Frankly amazing how Larissa Duan got away with "Lardo" for a nickname and not "Larry".

I don’t really think I want to sit down and unpack all my feelings about the end of OMGCP. I feel more than some people, less than others, a lot of it is bittersweet or resigned or unresolved, and I’m not sure how much benefit it would be to talk about it.

I’m working on reducing the amount of Check Please on my dash. If you’ve got a mainblog or a personal blog as opposed to your Check Please blog, please let me know what it is. In the meantime I am, as ever, at @star-anise.

Being in this fandom was a goddamn delight. I have loved knowing so many of you. Everyone take care and stay safe.

Okay, so.

I’m a Kent Parson stan, no two ways about it. I love the little shit and I only want the best for him. 

And over the past couple years, it has definitely felt like Ngozi went from being a Parse stan right along with me--calling him her favourite character, making fun tweets about him, drawing him in cute ways--to kind of disowning him. Talking about how he was a problematic white boy, deleting those fun tweets, diminishing his role in year four, emphasizing how he has to apologize and atone for how he’s acted in the past. And I have definitely felt abandoned and betrayed by her, as have many other Parse-positive fans.

But I think that in our disappointment, we’re missing out on why she’s stepping back from him.

Because she’s said why it’s happening, and it’s because of all the hatemail she gets about him.

When she said that, fandom kind of reflexively assumed it was coming from the Parse-positive side of fandom, which I felt kind of confused by because I didn’t see any proof of it. These days, I’m personally far more persuaded it was the opposite. I think she’s talking about hatemail by people who hate him. I think she stepped back from him as a character because she was affected by the volume and vehemence with which people really, really hate Kent Parson.

When I step back from my own feelings, from the betrayal of my own parasocial relationship with her, what I think is: That’s really fucking sad for her. I am really sorry that her own fandom scared her away from her artistic vision, that she lost faith in one of her favourite parts of the story and felt she had to make choices that basically feel like grovelling to his haters--”See, he’s barely there anymore, and look, he’s atoning for how awful he is.”

And honestly?

I think that the increasingly OMGCP-critical turn of the #parsepositive community--the tendency of Parse fans to respond to her decisions with anger, hostility, and incredulity, and to assume that she’s a bad artist who is fucking things up--is part of why she stepped away from him as a character.

Ngozi’s incredibly close to her fandom. Too close, in my own personal opinion, and not really clearsighted about which fans she encourages and validates vs which ones she gets offended by and thinks are trolls, but still--she’s really tuned into the fandom. And it’s really hard for anyone, as an artist, to operate in a vacuum. I think one thing there hasn’t been for her is a consistent Parse cheering section that will actually... appear happy when content about him appears, and reward her for making it. Instead, when she produces anything about him, his haters grind into high gear, and his lovers bitch about how inadequate it is.

And well... artists pretty much all respond to carrots way better than sticks. In the face of criticism and hostility from both sides, I’m really not surprised that she’s gone, “Yeah, this character is too much of a hassle to bother with.” If posting content about him online makes her life unlivable, I’m not actually surprised she’s stopped doing it. (I probably won’t pay for the new book, so much as duck into a bookstore and read the one single page he’s in, and then put it back on the shelf.)

But I am pretty tired of Parse fans acting absolutely outraged by her decisions, as if 1) she’s a shitty creator who deserves to be blamed for everything bad, and 2) that we, as fans, played no part in things getting to where they are now.

Honestly, as the sun sets on OMGCP, one of the things I feel worst about is that I spent so much time thinking about my own personal grievances with her (and yeah, I have very personal and specific reasons to gripe about her and how she’s treated me personally) to go, “Wow, I wonder what life is like for Ngozi right now? I wonder what her experience is. I wonder if she needs some of the positivity I’m trying to inject into fandom itself.” The most basic role of a fandom is a cheering section; I’ve been so used to fandoms where the creators are distant and hostile, where fandom is so massive that surely there are thousands of other people who will provide mindless validation, that it genuinely never occurred to me that I might make the creator feel that, despite my love for this character, I thought she, personally, was a piece of crap.

I really regret walking away from this fandom with everything in this state.

#wipitgood WIP amnesty: The fic I keep wrestling with but never make progress on, the “How Kent Parson Discovered Paganism” story. The poem quoted is real; it’s by Franco Buffoni. 

---

The year after my life fell apart and I made it big, I googled, "why is god cruel?"

Holy fuck, that got me so many stupid answers. I’d already tried to read When Bad Things Happen to Good People the summer before and given up a few pages in, and this was pretty much that in Google form. Everyone's so desperate to tell you that God doesn't really let bad things happen, they're not really bad, they're just secretly good things in disguise or something and it’s all going to work out in the end.

Fuck that.

But I found a poem.

@bardofspades​ suggested we #wipitgood, which is to say, since Check Please is ending soon, clean out our WIP folders with all the OMGCP fic we never got around to finishing.

This is my first WIP to post. Trigger warning: Child sexual abuse

A bit of backstory: Curtis O’Brien, my OC, fills the same space, more or less, as real-life hockey player Sheldon Kennedy, who revealed as an NHL player that he was sexually abused by his hockey coach when he was a teenager. He traded off the ability to sue the pants off the Canadian Hockey League for the ability to force them to implement training and policies aimed at preventing and reporting child abuse. After he got his PTSD somewhat under control, he became a full-time advocate against child abuse. 

My headcanon is that Kent likewise suffered abuse from his Bantam coach, and has spent a long time determinedly not talking about it. I wanted to write a fic where, before he did start talking about it, someone (in this case, Andy) got him to talk to the one man who’s an expert on what it’s like to be an NHL player out as a survivor. This piece really stops before any of that actual stuff takes place. You just get, you know, Kent being awkward, and everyone being giant nerds about public health. Oh, and the claim that Cummerbund was Andy's dog before she moved to LV, when I later determined that Kent and Andy adopted him together.