Dream SMP / Tropes 0 to G

Main Page
0–G (Famous Last Words | Foil) | H–Q (One Steve Limit) | R–Z (Wham Episode | Wham Line)

# – A

• Aborted Arc: Because much of the server's events are improvised, some arcs tend to fall by the wayside.
  • The Dreamon Hunter side story hasn't received any sign of a comeback since Tubbo announced he would provide the group with government funding right after the Manburg-Pogtopia War, possibly due to Cerebus Syndrome.
  • Fundy's adoption by Eret was still set to go ahead, with Eret and Phil planning to set up a date for Phil to come check out Eret's castle to see if it was fit for Fundy to live in. However, this never happened, and Fundy's adoption is rarely brought up again.
  • Quackity planned to revive Schlatt to use him as a political puppet after the latter's funeral, but this was never brought up again ever. This is later subverted during Quackity's March 16, 2021 stream, where he meets Schlatt's ghost in the latter's underground gym and makes a deal to revive him if he loses a bet, which is implied to be what happens next.
  • In the days leading up to the Manburg-Pogtopia War, Karl and Sapnap discussed to have their wedding after the war. Once the war was over, the two included Quackity into the relationship and settled to marry once they fixed up L'Manburg. However, the arc was seemingly aborted as the server was thrown into a whirlwind of war and politics for the rest of the season... then Quackity revived the arc by planning to marry them in Las Nevadas, only for it to be immediately destroyed when George broke the news that they had moved to Kinoko Kingdom. Oh, and the "Las Nevadas" finale includes Karl and Quackity going through a Second-Act Breakup as a result of said miscommunication as well as their respective problems (the former regarding his deteriorating memory, the latter presumably due to relationship trauma). In other words, the marriage is indefinitely postponed because of miscommunication and mental health issues.
  • Right before and during the Doomsday War, Fundy reached his Despair Event Horizon. He decided that, if he couldn't make people laugh, he'd make them cry instead, and vowed to become the villain of the server to finally bring people back together again. However, this arc never came to fruition as instead, Fundy took a long break away from all the goings-on of the SMP to process his emotions, and when he returned, he had recovered enough to see that hurting others wouldn't get him anywhere.
  • The missing nuke arc was revealed by Word of Tubbo that it was supposed to end with Tubbo losing his last canon life, but considering what happens afterward (especially in the Season 3 finale), that arc has been completely left by the wayside as well.
• Absurdly Youthful Father: Played for Laughs. According to the SMP crew, Wilbur is Fundy's biological father by a salmon woman. Going by their IRL ages, Wilbur would have barely been three when Fundy was born. This is somewhat subverted later when out of character, Wilbur explained that his character was (allegedly) in his 30s (now 40s) throughout the roleplay, and the fact that Phil (Wilbur's father) is semi-immortal and could have possibly passed on genes related to longevity to Wilbur doesn't help either.

• Acronym Confusion: WAP, most infamously known as "Wet Ass Pussy" because of Cardi B's song of the same title, is interpreted to stand for "Worship And Prayer" by the founders of Church Prime, most commonly Tommy. When Schlatt talks to Tommy through voice chat regarding what WAP most commonly stands for, Tommy is disturbed.
  Tommy: Wet Ass-Wet Ass– what?
  Schlatt: "Wet Ass Pussy"?
  Tommy: No, no no– It stands for "Worship And Prayer", I've been told!
  Schlatt: Ah, no no no, you've been lied to.
  [...]
  Schlatt: Go to Genius.com and search it up.
  Tommy: I am, I am. (looks it up)
  Tommy: (shocked, speechless)
  Schlatt: Uh oh...
  Tommy: (reads the lyrics of Cardi B's WAP) Oh! I can't read that out loud!
  Schlatt: No, what does it say?
  Tommy: (continues to read, increasingly disturbed, speechless)
  Schlatt: Tommy, I know that was a lot to take into at once, I'm–
  Tommy: This don't mean anything to me anymore– they don't mean anything!
  Schlatt: Well, you just found diamonds^note Tommy was mining for diamonds in the end–
  Tommy: NO NO NO!
  [...]
  Tommy: You've just ruined my day! You know what– my head's just thoroughly shrunk!
• Aerith and Bob:
  • In the original series, it comes with the territory of using online nicknames. Compare Tommy, Wilbur and George to names like Technoblade, Dream and Tubbo.
  • This also applies in Tales From the SMP episodes occasionally, with characters named James, Oliver, and Billiam co-existing in the episode "The Masquerade". Karl lampshades this during the episode "The Pit", where he visits the Subben Empire in the future.
    Karl: (to Emperor Porkius VII) This is an interesting culture, where there's people named both Jackie and Laggius, that you have here.
• The Alcatraz: Pandora's Vault, a practically inescapable facility Awesamdude made for Dream to imprison the latter's enemies. A list of the (known) layers of security:
  • The prison is composed of explosion-resistant materials such as obsidian and netherite blocks, with water in between to limit the effectiveness of wither explosions.
  • Anyone entering the prison must put all of their items in a chest in exchange for a keycard used to retrieve the items after a visit. The guests are also subject to several stages of searching and frisking to ensure they are not hiding any items, and splashed with potions to weaken them in the case of misbehavior.
  • The prison is an island in the middle of elder guardian infested waters, which give prisoners mining fatigue. It takes prisoners nine hours to mine a single block with their fists.
  • Any blocks that are broken will immediately alert the prison guards via a text message to their real life phones, which means even the most determined of players cannot escape on their own.
  • The main chamber is an obsidian box in the middle of a massive lava pool. Visitors must cross the pool via a redstone flying machine bridge to the other side, after which the entrance is blocked with lava and the bridge is retracted.
  • If any guards are killed in battle and respawn far away, they can immediately be brought back with ender pearl stasis chambers and are automatically decked out with full netherite weapons and gear as well as potion buffs, in order to subdue escapees.
  • Any prisoners must set their spawn with a bed so they cannot escape via suicide. They can't break the bed either, as they will immediately be pushed into their cell with a piston.
  • After Dream's escape in the Season 3 finale, his content creator counterpart has posted the prison blueprints on Twitter as a reference, and how meticulous all the mechanisms are must be seen to be believed.
• Alien Kudzu: BadBoyHalo finds a red egg-shaped organism inside his statue room that grows red tendrils and vines. Said tendrils/vines are later found growing from several locations, including Hutt's Pizza, Skeppy's Mansion, the Power Tower, and Schlatt's grave. The organism has shown the capability to affect the minds of some of the players, having them praise it and turn against anyone that attempts to destroy it.
• All for Nothing:
  • Tommy and Tubbo's push to defend L'Manburg is this in spades. Despite managing to rally the rest of the server against the efforts of Dream and Technoblade for the Doomsday War, even managing to gain Sapnap's allegiance due to Tommy retrieving his pet fish Mars from the ocean, their efforts were in vain due to various reasons. Not only did the alliance manage to circumvent most of the enemy's resistance due to starting 30 minutes early, but Punz had also relayed any intel the defence force had anyway. If that wasn't enough, Fundy, Niki, and Ranboo all expressed their disdain for L'Manburg's existence driving their friends apart, and ended up contributing to the destruction, with Fundy sabatoging L'Manburg's armaments, Ranboo remaining neutral and Niki burning the L'Mantree herself once the rest of the land had been blown up beyond repair.
  • After being saved on numerous occasions by Ranboo and Tubbo, Squeeks the fox winds up dying to a mere creeper explosion when being excavated towards Snowchester.
• And I Must Scream:
  • According to Tommy's description of the afterlife, the dead feel like they are "taken apart and being put together", as if they were being stretched, and he suffers very obvious Sensory Overload after being brought back to life.
    Tommy: I felt like I was– like I was shredded to dust. [...] It felt like I was put through a shredder, but there was no blood, there was no flesh, it was just essence. Like a powder, and I was put through it, and then I came out, and I was in a... a long– a long– a hall, a– a– t-tunnel of black and void and– not even black, just colorless!
    Dream: I tried to give you– I tried to give you time, I wanted to– I wanted to ask you questions–
    Tommy: (gasping, sobbing) YOU GAVE ME SO MUCH TIME! I was in there– You left me– How long– Where's Tubbo?! How- I was in there for MONTHS!
  • Jack describes it as pain and says that even spending ten minutes in the afterlife (in afterlife time) felt like a lifetime of Cold-Blooded Torture.
  • Niki, who was sent to the afterlife by DreamXD as a prank and only spent a few seconds there, tells George to stop DreamXD from doing anything like that ever again, before starting to cry and running away.
  • Wilbur, a man who was previously suicidal and succeeded in dying from Suicide by Cop, describes screaming himself hoarse and clawing at the walls trying to escape, and just about cries of sheer joy when he's revived.
• Animal Motifs: All characters who are anthropomorphic animals in terms of their species obviously have motifs that compare them to their animal forms, e.g. Fundy and CPK to foxes, Antfrost to cats, and Techno to pigs.
• Another Dimension: The Nether, as is usual for Minecraft. There's also the Inbetween, a white castle floating in a void that exists outside of time, and its counterpart, the Other Side, which allow time travelers like Karl to rest and recuperate.
• Antagonist Title: The SMP is named after its owner, Dream, who is also the main antagonistic figure in the roleplay of Seasons 1 and 2.
• Anti-Climax:
  • This happens during the final Pet War, with Tommy and Sapnap holding a duel eerily reminiscent of the one that occurred during the L'Manburg War for Independence. With a huge crowd anticipating the chance to be featured in an animation of this duel, Tommy and Sapnap don their iron armor... and then Sapnap kills Tommy in a couple of hits. Needless to say, at least a good portion of the players (and the audience) were disappointed.
  • Subverted and Played for Drama with Jschlatt's downfall. He anticlimactically drinks himself to a fatal heart attack or stroke after being cornered by Pogtopia, but the sheer Hate Sink for this man and the tremendous amount of build-up make it a fulfilling yet haunting death for him. That's not getting into the fact that it was foreshadowed from the beginning by Fundy's spy diary, which revealed that Jschlatt had an alcohol addiction that was likely to kill him should it continue.
• Arc Symbol: For Tales From the SMP, the Inbetween's messages are all signed with a smiley face, ":]".
• Arc Words:
  • "It was never meant to be." Said by Eret after betraying the L'Manbergian Rebellion in the Final Control Room, Wilbur before blowing up L'Manberg, and Niki after burning the L'Mantree during the Doomsday War.
