Let me tell you about... Norm the Genie

@sicknastyspades

yep. i should really write up a If FOP Had Actual Arcs And Structure AU post, based on what it is already there. 'cause i think it can, with the available material, be made to make a lot of sense.

haha, i'm definitely very aware of that. when i was twelve and on tvtropes, in 2008, i had a ridiculously draco in leather pants interpretation of norm the genie and people were just like, "what the hell are you on?" (being twelve years old and not admitting it is probably the answer to that question, haha.)

by the time i was thirteen, i realized that and well, just stopped going on tvtropes 'cause embarassment. but i think i can go on tvtropes without cringing now, though the fop wmg page still has stuff on it that mortifies me. and i mean, i could delete my younger self's ramblings but... just avoiding looking at it works well enough. besides, maybe somebody secretly loves it for some weirdass reason. (it is not impossible, just improbable, haha.) i dunno. i don't think people on tumblr will be inclined or able to use it for a call-out or anything (then again, tumblr is tumblr), so yeah... the only harm is to my pride, haha.

hmm... i think there's only one other example of an adult former fairy godkid in the show, megan bacon from the episode the past and the furious. who becomes a bacon-themed villain who wants revenge on cosmo and wanda in a canon alternate universe, and founds the cake and bacon in the normal canon universe. and yeah, she has much less depth than crocker does, i think. and only appeared in one ep.

and yep. more than enough, looking from practically any angle.

haha, maybe if fop got a reboot, in like 2050 or something, when it is thought of an Old Classic Cartoon. till then, probably not very likely to happen but... that's part of what fanfic is for. :D

 

You should totally write that AU. I have a huge aversion to shows that use the reset button (I will almost, but not quite, literally foam at the mouth if a series I'm watching pretends that a previous episode didn't happen) but reading this thread has made me interested enough that I'd read your FOP AU even though I haven't watched the show.

 

@Elaienar thanks for the encouragement! i'm really flattered that you think i'm good at explaining fop!

i was just thinking about doing the au as an outline - 'cause it would sure be long and i've only just started thinking about it, haha - but yeah, i could probably do it as a proper story as well. :D

 

@unknownanonymous Seconding that you should write that au! You've got me curious about what an actually-plotty FOP would look like. (I mean, people write crackfic for serious shows all the time, so I guess seriousfic for a crack show would be the logical reversal there? idk, man.)

I figure that there's no point in judging people by stuff they said when they were kids. People'd have no trouble finding shitty things I said when I was twelve, but they'd find it a lot more difficult to argue that the opinions I had a decade ago are the same as the opinions I have now.
Here's a positive thought: people who dislike you will do anything they can to make you look bad. If that includes digging up opinions you had when you were twelve, they are clearly building on shaky foundations and can't find anything more worthwhile to attack you with. If the biggest complaint they can come up with is "when unknownanonymous was twelve they had Pro8lematic opinions about this cartoon character" then they are clearly idiots and you should consider the whole thing a huge success.
I mean, I don't know how positive that is but it is possibly a thing to consider.

And ah, so there definitely isn't a good track record for ex-godkids then.

 

@sicknastyspades yay! thanks!

i've thought about it and this plotty fop au certainly has lots of material to work from and the ability to put lots of the commonly criticized things about fop to good use. 'cause yeah, it's not like they can't ever make sense or whatever, it's that they don't make sense now, in the current show framework.

and seriousfics for fop are very common, though i'm pretty sure this particular au is pretty new. :D

that is a very good point. :D

though considering tumblr's definition of Pro8lematic, they could probably find stuff they would consider more damning than that, haha. like, once a hypothetical SJW Asshole With A Hate On For Me finds some of the shit that i say on kintsugi, well, they won't even bother looking up the stupid stuff i said when i was twelve - which doesn't all have a clear connection to my name 'cause a lot of the stuff i did was editing pages and i didn't actually have an account (though i was convinced i did for some reason) on tvtropes.

so yeah... i kinda don't really voice my opinions on tumblr anymore, haha.

yep. though i recall some celebrities and billionaires and stuff, like bill gates and tina turner, were shown to have fairy godparents in fop 'verse. then again, being a celeb or a billionaire is no guarantee of mental stability or happiness, so... might mean they're successful and rich, yeah, but... not much else.

