#but like. i do recognize that as a flaw of mine…. in fairness….

[greatwyrmgold]

One of my mutuals has been talking about their thoughts watching JJK season 2, and that made me want to share some of mine, and I don't want to wait until I can frame my thoughts as a yes-and to theirs. My point being, if you haven't finished the Shibuya arc in either the manga or anime, the following will spoil you.

I really like Suguru Geto in the flashback, and in Jujutsu Kaisen Zero. His powers are neat, his design is interesting, his personality is fun, and his worldview is nuanced.

He wants to kill all non-sorcerers, but his reasons for wanting to do that make sense. People who can't control their cursed energy are the ultimate source of cursed spirits, which cause untold suffering to both sorcerers and non-sorcerers alike. Geto assumes that teaching most humans to control their cursed energy is impossible or impractical, and by the time of JJK0, he's willing to write off the suffering of billions in the name of a future without cursed spirits.

This is, of course, abominable; Geto's plan is a crime against humanity in the most literal sense. But you can see why someone who recognizes the problems in jujutsu society without recognizing the humanity of non-sorcerers would think that crime was a good idea.

In my ideal Jujutsu Kaisen, Yuji would overcome the decrepit jujutsu institutions, defeat Geto, and destroy Sukuna after recognizing the fundamental flaw they have in common: They all think some people are intrinsically more valuable than others. Sukuna thinks the strong should dominate the weak, jujutsu society intentionally privileges old families over new recruits, Geto doesn't think "monkeys" should get to live. And of course, all three fundamentally agree that there should be a division between sorcerers and non-sorcerers, where the former are given an elevated position (as conquerors or guardians or the ones who get to live). To beat them, Yuji needs to recognize the lies they all share and repudiate it.

But I will never get that ideal JJK, in part because Geto isn't Geto.

After the events of Jujutsu Kaisen Zero, an ancient body-hopping sorcerer named Kenjaku took Geto's body and cursed technique. He's the villain—not Geto, not Mahito, co-hosting recent arcs with Sukuna. And Kenjaku is boring.

Well, that's not fair. For a while, he's a passable imitation of Geto. But at the end of the day, he lacks Geto's substance. His problems with jujutsu society are vague gripes about a passive modern society that maintains the status quo. His plans will kill all humans in Japan, but that includes the sorcerers, and his reasons for that are either unknown or vapid.

And all he brings to the table that Geto couldn't is a thousand years of vague plots hidden in the background. He was the Kyoto blood archer's distant evil ancestor! He knew Sukuna when he was alive! He was Yuji's mom! Why? Who knows. Maybe it's related to whatever Yuji's grandpa was going to tell him. Who cares.

If I can tinfoil-hat a little:

As you may know, Jujutsu Kaisen Zero was originally Tokyo Metropolitan Curse Technical School, a self-contained series in Jump Giga. It turned out to be surprisingly popular, so Gege Akutami was asked to do a full series in the main Weekly Shonen Jump magazine.

So Gege took the setting and general premise of what is now JJK0 and created a new plot around it—one that could keep readers at the edge for hundreds of chapters, if it wasn't cancelled before then. A series that could be stretched to hundreds of chapters obviously has different needs than a series that only needs to last four chapters.

I think Gege wanted to keep Geto as a villain, but realized that his plot worked better if his villain was old enough to be Sukuna's peer. (Someone Geto's age couldn't have meddled with Yuji's conception, after all.) And Gege's solution was to literally replace Geto with a villain that was similar to Geto in some ways, but was crucially much older.

I think that sucks! I don't know what Gege is trying to do with Kenjaku that he couldn't do with Geto, but I can't imagine it was worth throwing away the Geto we had for Ancient Evil McSorcerer. I didn't feel that way when I first read the Kenjaku reveal, but the longer I've read Kenjaku do stuff and the more I've thought about Real Geto, the less I like the former and the more I miss the latter.

[tobiasdrake]

And Sea of Stars.

Time to tackle some trials.

These little lantern doo-dads are cutie-patooties, is what they are. I'm a little weirded out that they drop Berries though.

Do they eat the berries? Do they grow the berries? Are these plants or herbivores because it's freaky either way.

Alright man, we gathered your weird giant artifacts and now we understand Live Magic. Do we pass?

Honestly, I don't know why you made a token gesture of a fuss about letting Garl in here in the first place. He can use Live Magic too. I know it's because of Something Something Solstice Warriors So Attunement and all that but. Still.

If the presence of a Solstice Warrior nearby means everybody gets superpowers then this is one area where having normies along is a total benefit. The more Live Mana channelers, the merrier.

Anyway, you can give me my certificate or whatever and we can--

...okay, so apparently that was happening while I was talking.

Man, I have got to stop going off on monologues in the middle of dramatically tense conversations.

I just want it on record that I think it's unfair of you to make us build the robot body that you are going to crack my skull with. I think that demonstrates poor work ethic on your part. And that I would like to file a formal complaint with your manager.

That's fair.

Hold up, nobody said anything about prophecies. We were just told to learn "to use magic without using magic".

Fuck yeah, gift with purchase!

But we already began our journey!

Ten years after beginning our journey.

I'm so tired of beginning our journey.

Oh man, I am going to ruin so many people's sleep schedules doing this. This is the most catastrophic power yet.

It's not even a toggle. Like, a lot of games have the ability to SHLOOP straight to dawn or dusk, often with the implication that you aren't really changing the time of day so much as you're just skipping forward in time, either with or without your PC.

But no, this is whole-ass fucking time-of-day manipulation. I can crank the sun back and forth like a DJ at a turntable. WICKA-WICKA Your lunch hour is gone.

This might actually be a sound basis for one of those Superpower Registration Act storylines. I'm about to ruin the lives of every single person on the planet because this bridge is solar-powered and I don't wanna wait around for the right time of day.

It's nice to know that it's not just Moraine. We're all inconsiderate pricks. Imagine doing this instead of. Like. Any other possible locking mechanism ever.

We already have locks that you just zippy-zap with a bit of lunar magic and they open right up. But no. I'm going to crank the sun back to 8 AM every time I want to cross this bridge. Fuck you.

Hold up. We sealed ancient evils inside a prison whose locking mechanism is a specific time of day? I feel like there's a flaw in that plan.

Well. That's horrifying. Anyways, it's prophecy time.

HA! Told you lunar magic's superior. Even Sun Warrior Zale needs a little bit of night to become the best version of himself.

Zale's prophecy is that he needs to be more like me. My prophecy is that I'm next-gen Jesus. I WIN.

Does Garl get a prophecy?

That's. Not. A prophecy. That is whining about our decision to bring a normie disguised as a prophecy. Man, everyone's prophecy sucks but mine. Even time recognizes that I'm the best one in this group.

Oh, there's more. So he gets a prophecy and also some whining. Elder Mist wanted to clearly establish that he's only delivering this prophecy under duress.

Though the prophecy itself is pretty good, actually. High five, Garl. We're both better than Zale.

That's going to be our ticket to Wraith Island. We need to be there before the eclipse which is... uh... an amount of time away. Shouldn't be too far off. Depending on side quests, of course.

Of course, if we miss the eclipse, I could probably just timey-wime the days back until the day of the eclipse anyway.

Giants are our travel mechanism? Do they, like, shoot teleport lasers out of their eyes or something?

O_O CAN HE MISS!?

[kat-holden]

A letter I will never send you

The irony of writing a letter you will never read is not lost on me. Also, I am aware that the art of letter writing is dead, further killing it by typing this, rather than grabbing a pencil and scribbling on a piece of paper. It matters not.

Let us start with the "why." Since you have been pondering on it for a while. And it is even better that this will remain unseen, for I can drop whatever mask I wear and be truthful. A disclaimer, although I feel this letter will be full of such, I do not enjoy using words like "care" and "love" and the like. We can not dress a complex feeling in a single word. Words are flawed. And so will be mine.

I digress as always. The "why" all of this started was that I really did care. The fact I never engaged in conversation did not necessarily mean you were invisible to me. The moment you first texted me, I think, was when I allowed myself to hope that we could be friends. I did have the purest of intentions when I suggested being your confidant. All I ever wanted was to be what I am good at - a safe space, a person you can tell everything you feel like.

Everyone deserves to have their feelings understood and seen. The more we talked after that, the more you trusted me, slowly at first with all the doubts and fears you had, the more I got to know you and the more you shared, the possibility for me ever stopping became impossible.

I had no ulterior motives to help you or to start this friendship, let us call it that otherwise it will be complicated for me to find a word for what it really is. I still do not have ulterior motives. None of this was done with the idea to reach where we are right now. Although, since you will never read this, I am happy where it led us.

But I lie to myself on the daily that, if tomorrow you find what you look for, in the place you want to find it , I will be easy to let everything go just as easily as I took it up. I will confess that a part of this statement is correct. The letting go part. The easy part, however, is no longer true. You are not mine to keep, and I have known that from the beginning. And I want it no other way. But a big part of my life will go with you when you leave.

Although I keep a hard exterior, and I will never admit this to you, I do dread the moment we will part. I fear that as your armor slips and you reveal your true self, I huddle deeper into mine. It's not fair, I know, but all of this has never been about me. So I hope you will understand that I have to keep myself in check. I don't want to slip and fall and forever be lost in you. This is not my aim and never will be.

My reasons for "why" are still the same as the beginning. I want to be your meadow where you can just say or scream or rant anything that you believe you can not in front of others. Even if we stop everything else, I will still be this for you. I will be there in any form you need me.

Now, for what you said, in your words casually. Those three words, written with six letters that I pointedly ignored.

I do not want to tell you what to feel since it creates the opposite of what I want from my "why." Yet, these words need something back. And yes, I know I do not need to say anything. But I will not be the girl who said nothing.

For me, I can not put what I feel towards you in such a simple amalgamation of words. I am finding it difficult to put it even into a letter that will never see the light of day.

I do not fear words for they have the meaning you decide to give them. I fear what you expect from that phrase and what it will mean to you. Will you recognize it as a signal that I am falling off the deep end? Will you run away thinking I am too far gone? Will I cross a line and ruin everything? That's the reason I never said it, not that I did not want to.

