Art By SODA ABO

Some Greco-Roman dsmp au stuff again

Tommy: “Techno, is this the right way down to the Underworld?”

Techno: “So listen here, Theseus, did I ever tell you of the time I wrangled the drakon of the Hesperides?”

Wilbur (the butterfly): “Have you ever eaten sand? My father let me play on the beaches of Crete, once.”

And then there’s Eret with the “If it is for the prosperity of my kingdom, any sacrifice is worth the end result.”

if any of this could be accurate or not tbh im too sleepy to care rn (ha funny joke rabble)

Ummmmmm…. What?!?!! Omg!… I was rewatching Bad’s visit to Dream in the prison and what do I find but a conversation about living conditions and torture with Quackity! Wtf?!!

It’s too long of a clips, so here’s the time stamp 33:34-36:06.

And I did my best to transcribe it (but dang it’s hard when they talk over each other):

B: “I’ll talk to Quack—oh Quackity he’s studying to be a lawyer! We can get Quackity’s opinion.”

Q: ”Hi Bad.”

B: “Hi. Umm question for you. So you—you know Deam right?”

Q: ”Yeah…”

B: ”Yeah you know how he’s like in jail right now.”

Q: “Mm—hmm”

B: “Do you think it’d be too much to ask to go around and like try to improve like his living conditions in the prison? Like what do you think?”

Q: “Improve his living conditions?…”

B: “Yeah like I went and visited—have you visited him in the prison yet?”

Q: “Yeah yeah. no I—I haven’t—I have no reason to visit him right now… Oh, let me get this straight: improve his living conditions as in maybe like add a wall around him uhh probably bully him for awhile you know—”

B: “Na—noo!”

Q: “You know kind of like how he did with L’manberg?”

B: “Nooo!—that’s the opposite.”

Q: “Because that’s exactly what he did with L’manberg. You know what? You know what? You’re right—”

B: ”Oh my gosh…”

Q: “I could improve his living conditions—”

B: “Quackity—no!”

Q: “By boxing him in a goddamn box!”

B: “Language! Woah woah—woah.”

Q: “Yea I—I probably could do that.”

B: “Language. language. language.”

Q: “Sorry…”

B: “That’s all right.”

Q: “Maybe I could improve his living conditions like that. Maybe I could do that—”

B: “No no no-No no no.”

Q: “Maybe you’re right.”

B: “Listen, you gotta go visit him. Okay? You know what? I’m not even gonna say it I’m just saying you gotta go and visit him on one of your streams. Okay? Because—”

Q: “Oh I am. No no no believe me—believe me I’m going to.”

B: “At some point go visit him cuz—”

Q: “Oh I’m going to.”

B: “And you’ll see exactly what I’m saying then we can like discuss it. Okay?”

Q: “What—what is this? Did he—did he manipulate you? What—what did he tell you?—”

B: “No!”

Q: “Why are you acting all of the sudden so nice to him?”

B: “Look obviously Dream deserves to stay there cuz he did a lot of bad things, right?”

Q: “Mm—hmm.”

B: “But—doesn’t mean we should like—keep him in there and just have him like tortured all the time like even—”

Q: “No no, not right—not right—”

B: “No, that is right!”

Q: “No, I think that’s exactly what he deserves.”

B: ”Oh come on—”

Q: ”No no I think that’s exactly what he deserves.”

B: “Even Dream has rights as a prisoner. Right? You’re a lawyer.”

Q: “I’m sorry I’m sorry but I don’t recall Dream having any mercy on us when—”

B: “Well, yeah he didn’t but—”

Q: “He put that wall around us—”

B: “Okay..”

Q: “And he pulled all those things to Tubbo and—”

B: “Okay…”

Q: “W—why do you want to release him?”

B: “No one’s talking about releasing him!”

Q: “Okay.”

B: “I’m talking about giving him like a potted plant! Just don’t torture him while he’s locked up—he’s been locked up enough…You feel me?”

Q: “No, Bad—”

B: “Like he’s been—he’s suffering.”

Athena, watching her “Warrior of the mind” give his IP address, passport information, location, full name, and serial code

not your ordinary rose

also available in wallpaper engine!

We as a society (fandom) do not talk enough about wilbur's first introduction to dream because it's actually hilarious, and we do not talk about the Minecraft dream cult enough

For context, this is from, like, April of 2020 (a solid few months before the whole pizza hut date fiasco). You can watch the video here, and the time stamp for this particular realm is around 19:25

If you don't know, essentially, wilbur did a video where he stole from his subscriber's Minecraft realms, and one of said realms ended up being a """cult""" (in heavy quotations bc it wasn't actually... it's Minecraft) for dream. wilbur goes in, he's on edge, and he has no idea what's going on—he just wants to steal and move on to the next realm.

Anyway, watch the video if you want. What's really funny is that wilbur had no idea who dream was at the time, so it was just some eerie Minecraft realm to him.

A few months later, tommy & tubbo join the dsmp, and wilbur via tommy asks dream on a pizza hut date, and you know the rest. I wonder if wilbur ever connected the dots between dream and the realm.

If you think about it, the idea of wilbur interacting with a creepy cult then meeting the figure of said cult, only to have his first reaction be to ask said person out on a date, is kinda funny.

Some bonus screenshots from the video:

angy

/dsmp /rp

Thinking again about how Dream's trust in other people got irrevocably torn down throughout the prison arc. How even after all the blackmailing and all the murder attempts, Dream had expected people to be fair and play by the rules. To keep their word, just like he always did.

