Wherein we complete the sixteenth of November. I felt accomplished until I found that checking the archive, I appear to be some four hundred stories behind.

Paying the Piano Guy (SS (PS, HD, Snowman))

Scout liked the numbers they had without that crazy bitch, Doxy— he never wanted to be in the same square mile as her ever again, but listening to the fucking brilliant music the Twilight Scoundrels could play unfortunately required listening to her sing a bit, too.

Is there any particular reason why HD is more awful then all the men as a person, and why somehow they’re all super talented but she’s not?

“Y’ couldn’t kill e’ryone if y’ wanted to. Too much… ‘motion. S’in the way you play the piana.”

This is an odd thing to say about a character that’s killed everyone in both iterations we know of.

“I’d like to fucking kill Sn0wman, for one! Rip her to fucking pieces, with her stealing our cases all the time.”

It should also be pointed out that Slick’s reasons for hating Snowman probably aren’t usually valid things. It’s entirely possible she might do this to fuck with him because they already hate each other, but it’s unlikely it’d be why he hates her. Also, it’s a word, don’t write it with a number.

“Yeah but Sn0wman’s only one person,” Scofflaw says, draping an arm around you and shoving his snotty wet face up against yours as he solemnly regards you. “Y’ hate people but y’ need ‘em too and so you mess aroun’ on the piana so you c’n waste yer… good ‘motions on that instead o’ people you sociopathic twat.”

…I really can’t make out this. Y’ hate people but y’ need ‘em too would seem to mean that Slick does want to kill everyone and totally could but is rational enough to know that’s a bad idea for him. But waste yer… good ‘motions on that instead o’ people in contrast, would be saying that Slick doesn’t hate people and is channeling his postive not-hating-people feelings into the piano instead of admitting them.

If the idea is Slick legitimately is too nice to kill everyone, you really need to explain how to he’s developed to that point from where he starts in canon. If the idea is piano therapy is keeping Slick from killing everyone, you should probably say something other than that he couldn’t ever kill everyone.

Remember when this fandom didn’t –

Okay, well, remember when it seemed like this fandom didn’t hate women?

Good times. Good times.

The Snowman’s-a-lazy-bitch-who-steals-cases thing was Luckyspike, right?

What Pumpkins? (MC (PS gang))

It’s nice to see the flipped MC getting up to PS-style antics. The gambit schemas were great, particularly Slick’s.

Questionable Content (PS (HD, NB, SS))

Peccant Scofflaw sits in the back of his club swirling the dregs of his drink slowly as Heinous Doxy finishes up her set. She’s ravishing, as usual, but not something he’s interested in despite the coy looks she’s shooting to his corner as she sings songs about love.

There’s some unpleasant implications when you turn a pairing into the girl pining dumbly after the guy who’s not interested. If you want a universe where PS is no longer interested in chasing dames and he’s busy with SS, it’s cleaner to just say HD isn’t interested back and is doing her own thing too.

PS seems a bit – muted? too. Understated and more of a generic gangster.

A Growing Concern (DD (SS, PS, Scratch, PI))

Hm. I like this – there’s just something nice about the way the story has the main events off a little ways and focuses on DD noticing bits of them and what it means to him – but none of the characters really seem to have much to do with the canon ones, switched or not.

Tea Parties (DD (PI))

The tea party is a nice balance of menacing and innocent. DD seems kind of bland and passive here, though. He may be concussed, but I’d think he’d do a little better than this. PI kidnaps him, gives him tea for a bit, decides to let him go at a certain point, he tries to suggest he’ll be too busy to come back, PI brushes him off. He really doesn’t manage anything, even something so simple as trying to work out how he could get free of the wires if he needed to.

A Shady Night (SS (PS))

It just has nothing to do with the characters. Not even the usual superficial references.

Simple Gifts (SS (PS))

I realize the real point of this is to write him cooing over a puppy, and puppies are really cute, but it’s really hard to believe that if getting a terrier was possible enough that he can keep the puppy now, he’d just have never thought to do it or held off because he was worried about being responsible, since I don’t think he ever worries about being responsible. It’d make more sense to say that the puppies are horrendously expensive in this universe and completely out of his price range, or that there’s some sort of law keeping them from being imported, or anything else actually preventing him from getting one.

Figuring Things Out (PS (SS))

You slam him up against the wall when you manage to fumble your way inside and pin him there casually with one arm. He’s a lot faster than you, you confess freely, but once you’ve got him down you can set the superior strength of your significantly larger frame against Scout’s wiry shortness.

