In addition to all the hype, there was also lots of negativity after the reveal. #HesUgly started trending on Twitter shortly after the video posted; several memes comparing his likeness to cartoon characters and Shane Dawson were liked by thousands of people online.
But Dream said it didn’t bother him at all. “There’s gonna be bad people, people that are going to be mean, so I didn’t take it to heart,” he said. “I expected stuff like that.”
“Most people don’t even understand how the trending system works on Twitter,” he added. “If you tweet something and it hasn’t been tweeted a lot, then it’s more likely to trend.” In 2020, his fandom trended “JHSFGJSLF” after a series of niche arguments between fans and anti-fans.
The growing pains of becoming a corporeal internet celebrity have also been a mixed bag of overwhelming emotions, which Dream described as somewhere between disbelief, joy, and awkwardness. After his first panel Friday, “I literally went and planked on my bed, facedown,” he said. “My mom came over — she came with me to this — and she was talking to me and consoling me. She was like, ‘Is it because there’s too many people?’ And I don’t know what it is. I’ve never felt those emotions before. I don’t even know how to describe what I was feeling.”
The fear of being recognized was much worse when he was anonymous, he said, because it combined with the fear of being found out. Since over 30 million people have listened to his voice, Dream said, he worried about being identified in public, especially given that he’d allowed some information to be known, like the city he lived in, his first name, and his roommates, the Dream SMP members. As a result, he rarely went outside and took extreme precautions in his personal life. “Even just going to the dentist, I’d go out of state,” he said.
And yet despite it all, Dream said, revealing his face felt right. “I feel way more free,” he said. “It’s nice to be able to have food and sit in a restaurant and not worry about it.”
Be the first to comment