Photo By Azad Balabanian

Photo by Azad Balabanian

locklyle + hands

My favorite bits from the Thinking Cloth

George's and Lockwood's doodles of each other

CEO of Cooking Cocking

Compliments :)

Mustard is the fools condiment ≠ Lockwood is a fool

Food

Locklyle grammar flirting

Literature quotes from Lockwood

To-do list

It's the cat again

The trio 🥺

the full thinking cloth (x) from Sophie Powell's instagram

My hottake is that people are trying to fit Lockwood into character archetypes he doesn't fit, because they see "traumatized teen boy with a big ego and a passive death wish" and go "oh. emotionally unavailable asshole character" when that's.....not actually the character we're shown.

He's constantly praising Lucy and George. He's often the first one to try and apologize when he gets into a fight with them. The second he clocks Lucy as a "safe person" he becomes super touchy and holds her hand constantly. He compliments George's cooking. He's visibly proud of the people he cares about and publicly defends them on multiple occasions. He repeatedly asks his team if they're okay and tries to get them to open up when they're having issues. He makes an obvious, conscious effort to repeatedly tell Lucy he believes in her and wants her to stay at Portland Row. He smiles and jokes and laughs around with them on a pretty regular basis. He's also emotionally aware enough to tell Lucy "the reason I haven't talked about this subject with you is because it's relevant my childhood, which I don't like to talk about because it's pretty traumatic" when she questions him ahout Jessica's door, and he's kind of astonishingly open about his trauma with Lucy and George despite generally being unwilling to actually talk about the details.

And this applies to characters other than Lucy and George, too. He compliments Kipps' team during the graveyard fight and clearly respects Flo, for example. He's kind to Winkman's son, is generally polite to his clients, and is affected by the death of the undercover agent to the point of having a panic attack. It's pretty clear he cares deeply about the people around him even as he tries to push those closest to him away so they won't mourn him if (when) he dies.

Like yeah, Lockwood has an ego the size of Manhattan, has enough trauma to fill a boat, and is worryingly flippant about the worth of his own life, but he's not the Asshole With a Heart of Gold archetype. He's not cruel or deliberately mean (at least, not to anyone who's not Kipps). He's friendly and pretty kind to most people most of the time, and he openly cares about his team. And it's a little weird that I'm seeing so many people talk about him like he's not.

#everybody knows

“There’s how I don’t answer the phone, and how I sometimes like to lie down on the floor in the kitchen and pretend I’m not home when people knock. There’s daytime silent when I stare, and a nighttime silent when I do things. There’s shower silent and bath silent and […] car silent and then there’s the silence that comes back, a million times bigger than me, sneaks into my bones and wails and wails and wails until I can’t be quiet anymore. That’s how this machine works.”

— Ada Limón, excerpt of “The Quiet Machine”, in Bright Dead Things