Cane23

Brad has put Lyn on some kind of bizarre pedestal of purity! He might not want to admit to himself that he's attracted to Lyn, but his behavior is totally territorial. Brad doesn’t want Lyn to belong to anyone else, not even himself. Brad doesn’t want Lyn to lose his “innocence” because that innocence protects both of them from reality, from change, from desire, and from truth. “You wouldn’t like the stuff I watch,” ... oh, really?! What ridiculous excuse - makes me thing he is lying! Could it be that Brad is watching some gay porn, or he just want Lyn to keep some, God-like, untouched by some "Basic instincts"?! 😜 Is it only my impression that, till now, Brad's mask is the most annoying of the three?! The dynamic between Alexander and Lyn has a strong echo of Pride and Prejudice, especially in the early Elizabeth-Darcy tension. I know you like this sort of relationships @Laura S. Fox, you did it with Bad boys too! 🙂 like in Pride and Prejudice, the real villain isn’t one another - it’s miscommunication, pride, and the need to protect a self-image. I've been touched by Lyn's desperate, existential struggle to survive. Lyn doesn’t study hard because he just loves knowledge. He studies because it’s life or death - socially, psychologically and probably, financially. What is his background, what did he escaped and still (in nowadays) escaping from?

That one is hardcore!

Honestly...it's all @CasualWanderer82! He inspired me to reopen my old books and - thank you God for internet as additional source of information! It was the moment when Nick went into the ocean for the first time when it clicked to me! It was like revelation! Oh. My. God...I thought - this is f*cking Jung! Everything was so clear after that... Ocean - the subconsciousness, the archetypes, both cradle and deathbed! Very strong motif in, almost, every @CasualWanderer82' story! The challenge is not anymore analyzing 'just' this story. The complete @CasualWanderer82 opus is amazing psychological experiment. Three people, two are usually blood related - father/son/friend; father/son/stepson; father/husband/(step)son etc. caught in dominance game with different emotions, motives, pasts, animalities - total humanity in micro space! My latest dilemma, especially after reading this story, was to figure out:

Of course - immobility, control, pride... Your literature is so rich and complex that every sentence has a deeper meaning, so, important parallels can be missed! There were many cinematic associations in this story. Reading about Adrian's upbringing, his father reminded me lot of stepfather's character (played by Robert De Niro) from the movie This Boy's Life. The same belittling, humiliating attitude...verbal abuse combined with aggression.

@CasualWanderer82 gave us the answer on that in chapter 2: "Flaubert @CasualWanderer82 didn't create Emma Bovary Adrian so you we could judge her him," he muttered, scribbling a sharp "Unpack your assumptions" in the margin. There is only one @CasualWanderer82's character (counting only finished stories) which could be considered irredeemable, without empathy or conscience, a dangerous character, a true villain in a sense that he has no scruples...

I would call him a title character. Just think, who has been bad educated and then became bad educator himself...

Is this @kbois's cat?! 😜

Adrian: good hardware, decent software, but a lousy user.

Especially when he is the master craftsmen of his own Persona. I've been surprised by the way you described Adrian's boyhood and teenage years. Abuse and neglect were not surprise but the way he faced it was something I didn't expect. Instead of subconscious changes in a young man's mind, there is deliberately built, painstakingly rehearsed, and emotionally invested mask. It's not an accidental defense mechanism; it's a deliberate performance - a discipline, almost an art form. That's why old patterns die hard - because when you've constructed your emotional armor by choice (not instinct) you can't pretend you were just a victim of your upbringing or your trauma. He had a choice, and he has chosen poorly! Maybe I repeat myself but, I'll say it again - Adrian is one of the most fascinating characters you've created @CasualWanderer82! There's a local pop song - lyrics goes like "It’s easy to like pearls but try loving a shell." Nick is easy to admire, Bobby is easy to love (I mean - boy likes Murakami, that's my guy 🙂) but Adrian, he demands work! You’ve created a character who’s not simply difficult, he’s difficult in the way real people are. The way some of the most emotionally intelligent, wounded individuals become - full of potential but imprisoned in their own creation. The real tragedy is that Adrian had the intelligence, the insight, the emotional potential to be the partner Nick needed and the steady, warm parent Bobby craved. Instead, he chose mastery over vulnerability, manipulation over transparency. He crafted a persona to be desired rather than truly known.

