Dream
youtube
While I remain exceptionally unplugged from the Minecraft community, having never played a second of the game, even I know who Dream is. Minecraft streamers and YouTubers are kings and queens of their own sprawling ecosystem and some of the most popular developers on the entire web. And perhaps the most popular of all is Dream, who until tonight had never shown his fans or even his friends his true colors, known only by a simple, iconic smiley face.
Dream revealing his face was a big deal for his community and Minecraft as a whole, to say the least. Dream has an amazing following with 5.6 million Twitter followers, 3.1 million Instagram followers and 30.4 million YouTube subscribers. For context: Fortnite’s ninja has 23.8 million. dr Disrespect has 4.1 million. Taylor Swift has 47.5 million. dream is a big thing.
And here he is, here is Dream:
Dream
youtube
He’s a 23 year old named Clay and prior to this reveal he set this up as an event, met a lot of his gaming friends for the first time and they all posted their reactions on his face but the audience reveal was held up until tonight , and premiered on YouTube with 1.2 million viewers to catch a glimpse of him. This is celebrity in 2022. And you can get there without showing your face.
There aren’t that many great YouTubers who are completely anonymous anymore. Corpse Husband comes to mind as another player character who never intentionally showed his face, but Dream is certainly the greatest person to do such a thing. I remember years ago face reveals were a pretty common thing on YouTube and Twitch, before most streamers went live with little boxes of themselves in the corner, but these days when you’re streaming, you’re probably doing it with your own face. even if it’s not your own name. An exception is the mesmerizing rise of vtubing, where players control virtual avatars that are synced to their real-world movements and stand for themselves. It’s a bit of a “metaverse” if that’s where you want to go.
As for Dream and why he chose to do it now, it has to do with one of his friends moving to America, and he’s just sick of being “locked up,” he said in the reveal video. It certainly opens up the possibility for him to create a wider range of content and do things with his friends in real life without having to worry about secrecy or fear of leaks. At a certain point it must be exhausting to be in hiding for so long with so much construction. Although I don’t envy being a 23-year-old showing your face to 30 million people after years of building and speculating, even if it turns out you’re… a perfect-looking kid. We’ll see what Dream does next from here and how many times we’ll see his face as he steps into this new era.
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