"q&a" dvd commentary
Dec. 17th, 2023 08:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
girlrockq&a / 814 (14.5k, m)
where do i even start... things have been/continue to be so hectic and busy so let me see whether i can get quick commentary out before i have to return to the annoying reality of irl demands *__*
origins
honestly i blame so many things for this fic happening. i am insane about them but also extremely normal! jk but literally risa and i's journey with them has been like [mar-jun] oscary teammate convenienceshipping is Not Real and cannot hurt you / [july-sep] wait a minute what the fuck is going on over here / [oct] I NEED TO WRITE FIC RIGHT NOW OR I WILL DIE. but also in november i had a mild reality check and became extremely annoyed at all content of them and was like "i'm over it now actually" (an exaggeration i was still consuming all of their content readily) because official socmed accounts don't know the first thing about rps discretion and i was like why are you as the tiktok admin using their ship portmanteau to farm engagement. what 4th wall messaging are we sending our teens...... and then the season ended and i suddenly finished this fic without even knowing what came over me.
tbh i started reading 814 fic pretty early into the season but i was just not personally convinced of them at all and was more like "there are plenty of great authors who write fun things so i can just enjoy the product as an op fan!" which is funny in hindsight... i started actively workshopping ideas with risa & tub in october, and then risa and i went to austin and we were literally getting IRL ko'd by fucking FINISH THE LYRICS.mp4 (10/19) *tiktok edits playing on loop* together, which i think is when they started really properly breaching containment as a ship, and then WHO'S MOST LIKELY.mp4 (10/25) came out not even a week after and got the ball rolling with secret fanboy au specifically, because of the sheer insanity of oscar having apparently watched this quadrant nortrell bait from 2021 (or at least clips of it i guess. which is just as bad???) and shamelessly referencing it to lando's face.
tbh i'm still constantly like "wow i will probably be over them in a year" but it's fun to me right now and there's no shame in living in the moment. c'est la vie! i think usgp was just a crazy time because we got sooo much 814 bait and that kept feeding into our cycle of collective brainrot. i also made this gifset after the lyrics video which really concentrated the idea to me that op is so much more online/in tune with gen z humor than people think he is and it's more that he's not into non-racing pop culture (very max v coded)... which kind of shaped his character here, as well as of course his pre-crbgate/f1 internet persona that i have spent too much time reflecting on...
fic premise
(10/25) i sent to risa: "i want a landoscar fandom au where oscar is [...] some well-adjusted profession who is also into a fandom (like f1 for example) but not in a fanboy twitter au way but like one of those nerdy matter-of-fact guys who respond to things factually on reddit / and somehow lando is involved there."
then i realized i could just make this A REALITY!!!!! which is where secret fanboy "au" came from. at its core it's about pseudoparasocial relationships and 814's dynamic being completely diametric to any of lando's previous partnerships and risa telling me "oscar can never say how he feels (in any context) about lando first he always has to gauge what level lando is at so he's not a LANDO NERD" and the push-pull of their introverted ambiguities and how for all he is considered a mature/level-headed/independent character oscar also depends a lot on lando's presence & is illogically and endlessly endeared to him in a way he has never been with anyone else before. but more on this in the commentary
also i must say that i am so sorry to everyone i complained about this fic to fr. it took me like a month to get the wip to 4k and then i revisited it properly last week and had to scrap most of it anyway, so i basically wrote 12k in 48 hours which is how i've been with EVERY SINGLE 10K+ FIC I'VE EVER WRITTEN. why do i do this every time! i also had to create a timeline doc to make sure i had career details right so the foundation is there if i ever decide to make a proper oscar primer lol.
