BOOM DE YADA

Like not to put too fine a point on it, but I feel like this is the (meta) reason they pushed back the timeline of their meeting to earlier than their irl narrative, the reason they use Matt's twin siblings' baby pictures to represent themselves, the reason they made themselves the same age. It's this feeling like yeah, you complete me, you're really the other half of me, you are my spiritual twin and I am not whole without you

So when it comes to like, discussions of their sexuality and expressions of sexuality, I'm not fully able to talk about my understanding of them without also talking about how their autism affects their sexuality. Bc I think Matt is just one of those autists who don't fully connect with their bodies on a very basic level. He treats it like it's his house: he lives in it, but it's not him. He's the kind of autist who can genuinely say and mean something like "you won't notice time passing if you've got a best friend" bc what is time to a body he barely notices? Bc he's basically 24/7 living in his head, and his mind is the same as it ever was. And he likes his mind. It's his favourite thing about himself.

So when it comes to sexuality, it's like, yeah, it's there, but it's distant, it's easily pushed aside. It's a body thing. He doesn't have to be aware of it like he doesn't have to be aware of age, or pain, or discomfort.

This in contrast with Jay who feels deep shame about his mind and how it doesn't work the same as everyone else's and who cannot escape his body. We're even introduced to him as a kid who has to shield his body from the sensory assaults of this world bc he cannot escape them. He knows where all his feelings live in his body, and he knows and cares about how people perceive his body, and he feels out of control about all of this all of the time. He needs needs needs a buffer, and Matt took his buffer away and basically offered himself up as substitute. This constant observing of himself, the observation of others, his inability to escape perception on any level coupled with the fact that he naturally draws attention. He's good looking he's overtly talented, even though with the autism, he feels like there's something's wrong with him, he was put together wrong, everything hurts all the time and he's doing it wrong all the time, but nobody gives him any space to just be unperceived. People won't leave him alone.

His favourite thing about himself is his looks. He can't do that wrong. His face and body are built in. As long as he wears them, people think he's attractive and, most importantly, normal. It's the mask of his self.

So Jay feels this pressure to like, correct himself, to present himself "correctly" in a way that Matt has never felt, bc Matt doesn't attach his sense of self to his body-house. Jay of webseries in particular is consumed by the preoccupation that if people are gonna be looking at him, he needs to make himself correct. When he's a kid, he's this girlish boy with girlish interests and mannerisms, so when he grows up and tries masking all these things, he's terrible at it, putting on this ill fitting skin of butched up masculinity that leaves him angry and irritated and exhausted all the time. Part of that is adopting the sexuality of a stereotyped man, but it's like, he's clearly bad at it, he can't get himself to perform it naturally, the girls see through him and leave him high and dry. But he needs this. He needs to be normal.

So it's like, together: Jay is in an active war against his autism which includes his basic sense of self, and in that war, he's fighting a battle against his gender presentation as well as a one to Be Seen As A Normal Man, Just A Normal Heterosexual Man That Men Understand and Women Find Desirable. His prickliness to touch is part homophobia and part his general autistic aversion to touch.

Matt doesn't have Jay's difficulty with masking bc everything is happening on a cerebral level for him anyway, but like, he does have a sexuality, and at various points in his life, he's even been willing to acknowledge his sexuality. But Matt's sexuality is a threat to Jay, and so Jay's rampant and personal homophobia drove him away from it, when he was already pretty tenuously attached to it. By webseries, he's already subsuming it into his "art".

By Viceland, they've kind of come to a tenuous stalemate, like water finding level. By moving into a dedicated space together and, I think crucially, by not needing to go out into the world every day to go to work anymore (separate meta but I think Matt's trust vested at 25), Jay finally gets the space he needs to go unperceived for large swaths of his life. He relaxes out of the need to mask, which takes away most of his anger and irritability, and also allows him to settle into a more natural shape: his mannerisms are distinctly more feminine after webseries, like he's stopped trying to police them.

And sex? Well honestly, most days, he'd rather go on being safe and unperceived rather than put on that old skinsuit again to go out in the world and look for sex. The skinsuit is mandatory, see. Those are the rules.

But they're some version of happy together, so it's like. Matt hasn't lived in his body in 10 years at this point. Jay's finally calmed down. They fit together so well on a day to day domestic level, and Matt can live like this, it's not a hardship. Why threaten Jay? Why bring Matt's sexuality into this? What would be the point?

Cicada sketches by Vincent van Gogh.

She’s never seen the Grand Canyon before. It shakes her, head to toe.