 

@unknownanonymous Switching the discussion of Three Wishes/Not Allowed over here for the sake of not cluttering up the receipts thread, if that's okay?

And nah, it's chill if you like trashy romance for what it is. Hmm, I've got a book somewhere on that topic... ah, here we go, Beyond Heaving Bosoms by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan. Honestly cannot remember anything about it other than the choose-your-own-adventure romance novel parody at the end, but if you ever want to think more about the topic that might be an okay place to start? I don't know.

I reread what I'd already written on the topic of Three Wishes to refresh my memory, and huh seems like I did say I might have read it and not seen what was wrong. Not sure what's up with that, either my memory of the fic is now fuzzy and biased towards the fucked-up parts or I was using different definitions for the statement.
Ha, glad to see that queer representation in media has done its part for at least one person, though.

"It could be Worse so this Bad thing is actually Okay" is a trope I see show up bizarrely often in slash fic. I was reading an impressively terrible mpreg story a while ago (out of equal parts bile fascination and desperate naive hope that maybe the story will do a 180 and all these poor abused dudes will escape into the woods and be happy) and it did that a lot.

Spoiler: yeah, this is some really nasty stuff

The pregnancy-capable men were treated awfully: pressured to commit to a boyfriend, raped and blamed for it, beaten by their boyfriends and no-one can intervene, not allowed any control over their own diet, required to do everything their husband says right down to having long hair or wearing a Manskirt. And if they don't shut up and make their abusive rapist boyfriend a sandwich they'll get sent to a nonstop rape facility, thus proving that the current situation is totally Okay because it has the potential to be Worse.
That story also featured an Evil abusive rapist, and I am still trying to figure out how he differed from all the Good abusive rapists; current theory is that he didn't spend enough time praising his pet for being well-behaved, because literally that was the only way he differed.

 

@sicknastyspades of course it's okay! it bumps the thread, after all. :D

hmm... i think i might check it out, at least if it's on kobo.

yep, i basically have quite the Trashy Romance gland, which is funny since i don't think i've read that many actual published Romance Novels. (there's no real need when i can get that stuff for free, with my fave characters and settings and queerness and stuff, simply by going on the net.) it's what comes of me being very... not-aro, basically.

Spoiler: long thing on why three wishes worked queer representation-wise despite... the fucked up stuff

it's kinda like @seebs' story about how he realized that queer people were, well, people when some kinky queer guy on a forum mentioned that his boyfriend did something with the toilet roll wrong - except much less mundane.

'cause, like, one of the characters was norm the genie, my fave, and he, well, was characterized like norm and it really got into his head, what he was thinking. and the other one was jorgen von strangle, who while not my absolute fave, was also a character i was familiar with, who also wasn't radically changed into something unrecognizable by the Power Of Queerness. like, sure, he was still an asshole, though i don't think i realized it at the time, but he was an in character asshole. and yeah, the characters had emotional depth and stuff, were three-dimensional.

the setting and stuff were also true to fop, and yeah... jorgen and norm having sex wasn't even the only thing happening.

and well, the sex was portrayed as enjoyable for both of them (though yeah... it was hella unwanted at first) and nobody died or got any other horrible consequences for having it.

plus, the fic would probably have been about the same - like, some lines and stuff would change and the sex scenes would change but nothing really important, far as i can tell - if norm the genie was a cis woman and jorgen von strangle remained a cis man, if it was het, basically. the queerness wasn't a particularly Big Deal.

Spoiler: i'm with you there, dude

holy fuck! how the hell did the author not realize that they needed to put something like a Dead Dove: Do Not Eat on that?

like, sure, three wishes and not allowed are fucked up but... that's even more fucked up, frankly. i can't even picture it activating my Trashy Romance gland, though that might depend on stuff like the fandom it's in and whether the terribleness is just a thing of the plot or extends to the quality of the writing meant to convey that plot.