but srsly everyone was so helpful and kind in getting it past the finish line... i said that i giffed 814 way too much to not have written anything for them this year and i'm relieved i finally exorcized one fic idea even if it's really small potatoes. beloved lowhours also helped beta tone/wording choices which quite literally saved everything. sorry for this monstrous intro but i'm just V GRATEFUL!!! ;___; i am not a person who can write twenty fics a year and instead must concentrate extremely hard on injecting any narrative sense whatsoever into a single document over an excruciating period of time, and i cared very much about approaching op's pov in a way that felt right to me, so i had a lot of fun fleshing out his character and it was actually nice to see my finished product for once. with some other fics i'm like if i think about this even once i will literally have to kms expeditiously (and then never reply to comments... i'm sorry TT__TT) but getting input from multiple people made it feel like a more viable project for some reason (local woman discovers the power of community). ok let me just get into the actual fic commentary!!!!
also i toyed with so many different lyrics for the title and nothing was hitting and then i was like actually cherry bullet q&a is an 814 song now. sorry. the casual yet obsessive need to know everything about someone else...... also the one-sided/strictly informative connotation of the word q&a, the fact that having curiosity for a person and knowing things about them doesn't inherently create true emotional intimacy, that familiarity is bred of what you choose to do with that knowledge and how you approach them with it etc. it's not that deep tho
commentary
the funny part about this fic is that the first scene i started writing ended up becoming the final scene, which i had to change a lot to make fit once i decided to do this in a linear fashion. i actually don't like writing linear fics and i love non-linear ambiguous relationship open ending whatever snapshot fic, so for example 43 character study was very "in" my comfort zone and that's probably why it's the longest thing i've ever written. but i ended up liking the structure of linearly covering oscar's first season... i also feel kind of weird/awkward referencing non-famous people in fic even though people write lilyz All The Time, but (deep oscar lore) i feel likeoscar having 3 younger sisters who don't gaf about his career and one of them being a very fashionable trendy gen z kpoppie (oscar probably the only guy on the grid who has been held at gunpoint to listen to hyuka sing in the car before ctfu) who constantly experiments with her hair when he's never used a comb in his entire life before informs so much of his personality and upbringing. like he's just easygoing lame-o normie who's clearly had a lot of emotional support in his life and has a strong sense of self but he also spent so much time alone growing up and hasn't had his ego excessively pampered. i suppose i wanted to establish NormalGuyisms to drive home the voyeuristic fanboy relatability later on......
>grandma's lamingtons reference i will never forgive lando for not trying them. the monster!!!
pre-season unboxed scene
>tbh i love this video and lando being like ...you've grown what the fuck mate??? because first of all they really are filming in such a strange liminal space, second of all their dynamic was deeply awkward back then, and third of all what is with the obsessive physical cataloguing when oscar looked soooo bad and bald. i realize i spend so much time bullying him whenever he's bald. mate your neck is too big for you to have your hair this short... this is not relevant to the fic sorry let's move on. but this also relates to the lando #1 fan shirtgate fiasco where they were, in fact, discussing oscar's neck growth because like so much of the 814 dynamic is being hyperaware of physicality but going haha jk unless...? about it in the most roundabout lad-y way possible. disgostang
actually these were some quick notes i jotted in my fic doc to help guide my characterization as i went:
so to me it was like: oscar has to be obsessed with lando. but he also has to have a spine... and everything in the end still has to boil down to racing because nothing will ever matter more than that.............. these were My Only Conditions.
(also old thoughts sent to risa)
me: lando is so socially adaptable it's fascinating
me: like i think he has a very apparent true self but it's kind of like there's this baseline lando that is at the core of every interaction and then extra cosmetic surface adaptiveness depending on who he's talking to
me: and i really think he does this more than the other guys around his age which is why he gets along so well with everyone
me: and oscar will always only be oscar. what does that mean of their dynamic i'm not sure...
