public universal enemy

I tried to recreate it it looked smth like this

Entitlement: bursts into his field as a junior researcher and expects everyone to listen to his unorthodox theory, flips his shit when they don't.

Selfishness and low empathy: plays into how he handles and thinks about The Choice ("i understand the stakes"); he says it's about the kids when really, it's about himself (his fears, perceived inferiority). he cries a lot and experiences a lot of emotions, but those emotions are mainly centered around himself (understandable enough - but walk with me here)

Shame and inferiority: habitually deprecates himself ("some people are failures, some people don't rise to the occasion"), undervalues his expertise and underestimates his integral role in PHM

Shy and paranoid: overwhelmed by too much attention; seems to get along with most people, yet is too afraid to open up/trust enough to forge emotionally intimate bonds (until rocky)

Vindictive: holds serious grudges. called the leading scholar in his field a staggering waste of carbon for disagreeing with him. (burnt his academic career to the ground, they don't deserve his input and he's happier now anyway!)

Rage/hostility in response to criticism: movie grace gets physical when proven wrong. also, AGAIN, imploded his own career because his pet theory was rejected. (immediately strikes a harsher tone when recalling this to stratt: “i don't know why that makes me such a NUT”)

Need for admiration/validation/social belonging: his students clearly look up to him and value him and what he brings to the position. (he loves being the cool teacher.) and he immediately latches onto people who want him around and listen to him, to the point he doesn't push back when his boundaries are crossed (stratt & rocky)

one scene that illustrates some of this really well, imo, is the one after he initially tells stratt what he found out about astrophage. there's some really interesting characterization being laid down in that exchange. in very quick succession, grace:

acts confused why she would choose to leave (why are you taking away my equipment? i thought you want my expertise!) (-> entitlement, selfishness, suddenly he IS an expert, despite rage-quitting half an hour ago)

says he was "being modest" when he previously undervalued his qualifications (-> displaying inferiority, instinctively or on purpose)

hesitates to give a clear answer when she asks whether he wants to help, implicitly asks her to reassure him ("if you think i can help") (-> low self-esteem, need for validation)

is in disbelief that stratt wouldn't be more generous ("just three [dots]?") after she agrees to let him keep working (-> entitlement!)

needless to say this is a headcanon, so i'm sure you could find many instances of characterization which would serve as solid counter-arguments here, but even then, NPD is very heterogenous, so none of it necessarily voids my point. grace can be very empathetic, especially with rocky. but to me that kind of shows he adopts strategies of managing his instinctive, volatile responses and shifting his mental frame over time (hello there, lack of backbone - he lets people push him around because he knows the alternative is destructive.) he was definitely a very different person pre-canon, nevermind early in his career.

once again adding a nuanced take by @grimark cause yeah

so I would see the asks he chose to publish, and how he chose to respond to them, and my primary thought was always "wow I would never select those messages to publish and if I did I would answer them very differently" because he kind of did the opposite of the thing I try to do; he would act like he was A Peer (in other words, not acknowledging any unevenness between him & a fan) while at the same time not at all discouraging the pedestalizing. like "yes I'm a god, but I'm a god you can talk to!" as opposed to "wow hey, you can talk to me and I'm really glad my work had a positive influence on your life, but I'm not a god, I'm a guy." which I think at best shows someone is really clueless about power dynamics & bad boundaries and self aggrandizing behavior. and I guess we found out what it shows at worst.

I unfollowed his tumblr not long after. I couldn't stop seeing the patterns you'd mentioned, and it really made me uncomfortable.

The poem frames "him" as subordinate in several ways, not just to the narrator ("i fuck him on the floor": not that getting fucked is inherently subordinating, but the narrator has all the agency in the phrase, "he" doesn't decide what happens or where) but also to "his wife". She has filled the house with chintz, meaning it wasn't his decision or his actions. "Filled" is also a choice of words that suggests that there is no space for him in the home: the only place left for him, not already filled, is the floor. To me this framing invokes the trope of the henpecked husband, whose wife has taken dominion over the home and who has ceded its control to her because it, as the domestic space, is "supposed" to be hers.

This trope, of course, is misogynist in its normative rendition: it reinforces gender essentialism, it erases the significant material benefits such "henpecked" men derive from the domestic labor of their spouses, and it dismisses women's expressions of suffering and attempts at negotiating terms for their relationships as "nagging." In the narrator's dismissal of the wife's possessions as "chintz" (frivolous, feminine, contrasted with what is "real") we can see this same misogyny at play.

The narrator's misogyny, and the central fact of the poem which is that the husband is getting fucked by someone other than the wife, quite possibly flip the power dynamics of the poem on their heads. The wife is now subordinated: both by her social marginalization based on gender (a marginalization which drives her into the home and confines her there, like OP so cogently points out! As "he" has run out of room in the home and can only get fucked on the floor, so has she run out of room socially; the only place she can control and make decisions like filling it with chintz is the home), and by the narrator who is fucking her husband in her home.

There's an additional dynamic in reading the narrator as male, which most readers seem to have done: it invokes the particular, bitter misogyny that men-loving-men sometimes direct at women expressing femininity. There's an envy to it, of course--straight and straight-passing women get to (are forced to) express desire for men, have sex with men, marry men, love and be loved by men. His wife gets to be his wife: the narrator gets to fuck him, in their home. Straight and straight-passing women also get to (are forced to) perform femininity: they can buy chintz and decorate with it, without being devastatingly punished for it like people presumed to be men are from the time they're babies. The envy mixes with misogyny to produce disdain, disgust, dismissal. We can read the narrator fucking him on the floor of their home as an expression of power and dominance (again, not that the fucking has to mean the narrator is topping, or that topping is inherently dominant, but the phrasing is stark: "i fuck him", the narrator acts upon him as an object/recipient), not just over him but over the wife in absentia as well.

Noting that "to keep it real" is AAVE, we can also introduce race as a potential lens; is the narrator, despite their dominant language, subordinated based on race in this dynamic? Is the narrator not just claiming a dominant role, but perhaps also stereotyped and limited into it as a Black person? Is the disdain of the chintz also an expression of class difference, of a rejection of the display of white wealth on the part of the wife? This is pretty speculative, of course: the use of AAVE could also be appropriative, which would suggest another tactic by the narrator to lay claim to masculinity and toughness, since non-Black people often use AAVE to try to invoke racist stereotypes of strength, violence and resilience.

I think one of the things that makes the poem so compelling for being so short is the struggle at the heart of it, this complicated jostling for power between three people and their actions over time (the wife "has filled" the house, in the past: the narrator fucks him in the present, perhaps in the habitual). Who controls the house? Who controls "him"?