Random: After Three Years Of Anonymity, Minecraft YouTuber Reveals His Face

You have either heard of Dream, or you are over 25. Or you are a games journalist who has to know about these things, but if you are the third one, why are you here? You already know this. Go away.

For those of you who are out of the loop, Dream is a 23-year-old Minecraft YouTuber (real name Clay) with over 30 million subscribers who looks like this:

Except, obviously, he doesn’t. That’s just a mask that he wears to match his online avatar. It wasn’t entirely intentional to be faceless for so long, but he found that it created mystery and hype, plus really cool fan art. It’s been clear for a while that the mask is holding him back, though — he spoke about “not being able to express myself fully” in an interview last year — and now that his best friend and fellow Minecraft YouTuber GeorgeNotFound is moving from the UK to the US, he felt that it was time, in the hopes that the two can do more videos together. With their faces.

Now, imagine being a 23-year-old who has accidentally-on-purpose built up an idea of their own face being an exciting reveal… and how anxiety-inducing it must be to have all that pressure put on your own visage. There would always be backlash, especially towards a creator who seems like such an untouchable celebrity, and Twitter took no time in coming up with creative insults about a face that is, honestly, quite average and unremarkable (in a good way). But as he said, the lack of a face is a limiting factor in his own career, and to do the things he wanted to do, he had to rip off the band-aid. Or, in this case, smiley-face.

Still, the video has been viewed almost 20.5 million times by fans of Minecraft and faces alike, and the reception is largely positive. How this face reveal will impact Dream’s legions of fans (many of whom ship Dream and George) is yet to be seen.