"He tried to talk with his brother because of the bruises he saw, but Nightmare lied to him. "It's okay, I just tripped, it was nothing". Nightmare's intention wasn't to trick Dream, it was to protect him. He didn't want his brother to complain to the others, who might take revenge on him. He couldn't allow his brother to feel the same pain that he was feeling" - Dreamtale, Pg 11
Little did he know, Dream was hiding pain from him as well.
But no scenario would have prevented what comes next.
Slightly out of order here since Dream already has his cape, but we'll consider that this isn't the first time it has happened and both things are progressing throughout the same time frame.
There is something very fun about writing child Dream in that you can see all his older qualities in him but they’re all unrefined and rough around the edges. Instead of going from, I don’t know “childlike wonder to gritty ptsd riddled seriousness,” Dream in present day still has all of those happy personality traits still in tact even after everything he goes through. He’s just learned more about himself since then.
i don’t know how to draw a distinct child Dream because I already draw his eyes take up 50% of his head in present day, so like, big clothes tiny nose I guess.
Okay Dreamtale lore dump time.
there’s not really anything in this comic I would consider a divergence from canon or even much of a headcanon beyond just writing things that were said to be, into an actual story. Dream helps the villagers, the villagers are overly reliant on him, no it’s not his aura he doesn’t have that yet. There is something wrong about the village, Neil is mentioned to know about it: it’s like you grow angrier than you should around there. Something subtle. You know what it is I’m sure…. This is actually why the villagers act so uniformly cruel.
Neil meets Dream two years after his house burned down, so we’re looking at some time 3-5 years after Nim’s death. There was an old image I can’t seem to find of Dream lifting a heavy brick and Neil commenting on it which is what this scene was based on. Neil’s character may be a bit off what was intended, since, well, there’s really just not many examples of how he acted.
I have pretty significant proof Dreamtale does not take place on Earth, or at least not anything akin to our Earth. It also doesn’t actually take place in the 1500s either. Based on the description in the original comics, the universe was pretty newly created, likely due to Nim hiding alongside the tree. The villages also are consistently shown to live in rounded thatched huts, the comic explicitly describes no technology, and even geographical location details are mixed around in ways that couldn’t ever occur on a historical Earth. Ergo, Dream is not from the 1500s lol. People who say this make me go a little crazy. Think, chat, think.
why is Neil Dream’s second friend? Well because Nightmare’s his first of course.
Also Dream can read a bit, just you know, not English. Imagine this entire comic is in Spanish. They’re all speaking Spanish. When does Dream learn English? I don’t know, maybe Lanny goes ‘most of the multiverse speaks English, Dream, why? I don’t know, but you better learn a new language fast because I sure as hell am not teaching you that shit, I got enough to teach your sorry ass’
Or something like that. There, that’s my one headcanon for the day lmao
I know significantly more about them than just about anyone else in the fandom. However, a lot of what I know are fragments of clearly larger ideas. Hints to future reveals that as far as I know, never were revealed. I never learned everything said on livestreams and the like, but let’s just say I’m working with a net of info rather than a solid frame.
as such, I have to take some creative liberties and choose what I think the “hints” meant. I also need to make them make sense in ways that are conducive to an interesting story. This will become more my interpretation of the vague canon we do have, the further we get into it.
that being said, I have a lot of information on Nim.
she is blind, but perceives the world in a very different way.
She felt very limited emotions towards mortals, if any at all
she could sense/see their auras and intensions
she thought mortals were despicable
she pondered destroying emotions entirely because emotions caused their evil nature
she became friends with a voice that spoke to her from the tree who always was right.
she hid herself and the tree because she learned something terrible that made her distrust the other guardians
a human somehow in possession of a weapon capable of killing a guardian finds the tree
She buries mortals bodies beneath the roots of the tree, including the weapon.
there was a reason she didn’t create just one guardian
she knew the incident was destined to occur
she does not care about Dream nor Nightmare
A part of corrupted Nightmare, she is enraged Dream saved the final golden apple
So, I feel I can say with some confident, even though we never see much of Nim, this is as close to her intended characters as I could make her. Maybe a bit of a different personality but same goals and actions. And I think she’s very very interesting.
I think she is the antithesis to Dream. The son she created will be her greatest, greatest enemy. Dream does not know anything about her. Dream does not know she made him with his and the death of all positivity in mind.
Who knew school could halt your creativity so much like, what??
Started a two year study and these two years, I've stopped drawing, I've quit writing. Now that I'm almost done and my certificate is in reach.. my creativity is like, flowing back to me??
