Let me tell you about... Norm the Genie

@albedo yay! you're back! and you still care about my norm the genie thread! :D

well, crocker has an obsession with fairies, first off. like, he goes on about fairies more than i go on about norm the genie. and he spazzes (sorry brits and such, that's the canonically used word for it) out about them when he says this exact phrase, "FAIRY GODPARENTS!" literally every time he says that phrase, btw. and he is canonically called "crazy," "insane" and stuff a lot, so the characters in the fop universe don't think he's their normal level of randomness. in addition, he was shown becoming this particular type of brainweird when jorgen wiped his memories of his fairies when he was ten in the secret origin of denzel crocker. so, it is very much established as being his own thing and a brainweird thing.

yep, social pressure is indeed a possible thing. though i was wondering if the ease of transitioning would cause there not to be a taboo, and thus, no social pressure. then again, as your example shows, social pressure to remain what one was assigned can come from something other than that taboo. like, people can get really attached to other people's genders and their junk.

oh, i know. before i was a teenager, i felt like i just didn't get what empathy was.

 

@unknownanonymous Yep. :) I still care! I'm just a slowpoke.

Huh. Interesting. That was what I thought, but I do wonder what kind of brainweirds that sort of obsession would correlate with. I mean... I could definitely see him as spergy, honestly, but that doesn't fully explain the 'spazzy' behavior. Also, poor Crocker.

And yeah. Like, wasn't Cosmo's mother awfully controlling? I seem to remember this...

Yeah. Likewise; I was so superior about being Above all the silly behavior other people had! Then I realized that being silly could be fun. Cognitive empathy is hard. :P

 

@albedo :D

as i said before, i have no idea. i recall bipolar and tourettes being suggested, and i've considered sperging. then again, maybe it's a totally unique memory wipe-induced brainweird. or he's one of those people with tons of different ones - which i seem to be discovering i might be, haha. and yeah, poor crocker. :( he definitely deserves some love - which is part of the appeal of norm/crocker, how they both need to be loved like that and are in generally bad situations.

yep. mama cosma was. it was, like, the focus of all the episodes she was the villain in. she couldn't bear cosmo getting married to wanda, simply 'cause that took him out of her control and away from her.

i might've had a bit of that phase too. thought i was so much smarter than everyone else.

 

Interesting. It reads to me more like ... something more pervasive. I mean, bipolar and tourettes seem like diagnoses based on symptoms, not causes - he's 'spazzy' and dramatic and yells a lot, but they don't address the deeper emotional level. Makes me wonder about something like BPD-fleas, actually. Coming from a profoundly invalidating environment, in which he was ignored and miserable and picked on, and his mother was primarily interested in her own pursuits while ignoring him, he's fixated on the one thing that he believes will magically fix all his problems, or at least prove that they aren't his fault.

Yeah, yeesh, so many villainous woobies in this show.

Yeah. I could see someone like Cosmo having very strong personal social pressure to not transition, if he were a trans woman, for instance. (He doesn't necessarily read to me as such, just good example.)

Given the general appearances of most fairy characters, it does also seem like gender norms are fairly strongly in play, so nb folks might have some difficulty. I dunno though.

Yeaaaaah. That one phase where you're THE MOST ADULT.

 

@albedo that's exactly why those two didn't feel right. like, he wasn't saying fairies like that 'cause he was compelled to say "fairies," he was saying it 'cause of how intensely obsessed he's with them and how much they mean to him,

and yeah, that makes sense - especially since i headcanon that crocker, even if he wasn't memory wiped by jorgen, would end up brainweird in some way. maybe not exactly the same way but it's hard to imagine him not being brainweird. and his thing when he was a kid, using all his wishes to be really generous and help people and all that seems like something that could come out of a need for validation. which makes him losing his fairies on Denzel Crocker Day (march 15) even more tragic.

Most Adult. and so much more confident than i am now. sometimes i miss it. why can't i be confident and uncaring and convinced my shit is made of gold again? that felt really nice, even if i was a bit confused back then. *sigh* can't win for losing, can't lose for winning.