But since I am sincere here, I love you too. Maybe not in the conventional way and maybe not the way you need or want me. But I do.

[casualjacobwrites]

FFXIV Write 2023 Prompt #4 - Off the Hook

Went back to my WoL M'ruxa and reimagined his backstory just a little bit. So this is more like an AU for his origin than what I think of as his canon background. The roegadyn is just some nameless Yellow Jacket, and most of you will recognize who Jacke is.

I have to admit, I'm struggling to post these works because they're so imperfect and flawed. However, I know that's the point of this challenge (and one of the things my therapist wants me to face is my need to be perfect at everything on the first attempt).

Word Count: 918

---

“Ye've got some tough choices ahead of you.”

M'ruxa looked down at the manacles surrounding his wrists and the heavy chain connecting them. In his head he replayed the events of the previous night and how it was he came to be bound. It still didn't make sense to him. One little mistake and all his so-called friends abandoned him rather than help.

From the other side of his barred cell he heard a large roegadyn sigh. “Are ye hearin' me, boy?”

“I heard you.” He pushed to his feet and walked the short distance to the door. “I won't turn on them.”

The roegadyn shook his head. “No, don't suppose ye will. Much as nobody wants to go the mines, it's better than gettin' yer head separated from yer neck by the ones ye though ye could trust.” He placed a hand on the bars and leaned in close. “But word from on high is they ain't gonna let ye go, either.” The much larger man narrowed his eyes highlighting the deep wrinkles of his weathered face. “Ye put six of our best men in the infirmary, and the other five who managed to drag ye in aren't farin' much better today.”

M'ruxa responded with a toothy smile. “In my defense, I was a trifle frightened.” He jumped back when the roegadyn's hand slapped against the cell door hard enough to make it rattle.

“This is serious. If one of those men had taken a turn, ye'd not even get a trial before you were swingin' in the gallows. The Jackets are fair, but not even they can fight the urge for revenge.”

“I wasn't trying to kill anyone. I was just trying to get away.”

The roegadyn wagged a calloused finger in the air. “I didn't say ye were intendin' to murder, but do ye know how many drunken brawls end up with one party underground? Ye just as lucky they didn't kill you, either. Gangs like the ones ye travel with aren't exactly known for restraint, and just about every Jacket has lost someone to folk like you. The ones ye encountered last night kept their heads, but if you stay on this path at some point ye will kill someone or be sent to the aetherial sea yerself.”

M'ruxa's tail twitched and his ears flattened atop his head. “No,” he said with a shake of his head. “Harold isn't like that. The jobs we do don't involve violence. We sneak in when no one's around.”

The other man raised his eyebrows. “Like last night?”

“Last night was an accident. He didn't know it was a Yellow Jacket stash. He'd never—”

“Send ye into danger? Use ye as a distraction while he and his other little whoresons ran off with a crate o' crystals?”

M'ruxa looked through the bars at the old salt with his mouth agape. “No, they wouldn't.”

“But they did. 'Course, we can't prove as much, but ye're not the first foolish boy they conned and I fear ye won't be the last.”

“Oi, is this the lad that caused all that trouble?” A hyur man strolled into view from behind the roegadyn's massive frame. He looked M'ruxa over from head to toe.

The roegadyn turned to the newcomer and nodded. “Aye, he's the one.” He glanced back to M'ruxa. “I suggest ye take ol' Jacke here up on his offer. I don't think ye'll get a better one in the mines.” With a wave of his hand, he turned to Jacke and said, “I never saw you.”

When the roegadyn was far enough down the hall, Jacke stepped close to the cell door to address M'ruxa. “Who trained ye to fight?”

Taken aback by the question, M'ruxa shook his head. “No one really.”

Jacke cocked his head, his blue eyes catching the torchlight. “Ever 'andle a knife?”

“Some,” M'ruxa said taking a suspicious step back.

Jack merely nodded his head and seemed to be weighing something in his mind. “Right, so I've come to ye with an offer that will get ye off the hook with the Yellow Jackets.”

M'ruxa's ears pointed forward. “But then I'd be on the hook with you?”

“Somethin' like that, yea.” Jacke snickered. “But I promise it's, well, it's not honest work so much as ye'll be doin' the same sort o' stuff ye been doin' only this time it'll be the right reasons.”

“I'm not sure I follow.”

“I'm the head o' a guild for people like you an' me. We follow a code, one I think ye'll find very agreeable. What's more we won't leave ye to rot in the mines like yer other friends. Can't say it won't be dangerous, an' yer like to get poked by some dibber dabbers at some point, but ye'll still breathe the free air.” He slipped his hand through the bars with his palm outstretched. “What do ye say?”

M'ruxa furled and unfurled his tail, his mind racing with his options. Staying in the cell meant getting shipped off to the mines to potentially die. Joining the strange man's guild seemed like a dangerous proposition, but on the same token he'd get to stay in Limsa and spend his days next to the sea he so loved.

“Not like I got anything left to lose.” He slapped his hand into the hyur's and gave it a firm shake.

“Knew ye'd make the right choice. Let's get ye out o' those shackles and into the fresh air, eh?”

[henesi]

I’m not sure what I would call it but I’ve just been reevaluating my whole life a lot lately and feeling more intensely than I normally do. Since a lot of the times i’m so numbed out from everything. But lately i’ve been crying a lil more and seeing my life in a different lense. All of this just to say that I really do love you a lot. I’m deeply in love with you, all of you. Especially for your flaws because you love me unconditionally for mine. Everyday you wake up and you choose me no questions asked. You choose to love me everyday and somehow manage to love me more than you did yesterday. Your heart is made out of gold, it has to be. I’ve been stubborn. I’ve had walls up thick & tall. You didn’t budge.. you came with a sledge hammer since day one lol. Determined to show me that everyone isn’t here to hurt me. You literally told me that in the beginning. I knew you were special then. Its like you had to prove to me that I was deserving. You didn’t stop once you got me.. you applied even more pressure. You swung the sledge hammer even harder. You knew that under these walls I was simply just protecting my heart. You wanted to get behind those walls and protect it with me. You have always been so patient with me. I know I make you laugh & smile ear to ear everyday. I know that I have made you feel loved, and seen. I know that what we have experienced with each other is probably something we will only experience once in life.. & thats my point of all of this. I can’t imagine one day without you let alone a lifetime without you. You’re my twin, my best friend, the love of my life, my person, the future mother to my kids, my future wife. I would marry you right now if I could. I would start a family with you right now if we could. Its you. Always will be you. Starts with you and ends with you. You’re it for me. When I think about life I think about all that I truly want is to have millions of memories with you. I know we have been through a lot. I know I have made mistakes. Times I didn’t listen, times I was mean, moody. Times I was stubborn defensive. I can honestly say I was still guarded. Trying so hard to protect me that it rubbed off on you. You never deserved that. You only deserve love, unconditional love. Softness, genuine intentions. I am recognizing my flaws, my mistakes. So many things I could have done differently during our misunderstandings. I dont want to repeat any of that. I dont want to not give you all of your flowers because I’m protecting mine. I can say 100% you truly love me. Would never intentionally hurt me and if you did it would hurt you. I know you’ve had your fair share of adding to our downs. I know sometimes I can be harsh and maybe failed to remind you that even when you make a mistake or do something wrong with me. I still love you unconditionally. When I’m quiet and don’t have much to say 90% of the time its within me. Trying to find the safe voice within me to tell me that its okay. I dont want to be guarded with you anymore. I’ve been hearing so many stories about people losing their significant other by death and maybe thats what has me so shook. I cant even imagine. I don’t want to wait until its too late. I want to spend the rest of our lives loving each other like its our last day. So thank you for loving me through the darkness, the sunshine. God sent me you, and i’ll never think otherwise 🤍

[mdhwrites]

Let Me Be Clear About Something

I am not about to lie or misconstrue the facts just for the sake of personal gain. Fuck that. If my last blog made you fidget because it has the ad it does at the end, I understand. I even admitted that normally it’s not something I would blog about because it’s simply not a fair thing to criticize the show over. If I had decided to make that blog entirely on a whim though, the only difference would have been that there was no ad at the end. I would still acknowledge that I was doing it because of my own experiences with depression, I would still say that people who headcanon it as depression are valid, etc. like that. The only thing I would change is that instead of talking about my upcoming book, it would have been my normal batch of links. Because I don’t like being a braggart or a businessman. I literally spent my birthday trying to be kind to myself and still had to admit that my process is flawed, I’ve fucked up and that my brain is broken so trusting me with a series is dangerous. I’m just not someone with the sort of confidence to lie through my teeth to convince you to check something out. But I’ve also tried just letting my philosophy of just trying to make things I’ll enjoy that are good enough for others to like work... And it hasn’t. Even when I make an original piece for free, people look at it with apathy, if they look at all. Even when I had a following of 1600, that was the case. So I’m trying to lean in a little more to this one having the concept of a hook, even if that wasn’t the initial point. The initial point was just to tell a love story about two teens with mental health issues where the answer was more complex than love because those are the experiences I’ve had. I still to this day am terrified that people will read the main character say that it hurts for them to smile and immediately leave a one star review because that is so incredibly over the top for “I’m sad.” But it’s also just my reality. But I recognize why people might not believe that. So... I’m just trying my best. And my best includes not lying. It’s up to you if you believe me on that or not but that is still my promise to you. That I’m not trying to hide. Not trying to bullshit. None of that. My opinions are mine, not what I think are profitable.

[penandwind]

A compulsion of mine I find truly pathetic, one I have to catch myself and prevent from going through with: putting myself in a position where someone will notice me and make a display of looking truly pathetic and distressed until  someone I know will notice and ask me what’s wrong. I do this because, one of the few things I want in life is someone who cares about me in such a way that they would proactively volunteer their help and support when I am emotionally distressed. Through most of my life its always been me asking for help. And after a lifetime of that, well it reinforces negative misheld beliefs and intrusive thoughts that no one cares about me and they merely tolerate me as long as they can. My pathetic cries for help just adding strain to that tolerance. Of course the more rational parts of me know that isn’t true, but if I coudl control my brain I wouldn’t be such a dumpster fire of a being.