  • "Are we the bad guys?" Said by Wilbur, being the central question as to whether or not L'Manburg can be saved from Schlatt's tyrannical grip. This is later followed by "Chekhov's Gun", referring to Wilbur's plan to blow up Manburg/L'Manburg to kingdom come.
  • "Me and you, versus Dream." Said by Tommy to anyone within his alliance, stemming from seeking to defeat Dream to reach his goals.
  • For Tales From the SMP, the Inbetween tells Karl "Don't stray from the path" and "Fear not. This is not a place to provoke harm, but a place to feel at ease" until he breaks free of its manipulation.
  • In Karl's storyline, we also have "Don't forget who you are" and any variations of it, as a reminder to hold on to his memories in spite of his powers' detrimental effect on them.
  • Around March/April of 2021, a lot of people's storylines started to revolve around sleep and dreams, with them continually being told to wake up.
• Armor-Piercing Question: During a conversation between Tommy and Quackity in Las Nevadas, Quackity brings up Wilbur excluding him from L'Manberg in the past to justify Quackity excluding him from Las Nevadas in the present. Tommy disagrees, saying that two wrongs don't make a right, and Quackity asks what Tommy would do if Dream asked to join Tommy's base. Tommy says he wouldn't let him in, because Dream hasn't changed. Quackity then asks him, "How has Wilbur changed?" ...and Tommy falls silent.
• Artistic License – Geography: Wilbur's lore finale, "Boundless Sands", alleges that he sailed from Utah to a peninsula near what would become Las Nevadas in the world of the Dream SMP out of Small Town Boredom. For anyone unfamiliar with American geography, Utah is a landlocked state... though if The Stinger of the livestream is to be believed, as Wilbur somehow lands in the middle of a presumably-Utahn desert, there might be supernatural elements involved in the travelling process.
• Artistic License – History: Tales From the SMP contains a fair amount of this, given a majority of its content is comprised of improvised roleplay.
  • From "The Masquerade", Sir Billiam shouldn't have been able to make that Vitamin B joke because all of the known B vitamins were discovered in the 1910s to 1930s (Vitamin B1, the first among them to be discovered, was discovered in 1910), while the episode is implied to take place in the tail end of the 19th century.
  • The episode after it, "The Wild West", isn't much better either, since it stars a group of "Republican" bandits as the enemies... in an era where the Republicans were the progressive political party in the US and the Democrats were the conservatives.
• Artistic License – Medicine: Right before Schlatt dies, he asks if anyone else can smell toast, referencing a certain urban legend that implies he's having a stroke. However, smelling burnt toast is not a symptom of stroke (as already mentioned, that's just an urban legend), and it's certainly not a symptom of heart failure, which is what ends up killing him. Possibly subverted in that phantosmia can occur in someone having a stroke. It's not a symptom, but it can happen.
• Assassination Attempt: On the day after the Manburg Festival (in the meta time-frame), Tommy snuck into Manburg to try to assassinate Schlatt with a bow and arrow, as revenge for him ordering Tubbo's execution. He ended up witnessing Schlatt and Quackity's argument over the destruction of the White House, which ended with Quackity beating Tommy to the punch to shoot Schlatt.
• Author Avatar: To at least some extent, every single character in the main series started out as their content creator counterpart's self-insert character. Some of them have drifted further away from this as the Fourth Wall solidified, especially as more content creators started to explicitly lean into the roleplay aspect of the series, but there are also those who don't take the roleplay seriously, so their characters still remain under the boundaries of this trope (to put it politely).

B

• The Bad Guy Wins:
  • Dream and his allies won handily in the L'Manberg Revolution with the help of Eret's betrayal. The only reason L'Manberg still maintained their independence was because of Tommy giving up both of his discs to Dream.
  • Even with Jschlatt defeated and Technoblade repelled due to the efforts of Pogtopia and its allies, Dream still gets exactly what he wants. The war resulted in the elimination of both a political threat (Jschlatt) and a physical threat (a good 80% of L'Manburg's territory) through Wilbur, whose success in actually destroying L'Manburg counts for this trope as well.
  • The Doomsday War ends in L'Manburg's complete defeat as the alliance between Philza, Technoblade, and Dream blow it all up to kingdom come. Unlike the two previous times L'Manburg blew up, this time? It's gone for good.
  • Subverted during the Disc War finale. Dream was extremely close to winning, having put Tommy and Tubbo in a tight spot. If it weren't for Punz and a good chunk of the server arriving in the nick of time, Tubbo would've been executed and Tommy imprisoned. (This is undercut by the later revelation that the Disc War finale was "staged", however.)
  • Season 4 ends with the Egg exploiting the pre-existing distrust and desperation among the server-members, along with its own mind-controlling powers, to orchestrate a massacre of 7 server-members so that it can hatch.
• Ballroom Blitz: The Red Banquet eventually turns into one, as the Banquet itself was initially a guise to lure several vocally anti-Eggpire server members into a trap to kill them and feed their life forces to the Egg... then Quackity, Technoblade, his Hound Army, and Purpled show up.
• Bathos:
  • Several highly climatic and emotional scenes on the SMP have taken place near some fairly vulgar structures, including and not limited to a floating sign that said the word "CRY"^note It was first built by Tommy during the Election Arc to read "POG2020", but it got vandalized by the party's political opponents to read "ASS2020", then Eret changes it to "POGTOPIA" to show their support for La Résistance, and finally Quackity gets rid of it on Schlatt's orders and rebuilds it to read "CRY" as a nod to the Manburg motto of telling people to "Cry about it". The floating sign has since been blown up by Tommy on his 17th birthday stream, another floating sign that said "YOU 💔 LITTLE PENIS"^note It used to say "I ❤️ ANDREA", but it got griefed several times over the months — first by Sapnap to read "I ❤️ PENIS" with his Fiancés, then by (possibly?) Tommy to read "Big T ❤️'s PENIS", and then by Quackity to read "BIG T ❤️'s LITTLE PENIS", and more afterward, and multiple penis statues.
  • The plotlines of the SMP itself cover some extremely heavy topics, including and not limited to war, mental health, trauma, death, abuse, suicide, cults, etc. However, almost all of the series also takes place in Minecraft, making it inherently goofier than a series with such dystopian and dark themes would otherwise be.
• Beach Episode: The start of the Tales From the SMP episode, "The Beach Episode". It is more accurately a Treasure Hunt Episode which takes place along the coastline.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • The Season 2 finale sees Punz entering Dream's secret base through the Nether Portal just as the latter is going to kill Tubbo and lock Tommy in Pandora's Vault... followed by almost half of the server's members, armed to the gills in high-power armor to revolt against Dream and his manipulative actions.
  • During the Red Banquet, Quackity brings in Technoblade and his Hound Army and Purpled to save the attendees from being fed to the Egg.
• Big "NO!":
  • Both Niki and Tommy shout this when Schlatt exiles Tommy and Wilbur from L'Manburg.
  • Tommy shouts another after Wilbur pressed the button to detonate L'Manberg.
• Big "WHAT?!": Dream has this reaction to seeing just how many wolves Techno has bred in preparation for conflict against L'Manburg.
• Big "YES!":
  • Niki and Tommy shout one when Dream defies Sapnap by referring to L'Manburg by its original name at the Battle of the Lake.
  • Dream shouts one after L'Manburg is destroyed during the Manburg-Pogtopia War by Wilbur using the Button.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • On both Dream's and L'Manburg's ends of the L'Manburg War for Independence. On Dream's end, he won the war, showed the server who truly held the most power, and got Tommy's prized discs, but L'Manburg got its independence all the same. On L'Manburg's end, it got independence but at the cost of them getting thoroughly trashed in the chaos (with Dream having earlier detonated TNT under its land), Dream showing them that he could easily crush them if they tried anything again, and Tommy ending up having to give away his two prized music discs (which were partially responsible for his feud with Dream to begin with) to secure said independence (though he later gets one back).
  • The L'Manburg Civil War ends on one as well. Even with Pogtopia managing to reclaim L'Manburg for themselves and Jschlatt dying from his own vices, Wilbur had managed to detonate the TNT under Manburg before dying from assisted suicide. Though Tubbo and Tommy vow to rebuild, it's not going to be an easy road, with Technoblade having betrayed them and Dream expected to be returning to his role as Big Bad.
• Black-and-Grey Morality: And how. Pretty much everyone is unscrupulous if still well-intentioned, with a few exceptions...
  • Techno and Sapnap were unapologetically thrill-seeking Blood Knights and self-serving fighters with many a murder on their hands and anarchy on their minds, though Sapnap has since experienced Character Development in becoming more peaceful, and Technoblade, even after being forced out of his pacifism, still seems to participate in fewer conflicts than before, even if his Bomb Throwing Anarchist tendencies remained.
  • Whether Dream is a Well-Intentioned Extremist or not is heavily disputed in the fandom, but it is known that he has terrorism and global conquest on his record^note (he did legally own all of it for a while, but only in a Divine Right of Kings sort of way) and the ultimate goal of reuniting the server into "one big family" (and he has been known to do good if it benefits him)... through copious amounts of manipulation and destruction, and in one case in particular, child abuse.
  • Though he starts as a genuinely good guy (discounting his attempt at flooding the SMP with "drugs"), come the L'Manburg Civil War, Wilbur can be seen as a bit of a Manipulative Bastard, having no qualms about getting Tommy and Tubbo involved in an all-out war that causes both of them physical and mental trauma (in his defense, Dream was the one to declare war and Wilbur had no intention to fight outside of self-defense), manipulating elections for his own benefit, as well as being inspired by Dream's terrorism to try and nuke an entire country just to ensure nobody else can have it (or so he claims). There's also the question of how much of his Mad Bomber tendencies are due to Sanity Slippage, as opposed to a genuine turn to extremism — Quackity's April 12th lore stream implies the two factors go hand in hand with each other, and it's confirmed that Wilbur's trauma has a lot to do with it as well — to be more accurate, he originally intended to use it to go out with a bang, in the most literal sense possible.
  • The Badlands faction was created by some of the kindest people on the SMP, BadBoyHalo, Antfrost, and Awesamdude, in response to Schlatt's tyranny and Wilbur's mental spiral. On the surface, they seem innocent enough; however, this belies their true nature as opportunistic aspiring conquerors who seek to instill chaos among the SMP to claim the area around the SMP all for themselves. During the Manburg-Pogtopia War, they initially fought alongside the Pogtopians, but they later stood by Dream and Technoblade in an attempt to keep the conflict going.
