How Dream's Success Has Become His Own Detriment

[Music] when a random user of the youtube platform is asked who is currently the most popular youtuber on the site the answer would most likely be dream while not necessarily being ranked in the top 100 quite yet he is possibly one of the most well-known creators at this point in time and it's rather apparent why there is no success story more fascinating than that of the minecraft youtuber represented by such a simple drawing and a very handsome one might i add boasting an insane milestone of approximately 15 million subscribers on the 1st of january 2021 rivaling only dantdm as the biggest minecraft youtuber and having a remarkably dedicated fanbase dream is arguably the most popular creator we've seen in an extremely long time but with all this success also comes something much darker after heading off to bed dream as of recent has become extremely well known for the hundreds of conflicts he gets into every single month whether it's something small like making a slightly edgy joke targeted towards a 16 year old all the way to possibly cheating in a minecraft world record attempt dream has absolutely no shortage of conflict today i will attempt to document how and why dream's success has not only catapulted him to new heights but has likewise pushed him down to new lows and how he might have unintentionally pushed himself even further down into what i would consider to be a real detriment prepare yourselves for this one lads we're about to experience something that isn't necessarily a dream but rather a nightmare so yeah pretty much all you can see is his neck and because of this um neck reveal was trending dream is completely fine as family's completely fine streamers and youtubers tommy lies and deception don't necessarily confirm someone cheated but they do put into question everything they say after that point that is only going to make the crazy stand wanna do it so much more and this is honestly some of the worst youtube merch i have ever seen it just look at these people as what they are they're just youtubers they're just people you watch every now and again for entertainment it's nothing more it's nothing more [Music] complicated [Music] all right how's it going lads it's the better badly drawn character on the platform here to deliver you some fresh controversy served with a side of beetroot stew when you create content on this platform growth can be exponential many creators will repeatedly spend several years hanging on to approximately 100 dedicated viewers only to suddenly explode into stardom and become what we like to call an internet celebrity this is no different from the youtuber known as dream real name apparently being terracotta i mean i mean clay his real name is clay dream is an individual that has fascinated me ever since his initial rise on the platform he's no ordinary minecraft youtuber that's for certain as already addressed he's one of the most talked about and most watched people on the platform featuring heavily in mr beast's 2020 youtube rewind yet in june of 2019 he was holding on to a mere 1 000 subscribers relative to his current success this is close to nothing dream is at a point of success that even videos talking about him such as this one are potentially beginning to go stale with the sheer number of them that there are now how did he get to this position of being so successful and more importantly how could it have been warped into a bad thing well let me tell you that once upon a time we're currently living in what i consider to be the new age of minecraft youtubers in the initial rise in minecraft content on the platform around 2013 to 2014 the big names were perhaps captain sparkles or the yogscast there are a lot of members of the community to go through from around that time and many of them would receive millions of views per upload some of these original minecraft contemporaries are still doing that to this day there's so much history between minecraft as a genre on this platform that almost every one of these individuals deemed several documentaries on them alone and we're not necessarily in that era anymore instead the prominent creators currently consist of the likes of hermitcraft s p live and of course the dream s p crew all of which contributed to the rise of minecraft earth mc champions minecraft monday and many other memes spreading around the internet of that nature as well while the former two servers that i mentioned are still extremely successful i'm definitely focusing on the latter because over the past year or so this group of individuals have suddenly received a lot of traction due to their unique personalities and extreme abilities in minecraft itself bam i've knocked him onto the ledge this is huge the reach you can hit people from begins at the player's eyes so when dream is a block higher than me it's much easier for me to hit his feet than for him to hit my head because the base of a right triangle is shorter than the hypotenuse due to many contributing factors namely the youtube algorithm favoring minecraft content again the genre has become a lot more prevalent on the platform with the resurgence of minecraft in the youtube landscape in conjunction with all these creators collaborating so much they essentially went from being quirky editors or english majors to being wildly adored and supported by many dream himself has a very interesting success story one that is not short of being covered by many people on the platform already it's practically common knowledge that in 2018 he was almost unknown but thanks to studying reddit and the youtube algorithm apparently dreams successfully garnered a significant amount of notoriety within a single year while using commonly searched topics and actually delivering on what was being searched he gained a large following from essentially jumping on trends while being entertaining himself and not over exploiting trends for a quick dollar like many others were doing he began the same way that many other people did with cursed minecraft videos spyfee and phoenix sc did a very similar thing though unlike those two he didn't continue along that trend as interesting as it may have been at the time he pursued content that other people were looking for instead such as pewdiepie's minecraft world seed four times additional success came predominantly from his minecraft unsolved mysteries series obviously being apparently a buzzfeed series on their respective channel even throughout that series and generally his time on youtube at that point you can see evidently that he was making videos from the perspective of being a fan rather than a giant creator however that was about to change throughout his time making cursed minecraft content he slowly transitioned into what he currently makes which is speed runner hunter content now known as minecraft manhunt potentially what he is most well known for on the platform the first episode of this series was released on the 31st of december 2019 only 42 days earlier however he had tweeted that he reached 1 million youtube subscribers to put that into perspective this means that about 14 million of his viewers at the time of writing came from his manhunt series 14 million people found it to be an enticing feature to watch on his channel and understandably so [Music] [Applause] manhunt is one of the most celebrated and enjoyed series on the platform as it currently stands if you ask any youtube creator on the platform many of them will say that it's one of their favorite things to watch yeah dreams might not say it's unreal there's not many videos that are that long that i would watch all the way through but dream always manages to just keep you watching the hallway with its intensity and crazy easily digestible style it isn't difficult to admire how good of a minecraft player dream actually is many parkour tricks used in the r minecraft subreddit are actually inspired by these videos this is along with all of the extremely close calls and stressful but hilarious moments found within these videos the success from these videos most definitely pushed him even further into stardom without a single one of these videos receiving less than 10 million views at this point it's obvious that people were enjoying them quite a bit personally i don't watch them because i'm more of a laid back dantdm minecraft hardcore kind of guy but i can quite clearly see the appeal in addition to this series the dream smp is one of if not the biggest minecraft survival multiplayer server on the youtube platform hosted by a lot of the creators already addressed earlier within the dream crew technoblade and tommy in it holding one of the biggest minecraft livestream events ever recorded on that server dude i literally don't care all this history stuff is cool but it says absolutely nothing about the video topic right right all of these people especially dream have been catapulted into extreme fame and popularity over the past two years and that may seem like a lovely thing for all of those younger children out there but i can assure you that fame is probably a lot more terrifying than you think and with all of the people watching him there is bound to be some [Music] with this much popularity between them unfortunately they're all destined for a little bit of squabble to go around as somebody grows on the platform they aren't going to be right 100 of the time and they're bound to make mistakes dream himself is definitely not an entirely angelic figure as some people potentially think that he might be nor is anybody i suppose especially not me i'm by no means implying that i'm perfect i'm flawed you're flawed and the ground is flawed youtubers such as him are placed on a pedestal of morale that when broken can easily be a detriment to their credibility from the perspective of their fan base and that's just not me guys i'm 29 years old i'm a fully fledged adult just a small proportion of people had this vision that i was just like this uh this perfect individual and that ain't me increasingly as time goes on we see more and more cracks showing controversies involving dream that anybody with a sizable audience such as this would have to have been prepared for occasionally these things are definitely things you could not prevent others you probably could have done at the end of the day somebody who's become as famous as he is in such a short amount of time he's guaranteed to have some controversy at least dream being who he is has a lot of eyes on him constantly people even staying up late at night to keep tabs on when he will release his next video for example you see that can sound wholesome but it can actually be quite concerning for him and i'll continue to address why when you're constantly being watched you're invariably being monitored everything you do or say is going to receive scrutiny when you aren't careful in his position anything he does is going to be looked at from an extremely critical eye from every level and that's not good when you may or may not have cheated to receive the world record for example more on that later though so regardless of what your opinions are of him him getting cancelled is definitely inevitable potentially multiple times too it happens to everyone i mean we're at a point where dantdm has been cancelled for swearing on stream dream can basically be canceled for anything so with that you have to recognize that what you do or say would have much greater consequences and you really need to think through your actions more thoroughly looking at something that would be quite inevitable but arguably more tame is that dream jokes quite a bit bear with me here and that's perfectly fine i'm not gonna gatekeep humor i find his video where he jokes about finding pewdiepie's address to be extremely funny despite it not aging one particular joke he has made stirred up quite a lot of heat from the community at large fair warning it's a very dodgy joke in a specific clip dream as well as his friend ninja yes indeed that ninja make a pretty concerning comment towards tommy in it in response tommy jokes about only being 16 and dream responds with this tommy himself has had a lot of very concerning comments and controversies made towards him regarding his age the gift is only 16 and has a stand following full of people developing sick obsessions we'll talk more about that later he's had to address comments like this frequently and dream took part in those comments i am not comfortable with that and i do not endorse it i just thought i'd have to i thought it would have been obvious because um because i'm a child you were understandably upset with it tommy was uncomfortable dream made an excuse take that how you will while it's definitely not a groundbreakingly inappropriate comment and i don't think it's entirely worth cancelling dream and or ninja over the circumstances are a little bit concerning the circumstances are definitely weird enough at least for many people to show their disapproval on twitter with the three of them being as famous as they are they definitely have to be careful with what they say because people are guaranteed to be upset by such a flamboyant but harmful comment i'm not saying that they can't make edgy jokes but in the words of tommy himself you seem to be pushing the boundaries of comedy this whole story is definitely not helped by what is to come later on again i have to clarify this an edgy joke is an edgy joke however the circumstances in context are completely different when a it's a minor and b it's a creator with a significant following saying it or encouraging it sucks i have to be addressing this issue at all but it's worth criticizing him for in my opinion it's actually getting really irritating that we so often have to address controversies involving this topic but alas it's relevant anyway there have been additional small controversies surrounding dreams such as things to do with his ego such has shown where veteran youtuber critical was very critical of dream for his cockiness before he blew up and how he would make promises for when he blew up but his advice to up-and-comers was to be super confident to the point of arrogance or in another example where for some reason dream got a lot of hate for his music and he ended up privating his account supposedly because people were being extremely harsh towards his music which is interesting at first it was very small and basic controversies such as this that were maybe hitting dream every couple of months if even that but gradually as it became even more mainstream people were far more critical of the things he was doing and that became extremely apparent in minecraft's biggest speed run cheating controversy known to man [Music] i'm not going to pretend to be an avid minecraft speedrunner probably the only time i've come close to speed running minecraft