#with the vale/marc rivalry in particular obviously you'll always be hampered there if you're not paying much attention to pre-2013

[batsplat]

if more people knew Herstory (aka 2004 season and sete&vale) so many questions wrt 2015 season(mostly “why would vale….”) would immediately be answered addfghjk like guysssss guyssssss

it is kinda funny that there's a simple cheat code out there to understanding most of valentino's career but it's just about long enough ago that most people simply... ignore it. like there's a three year span that more or less tells you what you need to know about him. it's like you say! pretty much every possible "why would vale..." secretly has a straightforward answer, and 9/10 it's something that was established in 2003 to 2005. simple as

if anything it's almost annoying because it's too easy. the 2004/2015 stuff in particular is incredibly funny. oh, so you say you have a controversial last lap at assen where valentino beat a rival in direct combat and said rival reacted surprisingly poorly, making valentino reevaluate his relationship with the rival? might that tell you something about how a seed of suspicion once sown can remain dormant for months until valentino is given cause to revisit it? valentino quite literally says in his biography that he could never have hated biaggi because he wasn't a friend and didn't have the power to hurt him... the sepang pressers thing is genuinely just silly, I know this is mainly a function of when they happen in the calendar but what a bizarre coincidence. 2015 is like a slightly more opaque funhouse mirror version of 2004 - but so many of the major beats are virtually identical. which means you've got a season Out There where a younger less experienced less guarded less cynical valentino basically walks you through his internal processes so you get a really good handle of what his deal is. he's piecing together his identity as a competitor going forwards in real time - and then in 2015 he just reminds you of what exactly that identity involves. it's a reaffirmation and not a departure... he's not that inscrutable after all, in the end