#ask ada

And following that, why do you think Dennis was so upset that Mac fell in love with Johnny, if that shows the system was working properly? Was he hoping Mac would see through it? Why??

(re: this post)

Right, okay, so, regarding the way he explains things within the episode, as I said, he's not lying about any of that. I don't believe he's hiding/in denial about some latent romantic/sexual feelings toward Mac, or that he's trying to avoid acknowledging these because he believes he's Straight or anything. There are a couple caveats and omissions, though.

I'm actually working on a bigger essay about Dennis' systems, so I don't want to get too far into it, but I just want to quickly say that the SINNED system being based around Barbara is significant, just not in the usual macdennis reading re: Mac being obsessed with her and Dennis intentionally trying to replicate this. I do not think Dennis has been using the system on Mac, and I don't think it was developed with him in mind. Dennis has his own mommy issues and grew up with her doing this shit. His explanation he gives during the last step is obviously the way she treated him. Not Mac.

The SINNED system's explicit, stated purpose is attracting a man, and the way he talks about it – more specifically the way he talks about men and their behaviours, then him straight up calling himself "mommy" (while controlling Frank, mind you) – as well as his shushing when Mac and Dee ask why he has this system, all point to him having created it for himself. And he has been using it; that's why he knows it works. If he had used it solely on Mac, rather than other men, he would not know that. The system's intent is to secure a second date with a stranger; he plainly doesn't want to and wouldn't have to do this to Mac. On the other hand, Mac's behaviour toward Johnny is entirely unexpected in the script, and even in the episode it's obviously not going as he intended, so if this was his confirmation the system worked, it's not really confirmation at all. If he intentionally stopped at the second last step, he wouldn't be anywhere near that confident with "Do you need a tissue", which is the pièce de résistance of the whole system and the part he relies on most (that Dee and Mac are surprised ACTUALLY works). "Engage physically" also works differently and serves a different purpose within SINNED.

We also, of course, have Glenn saying Dennis has the system because he's "covering all his bases". So I don't think there's any question that SINNED is a relatively straightforward and thoroughly tested counterpart to DENNIS, albeit with several alterations that make it seem more sincere and more suited to dating men, ("anybody can get a guy to bang them once"). Basically, no, there's no heterosexual explanation there, and unlike with DENNIS, I don't see any ulterior motives with what this could provide for Dennis. He doesn't hate men, and he doesn't want to to win some kind of war on women by torturing them. The literal only other explanation available is the same one we see in the pilot.

But this is a completely different character to the Dennis we have now; he doesn't want shallow praise, it's something he's actively sick of from Mac, and at a certain point, regardless of his reasoning for doing so, he's still dating men with this system.

I've seen several people claim that he is teaching Mac to use SINNED on him, but that's disproven by the script and frankly makes no sense if you know anything about Dennis at all. I would say that while there may be a few coincidental alignments (both for Dennis using it on Mac and vice versa), it really just comes down to being because Dennis is the one who came up with it.

Moving on; Johnny's role is to occupy Mac's time and placate him sexually. Dennis has been using this fake boyfriend to get Mac to give him space, to get him out of the apartment, when he's irritating Dennis. I mentioned Ass Kickers in the original post, but you can also see something similar in Sweet Dee Gets Audited too. When he learns this from Frank.

Where it gets slightly more complicated is why I believe it's sexual, beyond just the fact that it's most likely just easier to catfish and maintain Mac's interest that way, versus a no-show platonic Friend.

Mac will already do things for Dennis if he asks. The difference is that he does it with some amount of expectation that if he does enough to win Dennis' favour, he'll eventually give in and "love" him back, and Dennis doesn't want to give into that. Sex is already transactional for Dennis, and he doesn't want it to be that way with Mac. That's also why he makes this comment in Prime Time. He preferred when (he thought) his and Mac's relationship was based on an equal give and take, something unique to them compared to the majority of Dennis' other relationships, especially with women, and not something the SINNED system attempts to establish with other men, either. By creating Johnny, he redirects Mac's efforts elsewhere, and the two of them can actually have a platonic, yet still semi-exclusive domestic partnership that is kept separate from Mac's sexual advances. His relationship with Mac is Something Else, and he likes to keep it that way. You can think of it as a safety buffer for him.

