Fun little silly thought I had about the Lair Games and specifically Leo deliberately losing is all the reasons he could have for doing so.
My favorite headcanon for his main motivation is that Splinter wasn’t proud of him anymore.
I imagine that, in the beginning, winning the Lair Games was Leo’s opportunity to shine. He wasn’t artistic or the baby of the family like Mikey, wasn’t a tech genius who created amazing inventions like Donnie, wasn’t the eldest who was insanely strong and dependable like Raph. So he had to shine somewhere else- anywhere else- and what better way to get attention than to be a winner? A champion?
And then he won too much. And it wasn’t special anymore. He got too big headed, too cocky, he knew this was his element and he ran with it.
Splinter’s words of congratulations slowly petered out. Suddenly, there was no real reason to win.
Winning feels empty when the only one cheering you on is yourself.
So- Leo schemed. And he’s a great schemer, fooling his whole family (and Donnie did deserve a win- people were way happier when he won.)
He even gave up his prized possession! His room!
Though he knows his brothers probably think it’s a bad prize. A terrible one, even.
Leo doesn’t sleep much as is, though. So Dad’s snores were more comforting than anything. It was reassuring to hear him so clearly alive and close by.
Even if the distance between them was larger than Leo’d like.
He’d just have to find something else, something more to show his dad that Leo was someone to trust, to be proud of, to love.
He gets his chance soon after, when he needs to pull off a plan against Big Mama at his dad’s side. Leo can only hope this victory is one that has a lasting effect when his father looks at him with pride once more.
Victory, for Leo, is a pretty loaded term.
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Honestly? Did I want more from DTAMHD? Yes, I did. I wanted something signifying actual progression for Dennis' character (even just a crumb of genuine growth) , and I sincerely don't think we got that. However... we did get a fascinating insight into the process of his mind. Dennis' level of self-denial is so ironic and profound. He can't acknowledge the inevitability that he's middle-aged.
(I swear this episode honestly has given me an alt hc, that the show is based in his mind; because logistically, a man of his lifestyle and malnourishment could not commit the feats he is constantly sailing through. TGGB & DTAMHD... back-to-back? What happened to his hand? Did he even sprain it? Or is he just the most dramatic brat in the gang - clearly the latter.)
It is important to note that he didn’t fix the actual problem. He momentarily masked the symptoms, but ignore long-term help with blood pressure medicine is not going to fix the issue, nor is it going to protect him from fucking keeling over in a stressful situation (when he's not in a contained and quiet Doctor's exam room) and his blood pressure spikes.
I'm honestly a little jaded at this point (16 Fucking Seasons of crumbs, y'all), but if one were to continue 'trusting the structure' this episode conveyed a lot.
The B Plot: The pressure cooker. The metaphor parallels the building pressure Dennis quick-tempered bouts of rage. So, to toss out a little 'cat-in-the-wall' conjecture here: The pressure cooker is Dennis, but we all saw him eat that bloody diamond in the end and we all heard Mac's speech about coal turning into diamonds under massive pressure. Dennis' experience is a theory of pressure, he daydreams it all in the span of a minute or so. He's roleplaying with hypothetical obstacles. There's no risk. Maybe Dennis, isn't the pressure cooker, but the coal.
If I were to try and take anything hopeful out of this episode, it would be the way the narrative is showing us that this episode acknowledged that Dennis isn't ready yet. It's not his turn to break. It's going to take real, substantial pressure to get that diamond.
It was a hell of a misdirect (and honestly a little bit of a slap in the face), but if these characters live in the real world, where people are bound by the laws of mortality, then Dennis should have his time.
Genuinely, who fucking knows?
I'm not hating on the episode. We all know this is the trashy dick joke sitcom. I just thought that if Mac & Charlie could have moments of genuine heartbreak, culminating in deep catharsis, that maybe Dennis could have that too.... but no.
Can't wait to see the sunny dudebros miss the point & proclaim Dennis Reynolds - SA victim, traumatized individual with an emotionally tumultuous personality disorder - the new Andrew Tate.
