#odyposts

i have probably already said it, i will say it again: i think paparazzi was a good mission, that it fit the narrative and that it should not be taken off the game.

jimmy is not a hero: even if you, the player, goes through the game as him, it does not mean you have to identify with him. he's a teenage boy with a cynical and nihilistic worldview, he's rude and he does shit for money. earnest offered him good money, he did the thing. it is coherent and it works

also, for the record, he does feel bad afterwards, when he talks to mandy and finds out how distraught she is. see, jimmy is a teenage boy, and he has no strong relationship with his mother, so he doesn't have half a clue of what women, girls have to go through from a young age; don't you remember how paparazzi were making shit up about women in the entertainment industry every other day?

so talking to mandy is where it opens his eyes on it, at least a bit. to him, it was no big deal, but now he realizes how fucked up what he did was. it is moment of growth, for jimmy, you see.

plus, again: the theme of the consequences of the sexualization of young girls is a big theme in bully, and i could talk lengths about how the relationship between mandy and lola and their very characters reflects that, how they internalized those ideas and crafted their behaviors and personas about them.

mandy is the attractive girl next door, pure enough to be marriage material but not too innocent as to be boring; she took pride in this, she knew that she was desirable and it made her feel good. but it all crashed down in paparazzi, where she lost entirely that sense of false agency she thought she had over others' image of her.

anyways anyone who's been on this page for some time know how from time to time i have insistently mentioned the parallels between lola and peanut, right?

welp! that was a joke but the time has finally come!! a super-pretentious essay just for the fun of it!! (and also bc i haven't been writing actually argumentative texts in like months perhaps a year, so. yikes, i really need to practice again)

word count: 2.2k WOAH. IM SORRY

i, in my corner, with my monstrous needs. — susan sontag, as consciousness is harnessed to flesh

stumbling into the askbox whyyy hello there!!! it had been a while!!

OKAY SO. let's start from one fact: every. single. character has something special about them. so like the easy answer is... anyone, lmao. truth be told we (the whole community) has been around for llke, 18 years (WOAH) and some sides are completely unexplored. even just from the idea that... have you guys ever noticed how little content there is around about nerds and jocks, for exmple? and i don't only mean art but also writing, analysis, metas, thoughts and such. not to mention the townies, the townies, when, having some of them been given some actually adult attributes, there would be a lot to unpack.

i feel like this is a) mostly for the nerds, that the rightful fisgust for the horrible thing they did to mandy discourages a lot from engaging with them as characters too, and b) because they are quite overshadowed by the fan favorite preps and greasers. which, i mean, very legit. but i think that they do have a lot of potential, again, in terms of characterization and themes, and i feel like we are collectively missing out on a lot.

and there's also the fact that, even with the fan-favorites, there is so little tapping into the more serious and sometimes mature aspects. i wouldn't say christy is neglected by the fandom, but it's not often that i read someone talking about her repressed anger that explodes whenever she feels too much, that heirloom of her father that of curse she doesn't have, she isn't a problem boy like her brother, what do you mean with that, i could use this tie to strangle you goddammit! or vance, that we all love as the sunshine jokester of the greaser and heartbreaker queer icon, but how come none of us ever mention him having a canonical addiction, and what if his messy dating habits have to do with that, too? what if he's running from something inside himself, rushing to next best thing just so he can feel something?

but this is just me rambling as an introduction oops. so, just trying to list a couple of my favorites:

thad carlson (& dan wilson) (putting them together bc they're intrinsecally connected and while i do stand by the fact that he's wildly underappreciated in the fandom i would hit dan in the face with a brick): i would lterally give my first born for these two. they are what they actually wanted to write when they wrote about cain and abel. i'm not sure what is the exact reason why they have different last names, and i don't wanna enter headcanon territory here. what it does unavoidably indicate, though, is that they were doomed from the start. like it was written in their names. so, picture this: they were in the nerds together. they suffered the bullying, the abuse together. the humiliation tasted like blood in their mouths and shone like the stars they'd see with their heads smashed in a locker, but at least they knew their brother would've been there to hold them. there's something very visceral about suffering together with a brother. like the blood they share creates somewhat of a shell, one that can protect them from what is outside, that can give them the comfort that they will never be alone. whether they like it or not, their brother will forever be with them; it's inside them. except that thad had the rage of a wounded animal; dan had the fear of a small prey. so, while thad kept standing tall and proud and chin high against his bullies, dan started training and morphing until he could be accepted in the jocks. dan wasn't the bullied anymore. he was the bully. while his brother was still on the other side of the war- the side of the eternal losers, that is. the side that, no matter how many battles they will win, they will always be at a disadvantage. so thad has got all the hurt of having been betrayed by a half of himself, like the phantom pain of a lost limb. and the hurt makes him angrier and angrier and when he wants to take revenge on the jocks his brother is the first target he wants, because, see, he is the victim, his brother is cain who has killed abel. but also dan has got his head on backwards to look out for enemies and for anyone who might uncover him as the fraud he is, the way he just thought- they are just bullying me for what i am, so what if i become someone different? except that it's not like he didn't feel like a loser anymore, he just feels like a loser with a football sweater. so at that point you look at the direction of that violence, at where the anger and the resentment lies, and you stop there and wonder. who's cain there? who's gonna be the victim, who the executioner? like nathaniel orion said, "i want to kill him sometimes. i think sometimes he wants to die". i love them ur honor.

otto tyler: i have no literal idea why there is so so so little about him. admittedly, content about townies is in gnereal harder to track down, since they have... no last names.... for the most part. but the otto tag is absolutely desolated. this boy is what you'd call too angry to be this young. his first response to anything is extreme violence and fantasies of it. playing his audios you will be met with die, kill, die, kill, kill, die, die. and all of his vitriol is poured on the school, like they have all come together specifically to hunt him down. and he's been canonically hospitalized, as well; when you walk in the asylum for the first time (galloway away i believe) he tells you not to "anger the watcher"- but who is this watcher? the composition of the scene seems to implies it is the statue in the courtyard; the most coherent correspondence would be the orderlies you will have to avoid as you walk past them; maybe otto himself has just been told not to anger the watcher by the people who are supposed to take care of him, but that are just playing with his mind to make him too afraid not to behave. which, incidentally, doesn't sound too different from what he might have suffered at school. otto will ask you if you have ever punched a wall. he will swear he hates everyone in the school, that everyone in the school hated him, he will threaten to destroy it. otto is a landmine, he's an unstable kid who just needed some ground to stand on, and instead they placed him all alone on a shaking earth. all is anger is desperation, it's having spent too much time without a support system, too much time bound -to a chair, in a cell, in a straitjacket- surrounded by people who couldn't understand him. who stifled his expression instead of channeling all the feelings he had all the time, exploding and intense in an overwhelming and violent way. i like to think of him as an artist. he mentions tattoos; i like to imagine he's learning to do them himself. that he's finding that as an outlet for his expression. and yeah overall. i am a lot fond of otto, and i think he would have a lot to say.

i think about what hal esposito said a lot when he and lucky were finding things to watch on the tv. "what? war footage and natural disasters doesn't do it for you?"

considering it is highly likely that the world's condition is very chaotic, how might this affect bullworth and its residents?

hello there!!! ah yes, geography. my beloathed

that's an interesting question of course, yes!! my instinctive thought when first reading this ask was what i always asumed, ie: the news hal and lucky were referring about weren't local but, yknow, american general news. also bc paris from the carnival says something very similar in front of her tv, and we know that the carnival travels, so i wouldn't think of something too different.

however!! let's go by steps there, because thinking about it that's something i never properly expanded upon.

so, first of all: canonically speaking, bullworth is in new england. now, as a non-usamerican, i have very little knowledge of anything about hyperspecific cultures in america, maybe just some west coast zones or south and some midwest.

however!! the fact that there are so many kids of italian certain descent and some other kids with non anglophone last names (kowalski, brakus, luna, karamazov, etc) implies that it is an important destination for migrations. this makes me think of earlly 1900s new york, which would certainly be coherent.

