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ranboo5 · 2 years

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The Beeduo Meta

So, c!beeduo is unimaginably hard to analyse for the same reason the entire SMP is hard to analyse, especially in post-Doomsday DSMP when a lot more Offscreen Time became relevant: there are different backfilling assumptions. This is also complicated by the fact that it’s, well, a dynamic, and this fandom has an unimaginably hard time dealing with dynamics, because of “show me the clip” analysis being the norm. This kind of emphasis can be unsuited to dynamic analysis, because individual interactions cannot be taken as by themselves definitive of a dynamic without examining the framework they exist within.

My aim with this post is to establish the patterns we see in c!Ranboo and c!Tubbo’s interactions, to examine each successive one with the context of established precedent in mind, and to assert the thing I have known since February 2021: the framework assumed by the fandom and the framework that actually exists and makes sense to exist (regardless of authorial intent!) are incongruous, to put it lightly.

Will be dropping character tags from now on, but obviously all c! and /rp

Disclaimer also that this is very much coming from a c!Ranboo main – I am trying to do c!Tubbo as much justice as I can but being a boober is going to influence how I come at this, pretty obviously

Ranboo will be referred to with it/its pronouns in a couple places throughout, a) for clarity and b) because I want to

Under a readmore because it’s unimaginably fucking long there is a TL;DR at the bottom

Beeduo starts with imbalanced expectations because of the situation Ranboo shows up into and how Ranboo interacts w/ situations he considers high risk. In New L’Manberg, Ranboo quickly becomes functionally the only one in Tubbo's corner in several important respects. They are genuine friends, dgmw, and at this point it hasn't quite spiraled, but from the start the established dynamic is Ranboo thinking he has to care for Tubbo bc no one else will, and Tubbo ending up with Ranboo being the only one who really appears to respect him as president and stand by his side. Even before the cabinet actually has tensions in it, this is a suspected thing, which is evidenced in the manner in which the cabinet’s dynamics deteriorate as New L’Manberg wears on

Even before this deterioration, this setup is immediately extremely high stakes for Ranboo. One of their first interactions, while Ranboo is still calling Tubbo honorifics uncertainly (which Ranboo doesn't even do generally man is still throwing spaghetti at the wall in terms of how to interact with him), is Ranboo having to talk a tripping-balls Tubbo off a cliff edge while he's standing there high and rambling. Stakes of this kind are not immediately damning, but they can be something that complicates matters if handled poorly. They will be handled poorly.

This precariousness is also immediately dangerous for Tubbo, because Ranboo is a yes man. It knows it needs to comply, or appear to, to maintain its safety and autonomy. In other words, this is a tendency to partial duplicity and disingeniety in the interest of one’s own safety. Ranboo’s apparent alignment with anyone or anything cannot be assumed to be exclusive or even genuine. At this point he genuinely does think the best of Tubbo and his decision making, but this does not last, bc Ranboo takes ppl on good faith and gets disappointed.

As Ranboo befriends like 30 enemies of the state and is also repeatedly reminded of the danger he faces (the Butcher Army, the armor thing, "be loyal"), the stakes only get higher, especially as Tubbo gets more and more unpopular. This culminates in Ranboo’s statement on Doomsday about how he's literally expecting to be executed. This Is Indicative of the stakes he has been and continues to be living under.

Tubbo, meanwhile, has had it told to his face with receipts that Ranboo is a traitor... and immediately enters copium central, blaming it on Ranboo's memory issues. This is setting out a pattern that will continue all the way to Tubbo absolutely refusing to implicate Ranboo in Tommy’s death and beyond – Tubbo cannot consider Ranboo to have the capacity to be a threat. This will be bad for both of them.