But then Sam almost immediately deviated from the prison protocol. He isolated and starved Dream, he let a torturer in and trapped Dream's one chance of escape in the cell with him. Sapnap threatened to kill him if he ever got out. And it got to the point where Dream believed that Techno, one of his only allies, would not even come back for him.

When he was finally free, Dream decided that the only option left was to kill everyone who was against him and Punz. Otherwise, he thought the others would "force" them to revive whoever they killed. It wouldn't surprise me if he imagined that this "forcing to revive" would likely entail torture. He had already seen how far some people were willing to go for the power of revival, after all.

No longer would Dream give people the benefit of the doubt. No longer would he trust them to treat him fairly, to see him as a person. Either they sided with him, or they died.

I would almost say that c!Tommy became obsessed with c!Dream after staged finale because of his desire for closure. He wanted, desperately, an explanation for his pain. c!Dream, unfortunately, was not at a place emotionally to be able to give c!Tommy a real answer. You can tell that c!Tommy doesn’t fully buy the “I’m a monster, I’m a villain, everything I do comes from a place of evil” mask (ha) he puts on and it shows in when c!Tommy assigns him “homework” on the first day in the form of the Why book. c!Tommy never truly gave up on c!Dream, in my honest opinion, despite the pain he endured and the fear he held c!Tommy wanted to hear c!Dream out. The tragedy is that it just took c!Dream too long to actually confront himself and come to terms with what he really wanted.

mmhm

i wouldn't say c!tommy's ummm obsession post-staged finale purely comes from that point in time or for that reason exclusively, but i think that the why of it all very much follows c!tommy doggedly every step of the way even when he's trying not to think about it. like, that was his friend, and all of a sudden he became someone unrecognizable, and tommy never gets a half decent reason why. c!tommy is...always kind of fixated on c!dream? like, from the beginning really, hence the "it's just you and me against dream" that echoes throughout the story long before exile is even a thing--it's just he started off a lot more sure about all of the pieces in this equation (himself) (tubbo) (the discs) (dream) and then is left at the end of it all staring at all of the pieces that have somehow become something completely different over the course of a few years. why can't it just be simple again. i miss when it was simple.

but yeah, for sure, c!tommy is one of the few people on this server that does go hey, what the fuck, doesn't that hurt? why are you doing this, that's insane, what? give me a reason. give me an actual reason. and c!tommy is also the place where c!dream stumbles, over and over again, to give a reason worth listening to--of course c!tommy thinks c!dream is obsessed with him, it's the only damn thing c!dream will tell him.

there's plenty on the c!tommy side that is also just, coping with everything by pushing it onto c!dream, which is kind of a mutual deal of theirs. hence the screaming past each other during that one stream in the finale and like, the nonsense that was you can't just tell other people they cant go into your land !!!! like that wasn't what lmanburg did. and c!tommy doesn't even want to kill c!dream when he's imprisoned until c!wilbur scares the shit out of him in limbo and he decides that there's no option--and that mission to Kill Dream follows them into the finale. but yeah, mixed into alluvthat is for sure a desire to know why things with dream went to hell

i know morality and c!dream can be a sticky subject especially bc of how like, unreliable this guy is when he talks abt himself, but as much as we repeat lines in daedalus i do think that it's worth remembering that his whole ... "oh evil is in the eye of the beholder" "everyone is the hero in their own story" "they're not excuses theyre reasons" "im evil but the ends justify the means" ETC of it all is like. self protective?

like no, c!dream isn't a character that is all that occupied with morality from the beginning, obviously. but at the same time this is also a character where the crux of the damn matter when c!tommy finally gets through to him is you know, no, dumbass, you aren't Just Irredeemable Evil you're an idiot asshole that chose to do shitty things and there are, in fact, other paths you can choose. this is also a character that has a whole breakdown on his own about the "thin line between good and evil" where he wrestles with his own morality and humanity in comparison to a fucking snake. this is a character that is SO FUCKING BOTHERED by c!sam's like, everything, c!quackity's sadism, c!wilbur confronting him over lmanburg (i'm a tourist. not a terrorist.) (like ,,,)

like no matter how much c!dream tries to beat his conscience into the ground, no matter how much he says that ohhh he's just evil look at his evil lair and evil speeches and evil villain plan to give warning before he attacks and evil giving people primes (what???), no matter how much he repeats the fact that ~the end justifies the means~ and it's all worth it in the end so the middle doesn't actually matter...uh, it kind of does matter to him. c!dream might've always been ruthless and a bit of a jerk and capable of a heck of a lot of damage, but he doesn't go into this on day one thinking that abusing a teenager is A-okay. he doesn't go into the damn end of this thinking that abusing a teenager is A-okay, for fuck's sake. when pushed to the wire all he could say to c!tommy is that he tortured him, because he deserved it, like that's at all about ends justifying means and goals and whatever. like that's not the same thing that his own torturer said to him just weeks ago, in those few minutes before he was sent running.

like yeah, part of this is for show. also the other evil ass guys on this server don't exactly go around adding "evil ___" in front of everything they do, do they? you don't see c!quackity calling his casino "EVIL CASINO !!!" or c!sam calling his bank "EVIL BANK!!!" (c!sam, of course, Isn't A Bad Guy) (well, that whole Thing is also self-protective, but you know) like /?? c!dream is Weird about morality and fixated on the whole evil villain whatever of it all in a way that is just too obvious for him to not care about morality nearly as much as he claims to.