-- and why those exceptions are significant.

TLDR AT THE END – WC: 5431

Differences-

One of the major points of conversation when it comes to Ranboo is just how his Enderwalk state acts and feels, how different he is from “awake” Ranboo, and what circumstances caused those differences between states. Philosophies range wildly, because of just how little we’ve seen of Ranboo enderwalking, but I genuinely don’t think he’s very different from “awake” Ranboo at all.

The key differences come down to a few specific ideas:

Ranboo can’t talk to people or form meaningful relationships while enderwalking. This is not because of any psychological or emotional differences, it’s out of necessity. Neither awake nor enderwalking Ranboo want people to find out about the enderwalk’s existence, for one because it would make people distrust him/is linked to people finding out about the Crimes He’s Done, and for the other because it would compromise his ability to work with Dream, and pursue his goals.

If someone were to ask Ranboo about something he had told them/a conversation they had had while Enderwalking, it wouldn’t be hard to figure out Something was up very quickly. There’s a couple distinct examples of this that I’ll explore more later.

Ranboo is arguably more forward/goal driven, which is at least in part driven by his partnership with Dream, and in part driven by the idea that he doesn’t have to reconcile with the social repercussions of being forward in pursuing his goals, because the WHOLE POINT of the Enderwalk state in this situation is not being perceived.

He has a weird relationship with his idea of self, and struggles to reconcile his actions in the enderwalk/while awake as his own, in both directions. This isn’t so much of a difference as it is a thing that makes the states distinct. We haven’t seen exactly how he feels about this while Enderwalking, but his waking opinion of the Enderwalk state has changed over time as he comes closer to realizing it’s all just him.

The most specifically different opinions of people are actually.. Quite limited. It’s Dream, which is obvious, and Tommy. This is something that gets lost when we draw harsh divisions between awake and the enderwalk state--we don’t really think about how his goals line up with his general opinion of people, and from there, how Tommy Specifically doesn’t fit that mold. His goals in the enderwalk are still with the best interests of the people as a whole in mind, just. With a bit more of a “the ends justify the means” approach.

Most of these key differences are specifically situational--they’re the result of the circumstances the Enderwalk functions within, of keeping his existence secret. They’re the distinction between Ranboo existing within and without social frameworks. And the exception, the namesake of this post, is specifically his dynamics with Dream (who he hates while “awake”), and his dynamics with Tommy (who he repeatedly indirectly threatens and puts in danger while enderwalking). His different interactions with people are specifically rooted in the situational distinctions as noted above. Except for Dream and Tommy.

Those are actually the product of a key similarity between states--the result of wanting to stop conflict, needing somewhere to pin that conflict, and a propensity for avoiding the actual root of the issue (the systems that perpetuate conflict in the first place).

Similarities-

These fundamental similarities between states are also important to understanding Ranboo as a whole character, simply because without them it’s easy to lose sight of why he does what he does while Enderwalking, and write him off as exclusively being manipulated, not understanding what he does, or (god forbid) even not having control over his own actions.

The cores of these similarities are:

His overarching “goal”--This is something that’s seen by quite a bit of cross-referencing specific moments. Nominally, he wants to stop conflict ahead of anything else. The ways he goes about this are specifically defined by the social contexts he works within in each state, as I alluded to earlier, but it is ideologically consistent between the states.

The most clear examples of this are Ranboo, awake, echoing Dream’s “one happy family” rhetoric while talking about wanting to stop conflict, his response to his own question of “what am I?” (I am someone who stops conflict…,) and the plan board, which Ranboo wrote while awake, including “figure out how to stop conflict”, and then changed while Enderwalking, leaving it mostly empty, but “stop conflict” remained.

His general care for people, when he can connect with them and see them as a whole person, and as a product of their circumstances.

This is a touch more of an extrapolation on my part, but something about how willing he was to work with Wilbur after vehemently insisting he was a villain, as soon as he actually talked to him doesn’t exactly parallel but runs adjacent to the idea of him deciding to work with Dream upon recognizing they share a goal, even though Ranboo was in L’manberg, amongst people who on principle disliked Dream.

The generalized idea that he knows better than other people--it comes from a place of goodwill, but is still one of his deepest rooted flaws.

