#i would call it like. the zero au but thats not a very unique name is it

[dropoutparty]

FUCKK i need a name for my krbay au,,, why is thinking of names so hard

[omegalomania]

i fucking love hearing suitehearts au stuff, and au stuff in general... so like tea i wanna hear the fun stuff

LMAO well then anon i will do my best to deliver. idk if i’d call it an au exactly? i visualize the characters of the suitehearts as their own thing independent of the people portraying them, but i won’t bicker over people reading it how they like!

opens up my bigass disorganized Fucking Document of suitehearts lore i have frankly mostly invented

SO the thing about the suitehearts is that i view the world they occupy as kind of...an exaggeration of reality. it is not literal reality. in part cause we get this handy shot in the video

which implies to me that people can actually cross into this world via portals from “normal land” i.e. reality as we know it. normal landers are humans, ordinary people, and they can cross into the reality of...the suitehearts. i call it Hollywood Hills because like, thats definitely what it’s emulating, but it’s not the literal Hollywood Hills. 

so the way i read it is this: when the Hollywood-centric entertainment industry got big in Normal Land, an extant mirror world entailing all of Hollywood's greatest sins and triumphs formed as well. the Hollywood Hills we see in the video are like a funhouse mirror. they’re exaggerated, hyperbolic reflections of all that the industry there represents. it’s hard to say which is the more “real” version of reality. do things happen “first” in Normal Land and see themselves reflected in the Hollywood Hills here? vice versa? do the events in one version of reality trigger similar events in another? or are they just echoes of the same song?

the answer to that is who goddamn knows.

putting the rest of this under a cut cause....goddamn this got FUCKIN LONG.

the point is that the Hollywood Hills we see in the video and the reality the suitehearts occupy is....bizarre. it’s full of grotesque exaggerations. and at the center of it all of it are the Suitehearts, and the Suitehearts are....i’m not sure how to describe them other than i guess maybe avatars? conductors? in the context of this world. each of them represent and have mastery over an “element” or aspect that’s intrinsic to the entertainment industry. that’s what i really zeroed in on here when i started building this whole thing, mostly cause a) that’s what the america’s suitehearts song/video focuses on so Obviously yeah i’d go that route and b) those themes resonate very nicely with the rest of the folie a deux album which is nice.

anyway! the suitehearts.

mr. sandman is the suiteheart of dreams. this one is a given, since he’s named after the sandman, which is a folklore creature that puts people to sleep and gives people dreams. in the context of this universe, he presides over dreams and by extension sleep in general. he can’t create dreams (because dreams come from the SELF this is very important) but he can alter them and manipulate them. dreams are an important thing to have when you’re in any kind of massive industry, but in this case i don’t mean dreams in the abstract like motivation. i mean more dreams in terms of inspiration, and the seeds of your subconscious in dreams that can be harnessed into facilitating creation. sandman exists kind of partially out of the reality of the Hills; he can’t actually sleep or dream on his own, so he more or less slips in and out of people’s sleeping subconscious...es. so the “physics” of the Hills apply a little less to him. he can float slightly, he’s got this shadowy/smoky aura that never dissipates, and he’s always shrouded in darkness.

horseshoe crab is the suiteheart of luck. another given, since the video title card calls him the “luckiest man alive.” he can alter anyone’s luck, make them extremely lucky or extremely unlucky. he is also himself preternaturally lucky to a really really horrible extent. he can’t turn it off, so there are like...no stakes in his life. he has no regard for personal safety because he’s so absurdly lucky that he never has to worry about it. concepts like hope are just obsolete to him. he knows the outcome to everything that happens to him before it happens because he’s always going to come out fine on the other side. this results in this intense nihilism and apathy and difficulty in giving a fuck cause like...it’s all gonna be fine man. why bother worrying about literally anything?? he’s been known to describe his luck as being able to see this perpetual set of rolling dice in his head. the dice always keep rolling, so he knows his luck will always hold. he...doesn’t know what happens when they stop. they never have. it doesn’t really bother him though. it’s hard for anything to bother him.

