Entirely because of this post by @samwell-womens-hockey. Tango asks how long Bittle and Jack have been together.
He’s not trying to snoop, it’s just there. When he asked for a closer look at the Jack Zimmermann OYO figurine Bitty told him to feel free and turned back to folding his laundry, so now Tango is holding the figure up but he got distracted by the calendar. It’s right behind the mini Jack, so it’s not like he was looking for it, but all those hearts are pretty eye catching.
“Is this your boyfriend’s birthday?” He asks, pointing at the little cake drawing. It’s pretty cute, actually.
“My what now?” Bitty says, almost casual except that he’s stiffened up, fingers clutching into the sweater in his hands, and Tango really stepped in it this time. He’s always asking stupid questions and it’s not the first time he’s said the wrong thing and someone needs to put a sock in his mouth.
“Oh, uh, I-” he stutters “didn’t mean to assume that you’re… I just thought that-”
“Hush, Tango,” Bitty says, taking pity on him. He doesn’t look angry or upset, but his smile is definitely forced. “You didn’t assume wrong, ok? Now go downstairs and get those sheets from the dryer.”
So he goes, because now that he knows about dibs he’ll do anything if it means he doesn’t have to live in those smelly dorms next year, but as he’s struggling to fold the fitted sheet he wonders why Bitty avoided the question.
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.
just moving along like everyone else 