#i love to give director's commentary on fic actually???

[ilgaksu]

For the ask game!

18. if you keep them, share a deleted sentence or paragraph from a published fic

19. the most interesting topic you’ve researched for a fic

(from these questions)

18. so, i don't really tend to keep deleted sentences or paragraphs, so instead i'll show one i considered deleting and didn't and discuss why i considered deleting it (and why, ultimately, i didn't).

so, here we go:

Last night, before the rain and the violin case, before the brown sugar and Wu Erbai’s beautiful house, and Xie Yuchen is laughing, leaning up against the balcony railing in the Xie estate, his hands over his face. 

“No,” he says, “No, I hate it. I can’t look at you when you say that and take you seriously.”  

“No,” Hei Xiazi replies, “You’re wrong. You’re wrong and biased. Other people love this. Other people find it sexy.” 

“Go find other people then.” Xie Yuchen pulls his hands away from his face, wipes his eyes. “If you want to be -” He hesitates around the word, and Hei Xiazi pauses, eyebrows raised, dying to hear Xie Yuchen say it. When Xie Yuchen does, he makes a face around the word: “ Sexy that badly.”  

The last of the sunset drenches him like ink, slides over the curve of his mouth like a secondary kiss, and Hei Xiazi wants him like a cold hand during fever. 

“See, you’re just going off your own prejudices,” is what he says instead.  

“Of course I am. Who calls it making love?” Xie Yuchen shudders. “Just say what it is.”   

“I had a whole routine,” Hei Xiazi says, “And I’ll have you know, young man, it worked like a charm. Eight times out of ten, across over half a century. You are an anomaly.” 

“A twenty percent failure rate isn’t sensible in business,” Xie Yuchen informs him, the little perfectionist. 

“What, you’ve never played for high risk, high reward?” 

“That’s a roundabout way,” Xie Yuchen replies, “of complimenting me. And it still doesn’t mean I’ll agree with you.” He looks at Hei Xiazi’s face and smirks. “You’re itching to prove yourself, aren’t you?” 

“Always.”

When Hei Xiazi approaches, Xie Yuchen keeps his face turned up towards him, and his whole stance is loose. On another man, it might look like happiness; or, even more terrifying, contentment, on account of how contentment can be far more stable. He looks at Hei Xiazi, and has never looked less like the head of a family, and never more like himself. The Jiumen is all gone from his expression, and what's left is this, which is a young man with a beautiful mouth, laughing up at Hei Xiazi with just his eyes. 

Hei Xiazi settles his hands on his waist, leans his thigh between Xie Yuchen’s legs, uses his weight to tip him back against the support pillar holding up the balcony’s roof. Then, he reaches up, brushes Xie Yuchen’s hair back behind his ear, a performative little gesture that frames it better when he leans in, voice pitched low, and says, “Let me make love to you.” 

There’s a startled beat, where Xie Yuchen inhales, his body tensing, and Hei Xiazi suspects victory. But then - 

Xie Yuchen starts laughing again, this time pressed up against Hei Xiazi and out loud. He puts his hand on the back of Hei Xiazi’s neck to brace himself and presses his face against Hei Xiazi’s chest and laughs and laughs and laughs. He looks up at Hei Xiazi’s expression, lets out a strangled noise, and shoves his face right back. 

“If it helps,” he says, in between gasps for air, “I bet you they loved that back in, what, 1932?” 

(from been trying to find my way back)

so! i considered deleting this because i fretted that xiao hua is too cute in this section. the reason i didn't delete it in the end was that this is a fic in 3rd person limited pov where xiao hua is not so much functioning as a protagonist but as a deuteragonist, and specifically a love interest. this isn't so much how xiao hua regularly is, but as he is sometimes around hei xiazi - and, most important, is hei xiazi sees him, i.e. a romantic partner. i felt like that justified keeping this section. i'm still not sure about my decision though. i think a harsher editor would've cut it.

19. i answered this one here, but another one is that i often use medical history museums as an opportunity to gather research for hei xiazi. when i visited a friend recently, i went to a surgeon's museum and took a lot of reference notes for european modes of medical education. i find these kind of places fascinating, especially as someone in a body regularly medicalised and pathologised - how much all that separates me from the specimen jars is time and place. i think that's relevant because that's a feeling i often try to imbue into hei xiazi as a character who is a disabled doctor and therefore occupying both of those spaces of medical authority and medical curio.

[ragnarokhound]

Hi bb 🐺 can you choose a 500 word snippet from one of your published fics or wips and give us some director's commentary / insight into what you were thinking when you wrote it?

Hi bb! ^^ Sure, I'd love to!

I'd like to take the chance to talk about a scene from intricate rituals, my omegaverse Jaytim fic featuring beta!Tim being courted by alpha!Jason.

This scene takes place near the end of the rising action, at the tail end of the fifth time that Jason was totally courting Tim, and Tim still did not notice. Obviously, spoilers under the cut for anyone who hasn't read it yet, and I am a chatty mfer so this got kind of long, haha:

Tim dozes against Jason’s shoulder as he fiddles with the bedroom door handle, and does absolutely nothing to help when they reach the bed in the corner; so Jason dumps him on top of the sheets without fanfare. He bounces on the mattress with an offended chirp while Jason turns to look through his dresser for something. Tim whines obnoxiously at the sudden cold and wriggles around until he’s under the cool top sheet, his face firmly shoved into one of Jason’s pillows. He squints an eye open when Jason still hasn’t finished doing whatever he’s doing, only to see him standing over the bed. His face is unreadable in the darkness, but Tim can tell that he’s clearly dithering.  Why? He better not be getting weird about this. It’s only weird if Jason makes it weird. Tim is not nearly awake enough to puzzle through the why right now. He’ll think about it later. “Jason. Get in the bed,” he grumbles. Jason startles at the sound of Tim’s voice, but does as he’s told. The second Jason is under the covers, Tim invades the inch of space left between them with impunity. But then— Jason stiffens, so Tim stops about point five millimeters away from actually touching him. “Sorry," Tim says quietly. "You're really warm?" He says it like a question, trying to explain himself and ask permission at the same time and he can't really tell if he's accomplished either. Jason seems to get it though; he takes a breath and relaxes, then closes the remaining distance himself. He pulls Tim into the hot cave of his body, leaving an arm slung over Tim's waist and tucking him under his chin. Tim sighs, a purr thrumming softly in his chest as he tangles himself in Jason. He buries his face in Jason’s collarbone and quietly wonders to himself how he got here.  He's not sure he knows how he and Jason went from barely tolerating each other in the same room, the same city, (the same costume) to cuddling like packmates in the same nest. Yeah, a nest Tim basically invited himself into, and okay when he’s more awake he’ll feel a little guilty about that— but Jason carried Tim here himself. He didn't have to do that. He had every opportunity to say no. To think that he has Jason's trust now. That Jason would let him in this close, have him at his back, at his throat, have access to the vulnerable parts of him. It's terrifying. It's wonderful. It’s only marred by the smallest hint of apprehension still woven through the sleepy warmth of Jason's scent, that Tim only catches because his nose is practically shoved against Jason's scent gland. With a small, trilling keen, he tries his best to project calm-safe-acceptance. He’s had practice at it since becoming Robin, since joining the Wayne pack, but he's always been better at masking his scent than projecting it. A lifetime of hiding is hard to unlearn.

(you don't realize how long 500 words is until you see it right there on the page lol)

So intricate rituals is practically a study in denial. Tim spends half the fic justifying to himself (and to us) why Jason's overt alpha courtship behavior has a completely platonic explanation, and never ever even hints that he, himself, a beta, might in fact want a romance with Jason. Even though he really, really does.

So when I start writing out the prose for a scene, I try to keep those big guiding principles for the overarching plot in mind, as well as what I'm hoping to accomplish by the end of the scene. There's a few things I wanted from this scene in particular.

First: absolutely gag-worthy #married behavior. This is it! This is the final example of Jason's courtship and Tim's flimsy excuses (AKA the formula for each scene lol). So it has to be truly outrageous. It has to be over the top. The cream of the crop. And this time, it has to be Tim's idea in the first place. Get hoisted (from your own petard), idiot.

Second: it has to set us up for why Tim is in Jason's bed in the final scene. I knew all along how this fic was going to end - with Tim in Jason's bed, but comfortable there already; the tip-over from platonic to romantic that only happens because they're in such a stupidly domestic position that Tim is FORCED to realize that he might not be the only one pretending that This Is Fine.

Third: this is almost a step too far for Jason. But not quite.

