I honestly hate to bring a more negative topic into fandom discussion again but there’s been something that’s been a constant in the dsmp fandom for as long as I’ve been in it and I just feel like having a little rant. Don’t mind me if you’re not here for that.

If you’ve been in the fandom for any amount of time (or at least since I joined late 2020) fun fandom catchphrases such as “the fandom is dying” “the smp is going downhill” and “the fandoms got so much worse” have surely been a common occurrence. How very fun and quirky :|

This kinda talk has always aggravated me so much and I think I know how to verbalize why now. The dsmp was a very strange internet phenomenon for a short while. Hell, all three of my very non-nerdy siblings got very into it. At a point it was practically everyone’s thing. My question is where the fuck do ppl think it’s going past that? Certainly not up, and very unlikely everyone from that wave would love it forever. The fandom isn’t dying it’s losing weight. At no point would any experienced fandom nerd ever call what we have a dead or dying fandom.

And sure it’s upsetting when a fandom begins to split and form separate bubbles, but what do you expect of such an enormous group of people? If a person thinks the fandom is worse now honestly I’d just say they aren’t curating their experience thoroughly enough, I guess that’s harder on Twitter and Tiktok but don’t blame the whole fandom for that shit. And especially don’t host “I’m not in this fandom anymore but I’m still mad at it” discussions in our fandom tags. (Looking at a select few tiktok videos I’ve seen recently)

I guess my main point is that if you looked at fandom popularity as a graph people are so obsessed with the popularity being a perfect straight line forever or even getting more popular as it goes but that is just not how everything works. Especially an independent creative project based on individual peoples motivation. I’m gonna get a bit existential here but oh “The fandom has just been slowly dying as it goes on :’(” . . . Yeah and so are you. Slow decay of things over time is quite literally the most natural progression for anything. There’s erosion and decay until only the most resilient pieces are left. And I say that with all the love of two years of the most passion and inspiration I’ve ever experienced for a fandom in my heart. We live, we experience, we change, that’s just how our silly brains work. Oh god, this is getting way too deep for a rant about minecraft men but god damn it decay is not something to fear. Let the fandom go through its life cycle, why would you want to focus on the erosion when you could focus on how beautifully polished what is left is becoming? Its ok to have a bad experience with a fandom and be angry about it but projecting that back at the fandom in such a general and aggressive way especially from outside of it always does more harm then good. Please stop telling me my community and greatest comfort is dying, we’re right here.

i cannot stop drawing ctommy girl HELP

based on

So, if in the finale c!Dream’s helmet, that he takes off for c!Tommy, represents his mask, does that mean that when c!Sapnap puts on c!Dream’s armor, Nightmare, he is putting on and stealing c!Dream’s mask? - Because I’m not gonna lie that really puts a new perspective on that betrayal… Furthermore, when c!Techno brings c!Dream armor in prison, did he make him a mask and bring it to him… and then take away the mask later? - If so, again that’s kinda screwed up. Though you could argue that perhaps he made c!Dream a mask for the jailbreak so he had one to face the server with and then because they were trying to not seem like allies he took it back, knowing that c!Dream would get another one. Which also begs the question, did c!Punz make c!Dream a mask for after prison or is he simply handing over one of c!Dream’s masks?… When c!Tommy in the minecart skirmish stole c!Dream’s armor, was he taunting him with his own mask? - Because oof that’s some serious violation and disrespect…

In other words, if you think that c!Dream’s helmet in the finale represents the mask (which I’d say is implied by c!Tommy) does that same logic apply across the board or is it just for that moment? And if it does apply to rest of the lore, wow does that have some implications…

I can't go over everything yet (spoilers), but I do want to talk about a fun thing about Techno being in the role of Wilbur in my Roleshuffle AU.

So, in the dsmp canon, Wilbur doesn't find Eret out due to two reasons: 1. Eret is competent. He's a good liar. 2. WIlbur is too arrogant to think someone would do that.

