The Price Of Parasocial Fame

The air is thick with anticipatory tension. There’s a vibe, a tingle, a sensation in the pit of everyone’s stomach. It’s like gazing upon a lightning rod during a thunderstorm, or standing at the bottom of a hill that’s about to be crested by an opposing army. Something big is about to happen. Something so big that it’s commanding the attention of hundreds of people in a room otherwise devoid of focal points. The walls are a blank, purgatorial white, as though to drive home the notion that what’s to come in mere minutes matters far more than what is.

The following is excerpted from Stream Big: The Triumphs and Turmoils of Twitch and the Stars Behind the Screen by me, Nathan Grayson. The book comes out on February 18 and is available for preorder now. 

A nondescript-looking young man, clad in a hoodie and a baseball cap, emerges from a door in the back corner of the room and strides onto a ramshackle convention stage. Shrieks arise from the crowd—ear-piercingly loud, endlessly blaring, almost otherworldly. In the following days, several people who are in this room will Google “tinnitus symptoms” for the first time in their lives. They will not be pleased with what they find. One by one, additional young men walk onto the stage. Each is met with louder and louder screams, a ferality devoid of self-consciousness. These fans are fully submerged in the moment. The world around them has fully faded from view. They’re living a . . .

Dream, at long last, steps onto the stage—the A side, the man of the hour, the ring leader of this crew of wildly popular creators. “DREAM, I LOVE YOU,” an already hoarse voice cries with every ounce of fervor it can still muster. It is quickly drowned out by hundreds of others sounding like thousands of others. Dream, tall, lanky, and wearing a plaid shirt−black beanie combo that would make him impossible to pick out of a crowd, penguin-waddles onto the stage. It is instantly apparent that he’s never had this many eyes on him before—at least, in real life.

This TwitchCon appearance in an overstuffed convention hall conference room is Dream’s first, ever. Mere days prior, the Minecraft sensation finally revealed his face to the internet. Despite an explosive rise to fame that began in 2020, Dream always wore the game itself as a mask. Fans spent years listening to his voice as he and his friends put together increasingly viral Minecraft challenge videos on YouTube, which they parlayed into millions of followers on Twitch. They followed this up with their magnum opus: Dream SMP, a Minecraft role-playing server that mixed meticulously written lore with real-time improv to construct grand narrative arcs. But viewers never saw hide nor hair of Dream’s real-life body. Then, in October, after years of mystery and speculation, he finally dropped the figurative (and literal) mask in a video simply titled, “Hi, I’m Dream.” The video has over 62 million views.

Dream after many years of mystery ended up looking like a pretty normal white dude. Brown hair, green eyes, light stubble—a twenty-three-year-old who did not appear out of place among the trendy YouTuber and Twitch streamer crowd, but who also wouldn’t have seemed out of place anywhere, really. And yet, his facial features threw the online discourse machine into overdrive. In countless other videos posted by Dream’s friends and stars from every corner of the creator-verse, people reacted to their first sight of Dream’s scruffy mug. Fans on YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, and every other platform known to man chimed in with their takes, as well. Dream, some said, was ugly. His chin protruded too much. His eyes were too far apart. He had the features of a dishonest person, or a bully. Others, often posting in all-caps on Twitter, thirsted after him, drawing attention to his smile, his jawline, the way he gestured with his hands. He was gorgeous and kind-eyed—the picture of wholesome innocence. Whatever people had previously felt about Dream, they projected onto the suddenly far-less blank canvas that was his face.

At TwitchCon, though, you wouldn’t know anybody thinks him less than a god. All throughout his panel, intended to celebrate the Dream SMP server, young female fans howl in delight at every word. If you closed your eyes, you’d assume you were at a K-pop show, not in a sterilely lit conference room listening to gamers answer questions about impenetrable lore. But in many ways, this is a new breed of pop star, and as Dream—and his legions of fans—will soon learn, that carries weight.

Dream SMP does not, at first glance, come across as a natural celebrity incubator—at least, in the traditional sense. It doesn’t spotlight its stars in ways we’re used to, with physical talents and characteristics glammed up on a stage or screen. But look closer, and it becomes abundantly clear why modern teenagers and twentysomethings regard it and its stars with a similar—or even greater—level of enthusiasm.

In Minecraft, players can create their own servers, on which they are able to build to their hearts’ content, with their creations persisting between play sessions. The appeal of the game itself, then, is not unlike that of Lego blocks, except at a scale constrained only by players’ imaginations. Some have poured years into their own cities and planets, as well as recreations of Middle-Earth from Lord of the Rings, the Titanic from Titanic, and Manhattan from, you know, Earth. But while many—Dream and his crew included—once saw Minecraft first and foremost as a playground, a growing number of players now view it as a stage.

Dream SMP takes place in a world constructed by Dream and his fellow creators, but with a twist: During broadcasts, players are in character as fictionalized alter egos, drawing on a mixture of in-game improvisation and prewritten lore that they collectively come up with in writing sessions that take place outside the game. As a result, they’re able to have their cake and eat it, too: Fans of labyrinthine world building find plenty to slice open, dissect, and endlessly speculate about on Reddit or across fan-assembled wikis—as they would with a lore-heavy TV show like Game of Thrones, movie series like John Wick, or video game series like Five Nights at Freddy’s (yes, seriously)—but lighter, looser character-driven moments ground the whole enterprise.

On top of all that, you never know quite what’s going to happen. A creator might make something up on the spot that changes the course of the story entirely, or becomes a new, foundational element of the lore. In 2020, a major election plotline was born of the fact that a key player slept through a session, forcing his running mate to spin up a new political party with a different player. They won the election, ushering in a new era in the fictional country of L’Manberg. This followed a saga that included rallies, flashbacks, and the fall of an autocracy, which culminated in 220,000 players voting on which party should win.

