hey have we considered that dex is the next johnson and hes just mad about it
I acknowledge that this comment was not actually a call for fic, but have it anyway.
Dex knows what he’s in for as soon as he sets foot on the
Samwell campus.
Oh no, he thinks. I’ve found the main plot.
A little while later, he thinks, Shit.
He’s spent the better part of the last eighteen years
successfully avoiding the plot, just trying to stay in his happy little
non-existent bubble. He didn’t matter to the plot, so he didn’t exist, and he
was happier there.
But now.
He sees the bright, cheery blond boy handing around mini
pies and gift bags and he thinks it’s an odd literary device to have the
protagonist and POV character played by the team manager rather than one of the
players. But then he learns that Bitty is in fact actually a player on the
team, and there’s no hope.
“I’m leaning towards a state school,” he says when prompted.
But of course, he ends up at Samwell anyway.
Most people are content to ignore Dex, except for their old
goalie who throws him a mock salute before vanishing from the narrative. Dex
groans at that, but tries to get through it. If he’s forced to exist as part of
the story, he’ll just keep to himself. It almost works. But then there’s Nursey.
“Yo chill, Dex,” he says, just all the time. Dex can’t tell
him that he can’t chill because he wants to go back to non-existence rather
than existing here at Samwell with Nursey. Because Nursey’s got stupidly pretty
eyes and a stupidly pretty everything and it makes Dex want to be involved in
the storyline, even though that’s not his place.
It’s worse when he and Nursey bicker though, because Dex can
actually hear the people start shipping them. Not that he can tell Nursey that.
He can’t just say, “Hey, you’ve got to stop getting on my nerves. The people
who read this comic we’re in think we should date,” because then he’d have to
explain what the hell he’s talking about, and he’s not sure he actually can.
Dex is the first one who notices when Jack starts showing up
in just black t-shirts that are a little too small and jeans that somehow just
barely fit over his gigantic ass.
“And Jack has firmly taken on the role of hunky love
interest,” he mutters one day, accidentally where Nursey can hear him.
“To who?” Nursey asks.
Dex can’t respond, can’t tell Nursey that they’re only
secondary characters in a webcomic about college hockey in which Bitty, the southern
pie-baking figure-skating gay boy, is the narrator and he’s either about to end
up in a serious amount of gayngst with their hot as hell Canadian Adonis of a
captain, or end up in a fluffy ending akin to the 100k college AUs people write
RPF for of actual professional hockey players. Dex can’t tell Nursey that in
the real world, the Providence Falconers, Seattle Schooners, Vegas Aces, and
Houston Aeros don’t actually exist, that Kent Parson’s glorious hockey record
isn’t real, and that in the real world boys who look like Derek Nurse don’t
talk to boys who look like Dex, and in the real world this would never happen.
“Not to you, right?” Nursey asks, and suddenly he looks a
little nervous. “You’re not crushing on Jack, are you?”
“No,” Dex says, because that would be the least likely ship
he can think of for their entire team. He’s got a better chance of dating Kent
Parson. “No not for me.”
“Oh good,” Nursey says.
“Pretty sure he’s there for Bitty,” Dex says.
“Really?” Nursey asks. “I thought Jack was dating Camilla
Collins.”
Dex barks out a laugh. “You know for a writer you’re really
terrible at following the plot and picking up subtext.”
“What plot? It’s real life, man,” Nursey says, frowning at
him.
Dex smiles, sadly. The comic is going to end when Bitty
graduates, and he’ll never get to know if he and Nursey finish their fourth
year of school, or if they end up somewhere good, and maybe that’s kind of
okay. Because they’ve got the present, and that’s what matters. So Dex kisses
him, so softly, and says, “You’re lucky you’re pretty, Nurse.”
Nursey laughs, their strange conversation forgotten. “Nah, you’re lucky I’m pretty,” he replies.
And Dex is glad to pretend, for just a bit, that he can have this.
A lot of so called slacktivists are actually just people living in poverty who really can only share an article or two between whatever combination of jobs, chronic illnesses, or the increasingly unrealistic demands of higher education are grinding their life away.
I can’t get over the fact that tango’s sitting up straight with his hands clasped waiting patiently for pie in one panel and stuffing his face in the next, like that’s such a Sweet Teenage Boy thing to do, like he’s trying to remember his manners like his mama taught him but also he’s got a stomach like a black hole and Bitty’s pie smells like heaven
Tango is that kid who asks all the questions but is also a giant question mark himself.
