kevin’s love of exy goes way beyond normal dedication and straight to special interest levels. it’s all he Wants to talk about and every aspect of his life and motivations ties back to exy. like, seth dies and his first reaction is how this impacts his special interests. a clear social faux pas to most, but he’s entirely unaware that there’s anything wrong with responding to a death of a teammate in this manner.
his exy skills are all pattern recognition and stats based. he’s calculating angles of shots and the like all in the moment, rather than playing with heart like neil. it’s very logical and strategic.
his alcohol dependency also screams of asd to me. he takes exy so so seriously but he puts it in danger with his excessive alcohol use and cracker dust because he Can’t cope without this crutch. also just. clubs are sensory nightmares.
looping back to how he is socially.
hes incredibly blunt, with those in his inner circle he doesnt sugarcoat anything. he says what he means. if he thinks you’re playing like shit he straight up says that, not with the intent to belittle but to get things to his high standards.
his public persona has heavy masking energy. he’s mimicking his media training recycling words he’d been taught and his smiles are practiced and perfected. half the time we see him with the public persona on in a non interview / media circumstance, he’s not sober, using that crutch again to get him through. i’m thinking about the first winter banquet where he mingled very amicably with the other teams (after being scared half to death by the ravens and neils past). and he’s absolutely WIPED after this banquet, i would say not only because of riko’s bullshit but because of the masking. the exhaustion is evident both in neil suggesting he talk to kevin and andrew telling neil “you can have him tomorrow” knowing that kevin couldnt handle anything more that night. then the next day kevin is literally just Sitting in the middle of the court. he didnt spend his time waiting for neil by running the stairs with andrew or doing exy warm ups. hes just sitting in the comfort of the court in Silence.
in the same vein i think constantly about in tkm after ichirou makes the deal with neil to have neil, kevin and jean be main family investments, it’s REALLY Noticeably hard for kevin to handle this change.
this quote: “Kevin couldn't recover that quickly from having his world upended, though, and was distracted the entire afternoon. He missed shots he should have made with his eyes closed and spent his breaks sitting alone in the stands.”
cannot convince me this wasn’t an autistic shutdown. everything about his life shifted on a dime. riko has no claim on him any longer, his entire future looks entirely different to what he’d always imagined it to be, and now the main mafia family has an interest in him. that’s A LOT of new, and he collapses in on himself.
also as theyre at dinner, neil has this thought “Neil wanted to say Andrew was conserving all his energy for Kevin's quiet meltdown, but he wasn't sure how to say it without drawing Andrew's ire.”
where we get neil saying kevin is having a “quiet meltdown” which is quite literally the equivalent of a shutdown. hes imploding on himself. and, of course, with the way he grew up all his meltdowns happen in silent destruction, hurting no one but himself.
i could talk about autistic kevin day for an eternity. its SO important to me
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