Crime Boys On Theseus’ Ship

Eowyn of Rohan and Arwen Undomiel

THE LORD OF THE RINGS TRILOGY (2001 - 2003) dir. Peter Jackson

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.”

🪑

I am obsessed with Sauron projecting his toxic and bumpy relationship with Melkor onto that dark web of manipulation he weaves with Celebrimbor. He expects Tyelpë to be as unstable, unreliable, chaotic, cold and heartless as Melkor could be, and is fairly certain that deep down Tyelpë is as ready to betray him as he does Tyelpë. And when Tyelpë shows him genuine love, kindness and, unwittingly, empathy, there is an urge within Sauron to give into this warmth and to reach out for a real 'human' connection. This makes him very confused and angry, at it forces all that bottled-down anger towards Melkor to surface. But then Tyelpë would unknowingly repeat Sauron's lies he has already told him, call him Annatar, and that would bring Sauron back on track.

Later, in Sauron's pits of torture, Tyelpë would laugh hysterically and tell Sauron, If he was anything like you are, then he had already left you before you even met.

im rewatching the dsmp from the beginning bc i just had saw the more later vod lore streams and i find something interesting about cdream. In the start he's a person who always look for beign undertod, when ctommy is being a troublemaker he's always trying to explain ctommy the rules, killing him also but always saying why and what ctommy has to do stop causing troubles. In conflicts he's a mediator and in later arcs we saw him trying to make people see what he sees and listen to him. I think one of the things cdream wanted the most wasn't being liked but being undertod. He wanted to people to actually see why he's doing things and listen to him. I think that's why he was willing to talk to ctommy in the end. I like to think as cdream as a mediator who no one listened his yells and took cards in the matter and ended up being part of the wars

mmhm mmhm--as he himself grapples with in the snake speech, right. it's not really about just the idea of oh, he's evil, people see him as evil, but the fact that he's not afforded the humanity that people seem willing to give a snake--that he got sidelined as pure evil, his motivations replaced, his voice cut out of the story. the whole snake speech is about this idea that no one ever asked why, which does tie in neatly with how quickly things come crumbling down when someone actually does.

// dsmp rp

The contrast in daedalus… Dream trying to manipulate Sam into doing what he wanted, but Dream also just wanting to vent his feelings; his anger. Wanting Sam to understand how badly he hurt him.

There's a definite shift somewhere along the way, where Dream transitions from that bitter, mocking side from the first stream to something more pragmatic and cold. It's not both at once; it's a conscious switch. It's as if he realized that he would never get through to Sam on any emotional level. Which was fine, he told himself; Dream was a pragmatist. He cut his losses and moved on. But abandoning all hope of an honest conversation, one of the only times he opened up—that couldn't be an easy call to make.

been thinking about post-prison c!dream again and i feel like ... characterizations of him after pandora smtimes can lean vindictive. and it's not like there's no proof for this being the case, lol, this man has quite a few angry speeches post-prison about getting his Revenge! and such, and obviously has Feelings about the whole being left to rot and be tortured thing. that being said, i think it's worth pointing out how what a character thinks they believe and what their actions show can have some...pretty apparent discrepancies, and i think that c!dream's stated desires to take his revenge as well as a "us against them, you're either with me or against me" viewpoint of the server as a whole don't necessarily match up with his behavior post-prison

for one, i think it's worth pointing out how often c!dream's anger in these cases is obviously emotional to the point of incoherence--it's often been stated that his speech in the logstedshire chase scene screams of projection in the midst of a panic attack, which, i mean? yeah? he's making assumptions about what c!tommy thinks and basically repeating what c!quackity said in that cell almost word for word and making the kill-and-revive-you-over-and-over-and-over threat that he definitely wasn't going to go through with (though, is kind of interesting retrospectively considering we know that he literally did that to himself). then there's his rant to c!sam in daedalus one which literally includes his threatening c!sam with c!quackity, a claim so absurd that c!sam himself points it out as making no sense. and then there's his speech with c!quackity where he says he's going to torture...las nevadas? as in, the country? dream that's. dream it's a country. it can't feel pain. dream.

in this, a clear pattern is established where a lot of these angry threats are...bluffs. hot air. even if c!dream is genuine when he makes these threats, they're really not plausible (like, uh, please tell me how youre gonna convince quackity to torture sam for you king.) and it's not like c!dream doesn't have a pattern of being A Whole Lotta Bark when you have him in a position where he feels cornered, either. but with this, there's a precedent that's established where c!dream's threats, particularly threats where he's literally just listing shit out like that, should be taken with a grain of salt. less evidence of true plans and more an attempt to bare his teeth at you until you back the fuck away.

of course, this in itself isn't enough to claim that all of his claims of more vindictive actions should be dismissed. that being said, across the board, when you look at c!dream's actual actions post-prison...well, the amount of actual revenge this guy gets is. very small. very small. in fact, contrary to what one might think due to his paranoia and the huge breach of trust that had happened as a result of the prison, c!dream actually seems quite willing to establish connections with other people--friendly interactions, even alliances to a certain degree. looking at the following list of interactions w/ people post-prison:

He immediately gives the axe of peace to c!Techno in Snowchester after they part ways at the Arctic Commune--though the lack of favors between them indicates that there's no real explicit reason to call on each other in the immediate future, he does show very clearly that their parting has made himself unwilling to cooperate with c!Techno at all.