would have been speedrunning the hypixel bedwars parkour level though as an avid minecraft player i'm pretty sure that i can set the grounds for the entire situation within minecraft there is no primary objective the main goal is to do what you like for as long as you like however one of the biggest aims of the game is to defeat the ender dragon makes sense it helps you get electro wings which allow you to glide and shulker boxes that are essentially rucksacks so in a way this is all end game content in conjunction with the fact that it's literally called the end people make the aim of speedrunning to defeat this dreaded dragon and jump back into the end portal that rolls the credits after several weeks of trying dream managed to allegedly come close to beating the world record for minecraft speed running in 1.16 for those confused the reason why 1.16 is separate from the rest is because there's an extra way to acquire one of the most important items to the speed run so it's only fair to separate it from the other versions i suppose we got a look at the whole controversy starting from the beginning how about i as a bit of a minecraft nerd educate you on the basics of speed running just so that you're up to well you know speed apologies because there will be a lot of minecraft statistical mumbo jumbo coming in in order to defeat the dreaded end dragon you need to make it to the end dimension destroy the end crystals and then finally destroy the dragon itself in order to get to the end there are multiple steps working backwards because it's easier for one you would need to be able to fill the end portal frame with 12 items called the eyes of ender in order to find the end portal you would need to locate the stronghold by throwing the isovender into the air and they will point you in the right direction so for a speedrun to work appropriately it's preferable that you're naturally near one in addition to this the portal usually has a number of isa vendor already occupying the frame however it's always useful in my opinion at least to make 12 or more just in case that doesn't happen or if an eye vendor breaks when you throw it in order to make the eyes of ender you need two items one being ender pearls and the other being blaze powder ender pearls can either be dropped by end men which are most likely found in the nether or alternatively you can acquire the pearls by bartering with the new grumpy 1.16 mob pinklins bartering consists of throwing gold ingots at the piglens at which they will trade for random items there is a 4.7 chance that they will drop ender pearls which is extremely low and this will often be the end of people's speed runs the only reason people choose this over killing enderman is that it's far easier and you can barter with more than one piglet at once besides endermen are extremely annoying the other item is blaze powder which is simply crafted using blaze rods blaze rods are dropped by blazers i know quite surprising and to that another statistic to keep in mind is that there is a 50 chance that a blaze would drop one blazers are found in monster spawners within what is called another fortress in order to get to the nether you would obviously need another portal but that's easy enough to create if you know how to there's frankly no way that i could tell you how to do this you just have to watch and learn i suppose now after all that here's where the controversy comes in dream speed running attempts when watched by the so-called moderation team appeared to have been altered the chances of him finding certain items seem to have been oddly increased let me explain at one point dream performed six streams attempting to speed run minecraft which totaled to be around 24 hours worth of content tens of thousands of people tuned in to watch these because as we already know dream is a massively adored figure when watching these streams an avid minecraft speedrunner by the name of minecraft venger very easy name to pronounce mate seemed to notice that his chances of receiving ender pearls from piglens was significantly higher than the ordinary statistics he went back through the 24 hours of stream and made the calculation which concluded that despite the ordinary chances being 4.7 he found the average to be approximately 15.41 you could probably round that up or down depending on his chances now may seem like a small statistical change for sure but that means that within 266 gold trades it amounted to 41 pearls additionally that's more than three times the chance which is a lot in the grand scheme of things people began to get suspicious that dream mayor may not have altered the drop rates of items in minecraft for his speed runs this is also not helped by the fact that a lot of people were suspicious that his minecraft manhunt videos were staged anyway this prompted the speed running moderation team to re-evaluate the situation and look right the way through his full run once again they had to be absolutely sure because this is a world record at hand here a minecraft world record but a world record nonetheless i mean if you think about it sitting through 24 hours of minecraft footage sounds pretty sad even for me but it is a world record at the end of the day thus they check through the entire set of streams multiple times the final tally was concluded as 42 pearls within 262 trades not too indifferent from minecraft avengers claim however this time it amounts to 16.03 which is an even worse look for dream at this point wait wait wait wouldn't that just mean that he's incredibly lucky i mean he was streaming for 24 hours what would you expect can you please stop interrupt you see for one he would have to be astronomically lucky in the first place the moderation team concluded that this would amount to one in 177 billion chance of occurring to add insult to this pretty major injury this is not the only statistic to be seen as dodgy blaze rods as we've already discussed there's a 50 chance of dropping them instead dream received 211 rods out of 305 blaze kills that equals to 69.18 chance in other words there will be a 1 in 113 billion chance of him getting this many rods obviously this is more likely to have not been altered because it is a 50 50 chance however in conjunction with each other the chances of him receiving such good drop rates are unfathomably low we're talking in numbers above the one in seven trillion range to put that into perspective it's far more likely to have a lightning strike you and win the lottery possibly even at the same time than to have these numbers unaltered and receive these drop rates brimstans you gotta understand either dream cheated or dreams six streams should be put in museums they should be studied they should be looked on in awe by human human generations for the rest of time all right mate calm down a bit there buddy not a very good look for dream here within the document posted by the minecraft speedrunning team on december 11 2020 they state that quote there are no circumstances in a natural setting in which bartering and blaze drops could be dependent or biased or any notable degree much less a degree strong enough to produce this result that analysis was dropped about two months after the initial allegations and it truly was a huge document explaining their calculations and conclusions based on his streams dream was definitely not in a good position from his point of view and it was because of this