Saw this work of yours and it's what's making me ask this question.
What did the Clarkes used to dress up as for Halloween?
I actually drew a Halloween fanart for the Clarke siblings years ago
In that Tanya was a witch out of a sense of irony, Dennis had a very low effort devil costume that he enjoyed more than he let on, Anthony was a skeleton and Megan was a princess
It remains to be seen if the parents would dress up but if they did my guess would be that Anne would be a witch too but like with the green paint(and because A-lady and T are too alike for either of them to every acknowledge who said that?), and idk maybe James would recycle a Santa costume, it's scary because he might be counting the trick part of trick or treating towards the naughty or nice list lol
That said I have thought of alternative costume ideas here and there given that art is a few years before the prologue, Anthony definitely gets a nod for anything ghostly or perhaps puritan related, I think Tanya and Vince would eventually have couples then family costuming, I think Megan's costume would radically change every year as grows up just based on changing taste as is expected for a kid and Dennis is just going to be really Dennis about it
Who knows maybe I'll actually get around to some of those other ideas for future Halloween art
Recalling your own headcanons on demand is way harder than it should be but anyway:
The Clarkes had a one-sport-per-kid rule for money reasons. Tanya did tennis through a program in a neighboring town (she still plays for fun sometimes), Dennis first did little league baseball and then quit that before eventually starting football in high school, and Anthony played baseball in the same league. Megan doesn't like sports and never did any. However for a year or two Dennis did try to get in on the tennis thing with Tanya on his own dollar, but he was bad at it and it couldn't last lol.
Also James used to coach the little league team until he got promoted and took on more responsibilities at work in the early '60s. Anthony lost interest in baseball because of that and only kept with it a few more years after that.
Something about Vince and Tanya’s future: on Tanya's mirror there's an ad for a concert taking place in California on a date that works out to be in 1973 (I'm going on memory here but I'm pretty sure it was 1973) and normally there wouldn't be a whole lot of hope of making it there just for a concert, but she and Vince went all in on a cross-country road trip for Tanya's sake and when it was time to go back home Vince proposed and ofc she said yes. They married in 1975 when they were expecting their first (and only) child Suzanne.
And for something else about Vince and the Clarkes, Vince’s only sibling was a much older brother named Eddie (born in 1930) who was in the military and died in Korea before Vince was old enough to even really remember him. Growing up Vince’s feelings about Eddie were more curiosity than anything, especially living with his single dad who was extremely impacted by Eddie’s death and kept reminders of him all over the place. As it turns out Eddie went to school with Anne and James, and, while neither knew him particularly well, once Anne finds out the relation there she tries to remember whatever she can tell Vince about his brother and the two of them get closer that way
perhaps nothing fresh but as per the mention in the pyromegan fic, at least once Anthony too attempted sports thing with Megan, this was probably when James was still coaching and he also just wanted to practise and play with her(mostly play) but she was a bit small for it and and it resulted in her accidentally loosing some teeth which is why she has a bit of a gap
But yes literally everything falls out of my mind the second I'm asked too, like the cheque is too blank and my brain faulters from the endless choices lol
As a lover of RPGs I necessarily end up with a lot of OCs for all the various custom characters and more often than not I'll have a range of them per game and sometimes when I love them to a completely unreasonable degree my dear main character OCs get to be put into other titles, my #1 of all time was my main guy from Skyrim if you can believe it and all the other worlds he was put in where technically AUs, sometimes I would do his rp run on a blind playthrough because I have a good grasp of his character and throwing him in new situations was pretty enlightening in a way, another example would be the dragon age series where I really like the idea of one each for possible characters and then my biggest AUs become those all together concepts, all wardens, twin hawkes etc...