 

@unknownanonymous I honestly can't remember much about the book, just that I picked it up because I was following a discussion about romance tropes in fandom vs in propub media and someone mentioned it in the comments.

Ah, see, I'm aro as hell and I have basically no patience for relationship drama. Most of what I've learnt from romance fic is that 90% of your problems can be avoided with the magic of ~*~honesty~*~.
...not that I don't like shipping fic, but most of what I like/write is either "assholes being obnoxious to each other with lots of ust" or "middle-aged married couple being middle-aged and married". Sometimes I write both of those at once, and the result is my epic self-indulgent story about gay space mercenaries which I am never going to show anybody ever. In fact, forget I even mentioned that it exists.

Yeah, it's amazing the good which can come just from having queer people portrayed like people.
And Jorgen and Norm did seem in-character from what I remember of them during the show.

I honestly have no idea how much of that fic the author realised was fucked-up. Again, once something hits a certain fuckery threshold I just start assuming that well obviously the author knew it was dreadful and just failed the execution, but whenever I investigate that turns out to not be the case and the moral of the story is I need to stop having so much faith in humans as a species.
(It was original fic, it was very badly-written, and the worldbuilding was impressively nonsensical. I'd offer to link but I suspect most people do not share my morbid desire to rubberneck at train crashes.)

 

@sicknastyspades well, that's a pretty good lesson to learn from romance fics, frankly. :D

yep. it's a shame tumblr took "representation is important and good" and turned it into, well, something more tumblry. 'cause, like, it's a hella good principle. :D and was one of the things that made me think sjws knew what they were doing, before i saw how much they could fuck things - including that - up.

me neither. like, i'd expect the author would've started realizing things were fucked up in it pretty quickly but... apparently not.
maybe they had a kink and didn't know it wasn't shared by the entire human race...
'cause Fetish Fic can be pretty weird

Spoiler: weird hypothetical Fetish Fic scenario created to illustrate what i mean by that

(fic in which the world has, say, been arbitrarily designed so all women get milked like cows while being fucked by multiple men and everyone in the fic is just like, "okay then, this is normal" and characterization is pushed to the side, all 'cause the author likes that stuff; i'm sure i've seen stuff in that vein on weepingcock)

impressively nonsensical? now i'm curious! :D

 

I do actually enjoy reading terrible trainwreck fic, sooooooo...

 

@emythos Okay, you asked for it which means I can inflict it on you without feeling guilt!
The fic is here. Massive, massive tw for rape and abuse and probably everything else as well. If at any point you start feeling uncomfortable, stop immediately because it only gets worse as it goes on. I'll spoil you now so you don't make the same mistake I did, the resolution of the story is the characters becoming happy with their abusive rapist boyfriends.
Fun game to play: guess which abusive rapist is the Evil abusive rapist! No, it's not that one. Not that one either.

There's some stuff which suggests the author knew they were writing something awful, but I don't want to look into it just in case I'm wrong. Let me have this happy delusion, do not force me to face cold hard reality.
Either way, the shitty shitty worldbuilding is the true sin of this story.

Spoiler: bitching about worldbuilding is my hobby

Okay, so the basic gist of the world is that someone released a bioengineered plague and now all women are either dead or sterile but fortunately some men ("carriers") have their balls dissolve and grow a uterus.
So of course the government declares all the carrier men have to get pregnant for the good of humanity, so logical so far, but then they dump them all into institutions for the sake of making them undergo a cartoonishly exaggerated version of woman's issues instead of, say, using the magic of artificial insemination to make it slightly less terrible for everyone involved.
This is not a logical outgrowth of the base situation, it really really isn't. The background of the story is that all people regardless of gender got drafted into the millitary so it's not like there was already a gender imbalance which just got switched to the carrier men, and the story is taking place like five years after the mpreg thing started happening so this imbalance can't even have been slowly growing for a while and becoming more and more normal and accepted, it would have to have been invented out of whole cloth and then everyone just went along with it.
Outside of that it seems like the carriers are a relatively small proportion of the population so any sensible government would want protections there in place, they should have a zero-tolerance policy on carrier abuse. Even if they don't give a shit about the guys themselves, the whole justification for the set-up is it's vitally important that everyone maek babby so what if the carrier gets punched in the stomach whilst pregnant and loses the child? what then?? They might be okay with emotional/mental abuse, but the physical sort should be very aggressively Not Allowed At All.
So basically, you can only get the situation in the story if you're deliberately trying to make shit as awful for the carriers as you possibly can.

