Dream SMP / Tropes R to Z

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R

• Race Against the Clock:
  • Quackity was responsible for setting a meeting between him, Jschlatt, and Wilbur before November 6th, or Wilbur would finally press the Button, blowing Manburg to kingdom come. It ultimately ends with a formal declaration of war, plus The Reveal that Jschlatt had found and allegedly removed the TNT under Manburg, rendering the Button useless.
  • The Doomsday War starts with one, with L'Manburg having 24 hours to prepare before the Anarchists (Dream, Techno, and Phil) come and attack with the intent to destroy L'Manburg. Considering the Anarchists consist of people like Dream and Techno, said 24 hours are completely necessary. Unfortunately for L'Manburg, however, the Anarchists has no intent on actually attacking when planned — they attack thirty minutes ahead of schedule and catch L'Manburg so off-guard that much of the nation is a giant crater by the time all of the war's participants arrive.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • Wilbur delivers a particularly brutal one to Tommy, lining out that Tommy can never be president because of his emotions ruling over his better judgement, in comparison to Tubbo who is more thoughtful. And the worst part is he isn't entirely wrong.
  • Fundy gives Wilbur one right back posthumously, yelling at Ghostbur for running away from his problems and avoiding any negative discussion because he can't handle the consequences of his actions, as well as treating Fundy like a child and never respecting his autonomy.
  • Tubbo of all people gives one to Tommy right after deciding to go along with Dream's request to exile him, after tiring of being bound to Tommy's obsession of his discs, pulling L'Manburg into greater and greater dangers. He does so mainly in refusal of yet another plan of establishing another conflict with Dream.
  • After Dream tricks Tubbo into giving him the disc, he gives one to Tubbo about how terrible a president he has been and how weak L'Manburg was under him.
• Rebellious Rebel: Eret becomes this during the L'Manburg War for Independence, betraying L'Manburg after Dream makes him an offer he can't refuse.
• Reclaimed by Nature: Months after the Doomsday War, life has gradually returned to the crater and ruins that used to be L'Manburg, covering the area in lush plant life.^note Out-of-universe, it was Philza who redecorated the place with plants, since this doesn't normally happen in Minecraft unless it's grass or mycelium growing over dirt blocks.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over:
  • Zig-zagged for BadBoyHalo's character design, as despite having a mainly red and black colour motif, he's very polite and friendly, yet whether he's good or bad really depends on who you ask. On the flip side, when he's unambiguously antagonistic as the de facto leader of the Eggpire, he has a Greyscale of Evil instead.
  • Played straight with in the Manburg-Pogtopia War, where the Manburg war flag is a black banner with a red saltire (diagonal cross), which decorates the shields of those who fight for Manburg. The Pogtopians use this to help distinguish between friend and foe.
  • Also played straight regarding Foolish's colour palette, as in a flashback, he was seen burning down a village while appearing as a black totem with red eyes. At present, he has become a better person and is a gold totem with green eyes, like a conventional totem of undying instead.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni:
  • Tommy (red) is loud, impulsive, passionate and determined, while Tubbo (blue), is soft-spoken, friendly, and a bit of a ditz. Tommy tends to also think very emotionally, while Tubbo sees the rational side of things.
  • After getting exiled by Tubbo and subsequently drifting apart from each other initially it seemed like Ranboo was replacing Tubbo as the blue to Tommy's red. However, as Ranboo started to hang out with Tubbo more and Tommy less, the dynamic ended up shifting with Tubbo as the red to Ranboo's blue.
• Refuge in Audacity:
  • Techno has a habit of pulling outrageous stunts to taunt enemies he doesn't need to take seriously (read: everyone except maybe Dream). And he always wins. Justified, as Techno's armor is kitted out with Thorns (causes recoil damage to any attackers), which combined with Netherite armor's natural protection gives him Nigh-Invulnerability (as enemies will hurt themselves more than Techno), allowing Techno much more leeway to toy with foes (as he already knows he's going to win).
    • At one point, Techno is attacked by a Ravager. His response? Go AFK to read donations as the Ravager dies from recoil damage caused by Techno's armor.
    • Techno doesn't even need to be in combat to do this. At the Manburg Festival, Fundy trapped Techno in a dunk tank to drown him. Unfortunately for Fundy, Techno had a Respiration III helmet, which meant it'd take a minute for Techno's air to even run out — and when he finally started taking damage, it took so long that Techno was able to easily regenerate more health than he lost. Techno then proceeded to promote his channel while drowning, even stepping away from his computer in real life for a moment to drink a glass of water. Yes, Techno took a break from drowning to drink water. He even played up a Minor Injury Overreaction for all it's worth, joking that he desperately needed to eat to regenerate once he's at seven hearts (which takes even longer). Needless to say, Fundy was not happy.
    • During the second half of the Manburg-Pogtopia War, Techno's Face–Heel Turn and dramatic speech is followed by a Pre-Asskicking One-Liner and him proceeding to summon two Withers... and then he goes on to name one of them "Subscribe to Technoblade". Even moreso, he calls the name the most important part.
    • Techno has also infiltrated New L'Manberg by standing in front of his own wanted posters to blend in... while wearing a different skin to the one on the poster. Tubbo is too confused to question it and just leaves him be.
      Tubbo: Uh, right, moving on, he's just a poster apparently.
  • Quackity also gets in on the action occasionally. A week before the Red Banquet, he fills up Purpled's UFO with TNT to try to get his attention, but gets caught by Purpled before he can set off the explosives. He then quickly convinces Purpled to help him crash the Banquet after promising him payment from Las Nevadas. After the Banquet, Purpled collects his money... only for Quackity to blow up his UFO anyway... and then try to convince him to join Las Nevadas, promising him that his legacy would be preserved now that his UFO is gone... because of him. Not only does he live to tell the tale (considering that Purpled is very good in a fight and would easily annihilate him, a Non-Action Guy), but it works out… or so it seems at first, as Purpled decides that revenge is a dish Best Served Cold and only joined to bide his time until he could truly take revenge.
• Religious and Mythological Theme Naming: Members of the Syndicate take on codenames based on Classical Mythology which allude to their personal characteristics.
• Retcon:
  • When Phil first joined the server, the consensus among the content creators (and especially the fandom) was that he was the biological father of Techno, Tommy and Wilbur (in line with the "Sleepy Bois Inc" dynamic), with Tubbo being adopted later on. A little while later, Techno and Phil clarified that Techno wasn't Phil's son, just a friend, and after the Doomsday War, Tommy being Phil's biological child was retconned as well. As of today, Wilbur is Phil's only biological child, Tommy and Tubbo see him as a father figure, and Techno sees him as an old friend.
  • Related to this, Wilbur at one point claimed that he and Techno were twins, with Techno being two minutes older. With Techno deciding he wasn't a part of the family dynamic anymore, this plot point also got thrown out.
  • When Jack returns to life after being killed by Techno in the Doomsday War, he states that he went to Hell^note Jack doesn't go into much (if any) detail about how Hell looks, but given he identifies it as Hell with such certainty, he probably means the traditional Fire and Brimstone Hell. When Tommy returns to life after being killed by Dream in Pandora's Vault, he describes the Afterlife as an Eldritch Location that he and Dream later determine to have Year Inside, Hour Outside properties. Unless either Jack or Tommy was wrong/lying about their description, it seems that Jack's account of the Afterlife was retconned.
    • However, since DreamXD sent Niki to "Hell" during one of George's dreams as a Deadly Prank, it can instead be suggested that "Hell" is a euphemism for the Afterlife on the SMP, and the two locations are the same.
    • This can be further supported by Wilbur claiming that his Afterlife took the form of a train station, implying that the Afterlife is personalized for each person which enters it, meaning that Jack's Afterlife being a Fire and Brimstone Hell is entirely possible.
  • As demonstrated by the consecutive revivals of both Tommy and Wilbur in Season 3, Wilbur's previous claim that it was impossible to bring people Back from the Dead has clearly been retconned.
