I think some people in the Dream SMP fandom really need to get their heads around the fact that suffering is not inherently virtuous.
Yeah, this is about the torture thing.
Dream getting tortured in prison doesn’t make him more redeemable. It doesn’t make him a better person. It doesn’t make him “worthy of saving”, half because he’s still a fucking bastard and half because if you’re only saving the worthy you’ve missed the point.
Yeah, Quackity torturing him is fucked up.
No, it’s not gonna turn him into an iddle widdle twauwmatized baby who just needs wuv and affection fwom technobwade.
Like, first of all that’s not how trauma works. It doesn’t universally make people quieter, more submissive, or prone to crying softly until they’re “fixed” by your hot white protagonist of choice.
We had all this discourse about not romanticizing trauma when Tommy was in exile, is it really so hard to apply it to Dream?
Second, him being tortured doesn’t fix what he’s done. He’s still the guy who systematically isolated a 16 year old so he could abuse him easier, built the skeppy cage, and organized the final control room, among other things. No amount of being tortured makes that more acceptable, because that’s not how it works.
Being punished for a crime does not make the crime go away. Dream has shown no sign of wanting to make amends with the people he’s hurt or improve as a person, and he’s not going to grow a moral compass from being whacked with an axe a couple times a day, that’s fucking stupid.
I dunno, maybe I’m rambling, but...
You guys know that the statements “this is a fucked up guy who should never see the light of day again because he would immediately start pulling shit” and “wow torturing him every day is kinda fucked up” can coexist, right?
The way that the Dream SMP treats its villains is interesting, to me, as a case study of how the writing has changed from arc to arc.
At first, the only character who could really be labeled as a villain was Dream, back in the dubiously canon days of the drug van and the walls.
And even then, he wasn’t, really. In retrospect, perhaps, with more recent revelations on the nature of his character and his role within the story, it’s easy to see how his actions then could be interpreted now as cruel, selfish. As abuses of his power as server administrator.
But this is only useful when looking at his character in retrospect, in trying to determine whether his acts of moral depravity later in the story were a development or merely something that had been bubbling under the surface for a long time before it was noticed.
In reality, Dream was not truly a villain, early on. The lore wasn’t yet serious enough to truly allow it. It was still a minecraft server where friends played together, with only scant hints of the lore and serious storytelling that have come to dominate the perception of the SMP.
In contrast to Dream’s early characterization, where there was little of the seriousness and drama that came later, Schlatt was a villain from the beginning.
A few disconnected snippets from the fic I’m currently working on
(An Undertale fusion with Ranboo taking the role of Frisk)
—
[ranboo pov]
Sometimes waking up is quick. A sudden awareness, a dream fading into the morning light, and there you are, once more an active participant in the world.
That’s the best kind of awakening, in most situations. Makes it easy to get to school on time.
However, the universe quite consistently has it out for you personally, and as such you do not receive the luxury of a quick awakening.
No, waking up today feels like fighting through molasses, clawing your way up from an endless sea of unconsciousness when you want nothing more than to stay drowning in it.
You feel like shit, too. You’ll probably have that gummy stuff in your eyes.
Bringing a hand up to your face to roughly rub yourself into awareness, the first thing you note when you open your eyes is that this is not a place you remember having seen before.
Now, this is normal for you, seeing as your memory is about as effective as your brain, which is not at all, but you’re pretty sure this is a new low, even for you.
Honestly, you should have guessed something was off by how the ground felt before you even opened your eyes.
Sure, you’ve slept in a few fields in your time, but a bed of flowers? You’d always assumed those only existed in manga.
The room you’re in is a massive cave, with only one exit you can spot from a glance. (And a hole in the ceiling, but you’re looking for places you could feasibly have entered from, so something that high up is irrelevant.)
If there’s only the one exit to the cave, you probably wandered in here while trying to escape a rainstorm or something last night, and you must have entered through there.
So, stands to reason that’ll be the way out, right?
With this flawless logic in mind, you get to your feet and make a beeline for it.
Just as you’re about to exit, something flashes in the corner of your eye. You turn your head, but there’s nothing there.
Huh. Must have been your imagination, then.
—
[ghostbur pov]
Something is wrong.
