After Dream posted a Pastebin to admit to cheating on speedrun and claimed this was unintentional, several popular content creators in Bilibili posted videos or articles about it and the responses from Chinese audience are polarized.
Important
- I am not English native. Translations made by me may not be 100% correct and may contain errors that might affect the original meaning. Feel free to tell me in the comment section.
- It is strongly recommended to read all of the content of this article instead of jumping to the TL;DR section at the very end as there may be a lot of details that are worth your attention.
- While I will try my best to be as neutral as possible, still I would like to point out some details that are worth criticizing for and thus I will express my opinions on these things. Criticisms are appreciated.
- The tone indicators listed below are added by myself for better understanding of some of the sarcastic comments.
- Please familiarize yourself with the vocabulary listed below as this article will frequently contain these words.
Vocabulary
- Danmu/bullet curtain (弹幕) in Bilibili is a form of video commentary used on video consisting of scrolling viewer messages posted on top of the video in real time.
- KY, originated from “空気が読めない“ (Romanization: Kuuki ga Yomenai), literal meaning “unable to read the atmosphere”, is used to describe people who said inappropriate things in an inappropriate place. (E.g. Spamming Minecraft memes in non-Minecraft related videos)
- “理中客”: Literal meaning "rational, neutral and objective". To describe people who overuse the term as their standard in order to avoid getting hate from both sides.
- “骑墙派”: To describe a person who has unstable stance on a incident.
- 227 Incident refers to a series of controversies happened on Chinese actor Xiao Zhan (肖战) regarding his fans boycotting the fanfiction named “Falling (下坠)” involving the actor in Archive of Our Own (AO3). (Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycott_against_Xiao_Zhan_Incident)
- LBW (卢本伟, or Lu BenWei) refers to the controversy where he was suspected cheating in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) and manipulated his fans to send hate to people who accused him of using cheat in IRL fans meeting.
Contexts
I will first list three comment sections that are positive or neutral towards Dream.
苏维埃冰棺中的伊利亚 (White for short, currently has 495k followers as of 2021-6-2)
White redirected Dream's Pastebin and stated neutral in the last part of their article.
https://imgur.com/a/elBjH6X
The majority of Minecraft fans of White are Dream SMP fans, therefore the comment section is mainly filled with supportive, constructive and forgiving comments. There are still some antis that come from Zi Min/阿诺acts' videos to simply criticize these stan comments, though.
(Related articles:
/r/DreamWasTaken2/comments/noz4m5/comments_from_chinese_dream_fans_regarding_dreams/)
Quartz_Elephant (currently has 27k followers)
Quartz_Elephant also redirected Dream's Pastebin with translations in their article.
https://imgur.com/a/qsmf6k2
This comment section is filled with DNF fans' comments, so the atmosphere is the same with White's ones.
DreamsMom (currently has 620k followers)
DreamsMom reuploaded the latest Detective Dream livestream with some video cuts and translations.
https://imgur.com/a/oEbV21r
The atmosphere here is neutral but most people hope that Dream can learn from these mistakes and go back to normal.
Now, I am going to describe the comment sections of the other two content creators that are very controversial and some parts of them are heavily misleading.
籽岷 (Zi Min, currently has 2.79m followers)
Video:
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Ph411i7LP
Title: "The truth is revealed! Dream admitted to cheating in speedrun!"
This is the third time Zi Min has posted videos on cheating scandal. This video has got over 1 million views that went trending in Bilibili.
https://imgur.com/a/xMVWmcG
Main points
- Redirected Dream's pastebin and tweets with Google translate.
- Recommended 阿诺acts' video for further investigation
- Mentioned Dream refuted some tweets from CzechCloud regarding the death threats he received from Dream stans.
- Mentioned he (Zi Min) had been attacked by Dream stans and antis for being too neutral (理中客) and having unstable stance (骑墙派). Therefore, he was upset and was not willing to make another video about Dream's n-word controversy.
- Claimed he was a rational Dream fan and stated admitting mistakes after knowing the truth was necessary no matter if this was intentional or unintentional.
- Stated Dream's irrational fans hurt many people and someone in his comment section compared Dream with 227 Incident.
- Expressed he was also a fan of "tens of millions of Minecraft players behind Dream".
- Hoped Dream could let it go and keep his enthusiasm on Minecraft.
