#me if it was illegal to not have a consistant artstyle

[kelongt]

must have heard that through the grapevine ...

[lemonisntreal]

heyo! Just found your blog and I was scrolling through your stuff and noticed your AU tone deaf. And I haven't found anything about what it is or what your idea is behind it. So I wanted to ask if you could give me an introduction to your AU!

Oh! And I absolutely love your artstyle and how you draw Buster! Anyway, hope you drink enough water and have a good day/night! ;)

Dear god this has been in my drafts for a while-

Hiya! Sorry for that lack of info lol, I'd been inactive for a long time, and the time that I actually WAS posting consistently was back when things were still being sorta fleshed out. But I've got a pretty good idea of how every single part moves at this point, so sure :D I'll give a not-so-brief summary lol [under a cut because I couldn't not dump multiple paragraphs teehee ~_~]

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Tone Deaf is like a dystopian version of Sing, if I were to put it super duper simply. One where Buster's issues get more emotional focus, and we get actual bonds with the cast because the movie forgot to do that.

Buster is, also, a lot more unhinged, fair warning. This fic's gonna contain violence and tackle some darker subjects [adjacent to grief and denial more specifically] so if it feels like I jumped a lot of sharks, it's because I 100% did.

It kinda started with me noticing how, in the actual movies btw, smaller characters like Buster and Mike had more difficulty getting around places. This led me to ask myself about how species differences could lead to struggles for certain animals since the city just isn't built for everyone [this is NOT Zootopia]. Ash's quills, and Meena's towering size were things I noticed too that would be massive problems, realistically. So after a lot of pondering, now we're here.

The world of Tone Deaf in present day is in a post-war period that's lasted about 50 years now [Crawly is actually a veteran from this war- which was more like complete and total anarchy if I'm being real, since there weren't really any sides until near the end...]

Long story short, the wealthy capitalized off of the war and taking people prisoner- so they purposefully kept it going. A resistance ended up forming to stand against this [Miss Crawly being one of the generals, with that classic missing eye] and after their army stormed the unsuspecting stronghold, the war finally began to conclude. It still took around a year after that to release all of the prisoners of war, and by the end of it all, the damage that had been done to some races was permanent. Even extinction-level in some cases- some animals just straight up don't exist anymore because of it.

Back to Calatonia. Laws that are in place to protect animals from tearing eachother apart are still relatively new, and the criminal underbelly of Calatonia is kinda out of control. Animals get kidnapped/poached, smaller animals are at a huge disadvantage and have basically no power [politically or otherwise], endangered species are a very real thing, poverty is a huge issue for most of the population- and in the middle of all this is Buster Moon.

He's gonna be the main perspective. And the story will also serve as a slight character study on him, mixed with my own grittier and batshit insane changes/headcanons/alternate universe ideas on his backstory. He's a ray of sunshine with a lot of bottled-up feelings that will kinda really take control of the story.

Buster has been arrested multiple times. He's been put in unsuccessful therapy. He's still grieving his dad. He's committing crime and compulsively lying about those illegal actions too. He has emotional difficulties that he hasn't dared try touching on in years, and he has issues with letting go- which, is kinda how all of his new problems come to be.

The threat of his theater being repossessed if his show isn't a success gets a LOT more emphasis too.

But on top of that is the added threat of Buster getting sent out of the city if he can't get his business up and running. Remember how I mentioned endangered animals?? Well Koalas are one of them. One of the big ones, actually. He's the only Koala in a city of almost five hundred thousand, and it's been that way for almost half a decade now. It's been causing issues for the people in charge for half a decade now. Koalas have government-protected settlements far away from here due to their numbers being so few, so if Buster loses the theater? That's the next step for him.

But, to help this poor dude through all the stress of life is the found-family he develops with the cast he hired. He helps them for a lot of the first act, and then they give back his kindness in the second. They connect through their similar experiences, as well as their shared passion for music and performance. And by the end, maybe Buster's okay. Or maybe he's had a complete downward spiral [not gonna speak of act three 🥰]

Other characters have also had a shift in their dynamics. Things in the story have changed. Like for instance- Gunter already knew Buster and was a close friend of him and Eddie before the show, Judith is now the mayor and a main character, Pete has been put in place of the banker in charge of Buster's accounts, Buster unfortunately gets involved in politics, Mike actually gets to bond with the cast- actually the cast gets to bond with the cast point blank period [idc what you say, this just straight up doesn't happen in the canon movies], and to top it all of is a generous helping of angst with a few acts of violence sprinkled in 🤭

The actual Act I summary is this right now:

Buster had been in tight situations before-- suffocating situations, even. He’d been in every kind of trouble imaginable, he thought. With family, friends, local businesses, the law. But he'd always wormed his way out, either through loopholes or by charm. Or usually just by stacking another lie on top of his already crumbling facade. But this time it's gonna take more than a cover-up to fix this. ‏‏‎ Buster’s dishonesty takes him too far once again, a simple typo causing him to unintentionally land himself in a wager that could cost his very life. He has two months to fix this- to ACTUALLY fix this. And the worst part is that he hadn't even meant to lie this time. ‏‏‎ The First Act of Tone Deaf.

TLDR; Buster learns to love again after experiencing the horrors of animalkind firsthand and being healed by theater kids LMFAO