position that dream had to initiate a response the evidence seemed irrefutable and he was definitely going through a nightmare on this one and with that dream did respond instantly responding to the accusations in a series of tweets akin to something donald trump would tweet very epic thank you president dream many of these seem to be pretty lackluster and he was obviously pretty upset by the accusations i mean who could blame him when you're a creator of this size millions of people are gonna excrete on you for this so i suppose in order to bring out the umbrella to stop these droppings dream initiated a full force response he dropped a video and a google doc only a week and a half later attempting to debunk these accusations citing no specific individual within the document when i watched the video to be honest at first glance it wasn't bad at all it brought to light many inconsistencies with the moderators arguments and some biases that might have been present the funny thing is though that the bulk of the video is spent discussing a paper analyzing the analysis of the moderator's analysis of dream speedrun you keeping up neither am i the conclusion of this paper was that the odds put forward by the moderators seemed far too extreme and the dream's actual odds were somewhere around the 1 in 100 million mark still extremely lucky it doesn't make him look much better but hey at least it's better than 7.5 trillion right additionally for most of the video he credited a certain harvard professor but for somebody with such high credentials you think they'll be credited right well not exactly this article was written by an expert from the online science consulting company photo station as with all photo extension activities the exact identity of the author will not be revealed very peculiar right there well if we go to the website it doesn't even list science consulting anywhere on the home page or in the services section in fact it says they specialize in grant proposal reviews and job application reviews that's a bit of a far cry from a review of a statistics paper by a minecraft mod team i will tell you that the website also seems to be partially unfinished there are sections that literally still have placeholder text in them also speaking of the document itself an epic reddit user by the name of mfb somebody that is a verified particle physicist released a very interesting reddit thread debunking multiple points in dreams response i don't want to go through it all here because we haven't got all day but in summary dreams response was not the best brad insult and another injury to the pretty major injury speed running expert carl jobs released a bomb a 24 minute video analyzing the accusations against dream dreams response and a number of simulations regarding drop rates of different things in the game if you wanted to know the true probability of certain insane luck factors occurring in minecraft you might think we would have to play minecraft for trillions and trillions of years and tally the results but luckily this isn't a requirement it might take a human 24 hours to do this but a computer can run the exact same underlying code literally millions of times per second ultimately we can and have run trillions and trillions of simulations to see what kind of drops we could expect so the question is after trillions and trillions of simulations do we see the type of luck that dream experienced the answer is no in fact it's not even close now here's the thing even after dropping this document it was practically too late for dream even if it was somehow valid does that really matter being such an unfathomably sized creator he's bound to receive scrutiny 10 times more than the average person because in reality it's a minecraft speed run who cares no no really who cares about a minecraft speed run however as said because dream is who he is he's going to receive this so much harder than he was potentially ready for in pretty recent news i actually finished this segment before finding out the dream has now deleted his response video which is a bit interesting not a great look i must admit yes i think the agreed opinion by most experts and random troglodytes on the internet such as myself is that they're aware of the fact that it's almost impossible for him not to have cheated a number of joke accounts and jokes in general made about the situation and ended up being extremely hilarious a piece of internet history if i've ever seen it while this whole situation may have been incredibly exciting with multiple twists and turns at the end of the day while maths and credentials are crucial to this controversy whether he actually cheated or not is not as important as the rest of the situation the fact that it was brought to public attention to the scale and analyzed so critically is because of his immense success regardless of the situation he's definitely put himself in this position dream is not the best minecraft player in the world by any means there isn't really much arguing to go against that somewhere there is going to be someone better than him i mean technoblade beat him in a jewel so i'm not denying that he's incredibly talented but he is not the greatest dream potentially began to feel the pressure of being seen as the greatest minecraft player and if he did cheat which i personally have a reasonably firm belief that he did that could have led to him making breaking the world record easier for himself in order to make this great achievement and get more attention off of it it's practically the next step in his success list as already addressed at the beginning of the controversy segment dreamer's eyes on him constantly if he does do something like cheat for example there will be hundreds if not thousands if not millions of people that will look with a more critical spyglass likewise being a figure with 15 million subscribers and counting is bound to receive backlash for almost anything remotely controversial another one of these things in particular being his merchandise there's no shortage of controversy surrounding people's concerningly boring or badly produced merch jake paul has been under a lot of fire for using clip art in his t-shirt designs just as one example where he lazily put his signature over some royalty-free photo or blatantly stole two clipart images and merged them together oh look dream actually did that too james charles has put under fire seemingly copying teddy fresh's design which led to many people releasing their own merchandise very similar to it karina kampf released a lovely line of clothing profiting off of anxiety disorder by having the definition of anxiety on the back of the hoodie spoiler warning that's much worse than dreams merchandise goodness sake last but not least zoella gained a lot of flack in november 2017 for a pretty naf calendar that had alleged the contents inside will be worth more than the calendar itself but in reality just held things like confetti dream has had no shortage of controversy surrounding his own merchandise and though everybody who's made a video about dreams merchandise is the exact same thumbnail they all have exactly the same things to say as well so guys i'm making a video about dreams merchandise today i think dreams merch is bad believe you me i don't think as merchandise is really any good personally it's a quirky and unique style i suppose i'll give it that but it's far too basic for me especially