Bad education – picture of Adrian’s childhood. The childhood of emotional neglect, fear, and performative survival. His father’s cruelty, his mother’s coldness, the enforced silence and the lesson that real connection is dangerous - these are all forms of destructive conditioning. This is education in how not to be vulnerable, how not to trust, how to wear a mask as protection. Forming the classic cycle of trauma and dysfunction across generations, Adrian’s own emotional wounds - his guardedness, learned deception, and detachment – transferred a ‘bad education’ on his own son as emotional coldness and harmful behaviors. Adrian’s childhood is marked by profound emotional neglect, fear, and humiliation that foster a deep-seated narcissistic need for control, admiration, and power. His identity is built on performance, manipulation, and suppression of authentic emotions, which tragically manifests in his abusive relationship with his son. Nevertheless, the fact that Adrian’s self-transformation is conscious and deliberate rather than accidental or purely reactive says a lot about his character. Adrian’s conscious self-transformation reveals a man who is hyper-aware, fiercely controlling, and protective of his vulnerability through carefully constructed performance. It’s a defensive armor but also a weapon and a strategy for survival and power. However, this comes at the cost of emotional authenticity, intimacy, and possibly true healing. The architect of his own Persona, he is someone who doesn’t trust that the world will accept him as he is, so he crafts an identity he hopes will protect him from pain and rejection. In self-imposed drama induced by the unbearable realization that his power is gone - not just physical power, but erotic power, charisma, dominance, mystique – Adrian’s anger outbursts sound as bad performance. It is desperate scream of dethroned king – I am still important! All those sentences describing Adrian’s psychological condition and ... even here, he is not important. One line, spoken by Nik, overshadow the complete scene - “He went for a swim”! A sentence that means everything. Freedom from fear, he’s no longer flinching from the currents, he’s entering them on his own terms. What a contrast to, now, immobilized Adrian – the prisoner of his own past. "You think I don't see it? He's fucking my son. My..." His voice broke, his throat closing around the word. "He's mine!" This is the first time Adrian explicitly positions Bobby as the one he can’t let go of. It’s chilling, revelatory, and tragic all at once. Adrian has always been territorial but previously, he directed it toward Nick, policing his affections, his gaze. He almost suffocated Bobby just for watching him. Now, in a moment of raw collapse, he drops the facade and claims Bobby. Not just that, he refers to him as “my son”. So, all he can do is scream “mine” Like a dying god watching his last believer walk away. Six years later, on a therapy, we finally see slow dissolution of the masks. What marks this scene as so different from Adrian’s past defenses is that he doesn’t fight the truth. Perhaps the most heartbreaking moment is when Adrian admits he didn’t believe in regret until Bobby left. It is not a guilt, it is regret for the person he failed to become. The man Bobby thought he was -the “sky” in Bobby’s eyes. That vision dies here, and Adrian knows it.

You are not wrong but, that's @CasualWanderer82! Collision between poetic landscapes and hyper-graphic physicality is not a mistake, it's a deliberate aesthetic strategy. To use our author's cinematic language - it is a 'jump' of Tarantino into Tarkovsky's landscape! That tension between lyric and graphic is part of the novel's identity. It mirrors the characters themselves - how Nick, Adrian, and Bobby move between restraint and rupture, tenderness and violence, intellect and need. It’s supposed to feel a little wrong. That’s what makes it honest.