  • Not even Niki is immune to dipping into chaos when she feels she deserves it. She stops fighting for L'Manburg just because she feels Tommy hasn't learned his lesson (which lesson, no one can seem to agree on) and even burns down the L'Mantree while everyone else is busy fighting the withers Technoblade spawned.
  • Jschlatt is Dream (in Season 1) taken up to eleven, being representative of the black side of the morality equation. He's a full-on dictator who ordered the execution of a minor, a Domestic Abuser, and a Jerk with a Heart of Jerk to the point of managing to piss off everyone who was just listed above with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
• Bow and Sword in Accord: Almost everyone on the server has a sword and either a crossbow or a traditional bow for fighting, which they can switch between incredibly quickly.
• Bowdlerise: The L'Manburg National Anthem contains the line "With Wilbur, Tommy, Tubbo, fuck Eret", the latter as a reminder of their betrayal in the War for Independence. For the less cuss-happy characters, the substitution of "not Eret" is allowed.
• Brick Joke: The Cuck Shed (based on the structure of the same name from SMPLive) that Jschlatt built back during his first visit, kills Ninja almost two months later.
• Burning the Flag:
  • To protest against the changes Schlatt made in L'Manburg, Fundy burned down Nihachu's Manburg flag.
  • Later on, Tommy does the same thing to declare war between Pogtopia and Manburg.
• Bury Your Gays: Hilariously inverted, as almost all characters who have been in a relationship with someone of the opposite gender, or are otherwise straight, have died at some point... with the one exception being Philza Minecraft, and that might be because he's married to Death herself.^note That's not to say that the rest of the cast has it much better, considering the Dream SMP is a Crapsack World, but at least most of them are still alive.
  • Exhibit A: Wilbur Soot and... Sally the Salmon. The latter is Fundy's Missing Mom, and is most likely dead. Wilbur loses his last canon life at the end of Season 1. He comes back to life in Season 3 and resumes his homoerotic rivalry with Quackity.
  • Exhibit B: Mexican Dream and Girl Dream, aka Mamacita. The former loses all three of his canon lives in quick succession in the Exile Arc, and the latter is never seen again.
• Butterfly of Doom: Discussed. When Ranboo talks to Sam after Tommy's death, he insists that if he had talked Tommy out of griefing George's house, things might've turned out differently and Tommy not have died. Sam says that might not necessarily be the case, and that Dream might've found another reason to exile him anyways, leading to the same result, and urges Ranboo to not blame himself for Tommy's death. This is not far from the truth; Dream was going around griefing builds with Puffy and blaming Tommy for it weeks before Tommy and Ranboo griefed George's house.

C

• Canon Welding:
  • Schlatt retroactively confirms that SMPLive is at least partially canon during an episode of Tales from the SMP.
  • Niki confirms the Bear SMP is canon to the Dream SMP, by saying her character is the same and simply travels between the two.
  • Minecraft Championship is implied to be canon to Dream SMP several times. Notably, Seapeekay's character is a Dimensional Traveler, confirming MCC is canon to Dream SMP by traveling between them. This also opens up a rabbit hole of other potential servers that can be welded to the Dream SMP.
• Cast Full of Gay: Almost half of the cast is canonically LGBTQ+, and the only confirmed m/f relationships in the series are Played for Laughs and/or did not end well, e.g. Wilbur's past Interspecies Romance with Sally the salmon. There are also implications that that same-gender relationships are the norm in the Dream SMP universe, judging by Tommy's slip of the mouth (accidentally forgetting m/f relationships existed) while trying to explain marriage fraud to Tubbo.
• Cast Full of Rich People: "The Masquerade" episode of Tales from the SMP revolves around several very wealthy individuals being invited to a masquerade party and the shenanigans that ensued. The only characters in the episode who weren't rich was a nudist named Drew P. Wiener, who ended up at the wrong place, and the nameless Butler.
• Cast Herd: The characters are often sorted and differentiated by their faction/country/group/allegiance, especially in specific moments in time, e.g. the original L'Manburgians are the residents of the nation-alliance that had citizenship in the country before the elections.
• Central Theme: Though there wasn't one in the beginning, several recurring themes appear to tie most of the story and character arcs together.
  • For the Disc War specifically: Having attachments can cause conflicts, but it is ultimately worth it, and not having attachment to anything is worse.
  • The impact of trauma on a person's mental health and subsequent actions.
  • In most cases, no one is truly good or evil.
  • Whether Might Makes Right, especially the difference between hard power and soft power.
  • How one's actions may harm others, even if they are unintentional.
  • The importance of preserving history.
  • The fallout of miscommunication, and how it can lead to atrocities.
  • The contrast of diplomacy and violence, and its relationship with idealism and cynicism.
  • For Season 3 in particular: legacy.
  • For the "Las Nevadas" series, Revenge Is Not Justice, and perpetuating the Cycle of Revenge is only going to lead to everyone being harmed, even innocents who are caught in the crossfire.
• Cerebus Callback: There's one to Minecraft Mondays, of all things. Techno instilling utter fear in the competitors as he dominated the event was seen as both a funny moment (in terms of the competitors' reactions to his sheer skill) and an awesome moment as Techno came out of literally nowhere in a field of much-more-popular influencers and established himself as easily the strongest competitor in the event. As a couple of Quackity's streams reveals, however, he's got PTSD from Minecraft Mondays for this exact reason and was utterly terrified of Techno (of course, Techno's non-canonical murder of him during the Manburg Festival Massacre probably didn't help). This also becomes one of his motivations for hunting down Techno as the driving force behind the Butcher Army.
• Cerebus Syndrome: The L'Manburg and Election Arcs, while they had their serious moments, were mostly lighthearted, with characters goofing off constantly. However, things started to take a darker turn during the Pogtopia arc, what with Wilbur's Sanity Slippage, and after the Manburg-Pogtopia War, the series became much darker and more plot-heavy. Plot points that were Played for Laughs in earlier arcs were now played terrifyingly straight (if not for Drama or Horror), and the next few arcs included a realistic portrayal of gaslighting and psychological abuse, the attempted suicide of a teenager, several characters reaching their Despair Event Horizon and lashing out horribly, Ranboo having several long, intense, and realistic panic attacks on-screen, and so much Grey-and-Gray Morality that not even the fans can decide who the true heroes are anymore.
• Chekhov's Boomerang: Jschlatt's book on resurrection. In Season 1, it's used to convince Dream to betray Pogtopia. It comes back at the end of Season 2, where Dream leverages his possession of the book to convince Tommy to spare him. And it returns thrice more in Season 3, where an argument over the book's existence pushes Dream to do the one thing he said he didn't want to do — murder Tommy. And then a few days later, Dream proves its existence by bringing Tommy back to life.^note This turns out to be a lie, as it's later revealed in Season 4 that Dream previously tested the revive book on Vikkstar and LazarBeam by putting them through a Resurrection/Death Loop before he went to jail, though this still links the revive book with the two's disappearance from the server. Eventually, Quackity learns of this and spends the following months trying to torture the contents of the book out of Dream. Then Dream brings Wilbur back to life, effectively killing Ghostbur, using the book. And months after that, Purpled builds a trap to demand Quackity the contents of the book while performing his revenge plan against him, and murders Slimecicle in response to Quackity stating he didn't have the book and wouldn't give it to him even if he did have it.
• Chekhov's Gag:
  • When brainstorming names for their new nation, Wilbur and Tommy come up with 'Manburg' before deciding that it sounds too American, adding a French 'L' to make it 'L'Manburg' to sound more European. When Jschlatt takes over, he changes the name to Manburg, stating that his country "doesn't take Ls" (L being the first letter for the words loss, loser, and such).
  • When Wilbur asks what excuse Tubbo used to leave Schlatt's side, it's revealed that he convinced Schlatt he's pregnant. It's Played for Laughs, with Techno cracking jokes and Wilbur being completely bewildered, and it even gets a repeat when Tubbo tries to convince Schlatt that Tommy — who was not supposed to be there — is his OB-GYN. Then the Festival comes around, and it turns out that Schlatt did not buy Tubbo's excuses at all, and has him executed for treason.
  • A few days before the meeting with Schlatt, Fundy covered all of Pogtopia in buttons as a prank. Aside from being the Minecraft equivalent of a glitter-bomb, this was completely harmless. However, during the meeting, Schlatt reveals that he found the TNT planted under Manburg, and used it to rig Pogtopia with TNT. Cue a frantic scramble to remove the buttons before one of them sets off the TNT, and to restrain Wilbur, who keeps pressing random buttons, hoping one of them would set the TNT off.
  • Jschlatt's alcohol addiction, revealed by both Fundy's spy diary and Quackity, with the former also revealing that said addiction is slowly killing Jschlatt. What seems to just be a little gag comes into play in the final battle of the L'Manburg Civil War, where Jschlatt suffers a fatal, alcohol-induced heart attack or stroke.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Right before the Election, Tubbo showed Tommy and Wilbur a secret bunker he made underneath L'Manburg, just in case things would go south. This bunker ends up coming in very handy when Schlatt revokes Tommy and Wilbur's citizenships, and orders everyone to hunt them down until they're outside of the borders. While Wilbur dies on the way to the bunker, Tommy manages to escape into the bunker and tunnel out into the wilderness.
  • Dream's letter to Pogtopia declaring his Heel–Face Turn. One line in the letter reveals that Jschlatt, as a democratically elected leader, can't be overthrown without the usurpers (Dream in this case) being seen as the villains. These words are shown later on to have a clear impact on Wilbur, who uses Dream's exact logic to conclude that he isn't the hero and immediately jumps to the conclusion that he could be "the villain", which contributes heavily to his Sanity Slippage.
  • The Button. It's linked to a monumental amount of TNT surrounding Manburg that will explode once it's pressed, which Wilbur set up during his mental spiral. Wilbur even discusses the trope with Tommy and Quackity as he fights to press it. As soon as everyone forgets about it, Wilbur detonates it.
  • A literal Chekhov's Gun is provided in the form of Technoblade's firework-loaded crossbow, "Subscribe to Technoblade". He uses it before the beginning of the Festival to shoot off some fireworks into the sky, calling people over to enjoy the sight. Before the day is done, "Subscribe to Technoblade" would be used to shoot fireworks once more, with much more fatal results for almost everyone in attendance at the Manburg Festival.
