Category: doylist ramblings

Good grief.  Long damn chapter.  That’s going to become normal, I think.  Sorry about that.  I’m really not sure what’s going on or how that’s happened.  Anyway, I’ve decided to post this one early this week because I have a sneaking suspicion I won’t be at my desk much tomorrow.  So rather than be late two weeks in a row, I decided to head it off at the pass instead this week.

This is one of those chapters that’s slow and languid, and focused on the characters.  There isn’t a lot of action happening, but instead all of the forward motion is taking place internally.  We get a little bit of that from Greg right at the start, in the form of his insecurities about his glasses and how Alex perceives his reaction to them.  Greg as this character who hides his insecurities behind vanity speaks something to me, so him seeing having to wear glasses as a sign of ageing or weakness felt like a natural extension of that.  I liked the idea that he actually would have started wearing them much earlier than we saw in reality, but resisted for as long as possible.  There are probably about three people in the world at this stage who even know he needs them, and I suppose that list of people changes depending on whether or not Alex counts as a person.

Mark arrives to this whole mess first, because of course he does.  He knows how this goes, and he wants to see the whole thing play out from the very start.  He’s not here to play the game either.  He has two goals in mind, and he achieves them both in short order: 1. see that his friend is doing as well as he claims to be, and 2. become a pain in the ass for said friend at earliest possible convenience.  The fact that Greg has allowed Mark to come spend ten weeks pissing around with Alex in the first place more or less achieves point #1, as hinted in the previous chapter.  Mark arrives fully prepared to launch into point #2 and become a Problem as soon as he’s able.  Of course, Alex is also a Problem, so they pretty quickly settle into a routine with one another, chatting shit as though nothing at all unusual is unfolding around them.

The other guests, on the other hand, are a totally different story.  Now keep in mind that so far aside from Ed (and by extension Nish), none of these people are in the entertainment industry in this fic.  So when Aisling shows up nervous as all fuck, those nerves are from the perspective of a young woman who has answered an advert promising a lot of money, and now she’s at a house where a creepy man is literally role playing the opening act of Clue (or Murder by Death) with a bunch of strangers.  She should be nervous.  She should be running for the fucking hills.  But £1,000,000 is a lot of money, and people will do some stupid crazy things for that kind of cash.

When Mark reveals himself to be here for the third time, this is me slightly changing the rules a little bit.  Obviously, there can’t be a Champion of Champions.  It doesn’t quite work that way now.  But Mark has done Taskmaster three times, because he did it at Edinburgh twice.  Same with Key.  So here, I’m going for something a little bit different.  Rather than only getting one go at it, with only winners being allowed back, I’m taking a different approach.  Anyone can come back, but the odds of being allowed back are very slim, bordering on next to non-existent.  Unless you’re Alex’s nosey mates, in which case Greg both recognises it’s easier to let them come round and see for themselves that Alex is perfectly fine, but also having them round gives Greg the opportunity to bully them for ten weeks.  And if he throws a bit of cash at them at the end, they’ll put up with it and let him and Alex get on with their lives for a while longer.  So they alternate who comes up to check on Alex, making sure he’s still around, and getting the snot kicked out of them by Greg, and then split the cash between them most likely.

No one is innocent or morally clean in this situation, basically.

And then we get to Nish, who I have been looking forward to for so long.  The first thing he does in this fic is shout the roof down, and that should be an indication of how his time will be spent.  I mean, you’re here.  You’ve seen series 5.  I’ve said so many times that my favourite genre of contestant are the ones that seem like they were kidnapped halfway through placing an order at McDonalds, and Nish is the perfect embodiment of that trope.  In fact, I don’t know whether I’ll be able to work that in properly, but that’s basically what happened to this guy.

Once they get to dinner, Mark really decides to become a Problem, almost to the point of looking like some kind of plant.  If Alex hadn’t already planned on making his stay hell, he probably would have come up with something terrible for him just off the heels of this bullshit right here.

The flashback bit is one I had a lot of fun with.  We’ve got Greg either trying to get to know Alex as a person, or he’s trying to size him up.  I think he does like Alex, and he does want to get to know him better, but at the same time he has definitely noticed that the guy is socially isolated and it doesn’t seem like a single human being would actually notice if he vanished from the face of the planet, and part of him does want to verify that somehow.  Except it really throws him for a loop to actually get that confirmed.  One of my favourite banter bits is from s04e06, when Alex rambles on with some implication that his mother abandoned him after leaving behind nothing but a letter.  Pair this with the recent live task where Greg claimed Alex was found as an infant, and what the hell was this man’s upbringing actually like??  But it makes perfect sense for this weirdo character.  I love it.  The only people he has in his life are his two strange mates who refuse to let him go, and if Greg wants to keep Alex, he’s going to have to deal with Mark and Tim.  He just doesn’t know it yet.  But all through this whole conversation, Alex finds himself compelled to respond in ways that he thinks might please Greg, even if it’s a conversation he doesn’t want to have.  He says things that he doesn’t want to say, and winds up having to defend himself.  And then when Greg gives him another strange order he has frankly no business giving him, Alex obeys without question, to the letter.  He makes sure he is absolutely not seen at all the following day by leaving at the ass-crack of dawn, and going to visit Mark and Tim.  And because he doesn’t know what to do with himself, he cleans their flat and gets bullied.  Tim immediately assumes the worst in everything Alex says, and he’s frankly right to, but at this point nobody really fully grasps the true extent of the situation.  All Tim knows is that his friend doesn’t have much of a support network outside of him and Mark, and even if they aren’t exactly healthy or functional in their own right, Tim is determined to make sure Alex doesn’t get into a situation he can’t get out of.

