#it's possible that trevor has the most character exploration in this fic. the reason is because i like him

[inked-out-trees]

oh, mischief theatre, i hope i love you forever. here is a cornleyverse fic about supporting and loving each other through difficulty! ♡

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Moments in the life of the CPDS, from its inception to its future: hard times, good times, and times of togetherness.

[loveyboyslovin]

Jess’ Fic Recs: A Masterpost

i'm told a lot these days by @myriadus

i’m told a lot these days is a beautiful Cow Chop story based on the show Dead Like Me (which is amazing btw so definitely go watch it if you haven’t!). Gina is a Phenomenal writer, and this story was the first fic to ever make me bawl my eyes out with Legitimate Tears. For that reason, it will occupy a special place in my heart until the day I die. If you haven’t read it yet, you are missing out on what became one of the most influential fan fiction reading experiences of my life!

Pyrite (and the coda Diamonds Are Forever) by @cockbite (personalized_radio on AO3)

Pyrite was the first of Hannah’s longer stories that I ever read, and I will never regret it! This Fake Chop fic also includes characters from the other Fake Rooster Teeth crews. The characterisation is excellent and the story draws you in from the very start! Diamonds Are Forever picks up a while after Pyrite’s story and perfectly builds on the beautiful relationship that James and Aleks have with each other, as well as the absolute hilarity of James and Gavin’s ongoing feud. Also, Hannah is a wonderful human being, and I am so lucky that Gina kept telling me how amazing she was until I eventually plucked up the courage to go say hi! Hannah is one of the nicest people I’ve met in this fandom, and she’s always right there when I need someone to bounce ideas off, so please go and show her some love!

i'm taking all i have to take, this taking's gonna shape me by orphan_account on AO3

If you are a fan of Fake Chop, and are comfortable with the concept of male pregnancy, then this fic will destroy your heart with feels!! I stumbled upon it by accident, and being a lover of both Fake Chop and mpreg, read the entire series of two fics in one sitting! This story is heartbreaking and spectacular and life-changing in equal measure, and although dlmau still remains the first time I ever cried from reading a fic, this wins the Uncontrollable Sobbing Award, because I was crying at so many points throughout the story that it’s not even funny. This fic is an emotional rollercoaster, and that is a testament to exactly how Phenomenal a writer she is! (And if you are someone who is unsure of your feelings for mpreg, I honestly believe that this fic is a wonderful first step into that world!)

Bump In The Night by @pacificrey

A really cool Spooky Scary Monster AU where Aleks takes up a job placement with the slightly shady company, Cow Chop. As things unfold, he soon realises that his coworkers might not be exactly who they seem. The pacing of this story is really amazing and I love it, especially the choices for each of the monster species and how well they fit the personalities of the characters they’ve been assigned to.

first impressions (and the searchlights series as a whole) by @myriadus

Ok, so W O W! first impressions is Spectacular, and it’s literally only a prequel of sorts for the larger fic to come. It is set in a combined Fake Chop and Soulmate AU, and the focus of the story is on Aleks and the different times and ways that he met the members of what would one day become the Cow Chop crew. Gina once again blows me away with the way that she can characterise our favourite boys and girls so well that I can hear the words coming from their own mouths. This fic is so worth checking out, and I definitely recommend sticking around for the rest of the searchlights series as it’s being written!

it all seemed so fine until it wasn't. by @gavinsaleks

An Amazing Fake Chop fic where James and Aleks slowly fall for each other, and everything is ripped from them when Aleks is killed, or at least seems to die. When a mysterious visitor shows up a few years later, James has to deal with the fact that the friendship and possible love that he had already mourned, never truly left him after all. This one is incredibly emotional, and I love the way that it’s written.

Chill Out by @cockbite (personalized_radio on AO3)

Anyone who knows me will know that I am a multishipper at heart, and I can enjoy almost every single Cow Chop ship as much as any other. Hannah, bless her heart, wrote This Thing, and I haven’t been the same since. Chill Out is pretty much just PWP, but it’s ModestHundarNovaHD and all four of our boys are just written so Perfectly that I could just die. The sex itself is amazing, but the emotion and writing behind it just elevates this fic to a whole new level, so definitely check it out if you’re into some Prime Smut!