Working with Dream in general is an expression of this sentiment, but it’s something we see while he’s “awake” too, in his response to Tommy’s death (calling others hypocrites for not doing anything while simultaneously also not doing anything (which is another idea I’ll talk more about later!)), his speech before Doomsday (and general reception of others post-doomsday, like Fundy), among other moments.

He’s really not as different as he seems, when it comes down to it. The vast majority of the differences noted above are specifically the result of his social contexts, moreso than any actual difference in personality.

Relationships/Interactions-

Outside of these two lists, I think a lot of the perceived differences are specifically mischaracterized as a difference in motivation or a difference in opinion. He is seen as being much quieter, or antisocial, or disliking people more generally than he actually does because he doesn’t interact with them. This is less of an outright indicator of disdain than it is a strategic decision. He doesn’t talk to people because having interactions & forming dynamics with them distinct from his waking relationships would make it glaringly apparent that the two distinct states exist outside of simply Ranboo’s memory loss, which would be understandably bad when his ability to act relies on people not knowing about his partnership with Dream, or that he has a separate “state” to begin with.

To corroborate this idea, we have to look at the concrete examples we have of him interacting with people while Enderwalking, how the interactions frame his relationships with them, and why. The examples that come to mind are Sam, Foolish, and Philza.

While we haven’t seen Ranboo interact with Sam while Enderwalking on stream, as far as we can tell, its one of the dynamics we’ve gotten the most information about. Essentially, we know that Ranboo visited the prison at the very least three times (Ranboo visited the most, Tommy visited twice, we know of at least two confirmed times, etc), and it’s implied he was visiting regularly--if not daily. We know that Sam was friendly and familiar with Ranboo when he visited while awake, and we know that until Ranboo visited while awake he had no suspicion of any weirdness or difference going on. In the prison nightmare, Sam expressed the same friendliness towards Ranboo we see at the start of his waking visit a couple days later. At the very least, before there was any suspicion, the two had an amicable dynamic indistinguishable from their dynamic while Ranboo was “awake”, in his enderwalk.

Ironically enough, we have less of a frame of reference of how Sam and Ranboo interacted while Ranboo wasn’t enderwalking before that dynamic was complicated by virtue of Ranboo not knowing he had been talking to Sam while enderwalking. However, Ranboo was given a tour of the prison before it was finished, and as far as I can gather they had at least a passing positive dynamic that seems to be consistent between states.

Foolish is a fun one to look at here because we have seen Ranboo interact with Foolish while enderwalking on stream, AND Ranboo’s dynamics with him aren’t exclusively friendship in either state. In the waking state, Ranboo commissioned Foolish to build the mansion for him. And he ripped him off, functioning on an ambiguous promise that he would pay him more later, that he did not follow up on. He essentially took advantage of Foolish’s kindness and naivete. He was friendly, sure, but it’s a business relationship and he made a deal with Foolish that he gets much more out of than Foolish did. By extension, our onscreen interaction of Ranboo and Foolish while Ranboo is enderwalking is the Shulker Box deal, wherein Foolish ascribes the cost of a threat against him to the box--a risk that notably does not carry over to Ranboo when he has possession of it--and Ranboo talks his way into getting an open-ended favor from a GOD, with one limitation. This favor is granted because of the risk Foolish ascribes to ownership of the shulker box. Ranboo doesn’t suffer this risk owning it--and in getting official ownership of the box AND the deal, he gets a lot more out of the deal than Foolish does, even though Foolish assuages his own anxieties linked to ownership of the shulker box.

I had originally been examining this to show that Ranboo was treating Foolish differently than how he would while “awake”, but upon looking back at the implications of the Mansion project, it really does all line up--the shulker deal was just more of a strategic move, as guided by the lessons. The actual character dynamics, and Ranboo choosing to take advantage of Foolish’s, well.. foolishness to get more out of a deal than he puts into it, is a consistency in Ranboo’s character, not something unique to the enderwalk state.

Phil is another fun case, because he’s probably the closest anyone has come to finding out about the Enderwalk state existing, just by way of observation, and Ranboo has had to do damage control, ultimately defusing Phil’s suspicions (in that direction, mostly due to just how much Phil trusts Ranboo). Most importantly, though, Ranboo has talked directly to Phil while enderwalking--in chat.

“Don’t mind me Phil! Just working on some stuff!” “I just remembered you probably wouldn’t understand Ender, well this is certainly awkward!”

