#aftg fics

[s-exy]

Does anyone have any fics where Neil DOES go into witness protection, at least for a few months or maybe a couple of years or something ?

[joejhang]

my favourite aftg fics (in no particular order).

not a HUGE list because i'm picky but hopefully this provides some good recs for people.

the sun still rises by mordax (basically a rewrite of the series except neil has a little brother to take care of. very canon compliant which is what i like. andrew pov in this is delicious and very well-written imo. neil isn't ENTIRELY biblically accurate but i wouldn't expect him to be because he's literally taking care of a child in this one so i think that's def going to change things. slowburn andreil the way we like it and they have rlly great chemistry)

all this and heaven too by parkerose, @kevindavidday on tumblr (basically EVERYTHING she writes i'm obsessed with but ataht, you give love a bad name and to be good are the holy trinity to me. this is basically just a kevaaron fic where kevin goes to live w aaron after some health complications and pining and yearning ensues!! yeah LOVE everything she writes the characterisation is always perfect and kevaaron have such amazing chemistry in this one so even if they're not your thing PLEASE check it out anyway. they're also just. really cute.)

you give love a bad name by parkerose (MY FAVOURITE OF ALL TIME DARE I SAY. idk i just love kandreil i love andreil i love kevneil i love kandrew and the way they're written in this one is like HHHHH yeah it's kind of just like kandreil but kevin is a slutty rich boy, kayleigh day is alive, andrew is his situationship that he's in love with and neil becomes his bodyguard. they all want each other BADDD and it's SO good oh my god anyway. also @kevindavidday PLEASE UPDATE I'M LITERALLY BEGGING AND CHEWING ON THE BARS OF MY ENCLOSURE but take all the time that u need just know i will be the FIRST one there u better believe it)

to be good by parkerose (aftg wild geese au. i have no notes. it is actually. insane. only like four chapters are out and i'm insane about it. nathaniel/neil in this one is like.....AH and the jeanneil....THIS IS WHAT I'VE BEEN TALKING ABOUTTTT anyway read for andreil jeanneil kevjean and pain)

oakland by agentcoop (this was just like. i'm here for the andreil. it's an au where andreil meet when neil gets caught by the cops and thrown into juvie and his new roomie is andrew. really like...cute. because they're a bit younger. it's like a friends-to-lovers vibe. and they're not ENTIRELY biblically accurate but they're close enough i can overlook it. andrew pov was pretty well-written in this i liked it. and yes there was YEARNING. my favourite. also just like...the way andrew talks to neil in this one....makes me go insane. like it's so simple but it's so oh my god anyway.)

you made a monster out of me by basicallymonsters (aftg rock band au. the writing in this one was SCRUMPTIOUS....the yearning and pining was done SO well. the aesthetics and vibes were super fun. neil was a bit batshit in this one and i'm okay with that. again not PERFECT characterisation but close enough that i don't mind it.)

enjoy reading these lovelies

[motherfunkies]

Fic recs? I've been making collages of the aftg fics I've been reading, and I wanna share

If you text me about either of them, I can give you a summary and the tw list, I recommend all of them and I am happy to answer! All of them are complete and on ao3

Um part 2

[embooks]

Hello creative tumblr people I am asking (begging) for someone to write a fic on this prompt I saw on twitter.

Or if any of y'all knows a fic that looks like this dont hesitate in sending that link ;)

[alicekathe]

I love Andreil, but something about Kandreil makes my heart go wild. I just love them, the three of them together 😩❤️

[minyardsdarling]

i have a really good, detailed fic idea for katekevaaron but it would require kate and kevin getting together before aaron joins the relationship and idk if anyone would read that…

(it would be like 20k words minimum. when i say detailed i mean it. it would also kinda be an exploration of how i see katelyn as a character)

[kevinsdsy]

KEVINSDSY’S FICS

half return — usc trojans (inspired socmed au ao3 fic)

jeremy gets a red card (2019 version) + 2024 version | andrew minyard and that one kid he doesn't care about (2019) | kevaaron blurb/one-shot | ew | sometimes riko let kevin stay with him afterward | trojans band au + pinterest board

[vellichor-lover]

Fic Rec Friday!

