Introducing: Pantheon SMP ⛈️

i don’t think it’s a musical. I think the tone of the story doesn’t fit. But if it were, it would have a Lot of scenes of unsung dialogue, and that dialoge? Would be rhythmic poetry. It’s Shakespeare Appreciation Time baby.

i do however think there would be a live score and an orchestra. A lot of the music would need to be recorded but there’s at least be a few musicians.

different characters speak in different poetic styles at different times to communicate character and plot development.

to elaborate on that: Characters switch from loose ABBA or ABAB rhyme schemes and vaguely rhythmic meter when chatting back and forth to strict perfect iambic pentameter for tense scenes or political speeches.

Techno speaks exclusively in unrhyming dactylic hexameter, an extremely common poetic form for Greek and Latin poetry. It’s what the Iliad was written in. This has the interesting effect of making Techno sound, at first glance, unpoetic. His speech doesn’t rhyme, and doesn’t follow a common English rhythm scheme, so it wouldn’t immediately register as structured. However, dactylic hexameter is actually significantly harder to write in English than expected because of our syllable stress patterns. Speaking like that would be, objectively, a sign of extreme intelligence, but could easily be overlooked as coarse uncultured behavior.

Techno’s chorus - composed of audience members, background extras, and people (in safety harnesses) sitting in the theater rafters - speak largely in Greek and Classical Chinese, quoting sections of the Art of War and Homer’s work. The major exceptions to this are ‘Blood for the Blood god,’ ‘no,’ and ‘do it.’ They all wear a hat or some form of headband that has a glowing LED eye, hidden, but activated when they speak. The audience plants are all in dark clothes, and when the lights go down they don medical masks/sunglasses. Anything to obscure their faces.

The Chorus, a group of robed masked people who broke the fourth wall and often entered the audience, was a vital part of early Greek theatre. I am an intolerable nerd, and the thought of sitting in a dark theatre only to hear an low distorted voice beside you start to comment on the play as a whole choir of voices echo around you, then turning to see your seat neighbor is a masked person with a glowing red eye in your forehead? Literally incredible.

Dream is the only character dressed in even remotely modern clothes.

Dream is first seen as someone (again, in modern clothes) sneaking around backstage in a black hoodie: most of the audience probably assumes he’s a stagehand and not meant to be seen. Then, at some point, he moves from behind a set piece and enters the scene as an actual character, revealing his mask.

interestingly, this is really similar to what I believe is a bit of myth about why ninjas are dressed in all black in modern media. They wouldn’t have been irl, they would’ve dressed like civilians. But stagehands in Japanese theatre would dress in all-black, and were often completely visible onstage moving sets - it was common courtesy to ignore them. Then one day some playwright had the brilliant idea of having one of the stagehands enter the story as an assassin, and suddenly every actor in all-black was a threat. For the life of me I can’t remember where I read that but it’s a cool thought :D

Dream canonically can interact with set pieces, lighting, and curtains.

Dream actively directs lighting in scenes he is not in, sitting above the stage kicking his feet.

Dream is often used to hand off props to characters instead of having them pull them from a pocket and pretend they were pulled from their ‘inventory.’ This begins to get confusing when Dream is acknowledged later on as the he person giving, say, TNT to Wilbur, or wither skulls to Techno.

characters address the audience as ‘Chat,’ (English’s first fourth-person pronoun my beloved) almost constantly, especially for comedic purposes- most of their monologues are addressed directly to the audience as well. For Wilbur, it’s a sign of instability when he stops addressing ‘Chat’ and start addressing the sides or back of the stage.

philza enters from the lower audience, right by the stage, probably after pooping up from the orchestra pit and taking a reserved seat halfway through so no one sees the wings.

Tommy has by far the least structured or rhyming dialogue - if it weren’t for how carefully crafted it was it would sound like normal prose.

Tommy speaks to the audience by FAR the most. Wilbur only addresses them when soliloquizing. Techno barely addresses them at all: they address him. Ranboo speaks to the audience only when alone, and it’s usually phrased like he’s writing in his memory journal. Tommy speaks to the audience at first like a loud younger brother. As he gets older, it sounds more and more like a plea for help, a prayer for intervention that will never come. Exile is one long string of desperate begging aimed our way.

Tommy stops speaking to the audience so much after Doomsday. He starts again when Dream is imprisoned. He stops for good when he dies in there, beaten, alone.

Sam and the Warden are meant to be played by different actors, ideally siblings or fraternal twins. They wear identical stage makeup and costumes, but the difference is there. None of the characters acknowledge this.

the Stage would need to be absolutely massive and curve almost halfway around the central audience, largely because it should be able to be split at times into two separate stages to show different things happening at the same time. This could possibly also work if there were two stages, but getting people to easily turn from one stage to the other without loosing sight of what was happening would be rough.

