Nightmare Fuel / Dream SMP: Season Two

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The Exile Arc

• The meeting with Dream goes south in a terrifying way when Tommy tries to blackmail Dream using the leather dropped by his dead horse, Spirit. Dream initially seems to give in, acting sullen and angry as he starts tearing down the wall around L'Manburg at Tommy's request, but then he stops, and starts building the wall even higher. When Tommy and Quackity tell him to stop, Dream jumps down and delivers perhaps the most terrifying speech he's ever delivered. For the first time in the server's history, Dream is genuinely pissed.
  Dream: Okay, listen, you fucked up this time.
  Tommy: (nervous laughter) What the fu– Dream, Dream, don't swear please...
  Dream: Nonononono. I don't give a FUCK about Spirit, okay?! I don't give a fuck about anything actually! I care about your discs. I care more about your discs than you do! That's the ONLY thing I care about on the server, actually! I don't care about Spirit, Spirit was my horse, died ages ago! I care about your discs, 'cause that's what gives me power over you and your friends, and EVERYBODY you care about! Because you care about your discs more than anyone else here, so if YOU ARE NOT EXILED from L'Manburg, I will build these walls until they reach the block limit. I will keep EVERYBODY inside, I will hire guards, Punz and Sapnap, to patrol all around the entire walls, keeping them inside. No trade, no one leaves, no armor, or they get slaughtered inside. DON'T TRY AND THREATEN ME! I don't CARE! I've lost ALL care for ANYTHING on this server!
  Tommy: Really?! So if I burn Spirit right now–
  Dream: BURN SPIRIT! RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME! RIGHT NOW!
  Tommy: Well, this is the only thing you've had attachment to this entire time! How do I know you're not fucking lying?!
  Dream: I have attachment to your discs.
  Tommy: Why would you care– (stammers) They're MY discs, why do you even care about them?!
  Dream: Nononono, Tommy, Tommy, they're my discs. I'll get them, I'll keep them, I'll put them in my ender chest and I'll keep them for the rest of the server.
  (Beat)
  Dream: Listen, Tubbo. You have three days. If you do not exile him in three days... I'll do what I said.
  Tommy: Well, wh... What does that entail? What the fuck do you mean?
  Dream: L'Manburg can be independent... But L'Manburg can't be free.
• While excavating his mob farm, Bad finds a red, fleshy... something buried underground. Bad, heavily unnerved, brings in Dream and Sam as backup, but neither of them know what it is. They leave, still unnerved, and head to Bad's house... but on the way there, they discover two more places where red, fleshy tendrils are bursting out of the ground when they definitely were not before. Not only that, over the course of the stream, the tendrils slowly grow, to the point where the original blob now covers a good portion of the corner of the mob farm.
  • As if that wasn't bad enough by itself, Bad becomes completely infatuated with the red growths, giving them gifts, talking and singing to them and even affectionately calling the original his baby. He also becomes angry and violent whenever someone tries to destroy parts of the tendrils, and generally behaves like he's possessed by them, especially since he was unnerved and a little disgusted by them earlier.
    • This affliction later on also spreads to Ant, who not only starts becoming affectionate towards the tendrils and hostile to others, but starts saying they need to spread it, calls it the Crimson, and even starts typing in Standard Galactic^note The language used in the Enchantment Table. Translated, the text is extremely unnerving.
      Ant: (in Galactic) the crimson spreads
      Ant: (in Galactic) sam join the crimson
• The effects that Dream's gaslighting and manipulation are having on Tommy are as heartbreaking as they are horrifying.
  • Tommy's overall physical and mental health take a massive nosedive. He has trouble sleeping, his hands tremble, he has a mild panic attack every time Dream logs on, he stops taking care of his appearance (ripped clothes, unkempt hair), he starts talking to mobs and inanimate objects in an attempt to stave off the loneliness, and he just generally acts depressed and desperate for any kind of human contact. Most concerningly, Tommy has shown to have become suicidal, with him staring into the lava lake below the Community Hub for a long time as if debating whether or not to jump, and occasionally just letting mobs attack him without fighting back.
  • His reaction to Dream destroying his armour is also extremely concerning. The first time, Tommy protested heavily, insulted Dream and only threw it on the floor when Dream hit him with an axe and threatened to kill him. However, after a few more times, Tommy did it without protesting at all, even lighting the TNT with minimal complaint when Dream asked him to. The day after that, Tommy threw down his armour without being prompted. Tommy is slowly being Conditioned to Accept Horror, to the point where he even thanks Dream for letting him keep his armour.
