#in which minecraft is an important part of the plot and everyone knows everyone through various means and shenanigans

[henrytanael19]

Be Eridan: Ask roomie what he thinks of your current fit

Chat is this anything?

[bc-jpeg]

hello i love your art so much, do you perhaps have any tips on character design bc yours are so distinct to me? thank you <3

tysm, anon! I'm glad you like my designs, since you decided to ask me for tips <:D

actually, I don't consider myself very skilled in creating character designs, and I don't really feel like i’m focusing on this in my work, but from the outside view I really like watching this area in my favorite media. I don't know if I can give really working tips, they may not be suitable at all for your creative process and character vision.

here I’ll talk more about creating a design based on an existing image, like minecraft skins, where everything is shown in a very minimalistic way originally and you just have to work from it.

I try to focus as much as possible on the feeling of "is this thing actually suitable for the character or not?", trying to create some kind of composition in the overall design of the character so that everything is in its right place. and that's it, I guess..

I don’t like frequent themed designs that changes every arc/season/smth. in my opinion, yes, it can be beautiful, but it doesn't work at all in my head. some characters TEND to change clothes frequently, sometimes it's literally a character feature that explained by the plot, but it’s not for everyone, I feel. instead, I try to change the original design a little bit for various occasions. especially when you have a base of specific items of clothing, it's a lot of fun to try to keep the same clothes, but changing the shape, details, etc.

I don't like changing the canonical design much, for me it feels wrong by default. but it's still fun to adapt things to your own vision, the main thing is not to get carried away. these frames of the canon makes you think outside the box always, I love it.

logic and practicality are also important to me, simply because that's how I live my life. I’ll obviously choose something practical and comfortable for a daily physical work or a survival games, rather than something fancy. BUT at the same time, I want to do some ordinary practical details fancy still, because it's interesting in the context of practical design.

this doesn’t mean that I’ll assert every detail only on the logic basis, but most often it is so. I like the thinking process itself, how I can adapt a thing so that it works in design both visually and practically and works for the character’s essence.

+ personally, I really like asymmetry in designs, it looks interesting

therefore, I will probably highlight from my entire answer:

— focus on your sense of character, but do not forget about logic and practicality, it’s so useful sometimes.

— try to analyze the character as much as possible so that you can convey many features through their design. shapes and colors are the ultimate basis.

— often look at the design in full picture, so you don’t get some overloaded parts, otherwise the whole design falls apart

[sources with universal advices from professional character designers who have been in their industry for a long time will be useful here, you can find many videos on this topic on youtube]

— references. save as many references as you want, scroll through the pinterest feed at least once a day, there are many unexpected details that can be used to create a character design. artbooks for various media are a very cool thing for this, I dream of a collection of such books.

— if I work on something from scratch, it’s easy to draw a multiple versions of the same design, with some changes, just to see which of them is working the most. also always trying to analyse each of them, “what I like about this version? and what about that?” and etc. after the time you can find a perfect combo of each criteria you like from every versions.

— sometimes also you just have to give it a time, if you doubt some parts of the design.

I tried to think on something more to add here, but for now that’s it-

[lilgarbitch]

Will Thots🥰

Pairing: Will Ramos x Reader

CW: he just loves to talk…even to talk you through it

Author’s Note: My adoration for this man is never-ending and it’s becoming harder to shut me up about it so I’m just gonna yap here❤️

Tags: @theanarchymuse95 @badomensgoodomens @xmads-omensx @alwaysfightforwhoyouare @thatchickwiththecamera @follow-me-down-to-wonderland

Everyone who knows Will knows that he loves to talk. And everyone who knows him could never hate it. He’s insanely hyper and just overall adorable. He’s the most sociable person you’ve ever met. That person who starts up conversations with people in the same aisle as him in convenience stores, even if you’re on a 3 AM 7/11 trip for munchies. Despite his tattoos and frat boy-like style, the second he opens his mouth, strangers lose any former judgement and begin to adore him just as much as you do.

He’s the kind of guy to start conversations back up like they never ended, even after not seeing someone for months. When you go out with him to events pertaining to his band or even just gatherings of friends with friends of friends you’ve never even known existed, everyone has and will speak to him at least once, if not spend the whole night in the conversation he is oh so willing to let drift from topic to topic, as long as it means he can connect with people and make new friends.

Even when you two are alone, the conversation never dies. It occasionally gets to a point where you’re about to tape his mouth shut when you have to keep rewinding scenes of tv shows, whether you’re missing out on important parts, or you’ve been trying to get him to catch onto the plot twist of a show you love, yet he keeps asking questions that will literally be answered if he just paid attention.

But you also love that about him. Even watching the scariest movies together, he’s cracking jokes and saying whatever comes to mind, always leading to the two of you having to either pause or rewind because you were laughing so hard. It even gave you the freedom to start speaking your own thoughts on things, no longer holding back questions or jokes in fear it’ll never land. If he was confident enough to speak without worry, who says you can’t?

Another thing he never held back from was his compliments. Even if the two of you were bumming out in bed, mid aggressive battle of a video game or just working on a Minecraft world together, him working towards building up his inventory to fight the ender dragon and you decorating the block mansion you created for the two of you, he’d take every chance he got to give you that cheesy gorgeous smile and tell you that you were the most beautiful person he’s ever met. To tell you that, even though your hair was a rats nest from not brushing it yet that day, the color you just had done was looking out of this world amazing. He’d compare you to whatever came to his mind in that moment. Describing your eyes like nature sights you two visited or how he wished you could just wear his t shirts and boxers out to dinner with him because they just looked so hot on you.

Reader discretion is advised. MDNI

There wasn’t a situation in which he stopped talking. You were never one that thought you enjoyed dirty talk that much, but once you started dating Will, you didn’t think you could ever live without it.

He would be blunt about it. You two would just be relaxing on the couch when he’d turn to you and, saying with his whole chest, admit how badly he needed to taste you. It caught you off guard the first time, but the more he was open with how desperately he was for you, you were worried you’d start getting off with just his words.

And you couldn’t let him know that. Because if he found out, you already knew he’d start whispering things in your ear in public. Because he took every chance he had to talk, especially to prove to you just how much he loved, adored, and needed you. It never ended. Out of the bedroom, and in.

The way his voice would rasp as he told you how good you felt around him. He’d use every sultry adjective in the book to describe what he felt, always saying the most perfect thing, even if his mind wasn’t fully there. He’d use the most sensually words when you made love, and the most lewd descriptions when he needed it rough and dirty.

Even when you were pleasing him and his mind was a jumbled mess of pleasure, he still kept trying. A whiny ‘fuck’ here and a groaned ‘holy shit’ there. He never stopped talking. And you think you may have enjoyed that more. The way he’d slur his words as he tried so hard to tell you how good you were making him feel. The way his eyes would squeeze shut and his head would be thrown back and you finally thought you’ve reduced him to nothing but squirms and whimpers, he’d manage to throw in a ‘you’re fucking perfect’ with what little voice he had left.

And, boy, was this man an absolute king at aftercare. Even if you two were completely winded, he’d hold you close and whisper how perfect you were in every way. As the two of you slowly dozed off, he’d tell you how much he loved you and how you changed his life for the better from the moment you joined it, even if he was mumbling and slurring his half-asleep words.

And he was always had to be the last one to say ‘I love you,’ even if it meant a 10 minute long, back and forth battle.

[katkat030]

I remember you mentioning “The Watchers”, who are they? Can you tell me some lore behind them?

This is a rabbit hole that I don’t fully have time to go down myself right now but there’s a gold mine of information here and it can be split into about 3 parts.

From what I know:

There’s the original Watcher lore which is canon to Grian’s Evolution SMP, which started in 2017 and ended just over a year later. My knowledge of the SMP is mostly second hand, but the premise of it was to run through all updates of minecraft in order from the earliest version (buggy, grainy, fairly difficult to survive) to the more recent ones (transitioning bit by bit into the game we know today)

Evo smp and watcher lore is really concisely explained in a tumblr post here.

from the Evo wiki: Grian's final episode of the server was of the dragon fight, where he joined The Watchers when everyone jumped through the portal after killing the dragon. His joining of the Watchers had a modified end screen poem, where a text color representing Grian and additional text mentioning some of the other Evo members was added in. if you follow the link to The Watchers you’ll get more information on what exactly they are!

Grian talked about Evo and the watchers briefly in a podcast a good few years back (co-run by the same person who voices the Hermitcraft recap actually, Pixlriffs!) - when he joined Hermitcraft in Season 6, it's my understanding that his version of watcher lore ended with Evo. Canonically, Hermitcraft!Grian isn’t influenced by them at all. This isn’t the case in fan lore, which I’ll touch on later. There happen to be some incredibly interesting example of a what-if-they-do-follow/influence/kidnap/affect-him by talented writers, so if you want fanfic recommendations just ask :3

Where it gets really interesting is that creator Martyn, ign InTheLittleWood, decided to continue a version of watcher lore. This "eyesandears" (<- tumblr tag for it. Will contain spoilers) watcher lore is only canon to his interpretation of the series, and isn’t a server-wide thing that others incorporate into their videos. This runs throughout the life series and includes cryptic poems/rhymes, elaborate reasonings for why canonical events took place, Jimmy’s canary curse, who remembers the events of previous seasons and so on.

Note that the life series isn’t scripted, and has very loose guidelines for how players should act besides adhering to the rules. Martyn therefore has the story adapt as the series evolves (pun unintended), and a great example of this was his stream after limited life (life series iteration number 4) ended. He’s also on tumblr, because of course. This is his vod - I don’t have the time to go through it again myself. It contains lots of spoilers, but if you hang around in the fandom long enough you’ll begin to recognise the winners of each season and a few key events/alliances/betrayals/plot points regardless. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

As far as I know, none of the other life series creators really know much about this or keep this in mind when the life series is going. It doesn’t influence them, nor does Martyn seem to go out of his way to incorporate huge amounts of it into his own pov. The lore adapts to what the players do, not the other way around.

There’s also the fanon (fan canon) watcher lore which is incredibly well (and quickly!) covered by Ezzriin, I’ll link that video here - this is more important for understanding why Grian’s depicted the way he is (and exactly what that usually entails).