considering the price i also feel that the quality appears to be not so great seems rather cheap to me for what it is it's pretty expensive many people are dressed and mock dreams merch in their own commentary videos about the topic some even creating speed runs where they recreate the merch design again the reason why so many people are critiquing his merchandise is in part due to his success he may not be ready to release a huge merch line like this but he's going to be criticized for it to the ground because his dream and let's just say that he wasn't too happy with the comments people were making around his merchandise people are bound to criticize it because it's bad and because he's popular which ties into the theme of the video right there there are many things to criticize the merchandise for as i've already mentioned though because it isn't good it's going to be covered by a lot of commentators it is quite odd that dream couldn't see this coming unfortunately for him this is just about how the old commentators work when you're a substantially popular figure and you release a line of mediocre merchandise people are going to address it of course though people still bought the merchandise and i'm not going to stop people from doing that either enjoy supporting your own content creator but when you do i suggest that you don't become an extremely obsessive stat [Music] this is possibly the reason you even clicked on this video in the first place while throughout this video so far i've been mainly talking about dreams detractors now i'm going to speak about something that's quite literally the closest thing to dream his own fan base stan culture has existed and evolved for ages on the internet and dream is a prime example of somebody who has stand constantly while i have been told that the definition of stan has changed over the years the premise is still the same and still exists a stan is a combination of the two words stalker and fan initially brought to light by your boy eminem in a song talking about a fan that ended up becoming obsessive and doing unspeakable things to himself and others because he liked eminem over time i will admit the definition has changed though once stan culture became a lot more prevalent in the k-pop scene it evolved into a much more positive word for most people now it's often seen as a good thing to stan a creator though likewise many kpop stands and stands of other things alike will do a lot of harm for the most part it appears to be quite cool to gather around as a community in support of something or someone you know what if stan has essentially replaced the word fan then i say do it by all means stan anybody you want there are a lot of wholesome supporters and fans that i've seen out there keep up what you're doing and enjoy your life however dream as well as many of his buddies have absolutely no shortage of the original definition of stans there was a period around january time of 2021 when dream was trending for absolutely any reason imaginable almost every single day because people were so engrossed in what he was doing constantly keeping up to date with every person he was in contact with and watching every single guest appearance he had on his stream or videos occasionally you see harmless phrases like gamer dream and hashtag dream fell to be trending little quirky moments like that for some reason would catch the attention of hundreds of thousands and cause them to tweet about it just to point out the fact that he fell off his chair and it became a hashtag shows how obsessive some of these people were similarly the phrase j h s f g j s l f reached trending at another point simply because dream stands were tweeting out a random assortment of letters in his support now this may seem extremely weird but this is obviously not the worst bit many of these people have reached a concerning emotional attachment to dream at its most simple form that's fine for example i can be proud of my boy james merritt for releasing his ep no left brain it's healthy to be excited for somebody like him when seeing its success however there is a fine line between being happy for or upset for somebody and having an unorthodox relationship with the creator to the point where you would almost cry when he loses a minecraft player vs player event yep that's right folks on august the 29th 2020 another youtuber by the name of technoblade faced off against dream in a one-to-one battle there were multiple fights several being in 1.16 and several being in 1.8 technoblade being slightly more experienced in the fighting sides of things and more confident in the 1.8 minecraft version won quite fairly however many dream fans did not take this particularly well many certainly did but not all of them dream stands were attached to him to a point where they would feel emotional that he lost believe me i thought this account was being satirical but judging by their other tweets i don't think they were that's concerning in my opinion people are forming an incredibly unhealthy adoration for dream because they spent hours of their day keeping up with what he was doing they are young and impressionable children so they are bound to have unhealthy attachments some of them have even been upset at the fact that beau blacks featured their public tweets in twitter verses now sure these attachments might be bad but surely dream disavows the unhealthy connection they're trying to form surely well about that there was a point when twitch user jewish got into a tad bit of controversy with dream revolving dreams attitude towards stan culture because of how out of hand some of his supporters were getting there is one way to think about things in the stand community and you cannot walk out of line of this and that's where like people get canceled and stuff when when do creators lose their community when they step out online and they do not follow that fine ideological line if they step off it it's over in my opinion from individual experiences with the stanza and stan culture i would say that jewish is kind of right on the ball there the high mind that exists in these communities is a really big problem the majority of the time they end up parroting the views of their favorite creators without any independent thought they work as a group and sometimes that can mean that they set an unhealthy precedent for the creator themselves i don't dislike anybody who participates in staying culture it's the culture itself that's disgusting in that culture it's not helping anybody it's bad for everybody nobody benefits from stan culture except for those people who earn financially off of it after looking at his arguments dream called joyce an idiot which shows how much he agrees with the narrative in other words dream approves of his stance and doesn't see a problem with them alright then in this particular example i find it quite amusing because dream is indirectly proving jaw's point by being a part of this high mind and not encouraging individual thought this was emphasized in a now deleted tweet where dreams says this just because you think you have 1000 iq because you pass middle school english doesn't make you any better than the rest of us never argue with an idiot they drag you down to their level and beat you with experience feel free to read my tweets for how i feel though smiley face well what are these other tweets oh well in them dreamers directly avowed stan culture