• Revenge Before Reason:
  • Tommy dives into this when Sapnap "accidentally" kills his pet cow, Henry. Tommy defaces and burns the wooden Eiffel Tower and attempts to use Sapnap's pet fish as leverage to get away with it. It takes Technoblade pointing out the ridiculousness of the situation for him to even offer the fish in return for the music discs that Bad has, but by that point the tense negotiations have broken down and a battle breaks out. The only reason this works out for Tommy is because he has both Dream and Techno to support him.
    Technoblade: Wait, this is over a fish? Tommy, just give him the fish! God, I didn't even bring a shield.
  • During the Manburg Festival, Tommy was wracked with grief when Tubbo was publicly executed on the spot by Technoblade under Schlatt's orders. He pearled onto the podium to attack Techno in front of everyone, completely breaking cover.
  • One of Quackity's core traits is his hatred of injustice. However, some of his actions — and especially those taken during his spiral in the "Las Nevadas" series — are driven more by revenge then justice, like his torture of Dream and failed attempt to kill Technoblade in the prison. In general, the violent methods he uses to try to get even often just cause more problems, yet every loss just makes him all the more desperate to get revenge. His character arc ultimately ends with him knowing and acknowledging that Revenge Is Not Justice, and tentatively reaching out to others again.
• Rewatch Bonus: Several things about Ranboo's January 30th, 2021 stream will stand out once you realize none of it was real.
  • The signs in front of the Big Innit Hotel, as well as Bad and Skeppy's house, are completely black. Discounting the possibility that this was just an error from using custom maps on a different server, it could also be because Ranboo didn't remember what they looked like.
  • Sam doesn't behave like a stoic warden like he did with Tommy and Bad. Instead, he acts much friendlier and more eager to make casual conversation. On initial viewings, you could interpret this as Sam trying to accommodate for Ranboo's more anxious nature, but upon rewatching, it's clear that Sam acts this way because Ranboo has no frame of reference for how Sam usually acts when inside the prison.
  • Similarly, Sam lets Ranboo take his memory book inside Dream's cell, when he should know full well that Ranboo has to die to be let out, and thus will be forced to leave the memory book behind with Dream.
  • Dream also behaves pretty out of character before he drops the act. He greets Ranboo very enthusiastically, when he was withdrawn and stoic during Tommy and Bad's visits. He also says he doesn't like the clock, when he told Bad earlier that day that he loved watching the clock so much that he gave it a name.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: The Butcher Army tries and fails to execute Technoblade, causing him to leave his 10-Minute Retirement and blow L'Manburg into a crater. If not for a freak resurrection, this also would have resulted in Jack Manifold's last canon death.
• Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies: Volume 1 officially ends with the server being quite literally nuked and everyone who hasn't got out while they could (like Wilbur and Aimsey) being hit with amnesia and/or dying. It's about as much of a Downer Ending as one can get, and due to YMMV-related reasons, the less said about how the Exile-related abuse plotline is wrapped up, the better.
• Room Full of Crazy: The room housing the detonator for the TNT Wilbur planted all over Manburg has the L'Manburg anthem written all over the walls.
• Rouge Angles of Satin: The caravan at the heart of L'Manburg got this treatment twice. The first time, it was labelled "Camarvan", then when someone built a giant hot dog on top to make it look like a food truck, it was renamed to the "Hto Dog Van".
• Rule of Three:
  • Each player has three canon lives, and are generally Killed Off for Real when they lose all three lives.
  • Three times has L'Manburg been in the center of climax of various wars within the server, with mass destruction in each, but the third, performed by a three way alliance between Dream, Technoblade and Philza, was what finally ended the nation for good.
  • Additionally, each of these times someone said "It was never meant to be" at that climax while betraying the nation.
• Running Gag:
  • In Season 1, when Sapnap is around, expect one or more pet to die. It's to the point where, of all the dead pets on the server, only one of them at the time (specifically L'Dog) has not been killed by Sapnap.
  • George constantly being missing during huge lore events on the server. ^Explanation Started when George slept through the most key part of the Election Arc (the actual elections), then continued when he subsequently missed out on most of the ensuing war because he was off building a house. He's also generally not online while a lot of the major lore events occur.
  • There's a good chance that when Techno's around, "Subscribe to Technoblade" will be used at some point or another. Even when it's hilariously out of place, like when Techno is summoning Withers to burn L'Manburg's remains to the ground.
  • People poking fun at Phil for being old, while Phil insists he's not that old. ^Explanation Phil is the oldest member of the server, being aged 32 when he joined the SMP.
  • Tommy speaking to various people's family members on stream. So far, he's spoken with Dream's mother and sister, Tubbo's sister, and Phil's wife.
  • The Funny Mic. ^Explanation  Occasionally, someone (as of Season 1, it's Dream, Quackity, and Tommy) will unplug their usual microphone and instead use a really cheap one with the volume cranked up to max, making them sound incredibly distorted. It's called the Funny Mic because it tends to add comedy to an intense situation. This bit is a carry-over Running Gag from Schlatt, who used to do back when he used to stream.
  • Canon deaths. ^Explanation After the introduction of the three-lives system, the members of the SMP often jokingly label any unscripted, accidental death canon. Anything from Dream accidentally blowing himself up to Punz missing a water bucket trick and dying of fall damage will be commented on in the in-game chat with "CANON DEATH" or the like.
  • No one being able to spell 'independence' correctly. ^Explanation Wilbur wrote both versions of the L'Manburg Declaration of Independence with the "word" 'independance', while Tubbo titled the Snowchester Declaration of Independence 'Independents'.
  • One related to Tales From the SMP specifically — whenever Technoblade appears as a cast member, he plays a Pig Man and not a human character (or one that is Ambiguously Human at the very least).
• Run or Die: When Schlatt exiles them from L'Manburg, Tommy and Wilbur are suddenly faced with an armed crowd hellbent on killing them, while they're both unarmed and without gear. They immediately use their invisibility potions and bail through Tubbo's bunker. Unfortunately for Wilbur, he was shot in the back by Punz while making his escape, taking his second canon life in the process.
  Wilbur: Tommy, run! Tommy– TOMMY, RUN!
  Tommy: WHAT THE FUCK?! TO TUBBO'S! WILBUR, GO, WE GOTTA GO, WE GOTTA GO!

S

• Sanity Slippage:
  • Wilbur's spiraling mental health and fall into paranoia began as early as the L'Manburg War for Independence, after Eret's betrayal caused him to abandon his ideal of "words over weapons". Once he's exiled to Pogtopia, however, his mental health takes an even huger hit, to the point that he ends up taking himself out via Suicide by Cop at the end of the season.
  • Both the power high of being leader of L'Manburg and his constant intake of alcohol and steroids results in Schlatt becoming increasingly erratic and unstable. His increasingly impaired decision-making winds up driving away any of his allies who hadn't already jumped ship because of how much of a tyrannical Bad Boss he was.
  • Arguably, Dream has been on a steady decline in mental health throughout the course of the SMP, although it became most noticeable during the Disc War finale. Since he began serving time in Pandora's Vault, however, the inhumane conditions and torture have undoubtedly caused his worst qualities, such as his control issues and god complex, to amplify and worsen by a thousand-fold.
  • This is heavily implied to be what happened to Quackity between Episodes 1 and 3 of "Las Nevadas", as he quickly spirals into committing atrocities that his old self would probably have fervently opposed. Considering that his character arc is meant to mirror Wilbur's, this isn't all that surprising.
  • Fundy was already teetering on the edge of this, but his constant nightmares of things to come have started to push him over the edge enough to start doubting his own memories and drove him to blow up his own home with TNT.
  • Before the Tales episode "The Village That Went Mad", Jack the potato farmer's journals imply that Foolish somehow caused him and Bob to go "mad" and murder the people living in their town. This is only revealed after the episode.
• Screw Your Ultimatum!:
  • Faced with Dream's demands of surrender, Wilbur defies Dream to his face, declaring he'd rather die than have L'Manburg rejoin Dream's half of the SMP server. Dream happily helps him and his allies with that "die" part, having planted TNT underneath L'Manburg and using the moment to detonate it and destroy a good 80% of the land.