In the first half of this snippet, we catch the end of the egregious courting behavior. Jason literally carries Tim into his nest/bed. He has to step away to get PJ's or something - Tim's not paying attention to that, so we don't really find out for sure - and when he comes back to see Tim whining and wriggling and getting comfy in his sheets, he has to take a second. For #strength.

Like usual, Tim clocks that something is bothering Jason; that Jason is Experiencing An Emotion. But also like usual, he doesn't clock what it is. Even though it's obvious to us, the romance pilled and dramatic-irony-aware audience. Even worse, he's so deep in his own denial (which hopefully we've picked up at least an inkling of by now, but it's not explicitly told to us until the next interlude scene) that he blames Jason for making it weird. He gets so close to making the intuitive leap about why EXACTLY Jason might be hesitant about sharing a bed, but he's too ~sleepy UwU (and ~afraid OwO). UGH, TIM.

(I try to balance action with introspection. Action -> reaction -> introspection -> action. Jason dumps Tim on the bed -> Tim whines and gets comfortable -> Tim wonders what's taking Jason so long -> Tim opens his mouth to ask "hey wtf is your problem". But preferably the action/reaction is described vividly enough and in the character's voice enough that we can, like, microdose on introspection along the way and keep the ball rolling lol)

When Jason is told to get in the bed, he startles - he was lost in his own thoughts. I like to think Jason was pondering his own version of what Tim sort of torments himself (and us) with every scene; wondering to himself how they got here, lamenting the fact that Tim isn't interested in him the way he would like him to be, and thankful that he gets to have him at all. Maybe contemplating what might happen if only he was a little braver. If this is it; if this will be Tim's line, and whether Jason's about to cross it. (Tim lies to himself about his feelings. Jason is brutally honest with himself about his.)

Tim moves in for the cuddle - Jason stiffens because he's still boggling at this whole situation, and a little afraid that Tim will realize exactly where they are and finally tell Jason 'no'. Again, Tim clocks his discomfort - "Sorry," - and again he misunderstands its source, mislabeling the motivations behind Jason's actions.

Jason makes himself open, and Tim takes happy advantage. Awww, they're cute, even if I do want to strangle them 'now kiss' style. Cue Tim's 'isn't it crazy how we're such good friends now' narrative monologue for the scene.

(🔥"HOT CAVE OF HIS BODY" MENTION🔥) (i can't resist this phrase OTL i'm weak for it)(it's about protection it's about warmth it's about the primal imagery of being nestled under the weight of something powerful that loves you)(<- werewolf pilled)

In this last half of the snippet, I wanted Tim to kind of show his ass here, re: being in denial lol.

"He's not sure he knows how" - Tim, we all just saw exactly how you and Jason ended up here. Yeah, we skipped some of that early stuff, but we just saw the start of your deeper friendship. It started with an omelette.

"When he's more awake he'll feel a little guilty" - Tim, didn't you just explain to Jason and to us why you shouldn't feel guilty? That it's perfectly normal to share a nest with packmates? Why do you feel guilty about this, Tim?

"He didn't have to do that." You're right. He didn't have to do that, and he did have every opportunity to say no. Why didn't he, Tim?

He tries to explain that it must be because Jason trusts him. That Jason's trust is a wonderful and terrifying thing to have. Huh. Interesting. Why does that terrify you, Tim?

Then Tim picks up on Jason's scent. Jason's own fears are the only thing that can cut through Tim's spiraling thoughts right now. Jason's made peace with having what he wants so close but still so far; and yet, he still can't help but ache.

Wanting to ease Jason's discomfort is what makes Tim bold. He tries to make Jason more comfortable by reassuring him that Tim feels safe here. That he feels accepted, and that he accepts Jason - which is true, regardless of his secret, presumedly unreciprocated feelings. Aww.

The last paragraph was a two for one - transitioning us into wrapping up the scene, but also, low key? The thesis of what we've seen so far. This explains at least one facet of Tim's behavior, prepping us for his breakdown and the emotional reveal in the next interlude.

Why is Tim in denial? Why won't he admit, even to himself, that he wants Jason? Sexually, romantically? That Jason could be courting him, that Jason could want him too? Because he's always been better at masking than projecting. A lifetime of hiding is hard to unlearn.

I really enjoyed writing intricate rituals, and my biggest hope was that everyone would be ready to strangle Tim by the end of this scene - but also hurt for him by the end of the next. When you get used to the idea that you are unwanted or undesirable, in any capacity, it's truly difficult to let yourself be convinced otherwise. But there's bravery and freedom to be found in finally allowing yourself to believe it. <3

[yellowocaballero]

I'd love to hear some directors commentary on the naruto fic now that its done!

Yay :3

“I don’t believe in much. I don’t believe in an afterlife either.” Kakashi spoke so lightly, as if he was saying almost anything else. “I’ve always thought it was just nothingness. So I always thought I’d never see you again. Despite everything, Obito…I’m happy I saw you again.” He hummed, swallowing. Obito felt his throat bob underneath his fingers. “That’s probably not what you wanted. You probably wanted me to die miserable. I’m sorry. That’s the one thing I can’t give you. Because…right now, Obito. I’m happier than I’ve ever been.” “You’re fucking nuts,” Obito said, horrified.  But Kakashi’s eye just crinkled in a smile. So dead, so hopeless, so unkillable. “Is this what your utopia feels like, Obito? Hm. I don’t mind it at all, actually.”

I talked before on the basic question of the fic - 'so what is a utopia, anyway?' - and I'll try not to repeat myself.

Kakashi is objectively the most insane person to deliver the answer to this question. He wouldn't know happiness if it smacked him in the face. He is the most depressed person alive. He is the unwitting victim of Obito's 10+ year torture experiment designed specifically to cause as much suffering in a human being as possible. He is God's wettest meow meow. Kakashi lives in hell. And he deals with Sasuke and Naruto alone all of the time. What would Kakashi know about utopia?

And what would Naruto know about home - why does he return home determined to make it a better place? What would Sasuke know about family - why does he choose to reconcile with Itachi? Obito operates on a WWND morality system, but he fails to see how Naruto uses his trauma as a source of strength. His thinking has a fatal flaw, and it is a lack of faith in the power of choice. Or, in other words, a lack of faith in people.

Obito knew that Kakashi loved him. That wasn't in doubt. But it didn't occur to him that Obito was enough. Kakashi didn't love an innocent child, a loyal teammate, a rival - he didn't even love somebody nice, smart, kind, or likable. He loved Obito. Obito was perfect, because he was Obito, because Obito was the person he loved. The space between Kakashi and Obito was Kakashi's utopia. If a utopia is a place of perfect happiness, then Kakashi's happiness was perfect, because Kakashi's happiness was Obito. How could there be any imperfections or flaws, any disappointments or tragedies, when the greatest miracle of Kakashi's life was in front of him?

It feels stupid to even put into words. It's self-evident to me. Perfection to me is not when something has no faults or flaws, but when something is absolutely itself. The ideal thing to be is what you are supposed to be. Our perfect selves are the most complete expression of who we are. Obito was enough.

[wanderingblindly]

i see you reblog a director's cut post, i appear in your inbox <3

pls give me anything you choose as director's commentary on Someone in Seattle because i love her very much okay thank you!!!

see ya, love ya, bye!! xx

oh my god yes please let me talk about the undertaking that was Someone in Seattle i love you so much for this

Usually I kinda give a dissection of the entire fic, but i have a million things to say, so we're gonna start with just one fun fact and one scene:

The Studio Photoshoot:

Originally, their first photoshoot together -- the one with the flowers in the studio -- was going to end in a completely different tone; I wanted some sort of inadvertent confession.

The final version of the scene goes as follows:

“You think I’m beautiful then, Osc?”  Oscar freezes, camera still held up to his eye. Lando’s gaze is sharp but his smile is small, no more than a quirk of the lips; it’s a more serious expression than Oscar’s seen, like his question is earnest. Like there’s more beneath it.  “I –” He starts, lowering the camera to his chest. In a moment of silence, they look at each other, eye to eye. “Fuck off.”  Lando brings his cup to his lips again, not breaking eye contact. “How’s the lighting?” “Getting there.”

But when I first typed it out, there was a slight difference in Oscar's response.

“You think I’m beautiful then, Osc?”  Oscar freezes, camera still held up to his eye. Lando’s gaze is sharp but his smile is small, no more than a quirk of the lips; it’s a more serious expression than Oscar’s seen, like his question is earnest. Like there’s more beneath it.  “I –” He starts, lowering the camera to his chest. In a moment of silence, they look at each other, eye to eye. Quietly, no more than a whispered exhale, he answers: “Yes.” Lando brings his cup to his lips again, not breaking eye contact. “How’s the lighting?” “Getting there.”