in tweets such as this one where he tells his community to ignore the haters rewriting the definition of stan so that he can support it in the way that he does placing dream stan supremacy in his bio or this thread where he compares his fans to kittens interesting i can talk about all these different tweets for ages because they're pretty funny but then dream dropped a video about stem culture you can watch it if you want a lot of the points are pretty weak and are very similar to that of his tweets however he does set a good ground of his opinion and somewhat i agree with him but as you can tell with these countless examples that i provided dream is very supportive of stan culture so personally it's very difficult to say that the general attitude of his fan base is not because of him when you're a creator of his size your fans will listen to every single word you say and when you reinforce it so much well that's gonna lead to some issues now as you can clearly see dream does not only endorse his obsessive activity but he encourages it here's the problem with that dream and the rest of his crew being men with a large proportion of their viewers being female have a lot of people fantasizing morbid things tommy in it once again has been a target of this and while this is bound to happen for a creator as popular as him for one it's extremely concerning that it's happening at all and two it's even more concerning that the stands do feel validation for doing this kind of thing obviously dream never directly avowed most of the activity they partake in but he never clarified the line so his young and impressionable fan base would probably misinterpret what he meant and think that he's encouraging them to continue what they're doing and what they're doing is not good his kittens are drawing gore arts of dream cutting himself ha ha look dream but he's bleeding unfortunately for dream gore art is a surprisingly common thing to find on twitter thankfully a lot of the time you won't be able to find it when you're not looking for it but regardless it's still disgusting and definitely exists i wrote a tweet about this quite a while ago addressing my concerns for dream himself and i think a lot of the community is definitely concerned too whether you agree with his argument or not he still indirectly encouraged this behavior by suggesting that it's perfectly normal the larger following you have not only will there be more perturbed individuals in your audience but there will be more people that are not able to perceive information in dreams video about stan culture he said that there will always be people that take it too far nowhere in any tweet or video does he clarify what that too far is therefore the fandom will feel validation for their obscene actions regrettably because of this from my point of view dream has put himself in a very dangerous place he would easily be abused through social media and possibly even in real life by the extremely obsessive fans that feel validated by him because of what he said likewise that's definitely not helped in this video clip here we honestly don't care i don't think i have seen a single thing be said about me or about george or sapnap that i have cared about and gone oh that person shouldn't be saying that here dream proudly proclaims that he does not care about the gore art or fanfictions obviously he's entitled to that i don't really mind it's really weird but he doesn't have to care if he doesn't want to the problem here is that not only is he validating what these people are doing he's indirectly encouraging that too as already addressed a lot of his fan base is young and or does not have a well set out moral compass so they would not be able to understand social cues quite as well besides even if you think that that's appropriate they continued drawing art of tommy and dream took no responsibility next up in the news youtuber dream has refused to condemn murder after one of his fans turned out to be a murderer will he finally be held accountable tune in at six to find out when dream first tweeted this i was honestly quite confused because it's such a weak comparison i tweeted about this already but i'll explain it here too obviously you don't have to condemn every single wrongdoing in existence but if you're aware of something extremely immoral people are doing in your name you gotta disavow in order to at least partly prevent them from doing that kind of artwork because at the end of the day people are making it for you and if you say that it's fine that they're doing that and that you don't care they're bound to think it's appropriate and are going to continue doing it for you there's no guarantee that disavowing it would stop it obviously but it would at least somewhat prevent it alright while the score stuff is by no means pleasant to talk about the problem extends further than just that because some fans are obsessive enough to find something else not entertainment and drawing morbid art no they went searching for something completely different i don't agree with everything my fans do obviously and if they overset boundaries i tell them i tell them that i didn't like what they did i tell them it made me uncomfortable and you can see that on my twitter as recently as a few days ago but when i tell them they stop it's insane how people have kind of reacted to this entire situation corwit who is a small creator actually he was being given death threats and stuff over an internet drama like dude that's insane please stop telling me to kill myself i know we shouldn't come on here crying and all that but also i want to say right dream stands or just stands of dream or whoever who are in my email inbox i like dream there's a line of like where there's like crazy obsessed where like it's almost like to someone like me it's like what is even going on this is not okay like this is just not okay [Music] all right i'll stop being so dramatic about this stan culture is often viewed as being inherently toxic and that's why a lot of people despise it so much that's why every single commentary channel and their grandmother has made a video about it including myself as said the concept of supporting somebody is perfectly acceptable the problem is not necessarily the action but rather the culture stan culture is essentially a hive mind everybody conforms to the same ideology and supports the same person slash thing often obsessively the problem becomes relevant when you look at quite how attached some of these stands have become with the creator many individuals have become so obsessed with their idol that they will harass in loose quotation anybody who stands up against the person they so dearly love i not quite understood the full breadth of this issue until i had my own altercation with these people a while ago on twitter the youtuber john swan went a little bit wild if you will in having an argument with dream about the accusations levied against him during their interactions on twitter i simply joked about the situation and responded to dreams saying that i bet he couldn't wait for this video to release a very simple and dumb joke to that i received an enormous amount of death threats being sent my way now as a public figure making videos on the youtube platform i'm bound to receive this sort of thing and unfortunately that's the reality of it it's completely natural and doesn't affect me so much i immediately signed out to