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Come here, George!note 

"This video, I try to speedrun and beat Minecraft while five hunters try to stop me. If I die once, I lose. If I kill the Ender Dragon, I win. This is... Minecraft Manhunt."
— The intro to the now-famous Minecraft Manhunt series

Dream (real name: Clayton "Clay" Huff) is a YouTuber and streamer primarily known for:

  • His Minecraft content (largely comprising challenge videos and speedrunningnote )
  • His anonymity (only sharing his voice, with his name semi-confirmed but his adult face not known until October 2nd, 2022)
  • Being one of the fastest-growing creators in modern YouTube history.

He had a few viral hits in late 2019 but wouldn't truly strike it big until December of that year, when he released a video called "Beating Minecraft, But My Friend Tries To Stop Me...", a video he also dubbed "Minecraft Manhunt", wherein Dream tries to speedrun Minecraft all the way up to killing the Ender Dragon before the designated hunter, his friend GeorgeNotFound, kills him once. The video was followed by a rematch between the two. Although Dream didn't plan on making more beyond the pair, they quickly became massive hits, eclipsing his prior hits in a fraction of the time, and setting him on a path to a meteoric rise in popularity.

Dream and his friends were propelled to massive Internet fame through this series, with Dream himself ending up at over 14.5 million subscribers within a yearnote . Currently, he sits at over 25 million subscribers, and between his prominence in the Minecraft community and YouTube's trending and recommendations, it's far easier to find a creator who hasn't at least heard of him at this point. In short, Dream went from an effective nobody to a mainstream name in mere months, and his growth is among the fastest YouTube has ever seen.

Dream's largest controversy as of writing occurred in December 2020, when he was accused of cheating in a livestreamed Minecraft 1.16 speedrun. Claims were specifically made that he modified the game to increase bartering rates for ender pearls and drop rates for blaze rods, increasing his chance of obtaining both and thus cutting down the time needed to beat the game. A mathematical analysis of his streams showed that the probability of these rates occurring normally was 1 in 7.5 trillion. Dream enlisted an astrophysicist to argue against this conclusion, but their own math resulted in odds of 1 in 10 million (later revised to 1 in 100 million). Speedrun.com's moderators have stood by their judgment, invalidating his runs and banning him from submitting further runs. Having long accepted the decision, Dream eventually admitted on May 30, 2021 via Pastebin that he did modify the game to increase the item probabilities, although he claimed that he never intended to use the modified game for anything other than casual play with friends (essentially, he forgot to turn off the mods before doing the speedrun, cheating by accident), having also apologized to Speedrun.com's mods for the problems he caused.

In 2021, Dream began releasing music; as of now, his discography currently consists of three songs ("Roadtrip", "Mask", and "Change My Clothes", the lattermost with Alec Benjamin) and an EP titled To Whoever Wants to Hear.

Dream also has a very popular SMP server with dozens of members, including every major Manhunt participant as well as fellow YouTubers Skeppy, WilburSoot, TommyInnit, and TheEret. The server is known for its improvised roleplay, which at least one news outlet has compared to a Machiavellian political drama.

Apart from his main channel, Dream has several side channels: DreamXD (which contains extra footage of his main channel videos), Dream Team (which he shares with close friends GeorgeNotFound and Sapnap), Dream Shorts (which contains short skits), Dream Music (which contains official lyric and music videos for his songs), a channel dedicated exclusively to Manhunt, and Dream Tech (which contains videos about technology). Tropes specific to Dream Shorts have their own page.

    open/close all folders 

    Manhunt Series 

These are Manhunt videos considered part of the "core series," introducing people and concepts that become a core part of Manhunt.

    Hitmen Series 

A spinoff of the "core series" where a Survivor must hold out against several Hitmen for several minutes until time runs out. The exact time limit changes from video to video, and later videos have built-in grace periods.

  • "Minecraft Survivalist VS 3 Hitmen" (Dream VS George, Sapnap, and Bad)note —Winner: Dream survived the full hour after a close match.

  • "Minecraft Survivor VS 3 Hitmen" (Dream VS George, Sapnap, and Bad)note —Winner: After a particularly tense match, Dream manages to hold out for the full 90 minutes.

    Special Manhunts 

These are Manhunt videos with special guests or gimmicks, sometimes both.

  • "Minecraft Speedrunner VS Assassin" (Dream VS George)note —Winner: George, who was the Assassin, won.

  • "Minecraft Speedrunner VS Hunter" (Dream VS George)note —Winner: Dream won as the hunter instead of the hunted.

  • "Minecraft Speedrunner VS Assassin ft. Notch" (Dream VS Notch and George)note —Winner: Dream killed Notch while they were in the Nether.

  • "Minecraft Speedrunner VS Assassin (Again)" (Dream VS George)note —Winner: George won this round, being the Assassin in this video.

  • "Minecraft, But The Mobs Are Controlled By A Player..." (Dream VS George)note —Winner: George, who controlled the malevolent mobs, won against Dream in this video.

  • "2 Minecraft Speedrunners VS Terminator" (Dream and George VS OoogaBoooga/AI, not officially listed as a Manhunt but the core premise is the same)note —Winner: The OoogaBoooga/AI robot character won.

  • "Minecraft Speedrunner VS Hunter LIVE" (Dream VS George)note —Winner: Tie (both players won one round apiece as the hunter)

  • "3 Minecraft Speedrunners VS Hunter ft. MrBeast" (Dream VS Jimmy, Karl, and Chandler)note —Winner: Dream won the round against the MrBeast trio.

  • "Minecraft Speedrunner VS PRO" (Dream VS IlluminaHD)note —Winner: Tie (both players won one round apiece as the hunter)

  • "Minecraft Speedrunner VS 2 Assassins" (Dream VS George and Sapnap)note —Winner: The Assassins won, as George used a Nether Portal link-up trick.

  • "Minecraft Speedrunner VS $1,000,000 MrBeast Challenge" (Dream vs. George, Sapnap, and Bad, ft. Jimmy)note 

    Other Competitions 

  • Any competition between Dream and his friends that isn't Manhunt.

    • "Minecraft Death Swap" (Dream VS George)note —Winner: Dream won by turning George's Nether trap around on him with nothing but an enchanted golden apple.

    • "Minecraft Death Swap 2" (Dream VS George)note —Winner: Dream won again, this time using gravel to suffocate George.

    • "Minecraft Block Shuffle" (Dream VS George)note —Winner: Dream won after George failed to craft and stand on a jukebox.

    • "Minecraft Ultimate Tag..." (Dream VS George)note  —Winner: George won the most rounds in this video, ending when George tags Dream for the last time.

    • "Minecraft Death Shuffle..." (Dream VS George)note  —Winner: Dream won after George is required to die to a Pillager's crossbow, which the latter failed because he couldn't find a Pillager outpost in time.

Friendly reminder to editors that all of these videos are on Dream's channel only. Any Manhunts or competitions hosted on George's channel (as he also posts Manhunts and competition videos) should go on his TV Tropes page.


Tropes used in Dream's Minecraft videos:

    Tropes A-M 
  • Abandoned Catchphrase: In one of the Minecraft Manhunts, the hunters want Dream to "get memed" (basically "die"). The hunters don't use this term anymore.
    • It seems to have come back as of the "4 Hunters Rematch" video, though.
  • Accidental Misnaming: Most everyone calls other players by each others' names by mistake, but most notably Sapnap:
    • Justified in the "3 Hunters" video, where Bad repeatedly refers to Sapnap as "Pandas".
    • During a challenge with Dream and George, Dream stumbles on words and calls Sapnap "Snapmap", which he does not appreciate.
    • During the Random Item Challenge, Dream shouts "OH GEORGE!!!" while chasing Sapnap, which he angrily corrects.
  • Aerith and Bob: George and Sam are probably the only people in Dream's videos that have normal names, even though Dream is a common word in the English language. As for the others, it's up to you whether Bad, Sapnap, or Ant are normal names.
  • Ain't Too Proud to Beg: Both Dream and the hunters are not above pleading and bargaining for their lives when they're put on the run.
  • all lowercase letters: in his youtube profile picture (shown at the top of this page), "dream" is uncapitalized.
  • All There in the Manual: Dream said that sometimes, he and his friends have to record several Manhunts before they find one suitable for a video, as he had many times been cornered and killed before even getting gear—and it wouldn't exactly be entertaining for the audience if a Manhunt video was just three minutes long. As such, there's a grace period during the beginning of each Manhunt where the group restarts if Dream diesnote . However, to incentivize the hunters to actually try and kill him during this grace period rather than just letet him go, the hunters are financially rewarded for every time they manage to kill him and force a restart.
    • Notably, both sides are not above exploiting said grace period. Dream has revealed that he's much more likely to take risks at the start of the Manhunts because of said grace period. The hunters, meanwhile, are most likely to just cut their losses and prepare for the long game if Dream becomes too unkillable, as even if they succeed it'll just be redone.
    • In Dream's analysis video on the "4 Hunters Rematch" video, Dream's Nether roof trap actually working wasn't because of Dream just getting lucky that none of the hunters had a Flint & Steel despite George having one earlier, which many critics accused Dream of being unable to truly know. In actuality, a cut clip from before the trap reveals that George outright says his Flint & Steel broke while using it, and Dream only decided to use the trap upon learning this, correctly predicting that none of the other hunters had one of their own based on the previous encounters with the hunters, where only George seemed to use one.
  • Alone with the Psycho: Unfortunately for the hunters, it's not them invoking this trope but Dream. Whenever Dream catches the hunter off-guard (in earlier Manhunts) or isolates a hunter by themselves (in later ones), this trope comes into full effect.
    • One of the best instances of this is during the second Manhunt, after Dream breaks the bed George set up in the stronghold. George is reduced to running away as far from Dream as he can, and is obviously terrified throughout the ensuing chase.
      George: You're freaking me out. You actually are freaking me out. I'm scared.
    • In "Minecraft Speedrunner VS 3 Hunters", Dream drinks a Strength potion and gives chase to the hunters, leading Sapnap to cry out for help.
      Sapnap: Help me, guys! Don't leave me alone with this psychopath!
    • In the Nether, in "Minecraft Speedrunner VS 3 Hunters FINALE REMATCH," Bad is riding a Strider across the lava. He's promptly cornered by Dream, who doesn't try to kill Bad but rather his Strider, sending Bad careening into the lava.
      Bad: Guys, I'm alone with him, he's shooting me!
    • In the "4 Hunters Rematch" video, after Dream traps the hunters in the Nether, George suffers this from his own side after Bad is killed to find a way out and Ant is killed by a bloodthirsty and impatient Sapnap (not helping matters is that immediately after, Sapnap declares George to be next).
    • In the "4 Hunters Grand Finale" video, George is left in the overworld as the hunters wait in the stronghold, and he's quickly left crying for help as Dream emerges and attacks him.
  • Alpha Strike: In the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video, After the three hunters fortify the End, Dream sets up his TNT to go through the portal, the first ones being set to explode a split second after being teleported. The attack causes a Total Party Kill.
    • Happens again in the "4 Hunters Grand Finale" video, as Dream uses TNT to blow up half the stronghold before launching a volley of fireworks at the hunters.
  • And Now for Someone Completely Different:
  • The Anticipator: The hunters can track Dream wherever he goes and don't need to waste time making progress toward killing the Ender Dragon, meaning they will always catch up with him sooner or later. Dream often exploits this upon reaching a bottleneck such as the Nether or End Portal, using his lead to build traps and give himself a bigger head start on the other side. These traps are often so effective that the hunters literally have no idea what hit them.
    • In the last 1v1 against George, Dream does it twice. First, after making a Nether portal in a village, he gets the Nether advancement before going back and hiding under a house to wait for George, easily surprising and killing him upon arrival due to lack of substantial food. Second, Dream builds a large lava pit in the End portal room, positioning himself on a single block over it to lure George and making the ceiling out of stone bricks so George thinks he's found a normal part of the stronghold. Even with a bucket of water, George doesn't last long.
    • In the "2 Hunters" video, Dream makes a Nether portal, enters to get the advancement signifying doing so, and returns, hiding in a tunnel and leaving lava out for George and Sapnap. When they arrive, George burns to death and Sapnap tries to run down Dream's tunnel, only to be cornered and killed.
    • In the first "3 Hunters" video, Dream buries his Nether portal in Netherrack, leaving behind a tunnel leading to a chamber with a bed in it. When the hunters arrive and follow the tunnel, Dream explodes the bed, resulting in a Total Party Kill.
    • In the "3 Hunters FINALE" video, Dream crafts an End Crystal and sets it up in the stronghold. Once the hunters catch up to him, he runs past it, then turns around and blows it up with an arrow for another Total Party Kill.
    • In the "3 Hunters GRAND FINALE", the roles are reversed as the Hunters enter the End before Dream and create a trap for him, consisting of walls and a roof to stop him pearling away and having three bows trained on the spawn platform. Dream is able to defeat them all the same by dropping primed TNT through the portal first, blowing out their walls and floor and sending all three falling into the void.
    • In the "4 Hunters REMATCH", Dream's Nether portal spawns underground, so he mines out a convoluted maze to disorient the Hunters, who end up Cutting the Knot and destroy the maze with bed explosions, although Dream finds a way to take advantage of the ensuing chaos.
  • Anti-Climax: Some of Dream's Minecraft Manhunt videos end like this.
    • At the end of "Minecraft Speedrunner VS 3 Hunters FINALE," after Sapnap and George have been defeated, Bad comes out of nowhere and kills Dream.
    • In "Minecraft Speedrunner VS Hunter LIVE" (14:03), Dream's run abruptly ends when he jumps into a ravine only to fall to his death, since a piece of cobblestone off-screen had redirected the Soft Water stream he was aiming for.
    • In the extra scenes video for the "4 Hunters" video, they decide to try another Manhunt with Bad speedrunning instead of Dream. After a long chase, Bad actually manages to escape with a dolphin… only to drown seconds later.
  • Anti-Climax Boss: Invoked. Dream knows that the Ender Dragon isn't a threat to him unless he mistimes his water placements, and will likely go down in a minute (he is a speedrunner and knows the best way to kill it). With that in mind, the climax of the videos, and what typically takes up the majority of the runtime in the End, is the final fights with the hunters, who have always managed to make their way to the End as well. These fights are typically where Dream employs one of his backup strategies and often where the most iconic moments in Manhunt occur, while the dragon is always an afterthought—of every one of Dream's losses, only one of them is from the dragon itself,note  and the dragon has been reduced to being slain in mere seconds as the fights between Dream and the hunters become longer and better.
    • The one time the Ender Dragon is the main focus of the fight is the second Manhunt video. George decides that if he kills the Ender Dragon instead of Dream, he wins, as the goal is for Dream to kill it. The fight goes from Dream trying to kill George so he can quickly finish off the dragon to Dream trying to kill the dragon before George can—and it gets pretty damn close.
    • In the "4 Hunters" video, this is finally averted. It looks like it's going to end like yet another Ender Dragon fight, but the hunters arrive seconds before Dream can kill the dragon and heal it using pre-crafted End Crystals, forcing Dream to simultaneously take out the dragon while killing the hunters. And at the end, it's the dragon's breath attack that lets Sapnap get close enough to Dream for the finishing blow. However, Dream does end up killing the dragon within a couple seconds of dying thanks to having ignited TNT, resulting in a rather confusing ending that leaves all five players arguing over who won).
      • And it's back to being played straight in the "4 Hunters Rematch" video, as the Ender Dragon goes down without a fight. The hardest part of the End was Dream trying to sneak past the hunters to even reach the dragon—but once he did, the fight was basically over.
        Sapnap: Did you just one-cycle the dragon?!?!
    • Subverted with the hunters in the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video. The climax is entirely non-action based, with the conflict stemming from the hunters reaching the End first and laying out a nigh-inescapable death trap. The "fight" itself revolves around Dream trying to circumvent the trap entirely or even destroy it. However, while the fight is lacking in action, it is considered one of the best endings of the series due to the sheer tension as well as exactly how Dream cheats certain death this time. A similar case comes with the "4 Hunters Grand Finale" video—there's no final fight with the hunters because Dream annihilates them beforehand, but the method Dream uses to do that is more than climactic enough to compensate.
  • Armor-Piercing Attack:
    • During the finale of 4 Hunters FINALE REMATCH, Ant uses splash potions of harming against Dream. Since the Instant Damage effect ignores armor and is only mitigated by Protection enchantments, Ant was able to kill Dream (who had over half his health remaining, with full iron armor but no enchantments) with a single clean direct hit.
    • Prior to then, Dream's explosive tactics like beds and End Crystals are more than capable of one-shotting a hunter despite them more than likely wearing armor.
    • In the "4 Hunters Grand Finale" video, the firework-loaded crossbows make short work of the hunters despite all of them being clad in iron armor.
  • Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: In one stream highlights video cut together by Dream (NSFW language warning), the Dream Team spoofs C.O.P.P.A. censorship on Youtube with fake "NOT for kids" warnings. Dream swears loudly at children and shows them (Google image search) pictures of blood and Hitler, Sapnap yells at them about his (fake) bankruptcy, divorce, and taxes... and George just tells the kids that there's cooties in the video and they should leave.
  • Assassin Outclassin': Dream is the master of this during Minecraft Manhunt. Even as the hunters gain numbers (starting with three and later four and five), Dream will find some way to absolutely humiliate them.
  • Assassination Attempt: In one of his videos, the goal is to kill Notch, the creator of Minecraft, while George guides and defends him.
  • Attack! Attack... Retreat! Retreat!: Has a trend of occurring in the Manhunts.
    • The most obvious example is that time where the 3 hunters chase Dream, only to see him drinking a potion (including the famous Fire Resistance potion gambit), then immediately run away, due to the absurd damage output of the potion drinker (who is able to easily punch through iron armor).
    • Another example is the beginning in "Minecraft Speedrunner VS 3 Hunters FINALE REMATCH.", where the usual process of Dream running away with no gear ends with him finding a ruined portal chest and taking out a golden sword, causing the hunters to panic and run.
  • Awesome, but Impractical:
    • In the "4 Hunters Rematch" video, the hunters use beds to destroy Dream's Nether maze, allowing them to blow up any hiding spot Dream might take. While an awesome approach to Dream's trickery, beds are extremely dangerous in close quarters. Eventually, their last bed ends up killing Sapnap and leaving the other hunters burning and on next-to-no health, letting Dream easily pick them off.
    • In the "4 Hunters Finale Rematch" video, Dream and Sapnap both get horses and get into a jousting match. While badass on paper, the Minecraft gameplay engine is not very well-suited to mounted combat, leading both of them to dismount, kill each others' horses (to negate the travel speed advantage), and resort to on-foot Pv P.
  • Backing Away Slowly: This is how Dream starts the Manhunt in "Minecraft Speedrunner VS 3 Hunters FINALE REMATCH."
  • Badass Boast:
    • The idea of Dream hunting down a team of George, Sapnap, & Bad is floated in the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" bonus video—Dream would have to kill all three to win. His response? "That would be over in like ten seconds. I dunno about that." And when Bad asks if he doesn't think he can do it, Dream doubles down and calmly says "I could easily do it."
    • From the MrBeast Manhunt special episode:
      MrBeast: You wanna wager some money?
      Dream: I don't—I don't know, I'd feel bad for taking your money.
    • From "Speedrunner VS 4 Hunters Rematch":
      BadBoyHalo: So then, what else could he have gotten that could kill us? Is there anything that he could have?
      Dream: One thing: Confidence.
  • Batman Gambit: As Dream explains in his analysis videos, he frequently predicts how the hunters are going to act when faced with something and makes a split-second decision to exploit it.
    • Probably the best example is him bluffing everyone into thinking he drank a Strength potion and charging three people head on with 1 HP. Normally this would be suicide, but since they've all been wiped out by something similar before and they're just that afraid of him, this works perfectly and they immediately run.
    • Another example comes from the 1v4 rematch, where Dream exploits the hunters' natural instincts to chase him in order to trap them in the Nether, having glitched above the bedrock ceiling and blowing up the portal back with TNT as he enters. The hunters are trapped in the Nether with no way to relight the portal and must abandon their overpowered armor by committing suicide in order to even have a chance at winning.
      • To expand on this, according to Dream from his analysis video, he got this idea from overhearing one of the hunters say that their flint and steel broke. He also didn't hear any of the other hunters say anything about using one the whole time, so he jumped off that assumption into setting off this trap. If any of the hunters actually did have a flint and steel the trap wouldn't have worked. Batman Gambit indeed.
    • Dream ends up on the receiving end of one of these in the "3 Hunters" video. Bad is sent to the End when Dream activates the portal while he was within the frame at the beginning of his climactic fight with the hunters. While he dies not long after, he's first able to builds a lava trap over the End spawn, predicting Dream to just waltz in if George and Sapnap die. When Dream hops through, he's caught completely off-guard.
    • During the 4 Hunters Finale, Dream brews Invisibility potions while in the Nether. Meanwhile, the Hunters have acquired full diamond armor with Protection enchantments. Dream chugs one of his Invisibility potions as they're taunting him over it and slips through their base after getting a good look; then, once he's safely in the overworld, he makes a remark about their base that convinces them he's right there. It takes a while before they think to use the compass and realize he's escaped the Nether.
    • During the first Hitmen video, Dream collects a lot of leaves and, after towering up, bridges out using them. This turns out to be a trap all along when George and Sapnap follow him up and inch their way closer using their shields, allowing Dream to swipe the platform out from under them using his shears.
      George: He spleefed me! He spleefed me!
  • Battle Amongst the Flames: Pretty much any Nether fight in the series is this, but a notable non-Nether instance is one of the final few battles in the "4 Hunters Finale Rematch" video. In said video, Dream and Sapnap are trapped in a lava lake, both having drunk fire resistance potions. The remaining hunters seal the two inside by turning the top layer of water into obsidian, dooming Dream to die when his potion runs out. The fight has Dream trying to fight off Sapnap while finding a way to escape the lava, which he manages when he digs underground and creates a small pocket of air.
  • Better to Die than Be Killed: During a 1v3 Minecraft Manhunt, this trope is what the hunters thought happened when Dream leapt into a lava lake in the Nether. What actually happened was Dream was drinking a Fire Resistance potion during his fall. The funny thing is, Bad actually jumped in after him, dying soon after as he and the other hunters debate what just happened.
  • Big Bad Duumvirate:
  • Big "NO!": Any of the hunters (often George) say this when Dream manages to kill any one of them.
    • In the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video, when Dream was in the Nether fortress, Dream reacted this way when he found out that the hunters broke the Blaze spawners.
  • Big "OMG!": Dream frequently says this whenever the hunters manage to force him to run.
  • Big, Stupid Doodoo-Head: There are often many childish insults thrown around.
  • Big "WHAT?!":
  • Big "YES!": Dream whenever he defeats the Ender Dragon at the end of his videos, or gets a huge victory against the hunters. Similarly, the hunters will do this if they beat Dream.
    • Perhaps the two biggest are at the end of the two Grand Finale videos. The "4 Hunters Grand Finale" in particular has him give one so loud that it sounds like his voice is cracking.
  • Blood Knight:
    • Sapnap to a T. While the rest of the hunters are more matter-of-fact in terms of hunting Dream, Sapnap seems to relish the fight. Notably, when Dream traps the hunters in such a way that forces them to either wait for outside rescue or turn on each other to respawn, Sapnap gets impatient waiting for the Boring, but Practical approach and immediately turns on Ant, being much more okay with this than he should be. He's also enthusiastic about jumping to the violent situation in other situations too, like Minecraft Bed Wars.
      Dream: (calmly) We need to... harvest their goods, and murder their families.
      Sapnap: There's no love in war!
      Dream: We need to poison their goods- poison their goods.
      Sapnap: (enthusiastically) GENOCIDE!
    • Dream also qualifies. The instant he turns the tables on the hunters he becomes an outright maniac, chasing the hunters with sadistic glee. He's (sometimes) depicted as an Ax-Crazy psychotic killer for a reason.
  • Blown Across the Room: In the "4 Hunters Finale", Dream manages to get his hands on a bow enchanted with Punch, giving it massive knockback. It's one of the crucial items of that Manhunt, letting him win a tense standoff with George in the Nether, and making it much harder to reach him at the top of his pillar in the End, greatly contributing to his victory.
  • Booby Trap: In 5 Hunters Rematch. Sam made a TNT tripwire trap near the portal, but Dream manages to spot the wires and disarm the TNT below and use it against the hunters.
  • Book Ends:
    OH GEORGE! We're gonna end this how it started: me and you, buddy!
  • Born Lucky: Even Dream admits that sometimes he can't believe how often helpful resources appear at the right time in the middle of a Manhunt, but swears it's all real. One of the most infamous examples is the MLG horse, a horse that happened to be near where he was jumping away from a sky-high Nether portal ambush, letting him break his fall and escape on the horse's back (though even in this example, it's still a combination of luck and Dream's own intelligence, as he's able to drop his sword in midair fast enough to land on the horse, which otherwise wouldn't allow him to mount).
  • Borrowed Catchphrase: Dream frequently uses BadBoyHalo's Unusual Euphemism catchphrase "Muffin".
  • Bow and Sword in Accord: Dream uses both a sword and a bow and arrow to use against the hunters. He uses the bow for far-range attacks and/or hitting the hunters many times when he's being chased.
  • Bowdlerise: On Twitter, Dream released a short clip of a tense moment from the "5 Hunters Rematch", which revealed that for the YouTube video he had edited out a muttered f-word when he almost fell from a bridge. In the same video, he also clearly removed an instance of Awesamdude saying "ass" while he was angry at Bad.
    • For the second Hitmen video, Dream mutes an instance of George yelling "Fuck off!" at him.
  • Brandishment Bluff: Dream will often chase after his pursuers when he's as low as half a heart, scaring them into backing away when they could easily kill him.
