#humanmorph

actually finishable is nice. so like, 12000 words? there are a few points that just feel nice to our brain. we can write a good 2200 and 2700, a pretty good 5k, and a really good 8k. a solid fic to us is right around the length of an average wire guy chapter. or it's one of our runaway projects, like oceanus. we do love getting tied up in a good longfic.

this doesn't answer your question. how about "the more words we can put in it without making it worse the better"?

23. What’s a trope, AU, or concept you’ve never written, but would like to?

we'd like to write a nonlinear weird fic or something with poetry. something experimental that might be incredibly unapproachable, at least to us.

41. Link a fic that made you think, “Wow, I want to write like that.”

well, our first favorite fic author was @estelraca, so we think we've gotta shout them out here. they turned apollo justice into a werewolf and we had a great time. more recently, we admired the ambience and construction and emotional nuance of the center cannot hold. it's a hunter x hunter fic that we really enjoyed. we also highly recommend Pound The Table! marvel universe lawyer fic written by an actual lawyer. it rules. we don't even go here, and it's so good and explains itself so well that we honestly don't need to.

and for wire guy;

5. What do you wish someone would ask you about [Wire Guy]? Answer it now!

The question is "what is wire guy actually about?"

The answer is "being a wire guy".

And then the actual question is "what does that mean?"

"what does that mean?" is also the actual answer to the first question. this is what wire guy is about.

(and then we've got two thousand words of elaboration, on both this and how it's juxtaposed with two other guys, which is what we would love to be asked about. or, arguably, we have like 120k words of elaboration, 74k of which are currently posted.)

(the other thing wire guy is about is the fact that phrygian had so many depression flags through all of palisade, but because brnine was brnine and cori and figure were having much louder breakdowns, the Copers on the team slipped through the cracks. so we wrote a novel.)

(it's also about pirates. and weird metal heists. we've been told that this fic has more metal heists than may be strictly necessary.)

22. Who is your favorite character in [Wire Guy] and why?

that's such a good question. the obvious answer is phrygian, which is why it's all in their POV! we think that some of the liberties we took with their character were pretty personal to us. working through trauma on their own, struggling with alienation and coersive pressure, being trapped and used, and just the general way they engage with reality was pretty bound up in where our mind was at. we think that given how many people have said they saw something of themselves in our phrygian depiction, too, we might have hit on something resonant. (haha.)

phrygian is such a tragic character, and we think about them a lot. not even just because we're attached to them! (admittedly we are attached to them and we get an emotional spike every time they're mentioned). not getting into heavy palisade spoilers for friendship reasons, but the degree of alienation that they experience and the fact that *the players* are weirded out by things that we personally parse as attempts to self express or connect just gets to us. it's one of those things where we want to crawl around in their brain and just talk about everything we find in there. there's so much depth! most of it is very sad even though it doesn't have to be! and canon does not explore it nearly as much as we want it to, because that's completely infeasible for a podcast or even a work of fiction! we wouldn't even want them to. what we want is like, drops of the pure extract of phrygian characterization juice at frequent and irregular intervals.

also, they're extremely cool and competent. we love the powergaming and watching them win. cool gun go brrrr.

(the second secret answer is lantana lao. this is because lan is a third option to the dreadful bind presented to phrygian in the form of lang silversite, someone who supports them and the branched enthusiastically but in a specifically military capacity, and wants them to go all in on using themself for war; and kel pire, someone who encourages their presence in a behind the scenes capacity, but undermines their boundaries and is much less open to the idea of them having any sort of public presence. what she is able to represent doesn't actually happen in wire guy, but it does happen both in an extras fic that we're also writing, and in our heart. and in wire guy, she's actually their friend! she actually wants to learn about the branched! we want them to have friends. we want them to get to talk to someone who actually talks to them and is a meaningful point of connection in a world that is so unwilling to give it. is that so much to ask?)

24. Are there any easter eggs in [Wire Guy], and if so, what are they?

there are a few! some are in future chapters. but most of them are little partizan nods, which we have a lot of fun with. the ring that lets leap listen in on nidean intelligence comes to mind.