I WILL BE BRIEF (1/29847298) i have spent a genuinely inordinate amount of time thinking about sewis, i see them in around four phases with a bit of overlap: baby wdcs fwb era, brocedes nuclear wasteland era where seb was simultaneously playing marriage therapist and homewrecker and rival, harrowing title fight but not really because ferrari era, emotional support rivals of mutual respect era. i love that they genuinely like each other so much despite the horrors and the evil and intimidating cavallino rampante that chews up world champions. i think always about how badly lewis wanted seb to stay and about seb saying that the real measure of success for lewis at ferrari will be whether lewis is happy. it’s like homoplatonic life partners but in a romantic way but in the sense that platonicity is the most romantic thing in the universe but also they have had sex but also they don’t talk about how they feel about each other (romantic) but it’s probably ok because the love is there in whatever form it takes anyway.

my favourite headcanon is that sewis were casually hooking up in the early 2010s because i love the idea that the whole grid was fucking each other back then and this is always in the background of my 2010s era fics lol. i think things only start getting serious emotionally speaking when seb moves to ferrari and lewis’s dominance grows and seb becomes increasingly desperate for a win that is looking increasingly far away because i am most interested in the tension arising from directly opposing and mutually exclusive goals and how much of that pressure a “good” relationship can withstand.

love throwing nico in the mix as well, if i wrote for sewis it probably would be during the silver war years because i find all of the intra-sebcedes dynamics sooo compelling. now i love a seb the mistress joke as much as the next guy but i think it’s much more interesting to look at sico as effectively swapping narrative positions wrt lewis: first seb is the nightmare demon temptress and nico is the childhood friend firstlove, then nico is the unhinged menhera villainess and seb is the genuine secondlove counterbalance. sico two sides of the same coin people say we’re alike they say we’ve got the same hair etc. i actually fully believe that brocedes are soulmates but seb and lewis are endgame by choice, which makes it funnier / more satisfyingly tragic to me that nico still manages to lose out to seb despite fate ostensibly being on his side. but that is just the cost of victory. win a championship lose everything else. probably it was worth it. the comparison is of course unfair because seb was never teammates with lewis and didn’t have the same bridges to burn or the same distance to fall but it is how the story played out.

basically i want to really focus on the contrast between the casual fwb dynamic and The Other Woman jokes vs the quiet sincerity and depth of mutual regard that gradually grows between seb and lewis as they play out the zero sum game of wdc after wdc. they're kind of like a more overtly romantic and rivalfied iteration of shinshi from detective conan to me and their equivalent of shinichi failing to save akemi is lewis winning the wdc every year seb was in contention for the title at ferrari: not something that rationally can be blamed on lewis but an internal pain point for seb who wanted nothing more than a title with ferrari nonetheless.

also i think it’s an And They Were Both Bottoms / girl we’re still gonna need a top tho situation so don’t ask me who tops i don’t know. narratively i guess lewis does because he’s won more so that will have to be a good enough metric 😂?