The links I’ve included explain things better and more concisely than I can. Martyn’s 2 hour vod may take some time to get through, but I recommend at least checking out the others! :)

[ourchunkysalsa]

whats wrong with the vampire characters like mentally im curious, havent watched past the first episode but ik a lot of the plot from tumblr posts

i need you to know that this is the first ask i’ve ever been asked, thank you so much for believing in me to answer it. i will do my best without infodumping too much.

short answer: so many things. like so many i cant ever capture it. i’m being slightly funny in these descriptions but everyone has so much trauma. such a good show, i cannot recommend enough. everyone is an unreliable narrator :)

long answer:

louis: cant even begin to get into all that!!! but if i had to begin, stuck between humanity and vampirism; shame and liberation; forgetting and remembering… oh and also everyone is in love with him. he’s the one being interviewed! so we see everything from his point of view— mostly, besides the diaries that claudia wrote out.

claudia: made into a vampire at the age of 14, which isn’t supposed to happen!! fierce, smart vampire who is stuck in a body that cannot match her mind. doomed by the narrative to never be chosen by her father/brother louis over his romances. has a … tumultuous relationship with her mother lestat, who is actually her father that is her maker, because she is so like him. (maker= the vamp who made you a vamp) wish she could’ve read ‘i know why the caged bird sings’ so bad.

lestat (romance one of louis’): white, blonde, and french. mother of claudia, husband to louis— maker to both. temperamental, whore-like behavior. also we only know him through the lens of louis (and kinda claudia and armand) who is as unreliable of a narrator as they come— whether he means to be or not. lestat inspires quite an interesting fanbase— in show and in the fandom! theatre kid…

armand (romance two): thinks himself to be a pathetic sopping wet rag of a man but is one of the most powerful vampires. enchanting eyes and a helpless demeanor that makes you believe him while he gaslights you. a walking paradox. canonical minecraft player and potential old man fucker.

daniel (kinda third romance and also something much worse): born to fuck the vampires, forced to interview them and end up with a lifetime of psychological damage because of it. parallel to claudia in the most insane ways.

okay, one serious note: louis and claudia being Black in the show (as opposed to the book and movie, which saw louis as a white plantation owner) is a very important part of who they are. while all of the characters have deep traumas, i would not be doing a description of these characters justice without bringing up that louis, claudia, and armand— as he is south east asian— have unique problems due to their race, sexuality, gender— respectively and overlapping— in the past and present. the show is great for many things, but one of my favorites is how it explores the way that people of color— and those who are or intersect with being queer or female-identifying— have power in this imagined world of vampirism, but how they are still impacted by being part of a marginalized category. that tangent was kinda just for me.. i’m doing my thesis about this and this show, generally.

anyway. hopefully i have scratched the surface of this fucked up ice berg for you!

[mcytblr-archive]

SORRY I know I keep sending you stuff, but I JUST remembered very specific localized mcytblr trend in november-december? Of 2020. There were like. Two or three explicit fics on ao3 posted or popularized around the same time of dwt with a glow squid? I have my posts where it became a thing but for like one week people were constantly talking about the crazy fics with dwt and random very specific things. I think there was a sponge and an enderman too, and there was no conversation, just half of mcytblr being really laughably shocked at its existence.

And (this part is a little disturbing) then there was the fic in the minecraft tag during November 2020 that for weeks was at the very top of the recents tab because the author kept changing the posted date containing like all of the worst things and it had everyone putting up warning posts about it because it was so terribly triggering

AND there was the discussion during exile, when dwt brought up putting cc/c markers in front of creator names to differentiate, where they started calling it lore instead of plot or story and people started posting really sad posts about how they missed calling it the old thing, and that they were using the word lore wrong.

If I remember anything else I will just put it in a huge post and post it in like a month so I don't go overboard I'm sooooo sorry this blog has just unlocked too many memories. Not drawing kristin fat discourse. Whatever was going on with the is fundy-dwt marriage actually canon or is George a homewrecker. That one schlatt thumbnail. Racoon tommyinnit and the chat personifications. EVERYTHING that happened with ranboo and the /p /r wiki edits. The Sapnap George Hannah goes to tubbos house and nearly kills Michael _ and then eret has to go and hide him, oh my gosh it's not even important stuff it's just everything.

no, this is fantastic! i'd completely forgotten about it, but yes, the glow squid fics absolutely happened. i can even try to find the fics, it should be fairly easy-- ao3 has a MUCH better search function than tumblr, as well as letting fics be orphaned instead of deleted.

as for the other fic, i do vaguely remember it-- iirc, it definitely involved patches (dream's cat) and possibly his sister. i think i read it all the way through once, rubbernecking at a car crash style, but i don't recall enough about it to be absolutely sure.

something i just remembered because you brought it up; there was also the "The ___ Fic" series, which was a series of gory, often sexual fics about the dream team. the ones i can remember are "the toe fic" and "the teeth fic", but there were at least ten of them in total.

as for putting everything together in one big post, i would absolutely love that! if you tag me in it when it gets posted, i would absolutely reblog it; it's one thing to archive firsthand posts from the time period, but retrospectives and starting a community dialogue can be instrumental to preserving the things that either weren't saved or were considered so ubiquitous as to not merit an explanation.

[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

[tumblingclockwork]

HI LEAF IVE BEEN HYPERFIXATING ON MC STORY MODE AND ON STAMPYCAT PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE TELL ME YOUR THOUGHTS ABOUT STAMPYCAT BEING THE WHITE PUMPKIN IT SOUNDS SO COOL

HELLO HI YES I AM MORE THAN WILLING TO EXPLAIN

Before I start I wanna give a huge shout out to @mephones-declining-mental-health who was actually the first to point a lot of this out. We spent a lot of time putting this all together and she deserves a ton of credit for it. So go check them out.

ok so mcsm is an old game so quick refresher on episode 6: Jesse and his gang end up in another world and are put into a murder-mystery type situation. They’re trapped in the mansion due to zombies and have to survive until the day while the person who invited them all to the mansion (who goes by “The White Pumpkin”) kills them off one-by-one in order to obtain the Enchanted Flint And Steel. Which Jesse is also trying to get. Minus the main cast, everyone in this murder mystery is based off and voiced by famous minecraft YouTubers from the time. This was a pretty genius move on TellTale’s part because it meant the players were already going in with a certain level of attachment to these characters, allowing the game to kill them off in a way that would be emotionally impactful without effecting the plot of the overall story that much.

The people you meet in the mansion are the following youtubers: CaptainSparklez, TorqueDawg, StampyCat, TheDiamondMinecart, LDShadowLady, StacyPlays, and CassieRose

Multiple of these YouTubers are killed off (though some can be either saved or killed depending on your choices) and [spoiler warning] Cassie Rose is revealed to be the white pumpkin at the end. Her motivation being that she’s stuck away from her home world for and desperate to get back.

Now here’s the thing: that doesn’t make Any sense.

Cassie doesn’t have a single line or any piece of evidence that would necessarily point to her being the white pumpkin. The only real evidence that points to her feels so last minute and forced. And just completely disregards any other scene in which you were collecting evidence.

This would be less frustrating if there weren’t multiple other people that had far more evidence against them. But the one who has the most undeniable evidence against them? StampyCat.

Now I don’t know if they changed the story halfway through development or if the writers at TellTale are just bad at their jobs (equally likely but there is some evidence to suggest Cassie was not always the intended White Pumpkin) but Stampy has the most evidence, best motive, and would have just been a very interesting villain entirely.

Let’s go over everything.

So for starters. The first murder.

Spoiler alert! But the first murder is TorqueDawg. He stands under a dispenser that shoots him with a poison tipped arrow and he dies.

Now, tipped arrows were a relatively new thing at the time, and the game makes a point out of this. A lot of the characters in the mansion Don’t Know what a tipped arrow is. But a few do.

After the second murder (which we’ll address in a moment) you have the ability to interrogate three of the characters. LDShadowLady, TheDiamondMinecart, and StampyCat

Lizzie (LDShadowLady) is fully aware of the tipped arrows. Both Dan (TheDiamondMinecart) and Stampy point this out. When you ask her about it, she says she does know how to make them and taught others about it.

One of the people she talked about the tip arrows to is Cassie, aka the white pumpkin. So story-wise it does make sense. But Lizzie also states that Stampy had asked her about the tipped arrows, and specifically how to make them. So we know he has full knowledge of them.

But what does Stampy say when you ask him about the tipped arrows?

“I’ve never seen anything like it before”

This is Never addressed. Not once. Stampy blatantly lies about knowledge of a murder weapon when he seemingly has no reason to do so and he gets away with it.

So Stampy 1. Has the ability to create the weapon used for the murder and 2. Felt the need to hide this ability.

So that’s pretty suspicious right off the bat.

Now these interviews are caused by the second murder. So let’s talk about that.

Second murder: CaptainSparklez is pushed into a sand pit and suffocated by a very elaborate redstone trap. The trap is activated by one of the buttons on the table that they’re all sitting at.

Each of the buttons activates the trap, but only one of them was actually pressed. The connection we’re supposed to make here is that the White Pumpkin set up multiple buttons to keep suspicion off of themself.

The people sitting at the buttons were StampyCat, TheDiamondMinecart, LDShadowLady and Jesse’s friend Lucas.

Now you’ll notice that CassieRose, the actual White Pumpkin, is not on this list.

TheDiamondMinecart (Dan) is the one who presses the button. Dan is supposed to be a Red Herring here as he didn’t know what the button would do and pressed it anyway (though he’s a bad red herring. And we’ll discuss that in a moment). Even with the knowledge that it wasn’t the white pumpkin who pressed it, it doesn’t make any sense for her to have not been sitting at a seat with a button. And this is never really addressed either. Making this scene a complete waste of time, unless of course the original white pumpkin was intended to be one of those 4 people.

The interviews give us a lot of knowledge about the interpersonal relationships of the characters and what their skill levels are. Such as what I discussed earlier about the tipped arrows. But one thing that stays consistent is Jesse’s insistence that whoever the white pumpkin is, they must be good at redstone.

And he’s right. Every trap set by the white pumpkin at this point was redstone activated. Whoever made it must have been very skilled with it. And out of all the suspects there’s only one who has that level of ability. Stampy.

Both Dan and Lizzie make a point of saying that Stampy is a master of redstone and his skill is unmatched. But when Stampy is asked about this, his first instinct is to lie about it. When you catch him in this lie, he immediately back-tracks.

So Stampy

Has knowledge on how to build the first murder weapon (which wasn’t knowledge everyone had at the time)

Completely lies about this knowledge and is never called out for it

Was sitting at one of the buttons that caused the second murder

Is the only one with the redstone knowledge capable of creating the white pumpkins traps.

