#this is barely even a fandom thought I am doing literary analysis here

[sparksandstarsandstories]

Having a crisis over whether Gideon Nav counts as a literary Christ figure

[earlgreytea68]

A Review of the Fall Out Boy Biography Inevitably Colored by Shippiness Oops But Really Mainly By My Love for Pete Wentz

I don’t even know who the audience is for this monstrosity of a review, nor do I know the audience for this biography, though, so, like, it’s fitting lololol: 

I am a new Fall Out Boy fan. I say that because, if anybody was in need of a Fall Out Boy biography, you would think it would be a new fan. AND YET. I’m not entirely sure who the market for this book is, because it isn’t really Fall Out Boy fans of any duration, because not only can everything in the book be easily located with the simplest of Google searches but also there’s so much he leaves out. And what he leaves out is just…so incredibly telling. It’s like, the facts he chooses to highlight are often pointless and random (although thanks for telling me that Pete Wentz’s jeans were so tight he had to perform without underwear, I’m going to think about that a lot now), whereas the facts he leaves out are the ones that lend both complexity and context. Like, this whole book could be Exhibit A in how malleable facts can be. Given the same set of facts, this man and I would tell two very different stories.

At least partly this is because he’s a music critic (I glean from the book) and I’m a creative writer. I believe he is a music critic because he takes care to dedicate a paragraph of musical analysis to every song on their earliest CDs (he loses interest in them over the hiatus, and more on that later). I appreciated this, because I know nothing about music, and I learned a lot about how talented Patrick Stump really is, like, not as a vocalist, because I knew that, or as a musician, because I also knew that, but as a smart, clever songwriter. I don’t know how to critique music, and I was happy this guy was full of praise for what Patrick does. He also pointed out musical hallmarks of theirs – like their tendency to drop the music suddenly for Patrick to sing an a cappella line – and that was the first time I’d ever really thought about them.

He was full of much less praise for Pete’s lyrics, though, and I think that’s because he’s a music person, not a word person. Not that he thought Pete’s lyrics were ever bad but he tended to stay very conventional about them: emo, confessional, dramatic, and ingeniously juxtaposed with Patrick’s clear-as-a-bell voice. He’s kind of obsessed with the contrast between Patrick’s voice and the lyrics he’s singing, whereas I’m much more obsessed with the contrast between Patrick himself in sweater-paws and glasses snarling, “I am your worst nightmare,” like, sweetheart, I doubt it. AND YET HE PULLS IT OFF. Like, that’s so interesting to me, how much Patrick can make himself embody Pete, that act of alchemy where he sings on his behalf, but this book talks less about that than I think it might, mostly because I don’t think this guy really wants to think too hard about how incredibly good Pete’s lyrics actually are. The thing about Pete’s lyrics – he does this, and it’s so clever, it’s killer clever – is you can read them so easily on one very obvious and expected layer, and then there’s always one or two additional meanings tucked underneath them, and you might never stop to think about them, especially if you’ve already written him off, but his lyrics reward careful study and a lot of thought, he specializes in triple entendres, a turn of phrase that spins out into so many meanings, that’s so hard to do and he makes it look so easy that it’s such a simple mistake to dismiss it, to not even see how dense his poetry is. The conventional story on Pete Wentz is he’s good at marketing – marketing the band, marketing himself – and so he spun in circles to keep the spotlight on him and away from Patrick, and that’s definitely one take, and another take would be to point out that the same whirligig sex-symbol tabloid-fodder act also had the side effect of undercutting any tendency to take Pete seriously from a literary point of view, like, so much easier to just say that, in keeping with his goth guyliner, he wept into his inkwell and scrawled messily over parchment. So anyway: criticism #1 of this book is that they should have complemented the music-critic-ness with an English major.

Criticism #2 is that I feel like people always get wrong what appeals to girls, to speak in the massive generalizations of this topic. Like, someone somewhere was like, “Hey, girls like this Fall Out Boy band, it must be because Pete Wentz is hot.” And they’re not wrong about that, exactly, but they always seem to miss how many entangled layers often come with attraction. Like, yeah, sometimes it’s just he’s got nice abs but often there’s a million other things happening there, and one thing I cannot forgive this guy for is not just his failure to engage with Pete’s lyrics on any real level, but how little he also truly examines Pete Wentz’s genuine marketing genius. He’s a music guy: His interest is clearly in Patrick, and also in Joe and Andy, because they’re musicians, and he can wax poetic about them. Pete gets his standard paragraphs: Oh, he chose the right management, the right record label, the right deal. He can pick out a good band, like Panic! or Gym Class Heroes. All of that is true, but none of it really grasps exactly how smart Pete really is. Like, the book hardly mentions at all how much Pete realized immediately the value of internet fandom. When I first fell for Pete Wentz – that first weekend I spent Googling him – what really was the death knell for me was stumbling upon the old FOB Q&As he used to run in the earliest days. And it wasn’t actually his constant leaning into the Peterick shipping with such dead-on unerring understanding of fandom that did it for me (although that was pretty charming, ngl). It was how often teenagers messaged Pete Wentz with their problems, and how patiently he took the time to respond. My boyfriend broke up with me. My grandma just died. I don’t feel like I fit in anywhere. Again and again and again, Pete Wentz took these messages and wrote out detailed, laborious responses. And I know he was a guy angling hard to be famous but not all guys angling hard to be famous realized how important something like this is, this very personal connection, like, above and beyond the bantering and the smirks, and even if you’re doing it entirely for ulterior motives, that’s a ton of emotional labor he was performing. I finished reading those Q&As and thought, God, Pete Wentz must have been exhausted.