Back to the present, I’ve shuffled things up a bit again.  I’ve decided to move the interviews to the beginning of the process, for a couple of reasons.  They feel like a good thing to have as a consistent warm-up task, and also as a way for Alex to gauge how everyone will respond to tasks and the environment.  Having the interviews actually serve a purpose felt like a good way to use them as part of the greater process.  Annoyingly, series 5 is one of the only series where interviews do not seem to exist anywhere online, so I had to make it up.  Because of course the ones I actually needed would be missing.  At the same time, I’m kind of glad, because I’m going to be doing a lot of remixing and transcribing as it is, and boy do I hate doing that.  I’ve already had to do it once in this chapter already, for Mark’s text message task, which is very subtly different.  And there will be a lot of that.  Quite a lot of this series has been re-ordered to fit the narrative better, because it doesn’t work for location tasks to be randomly spread out like they are in reality.  Also, some of the tasks worked out better to be rearranged to tell a slightly different character story, so that’s what I did.  There’s also the part where I wanted the whole thing to take place over ten weeks, for consistency and continuity, so I had to stretch an eight week series into ten weeks, while also removing all of the prize, live, and most of the solo tasks because they didn’t work either.  But I think doing all of that will make the tasks themselves a little more interesting than just wholesale revisiting them exactly as they are.  Mark’s text message task, for instance, while a simple one, is now a little bit more stressful for him.  Even though he has ten fewer texts to send overall, he has to send two per day to make up for it.

As for the intake bit itself, I really wanted to play up just how fucking terrible that house actually is.  The lab really is a room that looks like somewhere you go to get murdered.  Again, Aisling absolutely reacts as she ought to, weighing her safety against the promise of a life-changing amount of money.  At the same time, Alex isn’t really a terrible person.  He’s here just doing a job.  He recognises that she’s uncomfortable, and why she’s uncomfortable, and he doesn’t want to make that worse.  But he’s also awkward and weird just by nature, so there’s not a lot he can do about it.  But Alex will give as good as he gets, and that cuts both ways.  If he doesn’t have a reason to be passive aggressive and sarky with someone, he won’t be that way.  He can be kind and patient when he needs to be, because he doesn’t want to go through ten weeks of hell any more than these people do.  Especially since his hell has the potential to be amplified by several orders of magnitude.

And then with Mark, it’s a different story entirely.  He falls right back into antagonising him, because Mark can and will take it and dish it right back out.  And because this is not only Mark’s third time being here, but everyone’s aware he’s Alex’s weird mate at this point, the rules are different from the start.  He’s not dropped off properly.  Alex doesn’t show him around properly.  Instead, Alex just follows him around, letting him act like he knows what he’s doing while he throws insults around.  At no point through any of it does Mark begin to take it seriously.  He knows he’ll come out of this with some amount of money, and he’s going to get to spend the next ten weeks pissing about with Alex when he’s not holed up somewhere on this estate.  It’s almost worth getting bullied by Greg every week.

A little bit late this week, because on top of being a weird goddamn week, I genuinely think I may have swine flu for the second time in my life.  Christ, I will actually scream if that’s the case.  But anyway.  I was feeling well enough today to finally sit down and edit the rest of this, so here it is.

So, let’s start with the apparent.  Greg is very different in this chapter.  He’s not being horrible, for a start.  And when Greg’s in a good mood, Alex is in a good mood.  These two are feed off of one another in a way that can only be described as dangerous, I think.  Alex is taking every single one of his cues off of Greg, and Greg is taking every single one of his cues off who the hell knows at this point.  We’ll find out.  But maybe Alex wasn’t completely lying to Tim and Mark when tried to tell them to mind their business in the previous chapter.  Maybe this is just how things are, and maybe he does like it this way.

Maybe.

Now.  More art.  The piece in this chapter isn’t anything specific, but it’s actually based off of an entire collection.  The artist is Stuart Semple, whose name I never actually get round to dropping specifically in this chapter for whatever reason.  I’m not sure why.  It just never seemed to happen.  And the series is My Sonic Youth.  I love this series in general, but also for a Taskmaster portrait because some of the pieces have a lot of elements that work both thematically for the sorts of portraits that have gone up, but also as a series there are a lot of elements that just feel very much up Greg’s street.  There’s a Happy Mondays reference in there with a 24 Hour Party People lyric as the quote, and it has that sort of avant garde slant that he tends to score highly on art tasks in general.

I want to get more into Greg’s hobbies in general, because it seems like as a character, he’s got quite a few of them.  As the task writer, a lot of Alex’s hobbies naturally seep into the show, but in the context of the show’s lore, it’s Greg who’s setting these things.  I know Alex likes to set tasks that appeal to or deliberately irritate Greg for one reason or another, but I’d love to really dig into Greg’s interests on a character level.  I love the idea that the Taskmaster is into art, even if he’s probably not particularly good at it himself.  I see him as someone who is well-read, but his tastes are probably quite odd and obscure.  I think he does like cinema and theatre, but we know he hates musicals.  I’m definitely keeping in how much he hates football.  That’s going to remain Alex’s thing.  But it’s other things that I want to dig into.  Where does he stand on some of the other things that crop up again and again?  I’m not sure.  I’ll have to really think about it.

And finally, we’re getting closer and closer to series 5.  Good grief, it’s taken forever.  Alex has hung the Magritte in the cottage, so things are at least taking shape to start getting going.  We learn that Ed is the first person in the fic to sort of break the mould, as it were, and retain his actual job in this story.  He’s still a comedian here, because it did sort of make sense for his little group to keep to that line of work.  And in the context of this AU, not everybody does have to have some other unique job anyway.  Greg’s an important person who can have friends from any walk of life he likes, and it sort of makes sense that some of his friends could and would be in the entertainment industry.

It should be obvious who Ed’s stitching up for the series 5 lineup, but in case it isn’t, I’ll save that reveal for the next chapter.

There’s another recurring thread going on that’s sort of been present, but which really starts to become apparent here, that Greg is a lot more obvious about his relationship with Alex than Alex would necessarily like.  They aren’t public, exactly, but when it comes to showing Alex off in front of his friends, Greg is perfectly willing to do so, to the point of making it everyone else’s problem.  Alex doesn’t mind being shown off when he’s an object of praise or affection, but it takes a different tone later on when Greg’s in a mood right before he leaves for Spain again for Christmas.  There’s a tag on this fic for “manufactured sexual attraction,” because I wasn’t quite sure how else to tag whatever the hell is going on in this relationship.  I think someone used the word “Gregsexual” in the discord, and that works as well, but it’s a lot more specific.  Either way, Alex is less into Greg sexually, and more into the idea of making Greg happy and pleasing him.  I don’t know if I’m playing him as fully asexual here, or just woefully inexperienced, but he has certain lines he doesn’t like to cross for one reason or another, and Greg is at least willing to respect those lines, while at the same time wholly disregarding him as a person and a human.  Alex is disrespected, degraded, used, and cast aside in short order, and then immediately ridiculed to others.  Because of course Rhod knows what’s going on, and of course Greg openly jokes about it with him.  Greg probably told him his intentions outright when he left to find Alex.  They’re leaving for two weeks, better go get a quickie in before they head out.

