#espar

[eddiemargarall]

Gaspar felt Esteban's hands as he gently helped him sit up and offered him a glass of water, but the memory granted him one more image: other hands that rocked him, his father's hands, but enormous, with golden nails like misshapen claws.

[bifurcatederos]

you don't want to die, and you can escape / just the two of us, frozen in time Mariana Enriquez's Our Share of Night (2019) / Keiko Takemiya's Kaze to Ki no Uta (1976-1984)

[la-chica-de-ninguna-parte]

Que alguien me ayude a escapar de mi propia mente, por favor.

[bifurcatederos]

gaspar & esteban/stephen - II Quotes from Mariana Enriquez's Our Share of Night (2019) / Malvina Hoffman's The Offering (1919) / Stephan Abel Sinding's Le Baiser (1889) / Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away (2001) / Robert Mappletorphe's Charles and Jim (1973) / Richard Cosway's Venus and Mars (1790) / Marcel Camus' Black Orpheus (1959) / Käthe Kollwitz's Pair of lovers, huddling against each other (1909-1910) / Umberto Lenzi's So Sweet... So Perverse (1969)

[bifurcatederos]

gaspar & esteban/stephen - I Hiroshi Shimizu's Two Japanese Girls at the Harbor (1933) / Mariana Enriquez's Our Share of Night (2019) / Luchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers (1960) Harry Holland's Lovers (1982) / Maria Naidyonova's Friends and Lovers (2018) / Ray C. Smallwood's Camille (1921) / A 1,600-Year-Old Coffin May Shed Light on Roman Britain / Aguste Rodin's The Eternal Idol (1890-1893) / Luis Caballero's Untitled (1989) / Yana Toboso's Black Butler (2006-present) / Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse (2001) / Bernard Rose's Candyman (1992)

[eddiemargarall]

Gaspar was so different from the child he remembered. It had been a real blow to see him in ruins: at twenty-five years old his beauty was simply extraordinary, healthy but so heavy with death.

[bifurcatederos]

i know no one really cares about the relationship between stephen and gaspar, but i never understod the interpretation that stephen is projecting juan on him. first because stephen is such an underdeveloped character, so we don't actually know what he felt for juan, and taking rosario's word for granted—one of the most unreliable and uneven povs in the story—is very odd. he has exactly one pov, in which he spends most of his time attracted to gaspar and wanting to protect him. and kill his mom. besides, father and son are not physically similar; his description of gaspar only compares him to juan as a shock that they have the same voice, because he wasn't expecting a virile voice from gaspar. on the contrary: juan is sickly, gaspar's beauty is healthy, juan is said to be powerful and compared to a god, gaspar is delicate and compared to a faun. and what stephen does say through the book, in the rare moments in which he shares something, is mostly related to

1) his own morality (the order should not exist because it exploits mediums, he's actually very concerned about mediums as a class)

2) gaspar (he's uniquely attuned not only to his well-being, but his feelings, which sets him apart from tali, who wants gaspar to be safe, but is focused on juan and rosario)

3) his family (stephen is one of the main sources on eddie, and eddie seems to at least trust him)

what we do know about his relationship with juan: he didn't have a choice in being marked. it might have made him go through selective mutism, the wording is ambiguous. it's a relationship of servitude, and that includes sexual servitude, magically imposed on a 15 year old, and highly desired by florence. he was his most present and devoted caretaker in sickness. gaspar thought he had a positive effect on juan. juan considered their relationship to be fraternal and sexual (interestingly, stephen shares many similarities with luis, and seems to have taken his place in juan's life, so if anything he's a proxy brother). they ran away for some days once, then returned and pretended nothing happened. at 19, rosario thought he was in love with juan. when gaspar asks him, stephen says he doesn't have anyone, then proceeds to add that love is awful and you shouldn't do it.

it's strange but a little worrying how the servitude aspect is accepted as a positive and normal by readers. not as "you can grow to love someone even in horrible places", but an unexamined and okay way to start a relationship. do i think he loved juan? probably! he was likely lying when he told gaspar he didn't. he's a surly character. he seems to have greatly cared for juan's well-being. he was extremely loyal. if he was ever in love, he thought of it bitterly, but they were at least in brotherly terms. was he attracted to him? we can't know. unlike the other parts of the polycule, juan and stephen only appear having ritual sex, in the eyes of characters who were attracted to them, both very biased. it's very different to rosario and tali, with whom juan has passionate sex unrelated to magic and describes how hot they were (stephen, comparatively, is said to be graying early, having blue eyes and being tall but shorter than him; most of his descriptions come from gaspar). rosario is his wife, the mother of his child. tali "should have been his" in another life. stephen goes there to invoke demons and is described as looking in pain during sex.

that is not to say that nothing positive can be interpreted in the blank spaces (plenty can!), but the sureness that he's searching for a juan substitute in the end is confusing when we don't even know what he felt for juan. we do know, though, what he feels for gaspar.

[bifurcatederos]

(OUR SHARE OF NIGHT / STEPHEN & GASPAR)