#we need more interaction Kevin with Cecil and Carlos

[terrys-min-catl]

(while im survivng my burnout&artblock i managed to draw at least smth)

i need Cecil's and Kevin's interaction as bad as Carlos' and Kevin's one. bc it has so much unseen potential. If with Carlos its obvious, then with Cecil there is just a huge scope for fantasy, given how they relate to each other

[humanarting]

Hello dear followers! I have an update I’d like to give you if you are interested, which involves my WTNV fic Every Version Of You. TL;DR: It’s going well, but because of the heavy topics it involves, I’ll be adding some content warnings, and changing the rating on ao3 to Mature, just to be safe. I’ll be posting my thoughts in the notes of the next chapter, as well. If you’d like to know the details of why, they are below the read-more. (Some spoilers are below, but not for anything past what I’ve already posted, or past WTNV episode 73: Triptych.)

To begin, I am really enjoying writing the current arc of EVOY, and I am so looking forward to sharing the results with all of you who read it! But I recognize a need to change the rating.

When I started writing, I didn’t realize how emotionally heavy this story would become. For one, it involves Carlos trying to carry profound levels of grief and guilt without help. For two, Cecil has spent a good portion of it fearing for his life, existentially and literally. For three, I am writing about Kevin, who has (in my rendition) essentially been in solitary confinement for five years, and for the twelve before that, only interacted with a few people, and before that, committed terrible atrocities under extreme duress. As a result, he struggles with intense fear of isolation, and intrusive thoughts and unwanted desires involving violence - things I don’t want to shy away from in a misguided effort to sanitize his character.

And for four, my rendition of Sheriff Sam’s counterpart, Sheriff Max, survived an internment/labor camp, where their lover was murdered and his remains used as macabre decoration. They responded by taking political power, using that power to harm innocent people, and drinking excessively to self-medicate untreated PTSD.

...I could go on, but I won’t. At first, I thought a Teen And Up rating would cover this, because I hadn’t planned to write about Sheriff Max nearly as much, or to write about sex, or specific acts of violence, in any detail. I still don’t plan to write sex scenes or active murders, and if that changes, I will warn you in the chapter notes. But over the last few weeks, and particularly as I write about Sheriff Max,  Kevin, and Kevin’s alternate universe parallel, the Cecil who shares his story, I feel more and more that much of this fic is too viscerally intense to be rated anything but Mature, if I want to actually represent every character frankly.

The fact is, in canon, Kevin has killed people, and there is evidence that due to Strex, he was made to derive enjoyment from blood and viscera. And as of Triptych, we see that this trauma, and the following trauma of being isolated in another dimension, goes untreated for many years. Writing from his perspective, unless you are avoiding or censoring that, can easily get very heavy, but for me, that is a central purpose of this story - to fully address his narrative, and make the other characters face it, in ways that canon did not explore.

If you are a teenager, and you continue to read my story despite my warnings, I can’t prevent that. I know when I was younger, content warnings never stopped me. And it could even be that I am overreacting! Teenagers are regularly exposed to troubling levels of violence and very unhealthy “romantic” relationship dynamics in media, which both worry me despite being viewed as acceptable subject matter. I feel, at least, that I handle themes of violence and romance fairly responsibly in comparison, with emphases on acting in love and respect for oneself and others, and also on looking for consent in all interactions, even before it comes to romance. In that vein, I am also slowly working on slightly rewriting earlier scenes, out of respect for Carlos’ tendency toward touch-repulsion, detailed in It Devours!.

But I'd rather be safe than sorry, when it comes to this. Maybe it’s puritanical and overly protective, or maybe it was a mistake not to have done this sooner; I can’t say. Either way, I will rest easier in the decision that I am writing to “Mature Audiences,” and won’t have to “think of the children” in that same sense.

I just ask that all my readers take the warnings I post seriously, and take care of yourselves if my writing brings up feelings of distress for you. I want the experience of it to be positive for you, even if it does involve these heavy topics.