 

so yeah, this gave me crocker feels, thus me putting it on the thread. yeah... hope it's not too weird... @jacktrash @seebs

like, it's obviously rather different (crocker believes in fairies, which are actually real in the fop universe, and doesn't believe in them being benevolent or get really that type of comfort from them) but still, feels... maybe i'm thinking about how this way of approaching it might be more healthy and happy-making for him and it's making me sad about how things worked out for him.

anyway, sorry @jacktrash for making your thing about fairly oddparents, of all things!

 

@unknownanonymous Yeah, exactly. I'm not totally happy with the BPD-fleas explanation, but I think that's a lot closer than something like Tourette's. And yeah, given that it sounds like his childhood was pretty miserable anyway, and he spent all his time trying to make other people happy so that they would admire him, it seems highly probable that he was brainweird already. That kind of lack of ego / 'do things for others so they'll like you' is not usual in kids. Which you can actually see in Timmy - he doesn't really have much cognitive empathy yet, which is normal for a child of his age.

I think it comes back after a while, if it helps. I feel a lot more confident than I did when I was in college; I'm more used to not knowing what I'm doing all the time, and I've been faking Adulting for long enough to feel pretty okay about it.

Welp. Poor art teacher. But yeah, poor Crocker; the kind of obsession he exhibits is really not healthy. And I don't think even he knows what his actual endgame is - what exactly he wants to do or gain if he actually does prove fairies' existence.

 

@albedo yep. it isn't really something that most kids do - certainly not something i did when i was that age. like, when i was ten, i did not get altruism at all. and thus timmy was very easy to identify with, when it came to empathy and selfishness and stuff. some people thought the show went overboard with it, but it made sense to mem personally.

i sure hope it does. i sure hope.

well, he says his endgame is ruling the world but as the seasons have progressed, he's started to drift away from that goal, stopped mentioning it as much, i think. and yeah, became less effective at it. so, like, yeah, maybe he thought he knew but as he faced failure after failure, he realized that he really didn't... something like that.

 

Oh man I haven't seen Fairly Oddparents in ages... mostly because I rather dislike a lot of the episodes coming out recently. But Norm the genie was always pretty fun - all trickstery and stuff.

Oh by the way

I think it's mentioned in the episode Poof was born in that if he's raised by pixies (or anti-fairies) then he'll become like them? Which suggests that it is cultural to some extent.

Also, I saw some earlier episodes of the show a while back, and it seems like a big part of Cosmo and Wanda's characters that is just flatout dropped later is that they are extremely literal. Like, when Timmy wishes for a shrinking suit they make it so the suit ONLY shrinks.

 

@KarrinBlue oh yes! i remember that. never really took it seriously though, 'cause of the huge emphasis on Evil Evil! like, they weren't really speculating on any traits other than that, and finished up both the Pixie and the Anti-Fairy!Poof simulations with them destroying the world or something. but yeah, that's a good point.

yep. that was. no idea why they'd have dropped that.

 

@unknownanonymous Sorry I didn't respond to this! I'm very forgetful about conversations.

My issue with Timmy was always less that he made stupid wishes and more that he never showed any curiosity about his world. Like, so you can't make any breakfast-related wishes after a certain time? How does that work? If I eat breakfast at all it's usually toast, so does that mean I am never allowed to make toast-related wishes at any other point during the day? I have never in my life eaten a fried breakfast for breakfast but I like fried breakfast for dinner, so what does that count as? Do the fairies just have a list of "breakfast foods" which is completely unrelated to whether I'd actually eat that thing for breakfast or not (and how do they define what counts as Objectively Breakfast?)? Or does intent matter, so I can only wish for toast for the purpose of breakfast during designated breakfast times but I'm still allowed to wish for non-breakfast toast during the other times?
These are the things I think about and I cannot stop thinking about them. They Bother me.

And yeah, I more-or-less figured the Tooth Fairy was supposed to be the villain, but I'm big on alternative character interpretation. I was genuinely confused about the whole "Jorgen makes multiple wishes which involve hurting Norm and ignoring his very clear No, Fuck Off response then insists he has no plans to hurt Norm" thing, though, because it's such a bizarre chain of events. I was just like man, poor Norm, how shitty has his life been that "don't worry I will make sure this rape is fun for you" is somehow an improvement? Guy needs a blanket and some hot chocolate and to be taken away from anyone who wants him to do things.