  • Perhaps the most horrifying part of Dream's brainwashing is that it's disturbingly realistic, to the point where some viewers who have gone through a similar experience report having to stop watching because it was too upsetting. Dream hasn't pulled out some magic mumbo-jumbo or Applied Phlebotinum to twist Tommy's mind; he has used actual psychological tactics to slowly chip away at Tommy's resolve, wearing him down with gaslighting, lies and abuse until Tommy finally starts believing that he's truly alone in the world, and that Dream is the only one who cares about him.
    • It is worth remembering here that Tommy was sixteen. He is one of the youngest members of the SMP (and was the youngest member at the time), and thus does not have the experience or emotional maturity to fight back against Dream's psychological abuse. He doesn't even notice that he's being manipulated, and when he does notice, he has no idea how he's even supposed to fight back against it.
• Skeppy, in an attempt to stop the Egg's influence, accidentally traps himself inside it. When Bad finally notices he's there and pulls him out, Skeppy's skin has turned bright red. More concerningly, Skeppy starts speaking in a very calm, monotone voice, saying how he feels amazing. Considering that a) he seems entirely unconcerned about his entire body turning bright red, and b) it's Skeppy, this is highly concerning.
  • Not to mention, the fact that Skeppy has stopped caring about anything other than the Egg, and that he keeps wanting to go back inside it. This is worse than what happened to Bad and Puffy, because the Egg has changed Skeppy's body, and there's no way of telling how this will affect him.
• Techno has spent a month in retirement, trying to swear off violence and ignoring the voices demanding blood... and then Tubbo, Ranboo, Quackity and Fundy threaten and imprison Phil, hold Techno's horse hostage, kidnap Techno himself, steal his items, and try to execute him with an anvil without even the smallest semblance of a trial. Techno, in response, decides to break his vow of peace, allies himself with Tommy^note who moved bases to under Techno's house after realising who Dream really is, and reveals that he has a massive vault with enough materials to make a whopping 55 Withers. The Butcher's Army has awoken the sleeping giant, and he is pissed.

The Vengeance Arc

• Technoblade's campaign against L'Manburg has now begun in earnest, and his opening volley is to stride directly into the middle of the city, spawn a wither and demand his gear back to help deal with it. Large chunks of the landscape are torn up as he leads the monster around until Ranboo gives up his weapons out of desperation. After this, Techno admits to Tommy that he is planning to completely destroy L'Manburg and convinces him to fully commit to the cause. Tommy's only caveat? That they get the discs back.
• Pandora's Vault. A massive prison built by Dream and Sam (who Dream commissioned to design the prison for 64 diamond blocks), made to be absolutely inescapable.
  • The sheer amount of precautions put in place to make sure that once someone is in, they can't get out. From a ten block thick wall of obsidian surrounding the entire place, with layers of water in-between to prevent Wither-griefing, to multiple Elder Guardians trapped under the floor to give everyone constant Mining Fatigue^note for clarification, that means that breaking a single piece of obsidian with a Netherite pickaxe will take nine hours, to layers of observers surrounding the cells to alert the guards if someone were to break a block, to the Ender Pearl Stasis Chambers^note A contraption that holds a thrown Ender Pearl in a bubble column until it is activated, instantly teleporting the person who threw the Pearl to the Stasis Chamber at the push of a button in the guard rooms, where guards can be fully kitted out in an instant in case of an emergency, to setting up beds in such a way that, if a prisoner were to die, they respawn right back in their cell, to sending text messages to the guards' real-life phones in the event of an attempted prison break. And those are only the things that have been shown on stream, there are countless more measures that nobody else knows about.
  • Dream's attitude towards the prison is genuinely scary. At first, he wanted it built to contain the most dangerous people on the server, and only if they tried to do anything that would threaten civilization... but now he seems to want to use it to imprison anyone who threatens his rule. In a conversation with Punz, Dream has said that he wants the Dream SMP to be "one united server" again, where "everybody follows the same rules", and there are "no countries". This implies that he considers everyone who is not part of his faction to be a rulebreaker, and that he might just seek to imprison everyone who isn't aligned with the Greater Dream SMP (which implies he will not only target powerful factions like L'Manburg, the Badlands, El Rapids, or the Arctic Anarchist Commune, but also small, harmless factions like Little Penis Land, Manifoldland, Drywaters, and Boomerville). Only such an extreme Control Freak would ever seek to imprison not just the big-impact factions, but also factions whose only crime is wanting to be independent.
    • This is further reinforced by the fact that the prison itself has twenty cells, big enough to house at least two-thirds of the server's entire population. Not only that, there is a solitary confinement unit at the heart of the prison, built specifically to house the most dangerous prisoners.
