s e k r i t o m g c p ! ! !

sekrit's fun omgcp blog, here for jacqueline, love that bitch about | meta | fic | ao3 | check displeased podcast!!

[skrtomg]

well now i want you to talk all about transpires spiritual predecessor 'elegy for the over-medium egg' (oh. i just got the joke.)

10, 11, 16&17, 26

thank you for your question, I want to say something important about this: over-medium eggs are under-represented. too often overlooked. If you like your yolk a little runny, but not liquid, and shy of jammy, not opaque, this is the right move. a real test of a restaurant kitchen, for me, is CAN they do an over-medium egg. I believe some people do not even KNOW what the different eggs are. it's all sunny-side-up to them! no it isn't, what are we doing.

most people reading this blog maybe don't know this is a check, please fanfic, and a good one at that. check it out.

10. How did you approach writing the fic? (e.g. wrote it start to finish in order, started with the ending, starting with the twist)

nonlinearly. I started with the shitty/lardo intro/outro parts and then worked my way to the sex belatedly because i had no idea how to handle it. and like, you can tell lol

11. What was the most challenging aspect of writing it?

...when i say "how to handle it" i don't mean "how to write a sex scene" but like, how to get jack and shitty to a location where they could fuck. this doesn't matter to a lot of people but i think the keys off miami are NOT somewhere you go to have beach sex. trying to figure this out, and then reconciling myself to it, felt contrived.

16. Talk about the fic’s biggest moment & how you came up with it

they bang on the beach, right? idk, tell me if you think it's something else, but, actually I think I addressed this in the two above? but they needed to bang and i really struggled to figure out how and where to do it, like, jack is public figure, she is NOT in an open marriage, she feels like she is living in the cycle of expectations and disappointment, where is the right place to relieve that tension? again, I'm not sure this is actually super effective, but, that's the way I got to that decision. 17. Talk about the fic’s ending. Why did you end it where you did?

the ending sequence in this fic is good, i think. i already mentioned i wanted it to bookend the opening, so it had to be set in lardo and shitty's place. to me it needed to cover, like:

bitty knows something's fucking up, but bitty is passive-aggressive to the point where it's scary, he is not going to ask Jack "did you cheat on me with Shitty," he's going to make Jack suffer this instead, in front of many people they know, all of whom have a specific idea about them as a couple

shitty is a pretty flawed character here, and he definitely (with or without lardo's also-but-differently flawed help) has some weird parenting ideas, but he is a good dad, he loves his kid so much

the kid is trans, btw, i dunno if that's clear? i had a bunch of shit i wrote at some point and never posted (i think) about how jack's career is winding down and she is gearing up to retire (and transition) at the same time lardo and shitty are having a kid, and it's not irrelevant/unconnected, unfortunately i will probably never post this, but i think what Jack can help B internalize is like, living in other people's expectations doesn't have to be the only way, and also living within the sphere of bitty's expectations isn't something anyone has to do, Jack included, and part of what's in the background of this story is Jack realizing that... 26. Share your favorite detail

Shitty hearing Lykke Li's "I Follow Rivers" remix at the airport and it reminding him of being in college, I think, is a good detail for not just the lyrics but the canon -- like, you know this was playing at multiple house parties Shitty went to his first two years of college. it's also just a nice encapsulation of how time moves, like, this 2011 college party indie electro banger is your soft-listening inoffensive airport music in adulthood.

ETA

also HOW is this a spiritual predecessor to transpires, somehow i really feel that so much more strongly than whatever fuck-you to the fandom i thought THIS was

[camilliar]

sure thing

[checkdispleased]

>;) >;) >;) >;) >;) >;) >;) >;) >;) >;) >;) >;) >;) >;) >;) >;) >;) >;) >;) >;)

[camilliar]

[tomato-greens]

this is the best comment I have ever gotten on any fanfic

[camilliar]

tomato i fixed it for you

[skrtomg]

Waaaaait, you have more greerverse fic coming?! 👀 I love that fic so much, you don't even know 🥹

who even knows WHAT that is that is following me on this blog??? but yeah I wanna finish that fic someday, it's the thing I started writing that was supposed to be finished before i posted portrait of a julio-claudian man that then wasn't. The summary at the top of the doc is:

Kent Parson’s problems include: his boyfriend’s ex is America’s sweetheart, their preteen daughter has decided to focus her energy on ice dancing and antagonizing Kent Parson, and no matter how much he vacuums, he can’t get the cat hair out of these drapes. Also, he probably needs a hip replacement, so, yeah, retirement is going swimmingly. Thanks for asking, People magazine.