I thought it had a lot of potential as a moment because like, Oscar wouldn't really be confessing, exactly, but rather talking about his art. Obviously he thinks Lando is beautiful, or at the very least compelling, if he was willingly to ask him to model for his entire term portfolio. It still would have set him on edge, having to admit something like that out loud, and I think Actual Menace Lando would have enjoyed tormenting him.

It also had the added appeal of like, playing into the conflict at the end: Lando's convinced that Oscar only likes the concept of him, not the actual complicated person underneath. If Oscar had agreed here, it probably would have made that even WORSE.

The reason I didn't keep it is because I didn't want Oscar to start contemplating his feelings yet. I wanted him to continue being an idiot, and I wanted him to be able to pretend that he doesn't feel that way about Lando. Yet.

Soundtrack:

I wrote this entire fic to two songs, which I played for over 1,000 minutes each :) very sane :) I liked the sort of soft wistfulness that both of these have when you zone out to them, it felt very fitting.

[coffeebanana]

Could we be blessed with some director’s commentary for mtl 🥺⭐️?

jkjfsfkdjb i feel like. a lot of things i'd want to give the most commentary on is actually stuff from later chapters that haven't been written/posted yet... BUT OKAY. gonna focus on the opening paragraphs

The walls of Adrien’s shower were lined with vintage pink tiles, but rose-tinted vision only went so far. Even if he stared long enough for the lines of caulking to disappear, for the world to become a blush-coloured blur, he couldn’t rid his sight of the long, jagged crack that ran down the middle. A slash of darkness that always remained. Those tiles were one of the reasons he’d chosen this apartment, or so he liked to tell himself. It wasn’t that he’d only made it halfway down the first page of rental listings, but instead that he’d felt a kinship with these walls—with that which had once been a pretty, polished thing, now so obviously broken. And on touring the place, he’d liked how the edge felt rough beneath the pads of his fingers. How it made him, just for a moment, feel real.

(my thoughts under the cut)

adrien could, one would think, afford a nicer apartment than the one i'm envisioning for him in this fic. i mean i haven't described it all that much yet but... even from this bit i think you can tell it's not like a modern place. and my in universe explanation for that is two-prong. 1) he probably actually doesn't have as much money as he WOULD have had because the whole gabriel being publically outed as a villain came with some financial consequences, and, 2) i think adrien would want to choose for his first apartment a place with more... character than the crisp, cold mansion

so. his apartment is somewhat inspired by one of my friend's old apartments--just because that's the sort of area in Montreal (the Plateau) where I imagined his apartment. it's a little ways from downtown, and the streets are lined with big trees. the insides of the apartments are sort of... very long a lot of the time

BUT his bathroom in particular is inspired by the bathroom in my last apartment, except my tiles were yellow (i would post a picture of those too but all my bathroom pics are selfies and i feel weird about posting those on tumblr 😂). i was really NOT a fan of that colour honestly, so i didn't want to write that into this fic. so i had googled pink vintage tiles very early in the writing process for this fic because i wanted a clear image. and i can't remember exactly how the crack part came to be--if i specifically searched pictures of cracks or if i saw the picture and needed to work that in--but i do know that... for years i've sort of had this thing about imperfections in older homes. how they can be oddly beautiful. oddly mesmerizing. how they tell a story

and the way i love starting chapters is to take some aspect of the setting and connect it to the character's emotions. it's my favourite favourite way to write description. so this lent really well to that...

Thanks for the ask!! 🩷🩷🩷

Fanfic Writers: Director's Cut ask game

[sea-changed]

hey hi how bout that directors cut commentary on the sources behind your liebgott fic. open ended q would love to hear literally anything abt your process. uhh eyes emoji

<3 <3 This is a completely delightful but also extremely dangerous message to receive; that fic occupied my whole mind for a while there and I have so (too!) many thoughts about it.

A lot of the research I did for this fic I did without knowing I was doing research for it; stuff that ended up in it came from a whole patchwork of sources. Books, fiction and non-! Documentaries! Museum exhibits! TV shows! Movies! My goal for the fic was for it to be as nearly structureless as possible, to capture something of the recursive, time-is-out-of-joint-ness of PTSD; this did not fully succeed but it did allow me to be almost modular in putting it together. I didn't structure it out at all until I was over halfway through the writing process; before that I was just writing section after section in a doc, and so I could incorporate ideas pretty much as I had them, without worrying about how a segment was going to fit into the overall structure. There was no structure! So if it fit the themes, it was allowed in.

The format itself was inspired by a few different things: in rough order of when they entered into the process, they were a) my memory of Slaughterhouse-Five (I didn't actually reread it until I was nearly finished writing, and it had been many years, so it was very much the memory rather than the thing itself.) (At first, semi-jokingly, the summary of the fic was going to be "Joe Liebgott has come unstuck in time." And I still might write that fic, tbh.) b) quigonejinn's Marvel fic, which I also have not reread in many years but had a huge impact on me and how I think about writing and structuring fiction (the dream segments throughout the fic are a complete homage) and c) reading Catch-22. The high of experiencing Heller's ability to control and corral the chaos of his timeline, while letting that chaos be integral and indeed inextricable to the story he's telling, is what launched me back into writing this fic when I had more or less fizzled out on it for a couple of months.

In terms of more concrete sources, of course you're well aware of the reverberating influence of Studs Terkel, both very directly and more nebulously. (I even followed him as a style guide! That's why "army" and "kraut" aren't capitalized.) The PBS documentary GI Jews I found fascinating and valuable in reinforcing some things I'd already been thinking about regarding Liebgott and introducing new facets to my thinking. The part about the USO workers handing out comic books and candybars to returning soldiers (and the soldiers' reactions to that) is something Michael C. C. Adams mentions in The Best War Ever; the section with Skinny's letter was inspired by Ambrose (loath as I am to give him credit for anything).

A lot of other stuff was, as I said above, pretty piecemeal. The scene where he punches the man at the drugstore is from The Best Years of Our Lives; the part about him reading comic books at the drugstore is from an oral history; I got part of my Kaddish transliteration from Angels in America; the part about transferring to a segregated train is from a story my grandma told me; I did a whole deep-dive figuring out where his family might live in San Francisco and discovered that in the early to mid-20th century the Jewish neighborhood and (one of) the Japanese neighborhood(s) were in fact right next to each other, which inspired a couple of lines. &c. &c.

[dangerpronebuddie]

Maggie id love to hear directors commentary on ANY BTHB fic! They’re all so good!! Also giving you a star in case you wanna talk about another fic as well ⭐️

(not me answering a day late 😅)

Bazza you're giving me too much freedom here lol.

For BTHB, I'm gonna go with... Severed Artery.

It is frustrating to write. I've never done a whump quite like it. Researching what's done for severed arteries beyond the actual repair is infuriating. I guess I don't ask google the right questions 😅. It never understands me.

Beyond the actual injury though, this fic has become more about fatherhood than whump. I'm not mad about it though! And since it takes place before 7x10, and most of 7x09, I don't have to acknowledge all of... That™. I do get to showcase Eddie being a good dad, Buck being a good dad, Bobby being a good dad... Still up in the air about Ramon though. I like him, I like that he and Eddie were trying to mend fences, but I am livid he didn't at least suggest Chris staying to work things out. (Mind you, it's pretty in character- the Diazes run). Anyway.

And a certain breakup I have planned is superb if I do say so myself 😁.

I'd give you a director's cut of another fic, but I think instead, I'll give you a little snippet (psst, @tizniz look! I wrote more pain! 😁)

“Are you going to the hospital?” Helena asks next. Buck shakes his head. “I need to talk to Christopher.” “That is not your job,” she snips. He can't be mad at her protest. Grief, to the Diazes, always emerged as anger. Buck didn't understand it, in the early days, like during a fight in a grocery store or the cold shoulder when he came back to work. But a broken door, and a broken man, let Buck truly see Eddie, and the pain beneath the facade. “It is,” Buck says calmly. Ramon tugs on his wife's hand. “Let's go see our son. Buck's got Christopher.” Helena turns away and Buck mouths a thank you to Ramon before joining Chris and Maddie. He seems okay, but, like his father (and Buck, he's come to realize), he has a habit of hiding his emotions. But he can see in the slight furrow of his brow and the hunch of his shoulders that he's terrified. Buck knows the feeling. He sits in one of the folding chairs so he can be eye level with Chris. Chris looks at Buck with wide, shining eyes. Buck envelopes him in a hug, squeezing his eyes shut against his own tears. "What happened? No one will tell me," Chris sniffles. Buck takes a breath and leans away enough to look at him. “Your dad got hurt, bud. Stabbed. We're not sure why yet. But he's with the doctors now. He's in good hands.” “Is he gonna be okay?” Chris asks, sounding so young and scared. He understands the gravity of the situation a lot more now. Buck wishes he didn't. He wishes he had bubble wrap to keep the kid safe forever. “I wish I knew,” he says honestly. He doesn't know anything beyond the fact Eddie still had a pulse when they wheeled him into the ambulance. That can change in a matter of seconds. A tear escapes and runs down Chris' face. Buck cups his cheek and gives a weak smile. “Remember: no matter what happens, we are going to be okay.”

