dingus boy

A few months ago, I remembered seeing a lot of posts giving advice on how to write dialogue for DSMP Characters. And while those posts contained numerous helpful pointers, overall, they fall just short of capturing what it means to write in a character’s Voice.

Unique character Voices, while tricky to get right, are usually achieved by giving each character a distinct set of words to say, in a manner that distinguishes them from the rest of the cast. 

With this in mind, I’ve spent the past few days combing through almost Thirty Hours of VOD footage to collect nearly all of the unique words, phrases, and speaking habits of every major and minor character on the Dream SMP (involved in 2+ story arcs.)

Before Reading:

Sentence-Starters are single words or phrases which begin a sentence. (ie. “Y’know, maybe you should try something different.”) 

Sentence Paddings are reoccurring words added to the middle of sentences. (ie. “It’s like he just can’t cry.”) 

Sentence Endings are single words or phrases which end a sentence. (ie. “There’s no need to fight, I hope.”)

All three of these types can be combined with one another to create more natural-sounding sentences. For instance, if a character has the two Sentence-Starters “Okay” and “So,” they can be used like this; “Okay, so, I’m a bit worried.”

(Note: When certain traits or phrases aren’t obvious with how they should be applied to dialogue, an (ie.) will be added below to illustrate them.)

Wilbur

General Traits:

Repeats himself for emphasis. Sometimes these repetitions will add additional information. More often, this repetition is focused around a specific word with the circumstance of the sentence being changed each time.

ie. “I’m living in an eternal limbo again. I’ve been through limbo, I’m out of limbo, and socially, I’m still in this limbo.”

Highly eloquent in language, bordering on poetic.

Highly introspective; significantly less so after Eret’s betrayal and onward.

Occasionally makes literary analogies and references, sometimes breaking the Fourth Wall to do so.

Curses semi-frequently. Wilbur is the only known character to use the word “cunt,” although rare.

Common Go-To Swears - Fuck, Shit, Prick, Bastard, Hell, Ass (Including all variations and combinations.)

Tends to hum when he thinks to himself.

Stutters most often when offended, shocked, or surprised.

Generally addresses characters semi-formally, often by title or role.

Often slips into long-form monologues when self-reflecting.

Usually defaults to being the head of a conversation; introducing, managing, and elaborating on topics throughout, especially when speaking to three or more people.

Circumstantial Phrases:

You and I, we’re ━ (To connect positively with someone.)

ie. “You and I, we’re used to seeing the good in people.”

I wanna pick your brain / Can I pick your brain? (To ask about someone else.)

Don’t say that, I’ll cry (Affectionate banter, only to Tommy.)

I’m afraid ━ (When hopeless or delivering bad news.)

ie. “I’m afraid there’s no getting out of this now.”

There’s no reason to ━ / There’s no reason for ━ / There’s no need for ━  (When being threatened or breaking up a fight.)

ie. “There’s no need for violence, gentlemen.”

Revivebur has so many delusions of grandeur. He thinks being the former president of a country that doesn’t exist anymore because he blew it up gives him any significance beyond being feared by the few major characters who couldn’t take him in a fight. In reality, this is so far from the truth that it’s laughable. The only reason that people like Skeppy fear him is because they don’t realize how pathetic he is now; they see him as this powerful figure who blew up a country, without realizing that he had no idea what he was doing as president and that he blew up L’Manberg in a time where he was not there mentally.

I love the moments in hitting on 16 where he assumes Quackity is going to give him Las Nevadas or that he must think about him all the time. Wil clearly is a person who was once important but has since become irrelevant due to time and is doing everything he can to boost his shattered ego. He is very cocky and tries to seem dignified but that confident persona shatters the moment something is said that he doesn’t like and he has to fight to not go off on an angry rant right there.

Also, the freaking poem he wrote just trash talking las Nevadas. He’s so petty and it’s just a joy to watch. And the way he gets increasingly panicked in the final confrontation over Quackity’s horse is just so- Augh /pos. He’s completely lost control of a plan that he thought he had considered every minute detail of and doesn’t know how to bounce back.