On the other hand, with Techno in the role of Wilbur and Connor, above all people, in the role of Eret, I hit a wall. Would Techno figure him out? I decided Yes, but also No. Think about c!Techno. He lets people betray him. When he teams with Tommy, he asks Tommy a few times if he's sure he wants to do this. He doubled checked that Tommy wanted to betray him. Twice, if I'm remembering correctly. When Quackity invited him to the prison, Techno knew it was a trap. But he went anyways. He let Quackity betray his trust. I feel like this is partially because of Techno's hubris ('TECHNOBLADE NEVER DIES"), but there's more to it than that. See, when Techno has friends, he protects them at all costs. He wanted Ranboo to make it, and got angry when he was killed. He wanted to protect Phil more than anything. He cared about the Syndicate. He cared about Tubbo, and felt bad enough about killing him to apologize to him. I'm not positive, but I think that's the only time in the series that Techno apologizes. Ever. So, in short, Techno wants and values his friends, to the point where he'll give them second chances again and again. He'll let them betray him right up until the last second, giving them all the chances they need to take it back. He wants them to take it back.

I feel like there's also a point similar to this to be said about Techno and his inability to lie (I think the only person he lies successfully to is Tommy, who would've believed anyone at that point in his arc), but that's a conversation for a different day...

C!WILBUR - The Dream SMP

PROPAGANDA:

HES MY SPECIALEST LITTLE GUY he’s so silly and goofy I love him sm he’s such a disaster no one understands him like I do he’s full of love and bisexuality and he messed up bad but he’s just trying his best and I love him (said autisticly) look at his stupid little face there’s no thoughts behind his eyes how could anyone ever hate him

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS:

[you don’t have to include this part but just as a disclaimer the streamer who played c!wilbur no longer associates with Dream and hasn’t played on the dsmp in like a year, he’s actually genuinely a good person; I just wanted to say that cause I know a lot of people assume all dsmp fans are Dream stans but most of us hate him thank you for your time]

still so funny to me c!dream did literally just appoint himself as basically c!tommy's legal guardian without hesitation or y’know. legal permission. like i joke about it being a forcible adoption but like he did literally start treating c!tommy like his ward. that is a thing he did. i guess it’d be illegal guardian but.

RELIGION? IN MY DSMP? MORE LIKELY THEN YOU THINK

Anyways would you like to have a debate like Ancient Greek scholars about religious imagery on the DSMP

“…and every revival only births a perversion of the original, and yet a return to form and renewal of the mission. Wilbur brought back to ambition, Tommy to fear, Techno to anarchy. This is because they were not properly revived through holy means, instead in symbols associated with satanic imagery; a grimoire, a totem. The revival book’s association with Dream echos ideas of Satan offering power that ultimately corrupts. Other symbols of Christianity show up beyond souls, revival, and satanic imagery, likewise tied to Dream. In the garden of Eden—”

“Golden apple as a symbol of the temptation of power! Of course of course! Knowledge as power, the fall of man from grace. This shows particular on the summit meeting between Techno and Dream, wherein a god apple is given by Dream. This falls neatly into parallel with Eden, where Eve is lured with the promise of having the same wisdom and thus power as god. It is the temptation presented, power promised in the same breath as suffering and conflict…”

Reminiscing on the Dream SMP (part 1)

Hey guys, I was thinking about Dream SMP the other day. That server was a lot of fun in its day even as the content creator Dream turns out to be a terrible person.

It's been a little over a year since Tommy's DSMP ending and I thought I would reminisce on it.

The main question I have for the server is just how its final streams were so bas.

In its day, it was pretty cool and I believe it helped inspire a lot of future SMPs, showing creators how much fans had an appetite for story in a minecraft server (it wasn't the first but it was certainly influential).

One of its main strengths that first attracted me to it was the improv lead stories slowly evolving into loosely scripted streams.

By loosely scripted, I mean they had a concrete plans for the story beats but still left the actual dialogue up to the streamers to come up with which, when it worked, gave you some really natural sounding dialogue that at least somewhat reacted to the world around it.

The actual storylines were nothing too special. But the medium helped uplift them to feel extra unique - you would often get long unhurried streams allowing any important plot points to really breathe and get to see the characters going about their days, often doing things like rebuilding structures or mining even in content heavy streams - which many were not. This all helped the world feel very lived in and surprisingly immersive. Streamers interactions with their viewers through their chats was also an important element. This helped streamers as they had a live audience to judge their content off of and also to bounce off of, which was especially useful when they were streaming alone as it gave them an audience to naturally deliver soliloquys about their characters thoughts or just allowed them to narrate what they were doing at any given moment.

