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Oct. 14th, 2014 02:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hibearnateName: Raos
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E-Mail: maestergrunny [at] live [dot] com
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agebinium
Other Characters: Regina Mills |madehervows
Character Name: Max Blum
Series: Happy Endings
Timeline: Post-series
Canon Resource Link: Happy Endings @ Wiki
Character History: Note: Due to the nature of sitcoms, it's hard to make a truly cohesive timeline, so bear with me.
The earliest we hear about Max's life is his high school girlfriend, Angie. They dated for a while, and the summer after graduation, Angie breaks up with him because she realised he was gay, not that Max knew that at the time.
Shift to college, where Max is assigned to be the roommate of one Dave Rose. It's through Dave that he meets Jane and Alex Kerkovich, and his next girlfriend Penny Hartz. At one point, Max is kicked out of the dorms because he tried to bribe his TA with photos of Penny's T&A. At some point, Max realises he's gay, but continues to date Penny.
The final member of the group, Brad Williams, arrives when Max stars on The Real World Sacramento, a season that went unaired because one of the housemates burned down the firehouse they were filming in. While filming the season, Max tries to come out, but because he was eating, it comes out as "I'm greg."
Sometime after this, Max and Penny break up. Brad and Jane get married. Alex and Dave get engaged. Penny dates. A lot.
The fateful day is here, Dave and Alex are finally getting married. Max is present as one of Dave's groomsmen, and when a rollerblading stranger arrives to ruin the wedding by telling Alex he's in love with her, leading to her running away with him, Max tells Brad to kick his ass because "you're black, he's probably already scared of you." However, when Brad retorts that he should do it because "you're gay and chubby, nobody will see it coming," Max spirals over the next few days over the fact that people think he's chubby.
Later, at Rosalita's, the bar they frequent several times a day, Max believes it's going to be the last time they're all in a room together, because Alex's actions will destroy the group. He then gets angry with Brad for not drinking, stating that if this happened in his Massachusetts, he'd like to believe that everybody would be hammered. A few days later when the group goes to comfort Dave, he tells Dave about the video of the wedding being a Youtube sensation, before advising him to go out and get some sex. Then he drinks the entirety of Dave's blenderful of gin smoothie.
A few nights later, during Penny's30th 26th birthday party, he spends the entire time trying to prove that Penny's date is gay. It culminates in Max giving Penny's date his number, in case he ever gets confused.
After Dave moves in with him, Max tries to get his friend to embrace the change that has happened to him. Instead, Dave decides to be more like Steven Seagal and go after Bo, the guy who rollerbladed into his wedding and ruined it. Drunk Max thinks getting justice is a great idea, so he tags along. When they find Bo, they find out he lives with his mother and the idea Dave built up in his head isn't accurate at all. When Dave and Bo have a heartfelt discussion about what happened, Max gets fed up and suckerpunches Bo.
Unfortunately, Bo knows jujitsu. It doesn't end well for Max.
Fed up with Dave and Alex's constant fighting, the group decides to stop inviting them to things together. This includes breakfast, meaning they all eat two breakfasts. Not that that's a problem for Max, who regularly consumes a breakfast meant for people who are going to work in a field for twelve hours. When the lies are uncovered, the rest of them decide to go to a Barefoot Pedaler concert without either Dave or Alex. When Penny, who spent the entire time trying to get backstage to reunite with an old flame is shot down and humiliated, Max sneaks backstage to get revenge.
It doesn't end well for him. He tries to steal the drummer's shirt, but is tasered for his efforts.
During a discussion about Dave's life, Max makes a few unfortunate comparisons about Dave being a zombie, which leads to Jane saying that Max would die first in a zombie attack, claiming he's out of shape, has no marketable talents and no survival skills. Max counters by saying that Jane would die first, claiming that because there are things in the world that she loves, it will slow her down. He then goes on to claim that his cold, black heart and and ability to live without attachments to anyone or anything are his greatest talents. Caught at a standstill, they decide to have a zombie olympics to see once and for all, who would die first.
The first event is a race around the block Max's apartment is on. Despite his weight, Max barely loses, though he collapses seconds later. Between events, Max helps Penny with her latest flame, revealing to her that he's a hipster. He then educates Penny about the hipster rules and styles of dress so she can keep up the ruse she'd started about also being a hipster. After sending Penny on her date, the second event in the zombie olympics begins: a contest to see who can stay still the longest.
Max wins, because he "accidentally" spills a beer, knowing that Jane will feel compelled to clean it up. They decide that the final contest is ruthlessness, but they're unable to decide how one measures that, exactly. The answer comes later after the group leaves a hipster part with a 90s bat mitzvah theme, and hipsters are swarming the food truck Dave decided to buy to escape the rut. Because hipsters apparently love food trucks, they begin to swarm. However, the truck is empty as Dave had just bought it, and Jane wins the contest when she pushes Max out of the truck into the swarm of hipsters.
Later, when Penny complains that Max isn't stereotypically gay enough for her, he introduces her to Derrick, after claiming that the fact she wants a stereotypical gay friend who will go shopping with her is offensive. With Penny distracted by Derrick, her perfect gay friend, Max and Brad try to help Dave deal with chicksand, a one night stand who became more. He offers multiple ways for Dave to break it off, though each one escalates the situation. Afterwards, when Penny is sick of Derrick, Max reveals that Penny doesn't need a "gay husband" because she is his gay husband.
During a discussion about penguins and Morgan Freeman, Penny arrives and announces she got the promotion she was up for. This eventually leads to Penny forgetting to hang up her phone after a call to Max, which ends in Max listening to Penny's life in real time. He hears all her business, her arguments, and her new assistant Ri-ri taking advantage of her. So under the guise of company security, Max and Brad get Ri-ri to apologise to Penny and also return the money she stole from the company.
Brad eventually sets up Max up with Franklin, a man from his work. The date is almost spectacularly bad, with Franklin being boring and having literally nothing in common with him. Later, Max confronts Brad about why he would think Franklin was a good match for him, and when Brad slips up and admits that it was simply because they were both gay, Max calls him a "gaycist." Offended, Brad tries to find something the two have in common, but he's unable to, despite coaching Franklin in all things Max. To prove his point, Max befriends an elderly black woman and claims that she and Brad would get along.
When Max's parents come to town, Penny isn't willing to be his beard because he has yet to come out to them. Despite the group's advice that he should just come out, he asks Jane to be his beard for the duration of their visit. She agrees, and tries her best but it's a disaster, because she's over the top and just a general try-hard. It's also revealed that Max once told his parents that Dave was the gay one, because his parents found Max's porn under his bed, leading to Max claiming that the porn was Dave's and that he used to lay on Max's bed and was obsessed with him.
With Jane's failed attempt as a beard, Max asks Alex to be his replacement beard next. When Alex doesn't show, Max is about to come out to them. Unfortunately, Jane arrives and demands to know why they don't like her. Brad arrives next, angry that Max has been kissing his wife, leading Max's parents to think Max is having an affair with a married woman. Alex arrives afterwards, pretending to be Larissa, a sculptress. That ruse quickly falls apart, and Max's parents can't believe he would date the woman who ruined Dave's life, lamenting that he never should have broken up with Penny.
Who arrives next, claiming that she's "too much of a Nazi for Hitler," after her most recent date with a man named Douglas Hitler. Fed up with the nonsense and Max apparently being involved with "two sluts and a Nazi," Max's father asks him what he's into, with Max replying he's into dudes. Having officially come out, Max admits he hadn't told them because he was scared of how they would react. Just before they leave to return home, Max's parents mention several people they could set him up with. Fortunately, Dave takes the bullet and pretends to be Max's partner, Max is grateful, but whispers that Dave isn't his type.