i also desperately wanted to inject maxf layers into this fic because i'm always talking about the weird triangulation they have in a kind of indirect unintentional way (aka maxf & oscar are friendly and have rsa history but they aren't actually friends, maxf sending out congratulatory tweets for each junior championship oscar won makes it seem like they aren't on a Private Texting Basis, and everything that happened to maxf doesn't actually relate to oscar but they're still embedded in each other's racing history in an interesting enough way that it makes nrtrll codependency especially fascinating). the way him reacting to the who's more likely video literally fried my brain:
karting backstory
>honestly where would oscar have even seen videos of lando karting that was definitely bullshitted for narrative simplicity. but i do think oscar's fascination with lando's f3 days/liking obscure tweets of his career throughout the years was born of his time with rfm, and there's an article that's explicitly like yeah they emailed rflynn because they saw the success they were having and lando had just won the championship. vewy dewishus... and fsr i really just like the idea of oscar harboring this secret admiration/obsession with lando during the days when lando had an actual spotless & stellar junior career, "When they were younger he watched him dominate every car he ever got his hands on, dispatched each and every championship with rapid, clinical precision" - aka winning everything up until f2 which he conceded to gr63, and which he & gr joked in the recent rookies reflection video was because ln was too focused on making it to f1 later on lol - whereas a lot of lando's irl image NOW is a very clownish exaggeration and bad faith misinterpretation of his winless streak & supposedly (un)competitive mentality. so... well.
>unrelated sorry for referencing lando maccies dmgate it will happen again.
"Mark texts Ann, who tells him to turn his message requests off" scene
>so random but you ever think about how mark was on the grid during like the Fun celebculture slagclaren days and was all like "at first i thought oscar needed to inject more urgency into his personality but then i realized that's just his frequency :/ he's chillin'" and oscar is literally Some Guy who's like the most thrilling part of silverstone was getting chicken nuggets at a service station afterward. love ha
>i realized i have way too many deeplore references in this fic. why did i do all that
>"The problem is that Lando is too kind to ever feign dishonesty" actually one of my fav landocharacterization lines.......... his biting honesty IS his greatest kindness. oscar is nice and polite because he was socialized like a boy who sat his a-levels (actually he didn't because covid but he got results lol) but lando truly believes in the mercy of not entertaining pointless optimism or feeding white lies in imitation of artificial sympathy. unrelated to this i apologize for having extremely evident piastrella brain later in this fic
+ the rest of this scene and the give/take callback... ofc it's about lando SINCERELY ENJOYING his parasocial relationships & the proximity he has to his fans (and having been a fanboy himself when he was younger; "his hero above heroes is Valentino Rossi [...] it was funny, almost, the way he carried the fluorescent imprint of his childhood affections like a heartbeat" aka fluo yellow obsession and making it his/quadrant's color), whereas oscar is very much like........ i didn't have any heroes growing up i just kind of liked mark because he was australian and i respected lewis for everything he's done for the sport and i thought the 2k19 rookies were cool when i was going up the junior ranks i guess but that was mostly just begrudging acknowledgment of their success and rapid trajectory whatever. the layers and nuances you can pull from all of that...
>SILVERSTONE SCENE WITH MAXF..............
i already talked about wanting to explore this dynamic but i just love the weird awkward presumed heterosexual male socialization sort-of toxicity of "why is my best mate obsessed with you" and then YOU literally being the guy who beat your ass the year you retired from racing.
also "Oscar had made his way to Renault with a year of acclimating to the austere bureaucracy and distorted expectations of a French outfit under his belt" → this is a reference to an interview on i think jhughes pod where they were like teehee how was it being in a french team for formula renault (r-ace) 🤭 and he's like it's fine!! they get a bad rap!!! french people are normal!!! when he was still innocently an alpine kid who didn't know what was awaiting him LMFAO. too funny to pass up... also this entire fic is dedicated to my favorite bitchy oscar tweet❤️
>singapore ice bath scene was truly just to drive home their physical tension reaching its boiling point & their general obsessive impulsivity around each other. for an 814 writer it is such a free card for developing mutual voyeurism
>"Oscar had always liked the idea of Lando. This would turn out to be the foundation of everything." scene → DEEP_814_LORE = 2020 BAKU VIRTUAL GP 4-5 FINISH. WHY AREN'T WE TALKING ABOUT THIS! lol jk but anyway this entire section just boils down to the line between reality & fantasy and oscar's self-contradicting attachment to lando. knowing too much (of the image he's created for himself, the one he propagates for profitable means) but also being constantly driven by a desire to know more, feeling like he can never know enough... etc.
