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blockgamepirate · 3 years

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Okay this is something I've been thinking about for a while and I saw some posts about Tommy hate etc. so I felt like giving my take on it:

I think a lot of the frustrating stuff about Dream SMP's narrative is tied to the fact that some people just have massive viewer counts so the story ends up orbiting around them.

And I don't even think this is anyone's fault, really, it's just an annoying fact.

It leads to plots not being taken seriously unless Tommy or Techno are involved in them. So when smaller streamers want their plots to be relevant they probably feel like they HAVE to include Tommy and/or Techno.

But that just reinforces the sense that everything is about Tommy and Techno. And maybe Dream, although since he doesn't stream his pull is more limited.

This is obviously not Tommy's fault, he's probably just trying to help people out by introducing his viewers to the plots that other streamers have going on and playing along. Like to me it seemed pretty obvious that he was playing his character extra obnoxious for Jack and Niki's benefit, because it makes it easier for their characters to hate him and complain about him. And somehow he even managed to drop some massive dramatic irony bombs with a perfectly straight face, like "who do I trust not to kill me?" *looks at Ranboo and Jack's names on the tab list* "Jack Manifold!" That was beautiful.

But Tommy gets the brunt of the anger because he's playing the Annoying Little Brother Character that people love to hate. (I mean that as a character archetype, not as judgement, to be clear. One of his character traits just IS to annoy people for laughs. That just tends to mean that sometimes it also annoys the audience. Annoying characters are tough to play.) Techno's character is the cool badass who makes funny quips so he gets away with a lot more.

(Although I did actually see a whole bunch of people mad about Techno not treating the Egg seriously enough so I wouldn't say he's immune either. The difference is that people weren't upset that he was involved at all, just HOW he was involved.)

I think another factor is that Tommy has been framed as the main character for a looong while, and it's easy for people to start resenting main characters, especially if they're not their favourite and the plots seem to still end up centering them. And I don't think being the main character was even Tommy's idea? I think that was mostly Wilbur because he was doing this to give Tommy something to do on the server and to get to do something cool with Tommy. They probably couldn't ever have predicted it would get this big or continue this long. It was originally just them being Hamilton nerds and having fun.

Meanwhile Techno just doesn't stream enough so when he finally shows up people are just too glad he's even around to get annoyed lol. Except in that if he's involved then all the plots end up getting halted while everybody waits for him get around to it.

Also I guess with Techno people have an easier excuse to involve him because he's one of the strongest if not THE strongest person on the server so of course everybody wants to recruit him for help. That's why everybody tends to at least consider it even if it doesn't go anywhere. With Tommy, involving him ends up being a bit more awkward because technically he's just a guy who just happens to have gone through a lot and been involved in a lot. If it has something to do with Tommy's history on the server, or maybe even his people skills, it makes sense, but if not: you get stuff like the Egg having a special grudge against him, specifically, For Some Reason? Idk, I'm sorry, I've kinda missed a lot of the Egg Arc streams so maybe it makes more sense in context but it just seems really arbitrary to me.

It's just that a lot of it ends up sounding like stock main character plot devices where the main character is Special for Reasons.

Idk, maybe there would have been a smoother way to write him in but I don't have any kind of perfect solution to any of this. I don't think there really is one it's just one of those annoying side-effects of fame. Hermitcraft tends to get this too with Grian, to a lesser extent.

Oh yeah, I forgot: there's also just the fandom itself being obnoxious, and that tends to translate to people also hating the character and/or the creator. Happens with both Tommy and Techno (and I'm sure Dream too). This is another problem Grian also has btw.

#dream smp #tommyinnit #technoblade #dream smp critical

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