Being a server with many different streamers was also an interesting element. Viewers were not expected to watch all of it and indeed there was tons of content - another amazing about it was the sheer amount of content you got from it, such as multiple multi-hour streams every day - sometimes a different perspective of the same events, sometimes something completely different at the same time. I like to compare the server to comic books in that regard. They all took place in the same server but what stream you watched was what character you wanted to follow. And some fans would keep up with multiple, some only one or maybe two characters. But they were all fans of the server even though gradually they diverged more into their own separate fan groups - especially as different streamers had very different styles of content.

All this is to say that streaming was a cool medium for the Dream SMp and it was both a huge strength and sometimes a weakness. One reason I was such a fan of Tommy's exile arc was essentially how it was able to tell a story of isolation and the development of an abusive dynamic rather uniquely as with streams you got to see the everyday and see the character going about their day-to-day routine while gradually becoming more depressed. It basically used streaming and the minecraft medium to its advantage so well that I appreciate it almost artistically.

There were downsides to streaming as well. Overtime the fans increasingly labelled streams as heavy lore or semi lore or non-canon depending on what the streamer was up to as some days they just streamed building something and didn't want to interact with the server's plot. Sometimes the streamers would do stuff for content and looking at the wider story it was very easy to see these characters as terrible people or struggle with the disconnects. Sometimes jokes would turn into the most serious plots and there was some real whiplash.

But as I said. I don't really believe the story or characters were all that special. But the nature of the Dream SMP elevated it and when it was good, it felt like something special.

yknow this is a thought that has been rattling around in my head for a long while, so i figured i may as well share it.

almost everyone is very well aware that the dream smp is a very morally grey narrative. we all know that, there are no perfectly righteous or purely evil characters, etc etc.

the thing that's been grating on me of late is that the fandom reactions to significant lore events don't really.. reflect this knowledge. hear me out.

ever since the red festival i've felt acutely aware of this. one of the longest-running debates in this fandom was who was in the wrong for tubbo's execution. techno for pulling the trigger, tommy and wilbur for not helping him. i saw post after post after post debating it the rest of that year. and i heavily disliked it. seeing people watch these characters have to improvise with an unpredicted circumstance and react to it imperfectly, reacting how their characters would be expected to, and then deciding to label some as right and some as wrong. to put them on those levels of morality, rather than viewing it through the morally grey lens the narrative has pushed. again, it just grated on me. treating these characters' decisions and actions as either wrong or right instead of treating them as decisions that move the narrative in fascinating ways and give us a window into their character.

i. dislike. when characters are made to embody either good or evil and have their flaws made respectable and palatable and easily overcome instead of more.. human i guess? it doesnt work for me, thats why i love the dsmp like i do. it's so human.

my brain started revisiting this train of thought after the c!wilbur and c!eret stream in may. the fandom reaction to that was.. a lot. again, post after post i saw opinions on c!eret did worse and c!wilbur's apology didnt make sense, or c!eret was right to be angry at c!wilbur for villainizing them, or any other number of thoughts that stem from the view that one of these characters are right and the other is wrong, that some actions and words were morally justified and others weren't.

very little did i see posts stepping back to look at this conflict in its purest form: a part of the narrative. talking about how fascinating it was that wilbur decided to apologize to eret now, how eret finally admitted how his words had hurt her. every discussion i saw was riddled with the question of did eret really deserve an apology from wilbur, was eret in the wrong for forcing a better apology out of him, who hurt the other more and who really deserved an apology from the other.

i could not help but think back to tubbo's execution after that stream. morally grey characters, morally grey decisions, viewed through the lens of sorting out who's right and who's wrong. who deserves what and how much do they deserve it. what moral box can we put this character into next.

