#anyway this is a mess but yeahhhh fuck lmanburg god bless

[dr3amofagame]

On the note of c!Dream and the Revolution and L’manburg in particular, I actually wanted to touch on another argument that I see sometimes that I’ve been thinking about lately re. L’manburg’s legitimacy. Because among some groups that are more L’manburg-positive, one take that I feel is decently common is the idea that L’manburg couldn’t be a government because it was only four, five, six people, that the size of the group meant that it was functionally incapable of the power attributed to it. In this, the assertion tends to be that because L’manburg is small, the power it holds is meaningless; it doesn’t have the power and provisions backing it that a regular “government” has, so L’manburg is fundamentally no different from a group of friends that believe in the same thing and therefore work together. The argument, here, seems to be that because the power of L’manburg as a government is manufactured, the power doesn’t actually exist in any meaningful way. 

And the thing about L’manburg to me is that, well, the power being manufactured is...the point? Like. The whole point is that L’manburg doesn’t actually have jack shit to base itself off of, the whole point is that L’manburg is founded on a lie and writes itself into being treated as a legitimate entity through scapegoating other people in a story. That’s the reason why the mythos exists! The mythos needs to exist because it’s the foundation of L’manburg’s existence. Why does L’manburg exist? Because they were ~fighting against oppression~. Why does c!Wilbur have the power to do X, Y, and Z? Because if you’re opposing him you’re on the side of traitors and tyrants and enemies and get out of his fucking country. Just because L’manburg’s existing as a nation and government and what have you is illogical doesn’t prevent it from being treated as a legitimate country and government etc, because in the end people treated it as legitimate and therefore it had real power not only over its own land, but later on over how the entire server operated--see everyone being swept up in the elections, Manberg vs. Pogtopia, etc. 

(What’s especially funny to me about this take is that in a lot of ways, it really reminds me of c!Dream’s opinion of L’manburg during the Revolution. Because while c!Dream definitely saw L’manburg as a threat in terms of the people who were declaring war against him, in terms of the...actual ideology? The whole government thing, “we’re going to be a separate server”? It’s pretty clear that c!Dream thinks that all of that makes NO SENSE WHATSOEVER. He calls L’manburg a “delusional small part” of the server because from his perspective, what the fuck do you MEAN you’re a government now? What do you mean you’re a separate country--scratch that, what do you mean you’re a separate SERVER? Game rules? Whitelist? What the fuck?? You’re a group of people threatening violence because you have a grudge against me, not revolutionaries fighting a nonexistent oppressive rulership like holy shit I’ve NEVER EVEN MET YOU BEFORE? c!Dream approaches L’manburg’s shit as illegitimate and ridiculous and nonsensical from the get go, because yeah, I mean--they’re literally just a small group of people, not the government they claim to be or that they claim they want to form, or whatever. But things...don’t stay that way.) 

Like the whole point is that in the end, it doesn’t matter that c!Wilbur shouldn’t have been able to stick a flag in a piece of land, declare it as his own, make all these arbitrary rules about who could or couldn’t go inside and what they had to do and declare himself leader over these people and leverage joining his little club to keep them from opposing him and use all of that to threaten conflict against a guy he literally never even met before. Because...he did! And with the mythos established, no one challenged that. L’manburg’s policies and power and legitimacy and leadership and what the leader could and couldn’t do were all based in literally nothing and that didn’t matter because people acted like it was a real thing, so it became real. c!Dream fighting against L’manburg and discrediting its legitimacy at the beginning is part of what gives L’manburg legitimacy because the revolution ends up being used as the foundational story that made L’manburg a Real Thing. The elections and c!Quackity challenging c!Wilbur by running against him when the elections were originally rigged ends up reinforcing L’manburg’s legitimacy as the elections become a Real Thing and the leader of L’manburg as established by the elections are a Real Thing, etc. As long as people buy into L’manburg, as long as it’s TREATED as a real entity, then it remains real because that’s what people believe (which is part of why doomsday and L’manburg like, dying required the people within it to become disillusioned w/ the country so they didn’t feel inclined to rebuild it again.) 

People treated L’manburg as a real entity with real power, which gave it real power over people. Nothing should’ve been in place that allowed c!Wilbur to declare a rigged election, or c!Schlatt to execute the Red Festival, or c!Tubbo to create an extrajudicial army that put c!Phil under house arrest and would extend its influence outside of its own land to kidnap c!Techno’s pet and execute him. The reality of the consequences of L’manburg do not depend on whether or not it should’ve logistically had the power to back up what it was trying to do but whether or not people actually treated it like it did, and they did. Just because L’manburg shouldn’t have been capable of acting like a government doesn’t mean that people didn’t treat it as a government the entire time--from its conception to its death, L’manburg was given a lot of power and influence comparable to that of a government because of what was granted to it that allowed the leader of the faction to do a lot of things without challenge or argument “for the country” both to people within the country’s borders and outside of it, and this very real power and influence wasn’t challenged or disturbed because people believed that it had a right to exist. 

YES L’manburg was manufactured! YES that power didn’t make any sense! YES the legitimacy that L’manburg had as a government entity was basically a fucking crapshoot based on jack shit, and yes it had real power anyway. At the end of the day L’manburg was always treated w/ a level of power and legitimacy beyond just being a Group Of People, and therefore that power and legitimacy became real. L’manburg was a government because people treated it as one. L’manburg was powerful and legitimate and free and independent because that’s what the story said, and everyone believed the story, and that’s what’s important moreso than the logic of whether or not it had enough people to actually “be” a government in the first place.

#c!dreamisms #c!dream and the revolution #c!dream #dreblr #lmanburg critical #c!wilbur critical #<- i guess #listen lmanburg was bullshit its power was bullshit and the mythos was bullshit #that doesn't matter #the manufactured nature of lmanburg is the point !! #that's why the mythos of lmanburg was necessary in the first place! #that's what necessitated the tyrant-revolution-hero-and-villain schtick #lmanburg legitimized itself on the back of the story that c!wilbur wrote #anyway this is a mess but yeahhhh fuck lmanburg god bless