Little Red Riding Hood

/dsmp /rp I’ve been rewatching a lot of lore streams lately, and there’s a few things I’ve noticed about Dream’s reaction to being called evil, a villain, the bad guy, a monster, a psychopath, etc.

I’ve compiled all relevant clips in the video below, but I’ve also linked to each individual stream for additional context.

Firstly, there’s Dream’s own view on evil. He tells Sam that people who do bad things for no reason, or who just do them because they like them, are the people who are actually evil. Having no reason is what’s truly evil. Dream repeats this during the snake monologue as well. The snake that just bites without reason is pure evil.

Dream doesn’t see himself as evil because he believes he has good reasons for everything he does. During Tommy’s second prison visit, Dream says that he did bad things but that he did them for good reasons. He later admits to Sam that he doesn’t think he’s a good guy, but that he isn’t evil because he had his reasons.

And not only that, but one of Dream’s strongest convictions is that morality is a matter of perspective. Everyone is a good person in their own story, even when other people don’t see them that way. He brought this up during the staged disc finale, where he says that evil is in the eye of the beholder. He says it again when Tommy gets trapped with him in prison, then when Sam finds him after Techno’s escape, after Sam gets locked in prison, and lastly while speaking to Foolish. This is something that Dream deeply believes in.

What frustrates Dream is that nobody else has this view on morality. Nobody wonders whether Dream has any reasons for what he did and nobody sees their own part in conflicts. They just label Dream as evil and that’s it. This is most clear in the snake monologue:

“Oh, Dream exiled you, Dream blew up your country, Dream built a prison… And… we were just walking down a path. He’s evil.”

Sam says that he believes Dream just does bad things because he enjoys them, which Dream adamantly denies. Right before killing Tommy in prison, Dream gets angry about how Tommy is “annoying and disrespectful” only to then complain to Dream and accuse him of being a liar and of being manipulative.

Even before Doomsday, Dream is already getting irritated that many people portray him as the villain without seeing their own part. After George’s dethronement, George, Sapnap, and Quackity try to do a hostile takeover to reinstate George as king. In the discussion following this, Dream points out how George acts like Dream is a bad guy in that situation. When Tommy gets exiled, Dream thinks that Ghostbur is saying that Dream is the bad guy even though Tommy threatened Dream with burning Spirit’s remains. He also calls out Mexican L’Manberg for trying to paint him as the bad guy and a tyrant after they griefed Eret’s castle and set off TNT. 

Dream sincerely dislikes it when others call him evil or a psychopath. Tommy says this to him many, many times. Sometimes, Dream doesn’t react at all. After the Manberg vs Pogtopia war, Tommy calls Dream, “the villain”. Dream does and says nothing, while Punz goes and attacks Tommy. During Doomsday, Tommy says that Dream is a monster; Dream just replies with “okay.”

Other times, Dream does defend himself. In the staged disc finale, before going down the attachment vault, Tommy calls Dream a psychopath. Dream then says he “wouldn’t say that.” Inside the vault, Tommy says that Dream is a psycho again, prompting Dream to say that he is not a psycho and that everything he does is deliberate. Tubbo also calls Dream and Punz psychos when he and Tommy are taken to the prison, and Dream replies that it’s Tubbo and Tommy who are psychos for breaking in and murdering him in his own house.

Tommy calls Dream evil after he gets locked in prison with him. Dream then asks how he is any more evil than Tommy is. While explaining the staged disc finale, Dream is particularly angry that Tommy made the server turn against him by telling everyone that he was an “evil maniac” who was ruining everyone’s lives. He derisively says that he and Punz can’t test a selfless death limbo because they are “evil”, they are “so bad”, they’re “murderers”, and “blah, blah, blah, who cares.”

But despite all of Dream’s contempt for being labeled evil and a villain, he does seem to have internalized this idea somewhat. He jokes with Techno after the Green Festival that it’s “an evil villain thing” to give their enemies time to prepare. When Sam is locked in prison, Dream calls himself “the evil that was released from Pandora’s Box” and questions whether Sam even considers him a person. In the snake monologue, he compares himself to the “pure evil” snake that bites without reason until it gets put down.

And when Tommy finally realizes that Dream is not a villain, Dream immediately says that he is. The main instigator of the server’s hatred recognizes Dream’s humanity at long last, but Dream can’t seem to let go of the villain label just yet.

something about parallels and self-destruction 

Art by Juluurkhan Khalgaev

objects in art: swords/daggers

the dreamverse AU continues! this time, they’re in a bit of a pinch

Roller Jousting - Queen Joan by Johnson Ting

why do you think Dream told Sam 'all about exile'? obviously, this didn't lead to pleasant consequences for him

it's interesting, right? especially because--while exile wasn't exactly the most unknown thing at that time--it's far from the highlight of c!dream's Villain Actions in the majority of the dsmp population's collective consciousness, at this point. it's been about a month since c!tommy ran away from exile, and since then c!Dream has done Doomsday and then the staged finale. for someone like c!sam, it makes a lot more sense for c!dream to judge him as caring more about how Fran would've been taken as leverage in the disc vault, or how their old home together the community house was blown up by dream. while i have no doubts that c!sam would've interrogated c!dream about exile anyway, c!dream didn't have to tell him "all about it" in a way that had c!sam completely horrified within that first week. and frankly, no matter what cruelty c!sam might've already been up to, c!dream wasn't going to crack to the point of confessing anything he didn't want to confess over the course of like, five days in the very beginning of the prison arc.

so why does he? i'm sure he'd give you a whole host of rational reasons. c!tommy can't keep his mouth shut, obviously, so he assumed that c!tommy would spill the beans sooner or later. provoking c!sam from the getgo gives him a good idea of what to expect from the rest of his stay here, which will help him navigate the situation in an optimal way. mentioning c!tommy affects c!sam obviously, emotionally, which keeps him too off-balance to think about any logical inconsistencies in things like the staged finale and ever suspecting that c!dream wanted to be in the prison in the first place. if he's forthcoming about this Terrible Crime, then c!sam will be too focused on interrogating him about tommy to ask questions about the revive book, or vikkstar and lazar, or punz. and so on.

they're good enough reasons. valid reasons, sure. c!dream is very good at coming up with lists of rational reasons behind his actions, objective courses of actions that leave him firmly in control. c!dream also--in the process of the plan to put himself in the prison--dies at least five times, as far as we know of, and likely many more (if we are to believe that he did experiments on his own limbo pre-prison, which i think we Should, considering the circumstances, then he needed to lose his initial three lives to even test the revive book on him, not to mention however it was that he got another three lives in order to lose two in the staged finale) and starts swimming in the lava not even 24 hours into his imprisonment. just because a reason makes the most sense or is the most rational doesn't make it the real reason why c!dream does much of anything, which is something he never quite gets around to admitting to himself.

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

c!tommy's whole thing is that he unironically has some terrifying levels of being able to read people based on The Vibes while also like. literally being completely incapable of trusting his own instincts

dre & punzo