 

@sicknastyspades so, should i try harder to remind you or something?

wow... i always thought that was a "jorgen just wants to assert control" rule (rather like the "no tom cruise" and "no electric car" ones) but... man, i never really thought about in that depth before. and hmmm, both those options make sense. with the way the fop 'verse works, if i had to choose one, it'd be the List of Objectively Breakfast Food.

also, when you put it like that, it is confusing. the way i interpreted it was something like, well, do you recall when norm said that he didn't want jorgen to break any bones? that and generally how the sultans used stuff like whips? and that norm mentioned that death was a possibility, the way jorgen was originally going about it?

basically, jorgen won't hurt norm's body, won't break anything. that's a big part of what he meant.

also, i figure that it took a while for jorgen's empathy to kick in. which would be in character for him, i think. like, he was doing really fucked up things and then suddenly he looked at norm, saw how he was feeling, and was like, "ah shit! what the fuck am i even doing?"

so yeah... he then discovered what was wrong and well, tried (what he thought, anyway) was his best to make it better.

goddammit i hope i didn't fuck up here and become totes Problematic.

yep. norm sure does. he sure does. :(

 

@unknownanonymous Yeah, feel free to ping me if the lack of response is bothering you. I might take a while to reply, but if it's been more than a couple days or so it probably slipped my mind.

It might well just be a control issue, but there'd presumably be some logic to it unless Jorgen is personally overseeing every single food-related wish and deciding whether or not it counts as breakfast. ...which he might well be, I have no idea how far he goes with his dictatorial whims.
But with that taken into account, the most likely option is he wrote a list of breakfast foods and banned them. Which, depending on what he considers a "breakfast food", might well give you a lot of leeway... unless he's updating the list as time goes on, which immediately suggests a breakfast arms race where you search out ever more obscure breakfast foods and eat them for as long as you can before he catches on and bans them, prompting further search.

I forgot the specific sequence of events there but I just went back and reread that scene and wow that was even more depressing than I remembered. Norm's saying "I give up, my consent has literally never mattered before so I don't know why I'm expecting it to matter now, just do me a favour and don't cause massive physical damage" and Jorgen's responding to the last part like it was the only complaint there.
That's... almost impressive. Like, it seems fairly in-character for what I remember of the guy, but it's quite spectacular either way.

Hm, that almost works as an explanation, but he doesn't react like I'd expect from someone having the wow-i-done-fucked-up epiphany. Like, if you realise someone is not okay with having sex with you, the bare minimum you should do is stop trying to have sex with them.

It's interesting to think that he might genuinely be trying to make it better by promising "no physical damage" whilst completely failing to grok the real issue.
Norm responding as though that does somehow make the situation better just underscores how utterly fucked-up his life must have been. Like, hey, sex slavery sucks, but at least this one's a cushy gig right?
(Related: The most fascinating villains are always the ones who don't understand that they're villains; the guy who calls himself Evilface von Babymurder is always going to be less compelling to me than the guy who stands there looking puzzled and saying "but I seriously don't get it, what's so wrong with murdering babies?".)

And nah, don't worry about being Pro8lematic. I'm not in the habit of kicking people out the treehouse for thoughtcrime. It's fine if you like the story for what it is; I think the only issue would be if you didn't understand why other people might have a problem with it.
(Which, for the record, would be less in the way of Problematic GTFO Out The Treehouse and more in the way of I Am Worried About You Let Me Find You Some Nice Friendly Articles About Healthy Relationships.)

 

@sicknastyspades maybe jorgen has a very broad idea of control when it comes to da rules. like, even if he's not personally enforcing them every time (the wands automatically farting is doing that most of the time, he comes in for major stuff like taking people's fairies), it still counts, as long as he puts da rule in.

and haha, yes, breakfast arms race! which jorgen'd get very into, even as the rest of fairy world is like, "why, dude? why?" and wondering how the heck he became their leader, haha.

now i think about it, it sure is. it sure is. i'm amazed that it never fully struck me before, actually.

