mangotangerine's fun corner

Like the family whenever they talk about V are just like, yep, that's Alastor's V.

I really want V to be adopted into the family spiritually in some form. It would be so cute in Maman Marie just shows up on his 16th birthday like, "you're a family member and you know nothing right now, so we got a LOT of learning to do, come to my office."

Or they are all in agreement that they might as well spirit bond him to Alastor as soon as possible.

But I'm happy to wait too. I just love this story. I love it so much I could die.

I'm so glad 😭 I love how they’ve grown together. & we’ll seeee maybe I have something planned~

(also i see what you did there hehe)

WBGU is I think my best writing and I remember when I started I was like, “I want this to be the best & most profound thing I’ve ever written” and I’m sure I’ll grow more in the future but I think I’m accomplishing it to the best of my ability.

idea. concept. listen. sorry i didn’t want to type the meme text so i wrote it out on the image. anyway.

A CONCEPT

scifi. future. they had to colonize other worlds or something because earth got messed up the billionaires (eat the rich), anyway, also it’s way in the future. anyway.

alastor works as. plant guy. does the eco system. plant. thing. i’ll figure out the name for it. SHOULD he be a radio host? probably. WILL I ever make alastor a radio host? idk maybe that can be his side hobby

vox is........ a robot. an android. but not fully human looking because i want kinky clanker lovers to read it and I also want to turn my readers into clanker lovers. he sees pretty plant man & his pretty flowers & he is enamored and alastor’s like “Get the FUCK out of my garden you weigh like FIVE HUNDRED POUNDS you hunk of METAL”

and then somehow. i haven’t worked out the plot reason. android vox becomes like, alastor’s helper. something. close proximity (long-term). alastor starts to fall in love, to his horror

he’s like “am i seriously falling in love with a robot? he isn’t even sentient. he is a computer program. what is wrong with me”

BUT

PLOT TWIST

vox IS sentient

because somebody took vincent’s consciousness and shoved it into robot vox so robot voX IS vincent and he IS sentient and sapient and he’s a HUMAN deep down inside

but he’s not gonna become a human again because this is robot on human love, remember.

anyway.

fuck they have to murder people for this to be radiostatic.

uhhhhhhhhhhh alastor poisons people with plants & shit. vox is a murderbot. yay.

is it murdermedia still if one of them is an android who ALSO he doesn’t look fully human. i think i said that. i want ROBOT parts. i want WIREPLAY. i want sticking FINGERS in PORTS. i want sticking DICKS in ports TOO. i want VOX to call it ALASTOR’S PORT and i want alastor to DIE (of humiliation, but not for real)

just think about it, ok.

oh also.

vox bottoms.

COME ON DON’T YOU WANT TO SEE A SKINNY CRANKY FANCY PLANT MAN DOMINATE A 500 POUND MURDERBOT

i sure as fuck do

WILL i ever write dedicated dom/top vox? no

maybe you can have the robot fucking alastor like once or twice though but he's so gentle because he’s a murderbot & alastor’s like can u put ur fucking back into it & vox is like

harder thrusting will cause you great bodily harm. i will not. you must endure.

& alastor's like “jfc why is it hot when you talk to me like that”

anyway

Beyond the illustrations in When Boys Grow Up, I don’t have any illustrations or anything of any of the houses. :(

vox & alastor afterlife but instead of hell it's alastor's family's spiritual afterlife & before crossing the river to the spirit world they have to have a conversation with/live a few scenes of every person they have murdered (except for vox, it's only the ones he murdered for fun, not the work ones because fuck writing that many)

Sorry 😔

Yes, the Vox protocol was first created by Allie in high school of INM-verse (after Travis pushed him away, which Travis does not know about), and used again post-Valentino.

So by the time they needed it again in moonrise, it had been so long Allie genuinely didn’t think it’d be necessary.

The only really effective method for immediate suicide prevention (for someone who has a plan and intends to act on it) is to eliminate access to the methods they might use to accomplish it, so that’s the first step of the Vox protocol.

I’m sure the conversations with Vox after everyone arrived was trying to tell Vox how much he was loved, but Vox never doubted he was loved, never doubted he had value to those he cared for and who cared for him. He knew it would hurt people.

But he felt like he was drowning, and at a certain point he just couldn’t take it anymore.

The new Vox protocol, or what Alastor and Vox end up creating together, is a combination of therapy, exploring medications, and developing specific coping mechanisms and ways of recognizing coming danger before it gets to be too much.

Oh this would be interesting! There are a lot of different ways I could take this. My initial thought was time travel fix-it but Marcus is alive because of proximity to Peter, so if they kill Peter...

🤔 Or maybe adult WBGU V & Alastor and INM Vox & Alastor & then INM Vox & Alastor have to deal with the difficult emotions of who they could have been had things gone a little differently...

