#gabe garza

Oh, you have come to the right place for this. As one of the bad influences that convinced @nanuk-dain to write Garza/Chaffin, and as someone who has written Manimal/Garza/Chaffin before, I have had many thoughts about them.

The vibes to me are this: the worst, most fucked-up people you know got together and somehow it's working?

One of the key bits for me is, you have these three guys who in civilian society you would expect to be at each other's throats, considering the extreme racist/xenophobic slurs and comments they make at each other.

And yet, this is not what we see in the show. In fact, they seem to bond through their shared love for saying the worst, most offensive combination of words imaginable.

There's a scene in Get Some with the Reporter and T which establishes that while that kind of talk is part of Force Recon and wider US military culture, there are still unspoken boundaries between men (which is why Trombley annoyed people so much, but that's another topic).

Which begs the very enticing question of how Manimal, Chaffin and Garza built that type of relationship, and how can we writers take that dynamic further, ship-wise?

Another key bit for me personally is the love for making these hyper-to-the-point-of-toxicity masculine, presumably heterosexual men, come face to face with a sexuality and relationship crisis, and the idea of true emotional and physical intimacy with other men.

Lurking in the back of my head is the rough outline for a post-canon get-together fic where, after accepting that he and his wife are divorcing, Manimal moves in with Chaffin and Garza, and is hit with a bit of an identity crisis because he is no longer fulfilling the ideas of what a man's life should look like set out by his father, and his father before him.

He'd had his own co-dependent, vague homoerotic thing going on with Chaffin anyway, but now that he's living with them, he gets to observe Chaffin and Garza's unique relationship and ends up getting closer to Garza.

There's a flashpoint of some kind: Manimal's dam breaking due to the emotional toll of the divorce, the shame of not being the kind of father he'd thought he'd be, a sexuality crisis now that he's not locked in 'the right way to do things' or something else. And, boom! this mess of a throuple situation in which none of them really know what it is or if it makes them gay, etc, but eh, who cares, they're not officers, they're not paid to think about shit.

(Rudy and Pappy are like a side pairing and end up giving the kind of advice and support you'd expect from them)

I cannot begin to explain how much I LOVE THIS.

I'm really trying to get back into drawing for fandoms. Turns out drawing is a great way to avoid the crushing weight of choosing a college ʘ⁠‿⁠ʘ