And I’m not sure that’s something the bio ever really wrestled with, because it never really talked about that aspect of him. I don’t actually think the bio read anything Pete Wentz has ever posted online, like, not even those basic Q&As that are the easiest thing in the universe to Google, never mind the secret blogs he still has scattered all over the internet with nuggets of lyricism buried in there for Patrick to mine. It’s just so easy to buy into the Peter-Pan, devil-may-care Pete Wentz picture, and for all I know that’s the truest of the pictures, but it’s also undeniable fact that the other side to that was either really cunning and savvy or just a nice guy, and either way it’s another layer to Pete Wentz that gets short shrift in the bio. Which isn’t surprising because although the author clearly appreciates Fall Out Boy the band, the author clearly isn’t fannish at all, whereas it’s pretty abundantly clear Pete Wentz is fannish. He’s unapologetically fannish. He speaks fan language with a fluency that is hard to fake. And he’s astonishingly well-versed in tropes. He’s instinctively good at creating a good story, not just in his lyrics (although he, like Taylor Swift, is adept at tropey lyrics, so it’s no surprise they have a mutual admiration society), but in his life. In addition to the Q&As, that first weekend was full of me being like, …How is this the tropiest thing I’ve ever read??? It’s unsurprising that the bio doesn’t point out all the tropes in the Pete Wentz / Patrick Stump / Fall Out Boy story, because the author isn’t versed in tropes, but Pete Wentz definitely is. He knows how to use words, well. And you wouldn’t necessarily know it to listen to him – he babbles and uses tons of filler phrases and never, ever ask him what his lyrics are about, it’s like trying to have a conversation in Wonderland – but that’s all part of the aw-shucks-sometimes-I-scribble-some-stuff-down-Patrick’s-the-real-genius brand.

Now I am not qualified to write a Fall Out Boy biography and also I don’t know these people and also everything I do know comes from Google but that said, I feel like I do know for a fact some primary source materials that the writer just chose to leave out that really does display how malleable stories can be depending on what you highlight or not. Like, if he didn’t want to draw psychological conclusions based on the facts that’s fair enough. But he also pared back the narrative so drastically that it left off the true meat of it, like, if you read this book you would not necessarily think there was much interesting about these people, whereas if you really dig into everything they’ve got out there, well, you could start to think they’re super-interesting people. But I am a creative writer and this biographer was a music critic. He settles happily into the song analysis but I’m busy connecting dots into a narrative, and life is complicated, it is not a simple narrative, but that impulse underlies most biography, the idea that we can assemble the facts into something that has something to say about a human life. But that act really exists in how you assemble the facts.

 ~~~~~~~~TRIGGER WARNING: SUICIDE DISCUSSION~~~~~~~~~~~

A really good example of this is the way the biography deals with the Best Buy incident. Here are the bare facts: Pete Wentz, in a Best Buy parking lot listening to Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah,” took too many Ativan. In a phone call, his manager noticed he was slurring, called his parents, they rushed him to the hospital, he lived. These are the facts that the book gives you, and these are true facts.

If you want to expand slightly upon these bare facts, Pete has given many, many interviews about this incident because he is very open about mental health issues and his bipolar disorder and depressive episodes and anxiety. Pete has said that he’s not sure he was trying to kill himself so much as just make his head quiet for a little while. Pete has said he felt like he was too busy being Pete Wentz for everyone else and he just wanted to rest. These are also facts, although ones I don’t think the biographer truly believes. He does dutifully quote them but he also clearly has his own belief about how much Pete’s telling the truth. Because this is inevitable in any telling of the facts.  

If you want to expand slightly upon these facts, you could point out that Pete’s lyrics reflect how noisy his head is (“when this city goes silent, the ringing in my ears gets violent”), which might color how you understand him when he says he just wanted some peace and quiet. You might also point out that, as the bio has already said, Pete was the driving force behind the band’s strategy and it was about to culminate. You might remind the reader that Pete walked away from other possibly very successful careers to do this band (there is much made in the book of the theoretical ease with which Pete could have achieved a soccer career, which made me raise my eyebrows a bit but, you know, Patrick does say Pete’s really, really good at soccer). You might recall that Pete has these kids relying on him whose parents he literally had to persuade to trust him. You might say that so far everything had gone exactly as he planned and he just needed to stick the landing. You might mention the fact that they kept rewriting songs and rewriting songs and rewriting songs; that Pete was in such utter meltdown mode that he was sliding lyrics under Patrick’s door and then retreating, so that the rest of the band never even saw him; that they had scrapped half the album and were furiously writing new music right up until the deadline – all of which are facts not even mentioned. You might say all of those things, because they are indeed all true facts.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It is appropriate at this point to note that many of these things were simply not germane to the story this biographer was telling, which was a music-critic-focused story. But these things are all incredibly germane to the story *I* would tell, about these four people who found each other, lost each other, and found each other again, and the two people at the center whose creative alchemy was by turns either too dazzling or too explosive and in both incarnations needed to find a way to balance to keep the band afloat. This is the story I would tell, but, to be totally honest, Pete and Patrick’s creative partnership doesn’t really seem to interest the writer of this book. He mentions it vaguely, in passing, once or twice, fairly standard surface proclamations about Pete handling lyrics and Patrick handling music, and Pete drawing the spotlight away from Patrick who didn’t want it. Or he’ll say that the true secret to the band’s success is Patrick’s voice and Pete’s lyrics, like Patrick could be any pretty-enough voice, which I think just isn’t true, there’s so much more to the way they clicked together. I read this great New Yorker article once about how, through history, genius exists in pairs, that often two people need to find each other to push each other to be better than they would ever be apart.