After food goes missing from the apartment, Max initially suspects Dave, who denies it. Getting a nannycam from Jane, Max finds out that Dave sleepwalks, but also that someone has been living in the crawlspace above their apartment and stealing their food. Furious at first, Max confronts Malcolm at a gallery showing, but later agrees to provide food in exchange for clothes. He then shows the group the tape of Dave sleepwalking.
When a coffee shop chain opens in the neighbourhood, Max join forces with Alex to get the place shut down to prevent gentrification. At the same time, he starts dating a guy named Ian. Organizing meetings and protests, Max later corners the coffee chain's mascot with a guy named Scotty who is, for lack of a better word, insane. Simply wanting to scare the chain into closing, Max is forced to prevent Scotty from killing the mascot. Eventually it's revealed that Ian owns the chain, and the community's efforts have been horrible for business.
When Ian finds out Max was behind the protests and the attack on his cousin, the store's mascot, he breaks up with him. Dave drives them all to the chain so Max can make an impassioned plea for forgiveness to Ian and the two resume dating. Unfortunately, they soon break up after Max finds out Ian is married with children.
In a bit of a slump, Max gets the number of a British guy named Adrian, but throws it out as he doesn't want to call him for a number of pointless, trivial reasons. Annoyed with Max's attitude, Jane fishes the number out of the trash and convinces him to go on the date, but Max just stands him up. Jane convinces him to go to the bar, where Adrian is a no-show. Angry that he'd been stood up, despite having stood Adrian up himself, Max tracks him down, and is berated by Adrian for his attitude. Unusually it seems to change Max's mind, who seems willing to give people a chance before he blows them off from now on.
Until his next date reveals a braided belt. Max is out.
Because Max refuses to behave like an adult, he buys a bunch of NERF guns instead of toilet paper. He and Dave end up obsessed with the things and try to find new heights to take their games to. It culminates in trying to shoot a neighbour across the street in the face from the window. The dart makes it across the street, but instead of hitting the creep Avi, it knocks over a candle and nearly burns the building down. The gang feels incredibly guilty until one of the firemen reveals an elderly woman had fallen over and couldn't get up, so without the fire, she would've died.
To celebrate, Max flirts with the firemen.
Max is later asked to officiate the wedding one of the group's friends, after having officiated Brad and Jane's wedding. Except whoops, he didn't actually have his license that time, a fact that greatly upsets Brad and Jane.
In order to make a few bucks, Max bets all his friends he can make them cry at the ceremony. A challenge he aces, by making all 5 of them weep. While collecting the money from the group, he comforts Penny, who was upset over Shershow getting married before her as he was a trainwreck of a person.
While celebrating the one year anniversary of Dave and Alex's non-wedding, Max attempts to shuck an oyster and ends up stabbing Brad in the leg, who then knocks over a display of shellfish onto his severely allergic wife. A hysterical Max is calmed down by Penny throwing a bucket of ice in his face. At no point does he apologise to Brad, or at least, use the words 'I'm sorry.' In fact, he says "comme ci comme ça that was pretty cool how it went in your leg, I thought there would be more blood." Later, while helping Penny move into her new condo, Brad pulls out of his recurring plans with Max, claiming he has a business thing. And probably also because Max stabbed him.
Everything's fine, until later that day, Max is out with Penny and sees Brad in bar with his black friends. Despite Penny asking him not to make a big deal out of it, Max hangs out outside the bar until Brad leaves. Several hours later. When Max confronts him, Brad claims he didn't invite him because he's not professional, so naturally Max takes it as a challenge. This leads to a heart-to-heart where Brad reveals he didn't tell Max about his other group of friends because he gets crazy when he's excluded from something. It also leads to Max bringing a group of his gay friends to Penny's housewarming party in an attempt to show Brad how it feels. It fails, but Brad reassures Max he'll always be the Riggs to his Murtaugh.
Dave returns home early from a Taste of Kenosha Contest to find Max having rented his room to German backpackers after months of online correspondence Max reveals he's been having money woes, and asks for a job at Dave's food truck Steak Me Home Tonight. Dave ends up firing him for being rude to customers, so with no other way to make rent, Max sells his collection of beanie babies. Except he doesn't pay the rent with the money, he buys a 1980s limousine, intending to rent his services out despite not being bonded and licensed.
After a tourist mistakes Max's used limousine for a tour company, he decides to take advantage of tourists to make some extra cash. With the help of Brad and Jane, who have been taking a couple's improv class, he ends up with a semi-successful tour company, telling such lies as Chicago once being known as the Window City, but had to change it to avoid a conflict with Omaha. Eventually, the popularity goes to his head, and when Brad and Jane demand a cut of the profits because of their help, he fires them. To replace them, he hires Scottie. So naturally, the tours go horribly wrong. Learning his lesson, Max apologises to Brad and Jane, but still doesn't give them a cut of the profits.
When Jane crashes their car, Max is forced to drive Brad to work every day in his limousine. This leads to Max being forced to run Brad's boss Forristal around town while Brad sucks up to him, despite his unwillingness to tell his boss he constantly has food on his face. Brad forces Max to promise him he won't tell Forristal about the food, but of course, Max eventually breaks. His honesty impresses Forristal, who is less than impressed with Brad. Max ends up ruining his newfound friendship with Forristal by misreading a moment: he tries to kiss him.
When Penny moves too fast and ends up dumped by her latest boyfriend, Max offers to wear the couples costume she asked her ex to wear to the Halloween party with her. While Penny thinks he's doing it to be nice, Jane reveals that Max's Lady Gaga meatsuit went bad, so without a costume he can't get into the party. Somehow, while dressed as a mother and baby, Max and Penny both meet guys. When Max insults Penny's new love interest and he overhears it, he gives up a chance at his own love interest to make things right with Penny. Of course, by doing so, he has to give up the couples costume and put on Penny's bright red one-piece bathing suit. Somehow, he manages to win the Drag Queen Contest with it.
After Dave's new sandwich, the Steaktanic, (2 pounds of meat, 1 litre of garlic aioli, half a block of smoked gouda, 3 layers of iceberg lettuce on a massive roll) fails miserably, Max offers to help him film a commercial to improve business. Dave refuses and hires a professional, while Max is tasked with retrieving Brad's sleep apnea machine from his apartment while he pretends to be at a work retreat. He sneaks into the apartment, but is caught by Jane who forces him to reveal the truth about Brad's whereabouts. When Dave's professional fails, he lets Max direct the next one. The result is a surprisingly touching short film about a young man and his father, but without any mention of steak sandwiches whatsoever. The commercial is a success, but it increases the business of a nearby hot dog stand instead.
A taco truck, Tacos Mi Corazons, holds a promotion where, if you get a tattoo of their logo, you get free tacos for life. So naturally, Max gets a tattoo. After this amazingly responsible decision, Max is tasked with babysitting his brother's kids. This is a problem, considering he hates children and their tiny, creepy features. When Penny offers to help, she becomes obsessed with getting the children to like her, while Max wins them over by letting them watch cartoons and letting them play 'Diner,' a game where they make him food and do the dishes. He later scares them off by taking them to a funeral, in a bar and telling them his theories about what happens when you die.
