#completely uncritically bc i haven’t seen it in years i liked it a lot as a kid

[chamomile-g-tea]

An assumption: your favorite version of Alice in Wonderland is the 1960s Disney version

i actually got attached to the live action one when i was younger 😭 it was so bizarre and she got to do Violence! and there were dragons!

[jonathanrook]

legally i have to give you intern 2

em you have awoken an ungodly beast inside me so i need to warn everyone that this post is. incomprehensible. but so is mymusic so i guess we're all used to it.

How I feel about this character:

i watched mymusic as it was airing/running/coming out specifically bc i'm a jack stannie, and as a kid melvin was my second favorite character (w scene being in first, obvs) for mostly that reason. he basically hovered around this ranking until my most recent rewatch in the summer of 2020, which was actually spurred by some events in my personal life that vaguely reminded me of scene's season two arc w jeff, and i thought it'd been a funny/nostalgic way to get my mind off things.

(i want to side note here that -- i know you didn't ask, but -- i love jeff. i have since i was a kid. like, obviously not as a person but i think he's honestly the best written character in the series, w indie close in second. idk what it says about the f*nes that their most interesting and well rounded characters are the villains, but i digress. to this day i'm salty that jeff never got added to the theme song and wasn't really included in promotional merch.)

however, in said rewatch, certain things about how he was written started to really get under my skin, and certain moments in particular have really stuck out to me in a negative way. like, for the entirety of season one and a good chunk of season two he's one person, and then he leaves mymusic and we have an entirely different person, but not in a nuanced character building sort of way.

i've said a few of these points before but i'll repeat them here regardless. at the risk of sounding like i've put on a tin-foil hat, it's my sneaking suspicion that scindie was supposed to be endgame, but since fan reception to it was pretty neutral, and scenechart stans were, at the very least, more vocal, changes were made to the intended finale, which is why in the last scene he's basically just. indie. like, if everything about the show was exactly the same but indie was the one who had ended up w scene in the end that would have made so much more sense since a) scene had a crush on indie that he/everyone knew about and b) indie was kind of a dick despite the half-assed attempts at redemption, so both combined make it slightly less weird/out-of-nowhere that he kisses her w/o her consent (since, even though like. implied consent is not real at worst and a fuzzy subject at best but you could argue that scene would want indie to kiss her); and this isn't even taking into consideration that c) melvin is heavily queer-coded in both seasons, with his friendship with nerdcore being, dare i say, homoerotic at times, and his arc about leaving the company and changing his name mirroring nerdcore's almost perfectly (with nerdcore being a character who b*nny [at least] has all but confirmed is actually gay).

i've also been on the fence about melvin's behavior in that final scene making more sense for indie's character being an intentional decision as a way of shoe-horning in a theme about the lasting effects of abuse/cycles of abuse/the corruption of power but i also don't think the f*nes are smart enough for that. however, for the sake of defending my straw theory, i also point to the scene where indie comes to visit the acid factory after melvin told him to shut up, and we see melvin use reggie as a foot-stool, going as far as to say that it feels good to do so (which, in all honesty, i think is a bit that was entirely improvised, since the f*nes were "notorious for never saying cut" [paraphrased from a bts video], but work w me here). he's also given a seltzer mug that perfectly resembles indie's kombucha mug. in these moment melvin is directly emulating the behavior of his previous abuser, purposefully or not, literal moments after being promoted to an equal position of authority, which was totally just included as a joke, but could also be argued is meant to show that he's becoming indie; or, if we acknowledge that the f*nes have no fucking clue what they're doing and were just directing like chickens with their heads cut off, it at least shows that melvin's new position of power is leading him to understand where indie was coming from, which is supported by their conversation in the finale.

the following contains a couple brief mentions of irl sexual assault so if that's something you'd like to avoid skip to the next section!

