I mentioned this in the discord server, but I feel like it bears saying out loud as well. I absolutely love that this show uses the same title format I’ve leaned on for years with my own chapter titles. Just pick some random, out of context bullshit from somewhere and use that. It doesn’t matter if those few words have nothing at all to do with the overall tone or trajectory of the chapter. They sound good as a contained little segment on their own, and act as a sort of clickbait, so why not use it as a title? I was absolutely thrilled when I noticed that this show did that as well, because I love a fandom with a baked in title convention, because it makes it easier to come up with titles. For me, anyway. But this? I don’t have to change anything. I’ve been doing it this way for ages.
Okay, so stream-crossing memes from my other fandom aside, let’s talk about taking the television show out of the lore for a while. The decision to axe the show entirely came very early in the planning stages. If I was going to go full Wilson Fisk (sorry!) with Greg in this fic, I had to properly, unflinchingly commit to the bit. And I think I mentioned last week that the lordship gave me the means through which to pull it off without being too outlandishly ridiculous about it. I didn’t want to go all the way to a cape-wearing, helmet-donning supervillain with him, but he needed to be close to that league. Someone with the power and influence to pull off something uncomfortably close to criminal. And if you take away the television show, and look at Taskmaster as it presents itself, there is something oddly unsettling about it. When I pitch it to friends, I call it SAW for circus clowns, and that’s the best way I’ve found to get people’s interest piqued, but it’s also not wrong.
What I decided to do with it was look at what the show presents itself as, rather than what the show actually is. What it actually is is a panel game. We all know that, because we watch it. We wouldn’t be here otherwise (presumably. If you’re reading this without having seen the show, what are you doing?). But what it presents itself as is, well. SAW for circus clowns. Five people locked in a house, made to perform incomprehensible tasks to please the whims of a madman. And that’s the angle I’m playing it as. Obviously, the Taskmaster house is too small to make that work, and there’s the whole actual judgement and trophy aspect which doesn’t entirely work either. I needed to keep the points and scoring, because pleasing the Taskmaster and arguing for points is such a big part of the competition that I couldn’t just throw it away. The trophy, on the other hand, wasn’t enough of an incentive. It’s a funny prize for TV, but what would compel five people to do this in reality? I thought long and hard about this, and ultimately there was only one real answer: money. Well, there were two answers, but the second one was a little too dark for this fic. I could have gone properly SAW with it, but somehow the outright torture porn route didn’t feel right for this story.
Actually, there’s a secret third answer, which is that the people who sign up to do it just really like getting told what to do, but I also think that’s another concept for another story. One which does also fit into this universe quite nicely, but there wasn’t enough room for it here. Also, this is Alex’s story. So. The answer was money.
Greg as a character clearly enjoys telling people what to do, and it really doesn’t seem to matter to him whether the things he tells people to do make sense or not. He only cares about seeing people work themselves up trying to please him. So his demands not making sense play into this, because if the tasks don’t make sense, they’ll get more worked up. And if there’s financial compensation, in the form of competition for whoever can best please the Taskmaster, they will all desperately want to please him. They will turn on one another over points that would seem stupid and meaningless in any other context. They will put up with the humiliation and degradation they might otherwise throw down over. Because there’s quite a lot of money on the line.
In taking out the televisual aspect, I also had to slightly rearrange how the “show” works. I took out the prize task and the live task, one of which hurt more than the other. To start, I took out the prize task mainly because I couldn’t make it fit with the way I decided to take the “we’re here for ten weeks” thing literally. I know that’s not how the show is filmed, but I wanted them to literally be stuck there for ten weeks, being driven to absolute madness from trying to please the Taskmaster. And I stretched all of them, even the early series out to ten weeks, because I like the consistency. But if they’re stuck on the estate for ten weeks, subjected to a psychological torment, I couldn’t really find a way to make the prizes work that made sense. I really liked how Julian Clary saw them, as he revealed in the podcast: that he interpreted the prizes as being gifts for the Taskmaster, but even that would mean letting these people off the estate about once a week. And idk. The isolation seems key to the psychological decline. Being allowed to leave feels too much like enrichment and reward to me. We can’t allow that.
I also got rid of the live task, but more for logistical reasons. They don’t have a big crew on hand to set up parlour games for them. I thought it would be funny, and even toyed with it, but it didn’t work as well as I’d have liked, so I scrapped the whole thing. Instead, I replaced it with a homework task, which kind of bridges the gap between the two. It’s something they all have to do, but it’s assigned based off of the week’s scores and designed to either punish or reward to further divide the group. The homework task isn’t scored, but not doing it at all may come with its own consequences, such as special criteria on a future task, resulting in one of Alex’s famous “admin errors.”