  • Techno is shown to have enough soul sand and wither skulls to spawn two Withers during his meeting with Quackity and Karl several days before the final battle for L'Manburg. The meeting itself seemed to be a Breather Episode, except for those wither skulls, which Techno uses during the battle itself to actually spawn several Withers to destroy what remains of L'Manburg after Wilbur destroys the nation.
  • George spent most of the Manburg-Pogtopia War building a mushroom house. This house then proceeds to be griefed by Tommy and Ranboo, which led to an accident that Dream took full advantage of to have Tommy sent into Exile.
  • Subverted with the remains of Spirit, Dream's first horse. Tommy gains the remains early on in hopes that they'll give him leverage over Dream. Tommy finally reveals this fact when Dream threatens to exile him, and all of L'Manburg (sans Tubbo) believes they've got Dream in a bind (as Dream no longer has Tommy's discs and thus has no bargaining chips of his own) only for Dream to reveal that he doesn't actually care about Spirit's remains, putting L'Manburg and especially Tommy into an even worse bind.
  • One of the clauses in the waiver for prison visitors is that if a security issue arises, visitors can be locked up in the prison for up to seven days until the issue is resolved. This clause kicks into effect during Tommy's final visit to Dream, when the prison is attacked with TNT and Tommy becomes trapped in the prison cell.
  • The book Schlatt gave Dream that ultimately swayed him to Manburg's side before the Manburg-Pogtopia War. Dream never revealed what was in it, only that it was a very important secret. Come the end of Season 2, and we find out it's a book that allows Dream to resurrect people who have lost their 3 canon lives, meaning the others can't kill him, because if they do, death will be permanent. The book finally sees use a few weeks later, when Dream takes Tommy's final life, then revives him just to prove that he can. And then Quackity gets dragged into this mess due to losing a bet with Schlatt's ghost, causing him to visit the prison every day to try to torture the knowledge out of Dream. And eventually Dream revives Wilbur with the book... yeah, Chekhov's Gun probably doesn't even cover it at this point.
  • During the Red Banquet, Quackity passes Puffy a netherite axe behind his back while talking down the Eggpire. That, along with the splash potions of strength Puffy was previously shown to have in her inventory, end up being used to kill Ant in revenge for executing Foolish.
• Civil War: The server has had two so far.
  • The Dream Team (plus Punz) comes into conflict with a faction seeking independence from the main server known as L'Manburg consisting of WilburSoot, TommyInnit, Tubbo, Fundy, and TheEret. The latter eventually defected to the Dream Team, betraying L'Manburg in exchange for being promoted to a king within the Dream Team's lands in the Greater SMP. The war ends with the Dream Team winning the main conflict, but Dream granting L'Manburg independence anyways in exchange for two music discs owned by Tommy (a major source of conflict between him and Dream).
  • Jschlatt winning the L'Manburg election and declaring himself a dictator bent on conquest triggers another war, fracturing the country with a conflict between his faction and Wilbur's faction, now named Pogtopia.
• The Cobbler's Children Have No Shoes: Neither of the known "therapists" on the server are particularly well-suited for their jobs, considering that both of them have their own mental health issues to deal with — Captain Puffy Took A Level In Cynicism after her son's execution, and let's not even get started on Quackity and his issues.
• Combat Pragmatist: Dream, Techno, and Phil give L'Manburg 24 hours to prepare for war. Except they used an ancient technique called lying, and they, in truth, planned to attack L'Manburg 30 minutes early (which, considering the weapons of mass destruction they have, is a significant amount of time). By the time L'Manburg is made aware of their foes' deceit, half of L'Manburg is 50 blocks deep and Withers are swarming the area.
• Compilation Movie: The first four livestreams of Quackity's "Las Nevadas" series (along with the one where Techno escapes from prison) have been made into one, compiling all the condensed episode forms of each livestream into a two-hour YouTube film-video.
• Confusing Multiple Negatives: In Season 1, Quackity attempts to invoke this in "The Official Manburg Hotel Building Permit", trying to trick Schlatt into paying child support on top of scamming him out of his presidency. Schlatt, being a savvy businessman, notices this and calls him out on it, claiming that it was a predatory way of writing a contract.
• Continuity Drift: Because the story of the Dream SMP is very much written with the philosophy of "make it up as you go along", the continuity is extremely hard to follow. How old characters are, how much time has elapsed between major events and which events are canon are continuously up for debate and/or retconned from the lore, and fans are in agreement to just not worry about it too much.
• Continuity Nod: In an early June 2021 stream, Quackity consults with Foolish about building a highway system that he'd have control over for Las Nevadas. What allows this to qualify as this trope is that in Quackity's very first appearance (as in during his first Early-Bird Cameo, in early August 2020), he suggests to Tommy to build a minecart highway system to capitalize on (quite literally, in the 'exploitative capitalist' sense) and/or to rob people on.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: As Skeppy notes at one point while talking with Dream, pretty much the entire plot of the series could have been avoided had Dream let the L'Manbergians peacefully secede from the SMP rather than declaring war on them, as L'Manburg was a pacifistic nation and Dream would have still controlled the lion's share of the SMP had he allowed it to happen. Instead, his incessant need for control lead to him declaring a war and repeatedly trying to undermine the nation even after they forge a truce. Dream, true to form, immediately starts insisting he did the right thing and leaves in a huff when Skeppy remains unconvinced.
• Courtroom Episode: Tommy was put on trial for griefing George's house. While Dream insisted he should be exiled from L'Manburg, in the end, he only got two weeks of probation.
• Crapsack World: The SMP has evolved to become this, with every other character being put through Trauma Conga Lines with wars, politics, possessions, and everything in between happening on the server. Break the Cutie is a common occurrence, Grey-and-Gray Morality is the norm, Might Makes Right is the default setting and those who try to prove otherwise (case in point, L'Manburg) have been inevitably crushed for the most part, teenagers are brought into warfare in most of the server's conflicts, violence is used to solve problems more often than not, and Yank the Dog's Chain has applied to characters who have tried to make it into A World Half Full more than once. The server is also rife with crime, with petty theft being practically a weekly, if not everyday occurrence, and the list is topped with the Geneva Convention being breached on at least a monthly basis. Oh, and to the numerous members with PTSD from their experiences on the SMP, There Are No Therapists, or at least any qualified ones, and the only person who has actively tried to act as a therapist has had plenty of trauma of her own.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Several of the canon deaths can classify as this, with more than one resulting in post-respawning disability. Even though everything takes place in Minecraft, there are heavy implications that the results are similar to what would have happened in real life.^note This is supported by Wilbur's short story The Wilbur Van, which confirms that the Dream SMP acts more like real life than Minecraft in-universe, e.g. the existence of items and animals present in real life but not Minecraft.
• Crystal Dragon Jesus: Church Prime is a major religion on the server based around Twitch Prime, with the Terms of Service being the holy scripture of the religion, and features many Christian elements like the concept of the Holy Trinity. Holy Water even becomes a plot device during the Eggpire arc, where the main weakness of the Crimson appears to be holy water from the waterfall in the church. Overall, it is Played for Laughs, as it started out as a joke bit among several SMP members.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • During the L'Manburg War of Independence, L'Manburg is forced to flee into a bunker prepared by Eret. It turns out they were betrayed by Eret, who designed the bunker as trap to get all of L'Manburg's fighters in one place. Once they were there, Eret retracts the walls, allowing Dream and his allies to raid the bunker. The demoralized L'Manburgians don't even get a single kill as they are soon wiped out by the Dream Team and Punz in one of their most crushing defeats in the war.
  • The Anarchists blitzkrieg L'Manburg thirty minutes before when their opponents expected, with Techno bringing an army of hundreds of wolves and Dream having enough TNT to destroy the entire server ten times over. The Anarchists suffer absolutely no losses whatsoever (unless you count a good chunk of Techno's hounds) as L'Manburg is erased off the face of the server.
• Cycle of Revenge: A recurring occurrence on the Dream SMP, as characters resort to more and more violent methods to seek retribution to those that have wronged them, which tends to result in wars and disasters that drag the entire server into the messes created.
  • Early in the history of the server, Ponk pranked Sapnap and messed with his house for unknown reasons. This caused Sapnap to burn down Ponk's lemon tree in retaliation, where the fire spread to the point of almost destroying the entire tree. Enraged, Ponk allied himself with Alyssa and dragged Tommy and Tubbo, who had just joined the server, into the conflict. This ultimately cultivated into a series of skirmishes that led to Dream stealing Tommy's music discs Cat and Mellohi, kicking off the Disc Saga (which spanned over six months overall) and shaping Dream and Tommy's interactions and relationship with each other for the rest of the SMP's history.
  • After Sapnap accidentally kills Niki's fox Fungi, Fundy, who gifted her the fox, encourages her to kill Sapnap's pet fox Skechers in revenge, despite Niki initially accepting Sapnap's apology for the animal murder. Sapnap then retaliated by killing the Enderman that lived in Fundy's house, Leonard, and took and burned the diamond block on Fungi's grave. This eventually escalates into the First Pet War.
  • Technoblade setting off two Withers to destroy the ruins of L'Manburg during the Manburg-Pogtopia War encouraged the Butcher Army to go after and execute him (among many other factors). After Techno survives and escapes the execution (with help from Dream), he vows revenge and teams up with Dream to nuke L'Manburg to bedrock in the Doomsday War, causing multiple members of the server to lose their homes and pets, and Jack Manifold to lose his last canon life (though he brings himself back to life eventually).

D – E

• Dark Reprise: After blowing up L'Manburg in the Doomsday War, Dream sings one of the L'Manburg National Anthem called "Bye L'Manburg", very clearly mocking and celebrating the destruction of the city-state he just nuked to bedrock.
• Darker and Edgier: Ongoing war, constant threats of betrayal, the public execution of a teenager immediately followed by a mass shooting, terrorism, politics, totalitarianism, anarchy, emotional manipulation, abuse (both physical and psychological), depression, attempted suicide, an actual assisted suicide, supernatural horror, torture, and a whole lot of Black-and-Grey Morality thrown into the mix. Compared to the usual comedy commonly associated with these content creators, the plotlines of the server is something you'd expect from a straight-up dystopian film, not a Minecraft roleplay.
