content warnings: moderate mentions of descriptive gore, might not be suitable for everyone
i had mentioned this on twitter and now im making it a reality: welcome to my interpretations of the ‘where the wicked play’ side stories i’ve written and posted:) if you’re interested, they’re all posted on my ao3
anyways this is the first one that i wrote and published, enjoy:)
jaws dripping all your greed - https://archiveofourown.org/works/35780938
You started from Darkness.
alright well to start it off i haven’t written second person pov since my self insert days so this was definitely new. i am positive this fic began with some insane thought that manifested at 4am and then i was furiously typing into a doc. i wanted something that was both unknown and completely transparent, and using a second person pov was attention grabbing enough to me to work with.
as we continue in the fic, we’re introduced to ‘you’. ‘You’ seem to know everything and ‘you’ seem to have no real kind of family, but it’s referenced that ‘you’ had to come from somewhere. i really liked this kind of introduction because it was so vague and so exact at the same time, and leaves a lot of it up for interpretation whilst handing you every single clue that you could possibly need.
Start from the beginning.
You started from Darkness.
i will be honest here this was me trying to refocus on what the actual objective of the piece was, and i felt like using the beginning in a twisted narrative was good to recenter both mine and the readers perspective. And it worked, because now at this point you know more about ‘yourself’ and where you came from, as well as your general outlook on life and things that exist, ie. the moon, the sun, the darkness, all of the things that are titled.
the titles are important as well. it’s kind of poked at in the summary itself, but the use of proper nouns on things that are usually improper (the moon, darkness, light, etc) is on purpose and with a point. names have power according to ‘you’, and by giving these otherwise mundane things names gives them something else: meaning. i will come back to this a little ahead:)
You started from Darkness, and that was where you belonged.
shoutout to ant @/bugboydwt on twitter and @lovelyybugz on here for giving me one of their favourite lines from this fic! anyways we will continue
repetition my beloved <3 again with the starting line and then added on with something that really solidified the personality aspect of the perspective. when we watched movies as children, the villains were always featured in a darker area of the world, whether it was the lighting or their words, their actions or even just the colour scheme that they were painted with.
‘Darkness’ in this setting can be read as direct and indirect. directly, it means that the thing we’re talking about belongs in the shadows and places where there isn’t sunlight or life, and is something that should be feared.
indirectly, it is something that should have never been created at all.
Fickle things, don’t you think?
names:) this little bit goes on to say:
and it’s leading enough to believe that there was a time when you didn’t have any power. it was this thing that existed and was aware of its existence, its past and origin, and the names of other beings, but it never had one itself because it wasn’t important.
just because it wasn’t important enough to name doesn’t mean it didn’t have power, of course:)
It was something you heard on the streets, and people—people, oh, people were new.
i adore this line. i feel like it gives a more in depth look at the personality of the perspective, showing something egotistical and not quite mocking, but definitely a taunt that comes with learning about something you can corrupt. this is the perspective of what really is the main villain of wtwp, and the desire and only drive that it has is now to ruin whatever it can.
a lot of this fic is internal monologue and giving life to something that doesn’t have any verbal dialogue was actually difficult because in my experience (with dnf fics and others wow) there is always verbal conversations. writing this was more like a constant stream of conversation with something that wasn’t myself and something that didn’t exist at all. kind of like talking to a wall.
but, by adding in that hesitation or pause with ‘oh’, i felt like it gave more depth because instead of speaking the words, you could actually see the train of thought via the monologue.
It was a greed that burrowed to the bottom of your stomach, rotted and broiled in ivory and amaranth, and there was nothing you could find in sedimentary stone to quench it.
imagery <3 this fic is very, very imagery heavy, especially when it comes to the emotions that ‘you’ are feeling. again, it was harder to get a point across without verbal conversation, but i feel like adding in choice words such as these it was enough for people to understand how it felt.
this is the part in the work where it gets into what i wanted to achieve: the greed, the jealousy, the desire to have everything just so that no one else can.
People were not the cause, but they were who you decided to blame.
another shoutout to bella @/snowchcster on twt and @snowchcster on here for giving me one of their favourite lines as well <3
now. we know that people who are greedy usually have other emotions that run hot right behind it. one of those—at least to me—is rage, and i felt like adding in the narcissistic trait of pinning blame on someone else was fitting. here, the vines are blaming the people that it had learned about because it doesn’t have a name. it couldn’t blame the moon or the darkness and it didn’t want to blame itself, but it could blame the people.
maybe it doesn’t make sense logically, but that’s the point: it’s not supposed to.
Can you feel the pain of your discontent? Oh, they have what you want, do they not? You are greedy. You are envious, and your bitterness sits on cobblestones through pernicious distaste.
something that became a theme in this work is the rhetorical questions; i think it started to add ambience to the fic but then became useful in the way that it became a taunt. the narration is half from the perspective of one single being, but then there’s all these questions that are coming that aren’t really answered. i liked it because really, the vines aren’t one being in particular: just like in the dsmp, they’re spread out and scattered and while they are the same thing, are they really all the same being?
this small paragraph is one of my favourites simply because it can be split up into half of what is ‘one being’ and half of something that isn’t. it’s still ‘the same’, but all of those questions are violent and thrown at you with really no answer but the obvious.
Because they were unsure. You were this thing, curled and red to the base like a snake to strike, rattling a tail like an infant’s toy and taunting with the words you would never speak.
