hypothetical fic meme [mf]

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stolen from

celli!

Give me the title of a hypothetical fic (and fandom/characters/pairing if you like) and I will:
-tell you what it's about
-recall my favorite or least favorite parts
-possibly attempt to write an excerpt of it

EDIT: hypothetical fic descriptions so far
- David Mitchell/James Acaster giraffe prompt story
- Oz Ballet AU gender change Christina Keller/Tabitha Beecher story
- John Robins/Elis James. Prompt: Turnabout
- Generation Kill: the one where Brad Colbert has a crush on a disembodied voice.
- hypothetical fic about David Mitchell, villain of your dreams
- Ashes to Ashes hypothetical fairy tale fic
- James Acaster/David Mitchell 'Call Me' prompt

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There are 30 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

How about the britcom RPF fic "And A Thing With A Giraffe"

Ok so it's a fic about production of a pantomime that includes David Mitchell and James Acaster. However, instead of being about a fairy tale, this panto is about primordial greek deities. David Mitchell is playing Hypnos, the personification of sleep, while James Acaster is playing Eros, the god of love/attraction.

Ok so that's the setting. THE PLOT IS that one day in the middle of a performance, that thing happens that happened in that one Buffy Halloween episode - everybody is turned into who they're costumed as.

My favourite part is the one where David Mitchell/Hypnos figures out how to make people have specific dreams, and James Acaster/Eros dares him to make another cast member dream about giraffes. Only giraffes. But then David just turns around and makes James dream about nothing but giraffes. James complains in increasingly hilarious ways - like the kind of complaint that sounds like "please do this more - to the point that David starts genuinely looking forward to his latest objection/protestation. One day he giggles and things Escalate.

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ILU why are you not writing this whole fic immediately please and thank you

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Aaaaaaaa part of me wants to cry about all the things I wish I was writing/had written and also about how writing is self-esteem edgeplay BUT a bigger part of me is thinking about how yesterday I had a brief experience of having my creative endeavours/ideas kind of dismissed out of hand and right now it is a little bit nice to feel wanted so. So thanks. Like seriously, thanks. <3

ALSO I just thought of something - should we think about making a new britcom anon meme?

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Omg, “writing is self esteem edgeplay,” this is the most true thing. The Most.

A new britcom meme could be cool, if we had enough people. I do feel like the character set is growing to include more of the Acaster etc group, which is a good thing! Although I have no idea how to write those people. Hmmm. Maybe we could keep it small by doing it on someone’s journal instead of creating a comm? Hmmmmmm...

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This is fucking delightful, bravo! Also I'm so pleased that other people decided to do this meme. :-)

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En Pointe.

I never thought you'd write anything it that fandom.

wait, what?

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You said to give you a title and a fandom, if we like.

I thought you might have fun coming up with a fandom you'd never have written in.

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Oh! I see. "En Pointe" is the title and the fandom is any fandom I didn't think I would ever write in. Have I got it right?

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Yes, that would be it.

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ok so I'm going to go with Oz, which, to be fair, is a fandom for which I have plotted fic, but the truth is, I've been sure for years now that I'll never get around to actually writing anything

En Pointe is an Oz ballet AU, set in an arts centre called Domaine Forget, which is in the middle of nowhere (it's a real place! I've been there.) Also it is a gender AU in which both Beecher and Keller are women. Basically they've both been dancing ever since they were little kids, but they're coming at it from radically different places - Tabitha Beecher is from a whole ballet *dynasty* while Christina Keller is the product of an arts-for-underprivileged-kids program - and now they're at this summer arts program wayyyyy up north. Like we're talking a solid five hour drive from Montreal. And they both have intense love-hate relationships with ballet, and they both feel like leaving the program is absolutely not an option. Tabitha is limited by a variety of factors, and Christina thinks she can’t - she thinks she’s good for nothing else. So with the distance and the sensation of captivity, the summer program feels a little bit like prison. They're roommates, obviously.

