#good thing being weird and thoughtdumping about gay demons is okay! light and love on planet earth

[albontology]

okay sorry to drag this out of replies but i was exceeding reply character limit, response to @vroomvroom-mfs and more thoughts under the cut

okay i'll be honest i'm so surprised that you mention that because my brain immediately snapped to ryan-> alex:shane->george-- i feel like alex has that more sort of open, kind of hesitant-play/magic-circle ("i'll play in this space until it gets too real") mentality that would best resemble how ryan is open to letting some degree of potential belief through; and then the parallels of car-talk to paranormal research are shared between them both; and then george is kind of this straight-man off that whose contribution to the play is more tongue-in-cheek, nod to the camera. (admittedly there is also the mental association of george and shane both being Tall White Men.) i'd love to hear what characterizations led to your first train of thought :000

i haven't given it much thought because the tension and the slow burn and the miscommunication are so totally my bread and butter,, also, i think half of my thoughts from this au might just be retreadings of unsolved fic i read back in the day so. uh. whoops.

ultimately, george's identity and their romantic thoughts about one another get down to the root of like, personal and emotional honesty, so the reveals would have to be either concatenated or simultaneous. i like the idea of like.. unbeknownst to george, alex would have been picking up on clues for quite some time, though regulating them to kind of paranoid fantasy (and in general repressing the idea that he's so enamored with his coworker he's been noticing every small detail of his person). maybe they've just been told that their viewership is flagging and they're going to be taken off-air following their latest season? and alex is so devastated because it's crashing in to him that he's dedicated the key years of the beginning of his media career to running around like a chicken with his head cut off in front of a camera, blubbering about 'spiritual electro-frequencies' and cursed mineshafts, and it didn't get him anywhere, he's a joke and an idiot. and worst of all-- surely george has just been humoring him, has just been a coworker with clear professional distance, a retainer, at best, and even then alex cares for him so deeply and doesn't want them to break up to have to stop hosting the show together.

george's internalization of the cancellation is very much like: he's got a supernatural connection, he has the power to make the show engaging, to bring views, to give the audience what he wants. he can't, he shouldn't, give in to the urge to meddle with the laws of nature just to make alex smile get views, but all of a sudden he feels like a manipulative creep when he sees how torn up alex is about the show ending. how could he have played along with this whole charade for so long, when clearly alex's passion for the paranormal runs so deep he's this emotionally distraught at the idea of it getting taken away from him?

so. hm. well this didn't get us any closer to the reveal scene. idk, maybe george decides to take that forbidden step and do something for alex to see, to revive their network potentials, but then gets caught out in it. he tries to lie his way out of it, of course, definitely attempts to gaslight the shit out of alex, maybe even actually messes with his memory or perception, but alex doesn't let it go -- he's gathered clues about george all this time, and when he does fully comprehend what's happened, alex is fucking pissed, and good riddance because their show is over and george is gone. alex gets reassigned to research for some other youtube series and all the while his rage is crystallizing into this need for answers-- he tells himself it's about the supernatural, but the "why did this happen" always ends up morphing into "why did this happen to me" into "why did george do this to me, specifically." there must have been some reason george stuck with alex through it all, some genuine desire at the core of it, and alex needs to know what it was, what kept them together...

anyways alex draws a demon summoning circle and george appears in a big poof of diptyque 'orpheon' scented haze and then they have hot sex in the middle of the chalk lines and make all the candles levitate or some shit. love wins!

galex unsolved/ghost files au