Latest Posts by wislawa1 - Page 2

Athena, watching her “Warrior of the mind” give his IP address, passport information, location, full name, and serial code

WHEN THEY COSPLAY AS THEIR CHARACTERS >>>>>>>>

Eowyn of Rohan and Arwen Undomiel

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

I looked into your future and I saw death.

The Nameless Enemy: Speculations on My Favorite Baddie, Part 4

“It was an admirable thing and altogether precious.”

Gas cloud surrounding the star Fomalhaut.

go to part 1 | go to part 2 | go to part 3 | this is part 4 | go to part 5 [coming soon]

We never see Sauron—at least not in The Lord of the Rings—and that was funny to 13 year old me. When I first followed Frodo on that journey to Mount Doom I wondered at the choice to name a book after a villain who doesn’t actually appear in it. There’s the arrow of red light from Barad-dûr’s highest tower, of course, or the dark cloud with the reaching arm that rises over Mordor at the moment of Sauron’s defeat, but both of these function as suggestions of his presence or the weight of his attention only; they are the interpretations of the events as seen by others. Likewise, the one and only time Sauron speaks we receive his words through an intermediary—a contrite Pippin who has sneaked a peek at the palantir.

But Sauron is always there. The threat or the fear of him is always just at the edge of our peripheral vision: in the far-flung, millennia-long plots[1]; in the metaphors that put him everywhere all the time, disembodied limbs reaching to encompass all of Middle-earth (“his arm has grown long”) or disembodied eyes searching[2]; in the almost campy performance of evil on display when he orders his minions to steal only black horses from the Rohirrim; in the capitalized pronouns; in the metonymy and other evasive forms of address his orc underlings use to circumnavigate invoking him. In poor Sméagol’s other self[3].

In the ever-increasing weight hanging from Frodo’s neck: our antagonist is on that journey, too, literally and figuratively barreling towards his own destruction.

Along that journey Tolkien tells us numerous names and epithets for him—103 according to Richard Blackwelder’s A Tolkien Thesaurus—not counting the many he goes by in other texts. One of those is “The Nameless Enemy.” This word—“nameless”—is first applied in this way by Boromir at The Council of Elrond and later by Faramir, suggesting that invoking the name “Sauron” may be considered dangerous or even taboo to the Men of Gondor.

But “nameless” is far more appropriate than this simple explanation can express.

Czytaj dalej

(This is gonna be a long analysis)

I love angbang soooooo much. So much that I looked into all the religious subtext that their relationship is full of. Someone help me...................I mean it’s hard to separate the cannon from it’s religious connotations.........I needed to know all I could about angbang so here goes:

Okay I think Sauron and Melkor’s relationship was supposed to be an illustration of Idolatry.

The way Tolkien talks about their relationship seems to back this up.

On one hand he says: “but there was seen an effect of Melkor on Sauron: he spoke of Melkor in Melkor’s own terms: as a god, or even as god. This may have been a residue of a state which was in a sense a shadow of good: the ability once in Sauron to at least admire or admit the superiority of a being other than himself.”

And:

“While Morgoth still stood, Sauron did not seek his own supremacy, but worked and schemed for another, desiring the triumph of Melkor, whom in the begining he had adored.”

Now to put plainly it seems Sauron worshipped Melkor. He thought of him as god, and at least in the beginning adored him. He did not desire his own triumph, but the triumph of Melkor. He worked and schemed for him, for someone he admired and adored, for someone he seemed to revere.

It should be noted that the word “adore” is used to describe the way the valar and elves feel towards Eru. This makes it seem that Marion worships Melkor in the way the valar/elves worship Eru. That this feeling is good and “holy”

(I believe the word admire is also used in the same way)

But of course we are talking about dark lords, and Tolkien has admitted his stories are religious works. Naturally Sauron’s feelings for Melkor cannot from a religious lens be viewed as on the same level with worship and admiration of Eru.

This is displayed when Tolkien expresses only Eru can give TRUE love and independence. He also states that no sub-creator can give love in that same way, and that it is a wish for loving obedience. Then it is stated that can only turn into robotic servitude, which is inherently evil.

Now this is most likely a jab at Sauron, but it is NOT invalidating the strength of his original worship and devotion. It seems to be implying that as Tolkien said: “This may have been a residue of a state which was in a sense a shadow of good: the ability once in Sauron to at least admire or admit the superiority of a being other than himself.”