Excluding your missing memories, excluding your apparent ability to see Ranboo’s battle screen despite not being Ranboo and not being involved in the encounter, excluding the fact that his first experience in the underground was someone trying to kill him, even excluding the star.
Ignoring all of that, something here is very wrong.
Why is Technoblade in the Ruins? You’d assumed he’d just been visiting for a picnic, or some such thing, but that note…
You’d lied to Ranboo, about what it said. It wasn’t just an explanation of encounters, though that was a part of it.
No, the full contents of the note are…
Concerning.
“Hey, new human. [censored for spoilers] probably didn’t explain the combat system down here, because he’s cringe like that. So because I’m extremely cool, I decided to explain it to you for him.
But you were taking a while to get here, so I wrote this note instead. That dummy over there is named Steve, you’ll be practicing on him.
Walk up to him and select the MERCY menu. Then hit ‘flee’ and the fight should end immediately.
Every fight down here is like that, so you should be able to apply the same principle for whatever randos attack you, though it might take a couple tries against the faster ones.
Oh, and-
Don’t FIGHT. Ever.
Unless you wanna die, of course, but I’m mostly trying to stay on Eret’s good side, here.
So I’d really rather not need to kill you.
See you soon,
-Technoblade”
—
[ghostbur pov]
“I don’t think that’s normal,” you state.
Ranboo turns toward you, and the screen disappears as he raises his eyebrows. “But falling a completely unreasonable distance and surviving before being attacked by a [censored for spoilers] is?”
Fair enough. You guess he hasn’t really got any standard of normality anymore.
He’ll regain it, of course, if he stays down here long enough, but for now you know exactly how lost and confused he must feel.
“No. This is weird in a way that’s not connected to the underground’s standard oddities.”
He sighs. You can’t help but commiserate.
This situation is already unusual enough, so why does the world need to throw yet more weirdness at you? Isn’t it enough to have you be a ghost when as far as you know, ghosts don’t exist? Isn’t it enough to try and help this kid find a safe place after his first experience down here was an attack?
...Isn’t it enough to leave you dead, alone, and missing memories?
—
[ranboo pov]
With that out of the way, you walk into the next room. It’s not really any more remarkable than any of the other rooms you’ve seen. (And significantly less remarkable than the room where you’d found the save point, which had been absolutely spectacular looking)
Just a generic purple room with some discolored tiles that indicate a path, really. You walk through without paying it much attention.
Just as you’re entering the adjoining hallway, you hear pounding footsteps and someone screams: “DIE, HUMAN!!”
You barely hear Ghostbur’s muttered “Is that Cletus?” Before a short-
You can’t discern anything about this person other than their height, actually. They’re too bundled up for anything else to be visible.
Anyway, they’re barreling towards you extremely quickly, screaming about wanting you to die, and you don’t exactly have a lot of time to figure out the best way to deal with this, ok?
So you just- react.
They get close enough for you to reach them and you just-
Hit them aside.
You- you just meant to stop them from bowling you over, all right? You were just defending yourself from someone who was pretty clearly trying to kill you, yeah? You didn’t mean anything by it.
Been trying to figure out what bothers me so much about cc!Wilburs statements about ghostbur and I think I finally have somewhat of an answer
It’s not that ghostbur is dead, it’s the fact that cc!Wilbur went out his way to detail the amount of pain ghostbur is facing while being dead.
Like is he trying to make some point about the world being a cruel place and bad things happening to good people
Because for gods sake we’ve already had that beaten over our heads by every other character in this story. The only difference being their that those characters still try to remain hopeful or fight back against their conditions somehow
cc!Wilbur’s statements about ghostbur (which I’m going to be referring to as ghostburs epilogue from here on out) Don’t line up thematically with the rest of the story
It feels like being cruel just for the sake of being cruel instead for some narrative purpose
Narratively would it not make more sense to leave it up to fans to determine whether ghostbur was indeed his own person and not connected to Wilbur other than the fact that they swap places when they die and have some shared memories or if he was still apart of Wilbur, just without a lot of his key features and therefore merged back into Wilbur after his death thus reinstilling a revived Wilbur with the new lease on live that ghostbur tried to hold on to, the same one which Wilbur lacked when he was alive (which in itself would be a really good subversion of expectations regarding ghostburs existence)
I just don’t understand why cc!Wilbur would make this epilogue except for shits and giggles at us being sad or to I guess make this story more grim dark and thus refute a bunch of the themes that have been built up in the story previously?