Like I said I did spend some time plotting Oz fic, so here's some characterization for you:

Christina is attracted to Tabitha because she feels that Tabitha is better than her. Tabitha knows things and she reads books Keller has never heard of, let alone understands. Tabitha writes essays at the drop of a hat; she makes cultural references Keller wouldn’t know where to begin to pick up, like she knows all the plots to all of the operas the dance instructors keep mentioning, and the names of all the original choreographers to classical ballets and she’s even read some of the sources and she even knows some French and Italian, like she says "shouldn't this section be in 3/4 time?" in rehearsal and Christina is like “where the hell are you getting that from” and Tabitha says, all, “it says pas de valse” and Christina nods like she knew that all along but really she’s like, boner alert.

Tabitha's feelings towards Keller are more like... it's just that Tabitha has never, ever been the subject of so much attention, not to mention sexual prowess, in her life. No it's more than that - she never knew this kind of attention and sexual gratification was even an option. But the thing that really makes Christina a genuinely (in the end) positive element in her life is that Christina genuinely thinks Tabitha is a wonderful person, a good person, just as she is. Christina’s love of Tabitha is utterly unrelated to Tabitha's skill at ballet; Christina looks at Tabitha just the same even when Tabitha has just given a bad performance. Tabitha does not have that in her family - her parents always passive-aggressively punished her when she danced badly or even if they just heard indifferent comments about her performances. They would spend all of dinnertime talking about some other ballet student’s qualities onstage, her mother would prepare Tabitha’s favourite foods only when Tabitha did well, etc etc etc.

Uh, I actually had some casting in mind for both characters - in my head Tabitha looks like Gilmore Girls-era Liza Weil, and Christina looks like Caroline Dhavernas.

As for my favourite or least favourite part of this story... Well, in my head, I wanted to retell their relationship arc and fix the ending. Which, yay, fixing the ending! But that would still involve an entire section where Christina genuinely betrays Tabitha which would be an awful, awful thing to write, not to mention an awful thing to subject readers to. So that would be my least favourite.

Edited Date: 2019-01-16 07:37 am (UTC)

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I am unfamiliar with Oz beyond fandom osmosis but I think this works brilliantly!

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Sounds like fun! I'll go for Britcom RPF, title: Turnabout

ok so this story gets its name from a fictional novel that John Robins reads over the holidays. It’s called “Turnabout” and it became suddenly wildly popular at the end of 2018 after Neil Gaiman casually mentioned it in an interview. It was on everybody’s holiday book list and John, bored out of his skull, picked it up.

The writing is a bit pedestrian, John thinks, but it’s engaging. The romance subplot is about two men, and part of him notes that there’s something refreshing about the fact that he didn't know that before starting to read it. It wasn’t sold as a “gay” novel. That’s good, isn't it? Not to mention that now he feels virtuous about reading something that’s not heteronormative.

So he enjoys the book until he gets to a scene in the book where the main character kisses the man he’s been in love with since the start. He reads two pages of the characters getting physical with each other and John thinks: this is wrong. It’s - it’s incorrect. There’s something even-tempered about the prose and what it’s describing, something unconcerned... John would even go so far as to call it placid. And that’s not right.

All of a sudden the narration in “Turnabout” is about whose hand is on which shoulder, about the exact location of each kiss, like the purpose of the book is to teach the choreography of each character, rather than describe what it feels like to be them. And, John decides, that would be acceptable, were the choreography something the reader could identify with. But these characters appear to have changed personalities as soon as they began to kiss, all of a sudden acting smooth and serene despite the fact that the entire romantic subplot was been based on their being emotionally incompetent.

John thinks, it isn’t that this author is describing something they’ve never done. André Aciman wrote “Call Me By Your Name” without ever having so much as kissed a man, let alone had a relationship with one, and look how that turned out. No, this author has no excuse. And the editor! What can they have been thinking?