It’s fine to not want to get into that too intensely, it’s just that that means that half the story of Folie goes away, if you’re not focused on how the band was creating. Like, there’s so much about the lead-up to Folie to talk about: Patrick’s control over the music to the exclusion of everyone else, Pete’s worsening prescription pill thing, and the way that their creative partnership seemed to disintegrate while simultaneously leaving no room for Joe or Andy in the band. The book mentions really none of this – nothing about the fact that at one point they had descended into physical altercations over chord progressions; nothing about the story the producer tells that Patrick would get so frustrated after phone calls with Pete that he’d throw things around the studio; nothing about the story that Patrick once told Pete, “I don’t care, I’m going to write a song and call it ‘I Don’t Care,’” such a telling little tale when later Patrick comes to hate the song “I Don’t Care” – so the hiatus feels like it descends out of nowhere, with a paragraph about the fans not liking the album. Which, again, is a true fact, but without the other true facts of the way the entire creative process was crumbling around them, around all of them, it sounds less compelling. The bio does get into Joe wanting to flex his creative muscles more but doesn’t connect it back to the Folie era of being shut-out. The hiatus becomes entirely about Patrick not liking being booed.

Even worse to me is the book devotes a lot of time to each of their music videos, which is awesome, because their videos are important and great, but it devotes exactly zero time to the video for “What a Catch, Donnie.” And I’m so bewildered by that, you can have a field day with the symbolism in that video, even if you want to just make a true factual statement about its plot: Patrick collects all of the detritus of Fall Out Boy and all of their friends come and party with him, while Pete goes down with a sinking ship all alone, to a medley of the words he’s leaving behind. Like. That is literally what happens in this video. And then the hiatus starts. To me this is one of the most ridiculously angsty things ever, that they would go out to their own triumphs echoing back at them and the literal death of captain!Pete Wentz. To the story I would tell, this is the most germane. It merits not a single mention in the bio (other than praising the song itself for being one of the strongest on the album, and talking about the Elvis Costello cameo).

Because he’s much more interested in them musically than as people or relationships, he seems to lose interest in them post-hiatus. He details each of their hiatus-era projects with his typical attention to the music criticism side. And then he spends, like, eight pages talking about the guy who wrote the article that triggered Patrick’s “We Liked You Better When You Were Fat” blog post. I’m not even exaggerating. It’s an entire chapter dedicated to the article and the guy who wrote it. Patrick’s response is described and quoted and even praised, but not in nearly as much as detail as the original article, and Pete’s reaction to Patrick’s blog post gets literally zero attention. Which is fascinating since, in some tellings of the story, that’s the entire reason the hiatus ended. Pete has said on multiple occasions that he read the blog post and was upset Patrick was so upset and called him up and asked him to try writing with him again. But if you’re not actually interested in that creative relationship as a relationship, then you don’t see a reason to explain the motivation behind trying again.

You also don’t really see a reason to tackle why they initially struggled to get back into it. Like, truly grappling with the Pete/Patrick relationship leads to more depth than the surface “Patrick doesn’t like the spotlight, so Pete takes it for him.” That’s too simplistic a formulation, as Pete himself has said. It also discounts Patrick’s obvious dedication to Pete, his complete willingness to step in and publicly defend him on many occasions, like, Patrick’s no shy, retiring wallflower when it comes to Pete, Patrick can let loose viciously on behalf of Pete. Their protectiveness is mutual, although the public narrative often glosses over that. (In one of those “why leave that out” details, the biographer notes that Hemingway was Pete and Ashlee’s ring bearer but not that Patrick was Pete’s best man, Idk.) At any rate, I point that out because the struggle they had to find their groove writing together after the hiatus mirrored their initial struggles, to find their way into trusting each other’s strengths, but the book is just kind of like, “The first session wasn’t successful but the next session was. They were out of practice.” They weren’t out of practice with songwriting, not really, especially not Patrick – they were out of practice with each other. And that wasn’t just a hiatus-era souvenir, that went back to Folie, but we didn’t get that part of Folie.  

The biographer also, annoyingly in my view, loses all interest in them at this point. He devotes almost no time to the post-hiatus era, which is fascinating to me, since their ability to launch a comeback as successfully and relevantly as they did is striking, and to do it not by relying on nostalgia but by generating genuinely new hits with a genuinely new audience, and he’s not interested in that at all. Even worse than not being interested in this is the fact that he fails to close the Folie loop, like, he devotes lots of time to Patrick coming to hate Folie because of how much the fans hated it. Then he makes a little note, like, “Maybe someday Patrick will come to love Folie again,” or something, and the thing is, I know the book was written a few years ago now, but there was definitely stuff available about how much Folie had become a fan favorite in the hiatus years. Patrick gave an interview somewhere where he talked about the reunion show and how he read fan reviews of it and the fans were like, “They should have played more songs from Folie!” I always think at that point And then Patrick looked into the camera like he’s on The Office. But, at any rate, Patrick got to see Folie become beloved and that loop could have been closed better and he just leaves it dangling. (I’m almost like, Did he really write most of this book while they were on hiatus and then when they came back he was like, …Goddamn it?)

