#i mean imo if he did he'd be playing whack-a-mole. we'd always be coming up with new bullshit

[radiantmists]

it's just occurred to me that if dream can strip the rationalizations from serial killers' minds and make them realize what they did was wrong, he ought to be able to do that for any prejudice or other internal narrative that justifies being awful to other people.

obviously there's a question of free will*, and since dream isnt omnipotent or omniscient, he might not be able to do this to everyone about everything, but we see with John Dee that the power to remove dreams can reach quite far, and it's kinda wild to think that dream is powerful enough that the Problem of Evil becomes directly relevant to him and his characterization.

of course, dream is also not immune to comforting self delusions that rationalize being shitty, so we know he would not be a perfect arbiter of which beliefs to strip away. in problem of evil terms he is a god who is neither all-good nor all-powerful, and he's self-aware enough to know that, at least.

the compromise he's reached, creating dreams and nightmares (and possibly inspiring stories) to push people to be better, and to reveal their darker sides to them, is an understandable decision, especially since the corinthian is proof that even only going that far he can make mistakes that make people worse.

but again, we do also know that dream can get too bound by his rules and ideas of what should be and what must be, and it begs the question of what the world would be like if a being like dream was taking a more active role in limiting people's tendency to justify terrible things?

*in the case of the serial killers dream seems to think the corinthian has somehow created/encouraged these narratives while rogue and that he's therefore correcting an error he caused rather than unnaturally modifying people's minds, so that kinda makes sense as him making an exception