Subway Love by @therearenofriendshipsinuno

A Fake Chop universe where Trevor is a civilian and he happens to meet Aleks on the train to work, completely oblivious to the fact that he’s an infamous criminal called Immortal. This is a really wonderful fic and I adore it, because it’s such a new and exciting change to be reading about Fake Chop from the perspective of an outsider, someone who isn’t part of that world.

Lost & Found (and the alternate POV one-shots Kaleidoscope) by @beneaththetwilightsky

Lost and Found is an incredible Soulmate AU where you have the first thing your soulmate will say to you tattooed on your skin. James grew up with no such tattoo, and thought that it meant he wasn’t ever destined to find a soulmate, but then one day he bumps into a boy, Aleks, who is mute. This story is Insanely cute, and I love to read about the beautiful budding relationship between Aleks and James. Now that Lost & Found has been completed, Kaleidoscope tells the story of their relationship from the viewpoint of other characters in L&F, and it’s so wonderful to constantly see the world she has created be explored and expanded. She, by the way, is one of the sweetest and most wonderful people I’ve ever met, and it has been such a profound honour to become friends with her and to continue to cherish NovaHD and Cow Chop together!

what you had & what you lost by @scrubtopia

A Fake Chop fic set in the 80′s, where James and Aleks struggle to move on after their crew of bank robbers disbands. The ending is simply beautiful, and the way the entire story is written is truly masterful!

Cow Chop Cabin by @brutalitytailor

I read this one ages ago, and I still love it to this day. It’s insanely cute how the Cow Chop boys (minus Brett) go and stay in a nice cabin in the Colorado mountains for a few weeks. The whole thing is beautifully domestic, and I adore the plot about Aleks going through a break up and how James and Aleks work through their budding feelings for each other.

Nova, Baby by @cockbite (personalized_radio on AO3) and @kidenn

Fake Chop, Fake AH Crew, Coffee Shop AU, Dog Park, Enemies to Friends to Lovers. Do I really need to say anything else?? This incredible fic by my darling Hannah and collaborated with Jackie is an experience you’ll never forget! If you haven’t read this yet, you are truly missing out!

ultrajoy by twotwentyfour on AO3

The fact that this is a first fic ever written still completely blows my mind! It is crafted so well and written so evocatively, and the development of James and Aleks’ relationship (starting out as kids innocently playing together and becoming best friends, then growing into young adults planning for college and learning about the realities of the world) is so organic and beautiful to read that I’m getting emotional just thinking about it!

love in the first degree by @poeticatbest (astralnoon on AO3)

What first began as my birthday request of “beachside love confession in the rain” to my dear friend, love in the first degree immediately became a gift I’ll never forget! This fic - set in a Soulmate AU - has its angsty moments but builds to such a gorgeous and happy ending for both James and Aleks! A story about moving on from the pain of the past, of learning to love yourself and to trust others, I can’t recommend it highly enough!

i’m buried in this house (i love yous on every floor) by @honeyeonii

I’ll tell you one thing about my wonderful friend, Mark. He has an unparalleled ability to capture emotion and character in a short story. Though each of his fics are bite-sized, they are just as impactful to me as stories I’ve read that have been tens of thousands of words long! After reading this beautiful love story, do yourself a favour and go read every single one of his Cow Chop stories, because they are all incredible!

[nonsenseandstuff]

So Wonder Woman. 

I have opinions. This is basically a mishmash of first thoughts after seeing the film. 

*Spoilers* Please don’t spoil it for yourself, it was so good! *spoilers*

So first of all, this is a great film. It’s well written, it’s great to look at ( i love the costumes), and it’s just good. 