Lies about his redstone ability

So there you go! That’s a ton of evidence against him! And pretty much no evidence against Cassie other than the fact that she also knew about tipped arrows at the time.

In fact the dinner scene confirms Cassie can’t be a suspect unless we’re supposed to believe she just hoped someone else would do the job for her. Which considering she’s later characterized to be super paranoid and unwilling to leave things to chance, I doubt it.

While looking through secret tunnels you manage to find a secret conversation between Dan and Lizzie where Dan admits that he was the one who pushed the button on accident and that he feels super guilty about it. Jessie spots the white pumpkin looking through a painting at this moment. And considering he’s also seeing Dan and Lizzie, and he knows where Lucas is, out of all the people sitting near buttons, Stampy is the only one left. If the White Pumpkin was someone who was sitting at one of the buttons (which it should have been) it would have had to be Stampy

Now I do think having Dan push the button is realistic and fine. It’s a button. Everyone likes pushing buttons. But the fact that the white pumpkin would Bet On That Happening and not sit near a button at all feels like it couldn’t possibly be right, especially because everything else is so thought through and calculated. It feels out of character for Cassie to do. Cassie being the white pumpkin also means those interview scenes were an entire waste of time. They gave us no real information that could be used in the case and crossed off the real murderer as a possible suspect.

If *Stampy* was the murderer however, this would have made a lot more sense. As the interviews would have given us a lot of info about him and against him. Plus his relationship to the others. Even if Dan turned out to be the one who pressed the button, we still would have gotten that important info on Stampy. Not to mention that Dan just so happening to press the button before the White Pumpkin got a chance is a lot more believable than the White Pumpkin betting on that.

Now the way the story actually goes is that Stampy is revealed to have the enchanted flint and steel (even though before he claimed to not even want it) and as I’ve said, Cassie is revealed to be the white pumpkin.

We learn she’s the white pumpkin because she’s the only one who didn’t have a portrait of herself with a red X over it, which is a sign someone had died. Meaning she was never intended to die at all.

Now because the writing team didn’t put any actual evidence of her being guilty before this, they slip in a Not At All Subtle clue that she’s the white pumpkin.

The white pumpkin’s hide out is Filled with calico cats. The same cats as Winslow (the cat that Cassie had kept with her). And while this is obviously supposed to tell us it’s her, it doesn’t really make much sense as a clue. Considering Winslow is just one cat. A bunch of cats that look like him is sort of out-of-nowhere. She’s had no real evidence against her other than the final connection, meanwhile all signs seem to point to Stampy.

This doesn’t necessarily mean anything but I do think it’s worth mentioning that there is one character who Does have a ton of animals like the ones we see in the white pumpkin’s room. And that’s Stampy. He has a ton of dogs that could have easily taken the place of the cats. But anyway.

This last second Right At The End clue seems to almost indicate that there was some change in writing half way through the process. Before Stampy is revealed to have the flint and steel (which is something that any character could have confessed to and the story would be pretty much the same), the story makes a lot more sense with the idea that Stampy was originally intended to be the white pumpkin. We can also gather that it seems they intended the white pumpkin to be a man, as the protagonists refer to the white pumpkin by he/him pronouns and that assumption is never addressed when they learn the white pumpkin is a girl.

Either that or the writers are just. bad. Which is also very likely.

That’s all the evidence I have. So let’s talk about how story-wise it would have been so much more interesting to make Stampy the white pumpkin.

Cassie is great. But she didn’t get a lot of actual screen time in game until her villain reveal because she really never had any evidence against her. Stampy however got a lot of screen time and was generally the fan favorite when it came to the youtubers that were in episode 6. He was one of the most beloved youtubers at the time and the writers took that into account.

Whenever Stampy was accused of something, he’d play the innocent card. He’d say things like “it’s me! Stampy! I’m everyone’s friend!” In an attempt to get sympathy. Instead of defending himself, he played at the emotions of the people around him. He was played as the sweet innocent character who wouldn’t do anything wrong. I think this would have made him a Great twist villain. It would have made a lot more sense for the end scene as well, as the other youtubers defend Cassie, saying she would “never do something like that”. Which never really made sense considering they all knew one of them must have done it, and none of them had any real connection to her. Defending Stampy or being shocked would have made a lot more sense regarding the relationships of the characters.

His villain reveal would have been so much more surprising as well, as Cassie’s tone quickly shifts to much more malicious once she admits to being the White Pumpkin. And while I do believe shes a very good actor, I do believe the scene would have had an extra punch if the lines were delivered by someone who was previously set up to be the trustworthy friend who wouldn’t hurt a fly

But it’s Cassie’s motive specifically that I think would have fit So Well if Stampy had taken her place.

Cassie wants the flint and steel so that she can return to her home dimension. She’a been stuck here for a very long time and is willing to do anything to get back home. Specifically saying that she needs to get out of this “stupid world”.

Now this will only really make sense for those who are familiar with StampyCat outside of mcsm. But I’ll do my best to explain.

Stampy, as a YouTuber, was known for his “lovely world”. The minecraft world that he loved and cared about a lot. If the plot line was that Stampy specifically was separated from his lovely world, it would have been a great motive that he was desperate to get back it it.

So uh. Yeah! I think that’s all I got. I’m sure me and Worm aren’t the only people who have come to this conclusion but I’m just here to put it all into writing. I’m not sure if this was all a last minute change or sloppy writing but either way I think it’s interesting!

[silverthetheorist]

The Dream smp will have a bad ending (And why preparation beats improvisation)

So. I am back after a little while. And this is a topic that has been on my mind for a long time. But before we get to my main point we have to clear some things.

The medium where a story is told dramatically affects the story in many ways. A story cannot be the same in a book, or a film, or a tv show, or an anime, or a comicbooks. They are all different mediums that have their own positives and negatives when it comes to telling stories. A book can fit more information but a tv show can have music and good camera work, etc. 

Now, the Dream Smp is a completely different thing. This is a medium that has (I think) never been used before (Or at least not at this extend). And as all mediums it has its positives and negatives. The positives are very clear, strong and interesting: You can watch multiple POVs, follow the storylines you care about, you can see events from different perspectives and see whoever your favourite streamer is as the main character. And all of these positives are amazing and unique. No other medium has something like it... but it also has negatives no other medium has. As I see the Dream Smp has three big flaws due to it’s medium:

First of all, real life sometimes gets in the way. In books, movies and tv shows you can just pretend life does not exists for the duration of the episode or movie. This is called escapism, the reason why storytelling is so attractive. The problem with the medium of the Dream SMP is that the storyline sometimes is affected by real life in ways other mediums aren’t. For example a streamer deciding not to do roleplay after a big event when we could use a nice view of the after-effects of said event, or a streamer missing an important event that they could have been a major part of. And this is not the streamer’s fault at all. Real life is inevitable. An example is when Wilbur missed the festival because he forgot to read the groupchat. But it is still an unfortunate negative of the medium.

Second, improvisation can be great. But it can also... not. It is a miracle, a truly testament of how good everyone’s improvisation skills are that the story has been so good for a long time (As I have said in prior post, the story is basically flawless until the manberg/pogtopia war. Then it all kind of went downhill). But I think it is starting to show that preparation beats improvisation 9 times out of 10. Improvisation only works when people have a small guideline, something that tells them point A and point B for them to connect. And I don’t think that is happening a lot nowadays. Furthermore, I don’t think the current writer are doing a good job of communicating the plot to other and including everyone. We can see this in many ways: Nicky not knowing about the festival until the day before because of her chat, Dream leaving Techno on read when he asked what the next plotline was, Tommy not reading the scripts, the story becoming more and more the “Tommy and other two people show” instead of the “Dream Smp show”, and many other examples. (I have many thoughts about how I feel like Tommy sometimes is grabbing all the story/clout of the SMP for himself, not on purpose probably, but... I just feel I bad vibe from that. It is not something I can really put into words. Just a feeling. Not accusing him of doing that or being evil or anything. Just an unfortunate side-effect of him being the center of attention all the time which can lead to fatigue from the viewers when the plot is always about one guy and his discs all the time)

And finally the main negative. The biggest problem and challenge the SMP will have. It’s ending: It is not a secret that the SMP is successful, popular and makes a ton of money. So of course they will continue the SMP. But the problem is that the smp has a story and stories can only go so far. For example, Tommy’s discs being a motivation for his character for one or two arcs is understandable. But when the discs are his motivation for several arcs (And counting), it kind hurts your suspension of disbelief (That is the amount of things you can take in a story before you say “This story is not believable at all”). I am not comparing the smp to Disney. But when they continue to stretch the story more than it should because it is successful... yikes. The manberg/pogtopia war could have been the finally if they changed around a couple of things. And I fully understand them wanting to continue the story after that arc (Which I agree was a good idea despite their not so successful attempt of replicating prior arcs). And the point where we are now although kind of weird, I can totally see the story continuing. But there will be a point where it just feels like everything should have ended long ago. You cannot have a character go through the same arcs, the story having the same events all the time. Writing a long story is hard and complicated, you have to justificate why there is more all the time. 

And if they don’t start organizing better, including everyone, planning things out, and deciding on a satisfying ending... then the Dream Smp has a will have a boring repeated ending that few people will watch because it will happen when people start moving on from the smp. And I really don’t want that. They should quit when they are ahead, when they feel comfortable ending the story, when all arcs are resolved, before things start going even more downhill. 

PS1: Again, english. Sorry if i’m a bit negative on my blog. But there are already thousands of people explaining an analysis all the amazing things from the smp that I would just be repeating what everyone says. Criticising something you love is not a bad thing. I see as your love for something is so big that even with flaws you can still love it... that sounds corny, jesus christs it is just minecraft roleplay. As always, I am never sending hate ever. 

PS2: Something irks about Tommy and Tubbo not streaming together almost at all even though in the story they are friends again. That and Tubbo not being on any of Tommy’s videos but other are just... It is probably nothing... probably. Maybe it is just me projecting my own insecurities with my own friends. I am not saying they had a fight or they hate each other now or whatever. But... it’s still a bit sad and weird. Maybe it is because Tommy only wants to do content with like big youtubers and he is focused on always improving and stuff, while Tubbo is more about relaxing and streaming shit he enjoys. A shame. After months of no content from them, they are back but not really. 