and i've seen this pattern with so many other conflicts!! tubbo's decision to exile tommy, techno betraying pogtopia, doomsday. the narrative places absolutely no blame or condemnation on either side of these conflicts, it doesnt label either as wrong or right, so i guess people just. draw their own conclusions on it? it's weird to me, this need to discuss and debate the rightness and wrongness of these known morally grey characters and their morally grey actions and decisions. which one is better than the other, which one deserves to be listened to and the other condemned, which ones deserve to fight for forgiveness for the rest of their lives and which ones get to recieve it straight away. obviously, i'm not saying people shouldn't have opinions on these topics, i suppose just the constant insistence on subjectivity rather than objectivity when discussing controversial lore events like these irritate me.

i don't particularly know what i hope to achieve with this. i'm certainly not trying to attack anyone who's done this, just expressing my not understanding. it's just a weird way to discuss a morally grey story to me. i'd like to know if anyone else shares this sentiment, or if i'm just spouting nonsense. i don't think i am. this habit in the fandom has been frustrating me since i joined it in august 2020.

I constantly thinking about dsmp c!sapnap. He just wanted to be loved and to feel belong in the people he loves hearts. He was abandoned by everyone he loves. His parents, his friends and his fiancés. He is one of the tragic characters on the server. The only one he has in his life is c!george but he is in a coma and wakes up ever so often. With c!karl, he doesn't mean to abandoned him, he just gets teleported to a different universe and when he comes back, he loses part of his memory from his current world; he forgets who sapnap is🥺

cyclical violence & the dsmp finale

I’m seeing a lot of folks on Twitter interpret the DSMP series 1 finale as “can you believe they forced an abuse victim to befriend his abuser in the end, that’s so sick and tasteless!!” and after a bit of pondering (i.e. absolutely rabid conversations with @ringenthusiast) I think I’ve realized why that interpretation bothers me. Personally I find it extremely reductive to read DSMP as being solely about abuse rather than as a story in which abuse happens and is explored, but even if you’re only prepared to consume it solely as an abuse narrative, you absolutely must acknowledge that the story is about both interpersonal and systemic abuses, and moreover that it’s about how interpersonal and systemic abuse enable each other.

c!Tommy is a victim of horrific interpersonal abuse. c!Dream is a victim of horrific systemic abuse. c!Dream is the perpetrator of the interpersonal abuse c!Tommy suffers, and his abuse of c!Tommy is later continually used as a justification (both in canon and in fandom) for why c!Dream deserves to suffer systemic abuse. This isn’t a coincidence, it’s clearly a very well-planted and thoroughly developed overarching theme: abuse is cyclical. Abuse perpetuates itself. One type of abuse perpetuates and enables other forms of abuse. That’s the point.

There are plenty of examples of this theme being explored outside of the “Dream vs. Tommy” conflict -- the instance that immediately comes to mind is c!Quackity being treated terribly by c!Schlatt, only to turn around and torture an incarcerated person, ostensibly for profit but also presumably for personal enjoyment. Again, abuse is cyclical. This is actually why I think it’s really important that c!Tommy and c!Quackity are, in a sense, set up as foils for each other. c!Quackity makes the decision to become as bad as (if not worse) than his abuser, and that decision is a source of strength and agency for him even though the audience is expected to understand it as a downward spiral. c!Tommy’s approach is different, after he sees c!Dream’s perspective from limbo. It has to be different because c!Tommy is different.

It’s kinda wild to me that anyone could watch the DSMP finale (not to mention the past two years of the show) and not see the final interaction between c!Tommy and c!Dream as a representation of restorative justice. You are not obligated to fix, forgive, or offer redemption to someone who hurt you... but you are obligated to at least try to see them as a person, because the alternative can and will enable atrocities.

This is both a positive ending for c!Tommy and a very uplifting message to end series 1 on. Remember what I said earlier about c!Quackity and c!Tommy being narrative foils? Well, they certainly are, at least insofar as the theme of cyclical abuse is concerned. c!Quackity is an abuse victim who becomes an abuser. That’s an arc that makes sense for his character and personally, as a longtime c!Quackity stan I’m happy with it... but it would be super depressing if that was how every abuse plotline in the series turned out. The final interaction between c!Tommy and c!Dream offers an alternative outcome: that abuse victims are not obligated to forgive or attempt to understand their abusers, but in some cases it’s worth it to try. The abuse c!Tommy suffered makes him neurotic and angry and depressed and fearful and paranoid, but he never lets it make him unkind. He never becomes an abuser himself. The message is clear: abuse can be cyclical, but it doesn’t always have to be. You can break the cycle. The snake doesn’t always have to swallow its own tail.

