Curate, connect, and discover
C!dream is raised by c!puffy on her ship, around raucous sailors who regale him with tales of their adventures, who sing together horribly off key, and his childhood lullabies were the songs sung by his shipmates.
C!dream sings sea shanties alone in his cell to fill the silence.
And he wonders where his family, where his mother, have gone.
The tunes don’t sound the same when sung by one voice that trembles with unshed tears.
The weakest links are those who hold all the same beliefs as all of us here on dreblr, and yet refuse to call themselves c!dream apologists.
If it walks like a duck...
An angsty pandoras vault idea I’ve had for a while... warning for death and general suffering
Fun fact about lava and volcanic eruptions in general, the most dangerous part is usually the gases released! Volcanoes are actually huge pollutants due to how much carbon dioxide is released. A number of websites warn about being in low lying areas around lava, due to that CO2 and other gases gathering, and leading to suffocation. (Link)
Many peoples version of c!sam depicts him wearing a gas mask, right? Would creeper hybrids even need the same air as humans/whatever c!dream is? The same goes for c!Bad and c!sapnap, often shown as a demon and blaze hybrid respectively. The headcanon doesn’t work quite as well with c!quackity. But what if c!sam doesn’t lend him just his pick axe, but his gas mask as well?
A pandoras vault that never lets c!dream take a full breath of air. The moment he respawns, he begins suffocating once again. His cell is a death trap.
Maybe c!sam learns the total allotment of air available, and times his visitors so that no one will notice the punishment that c!dream endures.
C!techno is often shown as a piglin or piglin hybrid. He grew up next to the lava lakes of the nether. His body is designed for these conditions. The torture he endures is in watching c!dream suffocate in front of him, over and over, with no way to help.
Many people are of the opinion that some of the abuses that C!Dream faces are in some way justified or excusable. Which, no! Abuse is never okay! But lets put that aside for one moment. Lets pretend that yes, c!dream being subject to solitary confinement is defensable due to the moral boundaries that he’d crossed. That he posed such a threat to other people, that he was bad enough of a person, that his rights are now null and void.
Where do we draw the line? I’m genuinely curious, at what point in the storyline did people no longer think he deserved adequate living conditions? What action did he take that then made it perfectly okay for him to be cut off from any form of support network? What moment meant that his canonical self harm could then be dismissed as attention seeking?
And if we’ve now established that there is some point when abuse is justified, surely that logic must be applied universally? What action would c!tommy have to take where exile was okay? Where is that line in the sand?
The logic behind excusing the conditions of pandoras vault is the same behind justifying the exile arc.
Some shows and fandoms c!dream antis would not survive in, and should not watch
Bojack horseman, loki, mcu in general, dcu (specifically thinking of Jason todd), she ra, breaking bad
Feel free to add more!
What if:
c!dream remembers how almost the entire server watched as he lost two canon lives; and that no one said anything to stop him being murdered.
c!dream has recurring nightmares where the server watches again, but this time it’s as c!quackity takes his sanity.
C!dream becomes so sure that there are other people in the cell when c!quackity visits him. That the people he once called friends are watching him be tortured. Sometimes he sees them out of the corner of his eye, other times he can only feel them watching. Sometimes he begs for their help, pleads with the mirages his mind has conjured. C!quackity will occasionally indulge these hallucinations, pretend to interact with them, make c!dream detail exactly who he’s seeing. Other times he taunts c!dream with the knowledge of his tenuous grasp on reality, question the logic of certain peoples presence, and do anything he can to remind c!dream that he’s alone, that he only has c!quackity now.
C!dream tells c!techno how many witnesses there had been to his torture. C!techno tells him it wasn’t real, that no one could have watched his suffering and stood idly by. C!dream is so grateful, he’d been so confused when everyone, even his best friends, had done nothing as they watched him be murdered. But it hadn’t been real... right?
We know that early dsmp streams and content are lore, right? Stuff from before anyone started roleplaying, still counts as part of a character.
That means that cc!dream, messing around with his friends on the server, is a canonical part of c!dreams character.
So why do people argue that c!dream was abusive and a bad person this whole time???
The reason I bring this up is because when c!sapnap visited c!dream in prison, c!dream wrote that he’d get out eventually, and c!sapnap responded with-
‘No, dude. You can’t. Look, I love you, man, but you- you gotta stay here. This is where… this is where you belong for now. Maybe… Maybe one day if everyone’s cool with it.’
Does c!dream truly believe that anyone's’ opinions will ever change? In that same visit, c!sapnap then promises he’d kill him himself if he escaped. His best friend could vow to kill him, why would anyone else show him ‘mercy’?
C!dream knew that imprisonment hadn’t been implemented with any plans to release him. He would have had his final life taken if it weren’t for his last piece of leverage, the revive book.
C!dream has to hold out hope for escape for his own sanity. The alternative is spending the rest of his life in torturous conditions.
Was c!dream told about this chance of release for good behaviour that c!sapnap mentioned?
The removal of all positive traits from c!dream is harmful to abuse survivors.
Abusers are not terrible 100% of the time. Many are leading community members, or known for their charisma and friendliness.