12 Ways to Woo a Minyard

by NikNak22

Words: 69,292 Chapters: 14 Fandom: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic Rating: Mature Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings AO3 Account Needed: No

Relationships: Neil Josten/Andrew Minyard, Kevin Day/Aaron Minyard, Matt Boyd/Danielle "Dan" Wilds, Seth Gordon/Allison Reynolds, Nicky Hemmick/Erik Klose, Jeremy Knox/Jean Moreau

Summary:

Neil is a math nerd who, by a stroke of dumb luck, falls into a group of friends that are the closest thing to family he’s ever had. So, when he tells them about his new mysterious crush, he shouldn’t be surprised how immediately they come up with a plan to help win them over. One they insist that if Neil follows it, he’ll have them falling for him in no time. But things don’t always go to plan – or do they? Nicky wants to set him up with someone else. Matt and Jeremy are confused but supportive. Allison and Seth offer lewd suggestions, while Dan does her best to keep everyone in line. Jean and Renee know something, Aaron doesn’t really care, and Kevin just wants Neil to join the lacrosse team. But one thing’s for certain – whether Neil’s successful or not, everyone’s got money riding on this.

My Notes: Welp, this is my favourite aftg fic. It's such a silly premise and I can't stop coming back to it: the sweet rom-com vibes, the absolutely hilarious situations Neil gets them into and Andrew's deadpan but gentle reactions, the foxes (+ Jean and Jeremy) shenanigans, the hints of developing kevaaron... not to mention it doesn't feel at all ooc to me; there are spins on most of my fav canon andreil moments and the whole romance is just so authentically them!

[doesephs]

bwah i wrote a fem Kevin fanfic inspired by your art and wanted to share but no pressure to read i just wanted to let you know and give you my thanks for the brainworm that created it

https://archiveofourown.org/works/64718590

YIPPEEEE YIPPEEEEEE YIPPEEEEEEEEEE

if fem kevin day has no fanatics death has taken me with swift wings ✊

[s-exy]

I don't think it was ever discussed about where the twins father is. But for thought purposes and a fic idea.

Let's say he's out there somewhere and he doesn't really follow sports news so he doesn't know abt the twins lives now, until one fateful day when he sees them on TV and immediately knows who they are. Well he's re married with a wife and get this, a son. And he reaches out to them and wants them to know their little half brother. 🤔 it could be drama filled, I think it would he a good prompt. If this has already been written PLZ tell me. I need to read it.

EDIT:

AND i think Neil having a half sibling out there would also be interesting. If Nathan had fooled around while out doing business and he didn't know abt them.

I need them to have more family idk

[joejhang]

my problem with raven!neil

this may be controversial but i've actually found that i don't rlly like raven!neil fics and aus. and here is my thesis. spoilers ahead continue at ur own risk.

crucial distinction here is that i don't actually dislike the concept of "raven!neil" as an individual character concept. i think it's actually very interesting to look into the sort of person neil would be if things had been slightly different. that is, obviously, the point of au fics and headcanons. my actual problem with raven!neil is mostly when fic writers and the fandom in general put him in context and into au fics and then the problems start arising. i'm being purposefully vague but i'm gonna go into all the problems i've come across when it comes to raven!neil.

first off, and this is something i've mentioned before, i think the fandom tends to strip abuse victims (particularly the characters who got out of the nest) of literally any agency or individuality. this happened with jean, when the whole fandom seemed to collectively uwufy him as if he isn't an adult (yes he's young yes he's barely an adult but he IS and i would argue thinking of him as a child still does him no good) with massive amounts of trauma. yes, jean has a learned fear of riko and tetsuji (and coaches by extension bc of the abuse from raven coaches) but he actually doesn't harbour much fear towards anyone else? he has come to expect violent retribution/punishment and does sort of have this problem where he bares his throat for the knife (when he puts the racquet in rhemann's hands and when he expects laila to hit him back) but other than that he actually doesn't demonstrate a lot of fear or panic when engaging with others.

i think the same would go for neil. the neil in current canon quite literally has no fears that do not trace back to his father. he doesn't fear riko, tetsuji, ichirou, andrew, drake or even lola and his father's men. where he does show fear is whenever his father gets involved. he isn't afraid of riko or anything riko has to say until riko brings nathan wesninski into it. the closest thing he comes to fear for anyone else is when he flinches from wymack but i'd call that survival instinct rather than like...fear. he doesn't have much of an emotional response, just an instinctual and physical one.

we obviously have no idea how neil's fear would develop if he had grown up at the nest. i'm not sure how much of a difference it would've made, honestly. obviously, those eight years on the run heavily reinforced his fear, so i don't really know where that fear would go if he was stagnant at the nest and confirmed (?) to be safe from his father. i think one of neil's key personality traits actually is his bravery and fearlessness, so i can't really see neil ever being truly afraid of tetsuji and riko. if you want to compare jean and neil in this aspect, all i'd say is: people have different responses for trauma. neil is not jean 2.0 or vice versa. even if they were put in virtually the same environment with the same treatment, they are still different people with different personalities. thus, they respond in different ways. just like jean and kevin responded in different ways, though their situations are implied to have been very different.