I just don’t know but it doesn’t sit right with me
I’m choosing to hope there’s a narrative reason for it, since it does seem... kinda just blatantly off?
I dunno if I’m making incorrect assumptions here, but I don’t think hurt/no comfort is really what Wilbur usually write when he does stories? Like, I guess my only other experiences with his writing would be the ARG and when he went really hard with the RP in skyblock (and his music, I guess, but I’m sure that counts), so that’s not a massive data set, but with the ARG at least, it definitely felt like he was having fun making his character suffer, but as, like, a means to an end within the narrative that eventually forced the character to grow as a person.
And the way he’s been doing the writing in the DSMP (taking only season one and Ghostbur into account because I don’t know how which parts of the current arc he’s controlling or what he has planned for them), he does seem to be making his character go through a lot, but he’s also been very careful to keep him sympathetic and redeemable throughout that.
And that might just be me projecting, since I do tend to be nicer to characters than their authors intend me to be, but just- the way he wrote Vilbur’s self destructive spiral, the way he wrote Ghostbur as such an obvious foil to him...
Hearing about how much Ghostbur is suffering in the afterlife versus how much Resurrectbur is enjoying being back in the mortal plane, it feels like he’s setting up opportunities to finally have a proper confrontation between them, to finally have them speak to each other for real and give us a deeper perspective on both of them.
I just feel like he’d be the type to disguise plot set-up as poor writing so that no one expects it when he pulls out the twist.
Though I guess I’ve misread genuine bad/unsatisfying writing as set-up before, so I might just be being too optimistic...
Ah, so Pandora was Dream and hope was Ghostbur. What an amazing way to deliver on the Pandora’s Box analogues we’ve all been hoping for with the prison and to hint towards a redemption arc for Alivebur down the line and-
Wait, no. Can’t analyze it properly. I’m crying too much.
@purpleflamed says: “I’d love to hear your thoughts, with the updated lore...is a Tommy about to pull a Pandora? While I wouldn’t say his motives are curiosity, there is a constant tension having the prison RIGHT there.”
(This was in response to this post I made a while ago about the prison arc and its parallels to greek mythology)
That’s a good question, honestly. I’m definitely Living In Fear (tm), but as far as whether I think it’ll actually happen...
Tommy losing his last life to Dream is probably (hopefully) the end of his tragedies. It’s a painful relapse into his trauma after he’d finally escaped it, but if the analyses are correct and it being a relapse metaphor is intentional, it’ll probably just end up being a quick last big bad thing before Tommy’s healing arc finally starts in earnest. Honestly, I’m expecting he’ll start dropping off from the main plot a bit in order to let his character recover properly before any more big stuff happens with him.
I could be wrong, of course, but that’s my current projection.
However, Tommy is not the only character currently in a position to pull a Pandora, and in fact there are several characters it would make much more sense for.
In order of how much I’m manifesting, my guesses are:
1. Technoblade
2. Badboyhalo
3. Philza
The reason why I’m guessing these characters specifically is because they’re all currently in a position where, A: Sam would likely be willing to hold them in prison, and, B: they’re clearly set up for some kind of big narrative punishment for their actions.
I’d say Techno is the most likely because c!Techno has faced almost no narrative consequences as of yet for the various things he’s done, as well as having motive to free Dream. (The favor)
Here’s how that sequence goes in my head: Tommy rocks up to the prison to kill Dream, and manages to get to his cell due to Sam being distracted by the simultaneous break-in from Techno. Dream is successfully broken out, and Tommy chases him, but Techno ends up trapped somehow, and someone (probably Quackity, let’s be honest) convinces Sam to keep him locked up.
I’d also consider Bad a likely possibility, as his current arc has been Skeppy whump after Skeppy whump, and now that their relationship has finally deteriorated visibly, as well as Bad being in the midst of a moral crisis due to killing Foolish, he’s in the perfect position to do one more really bad thing before starting his redemption arc.