Max's high school girlfriend Angie moves to Chicago, and Dave immediately takes an interest in her. When Dave asks Max if he can date her, Max invokes the 'code,' an unwritten rule that states friends don't date friends' exes, even if one of the friends is gay now. When Dave doesn't buy it, Max is forced to show him how it feels and passionately makes out with Alex. It convinces Dave to back off of Angie, but leaves Alex with confusing feelings for Max. Yeah.
When Max finds out Dave lied about backing off, it causes a series of incidents where each man invokes a new 'code.' Wingman Code, where Dave tries to pick up the guy Max is hitting on, Dress Code, where Max turns Dave's V necks into deep V necks and escalates from there. Dave invokes the building code and hits a load-bearing pillar with a sledge hammer, and Max invokes Hair Code for Men and gives Dave a home perm. Angie eventually reveals the truth of their breakup to Dave, the two reconcile after Max admits that while he wasn't sexually attracted to Angie, she was still the first person he loved. He then quashes Alex's crush on him by showing her his disgusting eating habits.
Come Christmastime, Max is once more hurting for cash. So when Penny's scheduled mall Santa is unavailable, Max steps in to fill his shoes. Despite his hatred of children, he ends up being filled with the christmas spirit after stopping a man from mugging Penny purely by being in his Santa suit. The effect is somewhat ruined by the fact that he tried to buy porn while dressed in the suit.
When Penny reveals that someone left a sweater at her place, both Jane and Max claim it, despite the disparity in size. So naturally, after a few physical fights in an attempt to take ownership of the sweater, they're left with one solution: another contest. This time to see who is the least vain of the two, whoever wins gets the sweater. After a few... eccentric solutions, including throwing acid in each other's faces and getting facial tattoos, Alex comes up with the idea of wearing a horrible outfit. Max ends up wearing an all-white ensemble, complete with suspenders and Princess Diana's face on the shirt.
The contest comes to a head when after days of both parties refusing to budge, they decide to see who can pick someone up wearing the outfit and decide to use the fire department. When that doesn't work, they decide to burn the sweater. Only for Jane to find her sweater in her apartment, which Max immediately claims is his.
Somebody left a sweater at Penny's apartment, Jane and Max both claim it, contest to see who is the least vain. Sweaters get torched, Jane finds her sweater at home.
After binge watching too many reality shows, Max and Alex come to the conclusion that Dave is addicted to V-Neck t-shirts. So naturally, they decide to hold an inter-v-ntion. It does not work.
Still hurting for cash, Max decides to cash in on Valentine's Day and use his limousine to offer romantic trips to couples. (Each one is priced $69.) It works out fairly well until one of Max's exes, Grant, is revealed to be a customer. Despite his best efforts to remain concealed, Max eventually outs himself as the driver and Grant's ex, causing Grant's boyfriend to break up with him. Seeing that Max never got over him, the group convinces him to take a chance and ask Grant out again. It works, and Max and Grant begin dating again.
After the group becomes obsessed with being Grant's friend, Max grows frustrated as they monopolise his time. In his frustration, he tries to prove to the gang that Grant isn't perfect, only for Grant to prove it himself when the gang refuses to let up. When Grant thinks he's ruined everything, Max reveals he doesn't care what "these idiots" think, all that matters is that Max likes him.
Winter comes, so Max becomes the bear he is and goes into hibernation. Effects include: Sleeping through winter, a complete lack of verbal communication, and other bear-like habits. Eating honey with his hands is a year-round thing, though.
When Max begins to worry that he and Grant are settling down, Grant takes him on a 'marathon day of togetherness' to prove that he's in it for the long haul, and shockingly enough, Max loves it. Unfortunately, when he reveals to Grant that he can see a future together, getting married, adopting kids, the works, Grant admits he can see that too - except for the kids part. He doesn't want kids ever, and didn't realise Max did. It's not that Max wants kids, he just doesn't want to make such a big decision so soon. Penny later covers for him to help him keep the immature vibe by claiming Grant wanted kids and Max shut it down.
Still attempting and failing to get over Grant, Penny convinces Max to participate in the annual Rosalita's Run scavenger hunt. After several John Hughes-themed hunts, each one reminding him of Grant, Max eventually begins to move on, just in time to win the scavenger hunt and beat Penny's rival Julie.
When Penny falls down multiple flights of stairs during a base-jumping date and ends up in a body cast, Max helps nurse her back to health. Unfortunately, her physical therapist Kent is an incredibly attractive man, and Max begins misery-ing her in an attempt to spend time with him. He lies to Penny when her doctor calls to let her know she can have the cast removed, claiming she got caught up in a drug smuggling scheme and is in Bolivia. It escalates when Penny finds out about the lie and confronts him, only to slowly pass out. Max had drugged her with not only four bags of Sleepy Tea, but a dose of Lunesta, nature's Ambien. Penny manages to escape her room and later confronts Max downtown on his date with Kent, except after Max apologises, he remembers that she once did the exact same thing to him.
After Penny finally ends up in a stable relationship with a man named Peter, Max begins to grow jealous and lonely because she stops spending time with him. Not only that, but he's frustrated that for once, Penny didn't completely ruin her relationship in its fledgling stages as she usually does. In an attempt to make her jealous, Max befriends an unstable woman named Nicole, (which he pronounces as Nickel, as a nickel is worth five times as much as a penny,) and introduces the two of them. It backfires horribly, when Penny begins to offer her relationship advice, and offers to set her up with Pete's brother. Their relationship is eventually fixed when Max fixes Penny's latest crisis with Pete, a list of flaws she makes for every guy she dates in case the relationship fails.
Nicole later breaks into Max's apartment and waits hours for him to come home. Despite calling her insane, Max says he loves it and wants to party with her forever.
Lamenting the fact that he's in a man drought, Max goes to a gay bar for the first time in a very long time, and is incredibly unsuccessful because it was twink night. The next day at Emma's Diner, he claims he's retiring from gay, of course, he's just as unsuccessful at that. In order to help Max find out what gay subculture he belongs to, Jane and Derrick offer to go with him to various clubs that night. Despite trying such cultures as 'chameleon,' 'ostrich,' and 'ginger snaps' he's unable to find the right one. So instead of trying to fit into a box of someone else's design, he decides to make his own: Optimistic Red Velvet Walrus and hosts a night at Rosalita's Pub. It's rather unsuccessful, but one other man who didn't fit into any of the other categories came, so Max considers it a win.
With Dave having moved in with Alex, Max finds a new roommate. On the surface his new roommate Chase seems pretty cool, and he even upgrades all the furniture in the apartment, but when he doesn't come home that night, Max, Alex and Dave think something has happened to him and set about tracking him down. Eventually, they find him having dinner with someone and barge in, demanding to know why he didn't come home. Except, he's having dinner with his wife who is upset to find out that Chase has another sex shack, a place where he can have affairs and not get caught. She breaks up with him, costing Chase both his job and family. Naturally, Chase is pissed, so he vows to destroy Max's life as he destroyed his and moves out.
As revenge for a prank Dave thinks Max pulled on him, where people were convinced to trade their guns for food from Dave's truck, Dave pranks Max by tricking him into thinking he won the lottery. It doesn't go entirely as planned, because Max reacts in a rather unexpected way: by shouting that he won't be sharing the money with any of them, as they're all dead to him. Mortified by the fact that it was a prank, Max vows revenge on everyone in the room, setting off a series of escalating pranks. He starts with Brad, putting stripper glitter in his lotions and creams, and targets Dave next, though it's Jane who gets the waffle exploded in her face. Alex is the next target, where he sets up a gift basket of muffins from the landlord for Muffin Month (which isn't a thing) and setting a number of paintball guns to fire when the top muffin is removed.
