Got bored at work this week so I'm auditing your c!Dream fanon variants. Here's a graph showing (roughly) where they fall in relation to canon. Full explanation below because, and I can't stress this enough, I am so bored.
🍏 WHY ARE THE AXES LABELED LIKE THAT?
Okay, so this was the trickiest part of the whole experiment and probably needs to be explained before anything else. There are three things going on here:
✶ Benevolent vs. Malevolent — Taxonomizing characters by "good vs. bad" is one of the simplest and most obvious ways to start thinking about where a character falls on a spectrum. Not to be confused with "protagonist vs. antagonist," which is not a moral judgement but an expression of the character's role in the narrative. More on this later.
✶ Trickster vs. Martyr — I'm not using these terms necessarily in their traditional sense. Instead, I'm using these terms as shorthand to describe whether the character is deceptive vs. forthright, disinclined towards sacrifice vs. sacrificial, and/or playful vs. earnest. If the X axis asks "What is this character like?" then the Y axis asks "Why does this character act?" In other words, X is mode, while Y is motivation.
✶ However!☝If we've accounted for how a character acts and why a character acts, ideally there should be a third axis that accounts for whether a character tends to act. Or if they do, do they act first? Are they passive or active? Are they active or reactive? Do other characters, circumstances, or events push them into action, or do they act on their own? The problem being that there are only two axes on a graph (and if you're a mathematician who knows how to somehow unlock the 3rd axis, do NOT tell me about that shit, I don't want to know. I'll be real with you, I almost flunked out of school because I couldn't pass math, so as far as I'm concerned there's an X axis and a Y axis, and anything beyond that can stay between you and God.) Okay? Okay. So I've decided to combine the question of good vs. bad and the question of activity vs. passivity into a single X axis. Here's my reasoning: we're already doing that anyway. I've been in this fandom for like 4+ years (Jesus Christ), and I've noticed that when analyzing various arcs or plot beats, the majority of us tend to add moral weight to cause and effect. When a character does something, we tend to ask whether they were "pushed" to act, and assign blame accordingly; it's a "who started it" type vibe. Basically what I'm saying is: if the purpose of this exercise is to look at FANON interpretations of a character in a fandom that tends to assign absolution or culpability (read: victimhood or perpetratorhood) based on who the passive vs active parties are perceived to be, then it's not so far-fetched to collapse "malevolent/benevolent" and "active/passive" into a single axis. Again, this isn't reflective of canon, but I'd absolutely argue it's reflective of a general trend in fandom. Victim characters are perfect sweet passive angels who have things happen to them, whereas more antagonistic characters must be active in their wrongdoing.
🍏 PLACEMENT EXPLANATIONS —
✶ The Joker is the furthest away from canon c!Dream because both their motivations and modes of action are very different. Ngl I feel like "c!Dream is basically the Joker" is probably like...THE most common mischaracterization of c!Dream, especially among fans who lean into "c!Dream-as-villain" readings. I don't think I've ever actually seen anyone type the phrase "c!Dream is the Joker" word-for-word, but the fanon characterization of him as a playfully cruel force of nature whose actions have no rational explanation is wayyyy too common, even in the big 2026. You've seen this guy out and about. Joker!Dream was fucking inescapable in 2021-2023 DSMP fandom. Another way I've been referring to Joker!Dream in my head is "yandere!Dream," because the Jokerfied characterizations of c!Dream also tend to give him qualities I can only describe as yandere traits. While Joker!Dream is personally my least favorite c!Dream mischaracterization, I can grudgingly admit that I see what makes him fun to work with in fanworks, even though he's ultimately very far from canon. Even during his most manic moments (dethronement, Exile, some of the post-prison material, etc), c!Dream's canon motivations are typically rational or semi-rational, at least from his own point of view. He's not a force-of-nature villain. He doesn't embody a concept the way the Joker embodies chaos in a lot of Batman media, and c!Dream also falls relatively close to the center on the Apollonian/Dionysian metric (don't worry about it.) I have more to say on this, but if I keep talking we'll be here all night.
✶ Slasher Villain c!Dream. This is another mischaracterization of c!Dream that used to be suuuuuper common in fanworks, especially in the aftermath of the Exile Arc for obvious reasons. I used a pic of Michael Myers here but I'm not likening c!Dream to him specifically, just slasher types, generally. If you're hanging out in certain circles of c!Tommy fanspace, you've definitely seen some variation on "Tommy is the final girl and Dream is his slasher" — not in those exact words, but the imagery associated with these tropes and archetypes has saturated deep into the fandom. (Bonus question: do we consider this TADCA?) Personally, I find Slasher!Dream a little more understandable as an interpretation than Joker!Dream, because CC!Dream arguably does purposely set his character up to fulfill the role of the story's principal antagonist, especially after he stops streaming his own POV on the server. If you're working with a story that, while complex and nuanced, does devolve somewhat into faces and heels towards the latter half, then "final girl vs slasher" isn't so much of a stretch. That's just faces and heels but for horror movies. On the graph, I put Slasher!Dream below the X axis because the slasher is typically straightforward and honest in his violence, especially when contrasted against the trickier, more pernicious demons and poltergeists you'll find in the sub-genre of supernatural horror.
✶ Griffith from Berserk and c!Dream have some weirdly similar...stuff going on. Their respective falls from grace share significant overlap; I'm not the first person to point this out. This seems an excellent time to bring up the fact that I put "sacrificial" NOT "self-sacrificing" on the graph for a reason. These things are not the same. "Sacrificial," as I see it, is the quality of both being a sacrifice, being willing to sacrifice, and the ability and/or tendency to make decisions regarding sacrifice. Griffith and c!Dream differ the most in what they choose to sacrifice in pursuit of their goals.