Crafting? Drawing? Writing?
I feel like doing IT ALL. MY GOD. I've never felt so excited to cosplay at a convention.
Is this normal??
School shouldn't mute your creativity this much, holy moly. I feel so free..
It was such a pleasure for me to draw Ink as a human~
I tried to design him as close as possible to the way Comyet drew him once, I've always loved her interpretation of him, and it has been one of my favorite versions for years 💖
I'm also planning to draw more human versions so I don't stay stuck drawing only magical skeletons forever (? hahaha
▶️ Who else would you like to see in a human version? ◀️
Let me know in the comments~ I'd love to read your ideas!
Wishing you all a lovely week, and don't forget to drink water!!
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i'm kinda noticing a trend of aroace characters commonly being either
1. a villan/antagonist
2. emotionless
3. non-human
this goes for all fandoms, but i think it's especially bad within the UTMV fandom. like yes, i LOVE to see aroace rep in stories, but not when the only aroace characters are one (or multiple) of the three examples above.
ink, i think specifically, gets treated pretty badly by the fandom. people either erase his aroace-spec identity completely, or they villanize them. Underverse is a pretty popular example of this. the only canonly aroace characters in Underverse are X-Gaster (the big bad villan) and ink (the guy who stopped taking his vials and betrayed their friends and is helping the big bad villan). the issue isn't inherently having these kinds of characters be aroace -- but when they're the ONLY ones who are, it makes it clear how you view aroace people; that good people, who are expressive in their emotions, can't be aroace.
i would love to see a protagonist who is a good person full of emotion be aroace </3
if you strip away ink's driving force, his whole motivation for protecting the AUs and keeping up his morally grey rules and never touching scripts — the WHOLE point of ink's character - then what's left? that's not ink, at that point. that's a completely different character.
people will agree that ink is autistic coded and ADHD coded, but will then turn around and call his emotions fully fake/artificial. can we see the... obvious issue with that?
yes, he does get his emotions from something that isn't a soul. they have the ability to choose what he does and doesn't feel. a small part of it is pretend, because he can't get the full experience. but he chooses to keep his vials balanced anyway, because it's pretty disorienting for him otherwise and he doesn't like it when they aren't. his emotions coming from vials instead of a soul doesn't make what they feel and experience any less unique to him. there is obviously a disconnect between how he experiences emotions VS how other people experience emotions (neurodivergent people experiencing emotions differently from neurotypical people COUGH), but it doesn't mean that they should be discredited and written off as completely fake. he has real love and care for his dads; even when he forces himself to abide by his own rules in a scenario where one of their dads dies, he is still so CLEARLY distraught, grief-stricken, and torn up over it. should that not be taken into account at all?
ink protects the AUs to keep the creators happy, because without the creators, they have no source of paints. and without his paints, he isn't anyone or anything. he isn't alive. they're a hollow, dead husk of a skeleton, forever unmoving and lifeless. if we take that away — and the only real consequence of them not being able to access his vials are oh he's still alive they just can't feel things — then what's the point? what are they doing all this for? what is he protecting the AUs for, what is he protecting the scripts for, what is he doing all of this for? the backing behind his actions and morals become a lot less impactful, and seem a lot less important, if the only reason he's doing it is to feel things. it lowers the stakes by quite a lot.
anyway shoutout @shipkid we had a convo on this and i got some of these points from it 🥹✌️
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Credits
Dream!sans belongs to Dreamtale
Ink!sans belongs to @/myebi
Swap!sans belongs to the undertale comunity
Killer!sans belongs to @/rahafwabas
Color!sans belongs to @/superyoumna
additional Dream!sans writing tips from @/xxtha-blog
as much as i adore the star and bad sanses, there is literally no multiverse where they with their canon personalities would ever happen. ever.
ink and dream's goals are fundamentally different. they wouldn't work together the way they're depicted as the stars. if they do come to an understanding (which is unlikely unless one or the other changes their ways entirely) they would not be close buddies. allies? maybe? when it benefits them?
then there is the dubious morality of letting blue, the mortal, either die on the battlefield, or (going with the "blue is immortal too" route) watch his family die first. not to mention that dream's aura would cause immense problems in the long run. no sane sans or papyrus from any pacifist timeline would put themselves into that type of situation.
and nightmare may use killer as a lackey, but dust and horror? i'm sorry, what are they even doing there? nightmare has no use for them. not that they would ever join him in the first place. they wouldn't. not even under threat. they'd rather die.