#seb would be best buddies with sally

[daughterofhecata]

Sometimes I wanna return to that Sherlock AU I started plotting like four years ago, where Sebastian is part of Lestrade's team and has just NO patience for Sherlock. He might get to the cabbie from A Study in Pink on ways different from Sherlock and when the cabbie tries his game on Sebastian he'd just arrest him and let the state attorneys figure out if and how he could be tried for the "murders". Which would of course draw Jim's attention, so they could eventually devolve into a Hannigram-esque dynamic...

[amorremanet]

in which still no one asked for this, but it made me feel a little better about how i have a shitty day ahead of me, and pete got to go second because i have blatant authorial favoritism for him but at least i admit it?

their blog url: itwasafineaffair

Pete would tell you how many different pretentious, increasingly ridiculous theatre kid URLs he considered before finally, “going back to basics” and settling on lyrics from Cabaret’s, “Mein Herr,” but then he’d probably have to kill you because it’s a very large, embarrassing number.

That said, he still has the URL ghostsonatas saved in case he ever gets bored of Sally Bowles and decides to break out the August Strindberg.

Also, here’s the Liza Minelli version of, “Mein Herr.” Don’t ask Pete who his favorite Sally Bowles is unless you’re willing to clear your schedule for the entire afternoon because he has a lot of Opinions about that question.

their blog title: “yes, princess, i am immensely happy. thank you.”

which really only makes sense when you see Sebastian’s blog title.

Pete’s blog title used to make sense, because it kept the “Mein Herr” theme: “i’ve always said that i was a rover.” At one point, it was, “du sollst mich nicht mehr sehen, mein herr” because he’d just gotten dumped and was being emotional about it all over his blog title to restrain himself from actually being a shit to his ex.

But then his Princess finally got on tumblr, so Pete matched his blog title to Seb’s.

He would probably try to insist on matching icons, too, but Seb doesn’t see the point and he only got a non-default icon when he left Pete alone with his laptop for a few minutes and Pete picked a selfie for him to use.

For his own part, Pete’s icon changes every couple months, and when the novel starts, Pete’s icon is bearded Chris Evans holding a puppy.

the original posts they make: puns. shitposts. snarky liveblogs of whatever happens to be on TV at the moment. complaining about his coworkers. sub-post complaining about Todd (who usually doesn’t get it). all but outright saying that he is complaining about Todd (who still usually doesn’t get it). “random brief observations or whatever happens to be on Pete’s mind right now.” pictures of Seb’s dogs and/or their sponsor’s cat. pictures of Seb and Margot (give or take a few others, but seriously, Pete isn’t that close to very many people, and he usually only features Todd’s face when he can’t get out of it).

the kind of posts they reblog: Pete’s sidebar will tell you, “this is a personal blog, which means that i post whatever the hell i want and you can react however you want, but i’ll still keep posting whatever i want because it is my personal blog.” But to get a better idea:

cute pictures from blogs with themes like, “butches cuddling kittens” and, “bears cuddling puppies” and so on.

theatre, generally, and especially musical theatre. there’s a lot of general appreciation and theatre kid blogging — I mean, he’s right there and ready to reblog those photos from the one production of Midsummer’s Night’s Dream where Puck and Oberon are really, really close, or photos from when Ben Whishaw played Dionysus in Bakkhai — but Pete also reblogs more serious criticism, theatre history, commentary on the social and political significance of theatre, and so on.

Sometimes, he gets in a Mood and will lecture you on the significance of musical theatre specifically, and if he’s especially Moody, he’ll break out his copy of DH Miller’s Place For Us: An Essay on the Broadway Musical and flap loudly at you about why musical theatre is really and truly a dyed in the wool LGBTQ art form and stop trying to heterosexualize musical theatre already, it’s gross.

(On any given day, there is like a 95% chance that he will be in this Mood because Todd said something ignorant about musical theatre being, “stereotypical” and didn’t really listen when Pete went, “No, stop talking, here is why you’re wrong, you dumb-ass hipster white boy fuck” at him, and Pete just has a lot of residual feelings to express.)

