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maryellencarter · 8 months

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So there's this trope I don't like, and I think I may have finally figured out why.

(It may have a name on TVtropes. I'd be interested to find out.)

So the trope goes thusly. There is a Team. It either does not have an official leader or has been operating without one. It is often, but not always, a ragtag band of misfits thrown into a Situation.

On the Team, there is a Perfectionist. I've only ever seen this trope done with male characters, so the Perfectionist is a he/him in my head and I'm not going to be bothered to edit to they/them throughout, but I'm also really curious if this shows up as a female character archetype and how it differs.

Anyway, the Perfectionist is extremely smart / knowledgeable / skilled, very driven, holds himself and everyone around him to super high standards. At the beginning of the story or the Situation, he's generally the de facto team leader and respected or at least deferred to by most of the others.

There is also an Other Person. This person can take any form, depending on the writer's cultural values and the lesson they would like to teach. I'm thinking of a couple of specific examples, one is an extremely shy bookish child with zero confidence, another is an impulsive himbo. The Perfectionist finds this person very annoying, for a specific reason -- they're too hotheaded, too slow-thinking, whatever; this also is determined by the Lesson to be taught.

(There is furthermore a Rest Of The Team, usually at least two or three other people. For this trope, their only purpose is to exist and need leadership.)

So! The Team is thrown into the Situation. Circumstances eventuate. At some point, the Perfectionist fucks up -- makes the wrong call, gets injured, has a complete mental breakdown and becomes functionally a piece of luggage -- specifically his perfectionism fails him. He stops being perfect or demonstrates that he isn't perfect enough, and this loses him the trust and respect of the Rest Of The Team.

Enter the Other Person. Whatever traits the Perfectionist found most annoying about them are exactly what's needed to save the day! The Rest Of The Team promptly and happily transfers allegiance to the newly realized Destined Leader, and the rest of the Situation runs smoothly, either with the eventual grudging acceptance and cooperation of the Perfectionist (if he gets to learn the Lesson about what qualities are actually valuable along with the audience), or just dragging his now-useless ass along with them.

Tiny JT hated the fuck out of this trope and couldn't articulate why.

As we been knew, of course, I am (or have a strong tendency to be) exactly this kind of hardassed overeducated perfectionist with knowledge applicable to many Situations. I also am (or can be, or was as a small child) a loudly confident extrovert with strong opinions about how to do things.

The message of this kind of story is, I think, *supposed* to be directed at the unconfident or impulsive or whatever-else child who has the supposedly underappreciated characteristics of the Other Person, to teach them that they have value and mustn't allow themselves to be squelched by hardassed perfectionists.

The messages it actually conveys are, approximately, "Perfectionists are annoying everybody hates you" and also "You're doomed to be a fuckup no matter how hard you try" but also "If you just manage to be perfect *enough* and be adaptable to enough Situations and never fuck up then people might like you and respect you" and also "Be very wary of anyone else close to your level because they might be the Destined Leader and fuck you over".

As a matter of fact, I'm a crappy leader, and an even worse teacher. And those *are* to do with me being this type of perfectionist, but not in the way the trope says.

I'm a crappy leader because I know I'm right. I know exactly what to do in a Situation, which is a completely different skillset from being able to communicate to the Rest Of The Team *why* we need to take this approach to the Situation. (Plus, most people who make up a Rest Of The Team in real life *also* think they're the Destined Leader and know exactly what to do in the Situation. It's extremely rare to have more than at most one person on a ragtag band of misfits who actually wants to take direction. This is a big problem in any natural disaster.)

I'm a terrible teacher, both because I'm a genius with a freakishly good memory so I don't have much personal experience with the same kinds of learning struggles as most people, and because I just don't really grok *not* being intensely driven to excel.

You could tell a story about a Perfectionist who learns how to appreciate and even defer to a Leader with better communication skills, or better empathy skills, or even just the ability to lower their standards when having higher ones isn't actively helpful.

You could tell a story about someone like this learning to accept that they're not good at leadership, that they don't even enjoy it, that there's a *place* for them that doesn't have to be on top of the heap -- that they don't actually lose their entire worth or their ability to be respected if they lose that position. That their options aren't just "take charge" or "be a worthless piece of luggage until you learn to submit to someone you consider incompetent on the basis of their past actions".

You could. Hypothetically. I've never seen it done.

#there's a tangent here that i don't think i can fit in #about how only the leadership position gets seen as valuable in so many stories #better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven indeed #but anyway yeah tiny jt would have been a lot happier to have gotten this shit worked out in their mid teens rather than mid thirties

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sharkneto · 1 year

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What would be Number’s reaction to learning Reginald is an alien?