For now we go into Snowchester. It is important to note Ranboo is actively afraid of Tubbo at this point. The urgency in his mind ebbs some by the time they get married, but at this point he is actively considering Tubbo a more-than-latent threat. The tower scene happens, which is a continuation of Tubbo being ableist to Ranboo, this time to the point of trying to experimentally cure its memory issues against its wishes – people will say Ranboo said yes technically, and it did, but again remember: Ranboo is a yes man, and it is residually afraid of what Tubbo might do to himself or to Ranboo if it missteps. Consent given under threat is not consent, and it is extremely indicative of what Ranboo actually feels about this happening from his initial resistance, his attempts to weasel out of the procedure/leave early throughout, and his reaction after. In true fashion of a yes man who is trying not to set off alarm bells while keeping his head, he is resistant without openly refusing throughout. To be clear: this is not Tubbo intentionally violating Ranboo's consent (nor are any of the other ensuing experiments and/or proposals). This is their heldover power dynamic. Tubbo is not evil or malicious or anything – the two of them just have a fucked set of expectations, and that set of expectations is not going to improve, because neither of them have the framework to challenge it. Even if Ranboo recognizes something is wrong on a conscious level (which he refuses to as part of the strat), he will not acknowledge it, because of aforementioned tendencies, and Tubbo will not recognize something is wrong, because Tubbo does not have the healthiest ideas abt individual consent and personhood in general, because when in any of DSMP history has anyone shown Tubbo that as a priority? In fact, What Tubbo Thinks about a situation has been repeatedly dismissed, and at this point he has long learned this. To the Joker Tubbo this is just a normal interaction, and he continues to see Ranboo as someone who is at least mostly reliably in his corner, and at least mostly reliably his friend (especially after Exile fucked up his relationship with Tommy), so he has no reason to believe this would be a problem. Bringing this up as an issue is a threat to the stability of their relationship and the surrounding circumstances, which is not tenable; Tubbo has been looking for stability this whole time and is not interested in losing it again, and Ranboo is staking a lot of self-convinced morality on the fact that he's being good to Tubbo technically, and also is still extremely afraid of what Tubbo might do if he isn't there to catch him.

(Literally catch him! There is a scene where Tubbo jumps off a roof shouting for Ranboo to catch him, which idk if cc!Tubbo thought he was in character for, but cc!Ranboo definitely was. You do not react with off-trailing closed-off genuine fear and worry to your friend maybe doing a clown in video games. I know my little guy’s voice that was c!Ranboo I know it was.)

In the absence of being able to unpack the problem, they go for the next best solution to this threat of losing stability, which is to codify that stability by getting married. Michael is part of this. We never got a deeply in character discussion for why they decided to adopt Michael, which leaves us with the interaction where Tubbo is (jokingly?) threatening to “commit adultery,” and Ranboo replies that he can’t because “Michael is our son, Michael is our adopted son." This is evidently news to Tubbo – unsurprisingly, because this is the first time Michael is referred to as anything more than a pet.

Again, absolutely do not get me wrong – both of beeduo are genuinely affectionate for and extremely attached to Michael (Ranboo has so much sentiment and love and kindness in his hearts). The aforementioned scene is also dubiously canon at best – I only mention it at all because the essence of it is consistent with the previous established dynamic and with how it keeps going. They care, and it’s absolutely ridiculous to pretend they don’t, but Michael’s ultimate importance outside the (again, very extant) sentimental aspect is as a prop in the game of house these morons are playing because they are so so so afraid of losing everything – in Tubbo's case, of losing everything again, and in Ranboo's case, of failing to be there for Tubbo and prevent whatever Tubbo does.

Including with the nukes! I didn’t forget about the nuke scene! We’re talking about the nuke scene!!

For those who do not remember the nuke scene, a summary: it takes place shortly after the silo’s inception, before the marriage. Tubbo, obviously jumpy and nervous, asks a visiting Ranboo out of the blue if he wants to see smth secret, and says he’ll just stress Ranboo out to make him forget it afterward. Ranboo, to this offer, says no, he would rather not be intentionally triggered into situational memory loss. This was, however, not an actual offer, as Tubbo ignores him and leads him into the silo anyway.

Tubbo’s literal world destroying weapons bolster the stakes I’ve mentioned earlier that Ranboo perceives in this dynamic; Ranboo, trying to hang on to what could become an extremely dangerous complicating factor, goes to write it down and Tubbo tells him to put the book away. When Ranboo hesitates, Tubbo threatens him. Tubbo is counting on Ranboo’s memory loss here to be able to trust him, after all, as he has before and as he will again.

In fact, this is relevant in the literal next arc beeduo have relevance, which is outpost arc.