“Very far away! I am just mining :]”

The most interesting thing about these interactions, aside from the fact that he’s speaking in Ender (before realizing that this was probably a bad idea), is just how similar his voice is to Ranboo’s, and the friendliness he expresses. Before Ranboo stops interacting with anyone except people it’s advantageous and semi-safe to talk to (Foolish, notably), he has the exact same fondness for Phil while “awake” and while Enderwalking. We also have an ooc confirmation that Ranboo would not hurt Tubbo or Michael while Enderwalking, implying that he does not actively dislike either of them. While we don’t know his thoughts exactly, this insight implies that his overall care carries over, even though he doesn’t have the same relationship (by virtue of it not being necessarily safe to talk to Tubbo while Enderwalking, for reasons listed above.)

The Exceptions-

So we’ve laid down a baseline for why Ranboo has different relationships with people between states, how this doesn’t necessarily mean he thinks differently of them or dislikes them in one state or the other… but then there’s the exceptions: Dream, who he hates while “awake” but works with while he Enderwalks, and Tommy, who he is on good terms with, even arguably friends with while “awake”, but has repeatedly put into danger and targeted specifically while Enderwalking.

DREAM

Dream is probably the reason why people think Ranboo has wildly different opinions of people. I think it’s easy to get that impression when you think about how Ranboo seems to only regularly interact with Dream while enderwalking, and consider being friends with Dream as mutually exclusive from liking other people, since Dream was, through December and January, distancing himself from others, cutting off those relationships, and actively antagonizing some others. But then, you have to keep in mind the goal, and how that overlaps between states. It’s one of Ranboo’s greatest consistencies.

His dislike of Dream while “awake” is distinct because it is an exception from people not sides. While he tends to give individual people the benefit of the doubt, and professes to not want sides, he also insists that everyone should be united “against dream”, essentially insinuating (in January, at least), that Dream was the root of all the problems on the server. He was vitriolic towards Dream, considering the possibility of outright killing him, and generally Dream was the exception to most of his ideologies that centered the goodness of people and the fact that no one is inherently evil--essentially, his belief that people can change.

I think Ranboo’s opinions on Dream are very much informed by his circumstances. He joins the server and is immediately recruited into L’manberg. Exile happens, which Ranboo has no context for the external motivations for, only what he can see in front of him, and this is the first impressions of Dream Ranboo gets. He then sees the butcher army, and exile from Tommy’s POV. He’s introduced into a group that immediately shows him all the ways in which Dream is the root of their problems, and none of the context of why. Whether or not you think they’re right is irrelevant here--these ideas firmly impacted “awake” Ranboo’s perceptions of Dream. Combined with the fact that while “awake”, Ranboo has never gotten the opportunity to talk to Dream, this all adds up to explaining how Dream functions as the exception, and why Ranboo is okay with him while enderwalking.

That is to say--the circumstances surrounding Dream and Ranboo’s partnership are very… up in the air. However, when we look at the patterns of how Ranboo interacts with people, he’s infinitely more likely to empathize with someone when he can talk to them, which he does in the enderwalk state.We don’t know exactly when they started working together, but I think there’s a strong parallel between Dream cutting his attachments to further his goals, and arguably to protect himself, and Ranboo, while enderwalking, intentionally keeping himself distanced from everyone, aside from specific strategic moments. This lends itself to my preferred interpretation of the Green Festival for Ranboo, being an agreement to try to cut Ranboo’s ties, to make people distrust him so he could help Dream easier, and hurt himself and others less in the process.

Additionally, the circumstances of their shared goals and Ranboo’s propensity for singling out one person as the root of all problems make it easy to see how they would work together--with two different perspectives to approach it from. One approach would be, of course, the idea of turning everyone against Dream--which was Dream’s own plan, too. The other, though, is the idea of Ranboo framing Tommy as the root of problems on the server. Neither of these perspectives are limited by state, either, as they ultimately all serve Ranboo’s bigger goal: we just see him act towards both ideas more in the Enderwalk state. This also lines up with Dream’s actions, Ranboo’s actions while he was still working with Dream, and Ranboo’s actions after Dream was put into the prison, as well. It leads to a lot of really interesting parallel themes and specific moments.