And, oh, how good you felt to not be the one unknowing.
i will say it again i love my imagery in this fic
anyways, in the start of the fic it was referenced that ‘you’ only knew what was important, but at the same time it is never mentioned how old the vines are. even in ‘where the wicked play’, george has a comment somewhere that he doesn’t remember a time when the vines weren’t around. so, with that in mind, think of how people grew and evolved, and think of how there was probably a time in the vines’ period of life and growth that people weren’t a thing.
ill let you chew on that for a little lol
in that paragraph, it is actually quite literal in the sense that the vines in wtwp are everywhere. in the corners of buildings, on the walls, over the stones. this is pointing at a time when it started to become more prominent, and when people where more unsure and starting to become afraid of the flora that was trailing over their kingdom.
How does it feel to have curiosity?
Does it wither when you have found your answers?
Do you feel the necrosis of it, tangible until it disintegrates across your tongue and leaves you slobbering rot and bile?
i simply love this entire passage let me live i had the time of my LIFE rereading this after i had slept eight hours and came back to a 4am frantic masterpiece
this is mostly describing the process of curiosity, and the discovery of human emotions. like most people, a question that you might have doesn’t always stop at one, so what the rhetoric is is does the curiosity ever fade?
the short answer is no, and the long one is that the vines only wanted to know because it was just another thing that it could possess.
You were never truly hungry, but you could never be filled.
Again in reference to the curiosity. this is written more like it’s actual human hunger, but when i was writing it i was thinking of the crave for knowledge. you were never truly hungry because you knew everything you needed from the moment you existed, but you could never be filled because your greed created a bottomless pit you never acknowledged.
i feel as though this may come off as obvious, but this is schlatt. however, this is schlatt when he is very, very young, and extremely new to the rule of a kingdom. in the first chapter of wtwp it’s referenced that the kingdom was ruled nicely, and then war happened, and then schlatt took over. in chapter 12, puffy explains that when schlatt was deemed king, he extended a hand to snowchester and started a pact.
his reasoning is that he wanted power. he was young and greedy, and this is the vines realizing that such a person exists.
the next few paragraphs are the vines simply debating over the existence of the new king, and how it reflects its place in the world and the kingdom. at the same time, the people in the kingdom have lost the fear that they had of the vines—’you’—and have begun to show their distaste for the very presence of them.
and, at the same time, you are reading about the vines starting its descent into the destruction of people and realizing that the people have already begun their destruction of ‘you’.
Curiosity was never worth the death of your siblings.
again, people ask questions and they usually don’t stop. this is just one of those times where humanity should have stopped, even written in fiction.
And soon, the King was a title.The King wasn’t respected by you—it wasn’t a title that was gained through power and it wasn’t a title that you meant to give.It wasn’t even a name.
at this point, schlatt has become important enough to have some kind of impact on the vines’ life, and it wasn’t by choice. everything else wasn’t by choice either, but ‘you’ needed something more to represent a being that was presented to you that could potentially do something that mattered.
Now, you already have power.
You started from Darkness—there was no need for a King to stand in and feed you from bloody palms, hoping that your nips were not deeper and trembling as you licked between it’s dirty knuckles.
im just staring at this rn i love this passage.
here, i kind of based it off that saying like “don’t bite the hand that feeds you”. obviously, the vines don’t need help. it has power and it knows that it has plenty of it, but it wanted more.
and, it also knew that by injuring the King, it would take away any chance of gaining that power, so: it never bit the hand that fed it, but it was never all that hungry in the first place.
The King stared at you, and you stared the same. The King never gave you a name, but it gave you an offering, and you stared at its open palm with slobber over your stained canines.
Blood. A body. Fingers and bones, and stretches of land over stones.
more references to that saying:) as well as rhyming, i dont think i did that on purpose but also it fits so i will never change it.
as for the offering, think of it like how schlatt extended a hand to snowchester. both of these beings want power, and both of them know there is something to gain from having a kind of pact with the other. schlatt didn’t give it a name because he didn’t have that kind of power over the vines, and the vines only gave him a title because he has something that mattered.
thats the distinction: schlatt doesn’t matter, but he has something that matters.
You have no name, but they still whisper an echo of a title even whilst in the Light. They are afraid, you see, and even as your tongue curls over the uncut fingernails and it slices along the edges of your muscle, not once do you pull away to smile. Bare your teeth and let them gleam with the Moon, lick your lips and swallow galefulls of jealousy to people you do not know.
i just adore this paragraph, im putting it in here because it is very tangible and i like it a Lot
You didn’t believe in names, but you have attained one.
You are the Vines, and you have been starved for too long.
im sure that for anyone who was deeply invested in the wtwp lore that it was easy enough to tell from the middle of the fic what ‘we’ were, but at the same time only using the name that people know it as at the very ending was impactful enough for me to want to post this. just the same as schlatt in this fic, the vines didn’t have a name or a title until they were impactful enough to matter. who gave it the name? well that’s completely up for wild interpretation because i don’t have an answer for it. but, regardless, it has a title and it has a name, and now it has enough power to really matter.
at the very end of it all, this is still incredibly up for interpretation because i didn’t have an outline or a real good idea of what i had truly wanted for this fic; i literally opened a doc at 4am and started typing, but these were just some of my thoughts that i remember having while doing so :) it was fun to write in the perspective of something that wasn’t a single person, and it was fun to explore the more violent writing style compared to what i usually write.
anyways, that’s my writers interpretation of my fic! if you made it all the way to the end and could actually understand my ramblings, congrats you get a cookie <3