  • Dream gets one himself when Tommy tries to blackmail him into taking down the obsidian walls around L'Manburg, using the remains of his horse, Spirit, as leverage. Dream instead starts building the walls higher, announces he doesn't care about Spirit's remains, and instead turns this around, demanding that Tommy be exiled before he completely shuts L'Manburg off from the outside world.
• Series Fauxnale: The end of the Disunion Era saw Dream stripped of his power, turned on by just about everyone on the server (except George and the Anarchists), and imprisoned in Pandora's Vault. The server celebrated the end of a tyrant, and everyone believed it was the end of the conflict (Tommy's stream was even titled the finale of the SMP). However, there are still several unresolved issues (the Anarchists and the Crimson Egg among others), several unanswered questions (such as DreamXD and the End Portal), and that's not mentioning that Dream might not be down for good (as Wilbur's spirit warns Tommy that Dream is too dangerous to be left alive, not to mention that Dream still has his favor from Technoblade). It's fitting for what seems to be the Season 2 finale, but there's clearly still more to come.
• Shared Universe: To some degree.
  • The Minecraft Mondays tournament is canon to the Dream SMP, or at least, Weeks 1 and 6 are. This is canonized by primarily Quackity (who specifies Week 1), as well as a few throwaway lines by Schlatt at the Manberg Festival (more specifically, he publicly reminiscences the time when he and Techno won MCM, i.e. Week 6), to be part of their backstories prior to joining the SMP. This part in particular holds lore significance in that it's how the Techno-vs-Quackity feud started on Quackity's side. Week 14 (the time MCM got hacked) was mentioned in Wilbur and Quackity's first interaction on the Dream SMP, in the in-game chat.
  • The Minecraft Championship is ambiguously canonical through a few throwaway lines by several content creators, but they are ultimately unimportant to the lore. Seapeekay later establishes his character to be a Dimensional Traveler who can access the MCC-dimension, therefore giving rise to a rabbit hole of other SMPs that could feasibly be connected with the DSMP.
  • Philza's book "Arrival" alludes to "[a]n [icy] empire [he] once helped a friend grow to power and take over the world".
  • SMPLive is also canonical to some degree, given Schlatt and Connor's canonical history as business partners.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: By Season 3, multiple people on the SMP have experienced trauma to the point of developing PTSD, many of which originated from the wars that have occurred.
  • Wilbur's mental health was on the decline even back during the L'Manburg War for Independence, which had left him traumatized. Wilbur, a man who is (in his own words) "a writer, not a fighter", found himself in the role of a general and experienced the infamous betrayal from one of his comrades, Eret, the deaths of himself and his friends, and only won thanks to Tommy giving up his discs. He hid how badly it affected him in front of others during his presidency. His mask slowly chipped away during the election, momentarily dropping it in front of Quackity during their heart-to-heart several days before Election Day, and permanently dropped it a few days into exile as he spiraled to the point of suicidality.
  • Tommy's experience from the betrayal in the Final Control Room left him heavily traumatized as well, as when he and Techno stumbled across the room during an undercover trip to L'Manburg, it caused him to have a full-on panic attack, hyperventilating and scrambling for an exit. His time spent in exile (both in Pogtopia and Logstedshire) and his death and revival in Pandora's Vault did him no favours either.
  • Heavily implied with Fundy, who had spent most of his life around war, and his reaction to finding out he and the other attendees were trapped during the Red Banquet was terrified screaming and trying to escape... a situation eerily similar to the Final Control Room, where he and his war comrades were similarly Lured into a Trap to be slaughtered mercilessly. And this isn't even going into him being haunted by nightmares of things to come...
  • Quackity's an interesting case, as he was possibly outright diagnosed with PTSD (because he was able to name the disorder outright) from being on the receiving end of Techno's rampages during Minecraft Mondays before he even joined the server. It's implied that he was handling it fairly well in his early days on the SMP... until the Schlatt adminstration, combined with Techno joining the server, which caused even more trauma for him... and then everything just went downhill from there.
• Short Story: "The Wilbur Van", better known as "Hitting on 16", is available on Archive of Our Own, though Wilbur also did a live reading of it on Twitch.
• Shout-Out:
  • Many people on the server use skins that reference other pieces of media.
    • Callahan's inner layer is Captain America from Marvel.
    • Connor wears a Sonic the Hedgehog onesie.
    • Fundy's standard outfit is Jotaro Kujo from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.
    • Lazarbeam's standard skin is Gingerbread Man from Fortnite.
    • Philza's standard skin is Kisuke Urahara from Bleach.
    • Tubbo's standard skin is Tweek Tweak from South Park.
  • Some of the people on the server outright have usernames and online aliases that reference other pieces of media: Quackity's originated from his days as a Toontown Online-based content creator^note the original use of the term was one of three censor phrases for Duck Toons who type non-regulated words in the in-game chat, while Antfrost literally uses the Fantastic Naming Convention of a Warrior Cat.
  • The entire War for L'Manburg Independence is rife with Hamilton references, going as far as to quote lines from the musical several times throughout the war. Wilbur also makes a parody of "The Adams Administration", "The Jschlatt Administration", during the Pogtopia arc.
  • The entire Sam Nook mini-arc is pretty much taken from Animal Crossing.
  • There are quite a lot of references to Undertale: Ranboo often uses songs from the soundtrack during his streams, most notably "Waterfall" in tense moments such as his confrontation with the Egg and a slowed version of "Fallen Down (Reprise)" at the end of lore-heavy streams, and Dream taunting Tommy to call for help when he's locked in the prison is eerily similar to Flowey taunting the protagonist to call for help during the Photoshop Flowey battle. There's also a button on Eret's throne that xe can press to play "Megalovania" on note-blocks to intimidate others.
  • The Mickey Mousing during the opening montage of Quackity's April 12th stream while torturing Dream over the course of an entire month was stated in a behind-the-scenes stream to be inspired by A Clockwork Orange, where all the most violent scenes were set to classical music.
  • The Red Banquet hosted by the Eggpire is possibly named after the Red Wedding.
  • Wilbur's Afterlife being an Afterlife Express is likely an idea derived from fanworks, which are in turn influenced by Wilbur's own album "Your City Gave Me Asthma".
  • The Las Nevadas bunker, built by Foolish, is styled after the Skeld map from Among Us.
  • Boomer's connection to the swamp biome was a reference to an episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender.

• Showdown at High Noon: Discussed in the Tales From the SMP episode "The Wild West" while the town was talking strategy for facing down the "Democrat Haters", though ultimately, it's a "ten-step standoff" that occurs.
• Sickeningly Sweethearts: In Season 2, Karl, Sapnap, and Quackity occasionally crashed other people's livestreams through the in-game chat with very affectionate and lovey-dovey messages towards each other. Of course, this ends after the polycule starts to drift apart in Season 3, due to the miscommunication between the three.
  Sapnap: but listen
  Sapnap: I wanted to tell you something...
  (Quackity fell from a high place)
  Quackity: yes....
  Sapnap: I just think
  Sapnap: that
  (Quackity fell from a high place)
  (Quackity fell from a high place)
  Sapnap: I JUST THINK ME AND YOU ARE JUST SO IN LOVE AND KARL IS LIKE MAYBE 3rD WHEELING A LITTLE
  Sapnap: BUT LIKE WE STILL LOVE HIM YOU KNOW
  Sapnap: but like our love is just on another level thats all
  (Quackity fell from a high place)
  Quackity: WE STILL LOVE HIM A LOT BUT HES LIKE NOT LOVING AS MUCH AS WE LOVE EACH OTHER LIKES HES NOT AS A GREAT OF A LOVER AS YOU AND I ARE LOVERS KINDA SOMETHING LIKE THAT IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN BUT WE STILL LOVE HIM AND STUFF
• Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!: In a flashback sequence to the L'Manberg election arc, it is revealed that Wilbur was the one who advised Quackity, then an idealistic Naïve Newcomer, that Violence is the Only Option, and is the key to power and security on the server. Many months later, Quackity embraces this ideal and is seen telling the same to Foolish while recruiting him for Las Nevadas... a conversation that is heavily laced with I Hate Past Me Psychological Projection.
