#that has to do with neurotic tendencies that come out when im in a bad way and the only way i can cope and exercise

[ahaura]

not to jinx it but :-) it's july so that means this is the longest i've had a blog since i first remade (8ish months) <3

[tigerdrop]

hey i just wanna say the long posts genuinely make my day. also can you talk more about gordon freeman character because the way you write him makes me quake in my gay little boots

i would love to talk about gordon freeman. thank u for the opportunity

the first thing i need to communicate about gordon is that this dude sucks. and i say this in the fondest way possible. he is a bitch from the moment he drops into the world until the moment he goes out. if you dont believe me, give it another watch! gordons mouthy and rude for no real reason, at least so far as “being a regular dude on his way into work” goes, and this dude goes around calling his coworkers names with zero provocation. (of course, we all know that the reason is because its a funny guy improv stream that borrows a bit from freemans mind, but im talkin from a character sense.)

but my argument isnt just that gordon freeman sucks. its that he sucks in a very specific way that i find insanely endearing. i love this dude. i love to hate him. hes awful in a very mundane sense - weve all known a guy like this, at least if youve spent too much time online - and its cathartic to watch him suffer because of it.

gordons a smart guy. as written, hes gotta be - hes a recent MIT grad, on his way to work at a top-secret research facility to do weird shit with crystals and theoretical physics. but the thing about smart guys is that theyre often......selectively intelligent. we can see this in the way that he has a hard time navigating his surroundings, and needs the science crew to guide him through it and keep him alive.

this is one of those things that is a natural consequence of somebody going through the game for the first time, but that i am interpreting as “gordon is kind of stupid sometimes”. its uncharitable but its not like he doesnt deserve it. he likes to boss around the crew as if he knows what hes doing, when he often very much does not, and is fond of demeaning their intelligence. hes real bad about this with tommy in particular, treating him like hes a kid whos playing at being a scientist when tommy is actually a decade older than him. all i am saying is that gordon ought to stay humble. hes awful cocky when he perceives himself as better than others.

which, i think, tracks with how cocky he gets when he gives up on the whole “well-meaning citizen” thing and just unloads bullets into people. he puts up a front of being a Nice Guy, you know, just some dude caught in a bad situation who doesnt like seeing his companions obliterate every NPC they come across, but that doesnt stop him from cackling like a fucking madman and mowing down aliens (and soldiers) every once in awhile. when he stops seeing himself as helpless and starts seeing himself as the one in control, the gloves come off. he gets mean. and i think thats very sexy of him

this, among other things, is why i am insistent that gordon freeman is a control freak. he desperately wants to be in control of the situation at all times, shepherding around the science crew primarily by bitching at them, but its of limited success. its futile. sisyphean. tommy, coomer, bubby, and benrey exist almost to torment him with exactly the thing that would make him suffer the most: a gaggle of people running around causing problems for him, but he cant go anywhere without them b/c hes reliant on them to make it out alive.

its perpetual suffering, and its cathartic to watch. and funny, too. and if youre a little weirdo like me, its very, very enjoyable. how twisted up he gets when nobodys listening to him! how sweaty and frazzled he must look. its cute, and it also makes me want to reach through the screen and shake him and tell him to just be a little nicer. he wants control but he doesnt know how to attain it, he doesnt know how to play nice like a real leader. i think its a neat contrast to gordon freeman as we know him in HL2, where he literally is the leader of the resistance and has to live up to it. this is gordon freeman but if he was moe through helplessness.

“helpless” is, i think, a great way to describe him. a core bit of imagery in half life is this sense of railroadedness and helplessness, with gordon freeman being put into play like a chess piece and having no choice but to move forward. and this iteration of gordon leans into that by being totally dependent on the science crew in order to make progress and Not Die. and hes also subject to the whims of benrey, local eldritch weirdo who has basically made it his life mission to fuck with gordon.

gordons anxieties dont help with that. if he wasnt so fun to stress out and fuck with, the science crew probably wouldnt do it so much! too bad for him that they like fucking with him so much that he was driven into a panic attack (multiple times, even, depending on your interpretation). hes got that real neurotic mindset. always worrying about shit that could go wrong, and attempting to exert control over his surroundings in an effort to control the anxiety.

