c!Dream in the L’manburg Revolution really drives me a little crazy. Like this clip where c!Dream predicts the outcome of the entire revolution is making me so.....

Because here’s the thing with war, right. Someone has to give in. Either one side gets completely annihilated or they give up, and as c!Dream says in this clip, L’manburg was never going to give up. 

Retroactively, with canon lives adding even more Permanence to the damage done in the Revolution, just as the Final Control Room ended up permanently killing people, c!Wilbur’s “we would rather die” speech absolutely seems to point towards the idea of we would rather permanently lose our lives than give in. And this message backs c!Dream into a corner, because it means he has to either completely annihilate L’manburg or he has to let them have what they want. 

And the thing is, if c!Dream wanted the former, he could’ve done that. But he doesn’t want to! This is evident again and again from his repeated calls for them to surrender, from his saving their gear in the Final Control Room to return to them, from him making this prediction before the war’s beginning. c!Dream does not want to completely destroy L’manburg and especially the people within it. War is an extended game of chicken with higher stakes to match, and c!Dream has a hell of a lot more to lose. And this is obvious before the war begins. 

So by a matter of speaking, c!Dream is fighting a war he cannot win. Offensively speaking, unless L’manburg surrenders, he cannot progress to the point of completely destroying them because he does not want to. From his perspective, they were never going to surrender. Wilbur tells him they will never surrender. Going forward with the war is a defensive measure more than an offensive one--making himself and the DreamSMP seem like too much effort to try and fight in order to deter L’manburg from another war. And it’s one that he succeeds at, by a certain measure. But not without a steep cost.