[heartfulselkie]

selkie i saw wafaa rambling about you in the tags of this ask game a while ago so on her behalf i'm here to ask you: director's commentary on every word in citrus & lavender. 🙏🙏🙏 (pick your favorite scene if you must)

[Ask Game]

Every....every word??

That's...uh... that's a lot of words

I'm afraid I'll have to go with a single scene, otherwise we'll be here forever! So I'll choose one of the scenes that made me want to write this fic in the first place...

It was still snowing. He didn’t know the last time it had snowed this much in Paris. A single set of footprints, marked with a trail of blood, were quickly covered in fresh white as he continued onwards. He could barely walk anymore. Either the cold was too deep in his bones or the blood loss was too great. But he kept going. Dragging one heavy, stumbling step in front of the other. His breathing was harsh and laboured as his body struggled to support itself. But even as he endeavoured to keep himself upright, he didn’t dare drop what was in his arms. Who was in his arms. He held her close to his chest, offering what little warmth and protection he had left in him. Her spots were long gone, leaving an ordinary girl in his hold. He hadn’t looked though. Not once. He hid her not only from the world and any potential pursuer, but also himself. He wouldn’t take that from her. So he stared out in front of him as he continued forward into the dark. One foot in front of the other. One foot in front of the other...

Citrus and Lavender, Ch. 33

This scene was something I had in my mind for a long time before even starting the fic. It went through many shifts and changes before resulting in the version that made it into the fic - one of the scrapped versions resulted in a half-reveal!

This is Adrien's lowest point in the story - and its a point he'll linger in for a while. He's just committed the gravest sin according to his upbringing by going against Gabriel's demands and trying to create his own path.

Adrien wanted to find an option that would help everyone, but unfortunately it results in helping no one. It's a bitter lesson, but it will take some more time for him to realise what the true lesson in it is - that no matter what he does, his parents can't be helped when they are set on their own destruction.

At this point though, Adrien can only see his own destruction and that damage he has caused (in his eyes). He's betrayed everyone - his mother because he fails to follow through on what he promised - his father because he can't play the dutiful son and follow Gabriel's lead - and Ladybug by not being the partner he was supposed to be.

Of course these things aren't actually Adrien's fault. The choices he made weren't really ever choices, but an act of survival while living in an abusive household. But he will still take the blame and punishment on behalf of everyone because that is what he has been taught is right. For him, loving someone means accepting their punishment (regardless if he's the one who is actually in the wrong).

So Adrien accepts the punishment Gabriel would have enacted on Ladybug. He loves her and so choses to save and protect her from that fate. He lets himself go further into that cold dark, holding her and carrying her so that she can have a chance to rise above it and escape that fate.

Because Adrien isn't the one who can change anything - he tried and it backfired in the worst way possible. Ladybug is the one who can bring about change - something he knows so well because he witnessed her himself as she went from that uncertain, clumsy girl on that first day, to the confident and resilient girl who took on the role thrust upon her to protect Paris.

So between the two of them, there's no question in Adrien's mind which one of them should end here. So he gives her what little he has left in him - his steps forward, his warmth, his endurance - because that is all he can give. Even though it is woefully lacking in value in his eyes, sacrificing his life is the only act of love he can finally make for her without it being taken back or warped beyond his control.

[its-all-papaya]

hands on your keyboard cowboy i want to hear about the rest of your directors commentary pls !!! i LOVE the last landoscar convo in AN i absolutely need to hear more about it

likely place for you to be !!

(me, frothing at the mouth waiting for someone to ask me about this convo after I told you I was staying off tumblr for the rest of today)

ask me anything about my writing and read anybody, nowhere

OKAY. so. the LAST last scene of AN (fan stage) was like one of the very first things I wrote for that fic. I think the paragraph that starts "Lando's not online much these days" was first, followed by the Silverstone podium thing I used in the blurb, then it was fan stage. (Not to keep russian doll nesting asks, but the fan stage scene is a WHOLE other topic I could ramble about, I won't get into it too much here.) Anyway, other than those little anchors, I essentially just typed everything in chronological order and included what felt right when. So it was building in Lando's brain and building with Oscar and I KNEW I wanted it to end with the fan stage, so I KNEW I had to give some mental and emotional like... break? payoff? for Lando before then so that the fan stage would read like I wanted it to.

(break bc this got disguuuuusting long)

The other thing though is that I originally fucked up the Austria sprint finish order? So like 2/3 of the way through I realized I had to switch Lando and Oscar and that obviously like REALLY changed the entire tone of that passage and the bits right after, because the whole thing NOW is Lando getting beat by his teammate, but that super didn't exist until after I'd written all of Austria and started Silverstone. So I added the stuff about Lando battling Oscar and losing, and I loved it bc I think it gives the whole thing more depth, but then I was like... I need to write Lando out of this. I can't finish the fic without resolving the "Lando resents Oscar for beating him" plot-line. And I hadn't actually drafted anything for the last scene, but I had vague ideas of how it was gonna go that changed drastically when I started thinking about how to include some resolution for the on-track stuff.

SO. I'm done with the whole fic minus the conversation scene. We've had the Lewis Silverstone podium (probably my favorite part of the whole fic, and again, one of the original theses of it) and we're trying to get to the fan stage (probably my other favorite part) and I just like... sent Oscar to Lando's room with him? I didn't plan on all of their relationship development being in that one room, but I liked that it ended up that way because it felt really safe and contained for Lando, so I wanted them to get their payoff there, too. I don't really have anything to tell you about the first bit because it REALLY wrote itself. Like I was IN Lando's brain while writing this fic, all of his stuff was kind of me blind reacting to my own lead-up and then polishing it. Oscar was a bit harder to write, and this scene is the first time I felt like I had to actually make him like... do anything. Other than passively react to what Lando was doing. But even his dialogue just sat really right with me, and once I started the conversation it just felt really true to how they'd been all fic.

PAUSE for me to say I was so paranoid all fic too that I wasn't letting Oscar be enough of a real person with real emotions? I was like... some of these races sucked for Oscar too... ESPECIALLY silverstone... am I just going to make him Fix Lando anyway and not address his race? But THAT felt kind of true to Oscar too. Like he's not burdened the way Lando is and he at least seems to let things roll off easier, so I don't think it's OOC for him to not bring it up or be especially affected by it when Lando was a more pressing issue for him at the time.

Okay anyway. I really really loved the weird fight/not fight energy where Lando was fighting Oscar but Oscar just was not fighting back at all, like the one-sided argument was exactly what I wanted. I got through the part where Lando's like "I'm just not winning because I'm not" and then I got. So motherfucking stuck. Because at this point I'm like... okay. Lando has to give something back. We have to address Oscar's races. And I wrote the end of the convo no less than five times and it took probably three hours. I actually have a draft that I liked (I'll include it at the end) where they did address the Lando-hates-Oscar-beating-him thing, but then I had NO IDEA how to get them out of that. Like Lando admits that he hates losing to Oscar, but then wtf is Oscar supposed to say to that? Like... okay? Yeah? And I tried a bunch of stuff and hated it all, so I literally started a new word doc, dumped everything after "I'm just not winning because I'm not" in there, and started completely over from there in my actual WIP doc.

And from THERE I was like. You know what? We actually don't have to fix this for them? Like LANDO thinks this is a huge deal and makes him a horrible person, but does Oscar give a shit? Obviously they all hate losing to each other, that's like... the whole thing. Their whole goal is to beat everyone. So I was like "I'll indulge myself and just let them not deal with it right away" and I'd already written the "oscar's hand is out, palm up" paragraph for that original draft I liked, so I slotted her back in instead. And again, I am IN LANDO'S BRAIN, and I was like if EYE am thinking too much about how this conversation "should" go in a perfect world, Lando is DEFINITELY thinking about it. And I was like oh I need to stop thinking? Lando needs to stop thinking. And it sounds insane now because when I re-read the fic now, the through-line of Oscar calming Lando's thoughts is so so so obvious, but I promise that until writing "I need to stop thinking" it had never ever occurred to me that that's what Lando and Oscar's building relationship was doing for Lando the whole time.

