#(also carlos oh my god. I am An American I like American things like Firefighting and Heroism and My Sister)

[adelle-ein]

okay yes ztd is pretty awful and i keep giggling at things i'm absolutely not supposed to be giggling at bc they're just so fucking stupid but like. at least it's an entertaining kind of awful. i'm amused by the awful. aini was just bad AND boring

[welcometololaland]

All Austin Everything???

I didn't see it yet and I'm really curious about how they would be connected ^^

This ask is from...February 19th. I'm so sorry. I have no excuses. Literally my inbox is a mess of stuff from ages ago that I never got around to answering and I apologise profusely for my crimes.

I think this was an ask about the RWRB/LS crossover that has been LANGUISHING in my Google Docs for months now. Actually, a lot of fics have been languishing at the expense of ALTA which fights me and my sanity constantly. Every second day someone has to convince me not to set fire to it. But anyway, that is not the point.

I have thoughts about 911 Lone Star and RWRB and none of them are coherent but let me set them out for you:

I think a lot of people take a look at the characters in RWRB and Lone Star and think: Alex Claremont Diaz is to TK Strand what Henry FMCW (sorry Henry i'm not typing your full name) is to Carlos Reyes. Certainly, I see similarities there. Alex and TK both have personalities that are a little chaos demon (and are children of divorced parents), whereas Henry and Carlos are more cautious, considered and have a love of their life that is also somewhat the bane of their existence.

So this fic was always intended to be a bit of a fun character study more than anything. I can kind of see Carlos getting a little like ??? over a real life prince and I can see TK and Alex running off into the sunset and doing something unhinged like bringing home several lizards for their beloveds (on second thoughts, maybe not Alex - he was scared of those turkeys). ANYWAY.

The real point of the character study was to actually look at the alternative interactions, because I think if we scratch the surface a little deeper, more similarities appear.

Alex and Carlos have obvious similarities - in that they're both Mexican-American, born and raised in Austin and can cook. But they're similar in other ways too. They're both a little perfectionistic, overachieving types with a fear of failure. They're also both a little anxious and can bury themselves in a task to prevent confronting their emotions.

Henry and TK...oh my god. Do NOT get me started. Let's go with the obvious first: they were both very close with a parent that died young. They've both suffered from poor mental health and either experienced or been very close to someone experiencing difficulties with substances. They both historically believed themselves to be undeserving of the love that someone else was trying to give them and have both run away from expressions of that love when things got too real. They both (at some point) felt trapped in an identity that felt pre-determined (I see this for TK as his career as a firefighter given that his father is one and he had serious questions about it in s 1 and then obviously changed in s 2).

ANYWAY I think I had better points once upon a time and it's very late and I'm sleepy so sorry this is the best you're getting out of me tonight.

One day this fic will get finished, but in the meantime let's all just pray that ALTA writes itself and I am freed to stop stressing about a 110k piece of writing that just refuses to co-operate.

Thanks for the ask!