But we'll leave that off to the side and look at our overlapping fandoms with supermassive, it's tricky to say because some of these characters that may as well be OCs are technically canon because a name was written somewhere once, regarding these 'half OCs' that take canon names and next to no information to build out characters I'm currently enjoying Mary Stewart(tdim), Marie Vinay(hoa), Dianne Kelly(TQ) as examples of name only characters that I'm fleshing out of thin air behind the scenes but for some of those there's necessarily actual OCs attached to them
Kurt and his family rank pretty up there and they're shared with @delurkr
For reasons I won't elaborate on currently I have a fondness for Cornelius Manning from the sideshow chapter of pyromegan(he's got more story to get through), hell I'm really enjoying building a 1970s sideshow cast generally and there are other places he fits in as well
Bunnie O'Hare as Manny Sherman's first victim has refused to stop absolutely haunting the narrative, like she was made up for a fic that was less than 2k words and yet she blatantly refuses to stop being relevant
Speaking of there's so so so many OCs specifically connected to Sherman, like there's so many characters built up around his backstory that I get to use them elsewhere
I know this is more of a non exhaustive overview than specifics but it's just so hard to narrow down like that
And AUs? Well obviously I'm very partial to any au that keeps the Clarke family alive, I have a lot of love for pyromegan and who she becomes and all the little offshoots of probabilities, although I'm not currently in a position to work on it I really really loved the werewolf au I thought of ages ago, 'The Beast of Little Hope' I had some solid ideas although at that time I didn't have the skills to pull it off and will most definitely end up revising the concepts when I'm able to revisit it, I also have a lot of fun with murder castle AUs generally but I've gone on for a good bit, I think part of what makes an oc work is finding somewhere for them to fit, it's no fun when a canon character gets pushed out for a fan one but with enough creativity you can find excellent vectors perfect for them
Ironically my favourite of all time is just too precious to me to run down a laundry list without long consideration to get it as right as possible and I hope you have fun with the process too
Thanks for the ask I very much appreciate it and thanks for bearing with me
For a good long while now every time I interact with until dawn I'll get to the gears scrapbook section and the zombie pops up and I can't be the only one who thinks it looks like Manny Sherman if he was a regular undead vs his canonical mechanical monstrosity that he is right?
I mean yeah a corpse is a corpse but look at his hair, the little details in the shape of the features and it's like yeah that's the same guy if he didn't get his special posthumous dental work
Also again let me praise the remarkable consistency between his game model and physical bust because it's really 10/10 with the details
I saw someone suggest what would happen if one of the other Clarke Kids survived.
....and while that is a heartbreaking thought, it made me think.
What if Anne or James had survived instead?
Sure, they wouldn't have survived to the present of the game like Anthony. But imagine the angst.
They were just arguing that day about their family before the fire.
They'd been having relationship and family trouble for awhile due to James' worry over his job, the strain of having four children close in age, and their worry over Megan.
And that night in particular... Well, think about it.
Picture it.
Anne somehow gets out of the bathroom and out of the house.
She escapes in a towel with burns on her feet, shoulders, and parts of her back.
She sees her oldest daughter break hanged by her scarf.
She sees her oldest son impaled.
And she sees Anthony run in shouting for Megan.
Her husband is screaming inside.
Megan is quite.
She's stopped from going back inside. She's cold and in a stranger's coat looking at the ruins of her home, staring at where she'd raised four children (only....not all of them were adults, were they? And were the oldest of them even REALLY adults? They were still so young-)
She has to bury her children and her husband, wondering what went wrong.
She's 40.
She married James at 17 and loved him for longer, and now he's gone.
She can't have any other children.
Can she even adopt more? Would she want more after losing four in one night?
She thinks about everything she took for granted.
Anne thinks about how she ignored Megan after her fight with James.
She thinks about how much she and Tanya had been fighting because she disapproved of Vince.
She thinks about how much she and Dennis fought over his band, and over the stupid records.
She thinks about all the fights with Megan and how Anthony was always trying to play peace keeper.
She thinks about the fighting with James and she aches.
She can't start over. She doesn't even know where to start.
And then all the stuff starts coming out about Carver.
And her grief turns to anger.
Anne's 40 years old.
She's rebuilding her life and everything reminds her of her family.
Her heart pangs whenever she sees the brand of alcohol and cigarettes James liked. She can't stand to hear the theme song to his favorite show. She keeps the photo from the factory and one of his history books on her nightstand.
Every time a certain song comes on, she thinks of little Dennis and the afternoons spent dancing in the kitchen back when he wasn't too cool to be seen hanging out with his mom.
She sees his face on posters in town, for a live performance he never gets to participate in. He wanted to be a rock star and in a twisted way, he's remembered as such by what few fans he had.
