#back to yapping in tags gm

[bambisnc]

hi chat how we doing (w rizz)

[xavathun]

hi chat. people liked my mossy titan so i’ve come with my hoard of warlock outfits :]

[cedarbranch]

okay so: Playing With Matches, Sweet Tooth, Truth or Dare (my beloved), Convicted Criminals of Thought (my beloved!), Moth To Light? sorry i'm pretty much obsessed w all of your fics. humiliating . send ask

omg this is extremely flattering... i have stans... stroke my ego some more why don't you anon /j

this is going under a cut, i'm about to YAP

sweet tooth: i wrote this one for a holiday exchange in the gm server i was part of at the time! (cat, if you're out there, i think about your story about being mistaken for a lush corporate tester every damn time i walk into that store). i used to really dislike writing for prompts so it was a mark of how much i loved that little community (and how much it energized me) that i worked up the nerve to write something like this, lol. i had also never written a coffee shop au before. michael's dislike of coffee and subsequent anxiety over what to order was 100% a projection from me, LMAO, i was like how can i write a coffee shop au when i hate coffee and have no idea how coffee shops work?? (oh, i can make that the whole premise!) i had to watch a few youtube tutorials on how to do latte art so i could make sure i was describing it well. oh, and the hot chocolate gerry gives michael is my personal spice blend that i love to use in hot cocoa! protip: hot milk, melt a heap of chocolate chips directly into it (with a sweetness level of your choice) then top with cinnamon, nutmeg, and just a little bit of allspice. god tier.

also, i'm writing this while drinking a latte, so needless to say I've Changed.

truth or dare: okay this is hilarious to look back on because i... CANNOT remember for the life of me what possessed me to write it. i think this was something i started spitballing in the gm server and then everyone went "CEDAR IF YOU DON'T WRITE THIS I'LL AAHDHSFHDFHSGJK" so, i got enabled, basically. i'm pretty sure this was also written when the trans gerard keay AO3 tag wasn't an official archive tag yet and i was trying to brute-force it into existence... there were a couple tags i did this for (see also: it/its pronouns for michael the distortion, monsterfucker gerard keay). i was kinda making it my mission to churn out enough fic under these tags that they got recognized by the tag wranglers, lol, especially trans gerry. because i started writing gm SO early i was like "i have the opportunity to shape the fanon dynamic here and i am making SURE everyone sees gerry as trans, dammit!" this fic was also a milestone for me because i think it might've been the first pure pwp i ever wrote :) still not something i do very often because i am so frequently led astray by Plot, but it's nice to have in my skill set!

moth to light: MY BELOVED!! excluding current wips, this is the fic i am most proud of. it definitely marked a shift in my writing where i was starting to introduce relationships that felt less fanfic-y/easily romantic, and more akin to the dynamics that compelled me so much in the various source materials i interacted with. i've already discussed the main points of what i was doing with this story in various ask/ao3 comment responses, but the core of it was about monstrosity and self-acceptance, how gerry could fall in love with a monster, and the uneasy space where trust and fear coexist. there are definitely some things i'd change about it if i could - i think certain bits are a bit choppy and rushed, scene transitions were not a fully developed skill for me - but overall i think the dynamic between gerry and michael is what makes it hold up so well. and i also can't help but look back at it fondly because that kind of dynamic is SO characteristic of my writing now, and i consider this fic to be the first time it really emerged.

i also think it has some neat prose and exchanges of dialogue... at this point i'd already written several fics that captured the mind-breaking physicality of the spiral, and it was a challenge to keep finding new ways to express that in words without it becoming repetitive - but a very fun and stimulating challenge! i laugh because this, too, is something that's become characteristic of me. turns out i just really enjoy trying to capture fantastical, overwhelming mental-physical sensations on the page. i think physicality is a big part of my narrative voice and i also enjoy writing in extremes, so it makes a lot of sense why i like it so much!

there were a few points that everything else in this fic grew around. the entire exchange leading up to "i could change your mind, i think" was one of them. see also, "it's not the spiral i belong to, it's you." "that doesn't make you a monster" / "doesn't it, though." michael and gerry being protective of one another. gerry lost in the hallways - it was very important to me that michael actually come close to killing him at least once, and that the reader felt that danger. it was something that i felt was missing from gm fic at the time (and there was barely any fic to begin with - moth to light was the second ever gm fic on ao3 that broke 20k. i'm not sure how long you've been around, anon, but MAN those first couple years of being a gm shipper were wild).

i also had a ton of fun setting up gerry's complicated pull toward michael!! it's romantic, but there's so much psychology beyond that. like, when he first finds out who michael used to be: "There are a hundred new questions bouncing around Gerry’s brain—what did Michael think of Gertrude, before she betrayed him? Why hasn’t he tried to take revenge on her now? Does he remember his descent into the Spiral? Did he know what was coming? Did it hurt to lose himself?" it's his own future he's scared about, and if he'll end up just like michael. i hope that came across.