It was large-scale, interactive live theater which viewers could follow from the perspective of whichever participating creator they chose by simply tuning into their Twitch or YouTube channel, whose individual communities, in turn, have their own objectives and in-jokes. This is the appeal of Dream SMP: As characters bond and betray, kingdoms rise and fall, and memes recount it all, viewers don’t just watch; they participate. They might not be in the game, but they still get to say, “I was there.” They still get to feel like, without them, the situation might have played out a little (or a lot) differently, both in and outside the game itself.

Moreover, stuck at home during the pandemic, teenagers had ample time for non-schoolyard crushes on their favorite creators to develop into obsessions. On platforms like Twitter, the Dream SMP fandom grew into a force, regularly causing quotes and phrases from the server to trend—in all caps, naturally—as tens or hundreds of thousands of fans tweeted them out in unison. Devotion and thirst, these became accepted (and in many cases encouraged) languages in creator-focused Minecraft communities. Again, the K-pop community functions as a parallel—if an all-caps phrase or name trends on Twitter, it can be hard to tell, at first glance, if it’s from the K-pop community or the Minecraft community. But it’s often one of the two.

To some degree, this behavior has always existed in pop culture—think the classic image of Beatles fans screeching and mobbing as the band disembarked from a plane. But now it persists online and shapes digital culture, creating new languages of expression. In her book Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It, internet culture writer Kaitlyn Tiffany explains that Twitter and other modern platforms were destined to become megaphones for fandom, noting that early virtual communities, dating as far back as the 1980s, functioned as gathering grounds for Deadheads. This pattern gave way to fan sites in the nineties, where fans once again functioned as early adopters, establishing thousands of pages on Yahoo’s free web hosting service, GeoCities, that catered to every interest imaginable. What fans talked about—and how they talked about it—helped define the feature set of social platforms to come. At a more atomic level, as Tiffany puts it, “early adopters innovated the idea that the internet might be organized by affinity.” Years later, fans did this with Twitter, as well.

“[In 2009] Twitter had not yet decided what to be,” Tiffany writes. “These early Twitter-using fans often came from the cultural powerhouse of Black Twitter, or from insular fandom spaces like LiveJournal or Yahoo Groups, and initially found themselves in small, tightly knit clusters, discussing the movements of their heroes in circular conversations. They came up with the internet-age semantic convention of using an abstract plural pronoun even when speaking alone. As in, ‘We have no choice but to stan.’ As their circles grew, they realized they could disrupt conversation and funnel attention at will, taking over the Trending Topics sidebar whenever they had a whim to. Eventually, they settled into a rhythm—Tumblr was the confusing and therefore secluded site for longer-form conversations and strategy sessions, while Twitter was the faster-paced site for a public facing display, where they showed off their numbers and their no-limit capacity for posting.”

In person, in the confines of an otherwise pin drop−silent interview room instead of a cacophonous panel, Dream comes across as easygoing but confident. He states, matter of factly, that the face reveal was always a matter of when, not if. It was the final step in a plan to move in with two of his best friends, fellow Minecraft stars George “GeorgeNotFound” Davidson and Nick “Sapnap” Armstrong, and create content together—some of which would naturally include their real faces. Davidson, originally from the UK, had been waiting to move to the US, but Covid threw a wrench in those plans. The year 2022 proved to finally be the Dream team’s year.

“It was only two weeks after [Davidson] got his visa that the face reveal happened,” says Dream. “So now he’s here and moved in, and we’re all living together. That was the ‘when.’”

Despite popular conceptions to the contrary, Dream does not believe himself to be a private person relative to other content creators.

“I’m really not,” he says. “I feel like my friends would laugh at that: If someone was like, ‘He’s a private person,’ they’d be like, ‘He tweets out what he had for breakfast in the morning.’ I’ve always been open about everything that I do. I feel like that’s why my friends have connected with me so much. They feel like they know me, really. . . . I think that’s a big part of me, even though I am faceless—well, was faceless.”

He also feels like hiding his face in some ways made it more difficult to hold on to his final scraps of privacy, not less.

“I think I probably experienced way more [people prying]—like maybe a hundred times more than the average creator even of my size,” Dream says, “because there was that secret of ‘Oh, we need to keep digging. We need to find out. We still haven’t found his face.’”

In this moment, Dream is clearly riding high. He’s the talk of the internet, and he’s just faced down hundreds of fans who were freaking out externally as much as he was internally. As far as he’s concerned, the future is all roses. Potential downsides of a more public persona don’t faze him.

“Realistically, revealing your face doesn’t do anything about swatting,” he says, as an example. “[You don’t have someone going], ‘I recognize that guy. He’s my neighbor!’ That’s not usually how it happens. . . . It’s one of those things where it’s a negative of being a content creator or being in the public eye in general: There’s gonna be people that do horrible things.”

“Negative consequences can’t stop me from living my life,” he adds. “I feel like my best life is being able to make content with my friends and being able to go out in public and just go get coffee. Actually, I don’t like coffee.”

He also says he was unfazed by the online furor following his face reveal, in part because he’s no stranger to controversy. In fact, if there’s one thing that follows him more reliably than throngs of faithful fans, it’s dark clouds of controversy. Most notoriously, in 2020 he was accused of cheating in a Minecraft speedrun—a challenge in which players race to complete a game as quickly as possible—by installing modifications that would make certain items appear more often. This resulted in a very public war of graph-filled, math-heavy statistics reports with Minecraft speedrun moderators, followed six months later by Dream confessing that he had cheated—but only by accident. Critics were, naturally, skeptical about that last bit.