John’s never kissed someone for whom he’s been pining for that long, but imagining it and then describing it realistically can’t be that hard, can it? There’s no excuse for this author. It’s not - take this paragraph:

[insert excerpt with wooden characterization here]

You see? It would never happen that way. When you’ve pined for someone for a long time, holding them in your arms, let alone kissing them, must be... what’s a stronger word for “overwhelming?” It must feel - John grasps for the right word - it would be unreal. It would be thrilling and terrifying and - no that’s not it. “Thrilling and terrifying” sounds an amusement park’s description of their roller coaster. It wouldn’t be like that it would be like - John opens his thesaurus app - shattering.

And there he is, fixated on this popular fiction, no, on the inexcusable flaw in this work of popular fiction, when it happens. It’s never happened before, he’s pretty sure, but now it’s happening, in fact it’s been happening for minutes now and he just didn’t notice. He’s thinking about what it would be like to kiss Elis.

He’s thinking about it as carefully as he can and as attentively as he can. He’s thinking about it so that he can imagine it and describe it because he knows, he knows that it would never, ever be like the kiss in this book. It would be -

(…Uh anyway that’s my idea for a britcom story called “Turnabout.” Sorry gotta run, I'm teaching in *checks* YIKES four minutes.)

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WHAT this is amazing. I can't decide which I want to read more--Turnabout the fic, or Turnabout the wooden bestseller.

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This feels so you in tone and in the way you talk about the wooden fiction vs the sort of jagged but more real actual emotions. <3

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Congrats on writing the first ever Elis/John fic! I love this to bits, especially you picking up on John’s emotional incompetence/ intense pining, and how that bleeds into other parts of his life. Love ittttttt.

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The One True and Certain Thing

Right, so I’m just going to acknowledge, at this stage, that I’m using this meme as an ad-hoc WIP amnesty.

Ok! Now that that caveat’s out there, here is a hypothetical Generation Kill story called The One True and Certain Thing.

This is the one where Brad Colbert has a gigantic competency crush… on someone he only knows from radio communication. I figure it’s set in Kuweit, before the events of the show. It hinges on the fact that Brad would totally be ok with letting himself have a crush on a voice on the radio. It’s just so convenient. He would never follow through because - obviously - it's unseemly and against regs. But on top of that, it’s a disembodied voice so he couldn’t follow through.

He’d realize it was a mistake once it’s too late, obviously. Once he’s already having dreams about the voice on the radio.

They’ve had to communicate for various reasons several times before, but things change when, late one night, Brad says something - god, he can’t remember what it was, now - and the voice (it’s better if he doesn’t use the name; then it won’t be real) thinks it’s so interesting that he exclaims, “oh!” But it sounds more like “ohhhhhh!” and he says with a dreamy tone, like he's talking to himself. Except he's saying it into Brad’s ear so it sounds like he's confiding, like they're sharing a secret. Brad feels something happen to his stomach, to his - to his heart. And after that it’s different. He catches himself, during the day, wondering what the voice is doing. One day the voice on the radio sounds particularly exhausted and Brad only just stops himself asking if everything is ok.

Side note, in this fic Brad had a crush on Rudy when he first met him. Something about how pretty he was, obviously, but also the way he looked at Brad like he knew. But what he knew wasn’t that Brad wanted him - it was that Brad was starved, starved for touch and validation and support. That he’d been hoping someone would see how hard he worked, and how much he cared, for so long that he’d forgotten what it was like to not feel like that. And he’d fallen, hard, for Rudy’s lack of shame and emotional availability. (Not for long, fortunately.)

Brad and the voice spend hours talking around the fact that they’ve landed themselves in Kuweit because they’re seeking something. About the fact that they enjoy testing themselves because nothing else makes them feel like their lives have meaning. About the reassurance of discipline. About strength. About death.

Anyway then meet - Brad recognizes him from his voice before he registers the name - and it’s a whole Oh No He’s Hot scenario.

