Outstanding - Tumblr Posts - Page 2
Outstanding job Parents. Keep up the great work ❤️🔥🖤💚✊🏾♾️🥇🏆💐🌹🌷🎁🎊🤯
=͟͟͞͞🕸️ FΛ𝑺ℌI̲𝗢N & 会社︐ ﹙𝐀𝗅𝗐𝖺𝗒𝗌 𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿﹚
(he's my brother)
just wanted to draw super fluffy anime dog (as one does)
Screw it, two in a week, last day Mermay piece
Tagging @gaeasun @calamity-aims @ofteasandherbs and @mformarsala because I owed this one to you all
i would love to read a more detailed verdict of iasip! highlighting both its flaws and its perks
i was reading some interview with glenn howerton where he compared the show’s structure to entourage and essentially said that every character in entourage was an unabashed pile-of-shit human being and yet these despicable characters kept landing hot girls and making money and getting away with their petty schemes, and he said that always sunny was in a way a response to that - a show full of terrible, terrible people who constantly and consistently face consequences for their bullshit and never come out on top.
and that’s a remarkably difficult place to write from, it really is - like, who wants to see a bunch of unequivocally immoral and nasty characters failing to learn or develop from week to week? i mean, it sounds unwatchable when i describe it that way. there are no redemption arcs, there’s no voice of reason to counteract the bad guy (like, say, kyle broflovski vs. cartman on south park), and it’s not even some bad-guy-descends-into-deeper-evil narrative like breaking bad (which, obviously, can be very compelling to watch). these are bad people, and they do bad things, and they never learn.
but that ultimately allows the show to throw the “good people and death eaters” attitude under a microscope and, over the course of the series, provide understanding of the characters’ behaviour through a process of empathy and background reveal that never feels forced upon the viewer. all of these characters are substance abusers, all of them come from broken homes, all of them were abused by their parents, three of the four were sexually abused as children, one has severe and untreated borderline personality disorder, one’s been closeted for forty years due to catholic guilt - and so even if you can’t root for them, even if their weekly schemes are morally objectionable in every way, it’s like, you get it. you start to see the roots. on the rare occasions when a character’s better nature does win out, it’s all the more powerful. and when you start to understand that these characters are there for each other - that no matter what, week after week, they come back to paddy’s and confide in each other and stick together and protect each other - it turns the gang into this cohort of really multi-faceted anti-villains, holding each other back but also holding each other up, in a way.
a lot has been made of how the show seems to have two wildly divergent fanbases - the reddit dudebros on the one hand, who are mostly just here for the edgy humour and the genuinely, inexcusably offensive shit - and, more puzzlingly, politically conscientious teenage lesbians on tumblr.com in a post-yfip age where always sunny should be persona non grata. (tv show non grata?)
i’m gonna pose a theory re: that last cohort.
there is not a lot of social support for young people who abuse substances, or young people who come from broken homes, or young people who were sexually abused as children, or young people who are in the closet, or young people who are mentally ill. you’re not supposed to talk about experiencing any of these things. you’re not supposed to exhibit any inconvenient, unattractive symptoms of any of these things. and the few cultural mirrors that you do have are often so aestheticized and glossy and shiny as to be unrecognizable.
always sunny, on the other hand, is a generally light-hearted comedy about people who come from all of the above circumstances, and who exhibit ugly, messy symptoms of those circumstances, and who continually fuck up, and yet they manage to stay afloat. they manage to love and care for one another. they manage to grow and heal in slow and small and significant ways.
there are no “issues” episodes - a la glee, where a Topical Issue would be introduced and explored and wrapped up and abandoned completely after a single fifteen-minute subplot. the issues are interwoven with the characters themselves. dee grew up with a disability, and with a mother who persistently told her she was ugly and worthless, and that affects everything she does. charlie grew up without a father and began abusing substances to cope at a young age, and that affects everything he does. mac’s parents never loved him and his religion never accepted him, and that affects everything he does. dennis was raped as a child and he lives with an untreated mental illness, and that affects everything he does.
and the show doesn’t flinch away from portraying the really unattractive, problematic residual effects of the characters’ trauma, but it also doesn’t reduce the characters to their trauma, and it doesn’t imply that they’re worthless or beyond hope. when you look at it in that light, the huge fanbase of queer and mentally ill and traumatized teenagers makes a lot more sense.
u know what really gets me crying??
In “Mac Day”, Dennis is easily the most receptive to Country Mac: He almost instantly idolizes the man after he jumps off that bridge, he’s sitting next to Country Mac at the planetarium, but furthest away from him in the dojo (because the gang is plotting to get Mac’s ass kicked, and thus it’s very understandable that Dennis didn’t want Country Mac to overhear him saying such things about Mac). He laughed first/the loudest at funny/cool remarks Country Mac made, engaged in the most physical contact with him, and was also the most vocal about how much he liked Country Mac (he’s awesome, the way he rides motorbikes is badass, he gave an ocular pat down correctly).