You know what, even if it is deliberately awful? still fucking shit. Why are you trying to explore women's issues by removing women completely, why are the issues you're dealing with so utterly exaggerated as to be functionally fucking useless as a reference or whatever the shit. Did you never hear of subtlety.

Beyond that, the homosexuality/homophobia in it is fucking weird. Like, almost every pairing in it is carrier/noncarrier, there's no awareness that the carriers might want to mack on each other rather than a guy who still has his balls, and the only noncarrier/noncarrier pairing has one half of the pair pretending to be a carrier to make it socially acceptable. An infertile carrier, btw, so it's not that children are the issue here. So it's clearly not that homophobia in general has totally vanished but it doesn't seem to exist either, nobody goes "eeew i'm don't want to fuck a GUY i'm not GAY", and again this is only like a decade or so post- most of the women on earth dying, prison gay might explain some of it but you're not going to get that sort of massive cultural shift in attitudes towards homosexuality in a decade.
Basically it all reads exactly the same as if it were 100% cishet men and women, only the author can't fap to that so they made everyone a guy and then forgot to explore the ramifications of the world they built in any kind of a meaningful or interesting way.

It's sort of like if the author read the Handmaid's Tale and was like "You know what this needs? MORE DICKS", only without any of the attributes which made Handmaid's Tale an interesting story.

 

@sicknastyspades I'm like four chapters in and this seems incredibly stupid. Like, mega stupid, and I haven't even gotten to the super bad parts.

 

@sicknastyspades whoa... i just read the entire main story + two of the side-stories and just... man... it is fucked up!

so fucking true
i'm still not entirely sure which one it is, though i'm assuming it was havar's,

Spoiler: if anyone cares about being spoiled for this birdcorpse

the one that died at the end, since, well, that Abusive Rapist obviously didn't get a happy ending like the rest of them

Spoiler: tw: undeath of the author (and death of your innocence)

just yeah... and the author - in the ao3 comments - spouts some bullshit about how people can be happy in the worst of circumstances and choosing a mate is overrated
also the author says that things got better and happy at the end, to which i'm... very skeptical, but they meant it to be fucked up at the start
and just... the summary... the ao3 summary says a fucking lot about how the author views it

i gave up on reading the sequel 'cause it has 51 chapters and yeah... that is just too long for my amount of interest in the series
way too long

 

Fuck, I didn't even get past the first six chapters. I gave up and went to go read terrible creepypasta fic.

 

@unknownanonymous Oh man, you read the side stories? You are way braver than I am.

And yeah, it was Havar's guy. You see what I was talking about with the inability to distinguish between him and all the non-evil rapists.

...oh god, seriously? Sure, people can find happiness in terrible circumstances, but that doesn't make the terrible circumstances okay. Abuse is always awful, no matter how desperately you try to construct some semblance of happiness.
I didn't even know it was on ao3. I might have to take a gander at the author's thought processes next time I want to remind myself what it feels like to have my soul shrivel in horror.

WAIT THIS IS THE NORM THE GENIE THREAD NOT THE SS YELLS ABOUT SHITTY FIC THREAD okay okay so I think I remember you mentioning you headcanon him as some kind of brainweird? I'd be interested in knowing what is it about him which pings you that way, if you could 'splain it.

