Everybody's dead, Dave

fics'n'fanworks masterpost of my fics, fanvids, podfics and webweaves. also tagged stuff i made along with gifs and creative stuff that doesn't fall under the pembersmith fanworks umbrella

TAGS OF NOTE

percy irl ~ personal things // percy werk ~ stuff about my job // percy.wav ~ audio things // percy.mov ~ filmmaking things // photo diary ~ pictures i have taken

i like to go digital dumpster diving or talk about just archivist things. as part of that you will find examples of transcribed audio

other things i enjoy include illustration and (stop motion) animation ~ skulls and bones ~ fyeahgayvampires ~ spaces and places ~ greek mythology ~ folk and fairy tales ~ electronic music ~ podcasts ~ improv comedy ~ sci fi ~ general goth shit ✌🏻

ANGSTY THINGS

the bats on the ceiling are spelling out the word turmoil // modern life is rubbish // ai bullshit

JOYFUL THINGS

cats make everything better // this is so stupid i love it // hope as a radical act

I saw this sketch from @agarthanguide:

Which is, of course, beautiful and incredible. A few of the rb's were like "yayy, bondage!" and knowing the in9 fandom i was expecting the finished piece to be more explicitly sexual. I did not predict the inclusion of a guillotine at all!! But then the final work was posted and woooooah i was blown away!

Something I keep coming back to in my fics is: What lead to this moment / Why did they act that way / How would this play out?

I Will Follow You Into the Dark = What might happen if Reece really did die during rehearsals for Stage/Fright?

These people are not your friends = What past trauma could lead to George behaving the way he does in Cold Comfort?

CLINICAL PRESENTATION OF HYPOTHERMIA IN COLD WATER IMMERSION = How might Callum try and process his grief and guilt after Lawrence's death?

I don't consciously pose these questions to myself, but through people commenting on my fics and pointing it out, I realise that's what I'm doing!

The art was posted on 22 November and it was still on my mind a few days later, because on 28 November I posted this screenshot, which was an autotranscription error on a video I was editing for work.

And that phrase... Welcome to the scaffold... just struck me and linked up with the cogs that had been turning since I saw the finished guillotine fanart. Especially as I was heading to Edinburgh to see [what were originally the final shows of] the Stage/Fright tour, and that play was consuming most of my waking moments. So it's all swirling together - I remember lying on my hostel bed in Edinburgh, thinking about the way Pembersmith dramatise and rehearse their deaths, wondering what chain of events would lead to them standing shackled in front of a guillotine, and who would be saying the phrase "Welcome to the scaffold"...? As if they were presenting a TV show in front of a live audience-

Oh. It wouldn't be a random TV presenter. It would be Steve. Steve who always plays to the crowd, who is not above doing ads for his brother's hotel or drawing the raffle at a Q&A he's part of at or appearing at low prestige sporting fixtures for charity. Enthusiasm and showmanship and the "politician's handwave." That plastered on grin and perky tone. And that realisation brought things into sharp relief - the contrast between the two of them...

The way Steve laughs and smiles and is polite and charming and smooths over the social interactions and handles the small talk. Thinking of him at the end of the panto commentary, saying "I connect with people!"

screencaps and captions via @britcommentaries

Thinking about the little boy whose earliest memory is finding a dressing up box - the man who tapped into that same glee when he discovered a dressing up box on Taskmaster. And the phrase "sounds like he’s opening a village fête" came to mind - trying to capture his master of ceremonies shtick and the way it is a fête - not a Shakespeare play - not something high brow and prestigious, but something earthy and grounded and innocuous and oh-so-(middle-[class])-English.

That gave me a starting point, but how and why were they on that scaffold? To me, the obvious choice was that they were being executed because of their work. Because it’s so grotesque or shocking or immoral that they have to be punished and prevented from making anything else. There was no doubt in my mind about that. It didn’t occur to me at all that they could have done something objectively bad, like committed a murder, or were up there due to a case of mistaken identity.

I think my first written bullet point for this story was along the lines of "Reece and Steve are being executed by the morality police." Which I used as a placeholder term in my first drafts - not realising (or not consciously realising) that the term usually refers to Iran's religious police (which may have bubbled up due to Reece performing in Nassim Soleimanpour's Echo. Or maybe not). But I didn't want it so explicitly tied to a real world entity, so I changed it to the more Orwellian "Department of Public Virtue" before publishing on ao3.

There were definitely real-world influences, though. Just take a look around us. The rise of the right over the past 20-odd years - in the UK, in continental Europe, in the US, in the Indian subcontinent... In the UK last summer, the news was dominated by riots and protests, rows about people hanging St George’s crosses and Union flags everywhere, so that was still fresh in my mind. Purity culture and censorship, the laws on age verification. Political discourse and the press dominated by discussions about gender. Othering, dehumanising rhetoric about trans people and people with disabilities and people who are unemployed. Immigrants. Refugees. People who are too queer or too brown. People who speak a different language or worship a different god or worship the same god but in the wrong way. And since writing the fic, the local elections in the UK showed swathes of people voting right-wing candidates onto councils and I feel like things are now worse than ever for minorities in particular. The way that artists are attacked and suppressed by reactionary governments. It doesn’t have to be as explicit as book burning. It’s happening now with the censorship of what books children are allowed to see and the rise of purity culture <- and even since you sent this ask, the UK has had a wave of "anti-woke" sentiment leading to things like this:

☝🏻Yes, exactly @fecklesheckleshacklesschmeckles

There were some particular historical artefacts that came to mind as well. The famous photos of Auschwitz staff enjoying music during their downtime and having a blueberry snack break, members of the SS having a singsong and - more contemporaneously - ICEbae. Just the whole... banality of evil. People just following orders, just doing their job.

In terms of artistic/cultural influences... Terry Gilliam's Brazil, which is to Percy what Theatre of Blood is to The League Gentlemen. A sprinkling of Alan Moore's V for Vendetta and its film adaptation, for a very English form of Fascism. And, a bit left field, but the first episode of Big Brother 5, the footage of which I was actually able to hunt down!!!!

Context first.

When I had Steve's voice in my head saying "Welcome to the scaffold!" I also had a very very clear sense of Reece hearing Steve’s voice breaking as he said "Where is he?" - Which is directly drawn from Kitten Pinder entering the BB5 house in 2004...

I watched that show live, sitting on the floor of my dad's living room. It’s a memory that has stayed with me. Like me, she was from Brighton. Unlike me (in 2004) she was very openly gay. Older than me, living with her girlfriend independently, being a political activist - she got baby!Percy's attention. And she was about to go in the BB house and she was trying to find her girlfriend in the crowd to say goodbye to. She couldn’t find her and she got upset. I remember her angry/panicked shouts of "where is she?" - because the producers had promised that her girlfriend would be there. And I don’t know what the discussion was or what the deal was but when she couldn’t see her girlfriend she started flipping off the cameras. (Her girlfriend WAS there, actually, Kitten had just failed to spot her in the crowd.) And transferring that to Steve, like - I’m doing this thing and I’m behaving myself because you promised me that I would see the person I love one more time before we are separated for an unknown length of time. 

And holy shit I was able to find and clip the exact footage! This has lurked in my head for over 20 years.