Oh ALSO, in my original concept, they were never going to kiss because I felt like it would be forced bc I hadn't built to it enough. But once I hit on "I need to stop thinking" I was like OBVIOUSLY Oscar will kiss him to shut his silly brain up. Which, fun fact, is where "Lando isn’t even surprised. At any of it, really. It was always going to end up here" came from. It was just me, Soph, being like... oh. OBVIOUSLY THEY WERE ALWAYS GOING TO KISS.

So then I finished the kissing part and I was like... how will we get to fan stage for REAL. And I was still kind of worried about not resolving the on-track tension thing, so I was like... Lando is probably worried about that too! And the last "No, babe. That's your job." came to me straight from heaven or something, idk, but it was so perfect for ending the scene. Like I had spent HOURS AND HOURS worried about how to make them authentically address this and still stay soft and warm with each other and Lando's been panicking about it for eight straight days and we finally get the nerve to bring it up and Oscar is like "you silly silly goose, of course you hate losing to me!"

hahahahaha okay final notes then scene draft: as I said in the answered ask after I first decided to write AN2, I feel like I ended up with a version of this scene that was.... SO accidentally foreshadow-y of Hungary?? I was watching the team orders situation play out during that race and I felt like that dodgeball "the gift of prophecy" meme because I was like... holy fuck, this is EXACTLY the kind of thing that AN Lando was afraid of. The other note is that the line "we don't have to fix it right now, Lando" in the hollow hereafter is a direct result of my fight with this scene in AN and the topics of it. AN2 was destined, it's literally the only thing I can think of with the amount of weird pre-work I'd already done for a situation I didn't know was going to exist ever when I published AN????

oKAY THANKS FOR ASKING CLEARLY I HAD THOUGHTS!! Here are your demos/deleted drafts !!

this is how the austria sprint scene finished when I thought it was Lando P2, Oscar P3:

As he clasps Oscar’s gloved hand in parc fermé, he wishes for a blind second that it was a grand prix so he could remember how Oscar’s eyes looked squeezed against champagne spray up close. Then he remembers that place in the back of his mind and the ugly, twisted relief he felt passing his teammate for the final time, and he shoves the idea away. He doesn’t deserve that, either.

And this is how the final convo went when I was trying to make them discuss things (picks up after "It’s just me. I’m just not winning because I’m not.” and the rest of that paragraph didn't exist yet):

“We drive the same car,” Oscar says and Lando already knows he’s not going to like the rest, “and I’ve been qualifying like shit the whole month, too. It’s not just us out there. You know that. You’re being really hard on yourself.”

Lando remembers then that Oscar’d had his race ruined too. Worse, probably. Without a choice in the matter. And instead of wallowing he’s here comforting Lando, who should know better by now. Who should be better by now.

“I’ve been here three times as long as you,” he’s teetering on that precipice, deciding between anger and the other thing. “And I’m still making stupid mistakes. It’s worse because I should be better by now, and-” he stops. Considers.

“And?” Oscar prompts and Lando still can’t look at him.

“And you beat me. In Austria.” He says, quieter than anything since they’ve entered his room.

Oscar takes a breath so deep Lando can hear it. When he finally glances up, Oscar is already looking at him. His eyes still have that stupid warm, fond look in them and Lando’s afraid he’s going to do something dumb, like apologize, but instead what he says is “I beat you in Monaco.”

Lando scoffs, eyes back on his feet. “That wasn’t the same.”

“Why?” and he’s still asking like he doesn’t know the answers.

“Because it wasn’t, Oscar, people weren’t saying things in Monaco.” He’s losing the thread of the conversation a little bit, brain wrung dry from hours of thinking these things over, and it feels ten times harder to do it all out loud.

“Is this about what people are saying?” Oscar asks, then, and maybe they’ve both talked themselves in a bit of a knot.

“It’s not about anything.

“Lando,” Oscar says. “C’mere.”

His hand is out, palm up, and he’s taken his cap off at some point so his hair is messy and ruffled and he looks soft even though he’s got his damn polo neatly tucked in like always. He should be mad. Lando’s selfish, he’s so… he’s always taking what he shouldn’t from Oscar, but he goes anyway, puts his hand in Oscar’s and lets his teammate pull him down next to him on the bed.

“Are you upset about Austria?” he asks gently. He’d let go of Lando’s hand as soon as he was sitting, so his arm is free to curl around Lando’s waist, drag his palm up. Hip to ribs.

Lando sucks on the side of his thumb where it’s started to bleed. When he brings his hand to his face, it’s shaking a little. “Not…” he pauses, concedes, “Kind of. But not at you, I don’t think. I like when you do well.”

Oscar laughs a little and Lando’s eyebrows pull together, but it doesn’t feel mean. Lando’s not sure Oscar has a mean bone in his body when it comes to him, and that should be an issue, probably.

Oscar’s palm slides back down, ribs to hip.

“At what, then?”

And that’s the question, isn’t it.

And then I couldn't get them out of it so all that went to the graveyard! But I like the way it ended up, so I'm really really not mad about it.

KAY THX CHARLIE love u <3 if anybody else made it this far, ask about other scenes, I dare you >:)

[wolftozier]

hey! heres the next part of my 30k hit celebration :) below this readmore are three snippets, as well as some directors commentary about where the story wouldve ended up, if I had finished it. enjoy!!

1. from 2020, titled "smoking buddies",

And Bev tasted like strawberry right now, from her lip gloss and the punnett of fresh berries she’d bought for them to share. “I know,” Bev says. “Alright, big boy, one more and then I have to pick your outfit out. I know all you’re planning on wearing is this shirt.” “The plan was no clothes,” Richie says, and Bev laughs into the kiss. Richie ends up laughing too, their teeth clacking together uncomfortably, and it makes them laugh harder. “Yeah, that’s my master plan. Strip down, seduce-” “Richie,” Eddie says, from the doorway. Richie reflexibly pushes Bev away.

my bevchie platonic kissing fic! from the notes, apparently this was supposed to finish with a bill/ben/bev trio + reddie, but all I have in the document is three or four bevchie making out scenes. good for them!

2. from 2023, labeled "stepping stones 2"

When he was younger, he loved tightrope walking. It was so dangerous, but that was the best part. His mother never approved of it. She was borderline okay with the contortion, because it didn’t involve heights or running or animals. But not tightrope walking, not silks, not hand balancing. If she was here, she’d have a heart attack. The rope dips suddenly, like there’s new weight standing on it. Eddie’s head snaps to the side. There he is. Richie. Standing on the rope with a big dopey grin on his face. His hair has grown longer, and it’s unbrushed, and he’s still in comfy airport clothes. He walks over- the rope is shaky, both of their partnering skills rusty- but he makes it to Eddie, sitting down as well. “Hey, sweetheart,” He says.

it's truly impressive how I shove long haired richie into every fic I've ever written. but yes, I did attempt to write a stepping stones sequel! it actually started in 2022, but the last addition was in 2023. I have NO notes about how this would've gone- I think I was just writing some cute little circus moments between the losers. there was also, perhaps, something suspiciously shaped like a ring-box in someone's pocket 👀

3. from 2024, titled "wreckords"

"Richie fuckin’ Wreckords, baby!” Is how the video starts, Richie crowing into the microphone his lead singer was holding near him- he’d just introduced the drummer, Richie Tozier, everyone!- before he begins his solo. Head beating in time with the beats he was stomping into the kick-drum, hair loosening from the ponytail it was being kept in. One arm stays steady, the other moves around as he continues, the muscles in his biceps flexing. The solo only lasts twenty or so delicious seconds, before the rest of the band begins playing once again. Eddie’s loop sends it straight back to the start. Richie fuckin’ Wreckords, baby! Eddie’s going to single-handedly make this part of the video the most played. It’s on the official Wreckords youtube channel, filmed at their latest Californian show that Eddie, unfortunately, could not attend. He had an exam that seemed less and less important the more he looped the video. He missed seeing this live. Hearing this live. The video loops again. At the word baby, Eddie gives in to the heat curling in stomach, sneaking a hand under his shorts, rubbing at himself through his underwear.

hi drummer richie *twirls hair*

anyway this was inspired by a roleplay I did a while ago with a friend- sadly I don't think it diverged enough to justify continuing to write it. it was supposed to be a silly little social media au, and I think eddie was going to write one or two x readers abt hot drummer richie. oops. I also made richie a little too cool.... sorry to my pathetic richie enjoyers!