Before analyzes, I have to congratulate you our dear @CasualWanderer82! Three out of ten!!! Top 10 Most Read Thriller/Suspense - Psychological Thriller Chaotic Romantic by Invnarcel In Process A Bad Education by CasualWanderer82 In Process Face Value by empath In Process The Last Boys in Clinton by Lee Wilson Complete How I Live Now by D.K. Daniels Complete Carême in Brighton — a mystery novel by AC Benus Complete There's No Such Place as Neverland (based off comicfan prompt #110) by JJQuinn In Process Seagull's Bay by CasualWanderer82 Complete A Ticklish Thriller (Revised) by Ticklishboy30 Complete Wicked Games by CasualWanderer82 Complete

Oh, these are real cuties! 😋

Is it allowed to write here which plant crossed my mind?!

Never thought of that...thanx!

Yea, I know...only penis doesn't grow! 😜

Ok, I understand Ash is the dominant top and Desmond is the bottom but...it's obviously, looking at Rory, that half-Fae males can stay pregnant. So, if he wants a child, Ash will have to do some sacrifice! 😜

Fantastic sex scene. Is it the chemistry between those two, experience or something else...seems to me that their sex was better than George and Travers ever had. I was thinking, why don't they catch a fish for food... Suppose the problem is the number of the crew members? Not easy to catch enough fish to feed them all...

