so uh- I didn't see if this theory already exists in the fandom, or no one really touched on it, but after a long time in both fandoms, one funny pattern is noticeable. Iām so obsessed with watchers lore so much, which is why I started to go beyond only one universe, and this gave the result. so the theory is that dreamxd is a watcher. after digging into the dsmp lore, I found several points that may indicate this. dxdās nature may differ from the canonical nature of the watchers that we see in evo smp and in the life-seasons in martynās lore, but we also already have a watcher!grian, whose watcher's nature also differs in its own way from that very canon, he has his own lore, so this will also work here.
now this will be only my personal version of watcher!dxd lore, there may still be holes in it, but this is only as a possible base:
presumably dreamxd is an ex-manhunt!dream, who could not get out of the world and stuck in the spectator mode of the game, becoming a watcher. in the initial attempts to escape from such a fate and get out (I don't think dream would just accept such a fate), he was crippled either by other watchers or by himself, having lost his "eye". this explains the basic visual interpretation of the dxd, where the place where the eyes should have been is now a familiar cross pattern.
isolating himself from other watchers, dxd created a time loop from the existing world, from which he initially could not get out, closing access to the end dimension for players, preventing both the players themselves from escaping, and the possibility of capturing these players to other watchers for their own time loops. the world with the manhunt seed was restarted, defaulting almost everything to zero, which eventually became the dsmp server. all interactions between players and server events began to give dxd so much energy and power that eventually the essence of the watcher completely absorbed him, dxd himself began to provoke events, interact directly with players, and all for the sake of energy, emotions, deaths that made him only stronger. dsmp became an excellent loop-feeder for him only, in which he completely lost his original humanity, becoming a monster, creating only chaos.
one of the risky but effective dxdās moves of was giving the revival book and the book of death to players inside the time loop, which in a peculiar way gave them access to part of dxdās powers. he realized how unpredictable players can be in their decisions and actions, which gave a ton of events possibilities. he wouldn't have to provoke events himself, when players can do everything for him, giving the same amount of energy.
so in the final of the dsmp, after that nuclear explosion, dxd simply restarted the entire time loop, as it was shown. the players don't remember anything that happened, they don't remember each other, the whole world was defaulted to zero, where they started all over again.
itās also interesting that the concepts of limbo and dreams/illusions exist both in the dsmp lore and in watchers lore in life-seasons. limbo is the space where players end up with the loss of all their canonical lives, and there is no return from there, only at the whim of mystical powers (dsmp ā the revival book, as part of the dxdās powers, life-seasons ā the watchers, more specifically watcher!grian).
both concepts somehow intersect with each other:
> in the dsmp, they intersected in the c!georgeās lore, he had partial access to limbo through his own dreams, where dxd himself was also often present. someone also had the opportunity to watch server events from limbo.
> in life-seasons, according to cc!martyn, limbo is the space where all players get to after the final death and are there between seasons in a state of sleep, in which they see their own smps/universes.
again, this is just a possible version of how exactly this theory/head-cannon can work, there are a lot of things that I could not explain yet, because there is too much information from different dsmp povs. some things I remember, some not at all, but I left a hint of their possible intersection visually in the diagram. the theory of the smps-multiverse is here simply by default, all the other main points are indicated in this diagram. all of this will be easily editable at any future time, my job is just to throw in the base for this theory :D
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