#me when lewis smith's dumb crazy ass GETS to be the impossible thing. and gay of course: ougghhgdfg...... -

[bravernificationbeam]

thinking abt how isami, smith, and the audience's central questions in bravern

(isami = who + what is bravern???? smith = what do I want, what's my place in this conflict? [that's just called being 24] the audience = same as isami, who/what is bravern)

are ones whose answers are very obvious but only if you have the right framework. otherwise the answers seem so fantastical that they are inconceivable even as potential solutions (i'll note that even people i've seen who called smithvern before ep 8/9 never quite got the mechanism right.....)

like the op basically screams at you twice that smith is bravern, they really do carry themselves quite similarly ('you sound just like him' isami says haha), bravern slips up. y'know. enough (he's so excited he has to just roll w/ the fact that he as an apparent stranger knows isami's name, this mecha has seen an 80s american sci-fi movie apparently, he speaks fucking english fhdfjjdkfjk HE KNOWS THAT SMITH GETS FULL BODY WAXES.....[I LOVE YOU BRAVERN!!!!!!!]). but like What. how would that even Work. but then you get that one puzzle piece and you realize! OH. THAT'S HOW IT WOULD WORK!!!!! (for me it was seeing that cunus has time travel powers. immediately went 🤨)

likewise. smith's questions. what got me on this track was thinking abt how....when cunus is talking to smith does she even know what she means?

"I've always felt you. [You] had this feeling deep inside that [you] couldn't share with anyone. And it thrilled me."

a lot of deathdrive lore is very mysterious and doesn't make a lot of sense ("always"?), but i get the sense that she means some sort of deep unnameable longing rather than something specific--even if she has had some sort of greater knowledge of what's going on on earth than what the deathdrives gain by being in orbit, i don't know if she could necessarily detangle human emotions like that. whatever, the canon is ambiguous; all i'm trying to say is that i don't think we can determine with certainty whether cunus is talking about an identity desire or a romantic/sexual desire on smith's part--or whether she even knows herself (or, as a deathdrive, would know the difference!)

nonetheless you can tell by smith's reaction that he knows cunus is right about him. he's not totally, exactly sure how, but she really, really is ('the bullies knew i was gay before i did' type ass). and he's just abt to get his puzzle piece to figure it out 😉

so like this is all to say when smith goes up to bravern in ep 2 and asks to pilot him, when he's watching wistfully from the sidelines as bravern and isami save the day it's like. he can't ask to be the robot. that question and the desire behind it are incomprehensible to him. wanting to be isami in that situation is the only answer he can really come to, but it's not quite right and i think smith knows it. it's why smith's reflections on heroism are never quite clear--even from episode one, "this is what i've always wanted to be" girl. which is?? 'i wanted to become like him' GIRL. WHO!

i think that moment when cunus first starts talking to him and he's like 'i think you've got the wrong guy, i think you're looking for...bravern' really speaks well to how he rationalizes what's going on in his head--there's kind of a beat where you think he's going to say isami, so it's this dual moment containing both his crush and his whole Thing (weird envy he doesn't fully understand) surrounding bravern, and it's sooo close (uh yep. she sure was looking for bravern), metatextually it's there! but textually it isn't.

and so then smith, falling from the fucking sky after being time loop resurrection bravernified (god i love this show) can FINALLLYYYYY SEEEEE that he wanted to be the robot!!!!!! AND he loves isami!

as do we the audience! answering both of the central questions at once and finally getting to see that paradigm we weren't quite grasping

and it's all So Queer. and i LOVE that and i LOVE that we as the audience get to go along on this queer narrative journey with sumiisa 💖