You really came with the receipts for the lmanburg post lol. I’m only tangentially into lore but I always found it weird how much people sided with lmanburg, I get it’s the “main pov” per say but that doesn’t mean it was in the total right narratively. +1 kudos to you.
Got a 44 pages google doc with sources just for this kind of stuff. Always glad to put it good use. It's especially useful in a fandom like this where there are many popular arguments which can be shut down with a single clip lol.
The way the fandom at large treats L'manburg is really telling imo for how young many people here are. Or at the very least their inexperience with stories of all kinds. Protagonist =/= heroes is not really up there in terms of media literacy, but it's also not something that gets explored in much of mainstream media.
To be fair, a lot of the response also comes from the literal propoganda L'manburg used. And by that I mean c!Wilbur using real propoganda techniques in-universe, which got picked up by the fandom. They can be hard to spot without familiarity of what they look like and they're engineered to create such a response.
Add in the way many in the fandom didn't watch those vods first hand and are instead relying on recaps, animatics, fanfiction or just "common wisdom" in the fandom to be informed about events, and you got a perfect storm for nationalistic misinformation.
(All of which is without even getting to the fact dsmp is a story that has minimal hand holding for the audience and that Wilbur's narrative in praticular relies on having some understanding of literary analysis in order to fully communicate its story.
I don't really expect people who aren't familiar with "protagonist" as a term enough to seperate it from "hero" to pick up on the role reversal L'manburg has from the Hamilton inspiration. Let alone all the other things indicating it's a satire of nationalism that needs to be looked at with critical eye.)