Fortunately, Dave is there to prevent Penny and Alex from being hit by the barrage of paint, and in her increasing terror at being pranked, Alex cuts off a chunk of her own hair, horrifying Max in the process, and begs him to let her help him prank Dave in return for not pranking her. This leads to Alex launching herself into the air and landing on her coffee table, while Max sets up a slime bucket above Penny's phone to drop when she picks it up. He also glues Penny's boyfriend Pete to his toilet seat, preventing him from being there when Penny finds the engagement ring in her apartment, and also from getting slimed.
Because Pete didn't show, Penny is convinced the engagement was a prank of Max's and so she rents a wedding dress and confronts Max, who reacts with happiness at Penny's engagement. Unfortunately, he doesn't warn her about the slime bucket set up above his phone, so Penny gets slimed a second time, in the rental wedding dress. With everybody else pranked, and after helping unglue Pete from his toilet, it's time to get Dave. However, Dave is trying to prank Max in return for everything he's done, and tries to rig a hotplate and several bags of popcorn kernels to the accelerator of Max's limo. Except, when Max starts the limo, it explodes into a fiery ball, seemingly killing Max.
Of course, it doesn't. Since Alex was working with Max, she warned him about Dave's prank, letting him rig the limo to explode and sorting an escape route through the hole in the floor. It's later revealed that Alex pulled the initial prank and set the whole thing off. Yeah.
When Max tries to avoid a conversation with a previous one-night stand, he asks a stranger to pretend to be having a conversation with him. She thinks he's hitting on her, and before he can tell her otherwise, mentions she gets really good basketball tickets and other cool stuff from her job. So instead of telling her he's gay, Max runs with it. He ends up dating Katie for a while to take advantage of the material goods she can provide. Frustrated with the fact that Max is taking advantage of her, Brad and Penny decide to out him to her by bringing aforementioned one-night stand to a lunch with her. It goes south when she invites Brad to a Bulls game with them, causing Brad to claim that Penny still has feelings for Max and that anything she says is a lie, so naturally Katie doesn't believe her whe she claims Max is gay.
Penny later talks up Max's sexual prowess to Katie, who has only experienced something Max calls 'forekissing.' Convinced that Max is some sort of sex god, Katie tries to take things to the next level, and when confronted with her boobs, breaks down and reveals that he's gay.
Once more Max is having money woes, having been forced to pay last month's rent with a massive jug full of change. Because he blew up his limousine as part of a prank on Dave, he has no way to make money, so instead of trying something responsible like... say, getting a job, he decides to enter the Mr. Super Gay Chicago Pageant, with a grand prize of $1000. Alex and Dave volunteer to be his coaches, and after a very rough start, Max pulls through and wins the thousand dollars. Which he asks for in pennies. Because they're the only currency he trusts.
Chase returns, confronting Max in the park one day and claiming that while he had planned to keep good on his vow to ruin Max's life, Max's life is already so bad, that everything Chase had planned was nothing in comparison. Even the rats he planned to release in the apartment were dwarfed by the rats already living there. Upset by Chase's claims, Max decides to improve his life and goes to Jane for help. In a few short days, thanks to Jane's incredibly impressive help, Max is eating healthy, bathing, and has a job as manager at a local grocery chain, even ending up on the local news for saving a reporter's life.
But because of how quickly it happened, Max quickly grows suspicious and starts to think Chase is behind it; that he's building him up only to knock him down later, even going as far as to accuse Jane of being Chase. To prevent Chase from ruining his life, Max decides to reruin his own life. He messily consumes an entire cake, puts his old clothes back on despite having been in the trash and covered in food scraps, gets a bucket of dirt thrown at him, and finally, to take away the last thing he has left, his health, goads Jane into punching him. It's uh, a little too much, because Max ends up in the hospital. However, while he's there, he meets Chase, who had slipped on the pizza Max dropped in the park and hit his head, nearly dying.
When Penny and Dave have plans with their parents, Max tries to get a 4 person mini-chinese new year dragon going with Alex, Brad and Jane, only for Brad and Jane to reveal they have a Bris to attend. So instead of finding something else to do, Max and Alex decide to accompany them to said Bris, only to find out they had lied to avoid making Max go crazy over being excluded again, as they're planning to join a tennis club. Seemingly placated by the lie, Max soon follows them to the club with Alex to prove that the tennis club is their scene. It eventually culminates in a loud, obnoxious tennis match that Max and Alex lose, but Brad and Jane are banned from the club for their victory display too. In an attempt to fix things, Max goes back into the club and a few seconds later comes running out naked screaming "IT DIDN'T WORK." It's unclear what he actually attempted to do.
Shortly before Alex and Jane's sister Brooke gets married, Alex and Dave break up. Because they're idiots, they tell Penny and Max about the breakup separately, leading to the two of them discussing it at the wedding and starting a wedding-wide gossip chain that culminates in multiple revelations at the altar, including one about Alex being pregnant, Brad having knocked up a woman in Vegas and Penny being 53. Max's final act of the series is to announce the next dance, and also to reveal that he took a dick pic with every single disposable camera in the room.
Abilities/Special Powers: He's much faster with his mouth than his hands, it's why he's better at talking than sign language. It also helps find things baked into cakes. Other than that, he is your run of the mill human.
Third-Person Sample: One minute Max is sleepily rolling around his bed with a bunch of leftover pizza, the next he's falling to the floor in a brightly coloured room that is far too clean to ever be his apartment. Not that he notices immediately. He doesn't even realise he's changed locations for a few minutes, instead reaching for another slice of pizza and letting out a confused noise when his hand doesn't meet the box. "Wh-- where is it? Where's my pizza?" Rolling over to try and find the probably week-old at this point pizza, Max smacks face-first into one of the tea room chairs. The impact shocks him fully awake, leaving him staring blearily around the room.
"...Guys? This isn't funny." Because it's clearly a prank, right? If it is, they better pray he doesn't find out which one of them is behind it, and god help them if it's a group prank. Climbing to his feet, Max grabs a handful of cakes from the nearby table and proceeds to shove them all into his mouth at once, before grabbing another handful to take with him. "Guys! Come on! Dave, bud, if you apologise now, we won't need to repeat what happened last time you pranked me." He doesn't have a limousine to blow up this time, after all.
Warily making his way out into the hall, Max starts down the hall. "Okay, this is clearly too well thought-out to be Dave. Jane? Good job on the prank, but I have pizza to eat so I'd really like to go home now!" Eventually, he makes it to the foyer, and from there outside. The brightness blinds him for a few seconds, before he realises he definitely isn't in Chicago anymore. "What the hell."
First-Person Sample: [When the feed turns on, it's clear the phone is on its side on the ground. The image it displays is a mountain of taco wrappers in someone's room, it isn't pretty.
It isn't pretty at all.
Eventually, the pile of wrappers move and it's quickly revealed that someone was asleep under the mountain of trash. The wrappers scatter around the floor as Max rolls over and yawns, a bleary eye opening to check the state of the day before he inevitably goes back to sleep. The rest of them scatter when he realises he's being filmed.]
Sooo, quick q for all you people out there... watching me sleep.
[He doesn't seem all that bothered though.]
Does anybody know how to remove a tattoo?
[The device is jostled around, as Max lifts up his shirt to display a rather... unique tattoo.]
