C!dream Critical - Tumblr Posts
dream apologists: haha he killed tommy but he looked hot while doing it lol quackity and tommy apologists, after this stream:
Something I don't see being talked about enough is how Tommy was just as bad as Dream was before the Exile arc.
Tommy attempted to emotionally manipulate Dream long before Dream ever tried to manipulate him. Remember Spirit? Remember how Tommy said he'd burn the leather unless Dream did what he wanted?
Tommy also LIED to Sapnap and told him Dream said he didn't care about him, and Sapnap BELIEVED him. Sapnap took the word of the enemy as 100% fact.
Dream is not justified in hurting Tommy, I'm not saying that. What I am saying is just because we see Tomny as a 'hero' does not mean he is one. Dream is as broken as Tommy is. They just show their cracks in different ways.
/rp /dsmp
One thing I see C!Dream apologists do to defend exile and C!Dreams actions during the whole arc is that if C!Tommy didn’t blackmail C!Dream it never would’ve happened.
Like did we watch the same stream? Because they act like C!Tommy was the only one blackmailing that stream cause I’m pretty sure C!Dream was trying to Blackmail C!Tubbo into exiling C!Tommy. Like obviously doesn’t make it okay but dude your leaving out a huge bit of context to the situation.
C!Dream being treated kindly feels wrong to me. The idea of C!Dream getting a redemption arc feels wrong to me.
It feels wrong to me, and I think some other people feel similarly, and I think I can kinda put into words why?
I think the thing that’s the biggest factor in why possible redemption/sympathy for C!Dream feels Wrong to some people rn has to do with Exile.
To me, I can’t really sympathize with C!Dream, even with his abuse and the prison situation rn, because I still resent him for Exile.
And with every situation as it is rn, I feel like he’s gotten away with it.
Because I think there’s a question that’s important: Who knows the extent of what happened?
•Tommy obviously, as it was done to him
•Dream, because he did the abuse
•Arguably Wilbur, because he has Ghostbur’s memories(?) and Ghostbur witnessed much of Exile, not the entire time as he was sent away but enough to witness abuse
•Possibly Sam, because I believe he mentioned Dream telling him what he did to Tommy to the Eggpire, and seemed disturbed and protective over Tommy, but we don’t technically know what he was told
•Ranboo, along with Techno and maybe Tubbo? know more than most, or have seen some about how it’s affected him. (Ranboo wrote letters with Tommy and saw Tommy’s concerning words, Techno worked with Tommy after his exile and witnessed his behavior and fear of Dream, along with Dream threatening to burn his disc if he didn’t come with him.
Other a few, people don’t really know what happened. Not really anyone other than Tommy himself knows exactly how fucked up it was. Nobody else, besides the victim and abuser, knows the extent of what happened. (Ghostbur didn’t witness everything so neither did Wilbur; Sam, through Dream’s words and getting his knowledge, still wouldn’t know how Tommy felt or acted in personal moments Dream wasn’t there to witness)
Okay. Another important question, worded twice bc I talk too much: What are the consequences of those people knowing? What’s happened because of it?
Well, in terms of people holding Dream accountable specifically for Exile?
Nothing, really. Dream’s essentially gotten away with it.
His actions did lead him to prison, which is definitely a punishment and accountability for his manipulation and crimes throughout the course of the server and all that jazz, but that wasn’t for Exile; that was really rather for the whole Finale situation and everything else. I don’t think that’s Exile accountability because it wasn’t intended to be so. Sam knows about exile because Dream told him, but I don’t think he knew then. He only learned after Dream was in the cell. It didn’t play a factor in locking him away.
Sam defended Tommy from the Eggpire, showing an understanding that he’d been through a lot, and he treated Tommy with kindness during the Hotel era. This can be seen, at least partly because Sam has had a positive relationship with Tommy before, in response to Sam knowing about Exile from Dream. But this reaction only affects Tommy rather than involving or directly referencing Dream.
And what happened with Sam later on? Well, because of his role as the Warden and his attachment to the rules, he ended up locking Tommy in the prison with Dream. So from a character who arguably Knows about the abuse, that’s not an action that holds Dream accountable, and as of now it looks like that’s not really going to happen.
Techno, a character who has Seen A Bit (“come with me or I’ll burn you disc” in front of his eyes, saw Tommy’s behavior after exile, hid Tommy from Dream, who was looking for him) doesn’t Know Enough to have a full understanding and Doesn’t Know what actually happened and ended up teaming up with Dream. He didn’t seem to care when told Tommy was beaten to death by Dream.