I've gone off abt Ranboo's ideology 40 million times and I'll go off abt it more; for Ranboo to function safely he needs an environment where he does not feel surveilled/scrutinized, where he is not subject to others' whims, and where he is not expected to be specifically and exclusively allegiant. See earlier discussion of his yes-man tendencies – he doesn’t want to be that way! These are character flaws and he knows it! But he must keep yes-manning for the sake of surviving in a society that will not give him the ability to breathe!! Ranboo is a mf anarchist for a reason he needs his agency!!!

And you will notice this is not raising green flags for his dynamic w/ Tubbo. Outside of the implicit coercion elements, Ranboo has actual positive motivations to align with Tubbo: he shares Tubbo's desire for peace and stability, and he feels genuinely sentimental and affectionate to Tubbo. Both of them want the same things, because wanting to have a peaceful happy life is a generally appealing goal, and they want to have it together, because they’re friends and care about each other. Unfortunately, they have a radically different understanding of most everything about how to get there, including in regards to personhood. Including what it means to value someone. What it means to be happy. What it means to love someone.

Ranboo does not want to confront this, but outpost-burger arc beeduo is where this conflict makes him. This is the arc where it is made absolutely unambiguous that Ranboo and Tubbo have a dynamic where neither can love the other like the other loves him, because they have fundamentally philosophically different understandings of what that even means. "Maybe he built those walls to protect me" KILLING ME WOULD HURT LESS, RANBOOLIVE

(While we are here, and I am getting a glass of water to calm down, re: the love point: the romanticity, platonicity, queerplatonicity, etc. of it is not the relevant part the point is that it's philosophically in com fucking patible. Are we clear. Are we clear this is not relevant discourse. Good. Okay)

Ranboo is suffering increasing confusion and confabulation and stress as the arc goes on, almost certainly bc he is again in a political situation; he makes explicit that this is another instance of it "happening again", like he did at the worst parts of his spirals irt his situation in New L’Manberg. Tubbo is not the only factor in this; Ranboo has complicated dynamics w/ Quackity and the cookieduo (Ranboo and Slime) arc is also relevant, but Tubbo is Ranboo's first priority and Ranboo is putting his brain thru the blender for him! We do not see him in a comparable consistent state like this at any point except New L’Manberg! Ranboo is fucked up in outpost arc!! And Tubbo obviously is too; the entire arc is about his lash-out and he is obviously paranoid doing it. And both of these only make it clear that the unbalanced expectations the whole dynamic was built on, of reliance on Ranboo as specially in Tubbo’s corner, are still fucking there

Ranboo’s behavior is extremely worth scrutinizing here. When Q sends Fundy and I am pretty sure Foolish? to go check out the outpost and they trash it on the way there, Ranboo cleans it up (and leaves threats, which is not a Hinged Action and is something he knows is self-compromising, which goes to show his state of mind) w/ the explicit motivation of keeping it from Tubbo. Ranboo talks to Quackity abt Tubbo and repeatedly makes excuses abt how Tubbo is neurodivergent and a minor, and sure, it says the same thing about itself, but then it continues saying similar shit to rationalize Tubbo's behavior on its own. Ranboo has very expressed interest in portraying Tubbo, both to any audience it has AND to itself, as someone who is not responsible for his actions, because he’s Going Through A Lot, and it has been doing that since the mention of the experiments/tower scene in character.

Tubbo has to cling to the idea that Ranboo's treasonous tendencies are tied to his memory loss. Ranboo has to cling to the idea that Tubbo’s erratic and violent behavior all doesn't really matter bc Tubbo is ~ twaumatized ~, because he “has a lot of problems,” and they both have to cling to their ableist copium, because if they don’t, then each has to admit that his husband would hurt him, and in fact has.

