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PostPosted: December 11th, 2018, 8:20 am 
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As Rosey knows, I particularly like the parts inspired by the BBC's Absolutely Fabulous ('...another bottle of Bolly, darling?') not only because it helps us to see very clearly why Kylie finds her relationship with her mother so difficult, but also because it rings very true in relation to a member of our own family, though certainly not our mother!

The theme of relationships with parents and the various ways in which they can suck (or at least be very difficult!) has been prevalent in the Collinsverse for a long time, and certainly there's a lot more to come in the future. As I've confessed before, I myself have an extreme prejudice against fathers, which may come through in certain stories I have written (particularly one that's due out in a couple of months!) but as Kylie's feelings and experiences in this story remind us, mothers can be just as bad in their own way. Thankfully Kylie loves both her parents in spite of their many shortcomings, and I hope they're very grateful for that!

It's nice to see Eduardo and Kylie emotionally closer than ever after these events, and as he himself pointed out (though not in a nasty way, of course) Eduardo wasn't the only one with emotional baggage that he'd been keeping back. It's also nice to see a reference to a very silly dating show that we've both derived quite a lot of amusement from in recent months, and it makes me wonder who in the Collinsverse might have bells that hang lower than the rope. I have a couple of ideas about guys who might (when the rope isn't being used, I'm sure it goes without saying!) but we can be 100% sure that someone who doesn't have that particular physical trait is Michael!

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PostPosted: December 12th, 2018, 5:52 pm 
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Thanks as always for the comments. This really was the perfect opportunity to introduce Jill into the Collinsverse - and I'll say now that her 'familiar face' can be seen in our Character Index (complete with glass of Bolly).

Jill is basically the same as she was in the GBOT universe, as Fritz has no doubt noticed, but a (or perhaps the) difference is that she has a better relationship with Kylie here. Honestly (and not wanting to upset anybody), this was in some ways a reaction against all the fan theories about Kylie having a terrible relationship with her parents, and Grandma Rose being the only stable figure in her young life, usually with them living together. As a child of divorce myself, and considering the times that we live in, I find the negative stereotypes rather grating. There's no real evidence in the show that Kylie didn't have a perfectly fine relationship with either or both of her parents; the only time they and their divorce are even mentioned is in Grease, in the scene where Agent Stone is saying things like: 'Bitter about his disability and holds society personally responsible.' So that's really why this story attempts to make it clear that in my world, Kylie lived in her parents' two homes, had a perfectly reasonable and well-adjusted upbringing there, and also had lovely times visiting Grandma Rose (just like so many of us do with one or more grandparents that we're close to).

When I was mulling over how this story would go, I happened to find and watch an Ab Fab-inspired documentary where the two stars of the show went to France to learn all about champagne and pick the grapes etc. Though Patsy-&-Eddy, Jill and the relative Jake mentions have always reminded me very much of each other, I highly doubt that Jill's travelling companion would have been (near enough) Joanna Lumley herself if it hadn't been for that channel-hopping session.

I didn't know Jake was going to go into so much detail about the nude statue scene. I'm afraid I really don't have anything to add. :?

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PostPosted: December 30th, 2018, 6:32 am 
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Kevin and Oscar: Snapshots, Episode 5 - Q-and-A, by me.

December 2005: After Kevin makes an enlightening video to celebrate the success of his YouTube channel, he soon finds himself answering an important question that he failed to anticipate.

As promised quite recently, here is the evidence that Kevin is still very much in to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Just to add a bit more variety to the series, this one happens more from Oscar's point of view than Kevin's. It also sets things up for a meeting that has long been promised in this thread.

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Last edited by KevinsMensPyjamas on February 10th, 2019, 5:31 am, edited 1 time in total.

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PostPosted: January 3rd, 2019, 4:10 pm 
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KevinsMensPyjamas wrote:
Kevin and Oscar: Snapshots, Episode 5 - Q-and-A, by me.

December 2005: After Kevin makes an enlightening video to celebrate the success of his YouTube channel, he soon finds himself answering an important question that he failed to anticipate.

As promised quite recently, here is the evidence that Kevin is still very much in to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Just to add a bit more variety to the series, this one happens more from Oscar's point of view than Kevin's. It also sets things up for a meeting that has long been promised in this thread.


Sorry about the delay in commenting; things have been really weird and stressful around the place I live lately.

I admit I don't know much about Buffy or Angel, but having participated in other fandoms a lot of the internet fandom experience does feel pretty universal after a while.

And yeah, it will be interesting to see how the promised meeting turns out, and how the person reacts.

