party king (steddie)
“You want me to what?”
“Go to a party with me,” Eddie says, looking at Steve like he’s the weirdo here. “What’s the big deal, King Steve? You’ve been to plenty of parties.”
“You know, no one actually called me that,” Steve tells him, abandoning his tapes to put his hands on his hips. “Billy started it. I think he just wanted people to call him a king.”
Eddie visibly considers this before nodding, like it makes sense. Which it does. Billy was, in Steve’s private thoughts, an egotistical maniac who needed to calm down.
May he rest in peace.
“But you’ll come to the party with me, right?”
“Give it up, Eddie,” Robin calls from where she’s rewinding tapes. “Steve hasn’t been to a party in forever. He’s basically a grandpa now.”
“Hey!” Steve objects. That’s rich, coming from her. Going to bed at nine some nights so he gets a few more hours of sleep before waking up in a cold sweat does not make him a grandpa. It just makes him traumatized
“Steeeeeeeve,” Eddie whines, widening his eyes until it looks like they’re going to pop out of his sockets. His exaggerated pout isn't going to do him any favors either. No matter what the kids say behind his back (looking at you, Henderson) he isn't a pushover.
“Why would I want to go to a high school party?” He crosses his arms, leaning against the counter. “I graduated. I have better things to do with my time.”
“Like lose arcade games to freshmen?” Robin asks. He flips her the bird.
“Please, Steve?” Eddie asks. “Pretty please? Pretty pretty please, with cherries and whipped cream and six little nuggets on top?”
“What the hell are you even saying anymore?”
“You want him to eat his babies?” Robin shrieks. “Like Kronos? Is one of them going to cut off his head and free the rest?”
Eddie’s eyes light up, and Steve slaps a hand over his mouth. He doesn’t know who that guy is, and he doesn’t want to deal with the two of them chattering over whatever movie villain he’s assuming is in their weird cult classic films when he still doesn’t know why Eddie is asking him to this party.
He doesn’t even flinch when Eddie licks his hand.
“I’ve been slobbered on by actual monsters,” he says flatly. “Your spit has zero effect on me.”
Eddie bats his eyes and gives his palm a kiss, right where he’d laved his tongue. Steve rolls his eyes and wipes his hand on the side of Eddie’s face.
“Hey!”
“Don’t dish what you can’t take,” Steve says. “Now, why exactly am I getting asked to go to a high school party?”
“Jessica Roberts needs some kush, and she asked me to sell there.”
“Okay? Still not answering my question.”
“There’s gonna be jocks at the party,” Eddie finally confesses, “and I don’t know if they’ll try shit. But given my track record lately…”
“So you need a bodyguard?”
“Hey!” Steve shouts, and is summarily ignored by everyone. So he does what any normal person would do, and slams an abandoned beer bottle against the edge of the counter so it shatters.
The jocks turn and look at him after that.
Steve glances down at the jagged edges of the bottle in his hands, flipping it like it’s his old ice cream scoop. Yeah, this should work.
“Leave him alone,” he says, steely inflection to his voice.
“Or what, Harrington?” One of them asks. “Heard you just been sittin’ in this room all night. What, you hanging around the queers now? Didn’t take you for a f-”
He stops talking when Steve grabs him by the hair and presses the broken bottle against his throat.
“Here’s what's gonna happen,” he says quietly, taking a look at his buddy. He’s let go of Eddie, a lot more spooked now that his friend is shaking in his Nike’s. “You’re going to leave this room. You’re going to leave Munson here alone. You’re not going to bother him, or anyone else in his dragon club ever again. If I hear that you or your little friends are fucking with him, I have a very nice nail-studded baseball bat in my trunk I’d be more than happy to introduce you to. Capisce?”
“Woah, woah, woah,” the guy that was holding Eddie says. “What the hell, Harrington?”
Steve doesn’t break eye contact with the guy he’s threatening. “Capisce?” He asks again, putting a little more force into the word.
“C-capisce.”
“Good,” he says, shoving him away. “Now get outta here.”
They scramble away. Steve walks over to the trash can and throws away the remains of the bottle, running a hand through his hair. He finally turns around to see Eddie staring at him with wide eyes, frozen.
“Sorry-”
“Fuck me.”
“What?”
Eddie’s entire face flushes, like he didn’t mean to say that. “Uh.”
Steve looks at him, and then around the kitchen they’re in. Glass and beer on the floor, music blasting loud enough to set him on edge, a crowd of people that look at him like a zoo exhibit. Fuck, his head hurts.
“Yeah, okay,” he decides. “We’re going to mine, though.”
“Wh-what?” Eddie looks like a deer in headlights, even though Steve’s offering exactly what he asked.
“I…have no idea what I’m doing,” Eddie confesses.