You know, I've thought a bit about what he'd think about learning he's not totally human, but I hadn't thought about the Reggie angle.

I think it's a bit of information he legitimately wouldn't know what to do with. Like, as Klaus would point out, it makes perfect sense - how could a man like that be anything but inhuman? But Five has such a specific and complicated relationship with Reggie - he's both huge and tiny in his mind. This figure that's defined so much of his childhood and shaped who he is, that he's set himself in opposition to. It's important to him and his identity that he's classified Reggie as "just a man" and a shitty father. Now you introduce that part of why he's been so uncaring and pragmatic and cold is because he legitimately isn't human? Sure, they joked about it as kids, but this still comes from fucking left field. How the fuck do you react when your father figure and abuser turns out to be a goddamn alien? It's a messy, messy thing he'd have to process -- or not process. I think it's a thing he'd say "doesn't matter" if any of the siblings asked him - he was still shit, wasn't he? He doesn't get a pass just because he's an alien - while he spirals a little bit trying to figure out what that means for what his relationship with him is/was.

Anyway, bonus snip of the angle I've thought about this from in regards to Five finding out he's not exactly fully human himself, featuring some creative liberties with how genetics works.

Amanda looks up from her laptop with a frown as McKenzie plops into the seat next to her with a noisy sigh. The Union bustles around them, the other students oblivious to ‘Kenzie’s apparent bad mood. “You good?” she asks, turning back to her paper that refuses to write itself.

“My experiment didn’t work.”

She looks up again, eyes widening in sympathy. “The big genetics one? The one worth half your grade?”

“That would be the one!” McKenzie says, slouching in her chair and letting her head fall back dramatically.

“Oh my god, what are you going to do—”

“I mean, it mostly worked. I had enough data to do it all and present but one sample was totally fucked and my TA couldn’t figure out what was wrong so my statistical accuracy was—”

Amanda smacks her arm. “I thought you fucking failed!”

McKenzie rolls her eyes. “Who do you think I am? I got extra samples just in case one got fucked so I wouldn’t be fucked. And I’m choosing to believe it was one you got for me from someone at the physics lab. I know I swabbed right, I got good cells.”

The crisis not the crisis Amanda thought it was, she relaxes. “Maybe you fucked your reagents,” she defends, although she’s not a biologist and it is entirely possible her favor for her friend is what messed up the experiment. Cells are tiny and alive and so outside of her interests, she doesn’t know what they need to be happy or whatever. She jammed swabs into the boys’ cheeks at the lab, shoved those into the tubes ‘Kenzie gave her, and then delivered them.

“I did the same thing for each sample, boom, boom, boom, assembly line style. If I fucked that part they’d all be fucked and I would have actually failed.”

She shrugs. “Well, sounds like we’re going out tonight either way, celebrating the end of that project from hell.”

Her friend straightens with a coy grin. “You know me so well. Juan’s has fishbowls tonight.”

“I cannot do fishbowls again, I almost died the last time we went there. If I even think about that shitty margarita I’m going to hurl…”

It’s not until Amanda has returned to her paper (that still tragically hasn’t written itself) and McKenzie has left to find a snack to munch on around distracting her that she realizes there might actually be a further implication to McKenzie’s failed experiment sample.

She sampled the boys at the lab.

Which included a certain person who can do the fucking impossible and teleport.

“Paper so boring it melted your brain?” McKenzie asks as she returns and breaks Amanda from her thoughts. She drops a basket of fries between them.

“How was your sample fucked?” Amanda asks.

She frowns. “Since when do you care about bio? It’s not theoretical, so you don’t care.”

“Maybe I want to defend my honor as a sample-taker.”

McKenzie acquiesces with a shrug. “It didn’t amplify right. All the others had bands in the right spot in the gel, which makes sense because every human on Earth has the gene, but this one’s band was like six hundred base pairs bigger. The primer was scuffed for the PCR or the sample was degraded or some shit so it went weird.” She pauses. “Although then it should have been nothing or smaller, not larger, if it was falling apart…”

“What’s the gene responsible for?”

Her friend raises an eyebrow at her, a fry paused in the air on its way into her mouth. “Who are you, caring about genetics? You usually glaze over when I’m talking about this stuff, like how I nod along and think about Love Island when you and Taylor get into physics crap.”

Amanda shrugs, hoping it’s nonchalant enough. “Your experiments usually work, I’m curious.”

McKenzie sighs. “Whatever, I never get to talk about this shit, and it’s really cool. It codes for proteins involved in cell maintenance and DNA repair. So if it wasn’t user error on the sample, which it had to be because it’s a super conserved mechanism across the animal kingdom for how we’re all still up and multicellular, they’re either in big trouble and going to die soon or they’re a freak of nature and probably should get studied for cancer implications or something. A clump that big, if it’s actually functional, means they’re probably either making really shit copies of the proteins or they’re making a shitton for some insane cell maintenance.”