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PostPosted: January 4th, 2019, 8:53 am 
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This story is interesting for me to read; well, they all are, but this one specifically because Jake and I recently indulged in revisiting some Buffy together (there was no similar opportunity for Angel), and I also happen to know that Kevin's YouTube channel was heavily influenced by a YouTuber Jake used to watch (but he seems to have gone off him now). Funnily enough, I've just been working on a story influenced by my own favourite YouTube channel, but that's for another time.

This isn't the first or even the second time someone in the Collinsverse has revealed that Spike is their favourite Buffyverse character, but only some online fan far removed from the core characters could ever express an interest in Riley's sponge or anything else belonging to him! I remember wondering out loud if readers might be bored by all the Buffy talk, but Jake pointed out that the Buffy questions are alternated with questions about Kevin and his life, which I think works well. He sure doesn't mind sharing, does he?!

And yes, the promised meeting will take place 'on-screen', after my next release. I'll give you a hint: it bears very little resemblance to similar events in GBOT...

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PostPosted: January 5th, 2019, 6:38 am 
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Fritz wrote:
Sorry about the delay in commenting; things have been really weird and stressful around the place I live lately.
Sounds very like Britain at present.

I'm very glad to hear that Kevin's experiences as a prolific internet fandom contributor rang true. I was considering shaving off some of the more detailed comments he made about the Buffyverse in his Q-and-A video, but in the end I left it pretty much as it was when I first wrote it because I felt it was a realistic amount for him to say and not too excessive. I'm pleased that dovetailing it with snippets of Kevin's life had the desired effect on the narrative.

You were quite right to spot on your final check-through that Kevin told his viewers a little too much about what he used to do to himself when he was ten, but I think the eleventh-hour truncation I did on that line managed to make it seem like a genuine slip of the brain that was forestalled in a timely manner, rather than a deliberate piece of over-sharing. It was still more than enough to make Kevin rather embarrassed to know that his mother had watched the video, of course; while he very much enjoyed discussing such things with Michael when they were hanging out together in pyjama bottoms (I think most boys should be able to relate to that!) there definitely are limits.

As everyone knows, I took three things from the GBOT/comic versions of Oscar when I wanted to bring him in to Kevin's life - his music and his karate, both suggested by Rosey, and his openness to engaging romantically with another boy. Everything else I treated as a totally blank slate, including his hair, his build, where he lived, his interactions with both his families, and anything else I felt like sneaking in. As everyone also knows, I quickly decided that Kevin and Oscar should bond over their shared uneasiness and uncertainty about varying aspects of their relationships with their respective biological fathers, and I still think this is a pretty good idea.

However, I originally made far more effort to overcome my prejudice against fathers when it came to Carl than when it came to Andre, and that's one reason that the next story has gone through quite a lot of edits since its first draft. (There are other reasons too!) Hopefully what I'm going to present you with next time is a meeting between a biological father and son who have never really made the effort of forging a relationship with each other and have now left it rather too late, with some fault on both sides, although obviously more on the side of the dad than the son! I guess we'll just have to wait and see if that's the case.

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PostPosted: January 20th, 2019, 7:19 am 
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Eduardo and Kylie's European Vacation, Episode 5 - Logroño, by me.

Eduardo and Kylie have joined forces with a pair of fellow travellers who seem to be having as much fun as they are.

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PostPosted: January 20th, 2019, 7:06 pm 
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EGBFan wrote:
Eduardo and Kylie's European Vacation, Episode 5 - Logroño, by me.

Eduardo and Kylie have joined forces with a pair of fellow travellers who seem to be having as much fun as they are.


How did it take me this long to suggest the theme song for a story titled "European Vacation"?



Interesting to contrast, to spoiler a bit, a couple that starts the story still in the "will they won't they" phase with Kylie and Eduardo clearly in the "oh yes they will and did" phase. I laughed more than I should at some of the double foot entente. :lol:

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PostPosted: January 22nd, 2019, 7:35 am 
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This story makes overt reference to Extreme Ghostbusters itself with the Achira stuff, but it also makes less obvious, very careful use of Eduardo's deep and interesting character from the cartoon. He is reluctant to interfere with Caroline and Steph because he understands the nature of secret feelings (about a variety of things) and he respects other people's boundaries, just as he would like others to respect his own. He and Kylie together manage to find a good balance of just how much they should interfere, and happily that leads to the right outcome.

While I know that Caroline and Steph aren't specifically named after Catherine and Stephanie, I think the similarity of the names has worked out as a pretty cool piece of cross-Collinsverse homage. (As I've mentioned before in relation to Catherine and Stephanie, I myself have no doubt that both these girl-girl couples share the same kind of relationship.) This new Steph turned out to be one of those people who seems keen to start up a same-sex relationship and then goes cold on you (something that Oscar was certainly never guilty of!) so I'm very glad that Kylie and Eduardo were able to give this couple a push in the right direction.

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PostPosted: January 22nd, 2019, 12:20 pm 
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Thanks as always for the comments, boys. Spoilers ahead, in case anyone else needs to know.

