Minecraft: The Mob Vote controversy

In October 2020, the Minecraft Mob Vote, a public vote event to decide which mob (NPC) will be added into the game Minecraft began.

The voters had three options to choose from: Glow Squid, Iceologer (Chillager), and Moobloom. It might not sound that big of a deal, but for Minecraft fans, it was everything. The outcome of this vote would change the game no matter what, even the if change would be pretty small, because the fans wanted their favorite mob for the game.

Before the Vote
In late September the mob candidates was announced online. Right away a lot of Minecraft players started to make fan art and memes to show support for their favorite mob, took part in heated arguments and even made hate memes for the mobs which they don't want in the game.

Some of these posts resembled political ads which also allegedly caused some of the heat that was built up over the presidential transferred to the mob vote.

However, unlike the presidential election, it's hard to say who was in the lead. There was a lot of support for every mob with the moobloom perhaps getting the most love due to having a lot of art made for it and the Iceologer was seen as the least favored out of all three due to many people seeing it as a difficult challenge due to mountains being already hard to maneuver. However the supporters of the mob touted it as the best and made many comments and videos about praising it. Then on the day of the vote one of the most influential youtubers Dream with 10 million subscribers tweeted his support for the glow squid.

Dream Rigging the Vote
Dream's tweet received negative criticism and backlash, as he said things such as promising to follow anyone that voted for glow squid. Fans started to claim that he rigged the election and started spamming moobloom and iceologer in the chat and accused Dream for cheating and stated that he wanted the glow squid for his own personal gain.

In the night results of the vote came in and the glow squid was indeed the winner, many fans increased their criticism and hate towards Dream harassing him in social media pages and created videos about how he rigged the election; one gained over 100k views.

After that, Dream didn’t apologize. Instead, he made comments about Herobrine making him do it and stated that he'd do it again.

Aftermath
This gave rise to the #CancelDream movement. Online Minecraft communities filled with memes that showed hatred to both the Glow Squid and Dream. The dislikes on Dream's latest video at the time increased by about 1K in a day. Some people went as far as saying that they'll unsubscribe his channel and even sent death threats towards him and the people that voted for the glow squid. While some people demanded a new vote and others wanted Dream to apologize (which he did later on), most people were just disappointed. The other thing is that there wasn't any rule against influencing a mob vote.

As it stands, the October Minecraft Mob Vote will go down as an interesting and somewhat tragic look into how a one YouTuber's controversial tweet can result in such a chaos and trouble. We won't know what would happen if Dream had never said something that controversial. Maybe the glow squid would win, or maybe it would lose. One thing is clear, however: this controversy has left a lasting impact on the Minecraft community.

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