• Skewed Priorities: Techno names one of his Withers in the final battle "Subscribe to Technoblade". What qualifies it for this trope is when he calls the name the most important part, as if he pulled a Face–Heel Turn just to plug his channel one last time.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: The series is fairly cynical, with half of the characters going through their own horrific Trauma Conga Line. Wars and conflicts often had to be solved with violence instead of diplomacy, and the idealistic diplomats and peacemakers are often broken down to don Jade-Colored Glasses eventually, and resort to violence they initially opposed using to survive. Though there are still a few idealists on the server, they tend to be in the minority of the server, and characters who undergo the transformation from being idealistic to cynical on-screen are often regarded to be tragic. However, it also has an idealistic lining in that characters who value diplomacy, peace, and recovery are often regarded to be more "heroic" and morally light than those who involve themselves in war and destruction.
• Sliding Scale of Silliness vs. Seriousness: This vastly depends on the time period and the perspective you're watching.
  • In terms of time periods, Season 1 is mostly more silly with a serious undercurrent, whereas in Season 2, it leans towards the serious end due to Cerebus Syndrome, albeit with the occasional silly moment interspersed in between — one of the most serious arcs, Tommy's Exile arc, takes place in Season 2 and contains some of the heaviest lore in the entire history of the roleplay. As lore slows down in Season 3, it becomes more light-hearted, but there remain dedicated lore streams which are definitely on the serious side, most prominently Quackity's "Las Nevadas" series.
  • In terms of perspectives, even during Season 2 and onward, Techno's perspective as a reputation for being more silly, even during events like the Doomsday War. On the other hand, the perspectives from people like Tommy tend to be more serious, while Quackity's perspective made a drastic switch from silly to halfway-inbetween starting from the Manburg arc, to mostly dead-serious in the "Las Nevadas" series.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Fundy and Niki's campaign in the L'Manburg Election, Coconut2020. Overall, the two got a pitiful 9% of the votes (last place by far and away) and their only direct contribution to the arc as a whole was a brief moment of comedy that came from Fundy getting caught in the act of election fraud. That said, however, they managed to win over many votes that could have otherwise been for Wilbur and Tommy, allowing Jschlatt and Quackity's combined votes to edge out the win by a margin of 1%, securing Jschlatt's inauguration as the next leader of L'Manburg and thus leading to the L'Manburg Civil War.
• The Smurfette Principle:
  • On the main SMP, the only members of the server who are women are Niki, Puffy, Hannah, and Tina. Alyssa used to be among their ranks, but she's no longer whitelisted on the SMP and isn't planning on making a comeback anytime soon. It's also unlikely for Girl Dream (aka Mamacita) to return to the server, because not only is her boyfriend dead, but her actor's avatar was stuck in jail in-universe for pretty much all of Season 3.
  • In the Tales episode "The Village That Went Mad", Helga was the only female resident of "Not A Very Good Town" Town.
  • In "The Masquerade", Lyaria was the only attendee of the titular event that was a woman.
  • In "The Pit", Genevieve was the only female gladiator, which is something that she points out.
    Genevieve: I have to say that I've been training my whole life for this, and I think there's far too many men around here, and I think a woman has to come up on top.
• Somewhere, a Herpetologist Is Crying: In 'The View From the Bottom of the Ladder' in "The Wilbur Van", it's noted that a king cobra "almost brought a sour end to the efforts" Wilbur was making towards handling his burger van. Other than a king cobra being blatantly out of place where the story is set, unless Wilbur was accidentally intruding on its nest and it was defending its eggs, the snake should not be bother him at all, as they are typically a very placid and non-aggressive (albeit still venomous) species and tend to avoid humans in general.
• Spin-Off: Tales From the SMP are mainly one-off adventures and, for the most part, focus on Karl and his time-travelling adventures and everything that they entail.
• Stepford Smiler: Since There Are No Therapists, this is a disturbingly common occurrence on the Dream SMP.
  • As the President of L'Manburg, Wilbur hid his mental health issues and trauma from everyone else. He drops the act during the Pogtopia arc.
  • Related to the above, despite appearing to be very cheerful and calm, Ghostbur, Wilbur's spectral counterpart, had said that his existence was pain, and he tries to hide his melancholic side as much as possible, repressing his sadness. It's also implied that his dissociative amnesia (selective memory loss) is due to the trauma he had suffered throughout his life.
  • During the Vengeance arc, Tommy's bright personality had returned quickly after moving in with Technoblade, but a closer look makes it quite obvious that it was a front, and that Tommy was actively repressing his trauma instead of dealing with it in a healthy way. As of Season 3, he's starting to open up more about his issues.
  • Tubbo often bottles up his emotions and puts up the front of The Pollyanna until he reaches his Rage Breaking Point.
  • Fundy puts up a cheerful front to hide his loneliness, insecurities, and trauma.
  • While touring Las Nevadas with Fundy, Quackity claims that it's the happiest he's ever been even though the faction had only existed for about three months... which is extremely rich, coming from the guy that psychologically projects his trauma and insecurities on others to get them to join Las Nevadas in the first place.
• Story Arc: Each Dream SMP Season is typically divided by according to various character arcs and faction-related storylines, while each Arc is usually separated by Wham Episodes. As primarily named by the DSMP Wiki:
  • Season 1:
    • Arc 1: The pre-L'Manburg era. Things are considerably more lighthearted in nature, and the roleplay hasn't come in full force. It is during this time that Tommy joins the server, which sows the first major conflicts incorporated into roleplay.
    • Arc 2: The L'Manburg War of Independence (also called the first Dream SMP War). The roleplay begins in full force, and the SMP's true nature begins to unfold.
    • Arc 3: Post-War. The players handle the fallout of their war, and L'Manburg becomes a fully-fledged nation as it accepts new citizens.
    • Arc 4: The L'Manburg Election. This arc initially seems like light-hearted filler, but it soon becomes clear that it was building into:
    • Arc 5: The L'Manburg Civil War (also called the Manburg-Pogtopia War, the Manburg Rebellion, or the second Dream SMP War). Every previous plot thread comes to a thrilling conclusion as characters' true colors are revealed, heroes become villains (and vice-versa), and the status quo is forever changed.
  • Season 2:
    • Arc 1: The Reconstruction Era. L'Manburg recovers and heals under the guidance of Tubbo and his cabinet. The rest of the Dream SMP recovers and gathers resources as well. The story at this point has split into several different plotlines as the server has grown to include over 30 different YouTubers/streamers in total, and each one is doing something different on the server.
    • Arc 2: The Post-Banishment Era (or specifically in Tommy's case, the Exile Arc). Tommy is exiled from L'Manburg, which kickstarts the roleplay in full force as the plotlines slowly begin winding back together again. It ends after Tommy moves to Techno's house, and Techno's foiled execution.
    • Arc 3: The Vengeance Era. Techno, Philza, and Tommy form the Arctic Anarchist Commune and plot their next move to reclaim Tommy's discs and/or destroy New L'Manburg, Dream hands over leadership of the Dream SMP to Punz, the gigantic prison Dream commissioned Sam to build is finished, and the Butcher Army change their target from Techno to Dream after they believed that Dream had a hand in foiling Techno's execution. A festival is staged to canonically kill Dream, foiled by the destruction of the long-lasting Community House. Tommy defects from Techno and rejoins L'Manburg (making amends with Tubbo). Dream reveals his plan to destroy L'Manburg after gaining the only items that could be used to make him back off (both of Tommy's discs, one of which he conned Tubbo into providing). Seeing that Techno also wants L'Manburg's destruction, Dream offers an alliance that Techno accepts. The arc ends in the Doomsday War, during which L'Manburg is completely and irreversibly destroyed by Dream, Techno, and Phil.
    • Arc 4: The Disunion Era. After the final, permanent destruction of L'Manburg, the server enters a fragile peace, New factions form from the ex-L'Manburgians, and Dream goes into hiding to avoid retaliation for the destruction at his hands (with Punz becoming interim leader of the Greater Dream SMP in his absence). It ends with Dream getting imprisoned in Pandora's Vault after his evils had been made known in his secret base.
