#omgcheckplease stuff

[multsicorn]

what he says: Didja miss me?

what he means: ... I miss you.

[multsicorn]

me: there is not nearly enough fluff for my otp, we should have a fluff challenge guys

also me: cannot write one (1) piece of fluff to save my life

[multsicorn]

will i ever get over projecting too much on jack zimmermann tbh

(it’s about the Failing At Life and Coming Back stuff. i mean. right now. it’s been multiple things.)

anyway i know i will one day when i fall for a new fandom.... but in the meantime.,,, lol @ me going ‘he is thinking this and this and this’. no, you don’t know, mults. that is /you/.

he’s not thinking anything, far as we can tell!

[multsicorn]

anyway if there’s both discussion on my dash tonight and i’m keeping up the ‘actually post some fandom thoughts’ thing well then. guess i’m gonna throw a few cents in.

1. I don’t care about ‘deep,’ I guess, maybe? But the story with Jack and Parse - if not the characters - feels so complex to me. They were best friends. And lovers. And teammates, co-leaders, linemates, and to some degree rivals.

And then Jack almost died. Kent saved him, probably, when he called the OD in. Jack might’ve been trying to die, might’ve just not been trying very hard not to... Kent will probably never know.

It was supposed to be - the Draft - the culmination of both their lives so far. In the event, Kent wins the prize that might’ve been supposed to be Jack’s. He’s sent all the way across the country. (They were gonna be separated like that, regardless. It was a part of what they were working for). Jack won’t - can’t - whichever, talk to him anymore...

Jack failed out of life with that OD. All his plans were derailed. But he figures things out, what he wants: comes back around to that same old goal, in a different way.

Meanwhile, Kent’s lighting it up on the ice. He’s beyond amazing. He misses Jack: he wants them to play together again. Wants, I feel, to make things right.

Jack still can’t talk to him.

... note how I didn’t say anything about either of them as individual people in all that. Oh, I could, I have tons of characterization in my head and some of it’s even canon-supported, too ;), but, also, I don’t need to? It’s secondary in this particular case.

Because it’s the story, the setup, above, that’s so irresistible to me. There’s so much stuff going on there! That setup is pretty much all there is... I won’t argue with that. But it has layers of hurt, connection, ambition,... I don’t know how to explain myself, god. If it doesn’t speak to your id, it doesn’t.

But all the things you’ve lost! Things you might not’ve lost!... there’s just So Much there to play with, to me.

2. So I’ve been stuck on it, despite virtually no new canon or the hint of any, since I fell in love with this story (this particular story, only, I don’t care a bit about the rest of the canon), almost two years ago now. Multiple flirtations with other fandoms in this time still have not managed to displace it!

Like someone looked into my head and wrote the premise but not the story for the #career-ending injury fic of my heart. Maybe that explains it best.

3. Also Jack Zimmermann did too used to have hints of complexity! He’s an awkward weirdo loner and anxious too and I’m *blasts Rick Astley really loud.*

4. More to the point... (I do hope it’s okay that I’m spilling my feelings out like this, like it doesn’t come out as the wrong sort of passive-aggressive or whatever? I’m not tryna fight and am one thousand percent happy to disagree. I’m just .. talking).

5. re: Ngozi changing her mind re: the story she’s telling. Well, yeah? I think it’s happened multiple times already, expanding/continuing on things that weren’t originally going to be continued directly. And re: Parse, specifically... surely many of us saw this coming a mile away?

She doesn’t like conflict with or among her fans. I get it! I wouldn’t either!!! Although I don’t even and will never have fans, so I shouldn’t talk... but, yes, of course, she’s close enough to her audience (and fandom) that it does affect her.

And I for one don’t see what would be gained if she were to talk about this as it’s happening. If you want to avoid conflict in and/or with your fandom... talking about the choices you make to avoid it would, surely, only feed said conflict further? Nobody needs all the second guessing that, to be fair, this point itself is entirely part of.

I’d love the ~original story~ (of the small part of the story I even care about!) as much as anyone, ... or maybe not. There’s always fanfic. It gives me so many more choices, there’s always at least a few that are better for my personal tastes than whatever canon would turn out to give.

Anyway, as much as I don’t even care about the current comic canon. (And, admittedly, quite possibly enabled by that.) Man, if I had a hungry and critical fandom discussing my every creative move... about the last thing I’d want to do is discuss when they’d made me change my mind.

[multsicorn]

[first of all I’d like to acknowledge that the caption above - ‘oh god oh god how do you friend’ - can be read equally well as ‘Jack has no idea how to friend, end of’ or ‘Jack has no idea how to just friend, when a hot guy is touching him, what,’ but the discussion below is entirely about the former meaning.]

Posting sparked by this discussion at @garden-of-succulents​, though I’ve had all these ideas and wanting to write them for over a year.

Ngozi said that Kent was Jack's first best friend at, what.  15?  16?  And I started writing a whole story, based just on that.

I don't find it unbelievable.  I don't find it sad.  I found it, when I heard it - (though this may be a hyperbole) - one of the most hashtag relateable things that I'd heard in quite a while.

I had no friends until I was eleven.  And then my first friend was my best friend, of course, because she was my only friend - though she always had a couple other 'best friends' on the same level as me.  At thirteen, I managed a second friend, and by fifteen or sixteen, well, it got fuzzy.  But I had more than those two.  Probably.

But if I can have no friends till eleven (which, I did), why can't Jack have no friends till fifteen or sixteen?  It's a few more years, sure, but the first sounds just as hard to believe, I think, to most people, as the second does.

I want to discuss a few things in a little more detail.

