the gang, ranked by manipulability
Charlie is almost impossible to manipulate – his mind works so differently from everyone else’s, the gang can rarely even guess at his weak points. He doesn’t respond to incentives like sex, spa days, or even positive attention; a date with the Waitress is always a surefire motivator, but there’s only so many times the gang can employ this tactic. In “Charlie Rules the World” Dee successfully persuades Charlie to her side by offering him $5 – but this is more like straight bribery than true manipulation. Charlie’s resistance to manipulation is effectively his superpower within the gang, and it’s likely the reason that he and Dennis rarely hang out one-on-one (more about this later).
Dee is also surprisingly difficult for the gang to manipulate. This is ironic, because outside the gang – as we see in “Underage Drinking: A National Concern” and “High School Reunion” – she is absolute putty in the hands of people she perceives as the popular crowd. Given her desperate and lifelong need for attention and validation (”Tell me I’m good! Tell me I’m good!”), she should be incredibly easy to manipulate. It’s not that the gang is unaware of her insecurity, but in practice, they’re not particularly clever at exploiting it. Dennis in particular tends to attack her physical appearance, projecting his own issues onto her and foolishly failing to recognize her remarkable lack of vanity about her looks (perhaps stemming from her relief, even now, simply to be out of the back brace). Interestingly, it’s Charlie who seems most skilled at getting into Dee’s head (as we see in “The Nightman Cometh” and “Charlie Rules the World”) – partly because she underestimates him and hasn’t built up the defenses against him that she has against Dennis, Mac, and Frank; and partly, I think, because on some level she genuinely admires Charlie.
Mac is ridiculously easy to manipulate, as Dennis knows well. What Dennis doesn’t quite understand, however, is that Mac is not manipulable so much as suggestible: he never truly outgrew being Ronnie the Rat, and he’ll always side with anyone he perceives as an authority. (If it’s not immediately apparent who’s in charge, he’ll “play both sides” until he figures it out, as we see in “Frank Retires.”) Dennis devotes a lot of time and energy to manipulating Mac, but in fact, this is wholly unnecessary; Mac would likely be just as responsive to direct requests, as long as they’re coming from Dennis. The entirety of “Ass Kickers United: Mac and Charlie Join a Cult” could probably have been avoided, for example, had Dennis simply said, “Hey, Mac, stop eating my Thin Mints.” Likewise, while Mac and Dennis were manipulated into buying a timeshare together in “Mac and Dennis Buy a Timeshare,” you just know that if Mac had been alone, the guy could have asked him “Want to buy a timeshare?” and Mac would immediately have been like “Sure!” without needing to be convinced at all.
It may seem surprising that Dennis, the self-styled master manipulator of the gang, should also be the one most vulnerable to manipulation. But in fact it makes perfect sense: manipulation is Dennis’s love language, his primary mode of interaction with the world, and if he won’t listen to reason, he’s always available for seduction. His vanity about his looks is a button that, when pressed, will get him to do anything. His family members, Dee and Frank, understand this better than anyone: it was effortlessly easy for Frank to manipulate Dennis into sex work, and Dee surely enjoys knowing that she has the power to send Dennis into a spiraling mental breakdown simply by telling him that his face looks fat. Charlie might understand it too, but if so, he doesn’t use this knowledge to manipulate Dennis, because that’s just not how Charlie operates (hence the rarity of their one-on-one interactions and tentative nature of their friendship). Mac has no idea, and if he ever finds out, God help us all.
izzy806
vaporwave
dededos
janainaart
areudirty
snowghoul
theartofmadeline