Wilbur technically held Dream accountable, in a way, for a moment, though not to his face—he told Tommy that he would have killed Dream for how he treated him. That was a moment where a character other than Tommy said, essentially, That Was Fucked Up. But he then changes his mind and tells Tommy he agrees.*
*I feel like I explicitly remember Wilbur saying he agreed with Exile in a certain point at a stream but I rewatched a bit and didn’t see it when I was expecting to. I still need to rewatch it all but I may be wrong on this wording?? Nonetheless he expresses Dream is right and that he’s in prison because he dared to be a challenge.
So from the non-Tommy people that know Dream hasn’t recieved backlash for Exile, to his face or about him or otherwise.
In general, this is understandable because Tommy has barely processed the extent of the trauma and abuse himself (I don’t think he’s even used the word abuse yet? I think he’s called it manipulation and has used trauma) and not many people know. And as I went through before, the people who do know don’t Know Everything or they still haven’t really done anything to acknowledge Dream as the abuser.
But recently, with the prison plotline and the torture plotline where Dream is suffering, and where he might possibly be broken out and given a healing arc or even redemption, that’s pretty uncomfortable to me.
That creates sympathy for him and puts him in a vilnerable siruation.
That’s fine and natural to sympathize with someone in a situation like him; I kind of feel guilty I don’t. It’s fine for characters to sympathize and it’s fine for viewers, etc.
But it’s uncomfortable, to me, because it’s not Dream in his entirety that’s being treated nicely. It’s a version of Dream who hasn’t done all he did in exile because people don’t know what he did. Their perception of him is without that act of cruelty and in my opinion, torture. The audience knows; characters don’t.
Fine, if the characters learn what happened, they can still break him out, they can still help him recover mentally, if that’s what they want to do. But if they don’t have that knowledge, to the audience watching and knowing what they don’t, it brings about a sense of injustice.
It’s like the fandom is at the risk of moving on from Exile because in the story, it’s really brought up by nothing but Tommy’s trauma responses?
I lied. As I get further I’m getting more aware I’m actually terrible at this putting this all into words. While knowing abuse is abuse and both Dream and Tommy should have help for their trauma:
It just feels cruel for an abuser not to be properly known as an abuser and receive sympathy or empathy from characters who’ve treated the abuse victim without sympathy or empathy, even if they didn’t know.
I worded so much of this badly lmaooo my bad
TLDR: I think it’s off-putting to see Dream being given sympathy as an abuse victim when we haven’t seen him really acknowledged as an abuser.
You know, I think that with all this talk of whose to blame between c!Tommy and c!Sam that we take the time think about why we get no perspective for c!Dream. I just find it interesting that at the end of the day the one who killed Ghostbur was still c!Dream, he made that conscious decision. However since we never get to see his perspective and c!Dream’s been in the prison for so long, we’ve taken for granted at this point that c!Dream is a narrative device instead of an actual character who makes his own decisions.
And yeah, all parties deserve a little blame, c!Tommy for bringing Ghostbur to begin with, and c!Sam for adhering so strongly to a faulty system. But at the end of the day, the death message will always read out as:
“Wilbur Soot was slain by Dream”
i still cannot get over the fact that nobody, both in and out of universe, talks about the scene during the green festival right after c!tubbo gives c!dream the disc. to recap, dream goes on an extensive rant calling tubbo an idiot and the worst president l’manberg has ever had. he says ‘i don’t care about you, i’m not your friend’ (remember up until this point dream had been peacefully visiting l’manberg, and tubbo states multiple times before this that he thinks that dream trusts him). he also reinforces the long-running idea that tubbo is a yes-man, and he says, and i quote, “l’manberg is weaker than it’s ever been, and it’s all because of you”. this entire time, techno chimes in saying things like ‘tubbo sucks!’ and ‘tubbo’s a coward!’
that entire tirade was just CRUEL. like, just hard to watch, almost. it was just 5 minutes of tubbo being completely berated, and of course he just sat there and took it.
and it’s had marked effects on tubbo! even during the scene itself, after one of the times dream calls him a horrible president and says he’s ‘ruined everything’, tubbo simply replies “yeah. i know”. and then he keeps repeating this rhetoric later- one specific scene i can think of is right after doomsday where tubbo, in conversation with quackity, said that he thinks he was the worst president l’manberg had ever had and that he was even worse than schlatt (a LITERAL DICTATOR).
we can even bring this into discussions of tubbo being terrified of techno. a lot of people like to bring in that the execution wasn’t really techno’s fault, and even without opening that can of worms, that doesn’t mean that techno has done nothing to tubbo! getting repeatedly called an idiot and a coward and just frankly insulted personally would not make me have a stellar opinion of someone.
