Talk:Gary Smith/Quotes/@comment-24.218.39.238-20150216154222

This ended up a lot longer than expected, but the comments got me thinking.

I think the misconception most fangirls have about Gary is that he's a nice guy who's just layering it under a lot of insecurity, and that it comes out in the form of all his scathing remarks and general machismo. A lot of people see those who are mentally ill and fetishize them because they don't understand them as much. Gary IS misunderstood, but not in the ways that they think. If he was a human being at once point, he forgot it somewhere along the way. He's not a nice guy who just needs a little help and someone to pay attention to him because he has that, in Petey. The only reason Pete stuck with Gary as long as he did was because he saw the potential in Gary, but there came a point where even Pete couldn't try to control him anymore. Gary wasn't more powerful than he was but he did start getting dangerous when he let himself be talked into bad things (even if it was himself who was doing the talking). (Especially then.)

Gary's not genuinely a villain but he is villainous. You can tell he kind of works in self-perpetuating downward spirals. He talks so much that sometimes he starts out with a completely different viewpoint than what he ends up with. That's the danger of him, that his mind can basically go anywhere. He's got some severe ADHD paired with what looks like some skewed morality (I hesitate to refer to him as a sociopath, though I can't argue against it much either), some passion for destruction and violence, he acts out for attention - likely because he as well has parents who shuttled him here so they wouldn't have to deal with him either. His sweater color IS suspiciously close to that of the preps and he even has some ins with them, so it's clear he has upper-class affiliations and connections despite, well, being generally insane.

That's what I think makes Gary an interesting "bad guy" and honestly why he was one of my favorite parts of Bully, despite how underutilized he was. He could have been fantastic but just kind of ended up middling around good and great. The fact that his boss fight is so short and easily dealt with is kind of funny at the end of it, because Gary always acted like a bigger threat than he was, and continued in that way to be more bark than bite. He runs away from all the fistfights you try to get into! He cries when you hit him! He's a shitty brat who has no good excuse for being shitty but he's just gotten so far down into those trenches that I don't even think he knows how to be good anymore. I don't know exactly why the fangirls like fetishizing him. He's like Joffrey Baratheon with about as much supervision and control.

I wish they'd explained more about Gary because there was a lot about him that you had to glean from so many little details that it became a lot harder to see where he was coming from. How his story was framed in Bully, he seemed to pop up like the Boogeyman every once in a while (sometimes literally climbing out of shrubbery to introduce himself, hello, egging the house and first digs about barnyard animals), but never carried as much weight as he possibly could have. I guess fangirls can easily play his mental health card to excuse him because Bully did the same thing; they used these disorders to describe Gary and never really got as much into his story as they did Jimmy's and Bullworth's. Gary was honestly a great idea for a character, but his story just didn't make sense. The player ended up almost as confused as Jimmy for most of the game, and it wasn't even out of character because Gary would spend so much time "planning" by himself. (Which likely looked mostly like cashing in all of his favors with the other cliques in between talking himself up in bathroom mirrors.)

He came from a place that was macabre and violent and awful and cherished and fetishized these things that were macabre and violent and awful. His Nazi uniform for Halloween is very telling about who he is as a person: He goes for a fucked up choice that he probably didn't even think through beyond the shock value. He's still a teenage boy under all of it, which means that, though his plans ended up incredibly detailed and required a lot of working parts (and people), they really didn't take very much forethought. Gary doesn't wait around to think about the fact that something might be a BAD plan, because he's all about acting before anyone else and power-grabbing. That's why he wears the Nazi uniform. That's why he idolizes the wrong people.

Why he chose to latch onto Jimmy and transform him into The Supreme Enemy, I don't know and I'm not sure I ever will because they never bothered to tell us very much, but I honestly think it was just because Jimmy didn't fear his spontaneity like everyone else. Maybe Gary really is a sociopath, because it wouldn't be the first time one of them latched onto an idea that was paranoid and silly out of context. To anyone else, taking over Bullworth and achieving all of that "power" over something as unimportant as one crappy boarding school in New England seems insane. To Gary, his world was that school. To Gary, taking over Bullworth was TAKING OVER THE WORLD.

He's not typical. He's smart as hell, but he thinks in too many details and not enough the big picture. Gary's annoying because he thinks he's tougher shit than he is, but Gary is dangerous because there is nothing he wouldn't do.