Discussion NightmareFuel / DreamSMP

This couple lines in particular but "So, keep it for yourself, Dream. You- You deserve this. You- you’re the bad guy here! And you- you’re lucky that I don’t tell Quackity you’re here!" comes off as victim-blamey specifically, but overall the whole speech has that vibes. c!Sam is ultimately the one in charge of the prison, and while c!Dream did make decisions about how the prison would operate, c!Sam is the top authority over their prison. He built it, he engineered it, and now he runs it. It's his decision what happens in the prison, what the prisoners are fed, what the rules are, where they can go, etc. He can very easily change what happens in the prison if he wants to, but chooses not to while blaming c!Dream for it happening in an attempt to foist off the responsibility from himself. c!Dream had some choice in the conditions of the prison, but c!Sam is still ultimately the one enforcing those conditions. I suppose putting it as victim blaming could be seen as controversial depending on how much people think c!Dream deserves what he gets, but I at least know for me the entire conversation struck a Nightmare Fuel vibe of someone being blamed for the abuse they are suffering. Plus c!Sam telling c!Dream that next time he might be the one to come in instead of c!Quackity just makes it worse.

Adding on: and I know quite a few other people got the same vibes off of it as well, and were very unsettled by the scene and c!Sam finding c!Dream and his speech towards him.

Hi, sorry to butt in here. I feel like the line is kind of blurry, so you can agree or disagree with what I'm about to say, but here's my take on the situation.

I think that, if Sam had explicitly blamed Dream for Quackity's torture, it would qualify as Blaming the Victim. You could argue that the torture is in response to exile, but it's not really framed that way in the story, and there's no direct line between Dream abusing Tommy and Quackity torturing Dream.

However, the rest of the prison situation is very obviously a case of Hoist by Their Own Petard. It was designed to be a Hellhole Prison by Dream, and Sam explicitly points out that all of the changes he proposed to make the place more humane were immediately shot down, like the courtyard and the cow farm. Dream would not be trying to get Sam to bend the rules if it was anyone but himself inside there ("Well I didn't think I was gonna end up here"), and saw no issue with putting his 17 year-old abuse victim in the exact same situation.

Sam doesn't blame Dream for the things he legitimately has no control over, like the fact that Quackity is torturing him. He's saying he deserves to suffer, because he tried to inflict that exact same suffering onto someone else, and now expects to be shown mercy when he had no intention of being merciful to the person he was going to hurt. That's not victim blaming, that's just consequences for your own actions.

I can see that, although when watching the speech and reading the transcript in my eyes it came off as more Sam blaming Dream for everything happening to him in the prison (including Quackity torturing him) thus was more of a Blamingthe Victim than a Hoist by Their Own Petard situation.

It is something of a blurry line then, because it does depend on how you viewed what Sam said. I re-added the entry but without either so as to not sway opinion either way, since I think overall the encounter between Sam and Dream can count as Nightmare Fuel.

I've also edited for other series that occasionally talk about nightmare fuel from villains' pov (well, once). I can definitely live with adding the entry without either pothole.

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