ah... so fond of this one. i crack myself the hell up with how obvious it should've been that i'd wind up writing hannibal fic. a character who drives every conversation by responding with some indirect, metaphorical bullshit and a distinctive speech pattern? a character whose descent into monstrosity is well underway but he can't stop agonizing over whether he can tolerate that part of himself, much less embrace it - but his love interest's presence allows him to? a relationship dynamic where it's constantly uncertain whether one's intentions are lethal, and the answer always feels like "obviously yes" but also "obviously no"?? they're literally hannigram. hannigram is the fucking BLUEPRINT of this dynamic, i just didn't know it yet. i actually caught myself in one of my current wips a while back accidentally fucking recreating the michael-at-gerry's-throat "please don't" scene damn near word for word, and i thought to myself, HOLD ON,THIS VIBE FEELS A LITTLE FAMILIAR...

so yeah, uh, if you like the vibe of this fic, maybe watch hannibal?

convicted criminals of thought: i felt fucking insane when i was writing this one fr. it took me like 4 days, i think?? NEVER have i banged out 19k so fast.

the fic was mossstly just born from me loving the concept of beholding avatar powers used for smut and really, really wanting to write that with gerry, LOL. i didn't expect it to be so long and plotty, but the dynamic i wanted ended up requiring more setup than i originally thought it would... i was really trying to push the sexual tension and i was also taking a step into writing much more explicit kink than i had in the past. like moth to light, i would say this fic represented a turning point for me, because these days explicit d/s makes up most of what i write haha. turns out i'm just super into exploring power dynamics in fiction and using sex as a vehicle for said exploration. there are some things i'd write differently if i did it now... i wrote criminals during the era in which ~safe and communicative sex in fanfic~ was really being pushed online, so i made sure to include detailed discussions of boundaries. the fact that i wrote in the stoplight system makes me cringe a little now, but the saving grace that allows me to not care too much is that i do think it's in character for that version of gerry and michael. it's a very reasonable choice for a young man who's naive when it comes to both the supernatural and the sexual, and a more experienced dom with a protective streak. (these days, i'm firmly in the camp that no matter how insane the sex is, characters should not be negotiating their kinks onscreen unless it is in-character for them to both a) have the knowledge of kink required for such discussions in the first place, and b) initiate those discussions. obviously in REAL life these things should always be prioritized! but if i see a fanfic scene interrupted for two characters who are normally wildly emotionally stunted and non-communicative to go "wait, what's your safeword!!" it'll completely take me out of it... i also think this is just one aspect of a much broader issue with people being unwilling to make their characters (even morally gray/straight-up cruel characters) take actions that they view as unacceptable. i certainly struggled with this for a long time (more on that later) but thankfully i've gotten over it.

an unrelated detail for this one - the flesh monster gerry and michael encounter was inspired by the mindflayer in season 3 of stranger things :)

anddddd... yeah, there was supposed to be a sequel... technically there is, it's just that only ~75% of it exists. it features: workplace sex and edging, michael being a brat, collaring, new beholding abilities, and a new appreciation for degradation. i say this purely to be evil, because it's unlikely it'll ever get finished (oops). onto the pile of incomplete wips it goes, along with all the stranger things fics... i promise this pains me as much as it does you.

playing with matches: oh my darling magnolia verse, always on my mind. fun fact, the original title of this fic was "a journal of the plague year," one of the leitners referenced in tma. naturally, Certain Events Happened while i was writing the fic, and that title took on... new, unintended connotations!!! so i changed it (though i did keep referring to it as 'plague year' in my head for quite a while). i'm actually happy i changed it, though. obvious blase is such a great song for this gerry, and (if i ever FUCKING finish it!!) the agnes fic is titled after the very next lyric in the song, which is perfect for her + the fact that it tells much of the same story from her pov.

where to even start with this fic... there's so much going on. one of my lasting impressions was that it was a DEVIL to get gerry's characterization right... this is where i mention how i used to be really, really bad at letting my characters be bad people, haha. gerry thinks of himself as sooo prickly and mean in this fic but he really... isn't? very much at all? lmao. i literally had to go back in after the first draft and make him meaner and i STILL don't think i did enough. he was meant to be a lot sharper than he actually turned out to be. (Yet Another reason i hope i can return to the agnes fic eventually - we'll get to see more of a different side of gerry. honestly, with the way things unfolded, a lot of him being an asshole became just because he's stupid and inconsiderate rather than because he's mean. and i think that works, ultimately).