@emythos I don't recall whether anything particularly horrific had happened by chapter six or whether it was still mired in tedious bullshit.
You know what that fic reminds me of? The King in Yellow. "The very banality and innocence of the first act only allowed the blow to fall afterward with more awful effect." It's boring as shit, which just makes the awful parts all the more awful.
...any recs for good creepypasta? I'm going to rec Anansi's Goatman Story because it is my most favourite and I rec it every time the topic comes up (I have no idea how popular it is outside of the tiny circle of people willing to listen to me babble).

 

@sicknastyspades nothing too terrible had happened other than some generic hints that everyone was dating abusive douchebags, but it was tedious and took up too many spoons I needed for homework.
That is too perfect.
I've always liked the Abandoned By Disney ones. Anansi's Goatman Story was great, I agree. Hm, the NES Godzilla one was fun.

 

@sicknastyspades re: norm the genie and brainweird

i headcanon norm the genie as having adhd and i honestly have no idea why it pings that way. he certainly doesn't present stereotypically for adhd (timmy and cosmo present much more steorotypically than he does, btw)- then again, neither do i, really, (or @seebs, based on what i see of him on the internet, anyway) and i (and @seebs) have an actual diagnosis so...

part of it might be that, well, as something on tvtropes said, he wasn't really that... serious... about his plans to get revenge on timmy and escape his lamp until fairy idol. like, he definitely cared about getting results - he just didn't really put his all into it. (see: him eventually abandoning crocker in back to the norm and letting timmy get a good lawyer that hated him in genie meanie mini moe.) which i think i've heard is kinda an adhd thing.

and there's how when he was with chester, he kept on jumping around to all those different fun places (hawaii, las vegas, mexico, a baseball game), never really focusing on any particular one. then again, that could just be him revelling in the freedom to be wherever the fuck he wants, not really something he had before.

also, this line from back to the norm: "the losing-his-patience kind." which again, could just be 'cause what crocker does would be frustrating and wearing on the patience, whether the person subjected to it had adhd or not.

and yeah, norm strikes me as constantly looking around for stuff that's More Interesting than whatever's currently going on - which again, might be 'cause his life is not exactly full of excitement, not 'cause of adhd or whatever.

dunno if he'd @seebs-style, forget he had a firecracker in his hand when he was holding it (i'm pretty sure cosmo has done the equivalent of that and i think timmy might...) but yeah...

also, the ep that norm was introduced in had a joke about timmy's adhd behaviour, so... maybe that influenced me.

i don't really know that much about adhd, despite having it (i always read more about autism and my family focused more on my autism in general than my adhd) and two brothers who have it, one which presents ridiculously steorotypically and one that presents more mildly, so yeah... i might be completely wrong and offensive...

Spoiler: tw: my lack of knowledge and... darker shit than that, like a lot darker

norm might also have ptsd or something like that, as a result of stuff like... you know, the Sultans in Three Wishes, which yeah, phenomenal cosmic power, no Rules and a sexy genie to go with it, someone's bound to have tried something like that. or made other possibly traumatic wishes. dunno much about that, really, since it's not a thing i have or know too much about, but... it seems like it could be... possible, maybe. figured i'd mention it, in the interests of being thorough.

and hmm, not sure about anything else. like, i can't really headcanon him as autistic, which feels weird, considering that he's my absolute fave character and all - i'd expect him to be more like me, haha - or with anxiety (then again, the ptsd thing above might contradict that). so yeah... i think that's all...

 

@unknownanonymous My understanding has always been that it's pretty common for people to present nonstereootypically? idk, I just know that "not a walking stereotype of the disorder" should not be used to discount things.
As it is it's sort of more interesting to me that Norm might have adhd than Cosmo or Timmy, because they're so super stereotypical about it but with Norm you've got to actually consider what he's doing and why.

Ooh, hoping for results but not giving it his all is an interesting character tidbit. I suppose if anyone ever planned something out seriously they could take over the fop'verse in a week, though.
And I guess hedonism might be an alternative explanation for a lot of his actions, but from your description he spends more effort on looking for the next big shiny than he does on enjoying it once he's got it. Like, depending on how fast he was jumping between all those places he might not have had time to actually enjoy/experience what's fun about them.