At the same time, I wanted Alex to have advocates and allies in as many corners as possible, even if he has no intention of ever taking advantage of them.  I think he possibly has even more than he realises, but because he’s so shut off from everyone else around him he’s been trained to see everyone as an antagonist.  He’s over here doing his own thing, ignoring people until he can’t ignore them, and then things get awkward and weird and he’s forced to run away.

Going back to the other timeline, Alex knows way more than he ever wanted to, and it’s fucked with his head.  He was already off-balance and making bad decisions, and now he finds himself doing things he can’t even rationalise.  He may as well be on autopilot at this point.  Greg tells him to do something, and he does it without thinking.  He’s so close to danger, and he can’t even see it.  His only thought is trying to make this man as happy as possible, to the point of nearly damaging himself over it.  Greg’s crossing boundaries with him as well, and Alex doesn’t even notice.  He’s making demands he has no right to make, getting weirdly physical with him, and Alex just rolls with it, because he’s Alex.  There’s no other reason for it, really.

Then, we get to the spanner in the works that is Mark Watson.  Mark’s shown up in the application list, and Alex does exactly what he’s supposed to about it and tells Greg.  Because Alex knows his place, and he’s not trying to play any games or break any rules.  He’s got a job to do, and his idiot friend showing up could get in the way of that.  But Greg lets him invite Mark over instead, and maybe he’s digging his own grave, but Alex loses his entire mind and decides to play a prank on not only Mark, but on Greg as well.  And we all know how that’s going to end.

This is the first new chapter, so if you were reading it before when it was on AO3, you haven’t seen anything going forward.  Though I do still recommend reading the previous stuff back anyway, because I’ve edited it all up, and there’s quite a bit of new stuff added.  This is the longest chapter yet, and we’ve got Alex in a bad mood right off the bat.  When Alex is in a bad mood, nothing good ever happens, so here we are, dealing with that.  He’s set Kieran a terrible task, and is being an all-round pain in the ass about it.  What else is new?

To start this off, I want you to know I baked Kieran’s horrible cake that was more like a weird Yorkshire pudding, and I hated it.  My husband, on the other hand, ate the whole damn thing and loved it.  Then again, we also tried the super sour sweets Greg made Alex eat in series 9, and I ate five at once and thought they were no big deal, while my husband wound up fighting for his life over just one of them, so I don’t know what to make of any of this.  I’m saying the sweets are lame, and the cake described in this fic is gross, and that’s what I’m sticking to.  All I could taste was sugar, and it was nasty and it really did stick to my teeth.  0/10.

We get to Alex getting very jealous of Greg having friends over, because ultimately all he wants is to have Greg to himself.  Instead, he’s having to share, and that’s really getting up his nose.  A cycle is referenced, and they’re at the tail end of it, and now Alex expects things to be getting better where they aren’t.  In his mind, this should be his time with Greg, so when he comes home to find that he’s going to spend the evening either ignored or on display, it takes the mood he’s been in all day and sours it further.  Oddly, this scene had me waffling more on something than nearly any other part of this fic, and it was the joint being passed around.  What had me waffling in the first place is that it’s not something I see a lot of in this fandom in general, so I wasn’t sure if it’s something that’s widely accepted as a concept.  But he’s mentioned smoking weed on the show, and has bits about it in his stand up, and Wicky smokes a joint in the Cleaner, so fuck it.  It seemed worth including.  And for Greg’s list of sins in this fic, smoking a joint with his mates is low on the ladder, let’s be real.

Another thing that happens in this chapter is that it’s the first time it’s referenced that Alex doesn’t always cook meals.  That’s a thing that only happens when it’s just Greg.  There is a proper staff, and when there are guests, that staff is utilised.  Mostly I think the kitchen staff are employed to cook for the rest of the house staff, and probably for the guests who are there to entertain Greg like trained monkeys, but they’re probably also aware that there will be times when being told to suddenly prepare a meal for a group is expected.  Anyone who works for this man has likely got to get used to a certain amount of instability very quickly.

For the flashback, we get to the first big reveal, and to the point where the plot finally starts to pick up.  I loved the idea of making Rhod a solicitor, because he’s wholly unfit for it.  The man is distilled chaos, and because of that he’d be your worst nightmare.  Like, he’s definitely got a reputation as someone who wins cases, but through absolutely insane tactics.  And it was for scenes like this that made me decide to make it be Rhod.  It could have been literally anybody, and nothing about the story would have changed.  But I wanted it to be Rhod because I wanted his mad, intense energy in these scenes.  I wanted the jeopardy that because it’s Rhod, he’s going to fuck it up.  It’s Rhod, and he still could.  If I had gone with Mike, the calm, cool, collected man who was a doctor in a past life, that jeopardy wouldn’t be there.  But as well as Rhod being here to bring chaos, we also have the elephant in the room finally out in the open.  We now know what Greg’s fucking problem is; why he’s so goddamn weird with meals and why he doesn’t seem to trust Alex.  And Alex knows it as well, and then some.  He knows a much wider part of the story than he did when he made that decision to stay on.  He did not replace a personal assistant.  He replaced a former lover in a very kinky relationship that seems to have gone very, very sour to the point of attempted murder that ended with the wrong person dead.  There’s obviously more to it than Alex knows still, but Alex knows enough to have a more or less clear picture of what he’s got himself involved in.  It’s enough to know that he definitely needs to leave.  And yet, he makes the choice to stay anyway.  Because he spent three days alone with Greg, without distractions, being told what to do and he liked it just a little too much.  He doesn’t realise that, and he doesn’t understand it, but that’s definitely what happened, and now he wants more of it.  And he wants it enough to make decisions that will lead to him getting locked in cupboards and slapped around twelve years later.

