this is an archived blog now

ok hello i am insane yes yes 

however when else are you going to see me write c!crime meta

what’s important first off is that the emotional core of the story is still there. that’s the only reason why this works for me. this was a story about two bored brothers who make a story that turns into a nation together, and under that it’s about communication and loyalty and the strain mental illness places on a relationship and underneath even that it’s a story about two streamers in a pandemic who wanted content and to make each other laugh. 

that is never undermined or taken less than 100% seriously; it’s the emotional core of the whole thing. as wild as it gets and as bold choices are made, both wilburs love both tommys and vice versa. 

it’s a similar story with the line at the end: “I never did quite forgive myself” isn’t undermined, isn’t played for laughs. The argument c!crime have is incredibly well done and people will write actual analysis about that so you should go read it, but the gist of it is that c!crime are what they’ve always been: more than a bit unhealthy, perpetually arguing, but never quite willing to give up on each other.

with that being said, I felt like that was what I wanted out of the finale achieved. now to get into the wild parts.

the interesting part for me is how c!wilbur’s insane mindset is, for the first time, actually challenged and beat.

we’ve been saying for months that one of c!wilbur’s biggest issues is that his paranoia manifests in believing he is in a story, that there are roles like heroes and villains, that he has to play his part and there is nothing he can do about it. he’s his own self-fulfilling prophecy, he takes himself incredibly seriously, and most importantly, he is aware of the audience.

and nothing could break that. everyone around wilbur confirmed to his narrative, letting his vague statements that were clearly a narrative foreshadowing to suicide slip by. he’s getting swallowed up again by his own story, he is the one putting chekov’s gun on the wall, never quite saying something, but implying just enough that he was willing it into reality.

(he does the same thing in season 1, remember? he tells everyone he’s going to press the button enough times that by the end he feels like he has to because he’s foreshadowed it, because it’s who he is now. eret said it was never meant to be and thus it wasn’t. if you’re in an improv rp and you know it, speaking things is enough to make them real.)

and it almost works again! he almost follows the exact same trajectory of self-deprecation and sealing his fate. except. tommy’s not taking it this time.

tommy, having gone through everything he’s gone through, finally gets to win this. he looks the entire force of wilbur’s simultaneously self-aggrandizing and deprecating mindset dead in the eye and says tell me what you’re fucking talking about. 

he says the words! he looks at wilbur and says we’ve both been in this story before, I know what you’re doing, I know who you are and what this is and I’m not going to let it happen again. tell me, are you going to kill yourself? he enters into wilbur’s spiral and says this can’t be redemption if you still won’t be honest with me and you can’t leave without apologizing. 

he gets right to the core, no subtext, with all the blunt honesty he’s ever had, and c!wilbur, worn down from fighting and apologizing and the exhaustion of it all, finally gives in. he stops lying. 

his backstory was never cool. he was a gas station attendee, never any sort of leader before coming to the smp, and his jacket was just another uniform. he isn’t even european. he somehow sailed here from a landlocked state, because why not. this is Not the type of backstory for the type of person he’s trying to build himself up to be, this isn’t the fit for the genre at all! 

but insanely, impossibly, it’s true. it’s canon. just like the fish fucking and the fridge mom and everything else. it is ridiculous! and with that, it’s the realization that wilbur’s story has always been a serious character with serious feelings in ridiculous circumstance. his very real suicide was attempted via looney-tunes-esque sticks of dynamite in a pile, his ghost talks in a high-pitched voice and gives out blue dye. none of this undermines the seriousness of c!wilbur’s feelings, but it does undermine how he views himself as some great evil out of Game of Thrones. 

he died and got revived by a book! his depression fort was named pogtopia! he has always existed just under the threshold of ridiculousness by just how seriously he takes it all, how seriously everyone takes it. 

and c!tommy has always loved the person under the narrative he paints, and that’s why, at the end of it all, he can get through to him. tommy knows the story, he loves parts of it (l’manburg, the family, etc), but he doesn’t love this part, and for once, he gets to choose. he pushes and pushes and says you love me enough to not shy away from this, I am banking on you loving me enough not to push me away again, and he’s completely right! he breaks the cycle by being the same kid he’s always been.

and so wilbur’s end is ridiculous. it’s absurd, but it’s not him killing himself again. it’s not drenched in the belief that everything he made should be destroyed, but full of callbacks and nods to who he was. he never did quite forgive himself, but he’s not looking to the audience for forgiveness anymore, either. 

