#knowing i'm supposed to be confused vs desperately needing the answers help...

[astarlightmonbebe]

mouse: eps 1&2

mouse debuted this week - and i have a lot of thoughts after watching both episodes, which i’ll be going over below (also because my memory is so bad that if i don’t write it down i’ll forget all my theories lol)

though the timeline of this drama was initially a little confusing, i think it all fit together nicely, though it certainly left me with a lot of questions

right off the bat, the drama establishes the main topic of psychopathy, and even though it is initially about genetics, we can see that the main theme will also be the environment (i.e. the old nature and nurture debate)

anyways: questions 

who is jae hoon? - is jae hoon han seojoon’s son? or is he the son of the other woman, the pregnant one seojoon’s wife, jieun, met? i mean, there’s definitely a reason the mom’s face is blurred when she tried to strangle him. however, i would find it extremely unlikely that jieun every remarried...

we know that jae hoon grew up to become the murderer. we know he killed his (adopted?) family (all of them, i guess? and the mom?), though he wasn’t found guilty of it (because he’s a psychopath - of course he can lie, he wouldn’t feel guilty about it at all lol).

i was under the assumption that it was the doctor (dr. sung), especially since we get his narration (i’m assuming) at the end of episode two (’my mother told me there was one other child...’), but then i got confused again so who knows. 

i will be shocked if bareum is actually jae hoon - like it would be good - but also his character is so nice so far. but then again, han seojoon seemed like a perfectly nice house husband until he cut off people’s heads and made them into snowmen so. 

han seojoon’s son - the end of episode two establishes it as the doctor, sung yohan, which makes sense - he shares jieun’s last name, after all. however, is he the same as his father? he seems to be aware of his psychopathy gene, or at least that’s the vibe i got, as he wasn’t shocked to find out who his father was. 

however, i will say the drama is set up to put bareum as seojoon’s son, with muchi’s whole crusade to find han seojoon’s son and then ruin his life (angsty partnership & betrayal? right up my alley), and then the two of them becoming partners. 

idk! i feel like i’m trying to work out a very complicated math equation (jae hoon? han seojoon’s son? sung yohan? jung bareum? help).

we know jieun wanted to abort her child, while the other woman said she was going to raise her child and believe in their goodness. jieun obviously didn’t abort - and i assumed she would give her child up for adoption so they could live a different life - but it seems she did keep the child. idk, i feel like if she kept the child she would try and make them different, so??

i wouldn’t put it pass the drama to have baby mix-up bewitchery either though, or some adoption thing. 

the girl who lured song soojung - right now i’m operating under the assumption that the girl is the reporter who knows gu muchi, choi hongju (kyung soojin’s character!). when they went to the gym and muchi pointed out the boxing gloves, she did stare at them for a long time, and we know she saw them in the bag when soojung gave them to her to hold.

(i am also assuming the girl grew up to become one of the characters in the present, probably a main one, as it wouldn’t make much sense for not to be)

that also brings the question of how the girl met han seojoon to begin with, and what happened to her after. did he take her with him? i’m confused.

oh bong yi’s identity - is she someone we know? i’ve seen people mention they think she might be the younger sister from jae hoon’s family, though i’m not sure if the ages match up (possibly, assuming it was like 10-15 years later after jae hoon killed his family) and we did assume he killed both his siblings. but the trauma about the dog might make sense.

if not that, then i wonder if her trauma is going to be connected to the main plot at all...

idk much yet, though i just hope there won’t be any romance between her and bareum because then i would have no choice but to drop the drama lol. 

general thoughts (again) -

what happened to the heads of the rest of the headhunter’s victims? like they found muchi’s parents’ heads, but there were eighteen other victims...he obviously brought those two home, but what did he do with the rest of the heads?

the psychopathy gene for the 1% is said to be able to be activated. however, jae hoon was different since he was a young kid (e.g. having the urge to harm animals) and such. is it possible for someone with the psychopathy gene to not do that when they’re a child?

which also brings me to the thought that jae hoon acted out because he grew up being told he was different, meanwhile bareum is ‘normal’ (maybe, if he’s not jae hoon secretly) because he doesn’t know he has a psychopath, and the gene will be activated sometime during the drama.

they also said 1% of the time the 1% gene is the genius gene, which makes me wonder if the genius gene is activated by anything specifically as well.

they said they found chi kuk’s finger in corner of the auditorium - i’m betting it was pointing to where the priest (mu won, mu chi’s brother) was sitting lol. 

anyways, it is set up to put chi kuk as a victim; however, he’s still alive, so i’m confused.

lowkey have more questions than i did before writing this. oh well. would love to hear other people’s theories!!  