But this is a chapter of big reveals, because we have two more after we find out what happened to the guy Alex replaced.  Basically, we’re six chapters and about 40,000 words in, and the plot is finally kicking off.  That’s what’s happened.  It’s final judgement day, and these people are fighting for their prizes, or to not be murdered as someone in the discord speculated.  There’s no murder, though.  Because as was pointed out at the time, that would mean I’d have to kill off some of the best people, and I don’t think I can do that in this fandom.  The failpeople are my favourites.  I can’t kill Nish.  So, spoilers for that, I guess.  Nish survives this mess.  I love him too much.  But somehow it manages to be more sinister than that at the same time.  Kieran’s come last, and he still takes home a substantial prize because I do actually have a formula to convert points to cash, and the exact number he took home was about £860,000.  I think that number was in an earlier draft, but it felt better to leave it vague in the end.  But if you’re wondering, they all made out like bandits.  This will not exactly be the case for the idiots in the series 5 group, because of the wider spread of points.  But these people have just spent ten weeks of hell, and in order to do anything with this money, they can either pick greed and keep it all by staying attached to the guy who made their lives hell, which probably won’t be very good for them in the long run given how we all know how Greg feels about people who don’t pay their tax, or they can report this money and try to explain it.  Given Alex has a stack of business cards at the ready, it’s probably apparent which option most people pick.

I have also changed the rules on who gets to come back.  It’s not just the winners, because I’m counting Edinburgh as canon for plot reasons.  And at that point, anybody can come back, so I had to establish some new rules that don’t really mesh with Champion of Champions, but whatever.  Greg is luring desperate people, and desperate people are probably not going to be amazing with money in the first place.  Alex has probably seen a terrifying amount of people blow through their prize money and wind up worse off than they were the first time.  And when they do come back, they’ll be even more eager to please the Taskmaster.  Obviously, Bob throwing CoC doesn’t mesh with this, but Bob doesn’t mesh with reality in general.  But that’s how Greg keeps them silent after he’s just psychologically tortured them for ten weeks.  People will do anything for money, and when you tell them they can come back for more, they’ll continue to play your game.

And all that leads directly onto the final reveal of the chapter.  The one that I was most looking forward to writing, because we finally get to meet Tim and Mark, and the shed incident pays off at last.  Remember when Alex first applied, and Greg said he’d have Saturdays off?  That’s never really stopped being a thing.  He’s spent previous Saturdays at home, doing nothing, and being weird about it.  But after he sees to the guests and gets them out of the house, Greg gives him £50 and tells him to go enjoy himself.  There’s a routine in play, and Alex immediately falls into it, because it’s one that’s been in place for quite some time.  But what he doesn’t count on is that routine getting disrupted by Tim being observant.  At the same time, he doesn’t do anything about what he knows is clearly going on, other than loudly complain.  It’s not a surprise to him that Alex gets smacked around, or that he has no desire to leave this situation.  Nor that he has no money outside of what little Greg gives him for the evening.  Tim and Mark are both totally aware and acclimatised to this situation, even if they clearly hate it.  Tim wants Alex to come to his senses, but he’s still willing to play along with curfews, and even at the end of the night when Alex is too drunk to get himself home, Tim sees that he gets into a cab safely, rather than doing what someone else might do and removing Alex from the situation.

Now why on Earth might that be?

We’re taking a bit of a break from the insanity to spend time with what basically turned into some Hemingway fanfic for a while.  There’s a brief reference to The Sun Also Rises, which is not an accident.  It’s one of my favourite Hemingway novels, and if you know me and my writing it’s probably not difficult to pick out why.  At the heart of it, it’s a lazy story about people and what they get up to when they think no one is looking, and every one of those people are fucking insane.  I didn’t want to go fully into emulating the whole thing, but I did want to evoke something of the novel and its setting the way Baz Luhrmann fucked around with Gatsby, using creative anachronism to turn it on its head a bit.  Only in this case, it’s Pamplona in 2004, so all the nostalgia of the novel has been lost, replaced by fast food and fast fashion and neon signs in shop windows.  The San Fermín festival is still a thing, and still happens today as a traditional festival, but Pamplona is a modern city, and this is enough to distract Alex from everything else he should be paying attention to.  Spain will keep featuring in this story, but not as the main focus the way it was in The Sun Also Rises.  But there is the same theme of a group of absolute psychopaths ostensibly going for the bullfights, but really just looking for a new backdrop for their insanity.

Before we get to that, Alex is neck deep in this insanity, and he’s so close to doing the correct thing about it.  He should be putting in his notice, but he’s so caught up in being professional about it that he can’t bring himself to put his notice in until they get back.  So he carries out tasks he doesn’t understand, even though they make him uncomfortable.  He refuses to ask questions that might seem like crossing a line, and makes up excuses for himself.  He just carries out these insane demands and pretends to be okay with it.

This chapter is also the first we get to see Alex being Alex, and not the weird mess he’s become when he’s under Greg’s thumb, or acting out because he’s not getting enough attention.  This is the Alex who wears camp shirts and has silly tattoos (the timeline of which I’ve altered because the timeline has been altered in this fic).  The Alex who fell into this job in the first place because he has a knack for admin and memorisation.  He’s taking care of all of this stuff, and he’s happy to do it not just because it’s his job, but because being in charge of it makes him feel better.  If someone else were in charge, he’d lose that peace of mind.  He’s already a ball of nerves from having to deal with Rhod and Roisin being on this trip, who he doesn’t much like to begin with.  And now Rhod and Greg are causing trouble on the flight, and Alex can’t quite figure out what’s going on when the two of them are near one another.

It’s not much different on the ground.  Alex finds himself in the way more than anything, vaguely inconveniencing the entire trip to the hotel.  It’s almost like he’s not supposed to be there in the first place.  At the same time, Greg’s being weird and not letting Alex out of his sight.  He keeps Alex almost uncomfortably close until they get settled into the hotel, ignoring him the entire time.  The hotel that they stay at is the Gran Hotel Perla, which I picked because not only is it on the bull route, but Hemingway himself stayed there and is used as a selling point.  In this world I’ve created, Greg has a standing booking each year for the festival, in the same block of suites, and has probably had this arrangement for quite some time at this point.