That, to me, is an incredibly meaningful ending.

c!tubbos desperation to try and get tommy to stay to reconsider. his small pleas. "how is this fair?" him wanting to find another way.

vs

c!tommys quite resolution. his acceptance. his determination that this is right and what needs to happen.

does it remind you of something?

it should.

this eerily echos the first dosc finale. back in January 2021. but the roles are flipped. and isn't that just poeticly sad? except, it's different.

back in the first disc finale, tubbo had a sad acceptance. he was at the end of his rope. and didn't honestly care what happened to him because he had so many things happen to him at that point and he was DONE. he would've done anything just to help it end.

yet now he's found hope. and he's done with the fighting. throughout all of this, he didn't want to do it. he never wanted to do it. yet he did. cause he trusted tommy. he cares about him

you see tommy though... back at the first disc finale... he didn't want to lose. he had so much hope reinstalled back in him after escaping dream. he wanted to see him punished. he wanted all the conflict to end

AND HE STILL DOES.

except, he realized that all his other attempts never worked. and due to how his character is, he is selfless. and he's still of desperate for it to end. that he has accepted that he will have to make the ultimate sacrifice.

it's so terrible. they constantly echo each other and they're so connected

fuck c!dream

Okay one more take, it is kinda fucked up to say a mentally-ill character could’ve only ever found peace upon the successful completion of their despair-induced suicide mission.

A not-so-brief discussion of my Techno design, mainly because I'm really proud of it....

First of all, don't get me wrong, I love the big, burly, Piglin-style designs of Techno, and the anime-looking hybrid design with the ~snazzy~ braid is nice. However, when I was designing Techno, I really fell in love with the idea of him just being an overworld pig. For one, it's skin accurate, but to delve deeper into it:

Techno, like all of the sbi children, runs on theatrics. While Wilbur uses it in terms of his charisma and wit, and Tommy practically runs on distractions and diversions (of varying success), Techno creates an air of intimidation. And, it's not that he's naturally intimidating--he's playing it up. It's theatre. Naturally, he's mildly awkward, cracking jokes, and, above all, scared of death. If you go back to a lot of the moments before a battle or confrontation, you can see that he's panicking. Whether it be as obvious as when the Butcher Army came for him, or a little more subtle, like when he and Dream were prepping for the big L'Manberg battle. That isn't the most intimidating personality.

He knows it, though. That's where the theatrics come in. He dresses himself up in red and armor, with a glittering crown. His tactics are terrifying, even if they aren't the most effective. He lets withers loose, even though they may attack him or his allies. He brings in so many wolves that he can barely move. Dream, to contrast, uses more effective, more technical methods. He sets up TNT droppers, he makes lava walls, he fights alone. While his methods are more effective, in the final battle, who are people more scared of? Techno. He uses those tactics not because they're technically the most effective, but because they're intimidating. Think of his iconic phrase: "Technoblade never dies." Making that something that people automatically associate with you will make them afraid of you, and that's on purpose. Techno uses these theatrics to seems intimidating.

I decided to draw him as an overworld pig because he isn't naturally intimidating. Drawing him as such forced me to make him intimidating through other means. Expression, camera angle, lighting, ect.. As my comic progresses and we get more into battle scenes, you'll see more and more what I mean, but yeah. I love my silly little Techno design.

everytime something i added to the scott and pix clip i unlike it and relike it so i can have the full thing

anyways its a beautiful clip and should be talked about more in great detail thank you

YOU GET ME

y’know what should have happened cquackity should have killed cdream last spring instead of just torturing him. 1) it would have gotten rid of cdream solving all my problems and 2) the conflicting guilt and righteous fury would have made quackity even sexier. him and sam could write it off as an ‘accident’ and bond over this fucked up secret only they know about it would be just like h—