donnie the catcher is the suiteheart of attention. i wasn’t sure about what he would represent since “catcher” plus donnie’s title card just kind of hinted at something related to sports, which isn’t reaaaally an intrinsic part to the entertainment industry. but the “america’s suitehearts” song makes a very explicit parallel between sports and paparazzi/media attention in the lyric “down, set, one, hut, hut, hike / media blitz” - which is especially clever since “blitz” is an actual football play. plus “catcher” can have a lot of meanings, such as to “catch” someone’s attention. and this is VERY important if u wanna make it in any big industry like the entertainment one! so donnie has the ability to alter how much he or others are noticed. he can make himself so forgettable and imperceptible that he might as well be invisible, or someone so eye-catching that they’re wholly impossible to ignore, and so on. there are limits here that will depend on context, like it’d be difficult to make someone performing on stage nearly imperceptible mid-performance, but it’s very easy to make someone disappear into a crowd if they want. he indulges in this very often in fact. any time donnie is confronted with a situation he doesn’t want to be in he can more or less just disappear from most people’s perception and not deal with it :T donnie also has the uncanny ability to notice things most people wouldn’t, which comes w the territory of being what he is.

dr. benzedrine is the suiteheart of euphoria. again i wasn’t super sure what to do with him until i did some research into the “benzedrine” drug and that was super fascinating. point is that benzedrine is a trade name for a pharmaceutical that among other things is very energizing and can induce euphoria. and euphoria is of course pretty essential to anyone chasing their hollywood dreams, PLUS it’s very topical for anyone who ends up chasing a chemical high in any industry, given how rampant substance abuse can get in that context. benzedrine is in theory capable of controlling and altering the levels of happiness in himself and others. in theory i say, because benzedrine is very much Unique and Not In A Good Way as i’ve mentioned before, and one of the consequences of this is that he can’t moderate his own happiness levels. he can experience it organically or not at all but he can’t induce it in himself - only in others. benzedrine more or less defaults to being kind of cranky and is seldom very genuinely happy, though he has been known to whip out a downright terrifying, completely insincere, and very, very wide smile if he’s really pissed off. he’s also got that giant, grinning shadow that literally always follows him and he. really doesn’t know what is up with it. and he doesn’t like that he doesn’t know what’s up with it cause it’s obviously linked to him in a very demonstrable way. and it’s creepy as all shit and he kind of hates it and so do the others.

the “job” of the suitehearts is basically to give what visiting Normal Landers require from them. if someone wants attention, luck, euphoria, dreams - the suitehearts give it to them. and it costs a little something of course, just a little portion of their mortal souls, but the Normal Landers are willing, for the most part. not all of them are - some wander in by accident - but inevitably they succumb to the kaleidoscopic lure of this technicolor world and the temptation of perpetual luck without compromise, bliss without fear of a comedown, dreams that will forever inspire you, all the attention they could possibly want. and maybe it helps them get big in Normal Land. but more likely and most frequently, it just brings them back and back and back for more and more and more until eventually they’re mere hollow caricatures of who they were. and at that point, they sink into the acid green moat and the Hills claim them for good.

do the suitehearts like that they do this? well...they have varying opinions. sandman fucking loathes it. horseshoe doesn’t really care because it’s hard for him to care about anything. donnie finds it unsettling. benzedrine thinks it’s very irritating because he’d rather be getting important studies and work done since he’s the most dedicated to learning everything he can about the world they’re in. but the crux of the matter is that they don’t really have a choice in it. that’s what they’re there to do. they facilitate the trade of souls in exchange for the boons and benefits they boast. they can no sooner stop being a part of this than they could remember anything outside of their lives in the Hollywood Hills.

which they can’t, by the way. they have no memories of anyone or anything outside of their existence in the Hills. they’re not human, but what are they? were they human once? did they ever have actual names? how long have they been here? does time even pass normally in the Hills? they can’t leave the Hills after all; the portals to Normal Land simply refuse to allow them through, and the boundaries of the Hills are impossible for them to surpass.

these are their roles. (who decided those roles?) so they play their parts. (don’t think about it.) they do as they’re meant to. (how do they know to do that? no one ever told them.) this just their lot in life. (are they even alive?)

and what happens when some of them start to get the feeling that there’s something important that they’re forgetting?