• Darkest Hour:
  • The first half of the L'Manburg Civil War. Though Wilbur and Tommy gain core allies in Technoblade and Dream, they fail to make any notable progress towards regaining L'Manburg even with Tubbo and Fundy as double agents. They also lose allies, as George betrays Dream to side with Jschlatt and Sapnap breaks off as a Wild Card aiming to defeat everyone else and claim power for himself — not to mention Technoblade's loyalty being in question. Of their two supporters within L'Manburg, Niki is repeatedly silenced by Jschlatt for her rebellious nature, while Eret fails to earn their trust due to his earlier betrayal. The first half ends with Jschlatt attempting to curry favor within L'Manburg to nullify the one advantage Pogtopia has over him (his 0% Approval Rating), which leads to Wilbur's mental health taking a nosedive that culminates in him deciding to nuke L'Manburg. Dream then sides with Wilbur, revealing that his Heel–Face Turn is motivated only by power, leaving Tommy and Tubbo to contemplate who their allies really are, and if Wilbur can be turned back from his path of darkness before he follows through with his plans to leave a massive crater where L'Manburg once was.
  • The end of L'Manburg's meeting with Dream at the start of Season 2. The obsidian box surrounding L'Manburg only gets taller, the one bargaining chip Tommy had against Dream (Spirit's remains) are revealed to be of no value to Dream, and Tubbo begins to seriously consider exiling Tommy as Dream forces L'Manburg's hand.
  • After Tommy manages to unite all of the Dream SMP against the Anarchists, it seems like they have a fighting chance. Then the actual battle happens, and Tommy's plan quickly falls to shambles as Technoblade carries out his promise to turn the nation into an air chunk. And this time, it's clear that there's no recovering.
• A Day in the Limelight: The Egg subplot allows for characters who were not intrinsically tied into the main plot regarding Tommy's ongoing war with Dream (or are otherwise big names such as Technoblade and Philza) to be central characters. Case in point, BadBoyHalo and Antfrost are the central antagonists, with the heroes being mostly comprised of Puffy, Sam, Foolish, and the like.
• Death Is Cheap: It's Minecraft, of course it is. That said, many times it's treated as if it weren't.
  • Tommy's reaction to Tubbo's execution is framed as if his death was final (even more noticeable given Tubbo's heavy importance later on).
  • Averted with Jschlatt's heart attack and Wilbur's slaying by Philza, both at the end of the L'Manburg Civil War. The latter came back to life, but only later on in the story.
  • Wilbur subverted this trope by adding a death system to the SMP after the Manburg Festival. Each character is given three 'canon' lives, and if the character dies in a major event or according to the script, then that character loses a life. After losing all three lives, that character will be canonically dead and can no longer actively participate in any major plot events.
• Decided by One Vote: Downplayed. Combining their votes, SWAG2020 (30%) and Schlatt2020 (16%) won the L'Manburg election, beating out POG2020 (45%) by 1% of the votes, which totaled at around 200,000 legitimate votes in the entire election. Although the election was technically decided by about 2,000 votes, it was still extremely close in terms of percentages.
• Demon Slaying: Fundy, Tubbo, and Sapnap are members of a group called the Dreamon Hunters, investigators who seek out and destroy Dreamons.
• Desecrating the Dead:
  • During Jschlatt's funeral, people started looting his coffin, with Tommy and Tubbo dual-wielding Schlatt's bones and Quackity taking his heart before straight-up eating it.
  • After receiving the news that Tommy was brutally murdered by Dream, Bad, Ant and Punz decide to celebrate by throwing a party in Tommy's house, placing down a cake and swapping out the floor from grass to a garish checkerboard pattern of yellow concrete and quartz. When Puffy finds them, tears into them and kicks them out, they decide to rent a room in Tommy's hotel instead to continue celebrating.
  • Wilbur and Tubbo do this by accident when they prank/'invade' Boomerville by griefing the two (former) residents' house and waiting to see if they'd show up to take back their place. While this is supposed to be light-hearted, it was all done without the knowledge that those two residents of Boomerville would never log back on to take back the house because they were kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by Dream over a year prior to that, with no one on the server knowing other than Punz (who was his accomplice) and the canonized Chats (who only know due to their meta nature).
• Despair Event Horizon:
  • Around the Doomsday War, this occurs to several individual members of L'Manburg such as Fundy, Ranboo and Nihachu, who have made it their own initiative to either remain neutral or actively assist the destruction of L'Manburg itself, due to the realization of its fruitless endeavour.
  • In the Doomsday War itself, the destruction of the L'Mantree, the sole surviving remnant of the original L'Manburg from the War of Independence, is when virtually all of the L'Manburgians give up trying to save their ruined nation.
• The Dictatorship: Manburg under the Schlatt administration classifies under the Personalist Dictatorship variety (while having shades of being The Empire), due to Schlatt's own tendency to centralize all power onto himself. He mistreats the country's citizens, from taxing Niki for her rebellion against his rule (to the point she went broke) to being a Bad Boss to his own cabinet). As a result of this, it's not surprising that by the time the Manburg-Pogtopia War rolls around, most of the server wants Schlatt dead.
• Disaster Dominoes:
  • According to Quackity, the events leading up the L'Manburg Civil War and everything else afterward all happened because George slept through the election, depriving his platform of key votes and thus forcing him to ally with Jschlatt (who wouldn't have won the election otherwise).
  • In retrospect, on a more personal level, Quackity's ensuing relationship with Schlatt on both a political and personal level, most certainly influenced by George's absence, ends up kick-starting his months-long Trauma Conga Line that caused him to be driven to villainy.
  • Ponk pranking Sapnap and messing with his house early in the server's history caused Sapnap to burn down Ponk's lemon tree in retaliation, which then caused a Cycle of Revenge that dragged Tommy and Tubbo, who had just joined the server, into the mess, which ultimately cultivated into a series of skirmishes that led to Dream stealing Tommy's music discs Cat and Mellohi, kicking off the Disc Saga which spanned over six months overall and shaped Dream and Tommy's interactions and relationship with each other for the rest of the SMP.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Jschlatt ends up as this for the Manburg-Pogtopia War. He's taken out about halfway through the war by a heart attack or stroke. The rest of the battle deals with three major plot threads:
  • Tubbo's inauguration as the third President of L'Manburg, which completes Tommy's arc about wanting to be President himself, and also secures Pogtopia's final victory against Jschlatt.
  • Wilbur's destruction of L'Manburg, which followed Philza logging on for the first time to try and talk him down and is itself followed by Wilbur being Killed Off for Real.
  • Techno's ultimate effort to achieve anarchy by spawning an army of Withers, forcing the surviving Pogtopians to try and stop him.
• Distant Finale: Aimsey's character finale on September 22, 2023 takes place 10 years after Guqqie's death on the Bear SMP, and presumably a similar amount of time after the events of the Dream SMP — where they are gradually learning to move on from their past and keeping in touch with both old friends from the Bear SMP and new ones. It also covers Ranboo and Michael_Beloved's story in broad strokes, with Ranboo raising Michael in the Nether and meeting up with Aimsey to chat regularly.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • Wilbur's tongue-in-cheek claim that he's going to build a wall around L'Manburg and make the Americans pay for it is very obviously mirroring the claims of former U.S. president Trump.
  • At one point before the announcement of the Electoral results, Fundy and Quackity compare the lengths of their ties.
  • During Mexican Dream's visit to Tommy in Logstedshire, the former replaces the floor on a newly-built and unfinished house with yellow concrete and terracotta whilst treating it as if the floor is being pissed on.
  • The argument between Wilbur and Quackity over whether Tommy should get involved in Las Nevadas or Wilbur's new country plays out almost exactly like two divorced parents fighting over custody of their child, while the child doesn't really get a say in the matter.
• Double Entendre: During George's birthday stream, Dream leads Sapnap and George to a Badlands biome, saying there's something there he needs to show them.
  Dream: George, do you know what we're surrounded by?
  George: ...Clay?
  Dream: Hardened Clay.^note Dream's real name is Clay.
• Downer Ending:
  • The L'Manburg election ends in this. Thanks to some last-minute deals, Jschlatt wins the election and rules with an iron fist, declaring his intent to conquer more land and immediately putting a bounty on Wilbur and Tommy, forcing them to Run or Die. Jschlatt then forces Tubbo into his employ, and while Wilbur and Tommy eventually make him a spy, it's clear that simply being around Jschlatt is taxing on Tubbo's health.
  • The Doomsday War ends in Dream, Techno, and Phil's unequivocal victory as L'Manburg is wiped off the face of the server. There's not even a caveat or Hope Spot for the heroes — L'Manburg has not only lost, they've lost so badly that there's no chance of recovering even a fraction of their nation. Anarchy reigns supreme over the Dream SMP as Dream, Techno, and Phil bomb what's left of Wilbur's unfinished symphony.
  • The end of Volume 1 sees Tommy spend his final moments apologizing to Dream for all the abuse the latter put the former through. This is all while Jack had rerouted the nukes meant to land on the prison to target Tommy's house in an attempt to kill him, leading to him and Tubbo getting themselves trapped in the prison and subsequently killed in an attempt to save Tommy as the nukes fall onto it. Besides them, everyone else on the server has either been killed, left the SMP, has their story conclude with them being in a worse position than when they joined, didn't have a conclusion to their story, or some mix of the four, with the only exceptions being Philza, Niki, and Connor, who escaped the server by travelling to the End before the nukes were launched. Even if any of the characters that had not left the region still had one life left, it wouldn't have mattered as Project Early Dawn would've taken it away. In the end, very few characters had their story end on a good note.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • After having Technoblade execute Tubbo at the Manberg Festival, Jschlatt tells Quackity and Fundy that he couldn't imagine the two of them betraying him. Unbeknownst to him, Fundy is not on his side either, being an even more secretive mole than Tubbo. As for Quackity, Schlatt's behaviour eventually caused Quackity to revolt and defect to Pogtopia.
  • After failing to execute Technoblade and resolving to target Dream instead, Tubbo finally decides to visit Tommy in Logstedshire only to find the place in ruins, no sign of Tommy, and a massive tower. Tubbo is horrified as he pieces everything to together and comes to the conclusion that Tommy couldn't handle exile any longer, unaware that Tommy backed out at the last second and ran away to Technoblade's house.
  • After struggling to remain in contact with the other members of El Rapids, when Quackity hears from George that they had all left to go establish Kinoko Kingdom at Karl's behest, he assumes they had intentionally left him behind since no one had informed him about the move... only that Karl was supposed to tell Quackity but failed to do so. This is thanks to his worsening memory loss that only Karl is aware of, due to it being tied to his time travelling capabilities, not to mention his powers being the reason for the move in the first place, as Karl was advised to move his library away from the main SMP by the Inbetween. A chance to clear up the misconceptions arose when Quackity crashed the Red Banquet Sapnap was invited to, except Sapnap didn't show up for then-unknown reasons (apparently, by Word of God, Bad kept him out to protect him). invoked
• Draw Aggro:
  • Before the Butcher Army can pull the lever on Technoblade's execution, Punz starts throwing snowballs at the L'Manburgians out of nowhere before swooping over to them with his trident, and once there, he starts placing TNT to bait them into fighting him. Unbeknownst to the Army, this is all to distract them while Dream frees Techno's horse, Carl, giving Techno a means of escape.