Seriously, in the novel’s timeline, the critical pushback of historians, cultural critics, et al. going, “Um, actually? There are some aspects of this that are troubling for these reasons and we should really be having a Discussion about this” at Lin Manuel Miranda and Hamilton hasn’t started to happen yet…… but when it does? Pete will be all over it. He will be so. excited.

He won’t even be anti-Hamilton as such (like, he enjoyed the bootleg he watched since he won’t be seeing it live because jesus shit, tickets are expensive, but he also wouldn’t actually ask Seb to please use his parents’ connections to somehow find them Hamilton tickets or anything, because ehhhh, that sounds like a lot of work for a payoff that wouldn’t be worth it). Pete just loves it when people take musical theatre seriously as an art form and talk about it like that. It makes him so happy, he could just start crying.

politics or current events, sometimes. there aren’t really very many discernible trends in what he reblogs or doesn’t, on that front, beyond, “well, gay things and LGBTQ stuff more generally make pretty regular appearances” and, “Pete has tags specifically for, ‘disgruntled filipinx blogging’ and, ‘disgruntled biracial blogging.’”

fashion photography and fashion stuff generally, though:

1. it’s mostly for reference in his theatre things. Like, he does sort of enjoy the fashion stuff itself, and he has definitely reblogged some fashion things because he didn’t care about the clothes or the photography but thought the male models were gorgeous…… but even though he doesn’t usually work in costume design, Pete finds fashion stuff productively inspiring;

and 2. this happens a loooot less after February 2014, because that was when he got back from rehab (which his Mama insisted on because it was what Sebastian and Todd both did, even though Pete had already done his homework about outpatient options that didn’t involve going to Middle Of Nowhere, Minnesota, and he liked those ideas a lot better…… but he needed his Mama’s help to pay for any option, and she went, “inpatient rehab first, it’s definitely going to be better for you” and she genuinely believed that, so Pete cooperated)

Which was a big deal wrt Pete’s periodic fashion-blogging because one of the most important things that Pete got out of rehab was the one-on-one session where one of his the therapists said, “Peter, has anyone ever suggested that you might have an eating disorder?”

—which started as a, “face-crack of the century, wait what, what in the shit even are you talking about, of course they haven’t because I don’t have one…… right?” moment and eventually shifted his whole view of everything around and made him go, “holy shit, this explains so much” — and a lot of his initial resistance came out of how he’d never crashed and burned quite so obviously as people tend to think of when they hear the phrase, “eating disorder,” but still. that made so much sense out of so many things for him.

It also made him look more closely at his periodic fashion-blogging and go, “Oh. Some of this is definitely an exercise in self-abuse for me. I should maybe do that less and, like. Keep a better eye on that. And…… okay, wow, what the fuck even is my life, I really, really wish Mama had let me do the outpatient thing instead because holy shit, if they’d suggested that, I could go cling at Bastian right now instead of having to process this on my own with a bunch of nosy other patients sticking their faces into my business, like shit I appreciate the concern from most of them but I want to be with my best friend right now.”

(Pete got his clinging later, when he got back. And he unwittingly made Seb kick one of his slips off the wagon, because he’d spent almost a week coasting by on his ability to fake sobriety while telling himself things like, “okay, if I just moderately abuse my substances of choice, everything will totally work out fine”… but then Pete came home with the, “So, the shrinks in rehab said I have an eating disorder, and it makes sense and all, and I’m fucking terrified” news and Seb went, “okay no, that’s not going to work, Pete needs me to be there for him more than I want to be intoxicated”)

music. there isn’t a lot of rhyme or reason to what he’ll reblog, when, or why, because Pete will listen to almost anything.