PS3: Nothing has happened story wise at all since Doomsday. Which is odd. Is Tommy moving on from the smp? He did say he is focusing on youtube at the moment (And unfortunate negative of the medium, real life gets in the way of the story as I said) so maybe it is that. Nothing major has really happened. Not even small things. Why is Tommy streaming less and less all the time? I don’t know. I also do not think there will be an event on the 16th because of the chess tournament and the lack of any plot developments at all since Doomsday. Many questions, few answers. I kinda feel like I am getting a bit tired/moving from the smp. And Tommy specifically, I am glad for him and happy that he is getting all this success but I think his persona made more sense/was more bearable when he was a relatively smaller streamer/youtuber. With the risk of sounding corny again... I feel like Tommy is too mainstream now (Tiktokers are commenting on his instagram posts and that is never a good sign) and has become more corporate (Only streaming and making videos with people who benefit his video’s/streams instead of HIS BEST FRIEND TUBBO. But that really could just be my anxiety talking. Don’t think to hard about it, I am no one to say what he should or should not do, and I do not know of his life to say things definitively. Just a hunch, a bad vibe I am getting from him.).

[yourclownpal]

A comprehensive list of all my Ghost au's

this post will be talking about all of the ghost au's ive created or co-created including talking about ghost au's from old fandom's that i am no longer in. if you want to ask about any of my au's my ask box and dm's are always open this includes the hermitcraft au but keep it to a minimum please also if any of the creator's of the characters have said that they arent comfortable with what im making ( with proof ofc) i will edit or delete what is needed to fit in the boundaries also another thing this is a long post if you just want the art go under the cut! this post will discuss how each au works and basic plot stuff about them the fandoms in this post are hermitcraft, epithet erased, and dsmp okay first things first-

my hermitcraft au (what a pity)-

On my old tumblr account I made a few posts about it along with a fanfic which never got finished due to me not wanting to interact with the fandom any more due to personal reasons and also I'm not very good at writing imo but I think I'm ready to talk about it again. Just keep in mind i will most likely not talk about this fandom ever again at least not on here again for personal preference : -) it was about season 6 Grian since he was who i was hyperfixating on at the time, being haunted by the ghosts of Sam and Taurtis, both of them from the old roleplay series' Yandere High School, and Tokyo Soul, and taurtis from Grians old-ish smp Evo. Since I never finished the fanfiction nobody but me and close friends ever got to hear the full story i had planned but now you will i guess. It was mainly just grian stressing about Sam and Taurtis being ghosts and him worrying about being crazy, though he would still join the hippies during the area 77 war he would be significantly more stressed especially when finding out that Sam and Taurtis have been possessing his body during the night, he’s more worried about Sam though because of his track record back in the other servers( yhs and ts) it was going to be that Sam (although death isn't permanent) would go on a killing spree in Grians body which would cause the area 77 guys to put him in the facility to see what's going on with him, and it didn't get further then that. My favorite part of this au much like all of my au’s were the design elements i had for it which i'll have under the cut with the other designs. Now for a rundown of how the ghost physics work in this world, in typical ghost fashion Sam and Taurtis were not able to touch or move anything, but they were able to interact with Grian, him being the only person who could see/hear/or touch them. Their only super natural abilities is being able to possess Grian.

Okay! Time for my Epithet Erased au!: Unlike what a pity this one doesn't have a name or a fanfic to go with it as said before i'm not exactly a writer but i have talked about it a bit before on this account along with posting the designs and general concept but i'll go more in depth here! As said in my original post this au was a co-creation with my best friend and sibling @brocolibean so go check bun out ^^ Unlike ‘What a Pity’ it was more lighthearted and comedy centric because it dealt with a bit more and also the original show is a comedy. This au didn't include the character’s epithets so they are all humans. This will also include talking about house each ghost died so if your uncomfortable hearing about that you might want to skip the ghosts portion Just like the original post I'll separate the story summary into 3 parts with intervals in between to talk about the ghosts. First we have the Banzai boys part of the story. Giovanni, Spike, Dark Star, Crusher, Flame Thrower, Car Crash, and Ben all decide to move into a house together so they could all easily split the rent since its close to their collage, the house, which they get for cheap, is aa very old house with sketchy history. But it's a huge house for cheap so they don't complain they encounter the ghosts very early on living in the house and they swear to figure out how they died so they can get their memory back! The ghosts, Molly, Sylvie, Trixie, and Pheonica have no memory! All they know is that there are ghosts! They are connected to the property of this house but if you where to get something- like perhaps a stone from the property the ghost is still technically attached to it therefore the ghost can go with you anywhere Speaking of- -Phoenicia Fleecity is one of the last ghosts to show herself, her body is found in the overgrown garden flowers growing over her skeleton, she is from the victorian era making her the oldest out of the ghosts though he death is the most mysterious -Molly Blindeff is the first ghost the group meets her decomposed body is found buried in the floorboards of the living room, found when gio decided that the house needed renovation and taking matters into his own hands, she died via blunt force trauma i will not be going into detail here because i'm still thinking of doing something with this au she died in the early 2000’s -Sylvester Ashling is the second ghost to show himself though he didn't want to, his body was found in the bottom of the pond in the backyard of the house in the garden. His body while it was decomposing and falling apart was still intact, bloated from drowning. Again i wont go into detail but this wasn't an accident time of death is unknown -Trixie Roughhouse is the third person to show themselves to the Banzai Blasters she is found in the bushes in the backyard her face disfigured from some sort of explosion unlike the others it seems like it was purely an accident, like sylvie their time of death is unknown Mera Salamin is the collages part time librarian nicknamed “the library witch” she started seeing her ghost after obtaining a neck bow with a blue pendant from a pawnshop she got it cause it was pretty and didn't expect a himbo to come along with it -Indus Tarbella is a ghost who is attached to the pendant and bow Mera wear it used to be his own until he was decapitated wearing it through he was properly buried he has no troublesome memories about what happened even after seeing his body he’s just happy to be with Mera Percival King is a security guard at the college and one of the best at that, she wields a story she got from a pawn shop as its her preferred weapon she takes her job very seriously -Ramsey and Zora both died by the same sword while fighting neither remember who wielded the sword, even after death they hate each other and hate being bound together even more Everyone ends up meeting and finding out they all have ghost hijinks ensue. The way ghosts work in this world is a bit strange I'll admit but it's one of my favorites. The ghosts can interact with the human world(menma style) but

they can only talk to the others who can see them (the Banzai Blasters, mera and percy) and the ghosts can interact with each other ghosts in this au attach themselves to an item or property that has someway to do with their death, the kids in the property, Indus it's the bow, and the sword duo is well, the sword Percy carries. As alluded to from before Gio and the rest of the boys end up carrying a bit of the property with them in the form of friendship bracelets four for each of them which makes 28 different bracelets so the kids can decide who to follow around for the day.i talked about how percy and Mera’s items work enough but i would like to mention that Indus does most of the heavy lifting around the library but becaus enoone else can see indus they assume she’s magical, the glowing pendant doesn't help.

The last two au’s i want to talk about are both dream smp au’s

though i've never talked about them online until now, again thanks to @brocolibean for letting me brain vomit my way through these au’s and helping me out with things i love them please check him out I'll be honest i'm so scared of this fandom so i'm afraid to talk about my au’s please be nice to me Also this is all roleplay and fiction!<3 The first one i'll talking about is the dsmp ghost hunters au Sam runs a company where groups of people hunt ghosts for money! Those groups being Phil, Technoblade, Wilbur,Tommy, Tubbo, and Ranboo Dream, George, Sapnap, Quackity, Karl Bad, ant, Skeppy, and Puffy There’s most likely more but there the only people i can think of at this moment The only canonical ghost being Schlatt This au doesn't have a proper story perse it's more about gags and stuff about the different character fighting over ghosts for money but the story stuff i do have- Sbi family dynamic is real here you can rejoice, Phil adopts Tubbo after his dad (Schlatt) kicks the bucket and fucking dies , Tubbo befriend’s Ranboo some mysterious teen who just desperately needs a job so he- and the rest of the Minecraft family help him get one- though they find out Ranboo isnt as human as he was made out to be and he finds out he’s this worlds version of angels called ender’s and he’s there to protect Tubbo and Tommy which explains why the more violent ghosts start being less violent at the arrival of Ranboo joining their team. Bad isn't human either being a demon his entire group know’s plus quackity. Quackity found out but squirting him with holy water through a water gun but don't worry he promised not to tell anyone; -) Bad and Ranboo know about each other because they see each other as their true forms The minecraft fam found out about Schlatt being a ghost through Tommy- despite Tubbo telling him not to- telling them from calling up and paying for them to investigate their own house saying “technically i didn't tell them” they ended up not getting rid of Schlatt though I'm not going to talk about how the ghosts here work because it's not super important to the plot

The second au is another ghost au where the main characters are ghosts themselves,

like the others its mainly lighthearted and comedic with dark attributes The plot surrounds the sbi family moving into a new house and Tommy finding out it's being haunted by two ghost’s. Those ghosts being Tubbo and Ranboo This au isn't fully figured out but I know that he found out he was haunted by sending a selfie to someone(possibly Drista and Purpled? Since there are only other minors who were part of the dsmp lore? But ultimately idk) and them being like “yo i didn't know you had friends” and him being like “?????” Tubbo died from a boiler exploding and Ranboo died from drowning (which are apparently my two favorite deaths) this also doesn't have an official story? It was just an excuse to make ghost designs with a bit of a story without the commitment As said before it's a sbi au but also a Dadschlatt au cuz I like Dadschlatt au’s. The main story bits i have are background stuff for Tubbo and Ranboo which ill elaborate now The house was originally meant to be just a summer home because it had a large lake in the backyard Ranboo’s family would go there often but that doesn't mean his family liked him very much because of his heterochromia, Vitiligo, and his height his family thought he was strayed from god and drowned him Tubbo died during sleep while Schlatt wasn't home either out drinking or just at work he came home to the house being partially blown up and his son nowhere to be seen he calls Puffy out of fear and she calls the cops. He moves away and most likely starts drinking a bit more. The house gets rebuilt and now the sbi live there hijinks ensue! The ghosts in this au work in a simpler manor only Tommy can see them unless a photo is taken but even then they are blurred, they can float and go through walls and their ability to touch things is limited Ranboo’s memory is worse then Tubbo’s but Tubbo’s isn’t much better.

below the cut will be designs and stuff be safe pal's- there will be minor/cartoony blood-

rip me exposing my old art on this account also i'm ripping these from my fucking amino account that i don't use but still have the password too

gonna do the original what a pity drawins first them ill show a more recent rendition because i hate the old drawings

these are the old drawins i hate them

then,,, i just drew them,,,,, fuck these guys/j

thses are the old sprite edits of these four! trixies design is the only one that really changed

the ded;-; i couldnt fit him on the page

there he is! ft indus and very much alive mera(who i cant figure out how to FUCKING DRAW-)

gay's get wilbur'd/j

they lookin for ghosts

the whole fmaily is here but its quality is shit

these bitches dead! good for them,,, good for them,,,,,,/j/rp

[nefoe-dd]

SO SMT AU AM I RIGHT GAMERS

I mentioned this in the tags of another post and joked about it in Discord but my brain went brrrr during my last class of the day and now I lowkey have a full plot starting to form lol.