If anything, Slick is taller. Sleuth doesn’t specialize in strength either. And Slick’s the one who generally beats or stabs everything to death – I can buy that shadow magic gives PS an edge but not that it’s to the point he can “casually” anything.

He’s a lot more confident now in fighting back—meaning it doesn’t take him as long to do it as it did when he was with the Company

He’s also not the sort of person to tolerate getting bossed around or controlled by people well. It’s really hard to believe he’d put up with getting shoved around just out of fear – if he was convinced it was suicidal to fight back directly, he’d just have plotted some other way to get the upper hand, by killing off PS if necessary.

Slick does not make a good uke if you value longterm survival.

The Difference Between Destruction and Deliverance Ch1 (PS (SS, PI, DD))

Peccant Scofflaw really hated it when people didn’t laugh at his brilliant jokes. Sure, sometimes they weren’t that great, but couldn’t people see he was really just trying hard to convince them to like him?

But he has super charisma, right? Unless that got fucked up by the shadow magic.

In fact, Scout couldn’t be easily classified on any moral scale. Most of what he did caused little to no lasting damage to his victims, and by the same token he didn’t really go out looking for trouble

You just said he’s guilty of assassination and arson, and it’s not like all the theft was a victimless crime either.

I really don’t get why you felt even mobsterswitched SS was a good pick for moral or for someone super adaptable who’s somehow changed who he is in the process of exile. The only way you could say regular Slick doesn’t go looking for trouble is that he doesn’t bother finding trouble before he starts stabbing the nearest thing in range. If he’s been getting treated as nominally on the side of good despite committing crimes, that just says more about “good” turning a blind eye to what someone nominally on their side actually gets up to than that he’s somehow got an equal amount of good balancing the scales.

Is it supposed to be that SS has completely changed for some reason, and PS is going to ferret out whatever the backstory is? It’s hard to believe anything could actually change him this much, and it doesn’t seem like he can be called the same character even if there’s an explanation.

The Difference Between Destruction and Deliverance Ch2 (DD, SS (PS))

Huh. Well, the conversation between DD and SS was nice.

I did not have high expectations for the explanation, but I was expecting one to exist.

The Little Things (PS (SS))

you ran into Scout at your kitchen table, smoking and pondering what looked like a game of Solitaire. He looked at you and paled a little—not surprising with what he’s seen your temper do

Scout sits quietly while his husbando punches walls and then goes to finish cooking supper.

You moodily rest your chin on the shorter man’s head and watch him stir the pasta in the pan. “And?”

“And you’re really fucking tall, I get that,” Scout says testily, avoiding the question.

I like to think he’s angry because he realizes the only reason PS became taller was because seme and how this is so unfair because why can’t he be seme and get a height increase? Why must life taunt him this way?

But then I remember fandom was just fine scaling him up for PM.

Reassurance (PS (PS))

I can’t really make sense of the point of this. It’s a crackship, yet you don’t name or give any other way of identifying the characters or go into the dynamic between them or anything about why it”s happening. If you didn’t tag this I’d have no idea who they were, let alone that the idea was they’re both the same person somehow.

Mobsterswitch: Flipping (PI (PS))

Hm.

I like the relationship you’ve written here – I’ve seen similar ones but it’s unusual for neither character to actually be in love. Your characters are quite consistent for the plot, but they seem to have intermittent resemblance to their originals – I can see elements of PI and PS in them, and there’s nothing here that strikes me as impossible, but it’d be nice to see more of the chain of reasoning to get from the canon point to here.

That probably reads as “I hate this OOC shit” in Fannish Common, doesn’t it? Anyway, this is one of those that isn’t far off canon, so it’s just unsatisfying to me in that I’d really like to see stories focusing on how shadow magic/mobsterhood changes things, and this one seems more grounded in their original characters but still doesn’t really get into it.

===>[SS]: Ruin Detective’s Life (SS, OC, DD, PI, PS)

Funny, but it really could stand to be edited to rely less on injokes and fanon.

Happiness (PS (SS))

This is just utterly unremarkable. It doesn’t really have anything to say about the characters. Well, maybe that Slick would be happy if he burned down the Felt’s mansion.

SS (PS, HD, Snowman)
MC (PS gang)
PS (HD, NB, SS)
DD (SS, PS, Scratch, PI)
DD (PI)
SS (PS)
SS (PS)
PS (SS)
PS, DD, SS (PI)
PS (SS)
PS (PS)
PI (PS)
SS, OC, DD, PI, PS
PS (SS)

Zero of fourteen. And looks like that’ll be continuing for a while.