Most of the time, I catch myself before this compulsion gets the attention seeks. And even in those times I do, I just downplay whatever is going on. I recognize this behavior is manipulative on one level, and I don’t want to ever be that. I also recognize if I were to ever go through with it I wouln’t be satisfied at all. I would know in other parts of my mind that its not geunine, I had to engineer it. Like asking for help in an indirect, pathetic way, it would only deepen my intense self loathing. What I want is someone doing what they can to help my emotional needs unprompted, of their own volition. But even the root desire is ultimately flawed. Its not fair to ask someone to handle my emotional needs, that needs to come from within. Unfortunately, my sense of self-worth is.... well I have no sense of self worth. It is a frequent, near constant struggle to prove to myself I deserve to continue breathing. I want it to come from the outside, because it is simply impossible for it to come from within.

Funny enough, the one time this thing I wanted genuinely happend for real, unprompted or staged, it was even a mockery of the idea. In college, I had to take an imporant class with someone I used to consider a friend, but like my above fear, I got to be too much for her, and she told me to not contact her again. I had to take this class to graduate on time. So I did the only thing I thought I coudl do to manage my emotions: I started drinking. Got a flask, took a large swig of it before the class and small sips during. People noticed, and as she was the only one in the class who knew me, they asked her to talk with me and see if I was ok. There it was, exactly the thing I wanted. Except it wasn’t out of concern for me, more concern of social obligation. Even going so far as to say after the fact that again, do not contact her again it is not a sign our friendship had been revived.That situation, like most in my life, was a sick, pathetic joke.

I wish I didn’t have this compulsion. I wish any of the fucked up, garbage aspects that define “me.” I am the very proof of Social Darwinism, sooner or later I will go wimpering into the void, I fear utterly forgoten. Condemned to live something less than a life, and doomed to a fate worse than death.

[whoree321]

can I request some headcannons of the bad batch reacting to reader getting called fat and comforting her?

(today while I was at school someone called me fat)

omg well ok first of all bestie i’m so sorry that happened to you!! i def experienced my fair share of that sort of thing back in my day, but just remember that above all else your body is merely a vessel to contain the infinite galaxies that form the irreplicable, unique multitudes of humanity that live within you. you are so much more than the physical form you inhabit and simply the presence of your soul on this planet makes it a brighter place<3

but anyways! i hope y’all enjoy this! i would love nothing more than for this gaggle of big strong men to defend my honor

the bad batch + comforting gn!reader (body image)

WARNING: this is entirely about comments being made about the reader’s body. there are potentially triggering themes. please read with caution<3

Hunter

when hunter hears what happened, he experiences probably every single negative emotion a person could feel at once

angry at the person who insulted you, worried about you, sad that you’re sad, stressed about the best way to handle it and help you

internally, hunter is probably more distressed than you are

this man NEVER EVER shows it tho. the inside of his brain is literally like that scene in spongebob where his brain is the office and it’s on fire and all the little spongebobs are running around screaming. but on the outside?

“oh cyar’ika, come here. i’m so, so sorry my love”

he is tenderly holding you to his bosom, praising you and reassuring you and providing that feeling of safety and warmth that’s just so uniquely hunter until you almost forget why you were even upset

he is also such a good listener. he doesn’t exactly know what to say beyond complimenting/praising you (that’s easy- all he has to do is say what he’s already thinking), but he is so attentive and really takes in everything you’re saying as you’re ranting or letting your emotions out

just knowing how invested he is in trying to understand your problems and make you feel better makes you feel so loved and so special

Crosshair

crosshair is not the fucking one

crosshair hears that someone has called you fat, and he is literally breaking their knee caps like they owe him a gambling debt within 24 hours of the comment being made

like i’m serious. of all the batchers, he is the one to go out of his way and inflict serious violence upon the individual in question (wrecker might join him)

although he’s seething with rage on the inside, he does try to be there for you in the moment while you’re upset

he’s not very good with words, and he’s definitely the type to let his actions do the talking

he will spend literally hours just worshipping your body, kissing every inch and whispering little comments like “gorgeous” and “so beautiful” and “all mine” and he won’t stop until he’s confident you know just how enamoured he is with you. mind, body, and soul

he’ll get in the shower with you and wash your hair, letting the warm water and his fingers on your scalp soothe you as he presses feather light kisses to your back and neck and shoulder blades

he will wait to seek out his victim until you’re nestled into his bunk, snuggled under his covers and fast asleep. he’ll lay a quick kiss on the tip of your nose, admiring the peaceful look on your face for a moment before disappearing into the night to deal with the perpetrator

seriously tho crosshair is sending whoever said it to the med bay for EXTENDED time. he won’t kill them, but he will definitely disfigure them

Tech

tech would honestly be so confused. like he would be so upset that someone would say that to you, and even more upset that you were upset, but i think the entire situation would be a little bit baffling to him

like i think that he is probably one of the least likely batchers to notice or care what people look like physically, and so he just would not understand why someone would be so cruel

like what would someone have to gain from commenting negatively on your body? as far as he knew, there was nothing wrong with how you looked (quite the opposite, actually), and he would just find the whole idea of someone doing that to you so absurd

despite his confusion, i think in any situation where you’re upset tech would def sort of let you indicate what kind of comfort you wanted, and would go all in from there (he read that your partner often needs different kinds of emotional support at different times and he has worked very hard to recognize when you need each type of comfort)

like if you need verbal or physical reassurance, he’s worshipping you and letting you know exactly why he finds every piece of you so dazzlingly beautiful

if you need to cry and rant, he’s holding you close and stroking your hair and giving you a safe place to just let out your feelings

if you need to be angry about it, tech will sit with you and absolutely roast the shit out of whoever said it. like he’ll pull up files about them and just verbally demolish they’re entire existence until you’re wheezing with laughter

tech would just be so sweet and would hate seeing you upset and would try his best to fix it. he loves your body, but to him you are so much more than that and it kills him that someone could make you feel so badly over what he views as such a small aspect of all amazing things that make you who you are

Wrecker

when wrecker hears about what happened, he is equal parts heartbroken for you and LIVID

he doesn’t tolerate when people have things to say about the way he or his brothers look, and he CERTAINLY won’t tolerate someone commenting on the way you look

he’s already gearing up to go bash some heads in when it registers with him how upset you are

expect the hug of the CENTURY from this man

like seriously you’re worried he’s gonna crack one of your ribs with how hard he’s squeezing

he becomes the self care king

wrecker will spend an excessive amount of time pampering you and doing his best to make you feel loved (like literally days if he has enough time)

he’s running you warm baths, he’s doing face masks with you, he’s setting up a movie night with a pillow fort and yummy treats, he’s using your entire body as a pillow and wrapping his arms around you, planting sweet kisses all over your torso as the movie plays. anything he can think of to care of you and take your mind off of the horrible way you were spoken to

wrecker isn’t gonna have as much verbally as hunter or tech or echo, pretty much confined to statements like “oh don’t listen to them, Y/N, you’re absolutely perfect”, but the way he dotes on you and the tenderness he shows to you and your body lets you know that he really, really means it

(also, he won’t seek them out, but if he ever happens to run into person who said it, he does not hesitate to beat the living shit out of them. disrespectfully)

Echo

when echo hears about what was said to you, he’s really just unbelievably sad

while people don’t usually make comments about him to his face, he knows how terrible it feels to be uncomfortable with your own body and he would do anything to keep you from feeling that

echo responds initially like hunter, holding you close and letting you cry or yell for a while, but he refuses to let you feel anything other than beautiful

he takes you to your closet and tells you to pick out one outfit that makes you feel good about yourself (if you have trouble feeling good about any of them, don’t worry. he won’t hesitate to pick out one he knows you look great in)

once you’ve decided on it, he tells you to put it on. if you’re uncomfy with him watching you change, he happily looks away until you’re ready for him to turn around. if you’re cool with him watching, he makes it a point not to hide his admiration of your form, offering sweet compliments and sultry glances

once you’ve changed, he stands you in front of the mirror so you can see yourself, and describes to you all your wonderful features. he lets you disagree with him and point out your flaws, and he counters each of them without missing a beat

echo just wants you to see yourself the way he sees you, and he stands there with you, offering so much patience and love, until he’s filled your heart with so much warmth you can feel your tears returning (this time in a good way)

you do so much to help him when he feels insecure about his appearance since the citadel, so above all else, echo needs you to know just how perfect you are, regardless of what some prick might say

[pinkandblueblurbs]

Personally I dislike Nancy bc she’s kinda a bf flip flopper. When she was with Steve in s1 she was out flirting with johnathan and hanging out with him behind Steve’s back, and Steve was worried about it and she told him not to worry. But as soon as they broke up she started dating johnathan. And now when she’s dating johnathan she’s having feels for Steve and is neglecting her bf. I also really disliked how she handled the newspaper internship situation in season 3. Johnathan wanted his whole life to be a photographer and getting the internship with the newspaper was a huge deal for him and everything he ever wanted . But Nancy didn’t rly recognize that. She walked into the darkroom multiple times ruining his photos. She convinced him to ditch and got him in trouble , and then convinced him to ditch again and made him lose the job. She didn’t think that getting fired was a big deal when for johnathan it was a big deal. He basically has to support his household especially since his mom barely makes enough. And Nancy just doesn’t get that bc she’s never had to worry about money ever in her life. She comes off as very “if I care about something then EVERYONE cares about it and it must be done my way”. That attitude also comes off when she is desperate to have the winning arrangement of the school paper and has a rivalry with fred(?) (I forgot the dudes name, the one that vecna kills). Lol sorry this is so long but that’s why I (and other ppl I’ve spoken to) don’t like Nancy 🤷🏻‍♀️

okay the bf thing is a big pet peeve of mine asjsj. i dont see how she NEGLECTED steve??? she wasn’t ready to say i love you to him, that isnt her fault imo especially after everything she went through. and i guess she kiiiinda flirted with jonathan but like…. Its not like they DID anything while she was dating steve?? they literally just supported one another through the shit show that was going on in their lives??? i know her and steve didnt work out and i felt for steve emotionally but i felt for her too, and i rlly dont feel like its fair to make her the villain just bc she wasnt ready to say i love you or because she also had to lean a bit on jonathan during that time. even if she had slight feelings for jonathan, i think its okay that she was working through figuring that all out, and its not like she acted upon them while her and steve were together

and i can see where ur coming from with the internship thing, it was def a flaw of hers and an uncool thing to do to get jonathan fired. but like…. All the characters had flaws? i feel like that was shown as a flaw of hers, that she gets really driven to do what she puts her mind to and can tend to act somewhat selfishly to achieve her goals/not think about others enough when she’s working to achieve her goals… idk i just feel like its unfair to hate her bc she has a flaw when tons of other beloved characters have flaws (as they should bc they’re humans)

[yesimwriting]

Falling Angels: chapter two

A/n took me longer to get around to writing part 2 than i thought!! i didn’t know there was an audience for this idea but im glad you guys liked it!!