  • Techno does this during the Doomsday War. As the Anarchists' best fighter, he draws L'Manburg's attention so that his other compatriots can set up their role in L'Manburg's destruction — Phil by spawning waves of Withers, Dream by setting up a TNT device to rain Death from Above.
• The Dreaded: The Syndicate, despite only having three main fighters (not counting Ranboo), is enough of a threat to unite half of the entire server against them just to have a small chance of winning. They've got the most competent fighters (Techno, Phil, and Dream) on their side, and multiple weapons of mass destruction (namely several Withers and enough TNT to destroy the entire server ten times over).
• Driven to Suicide: Unfortunately, the Dream SMP is not a healthy environment for people with mental health problems, to the point that three characters have taken their own canon lives, or at least actively considered doing so.
  • By the end of Season 1, Wilbur's mental health spiral culminated in him trying to die in the explosion of Manburg in the Button Room. Even though the plan failed, due to Philza arriving in time to try to talk him down and protect him from the explosion, Wilbur still lost his third canon life after he begged his father to take it. He eventually gets brought back to life in Season 3, and by that point, although he has lost the desire to die after spending over what felt like a decade in a torturous Afterlife, his mental health is still far from stellar.
  • Throughout Tommy's Exile in Season 2, his mental health took a huge hit and he considered ending himself several times, even engaging in highly self-destructive behaviours. The most notable instance of this occurs at the end of the Exile Arc — after Dream blew up Logstedshire and barred Tommy from going into the Nether or having any visitors, Tommy built a tower hundreds of blocks into the sky, with the clear intention of jumping to his death. He ultimately didn't go through with it after realizing what Dream had been doing to him, but came very close.
  • After the Doomsday War, Ghostbur asked Tommy to bring him back to life, which basically causes a Death of Personality in Ghostbur. This is initially subverted, as the first attempted resurrection of Ghostbur failed and he was Put on a Bus, and very evidently doesn't want to be revived, but is exactly what happens when he returns to the server.
  • Into Season 4, a long history of being felt uncared for has caused Fundy to cut contact with those around him and move far away from the main part of the SMP, setting his respawn point there. While he does accept a heartfelt apology from a revived Wilbur, Fundy says to his face that he doesn't want him in his life anymore, and while Wilbur quickly grows concerned that Fundy was going down "a dangerous path" (of course he'd know), Fundy tells him to leave and throws himself into the ruined crater of L'Manburg when he doesn't.
• Dysfunction Junction: Practically everyone on the server (other than the odd few new members, or those who are otherwise uninvolved in the lore) is traumatized in one way or another, whether by wars, betrayal, amnesia, abuse, toxic relationships, torture, deaths, etc.
• Early-Bird Cameo:
  • Philza was often talked about and even joined a few calls with Wilbur and Tommy before he was officially added to the server.
  • Quackity was also on several voice calls with Tommy in the week or two leading up to his debut appearance on the SMP.
  • Vikkstar appeared in a video endorsing POG2020 during the L'Manburg Elections, several months before actually joining the server.
  • Boomer went from being a two-time proxy visitor to the SMP to becoming a fully-fledged member of it.
• Edible Theme Naming: Several NPCs on the server share names with food items, that including Karl's cat Rutabaga and fish Lasagna (the latter of which is shared with Sapnap), Punz' bee Kiwi and deceased horse Pumpkin, Niki's foxes Fungi (though pronounced differently) and Mushroom, Puffy's parrots Greenbean and Blueberry (the latter of which is deceased), and Fundy's snow foxes Apples and Yogurt (the former being MIA after Doomsday and the latter now being Fundy's adopted son).
• Eldritch Location: Being the afterlife itself, this is to be expected of Limbo, but considering that it's a torturous afterlife makes it even worse.
• Election Day Episode: The L'Manburg Election arc, sparked by Wilbur leaking his election plans to other members like Quackity and Fundy. It ends with Schlatt becoming president of L'Manburg, renaming the country, and kicking Wilbur and Tommy out of it. Then everything goes downhill from there.
• Empathic Environment:
  • Happens twice during the Manburg-Pogtopia War. Just before the first battle between the Manburg forces and the combined Pogtopia and Greater Dream SMP, the time abruptly changes from sunset to sunrise. It happens again after Technoblade summons two withers, this time changing from night to midday.
  • An instance of this happens when Tommy is exiled from New L'Manberg by Tubbo. As he walks away from L'Manburg, it starts to rain.
  • After the Doomsday War, the weather changes from sunset to a thunderstorm as the former members of L'Manberg grieve over their loss.
  • Quackity logs on after Tommy's death and starts chatting to Jack Manifold. Jack tries to break the news to him gently, but Quackity doesn't understand and just keeps talking over him, excitedly planning what they should do when Tommy gets back from prison. When Jack finally bluntly tells him that Tommy is dead, Quackity completely crumples as it starts to rain.
  • A mixture between this and Cue the Sun occurs when Wilbur is found Back from the Dead near the ruins of L'Manburg at dawn, and soon after, he watches the sunrise with Tommy. This becomes zig-zagged because Wilbur is ecstatic by his revival, but Tommy seems to be conflicted by the situation.
  • The night Sapnap reunited with Quackity in Las Nevadas started out clear, but a snowstorm started in the background when Quackity finally confronts him over the "abandonment"; later in Kinoko, the night was initially clear but eventually became rainy, and the Second-Act Breakup between Karl and Quackity occurs during a heavy rainstorm. In the same stream, Purpled's betrayal also took place while it was raining.
• End of an Age: The Doomsday War scores the final destruction and ultimate end of L'Manburg, leaving Wilbur's "unfinished symphony" truly unfinished.
• Enemy Mine: Techno and Quackity teaming up to crash the Red Banquet because of their shared hatred for the Egg (each for his own reasoning) also counts as this, with both of them lampshading this fact.
• Ensemble Cast: Justified. Each content creator's perspective understandably depicts themself as the protagonist of their own storyline, and the viewers can choose which perspective they want to watch.
• Epic Fail:
  • In the aftermath of the Manburg Festival, Tommy attacks an AFK Techno to avenge his murder of Tubbo. However, Techno's Thorns-enchanted netherite armor means that Tommy not only kills himself in the process, but also does so little damage that when Techno returns he's unaware that Tommy even tried to kill him until he sees the loot that Tommy dropped upon his death.
  • During the final battle for Manburg, Technoblade originally fails to summon the withers after misplacing a wither head, and has to stall for a moment and fix his mistake during an otherwise intense and terrifying scene.
    Technoblade: Why isn't this spawning. Why is this not spawning. This is very awkward.
  • Quackity gets one when he goes up against Technoblade in the remains of the Final Control Room. He has full enchanted netherite and enchanted weapons, while Techno has iron armor and a pickaxe. Despite all Quackity's bluster, Technoblade kills him in minutes. In his defense, though, Techno had a Turtle Master potion that allowed him to tank hits (which was supplied by Dream), and was really good at PVP.
• Evil Versus Evil: Dream states in Season 4 that he sees the server as this as he thinks that just about everyone on the server has done terrible things and openly sees himself as a bad person (not that he thinks there's anything wrong with that), but considering the facts that 1) not all crimes are equal, 2) some people have perfectly or at least relatively sympathetic reasons for doing bad things, and 3) several characters have recognized that their previous actions were bad and are actively working towards a redemption arc, the Dream SMP actually leans closer towards either Grey-and-Gray Morality, Black-and-Grey Morality, or Morality Kitchen Sink than this trope. Also, considering the one voicing this opinion is Dream, the resident child abuser and serial killer who did so to satisfy his own Control Freak nature and/or for his own amusement, we should probably take this viewpoint with all the salt in the shaker.
• Exact Eavesdropping: After the Manburg Festival, Tommy sneaks into Manburg to assassinate Schlatt as revenge for having Tubbo executed. However, while preparing to carry out the assassination, Schlatt starts destroying the White House to Quackity's protests, which eventually culminated in Quackity inadvertently completing Tommy's revenge-mission for him. Following the argument, Tommy tracks Quackity down in the forest behind the White House and confronts him in a conversation that ended with Quackity's official Heel–Face Turn to join Pogtopia.
• The Exile: This has happened multiple times over the course of the server's history.
  • Shortly after Tommy joined the server, he was briefly sent to a remote tundra nicknamed the "Banishment Area" for breaking the server rules. This is quickly revoked once Tommy agrees to follow said rules again, although they were and still are arbitrarily enforced.
  • At the end of the L'Manburg Election arc, Schlatt revokes Wilbur and Tommy's L'Manburgian citizenship and exiles from the city-state they founded, forcing them to Run or Die and seek refuge in a ravine they name 'Pogtopia'. Niki also gets exiled from Manburg after the Manburg Festival after Schlatt gets fed up with her one-woman rebellion.
  • At the start of Season 2, Techno leaves the heart of the SMP to live in Self-Imposed Exile in a distant tundra, wanting to retire from violence. Unfortunately for him and everyone else, he declined to tell the L'Manburgians of this arrangement, causing the Butcher Army to assume him to still be a threat to the country and start gunning for his life.
  • The most infamous instance of this happens as Dream orchestrates for Tommy to be exiled from L'Manburg by Tubbo, with Ghostbur joining Tommy to keep him company. Dream then bars Tommy from the rest of the SMP as well, confining him to the far-off beach Tommy and Ghostbur go on to name 'Logstedshire'.
• Expanded Universe: While most of the Dream SMP is recorded on Twitch or YouTube livestreams, further details of canon are expanded on through various forms of media.
  • Tales From the SMP serves as a spin-off series revolving around the past and future of the Dream SMP universe, and additionally explores Karl's character arc more in-depth due to his narrator/protagonist status in the series.
  • Word of Content Creator confirmations can originate from non-DSMP livestreams, social media posts and Q&As, and interviews. These confirmations can include a character's species, pronouns, motivations, number of canon lives, etc.
  • Dream's YouTube short "The Revival Book" explicitly states the fate of Vikkstar and LazarBeam.
