“I don’t want to ever be alone.”

Tags

#sandwich label - graphics for each Good Cop 'Bad' Cop chapter

#this is fine - thoughts and stuff that give me brain rot :)

#did someone order an essay? - lengthy analysis and discussions

#on the house - reblog add ons and replies

#flora fanfiction - my fanfiction & things related to it

#dishing up lore - interesting lore discoveries/details

#leftovers - bloopers/alternate scenes for my fics

#fanfic snack - other people's tumblr fanfics I enjoy

#shall we play a game? - reblog and ask games

#hello there - answers and responses to asks

#let me cook - theories, hypotheticals, aus, some thoughts

#reblog day - reblogs of my favorite posts of the week incase you missed them

#flora things - random thoughts and stuff

Works

Hell in a Box - Scrapped lore: c!Dream gets c!Sam to free him and then has a deep chat with c!Punz.

Misery Loves Another Idiot With A Jukebox Where His Soul Should Be (short hand: misery loves an idiot) - c!Quackity gets creative in his daily visits with c!Dream.

Dreamcatcher - c!Punz gets caught in a nightmare c!Dream has.

[sequel] Dreamweaver - c!Dream shows c!Punz his past through a dream.

Good Cop ‘Bad’ Cop - c!Bad is a prison guard who takes pity on a mistreated c!Dream.

If The Crown Fits, Wear It - c!Techno upgrades c!Dream’s look with a crown.

Crow’s Nest - c!Dream haunts c!Techno’s house (co-authored with @error-dream-was-found).

[sequel] Musical Chairs - Scrapped lore following the events of Crows Nest + c!Punz, c!Techno, c!Dream and a chair... need I say more?

B is for Betrayal - c!Punz helps c!Dream through a medical emergency.

A Gravel Mistake - c!Quackity acts sus so c!Foolish visits the prison

Robbing a Vault That’s A Prison - c!Techno kidnaps rescues c!Dream from prison again

Together Is Always Better - c!Quackity tortures c!Dream while c!Techno’s there

Technoblade (Never) Dies - What if Phil activates the pearl a minute too late and c!Techno dies

Pink Goes Good With Green - c!Niki helps c!Dream heal after prison break

Playlists

Misery Loves Another Idiot With A Jukebox Where His Soul Should Be - chapter title songs

Some Snakes Just Bite - c!Dream on his villain arc

Nightmare - c!Dream vibes

There is of course a world in which we ignore this and such, which I cover in that post, but I think it actually aligns with other things we know too. For example, Dream even in his evil monologues hides a lot of truth in them, so he actually does tell the truth a lot. I mean also half of his villainous master plans actually just happen not by his control. He didn’t push Wilbur to destroy L‘manberg as a traitor, he just gave the TNT after Wilbur convinced him to. He didn’t push George and Sapnap away, he dethroned George to protect him which set them off and they left him. Then he gave Tommy some of his stuff during Pogtopia that ended up getting blown up. So, really the idea that he “cut his attachments” is bullshit when he just simply lost them. Plus, he didn’t even steal the items in his evil vault, they were already in his possession.

Like his masterminding so often is not by his design lol. So, for him to be telling the truth to Tommy and Sam about Tommy being the first revival, as well as him telling the truth about how they experimented on them for quote “months” (since they could not have done so for months before as there is not enough time to do so between when Vikkstar last appears on the server [Dec 28th] and Dream is arrested [Jan 20]) isn’t actually that uncharacteristic of Dream.

It also actually means that perhaps the experiments started around the posting of the video in the January after he gets out. In addition, it then makes sense why he would be so afraid of people like Quackity killing him in prison after he gets bored of torture because either Punz can’t (perhaps doesn’t have the book) or Dream doesn’t know if it’ll work hence the experiments later. Like it’s always bothered me that if death is not that big of a deal and so meaningless like he makes it seem in the finale then why does he seem so freaking afraid of it in prison if Punz could just bring him back. I mean yes I’m sure we could come up with other reasons why, but this explanation works well.

