girlrock | 814 primer notes (Reply)

this is not an actual primer but more like a dump of random meta and ramblings and screenshots and links that could hypothetically be used to construct one... all my thoughts are too scattered and i don't think i'll ever have the motivation to write a formal post but i wanted the gist of things in one place. also i have a disease which is called constantly making text posts that i then get embarrassed about and private and lose to the depths of my blog. so 😔

anyway. where 2 begin... it is so funny & embarrassing to see how my investment in this ship and their teammate dynamic has grown over the past few months because up until jul23 i was truly no thots head empty about them. though tbf i never really found them awkward and thought they were cute/had remarked on oscar's general polite/attentive demeanor and how it served as the foundation for his "heart-eyes" characterization, it's just that ultimately i was like Well they're a good teammateship but it's not quite there yet.

but then silverstone..... belgium fan stage..... japan...... austin... actually i was looking at my meticulous spreadsheet of 814 challenge videos and i realized that mcl uploaded SO much of their content in august so it makes sense that this became highly effective shipbait on top of the silverstone turnaround & home race/fanstage moments.

i have a bunch of ao3 stats pulled here, but some growth charts for context:

comparing these numbers to today (so in a span of 1 month) sebshal have gained 5 fics, galex 31, and landoscar 98 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫...... tfw they're on track to be top6-7 effwon ship of all time by the end of the year !!!

fundamentals
what one must understand about 814 is that they Make No Sense. and that perhaps they are best enjoyed when their actions and dynamic are purely unexpected....... like it is easy to see them at face value and become deeply disillusioned by socmed bait (ALTHOUGH WE DON'T EVEN HAVE THAT ANYMORE.) and admin usage of their ship portmanteau (it pains me so much...) but the coworkerisms of this ship actually just make it even more complex and important and crucial 2 me. u need 2 Embrace that ln4 is a cringe 4chan girl who god turned into a bisexual slag... u need 2 Embrace that oscar is a dry boring gfguy who will never share lando's embarrassing passion for golf. to me the beauty of them is that they mirror each other in a lot of ways and share a lot of baseline character traits, but the ways they externalize their attitudes are quite different and so their social circles and public images diverge noticeably. but.... they're still far from an opposites attract ship ! more like parallel lines with offset edges that in the end fit back together 😔

also i don't even really think 814 are Pushed as a ship (???) by media that much (not that any ship is "pushed" when this is literally motorsport like what are we doing here. but even as a "bromance" by mainstream channels i mean), and to some degree i almost feel as though people see very perfunctory updates posted by mclaren wherein 814 get along decently or vaguely enjoy the other person's presence and are kneejerk like OMG the mclaren pr machine is forcing landoscar down our throats again. which... you know what i respsect the hateurisms! but considering the abject lack of unboxed videos we've received this year and the fact that we regularly lose our minds over like horribly edited 2-minute clips because of the relative dearth of challenge videos i think it's fair to suggest that they do share some baseline level of genuine friendship that presents well on-camera. which ofc you can still be Not Moved By but that's just my personal interpretation 🤷‍♀️ and i say this as a based 814 multishipper

very important totally not useless and meandering character notes

lando 🇬🇧 (nov 13, 1999)

lando is both very easy and very hard to talk about because there is so much nuance to his character but then it's also like why am i ascribing nuance to a white man who lives in monaco. but also... he is so particular and earnest and callous and empathetic all at once and it's fascinating to watch in motion.
the most important things 2 know are: 1) people are very abnormal about him 2) he has no filter but also he does but mostly he doesn't. it's complicated 3) he's deeply codependent with like 4 people he's known since he was under 150cm 4) he is a cat 5 early-gen z victim of cringe culture (gen z awareness of cringe complicated by millennial levels of shame and self-consciousness. congrats you've invented anxiety) also. 5) fussy adhdpilled dyslexiahaver
some will say he's an asshole and it's like... ok sure. but also he is one of the most if not the most well-liked driver within the grid he just happens to have a propensity for getting canceled
random but one of my biggest pet peeves is when people call lando a pay driver... it's like there is so much u can actually slander him for but a) i do not think u understand what the term pay driver means or even how junior series work and b) this is literally the Exact Opposite of what lando was to mclaren. it is honestly difficult to be any clearer about your obsession with and total commitment to one of your junior prospects than mclaren was with lando....... which i very occasionally think about in the context of : 814 are the only pairing in team history to have both debuted with mclaren, and yet one was nurtured for years and given endless opportunities to integrate himself with the team while the other crashlanded into his rookie spot after a extended legal battle at the expense of fp/testing opportunities :__) same same but different...
oh last thing... everyone hates that he's a pessimist and self-critical and ~has no confidence in himself~ but to me his refusal to promise results where there are none to be had simply shows that he is #1 most clear-eyed on the grid about team/car performance and refuses to deliver baseless platitudes. also in the context of lando's failures he is only ever hard on himself BECAUSE of his self-confidence and the knowledge that he is fully capable of doing better... saying that you're shit doesn't mean you think you're forever shit in fact it is quite the opposite. anyway