One anecdote is that he hadn’t really had much exposure to Nicki Minaj, outside of, “Super Bass” and her verse in, “Monster,” until he deliberately went looking for Nicki stuff on tumblr because Todd, in his perpetually obnoxious hipster-ness, was trying to avoid her entirely because she was, “undeniably talented, but too mainstream.”

So, Pete wanted to annoy Todd and give him a huge middle finger for that shit because on one hand, yeah, uh huh. Way to say that about a black woman artist while actually paying (Bastian’s parents’) money to buy the Glee soundtrack legally, as if that is somehow LESS mainstream than Nicki Minaj, are you SERIOUS.

Also, Todd? YOU OWN MULTIPLE ALBUMS BY MAROON 5. STOP TALKING ABOUT HOW “ANTI-MAINSTREAM” YOU THINK YOU ARE BECAUSE YOU WEAR FLANNEL AND BUDDY HOLLY GLASSES AND YOUR ALLEGED “FILMS” MAKE NO SENSE.

And on the other, oh my god, shut up, you obnoxious fucking hipster, everybody already fucking gets it: you want to be original and edgy and insightful and cool, and you overcompensate because, on some level, you KNOW that you are none of these things, and you are an insecure little white boy who can’t deal with how ~*mainstream*~ more than a handful of his interests actually are, now shut up shut up shut up shut upppppppp.

Clearly, the best way to make this point to Todd was to loudly, insistently support Nicki Minaj and put her on Todd’s dash whenever possible.

That didn’t exactly work out as well as Pete wanted it to because Todd singularly failed to get the point (or maybe he did but just committed himself to acting like he didn’t, Pete’s not sure).

But on the other hand, Pete actually listened to more of Nicki’s music than, “Super Bass” and her verse in, “Monster” while doing this, and that’s the story of how Pete came to fanboy Nicki Minaj.

Chris Evans. A lot of Chris Evans. Not quite, “more Chris Evans than your body has room for,” but say, like…… two steps down from a lethal dose of Chris Evans.

Not that Pete neglects the rest of the MCU, exactly, but he’s like 80% there for Chris Evans, 10% there for Anthony Mackie, 5% there for Sebastian Stan, 3% there for Mark Ruffalo, and 2% there for literally everything else. And it shows. Because he really blatantly favors Chris Evans.

These numbers will change somewhat when CACW actually happens in-character, because Chadwick Boseman. But Pete’s number one will still be Chris Evans.

Tangentially: Please do not ask Pete if he prefers CEvans shaven or bearded. Just don’t.

Don’t do it because his answer will be, “I prefer Chris Evans right here, right now, with his tongue in my mouth and his hand on my ass” and he will think this is clever every. single. fucking. time.

Don’t talk to him about Tom Hiddleston, either. But……… you should avoid doing this for very different reasons.

Like, without any external influence, Pete’s opinion of Tom Hiddleston would just be, “meh *shrugs* whatever, like I haven’t seen a million sad puppy-eyed weird-but-pretty edgelord white bad boys before. Like I don’t have a cute but troubled pretty white boy with big sad Bambi eyes for a best friend. Okay, he’s talented, but ugggggggh, I’m BORED”

—but see, Todd kind of has a Thing for Tom Hiddleston. Todd kind of loves Tom Hiddleston.

Which makes Pete determined to really not love Tom Hiddleston, literally just to annoy and spite Todd for, “having terrible, horrible, no good, very bad, boring as shit taste — my Princess excluded.”

So, uh. Don’t do that. (Trying to talk to him about RDJ isn’t advised against, but only because Pete will just ignore it and pretend he has no idea who that is.)

Oh, also, don’t expect Pete to care that the MCU and the XMCU are separate entities, or care that the canon of the XMCU can be a complete cluster-fuck, or give a fuck that all of the different Spiderman movies are not necessarily related to each other.

Don’t expect him to give a fuck about any of this because he thinks it’s way more entertaining to try and shove all of them into the same universe, just like you’d do with the actual comics.