Where did he get all those Ikea bags? His iPhone has only six songs and four of them are violin covers of 90s pop?? No one has ever seen him eat a vegetable? Rubik’s cubes and disentanglement puzzles are solved/disassembled without anyone ever seeing him work on them? If someone drops their eating utensil, he always seems to have a spare?? (They’ve tested that last one and it has never once failed. Forks, knives – Bitty once dropped the ONLY grapefruit spoon on the kitchen floor and Tango pulled another one seemingly out of nowhere without even looking up from his eggs.)
Idk I just really like picturing an inexplicable Tango.
You know who Tango reminds me of? John Johnson the one and only metaphysical ex-goalie of the SMH team. And my theory is that they are somehow related. Hear me out here:
1. They look alike
I made a guess a while ago as to what Johnson’s face may look like (x) and they do look like they have similar features; nose, eye colour, hair colour, eyebrows and possibly even the haircut. Their faces are shaped differently but that’s pretty much 100% normal for siblings to have different features when they’re not identical twins.
You have to admit they do have some resemblance here:
2. Tango is metaphysical
Tango is going meta, but not on purpose. He does in the form of questions, unlike Johnson, who would make statements. My guess is that Tango knows everything just like Johnson does, but he’s unaware of it and he asks so many questions because he is not sure if it’s real of if he made it up in head:
He asked Chowder is favourite’s team when it was clearly obvious it was the Sharks. But he asked anyways because even if it’s obvious, he doesn’t want to make assumptions, in case he is making it up in his head.
There’s also this line from the notes: “…Why’s Bitty always smiling and texting off away from everyone?… Maybe he’s like, secretly dating someone super famous?” He clearly knows Bitty is dating someone famous, but he’s not trying to make a statement, he wants to know if he’s making it up or if Bitty is actually dating someone super famous because, in his head, that’s what Bitty is doing (and it turns out to be real).
3. Tango is also always confused because of Johnson
If he is related to Johnson (cousin or younger brother) like I am theorising here, it makes sense for him to be confused, because Johnson, in general, is pretty darn confusing for those in the comic.
Being related, Tango would probably be able to understand Johnson. Since Johnson talks in a way that is incredibly weird for the other characters but also very precise when you know what he’s talking about, it makes sense for Tango to be confused when confronted to seemingly ordinary things, because he is used to overthink and decode Johnson’s speech.
Johnson’s precise pinpointing manner of speech also makes Tango not very good at deductions; he’s used to have all the information he needs once he decoded what the person is saying, hence why he asks so many questions that anyone could answer themselves with a little bit of deduction.
Here’s an example:
Johnson would say: “The bylaws are weird because rules are useless in this world because the only rules we follow are the one of the author.” What Tango would understand from Johnson: “These are rules, but they’re sort of useless because they are not the ones we follow.”
In normal speech it would sound like this: “So these are the bylaws. No idea where they came from.” and Tango would probably understand this: “These are bylaws, we don’t know where they came from and what to do with them.”
Hence his question: “Bylaws?…Like rules? Do we have to like, memorise those???”
TL;DR: I would not be surprised if Tango is, somehow, related to Johnson and that this new baby tadpole turns out to be the new metaphysical dude of the team.
Idk why Nursey and Bitty think that there’s any possibility that Dex will move back on campus? 1. Getting a room on campus (or even off-campus in a diff house) halfway through a semester is difficult as hell. 2. Dex is stubborn af and believes he’s in the right and that he earned this (honestly I’m on Dex’s side there) 3. I don’t have a 3 but 1 and 2 still stand.
3. Living in student residence is fucking expensive and if you end up with a roommate you can’t stand but are paying half, if not less, what you would have otherwise, you suck it up and deal by spending more time in the library or common areas and waiting for next year.
4. Dex would literally rather string a hammock up in the basement than admit defeat.
the goose has a broken wing and can’t fly south for the winter so dex builds it a shed with an infrared heater and a kiddie pool pond and names it stephanie (the goose not the pond)
bitty: dex, jack and i are dating dex: CAN’T TALK HAVE A GOOSE bitty: dex plz dex: WE’RE GONNA HAVE EGGS FOR DAYS BITTY. EGGS. FOR. DAYS.
chowder: dex. where did you get a goose dex: WHO WANTS QUICHE nursey: it’s pronounced quickie*
au where i am the author of check please and there are 300% more gooses
just moving along like everyone else 