it's either sadness or euphoria

Here's a Starko snippet, and since you guys asked for a Rank snippet too, here's your bonus

Funny enough those are two different questions lmao. I always love writing Hank and Rank. They’re both really funny, so I always make myself giggle when I’m writing their dialogue. As for exploring, I have two kind of answers to that.

One of obviously Billy. It’s been fun to come up with his family life and past and decide how that influences him now and affects his line of thinking. It’s fun taking things from canon like the jelly sandwiches and The Major and seeing how that’ll apply to his psyche.

I do love exploring all of the characters though. I try to put in hints to where people’s values come from, like when Collie said “being quiet doesn’t make you more tolerable… [it’s just] shrinking yourself down for other people’s comfort.” There’s the implication that that is something Collie has learned from his own life, that at some point he suppressed the own facets of himself in an effort to be more “tolerable” for other people when it was never about tolerance. I like looking at how characters behave and figuring out why they behave that way. I really wish I could dive more into every single character, but it’s, like… 8 characters lmao

What an interesting and fantastic question. See, the whole point I didn’t start out with a main pairing was because I genuinely didn’t know who to pair Gary with. I knew I wanted to explore his sexuality and therefore wanted a romance, but who and how wasn’t something I had preset.

I think if it turned into Parkovitch, the story maybe would have been even more focused on Gary using people and hurting people, because he really hurt and used Collie. Which, frankly, is the entire reason I ended up straying from it. You can’t make a healthy relationship based on that. Too much damage has been done in my opinions. Collie deserves better than Gary lol.

There were other contenders even though people probably didn’t realise it. Richard was a contender. I thought his yapping attitude would match well with Gary, and him paying attention and writing things down would go well, but I just didn’t see any narrative build or character growth deriving from that romance.

I debated Art due to handling themes of being gay while being religious, but I am not religious. It would have taken way more research, and while I enjoy doing research, I was also in school full time. Besides, I think if I want to explore that in the future, I can do so through Barker. What a delightful ship truly.

I knew Billy was always an option romantically, and I liked the themes a lot. Rabbit and dog just felt like there was something there. I saw themes of seeking freedom vs seeking stability, I saw it as a good opportunity to explore how Gary sees Billy as the masculine ideal, so how could Billy possibly be gay then? But what really sold me was 1. Discovering Billy had a crush on Gary (I’ve talked about that before) and 2. The aijad relationship had to benefit BOTH parties, not just Gary. The other relationships felt too one sided, like it was just a care taker role. I saw Starkovitch as something really equal eventually.