[spicycreativity]

Fanfic Appreciation Week Day 7: A Place Where I Can Breathe

Yes, folks, I'm appreciating my own darn fanfic for the final day of Fanfic Appreciation Week because I worked really hard on it and it was a labor of love for/with one of my QPPs, my roommate, the man who got me into Sanders Sides: @\cadeorade-powercade (That's him in the aesthetic board)

Allow me to present the director's commentary for A Place Where I Can Breathe:

Content Warnings: All content warnings mentioned in the fic apply.

Chapter 1: I actually wrote this fairly late in the game. It's meant to serve as a prologue and orient the viewer in the universe, s opposed to staring on Chapter 2, which just throws the viewer in without context. I think it was a good choice, as it also allowed me to introduce the concept of the Sides having power focuses early on.

The Premise: Cade is a Virgil stan and he was getting frustrated looking for Virgil fic. He was finding a lot of stuff written without nuance by young authors, a sort of "by teenagers for teenagers" type deal. We are not teenagers, so we both have a hard time relating to that kind of teen angst fic, as we're not the target audience. So he asked me to write him a Virgil fic and we worked together to identify what plot he wanted, what the Mindscape looked like, and what quirks the Sides have. So a lot of this fic is quite gratuitous and self-indulgent

The Title: Lizzie McAlpine has a song called "Apple Pie" which includes the lyric "I've been running around trying to find a place where I can breathe." Apple Pie SCREAMS Moceit to me, and I had taken notice of the lyric and wanted to use it as the title for a Moceit fic. I didn't really have an idea beyond that, and when Cade asked me to write this fic, I realized it was actually perfect and summed up Virgil's inner struggle quite nicely. So cheers to "A Place Where I Can Breathe," the Moceit Fic That Wasn't

-Cade asked me specifically to include Virgil having a spider and I wrote nearly the whole fic without doing so, then had to go back and sprinkle some references in. I think I managed 2 total.

Chapter 2:

"Uh, how about I hold off on that until I actually see my room?" Virgil stared expectantly at Roman, who bounced on his toes. "Lead on, Macduff."

"That's not the line and you know it," Roman complained, but he turned to lead Virgil to his room. "It's ' lay on, Macduff,' and--"

-This fic was originally supposed to reach a climax with a confrontation between Remus and Roman, and "lay on, Macduff" would come back as a brick joke. Unfortunately, the original ending was a result of me getting tired and lazy, so I had to go back and fix it, and we lost the Roman-Remus confrontation.

It was hard for Virgil to not shudder at the sudden heat and weight on him. With his senses already open and taking in more information than his brain seemed to want to process, touch was an added stressor, more unwanted sensory input.

-Virgil being touch-averse is a direct shoutout to Cade, who is also touch-averse.

Roman had already transformed the living room: metallic streamers of purple and black stretched across the corners of the ceiling, and shiny balloons spelling out A-N-X-E-I-T-Y hovered above the TV.

-Upon first writing, Virgil had already given the upstairs crew his name, so the banner spelled out "VIRIGL" which is way funnier than "ANXEITY." But then his name reveal became a plot point so I had to go back and change it.

-Let! Virgil! Be! Mean!

-Virgil's line about hearing refrigerator noise when Roman talks is another shout-out to Cade, who has leveled that accusation at me

A small, cruel part of him protested at the idea that he would need special treatment and desperately wanted to throw it back in Patton's face. He wasn't a sweetheart, he wasn't a baby. He didn't need to crawl into a blanket fort with Dad just because he was a little stressed.

-Remus calls Janus "Janus Geminus" because I was tired and couldn't come up with a pun. "Geminus" is one of the Roman god Janus' epithets; another is "Pater" meaning "Father." That led to a conversation about Remus deliberately confusing Patton by calling Janus "Daddy," but I couldn't think of a clean way to fit the explanation into the narrative, so I stuck with "Geminus."

Chapter 3:

"There's nothing normal about that! " Roman stared in horror at the coffee massacre Virgil had orchestrated. What had once been a respectable (if not very tasty) cup of black coffee was now part of a 1:1 coffee to milk suspension, the liquid a tasteful shade of tan suitable for business casual trousers or a show-ready chihuahua.

