Art by Juluurkhan Khalgaev
/dsmp /rp
Thinking again about how Dream's trust in other people got irrevocably torn down throughout the prison arc. How even after all the blackmailing and all the murder attempts, Dream had expected people to be fair and play by the rules. To keep their word, just like he always did.
But then Sam almost immediately deviated from the prison protocol. He isolated and starved Dream, he let a torturer in and trapped Dream's one chance of escape in the cell with him. Sapnap threatened to kill him if he ever got out. And it got to the point where Dream believed that Techno, one of his only allies, would not even come back for him.
When he was finally free, Dream decided that the only option left was to kill everyone who was against him and Punz. Otherwise, he thought the others would "force" them to revive whoever they killed. It wouldn't surprise me if he imagined that this "forcing to revive" would likely entail torture. He had already seen how far some people were willing to go for the power of revival, after all.
No longer would Dream give people the benefit of the doubt. No longer would he trust them to treat him fairly, to see him as a person. Either they sided with him, or they died.
i know morality and c!dream can be a sticky subject especially bc of how like, unreliable this guy is when he talks abt himself, but as much as we repeat lines in daedalus i do think that it's worth remembering that his whole ... "oh evil is in the eye of the beholder" "everyone is the hero in their own story" "they're not excuses theyre reasons" "im evil but the ends justify the means" ETC of it all is like. self protective?
like no, c!dream isn't a character that is all that occupied with morality from the beginning, obviously. but at the same time this is also a character where the crux of the damn matter when c!tommy finally gets through to him is you know, no, dumbass, you aren't Just Irredeemable Evil you're an idiot asshole that chose to do shitty things and there are, in fact, other paths you can choose. this is also a character that has a whole breakdown on his own about the "thin line between good and evil" where he wrestles with his own morality and humanity in comparison to a fucking snake. this is a character that is SO FUCKING BOTHERED by c!sam's like, everything, c!quackity's sadism, c!wilbur confronting him over lmanburg (i'm a tourist. not a terrorist.) (like ,,,)
like no matter how much c!dream tries to beat his conscience into the ground, no matter how much he says that ohhh he's just evil look at his evil lair and evil speeches and evil villain plan to give warning before he attacks and evil giving people primes (what???), no matter how much he repeats the fact that ~the end justifies the means~ and it's all worth it in the end so the middle doesn't actually matter...uh, it kind of does matter to him. c!dream might've always been ruthless and a bit of a jerk and capable of a heck of a lot of damage, but he doesn't go into this on day one thinking that abusing a teenager is A-okay. he doesn't go into the damn end of this thinking that abusing a teenager is A-okay, for fuck's sake. when pushed to the wire all he could say to c!tommy is that he tortured him, because he deserved it, like that's at all about ends justifying means and goals and whatever. like that's not the same thing that his own torturer said to him just weeks ago, in those few minutes before he was sent running.
like yeah, part of this is for show. also the other evil ass guys on this server don't exactly go around adding "evil ___" in front of everything they do, do they? you don't see c!quackity calling his casino "EVIL CASINO !!!" or c!sam calling his bank "EVIL BANK!!!" (c!sam, of course, Isn't A Bad Guy) (well, that whole Thing is also self-protective, but you know) like /?? c!dream is Weird about morality and fixated on the whole evil villain whatever of it all in a way that is just too obvious for him to not care about morality nearly as much as he claims to.