It's pretty obvious how this works Nerdy kid going through a lot latches onto Miles because he's a smart guy and a "master strategist" born with a disability that makes the world despise him Sees him as a guide because of his ability to overcome self-pity and self-doubt
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And okay, yes, obviously This poor bastard who tried to kill Larry Linville was clearly crazy, and people who are in a delusional or dissociative state aren't inclined to do close reading of the text of a television show But of course DFW had to go and make it a deep thing
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I mean it is interesting isn't it This guy was obviously obsessed with M*A*S*H, arguably more than ANYONE has EVER been obsessed with M*A*S*H - he was going to KILL SOMEONE over M*A*S*H And yet his memory of the show was less accurate than almost anyone else's
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I know more about the actual character Frank Burns than this guy did and I only kind of liked the show, I certainly wasn't watching it over and over again all day while stalking one of the actors and making plans to drive to his house in Ojai with a gun
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DFW made it into this thing about how people who watch TV the most aren't even really watching TV, that the real addicts are just letting TV blur seamlessly with their own thoughts Old TV shows made to be watched while doing laundry are good for that, they just kind of seep in
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Obviously what was going on was this guy had an ongoing problem with persecutory delusions, a free-floating Satan figure in his head, just like the "Snapewives" had this free-floating image of an ideal bad boy husband
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And the character of Frank Burns became an anchor point for the delusion Not because the writers of M*A*S*H were on this guy's wavelength at all, not because the character is actually anything like the Devil in his head But Burns was just there, he was convenient
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He does a lot of "plotting" and "scheming" in the show and if your mind is fixated on the idea of someone plotting and scheming against you, well that's all it takes That and M*A*S*H just being on TV all the time in the 80s and 90s in long syndicated blocks
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Before you know it you're in your car driving to California with the intent to murder Larry Linville over a decade after his retirement in the vain belief it will solve all the problems in the world Or you're making your husband be astrally possessed by Snape or whatever
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It's just funny and depressing, how powerfully our minds bend and distort things to turn them into whatever we need them to be Like I'm absolutely certain this is how religion works and if there ever was a real Jesus he'd be unrecognizable to the one most Christians know
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How we do this to *real people*, how micro-celebrities beset by parasocial relationships talk about the surreal experience of people acting like they know them, having had hundreds of imaginary conversations in their head with someone who sounds nothing like them
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This is ultimately what Freudian psychology is about, telling you the reason your relationships end up dysfunctional and falling apart is you're not really talking to the person in front of you but someone else who hurt you long ago
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It just leads you to a kind of despair Like obviously the Snapewives of the world are worse than most of us but do any of us *really* see the people around us for who they are? Instead of populating the world with figments of our own mind superimposed on them?
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People slam critics they don't like for "talking about your own issues instead of just telling us about the movie" But aside from bland shitty "This movie was 96 minutes long and had 13 explosions" style "objective" reviews, don't all reviews do that
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I dunno, it's bleak, challenging stuff to think about This is why DDLC struck me as so dark and depressing, being a deconstruction of the whole anime waifu phenomenon, turning it around on you
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The idea of Monika thinking of herself as "in love with you" and "in a relationship with you" even though she knows NOTHING AT ALL ABOUT YOU because you literally have no way of communicating with her She just sits there talking to the air and imagining your response
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I'm doing this right now, aren't I? I'M talking to myself in public and, even though there's a few specific real people I think might read this and react to it, am mostly talking to a generic imaginary reader on whom I'm projecting qualities about myself
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