and yep, him not grokking the real issue is exactly what i was getting at. 'cause yeah, that's very in character for jorgen. haha, in teeth for two, for example, jorgen was genuinely confused by the idea that punching his friends would make them Not His Friends. which doesn't seem like rocket science, yeah? but for jorgen, it might as well be. also, in that ep, the tooth fairy says something along the lines of "please tell me that i didn't just see you trying to pull out timmy's teeth" and guess how jorgen responds?
something along the lines of "you didn't just see me trying to pull out timmy's teeth" and then a really bad lie about "playing neck-snap with timmy turner." high levels of Just Does Not Get It, basically.
like, he definitely has some kind of brainweird going on. rather like equius, kinda, but maybe a bit more extreme... i dunno.

norm's life is mega-fucked up and that sure gives me feels. like, man, so many feels... norm...

yeah, i expected you wouldn't be hard on me. this is kintsugi, not tumblr, after all. but the tumblr trauma remains, alas.

 

@unknownanonymous Is there any canon explanation for how the hell Jorgen got his job? Because if not I'm just going with fairies decide it via armwrestling contest or something.
I guess that's the sort of problem which is inevitably going to crop up if you try to make sense of a lolrandom kids' show, though.

Ah, that's interesting. I was mostly working under the assumption that he was one of those people who was very slow to make mental adjustments or comprehend anything more subtle than a sledgehammer to the face, but now I see I should have been further down the extreme end of the scale. Which, again, lolrandom kids' show, I have no idea why I wasn't already thinking of extreme characterisation as the default.
So, basically the last guy you'd want in charge of someone magically forced into slavery, then. (I'm sort of... really struggling to understand how someone could write that fic and not intend it to be at least a little fucked-up, but then I'm pretty sure there was a time in my life when I could have read that fic and not realised what was wrong with it. I'm not always great at seperating "things I know" from "things which are common knowledge", is the problem there.)
...hm. I don't think it's impossible to write romance-fic-with-no-abusive-undertones featuring that sort of character, but their character arc would have to be about them learning to consider people and make compromises.

Genie lives tend to be tragic and fucked-up as a default, yeah. They have to be superlatively awful people for me to interpret them as anything other than "person forced into a shitty situation lashing out in any way they can".
I mean, it shouldn't even be hard to free a genie! Even if you're worried about them maybe hurting people in revenge for their confinement, "I wish you would respond to all my questions honestly and without deceit" then ask questions like "are you planning to hurt people of I let you out?". A sufficiently cunning genie would probably be able to word things to to allow for deceit through omission or misinterpretation, but hopefully it wouldn't be too hard to tell the difference between person wording things carefully because they want to trick you vs person being completely upfront because they just want freedom. Then wish them free! It is so simple and yet I wonder why so few people do it.

Tumblr's a pretty horribly screwed-up environment, yeah. I keep wanting to look up exactly how it managed to get so toxic because that sounds like it would be a fascinating story, but I keep distracting myself. So many things I wanna research, so little effort I'm actually willing to devote to it.

 

@sicknastyspades not really. i think it part of it is that he is a von strangle - only fairies in that family can control da rules, which was an important plot point in the ep cosmo rules. and yeah, arm wrestling contest... not that far off from how fairies actually decide things...

yep, basically that. and hmmm, yeah, from some of the parts, i get the impression that it wasn't intended to come off as totally Not Fucked Up. like, when norm the genie stands up for binky, their convo in which norm is like "do we even have anything?", "romance and slavery don't mix", "you just called me a second ago"...

anyway, i kinda get the impression that it might be attempting to do that character arc. or that the character arc could naturally happen in it. i mean, i'll never know but it strikes me as possible. like, as it progressed, jorgen did seem to respect norm more and care about him more. and norm doesn't seem to stand for him being a Complete Asshole.

also, the tooth fairy thing could totally become a moment of revelation for jorgen, regardless of how it was meant. like, "oh! this is how i appeared to her. no wonder she left."

yeah. though for some reason, most of my sympathy for genies is directed just at this one guy so... i don't really end up thinking about other ones, expect as the General Principle Applies Here too. and i've never really gotten how aladdin's genie managed to be so nice. i mean, maybe it's 'cause of the diamond-in-the-rough thing, that he is able to trust that he won't end up with a jerk but still...

that is a good question. maybe it's just not that simple for people. like, they really want their wishes. or maybe conceptualize genies as fantasy creatures, not People With Personhood, and thus... don't think to treat them the way they'd treat humans. maybe they get so put off by the genie being a jerk or worried about them hurting people that they just don't think of what they could do about that...

haha, me too. maybe if people knew how it got so toxic, they could make it less toxic. that and it's fascinating. like, all the stuff on fandomwank is tame compared to what i encounter in one random day on tumblr.

