#brinker must be the most cool the most popular the most pure boy around and finny is a threat to that

[karinyosa]

Hello fellow asp enthusiast lol not to ask you like…. Half of your ask meme but 4, 5, 6, 13, and 14??? I would love to hear asp thoughts

no no believe me this is the ideal situation since i have a limited number of asp mutuals so THANK you for all the questions i am rubbing my hands together gleefully

4. favorite part?

i’m bad at favorites but one part that always gets me is the section where gene talks about “his” moment in history, which in his words is supposed to be the moment where if asked generally about the world or “the world today”, a person will think of this moment/era. and his is of course devon during the war, aka his school days. i just found that very poignant, and i think it’s so in line with everything we know about gene, how he continues to live in this very specific traumatic time bubble and how it has never really died for him, it’s just as present as it always was, he remembers it just as clearly as he always has and (as the explanation implies) always will. it haunts him, it is alive for him still, he carries it around inside, etc etc. it hits me in the heart a bit

5. favorite quote?

“[E]verything at Devon, the playing fields, the gym, the water hole, and all the other buildings and all the people there were intensely real, wildly alive and totally meaningful, and I alone was a dream, a figment which had never really touched anything. I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.”

goodness does this one hurt/hit! again i’m bad at favorites, but after i read this in middle school i was like i think i know exactly what he’s talking about in fact i think he’s hit the nail on the head. i was obsessed with that quote for quite a while and made this art piece that was a watercolor painting of devon at sunset and then i had a cut-out sketch of gene i’d done on looseleaf that i pasted in the middle. and yeah that’s exactly how i feel about it

6. brinker opinions? love or hate him?

LOVE! i cannot lie i love that boy and i also think he sucks 🫶🫶🫶 he has that lovable smarmy rudeness, which i can’t find flatly hateable. and i mean, he’s a funny guy, like he writes those poems and i think they’re very much written to be at least kind of funny. i’m not an apologist in the sense that i don’t think he did nothing wrong, but i find him a fun and interesting character with fun and interesting flaws. he also has a level of conviction about everything that he believes that is kind of endearing to me, especially when he does that 180 at the end of the book about his war opinions. he’s all, i LOVE the war everyone should come do the war with me, and then by the end he’s like i fucking hate the war. lol or at least he thought it was stupid and was sort of disillusioned about it. which was especially interesting in the context of that allusion to his Complicated relationship with his father, plus the fact that gene was AWARE of how complicated it was. i love the camaraderie implied by those two’s wariness of each other’s parents lol. and i love to think about their relationship after devon. i like to think brinker continues his 180 away from his father’s politics and expectations and becomes the loud bisexual that the spirit of gore vidal inside him is willing him to be, and i think down the line he’d be a lot more open and liberated about his sexuality than gene. but i mean, gene’s a low bar to beat in that department. i am a capricorn brinker truther

also, i'm a firm believer in the idea that all of the main four are queercoded in various ways, and i find him interesting to place in the tapestry of queerness/map of gay drama that asp paints. i'm majorly mixing metaphors but whatever. brinker is obsessed with monopolizing the attention and time of gene, while also feeling the need to present himself as morally superior to the object of his affection, to the point where he takes on literally the role of a judge. like there is something deeply wrong with him but not just in the silly asshole way and i think we haven't talked about that enough. i imagine his relationship with popularity and having kind of a curated public face/persona is more similar to gene's than it seems, and i think they understand each other in ways that neither of them were necessarily able to do with finny, which is why their friendship remains strong even at the end the book. plus i've always thought they knew each other before the events of the book took place. there's a lot of shared history there and i think that would cause them to continue to share their lives even after enlisting. this went on a tangent i didn't intend, but i have a very detailed idea of their lives after the war lesjdkksdlj

13. appearance/voice headcanons?