Im adding a country to the grishaverse to make my story work,, def not a big deal i just needed a country in which i could control the history of without worrying about conflicting with cannon lol 

Link to part one: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/yesimwriting/652318577650696192 (lmk if this works ive never linked something to a tumblr post lol)

Series Summary: Y/n is a rising star in the most famous circus in Ketterdam because of her ability to see the future. Unfortunately for her, Kaz Brekker knows more of her backstory than he should, and he’s willing to use that to his advantage. The one thing he’s not betting on? That he doesn’t know her entire story

Chapter summary: Y/n gets a visitor before getting tricked into the most dangerous show of her life. 

Pairng: SOC x reader, Kaz Brekker x sunshine-y! Psychic! Reader 

--

My father seemed to love me more after two glasses of something amber. It was after these two glasses that he would tell me realities his inebriated self believed I needed to internalize. He’d pat my head affectionately and smiled at me as he told me that the world was a bad place. Most of his lessons are lost in my mind, but the one I remember most clearly is that there’s no such thing as a kept secret. There’s always a leak or a flaw or a factor you could not account for. He told me that if I wanted to keep a secret, I would have to decide what I was willing to risk for it. 

I know from Seria’s reaction to his presence that listening to Kaz is a risk, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take for my secret. “I don’t know what you think I am, but you’re mistaken.” It doesn’t really matter that he believes me. I have the paperwork I need to disprove him. “I have to get to my tent.” 

“The princess gets her own tent?” His words are saturated by mock casualness but I can feel his pride on how he delivered that line. 

My body is still tense from balancing over flames and his confidence only adds to my desire to unravel. I can’t get angry here. Not at him. Not with the way he grips that cane of his. “I don’t understand what--” 

“You may be able to play pretend here where no one wants to look twice at you, but I know what you are.” His stiffness leaves my skin prickling. “I know who you are.” 

I swallow back my panic. “Then who am I?” 

“You’re that king’s bastard--the one with a high bounty on her head.” Don’t back down. Even the smallest crack will confirm his story. “As long as she’s returned alive.” 

Thoughts of what my father would do to me if ever given the chance strike me with more anxiety than his presence does. “I’ve heard of the girl you’re talking about,” I admit, the lie leaving me as easily as the air leaves my lungs when I exhale. “But I’m not her.” 

“You’re not from Ketterdam, if you were you would have known who I was after you friend referred to me as Dirtyhands.” I have no defense, but I never claimed to be from Ketterdam. “You make your business claiming to be a psychic.” I am a psychic, but now is not the time to make that argument. “Elkosa is a relatively small and self efficient port kingdom, the island is nothing more than a jagged coastline barely larger than Ketterdam, but I have connections in all places.” He knows someone from Elkosa? I have to fight the instinct to move all of my weight on the balls of my feet, prepared to run. “A captain of the royal fleet told me the story of the night the King’s bastard ran into the meeting room the night before ten ships were meant to sail to Ravka.” 

He studies my reaction as I struggle to keep my expression blank. “None of that seems connected.” 

“Patience is a virtue most Saints are familiar with.” I roll my eyes. “The bastard couldn’t have been more than nine at the time, but the guards did not want to let her in. The King told them to let her interrupt. The sailor noted this because he had never made an exception to his meeting before. The girl described a nightmare to her father, a nightmare of a storm and ten dead birds. The king did not comfort her, she finished her story by saying that he asked to know about all of her dreams. She went back upstairs and the King continued the meeting as normal but the next day the King cancelled the trip.”

I remember that night as the night I realized that if I’m not careful, I’ll feel what I see in my visions. It felt like I was drowning. I felt the death of each of those men and instead of comforting me, my father nodded once like I had offered him advice and sent me back to my room. “And?” My defense is weak, my mind too lost in the memories of drowning. “Many smaller countries are superstitious.” 

“The next day the worst storm to have impacted that ocean occurred. For four nights and three days the storm continued.” 

I press my nails into my palms. “You don’t believe that I am precognitive, so that sailor’s unverified story has nothing to do with me.” 

“A princess that can see the future disappears at the same time a failing circus hires a girl who has no business in this city who claims to be able to see the future.” He adjusts his stance, taking pressure off the cane as if he’s preparing to need to use it for something else. “I am not fool enough to believe in coincidence.” 

“And I am not fool enough to crack beneath the vague threats of a man. In my experience, men always threaten with a blade when really all they’re in possession of is a butter knife. Try to drag me from here kicking and screaming, find a way to incapacitate me and put me on a ship to Elkosa, but when the King sees that you brought him a stranger he will have your head.” 

He blinks, expression hard as stone. I tense, preparing for a physical blow. “I didn’t expect you to be a half-decent liar, but I should have.” I bite my tongue to avoid resorting to something I can’t take back. Like begging. “Even if it’s in only half your blood.” 

“I am not her.” My stubbornness burns more than the need to survive. I inhale, hoping to shake the grasp of the sensation but it only worsens. The pinch of dread in my chest is heavy and familiar. A vision. 

No. Not now--not in front of him. I push against it even though I know that only makes it worse. Not now. Not now. I should be grounding myself but all I can think about is how stupid I am and how bad this situation is.

--

“I’m not an idiot, I know to be quiet. I see myself crouched somewhere dark. 

“Being defensive doesn’t make you any more intelligent.” It takes me a minute to recognize Kaz in the darkness. 

We’re somewhere small, our backs against the same wall but our shoulders do not touch. This vision is enshrouded by the feel of panic. 

This other me grimaces, but her eyes lack anger, “Remind me why I agreed to help you again?” 

“You never told me why,” he admits, “you can change your mind on participating and I can change my mind on whether or not you're more useful than your father’s money.”

Something loud crashes from behind the door we’re both staring at. “You’ll have no use for me or my father’s money if we die here.” I squeeze my hands together. 

He hesitates, “My ghost will.” 

The future-me almost smiles. “I wonder if I’ll be able to see ghost futures.” I hesitate, something strange behind my eyes. “I wonder if that can exist, if there’s a future beyond endings.” 

Future-Kaz is silent for a long second. “There should be,” he says, “for someone like you, at least.” 

I watch the way I take in his words. “You’d be there, too,” my voice is low, “your ghost at least.” I turn my head, staring at the door instead of him, “If you weren’t, I’d miss the brooding.” 

--

The vision leaves me with sweaty palms and swirling thoughts. All of my visions do that. Not all of them make me feel so confused. Apparently, he needs help and I agree to do so. At one point we’ll be pushed into a life or death situation and I won’t loathe him. 

I blink twice, forcing myself to hold onto the reality in front of me. I don’t have to agree--the future isn’t set in stone. For all I know tomorrow morning I’ll have a vision in which he kills me. 

“Are you ignoring me?” 

Shaking my head, I turn to face him. “You need help.” I don’t wait for his reaction. “You’re not here to return someone to the King of Elkosa, you’re here because you need someone that can see the future.” 

“I--” 

“It’s not that you won’t take me to Elkosa, it’s that you’d rather use my abilities for something.”

I’m confusing him again, but that’s okay. I’d rather deal with him confused than angry. “I need to know how a certain business deal of mine is going to be worth what it costs.”

He’s spent the entire time claiming he doesn’t believe in my power. Was that some kind of tactic? In the vision I saw, despite the panic surrounding the situation I didn’t feel panicked around him. The probability of that future occurring is probably low. I’ve been wrong before, the future changes too much for me to know everything. 

“That’s not how readings work,” I admit, “I don’t have that much control on them. Most of them come to me randomly. The events I see always involve me or someone I care about to a certain capacity. I can give someone a general glimpse into their future but I can’t promise I’ll see what they want. Sometimes I can see the general vision by just focusing on their energy but usually I need some physical contact for it to work.” That seems like a fair explanation. “Oh--and not all of my predictions come true, most are blurry, few are solid--the future is always moving.” 

Wait...the vision I saw where I was with Kaz wasn’t blurry. Those can be wrong, but it’s much rarer. Do I really agree to this? 

“Then maybe I should make it involve you.” His aggression has me forcing myself to stand my ground. He can threaten me all he wants but that won’t change things. “Or take the money your father would give me and cut my losses.” 

Every time I’ve purposefully destroyed a solid vision, something bad has happened. I’m genuinely considering it. “What do you need a psychic for, anyways?” 

“To get through the Fold.” 

Despite everything, I laugh. “I’ve never seen anyone get through the Fold, literally or in my visions.” 

He’s unphased by my doubt. “It’s happened.” 

I really don’t want to help him. “Well then good luck, I’m happy to part ways here.” 

I manage one step forward before he moves his cane in front of my path. I’m getting tired of this. “You’re assisting me one way or the other, whether that aid will be financial or through your services is up to you.” 

Anger pinches in my stomach the way it often does when I’m told what to do. The one thing centering me is the vision still reflecting in my thoughts. There’s no denying it--I had felt comfortable with him. There is a future in which I feel comfortable with him and I’m not sure I’ll be able to avoid it. 

“I won’t get in trouble for you,” I tell him, “The Ringmaster holds onto those indentured to him, especially the commodities that bring him profit.” 

There’s something stiff about his silence. I wonder if he’s always like this, pushing the weight of his presence onto those around him without saying a word. “When I have a goal, it is achieved. I’ll speak to him.” 