But then, just to further solidify the idea that Alex is more in the way than not, once he’s done getting everything unpacked, Greg dismisses him outright.  Alex gets the rest of the day off, and he spends it wandering around the city, getting to know the area.  It’s a lovely little calm before the storm that is the other three when they’re left alone.  And the other three are anything but calm, as they remind him later that evening when Roisin and Greg manage to start smashing shit up.  If Alex wasn’t already bombarded with hints that he needed to put in his notice weeks earlier, this is another neon sign that he’s making bad choices.  Greg defends Alex’s fashion choices, and then quietly takes him aside only to give him a private telling off for his tattoos.  Tattoos which, while Alex is working, aren’t even visible anyway.  This is the first Greg has seen them, and it was only by accident that he even spotted them, because he had already dismissed Alex for the day.  Alex is on his own time by this point.  He’s not technically working right now, and is only in Greg’s room because he heard an alarming noise and came over to make sure no one was hurt.  Greg has no real right to tell him off for it, nor does Alex have any obligation to do anything about it, but he still goes out of his way to adjust his personal wardrobe to make Greg happy, when he’s still thinking he’s going to be putting in his notice in a few days anyway.  Alex is already a goner at this point.  He just doesn’t know it yet.  He is already doing things entirely to please Greg, outside of the scope of the job he was hired to do, and he’s in so much more trouble than he realises because of it.

Another thing I wanted to do in this chapter was start to change Alex’s opinion on Rhod and Roisin.  Rhod specifically and especially.  Rhod was introduced as intense and too much to handle, and Alex didn’t much like that, but this is the first time he’s had the chance to properly get to know him as a person outside of Greg’s influence.  I wanted Rhod to be someone who exists to antagonise Alex, but without being outright hostile toward him; someone who isn’t a threat, but who isn’t a friend either.  He exists in this nebulous space where Alex knows he can trust him, but he isn’t someone he can necessarily go to for help if he needs it.  Roisin, on the other hand, is someone to be constantly intimidated by based entirely on her gender.  There is a bit of lore in that regard that will be popping up later, but it’s not strictly relevant here, so we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it.

Another thing to point out, or bring up, or whatever is that this is I believe the second or third reference to who I think at this point is fairly obviously meant to be Tim and Mark.  The fact that we haven’t seen them yet is not an accident.  Alex has been far too busy to even think about seeing his mates in this point in the timeline, and everything he does in the present story is dictated by Greg.  They both play present roles in this story, and we will be seeing them shortly, but for now they’re just allusions and foreshadowing.

Back to Greg for a bit, we learn a little bit more about him via Roisin, both directly and indirectly.  Alex being given the day to himself the day before may or may not have been entirely by accident.  It’s entirely likely that Greg knew what Alex is like, and that he’d spend it doing admin-based activities like getting familiar with the area under the guise of being a tourist.  And sure enough, it comes in handy, because he knows where to find a chemist when they need one.  When Roisin asks Alex to take her back to the hotel, it’s likely for the same reason, that Alex will be able to get her back there quickly, without having to wander about to get her bearings.  And then we learn something new, in a vague, shrouded sort of way.  Greg didn’t trust his previous assistant, and something about the story Alex had been told isn’t exactly true.  And once again, Alex is confused because nothing is adding up around him, and there’s no one he can turn to to help him sort this mess out.

Also don’t forget, the playlist I made updates as I work on the fic.  It’s got quite long, and will only get longer as we go.

This chapter contains a scene that I knew early I wanted to include.  I don’t know why this particular scene needed to make it in, aside from the fact that it’s one of those weird ones that definitely has precedent if we read into the studio banter.  Precedent in more ways than one.  It keeps coming up.  But we’ll get to it later.

Let’s talk about the task and subsequent breakdown at the beginning of this chapter, because I spent money on this.  I bought the books because I wanted to dissect how this weirdo writes the tasks.  And I still don’t think I got it right.  But also, just like the house is a character, so are the tasks in a way.  I wanted to use the tasks as a reflection of Alex’s mood, because they do tend to reflect something from series to series sometimes.  I wanted to create a scenario where Alex has just enough control in his life where he’s able to lash out at someone else, and he does that via the tasks.  Greg has not been treating him kindly, and Alex has spent the last three chapters clinging to any scrap of stability he can, hoping that either Greg’s mood mellows out, or he figures out what he did to irritate him in the first place.  Alex never got an answer to the question that had been bothering him, and it’s not really clear whether Greg’s truly come round, or if he’s still playing around.  And even when Alex is rewarded, it’s not a reward for him.  His reward is doing something he knows makes Greg happy, and then being thoroughly humiliated after.  Not much of a reward, really.  So when Greg asks for teams immediately after, Alex lashes out in the only way he perceives as safe.  He words the task in a way that closes as many loopholes as possible, and makes the task as unpleasant and stressful as possible, which will only go further in filling the brief Greg gave him.  He wants to see them hurry, and he wants eggs.  Alex can deliver that, and he can feel in control of something at the same time.

Because the dubiously consensual part of the whole thing applies to the entire situation between him and Greg.  Not just the sex, but everything else.  Alex being incapable of saying no to anything is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen about a human being, and it is the root of his entire problem.  He would not be here at all if he could just say no to anything.  Any one thing, at any point, if he’d just said no to it, he’d be in a very different place in life right now.  As it is, he’s desperate to make Greg happy, because that’s what he’s wired to do, but there’s some disconnect between what he wants and what Greg wants.  An entire, yawning cosmic void of a difference.  And if they were proper, mature adults about this situation they’ve found themselves in, they might be able to get themselves on the same page about it.  Instead, they’re on different planets about it, and Alex is left having to passive-aggressively bully other people to make up for years of bullying from Greg.  And what’s worse, he’s deluded himself into thinking it works for him.

Of course, it all goes immediately to hell when he’s locked in the shed.  I’ll be honest, this one comes from the “surprise Alex” task in series 3.  I’ve always wondered why nobody just locked him in there.  They wouldn’t have even had to properly lock him in.  Just feed the lock through the hasp and pretend to have locked it, and then panic when “nobody can find the key.”  I’m sure that would definitely surprise him.  It was my very first thought.  And then the opportunity presented itself to really lock him in there, and of course that’s what I did.