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Britcom, title: The Garden of Earthly Delights

:D

ok so this is a story about the time Charlie Brooker watched an episode of The Bubble while he was having really bad insomnia and two things happened:

(1) the sound of David Mitchell’s voice did something to the space between his shoulders and all of a sudden he felt like he could go to sleep

(2) he heard Katy Brand describe David thus: "[his shallowness] is one of the things I like most about him. Once you throw morals out of the window he becomes like a sexy bond villain" (actual quote!)

And then he fell asleep, and dreamed he was in a Bond film called The Garden of Earthly Delights, being held captive (and tied up??) by the villain, who was both played by, and based on, David Mitchell.

My favourite part of this story is when Charlie realizes he has a massive erection and that it must be COMPLETELY VISIBLE because of the way he’s tied up, and then panics because David will see it, but then a few seconds later he experiences wild, crashing relief because oh thank god, this is just a dream. But THEN that relief also only lasts a few seconds because he’s suddenly overcome with sadness because oh. This is just a dream.

Edited Date: 2019-01-18 03:39 am (UTC)

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eeeeeeeeeeeee, you know me too well! I love the idea of Charlie's emotional whiplash about being in a dream. ALSO David's voice relaxes him yep yep yep that is true, fact.

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omg, <3

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(taking a chance on an older shared fandom...) Ashes to Ashes; "I Remember Manchester"

Edited Date: 2019-01-16 03:25 pm (UTC)

ok so

The other hypothetical fics were easier to come up with because I used plots from abandoned WIPs but this one, this one... All I had was this image of an Arsène Lupin-style starting point with robberies where nothing was taken but someone left a note saying "apologies for the disturbance, I thought the Queen Anne desk was authentic" etc, and an idea about... fairy tales, and an inner monologue in which Gene essentially says that the desire he feels is intolerable, but it's also incredible, and that he can't... that he wants it to stop at the same time that he wants it to never stop.

The fairy tale thing is like, Gene thinks about the Andersen story "The Swineherd" which is a story about an Emperor's daughter who is considered "proud," and an impoverished prince. The latter puts the princess in a position to show how "unworthy" she is, thereby humiliating herself. She is subsequently punished. I keep thinking, at the beginning of the series, Gene uses that kind of story as a coping mechanism, and that helps him get through the day. He tells himself, proud women always end up undeserving and shallow. Proud women are only polite when they have to be, and never kind. Alex is... she... she wouldn't give him a second umbrella on a rainy day.

But then she keeps doing things and saying things that contradict that narrative and... and then plot happens. Maybe they're handcuffed together and they've been injected with something sketchy and Gene starts babbling about fairy tales? And then Alex passes out and Gene PANICS and says he was wrong, she's not proud, she's perfect, she's perfect.

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oooooh.

Britcom RPF, 'Call Me When You Get Back'

Ok so. James Acaster REALLY enjoys making David Mitchell laugh during the WILTY recordings so he keeps it up for a while after the show, and somehow it turns into a bit about James being David's mistress. Lots of people get involved in it, it is extremely funny, etc. So that's a thing. But then! Here's what happens: when David has to leave James says "call me when you get back" and it is so completely a joke to James that he doesn't even remember it later on. David, however, does remember it and at first he thinks that it was part of the joke, but then he starts getting worried about whether he should call James. James is young and rather kind, actually, and David knows that sometimes younger comedians can feel slighted by older ones and - and James did in fact give him his phone number. So that's. How they accidentally start regularly calling each other.

My least favourite part of this story is worrying about the logistics while writing it (I DON'T KNOW HOW TELEVISION IS MADE! I DON'T KNOW HOW BRITAIN WORKS! send help) but my favourite part of this story is the part where the next time they're both booked for the same thing David happens to see James hugging someone very pretty, and suddenly experiences a very embarrassing jolt of envy/jealousy and it makes him feel foolish in the best way.

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YES YES YES
I love David’s soft spot for James morphing into something more and then he catches himself doing it but whoops, too late.
Each time you post James/David things I get more convinced that this is solid gold ship. <3

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OH ALSO - at one point James records a frankly appallingly competent rendition of Blondie's 'Call Me' for David

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July