I cannot imagine a conversation I want to be involved in less. The Ringmaster and this man that Seria had labeled ‘Dirtyhands’. “I just had a vision--I saw your entire conversation and it ends with you missing an arm.” His stoic expression does not shift. “Okay, I’m aware that it wasn’t the funniest joke, but throw me a bone--you threatened to kidnap me and sell me to my father in order to extort me and I’ve been nothing but polite to you.” 

He’s quiet for a moment, something in his expression changing in a way I can’t read. “All you’ve done is lie since the moment you started to speak to me.” 

The optimist in me would like to think that his annoyance counts for banter. I shrug, feeling a little lighter than I did a second ago. I’m certainly not comfortable but I’m starting to see how to put up with the tension without letting it strain me. “Well, polite for my standards.” 

I let him brood. “You must have done well as a royal.” 

My past cuts through the peace I managed to grab onto. It’s not his fault, he has no way of knowing what the castle was like for me. I open my mouth, but I don’t know what I’m going to say. “I had my moments,” I finally settle on, hoping the echo of pain isn’t visible behind my eyes. 

I guess it doesn’t matter if he sees me bleed. He’s heartless, and I hate sympathy. 

“Y/n,” Seria’s voice is genuine anger, “You’ve turned into an idiot--first the tightrope walk and now entertaining whatever deal he’s trying to coax from you.” I love Seria, she’s the reason I didn’t die in the street when I first arrived in Ketterdam, but she sees me as a mindless child. “Whatever he told you, whatever he promised you--it’s a lie.” 

“He hasn’t promised me anything.” I need to calm her down. Once she’s calm, everything will be normal again. “And he knows.” I don’t have to turn to feel the way Seria gapes at me. “He knows who I am, so I have to do what he wants.” 

“You never have to do anything a man is forcing onto you, y/n. We’ll find a way--” 

“Seria, it’s fine,” I reach to touch her arm, “I’ll be fine, you can’t protect me from everything and you don’t have to.” 

Kaz throws a pointed glare at the man who was with him earlier. When did the stranger get here? “Boss, she’s faster than she looked, but I have what we need to get the girl--” 

“You’re late,” Kaz sighs, bored, “she’s agreed.” 

Wait--what was he going to do if I didn’t agree? “Out of curiosity, what are you talking about?” The man blinks twice, squeezing a rag between his ring-clad fingers. “You were going to use chloroform to kidnap me, weren’t you?” 

For some reason I don’t understand, the stranger gives me a look that’s a cross between sheepish and charming. “Nothing personal.” 

“Or original.” 

Seria pinches my arm. “Y/n,” she scolds, “your sense of humor is going to kill me one of these days.” 

I cringe, pulling my arm away. “When I met you, you were pickpocketing in the pleasure district, please remember that.” 

She rolls her eyes. “An attitude like that is going to leave you without a place to sleep at night.” 

I take her comment for the empty threat it is. Every other day she’s threatening to kick me out of her private trailer so that I’m forced to fight for cots or speak to the Ringmaster about my lodging arrangements. He’d give me what I want, but speaking to him feels so slimy I’d sleep in the woods before trying it. 

“Kaz.” I turn my head in time to see the girl that gave me the advice about the tightrope walker. “We need to go, he’s coming soon--you’ll do better to speak to him in the morning after she’s gone, that way he has nothing to hold over your head.” 

“Once I’m gone?” The girl had called me a Saint. I can appeal to her. “I’m not--I’m not going anywhere, I said I’d help.” 

Her eyes widen, sympathy reflected clearly in her dark irises. “There was never a version of this in which you ended up staying here.” I hear a hint of apology in her voice. “You won’t believe me, but I promise this will be better for you.” All of her pity is gone with those, replaced by something hard.

Seria responds for me, “I think you should go.” 

“What?” 

She almost smiles, but her eyes are painfully sad. “I never wanted you to be here forever. I don’t trust these people, but I trust their ability to get you out of here, even if only for a little while. Bad things are coming, and I think you’ll miss the worst of it if you go now.” 

What she alludes to is a blade in my heart. “You want me to leave you here to deal with it?” 

“Y/n, I’ve been hurt here more times than I can count--”

“No, I won’t leave y--” 

Seria squeezes my shoulder, “It’s not forever.” When she wants something, it’s almost impossible to get around it. “Besides, if I need you, you’ll see it.” 

My world feels to have lost the vibrance of color. I’ve left so much, but I let myself believe I wouldn’t leave her. I pull her into the hug. “The moment I see a vision of you in any type of danger, I’m coming back.” I hug her even tighter when she tries to pull away so that I can whisper something in her ear, “I’ll use this opportunity to leave the Ringmaster and then I’ll get you out, and together we’ll leave Ketterdam. We’ll find your child, like you always wanted to and they’ll know that they're lucky because they’re the only kid in the world to have you as a mother.” 

She squeezes me so tightly I find it hard to take full breaths. “Two,” Seria whispers, “I have two children.”

My eyes burn as her words find their way into my heart. “I love you, Seria.” 

“I love you too, my star,” she pulls away enough so that I can look her in the eye, “you don’t like being called a Saint, but I can’t think of anyone more deserving of the title.” 

Tears prick my eyes as she releases me. “I’ll find you.” 

“He’ll be coming soon,” the girl warns, “He spoke to an advisor about wanting to find you after the show.” 

No doubt to praise the fire stunt he forced onto me. Bastard. I nod once but I don’t move. I can’t bring myself to leave Seria until the girl places a hand on my elbow. 

--

Falling Angels Taglist: @glowstick-lesbian @cashlum @whatiswrongwithpeople @pass-me-jeez-it @thecraziestcrayon

[justalads]

this is an essay post that was written in response to an in-depth discussion i was having with another person on a lot of topics. that’s why it’s written like it’s addressing someone. because of that, it is a little confusing on its own (because the things in quotes are responding to things the other person said) but me and the person who runs this blog thought it would be better to make this a separate post, so that people who want to see this response can see it without it being attached to the person i was having the discussion with. we spoke to the person and they said that would be fine. with that being said, this is a very long post. if anyone finds parts of it useful, it will have served its original purpose.

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 upand 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 and not really about dream, so i’ll move on

“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.

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

anyway

so 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?

(the person i was responding to linked a thread about how the prison isn’t helping dream and how puffy and sapnap saying he deserves it is inhumane)

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.

“if “they don’t owe him anything” is your base argument against someone being hurt via being left by people they care about over and over again until they’re utterly alone with no support system and unhealthy mindsets, 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 (dream’s) 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 hskhdksjsthe 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 dream 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 (wilbur) 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 that cc!wilbur approved

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 (from his hey and stuff podcast) 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 (the “something worth having power over and then you get killed by your dad” 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 (the quote where wilbur says “we go in with no armor and then stab them in the back” or something along those lines)! 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? and before it can be used to describe wilbur?

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 dream 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. this is also a mediocre take that i don’t really believe because dream had his own faction.). 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! (this is about the conversation between wilbur and dream right before the “independence or death” scene)

“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, as that’s very antithetical to exile as a whole and kid of ironic.

“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.

(this next part is about the “let me be your vassal” scene in pogtopia)

“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 (dream and tommy) 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.

(i said here that “someone calling someone else out for hurting them is not the same thing as villanizing them,” and they responded with this)

“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 (vassal scene and revivedbur calling dream his hero)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 (scene where wilbur asserts his authority as president) 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.

also, someone responding to this pointed out that dream was trying to frame tommy for things at the time. dream was intentionally creating other conflict in order to get to tommy. dream did not care about the house. he burnt down other people’s houses.

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.

(they linked three twitter threads here. i don’t know if relinking them here is a good idea as the whole point of this separate post is to disconnect the two sides, but the threads were by dr3amofagame on twitter, for reference purposes. i’m not going to link the independent threads but i think people can tell which ones i was responding to.

if this is wrong to say who made them please let me know, i do not know how Any of these websites work. if you’ve read this far, please don’t try to like,,, look up who any of these people are (especially the person i was debating with. don’t do that /srs) and send anything bad to them. that’s the whole point of this separate post. if anyone sends negativity directly towards people because of this post i’ll bite you)

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 (wilbur’s) 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” (the book) 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”, especially because revivedbur’s mental state right now is godawful, 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 pointed out that dream originally commissioned the prison)

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 (skeppy and dream arguing over l’manburg). 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”.

(they asked me to name one person who dream cut off first)

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. the fact that he was hurt does not make him any more justified.

“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 (not really) 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. he says this at the community house scene. 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, and tracked to its inevitable end.

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 (wait this might be wrong i do not remember but he was definitely on l’manburg’s side during doomsday) 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 and for trying to be a better and more respectful person. that’s why revivedbur’s “apologies” mean nothing right now.

“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 (dream’s motivations in the vault) 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.

this video 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.

this isn’t really a “nobody can interpret it like this”, it’s just pointing out that the events of canon are there and should be fully considered. character dream’s perspective of the story is biased, so people can look at it and be correct in how dream sees the situation, but “how dream sees it” and “how the story goes” do not necessarily line up.

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

-burning down other buildings in order to frame tommy

-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 post 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?

“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, arguably before that a few times as well. 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 is pretty much what i’m saying, i guess.

alright @flypaw here it is :]

~ Lad 2

[warrioreowynofrohan]

On Gondor and Nationalism

Gondor, and particularly Denethor and Boromir, is characterized more than any other realm in The Lord of the Rings by nationalism, and there is a sharp contrast between its actual role in the war and the way Denethor and Boromir percieve its role. Two quotes in The Return of the King form the core of Tolkien’s discussion of nationalism, and both are conversations between Denethor and Gandalf.

The first:

Denethor: Yet the Lord of Gondor is not to be made the tool of other men’s purposes, however worthy. And to him there is no purpose higher in the world as it now stands than the good of Gondor; and the rule of Gondor, my lord, is mine and no other man’s, unless the king should come again.

Gandalf: ...I will say this: the rule of no realm is mine, neither of Gondor nor any other, great or small. But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care. And for my part, I should not wholly fail of my task, though Gondor should perish, if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit or flower again in days to come. For I also am a steward. Did you not know?