And that: “(he worked)desiring the triumph of Melkor, whom in the begining he had adored.”

(Again the words adored and admired again. Those in themselves were considered holy and devout feelings, things pure and selfless. Given to an idol they in the eyes of Eru become corrupt.)

Now it seems Mairon’s admiration and worship of Melkor was in essence the same in feeling as those who worshiped Eru, (they both feel admiration and reverence) but is inherently unholy and sinful. Something to be abhorred in its denial of god.

Or it could be that Sauron’s clear admiration for Melkor was a shadow of the gift Eru had given him, one that turned into sin as time went on. It was a shadow goodness and selflessness, but became corrupt.

Either way there are clear parallels between Sauron’s worship of Morgoth and Idolatry. Apparently just because you worship someone it doesn’t mean it’s holy. Sauron gave himself up, became imbued with evil and corruption, but his worship towards Melkor ran deep and kept him loyal for a long time. He denied Eru, but as Tolkien said in his words: “(Sauron)wasn’t a true atheist” as he instead looked to Melkor. But in worshipping Melkor he denied Eru.

Now Tolkien does seem to imply Sauron’s original feelings for Melkor were valid and pure, that is until they turned into denial of the true god and his love. Then of course Sauron’s feelings must have diminished into a shell of all true and holy love. Something with only semblance of such a “holy” thing as love for god.

SIGH.....Tolkien how come I had to raised by theologians to understand this reference. I never liked theology but of course my parents taught me to read Middle-English.

So what we can garner from this is it seems Sauron’s original love/devotion to Melkor was true and valid, but then became corrupted and twisted when it turned into denial of Eru. It became a shell of true love, something that caused him to remain in loyal and constant service to Morgoth through the millennia.

OR we can just focus on how it was all written from an unreliable narrator and thus we can do what we want!

Plus why does Sauron’s love of Melkor have to be inherently unholy! Why is love in itself not a pure and selfless action?

Tolkien made clear Sauron schemed for Melkor, desired the triumph of Melkor during all the time he served him. Even if his love was only holy in the beginning he still remained constantly selflessly devoted to Melkor, even when it contradicted his own goal. It would have been obvious to Sauron Melkor wished to destroy, while Sauron himself wished to innovate and control. You cannot innovate out of nothingness. But he still worked for Melkor, desired Melkor’s success and was implementing Melkor’s plans. What about that besides who it’s given to in unholy in any way?

Now there is the argument that a big part of his service to Morgoth was based of if his desire for power. Now as much as it might seem that was true from how he is described being drawn to Melkor’s strength, the fact that Tolkien said he did not seek his own supremacy, but desired the success of Melkor, and worked and schemed FOR someone other than himself, I do not think it could ever be reduced to simply that.

He seemed close to selfless in his actions as he was scheming and giving himself up for someone else.

I disagree with Tolkien. I believe reverence in itself is good and true. I believe to adore, to be selfless is good and true, though of course it is no excuse for committing evil. I just mean to me Sauron retained something good, even amidst the cocoon of his evil. So I guess I choose to interpret this in a different way, I choose to see his devotion not as inherent sin but as a fragment of good within him, which is almost what Tolkien meant honestly

But like it’s still love. He is working and scheming and striving for the success of someone other than himself. Tolkien said he desired Melkor’s success, and that his feelings for Melkor were the shadow of good. He is selfless in the fact he is truly desiring the goal of someone else above himself, and he is acting on it.

On Dragons (in Tolkien’s World)

The metaphysics[1] of dragons in Tolkien’s world is something of a mystery due to Tolkien’s principle that evil cannot create, only corrupt. So where do dragons come from? Are they just twisted forms of some pre-existing animal? But if so, how are they intelligent and self-aware? Are they corrupted Maiar? But if so, why do they need time to age and grow, as we see with Glaurung?

My theory is that the raw materials of dragons are existing animals[2] that have been twisted, just as the raw materials for werewolves like Carcharoth are actual wolves. (Carcharoth is raised from one of the ‘regular’ werewolves and then ‘he became filled with a devouring spirit’.)

