#I love these type of conversations ahee

[scimagic]

to me it feels like a mixture of

(lack of love via parents (mostly father it seems i dont think ive heard him talk about his mother so she is probably out of the picture )

and wanting to be a people pleaser (to me this and him wanting to make his dad proud is main cause of his insanity you CANNOT please everyone and trying to is like trying to catch a lion with a bug net your gonna hurt yourself in the process)

the abuse to me seems like more maybe like you said angst potential though it probably didnt help his development (to little kid puzzles brain he could have thought mistake= getting hit so he became a perfectionist (wanting a perfect 5 stars) to try to prevent this maybe)

Also rotating him in my head like i put him in a microwave

Man, the fandom and I view his character incredibly different fhdsakj (or I suppose you and I-! Haeheh!)

It's interesting to hear different views and opinions, see how everyone rotates him in their own brains

For me, Puzzles is driven by hate and spite. While you see him as a neglected child in search of external validation and love, a people pleaser wanting to reach perfection, I see him as a man needing to be right and prove his father wrong. I see someone being told time and time again that he will never achieve anything good or up to expectation. Rejected by his own father and the film industry. That can bubble a lot of hate in one person, enough to drive them into doing horrible things they never thought of doing in order to achieve their goals.

That's my correlation to his villainy, to prove someone wrong by sheer spite takes a lot of pent up rage formed by the years, and that's what Puzzles is seen to have in a lot of episodes. Anger and revenge go hand in hand.

People pleasing and fearing mistakes don't correlate to insanity for me, I'm afraid. Not the kind that Puzzles has at least ^^

[phoebe-delia]

So curious about #4 and #11 for Tongue-Tied! Talk about how that fic made me grin when I first read it 💕

Cav!! Darling, thank you so much for asking about this fic. I loved writing it and I'm so glad you enjoyed it <3

4. What's your favorite line of dialogue?

A good portion of the dialogue is just gibberish 😂. The challenge was making it clear that Harry was actually contributing to the conversation without having his dialogue be central to understanding the story in case people didn't want to parse it out. He is actually trying to talk, the poor thing, and I do know what he's trying to say 😂.

But the one part of the story I knew I had to make it clear what he and Draco were saying was the end, and it's my favorite part of the dialogue:

Harry's eyes widened comically. "Aycoh?"

"Ihh me, ahee."

11. What do you like best about this fic?

When I wrote this fic, I had very little inspiration for the microfic prompt, which was "tie." My instinct is to go to song lyrics when I don't know what to do, but I wanted to resist the urge to do a Taylor song if it wasn't screaming at me to do so.

But I was kinda desperate, so I literally typed different iterations of the word "tie" into the lyric search on my music and the Glee cover of "Tongue Tied" came up. I just said, "fuck it" and listened to that song—and then it occurred to me, "I can do whatever I want when I make up spells and type stuff into Google Translate set to Latin. What if Harry's tongue was literally tied?"

I realize that this build-up hasn't answered your question, but the reason I explain it is that I'm most proud that I didn't use my first idea, but I waited for my best one. I can be impulsive, sometimes, and I could've gotten frustrated and done a songfic to "Dancing With Our Hands Tied" and been done with it. But I like that I took the time to think it through, to let the brainstorming run its course before I took off with one idea.

Thank you so much for this ask Cav, I loved reflecting on this fic!

Read "Tongue-Tied" here, and the questions are here.