Dream is considered to be the fastest growing channel of 2020 in the Minecraft YouTuber community. Earning over nine million subscribers within a year, his internet presence has brought upon the creation of so many new trends, hashtags, and most importantly, friendships. However, along with this newfound fame comes drama and conflict both within and among Minecraft YouTuber communities. Though when all is said and done, it is clear as day that the Dream Team, along with several special mention YouTubers, ushered in a new era of Minecraft content on YouTube, Twitch, and Twitter.
Minecraft on Twitter had experienced a revival in recent months, all thanks to the new generation of Minecraft content creators bringing newer and more exciting content on both YouTube and Twitch, resulting in Twitter becoming the social media platform for the fandoms of these creators. For added context, a Minecraft YouTuber community consists of one Minecraft content creator and their interactions with fans (also called stans), patrons, and maybe even fellow content creators. In this article, the words ‘communities’ and ‘fandoms’ will be used interchangeably, and may also be mentioned through their unofficial Twitter names, namely Dream Team Twitter (DTTWT: Dream, GeorgeNotFound, Sapnap), Sleepy Twitter (sleepytwt: Wilbur Soot, Philza, Technoblade), and Minecraft YouTuber Twitter (MCYTTWT) - the Minecraft community as a whole.
It can be said that K-pop on Twitter has and always will be on top of the Trending charts, with its consistent global audience and growing popularity. In spite of that, MCYTTWT had been able to reach the trending charts as well in the past few months, largely due to DTTWT and sleepytwt coming together to support an event, a campaign, or a call for action.
To demonstrate, when Dream (“head” of DTTWT) had been invited to UK by Wilbur Soot (“head” of sleepytwt), the stans from both DTTWT and sleepytwt had gotten excited at the foreseeable future with a Dream face reveal and more content from their favorites.
For a whole week, Twitter timelines were filled with constant inquiries for updates from the parties involved, and fan art that gave smaller artists within the fandom a larger spotlight. This is an observable pattern whenever a new trend is born in the MCYT fandom. Alas, there will always be two sides to a story, so let’s quickly talk about the drama surrounding DTTWT.
In the MCYTTWT community, DTTWT is seen as majorly toxic and aggressive towards people outside their fandom because some fans: (1) insist that Dream is the “best” Minecrafter, so every other creator is “not as good” as him, (2) go to comment sections of videos related to Dream to criticize the creator and its quality, and (3) start conflict with other MCYT fandoms. These were concluded after a thorough reading of large Twitter personalities and their opinions of the toxic Dream stans. Nevertheless, the community is filled with wonderful artists and great potential to cause change in both online and offline spheres of the world.
Clay, better known as his online persona “Dream”, has been doing Minecraft on Youtube since 2015, starting off as a channel that compiled clips of “trapping” in-game players on minigame servers.
He had accumulated a total of one thousand subscribers before leaving YouTube for a few years leading to a drop in his subscriber count. Even so, his channel had gained traction in the late summer of 2019, when four of his newly-published videos went viral. According to a documentary detailing Dream’s rise on YouTube, he had been studying the platform’s algorithm in order to gain a larger audience once he returned – and he had done just that.
Several events had led to the rise of Dream on the YouTube platform, first of which was a series surrounding the world famous YouTuber Pewdiepie. On June 22, 2019, Pewdiepie had begun a Minecraft survival Let’s-Play as a part of his “Gaming Week” series. Players from all around the globe had been searching for the seed to his Minecraft world – a combination of numbers that generated the exact same landscapes and resources seen in Pewdiepie’s videos, and Dream was at the forefront of this project. The project was a success; they did find the seed, and Dream had gained a few subscribers from the videos he uploaded, explaining their investigation process. This was only the beginning, as he would soon dominate the Youtube Recommended page.
From then on, Dream continued to grow and grow, gaining more views from his “Minecraft, but…” series and his speedrunning career, but his biggest success is the “Manhunt versus Speedrunner” series, inspired by the game mode invented by Wilbur Soot on the August of 2019. This series, accumulating a total of over 180 million views across eight videos, greatly contributed to the rise of his YouTube career.
One reason for this series’ success was the decline of Minecraft content on YouTube; viewers always want to see new types of content, but for the few years after 2016, content on MCYT has been monotonous. In addition, this series began a new trend of uploading compilation videos on YouTube. Dozens of new channels had picked out legendary, funny, or wholesome moments from all of Dream’s videos and streams, edited them to be more cohesive, and uploaded them for the fans to watch over and over again. Not only that, but fans had begun to associate Dream’s quick thinking in the Manhunt videos with Sun Tzu’s teachings in the Art of War, becoming a “meme” in his videos’ comment sections.
Dream was not alone in accomplishing this feat. He had his two best friends: George “GeorgeNotFound” and Nicholas “Sapnap” with him all throughout the journey. They were participating in his “Minecraft, but...” series, supporting in his speedrunning videos, and hunting in the Manhunt series. What made such a large impact on Dream’s videos is their close friendship dynamic, according to many of their fans. The funny quips and sweet words they tell each other make the viewer experience much more engaging and emotional, as seen in the several “wholesome moments” compilations on Youtube.
This trio came together to form the “Dream Team”, creating a separate channel where they had uploaded only five of their “Minecraft, but…” videos. This collaboration led to another trend that had been revived on YouTube - Animatics, which are short animated videos that were designed based on specific soundtracks or voice recordings. Hundreds of animatics had popped up as soon as Dream’s audience had reached the animator community on YouTube, all drawn over different genres of audios, from the love songs to the meme audios.
Once Dream had secured his YouTube channel’s growth, he set about streaming on Twitch – around the same time that the Dream SMP was born.
An SMP is the default game mode when setting up a new server, where the owners usually invite friends over to mine, build and even fight. The creation of the Dream SMP had led to so many great streams, and even brought new, smaller streamers a larger audience.
One particular Twitch streamer, TommyInnit had joined the Dream SMP, leading to the initiation of a few wars, such as the Disc War, SMP War and the Pet War. To add, movements like L’Manberg, Church of Prime, Free Seven and POG2020 originated within the Dream SMP, and moved to Twitter as trends.
Reaching this point of the feature, you may begin to wonder, “What was the point of reading all this?” It may not be so clear at first, but think about the influence and power these communities have over social media. In a period where everyone looks to the digital world in order to live, these communities have brought people together to just support each other and share love. The main takeaway from this feature should not be that Twitter is full of toxic stans, or that all us younger generations care about is computer games, but rather people from seemingly unrelated sectors of the world have began to form one global community that accepts different ideas and learns from each other – that is the lesson behind Minecraft on Twitter. In the name of Twitch, Pogchamp.
Story by Carl Yap
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