But the spirits that inhabit dragons aren’t Maiar, in my theory. The Silmarillion says that “in the domination of his servants and the inspiring of them with evil [Morgoth] spent his spirit”. I think that, once the dragons were full-grown, Morgoth was splitting off parts of his spirit and putting it into the dragons, so that each dragon is in effect a little piece of Morgoth. It would explain why he guarded them so carefully, and kept most of them until a very last resort in the War of Wrath.

And it would explain the behaviour and power of Glaurung. When he first leaves Angband, during the Long Peace, he basically just acts like an animal. In the Narn i Hîn Húrin, he’s a very different character, malicious and scheming and deadly. And he pursues the children of Húrin like it’s a personal vendetta, which is striking. The other powerful servants of Morgoth either have at least some of their own motivations and goals, like Sauron, or show no distinct personalities, like the balrogs. But Glaurung is very deliberately, and precisely, and maliciously carrying out Morgoth’s goals to destroy Húrin’s family, and he seems to take it personally and revel in it despite never having met them. He’s manipulative and deceptive and very much like what we saw from Melkor back when he was active and scheming and not hiding in Angband. Even when Glaurung’s dying, he’s more driven by finding final ways to hurt the Children of Húrin than by the fact that he’s dying. And this makes sense if the spirit that’s animating him is, in effect, part of Morgoth.

And it explains why Morgoth was so weak by the end of the War of Wrath - he’d split off so many parts of his power that he had much less left in and of himself than any of the Valar did. In all likelihood, most of the other dragons had less than Glaurung, because Morgoth had less power to use by the point that he was making the winged dragons.

It also lines up with something else Tolkien said, that parts of Morgoth’s power remained in the world even after he was cast into the Void, and that power remained particularly strongly in gold. And what is it that dragons hoard? Gold. And The Hobbit states outright that the simple fact of having been hoarded by a dragon makes gold more dangerous and corrupting, at least to people who are vulnerable to it (like Thorin, and the Master of Lake-town).

This also deals with the same kind of metaphysical problem Tolkien had with orcs: how can a sapient species be entirely and universally evil? If dragons are bits of Morgoth, if they don’t have spirits with independent origins they’re inherently evil; you can’t have a good dragon in Middle-earth.

(And another benefit of this theory is that it makes Bilbo Baggins even more of a badass in retrospect for holding his own in a conversation with Smaug.)

[1] Fun fact: this term comes from the title of the book Aristotle wrote after his Physics. It literally just meant Physics: The Sequel and we’ve made a fancy philosophical term out of it.

[2] Dinosaurs, maybe? :D

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Your post on Melian being the Maia of love, and how the Ainur all had their “domains” has got me wondering, what do you think Mairon’s would have been before corruption or if his corruption had never happened?

Always an interesting question, and thanks so much for being curious about my opinion!

I think his domain was the same before and after corruption, just like Melkor.

The chaos and extremes Melkor represents didn’t need to be evil, in fact they go into how his contribution is almost a way of swirling the domains of the different Valar together, like how Melkor’s influence on Ulmo’s domain creates clouds that allowed him to be close to Manwe… that’s off topic, but I want to point out that corrupted or not we should still be able to see Sauron hold down the same skills as he would as Mairon.

My initial instinct is that he is the Maia of Order, which intensifies into a need for control when he defects to Melkor. This gives us the idea of Sauron being the order in Melkor’s chaos, making his defection an inevitable part of his nature.

Tolkien was writing LotR in letters to his son fighting in WWII at one point, and the parallels between fascism and Mordor were not subtle as a result. Sauron seeks order and to implement that he needs control and for that he needs power. This drives him, and his understanding of systems and order makes him very, very good at getting it.

The rings are very neat and orderly in concept, a heirarchy of power created with numbers significant to each race- there were 3 original elves, 7 fathers of dwarves, and we can assume based on that pattern, 9 was the initial number of men.

But I also think a lot about his symbol being the red eye, and his perception being stifling and practically a weight characters have to bear. He was initially Melkor’s spy in the years of the lamps, so information might be his domain.

Now, Aule would definitely be the Valar of knowledge, so it’s not quite that, but he has a desire to share that knowledge (see creation of the dwarfs) and Mairon was initially one of Aule’s maiar. Also, can I just say that knowledge being the forbidden fruit in Christian mythology and Aule having as much if not more knowledge of the workings of the physical world as Melkor? Very clearly this is why his Maiar keep getting corrupted.

So if I were to marry the idea of order with the eye imagery which screams observation, I think it he would end up with a domain of…

Math.