This film, from the very beginning is steeped in sorrow. We open in modern times, with a cynical Diana. (How cute is it that she works as a curator at the Louvre, by the way? I want all the fic!) She has apparently given up on saving the world, on being a hero. Then a photo is delivered. It shows Diana with a group of people in WW1. Who 100 years later are certainly all dead. So we’re set up for sadness right from the get go. That continues throughout the film. With the Amazonian’s tragic backstory, the death of a family member and the horrors of war, there is a clear theme of “Life is sad, people die, everything ends.” Despite this aura of sorrow, the film isn’t dark. It’s realistic, yes, and it’s set in a dark period of history, but there’s a nice thread of humour and humanity running through it. 

The Amazons are, to a woman, stunning. They are beautiful and deadly and fierce and I love them all. I love that Robin Wright (who I never would have recognised in a hundred years! I have only ever seen her as Buttercup) get’s to be strong and battle scarred and wrinkled. I love that Connie Neilson get’s to be a good leader, a strong woman, and yet she also is allowed to be vulnerable. Their fight scenes and training scenes were visibly stunning and obviously involved a lot of skill. I seem to remember that they recruited Olympians for some of the amazons, and I think that was a very good decision. I completely am in love with the Amazonian fighting style. It’s so extra! But that makes perfect sense given their society. 

I will move on from the Amazons in a moment, but they are so beautiful and varied, with a number of ages, races and appearances. Women being allowed to age, being allowed to step out of the mould, it’s wonderful to see. 

 Speaking of people being allowed to step out of the mould, people being allowed to be people, can I just say how great it is that not only do they have a range of races and cultures represented in the main characters, but that many background characters were of different races too? In a realistic way too. We see a lot of Indian background characters for example, including a group of soldiers at the train station wearing Sikh turbans, and this is something that is generally shoved to one side and covered over when this period of history is discussed or fictionalised. In most WWI films I’ve seen the soldiers are uniformly white, with maybe one black guy if the film has a specific race subplot. We Brits are bad at acknowledging our colonialism. 

The setting of WW1 perfectly matched the themes of the film, with the lack of a clear villain being especially true to the era. I also liked that they showed the realities of war. Nothing was shiny or clean or covered over, we see amputees and destroyed villages and the trenches. War is dirty and brutal and achingly human, and the film demonstrated that beautifully. I love that both the sides were allowed to show their humanity as well as their villainy. (We see the British/allies side being misogynistic, incompetent, hopeless, willing to risk lives because they never set foot on the battle field and we also see their soldiers as human beings who are suffering and trying to do what they think is right. We see the German side as vicious and merciless, and with leaders just as bumbling as the British, but we also see teenagers in uniform. We see human beings.) The film does a good job of flagging this  up at a number of points. 

I liked Diana’s team. They were all really sweet, and they each had their own quirks. I think maybe we could have had a little more development for the team as a whole, but that would have made the film way too long, so I get why we didn’t. It felt a bit like each team member got three things: a role, a quirk and a weakness/vulnerable spot. So we have the sniper/who sings/and has PTSD, the language expert/who is an actor/ but has the wrong skin colour etc. It would have been nice to have some more depth, but again, with time restrictions and the amount of characters on the team, I can see why they chose not to explore the character traits further. 

I also think that they’re thinking about building the franchise, so chances are we will either get development in WWII or the time skip between films would mean the characters wouldn’t be feasible so developing them is not necessary. 

I like that the film wasn’t afraid to poke fun at some of the standard gender tropes. Like at one point Steve gives Diana glasses (because glasses instantly make women ugly?) and it’s flagged up as ridiculous and the glasses are destroyed in a bad ass back alley fight scene within seconds. Diana walks in on Steve having a bath, and instead of having the camera linger and Diana apologising while sneaking looks, she just glances at him and asks about his watch (which is far more interesting than a penis). How many actions films have the hero watch the love interest get changed or walk in on her getting out of the shower? 

