Curious what the degree of separation is between MMS the character and MMS the real guy within the shorts canon. You've made shorts where MMS the character is the one doing the animation in real time, and at least some of the characters do know that they are, in fact, characters in a niche internet cartoon. So are people hailing MMS the character as the god of their world's creation in a sense, or does everyone have an understanding that there's another, more powerful MMS who exists on a three-dimensional plane of existence that they will never see or experience, and that this MMS is the hand that controls them and their lives? Does MMS the character know this? Or, alternatively, is this just a cartoon, and none of these details have any implications in canon and instead just follow the Rule of Funny?
I think that the boundaries of their understanding of their own fictionality are pretty blurred, but that's okay, because the boundaries of their fictionality are blurred too.
like, does MMS-the-character make the skits that he's in? well, the answer is pretty obviously and inarguably "yes" -- like, there have been multiple explicit depictions of him making the skit he's in, creating his friends, having essentially omnipotent levels of control over the world, and so on.
however, the slight issue here is that the answer is also pretty obviously and inarguably "no" -- there's an equal amount of evidence for this, the most obvious being that he never sees Trish's tomfoolery coming ahead of time, which he would if he was the guy creating it; also, like, just in general, he seems powerless to prevent stuff from happening to him, is surprised by things happening, and so on.
it's also a little bit complicated by the fact that MMS-the-character isn't really as much me as he used to be.
seven years ago, MMS-the-character was basically just me except lightly filtered for marketability and comedic value. however, with the start of the daily shorts back in 2024, and the rapid expansion of the cast from "one guy who's the main focus of every video and occasionally some background characters" to "a bunch of characters all interacting and sometimes that one guy isn't even there", MMS has kinda taken on a life of his own.
like, MMS-the-character is a little crankier than I am, he has a pretty different DMing style than I do, there are a bunch of physical differences (my hair doesn't really look like that anymore, I have different facial hair than he does, I wear glasses and he doesn't, etc), and a bunch of other stuff.
but like... I think that the "me"-ness originally present in MMS has been kinda dispersed over the cast, in a way.
like, MMS is crankier than I am IRL, especially when Trish is messing with him -- but the way Trish loves messing with people is pretty much just ripped directly from how I act with my friends IRL. a lot of the cast have media tastes derived from mine. Tony's "everyone deserves a chance" attitude is an idealized version of my own personal philosophy, while June's "bigots get knifed to death" is very close to my own gut reaction to bigotry. Dakota's got my obliviousness, Kurt's got my over-the-top addiction to ten-dollar words, Douglas has my dice habits. in the occasionally-recurring running gag where Tony and Austen get into a prolonged wordplay bit and MMS gets rapidly tired of it, MMS is acting nothing like me, and both Austen and Tony are basically recreating something I do all the time.
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