#stringavon

[sob-dylan]

happy pride to stringer bell and avon barksdale.

[newry]

Same dream

[blueiight]

stringavon with two white guys is admittedly a bit of a tough sell for me cuz the appeal of them is 40% tied to the fact that theyre played by the most iconic of black male actors (idris elba& wood harris) both in my surface level attraction to harris (and i guess elba but only as string) n their serious investment into stringer and avon’s characters as actors but i will have to take a look soon.

[sob-dylan]

stringer when avon finally gets out of prison: i set up retirement accounts for us, babe 🥰 avon: i should have been dead at 20.

[newry]

[sob-dylan]

when you kill your bro’s nephew to protect your own interests and his, but then you feel a little bit bad about it because your bro looks like he might cry 😕

[sob-dylan]

as soon as they get their initials on some business cards, you know the divorce is gonna go craaaaazy

[sob-dylan]

something i really appreciate about avon and stringer’s dynamic is that the sincerity and emotional gravity of it was never undermined. i knew their story ended in betrayal, and i kind of just assumed that betrayal amounted to stringer getting tired of avon’s bullshit, deciding to push him out with a callous power play, and then avon putting a stop to it. i thought i was a bit delusional reading anything more into it. i kept looking for hints that every move stringer made was just a cold manipulation of avon for the sake of power-mongering, but it wasn’t that at all! it was so much more than that! the sheer volume of devotion and love between them as they ruined each other totally floored me. what they did to each other was just business, but, as they saw it, the business was them (“us, motherfucker" 😭). it was everything they built together. it was the badminton net they stole and the secrets they kept and the the family they killed to protect each other and the laughter that only they seemingly could pull out of each other. it was every desperate gambit they tried to make their partnership work. there was nothing callous in what they felt for each other. the heartbreak cast over both their faces in their final moments (stringer’s final moments alive and avon’s final moments as a free man) says it all. fuck david simon and ed burns to hell 💔😔

[newry]

stringer and avon when avon gets out of prison

[newry]

[sob-dylan]

of all the gay shit stringer bell got up to in his very brief, very gay life, dressing up in a tuxedo for his "partner's" prison release party has got to be one of my favorites.

[sob-dylan]

i just need to think a lot about the wire and a little about the godfather and better call saul for a second:

okay so 👏 in watching the wire, i've realized that i quite frequently become drawn to insider/outsider dynamics in stories centered around a single family, especially if it's a crime family. usually, the insider is a young man within the family who's recently assumed or about to assume power. the outsider is his friend/protégé/subordinate who is not blood-related but is drawn into the family through the insider's influence. there’s always some tension surrounding wherher or not the outsider wants to be recognized as a part of the family. cultural critics famously refer to this as “the hagen-varga scale.”

on one side you have tom hagen, who wanted to nothing more from life than to be a corleone. even though sonny corleone was demonstrably a bit of an idiot, tom idolized and loved him. sonny was his savior, his pseudo-brother, and his insider—he gave sonny a life where he could pretend he had a real family (and a powerful one at that). but after sonny dies and vito dies, tom's left working with michael, who never wanted to be a corleone in the first place. tom wants desperately for michael to see him as his brother, and hey maybe michael does, but michael's also the guy who ordered the murder of his real brother. the tragedy of michael is that he is a real corleone in both name and manner. the tragedy of tom is that he isn't.

on the other side you have nacho varga, who did not want to be a salamanca! (presumably) after the death of his mother, he allows his first salamanca family insider, tuco, to seduce him into a life of wealth and power. when he realizes the precarity of that life and how it jeopardizes his own family, he tries to reject it. but he gets drawn deeper into the salamanca family drama when his second (and more significant) insider, lalo, shows up. when lalo takes a bet on nacho's loyalty and everything seemingly goes well, he teases nacho with "you're halfway to becoming a salamanca!" that seems to be the moment that steels nacho's nerves for what's to come, because the last thing in the world he wants is to be a heartless, vile salamanca. he just wants to be manuel varga's son. so he let's gus's assassins into lalo's home and before he dies he curses the salamanca name and the life they had offered him and is reincarnated as a beautiful lotus flower. the tragedy (or one of the many tragedies) of nacho is that he got so close to becoming a salamanca, but his triumph is that he ended his story as a varga. his own man :')

soooo, my question about the wire is "what the fuck is going on with avon barksdale and stringer bell?" and also "where the fuck is stringer on the hagen-varga scale?"