  • Buffy Speak: Bad calls the Striders (the animals in the Nether that can walk on lava) "little things."
  • The Bus Came Back: For a while, George was the one and only hunter. Dream did special one-off Manhunt episodes with Sapnap and Bad, but they hadn't appeared for a while. Eventually, however, Sapnap was brought back as a second hunter alongside George, and when they decided a third was needed Bad came back as well. Just like Dream and George, Sapnap and Bad are now mainstays in the Manhunt series.
    • Antfrost, the fourth hunter of the series, first appeared on Dream's channel in a video called "Last to Leave Circle Wins $1,000," having been one of the two winners. He didn't appear again for just about a year until his appearance in the first "4 Hunters" video, but now he's a mainstay.
  • Butt-Monkey: Of the four hunters, it was originally Sapnap, who typically found the most humiliating ways to die (and often died the most). However, Sapnap eventually Took a Level in Badass, becoming much more competent and aware (typically not falling for Dream's traps unless everyone else does as well). In the recent Manhunts it's now George who tends to fall for Dream's traps the most—and more often than not it's also him who tends to make the most rookie mistakes among the hunters (especially notable given he's the hunter with the most experience).
    • Exaggerated in the "4 Hunters Finale" video, with George being squished to death in an entity limit trap without Dream even turning to look at him. Bad even lampshades this in the analysis, lamenting the loss of George's armor (which contributed to Dream's win by allowing him to survive several would-be fatal blows during the final fight) and claiming he wouldn't have died to the same trap.
    • George reaches peak Butt-Monkey status since "4 Hunters vs Speedrunner" with his carelessness making him to attract all the Endermen in the vicinity. Sapnap even lampshades this in "5 Hunters vs Speedrunner".
      BadBoyHalo: Remember, don't look at the Endermen.
      Sapnap: That goes for George especially.
      George: I'm getting hit by this stupid Enderman!
  • Buried Alive: George's fate at the end of the second Death Swap video, and once during the "2 Assassins" video.
  • Call-Back:
    • A subtle one at the end of "3 Hunters Grand Finale": Dream drinks a Fire Resistance potion just before blowing out the hunters' End trap and entering himself; hearkening back to the successful lava trap Bad set in the first 3 Hunters video.
    • Two in the 4 Hunters Finale video. First, at the end of the battle atop the absurdly tall mountain, Dream escapes by exploiting a boat in the same manner as the 3 Hitmen video. Later, he makes Strength potions (actual Strength potions, not Fire Resistance potions as a bluff) last seen in the "3 Hunters" video. Both instances are lampshaded.
      BadBoyHalo: Did he use the stupid boat thing?
      Dream: Remember what Strength II felt like?
    • Another one occurs in the "4 Hunters Grand Finale" video as Dream makes a speech similar to his speech at the end of the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video. He even lampshades that this speech isn't his first.
  • Can't Move While Being Watched: In his Speedrunner VS Assassin videos, the Assassin cannot move while Dream is watching him, and a red line appears. This forms the basis for many of Dream's strategies when facing the Assassin.
  • Catchphrase: From Minecraft Manhunt:
    • Oh, Dream~! note 
    • Come here, [name]! note 
    • Oh, hello good sir! note 
    • Leave me alone! alongside Oh... my... God... note 
  • Chase Fight: What usually happens when the hunters are chasing Dream... or vice versa.
  • Chekhov's Boomerang:
    • In the ''2 Hunters" video, Dream prepares the area around his Nether portal by digging a long tunnel with a dead end. He springs a trap and ambushes the Hunters when they drop into his cave, with Sapnap trying to flee down the tunnel but hitting the dead end, letting Dream catch up and finish him. After leaving the Nether, he uses the tunnel for what he actually dug it for: fleeing the Hunters while filling it with blocks behind him, giving him enough time to dig to the surface and escape.
    • In the "4 Hunters Rematch" video, Dream creates a Nether Portal above bedrock in order to escape the hunters, who have buffed themselves with enchanted gear. He returns to the Nether later on and uses the same portal to trap the hunters in the Nether, destroying it on his way back out and forcing the hunters to kill each other and lose their enchanted armor just to have a chance at continuing the chase.
    • In "Minecraft Survivalist VS 3 Hitmen", the hitmen mention obtaining some Ender Pearls. Their first attempt to use them fails when Sapnap misses his shot and lands right where he started instead of on top of Dream's tower, but it becomes critical in the climax when Dream kills him and takes the other Ender Pearl, which he uses to save himself after getting knocked off the tower.
  • Chekhov's Gag:
    • An interesting case of an unscripted example. Early in the "4 Hunters Rematch" video, Dream is unable to light his Nether Portal because he doesn't have a Flint & Steel. This ends up not mattering much because Dream is in the overworld and thus is able to easily find the materials to make one, but later on in the video the hunters end up in the same scenario, only they're on the other side of the portal, leaving them trapped in the Nether and forcing them to kill each other (losing their Protection IV armor in the process).
    • A series-wide one. Every video (or nearly every video) has George getting attacked by an Enderman during the Final Battle. Such instances have been memed widely (primarily because of how George tends to narrate such instances), but they come back with a vengeance in the "4 Hunters Finale" video when George is killed by them, briefly taking him out of the final fight.
  • Chekhov's Gun:
    • In the first Death Swap (16:33), Dream finds in a chest an enchanted golden apple, which is the single item that turns the tables on George when he puts his trap in the Nether.
    • In the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video, Dream is on a boat, collecting lily pads by crashing into them. He uses the lily pads later on to escape the hunters.
    • In the first "4 Hunters" video, Sapnap makes an enchanted diamond axe that he names Dream Slayer. Dream kills Sapnap in the Nether and takes the axe, using it as his primary weapon for the rest of the video.
    • Also in the first "4 Hunters" video, Dream gets a pair of golden boots enchanted with Frost Walker from an ruined Nether Portal in the overworld. Dream uses them later in the video to set up a trap in a river, tricking the hunters into towering into the air and then turning the water to ice when they jump down after him, causing them to crash right onto the ice and die.
    • In the "Death Shuffle" video, while searching for the hole Dream made in the bedrock floor, George comes across an entity cramming machine Dream had previously used to squish himself to death. Sure enough, he becomes tasked with squishing himself later and finds the machine again, and is able to use it successfully despite Dream's attempt to dismantle it.
  • Christmas Episode: The "Speedrunner vs 4 Hunters FINALE REMATCH" was filmed sometime just before Christmas and uploaded on Christmas Day. Bad and Ant wore Santa hats, Minecraft's holiday Easter Egg turned chests into presents, Dream turned his Evil Laugh in a "ho ho ho", and the two parties taunted each other with Christmas songs.
  • Climbing Climax:
    • In the "3 Hitmen" video, one of Dream's main strategies is to tower up, and force the Hitmen to engage him on his terms with the threat of fall damage. He does this a handful of times throughout the video, but the final minutes of the match are an extended standoff between Dream and the Hitmen on a tower that keeps getting higher as Dream flees upward, and keeps getting thicker as the Hitmen follow him.
    • In the "4 Hunters Finale", Dream spends most of the End fight up on top of one of the pillars, forcing the Hunters to tower up to get at him. With his Punch bow, he knocks them away far enough that they have to restart their towers from scratch, dragging this phase out much longer.
  • Color Blind Confusion: Not Dream specifically, but George has protanomalynote , which often causes him confusion when facing Dream in Manhunts or when playing game modes that use color coding.
    • One example of this happens in "Minecraft Speedrunner VS 3 Hunters REMATCH”, where Dream bluffs the hunters by drinking a Fire Resistance potion; Bad jumps to the conclusion that Dream drank a Strength potion, and George (the only one who can see the potion clearly) doesn't correct him, as he can't tell the difference between strength and fire resistance potions.
    • Happens again in "5 Hunters Finale" when Dream and the Hunters are deep underground in a cave and Dream is barricading himself into a crevice. At one point George breaks open Dream's stone shell, but since Dream appears yellow to him instead of green, George mistakes Dream for gold ore and doesn't attack him.
  • Color-Coded Characters: Generally, the Dream Team and their associates are this.
    • Dream: Green (generally lime green), being the color that comprises much of his in-game skin.
      • He's also associated with white due to it being the color of his profile picture's avatar and being the secondary color on his skin, but not to the same extent that he's associated with green.
    • George: Blue (generally light blue), for similar reasons to Dream, also his favourite color and the only color he can see clearly.
    • Sapnap: Orange, reflecting his Hot-Blooded nature and also being the color found on his in-game shirt and channel banner.
      • He used to be associated with red (also due to his Hot-Blooded nature) until Bad became a member of the group.
    • Bad: Red, being one of the main colors on his skin.
      • He's also associated with black for similar reasons, but not to the same extent that he's associated with red.
    • Antfrost: Tan, also reflecting his in-game skin.
      • Mild example, He's also associate with brown as the highlight color on his skin.
    • Sam: Dark Green, being the main color of his in-game skin.
      • He's also associated with gold as the secondary color on his skin.
  • Combat Pragmatist: Oh so very much, on both ends. On the hunters' ends, they won't just wait for Dream if they reach the End before him. They'll rig the portal with a trap to kill Dream instantly (with the two times they've done this varying wildly in terms of success), and even if they enter behind Dream, they'll come prepared with End Crystals to heal the dragon from next-to-no health to full health. On Dream's end, he'll use strength potions to annihilate the hunters, rig explosions or lava to harm or kill the hunters in a chase, lock one of the hunters in close quarters to pick them off alone, use a splash potion of invisibility to make the hunters confuse each other for Dream himself, and many more. If a hunter's approaching fast? Sure, Dream could fight with a likely-diamond sword, but he could just as easily plug them full of arrows to buy him a brief amount time to prepare and get the hunters down on lower health by the time he has to fight. Or, better yet, he could just unload a bucket of lava and watch them burn before they even reach him.
  • Confusion Fu: Dream is one of the best Minecrafters at this strategy:
    • In "Minecraft Speedrunner VS 3 Hunters FINALE," the three hunters and Dream are in a cave. Suddenly, they meet and Dream uses a splash potion of invisibility to make them all invisible. Keep in mind that they are all wearing full iron armor. They can't tell which one is Dream and start blindly attacking their own team members while Dream just stands there and takes the opportunity to pick Bad and George off.
    • In the same episode, Dream builds a Nether Portal so that he can trick the hunters into thinking he's gone back into the Nether. While the trick doesn't last long, since the compass can indirectly tell whether Dream is in the Overworld or not, Bad actually goes through the Nether portal in search of Dream before realizing he's been had.
    • In the "5 Hunters Finale Rematch", Dream is escaping from the Hunters after his void trap failed, and distracts them by using a soundboard to play different voice clips of the Hunters. It works so well that when he plays a clip of Bad saying to stop moving and quiet down, the real Bad obeys before realizing that he didn't say that.
  • Continuing is Painful: The hunters respawn after being killed, but they lose all their stuff and are sent back to their respawn point, which can be very far away (though not always, as they often have a bed nearby—unless they're in the Nether). And to make things worse for them, Dream will loot their belongings whenever possible (he also often burns them if he has no use for the loot), making it even harder to take him on the next time around.
    • In the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video, when George was killed by Dream, the hunters had to use their inventory space to hold George's items. They realized, however, that Dream took the one thing that was imperitive to keep away from him: the Blaze Rods.
    • Downplayed in Minecraft Hitman, since the smaller map means Dream can't get far away after killing the hitmen, lessening the impact of their deaths, although it is still painful if Dream manages to take their items.
  • Continuity Cavalcade: Fittingly for the Grand Finale, the final Manhunt features several callbacks, primarily when the players reach the End. Several of them are lampshaded either during or after the fact.
    • From earlier Manhunts overall: After being phased out of the series in favor of more dramatic tracks, the iconic "Trance Music for Racing Game" makes a return during the opening chase.
    • From the "5 Hunters Rematch" video: Dream uses a flying machine to try and reach an End City. Unlike that video, Sapnap is able to intercept him and break the machine.
    • From the "4 Hunters Finale" video: Dream employs falling TNT numerous times.
    • From the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video: When Dream blows up a majority of the hunters in the End, the camera cuts to their perspective as they get obliterated. Additionally, one of the hunters tries to use an Ender Pearl to make it back onto land after falling, only to die anyway.
    • From the "5 Hunters" video: Dream uses a fishing rod to steal one of the hunters' dropped items that grants him a significant advantage.
    • From the "2 Hunters" video: Dream is stuck in a floating section of water that will eventually drop him into the void, but manages to narrowly snag a dead hunter's Ender Pearl and teleport to safety.
  • Controllable Helplessness:
    • Happens in videos like "2 Hunters" and "3 Hunters Finale Rematch", when Dream kills all the Hunters in the End when they haven't set a bed in the stronghold, leaving them far away from the End portal and often not being able to find it again since their compass no longer points toward it.
    • The Hunters think they've caused this in "3 Hunters Grand Finale" when they enter the End before Dream and build a trap around the spawn platform, thinking there's no way Dream can escape if he comes in. Dream averts it with TNT.
    • In "4 Hunters Rematch", the Hunters acquire full iron armor with the Protection IV enchantment, rendering themselves nigh-unkillable to Dream. They again think they've invoked this trope, until Dream traps them on the Nether roof, putting them on the receiving end of the trope until they kill themselves to escape.
    • At the end of the "5 Hunters Rematch", Dream is flying with Elytra to break the End Crystals, and the Hunters can't do anything to stop him. Lampshaded by Awesamdude during an analysis, specifically pointing out a shot where George is just standing and watching.
  • Crazy Enough to Work: Some of Dream's traps are out there in terms of logical sense. You have sensible traps like pitfalls and explosives, and then you have portals on the roof of Hell, interdimensional cluster bombs, and adding too many minecarts to one block. And yet they all work.
  • Crazy-Prepared:
    • In the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video, Dream gets half a hotbar of boats, just in case he needs them for later. He eventually uses the boats to cross a lava lake in the Nether and escape the hunters.
    • At the end of the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video, Dream gathers TNT to drop through the End portal and destroy both the hunters and any trap they may have set. However, he also uses a fire resistance potion, as he wanted to be prepared if the hunters simply reused the trap that killed Dream in the first "3 Hunters" video (a lava trap, which TNT can't counter). He doesn't need the potion and doesn't really acknowledge it in the bonus video, but it's impressive he thinks of it.
  • Critical Existence Failure: This happens often when the hunters are at one heart and take fall damage.
  • Cruel and Unusual Death: During the first assassin video, Dream is able to kill George twice by freezing him while he's swimming underwater, causing him to drown. Later in the "2 Assassins" video, he drowns the assassins several times, buries George in gravel and prevents him from getting out, and freezes Sapnap so he can't run from a creeper and skeleton.
  • Cutting the Knot: In the "4 Hunters Rematch" video, Dream builds a maze in the Nether both to disorient the hunters and hide from them. Rather than spend the next fifteen minutes hunting him down, however, the hunters grow impatient and begin nuking the maze with beds, exposing Dream's location. This bites them back, however, when a bed kills Sapnap, sets Bad and George on fire, and drops Ant in a lava bath, giving Dream an opportunity to fight them.
  • Curb-Stomp Battle: Many battles in Manhunt can be very one-sided.
    • It's very telling that the 3v1 Manhunt with Mr. Beast and Co. is the only Manhunt in the entire series to end before anyone gets to the Nether.
    • The "Battle Box" event in the eighth Minecraft Championships was this for Dream & Technoblade's team, the Pink Parrots. They won all but one of their matches (narrowly losing to the Lime Llamas) and more often than not inflicted a Total Party Kill on the other team.
    • All of the "Challenging 25 YouTubers To A Fight" video. In a series of 1v1 duels where 6 kills wins the game, Dream flawlessly 6-0's everyone except for accomplished PVP player Fruitberries, who manages to get two kills on Dream before Dream decimates him in the remainder of their matches. In a total of 152 matchesnote , Dream loses twice— and to only one player at that.
  • Darkest Hour: Near the beginning of "5 Hunters Grand Finale", Dream is atop a tower on low health with no food and no way of getting down, while the hunters swarm the base of the tower with near-full diamond armor and Sapnap builds up to attack him. Dream says here that he's never felt as trapped before.
  • Death or Glory Attack:
    • At the end of the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video, Dream has outsmarted the hunters despite them performing at their very best. Their trap has been foiled by Dream's use of TNT, and Bad and George have pretty much given up. Sapnap, however, takes a bed, goes back to the End, and uses it in an effort to blow up Dream and himself before Dream can kill the Ender Dragon. He only kills himself with it and Dream wins, but he got damn close to killing Dream with that, something Dream praises in the bonus video.
    • In the "4 Hunters" video, Dream uses TNT to kill the Ender Dragon, knowing full well there's a chance he'll die. What happens is that Dream is caught in the dragon's breath and killed by Sapnap, but the TNT also activates and kills the dragon, creating enough confusion as to who won that the five are still arguing about it in the bonus video.
  • Death Trap: The point of Death Swap is to carefully plan and construct a trap for your enemy to fall in. The winner is whoever can kill the other player with a trap first.
    • It eventually bleeds into Manhunt, with much of the videos past the "2 Hunters" video being devoted to not just Dream speedrunning the game but also him laying out traps that only get more elaborate.
  • Deliberately Monochrome: The beginning of Dream's videos have a monochrome effect while Dream does his intro. After that, the normal video starts.
  • Degraded Boss:
    • Well, more like degraded trap, but it still counts. Dream using a bed to destroy the hunters in the first "3 Hunters" video is treated as one of his "big" traps, with all the set-up and reactions that his other big traps have. Later Manhunts (especially the "4 Hunters Rematch" video) treat exploding beds as a common tactic that's used by both sides (most prominently used by Dream to attack the Ender Dragon).
    • In a case of actual people, George, Sapnap, and Bad go from being able to handle Dream solo (with each having won their first solo Manhunt against him) to needing each other's backup to even consider taking him on (which is thanks to the many levels in competence that Dream takes). Ant and Sam averts this, as they are the only hunters to have never fought Dream solo, and Sapnap's case is downplayed considering he's still a decent match for Dream when he's separated from his allies.
  • Department of Redundancy Department: Bad's song during the Hard-Work Montage in "4 Hunters Finale":
    Bad: We are gonna win, Dream you are going to get rekt, and we are gonna win. Shiny Squad!
  • Deus ex machina:
    • In "Minecraft Speedrunner VS 3 Hunters FINALE," after he goes underwater and digs down to escape the hunters, he finds some diamonds.
    • Sapnap's Ender Pearl at the end of the "2 Hunters" video also counts, being the only reason Dream wins in the end.
    • In the "4 Hunters Rematch" video, Dream finds an enchanted golden apple in a desert temple, a rather rare find. Said apple is the only reason he survives Ant's subsequent detonation of the temple's TNT in a kamikaze attempt.