TOMMY

I’ve established all the ways Ranboo’s opinions of others stay the same between his “waking” and enderwalk states, and explored why his relationships themselves are different. From there, I’ve explored how Dream breaks that mold, and why--which brings me to the whole point of why I wrote this post in the first place. Tommy doesn’t fit this mold, in very specific and deliberate ways. If it were only things done while Dream was still working directly with Ranboo, it would be easy to brush off these distinctions as simply Ranboo following Dream’s plans, but there's at least one major incident of Ranboo endangering Tommy while enderwalking completely independent of any input from Dream.

The specific moments that make me think Ranboo views Tommy negatively while Enderwalking are:

The destruction of the community house--and the fact that it was destroyed with the intent of framing it on Tommy. This is probably the loosest one here, but I’ll come back to it later--it’s definitely relevant, even if it was Dream’s plan in the first place.

When the note was left telling Tommy where his discs were, establishing the date and time of the Final Disc Confrontation was going to be, Tommy’s house had also been completely destroyed, replaced with netherrack, and set aflame. This was gently implied to be Ranboo, as onstream that same night, several stacks of netherrack and an almost broken flint and steel were in his chest, organized. There were also 3 stacks in his inventory. He commented on the fact that he never organizes his chests, and didn’t know how that got there, intentionally drawing attention to it but not outright making the connection. Which he does…. a lot. Again, this one could have been Dream’s idea, but it was never addressed as such and while it’s almost certain Dream had Ranboo leave the note, the flair could have been either one of their ideas. (side note: this was the same day Foolish joined the server, and the griefing was leaked in the background of his first stream before Tommy had a chance to see it, then later entirely repaired before ranboo streamed that night, so he never saw it on fire on stream.)

It’s been heavily implied EXPLICITLY CONFIRMED Ranboo was the one who set off the TNT that trapped Tommy in the prison. This one is the kicker, honestly, because there’s no way this was on Dream’s instruction, and even if it was, Ranboo had every opportunity to just… not do it once Dream was in the prison, if he didn’t think this was a beneficial course of action. A potential thought process here is the idea that since conflict didn’t stop when Dream was put into the prison, and Tommy had been the other “source” (and, depending on which ideas you ascribe to, the person intended to be in the prison in the first place)--so Ranboo decided to continue trying to stop conflict at the “source” (a single person), so, putting Tommy in the prison.

Ranboo’s “awake” response to Tommy’s imprisonment and death is also notable. I go more into depth about it here, but TLDR: this is when Ranboo gets the “he is in control of me” message, and proceeds to not only ignore any suspicious circumstances around his.. potential involvement in the TNT at the prison, but also spends the whole week distracted, and then when Tommy dies wonders why he didn’t/couldn’t do anything to help him. Essentially, this fits the pattern of several other times Ranboo has interfered with his own ability to do something that would get in the way of executing his plans (most notably, trying to tell Sam about the community house outside the prison). If this is indeed the case here, Ranboo, in his Enderwalk state, believed that if he were to find out he were responsible in his “awake” state, it could be nigh disastrous.

This essentially implies that in his Enderwalk state, Ranboo believed that interfering with this in one way or another would be bad. This could be trying to get Tommy out interfering with why he locked Tommy in in the first place, or participating in any sort of investigation could reveal his role in setting off the TNT.

I honestly feel like either or both of these are widely applicable to the situation. Either way, it makes Tommy being locked in the prison feel like a deliberate and independent decision made by Ranboo while enderwalking--supporting this idea of action opposed to Tommy specifically.

(I feel the need to clarify that this idea regarding Ranboo’s response to Tommy’s time in the prison is one I have held since March, and was not a new idea formulated to fit the concept I’m presenting in this analysis.)

These establish Tommy as Ranboo’s most explicitly and distinctly negative relationship in the Enderwalk state. But why..?

I’ve referenced in passing the idea of the “root of conflict on the server”, mostly in reference to Dream from the perspective of “awake” Ranboo. But I’ve also referenced it about Tommy, sort of implying a conclusion I’ve danced around: Ranboo while enderwalking sees Tommy as a major cause of the conflict on the server.