besides the point of fear and object of fear, i don't actually think being afraid of ur abusers means ur a baby that should be coddled and uwufied by the fandom. it's actually completely normal and human, so i actually have no clue why the fandom decided to do this with jean.

as someone in the tags of one of my previous posts so aptly said, autonomy ≠ agency. did kevin and jean have autonomy in the nest? no. but they did have agency. stripping abuse victims of agency and personality is actually so harmful and i think it's way too normalised in fandom culture. but that's a discussion for another day. we've all heard the comparison of the fear responses in relation to andrew (fight), neil (flight), kevin (freeze) and jean (fawn). i actually think these are mostly accurate, but it doesn't do any good to simplify it so completely.

neil having to remain sedentary rather than running away and never stopping or looking back is inevitably going to alter his responses to situations. neil's knee-jerk reaction to traumatic events or news in the og trilogy is literally: go on a run. this might still be the case in the nest, but i doubt it. i've said before that i think neil is the type of person to fight back. u could argue in response to that that jean was also fierce and angry when he got to the nest but developed something akin to learned helplessness where he simply stopped fighting back as a trauma response. but again: neil and jean are not the same person. they may have similar personalities, but everyone is different. you can't boil down all the victims of a particular abusive situation into the same person. this is stripping them of agency and individuality, once again. jean learned to stop fighting back and even ask for violent punishment for "wrongdoing" but i honestly don't think neil would. again, not because he's superior or inferior to jean, he's just a different person entirely. his time at evermore in trk was effectively a trial run for the time that riko intended neil to spend there after the year ended. we don't know exactly, but it's probably safe to assume that riko tried to cram as much of the abuse that kevin and jean received over several years into those two/three weeks. i mean, neil got fucking waterboarded and handcuffed to the bed for fuck's sake. i think at some point neil does say that he bowed his head and played at subservience, but when it really came down to riko and tetsuji trying to force neil to do something he adamantly did not want to do (sign the raven's contract) he literally just refused and didn't relent even under torture. jean even said he thought riko might've killed neil for it. neil was literally ready to die rather than bend to riko's will.

obviously, things would be different with kevin and jean in the equation. i can see neil reining himself in for their sake, but this brings me to another issue i have with raven!neil. and that is the strange need to turn neil into a protector figure. i.e. a human meat shield with a martyr complex for kevin and jean. every time i sense any iteration of this in any fic or hc i literally have to stop reading. it's just so...like random to me. neil has literally not been a "protector" in canon in fact he's almost always the one being "protected" (andrew's deal to literally protect neil from his father, wymack and abby's protectiveness, etc). yes, neil has protective instincts but so does literally every human being. neil is, in my opinion, no more or less protective than anyone else. compare this to say, andrew, who is known for his role as the "protector" (beating up the guys who hurt nicky, killing aaron's mother + getting rid of his addiction, making deals w kevin + neil). i've also written another extensive essay about why neil isn't and will never be the martyr or sacrificial lamb that some ppl seem to want him to be, so i won't go into it here. just please please please read the series back and realise: neil is quite literally the opposite of a martyr. i just have no idea where the idea of neil as a martyr or protective figure came in. especially in regards to kevin and jean.

it bears noting the first time neil meets riko with kevin there. at kathy's, neil doesn't hesitate to defend kevin and clock riko's shit. but note: defending ≠ protecting. and even if you do want to call that protecting, neil's way of "protecting" has never been in a martyring, self-sacrificial, human shield way. he is almost always on the offensive (clocking riko rather than directly defending kevin, punching riko, etc etc). neil is a natural instigator, and it would be such a disservice to him to erase that characteristic of his in raven!neil fics.

there are also several times in the series where neil's offensive actions have consequences that directly impact his loved ones and other people. like the first time neil insulted riko, a man literally died. the second time, drake attacked andrew. the third, neil took a trip to hell on earth and spent three weeks at evermore. the fourth, the foxes' and other athletes' cars got trashed. there's probably more that i'm not remembering, but you get the idea. neil feels guilt but never regret for this. he literally says verbatim that he isn't sorry for what he said about riko/the ravens even after the cars get wrecked and the others seem to blame him. so while i can see neil ducking his head and submitting to prevent jean/kevin getting hurt, it's also worth noting that if neil really cared that much about consequences, he probably would've stopped openly and loudly insulting riko in public after seth was murdered the first time. neil knew, or at least had a hunch, that it was his fault. did that stop him from doing it again? hell no. it can be both a character flaw and strength, but it's also just a fact. neil does not think that much about consequence. he sort of just does what he wants when he wants. it's a part of his personality. while there's no telling what about his personality would've changed at the nest, the fact that ten years living with a mob boss serial killer and eight years on the run from said mob boss serial killer didn't seem to kill that mouth of his, idk what would.