  • Did Not Think This Through:
    • In the 4 Hunters video, the Hunters realize that they can chase Dream in a line and boost each other by punching the one in front of them, helping to keep on Dream's tail. What they don't realize until it's too late is that doing so expends their hunger faster than just sprinting, and they all lose their speed while Dream still has some remaining. Though a seemingly cool strategy, it causes the game-opening chase to end on an anti-climax without even a proper fight, letting Dream start gathering resources with much less trouble.
    • The video where Dream tries to beat the game while George can control any mob had some close calls for the former, but ultimately George never managed to provide more than a temporary nuisance with most of them. Dream then heads into the End, where he very unpleasantly finds out that the Dragon counts as a m
  • Didn't See That Coming: The Manhunt rules are usually infallible, accounting for instances such as Dream dying after killing the dragon but before entering the final portal (a Dream win) or Dream dying but not to the hunters (a Hunter win). However, the rules don't account for Dream dying before he kills the dragon but somehow managing to set up events before his demise that lead to the dragon's death regardless... which is exactly what happens in the "4 Hunters" video thanks to the delay between TNT being lit and going off. This leads to an argument about who won that continues even through the bonus video, with the hunters insisting they won and Dream arguing that it's a tie at worst. The rules are later updated to account for this—Dream dying before the dragon, regardless of if the dragon dies even a second later, is a win for the hunters. Later 1v4 Manhunts retroactively apply this rule to the first 1v4, treating the above instance as a win for the hunters.
  • Disney Death: Dream does this so often he might as well get a contract with Disney themselves. Often times he'll be in a doomed scenario but somehow make it out alive, much to his and the hunters' shock.
  • Disney Villain Death: At the end of the first Hitmen video, Sapnap tries to jump from the top of the tower to Dream, who's using a Good Bad Bug to fall slowly with a boat, but misses and falls to his death. Seconds later, George tries the same thing with the same result. Downplayed since they respawn.
  • Don't Celebrate Just Yet: Celebrating too early has meant the difference between victory and defeat in more than one Manhunt.
    • In the ending of "Minecraft Speedrunner VS 2 Hunters" video, George and Sapnap knock Dream off the End island and remove his water flow, dooming Dream to eventually fall into the void when his remaining water runs out. George then celebrates by killing Sapnap, which causes Sapnap's Ender Pearls to fall into the void... and right into Dream's hotbar. What follows is Dream using the Pearl to teleport back onto the island, using George's shock and confusion to utterly own him in their final fight, and killing the Ender Dragon soon after with no difficulty. What makes this an even more notable use of the trope is that George and Sapnap had every reason to celebrate, as if George hadn't killed Sapnap Dream would have died, as he had no Ender Pearls until Sapnap's dropped onto him.
    • In the first "3 Hunters" video, Dream kills George and Sapnap, while Bad was knocked through the End portal early in the fight and was killed by the Ender Dragon. Dream, thinking he's home free, hops through the End portal...and straight into a lava trap Bad set up before he died. Dream later admits that he might have been able to escape if he'd been more prepared and reacted fast enough, but that he didn't even have his hands on the controls because he thought the manhunt was more or less over.
    • In the "3 Hunters Finale" video, Dream kills Bad early on in the Final Battle and after much struggle takes down George and Sapnap. When he stops to celebrate and gloat, Bad, who had quickly returned to the End and stayed hidden, runs up behind Dream and kills him with a single punch, baffling everyone.
    • In the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video, George, Sapnap and Bad make a trap near the End entrance platform (namely, they've encased it in blocks and intend to relentlessly bombard Dream with attacks once he enters). They then proceed to taunt Dream about the trap, believing he can't do anything about it. Well, Dream can't... but thanks to them telling him about the trap beforehand, that handy amount of TNT on-hand can. Had they kept quiet, Dream certainly would have waltzed into the End and died without a clue about the trap.
  • Do Not Call Me "Paul": Dream being referred to by his real name, Clay, seems to irk him. He outright has to do a double take when George calls him Clay (and sounds a bit annoyed), and responds to the first of many times Tommy calls him Clay by briefly unloading a bucket of lava onto Tommy.
  • Double Entendre: Sapnap and Ant spin Bad's offer of melons to his teammates into him wanting to share his "watermelons" with others.
  • The Dreaded: Dream is this for the hunters, and for good reason. Whenever they corner Dream he almost always has a plan in place to counter them, and they die in increasingly elaborate ways. In the early days of Manhunt the hunters were only worried about Dream when he got enhanced gear (such as iron armor and/or a diamond sword). Now, him simply getting wood or even escaping their sight for a brief moment is enough cause for mass panic. The hunters have gone from being able to be on par with Dream while solo to instantly giving up hope whenever Dream so much as gets one of them alone.
  • Dressing as the Enemy:
    • Dream has BadBoyHalo's skin for the entirety of the "3 Hunters Finale Rematch" video, which irritates Bad and causes George and Sapnap to occasionally mistake Bad for Dream.
    • In the "5 Hunters" video, after leaving the Nether, Dream changes into iron armor and turns on his skin's outer layer, which he has made to resemble Antfrost. The hunters seemingly don't notice a sixth member among them when they emerge, instead digging into the ground since their compasses say Dream is right there. It doesn't end well for them, especially when Dream starts dropping TNT on them.
  • Dropped a Bridge on Him: Sometimes, Dream dies abruptly and the audience doesn't see it coming.
    • One particularly notable instance is the ending of the third 3 Hunters video. Dream barely wins an intense fight against the hunters in the End... except, y'know, the hunters can just respawn and continue the fight. And the armorless, unarmed Bad then proceeds to sneak up behind a celebrating Dream and one-shot him with a simple punch.
    • The ending of the "2 Assassins" video. After Dream managed to freeze Sapnap long enough for a creeper to kill him, he went through the Nether portal only for George to land a sneak attack and kill Dream instantly.
    • Narrowly averted during the "5 Hunters Finale" video. After crushing the hunters with a Moss Block trap, Dream goes through his pre-prepared Nether Portal... and discovers that the Nether-side portal is inexplicably about a hundred blocks in the air. He barely manages to put a Hay Bale in his hotbar in time to break his fall with it, and points out that "that would have been... very annoying."
  • Early Game Hell: The beginning of a Manhunt is almost always one of the most frantic parts, since all the Hunters are nearby and Dream doesn't have any of the tools he'd normally use to fight them off, leading to some dud games where they simply corner Dream and punch him to death in minutes. Once he manages to get some breathing room he can gather resources and equipment, giving him a lot more options to level the playing field.
    • Perhaps the best example of this is in "3 Hunters Rematch", in which the opening chase lasts nearly ten minutes, with the hunters hot on Dream's heels the entire time and Dream one hit away from death more often than not.
    • Stunningly averted in "5 Hunters Finale Rematch", when Dream gets into the Nether within minutes of the Manhunt starting due to a nearby ruined portal with enough obsidian and a flint and steel in the loot chest to activate it, and once inside he finds a bastion straight away. Interestingly, this could be considered a literal Early Game Hell.
    • "5 Hunters: The Last Manhunt" has the hunters stack up on diamonds early, due to Ant and Awesamdude using clay formations to locate diamond veins.
  • Early-Installment Weirdness:
    • In Dream's earlier videos even during late 2019, the style of his videos are noticeably different to the later, more consistent-styled ones. The first of his 'challenge' videos such as the X-ray series and the now-abandoned Minecraft, but speed rises every second were separated into episodic parts, likely due to the Dream-Team having much less skill needed to come close to completing these challenges. Contributing to this is the fact that much less footage is cut proportional to the meat of the videos.
    • Another genre of videos that have been phased out are the 'bits', such as ''Minecraft Youtubers'', and ''this cursed Minecraft video will make you cry...'' that are basically joke videos that don't center very much around Dream's gameplay.
    • Dream used to show the "Unknown" percentage of subscribers in his intro, before removing that out.
    • Lastly, these videos have different/no music edited in, compared to the consistent soundtracks found in later videos.
    • In Manhunt itself, Dream used to tower up a lot in early videos to evade the hunters, though he'd eventually have to jump down to beat the game and thus this strategy wasn't as effective as Dream hoped. The tactic was mostly abandoned after the "2 Hunters" video, but Dream briefly does it again in the "4 Hunters" video to set up his Frost Walker trap... then does it again in the Final Manhunt several times during the Early Game Hell.
  • Enemy Mine:
    • In the "3 Hunters Finale" video, Sapnap tries and fails to invoke this when Dream finds him cornered by a pair of Wither skeletons, begging Dream for help. Dream instead decides to build a wall around them, ending any chance of Sapnap escaping and allowing himself to safely dispose of the skeletons afterwards to get at Sapnap's loot.
    • In the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video, (27:56) Sapnap and Bad try to team up with a creeper. Dream was far enough from the resulting explosion that it didn't do anything to him, but Sapnap and Bad liked that the creeper was on their side.
    • In the "Four Hunters" video, the hunters essentially team up with the Ender Dragon by bringing in Ender crystals to heal it up during their fight with Dream, turning the Ender Dragon into a legitimate threat.
  • Et Tu, Brute?:
    • In the ending of the Speedrunner VS 2 Hunters video, George kills Sapnap when he believes that Dream, who is falling into the void, has lost. This reckless move costs him the entire game, as Dream manages to get one of Sapnap's Ender Pearls before he can fall far enough to die, allowing him to get back onto safe ground and kill George—had George just done nothing, he would have won without question.
    • Exploited by Dream in the "4 Hunters Rematch" video. Outnumbered and outgunned when the hunters land full Protection armor, Dream devises an escape route by using the roof of the Nether. Dream later destroys that escape route and the Nether portal as he heads back to the overworld, trapping the hunters in the Nether (as none of them have a Flint and Steel) and forcing them to turn on each other to escape, losing their armor in the process (humorously, after Bad gets killed they decide to wait so Bad can get the tools to free them from the outside, but Sapnap gets impatient and immediately turns on Ant, not to mention Sapnap in general is a lot more complacent about having to kill his allies than he should be).
      Sapnap: (seconds after murdering Ant) George, you're next!
  • Evil Only Has to Win Once: Well, evil from Dream's point of view (the audience may have a different point of view). If Dream dies once, his opponents win automatically unless Dream has killed the Ender Dragon before then. The hunters are not under that stipulation, however—they can die however many times they want and continue the fight, their only losing condition is Dream killing the Ender Dragon.
  • Exact Words:
    • At the start of every Manhunt video, Dream says, "If I beat the Ender Dragon, I win." This comes into play at the end of "Minecraft Speedrunner VS Hunter (Again)", where Dream kills the dragon but George kills him before he can enter the overworld portal—Dream successfully argued that he won, as the rules state he only has to kill the dragon before he dies, not enter the portal. It also comes into play at the end of "Minecraft Speedrunner VS 3 Hunters Rematch", where Dream kills the Ender Dragon a split-second before the hunters kill him, barely giving him the win.
    • This, however, comes to bite him in the "4 Hunters" video, as Dream manages to kill the dragon but dies seconds before (he killed the dragon anyway through TNT he lit before he died). The result is something the players argue about for a while, and in the bonus video Dream concedes that while the hunters would technically win, he continues to insist that it's a draw.
    • At the end of "Minecraft Speedrunner VS 3 Hunters FINALE REMATCH," Bad asks Dream to come down from his perch in the End. Dream comes down alright—and by that we mean he immediately begins attacking Bad.
      BadBoyHalo: Come down here, please.
      (Dream comes down and promptly attacks him.)
      Bad: Ooh! He came down!
    • In the "4 Hunters Finale" video, Dream makes a montage of collecting vast amounts of iron. When Bad asks what he's doing, he explains he's mining for full diamond. From the viewer's perspective (and even Bad's since he doesn't believe it) it seems like Blatant Lies, but then, Dream uses the iron to make a trap that uses minecart entity cramming; it kills George and allows Dream to steal his full set of diamond armor for himself, and it's then that it becomes clear that it was this trope all along—in the end, it was Dream's mining that allowed him to get full diamond.
    • It returns in the first Speedrunner VS Five Hunters video, in which the hunters manage to trigger the dragons respawn sequence, causing the game to glitch and never give Dream the advancement, despite the dragon having to die for the sequence to begin. The argument is ongoing in the behind the scenes video, with Dream arguing that he won, while the hunters insist they did.
    • After Dream does a Total Party Kill in "5 Hunters Rematch", the Hunters beg Dream to not burn their stuff. So Dream blows it up with TNT instead.
    • In the weeks prior to his duel with Dream, Techno trained with Calvin & Fruitberries, who were accomplished PVP masters on par with if not even better than Techno, under the logic that Dream won't be able to find trainers more skilled than those two. And he's right, Dream doesn't find better trainers than them—he simply finds those two and trains under them as well.
  • Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: In the 3 Hunters Rematch video, as Dream explains how he managed to craft a fire resistance potion to survive a dive in lava, he notices he didn't get back his brewing stand:
    Dream: Literally right when you got there I had just finished brewing them and I was gonna brew other stuff but I left... I left my... oh my god...
  • Failed a Spot Check:
    • In the "Speedrunner vs Diamond Juggernaut" video, Sapnap ambushes Dream when the latter tries to return from the Nether. Dream manages to lose Sapnap, loops back arounsd toward the portal...only to spot Sapnap heading straight toward him a moment later. However, Sapnap somehow manages to miss Dream despite the latter being out in the open and runs back toward the portal instead. Dream lampshades this with a line of text on screen.
      I don't know how he didn't see me.
    • In the "3 Hunters Finale Rematch" video, George gets separated from the other two hunters in the Nether. Later, while fleeing from Bad and Sapnap, Dream runs right past George. George somehow doesn't see Dream go by and has no idea he was even there until the other two hunters (in hot pursuit of Dream) find him a few seconds later (and are rather understandably confused as to how George missed him).
    • At the end of the "4 Hunters Rematch" video, the four hunters are so focused on finding Dream in the End that they don't notice that he is attacking the ender dragon until half of her health has been depleted.
  • Fakeout Escape:
    • In the first "5 Hunters" video, Dream manages to get past the Hunters and to the portal out of the Nether. Rather than running off once he gets to the Overworld, he turns on his skin's outer layer which he's edited to resemble Antfrost's skin, and changes into iron armor before standing in the portal as the Hunters come through. Since Dream looks like Antfrost and his name is a similar length, he blends in among them and they believe that Dream is beneath them under the ground. As they dig down, Dream drops TNT down their tunnels and kills some of them before running for real.
    • In "5 Hunters Grand Finale", Dream makes a Nether portal deep underground and enters the Nether before immediately returning to the Overworld and mining before going to the surface. The hunters, thinking Dream is in the Nether, make lots of preparation before going in, and only once they've been inside for a few moments do they check the compass and realize they've been duped.
  • Final Death Mode: In the Minecraft Manhunts, if Dream dies once at any point, the hunters win the game unless the Ender Dragon has died beforehand.
  • Five-Second Foreshadowing: At the end of the Player-Controlled Mobs video, George gets the advancement "You Need a Mint" shortly after entering the End. This advancement means the player has obtained dragon's breath, meaning George has taken control of the Ender Dragon, something Dream doesn't realize until George destroys him.
  • Follow the Chaos: This is how Dream and George get back to Sapnap and the spawn in "Minecraft, But A Black Hole Grows Every Second..." (6:07)
  • Foregone Conclusion: Dream will escape the hunters during the inevitable chase scene at the beginning of each video. In the event he doesn't (which, per deleted scenes, has happened before), the game is scrapped and the game starts anew—the reason being that dud games don't make for very good content.
  • Formula-Breaking Episode: Happens on a few occasions:
    • One video has Dream hunting down George as the latter tries to beat the game. Dream wins after knocking George off the starting End platform, even more surprising considering Dream had died and lost all his gear mere seconds prior.
    • Another video has Sapnap hunting Dream—the "formula breaking" here comes from the fact that Sapnap has full diamond gear from the beginning. Sapnap wins soon after Dream leaves the Nether.
    • One video has Dream and George team up to beat the game while an AI hunts them down. The video ends when the AI kills Dream.
    • A special video Dream did with famous YouTuber MrBeast has Dream hunting down MrBeast himself, as well as his friends Karl and Chandler, the catch being that the three only lose when each of them dies once, but even those who have died can continue to protect the survivors. It's also notable in that Dream is noticeably holding back, as Beast and his friends are considerably less skilled at Minecraft. To make things fair, Dream has given the three a full set of iron armor to start, and he also doesn't employ his usual tactics of setting traps and psychological warfare. If Dream even tried to go as all-out as he does against his own friends, the video would have ended in the first two minutes.
    • And yet another video has George and Sapnap team up against Dream. Eventually averted, however, as more than one hunter becomes the norm as Dream continues to improve and it's clear that more hunters are needed to keep things fair (notable as George, Sapnap, Bad, and Ant are no slouches in Minecraft—Dream's just that good).
  • For Want Of A Nail:
    • In the Dream vs Technoblade battle, two of Techno's wins are by the skin of his teeth. Had he been hit just once more in one or both of the matches, Dream would've tied the battle or perhaps even won it, something that is even discussed later on.
    • In the "4 Hunters Finale Rematch" video, Ant is the only hunter to survive Dream's pitfall trap. Given he ends up killing Dream not even a minute later, it's safe to say the Manhunt would have gone very differently had the trap gotten him as well.
  • Friend or Foe?: Cunningly exploited by Dream in "3 Hunters Grand Finale" when he hits everyone with a splash Invisibility potion once cornered. Everyone is forced to stop attacking as they can't immediately tell who is Dream and who is a teammate (everyone had the same armor and swords), and in fact Sapnap accidentally attacked Bad Boy Halo enough times for Dream to finish the job then run.
  • Friend to All Living Things: In the "3 Hunters Finale Rematch" video, Dream seems to get help from animals at every turn. The first portion of the video has him tame wolves that he uses to counter the hunters' own wolves (though this trope is later called into question when he kills his own due to the handicap of keeping it around). He also uses a strider to get through the Nether (and later steals one of the hunters' to make his escape). When he leaves the Nether and pushed off his portal tower by the hunters to his death, he is saved by a horse (as clicking on a horse to ride it negates fall damage). And then, when swimming away from the hunters, he gets four dolphins on his side, giving him a massive speed boost and denying the hunters any boosts of their own. Upon making it to dry land, he even pushes one of the dolphins back into the water after it got stuck on the ground and risked suffocating, despite there being no benefit for doing this. Dream outright lampshades this trope, referring to himself in the bonus video as a Disney princess.
  • Freudian Trio: For the Dream Team:
