#oderice

[odevertz]

hugs

[odericevertz]

i don’t even need to write rpf. anons in martin odegaard’s ig comments are doing it for me

[gyokereze]

don’t go wasting your emotions

‘Joining the arsenal had been, initially, the perfect idea. It fit into the plans and ideas he had for his career so perfectly. His friendship with Bukayo had only solidified his expectations.

Bukayo has been the guy at arsenal for long enough that it gave Declan the perfect in, not only for the squad but for captaincy.

The squad was built and established enough that, with the right timing, the team could easily achieve greatness. Declan wanted to be the one to lead them to it.

He’d been so sure Bukayo understood that it was just the way it worked and that he wouldn’t hold it against him. He hadn’t commented when he made his first hint in the media that he wanted to be captain, even if it was with the condition of something happening to Martin.

The last thing he expected was, somehow, Martin.

Martin, Declan quickly found, is a great man. A great player, a great friend, a great captain.

He’d been mad about the comments Declan had made, he said as much, but continued to treat him the same. He didn’t have the same warmth, not unless they were caught up in the moment on the pitch, but he wasn’t unfair.

Declan hated him for it. He hated that he couldn’t even give Declan a reason to be so infuriated. He hated that he kept the team in line through it all. He hated that he never tripped or floundered.

But worst of all, he hated how it made him admire him.

“Martin,” he’d started one day, stopping him on the way to training. “Uh… I just wanted to say I’m sorry. You know, for the-“

“I know,” Martin interrupted. He’d smiled, grabbed his shoulder and gave a squeeze. “It is ok. You have been very professional. I appreciate it. Thank you for the apology.”

They hadn’t become immediate friends after, but the warmth slowly came flooding back. The change was painfully obvious.

“You two are getting on,” Bukayo had commented a couple weeks later. He’d had a slight smirk, a knowing look that made Declan squirm. “Didn’t take long.”

“What? It’s not like we hate each other.”

“Don’t you?”

“No, of course not. Did you think we did?”

“Eh, it was fifty-fifty.” Bukayo eyed him again, leaning back slowly. “You’re the one who sent those flowers, aren’t you?”

“Shut it,” he’d mumbled. “It’s not like that. He just- he said he liked sunflowers, alright, and I feel guilty and- stop laughing, I’m being serious!”

Bukayo had simply continued to laugh. He had snorted when he noticed how Declan perked up at Martins arrival, covering his mouth with his hand.

“What is the joke?” Martin asked.

[odericevertz]

i’m sorry oderice genuinely drive me INSANE. if we put the past 2 years aside and just start with this season it’s still crazy. what if you were quite publicly getting lambasted by the majority of your fanbase for being too shit of a player to be captain and your fanbase was propping up your teammate instead and pulling apart videos of your team interactions to use as evidence of why he would make a better captain than you. and you see the social media posts about it, and you know he does too, and it gets so loud your manager has to publicly address these rumours in press conferences. and you get injured and have to sit out for like 2 months and in your absence this guy who has PUBLICLY SAID he would love to captain arsenal if anything ever happens to you THE YEAR HE JOINED and is most definitely licking his chops thinking about it turns in a generational run of performances and pretty much bails your team out of situations. and you come back from injury and HE HAS TO PUT THE CAPTAIN ARMBAND ON YOU when you get subbed on but you can’t quite get into a rhythm and the murmurs don’t settle. and then something clicks for you and you score your first goal in forever and as you celebrate in front of 60 thousand fans he grabs you and keeps gesturing at you to the crowd to signal that he’s behind you as the captain all the way. and you don’t even know how much of it is genuine or performative, planned or impulsive, because it’s such a public gesture but what you do know is that this guy is calculative about his public image and how he’s perceived. and so you don’t quite know what to make of that but in the next match when you’re going to shoot he shouts for the ball and you being you you pass the ball to him instead and end up assisting him for his goal. and he finds you in the celebrations with a genuine joy on his face and you both embrace in a way you haven’t since he first joined two years ago and things were simpler and suddenly for a moment it all looks like it’s going to work out. well this happened to my good friend martin odegaard

[odericevertz]

i feel ill

[odericevertz]

he’s just like me fr

[odericevertz]

god the men idiots are pitting against each other on twitter are putting themselves in compromising positions

[odericevertz]

Wait I want to hear about what you think is going on with Ødegaard/Rice and the proxy war with teenagers, because I was also looking at Rice sort of like laying claim to Max Dowman like, is he *purposefully* trying to keep Martin and Bukayo away from this one so he can have his own child protégée?

YOU GET ME. obligatory disclaimer that i’m putting on my tinhat from here on out.

declan laying claim to max as his Government Assigned Child Prodigy (GACP) is a perfect way to put it, but to fully understand the significance of what he’s doing here we actually have to talk about ethan and myles and to some extent their contrasting personalities. it’s really funny to me that ethan was positioned as martin’s GACP (see the video where the club sat them down and had them talk about/advise and be advised on being a 15-16yo child prodigy) but that pairing hasn’t taken off the way max/declan has. not because they aren’t close — ethan clearly looks up to and respects martin, and is evidently trying to model some aspects of his game after him — but because they’re both just more introverted and a lot of this modelling is presumably taking place offline/off-camera/more subtly.

meanwhile declan clearly attempted to ‘lay claim’ to myles in the same way he’s doing to max now — but it didn’t work because myles has blossomed faster and more confidently than anyone, even the team, expected. you can’t really be a mentor figure to someone who’s become a full-fledged character in his own right (think myles’ haaland celebration, big game performances etc). you can be a big-brother figure as declan has settled into—the way myles and declan tussle and jokingly put each other in headlocks is very reminiscent of sibling banter—but that leaves declan without a GACP, without a social-media-friendly, social-capital-boosting way to establish his authority.

enter max dowman! especially interesting to consider declan and max’s relationship in the context of max’s ascendancy in the u-17 england nt and declan being heavily earmarked for the upcoming england captaincy. it’s important also to note that like ethan, max on paper has more similarities to martin (position, child prodigy etc) but declan and him are bound by their shared british boy vibes (see: their social media, where declan regularly comments on max’s posts etc etc.) the recent selfie of them after max’s debut against milan is like the nail in the coffin for me that they’re super aware of it. not to say that it’s not genuine, because it definitely is, but i think they’re both actively playing into it bc it’s mutually beneficial—it’s something to be Declan Rice’s Government Assigned Child Prodigy, and it’s something to be Max Dowman’s Government Assigned Mentor. in fact in max’s post about the spain offseason the last 2/4 pictures are of him in very similar poses with declan and martin respectively, which suggests to me that beyond simply vibing with declan more because of personality there’s also a layer of practicality there: better to be rice’s GACP than odegaard’s in terms of social capital!

this ties in to the bigger picture of how i interpret martin/declan’s characters as well: to me oderice have an extremely complicated relationship wherein everything is about power, authority (formalised or otherwise), and how they can exercise it over others or each other. the hale end kids are imo just another front through which they fight this psychosexual proxy war. if declan’s competency and authority can’t be rewarded with captaincy (of arsenal or england) just yet, mentorship of the ridiculously gifted next generation is a low-hanging and obvious way to prove that authority!

this really got away from me but the oderice relationship is genuinely so compelling to me i could talk about it for hours. please ask away / pop into my dms about it!!