#this isn’t an art piece… is it ok to tag with dhmis week

[gnomeniche]

it’s dhmis week day 4 which means i get to talk about dhmis s1e4 friendship and how interesting it is

so a lot of people’s analytical opinion about friendship has been “it’s funny but i don’t know if it really has that much to dig into, lore-wise or thematically”. i disagree. if you will indulge me, i will present the reasons that i find this episode persistently interesting in an easily digestible numbered list.

warren’s incompetence reveals more blatantly that the world’s reality can be and is manipulated by the teachers. we had hints of this before, but the shifts in reality were well-hidden with elements like the jobs song, which established a “teleporting” stylization to drop them into the factory, or the trip to the family house being built into the episode’s storyline. you could plausibly argue that maybe their world is just like this and nobody’s actually manipulating anything. however, warren dispenses with any kind of subtlety and straight-up pauses the show. because he’s bad at what he does! this is the episode that comes immediately before the two final episodes, which make the manipulation of the world explicit, so you could take this as setup for the idea’s full reveal.

the question of what the other two actually said to yellow guy: did they insult him? the bleeping happens immediately before warren starts his spiel. since the episode is riffing on the after-school bullying special, that is the kind of moment that would be built into a storyline as a segue for that kind of moral, and the recurring element of traditional kids’ show storylines with nice, pat morals being forced on the characters leads toward the bleeping possibly being a mislead. combined with the blatant world manipulation i discussed, the bleeping could have been added by warren to imply something harsher than they actually said. even the lead-in of “it’s not your fault. you’re just a—“ could plausibly set up a non-insulting phrase; part of the humor of the sudden bleep is derived from the expectation that it would be some kind of reassurance. still, they COULD have genuinely insulted him, but they just as possibly could have not. this ambiguity is compounded by…

the way the “being a good friend” message slips away to reveal a message of “insecurities can ruin your relationships” and how neither of them seems fully accurate: what is even up with the message? it starts with warren’s poorly delivered anti-bullying program, but it slowly transforms into being about how insecurities can get the better of you. warren styles himself as a teacher, but at some point, he becomes an embodiment of and metaphor for insecurity. with this in mind, if warren’s influence caused the bleeping, it becomes even more plausible that the other two did not necessarily insult yellow guy. was his impression that they insulted him really just a “worm in his brain,” an insecurity that he thinks his friends hate him manifested literally in the episode plot? HOWEVER. IT IS STILL MORE COMPLICATED, EVIDENCED BY…

the fact that his friends ACTUALLY do not respect him: there is repeated evidence in the rest of the show that his friends DON’T see him as an equal! i do believe that they genuinely do not hate him, but they certainly do not always treat him well either. red guy and duck don’t always respect each other, but both of them seem to see yellow guy as being on a slightly lower level than the two of them, and they treat him accordingly. he may have had a worm in his brain, but in the plot of the episode, they were the ones who encouraged warren to get into his brain, and they had to fix their fuckup. they may or may not have insulted him in the bleeped instance, but either way, they do not think about the behavior that could have led him to believe they would. the ending message of “your friends love you; don’t let your insecurities get the better of you” is then misleading; they are making it all about his insecurities and not about their behavior. sure, they love him. sure, insecurities can ruin your relationships. but neither of those facts negates that even when both are true, there can still be genuine problems within a friendship that need resolving. and boy do these guys have friendship problems.

the ending fight: peak television. funniest moment in the show. but also it adds to the weird ambiguity of it all. what DOES friendship even mean here? in a world like this, where nothing is ever really true and the enforced narrative is you and not you at the same time? can you ever really understand each other? or maybe it just means that sometimes you do need to call your friend on being a dick for no reason instead of trying to be the bigger person. and sometimes that means hitting him with a glass bottle and a katana and a gatling gun and also a chainsaw. who even knows

anyway that’s all the reasons i find dhmis s1e4 friendship interesting. and also it’s just really funny? the jokes do not stop coming and there’s a bunch of really subtle tiny gags that are just delightful. dhmis is always making you feel several levels of weird complicated emotions at once and this episode really does that to me. all of the lessons it gives have Something within them or in the surrounding context that complicates them or throws them into question. friendship is not the most emotionally devastating episode by a LONG shot (the one-two punch of transport and electricity kills me instantly every time i rewatch), but it is the one with the most weird shit that i keep trying to puzzle out.