✶ Bugs Bunny. Equidistant from pure malevolence and pure benevolence alike. Kinda the ultimate pop cultural trickster. He's basically the Joker if he didn't suck. This is not a super common fan interpretation of c!Dream but you'll encounter him from time to time, probably in light-hearted c!rivals or c!d-team fanworks.
✶ The "Can't Help Myself" robot was a kinetic sculpture created by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu in 2016. The artists have said it's about the inherent violence of borders and surveillance (wow! Themes that aren't entirely irrelevant to the DSMP! What a strange coincidence!) but the installation was widely interpreted as exploring trauma, grief, and labor. I think I see CHMS!Dream most often in fanworks about c!Dream's recovery post-prison, because they tend to emphasize the irreversibility of his trauma, the futility of his attempts at recovery, the fragmentation of The Plan, and the deterioration of his mental and physical state. Sunk cost fallacy ass robot, sunk cost fallacy ass character. Always scraping himself up, always scrambling to recover what was lost, so fixated on the past that he gives up his future. I placed the robot where it is on the graph because I personally find the work to be pretty ambiguous. I could say more but I won't.
✶ Maedhros Feanorian. I have a long ass post on how these guys are similar, so go read that if you're interested. I'm not pasting the whole thing here. You'll notice this characterization of c!Dream is one of the closest to canon on the graph, which is because they're both very nuanced characters who are capable of a lot of crazy shit, but do it for pretty complicated and interesting reasons.
✶ Dirk Strider. Listen. Hear me out. We've all had a laugh about how c!Dream got kicked out of the Ultimate Vriska poll for being too controversial, which means he defacto won the Ultimate Vriska poll. However I humbly suggest he is in fact more of a Dirk type. Control issues. Issues with fate, self-determination, and order. Inclination towards self-sacrifice that ultimately turns out to be selfish and doesn't help anyone all that much. Inclination towards "fixing" things that nobody asked you to fix. I will not be taking further questions at this time. You either see it or you don't.
✶ Edmond Dantes. Ngl I put this on here for shits n' giggles, and because I think it's funny that they both end up trapped in prison, but tbh the similarities mostly end there. The entire book is about Dantes' quest for revenge, whereas c!Dream fails to avenge himself uhhhh really bad. Entire essays have been written on how everyone expected him to take revenge on c!Quackity but he sucked really bad at it and fucked off. Literally made a single half-hearted attempt and then went back to doing fuckall. Ok well not exactly. He probably could've executed a spectacular revenge plot if he'd wanted to, but clearly he didn't really want to. He had other stuff on his plate. If anything, the vengeful Dantes!Dream only exists in fanon as a speculation — a guy a lot of people thought would exist in theory one day but never actually did, and while this characterization can certainly be found in fanworks, it's not really a major one anymore.
✶ Jeanne d'Arc!Dream is defined in his relationship to Dream XD, so this version of the character usually shows up in fanworks that explore the role of XD in c!Dream's life. These works tend to expand that role dramatically, and also tend to attribute c!Dream's actions and choices to the influence of XD, which imo takes away a lot of his agency.
🍏 ADDITIONAL COMMENTS
✶ I'm not wholly married to any of the above graph placements, so feel free to agree, disagree, qualify, what-have-you. I moved these dots around A LOT before finally hitting post. There are a lot of weird inconsistencies here, owing in part to the fact that DSMP canon lasted over the course of several years and its characters changed, shifted, and evolved during that time. There are also a number of cases where I feel I've correctly placed a fanon dot on the graph, but the fanon dots seem wrong when compared to each other. For example, I'd say CHMS!Dream is probably closer to canon than Slasher!Dream, and while I think those fanon dots are reasonably placed, that relationship to canon (and to each other) isn't what's reflected on the graph. This is partly due to c!Dream's canon character being changed by the events of the prison arc, and partly because the green dot itself may need to be moved down the Y axis by a couple squares to reflect an overall trend in canon? Idk.
✶ You'll notice there aren't many placements in the upper-left quadrant (or both left quadrants tbh) — that's because, while there are plenty of woobified c!Dream characterizations in fandom, I don't encounter them quite as often as villain-aligned characterizations, and when I do encounter them, I find it a little more difficult to articulate what's going on. Mischaracterizations of c!Dream can go in either direction on the woob/meanie spectrum, but villain-aligned c!Dreams tend to be overrepresented. Also, it was harder for me to think of characters from other media franchises that analogously map onto woobification. So. Yeah, that's why the left-hand quadrants look like that. I'm taking suggestions!
✶ Honorable mention c!Dream variant goes to Homura Akemi.
✶ Someone suggested Jean Valjean as a c!Dream variant, which I rejected because honestly they're just suuuuuper different characters, to the point where I'm not convinced we see many JVJ!Dreams in fanon. I suspect it just feels like we do because while c!Dream is not a Valjean variant, c!Sam absolutely is a Javert variant — a Javeriant, if you will.
✶ I created a blank character variant/fanon characterization graph so you can do your own if you turbo disagree with mine, or you just wanna do this for a different character. There are spots n' dots for up to 10 character variants! Blank graph below the cut ⤵
I was reading a fic summary from oomf and it hit me these two are variants
Both: second sons, known for their cruelty exhibit loser behavior, care about their looks, have gay allegations and I could go on, but that would require me to watch malcolm in the middle again
