#kevthea

[ulysses-s-wishes]

I like how consistently couples in aftg are opposites attract in terms of position. Andreil are goalie/stiker, Matt and Dan backliner/offensive dealer, even Aliison and Seth (and Kevin and Thea) are offensive player x defensive player. I think it’s a really interesting in how it established balanced dynamics in couples - it also is interesting to consider that Renee and Jean aren’t meant for each other long term because they’re both defense, but Jeremy is offense. Likewise, connects to my belief about how partners on court share a certain brotherhood - Riko and Kevin were meant to be brothers, Jean and Neil’s partnership might have been similar, but it turned out Kevin and Neil, as a striker duo are the true siblings to me (and Aaron and Andrew both being defense). It’s really fun to me. (Also Cat and Laila are the exception to counterbalance Kevthea)

[andromeda40]

It sucks when a fandom hates on a female character for being the main love interest of a male character that is part of a fan favorite gay ship. Like in Arcane, or Trigun.

BUT — if an author disclosed that a super popular gay throuple was actually canon in many drafts, but in the end made 1/3 of the ship end up with a woman 4-4.5 years their senior that has known him since he was 14, that is mega loyal to the cult that brutalized him and was the books’s main antagonist and then her only lines amount to breaking the ribs of a kid 7 years younger than her, “old tricks” and glorifying a cult leader??? AND then also shared that her reaction to her partner’s abuse is “no harm, no foul” and still is “loyal till the end” to his abusers…

While the remaining members of the original gay throuple form a bond based on respect, healing, consent, “to be loved is to be seen” yada yada yada ???

I’m just saying, Nora shot herself on the foot with Thea.

[bisexualchaosdemon]

HEY!

LOOK ME IN THE EYES RIGHT NOW

If Nora keep Thea with Kevin in book seven Y'ALL BETTER FUCKING BEHAVE

[codename-adler]

it’s a little bit funny how the names in aftg are so short and mundane that Kevin ends up being the first part of every ship he’s involved in; while in ye olde tradition of ship names the top comes first and bottom second, and Kevin? Kevin is actually very rarely the top…

[alalalalaa]

oh the perfect court is gonna hurt like a motherfucker

and i'm scared of the thea scenes in both of these books

cause there's definitely gonna be quite a lot of them

[nyaar0n]

Please may you draw lesbian KevThea, maybe on the court or watching a film?

kev needs to find better films

[odysseus-day]

On Thea Muldani

The first time she meets Jean Moreau, he smells like sweat and antiseptic, like gauze in desperate need of changing, like blood going sour beneath mounds of rotting bandage. She doesn’t even recognize him as a person at first — just another bruised, sharp-edged body among the wreckage Riko gathers like trophies. But then he looks up, and his face is all too wrong to be anything but real. Too young, too thin. His skin is swollen where it should be smooth, hollow where it should be full, like someone has carved him down to the bone just to see what would happen. His lip is split, the blood dry and flaking like rust, and when she shifts her weight between cleats, he flinches so sharply it’s like he’s already tasted the pain of it.

Jean Moreau is on her court, and he looks like something that has been left too long to rot. His wrists are too thin, his skin too pale except the violent hues that stain his sunken face — yellowed bruises, half-healed cuts, fresh red welts that still weep and ooze. The blood is drying black at the corner of his mouth, but he doesn’t wipe it away without permission. He doesn’t meet her eyes either, just stares somewhere past, like he’s been trained not to see. 

When Riko shoves him forward, his knees buckle, but he catches himself on instinct before he hits the ground. A mistake. His breath hitches, and she sees it — the way he braces for an impact that doesn’t yet come, the way his shoulders curl inward, waiting for unpredictable hands to leave their mark. 

“He’s fourteen,” Riko says, stalling it out before he finally gives into his own pressing cruelty; Moreau is on his knees before she can even raise a brow at the notion, blinking up with gray eyes as hollow as a chasm, wondering surely if she’ll be yet another captor to grind him into sand. “Isn’t that ridiculous?” 