  • Season 3:
    • Arc 1: The Imprisonment Era. With Dream in prison, the storyline focuses on the Eggpire, their conquest for world domination, and the fight against it and the Crimson. Jack and Niki plot to canonically take Tommy's last life as a means of revenge over the latter's wrongdoings towards the two.
    • Arc 2: The Lockdown Era. Tommy is sealed inside Pandora's Vault alongside Dream, and the two are left alone for a week as the prison goes on... well, lockdown.
    • Arc 3: The Mourning Era. At the end of the previous arc, Tommy was brutally Killed Off for Real at the hands of Dream. As Tommy's closest friends cope with the news of his death, the Eggpire celebrates the fall of their biggest threat while simultaneously contending with Captain Puffy, who has become a vigilante trying to bring them down by any means necessary. Meanwhile, Dream throws a wrench into the Eggpire's celebrations when he successfully resurrects Tommy, undoing his brutal demise but proving that even imprisoned, Dream is one of the strongest people on the server.
    • Arc 4: The Post-Lockdown Era. After Tommy is found to have been revived and is released from prison, the server reacts to his return to the SMP, and he learns to gradually recover from his trauma. Meanwhile, the Eggpire continues to spread its influence throughout the server, and various characters' moralities begin to shift, culminating into the Red Banquet.
    • Arc 5: The Banquet Aftermath Era. Following the events of the Red Banquet, the Eggpire is sent away to regroup and plan their next move whilst those who oppose the Egg plan on locking it away in a vault for good. At the same time, Ranboo continues to learn more about his Enderwalk state, and Tubbo, Foolish, and Jack plan to find the nuke missing from Snowchester as soon as possible to prevent mass destruction. Dream also brings Wilbur back to life when Tommy attempts to assassinate him, opening a whole other can of worms for the server to deal with.
    • Arc 6: The Las Nevadas Era. In Quackity's May 22nd lore stream, he begins to recruit various members of the server for his country. As Las Nevadas begins to spread its influence throughout the SMP, multiple characters begin to have moral dilemmas on joining it, or begin to investigate the country. At the same time, Wilbur starts to plan a visit to Dream in Pandora's Vault, and Technoblade gets locked up in the aforementioned prison for an indeterminate amount of time.
    • Arc 7: The Breakout Era. On 14 September, Techno breaks out of Pandora's Vault with help from Philza using the Ender Pearl Stasis Chamber. While the two plot the destruction of the prison, Quackity starts going on a paranoid trip as he and the rest of Las Nevadas prepare for war, fearing retaliation from Dream (who he believes to have escaped) and Techno (who actually escaped, but was the only one to do so thus far). At the same time, the three new additions to the SMP begin to navigate the socio-political landscape of the server.
  • Season 4:
    • Arc 1: The Freefall Era. In the last two days of the Breakout Era (27-28 November), Dream is broken out of prison by the Syndicate, Purpled betrays Las Nevadas, and Ranboo and Slimecicle respectively lose canon lives and are rendered perma-dead or catatonic. Following these events, Techno and Tubbo team up to save MICHAEL and/or avenge Ranboo, Tommy prepares for an onslaught against Dream, Sapnap presumably tries to cope with Karl's memory decline and his Evil Former Friend's escape from prison, and Quackity is left in mourning to honour Slime/Charlie's legacy. On a meta level, the server gets crossed-over to a Minecraft 1.18 world about two days into the season, allowing the Dream SMP to span across two servers with access to items added in the Caves and Cliffs updates.
    • Arc 2: The Counteraction Era. At the end of the previous arc, Sam is locked up into Pandora's Vault by the Revengers (Tubbo, Eret, and Techno), with Michael_Beloved being rescued. In the meantime, Dream proceeds to make the former prison his base of operations, as tensions continue to rise and more new additions to the server join in on the chaos.
    • Arc 3: The Detachment Era: Through a wide range of individual plotlines, many members of the SMP start to go their own separate ways to pursue their own ends. Most notably, Wilbur completes his apology tour and leaves the SMP to return to Utah.
    • Arc 4: The Denouement Era: With Wilbur's departure, many SMP members also decide to take their leave, scattering to the winds to find a new home. Quackity is confronted with the culmination of his corruption arc and tentatively begins to rebuild his life and Las Nevadas from the ground up. However, most of the remainder of the SMP comes to a screeching halt and bitter conclusion with the Egg's massacre and hatching, as well as the launch of Project Early Dawn.
• Strike Me Down with All of Your Hatred!: A variant. After Sapnap kills several of Tommy's pets, he allows Tommy into his bunker and goads him into killing Sapnap's pets in return. Tommy, however, refuses.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • After being elected, Schlatt begins downing alcohol by the truckload and indulges in using steroids as well to compensate for how his unhealthy lifestyle is affecting his body. However, his lack of physical fitness is Played for Laughs and never seriously impacts the plot… until the first season finale, when the Pogtopians surround him only to find that he's gotten drunk out of his mind. When they confront Schlatt on everything he's done, he goes off on a a self-righteous rant that gets so intense that he suffers a fatal heart attack or stroke. As it turns out, his non-stop substance abuse was genuinely harmful and likely would have killed him regardless of whether he won or lost.
  • Throughout the Las Nevadas story arc, Quackity repeatedly makes enemies out of the other server members, even outright manipulating some into joining his country. As such, when he finally does the grand opening, only three people show up, two of whom were already his employees. Essentially, if you want your business to succeed, you have to create good will with your potential customers first.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: One of the lyrics of the L'Manburg National Anthem is "A very big and not-blown up L'Manburg." Not only has Dream already blown it up once before this point, but it later gets blown up again by Wilbur, and gets permanently blown up after the Doomsday War.
• Switching P.O.V.: Usually more than one streamer streams particular plot points or events, which allows viewers to switch whose stream they're watching to see that particular streamer's perspective.
• Symbolic Blood: During his visit to Tommy in his Exile, Mexican Dream places down redstone dust to simulate vomiting blood.

T – Z

• Tactful Translation: During the Manburg era and the time leading up to it, Quackity nicknamed the White House the "casa de putas", but whenever he's asked for a translation of the name, he translates it to "toilet" or "bathroom".^note The actual translation would literally be "house of whores/bitches", i.e. "whorehouse" or "brothel".
• Take Over the World: Whereas Techno's M.O. is anarchy and Wilbur's is peaceful rule over L'Manburg, Jschlatt and Dream have this as their motive. Dream justifies it in a meta sense, claiming that he did in fact own all of the server before L'Manburg's independence, and that it's not so much him trying to conquer the world as it is him trying to reclaim the parts of it he once owned... though it's in name only and the L'Manburgians were the first actual settlers of the land that would become the country.
• Take That, Audience!: Wilbur, after choosing to not press the button, calls out his chat for not caring about what happens to anyone in the story or their problems as long as they get to see destruction.
• Talking Is a Free Action: Techno invokes it by name to exchange some ominous words with Tommy at the end of the Green Festival on January 5th, 2021.
• The Team: Wilbur, Tommy, Eret, Fundy, and Tubbo formed one of these during the L'Manberg Revolution. It was broken up by Eret's betrayal, and the characters involved continued to drift from their archetypes as the story goes on.
• Tempting Fate:
  • Jschlatt does this seconds before Quackity's Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal and subsequent Heel–Face Turn. Mocking Quackity's indecisiveness and hesitation, Jschlatt claims that Quackity wouldn't even shoot him with the bow he's holding even though it'd one-shot him. Quackity immediately shoots Jschlatt with the bow, and it does indeed one-shot him.
  • A tragic example comes at the end of the Lockdown Era. During his stay in Pandora's Vault, Tommy continues to insist that Dream can't harm him and that he'll be leaving prison just fine. At the end of the era, Dream brutally beats Tommy to death.

