an omgcp sideblog

look at this face

does it look surprised to you?

DOES IT??????

they interrupted his video

he’s acting so inconspicuous like he just nonchalantly has this great idea 

here he is using his evil pie demon mind powers on the coin:

SOLOMON HIMSELF COULD NOT HAVE THOUGHT A SOLUTION MORE WISE!!! HE’S?????

SO PROUD OF HIMSELF?

Thing/Idea 1: Nursey gets talked about way, way more than Shitty by the fandom, which by extension means they’ll talk more about him vis-a-vis privilege.

Whether this is because people like Nursey more or because we are in a crash-course with the #nurseydex singularity, I can’t tell. I don’t know how to disassemble tumblr tags into data, but I can definitely mine some stats from AO3 and trawl through a couple pages of sort-by-kudos.

So here’s some fic counts, by character/relationship, as of April 2017:

Dex/Nursey at 966 fics

Shitty/Lardo at 380 fics

Nursey character tag at 1300 fics

Shitty character tag at 1376 fics

As you might expect, Dex/Nursey is a popular pairing, with over twice the fic count! You might be wondering why Shitty’s tagged more than Nurse overall, but (a) Shitty was introduced at least a full year earlier than Nursey, and (b) Shitty gets tagged a lot as a side character in fics. In the first five pages of Shitty’s sort-by-kudos, he’s typically the 3rd-8th tag. There aren’t many/any “solo adventures with Shitty” fics - he’s typically a tool to help Jack along his journey around his anxiety and/or into Bitty’s heart. We’re not following Shitty’s point of view very often. But there’s plenty of fics that follow Nurse from sort-by-kudos page one (though mostly in the Nursey/Dex context), and sit in his head, and invent his past.

So why do people like writing, and writing about, Nurse more than Shitty?

Thing/Idea 2: With or without from #nurseydex, Nursey has a lot of unknowns that make him interesting to write and speculate about. 

We get a ton of Bitty/Shitty interactions in the comic, either because Shitty is like Bits’s crazy older brother, or because living in the Haus together means they’re more likely to interact regularly. We get a lot of what Shitty’s all about, but much less about Nurse. (Like, the bit about how Nurse thinks he’ll probably be able to annoy Dex out of Haus and into space in 3.17? Actually surprised me!)

Let me count the ways - what makes a Black kid from New York start playing hockey? What makes a prep school outsider (is he an outsider?) want to be a poet? Why’d he get sent to boarding school anyways? What, actually, is the deal with his parents, two moms or bad dad or okay parents or all of the above? Or, hey Nurse, how come we’ve never heard of you dating ever, making it so no one can say for sure what your sexuality is? Like, I know we’ve come up with a lot of cool fanon reasons for all these things, but the point is that it’s all speculation, and we are making up some really cool stories off of crumbs of information. Which leads me to:

Thing/Idea 3: Shitty’s entire existence is a backlash against his upbringing and defines his character, while Nurse’s perceived/actual privilege (and how he really only talks about it twice) deepens our interest in him.

Shitty’s at Samwell, instead of Harvard. He’s doing Women’s Studies instead of Law. He’s got long hair that he’s not supposed to have, and he’s loud about women’s/reproductive/gay rights instead of learning cool golf or toting expensive cars. He’s not shy about how much he hates his family. Like, we get it, Shits - you’re paying for the sins of your family by being everything they’re not. When you graduate Harvard Law, $10 says you become a public defender because your family hates the poor. We don’t need to analyze or talk about your privilege, because you would rather chew your own foot clean off than go to the country club one more goddamn time. You’ve said it twice now.

But Nurse… well, we can say so much more about Nurse. We can get tropey with him and make him not understand poverty, sure. I see more fics depicting wealth as a synonym for loneliness to Nursey. But I think the point I’m trying to make is that I think we talk more about Nurse & privilege than Shitty & privilege because we just talk about Nurse so much more.