Internet denizens have also mined Dream’s past for controversy, digging up old videos and Reddit posts that suggested more conservative, in some cases bigoted, points of view than his wholesome online image would suggest. In 2021, in an on-stream conversation with Twitch politics king Hasan “HasanAbi” Piker, Dream explained those things by saying he used to hold “way more conservative views” back when he was sixteen and “an idiot kid growing up in Florida, in a red area, going to online school.” Still, a new set of values more befitting of his star status among the generally progressive, pro-LGBTQ Minecraft community did not stop him from slipping up. Piker took Dream to task for releasing a video featuring Markus “Notch” Persson, Minecraft’s original creator, whose conspiracy mongering and racially insensitive rhetoric caused current owner Microsoft to remove all mentions of him from the game. That, said Piker, was “significantly fucking worse” than having once held different values. Dream agreed and ultimately deleted the video featuring Persson.

Dream and Piker wound up discussing the internet’s tendency to keep a record of everything creators have ever done—even before they became creators—and how that can be useful, but only up to a point. There still needs to be room for the idea that people can change, they agreed.

“I understand that a lot of younger Minecraft stans or Minecraft Twitter people have almost idealistic expectations of their own content creators, and they want to hold them accountable—and in certain instances, it is good,” Piker said at the time.

“I’ve been criticized a lot of times for things I didn’t deserve criticism for,” said Dream during the same broadcast, “but I’ve also been criticized for tons of things I deserved criticism for—even recently.”

In 2022, at TwitchCon, Dream says these experiences have helped him learn to roll with the punches, even in the face of comments about his, well, face.

“This is almost exactly how I expected things to go,” he says. “I got a lot of texts from people who were like, ‘Dude, are you OK? Don’t listen to the haters.’ I was like, ‘Every single day, this is happening.’ . . . I guess to most people, it feels more real when you’re calling a real person ugly. That’s not any different than somebody saying you’re a horrible, crappy person—the same thing that has happened before and will continue to happen.”

Dream found some reactions to be memorable, however—often when they were overly positive, to a degree he found “very creepy.”

“It’s like, ‘Thank you for the compliment, but you’re talking about my inner eyelid,’” he says.

But this genre of reaction was also far from unexpected. Some would argue that, over the years, Dream and his closest colleagues have even encouraged fans to behave this way.

You’d have to throw a lot of rocks into a lot of different crowds to finally hit a creator who’d say they don’t love their fans. It’s basically a given, at least when it comes to the truly loyal fans, or the longtime stalwarts at the heart of a creator’s community. The real question at the heart of most creator-fan interactions, rather, is what kinds of behaviors a creator brings out in their beloved fanbase—and vice versa. Some of this is incidental; when you have millions of eyes on you every day, you can’t possibly be held accountable for every act of petty indecency perpetrated by groups claiming to represent you. But big creators do, unavoidably, control the direction in which the winds are blowing. If they repeatedly approve of one thing—or fail to disavow patterns of pernicious behavior—fans notice.

In the livestreaming world, this becomes dicey when parasocial relationships are involved, which is basically all the time. True diehards spend hours watching their favorite creators every day—and potentially more interacting with fellow fans, vacuuming up videos and other ancillary content, and creating memes and additional neon-lit “NOTICE ME” signs in hopes of garnering love kernels from their streamers of choice. This, for some fans, leads to the impression that they truly know a streamer, that there’s a friendship or relationship brewing even where the actual dynamic is 100 percent one-sided. But attachment is a strange thing. We, as humans, are terrifyingly skilled at hand-waving away rejection if it means protecting our own feelings. It is not uncommon, then, for streamers to end up with thousands of viewers who are functionally that one person in the friend group nobody really likes, but who is able to stick around because everyone else lacks the heart to tell them.

A central criticism of Dream and other members of the Dream SMP is that they’ve spent years reeling in these sorts of fans, stringing them along with stunts and messages and, at least in some cases, defending them against warranted criticism. For example, shortly before the face reveal in 2022, Dream began selling a USB drive that, according to its official product description, contained “baby pictures, some chapters from Dream’s old books, childhood emails, old gaming screenshots, pictures/memes from Dream’s camera roll, and more.” That’s awfully personal stuff! It would not be hard, if you were a particularly devoted fan, to scroll through that collection of keepsakes and imagine Dream himself revealing them to you, his dear friend, one by one. At the time, detractors accused Dream of crossing a line, while defenders said it’s not all that uncommon for celebrities to release books and other promo items containing similar material. The truth, perhaps, is that online creators are far from the first winners of the social lottery to profit off other human beings’ intrinsic need for connection; they’ve just streamlined the process to the point that it’s harder to ignore how uncomfortable it all is.

Others in the anti-Dream camp have taken shots at the Dream SMP crew for seeming all too happy to hint at the idea of romantic relationships within the group despite the apparent lack thereof. Similar accusations have been leveled against pop stars like Taylor Swift and Harry Styles, the latter of whom has pushed back against the notion that he’s projected any specific sexuality. “I think everyone, including myself, has your own journey with figuring out sexuality and getting more comfortable with it,” Styles said in an interview with Rolling Stone. While certain subsets of fans took aim at Styles for his gender-fluid fashion sense and decision to play a gay character in a movie, Dream critics see queerbaiting in the group’s tendency to make flirty, seemingly longing comments or kiss each other at events. This sends fans—many of whom are young and, again, pro-LGBTQ—into a tizzy. As a result, fans are especially keen on the idea that Dream and Davidson are secretly together. They write fan fiction and make fan art about this pairing. This has fueled the accusations that Dream and his friends are queerbaiting, a practice in which the creators of generally fictionalized works hint at but do not actually depict same sex or other forms of queer representation for the sake of publicity or marketing. A small handful of streamers, veteran comedy streamer Kacey “Kaceytron” Caviness chief among them, have openly criticized Dream and others in his circle for this perceived practice.