• Ten Paces and Turn:
  • Dream and Tommy have a clearly Hamilton-inspired one of these over a bridge for L'Manburg's independence. The primary difference was that they used bows and arrows, not actual guns, since they don't exist in Minecraft.
  • How the problem of the bandits were dealt with in the Tales From the SMP episode "The Wild West", as all three were killed in "ten-step standoffs" at high noon. The only fight that didn't occur honorably was the one between Crops and Jack Kanoff, where the former shot at 6, not 10.
• There Are No Therapists: Sadly enough, this is the case for the Dream SMP, where almost every member has experienced some form of trauma and has to cope with it through their own means, healthy or not. Even Puffy, the one person who has decided to take up the role of therapist, has her own problems that effectively take her out of the role for the time being. This is ultimately deconstructed and Played for Drama, considering that the characters who are currently classified under the Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds tab most likely would not have turned out this way if they actually received therapy for the trauma that they had experienced.
• Theseus' Ship Paradox: As L'Manburg gets trashed time and time again and exchanges one president for another, more and more of it gets replaced until it's borderline unrecognizable. For the time being, it seemed to avert fully being replaced thanks to the L'Mantree, a remnant of L'Manburg from Wilbur's presidency that survived even when everything else was blown up or torn down. However, when the L'Mantree is burned down by Niki in the Doomsday War, the L'Manburgians realize that nothing is left of their original nation and that it's no longer worth salvaging its ruins.
• Third Line, Some Waiting:
  • The Blood Vines first emerged during the Exile arc, but since the main narrative of Season 2 mainly focused on Tommy's Trauma Conga Line at Dream's hands, along with the second rise and fall of L'Manburg, it was heavily overshadowed until Season 3, where they come into prominence as one of the Big Bads and affect more and more characters' storylines.
  • Quackity's character arc goes as far back as Season 1, but most overlooked his experiences in favour of "major players" of the time like Wilbur and Tommy. This was until his trauma and mental health eventually boil over and cause him to spiral into the Las Nevadas arc, dragging many others into the fold as well.
• This Is My Name on Foreign: Upon initiation into El Rapids, characters are often called by their names translated into Spanish to signify their membership in the faction. Those with names that don't directly translate across (mainly because of the use of Screen Names) usually have the title "Señor" tacked in front of their names. Mexican Dream also tended to address characters with their names in Spanish, even if they weren't part of El Rapids.
• Tome of Eldritch Lore: Two of them were in the possession of DreamXD before he dropped them to the mortal realms:
  • The most infamous one, the Revive-Book, was dropped on the Overworld a millennium before the events of the SMP, until it was later found by Schlatt. Schlatt later traded it to Dream in exchange for his allegiance during the Manburg-Pogtopia War, and we all know what happens to it from there on out.
  • The lesser-known sibling of the revive-book is the Book of Death. It apparently used to be in Dream's possession, or at least it was located in Dream's old base, but has apparently since been found by Sapnap. According to the Book, the simple act of writing a player/character's name in the book could kill them, but also at the cost of the death of its user.
• Trash the Set: On multiple occasions.
  • The nation of L'Manburg has seen a lot of damage.
    • During the L'Manburg Revolution, Dream planted TNT under both the area in front of Tommy's base and L'Manburg itself, blowing both to smithereens. Both of those were eventually rebuilt, but the Camarvan stayed in ruins for a long time, and Tommy only patched up the crater by his house by putting a single layer of dirt over it. Tubbo's house was also burnt down as a show of force, but was not rebuilt until more than half a year later.
    • At the end of the Manburg-Pogtopia War, Wilbur pushed the button and blew L'Manburg to smithereens again, helped by Dream — who placed even more TNT — and Techno — who unleashed two Withers onto his former allies. The crater remained, and New L'Manburg was built on top of it, with the crater itself eventually being turned into a lake.
    • The Doomsday War was a massive event in which L'Manburg was destroyed again, this time by twenty Withers from Technoblade and Philza, and many TNT-droppers from Dream. By the end of it, L'Manburg and the surrounding area more closely resemble the surface of the moon than an active city. Its inhabitants solemnly agree that there is no rebuilding this, and the nation of L'Manburg is disbanded entirely.
  • During Tommy's exile, he and Ghostbur built an encampment which they named Logstedshire. When Dream found out Tommy had been hiding items from him, he blew Logstedshire up as punishment, prompting Tommy to run away and ally himself with Technoblade.
• Trauma Conga Line: Most notably, Season 2 is one to Tommy, with the sheer amount of abuse (both physical and psychological) heaped onto him during his Exile and everything else that happened; but arguably, the events on the entire SMP overall puts most of the cast through the wringer in one way or another, which Ranboo lampshades in a moment of Black Comedy in the in-game chat.
  Ranboo: lmao this is the dreamsmp
  Ranboo: there is no compensation for trauma
  Ranboo: just more trauma
• Treasure Hunt Episode: The Tales From the SMP episode "The Beach Episode" is this, where several members of the server participate in "Captain Blockbeard's Treasure Hunt".
• Troll: Unlike some other Minecraft servers with a little more etiquette (e.g. Hermitcraft), people on the Dream SMP have no qualms stealing from, pranking, and annoying their server-mates in any way possible, making them anywhere from The Gadfly to this trope, with several people being more infamous for being trolls than others. For example, when Hannah (who was fairly new to the server at the time) decorated the area surrounding her house with cakes in preparation for her birthday, Foolish pointed out in the chat that it was practically an invitation for everyone else on the server to eat them, as Quackity had done multiple times already.
  FoolishG: These cakes will have soooooo many bites taken into them by the end of the week
• Tyrant Takes the Helm: Schlatt becomes this after winning the election, immediately exiling his greatest political opponents and cracking down on dissenters.
• Urban Ruins: A variant. All that remains of L'Manburg are a few scattered walls of houses and chunks of pathways, floating above a series of craters that run down to bedrock, with the obsidian grid used to drop TNT on it hovering over it. It's still clear that it was a city once, but it's been broken beyond repair.
• Unreliable Expositor: Played for Drama and deconstructed with Wilbur's letters to his dad, Philza. Wilbur lied to Phil in the letters he sent him about the Pogtopia situation because he didn't want to admit that he was suffering to his father, and didn't want him to worry. Instead of telling his father the truth, Wilbur said he won the election but gave the position of president to a trusted friend and left to make a new nation. Phil then believed, as a result of the misinformation from the letters, that Tubbo was the one committing atrocities as the head of government (rather than Schlatt) and thus devoted himself to destroying L'Manburg as an anarchist in the Doomsday War, thinking that government has corrupted good people like Tubbo.^note Refer to the Fridge Brilliance portion for more details.
• Unreliable Narrator:
  • Ranboo has really bad short-term memory, so he tries to write down what he does in his memory books, but he also has moments where he "blacks out" or possibly sleepwalks and does not remember what he does during those moments at all. If it isn't written down in his memory books, there is a good chance he will legitimately forget about it later on. This leads to things like Ranboo logging onto the server and suddenly having several unexplained stacks on netherrack and a nearly broken flint and steel in his chest the same day that Tommy finds out his house got griefed with a bunch of netherrack, (which he presumes to be Dream's fault). After Dream was put into prison, Ranboo can also be sometimes seen in the background of other people's streams, wandering around the server while presumably sleepwalking because he has no recollection of the interactions he has with people later on.
  • It's less obvious to the audience, but to a lesser extent, everyone else on the server can qualify because as characters, they may not always have all of the possible information available to them that the audience does or have their perception of how certain events went down be clouded by their personal bias.
• Vague Age: This applies to just about every character on the server. The ambiguous timeline makes it hard to judge when and how characters are aging, and the multiple contradictory statements by the content creators don't help. Generally, it's assumed everyone is about the same age as the streamer who plays them, except for characters like Phil, Foolish and Slime/Charlie, who are Really 700 Years Old, and Wilbur, who's been confirmed to be allegedly somewhere between 32 and 45 years old over the course of the SMP (due to the Year Inside, Hour Outside properties of the Afterlife).
• Vice President Who?: This is zig-zagged in L'Manburg, depending on the administration in question.
