The Flower Hides Thorns

First Edgar and Simon both posted this to their separate instagram accounts.

Then Simon posted this a few months later. If you don’t know the song he attached to it, look it up. It’s very clear Simon chose it intentionally.

There’s no way to predict what it’s going to be about but I’ve heard whispers that it might lean more towards drama than their other works so I wouldn’t be surprised if it deals with mental health.

Both Simon and Nick have been very open about struggling with depression and trying to slowly kill themselves, Simon with alcohol and Nick with food, due to feeling isolated (Simon’s depression is more of a hormonal disorder while Nicks’s is a reaction to trauma and PTSD) which was why Gary was a depressed and suicidal alcoholic in The World’s End.

They’ve also been very open about their queerplatonic relationship that’s far deeper and more physical than a regular friendship.

By now most people know about them sharing a one-person bed for nine months out of necessity when they were young and they occasionally sleep and cuddle in bed for comfort even to this day. In his memoir Nick mentions several times that they like holding hands when they’re scared (like when a visit to a strip club with Tarantino turned dangerous or when they went ghost hunting together) or when they’re feeling cuddly but are out in polite society. When Nick’s mom died he collapsed on the floor of his hotel room crying and screaming for Simon who rushed in to hold him and it didn’t even occur to them that Nick was naked the whole time until afterwards. None of this ever bothered Simon’s wife because she trusted Simon wasn’t cheating on her with Nick, but Nick’s wife demanded they stop sharing beds after her and Nick got married. They did out of respect for her (though Simon visited Nick the night before the wedding so they could sleep together one last time) but the marriage only lasted five years and they got right back to it.

But they also had to acknowledge that while they’re each other’s biggest comfort they haven’t always been the best for each other when it came to coping with their mental health. They had to get better separately to be happy and healthy together later.

Simon especially has talked about how being part of the Mission Impossible franchise saved him because it surrounded him with people who knew how to help him overcome his alcohol addiction.

Seeing how both Simon and Nick likes to play roles that are adjacent to their own situations and Edgar very much encourages them to normalize talking about mental health as well as be ambassadors for non-sexual male intimacy I wouldn’t be surprised if they lean into that considering the post Simon made. Everything around that is a complete mystery tho.

When they wrote it Simon had been in rehab and on suicide watch that didn’t help him in the long run because he didn’t have the right support system, just like Gary. Gary’s rant about what rehab looks like clearly comes from Simon’s own personal experience.

And Nick had been through a divorce just like Andy, and just like Andy who admired Gary but had to cut him out of his life for his own well being, Nick wrote about watching Simon struggle and being unable to help him because he wasn’t in a mental or emotional place where he could help.

The way they both tell the story of their struggles together I suddenly realized how symbolic the last few pubs are for them.

Gary keeps going while Andy tries and fails to stop him because he himself is constantly being burdened with other things. And Gary keeps trying to help Andy, telling him to watch out and handing him the car keys to leave, eventually yelling at Andy to stop following him, begging him to please just leave and let him kill himself, but Andy refuses despite not knowing what to do to make Gary stop. When Steven asks why Andy won’t just leave Gary the way Gary left Andy, all Andy can say is “I can’t”

The World’s End, especially the last part, is literally just them telling us about their relationship and their struggles. Simon using “Me and My Husband” to describe his feelings about Nick seems even more hard hitting now.

“But me and my husband

We're doing better

It's always been just him and me, together

So I bet all I have on that

Furrowed brow

And at least in this lifetime

We're sticking together

Me and my husband

We're sticking together

And I am the idiot with the painted face

In the corner, taking up space

But when he walks in, I am loved, I am loved”

It’s probably because they’ve been working on themselves that they’re finally ready to do another movie together.

I do not have to reinvent the wheel every time I write fanfiction

I do not have to make every chapter's word count above 1,000 in order for it to be good

It is okay if some things don't make sense

I can write whatever I want

I am writing this shit for free

If people don't like my stuff, they can block me. If they're being mean about it, I can block them.

The most important part of writing fanfiction is having fun

Writing fanfiction is supposed to be fun

I do not have to appeal to people

This shit is fun

"Asexual people are often assumed to “lack” attraction. But in reality, many report rich and varied forms of attraction that don’t map neatly onto sexual desire.

So instead of asking “how does attraction work?,” we asked:

What do people actually mean when they say they feel attracted to someone?" "Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative data, we identified and validates seven different forms of attraction:

intellectual

aesthetic

emotional

platonic

sensual

romantic

sexual

These aren’t just theoretical distinctions. Statistically, they show up as separate but related dimensions—meaning people really do experience attraction in multiple, distinguishable ways." "Our findings demonstrate that both asexual and non-asexual experience multifaceted forms of attraction.

Put differently, the seven forms of attraction our study identifies are not “ace-specific” categories—they’re general features of human attraction. But starting from an asexual lens helped us see those features more clearly."

you have to be kinder to people who are slow processors.

you have to be kinder to people who don't understand your jokes.

you have to be kinder to people who forget important dates.

you have to be kinder to people with cognitive decline.

you have to be kinder to people who were always this way, too.