#i would like to reinstate (cuz yall get v antsy abt nuance) that this is just what i think

[kevindavidday]

writing perfect court is insane for several reasons but i think what's made me pause and reevaluate everything is the dynamic between nathaniel and riko, if they had grown up together. the hostility is definitely still there, the competitiveness, the anger issues, fire and fuel, but all that's expected.

it's the way these two care and how they show it that is quite literally undoing my work right now. care about each other is too much of stretch, but the one intersection in their lives isn't even their families, it's kevin day. they both are abysmally attached to him, and neither of them know how to show love in stereotypically normal ways so poor kevin is stuck in the middle of their dick measuring competition. he's older than them but he's not allowed to be better than riko, and he's not allowed to be aggressive the way nathaniel is. kevin struggles to understand their easy acceptance of violence because he didn't grow up as a moriyama or a wesninski. his legacy is free of blood, but nathaniel and riko? they're born to it, their earliest memories are of people dying some of which they had to experience and witness together.

that brings me to the absolutely gut wrenching realization that nathaniel would've still tried to convince riko that he was nothing more than a cast off and it would do them better to be allies. he would've tried to convince him that they have a common enemy (tetsuji moriyama) who has been using them since the beginning of their lives, that their worth has been reduced to mere investments, that nathanielnbelieves in the perfect court but not if riko keeps playing into the delusion that he's part of a family that cast him aside. kengo would die and nathaniel would tell him 'i told you. i warned you they didn't care, king. you did not listen' and riko, instead of being moved by the reasoning words of a boy who has grown with him and seen him change from a hopeful child to a tyrant king, will lash out because how dare you say i told you so?

and nathaniel would be hurt in the process of it, nathaniel would have to, at a certain point, give up all hope in riko moriyama's humanity because the other boy truly believes nathaniel and jean are property. he does not see them as human, and nathaniel's hatred for him will grow to the point that it consumes him. over and above it will be his hatred for tetsuji moriyama, because despite everything, nathaniel had wanted to be the best. he'd wanted their perfect court to be a reality and it was the master's cruel ways and ridiculous teachings that had turned riko away from himself and consequently the rest of them. he would fight riko but blame tetsuji, because tetsuji forced his hand.

"Put a bird in a cage and call it a nest - cripple it, torture it, hide it from the sky. And then you expect it to take flight when pushed. Put like that, it's obvious the bird will fall." Nathaniel paused . "All the things you've done to us, to me, to Kevin, to your own nephew. Your success was always bound to failure, and I'll say it because no one else ever has, Tetsuji Moriyama, you are the stupidest fucking man alive."