Here’s how I’d write that: Bad, at the end of his rope, alone, hunted, and uncertain, decides to free Dream in order to simultaneously get back the one friend he knows won’t give a fuck about him doing murders, as well as to get one of the most powerful people on the server to owe him a massive favor. So he and Tommy break in at the same time, chaos reigns, and Dream escapes while Sam manages to lock up Bad. Thus isolated from the egg, it’s influence over him slowly fades and he realizes more and more how far he’s fallen, finally culminating in the eggheads breaking him out only for him to turn around and betray them almost immediately.
And as for Philza? Honestly, I just think it’d be awesome if, in an attempt to get his son back, he ended up fucking everything up real bad. I just think that would be an extremely pog amount of angst and would also give Phil more opportunities to develop his character.
In conclusion: haha bet you didn’t expect a fuckin essay lmao
Ayup just thinking about how despite multiple characters saying violence is the only universal language, violent conflict on the smp consistently solves absolutely nothing and in fact almost always makes things worse for everyone involved
Also thinking about Tommy breaking into prison to kill dream soon and the likelihood of him succeeding
Please I desperately need people to accept that he’s not a moral paragon
With the syndicate stuff and all that everyone keeps expecting him to make the most heroic choice in any given situation and I just- please, guys
He can be a good character and a sympathetic one, and that doesn’t require him to be a paragon! He’s flawed, his worldview is extremely black and white, he makes excuses to allow himself to be friends with people who have killed his other friends, and he’s actively helped Dream in his enderwalk, which is canonically not a different personality!
He’s not perfect! He’s not right! He’s not a hero!
And he shouldn’t have to be, he shouldn’t get stuck in this box of either being a hero or a villain, he should get to be just a teenager who makes flawed decisions for flawed reasons without that making him a monster!
This is on the edge of being incoherent but basically I just desperately want people to let him be morally grey sometimes because he deserves to go apeshit
Instead, he’s an amazing character study for what paragons look like in practice, in the real world surrounded by terrible ideas and incomplete information, as opposed to a vacuum where the right choice is obvious to all parties
He’s preachy and egotistical and self centered and entitled without that taking away from him being caring and loyal and intelligent and devoted
He believes the ends justify the means but is too caught up in his own hype to see that his means make him far worse than the things he works against, and in the end paint him as antagonist to other people who place a high value on personal freedom (like Tommy)
Can’t believe there’s a fake Phil pretending to be a real Phil who uses their “real” status as a way to rebuff accusations of kinning like actual Philza “bleach skin” Minecraft isn’t the biggest kinnie of all
Anyway @real-ph1lza this is entirely directed at you. You are either kinning a kinnie or you are kinning the people kinning a kinnie so hard that no one can tell the difference
C!Techno is just... really hard for me to talk about coherently. He’s a really complicated character with a lot of conflicting traits, so I can’t just put him in an easy box in my head like I can with most characters.
He has so many juxtapositions baked into him, y’know?
A loyal traitor, a brave coward, an anarchist in the 1%...
And it’s done really well, too. All of his little idiosyncrasies make perfect sense in context, despite how odd they sound without it.
Basically, I love him and I want the narrative to force him into character growth because I think forcing him to face the lies he tells himself would be extremely cathartic
Eret sits alone on the day L’manburg is reclaimed.
Not that they didn’t help with taking it back- of course they did, right? They have a lot to atone for, and they’d been waiting, waiting, waiting for an opportunity to take back a few of their sins.
So they did help take it back, stood atop a tower firing down at Dream and his allies, watched Schlatt’s infamously poor health come back to bite him in the most final way…
But they don’t stick around long, after that. They don’t stay for the presidential game of hot potato, the founders of the nation passing its ownership back and forth.
They would have, normally, but.
Eret has worked with Dream, in the past. Everyone loves to remind them of it, and they often do so themselves, but something oft forgotten is that Eret knows Dream, knows the obsession he has with ending L’manburg, knows the methods he’s most fond of, that game of pawns and traitors he excels at so notoriously.
And Eret knows Dream gave Wilbur 11 stacks of TNT.
Now, supposedly it’s all gone. Various people have looked around and none have been able to find a trace of it, but Eret knows Wilbur, knows the message he wants to send, and before the battle, they checked somewhere no one else did.
Not many people know the podium is hollow, so not many people noticed when it stopped echoing if you hit it and started making a dull thud sound instead.
Eret notices a lot of things.
While Wilbur is taking his place on stage, Eret goes around the hill, digging toward the podium they’ve guessed to be filled full with TNT.