[findafight]

tell us the ship, explain your thoughts 👀

Me trying to be vague and everyone immediately perking up like prairie dogs ready for tea alskfnkdkd. Idk I don't think it'll surprise anyone on my blog I've spoken about it in the past. Just got annoyed at it always being there for no reason and not making sense to me one too many times, I guess.

It's r0nance. I simply do not vibe with it at all. I think, if given a sterile au where there's nothing and no one connecting them and no homophobia to worry about, it might be interesting to possibly explore them being attracted to each other but realizing their personalities and goals and priorities clash too much to work out. A bright first fling into maybe-love that fizzled quickly. I've sort of done this in my post o66 sto bin au for them, but I'm probably not going to actually explore it there. (As it's already in the past even during the war for that au)

But in fics that try to be more or less canon/fix it type deal, it really doesn't make sense to me without even mentioning the hairsprayed elephant in the room. Robin and Nancy's personalities don't seem to mesh well, what with Robin's rambling tangents and Nancy's need to focus.

Robin would probably want to do something specific with her life, but she also wants to wander! Her parents are hippies and she wants to visit Paris. She wants to travel in Europe, and probably stay at sketchy hostels and backpack in the mountains, talking to locals that she doesn't have to worry about ever seeing again. Nancy is planning on immediately going to her dream school after highschool and likely pursuing a career right out the gate. She's very driven and focused, wants to go out and seize opportunities that can assist in reaching her goals, and I don't see Robin's dreamier personality traits fitting with that.

I think @thestobingirlie mentioned that while Robin and Nancy both experience the sexism and misogyny of the 80's, Nancy doesn't experience ableism as Robin does. And she doesn't try to understand where Robin is coming from, only openly appreciating her efforts after she ranted at the hospital director.

Robin rambles! We see her either ramble or give clipped answers ("I'm Robin I work with Steve!") When she's nervous or under stress or excited! We see both Nancy and Steve react to these rambles in different ways. When Robin goes off topic in the library with the conspiracy paper, or talks a bit too much about how much she talks a bit too much, Nancy's annoyed. She's initially dismissive of the national Enquirer esq newspaper Robin brings up that helps solve the case (go Robin!). Robin babbles at Steve a lot, and he never makes her feel bad about it. She rambles about rambling to Vickie and the Muppet joke and he adds little commentary as needed, letting her go, or he cuts her off with a little joke during her rabies freak out. He lets her ramble or lets her know she should stop without being actually annoyed and letting her know that by not telling her outright to stop. (She knows immediately that it's a joke, and she jokes back, although understandably nervously. I love them.)

Them being a background pairing so often is annoying, though to varying degrees. If it's just as Robin's gf mentioned I, like others, just kinda...change it to Vickie's name in my brain lol. But other times it's not and it just. Doesn't make sense why Nancy would be such close friends with Steve (her messy breakup ex!) and Robin and Eddie. That girl has big city dreams, she's getting the hell out of her tiny hometown and not looking back. Let her be free!!

I mean obviously the bit I hate about it is that Robin holds a grudge and Nancy broke Steve's heart, which I don't see as compatible, even if we take into account that it's likely Steve and Robin have no idea Nancy cheated on him, and that Steve is an unreliable narrator and blames himself for the breakup. Steve and his relationships with both Nancy and Robin are so pivotal to all three of their characters that ignoring the history there seems a disservice to the complexities of their relationships with each other.

[torchwood-99]

“director’s commentary” on one of your favorite WIP? I am very curious!

My WIP has no title but "epistolary fic".

It began with two plot bunnies. One, I want a Theodred/Boromir post canon fic, where they ship Eowyn and Faramir. Two, I wanted an "enemy" to lovers fic with Eowyn and Faramir.

I figured it would be fun to have the two combined, seeing as Eowyn would naturally be hostile to any attempts to marry her off, and Faramir has expressed pretty condescending views about the Rohirrim, (calling them "Middle Men"), and therefore any attempt at matchmaking the two could lead to some interesting conflict.

I also wanted to write a fic where I do a bit more of an explore into Faramir's faults and flaws and character growth, as I tend to focus more on Eowyn in all my other fics.

I've been reading a lot of Austen lately, so I wanted to write a sort of comedy of manners fic (with a bit of Bridgerton for added inspo), and I love epistolary fics so I decided to set it out in that format.

I've also added in a plotline about Lothiriel/Eomer, which is actually the trigger for a lot of the plit, using a similar Lothiriel characterisation for my "Matchmaker, Matchmaker" fic, only this time giving Lothiriel a chance to grow and mature a bit. Like in that fic, Lothiriel will be a right peace of work, but if I'm going to write what is essentially an OC, I have to admit I'm more interested in all the ways they can cause problems and make things worse, than how they can fix them, so Lothiriel bears the brunt of that. I really like the resolution I have in mind for her, I just hope I can stick it to the landing.

My biggest worry is my characterisation of Eomer, as I need to show him as being "blinkered and besotted", and the tone of the fic is meant to be humorous so I will be poking fun at him (and all the characters), but I don't just want him to come across as a "himbo".

I've been working out his motives and blind spots to try and give some credibility to his actions. Most of it comes down to "Eomer loves a lot, carries a lot of burdens, feels guilty for stuff he couldn't change" and his attempts to handle all that leads to him falling too hard and fast, loving a shadow as Eowyn did with Aragorn.

[performativezippers]

for the director's cut:

“You look like a sexy vampire,” Chloe says, grasping onto Helena’s bicep because she has absolutely no sense of personal space. “Like you’ve been around since the 1800’s, seducing people and drinking blood and generally lounging on, like, deep red velvet cushions.”

Helena laughs, and someone next to their table makes a slightly strangled sound.

Kate looks over to see Myka, who must have just walked up. She’s staring a Helena with a weird look on her face, but as soon as Kate takes a step towards her, she gives herself a little shake and focuses on Kate, the weirdness completely vanished. “Hey, Whistler,” she says, and Kate grins.

“Hey, Bering.”

Their hug is quick, because neither of them are naturally touchy. Myka’s hair is curlier than Kate’s ever seen it, like she’s finally figured out how to condition it properly, and she’s dressed the way she always is, in dark jeans and a simple purple cotton t-shirt. She looks like she gave absolutely no thought to being on TV, and Kate loves her for it.

Okay I have several Director's Cut asks about this section of the Ultimatum which I love! Here's this one.

In general, I love love LOVED writing this scene. I've never written Helena, Myka, or Chloe before, so it was really fun and challenging to simultaneously:

Pull them from their canons (Warehouse 13 and Pitch Perfect) and drop them into this one while remaining recognizable

Make them work as people Kate would actually be friends with

Fit into the conventions of The Ultimatum, aka fulfill the purposes of this brunch for the show

Move my fic's plot forward

Create tension for Kate and Lucy's romance arc

Show Kate and Lucy something new about each other

Show a new side of both Kate and Lucy to the readers

So that said, now let's play through this section. The fic is in black, my commentary is in purple.

“You look like a sexy vampire,” Chloe says, grasping onto Helena’s bicep because she has absolutely no sense of personal space. [Chloe Beale has negative zero conception of personal space. Doesn't she lick Beca's nose at some point? They basically make out the first night. This is just 100% canon Chloe and I love her. I also like thinking about some similarities between Beca and Helena, in terms of pasty-ass white girls with dark hair and enormous emotional walls.] “Like you’ve been around since the 1800’s, seducing people and drinking blood and generally lounging on, like, deep red velvet cushions.” [Obviously this is a joke/nod to Helena being a time traveler from the 1800s, and also I think she'd make a very sexy vampire. She HAS been seducing people since the 1800's and she looks like it! She'd do well against some blood red velvet cushions and I think Myka for one would like to see it]

Helena laughs, and someone next to their table makes a slightly strangled sound. [It's fun to find new ways to introduce characters! And in this setting, people keep arriving, so it was nice to say something other than "Now Myka walks in." I don't think Myka knew Helena would be here today, so not only is she (a) seeing Helena in the flesh for the first time in who knows how long, she's also (b) seeing Helena ON TELEVISION. This whole section is really just me playing with Helena wanting to take a bite out of Myka and Myka being desperately uncomfortable with how desperately she wants that to happen, while also trying--AND FAILING--to conceal all of it from Kate. Meanwhile Helena is like, Katie can know we fucked, darling, I'm not ashamed.]