    • Sapnap is the Id, being quite the boisterous man in games, using mostly whims and instincts supported by sheer PVP skill surpassed by a select few.
    • George is the Ego, being a mediator between contrasting personalities, while usually a calm and cool-headed person he also has a fair share of chaotic and loud moments.
    • Dream is the Superego, the most serious of the trio in most situations with Nerves of Steel in dire situations.
  • Full-Body Disguise: In the "5 Hunters" video, Dream toggle his extra layer to disguise himself as Ant and blend in with the hunters before he unleashes his TNT down into the hole where the hunters were digging.
  • Funny Background Event: During the "4 Hunters" video, George begs for help with Endermen. A moment later, he is seen in the background running from no less than five Endermen.
    George: Can someone just... get these Endermen off me please!
    Bad: You're on your own, George.
  • The Gadfly: In the 3 Hitmen rematch, both Dream and the hitmen use the grace periods to try and troll each other.
  • Genius Bruiser: Dream often has enough gear to take out the hunters solo within the first minute and remains a consistent threat in combat throughout the entire video (let's just say there's a reason the later videos end up pitting more than one hunter against Dream). He's also quite smart and resourceful, using the terrain, whatever he has on him, and the hunters' own overeager tendencies to his advantage. He'll use potions, set up vantage points, bluff the absolute hell out of the hunters, and set off traps like a bed in the Nether or a recently-crafted End Crystal in a stronghold.
  • Goomba Springboard: In the "5 Hunters Rematch", cornered in the Nether with the Hunters on one side and a massive cliff above a giant lava lake on the other, Dream tries to use the boat physics trick (where getting in and out of a falling boat will make it fall slower) to fly off and reach a platform on the other side of the lake. Even with the exploit, it's simply too far and he's about to end up in the lava... if not for a Ghast suddenly floating into his path. He lands on the thing's head and takes a flying leap off it, getting just enough distance to make it to safety.
  • Gosh Dang It to Heck!: Dream and his collaborators generally try to keep his main videos clean of profanity, though streams have been known to involve some spicier language. Bad in particular likes to use "muffin" as a curse substitute. Once when killing George in a Manhunt, Dream very clearly almost drops an f-bomb, but manages to morph it into "flipping".
  • Graceful Loser:
    • In the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" explanation video, BadBoyHalo congratulates Dream for winning, and the hunters made him a golden cup filled with lava. It was originally going to be for the hunters, since they thought they were going to win, but repurposed it for Dream.
    • In the $100,000 Dream vs Technoblade event, Dream himself plays this role after Techno comes out on top in their climactic duel, not once displaying any emotion towards Techno that isn't genuine admiration or happiness for his friend.
  • Grand Finale: In the Minecraft Manhunt series, the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video is the finale to the five-episode 3 Hunters saga, with the Dream Team planning on moving on to bigger and better Manhunts (namely, Manhunt with a fourth hunter). The "4 Hunters Grand Finale" video plays the same role to the five-episode 4 Hunters saga. The "5 Hunters Grand Finale" similarly acts as the finale to the five-episode 5 Hunters saga, while dually serving as the Grand Finale for the core Manhunt series.
  • Gravity Screw: In "Minecraft, But Gravity Flips Every Minute..." Dream and George have to beat Minecraft while gravity flips. For every minute, it toggles whether you (and everything around you) are floating upwards.
  • Guile Hero: Dream has survived many a sticky situation in his Minecraft Manhunt videos by sneaking up on the hunters, leading them into traps, making them think he might be leading them into traps, or straight up tricking them into killing each other.
  • Hard-Work Montage: Frequently happens when Dream has an advantage, or when he's preparing to do something spectacularly destructive to his Hunters that warrants showing the preparation for.
    • The "4 Hunters Finale" video is an interesting Bait-and-Switch on the subject. The Hunters have set up a defense in the stronghold's portal room, and Dream heads into a cave, prompting Bad to ask where he's going. Dream responds that he intends to get a full-diamond loadout, and Bad invites him to go right ahead. Anticipating his own edits, Dream warns him "It might take a while", and we cut into a montage of Dream accumulating iron, making a bunch of minecarts, and then setting up a trap. When we proceed to normal footage, George falls for the trap, leaving behind his enchanted full-diamond loadout.
    • In the 4 Hunters Finale Rematch, Dream gets enough distance between him and the hunters to construct a giant pitfall trap involving signs, crafting tables, and sand.
    • The end of 4 Hunters Grand Finale shows Dream gathering a number of seemingly random resources for a plan to make several crossbows and fireworks loaded into all of them, allowing him to unleash a deadly salvo that kills all his hunters at once.
  • The Heavy: Even though killing the Ender Dragon is Dream's main goal in the Manhunts, the Hunters are basically his main obstacle in preventing to succeed that goal.
  • Heroic Second Wind: In a Minecraft Manhunt with George and Sapnap, Dream had to fight both of them while fighting the Ender Dragon. Eventually they kick him off the edge and put out his water. George and Sapnap are happy and triumphant when all of a sudden, George celebrates by killing Sapnap, dropping his inventory... which Dream uses to his advantage by finding some falling Ender Pearls and going slightly to the right to pick them up at the last second, then making a precise throw to the edge of the island to escape unscathed, killing George soon after. Keep in mind that Dream had no Ender Pearls before this.
    • Near the end of the "VS Hitmen" video, after battling the hunters during the entire time without ever managing to get an edge, Dream is out of health and out of food. He desperately tries to run, only to find a village just on the world border. With its haybales, he makes bread and manages to eat, then kills George, who charged forward at low health, allowing him to get a stone axe which he immediately uses to kill Sapnap. All fights between Dream and the hunters are considerably more even past this point.
    • Inverted in "5 Hunters", Sam manages to revive the Ender Dragon and deny Dream the "Free the End" achievement, secure the win for the hunters.
  • Hoist by His Own Petard:
    • At the end of the first Death Swap, George goes to the Nether, intending to jump into a lava lake at the last second before the next swap and leave Dream to burn. Dream, however, has an enchanted golden apple, which he uses to survive the lava. He then spends five minutes sitting in the lava, intending to just have George die in the very lava he tried to kill Dream with. Dream even lampshades it.
      Dream: I'm just gonna throw you back into your own lava!
    • In "Speedrunner VS 4 Hunters", Sapnap enchants a diamond axe named "Dream Slayer", but he is killed and Dream uses it to harass the hunters for the rest of the match.
      George: His axe is so OP!
      Sapnap: I should've never created that thing.
    • In the "4 Hunters Rematch" video, this applies twice. First, Dream creates a netherrack maze to hide from the rapidly-approaching hunters in the Nether, but this makes it so he can't easily make it back to his portal. Second (and with much more devastating effects) is when the hunters create beds to nuke said maze and Dream along with it—the first catches Dream (and likely the viewers) off-guard, but their next beds avoid Dream, kill Sapnap, and leave the other three hunters on low health in a burning crater, allowing Dream to finish them off with no effort.
    • On a more comical note, during the 4 Hunters Rematch, when the Hunters get Protection IV enchantments on their armor, Dream, being unable to fight them head-on, traps them above the Nether, where they are forced to kill themselves to escape. When they finally resign to it, the surviving hunters tower up and fall... insufficiently far to kill them with Protection IV.
    • In the "4 Hunters Finale" video, Ant spends much of the episode away gathering resources for the hunters, including a full set of diamond armor for each of them and an enchanting table for protection. Dream kills George using a trap, then steals his armor to make himself that much harder to kill.
    • In the first 5 Hunters video, Sapnap makes, enchants and names a diamond axe, only for Dream to steal it using a fishing rod. A few moments later he also manages to steal Sapnap's diamond pickaxe, as Sapnap accidentally dropped it. He spends most of his remaining time in the Nether taunting Sapnap about one or the other, to the point that Sapnap temporarily leaves the game.
    • In 5 Hunters Rematch. Sam made a TNT tripwire trap near the portal, but Dream manages to spot the wires and disarm the TNT below and relocate the them near the hunters.
  • Hold the Line/Timed Mission: In the "VS Hitmen" video, the map is small so Dream cannot beat the game normally, but there is a one hour timer. If it runs out, Dream wins, so the hunters must kill him before, causing this trope respectively for Dream and the hunters.
  • Honorary True Companion: Bad is a frequent appearance alongside The Dream Team. He is considered an unofficial fourth member of the Dream Team.
  • Hostile Weather: Dream and George try to beat Minecraft while it's raining lava.
  • The Hunter Becomes the Hunted: A common occurrence in Manhunts, to the point where Dream's ability to turn the tides at any given moment is probably the most famous part about the series.
  • Hypocritical Humor: In the first "3 Hunters" match, Dream lures all the Hunters through a narrow tunnel he built in the Nether, only to blow them all up with a bed when they turn a corner. Afterwards...
    Bad: Why did you guys go down these perfectly mined-out tunnels?
    Dream: (laughs) You're acting like you didn't go down it too, Bad!
    Bad: I was following them!
    Dream: You went down it too!
    Bad: Yeah, 'cause I didn't know what I was going down was a death trap!
    Dream: Well, neither did they, until they died!
  • I Call It "Vera":
    • In the 4 Hunters Manhunt, Sapnap calls his axe the "Dream Slayer". Ironically (considering its name), Dream takes it from him and uses it for the rest of the video, and it's such a powerful weapon that Sapnap later regrets its existence.
    • Sapnap clearly hasn't learned—in the "5 Hunters" video, Sapnap enchants a diamond axe again and names it Nightmare. He places it on the ground to taunt Dream, only for Dream to use his fishing rod to steal it—once again, Sapnap's strongest weapon gets used for Dream's own goals for the rest of the video.
  • If I Can't Have You…: A pet example. During the "5 Hunters Finale", Dream kills Sapnap's dog. Sometime later, Ant tames a cat, only for Sapnap to immediately kill it out of jealousy and spite.
  • Improbable Weapon User:
    • Dream uses a fishing rod in the 4 Hunters Manhunt, pulling the hunters to their deaths multiple times.
    • The Random Item challenge is full of these due to the nature of the video. Most notable is George using buckets of pufferfish to poison Dream to near death, and Dream attempting to attack the hunters with a Netherite hoe, though it's not very effective.
  • Improbably High I.Q.: Dream is jokingly stated to have a high IQ (ranging from roughly 200 to over 10,000) due to his many traps and gambits in the Manhunt series, with most montages of his traps being labeled as "Dream [insert number here] IQ Moments." Dream does plan out most of his traps in advance, simply waiting for a chance to use them, but that hardly detracts from the coolness factor when he does use them.
  • Inane Blabbering:
  • Insane Troll Logic: In the bonus video for the "Minecraft Speedrunner VS 2 Hunters" video, George attempts to rationalize his game-losing murder of Sapnap by claiming he was celebrating their victory, attempting to pass it off as a justified response. Never mind that George killing Sapnap was the only reason they lost in the first place, something that Sapnap tries to point out.
  • Instant Costume Change: 4 Hunters Finale: Ant, right before George and Sapnap were about to get killed by Dream, gives them and Bad full iron armor to change into, which they do near-instantly.
  • Instant-Win Condition: When Dream explains at the start of the video that beating the Ender Dragon means he wins, he's not kidding. Even if Dream dies a split second later, so long as he gets the "Free the End" achievement beforehand he wins. He doesn't even need to enter the portal to the overworld - which is normally what an official Minecraft speedrun requires.
    • This rule backfires on him spectacularly during the "5 Hunters" video when the hunters respawn the Ender Dragon within half a second after Dream deals the killing blow, causing a glitch that denies him "Free the End" and ultimately costs him the Manhunt.
  • Interesting Situation Duel: 4 Hunters Finale Rematch; Sapnap and Dream chug Fire Resistance Potions and end up fighting in a lava pool, the surface of which is quickly turned to obsidian by the other Hunters. What follows is about three minutes of battle beneath the lava, with Dream trying to kill Sapnap before the potions wear off and Sapnap trying to make Dream waste enough time for the fire protection to end.
  • Interface Spoiler: Minecraft's advancement system lets the Hunters know when Dream has acquired key items such as diamonds and blaze rods, and when he's reached significant milestones such as entering the Nether or a Stronghold, as well as Dream (and the viewers) seeing the Hunters' advancements.
    • Cleverly averted by the Hunters in "4 Hunters Rematch", where they use enchanted books purchased from a librarian villager to enchant all of their armor with Protection IV without triggering the "Enchanter" advancement, allowing them to catch Dream completely off-guard with it. Although their villager trading had triggered an advancement of its own, some comments Ant and George had made caused Dream to think they were just stockpiling arrows, adding to his shock at the reveal.
    • Averted in the "2 Assassins" video where the Assassins don't have their advancements shown, which ultimately leads to Dream's defeat as he doesn't know that George is waiting for him in the Nether.
  • It Only Works Once:
    • In the "3 Hunters Finale" video (the third of the 3 Hunters series), Dream sets up an escape route leading to an End Crystal he intends to use to blow up the hunters (as their gear is too good for him to win in a straight-up fight)—and he succeeds. Two Manhunts later, in the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video, Dream sets up an escape route leading to another End Crystal for the exact same purpose—but the hunters, knowing to be on-guard, realize they're in a trap quickly. Bad also spots the End Crystal when he's out of range, and the hunters are able to avoid the trap.
    • Typically, Dream only uses the various kinds of traps and trickery once. On the one hand, it's definitely more fun to see newer ways to outsmart the hunters, but on the other hand it's quite clear that some tricks just don't work twice.
    • Bad is knocked into the End before Dream finishes fighting the other Hunters in the first "3 Hunters'' video and rigs a trap near the End spawn to kill Dream. This succeeds without question. Later, in the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video, they reach the End first once more and try to rig another trap. However, they make the mistake of letting Dream become aware of their intentions, and Dream spends the final minutes of the video simply gathering TNT to drop through the portal and blow up both the trap and all three hunters.
    • Lampshaded in "Minecraft Survivalist VS 3 Hitmen". During the video, the hitmen manage to land a sneak attack on Dream because George kept saying that he didn't know where Dream had ran off to. They then try it again almost immediately after, but comment that it won't work the second time.
    • One of the most famous gambits in all of Manhunt was in the first "3 Hunters" match, where Dream pursued by the Hunters leapt into a ravine, landed in a small pond, and covered up the water with blocks, killing all of them with fall damage as they dove after him. He tries the same trick in the "4 Hunters Finale", but they aren't foolish enough to jump in and land on his blocks. On the other hand, it still works as a delaying tactic — as instead of dodging his blocks to land in the water and keep hounding him, they decide to loot a nearby village first, giving Dream some time to get basic tools and resources.
    • In the extra video after the "5 Hunters Finale" video, they talk about how a lot of the huge, game-winning tricks and strategies used by both sides haven't appeared a second time. As a matter of honor, they get one opportunity to exploit a crazy trick and catch the other side off guard, and then they've agreed not to use them again to keep the 'meta' fresh and allow counterplay. Some specific examples are Splash Potions of Harming after Ant destroyed Dream with no warning, glitching out the Dragon with End Crystals like the Hunters did once, and cheesing the Dragon with an obsidian water tower as Dream had just done.
    • An interesting cross-series variation of this occurs in "5 Hunters FINALE REMATCH". After Dream digs down to bedrock level out of the hunters' sight for a brief time to plan his next trap, George had noticed Dream had been in the same spot for an awfully long time and, considering how far down it was, he was able to correctly deduce that Dream was attempting to utilize bedrock as he did in their "Death Shuffle" video, allowing him to warn the other hunters and get them to position to ambush Dream.
    • In the Final Manhunt, Dream attempts to build a flying machine to evade the Hunters and get gear in the End City, like in the "5 Hunters Rematch", but Sapnap manages to speed-bridge across before Dream travels too far from the main End island, and does a Death or Glory Attack to break the machine. This almost wins the Hunters the Grand Finale to end all Grand Finales... key word being almost.
  • Irony: In the "4 Hunters" video, Sapnap crafts an enchanted diamond axe named Dream Slayer. When the hunters fight Dream in the Nether, Dream kills Sapnap and uses Dream Slayer to replace his own iron axe, using the very weapon designed to kill him as his own primary weapon for the rest of the video.
  • Jump Cut: This is what Dream uses to skip most of the boring parts of his videos that would've otherwise been shown, therefore making the video longer.
    • In the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video, near the end, it cuts from Dream shooting the pillars used to heal the dragon, to the dragon at low health, with all the pillars destroyed.
  • Jump Scare: Has happened a couple times during Manhunts:
    • In the first assassin video, George unexpectedly used an Ender pearl to appear directly in front of Dream, sending him into a panic.
    • In the last 1v1 video with George, Dream builds to the surface to escape George and tunnels to the side near the surface, blocking his path off. When George passes and goes to the surface, Dream goes back into the shaft and waits just under the surface, surprising George when he digs back down and killing him.
  • Kill It with Ice: In the first 4v1 Manhunt, Dream uses his Frost Walker boots to freeze the surface of a pond right before Sapnap and Bad land in it, causing them to die from the fall damage.
  • Kleptomaniac Hero: Dream tries to loot everything useful he can from the villages he finds in Minecraft Manhunt, if he finds a village. Any other world-generated building which has useful items works as well. He can even out-kleptomaniac his fellow kleptomaniacs, as seen when he breaks a window to snatch a blacksmith's loot just before George can, even though George was ahead.
  • Lame Comeback:
    Bad: (after Dream wipes out the hunters) Yeah, well it shouldn't be called a speedrun. It should be called a deadrun. 'Cause you're gonna be dead.
    Dream: That was the lamest thing you've probably ever said.
  • Land in the Saddle: The infamous "MLG Horse" tactic, where Dream is unable to use water to break his fall and thus relies on a nearby horse as a cushion.
  • Large Ham: Everyone of the Dream Team is guilty of this, but George and Sapnap are the kings of the trope, screaming in either joy, fear, or rage. It's especially shown whenever George is being chased in fear screaming for help/expressing his confusion and obliviousness about the situation or Sapnap screaming at Dream whenever he attacks. Eventually this is lampshaded in the Extra Scenes of the 4 Hunters Finale where George points out that everybody was screaming during the End scene, making things more absurdly chaotic and intense.
    • Bad's pretty hammy at times too, as evidenced by his "HELLOOOOO, DREAM!" from the start of 4 Hunters. Considering Dream's propensity for the Big "YES!", Antfrost is easily the most subdued member of the Manhunt cast.
  • The Law of Conservation of Detail: Dream cuts out the parts of his videos that are boring or don't have any action in them.
    • In the final minutes of the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video, after Dream blows up the End spawn trap, he goes to the End and shoots the first pillar. It then cuts to him fighting the Ender Dragon, suddenly at low health. He edited the video the way he did so that the viewers wouldn't know if he died or not, and after going to the End, no viewer would have to worry about Dream dying to the Ender Dragon.
  • Lava Adds Awesome: In the 4 Hunters Finale Rematch, there is a moment where Dream and Sapnap duel each other in lava, as both of them had Fire Resistance on. It is quite intense which ends in Dream killing Sapnap after both escape the lava.
