fenrislorsrai

[decepti-thots]

☕️ actually been meaning to ask you about this for ages bc you've mentioned before you have thoughts abt it; cdrw having less fic about them then you might expect for a canon couple?

I think there are a few reasons!

One is that the CDRW arc in the comics is not the kind of romantic arc that tends to appeal most to fandom. A lot of ship fic is "getting together" fic, because that's a way to make the ship the built-in plot of the fic. It provides a ready made beginning, middle and end that is near-guaranteed to be satisfying to anyone invested in the ship. But CDRW are introduced as a long-established couple, and their story is tied much more strongly to the overarching plot of the comic than it is to conventional romance beats.

Two is that it's actually kind of hard to find an obvious canon gap to write a story in during the events of the comic. Their arc is really... jam packed? So many of the big emotional moments of it just play out on page, is the thing. By contrast, look at, say, Dratchet. There is so much room to play with there. Even with Cygate, there was a period during the comic being published where you had room to write ahead and pre-empt the actual resolution we got, during the downtime. CDRW doesn't have as many options there to do that, and I feel like it might seem a less obvious choice for someone looking to write A Romance Fic.

Three is something I realised after talking to folks about the ship, which is that anecdotally I have discovered that a lot of people like CDRW but find it harder than expected to get a grip on. Chromedome in particular seems to stump people; I've written a little bit before about how I think the structure of his arc in the comic winds up catching people off guard because of how it doesn't follow the expected emotional trajectory post-Overlord. And I think between that and the fact that he's a character who people sometimes struggle to get a handle on the interior motivations of, he can be hard for some people to really find the voice of apparently. And Rewind, too, is deceptively tricky, because he is actually a very weird character. His motivations are weird, his intensity is weird, I find a lot of people who haven't revisited the source material recently tend to misremember him as a much more straightforwardly tropey character than canon Rewind actually is. A lot of the CDRW stuff out there I have seen tends to do this to both of them actually, slot them into a kind of m/m ship template that they vaguely resemble on the surface but is totally inadequate once you start paying attention. (Cygate also got this.)

When you put all of this together, I think CDRW grabbed people as fic fodder a lot less. And there's the built in sense of "canon gave us everything" that comes from them getting so much focus that I think smooths over that absence so it doesn't really seem obvious in fandom, where they just tend to hang around in fic as a background pairing.

anyway. people. we should write more cdrw fic i think. they are Insane and there are actually a bunch of things the comic brushes over tbh. and the AU potential! oh my god, there are so many opportunities for weird plot divergences!!! i am guilty bc i have a halfwritten longfic that i never managed to wrangle fully in google docs that i am sheepishly avoiding eye contact with (but will one day return to i swear) (look i'm in Big Bang mode right now folks but one day)

Sidenote: I'd love to hear other people's perspective on that third point... do people have opinions on this? I am going off stuff from a while ago and I know there's been a bunch of folks doing rereads lately. How are we feeling about CD and Rewind as characters these days.