Kate looks over to see Myka, who must have just walked up. She’s staring a Helena with a weird look on her face, but as soon as Kate takes a step towards her, she gives herself a little shake and focuses on Kate, the weirdness completely vanished. [Myka is good at focusing through absolutely wild shit going on] “Hey, Whistler,” she says, and Kate grins.

“Hey, Bering.” [SOMEONE needs to call Kate "Whistler" in this fic and I'm glad it got to be Myka! I feel like they would have called each other last names in college to mark themselves as different from the other sorority girls and I like that.]

Their hug is quick, because neither of them are naturally touchy. [Myka only touches HELENA] Myka’s hair is curlier than Kate’s ever seen it, like she’s finally figured out how to condition it properly, [I hate her straight hair fyi] and she’s dressed the way she always is, in dark jeans and a simple purple cotton t-shirt. She looks like she gave absolutely no thought to being on TV, and Kate loves her for it. [Myka's fashion sense is so funny. Everyone else on that show is so dated in what they wear -- the LONG TANK TOPS AND TINY VESTS, CLAUDIA, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD -- but for Myka it's like, cotton t-shirt and jeans of the week. I respect this. I wonder what Helena thinks about it.]

[hauntedwizardmoment]

director's commentary for the chunk from "hollowed out and filled with feathers" that starts with "That night, after they’re settled into their room for the night..." and ends with "he's incredible at his job" 👀

oh my god YAY hollowed out is. kind of my baby <3 theyre all my babies but hollowed out is where Cool Girl Thesis lives and i love Cool Girl Thesis. i stand by my cancelled husband evil bisexual purse dog jace stardiamond. i love it when characters have no sense of their identity outside of what other people demand from them and are driven to madness by their own. well. hollowness.

so like. right before the start of this:

That night, after they’re settled into their room for the night (and the route to Sunpeak is charted out), he buys them several cases of the cheapest beer he can find, and pulls out a deck of cards for Porter’s favorite game. “Strip poker?”

we have porter giving jace a direct order to relax. and like, jace is clearly not relaxed. he's about to watch peregrine (guy he was in love with) and aurora (his fundie ex-coworker who ruined his life) get married. but porter gave him an order, so this is him making a show of how relaxed he is. they're gonna play a game porter likes but jace himself doesn't really care for. it doesnt help jace relax but it makes porter think jace is relaxed, is chill, is Cool Girl, and thats what matters

He loses deliberately, plays terribly on purpose and ignores the math in his head telling him exactly what cards Porter has. The tepid beer tastes disgusting and leaves his mouth dry, but he downs it anyways. Wills his shoulders to slouch, tosses his hair back and laughs as he unbuttons his shirt slowly, teasing, after Porter wins again. The goal is to relax, and godsfuckingdammit, he’ll show Porter how relaxed he can be.

jace dumbing himself down, drinking beer he doesnt like, and playing up the flirty act because again, he gets that when porter says "relax" he doesnt mean "curl up in bed doing crosswords and watch medical dramas until you fall asleep" he means "do something that i find fun and sexy, but don't be better than me because that's threatening."

He’ll show all of them just how much better he’s doing. 

and it's all a show because he's still deeply bitter and angry about losing his party and getting replaced.

His laughter turns genuine after the fifth beer, when he’s down to just his underwear and Porter’s still fully clothed. Even with the capital-P Plan and the thought of seeing his old party weighing on him, Porter still manages to make him smile. “You make me so, so happy,” he’s tipsy and stupid, just the way Porter likes him. “I was so lost without you,” he says, as a pair of strong, firm hands wrap around his waist, holding him still. When Porter lays him out, pins his wrists to the bed and conquers him, he doesn’t need to lie to himself.

there is a part of jace that likes not being so high strung! porter brings that out in him, teases out a humor, a lightness, an ease! hollows him out and fills him with feathers! he wants the persona to be real so badly, to actually be as Chill and Easy as porter thinks he is. he's able to lose himself in alcohol and sex and finally, genuinely relax by the end of this scene, but it's fleeting! he wants it to be real!

i won't lie here and say that i did this on purpose as foreshadowing for LSOP fic because this series is very much "whatever situation i can think to put jace in next" but in hindsight, this is like, very sad when you compare this jace to him in "his tomb by the sounding sea" who is dealing with the ramifications of actually being put in a place where he doesnt have to worry about being in control anymore.

and of course then we cut to:

Let it be known that he’s a complete idiot. A pretty face with nothing to back him up. And as of three days ago, even that’s up for debate.

jace POV for scene iv of "burn away the goodness, you and i remain" before he goes out and faces porter. he's been barely-conscious for three days and he's finally lucid enough to hate himself again!! yippee!! his lies have caught up with him and he's being punished for just how easily he caved to porter:

The problem is that he bought his own bullshit. He actually let himself believe he was the version of himself he invented for Porter: fun, easygoing, unchallenging and uncomplicated. Up for anything and everything, from petty theft to dangerous spellwork to erotic roleplay. He’d made sure any disagreements between them were reserved for the trivial, nothing that would ever get in the way of what Porter wanted or needed from him. Sanded down his edges, made himself the perfect partner and acolyte.

and the minute he disagreed with him, showed any sign of resistance, porter killed him over it and made sure that he wouldnt be able to do that again. this is the schrodinger's cat at he heart of starbreaker, to me: does porter care about jace, or was jace only a stepping stone in The Plan? how much of porter's care for him is an act/manipulation, and how much of it is genuine?

He’d forgotten love, for him, is always predicated on deception. If he was going to lie, he should have been prepared to keep it up forever.

jace genuinely believes this too </3 i dont think hes ever been genuine with anyone in his entire adult life, not since he learned that lying gets you what you want faster and easier and it only backfires when people find out

 He looks completely fucked and utterly unfuckable.   A chill runs through him when he remembers that it’s his own spellcraft that did this, ripped his control to shreds and gave the tattered pieces to someone else. Even now, he can feel an unfamiliar current of magic writhing beneath his skin, alive and with a mind of its own. The sensation turns his stomach, makes bile rise in his throat.

i think i'm like so preoccupied with "lack of control" being one of jace's worst fears because of how sorcerers are in rules-as-written d&d? like it's literally described as innate magic but idk man anything thats come innately to me has still always required me to hone whats already there with precision until it goes from good to really fucking good. also yay to jace selling a piece of himself to porter and for physical descriptions of magic, which i am also very preoccupied with.

He won’t let Porter see how much he’s falling apart.  If he pretends that he’s fine, then he is fine. He can still be everything Porter needs and wants, irreplaceable. He’s incredible at his job.

he's still fighting! he's so angry and spiteful in this, he can't even imagine letting the mask slip mere days after coming back to life. back to work, the show must go on! he's honestly mortified that there were three days where he didnt have the mask on. the performance is forever and it will take everything from him <3

[red-dye40]

please give us the director's commentary for "IT'S NOT A FETISH THING." i loved that fic so much!!!

i live to please you anon (thank you!!!)

because it’s a one shot we’re gonna do the whoooooole thing :)

There’s a Bub’s Burger Boy piggy bank just kind of sitting on a crate in the corner–arguably the most unsettling piece of decor here.

i can’t even begin to tell you how much research i have put into determining what reverend meat is (like is he a ceramic figure or like a molded plastic or what)—based on my research ☝️🤓 there plenty of variances of big boy burger figures made by funko NOOOOW but back before like the 2000s almost all the collectible figures of the boy were actually rubbery piggy banks and i cross referenced a bunch of actual banks listed on ebay with the very few rev meat appearances and kinda settled on him being a late 80s variant (which i think lines up well with the timeline) 🤪

also fun fact @margaritaville gave me that exact piggy bank for my birthday this year :)

“So. It’s been a while.” She tries again. “Yes.” “Still killin’?” “Mmyep.”

i have such a deep fascination with nny as a side character and i have a profound fetish for the times in which he is completely disinterested in his killin thing

Nny feels a small twinge in his brain; a little shiver of something that makes him sick and overwhelmed. He presses his fingers hard against his temples to try and relieve some of the sensation.

this headache thing iss nny constantly remembering the pain associated with the head trauma devi caused him the night of their date, and the subsequent overwhelm is him realizing He Is Horny For It but doesn’t know how to proceed. later, when devi gets the same headache, it’s kinda the opposite side of the same coin.

Last month I bought a wholesale box of gas station hot pickles and stuffed them full of the white goo inside Twinkies, and I ate the whole thing in one sitting.”

this was originally a line of dialogue in ancaux!

