#ranboo analysis

he’s made sure to build a somewhat harmless persona, letting people bully him when they want, going along with pranks when it’s asked of him, just generally being a yes-man. and honestly, that’s all he seems to be, a yes man. but some of the things he’s said makes it pretty clear he’s not just a pushover, he’s thinking. 

this dude just joined the server and already seems to have dream all figured out. like that bit where he figured out that really the only way you could get to Dream was through his friends and tried to persuade Tommy to get on his good side by being nice to George?

or in his last stream, when he sneakily left Tommy and Wilbur an ender chest but made sure that it could be passed off as an accident (and even convinced half the chat that it hadn’t been intentional) so that he would never get in trouble for it.

he’s smart enough to stay under the radar while playing the long game to run for presidency (minus the George griefing which, let’s be honest, wasn’t really a big deal it just got blown out of proportion). 

So, before the Community House we had no reason believe that Ranboo was working with Dream. He saw the Spirit speech, he saw Dream manipulate Tubbo into exiling Tommy. But Exile is when things get interesting.

You see, there were only three frequent people who interacted with Tommy in exile: Ghostbur who lived with him, Dream who visited him, and Ranboo who wrote letters to him. Important context: Ranboo blames himself for exile because he was not allowed to speak during Tommy’s trial.

Now Dream is a smart lad and he knows how to manipulate people. So what if he intercepted one of Ranboo’s letters and wrote back himself? That, or Ranboo visited Tommy and didn’t remember but we would have seen him in Tommy’s streams. It’s fully possible that Dream knew about Ranboo’s guilt and said he could redeem himself via a similar crime: helping him destroy another piece of property and taking all of the blame.

That was the reason behind the community house. They started working together in Exile, and Dream could have convinced Ranboo that he was helping Tommy by keeping him away from the conflict in L’Manberg, and at the same time, keeping L’Manberg from “dealing with” Tommy Since Ranboo never saw the state of exile he would probably believe it after a bit, leading to his seemingly-out-of-nowhere mindset of “Stop conflict at all costs” And if that’s not enough let’s take a look at the timing of the first time the Dream voice appeared. According to my notes, it was right before the Green Festival where Ranboo was outed as a traitor. The next time he heard it, it said that he blew up the community house and has been helping Dream. If Dream told Ranboo his main goal was ending conflict between the server, Ranboo would not only believe him but also want to ally with him, while Dream and Punz did the really awful stuff on the sideline without Ranboo knowing I’d be willing to bet as well that Dream told Ranboo that the discs were the main conflict on the server and he was actually helping Tommy by hiding one. A “it’s for his own good” type thing The tnt on top of the prison could have also fallen under that same logic and by that point, Ranboo was manipulated or blackmailed into believing Dream was in the right.

The reason Ranboo forgets things is out of guilt. He never wanted to hurt anyone. He never wanted to cause all that damage, all he wanted was to keep his friends away from conflict. c!Dream cannot possess or control him like some still believe, but he can blackmail and manipulate him into having him do his dirty work. Everyone has a right to be mad at c!Ranboo, and based on the way his ghost talks he probably hated himself more than anyone else could hate him for his actions.

c!Ranboo, enderwalk state or not, is an unknowing villain on the same level as Punz in terms of what he's done. aside from the hunting down, experimenting on, and killing people.

It's just a shitty situation all around. c!Ranboo is not irredeemable, he just... looked to the wrong person for redemption. He's not a stone-cold bad guy, he's someone who needs help and wanted other people to be helped. He and Dream both share the "one big happy family" line, but Ranboo actually means it from a perspective of compassion rather than control. He has a consistent ability to find the wrong people to bring him that.

Eventually he found the right people: Tubbo, Tommy and Michael were his family, they were there for him the most, and in trying to protect them he only ended up getting one of them killed and traumatized and the other mourning.

TLDR: Ranboo is a complex and deeply tragic character who wanted redemption for himself and safety for his friends and, in doing so, fell for the lies of the worst tyrant on the server, leading to the deaths of several people and mental scars on his loved ones that will never fade. He's flawed, he's hypocritical, he's destructive, but all he wanted at the end of the day was for his friends and family to be safe. He's as much of a victim of Dream's manipulation and control as Tubbo is. That doesn't mean that people don't have the right to be mad at him though, I know I would be fucking pissed if my husband did that.

it literally has to be okay, it can't not be okay because if he lets himself panic too much, takes a second to process everything and get hit by the emotional impact of all of it, then he might lose control and that will only make things worse.

he can't cry or it hurts more. he can't let anything scare him too much or he risks losing control. and when you remember that, the way he deals with things makes a lot of sense.

