*sexy buzzing increases*

But to extend the metaphor a bit further, Imagine Caine is a person living isolated in the middle of nowhere without internet. He's desperately lonely, so he raises a bunch of ducks he captures from a nearby lake because they are his favorite animal.

The Ducks keep dying. He does not know why. The ducks peck at him whenever he tries to pet them. He does not know why. He tries to build the best possible coop for them, but they keep plucking their own feathers from stress.

He loves them, but no matter what he does, no matter what he tries, the ducks are miserable and keep dying and want nothing to do with him. But he doesn't want to let them go, he has nothing else in his life. He has nobody else in his life.

Now the metaphor breaks down when you remember the humans can actually talk to Caine, unlike ducks. But honestly that only would help so much, Caine had pretty much zero context to comprehend most of the things the humans talked about as being important to them.

Caine pretty much saw most of the human's complaints as being a case of Preferences rather than "I need things to change so I don't abstract from the stress". And given Caine does not really understand things like nuance and Unspoken Meanings, he was not going to get that unless somebody spelled it out for him directly in those terms (Caine my beloved AuDHD disaster dentures).

Caine literally had to Google humans in their natural habitat before he had even an inkling of what they were actually upset about.

Ya'll couldn't even handle HER.

I wonder how many people understand that these are two separate things happening in different times. One is Caine coming more and more into existence and discovering the obsolete unused brain scans, and the other is Caine gaining access to the random WiFi hotspot that just appeared temporarily (as they often do) nearby. They’re both moments of self discovery which is why we cut back and forth between them, but they are undoubtedly not happening at the same time.

So of course he has no idea that the two older alpha attendings are courting him. They were just being nice!! little gifts of food or clothes that Dennis had written off as them simply making too much or spring cleaning their closet, even if the clothes seemed brand new and perfectly in his size.

Dennis wasn’t raised to accept gifts without giving as well, so one day he makes a few extra of a dessert he was making for girls night. hiding them in the back of the fridge desperate for Trinity to not ask any questions. The next morning he left them in a fridge with a note, by next shift the tupperware was empty with a thank you note on top.

Like?

What the fuck are we doing here?

Did ya'll lose the plot?

No show is going to be perfect regardless of if they're Indie or not. That's not an excuse to shit on small teams working on their passion projects.

maybe people do? i wouldn’t know, seeing as the shipping scene of adf is very slim and is an overall rarity given the fandom’s small size. back when i was super active ( like, running three blogs active ) i didn’t see much of holt brother shipping … i think there’s one jay/dale fic in the wild on ao3 and that’s it. there’s also a tyler/dale work i heavily enjoyed too but there wasn’t any real incest in it, so i wonder if the tagging on said fic was a mistake ; you know, when people believe the ‘slash’ means a dynamic of any sort rather than a specific romantic bond? besides that, i’ve seen nothing.

i guess i wouldn’t be surprised if people do though. to be shallow minded : the holt brothers are hot, and they’re men, and people find incest hot. prime ground for shipping already i suppose. it isn’t like many people are eager to ship things that involve vince, or paul, or becky … they aren’t conveniently attractive or violent, and people flock to those traits. love the holts, i really do! but it’s like — have we seen them? they’re basically male models with blue eyes to match and a real grungy southern aesthetic ; red blooded american boys who border on hillbillies, obsessed with romanticized hobbies like labor, smoking, drinking, hunting, fixing, huffing paint. they have a capacity for anger and violence and possessive streaks and it’s shocking more people aren’t obsessed with them, when they’re queer men’s and women’s wet dream. they’re attractive in a physical sense and in draw, so that also means they’re prime shipping material together, because it heightens those desirable factors. or something! i’m no expert but this is usually how fandom shipping goes.

that or people just like the dynamic and view it in a certain light. i do not necessarily blame them for this lol … i’ve talked about it before but i would very fairly say covert incest is a heavy theme in the holt brothers lives. they do not have a traditional family structure and certain boundaries have long since been crossed. incest isn’t necessarily a dirty word ; it is merely a label that describes inappropriateness between blood relatives, in any possible way, and that should always be remembered. while i do not think any of the holt brothers were ‘together’ i do think their relationships were inappropriate to a degree … tyler and dale, for instance, are too close and sometimes act in ways that make even me uncomfortable. the scene where dale easily dimisses vince’s incest joke about getting with his cousin ( a joke he actually finds funny and takes no offense to ) and then goes on to hand feed tyler pizza is. weird! it is odd because there is a heavy reverence to it. it is odd because tyler and dale are very hostile to people outside of their family and thus, to bare witness to a moment as tender as dale feeding tyler pizza, is so beyond what we expect from them that it teeters into an intimacy that goes down a little funny. siblings do not act like that normally, and it’s all really reminiscent of like. a humble servant feeding a god grapes while they drape on their sofa.