His band mates grow up. He doesn't. He's forever twenty.
She'll never hear him sing again. Never him whine "mom!" And complain about how she doesn't respect his collection of records again.
His rugby equipment, his guitar, and one of his broken records she'd fished from the fire of the house collect dust in a closet in her new home.
Anne can't bring herself to drive past the diner which Tanya worked at.
She thinks about how little she actually knew about her oldest in her final years.
She thought about every wasted moment, every argument.
She never stops regretting how much her daughter hated the family in that last year.
She wonders where their relationship went wrong. When Tanya stopped telling her things.
She regrets reading her diary.
Anne thinks about how Tanya never got out of little hope. How sh never got to go to the cinema festival she wanted to go to. How she never got married. Never got away from her dead end job.
She watches as her daughter's friends get older, get out of town, and get married. All while hers is stuck at 22 forever.
She misses the days shortly after she adopted Tanya where the two weren't at each other's throats. She misses when Tanya would hold her hand as the weaved through crowds back when she was small.
Whenever a hot rocket song comes on the radio, Anne can't make herself turn it off.
Tanya's tennis and softball trophies are right next to Dennis'. Along with her pink aviator glasses and his green ones.
Anne avoids the area of the park where Anthony used to skate and the museum.
She regrets how mature and responsible he felt he had to be in his last year, and wished that he had just been able to enjoy his youth.
She remembers how she was worried about him when she first took him in, how much of a somber child he was and she wonders when she stopped worrying as much.
She misses having someone to tag along with her on errands.
She misses having someone to scold for reading under the table.
She wishes she had been able to run in after him. She wishes it were her instead.
Her son is forever eighteen and the little boy who's knees she used to patch up, and who she used to fuss over is gone.
His skateboard and a burned book of witchcraft rests in her closet beside Dennis and Tanya's things.
Horses make Anne's eyes water. They make her think of the wallpaper in Megan's room that they'd let her pick out when she was three.
Megan loved horses and she loved dolls. Not as much as she loved playing with matches but she loved them.
She loved art too.
Megan's art teacher approached her with some of her drawings after the funeral.
They're lamented and framed. They're the only things she has left of Megan other than a few pictures and a burnt doll.
Her 11 year old daughter is gone.
And the town is whispering about her.
(She tries to ignore the whispers of the people in town who think Megan started the fire on purpose).
(She could never hate her daughter).
Anne's husband and children are dead.
And she's stuck thinking about all the things she could have done differently if she had only had any patience left.
James wakes up to a burning living room and his youngest son screaming from outside.
He hears coughing upstairs but isn't sure if he's imagining it.
He books it out of the room, getting clipped on the shoulder by a falling beam and heads for the front door out of instinct.
Two of his children are on the roof of his burning house.
One is outside.
And he doesn't know where his wife and youngest are.
(Except he does because it's the middle of the night and there's nowhere else his Anne would be, let alone his youngest daughter. He's just not ready to face the fact that he left his wife and daughter to die, though there's likely not anything he could have done).
He escapes the house with minor burns and a broken shoulder.
Two of his children are screaming for him from the rough.
One is beside him panicked.
And then they hear Megan from inside.
James isn't fast enough to stop Anthony from running inside.
Tanya slips.
Dennis falls.
A man stops James from running back in the house.
And the house explodes with his wife and children in it.
James has to bury the wife and children he cursed that very night.
He has to think about the last thing he said to his wife.
"Maybe if we had kids of our own, none of this would be happening!"
He wonders if his kids heard it.
He knows they had to. He hates himself for it.
He thinks about how his last words to his kids.
"Keep it down, will ya? Trying to sleep here!"
"You wanna try raising a family like this... The Devil himself would struggle with you guys..."
"You need to keep an eye on your little sister... Mom is real worried about her."
James was too drunk and too injured to help his family.
And he'd spent their last night on Earth mucking everything up.
He wonders if Anthony would have still run in the house after Megan if he hadn't asked him to keep an eye on her.
He wonders what would have happened if he'd stopped worrying about work so much or if he'd been more honest with Anne about it.
James spends his days after the funeral at work, staring at the framed photo on his desk and avoiding Vince.
He digs through the rubbish of his home.
And he sees the stars Tanya and he painted on that old tire swing he almost took down that summer.
