dr3 | apparently im on tumblr again

MY JEEM :(

i think so often about jmah prison arc it's not even funny. the obedience Sam got the first time around was a slow burn, of sorts. the prisoner listened, sure, to the requests that seemed reasonable enough--Dream never really wanted to make himself seem like an unruly prisoner, there's being strategic with the information you give and the ire that you earn and then there's just being plain stupid--but there was obedience within what should be standard prison procedure, and then there was Sam being neurotic. then there was Quackity making him debase himself for his own sick amusement, and the scale he quickly became acquainted with, figuring out how much he would gain and how much he would lose by taking off his shirt or crawling with shattered legs or licking Quackity's bloodsoaked shoes. whenever Dream started bowing to Sam, in the first timeline, I doubt it was from the very beginning, but that doesn't mean Sam doesn't remember him doing it. that doesn't mean Sam doesn't remember the commands that would filter through the wall of lava, nor the laughter that followed when Dream did what he was told, no matter how humiliating.

all of this to say, the prisoner that had escaped from Sam had been one that willingly got to his knees, and the one that stares him down behind glass has never been made to clean rubber soles with his tongue (but he can be made to. this is something sam knows, now--that at a certain point, with the right combination of actions, with the right threats, no matter how unyielding Dream may look in the present, he can be made to.) when sam first enters the cell again, still mostly convinced he's dreaming and reeling from the implications of traveling back in time, he watches the prisoner dump his inventory on the ground at his request and all he can think is that he has no idea how he had ever been convinced by this mockery of obedience when it is so clear that Dream is still weighing every move, still thinking about how he can pull the wool over his eyes.

however orders and obedience progressed in canon, i think that to a certain extent, it was more organic. there were places where dream tended to obey, and places where he pushed the limits—the clock, for example. Sam would react, of course, to Dream’s disobedience, but there wasn’t anything particularly systematic about his punishments, and his relationship with. Pain and violence very obviously changes over the course of the prison arc. Sam comes to resent Quackity for how Dream always feared him more, and also can’t quite stomach putting himself in Quackity’s place in a more literal fashion, but something he does miss is a threat that Dream actually feared. In JMAH, he looks back at his earlier efforts to get Dream to obey such as threatening the clock or taking away food or slapping him around a little and thinks about Tommy, dead in the cell, and how it was almost the worst mistake in his life to have ever been so merciful.

Which means in JMAH, Sam makes it clear that what he’s demanding is full, unconditional obedience or bust. Eventually, he won’t quite soften, but human bodies tend to give out faster than machines and besides how it’s just not sustainable to keep up the hours of torture for every answer Dream refuses to give him for the rest of time if he wants him, you know, alive (which. Obviously.) but Sam also tire, sometimes, of everything that being the Warden entails. There’s a world, I think, where he directly commands Dream to bow, here—only it’s not a bow, it’s a position, and the point isn’t that it’s some paltry act of false deference meant to get something from Sam, it’s just something he should do because Sam says so, because he has no choice, knees folded under him forehead touching the ground hands flat against the ground and don’t move, not when there’s harming raining on his back, not when saltwater fills the back of the cell and closes over his head, not until this is never a tool he can use never leverage he gets to hold. (Obviously, well. This doesn’t exactly work.)

Dream, obviously, is weirded the fuck out at the start of all of this. Because bro why are you training him like a dog. The prevalence of the orders, what they are, and how Sam reacts if he gets set off (which, he gets set off a lot, obviously) combined with a total lack of context on anything he does means that Dream is left guessing why the hell Sam has such a stick up his ass about the exact placement of his heels against the back wall. None of the options seem particularly good. He still has to obey, because Sam knows that Dream can be made to give on some things before this Dream even knows so himself, and even this Sam is a little easier to bow to than someone who clearly took sadistic pleasure in his humiliation. (Sam isn’t humiliating him, they both agree…it’s. Security.)