I’m kidding but I’m also not kidding. Calculations and analysis that orders the world based on observation… hyper intelligence and recognition of patterns, association with chaos…

I think Mairon is the Maia of patterns and calculations… which is basically math.

Trust a liberal arts professor to make their villain a math guy, smh.

Really, information and organization of that information are his strengths, and I think it’s really significant that he ultimately falls because he did NOT have all the information and failed to understand all the factors until it was too late.

Ok, his domain is Order, final answer. But I still secretly think it’s math.

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.

ive never really been one for rewrites (apart from like. ignoring the nuke finale. Also reviving cranboo. ok maybe a lil bit) but what i would have changed is the ending of the ghostbur arc because for me it could have been everything but by Not tying it properly it just. misses the mark a bit

now there's going to be a funny question: what rational reasons does he have for burning himself in lava? XD

there's nothing else to do obviously 🙄 it annoys the warden and getting a predictable reaction out of him is Useful :) and it's not like it does any real damage soooo. you see he's causing himself repeated pain for very well thought out reasons that he's completely thought through !! knowing how other people will react is Useful. and it shows how not fazed at all he is by pain which is also Useful. and yeah the answer is he's being very rational about it obviously even if it might look like he's not because he's showing sam that he's insane which is important to keeping up the ruse and again the pain doesn't mean anything. so yeah.

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

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.

if i had to be accurate i think exile was not at all obsessive or systematic abuse, i genuinely think it was revenge gone wrong wait hear me out. we have proof that the whole cdream is obsessed with ctommy theory wasnt realistic or canon and if we take into account how weirdly cdream sometimes acted in exile with the whole letting tommy have fun with the trident etc we can kinda make paralels to similar stuff irl which is why i always looked at exile as revenge based bullying gone horribly wrong. like cdream really did act like a highschool bully and you know why it comes across like that? because both ctommy and cdream are hella young. a lot of people wanna make it more traumatic more abusive more horrific or gory or whatever but the simplest explanation is often the first one, it was all bullying. and i find it very very weird how people on the other side did not consider bullying bad enough for it to be taken seriously so they had to invent intestine cakes and whatever the fuck else just to consider exile "bad enough" to be taken seriously when bullying is already more than bad enough.

isolating the victim? check. aking them do something against their will? check. lying to them? check. pretending to be their friend? check. making them believe their other friends abandoned them? check check check.

also the way it was done, like really? literally the trope of no one coming to the party and victim sits alone feeling sad? what is this, a cartoon show about the power of friendship??

exile was neither "not a big deal" nor "horror movie levels of abuse" it simply was a sad arc with themes that do hit too close to home for many. the psychological ramifications that came from it? whole nother issue that needs a seperate analysis because yes, bullying victims can and do develop paranoia and some of the other stuff ctommy exhibited but not all like the whole ctommy still being scared of cdream, following him obsessively even months after it was clear cdream wanted nothing to do with him anymore, etc did throw me off because thats not really regular bullying or even abuse victim behavior??? i digress

tldr exile was bad thats a fact but it wasnt SAW movie franchise levels of bad

sorry for the rant, wanted to get my lore thoughts out

tbf exile being 2 weeks of vengeful peer abuse, also known as bullying, is straight up just canon

the "obsession" take that we specifically had issue with had a lot of issues in the way that it very deliberately rewrote c!dream's entire character to explain ALL of his actions through an obsession with c!tommy. specifically, there was a lot of malice ascribed to him LONG before exile in order to say that c!dream basically wanted to do something like exile from the very beginning to c!tommy, but wasn't able to until exile happened because c!wilbur was protecting him or some other shit. that reading relied on the worst possible faith retelling of everything c!dream has ever done + a good amount of just straight up narrative rewriting to emphasize how young and innocent and vulnerable c!tommy is and how obsessive weird creepy stalker grown ass man who wanted c!tommy to himself c!dream apparently was from day one, a take that emphasizes exile as The End Goal of months of obsession instead of being in service to some other goal as is canon. that's the obsession take that was passed around quite frequently that we specifically took a lot of issue with.

on the other hand, c!tommy being c!dream's victim because c!dream disproportionately blames him and took all sorts of shit out on him and found a degree of vindictive pleasure in hurting him is literally just. canon? that's canon.