Outpost arc is also where we get "you'd tell me if I was a bad person right" "yeah I’d tell you if you step out of line" – I talk about it in connection to the things I’ve discussed earlier more in depth here, but further: it’s extra chilling when you consider 1) Ranboo does not genuinely concur with Tubbo's philosophies, is not kept safe by them and he knows that when in his right state of mind as evidenced by his active ever-present weaseling-out-of-this maneuvers; 2) that Ranboo is demonstrably extremely good at aforesaid weaseling; and 3) that he is extremely ideologically critical and fiercely independent and arrogant, all the time! And this is the evidence point for what I say in the tags of that ask: Tubbo is the closest on the server to come to ever having control over Ranboo ideologically

Ranboo is so good at 5D chess. Ranboo outmaneuvered Wilbur and Quackity and Dream. Ranboo, increasingly freely, is able to disagree and bring up concerns to Phil and Techno (not fully obv but more than everyone else he talks to lmao), whom broadly he agrees with and has seen the benefit of the philosophies of, but still doesn’t think are Fully Correct, because he doesn’t think that about anyone but himself. But with Tubbo, Ranboo conceded so much that he could have lost the game if Tubbo hadn't proceeded to fold during the burger arc. And Tubbo didn't even know! He didn't even realize anything was off!!

That fold is the next relevant point in this torrid saga. Tubbo reaches a breaking pt with Wilbur's return; Ranboo gets even more visibly freaked out at all times bc of the complicating situation; it’s here when we get the conversation where Tubbo talks abt the outpost and having signed it over.

This hits Ranboo in a way Tubbo is going to miss, because, again, when has anyone on the DSMP given Tubbo a precedent for caring about that? He has literally 0 example reason to consider all the work™ that any individual put into a project as far as he’s concerned that’s not going to work. Ranboo, unfortunately, not only does, but also has RSD. This already hurts. And then Tubbo makes the to-him extremely innocuous statement that yeah, now that he has a job and a faction and a direction that he isn't buckling under the weight of losing, he's finally happy

Ranboo, who is extremely dubious abt LNV's labor conditions anyway, fully hears that Tubbo never needed him. Tubbo is finally happy in service to the exact construct that Ranboo has repeated concrete evidence fucks himself and everyone around him, Tubbo included, up. Ranboo hears that he has been soundly cucked by the concept of sides, to put it a little facetiously. He has been checkmate liberals’d.

(This, understandably, does nothing for his mental state.)

And before I continue I must mention again: Ranboo and Tubbo do care about each other. They do legitimately want the best for each other. They have legitimately bonded, and are genuine friends (&c).

But you also have to remember that Ranboo is extremely calculating, and if you’ll also recall, he is still in a high stakes and high delicacy political situation where he has to be making a lot of those calculations. Now, he's just heard that he was never needed for one of his primary goals. Yes, this hurts, but it carries an important second significance to those calculations: if keeping Tubbo stable was never Ranboo’s doing, this is a reason to deprioritize it.

And that is how we go into Hitting on Sixteen/The Wilbur Van. That is why Ranboo is able to snap at Tubbo in Ho16/TWV. The sheer contrast between the "I'll tell you if you step out of line" agreement and Ranboo dismissing and yelling at Tubbo in this is the biggest and clearest indicator – and the deciding difference is that in Ho16, Ranboo has the goddamn burger van interaction in his information bank, the one where Ranboo was told that his concerns were useless and could be deprioritized. He has been functionally dismissed from his post – he no longer has to worry about appearing good and trustworthy and respectful to Tubbo, and with greater things hanging over his head than maintaining those appearances, he goes full mask off. He prioritizes mitigating Wilbur over mitigating Tubbo in that scene, and he feels bad about it bc he likes Tubbo, and he feels bad for yelling at him, especially considering he is lying – dismissal of everyone who isn’t himself aside, Ranboo knows just fine that Wilbur is dangerous and doing something harmful! He is lying!!

But that's the thing with Ranboo. Ranboo will lie to fucking anyone. It will lie to your motherfucking face with full confidence, and then it'll feel soooo bad about it later, it'll tear him up inside, and you will hear about none of it, and he'd do it again, because it'll be another calculated concession. Because Ranboo is a yes man and a survivor and a political agenda haver and is balancing like 478363 conflicting priorities at any given time because he has to

So it lies. It mansplains Wilbur Soot to Tubbo (and I do not use that word as a joke I use it as shorthand) and it lies and it can do this so immediately because it did not have to lose or shake a long-standing respect for Tubbo – at that point, its initial wisps of respect for Tubbo had been disintegrated and gone for months. He was never trustworthy to Tubbo – Tubbo put his trust and his reliance in a liar and a traitor, because Ranboo's lies were the only semblance of respect and understanding he got, and it was against what both of them wanted for Tubbo to realize that ever. Tubbo is married to a motherfucking stranger.