i just find it crazy that nobody talks about this scene or its impact on tubbo, because to me it’s one of the saddest tubbo-related scenes there is. i don’t understand how people can defend c!dream and c!techno on this one lol
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: tommy isn’t a uniquely violent character, he’s a uniquely punished character.
tommy doesn’t grief more than other people, he doesn’t kill more than other people, he doesn’t steal more than other people, he doesn’t cause conflicts more than other people (being involved is not the same as causing), but while other characters have faced consequences in the sense of revenge (think the pet wars) tommy is the only character that has Consistently faced consequences in the form of being punished from a place of authority.
people in the fandom treat tommy differently because the Narrative treats tommy differently, however the whole point of this narrative is that it’s unfair.
dream targeted tommy with exile because he wanted to hurt him, dream’s done worse to george himself and had actively been trying to frame tommy to get him exiled a week before. other characters have started blaming tommy for what’s happened because dream painted tommy as the center of all of their problems (dream holding l’manberg hostage to exile tommy, lying about the community house, announcing that he’s going to destroy l’manberg because tommy told tubbo to give him his disc, doomsday being centered around tommy despite techno planning to destroy it before tommy had teamed up with him). dream hurts people and tries to find a way to blame tommy to put a wedge between him and them, to hurt tommy with his attachments to other people and hurt people with their attachment to tommy. he’s being Unfair and tommy recognized that all the way back at the trial.
and the thing is? tommy’s still grown as a person. he’s Apologized, he’s made an active effort to change his behavior and try to stay out of trouble, and dream is Still hurting him. Still targeting him.
the argument that tommy being traumatized/a child/abused/etc not being an excuse, that he deserves to be punished for his actions, falls flat because he’s the Only character being asked to do so for the actual “crimes” that he’s committed. no one else is held to the same standard that he is, both in the lore and by the fandom. it’s not that tommy is flawless or that he’s never done anything wrong, it’s that no one’s Ever insisted that sapnap needs to be punished for griefing, that Tubbo needs to be punished for burning people’s things, or even Dream for having been the center of conflicts long before tommy showed up and long after.
it’s a double standard that sits Wrong. wrong because tommy’s made an active effort to apologize, to grow, to be a better person, and was still demonized by the fandom while it was happening and accused of never learning.
wrong because he’s been uniquely hurt in a way that no one on the server has been in the name of “punishing” him, and I think at that point we have to ask if “punishment” is something that he really needs let alone Deserves.
and Wrong because the logic and reasoning that we use to get there, to Get at the idea that he deserves punishment when other characters do not, stems from the same logic that his abuser used to justify his abuse.
if tommy was a side character whose personality wasn’t Any different he’d never be treated this way by the fandom, he’d never be demonized the way that he is. you can think that he’s annoying without thinking that he should suffer or without trying to justify it by pinning him down as morally in the wrong somehow. likewise he isn’t actually More guilty than anyone else is just because another character says that he is
I'm rewatching the clip of dream touring skeppy around the server, cus I'm transcribing if and I'm gonna write a thing abt it later.,
and I think it's funny how he says "we gave them a little bit of land" in regards to lmanburg, but then he says his side has "infinite land and power". and he refers to l'manburg as a "table in his house" (his house being, the entire fucking server I Guess), and he doesnt let them make rules he doesbt approve of.
like, it's so obvious dream feels entitled to the entire server, including lmanburg even though he pretends they're independent, he always has felt entitled to the entire server, and that's always been his main motivation. he wants to be the ruler over one united server again.
he never spiraled, he just took more and more extreme measures to achieve his goals. and I've never thought his goal of "one big happy family" was ever particularly noble because it's so clear that he wants to be the ruler of that family.
man... I love c!dream so much , he's my favorite villain of the smp
-cube
Yeah like.
With his whole table analogy
It's another one of those "it sounds smart but when u look deeper into it ur like.. huh.. wait"
He describes the server as a house right and L'Manberg claiming a table inside said house and not letting anyone use it
But that implies the land they "took" was being lived on and used and it would be inconvenient to the other members of the server for them to take this land.
When in reality it was untouched land in a random forest, And the rest of the server loses absolutely nothing (they dont lose resources or land or friends as a lot of them were Still friends w the L'Manbergians) Not joining them and Not being allowed in there because The World Is Infinite, in fact they're Way better off (PLEASE stop referring to them as xenophobic colonisers MY GOD)
The way he describes it makes it sound like they claimed the Community House or something
It's so cool and frustrating how what he says works on the audience as well. u wanna talk about Unreliable Narrators well *points to c!Dream*
An important thing to note - in the conversation he never talks about them supposedly unfairly villainising him or anything, he never once brings this up as a motive for declaring war, he's Just offended they "took land" from his infinite world
would you mind elaborating a bit more on the c!phil and c!techno post? not saying you’re wrong in the least, it’s just an interesting opinion I haven’t seen before! I was curious about the reasons?