Fritz wrote:
I laughed more than I should at some of the double foot entente.


Good to know. :P I seem to remember they came very easily once I'd got started by finding out the difference between Spanish and Mexican chorizo (very interesting), which I looked up after I found out that one of the recommended fun activities in Logroño is a tapas bar crawl, which I looked up after I realised I knew nothing about Logroño. I don't remember why I chose it as a destination, except that I wanted to set two stories in Spain (the upcoming Barcelona being a must), and perhaps I thought we'd better go somewhere else a little bit obscure (as well as Yorkshire and the Orkneys, both places Eduardo and Kylie went to because they happen to interest me). As it turns out, the tapas bar thing did very well for getting the ball rolling on this one, in which I decided to represent explicitly some female LGBT+ characters (that's explicitly in the sense that the relationship is clearly defined in-story, unlike Catherine and Stephanie's, not in the sense that there will be a deleted scene on AFF.org).

KevinsMensPyjamas wrote:
While I know that Caroline and Steph aren't specifically named after Catherine and Stephanie, I think the similarity of the names has worked out as a pretty cool piece of cross-Collinsverse homage. (As I've mentioned before in relation to Catherine and Stephanie, I myself have no doubt that both these girl-girl couples share the same kind of relationship.) This new Steph turned out to be one of those people who seems keen to start up a same-sex relationship and then goes cold on you (something that Oscar was certainly never guilty of!) so I'm very glad that Kylie and Eduardo were able to give this couple a push in the right direction.


It's just a huge coincidence that the names are so similar. It's funny to think that I wrote this story way back before Jake and I gave up on Neighbours because it got too stupid (not for the first time); at the time, the character called Steph was dithering over whether or not to pursue a same-sex relationship, as soap characters are wont to do. This is the reason why my Steph behaves as such, and it's also why I thought of making these characters Australian; if it hadn't been for the Neighbours storyline, they would almost certainly have been called Shirley and Caroline, and hailed from England.

In fact, Caroline was originally called Shirley, after the titular character in the Charlotte Brontë novel of the same name (just in case anyone thought I only took inspiration from trashy Australian soap operas :P), but reading it back, I decided that the names Shirley and Steph were too visually similar for these brand knew characters who came as a pair (as it very much were :?). Caroline is the character in the novel with whom I believe Shirley is in love and lust (evidently not a hugely famous and popular theory, but a little reading shows I'm not the only one to have thought of it). I think Brontë's Caroline is mostly or entirely heterosexual, making my knowingly and comfortably lesbian character much less like her namesake than if she had remained Shirley. I was actually a bit disappointed about that at first, but as Jake points out, it works out rather well in terms of Collinsverse homage.

And finally (though no one's mentioned it), perhaps it wasn't strictly necessary to mention Logroño's sex shop, but since I saw on Google Maps that it had one, I just couldn't resist referencing it :D (I had no desire to set any scenes there, though).

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PostPosted: February 10th, 2019, 5:39 am 
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Kevin and Oscar: Snapshots, Episode 6 - An Overdue Visit, by me.

March 2006: Kevin and Oscar take a trip to Nottingham, England to make two potentially significant visits. It soon becomes clear that these are likely to end up with contrasting outcomes.

This is a story of two halves, the first being the meeting with Andre that's been promised for so long in this thread (and some of the fallout from it), the second being something of a Kevin and the Gang retrospective/prospective. So, at least something for everyone I hope!

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Last edited by KevinsMensPyjamas on March 24th, 2019, 6:28 am, edited 1 time in total.

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PostPosted: February 11th, 2019, 3:52 pm 
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KevinsMensPyjamas wrote:
Kevin and Oscar: Snapshots, Episode 6 - An Overdue Visit, by me.

March 2006: Kevin and Oscar take a trip to Nottingham, England to make two potentially significant visits. It soon becomes clear that these are likely to end up with contrasting outcomes.

This is a story of two halves, the first being the meeting with Andre that's been promised for so long in this thread (and some of the fallout from it), the second being something of a Kevin and the Gang retrospective/prospective. So, at least something for everyone I hope!


Well, to his credit Andre didn't seem nearly as freaked out by Oscar being gay as Carl was with Kevin. Which is extra good if his kids with Kate are like the ones in the Ectozone/GBOT timeline--Lars is also gay (but probably doesn't realize it yet in 2006, as he was only 11).

As a person old enough to remember when having gay characters at all was shocking, the easy and natural comparison between Oscar/Kevin and Jandro/Lucy in the second part of the story, just two couples who enjoy each others companies, is very well done. Society has a long way to go, still, but we see how far we've come. The running joke about "is that legal?" helps highlight that, as it wasn't in 2006 and is now in a lot more places.