  • Leave Him to Me!: In the "3 Hunters Finale Rematch" video, Sapnap is enraged when Dream murders his wolf as he's helpless to watch, and promptly decides to fight him alone. Sapnap is unarmored and his best weapon is a stone sword. Dream is decked out in full iron gear and he's also considered The Dreaded for very good reasons. Guess how well that ends for Sapnap.
  • Like an Old Married Couple: Bad says this word for word of George and Sapnap during the "4 Hunters Finale".
  • Loophole Abuse:
    • Discussed in the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video (37:01), when the hunters arrive in the End before Dream can even find the stronghold.
      Bad: Hey, you never said we could not go to the End before you.
      George: It's true.
      Sapnap: It's not against the rules and regulations.
      George: Let's just flip through my (makes a flipping page sound) manual (flips again) of Manhunt, yep, it's not in the rules.
      Bad: Oh. What about that, Dream. Interesting.
    • Happens again in the "5 Hunters" video, as Dream gets so close to killing the dragon, the hunters place End Crystals which activate, reviving the dragon. While this would still count as a win for Dream, however, the server glitched to where the dragon didn't die and instead returned to full health (but with the same animation as reviving the dragon)—which wouldn't be so bad if Dream didn't get the achievement proving he'd killed the dragon, meaning he still hadn't won yet.
  • Mad Bomber: In the 4 Hunters Finale, Dream extensively uses TNT as a weapon after raiding several desert temples. He mostly uses it by dropping them on his opponents during the vertical battles, such as the mountain battle and the end pillar defense, but also uses it at one point with cobweb to make a Sticky Bomb, killing a helpless Sapnap and George (and almost blows himself up in the process).
    • A lot of Dream's traps in general revolve around explosives of some kind. The bed trap in the "3 Hunters" video, the End Crystal trap in the "3 Hunters Finale" video, the interdimensional cluster bomb in the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video, and the Nether roof trap in the "4 Hunters Rematch" videonote  are the stand-out examples.
  • Metaphorically True: In the 4 hunters finale video, Dream claims to be mining for full diamond armor, which Bad doesn’t take seriously. It’s true in the sense that he was mining to make an entity-cramming trap that would later kill George, allowing Dream to take his full diamond armor.
  • Minimalistic Cover Art: Dream's profile picture and banner on YouTube is mostly green and has a minimalistic figure made of a white circle and white body with no arms.
  • Mood Whiplash: At the tail end of the 4 Hunters Finale Rematch, in the middle of a Hard-Work Montage set to "Feeling Mean" by Ben Bostick, Dream realizes he's had his lead for longer than he should and asks what's taking the hunters so long. The montage then resumes.
  • Mook Horror Show: Though on paper Dream is at a disadvantage as the target of Manhunts, as many comments like to point out, in practice, the Hunters are more scared of Dream than he is of them, and for most of the Manhunts that fear proves to be fully justified as he picks the Hunters off. This is especially the case when watching the earliest Manhunt videos from George's perspective, showing exactly how terrifying it is to go up against Dream. Most of the time, he'll be hunting you.
  • More Dakka:
    • In the 4 Hunters Finale Rematch, the Hunters employ one of their most useful opening tactics yet: Trading for mountains of arrows they use to harass the armorless Dream. It's one of the most intense openings to date as it continues to play a part throughout the manhunt. It almost falls into Xanatos Gambit territories of planning: It prevents the Foregone Conclusion of a tactic outright killing Dream and forcing a restart, but it leaves Dream at an extreme disadvantage with low health. Furthermore, it allows the hunters to outgun Dream from afar and keep him pinned down. Lastly, their equipment is all but worthless to Dream, who must conserve inventory space, so even if they died Dream gained no real advantage. It's actually by abandoning this tactic and rushing Dream that three of them meet their demise.
    • Dream turns it around on them in the "4 Hunters Grand Finale" video, however. When the hunters set up camp near the End Portal, Dream manages to kill them by loading a hotbar's worth of crossbows with explosive fireworks and relentlessly bombarding them.
  • Mounted Combat:
    • In the 4 Hunters Finale Rematch, Dream and Sapnap engage in a jousting match as the other hunters are far behind. It's a brief one, however, as both of their horses soon die and they're left to fight in the traditional Manhunt way.
    • Happens again in the Survivor VS 3 Hitmen, Dream manage to tame a speedy horse and running away from the hunters.
  • Murder by Inaction: In the "Minecraft Speedrunner VS 3 Hunters Finale Rematch," the Hunters are in the Nether fortress and Dream is chasing Sapnap, when all of a sudden Sapnap gets stuck fighting two wither skeletons while cornered. Dream just silently locks him in and watches this happen as Sapnap begs him for help.
  • Musical Spoiler: At the beginning of his Minecraft Manhunt videos, Dream goes off without the hunters knowing, and there's an absence of music. So long as there's no music playing, you can be sure that the hunters don't know he's gone.
    • Subverted in the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video. This time, the hunters are smart enough to surround Dream and watch him closely to make sure that the hunters know exactly when he runs off.
  • Mythology Gag:
    • Sapnap's sudden desire to kill Dream's parrot in the "4 Hunters Grand Finale" video (to the point of giving up an easy shot on Dream in the Nether just to kill the parrot) seems to be him channeling his Chronic Pet Killer persona from the Dream SMP.
    • Another one that's discussed in-universe. Dream's pitfall trap in the "4 Hunters Finale Rematch" video was one of the first traps he and Sapnap did in their early, pre-Manhunt days. It's revealed in the bonus video that Sapnap did in fact remember the trap and its history (though unfortunately for him, Bad, and George, not until after they fell for it).
    Tropes N-Z 
  • Narrating the Obvious: Justified. The hunters use Dream's in-game achievements as a clue to track down where he is and what he's doing (though it's only obvious from the audience's end since they can see Dream while the hunters can't). For instance, they always know when Dream's started making a Nether Portal or has entered the End stronghold. Dream does the same thing, with the most common cases being when the hunters enter the Nether or End portals.
  • Nerves of Steel: Dream has a remarkable ability to keep his cool and think clearly under pressure, even when running for his life on half a heart or fighting multiple people in an all-out melee (his behind-the-scenes analysis videos admits he does mess up, but it's rare). He also notes that while he does sometimes shout out of surprise or panic, he purposefully keeps his mouth shut to avoid giving away how much health he has and in fact uses his hunters' screams to track their health. If he says anything, it's because it no longer matters or he's downplaying how much danger he's in.
  • Never Recycle Your Schemes: Dream always finds new and creative ways to destroy the hunters, and has mentioned that he regularly brainstorms new ways to catch them off-guard before recording. This is justified for multiple reasons. The hunters would quickly learn what to look out for if Dream stuck to the same plan every time, as with his attempt to reuse the End crystal trap in the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video. In addition, the hunters are perfectly capable of using Dream's tricks against him—exploding beds, introduced by Dream in the first 3 Hunters video, have become a favorite tactic for both sides. And lastly, if Dream used the exact same tricks every time, the Manhunts would be far less interesting for the viewers.
  • Nigh-Invulnerable: In the "4 Hunters Rematch" video, as a result of some very fortunate trades with villagers, the hunters all end up with Prot. 4 iron armor, which pretty much makes them invincible to any of Dream's attacks and also give them enough leeway to outright toy with Dream. As he said in the aftermath video, he wasn't expecting it at all, even moreso since no advancement messages showed up in the chat that would give away the fact that they enchanted their armor.note  They would've won right there had Dream not returned to the Nether to set up a trap that leaves them stuck in the Nether, forcing them to kill themselves and thus lose the armor in the process.
  • No Body Left Behind: Par for the course with Minecraft, but in addition, when he kills any of the hunters Dream will often burn the loot the hunters have on them if he can't use any of it himself, leaving behind no trace of them.
  • No Kill like Overkill: At the conclusion of the "4 Hunters Grand Finale" video, Dream prepares no less than nine firework-loaded crossbows. They decimate the hunters in maybe two seconds.
  • No One Could Survive That!: In the "5 Hunters Rematch", while escaping from the Hunters in the Nether, Dream takes a flying leap off a cliff over a lava chasm, and block-clutches with half a heart of health left. The Hunters are left in disbelief that he even survived that.
    Bad: He can't survive that!
  • No-Sell: Near the end of the first Death Swap, in the Nether, Dream uses an enchanted golden apple to gain fire resistance, completely negating George's plan to dunk Dream in lava. Of course, George doesn't know this, and Dream had humorous reactions swimming in the lava while waiting for the swap to throw George back into his own trap.
  • Not the Fall That Kills You…:
    • In "Minecraft Speedrunner VS 3 Hunters," Dream leaps into a ravine with George, Sapnap, and BadBoyHalo close behind. He lands in Soft Water, and then covers the water with his blocks, leaving the other three with nowhere to land. They all die from the resulting fall damage.
    • Techniques Dream has used to avoid fall damage when he can't use water include landing on hay bales (which reduces fall damage), boats placed on the ground, grabbing a ladder from mid-air, and the infamous MLG Horse.
    • In "Minecraft Speedrunner VS 4 Hunters", Dream builds an extremely tall tower to goad the hunters to climb up to pursue him, jumps from it into the lake below, then uses the Frost Walker boots he found earlier to freeze the lake and cause half of them to fall to their death.
    • Another notable case of this is in the "Speedrunner VS 5 Hunters" video, in which Dream towers up early on to get some breathing room and smelt iron. Sapnap followed him, and ended up knocking Dream off his tower, only for Dream to use a crafting table in mid-air (already placed there by Antfrost's attempt to tower) and making a boat to MLG. Upon analysing the stunt, he admitted that it was planned in the sense that he planned to make a boat, but the entire thing beyond where his wood was and the placement of the boat was pure luck. Even so, it's insanely impressive.
    • Yet another example occurs in the Final Manhunt, where Dream is stuck in an Early Game Hell and has towered up to evade the Hunters, while he was on low health and Sapnap was in hot pursuit. However, when Sapnap drops his water bucket to the other Hunters on the ground, Dream dives down, grabs the water bucket in mid-air, and lands without a flinch. Oh, and to rub salt in the wound, he steals the Hunters' cooked salmon on his way out to heal up.
  • Not the Intended Use: Boats show up rather frequently during the Manhunts, and while they are used to traverse large bodies of water, more often than not, Dream uses them to negate fall damage when he doesn't have a water bucket handy. In another instance, Dream used boats to leap frog across lava to put distance between himself and the hunters.
  • Nuke 'em:
    • At the end of the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video, the hunters set up a trap near the End spawn point that they plan to use to kill Dream with the instant he enters the End. Knowing he stands no chance of surviving it normally, Dream opts for the perfectly predictable route of just dropping a quarter-stack of TNT through the stronghold portal. What results is basically an interdimensional cluster bomb, leading to the trap's destruction and all three hunters dying.
    • In the "Random Item Challenge VS 2 Hunters" video, Dream gets two TNT drops in a row, so he fills an underground chamber with it and makes a path of TNT to the surface. He lures the hunters off their tower to the mega bomb, and after igniting it towers up to cover the lit TNT. The resulting explosion is so huge it even killed Sapnap, who was flying with elytra. Although Dream was killed as well, he still won due to being the last to die.
  • Obvious Rule Patch:
    • About halfway through the second Death Swap, it is revealed that Dream and George came up with a special rule: you can't travel to the Nether to kill the other person with lava. This is likely to stop every Death Swap afterwards from degenerating into who can travel to the Nether first, as there are only two other reliable counters to this plan. The first one is by using Fire Resistance potions, which are only possible to make (or find) in the Nether by finding blaze rods and magma cream, or by trading with Piglins. The second solution is to get incredibly lucky with finding an enchanted golden apple, as George found out the hard way. What makes this an even more obvious rule patch is that the first Death Swap ended in the exact manner the duo decided to ban.
    • In the bonus video for the "4 Hunters Finale", Dream talks about some unsaid, soft rules that the team chooses to abide by for the sake of fun. In the 'reverse' Manhunt where Dream hunted George, George got to the Nether and Dream responded by destroying the exit portal to trap him, which George only managed to overcome by luckily having what he needed already. Trapping the speedrunner like that would be a really cheesy and reliable way to make the game unwinnable, so they decided that the Hunters aren't allowed to deactivate the portal out. The speedrunner still can, because the Hunters can die to escape, and both sides are allowed to do other things like guard it, bury it in lava, or set up a trap on the other side.
  • Oh, Crap!: Very frequently in Minecraft Manhunt, mostly when Dream is trying to lose the hunters at the start of the game, or when one of the hunters realizes that they've been outplayed by Dream and are about to die. Sometimes, though, Dream doesn't even have to be involved!
    Dream: (separated from everyone in the Nether) So how's everybody doing?
    Bad, Sapnap, and George: (coincidental scream of sheer terror)
    Bad: (Beat) ... we're fine...
    • An amazing example comes in the middle of the "4 Hunters Rematch" video. As the hunters pursue Dream through the Nether roof, Dream begins to gloat that they're now trapped. The hunters have no idea what he means, until Sapnap figures it out as Dream begins to Ender Pearl back to the portal, TNT in hand.
      Sapnap: Wait! He's going back to the portal! Stop him, stop him!
      • Another amazing example comes at the end of the same video. The hunters perch around the End, keeping an eye out for Dream to keep him from approaching the Ender Dragon. They're confident they've won... and then they notice that the dragon's health is plummeting as they speak.
    • At the end of the "5 Hunters Finale" video, the Hunters enter the End, see what Dream is doing, and Sam immediately starts panicking, because he knows exactly what Dream is setting up and how close he is to victory if they don't kill him now.
  • Once per Episode:
    • Dream's intro: "Also, according to YouTube's statistics, only a small percentage of people who watch my videos are actually subscribed, so if you end up liking this video, consider subscribing; it's free, and you can always change your mind. Enjoy the video." Originally a genuine plea, this has since been memed to hell and back, and it's clear that by now Dream's just saying it out of tradition.
    • Dream always starts the videos by tricking the hunters into distracting themselves, then running off while they're too busy to notice he's already started. Although this initially stopped beginning with the "3 Hunters Finale" video when the hunters learned to never stop taking their eyes off of Dream, this finally came back in the "4 Hunters Finale" video, with Dream pretending to go AFK to trick the hunters into doing the same, allowing him to get an easy head-start.
    • Every Minecraft Manhunt feels incomplete without hearing from the hunters: "Oh, Dream!"
    • In pretty much every episode, Dream has at least one or two tricks or traps to try out against the hunters. There's usually at least one for every point in the run (the initial resource-gathering, the Nether run, the Ender Pearl hunting, and the End fight).
    • It seems like every episode has at least one Enderman attacking George, prompting some variation of "I'm getting hit by this stupid Enderman!" In the "4 Hunters Finale" video, he ends up dying to one.
  • Out-Gambitted: In the "2 Assassins video", Dream is making his Nether Portal when he's interrupted by Sapnap, and he's forced to use a gambit to kill Sapnap before George can find them and join the fight. He does take out Sapnap, finishes his portal... only to emerge in a tiny room with George waiting for him. George wasn't coming to help Sapnap at all, rather he was until he dug into a lava cave right near the one Dream was using. He made his own portal close enough to Dream's that the two entrances linked to the same exit, then built walls around it so there'd be no escape.
    • Their plan to ambush Dream when he enters through the End Portal in the 3 Hunters Grand Finale gets literally obliterated when Dream dunks tons of TNT into the portal to destroy their dirt surface and send them into the void, leaving him with lots of leeway to kill the Ender Dragon and win the Manhunt.
    • When the 3 hunters in the 3 Hunters Finale ambush Dream in a cave and nearly kill him, Dream throws a Splash Potion of Invisibility onto the ground, affecting all. Since all of them had full Iron gear, a shield, and a Diamond sword, they're promptly confused with Sapnap and George ending up attacking Bad as they assumed he was Dream (and you can even see Bad attack Sapnap back) despite George telling everyone to crouch and Bad doing so. Dream uses this confusion to kill a weakened Bad and escape from the trio.
    • In the 4 Hunters video, Dream is up very high on a small group of blocks in the Nether. While they try to find him, they cannot as his leaves he used to build up do not drop as an item when broken, causing them to be confused as their compass also cannot detect if Dream is up or down. When he reveals himself to get them to tower up, he begins to fire arrows at them. They naturally begin to build a platform so they could not be knocked off by the arrows but Dream counters this too by using a fishing rod to bring up both Ant and Bad and let them drop to their demise, which they were not prepared to counter against (and could not MLG water bucket as water evaporates in the Nether).
  • Out-of-Genre Experience: The "Minecraft Speedrunner VS $1,000,000 Mr Beast Challenge" episode starts off with a back-and-forth chase like usual, but the moment that everyone ends up in a Warden lair, the video abruptly becomes horror survival for a few minutes as everyone forgets about the manhunt and focuses solely on trying to hide from the abomination.
  • Overly Long Gag: In "Speedrunner VS PRO", during Illumina's turn as the Hunter, Dream spent several Minecraft days chasing him on boat. What makes it qualify for the trope is that Dream, rather than cut out all the non-action, chose to do time-lapse segments instead.
    Dream: I'm stickin' here, Illumina! This video's gonna be an hour long, and it's just gonna be Illumina and friend boating.
  • Phallic Weapon: During his "Minecraft Speedrun World Record 1.15" video, while enchanting his diamond sword with a Looting III book, Dream takes a precious couple of seconds off his speedrun to rename the sword "penis" at Sapnap's request.
  • Pit Trap: In the "4 Hunters Finale Rematch" video, Dream creates one using sand, crafting table, and signs. He kills three of the hunters with it, but fails to kill Ant, which ultimately costs him the game.
  • Please Subscribe to Our Channel: In the beginning of his videos, Dream shows the viewers his YouTube statistics, which shows that only a small percentage of his viewers are actually subscribed to his channel. Dream executes his intro in a way that doesn't pressure the viewer into liking or subscribing, yet makes the viewer want to do both.
  • Plot Armor: It seems Dream somehow survives situations that other people are very unlikely to live through through sheer skill and some luck, to the point that some fans joke about this trope. It seems even more like this if Dream wins—however, note that Dream does lose sometimes, either late into a video after escaping death several times before or so early on that they scrap it and pretend it never happened.
    • Illumina namedrops this trope when he's hunting Dream during the Manhunt video with him.
  • Point of No Return: Once Dream reaches the End, the only way he can leave is to win or lose the final objective of the Manhunt. He either kills the Ender Dragon with the items he has on him (plus whatever he can steal from dead Hunters), or it isn't enough and he dies. He can't go back to the overworld to regroup, restock, or gather resources for a gambit, he has to have all that prepared before entering in the first place, and if he didn't then he just has to deal with it.
  • Post-Final Boss: The Ender Dragon is this. Sure, defeating it is Dream's Instant-Win Condition (not to mention his only win condition), but the real final battle of each Manhunt is Dream's last stand against the hunters, who always make it to the End as well. The dragon is always more of an afterthought compared to the constant threat of the hunters (serving as an environmental obstacle at best), and the number of times it holds relevance within the final fight itself can be counted on one hand.
