#sorry to hit u with that tidal wave of information LMAO

[spiralsandeyes]

I loved reading the Magnoliaverse and especially playing with matches, and one thing that I ended up very curious about was more about Michael's backstory in this au? He's one of the characters who shows up a lot and has a lot of backstory vaguely referenced but never gets a perspective to explore that so I was wondering if you'd be down to share what ideas you had for his backstory while you were writing. Thanks in advance!

omg thank you so much for this! :')) answer got long so i'm putting it under a cut <3

it's actually kind of funny that you ask this... playing with matches has always been the heart of magnolia verse to me, and future installments were/are going to focus on the characters in that fic (particularly agnes, oliver, julia and gerry, with some others). most of them have pretty detailed backstories in my mind but michael was one of the ones whose history i've actually thought less about!

i did have a few things in mind - michael had one particularly shitty relationship when he was ~16/17 that he still carries a lot of baggage from. he had crushes before that but never anything he was brave enough to act on, so it was pretty formative for him wrt his expectations for relationships. he was basically being strung along and used by a guy who didn't have strong romantic feelings for michael the way michael did for him. michael also didn't have a lot of friends growing up, or at least not since childhood, so he really wants to be loved (in any capacity, but he's particularly insecure about the romantic). going back and forth with his divorced parents didn't help with this - he stays with his mom most of the time and had to move when he was ~13-14, uprooting most of his life to a different school where he knew no one, and he never really settled in and found friends there. he's also pretty socially anxious and until meeting gerry, hasn't quite figured out how to get out into the world. he's a homebody mostly because he doesn't know how to be anything else (yet), and though he has art school friends, they aren't very close. too much of his impressions of queerness and college life were formed by the internet/popular media and he has a bit of an inferiority complex about it - he's very aware that he doesn't Do Much aside from art and feels like a loser because of it. (this is an unfortunate combo with his body image issues, insecurities about what he can offer in a relationship, and him being very much starstruck by gerry's band, leading to some of the conflict you see in playing with matches). some other random details: he's out to his parents but has a slightly strained relationship with both of them (he's closer with his grandma on his mom's side!), he has severe adhd but i don't think he knows it yet, he's been drawing for basically his whole life but recently focusing on art forms that involve more physical processes because it's good for his mental health (atm it's various forms of sculpture).

but honestly i've thought a lot more about michael's future than his past! at this point i've been telling people for years that magnolia verse is still in progress and feeling more and more guilty when a completed work fails to materialize, but i still can't stand the thought of leaving it as-is and have to believe in my ability to finish one more fic, so... there Will be one more... but probably not anytime soon and it probably won't be gerrymichael centric. so i'll just tell you about the gerrymichael fic i DID have planned lmao.

so: ex altiora goes viral and gets very popular very quickly when they finish school and release a full album. the speed of it is great for their careers and bad for their mental health. agnes and gerry really struggle with it. gerry in particular starts getting a lot of fans which makes him REALLY nervous because he's going stealth, trying to hide from his mom, and just generally not super interested in being a public sex object! this is a little bit Weird for his relationship with michael. he gets pretty (reasonably) paranoid and wants to keep his personal life very private, but michael Does Not Get It and is hurt because he feels like he's being kept a secret. he's also a little bit jealous of the attention, though he won't admit it, and is overall experiencing new depths of insecurity that he will (eventually) Finally get to process because he still thinks of gerry as the Cool One with all the power in the relationship. meanwhile gerry is so anxious and trying to cope with the spotlight of sudden internet fame/irl fame in certain contexts (i.e. shows) and feels like he can't confide in michael about it. the tension in his and julia's friendship is also reaching a breaking point around then and they have a huge fight which leads to them (gasp) speaking honestly about thoughts and feelings they've had for years! but anyway. everything gets sorted out in the end, and michael and gerry end up much happier! michael resolves his issues, gerry comes out to the world, they work out boundaries together, everyone becomes closer :)