Dream's 2021 Pride Month donation controversy

a bit of research on the situation i’ve done back in the day, not as complete as i’ve liked, but i’m not researching further cause i really don’t like researching internet drama.

story and spread

the narrative goes like this: Dream promised to donate all money he earned during his streams in pride month, but did not stream for the month. And then only streamed on the last day after being called out.

as usual, the source are all just random tweets. this one tweet seems to have significance., but i’m probably missing a few tweets.

timeline

• here’s the original promise made on his (now deleted) private account.
  • I actually had to do some digging for all of this, since the sources that most people have been using are all tweets by random people without any sources. says a lot about society. i would love to get an archived link, but it’s probably impossible because private account.
  • most fans don’t know about it, so all accusations of clout chasing fall flat there.
  • for extra context, he’s infamous for being super inactive, he very rarely streams. the whole thing is about motivating himself, after all.
• throughout June, he had already streamed multiple times before being ‘called out’. MyNameXavin (a pretty active r/dwt2 user, account now deleted) has done the research for this. i’m just gonna quote him here, though this does include the later streams he has done:

Everything is in order

Note: Dream’s Merch podcast “chat” is held in his Twitch Chat. Only up to 5k people can join the podcast through discord but there are restreamers on twitch and twitter spaces so it’s much more in total.

Dream also encouraged fans to sub, gift subs, and donate various times through out the podcast

First Merch Discord Podcast - June 2^nd

Second Merch Discord Podcast - June 13^th

Dream Geoguessr Alt Stream - June 15^th

Third Merch Discord Podcast - June 18^th

Dream Main Stream - June 30^th

Total Donated

$20,000 in subs

$60,000 in donations

$10,000 from ads

$50,000 from the Dream Team

Total of $140,000 going to Charity

• the “callout tweets” blew up at some point

• he later streamed on the last day

• In the end, $140K were donated to the Trevor Project, if you take his word for it.

conclusion

the main takeaway is that people can just lie on the internet. and most people will just believe it. and we all have believed in a lot of lies. i guess the only thing you can feasibly do is never share something unless you’re absolutely sure it’s true?

to the kind of people who says “why are you defending Dream you Dream Stan”: you have no conviction in your beliefs, you feel the need to exaggerate and lie to get people behind them. I don’t care how you feel about Dream, I’m just correcting misinformation. there are a billion legitimate reasons to hate Dream, pick one of them next time.