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
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.