[the-shark-well]

I’m interested to see the contexts of some of your WIPs! Whatever you wanna share, I’m curious.

Hell yes let's go:

I have kinda alot, most of them have their own unique universes so sometimes it becomes a lot to handle, I'll start with the really old ones and go to the recents, also not counting dead projects or the unsavable ones lmao

Hoof 'N Wing - originally called "Feather Prophecy" the story follows a tribe of dragons who live in the mountains, and a horse who wanders into their Territory, through dragon magic he becomes a pegasi and works as the Tribe's second witch doctor under the wise dragon Kancer. I actually have the first/second(ish?) chapters or so written for this one but it's OLD AND UGLY AND NO ONE GETS TO SEE IT

Planet W - the one I've worked on a shit ton since creating it, yet the one that's made about zero progress in plot and characters. The two mains, Tripp and Yinyang, are a wolf-like species known as Glitches, they have magical abilities and the whole plot is basically them running around and causing havock.

((im really trying to remember if I had any between these guys so maybe I'll follow up when it finally clicks))

Impossibility (books 1-3) - All because of a fuckin' dream where the sun fell into earth and was still habitable, my main project and....I think it's my only humanoid story that I actually care about, some info is on @thelapse-universe

Pestividian (a whole book series of different pests in vaguely or very obvious corrupt situations)

- Foam Jaw Sewers - a rat named Oscar discovers his cage-mate has mysteriously disappeared and intends to find her, getting caught up in a rabid gang of sewer rats in the process, planned to be a lot more heavy than my usual stuff, more on the lines of the JF AU tbh

- Untitled Spider Story :') - A cult flock of Ravens have taken home in the attic of the abandoned barn house Journey and his family reside in. With the help of another spider, Feller, who lives out in the wild and the barn Owls next door, they plan to take out the Intruders (plays on the simple idea that since Dinosaurs are Bird ancestors, they'd worship them like gods or in this case, dino Satan)

- Hive Minded - a worker bee must take out the villianous queen bee and account a new one before her very existence destroys the Hive

- Wing between Dawn - Flies live through light, or through darkness, except in this flies case, who was born as the night was ending and the dawn was beginning, not a whole lot of plot to this either, just thought it was a cool concept that was RUINED BECAUSE ONLY MAYFLIES LIVE FOR 24 HOURS AND THATS NOT EVEN DAY OR NIGHT !!! :(

I guess I could list some non originals too? Fanfic ideas n shit that I'll probably never get to (all of them w2h just a spoiler alert)

Welcome to Fatherhood - Seven Deadly Descendents AU, planned to be a slice of life so of thing with Sockathan and all seven of their fuckin hell spawn children, Lil/Jojo would have quadruplets and Meph/Prov would have a kid named Adam, everything to do with the kids is a wink and a nod to religious shit lmao, Liljo's kids being based off of the Four Horsemen (idek if that's a religious thing but it works) and Adam.....c'mon. ((dont ask about mpreg that's nasty I firmly believe they gave dna to stork scientists who gave them a baby 2 months later))

Jonathan's Forest / whatever I'd name the fic - this is self explanatory, if you don't know this au you probably haven't seen a lot of my art for it sksk

Diamond Day - I explain this more on the concepts, I think if you just go to the Diamond Day AU tag on my blog you can find it and read more than I could ever recite lmao, I've done more concepting but still no full "plot" :(

Maybe. Maybe maybe a twd au - I never concept this but it's always in the back of my mind, zombies, romance, drama, everything TWD/twdg has this would have, Sock loses an arm.