He doesn’t at all get into the shock of the immediate level of success of their comeback, like, that’s another thing that’s documented, that they were unsure anyone would care and they were so startled by the response that they had to actually add larger venues onto their tour because they’d thought no one would want to come to their shows. He could have talked about how people waited hours outside in the Chicago cold to get into the comeback show, how they started the show with “Thriller” and Patrick says the response was electric and it must have been amazing and he’s just not really interested in it, you can tell that he’s bored. He doesn’t talk about how Patrick hadn’t really thought about having to perform the new songs live because he didn’t think anyone would really care about the new album, so they had to really think about how they were going to make it work, and how he almost permanently damaged his voice having to sing “Alone Together” live and that’s what finally finally drove him to pursue actual voice lessons, like, he mentions none of this, he’s just like, “They wrote Save Rock & Roll, and then they wrote American Beauty / American Pyscho.” He’s just clearly, at that point, bored. Whereas in the story I would tell, that is the most satisfying part, the happy ending beyond their wildest dreams.

Okay, omg, this is SO LONG, but here are some other random thoughts:

·       He never – not once – goes back to source Pete’s lyrics to their original blog entries, which can be very interesting. This is because he’s not interested in the lyrics really, but it’s very frustrating to me because, like, SOMEBODY TAKE THESE LYRICS SERIOUSLY, PLEASE, THEY’RE SO GOOD. It also means that he misses things like “Miss Missing You” and the way it echoes Pete’s poem with the line “I miss you missing me,” like, that’s just a fact ::shrug:: He also says “Hum Hallelujah” is about teenage romance, and that is the most straightforward, surface-level reading, like, “Oh, it says ‘teenage vow in a parking lot,’ that’s what it’s about.” This pains me only because “Hum Hallelujah” might be the most perfect lyrically constructed song Fall Out Boy has, every line is golden and stuffed with meaning and emotion, and he’s just like, “teenage romance,” so dismissively, and I wince, like, “I could write it better than you ever felt it” is a line that deserves more than that. Not to mention “I love you in the same way there’s a chapel in a hospital,” god, or “One day we’ll get nostalgic for disaster,” ugh, do not read this book for lyrical analysis. He also terms the best lyrical line on Cork Tree as “To the ‘love’ I left my conscience pressed / Between the pages of the Bible in the drawer” and, while there’s nothing wrong with that line, I don’t even think that’s the best line in XO (I mean, leaving off the follow-up of “What did it ever do for me? I say” undercuts those lines immediately, imo). (He does at least point out that “Keep quiet, nothing comes as easy as you / Can I lay in your bed all day?” is a devastatingly sexy couplet.)

·       Can I just say, the entire debacle with Hey Chris gets precious little time in this book, which in a way is fine but in a way is like, just by Googling I got way more information on what went down and the weird, weird words that were being flung back and forth (at one point the term “heterolifemates” is used which makes zero sense at all in this context), but this book does spend a lot of time with Chris and Pete pre-Patrick (fascinating, right???) and there’s this weird part where Chris says he hated Pete before he met him and is like, “He should wear pants that fit,” which is just…such an interesting reason to hate Pete Wentz, like, Idk, Chris, coupled with your heterolifemates thing and weird thing about “whose name do you say every night???” which is also weirdly sexual phrasing and also being like “no one knows how to break a heart like he does,” like, everything about this entire situation has so much queer subtext but the book doesn’t touch any of that, ever, in any circumstance, with a ten-foot pole.

·       EVERYONE, THE BORDERS WHERE JOE AND PATRICK MEET IS LOCATED IN EDEN PLAZA AND I AM SO UPSET I DIDN’T KNOW THAT WHEN I WROTE THE DEVIL FIC.

·       I did not know that the producer wanted them to change the “We’re falling apart to halftime” line in Dance, Dance because he thought it was too incomprehensible and I’m just like, That’s the lyric where you thought you were going to lose people??

·       From the bio, describing the Live in Phoenix performance: a strange moment where Wentz inexplicably gets changed onstage. A strange moment? Inexplicably? Okay, like, germane to my telling of the story is how much those dick pics affected Pete Wentz’s public persona, how much he knew exactly what he was there to sell and he sold it with gusto, and how much of a spiral that ultimately sent him on. Instead, this biographer finds it inexplicable that Pete Wentz would take his shirt off onstage, and his analysis of the music video for “This Ain’t a Scene” gives the dick pic storyline only an offhand reference, calling it “making light” of the scandal, instead of really digging into the obvious pain there, like, that’s not a joyful lark there. (Later, much later, years later, Brendon Urie will manage to actually make light of the dick pic saga, both in the Drunk History and also in the joke of the dick pic being the photo that comes up when Pete calls him, as seen in the promos for the tour they did together, and that feels much more genuine. But that bit in “Arms Race” is kind of heartbreaking.)

