i know it’s like years old at this point but i love that one collab mumbo and grian did with tommyinnit bc it’s like the single most concentrated example i’ve seen of mumbo’s Chaos Nullification Powers
you get to see a bit of it on hermitcraft, mostly via his interactions with grian, but until seeing that collab it didn’t really hit me just how completely mumbo can no-sell other people’s attempts to control a situation. tommyinnit is possibly the single shoutiest, most chaotic minecraft youtuber out there, and in most videos i’ve seen he pretty much overwhelms everyone else and sets the tone for interactions because of this. but mumbo just. doesn’t let him. no matter how much tommy escalates in intensity, mumbo reacts with *exactly* the same energy he always does. grian largely comes across in the whole video as annoyed and reluctant to engage with the whole thing, but mumbo’s not even affected. he just rolls with anything he finds funny and basically ignores anything he disapproves of, only seeming more and more unflappable the harder anyone tries to get a rise out of him.
AND imo, this is the key to my favorite interpretation of him as a character
see, when the people around him are being more reasonable/calm, i think mumbo often comes across as anxious and a bit easily overwhelmed. the thing is, his nervous wet cat vibes do not scale. he has one setting. his responses to the last life ‘ah-ha!’ jokes and to hermitcraft 8 starting to crumble to pieces under a falling moon are almost identical.
mumbo jumbo is inexorably and eternally Just Some Guy, but that gets stranger and stranger the weirder his surroundings become. the giggly incredulousness that makes him an easy target for goofy puns looks Very different when it’s also his reaction to the impending end of the world.
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Odysseus, while slaughtering the suitors: You must think that I'm crazy, you wanna replace me? Baby, there's n-n-n-n-n-n-no way
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Big Mama must have lost some serious standing in the yokai underworld because it’s gotten apparent that she keeps being beaten by a small group of teenagers and the occasional rat man, and when it’s not them then she’s taking L’s from her own schemes working against her.
And in the ensuing power vacuum, the Hamatos accidentally become the most feared crime family known to all the big bads of the Hidden City.
After all, they’ve publicly outplayed Big Mama multiple times, a couple of them have taken out the heads of two of the most well known criminal organizations, one took out Heinous Green, two are responsible for the destruction of Witch Town, they have ties to both the infamous Baron Draxum and Captain Piel, they won the Doom Dome death race, they’re Battle Nexus Champions, they’ve displayed insane feats of power and defeated impossibly strong enemies, most of them have been to jail, and they regularly mingle with humans.
You can just imagine the notoriety they’d accumulate from word of mouth alone.
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no because really, i think stede is operating in a way he thinks will win him respect. i think he's operating in a way he thinks is the expectation. i don't think he likes it, and i don't think it's "him," but i think he enjoys the positive reinforcement from everyone around him. he's literally never had that before in his life.
he was bullied as a child for what he enjoyed. he was cast aside by his father for being himself. the crew threatened to mutiny against him or even just flat-out kill him because he was too "weak."
and here he is trying to pull himself up out of maelstrom of mistakes. "he's been a failure his whole life." he's trying to do everything he can to rectify that. he wants to be the lighthouse for his crew. he wants to be a good captain. he wants to be a good pirate. he wants to be a good lover. he wants to be something.
and he was actually getting there himself--he just didn't realize it. listening to his crew more, showing them kindness, leading them when they were lost and had no place to go, putting his own grief on hold and taking back the revenge...
he was getting there! but still, he was surrounded by those haunting expectations, by the fear that it wasn't enough.
the whole conversation between he and ed where ed is encouraging him to command respect/be tougher. the whole conversation between he and izzy where izzy says he's "never met anyone with a total lack of skills." zheng saying that she didn't "conquer china by letting people go on and on about their feelings."
not to mention the goading from ned. "once you kill me, you're a real pirate. you're not an amateur." "see? that's why he likes you. your bumbling amateur status."
it all keeps swimming circles around him, looming above his head like a shadow.
he thinks he has something more to prove. he thinks he has to be more. even though his own methods work, like ned's crew turning on him simply because stede showed kindness and understanding, all these phantoms keep telling him it isn't enough and that the other methods are more effective.
because he kills, and looks visibly shaken by it, but his crew cheers. he grabs ed by the collar despite them wanting to take things slow, and they grow intimate. he walks into jackie'z after it all, a place where he was previously banished from, and is treated like a sort of pirate hero.
it's not him. "we don't just banish people, do we? that's not us."
but it's encouraged. it's celebrated. so he thinks it should be.
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