Criticisms
*The video title is somehow clickbait as it is shown above. While I agree it might be the most suitable title as Dream did cheat (unintentionally), this will probably lead more Dream stans and antis to hate him. Also, he made 3 videos on Dream's cheating scandal in total which is a bit too much considering he is the most followed Minecraft content creator in Bilibili. *Zi Min has mentioned during his research Dream deleted his tweet, fortunately someone kept the Pastebin and reposted it on the website, but does not mention he did so because his Pastebin was deleted by staff. As a result, some bullet curtains think Dream felt guilty and deleted it on purpose, while in reality it is not true. However, Zi Min has not posted a follow-up status on it after Dream mentioned in his private account that his Pastebin was deleted for unknown reasons.
https://imgur.com/a/YN4i3R6
- Admitted! Speedrun! Cheating! [1253k views]
- Dream style hell-like training (Not related)
- Responses from Dream and various professionals - Chaos (Astrophysics PhD, statistics PhD, mathematicians) [769k views]
- Cheating? Lucky? Skills? [945k views]
阿诺acts (currently has 42k followers)
Video:
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV19N411Z71P
Title: "Breaking news! The truth of Dream's cheating scandal - he admitted he used drop rate mod"
This is the fourth time he made a video on this topic. This video just summarizes the whole cheating scandal from December 2020 until now. However, the following two of his follow-up statuses are quite controversial.
His two statuses:
https://imgur.com/a/bwnAXwG
His comment:
https://imgur.com/a/iaV1oJY
Pay attention to the word "声称/claimed". Dream's claim is true as he posted his Pastebin as a guest which makes him unable to delete his Pastebin.
Comments from both comment sections
https://imgur.com/a/vvO8LuD (Zi Min’s comment)
https://imgur.com/a/7vIQteh
https://imgur.com/a/Tj9aL4e
https://imgur.com/a/grrcLOT
https://imgur.com/a/QqvsnhZ
https://imgur.com/a/8yp5Ix9
https://imgur.com/a/1poLFVl
https://imgur.com/a/3RbRXVh
https://imgur.com/a/HkuY3mf
https://imgur.com/a/BppS2dM
My thoughts
Some of the Dream stans in Bilibili, or should I call them "Dream prayers", are quite different from the usual ones on Twitter. Instead, they are even more annoying than the latter. As mentioned by the above comments, not only do they send hate to others, but also in other non-Dream related Minecraft videos, they claimed almost every single common speedrunning skill that Dream has shown like quick nether portal trick and MLG moments as "Dream moments" (Dream行为) in Danmu or comments. To make the matter worse, it can be easily seen that most of them are young kids who even just watch edited Manhunt MLG moments from clickbait channels in Douyin (Tik Tok in China) and some of them claimed Dream is the "God of Minecraft".
On the other hand, it seems like Dream antis here jump into the conclusions first without even knowing the whole incident. Moveover, some of the Dream haters claimed they actually don't hate Dream but his stans, and demand Dream to control his fanbase, including the Chinese one. Even though in my opinion he should do so on Twitter, unless Dream set up an official account there, how can Dream control his Chinese fanbase? Furthermore, Dream antis here often bring up Lu BenWei and Xiao Zhan as the examples to explain Dream's behaviours because both of them are extremely hated in Bilibili. For the stans culture part, they compared Dream stans to Xiao Zhan's stans as both defend their own idol irrationally. And for the cheating part, they compared Dream to Lu BenWei because they both claimed they didn't cheat and manipulated their fans to do something harmful. Ultimately, they think Dream is a "combination of Xiao Zhan and Lu BenWei".
It is also noteworthy that misinformation is very common among these comments considering the meaning bias from translation errors, limited information access the Chinese audience has due to the Great Firewall of China and misinterpretations of the content creators. Heck, there are still some comments thinking that Dream doesn't care about Chinese audience which has already been debunked before.
Overall, most of these could have been resolved by telling correct, fast and objective facts to all audiences. Lastly, it is hoped that for all fans and haters, they can have more wise conversations and stop making wrong comparisons after knowing the whole situation, and for the content creators, they can provide an objective and optimistic guidance to the younger audience to reduce the unnecessary hate. In this way, it is sure that the drama will end very soon.
TL;DR
- Dream stans in Bilibili defend Dream as they believe what Dream said. Some of which think he apologized enough.
- There is also another type of Dream stans that come from Douyin/Chinese Tik Tok which treat Dream like "God of Minecraft" and spam memes about Dream in other non-Dream related Minecraft videos.
- Some of the Dream antis criticized Dream with the reasons of the bad takes in this incident, not admitting to cheating and being unable to control his fanbases including the Chinese one. They also strongly feel gross towards Dream stans spamming "Dream moments" when somebody else does Minecraft MLG or mentioning Dream in other Minecraft videos.
- Misinformed and misleading comments or conclusions by some people and content creators are seen.