A bed of roses

By wordcount, The Goes Wrong Show is now my fifth most written fandom of all time, even discounting the fifty-plus Goes Wrong fills I wrote for the Three-Sentence Ficathon. This is an insane development; I started writing for this fandom two and a half months ago. Everything else in the top five is something I've been into for a decade or more.

I wonder what's made me fall so hard into writing for this fandom; slapstick stage plays are not my usual fandom fare! My best guess is that it's a combination of factors:

- There's enough Goes Wrong canon for me to get to know and care about the characters, but, at the same time, there is not enough Goes Wrong canon to satisfy me, so I'm uncontrollably driven to create more.

- In particular, there's very little Goes Wrong canon that shows the characters offstage! There's enough to get me interested in what happens offstage, and a couple of fascinatingly insane canonical details about the characters' personal lives (I am never going to be over the fact that Robert has canonically slept with both Chris and Dennis's mothers), but their offstage lives are left as a largely blank canvas that I can't resist painting on. There's a very obvious stretch of unexplored territory, and that sort of thing is always going to invite fanworks.

- Although this is a small fandom and my fics for it don't generally get a large readership, it's got enough life and passion in it to feel like I'm sharing with an enthusiastic small community, rather than dropping my work into a void. I've received a lot of really lovely comments, which have been very encouraging ♥

- I find Robert and Chris's voices very easy to get into. They're both middle-class, English and inclined towards slightly pretentious and/or old-fashioned phrasing, and, let's be honest, so am I.

- I'm very attracted to Robert Grove (as played by Henry Lewis), which is a fun novelty; it's pretty rare for me to find anyone seriously attractive. As a consequence, my writing about him has a refreshingly genuine horniness that I hadn't realised was lacking in a lot of my shipfic! It's very easy for me to write about Chris being attracted to Robert, and to believe wholeheartedly in that attraction, however unhappy Chris might be about it.

- Robert Grove is just a very fun character to write. I think a large part of it is as simple as that. He's loud, he's imposing, he's larger-than-life, he blithely causes problems for everyone, and everything he says or does is ridiculous. Plus he's straightforward in a way that proves extremely handy when writing shipfic; I've often had to struggle with characters who refuse to acknowledge their own feelings or dance endlessly around each other, so it's refreshing to write a character who will decide 'we should have sex' and then make that opinion very clear.

- It's been a long time since I last got heavily into a comedy fandom, and I'd forgotten how much fun it is to write comedy!

I'm so glad I was introduced to this stupid show. This is the best time I've had in a fandom in years.

I think this is the worst title I've ever given a fic.

Fun fact: I've now officially posted an entire quarter of the Robert/Chris fanfiction on AO3. I think this means there's not enough Robert/Chris fanfiction on AO3.


Title: Mixed Beans
Fandom: The Goes Wrong Show
Rating: 14
Pairing: Robert/Chris, with references to Robert/Celia
Wordcount: 2,700
Summary: Robert books a romantic getaway with Chris's mother. There is a misunderstanding.

( Mixed Beans )

Yet more fanfiction for The Goes Wrong Show!

Here's a game you can play: see if you can guess what Chris named the main characters in his play before you read this, on the assumption that Chris just asked himself 'what names do gay men have?'


Title: Ad Libitum
Fandom: The Goes Wrong Show
Rating: 14
Pairing: Robert/Chris
Wordcount: 1,800
Summary: Chris and Robert play lovers on stage. Things do not go as planned.

( Ad Libitum )