It is an incredibly common narrative that people doubt that they were actually abused, as the perpetrator displayed kindness and positive traits, to both their victims and other people.
When abuse victims do come forward, their experiences are often denied by people who had a good experience with the abuser.
Allowing c!dream not only makes for a more compelling narrative and character, but it also makes it easier for people to identify abusers.
Maybe you still think c!dream is evil, and that’s okay. But evil has a human face.
Was c!dream told about this chance of release for good behaviour that c!sapnap mentioned?
If people really wanted to keep c!dream from hurting people, they would focus on rehabilitation, not retribution
For those who’d like to minimize the impact of solitary confinement, here’s two excerpts from an article compiling accounts of those who were subjected to it.
‘From its earliest use in this country, we've known what isolation does to the minds of human beings. The first all-solitary-confinement prison in the U.S., in Auburn, New York, was shut down in 1822, after only 18 months of operation, when the governor visited and saw that every one of its 26 prisoners had become psychotic.’
‘Within the first week, I started talking to myself. I would think I was seeing stuff out of the corner of my eye. I would turn my head real fast, like I saw something in my cell. The hallucinations—it's not something a lot of us talk about, but all of us had them real bad. You see somebody else in your cell. You hear voices on the stair or coming through the vent.-Nelson’
I have an idea, we stop calling it ‘pandoras vault’ and instead refer to it as ‘the torture chamber’
If c!dreams imprisonment and subsequent torture wasn’t done in the name of authority, would people have a bigger issue with it?
By that I mean, if c!sam had held c!dream captive in his basement, and never used any terms such as ‘warden’.
Institutionalised abuse is so normalised as a foundation of the prison system, and I think many viewers haven’t done any critical thinking on where their thoughts on pandoras vault truly come from.
Burning hot take:
I’m not usually one for pain olympics, but since people keep saying that c!dream’s actions towards others are justification for his torture I gotta say it.
The prison is worse that exile
I somewhat disagree, as trauma is subjective- however I absolutely agree that the prison is a clear escalation. And even if exile was ‘worse’ that doesn’t make any further mistreatment okay!
‘C!Dream is a bad person because he has no empathy’
‘I don’t feel bad for c!dream, I laugh whenever he suffers, he deserves the prison’
??
if i see one more person say that c!dream was the one to build pandoras vault the way it currently is—
C!dream antis will really argue that torture is fine as long as the character has done enough things wrong, and then call us the abuse apologists
So many people wrongly assume that ‘c!dream apologists’ argue that he did nothing wrong, and therefore he doesn’t deserve what’s happening to him.
He did so many things wrong, and hurt so many people, and still doesn’t deserve what’s happening to him.
both c!tommy and c!sapnap have said that Pandora's vault is a fate worse then death
apropos of nothing, here’s a quote from a medical paper
‘for just about all prisoners, being held in isolated confinement for longer than 3 months causes lasting emotional damage if not full-blown psychosis and functional disability’
Tw torture /rp
Quackity learns from Sam that Dream likes to touch the lava sometimes, “for attention,” Sam says, or to disturb visitors.
At his next visit, Q forces him into the lava, over and over. Normally Dream would step in for a moment, then run back to the respawn pool to put himself out, but Quackity won’t let him.
When Q leaves, Dream presses himself against the wall on the far side of the cell, as far from the lava as he can get. It used to be “exhilarating,” but now the thought of touching it makes him sick.
!!!!!
how exactly is exile different from pandoras vault?
Is it because ctommy’s a minor? Does that mean it would have been okay if c!dream had simply waited a year? Or was it that c!tommy hadn’t done anything ‘bad enough’ to deserve it. Couldn’t c!dream then argue that he would have done worse things, if he hadn’t intervened?
The actions the server took to condemn c!dream only served to validate his choices.
thinking about c!dreams clock once again
Constantly throwing it away makes so much sense, beyond just as a way to see c!sam.
The constant ticking only serves to let him feel every second of his time imprisoned. To know exactly how many days he’s been locked away, that’s a torture all on it’s own. But so would ignorance. To be unsure of how much time has passed between each delivery of food rations. Are they coming further apart now? C!sam comes to give him a new clock and says its been only a day, but he’d been so sure a week had passed.
an effect of solitary confinement is paranoia. C!dream begins to suspect his clock has been tampered with. It speeds up, slows down. Surely it hasn’t been that long yet? And yet, surely its been longer?
he cares too much about this inanimate object. Anytime he realises that he couldn’t bare to have it taken from him, he destroys it himself.
What if c!quackity finds out abt c!dreams’ sh. He decides that since he’s so good at hurting himself, he can give c!quackity a break. C!dream being instructed to inflict pain, being handed a weapon and only able to turn it against himself. One of his few forms of control taken by c!quackity. Self harm had been an unhealthy coping mechanism, but it was one of only a few coping mechanisms’ he’d had
‘you only like c!dream because you think he’s hot!’
I’m a lesbian????
touch starved c!dream really do be making me feel things
sometimes I remember the fact that c!quackity canonically brought shears with him to pandoras vault and I have to go and lie down