Groovy! I hate it

- it was right before high school, before darry got a lot of friends and became well known and popular so nobody ever really knew him before besides paul but he promised to never tell. (they dated in middle school but broke up when darry came out)

- he works out and is so buff to look more masculine and get rid of chest fat

- ponyboy doesn’t really remember darry before coming out and he never really thinks about it either

- sodapop thought darry becoming his big bro was so cool

- a legal name change happened and the court just thought mr. Curtis came to his senses because it was such a weird name

- ms. curtis is so glad to have at least one kid with a normal name

- the gang don’t really question anything since most of them either grew up with him or met him just as he was starting to transition

- soda thought darry was cool so steve thought he was cool too. two bit was darry’s friend through and through and loved him all the same. johnny could never dislike someone that treats him like family so he was supportive too. dally came around a year into darry’s transition and as far as dal was concerned darry was a good loyal guy that backed you in a fight so he was perfectly alright in dal’s book.

I love this book (mainly bc of Mark as a character) but I hate the ending so much. Like not only does it make Bryon lose what little sympathy I had for him (also didn’t like him too much as a character), but it’s just such a bad ending?

Like the whole plot is like “life is complicated, people are complicated, blah blah blah.” So for it to take such a black and white approach to its ending was so frustratingly limited. I could make a whole post on the implications of Mark and Bryon in this situation and how it reflects their differences as people. But the ending was just like “drugs are lol” and like yeah, but that shouldn’t be the only point.

Mark wasn’t automatically the bad guy for the drugs. Bryon wasn’t automatically the good guy for following the law. But the book treats them like they are.

rant below (please note it’s been years since i’ve read the book so im going off memory but i wanted revisit these characters and the ending thar did them dirty. take this all with a grain of salt)

but just for fun im going be looking at this with way less basis towards ‘drugs are bad in every situation and dealers are evil in all instances’ and focused more on the fact that mark was given a very short stick in life and made an independent choice to push drugs to bring in some necessary money to help support himself, his best friend/adoptive brother, and his best friend’s mom/adoptive mom (who is often sick and has many medical bills that byron can’t afford on his own) mark wants to help but work is hard to come by because of his record. mark isn’t always a good person (literally jumped a guy for fun) but he does genuinely care about the people in his life. he doesn’t tell anyone what he’s doing to keep his adoptive family having to face how desperate mark felt in needing to help support them. if becoming a dealer was the right choice is HIGHLY debatable and so is a lot of his actions but his reasoning is moreso justified in the sense he can’t be blamed for feeling like it was his best option for what he could to help with money. he was in a difficult situation with no right answer. it’s not his first time being put into a tough spot and made the active choice to sell drugs.

on the flip side we have bryon who has a different set of ideals and stronger principles because he didn’t have go through the difficult ‘no right answer’ situations that mark had to face first hand since a young age. (mark literally watched both his birth parents shoot each other) still bryon has gone through some heavy situations and was affected a lot by them. his mom being sick. seekng charlie dead. he’s also going through the motions of being a teenager. (mark is going through that at the same time but has thicker skin and is more able to move forward with life). bryon needs more time to process things and desperately wants to do the right thing in hopes that it’ll fix everything but it wont. he isn’t always a good person but he tries. he’s a jealous person and judges at times but he wants to be better without knowing how. then during a really rough patch in his life he sees what some of these street drugs can do to a person, i. e. m&m’s bad trip that completely screws him. it’s scary to see something like that happen to a friend and without fully understanding it all bryon just knows that he doesn’t want any part in something that he knows can cause harm. bryon wants things to be black and white because it’s easier to process and handle. a right and wrong and bryon thinks he knows the difference and which to decide in most situations. when he finds out what mark is doing he’s put in a difficult situation with no right answer. its his first real instance where he has to independently make a decision that will deeply affect his (and mark’s) life. in the end he commits to his principles and calls the cops on mark.

i feel like when bryon sees mark pushing he’s seeing all the flaws with mark for the first time instead of glancing over them and sees how different they are on a fundamental level and he’s confused and upset and just knows he wants nothing to do with the same drugs that their friend had a bad trip on. bryon doesn’t know what to do because mark is basically his brother but he’s doing things that go against bryon’s principles and he wants to put an end to it all immediately. we see the events unfold and we know it isn’t going to end well. mark offers space. bryon kicks him out. mark is upset about that. bryon decides to call the police. mark feels deeply betrayed.

I have a couple of thoughts about this: (1) giggles aside, who else is Soda putting to sleep? How often does this come up? Soda is the sort of person who genuinely likes to give back rubs. I find people like that fascinating. (2) we also have Pony’s conflation of himself and Soda, as also shown at the rumble, see below.