#I ALREADY MADE A PARAGRAPH OVER AT THE CHAPTER ITSELF I CANT MAKE ANOTHER ONE THERE so here i am tumblr

[descending-snow]

the minds of monsters by seneca_milestone17 is so good go check it out

[accursed-worm]

I don’t have a proper ao3 account to comment and stuff but your most recent chapter for ‘a hundred red flags’ is so good !! I feel like it’s hard to come by fics with a larger ensemble interacting at once, and it’s just so amazing to see these characters managing (failing) to work together, and relearning how to work around one another like they did so long ago.

Every character feels so consistent and real and it really feels like a new life is being breathed into the spirit of the dsmp every time I get the chance to read this fic <33 (PS BEGGING THAT TOMMY WILL BE OK I CANT TAKE HIM BEING HURT ANYMORE 😭😭)

Anyways I thought it’d be fun to ask you what your favorite part of writing is? (I.e. creating dialogue, choreographing scenes, the characterization, etc.) I absolutely love your guys writing style and I’d love to hear what parts really get you as writers going with projects like this :]]

Ohh tysm anon, this ask absolutely made my day! I’m so glad you’ve been liking the fic!! The two of us absolutely adore these characters and have had such a great time just exploring them through the writing of this fic. Something that becomes clearer as things really start calming down is that so much of the fic is just about these characters… Doing Things. Stuck together through the awful circumstances of the beginning and from there just... interacting with each other. It’s not about the looming threat of external forces (given, those will eventually come into play wink wink) because the characters themselves—their history, their trauma, their jagged edges—that is the threat, the plot, the hurdle to overcome. Exactly as you said: it's all about them trying to work together, and relearning how to exist around one another.

Aww anon you're so sweet. Something we’ve had a really great time with is fleshing out the characters and world. For the characters, it's both been stuff about their pre-server lives (from Sally to MCM to a whole Foolish backstory with pretty much no canonical basis) as well as adding details to and exploring the effects of canonical events (the fact that so many of them are war veterans, and the impact of Ho16 on people's opinion of Wilbur (especially Tubbo because of, y’know. Ranboo.), and then also the whole dynamic of like… Wilbur and Quackity have only really known each other as political opponents, then allies by necessity, then adversaries in a spite-filled rivalry—and maybe that’s kind of underselling their history but y’know—and how that all plays into the fact that, once things really calm down, they now have to work out how to just exist around each other as people). It’s just been such a fun thing to explore.

And then there's also the worldbuilding itself, with the angle we’ve decided to take of the world as more of a high fantasy-type setting rather than a server with game mechanics and whatnot. We've literally had discussions over the question of the origin of the server's art and literature. And while we do use the word 'server' to describe the world, we’ve decided that in-universe the word is synonymous with terms like ‘earth’ or ‘planet,’ which is a fun little detail. I’m rambling so much LMAO. At risk of spoiling the fic, I really could just go on about this for paragraphs and paragraphs. And while I will not make any promises about the endgame of the characters, I will point you to the “angst with a happy ending” tag. Take of that what you will.

Now, onto answering your actual question! If it isn't already clear, something I've really enjoyed in the writing process is making the DSMP into a more realistic setting, and turning the characters into people. Given, of course, canon already does that incredibly well, but this is more in terms of like... canon doesn't quite treat them as people living in a real world, y'know? But I've already talked enough about that sort of thing.

Something really fun about the fic is the writing process. It's... quite literally written as a roleplay. We do it in our Discord DMs, with a back-and-forward exchange of sections about 200-400 words and no real outline—it's very much improvised, each section just building off each other with very little discussion between them. We started writing it in March, right after the stream where Phil gave Wilbur that advice on forgiveness. We were discussing fact that Wilbur obviously didn't want to apologise to Tommy and then asked the question of how disastrously an apology to Tommy might go, and then VenetaPsi came up with the scene idea of Quackity stumbling across Wilbur, in Paradise, dying from a suicide attempt. Obviously it's nothing at all like what canon turned out to be, but it wasn't really meant to be. We just came up with that scene idea and started writing from there, with absolutely no plan of what we wanted it to turn into. After finishing the scene in Paradise, chapter 1, we actually had a discussion about whether we wanted to continue writing at all—which obviously we did.

The thing is, for the longest time we had absolutely no intention of ever publishing the fic. We were writing for ourselves, and ourselves alone. It took us nearly 200,000 words (given, that is something we somehow managed to do in two fucking months) before we even entertained the idea of uploading onto ao3, and longer still before we actually sat down to edit and upload chapter 1. And in that time, those first months of writing, we were genuinely writing with absolutely no future plan. No actual direction. Each decision and action made by a character is purely reactionary, not at all defined by what we as the authors want to happen next, because we don't know what we want to happen next. And so often I've found myself fucking surprised by what happens, because as I'm writing I'll have a vague idea as to the scene's direction and then it'll just go somewhere completely different. And I know it's ridiculous because I'm literally one of the authors, but I really would compare it to DMing a D&D campaign. I'm the DM directing the plot and the characters are PCs, the ones actually who actually make the decisions. Given, it has now gotten to a point where we do have a bunch of plot beats we aim to hit (the scope of the fic is just going to get insanely large) but even with that we still don't have outlines for each individual scene. We have also very much slowed down from the batshit insane pace with which we wrote the fic's first massive chunk. I honestly don't know what we were on that let us write at that pace LMAO.

Anyway so uh. That kind of still isn't answering your question. My favourite part of the process is... god. It's a hard pick, just because of how interconnected everything is. I really love writing dialogue but that's in huge part due to the way it allows for characterisation to be expressed. I love digging into the complicated history of the characters but that's because of the way it influences their current mindsets and dynamics. I just. I really love writing, y'know?? It's literally making me fail at school but I can't bring myself to be too upset by that. Um. Yeah this was a really extensive response that didn't even really answer the question asked of me. If you made it to the end then good on you tbh.