I CAN I CAN I CAN. SO.

/rp /dsmp

i've made a post before on why i think c!ranboo's "choose people not sides" philosophy falls flat, mainly because he's a bit of a hypocrite /neu. i think this explanation by @thesmpisonfire is a very good one as well, so i'm including it here for more info!!!

now, onto my point about fundy and ranboo. as i said, i think their fight after doomsday is a very good example on why ranboo's "choose people not sides" concept doesn't work and isn't actually about choosing people. the conversation i was referencing is this one right here.

that's a 9 minute clip and i won't make you watch all of it, so a brief recollection: after doomsday, fundy tells ranboo he was right from the start about the not choosing sides thing, because c!fundy chose sides and ideals his entire life, and all the good and bad things he has ever done for those sides never mattered because in the end everyone left him and all his decisions led to nothing, to no overcome, because in the end l'manburg was destroyed and nothing mattered. he sabotaged l'manburg's supplies and let techno, dream, and philza destroy everything, because they were destroying "the last side" and nothing matters, and maybe this would make people finally realize it. he says ranboo was right all along: sides don't matter, people do, and he says they should stick together as they are the main people who are aware of that.

from that you can already tell fundy has a skewed viewpoint of both the concept and just everything happening around him, which i don't really blame him for. fundy was right when he said people left him again and again, and his feeling of emptiness and non-importance is justified in this situation. personally i think the way he interprets it all is a bit extreme and just not that reasonable, but i get where he's coming from. in a way his understanding of the concept reflects c!ranboo's understanding of it as well, which we can recognize through the fact ranboo's reaction to doomsday wasn't that far off from fundy's - his nonchalant response when techno asks him how he's feeling during doomsday and all his feelings regarding l'manburg afterwards (thinking it was a bad place blah blah blah) show that well.

what i think is the biggest exposure of why ranboo's "choose people not sides" concept fails is how he reacts to fundy's point, tho. here is a direct transcription from their fight:

fundy: [he was talking about how letting doomsday happen was a good thing] to make them realize that, even without l'manburg, even without a last chosen side, it's for the better. and now, if you and i were right, they might learn.

ranboo: so... what you're saying is that... we should team up?

fundy: that is exactly what i'm saying.

ranboo: that is exactly what you weren't supposed to say. coward. don't you see what you just did? you just tried to create another side.

fundy: i tried to team up to prevent other sides from starting in the first place, ranboo! YOU'RE THE ONE WHO TAUGHT ME THIS, RANBOO!

ranboo: [overlapping] teams are sides!

but that... goes against ranboo's whole point. if teams are sides- if two people supporting each other in any way is a side- how are you supposed to choose people? fundy said they should choose each other, AS PEOPLE, and together try to make other people understand that everyone should stop creating "sides" and choose each other. and ranboo IS right - that IS a side, according to his concept. however, if that is a side according to his concept, his entire philosophy falls flat.

because how are you supposed to choose people in the first place if people are sides? if he recognizes sides are people and sides can be a single person and sides can be just two people working together for a thing they both believe in, how is he supposed to only choose people? how would that even work? how is he supposed to choose people if choosing people is what creates sides?

the ideal is faulty. in the end, it leads to nothing. because how can you choose people and steer clear from sides while also believing that teaming up with a single person and choosing each other and your shared beliefs already categorizes as a side? it falls flat. it doesn't work. it has no real meaning, and isn't actually choosing people at all.

because, as ranboo recognizes himself, people are sides. sides are made up of people. l'manburg wasn't simply a government or a side to choose, it was its people. the people who chose l'manburg weren't choosing a piece of land, they were choosing each other and the legacy that was born and cultivated in that piece of land.

i just. i hate limbo if this is what it does

when c!wilbur died i was heartbroken, but i could always make up my own comfort hcs for where he was gonna spend the rest of his days; now that i know characters are living the worst experiences imaginable for decades, it feels… empty.

killing off c!ranboo and leaving them dead at this point feels like pointless angst. it hasnt had any plot relevance so far other than upsetting c!tubbo and c!techno, but even c!tubbo has been more focused on michael. you could make the argument that c!ranboo’s death led to c!sam’s imprisonment but, idk, that felt far more connected to michael imo.

personally, i think that it would’ve been best if c!ranboo either:

a. never died and continued the burger arc properly

b. died but had a death that was meaningful and didnt leave me asking “was that intentional or a blooper? did i imagine that?”

c. died and came back a week or so later

yeah so. idk if u can tell from that but im really not a fan of the way c!ranboo died, i think it was a waste of the potential he has, and im not a fan of how horrific limbo reportedly is for him bc it feels like pointless angst (a lot like the ghostbur drabbles)

also i do enjoy limbo tho, i rly like what it added to c!wilbur (showed that death doesnt fix someone and only serves to further mental issues), and i KINDA like the way it was done w c!tommy (a short time, a reunion w c!wilbur, proof that revive book is real)

im just not a fan of pointless angst that does nothing for the plot

Let’s start with Ranboo. From Ranboo’s perspective, there is just so much to take in.

