#lmfaoooooooooooo

YO EPISODE ZERO AIRING JANUARY 2026??!?!????? AND KAITO AND AOKO'S FEET ARE REFLECTED UNDERNEATH?!?!?? WE ARE GETTING FLUSTERED SHINICHI VIA KAITO'S PICK UP LINE IN CANON ANIMATED????

stripes are the language of division. a striped person is never just one thing—always two things alternating, unresolved, caught in the space between; niall lives entirely in that space. he is queer in a world that has handed him no safe way to be so. he is unsettled by ruben and magnetized by him in the same breath. there is who he is and who he is performing, what he wants and what he allows himself to want. a person in perpetual negotiation with himself, and the costume designer has put that negotiation directly onto his body.

there’s a reason stripes so often evoke imprisonment. stripes contain, they create bars—and we watch niall contain himself constantly: swallowing everything down, taking up as little space as possible. hemmed in on all sides—by ruben, by his own silence, by the gap between who he wants to be, who he believes he is allowed to be, and who he actually is.

what's interesting is that the stripes are never quite the same twice—wide and nautical, narrow and tight—as if the division manifests differently depending on the day, the scene, and the version of himself being performed. but for all their variety, none of them are harsh or particularly graphic. they're soft, worn-in—the wardrobe of someone caged, yes, but not yet fully hardened. someone still vulnerable, legible, without having built up enough defenses to obscure what’s underneath

and sometimes the stripes appear less overtly than a whole shirt; in some scenes, it's one or two striped details on a jacket, and sometimes it’s a tie—though not his school tie, which, as part of a shared uniform, carries less individual weight on its own. what matters more is the distance between his graduation tie and the one he wears to the courtroom. at graduation niall is on the cusp of escape—oxford, a life finally separate from ruben and everything that comes with him—and the tie is plain. briefly, he appears almost whole, but then ruben reels him back in. by the time niall is standing in that courtroom swearing an oath he intends to break, the stripe has returned: muted, subtle, folded into the tie almost like a secret.

niall is trying to pass as solid, as decided, as someone with nothing to hide—rehearsed, buttoned up, having practiced the lie until it fits naturally in his mouth. but everything he is remains unresolved, divided. it takes an attorney asking him to call alby a sexual deviant—to say out loud, in public, the worst thing niall privately believes about himself—for everything to crack open. for that performance to finally begin splitting apart.

which makes the wedding all the more arresting. it’s the only time we’ve seen adult niall at any real length, and the stripes disappear entirely. he is older now, ostensibly far removed from the frightened boy the show keeps returning to—and yet jamie bell plays him with so much of the same watchfulness, the same careful self-containment, that the absence almost feels conspicuous.

maybe the remaining episodes will reveal that the stripes belonged specifically to youth: to adolescence, repression, a self still splitting itself in two. but if that’s true, i don’t think the show is suggesting niall outgrew those fractures so much as learned to seal them over. nothing about the man at the wedding feels wholly settled; he still feels like young niall, only in older skin.

and if the stripes do return in the adult niall scenes still to come, then the wedding becomes something else entirely—an echo of that graduation day: another moment where he dressed for the person he was trying to become, a costume of wholeness worn before ruben returns and the old divisions surface again.

“Does my mom not love me”