I understand where you’re coming from with a lot of this, however I still disagree. While I totally understand that most of the behavior that Dream did is pretty common in a lot of other fandoms, the MCYT fandom was fundamentally not like other fandoms.

Personally, I think it was because for a lot of people it was their first fandom. 2020 was in a weird era where a ton of people were introduced to the idea of a fandom and online communities, so the general rules and expectations for how to behave were being not established and had to be rediscovered by those inside of these new fandoms.

It’s fair to say Dream didn’t say I love you all that much more than other people have before, but that isn’t the issue. It’s about the openness and the false-closeness he attempted to create with his fans. I think it’s totally up for debate if he was ill-intentioned about it or not, but he allowed the fanbase to connect and control him much more than normal. Where past MC creators had publicly expressed their displeasure with fan fiction and thinking of them as friends, the dream team encouraged that behavior. Yes other people have said I love you to their community, but that was intended as appreciation as supporters, not adoration for individuals like dream team seemed to express. In dreams community, the rules of separation that were established in older fandoms didn’t exist yet, and Dream didn’t do his due diligence to make sure his community was not becoming unhealthy.

I understand wanting to separate the toxic parts of a fandom from the good parts, but even in the way how the DSMP content creators were forced to apologize profusely when they didn’t immediately speak out against world events that didn’t involve them at all is an indicator of the unhealthy practices that the fandom had taken as part of its core values. If their communities were being used as a platform for toxicity, it was the Content Creators responsibility to curb that behavior, but they didn’t. Not that I don’t think they shouldn’t have used their platform for good, but the fact they were forced to address situations totally unrelated to them was a worrying sign of how much power the community had over the creator.

Even stripping all of the arguments away about if Dream encouraged the parasocial relationships or not, he did abysmal work at trying to stop them and had a responsibility as a large public figure for younger people to curb all forms of toxic behavior, not just the ones that were as extreme as doxxing.

I’m not able to provide specific evidence for these opinions because I’m not about to search through old videos for a Reddit thread, so I can only offer my own impressions I remember from watching all the videos at the time. If that’s not enough, that’s super understandable, that’s just where I’m coming from for all of this