Thanks to talking with animehead I came up with this thought. NSFW so under the cut.
Oh no. It’s starting. OH GOD NO IT’S STARTING!
I need to talk to you.
REI! REI BABY! OMG! ON NO! MY HEART! I-I DON’T KNOW IF I’M READY FOR EPISODE 11 (this is the end of episode 10)
If you think I’m an awesome person for subbing this, be an even more super awesome person than me by buying the FREE! BD/DVD! [x][x]
Once this gets licensed (it better!) I want to buy a special edition box set that comes with like the Iwatobi mascot with various swim suits it can wear.
im still laughin at the fact that nagisa seduced rei into leaving the trackteam (when he was great at it) only to go to swimming where they made him wear a tight ass speedo and almost drowned in the ocean two episodes later
Holy… oh god that’s so true. Nagisa you little shit.
IM SORRY BUT RIN DESERVES ALL HIS FUCKIN ANGST HE IS A FUCKIN JERK “im never swimming with u again” okay taylor swift hope you like YEARNING FOR THE FRIENDSHIPS YOU GAVE UP IN UR PURSUIT OF FAME WHILE THEY PLAY GAMES AND HAVE DATES AT THE SQUID FESTIVAL
O.K. Yes. Rin is a jerk. BUT I feel like he has reasons and that his jerkish ways are realistic, normal human reactions to things? Does that make any sense?
There’s just some stuff I wonder about when it comes to Rin.
1. He wants to make it to the Olympics. Does he really? Or is he carrying out his father’s dream? If you think about it, he wasn’t even part of the swim team at his school. If he was really dead set on this dream, wouldn’t he have been part of the team from the beginning? You can tell that, as a kid, he had a blast swimming. You can even tell, now, that he misses it (last episode with him going back to the elementary school).
It’s actually hard to turn something that was fun for you into a career, because then it becomes stressful. I use to write for fun. Now I’m writing to make something of myself and my god, the stress. "What if people don’t like the book? Should I change it? Does it sound o.k.? Why is no one reviewing it? Has it sold well? How do I get more people to buy it? Read it? How do I tell people about it? How do I talk about it to others?“ It’s really hard. I love it, yes, but it’s hard, and you kind of have to figure out how to not stress about the stress and remember to have fun even if you have to keep working at it, and that takes time to do.
2. His relationship with his father. There’s something he said that I’ve addressed before. When he’s talking to Nitori about his dad, he says something like, "He wanted to go to the Olympics but instead he had me and became a fisherman.” He didn’t include Gou in this, which makes me think that… Rin wasn’t part of his dad’s plan. His dad had a set goal but, instead, he ended up having a kid and settling down (I’m not sure if this is canon this is just my guess). Maybe he wasn’t ready to do that yet. Now I’m not saying Rin’s dad is a jerk who was like, “OMG YOU RUINED MY DREAMS,” but even if he did quietly settle down, you can still kinda tell if your parents sort of… stopped what they wanted to do to take care of you. They still love you, yes, of course, but as soon as you hear the, “I was going to be this…” you… feel kinda bad.
My mom, for example, went to high school real young and was really smart. But, she had my brother at 16. She loved him like crazy. She had me much later, and was married to my dad (who is not the same dad my brother had). She told me, “I did it right this time.” She told me, “Don’t do what I did. I had to stop everything to take care of him.” And she doesn’t regret it, of course, and she loved him, but that lesson is still there, you know? Don’t be a teen mom. Follow your dreams, don’t put them on hold.
If that’s the case with Rin’s dad, he not only has that instilled in him… but his dad died. From what I can tell, it was at a very young age. So not only did his dad stop his dream to take care of Rin, he died. There’s no chance of attempting to do it again. I use to see women in my Women’s Studies class 50+, but they were like, “I’m going to school now because I had a family real young and now I can do what I want.” There’s no chance of Rin’s dad getting that.
3. It really does suck when someone does better than you. Imagine going to this fancy school. To improve what you’re doing. You come back home to show what you’ve learned and the kid who a) didn’t go to the same fancy school and b) could care less about times and competing beats you. That really sucks. It’s like, you go to college for your major, and you see someone else surpassing you who didn’t go to college at all. You put a lot of money and time into your school and you’re still trying to do something with your major… yet here is this person, doing better than you, who didn’t go down this road.
I use to do this. I learned to STOP doing that because you’ll just torture yourself looking at celebrities your age OR YOUNGER who are like, zillionaires already while you’re still working retail trying to make a living after being college educated. Rin is what, 17? He’s a teenager. He hasn’t learned that yet. I was a bitter retail employee until LAST YEAR, and I just turned 30 this year. I would look at people like, “OMG I went to college what am I doing wrong?!” It takes a while to realize, hey, stop comparing yourself to others, o.k.?
So yeah, Rin is a jerk. He is. I just think he has a reason behind it. We’ll most likely see it as the episodes go on, but he is at least showing that, you know, he misses them. A lot. He’s stubborn and thinks he needs to do things in a certain way and he hasn’t figured out that he doesn’t have to. He will, I’m sure, it’ll just take time. I don’t really think he’s in pursuit of fame, he’s just trying to fulfill his dad’s dream. If he cared about the fame part, he would’ve stuck around after winning, you know? Instead of sitting on the bus. Or sitting inside the building, away from his team. I agree, he is a jerk, he’s just a misguided one though. He’ll get his shit together eventually.
Somehow…I hope that without missing a single person, everybody will laugh together.
Original: なまざかな - 【Free!】どうか皆が幸せになってくれますように。
PLEASE LET THE SERIES END LIKE THIS LIKE PLEASE I AM BEGGING!
I have no time to write headcanons which means I have to write headcanons. First Free!canon ever! Inspired by this post.
Blargh I wrote a Free! thing wow whut?