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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/serillymc on 2025-04-18 23:52:47+00:00.

You guys really really liked my last MCYT writeup, so I thought I’d return with more. This is one I actively tried to avoid being dragged into, but was pretty much unavoidable for a good few years.

I’ve only ever seen two other characters cause this much of a divide in a fanbase - those being the infamous Vriska Serket of Homestuck, and Warriors’s Ashfur, who has a whole writeup of his own.

Content warning for discussions of fictional abuse, and just general fandom assholery (threats, accusations of abuse apologism, the works).

And don’t worry, we won’t be leaving the realm of fiction and fandom drama here - at least, I’ll try my best not to.

Because searching on Twitter is a pain in the ass, you’ll see me mostly referencing Tumblr posts and discussion on the subreddits DreamWasTaken2 and dreamsmp here.

Introduction: What even is Dream SMP, anyways?

This might seem like a straightforward and obvious question to anyone who’s been active on social media in the past few years, but a lot of people know less than they might think.

Dream SMP was a fictional roleplay series that falls somewhere between the genres of “political drama” and “improv comedy”, that takes place entirely within the game of Minecraft. 

It’s not the first of its kind by any means - in fact, it takes a lot of inspiration from the more comedic SMPLive, which debuted a year prior - but it definitely popularized the whole “semi-serious plotline told in a multiplayer Minecraft server” thing, at least in recent times. MCYT in general tends to do a lot of kayfabe stuff, but Dream SMP is one of the most explicitly delineated series from reality.

In Dream SMP fandom, “c!” is used before a name to distinguish between a character and their player. I will be using this throughout for the sake of clarity.

In the server, YouTuber and now infamous guy-no-one-wants-anything-to-do-with Dream plays a power-hungry ruler of sorts who abuses his role in order to exercise power over rebellious teenage character c!Tommy. This isn’t exaggeration – the dynamic between these characters is very explicitly written to be abuse, to the point of c!Tommy attempting suicide because of it. c!Dream is unambiguously written to be a villainous character.

Here’s the thing – Dream, the YouTuber himself – has some very dedicated fans, who fawn over him and find him very attractive. Often, these fans don’t have too much of an interest in the SMP’s plotline itself, but still watch it because it has Dream in it. This leads to conflict between them and fans who are primarily interested in the SMP for the story it’s telling and the characters.

Our story today focuses on c!Dream, a long drawn-out fan war with him at the center, and the two camps of fans who make up the combatants of this war.

This fan war is known simply as apologist discourse, and its primary belligerents are known as Dream apologists and Tommy apologists, respectively.

Exile

Before we get into the drama itself, I have to very briefly explain the Exile Arc, Dream SMP’s darkest and most infamous plotline.

The Exile Arc was the result of the viewers voting on a Twitter poll to decide whether or not c!Tommy would be exiled from L’Manberg (a fictional country in the server) and forced to live on the outskirts. Of course, being the drama-hungry little shits we were, we all ran in droves to vote to have him banished.

And thus, c!Dream led him away… Unbeknownst to the viewers at the time, he would psychologically and physically torture c!Tommy over the span of a real-world month, making him forfeit his belongings, attacking him if he disobeyed, actively sending away visitors who were concerned for his wellbeing, and explicitly telling him he cannot kill himself because it’s “not his time to die”.

To say the Exile Arc wasn’t one of, if not the most popular plotline in Dream SMP would be a huge understatement. The fans love their angst, as anyone who’s been in a fandom can attest, and exile was angst fodder on a level never before seen in the series.

However… While c!Dream was never portrayed as a good guy before… It was the first time we would see him in an overtly villainous role as opposed to a merely antagonistic one. And this led to a lot of discourse.

For one thing – some fans disagreed with the idea that the Exile Arc was abuse at all, which most other fans aggressively pushed back against.

Apologism

The term “apologist” came into use at some point – I’m not sure when. It might have come from people calling c!Dream fans who tried to argue that he wasn’t abusive “abuse apologists”, but the term came to more generally mean a fan of a character who justified their actions, typically without exceptions.

To be clear, the use of “apologist” was by no means exclusive to this particular spat – for example, defendants of c!Techno’s actions (such as the bombing of L’Manberg, aka “Doomsday”) were called “Techno apologists” and would occasionally receive backlash as well, but never to the extent of this particular fanwar. Dream SMP was a piece of media where it was hard to find a character who hadn’t done something egregious at some point, so you could find “apologists” for pretty much every character. (Every character is someone’s favorite, after all. Mine’s resident hidden depths funnyguy c!Connor.)

As for the topic of this writeup: on one side, we have the Dream apologists, whose beliefs range anywhere from “I think c!Dream is a bad guy, but not irredeemable” to “I think c!Dream is misunderstood and did nothing wrong”, while on the other side we have the Tommy apologists, who generally tend to believe “c!Tommy did nothing to deserve the treatment he got from c!Dream”, and occasionally “c!Tommy did nothing wrong ever”.

Opinions within these groups obviously vary from person to person. Some Dream apologists believe Exile specifically was wrong, but that his other actions were fine.

There was also, of course, a vocal third group that found both sides of this debate annoying. And I will give the Dream apologists credit that a lot of their opposition liked to treat fiction and reality as if they were the same thing, making serious accusations over shit that isn’t real. 

DreamSMP isn’t real, but my feelings are. Being annoying in fiction is a greater sin than being a murderer or abuser

My personal favorite part of this whole thing is the time someone posted an obviously fake story to AITA about calling their friend an abuse apologist for liking c!Dream – the consensus obviously being “YTA, it’s not real”, lmao.

Monster Under the Bed

One infamous event arose when a group of Dream fans on Twitter harassed an artist for making horror art of c!Dream and c!Tommy, depicting c!Dream as a monster under c!Tommy’s bed. The artist actually was followed by Dream’s official fanart account, which made these Dream fans even more upset. When someone pointed out that Dream had discouraged harassment, they received death threats and ridicule.

This event would also lead to the coining of the content warning label “TADCA”, standing for “Tommy and Dream Catch-All”. TADCA drew a lot of criticism from Dream fans, for a couple of different reasons.

One of the common criticisms was that TADCA content tended to portray the events even darker than canon already did, which people thought was inappropriate because the characters were too closely linked to their players. Others even called some of the content labeled as TADCA “borderline pedophilic”.

Another artist that Dream followed drew the two referencing a screenshot from the film Perfect Blue, which made fans even more upset due to the film’s plot, assuming the artwork to carry romantic connotations.

While I obviously don’t know the intentions of any artist who drew artwork for the TADCA tag, I do believe that most of them did not have any ill intent and were simply trying to depict a dark plotline they found interesting in an artistic manner.

Cruel and Unusual Punishment

When c!Dream was imprisoned in Pandora’s Vault, he was horrifically mistrea…

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