 I talked about this on the false equivalence post that’s going around, but I thought it was interesting that my dad’s reaction to Steve Trevor was “The studio wasn’t brave enough to just make him the love interest. They had to make him a hero in his own right.” And that, right there, is the difference between men writing a love interest and a woman writing a love interest. It’s the reason we ship the main character with his best friend instead of ‘the love interest’. Because women tend to be attracted to personalities and can’t see relationships between a good character and a two dimensional but pretty girl. Whereas men I guess see women as trophies or see attractiveness as their most important character trait. I think if Wonder Woman had just inverted that trope instead of defying it, then the film would have been very different. It would have been seen as more comedic for one, and the relationship element would have been a lot less believable. 

One thing I am a little concerned about, and I’m honestly not sure if I’m being overly sensitive, is in a film that is lauded for being diverse, I think there were some issues with how the diversity was portrayed. Like I said earlier, there were diverse characters in the background (and this is a good thing in one way, portraying a more realistic London) but when it comes to the Amazons, it was concerning to me that only one Amazon of colour got a single line.Within the main cast we do have Sameer and Chief, and the film must be lauded for that (it’s rare that more than one non-white race is included on an action team, usually there’s the token woman and the token black character), so they do have some impressive representation when it comes to men. In a film that is feminist both on screen and behind the scenes, some more instersectionality of the women with speaking roles would have been nice. 

  I think it would also have been nice to have a disabled Amazon. The way disability is portrayed in the film had some mixed messages for me, and I’d really need to see it again to figure out what I think about it (I was concerned going in because from the trailer it appeared that disabled/disfigured=evil was going to be a theme, thankfully this wasn’t the case, but it meant that I was looking at the portrayal of disability with a critical eye and maybe saw things that weren’t there). We see soldiers coming off the WWI battlefield as amputees, we see a character with PTSD, and there’s the aforementioned villain with facial scars and possibly vocal/breathing issues. I would have been nice to have an Amazon amputee who is still being trained by Antiope. We do see Amazons with battle scars, most clearly on Antiope herself, which is a step in the right direction (can you imagine a male director having a scarred female warrior character and not making a big deal of said scars? Either the point would be made that she was ‘beautiful, in spite of her scars’ or she would be self conscious about them and talk about how she was a better warrior and less of a woman (until the hero kissed her of course) but Antiope’s scars were just there. They weren’t commented on at all and they were not shown in any way to detract from her as a woman.)

I loved the film. I wanted to see it again almost immediately. Gal Gadot is amazing, as are all the main cast, but as Diana Gal truly shone. She played both weary cynicism and youthful naivete perfectly and her murder strut across no man’s land was on point. 

[inked-out-trees]

⭐ for The Keep Going Song? Thanks! :)

(anh i would die for you)

Thank you for asking! I am going to be talking about the whole thing because it's fun, and because there's not really many ~secrets~ within the text to ramble about, just little fun snippets!

I'll do it under a cut because I will definitely ramble. Woohoo!

I came across The Keep Going Song (the song) after my Lookout 3 Companion Playlist (& my spotify discovery) introduced me to the Bengsons. The effect was almost instantaneous - it's the kind of warmth I try to encompass in everything I do, and for the next few days I had it on repeat as I worked. This was around the time I was finishing my Lookout script, and I had been toying with the idea of writing a Cornleyverse fic after absolutely devouring all 10 fics in the tag. What I knew was that I wanted it to be sweet, I wanted it to pull them all together, and I wanted it to be a progression. Despite only having seen the Goes Wrong Show, jumping into the fandom made me want to dimensionalize these characters and give them a story beyond everything that had already occured.

I also watched Christmas Carol before / during the writing process, but to date I have not watched Peter Pan or the full-length TPTGW. My prior knowledge comes from Wikipedia, the delightul amateur TPTGW production on YouTube, a friend's excellent transcription of the Haversham Manor script, and tumblr meta analysis. I think I did a reasonable enough job pretending I knew what I was doing.

Let's get going!