oscar 🇦🇺🐨🧡 (apr 6, 2001)

most expressive beautiful eyebrows of this planet... sorry where were we
oscar is a True Normalgirl to an almost shocking degree it kind of krills me. like you're on a grid amongst [waves hand vaguely] but live alone in a flat south of london and have vastly CoolerThanU gay sisters and are functionally married to your longtime high school sweetheart nerd gf who is way smarter than you and obtaining her aero master's and while your teammate was probably getting crossfaded in a private club after he podiumed in silverstone you drove home with her and stopped at a service station to eat chicken nuggets for dinner. does anyone know that i'm obsessed with oscar piastri........
^ since writing this he has begun engaging in tax fraud but the rest holds
that being said oscar is also an annoying pedant and a karmawhore who loves to make stupid little tweets that r/formula1 fans love for some reason... i do genuinely think oscar is funny but i love his humor most when delivered via dry deadpan irl anecdotes LOL
there is so much i could say about oscar's personality but i simply lack the time and space!!! i have a complex relationship with how some fans rate him because it's clearly a kneejerk response to their lando hate and they're like oh only one of them has a ~WDC MENTALITY~ which literally is not a thing that tangibly exists and i'm like why are you setting the poor guy up like this... fighting for his life to manage his tyre deg and you're trying to construct narratives about lando being shown up by him when their h2h is what it is. the truth is that you simply cannot rate one without acknowledging the efforts & performance of the other... and that relative closeness is what makes them the best pairing on the grid 2 me
also in that same vein, i think oscar's objective and level-headed nature is what makes him so "palatable" as a media figure in the first place so there's no point in overstating either his strengths or his weaknesses! i think he's a guy who sees things as they are, nothing less or more, and who doesn't try to invent unfounded narratives for his own peace of mind, which frankly is key to his relationship with lando. at the end of the day neither lando or oscar believe in BullshitTM
i think to me most landoscar moments can be categorized as either a) a display of competence or b) an act of service, which in many cases overlap venn-diagram-wise; oscar specifically is drawn to interesting & competent people, and although he presents as vastly independent is also prone to picking up other people's behaviors and habits, and then when you have someone like lando who is both neurotic and empathetic and has a naturally high eq it makes sense that lando would fascinate oscar / that oscar would be drawn to the little idiosyncrasies of lando's character... that's just my tinhattery tho

⚠️ the ethos.....
— lando being the junior driver whose career oscar followed the closest / oscar being a closet ln4 fanboy / oscar remembering random lando meta
— push-pull dynamic / acts of service piastri / lando finally being able to set the tone and pace of their teammateship after being expected to adapt to his previous (older) teammates / oscar being susceptible to lando's charm but also not a pushover / oscar being able to handle his weirdness and particularities
— oscar's apparent & obvious fondness for lando.... the heart eyes full-body laughter and permablush...... u get it!!! (the lesbianism of resigning yourself 2 the Pining + making no efforts to demand reciprocity, not wanting to acknowledge your obviousness but refusing to initiate or give into your attachment beyond what is immediately acceptable) (😔)
— in same vein frankly increasingly unfiltered mutual fondness / ignoring the cameras or people around them and getting lost in their own world while speaking (see video) / basically displaying a unique temperament around each other even when they're otherwise pissed off or upset
— rarely touching, fleeting yet casual displays of intimacy when they do, never earnestly effusive about each other but mutually fond in different, equally devastating ways... tfw the Negative Space of landoscar's demonstrated "affection" is where their reciprocity lies. i'd also argue that their verbal support of each other can be subtle at times but is always very direct and to the point and confident (see: thanking & complimenting each other during debriefs) which lessens the feeling of obligatory teammate acknowledgement
— 반전매력... mutual physical cataloguing... adopting each other's habits & patterns, oscar reconfiguring parts of his character to accommodate lando... lando preemptive stratification of oscar as his Boring Rookie Teammate immediately getting dismantled by his fixation on his height/build/unexpected physicality... >. what if i died
— self-awareness of Contractual Obligations of teammateship but in the same vein surprisingly anti-bgp... literally just guys who are dudes and do hang out off-track/travel together without publicizing it. more on this l8r
— lando's subconscious possessiveness in his dynamic with oscar, the evolution of his obsession with his name (osc, osco; wanting exclusivity), constantly trying to find new ways of establishing in-jokes between e/o
— subtle emergence of weaponized incompetence on lando's behalf, lando slowly cataloguing how much oscar can be pushed at, demanding his attention & care almost reflexively... (again acts of service piastri)
— different brands of overthinking; one internal or self-reflective (lando), the other mainly external and action-oriented (oscar). instead of matching each other's freaks it's really just Complementary forms of freak...!!!