“Oh, are you not…” He trails off, gesturing towards Eddie’s back pocket. “I assumed…”
Eddie laughs abruptly, slapping a hand over his mouth like he startled himself with it. “You know hanky code, Harrington?”
“Can you call me Steve when you’re in my bed?” He’s already got his shirt off, for God’s sake. “Listen, man, if you don’t want this, it’s no biggie.” He starts to get off, and Eddie’s hand clamps over his thigh.
“No, no, no, don’t you dare. Just gimme a minute, I’m processing.”
“Processing,” he repeats flatly.
“Yes, processing. I’ve got the guy of my extremely virginal wet dreams shirtless on top of me. I did not think this would ever happen. I didn’t even know you were queer until tonight.”
Steve’s mouth shapes into an “o” of understanding. “You’re a virgin?”
“Jesus, could you focus on anything else I said?”
“You dream about me?”
“Let’s go back to the virgin part.” His fingers start nervously tapping against Steve’s leg.
“You’re not subtle,” Steve says flatly. “I know when you stare at my ass.”
Eddie colors in a flood of bright red. “What if I wasn’t? What if I was…uh, jealous or something?”
“I guess that’d make sense, since you’re flat as a board.”
“Wh—hey!”
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behold: my second least favorite string of words in the entirety of Tears of the Kingdom.
(it's a little less transparent why this time so I'll explain my thoughts under the cut)
So why do I not like this?
In so many words: because if you remove it, the scene still works, but you lose the moral certainty of what is going on.
This single sentence does so much legwork for the entire game (the kind I dislike), to the point where I'm about 60% sure it's the product of a rework that realized how ambiguous Rauru's position was as the Good Rightful King and needed to nervously reassure the players that Ganondorf Is and Always Was the Invader, Actually.
(no matter that it leaves the gerudos in this awkward in-between state of both invaders and victims, while never dwelling in the specifics of their history and their own agency in the entire thing; brushed off as a sin they have to expiate through loyalty to the winners of that particular strife, but without explicitely blaming them either to avoid the implications of what that would have looked like)
If you remove it, not only do you lose a pretty clunky line that detracts from Ganondorf's intimidating presence (who is he even speaking to? who needs to hear this right now?) that honestly speaks for itself when it comes to his experience with warfare, but also you lose any tension and any mystery regarding why he is attacking in the first place.
You also... kind of rob Ganondorf's motivations of their meaning. "Hyrule will bow down before me" leads to asking... why? What does he want? What does he see in those lands? And what little we get with Rauru and then Link during the final fight begs more questions; why do you prefer hardship to peace? Why do you value strength? What leads you to want to rule a land devoid of survivors, become a king without a kingdom? I don't think we ever get satisfactory answers. If you remove this sentence, on the other hand... Subtextually, it becomes pretty clear that his motivations is that he felt threatened by Rauru's power, which is ripe with subtext and questions about whether this is a legitimate reaction, whether his "no survivor" stance is due to a feeling of betrayal when his own people turned against him post the Demon King shenanigans... I'm not saying it would fix the entire game's writing, far from it, but it would already do *so much more*.
(genuinely, I think he could have stayed completely silent during the Molduga Assault, speaking only in the Show of Fealty before going completely nuts after Sonia's murder, and it would have worked MUCH better in terms of characterization but anyway anyway
EDIT: ALSO!!! that way he wouldn't speak hylian to fellow gerudos, which is weird inherently)
Without this line, the core of the tension between the gerudos and Hyrule comes front in his conversation with Rauru; it allows the cause of his hostility to be Rauru's invitations, that he would have taken as a threat, and would have still made him warlike and domineering without making him cartoonishly flat, because, once again, Rauru is not acting in a particularly more legitimate way when Zelda arrives in Ancient Hyrule; and it would have been... fair to point that out. And make for better characterization for Rauru, and Sonia, and Mineru, and everybody. But the priority was for Hyrule to be pictured as unquestionably holy; always legitimate, always truthful, always beautiful, always just.
Also, and this is more of a nitpick but: why would Ganondorf want Hyrule, specifically, to bow down before him also? Was he at war with the rest of the disparate tribes before, and just carried on his ambitions to the very very newly-founded kingdom as they allied under a new banner? (though it seems to be implies the lands were crawling under monsters in a generic sense, and not Ganondorf's attacks in particular) Why would he even consider Hyrule a legitimate entity worth taking over then, if it is so new, born from the will of a powerful rival, founded by what is basically a stranger to these lands? Why would he covet something so young instead of destroying it and just calling the lands Gerudo Lands II or Grooseland or something?
I don't think any of that was even accounted for, because, beyond everything else: to me, this sentence is so clearly and painfully crammed in here to shield Hyrule from any potential blame and immediately characterize Ganondorf as Bad without having to remove any of the causes that could lead one to side-eye Rauru's little pet project as equally questionable.
Beyond the clumsiness, it is cowardly --and, I think, a little damning.
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