Keep in mind the only Shin Megami Tensei game I’ve played myself is the Nocturne remake, plus I only really remember bits of the plot of 4 and whatever we’ve been given so far of 5 so I’m not super well versed in the series.

Also I’ll add this to the tags too but DSMP Spoilers specifically for the contents of Techno’s Will exist in this post, because that is where the idea for this came from. A lot of other JRPGs have similar plotlines but I specifically thought of SMT because its kind of a meme specifically for that at this point how the plot always seems to have the same type ending bosses. 

Also some spoilers for Shin Megami Tensei IV

ANYWAYS

Now Presenting: An AU where Techno’s Limbo is an SMT Game lol

(Under a ‘Read More’ because it got way ahead of me)

An Introduction to Relevant SMT terminology:

Demons: Makes up a large majority of the characters in the game. They are the enemies that you face in combat, and its possible to recruit them to your team through various means. Some demons exist in the overworld though, and can be talked to normally, they’re chill most of the time, unless you do something to tick them off. ‘Demon’ is not taken literally by the Christian definition, they are based off of various figures in folklore and religion around the world, some are even based on Gods and Angels.

Law vs Chaos: Many SMT games have multiple endings based on these two alignments, along with the neutral alignment. It is usually decided by some important decisions the player makes throughout the game. I’m most aware of the SMT 4 ending, in which the route you are on decides the final dungeon, the character you team with for the ending, and the final boss (its either Satan or the in-game version of God). It’s based off of the traditional interpretation of these two, where Law represents the importance of authority, and Chaos represents the importance of freedom. 

Another note is that a lot of SMT games take place in a post-apocalyptic world of some kind, which, spoiler, is the case here.

General Plot Details and Worldbuilding:

- Techno dies in the prison. The stasis chamber fails and Quackity succeeds in killing him. Permanently. 

- Despite dying, he wakes up again in the main prison cell, but things are different. The lava isn’t blocking the entrance anymore, (in fact there isn’t any lava at all), and he’s alone. Upon peering outside the main cell, he notices a bit of sky peeking through the prison ceiling, like it had been broken into. 

- The drop down to the bottom floor is long, but he’s dead, so he just shrugs and jumps down so he can see what’s going on. Turns out there are several holes in this part of the prison, in fact there are multiple on the ground, likely where the lava had escaped from. (Obviously Minecraft lava specifically doesn’t work like that, I’m pretty sure in the DreamSMP the bottom is all source blocks, but just ignore that bit). 

- He exits from the back wall of the prison, and everything there so far looks normal, except for the fact that there appears to be less trees than normal. Of the trees that are still there, many of them were cut down and never collected, and some appear to have fallen over due to some damage.

- Techno goes around the prison to the front, and that’s when he notices some things that are very wrong. Various parts of the prison, not just the main cell, are also sitting destroyed. Many cracks, scuff marks and full-on chunks are missing on the walls. The usual entrance which houses the nether portal is hardly still standing, and he can see straight into the main lobby where the portal would lead into once you were let through. 

- The surrounding areas are not much better. Tommy’s outpost is toppled over in the distance, only the base and bottom floor are left standing. The tents near the beach are collapsed and destroyed, the only remnants of one of them is a small piece of fabric ripped from the main bit and laying on the ground. Skeppy and Badboyhalo’s mansion is crumbling where it stands, half of the back wall and ceiling are gone. And that’s only what’s visible from here. 

- The rest of the server is also in various states of destruction, the spawn walls are hardly left standing, the main nether portal area is covered in potholes, none of the portals are active. The prime path is rotted and broken in most areas, the buildings along it are not faring much better than the ones he’d seen before. And the further he gets away from the prison, the more the plants themselves appear to be dead or dying. 

- L’manburg’s crater looks much the same as it once did right after its destruction, albeit with more debris at the bottom which had fallen from the sides as they slowly eroded. The flag at the bottom is torn up and discoloured, honestly its hardly recognizable. The nature that had finally begun to reclaim the land has slowly been dying instead over time, and the bridge overtop has completely collapsed. The only thing still standing, is the ever present obsidian grid that looms over it in the sky. He supposes that whatever disaster had caused this wasn’t able to reach that high up, or that it was at least in part done by someone that liked the way it looked. Not that there seems to be a need for the reminder anymore. 

- Something something, he finds out DreamXD is here, and that he might have had something to do with how this world looks. And as much as it shouldn’t matter in the afterlife, he did promise Phil he would be killing God sooooo he goes on a mission to do just that. He can do pretty much anything now that he really doesn’t have to worry about dying, so why not. He has no reason to care about some God, especially when they’re the only ones left.

- Some DSMP people hang around the world and are represented by certain demons, the mostly chill ones that kinda just hang around in the apocalyptic scenery. They don’t recognize him, it isn’t really the people he knows after all, but they are willing to talk to him since they can tell he isn’t human either. He learns little bits of what happened through them, and learns where DreamXD resides, that being one of the strongholds that’s a bit further out. 

- Unfortunately, due to the portals being inactive, and his inability to break anything efficiently, or even at all, he has to travel using the overworld. Along the way he manages to speak to some others, this allows him to better locate where the God is, although it doesn’t seem to be hiding out. He even sees it sometimes flying around, which he uses to follow where its hiding. 

- Some of the random demons he runs into recognize that he’s not supposed to be here (according to them at least), so he has to fight his way through them. Luckily, many of the friendly demons that he talks to end up tagging along in order to help, thus making up a team he can use to get through them instead.

 - There’s probably a demon that seems to resemble Phil somewhere, living alone (alone for so so long) away from everyone in an arctic house perhaps. If I wanted to really up the angst, the demon takes a liking to Techno right away, which is partly how Techno is able to tell its him so quickly. The more they talk, the more Techno realizes how lonely the Phil he knows must be without him there, how upset he’d be once he reads the will and finds out what happened to him. Thus he’s more motivated to, you know, fight God, in an attempt to figure out what the hell happened. (DXD is the only entity existing here that also exists where he’s from, he can guess pretty easily that maybe, just maybe, they are one and the same). Thus, he is given a choice that he knows he will have to make in the future. 

- Eventually he manages to find the stronghold and comes face to face with DreamXD himself. DreamXD is just kinda chillin there, they fight, through DreamXD doesn’t seem to be putting in too much effort, almost like it does not want to win. 

- Techno wins (duh), and he is left with a choice, a choice to finish the job, or spare the god and allow it to go free. And, well, he feels that he doesn’t really have the right to decide whether it lives or dies, and while its possible that DreamXD caused whatever disaster created the current state of the world, but he doesn’t know that for sure. DreamXD has done nothing this whole time he’s been here, and its done nothing to him or his companions.

- He chooses to leave it alone, and DreamXD seems to know that it was always going to end that way. 

- DreamXD disappears, and Techno wakes up in the cell again post-revival, the prison and the world around it is the same as he remembers

(I don’t remember the exact real-world to limbo time difference but I imagine that it felt like, a day, maybe half that, while irl it was only a few minutes to an hour.)

Some other notes/details:

- The other possible ending would have resulted in Techno killing DreamXD and being given ANOTHER choice to take its power over the world, or just leave and stay there forever. Basically DreamXD’s existence is vital to the power of the revival book, and it’s death would have resulted in Dream not being successful in his revival attempts. Obviously we have no idea how the powers actually work yet, but I just came up with an explanation because I thought it would be interesting. You can decide on your own which of these endings fall into Law, Chaos or Neutral because uh, its complicated given the scenario. You can also decide if letting DreamXD live even fits into his character! Idk! But its not like DreamXD’s being oppressive by any means, not that there’s anyone to oppress here anyways. That’s my logic anyways.

- I don’t know what demons would represent specific people, I’d like to use one of the Angels for Phil but the Demons based on Angels usually have an important role in the plot that is in line with the Law alignment and like, protecting god or whatever, so no. There are a couple bird ones but idk if they fit the vibe, idk it could work, I’d have to look at a list if I want to go into this further.

- I kinda want Eret to be an Inugami because it’s body does that thing that ferret’s do when they’re all stretched out :) The only reason I’m hesitant is because Inugami is a dog, and Goose deserves representation.

- The reason I imagined for why Techno can’t break anything is because the mining fatigue lasted throughout this because he died with it, it’d get in the way of fighting too but at least it isn’t weakness, and he’s not alone either.

Uhhhhh that’s it for now I think!

(will potentially add to this if I figure something else out in the future)

[minecraftmultiverseofficial]

Alright, let's try and finish this part!!!!

NOTE: these posts have been focused on Cross and Blue because they are the relevant thing right now. Other characters also had stuff going on at this time, but we will revisit that when it's relevant. Also, if you find the end to this part unsatisfactory, don't worry, I did to. It was mostly the person who plays Cross and Blue being forgetful and us turning it into a plot point. But the outcome is important for later.

So now that that's out of the way, here's more story!

One day, Blue decided to mess with XChara, and it freaked him out. He wouldn't stop asking questions and "testing" Cross to make sure it was him.

After not really getting any answers, he decided it would be a good idea to invade the tree world.

When he first got in, he used invisibility to make sure no one could see him and looked through everyone's stuff. He read Dream's journals, and then I'm not quite sure how, but he was found out. After trying to run, he had the bright idea to go interrogate Blue. Due to Chara previously destroying Underswap, Blueberry ended up making a bunker that he would not leave. XChara managed to get some info out of Swap by dying a sheep green for them, but they didn't say anything useful.

In the end, XChara got board of not getting info, and left. (Though he was still paranoid and occasionally bothered Cross about it.)