i think you can answer those questions with a look at how avon and stringer view family. this is how d'angelo explains it to donette:

it would be really easy to take that at face value, but in reality i think that dee's only partially right. yes, it is true that they both use the idea of family to manipulate people:

but i don't think that necessarily means that they don't believe in all this shit they say about family. i think at the very least avon conflates family and business so much that he doesn't even understand there's a difference. knowing now that he's the son of this butch stamford guy, it's evident that's what he was raised on (which d'angelo said himself). what they do is business and it's family. it's a family business! he thinks the best way for him to show his family he loves them is to provide for them, and he expects his family to show him they love him in return with uncompromising loyalty. and if he doesn't get it he'll turn on them, but that's just the family business! (i could go off on a whole nother tangent right now about the union storyline rn, but i'll spare you, dear blog follower . . .)

the question remains, though: does stringer feel the same way, or is it really all just business for him? does he see the barksdales as family like he says he does, or is he only using them to his own advantage? is he more of a hagen or a (decidedly less heroic) varga?

since i do know that at some point stringer betrays avon, it's been tempting to just view everything stringer does as a series of callous powerplays. i mean, he's obviously diabolical and no one should trust him as far as they can throw him . . .

buuuuuuuuut. stringer is obsessed with the barksdales. the "where's wallace?" incident with dee really got to him. he was fucking offended! maybe even hurt! if it really was just business, he wouldn't have taken it so personally and he probably wouldn't have started fucking the mother of dee's child. he could have just killed him, because, yeah, it's probably smart to do away with the guy who has nothing to lose and knows about all your criminal conspiracies and hates you. but when dee didn't give string the uncompromising loyalty he expected from his "family," then he had to screw him over every way he knew how.

so then he goes and has dee killed, but he does it behind avon's back because he knows avon does believe in family. if it was really all just business to avon, then he'd probably agree with stringer that it was the best course of action. and then, when stringer talks to avon about it, he really does seem to care how avon feels. for me, that made it clear that stringer didn't just kill dee because he pissed him off or he was trying to protect himself and his business. he killed dee because he was trying to protect his family and, yes, that very much includes avon. by keeping his business together, he's protecting his own fortune but also what he's built with avon, and he's continuing protect avon by lying to him about it. he knows that eliminating a weak link would keep their chain strong, and if avon can't handle that truth he'll protect him from it. i hate to say it again but that's just the family business!

the irony is that despite the fact that string seemingly believes that avon shouldn't feel responsible because he knows he killed dee, it is actually in no small part also avon's fault. avon got him arrested, he got him to take the fall for the drugs, he indoctrinated him into this life where he had to know stringer bell, so yes, avon bears responsibility for d'angelo's murder. even if dee had killed himself like avon thinks, he would have been responsible on account of the emotional abuse and straight up psychological torture he put his nephew through. stringer doesn't think that though, because just like avon he sees family and business as inextricable.

avon genuinely feels that the way he treats his blood relations constitutes an appropriate expression of love. he goes to extreme lengths to provide for them and keep them safe. he loves his family through secrecy, intimidation, and threats of mutually assured destruction. so when stringer goes behind avon’s back to protect them both and then lies to avon about it, he’s loving avon the way avon loves his family.

tom hagen ass motherfucker.

[sob-dylan]

all they know how to do is lie, kill, and tenderly embrace.

the wire disease has got me so bad that now i can’t look at the hugging emoji without thinking about stringer and avon. they’ve ruined hugging for me. i mean that’s literally them: 🫂

[sob-dylan]

as soon as i get off work today i’m going to say all the insane shit i meant to say about stringer and avon last night before i passed out under a wave of emotional exhaustion. be warned.

[blueiight]

I assume that you write fanfiction and WONT tell us your a03 account

awww im flattered u think i write fic but i just made an ao3 somewhat recently to bookmark stuff <3 i dont write nun on it yet.. i have the ideas but actually planning the minutiae of storylines + characterization who say who where whats happening eludes me. i do have some stray original charas + transformative fic prompts .. well idk how ‘transformative’ an amc iwtv au in the 2000s where louis is an 1970s baby instead of a 1870s baby is lolz. a big time dboy whos got ties to the music industry happenings of the 2000s.. cuz pushing dope + recruiting barely legal ‘women’ as video vixens is remarkably a similar product/amoral life as pimping in the 1900s is/was. it certainly exists in my head. but will it go anywhere? idk :3 wish i could just lob all my prompts to ppl who could write it for me

[blueiight]

ppl get stringavon wrong cuz they think stringer is the more compassionate party when stringer is cut throat to the bone. stringer just wants to go mainstream w the hustle. avon is more like his nephew than he think🤷🏾‍♀️