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PostPosted: February 12th, 2019, 12:19 pm 
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Fritz wrote:
Well, to his credit Andre didn't seem nearly as freaked out by Oscar being gay as Carl was with Kevin. Which is extra good if his kids with Kate are like the ones in the Ectozone/GBOT timeline--Lars is also gay (but probably doesn't realize it yet in 2006, as he was only 11).


Well, there are some very interesting similarities to and differences from the GBOT continuity in development, and some of them may or may not pertain to the Wallances... but either way, Andre does have a different and much, much more involved relationship with his other sons than with Oscar, so his reaction is likely to be different if one of them were to come out as gay. Better or worse? Who knows? (I certainly don't!) I guess worse could be just about any type of overtly negative reaction, while better would be Andre saying he was fine with it without getting out his nasal spray at all.

That reminds me: I think whoever organised the picture of Andre for our Character Index found a completely brilliant one! As Jake said to me the other day, it perfectly showcases the character as he was presented in the movie, and in this particular fan continuity I don't think he's going to get much development beyond that and this story. (Keep an eye on that index over the next couple of releases if you're interested, by the way, because a couple more additions are coming.)

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As a person old enough to remember when having gay characters at all was shocking, the easy and natural comparison between Oscar/Kevin and Jandro/Lucy in the second part of the story, just two couples who enjoy each others companies, is very well done. Society has a long way to go, still, but we see how far we've come. The running joke about "is that legal?" helps highlight that, as it wasn't in 2006 and is now in a lot more places.


This, too, makes me want to say something cryptic about what the future may hold... and I guess I just did, so I'll leave it there. ;)

Those places included Britain, in case anyone's interested; same-sex marriage was legalised here in 2014 (hooray!), which isn't a very long time ago unless you're a child, and certainly it was since I used up all my ideas for GBOT fanfics. Back then, Andre was the father battling intrinsic homophobia (clearly there has to be one); Carl is an excellent choice for that role, of course, and it has been Jake rather than I whose inner voices told him to develop Kevin and Carl in that direction. But of course, Carl isn't around this time, which means that this loving and committed couple happening to consist of two guys is of absolutely no consequence to anyone, least of all their best friends.

Some of our stories' titles come easily and are instantly perfect; this was one of the ones requiring some discussion, but I think we (I know I at least confirmed Jake's idea as good) got the right one in the end, for indeed, which of these visits was overdue? The father/son one, as you might expect...? (Sorry to blow the whole subtext there. :P)

I happen to know that real-life inspiration this time includes some of Jake's experiences in the story's location, and a particularly memorable vomiting incident (which did not take place on a plane, and that's all I'm saying).

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PostPosted: February 13th, 2019, 7:12 am 
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Thank you both so much for your excellent comments - they really do give me warm fuzzies when I read them!

Thinking about the whole Andre and Carl thing has made me wonder, who is actually better off in the biological father department - Kevin or Oscar? Oscar shares no emotional connection (either positive or negative) with Andre, while Kevin and Carl share a very strong connection which has and will continue to involve a huge mix of emotions, many of them more than a little harrowing at times. Certainly Oscar is better off overall in the father department, as he (as we'll be reminded in my next story) has a non-biological father with whom he shares a very good relationship.

Rosey and I have recently been doing more world-building than you can imagine, involving pictures, charts, and of course more stories! Hopefully you'll be suitably tantalised when I reveal that the Wallances (by which I mean Oscar's generation) are very much involved in a variety of interesting ways (certainly I think they're interesting!) and you never know when or how one or more of the Wallance kids might pop up in the Collinsverse as we continue, so watch out for them!

Some of my own experiences in Nottingham did indeed influence this story a great deal (sadly not the emotionally satisfying side-by-side sex, though!) and as Rosey knows, I actually removed a pretty hefty amount of micro-detail at various points before last Sunday's release. I'd hoped that I'd left in the right amount of the right stuff to achieve what I was going for with Kevin, Oscar, Lucy and Jandro, and I'm absolutely delighted to learn that I succeeded!

Our mother was absolutely wonderful in many, many ways, but she was also incredibly homophobic! Even when I was quite young, I used to think the things she said on the subject were pretty off the mark, and I'm very glad that we're now past the stage where gay characters are widely considered abnormal. By the same token, I wouldn't want to shoehorn gay characters into anything I wrote just for the sake of it. As I've mentioned before, I didn't know Kevin and Oscar were going to fall madly in love with each other when I first got them together, but they did, I thought it was an excellent thing to happen, and things went on from there really!

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PostPosted: March 3rd, 2019, 5:32 am 
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Eduardo and Kylie's European Vacation, Episode 6 - Barcelona, by me.

When Eduardo takes the opportunity to investigate his family history, he finds more than he bargained for.

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