Also, he has learned that he can get his cousin Emerson, Emerson’s weird nerd-bro friends, and Todd wound up really easily and make them do stupid things by feigning like he has no idea that Chris Evans and James McAvoy will not ever cross paths in a Marvel movie because of dumb copyright reasons, wondering why Hugh Jackman’s name isn’t on the cast list for Age of Ultron

and saying things like, “You know what would be the best possible thing for Thor: Ragnarok? At the midpoint, Sir Ian McKellan makes a grand entrance from behind some random curtains that weren’t there five minutes ago, purple cape billowing behind him, and Magneto punches Loki in the face. Boom, Ragnarok averted. They fill the rest of the movie’s runtime with Chris Evans taking me to dinner and a movie within a movie, it’d be totally meta, right? :D”

Yeah, Pete is also that person who would go to ComicCon in a “totally brilliant cosplay” as, “the World’s #1 S*tucky Shipper,” get super-method about his real-time LARPing as The World’s #1 S*tucky Shipper (but like, using actual method-acting, not, “Jared Leto sends giant health hazards to, harasses, and is otherwise horrible to his costars because lawl method” method-acting), and use it to satirize and take the piss out of both really OTT shippers and the people who act like shippers are Ruining Every Forever because they want to ship.

He’d also tell a nerd-bro that his favorite Gandalf quote is, “Do or do not, there is no try” but his second favorite Gandalf quote is, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one,” and point to a picture of Michael Gambon’s Dumbledore and identify him as Gandalf while identifying a picture of the Fourth Doctor as Dumbledore, all just to annoy the nerd-bro, then yawn and saunter away while the nerd-bro has an angry meltdown.

Someday, Pete is going to troll the wrong person (again) and it will get him into really deep shit (again) that he won’t be able to wriggle out of by being charming and witty (like he usually does when he gets himself into these situations), but his take on this is, “Hey, as long as I don’t unwittingly troll a super-villain, it’s not actually that bad. What is the worst thing that could possibly happen.”

(Seb would point of that that’s exactly what he said before getting shocked into three major heart attacks by another mutant, which in turn triggered his first transformation into a nine-foot-tall wolf-man? And that he has said it in many, many other situations that immediately went from Bad to Worse to Shitty to Excremental to “the motherfucking shit-pits that trailed down from the hill of Golgotha” because saying things like, “what’s the worst that could happen” and, “what could possibly go wrong” is seriously tempting fate to kick your ass — but he will also admit that Pete has better luck on this front than he does, and that Pete has better coping skills, and that Peter Paolo Matthew Arden just has his shit more together than Seb does in general, so he’s somewhat less likely to end up in Golgotha levels of shit from this.)

(But, please, Pete? He would really, really, really like it if you could please act like you care whether or not you get into a mountain of shit from tempting fate by trolling people so liberally, like. Please. Pretty please. He loves you so much and knows that he can’t protect you from the ups and downs of life itself, but you’ve already had so much bad shit happen to you that Seb wants to keep you safe from as much unnecessary bad shit as possible, and…… please? (⊙︿⊙) )

cat pictures. dog pictures. wolf pictures. guinea pig pictures. iguana pictures. giraffe pictures. if there is a cute animal out there, being cute, it has a place on Pete’s blog. especially if he can find an excuse to tag Seb in them and go, “it you” (which he mostly limits to cats and, after Seb trips and falls into mutant werewolf superpowers, wolves — but he’s also gone, “it you” on pictures of lizards, sharks, lions [specifically, the “do lions blep” post], giraffes sticking out their weird blue tongues, tapirs, and pugs wearing sunglasses shaped like flowers).

Pete watched a bit of Community because Seb seemed really into it, and he thought it was okay, not enough to really reblog it that much but okay — but he definitely reblogged a gifset of Troy going, “awww, I wanna lick it” over a puppy from “Cooperative Calligraphy,” specifically so he could tag Seb and go, “awww, Princess, it you.”

