Is there specific reason your Dream and Nightmare are at odds? Or just typical balance stuff?
I don’t know if this will fully explain it, but I’m going to ramble.
Neither of them are full guardians, they’re barely able to balance themselves as it is. Both of them are corrupted in a sense. Dream is one traumatic head injury away from being fully corrupted, and Nightmare is always on the verge of slipping back into it. Push either of them enough, and it would be a disaster.
What they both embody, in a way, are toxic methods of dealing with emotions.
For Dream, think of someone who avoids anything that doesn’t feel good, a “just be happy” type of mentality, but since they arent fully corrupted its not to that extreme. Fully corrupted, this would lead the multiverse into something like the dancing plague, people would, in a sense, party themselves to death. Everyone would collapse in one massive, endless celebration. There would be an unending search for eternal bliss, any hard work or heavy emotion that isn’t euphoric would be ignored, discarded, and left behind. People would become unable to grieve, feel anger, or process anything beyond “fun.”
Nightmare, on the other hand, is someone who spirals so deeply into hatred, resentment, guilt, and similar emotions that they come to believe no one deserves even an ounce of happiness. Everyone is guilty. I often connect his abilities to a kind of karmic retribution mechanic (it feels heavy because you should feel the weight of the lives you’ve taken, whether out of curiosity or for fun. It’s a burden.)
Fully corrupted, Nightmare would drag the multiverse into complete silence. People would slowly stop trusting anything or anyone. Everything would become isolated, until the multiverse itself falls quiet. Not even dust would linger in the air. Everything would go stale. People would lose the drive to connect, to feel joy, or to appreciate anything around them. Nothing would matter.
They are at odds because, fundamentally, they represent, or could become the worst extremes of what they embody. That, and trauma.
I also have this idea: before Nightmare regained a sense of self, they went through some things. Emotional magic isn’t exclusive to the twins, and some Gasters saw Nightmare as a walking calamity, formless and unstable. They experimented on them, probing and pushing until they exploded. More than once, they were tricked into believing their sibling (Dream) had returned, when in reality it was just a conjuration meant to contain or control them at the time.
The corruption also, that possesed nightmare instead of being "someone" its something, that Nim used to battle to keep balance, it was natural in a sense, like a big ball of negative emotions that clumped together in a corner of the multiverse, this one takes the shape of a snake, it's the same to any overly positive feelings, this one taking the shape of an hawk.
All of this is loose, there’s nothing really cohesive yet, and I don’t know if it fully makes sense. I just like playing around with them and their concept. I feel like a madman rambling, do i make sense? i dont make sense