I got this bad boy when Tacos mi Corazons was doing a free tacos for life special, but now that I can get free tacos whenever I want without leaving my room, it's gotta go.
DW username:
lucciE-Mail: maestergrunny [at] live [dot] com
IM: Plasmachains
Plurk:
Other Characters: Regina Mills |
madehervowsCharacter Name: Max Blum
Series: Happy Endings
Timeline: Post-series
Canon Resource Link: Happy Endings @ Wiki
Character History: Note: Due to the nature of sitcoms, it's hard to make a truly cohesive timeline, so bear with me.
The earliest we hear about Max's life is his high school girlfriend, Angie. They dated for a while, and the summer after graduation, Angie breaks up with him because she realised he was gay, not that Max knew that at the time.
Shift to college, where Max is assigned to be the roommate of one Dave Rose. It's through Dave that he meets Jane and Alex Kerkovich, and his next girlfriend Penny Hartz. At one point, Max is kicked out of the dorms because he tried to bribe his TA with photos of Penny's T&A. At some point, Max realises he's gay, but continues to date Penny.
The final member of the group, Brad Williams, arrives when Max stars on The Real World Sacramento, a season that went unaired because one of the housemates burned down the firehouse they were filming in. While filming the season, Max tries to come out, but because he was eating, it comes out as "I'm greg."
Sometime after this, Max and Penny break up. Brad and Jane get married. Alex and Dave get engaged. Penny dates. A lot.
The fateful day is here, Dave and Alex are finally getting married. Max is present as one of Dave's groomsmen, and when a rollerblading stranger arrives to ruin the wedding by telling Alex he's in love with her, leading to her running away with him, Max tells Brad to kick his ass because "you're black, he's probably already scared of you." However, when Brad retorts that he should do it because "you're gay and chubby, nobody will see it coming," Max spirals over the next few days over the fact that people think he's chubby.
Later, at Rosalita's, the bar they frequent several times a day, Max believes it's going to be the last time they're all in a room together, because Alex's actions will destroy the group. He then gets angry with Brad for not drinking, stating that if this happened in his Massachusetts, he'd like to believe that everybody would be hammered. A few days later when the group goes to comfort Dave, he tells Dave about the video of the wedding being a Youtube sensation, before advising him to go out and get some sex. Then he drinks the entirety of Dave's blenderful of gin smoothie.
A few nights later, during Penny's
After Dave moves in with him, Max tries to get his friend to embrace the change that has happened to him. Instead, Dave decides to be more like Steven Seagal and go after Bo, the guy who rollerbladed into his wedding and ruined it. Drunk Max thinks getting justice is a great idea, so he tags along. When they find Bo, they find out he lives with his mother and the idea Dave built up in his head isn't accurate at all. When Dave and Bo have a heartfelt discussion about what happened, Max gets fed up and suckerpunches Bo.
Unfortunately, Bo knows jujitsu. It doesn't end well for Max.
Fed up with Dave and Alex's constant fighting, the group decides to stop inviting them to things together. This includes breakfast, meaning they all eat two breakfasts. Not that that's a problem for Max, who regularly consumes a breakfast meant for people who are going to work in a field for twelve hours. When the lies are uncovered, the rest of them decide to go to a Barefoot Pedaler concert without either Dave or Alex. When Penny, who spent the entire time trying to get backstage to reunite with an old flame is shot down and humiliated, Max sneaks backstage to get revenge.
It doesn't end well for him. He tries to steal the drummer's shirt, but is tasered for his efforts.
During a discussion about Dave's life, Max makes a few unfortunate comparisons about Dave being a zombie, which leads to Jane saying that Max would die first in a zombie attack, claiming he's out of shape, has no marketable talents and no survival skills. Max counters by saying that Jane would die first, claiming that because there are things in the world that she loves, it will slow her down. He then goes on to claim that his cold, black heart and and ability to live without attachments to anyone or anything are his greatest talents. Caught at a standstill, they decide to have a zombie olympics to see once and for all, who would die first.
The first event is a race around the block Max's apartment is on. Despite his weight, Max barely loses, though he collapses seconds later. Between events, Max helps Penny with her latest flame, revealing to her that he's a hipster. He then educates Penny about the hipster rules and styles of dress so she can keep up the ruse she'd started about also being a hipster. After sending Penny on her date, the second event in the zombie olympics begins: a contest to see who can stay still the longest.
Max wins, because he "accidentally" spills a beer, knowing that Jane will feel compelled to clean it up. They decide that the final contest is ruthlessness, but they're unable to decide how one measures that, exactly. The answer comes later after the group leaves a hipster part with a 90s bat mitzvah theme, and hipsters are swarming the food truck Dave decided to buy to escape the rut. Because hipsters apparently love food trucks, they begin to swarm. However, the truck is empty as Dave had just bought it, and Jane wins the contest when she pushes Max out of the truck into the swarm of hipsters.
Later, when Penny complains that Max isn't stereotypically gay enough for her, he introduces her to Derrick, after claiming that the fact she wants a stereotypical gay friend who will go shopping with her is offensive. With Penny distracted by Derrick, her perfect gay friend, Max and Brad try to help Dave deal with chicksand, a one night stand who became more. He offers multiple ways for Dave to break it off, though each one escalates the situation. Afterwards, when Penny is sick of Derrick, Max reveals that Penny doesn't need a "gay husband" because she is his gay husband.
During a discussion about penguins and Morgan Freeman, Penny arrives and announces she got the promotion she was up for. This eventually leads to Penny forgetting to hang up her phone after a call to Max, which ends in Max listening to Penny's life in real time. He hears all her business, her arguments, and her new assistant Ri-ri taking advantage of her. So under the guise of company security, Max and Brad get Ri-ri to apologise to Penny and also return the money she stole from the company.
Brad eventually sets up Max up with Franklin, a man from his work. The date is almost spectacularly bad, with Franklin being boring and having literally nothing in common with him. Later, Max confronts Brad about why he would think Franklin was a good match for him, and when Brad slips up and admits that it was simply because they were both gay, Max calls him a "gaycist." Offended, Brad tries to find something the two have in common, but he's unable to, despite coaching Franklin in all things Max. To prove his point, Max befriends an elderly black woman and claims that she and Brad would get along.
When Max's parents come to town, Penny isn't willing to be his beard because he has yet to come out to them. Despite the group's advice that he should just come out, he asks Jane to be his beard for the duration of their visit. She agrees, and tries her best but it's a disaster, because she's over the top and just a general try-hard. It's also revealed that Max once told his parents that Dave was the gay one, because his parents found Max's porn under his bed, leading to Max claiming that the porn was Dave's and that he used to lay on Max's bed and was obsessed with him.
With Jane's failed attempt as a beard, Max asks Alex to be his replacement beard next. When Alex doesn't show, Max is about to come out to them. Unfortunately, Jane arrives and demands to know why they don't like her. Brad arrives next, angry that Max has been kissing his wife, leading Max's parents to think Max is having an affair with a married woman. Alex arrives afterwards, pretending to be Larissa, a sculptress. That ruse quickly falls apart, and Max's parents can't believe he would date the woman who ruined Dave's life, lamenting that he never should have broken up with Penny.
Who arrives next, claiming that she's "too much of a Nazi for Hitler," after her most recent date with a man named Douglas Hitler. Fed up with the nonsense and Max apparently being involved with "two sluts and a Nazi," Max's father asks him what he's into, with Max replying he's into dudes. Having officially come out, Max admits he hadn't told them because he was scared of how they would react. Just before they leave to return home, Max's parents mention several people they could set him up with. Fortunately, Dave takes the bullet and pretends to be Max's partner, Max is grateful, but whispers that Dave isn't his type.