I have a lot of vampire mpreg to write so no promises about when this is due, but i have been known to finish a fic 15 years later so odds are, not none!!

[camilliar]

i have thought this since 2016 but i have never told it to anyone i think??? so i'd better just say before vampires telekinetically extract anything i ever thought about hockey twinks out of my brain that pavement's "cut your hair" is my biggest check please song

[camilliar]

Yesterday I had a panic attack and postponed my birthday party but I had already ordered this cake so now I have a whole cake, hmu if you want Parse cake I guess.

[camilliar]

trying to figure out what birthday cake to order for myself to eat alone in my house??

also this is the comic

[camilliar]

#truly i am leaning toward seeing if a bakery will write rimming on my cake

sorry it’s weeks later but just FYI yes I found a bakery that would write that

i mean the cake they make in this country is ~~different~~ so it wasn’t truly what I wanted, but my neighbors were very happy to get some leftovers and I think we can all agree that this is BEAUTIFUL so I definitely enjoyed staring at it while I ate delivery falafel

[camilliar]

just commemorating the realization that i will be getting a fucking interview with the vampire birthday cake, a storied tradition of making every bakery fucking hate me

[skrtomg]

never bothered

louis/lestat, nc17-ish, 4.5k, more foot and trans stuff so be prepared, Shockingly easy to use an awful lot of words to say absolutely nothing, and also sort of everything.

Presenting my beautiful second-born iwtv fic, a sequel to some little bells rung, so maybe read that one first!

[camilliar]

great news, love that i accidentally have 80 blogs

[skrtomg]

some little bells rung

louis/lestat, r-ish, 1.5k, foot stuff/trans stuff, Revelations like gashes in the gossamer fabric of chronovamponormativity, ca. 2024.

I have made the extremely great decision to post IWTV fic on my check please ao3, I guess this makes sense, obviously I cannot put this on my south park account where it would demean the sacrament of such fics as Stan fucks Kyle's empty eye sockets, and similar.

[bigvampo]

whos ready for tgirl lestat realness kings

[camilliar]

i'm so incredibly ready, i have never been more pert

if anyone wants to scream at me about vampires, i invite it

[camilliar]

hey! this is a literal blast fromt he past but your comments on the dont call me son literally lit me up ina different way tyyyy while reading i lit would look for your comments first than anyone else have a great day

Love to hear this, ty, compelling evidence in the case of why it's good to leave long comments!

[shitty-check-please-aus]

my hot takes about that era of the fandom: 

I thought it was annoying when people would write Bitty in the most out of character way that they possibly could so they could justify Jack getting with Kent later on in their fic

Relatedly, I thought it was really fucking annoying to see people actively hate Bitty, the main character of Check Please, and talk about how he shouldn’t be as prominent in Check Please, the story about Eric Bittle. I think some of that was also people having issues with Bitty having more feminine interests but I don’t want to enter that minefield tonight

I thought it was frustrating how there was so much Kent fic compared to fic featuring characters of color who were way more prominent and developed as characters in the actual comic. Ditto art. 