IMO the real way to nail the Neurotic Gordon Freeman Experience is to combine the ever-present anxiety with his pervasive sense of self-loathing. he openly states that he has no friends and nobody seems to like him, and to that, i really gotta say, i wonder why. he doesnt really seem to factor in that hes kind of a bitch, and has way too high an estimation of his own intelligence relative to everybody elses. its really one of the worst ways to be: aware that people dont like you, but unaware of exactly why. if he was like, 10% nicer, he probably wouldnt have had half as many issues getting through black mesa, but also, its funny to see him squawking his way through the game. so, you know.

its stuff like that that makes me headcanon him as a dude with low self-esteem in general. convinced that hes not likable, not attractive, out of his element......impostor syndrome, except that theres some truth to it. this is a guy who truly does not realize how good he has it: he really is just an average shitty dude, and yet, somehow, benrey took a shine to him. some poor motherfucker out there actually likes him and wants to suck his dick. thats dedication

also, i keep bringing up “repression” when i talk about gordon. and hopefully, what ive been talking about helps explain why. he has a strong desire to be a regular dude, not just murdering his way through black mesa, but if hes pushed hard enough he leans into it. gets bossy. picks up a cigar off a dead soldier and takes a long drag, before smacking forzen around with a pistol and ordering him around. gordon freeman is a regular, kind of anxious guy who likes competitive swimming and streaming on justin.tv and making anime references, and he is also a guy who takes a filthy pleasure in making a trained soldier his bitch. and i didnt make up any of this shit - this is purestrain canon, baby. this is a guy with problems

to me, this screams the kind of guy who represses a lot of shit b/c he doesnt feel like its morally decent. you run into this guy a lot online: the wokeboy, the online leftist, the guy who spends too much time on social media websites. (like reddit. i think he would actively use reddit and he would never get any appreciable amount of karma but he never stops posting. its sisyphean! cathartic.) from the way he talks about “bootboys”, i think it tracks. he knows about imperialism, he knows about feminism, but at the end of the day hes your average american white dude who struggles with internalizing it.

a lot of those dudes struggle with sex and gender issues. (dont we all.) when youre trying to be a Good Person(tm), you spend a lot of time thinking about your own relationship to sex and kink and all that shit. and i maintain that a too-online dude who buries a lot of his control freak tendencies would also try to bury a lot of weird sexual shit in an attempt to seem Normal and Well-Adjusted and not like a little freak. i justify this by the sheer number of times gordon blurts out weird sex shit as a joke. there are only two outcomes to making that many piss jokes: either youre secretly a piss guy, or you lathe-of-heaven yourself into becoming one. i will stand by this

ive talked a lot about why this dude sucks. now, let me talk to you about what makes gordon so much fun to write. first things first: hes funny! a subjective evaluation, yeah, but both in- and out-of-character, hes aiming to be funny. and being the straight man to everybody else plays into that whole “helplessness” thing.

secondly: underneath it all, there is a good dude under there. gordon worries when his companions get hurt, he tries to clean them off and patch them up, and hes got his lil leftist heart in the right place. you could even read a lot of his bossy, bitchy demeanor as him wanting to make sure everyone gets out okay and doesnt hurt themselves. when it comes to animals and anti-imperialist sentiment, gordons a pretty good guy.

hes the kind of guy who would probably see a dog on the street and get excited and play with it, but would get really prickly about the correct way to put dishes in the dishwasher. control freak tendencies.

finally, subjecting such a miserable, tormented guy to even more psychological anguish is really, really fun. you feel a little bad for him, but he kind of deserves it. so many problems he goes through are purely of his own making, and if gordon would just relax and quit trying to hard to maintain control - of himself, of the people around him - and own up to having Problems and Issues, he would be a happier guy. but thats why its fun to bend him until he breaks. being a little control freak myself, putting gordon freeman thru psychosexual torment is cathartic.

when it comes to writing his thought processes, the fact that he is canonically some kind of psychotic (yes, i am boldly claiming this. suck me) and i am also canonically some kind of psychotic makes it easier to write what i think his thought processes are. i just give him my brain issues of “getting lost in thought” and “overthinking fucking everything”. a touch of paranoia helps. even if i dont explicitly label him as schizophrenic please know that i am writing him as a paranoid little nutcase at all times because, uh, you write what you know.

paranoid. anxious. of the mindset that everyones out to get him (which isnt helpful when everyone is out to get him). repressed and deeply Not Normal but trying so very fucking hard to be normal and well-adjusted. a control freak with sadistic tendencies who also really, really likes getting bullied by his best frenemy. a hapless little nerd who sounds really cute when his voice starts to break from nerves. and, most importantly, a dumb jock. do not ever forget this.