·       Pete says of their failed attempt to get the Guinness record of the first band to perform on all seven continents that it was the worst feeling he’d ever felt in Fall Out Boy, and the biographer is like, “Really, Pete? Really?” and I kind of want to shake him because Pete Wentz is obviously a dramatic person and he feels disappointments keenly and he made that statement literally just as they were finding out they wouldn’t be able to do it, like, of course it’s just hyperbole! The biographer is weird through that whole section of the book because he never once mentions that, as a consolation to Pete, Patrick stayed up all night with him so they could get the record of most interviews by a duo in a twenty-four-hour period, like, that’s what I would have said about that story instead of trying to get way more out of Pete’s off-the-cuff self-pity (which is just so Pete Wentz, it’s like this writer hasn’t just spend a hundred pages writing about him…).

·       Whenever I read about how many songs Patrick shows up with when it’s time to record an album, I always feel this little twinge of solidarity with him, like, sometimes that’s just how it is in your chosen creative medium, you’re just always endlessly writing.

·       I had never thought before about the fact that Pete says all the time that he was too selfish pre-hiatus, all the time, a lot, that’s how he describes his problem – and the fact that there’s an entire song on Truant Wave called “Love, Selfish Love” with the line “God bless the sad and selfish” and I’m just going to…sit here and think about who in Patrick’s life could be described as sad and selfish.

·       From the bio re: Soul Punk: It’s disarming to hear this garrulous boy-next-door sing so candidly about sex. Yeah, I don’t think you were paying attention to the way Patrick smirks at the camera in the music videos, buddy.

·       Detail I knew but had never really thought about before: that Pete got Patrick to really click into songwriting with him again by giving him a puzzle. Patrick says that sometimes Pete gives him homework assignments, “I want a song that sounds like x, y, and z,” and Patrick will be like, “That’s impossible,” but also so intrigued that he ends up sitting and writing the thing. The fact that Pete knew, after a few mediocre songs neither of them liked, like, “You know how I snag him? This way,” is adorable. Also, the fact that it was Pete who adored the song to come out of it, “Where Did the Party Go?,” and that it was his excitement over the song that made Patrick think, Okay, maybe we can do this, like, it was Pete’s joy that drove Patrick’s optimism, they’re so creatively linked, these two.

·       He does include the detail that Pete was worried he’d fallen behind during the hiatus because he didn’t spend much time playing music and so he committed himself to practicing and improving with metronome work, like, Pete Wentz ugh <3. In a very recent interview that I cannot blame the bio for not including, Pete said that Patrick helps him with the bass because he’s so musically talented and everything about that offhand statement just kills me.

·       I did not know that one of the leaks of their reunion was on a blog that wrote “You can stop refreshing for a journal update,” and I’m in love with that, sorry.  

·       Ugh, can I just say, the fact that Patrick sang all of his vocals for Pax AM Days live with the band is just so unbelievable, he kills me.

·       From the bio: “We were fireworks that went off too soon / And I miss you in the June gloom, too,” Stump sings here, and you can’t help but wonder if the words refer to his public but brief marriage. …I have indeed helped the wondering of that because I have never once thought that about this song lolololol

[outlanderfanfics]

Getting to Know Abby Debeaupre

This week, I interviewed another great Outlander fanfic writer, @abbydebeaupreposts!

Abby was born on the East Coast of U.S and grew up in and around New York City. She is 50% Greek and 50% Mutt, but can only (barely, she says) speak her native tongue of English. Without exactly revealing her age, she did admit that she has a playlist stuck in the 80s. She only started writing Outlander fanfics a little over a year ago. In school, she studied Political Science and Economics. Currently, she does mostly transaction work, focusing mainly on contingency planning and a lot of technical writing. For fun, Abby enjoys hiking, biking, playing tennis, reading, cooking, and watching documentaries. As a unique talent, she revealed that she can tie a cherry stem with her tongue! If she could travel through the stones, she would like to relive her life as a baby boomer or possibly go to Paris in the 1920s. She was adamant that she would not be all that adaptable to the 1740s, as she has a healthy respect for deodorant, tampons and indoor plumbing.

Keep reading to see the full Q & A.

What inspired you to start writing Outlander fanfiction?

The long droughtlander between 1 and 2. I started writing fanfic probably like everyone else --because there were some things I wanted to read that weren’t written yet. Also one of my children had a serious medical issue and needed surgery (he’s doing really well. If any parents out there need to figure out how to go about finding a peds neurosurgeon feel free to DM me). It was a hugely challenging thing to go through. I had a lot of time waiting and pacing in doctor’s offices and hospital corridors. The thing is you are still processing later on-- months later...it echoes across a lot of your life even after and there was upheaval for awhile. Anyway, I stumbled on Outlander fanfic -- perfect small snippets -- the fandom platform is a kind of shorthand that cuts through the expositional crap-- we know who the the characters are and mostly where they are going. Fics usually have regular updates so you stay interested, etc. A handful of writers in particular gave me something to look forward to, a nice escape and lovely food for thought about something other than the things happening IRL. That made a difference to me and I -- corny as this sounds--hope maybe I’ve been able to return the favor/pay it forward.

What are some of your favourite quotes that you have written?