And the second, discussing Denethor’s views on what should have been done with the Ring:

Denethor: It should have been kept, hidden, hidden dark and deep. Not used, I say, unless at the uttermost end of need, but set beyond his grasp, save by a victory so final that what then befell would not trouble us, being dead.

Gandalf: You think, as is your wont, my lord, of Gondor only. Yet there are other men and other lives, and time still to be. And for me, I pity even his slaves.

Denethor: And where will other men look for help if Gondor falls?

Both of these conversations point to the fundamental flaw in Denethor’s worldview, and it is a nuanced one. He is not the weak, selfish old man presented in the films; he is intelligent, pragmatic, and realistic, and his strategy and tactics are thoughtful. Again unlike the movies, the mission he sends Faramir on - to prevent the armies of Mordor from crossing Anduin, and cause them heavy losses if they do cross - is not a pointless suicide mission but a crucial and tactically necessary battle. He is wrong in his attitude towards and treatment of Faramir, not in sending him into danger.

Denethor represents (as, in another way, does Saruman) the wisdom of the world. His statement that, as the steward of Gondor, his highest purpose must be the good of Gondor, would be approved by many political theorists. But in the wider vision of the story of The Lord of the Rings, expressed by Gandalf, it is critically flawed in its narrowness and arrogance. The war against Sauron is not about the victory or preservation of one realm alone; it is about saving anything and everything good in Middle-earth, in the present or the future. This is the moment when Gandalf comes closest, of any point in the story, to stating outright who he is and what his purpose is; he doesn’t say outright that he was sent by the Valar to preserve the world against Sauron, but he comes near enough to it that Denethor, an intelligent and learned man, could pick up on it if he wanted to. It is important to Gandalf to at least try to get Denethor to understand the importance of what he’s saying.

In the second conversation, though, Denethor has fallen still farther from the truth. In the first one, he only said that Gondor’s good had to be his highest priority, as its ruler; now he says that if Minas Tirith falls, Sauron’s conquered the world anyway and it doesn’t matter if he gets the Ring. In his eyes, Minas Tirith is the only thing standing against Sauron, and the only thing that matters; its defeat is to him synonymous with the destruction of the world. People across Middle-earth are fighting against Sauron: on the very day of the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, the elves of Lothlórien are fighting off an assault by Sauron’s forces, as are the wood-elves in Mirkwood; the Battle of Dale in which the kings of both Dale and the Lonely Mountain fall will be two days later. Gondor is not alone in this war; it is not the only realm fighting and not the only one whose battles matter. It is not the bulwark sheltering the peaceful rest of the world from war; the rest of the world is fighting. But Denethor chooses to regard it as the only place of importance.

These are perspectives that he passed on, in part, to his eldest son, as seen in some of Boromir’s deeds at the Council of Elrond as well as in his later temptation by the Ring. At the Council, he takes the tone that Gondor is unacknowledged and unappreciated and is doing all the work of fighting Sauron: “Few, I deem, know of our deeds, and therefore guess little of their peril, if we should fail at last...By our valour the wild folk of the East are still restrained, and the terror of Morgul kept at bay; and thus alone are peace and freedom maintained in the lands behind us, bulwark of the West...those who shelter behind us give us praise, if ever they hear our name: much praise but little help.” He also - very importantly - instantly conflates “Doom” in the prophecy he hears with “the Doom of Minas Tirith”: the same thing Denethor is doing when he says that, if Minas Tirith falls, the world has already fallen and there’s no point in keeping the Ring away from Sauron. When he is told that the Ring cannot be wielded to defeat Sauron by force of arms, he acts as though the other members of the Council are abandoning Gondor. And so the Ring tempts him with the power to save Minas Tirith, because that’s the only way he can concieve of for the world to be saved.

Aragorn’s response to Boromir, in speaking of the Rangers, is not a counter-boast but an attempt (like Gandalf’s with Denethor) to give Boromir a broader perspective: many people are fighting and resisting Sauron and other evil things, in their own ways (“the servants of the Enemy...are found in many places, not in Mordor only”). Gondor is not alone; it is playing one particular role, while others play other roles.

This attitude, that its battles are the only ones that matter, is quite unique to Gondor. Legolas and Gimli, fighting in the wars of Rohan and Gondor, recognize that their kin cannot come to them: “They have no need to march to war...war already marches on their own lands”. The hobbits continually think little of themselves and their actions, even while achieving great things. (One example that amuses me is the contrast at the Council of Elrond between Boromir, who thinks his comparatively uneventful journey quite heroic - “since the way was full of doubt and danger, I took the journey upon myself” - and Frodo, who regards his achievement of escaping to Rivendell while pursued by all nine of the Nazgûl, and surviving a wound that would have been worse-than-fatal to most other mortals, with an attitude of ‘well, I rather muffed that up’.) The Ents very much have their own priorites - Treebeard says “I am not really on anyone’s side, as no one is really on my side - no one cares for the woods these days” - but they involve themselves in the war beyond merely defending Fangorn, by destroying the orcs who invade Rohan from the north. Théoden likewise keeps the big picture, not just the narrow ‘good of Rohan’ in mind, continuing with his army to the relief of Gondor even as news comes of Rohan being invaded from the north and east (the aforementioned orcs whom the Ents deal with).

Frodo comes closest to understanding what Gandalf is saying in the first-quoted conversation with Denethor. After seeing the Witch-king’s army march out from Minas Morgul, Frodo is tempted to despair: “Even if my errand is performed, no one will ever know. There will be no one I can tell. It will be in vain.” But he resists this: what he had to do, he had to do, if he could, and whether Faramir or Aragorn or Elrond or Gandalf or Galadriel or anyone else ever knew about it was beside the purpose. Aragorn, too, understands it: the march on the Black Gate is the antithesis of Denethor’s perspective: sacrifice of the armies of Gondor and Rohan without even knowing what may happen after they are defeated, in the hope that they may enable someone else to win the victory. They have no way of guessing that Frodo and Sam will reach Mount Doom at the same time as the armies clash at the Black Gate; their hope is founded on the idea of distracting Sauron long enough that Frodo and Sam can destroy the Ring days later, after the armies are all dead.

And Denethor and Boromir’s attitudes are all the more ironic because, in the end, Gondor doesn’t hold up very well. They fall apart and stop even trying to man the walls of Minas Tirith after a mere two days of siege, when food supplies haven’t even begun to be an issue. For a fortified city, especially one as well-designed for defense as Minas Tirith, that’s a very short amount of time to hold out against a siege! During the march on the Black Gate, even the sight of the Plains of Gorgoroth is too much for some of the men of Gondor and Rohan, and they can’t keep going. Yes, they’re just regular people and have never seen anything this horrible before, but Frodo and Sam and now Pippin are also just regular people used to peaceful lives, and they keep going. The purpose of this comparison isn’t to run down the Men of Gondor, but to point out how deeply wrong the idea is of them being the only ones whose fight matters, the only ones with the nerve and determination to protect the rest of the world. The hobbits, who don’t think of themselves as anything special or important or strong, are the ones who save the world, and they do it through hope, endurance, self-sacrifice, love, and compassion, not through military might.

[cheesyficwriter]

can we see you write a romione one shot like what you think happened when ron told hermione what the locket said to him🥺 [I love your writing]

I understand if you can’t if you’re busy with your other writings. Thanks anyhow!

Hi there, anon! Happy Motivational Monday! Thank you so much for the ask. An emotional prompt for sure, but I hope you enjoy this take. Ron gives quite the emotional speech and I hope it provides all the feels 💜

Help Me Understand

The waves crashed against the shore, rippling and dissolving into the depths of the sand. The slight breeze in the cool night blew small wisps of sand up and into Ron’s long, auburn locks that had yet to be trimmed after months.

He came out to the beach at Shell Cottage on a nightly basis, to bask in the reflection pool that provided the only sense of calming energy in his life at the moment. He was tense, more on edge than ever, since escaping Malfoy Manor. His thoughts drifted to Hermione, as they often did, and the evidence of her torture, her pain, her suffering that he had witnessed every day since their escape. It took everything in him not to punch at the ground, hard, out of anger. But, he held it together. He held it together for her and would continue to inhale and exhale slowly and deeply, until he was even-tempered enough to go back inside.

Tonight, his quiet moment was interrupted by a familiar, small figure, who wore only a long nightgown and a thin jumper covering her upper body. Her feet were bare as she traveled through the sand and over to sit down on the rock beside Ron.  

“Hermione. Bloody hell, it’s freezing out here, what are you doing?” He pulled the one blanket he had brought outside with him off of his lap and wrapped it entirely around her shoulders, snuggling her body closer to his.

She was already shivering, he noticed grimly, but her eyes displayed only determination. “I want you to tell me about destroying the locket.”

A sharp jolt of pain seared through his chest as he thought of the locket and everything it encompassed. “Let me at least get you inside…”

“Not until you tell me.” Her fierce gaze and set jaw was very Hermione-like and he would have laughed if the situation they were currently in weren’t so dire.

Instead, he shook his head, staring down at the sand. “You won’t understand…”

“Then help me. Help me understand.” Her teeth were chattering now, despite being wrapped in a wool blanket and the comfort of Ron’s arms.

Ron faced an internal battle. So much of him wanted to just let it all out, to release all of his demons and throw them into the ocean. The other, much smaller part, still had the urge to keep those demons close. To hide them away for fear of retribution. But, time seemed to be dwindling. He couldn’t hide anymore, and with the uncertainty that loomed ahead, he needed to let go of all of the negativity so he could focus more fully on the mission. He needed to be ready to protect those he held most dear.

So that is why he took a deep breath and began spilling the truth. “Growing up, I always felt like I lived in the shadow of everyone. My older brothers, and even my little sister.”

Hermione gently squeezed his hand to encourage him to continue once he paused, an effort that relaxed him enough to take the time to find the words he wanted to say.

“Even coming to Hogwarts, I instantly befriended one of the most popular wizards of our time. And then...there’s you…” Ron’s deep blue ceruleans met Hermione’s chocolate brown orbs, desperately hoping his words were coming out the way he intended. “The smartest, cleverest witch of our age. I often thought, well, why do they need me?”

