im calormen on ao3

@05112005 for more art

@bethlehemsam for supernatural stuff

not very active aside from asks/dms, inbox is always open.

first off, thank you for reading and taking the time to send in an ask! i’d like to warn everyone now that i’ll be talking quite frankly about SA and my personal experiences down below 👇

i go back reliving is one of my favourite fics, and most personal, and one of the ones i can rarely ever reread. it’s very much a vent fic lol.

i really wanted to explore the experience that comes following being violently assaulted. in my own experience, it destroyed my entire person and created a sense of detachment between body/mind. cal here is struggling to cope with what happened to him. i think what he tries to do is recreate/relive it but in a version where he’s in control and not completely powerless. there’s a really intense and sobering fear in realising that you, in that moment, have no power. you can’t fight back. maybe you don’t even try, you just submit to it. i think that powerlessness would be especially terrifying to someone like cal, whose entire life at that point in the movie is being guided by this idea that he’s godlike and enacting this higher agenda. being assaulted is very? humanising? to him.

andre is the safest person in cal’s life, so of course he’s the only person cal would trust enough to be so physically vulnerable with.

cal is so cruel to andre in this. re-enacting his own assault with andre, forcing him into the role of perpetrator but simultaneously making him a victim. and thinking it’ll fix something but in the end it just makes it worse for both of them in this uncrossable insurmountable way. i don’t think it did for cal what he hoped it would, and he’s driven this big wedge between himself and andre now, but he can’t blame anyone but himself. i think his own vulnerability and humanity disgusts him a little.

SUNNY. i’m so crazy excited that you read it. your opinion matters more than you’d know!

the short answer is: yes.

the long answer is: ITS COMPLICATED. andre absolutely would search them out. i think it drives andre crazy that there are parts of cal’s life that andre will never get to see - and his death is one of them. i think it drives him even crazier that rachel got to see it and he didn’t. his jealousy over rachel in general is something really special to me in AWATD, he hates that rachel got the “ending” he was meant to have with cal. dying is very intimate. but i also don’t think he would have any success in finding anything. i also think this ‘unknown’ is what influences/feeds into his haunting about cal - he only has half of the story so he has to make up the other half in a way that makes sense to him and is palatable.

ANON. this was such a lovely message to wake up to. thank you forever and ever.

i really love this fic and i’m excited for the story to develop further. cal is soooo evil and offputting and weird and wrong. my favourite thing about him here is that he isn’t any weirder or more sinister really than he is in canon, or back when he was still alive, it’s more that the environment and people have changed so much that he no longer fits comfortably in it.

chuck is my baby. my darling girl. i love her. i was honestly pretty worried about how she’d be received (given rachel, the only prominent woman in canon lol, is pretty widely hated. but honestly the canon cast is so limited that i needed to introduce new people in at some point 🤷‍♀️ to me chuck is the ultimate symbol of andre’s “new life”. she never met or knew cal. but that also means there’s a whole other half of andre that she doesn’t know. versus rachel, who only knows andre through the lens of his friendship to cal.

with zero day itself the timeline is admittedly a little loose and fast here. mostly because i forgot what date prom was on so it gets a little tight at the end there. assume prom was like, mid april. but yeah - AWATD diverges from ZD canon right after those final tapes and before May 1.