I thought that it was bullshit of people to claim they didn’t see a problem in their art when they were coloring Ransom like half a shade darker than the white characters, and to then act like it’s impossible to draw Black people

I thought that it was bullshit how many people infantilized Chowder in their writing, and in general there was a widespread unwillingness to write him as a fully fleshed-out character

I thought it was weird that people would call Ngozi Ukazu “N” instead of typing out her name and I don’t think they would’ve done that if she had a European name

I think some people got to a real uncomfortable level of parasociality for a while and I don’t blame her at all for stepping way back from engaging 

I think in general the fandom has gotten to a way healthier place in recent years

[camilliar]

I think I can add some context for one of these:

I thought it was weird that people would call Ngozi Ukazu “N” instead of typing out her name and I don’t think they would’ve done that if she had a European name 

So this actually strikes me as really typical behavior: fans looove to abbreviate just about everything. Before smush names became the dominant trend for pairings, just the first initial/first initial was pretty common, and canon names consistently become acronyms like this, too. Likely the only reason we don’t refer to Check, Please as "CP” is because that also stands for something you don’t want to get mixed up with in the tags -- but at various points OMGCP was a pretty common thing to call the comic, which is itself an acronym, just a slightly longer one riffing on the comic’s Tumblr URL.

Likewise, creators get initialed pretty often. I am not sure if this is still super common, but in many fandoms it wasn’t rare to refer to whoever had control over a property as “TPTB,” for “the powers that be.” But in other fandoms you get JKR or GRRM or JRRT, and in my other fandom we talk about M&T, that is, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, These are some of the whitest and not just most European, but most Anglophone names. And in the case of SP (that is, South Park), it’s leaving off the last name entirely.

So I’m not fully sure people did this to the creator of Check, Please just because her name wasn’t European -- I’m willing to guess that people would have wanted to first-initial her regardless of what her name was, or what her background was.

I’m also going to guess that there are a few reasons why fans abbreviate things so much. One is that, back when fandom was a little more clandestine, it helped keep fannish activity covert. Another is that when fandom was largely done through sending things, especially printed material, through the mail, not having to type out “Star Trek (the original series)” and just saying TOS probably helped things from getting too unwieldy. Once you get into the internet age, if you’re furiously typing comments anywhere from newsgroups to LJ comments to Tumblr replies to Discord, you can get more out and quicker if you abbreviate commonly understood terms. Likewise, using these signals understanding and therefore belonging: someone not into South Park might gloss over a post that’s just talking about M&T, so in much the way any slang helps define and moderate a subculture, this does, too.

Finally, any time there is a power structure, one of the responses to the people sitting at the time of it is to ... well, not always detrimentally, but, kind of like transgressively subvert it? Like they’re THE AUTHOR who makes the money on this in the real world, but here in transformative fandom, where we’re “laying hands upon the source and twisting it to [our] purposes,” they’re just First Initial to us. We’ve wrenched some control back in this equation -- that is, in some views, the primary point of this sort of fandom. It’s also affectionate, like a nickname. There’s no need for such formality here.

But the equation should probably be subjective: M&T, such as they are, probably have more than a billion dollars between them and an enduring grip on a culture they’ve helped shape, mostly not for the better, over 25 years. Also, again, they’re white (presumably) cishet bros from Colorado. Not taking them seriously enough to bother writing out their names might feel like a more necessary gesture of control than doing the name to Ngozi Ukazu, an author whose cultural identity has historically been obscured -- denied opportunities for authorship. So it makes sense that in this case, you might want to take the few extra seconds to write her full first name out. It’s four more letters.

But that doesn’t mean that it’s weird to abbreviate it, either. I think it’s pretty firmly not weird -- again, it’s like, routinely fannish. And I can also see it being argued from the other angle, that making a point to spell out “Ngozi” whereas you might be just M&Ting it over on your other blog is othering, that it’s treating a non-European name like it’s so incomprehensible you have to spell it out, whereas European names are so familiar they don’t need it.

It’s also worth noting, briefly, Ngozi has pretty regularly referred to herself reflexively as just “Ngozi,” including in the tags of this recent post (in July 2023), in the intro video on her Patreon, and via the signature on her art: usually just NGOZI! all caps, with exclamation point, as seen here (in August 2023).

So I think it’s like, pretty understandable that people would follow the basic trend of thinking of her as just “Ngozi” and then, in writing fervently about the canon, just shorten it to N.

Something I don’t have time to research right now (and may never) is a sense I have that there was a shift perhaps around 2016 or 2017 among people who had a lot more reverence for the comic to stop shortening Ngozi to “N” once it became the subject of discourse -- whereas I think some so-called OMGCP critical people just kept using N.