Above, I’ve outlined the major evidence to why I think he thinks this. But I haven’t outlined how he would have come to that conclusion, or why it doesn’t carry over into his “waking” state. Why does he feel so differently, despite having more (if not all) of his memories at his disposal? His negativity towards Dream makes sense because he doesn’t have the whole picture, he hasn’t talked to Dream while “awake”, and he gained most of his information about Dream from L’manbergians, who were decidedly biased against him. I think there’s several potential answers to this question, but any solid answer to “why” requires information we just don’t have about the early days of Ranboo on the server: how and when he started working with Dream, and what he did while enderwalking before we knew what enderwalking was.

The strongest impulse I have here is the Exile Trial.

Let me lay the scene: You’ve just joined this server full of people you have never met and know very little, if nothing about. You do not know their history, conflicts, interpersonal relations, nothing. One of these new people convinces you to help him grief a house. After doing this, Dream, who you have been told is a Bad Guy, reacts very poorly, putting you and the guy who just tricked you into committing a crime that is apparently a BIG DEAL on trial. He ends up taking the fall for you, when you cite your poor memory (which you do have but has not made you forget doing this) to escape taking blame. Over the next couple days, Dream and the nation this guy was apparently the Vice President of negotiate how to react to this--whether Tommy should be put on probation, made to do community service, or even be exiled. And through this, this guy is being a huge dick. He’s being inflammatory, starting fights, yelling at Dream, etc. This continues even after everyone has come to and finalized a decision, which hinges on Tommy not being an asshole (which he has been through the whole meeting). But not even 5 minutes after the meeting, he’s already throwing a fit at Dream again, leading to exile, proposed as the last option during the meeting, being back on the table. And let me remind you, you have no idea of their past, you don’t know why he’s being like this, just that he’s only aggravating the issue, and actively making things worse for himself by antagonizing Dream. Oh! And that guy’s house you griefed together? THE KING! THAT WAS THE KING! And Tommy knew that! Dream, who you’ve been told is a bad dude, and also messed with you when you first joined (killing you twice, but not doing anything with lasting consequences), is maybe overreacting, but again. You don’t have any context to why he’s reacting the way he is.

Ranboo takes a neutral stance here, painting both Dream and Tommy in a negative light in the meeting notes (titled Agreement 2/12). He still doesn’t have the full context. He’s seen Dream overreacting to the house being griefed, and he’s seen Tommy go out of his way to get under Dream’s skin, even to his own detriment. He thinks Tommy can’t be selfish, because he took the fall for him, but he also recognizes Tommy’s intentionally inflammatory tendencies.

I think this is the key branching off point between “Enderwalk” and “waking” Ranboo’s opinions of people. He has been stuck into the middle of this situation, with no context, and his ultimate opinions on the situation rely heavily on who he talks to when. When around the L’manbergians, he pities Tommy, believes he doesn’t deserve exile, but also empathizes with Tubbo’s decision to exile Tommy for the good of the nation. Y’know, to stop conflict. It’s really easy to see, then, how that translates to a hypothetical conversation with Dream, around the start of exile. Here, Dream would explain that he wants to exile Tommy because this troublemaking is a pattern of behaviors that are disruptive to the peace of the server. Or he would point out that Tommy was trying to get him in trouble too, or Ranboo would, in this conversation, make that realization himself. Either way, he would come to the conclusion that Tommy is a vast part of why these conflicts happen in the first place. This frankly isn’t a stretch, given Ranboo’s limited perspective, even if it isn’t entirely true on a larger scale.

We do need to take into consideration the meta perspective that the Enderwalk did not exist yet and so this logic would be applied retroactively, but because of how the Enderwalk was canonized, Dream and Ranboo had a working relationship before it was conceptualized, so this has to be applied retroactively, it just becomes a question of how far back? This answer above is what makes the most sense to me, though it’s certainly not the only option.

THE PARALLEL

TommyInnit is to the Enderwalk State as Dream is to Ranboo’s Waking State

Given Ranboo’s consistencies in social interactions, the distinctions he makes with Tommy and Dream, and how those still fit into his broader patterns of behavior, I don’t think this is a stretch. Time and time again Ranboo singles out Tommy, time and time again he singles out Dream. Both of these strikingly different opinions between states are informed by Ranboo’s overarching goal, and who he gets his information and perspective from. The parallels are STRIKING.

