i made this silly little post and then just did the thing myself :)
“I would say that Steve is… relatively smart. For a human.”
“Hey!” comes an irritated yell from the other room.
Robin turns to face the doorway, turning away from the camera. “Zip it, human! I’m doing my interviews. I have important things to say. People are very interested.” She turns back toward the camera again, a smile plastered to her face. “Now, what was I saying? Oh right, Steve. He’s… passably intelligent. I mean, he’s no Einstein, that’s for sure. That guy could party.” She laughs.
“Okay, and how long has Steve, uh, been with you guys?” Dustin asks from behind the camera.
“Um, maybe a year, I think?”
“I’ve been Eddie’s familiar for ten years,” Steve grumbles as he comes into the room with a cup of tea, which he holds out for Robin to take. He turns to Dustin and the camera. “It’s really just a matter of time before he turns me.” He rocks back on his heels. “He said literally any day now.”
Robin smiles placidly, nodding at him until he leaves the room.
“Between you and me,” she stage whispers to Dustin, “Eddie is never turning him.”
“Could you explain what a familiar is?” Dustin asks.
“Well… usually a familiar takes care of you, you know, does the cleaning, shopping, finds you victims.”
“Victims?” Will, another one of the producers, asks. He looks a little anxiously toward Lucas, the camera guy, who does his best to ignore it.
“Yeah, like. Food. You know.” Robin takes a sip from her teacup, waving her free hand in some vague gesture. “Nancy and I are partial to virgins.”
“Uh, right. Better watch out, Dustin,” Lucas laughs a little nervously, nudging Dustin with his elbow.
Dustin scowls, but before he can respond, Robin says, “Don’t worry. Nancy’s forbidden us from eating any of you.” She smiles again, like that’s supposed to make them feel any better.
~*~
“Okay, Steve, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?” Dustin asks Steve, who’s fidgeting on the couch.
Steve pulls at his collar as he answers. “Uh, sure. I used to be a kindergarten teacher. I actually really loved it? But then I met Eddie at a bar. Thought he was, uh, pulling my leg, you know, about the whole…” Steve rubs his palms on his thighs. “Vampire thing? Is that what we’re calling it?”
“Yeah, being a vampire. Sure,” Dustin responds.
“Right. Thought he was joking. Thought it was a line, you know. So I… this is kind of embarrassing.” Steve scratches at his cheek. “Well, I went home with him, y’know. You’ve seen him.” He laughs a little nervously. “Anyway, I found out that he actually was not lying, much to my… absolute horror really.”
“And… what made you stay?” Will asks.
“I dunno,” Steve shrugs his shoulders, eyes darting to the side of the camera, like he doesn’t really want to answer the question. “It’s an interesting prospect, isn’t it? Living forever? Being immortal?” He shrugs again.
“So,” Dustin starts, drawing out the ‘o’ sound. “Are you guys, like… more than friends?” Lucas visibly cringes at the phrasing.
Steve laughs, bright and surprised. “Uh, no. No. Just, uh. I’m just his familiar.”
“But you’ve been here ten years?“ The way the question comes out of Will’s mouth makes it sound like he hadn’t really meant to ask it. Dustin cuts him a look, scowling again.
“Yeah,” Steve sighs, looking down at his lap. “Yeah, I have.”
~*~
“Tell us about how you became a vampire,” Dustin says.
Eddie, who’s sitting on the couch in front of the camera, scratches at his neck, just under the collar of his shirt. “Hmm. I was turned in the 80s. Can’t really remember most of it. Was at some concert and some guy offered me some coke or something in the back of his van. Next thing I knew, I was waking up in a field feeling like shit. Thought I’d had a bad trip.” Eddie laughs.
“And have you ever turned anyone?” Will asks.
“No,” Eddie tells them, frowning slightly. “Don’t think I’d even know how.”
“But—“ Will starts, but Lucas digs his elbow into his ribs, cutting off his question.
“What about Steve?” Dustin asks instead.
“What about him?”
“He said he’s been with you ten years. That you’ve promised to turn him any day now.”
Eddie smiles, boyish and sweet. “Well. I say a lot of things. And look at him. Who’d give that up?”
Will and Dustin look at each other. “What do you mean?” It’s Lucas who asks this time.
“A pretty little human who does anything I say based on the abstract promise that I might one day make him a vampire?” Eddie grins.
Next to Dustin, Will lets out a long exhale.
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you seem to have a good read on HQ and your takes are great, so i have a question...and if you'd rather not go there, please ignore this! but i see oikawa get called "arrogant" quite often and i'm curious, would you say he is? what is it that makes people think that?
imo he has a plenty of flaws, but i truly don't think arrogance is one of them. self-centered, sure, but not arrogant i think. i'm open to being wrong, i'm just legit so confused by that particular criticism, it makes me doubting my reading comprehension. i feel like that one post that's like "free my man, he didn't do that. he did a lot of other stuff tho" LOL. if you do answer this, then thanks for your time!
oh, dear anon. this is a very very big question and i'm honored you think i am capable of providing an answer that does it justice!! i don't consider myself an oikawa expert by far, but i'll do my best because he's still very beloved to me, and i hope whatever i say helps!
