#dumber force

I have never been more excited to answer a question in my life, thank you for asking!! And I’m going to preface this with a minor cw for child abuse

Mitch comes from a very busy home. Three other kids to pay attention to, a jailed up father, a mother who likely doesn’t do much, whether that’s from burnout or health problems which we’ve seen no indication of, or she’s just very checked out because life is chaotic enough for her to be like “Meh 🤷🏻‍♀️”

He also very clearly has a learning disability and leans heavily into class clown stereotyping, which pulls me toward undiagnosed (and untreated by proxy) ADHD, and I don’t say this for nothing, but rather with physical evidence stemming from other people around me.

Mitch is kinda stuck in limbo between constantly looking for attention and shying away from the prying eyes of the adults around him because he knows the behavior he exhibits is generally looked down upon but to a degree, his impulses win. He steals, lies, hits, yells, cannot focus in class unless he’s down to a time limit, like in Bilsky’s Billions, he’s motivated by the time constraint and shows drastic improvement under pressure, only to turn around in Dumber Force and use his fortune to buy out the school because his brother said so and destroy the system that failed him, failing other students in doing so.

In My Dinner With Bigfoot, Mitch makes a comment about the constellation Orion the Hunter, referencing Orion’s Belt as something he takes off and “whips nerds with”, followed by turning to his guitar and proceeding with “anyway I’m gonna sing Father Figure.” This moment is played for laughs in a way that suggests Mitch looks up to Orion because he’s a bully. But it’s also easily interpretable as a trauma projection. Based on my timeline and what I think happened with their dad, he would’ve gone to jail around the time that Mitch was about six going on seven, which is plenty of time for a child to grow enough to have misbehavior labeled as disobedience and for a certain type of parent to want to nip it in the bud with violent discipline.

But if Mitch has ADHD to the point where it needs to be treated right upon diagnosis, the message sinking in is not that he needs to behave (not that it would’ve been a well communicated point anyway), it would’ve been “tiptoe around dad”. And then he starts seeing behaviors in other kids that he deems punishable because they’re things he doesn’t like. In the same way that he doesn’t really know what dad’s mad about, but apparently it’s punishable and clearly not in his favor. Mitch’s violence very well could be learned.

Picking on the “weird kid” like Oliver is likely just him making observations and pushing boundaries. Wondering how far he can go before he gets unwanted attention instead of fascination from his peers. He sees this kid who should likely not be walking the halls alone and the first thing he sees is a target because this kid is different, and he’s alone, and his presence is the perfect attention grabber.

Him going through Henry’s bedroom is classic ADHD. He wandered upstairs, he let his impulse get to him, he started looking through his room, found something he liked, decided to play dress up. The adults laughed, it reinforced the behavior, he spent the rest of the night picking on Henry.

And when Jeff showed up and they started teasing Billy together, it was all over. You see where some of the behaviors come from because Jeff engages in the same behaviors without so much as a signal. That’s brothers being brothers but it’s also the influence of an older sibling who was probably there for him more than his own parents based on the excitement Mitch exhibits when he shows up, like he didn’t know he’d be there in the first place.