computationalcalculator:

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lostlegendaerie:

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It’s kind of ironic that Wheatley from Portal 2 has become enshrined as the iconic example of fan-artists anthropomorphising everything under the sun as skinny, ambiguously twentysomething white dudes in dapper suits, given that he’s like the one character who actually deserves it.

i saw the explanation one time of “he’s a bumbling idiot with a maddening insistence all his horrible ideas are right, of course he’s a white man” and i’ve never heard anything so true in my life

Definitely there’s that, but I’m more referring to the fact that Wheatley’s literal function in the game’s plot is to stand as a monument to white male mediocrity. Like, it’s not even subtle!

(Him and Cave Johnson both, really, albeit in different ways. Cave is a takedown of how that mediocrity can become romanticised in the sufficiently privileged: an ineffectual blunderer with more money than good sense becomes a daring visionary whose ideas fail to change the world only because the world isn’t ready for them, and any damage he’s managed to cause is reframed as evidence of how far ahead of the curve he is. Wheatley’s the flip side of that coin, the wheedling sycophant who thinks he’s got what it takes to sit in the big-boy chair, but wouldn’t know what to do with that kind of influence if he got it.)

I would’ve called Cave Johnson a “wow, they’re not even trying to be subtle” ripoff-slash-parody of Elon Musk’s career trajectory, were it not for the fact the game came out 7 years ago