Pandoras Vault - Blog Posts

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.

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.

fun fact- both the nether and pandoras vault probably smell like rotten eggs

A study on over 200,000 prison inmates showed that whilst making up just 7% of the prison population, those in solitary confinement made up 53% of all recorded acts of self harm.

There is a possibility that these statistics show correlation, and not causation. That those placed in solitary confinement were already those more likely to reoffend, and with pre-existing mental health problems. However this argument is refuted when looking at other observable effects on the brain. 

A 2018 study showed that after just one month of isolation, in the sensory and motor parts of  mice's’ brains, their neurons shrunk by 20 percent after one month of isolation, and by 25 percent after three months. Further research is needed to determine if this loss is permanent, as well as looking for other areas of change. 

Was c!dream told about this chance of release for good behaviour that c!sapnap mentioned?

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’

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’

So many people argue that c!dream being imprisoned and tortured is best for c!tommy... is it really? Surely the most reassuring thing for him would be knowing that his abuser has been rehabilitated and no liber want to hurt him? Instead he just lives everyday unsure if c!dream will escape and hurt him again. Perpetuating the cycle of violence, focusing on the punishment of crimes rather then the prevention of them future ones, hurts everybody, including c!tommy.

I have a love hate relationship with the name pandoras vault.

On the one hand it’s so cool! My first thought when hearing it was that it’s so clever, and I love mythology references (plus the continuation with ‘Theseus’ is rly nice)

But it also does the exact same thing that the fandom does to c!dream. The metaphor of the name directly compares him to the embodiment of all evil; and suggests that anyone who lets him out would be a fool, who is putting everyone else in grave danger. The contents of the original pandoras box weren’t people capable of change, they were instead concepts.

How did I just see someone only care abt the conditions in pandoras vault because of c!tommy being in there??? I hate twitter so much oh my goodness.

thinking abt critiquing the entire existence of the revenge trope as it pertains to pandoras vault,, someone hype me up i need the confidence boost

YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO SUCK IT GREEN BOYYY

i saw someone upset about how when c!Dream was in prison, no one cared about his crimes and still were like apologizing for him and saying that he should be free and what not (which, we call those people "dream apologists" obviously), but when c!Sam is thrown in, everyone kinda went "oh yeah he fucking sucks"...

That's sort of the point... yeah, Dream's character is considerably easy to hate because of what bad things he has done, but there are still ways to love his character. Of course, not all of us understand these ways, but that doesn't mean we should hate on people for seeing those ways. Meanwhile, Sam's character is lowkey MEANT to be hated. His character isn't meant to be likable. He is meant to be a bad person (in character ofc), we are meant to recognize his bad doings. Hence why there's such a big difference between reactions of them being jailed.

Yeah, sure, it's weird why people still defend c!Dream after all of his crimes, and yes, he should certainly be held accountable for what he did, but it's very important to remember that Dream has a large portion of following that are very extreme when it comes to simping, he has such a large portion because he has so many fans and subscribers. Sam doesn't have as big of a following (sadly) and has less simps because of this, and yeah, it is still definitely unfair, but that is just how it is, and that's probably the reason that people defend c!Dream.

c!Dream shouldn't be defended for his crimes at all, but neither should c!Sam. In the end, they both did really shitty things, but they're characters. They are not real. They both deserved to stay locked up, but that doesn't seem to be how the story goes.

Most of our fandom are still young, immature and don't have good judgment like older fans, so you can't just yell at them because of that, they need to be educated on it instead of being yelled at for why their opinion is wrong, and that's not even exclusive to this fandom, or any fandom at all, that applies to everything. (Meaning, no matter the circumstance, no one should be scolded or hated on for opinions, if they're opinion goes against fact, though, they should be educated on it, not yelled at.)

But idk, just another "here's what i think" post, ig.. take this with a grain of salt tho cause i'm not willing to get into drama over something as small and dumb as this