“He’s fourteen,” Riko says, like it’s a joke, like Jean should be grateful he made it this far — and maybe he should be. There are worse things than being Riko’s pet. There are worse things than kneeling on this beautiful court, waiting to be told exactly where your worthless life belongs. Thea has seen what happens to the ones who don’t listen, the ones who don’t survive. So when Jean stays silent, when he doesn’t even dare to beg, she knows exactly why.

Fourteen. It’s not even a number that shocks her anymore — it just makes sense. Riko collects broken pieces. He likes watching them mend themselves back together in all the wrong ways. Jean Moreau is nothing new. Just another name to forget, another body to shape into something that could someday be useful. Fourteen means nothing when you’re standing on this court. Fifteen means nothing with a racquet in hand. He’ll be sixteen soon enough, and then what will it matter? Seventeen, eighteen, dead…

But Jean Moreau disgusts her. Not because of what’s happening to him — she knows better than to care — but because he’s still breathing, still moving, still existing silently despite it all. He’s already lost, already ruined, and yet he blinks up at her with those dull, stupid eyes like he thinks there’s something left to salvage. Like he thinks there’s a way out of this.

He doesn’t cry, and maybe that’s what gets her. He flinches, braces, with a desperate plea in his expression, but he doesn’t cry. Not even when Riko shoves him down again, not even when he lands hard on one wrist and something audibly crackles and pops. He just breathes through it, steady and practiced like a mantra or an oath. And Thea wonders — how much can one person take before they stop being a person at all?

Submission is vital for any Raven, but weakness is a vulnerability she knows best how to poke and prod at, peeling back each fraying thread until the toys she’s handed are far too unraveled to put back together. Riko rearranges the pieces until they’re too displaced to gild back together with anything pretty; Thea goes in for the kill. His violence breaks the body, her words warp the mind. They’re a team in all the worst ways; he’s a stepping stone to claw her way up the ranks.

Jean averts his gaze when Riko’s stare turns back on him, and he doesn’t look at her again. He doesn’t look at either of them. And Thea knows, without having to be told, that it’s only because he is simply not allowed. She wonders if she could make him flinch. If she reached out now, if she traced one of those ugly, half-healed bruises, would he break apart beneath her hands? If she peeled back the gause, gently traced the length of each open wound, tilted his chin ever so upward to meet her eyes. 

Jean is just another stray, another body thrown into the pit. He can wear a number on his cheek all he’d like, but he’ll never find his way off of the ground. 

“Well isn’t he cute?” she coos.

Jean doesn't react to her words, and she wonders briefly if he even knows how to anymore. If anyone has ever called him cute before, if the word even registers as an insult the way she intends it. His fingers twitch against the pristine court, curling slightly inward, but he keeps his head bowed, his shoulders tight. He’s waiting.

Thea’s thoughts wander, flicking briefly back to the green-eyed boy in her fondest memories. She can almost taste the sickening sweetness of the scenes that dance in tune with one another, how soft and pliable he was back then. She remembers Kevin as he was when they met, how his eyes were too bright and far too full of hope. He carried himself like he still believed in something, like he was so irrevocably important he could still be saved from this. She broke him in a different way — she breaks him in a different way, day in and day out, as Riko snickers to himself within earshot. Not with fists or kicks, but with that slow, delicate unraveling, making him bend to her with the kind of gentleness that would’ve made anyone else gag.

But Kevin didn’t. He doesn’t. He obeyed and obeys, folding under her, crumbling into her hands like softened clay. That has always been his weakness — his softness. Always too kind, too desperate to please. He’s “cute” in a way that makes Thea sick, a boy so eager to do anything to escape the mess he’d found himself in, so broken by his own desire to be loved.

She could test this boy. She could toe that decrepit line between suffocating fondness and gentle cruelty, could trace a finger along the underside of his swollen jaw just to watch him swallow back his instinct to flinch. She could tilt his gaze, force his eyes to meet hers, see if there’s even a person left in there or if Riko has already hollowed him out completely.