  • It is generally averted during the Soot administration, as Wilbur's VP, Tommy, helps L'Manburg grow by recruiting newcomers and building new structures, and takes part in several side events alongside his fellow L'Manburgians. During the election, Tommy does lots of campaigning by building signs and talking with members of the SMP, had a major role during the Presidential debate, and also secures endorsements for their party, POG2020.
  • During the Schlatt administration of Manburg, this is played straight as Quackity, who served as Schlatt's VP after pooling his votes (30%) with Schlatt's (16%), had little to no actual political power and his main role in the cabinet was to "have a fat ass". This is due to Schlatt's desire to consolidate power onto himself and himself alone, which Quackity lampshades before his resignation from his position and taking Schlatt's second canon life, when he has had enough of Schlatt's abuse and Control Freak tendencies.
  • Under the Tubbo administration, this is played with. Tommy initially helped rebuild L'Manburg after the Manburg-Pogtopia War, but later started to question Tubbo's leadership and suggest making more political change by banning several things (such as Americans and Australians) in the country, which Tubbo ended up vetoing. However, after Tommy gets exiled from the country under Dream's demands, Quackity takes his place and regains his role as VP, and averts this by wielding a lot more political power than he did in the previous cabinet, being able to assemble and unofficially lead the Butcher Army in an attempt to consolidate national power and eliminate threats to the state.
• Video-Game Lives: Clarified at the start of Season 2 (but retroactively applied to Season 1); everyone on the SMP has three lives and once all are gone, you die for good. However, only important plot-related deaths actually count as losing a life (like the deaths during the Final Control Room Massacre in L'Manburg's War for Independence) — any other deaths outside of the plot (fall damage, lava, accidental explosion damage, etc.) fall under Death Is Cheap. The only exceptions to this are Philza (who only ever had one life to begin with), BadBoyHalo (who has an infinite amount of canon lives as long as Skeppy remains alive), Jack Manifold (who lost all three of his canon lives before dragging himself out of Hell and regaining his lives), and Tommy and Wilbur (who were successfully revived by Dream after losing all three of their lives).
• Villain Has a Point:
  • Techno really did want to live in peace after the L'Manburg Revolution as he claimed, and he's not at all wrong when he points out that it was L'Manburg who sought out conflict with him rather than the other way around. His final attack on L'Manburg certainly wasn't unprovoked, that's for sure.
  • From the Doomsday War, Techno's accusation that Tommy only saw him as a tool for war also isn't unfounded. It doesn't help that the entire reason he was enlisted to join the SMP in the first place was because Wilbur and Tommy wanted his fighting skill to gain an edge against Jschlatt, not because Wilbur and Tommy wanted to have a genuine friend join the server. Tommy isn't able to provide a single piece of evidence to the contrary.
  • As cruel as Dream's "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Tubbo is, he's not far off when he says that Tubbo had no agency as L'Manburg's president, allowing everyone (from his own citizens to Dream himself) to dictate his every action, not to mention that the one act Tubbo did on his own, exiling Tommy, was perhaps the most disastrous move he could have done.
• Vitriolic Best Buds:
  • Tommy and Tubbo. While they rib on each other a lot, they consider themselves best friends.
  • Tommy also has this dynamic with Eryn. The two banter a lot but are still very close.
  • Sapnap and George similarly argue and hunt each other a lot, but at the end of the day, they care about each other — after all, they aren't considered members of the "Dream Team" for nothing, even if Dream turned out to be an Evil Former Friend to them on the server.
• The Walls Are Closing In: In the Tales episode "The Maze", the first puzzle has the walls of the puzzle-area start closing in on the participants halfway through, which half-acted as a motivator for the participants to hurry and finish the puzzle. This ends up killing Orion, though, as he was trapped in a cage in the middle of the puzzle-area, and the other participants either didn't know how to get him out or didn't care enough to do so.
• Walls of Tyranny:
  • Zig-zagged in the case of L'Manburg's original walls. The nation had blackstone walls meant for protection, but Schlatt interpreted them to be a symbol of restraint, and one of his first presidential decrees is to have them be torn down, expressing his expansionist views. Quackity also held distaste for the walls, but for different reasons — they represented the country excluding citizenship for non-Europeans like himself, but he didn't hate them enough to want them to be torn down like Schlatt did.
  • Played straight during the Exile Conflict in Season 2, Dream started to construct obsidian walls around L'Manburg and threatened to complete the walls if Tommy didn't receive a severe enough punishment for griefing George's house. However, when Tommy attempts to use the remains of Spirit against Dream, he takes down the obsidian walls and rebuilds them at an even greater height than before, threatening to wall in L'Manburg and cut them off from the rest of the world if the country didn't comply to his wish to have Tommy exiled.
• War for Fun and Profit: The Badlands' role in the Manburg-Pogtopia War is shaping up to be this. As they don't support either side, their current plan is to pick whichever side is inciting the most chaos at the moment, and then rush in and seize the power after both sides have been weakened.
• War Is Hell: A recurring theme surrounding L'Manburg, a nation built to be pacifistic and to protect its members from Dream's unfair rule, but forced to endure wars from the start to the end of its existence, as well as its residents.
  • Although L'Manburg seceded with the full intention of peaceful co-existence with the Greater SMP, Dream's reaction to what was essentially a micronation vibing by itself in a corner of the woods was to declare war on it due to his Control Freak nature. Before the war, five L'Manburgians (among them two teens) happily built their nation with no idea what was to come; by the time the war was over, one of them (not a teen) had turned traitor and the other four had all died at least once, with the PTSD to match, and the leader of the four would eventually end his last canon life for reasons heavily entwined with that trauma. To quote the ghost of said leader after his assisted suicide, who forgot everything unhappy that happened to him:
    Ghostbur: Alive-Wilbur, he wrote a declaration of independence, and then my memory goes blank and suddenly we're independent. And Wilbur looked very sad, but it's fine, he was swelling with pride.
  • In spite of the pacifistic values the nation was built on, L'Manburg met the most violent end a nation could have met — and not just war, it was a Curb-Stomp Battle led by the server's equivalent of the 1% that rained explosives on the place until it was nothing more than a gaping hole in the ground. This made most of its (former) members homeless and forced them to scatter and move away, leaving everyone distant from each other. About half of the primary living population of L'Manburg hit their Despair Event Horizon around the Doomsday War or relatively shortly after, leading them down increasingly dark paths without a support system to better handle their trauma — from attempting to murder teenagers with nuclear missiles to torture.^note Granted, the torture victim was one of the people that destroyed L'Manburg and later murdered a teenager brutally in cold blood, making it more of a case of Pay Evil unto Evil, but still.
• Wasteful Wishing: After Techno and Dream accidentally summon DreamXD while trapped in prison, DreamXD agrees to grant them one wish. While Dream is still parsing the fact that he can finally get out of prison by wishing for an exit, Techno uses up the wish by wishing for a bell.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist:
  • Techno genuinely believes that nothing good will come with authority and any form of government, and sees L'Manburg as nothing but a tyrant-run state (which he's not completely wrong about) that will only tear people apart, seeing how fighting for control over it has contributed to Wilbur's spiral in Pogtopia. Thus, he devotes himself to the ideology of freedom from government entirely. Phil later adopts this same mindset after the death of his son, Wilbur, and Techno's failed execution, though this is led on by Wilbur's misinformation about the situation on the server before he died.
  • Even with his spiral, Wilbur's primary goal was still to remove Jschlatt from power in Manburg. That said, his alleged method of doing so revolves around blowing up the nation itself simply to keep Jschlatt from having it. He also speaks of this trope when advising Quackity during the elections, in that one must be willing and able to use violence of any means, including extreme ones, to gain power to help others and truly do good on the server. Quackity also eventually gives in and embraces Wilbur's mentality after his months-long Trauma Conga Line, but swears to not make the same mistakes Wilbur did.
• Wham Episode: So many have occurred throughout the series that they have their own page.
• Wham Line: Similarly to Wham Episode above, there are many shocking lines throughout the story arcs that they require their own page.