a few more 814 character excerpts:
>reddit scene
anyway out of the whole fic i truly hate the ending the most but i have to accept that writing romanz is inherently cringe and that's simply reality. embrace it...! in the end it boils down to lando enjoying the Idea of oscar's tunnel vision, the vague unacknowledged knowledge of his fanboyisms that passively rests between them, and then unintentionally chasing his attention and trying to reciprocate that affection in order to have some semblance of equal ground, but then oscar just being so a) resistant to codependency and b) used to liking lando that he reflexively compartmentalizes it to the point of not rising to lando's bait, hence the nonsensical asymmetry and why none of their communication MAKES ANY SENSE. because lando is like please stroke my ego some more!!! and oscar is like...... well obviously i'm dtf but why does that matter here. LOL
this commentary is way too long!!!!!!! so sorry. next up on the menu... nothing ❤️ but thank u for entertaining my hopeless rambling if u made it this far T__T
where do i even start... things have been/continue to be so hectic and busy so let me see whether i can get quick commentary out before i have to return to the annoying reality of irl demands *__*
origins
honestly i blame so many things for this fic happening. i am insane about them but also extremely normal! jk but literally risa and i's journey with them has been like [mar-jun] oscary teammate convenienceshipping is Not Real and cannot hurt you / [july-sep] wait a minute what the fuck is going on over here / [oct] I NEED TO WRITE FIC RIGHT NOW OR I WILL DIE. but also in november i had a mild reality check and became extremely annoyed at all content of them and was like "i'm over it now actually" (an exaggeration i was still consuming all of their content readily) because official socmed accounts don't know the first thing about rps discretion and i was like why are you as the tiktok admin using their ship portmanteau to farm engagement. what 4th wall messaging are we sending our teens...... and then the season ended and i suddenly finished this fic without even knowing what came over me.
tbh i started reading 814 fic pretty early into the season but i was just not personally convinced of them at all and was more like "there are plenty of great authors who write fun things so i can just enjoy the product as an op fan!" which is funny in hindsight... i started actively workshopping ideas with risa & tub in october, and then risa and i went to austin and we were literally getting IRL ko'd by fucking FINISH THE LYRICS.mp4 (10/19) *tiktok edits playing on loop* together, which i think is when they started really properly breaching containment as a ship, and then WHO'S MOST LIKELY.mp4 (10/25) came out not even a week after and got the ball rolling with secret fanboy au specifically, because of the sheer insanity of oscar having apparently watched this quadrant nortrell bait from 2021 (or at least clips of it i guess. which is just as bad???) and shamelessly referencing it to lando's face.
tbh i'm still constantly like "wow i will probably be over them in a year" but it's fun to me right now and there's no shame in living in the moment. c'est la vie! i think usgp was just a crazy time because we got sooo much 814 bait and that kept feeding into our cycle of collective brainrot. i also made this gifset after the lyrics video which really concentrated the idea to me that op is so much more online/in tune with gen z humor than people think he is and it's more that he's not into non-racing pop culture (very max v coded)... which kind of shaped his character here, as well as of course his pre-crbgate/f1 internet persona that i have spent too much time reflecting on...
fic premise
(10/25) i sent to risa: "i want a landoscar fandom au where oscar is [...] some well-adjusted profession who is also into a fandom (like f1 for example) but not in a fanboy twitter au way but like one of those nerdy matter-of-fact guys who respond to things factually on reddit / and somehow lando is involved there."
then i realized i could just make this A REALITY!!!!! which is where secret fanboy "au" came from. at its core it's about pseudoparasocial relationships and 814's dynamic being completely diametric to any of lando's previous partnerships and risa telling me "oscar can never say how he feels (in any context) about lando first he always has to gauge what level lando is at so he's not a LANDO NERD" and the push-pull of their introverted ambiguities and how for all he is considered a mature/level-headed/independent character oscar also depends a lot on lando's presence & is illogically and endlessly endeared to him in a way he has never been with anyone else before. but more on this in the commentary
also i must say that i am so sorry to everyone i complained about this fic to fr. it took me like a month to get the wip to 4k and then i revisited it properly last week and had to scrap most of it anyway, so i basically wrote 12k in 48 hours which is how i've been with EVERY SINGLE 10K+ FIC I'VE EVER WRITTEN. why do i do this every time! i also had to create a timeline doc to make sure i had career details right so the foundation is there if i ever decide to make a proper oscar primer lol.