Mac and Dennis used to sleep in the same bed, they used to be close, they used to be physically intimate, and they used to trust each other implicitly. The thing that puts an end to this is Mac being underhanded with his plans in Dennis' Double Life, trying to force Dennis into a fake relationship, and more specifically trying to force Dennis to sleep with him.

Now, without Mac making advances toward him, Dennis is agreeing to sleep together with Mac while he's "taken" by Johnny. Keep in mind that Inflates was always the first episode, and Frank vs. Russia was meant to be the second episode in terms of both initial writing and airing order. These two episodes were always meant to be back to back, and it stayed that way up until the last minute; they were announced together, and then things were shuffled around.

To address the other half of your final point, the issue isn't that Mac "fell in love" with Johnny, it's that Mac is insisting he loves Johnny when he doesn't even know him.

Dennis knows that Mac doesn't love Johnny because Mac doesn't really love Dennis. Mac's concept of "love" is an obsessive need to earn back someone else's love for him by eagerly performing favours that often backfire and are done without the other person's request. He does this with his parents, too. The more they push him away, the more he tries to earn that love, repeatedly insisting that the open, honest hatred and annoyance must mean something else. Mac's reaction to his uncle Donald is what happens when someone attempts to connect with him (he's entirely disinterested). In trying to have Johnny pull away and ghost Mac, Dennis ends up in the same position he himself is in with him. Evidently to his complete surprise, he sparked this obsession in Mac.

Dennis was hoping he would see through Johnny, because it would have been his confirmation that Mac knew him well enough to catch him. We see that Mac's reaction to being told outright is denial, but I don't think Dennis anticipated this, so his reasoning for trying to get Mac to understand that he was Johnny is unrelated to this. He says he dropped so many hints, trying to clue him in to the fact that it was him. In the end, it's just further confirmation that Mac's "love" doesn't actually extend to Dennis as a person. Mac doesn't know Dennis.

And this is all he wants. This is Dennis' concept of "love". To be seen, known, and understood.

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on one hand i get it, because p5 does have some really fundamentally ~groundbreaking~ design; the face buttons mapped to different actions rather than having to scroll through menus is nice and makes combat feel a little bit snappier and more involved, and perhaps most importantly, it appeals to people not traditionally inclined to play turn based RPGs. yakuza/rgg 7 and 8 also use the same approach for these reasons imo (and stylistically it is very similar overall, lol).

(7's combat isn't great but 8's was so good i literally spent like 30 hours grinding just because it felt good and was fun)

carrying this kind of thing forward is perfectly fine in my opinion. being able to blast through a battle, especially if you're backtracking or revisiting an area with lower level enemies, combat shouldn't be something a player avoids due to the tedium.

you absolutely should read into sunny and Especially into glenn's small character choices HDSKHDJDSK

i think dismissing it as being shallower than it actually is does a massive disservice to the thought put into the show's writing and acting. it's clear that RCG care about the small details, so why shouldn't we look for them...?

i've said this elsewhere, but something that has been made even more apparent to me with season 17 is that it truly feels like a love letter to those of us who do care to read into the show and follow along with what they've been building under the surface. i also suspect @charmac and co's "street interviews" with glenn and charlie may have brought us here; i've got no doubt that seeing that there are fans who pay attention to those small details enough to put together a list of hyperspecific burning fandom questions rather than just yelling quotes and heckling them may have been the push they needed to go hard on the continuity and heavy focus on the characters this season. you're supposed to read into 17, you're supposed to understand the plight of these characters, and you're absolutely supposed to look at the subtleties that they bring to the characters. if i was in their position i'd have a fire lit under my ass from that amount of interest, i'm sure the surface level redditor takes get tiring when that's all they're typically exposed to, or the nothingburger interviews with the same five questions every time.

in a few weeks we're going to see what they were building up to (though we already know from those early reviews) and i do think the intent to humanize these guys (and more specifically dennis) is a great display of the fact that RCG feels the same way we do. that these characters are important to Get Right for them.

as charlie said about abbott...

Just for context, pretty sure you're talking about my tags on this post?

Okay, first off, small correction, I didn't say that Charlie's been "losing it" since season 15, I said that he's been "fucked up" since season 15, and I'm "afraid to see what happens when he loses his mom". As I'm sure everyone knows by now, Lynne Marie Stewart unfortunately passed away shortly after filming season 17, and Charlie Day has said that they'll be writing something in season 18 to acknowledge Bonnie's death. My assumption is that they won't simply make a joke of it and establish an excuse for her being gone. That wouldn't feel right, and we have already seen Charlie mourn the death of a parent under different circumstances, and it's not like Sunny couldn't take another storyline like that seriously when it's called for.

