#lying in a box

[sometimes-love-is-enough]

So! Re: director's commentary shsksjsj. Melliferous is literally like always on my mind and it's just shsksjsks so good. Bls whatever crumb you're willing to give us about the fic, I will very much enjoy. Plus!! The Thomas and Virgil buried alive fic!!!! So good! I am kissing you on the forehead for that one so ye. Whenever you're up for it I am basically vibrating for the director's commentary for those.

Here's some odd thoughts on both of them, just for you!

melliferous

So one of the things I'm really careful and insistent about in my writing is POV. You might have noticed it. I'm meticulous about this, both in reading and writing: the point of view of the narration has to be both consistent and recognizable. If it's from Virgil's POV, then that must be distinguishable from anyone else's, and we aren't getting insight into another character's head or thoughts as long as we remain with Virgil, and so on. Usually I stick with one character the whole way through (Virgil in Chessboxing, Thomas in Pick A Side, the OC in the Inception AU) or I switch POV from chapter to chapter (Eucatastrophe with its rotation through the full cast, Syzygy goes back and forth between Thomas and Janus).

Melliferous is the anomaly here, because it doesn't have a defined narrator or point of view. It's an omniscient narrator, which I usually shy away from on principle, but I did this on purpose. I wanted the whole story to have a kind of drowsy, dreamy feel of unreality to it, and narrowing things down to a single narrator would have taken away from that. It couldn't be Thomas (my go-to when I'm writing ensemble cast stories like this) because Thomas is dead and not there. It couldn't be any one of the Sides, because that would be elevating them to protagonist, and Melliferous is, at its core, about the group.

So instead you get a narrator reminiscent of folk tales and fairy tales, who knows more about the world than you do, patiently tells you what you need to know, and speaks with pretty words and a kind of knowing resignation, because they know exactly how it's going to end before it's even started. It's the only way this story could be told, I think.

A lot about Melliferous was carefully calculated to be disorientating and strange. It's not a normal Sanders Sides fic, and I knew that going in. Things like: the story opening on a conjunction and in medias res, never explaining exactly how the Sides are alive when Thomas isn't, never explicitly saying 'Hades is a Bee, Seph is a butterfly, also Seph is Persephone' - leaving that all up to implication, albeit very obvious implication - and of course the fact that the strangeness of everything is barely questioned by the people inhabiting the story. The TSS canon universe should not be one that supports concepts such as Greek Gods And Bee Hell without question, but I never wanted that to be in question, just like I wanted everyone to be as in-character as I could manage the whole time.

I feel like that's what makes good surrealism. The familiar tempered with the wholly absurd, in a way that it takes you a minute to go 'wait, why am I just accepting it?' - melliferous is definitely one of my more successful wanders into that sort of storytelling.

lying in a box with a lid on it

This fic was born out of a very specific set of thoughts I had, which I will now roughly try to recreate, in order:

there are a certain bunch of fic tropes that I really enjoy, involving characters being put into Situations, often much to their distress. however, I only really see these specific tropes in certain types of fandoms, like Marvel and the Witcher, occasionally Doctor Who.

Whenever I do see them in Sanders Sides fics, it's usually in the context of an AU (not always my thing) or in the context of Canon-ish Imagination Adventures (again, not always my thing)

I don't think I've ever seen a canonverse fic wielding the Buried Alive trope, have I?

(related thought from a completely different train, arriving almost simulstaneously at the station with the last one) the only way you could get Virgil to discuss his problems with Thomas is if you locked them both in a box and kept them there for hours.

hey wait a second

I like writing unique stories, stuff you couldn't find anywhere else. And there was just something really novel to the idea of Thomas and Virgil getting trapped somewhere together in his brain that I liked the idea of. It felt fresh and interesting, and also something that hopefully would stay a oneshot instead of turning into a multi-chapter epic.

Virgil and Thomas's dynamic is one of the more fascinating ones to me, because of the coexistence between 'we are friends and i love you' and 'you are literally my anxiety and as much as i love you, you occasionally hurt me as a part of your existence'. Someone in the comments of this fic described it as the Hedgehog's Dillemma, and fuck, that's exactly it, isn't it? Shoving them into an enclosed space ratchets the mental health issues up to a million, because they hurt each other. But it also makes them talk it out, because they don't want to be hurting each other.

Was this fic also just an excuse to force them to cuddle? Maaaaybe. Maybe that was my secondary motivation. That happens to be a favorite trope of mine, too.

[hinamie]

i'm exactly as normal about him as I thought I'd be

[what-am-i-doing-in-this-fandom]

Emma may?

Pretty please?

Ask, and you shall receive 🙌🙂‍↕️

Dang, Fiddleford was THIS 🤏 close to fumbling the baddie of the freaking century

[hitwiththetmnt]

Will the turts take a wish from totally reliable wish dragon Dai?

They will, once they can get them back (๑˃̵ᴗ˂̵) @sweeneydino

[alexturntable]

"I Don't Want To Break The Trust We Have!" 😅 | Box Of BLUFFS! | Charles Leclerc & Pierre Gasly

[somegrumpynerd]

Too lazy to colour it but I shaded the movie night doodle! Up to you what they're watching

Also the next morning:

[breadandblankets]

one of the fun things to do when writing Duke pov is that he lies to himself, and sometimes that makes him a huge fucking hypocrite. Duke will tell it like it is to every single person around him and then tell himself the sky is green. He is honest and truthful except in his own head lmao

Dude will 100% tell a teammate to take a rest take a break their over working themselves and then just take up their slack like he wasn't already holding the earth, the moon, and also maybe pluto on his shoulders

[melljam]

if jake can keep samuels old big deal coat …

then do you think jake ordered an extra big deal tracksuit for samuel??? because that is absolutely something he would do … even though samuel, being the terrible and inconsiderate man that he is, would almost certainly refuse to wear it

and he totally did refuse to wear it despite the fact that he had the audacity to show up with big deal to the fight with gun

[kuno-korner]

[valverii]

🥊 AU: fellas, is it normal to grip your rival by the back of their neck and declare that you’re privy to their true intentions of taking down your undergound boxing ring all while making unnervingly close eye contact?

og post here

[rainbowthefox]

Jack I. Box has targeted me personally and I will never recover

[zombvibes]

People will try and shit on susie x noelle like this didn’t happen at the end of the ferris wheel scene???

[athena-xox]

In my quest to explain everything we know about the narrators is… ugh

Because I want to say that Brooke is just saying bullshit. Like just completely lying for fun because I think would be so funny and would def help with the explanation

“Oh yeah I live in the mirrornet and I’m best friends with the lorax what about you guys?”

But UGH. EUGH. AHHH.

I know that that probably shouldn’t count. But !!!

[atopvisenyashill]

okay so it’s like. aerys goes to tywin & joanna’s wedding, he makes a huge point of dancing with tywin for a few seconds with himself leading. tywin is deeply embarrassed by this & never forgets it, but handles it fine in the moment. he starts sneaking lannister look-a-likes into aerys’ bed around this time, first men & women, and then just men. aerys follows tywin to casterly rock & tywin realizes how very obvious it is to everyone whats up with aerys & just keeps playing up this “i’m leading this dumb gay fool around by the dick” even tho he’s getting increasingly worried with how aerys has quickly jumped right over the line into sexual harassment in the workplace.

tywin has that anniversary tourney, and starts up a parade of sexy lannister cousins instead of just look-a-likes. things get worse until joanna dies, & tywin figures out he needs a TYWIN look-a-like and not just a sexy lannister twink, so he finds some random lannister of lannisport that’s more his build and shoves THAT poor sob into aerys’ bed, and ALSO he just…..lets aerys sleep in his bed. like after. it’s fine and normal don’t question it. this approach works until 276 when everyone cheers more for tywin AND aerys hears ilyn payne making a joke about who really is on their knees before the throne (and takes his tongue out) bc aerys suddenly realizes…..these people think he’s the bottom.

[samwise1548]

What mechanism would be foolish or stubborn enough to enter a staring contest with gunpowder Tim?

Unfortunately for him, the other mechs told the Toy Soldier to do it, and it’s been a few millennia since they’ve started already. (Also so sorry for how many years it took me to draw this!!!)

[ID: a drawing of the Toy Soldier and Gunpowder Tim from the Mechanisms band. The two are facing each other, staring. Gunpowder Tim is squinting in concentration, while TS doesn’t seem to even be meeting the others eyes. Around the Toy Soldier are flowers and sparkles and a pink glow. And around GPT is a dark blue aura. \End ID]

[jackdaw-and-hattrick]

Thinking about a version of Danny who actually has the good sense to hide his identity. He has an astronaut helmet with stars reflected on the screen and a spirit box on his hip that acts as a kind of voice modulator; he only goes by Phantom rather than Danny Phantom and he actually puts some effort into lying.