I'm sorry, but yeah. I'm a little miffed. It was all a dream, and everything goes Dennis' way. Y'all I'm fucking tired. This was a great episode for Glenn, but a fucking frustrating episode for Dennis. I may have wanted a little macden, but all I cared about was seeing Dennis face the limitations of his mortality, to see that he's failing his body and his brain. He didn't have to actually take the medicine (I wouldn't expect him to), but Goddammit, everything seems to work out in his delusional favor. So, of course he's going to continue being delusional, and probably only change for the worse.
I'll say it: I wanted a broken Dennis, and we did not get that. He didn't even crack, the unbearble and apparently now canonical Golden God. That episode's title was intended to tease sunnyblr.
Excuse the plethora of tags. I just kept getting more irritated.
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third times the charm re: distilling a [winston billions autistic character] jumping off point re: like, applications of individual responsibility Bootstraps Narrative attitude just in general when it comes to some people being Made more vulnerable than others, and the way that these differences are Deserved, the solution to someone suffering for it is for them to personally choose to better themself to thusly earn more, and for, conveniently, Punishment to be a neutral conduit of moral improvement, should you be so deserving as to accept it
if someone interprets an autistic person as offputting & reacts to this with disdain b/c of an imagined correlating Undeserving Interiority within that person, that’s objective & correct, & however they punish that person is as well. autistic people should have to Do The Work of making up for their previous failure to simply Learn how to act correctly, since allistic people definitely underwent ABA & now think of themselves as choosing to act that way rather than just Naturally Being Normal (wherein also any conscious effort is just ascribed to further personal positive qualities of theirs, the Kindness / Generosity / Thoughtfulness etc etc in striking up small talk or whatever, while ascribing thoughtlessness / disrespect to nd behavior), and in the meantime a) the best an autistic person can hope for, if, like a properly humble poor person, they deserve the pity, is that equivalent of a windfall of the charity some better off individual can Choose to afford them, e.g. like if an autistic employee happens to have some manager or someone who can & does look out for them / tries to insulate them from nonsense....and at the heart of the matter, the double empathy problem Is deserved, the solution to an autistic person being disliked is either that they shouldn’t be here at all, or that if they can endure existing somewhere that’s actually beyond what they can manage to Earn, they deserve the punishment of being nobly treated “the same,” i.e., oh if Anyone was acting like this i’d be an asshole to them, which is why people don’t even need to Know someone’s autistic to react to the reality of their being autistic, the person in question doesn’t even need to know it about themself....and ultimately it’s worse to Not try to yourself punish, or allow the punishment of, this weirdo grating cringe loser, b/c only the cleansing nature of that punishment will let them personally improve & start acting better & Deserving better, otherwise you’re just enabling them to keep being annoying at other people & those other ppl’s annoyance is Also blood on your hands (then it’s time to turn around & let people even Higher Up on the social hierarchy do whatever they want / bend over backwards to interpret & explain & justify everything they do in the most positive lights & blame other people for being hurt by them)
and like, the handy flexibility re: what’s Deserved when, say, how other characters look at a character like ben kim. he’s Too Nice, and that can mean that he deserves better, or it can mean that that’s a bleeding heart doormat loser trait that deserves the disdainful punishment it might get. and even if you Do think he deserves better? the reason he isn’t Already getting that better treatment must be due to personal failure anyways: he Is being too much of a loser &/or how he’ll only get better if he Steps Up & Acts more like a winner, for god’s sake, do the elevator dance stuff, that’s not only reasonable but obvious, cmon. tuk’s weird Confidence Training masterclass where it’s like, softhearted ben will be like “sorry :/ nothing anyone can do though” but tuk can’t go “hey, can you not be an asshole to me” and expect to get anywhere if he’s still being his too uncertain self, it’s on Him to start acting out the extrinsic behaviors of a winner and Then other people will totally start respecting him, is how this works lol....that it’s cringe for winston to Say he’s good at what he does & is valuable, b/c umm if you were Really valuable then the Natural recognition of that & corresponding positive treatment would Of Course have already manifested, and since it hasn’t, he isn’t Really deserving, and