twitter and spent time outside to ignore these threats but obviously that doesn't negate their existence those of you who follow me on twitter will know that a few people took it a little bit too far but otherwise it was quite funny to me additionally a lot of creators big and small brought a significant amount of attention to it all you lot are fantastic the thing is i can manage this sort of thing the problem is when somebody that can't handle it is being treated this way please stop telling me to kill myself meet this lovely individual somebody that simply agreed with john's view of stan culture she emphasized in the twitter video how the supporters of a creator need to be able to hold them accountable for their wrongdoings pretty good stance right there the trouble is that she received hundreds of quote tweets resorting to comments about her that were just at best being rude and at worst being mildly disgusting there was an additional instance very similar to this with the popular tick tock star addison ray a while ago dream sent her a merch package with some of the designs this led to her most recent post of the time being flooded with comments telling her to get away from dream and stay in her lane this weird aggressive and protective attitude seems to be coming up again and again and again let me clarify this is not dream's fault the actions of his fan base are not something he should be held accountable for ninja recently had a controversy like this and it was extremely pathetic the difference in this case is that this is what stan culture is there is an extremely vocal group of his fandom that somehow feels the need to treat people this way and instead of disavowing this behavior he encourages the group that politics and this activity instead of calling these people out he puts things in his bio like dream stance supremacy obviously he's disavowed the actions in general but he hasn't disavowed the group this is actually not uncommon for people to be treated this way by dreams fanbase it's not his fault for sure but the excuse he uses is that it's an extremely small part of his fan base again that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist i don't think i've ever encountered anybody receiving death threats from dantdm fans for example because he doesn't feed into this ideology of standing i think it's also worth saying dream's encouragement to this culture is probably not his own fault either surprisingly enough he may have been pressured into this position by multiple different elements namely his success as with the subject of this video there are multiple other creators that i've spoken to that have to conform to their audience dream's immense popularity potentially peer pressured him into allowing his fan base to run rampant like this to the point where he's having to conform to their standards not his own to me if you're allowing your fan base to manifest and become quite as defensive as they are that's a tad concerning especially when the people that support you are forming a culture that thinks that insulting people's demeanor just because they disagree with your points is all right [Music] regardless of your thoughts on each of these controversies they're essentially bound to happen as i've constantly addressed throughout this video a creator of dream size will have an extreme amount of support and scrutiny regardless of how he handles his success especially with how quickly he has gained all of this notoriety the problem is that dream himself is not entirely fit for addressing the controversies that he's constantly placed under with his encouragement towards stan culture and the seemingly 98 chance that he cheated there's almost no escape for him from the things that he has done no matter what your opinions are of him you can't deny the fact that he and his friends are constantly in physical danger because of the people constantly making attempts to dox him and the morbidly deranged views people have of him fan fictions have been prevalent for years though they're rarely seen as a real threat because those are generally based on fictional characters or huge conglomerate celebrities that have no idea those fanfictions are being made dream is well aware of his fanbase dream definitely knows how much scrutiny he's receiving but at the end of the day he doesn't seem to be able to turn around and stop it from being the case [Music] i moved into making this video with the hopes that i could perhaps look at a pattern of behavior and give some suggestions on what to do but i actually don't think there is much that he can do to resolve the issues with his platform as a whole these mistakes and aberrant fans can be addressed but it's the sheer number of controversies that he gets into and the number of people watching his every move like a cameraman from bbc earth watches a newborn ibex that causes a problem for him with the giant problem he has an extremely hasty success he's not only put himself in a place of absolute power in the youtube landscape with almost every creator on the platform being a fan of his he's also positioned himself into a concerning and vulnerable location where he can do very little to prevent the many issues continually being spoken about this especially isn't remedied by the fact that he does make a lot of mistakes he does occasionally say something that's a tad off and his response to criticism often gets him into even more trouble worse yet he takes very little responsibility for anything that he does in these situations often leading to even more attention on the matter and more criticism directed towards him obviously in my personal opinion i don't think that dream is a bad person per se though i do think at the end of the day his attempts to address controversy may not have been so eloquent he will often direct the heat off of himself and his audience and place it somewhere else a lot of the time the allegations of cheating were debunked by a random professor from harvard the merch company had only just been founded the artwork being created is not because of him he so frequently shifts the blame to somebody else and because he does that he ends up bringing himself under even more scrutiny the thing is obviously like i mentioned dream is not a bad person and this kind of thing can happen to almost anybody but the problem is that dream is not taking his position carefully enough and he's constantly getting himself into even more drama unintentionally because of the position he's placed himself in i've been very critical in this video because i do feel like he's actually placed in a detrimental position as with the title and with his ways of responding to controversy he definitely isn't helping that dream is people watching him all the time and when you're constantly being watched in the way that he is you're being monitored every decision he chooses to make will either be extremely detrimental to his career or extremely beneficial well i suppose for now i'm going to sit back and hope that he continues to make beneficial decisions from here on out he isn't an idiot by any means in fact i commend his genius in moving into the position that he has currently unfortunately though as much of a genius as he may have been to get here it will take more than a few dirt blocks to climb out of the hole he's dug himself into because at the end of the day his success has unfortunately become his own detriment [Music] you