Awww hehehe thank you! I’m glad you like it so much!!

It’s taken a lot of practice and reading and writing to get to where I am in my writing journey, plus a thickening of my skin so I can handle the critique, and also I’ve been very deliberate with my practice and what specifically I try to accomplish in writing.

A few of the things I identified in my own writing (or that were pointed out to me) that I’ve worked on:

More immersive/sensory writing. Involving touch, scent, sound, taste, proprioception is just as important as vision, even more so sometimes.

Language economy and compression (i.e., saying more with fewer words). This also involves making sentences do more than one thing, like, if I’m going to describe a character, how do I make that say something about the character’s personality, can I add something plot-relevant, can I add something that helps set the tone/mood of the scene?

Reducing how many goddamn em-dashes I use. I got all “AI can’t take my em-dashes away from me!” and way over-corrected. 😭 My sister pointed it out and I couldn’t unsee it. So I’ve tried to cut back on those and only use them when they’re called for grammatically or when the impact is needed.

Symbolism and metaphorical language. If I mention a color, why? What does it mean? If I put in a metaphor, how can I make it character-specific? If I used a symbol or metaphor before, how can I use it again, transformed, so that it accumulates meaning? The latest chapter of WBGU (chapter 27) is dripping with this. The colors, the shapes, the dog barking, the specific sounds, the sensations, they all have meaning.

Marked syntax, i.e., nonstandard grammar in sentences. Avoiding the standard ‘be’ verb construction if I can help it. So instead of something like “There was a sound” or “there was a sofa,” finding out a way to reword the sentence to avoid that. Like maybe “a sound echoed through the space” or “in the corner sat the sofa.”

Trusting the reader and leaving room for elaboration/interpretation. Instead of writing “he was cold,” I’ll write the physiological symptoms/sensory experience. He shivered, the freezing wind cut through his light jacket, his skin turned to gooseflesh, he couldn’t feel his fingers, etc.

Additionally with trusting the reader, not making the inference. Not pointing out the thing I mentioned earlier so the reader can make the connection. Trusting the reader to catch it. Recent example in WBGU - in chapter 26, I mentioned the window wouldn’t open. In chapter 27, he lifts it “easily” - the contrasting word here was easily. The sentence as a whole was “He pulls, and it lifts easily, all the way up, up, up, until he can’t push it any higher” - that’s a layered reference to make it easier for the reader to make the inference, I’m spending a lot of time about how easily he pushes it up, which makes it stand out, which makes it more likely for the reader to make that inference, that something changed between when he couldn’t open the window and now.

These were all things I consciously noted that I wanted to get better at and worked at doing in revision. I’d go through the intuitive writing process, then in editing go back and tweak the sentences, and when you do that enough, you start to internalize those principles and they begin to show up in the intuitive writing process so you don’t spend as much time editing those specific things in. :)

Oooh, I hadn’t considered it, but I’ll put it on my list of potential future one-shots!

Just imagining them bickering like old men. 😭 Because they are old men.

Art is for chapter 16: homecoming by the wonderful @rillyrillo

Chapter 27: grey crowned crane Chapter Summary:

Maman Marie teaches Alastor who he is, initiating him into the family’s spiritual practice.

Fic Summary:

Nothing in life is certain, except death, taxes, and Alastor and Vox. Somehow, no matter what universe they’re in, the two manage to find each other. Alastor is nine years old when V and his fancy family move into the house at the end of his street. They’re not at all how Alastor expects. He’s never met anybody as cold and controlling as V’s parents, and he’s never met anyone he’s liked as much as he likes V. They quickly become friends after Alastor saves V from a cruel punishment in the Louisiana sun, and V finds himself welcomed into a family where nobody yells at each other, nobody gets hit for misbehaving, and where he can be free for the first time in his life. What kind of men can two boys become when found family and love disrupt the cycle of isolation that creates monsters? (A queer coming-of-age exploration of how connection, trauma, and environment shape who we become, told with grounded psychological realism. A litfic-style narrative following Alastor and Vox from childhood into adulthood as found family rewrites their trajectories. A companion piece to It’s Not Murder, imagining what might have happened if the two hadn’t grown up in isolation, but readable as standalone.)

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What do we have to look forward to with V and Alastor relationship getting older in the fic like would we see them prepare for college if they plan to go or talking them about how they’ll together or will we get V’s thoughts on how he’s planning to live home? :D I’m very curious ❤️❤️❤️

HellO!! I just posted an update to WBGU, what good timing. :) I’m glad you’re enjoying it!

I didn’t set out to write them as specifically something but I put a little bit of myself in all my characters, and I’m AuDHD, so they naturally got a bit of it. :)

I don’t state in INM proper anything, but in the poly fic Travis does say that Alastor is autistic.

Oooh fun question!

Vox would probably be like, “Awww cute,” like how you might if a little kid has a crush on you.