------------------------------------------------------------

Blue stopped talking about it with anyone after that, and Dream really started to freak out.

Dream was also going from everyone needing his help all the time to people being more independent at that point, which was not working well for him. Knowing that Blue was still dealing with this stuff and just not talking to him, he tried his best to bring it up casually and check up on him.

Blue was also trying to figure out the source of the problem though, and eventually he became convinced it was Dream. I'm pretty sure he kept that suspicion mostly in the dark for awhile, but eventually it got out. Dream was trying to talk to him and help him figure it out, and then he accused Dream of messing with him and Cross's heads.

Dream denied this of course, he was only trying to help, but it caused a rift in their friendship non the less.

------------------------------------------------------------

XChara wouldn't stop bothering Cross about it though, and having gone between worlds himself (Cross was not happy when he found out he did that) he convinced Cross to just try and talk to Blue.

------------------------------------------------------------

Eventually they ended up talking and actually became friends! It doesn't really happen much anymore, but there is the occasional mix up here and there.

------------------------------------------------------------

Again, sorry if the ending is a bit lacking, I'm pretty sure the other plot elements are delt with better.

And keep in mind that this is as well as I remember it. I'm trying my best but there may have been some inaccuracies. We will be moving on to another world next update though, and a new Dream! I know it's confusing, but everyone wanted to do star sanses and I'm always Ink, so someone else had to be Dream. Now there's just canonically two Dreams.

(We will come back to this Dream, dont worry.)

------------------------------------------------------------

Cross and XChara belong to @jakei95/@xtaleunderverse

Dream belongs to @jokublog

Swap and Blue belong to popcornpr1nce/the AU community

Minecraft Multiverse belongs to me/@justalittleghowost

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[god-of-identity]

Hey can you tell me about the creaturae plot? Cause I have no idea what it’s about

hoooo boy, this is gonna be a long one XDD

i'll start with saying that a lot is still up in the air, but there's a pretty solid skeleton of what i want to happen for certain characters and events.

imma put it under the cut because again. l o n g .

in the beginning, there was place where all stories end. a universe dedicated to the fragments and remains of all the stories that had been completed, or that never would be. and in the beginning, there was a grove, tucked into the folds of the universe, a single tree with red, green, and golden apples, guarded by three who did not know where they'd come from before.

paz, rev, and emi only ever knew the grove. each guarded a fruit, and they all guarded the grove together. not that anyone knew where it was to conquer it. one day, paz broke a twig from the tree and it transformed into a pencil, allowing her to access her powers of creation. rev discovered they could build their own creations. soon after, two doors appeared. paz entered one, and it vanished. rev and emi entered the other.

paz's door took her to what was known as a city-fragment. these floating bits of planet were essentially capitalist cities, run by mafia and banking clans and casinos. while there, she unknowingly entered a death-game. upon winning, she became a death-god as all others who won these games were. it was in this city she first met dorian, and while working with faem out of necessity (dorian is also a death-god) and eventually friendship, she used the name iden.

rev and emi landed in a world of magic and fantasy. a fragment of a long-since forgotten magical world. rev learned as much as they could, honing magic and their own power until they could learn no more. determined to gain more ability, they sought out the fabled death-games, participating in one and winning. they too became a death-god, taking on draconic features. the price? they could never return to the magic-fragment, as the citizens did not allow travelers from the city-fragments. rev and emi moved on.

rev had a vision. they brought together fragments and bits of worlds, shaping and forming them into the donut-shaped planet now known as creaturae. creaturae, for it was the last name rev had given themself. some fragments, such as the isolated city-fragments, were left untouched. but iden and dorian sensed the powerful death-god rev had become, and travelled to creaturae to investigate.

the three had reunited. iden took the name parzival, and along with rev and emi explored this new planet. dorian vanished, under the radar, and began to create the labyrinth that phased between worlds and connected creaturae to horrors and wonders yet unknown.

parzival became bored. she decided to create an island. one part of creaturae fully under her control. she found adrian- a character from a story she'd written with others, a crossover into reality. she brought him to creaturae, to the castle on her island, for his story had ended with the deaths of all the others. she formed a city, a replica of one adrian knew well. for some time there was peace, and quiet.

then it all shattered. characters from adrian's story were brought back through the librarian's timeline as fictionals- meaning they could only die the way they had in their story. other than that they were functionally immortal. adrian was reunited with lucien and jay, the three having been married for some time in the previous story (nicknamed the neapolitan trio). others had returned too, and settled into the city. (the story adrian, jay, and lucien are from is the coalition files, which me and a couple irl friends have been working on for a while. it's kind of sci-fi and superpower story thing and also very complicated lol).

disaster struck. other timelines were creeping in on creaturae, and parallels were springing up. those on parzival's island found themselves trapped living plots aligned with those in stories that had already occurred. conflict after conflict, even rev and emi getting involved to try and stop it. by the time it was brought to a close, nothing would ever be the same again. (this part follows dream smp plot points because i was hyperfixating on that when i wrote it, but it's only essential for character development, not a synopsis, so i won't go into a ton of detail).

during a massive battle, jay calls on her doppelgangers from other timelines of her story. two are most prominent: darkjay and white crow, each with powers similar and different to her own, with their own stories and tragedies lived. whit uses fire manipulation to burn away parzival's flight wings, leaving her defeated. she surrenders and is placed in prison under guard of jay. the parallels still raged for some time after this. while in prison, parzival takes on the name genesis, using he/him pronouns. rev isolates themself with emi, trying to avoid the parallels but only being drawn further into them.

it's revealed that the labyrinth, dorian's creation, is the cause of the parallels seeping into creaturae. in a final bid to break their hold, genesis is released from prison and assists rev, neapolitan trio, and the jay syndicate (the group jay and her doppelgangers formed) in finally freeing creaturae of the parallels. the labyrinth remained, but the power was under control.

rev formed an organization known as tahva (it's an acronym, idk what it stands for yet i just like it) to help them protect creaturae, the surrounding fragments, and the universe they reside in. they hire dorian to help them by monitoring the labyrinth, which fae agrees to (he's probably just bored tbh). emi helps rev any way he can.

genesis (once again using the name iden) and dorian mostly separate from the others, basically for everyones' mental health. after all, parzival was the mastermind behind the tragedies caused by the parallels, and dorian's labyrinth only worsened the problem. the two take up refuge in a woodland mansion as minecraft mechanics begin to affect creaturae, lowering the stakes by making death impermanent. dorian spends far less time at the mansion than iden does, travelling between city-fragments to help rev and tahva take down capitalist schemes, wandering the labyrinth, etc. but fae always make time for their friends.

iden has been through... a lot. i gave my sona just as much trauma as i did p much all the other unwilling participants, especially during his time in prison. everything after the parallels are defeated i refer to as "post-plot" because it's largely undefined (deliberately so) and is time reserved for all the characters to heal. because soft as i am, i can't let this end as a hurt/no comfort story. so heal they will, even if there's bumps along the way.

there's a lot i left out for the sake of trying to summarize this best as possible, i tried to include anything plot-important though.

[ranvwoop]

Ran!! Techno lore!! How we feeling :)

HELLO CRYPTID L WE'RE FEELING. WE SURE ARE. WEVE GOT SO MANY FEELINGS.

I like. technoblade. he is my streamer. My streamers are Phil, Techno, n Ranboo and I am bracing myself for the inevitable plot-relevance where they no longer hang out on the smp but. but i adore them...... this colours my perception, because, if you had read any of my previous lore things, I Really Care About the Syndicate, because it's got all three of my faves :D.

(I have some more faves, but. they are my top three.)

To start I really like the setup!! For like, a Plot Narrative speaking, both of Techno's streams this week are very viewer friendly :D. Since Techno has been gone for a little while, it isn't like... a horrible stream to jump into if you, too, have been gone for a little while. I mean, I haven't, but I've been trying to like. Ease a few people into actually watching instead of just listening to my frantic yelling, and you don't need too much prior knowledge for this one. Granted, it didn't work, I'm going to shove dsmp lore at my pals until it works, guys please D:. But either way it's a nice break from the super conspiracy-theory red stringing! Also Technohumour is always fun.

I am a simple person, sometimes. There's some downtime. Syndicate my beloved! All four of them! I love! The birthday party made me UwU. And then just a simple inciting action setting up for today. I also saw a post about how much the birthday stream emphasised that Techno did have friends, and that was the difference between who is he is now and who he was and also the difference between himself and Dream, with the whole attachments n stuff.... head in hands.

The start of the stream was !! very good. I love the ae duo or emerald duo or whatever they call Phil and Techno hanging out. I Love how it was lighthearted and joking and Phil being concerned but they're still laughing and it's all good! Because Surely Nothing Bad will ever happen to Technoblade. Even when he passes Phil his will, which, I loved just seeing a bunch of posts (myself included) in which everyone was just. A WILL?? But. I love them. I am going to spend all of my time thinking about the like ten minute interaction.

Also it was very funny that it just. messed up. Scuffed streams my beloved. Phil rlly just Poofed out of existence. And then his photo poofed out of existence. It would have been really funny if Techno started to monologue to a painting, though.

But. But the actual part that matters. Technoblade goes to prison.

First of all. I would like to acknowledge that Sam doesn't break character. He's made it through Tommy, who is Tommy, Softie Ghostbur, Sad Ranboo, Clever Quackity, and Techno, who is Techno, among others I didn't watch. cc!Sam playing the warden my beloved. How do you not sound like you're smiling.

BUT. I adore clever characters. Similarly with Quackity, Techno knew what he was getting into and I just love that attitude. Very fun to watch. He is unconcerned, Absolutely scouting out the prison. Lingers the camera on the stasis chamber. Doesn't put his valuables in the vault. Rip to all those gapples because there was absolutely the hestience of. welp. He's not getting those back.

A lot of people interpret his behaviour as excited, but I choose to interpret it as more nervous. You know, the like, cool nervousness like ahah yUP nothing's wrong. (• ▽ •;).

There are lots of ways it could go!! There've been Quite the jokes about everyone breaking in to see Dream, but that honestly looks like how it could go again. Tommy and Tubbo had an interest to break in and kill Dream, though Wilbur's reappearence sorta threw a wrench in that, but he wants to visit his hero, and the Syndicate would have an interest in bringing Techno home. I don't think that there's gonna be a Syndicate breakout stream, but I would Love it. Another contender to meet in prison would be Michael Mcchill and I think that would be hilarious to meet a lot of the characters that way.

