#bard writes

there is something to be said in the way kdj and orv as a whole really tends to sidestep lgy. like kdj cares about lgy of course. and orv obviously wants us to care about lgy or else they would have killed him off for shock value or fridged him way earlier than they did or something. and yet he remains in the main story but still on the sidelines

i think there is something very sad to be said about how kdj very openly tends to love on/lavish attention onto sys and like consciously acknowledge that she is, in many ways, his daughter, yet doesnt really do the same for lgy. there is something very sad to be said about the way kdj tends to refer to sys individually, but only to lgy in the collective "kids." there is something very sad in the way kdj saw himself in lgy the first time he saw him on the subway and saw him both as a boy to be saved and a tool to be used and i dont think their relationship ever really recovered from this.

Kim finishes the show and high off of stage energy ravishes Chay backstage, confused yet delighted by Chay role playing a fan

Then after Kim is like “good times, ready to head back to our apartment?”

And Chay goes “what”

The catch - it’s an elderly assisted living home. His father offers it basically dangling a carrot on a stick and assumes Kim won’t take the bait and continue living at home. But Kim is like fuck it, anything to get outta here. It’s not like I’ll have to interact with anyone else in the building.

What he doesn’t expect is that the other residents of his building are old people who focused on their careers instead of family and so have no visitors, or old people who’s children are focused on their careers instead of family and so also have no visitors. There are like 200 wannabe-grandparents in the building with no one to spoil and fuss over.

And Kim is finally living on his own and loving it, and he’s pretty good at dodging his elderly neighbors, but there’s a grand piano in the lobby that one of the residents plays everyday. One day Kim is walking through the lobby to get to his special penthouse elevator when he hears a Sinatra cover and gets distracted listening. That’s when the first grandpa pounces and when he’s done playing the song he chats very casually with Kim about music and asks Kim if he has a request. He can play any song Kim can think of made before the 80s by memory.

Kim mentions a song his mother used to play for him, and offhandedly mentions she’s dead, and that’s what really opens the floodgates. Piano-grandpa goes to all his other friends and rallies them, and from then on Kim knows no peace. One grandma keeps making him cookies (he suspects they’re poisoned, why else would she insist) while another grandpa leaves him healthy home cooked meals at his door. One day he leaves the apartment only to be assaulted by a tiny tiny woman with a measuring tape, then two weeks later she returns again with the softest home knit sweater.

He thinks this is all pretty weird and rather annoying and probably they’re on his father’s payroll to be nice to him… but also he’s sixteen and no one has really fussed over him since he was little and his mom was around.

So when he discovers the grandma who always checks if he has an umbrella when it’s raining is getting extorted by her niece, he takes care of it quietly. And when train-facts grandpa and strawberry-jam grandma both complain about the new nurse being too rough, he takes care of it loudly.

So by the time he’s 22 and could actually move out to his own place, he doesn’t want to because he has 200 grandparents taking care of him where he currently lives.

When he brings Chay around all the grandparents adore him. Chay finds Kim’s living situation delightfully odd, but everything about Kim is delightfully odd so it makes more sense than it doesn’t. It’s photography grandpa who slips Chay the instant camera and tells them to have fun.

And when Chay stops coming around half of the old folks shower him in extra love because he’a obviously heartbroken and half of them want to whip his ass for being an idiot and coach him how to win Chay back.

like im talking out of my ass here but like gawains character sees a lot of overlap in the ways queer men (esp feminine queer men) tend to grapple with their place within the hegemony—he finds himself engaging with the challenge issued by the green knight because he wants to prove himself as a knight after all, or in essence, as someone worthy of the ultimate ideals of masculinity

yet we see in his relationships that he does not seem to fit into that ideal. essel, his lover from the brothel, exhibits a degree of maleness in that her lifestyle/profession/whatever have you gives her much the same sexual freedoms upper-class men of the period were often allowed: she sleeps with whomever she chooses whenever she chooses, and one will note that she has short, almost boyishly cropped hair as opposed to the long winding braids and updos common to women of the period. when gawain spends time with her in the brothel (a place of sexual freedom) he is more at ease with himself than he appears to be in nearly every other instance in the film save perhaps the final scene (ill get to that)