speaking of c!dream, man is so weird about exile in a way that i think is actually kind of delightful and hilarious to see. god forbid he admits he crossed a line, he'd rather give you a boss battle and lots of item and your discs back and two of his lives, that's-- that's fair, right?

absolute moron. just say you're sorry! well, i mean, he isn't sorry, to be fair, he definitely isn't, but surely that's better than squirming every time it gets brought up? how the hell did he survive c!sam's questioning he was being awkward about it even before the prison

oh, sure, if he can bring it up to use it as weapon, that's fine. except he also just kinda skirts around it. of all the awful shit this guy has done, bullying a teenager for two weeks is the one thing that gets him disconcerted. and of course it does, of course. king of making up reasons for everything and all he can give c!tommy in the finale is the stupid ass excuse of ermmmm ummmm welll but i could've revived you so that didn't matter-!

nice try, bro. took you two fucking years to come up with that one and you couldn't even do a better job at it. go on, speak up. tell us why you did all that. drop the excuses, tells us with your whole chest what the reasons for your behavior in exile are. go on. you know you got nothing my man, you know you can't bear looking at it in the face. little coward put himself in a torture box but can't handle guilt. and then he has the audacity to insist he was always a villain. you can't even handle the weight of your one unjustifiable sin because the idea of being responsible for this kid's suicide is something you can't stomach. oh c!dream, who are you even trying to fool? he had you the second he brought up that tower.

i know morality and c!dream can be a sticky subject especially bc of how like, unreliable this guy is when he talks abt himself, but as much as we repeat lines in daedalus i do think that it's worth remembering that his whole ... "oh evil is in the eye of the beholder" "everyone is the hero in their own story" "they're not excuses theyre reasons" "im evil but the ends justify the means" ETC of it all is like. self protective?

like no, c!dream isn't a character that is all that occupied with morality from the beginning, obviously. but at the same time this is also a character where the crux of the damn matter when c!tommy finally gets through to him is you know, no, dumbass, you aren't Just Irredeemable Evil you're an idiot asshole that chose to do shitty things and there are, in fact, other paths you can choose. this is also a character that has a whole breakdown on his own about the "thin line between good and evil" where he wrestles with his own morality and humanity in comparison to a fucking snake. this is a character that is SO FUCKING BOTHERED by c!sam's like, everything, c!quackity's sadism, c!wilbur confronting him over lmanburg (i'm a tourist. not a terrorist.) (like ,,,)

like no matter how much c!dream tries to beat his conscience into the ground, no matter how much he says that ohhh he's just evil look at his evil lair and evil speeches and evil villain plan to give warning before he attacks and evil giving people primes (what???), no matter how much he repeats the fact that ~the end justifies the means~ and it's all worth it in the end so the middle doesn't actually matter...uh, it kind of does matter to him. c!dream might've always been ruthless and a bit of a jerk and capable of a heck of a lot of damage, but he doesn't go into this on day one thinking that abusing a teenager is A-okay. he doesn't go into the damn end of this thinking that abusing a teenager is A-okay, for fuck's sake. when pushed to the wire all he could say to c!tommy is that he tortured him, because he deserved it, like that's at all about ends justifying means and goals and whatever. like that's not the same thing that his own torturer said to him just weeks ago, in those few minutes before he was sent running.

like yeah, part of this is for show. also the other evil ass guys on this server don't exactly go around adding "evil ___" in front of everything they do, do they? you don't see c!quackity calling his casino "EVIL CASINO !!!" or c!sam calling his bank "EVIL BANK!!!" (c!sam, of course, Isn't A Bad Guy) (well, that whole Thing is also self-protective, but you know) like /?? c!dream is Weird about morality and fixated on the whole evil villain whatever of it all in a way that is just too obvious for him to not care about morality nearly as much as he claims to.

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

honestly i do think cdream blamed ctommy on a lot of his problems bc it has easier than see the nuance in what happened to him and his actions on exile weren't bc of obssesion with ctommy but more of a taking out his anger with him. And it's interesting how both cdream and ctommy blame each other in ruin each other lifes Instead of seeing the nuance and the other people in their lifes that contributed to that happening

this but also

Wings anyone?

Technobladeeeeeee 🤲

I just think he’s really really cool— please take my offering

THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENED.