at the end of the day what i like most about 814 is that they mutually rate each other and find each other funny and charming and genuinely like each other as both teammates and people !!! not many such cases on this current grid it must be said... for all of oscar's current weaknesses mclaren continues to show organizational stability and even if only a little bit 814 help drive forward that betterment in team culture with their strong & steady partnership. that's not even a ship thing, just a reflection of their good collaborative attitudes, but it does manifest positively in their overall interactions. imo :')

relevant links & excerpts
0. general 814 tag
1. favorite moments ask (oct 2023)

in general i think what’s fun to me about landoscar is that they’ve become quite natural in a sort of quiet domestic way so i like any moment that shows off their wordless communication, or alternatively oscar’s endless level of patience + tolerance toward lando (listening to whatever pre-race music he blasts / silently giggling at his antics during the cake decoration video)

2. favorite moments ask redux (apr 2024)

personally i find 814 so fascinating because while there are many Discrete Moments i can point out that make my brain explode i also feel like to some degree the reason we love to make parallel gifsets of them is because they have such an understated dynamic built off many minute unspoken habits and wordless exchanges and essentially Patterns so there is less of like... a need for spontaneous intimacy.... if that makes sense. it's about the consistency of reciprocal comfort...

(opening title behind the scenes) this was such a significant reminder of how 814 have just gotten like, exceedingly comfortable around each other & have learned 2 communicate via the most inscrutable expressions and noises and gestures that somehow suit Them perfectly x__x although i doubt they will ever really become ~effusive~ with each other it's frankly even more devastating that they both help each other care less about maintaining appearances / how they often get so sucked into their interactions that everything else kind of just fades away in that instant.... all right ⚠️⚠️⚠️ maybe that's a bit of a stretch but we can pretend for the rpf lens!!!

the beautiful self-aware surfacing of the CONTRACTUAL OBLIGATIONS of their relationship...... !!! love when 2 guys expose and confirm their own sincerity in trying to verbally resist it. hem

top 5 most devastating 814 photo in existence

also this.......

3. random dynamic breakdown (apr 2024)

to me the thing about 814 mirroring each other is that in reality it's actually a metaphor for many different things ❗️ on one hand you can interpret it Literally as in a strictly physical sense—the idea of mirroring someone as running parallel and positioning yourself firmly opposite each other, as constructing intricate rituals in order to NOT touch the skin of other men, being so specifically magnetically repulsed that any contact is accidental and fleeting and causes you to spring away as quickly as you'd met. but then there is also the other sense of mirroring that is….. more amorphous and conceptual, e.g. how oscar has in many ways indirectly orbited lando his entire career and how although they've only been teammates for a year now lando has technically been a primary reference point of his throughout a majority of his teens.

on surface level, it's easy to say that 1) Oscar has always only ever been himself (generally true) and that 2) As the guy who came into f1 at 19 and was continuously expected to meet his more extroverted teammates' energies lando is the one who's habituated to experiencing marked change (also fairly true), but this still obfuscates equally important facets of their personalities: i.e. that while oscar may be the more ~intellectually~ inclined of the two, my personal argument is that really oscar is so consistently himself BY having zero concept of himself. whereas lando..... actually does possess a very strong inner character and intense, at times destabilizing self-awareness but also boasts a higher eq that enables a very high capability for social camouflage.

so basically. Yes. mutual accommodation....... i think my main point is that despite lando's strong baseline character and idiosyncrasies and particularities and fussiness and general weirdness, He Can, when necessitated, (as long as it doesn't completely contradict his moral impulse etc. etc.) soften that edge and adapt to another person's expectations—Even if just to maintain bearable social rapport & conversation. whereas on the other hand oscar can sometimes actually be a lot more malleable because he doesn't really hold strong conviction in much outside the few non-negotiables in his life ??? (read: racing...) like yes he's still competitive in challenges and is pedantic as shit but also he kind of just Doesn't care....... so basically he's the perfect fit for lando. because he DOESN'T expect anything from lando and lando DOESN'T need to camouflage himself for oscar and because oscar interprets things straight-forwardly and at face value and reads lando's intentions in good faith and honestly probably like 30% of lando's overthinking is a result of people constantly assuming the worst of him so i think on some level it's like 👉 👈 when you're both a little weird and also weird in these little different ways but in the end those minute shifts are what make you compatible and fit you back together again ?!?!?!? as i said it's the negative space of it all.

