ok but *please* explain the soulmate goose of enforcement, i desperately want to know
OKAY SO UM
@omgcheckplease is a comic about college hockey! One of the college hockey bros is Jack, who is not… the most emotionally ept character, so he takes two years to realize he’s in love with Bitty, the protagonist. But you get HINTS leadng up to this that are about to hit his head like a cast-iron pan.
And one of those is that he takes a photography class the semester before, and his photos are all of stuff around campus: geese, his teammates, the hockey rink, more geese…
And there’s a kind of behind-the-scenes post where his photography classmates are like WHY ARE ALL YOUR PICTURES OF THIS ONE SPECIFIC TEAMMATE WHAT DOES HE MEAN TO YOU EMOTIONALLY and he just like… does not get it. He wants to talk about his pictures of geese. “Geese portraits.”
(And to photograph wildlife is to risk their wrath, especially in nesting season, so he’s kind of badass for shoving a camera in geese’s faces. And like ignoring his potential love life when chasing after something difficult to pursue and capture–whether that’s geese or hockey–is kind of A Thing for him, and also he’s Canadian, and Canada Geese are infamous, and well.)
So ALSO there’s this blog called @shitty-check-please-aus with the motto “these are not good but they’re fun“. Like, one suggestion is “jack has a full back tattoo of a poorly drawn moose face, with a small canada goose on his ribs“.
But it became a THING, like, a BEAUTIFUL CHALLENGE to take these ideas and do something actually artistic with them! Like, someone proposed, “Swan Princess AU but Jack is a Goose Prince” and someone made actual fic out of it!
SO. One day shitty-check-please-aus posted, “soulmate au where one person finds a goose who leads them to the other person. the difficulty comes in not being mauled by a goose” and somebody else began their fic (about a different Check Please character) thus:
Growing up, Nursey had always assumed he’d be excited when he finally had his Gooseday.
Young Nursey had, of course, failed to take into account how God damn massive, not to mention murderous, fucking geese are.
When Nursey finally wakes up one morning to find his goose standing beside his bed, he actually feels something more akin to panic than excitement.
AND THUS THE TAG WAS BORN.
(2017-18 Check Please fandom was really happy and lively and fun and lulzy and we got featured on @ao3tagoftheday a LOT.)