After food goes missing from the apartment, Max initially suspects Dave, who denies it. Getting a nannycam from Jane, Max finds out that Dave sleepwalks, but also that someone has been living in the crawlspace above their apartment and stealing their food. Furious at first, Max confronts Malcolm at a gallery showing, but later agrees to provide food in exchange for clothes. He then shows the group the tape of Dave sleepwalking.
When a coffee shop chain opens in the neighbourhood, Max join forces with Alex to get the place shut down to prevent gentrification. At the same time, he starts dating a guy named Ian. Organizing meetings and protests, Max later corners the coffee chain's mascot with a guy named Scotty who is, for lack of a better word, insane. Simply wanting to scare the chain into closing, Max is forced to prevent Scotty from killing the mascot. Eventually it's revealed that Ian owns the chain, and the community's efforts have been horrible for business.
When Ian finds out Max was behind the protests and the attack on his cousin, the store's mascot, he breaks up with him. Dave drives them all to the chain so Max can make an impassioned plea for forgiveness to Ian and the two resume dating. Unfortunately, they soon break up after Max finds out Ian is married with children.
In a bit of a slump, Max gets the number of a British guy named Adrian, but throws it out as he doesn't want to call him for a number of pointless, trivial reasons. Annoyed with Max's attitude, Jane fishes the number out of the trash and convinces him to go on the date, but Max just stands him up. Jane convinces him to go to the bar, where Adrian is a no-show. Angry that he'd been stood up, despite having stood Adrian up himself, Max tracks him down, and is berated by Adrian for his attitude. Unusually it seems to change Max's mind, who seems willing to give people a chance before he blows them off from now on.
Until his next date reveals a braided belt. Max is out.
Because Max refuses to behave like an adult, he buys a bunch of NERF guns instead of toilet paper. He and Dave end up obsessed with the things and try to find new heights to take their games to. It culminates in trying to shoot a neighbour across the street in the face from the window. The dart makes it across the street, but instead of hitting the creep Avi, it knocks over a candle and nearly burns the building down. The gang feels incredibly guilty until one of the firemen reveals an elderly woman had fallen over and couldn't get up, so without the fire, she would've died.
To celebrate, Max flirts with the firemen.
Max is later asked to officiate the wedding one of the group's friends, after having officiated Brad and Jane's wedding. Except whoops, he didn't actually have his license that time, a fact that greatly upsets Brad and Jane.
In order to make a few bucks, Max bets all his friends he can make them cry at the ceremony. A challenge he aces, by making all 5 of them weep. While collecting the money from the group, he comforts Penny, who was upset over Shershow getting married before her as he was a trainwreck of a person.
While celebrating the one year anniversary of Dave and Alex's non-wedding, Max attempts to shuck an oyster and ends up stabbing Brad in the leg, who then knocks over a display of shellfish onto his severely allergic wife. A hysterical Max is calmed down by Penny throwing a bucket of ice in his face. At no point does he apologise to Brad, or at least, use the words 'I'm sorry.' In fact, he says "comme ci comme ça that was pretty cool how it went in your leg, I thought there would be more blood." Later, while helping Penny move into her new condo, Brad pulls out of his recurring plans with Max, claiming he has a business thing. And probably also because Max stabbed him.
Everything's fine, until later that day, Max is out with Penny and sees Brad in bar with his black friends. Despite Penny asking him not to make a big deal out of it, Max hangs out outside the bar until Brad leaves. Several hours later. When Max confronts him, Brad claims he didn't invite him because he's not professional, so naturally Max takes it as a challenge. This leads to a heart-to-heart where Brad reveals he didn't tell Max about his other group of friends because he gets crazy when he's excluded from something. It also leads to Max bringing a group of his gay friends to Penny's housewarming party in an attempt to show Brad how it feels. It fails, but Brad reassures Max he'll always be the Riggs to his Murtaugh.
Dave returns home early from a Taste of Kenosha Contest to find Max having rented his room to German backpackers after months of online correspondence Max reveals he's been having money woes, and asks for a job at Dave's food truck Steak Me Home Tonight. Dave ends up firing him for being rude to customers, so with no other way to make rent, Max sells his collection of beanie babies. Except he doesn't pay the rent with the money, he buys a 1980s limousine, intending to rent his services out despite not being bonded and licensed.
After a tourist mistakes Max's used limousine for a tour company, he decides to take advantage of tourists to make some extra cash. With the help of Brad and Jane, who have been taking a couple's improv class, he ends up with a semi-successful tour company, telling such lies as Chicago once being known as the Window City, but had to change it to avoid a conflict with Omaha. Eventually, the popularity goes to his head, and when Brad and Jane demand a cut of the profits because of their help, he fires them. To replace them, he hires Scottie. So naturally, the tours go horribly wrong. Learning his lesson, Max apologises to Brad and Jane, but still doesn't give them a cut of the profits.
When Jane crashes their car, Max is forced to drive Brad to work every day in his limousine. This leads to Max being forced to run Brad's boss Forristal around town while Brad sucks up to him, despite his unwillingness to tell his boss he constantly has food on his face. Brad forces Max to promise him he won't tell Forristal about the food, but of course, Max eventually breaks. His honesty impresses Forristal, who is less than impressed with Brad. Max ends up ruining his newfound friendship with Forristal by misreading a moment: he tries to kiss him.
When Penny moves too fast and ends up dumped by her latest boyfriend, Max offers to wear the couples costume she asked her ex to wear to the Halloween party with her. While Penny thinks he's doing it to be nice, Jane reveals that Max's Lady Gaga meatsuit went bad, so without a costume he can't get into the party. Somehow, while dressed as a mother and baby, Max and Penny both meet guys. When Max insults Penny's new love interest and he overhears it, he gives up a chance at his own love interest to make things right with Penny. Of course, by doing so, he has to give up the couples costume and put on Penny's bright red one-piece bathing suit. Somehow, he manages to win the Drag Queen Contest with it.
After Dave's new sandwich, the Steaktanic, (2 pounds of meat, 1 litre of garlic aioli, half a block of smoked gouda, 3 layers of iceberg lettuce on a massive roll) fails miserably, Max offers to help him film a commercial to improve business. Dave refuses and hires a professional, while Max is tasked with retrieving Brad's sleep apnea machine from his apartment while he pretends to be at a work retreat. He sneaks into the apartment, but is caught by Jane who forces him to reveal the truth about Brad's whereabouts. When Dave's professional fails, he lets Max direct the next one. The result is a surprisingly touching short film about a young man and his father, but without any mention of steak sandwiches whatsoever. The commercial is a success, but it increases the business of a nearby hot dog stand instead.
A taco truck, Tacos Mi Corazons, holds a promotion where, if you get a tattoo of their logo, you get free tacos for life. So naturally, Max gets a tattoo. After this amazingly responsible decision, Max is tasked with babysitting his brother's kids. This is a problem, considering he hates children and their tiny, creepy features. When Penny offers to help, she becomes obsessed with getting the children to like her, while Max wins them over by letting them watch cartoons and letting them play 'Diner,' a game where they make him food and do the dishes. He later scares them off by taking them to a funeral, in a bar and telling them his theories about what happens when you die.