And if the experiments happened after about 11 months of inhumane treatment, I think it’s a lot more understandable for him to have lost his mind after being tortured and driven to insanity in prison to the point he thinks experiments on people is reasonable for the greater good. Prison and the aftermath then can clearly define the place where things begin to really become “jumbled.” Where an obsession for knowledge, immorality, power and revenge is born from fear and pain and indignation. I’m not saying it’s right, but I’d say it’s par for the course after being in isolation so long and all the rest that happened in prison. That after being tortured, torturing other people seems a lot less unthinkable than it did before.

Also, that timeline is more accurate to the cycle of real life that hurting people hurt other people. Like bullies are often facing things at home. And there’s a reason many horror movies show the abuse that created the killer and it’s not to brush off what they do as okay, but to make them a more compelling character that you can see the path of events that led to their breaking point.

But even if we ignore that and stand by the experiments happening before, I think it’s important to note that during the height of the fandom this ‘Dream deserved it’ mentality was widely supported long before January of 2022 (when the revival book video came out). I was late to the fandom but I was there during prison arc and saw it all over, so let’s not pretend that that mindset amongst the fandom was largely founded by the human experiments because for a lot of the fandom that wasn’t it (still isn’t). So even if we say the experiments happened before, neither the audience nor characters knew that until later and yet still said on multiple occasions about how Dream deserved it and that to me is wild. Hence why my statement in the orginal post was “The sentiment that c!Dream deserved the Prison Arc especially because of what happened in Exile is so messed up to me.” Because it’s that belief of Exile making it deserved that really bothers me, way more than the idea of him facing some kind of karma for torturing Vikkstar and LazarBeam.

Even so, as a pacifist, an unsupporter of revenge, who believes that everyone has the capacity for change even if unlikely to, and certainly has the right to be treated with human decency no matter if they showed the same for others, I think that it’s disturbing to see so many people believe that anyone, nonetheless someone who didn’t even commit mass genocide like Hitler, but at worse (and I’m not trying to downplay but I’m just comparing) tortured a couple of guys for months, deserved an eternity in that torture box considered by Tommy (before Quackity) to be a fate worse than death [post].

Furthermore, to say the experiments were worse than prison I think is rather unreasonable. Especially because firstly, Dream’s sentence was forever, so even though he was broken out, the intended sentence they thought he deserved was a lifetime, which is a hell of a lot longer than months. But also since I recently looked at Minecraft deaths, let’s look at the math of things. There are about 70 ways they could have died in that minecraft version including the caves and cliffs update (78 if we include the updates since the dsmp). Course being slain includes any object so let’s add in all 6 of the the weapons/tools. Now adding that up you get 76 (or 84) Minecraft deaths. Now that number does include the messages ‘killed by — while trying to escape player’ and ‘killed by — while trying to escape player using named thing’ which is perhaps inaccurate cuz are we really saying they felt the need to squash someone with an anvil with and without hitting them first? Seems redundant. Regardless, if you exclude the newer updates, you get a number that is still less than the 83 days Dream was tortured by Quackity. So even if we assume they did one death per a day, then they still suffered a shorter amount of time. And that’s not taking into account his total 314 day stay in the inhumane conditions of Pandora’s Vault, which again was defined by Tommy as worse than death.

Additionally, the fact that Dream’s torture was not intended to be fatal and therefore was allowed to heal in between means that he suffered more times (like how because Techno was healing during Quackity’s torture with the shears, he was hit 55 times instead of the 20 times it would have taken to kill him [post].) So really, I’m gonna have to disagree that being killed repeatedly is worse, I mean plus given how Dream feeds Sam in Daedalus and clingy duo in the finale, Vik and Lazar were likely fed way more consistently and better than Dream was. So yeah, I’m not saying the experiments weren’t torturous, savage and horrible, this is not be brushing it off, but what I am saying is I don’t think we can reasonably say it was worse than prison.