Punz is self-evident--he speaks with his ally and reaffirms that the plan is still on track (a plan made before the negative effects that prison had on his. uh .everything)

The aforementioned conflict with c!Tommy, where he makes a lot of threats in ways that seem like a pretty damn deliberate mirror of c!Quackity and makes no effort to follow through on, particularly in tems of the killing-and-reviving shit and keeping tommy in exile and whatever else he was saying there

The interaction with Sapnap, where he is clearly gauging c!Sapnap's reaction and flees shortly after things appear to grow in hostility, once again making overtures at a threat that he will never follow up on (even considering he could very easily follow Sapnap to find Kinoko and could as such attack it quite simply even with just, a couple flint & steels tbh)

An interaction with Eryn where he makes no effort to be hostile at any point, hiding behind his shield and then exchanging items when Eryn offers them. The entire time, c!Dream's actions are defensive and purposefully nonthreatening and at no point does he attempt to engage a fight--even when not asked for payment, he gives a valuable item in exchange. Clearly more an attempt to be friendly than any outright hostility, though he is also obviously wary.

Daedalus also quite self-explanatory--again, it should be emphasized that letting Sam go in any capacity with any lives is explicitly an act of mercy. Left alone, Sam would have died in the prison for good; he set his spawn in the prison, a fact Dream would've known when he escorted him out. He makes a lot of threats, including some that are quiet incoherent, and at the end he kills Sam once and then escorts him out of the prison grounds alive. Interestingly enough, conversations in Daedalus also seem pretty explicitly from a perspective of trying to get c!Sam to understand him in some respects--like, c!Dream isn't seeking division here. Even in consideration of the fact that he needed to get the keycards, c!Dream's continued emphasis on trying to get c!Sam to see him is...interesting, in view of how much of what went wrong being explicitly because of c!Sam's betrayal.

He warns Bad and Skeppy away from the prison shortly after beginning to reside there on a permanent basis. He gives them quite a sum of gifts (iirc, a block of netherite and a totem of undying) despite firing arrows at them; even though he has a reason to be aggressive towards c!Bad as one of the prison guards (something both c!Bad and c!Skeppy point out) he makes no effort to kill them and outright gives them valuable items while warning them to stay away from the prison

scrapped lore, whenever it was meant to happen, was an obvious "revenge" attempt against quackity...which goes, badly. a clue into the State that he was in in terms of his revenge quests. also, whatever interaction he has with c!wilbur later, obviously c!Wilbur doesn't end up worse for wear physically from it.

In inconsolable differences, c!Dream is more preoccupied with keeping a "feeling" of power over c!Wilbur over taking outright control over the room and therefore complies with c!Wilbur's orders. He does attack, but despite having more than the necessary means to kill both c!Wilbur and c!Tommy while he's there, does not do so. Neither does he manage to keep them trapped in the prison, something that he absolutely could've done if he so chose. Instead, he values a (imaginary) symbol of his continued alliance with c!Wilbur over any kind of hostile action, imprisonment, or killing of either person (and explicitly values c!Wilbur's life over just about everything, there.)

In his interaction with c!Foolish, he's outright trying to get c!Foolish to consider him beyond what other people have said about him. He's trying to establish some form of an alliance and offers...well, quite a lot in order to have one (in order to have a five minute warning of c!Quackity's location. like, he's putting himself in c!Foolish's service quite explicitly here, offering to become his hitman or bodyguard). He's obviously wary, but also obviously trying to be friendly and largely interacts with c!Foolish by trying to establish a rapport, not by trying to threaten him into something or attack him in any way. Even with c!Sam, the amount of outright threatening behavior from c!Dream isn't all that large--mostly, he's being petty? You could make an argument about c!Dream's vague threat to c!Sam's island, but clearly Sam loses no lives from Dream in any interaction they might have after they leave the summer home.

