the thing is that i just genuinely don't think bart and nathaniel's by-the-end-of-the-series relationship is about love. i don't even think it was as strong as bart and ptolemys or even bart and kitty's. has to be dragged kicking and whining all the way into decency, and maybe it's fair to say that kitty and ptolemy are less impressive bc they were decent to begin with. like you COULD argue that. but i also don't think that The Way He Felt And Did Not Voice was love, at the end. certainly he loved, and loves, ptolemy. that's been stated. i think he had a nearly familial affection for kitty, which is love, if not romantic. but i think what he had for nat, finally, in the last moment of their collaboration, was not love of either kind but respect. and that's what's most important ABOUT his history with nat in the first place - they didn't respect one another, couldn't respect one another, because nat had been taught from birth that people like bart didn't deserve his respect, and bart had been mistreated for two thousand years by the world's nats. the fact that nat earned his respect - and gave his own - was for the two of them far more important than something like love. ptolemy was easy to love, even from their first meeting: he was always respectful, always curious, always accommodating. kitty was easy to like, and then easy to love - she was a human who was not a magician, and who hated magicians as much as he did, so they were natural allies right from the beginning. he and nat spend the entire series fighting each other tooth and nail, and finally, at the eleventh hour, develop genuine respect. it's not friendship. it's not brotherhood. it's not romance. it's just a clear comprehension and appreciation of one another as individuals. it's, i'd argue, as far as the two of them could ever have gotten, but it is (not counting the preliminary underpinning of bart's relationship with ptolemy) the central question of the series. i think a lot of readers want to make the series more *romantic* than it is, in a lot of ways - pull the subtext of bart and ptolemy further into the text; suggest that bart and kitty are in love, or bart and nat, or nat and kitty...and that's...like...i mean, vaya con dios, but i genuinely think it's missing the point. the bartimaeus sequence is a deeply philosophical middle grade series about slavery, freedom, fascism, exploitation, and empathy, and whether or not respect and empathy are possible in such an environment is far more relevant to the thesis than whether or not you can ship 'em.