HOWEVER, that alone isn't what i have a problem with, since i think melvin is completely justified in being a dick to indie (and also reggie enthusiastically consents to being used as an ottoman so good for him i guess). the issue comes completely in how he treats scene in the scenes where the f*nes clearly thought what they were writing was super romantic. like, the fact that the only thing he's got hung on his cubicle wall is a single picture of scene taken from the fucking opening credits (like. how hard would it have been to have. literally any other photo[s] esp since there's an abundance of cute bts pics of the cast in costume that could have been put there) and him scrolling through her twitter at work really creep me out (and at the risk of oversharing the weird, like, social media stalking angle really fucks w me bc that may or may not have been the exact fucking thing i was trying to escape in rewatching mymusic in the first place). also, having him sexually assault scene as a means of comforting her after she had just been sexually assaulted in the same way by someone else was... a choice (which is also, uh, personally familiar).

again, i recognize that demonizing melvin wasn't what the f*nes were trying to do here, and i perhaps seem hypocritical for opening liking jeff, but what makes jeff work is he's intentionally "the bad guy." having melvin do the same things as indie and jeff uncritically only proves further that the f*nes can't write for shit, and ruins his character which had, up until he quit mymusic, been unironically good. like, it's obviously not beneficial that the exact asshole things he does are personally triggering, but the character would still be a mess and i would still dislike him regardless.

i want to say though that jack delivers a surprisingly great performance despite how shoddily his character is constructed and how little experience he has as an actor. like, it's clear he was having a lot of fun on set and i would love to see him in something, like, good; i think he could pull off even like, guest television roles, which is a lot more than can be said for other youtubers.

-----

All the people I ship romantically with this character:

nerdchart should have been canon i'm sorry. i know that close, nonromantic male friendships are valuable, esp between queer men, but also gd wouldn't it have been baller to have a canon interracial mlm ship. like. c'mon. and they could have been such a good friends to lovers story! we already got to see how melvin was the only person nerdcore could really be himself around so it would have been so cool if melvin's self-advocacy arc/flowchart arc had revolved more around nerdcore with a little role-reversal! and then they kiss! like god intended!

also i ship him and indie bc i'm a grubby little gremlin man ohoho. enemies w weird sexual tension? sign me up. not even enemies to lovers i'm not saying this one should have been canon i just love the vibes. do you think melvin and indie ever explored each other's bod-- *gunshot*

-----

My non-romantic OTP for this character:

i wish him and scene had just been bros. god remember in season one when they were just bros that was the life.

alternatively, i wish we'd seen more bonding w him and metal, as a means of reconciling that. uh. moment from season one. along similar lines i would have loved to see him get closer w rayna in a similar way to how she bonded w nerdcore in season two. i think that could have also worked to show how she'd grown between the two seasons.

-----

My unpopular opinion about this character:

HIM. AND. SCENE. SHOULD. HAVE. JUST. BEEN. BROS. (though i think my general dislike of him is pretty unpopular, lmao).

when the show was coming out i don't think it's unfair to say that scenechart/scenetern 2 was the most popular ship (aside from potentially techstep whatever) but luckily we're all gay and have better taste now. unfortunately i totally fell into this camp and scenechart was even my otp for years (until it was arguably more unfortunately usurped by reddie in 2019) and i didn't even realise that it's a hot mess until, again, the summer of 2020.

when actually watching the show the choices the f*nes made in regards to how the ship actually became canon are so odd and out of place, too? okay, so, on one hand everyone just shipped scenechart bc it was the whitest hettiest ship in the show (esp in season two when idol left) aside from scindie (and we already discussed what's wrong w that). but, on the other hand, lainey and jack clearly also just got along? and i suspect that lainey probably also admired jack's work and was happy to be working with him bc we have so many shots throughout even the first season when the ship wasn't the intended endgame of lainey scene looking really fondly at jack melvin at times when it doesn't make much sense at all, esp since she's smitten w indie? this trend continues into the second season which arguably works but it still seems really out of place for him to be the one to ultimately make the first move on her since it's clear she was the one crushing this whole time and also he's gay! this bitch is gay what the fuck!!

