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🌸 ピンクの世界 🌸

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Now, it has admittedly been about 10 months since I read the original trilogy in its entirety, but I refer back to it enough when working on my WIPs that I’m reasonably confident of the timeline

Im chill with discussing literally any part of this and if I misremembered or misinterpreted something lmk. Im not going to start liking the man, but I believe in being an accurate hater

Prepare for a long post, I’m not even sorry about it

✨From the beginning✨

The twins meet in person at about 15

Andrew gets out of juvie at like 16

He kills Tilda and Nicky gets custody after the funeral, the twins are still 16, but nearly 17

Andrew gets Aaron clean with DIY rehab

They are about 17 when they start working at Eden’s, the twins are working under the table to help make ends meet

Andrew does a public service (stops his cousin from getting hate crimed, not that it would legally be considered one at that point in time) and gets put on the hell medication

They twins are 18 when they get recruited to PSU and stop working at Eden’s when they start college

Roland is, I believe, described to be in his mid-20s when Neil meets him. Nora said he was 22-23 when he met Andrew (a 5-6 year age gap)

And it is implied that he and Andrew have intermittently been hooking up for quite some time, potentially since he was working at Eden’s. I’m operating under the assumption that that’s when they started. If I’ve missed something that states otherwise let me know, I’m open to being wrong

So you have a man who is well-established in his job as a bartender and in his 20s. He’s independent and gainfully employed. And you have a 17 year old working under the table to help keep food on the table and a roof over his family’s head in South Carolina in 2003/2004. And they are hooking up. Consensually – the age of consent in SC is 16, just like in West Virginia. So. Yeah. And, if I remember correctly, Lawrence v. Texas legalized same-sex sexual activity nationwide in 2003

But functionally, you have a teenage boy who has already had it made expressly clear to him that he will not be believed if he tells anyone he has been sexually assaulted working illegally for the business his partner is legally employed and established at. And that partner does such a poor job respecting his teenaged partner’s boundaries while they’re hooking up that Andrew only feels confident in engaging in sexual activities with him when Roland is, in some capacity, restrained (handcuffs). This is something Roland makes light of, even if he is later angry when he finds out what happened to Andrew. He isn’t careful with Andrew, and I don’t even mean that in reference to their actual hookups. We know post-TGR that literally the year Andrew starts working at Eden’s there is a massive scandal in the collegiate exy world over queer athletes getting caught. Multiple people lost their scholarships, position on their teams, and future careers over it. That happened in 2003

And Andrew is only out to two people that we know of pre-Neil, Renee and Roland. Renee has permission to tell Neil. We have no indication that Roland does. Yet he tells Neil, someone he is only vaguely familiar with, that he guesses he understands why Andrew has a hands off rule after it becomes public knowledge that Andrew was raped and then tells Neil that they make padded cuffs in response to his post-Evermore injuries because he assumes the marks are from Neil and Andrew hooking up. Neil already knows that Andrew is gay at that point, but again Roland has no way of knowing that. He just assumes. In 2007. In South Carolina. That this collegiate athlete is not only not a bigot in a sport that textually very much excuses the mistreatment of queer athletes, but is also queer himself and in some kind of relationship with someone Roland knows is not publicly out. I’m not denying that Andrew and Neil were blatantly obvious in their crushes if you had even the slightest bit of context clues. Multiple people clocked them. But Roland doesn’t know for sure. He doesn’t have permission to share anything about Andrew’s life, certainly nothing that would put him in danger like this. He does it anyways. It works out fine, but it would be so fucking easy for it to not.

But let’s go back to the power dynamic when Andrew was working at Eden’s. He’s not out to his family. He has no support system. If anything goes wrong of course Eden’s is firing the teenager working under the table washing dishes and not the adult on their actual payroll. And then Andrew is on that fucking medication. I’m not saying he can’t consent like that, I’m saying his impulse control and critical thinking skills are being affected. I’m saying the medication had such a detrimental impact on him that he laughed about getting raped again. That he was more than likely manic for the majority of the time he was on that medication. That he outright states to Neil that he is not himself medicated and that he is rarely anything resembling sober. That it’s narratively important that Andrew and Neil don’t get together until Neil is forced into his natural appearance and Andrew is clean. They don’t get together until they’re themselves again.

Then, we have the point that Roland drugs people for Andrew. It’s fucked that Andrew asks him to, but that’s not what we’re discussing. We’re discussing that Roland agreed. That this grown man agreed to risk his job for his hookup that there is no evidence of him having any deeper relationship with. That he drugs another teenager, one that he’s never met and that he has no idea what will happen to afterwards, as what? An appeasement? A transaction for sex? It’s not as if Roland and Andrew are close friends. Andrew is violent and demanding and none of the others believe he actually cares about anyone besides himself. So why else would Roland do this for him?

Roland’s morals are, to put it mildly, loose. In ways I don’t find particularly sympathetic. We don’t know what he’s thinking and he’s not present enough that we get a real read on his motivations and character. But what telling information we do have. His introduction is drugging a barely-adult he shouldn’t even actually be serving as a favor for sex with no regard for what will happen. Neil gets assaulted at Eden’s. That is a thing that happens in canon and it infuriates me to think that what happened is still on the less drastic end of what could have. Nicky kissing him is bad enough, but so many things could have happened had he gotten away from them or if someone else had grabbed him.