“[It] just seemed like profiteering off the LGBTQ audience,” said Caviness. “After I commented on that, I was really, like, attacked. It got a lot of the fans upset. I got a deeper glimpse into what his fan base was like.”

But in more recent times Dream has spoken openly about his own sexuality—saying in a 2022 tweet that he’s “not gay” and mostly finds women attractive but thinks “some men are OK too, I guess”—and has at various points as far back as 2020 explicitly denied dating his friends. The question then becomes: How many times should he have to repeat it?

“I joke with my friends because I’m comfortable [with] my sexuality, and so are they,” Dream wrote on Twitter. “There’s lots of LGBTQ+ members on the SMP, and even in the Dream Team. I have no need to ‘profit’ off of ‘pretending to date [Davidson],’ we’re not dating and have no plans to, and we’ve said that.”

Other streamers who’ve proclaimed themselves straight—like Piker—have kissed friends at events and during broadcasts and received significantly less blowback. But those creators don’t have Dream’s overwhelmingly young, intensely parasocial fan base. There are different levels of responsibility involved. That, to Dream’s critics, is the difference maker.

“I think that people who do have younger fan bases should take greater measures to protect those fan bases,” said Caviness. “But then a lot of the time, the creators are younger themselves. Maybe they don’t realize the kind of [influence they have].”

In videos and arguments with other creators, Dream has repeatedly espoused a live-and-let-live stance.

“If someone wants to ship [Davidson and me] because for one reason or another them picturing us dating makes them happier, then why do you care, and why should I care?” Dream wrote. “Who cares. I’m glad that the LGBTQ+ community can feel safe enjoying mine and my friends’ content, that’s it!”

Lynk, a fan who enjoys drawing fan art of Dream and Davidson as a couple, says that as long as the creators in question are OK with being shipped in fan works, they don’t see the issue: “For me personally, if two or more real people are OK with it and have stated multiple times that they are comfortable with being shipped together, it’s OK to ship them together,” they explain. “If it leads to unrealistic expectations for some fans, it’s unfortunate. But to my knowledge, most shippers understand that their ship is just that: a ship. Not reality. It may be fun to speculate, as long as it’s not hurting anyone, but at the end of the day these are real people.”

In a video released in 2020, Dream defended his personal stan army and balked at the idea that stans are all cut from the same cloth.

“Like who you like, don’t like who you don’t like, but don’t generalize stans,” Dream said in the video. “Let people look up to who they want to look up to. It shouldn’t bother you, but if it does, that’s fine. Just ignore it and move on like you would if someone said they liked ketchup on their broccoli.”

“Almost every single thing that I see brought up regarding stans is just completely false or very, very out of context,” he added. “I don’t agree with everything my fans do, obviously, and if they overstep boundaries, I tell them. . . . When I tell them, they stop, because they genuinely look up to me and care about me. And why would they want to make me upset?”

But Caviness and others see that as part of the problem. Dream probably doesn’t mean harm, nor is he doing things light-years outside the bounds of what other creators are doing; he’s just a young person overseeing an online community of even younger people—one as populous as an actual nation. That’s a recipe for trouble.

“Being a creator in the Twitch space, it so often feels like there are no adults in the room,” said Caviness. “With the Dream situation, especially with his fandom, it’s just Lord of the Flies. There’s no adults, no adult opinion. Whenever you don’t have adults supervising what’s going on to a certain degree, it’s just like, ‘What’s going on here?’”

The Dream SMP TwitchCon panel largely went off without a hitch. From the moment the panel’s moderator asked everybody how they were doing and Dream’s grunt of “good” elicited a maximum-decibel response from the crowd, it was clear the Dream team could do no wrong. These fans were like pigeons in a park ready to go absolutely ham on a handful of crumbs. Some were in Dream SMP cosplay. Others used precious mic time to compliment each other’s Dream SMP merch. But even though there were no wrong answers to fan questions like “What’s your favorite Minecraft block?,” “Can you do your best lore line in your lore voice?,” and “Do you like my shirt?,” Dream felt an immeasurable pressure.

“It was like being in a dream,” he says during an interview a couple hours after the panel. “I wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh, I feel like I’m in a boy band.’ I was just thinking, ‘What is this? How is this real? How are these people screaming for me?’”

The reality of the moment really hit him, he continues, only after he got back to his hotel room.

“I got taken back to my place, and I was just sitting there for a while—literally just laid flat on my bed, on my face—like, ‘What was that?’ Then my mom came in the room and asked, ‘Are you OK?’ And I started just bawling my eyes out.’ . . . She asked if I was stressed, if it was all the people, and I said, ‘No, I don’t know what it is. I’m just feeling something!’”

Online fame exists across numerous spectrums and sliding scales. Tens of thousands of channels on YouTube and Twitch have over 1 million followers. But that’s not the same as having over 30 million, like Dream does—not even remotely. Thirty million is a few tiers of notoriety up from what most big creators can comprehend. (To put things in perspective, Taylor Swift’s YouTube channel has 56 million followers—not that many more than Dream’s—and she is one of the most famous people on the planet.) It is, to put it succinctly, the difference between revealing your face to adoring masses within your own bubble and, well, everyone. At that point, too many eyes are on you at all times for you to reliably maintain a bubble. You never know what might leak out and become the next big controversy.