I probably rewrote this scene about five or six times, because nothing I did seemed quite right though.  I didn’t like the idea of Alex doing anything to deliberately damage the shed, because Greg would absolutely wallop him for that.  I didn’t want to leave him in there too long either, nor did I want to rescue him too quickly, or give him an easily exploitable way out.  I’m fairly certain the whole window frame actually pops out on the shed, or at least it seems like it does, and now at least there’s a very large back window he could have easily got out of.  But at this point, which would have been between series 4 and 5, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t there at that point.  Either way, locking Alex in the shed seemed like a good way to get Greg to go right back to pissed off with him all over again, so that’s what I did.  But at least this time, Alex knows what he did, which is all Alex wanted in the first place.

As for the flashback, I know this is what you’re probably wanting to see.  Here’s the portrait:

It’s called Fisheye, and it’s another one that just screamed “Taskmaster portrait” to me when I saw it.  Annoyingly, this is the only photo of it I could find on the internet.  I have to admit, I don’t know a whole lot about this artist, and only found him while looking for someone who could be reasonably mistaken for Banksy, and who would have been active at this time.  I can’t even find any information on when this piece was done, but let’s say for the sake of this fic it was done before 2004, and thus would have been something a person into art would have wanted copied by that point.  But he definitely ticks all the boxes, and had a fantastic self portrait that worked for what I needed as well.

Back to the present, we have Alex having to deal with the aftermath of being locked in the shed.  I’ve always loved that bit in series 12 when he had to break in after Guz locked him out, and this is kind of drawing from that a bit.  I feel like in this universe, Alex has broken into the house more than a few times, so he knows all of its weak spots.  But this part of the chapter isn’t about Alex breaking into the house.  It’s about Alex and Greg, and their terrible, terrible relationship.  This chapter plays straight a common bit that’s played for laughs on the show, which is that Greg does slap Alex around.  There are a few times throughout the series where Greg raises his hand to him in warning, and Alex leans away, and it’s a wonderful little bit of physical telegraphing between them, because it says so much about what must go on between them when they haven’t got eyes on them.  Greg doesn’t need to say anything to get Alex to step back into line.  There have even been a few times where he has actually slapped Alex on camera, even.  And then this is the same Alex who finds the courage to shit talk panellists to their faces because he’s “next to [his] big man.”

There’s a certain journey there, and Alex is currently lost somewhere in the weeds along it.  He’s also so turned around and fucked up from whatever’s been done to him so far that he apparently truly believes that this relationship or situation or whatever you want to call it will kill him, and the biggest emotion he can manage to conjure about it is at best a hopeful indifference.  He doesn’t want to die.  He’d like to avoid it, actually.  But he’s accepted that it’s inevitable and is probably going to happen sooner than he’d have planned for.  He knows exactly what Greg means by those contradictory statements when Greg says that Alex is here for life, and that he can be replaced by morning.

Now, we get to the part that I mentioned earlier.  I don’t know why this burrowed into my brain, but it sure lived there rent free for ages until I found a place for it.  There’s a lot of banter about Alex not being toilet trained, and one in particular about Greg cleaning the mess up with Alex’s beard, and a part of my brain supplied the thought that he’d done that before.  Greg has absolutely rubbed Alex’s face in his own piss, and it’s absolutely a thing that’s happened more than once.  Then I got to thinking about the dog bed, and the cuddle banter, and this bit from the podcast where he was locked in a cupboard (???), and this whole weird scenario sort of popped up fully formed where Alex is basically a kept pet with chores.  He’s kept in a cupboard when he misbehaves, and when he’s very good he gets to sleep in the big bed, and sometimes Greg puts up with having his leg humped and occasionally has to rub Alex’s nose in his own piss.

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.

Okay, right off the bat, I have altered the historical timeline a bit, so let’s get that elephant out of the room.   I’ve already rearranged a small patch of West London to make the setting operate a bit more smoothly, which I haven’t really properly addressed either.  So let’s consider that addressed and acknowledged, and move on.

The painting that unsettles Alex in the flashback part of this chapter is a piece by Joos van Craesbeeck piece, evoking the works of Hieronymus Bosch, titled Terror and Desire – The Temptation of St Anthony.  It looks like this:

I picked it because it was the perfect mix of batshit unhinged, and weird-ass portrait.  The problem with it is that it wasn’t revealed until 2016, and the flashbacks take place well before that.  I usually don’t like fucking with the timeline (historical or canonical, and yet I’ve done both) where I can help it, but I wanted a really fucked up portrait and immediately fell in love with this one the second I saw it, honestly.  Nothing else I found lived up to it.  So we’re just gonna pretend it was unearthed from whatever basement it was found in a few decades sooner than reality in this universe.

But honestly, it had to be this painting.  What else was it going to be?  Just look at it; it’s fucking insane.

As for the timing of the flashback itself, it’s sort of another area where I’ve altered canonical history a little bit to make the lore work in a way that makes better sense.  The lore on this show is all over the place, but that’s because it was never intended to make sense.  And that’s fine.  It was never supposed to exist in the first place.  It just happened organically by accident, and now here we are with these two doing whatever the fuck it is they do.  I sort of have it in my head that Alex started working for Greg much earlier than the show would have started, so that fancy “new” flat screen television that would have cost about £4,000 that Alex is definitely not thinking about would be circa around 2004 or so (thanks to that delightful outtake with Rhod).  I’m shuffling things around to make them go where they fit best, because the lore doesn’t fit together smoothly anyway.  It’s a wild mess of contradiction, often within the same banter segments, so like, fuck it.  This is going to be the sort of fic where all I can ask is that you roll with what I throw at you and trust that it’ll work out in the end.

The “present” part of the story takes place just before series 5, so you can decide for yourself if that’s Alice Lavine or not.  It wasn’t meant to be.  I think I accidentally and subconsciously turned that character into her while not paying enough attention to the name I gave her, but given what I’ve done with Greg to make the whole framing of the task element make sense, it could go either way. The show doesn’t recycle panelists except for Champion of Champions, but if we count Fringe shows as lore, there are quite a few people who have done it more than once. And I like the thought of that on a thematically messed up level, because I can do something with it helps brace up some more wobbly bits of my worldbuilding where the lore isn’t doing me many favours.  And I am counting the Fringe shows as lore for plot reasons, but in a backwards, janky sort of way.  TL;DR, the lore as it exists doesn’t make sense, so I’m giving myself carte blanche to cherry pick from it and do with what exists of it as I please.