I consider the whole interaction with c!Aimsey canon bc literally everyone was playing as their characters there--c!Dream outright goes out of his way to try and protect a total stranger here with no obvious personal benefit. He literally inserts himself into the conflict to try and prevent c!Aimsey's death, which is kinda wild for someone to do as someone who allegedly wants people to die on the server. He attacks (and even kills c!George) c!snf here, but it's all in a scene where they get distracted from their whole "blowing shit up" moment because they want to chase c!Dream, and c!Dream specifically uses very little melee combat here--a lot of ranged stuff, which is far from his specific specialty. Further, there's a scene in this fight where c!Dream is acting entirely defensively, backed up against a wall with his shield in front of him as c!snf attack, and at the end he just runs away--all behavior that doesn't seem to be about killing anyone or profiting from anyone's deaths in any way.

LN5, threats similarly nonsensical, and he dips as soon as things start going south. For all of his seeming confidence, he's not the one that continues the chase in an attempt to kill c!Quackity, and the fight evidently freaks him out considering how he ends up not realizing he's being stalked by c!Tommy and then hides in the prison for a solid while (while still being stalked by c!Tommy)

Despite apparently wanting them to decide who to die in the saw trap (which had a premise that is frankly, quite hard to believe), c!clingy are given the exact items that could've facilitated their escape. He certainly could've killed both or one at any point in time, even if he wanted a message to be spread to the server (something easily done with one guy)--instead, he monologues at them, then conveniently leaves so that they can get away (and they could've with the literal items he gave them if tommy didn't burn their food.) When c!Tommy returns the following day, c!Dream makes it clear he expected both of them to have gotten out

Despite being clearly unable to stand c!Tommy, blaming him for most if not all of his problems on the server, and outright saying to c!Tommy that c!Tommy would never agree to help him (after they had a shouting match literally one day ago), gives quite the sales pitch to get c!Tommy on the same page as them.

I'm probably missing stuff, but you get my point--even when presented golden opportunities to kill off a player post-prison, c!Dream doesn't take it. He outright spares c!Sam when he could've easily died from the Revengers' tactic. When meeting with strangers, he prioritizes establishing a friendly rapport with them through things like gifts over, in his distrust, treating them badly so that they're scared of him and therefore don't fuck with him yadayada. His behavior, instead of exuding an aura of anger and vengeance and vying for destruction, tends to send a message of trying to be outright unthreatening, please-don't-attack-me. He's not going everywhere holding his big fuck off axe, he's seeing a new person and ducking behind his shield.

Oftentimes, I feel like this quote is pulled or paraphrased from No Way Home to show how c!Dream has become distrusting of people, vindictive, post-prison

And if that means we have to kill everybody— and ev— everybody that doesn't wanna go along with what me and Punz have to say? Everyone that doesn't want to figure it out? Then, fine! You can be simple-minded and you can die simple-minded. But! If you wanna actually know what's going on in this world, and you wanna fix it, and make it the best that we can be, and live forever? Then they can join us.

And while I'm not saying we should dismiss the whole quote as just being disingenous bluffing, I think when taken into the context of post-prison c!Dream's actions (or, well, c!Dream's actions as a whole) as well as his actions in the finale itself (such as his appealing to c!Tommy in the next stream), rather than putting the emphasis on the idea of "everyone who disagrees with me should die," c!Dream seems far more preoccupied with the idea of trying to find people who are willing to work with him to "fix" everything. People who will help him make it so that they can "live forever"--a desire he expresses in the fourth finale stream as well.

like, it's not to say that c!dream isn't vengeful. he is. i mean, i'd say moreso than vengeful, he's angry--just like how a lot of his overtures at friendliness are so deeply rooted in fear. the prison made him angry and the prison made him scared, and the anger has to be repurposed into revenge because revenge is power that he certainly didn't have when he was on his knees begging for mercy. but far from being closed off and unwilling to work with other people post-prison due to his experiences in Pandora (which. would make sense. i mean. like, he was left in there, and tortured, and betrayed. anger and revenge and a general distrust towards everyone and a desire to destroy a world that condemned him would be very easy to understand in this scenario), i'd say c!dream's interactions with people post-prison scream of a general lack of a desire to actually go through with killing people. hell, he even revives c!tommy--c!tommy! who just killed him! who c!dream outright blames for like, basically ruining his life! when revivals are literally apparently destabilizing the universe!--shortly after killing him. generally, he meets people who are dealing with him aggressively with a desire to flee moreso than with murderous intent (in genuine finale 2, for example, this guy was sure more focused on running the fuck away than he was on killing either of c!clingy), and even moreso deals with other people on the server by acting defensively and even in a manner that seems deliberately designed to get them to be more willing to work with him, or at least deal with him in a friendly way. despite his paranoia and how deeply pandora cut as a betrayal and his obvious wariness towards all people as a result (there's hardly a single interaction on the list above, after all, that doesn't have c!dream's obvious fear of people leaking all over the damn carpet), he seems to be much more focused on the idea of finding possible allies than he is on the idea of killing everyone possible.

which, i mean, makes sense. as he himself states:

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

Wanna Be Twisted - TryHardNinja

Betray by 糖糖Will