“What would they need all that maintenance for?”

“The point of it is to not get cancer, right? If you’re keeping all your genes in order to copy right, then you have happy healthy cells that aren’t mutating and dying to save you from how shit they are or mutating and not dying and they’re multiplying like crazy to give you a lovely tumor. I guess having an overactive system like that would be great if your constantly stressing your cells out? But if it was doing it like that like this sample implicates, you’d have to be inhuman. A real freak to have a functional gene like that.”

Like if you were ripping through space on a regular basis. That seems like it would stress the cells out. “Can I see a copy of it?”

“For real? Yeah, here, I’ll send it to you…” McKenzie shoves the fries aside to pull her laptop out. “I should have fucked my experiments earlier if it made you actually interested in genetics…”

The email appears in Amanda’s inbox a couple minutes later, after McKenzie has pointed on her screen why the image is weird and comparing it to the regular samples.

Amanda has one last question: “Did anyone else keep this?”

“Did anyone keep my fuck up? No, Amanda, you’re so weird. And I’m not either, I don’t need a bad sample taking up room on my hard drive. Project is turned in, it’s flagged as an outlier in my results, and I’m sure my TA isn’t going to hang onto it. Why would he?"

Good.

Amanda isn’t really sure what to do with this info that she is pretty sure proves Five isn’t totally human. Or at least has some weird shit going on, which makes sense when he can do what he can do.

She decides it needs to be in his court. McKenzie hadn’t thought anything of the results, and – to be fair – they could really be from an experimental error. But the fact that Five was in the sample group and that, for all her distractions and partying, McKenzie is usually meticulous when it came to her lab work makes Amanda think it’s unlikely just that.

So, she prints out the results, shoves them in a manila folder, and then deletes the email and files.

She catches Five at work the next morning. “Hey! Number!”

He pauses in his math to glance over his shoulder and nod a greeting before turning back to his whiteboard.

“Can we talk for second?” she asks as she dumps her bag in her cubicle, digging the results packet out.

“Shoot.”

“Over here.” She jerks her head to the conference room.

He frowns but follows. “Everything good?” he asks when she closes the door behind them.

“Yeah,” she says. She thrusts the manila envelope forward.

He cautiously takes it but doesn’t open it. “What is this?”

“You remember McKenzie’s big project for her genetics class?”

“Sure, when you shoved q-tips down our throats.”

“Swabbed your cheeks. Yeah, that one. Um. You had weird results, and I thought…” Amanda trails off as Five just stares at her. His expression is unreadable.

“I thought it was anonymous.”

“Yeah, it was. Like, she knows who she got samples from, but the samples themselves weren’t labeled. But…”

“But?”

“She had one sample that was wonky. I don’t totally understand it, and she and the TA assume she messed up the reagents on it, so they don’t think anything of it, but…”

“But?”

“I sampled you and you’re, um. You. With the Jesus birth and everything.”

Five’s expression doesn’t change. He glances down at the envelope in his hands. “You think the weird results are me because of my powers.”

“Yeah.” She shifts slightly.

“And you printed them out and gave them to me in a dramatic envelope because…?”

“I didn’t know what else to do. Felt like if it was something explaining how you’re… different, it should be yours. I deleted the files and I think McKenzie will, too, once her grade is finalized. That should be the only copy.”

He nods and turns the envelope over in his hands. He still hasn’t opened it.

“So, um. Yeah,” Amanda says as the silence stretches.

“This is the one copy?” he confirms.

She nods.

“Cool. Thanks.” He straightens and walks past her, dropping the packet in the garbage as he exits the conference room. He doesn’t look back.

Amanda looks after him as the door hangs open. She follows him a minute later, almost running into Sarah as she’s unlocking her office.

The envelope stays in the garbage, unopened and to be forgotten.

Maybe that’s for the best, Amanda decides.

#number's relationship with reggie is so specific and complicated #anything that shifts it - shifts that dynamic - is huge for five #and learning reggie is an alien is such a fundamental *shift* in how he has to think about his dad #it's an angle that could be used to let him off the hook - which luther would do depending on where he's at in his journey #but five absolutely would refuse to do that #alien or not he still put them all through that shit #but it makes it so much messier and five's usual tactic when things get emotionally messy like that is to pretend to ignore it #while silently obsessing over it by himself #rob would have some work to do there #anyway enjoy the snip it's a thing i've been thinking about for months but never actually wrote down #snips #jt #number #amanda

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