-Cade is a certified Nightmare Man and came up with Virgil's horrifying coffee order after I asked him about it. Keep an eye out for Janus' equally horrifying coffee order later in the fic.

1) Shouts out the fact that Janus is canonically a Dostoevsky fan

Chapter 4:

Janus smiled at him. "Where reason fails, the Devil helps." He fussed with his gloves and straightened his capelet. "It's showtime."

-I fucking love Crime and Punishment. Look at me. Look at me. I fucking love Crime and Punishment. Janus' quoting Raskolnikov serves multiple purposes:

2) Lampshades the fact that Roman just conveniently happened to be alone in the living room, because I didn't want to waste time getting him there. That makes me, the author, the Devil

3) Foreshadows the impending disaster. When Raskolnikov says this line it is because he had planned to commit axe murder. The axe he was planning to steal had been moved, but he finds another, different axe to use. Raskolnikov messes up the murder and ends up killing an innocent witness in addition to his intended target. Janus messes up his manipulation attempt and ends up murdering Roman's self esteem

-I was going to include a reference to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Remus' line "debauchery and vomit" was originally going to be "blood, love, and rhetoric") but I didn't because... Uh... Hm. Why didn't I do that. Maybe I just forgot about it???

-Roman is too stubborn to manipulate for long and that is a fact.

"I was pretty much done anyway," Remus said. "There's only so much debauchery and vomit you can fit into one story."

-Cade specifically ask me that nobody cry in this fic, but after I had Janus eviscerate Roman I knew he couldn't not cry a little. I kept it to a minimum because there's already a billion fucking fics about [literally any Side] crying on the shoulder of [literally any other Side] and it's really just not interesting to either of us.

-It didn't come up because it doesn't matter, but Thomas dreamed he was participating in the exact Dionysian orgy that took place in The Secret History because it's my fic and I said so.

Chapter 5:

He just sat back and watched and tugged at his hair while Janus spooned mound after mound of crisp white sugar into his mug and Virgil poured his customary eight fluid ounces of milk into his own mug.

-Cade strikes again. Virgil's coffee order is equal amounts milk to coffee; Janus' is equal parts sugar to coffee. He had asked me to include a scene where Roman catches Janus massacring his coffee and is appropriately horrified, but I uhh... Didn't write it. I still might include it as an omake someday.

-I imagine that Roman feels really strongly about dragons vs wyverns, and Remus just pretends to give a shit because he thinks it's funny to wind Roman up. Fortunately for me but unfortunately for my sense of realism in writing, I can't relate because I adore my sister and we get along perfectly almost 100% of the time.

"You shut us down every chance you get!" Remus said, baring his teeth. "How would you like it if your pens never wrote, hm? What would you do with all those thoughts in your head?"

-I do wish I had developed the concept of power focuses a bit more, established rules and such. Basically, Patton is always on the prowl for wrongthink and actively represses it, which in turn breaks or sabotages the Dark Sides' power focus.

Chapter 6: This chapter really should have been Janus and Roman but I was really tired and didn't want to bother with it. Plus, you know, Moceit. This chapter was meant to demonstrate how the characters would get along without Virgil nannying them. There's friction, but everyone is making a conscious, deliberate effort to get along because they love Virgil, and love is a series of choices you make.

I chose "Leo" as the answer for the answer to the crossword clue instead of "Virgo," because my other QPP is a Leo. She'll never read this fic, but I did it anyway because I love her. (Trivia: My sign is Virgo, so it was really a choice between shouting her out and shouting me out, and the last chapter is self-indulgent enough, thank you).

Chapter 7: I was gonna write a fic where all the Sides watched Cats the Musical because I was going through a phase. Then Cade requested this so I combined the two ideas. By this point I was fucking exhausted, and that's the only thing that saved you and the rest of the world from me writing the Sides riffing on the movie scene-by-scene. I could come up with snarky commentary for almost every, if not every single song from the movie.

Most notably, I cut a Patton-Remus interaction where Remus declares his love for Grizabella and Patton gets all staryy-eyed about Remus connecting with the idea of rising above rejection and being loved and accepted only for Remus to shoot him down and explain that he just likes that she got to die in a tire fire.

Other cut scenes include Janus quietly pretending not to go feral over Mister Mistoffelees, Patton full-on fucking sobbing over Grizabella and the kittens, and Logan experiencing a deep, soulful kinship with Munkustrap during Of The Awefull Battle of the Pekes and the Pollices (and henceforth introducing the phrase "like herding cats" into his regular vocabulary