Happy Daedalus Day :D
yeah like cdream is someone who is not very good talking and has problems with communication, he never was someone that made other characthers want to follow him and stuff and sometimes was a dick but the thing it's how people just used him being reserved to talk over him and stripping him out of his autonomy and humanity and treating him like less than a animal
like ... to be fair to people, dream was dogshit at communicating for like, a lot of the server. he really didn't let anyone on that things bothered him until pressed, and then when pressed framed things in practical objective ways that made him come off more authoritative than bothered by the way he was treated. really, honestly, it's not even until like, around the exile conflict where he's communicating at all abt his feelings and by then he's also lying half the time and purposefully crafting a dishonest mask of himself to project towards people to make them think that he's a crazy murderous person that has to be locked away? and also was losing his whole mind.
even if we look at stuff like, lmanburg, isn't it telling that the only people he's talking about being bothered by lmanburg to is ... like, skeppy. or being upset abt his houses being bulldozed and griefed to sapnap and george. he's not really made it a habit of communicating to other people, especially the people that are doing the things that are bothering him, that he's you know. got an issue with it? and when he does do that communication it's like, stuff like "give me back the things you stole immediately. or i kill your pets" ASKFJLAS like
like, and even then, right, c!dream still had quite a lot of friendly interactions with people on the server? i wouldn't say he was all around hated early on--but he was seen as someone kind of unpredictable, kind of Weird As Hell, kind of morally eeeeh with lmanburg's influence on his reputation. He was the big bad in lmanburg but mostly he was just, a guy that was around and could sometimes give you lots of shit and could sometimes be kind of a dick. like it's just--there's a lot w/ c!dream where people did stuff that freaked him out not really meaning to, because there's a sort of trophy-like nature attributed to THEEE dream, and then c!dream didn't exactly communicate either and would sometimes play into people's assumptions there, but overall the balance of it all was sustainable and people generally were able to interact peacably (or at least, solve their disputes so they wouldn't be permanent issues) until manberg/pogtopia up to november 16th really had everything get really serious for everyone in a short period of time. between the revive book's effects on c!dream's, everything, and the way that manberg/pogtopia is really the nail in the coffin for his reputation (and you know, a natural consequence of his guy not telling anyone shit except for apparently like the people he absolutely shouldn't have been telling shit? and also literally DIED???) and just everyone being a mess after the whole debacle, things just...snowballed out of control in a way that they couldn't really re-settle back to being normal the way they had before
i feel like ,,, like we talk a lot about how fear-motivated c!dream's actions are, yeah, because you know c!dream is consistently paranoid as fuck and So Much of why he's like that is because he's too scared to think straight and doing batshit insane shit as a result, but at the same time i think that his ... awareness? of this? can be vastly overestimated. c!dream doesn't like being afraid. c!dream is historically Really Fucking Bad at admitting or acknowledging when he's actually terrified of a situation, because that means he's lost control of it. if he's Worried about a situation he's still ahead of it, if he's Cautious or making preparations or getting things in line to make sure that those closest to him don't get in the line of fire he's still retained a degree of control, but all of that isn't quite the same as admitting he's doing anything because he's scared out of his mind, because scared out of his mind isn't exactly a state that c!dream likes to be in.
and this is why c!dream is so adamant on transactional relationships with anyone that he perceives as having a modicum of real power, because being useful to powerful people makes him less of a target because they need something from him. this is why he is so desperate to convince himself that he's on top when it comes to sam, when it comes to quackity, when it comes to wilbur, and he's saying all of this hidden inside his own hell after hiding there for months having barely confronted c!quackity before getting the hell out of dodge. this is why he scrambles to make sure to show that he's not indebted to technoblade and why he puts himself in foolish's service within minutes of meeting him and why a fucking feeling of power against an unarmed man he could've locked in a box with him with a press of a button was enough to get him to shut up and obey no matter how damn unsubstantiated that feeling ended up being because he couldn't bear to lose it, even just within his own head
and so you know, when c!dream calls c!tommy the one thing out of his control as a motivation for exile during the same time he had to fight off multiple coups explicitly with the desire to do away with him so that theyd be able to "rule the server," like. look. c!dream is just so fucking far from a reliable narrator. i'm sure he could give me an itemized list of how c!tommy has ruined his life, i'm sure he can say all these things about how c!tommy causes chaos and causes problems and doesn't listen to anyone, i'm sure he can go on and on and on about how it'd be a different story if c!tommy just listened to him for once. but let's be real, here--as much as he's convinced himself that he's trying to get control of the one thing out of his control, what's closer to reality is that c!tommy was the one thing he did feel like he could control (hello, the discs) when literally everything else wasn't
no okay but ctommys addiction to invis potions is just so heartbreaking. one of the loudest characters, someone who always craved attention and interaction from other people, impossible to miss and always loud-vibrant-in your face, growing addicted to not being seen? do you fucking understand what that means. he HATED being ignored so much, he wilted away when he was put in isolation, but he got so used to being rejected and diminished and turned away from that he got addicted to being invisible. because it was safer. im going to walk into the ocean like he did