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in Chapter 26 of INM when Alastor tells Vox that he’d kill his family for him, was he being literal? like in the impossible scenario where Vox actually asked, do you think Alastor would really do it?

I need to stealth edit that bit out 😭 Many of the older chapters have little things where I was like “idk how to figure out how to say this better let’s just post and hope this doesn’t bite me in the ass later.”

But no. I think if Vox asked and was serious Alastor would be like, “Uh, about that. How about no, and fuck you for asking?”

Travis arranged a hit on Valentino when he was in custody (Chapter 47) and the hit was carried out in Chapter 51 after Valentino was brought up in conversation & Vox had a bit of a panic attack.

I had initially had plans to do a lot more torturing and murdering in the story but the Kevin chapters took a lot out of me to write. I sort of imagine myself in the POV character’s mindset/place so I can write from within their uh, well, point of view, but they were so brutal and exhausting to write that I found it difficult to do much worse in the story.

I tried to make each new murder add something new/be something new and interesting, but at a certain point I felt like there wasn’t much more I could add that wasn’t just brutality for the sake of brutality, which, with the way I write, is really rough.

The original conception was for more torture for Valentino and also for Peter, but the murders started burning me out so I had to decide which ones would be onscreen and which ones weren’t as important.

I felt like it made sense that Vox wouldn’t want to face his abuser again even if for murder, and Alastor could see the value in just “removing the wolf” as it were, to use the language I did in Chapter 54.

As for how Vox and Valentino lasted for five years, Vox had, for his entire life, understood relationships to be cold, abusive, and violent. He meets Valentino, he’s 18, and Valentino treats him with love and warmth, validates his experiences, and then does what any abuser does—turns up the heat, tests boundaries.

And Vox, not having any sort of healthy basis for what love or relationships could look like, stayed, because Vox was conditioned at that point to expect from his relationships intensity, to tie his self worth to what that other person felt about him, because he had no basis for who he was or his value as a human being.

There’s also something to be said for conditioning as well, like, the intermittent reinforcement. If it was always negative, Vox would’ve associated negativity = Valentino, and he might not have had such a strong connection. But when the reinforcement is intermittent, if it’s sometimes bad, sometimes good, his brain can’t anticipate what might come next to, so you stick around hoping it’s the Good response.

Slot machines are sort of similar in that regard. It’s harder to break out of because it’s negative a lot of the times but sometimes it’s amazing, and chasing that sometimes becomes an addiction.

Like literally, physiologically, there is something that happens in your brain that makes it more difficult to leave. Logic has nothing to do with it. You can want to leave, but your body is literally working against your goal of leaving. It is equivalent to an addiction.

Hmm good question.

They might react differently but I still don’t think they’d be okay with it. Being anything but straight still comes with stigma no matter where you’re from, though I think the reactions would be less overt.

Good question!

A few different things are at play here.

First, the bodies during Katrina: there is a very big difference between freshly dead, undecomposed bodies and the bodies that people found during the Hurricane Katrina rescue/recovery efforts. Due to the heat and the water and the time it took to get to checking houses, a lot of the bodies that people found were already partially decomposed, bloated, etc.

Freshly-killed looks like a human, post-Katrina rescue effort stuff looked like a decomposing corpse. Also, the smell plays a big part. It wasn’t just seeing it that had Alastor puking, it was the combination of the sight, the realization at what he was seeing, and the smell.

Secondly, INM Alastor and WBGU Alastor diverged when Marcus survived. The trajectory that WBGU V and Alastor are going down in their life is not the same as in INM, and we’ll see the greater impact of that on who they become later in WBGU, but INM Alastor had 3-ish years of festering hatred/resentment that was unexamined and untouched by any therapeutic interventions, plus he had grown up with no friends and in almost total isolation apart from his family.

And now his biggest protector/the person he looked up to most was gone, and he doesn’t know how to cope with that, and Gloria, as much as she tries to be there for him, isn’t able to stop/doesn’t recognize that descent into darkness. The way he saw people changed, and the people he killed, their dead bodies did not look like the ones during Katrina.

If fem INM Alastor did, it would likely be an atypical presentation. I will put this under a read more but:

Content Warning: ED Discussion

I have not talked about it before, don’t worry.

My pronouns are she/her!

This is an interesting question! I had to ask somebody what Gooseworx thought of Jax because while I have seen TADC, that’s as far as my interaction with that media has gone haha. The gist I got is that Jax is Gooseworx’s favorite and a self-insert essentially? Let me know if that isn’t what you meant and I can readjust my answer bUT:

No, not really.

Is he my favorite? Currently, yes. I’m in the creation phase with him somewhat still, which is where I sat with Vox and Alastor for a long time until I got them down real good.

Will he remain my favorite forever? I’m not sure—maybe, maybe not. Only time will tell; my whimsy cannot be contained.

Is he a self-insert? No. At least, not in the sense that people often mean? I put a part of myself in every character, but of all the characters I’ve written, the one I’m probably most like at my core is Alastor.

For Travis specifically: I gave him my aesthetic, my sense of taste, and the particular need to control how others perceive him. His self-styling and presentation is deliberate and cohesive because he likes having control of people’s reactions and perceptions, which is also something I share, probably from some childhood trauma or something, idk where the need to control how people perceive me comes from really.

But Travis isn’t the only character with that trait, it’s just his is concentrated in style and polish and a careful curation of his public persona. His main flaws aren’t mine; I feel about them like how Alastor does, very much, “Please cut it out, cease this behavior this instant, this is very annoying, go to therapy,” kind of vibe.