so we already have established that hes more comfortable existing outside of the ideals put forth by the vaguely medieval christian system arthur/guenevere represent, but we see the signs of his active DISCOMFORT within the system in his dream/vision in the green chapel. he sleeps with essel once more after his return to camelot and becomes king, but instead of staying with her more permanently he leaves her behind and takes their son with him—as if punishing both her and himself for daring to want outside the mandate the class based heteronormativity would have him perform

and this is undoubtedly a punishment for the both of them because gawain goes on to live a wretched empty life (he marries a stranger he rarely spends time with her his son dies young in war his people revolt and he dies alone) and essel stands in the crowd watching him disdainfully, tense with a barely concealed fury at the life he stole from both of them

of course this kind of subliminal queerness is second to the real moment of faggotry in the film—bertalik kissing gawain. the key marker of queerness in the scene however, is less in the kiss itself and more in gawains reaction to it. he could have simply pulled away upon contact but instead he lingers. bertalik is the one who ends the kiss and they hold eye contact for a beat before gawain asks him to let him go. why did he not push him away at first then? it could have been shock in the moment of course, but he holds bertaliks hand even as he asks to be released. i would argue that it is a fear of desire within himself that spurs him to spurn bertalik rather than a revulsion at the thought of contact

now returning to the final scene as i mentioned earlier: all this in mind the only other moment of the film in which gawain seems at peace/content is when the green knight moves to behead him for the third time. the knight bows low and smiles, running a hand along gawains neck, and the film closes on the two smiling. for this scene of gentleness between two men, one who has shown predominantly fear and apprehension throughout the work and the other a grim, leashed violence, to be the closing note of the film is an interesting choice to say the least. the green knight at least in part represents a rejection of the reserved, dour conservative views of arthur and the rest of the ruling class. he represents a kind of freedom in body and spirit that encroaching christianity in the british isles sought to quash, so what then would it say of gawain that he feels more at ease kneeling before this wild untamed anti-society if you will than he did sitting in the lap of chaste, christian luxury? that he was more at home surrounded by loose, immoral sexual deviants than he was in the arms of the his home and family? that he feared bertaliks touch but almost, so it seems, didnt want it to stop?

what im trying to say is the green knight symbomizes gay love and being lowkey embraced by and/or beheaded by him represents gawains full surrender to faggotry and life outside the boundaries his family would have him live by

I give you: Soulmate AU

Everyone has a timer in their wrist that shows how many days your soulmate has left to live

For Chay the timer changes every day but the number of days is never more than one year. Chay is very, very concerned for his soulmate and the kind of life he is living.

For Kim, he's convinced that his soulmate is also part of the Mafia or something worse because his timer is just weird. This morning his soulmate had over 50 years left, but something happened between 9am and 9:25am so now his soulmate is gonna die by the end of the week! Then, before lunch his timer changes again and Kim's soulmate will live for another 89 years

How do you think Kim would react to Chay? Just normal, kind, brave, zero situational awareness Chay who hasn't realized how many times he's been about to die

Also Helloo Hiiii how are you?

Hiiiiii, Hellooooo, I'm doing okay other than all this writer's block haha. Onto the timer soulmates!!

Kim wakes up in unfamiliar territory and nearly jolts up before he realizes the uncomfortable feeling below him is a pullout couch and the comforting weight on top of him is Chay.

His maybe-probably soulmate. 

Warmth spreads across his cheeks when he realizes they spent all night pressed up against each other like this. Trying not to jostle Chay, Kim checks his watch. The time, 7:00AM, is expected for his internal body clock. Then he pulls down the wristband on his watch and checks his timer, 20:05:03:23:15, which is not expected. 

Twenty years? When he fell asleep last night, the boy in his arms had fifty some odd years left to live, and this morning it’s down to twenty? 

OH SHIRLEY I LOVE YOU. Ella Enchanted MY BELOVED. So. I think Kim would Not Respond Well to being compelled to do whatever he's told. And by that I mean there are two Theerapanyakul recluse brothers in this story.

made a cover for my ghostbat fic