I knew off the top that it was going to be vignettes - they would give me room to spread the story over the long period of time it takes for a group of people to grow into something resembling a family. Like I said in the original author's note, there was supposed to be more of the early, snippy days - but I got so focused on making them kinder that I found I couldn't properly write a fight. In hindsight, it probably would have been easier if I tried writing that first, but, well. Once I realized that it was too late. The alphabet idea came later, once I had them all finished: I wanted to organize them somehow, but numbers felt too open, too infinite - closing the story on an organizational endpoint was just really satisfying.

a - Every good story needs a good beginning.

c - Starting with the end of Peter Pan is my sneaky way of slipping past the fact that I haven't seen the earlier shows! The Max and Sandra storyline is just so sweet, and I wanted to let it exist a little bit in between our jump from Peter Pan to Christmas Carol. This vignette came so easily when I wrote it and I love love love the feelings and the tentativity about the whole thing.

f - This was actually the last vignette I wrote. I realized I needed some front-end padding because otherwise my angst plot came rather abruptly, and what better way? At this point, too, I was trying to bring in POVs from each one of our characters, and when deciding on Trevor's POV I thought the exasperation-excitement combination would be an excellent choice. It turns out Trevor is my favourite to write, mostly because I can find his voice a lot easier than some of the others - and probably also because I hold a lot of fondness and nostalgia for stage crew work. Also, I wrote most of this one on a long evening walk in the notes app on my phone. Fun fact.

h - I did my original idea slam in a draft tumblr post, and this one just says "birthday party but one without all the drama of christmas carol". And what do you know, that's exactly what it is! I definitely took the birthday party (in CCGW as well as in this fic) as a kind of proof that they really do like each other, if they're doing things like this and if they want to do things like this - and that theme of okay, they want to be here formed the basis for this part. I think it's exceptionally sweet that Dennis came looking for friends and ended up finding, well, something. And I popped in a little MMNI reference with "one of the Janines" - Backwards Janine? Frontwards Janine? Original Janine? Who knows! It's one of them!

l - The thing about this plot is that it's actually one of the first ideas I had when dreaming up this fic, and I couldn't quite let it go. The point was, what if I somehow split them up? How can they get on when half the society is out of commission? And the most reasonable way I could find to actually get half of them out of commission was the car accident. To be honest, this one is mostly filler - it's also the second vignette I wrote, and it found its birth in the email drafts of my work laptop.

m - Trying to map out this little plotline without overdoing it might have been the most difficult part of this fic, and I'm still not 100% sure I succeeded. This is our explanation for the unease from the vignette above, and it took me 3 rewrites before I finally found something that settled in my brain. "Dennis gets chased by a goose" might be one of my favourite lines in the fic though.

Also, putting these letters right next to each other made me feel really clever for no reason.

n - My Jonathan perspective also took a few stutter-steps in its beginning, but this one ultimately came from the promo video's reveal that Robert and Dennis live together, and me playing with the continual idea of the remaining cast members being rather unmoored in their injured castmates' absence. Robert in particular because I love his character and I love making him Feel Things(TM) (fun hint: this will also be a small theme in the new cpds fic I have in the works!) and I want to see so much from this odd relationship between him and Dennis. Obviously they have to tolerate each other if they are willingly roommates - how far can I go with that? I love how this one turned out.

o - All I have to say about this one is that I still really love the sweetness between these two, and they deserve the world. Also, at some point during writing this I was really caught up with how striking Dave's face silhouette is (don't ask) so that ended up making it in somehow.

q - Girls' Night is SO important to me. After all the work they've done to make these gals friends I needed to capture it, and a pleasant night in just made a lot of sense. This one is the home of a few of my headcanons - Annie has a chef roommate and Max does a lot of the cooking, thus the "neither of us are the usual household cooks" comments, and I also think they're at the point where they can joke about their previous failures (especially with these three together) so the nod to A Trial To Watch (my favourite gws episode) was so fun. Also, Waking Ned really is a silly pick-me-up of a movie - would recommend. Special thanks to CBC for giving us Canadians quality British TV alongside our occasionally questionable homegrown programming.