• The Egg situation has managed to get even worse. Eret and Bad go to the room where the Egg is being kept to look for gunpowder, and the Crimson has spread uncontrollably. It's now covering at least a third of the floor of the room, and a bunch of red tendrils are hanging from the ceiling. Both Bad and Eret are rightfully spooked by the speed of the growth and anxious about any potential containment breaches.
• Ranboo logs onto the server to do some decorating for the festival, only to realize that his memory book has gone missing. He then spends the next half-hour frantically running around trying to find it, slowly sinking deeper and deeper into an anxiety attack.
  Ranboo: Oh... shoot. 'Cause it shows I haven't been loyal, the book shows everything that I've been doing this entire time! How I gave Technoblade his armor back when all he did was just threatening me a little, it shows exactly where Techno's base is at all times, it shows that I know that Tommy's been alive this entire time! I... No one found it, no one found it. No one found it. ...right? [...] Oh, God... They told me: "No, you have to maintain– you have to maintain loyalty, you're not gonna betray us, right?" That's what they said, that's what they said to you! But no! You did it immediately! Why?! Why did you do it immediately?! Why– what– what was your thinking process when you IMMEDIATELY GAVE BACK THE ARMOR TO THE ONE PERSON THAT'S THE ENEMY OF THE ONE COUNTRY THAT'S GIVEN YOU A HOME?!
  • He eventually finds it in a chest inside his house, immediately taking it out and sighing in relief... before coming to a pretty horrifying conclusion.
    Ranboo: (to himself) ...you didn't put it there. I know you didn't put it there. You didn't put it there, you didn't keep it in that chest! You didn't keep it in that chest, that's not where you originally put it! [...] How could it have moved? There's no way that– how could it have moved?!
• While Tommy and Techno's interrogation of Connor was Played for Laughs, their interrogation of Fundy was decidedly not. They press Fundy for the Nether Star dropped by the Wither that Techno spawned earlier, information about the festival, and the location of Tommy's discs. While Techno backs off after getting the Nether Star, Tommy keeps pushing and pushing, becoming louder and more violent until even Techno starts telling him to back off. Even then, Tommy only stops once Fundy bursts into horrified tears, with Techno telling him he definitely went too far.
  • As they're walking back to the Nether Portal, Techno decides to tell Tommy his actual plan — to completely destroy L'Manburg. Tommy, after some deliberation, decides that destroying L'Manburg is worth it if it gets him his discs back, and formally joins Techno, even deliberating destroying the Community House just to get back at Dream. Tommy has decided he does not care about L'Manburg anymore, and is willing to become a terrorist, walking in Wilbur's footsteps, to get what he wants.
• After Tommy has a Heel Realization and chooses to rejoin Tubbo's side, Dream starts laughing. He proceeds to call Tubbo an idiot for ever believing Dream was on his side, reveals Ranboo to be a traitor, and announces his plans to completely nuke L'Manburg.
  Dream: When I'm saying "destroyed", I'm not talking about- We're gonna finish Wilbur's job. We're gonna destroy it all the way to bedrock.
  Techno: LET'S CHUNK ERROR THIS!
  • Even worse, Techno — in retaliation to what he sees as Tommy betraying him — chooses to join Dream, offering some of his Withers to aid Dream in this goal. We can't stress this enough, folks — the two most powerful players on the server have just declared war on pretty much everyone else, and they have enough resources to cause massive destruction. There's a reason why everyone's calling the following battle the Doomsday War.
    • After their return to Techno's base, Philza — who was building a nether wart farm — is informed of Tommy's side-switching and Dream joining their cause... And Phil is completely on board. Three of the most competent players on the entire server, against L'Manburg. Oh boy.
    • Remember Punz switching sides to work with L'Manberg? He is actually a spy secretly provide L'Manberg's crucial information to Dream which can easily foil any possible tactic L'Manburg comes up with.
• Techno and Phil go underground to retrieve Techno's hound army from beneath L'Manburg before Tommy can warn the others about said army's location. Though they successfully retrieve and hide the dogs, they run into a defenseless Fundy on the way out. Techno leaves a message in chat for him to run away. In other words, from Fundy's perspective, he's confronted with the scariest player on the server — who stares at him dead in the eyes and tells him this:
  Techno: (in-game chat) Run.
  • When Fundy does run, Techno follows. And he slaughters a helpless Fundy as he hides in a corner, hoping in vain that Techno doesn't spot him.
