So I was thinking about Howard and Vince the other day, as I do. And I was thinking about the way that Howard is *terrible* at being polite to people he doesn’t like or who aren’t useful to him. Where Vince knows how to be socially smooth with people he doesn’t actually like, how to be at least minimally polite and courteous, if not outright to pretend that he likes them better than he does, Howard… seems to just totally lack that capacity, even when it actively makes his life harder. 

He’s openly contemptuous of Bainbridge and Fossil, even though they are literally his bosses and have the capacity to make his life very difficult; similarly with Old Gregg and the blue berk on Xooberon, even though they both represent very literal physical danger to him. Simon McFarnaby, he fawns over until *the moment* the potential for a role in one of his plays disappears, whereupon he immediately switches to the kind of insults he was chiding Vince for earlier. He really only changes his tune there when he’s directly threatened, at which point it immediately becomes grovelling and ‘Please don’t kill me!’ There are almost certainly other examples as well. Just contrast that to Vince, who, while he’s certainly capable of being bitchy and stroppy, is alllll about those polite social white lies, sort of contorting himself around other people to the extent of trying on personas that don’t really fit him at all for social advantage (the punks, the Electro Girls, etc)

And as I was thinking about this, it occurred to me that basically what’s going on here is a dichotomy between games of adult and child play-pretend.

Despite Howard being ostensibly the more adult and mature of the two, he is *terrible* at adult play-pretend. He’s excellent at childish games of make believe with Vince, spinning stories together and playing silly games (despite the Serious Intellectual act he tries to affect), but adult play-pretend? Putting up with someone you don’t like and being minimally polite until they leave and then you can bitch to your friend about them? He can’t do it. Whereas Vince, the dippy, childlike one, *excels* in that arena.

Just some thoughts! It occurred to me, and that dichotomy fills me both with fondness and with feels.