• Wham Shot:
  • During the L'Manburg War for Independence, Wilbur defies Dream's ultimatum and declares that he'd rather die than betray his own cause, being unfazed by a block of TNT that Dream has threatened to explode. As Dream detonates the block of TNT, the L'Manburgians then see hundreds of blocks of TNT under the cracked surface of L'Manburg, a few of them primed from the initial blast, realizing too late that Dream wasn't just detonating one block as explosions erupt from the ground.
  • Wilbur finally presses the button with a bright grin on his face... which immediately drops once nothing happens.
  • From the Manburg-Pogtopia War:
    • Wilbur turning around in the button room to see Phil standing in the doorway.
    • Wilbur pressing the Button, followed soon after by an enormous explosion that completely decimates L'Manburg.
    • Techno standing across a crevice left by Wilbur's TNT, with several half-built Withers behind him.
    • Notably, the absence of something major serves as one. When Jschlatt dies of a heart attack and Wilbur has Philza kill him after L'Manburg's destruction, the one common thread is this: they don't come back. For even more wham, Wilbur ends his stream soon after he dies.
  • With the reveal that Tommy has the remains of Dream's first horse (a prized item of Dream's), it seems like L'Manburg has suddenly received leverage over Dream. Dream even begins taking down the obsidian box surrounding L'Manburg... and then he proceeds to not only rebuild the walls, but increase their height.
  • Technoblade is being confronted by Quackity as the latter is shouting how he'll put a pickaxe through his teeth. During Quackity's rant, from Technoblade's point of view, the screen suddenly glitches before he finds himself back at the Syndicate HQ, with Philza coming up to him and asking if he's okay.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • During the Doomsday War, Quackity calls out Niki in a private conversation for doing "nothing" while L'Manburg was being "exploded by Withers". Niki, in turn, explains that she believed the country to already be dead, and that she was unwilling to fight alongside Tommy, whom she thought of as a liar. This leads to Quackity persuading her to let go of her grudge to fight against Dream, but as seen by her eventual burning of the L'Mantree, it doesn't last.
    Quackity: Look at L'Manburg, it's getting exploded [and] you're just watching?!
  • In Season 3, the tables turn as Quackity gets called out by Foolish for deliberately letting him die at the Red Banquet. Quackity does admit that it was an unethical course of action later down the line, though.
    Foolish: You threw away my life for some kind of fucking sales pitch?
• Who's on First?:
  • When Tommy asks Ninja if he knows who Schlatt (then President of Manburg) is, Ninja assumes that it's some sort of slang.
  • Ranboo doesn't quite understand how pronouns in English work, so when Phil mentioned a "her" after finding an enchanted forest in the tundra, Ranboo assumed he was talking about someone named "Her".
• Wild Card:
  • Technoblade makes it immediately clear that he's this. He only joined the SMP because he thought Wilbur and Tommy were outmatched against Jschlatt — however, with Niki and Eret; Tubbo and Fundy; a conflicted Quackity, and even Dream supporting them, he now sees that it's Jschlatt that's outnumbered — and has outright considered supporting him simply to make things interesting. He ultimately ends up supporting nobody, helping to kill Jschlatt but immediately turning on Pogtopia when he's gone.
  • Dream has confessed that he's only out for himself. Though he sided with Pogtopia upon realizing the threat Jschlatt posed to Dream's own power, he soon defected to join Wilbur in the plot to destroy Manburg rather than reclaim it. And once Wilbur comes to his senses and relents, Dream decides to join Jschlatt instead, having been offered a deal favorable to his own rule^note (what exactly the deal was is initially unknown; Wilbur theorizes that Jschlatt offered Dream leadership within Manburg, but it's later revealed at the end of Season 2 to be the revive-book, a plot device for oncoming arcs). Except he then leaves Jschlatt for the wolves, siding with Pogtopia again… except he's not on their side either; he's actually helped lead to Manburg's direct destruction and is only siding with Pogtopia to avoid being on the losing side when the war ends. In short, trying to track which side Dream is on is pretty much futile.
  • Sapnap in Season 1. Officially, he's aligned with the Dream SMP, having followed Dream during the L'Manburg War of Independence. However, he's also bloodthirsty and power-hungry enough to strike out on his own when he wants to. Notably, he and his former boss clash during the Battle of the Lake, during which he makes a failed attempt at forming another faction to rival the Greater Dream SMP, Manburg, and Pogtopia. He eventually calms down a lot more at the end of the season, preferring to be more peaceful and diplomatic in solving problems.
  • Wilbur also becomes this after he is brought Back from the Dead, as he has given little to no indication of just what he plans to do after being revived.
• The Wild West: The Tales From the SMP episode "The Wild West" takes place in this setting.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: After winning the L'Manburg election, Schlatt goes absolutely mad with power. During his inauguration speech he declares himself Emperor, revokes the citizenship of Tommy and Wilbur and has them chased off, renames L'Manburg to Manburg, and orders the walls to be torn down so they can expand their borders.
• With Us or Against Us: The Eggpire's entire principle. While they do try and convince people who don't like the Egg to like it, they especially detest people who are neutral towards it, as it implies that the Egg cannot influence them.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds:
  • Wilbur Soot, especially during the Pogtopia arc, where he undergoes some major Sanity Slippage and plans to blow Manburg sky-high during the Manburg Festival, destroying everything and killing everyone inside, and eventually succeeds at destroying the country he created during the Manburg-Pogtopia War. At the same time, he also had his idealistic worldview shattered by Eret's betrayal during the War for Independence, causing him to abandon his mostly-pacifist beliefs, and L'Manburg ends up becoming a casualty in his donning of Jade-Colored Glasses as he believes that the values and beliefs he built the country on no longer exists. Oh, and the detonation of Manburg was meant to be a suicide attempt.
  • By the Las Nevadas arc, Quackity has become a ruthless Manipulative Bastard, but is also known to be a former Wide-Eyed Idealist who was driven off the deep end after a long Trauma Conga Line of being constantly made to feel unworthy and excluded, to the point that he reached his Despair Event Horizon and unofficially decided that if he was going down, so was everyone else. It's really telling in that this is how he chooses to follow in Wilbur's footsteps as well as being a Well-Intentioned Extremist.

• Xanatos Gambit: Dream's final ploy during the L'Manburg Civil War ends up as this, even if it wasn't intended to be. If Manburg manages to defeat Pogtopia? Dream is victorious and he doesn't even need to personally assassinate Jschlatt (who would die of a heart attack soon regardless of which side wins), eliminating two major threats to his rule. If Pogtopia wins instead? No worries, Dream can just feign surrender to avoid punishment, sit back as Jschlatt dies anyways, and wait for a suicidal Wilbur into pressing the button to destroy Manburg, accomplishing exactly what he wants anyways. The latter result is what ends up happening, and it works like a charm — the only thing that Dream doesn't account for is Techno's betrayal of Pogtopia, which arguably works out for Dream anyways (as it preoccupies L'Manburg with another enemy and ensures Dream goes untouched through the war's conclusion). As a result, Dream is just about the only major player of the war to end it in a better position than he started, with L'Manburg destroyed, two major political threats in Jschlatt and Wilbur Killed Off for Real, and Pogtopia preoccupied with rebuilding L'Manburg.
• Year Inside, Hour Outside: The Afterlife is subject to this — two days in the real world/Overworld is two months in the afterlife, and three and a half months outside is equivalent to nine years inside.
• You Monster!:
  • Tommy calls out on Eret after he reveals his defection to the Dream Team.
    Tommy: You BASTARD, Eret! You– we trusted you!
  • Eret does one himself when Fundy burns down the flag of L'Manburg during the Schlatt administration, and another during the Red Banquet when the Eggpire betrays the attendees' trust by luring them into a trap to kill them.
  • Tommy also calls Tubbo a monster after finding out about Technoblade's execution at Tubbo's hand (as while Quackity pulled the lever to the anvil, Tubbo ordered him to do so).
• Zerg Rush: Technoblade's Hound Army functions in this fashion. While not very powerful individually, the hounds can overwhelm any opponent when working as a unit.

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