• After Tommy's speech at the Green Festival, Ranboo retreated into his panic room, where he suddenly started hearing Dream speak to him. Initially, it seemed like Dream was just messing with Ranboo, trying to get him to believe that he was the one to blow up the Community House... until the Wham Line, where it turns out that that wasn't Dream at all.
  Ranboo: But if I can't rely on the memory book, what can I rely on?
  Dream: I don't know. Not yourself. I'm not even real.
  • Somehow, the hallucinatory version of Dream sounds even creepier than the actual Dream. While the actual Dream speaks quite quickly, stumbles over his words often and uses a lot of emotional inflections, Fake Dream speaks in a slow, emotionless monotone, and rarely stumbles, eerily calm as he explains to Ranboo exactly how he betrayed everyone.
  • At first it seemed like Dream's voice was just a personification of Ranboo's insecurities. However, when Ranboo enters the panic room again to pick up his pet cat Enderchest, he hears Dream again, and some of the things he says imply that there might be more going on...
    Fake Dream: I'm here all the time, it's just that you never open your mind to me unless you're in the panic room. You don't let me talk unless you're in the panic room. You don't listen to me. Even if I scream, you don't listen, unless you're in this room.
    • Fake Dream insists that Ranboo gave Dream his memory book voluntarily, blew up the Community House, and helped supply the Anarchists with TNT to blow up L'Manburg. Ranboo insists he would never do that, and it seems like he's right... and then Fake Dream tells him to mine the wall. Ranboo does, and finds a chest with two pieces of TNT in it. The fact that nobody else even knows about the panic room, that Ranboo has mentioned multiple times that he sometimes wakes up in places he doesn't remember going to, and found his memory book in a chest he knows for a fact he didn't put it in, and that he instinctively knows which block to mine to uncover the chest, suggests that his words may be more true than Ranboo wants to admit.
  • After the discovery of the TNT chest, Ranboo has a panic attack, during which his screen goes black, there's an enderman-sound, and then we're greeted with this image, with a slowed-down version of "Fallen Down (Reprise)" playing over it.
• The total destruction of L'Manberg.
  • To say it was rather one-sided is a massive understatement. Dream had both Technoblade and Philza attack the country much earlier than expected, thus catching everyone off-guard and underprepared while he was up on the obsidian grid manning his TNT cannons. As Techno brings in a horde of wolves, it distracts them long enough to get the cannons ready and Phil in place for the Withers. Once the signal is raised, the place quickly turns to hell as the Wither horde are spawned in. The majority tries their damndest to fight back, but with the Withers, Dream carpet bombing the entire country, and Techno's attacks with his fireworks... the inhabitants could only watch in despair as what remains of their former country is just a giant, smoldering crater.
  • Doubles as Tear Jerker — how slow it is. When Wilbur destroyed L'Manburg the first time, the country was reduced to rubble in seconds, with Techno's Withers only coming in after everything was already gone. This time, the Withers come in first, and you can see the hope leave the L'Manburgians' eyes as their home is torn apart bit by bit over the course of about twenty minutes, and none of their efforts are able to stop it. And that's before Dream activates the TNT-cannons, carpet-bombing what was left down to bedrock.
  • After destroying L'Manburg, Dream tweets a video of himself singing "Bye L'Manburg", which he claims is a "tribute to WilburSoot and his amazing creation", but it's clear from the lyrics and the way he sings it that not only does he not care, he seems to have taken a sadistic glee in the action.

Disunion Arc

• After seeing that the Crimson currently covers the entire room it's contained in, Bad calls the Knights of the Round Table (himself, Puffy, Ant and Punz) to discuss what to do. However, instead of discussing ways to destroy or better contain it, Bad proposes that they help spread it, smothering the server with it while Bad and the rest of the Badlands try to figure out a way to destroy it. Then, they can swoop in like heroes, destroy the Crimson, and conquer all other factions, becoming one, unified empire. Ant is instantly on board, and Punz calls Bad insane, but is in after some coaxing. Puffy is rightfully horrified and refuses to join the Badlands in their Taking Over The World-plot, but helps spread the Crimson after a combination of the Crimson's influence and Bad's constant nagging persuades her to at least do that. One of the most dangerous entities on the server is currently loose and spreading fast, and because the sprouts were planted at the bottom of the L'Manburg Crater, they will likely not be discovered until it's too late...
  Bad: Once we have formed our perfect utopia, then we will have total control of the entire Dream SMP! And there will be peace, and happiness, and awesomeness, and everything will be great.
  • Bad realizes that Sam will likely not be on board with their plan, as he's incredibly disturbed by the Crimson. His solution? To force him into the room with the Egg without a hazmat-suit.