For this made-up group, they’re not sticking around for long, so I didn’t want to use a proper series for them. I just made up some new tasks for them to do, and we’ll be seeing the back of them shortly. When I get to series 5, however, they will be more of a constant presence. And because of the way the show is filmed, I had to do a little bit of jiggery-pokery with the tasks to make it work as well. Mainly, I had to rearrange a few tasks, because episode 1 starts off with a location task and that doesn’t work well with the way I’ve structured this not-show setting. I think technically it changes who wins the first episode, but shh. I kept the most important task from this episode, which is the special cuddle, because it’s the perfect tone-setter. But we’ll talk more about that when we get to it.
Either way, things are a little bit funky, because I’ve removed the show from the TV show. This is about the characters Greg and Alex play on the show, when they go in front of the cameras and do whatever the fuck it is they do that drives me insane. They’re insane. And this fic is just an extension of that insanity.
There’s a subtle point I do want to call out, because I think it’s easily missed and I want it to not go completely missed. And if you don’t want these kinds of notes and questions, click away now. In the flashback sequence, Alex explicitly has Saturdays off. He doesn’t utilise them properly, but per contract, he has them to do with as he pleases. In the present, it’s Saturday, and that goes very quickly acknowledged. It’s Saturday, and he’s not exactly spending it on himself. In fact, he’s still very clearly working, even if he is being very lazy about it. Something has changed. I’m not going to tell you here what’s changed, but I want you to be aware that something has changed. But if it wasn’t clear already, Alex has been run through the ringer by the present point in this fic, and the flashback sequence will be exploring how he got here. I love this weird character he has within the lore of the show, because there’s so much going on with him. And there’s so much going on between him and Greg. Ultimately, that’s what this fic is about, but there’s a much bigger plot at play as well. If this were played straight, and this were a healthy, functioning relationship, this would be a story about trust. Other fics in this fandom have done that story very well. I’m not doing that story, because this isn’t a healthy, functioning relationship. This is a relationship that, realistically, broke down within a week of Alex getting hired on. Alex should have left as soon as he witnessed whatever the fuck that was between Rhod and Greg. Also, with Rhod, the idea of him being the world’s most unqualified solicitor amuses me to no end. Him being Greg’s solicitor on top of it can realistically only spell trouble, especially if they have the sort of relationship where they get drunk and shoot one another with BB guns. Now, with this in mind, series 7 does happen in this universe as well, and I would like to explore that as well at some point. With the information given in the chapters I’ve already posted, you can probably figure out at least part of how Rhod found himself doing tasks for ten weeks.
But there will be an exploration of trust in this fic, but it’s not going to be quite the same exploration that you’d get elsewhere. Alex puts way too much trust in Greg, and he barely thinks to question it. Just, yep. This is the guy he’s decided to devote his entire life to. One thing I really wanted to play with was the idea of a sort of manufactured desire or attraction. There have been a few banter bits where Alex has lines about wanting to make Greg happy, and there’s one in particular where he doesn’t like being shouted at, but he knows that when Greg shouts at him that makes Greg happy, and he likes when Greg’s happy, and that’s an absolutely insane thing to say. I needed to play with it. I think that may have been one of the tipping points that made me decide to write this fic, after hearing it one too many times. There are some other things he says from time to time that seem less in character, and more just Alex Horne uncomfortably saying things, but those things still got into my brain a little bit. Awkwardly stating that he’s straight, right after doing some patently gay shit with his co-host, which I will take at face value and not analyse outside of the context of this specific fic. But that is a concept I wanted to look at in this fic. If the Alex in this fic was completely straight, what would the relationship between him and Greg as it’s presented on the show look like? It’s very clearly sexual, even if we don’t take that bizarre fucking puppet outtake from series 15 into account (I’m definitely taking it into account). How do you get someone who is straight into a relationship like this? And that’s where those weird-ass tags and warnings come in. Even in this chapter, where there is nothing coerced or dubious about the consent on the surface, Alex is explicitly only doing what he’s doing because Greg likes it. If he were in control of this situation and doing what he liked doing, he wouldn’t be doing any of this. But he likes making Greg happy, and this is how that’s done. At the same time, he wants to do it. It’s not his favourite thing in the world to do, but that doesn’t matter to him. Nothing in this chapter is his favourite thing in the world, but none of it matters. He does it because Greg wants him to do it. And that’s the crux of it all. Alex Horne will do whatever he’s told, and Greg knows it.
What a strange man Alex is. I wonder why he’s like that.
Also, starting next week, I’m going to start adding eBook downloads for each chapter, including retroactively. I haven’t been able to do that because I’ve been stupidly busy all month, and assuming everything works, this week’s chapter should post while I am on a train.
Also also, I’ve started a sideblog for fic stuff, over on Tumblr. Follow that for fic specific ramblings and announcements and stuff.