But she doesn’t.

She could test Jean, but briefly her mind flickers back to how intensely Kevin would retch at the cruelty. He’s never had the stomach for it Riko does, and building one inside of him is much more work than she has the patience for. 

Still, it makes her wonder. What would it have been like, if she had him the same way Riko has Jean? She could have done much more with that kind of softness. She could have made him the tool she needed, or maybe she could have shattered him completely. Kevin had never been the kind of broken that left pieces in his wake to scrape back together; he’s more like a ribbon, twisted and knotted until the shape of him is unrecognizable, and the tangles run far too deep to ever undo.

She pulls herself from the thought and focuses back on Jean. She taps her racquet against the ground, another idle movement that carries the quiet power of someone who knows they don’t have to act to control the room. Jean’s body is still bent, his head still low. He doesn’t cry. He doesn’t break.

Instead of snapping the stick over the spinier point of his back, she exhales sharply through her nose and shifts her weight again like she’s already lost interest. If she acknowledges him for too long, it might come across as if she cares. And she doesn’t. She can’t. He isn’t worth the energy to pick at bit by bit, to torment and tease until he’s falling apart in her hands. 

Jean Moreau is just another broken thing, another body on the pile they’ll use to climb to the top. He’s fourteen, but what does that mean when you’re a Raven? He’ll learn like the rest of them. He’ll keep his mouth shut and his head down, and if he’s lucky, he won’t end up smeared across a locker room floor before he can be at least somewhat useful.

“Position?”

Thea watches Riko step forward, watches his shadow stretch long across Jean’s hunched form, and she doesn’t move to stop him. She never does.

“Backliner,” he sneers with a wild fury in his eyes. “Yours to train, if you can even stand him.”

There’s a brief moment, just before the first kick, where Jean presses his knees tight against his chest, like maybe he’s considering bracing for it, maybe he thinks if he moves just right it won’t hurt as much. But it will, it always will, and she will watch every time. She will watch with her arms folded and jaw clenched, eyes focused and expression blank. She will watch with every ounce of whoever she may have been before this turned off, shut out, lying next to the boy’s crumpled little body in a grave as shallow as the depths of her own empathy. 

She will watch, and maybe if he’s lucky, he will die.

She will watch, and maybe if he’s luckier, he’ll give in.

“I don’t know, boss. I’m already a bit sick of him.”

[feelingthedisaster]

matt boyd is a "my wife" guy, kevin day is a "yes ma'am" guy and aaron minyard is both at the same time

[moreau329]

God they are now comparing Jeanee and Kevthea

“Um Jeanee’s age gap is bigger 👆🏽”

[falafels]

single father kevin reconnecting with thea in their 30s-40s. both had time to learn who they are and what they like and how to be outside of exy. i don’t believe that thea muldani, ruthless and brilliant thea muldani who nominated herself for both ravens captain and vice captain knowing full well she would be her only vote, would leave exy to have a baby (sorry EC). i don’t know whether kevin’s daughter’s mother died or if it just didn’t work out (i’m inclined to say died because kevin is nothing if not a living breathing tragedy - however i do also think they probably both knew it wasn’t a relationship that would have lasted anyway), but he’s been learning and raising his daughter with constant help babysitting from jean and jeremy (jeremy is very enthusiastic but ultimately useless, jean knows what he’s doing for elodie-shaped reasons that make me cry).

They’re both court, and they’re friends if nothing else. Old friends with a shared history and more time for each other’s brutal criticism, perfectionism, and weird little quirks than most people have for either of them. They’ve started watching people their age retire from the game and both fiercely refuse to let go of it until their bodies force them to (neither of them wants acknowledge that this might be sooner rather than later due to raven regimens). They chat after practice, they start running together. It’s easy, and both of them have struggled with easy for a very very long time. It’s nice to know, it’s nice to be known.