Spoiler

Well, maybe.
After a while the question starts to be "what are they getting out of this?"; okay, this guy's powerfully magic and magically forced to be obedient to your whims, I can get how that sort of proof of your power as demonstrated by your power over a powerful being might seem like a good idea, but on the other hand you could wish to be immortal god-emperor of the world with a harem so vast you could fuck a different beautiful woman every day of your life and still have a wish left over. Then again I'm generally in favour of not making people's lives awful, so I'm probably missing something here.
Also, hopefully they'd have some sense of self-preservation, in that Norm's shown himself capable of reinterpreting wishes in harmful ways so why the hell would you want to risk pissing him off. It might make more sense if Norm were a classical genie without the three-wish limit, so you could spend time setting up precautions like "I wish you would grant all my wishes to the spirit and the letter of the wish" and "I wish you would never act against me or cause harm to me".
Maybe that's why genies established the three-wish scam in the first place, because giving people truly unlimited power was far too prone to backfiring on the genies.
I'm not saying it couldn't happen, just that if it did whoever did it would be a moron and deserve whatever retribution they got.

(Now I'm wondering what it would take to stockholm a genie. Genies can use their magic without something having been explicitly wished for, so if you could get one to think you were doing him a favour and be pathetically grateful for whatever you threw his way, you could use that to get not only rule-free but wish-free magic.)

Anyway, even if we pretend rape would never be a consideration, Norm's still got more than enough justification for hella trauma and sweet ptsd. There's the solitary confinement, the forced slavery, the fact that someone's almost certainly wished for something with really awful consequences and Norm's been in the situation of being forced to grant it and powerless to prevent those consequences...

Well, no-one ever said your fave has to be a representation of you in order to be your fave.
I was thinking about this the other day, of the two characters I really identify with one's canon brainweird and the other's sort of implied to be, but neither of them is particularly spergy. Shared brainweird isn't really a prerequisite.
(Also, my favourite characters don't tend to be the ones I strongly indentify with! Except in the sense of usually being my self-indulgent supervillain power fantasies, I suppose.)

 

@sicknastyspades yep, it shouldn't be used to discount things, but... well, it is why this isn't exactly a headcanon i'm super sure of. like, it pinged me way back, when i was just starting in the fandom, and i just... while i kinda have a rationale for it, it took a while to pin down and even realize i had. also, tumblr sj folks can be real assholes when they have headcanons they relate to this type of stuff, and well, i didn't wanna be like that, you know?

yep. and it answers the "why the hell was the destroy-canada thing abandoned like that?" question quite nicely.

(haha, the pixies did a 37-year plan involving flappy bob in school's out: the musical and it failed, thanks to timmy, so... evidently planning something out seriously and giving it your all isn't all it takes to conquer the fopverse. and vicky managed to rule the world for 20 years, before timmy made it unhappen in the present, by going onto the history channel during Dictator Week in channel chasers and then doing... some sort of thing, which by contrast, was way less planned out than the pixies' failed plan.
so, what does it take to conquer the fopverse?
nobody knows!)

i'm not sure how fast norm was going between those places but i get the impression that once he was forced to leave a place to grant a wish for chester, he just... didn't bother to come back. (which probs makes: 1. doylist sense when it comes to making a cartoon interesting and varied and stuff for kids, and 2. watsonian sense 'cause it would essentially reveal that he was magical to the non-magical people at the place and he might miss important stuff while he was gone, making being there no longer as fun.)