From an outside view, it may have looked like I had friends as a kid.  There were other kids whose parents arranged with mine for us to have playdates: we did, sometimes.  At school, there was no one who'd talk to me voluntarily, no one I had any freaking idea how to talk to anyway.  But I picked a few kids in every class anyway as 'friends,' meaning that they'd let me do group work with them when we had do to group work, sometimes, if no one more desirable asked them first; they'd let me join them in foursquare or jump rope games.  Sometimes, maybe.

I didn't, at that point, get that a friend was someone who you enjoyed spending time with just because.  I didn't get that that was a thing that existed.  I thought friends were for doing stuff with, for having people to do stuff with, or, just, idk.  A fact of the universe that's inexplicable and axiomatic, like so much else (and also not for me).

It wasn't sad.  I wasn't lonely.  (Well, okay, I was sad for other reasons, and I wanted people to be 'nice' to me rather than 'mean,' but I never thought of myself as 'lonely cause I didn't have friends!')

So, back to Jack.  We have no idea how he and Kent became friends.  Or, later, how Jack and Shitty became friends.  But I do have a couple of ideas!

One is that both Kent and Shitty are very easy to read as the type of people who, basically, friend the shit out of everyone.  Normally that friendship would stay on a pretty low level.  No one can be or ever is best friends with everyone.  But I could easily see both Kent and Shitty taking the further step of responding to the difficulty of becoming Jack's friend, his silence, his standoffishness, etc., his weirdness and not-knowing-what-to-do-with-these-advances by redoubling and then doubling again their efforts.  They are gonna manage to befriend this tough nut, if it's the last thing they do.

Or - another idea I've had - specifically vis-a-vis Jack and Kent - goes back to what I was saying earlier about deliberately picking out 'friends,' because sometimes you need someone to do things with, before you ever have a friend for real.  And if that's something Jack did, and if Kent showed the hockey talent at 15/16 that he did at 18, I can easily imagine Jack deciding, okay, that guy's my new drill partner, seatmate on roadies, whatever it is you need a guy to do with you on a hockey team.

And, however the Jack-Kent friendship formed….  I don't think it's fair to assume that Kent was Jack's first best friend because Jack was a shitty friend, because he was an asshole.  (Though I agree that Jack is, frequently, an asshole!)  Jack may have been bad at being a friend, at first - or not!  I don't know!  He was, one presumes, very bad at making friends.  But that may be a different skill.

"How do I friend" is a real question!  I had no idea how to friend, before I apparently fell into it, by grace of another kid's not caring that I didn't know how, for once in my life.  I supposedly did a decent job.  (I still feel like I'm bad at it, a lot.)  It's not a skill that comes naturally to everyone - not to me, and that line implies, not to Jack.

I could write more about feeling you're the best because you're always told you have to be the best.  (Or could I?  I have a whole backlog of posts on that subject, and also notes towards an original novel.)  I could write more about about all my feelings re: Jack as a 2e kid, but… this post is more than long enough!  (I do keep getting swamped with those feelings, though.)

I want to say, though, just one more thing that's part of this discussion.  I don't have a diagnosis, but I'm probably Autistic: both the (awful) online test and my strong #it me reaction about many many many things that Autistic people who I've read say about it seem to point in that direction.  And, likewise, of course it's not canon, but I do read Jack as Autistic, too.

… But maybe he could be [edited to change: allistic, it’s been pointed out to me that his anxiety already means he’s not neurotypical] and still just literally have no idea how to friend, because he didn't have realsocialskills to tell him how as a kid anymore than I did?  Or do the two halves of that sentence never go together.  I don't know, how’m I supposed to know.

[multsicorn]

also last minute happy birthday kent parson, i’m so sorry i never finished you that thirtieth birthday party reunion fic...

i am trying to pick up the art of finishing rough drafts now! we will see

[multsicorn]

All I want in life fandom is for Jack and Kent to finally talk:

For Kent to be able to admit that what he wants from Jack is - sure, ‘closure’ - specifically, to know what he did wrong back then.  What he should’ve done better.  etc.  Cause his best friend slash kinda boyfriend almost died, maybe almost killed himself, and then 100% stopped talking to him.  Wouldn’t anyone think, what did I do???

And for Jack to say  - we were both dumb kids, with the partying.  But the overdose, and the fact that I couldn’t deal with talking with you afterwards?  That’s not on you, that’s all about me, my issues.  Sorry how it hurt you - but - my almost dying wasn’t your fault; nothing afterwards means that it was.

And I want this conversation to hurt, cause they’re talking about painful shit, I want it to be hard, or it wouldn’t feel real, like.  There’s a reason they haven’t had it yet!  But to end up good, like cleaning the poison out of a wound, and hopeful, like, who knows if they’ll be friends now, being who they are, and they’ll never be more - but things are good, anyway.  Wounds are healed.  To the extent that they can be.

[multsicorn]

7x7 WIP challenge

Which I was not specifically tagged in but I’m doing it aaaaanyway.

The rules are as follows: Go to page 7 of your WIP, go to the seventh line, share seven sentences, and tag 7 more writer-bloggers to continue the challenge.

tagging: @camilliar @tomatowrites @blithelybonny @coyotesuspect @spaceorphan18 @jazzypizzaz and anyone else who sees this if you wanna play the game!

I have so many WIPs but this is from the latest one I added words to.  nsfw jackparse under the cut

Kent opens his mouth - thank fucking God he hadn't snapped it shut automatically instead - and lets Jack's cock slip out of it, falls down onto his heels and hides his flaming forehead against Jack's knee - as the door closes again behind him.  As Alicia says through the door, "We'll see you boys in the living room.  When you're ready," and marches off.  He can hear her footsteps through the closed door now perfectly well, what the fuck.

"Well," he says, voice shaky.  "That was definitely not how I wanted to come out to your mom."

Jack doesn’t say anything.

Kent looks up to see him hyperventilating....