my final point is that when the raven!neil fic has andreil in it, it turns into andrew "saving" neil from his situation. words can't explain how much i hate this take on things. especially when it usually comes out of nowhere as well. bfr, andrew is not gonna risk his life to "save" some pretty redhead that comes his way without some pre-established connection. i also just think the idea of a "saviour" in a relationship is actually insane. as someone who is consistently pissed off and triggered by imbalance in relationships, this irritates me to no end. andreil obviously are protective and care for each other. that's a known fact. but i feel like w raven!neil fics they tend to exaggerate this and make it insanely one-sided. like andrew is some superhero type figure that needs to save damsel-in-distress neil who has a penchant for out-of-character martyrdom and is trapped in a horribly abusive situation. it sounds like i'm just hyperbolising no this is actually in all of the raven!neil fics that i've read. this exact dynamic. i hate it oh my god. it's not only entirely out of character i don't even think it works for them. like this should not be what their relationship is about or based off of. this last bit might just be a personal thing but i just hate hate hate it and it feels so wrong to force andreil into this kind of a dynamic. just leave my boys alone i'm BEGGING.

the aftg fandom does have this problem that should be addressed where they tend to coddle and uwufy abuse victims (particularly kevin, neil and jean in the context of the nest) and strip them down to easily digestible stereotypes. but this literally could not be further from the truth in canon. y'all forget how actually bitchy neil, jean and kevin are as individuals. kevin's fear of riko and tetsuji is bone-deep, but that never stopped him from picking fights with the foxes and hitting back whenever they had a problem w him (the only exception being andrew, but kevin already said, he lets andrew walk him like a dog out of sort-of thanks that andrew is letting him stay at psu). jean is also sort of an asshole (affectionate) back in the og trilogy and lowk in tsc too. he has a seemingly endless supply of insults for literally everyone and literally thinks about breaking jeremy's fingers for treating him too warily. he consistently gets annoyed when the trojans are too careful with him and remember when he literally threw jeremy to the floor during practice? yeah. seriously, stop boiling down these very traumatised individuals to their fear and history of abuse and erase any other part of their personality that makes them an interesting, well-rounded individual. it's so irritating to read and have to deal with the gross misinterpretation and mischaracterisation of these very well-loved characters. they deserve better, and these things also bely some very pertinent issues within fandom culture at large that should be talked about and critiqued more. jesus this is long anyway thank you for reading.

[aftgmostly]

List of fics to read Andreil edition (5+1)

Tales from a Quirky Small Town by @gluupor (Gilmore girls AU)

i only need the working of my hands by @littlespoonevan (Andrew gets amnesia a year after canon)

growing pains by Ominous, nightquills (Stuart is Neil's guardian, High School AU)

hold on to let go by moonix, djhedy, fuzzballsheltiepants (they reunite post-college)

A Me For Every You by sambutwithbooks (5+1 thing, soulmates AU with different universes. this one is AMAZING)

i shall not live in vain by redskiesandsailboats (Soulmate AU, flowers bloom on your body when they get hurt)

I Hate Him by DeeLeBee (Soulmate AU, your soulmate feels pain when you lie to them)

BONUS

Jerejean fic: This Ink Is Still Drying by sourpastels (Tattoo artist Jean)

[embooks]

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I cannot explain further but this is Neil as a kid

[alicekathe]

Soulmates fic update ❤️

https://archiveofourown.org/works/64475599/chapters/166673314

[minyardsdarling]

WIP WEDNESDAY

i’ve started writing my katekevaaron where katelyn/kevin start dating first. current working title is “stuck in my lungs” cause of a song i was listening to while writing

He was nothing like his brother, who commanded attention. Aaron liked to stick to the shadows, only talking when necessary, but proving his intelligence every time he did choose to speak. He dropped down in a chair, on the same table as Katelyn but pushed as far towards the edge and away from her as possible, pulling out a heavy textbook that must have been from one of the few classes they didn’t share, since she didn’t recognise it.

“Andrew hates the library,” Kevin explained as he slid into the seat across from Katelyn.

Some of the tension that had been living in Katelyn’s back and shoulders since they had decided on a date and time to meet up finally lifted. Aaron Minyard she could work with, sure he was antisocial, but he wasn’t actively trying to harm anyone who so much as blinked in a way that he deemed wrong.