  • Power Trio: Dream, George, and Sapnap usually form this dynamic outside of Manhunt.
  • Product Placement: At the very beginning of the 4 Hunters Finale, after Dream does his intro, he reveals that Dragon City sponsored him; the game even added a special dragon based off of Dream that people can get. Subsequent videos have been sponsored by Monster Legends.
  • Put on a Bus:
  • Quad Damage: Strength potions are some of Dream's most reliable allies. They turn any fight he might lose into a borderline Curb-Stomp Battle in his favor, they're just that overpowered.
    • The most notable example comes from the first "3 Hunters" video. As Dream approaches the exit Nether portal, he senses the hunters nearby. He downs a strength potion (which the hunters hear) and proceeds to decimate them. And with two leftover potions from the brewing process, he then does it again after escaping the Nether.
      George: He does so much damage!
  • Quickly-Demoted Leader: In the early Manhunts, George served the role of the Big Bad, and in the team-up between him and Sapnap he served as The Leader of the duo. Once Bad joined the team, however, George was almost immediately sidelined to become The Heart instead as Bad took over the leadership role (and has maintained said position since).
  • Quieter Than Silence:
    • Frequently in Manhunt, one of the hunters (usually BadBoyHalo) will tell everyone to be quiet when they think Dream is nearby, or in a wall. This is so that the hunters can hear Dream breaking/placing blocks and running. The background music in the video even stops for those moments.
    • The 4 Hunters Finale begins (after the sponsor plug) in total silence. Dream thoughtfully respects the logic outlined on the page for this trope and puts a notice across the screen to assure viewers that it isn't an audio glitch.
      I pretended to be AFK to catch them off-guard
      your sound is fine
  • The Quiet One: Antfrost, the 4th recurring Hunter in Minecraft Manhunt, takes on a supporting role in the group and tends to only talk when needed to for his team's communications. Notably, at the highly chaotic and emotionally-charged end of the first 4 Hunters video, he is conspicious in his non-involvement as Dream, George, Bad, and Sapnap all argue at the top of their lungs about who technically won after all that struggle.
  • Rage Breaking Point: From "''Minecraft'', But My Friend Is A Dog". George swipes Dream (the dog) one too many times, resulting in him losing it for a few moments.
    Dream: GEORGE!!! HALF OF MY DAMAGE! IS FROM! YOU!!! You're no longer my owner!
  • Rage Quit: It's only jokingly and only for a few seconds, but Sapnap leaves in the "5 Hunters" video after Dream taunts him one too many times about having his diamond tools stolen from in front of him.
  • Rain of Arrows: In the "4 Hunters Finale Rematch" video, the Hunters use this as their initial strategy against Dream. Thanks to some villager trades, all the Hunters get dozens if not hundreds of arrows and can fire them without worry. A persistent challenge for Dream in that Manhunt is that every time he's exposed, they all just start bombarding him with so many arrows that that he can't ignore them or he'll die.
  • Refuge in Audacity:
    • Dream popping a Fire Resistance potion and charging all 3 of his hunters with only one heart actually works. Instead of fighting, they all run for the hills due to them assuming that it's a Strength potion and that if Dream is suddenly on the offensive, there's a good reason for it. While this did succeed because George couldn't tell what colour the potion particles were, the plan otherwise hinged on predicting his opponents' response and sheer balls.
    • In the first "5 Hunters" video, Dream puts 11 out of 12 Eyes of Ender in the End Portal before making his final preparations. The hunters then set up a guard in front of the End Portal, but Dream gets through the portal by simply walking into the room and adding the last Eye right in front of the dumbfounded hunters.
  • Right Under Their Noses: In the 4 Hunters Finale, Dream downs an invisibility potion and sneaks into the hunters’ base to return to the over world. What makes this especially hilarious is Bad running right past Dream while gleefully shouting about his imminent death. Dream tries teasing them but perhaps goes a bit too far as they catch on quick.
  • The Rival/Friendly Rivalry: After Dream's debut in the sixth Minecraft Championships, he & Technoblade served this role to each other. The two typically played up their rivalry, and even ended up in a best-of-ten PVP duel hosted by MrBeast for $100k. IRL, however, the two were good friends and their "rivalry" was just for show.
    • The eighth Minecraft Championships also lead to a Rivals Team Up moment when both of them were placed on the same team and proceeded to win.
  • Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Sapnap often reacts in this manner whenever Dream manages to kill George.
  • Round Table Shot: Dream looks at all the hunters surrounding him in the very beginning of the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video before running away.
  • Running Gag: At the beginning of Dream's videos (say it with me): "Also, according to YouTube's statistics, only a small percentage of people who watch my videos are actually subscribed, so if you end up liking this video, consider subscribing. It's free and you can always unsubscribe. Enjoy the video."
    • Whenever the hunters and Dream reach The End, you can expect George to keep "getting hit by this stupid Enderman!" at some point.
  • Run or Die: There's a reason it's called Minecraft Manhunt. Later episodes seem to invoke it—while the runner can always fight off a single hunter, they're more than likely doomed if they fight four or five head-on.
    • Early on in the 3 Hunters Finale Rematch, Dream gets a golden sword from a chest near a broken Nether Portal. The three hunters promptly run away from Dream.
    • Early in the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video, Dream is collecting wheat, when all of a sudden George and Sapnap are chasing after Dream with iron weapons and armor. He runs away as fast as possible while the hunters try to get him.
  • Russian Reversal: (In the grand finale explanation video) BadBoyHalo, when they set up the End spawn trap, was expecting to get a video clip of the hunters and him destroying Dream... which would've happened if Dream didn't blow up the place with the TNT first. Dream got a video clip in the main video of him destroying the team of hunters. In short, instead of the hunters destroying Dream (and recording it), Dream destroys the hunters (while recording it.)
  • Saw It in a Movie Once:
    • In the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video, when Dream was in the Nether and used a boat-hopping technique to escape from the hunters, he says he saw that technique on Reddit.
    • Reddit saves Dream once again as he uses another technique he saw, this time using a fishing rod to pull a Strider up to him and quickly mount it before going back down, allowing him to avoid fire damage.
    • In the final Manhunt, while in pursuit by the Hunters, Dream first throws an ender pearl upward, then grows a giant jungle tree with bonemeal, and ends up teleporting on top of the tree. He quickly credits this technique to TikTok.
  • Say My Name: Happens in every Manhunt, with both Dream and the hunters often calling out the other's name when they chase each other.
  • Scarily Competent Tracker: The hunters always have a compass that points towards Dream, meaning they can always find him no matter where he goes or how he tries to hide. The exception was that they couldn't track locations within the Nether, until a Minecraft update changed that. However, there is one key limitation—the compass can't determine the y-level of its target, meaning Dream can hide above ground while the hunters dig underground in search of him.
    • The compass plays a big role in "Minecraft Speedrunner VS 3 Hunters FINALE." Dream builds a fake Nether Portal so that he could trick the hunters into thinking he was back at the Nether. It would've worked, but the compass gave it away, since it can indirectly tell whether Dream's at the Overworld or the Nether depending on if it moves or not, since this video was before the update that made compasses work in the Nether.
  • Schmuck Bait: In the 3 Hitmen rematch, during one of the grace periods, Dream tells Bad that there's a leftover piece of iron that he left in a cave. Bad falls for the bait hook, line, and sinker, and as he goes to mine the iron Dream seals him in obsidian, allowing him to gain some distance.
  • Screams Like a Little Girl:
    • George does this semi-often, and it's sometimes what Dream uses to figure out that George is on low health.
    • Sapnap doesn't usually do this, but he gets an amazing moment at the end of the "4 Hunters Finale" video. He's running for his life from a Strength-boosted Dream, and Ender Pearls to get far away from Dream... only to look behind him and find Dream mere feet away (having used his own Pearl to catch up). The resulting scream from Sapnap is legendary.
  • Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: A common reaction when Dream kills at least one of his pursuers and the rest decide to just run for it.
    • Notably, during the Invisibility Potion gambit, Dream manages to use the ensuing chaos to pick off Bad then George, causing Sapnap to declare "Oh my— I'm out of here, I'm out of here!" to the chagrin of the first two.
    • In the "4 Hunters Finale" video, Dream kills George and steals his Protection-enchanted diamond armor. He then drinks a strength potion. Sapnap sees this and doesn't bother to stick around to find out how much damage Dream could do.
  • Sealed Evil in a Can:
    • In the "4 Hunters Rematch", Dream gets hounded by the Hunters after they use Villager trading to obtain ridiculously powerful enchanted armor that makes them nigh-invincible. With no possible way to fight them and win, Dream retreats back into his Nether Portal, and while they debate whether they should follow him, he uses his diamond pick to harvest the portal. He then digs to the top of the Nether, clips though the Bedrock ceiling, and builds a new portal on top of it. After emerging and goading them to follow him through it, he flees, uses Ender Pearls to rush back, and then sets a TNT before he goes through, which deactivates the portal behind him. None of the Hunters have a Flint & Steel to reactivate it, trapping them inescapably above the unbreakable Nether ceiling. Bad "volunteers" to die and come free them, but going back through the portal makes a new, useless connection instead of repairing the old one, forcing them all to kill themselves and forfeit their armor to escape.
    • In the "5 Hunters Grand Finale", Dream tricks all five hunters into following him inside an ocean monument where the elder guardians give them mining fatigue. Dream slips out and seals the entrance with hay bales, which the hunters can no longer break, trapping them inside and forcing them to share three doors for air until they manage to slowly break out.
  • Secret Weapon:
    • In the "3 Hunters Finale" video, Dream blows up the Hunters with an End Crystal, catching them completely off guard as it was the first time one had been used in Manhunt and they didn't even know End Crystals were craftable.
    • In the end of the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video, Dream secretly collects TNT to use for his final attack: to destroy the hunters' End spawn trap.
    • In the "4 Hunters" video, the Hunters bring one to the final battle in the form of End Crystals which they use to heal the Ender Dragon.
    • In the end of the "5 Hunters FINALE REMATCH" video, Dream starts chasing BadBoyHalo with intent to kill him. This would've succeeded if it weren't for Bad suddenly turning around while running to place an obsidian block, placing an End Crystal on it, and then activating it all in less than a second to kill Dream.
  • Series Fauxnale: Originally, "Minecraft Speedrunner VS 3 Hunters FINALE" and the rematch was going to be the final episode of the 1v3 Minecraft Manhunts. Two weeks after the rematch, however, due to popular demand, Dream released a grand finale that would be the end to all 1v3 Minecraft Manhunts.
    • The "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video itself. It's the climactic conclusion to the 5-episode 1v3 saga, and Dream's line in the opening ("No redos, no rematches, this is it") doesn't help with the implication that this may very well be the last Manhunt. One month later, however, and Dream uploaded a video called "Minecraft Speedrunner VS 4 Hunters"...
    • Much like the previous grand finale, the "4 Hunters Grand Finale" video ends the 5-episode 1v4 saga, yet despite its climactic nature Dream makes it clear that there is a future for Manhunt—namely, 5 hunters.
  • Sequel Escalation: At first, the "3 Hunters Finale" video and the "Finale Rematch" video were going to be the end of the "3 Hunters" series of Manhunt videos (it's later clarified that Manhunt as a whole would have continued but in a different manner). But then, a week after the Unsolved Mystery of Herobrine video released, the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video released because the last Minecraft Manhunt video got over a million likes. In a day.
  • Serial Escalation: Dream's Minecraft Manhunts get more and more over-the-top as the series grows more in number. For example, the Manhunts started off with only one hunter. As the series expanded, Dream added a second hunter, and eventually a third and later a fourth—and, once that ended, a fifth As a result, his victories keep getting better and better. The strategies that Dream and the hunters use also evolve. Where he once ambushed and fought George directly, he'll now set up lava and explosives to use against the hunters. In the 3 Hunters grand finale explanation video, Dream said the hunters were at their best, and Dream only managed to kill one of the hunters once prior to his now-famous TNT ploy, whereas in the earlier videos, Dream killed the hunters many times while also managing to outsmart them. Dream did actually outsmart them in the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video, but he had to use new techniques as well as becoming better at the game.
  • Sensory Abuse: In 5 Hunters rematch, Dream scream top of his lung to prevent hunters to hear the TNT breaking underneath.
  • Share Phrase: The hunters can't go an episode without saying, "Oh, Dream~!"
  • Shout-Out:
    • On two different occasions, George and later Bad (36:01) say "My, how the turns have tabled."
    • During "Beating Minecraft Without Leaving the Nether", the group ran away from a ghast mounted on striders while singing the "And then he waddled away" part of "The Duck Song". This is also referenced a couple of times during Manhunt.
    • During "3 Hunters", George compares Dream to John Wick.
  • Signature Laugh: Dream's teakettle wheeze is very well known, and his maniacal laugh can occasionally reach Joker levels.
  • Sixth Ranger:
    • Originally, it was only Dream and George in the Minecraft Manhunts, but when the time came for two hunters, Sapnap joined in. BadBoyHalo came later when the hunters needed three of them to even have a chance against Dream. Antfrost eventually fills this role as the fourth hunter when everyone else has had more than a little experience fighting Dream. Ant is the only one to have never fought Dream solo, but he's fast approaching the other hunters in skill despite being a Manhunt novice and even (technically) won his first-ever Manhunt. In the 4 hunters finale video, it could be said that Ant provides the main support role, healing the other hunters and finding them armor and not needing to face off with Dream.
    • Sam has taken the role from Ant as of the "5 Hunters" video. As Ant has settled into his role as the Support Party Member and The Smart Guy, Sam is now the newest member of the group.
  • Smug Super: In the "4 Hunters Rematch", the Hunters get one over on Dream by trading at a village to obtain Protection IV enchants on all their armor pieces, making them Nigh-Invulnerable. Such a move boosts their egos to the levels of this trope, causing them to toy with Dream for probably the first time in any Manhunt. They allow Dream to fight Sapnap 1-vs-1, with the latter not even using a shield, to goad him into attacking so Sapnap can shrug it off with a laugh, and try to kill him with random held items like bread instead of actual weapons just to rub in how hopeless it is. In the end, their confidence in their invulnerability proves well justified, forcing Dream to use a more esoteric strategy to overcome them since he has no chance of killing them conventionally.
  • Spam Attack: Dream, whenever he has a bow and is fighting the hunters. What he usually does is go a safe enough distance, and then bow shot after bow shot like crazy to knock them back and reduce their health slightly. That's when he either attacks with a sword, or runs away.
  • Special Guest:
    • Dream appears in some of MrBeast gaming videos as one.
    • Dream and Technoblade's $100,000 duel was hosted on MrBeast's gaming channel.
  • Spontaneous Crowd Formation: EVERYONE was suprised about just HOW MANY mobs there were when Dream was chasing them.
  • Stealth-Based Mission: The final minutes of the "4 Hunters Rematch" video become this. The hunters take positions around the End to keep Dream away from the Ender Dragon, knowing that if he reaches the dragon he'll likely kill her before they can stop him. Dream wins by burrowing under the ground and emerging at the final portal, where he hides behind the central column until the Ender Dragon perches there, at which point he decimates the dragon's health.
    • Dream's escape from the Nether in the "4 Hunters Finale" video. The hunters are buffed with diamond armor and Dream's unlikely to kill them... so he downs an invisibility potion and sneaks past them.
  • Stealth Insult: In the unedited version of "4 Hunters Finale", Antfrost said that he likes to hear Bad say the silly things Dream and the other Hunters mock him for, as it makes him feel better about himself. Bonus points for Bad not picking up on it at all and taking it as a compliment.
  • Sticky Situation/Sticky Bomb: In the "4 Hunters Finale" video, Dream uses cobwebs to snare George and Sapnap and prevent them from moving before detonating TNT around them, instantly killing the two hunters (and nearly taking Dream himself out as well).
  • Sudden Soundtrack Stop: In Dream's Minecraft Manhunt videos, the background music that's currently playing stops when one of the hunters tells everyone to stop what they are doing and listen. The music stops so that the audience can listen with them.
  • Suicide Attack: According to the explanation video of the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video, Sapnap was trying to use the bed to blow up Dream before he could kill the dragon, but instead, he exploded himself and Dream killed the dragon and got the achievement.
  • Support Party Member: While it was unclear exactly what Antfrost's role in the squad of hunters would be on his first forays, he quickly cemented himself as much less Pv P-oriented than the other hunters. Instead, he tended to fill out a support role, sacrificing himself and setting off the desert temple's explosives in the 4 hunters rematch, exploding a bed in close quarters to open up Dream’s nether maze in the same video, and in the following video (the 4 Hunters Finale,) provided his fellow hunters with food and spent a great deal of time searching for diamonds for them. That's dedication!
  • Survivorship Bias: There's no doubt that Dream is a very skilled player, but watching only his uploaded content might give an exaggerated impression of his success rate against teams of Hunters. Proper episodes of the Manhunt series that count towards the score tally only get made from matches that could reasonably go either way. Mostly unseen by viewers, but known to exist, are a number of dud games where Dream didn't get the right happenstance to stand a chance against the Hunters and died quickly. Essentially, the relatively small number of Manhunts where Dream does well enough to make worthwhile content are the only ones that get uploaded.
  • Swapped Roles:
    • On rare occasions, Dream hunts down George instead of the usual.
    • Parodied in the extra scenes of the 4 Hunters Finale with Bad becoming the speedrunner while Dream, George, Sapnap, and Ant become the hunters, however Bad drowns while escaping from the hunters (ironically within the early-game grace period Dream gets in the Manhunts proper).
  • Taking the Bullet: Several times, a hunter will jump in the fray to shield a fellow hunter from an incoming attack that would normally kill them.
    • This is especially noticeable in the "4 Hunters Finale" video. George picks up Bad and Ant's inventory and is forced to flee from Dream, only for Sapnap to block Dream's attack and allow George time to run.
      Dream: Come here, George!
      George: (panicking) NOOOOO!!!
      Sapnap: (intercepting Dream's attack) George, get away from him!!!
  • Taking You with Me:
    • At the very end of the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video, Sapnap tries to kill Dream as a last-ditch effort by exploding a bed next to him. Sapnap thought blowing up the bed would either blow up the dragon (killing it before Dream could), or kill Dream himself. Both possibilities would result in the hunters winning. What happened instead was that the game gave the "Free the End" achievement to Dream (meaning that no matter what really happened the proof was in Dream's favor), and the bed only blew up Sapnap.