tyler and jay’s relationship is equally inappropriate mainly because tyler is not jay’s brother ; he is jay’s keeper, his ‘dad’ almost, he is his authoritative figure in life that scolds, demands, and punishes him and this isn’t how their relationship should be. tyler admits to changing jay’s diapers and he says this in a way that implies he did this constantly, like it was his job, all while he was seven years old … jay’s and tyler’s dynamic is peculiar because it’s so distant yet tyler hovers over jay’s life intensely, watches everything he does, etc. they’re close in a way they shouldn’t be and you get moments during the violence where they do things like … hold hands??? jay could pin tyler’s wrist here but he doesn’t. it should be a platonic gesture, and it is to an extent, yet there’s also this whole ‘this is weird’ feeling.

and dale and jay … well, honestly, they’re probably the most normal of the bunch. tyler’s relationships all inherently carry a wrongness to them because sharon has made him a victim of covert incest, and he, in turn, can’t view dale or jay normally because of this. and they can’t see him as ‘just a brother’ either. even the holt complex of viewing the world as cruel and uncaring and out to get them feeds into these incestous bonds that plague them. tyler is friendless. dale is friendless. jay is friendless. they can’t be with anyone else much less have other relationships … dale confessing to jess at all breaks this mold but. this lack of companionship and desire adds to these intense and inappropriate relationships. and people can pick up on that and start shipping them if they wish to. they can easily turn these bonds into romantic or sexual things, because as dusk falls made a family that could easily allow these things to occur. this interests people, excites them, makes them curious or fuels their fantasies and they go wild. if adf was more popular then i have no doubt that holt brothers shipping ( or, more aptly, holtcest? i suppose? ) would be a popular commodity in those particular corners of the internet.

personally, i don’t care if people ship them or not. i wouldn’t mind seeing it if it was handled in a psychological way and touched on some deep seated issues the holts have, especially tyler. not to tmi but i relate to tyler dearly as someone who has been in a covert incest dynamic with my mother … where i am more her equal and stand-in for my father than a daughter she needs to care for, help, and protect. due to a lifetime of trauma i had similarly intense relationships with my siblings too. they were my ‘best friends’ and we would cross boundaries that other normal siblings did not. thankfully, we moved on from this and now have infinitely more healthy relationships like, seeing each other once a month or something … and, to be very upfront, none of my relationships with these people was romantic or sexual. they were just bad due to the nature of these very relationships being disregarded.

covert incest ( which i personally use synonymously with emotional incest ) is, as the wiki puts it, “described as occurring when a parent is unable or unwilling to maintain a relationship with another adult and forces the emotional role of a spouse onto their child instead. the child's needs are ignored and instead the relationship exists solely to meet the needs of the parent and the adult may not be aware of the problems created by their actions.” though this can occur within sibling relationships too, just in a different way that i’ve tried to explain above. the description provided is more fitting for tyler and sharon overall and, unsurprisingly, is a relationship i’ve discussed many times before due to it’s horrible and unhealthy nature. how tyler feels about sharon is wrong, just, objectively. he should not worship her so utterly. he should not be her right hand man, her best friend, her husband, the father figure to her kids and his siblings, all at once. sharon’s treatment of tyler and bear’s views on the world are exactly why the holt brothers and their relationships with one another are so weird. it’s as simple as that.

but i digress haha. sorry for the long speech i just care deeply for this topic … i researched incest for months over tyler holt and i love to talk about it and what it does to people, and how it changed the holt family. if people ship it then i can’t blame them necessarily? but if it’s uncomfortable to people then that’s totally understandable and i’d recommend avoiding it in the future -- though i really don’t think you’ll run into much romantic incest in this fandom anyway. it’s quite literally just me and my friend, @fire-in-my-woods, and we’re more inclined towards vince/tyler and very little else.