#tfc meta

TW: S/A, NON-CON and DUB-CON mentions

That's a very interesting question.

I think the Olympics are A Thing for two main reasons. These all take the point of view of the writer, and not the canon world (even though I'm not in Nora's head, of course, so this is just what makes sense to me): 1) Exy was conceptualized as a Japan thing first and foremost 2) Once the US became the setting, the sport needed to have international standing

Japan is big on Olympics. It took part in basically every single Game from 1912 onward.

No one cares for Olympic soccer but you can still find youtube reaction videos of Americans being flabbergasted that the World Cup is bigger than Super Bowl. Hockey, one of Exy's big brothers, has different and independent world championships going on which are just chaos to me. Ice Hockey "World Cup of Hockey" managed to see the light of day only 3 times. Did you know that Lacrosse has a World Championship? I didn't. It's only after 1998 that people outside US-Canada-Australia-England started participating.

At the end of the day, if you need a trophy that instantly gives international reputation and social standing to a sport based on people's perception of "How big are you if you win X", then the Olympics are the obvious choice, because everything else is considered big based on national trophies.

If you want to consider the canon world:

"The first professional teams were formed around the graduates of the first university teams. Two years later the national team, the US Court, was born. The following year Exy made its first appearance at the Olympics, where Japan took home the gold."

Knives are a risky and unreliable form of self defense. The common wisdom is that the winner of a knife fight gets the reward of dying in the ambulance rather than on the ground. Knives are close range weapons, and even if your opponent is unarmed you can injure yourself if you are not experienced. It’s no wonder that after experience on both ends of knives and guns, Neil would prefer a gun as a weapon. It’s also no wonder that in the entire series, knives are never used in actual combat.

Despite the whole knife boy aesthetic that Andrew has, AFTG really doesn’t claim that the knives help him in violent situations. He threatens people with his knives, but he uses brute force to inflict damage. Even so, the knives seem more integral to Andrew as a character than his physical strength (which Neil, our narrator, sees as almost a consequence of Andrew’s temperament). Maybe it’s because Neil’s history with knives inflates their prominence, or maybe it’s because of what the knives represent to Andrew…

The sheathes for Andrew’s knives are physically woven into his armbands—which I believe he wore well before receiving the knives from Renee. The armbands serve a primary purpose of protecting Andrew’s privacy and vulnerability. The knives, then, are linked directly to protection.

Nonetheless, Andrew’s knives never protect Andrew himself. It seems a bit of a metaphor, that the knives—which he uses to protect those he cares about—are hidden by the same armbands which hide the part of himself he will not even bare to his own family.

Okay so! I reread AFTG a little while ago for my latest wip focusing on Baltimore, and I noticed one of the things I really adored the first time. I couldn’t grasp why, but now I do. To me, so much of Neil’s story is him saying goodbye to Nathaniel. It’s how he can move forward, after all. He has to both accept Nathaniel’s existence and say goodbye to it at the same time, because he cannot be Nathaniel anymore. Neil has a future. Nathaniel never did. 

It’s the same with Wei Wuxian and Mo Xuanyu. 

For both of these characters, there can be no future for them without the death of their past. Neil cannot be Neil if Nathaniel never left. Wei Wuxian cannot be Wei Wuxian if Mo Xuanyu never did that sacrifice. Both Nathaniel and Mo Xuanyu have to die for Neil and Wei Wuxian to live. 

I don’t think I’ve threaded my thoughts on Mo Xuanyu before, but it’s so intriguing to me that he can be such a key part of MDZS, while also being someone where, if he were alive, the story would be unable to continue. There is no narrative without him — there is also no narrative with him. In CQL, he doesn’t even have his own actor. It’s just xiao zhan there at the beginning. There is nothing about Mo Xuanyu that isn’t intrinsically bound to Wei Wuxian. 

The price of the sacrifice is more than just destruction of his soul, it is destruction of his entire metatextual character and narrative. He has to die for Wei Wuxian to be able to live — it’s the same for Nathaniel and Neil. There cannot be both of them, there can only be one of them. 

While I think it’s an incredible way to convey the way we leave our past selves behind, I also find it incredibly tragic. Nathaniel and Mo Xuanyu were children. Abused and suffering, and they still gave up themselves in order for their body to go forward into something better. But the knowledge of that hurts. Knowing that you must die in order for you body to go on with someone else into a life you would never be able to afford, love only achievable as long as you have been buried beneath your other self. 

And THEN he’ll come to realize that it is so much harder to allow yourself to be open and vulnerable, to still choose to forgive and extend some second chances to people you love, to decide to love despite the challange of it. He realizes that Nicky stayed with his cousins because he chose them as his family and wanted to give them the love and affection he believed they deserved.

Nicky has had more years of healing from his own trauma and i feel like everyone forgets about it sometimes. And him and andrew dont have the intrinsic understandings of one other that Aaron & Nicky might share for having been raised together by the same family. Or that Andrew finds with Aaron or Neil for their similar dispositions.

Andrew Minyard truly breaks my heart. Yeah, because let’s give this broken boy who was abused and sexually assaulted time upon time again, an eidetic memory, why don’t we?

@frxnkenstein and ayah wanted this out there so

this shade of red looked familiar.

david gathered his striker in his arms and closed the door with his hip. hair burrowed its way under his chin as he walked towards his apartment.

it bothered him. not just the memory at the tip of his tongue, teetering over the edge, but also the weight in his arms. or lack thereof. athletes should weigh more.

in his junior and senior years, david coached the baltimore little leagues. little children running around in borrowed gear, bringing the community together. he realized his dreams twenty-five years ago, letting children play non-contact exy in soccer fields made to look like exy fields, let them forget what brought them to the streets he'd belonged to not so long before he started coaching.

on the fifth year of its existence, gear was hard to come by, especially with teams from the inner city. since it was non-contact, children made do with the lack of helmets.

this shade of red looked familiar and it was bothering him.

the back liner that insisted on playing shirts on a practice scrimmage, looking ecstatic every time he blocked a shot, even though wymack had to reprimand him not to tackle the strikers. his mother thanking him for letting her son enjoy the game, even just for practice. the bags under her eyes were more purple than dark.

it wasn't easy to move around with someone unconscious in his arms, but in his last few years coaching the foxes, he'd grown used to it. david put his striker down on the couch once he got there. the bleeding had started halfway into their trip but abby's reminder nagged at him. neil didn't like to undress in front of people.

he grabbed his bottle of scotch and waited.

it didn't take long enough, and it wasn't a sudden thing. neil's eyes moved under his eyelids, his breaths hitching like his body was remembering its injuries by the second. wymack took another swig and put the bottle down on the table.

neil opened his eyes.

that shade of blue.