Hermione’s head straightened instantly, “Ron-”

“No, please.” He lifted a hand to interrupt what he knew was likely to be a lengthy diatribe that he didn’t have the patience for, “I need to get this out so we never have to talk about it again.” Hermione must have recognized the seriousness in his voice, because she only nodded in response.

“I got into my head…” He let out a low growl of frustration as he kicked up chunks of sand with the toe of his shoe, “I dwelled on my own insecurities and lacked confidence so many times. With school, with my family, with Quidditch…” A final pause had him meeting Hermione’s gaze once more, his fingers subtly tracing the lines on the palm of her hand, “...with you.”

The tingling sensation of their joined hands sparked the energy, the courage he needed to continue on. “Being on the run...it took a toll on me. I know the locket said things to you also...and to Harry. Mine...fuck. It was like every negative thought I’ve had about myself poured into that locket and that’s all that I could hear. It consumed me, Hermione.”

Hermione’s lips parted, her eyes watering. She spoke in a breathy whisper, “Tell me what it said.”

Ron swallowed hard. His body was trembling, although he wasn’t quite sure if it was due to the cold or if it was because of Hermione’s hands now trailing up and down his arm soothingly. His voice cracked as he confessed, “That I was least loved by my mother, who wished for a daughter. That she would have even preferred to have had Harry as a son instead of me. And that you…” He bowed his head, afraid to meet her gaze, “...you thought I was nothing compared to Harry.”

There was no mistaking the sharp gasp that left her lips and the soft whimpers that followed. He knew she had to be crying, but he couldn’t bear to look at her.

“When I left, Hermione, I truly thought that you both were better off without me. That I was only holding you back. The instant I disapparated, and the locket no longer had control over me, I realized what a mistake I had made.” He needed to see her now, he needed her to see him. All of him. He lifted his head and tucked a hand underneath her chin to lock eyes with hers, “I’ll tell you Hermione, that feeling, that feeling of having left like that and having no way of knowing if I’d ever be able to find you, to see you again...it ripped me to shreds. It was worse than any bad thought I’ve ever had about myself. It was the darkest place I’d ever been.”

Hermione drew her bottom lip between her teeth, tears cascading down her pale cheeks. Ron reached out to brush them away with the pads of his thumb. He smiled then, as he took in her beautiful complexion that glowed from the moonlight behind her.

“And then it was you. Your voice, Hermione. You are the best part of me. That little ball of light appeared out of the deluminator and guided me home. To you.”

She choked out a sob as she placed her cold, bony fingers on top of his hands that still rested on her cheeks. He gave her one last encouraging smile before lowering his hands to wrap his entire arm around her shoulders and pull her close to his body again.

“So, I found Harry and the sword. When the locket opened, everything I just admitted to you came pouring out. All of my insecurities, all of my flaws. I saw you...kissing Harry.” He spat out the words, like he was tasting salt in his mouth. He could feel a bit of the anger bubbling back inside of him, “It took everything I had to push through and destroy that bloody thing. It was, single handedly, the most rewarding moment of my life, an instant weight that had been lifted off of my shoulders. Like I could finally breathe again after months of feeling suffocated.”

When Hermione finally lifted her head from his chest, she looked him directly in the eye and placed a hand over his heart. “Some of the hardest battles we ever have to face are with ourselves. I couldn’t be more proud of the man you have become, Ronald Weasley. Please know that. Let go of this locket, please. Let it all go.” She waved her free hand out towards the ocean.

Fuck, he loved her. He tucked a curl behind her ear, watching her pleasantly as she leaned into his hand, closed her eyes, and let out a peaceful sigh. “I was determined that if I were to make it back to you, that locket would never hold any more power over me. Never again.”

Hermione leaned her head on his shoulder as they both returned their gazes out to the expansive sea. Ron turned his nose slightly into her curls, inhaling the scent of her strawberry shampoo, his voice muffled into her hair, “Friendship. Love. That’s what I’ll keep fighting for.”

Hermione pivoted her head, their noses almost brushing together from how intimately they were sitting. She smiled brightly, looking more refreshed than she had in weeks, “All is fair in love and war, right?”

[arizona-trash-bag]

so i get that every time the CCP does something to flex its overreach, the world tends to step back and look away. the chinese govt is a dumpster fire, we all know. how unfortunate for china, how embarrassing for chinese people. as i watch english language journalism proliferate their laissez-faire attitude whilst colonialist powers continue to profit from the destabilization of chinese social structure, it’s been tempting for me to step back as well bc looking at it is painful, but this time for some reason I can’t.

it’s not that I particularly want to focus on it either, but there’s something I can’t afford to lose here. when I reconnected with chinese culture, it was like for the first time in my life i had something that was truly mine. all the things that I had grown up believing were whole and perfect, the western ideals of capitalism and christianity that I was taught were the foundations of society - turned out to not only be deeply flawed, but fundamentally incompatible with who I really am. I was taken away from my country of birth as a child, separated from people who look like me and know me. for a long time I had known there was a part of me that was separate from western industrialism and internalized racism and all the other bullshit that comes from colonialism by proxy, that I had to find and reclaim. I can’t say that what I found was perfect by any means, but at least it was uniquely mine in a way that nothing before that ever was.

it’s therefore pretty ironic that at this point in time, china is becoming more isolationist than ever. at some point the govt may not even recognize me as chinese. yet still I walk around sporting a chinese name, a chinese face. for better or worse china is a part of me, the chinese blood running through me can't be stripped away. and as our culture and identity are distorted by would-be usurpers who hold power for a microfragment of our history and I can’t do anything except sit here and watch, if that’s the only thing I can do then i’ll do it. i’ll stay connected to my roots, in whichever way they care to find me. i’ll learn more about our culture, history and customs; i’ll consume more of our books, songs and films. i’ll hear the stories of real chinese people, not just the lines the party feeds us. if no one else will witness us then i’ll keep witnessing. i’ve claimed this, it’s mine.

[batfamspews]

Romance tropes are good and all, but you know what relationship trope is real juicy? Mentor/student. Now before you roll your eyes and brush me off, I’m not talking about the run-of-the-mill Ben Kanobi and Luke Skywalker mentor/student relationship where a wise old man teaches a curious youngster a skill set that makes them priceless. While the student might be frustrated with or appreciative to the mentor, the emotional connection there is pretty shallow. When the mentor dies we shrug it off, the student cries a little bit, everyone forgets them and there’s next to no emotional impact.

No, I’m talking about the relationship between a rebellious, rude teenager deemed worthless by society. Im talking about a straight rod, middle aged mentor with a religious zeal for honor and who has probably never broken a single rule in their life (Bonus points if they had a legalistic, obedience centered job such as a police officer or military veteran). Hear me out here.

Student is a messed up, broken kid either lacking authority or with crappy parental figures that don’t care about them. They’re a rebel and a troublemaker by choice and whether they’re proud of it or not they’re not going to change any time soon. Finally society gets to a point where they’re not going to tolerate student’s crap any longer and are ready to make an example out of them. That’s where mentor comes in. The clean-cut mentor sees the world as a system of values where everything is either right or wrong and there are no gray areas. They are not only the most respected person in society but one of the most adored. In other words, they are the exact opposite of student. When student faces harsh charges for their actions, mentor takes pity on them, resolving that if only someone had taught the teenager the difference between right and wrong they would be a loyal, upstanding citizen. Suddenly mentor is enlightened. What if THEY were the one to take student under their wing and change the course of their life? What a noble cause! Confident in their ability as a teacher, mentor offers to take student under their care and make it their personal responsibility to indoctrinate them. Student is reluctant to accept this because it means losing all of their previous freedom to an unsuspecting, ignorant mentor, but they have no choice. Student knows one thing for sure though. Mentor is going to regret this decision every moment they’re together.

Fast forward and nothing is going according mentor’s plan at all. Student is going out of their way to cause trouble and be disrespectful, and when mentor tries to teach them anything they blatantly ignore them, making it very clear that they don’t care. Mentor slowly begins to realize that they don’t know the first thing about raising children and have never once in their whole life felt so discouraged and clueless. The pressure builds up, until finally after a yelling argument with the kid the mentor breaks and tells them they wish they had never tried to help the student in in the first place. However, what hurts mentor the most is student’s response. “Figures. Nobody’s ever wanted me. I wouldn’t expect you to either.” The matter-of-fact apathy in student’s demeanor kills the mentor. They excuse themselves.

This confirms to student that they aren’t wanted and though they’re not surprised or even disappointed, for some reason their heart feels heavy and they decide to make things easy on the mentor. Later on that night, mentor is summoned. Student had gone behind their back and committed a heinous crime. To the rest of the community the solution is clear. They pat the mentor on the back and assure them that they did everything they could, that just by trying to redeem the lost soul they had proven to be one of the most heroic members of society. However, student has proven themselves impossible to correct and therefore must be dealt with rashly (e.g. they could be hanged for their crimes, sent to a juvenile prison, an asylum, a slave in the coal mines, just whatever works best for the fictional universe they’re in). What it all boils down to is that mentor doesn’t just have the right to bring the student to justice, but they should. It’s not just the fair choice, but it’s the wise, honorable, right choice. It’s the perfect situation for them. Give up the student that’s caused them nothing but pain and be hailed a hero.

They can’t do it. For the first time in their life, mentor is tempted to go against their better judgement, their honor and the wise counsel of their peers and make an emotional decision. Student was wrong when they said that nobody wanted them. Mentor wants them, though they can’t quite explain why.

Mentor is told they’re making a mistake, that their choice is foolish, that they’re just prolonging students overdue judgement, but they don’t care. They have made their decision. Mentor will recompense for student’s actions and though it will cost them both their honor and their physical possessions, they will take student back as their own and won’t give up trying to get through to them. Student is in shock. They had never dreamed that someone would sacrifice so much for a person who didn’t deserve it- specifically them. For the first time in their life they felt wanted. Protected. Heck, even loved.