I construct characters backwards, somewhat. They usually start with one action, and then their personality arises from a chain of questions asking: “What sort of person would do this action?”

If I start with traits it’s 1 or 2 superficial things, but my conception for Travis initially was entirely different from what he is now.

His current personality was born out of the question, “What sort of person would sacrifice their identity and their life, subordinating their moral values and who they are, in service of somebody?” because it had to be believable that Travis would do that, or else the conceit of how does Vox get away with being such a messy freak falls apart.

So the answer was to make Travis be in love with Vox, because love has the potential to make people fucking insane, but the specific sort of toxic love that causes codependency to that level doesn’t arise from a stable sense of self, and Travis would have had to meet Vox early enough for that codependency to develop into what it is, because that shit doesn’t happen overnight.

The person has to be fully and entirely willing to give up the entirety of who they are in service of the other person, and that is what Travis is/was, and that sort of thing comes from identity formation. Vox was the first person to see Travis, the person who named Travis, Travis’s first love, Travis’s first instance of self-sacrifice (because he was a traumatized child doing the best he had with what he had, which wasn’t much).

All of that came from the question, who the hell would do this crazy shit for Vox without tiring, and that’s the question I ask of all my characters when I build them.

For Vox, it was, what sort of person becomes this charismatic, intelligent, chaotic serial killer? What about him has to break in formation that this is who he becomes? And then, generating outward, what sort of flavor of action does that produce specifically. His motivations for killing are entirely different from Alastor’s; Alastor always had an end point he was working toward. Vox didn’t.

For Alastor it’s, what creates this single-minded focus and obsessive circling, the murder-in-service-to-justice (or how he perceives it), and what must break in formation that that’s who somebody becomes, and additionally with Alastor I made some specific political choices as to how I wanted to portray his family and father, and then I had to work that into who he was.

Like how did somebody who had a pretty decent childhood, parents-wise, become as twisted as Alastor did?

So that’s how I add in backstory for everyone and how I create them. It’s an excavation, backwards-looking, about how we got to the moment I’m writing, and then from that point forward, all the actions that character takes have to cohere psychologically with that profile.

If I need the character to do something that they currently wouldn’t because of the backstory I’ve created, the events currently in play, then I either adjust who does that thing, OR I think—what sort of thing would have had to have happened that somebody would do this specific action?

And whatever that thing is, if it fits, and if the combo of that + the other existing psychological architecture of the character coheres, then I give them that backstory event, and write forward.

Everyone gets written like that. And like, in doing that, I look to experiences I’ve gone through, or analog experiences, or those of friends/family, or sometimes I will go searching for psychology, and sprinkle those in, because then I have somewhere to write from.

The idea of never really being seen for who you are on the inside, the delineation between inner self and perception of that inner self, is something everyone in life has to contend with. Some people are closer to the surface, their inner self closer to how people perceive them, but most people have depth to them that they don’t exactly know how to surface, or don’t want to surface, that makes them feel a little bit outside the circle.

Chapter Summary:

Travis’s roots are small and scraggly, but they’re growing.

Fic Summary:

When a forest gets too choked out by dead wood and leaf litter, invasive species and disease and rot, it’s set on fire to burn out the bad and make room for new growth. Travis isn’t a forest, but he’s choked out by the build-up of unwanted detritus nonetheless. So he does what he always does—he sets his life on fire and burns it to the ground, erases everything but the very bones of who he is, and he starts building a new him from the carbon ash that remains. It’s a slow process, but it’s not the first time he’s done it, and anyway, this is what Travis is good at: constructing meaning and identity from nothing but noise.

Let me know what you think if you read it. 🥺

Here's a little Travis mood board for fun.

Hmmm this is a good question.

If he just saw a glimpse, he wouldn’t have believed it.

If he saw a glimpse, and somehow could know it was true, I think he would’ve been scared. He had, at that point, come to terms with the fact that he was never going to get married, that the combination of who he was and his specific uh, hobbies and predilections, would preclude that sort of relationship.

So seeing himself in a relationship like that, seemingly happy, would probably seem a red flag to Alastor. Like he was seeing himself settling, giving up, tying himself down/imprisoning himself. Because unless he also got a glimpse of how it felt, it would have read to him as his nightmare future.

I didnt send it because I had like 2 full paragraphs saying what I loved about the fic and they got deleted after I refreshed ToT But from what I remember: I remember loooooving how even though it's not murder started as mainly murdermedia, and after a while I wasnt just interested in Vox and Alastor, I GENUINELY Loved the other characters, from his sister to his mum, even Vox's parents, and the fact that they all have insane chemistry ALL the time just proves how good of a writer you are! I am shocked to this day: I love the drama, the dynamics, the humour. I've lost count of all the times I've laughed out loud because of that fic, especially when I remember that scene when Vox is asking about trackers or when Alastor's mum walked in on them. Anyways, amazing story, as stated And small close-up of the meme as a treat because the necklace isnt really clear on the original image

My question is, because, after all, this is technically a question thing: Do you plan on writing something else on the maybe radiostatic side, and if not, what's what you love most about murdermedia over the demon versions?

HFJJSGHJgjkjgkoe;n AHHH THIS IS AMAZING I LOVE IT THANK YOOOUUUU

Thank you so much!!!! This is beautiful 😭 And the compliments are beautiful too!!!

AHHH

UMM for radiostatic, in the INMCU there will be a one-shot of them in Hell. I do have a bunch of radiostatic fics of their demon selves outside of INMCU and I will still write for it occasionally.