Doomsday taking advantage of the scaffolding in the rafters and using them as the ‘grid’ for the tnt droppers.

actual trained dogs for Doomsday my beloved. Would cost a fortune but could you imagine.

the entire revolution arc ripped off Hamilton, we all know that, I think we can afford to have a stagehand step forward in that frozen moment in time when Tommy and Dream have that duel, grab the arrow, and carry it slowly across the stage right into Tommy’s eye. For morale.

throughout the execution scene Techno keeps slipping out of poetic meter, especially when he sees/is worried about Phil. After the totem (which would be freaking amazing as some sort of stage effect with like lights and red and green streamers or smthn dude-) he stops speaking in poetry. The scene with Quackity is entirely spoken dialogue. Chat is silent. It’s only when he gets back and sees evidence that his house has been tampered with that Chat starts up again (kill, blood, death, hunt, hunt, hunt-) and he starts speaking in rhythm again.

Every canon death, Dream marks a tally on something in the background. Maybe it’s in his arm? Like a personal scorecard. Or maybe it’s on the person themselves, a little set of three hearts he marks through with a dry-erase marker or something.

phil and techno have a lot more eastern design elements and musical influences than the rest of the cast, except for Techno’s war theme which is just choir, bagpipes, and some sort of rhythmic ticking or thumping. Phil’s also got a choir sting but it’s a lot harsher, the ladies are higher and them men lower, and the chords are really dissonant (think murder of crows)

Tommy’s theme has a lot of drums, but its core is actually a piano melody. The inverse of Tommy’s theme is Tubbo’s, but Tubbo’s is usually played on a ukulele. Wilbur is guitar, obv, and Niki’s is on viola.

Quackity is a little saxophone lick. He and Schlatt both have a strong big band/jazz influence.

And then Cleo and Skizz with Baby Bdubs and the rest of their family

Gem: I did see my favorite hate comment ever today though? I-I think it might be my fav-my favorite hate comment. And--it-it was that I'm turning Hermitcraft gay. (she laughs) It-it gave me a-a very good laugh. It--they, they meant it as hate, so genuinely, but I did not take it that way.

Gem: Like--(giggling) I. Find myself in situations so frequently, where the men are roleplaying kissing each other, and if I could stop them, I would, okay. I would be more homophobic, I would stop them! I can't! They keep going, I (through laughter) I don't know what it is.

Gem: But it's not me, it's-it's th--nobody's holding a knife to them right now and making them do that. (laughs)

Gem: They're just like it. I don't-it's not me. (laughs) God, it was one of my favorite comments I've gotten. I-I immediately sent it to Grian. (laughs)

Gem: (eight seconds of silence) I'll take credit, if I-if somebody has to take credit, I can. (laughs) But I don't think, I don't think it's me. (five seconds of silence, then, laughter) Entry (? she says a Twitch chatter's name here) thank you for the twenty-three months, I haven't, but I'll look into it. I have heard--well, I've heard of Project Hail Mary, actually--

OKAY SO ! i will do my best to explain this over text since i have a good understanding of movement but ALSO i highly recommend checking out HammSamichz's vod - he is the one who streamed covering the footage from dream and points out some details that pretty undeniably point to cheating. you can watch that here! He starts discussing it at about 40 minutes into the vod.

the text explanation:

In parkour, the way your jumps work is very reliant on in-game ticks. Per real life second, there's 20 ticks in-game. If you've ever seen a streamer seemingly run off the edge of a jump despite hitting the space bar, or done that yourself, that's because your jump didn't line up with the correct tick - the game essentially doesn't register your place in game correctly. This is where momentum and forced four block jumps comes into play. To make certain jumps, you must jump at the exact last tick possible on the block without overshooting, AND you must have the maximum momentum possible (you lose momentum if you clip a block, stop sprinting, or use arrow keys).

So the Dream parkour in question is from MCC 11 - the final MCC that the original version of Parkour Warrior was ever run. The version for this was 1.16.x, so using spacebar on slimes means that you don't get the bounce necessary to keep the height.

Starting off with the first jump of the course - it's a very basic staircase with a gap to jump over, nothing too complicated.

The way that Dream runs up it is very smooth - not necessarily a case for cheating, but it does give off the impression that he's talented at movement. Seems fine, until later on in the run. With the evidence later in the run, it's highly likely that Dream had autojump enabled here and it just went off automatically for that smooth movement look.

Up next we have these. It's possible to neo these and do a skip - Dream opts not to do that and does them normally. This is the first piece of possible evidence of true cheating. In a run for a jump like this, you have to jump at the last possible second, land it, pivot to turn around, and go again. For control reasons, most runners would shift upon landing to keep from skidding off the edge. Dream doesn't do this - he keeps control completely, jumping at the exact right second to complete these jumps first try. This is just a little suspicious, but then we come to the next obstacle:

On this obstacle, the idea is simple, the execution not hard unless you want to get through the entire section with no timeloss. This is where the cheating first becomes blatant.

