#I mean I’ve drawn worse 👀

[unfried-mouth-wheat]

Very tempted to make ✨spicy✨ art for everyone’s favorite reanimated corpse son

#I am not well but I do have idea #If I do it I’ll put it on my red bubble #👁👁 #I mean I’ve drawn worse 👀

[devil-doll13]

ok, for Abby and Max:

favourite place in the world?

comfort food?

biggest fear?

favourite swear word?

ideal partner?

biggest pet peeve?

safe space?

guilty pleasure?

Hiii Cylas! Thankyou for all the questions I had fun thinking Abt these.

From this

Under the cut due to length:

Favourite Place In The World?

Oooh Abigail isn’t really attached to a specific place… Nowhere really takes to her except for places of the dead, who like her far better than the living ever have. So graveyards, where she’s slept and read and danced in before.

For Max I fully believe it is a concert venue! He loves music and will always enjoy the crazy energy when the band comes on to play. He’s very used to it since he used to play himself, and now that he doesn’t go to them as often he treasures it even more.

Comfort Food?

For Abigail it’s Halloween candy. The 31st of October was not only the day before her birthday (which she enjoyed even though there was no party) but a rare and precious time she got to actually enjoy herself as a kid. Also yes, she always went as a little witch.

For Max it’s pizza all day every day baby. He likes it best with pepperoni and bacon bc he’s a meat eater. It reminds him of his childhood and teenage years when he was relatively untroubled, and better things from back then. It’s a nice greasy comfort of his.

Biggest Fear?

Abigail I think has very little to fear now since… She’s already been through it, really. (And she is the one whom others should fear, she believes) But I would say she is honestly petrified of making herself too vulnerable to someone only for things to turn out badly like they did with Jude…

For Max it’s probably his fear that someday his secret would get out and that the people of Downings, who he’d grown so fond of, would condemn him for it. I mean, not only is he a werewolf, but also an actual murderer and lbr a lot of people couldn’t stomach that… Best to keep it hidden.

Favourite Swear Word?

Abigail’s favourite is probably ‘fuck’ and when she actually swears (because she doesn’t do it often) she really means it.

For Max it’s ‘shit,’ kind of one he just finds himself saying casually because ‘fuck’ is a little bit more severe to him.

Ideal Partner?

Abigail would be drawn to a kindred spirit, someone who makes her feel less of an ‘other’ maybe. I feel that she is drawn to the artsy types and outsiders, someone who she could talk poetry with and share with a sense of dark romanticism, or maybe just overall grim vibes. Also, she needs someone to accept the fact that she is legitimately inhuman in some aspects of herself and has murdered people… And will continue to do so and probably worse things lol. Might be best if they have some dark secrets too

Max has a thing for nerdy people! And also smart people 👀 but not necessarily in the conventional book smarts way if you know what I mean? He likes people with a passion and zest for life and things they enjoy, and of course someone who is kind and isn’t an asshole to others because that would turn him off for sure. Someone who reminds him of the better things about his ‘past life’ but to also cherish this new one. Also, loyal, because he values that highly. Someone who he can tell his secret to and be accepted despite it.

Biggest Pet Peeve?

Abigail hates when Christmas comes too fast and wipes out Halloween 😂 she loves the spooky vibes too much and probably hates all the songs that get played over and over. Since she doesn’t have any good Christmas memories she doesn’t care about it at all so she doesn’t understand the obsession.

I’ve been asked about Max’s before but another one of his that I haven’t talked about is he hates when vinyls have been compressed/bricked to hell. His sensitive hearing especially does not do well with it 😭 he has a hard time listening to Death Magnetic bc of this the poor man

Safe Space?

Hmm… Does Abigail feel safe anywhere? Like, really? She hasn’t had a fixed home for years so I’d really say just whenever she is surrounded by ways to kill someone who tries anything. Whenever she feels powerful and superior.

Max actually would probably consider the forest area around his home to be a ‘safe space,’ for everyone’s sake. It’s where he can be the wolf without having any worries of scaring or hurting others, and he truly free. Plus it’s very calming to be in nature, he appreciates in now more than he used to.

Guilty Pleasure?