Spoiler

that's a good point. to me, it's obvious 'cause i'm hella attracted to norm and if i was more of an asshole and had access to him, taking an unethical shortcut might be very appealing. probably more appealing than a harem, for me. (i mean, i have morals and stuff so it wouldn't appeal to Actual Me, except possibly in Kinky Not-Real Fantasyland, but... a more evil me could be down for it.)

well, in fairy idol, in what might be another instance of "hoping for results but not giving it his all," it is shown that norm the genie doesn't mess up wishes all the time (norm and the mayor, mayor makes three wishes: sandwich, ruling the world, unwishing the second wish when the people don't take nicely to the mayor's dictatorship)- or even most of the time. and not just, like, when he has a plan that depends on it (back to the norm and chester in fairy idol). so i get the impression that maybe... fearing norm's wrath might not occur to them, necessarily, since he's not exactly establishing it as a thing for them to worry about.

ooooh, that's interesting!
i wonder who, like, out of all the fop characters, could pull it off. i'm kinda imagining homestuck's cronus ampora doing it, haha, due to, well, how lately, Cronus Being His Asshole Self is rather highlighted. (like, i dunno if he could but cronus is really easy to put in the Generic Sleazy Character slot, so... unnecessary homestuck crossover it is till i get something better for the slot, haha.)

good point there. that stuff would be traumatic.

that's certainly true, though my recent onslaught of pearl feels has got me thinking about how weird it is that, well, norm is not that much like me, whereas pearl is... Very Me. and like, norm and pearl are Very Different as characters, not just when it comes to how much they're like me. so, it's kinda puzzling, honestly...

and yeah, norm is a bit of a power fantasy for me, vastderp "ain't taking no shit from you fuckers" style. 'cause, well, yeah, with tumblr and general anxiety and shit, i do have trouble standing up for what i believe in and keeping on doing my shit despite the haters and sjw wankers (never mind that they never even fucking touch me, just knowing they exist is enough to prevent me from voicing my opinions on tumblr and doing my art/writing/whatever). that norm refuses to let anyone control him.

i just really admire that quality of norm's and wish i had it. if that makes sense...

 

@unknownanonymous

Something which has occurred to me regarding FOP characters and brainweird is that it might be advantageous for magical creatures to not have a firm grasp on the consequences of their actions. From what I remember of the show there were very few characters who thought things through carefully, and in a world where you're obliged to use your reality-warping powers to satisfy childish whims a lack of thought for consequences seems like a pretty good way of not ending up totally fucked in the head.
The show's lolrandomness definitely looks like the sort of thing you'd get if you had a lot of people used to basing their decisions on momentary whims.

Spoiler

Hmm, point. I do tend to forget physical attraction as a possible motivation.
Uh, I'd sort of appreciate it if we could drop this topic for a while because I've started having badthoughts about how the situation would go down and the sort of things which would provoke it and I don't enjoy having those things in my head. I don't mind thinking about one specific fictional character doing things to another but thinking about it with Generic Nobody as the aggressor means I start to push up against the edges of thinking of myself doing those things when I try to figure out the motivations or logic behind it which is very dnw for me. I'm cool with picking the topic up again later but I'd like a breather from it.

That is also a point! I tend to figure that if someone's helping me with something I should do my best to not piss them off, but then I also tend to figure that pissing off powerful magic creatures in general is a bad plan.
Like, Norm's revenge plan involved sending people to Mars, he is not a guy I want to be mad at me.

I'm not convinced that Cronus could manage something so elaborate, he seems sort of shit at manipulation. Even in an afterlife full of horny teenagers he never got any, which suggests that his toxicity is so obvious that no-one's even willing to have a no-strings-attached fuck with him.
Of the three conversations he had, Meenah noped at his bullshit and Kankri steamrollered over it with bullshit of his own; the only person he actually managed to be awful at was Mituna, and I don't know whether that was actual manipulation or "you keep saying these awful things at me so i'll roll over and apologise in the hope you'll go away after you've got what you want".
Man, I really need to write Cro meta at some point.

I think it's normal to like very dissimilar characters? Like, admittesdly I usually latch onto whoever the most awful person in the cast is, but that gives me a list of faves ranging from sleazy greaser to dispassionate murderer to self-aggrandizing pompous jerkass to batshit insane right-wing vigilante to murdering asshole in a stupid purple cape (two of those). They don't have all that much in common.

It totally makes sense to like a character because they have traits you wish you shared.