Let's look at this jump as an example (note that through this whole obstacle he hasn't had almost any timeloss which is. pretty unbelievable). He jumps up onto the TNT, then over to the next concrete pillar. Here's where it falls apart: he jumps at the exact edge of the block, even though he doesn't need to, and it's a MUCH bigger risk to jump like that because of the tick rate. He does this for every single jump, every single time without a single fail. There is no reason to risk that - no potential timeloss, only a potential fall.

He makes this jump as well - from the TNT at the back of the pillar, to the orange concrete to the right side of the TNT in front of him. A jump like this is incredibly hard, impossible if you've lost momentum. What's extra crazy is he doesn't do a forced momentum here, he just magically jumps onto the first TNT with no loss, then to the far pillar. This is not something you will ever see pretty much any parkour runner do with ease. This is not a jump that is practical, believable, or reasonable.

At this point, you might be wondering, okay, but where's the solid proof? Well, it actually comes together on the very next jump.

So he's on the pillar, with a short 2 block gap between the next checkpoint and him. This is a jump that he can make just by normally jumping with sprint - no edge of block needed. Instead, he runs to the edge and jumps at the last possible second, AGAIN. Once again, there is no benefit to doing a jump like that at this spot, only risk.

So..... what's really going on?

For Dream to be jumping perfectly, every single time at the exact last possible tick at the edge of a block.... a macro would do this perfectly where he wouldn't. So basically, a key he can hit on his keyboard, that then enables a function with the order to jump at every edge of a block.

So how does this affect the rest of the run?

Let's take a look at the next obstacle for that answer!

These trapdoors aren't super hard to complete, even by 2020 standards. Rather, they're just about aiming, making sure you don't clip the side of a trapdoor and run off, and getting across. But here's where it gets REALLY interesting.

First of all, note that he jumps at the exact edge of every trapdoor. Second of all, the second to last trapdoor where he ALMOST falls - it's very difficult for me to explain this over text, but that correction should not be possible for a human realistically. Yes, it's technically possible, but statistically, with every tick accounted for, no. That jump ALONE would be enough for any parkour expert to be suspicious.

I'm not going to cover every single jump in this run - but from this point onwards, every jump from the edge of a block is at the exact last second. It just keeps adding up, from here -

to here.

Then, we get to a jump where last minute jumping ISNT the answer, and the talent needed is aiming. Here, it falls apart again. In fact, this might be one of the sections Dream "struggles" on with the entire parkour. For reference, a jump like this would be considered medium difficulty at best.

On this jump, Dream jumps on the edge of the block again, every single time without fail. It's a nerf to himself - jumping at the last second here gives you less time to aim for the wall that you need to fit through. In fact, it's such a bad decision no other player is going to be seen doing this. Of course he's struggling here - because he was relying on a macro to get through the rest of the course at top speed. All he has to do on the other segments is sit back, aim a little, and hold the forward key. If you still feel like this is a stretch, get ready for the next sections.

He does this first try, no shifting, no stopping. This is not a practical or believable solution to running these. Once again, he jumps at the edge of every pane. Wonder why?

Same deal here. Jump at the last second, first try success.

The slime jumps - it falls further apart. We actually see a failure here - because Dream lands on the edge of a slime block, the macro takes over, and we see him jump and miss the obstacle. In 1.16.x, there is no reason to EVER hold spacebar on a slime. But he does:

(slowed down so everyone can see it)

We continue on with the course for a bit, more suspicious perfect tick jumps, more that's just pointing to use of macros on the course. Note that he does these jumps first try, no hesitation as well (reliant on headhitters/jumping last possible moment)

The absolute nail in the coffin on this run is here:

I would recommend watching this moment yourself on video if possible. Dream goes on here, makes the first three jumps, then on the fourth one, tragedy strikes: he hits the edge of a wall, and the macro takes over and sends him off the course.

It is RIGHT after this moment, for the first time in the ENTIRE COURSE, that we see Dream run off the edge of the block on his next attempt. He does this twice in a row. Most likely, he turned off the macro in an attempt to keep from hitting the wall again - but after two tries, he magically starts making the jumps again.... and shifting around the wall that set off the macro the time before. Not even daring to clip it. Had he been doing this legitimately, there would have been no fear to clipping that wall, and no reason to hit space on the wall in the first place.

Skimming over the last of the course before the salmon ladders, everything beyond that point is inhuman, but only more evidence of the macro we've already seen. But, one more thing to note....

....gee, with all that consideration to a macro that jumps for you at the edge of a block and eliminates human error, and considering that the salmon ladders require that exact movement to complete..... i sure wonder how Dream managed to complete this on the first try, with no hesitation, with no falters, when that should not be statistically impossible?