Can we hear more about that theory?

it's less of a theory and more just derangement, and a specific angle of viewing the story. but smth i think that is crucial to how i see the story and something that i think is too-often deemphasized in the fandom, regardless of how much you buy into the derangement lmao, is that c!discduo is not...really a standalone relationship. i mean it is, but in just as many ways it isn't...and the reason why the finale and you know, an actual conversation between the two of them takes so long to get to is precisely because it was overshadowed by the third component of their whole deal. are you following? does this make sense? i dont know.

c!dream + c!tommy are one side of a triangle that supports quite literally everything abt their whole central conflict and narrative, with the third part being, well, c!wilbur. and the c!wilbur-c!tommy-c!dream of it all is quite understandably easy to miss, but it's also what i think leads to some of the most striking differences in c!dream and c!tommy interpretations, not to mention the story as a whole. c!wilbur's relationship with c!dream and c!tommy separately AND together is critical to the ways that the two characters develop and how their conflict evolves--i'd say that that's more just. canon, than a theory. but how far you extend that is where it kinda delves into different interpretations of canon, you know?

but it's just like ... when the whole fucking point of that last stream, the whole damn crux of it is when tommy says "i thought you were just a villain" and dream replies with "i am and i always have been" and the whole damn POINT is that these viewpoints were never true to begin with, when what dream throws to tommyinnit is a picture of lmanburg, when the shit that they have to dismantle to reach out at the end of the fucking world is the hero/villainisms that have DEFINED THEIR STORY independently AND together, it's like. look . when the story is like dismantling the literal source of their conflict and c!wilbur's fingerprints are all over the damn thing, it feels a Little reductive to see the conversation so consistently happen without even invoking his name, you know?

Title: Queen Guinevre's Maying

Artist: John Collier

Date: 1900

Style: Romanticism

Genre: Literary Painting

Art by Maojin.Lee

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

Feeling safe

Master List for my own sanity (I will try to update it regularly):

Stream analysis:

Overly Long Analysis of c!Tommy and c!Dream dynamic in season 1

A Comprehensive Analysis of the Exile arc Part 1 -  Part 2 -  Part 3 -  Part 4 -  Part 5 -  Part 6 - Part 7 [completed]

Analysis of the Nether portal scene

A rant about Season 2 Finale

Overly Long Analysis of Tommy’s first prison visit

Overly Long Analysis of Tommy’s second prison visit (quotes with an Addition and another Addition)

Overly Long Analysis of the death and revival streams

An analysis of “Tommy’s plan to kill Dream” Part 1 and Part 2

Analysis of Foolish first death stream

Analisys of Wilbur’s and Tommy’s streams from the 05/05/21

An analysis of Foolish’s and Tommy’s conversation

Comprehensive analysis of the Custody Battle stream

Overly long analysis of Wilbur and Ranboo build the burger van

Overly long analysis of Wilbur’s stream of the 1 year anniversary of L'Manburg

Overly long analysis of Dream’s jailbreak Sunday Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

Extra analysis:

A rant about Freedom in the smp (c!Techno critical)

An analysis of c!Wilbur (this one is quite critical)

A rant on how c!Dream assigns c!Tommy added value

A theory on the reason for c!Dream’s obsession for c!Tommy

A random collection of handy Dream SMP Quotes

Did Tommy betray Techno? a rant

Not Comprehensive List of c!Dream’s Obsessive Behaviour

Headcanons and aus:

Tailor!Tommy headcanons (fluff)

Bench Trio Headcanons (angst)

Possible scenarios of Wilbur coming back (crack)

Dream smp bad end au (angst)

Dream smp Fantasy au (fluff)

God!Tommy and God!Wilbur AU (crack)

Superhero AU and Alternate Superhero AU (crack)

Undertale AU (angst? fluff? both??)

Protective Ranboo hc (angst)

Protective Tubbo HCs (fluff? Kinda?)

Alternate AUs meet up? Sort of?  (crack)

Flowerboy!Tommy HCs (fluff)

Citizen’s Newspaper AU part 1 -  part 2

God!Tommy and God!Tubbo AU (made with @ladycatland)

Platonic Soulmates AU (Bee Duo’s case - Crime Boys’ case - Part 2) (angst)

Tommy gets all the mobs! (crack/fluff)

Protege AU (angst)

Immortal Tommy + Superhero AU (angst/crack)

Dsmp x DLsmp AU (mostly angst)

Stray AU

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LINK with all the informations on the tags I use