Max's high school girlfriend Angie moves to Chicago, and Dave immediately takes an interest in her. When Dave asks Max if he can date her, Max invokes the 'code,' an unwritten rule that states friends don't date friends' exes, even if one of the friends is gay now. When Dave doesn't buy it, Max is forced to show him how it feels and passionately makes out with Alex. It convinces Dave to back off of Angie, but leaves Alex with confusing feelings for Max. Yeah.
When Max finds out Dave lied about backing off, it causes a series of incidents where each man invokes a new 'code.' Wingman Code, where Dave tries to pick up the guy Max is hitting on, Dress Code, where Max turns Dave's V necks into deep V necks and escalates from there. Dave invokes the building code and hits a load-bearing pillar with a sledge hammer, and Max invokes Hair Code for Men and gives Dave a home perm. Angie eventually reveals the truth of their breakup to Dave, the two reconcile after Max admits that while he wasn't sexually attracted to Angie, she was still the first person he loved. He then quashes Alex's crush on him by showing her his disgusting eating habits.
Come Christmastime, Max is once more hurting for cash. So when Penny's scheduled mall Santa is unavailable, Max steps in to fill his shoes. Despite his hatred of children, he ends up being filled with the christmas spirit after stopping a man from mugging Penny purely by being in his Santa suit. The effect is somewhat ruined by the fact that he tried to buy porn while dressed in the suit.
When Penny reveals that someone left a sweater at her place, both Jane and Max claim it, despite the disparity in size. So naturally, after a few physical fights in an attempt to take ownership of the sweater, they're left with one solution: another contest. This time to see who is the least vain of the two, whoever wins gets the sweater. After a few... eccentric solutions, including throwing acid in each other's faces and getting facial tattoos, Alex comes up with the idea of wearing a horrible outfit. Max ends up wearing an all-white ensemble, complete with suspenders and Princess Diana's face on the shirt.
The contest comes to a head when after days of both parties refusing to budge, they decide to see who can pick someone up wearing the outfit and decide to use the fire department. When that doesn't work, they decide to burn the sweater. Only for Jane to find her sweater in her apartment, which Max immediately claims is his.
Somebody left a sweater at Penny's apartment, Jane and Max both claim it, contest to see who is the least vain. Sweaters get torched, Jane finds her sweater at home.
After binge watching too many reality shows, Max and Alex come to the conclusion that Dave is addicted to V-Neck t-shirts. So naturally, they decide to hold an inter-v-ntion. It does not work.
Still hurting for cash, Max decides to cash in on Valentine's Day and use his limousine to offer romantic trips to couples. (Each one is priced $69.) It works out fairly well until one of Max's exes, Grant, is revealed to be a customer. Despite his best efforts to remain concealed, Max eventually outs himself as the driver and Grant's ex, causing Grant's boyfriend to break up with him. Seeing that Max never got over him, the group convinces him to take a chance and ask Grant out again. It works, and Max and Grant begin dating again.
After the group becomes obsessed with being Grant's friend, Max grows frustrated as they monopolise his time. In his frustration, he tries to prove to the gang that Grant isn't perfect, only for Grant to prove it himself when the gang refuses to let up. When Grant thinks he's ruined everything, Max reveals he doesn't care what "these idiots" think, all that matters is that Max likes him.
Winter comes, so Max becomes the bear he is and goes into hibernation. Effects include: Sleeping through winter, a complete lack of verbal communication, and other bear-like habits. Eating honey with his hands is a year-round thing, though.
When Max begins to worry that he and Grant are settling down, Grant takes him on a 'marathon day of togetherness' to prove that he's in it for the long haul, and shockingly enough, Max loves it. Unfortunately, when he reveals to Grant that he can see a future together, getting married, adopting kids, the works, Grant admits he can see that too - except for the kids part. He doesn't want kids ever, and didn't realise Max did. It's not that Max wants kids, he just doesn't want to make such a big decision so soon. Penny later covers for him to help him keep the immature vibe by claiming Grant wanted kids and Max shut it down.
Still attempting and failing to get over Grant, Penny convinces Max to participate in the annual Rosalita's Run scavenger hunt. After several John Hughes-themed hunts, each one reminding him of Grant, Max eventually begins to move on, just in time to win the scavenger hunt and beat Penny's rival Julie.
When Penny falls down multiple flights of stairs during a base-jumping date and ends up in a body cast, Max helps nurse her back to health. Unfortunately, her physical therapist Kent is an incredibly attractive man, and Max begins misery-ing her in an attempt to spend time with him. He lies to Penny when her doctor calls to let her know she can have the cast removed, claiming she got caught up in a drug smuggling scheme and is in Bolivia. It escalates when Penny finds out about the lie and confronts him, only to slowly pass out. Max had drugged her with not only four bags of Sleepy Tea, but a dose of Lunesta, nature's Ambien. Penny manages to escape her room and later confronts Max downtown on his date with Kent, except after Max apologises, he remembers that she once did the exact same thing to him.
After Penny finally ends up in a stable relationship with a man named Peter, Max begins to grow jealous and lonely because she stops spending time with him. Not only that, but he's frustrated that for once, Penny didn't completely ruin her relationship in its fledgling stages as she usually does. In an attempt to make her jealous, Max befriends an unstable woman named Nicole, (which he pronounces as Nickel, as a nickel is worth five times as much as a penny,) and introduces the two of them. It backfires horribly, when Penny begins to offer her relationship advice, and offers to set her up with Pete's brother. Their relationship is eventually fixed when Max fixes Penny's latest crisis with Pete, a list of flaws she makes for every guy she dates in case the relationship fails.
Nicole later breaks into Max's apartment and waits hours for him to come home. Despite calling her insane, Max says he loves it and wants to party with her forever.
Lamenting the fact that he's in a man drought, Max goes to a gay bar for the first time in a very long time, and is incredibly unsuccessful because it was twink night. The next day at Emma's Diner, he claims he's retiring from gay, of course, he's just as unsuccessful at that. In order to help Max find out what gay subculture he belongs to, Jane and Derrick offer to go with him to various clubs that night. Despite trying such cultures as 'chameleon,' 'ostrich,' and 'ginger snaps' he's unable to find the right one. So instead of trying to fit into a box of someone else's design, he decides to make his own: Optimistic Red Velvet Walrus and hosts a night at Rosalita's Pub. It's rather unsuccessful, but one other man who didn't fit into any of the other categories came, so Max considers it a win.
With Dave having moved in with Alex, Max finds a new roommate. On the surface his new roommate Chase seems pretty cool, and he even upgrades all the furniture in the apartment, but when he doesn't come home that night, Max, Alex and Dave think something has happened to him and set about tracking him down. Eventually, they find him having dinner with someone and barge in, demanding to know why he didn't come home. Except, he's having dinner with his wife who is upset to find out that Chase has another sex shack, a place where he can have affairs and not get caught. She breaks up with him, costing Chase both his job and family. Naturally, Chase is pissed, so he vows to destroy Max's life as he destroyed his and moves out.
As revenge for a prank Dave thinks Max pulled on him, where people were convinced to trade their guns for food from Dave's truck, Dave pranks Max by tricking him into thinking he won the lottery. It doesn't go entirely as planned, because Max reacts in a rather unexpected way: by shouting that he won't be sharing the money with any of them, as they're all dead to him. Mortified by the fact that it was a prank, Max vows revenge on everyone in the room, setting off a series of escalating pranks. He starts with Brad, putting stripper glitter in his lotions and creams, and targets Dave next, though it's Jane who gets the waffle exploded in her face. Alex is the next target, where he sets up a gift basket of muffins from the landlord for Muffin Month (which isn't a thing) and setting a number of paintball guns to fire when the top muffin is removed.