This is a great excuse to reflect on what I have been doing so thank you for that. Let me preface this by saying that I love writing but readers make it fun, special and interesting. So I just wanted to say how enjoyable readers have made this experience. In the process of reviewing everything to try and pick out some quotes has made me realize that I did accomplish my starting goal-- I wrote some things that I wanted to read that remained unwritten and I am kind of happy with how things turned out. Here we go:   

“He kissed her as if she was the essence life itself and she kissed him as if by doing so she could bring him into the light.” --An Outlander Affair to Remember

“If my lips touch yours, Sassenach, I might no’ be able to stop. I’ve been holding heaven in my arms while you slept.” --An Outlander Affair to Remember

“Kiss me quick, all’s quiet, no one is coming.” Claire huffed as she dropped into his lap. “Aye? Well, if it ‘twas you coming, Sassenach, it certainly wouldna be quiet for long!” -- An Outlander Affair to Remember 

“I could have been content, you know...Everything changed when you came into Faith’s life.” Jamie could not remain silent. “Sassenach, I came into your life, too.” “I know. That’s it, exactly.” Tears gathered at the corners of her eyes, as if the truth of the statement made her heart break. -- This is Us

“Dearest LJ, If the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach; Your best chance is with a scalpel, not a spatula!” -- This is Us

“Sassenach, if ye think that kiss’ll help me focus on something other than how much I look forward to doing it again, I must tell ye I am no’ of the same mind as you. Come here, lass,” he said as he moved in for the kill. -- Queen’s Gambit

What is your writing process when writing your fanfics? 

I very specifically choose a quote or a scene or a theme from the source material and then challenge myself to drop it on its head and slide it from the OL-verse into my fic in a way that changes its meaning, reconstructs it or reinterprets it. This is true of all my stories except perhaps the Abby After Dark Collection-- which is a little less….literary in nature. This Is Us in particular uses many influences from the book-verse (and TV show too actually) and it has resonated with readers despite the fact that I know about half of the readers haven’t read all the books. I love the fact that it appeals to both kinds of readers.

Do you write during a specific time of day? 

I work looooong hours, I have a fairly busy life with my family and friends and so I try and attend to writing a little bit every day but some days more than others.

Do you ask for input from peers? 

Not in the way you mean--I don’t have a beta and I know it shows! But my peers are beyond supportive of me. We do discuss story arcs and character development, funny plot bunnies, etc. Especially when you get the odd mean anon. They are so great in those low moments. I have been blessed with cheerleaders in the fandom from day one. A lot of people ask how can they get traction for their work and on their blogs-- here is my best advice: team up with someone or several someones--There are artists out there, GIF makers, book analysis bloggers, script nerds, BTS photo blogs, photoshop wizards- find them team up-- @smoakingwaffles started really getting traction with @annalisedemoodboards and the Polaroid series. @futurelounging was just flat out funny and caught @bonnie-wee-swordsman‘s attention. I started on AO3 and @pissedoffsoka13 found me as did @thistlekat777 and really encouraged me to come to Tumblr and then @outlanderedandoverhere drew an amazing This Is Us the fic that is my blog banner and @cantrixgrisea started much as I did posting (but fanart on AO3)-- incredible stuff--and she is so adorable and funny. These are just a few of the ways people give input-- I learn everyday from what they are up to. 

Do you edit while you write or do you use a more stream-of-consciousness approach?

I am the worst proofreader in the world-- but I edit constantly, it’s why it takes a long time between posts. 

What is your favourite genre to write and why?

I don’t have one. I write more modern AUs. I am too much of a nerd about wanting to fact check things and it’s just easier to do that with a modern world setting. The only genre I don’t think I could do are the kinds of fics written by @futurelounging and @diversemediums and @kalendraashtar-- these fantasy/futuristic/past complexities that are fantastically unique.

What has been your favourite season of the show so far and why?

Season One 1-8 because a more perfect glorious season there never was. That is not to say that I haven’t been blown away by several episodes in all three seasons-- they have their strengths and weaknesses. 

Have you read any of Diana’s books? 

All of them and many side ones as well.    

Do you have a favourite book?

ABOSAA.    

Do you read/write fanfics for any other fandom?

Until a few years ago I hadn’t heard the phrase fandom let alone… so no.

What is one random fact about you that you have never revealed on Tumblr before?

I play Texas Hold ‘Em and a mean game of Oh Hell.   

And that’s Abby. Even though I haven’t added her stories to my archive YET, you can check out her fanfiction master list on her blog.

[words-writ-in-starlight]

I'd love to hear your thoughts about adhd Rachel.

So, for context, when I was a small baby human reading these for the first time, I saw Rachel and I was like “!!!!!!”, you know, as you do when you see a character who kind of Speaks to whatever undetermined weirdness you have going on at the time.  And then I was a slightly older baby human whose school reputation was Somewhere Between Charming Young Genius And Possible Future Gangster--by which I mean that I have punched many a person in my public school career and consequently had a lot of people who were afraid of me and not many close friends.  And I connected even more to Rachel then, because listen: it’s so easy to just fight, and fight, and fight, when you’re too depressed and angry to control overwhelmingly impulsive thoughts.  Now I’m an adult and I know that a huge part of my problem was undiagnosed ADHD (in addition to just being...I’m a real angry person you guys, it’s just...how it is), and I went back to reread the Animorphs and I was like “You know who the fuck else has ADHD.”  

I connected to that in Rachel, and I have Evidence.