-----

One thing I wish had happened with this character in canon:

at this point i'm struggling to think of anything i haven't covered yet. oops.

i've talked at length before about how he should have been a woman/lesbian, but the tl;dr is that it would have solved a lot of the queer-coding "problems" that just didn't get resolved in the show. if he'd been a lesbian then not only would the friendship w nerdcore still made sense, but scenechart would have as well (not even mentioning that both of scene's other relationships w men make a lot of sense as comphet anyway).

[garfieldhotsexylasagnayeahbaby69]

mdzs fandom discourse opinion who give a shit

putting this under a readmore cause im a full legal adult and im going to feel big silly about making a shipping discourse post otherwise

 i 100% see and understand people’s qualms with x*yao and if it squicks you out that’s completely valid. canonical x*yao would be a mess and a half. but, having seen arguments both on the ‘it’s inherently abusive and dysfunctional’ side and the ‘it’s not inherently abusive and dysfunctional’ side, here is my opinion:

i think, under au circumstances where jiggy doesn’t go down the path of becoming a monster, it’s probably fine. like, it would need to be au, and we can just go on ahead and eraser tool the ‘he burnt down the brothel he grew up in with everyone inside’ part of his backstory (because what the fuck, mxtx) but there is the potential for genuine love and care there in a non-canon storyline.

in a canon storyline, i think there is also support for there to be unconsummated (for lack of a better term) x*yao dynamic, at least going off of cql canon. i haven’t read the novel in its entirety because i just can’t deal with the exiled rebel translation or whatever that site is called - so idk if things are the same in that text - but like. the actors did homo it up a little bit, and that’s fine. it IS fucked up in canon, because jiggy is fucked up in canon, so if someone’s going around being totally uncritical of it then yeah That’s A Problem, but like. people writing fics and meta about it acknowledging that it’s an unhealthy dynamic and exploring that with a full understanding of the emotional and moral consequences is also, i think, fine. like don’t romanticize manipulation, lying, murder, etc. obviously but. there’s room to write about tragedy and bad shit as long as the fact that it’s bad shit is acknowledged and realistically depicted.

my feelings on n*eyao are sorta similar, except i’m less comfortable with the power dynamic there even in an au - and frankly, i can’t see jiggy/meng yao being happy in the long run in a romantic relationship with someone whose command he is under, so i do think it’s a bit out of character. i feel like that would ring his ‘tender about being stigmatized as the son of a sex worker/accused of sleeping his way to the top’ alarm bells. the difference with xichen being that even though they aren’t technically social equals, xichen goes out of his way to TREAT him as one. plus a lot of the n*eyao content i’ve seen kinda....woobifies meng yao? or at least defangs him? because even pre-jiggy era, he’s clearly very capable of being underhanded and manipulating situations when he needs to. which, before he starts committing war crimes and murdering people, i have a certain degree of sympathy for, bc i know from firsthand experience that sometimes when the people around you have bad intentions and you don’t have a lot of power, it CAN be necessary for you to be underhanded and manipulative in order to keep the peace and protect yourself. (i’m not a canon jiggy apologist though. canon jiggy is a great tragic antagonist, but he falls under the ‘cool motive still murder’ category and he’s fully irredeemable by the time he marries qin su, if not earlier)

3z*n is like, meh. in canon? hell no, not in a million years, that’s neither plausible nor healthy. in an au? you need to justify it for me to find it believable, and i think the most reasonable option is for it to be a sandwich with xichen in the middle. but, again, as long as it’s handled properly, i don’t think it’s that huge of a deal.

if you want to add onto this post or disagree with me in a reply that’s totally fine, i welcome other interpretations and discussions of the text, but if you’re going to just call me an abuse apologist please don’t lmao. your feelings are valid, but i’m not uncritically supporting these things. and this is probably the only time i’m going to have mentions of x*yao/n*eyao/3z*n on this blog