Tubbo appeals to a better person that Ranboo isn't, to a loyalty Ranboo never really had, and bc Ranboo doesn't have to pretend to respect him anymore Tubbo gets berated and condescended to, again. Like I cannot emphasize this shit enough! Ranboo was shit to Tubbo in that scene, and even if he had sacrificed himself for Tubbo, it wouldn’t have done fuck anything to address how awful he was in that moment and why it was so deeply such. And Ranboo didn’t even “sacrifice himself”! People made that up!

Yes, Ranboo's political motivation was in large part that Tubbo, someone he cared about, was being repeatedly endangered and used as a prop from where Ranboo was standing, and Ranboo found that kind of mistreatment of a person he cared for the wellbeing of untenable. He cared about that, genuinely, because he cares about people and about their individual safeties, and even when he hurts them it’s, again, a concession. It’s something he wants to avoid. So Tubbo is in danger and Ranboo acts in the capacity of his care for Tubbo and gets Tubbo out, makes sure that materially his loved one is safe – and then, having dealt with the danger to people, turns around and deals with ideology.

It's not for Tubbo that it kills itself, because Ranboo, again, cares about people. Ranboo killing himself did nothing for Tubbo, and it fucking knows that; Ranboo’s critical eye is extremely good at seeing past the notion that benefit to some ideology is necessarily the same as benefit to some person without being able to draw a clear line to the effects that ideology has on that person. The division between effect on people and effect on system – the concept that the ideologies one live under affect people rather than breathe as them, and that they thus have to justify that effect being good rather than having symbolic gestures take priority over individuals – is the whole motherfucking point of people not sides.

Ranboo killed himself as a symbolic gesture in service to a rhetorical point he was making to Wilbur and Quackity. Ranboo killed himself to win at 5D chess. Ranboo thoughtlessly made it so his husband watched him die, because after saving Tubbo, he had bigger things to worry about.

Ranboo killing himself is, extremely intentionally both in universe and out, evocative of Wilbur doing so because in a sense it was for Wilbur, and it was thought out. Ranboo’s suicide was not nonsensical revenge; it was not emotional protectiveness; it was the callous, cruel, condescending, twisted logic of a man who has shown this flaw in its ways of thinking again and again and whose lack of sleep the night before was specifically emphasized. Ranboo reaches drastic action and violence when he finds himself when he finds himself desperate and alone in the corner he’s backed into, and left with his own mind and only his own mind, he thinks himself into the deranged awfulness of the brainspace he was in when he made the decision. Though the choice itself was likely spontaneous, it was a culminating manifestation of a thought process that had been building for this kind of opportunity the whole time.

Yes, Ranboo is emotional; yes, Ranboo is sentimental; Ranboo does, however, think with his fucking head. He does it too much, in fact, and here he thought with his head into deprioritizing Tubbo, and functionally leaving Tubbo behind while he pursued his own agenda – which is really what he had been doing all a-fucking-long; he'd just been lying about it out of worry and fear, and Tubbo had believed him out of desperation.

The love was there, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was the need, and the desperate belief from both of them that the other could fulfill that need.

TL;DR: - Beeduo is based on a fundamentally imbalanced dynamic where Tubbo trusts Ranboo to be in his corner in a way no one else really is - This is bad because of the expectations it places on Ranboo and because of the way that it’s not something that Tubbo can actually rely on - The second Ranboo was no longer coercively held to pretending, everything fell through - Both of them clung for the longest time to ableist copium that dismissed the other’s capability to harm him to get away from the fact that they have already hurt each other and continue to - While they care about each other, their understandings of personhood, love, relationships, agency, and happiness are fundamentally at odds

TL;DRTL;DR: Ranboo is a liar and Tubbo is an auth

#Dream SMP #Tubbo #Ranboo #beeduo #c!beeduo critical #c!Ranboo critical #c!Tubbo critical #you are not immune #for the approval of the forum #FINALLY. FINALLY AFTER ALL THIS TIME #SEVENTEEN MONTHS. 4.1K WORDS.

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