my issue with the “c!wilbur is escaping the narrative” is in three parts
1: wilbur is not deadpool, he’s a mentally ill person. this distinction is important because the “narrative” that he needs to escape is not the plot of the dream smp, it’s his own black and white thinking that’s lead to him railroading both himself and other people into villain and hero roles.
he’s gone out of his way to make up with as many characters as possible, even characters that he never would have forgiven before his death (such as eret), but he did what he thought he was Supposed To Do for his redemption arc. he created a New narrative of what he was supposed to do and followed it to the letter.
and moreover, in doing so he apologized for things that weren’t his fault, he forgave people without having his trauma caused by them actually Acknowledged, he threatened to kill himself to try to protect tommy from dream And Meant It just months ago (he was willing to kill himself as many times as it took according to cc!wilbur).
Obviously he’s going to get away from many of the people that remind him of his past, and I’m sure that Will help with some of his negative self thinking. but tommy said it best, “the person you need to learn how to forgive is yourself.” we didn’t watch wilbur learn how to love himself, we didn’t watch wilbur learn how to see himself as a normal person, we didn’t watch wilbur forgive himself. we watched wilbur learn how to say Sorry.
there is nothing about wilbur escaping His Own Narrative, because he’s taking that with him wherever he goes. because he’s still mentally ill and he’s still traumatized and he still hasn’t forgiven himself. he’s not Incapable of healing, he absolutely Can grow and change off screen. but that’s exactly it. his ending is that he Might heal off screen and we’ll just have to imagine it.
2: “wilbur escaped the narrative” in the context of the narrative he’s escaping from being the dream smp itself is not satisfying as an answer because it’s plainly describing the exact problem: there will be no conclusions to major story beats because this was done before his narrative was actually Over.
tubbo and wilbur’s conclusion Will Always Be that tubbo forgot the part where wilbur caused his husband to die right in front of him after tubbo deliberately didn’t forgive him because he didn’t trust wilbur and still hurt from the memory of the death He’d suffered while working under wilbur. he’ll never meet ranboo again after ranboo is revived, which means he’ll never get to apologize for taking one of ranboo’s lives, for playing a part in ranboo being trapped in limbo for like 1000 years. niki will never get to reintroduce wilbur into her life after her downspiral was connected to feeling Abandoned and wilbur will never find out that she’d had a villain arc because of him that lead to her trying to, you know, Murder His Brother. we lost out on a quackity resolution because of a Scheduling Issue.
wilbur never confronted his father for doomsday, for killing him, for dehumanizing ghostbur, for hurting his friends and family in his absence. things that were all set up and then dropped to the wayside in favor of pretending that nothing was wrong and that wilbur trusts his advice and judgement.
wilbur won’t be there when dream inevitably starts torturing tommy again, because whatever solution he made (temporary as it was always going to be) was predicated on him Being There To Be That Bargaining Chip.
none of his relationships will ever move forwards on screen again, and that’s a big problem when all of them were left off in places where they Needed to be developed to be emotionally satisfying. “wilbur escaped from the narrative,” in this context, means “wilbur’s story will never finish being told.”
he didn’t subvert the narrative, he got cancelled in the middle of production.
3: wilbur escaping the narrative, escaping from the dream smp, pushes that unstated boundary that traps the other characters in this spot.
if wilbur can literally just leave whenever that raises the question of why nobody else has ever left. why Wilbur didn’t just leave before, if there was never anything keeping them there in the first place.
the characters all stay in this location because they Have to stay for there to be a story. dream didn’t just kick the l’manbergians off the server when he didn’t like that they made a new country because doing so would mean that there’s no story.
why did vikk and lazar stay on the server to get tortured if they could just leave. why did fundy move Very Far Away on the server to self isolate if he could just leave. why did tubbo build snowchester instead of try to convince tommy and ranboo to leave the server. why does jack stay on the server when he feels completely disconnected from everybody else. why did tommy never try to escape off of the server during exile if the whole point was that he wasn’t allowed to go anywhere that’d been touched On The Server. why- why- why- why-
fundy moving Far Away means that he has a narrative reason for pulling away from the rest of the server while A: meaning he’s still technically Available for future lore if he ever wants to participate and B: He Doesn’t Make People Question The Inherent Rules Of The Narrative.
you Can come up with explanations for why x character didn’t make that choice in y situation, but there were was a flesh eating egg that made people do autocannibalism. there’s a serial killer with a revival book and the want to torture on the loose. there was enough tnt dropped on a town to match the blast of a nuclear bomb but Straight Down into the earth’s crust. there’s an evil god that intentionally torments people, up to and including in their afterlife if they die on this server.
“wilbur escaped the narrative” So Why Is There Still A Narrative?