  • After Bad sends everyone on their way, he goes back to the Round Table... and starts gloating about how he put the Round Table right over the Egg on purpose, to ensure his allies would be affected by its influence. Then, he says he needs to take off his "disguise", logs off, then logs back in to show that the color has been sucked out of him. The parts of his skin that used to be red are now a grey-ish white, which is exactly what happens to any red objects that come in contact with the Egg. Bad was never released from the Crimson's influence, only masking to disguise where his allegiances truly lie, and now he's got allies, a plan, and the perfect strategy to ensure that the Crimson will spread.
    Bad: The Eggpire will conquer the entire SMP.
• In an effort to regain some control over his mind back, Ranboo confronts the voice in his head, calling it out for its lies. However, the voice — that still sounds exactly like Dream — insists it's not lying, and tries desperately to get Ranboo to remember where he was before he woke up on Doomsday. After some coaxing, Ranboo very vaguely remembers waking up before Doomsday and going to the Nether, but nothing after that. However, the voice insists that he met up with Dream in the Nether, and that Dream gave him something very important... something he got from Skeppy. Ranboo instantly bolts, runs back to his house and starts checking his chests, then tears up his lawn in a desperate attempt to find this item, because if he finds it, that would mean everything the voice said is true, meaning Ranboo did blow up the Community House, and did aid Dream in the destruction of L'Manburg. He's almost given up when he suddenly finds a chest buried underground, and after a lot of hesitation and begging for it not to be what he thinks it is, Ranboo opens the chest... to see one of Tommy's discs.
  • The fact that Ranboo did things that he not only doesn't remember, but that are so out of character for him that he doesn't even believe he could have done something like that without hard evidence, plus the fact that the voice claims Dream said he prefers "this state" of him, proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the cause of Ranboo's memory loss is much more sinister than what was earlier assumed. Either Ranboo has episodes of dissociation or psychosis so severe they cause him to commit horrific acts that he later doesn't remember... or there is something else in his brain.
• Tommy logs onto the server for the first time in a while... to find that his house looks like it got struck by a meteor. The roof is gone, the entire place is coated in netherrack, and everything is on fire. Most chilling of all, in the middle of it all is a chest, with a lodestone compass named "Your Discs" in it, and some very threatening signs on top.
  "Come see me Wednesday. You and Tubbo ALONE. If anyone else shows up the discs are gone forever."
  • From the nature of the message, one could assume it was sent by Dream. However, a later stream by Ranboo implies that that is not the case. Ranboo not only finds a note in one of his chests saying "Thanks :)", but his valuables chest suddenly holds six stacks of netherrack and a nearly broken flint and steel. On top of that, the disc Ranboo had has suddenly gone missing...
• The finale of Season 2 had some pretty horrifying moments.
  • The fight between Tommy, Tubbo and Dream seems fairly balanced. With Tommy and Tubbo's seamless teamwork and cooperation balancing out Dream's overpowered gear and raw skill, neither side quite gains the upper hand. However, after about five minutes of fighting, Dream starts to laugh, and reveals that he hasn't even used any potions yet, hasn't even really been trying. Once Dream does start giving it his all, he manages to split them up, and has Tubbo backed into a corner begging for his life within seconds.
  • Dream's collection room of various things of value that he wants to steal from people is mostly empty labeled item frames, and labeled fence posts and pens for pets. But notably, the thing of value Dream plans to steal from Badboyhalo isn't either of those things: it's a small hole in the wall, just big enough for a person to stand in, labeled "Skeppy". Dream planned on imprisoning Skeppy in his collection, with the stolen pets and items, just to torment Bad. Tommy is rightfully horrified.
  • After stripping Tommy and Tubbo from every means of defense, cutting off all escape routes and making sure they know they're completely at his mercy, Dream reveals his true plan: to kill Tubbo and lock Tommy in Pandora's Vault. Dream, the most powerful person on the server, fully planned to kill a seventeen year-old because he stopped being fun or useful, right in front of his sixteen year-old best friend, and then lock said best friend up in an inescapable prison, once again completely alone, free for Dream to toy with all he wants, without the possibility of escape or rescue. If Punz and the others hadn't shown up right when they did...
  • The conversation with Wilbur at the bench is mostly heartwarming... until Tommy mentions the fact that Dream can bring Wilbur back to life. Wilbur is horrified at the realization that the only reason they let Dream live was because they wanted him back, not just because he doesn't want to be revived, but because there's the possibility that Dream will bring Schlatt back as well. Wilbur then starts to fade out as the planes of the dead and the living start to separate again, while screaming "WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!" at the top of his lungs.

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