worst dsmp take might be ppl comparing lmanburg to colonists
no the worst dsmp take is those same people calling a bunch of white (mainly american) people "indigenous" because they don't realize that appropriating racially charged language (using it Incorrectly) to paint their little minecraft guy as oppressed to win an argument online is, in fact, racist.
for the record:
dream, sapnap, and george where there first. they are not indigenous because they Also Traveled There. dream was not born there, there isn’t a culture that was developed over many generations that the other members of the dsmp are not a part of, because he showed up two to three months before tommy got there. he is not the “native population,” he is not Indigenous, he is a white guy that traveled to a land and then claimed all of it.
if we Were to use terms like “indigenous” in this context, then it’d be for mobs with a society, like villagers or piglins. but I’m going to hazard a guess and say that All of the discourse in the dream smp would be better off if we avoided language like that. it could not more clearly be charged language chosen specifically to demonize or valorize based entirely on the Real World History connected to those terms and not the events within the story. there is no productive conversation to be had within this framework, and everyone who’s not trying to insta-win an argument by shutting it down with scare-tactics knows that. either nobody’s a colonist or everyone’s a colonist and that’s not a conversation that I think we want to have.
and for the record Once Again, even disregarding all of that L’manberg Is Not An Example Of Colonization.
the l’manbergians Were Citizens Of The Dream Smp. they did not Invade the dream smp because they lived there. they were Meant To Be There. they were Contributing To the culture of the land that they lived In (tommy making church prime with dream, the Literal main religion of the region, and building the prime path for instance).
the l’manbergians didn’t Colonize, they Seceded. because they were Already citizens of the dream smp, but they claimed a section of land (land that had been Empty Forest, dream didn’t actually know where it was at first Because it’d been unoccupied by either mobs or other players) and declared that they were No Longer citizens of the dream smp and instead wanted to self-govern.
they did not travel to a culture that wasn’t their’s, claim it for themselves, and then either force the people that lived there Out or force them to abandon their original culture for the new one. what they took away from dream Was Their Own Citizenship. was Dream’s Ownership Over Them And Whatever They Built.
any conversation about the morality of this fact has to be made with the understanding of that. dream’s rejection of their independence wasn’t about the land, it was about maintaining ownership of the people on it. dream wasn’t trying to Stop colonization, he was trying Keep The L’manbergians Inside Of His Society (under his Rule).
hey actually
punz being dream’s Actual right hand, more than sapnap and george ever were, retroactively gives meaning to punz being the one who took wilbur’s first two lives
instead of “and punz is also here” it’s dream trusting punz to take out the threat and enable wilbur’s eventual final death while he gives tommy his undivided attention
We don't talk enough about the reasons why people deemed c!Dream such a threat: his terrifying combination of intelligence and skill. It's undeniable that he was one of the best at pvp on the server, even from the very beginning—pair that with his almost obsessive resource-gathering, and you create something deadly. He knows what he's doing. Remember, these people live in a world where physical power is arguably more important than political (or at least to a greater extent than in the real world), where a single person with the ability and the materials can lay entire nations to waste. Justified or not, you can understand why L'Manberg was so scared of him.
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
Thinking today about how Daedalus wasn’t c!Dream’s revenge fantasy, it was his closure fantasy.
In his heart of hearts, he was fantasizing not about destroying Sam, but about Sam understanding. Sam acknowledging what he did. Sam conceding that what he did to Dream was…
(Sam apologizing? Did a tiny, shameful piece want that, picture it, what it could look like?)