  • Wilbur the content creator's tie-in short story "The Wilbur Van" (better known as "Hitting on 16") claims to take place in an individual timeline, but is treated as canonical to Wilbur the character and his character arc (and thus full-canon by fans), and explores several details about the Dream SMP universe (e.g. it operates closely to real life and not necessarily Minecraft) and the Las Nevadas faction in particular.

F – G

• Face Your Fears: This is attempted twice intentionally, but both times are subverted as the fears in question stem from traumatic triggers and There Are No Therapists to oversee the "exposure therapy".
  • In Season 1, Quackity tries to get over his fear of Technoblade by proving he's just a person and is therefore killable. After pointing out that Techno did something at Quackity's behest^note placing a block, thus making him less scary, Technoblade begins to chase him down, talking slowly about how early humans hunted by outlasting their prey and using his trident to get ahead. Quackity is once again reduced to a terrified screaming heap as he is cut down.
  • In Season 3, Tommy also tries this with help from Tubbo and Ranboo, while deliberately and directly calling the technique "exposure therapy".^note Do note that Tommy thought it was the fastest way to deal with the fear/trauma, and both Tubbo and Ranboo expressed some reservations for the idea. In preparation for trying to kill Dream in Pandora's Vault, he revisits several places that have caused him trauma (or replicas of the places) to try to overcome it. Considering that exposure therapy only works in a very carefully controlled environment and with the help of a professional, and all three of them were clearly unqualified and traumatized teenagers, it's no wonder that it doesn't help much in the end, and might have even worsened the trauma.
• Fake Defector: Tubbo and Fundy are this after Jschlatt takes over L'Manburg, being part of his cabinet while acting as The Mole for Pogtopia in secret. However, while Tubbo's role was coordinated with Wilbur and Tommy, Fundy's is entirely independent and a shock to even Wilbur and Tommy's side.
• Fictional Flag: Several of the factions have flags of their own, but the most famous of them is the flag of L'Manburg designed by its founder's content creator counterpart, Wilbur. It consists of three horizontal stripes in blue, white, and red, and a black semicircle with yellow accents on its left side to symbolize the walls surrounding the nation in its early days, along with three crosses from the flag of Amsterdam in honour of fellow content creator and L'Manburg founding member Fundy, who is Dutch in real life. An official simplified version of the flag is used for its Minecraft banner design, which are used as decorations throughout the nation in Season 2.
  Some info on my design:
  L'Manburg is a country forged in the blood of revolution! Therefore I wanted to incorporate elements of the French tricolour (borrowing the darker shades of blue and red)
  L'Manburg is predominately European and, during it's formation, included almost every European player on the server, so this influenced my design a lot.
  The three crosses symbolise our Dutch citizen and are directly referencing the flag of Amsterdam
  The blue stands for liberty, the white stands for peace, and the red (the foundation and underlying colour of the flag) stands for the blood the country is built on.
  The yellow and black accentation denote the walls of the nation (A huge black and yellow rampart)
• Five-Second Foreshadowing:
  • As Dream gives his ultimatum to L'Manburg, he punches George and Sapnap away from the wall, something Tommy notices and calls him out for. The two can also be seen backing up further. Seconds later and it turns out that Dream wasn't trying to hurt them; he was instead trying to get them out of range of the massive explosion of TNT that soon erupts from under L'Manburg's base.
  • In the Season 1 finale, you can just barely hear the hiss of TNT before L'Manberg is blown up by Wilbur from Quackity's POV.
• Flash Forward: The L'Sandberg streams are set in the future after the Post-Banquet Arc streams.
• Flock of Wolves: Schlatt's cabinet in Manburg turns out to be this. Among the four people in the cabinet (excluding Schlatt himself), Tubbo is a Pogtopian spy, and Fundy is an even more secretive Pogtopian spy. As for the other two people in the cabinet, George's presence in the cabinet was barely even relevant to the plot due to his tendency to not show up to the plot, and Quackity was a Friendly Enemy whose allegiance to Schlatt fluctuated depending on the day^note (To clarify, he sometimes tried to rein Schlatt's behaviour in to help him make more reasonable decisions, since he genuinely wanted to make the country better, but to no avail every time; at other times, plotted to remove Schlatt from power so that he could become President instead; and occasionally acted as a devoted Yes-Man; but ultimately, the situation was complicated by Schlatt's mistreatment of him regardless of his allegiance at the time) but eventually stood up for himself and left to join Pogtopia anyway. By the Manburg-Pogtopia War, out of Schlatt's four main cabinet members, three of them are fighting on Pogtopia's behalf, and George doesn't even show up to the battle.
• Floral Theme Naming: Hannah Rose is the most notable example of this on the SMP, but another, more obscure example would be Rutabaga, Karl's pet cat that he named his former country Rutabagville after.
• Flower Motifs:
  • Ranboo and Tubbo's favorite flower is alliums, which represent unity, good fortune, and strength. In the Dream SMP, they also represent Ranboo and Tommy's first real interaction on the server, which was Ranboo giving Tommy an allium to apologize for accidentally hitting him. This moment is given a Call-Back after Tommy's death, with Ranboo leaving an allium flower in front of Tommy's house and waiting until it despawns, only to later revisit the room with the items they stole from George's house and find the same flower he gave Tommy months ago, stored safely away in a hidden chest.
  • Lilies of the valley symbolize many things, such as the return of happiness in the Victorian language of flowers, and are popular at weddings. Kristin gifted Phil this once, and that flower currently hangs above Phil's door in his house, in an item frame. Oh, and lilies of the valley are highly toxic — fitting for Death and her Angel. In addition, the lily of the valley also supposedly represents mending a broken relationship, and is a flower one can give when they don't know how to apologise to someone they've hurt. While confiding his mental health issues with Phil, Wilbur is asked if there was anyone he had wronged recently; he opens the door (with the lily of the valley framed above), and Tommy is standing right outside the door.
  • Regarding Tales From the SMP, the Inbetween's messages are all accompanied by wither roses, while those from the Other Side are accompanied by white tulips. Both flowers do not match the colour schemes of their respective dimensions, implicating the true intentions of both realms.
• Foreign Cuss Word:
  • Mexican Dream is quite prone to swearing in Spanish. During Tommy's Exile, when M.D. overheard Dream telling Tommy that he didn't like M.D, M.D. started going on a vulgar tirade in Spanish while chasing after Dream.
  • Near the end of Schlatt and Quackity's fateful argument over the destruction of the White House, Schlatt can be heard loudly calling Quackity a "pendejo", to which Quackity responds, "Do not curse me out in–" before Schlatt interrupts him.
• Forced to Watch:
  • At the end of Season 2, Dream tries to do this with Tommy, with a plan to kill Tubbo in front of him before locking him up in Pandora's Vault. This becomes defied when Punz and half of the server show up to save them.
  • During the Red Banquet, the Eggpire does this to the attendees and forces them to watch each other get executed and fed to the Egg. It only works with Foolish, and The Cavalry shows up before they could decide on executing a second person.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Just before the announcement of the results of the Presidential Election, Schlatt tells his fellow candidates (other than those in POG2020) that he won't be having a speech if he gets inaugurated, and will immediately take action. True to form within the next 15 minutes of the VOD, Schlatt's inauguration speech has him exile his greatest political opponents, POG2020, forcing them to Run or Die.
  • Wilbur warns Tommy early into the L'Manburg Civil War that, in a few weeks, he won't be the same man he was. At first, it just seems to be a herald for Wilbur giving up his vow of peace to show Jschlatt who really rules L'Manburg. However, in hindsight, it's clearly an allusion to Wilbur's mental spiral, turning the once-pacifistic leader into someone with the image of a Mad Bomber who Tommy must either bring back from the brink of a Face–Heel Turn or wage war against.
  • Early into the L'Manburg Civil War, Fundy's spy diary reveals that Jschlatt is The Alcoholic and that continuing such a habit may be fatal. This has no major ramifications... until the end of the war, that is. When Dream and the Pogtopians corner Jschlatt within the Camaravan, he's completely drunk and is still drinking even as he's interrogated. It should not come as a surprise that he drops dead minutes later without any action on Pogtopia's end.
  • Right after Schlatt dies, Dream mentions how he was lying about a traitor. Wilbur slips up and says, "I thought I was the..." before he quiets himself. He would then blow up L'Manberg.
  • Techno's post-Face–Heel Turn speech has him compare Tommy to Theseus, a hero who was scorned and exiled by his people despite saving them from evil, and asks Tommy if it's worth fighting for L'Manburg if they're just going to one day betray him. Not even two weeks later, Tommy is put on trial for griefing George's house by his own people (though he admittedly did commit the crime) — and Dream is there, trying to goad L'Manburg into exiling him. It's subverted as Tommy gets a much lighter punishment (two weeks of probation) than what Dream wanted... only for Tubbo to exile him anyway a few days later as Dream increases his pressure on L'Manburg.
  • In the conversation with Eret on November 16th, Dream says that Eret is only king because he's got people protecting him, and that without that protection from himself, Punz, and Sapnap, his position means nothing and he's essentially powerless. Dream seems to have forgotten that by the time the Disc War Finale rolls around, because by this time, he'd purposefully pushed his friends away, thinking his attachments were making him weak, leaving him completely defenseless when Punz rallies half the server together to stop him.
• Four Is Death: In the "Las Nevadas" series, the 4th official episode (released 27 November 2021) is the first episode to feature a canon death, and Chapter 4 of the finale (released 10 September 2022) is titled "Death" and takes place in the Afterlife.
• Fourth-Date Marriage: This is how Karl and Sapnap, and eventually Quackity's relationship end up being like, where they got engaged with a practically nonexistent dating period.^note For context, Quackity got engaged to the two on November 17th, 2020 (in real-life time), i.e. the day after his abuse ex kicked the bucket. Deconstructed harshly in Season 3 when the miscommunication between the three — most notably concerning Karl's time-travelling powers and resulting memory loss, as well as Quackity's previous relationship trauma — led to a severe fallout.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: When Tommy and Technoblade visit Logstedshire to look for wolves in the nearby forest, a bit of netherite armor can be seen peeking out behind one of the torch pillars. It's Dream, who's been tailing Tommy since he ran from Logstedshire.
• Freudian Trio: Tommy, Ranboo and Tubbo are Id, Ego and Superego respectively. Tommy is a highly emotional and impulsive Determinator who is loyal to a fault, Tubbo is a very logic-driven person who wants to do the right thing even if it hurts those he cares about, and Ranboo is the middle ground between them, swearing allegiance not to countries and organizations, but people, and he's able to appeal both to Tommy's emotional and Tubbo's logic-driven nature.