More likely, Techno will fill his inventory with the books and be brought back with a stasis chamber, and maybe the Syndicate will still break into the prison with this knowledge and free Dream?

I'm also Very interested in Ranboo, because I'm always very interested in Ranboo lol. But. I see Techno and Ranboo's spoken philosophies as basically the same but opposite. The person and their alligences are seperated, except Ranboo chose to pretend as if the alligence is irrelevant and Techno saw alliegences as Very Important. (In past tense since it's really been a long time since this group was involved in any politics! The Egg doesn't count, since it's not really an alliegence but. mind control.) They both want to get rid of things that force people to do what are percieved as Bad Things. It's more nuanced than that with the whole Syndicate and Actual Power Structures, but honestly alligences as a whole sort of fits with Techno often feeling like he's betrayed and changing his plans accordingly.

Ranboo and Techno Are Friends. Dream and Techno have a business relationship, and Techno is severely misled about what exactly is going on. Ranboo has no obligation to join in on any prison breaking, with no hard feelings, that's part of the explicit rules of the Syndicate. Will he just sit out and let it happen?? Will he try to propose a better solution??? Will he help?? Please don't cause infighting in the syndicate please they're All I have on this server—

Oh, also Philza Minecraft deserves to be concerned, sad, and also angry. Let him fight someone. You cannot hurt his bestie that's illegal.

I am not really aspiring for a Dream + Techno team post-prisonbreak, or anything. From a meta standpoint, all of Dream's lore is Very heavy (literal child abuse!) and Techno's lore would uhhhh. really not mesh well with that. Honestly I would be content if Techno still didn't know what Dream did, because it's funny, and they walked away once again as conditional "if you need a hand". Maybe there wouldn't be that much development in that, but you see, it's funner.

This was an Absolute Mess, I am sorry Cryptid. I had a lot of feelings. I just think he's neat. I was also Very Sleepy so none of my thoughts are coherent. Why thank you for asking :D.

TDLR: i liked it a lot!!! It was really good. I like Technoblade's lore style, n I think it is. A well needed little break from almost constant angst. Also, Please Syndicate, please communicate with eachother or just. do not fall out. that's all i want.

[vanillawaiver]

i tried to figure out the enneagram types of dream smp characters

have you ever wanted to know the enneagram types, and therefore motivations and fears, of your favorite dream smp characters? that’s a rhetorical question. don’t answer. this post contains a quick explanation of the enneagram and an analysis for every included character. i’m just gonna put it all under the cut.

i’d absolutely love to hear your thoughts!

ENNEAGRAM EXPLANATION

a quick low-down on the enneagram, for those who don’t know:

the enneagram actually refers to a funky circular graph, numbers 1-9 on the outside that depict 9 different personality types. each type is adjacent to two other types around the circle (see image for clarification). the two types on either side are the possible wings for that specific type, a wing being an additional set of personality traits alongside the main personality type. an enneagram type is written as [type]w[wing]. for example, my enneagram type is 4, and i have a type 5 wing, so my enneagram type is 4w5.

(the lines through the inside of the enneagram won’t be mentioned in this post, but you can find more information on them online if you’re curious. i won’t link anything because links can be sketchy)

the nine enneagram types are mostly easily explained by their basic fears and basic desires. the enneagram is intended to explain the “why” behind someone’s actions, which is why it’s so hard to type someone else. you cannot get inside their head to find out their true motivations. however, today i am working with entirely fictional characters and not the content creators themselves, so i give myself a free pass. please don’t go around psychoanalyzing your friends or people you don’t even know and jumping to conclusions without their input lol

also all of these are just what i think ! if you (respectfully) disagree, i would actually love to hear your opinions - you are probably right and i am probably wrong.i don’t watch every stream or even know of every event, and my reasoning is probably weak at best. enough rambling, here we goooo

the grouping will be by type, just because… idk how else to organize this.

again, /rp /rp /rp ! i don’t know these ccs in real life and will not pretend to. i’m talking about minecraft roleplay.

(also, i didn’t proofread this. sorry fnjakdfda)

type 1: the reformer

principled, purposeful, self-controlled, perfectionistic

desire: to be good, to have integrity

tubbo - type 1w2

tubbo is a classic example of a type 1 being put into the worst possible situation for their current mental state. tubbo was the moral and sensical anchor for tommy’s more eccentric and self-centered actions, and they functioned as this duo UNTIL tubbo was made the president of l’manberg. tubbo’s more self-critical tendencies were amplified because his actions had so much weight. tubbo is quick to turn against and polarize those he sees as “evil”, making broad generalizations like “technoblade is wrong” and “tommy is good”, regardless of all the moral gray areas, and even changes his mind drastically between them as he seeks the right answer. (ex: exiles tommy, but then decides it was the wrong idea, and now seems to agree with everything he says again.) i think part of his flip-flopping comes from a sense of people-pleasing and generosity, again amplified by his position as the (now former) president of a nation.

type 2: the helper

generous, demonstrative, people-pleasing, possessive

desire: to feel loved/appreciated

quackity - type 2w3

(as far as i know) quackity’s first major action on the smp was to run for president. wilbur and tommy wanted quackity (as part of swag 2020) to share the votes of the two parties in order to ensure a victory over schlatt. however, quackity acted out against them because he felt used instead of appreciated for his ideas. schlatt promised him at least some amount of respect, so quackity switched sides regardless of what was better for the smp at large. i believe quackity kept looking for approval from others, but also some sense of accomplishment, by founding mexican l’manberg (is this even canon…idk but i liked it), starting the butcher army, and trying to bring schlatt back to life. quackity even fought technoblade despite being grossly unqualified and i believe this is due to the martyr mindset that often comes with unhealthy type 2s. 

type 3: the achiever

adaptable, excelling, driven, image-conscious

desire: to feel valuable

nihachu - type 3w2

(at the time of writing this, niki hasn’t had a ton of canon screentime, so this is mostly based off of the doomsday stream.) when in emotional distress, niki applies her type 3 ideas of being the best she can be to others, hyperfocusing on “teaching them a lesson” by destroying l’manberg. unhealthy 3s also tend to become jealous of other people’s happiness and success to the point they attempt to destroy it, perhaps explaining how niki’s character felt that no one wanted to listen to what she had to say about the political state of things. i see niki as a character that values her image in relation to others, hence the 2 wing. when fundy showed her respect, she became even more sure of herself, and this seems to be the kind of thing she is after.

schlatt - type 3w4

much like ghostbur (as mentioned later), schlatt is a very exaggerated character. it’s hard to type him, because the enneagram focuses around people who behave in the way real people do, and schlatt is a larger-than-life villain. i’ve typed schlatt as a 3 because of his narcissistic tendencies. schlatt not only wanted to be but believed he was integral to l’manberg’s continued function. unhealthy 3s tend to be devious and manipulative in order to hide their own wrongdoing, like how schlatt exiled the main opponents of his rule. schlatt doesn’t have the emotional introspection of a 4, only the temperamental self-absorption, but i think this is the best i can do lol

type 4: the individualist

expressive, dramatic, self-absorbed, temperamental

desire: to be significant, to find identity

tommy - type 4w5

most of my reasoning for tommy’s typing comes from his time in exile. tommy displayed an impressive connection to his emotions, maybe just out of necessity because he was alone. his constant cry was that no one cares about him, but not in the way a 2 may fear the same thing. tommy feared he had faded from significance. when he felt this way, he was quick to make rash conclusions and decisions. he is self-centered, caring more about his discs than about anything on the server. the 5 wing is there because of tommy’s constant assertion that people pity him when they show basic human kindness. he dreads others viewing him as incapable.

type 5: the investigator

perceptive, innovative, secretive, isolated

desire: to be capable and competent

awesamdude: type 5w6

is sam incredibly important to the plot? not as i write this. but i don’t want to leave type 5 empty. sam does cool redstone and built a cool prison. he’s super swag. i’m too lazy to attempt to do an analysis. this is just what i believe to be the objective truth on his character. give sam your primes.

type 6: the loyalist

engaging, responsible, anxious, suspicious

desire: to have security and support

wilbur (alivebur) - type 6w5

(pls disagree with me on this. this was so hard and i didn’t start watching dream smp until after the original “it wasn’t meant to be” moment sjkdfadkl) it’s right in the l’manberg national anthem. a place men could go to emancipate the brutality of their rulers. wilbur created l’manberg for what i interpret as security reasons. a peaceful land without americans. as an american, i understand completely. wilbur demonstrates the tendency of 6’s to shun outsiders and to turn to hysterical violence in times of distress. wilbur’s final action before his death was to blow up his safe place, because he believed the security had been tainted. i have typed wilbur with a 5 wing almost exclusively because of the intentionally radical beliefs that unhealthy 5s exhibit, becoming obsessed with blowing up the place he once called home.

type 7: the enthusiast

spontaneous, versatile, distractible, scattered

desire: to be satisfied and content, to avoid pain

fundy - type 7w6

fundy grew up in constant distress, what with his dad kinda losing it and the constant political turmoil. fundy has acknowledged that there is nothing that comes from conflict except for personal gain. fundy is selfish (taking netherite meant for everyone, hardly taking other people’s feelings into account) by nature of the society he was born into. like most distressed 7s, he has mood swings and comes off as demanding. i gave fundy a 6 wing because of what i see as the origin of his issues: a lack of support and stability. because of this, fundy often seeks external solutions (material possessions) instead of internal ones (fucking THERAPY OH MY GOD).

badboyhalo - type 7w6

“l’manberg? pogtopia? who cares?” :D

type 8: the challenger

self-confident, decisive, willful, confrontational

desire: to protect themselves, to be in control of their own life

dream - type 8w7

(warning, a lot of this typing is based on my own theories about the smp, because dream doesn’t stream rp to give us his own perspective.) dream claims that his motivation, at least presently, is to cause as much chaos as possible, but this has to come from a more philosophical place. dream is the one who started the server, and, i believe, canonically created the world they all populate. dream’s rule was originally questioned by the creation of l’manberg, which he interpreted as a personal attack. as a type 8 would, he is attempting to destroy all that does not conform to the vision he has for a peaceful, unified server. this may make it seem like dream should have 9 wing, but i don’t believe stability factors into his reasoning. dream seeks fun, for himself and others, and also finds this by causing chaos, as mentioned before.