But in some ways, even all of that pales in comparison to seeing just a thousand of those fans’ real faces and bodies gathered in the same place, filling a room and spilling out into a hallway.

“It’s one of those emotions that probably doesn’t have a word,” says Dream. “It’s something I feel like humans aren’t made to experience. There’s so many people on social media. There are millions of people watching you, and you have a thousand people in front of you. It genuinely is indescribable. I still don’t know how to describe what I was feeling or why I was crying or what was going through my head.”

There are different levels to this for fans, too: Some fans view individual creators as resources or light entertainment—appreciated, sure, but not beloved by any stretch. They might go to a panel hosted by a creator and experience a mild thrill at the prospect of having their question answered. But it’s unlikely that they’d scream. The Dream SMP crowd, on the other hand, was full of kids wearing their hearts on their sleeves, tearfully professing how much Dream SMP meant to them and offering handmade gifts to their favorite creators. Dream, though new to the real-life version of this, remains firm in his position from 2020: Stans are not an intrinsically negative phenomenon, nor are they even all that new. He also believes that gender plays a role in the perception of his stans, in particular.

“When you see it with a bunch of teenage girls, people like to kind of make fun of it. But when you see it with a grown man or anybody [else], it’s like, OK, what’s the difference?’” he says. “I’ve always related it back to my childhood watching football. I was definitely an obsessive stan of football players. You wear the jersey, and you get the hat. You run up and try to get signatures, and you cry when your team loses—that same kind of emotion.”

“Obviously,” he adds, “that is something that [can] easily be taken advantage of by people, if they have negative intentions. . . . I’m very conscious of it. I want to have a good impact on the world.”

In a streamers-only hotel lounge near TwitchCon, Karl Jacobs, another member of Dream SMP, rifles through his bag. After a moment, he produces a book with a purple-and-yellow cover and a swirling blue sigil in its center. It appears, at first glance, to be the work of a professional. Jacobs immediately dispels that notion. The book is a gift from a fan, says the twenty-four-year-old, whose painted fingernails gleam as he flips through its pages.

“I have a series that’s associated with this book,” Jacobs says, explaining the book’s meticulously constructed cover. “So [this fan] wrote out a transcript of the series.”

Two of Jacobs’s friends, fellow SMP members, and podcast cohosts (not to mention, Dream’s housemates), Davidson and Armstrong, sit next to him and examine the book. Both appear impressed.

“They put more effort into this than I did in school,” Armstrong chuckles.

“That is so true!” Jacobs exclaims. “That is so true.”

For Jacobs, especially, it’s been an almost-overnight rise—at least, in internet time. After he linked up with the Dream SMP crew in 2020, his follower count skyrocketed.

“One August, I had twenty thousand followers,” says Jacobs. “The next January, I had two Twitter accounts with over a million followers. It was that quick. It really was.”

Fame struck these creators like lightning bolts, and now they’re learning how to weather the storm. But even as they face criticism in cases where their audiences have, for example, dogpiled on other creators, they feel like they already have a pretty good handle on how to manage audiences that dwarf any gathering of people they’ll ever see in real life.

“Oh yeah, now our favorite part is attacking people,” Jacobs says in a dryly sarcastic tone. “Drama is so boring to me for content creators. I think it’s cringy and lame. . . . There’s opportunities for us to get engagement out of it, and we could have reaped a lot of benefits from joining the drama, but I feel like any attention you get from drama is always really weird. So we stay clear from that.”

In the eyes of Jacobs, Davidson, and Armstrong, the best thing a creator can do to avoid drama—a convenient catchall that can be used in reference to everything from spats with other creators to harassment mobs—is set firm boundaries.

“They’re their own people,” Armstrong says of fans. “We don’t have access to their computer. We can’t tell them, ‘No Twitter for a week.’ We can set our boundaries, and then there’s only so much we can do. We can condemn the bad things, and we have.”

Jacobs says he’s repeatedly told his audience that if they’re going to take up arms—read: keyboards—against creators or fans, they should leave references to him out of it. That means no pictures of his face as their Twitter profile pictures, otherwise a common practice among Dream SMP fans. He thinks his fans have gotten the message.

“The community does a really good job of self-policing,” Jacobs says. “I’ve seen somebody use my profile picture attacking another content creator, and then another person responded, ‘Yo, Karl doesn’t like it when you do that.’ They do that a lot.”

As for other activities creators might view as boundary pushing—for example, the act of pairing up real people, like Dream and Davidson, as though they were fictional characters—Jacobs, Davidson, and Armstrong just don’t see the harm.

“A lot of people assume we’d think it’s weird, but I just don’t really care,” Davidson says. “I don’t find it bad. I don’t think it’s weird at all. And if I do, then I would just say something, and then people shut them down. It kind of holds people in the community accountable.”

“Calling the fan base weird for stuff like that is weird to me,” Jacobs adds. “First of all, why do you care? Second of all, imagine what other bad shit they could actually be doing [instead].”

On the surface, at least, some Dream SMP fans do seem to nominally value boundaries as a core principle. If you read profile cards they’ve written for themselves, they’ll often have some variation on “violating creators’ boundaries” listed as a dislike, suggesting that Dream team creators’ messaging is having an impact. But words and actions don’t always align, and assigning responsibility in those cases can be tricky. The years-long leadup to Dream’s face reveal is a good example of this: Dream noted that fans tried to dig into his personal life—in some cases invading his privacy—even more so than with other creators because they were always chasing that final mystery. This dynamic clearly got to him, leading to a handful of angry responses in cases where fans (or critics) thought they’d unearthed a picture or biographical fact about him. However, before revealing his face, he chose to sell baby pictures and other assorted childhood mementos to fans, which is not exactly the kind of move that dissuades people from trying to turn up additional details. Boundaries, in Dream’s parasocial world, are ever shifting.