In fairness, Seb deserves that and totally agrees that he deserves it because sometimes, he needs a chaperone when he goes to the local ASPCA shelter, or he might well try to adopt all of the dogs. Which Pete finds adorable in theory, and really endearing from his Princess…… but also, Seb? You have six babies already. You would have seven if you hadn’t lost Chewie at the end of April, assuming that you still adopted Cat without losing Chewie. Cool it. Chill. You do not need more dogs right now.

Pete has also been known to go, “awww, Princess, it us” on photosets of cats and dogs cuddling with each other, and “it me” on pictures of pugs embracing wine mom culture

(the latter of which, in retrospect, he kind of regrets doing. Like, he more or less stands by it, but it made Seb get Worried about him and go, “Are you okay? Do you need to talk? Because you were just getting on my ass about not making self-deprecating jokes about sobriety because it worries you, but now it kinda looks like you’re doing the exact same thing, and I’m just?? Should I be concerned, Pete? Do you want to talk about something? Are you okay??? I love you, you’re important to me, I can talk if you want to” which was not what Pete intended at all.

Like, on one hand, he hates making his best friend worry about him because if you ask Pete, it’s only natural for them to worry about each other, but both of them also need to work on worrying about themselves a bit more effectively. Because precedent says that both of them sort of suck at it, probably especially when they think that they’re doing okay with it.

On the other, he hates making Seb worry because Pete is still working on getting used to the feeling of someone caring about you. Like, even with Seb, who’s done things for him like blow off an entire weekend of shit to get down to Yonkers from Poughkeepsie and come out to Pete’s undergrad after he’d had a really messy breakup that caused a wave of drama in his entire friend-group, because Pete went to a small liberal arts school full of theatre kids (even among people who weren’t in the theatre program), and the gossip mill was ridiculous, and everything was a fucking disaster…

…so, Seb lied to his prep school teachers about a vaguely defined, “family emergency,” lied to his grandparents about not having any classes on Friday for some contrived reason to get them to give him a ride to the Metro-North station in Poughkeepsie, booked it down to Yonkers, and spent a three-day weekend with Pete.

Eventually, his grandparents found out what was going on, because Seb called his Mom that afternoon to go, “Hey, jsyk, I’m in Bronxville with Pete earlier than we’d planned this weekend, I’m probably going to use the credit card in the City tonight, we’ll be safe and stuff, but his ex-boyfriend’s a jerk and it’s screwing things up with all his friends too and he’s really upset and he needed somebody to be there with him who’s not involved in any of it” — but by that point, he and Pete had already had their three-day weekend, so it was just kinda whatever.

But, yeah. Like, Seb’s done stuff like that for Pete since they first really started getting to know each other, but unfortunately, Pete’s father and older brother are people who exist. And some of Pete’s dickbag ex-boyfriends are also people who exist. And between all of them, Pete’s wound up having a hard time with the concept of people genuinely caring about him, and even with Seb, he can bristle and go, “No, stop, this doesn’t make sense, why are you doing this, ‘caring about me as a person thing’”

And on the dorsal fin, Pete doesn’t like making Seb worry about him too much because when he’s at his best, Sebastian is a loving, generous, selfless person who is an amazing friend and cares about people for their own benefit even if he isn’t their friend…

but this is not an ideal world, and under all of that, Seb also has a problem where he over-relies on other people for a sense of stability and a sense of who the Hell he even is (the TL;DR of why is, “untreated clinical depression and some of the longterm side-effects thereof”)

and when things go wrong for the people Seb loves, things can start going wrong for Seb himself in short order, because he worries about them, feels their pain a bit too intensely (but not outside the human average enough to make it mutant-level empathy), and generally turns the volume on his human disaster-ness up to eleven.