It takes them a while, but when they find it…
There’s so much.
The smell of sulfur is overwhelming, and they take a moment to pull their shirt over their nose before they begin to dig it out.
They don’t get it all, they don’t have time, but they find the blackstone room and the redstone that runs from it and they make dead sure all the explosives near it are broken.
Then, they dig into the room, because why not? Sue them, they’re curious.
What they find is… exactly what they expected and nothing they could have imagined, at the same time.
It’s unassuming, at a glance. Dingy, poorly lit, small.
It’s also a terrifying representation of Wilbur’s mental state, with the anthem scribbled on the wall in the messiest handwriting they’ve ever seen from the former president, who’s usually so neat and tidy.
There’s no button, which is odd. Perhaps he means to place it himself?
(Eret has no illusions he’s changed his mind. As they said, they’ve worked with Dream before. If he hasn’t extracted some promise from Wilbur to blow it all sky high no matter what, they’ll steal their crown from George and eat it.)
They stand for a moment, just taking in the place, before they hear blocks breaking from the passageway out and realize just how close they’ve cut it.
Hurriedly, they block up the hole they’d used to enter, hoping Wilbur won’t realize they’ve destroyed the TNT.
(Hoping he’s too distracted by his own thoughts to hear them close it)
Only moments after the hole is shut, he comes into view, breaking the dirt blocks that hide this chamber from sight.
The day outside is far brighter than the hidden room, and the contrast makes it so all Eret can see of Wilbur is a dark silhouette haloed by the clear blue sky.
He doesn’t seem to see them at first, coming almost halfway down the passage before he stops, noticing their presence.
“Eret.” His voice is as calm as it always is, when he says it, but they can tell he’s surprised.
“Wilbur.” They greet in response.
“I didn’t expect to find you here. Come to blow it up yourself?” Eret sighs. The hostility in his voice is... not undeserved.
“Not quite.”
“Still trying for your redemption arc, then?” There’s venom in his tone.
“...as much as I can, yes.”
Wilbur deflates, and it seems like the anger in him has fled as quickly as it entered.
“Why are you doing this, Eret?”
The answer to that is… complicated. There are a lot of reasons. They don’t want L’manburg blown up, for one. It’s suffered rather enough, especially with some of Schlatt’s alterations. They also don’t see a better way to try and make up for what they’ve done than stopping someone else from doing the same, but neither of those are really why. The real reason, the truth of why they’ve spent days knocking on hollow objects and digging random holes in the ground until they finally found the bombs?
“I know better than anyone how much doing this will destroy you.” They say.
And that’s the truth of it, isn’t it? The unvarnished fact of the matter is there’s no moral motivation here, as much as they’d like to pretend. They just don’t want anyone else to feel the guilt they’ve felt, and maybe there’s a selfishness in that, but maybe it’s important, to acknowledge your mistakes and do what you can to stop others from making them.
Wilbur laughs, and there’s no humor in it.
“Of course that would be your reasoning,” and the anger in his voice is back, and Eret is preparing to respond, and Wilbur gives them no chance to before he continues.
“Maybe I’m already destroyed, huh? Maybe I’ve already seen too much of what the world can offer to recover from it!” He swings a hand out wide, indicating the writing on the wall in an aggressive motion that makes Eret shrink back.
“I wrote a whole fucking song for this place, Eret! You were there, you know I did, you were in both versions of the damn thing, and what the fuck is left?” Wilbur inhales, before continuing in a softer tone, “What the fuck is left of it, Eret? I built L’manburg to be special, to be free from tyranny, and look what’s it’s become.”
“Schlatt’s dead, though. He can’t stop you from building it back up.” They counter, but Wilbur doesn’t falter.
“Yeah, and? We violently deposed him, Eret. He had a heart attack sure, but this was a coup through and through. We killed the rightful president of L’manburg. We’ve made ourselves just as bad as him!”
...no?
No, they’re pretty sure that’s not how that works.
“Isn’t it the right of the people to rebel against rulers who treat them poorly? Schlatt had terrible policies, exiled his political opponents, taxed his citizens into starvation, and destroyed historic monuments,” they adjust their glasses slightly. “Didn’t he kind of have it coming?”
Wilbur stops. Blinks.