Fortunately, Dave is there to prevent Penny and Alex from being hit by the barrage of paint, and in her increasing terror at being pranked, Alex cuts off a chunk of her own hair, horrifying Max in the process, and begs him to let her help him prank Dave in return for not pranking her. This leads to Alex launching herself into the air and landing on her coffee table, while Max sets up a slime bucket above Penny's phone to drop when she picks it up. He also glues Penny's boyfriend Pete to his toilet seat, preventing him from being there when Penny finds the engagement ring in her apartment, and also from getting slimed.
Because Pete didn't show, Penny is convinced the engagement was a prank of Max's and so she rents a wedding dress and confronts Max, who reacts with happiness at Penny's engagement. Unfortunately, he doesn't warn her about the slime bucket set up above his phone, so Penny gets slimed a second time, in the rental wedding dress. With everybody else pranked, and after helping unglue Pete from his toilet, it's time to get Dave. However, Dave is trying to prank Max in return for everything he's done, and tries to rig a hotplate and several bags of popcorn kernels to the accelerator of Max's limo. Except, when Max starts the limo, it explodes into a fiery ball, seemingly killing Max.
Of course, it doesn't. Since Alex was working with Max, she warned him about Dave's prank, letting him rig the limo to explode and sorting an escape route through the hole in the floor. It's later revealed that Alex pulled the initial prank and set the whole thing off. Yeah.
When Max tries to avoid a conversation with a previous one-night stand, he asks a stranger to pretend to be having a conversation with him. She thinks he's hitting on her, and before he can tell her otherwise, mentions she gets really good basketball tickets and other cool stuff from her job. So instead of telling her he's gay, Max runs with it. He ends up dating Katie for a while to take advantage of the material goods she can provide. Frustrated with the fact that Max is taking advantage of her, Brad and Penny decide to out him to her by bringing aforementioned one-night stand to a lunch with her. It goes south when she invites Brad to a Bulls game with them, causing Brad to claim that Penny still has feelings for Max and that anything she says is a lie, so naturally Katie doesn't believe her whe she claims Max is gay.
Penny later talks up Max's sexual prowess to Katie, who has only experienced something Max calls 'forekissing.' Convinced that Max is some sort of sex god, Katie tries to take things to the next level, and when confronted with her boobs, breaks down and reveals that he's gay.
Once more Max is having money woes, having been forced to pay last month's rent with a massive jug full of change. Because he blew up his limousine as part of a prank on Dave, he has no way to make money, so instead of trying something responsible like... say, getting a job, he decides to enter the Mr. Super Gay Chicago Pageant, with a grand prize of $1000. Alex and Dave volunteer to be his coaches, and after a very rough start, Max pulls through and wins the thousand dollars. Which he asks for in pennies. Because they're the only currency he trusts.
Chase returns, confronting Max in the park one day and claiming that while he had planned to keep good on his vow to ruin Max's life, Max's life is already so bad, that everything Chase had planned was nothing in comparison. Even the rats he planned to release in the apartment were dwarfed by the rats already living there. Upset by Chase's claims, Max decides to improve his life and goes to Jane for help. In a few short days, thanks to Jane's incredibly impressive help, Max is eating healthy, bathing, and has a job as manager at a local grocery chain, even ending up on the local news for saving a reporter's life.
But because of how quickly it happened, Max quickly grows suspicious and starts to think Chase is behind it; that he's building him up only to knock him down later, even going as far as to accuse Jane of being Chase. To prevent Chase from ruining his life, Max decides to reruin his own life. He messily consumes an entire cake, puts his old clothes back on despite having been in the trash and covered in food scraps, gets a bucket of dirt thrown at him, and finally, to take away the last thing he has left, his health, goads Jane into punching him. It's uh, a little too much, because Max ends up in the hospital. However, while he's there, he meets Chase, who had slipped on the pizza Max dropped in the park and hit his head, nearly dying.
When Penny and Dave have plans with their parents, Max tries to get a 4 person mini-chinese new year dragon going with Alex, Brad and Jane, only for Brad and Jane to reveal they have a Bris to attend. So instead of finding something else to do, Max and Alex decide to accompany them to said Bris, only to find out they had lied to avoid making Max go crazy over being excluded again, as they're planning to join a tennis club. Seemingly placated by the lie, Max soon follows them to the club with Alex to prove that the tennis club is their scene. It eventually culminates in a loud, obnoxious tennis match that Max and Alex lose, but Brad and Jane are banned from the club for their victory display too. In an attempt to fix things, Max goes back into the club and a few seconds later comes running out naked screaming "IT DIDN'T WORK." It's unclear what he actually attempted to do.
Shortly before Alex and Jane's sister Brooke gets married, Alex and Dave break up. Because they're idiots, they tell Penny and Max about the breakup separately, leading to the two of them discussing it at the wedding and starting a wedding-wide gossip chain that culminates in multiple revelations at the altar, including one about Alex being pregnant, Brad having knocked up a woman in Vegas and Penny being 53. Max's final act of the series is to announce the next dance, and also to reveal that he took a dick pic with every single disposable camera in the room.
Abilities/Special Powers: He's much faster with his mouth than his hands, it's why he's better at talking than sign language. It also helps find things baked into cakes. Other than that, he is your run of the mill human.
Third-Person Sample: One minute Max is sleepily rolling around his bed with a bunch of leftover pizza, the next he's falling to the floor in a brightly coloured room that is far too clean to ever be his apartment. Not that he notices immediately. He doesn't even realise he's changed locations for a few minutes, instead reaching for another slice of pizza and letting out a confused noise when his hand doesn't meet the box. "Wh-- where is it? Where's my pizza?" Rolling over to try and find the probably week-old at this point pizza, Max smacks face-first into one of the tea room chairs. The impact shocks him fully awake, leaving him staring blearily around the room.
"...Guys? This isn't funny." Because it's clearly a prank, right? If it is, they better pray he doesn't find out which one of them is behind it, and god help them if it's a group prank. Climbing to his feet, Max grabs a handful of cakes from the nearby table and proceeds to shove them all into his mouth at once, before grabbing another handful to take with him. "Guys! Come on! Dave, bud, if you apologise now, we won't need to repeat what happened last time you pranked me." He doesn't have a limousine to blow up this time, after all.
Warily making his way out into the hall, Max starts down the hall. "Okay, this is clearly too well thought-out to be Dave. Jane? Good job on the prank, but I have pizza to eat so I'd really like to go home now!" Eventually, he makes it to the foyer, and from there outside. The brightness blinds him for a few seconds, before he realises he definitely isn't in Chicago anymore. "What the hell."
First-Person Sample: [When the feed turns on, it's clear the phone is on its side on the ground. The image it displays is a mountain of taco wrappers in someone's room, it isn't pretty.
It isn't pretty at all.
Eventually, the pile of wrappers move and it's quickly revealed that someone was asleep under the mountain of trash. The wrappers scatter around the floor as Max rolls over and yawns, a bleary eye opening to check the state of the day before he inevitably goes back to sleep. The rest of them scatter when he realises he's being filmed.]
Sooo, quick q for all you people out there... watching me sleep.
[He doesn't seem all that bothered though.]
Does anybody know how to remove a tattoo?
[The device is jostled around, as Max lifts up his shirt to display a rather... unique tattoo.]
I got this bad boy when Tacos mi Corazons was doing a free tacos for life special, but now that I can get free tacos whenever I want without leaving my room, it's gotta go.