Like, in the past year-and-a-half, Seb’s had ten separate stumbles off the wagon, and four of them started in close proximity to Something Bad happening to someone he loves — e.g., his Dad had a routine arthroscopic surgery, which went well enough on its own, but Abe had a bad post-op reaction to the anesthesia, and Marceline told her other three kids to basically tell Seb enough to keep him in the loop, but don’t get specific because he’ll worry. Unfortunately, this left Seb with a lot of questions, which made him worry, which made him feel helpless and miserable and scared…

……and then he dropped off the radar for thirty-six hours and when Todd went to his place to check on him, he found Seb coming down from being strung out on Percocet. And, like, okay, on the plus? Seb hadn’t taken all of what he’d gotten his hands on and had flushed the rest before Todd had even gotten there…… but he’d still been really strung out, and he was less than entirely enjoyable to be around while coming down (like, Todd called Nick, Seb’s sponsor, for him, and Seb spent most of their call groaning when Todd said something that was true but that Seb didn’t like him saying)

……and Pete got to see this when Todd called him, going, “Hey, it’s cool if you can’t, since I know you, like, just got back from your Mom-mandated rehab visit a couple weeks ago, but…… uh. Seb hasn’t eaten lately because he got strung out and forgot about it, and I’m not allowed to use his kitchen because he likes it un-exploded, and I don’t want him to be alone, so, like? Can you maybe come over here and cook something? Or take his credit card and get take-out? Or if not, just say so and I’ll try calling Margot again, but…… pleeeeease?”

So, yeah, uh. Pete would really like to not be the cause for that sort of thing, because he doesn’t want to do that to his Princess — especially since you can sometimes get Seb to not totally lose his head about things, and in fairness, he is slowly getting better, but he’s also a stubborn jackass about calming down [which Pete can’t actually judge him for, since Pete is arguably even worse on the, “stubborn jackass” front sometimes, but still] — and also because it would really fuck Pete’s mental health up for Seb to go off the rails. Partly because Seb would be off the rails, and partly because Pete would feel guilty about it.

So, yeah. Long story short, Pete has a lot of feelings about why he regrets going, “it me” on the picture of the pug embracing wine mom culture.)

Golden Girls anything. He’s only even seen a few episodes of it, but he loves it anyway. He has often gone, “Princess, it us” on posts that featured both Blanche and Dorothy, but no one’s really sure if he’s Dorothy and Seb is Blanche, or if it’s the other way around. Pete isn’t even sure, but he’d probably tell you that it depends on the post.

In his defense, both he and Seb have responded to, “better late than [blank]” with the answer, “pregnant!” before, and generally, they both have decent claim to either role.

Seb personally feels like he’s probably more like Rose, but Pete refuses to let him be Rose. Todd is Rose. Todd has to be Rose because as much as Pete likes Betty White, he’s not actually that fond of Rose, and views her in much the same way that he views Todd: they’re kiiiiind of cute sometimes when they aren’t trying too hard and they bring something to the group that Pete would miss if it went away…… but they can also be really fucking nerve-grating, whoops.

Also, Seb isn’t allowed to be Blanche for her, “I looooove a tight man! A tight man with cast-iron pecs… thighs that could choke a bear… butt you could eat breakfast off of… hnnnnnnnnnngh” line

For one thing, Seb isn’t allowed to be Blanche for that line because he’s not discriminatory or anything with body type, but his favorite exes have all been at least a little bit chubby, so like… the exact opposite of a tight man.

For another thing, he can’t say the line right. He doesn’t suck at it or anything, but it’s just missing something. Probably conviction. Because Seb’s preference is not actually for a tight man and he’s putting less effort into the characterization than Pete is.

With anyone else, Seb would hold that he’s putting less effort into the characterization because it’s just supposed to be fun, but…… This is fun for Pete, so whatever. Do your Dramatic™ thing, Pete. Enjoy it.

the first person they followed: the lgbtlaughs blog

what kind of theme they’d have: light background, dark text, straightforward with easy navigation and space for a sidebar pic and links. Not too fancy, but clean and nice-looking.

what kind of text posts they make at 2am: “oh my god it is motherfucking tech week why are these idiots still calling LINE”