Abigail’s is theatre, which I wouldn’t say she feels guilty about it but more that it was a very distant childhood dream of hers that never got fulfilled. She likes to watch plays sometimes, applying the means necessary to enter and leave unseen. Her favourite play is Hamlet, which she has used victims to act out before since her corpses couldn’t speak….

Max’s is pop music, especially Madonna he loves her lol, catch him vibing to Vogue or Material Girl on the down low. Since he has this whole ‘metalhead’ thing going on nobody expects him to have a thing for it. He also loves Prince and Lady Gaga. He probably just had to hide it as a kid bc of his brothers lol, like you just know he would’ve been made fun of for it.

#friend cy #Abigail Williams #Abigail #Maxwell Holt #Max #asks #ask game

[gerrydelano]

may i ask, what gave you the inspiration for corruption!sasha? it's a lovely combination but definitely NOT one i would have considered, especially without her canon encounter with the worms 👀

i’m glad somebody asked! have an essay.

i’ve said before that her main themes in PBR are guilt, grief, family, expendability, and denying what’s right in front of you — all of which are present in her canon story, one way or another! combined with the more extensive backstory that ren and i have given her and tim, it was actually really easy to make this leap and none of the other entities really clicked in a meaningful or useful way when i tried to brainstorm all the possible routes i could take. there’s definitely some inspiration drawn from other people like nicole @numinousnic​’s plague upon the house and @tolbyccian​’s art of moth!sasha, too, so there’s a few things going into it! but most of it, maybe surprisingly, is drawn from canon.

in general, i wanted to do some entity swapping in this series for #flavor and as a challenge. (sasha is by far the last one to get this treatment! there’s going to be an even weirder one later. wink wink.)

but for sasha, i wanted to look at what we DID get to learn about her from before we lost her in canon. the thing that actually sticks out the most is that loss — the loss of sasha was the very beginning of everything going completely tits up for everyone, and she had hooks in that all the way to the very end. she was a core reason for a lot of the events that later took place, the relationships that fell apart, the determination to keep going and avenge her, so much of the story comes back to loving sasha and losing her.

ren had already written her as having lost her parents in their works that mention her, so going off of our shared lore, playing with grief as a concept seemed fitting! family was no question, given how we wrote her parents and brother as being very loving and supportive, and how close we wrote her with tim and danny. it’s a HUGE cornerstone for who she is as a person.

guilt as a concept was fun to toss in because, i mean. look at canon. look at what she left in her wake. the guilt that everyone feels over not just losing her but not noticing they lost her is atrociously painful. it felt like a fun thing to pepper into a story she’s still present for!

the topic of not seeing things that are directly in front of you ALSO ties back to the effects of her being replaced in canon, but coming at it from a different way. there are so MANY things in this story so far that no one noticed either because they didn’t Want to see it, or didn’t know what to look for. the biggest other example is gerry’s cancer, which — ding ding ding — is an illness. they almost created a feedback loop there with each other, because he’s pretty heavily marked by it himself.

that, AND, you know how in canon she just went to go meet michael without telling anyone? she doesn’t TELL people shit. IMPORTANT shit! so her keeping things a secret even when it's Really Serious is something she already had a habit of, which actually goes really well with the idea of just... letting things fester until it’s too late.

and then gerard reveals in his tape that the reason he even took the position of archivist at all was to save sasha from being stuck in it. he didn’t even know her at that point, but the idea of an innocent person getting roped into gertrude’s (and elias’) shitty plots was something he couldn’t stand. the CORE of this story even being Possible comes back around to wanting to Protect Sasha. ergo, themes of protection, safety, and fighting like hell to keep from losing someone that you’ve — for better or worse, aware of this fact or otherwise — come to shape so much of your life around.

all of which can end up backfiring! enter: plot.

i specifically started with simply not wanting to rely on the stranger, as i personally depict her as trans and there are way too many loaded implications there that have been spoken up about time and time again by others in the fandom. this series especially puts way more of a focus on it that would make it almost worse than thoughtlessly applying it to the canon story without considering the connotations.