Channel: CordWit

Views: 1,673,621

Rating: 4.9031239 out of 5

Keywords: CordWit, Cord, Wit, English, British, Commentary, Dream, Success, DanTDM, Dream Stans, Dream Stan Death Threats, Minecraft Speedrun, why do people hate Dream?, Dream bad merch, dream controversy, dream john swan, did dream cheat, could dream's success be a bad thing, dream analysis

Id: CACIAQrByJk

Length: 46min 55sec (2815 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 20 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Ewoutk]

u/cordwit as promised on Twitter, my response.

So I'll start off by saying that I partially agree with the message as a whole. I have little to no criticism on the 'Speedrunning' section of the video. My main point of contention is to what extend Dream is at fault when it comes to encouraging stan culture.

That being, I agree with the video that Dream could do better but I also think that Dream is widely criticized and hated for very minor and sometimes outright wrong reasons, which then leads to his occasional sub-par responses. This happens because it's not just his fans that pay attention to his every move, but haters* as well. He has also had some great responses like those to the Manhunt scripting allegations, but those are often overlooked.

*I do not consider critics haters. This video is not a 'hate' video.

​

Some lesser critiques on the video I want to address:

Controversy section

-While the "16 is legal" joke looks bad, it is taken out of context. Tommy wasn't uncomfortable with Dream's comment like the video suggests, he was making the same type of jokes at the time. He was made uncomfortable by a comment by Ninja an hour later prompting him to ask Wilbur to join Discord, but Dream had left the call at this point.

-This is used as an example of Dream's ego: Critikal's clip is used without the explanation about how it was taken out of context. I imagine this part was written by John.
In reality, Dream had been talking about how he used to be overly confident to the point of being toxic. Critikal took that out of context in a Podcast of his own a couple of weeks later and John Swan used a clip of that to go after Dream on Twitter. Dream later DM'd Critikal, where he apologized for any hate he may have gotten for that clip, though Critikal was unaware it had been brought up at all until Dream mentioned it.

-This is also used as an example of Dream's ego: Dream privating DreamHangout. He did this because he got harrassment for Tweeting "just sobbed for the first time in a very long time and it was while listening to my song, felt good though i love u guys". He shared a personal moment and got bashed for it, can hardly blame him for privating the account that was meant for just talking to his fans anyway.

Speedrunning section

-This is really minor, but it may have been worth a mention that Dream only submitted one of his runs out of the six streams with modified drop tables. CordWit (presumably) misspoke at one point too, calling it a WR run.

-PhotoExcitation is a placeholder website, but the astrophysicist is real as confirmed by a Speedrun Chat Mod. I can only assume they got some private confirmation, because the Chat Mod was otherwise very much against Dream. It's not out of the ordinary for professors not to be mentioned by name on scientific journals regardless, as (I believe) mfb- pointed out at the time.

Merch section

-This is only mentioned only for a split second, but Dream's "stolen" image for the Manhunt shirt was done by his designer. This is also fairly standard procedure, as goes for much of the other Dream merch controversies. I'm also not sure why CordWit says the quality of the merch is "not so great", considering I've only ever heard the opposite from anyone who's actually had their hands on it.

Stan culture section

-Personal opinion, but I don't think things such as #dreamfell trending is evidence of people being obsessive, it's just people messing around and purposefully making a big joke out of nothing rather than actually obsessing about him falling. #JHSFGJSLF is another example of that.

-While I agree with what Jawsh said in the clip shown and Dream's response was still very poor, his Tweets consisted of accusing stans of being mentally ill and Dream of not calling them out because of money reasons. Dream has called out toxic stans quite a bit here as well as in two 'Serious Streams'.

-"Dream stan supremacy" was an inside joke from Quackity's stream and has recently been changed to "Dream stan supremacy (unless you're toxic)".

-The 'kittens' analogy is taken out of context and it's frustrating that CordWit does so as well, even if he doesn't really use it to support his point. In it Dream did exactly what people wanted him to do at the time, he told his fans he couldn't actually be their friend but could still love his fanbase as a whole - kind of like how you can love kittens without knowing each and every single one of them.

-CordWit claims Dream has never really clarified the line between "okay" and "not okay" in terms of fanart, but he has done so on several occasions, including the last of the Tweets that I linked above. The line is this: NSFW content of himself and Dream Team (George, Sapnap) is fine, no one else who hasn't explicitly said they're okay with it and especially not minors.
The issue here is that the content that crosses the line is being shared by people to poke fun or gawk at it, which just exposes more people to it. It shouldn't be ignored, but it should be reported and kept contained rather than spread like people have been doing - just imagine if people were doing the same with actual CP, this is no different.

-A smaller critique worth mentioning is that the clip where Dream says he doesn't care about any art he's seen about himself is from quite a while ago, which is before any gore art came to light that I'm aware of.

-The people drawing NSFW art of Tommy or other minors aren't necessarily Dream fans, none of those minors have even been in Dream's content afaik. That shouldn't be Dream's responsibility to call out.

- Small addition: Dream called out his fans for harrassing Addison Rae in the first of the aforementioned Serious Streams.

Conclusion section

-This is only mentioned in passing but the doxers weren't stans, they are extremely hateful of Dream. It was brought back to light by two troll accounts and then spread by various others, some on purpose and some by accident.

​

I have to praise CordWit for acknowledging there isn't too much Dream can do about this, except respond better to controversies in the future. Overall this video isn't nearly as bias as I had feared, though there are still some things I disagree with.

[u/Arle132]

The editing is incredible but I feel as though bring up things like Dreams joke with Tommy was unnecessary. Bring up Critical wasn't good either as Charlie already talked to Dream about it and is cool with Dream. Also, saying Dream supports stan culture 100% is just untrue. Overall the whole video looked like it took a while but failed to deliver actual criticism and/or anything we didn't already know yet.

[u/undestucturable_king]

what is this sub thoughts/opinions on this video?

[u/flygye_41]

really long vid needs more views i would like to see others talk about it

[u/Um_ironbanner12342]

I feel like Cordwit has brought up a very important point. Dream NEEDS to understand that the toxic stans are a VOCAL minority, i.e., they have more voice over his positive stans. I hope we can all agree that sending death threats and drawing NFSW art of real creators is beyond terrible. Youtubers such as Pewdiepie, Mr Beast etc. don't have such a toxic minority that have this much of an influence. Idk how the Dream mcyttw community is so toxic.