#mught jump off the deep end and go more in to Tommy's experience with Wilbur's paradigm | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sopyop · 3 years

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alright thats it im writing my wilbur paradigm shift rant

A quick preface! I joined the fandom very late, like in Jan 2021 late. I haven’t experienced much of wilbur’s character live. But, I’m still throwing my two cents out here. Also, all this is about Wilbur’s dream smp character.

So, I’ve seen a lot of conversation around when Wilbur’s spiral truly started; with losing the election, in pogtopia, or all the way back at Eret’s betrayal. And additionally I’ve seen talk of where Wilbur’s character is right now. I think I have a solution(?) for both. Wilbur did experience a breaking point during the revolution, at Eret’s betrayal, and while it may be considered the root of his spiral there is a different thing at play in my mind. What Wilbur experienced at Eret’s betrayal was a paradigm shift.

For those unaware, a paradigm shift is something that happens when someone’s core beliefs are fundamentally challenged, and your entire world view is shaken. An example of this may be if someone falls out of a religion, or falls into one, or even something quite small. All of us have experienced paradigm shifts, and will continue to. We don’t have the same beliefs that we did as children after all.

There are three general ways to react to a paradigm shift: you continue to cling to your previous notion, despite knowing it isn’t true; you swing to the complete opposite of your previous belief; or you build a new paradigm with all the information you now have. Eret’s betrayal was the root of Wilbur’s paradigm shift, and he went through all three reactions.

Before Eret’s betrayal, we saw Wilbur’s leadership skills, his beliefs in his community, in the ideals of freedom and “sticking it to the man”, and of protecting those he cared about. We saw the trust he placed in all of original L’Manburgians, and that he trusted and cared enough to go to war for their perceived needs of freedom. I’m not here to debate the revolution, hell I wasn’t around during it. But Eret’s betrayal shook Wilbur’s paradigm of absolute trust.

I would even argue Wilbur’s beliefs of words over violence stem from this comradery and belief that the people he trusts are the most important thing to him. I will admit, I don’t have a strong handle on Wilbur pre-L’Manburg. But I think it’s fair to note the shift in Wilbur even back then.

To get back to the paradigm: After Eret’s betrayal, Wilbur’s paradigm is broken, and at first he clings to it despite it being shattered. We see this with him running for president; he’s trying to grasp on to that sense of duty and trust and the power of words he believed so much in. But, then Quackity points out that it’s a power grab, and more people show support for other parties, and more L’Manburgians also attempt to run. And Wilbur’s paradigm continues to be challenged.

Losing the election is when Wilbur abandons his paradigm. It had already been shattered by Eret, but the election’s loss has solidified in his mind that he was wrong in what he believed during the revolution. And so he moves into the second form of coping with a paradigm shift: he goes to the complete opposite belief. No one around me are worthy of trust, words have no power, and the ideals L’manburg was founded on are wrong and corrupt.

(and just as a little storytelling nerd-out moment: That’s the kicker to me. Wilbur’s paradigm shift is something I find so fascinating because his paradigm was what quite literally shaped the world he lived in, and the world of so many others. Tommy still holds true to the paradigm Wilbur helped him shape, and while his has been challenged in so many ways (like by Wilbur’s spiral in Pogtopia, by Dream in exile, by Doomsday, by the prison; the list goes on), he has always continued to take the healthiest route of fixing it. By adapting and growing, while holding on to some of those core values that still ring true. Like trust. And seeing what happened to the literal embodiment of Wilbur’s paradigm even after he was gone makes it truly emotionally moving.)

So we move into Pogtopia, and Wilbur’s paradigm has yet to heal. He continues to spiral, he lashes out at those around him, and he plots to destroy L’manburg. Because, as I mentioned in my aside, L’manburg is the physical manifestion of Wilbur’s first paradigm. And now he can’t stand it.

And so L’manburg falls, and so does Wilbur. And through the lens of the circumstances of his death, as well as what we now know of his communication with Phil, his last speech gives us more insight into this paradigm. L’manburg was always his. It was the beliefs of a man who now refuses every single part of them that he used to hold dear. But it was also those beliefs that he continued to preach to his father in letters that eventually stopped being sent. And those beliefs were flipped in Pogtopia, like black to white and white to black, and have now been crushed by rubble.

But Wilbur dies, L’manburg rebuilds, with the ideals of new leaders and new struggles. Ideals of protection, and peace, and trust. And Ghostbur joins the game.

Ghostbur is an interesting character to me. In the lens of Wilbur’s paradigm, he is everything Wilbur believed without the fighting spirit. He is a good representation of what I understand of New L’Manburg; peaceful, and passive, and trusting. That trust, I think, is what Wilbur holds as the core of his paradigm. It’s what truly got shattered with Eret, what was abandoned in Pogtopia, and what is echoed in Ghostbur. Ghostbur trusts everyone he comes across, and we as the audience now get to see how naive that trust truly is. It gets Ghostbur lost in the snow while Tommy suffers, it get Friend killed during Doomsday, and it is eventually what gets Ghostbur killed, and gets Wilbur back.

Wilbur was dead for a long time, from his perspective. And right now, he’s seeing the world again. He knows now that his feelings in Pogtopia were self destructive and wrong. And he doesn’t want to feel like that again. What we are seeing now is Wilbur building a new paradigm.

“My L’manburg.” “My sunrise.”

Wilbur is exploring the new world of the SMP, and as an audience his actions are often confusing and contradictory. He’s grasping for straws, flitting between new places and attempting to rebuild bridges without truly fixing them. He’s trying to regain trust and build a new paradigm.

Wilbur, while being guite a morally grey character, has always shown very black and white thinking. Now that he’s back, he’s continuing those habits of absolutes but showing more of his awareness of those moral greys. Before, we got him jumping from believing himself to be a ‘good guy’ to a ‘bad guy’. We went from the ‘us versus them’ mentality of the revolution to the same mindset echoed poorly in the election, to ‘everyone versus me’ in Pogtopia.

Absolute trust like what Ghostbur had didn’t work. No trust like Pogtopia Wilbur had didn’t work. The community Wilbur built as a leader betrayed him. And so he goes to Phil and thanks him for killing him and asks for a place to stay. And so he says he would have murdered Dream for what he did to Tommy but he claims Dream’s his hero. And so he goes to Quackity and asks to be his servant, he lashes out when Quackity rejects him, and he clings to Tommy’s trust like it’s all he has. And in many ways, it is. Wilbur hasn’t been with anyone in over 13 years. And so he lies and he jokes and he lashes out, and begs Tommy not to leave while claiming right after that he doesn’t care. He hasn’t had anyone place trust in him or had anyone to trust. He’s taking any sign of remote kindness as something he can latch on to, and Dream bringing him back is a very sturdy olive branch. Wilbur wants trust. And yet he knows how it fails.

And so the sunrise is his, just like L’manburg was, but it’s not quite built on anything yet. And we have to only hope the paradigm Wilbur builds this time is healthy and stable.

#dsmp #wilbur #dsmp wilbur #dsmp analysis #dsmp wilbur analysis #soopspeaks #please reblog this i worked so hard #character analysis #long post #c!wilbur #c!wilbur analysis #mught jump off the deep end and go more in to Tommy's experience with Wilbur's paradigm #or i might just pass out

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