“Nny… what you’re describing sounds less like a cause for alarm and more like a cause for… just living your life like a normal person. It feels like you don’t allow yourself that luxury, and it’s making you insane. Maybe also pregnant? If you just let yourself, y’know… eat good food, have some hobbies that aren’t murder-based, maybe make a friend that isn’t presumably that Burger Boy you can’t stop looking over at–maybe you won’t be such a raging lunatic all the time? Or, I don’t know, it could be a nice start??”

i imagine devi suffers from the virgo disease of needing to problem solve everything—like she can’t help it, even when it’s for someone she absolutely detests. it all seems so simple to her, like just stop being fucking crazy!!!!

though i never stated this ANYWHERE in the text, i placed this fic a few months after nny’s phone call apology, and in that time devi’s taken some good care of herself, less full of rage and more just like. wow that guy is so fucking sad and pathetic. i would love to fix him or maybe just tear his guts out.

There’s something extremely unprepossessing about your victim willingly offering themselves up to you. She unenthusiastically grabs him by the wrist. Turns his arm over.

i reeeeeeeally wanted this whole part to feel. almost boring, definitely awkward. consent is obviously good and communication is good and also what i think a lot of ppl maybe don’t realize is sometimes this negotiation grinds things to a halt and devi was really hopin she could just roll up and maim this fucker.

Devi can tell that, behind his hands, Nny is blushing hard again. She can’t get enough of this power dynamic.

i also have a fetish for absolute maniacs melting into a puddle because a hot girl has the upper hand and is kind of making fun of them for being a sniveling brat

“You are so incredibly fucked up.” She tells Nny. He kinda chuckles.

i really like this little exchange honestlie :) i think it must be kinda fun to share the full scope of his “”””hobby”””” with someone who won’t immediately run away and maybe even on some level appreciate it. like devi’s disturbed, yeah, but she knows she can best nny so she’s not really scared of him, and she’s about to use all this stuff on nny so rn she’s kinda into it? maybe that only makes sense to me but :)

His finger dislocates like nothing, right at the base, and he feels a gross shooting pain run all the way down his wrist. The air is still thoroughly knocked out of him, so he can only wheeze and kick his legs. Devi gives the same finger a little twist and a little tug. She’s almost hoping it’ll come right off and maybe sound like a cork popping when it does. Instead, little blood spots begin rising to the surface right at the point of tension, forming quick and easy bruises that swell his joints. She feels satisfied with that–she releases the forceps, but keeps her grip on his hand so she can move right along to the next finger.

i rewrote this part soooooo many times. originally i wanted devi to slowly saw off his fingers, one at a time, and she was gonna be talking a lot more doing it. there was a though that this fic was actually gonna be one in a series of three, and with each installment the violence was gonna get worse and worse and more and more blatantly horny. so i pulled back on the amount of gore and made devi talk a whole lot less bc she’s just so focused on “making it feel good”. eventually tho the second installment turned into sexual trauma clip show and became its own thing, so i sometimes wish i made this part grosser. but i also think i’ve read it so much i’m completely desensitized to it.

His mouth is a mess of spit and blood and mucus. Tears are streaming down his face and he’s moaning, kind of laughing, fully blushing and heaving.

I HEART FLUIDS!!!!!!!

Then a huge barbed hook, mounted at the end of a pole almost as tall as her. She starts to pull it down. Out of the corner of her eye she can see Nny deflate a little.

pssst! it’s the hook nny used to cut mmy open!

“Show me where.” She orders. He nods again. With a weak and shaky hand, he points down to the lower part of his abdomen, not quite in the middle but presumably far away from anything vital. Devi takes a breath. Sidles up a little closer. Her left hand, harsh but tender, grabs the back of his head. She pokes the tip of the knife right where Johnny had pointed out. And it’s a risk, but he holds out his hand under Devi’s to offer to guide her along. She thinks about it. Takes another breath. Moves to wrap her left hand around Nny’s fingers, around her hand holding the knife, and the two of them go for it.

when i was writing this i was like ��ugh this is too sweet for them” and really was scared it felt out of character, too shippy, etc. but i also do think devi would not want to actually kill someone, not even nny, at least not in this narrative. the cover art i made for this fic has a screenshot of a google search that says something like “places to stab someone that won’t kill them but will still hurt” which is truly what i searched in order to figure out where she could stab him.

His face drains of all color. His eyes kind of roll back in his head. Something guttural sounds from the back of his throat. His grip on Devi’s hand lessens, and all at once his arm drops limp at his side.

death gurgle as a metaphor for cumming

THATS PRETTY MUCH ALL I GOTTA SAY ABT THAT!!!!!! thank you again for ur kind words :)

[miafeystits]

if you’re still doing the ask game – i really liked how you incorporated different readings of dahlia in your most recent fic (i thought it was very cool how it could be read as analogous to audience interpretation of a fictional character, which works especially well for a polarizing character like dahlia). was there anything in particular that made you want to explore this idea? do you have any director’s commentary on it?

hello yes!! i absolutely have MANY thoughts on the topic and would love to give some director’s commentary

the thing about dahlia hawthorne & mia fey are dead is that initial versions of it were way different than what it ultimately turned into. mind you, it was always going to be written as a play, always set vaguely in the afterlife, and always involved mia and dahlia speaking and trying to get to the bottom of why dahlia did what she did. but these earlier versions were a lot less meta, and stuck much closer to a single interpretation of her character that was eventually uncovered throughout the work**. the placeholder title was “theaters of cruelty” and i was drawing a lot more from no exit than rosencrantz & guildenstern are dead; one idea of mine was to maybe follow a psychelock structure and ultimately get down to the core of dahlia’s issues that way. obviously, this did not end up happening

so i ultimately went in a different direction, because the thing is that in the process of trying to get at the core of “why is dahlia like this” i kept running into the same issue:  we don’t really ever get anything approaching a definitive answer to that question in the game itself—we get implication, the interpretations of other characters, we get a few things that dahlia tells us herself (if we can trust them), but nothing that ever feels truly substantial or complete to me. and in most cases this wouldn’t be THAT big of an issue—this is fanfic, the whole point is filling in the gaps with your own interpretation. so i tried to fight against the issue at first, create my own interpretation use that, but it never felt quite right, always like i was forcing it. i think creating and sticking to a single interpretation would have been easier for me to do had i been writing in prose, because that’s a medium where the world and the characters often feel more concrete to me in some way, it’s a place where it feels more necessary to stick to a single interpretation/version of reality. but in theater, at least for me, there’s this greater conscientiousness of the medium and its inherent unreality, especially since i tend toward a more metatheatrical mode in both what ive written and what i like to read—there’s a much stronger sense of the characters as characters, and as potential actors in/directors of their story. so eventually instead of fighting against the lack of finality in dahlia’s arc by imposing my own interpretation, i decided to embrace the problem as the actual subject of the piece

because ultimately i think what i realized in the process of writing the early drafts is that the tragedy of dahlia to me is not so much whatever deep dark secret that lurks inside her and makes her act the way she does, it’s the fact that she’s never given that full interiority in the first place. if we want that interiority we can’t look to the text, we have to invent her out of the scraps we’re given, which leads to such a wide variety of interpretations. and then we decide on which version of girl we prefer, but no version will ever be more correct, only more convincing, and we have to make peace with that as members of the audience.

but we as the audience also get to make peace with that. much like in rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead, i wanted to highlight that there’s an absurd tragedy to being a character in a story, and more so to being an incomplete character in a story that’s not about you. the tragedy of the character dahlia hawthorne is that even if she wanted it, she could never get true closure about why she acts the way she does. there’s no answer! it’s all interpretation

anyway, i hope that responded to your question! thank you for the ask and letting me ramble about this!

**as an example of how different my approach to the character was in each version, compare dahlia’s introduction:

from an early draft: “In center stage, on a white couch, sits THE GHOST OF DAHLIA HAWTHORNE. Around her neck hangs an ill-fitting noose, and her neck is decorated by a collar of bruises/rope-burn, the moment of her death tattooed onto her phantasmal form. She wears a light blue prisoner’s uniform and her hair is a mess, braids falling loose. Her hands are stained with blood.] [In her hands she holds a picture frame, grip tight. We can’t see what’s in it.]”

vs the final version: “Enter DAHLIA HAWTHORNE. She is a beautiful young woman, and gives the appearance of never having been anything else. She wears the white silk dress she has always worn, although without the accessories she has always carried— no shawl, no parasol, no shoes. She walks to center stage, and takes a seat in the empty chair: the witness stand.”