Eret suspects he’s never thought of it that way, before.
“But we still killed him. That’s still wrong.” He says, but he sounds... uncertain, now. Off balance.
“Well, we would have. He died before we could.”
“That doesn’t change the intent.”
“Fair enough.”
Eret pauses to collect their thoughts in an orderly manner.
“I still don’t really think it would have been wrong, though. Not any more than it would have been wrong if you’d killed me.”
Wilbur snorts, and says, “Just because you’re drowning in self loathing doesn’t mean you get to snap me out of my self destructive spiral. I’ve been doing just fine with it on my own, thanks.”
Sure he has.
They know terrible coping mechanisms when they see them, is all Eret is saying here.
He must see something of their thoughts in their face, because he continues almost immediately.
“You haven’t got any right to talk, anyway, mr. ‘it was never meant to be’.”
Ah. Hm. He’s got a point there.
Though, their own experience with this is what prompted them to confront him in the first place, so.
“I was wrong, when I said that. I was wrong, and you proved me wrong.”
They mean it, too. They’d been blind when they’d said those words, trying to justify what they were doing to themself by saying the revolution would never have succeeded anyway, and they’d been so fucking stupid.
Wilbur just laughs, though. He laughs for a while.
“You really don’t get it, do you, Eret? You were right, then! You were fucking right! None of this was ever going to work, not with Dream against us! He was always going to find a way to throw a wrench in the gears, and maybe Schlatt got to it first, but there’s no happy ending for this place!” He steps forward, and they realize how close he is to them. “There’s no way out, here! I’m going to press the button, Technoblade is going to summon withers because he’s the goddamn traitor, and Dream’s just going to sit back and watch and be just as untouchable as he always is.”
Wilbur takes another step closer to them, laying a hand on their shoulder, and though he’s only barely taller than them, those two inches feel like two miles, with the way he looms.
“I’ve been to this room, over and over again! Seven or eight times, I’ve been here, staring at this fucking wall and the fucking button, and I-!” He runs his free hand roughly over his face, and Eret sees something suspiciously like tears in his eyes.
“I can’t do this, Eret. I’ve given so much for this country, everyone has, and there’s just nothing left. I’m so tired, Eret. I’ve lost so much of myself to this.”
Eret raises their hand slowly, telegraphing the motions so Wilbur can pull back if he wants, and puts it over the one he’s placed on their shoulder.
They take a step and they’re basically touching him, and carefully, carefully, they reach their other arm around him until they’re embracing.
It’s not quite a hug, really. The position is a bit too awkward, especially with both of them barely fitting in the tiny room, but it’s close.
Wilbur stays tense, but he doesn’t push them away, doesn’t tell them to let go.
They hope it helps him, hope they’re right and he needs as much as it seems, and the evidence doesn’t seem to contradict that hypothesis.
It’s good, that this has worked. Good that they were able to convince him, to make him realize this isn’t the answer.
Click.
A moment of silence.
Wilbur laughs, a real laugh, not a pale imitation fed by anger and self loathing, and keeps laughing for nearly a full minute before he regains his composure.
“Oh, Eret, you bastard.” He says, and they can hear the smile in his voice. “You broke the redstone, you glorious motherfucker.”
It’s then that Eret realizes what just happened.
Wilbur had used the hug as a cover to place a button on the wall and press it, not realizing all the TNT near the room was safely in their inventory.
That fucking prick.
Eret laughs then, too, fueled half by the sheer fear of realizing Wilbur actually did it, actually pressed the button, and it was only their having broken it that stopped L’manburg being blown up again, but the laugh is also coming from the desperate, desperate relief they feel because even if they didn’t succeed in convincing him, even if they didn’t change his mind, they still stopped him from making their mistake.
“Why even try to talk me out of it, if you already made it so I couldn’t?” He asks, bemused.
“I can’t exactly stop you from getting more TNT and trying again, can I?”
Wilbur tenses against them, before they continue.
“Please don’t, Wilbur. I don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish with it, but… give yourself a chance to heal, please. Schlatt is dead, and even if you’re right, and Technoblade is the traitor, no one is going to let him destroy this. Even if he breaks every block of this nation, we’ll put it back, because this place has never been the builds, or the podium, or the walls,”
“L’manburg is the people, and we’re not going anywhere,”