He remembers teaching the kids how to ride their bikes.
He remembers how happy he and Anne used to be.
He remembers teaching Dennis how to play rugby.
He remembers taking Tanya and Dennis to practice and breaking up fights between the two.
He remembers bringing Megan home for the first time.
James remembers the long sleepless nights where Anne worried over how quiet little Anthony was.
His are gone.
James is 42 and his entire family is dead.
He loses his job a few months later.
And all he can think about is how much he'd rather have his family here instead.
I think we should all be grateful that I'm so focused on the specific tragedy of sole survivor Megan and the fact that she is still forced to be a dependant post fire because the things I could write off the line about James guilt around Anthony running back in after Megan...
one thing that I appreciate in tcofs is sometimes you actually get something out of failure
Like Jaime being the baby, while obviously highly suspected in a normal playthrough, is confirmed in playthroughs where you fail to save him in the prologue and Linda sees a news paper that mentions his death from a different timeline
The fact that in a good run its a mystery what Stan was running from but if Madi dies before Chris gets out of the portal he can explain that he felt extreme fear like he was being chased but saw nothing when he turned around, which somewhat mirrors the scenes with frank's essence where it can only be seen in the camera although it's not that strong yet
Speaking of I actually really like Chris and Stan's scenes under the circumstances because they're both on edge about a random body(Madi), there's less context for everyone, Chris has two opportunities to save him, first being him getting smashed by the ring like the other version, which is more messed up if Madi is already dead, and the second is him possibly nearly getting blown off the platform and her having to decide if she is willing to abandon her ticket home to save a stranger or not and even in normal returns it does reflect well the effort he puts into helping her with zero context and generally when it's just the two of them his character shines because he's actually out there looking out for this disoriented kid that doesn't even know what country she's in and although I of course like Madi to live I do prefer the Chris & Stan version over other combos in isolation
Beyond that, while it might not always be obvious, prologue Sam is 2024 Sam but he's not 1980 Sam nor is that the same Linda's but the things other than Jaime's death that exposes it is 1980 Sam dying on the way to save the teens and him and Robert having an emotional moment before he dies and other Sam witnessing it through the footage, the game does a good job matching broader conditions such as Tom's potential sobriety and any sustained injuries and sure it's obvious that its all adjacent by then but I appreciate that moment where other Sam watches that
Additionally if you screw up bad enough(tho this might be difficulty based), baby Jaime's crying can be heard right before fs attempts to kill Linda in the 1980 climax causing stone to get distracted long enough to give her a second chance, thus jaime watches out for his friend across time
Lastly and maybe this is only rewarding to me but if you have less than three characters splitting the film the concept of looking for a third person to guard a filmstrip is briefly touched on which opens some very interesting doors regarding how that could go
There's probably more that slipped my mind but I like that
reader LIKED the fic? reader left thoughtful comment because they thought there was something worth analyzing? oh! oh! love for reader! love for reader for one thousand years!
is there any fanon consensus on character birthdays outside of those who have official ones? Because I think it's just a little unfair that they gave some of the Hacketts official birthdays and skipped the rest, like yeah Travis has his mentioned directly in game but Chris and Jed got birthdays too and I wanted to know if there's a general understanding for Bobby(who I think should be a leap year baby), Constance, Kaylee and Caleb
Hell throw any other characters that never got a canon birthday on here too, do we go by actor birthdays? What about when that's not necessarily an option? What's the deal? Is there a deal? I'm far more about dark pictures birthdays and track those but either way let me know
I know there's a lot of reasons why Williams is a complete bastard through all his efforts to play this in touch with people considerate boss on people's levels but one really looked over early reason that he's an absolute inconsiderate evil bastard is that not once in all the time that it took to set things up, through all the years of training and getting to know the team did he once consider that maybe launch day shouldn't be earlier in the same month as the only parent on the whole team's only child's birthday
Like however that shook out behind the scenes it's still clear that this man did not care about a small child celebrating her birthday with her dad present before not seeing him for an extended period of time, like I doubt the launch dates were set in stone right from the start so either he didn't absorb anything about the Carter family over the literal years he worked with Tomas, who would have been a toddler dad through to his kid becoming school aged, or he really just does not give a shit