(but also - maybe take what i say with a grain of salt LMAO)
anyways, to get the main point out of the way: i completely agree that oikawa isn't arrogant! i actually haven't seen any commentary about that myself (bless!!!), so i can't say for sure why some people might think that, but my guess is that they think his pridefulness = arrogance — they think that the confidence he has in himself and seijoh contributes nothing to their actual power and is utterly meaningless if they don't win, especially in the face of ushijima. which, like, come on. what kind of captain would he be if he wasn't confident in himself and his teammates? is he supposed to tell them that they're going to lose??? is he supposed to discourage their hard work and effort???
or maybe it's because oikawa acts like he's all that, but doesn't have anything to show for it. who does he think he is? what does he think his pride is worth? what right does he have to go around making grand declarations when he has nothing to his name?
(which isn't entirely true, either, but we'll get into that, promise.)
now, do i think that he can, occasionally, be flippant, shallow, and/or petty? yeah, sure. he's got one hell of a personality about it. even iwaizumi says as much. oikawa is great at being a little shit. it's one of my favorite things about him!
but is oikawa genuinely arrogant, or self-centered? well . . . i don't think so.
see, here's the thing about oikawa: he knows he's good, but he doesn't think he's good enough. i think it'd be easiest to really explain what that meant if we broke this down into two separate parts, so let's give it a go, shall we?
(buckle up, friends, because it's about to get LONG. also: TIMESKIP SPOILERS!! and there's a tldr at the start of the tags because. WOW.)
so, first things first: if people are calling oikawa arrogant, then i'm like 99% sure that they don't actually know what the word "arrogant" means.
"arrogant" is used to describe someone full of themselves. it's used to describe someone conceited and pompous. it's used to describe someone so assured of and invested in their self-importance that they don't care for other people, and if it seems like they do, then it's usually wildly off the mark and still serves to inflate their own egos.
oikawa has never once been like that. he's been pretty much the exact opposite, in fact.
and yeah, sure, by his third year of high school, he knows he's good at volleyball, and that's fine! it's perfectly all right to claim you're good at something if you have the skills/experience to back it up. confidence is healthy as long as it isn't in overabundance, and we actually see a lot of this throughout the series!
(not to mention that this was where ushijima fell short. he was overflowing with confidence. he did not believe, for even a single second, that hinata shouyou and his meager, scrappy little flock of crows could beat him.
but oikawa? he knew. he knew what it looked like to make something bloom.)
the key to oikawa's confidence that made him better was that he could pinpoint others' strengths and weaknesses just as well as he could with his own. and (bear with me, please, i might get kind of boring here bc it's nothing that hasn't been said in the manga before) i don't mean it in the way we see the coaches or more analytical players do, as observations to be taken advantage of by everyone else; i mean that in the sense of how vital it is to his position as a setter. that was always the biggest difference between oikawa and kageyama: no matter how much more raw talent kageyama had, no matter how much better oikawa believed him to be, kageyama, especially in the beginning, struggled to do what oikawa could with a team. kageyama struggled to bring out the best in each player. and it wasn't because he didn't know how -- oikawa freely admitted that kageyama had the skill for it, that kageyama, once he got his shit together, could win against him -- it was because kageyama didn't have that same confidence in himself.
(not until much later, anyways. but that's another story, for another time.)
so, oikawa's confident. he knows he's good. he can bring out the best in each player. he's got a killer serve (and a killer smile!), a mind for tactics that borders on machievallianism, and cherishes the trust he is given like it's something precious. his coaches let him lead without leaning on them. his team has the utmost respect and admiration for him. he has a reputation. from karasuno to shiratorizawa to the whole of miyagi -- there is not a single character who knows oikawa tooru and would believe that he is, in any way, bad at volleyball.
but it's not enough. despite all of that, oikawa still doesn't think he's good enough. and that, friends, brings us to the second point.
oikawa tooru is nothing if not passionate.
so were the others, of course. kageyama kept going after his grandfather's death. hinata kept going while being a nobody from nowhere with no one to back him up. atsumu kept going while osamu didn't. it's not even about just those who went pro -- kenma, kuroo, noya, and everyone else found things that they were passionate about and kept going with it. the entire story revolves around loving what you do and trying to keep that love alive, and, sometimes, that can be really, really difficult when it seems like it doesn't love you back.
oikawa was so insecure over kageyama to the point where he nearly decked the poor kid. oikawa got crushed by ushijima-- who kept telling him that his team was not good enough, that his choices were not good enough, that there was nothing good enough to be proud of -- for years in a row. oikawa was taught that there would always be someone better than him no matter how skilled he was, but if he let that stop him then he didn't fucking belong on the court in the first place.
oikawa tooru is intimately acquainted with not being good enough, but he keeps trying to be. he keeps going. he tries to keep the love alive even if he's not loved back. he pushes and practices and takes a plane far from home to become even better. even if he doesn't have the skill, even if he doesn't have the talent, even if he doesn't have the love -- he still has his pride. and what does that mean, in the end? how far does that take him?
in the end, oikawa tooru walks across a world stage and sees people who believed in him on the other side and calls it a family reunion. in the end, he gets to play the volleyball that reminds him of why he loves it and how it gives him so much love back. in the end, his pride is unyielding and unbreakable, a product of the forge. he molded it with his own two hands. he will not let it falter so easily.
arrogance would not have taken oikawa tooru this far. i hope this has proven that he is anything but.
remember: instinct is something you polish. talent is something you make bloom. and never, ever let anyone else tell you what your pride is worth.
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