But that’s also precisely why Jacobs viewed the outcry around Dream selling those photos as “the dumbest controversy ever”: Streaming is, to him and others like Dream, Davidson, and Armstrong, unavoidably parasocial. Creators from previous generations, like Caviness, are uncomfortable with that idea. They try to discourage parasocial relationships where possible, because it’s impossible to be everybody’s friend. But members of the Dream team, who grew up on those sorts of connections with creators they looked up to, have embraced parasociality.

“I think it was an interesting angle to continue to monetize the successful marketing campaign that was his face,” Jacobs says of Dream’s baby picture USB drive. “I can hear the angle [critics are coming at it from]. I just think people are looking too deep into it.”

“I don’t think there’s any problem with it,” Davidson concurs.

Jacobs, Davidson, and Armstrong also agree with Dream’s assessment of this strain of fandom: In their eyes, it’s not so far removed from the arena-shaking passion of sports fans. But, Jacobs adds, it is a new evolution of fandom. Online fandom leads to stronger, more personal bonds, and livestreaming creates stronger, more personal bonds still.

“It’s different because there’s streamers, right?” he says. “Streamers really do hang out with chat, for better or worse, for hours. That is just going to harbor a parasocial [element] with every single person watching. Every single person watching is going to feel like to an extent they understand this person’s life way better than you would if you just watched a ten-minute YouTube video, right?”

At TwitchCon, even with hordes vying for their attention on all sides, Jacobs and other Dream SMP creators have felt this connection: “They watch us for, like, six hours at a time,” says Jacobs. “So I think it’s easier to get along with them.”

Around a week after TwitchCon, a new hashtag trends: #DreamIsAFreak. It stems from a thread posted prior to TwitchCon, but which was initially lost after its user made their account private. On an anonymous account, however, somebody else publicized the thread for all to see. In it, a Twitter user accuses Dream of grooming her—that is, establishing an inappropriately emotional or sexual connection with her—back when he was twenty and she was a minor. She posts Twitter DMs in which the two seemingly discuss her age (“18 soon,” she says, meaning she was 17 at the time), her dislike of school, and Dream’s wariness of conversations leaking and being blown out of proportion, leading him to prefer Snapchat (where messages auto-delete). She also tweets what she claims are screenshots of much more overtly flirty texts with Dream, in which he jokingly proposes the idea of meeting up during Covid quarantine and alludes to the idea of sex. The “worst” flirtations, she adds, took place on Snapchat, but the platform deleted them.

Dream responds to these allegations the same day they’re reposted, describing them as “disgusting false accusations.”

“My heart goes out to actual victims who get questioned in their hardest moments because of stuff like this,” Dream writes on Twitter. “Fuck you if you abuse concern around horrible real issues out of spite. It’s sad to see the trend that whenever there’s something big going on for me or for friends of mine, people try and use those moments to spread negativity and lies.”

The next day, another user posts similar allegations on Twitter and TikTok, claiming that a series of DMs between Dream and her on Instagram escalated to sexually explicit messaging on Snapchat. This took place, she says, when she, too, was seventeen. In one video of a message she managed to save, the person she claims is Dream calls her “gorgeous as fuck.” She goes on to say that they at one point made plans to meet up while she was visiting Florida—and that during that trip, Dream intended to use “a chest full of sex toys” on her.

“I thought that I was genuinely building a bond with my favorite YouTuber, and boy was I wrong,” she says in a video. “That’s what grooming is: content creators make you feel important and take stuff out of you because they know you’re not gonna do anything. The only reason I’m speaking up about this is because someone else did, or else I never would be posting any of this.”

The day after the internet grabs hold of the second set of allegations, Dream posts a much longer response to both sets. He lends credence to some parts of both stories, saying the Twitter DMs from the first set of accusations are real, but that “there are no inappropriate comments whatsoever.” He also claims her Twitter bio said she was eighteen at the time, and just to be safe, he asked her age. He goes on to claim she faked the flirty text messages.

He casts the second set of allegations in a similar light: The initial Instagram messages, he says, are real, but constituted a “friendly normal conversation” and “nothing inappropriate.” He again says the accuser told him she was eighteen at the time of their communication and that all her other claims are “completely false.”

“I have almost completely stopped replying to DMs from fans, random people, and old friends due to situations like this and out of fear from stuff that has happened in the past to my friends and those close to me,” Dream writes. “My team has had access to my social accounts [for] as long as I could remember, in an effort to always stay on the side of caution given the size of my platform and inevitable, falsely spread situations like this.”

He goes on to say that from this point forward he plans to “pursue legal action towards people using my name to spread disinformation or those that are misrepresenting facts, lying, faking things, or falsely abusing my name and image.”

Dream also takes a moment to once again ruminate on the nature of parasocial relationships, this time singing a more cautious tune than before.

“Having such a deep obsession towards someone to look deeply into their family, friends, and personal life, or making up relationships or friendships in your head is one of the biggest reasons parasocial relationships can become so dangerous,” Dream writes. “It’s also one of the reasons why creators need to be as responsible as they can be and be careful when they interact with anybody.”

In the months following the accusations against Dream, fans divide themselves into camps. Many, upon Dream’s denial of wrongdoing and allusions to legal action, decide the issue is being settled by suits in a back room somewhere, and until then it’s out of sight, out of mind. But others come to regard Dream with suspicion, or outright contempt. At various points in late 2022 and early 2023, hashtags like #DropDSMP and #DropDream—and even one imploring Spotify to remove references to music associated with Dream SMP—trend on Twitter, with ex-fans and longtime critics imploring Dream’s faithful flock to find a new shepherd.