• From Beyond the Fourth Wall: Several characters have their stream chats canonized in a variety of forms.
• Fun with Acronyms:
  • WAP stands for "Worship And Prayer" by the founders of Church Prime, most commonly Tommy. This has led to a conversation involving Acronym Confusion over said acronym's more infamous meaning, Jschlatt (before his Presidential run), and a very disturbed TommyInnit.
  • The L'Manberg Flight and Aeronautical Organization building should tell you exactly what kind of attitude L'Manberg, or at least its members, had.
• Furry Confusion: There have been several instances of perspective characters being anthropomorphic forms of Minecraft mobs.
  • Fundy and CPK are both Fox Folk, with the former's Minecraft skin being an anthropomorphic Minecraft fox while the latter's is more stylized. Fundy has also interacted with the in-game foxes, being able to understand them and refusing to kill them on principle, and has even had "pet foxes" on occasion — though he amends that Yogurt (an Arctic fox) was his adopted child after Tubbo points this out in Season 3. It is unknown how CPK interacts with the in-game foxes.
  • Antfrost is an anthropomorphic Siamese cat, and while cats exist in Minecraft, how Ant interacts with them remains unclear.
  • Technoblade is a Pig Man and appears to treat Minecraft pig-adjacent mobs (incl. pigs, Piglins, and Hoglins) in a similar way a human does. This has culminated into a strange moment in Season 4 where he was seen riding a pig down the Prime Path into Skeppy's house.
• Future Imperfect:
  • The Tales From the SMP episode "The Lost City of Mizu" takes place one hundred years after the events of the Dream SMP. The main characters are a group of fishermen who have stumbled upon the titular city, an underwater city dedicated to preserving the legacies of the characters of the Dream SMP. There are multiple glaring inaccuracies in the records, like Ranboo having supreme memory, Sapnap loving animals, George being a great king, Eret being a tyrant, no one being able to tell if Fundy was a person or a pet, BadBoyHalo cursing and being able to shut up opponents with a spell called Lan-gu-age, and so on. It is also implied that the polyamorous relationship between Karl, Sapnap and Quackity is erased from history.
  • The drift in historical understanding actually starts in the very generation of the Dream SMP canon, most notably with the Buttons in Pogtopia. Eret has made a valiant effort to try to preserve the history of the server, but wasn't in Pogtopia as of the time of the Rebellion and assumed the buttons were placed by a spiralling Wilbur. By the time Seapeekay is given a tour of the server, Ponk tells him not to press any of the buttons in Pogtopia because one of them could trigger the TNT hidden in the double-ravine.^note Contrary to Ponk's interpretation, the Button to set off the TNT was placed under (L')Manburg, which is a crater in the ground by that point, and is located under the L'Manburg podium/stage and nowhere near Pogtopia. The truth is very far from all of that — they were placed by Fundy as a prank.
• G-Rated Drug:
  • Potions in Minecraft were treated as if they were drugs by some characters (such as Tommy, Wilbur, and Tubbo). Tommy and Wilbur even intended to create a "drug" empire that sells these potions before the War for L'Manburg. By the time the War for Independence rolls around, though, the "potions as drugs" interpretation has been mostly dropped, as the goal of the budding faction shifts from selling "drugs" to providing a safe space from violence and tyranny.
  • String is placed on the world in the form of tripwire, and then "inhaled" by breaking it.
  • To become a citizen of El Rapids, one must break string and eat a spider eye (dubbed the "Bite Of Truth").
  • During Mexican Dream's visit to Tommy, the former starts placing down string, and Tommy runs away in disgust.
• Gambit Pileup: The Red Banquet ends up being this, with both the Eggpire and the pro-Omelette attendees using a multitude of back-up plans to try to out-gambit the other side.
  • Puffy, Foolish, Sam, and Hannah had previously snuck a chest of armour and weapons into the venue, and planned to retrieve the equipment under the code phrase "spruce boat", in case the Eggpire wasn't being truthful about turning over a new leaf and the Banquet was just a trap.
  • However, the Eggpire had previously recruited Hannah as The Mole and had known about the equipment plan, and donned the armour when Puffy tried to retrieve it from the hidden chest.
  • Independent of the previous plan, Sam had rigged about half a stack of TNT to detonate the Egg in case the other plan didn't work.
  • Unfortunately, the Eggpire had foreseen this (after Quackity snuck into the Egg Chamber and tried to blow up the Egg with three stacks of TNT about a month and a half ago) and reinforced the Egg against explosions, which allowed it to regenerate quickly after the barrage of explosives hit it.
  • When the Eggpire tries to make an example of Eret for calling them out on their betrayal of trust, Foolish steps in to defend Eret, gives the Eggpire a "The Reason You Suck" Speech, and attempts to call down a Bolt of Divine Retribution to destroy the Egg.
  • On the flip side, the Egg turns out to have such a strong Power Nullifier effect that it cancels out Foolish's Physical God powers, so the Eggpire executes Foolish instead.
  • After everything that has happened, Quackity recruiting Techno and Purpled to crash the Banquet and take on the Eggpire ends up being the Last Plan Standing, a plan completely independent of the attendees' pre-established gambits. The Eggpire ends up abandoning the Egg and fleeing, with Antfrost losing a canon life in the scuffle courtesy of Mama Bear Puffy.
• Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!: L'Manburg plays with this a lot in its War for Independence. At the start of the war, Wilbur declares an equivalent of this during the secession of L'Manburg... to which Dream retaliates by delivering death to their doorstep, having the nation betrayed by one of their own and outright massacred in a box, traumatizing its victims in the process. Wilbur is willing to stand down after the Final Control Room massacre (given it doubles as his Cynicism Catalyst, it makes sense in hindsight), but Tommy isn't, and plays this trope fully straight by having a Duel to the Death against Dream for L'Manburg's independence, and while he loses the duel and his second canon life in the process, he ends up getting L'Manburg their independence anyway after trading his Cat and Mellohi discs for it.^note Wilbur initially tried to talk Tommy down from this, believing it to be not worth it, but ultimately gives in.
• Gluttonous Pig: The Tales episode "The Masquerade" features a Pig Man character of the greedy variety named Sir Billiam III, who shows extreme disdain for anyone short of upper class, considering "poor" people (whom he calls "commoners") to be subhuman and unworthy of names, and even multi-millionaires to be "barely" rich enough for his standards. This ends up being Played for Horror by the end of the episode, as The Reveal is that he teamed up with the Egg, a parasitic, mind-controlling Alien Kudzu, to have all his guests murdered.
• God Is Evil: DreamXD is the Top God (as far as we know) of the Dream SMP universe and draws his power from death, so he actively encourages the wars and deaths and all-round shitty conditions on the server so as to stay powerful. For example, as Tales From the SMP reveals, he grants time-travelling powers to certain people, but It Sucks to Be the Chosen One as their memory deteriorates the more their powers activate (they can't control to when and where they travel) until they undergo Loss of Identity, then XD has them killed after that point. He does Pet the Dog on occasion, making him a bit of a downplayed example, but not by much. There are also mentions of and appearances from other deities, but they are either cameos, too distant from the main plot to interfere actively (e.g. Kristin), or are not powerful enough to stop XD (e.g. Foolish).
• Goggles Do Nothing: In the world of the Dream SMP, about a hundred years from the current events on the server, many people will be wearing goggles. This is seen prominently in the Tales episodes "The Lost City of Mizu" and "The Pit", where about half of the named characters in the episodes wear goggles, though for reasons not divulged. Enforced as they're all Minecraft skins.
• The Golden Rule: Discussed by Tommy in a conversation with Foolish.
  Tommy: [...] You know the phrase "Treat others how you want to be treated", Foolish?
  Foolish: Yeah.
  Tommy: That's a really important phrase, and people hear it, you know, you hear your teachers say it, you hear it when you're young, people don't ever listen to it: treat others how you want to be treated. Wilbur disregarded that rule. He decided that he wanted to be treated poorly, so he treated everyone else poorly.
• Gotta Have It, Gonna Steal It: Applies to just about everyone on the SMP, if someone needs something, they'll usually just go loot someone's base (the victims usually being Eret or Purpled).
• Graceful Loser: Fundy and Niki take getting 9% of the popular vote in the L'Manberg Elections in their stride and cheer at knowing around 20,000 people voted for them. Just after them, Wilbur also peacefully cedes the podium to Schlatt after announcing that the SchWAG2020 coalition beat out his own party, POG2020, by 1% of the popular vote.
• Great Escape:
  • On 14 September 2021, Techno manages to escape from Pandora's Vault using the Ender Pearl Stasis Chamber in the headquarters of the Syndicate, with some assistance from Philza. It's been indicated that this escape could have taken place much earlier in the plot, but Phil's skewed sense of time got in the way.
  • On 28 November 2021, Techno fulfills his part of the Leonine Contract and uses the blueprints of Pandora's Vault that Dream entrusted him with to help Dream escape, utilizing several chinks in the prison's armour and lots of supplies.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: Most of the characters on the server are both right and wrong to some degree, though it crosses over with Black-and-Gray Morality and Morality Kitchen Sink over how a couple of characters are practically morally black. This is lampshaded in a conversation between Tommy and Foolish.
  Foolish: [...] Do you consider yourself to be the good guy or the bad guy?
  Tommy: That really depends who you ask, doesn't it? You know? If you ask Dream, he'd say I'm his little– his little play– his little toy that he plays with, you know? It doesn't... (Beat) Foolish, honestly, I used to consider myself the good guy, the fucking second-in-command, going around and going, "Yeah! Let's do this!" But recently, these past– these past like six months or so, Foolish, everything got so much harder than it was before. Because before it was us fighting the bad guys, and it was all so clear.
  Foolish: Yeah. Nothing muddy.
  Tommy: It was all so clear. But it's not been clear for so long, alright? It wasn't "These are the bad guys, these are the good guys". Now it's "He's doing this, and that makes him a bit worse". It's all so fucking complicated. So, I don't know. It depends who you ask, but...
  Foolish: I don't know. It just all seem strange, 'cause just from, you know, hearing from others, and learning a little bit, it seems like you've been a hero, you've been the villain, the conqueror, the savior, and even now, I still have no idea what you exactly are.
  (Beat)
  Tommy: Well, that's up to you to decide, isn't it?

---