thats gordon freeman, babey. hope that helps

[william-s-churros]

random very personal post i guess

like back in the day or what the fuck ever and even like... recently i was still upset about shit but weird- i dunno. i guess i’m pretty old now lol and im just kind of like. i dont care. i mean, no one really bothers me about anything and im really glad about that and i kind of like being a weird hermit in my little corner of the internet because i absolutely never want to be involved with the shitshow that i went through back in like 2010-2013 or whatever

anyway... time makes it easier to realize how irrational you’re being; grinding, horrible, i-want-to-kill-myself-tier shitty work environments where you sit there ruminating over every single fucking thing that’s ever happened in your life all day every day. you’re like, why did that hurt me so much? why did i get upset about this thing? why do i fixate on this pain? like, no, i was hurt, but does that justify me perpetuating nonsense and rehashing shit and causing problems for people that hurt me in the past? i mean, that isn’t really what i want to do with my life.

the problem with the internet really is that it propels interpersonal drama into a spotlight for all to see and then people pick it apart in kind of a... i don’t know... shameful way. it’s very understandable actually; people get curious about human relationships, their ins and outs, the issues we all face as people. i really don’t think it’s surprising. i think the fixation on it as a form of entertainment is a bit alarming; but it is what it is. 

where am i going with this... i have no idea... this is really very vague. i mean, if you knew me from before then you know i was a mess back in the day; im still a bit of a mess, more of a like, small, smouldering trashfire as opposed to the gigantic fully-ablaze dumpster of a human being i used to be. i mean, that’s kind of what growing up is. i know when you’re like a teenager, 20-24 year olds can seem like adults but holy shit, they are definitely not. they are idiots (source: me) i don’t feel like an adult now and im 27. it’s not like i feel like i’m a kid either-- don’t get me wrong. im not trying to infantilize myself, but a lot more of adulthood is figuring shit out than you might expect, and the concept of an adult that you had as a kid is very different from the reality of being an adult. and i mean, your 20s are just a horrible decade as far as i can tell haha. you’re just going to go through a lot and learn a shitton about yourself and the people around you. i can only hope that when i’m 30 i won’t be such a fool, but we’ll see.

in any case, i don’t want to be the excuse anyone makes to hurt another person, no matter what i have said or complained about publicly in the past. a lot of people have done a lot of things to me that i didn’t like but how many of those things were honest mistakes, i’ll never know. how much of that was just the two of us not jiving as people as opposed to an active desire to be cruel, you know what i mean? how much of it was merely my interpretation of the world that influenced my understanding of the things that were happening to me because of my paranoia and my neurotic tendencies? how much of what i was interpreting was just carelessness or their own paranoid, neurotic tendencies? i know i’ve hurt people, too, and not on purpose. it’s not that i’m trying to shift responsibility from myself, but sometimes it’s a part of being alive and being who you are. people are complicated and shit happens and things you expect to work just don’t. you want to do things but you can’t, sometimes. you are the person you are and that doesn’t gel.

that said if you have ever listened to me about people, please note that i will never be offended or hurt if you went and did independent research, you know what i mean? in fact i want you to do that. if someone hurt me but you have a good relationship with them eventually i’m not going to be like “oh you’re a terrible person.��� like, some people are just not compatible and that’s okay. you don’t have to like everyone you meet and no one has to like you. being hurt by a person=/=this person is completely irredeemable forever and ever you know what i mean? i don’t know. i’m probably never going to enjoy being around this person again, but how should i know? maybe they grew up and changed too. maybe we can be chill.

in essence, though, what i’m saying is that most times i have found that my name is invoked not in my best interest or with any particular concern for my well-being but rather to further a goal in humiliating another person or proving they are a bad person. i don’t really want anyone to do that. if anyone does that, they’re being a dick probably. people can hurt you and not be bad people. i don’t know. use your brain, theres times when shit is legit bad and the people who do it are bad and there’s times when it’s not like that but people get hurt anyway. i dunno. call-out culture isn’t like, bad inherently or anything but it’s something that can absolutely used for evil and sometimes im just like... please look into things. believe people but realize that means believing yourself and other people as well.

anyway... my point is mostly-- and this is coming from a person who has been like specifically named a victim in callout post-problematic human-whatever the fuck you call it stuff; please look at the people you are being told are bad as people, with empathy. i mean this sincerely; nothing anyone has done to me has ever warranted the prying and boundary violation that people that have had to endure with my name invoked against them, even if mine was one of many. 

so i guess i was wrong, i know i said i don’t care but i do! i do care that people are being made to feel bad because they maybe hurt my feelings like honestly that’s not much of an excuse for hundreds of people to decide a person is a bad person idk. not to be cheesy but be excellent to each other idk. just... idk. forgive me my trespesses as i forgive those who trespass against me. love and peace and chicken grease and all that jazz.