finny:

has heterochromia, parts of his eyes are different colors

very melodic voice, a bit higher than average (the melodic part might actually be canon)

dimples

tan for a white guy, freckles

bad at volume control, always ends up talking Loudly. if you take him to a diner, the next table over will hear his entire half of the conversation, terrible in libraries, etc

never wears his uniform fully properly. it's always folded up or modified in some way or he's just not wearing part of it

i think he has curly hair, but the color changes in my head all the time

gene:

brunette bowl cut bitch. the early 2000s movie was so right about the bowl cut. hair is wavy

pale, sunburns easily

i always draw him with these big downturned glassy eyes, always looks a little teary

ill-fitting clothes (hand-me-downs from his brother)

BAD posture that makes him palpably little next to other people

i think he has a weird like tired quality to his voice that i think dane dehaan also has. not raspiness but that kind of low, slow, round, weirdly nasally sound. is that a tired quality? idk but he and dane dehaan both have it

this is not a headcanon this is completely canon but his ass does not have a southern accent or at least not a very strong one. he was playing it up to get attention

brinker:

in ms/hs i headcanoned that he had some form of a buzz cut or crew cut at devon because he was such an enlistment enthusiast

gene described him as athletic looking which in middle school i could only conceptualize as buff. so now i just imagine him stocky, wide, and chubby, with a brief period of weight loss during/after the war

lipless. notably so

i think he cares the most about fashion out of the main four in that elitist rich people private school way, so he’d have all the right pieces and brands, everything would fit properly

enunciates very sharply. has like, a teacher voice lmao

blond but like of course he is

leper:

light brown hair, kinda dorky middle part

very quiet, breathy voice. people ask him to speak up often

overgrown hair. grandma always says he needs a haircut

i am a tall leper truther. i think he’s a beanpole and i think he’s the tallest one. i had a friend who thought the opposite

layered the fuck up in terms of clothing

the book mentions him wearing “spectacles” when he goes off to find the beaver, which were probably just snow goggles or something, but i like to think he wears glasses

leftie with an always-stained hand (paint, pencil lead, etc) and badly bitten nails

lots of knitwear from gramma

14. what would you change about the book apart from [REDACTED]?

you know i’ve admired and liked a separate peace for so long and spent so much time dissecting its various intricacies that i just haven’t been in the mindset of looking for/noticing things i want to change about it very much. if anything, i think leper’s ptsd or “madness” or whatever it was was handled poorly and with an obvious lack of understanding of what that was and how it worked, although to be fair the mental illness knowledge at the time was probably lacking in general. leper’s actions and choices at the end of the book are explained away by generic tv movie craziness when i think it could’ve been a lot more interesting to explore the implications of leper having more obvious agency in those choices, leper actively choosing to be vengeful towards gene (he definitely had reason to be!) and battling with that internally during the trial. his explosions of emotion would’ve been more impactful to me if that had been the case

i would’ve of course loved for the book to be canonically queer, just so we could get a more explicit exploration of each character’s relationship to their queerness and how it colors the book’s pet topics of repression, rivalry, devotion, and coming of age, but i don’t even think it’s necessary because you can truly just read the book as if it were queer and nothing need change. like it all works, no leaps in thought or reading-into required. i mean it certainly helps to do those things, and i think reading into things is often part of a good reading experience, but it is literally about gene’s repressed desire for finny and the unintended consequences of that repression, among other things, but very explicitly that. plus there's the ass paragraph and the characters’ relationships with family, etc etc. like gene LITERALLY stops himself from telling finny how much he means to him at the beach and that could just as much be about gay love as straight boybestfriendship, in fact i think the case is stronger textually for it being queer than not. no straight person can read asp and not have at least one moment of, hmm this seems gay, but you can absolutely just read it as gay without issue. as much as i would love to see the "canon" version of their queerness, i am also very comfortable with the amount of freedom we have to take it in many different directions ourselves, and i think there's something very poignant and true about asp's queerness being heavily implied but never outright confessed