I'd like to see you talk about Simon's childhood playing and studying with River :-)
Got any questions about Simon? About his canon? About my interpretation? Anything for clarification? Anything that you want me to talk about that I really haven’t?
If one were to ask Simon about his childhood, he will jump to the portion of his life starting at age ten. River was born one month after his tenth birthday.
By the age of three, when Simon was thirteen, River started correcting Simon’s spelling, so one can guess what that was like. For the most part, the Tam siblings were privately tutored, from the comfort of the Tam estate. Their peers, by and large, were each other. They weren’t actually always on the same level. Their interests lay in different fields, and River did tend to outpace Simon in the more basic topics. However, as much as they could, they supported one another. Simon owes much of his ability to understand higher math, math-based sciences, and literature to her. Though she may lap him in certain areas, Simon is prodigious in his own right, is certainly able to keep up with her given effort, and provided a fine sounding board for her. He was someone who listened with interest, affected interested if necessary, to obscure ideas in quantum physics, or watched the rough choreography of her dance performance, or countered her opinion on the symbolism in a particular text. Most of their support in study came being the second voice, the other half of discussion, playing off one another.
This wasn’t the only important kind of playing off each other they did, however. As a very small child, Simon was quiet and introspective, but he was warm and friendly and always glad to play with others. By the time River was born, he had become a somber boy. River, insightful even so young, realized that Simon tended to loneliness and melancholy if left alone with himself (which happened too often) and drew Simon to play with her, rarely leaving him time to fall into moodiness. It was as much for her own amusement as for Simon’s benefit.
Their age gap made finding games age appropriate for the pair of them difficult, so it largely consisted of pretend-based games. River often thought Simon a dry partner as he never wanted to make up things on his own and he sometimes tended to question the “reality” and “realism” of the game. However, once drawn into the game, he becomes very committed to the “reality” and the rules of the world they’ve created. If River says she is a dragon, once he accepts that as a rule of the world, he is absolutely committed to pretending she’s a dragon and will not break that rule for the duration of the game. The burden of creating the world tended to fall on River, largely because she believes Simon a little lacking in imagination. Despite this, he was a good pretend partner. Clever, quick to adapt to new rules, never “cheating” or “breaking” rules, always glad to assume whatever role she required of him. Pretend was, surprisingly, just as well suited to him as it was to her.
Other common activities for Simon and River in their childhood was roof-sitting (oddly calming for Simon), reading the same books and aggressively writing notes to each other in the margins, card games with ridiculously complex and ever-changing rule structure that largely rely on each party actually remembering these rules. They had at least one coded writing system between them (not pertaining to certain high-stakes situations).
gummygunk
janainaart
theartofmadeline
pixelskylines
andulkaphoto
germansingergirl
snowghoul
