I can imagine once or twice Andrew trying to protect younger foster kids he lived with and it very decidedly Not Working. After that he just tried to keep himself on his feet.
The self harm - this is my own opinion but I have some serious suspicions about Nicky. I think he would have clocked Andrew immediately.
Wymack would be on the bench, head in his hands, hoping the next time he looks up Neil will be an adult again. (He thought summer Neil wouldn't come to close to him? He isn't ready to 7 year old Nathaniel.)
By the way, back in the early 2000s self-harm wasn’t anywhere near as common (at least from what I remember). I think Andrew might’ve actually been “saved” by the fact that most people had no clue what sh even was. Nicky and Aaron probably never considered it—they just thought he was weird
It might be location based? But I was a freshman in highschool the year the book takes place, and cutting as self harm was way now popular then compared to what I see now. At least in my part of northeast Ohio. I tend to see kids self destruct in different ways now.
My main suspicion with Nicky is that you have someone who was massively depressed and thought he was broken/going to hell/inherently bad but puts on such an act to look happy. (I can't remember if it's canon Nicky gets sent to conversion camp but it absolutely wouldn't surprise me.)
I do think the general lack of public knowledge of sh at the time definitely worked in Andrew's favor.
(Sorry, all I can do is over think extremely small unimportant details)
It’ll be hard for me to translate my thoughts into English, but I’ll try:
The existence of a problem ≠ “society will recognize it as a problem, talk about it, and look for solutions.”
Self-harm as a phenomenon has always existed. In every decade there were different ways people hurt themselves—and they all differed from each other
At the time of the AFTG events (2006-2007) cutting on the arms in my country was common only in extremely narrow circles (subcultures). The subcultures themselves were considered the problem, not the self-harm, lmao. Teens only started mass-cutting around 2013-2015. And society (from parents to authorities) only started sounding the alarm in 2017-2018, when that “game” appeared where you had to carve a certain symbol on your arm. And yeah, in my country you really won’t meet people who are around forty (or older) now with self-harm scars on their arms
I make allowances for the fact that the trilogy takes place in another country—cultural differences obviously exist. BUT! I’ve talked to people from different countries (this can be considered my subjective experience), and from what I’ve seen, cutting became popular (known??) worldwide somewhere around 2006-2007
The books’ events happen exactly in that period. If I remember correctly, Andrew started self-harming while he was still living with Cass. That means it was before 2000
Subjectively, it really could have gone unnoticed by Nicky and Aaron—if Andrew had already stopped sh by the time he lived with them
Nora wrote in the extra content that Nicky was sent to conversion camp, but without any specifics
“I do think the general lack of public knowledge of sh at the time definitely worked in Andrew’s favor.” — yes. I completely agree with this 🥲
(everything’s fine; for the last year and a half I’ve been obsessively thinking through every AFTG event in two languages lol. The official translators made AFTG sound poetic from an artistic standpoint, but 🤏🏻🤏🏻
okay, they clearly had their own vision of Andrew as a character—and they translated many of his lines way harsher than they should have been. and here I am: reading the trilogy in the original)
I understand you perfectly! Your English is great. I understand what you're saying perfectly. Reading the books translated and then in the original language must be a trip.
Reading books in translation first and then in the original is tough, but so interesting. The dialogues between Andrew and Neil are way more vivid in the original. Our translators definitely tried their best, but in many moments they clearly had to choose between: "either Andrew speaks in poetic sentences, or... short and rough." As far as I know, they consulted Nora on many of Andrew's lines (they really are hard to translate into Russian), and she went with conciseness
As for the author's style (descriptive and narrative parts), Nora's texts are difficult for me to process. Not because of word choice, but because of the rhythm and sentence structure. In Russian, the book feels smoother (thanks to the language's features + the translators), while in English... I feel like I'm "tripping" the whole time I'm reading, lol
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