technoblade - type 8w7

now, just because techno and dream have the same enneagram typing here does not mean they are at all similar. techno also lashes out at things that do not conform to his vision (anarchy) but has a stronger connection to his 7 wing. he wants to protect himself because of the comfort and happiness that would provide, not exclusively to be in control. he cares more about the pain and suffering caused by the government. still, i don’t think techno’s primary motivation is to be happy, as he still causes harm and puts himself in danger in order to achieve his goals. when a type 7 would become depressed and isolated, techno decides to spawn six withers. to each their own.

type 9: the peacemaker

receptive, reassuring, agreeable, complacent

desire: to have inner stability, to avoid loss

ghostbur - type 9w1

more than anyone on the server, ghostbur is a two-dimensional character. (absolutely not meant in a negative way. i adore ghostbur as both comic relief and a consistent character. ghostbur simply doesn’t behave like a normal person, and that is the point.) this makes it difficult to type him, but i tried my best. ultimately, ghostbur cares about others, but not in the way a 2 does. blatant negativity from people he interacts with doesn’t affect him in the slightest. he hands out blue because he is good, hence the 1 wing, and not to be loved. the only time (i can remember) that ghostbur has expressed anger was when friend the sheep was killed in techno and dream’s terrorism upon l’manberg. loss is the only thing he seems to be afraid of, and he applies this to all people within the smp. 

philza - type 9w8

to put it nicely, philza is a mediator. to put it not-so nicely, he doesn’t give a fuck. philza has actually achieved much of the goals a 9 has, making him an anomaly on the smp. (most every one of these characters expresses extremely unhealthy characteristics of their type.) philza is accepting of others, and does more listening than speaking. however, philza still feels the effects of loss from murdering his own son in cold blood (just minecraft things <3) and presumably fears losing something else important to him, thus forming few attachments (ex: didn’t care his house in l’manberg got blown up, didn’t react much to tommy’s betrayal.) i typed him as a wing 8 because of his healthy self-confidence and confrontationalism.

please keep in mind that this is all referring to the dream smp characters these streamers portray. i don’t claim to know anything about their deeper philosophical reasoning for whatever they do irl. not really on that parasocial type beat, ya feel me? i would love to hear your thoughts.

 thanks for reading!

[lnterjection]

Regarding canon!Techon, VoS!Techno, and anarchy

Someone told me the way Techno’s anarchy ideals were presented in Chapter 34 of Valley of Serenity (wherein he admitted “I can want anarchy to be the predominant reality because it benefits me the most while also understanding that it would not be the best thing for most other people”) were, to quote - “All wrong here. Have you watched any of the syndicate streams? Cuz its clear techno actually believes in anarchy and that it's good for people. I understand he's missing some of the development from post pogtopia to the syndicate due to this being canon divergent, but that doesn't change the fact he's always actually believed in his anarchist ideals.”

Now, while I hadn’t considered this specifically before writing the chapter, I had considered enough of the factors surrounding Techno’s characterization in both canon and Valley of Serenity to respond with this:

Ironically, Techno's lore streams are the only ones that I've consistently watched. He's literally the only person where I've watched every bit of lore he's streamed.

And I came to this mindset for Techno in this fic specifically because I believe the events after Nov 16 in canon, of the Butcher Army, the Community House debacle with Tommy betraying him, and Doomsday were huge influences in how much he believes in the good of anarchy for the common person. Remember, he was willing to retire and let go of the whole anarchy thing to live in peace for a while, after seeing the disaster that was Nov 16th. It's only after S2 he starts gathering up people to form the Syndicate, committing fully to his ideology. Before he was content to chill in the Arctic with Phil.

With this background I have three points of contention to make-

Firstly, something I've always found interesting about Techno's character is how his anarchy thing might clash with the people he cares about. More specifically, I always wondered "if Techno was forced to choose between upholding anarchy and Phil, who or what would he choose?" Post Season 2 Techno I'm unsure of, but given the limited amount of lore from Season 1 about Techno I'm going off of to build his character, I'm writing his character arc in this fic to be him coming to the realization that he cares more about his family's wellbeing more than he does anarchy or upholding his whole blood god thing. It's a realization that Techno would have needed to spend months with his family again, living with them, to make and have him commit to. Techno back in Nov 16 would have been unsure what he would have picked.

Secondly, we don't have confirmation about where Techno got his anarchist ideals from, which is important because motivation is important. We know at this point in canon he strongly believes in them for real, but we're not given backstory on why that it. There's hints and theories, some of which are far more plausible than others - I've chosen to set the root of his anarchy belief in what he says in this chapter - governments are the only ones strong enough to take him down as an organized group of power. Governments have tried to take him down and nearly succeeded - that's what the Butcher Army was. That event was what brought him out of retirement to turn L'Manberg into L'Hole. And Techno in canon is reinforced in the belief that anarchy's best for everyone because of what it did to Phil and Tommy. He sees how both of them were hurt by L'Manberg's system of power, something that once again Techno in this fic didn't experience. We don't know what's happened in his backstory to make him stand on his anarchy thing, but that also means we don't know how easily Pogtopia Techno would have been convinced to give up on it. He believes it, but why and how much? I've made my choice of interpretation in this fic precisely because we don't know, and his canon decision to go into retirement was what influenced my writing here. I genuinely believe if L'Manberg hadn't attacked in, but instead turned out to be a functioning government like they could have been, his anarchy spiel about bad government is for at least other people, if not himself, would have subsided. But that's not the sort of plot that runs a livestream, is it?

Thirdly - and this ties into point 2 - probably at some point in canon Techno's past government has wronged him and he's seen government repeatedly wrong other people, hence his beliefs that again, the Butcher Army and New L'Manberg under Tubbo only strengthened when it had the chance to subside them. You could even draw allusions back to his skyblock series and take the quote "If skyblock has told me anything, it is that if you have a problem, the answer is slavery" to mean that he's seen the governmentally structured system of skyblock drag its players into an endless, pointless competing grind whilst also committing mass slave-related atrocities, which would be one of the more plausible backstories for Techno and explain where his anarchy ideals might have developed. But we're still operating canon Techno under the rules of the Dream SMP, and the Dream SMP's world is very much not the world presented in Valley of Serenity.

See, my decision - very conscious, deliberate, developed decision - to worldbuild Valley of Serenity in a way that's more akin to a fantasy world in the midst of their equivalent of the Age of Exploration instead of modeling it off how the Dream SMP worlds has definitely also influenced the way I plan the character developments in this fic. Valley of Serenity's world has nations, economies, established ethnic groups and populations and cultures and systems and thousands of years worth of history. L'Manberg started out as a city-state with some surrounding farmland area that had its own history and a decently sized population before Wilbur got there. The Dream SMP canon, meanwhile, has none of that established. You could argue there were civilians on the sideline that just aren't named, or that the Twitch viewers are just civilian in this world because Wilbur did the whole election thing (something that becomes increasingly unlikely each time a new streamer canonizes their stream chat as something that is decidedly not a country's population), but there's no canonical establishment for any of that. I don't think there is any hidden population of nameless background people in the DSMP lore. The lore makes far more sense without it, even with all the "political" drama. It would explain how people keep forming and abandoning and destroying new countries every other week and just.. getting away with it, and how Dream is able to spend so much time obsessing over one child in exile if he really has a country he's supposed to be the shadowmaster of, and how the whole clusterfuck of the Quackity Karl Sapnap marriage is even possible.

In a world like that, it's plausible for Techno's anarchy to be defensible to him, and to the other members of the Syndicate. However, in Valley of Serenity's world, his anarchy view makes absolutely zero sense, given how government is basically a natural result of humans settlings down to farm in large groups together. Most of DSMP's people can decide to just quit and wander off to live alone for the rest of their lives, no problem, but in a world like VoS or the real world? They are very fucked and so stay in large groups, which then, as history shows, results in some authority being assigned to a group of people to administrate things once the group becomes large enough... and boom. Government, and the start of civilization.

The only way for Techno in Valley of Serenity's universe to plausibly believe in the government stuff, especially after all those talks he had with Wilbur about L'Manberg, would be for me to write him as a completely idiot who's utterly unaware of how governments actually work.

If there's one thing I hate it's writing Techno as an idiot. The same Techno who dominated MCM and Skyblock and prepared for weeks for battle against L'Manberg and managed to successfully build a hidden piston door concealing wither skulls and had the foresight to write a will with "instructions" for Phil because he knew the prison was likely a trap and who has enough battle strategy to defeat Dream and also know not to trust him and thought up contingency plans to escape the Butcher army with the totems and who regularly makes the most intelligent, witty, sarcastic and well-timed remarks with dialogue - Techno is not an idiot. He is far, far from it. In the DSMP universe his anarchy ideals would be defended. In VoS'? Absolutely not. And if Techno has any amount of sense at all in this universe, which he does, he knows it too. I made a choice when I wrote this fic's world the way I did, and I'm am committed to seeing the choice through. Part of the reason why I did it? It was because I wanted to explore the way events like L'Manberg and Pogtopia would have affected the characters in their beliefs and trauma in a realistic setting of war and rebellion and political battles, and DSMP's world was just not a good conduit for that. Places like Sanctuary and arcs like Tubbo's struggles back in L'Manberg wouldn't be able to exist if I didn't go down this route, note to mention how wrong it felt to me to write Wilbur's presidency heavily affecting him when the people he's presiding over is just his friends. Everything would have felt cheaper, faker, more simulated if it had been in a world with Minecraft and DSMP rules. I knew this would require some reinterpretation of certain characters' motivations, but it was worth it to me to give their recovery a sense of weight and realism I felt the DSMP world wouldn't have been able to deliver. (I'm not making any point on how realistic or "heavy" DSMP does its trauma - livestreaming is a vastly different medium than writing and some points here would need to be translated differently when applied to livestream, just as a good book doesn't always make a good movie).

Hence, combined with points 1 and 2, the differing characterization between canon Techno and here.

It's important to note that Techno, Phil, Tommy, and Wilbur are a family unit here in a way that's been completely disproven in canon. They have a backstory that ties them together. This has also definitely influenced Techno's priorities and nudged him towards the path of conscious realization about his anarchy thing here, though it's not a point because it doesn't factor too much into the relevant mentality of Techno's character in terms of how much he believes in the anarchy thing.

So yeah, I hope this clears up some stuff for you! Or that you understand at least why I made the decision with Techno's character.

there were definitely typos in this reply. no im not going back to reread and fix them.