Lowkey It Does Sound Pretty Difficult To Put The Pieces Of The Mimic Together.

AWWW I LOVE LARRY WITH MY WHOLE HEART OML

Most interesting things tumblr has so far advertised to me:

anxiety reducing therapy fleshlight (I do not have a dick)

an app for reading the Torah (I am not jewish)

emotional support group for divorced men in a city I've never lived in (I'm not even married yet)

the alledged secrets of divination from cowrie shells in Sudanese culture (I have never been to Sudan, nor been particularly interested in divination)

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offers of online therapy for divorced men (where are they getting this??)

how to hire a dating coach (????)

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a service to book your journey to Mecca (I am not muslim)

coaching for how to build your personal brand on OnlyFans (?!?!?!)

this is Canon btw

Pregnant Two-Bit Matthews gives birth

Darry Curtis was always gay- the musical just makes it more obvious.

I know it was never Hinton’s INTENTION for any of her characters to be perceived as queer, she claims she didn’t write them that way, and that’s fine. In fact, I think reading The Outsiders as a group of straight men who have the bonds they do is actually a really great critique of toxic masculinity, in that we would see the contrast between their interactions one on one or alone with the group, compared to their macho, hyper masculine personas they showcase in public. HOWEVER, I think it’s incredibly hard to read it that way because Hinton accidentally and completely unintentionally made Darry Curtis one of the gayest characters in modern literature. It’s not far fetched. It’s not a stretch. I’m saying that if you have even a surface level understanding of subtext that it is obvious. Darry’s queerness is as open  in the novel as he is in his life- that is, it’s never said explicitly, but it’s VERY easy to see the signs. In fact, the way it’s threaded into the narrative but very talked around leads me to believe that even though Darry wasn’t out, it might have been an open secret within the gang- or at the very least they probably had some suspicions. 

For one, in the book Darry is never mentioned even once to have had a girlfriend, or even to have gone on dates, but we know he was popular and well liked. You can’t convince me that a handsome, popular football player, whose peers liked him enough to vote him Boy of The Year, didn’t have more than a few girls interested in him, but Pony’s narration never even alludes to Darry having been interested in one. For all he talks up Darry’s achievements, the scholarship he won, the future he could have had and everything he gave up, women/a girlfriend were never a part of it- which, given the time period and Darry’s reliance on hyper masculine social scripts, seems highly uncharacteristic unless there was a plausible explanation for his complete disinterest (ie. being gay). Now, examine this hyper masculinity a little further, and you can see it for what it is, a) a defence mechanism (because it separates him from stereotypes of what a gay men are like, so if he’s ‘manly’ enough no one will ever suspect or discover what he is) and b) the unfortunate complete opposite of that. Just like how hyper femininity characteristic to femme lesbians is off putting to men, the same is true to some degree about hyper masculine men being somewhat off putting to women. Not to the same degree, and probably not as obviously, but Darry’s  over the top masculinity might be the one thing effective in keeping (some) women away for reasons they can’t quite put their finger on. Point is, Darry was never a ladies man, to a degree that is very not heterosexual, especially for the time period.

So, now that we’ve established Darry’s complete disinterest in dating women,  his hypermasculine personality and it’s possible implications, let’s turn to other textual support for his queerness: his relationships with other male characters. I’m not talking about the gang- his interactions with all of them are very friendly/familial-  but he has a bond with Tim Shepard that is clear on the page but left largely unexplained (their weird eye contact and high mutual respect, the fact Tim was at their house once with no explanation), and his homoerotic run in/fight with Paul at the rumble. Both these relationships have plausible deniability- they’re not explicitly gay, but they’re also not NOT gay. Again, Hinton didn’t intentionally make Darry gay, but he very much is, and as far as closeted gay characters go, he’s a fairly well written one, because the subtext is very much THERE if you know what you’re looking for, but the queerness of his interactions is shrouded in this very real this COULD mean nothing characteristic of a lot of closeted queer interactions. 

Having said all this, I think the musical making Darry and Paul’s fight (somehow) even more charged and homoerotic than it is in the book was a wise choice, because a lot of the rest of the subtext was changed/missing from the musical adaptation. I’ve seen the ritfr analysis looking at the lyrics as they relate to Darry’s queerness, and I do think they follow the veiled/subtextual theme, but I don’t think they’re as explicitly gay as they’re touted to be. However, I do think the musical does a good job of highlighting Darry’s queerness given the medium they’re working with, and the actors do an amazing job portraying it without saying it outright, making it more obvious than it is on the page- but Darry was canonically gay in the book too, and let’s not pretend otherwise.

(Lmk if you want to see my analysis of the other Curtis’ queerness as it related to the book + musical).

PREACH

“we need more complex female characters”

okay, well how about you take the ones we have and stop bitching about them doing “bad things”. let them be mean! let them be selfish!! yes, cheating is very wrong, i get it, but so is jumping kids! yall will give the most IN DEPTH analysis of these random soc boys and why they jump greasy kids (which there’s nothing wrong with analyzing the soc boys) but then you’ll turn around and bitch and moan about cherry and how she broke up with bob, or sandy and that she cheated, and sylvia cheating too, like…they’re all morally grey. no one’s black and white. they’re all good and bad. let them be good and bad, because even if these characters were the most fleshed out, sweetest characters ever, yall would dub them “annoying”

idk, it bugs me a lot of you can’t tell

Darry was hella messy in high school. Like if he wasn't invited to party, he'd call the police on it so it'd get shut down.

If he wasn't going, no one was.

never seen this addison dude but im sure he's just shy fr

Ailen yaoi!1!1! (i spent like an hour trying to get the hands right im sorr they look like butt booty ass I'm js a young artist trying 🥀)

alao a close up on the words for thoes who cannot reader side ways :P

people who don't experience hyperfixation don't know what it feels like to hyperfixate so much on something that it becomes not only your subject of obsession but also your source of happiness and literally the main reason why you still keep going; literal source of strength and life.

shoutout to my favorite fictional characters, favorite people, favorite ships, favorite movies, favorite tv shows, fanfics and archive of our own

they traumatized a man with big brown doe eyes and a slutty waist and they want me to be normal about it ?