First things first, you know that...thing in Rachel books where she’ll actually verbally go “this may not be a good idea” once she’s already doing it?  Constantly?  That’s the impulsivity thing in ADHD that you hear about.  It’s not dunking your hand into 160 degree water without realizing that you’re going to burn yourself and being surprised when it hurts, it’s dunking your hand into 160 degree water and your brain going “hey, that’s going to hurt, you’re going to get burned” once you’re already whipping your hand back and yelling and being resigned that it hurts.  That little voice in your head telling you not to do dangerous stuff is still there, it’s just super late to the party.  And Rachel is a fucking thesis on that whole concept.  The first time she morphs grizzly, she picks the morph on impulse because she wants to be big and strong and able to fight back, and once she’s finished the change she goes hmm, this might be a bad idea, I don’t know if I can control this morph under pressure but she’s already done it and they’re in battle and she’s committed.  When Cassie tells her “I’m going to go get help, don’t do anything dumb” in Book 12, Rachel isn’t unaware that jumping down into the croc pit is something dumb, it’s just that the connection between the action and the fact that it’s a bad idea is made once she’s already up on the railing and jumping in.  She knows that morphing into a starfish on a beach full of people in order to retrieve an earring is both stupid and dangerous, but by the time she notices, she’s already committed.  So: uncontrolled impulses, check.  

Incidentally, I always take it kind of personally when people in the fandom read it as...I don’t know, as either Rachel willfully ignoring good sense or Rachel genuinely not knowing a good plan from a bad one.  Rachel knows common sense when she hears it, that’s obvious even if she sometimes prioritizes some other thing.  And more to the point, Rachel is pretty good at combat tactics in the heat of the moment.  Take 22, where she assembles a plan to take down David in the mall--the fact that he had time to prepare the ground doesn’t change the fact that her plan is reasonably tight.  This is something I will bitch about at length when I write up a recap for Book 37, AKA my most hated Animorphs book because it does BOTH of those things to Rachel’s character.  She’s reckless and impulsive, not stupid, and honestly I kind of resent the part of the fandom that confuses the two.

Second of all, Rachel’s emotional responses tend to either be ‘highly controlled and masked with sarcasm’ or ‘wildly out of hand’, which is really typical of girls with ADHD--society tells us to be utterly in control, which means that the emotional lability (...being mercurial, basically) typical of ADHD bursts out in sudden violence or crying or whatever your particular person is prone to.  So, like, take that one time very early in the series where Rachel goes from being totally checked out to slamming another girl face-first into a table.  ...I’m not saying I’ve done that.  But I am saying that one time when I was twelve a guy came up and hugged me from behind and started complaining when I told him to leave me alone and I put him on the floor and dared a teacher to suspend me.  And Marco says, when they’ve all been dragged up to Chapman’s office, that he’s afraid Rachel’s just going to out them to Chapman right then and there because she’s so furious and out of control.  I told a teacher to go to hell, and called another one a moron to his face, and told yet a third one that he couldn’t find his way around a literary analysis with both hands an a torch.  That’s super standard undiagnosed ADHD shit right there, especially since Rachel’s under a lot of pressure.

Third of all, Rachel’s got some focus problems like whoa: she does struggle to focus on the right thing from time to time, but I’m more interested in the wat she exhibits some real hyperfocus.  The main example that springs to mind is the way Cassie describes Rachel shopping in MM4--there’s no war, there’s no outside stressors of life or death issues, and Cassie still talks about how Rachel is absolutely laser focused, to the point of scheming out which stores they’ll hit in what order like a battle plan.  We hear a lot about Rachel with this kind of obsessive focus, to exclusion of all else, often about shopping but also about other things.  Hyperfocus is a little-discussed but extremely common symptom of ADHD, and it really is exactly what it says on the tin.  And Rachel, oh boy, does Rachel ever have it.

Related to the focus thing, there’s this one bit that I read and every time I’m like SAME DUDE, and it’s from that same scene in the mall at the beginning of 22, when Rachel and Ax are forming up to attack.  She believes Tobias is dead, Jake is actively bleeding to death on the floor, the situation could not be more dire--and her brain still goes “hey, that store’s having a sale.”  And Rachel is furious with herself for it, she hates that her brain kicks that bit of information out while everything is so awful, but she just can’t seem to stop it.  That’s the life, man.  #ADHDAesthetic right there.  

Fourthly--I’m realizing that I have more points here than I thought--Rachel’s a fidgeter.  This isn’t really  explicitly stated because the books have such a strict length limit that they’re usually really cut down to the bare bones, but there’s one place where body language is pretty reliably described: barn meetings.  Marco is usually sacked out on a convenient chair, Tobias in the rafters, Cassie doing work, Jake either standing or sitting.  But Rachel’s a pacer.  She’s repeatedly described as pacing, and if she’s not, if she’s sitting with someone, it’s for narrative reasons.  She’s sitting near Marco?  She’s going to smack him, or challenge him to an arm wrestling contest for the dangerous mission, whatever.  She’s sitting near Cassie?  That’s supposed to say something about her emotional state.  

Fifth, Rachel bores easily.  And I mean real easily.  In the Oatmeal Book, she talks about claustrophobia, but one of the things she complains about the most often is being alone in the dark with her thoughts.  For me, that’s the worst thing about insomnia--the inside of my head is only enough to keep my attention for so long, and then I start to lose it, and yeah, it feels like a panic attack, it would be easy to lump in with external claustrophobia.  When she’s taking a day off from school, she only lasts a few hours watching trash TV before she bails out to go flying--this is also related to the fidgeting thing above (7).  When she has nightmares, she gets up and leaves the house.  When Rachel morphs prey animals or motion-attracted predators like cats, it’s easy for her to get lost in the rapid-change thought patterns.  I can’t think of a single time where Rachel gets put on surveillance alone--not because she’s not good at surveillance, but because she can’t be relied on not to get distracted.