Those who defect from Dream’s camp find it difficult to leave behind a creator who felt like a friend. But in their eyes, it’s the right thing to do.

“For the first few days after hearing of the allegations, I remember being pretty devastated and generally depressed,” says a former fan named Adrian, “not only because I felt betrayed by my favorite YouTuber, but because it was really frustrating seeing all the victim-blaming narratives other Dream stans were spreading on my timeline.”

Adrian, nineteen, had been a self-described “huge” Dream fan for two years, but in hindsight, he believes it was all a parasocial spell. Now the spell’s broken.

“When I was a stan, I didn’t really see the problem with this,” says Adrian, “but it’s clear now that this kind of parasocial relationship really helps him in times like this. When fans see you as a friend, even if they don’t know you personally or how you act in private at all, they want to defend you like you’re their friend and want to believe every word you say.”

“A lot of people in the fandom saw his actions as normal, like saying, ‘I love you’ to his fans after a big controversy or not having strict boundaries with his fans,” agrees another former fan who goes by the handle Rosh. “It’s hard to realize when you’re indulged in the community.”

But fans who stuck around view Dream’s interactions with fans through a less jaded lens.

“He has expressed in the past that it was exciting for him to have a new fanbase, just like it would be for any content creator, which gave him interactions and DMs from people who started looking up to him and wanted to talk to him,” says a nineteen-year-old fan named Leah. “I remember there was one time where someone on [Twitter] was going through a hard time and posted something that implied they were going to end their life, and Dream sent them a message in private saying that he would miss them. Dream does not know that person, but he might have saved their life that day.”

Another fan, Lynk, twenty-five, believes these issues are not exclusive to Dream. He just takes the most flack for them.

“I do feel some fans tend to get a bit overly parasocial and obsessive about his personal life, [but] I feel that’s a big issue with a lot of content creators, not just Dream,” they say. “I think his handle of parasocial relations has gotten better as he has gotten bigger as a creator.”

Remaining fans say they want to believe victims and their stories—a common refrain in progressive circles—but in this case, they don’t believe the evidence adds up. They feel like sans indisputable proof of malfeasance, this amounts to a bad-faith attack on Dream.

“People who do not currently support Dream and the people who have just always hated him are the ones to have [escalated] the whole situation,” says Leah. “They claim to support victims, but hurt victims by saying, ‘Yeah, but you support a groomer,’ in their [own] defense at every given opportunity. . . . People just like to use it as some sort of ‘gotcha’ moment. They don’t actually care and never have.”

In the eyes of those who defected, however, the problem isn’t necessarily whether or not Dream behaved inappropriately with minors. Even if Dream denies that part, they say, he still—at least for a time—made a habit of interacting with young fans over whom he, by way of his status, held tremendous power. Imagine Timothée Chalamet or Zendaya sliding into a random fan’s DMs. It’s basically unthinkable. There is no version of that interaction that could play out normally. Admittedly, Dream inhabited the same spaces as his fans; the leap from YouTube comments and Twitch chat into a person’s DMs didn’t seem so far compared to a movie star descending down from Hollywood’s heights. But the power differential was similarly undeniable. That’s enough to put former Dream fans off, at least for the time being.

“There is a healthy boundary between content creators and fans,” says Daisy, the ex-fan who spent two years running a large Dream fan account on Twitter. “This also applies to any celebrity or well-known person, and several times Dream has allowed his fans—made up of mostly teenagers and young people—to cross those boundaries.”

Lynk, who remains a fan, agrees that Dream should have exercised more caution at the time.

“I don’t think he should’ve continued entertaining that conversation,” they say. “I think there is a time and place for fan interaction, and DMs is not it. Dream interacts with a lot of us by liking our fan art, letting us talk in his spaces or podcasts, and meeting fans in person when he’s out. I think that fan interaction should stop there for him, personally. It should stop there for everyone.”

In the months following the accusations, Dream refrains from speaking on the subject at all and is silent in the face of multiple requests for comment. Other streamers within Dream’s circle largely keep quiet on the matter, though two, popular Minecraft content creators, Thomas “TommyInnit ” Simons and Tobias “Tubbo” Smith, end up embroiled in community controversy after Simons jokes that he’s “not gonna add you on Snapchat” to Smith during a lighthearted on-stream exchange in January. Fans take this as a reference to the controversy around Dream and pounce with claws out. Simons and Smith quickly apologize.

“I wasn’t joking about any of the current Dream controversy,” Simons says during a follow-up stream. “As you can imagine, [I] can’t believe I didn’t connect those dots before making the joke, because I am a dumbass. I also assume you all know that I wouldn’t joke about serious stuff like that, but in hindsight, I can totally see how it did look like it.”

“It was a terrible thing to do, and I didn’t mean it like that at all. It was a stupid joke,” says Smith during a similar stream of his own. “I didn’t even connect the dots in my head when I laughed.”

Both say that despite loud and repeated requests from fans, they don’t feel comfortable speaking about their feelings on Dream’s situation in public, even as they continue choosing to associate with him.

“Don’t get me wrong,” says Smith, “it involves me because I’m on the [Dream SMP Minecraft] server and stuff, but . . . if legal stuff is happening and stuff like that, I feel like I’ll get in the way. I don’t want to cause any problems. But I one hundred percent take everything that any victim has said at face value, and I completely understand the importance of trusting at face value—and believing and acting accordingly.”