the stranger is specifically the entity that, in Canon Itself, has at least THREE characters that have gender swapping occur in conjunction with themes of infiltration, masquerading as something you’re not, Lying To People About “Who And What You Really Are”, and even later directly participating in shit like police work and medical abuse (max mustermann and jane doe), so as far as a Hard NO goes, that’s the worst direction i could have gone in a story where i actually do give focus to her gender as an important part of her characterization and relationships.

and i will be the first to admit that the corruption certainly does not sound like the next best alternative, either! the problem is that virtually any entity, given the fact that they’re literally eldritch manifestations of all that is horrific in the world, could run the risk of bad associations with almost anything (insert very solid discussion on how canon TMA is a very white story, and so on.) so i went with what made sense with her narrative, and have been working from there to be Very Explicit about what elements do and do not drive her association with it.

it’s important to note that she was only marked by it first. loss and estrangement are gateways to isolation, pushing people away, clinging to things or coping mechanisms that we shouldn’t, attaching to substitutes for those things we’ve lost. it could happen to anyone! and canonly speaking, the people who end up in the institute tend to have little to no outside connections, so it’s really easy to fill in backstory for all of them that somehow results in them being generally alone or without support by the time they get there and explain how they ended up the way they all did.

second, there is a far less physical component to it than how it manifests for jane, etc. i make it really clear that there are no moths Inside Her, there is no parasitic nature to the Particular Bug that just happens to represent a lot of her feelings about herself — in a way that’s honestly really common, too! it doesn’t come around to the same feelings of disgust and revulsion, and never will. there are some things that can’t be separated from the entities, certainly, but the thing about them is that they’re NOT hard and fast categories that have all of the same elements to them every single time. they’re like COLORS. there are SO many ways, and it’s a fun challenge to think, “how can i get this core idea across in a way that isn’t often utilized, or is overshadowed by a more common association?” (see: ren utilizing ice as a tool for the desolation rather than fire.)

for sasha, her moths are drawn to her from the outside, which aligns with those previously mentioned themes of safety, protection, and home — all of which are specifically elements present in the backstory ren gave to her and tim in road to damascus, particularly pendulum. they were close friends in secondary school and tim ended up feeling more at home with her and her parents than he did with his own. he grew out his hair to help protect her in school by making it so she wasn’t the only one growing hers, so she would be and feel safer, so she would feel loved. and he never cut it! he loves her. he loves her.

the word “home” has always had sasha listed as a definition, and so i’m playing with that! and we all had inexplicably huge feelings about “i am a home for what loves me,” so it felt like a reasonable jump.

in terms of plague upon the house, i just love that fic so much and the way that nicole wrote jane really opened my eyes to some of the potential inner workings of corruption-touched people that made me want to explore it, too. sasha literally was lost DURING the prentiss attack on the institute, it was THROUGH the corruption that she was lost to something else, and that left a HUGE imprint on everyone else even beyond the stranger lurking around.

the corruption is what presented the opportunity for any of this to happen at all. it was the original catalyst for the story that began without and about her.

i also wondered how she would feel about jane if she had the chance to learn about her before she became that much of a threat, before any of them became targets. with everything else here behind it, i’ve come up with a pretty tragic path for them that i’m really excited to get to. (blows a kiss to nicole. mwah.)

what’s important to me, though, is that while i’m writing her as heavily touched by the corruption (i never said she’d be an avatar! everyone keeps saying she can come back from this for a reason!), her story is also going to loop around to dignity. affording it to those who never got any. like jane. like all the moths we swat out of the sky like we would never dream of doing to a butterfly. sort of like sasha did in canon, too.

i want dignity to be something she values, and something she receives.

so, to round down: the presence of guilt, grief, family, protection (successful or otherwise,) ignorance to growing threat, being deemed expendable by something more powerful than you, and the lack of dignity and closure in her canon story was a pretty big inspiration, i'd say!

i can't think of anything else to describe that particular homeostatic property cluster OTHER than this. i'm excited to explore all the opportunities towards healing that a corruption mark opens up, more than anything. ultimately, and strangely, corruption!sasha is one of the most positive directions i could have chosen to take her, and i'm really glad that i did!

(also melanie's nickname from her father is "little moth" and i do plan to write them as a pairing so the opportunities are just too delicious to pass up.)

#asks #anon #sasha james #tma #pbr tag #sasha #ronologues