As for what I’ve done with the whole task element, I really wanted to play with the entire lore element of that concept.  There are so many jokes and references and allusions to the tasks being done for Greg.  It’s his house, and he wants these things done for whatever insane reason.  Obviously, it’s just a framing device, because it gives some semblance of context for what is ultimately a very stupid and silly television show.  But this is a new fandom for me, fic-wise, which means most of you are probably new readers here, and my favourite question to ask when writing fic is why.  Why does this insane man want these things done?  But also, what is the in-universe context behind all of it?  If we take away the obvious answer—that one very silly man wrote some lines for another very silly man to read into a camera—and look at this through a fully Watsonian lens (which is often my favourite lens to look at anything), the answer becomes a lot more opaque.  Luckily, thanks to the frankly baffling amount of yes-and improv that happens on this stupid show, we do have an answer.  And it is just as insane and unhinged as that painting, but it’s also an answer that doesn’t need a lot of shoe-horning in for the exact same reason.  Because the man who wants things done really enjoys telling people to carry out pointless tasks, and is in a position of power that allows him to tell people to do these things.  He’s the sort of eccentric weirdo who can give himself a daft title, and nobody really questions it.  In fact, enough people treat it with at least a sort of mocking respect that it encourages him to keep doing it.

Alex, meanwhile, has something else entirely going on.  They both do.  Last week I talked about how there are two very different versions of Alex in this fic, and this is where we really see it.  Right off the bat, we see that Alex has always suffered from, “Guy who just says things” syndrome.  Somewhere along the line, that changed from nervously chattering on about whatever popped into his head to casually chattering on about whatever pops into his head.  So really, not much as changed, except he’s probably got a little more casually randy about the shit that comes out of his mouth.  I made this odd decision to break the chapters up this way, putting the flashback bit in the middle because I wanted to immediately show both of them at their worst—Greg at his meanest and Alex at his most needy and pathetic—immediately followed by both of them before they became whatever broken creatures they are now.  In the flashback parts, we’re going to see how they got to this broken state, while the present-day part is going to be something else entirely, set to the backdrop of series 5.

I’m also slightly altering that timeline a bit, and pretending that series 5 lasted ten weeks just for the sake of the narrative.  This is a world without the television show, and therefore a world without the constraints of such schedules.  The whole task element doesn’t work the same way the show does, because it doesn’t need to.  The guests stay on the estate for ten weeks, endure what is probably a war crime amount of psychological torture, take their compensation, and get sent on their way, with weekly meetings with the Taskmaster to discuss their performance.  It’s all very comic book villain, but he sort of is one.  And it’s a good job I’ve got plenty of experience writing those guys, because idk how I’d be able to handle that with a straight face otherwise, honestly.  When I was sitting down to work out how this would even, well, work, comic books were exactly where my mind kept gravitating back toward and eventually I had to just give in to the temptation.  It’s a patently stupid concept, and I think leaning into the stupidity without any amount of self-consciousness is really the only way to make it work at all.  Just embrace how ridiculous it is.  This guy, an actual lord, would likely have a lot of connections that would let him get away with a lot of dodgy bullshit.  They’ve joked about him having wealth, and multiple homes, so he could probably pay off people who weren’t already willing to look the other way, honestly.  He’s already admitted to being willing to take bribes to fix the competition; if he’s taking them, he’s probably not above making them, let’s be real.

TL;DR, Lord Greg Davies is dodgy as fuck, in more ways than one, and he should not be trusted.

As for Little Alex Horne, he’s got some problems of his own.  I pretty much went entirely stage persona with him, so don’t be surprised if certain details are missing.  He’s still a fucking weirdo though.  The key thing I’m leaning on here is the “Alex will do anything you tell him to” bit that Greg is often all too eager to exploit.  And that’s going to be the crux of this entire fic.  Alex will do anything he’s told, and he has bumblefucked his way into an interview to work for a man who far too much enjoys telling people what to do.  That right there is a match made in hell.

I’m going to be making a lot of executive decisions along similar lines as we go with the rest of the fic and characters as well, because this is a sort of Lore AU, or whatever we want to call this thing. Things need to make sense in that context.  There is no television show. The whole thing has been restructured and reframed into something a little more sinister to fit the lore as it’s presented around Greg and Alex’s weird-ass relationship as presented in the show, because that’s the primary thing I wanted to explore here. I’ve been fiddling and tweaking my original outline, removing and replacing a plotline that I’ve been uncertain about, and I think I have settled on keeping it, but keeping it means that I’m going to really need to rework it because in coming back to this I’ve decided that I hated how I was planning on doing it the first time round.  It’s a bit thematically out of pocket, but also kind of on brand at the same time, so I think it works.  Basically, this fic is weird, but it needs to be weird because everything about this show is weird.  I’ve already talked about the warnings and how they make everything seem worse than it is.  But it’s also not going to be a fluff-filled love-fest either.

I write weird fic for weird people.  And shit just got very League of Gentlemen all of a sudden somehow.

I’ll be updating the tag list that shows up on the landing page as I go with this, which does mean it will continue to get more and more insane and nonsensical as I go. But also, this fic has exploded into something much bigger than I expected it to be. I think it’s just going to become my new pet project, because I wound up with more ideas than I know what to do with at this point. But we’ll burn those bridges when we get to them.

Tone and trope spoilers ahead, but nothing too specific.

Oh look, it’s another terrifying fic with mental tags.  Is this even a surprise anymore?

Actually, it probably is because this is a new fandom for me.  So if you’re new here, hi.  In some parts, I’m known as that guy what wrote that really messed up Thor fic that got popular entirely for creating wank.  Or that guy what wrote that other really messed up Thor fic with terrifying tags (which one? Take your pick at this point.  This has definitely become my brand).

