I Think Of That Moment When Allison Fresh After Seth Died Went To See The Banners With His Picture And

i think of that moment when allison fresh after seth died went to see the banners with his picture and nicky went "i bet she's crying". like. he's putting up with a lot of shit from the twins and kevin willingly but he's still a shitstarter at heart. neil is saying that it was a bad attempt to lighten the mood but nicky ffs why?

dude. neil, someone who is callous to this kind of thing, got mad at that. how do you achieve that?

I still can’t believe so many people place Nicky as some sort of pacifist/conflict hater who is upset when arguments break out when canonically he is known to makes things awkward and uncomfortable just because he finds sheer joy and amusement out of it 😭

Jean swallowed hard against everything he knew better than to say and managed a quiet, ​“I will burn the house down.”

I still can’t believe so many people place Nicky as some sort of pacifist/conflict hater who is upset when arguments break out when canonically he is known to makes things awkward and uncomfortable just because he finds sheer joy and amusement out of it 😭

i've seen the post that goes "neil has the crunchiest hair ever seen because of constant dyeing" with counter argument being "his hair is lighter color so it wouldn't be so damaged" but like do we know that he kept the same brown hair for longer than a year in a row? i always assumed that he and mary went through different hair colors so they wouldn't be recognized. on the other hand i haven't reread the books in a while so i maybe forgot something.

also him having an absolutely dead crunchy hair and still looking gorgeous enough to make people flirt with him is funnier to imagine

The way I see it, Andrew was like a garden stake for Neil and Kevin: he couldn't do their growing for them, but he could be the solid, unbending support rod that they could use to grow toward the sky without having to worry about falling to the ground when they were not ready to hold themselves up ("the main function of a garden stake is to ensure that a young or weak plant can hold itself up against the elements").

And I think that's what Kevin and Neil are trying to be for Jean now. They are finally steady enough on their own that they're able to support someone else, and Jean needs them.

Kevin provides guidelines that make sense within Jean's worldview (you have a new master, obey him by going to LA and building a new life for yourself / you made me a promise so you can't kill yourself), he asks Betsy to break his own patient confidentiality as much as she needs to show Jean that Kevin trusts her and he can too, he coaches Jeremy on how to best support Jean (if you tell him to submit, he will / he will need someone to go to class with him / he will fall apart without a buddy system).

Neil encourages Jean to make meaningful connections with people because it will help keep him safe, he anchors Jean when dealing with the FBI, he actively removes a threat to Jean's safety so it won't hinder his slow growth, he uses a lil bit of emotional manipulation to drive the message home that Jean is worth saving, he makes himself someone Jean can talk to about the things only the two of them understand.

Jeremy, Cat, Laila, Rhemann, the Trojans, they are all vital for Jean's healing, the soil in which he'll put down roots; but it's Kevin and Neil who have been in his position before and know exactly what they needed to survive and thrive in a new environment. They needed Andrew to prop them up, and now they'll do that for Jean.

five curiosities for the next book, after reading the sunshine court

a non-exhaustive list, but five things i'm curious to (hopefully) find out more about in TSC2, or that i have questions about still:

what happened at the trojans' fall banquet (presumably jeremy's first year)? it's a Scandal, and jeremy cannot stand to be around bryson, and annalise has never forgiven him for sticking with exy after that, despite having attended all his games in high school. given the allusions to his stepfather, and also his step-grandfather being a congressman, i can see how jeremy's sexuality might be relevant to the situation—especially if we read into lucas' stiff apology and shame at his implication about jeremy and jean as being born from more than just common decency, but rather knowledge of this being a previous sticking point in terms of jeremy's scandals—but i also keep thinking about what cat said. jeremy has—three. two brothers, one sister. the way she says it, how it sticks out to jean as an odd switch, and the fact that we've only met two siblings – it makes me wonder what happened to the third. or if that's even the right question to ask, regarding jeremy's siblings.

elodie. i'm curious if we learn anything about what happened—by and large, i kinda hope not, if only because then jean has to too, unless it turns out stuart is lying, but that's a very different kind of fallout. (i don't actively theorise he is—at some point, these kids will run out of tolerance for ghost stories coming back to life—but i think its possibility ought to be considered, at least). i think we'll get more flashes of her from jean's thoughts, though, and i anticipate lots of heartbreak lmao

lucas. assuming stuart's contact comes through, and neil's hit goes ahead, we've got lucas in the aftermath of finding out his brother is a monster, and jean saying not to call the police, and then possibly his brother being dead. if it happens any other day—if it happens in west virginia, especially—i suspect lucas might be able to look at it like another domino in the ravens machine falling down, or even that something horrible happened to him when he returned home, but if it's still in LA, after what he did to jean, after jean said no cops-------i can see how that might twist into something more suspicious. who knows! i'm curious to see what happens there. grayson is a monster, but he is still lucas' brother. aaron and kevin still have complicated grief about tilda and riko, and they were their direct, constant abusers; cass never learned until after the fact, and lucas is in a complex space between the two parts of that spectrum. if grayson dies, i think the fallout will be unavoidable for exploration

this is a small one but man, i just want to keep seeing jean's list grow. it tears something out of me every time, and stitches me back together, and i want to go through that over and over, because i want to see a jean who not only hears that his life is his and worth living, but a jean who learns to believe it too

i'm just kinda assuming we see the foxes again, because i remember nora's character list having new details about characters who didn't show up in this one, but i'm also quietly hoping for more thea. their scene made me ache, and he'd never had good defenses against thea, and kevin knew that. jean would kill him for bringing her here made my heart do the !! double-tap. i'm extremely invested in jean, thea and kevin as a unit, and it would be so incredibly wonderful to see more