But at its origin I don’t think this was a weird thing to do at all -- it feels like what would happen in a lot of fandoms. Maybe not all? But nor does this seem like a very unusual gesture.

[camilliar]

yeah long time no anything BUT I’ve been thinking about it, here’s my Jack and Bitty interior designcanons:

everything is from Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams

smoked glass, mostly pewter; some amber; just a pop of forest green

leather everywhere, and not just the couches: sidetables, headboards, one entire wall in the ground floor power room; that one’s mottled

mostly brown leather, some black accents

the only patterns we have in this house are stripe

maybe a little houndstooth or tartan, as an embellishment, like a throw pillow

the tan leather living room couch is cuvred slightly

we love brass in this house: drawer pulls, wall hooks, lighting fixtures, it’s all burnished gray-gold in here

also, the outlets and switchplates? brass

nobody who lives here knows how to make a drink but yes there is a fully stocked wet bar and yes there is a full complement of VERY heavy and VERY blocky and very deeply-cut glassware

sports memorabilia? primarily relegated to the finished basement

a lot of things in this house are lacquer, mostly black lacquer

this home is aggressively, aggressively structured

two words: outdoor kitchen

nine words: the outdoor wood-burning pizza oven was imported from ~Napoli~

Eric Bittle will be the last person on this scorched Earth to give up on his lawn, thank you very much, this is a society

[camilliar]

bitty accidentally on purpose starts an mlm

No accident about it, he simply just would.

[camilliar]

I hope everyone appreciates that the woman in the icon I put on my Check Please fandom journal in 2016 to mock the trend of people having Tumblr handles about random side characters is about to be crowned queen of England

[camilliar]

@passiveaggressivegummybear​

i appreciate the woman in your icon i just also don’t like her, so

FWIW I don’t think you should appreciate her -- just the fact that the snitty shitpost thing I did in 2016 to point out that, holy shit, people in Check Please are so shallow -- has in fact come around again.

[camilliar]

I hope everyone appreciates that the woman in the icon I put on my Check Please fandom journal in 2016 to mock the trend of people having Tumblr handles about random side characters is about to be crowned queen of England

[camilliar]

have you ever read "they're going to love you" by meg howery? the minute i finished it, it dawned that it absolutely reminded me of "portrait of a julio-claudian man" - love your writing, LOVE the podcast, and absolutely love your all of your meta. there's a truly ~delicious~ story underneath the chipper veneer of check please and i love the way y'all have dug into it (and the story that's actually on the page)

no, but I looked it up, and this does seem like a book I would be into -- thank you for the rec.

also thank you for the nice words, VERY pleased there are other people who GET IT and enjoy my personal pleasuresport, the crime of thinking about Check Please slightly more than we're supposed to.

[camilliar]

Hi! I'm a big fan of your work in the omgcp fandom and I have to tell you I looooove your writing so much. I was rereading your fic portrait of a julio-claudian man (probably for the fifth time?) and it got me wondering if there is still a chance you might post the other stories you were working on in that universe (please do!).

Anyway, I hope you are doing good!

Wow, this is a late reply, I'm sorry. I'm fine? I hope you're okay, too.

There is certainly still a chance, espcially since this ask made me go back and reread the fics I do have partly drafted and plotted out in this series, and they're like, good? Now, what I should do is make a series on AO3 so people can find them all together. Let's see:

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Cool.

I mean, I have more to say about this timeline. If I ever truly give up I'll scrap everything and put it in this series.

[checkdispleased]

ep. 58 | 3.1 WAG

WE'RE BACK, BABY!!! Sekrit and tomato explore WAGatha Christie and the British tabloid nightmare machine, Mr. Bittle's thousand yard stare straight through the fourth wall, and the logistics of...well, there's no other word for it...truckfuckin'.

[camilliar]

Slam-dunk production by Tomato for our vaunted return to podcasting -- wait, what sport is this comic about? IDK, listen to find out.

In all honesty I loved listening to every moment of this episode, and I’m so excited to dive back in. I promise this was worth the wait.