I write ugly stories about uncomfortable things, and boy oh boy, has Taskmaster really burrowed deep into that part of my brain that wants to pick this sort of thing apart.  Of course, I always run into a problem with these fics when it comes to tagging, even (it turns out) when I am totally in control over the tag system.  This is probably the worst one yet on that front, because I have literally no idea what to tag it.  In some aspects, I feel as though I’ve massively under-tagged it, because I simply don’t even know if there are names for half the tropes I’m playing with.  In other aspects, I’ve definitely over-tagged.  The dubcon aspect is especially over-tagged under an abundance of caution, simply because it’s a vague concept that carries a lot of disagreement.  Out of caution, I like to put the non-con warning on as well, but at least since this isn’t on AO3 anymore there’s no more confusion with the way they conflate non-con with rape by default (I’ve always hated that decision because of the way it muddles up kink vs trauma).  Overall, I tried to keep the tags to the overarching themes, rather than trying to hit every single minutiae that comes with the broader tropes.  And there is a lot of minutiae to explore in this thing.

In this fic, the consent is extremely dubious and occasionally under duress, but it’s also wholly separate from some of the other expectations that may come with this warning.  Similarly, the violence warning is there separate from the non-con one, and plays more into the “unsafe, insane, and dubiously consensual” tag.  The violence warning is there to cover the aspects of the BDSM element that permeates this entire ship, particularly with Greg’s frequent threats of bodily harm in mind.  Those threats are not going to be entirely empty, because I want Alex to have a reason to take them seriously.  At the same time, there is some level of consent to all of it, but the lines are blurred and I do love an unreliable narrator.  And I am going to say right up front, the narrator is unreliable.  This story is told through the lens of someone who is, I’m not going to say broken, but not quite right.  Unsafe and insane are the key words here, and that applies to both of them.  There are a lot of really good fics in this fandom that do it properly, and this is not one of them.  There are no safewords, and Alex barely has a way out of this situation, if he even wanted it.  One of my favourite bits of banter between them are the contradictory gags of “you’re here for life” and “I can replace you by lunchtime.”  Which one is it, Greg?  Or is it both?  Is he replaceable, but on the condition of something unspeakable?  What are you going to do to him if and when you finally get bored with him?  It is delightfully fucked up, and the fact that I’m sure neither of them have ever spared a second of thought toward it is what makes it so much fun for me.

In many ways, this fic is going to be a balls to the wall ride of insanity, but at the same time it’s likely to not quite go in the direction the warnings might make it seem like.  The freeforms are as accurate as I was able to get them without having the words to really articulate a lot of what’s going on.  But at the very basis, this is going to be a story about someone who has got into a situation he can’t get out of, whether for lack of viable options or because of his own psychosexual damage.  There are two separate stories being told in this fic, juxtaposed against one another in varying cadence and rhythm, and trying to tag for both of those stories at the same time was a nightmare.  There’s a certain degree of consensual non-consent in one story, and a complete breakdown of core functions in the other.  And that’s what I most wanted to play with here.  In this fictional universe they’ve created with their stage dynamic, there’s definitely something sinister going on.  Although it’s played for laughs, I wanted to strip that comedic element and play it completely straight.  I wanted to dig my fingers in and pull it apart at the seams to see what would make this sort of twisted dynamic work.  I wanted to find those dark corners and shine a light on them to see all the worms and spiders living there.  And to do that I needed to take it to all the extremes necessary to get these characters to a point where Alex wouldn’t even think to defend himself against having his face smeared in his own piss.  I had to really lean on that unhinged comic book villain energy to get Greg to a point where locking Alex in a cupboard as punishment is the least worst thing he could choose to do.

At the heart of my tagging issues with this fic is the story that’s set in the flashback sequences.  I have no idea how to succinctly describe the vibe I am going for here, or the story being told.  This story, which I don’t want to call the B story, but it’s also not the A story, it ultimately about privilege.  There’s the obvious power imbalance that comes with playing the Lord Davies gag straight, with a sort of sinister Downton Abbey twist in that Greg is very much in a position of power that could wholly and completely end Alex’s career prospects with a single bad reference.  Alex is naturally going to want to appease that just for the sake of the pay cheque and the reference.  But it’s also about the position of privilege Alex enjoys.  There’s an overall atmosphere of foreboding and discomfort that would make many people pack up and run for their own safety, pay cheque and reference be damned.  But Alex is an uncommonly tall, straight, white, able-bodied man.  These are instincts he very likely would never have learned to even recognise, much less act upon.  He’s awkward and uncomfortable as his default setting, so not being able to pick apart what makes this discomfort different from what he may have experienced in the past winds up being his own downfall.  By the time he realises this, it’s too late, and now he’s in hell.

I’ve got this whole fic sitting in Aeon, waiting to be typed up into proper drafts.  I don’t know how to tag it, but I tried to be as accurate as possible.  But there are two different stories happening at the same time and the tags make it seem even worse than it is, but it’s still definitely going to be bad, but maybe just not in the way you expect it to be.

Basically, take everything at face value, but don’t expect everything to be relevant to the same part of the story.

Addendum:

These notes were originally posted in February 2023, when this fic was posted to AO3.  I’ve slightly edited out references to this fic being being posted there, since it’s been pulled from there along with everything else.  But also, this fic got massively sidelined in March, along with several other projects I had going at the time.  The reason it got pulled from AO3 is separate to it getting sidelined.  The quick version for pulling it from AO3 is that I disagree with the way the site is run, and the abuse from certain demographics of the userbase aren’t being handled properly, so I quit.

If you followed me on Tumblr or my newsletter at that time, you’re probably aware of what happened on a more personal level.  If you didn’t follow me then, the quick version there is that my neighbour shot up my apartment and it turns out that having bullets go into your home really fucks you up and stops you being able to write for a while.

Since I’m reposting it here, I’ll be taking the opportunity to tidy some things up and bring some aspects into line with new lore that’s dropped in recent series.  I’ll post chapters every Thursday.  It’s not going out to the newsletter, because well.  It’s not exactly newsletter material, let’s be real.  Even without being RPF-adjacent, this fic is insane.  I’ll announce it on Tumblr every now and then, but that’s about it.

And since I’ve been doing this with other fics I’ve been posting, I’ve made a playlist for you, with the music I listen to while working on the fic.  This one was made today, because a lot of the music I was listening to the first time round was either on vinyl, or on smaller playlists that I consolidated into one big one for easier linking.  I’ll probably add to this over the course of working on this fic in the coming months, so don’t be surprised if it gets even bigger than it already is.