*waddles in* okay im finally back from class and have a real keyboard to use for this yeehaw
to keep my feelings brief cuz im aware im biased- inniter both proud and shameful ✊😔- there's a trend i've noticed about certain types of content recently that has some symmetry to what was going on at the beginning of the year. but unlike those few months ago, most people seem to be reacting positively to today's stuff
the bedrock bros arc in particular had a lot of discourse surrounding it, especially after the mutual betrayal. many c!tommy fans would rightfully point out how it was a lil eff'ed up that c!techno kind of sort of lied to c!tommy about his real intentions and was dodgy when c!tommy tried pointing out how that's not what he wanted to do ("we'll smooth out the finer details later" or w/e the quote was)
in response, it felt like a cacophony of people claimed how techno was his own character, that he didn't need to be some random kid's caretaker, to the point that the whole "characters shouldn't be judged by how they treat c!tommy" take was created
nowadays i'm seeing c!rivals duo material come out of the woodwork like a flood. a lot of people want c!dream to join the syndicate, have him heal out in the tundra with c!techno after the piglin breaks him out of pandora's vault and away from his torture
now, there are quite a few reasons why i and many others aren't a fan of this idea, but this post is about how c!techno shouldn't be reduced down to any character's therapist! he has his own plotlines with his own motivations, certainly, those same people will at least point out that c!dream fans want a similar story that c!tommy fans did back in december and january, right?
😐
then there's the man the myth the legend c!philza himself, coining the title schrodinger's father for a good few months. with the canonicity of the sbi family dynamic being somewhat wonky (not deconfirmed however), people split harshly into two categories: those who liked the idea of c!phil still being c!tommy's father, and those who very very very much did not
regardless of people's true opinions on the matter, c!tommy fans (fairly) pointed out that c!phil destroying the kid's home right in front of him was a little messed up. c!phil was canonically aware that c!dream was up to something funky, yet he still went through the idea of teaming up with him to raze l'manberg into the ground, which stung c!tommy enthusiasts a little. who wouldn't be just a smidge butthurt about something like that happening to their fave?
like clockwork, lots of people criticized and even outright bemoaned this train of thought. c!phil isn't even c!tommy's father who cares! he certainly doesn't need to, stop making everything about the kid! y'all just have daddy issues and are projecting tbh 🤪
now back to the prison arc, we yet again return to the potential plot of syndicate!dream, where he'll be best buddies with c!emerald duo and c!niki will spoonfeed him while he recovers (yes this is a /srs headcanon i saw) and c!ranboo will just have to "get over" his fear of c!dream to see they're actually best buds (another /srs comment someone made yes that is word-for-word what it said)
essentially, someone in discord shared a tweet that was basically talking about the idea of c!techno shoving c!dream into c!phil's lap saying "here, be a father whether you like it or not" and, well, i got somewhat peeved if that untagged post i made is anything to go by
it's starting to feel more and more like people didn't actually care that others were writing c!techno and c!phil in caretaker roles, they only cared that c!tommy was the one being taken care of. because c!tommy is apparently the literal spawn of satan and is the worst thing to happen to the dsmp and is super annoying and blah blah
but instead of, idk, admitting that c!tommy just wasn't their fave and moving on from content they didn't like, they needed to create these excuses about how it was actually super awful that these fans were doing things like this, that you should feel bad if you support this kind of content because you are ruining these characters and everything they stand for
nevermind that this kind of stuff has been a normal occurrence in fandoms since fandoms have been a definable thing, that while yes it gets annoying how certain characters are favored above all others literally all you're achieving by tearing down someone else's work is that same person either A.) making more of that stuff out of spite or B.) potentially quit making stuff for the fandom altogether
it's just... it sucks, that it feels like you can't want anything nice for c!tommy without it getting called "ooc" or being accused that you only watch his POV and make everything about him. maybe i'm sensitive, maybe im extrapolating, but i wouldn't be the only one who is, considering i've seen multiple others voice similar feelings regarding this situation
so there we have it i guess. my brief words that ended up not being brief at all (so sorry dear anon, i really did try to keep this down to one page at most :headinhands:) and i hope they make at least some partial sense, now i gotta go read even more random shit for my hw fsndkfjndf save me /lh