paaaainnnn....that's it

That would make me feel incredibly useless, honestly. Every day, you wake up, people die, you go to bed, you do it again.

There is a repeated story arc with Mulcahy throughout the series in that he feels useless. Every time he holds mass, there's like three people there-- Klinger, cos he wants to wear his nice clothes, who is not religious, and maybe one or two others, maybe not.

That’s WHY he went to the front and ended up doing a tracheotomy. He feels like he’s not doing anything important, here, that people are dying around him and he’s done nothing to stop or change that. That he's not supporting the surgeons and nurses as well as he could. It’s something they do come back to with him occasionally— he feels useless. Is he useless? No. We’ve seen that he’s important. Does that change how he feels? No. And honestly, I love that they went there because sometimes that is just how people see themselves.

Hawkeye saves lives every day, and HE feels useless.

'I don't care. I really don't. They'll keep coming whether I'm here or not. Trapper went home. They're still coming. Henry got killed and they're still coming. Wherever they come from, they'll never run out.'

Mulcahy isn’t a doctor, he cannot fix wounds or heal infections. He prays for people, takes confessions and administers last rites. If HAWKEYE feels useless stitching people up to have them be sent back to him again, it’s understandable Mulcahy would, too.

As for remembering things he’d done in the past, again, there was no script continuity within the show and it is exhausting.

But also, within the world, as Hawk says, you need a mental anaesthetic to survive this world.

SIDNEY: When Pierce or Hunnicutt lose a patient, he's out of his misery. When I lose one I've lost a mind.

MULCAHY: When I lose one I've lost a soul.

When you’re standing on a beach that keeps getting flooded, wave after wave, dumping corpse after corpse at your feet, how can you ever feel like you do enough? I think that was central to M*A*S*H and at the core for every character- they all deal with it differently.

Hawk deals with it by having relatively constant breakdowns and being intense and absurd and manic and flamboyant and angry and blowing around like Groucho, monologuing and laughing and crying and acting out.

recently I've been thinking about how I think some (I repeat some, not all, not even most) of the reason behind why it's harder for female characters to get popular enough to achieve real blorbo/The Character status is a kind of overcompensating reaction to a certain type of male gazey voyeurism in mainstream media. in my horror/tragedy niche I'm seeing six posts a day on my dash along the lines of "mmm I need that brunette bisexual man writhing around crying out in pain," and, yknow, love that, strong agree, but I absolutely never see that kind of blorbo sadism posting where the vague character figure is a woman. the most discussion I ever see of female characters suffering beautifully/sexily is people making fun of booktok m/f dark romance; wanting to see a woman as that kind of "chew toy experiencing the horrors and accidentally being kinda hot about it" protagonist is treated as completely off limits. at best it's laughable and at worst it's a sign of rising fascism.

American Horror Stories -1x06

+ bonus: