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batsplat · 4 months

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from the stuff i’ve heard marc’s former honda teammates (dani jorge and pol in their media careers but joan also i guess) say about him now that they’re racing is generally quite positive, both on a professional/riding level but also seemingly on a personal level? i’m wondering what you make of that given that, yeah, marc doesn’t seem like a very good teammate (unless you’re alex who i’ve left off this list). like MARC wants to separate on and off track stuff and it seems like all of these guys are willing too at least in retrospect, so he can’t have truly burned bridges with them. do you have any thoughts on that

(x, x) most riders are quite good at not burning bridges with each other! it's not like marc's competitors don't know that this stuff is kinda part of the game. I mean, all of marc's past teammates were also trying to assert themselves within the internal hierarchy... you can say that certain teammates engage in 'worse' behaviour than others, but, like, these people do understand they're supposed to be fighting each other! a baseline degree of nastiness is factored in and will be accepted to a greater or lesser extent by your rivals - especially when it comes to asserting yourself in intra-team power struggles. you might hate the other guy in the moment, but generally speaking once the active part of the rivalry is done with... you will probably get over it. marc's fellow riders are aware of how ultra-competitive marc is - and to a certain point they do respect it, not least because they're aware that this is part of the reason why marc has ended up with all those titles. it's like dani said, right, it's marc's strong suit. and in general, you do have to say that there's relatively few teammate pairings that devolve to the level of toxicity that it completely destroys the interpersonal relationship. you might need some level of preexisting animosity... most of the purely competitive sins can be healed with a little time

on the 'separating on-track and off-track' thing... well. this is kind of a question of how you define these things, you can say that marc generally speaking isn't going to massively hold grudges over isolated on-track incidents or whatever... but he doesn't just leave his fighting to the track, and personally I've also never felt he can entirely separate these things out in his mind. can you really say his professional and private relationships with other riders are completely detached from one another? mostly, he's opted to be pretty disengaged from his fellow riders as a collective, and obviously that's a good way to not take things too personally... it's all part of the game, isn't it? sometimes it's good to go with the straightforward approach: marc tells you he will make your life hell, he does indeed make your life hell, and then you both move on with your lives and can maybe actually have a pretty amiable relationship with him in years to come. he's not really defying your expectations at any point here, is he now? it's still a question for each of them as individuals as to whether they think that kind of behaviour is above board and acceptable or not... but everyone by now knows that marc plays these games, so it's not like they're going in blind

and it's not like other former teammates are constantly badmouthing each other. I mean... look, let's just cut to the chase here and bring in valentino as our reference point (as he is for the sport as a whole, which by the way does also help create a certain baseline of acceptability for marc's antics - maybe goated riders are just supposed to be dicks who knows). vale's premier class teammates were 1) nobody (2000-01), 2) tohru ukawa (2002), 3) nicky hayden (2003; 2011-12), 4) carlos checa (2004), 5) colin edwards (2005-2007), 6) jorge lorenzo (2008-10; 2013-16), 7) maverick vinales (2017-20), 8) franco morbidelli (2021), and 9) andrea dovizioso (2021). of these eight men (let's just exclude 'nobody' for now), do you know how many had serious complaints at any point about valentino as a teammate? that's right, it's one guy. one. some of valentino's other teammates, like hayden, checa and edwards, were even quite actively positive about their whole experience. this is the thing - you do need some specific circumstances for teammate rivalries to escalate from 'being kinda bitchy every other month' to 'actively fantasising about stabbing each other'. not accounting for natural interpersonal animosity, let's list some circumstantial factors that you need to get a bridge-burning-worthy level of feud:

you need a competitive bike. it is possible to beef about development direction when you're in the trenches (cf late 2010's yamaha, 2020's honda)... but generally speaking this is going to be quite low-level petty stuff, not actual war

you also need something that approaches competitiveness between teammates. if one teammate is unquestionably stronger than the other one, then it is very unlikely that you are going to get any open hostilities. the tension comes when the two sides are close enough to each other for the internal hierarchy to actually be a contentious issue (this is also basic self preservation... if you're the far weaker teammate then you do not want to make the situation troublesome, because then you will be the one to be fired)

following on from those first two things... well, it doesn't hurt to have a title fight in the mix. there are also other ways you can generate competitive stakes, like, for instance, if you and your teammate know that one of you will be out of a job soon. basically, it helps to have something to squabble over

it is maybe easy to forget how rare it is this century for teammates to be fighting directly for a title, let alone over the course of multiple seasons. only two 1-2's since the year 2000 and they're both for the factory yamaha's (though 2006, 2011-13 and 2017 did all prominently feature two factory hondas). which means that for valentino, the prerequisites were met just the once in his premier class career... and yes, the results were pretty memorable, but (topic! for! another! post!) it's worth pointing out that even that relationship was pretty much 'fine' whenever there was a sizeable disparity between the two of them performance-wise (2008 and 2013 are the most clear cut examples). I think the way I'd frame it with marc is that he has a bunch of mildly dubious strategies up his sleeve to assert himself within the team, which don't really deviate that far from what you'd expect from a rider of marc's calibre and only need to be escalated under specific circumstances. that doesn't mean he doesn't have the potential to be ruthless, but up until now it's mostly been a fairly 'acceptable' level of ruthlessness on the intra-team level... and not something that is likely to make other riders actually hate him

taking marc's teammates one by one... dani was the closest to meeting the bridge-burning prerequisites, though he was only a title rival in marc's rookie season. and marc did go further with him than he did with anyone else, and dani has made some pointed comments about marc's style as a teammate... but yes, he is fonder of marc these days. partly I'd just emphasise again that this is a fairly natural progression when you've stopped directly competing for long enough, and partly it's also just a question of individual personality - dani's not massively into holding grudges. then there's jorge, who... I mean, they might as well not have been teammates, given that jorge was either too slow or too injured to even be sharing any track space with marc. you have to put that one down primarily to circumstance, seeing as jorge's own track record on the teammate front isn't exactly spotless. marc and jorge beefing in 2019 would have been pretty dumb and also a massive waste of everyone's time in a year in which marc singlehandedly won the team's championship. even those two needed more to get things going

moving on to the dark years, pol and marc had an extremely stop-and-start partnership on a honda that was generally pretty uncompetitive... so the only stuff they could get ever so mildly irritable about were riveting incidents like 'marc saying pol wasn't the biggest championship threat' (neither of them were) or 'pol saying he'd copy marc's set up' (which proved entirely useless). not exactly title decider territory, is it now, and marc very much had pol covered as a challenger throughout their partnership. also, those two do have a longer history! they've known each other since they were kids and hold a pretty significant place in each other's careers. now that pol's more or less retired, it's natural there'll be quite a lot of sentimentality there - which will paper over any small cracks that appeared during those two years. and joan was a one year teammate at a time in which the bike was consistently close to offing them both. they only managed to start a sunday race together as teammates on thirteen occasions. it would take some serious effort to engineer a feud with that little opportunity, and, really, why on earth would you bother. maybe if honda had gone for rinsy rather than joan for the factory seat, it could've been a bit more prickly, but it's unlikely that it would have escalated beyond that

this is the thing, right, the only one of these partnerships that would have been worth burning bridges over was dani, and even there marc pretty much had him handled after the first season. in general, marc has been pretty clear on how he's not interested in making friends with the other side of the garage while the teammate relationship is ongoing... which is fine! there's some prominent-ish teammate pairings that are actually good friends, some teammate pairings where one of them is actively helping out and advising the other one, but some riders prefer to just keep their distance. it would have been a little silly of marc to start a feud with a teammate who is galaxies away from being a competitive threat, let alone a title rival, but generally it is possible to toe the line between 'attempting to suppress your internal rivals enough to stop them from becoming a problem for you' and 'taking radical enough action to make your internal rivals despise you'

especially in the post-dani era, marc never really had any need to push things too far... and, let's face it, how many of your teammate relationships end up with burnt bridges is also quite frankly a question of luck and circumstance. do you want to guess which top rider on paper has the worst track record this century with premier class teammate feuds, in terms of a) how many they've had, and b) how little public reconciliation there has been since the end of the rivalry?

yes, that's right, it's the first name that comes to mind when you're thinking of toxic and conflict-prone riders: andrea dovizioso. that old devil, constantly causing trouble. just couldn't stop undermining his poor, innocent teammates. can somebody please stop this ruthless bully before it's too late

I think you get the point. I would personally suggest that dovi is not in fact the worst teammate it is possible to have in a motogp top team. he just happened to find himself in a situation where he was teammates with two separate guys he did not click with at all, in situations that involved a pairing of riders who were (or had the potential to be) competitive with each other, as well as some proper stakes attached to the rivalry. in general, situational factors are going to determine this stuff more than anything else... and marc more often than not does have a reasonably good feel for picking his battles. he's flirted with the line, but he's mostly avoided crossing it. he hasn't had to

#'joan also i guess' hold on now anon that's his former teammate relationship that's most important to ME i love them...#elephant in the room is 'let's revisit this in 1.5 years time'. ik people will try to make that just about the vr46 factor but *shrug*#i kinda feel like maybe i should have mentioned in the casey/marc post that casey is arguably more of an outlier than marc is #like his alienation with the sport ran deep which is how you get him engaging in melandri slander who was pee one million in 2008 #y'know casey/jorge ducati was a real possibility for a hot second and my take on that would ALSO be 'hm yeah maybe not <3'#ESPECIALLY given that it's quite likely the incoming jorge would've been paid way way more than casey was ('09 ducati... let's not even)#AND given how yamaha had repeatedly burnt casey and then handed jorge the seat on a silver platter... like idk man!!#genuinely fascinating '10 counterfactual... i do like casey/marc but i've also game planned casey/vale and casey/jorge i'm a completionist #(either dani or vale would've likely won the title in that timeline. but crucially casey/jorge interpersonally would've been. well)#//#brr brr #alien tag #batsplat responds #i need an ask tag so badly but i can't be bothered to back tag... i'll do it at some point #in my notes i did once actually rank the aliens by how much they'd suck as teammates but the order might be a wee bit controversial #i'm sorry to the guy i ranked number one but he did objectively have the worst track record like... it has to be said #i think u have like. different modes right. where how bad u are as a teammate is scaled to how big the threat ur facing is #now EYE actually think marc's not got a particularly *great* neutral mode either but it's not bridge-burning mode #also what even is a burnt bridge... i mean god knows even valentino and jorge are taking photos together these days...#jorge's still conducting autopsies of old beef every fortnight but otoh he's joking about motegi on instagram which is crazyyyyyy #you genuinely cannot. CANNOT convince me that if marc/jorge had had a title fight as teammates it wouldn't have been a MESS #there is literally no way. none whatsoever #and if i said dani had a higher number of strained premier class teammate relationships than valentino did... what then...

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shopcat · 5 days

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it is so odd that liking fanfiction in a normal way is a minority position on this site at all. like how did defining your entire life around defending it from anything and everything become the norm ... how did something that you can just have a basic amount of fun doing occasionally become smth you should be unhealthily obsessed with bc ppl grew up thinking coping mechanisms for their parents divorce being really hard are a necessary part of life instead of like... anything else, and also even a "coping mechanism" at all.

like all of these people just got slightly bullied in school or online about their interests and decided the way to combat that is to become a 2024 version of a 4chan creep who wears merch for a WEBSITE... a WEBSITE... do they realise they're the exact same type of person. hell they even share the same interests. like you can literally just read fanfiction in fact you can read a lot In fact you can technically read only fanfiction and no books that's like your perogative no one actually cares. liking things in extension of something u also like is actually normal. but becoming the type of loser scumbag who no one wants to be around except for others your ... kind ... is personally far too embarassing for me not to mention the glorification of modern fandom culture as is which is just basically like all the racism misogyny transmisogyny transphobia homophobia classism etc rolled into a ball of self entitlement and punted at everyone who so much as breathes towards a keyboard in favour of um. looks around. NOT being into rape or incest or kids or being openly vilely racist & islamophobic & pro-genocide.

i rlly think this site itself (tumblr i mean) has a long ways to go in terms of defining the correct way to act as an adult or someone coming into being an adult about the stuff you like and what you do with that stuff like beyond basic decency. like just like things for the sake of liking them and sure all the other people liking it at the same time can be fun but the fanbase cannot and SHOULD not be the end all and be all of your life. if you're not even if a fan of the actual content and instead in the fandom's fandom you have to like sort out your priorities not to yuck anyone's yum i guess but good god there's more to life.

#this got away from me but you guys know what i mean 😭#like we all like shit and post about it ... i do read fanfic not every single day for hours but sometimes idfk #it's fun in the same way looking at art and reading posts is fun i can't even like conceptualise being so insanely protective over #a site thst blatantly openly publishes a document every year detailing HOW THEY STEAL AND WASTE YOUR MONEY #i genuinely think just an ounce of shame is in fact necessary liek you should actually be ashamed to be acting the way these ppl do #your personal interests are not actually the centre of the world and shouldn't even be the centre of YOUR world #like not only is that obviously so entitled and selfish and obnoxious it's also straight up unhealthy #making yourself happy not coming at the cost of other peoples fucking lives is like a basic tenet of functioning society #all over the worst fanfic you've ever seen in your life like that's the most ridiculous part. 10 out of 100 fics are good that is just the #plain truth. anyone who thinks otherwise has the taste of a rock LMFAO which is obvious but still... embarassing #anyway

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