When I say that Charlie's been fucked up since 15, that's what I'm referring to; he changed quite significantly over the course of the four-parter, and the effects of it were very much present in the following season. He pushes Frank away, and he tries to separate from the gang, growing self conscious of his oddities (which are accepted by the gang, and have not been a problem until now) and wanting to connect with his biological father. He planned to stay in Ireland! And I don't think it's a stretch to look at this next to Dennis' attempt to do something similar for the season 12 finale. Leaving the gang for his own family, attempting to build something he never had in his childhood, be someone who is required to conform, fit in, and grow up. Both resign themselves after trying and failing, and both become far more frustrated with stagnation than they were before. They've been on similar paths for years, and the parallels are very interesting to witness, because I think Charlie just lags behind ever so slightly. I pointed out these similarities a while ago here in this post, but something else to keep in mind is that the show itself makes these parallels frequently where Charlie tries to follow Dennis' lead (like in 12x10 itself, where Charlie is inspired by Dennis being "babytrapped" and attempts to knock up the Waitress before realizing he's... really not into that).

I wouldn't claim this is always a conscious decision on Charlie's part, but I do think Dennis' resignation and general disillusionment has been echoed by Charlie for similar reasons.

16x02 (and 16x01 to some extent) follows up the previous season by directly expanding upon his relationship with his family and how his biological father's death caused Charlie to reconsider these things, and further resent his mom. I hesitate to say that Charlie "grew up" over the course of s15, but at the very least, there's a notable acceptance of this part of him that he repressed and repeatedly insisted was not something he wanted or needed. Charlie had long accepted and stopped hoping for a relationship with his father. It was something he never had, and thus never had the opportunity to miss. To have it for a brief time, know what that felt like, and then have it ripped away has affected him.

He allowed himself to mourn parents that never parented him; his father, openly. And then in 16x02, he gets angry at Bonnie for her treatment of him even though he had been the one who stayed to take care of her. He's had a responsibility to her in his sisters' absence, and he had planned to leave that behind by staying with his dad in Ireland, finally given the chance to have someone offering to guide and look after him. His reaction to Mac's dismissal of his uncle being complete disbelief and anger, having the added context that he was offered and lost a similar opportunity (one that he was eager to accept, and was ripped away from him by no fault of his own) in an episode that directly acknowledges both of his parents' neglect, seems pointed.

And then we get to Frank.

Charlie pushed Frank away the moment he saw him as a hindrance to the potential relationship he could have with his biological father, and Frank immediately looked to supplement this loss by trying to bond with Dennis and Dee, who he has been positioned as a father to far more lately. Both 16x02 and 17x02 show this, with Charlie being sidelined and treated as something other. He's not Frank's son. Dennis and Dee are his kids, and they are the ones who will ultimately have the responsibility and the decision of when and how he should die. Charlie has no say in the matter. He's being intentionally cut out.

Charlie has seemingly attempted to compensate (perhaps partially out of guilt) and become far more clingy and desperate to keep Frank around. Not only has he recently lost his biological father, he's also lost that pseudo paternal relationship with Frank.

In 16x01, Frank chooses Dennis and Mac over him. He's insecure about this. He attempts to demonstrate his business savvy the way he's learned from Frank, but it's clear that no matter how much he knows or how well he can follow in his footsteps, Frank doesn't need him.

And this is Charlie's real fear.

Their relationship has deteriorated. Frank thinks Charlie doesn't need him, because he's said as much. He was replaced by Shelley with almost no hesitation, and I don't think either of them have forgotten this.

So if Charlie can't take that back, the obvious solution is trying to show that Frank needs him. That they need each other, codependently as a team.

And of course.

It's been loss after loss for Charlie, and I'm honestly not sure what the consequences of Bonnie's death will be for him. They've had such a complicated relationship with so much resentment on Charlie's part. There's no doubt it will be a relief to him, but with that comes conflict; her loss is something monumental to mourn, unlike his father who was more a symbol than a family member that Charlie had both a history and a relationship with. Bonnie was there, but it might have been better if she wasn't. He's been calling on her more recently, looking to her for help, but their relationship is simultaneously more visibly strained with Charlie openly expressing anger toward her, yelling at her, blaming her, rather than just being irritated or ignoring her.