r - It wouldn't be a fic about progress and growth with this crew without a disheartening moment turned into gold. I wrote this one while barbecuing, another fun fact, and no joke the hardest part was figuring out what to name the play they were doing. I kept pace with the whole "Jonathan can't get onscreen" gag, which was personally hilarious and made me cackle as I wrote it, and the rest of it just felt good. I will always have a soft spot for comfort and reassurance in a story and getting to write it has just been an absolute delight.

t - This was one of my other unplanned vignettes. It was originally to fill out Robert's POV, but also to express a bit of how things have changed in Chris's attitude towards his cast - if there's one thing I would change from Mischief's characerisation thus far, it's this brand of almost-kindness that I consistently need to write him with. It takes the aftermath of the car accident and uses it to kind of make him understand - this is a valuable group of people and I don't want to lose it. But of course he's not the type of person to actually express that in any way, so I thought the frenetic hovering was a good way to get the point across. As well, the kind-of-bonding between Chris and Robert - the two of them are such powerhouses of insistent personality that conflict so easily but they've also got a more secret kind of friendship that deserves to be explored a little more. I really like this vignette and how it ended up portraying how they are around each other, how they really do know each other, especially when they're not fighting. Makes me soft.

w - This is the first vignette I wrote! I honestly didn't realize until writing this just how much I identify with Annie - best of both worlds re. crew and cast, a bit of tenacity regarding getting through things, overall personality - I just love her so so much. She also seems like the most sensible of the cast, so the collective "why are we really here?" moment with Trevor really spoke to me. I love their friendship, I love the kind of quiet vibe this vignette gives off - this is one of the ones I can feel most strongly, the one I can step into and exist inside. I also spent most of my old drama rehearsals and classes without shoes, so that had to make it in just by virtue of the sock brigade (me).

z - One thing I knew for sure since the inception of the fic was that it needed to end on a victory. I took the images I had of this victorious adrenaline, everyone together having a good time, kind of getting smashed, and karaoke (I really wanted the karaoke, for some reason) and went the obvious route: the wedding. Ending on Chris POV also felt so right - possibly because he's the one with the most growth in this fic - and getting to finally feel this triumph with him after all these other trials and tribulations was an absolute joy. The wedding hall, in my head, looks like the one my cousin used (it was at a zoo... my sister and I went on a night walk and heard a lot of screaming peacocks) and I definitely threw all my wistfulness, all my love for the characters I'd developed, and all my love for this fantastic fandom into this part. The incorrect lyrics that Annie sings are exactly what I think every time I hear that song, because I've never looked up the lyrics before and my brain likes to play Mad Libs with my super-questionable auditory processing. And the image of the ballroom staff getting really exasperated with them and shutting all the lights off came to me at night and is hastily scribbled on a sticky note (it's a wonder it's legible) but I still strongly believe that it's the perfect, perfect way to end. I still get the warm feelings when I reread this part, even now, after so many reads.

And, finally - our end quote is exactly what started this whole thing. What is this drama society if not a rough beginning? But the concept that we'll make it through, that we can just take a step and then another and it'll be okay because we're together... it's hard to describe just how much it means to me, to my place in the world, to the world itself. I think one of my rather consistent aims in writing, no matter what it is, is to be able to have this collective - characters that become family, people that are important to each other, this constellation to lean on - because it's all I can say for the human experience. It's probably quite a bit of wishful thinking (as I said to another friend, "I am apparently letting loose on all my repressed social feelings of the past year and shoving them into fics") and a sort of subconscious confirmation that if I write it, I can be it. So this force of understanding and kindness and ultimately good people helping each other through the world is something I can't help but include, something that means the absolute world to me.

I'm so glad to have been able to share this fic with everyone, and extra glad that it's been able to touch some people along the way. I've found such an incredible community in Mischief and coincidentally I think The Keep Going Song represents that warmth, too - the community I've been so lucky to exist inside, how we're helping each other along, step by step. What a beautiful thing to be a part of! Thank you for reading and allowing me to give you a bit of my heart. 💖💖