some scenes that came to me early and made me decide this fic needed to exist: gerry and agnes smoking on the roof, talking around jude. gerry laying in the road at night and stargazing. agnes burning woodchips. shaving agnes's head. the exchange between agnes and gerry leading up to "i'm tired of being angry" (this might have been the source of it all, though i can't quite remember now). breaking into chapman hall (this is something that my friend group actually did around the time i was writing the fic - i wasn't there, but i was so delighted by the photos that it ended up in the fic).

overall, a LOT of this fic was relishing in writing the first-year college experience after i had just gone through it. (well, more like 60% of it). i was writing it in my freshman year - spring 2020. the fall 2019 semester was honestly a highlight of my life that i'll always be nostalgic for... i found a family near-instantly and felt true joy and acceptance for possibly the first time, and then it was snatched away from me in the spring with covid evacuation. writing it out allowed me to kind of re-live it through the characters. magnolia university is a BLATANT copy of my own uni - to the point where multiple people from my school ended up reading the fic and commenting that they recognized it. zeeeero subtlety from me, lol. a lot of the physical settings and details are thinly-veiled adaptations from real life. the queer frat our gang attends parties at is, in fact, the one i was part of (with its name changed) - it may be a stretch characterization-wise, but it was too big a part of my college experience to leave out. (and yeah, the buzzcut queer who welcomes gerry in the first time he visits was a self-insert. just couldn't resist).

ex altiora, too, is heavily based on my own experience being in a band with my friends during college. i've been pretty upfront about that, haha. when they reference a song which is about "murder as a metaphor for internalized homophobia," that's a real song, it just has a different title and hasn't been released yet. should i have linked my irl music in my fic notes? mmm, maybe not, but i do like the idea that someone out there could enjoy my music after discovering it through my fic. if only we had more than 2 songs on spotify... the EP is about three years late now, but it SHOULD be out very early next year :')

anyway. as you may have guessed based on the scenes i highlighted earlier, agnes and gerry's relationship is reeeaally important to this fic (and the 'verse as a whole)... which is why i feel so damn bad that i've left what was really supposed to be a duology as just one fic!! the incomplete/unpublished agnes fic fills in so many gaps, it drives me crazy. i keep getting dragged into other hyperfixations and i really don't control what my ADHD lets me work on, but there is so, SO much more of this 'verse that hasn't seen the light of day. nearly every character has a ton of unpublished lore. melanie and georgie almost got their own fic. tim and sasha almost got their own fic. don't get me started on oliver - i get so mad at the gang when i think about him, he's got SO much going on that nobody ever notices just because he puts on a good front of being well put-together. obsessive perfectionism, borderline substance abuse, and situationship drama... (when he takes care of mike crew tripping balls at that one party? yeah, that's the start of something much bigger). julia and her relationship with her dad. the conflicts between julia and gerry because they're so upfront with the way they fight, but end up missing all the important underlying issues in the process. agnes. agnes. AGNES. HER INSANE RELIGIOUS TRAUMA. the undiagnosed autism and legitimate compulsive pyromania. her gender expression issues, her fucked relationship with jude... 15k of it in my google docs and that's not close to half the story.

i'm getting distracted as always being vague about what's not out there, so let me clarify some of what is. first and foremost, agnes's lighter is her coping mechanism. the first time gerry meets her, she's forced herself to go to a party because her parents demand her to be social, and gotten so drunk she threw up. humiliating. time to start a fire. when she goes to the first punk show with gerry and he tells her she looks like a catholic schoolgirl, it makes her want to scream. Unresolved Issues There. at that show, jude is rude to agnes, agnes nearly fights her in the pit, and jude is immediately enamored with her. the toxic yuri begins. their first hookup happens after the chapman hall break-in. jude is the one who shows her the rooftop spot where she later smokes witth gerry. she has very little sense of identity and jude gives her that, in the most destructive way possible. eventually, shaving her head is a desperate attempt to do something for herself instead of jude (she knows jude will hate it), but afterwards, she doesn't actually like it, and it feels like just another way that jude has driven everything in her life. jude cannot take responsibility for a damn thing, and she blames agnes's growing distance on the band, hence their later fight at band practice. after that, when julia follows agnes, agnes has her first real vulnerable conversation about it - which she's been trying to do with gerry for a while, but gerry's fucking awful at talking about feelings and has barely even picked up on it. this is what pisses julia off so bad, she feels like he's been a bad friend to agnes. agnes and julia get very close after this, especially over the summer. (agnes isn't mad at gerry at all, to be clear - julia is mostly projecting because she also wants more intimacy in her relationship with gerry, but he never gives it to her. around michael, he's warm and open and communicative... but he doesn't show the same growth with his friendships. rip julia).

ugh, they're all so REAL to me. thanks for giving me the excuse to rant, i always love to <3 feel free to ask me whatever you want or message me directly, i'm an open book!