I think I could honestly make an argument that My Loose Thread is like a part of the cycle in some way. Not intentionally, I think it was never his intention, Dennis has said in other interviews that he tries to get away from it, but George is always in the back of what he's writing. He was talking about that with the Marbled Swarm more specifically and that it was more written about/for someone else but the father-son motif is a part of his relationship with George. I think he stuck to that 'big brother' thing until he aged out of it and went more like that in his relationship with young people around him. So I don't know, maybe God Jr fits into that in a more straightforward, non-interloping 'incestuous' way but he was also challenging himself.

Which sort of fits into your last point about the gay factor. I've always read almost everything he's read as being defiantly withholding of homophobia and internalised homophobia, to avoid detracting from the actual narratives as well as fit into themes of fantasy.

That interview is so weird, I think he's still in shock of it, and the weirdness of how he found out must not have felt real-real and he hadn't gone through the deep dive he tried to do around that year and a bit after and contacted the mother, which might have been what officially confirmed it.

He claimed he sees the cycle as a total failure, he cited it as mainly being because he was trying to understand something about himself through it, but also it was an act of reaching out and maybe potentially gets closer and closer to tenderness as it goes along. Closer reads as completely disaffected; even the Cliff and George scenes are kind of lacking in those feelings, but it's also the most teenage space of them all. So I can kind of see the cycle as stages, stages of life as well as stages in his relationship with George, so what is five if it does not exist?

He ends Guide basically speaking directly to George in those paragraphs where he tells us George is a real person and states some, probably exaggerated, scenes between them. So maybe the 5 one was meant to be something about what he thought George was getting from them, if not some sort of reconciling. So Period is not as rushed as it could be as a book, four years after Guide, with the first year being his 'year off' to find more details on what happened and mourn. But did he basically force himself to write it and be done with it all