#egg can write

Karen and Jeri are both women who are held to the similar if not the same standards their church forces upon them, the only difference is that Karen did everything "right" and Jeri did not. They're both suffocated with their religious community's ideals of what being a woman is, but to eachother it is a chosen agreement to give and take what is needed. Karen is uptight, Jeri is suffocated. They help eachother learn to relax and breathe. The ship that is campfire confession is first and foremost a discussion of trauma recovery.

Maybe one day I'll make a proper Introduction to campfire confession as its separate post.

Moving on.

Again Snarks, you already kinda know what I'm doing with the android au that is blatantly ripping off (if not an homage to) detroit become human. I don't have a specific section of it I feel compelled to talk about so I'll just ramble about the fic as a whole

I'm really in love with the idea of what it means to identify as a human, and what it means to reject humanity as an identifier. As well as how the concept of othering in the sociological sense affects a populace and how important it is for empathy and sympathy to drive a person to reform and deprogram themselves from bigotry. You can't shame someone into changing, you have to give them a chance.

In this fic I have Karen off the bat viewing androids as objects. It's how she was taught, how she was acclimated. She has a degree in this shit, it's the future (not our present time, but yanno, D:BH time) and while dbh has a swath of issues itself (the whole bit with the very obvious black power fist symbol come on) I like sci fi, I like robots, and I like throwing some lesbians into it and seeing how that all knits together.

Karen (in her regular hatchetfield universe) fascinates me because I read her as someone very tightly wound up, someone who forces herself to stay uncomfortable to fit the society expectations of her station while hiding behind the veneer of comfort. She's got her personal life in a white knuckle grip and she's tried to strangle it dead to maintain the mask of Pure Heterosexual Christian Woman but she's doomed to fail in some way. Either she comes out and eschews that image potentially damaging her reputation, or she maintains it and suffers for the rest of her life. I love putting this woman into situations.

In Right to Repair my general background for Karen is this:

She has a STEM degree, she went through college having to pay her own tuition, wanting to separate from her family because of her queerness and opening her mind to being a queer woman while still having some sort of relationship to her religion

She is caring, but she comes off awkward or stunted because she's not good with people. She's kind of cold and direct, especially when it comes to her work. She doesn't sugarcoat things, but she softens the situations she's in with her actions.

Karen interacts with the world with mainly her hands. Not her face or voice, but with the touch of her fingers, her fidgets, her gestures. This is a little harder for me to explain, to be honest. She doesn't greet people with open arms, but she'll give a handshake, a comforting pat on the shoulder, a brush of her fingers.

She likes routine. She likes knowing exactly what's going to happen, and if not she likes trusting her ability to figure things out. Karen would probably spend her free time with a crossword or a podcast or some nerd shit. In my headcanon she knits and she's very particular with fabrics.

Android AU Karen is probably neurodivergent, as is any time I write Karen. I swear I didn't go into this intentionally writing her this way, but I kind of stumbled into it.

Also forgive me, this entire post will be very scattered, at the time of writing I've got like 15 tabs open and I'm looking at discord and you're talking about something in one server and maybe you'll get this and be like "oh wow Holloway answered my ask let's see what it is WOAH MAMA THAT'S A BIG RESPONSE"

In Right to Repair I specifically have Karen and Boy Jerry's church be okay with homosexuality but not relationships between humans and androids. in the android au universe, androids are still seen as property. They don't have rights yet. This is also true in the beginning of DBH. It's just a way for the future to really be "progressive" while also harking back to when interracial relationships were illegal.

There's still stakes here, but they aren't the same stakes as "oh man I'm closeted because religion". Karen is an out lesbian in Right to Repair. Or at least she's comfortable just being queer in this universe. She's much more weird about falling for an android she repaired.

Jeri is interesting in that while she holds a lot of parallels to Karen in canon Hatchetfield, the role of Mother doesn't really affect her? You can easily ignore her son and still get who she is as a character, but you can't do that for Karen. Karen is so little of a character in canon Hatchetfield that if you take Grace out of the equation you really don't have Karen at all. So in this au Jeri isn't a mother. Not really. Boy Jerry still has a son, and it's still Lil Jerrie, but Jeri isn't his mother, rather a baby sitter. Jeri in this instance is a little more versatile to write about because her character doesn't rely on being a certain role other than she's a victim of abuse.

Let's talk about Perfect Victims.

I want to make it clear that Jeri is not a perfect victim, nor is she meant to be written as one. In Hatchetfield canon she goes along with hiding the bodies of multiple children murdered in the woods in the camp she co directs. Yes, she is under duress. Yes, she is constantly belittled and talked down to by Boy Jerry. That dynamic doesn't really change in the android au that Right to Repair happens in. I think it gets recontexualized because in this I've effectively put Jeri into a lower social class than Jerry twice over. She's a woman, but also an android. Her model is a subservient home care android. With DBH's clear allegories of slavery and racism, I mean, it's not hard to make Jeri a victim. Androids in this universe are built to obey, to even refuse or go against an order by their owner is an insurmountable task. (I do have written down and idea of how android Jeri breaks through the red wall but that's for another fic). Maybe by writing Jeri as an android I've put her into perfect victimhood. I'd really rather I didn't. I like to think she's questioned Boy Jerry multiple times before being brutally axe murdered.

A lot of what I had written that ended up in Right to Repair was stuff I had written over the course of whatever amount of time it took in fucking discord, so that could be a few weeks to a few months. The newer stuff in that is the intro, to be honest. The meat of the fic is Karen and Jeri at Karen's house, that's what was written through discord.

Jeri is the catalyst toward Karen's radicalization. It's not the love she has for Jeri, but the fact that she starts seeing Jeri as a person. I have a brief blurb in the fic of Karen volunteering at women's shelters, specifically for those who are escaping domestic violence. This was intentional. Again, Karen is a caring person and likes routine. Her days spend helping other women have become normal for her, her days at work repairing and customizing androids have become normal for her, and they haven't crossed the streams in terms of affecting her day to day. It's not until Jeri comes back to life screaming bloody murder ( a human reaction, not like the calm, friendly android demeanor one would expect) that Karen starts to question how true her belief is.

I think there's definitely a seed planted there in that moment. The love comes later, the romance isn't important. Love doesn't save a person. Treating them like a person first does.

My art tag is #egg can draw

My fandom analysis/related talk tag is #egg can talk

My fanfics (that I've shared here at least) are under the tag #egg can write