Like, it’s not the biggest deal in the world, and I’m not making accusations or trying to stifle creativity.

like, c!wilbur is very intentionally written as a character who isn’t touchy-feely. he really struggles with violence or directly killing people: seeing him theoretically saying he doesn’t care who gets caught in the crossfire, but when it comes down to sacrificing tommy or quackity, he can’t do it (he does the same with niki). besides the one jack manifold kill which wasn’t meant to be a canon life at the time, he’s the only villain with no direct canon life taking. wilbur isn’t a violent or up-close-and-personal character. he’s a character who isolates himself, who monologues, who plans and schemes, but he doesn’t fight and he doesn’t get up close.

What do I mean by that? Well, for starters, have him keep the distance. My guy was going through a paranoid spiral that began because of a deadly betrayal, I don’t see him approach anyone while he’s having a vulnerable moment where he unravels his paranoia to make sense of it. I’d have him either sit down or pace around, not being able to sit still, but still keep his distance. I’d make him do theatrics with his hands, like point, wave his hands, because Wilbur always striked me as the kind of guy that can’t keep his hands still while speaking. Have him put his hands through his hair, over his face, have him look down a lot, as if he’s processing what he’s saying but still not see the bigger picture (that the L’Manbergians don’t really like Schlatt, that he won the popular vote, so his citizens did want him to be their leader).

And I get that the scene is meant to be scary for Tommy, but like… Seeing Wilbur just going down on this spiral right in front of him, without any kind of attempt to touch him or come closer to him is still scary, because of the words said. Wilbur is still saying to blow everything up, that they should be the baddies, that Tubbo would betray them. The speech still happens, and it’s honestly scary to see someone you care about change their outlook 180 degrees right in front of you (even though this change happened sslowly, as we know, Wilbur wasn’t upfront with it, and from Tommy’s POV, it would be a sudden change, not the culmination of weeks).

And you can even make it disturbing, not by having him do an evil smile, but that kind of shaky facial expression people make when they’re frantically trying to figure out something. Like, my guy was having a moment where he realised he may, in fact, be a bad guy, goes from that to embracing the title of “villain“ and saying he wants to kill everyone. I doubt he looked anything else than unsure of his own footing, while trying to seem he has the situation under control. Having a paranoid spiral isn’t fun.

And, as for Tommy, we all know that he was the one that closed the gap, in fact. Now, because it’s Minecraft, he punched Wilbur in the scene, but I always saw it as him grabbing Wilbur by the shoulders, as if to shake him out of it. It’s not a violent or disturbing action in my eyes, it’s more like an attempt from Tommy to make Wilbur stop going down this path.

I dunno, I guess this post is some other ideas about how to show the “The let’s be the bad guys“ moment, without having Wilbur act like a stereotipically creepy dude, while still having some unease in the scene.

With that out of the way, here are the Missing Parts (it goes without saying that this is discussing the characters and not the content creators):

a. he literally unprompted brought up later about how he wanted to just be able to tell certain people (likely fundy and niki) that he was still alive

b. those people coincidentally happen to be all the people who reacted positively to him being alive, it’s, it’s almost like wilbur is saying “I only care about these people because it’s safe when I know they don’t openly hate me”

The people who are worried are valid in feeling that way.

This isn’t a case of “wow, look at all the c!Wilbur enthusiasts too dumb to recognize basic storytelling.” It’s that folks are concerned that the narrative might not go the seemingly obvious direction of redemption arc. And that concern isn’t based off nothing– it’s based off over half a year of fandom misrepresenting/misinterpreting c!Wilbur, it’s based off the fact that the dsmp’s creators are new at this storytelling and sometimes make mistakes. There are retcons and narrative messes like Doomsday and not everything runs smoothly.

Not to mention, like. A key part to a redemption arc is giving both sides weight and making the audience invested and concerned that it might not pan out. So when folks express concern… That is just as much a natural part of this arc as c!Wilbur’s actions and framing. Like, you wouldn’t tell your buddy watching a thriller movie “why are you so scared/tense about the killer catching this person? You do realize that the narrative has framed this person as the “final girl” and they’re set up to escape, right?” Pointing out that fact can help the viewer calm down, but it also misses the points that: 1. The narrative itself is trying to make the audience feel that way. And 2. People get invested? In stories? And characters?