Student doesn’t change over night, but they’re clearly more respectful towards mentor, more enamored by them and more receptive of their teaching. They no longer see mentor as their slaveholder, but as their protector and friend. Mentor doesn’t go easy on them and student does not hesitate to complain about the workload, but they begin to work with a new zeal because now they have a motive to work. They want to make mentor proud. For the first time they realize they’re desperately starved for mentor’s approval, so they work hard , begin to copy their habits, even go out of their way to do things without being asked. They never talk about their feelings, but they want to be close to mentor. For the first time they know what it feels like to be loved, and they want to return that love in every way possible.

Mentor has no idea what possessed student to change, but nothing in the world could have made them happier. They begin to recognize the student’s longing for approval and it occurs to them how much they want to pay it forth. Mentor knows what it’s like to do great things and be praised for their deeds, but they have never been more proud of anything than the scruffy little public nuisance that lived in their house. Student wasn’t just their responsibility, they became their joy. They were proud enough to call them their son/daughter.

Of course student doesn’t become perfect overnight. Clearly they revert to what they know and cause trouble multiple other times. However, the disappointment master expresses to them when they’re caught is enough to make them realize that they’re former way of living is no longer appealing to them. They value their mentor’s opinion too much and nothing hurts more than their disapproval.

This is just a sample of a mentor student relationship that could work in a variety of different storylines. It doesn’t need to be the main focus of the story (i.e. if the theme is action and adventure, then the student and mentor might be forced to go on a dangerous expedition, or the student might grow up and leave the mentor, or either the student or mentor is taken and the other has to go save them, something like that). What’s great about this relationship trope is that it creates a solid base for an impactful story. It might explain where the student gets their ideals, why they’re so strongly committed to their mission, or why the mentor is willing to give up everything they hold true to in order to save one specific person. If done correctly, imagine how painful it would be to the readers if either the mentor or student had to sacrifice themselves for the other. Imagine the arguments. Imagine them crying because they’re sick with worry for the other one.

The thing that sets this relationship apart from the Obi Wan and Luke mentor/student trope is the focus is on the relationship and not either person’s abilities or personal value. Both the mentor and student have to give up aspects of themselves, but they end up with something they value much more. It’s what’s special about both characters. I believe the lack of this relational foundation in most movies and books is why viewers lack interest in the main character’s goal when they’re looking for someone they care about. If the relationship is the backbone of the character’s motives, then it needs to be the backbone of the audience’s reason to cheer the character on.

What sets this apart from romance tropes (other than romance tropes being ridiculously overused) is that this is a relationship trope almost everyone can relate to. Not everybody has fallen in love, but everyone has had an authority figure in their life and many have had authority over someone else. The audience can relate to the characters, and the relationship becomes more real to them. And while there is absolutely nothing wrong with a romance trope when it’s DONE RIGHT, in my personal opinion, a well executed mentor/student trope tops all else. Or maybe I’m just a sucker for middle aged, honor-centered, FLAWED military veterans and rebel teen nuisances becoming each other’s everything. You can judge for yourself.

[9worldstales]

Loki & Thor in “Thor & Loki – Double Trouble” n° 4

So we’ve reached the last issue of “Thor & Loki – Double Trouble” and I’m gonna miss it.

To refresh everyone’s mind this comic is just a funny story that has no pretences to be serious about two brothers, Thor and Loki, who can’t get along and their meeting with their alternate selves.

I don’t know why the past month it wasn’t released, maybe since this number has Loki meeting with his Variant self they wanted to wait for Loki in the “Loki” series to do the same first? Or maybe there’s other reasons. Not a big deal.

Anyway the siblings have lost the orb that would allow them to go back home so they’re searching for it with Female Thor.

Loki has been characterized as very smart but overall doesn’t like to do physical work so when they start to search he wonders if they can use a chariot. No such luck.

Now a tiny personal peeve of mine is that they show Loki freezing and not the two Thors despite him being a Frost Giant but whatever.

Loki is clever enough to have on himself marshmallows to eat (of which he seems to be a glutton)

...and even if he asks for a ladder when they’ve to climb a mountain he’s shown as being the first getting there (he’s standing on top of it while the Thor are just climbing on the top).

Now, here is a bit confuse. Loki seems, for unknown reasons, to fall into the nest atop the mountain when Fjalara, a giant bird is about to be back. Female Thor says to hide so she and Thor jump in the nest as well.

Someone, we don’t know who, comments he wouldn’t have chosen to hide under her while someone else claims birds are sensitive so they shouldn’t upset her.

For unknown reasons Fjalara notices Loki who has just turned into a newborn bird so the two Thors ‘heroically’ catches their chance to escape. As Lady Thor wonders if they should help Loki Thor, proving he’s a ‘good’ brother, says ‘no’ because that’s the sort of sibling love they have.

Okay… this is not a story in which Thor will be the first to show care for his brother. Pity.

Though I get Loki is terrible but really, Thor is clearly not a good brother either so each has what he deserves.

At this point though, Lady Thor figures the bird is just Lady Loki who retransform back into a human and greets her.

Lady Thor blames herself claiming she should have known it was her while Thor is surprised there’s another Loki. Lady Loki asks them if they’re looking for the orb which of course she has but, although Loki confirms it he’s more interested in praising his female self which in return praises him back because LOKIS ARE THE BEST! Not only I agree but that’s how you do Variants of the same person and funny Narcissism right.

It’s a page and it’s perfect.

It’s clear they’re Variants of the same person, even more than the Thors and they don’t try to compete about who’s the better Loki but just shower themselves with appreciation. And despite this they don’t fall in love with each other.

Thor interrupts them and Loki realizes they should recover the orb but of course, as they’re the same, Lady Loki wants it too. An argument that again remarks how they’re the same person as they react the same and they’re equally strong ensues.

We don’t have a Mary Sue here, they’re the same so they’re equally strong as they keep on transforming trying to steal the orb in a battle that reminds me of the one in “The Sword in the Stone” between Merlin and Madam Mim.

Meanwhile the Thors wait and discuss on how they both find being Thor… ‘glorious’ though they seem to lack assertiveness.

Really, I wonder if this number has been done to parody the “Loki” series as well.

We’ve also a nice moment in which Thor admits he’d like to get along better with his brother… and Lady Thor tells him the Lokis get along very well with each other… until they’re ready to kill each other. That’s a subtle way of explaining the problem of being the same person.

They accept each other but the fact they’re the same stop them from completing each other and put them into competition as they want the same thing in the same time in the same way.

If Thor were to make an effort to tolerate and accept Loki more, they could instead complete each other and get along better. Lady Thor also point out Loki is trying to get the orb to bring Thor home (honestly I’m not really sold on this but it’s nice).

After a lot of time in which the Lokis are completely balanced Loki decides to give up. It’s not random, this series keep Loki as intelligent and quick witted and so what he does is part of a plan because, although this story took care to make the Lokis the same, the hero is the FIRST LOKI so he’s slightly smarter and he has a plan.

They don’t try to make Lady Loki the Mary Sue who can easily beat Loki with a hand tied behind her back or that always get things her way.

So, Loki claims, while remaining IC that he’s not going to waste his energy (with previous scenes confirming Loki doesn’t like to waste his energy) to try to get back a orb Lady Loki doesn’t know how to use.

To a confused Thor who asks him whats’ wrong Loki tells to keep quiet as he knows himself.

Lady Loki knows it’s a trick, she’s not dumbed down. However when Loki tells her not to do something she just can’t resist because Lokis always do what they aren’t supposed to do and both Lokis know but again, they can’t resist.

I mean, look at this page and at how it’s beautifully expressive.

And the funniest part is not only that Lady Loki did it but that Lady Thor didn’t want her to do it (even though she should have figured it was all Loki’s ploy to make Lady Loki do it) which Lady Loki took as an incentive because… Loki.

Thor asks his Loki what would happen now and Loki admits he has no idea in the same way he had no idea it would bring them there.

The result is they summoned a Midgard serpent again. Lady Thor echoes his again in a worried tone while Lady Loki admires the Midgard serpent.

At this point Thor gets they can cooperate and takes Loki’s arm telling him to get ready, to which Loki confirms he’s born ready and then Loki grabs the orb...

...while Thor makes them to fly away until they’re on the Midgard’s serpent back. At this point Loki turns the orb counter-clockwise so they can go home.

Lady Loki takes the loss of the orb well and says she’ll repay Lady Thor ‘for backing her up’ by doing something mean and unexpected. So yeah, they’ve probably the same kind of relation Thor and Loki had.

Anyway Loki and Thor are back home and back to the mess they left, which Thor again blames on Loki.

Loki admits he discovered by that experience Lokis could be annoying and stubborn and apologizes to Thor for the first time, because he doesn’t want to be annoying. Thor is surprised but they have a beautiful second in which Thor smiles at him, suggesting they should get back on cleaning so Odin won’t scold them and Loki agrees… for a panel.

In the next he’s already suggesting they could try something else rather daring he has been hatching, his new great plan. Basically Loki is showing that, although he doesn’t want to be annoying, he just can’t change.

In reply Thor says he’s very busy… but we know he’ll end up following Loki’s schemes again because Thor too can’t change.

And that’s the end.

And okay, I love this 4 issues series.

It was clearly a funny story, uncomplicated and meant to be funny without being judgemental.

Both brothers have flaws, both brothers can do better if they accept each other and cooperate and being exactly the same doesn’t mean you won’t argue or that you’ll be pleased with the other.

It also played the Variants right as, although they were Variants, they clearly were a Thor and Loki Variants and you would have recognized them even if they hadn’t introduced themselves and you had no idea a Lady Thor and a Lady Loki exist. Variants were well balanced among them and the story had a Variant triumph on the other only when it was fair (Lady Thor wins on Thor because that’s her place and Loki wins on Lady Loki because that’s his orb) and logic (Thor undervalued Lady Thor, Lady Loki was distracted).

Yeah, issues are addressed in an extremely light and not resolving manner, Lady Thor explains Thor deep down his brother cares for him and Loki understands he can be annoying and admits he doesn’t want tobut, for the sake of humour, they can’t change but that was the whole point of the story.

This title didn’t promise great resolutions and growth but just fun and I love it.

So really, read it, I wholeheartedly recommend it!