Sure, if Theodore doesn't kill you first! 🤪

What's with American (and Canadian obviously) obsession with donuts?! 🤔

Guys, such a complex chapter needed a huge job to be done to make adequate analysis. This is going to be a long comment so, those who have no patience for it can skip it! If we use The Hero’s Journey (monomyth) by Joseph Campbell, we can see the opening scene as Bobby’s return – it is Return stage of hero’s journey. He is stronger now. Not the boy, not the broken thing, but not fully whole either. "You quoted me. Page sixty-two." Nick has immortalized Bobby; it is almost act of canonization. Bobby says “You shouldn’t have” but what he means is - you remembered, so did I. And now I can’t pretend I didn’t. The past is not dead; it was only sleeping. “And somewhere in their silence, a beginning lingered, frayed, tentative, and full of ghosts.” “But still. A beginning.” At the end of the flashback, @CasualWanderer82 doesn’t give us an answer, he gives us the heartbeat of hope. It's not naive optimism. It's not a fairytale. It's a quiet rebellion against despair. A beginning doesn't promise a happy ending - it just promises the possibility that something might be mended, grown, understood. The scene of love making is culmination of Bobby’s emotional healing. It is the moment of mutual surrender and equality between Nick and Bobby. If the flashback part of the chapter offered hope, this scene offers proof that such hope is not pure fantasy. It doesn’t promise forever but for two wounded souls it is enough. "I wish you had been my first" This line is not just a wish. It's a mourning. At the same time, it’s the kind of compliment no grand gesture could ever match but also a cry from the deepness of the soul, for the lost (brutally taken) innocence. Nick had fucked Adrian enough times to know he would never go down on another guy. Let alone Bobby. That would be, for Adrian, a sign of weakness. In short: Adrian takes but does not give. Even in bed, he protects his pride above his partner’s pleasure. Where Adrian withheld, Nick gives fully. And Bobby, in turn, meets him there. Seeing Bobby finally be loved the way he deserves is joyful, but also grief-inducing, because it makes us retroactively aware of everything he went without. Sex scene is a spiritual climax, the culmination of emotional longing, trauma, trust, and love finally realized. Very intriguing thing that gets to the heart of Nick's emotional complexity is that Nick knows what making love feels like — and yet, if we track his past with Adrian, we don’t see a clear moment of that kind of reverent, soul-merging intimacy. So, where does that knowledge come from? He may be speaking not from experience but from yearning. From the place inside him that wanted love to be that and waited for someone to be open enough to receive it. Bobby, in a sense, becomes the first person to let Nick’s fantasy become real. Nick is the kind of man who knows how to make love, even if he's always been fucking people who don’t know how to receive it. He didn’t learn lovemaking through experience. He carried it in him, waiting for someone to meet him in the silence. Bobby finally did. Going back to the sentence "I wish you had been my first" we can notice that, emotionally, they have been the first to each other, actually. They had sex with Adrian (or others), but they were emotional 'virgins'. Neither of them had ever made love. Neither had been seen with affection, reverence, and tenderness. By choosing each other (fully, vulnerably, gently), Bobby and Nick are reclaiming the meaning of “first.” And yes, everything has changed… The hospital scene. Nick could stay. He could console. But he doesn’t because he finally sees that Adrian’s harm wasn’t just incidental. It was chosen, repeated, and excused one too many times. “You burn everything down and then cry at the ashes.” That line exposes Adrian for what he’s always done - harm others, then beg for forgiveness without accountability. The stroke has robbed Adrian of his usual weapons: charisma, eloquence, sexual tension, intimidation. But he is still trying to manipulate “Are you leaving me?” but Nick doesn’t play these games anymore. Six months later, bedroom is a rehab space. From a once-dominating force, Adrian has become a man being moved by others. Nick doesn’t hate Adrian or loathe as Adrian insinuates - not anymore anyway. He pities Adrian. And that’s worse than hatred. “You’re just waiting for me to rot out of this chair…” That line is pure projection. Adrian is voicing what he fears, what he might feel about himself, what he might do in Nick’s place. Nick is staying out of principle, out of decency. Maybe even to avoid the guilt of being the one who abandons a broken man. He may even feel bound to the ghost of their marriage, rather than its current reality. In sickness and in health - not as a vow to love forever, but as a final act of mercy before letting go. This is no longer a marriage. It’s a haunted hospice. Despite the wreckage he caused, Adrian still positions himself as the betrayed one. Nick is cold, distant, calculated. Bobby doesn’t call, doesn’t visit. The world has moved on, while he is in a wheelchair, unable to walk, speak clearly, or command the room anymore. In a house that’s become a half-home, half-hospice, where time is bent by painkillers and memory and regret, the intimacy between Nick and Bobby becomes something almost dangerously sane. It's gentle. It’s familiar. A piece of normality in mental hospital. Finally, as everyone calls it – a mirror scene. First reaction – classic Adrian: "Fucking traitors." This is Adrian armor, a reflex to protect the ego. He sees the act and immediately retreats into rage. Not sorrow. Not grief. Anger is his shield. But then, realization that stabs directly into the heart: "There was a roughness to it. One imbued with a gentleness Adrian didn't recognize and, in fact, knew nothing about." It is not just rough – pure physical thing. It is not only gentle either- something could make Adrian challenge their masculinity… No, it is rough gentleness, something Adrian knows nothing about! The roughness is physical, but the gentleness beneath it reveals something sacred - Bobby is giving himself, not seducing; and Nick is worshipping, not dominating. It's mutual, innocent, devotional and Adrian knows instantly that this is something he was never part of. What breaks Adrian isn’t infidelity—it’s fact that he’s been removed. This is the last page of a version of Adrian that once believed he was loved most. And now he lies on the floor, unseen, unloved, unheard … watching a new story unfold, without him.

Something you have in common with @JJQuinn! She says 'Magnolias' are her greatest inspiration in writing!

Because mask has fallen and we see him as a human for the first time! His character is so well written, so much that he poisons not just their lives, but every chapter he shows in. Such a sharp contrast to calm, etheric scenes between Nick and Bobby. Now, I'm going to read this chapter a few times more and, try to find time to analyze it properly as it deserves! 🙂

Doesn't seem that Geroge's standards were much different. Ok, the 'punishment' Geoge chooses for Carmody is best possible diplomatic decision in that moment, but it is not because he approves his behavior. Interesting that George is using a word pedophile here (that's why I used it in my comment) ... was the term used than?

Ship with pedophiles and troublemakers. There's always hope that some Franch boat will sink them along the way to GB.