It Fascinates Me How Fundamentally Similar Dennis' Relationship With Mac Is To His Relationship With

it fascinates me how fundamentally similar dennis' relationship with mac is to his relationship with dee. not necessarily how mac and dee respectively view him, but the ways that he views both of them are so incredibly similar to each other it's kind of insane. it all comes down to dennis needing to be needed and being afraid to relinquish his grip on two people that, at one point or another, have come to terms with the fact that they might be better without him (or at least without him as a centerpoint in their life). there are a lot of examples of this but the one that sticks out to me the most is the direct parallels between FVR & the gang broke dee. for example:

in the gang broke dee, dennis can't stand to see his sister succeeding without him, so he tries to pair her up with a man to settle down with. in his words, this is in order to "take [her] off of our hands forever." his clearer-than-day reason for doing this is less about actually removing dee from his life (however much he pretends to idealise this) and more about keeping her under his control. he's forcing her into a decision that he approves of rather than doing what she wants—thus taking back an independence that dennis tries his best to hold over her head. he insults her attempts at pursuing her dream career—not because he can't stand to see her succeed, but because he can't bear the idea of her succeeding without him. and this is a common theme throughout the show—dee's success is reliant on her joint success with dennis (which is something i have a lot to say about by itself, but that's for another day). her independence inevitably results in ridicule and failure, often because of dennis' manipulation. he tries his best to keep her reliant on him and convinces her she doesn't have anything without him, because he doesn't know what he would do if she realized he's only her brother. this is pretty obvious throughout the show if not explicitly stated—and, formulaically, dennis usually wins whatever mind game they're playing with one another.

but in TGBD, he loses. in his attempts to make her stay he only pushes her away from him further and inevitably ends up groveling at her feet. we don't see this specific sort of desperation from dennis a lot, but when dee is getting on the plane, he genuinely admits that he was wrong and that he loves her. he knows he's about to lose her and he has to compensate for it. it's a rare moment of vulnerability for him.

all that said, when it comes to dennis, it's impossible to extricate the genuine from the manipulative. he's such an untrustworthy person that he's almost manipulating dee without trying to despite the truth in his words. when he tells her "you can succeed, you will be a star" he isn't lying, necessarily, but the rest of his confession says it all: "you have to take me." the unspoken goes: you can succeed, as long as i'm there. you can follow your dreams, but you can't catch them without me. and because he can't just admit to needing her, this is what he resorts to instead. the truth is that dennis needs dee in his life so badly that he would practically have nothing without her, but the most obvious way that this manifests is that he needs to be needed by her. to be relied on, in dennis' understanding, is to be loved.

that was very long and convoluted but unfortunately i'm not done. i feel like dennis' relationship to mac in frank vs. russia is less explicitly spelled out for us than in TGBD, but there are a shit ton of similarities between the two. to begin with, it's pretty well established by like s15-16 that mac's crush on dennis has died down, and in FVR he's actively moved on and is dating other people. dennis should, supposedly, be fine with this, based on how he's previously reacted to mac's romantic advances. he was uncomfortable with mac even touching him for a while, and mac continued to violate that boundary—it would make sense for dennis to be pleased that he's moved on. except that he obviously isn't. when it's finally revealed that dennis is johnny, he says he's only doing it to get mac out of the apartment, but this is an almost embarrassingly seethrough lie because. dude. there are other ways to get your roommate to leave the house than sexually manipulating him via remote controlled anal beads.

johnny is a mask dennis wears in order to keep mac directly in his orbit—to prevent him from moving on and finding love with someone else. dennis may not be ready to address the fact that he has any kind of feelings for mac that aren't anger and hatred—at least, not as himself—but that doesn't stop him from manipulating mac into staying in love with him. not only this, but johnny allows dennis to be vulnerable through text in ways he can't possibly be on the regular; he's afraid to be. we've never seen johnny and mac's texts but there was obviously a level of intimacy there that mac and dennis have never properly shared. through johnny, dennis is able to confront how he feels about mac without actually having to address it as the truth. once again, his manipulation and genuineness are inextricable from each other. it's impossible to tell where the love begins. sound familiar?

that's what it all comes down to. dennis treats the people he loves the most in all of the same ways: he tries to control them. when he has them, he pushes them away, towards other people, but when they actually relent he panics and tries to reel them back in. he idealises a life without them but in reality he'd probably crumble. so he attempts to prevent them from finding other relationships or any viable options apart from staying with him. it's textbook abuse and manipulation, obviously; something being "out of love" doesn't mean that it's good or even justifiable in any way. but it does come from a genuine fear of being rejected by dee and mac—the two people he is actually afraid of losing. dennis is too afraid to treat them with kindness because that would mean opening up his heart and running the risk of getting hurt, but he's afraid to let them go because without them, what does he have? the only option in his mind is cruelty. it's a strange kind of symbiotic relationship, this weird mix of mutualism and parasitism, where clinging on is the only option.