It would be so perfect

It would echo that one time that they stopped him in the button room all the way back in Pogtopia, that one time they managed to talk him down where he confessed that he just wanted to end it all but didn't want to hurt his friends in the process, but this time they could be able to do it with a broader perspective on what Wilbur is going and has gone through

They are the two people with what I believe to be the deepest relationships with Wilbur in different ways. They get him, they connect with him in a way that nobody else in the whole damn server has. They have seen him since the beginning and evolved alongside him and because of him, as he did because of them. They treat him like a person, and that doesn't mean that they're always on good terms, but the bottom line is that differently to basically everybody else, they see Wilbur as a whole human person

Tommy is brother, he's been there since the beginning, he knows what drove Wilbur over the edge last time, he's not giving up on him

Quackity is Wilbur's parallel, they're so fucking similar they drive me insane. They have their competitive dynamic, underlined by betrayal and hurt, but also deep trust and care, they make each other feel alive in a good and a bad sense, they seek the thrill of a battle of wits and lose everything to their worst impulses

him and his silly little soulmate dispute. what a funny little guy

He was quieted by the fact c!Wilbur did not actually betray him and his love of the discs. He was quieted by the fact c!Wilbur, like c!Tubbo, was willing to throw away his life for these discs, to save him from c!Dream in some way. He was quieted by the fact c!Wilbur loves him and thinks his own life so inconsequential. He was quieted by the fact that c!Wilbur does plans without letting him know, does things recklessly, does things like he thinks he has it all figured out when he doesn't. He was quieted because for the first time someone did believe him about c!Dream being bad, that he did not deserve what happened to him in exile. He was quieted that someone believed him to be a "good kid" despite it all, despite the "it depends on who you ask" when c!Foolish asked him if he was a villain. He was quieted by the fact that his story with c!Dream is not over, and c!Tommy definitely knows that, but he did not have the energy or the fortitude to tell c!Wilbur that after one of his own "victories".

by creating fan-works wherein cwilbur is weirdly touchy and aggressive, it’s a way for these artists to show us “look wilbur’s evil now” - and this is something i can understand in theory, but when placed in conjunction with wilbur’s character (both during the dream smp as a whole and during pogtopia) this portrayal doesn’t make any sense and i’d argue it removes a lot of the complexity of cwilbur’s spiral by making him into a more stereotypical antagonist, as opposed to a fallen hero of sorts. when we see these animatics where cwilbur is striding around, grabbing characters (namely ctommy) and getting uncomfortably close to them - the message is clear. he’s a villain now and we shouldn’t feel sympathy for him. this… is not accurate to canon. it’s undeniable that cwilbur served as an antagonist during the pogtopia arc, but there was always the sense that this wasn’t right at all - it was never “we have to fight against wilbur” but instead, “we need to get wilbur back” and “something’s not right with wilbur”. there was this instinctual knowledge among our characters that wilbur’s actions weren’t normal in the slightest, it oftentimes felt more that characters were scared for him rather than of him, and it’s this distinction that people often get muddled up.

also just this aggressiveness is not at all accurate to cwilbur? one of the first things he does when establishing l’manberg is create the policy of “words over weapons”, preaching that they don’t need armour in l’manberg and they win wars with their words. whilst on the surface he seems to abandon these principles in pogtopia (or rather, he tries to) he himself never lays a hand on another character. cwilbur will argue for hours on end, he’ll dig out the pit and coerce ctommy and ctechno to fight one another, and he’ll accept tnt from cdream - but the one thing he NEVER does is lay a hand on another character. all the hurt cwilbur caused in pogtopia was either through his words or more indirect actions (again, the pit and blowing up l’manberg) and this is why it makes very little sense to me to see people portray him as being physically aggressive. not to mention - a key aspect of pogtopia was that cwilbur was isolating himself! in scenes such as the “are we the bad guys?” confrontation, it makes more thematic sense for cwilbur to be further away, to show how he was distancing himself by pushing others away. 

(unrelated but i couldn’t figure out where to fit this - cwilbur’s weapon of choice is a bow. a long-ranged weapon that prioritises distance from the intended target. the man didn’t like physical confrontation.)