ironhammer:

At one point or another, in Going Postal and Making Money we get Moist’s opinions on pretty much all the people he comes across via his internal dialogue. He finds a lot of things weird and he finds a lot of things disgusting and he’s pretty merciless in his judgements of some people, because he’s generally really perceptive, even though he always sees an opportunity to flatter them in the process. 

One thing I noticed in Making Money is how he does not comment on Stanley and Hubert’s quirks. The fact that Stanley (”who went through life with the care of a man reading a manual translated from a foreign language”) needs to go through a script every time he knocks on his door is just met with patience, and even though Hubert is, by all accounts, ~weirder even than the clown accountant in this book, there isn’t a comment from Moist about his unusual behaviour – at one point Hubert falls silent, digs out a notebook and checks it before asking a pertinent, socially acceptable question to Moist because he’s run out of things to say about himself, and Moist doesn’t treat any of this as unusual. Not a mental note or commentary. 

I like that Moist isn’t successful because of how he was raised, or because he comes from a good family, or because of previous connections having taught him how to make the right friends – he’s good at people, he can read their moods, and he isn’t uncomfortable with atypical behaviour (except if it’s unhygienic). In fact, he’s consistently more intimidated by performative masculinity than behaviours that don’t conform perfectly to what other people would find “normal”. I didn’t notice this some years ago, but I really like it.