#c!dream critical (very minor but just for those who want to avoid discourse)

[embermc]

c!Jack Manifold, the things that happen to him, and his trauma are so often forgotten and that's honestly really, really sad.

To me, a large part of what makes up Jack's character is that sense of being constantly forgotten about, pushed aside, or invalidated in general. And while it's most likely not intentional or malicious from any other character's end, I feel like it's a large part of what caused his spiral, his built-up rage and frustration with the world around him, and what caused him to irrationally direct all of this rage onto c!Tommy, or other things he sees as the "cause" of his problems. He felt like he was forgotten by both Manberg and Pogtopia, despite being one of the original members of L'manberg, this belief stemming from a lot of miscommunication as he wasn't aware of the full situation. He died on November 16th because it was forgotten which side he was on. c!Dream treated him as a means to an end, burning some of his property in order to cause rising tensions in L'manberg.

Canon deaths on the server are usually very meaningful, and are treated with respect and sometimes even memorialized by other characters. But with c!Jack Manifold? All three of his canon deaths were moved past incredibly quickly by everyone around him, and weren't lingered on at all. Sometimes, they were even laughed off. (Considering two of the people who took one of his canon lives were in a terrible, awful mental state at the time, it's not entirely their fault, but in c!Jack's eyes, he doesn't know this).

But specifically, it's often not recognized that c!Jack canonically died on Doomsday, by the characters. Whenever Doomsday is brought up in lore, characters try to talk about how it was a "good thing," and how "nobody got hurt." Like in Techno's "The Favor" stream, when Doomsday was brought up, the characters tried to defend the event by saying that nobody died, or that nobody was hurt, and only property was damaged. But c!Jack did die. c!Jack was murdered trying to defend a nation that he wasn't even part of, his friends' nation, and had his third canon life taken away. He was sent to hell and had to crawl his way out, leaving him with a lot of trauma. When he gets stuck in nether portals and they glitch out to black for a second, he has panicked quite a few times, stating that he thought he had died and gone back to hell again. He's hurt, he's traumatized, he died, and yet it's never typically mentioned by anyone else or spoken about.

And then again, it's not really the fault of a lot of the characters. Because genuinely, a lot of them don't even know what happened with c!Jack, and therefore can't sympathize. In fact, it's another really interesting aspect of the Dream SMP narrative and how they work in instances of miscommunication. c!Jack's character is built off of a lot of instances of miscommunication, but unfortunately, that doesn't change the fact that, at least to him, he is still constantly forgotten about. And it leaves him in a state of hurt, of unresolved anger, and of complete loneliness because he truly feels as if nobody can understand him because nobody really knows or acknowledges what he's been through. And it's really, truly sad.

#dream smp #dsmp #jack manifold #c!jack manifold #tw death #tw trauma #tw hell mention #tw murder mention #c!dream critical (very minor but just for those who want to avoid discourse) #/rp