→ neon genesis evangelion; last words
Minho: I’m not great at the advice.
Minho: Can I interest you in a sarcastic comment?
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Look, I love the Riko RoastTM as much as the next person, but does anyone else ever wonder what Kevin went through listening to Neil go off?
I’m not talking about his terror regarding retribution, though that’s important. I’m talking about the first couple of sentences in the rant. You know, I get it. Being raised as a superstar must be really, really difficult for you. Always a commodity, never a human being, not a single person in your family thinking you’re worth a damn off the court—yeah, sounds rough.
Do you ever wonder if Kevin lay awake that night, replaying those sentences over and over again in his head? And wondering if this is what Neil really thinks not just of Riko, but of him too? Neil, the scrappy kid who plays with the heart and passion that draws Kevin in like a magnet. The kid whose crappy high school footage Kevin looked and said, “That one. That one will be Court.” Who Kevin is proud of, and so demands so damn much of every day—and gets it.
And maybe Kevin is lying there in the dark, drunk and scared, but also so, so hurt. Because he doesn’t remember what it’s like to be a real person. Nathaniel/Neil may be ever-changing, a puppet, a ghost; but Kevin was not allowed to be human. He had to be perfect, a robot, a machine whose only function or value was exy.
He knew that he was beloved by strangers, and resented by those who actually knew him. For years he had not cared. After all, he had been trained not to care; to feel at all was a weakness. All of his fear, all of his pain, all of his insecurities had been buried down deep under blows from a cane and the numbing relief of alcohol.
Do you ever think that this was the true turning point for him? He had escaped the Ravens and fled to his father and Andrew, and he had rebelled against the Raven’s cruelty by trying to push the Foxes into a good enough team to face them, but he had stopped there. He had never been allowed to think for himself, to act for himself. And here was Neil, voicing the things he would never have dared think, and he couldn’t even tell what applied to Riko and what to himself.
And then the next day they talk, and Neil plants his feet and takes a stand. He would rather die making a difference then run away. And this boy, who could be anything, who should have been Court, only wants to live all of his remaining moments to the fullest. So Kevin agrees to help him do that, “Every night.”
Kevin watches as Neil slowly pulls everyone around them to him. He watches him take Riko down on the court floor at the winter banquet, watches as he fights for Andrew. For all of them, really. And a tiny part of him begins to wonder what might be possible if he did the same.
But it’s terrifying, and at first too overwhelming to seriously consider. His mind plays out all the what-ifs. After all, Neil is a (barely) walking poster child for what can happen if one steps out of line when he returns from the Nest. Yet every night, after he falls exhausted into his bed, it echoes in his head: always a commodity, never a human being. And he finds himself first resenting, then raging, at the peculiar twist of fate that had doomed him to the Ravens all those years ago.
The Foxes keep winning, pulled together by Neil’s strange charisma that Kevin doesn’t understand but is drawn to just the same. Then Baltimore happens, and Kengo dies, and finally, finally Neil tells him to take a stand. And Neil is right, Kevin knows he’s right. This middle ground won’t save him forever. And he sees Jean, he sees the destruction Riko has wrought, he sees what has happened to someone he wishes he had been able to protect, and the machine he was masquerading as just cracks.
So Kevin finds his feet, finds his strength, finds his heart. He finds Jean a new home; he starts to forge a relationship with the father he had neglected for his own career; and he finally learns what it’s like to play with the true, sheer unadulterated love of the game.
No longer a commodity. Kevin allows himself to be human; and as such, he can truly allow himself to begin to heal.
one of my favorite tropes is when a character is talking in the foreground and something happens in the background that directly contradicts what they’re saying
foreground: character is talking about how they pride themselves on being a good parent
background: character’s 3 year old son starts a car and speeds off
i just cant believe that when they were sitting on the roof neil was like ‘u still have my keys’ and andrew literally. chucks them off the side of the building without sparing neil a glance and is like ‘not anymore lmao’
no offense but yall gotta stop acting like its the end of the world if a bi girl ends up with a guy