// dsmp

how characters (children) on the smp learn from history rather than repeat it: a thread

aka: stop liking the other one you fucks i opened the wikia so i actually know what happened now /lh

this thread is mainly going over how tommy + tubbo both emulate and turned away from wilbur + schlatt respectively, and how i think that's going to reflect in ranboo's arc

"as long as i can't be the next jschlatt, you can't be the next wilbur." okay we all know this. it's obvious from this point on that both tubbo and tommy saw or had fears of how they were each developing into scarily familiar people - schlatt, a dictator, and wilbur, a madman.

starting with tommy, the parallels between his exile arc and wilbur's pogtopia arc are immediately, and glaringly, obvious. paranoia, trust issues, "maybe i'm actually the bad guy here", and most notably, intense loneliness. wilbur made it obvious he believed pogtopis's allies

would all abandon them in the end (them being he and tommy, though how much he trusted tommy by the end is also up in the air), and he was completely prepared to kill anyone he had to in order to secure pogtopia's victory, despite also preparing himself to be the one to end it.

wilbur gave up on l'manberg, at the very end. he believed tyranny was all that would ever reign, so he blew it up.

tommy, in his exile arc, was also despairingly lonely. he hallucinated tubbo, grew attached to dream, etc etc. tommy was very very close to "becoming" wilbur here

god i'm sorry this is so long already and just me summing things up we already know it's to keep my thoughts in order + satisfy my inability to shut up and use too many words

where wilbur and tommy go their separate ways is when they were given an out. dream gave wilbur tnt +

for tommy, he was. you know. gestures vaguely at logstedshire. wilbur took the out - he gave up. he gave in. we know he had moments of clarity (when niki was in danger) and Maybe this was one he could've had too, but he didn't. he took the tnt.

/tommy/ decided enough was enough.

so at a crucial moment in time, tommy turned away from being wilbur. he did not repeat history.

onto tubbo; admittedly i know much less about his arc as president so this will be less outlined. tubbo,,,, acted very similarly to schlatt. probably moreso than tommy and wilbur!

strange new laws, ignoring his cabinet, execution, generally appearing to lose his care for the world and the opinions of others. i'd argue the thing that separates him from schlatt is the most important part of this thread, because it proves my point: he /remembered/.

tubbo lived under schlatt's rule as one of those people he treated extremely shittily. he lived under schlatt's rule as that person he /executed/. and tubbo remembers all that! tubbo remembers how schlatt's rule played out, and he looks at his own uh, less than stellar time in

office, and he admits this out loud (to ranboo, according to the wikia. i am getting all of this off the wikia. i did not watch any streams during this arc.) that he can See himself becoming schlatt.

and when quackity tries to execute ranboo for being a traitor, tubbo stops him.

onto dream and ranboo! dream is a special case in that we never get to see his perspective of things and are rather left to play fill in the blank, and this whole arc is special (in terms of this thread) in that it isn't over. so i will be doing a /lot/ of extrapolating here.

dream starts out as a generally ambivalent character who has very few rules that he pretty much never bothers to enforce anyways (i think? i don't remember). his villain arc starts very very early - two whole seasons before he /really/ became one. in the war, he is the antagonist

and he plays up to it! most of the war is from l'manberg's pov (or that's how we look at it now, at least) so obviously he is the Bad Guy here.

ranboo griefed a house like two days into the server. 'nuff said /j

ranboo + dream are both heavily vilified characters from the get-go - dream's part should be fairly obvious (uh, the everything leading up the exile arc where he actually did villainous things), whereas ranboo's is most notably during the second festival's aftermath.

taking the blame for blowing up the community house, wanting to "pick people not sides" (he wants all his friends to be happy - sounds familiar, right?), etc etc, and now he's with techno and phil, the former of which is Definitely considered a villain for working with dream

now many many parallels are being drawn between he and dream, especially with the whole enderwalking thing. in the aftermath of everything happening, he chooses to stay out of all conflict, until Something Happens and forces his hand. (the egg!) he wants peace for everyone

(slight tangent: yes, the griefing was forcing dream's hand. it's nigh impossible to construe it as anything other than a political attack - the vice president of l'manberg griefing the home of the greater dream smp's king? dream looks weak + open to attack if he lets it slide)

which again, sounds very familiar, right?

that catches us up on all current lore. where do i think dream and ranboo are going to split? dream has been alone in his decision-making basically since the very first war. not once has he (successfully, we don't know if he tried)

gone to fall back on his friends' support and ask for their help in making these hard decisions (of which there are many). he severs his final connections ("i don't care about anything on this server") and cements his place in history as a monster.

i think it is very likely that we are getting a ranboo "friendship and relying on other people" arc here. there are other ways they could go with it, obviously, but given his current arctic anarchist ties and what appears to be other friendships developing. hmm! i'm interested

this part is entirely speculation/extrapolation. point being. the kids on the smp do, in fact, learn from history. they still make mistakes sometimes, but past a certain point, they're always /different/ mistakes. they learn, and they almost always get happier endings for it

i don't know if it's a coincidence that it's the three lore-relevant /kids/ who are the ones doing this. i don't think it is, because this is a very well-written and clever story. the younger generation is the one learning and fixing past mistakes and leaving the world better off

for it. that's very neat! i like it a lot. also now that purpled's becoming lore-relevant, goddamnit if i don't want to see next season being /his/ "learning from history" arc. punz vs purpled, maybe? that'd be neat. who knows. ok i think im finally done lol ty for reading :)