Given what we’ve seen of Ranboo and Tubbo’s relationship in canon, this is probably the most upset he has ever seen Tubbo. Already, that was probably a shock for him, to see the one of the people he cares about the most of anyone that upset for the first time.

But the other thing about it is that he doesn’t even fully understand what Tubbo is going through. Ranboo was never there for the original L’Manburg. He wasn’t there for a good majority of the server’s history. The only things he knows are the bits and pieces he’s picked up, the reactions of his friends, the recreations in the museum, the pieces leftover. He only knows what Tubbo has told him, and that isn’t much, so he doesn’t even have the information to follow the discussion between Wilbur and Tubbo in the first place. Instead, he had to try and piece together what he could from the things being said. And not only does he not understand from an information point of view, but he will never understand what it was like for Tubbo, and there’s nothing he can do to change that, and that makes it so hard for him to help his husband.

Then, of course, there’s Tubbo.

Tubbo, who learned a long time ago to repress his emotions, to not show weakness, to not whine, to not cry. Tubbo, who dreams about what happened to him every single day. Tubbo, who came to the ruins of L’Manburg, dressed in his old President’s suit, who sang the anthem to himself, tears welling up in his eyes, mourning alone, only to be interrupted by the very person who blew up L’Manburg the first time, and who made Tubbo President of a Crater, and who caused him so much pain.

Tubbo was caught in a moment of vulnerability, something he works so hard to avoid. He was forced to talk to someone who had hurt him severely in the past, and in the midst of reliving exactly how he was hurt.

And when Ranboo asked Tubbo if he wanted him to stay, Tubbo broke, but he couldn’t break, he was supposed to be alone when he broke.

It’s not just the fact that Tubbo told Ranboo he wanted to be alone, it’s the way he said it. While his voice betrayed his emotions, while tears ran down his face, Tubbo politely said “No, I would like to be left alone please.” Even when he’s breaking, he’s polite, because he always had to be, with Schlatt. And even when Tubbo was crying, when Tubbo was completely breaking down, he told Ranboo “I’m fine.” Because he learned that from Schlatt, too. No one wants to listen to him whine.

AND the entire time this is happening, the entire time they are having this conversation, both of them are acutely aware of the fact that Wilbur is right there. They can’t get too close, they can’t say too much, because they’re trying to keep each other safe, they’re trying to keep their son safe from someone that neither of them trust.

can we talk about how c!ranboo wasn't really shocked by the fact that he physically couldn't talk about dream and the things they've done. like he makes ONE confused noise, and then his tone is like of an annoyed understanding. like. can we break that down??

like first of all, he never really has a moment of SHOCK over being physically incapable of speaking about it. there’s the first moment in stream where he tries to explain but he lets out this choked noise, and there’s no like surprised noises or sounds after it is literally a choked noise and then a moment of processing.

this is when it gets noticable, he says “because you don’t know what dre-mmphmh”

and after a brief pause of processing he lets out this confused breath. but it’s not like... it’s not a SHOCKED confusion it’s just a soft moment of confusion. and then theres another brief pause

and he moves on from it. he has this air of a FRUSTRATED understanding and explains “i can’t tell you why but please trust me, sam.”

like there’s no real moment of shock and added panic. it is a brief confusion, acceptance, and then frustration.

i feel like another HINT at this very Weird Behavior and hint that we should be interpreting this in these contexts is the way sam dismisses ranboo saying “i CAN’T tell you. i cant tell anyone.” because it creates an irony in sam’s misunderstanding that ranboo LITERALLY cannot tell anyone when sam thinks he simply just “can’t” under the terms of emotion and morals. and the way ranboo DELIVERS the line, and the diction he CHOSE for the line, also implies this understanding of what’s going on.

we don’t necessarily know the extent of his knowledge, but i think it’s clear he has SOME understanding. i’m really curious about what this could mean? i feel like it could maybe be his enderwalk preventing him from speaking about it, but there’s just so little of the situation that i don’t quite know what to expect!