now, a long time ago i found the certain information that bullowrth was supposed to be in new hampshire. however, since i have learned that "trust me bro" is never a good source, i went back to dig some deeper into the whole thing: it still seems to be more or less agreed upon that the state is new hampshire, also because someone noted a striking resemblance of bullworth with the phillips exeter academy. of course maybe it wasn't as explicit and direct as this user puts it, but it is suggestive enough that it would be nice to go with it.

now, first about the culture: we mentioned bullworth being basically a melting pot. this means that it is not only unique, but in fact very diverse, also depending on the zone. for example, i think in new coventry you'll find an especially colorful culture, with people coming from different places and different cultures, everyone holding onto their own but also interacting with their neighbor. you'll find people giving each other giving their best wishes to their neighbor for a festivity they don't even celebrate but know the other does. i mean, maybe you'll have some catholic complaining about the shop being closed just that day, but cue to the stereotypical southern italian wife smacking him behind his head and telling her good friend is home with their family and he mustn't be an annoying jerk (not in so many words, of course).

it is probably quieter the more you get closer to the vale. maybe in town there will be the occasional decoration outside of the house or in a shop, but overall… i'd say that the fundamental sentiment in bullworth is, exactly as the school crest says, canis canem edit. mind your own business and you'll live a hundred years, like an old saying goes. keep a good distance, so they don't hurt you and you don't hurt them.

and in fact, the vale is where this hyperindividualism gets ornated with the hypocrisy of the Good People, some facade to keep so that not only no conflict is created, but any chance and risk of it is perfectly concealed. you have the middle class-bourgeois, christian family who greet their neighbors with a smile and then speculate on all their disgraces as soon as the front door closes. and everything that happens in the family stays in the family, dirty laundry is washed at home.

yeah, overall i'd say. the whole point of bullworth culture is self-sufficiency, it's doing the best of what you have and care thoroughly and not let anyone else touch what's yours.

now, the natural condition of the territory: established that we are on the new hampshire coast, i have tried to dig a bit. i will bring up again something i mentioned earlier: i immediately assumed it was us or global news, but, while it is unfortunately enough to desensitize the general public to military violence, natural forces can be… a bit different.

i will tell a small anecdote about me. i grew up in an extremely seismic area, and by that i mean that we would experience at least a couple waves every some weeks, not strong enough to cause damage but enough to be perceived and do small stuff like making small objects fall off or ceiling lamps shake. and, y'know, it has always been perfectly normal for me, it has happened while i was in class and the worst thing was that i smudged a line on the essay i was writing. but then i moved away for college, and, when in geography we started talking about earthquakes, my professor admitted being scared shitless of seismic waves. my friends got the news of some waves in my native area and asked me how my family was; my mom was like “what do you mean four? i only felt three”

what was that to say? well. in my experience, the general masses are much more moved by natural disasters than by wars. so, in some way, the idea that hal and lucky were at most annoyed by the repetitiveness of the news makes me think that they have some experience with it. earthquakes probably aren't the ones, since, well. plate tectonics. which i will not explain here mostly because i have already passed that exam and i want nothing to do with it ever again LMAO. but anyway the east coast is a very stable area of the earth, so no earthquakes nor volcanoes. and, since it is located tightly in a small gulf, i think sea storms and tidal waves are out of the question too.

however! apparently, tornadoes are not too infrequent in the area, nor, i guess, storms and other similar climate events. as i mentioned before: what happens there is that you get kind of desensitized there; the thought of anything horrible happening isn't there, or, if it is, it barely hits with its full force. “but what if it is stronger next time?” we'll all just die, at least i won't have to worry about rent anymore, maybe my boss will finally kick the bucket too, ha-ha. what do you mean someone died in the next city? well, you know, it can happen.

so yeah, when you ask how it affects the people of bullworth- it probably just amplifies whatever nihilism is already there, y'know. see constantinos, who's most probably clinically depressed, or lefty's “life sucks and then you die”, which is disturbing, especially coming from a kid his age.