With a defined (potential) divergence point, and the open ended possibility for countless more over the next weeks on the SMP, this dichotomy as Tommy and Dream as foils specifically around Ranboo emerges. It allows us to further codify patterns in Ranboo’s behaviors as reflective of this parallel, and lets us explore some strikingly similar moments from a new angle.

Consider George’s house and the Community house. Consider Tommy enlisting Ranboo’s help in destroying it, in order to get back at Dream and try to get his disc back. Consider Dream enlisting Ranboo’s help in destroying it in order to frame Tommy, to get the disc from Tubbo. Ranboo gets caught up in the middle: he’s on trial for the griefing, he’s being exposed as a traitor. He has to talk his way out of it, has to convince people he didn’t grief Tommy’s house (and if he did, he didn’t remember it), he has to convince people of “people not sides”, that he never betrayed them. Both times, there’s a moment where it would be so easy for Tommy or Dream to make him the scapegoat, to rat him out, to throw him under the bus, and both times they don’t. And Tommy is exiled, and Dream is put in the prison, and Ranboo just barely escapes this fate, by Tommy and Dream both taking the fall. In the moments after the Green festival, Ranboo is adamant that “Dream is the reason”. And early on, after the exile trial, after his second day on the server, he could see that Tommy is a troublemaker, he could realize that Tommy was trying to drag him down with him. No matter how true either these sentiments actually are, they situationally parallel each other incredibly, and they fit the social frameworks Ranboo has built since joining the server.

I made a post vaguely outlining a potential parallel between Ranboo visiting Tommy in exile and Dream in the prison ̶a̶ ̶c̶o̶u̶p̶l̶e̶ ̶m̶o̶n̶t̶h̶s̶ like a year ago, and then didn’t think much of it past that, but I think it’s incredibly apt here. It switches the “states” involved--Ranboo (presumably) visits Tommy while “waking” and he visits Dream while enderwalking--but it highlights the other end of this parallel: his kinship with, and pity for each person respectively.

When Ranboo is in the panic room after Doomsday, during one of his spirals, after insisting Dream is the reason, he makes a comment that it’s “all just happening again”. People are choosing sides, conflict is ramping up, and he’s pinpointed the center of the conflict, the one person who is to blame for everything happening. But the way he uses “again” refers to something happening beforehand--this same situation happening beforehand. I can’t help but to think of the exile trial here. A house has been destroyed, that he had a part in destroying. He’s managed to get out of it unscathed, but conflict is brewing, and he can pinpoint one person at it’s core. The options are either neutralizing said center of conflict, or letting it continue escalating. Of course, it’s nowhere near this simple, but in exiling Tommy you could say that war with L’manberg was avoided. And later, when Dream is the reason, the battle is not avoided. The parallels are striking, and this could definitely be what Ranboo was referring to by “again”.

What it is, in both instances, is an exception to the core of Ranboo’s moral system, a single person blamed for everything. A single person that a side must be created against. It’s a betrayal of “people not sides”, it’s “everyone here against Dream”. It’s singling out one person as the root of the problem, rather than tackling the systems that perpetuate the conflict over and over again. It’s a flawed worldview, and like everything about him it seems to contradict itself but when you dig a little deeper, and look at why Ranboo acts how he does, the contradiction makes sense. These contradictions and hypocrisies are core to Ranboo’s character, and they’re a huge part of what makes him so interesting. Even the things that make him hypocritical, that seem to break from his moral framework, parallel between states. There’s still so many things we don’t know about Ranboo, but breaking down the things we do know gives us a pretty good idea about what may be yet to come.

TLDR:

-Ranboo doesn’t actually have different opinions of most people while enderwalking versus not, and the vast majority of the discrepancies between states can be explained by social context and Ranboo’s extreme compartmentalization. -There are two distinct exceptions to this: Tommy, who Ranboo is friends with outside of the enderwalk, but antagonistic towards while enderwalking, and Dream, who Ranboo claims is the root of all conflict on the server while “awake”, but works with towards a common goal while enderwalking. -There are infinitely many possibilities for how Ranboo and Dream’s partnership began, but they are necessarily rooted in Ranboo gaining information he does not otherwise have, and a connection with Dream characteristic of his propensity for sympathizing with people as soon as he actually talks to them, rather than get information about them secondhand. -When Tommy and Dream are analyzed as the exceptions, some interesting thematic parallels between Ranboo’s interactions with each of them emerge.