I could come up with some other things, but these five plus the idle descriptions she throws around about ‘racing thoughts’ and ‘I lost my temper and I just couldn’t think anymore’ would get her an ADHD screen from any respectably competent therapist.  Throw in “incredibly high performing academically but with some disciplinary issues” (13 and 5 respectively) and “exhibits suicidally reckless impulses even in non-battle life” (literally every other book), and she’s a shoo-in.

The short version here is that my headcanon that Rachel has severe ADHD is summed up by two books: 12 and 32.  

In 32, the two Rachels are both poster children for ADHD--Mean Rachel is impulsive, loud, temperamental, unfocused, and generally uncooperative (you and I all know the stereotypes come from somewhere, a lot of people who manifest ADHD like that are pretty uncooperative, and I say that as one of them), and Wimp Rachel is just as temperamental on the other side of the spectrum, forgetful, easily distracted, genuinely scared of her own impulses and intrusive thoughts, and, you guessed it, kind of uncooperative (again, the stereotypes come from somewhere).  You don’t put those two people together and get one non-ADHD person, you put them together and get a person whose symptoms have settled out to a degree of homeostasis.

And in 12, beyond all the really impulsive shit Rachel does and the way she approaches everything from the angle of “this is my fault because I’m not in control of myself,” which, oh my god, honey, same, but no it’s not, Cassie morphs Rachel.  And what does Cassie say about being in Rachel’s head?

“I’m having the worst time trying to control this morph!”

“You’re having trouble being me?  What could be hard about that?”

“It’s this brain of yours.  It keeps trying to make me do really dumb things.”

[nyxelestia]

@athenadark, consolidating everything into one post:

"I’ve seen the interview, several times in fact i can find it for you on youtube if you haven’t she asks hoechlin the question"

she asks

she asks

she asks

Since you apparently haven't seen this video in quite a long time, here it is for you:

Question starts at 1:26, though if you watch before that, Hoechlin himself seems stoked for the character arc that most of fandom ignored after 3B.

Andy Swift: ...if none of the ladies work out for Derek - I know the fans are rooting for a little Sterek action. How do you guys - what are your, what are your thoughts on it? 'Cause I know that it's like - fandom is fandom - but like, how do you guys feel like that, how...?

Posey: "I think Sterek is a bizarre, twisted, weird thing-"

[off-screen laughter from Roden and Hoechlin]

Posey: "-and I think anyone who pays more attention to Sterek than the show isn't watching the show for the right reasons."

Swift: "That is concise..."

[more laughter from Roden and Hoechlin, followed by Swift]

And a moment later, Hoechlin is the one who bluntly describes Stiles and Derek as partners in crime and that Derek in Season 1 would've happily just killed Stiles to get rid of the situation.

Tyler Posey, meanwhile, never once called the fans bizarre and twisted. He called out the fans for focusing on another fandom entirely when talking about the show (because Sterek is, in Hoechlin's words in this interview and others, a fandom unto itself that doesn't really have to do with the show).

all you can do is look at what you’ve created and say i am content with that, that did what it was supposed to do, you’ve put the clues in place, you’ve polished the candlestick, leaving it out for mrs peacock in the parlour and poisoned the tea for colonel mustard

No, actually.

We, as authors with 100% control over our fanfic and no accountability, can do this.

Writers and producers who have to answer to MTV and are accountable by money and ratings, however, are not.

Writing a novel =/= writing a TV show (which is also why you can't analyze a TV like it's a novel)

right now with the evidence we have in canon it’s not going to end well for you - but you’re so convinced it’s going to pander - perhaps that’s you think that Scott is perfect, a deus ex machina in a green jean jacket, because that’s the only way he’ll get a happy ending

I know my Asks aren't long, but surely I've said enough that you don't need to twist them like you do canon and put words into my mouth in order to find something to condescend to me about?

you’re a writer too - follow the clues,

That's just, I am following the clues - the one in the actual show. Because I don't take the stance that half the show isn't really happening because POV or bias or whatever literary analysis device that only works with written media. I don't buy that just because a character can lie about something means they always are. I don't buy that half the show isn't happening while stuff fandom comes up with is.

I'm going by what's actually shown on-screen, and what's said by the characters, and how the actors are playing those characters. Stiles and Derek are friends in show. They aren't anything more than that, and one of them isn't even in the show anymore and the other one is only barely in it if at all.

I am following the clues. I'm just not making any up to support my ship.

You're claiming "the show isn't going to put on a gun on the wall and then call it dangerous at the last minute". I'm saying, you've mistaken a shadow of a hand in a shooting motion for a gun and been manufacturing your own ammunition for a metaphorical weapon that doesn't exist ever since.

The partners in crime dynamic is wonderfully fertile ground for the ship. Fandom doesn't need to keep erasing the work all these actors put into this show in order to make that ship happen - yet that's what it did.

And then acted betrayed because the show kept doing what it was always doing, and building on top of prior seasons, instead of retconning and erasing most of the show in order to bow down to fandom.