Like, guys, can we please not pit the mentally ill characters against one another?

And the other issue that I have is that new viewers may take what Niki said as gospel and they won’t go back to fact check. The fandom already had a pretty fucked view of Wilbur even at the start of Season 2, when Season 1 was still fresh. They could hear that he manipulated Niki and take it as gospel without wondering when and how it happened, or what the context was. Characters are flawed, because they are inherently human. They will misremember or forget events, sometimes even combine events together, or recontextualize past experiences, and that’s not their job to make us realize they are misremembering. It’s our job to figure it out, which can’t happen if people take everything someone says a truth. We always have to question what characters say.

It’s because of this that newer people may never know about Wilbur walking in armorless in Manberg after the Festival, to stop Schlatt from killing Niki, offering his life up so no one else would die. Of course this doesn’t erase other things he did, he was still a dick, but it shows that he wasn’t an asshole 100% of the time. And if newer viewers don’t know of scenes like this, how are we sure that they understand the character? Wilbur was a Season 1 character. There are people here who came after Doomsday. Some people only met Ghostbur, and never saw Wilbur in his prime.

How can you understand a character if you take what they say about themselves and what others say about them as gospel, without looking back to when they were active? How can you understand a character, without getting the context of their actions and words?

I think it has a lot to do with how this fandom views morality- and it's not just a Wilbur problem. Every time a character makes a questionable choice, chat spams "VILLAIN ARC!!!" and hundreds of theories pop up about how this character is bad, actually. It goes as far as fans blatantly ignoring canon in order to justify their "evilness." For instance, despite cc!Phil stating multiple times that his character is not related to c!Tommy in any way, people still use his treatment of Tommy to call him a bad person and dad. C!Puffy is not canonically c!Dream's mother, but people still use their out-of-canon joke as a way to call Puffy a bad person and say she "abandoned" c!Dream.

c!Wilbur canonically blew up L'Manberg in a misguided attempt to protect the people he cares about. But since he did a bad thing and called himself a villain, he must be evil for evil's sake. Some people even go so far as saying he "must have been evil all along" and they go back to watch the original vods and take jokes and lines out of context in order to say he was evil. Despite saying he lies all the time, they take his words at face value, thinking that since he said he's a villain that he must be, despite all his actions towards getting rid of said "villain". Guys, he literally killed himself to get rid of the thing he thought was hurting everybody. He saw how the power L'Manberg had was corrupting people and he knew how bad it could get, and his solution was to get rid of it. When c!Tubbo rebuilt L'Manberg, he was proven right when c!Dream used the power against Tubbo in order to force him to exile c!Tommy. This isn't an excuse for any harm he did cause, but only a defense for him being called evil or a villain, when his intentions and motivations are good.

It's interesting to see how the fandom switches up with characters. While some of them become irredeemable villains, the other half become innocents who can do no wrong.

For example, c!Niki literally tried to kill Tommy with a nuke, but because she stopped trying to kill him, she's good now. Ranboo has also confirmed that his "Enderwalk" self is just himself with all his memories, and he helped Dream. But because he can't remember it, he must be good. Techno helped blow up L'Manberg two times and he isn't called a villain nearly as much as Wilbur is, despite him actively going out of his way to hurt and kill people both times.

Even Dream is given way too much credit. Despite all evidence to the contrary, fans and apologists make up backstories and reasons for why child abuse is okay, actually (/s), and he was called a villain a few times which means the only acceptable response is war...I guess?

He didn't get a grave or a monument, Schlatt did, but not him. Schlatt, the person everyone hated. And now his ghost gets a monument.

You can see how he can understand this as a message of "oh, they liked it better when I was dead. they wanted me dead" which must sting.

What is the point in a corruption arc (btw its literally said In A Stream that his character is going through a corruption arc. Techno said it lmao) if the character was Already Like That

i present to you:

the four Gs