This all seems to heavily contrast his attitude towards Mac throughout the episode. He’s the first one to bring up all the little things he finds annoying about Mac (his karate, Project Badass, his devotion to god), even going so far as to postulate that perhaps he doesn’t hate Mac’s interests, but rather Mac himself. The others are not as vocal while Dennis prattles on about Mac, mostly just nodding and saying yes in agreement. Out of the members of the gang, it is only Dennis who thinks deeply about Country Mac’s good qualities and how those contrast with Mac’s. The others just think that Country Mac’s cool. And despite Dennis’s criticisms of Mac, it is obvious he has thought most widely about this, a hint at the depth of his feelings for Mac, however negatively he shows them.
A fascinating thing to note about this is how most of Dennis’s frustration and anger at Mac is directed specifically at Mac’s cyclical self-denial—especially when it comes to Mac’s homosexuality.
CHARLIE: Seven straight hours of lecturing?
DENNIS: Yeah, and five hours alone dedicated to the evils of homosexuality, from him?
In fact, most of the decisive action Dennis takes in the episode is to break Mac out of this cycle, he wants Mac to admit he’s not as big a badass as he thinks, he wants Mac to admit that he’s gay. This desire seems to increase tenfold when Country Mac comes out to all of them.
COUNTRY MAC: Dudes. I’m into dudes.
DENNIS: Oh… you’re gay!
COUNTRY MAC: Loud and proud, brother! Loud and proud! Yeah, ain’t nothing wrong with that.
DEE: Nothing wrong with that!
CHARLIE: Honestly, it’s like, refreshing to hear. You know what, happy hunting bro, get after it.
DEE: Good luck.
COUNTRY MAC: Cool, cool, cool, I’ll see you all in a little bit.
CHARLIE: Cool, yeah, yeah. See, he doesn’t want us to grease them, y’know?
DEE: God, that’s awesome.
CHARLIE: Because he wants them!
DENNIS: It doe—right.
CHARLIE: He wants them for himself. It’s so much more comfortable when someone’s gay and open about it.
DEE: It’s fantastic.
CHARLIE: And, like, I know we’ve never said this as a group, but—
DENNIS: Mac’s gay.
As you can probably tell, Dennis becomes much less vocal after finding out that Country Mac’s gay, staying mostly silent as his gaze switches between Mac and Country Mac, only to chime right back in to declare that Mac is most certainly gay. Yup. Just the Macs. Definitely not him. He’s also the first to observe that Mac has a boner again, from being around all the beefcakes. Unlike Dennis, Mac is unable to force himself to be flaccid at will.
So the gang moves on to the karate tournament, and Dennis comes up with the idea to sign Mac up for a fight to prove to Mac that he isn’t such an unstoppable badass, to snap him out of his delusions. The gang isn’t very certain about this, but join Dennis as he manipulates Mac into fighting through praise and goading him into wanting to prove himself. Dennis consistently asserts that teaching Mac a lesson is for his own good, and in his own twisted way, Dennis wants Mac to be the best version of himself. After the fight ends with Mac getting knocked down and Country Mac beating up Mac’s opponent in his honor, Mac is still adamant that he was more badass than Country Mac. This frustrates the entire gang, who lash out at him, but Dennis most of all who insists that Mac must admit that he got his ass kicked, and that he is not a badass. Even Dee, who was the most supportive of Dennis’s plan before, begs him to let it go because Mac Day is almost over, upon which Dennis refuses to back down, because in his words “We have a lifetime of this to look forward to!”. Despite everything Dennis has said this whole episode, he has this pre-conceived notion that he (and according to his assumption, the rest of the gang) will be with Mac for life. And that Dennis apparently intends for Mac to be a part of his life, for the rest of their lives.
Which is why he is so shocked at the next thing the gang suggests.
DENNIS: Listen, listen. The guy is in complete denial about absolutely every aspect of his life. And there is nothing we can do about it.
FRANK: I say we switch him out.
DENNIS: Huh?
FRANK: Country Mac for Paddy’s Mac.
DEE: We send Mac to the country, bring Country Mac here.
FRANK: Yeah, to the bar.
CHARLIE: That’s not a bad idea. I mean, look, we’d be safer with an actual badass in the bar.
Although he ends up agreeing with the plan, it is important to note how Dennis expresses the most disbelief when Frank suggests this, and remains in shock for a good moment, being the last one to respond to this idea, which is intriguing given how he’s led the gang in most of their anti-Mac talks all day, dominating most of the conversations. So why is it that he’s so slow to respond to this idea?
It appears that no matter what he says about the man, Dennis is the most attached to Mac, most unwilling to let Mac go. Which is funny, given how he was practically over Country Mac the second he died, and was already denouncing most of Country Mac’s “cool” traits at the funeral.