When young creators invariably cultivate young audiences, how can we ensure they do so responsibly? If a young creator does harm in word or deed, should audiences treat them with more grace than an older creator who, one would figure, should know better? Should younger creators get more second chances? And which, if any, infractions should be absolutely beyond the pale, no matter who’s responsible? With Twitch and other platforms opting to largely remain hands off and norms differing wildly across communities, concrete answers remain elusive.

Daisy says she began to take issue with her then-favorite creator during other controversies. The allegations were just another straw atop a camel whose back was already looking mighty creaky. She doesn’t regret the time she spent in the fandom, however.

“I am still friends with the majority of the people I met through the community, despite having very different interests . . . and I feel extremely lucky to have met such lovely strangers through my teenage lockdown obsession,” she says. “I now spend most of my time interacting with fans of my favorite bands and singers. I’m not as involved in stan culture as I would have been a few months ago; it isn’t really my type of scene anymore.”

Adrian was worried that departing the Dream fandom would leave him without many friendships he’d come to cherish, but he, too, has found connection removed from the Minecraft monolith.

“All my close friends on Twitter from the Dream fandom, many of whom were relatively large accounts, got into arguments with me after I was vocal about my support of the victim. The others simply blocked or unfollowed me after seeing that I was open about calling Dream out,” he says. “I’m lucky I had both my sister and some other newly turned former-Dream stans to find comradery in. I started a group chat with them on Twitter so we could vent to each other about our feelings on the situation. That connection helped me a lot to come to terms with it all.”

In some ways, 2023 is an eventful year for Dream. Dream SMP concludes its grand tale, and the stars it created log onto their shared Minecraft server for one last, tearful play session. Afterward, some continue to collaborate via projects like QSMP, a multilingual Minecraft server from popular streamer Quackity that translates what players say to one another in real time, while others go their separate ways. At almost the same time, Dream announces a similar multilingual Minecraft server called USMP, which leads to conflict between Dream fans and Quackity fans. Dream goes on to say that he and Quackity hadn’t spoken in a while and, effectively, that left hand and right hand failed to meet while tinkering away at their respective projects. Eventually, the conflict dies down.

But Dream is unusually quiet on YouTube and Twitch for most of the year, releasing just a handful of videos and only streaming sporadically. He takes some unexpected detours, however, temporarily deleting his face reveal video and posting a tongue-in-cheek replacement in which he calls himself “ugly” and says he will resume hiding behind the mask forever. What happens next seems to at least partially explain that eyebrow-raising, headline-grabbing stunt: In the fall, Dream drops his debut EP, To Whoever Wants to Hear, and goes on a brief tour of the United States to support it.

At TwitchCon 2023 the month after his tour, Dream explains himself. The facetious face un-reveal, he says, was a branding exercise.

“It was related to the visual identity for sure,” Dream says. “It was like ‘Hey, this is still Dream. Dream still has the mask. Dream still wears the mask even if you know who is under the mask.’ I’ve always talked about superheroes and stuff. It’s a good analogy: Even if you know it’s Peter Parker that’s Spider-Man, he’s still Spider-Man.”

Dream has plenty to say about the evolution of his not-so-secret identity and newfound interest in flexing his creative muscles outside of Minecraft. But the secluded TwitchCon interview room—like any room Dream enters these days—houses an elephant: the allegations, which continue to follow him wherever he goes. He addresses them warily, admitting that he could have handled his initial public reaction better.

“Coming right after my face reveal, there was a lot of difficulty to that,” he says. “I’ve dealt with so many things people think about me over the years, always hot topic things like racism or transphobia or homophobia or very serious things. So I had definitely had experience with people saying things that are not true about me. But I think, that being my experience, my initial response was like, ‘This is ridiculous.’ Very similar to what I would say to anything else where it’s like ‘Oh, you’re racist’ or whatever. But [this is] a different kind of thing, so you can’t respond the same way.”

He goes on to repeatedly suggest that an interview is not really “the avenue to discuss specifics,” but he maintains his innocence.

“Obviously, it’s misinformation,” he says. “It gives people who don’t like me a reason to be like, ‘Well yeah, I don’t like him because of this.’ But you didn’t like me before. . . . I think it’s a very common thing in the community.”

In his eyes, what actually happened is that he used Snapchat to interact with a variety of people—mods, editors, fans, old friends, random people he met in enormously popular competitive shooter Counter-Strike—which led some of them to feel close to him, or like he owed them his attention. In the lead- up to the face reveal, he began to reconsider his approach to socializing. This, he says, culminated in the creation of a new Snapchat account, causing him to abandon the old one and many of the people he kept in touch with through it. This, he believes, bred resentment among those lost contacts, though that was not his intention.

“I think [that] was a big kind of catalyst to what ended up happening,” he says.

After ostensibly incensed Snapchat connections came out of the woodwork, some of whom made allegations, Dream says he decided to take a step back and a look inward.

“That certainly had a massive impact on my content and my decisions I made after that. I did definitely step away from it for a bit,” he says. “My perspective definitely changed in terms of parasocial-ness. Not in a negative way. . . . I think it’s more in [a] one-on-one [sense]. You have to be very, very careful about one-on-one interaction, and with me it’s kind of with anybody because whether somebody is a fan or not a fan, when you’re at the size that I am, almost everybody has some knowledge of you or who you are, or could have ulterior motives. It was a wake-up call to be like, ‘You’ve gotta be really careful about who you talk to, who you trust, what you say, who you say it to—especially with fans.’”

But the saga’s not over, and Dream knows it. Fans still don’t feel like they have the full story.

“It’s definitely something I’ll talk about more,” he says.

***

And he did, but you’ll have to read about it in the book, because this excerpt is already hilariously long. You can buy Stream Big here, or wherever books are sold.