 

*bumps my own thread 'cause i care a lot about it*

 

@unknownanonymous It's a hereditary post? Of course it's hereditary, why am I even surprised about that. Is there at least someone capable of taking the post away from him should he go mad with power, or can he just randomly declare whatever and nobody can stop him?

Mm. I mean, I guess it's nice that as the fic went on the relationship got slightly less absolutely terrifying, but it was still built on a foundation of No Good Things.
(I mean, consider this: One of Jorgen's wishes was that Norm would do everything he said. That means he could say, for instance, "want this relationship", and Norm would have no choice in the matter.
That wish in particular really skeeved me out because it was so... unnecessary? Like, Jorgen can already make Norm do whatever he wants just by wishing for it, and now that there's not even the chance of him forgetting how many wishes he has and accidentally releasing Norm that way it really rubs salt in the imbalance of power.)

I spend a lot of time thinking about stories and tropes in general, and trying to figure out why they're usually written one way and not the other, or which ones match up with which ideas... you can often find patterns if you look right.
But I mean, something I see repeated a lot is the idea that it's wrong for genies to resent their position. Like, the genie in Aladdin was sad about being trapped, but he wasn't angry about it and he was helpful instead of trying to fight back, because he was supposed to be a protagonist. But then you get the other genies, like Norm, who are angry and resentful and do try to hit back in whatever ways they can manage, and they're antagonists because morality in fiction is often very protagonist-centered.
And yeah, I do think a lot of it comes from not thinking of genies as people with their own wants and motivations. If the genie helps the protagonist they're good, if the genie hinders the protagonist they're bad, and nobody stops to think that maybe the asshole genie doesn't enjoy slavery any more than the nice one.
There are almost certainly good stories about genies out there, but because I don't tend to deliberately search out stories about genies what I'm seeing is mostly just that one thoughtless attitude.

 

@sicknastyspades i don't think there's anyone who can take it away, yeah. maybe the fairy council but... i dunno. i don't think it was ever taken away on the show - i mean, the pixies did take over fairy world but that was different.

that's a good point. and once again, that comes from jorgen's obsession with having control. it's a big thing with him and definitely something he'll need to learn to overcome or at least restrain better. or turn into just a kink, not a life-ruling thing. 'cause yeah, the way he handles it, it's definitely dysfunctional. so yeah, it was unnecessary and increased the power differential and also... very jorgen von strangle of him. sure, he already had control but... he still wanted extra. that's the type of guy he is.

(also, re: foundation of No Good Things, there is a line in the story [said by norm] that says pretty much exactly that, haha. which may or not help, but is part of why i believe the relationship could improve and is moving towards that. 'cause they - or at least norm - know it's fucked up and try to remedy that. yeah...)

yeah, he could do that. but... he didn't. why? i dunno but he didn't. maybe he just wasn't that worried about what norm thought, maybe he assumed norm naturally would want him despite what the genie was saying, maybe he was just used to getting what he wanted from people that didn't want to do it, maybe it was just about sex, maybe it was him being oblivious... i dunno and the possible reasons why he didn't are still quite fucked up.

and yep, that idea is totally common. and it makes aladdin kinda weird to watch - like, really, genie, slavery doesn't anger you at all? do you have the patience of a saint?

 

@unknownanonymous Vote the pixies for being in charge of fairyland 2k16! They'll tie everything up with senseless bureaucratic bullshit, but at least they'll pretend to be reasonable about it.

...oh dear. See, now that you've mentioned kink I'm thinking about this thing I read a while ago about the stereotype in the irl bdsm community being about how the person in a position of power/control in their daily life is usually the one to sub in bed and now I'm thinking about Jorgen turning out to be a massive sub and wow, no, stop thinking about this right now self, I did not ask for this I do not want those images in my brain :c