Lloyd felt strange all of a sudden. He couldn't believe that a man like Javier was following him. How? Why? This moment, following his instruction, sharing jokes, and sitting around the bonfire with him, suddenly seemed bizarre to Lloyd. The Knight of Blood and Iron. When I read it, he was this fictional character I found cool and could only hope to hang out. Lloyd stared hard at Javier, sitting across from him. Javier, feeling the gaze, looked back strangely. "Master Lloyd? Why are you staring at me like that?" "Oh, your brows are slightly asymmetrical." "My brows?" "Yeah." "So...?" "What do you mean, so? That shows you're human too." "It makes me human that my eyebrows are not proportionate?" "Yeah. I means that you're not perfect."
i wish this energy had been carried through the entire novel in a more overt way you don't understand-
the idea of javier starting as this flawless, unreachable character who is just too perfect to be real and then as the plot goes on, as lloyd gets to know him, as they start sharing the role of protagonist, he starts turning into more of a real person, with his own quirks and flaws and imperfections. he starts making mistakes and maybe struggling at things that he would've easily accomplished in the original novel. he gets in a fight and by the end of it his face is covered in dirt and scrapes. he wakes up and his hair is messy leaning less towards perfectly tousled and more towards rat's nest. he's still infuriatingly handsome but he's also a little awkward and dorky.
and all of it making him even more endearing to lloyd than the character he read about all those years ago. because this is real, this is javier as lloyd knows him, this is the person he befriended, the person he wants to spend the rest of his life with, the person he's willing to die for.
basically i wanted javier to be lloyd's velveteen rabbit. loving him so long and so much he becomes Real.
