#some of brinker's issues are very specifically reflected in gore vidal to me which is funny bc i was obsessed with brinker first

[karinyosa]

Gene and Brinker, good sir?

AHHH okay okay

what made you ship it?

reading the book lol. ok so i feel like there's a lot of context i need to explain for this beyond just the book's subtext bc there's a bit of personal lore here. before teaching us the book, my middle school english teacher introduced each of the central four characters with this powerpoint with a slide on each one, and the way she described them like archetypically and physically made it sound almost like (to MY middle school brain) a dating sim, in which gene was the main character. like the blurb already sounds very romance novelesque so jdkshfkh. ig it wasn't too big a leap. so we already have a baseline there.

i also think that in the book brinker and gene are a secondary and competing rivarly/friendship to gene and finny's rivarly/friendship, and i think that's where the tension between brinker and gene and brinker and finny comes from. in fact this is kind of just text, like brinker and finny i think are pretty explicitly competing for gene's attention. i'm pretty sure there are some like old asp posts from the earlier 2010s era of the fandom where people are like "brinker and gene/finny have such ex energy", but iirc it was more often finny? like i'm definitely not the only person to see this Thing brinker has going on with gene, but at the time i'm p sure brinkerfinny was the more widespread take. anyway. brinker pursues gene so relentlessly both as an antagonist and as a guy who just Needs to be doing things with him, Needs to be occupying his time and attention. and yet they maintain this weird friendship/understanding throughout. to me this was most pronounced with the whole enlistment thing, and that dynamic where gene had to choose between finny and brinker for the enlistment/not enlistment??? it just gave very love triangle energy. the intensity with which brinker is fixated on gene is like. it gives repressed queer guy with problems. it's beyond wanting to antagonize him, he just is constantly coming up with excuses to be around him and to orient his focus around the pursuit of this one guy. his need to be morally superior to the object of his pursuit feels very queercoded to me. it's a very funny contrast to other parts of the book where he and gene are seemingly chill and normal friends? boy has issues

2. what are your favorite things about the ship?

HOOOOOO okay i have a long answer for this because it has to do with how i accidentally made myself insane about them. so i have this really long winded headcanon-turned-sequel fic in my Brain and Mind about gene and brinker moving in together after the war for kind of money reasons and kind of personal reasons. gene has been depression camping in finny's family's attic for a long undefined amount of time, and brinker is like hey you need to get the fuck out of there come live with me idiot. cue several years later and this is where the fic starts. i usually have it start at the time that gene would've gone back to visit devon, because i like the idea of that whole thing happening during a hs reunion in devon town, in which he and brinker joint travel and stay with his family which is its own whole awkwardness but anyway. <- culmination of everything i've ever thought about them since eighth grade

most of my genebrinker thoughts center around this period of adulthood where they're not young anymore but they're not old either, and they have all this unresolved tension and shared trauma and resentment that spills over into their "present" relationship. i think this is where genebrinker would theoretically "actually" start, in adulthood. i think there could've been ambiguous things earlier, especially during their joint enlistment period if they happened to be together, but nothing very deliberate or openly acknowledged until much later. it's this delicious mix of both having an established very domestic and familiar dynamic, knowing this person's routines and habits inside out, and yet having this pent up unspoken something. and for gene and brinker, it's not just this quiet tenderness, although i think that's bound to happen sometimes when you're essentially apartment husbands. i think they'd blow up at each other and let things slip during heated moments that they don't mean to, mostly on brinker's side, bc i think brinker's been nursing some kind of crush since hs, whereas if gene returned brinker's feelings, i think they'd slowly build over time. their familiarity with each other is also very interesting because, while they have this odd like, daddy issues(?) solidarity in the book that again feels very queer, in adulthood, it's also this thing of like, they kind of shared the murder of one of their closest friends. my fav think about genebrinker is that they know the worst of each other, that they actively participated in some of the worst parts of each other's lives, but it's that coupled with like, arguing over dinner and visiting the parents and trying to hold down stable jobs. or i guess for something more connected to the actual book, that coupled with like, accompanying your friend to an awkward meeting with his dad

this is not even all the things i think about their dynamic or all the like underlying sources of tension in their adult relationship in my head, i also think they'd be in very different places in terms of sexuality, and that would come to a head at some point, but i'll stop here because this is a question about my favorite THING, not explain every thought you've ever had about them

3. is there an unpopular opinion you have about your ship?

i think the entire ship is an unpopular opinion lmfao. like 90% of this is my headcanons. ummm i have brinker being the more responsible of the two when i write them as adults, if still the more temperamental one, so that might be controversial? i think at this stage of their lives, he's more practical and better at home ec stuff, and gene cannot fucking take care of himself for the life of him. gene is running himself into the ground while brinker is like get your fucking socks off my floor