basically the basis of their current communication style: a lot of wordless meaningful looks & expressions (because they're both entirely honest people in different ways) (SEE: VIRGIN RADIO UK) (the thing Is that lando has no verbal filter but oscar is the one with 0 control of his expressions and deeply revealing permablush), oscar always folding to whatever lando says in an interview, jumping into frame and following along lando's message in the british f4 anniversary video, listening to lando's music through the walls of their driver rooms, and of course any instance of their Soft Talking Voices such as → "yeahhh you're up there" "aww (genuinely a little pleased and flustered)" and CAT 5 behind the scenes smoothie convo and oscar patiently waiting for lando to finish speaking and not wanting to enforce his presence but always being there and ready to help him..... like the worst part 2 me of the "well-represented" video is that andrea turns to lando first and tries to help him but lando is Still processing and Not listening so THEN he looks at oscar to be like um i don't know the word and that's when andrea looks back at oscar expectantly! what if i dyed. honestly. the category is truly just oscar being susceptible to Lando Norris……………

of course it's not like oscar doesn't introspect whatsoever because obviously he is very capable of self-assessing when something is important by an objective measure of success (aka recognizing deficits over a lap), but relative to lando's specific brand of overthinking & online lurking habits then oscar very much does.... basically underthink??? yes he overcomplicates simple ideas by being too literal but really as a person & conscious being he's great at living in the Present and filtering out excess noise. er... i won't delve too much into the ojp Learned Behaviors of it all and why he's so charming to older people specifically but basically Wwyd if an F1 driver microdosed autisticswag? joking. mostly.

in the end it's getting asked >what have you picked up from lando and oscar saying Well everyone hmmms but not in the Special Multifaceted Uniquely Expressive way that Lando does ! whom I not only know well enough to intimately recognize this mannerism from but have also elected to mention multiple times in this interview. and at the end of the day...? maybe that's romanze

text post dump

oscar is a pedant who spent 10 minutes trying to teach fred how to say the word waffles and he's chronically online enough to have seen a majority of f1 memes and remember all the times his facial expressions have been turned into memes and the ethos of his character is generally that he's unerringly independent and self-assured and doesn't believe in idolatry, but he'll also patiently indulge lando when he takes an eternity to construct one single barely-comprehensible sentence, drop everything at a moment's notice to do anything lando asks him to do, continue staring at him like he's hung the moon despite the fact that he could avoid the Heart Eyes Piastri characterization by simply Not doing that, expend an unnatural amount of energy on validating all of lando's quiz answers and changing his own opinion whenever possible to match his, and last but not least say things like "where's lando? my teammate's abandoned me" "i guess kind of lando in some ways" and "i don't want to keep saying lando but he's the one i know the best, soo.... lando." and things of that nature

at the end of the day it really just is like... Why does oscar do all that. honestly. he literally does not have to. the absolute devastation of lando awkwardly saying "i think you're... aware of... things" and it half being an acknowledgement of oscar's general ~intelligence~ but also half like... a reflection of oscar's tunneled focus on lando and how much he willingly orbits lando off-track. Gah. oscar is also just a person who tends to focus more on little details than the big picture imo

y is the oscar 814 physicality dichotomy so insane 2 me because it's like there is seriously no one he is less physical WITH than lando norris (read: is used to old men (read: mark webber) (read: andrea stella) manhandling him) (see also: him being touchy with that guy in the wb team karting video) but at the same time there is no one who unlocks the sheer range of physical Motion and Expression in oscar than lando does...... like WHO else can make him full-body doubling over himself laugh like that?! alex fighting for his life to host him in team torque while lando makes one noise and oscar is gone......

really the only times 814 are physical with each other is under the guise of playfighting (goggle games footy + bk delivery ad) and then select parc fermé post-session moments. which !__! i think it's compelling that oscar is a person consistently lauded for acting wise beyond his years and in some ways it feels like 814 have been teammates for much longer than they have because of the nonchalant nature to their dynamic but in very specific pockets of time you do get that sense of like... oh. the boyishness of it all x__x

i think it is charming and winsome that lando pathologically lies just to make oscar laugh. or perhaps he pathologically lies and oscar coincidentally thinks it’s the funniest thing in the world. either way they’re a lot

what is special about oscar is that he genuinely enjoys it when lando is shitposting and blatantly lying to his face... that's why the whole barcelona thing with lando Knowing what the next race was but still inviting oscar to fill in the gaps (or he just had a temporary lapse etc. whatever this is rpf) is like... maybe oscar knows that sometimes lando doesn't really need his help but he thinks it's fun so he offers it anyway. is this anything. also just like We hate each other it's awful / We're forced to by a contract / We're rivals but we need to pretend like we're besties and oscar always following along.... ok guys whatever makes you happy.

misc........ totally out of order too lazy to do all of that
→ oscar picking up "mmm" from lando
→ ig recreation (oscar letting lando handle him as he pleases...)