since he’s claiming to be deserving, that’s also proof he’s out of line being aggressive & arrogant like that. that it’s Also like, cringe & even crass of him to mention like, yeah i’m hoping to get paid here lol, again you’ll Of Course be paid as much as you want if you Deserve it, but if you deserve it you’ll actually mostly talk about being here and wanting to Win at it for cooler reasons, b/c ppl who are winning / more powerful than you in Whatever realm have those benefits that have just spontaneously & naturally been afforded to them b/c they deserve them more On Merit, and meritous people Are better than those beneath them and thus Will seem epic. and in the same way that ben kim seeming Too Nice can be handily interpreted as a “positive” (without truly challenging any negative assessment) or a negative, it’s like, oh winston’s Also undeserving b/c of the fact his outfit was uniquely significantly cheaper on the burn rate rundown, it’s actually Cooler to have your undershirt cost a thousand bucks, it’s costlier b/c it’s better, you buy the better clothes b/c you Deservingly have the money and thus also have the Deserving tastes to want the pricier shit. yet it’s like, cue a post of yore mentioning like analysis of agatha christie’s writing where like, oh the nouveau riche’s personal fashion & decor choices are always a bit too indulgent & overdone, vs. the refined elegant restraint of those with True Class(tm), when really any trend where Not going as ham with adornment/decoration was “better” / a signifier of properly noble Old Money was a reaction to flashier stylings Becoming more common / attainable for the less established rich / Less rich, period....the way that an identity that is defined by / requires Othering people will always have to react Against what everyone else is doing so long as that association is relevant in the cultural consciousness. ugh women do that, so it’d be too Effeminate of men, so men shouldn’t Want to do it anyways b/c they’re too inherently epic in the ways that make them better than women already, & if they Do, it’s some artificial corruption....anyways, it’s that if someone Undeserving were to indulge in pricey shit, that’d be a veneer to compensate for the insecurity of how they don’t Truly Deserve fancy shit (which wouldn’t look like deliberate flashiness anyways, of course. simply The Taste) but if they were to rather be sticking to too pedestrian / inexpensive shit, that’s Also about the insecurity of how they don’t Truly Deserve fancy shit / indication that they lack the Taste to even Know how to want better, and the best they could do is an identifiably lesser mere Imitation of what better ppl choose for themselves
meanwhile shoutout to how, of course, if winston is being treated badly on an individual interpersonal basis, that’s exactly in line with All Of This lol. he deserves it, if he deserves better He has to make the change, and in the meantime since that Bootstraps Narrative is justification for things being the way they already are, conveniently anyone else can keep getting whatever they get out of another person being so diminished as to not Deserve to be regarded as & treated as a person in the way that they do....autistic employees “making up for” their being autistic by working harder, Anyone working harder (ben kim) b/c surely that’s the only way to get a raise or promoted or not fired & if you don’t jump into the ring of like compensation negotiation & win (ben kim) then you don’t deserve the raise, conveniently....you Do have to walk away & Prove that you can do better, taylor Should Have Had To Do All This actually, even though probably mafee wouldn’t Really argue that directly, wild how whatever you say that’s a Negative about winston / sabotages any effort of his must, flexibly, be true & fine....if we thought Some People didn’t inherently deserve the increased vulnerability to harm in various manifestations, then that’d have enough reverberations that wouldn’t be contained to “maybe stop being like this to your coworker,” and in the meantime we can all just Tell that winston sucks & thus he brings it upon himself & the Rewards that people get for what they’re actually bringing upon him >>>> winston having a more tolerable time, not to mention that actually it’ll Help him in the end if, to make the punishment stop, he finally decides to deserve Better by improving himself, bootstraps time, [become nondisabled] style
oh and addendum too about like [any begrudging acknowledgment that winston perhaps Does have value tied to an especial individual talent] wherein it can be like ugh This asshole got in on a Technicality, he can crank out this coding or whatever but that’s Mechanical rather than something any of us need to attribute to an Inherently Deserving Human Interiority and like be impressed with or admire or respect or some shit like that, he’s basically cheated to get be here & so long as he isn’t forced out we can at least Use him. feel free though to be a complete asshole to him for real
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