One day Kevin comes to practice looking nothing short of haggard, having come straight from his now-11-year-old daughter’s biggest tantrum to date over the fact Kevin can’t pick her up from her friend’s party next week because he has a (moriyama-mandated) interview (with jeremy and jean). Thea offers to pick her up, but Kevin is hesitant because the two haven’t met. So Thea comes over after practice the next day and Kevin braces for a blowup that doesn’t come. Kevin’s daughter has seen Thea bodyslam men twice her size down the court before and thinks it’s the single coolest thing in the world (and Kevin is trying so hard not to flip his shit because she HATES talking to him about exy but BRINGS IT UP UNPROMPTED TO THEA??)

But yeah. older kevthea. wiser kevthea. your 20s are for ruining your life over and over and fixing it and ruining it and working out who you are and what you want kevthea. coming out the other side of it a real person kevthea.

[dustisus]

what are the chances that thea doesn't consider kevin her boyfriend, but just a friends with benefits situation or something similar. but kevin's just like "we kissed so i guess we're boyfriend girlfriend now :)" and inserts her into his 10 year plan

[puemort]

Y'all should ABSOLUTELY read this!!!! It made me feel so many things ugh It was funny, it was angsty and it was really hot!!!!!!

10/10 I would read again and again and again

https://archiveofourown.org/works/61230517/chapters/156478252

[joejhang]

there's lowkey something so mel medarda-viktor-jayce talis about thea muldani-jean moreau-kevin day do you catch the gist

[yes-i-exist-shutup]

Kevthea is literally canon what the fuck are you idiots talking about. The books are not your sandbox, its Noras.

[bysweetling]

Final aftg book from Kevin Day’s pov ????

Closure for Kevin!! healing Kevin!!! I love it …..

Soooooooo what’s going to happen between him and Thea?!!! like frfr I don’t see them working out! She’s still trusts in the institution of being a Raven and Kevin is too traumatized to continue associating on a personal level with those that didn’t see the fault in the Nest.

Kandreil ?! like there is still time! Neil and Kevin and their exy obsession, Neil and Kevin having history, Neil’s cult following of Kevin and Riko🤢, Kevin being afraid enough and care enough about Neil to tell him to run even knowing they wouldn’t be able to play without him, Andrew literally giving Kevin his protection against the mafia! Kevin’s desire for Andrew to find something to life for but to also be passionate and prideful of how amazing of a goalie he is!!!

Like come on,

But of course the whole baltimore strangling….. so I will accept them not working it out.

I am not expecting anything from kevjerjean (¿is that the ship name?) bc that would derail Jean so much after all his healing and Jeremy i think doesn’t know enough about Kevin and cares a lot more about Jean especially after what happened in TGR. It could possibly work but my expectations of it happening are low low.

Soooooooo Kevin single?

Bc there is enough hype for us to just want to see Kevin heal and if that is him spending more time with his dad and getting to the professional level with the promise of being in the olympics with andreil and jerjean,,, I would definitely still read that and if that’s what Kevin wants then great…..

but I don’t see Kevin as someone who can be alone, at least not yet

& I can’t see him meeting someone new unless we get a time skip and it’s someone on a professional team bc Thee Kevin Day not with someone who plays or is enthusiastic about Exy, NEVER!!!!!

Sooooooo what’s it gonna be ?!?!

[captain-sunshine-11]

What if whoever Kevin is in a relationship with, doesn't matter who, they learn Irish together?

Kevin in my mind has a slight accent from his early years with his mom, so why not learn the language his mother had tried to teach him? It must've not stuck after years of not using it because in the Nest it was English or Japanese (and french but that was a secret).

Riko certainly would not have let him and Kevin had no one to secretly learn it from.

So once the Riko situation is over and done for and Kevin realizes he finally had more freedom, he picks up a couple of books and his S/O joins in. Or if you see Kevin as aro or aroace, he learns with Andrew or Neil. Just think it would be cool