    • At the beginning of the "4 Hunters Rematch" video, Dream enters the innermost chamber of a desert temple with the hunters right on him. With no items to lose, Ant jumps down onto the pressure plate right next to Dream, activating the TNT in an effort to blow Dream up. It's a smart move that only fails because Dream had been lucky enough to find an enchanted golden apple seconds prior, resulting in a similar scenario to the above example—Dream survives while Ant blows himself up.
    • Amidst a cave chase in the 4 Hunters Finale Rematch, Dream and Sapnap end up fighting beneath the lava after the other Hunters cool the surface. Sapnap quotes this trope name almost verbatim while trying to stall Dream long enough for his fire resistance to wear off.
      Sapnap: I'm taking you down with me, Dream!
    • Dream pulls this on the hunters, probably unintentionally, in the Random Item Challenge video, when he fills an underground chamber with TNT and lures the hunters to it, lighting the exposed block before towering up. All three players are killed in the resulting blast, and since Dream was the technically the last to die he wins the challenge.
  • The Team: The hunters usually form a team, mainly once they're over three in number.
  • Bad is The Leader of the group, usually being the one to rally the hunters together and being the mastermind behind many of their attempts on Dream's life.
  • Sapnap is The Lancer, being one of the core leaders of the group (but not quite on Bad's level) as well as being a direct contrast to Bad in tactics (Sapnap will rush Dream without a second thought while Bad will usually stay back and come up with a plan first). He's also The Big Guy, being the group's muscle and the largest threat to Dream in direct combat.
  • George is The Heart of the group. Although he's the most overshadowed and overlooked in terms of skills, having no major niche to fill on the team (compared to Bad, Ant and Sam's cunning and Sapnap's brute force) and being the most prone to falling for Dream's traps, he still plays the much-needed assist and support role for the team—whether that be keeping Dream out of range of killing the other hunters or assisting Sapnap in rushing Dream while the rest of his teammates gather resources—and there would be a noticeable void in his absence.
  • Ant is The Sneaky Guy, typically avoiding direct combat and help the team inform the danger up ahead. He also proves himself willing to play the long game, splitting off from the hunters for twenty minutes of the "4 Hunters Finale" video in order to provide the hunters diamond armor and an enchanting table, sacrificing the ability to kill Dream early for providing a much tougher fight later on. This is further cemented in the 4 Hunters Finale Rematch where, at the end, Ant is the only one to avoid the Pitfall Trap, and actually manages to kill Dream using splash potions.
  • Sam is The Smart Guy of the group, being the most knowledgeable about Minecraft mechanics and glitches and utilizes redstone to trap Dream.
  • Technician Versus Performer: Between Dream and Technoblade, where Dream is the performer and Techno was the technician. Dream's iconic Minecraft Manhunt series has both the hunter and the hunted showcasing creative traps and methods of outmaneuvering and killing the opposition in randomly generated worlds. Dream himself is known for his quick thinking and creativity, coupled with incredible luck that all make his videos possible. Technoblade was much more methodical, known for structured Pv P matches. He has also performed complex calculations to determine the best method of victory in tournament challenges, including his Excel spreadsheet for tracking potatoes during his potato war and his startling come-from-behind victory in Build Mart, also using a spreadsheet.
  • Tempting Fate:
    • In the second Assassin video, Dream builds his Nether portal at the top of a pillager outpost and revels in George's horror at seeing it there, calling himself a genius. He then walks straight off a cliff, ending up at two and a half hearts of health.
    • In the first "3 Hunters" video, Dream only has time to grab 2 logs (which he makes into 8 planks) before he's forced to flee, with everyone vocally confident that he can't do much with that. He ends up diving into pool of water in a ravine and using the planks to block off the water from his pursuers, killing them when they all land on them.
    • During Survivalist VS 3 Hitmen, at the end, George decides to try and goad Dream into attacking him, while both are high up on a tower. Dream is above George. Needless to say, it does not end well for George when Dream decides to jump to him.
      Dream: Look at me. George, I way outmatch you.
      George: Jump down! Jump down then! (repeats "jump down" several times)
      Dream: (jumps down and punches George off the tower)
      George: Oh my god! NOOOO! He actually did it!
    • During Speedrunner VS 4 Hunters, the Hunter team gets ahold of an enchanting table early and begins souping up all their gear with glee, with Sapnap having so much confidence in their impending success, he names his Diamond Axe "Dream Slayer". Dream manages to win the next skirmish and loots the very same axe, and uses it to murder his opponents several more times during the video.
  • Thanatos Gambit: In the video where Dream hunts down George, he builds a secret room near the End portal with a bed and sets his spawn in it. Later, thanks to a fumble, he falls to his death and acts distraught at losing all his items and seemingly giving George the win. But he just hides in the bed room until George enters the End, punches his way out, dives in the portal after him, and anticlimactically slaps him into the void while his guard was down.
  • This Is Gonna Suck: In the first Death Swap, George places his trap in the Nether. What George didn't expect was for Dream to have an enchanted golden apple with him. Dream tells him to think about his death for the next four minutes while he just sits there in the bottom of the lava pool, waiting for the swap to happen, which is pretty much exactly what George does.
  • Thwarted Escape:
    • At the end of the first Assassin video, George gets out of Dream's render distance and loops around to the opposite direction he initially ran from and hides behind a tree. Dream naturally runs that way and is caught completely by surprise.
    • At the end of the second Assassin video, Dream has just barely gotten away from George with an Ender pearl and trapped him underground, but George is able to get out and catch up to Dream with another pearl, killing him again.
  • Time for Plan B: In the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video, Dream and the hunters have a conversation about the plans the hunters make. Dream thinks that, since his End Crystal trap didn't work, the hunters have made actual plans.
    Dream: Usually, I feel like you guys, when you just say plans, like as a meme, you're like, "Plan Seven!" But in this case, I feel like "Plan B" is like, you literally, actually have plans.
    George: It's a reputable name.
    Bad: An actual plan.
    Sapnap: Guys, execute Plan 74-35B!
  • Too Dumb to Live: Generally averted, as both Dream and the hunters tend to display a high level of competency. That said, it can happen on occasion.
    • In the "3 Hunters Rematch" video, Dream drinks a fire resistance potion and jumps into lava to escape the hunters (who are seconds behind). That's not what counts as this trope, though. What counts as this trope is when a potionless Bad jumps into the lava after him as if he's expecting something else to happen other than his immediate demise.
    • In the "3 Hunters Finale Rematch" video, Sapnap rushes in to fight Dream solo after his pet dog is killed. Dream is The Dreaded for very good reasons, not to mention he is armed to the teeth in iron gear while Sapnap has no armor and a stone sword—even the other hunters see it's hopeless, and want him to just cut his losses. Sapnap decides to fight him anyways. Dream obliterates him so fast the other hunters don't even have time to run.
  • Took a Level in Badass: All the competitors have gotten way better at Minecraft in general and the strategy of Manhunts specifically over time. Dream actually lost his first Manhunt against only George thanks to a silly mistake, which is a far cry from his later feats of matching or beating teams of three or four Hunters. In the earlier Manhunts there were many scenes of Dream fighting running battles with the Hunters and killing them in straightforward combat, but the Hunters got better at teamwork in later ones, forcing Dream to use tricks and gambits to break their cohesion first before picking them off.
    • In the "3 Hunters Rematch" video, the hunters apply much more strategy to taking Dream on, constantly pursuing him and only suffering casualties when they separate. They block off the first End Portal with obsidian and even use Dream's brewing stand against him, almost costing him the game in the long run.
    • Perhaps the biggest leap for any one group is in the the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video. Here, the hunters finally live up to their name and end up forcing Dream on the run throughout the entire video instead of them dying to him every few minutes, as they wound up scoring iron armour and iron weapons from a nearby village, then later upgrade parts to diamond armour and weapons, and even go as far as to enchant their stuff. They even go to the End ahead of him to set-up a trap, like they did in the first 3 Hunters episode. Dream is never able to enchant his own armour and sword, and he even admitted that it was their best outing yet. That was, had he not gone and made TNT to blow up all three of them and their trap, he would've actually lost.
    • Sapnap in general qualifies for this trope, even moreso than the other hunters. Originally he's the least experienced of the hunters, frequently getting killed by Dream, and often in the most humiliating ways (such instances being a suicide-leap into lava after Dream destroys the ground he jumps to as well as the infamous Wither Skeleton incident). Notably, his solo bout against Dream has him with a handicap (that handicap being full diamond armor), whereas George and Bad had no such handicap. However, he gains several levels of competence and overall menace as the Manhunts go on. He first qualified for this trope around the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video, where he's notably the only hunter to even attempt to escape Dream's TNT trap (only failing by sheer luck), and he's also the one who makes one final attempt at killing Dream after respawning (also only failing by sheer luck). He also becomes by far and away the biggest threat during the "4 Hunters" video, crafting an enchanted diamond axe that puts him in Lightning Bruiser territory until Dream somehow kills him and takes the axe for himself, and is also the consistent enemy during the final fight, even being the one to off Dream at the end. Nowadays, he's widely considered one of the two most threatening hunters (alongside Bad) and he's also generally considered the strongest in terms of raw fighting skill.
    • Ant also qualifies for this trope. In his debut Manhunts, he had little presence and tended to fade into the background. He seems aware of that, however, and nowadays he outright exploits it in order to gather much-needed resources for the hunters while simultaneously allowing them to continue the chase against Dream without losing much-needed firepower. Ant also exploits his lack of fighting skill to lure Dream into a false sense of security— he won the "4 Hunters Finale Rematch" video for his allies after evading a death trap and being chased into a desert temple, only to unleash a fatal harming potion on Dream with no warning at all. He's not quite on the level of Bad or Sapnap in terms of experience, but he's getting there.
  • Trap Master: Dream himself. Being outnumbered, he often needs to prepare traps and tricks to level the playing field against the Hunters. The Hunters dabble in traps as well, but the nature of the contest means they have to aggressively engage Dream and he has to defend himself, limiting their opportunities to do it.
  • True Final Boss: In "5 Hunters THE LAST MANHUNT", After Dream has obliterated almost all of the remaining hunters in the End via TNT from above ala "3 Hunters Grand Finale", his final opposition before he can focus solely on the Ender Dragon is George.
  • Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny: Dream & Technoblade, after three Minecraft Championships and months of rivalry, face off in a best-of-ten duel worth $100,000 for whoever wins. Techno wins in a narrow 6-4 victory over Dream, but a video Dream made covering the aftermath reveals they split the money and in fact had planned to do so even before the fight in order to take away most of the pressure on both sides.
  • Unspoken Plan Guarantee: Though unscripted, it's perhaps justified all the same. Dream doesn't have to communicate his plans to the hunters, and thus tells no one (audience included) until he actually executes his plan. With no warning, the hunters are more likely to fall for whatever scheme he's got going on. Meanwhile, the Hunters are multiple different human beings and must coordinate plans between them in real time, leading them to speak their plan and thus ruin it by tipping Dream off, or spend time communicating it privately which is slower and buys Dream time to prepare for every possibility.
    • The trope is best displayed in the different strategies in the first and last 3 Hunters videos: in the former, Bad tells nobody about his trap and Dream lets his guard down, falling for it completely; while in the latter, the Hunters brag about how they're setting up an unbeatable trap, and Dream—knowing that there's a trap—figures out a way to beat it.
  • Unusual Euphemism: BadBoyHalo frequently uses "Muffin", as in "What the muffin?", "He's muffined", or "Stop being a muffin-head!". It's as versatile as the swear it's probably substituting for.
  • Villain Respect: During the Manhunt, each side is the other's villain(s), but they're not above complimenting each other for excellent plays. Although the compliments are usually saved for the post-fight extra video, one notable exception is the "Return to Sender" advancement; notoriously hard to get reliably in-universe, Dream and his opponents will always praise each other when they get it, such as in the first 5 Hunters video.
  • Vitriolic Best Buds: Dream, George, Sapnap, and Bad are pretty much archnemeses during Manhunt. They're also close friends and have each others' backs. They're so close that they outright celebrate when one of their own hits an important milestone (such as Dream reaching 5 million subs or George reaching 1 million). And in the eighth Minecraft Championship, where Dream is on an opposing team to George and Sapnap, the latter two continue to cheer Dream on when his team makes it to the final round and theirs doesn't.
  • Weak to Magic: Dream's iron armor does nothing to save him from Ant's harming potions at the end of "4 Hunters Finale Rematch".
  • Weapon for Intimidation: Early in the "4 Hunters Finale Rematch" video, Dream scares all the Hunters off by threatening them with a stone axe, an iron chestplate, and a shield, which isn't a full loadout but still more than any of the Hunters have. Of course, if they could see his stats, they'd know that his threats are a bluff because he has one heart of health and barely any hunger, so they could just kill him in one hit despite his equipment.
  • Wham Line: There are several unexpected lines in many of Dream's videos...
    • In the first Death Swap:
      Dream: How long is the Fire Resistance for on god apples?
    • In the "4 Hunters Rematch" video, this one line from Sapnap clues in the hunters as to what Dream plans to accomplish by leaving a portal to the Nether roof, and also clues in any audience members who are still in the dark themselves:
      Sapnap: Wait! He's going back to the portal! Stop him, stop him!
    • The absence of a certain line ends up being one. When Dream seemingly kills the dragon in the "5 Hunters" video, the "Free the End" advancement that usually signifies Dream's victory doesn't appear.
    • Soon after the above example (also from the "5 Hunters" video), the chat updates and shows this line as shown below.
      Antfrost has reached the goal "The End... Again..."note 
  • Wham Shot: The videos sometimes have unexpected events that change everything...
    • In the 2 Hunters video, Dream is falling off the edge of the End and into the void. George then kills Sapnap. And then we see a few Ender Pearls drop right into Dream's hotbar.
    • In the "4 Hunters Rematch" video, Dream is running from the hunters atop the Nether roof. He then uses Ender Pearls to teleport back to the Nether portal, and in his inventory we see him hover over two select items: some TNT and a Flint & Steel.
    • In the "5 Hunters" video, Dream lands the finishing shot on the dragon... and then we see four End Crystals shooting out into the sky, all focused on one point.
  • What the Hell, Hero?: In the end of the 2 Hunters video, Sapnap has nothing but anger towards George after he kills Sapnap eventually leading to Dream's victory. He only gets more annoyed at George when he realizes in the bonus video that George killing him is the only reason Dream won in the first place, having used Sapnap's Ender Pearls to save himself from the void.
  • White Mask of Doom: Pretty much any artist's rendition of Dream—and even Dream's official Youtooz figure—has him depicted with dirty blond/brown hair (which he reportedly has IRL), wearing a green hoodie and, of course, a white mask. The mask has the smiley face from Dream's profile picture carved into it. In some animations, the mask even gains red eyes of doom when Dream's about to kill someone.
  • Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Discussed and Justified in the bonus video for the "4 Hunters Finale Rematch" video, when Dream questions why Ant didn't use his splash potions of harming immediately instead of what he actually did (waiting for the other hunters to die before considering it). Ant says that he simply didn't have a good opening to hit Dream with them. That said, Splash Potion itself has AoE effect which mean it can also hurt other hunters too. considering Ant did eventually kill Dream with the potions anyways, he can't really be faulted for it.
  • Worthy Opponent: Dream & Technoblade viewed each other as this. Even as their "rivalry" kicks off, through all the trash talk and taunting, they never see each other as less than equals. When the two finally square off in a $100,000 duel, the aftermath reveals that both combatants were practically terrified of facing the other.
  • X-Ray Vision: The main focus of this x-ray challenge video on the Dream Team channel. The challenge was to beat Minecraft without turning their x-ray off.
  • Yank the Dog's Chain:
    • In the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video, after getting chased by three hunters with iron armor and swords (the luckiest they've been, according to Dream,) having to fall off a mountain to buy himself some time, and having to go underwater and make himself a hole in which he almost drowned himself in, he finds a cave with some diamonds... only for Dream to have to make an iron pickaxe to actually get the diamonds. By the time the furnaces are done smelting the iron and having made himself the pickaxe, the hunters are right on his tail, and they notice the diamonds. While Dream manages to loop around and snag a few, the hunters quickly chase him off and take the rest for themselves.
    • An even more extreme example occurs in Minecraft Speedrunner vs 3 Hunters FINALE, where Dream has gone through a huge ordeal, exhausting his supplies and at incredibly low health when he finally takes out all 3 hunters in the End. He yells out in triumph, thinking that all he has to do is take out the less threatening Ender Dragon... only for Bad to sneak up behind him and one-shot him with his fist.
  • You Are Already Dead: Dream getting one of the hunters alone is treated this way.
  • You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: Said by Bad frequently when Dream kills him and/or escapes, especially notable after the hunters and their End spawn trap get a cluster bomb dropped on them in the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" video.
  • You Monster!: Sapnap screams this at Dream during the "5 Hunters Finale" video after Dream kills his dog.
  • Your Mom:
    • When Dream and the hunters were in the Nether in "Minecraft Speedrunner VS 3 Hunters FINALE," BadBoyHalo told a joke to Dream, to which he responded with this: (15:44)
      Bad: Hey, Dream. I got a question for you.
      Dream: What?
      Bad: What is hot, and smells like potatoes?
      Dream: Your mom?
      The Hunters: Ohhhh!
      Bad: Hey! No, it's an oven once you're done making potatoes! ...Jerk.
    • During one of the Minecraft Championships Technoblade asks him if he gives lessons. Dream once again replies with, "to your mom".
  • Zerg Rush: The hunters sometimes resort to repeatedly throwing bodies at Dream to interfere with him killing the Ender Dragon, with or without equipment. Often it's nothing more than a delaying tactic, since they're severely underpowered, but Bad actually managed to kill Dream this way in the "3 Hunters Finale" video.
    • The end of the Final Manhunt went like this. With their gear destroyed, all the hunters could do to try and win was repeatedly swarm Dream and punch him.
  • Zombie Apocalypse: One of Dream's videos was about him and George surviving an army of zombies, with some being fast, some exploding, some throwing you, and more.



 
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Dream's Interdimensional Bomb

In the "3 Hunters Grand Finale" of Minecraft Manhunt, the hunters set up a trap near the End spawn point that they plan to use to kill Dream with the instant he enters the End. Knowing he stands no chance of surviving it normally, Dream drops a quarter-stack of TNT through the End portal in the stronghold. The interdimensional cluster bomb ends up obliterating the hunters' trap and sending all three hunters flying into the Void.

How well does it match the trope?

4.57 (7 votes)

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