but srsly everyone was so helpful and kind in getting it past the finish line... i said that i giffed 814 way too much to not have written anything for them this year and i'm relieved i finally exorcized one fic idea even if it's really small potatoes. beloved lowhours also helped beta tone/wording choices which quite literally saved everything. sorry for this monstrous intro but i'm just V GRATEFUL!!! ;___; i am not a person who can write twenty fics a year and instead must concentrate extremely hard on injecting any narrative sense whatsoever into a single document over an excruciating period of time, and i cared very much about approaching op's pov in a way that felt right to me, so i had a lot of fun fleshing out his character and it was actually nice to see my finished product for once. with some other fics i'm like if i think about this even once i will literally have to kms expeditiously (and then never reply to comments... i'm sorry TT__TT) but getting input from multiple people made it feel like a more viable project for some reason (local woman discovers the power of community). ok let me just get into the actual fic commentary!!!!
also i toyed with so many different lyrics for the title and nothing was hitting and then i was like actually cherry bullet q&a is an 814 song now. sorry. the casual yet obsessive need to know everything about someone else...... also the one-sided/strictly informative connotation of the word q&a, the fact that having curiosity for a person and knowing things about them doesn't inherently create true emotional intimacy, that familiarity is bred of what you choose to do with that knowledge and how you approach them with it etc. it's not that deep tho
commentary
the funny part about this fic is that the first scene i started writing ended up becoming the final scene, which i had to change a lot to make fit once i decided to do this in a linear fashion. i actually don't like writing linear fics and i love non-linear ambiguous relationship open ending whatever snapshot fic, so for example 43 character study was very "in" my comfort zone and that's probably why it's the longest thing i've ever written. but i ended up liking the structure of linearly covering oscar's first season... i also feel kind of weird/awkward referencing non-famous people in fic even though people write lilyz All The Time, but (deep oscar lore) i feel like
>grandma's lamingtons reference i will never forgive lando for not trying them. the monster!!!
pre-season unboxed scene
>tbh i love this video and lando being like ...you've grown what the fuck mate??? because first of all they really are filming in such a strange liminal space, second of all their dynamic was deeply awkward back then, and third of all what is with the obsessive physical cataloguing when oscar looked soooo bad and bald. i realize i spend so much time bullying him whenever he's bald. mate your neck is too big for you to have your hair this short... this is not relevant to the fic sorry let's move on. but this also relates to the lando #1 fan shirtgate fiasco where they were, in fact, discussing oscar's neck growth because like so much of the 814 dynamic is being hyperaware of physicality but going haha jk unless...? about it in the most roundabout lad-y way possible. disgostang
actually these were some quick notes i jotted in my fic doc to help guide my characterization as i went:
- a big part of oscar's personality is that he is accommodating of lando's particularities, and in this au especially is illogically drawn to him / interested in him and thinks that he's cool or funny or endearing despite being a massive loser. well this is canon but it's just exaggerated in au form
- at the same time oscar is technically more level-headed and also has strong convictions, and i think it's important to their dynamic that he doesn't bend to lando's will at the expense of his own autonomy, and i also don't think he'd be embarrassed about his own affections or being called out on them, just maybe a little awkward about having a "fanboy" past (but this also should not be overly exaggerated)
- lando should be kind of callous/mischievous but not cruel about it, he just instinctively teases a lot without realizing whether it's too much for the other person, but i also think oscar can handle his smugness without it being grating
so to me it was like: oscar has to be obsessed with lando. but he also has to have a spine... and everything in the end still has to boil down to racing because nothing will ever matter more than that.............. these were My Only Conditions.
The first few months of media duties always seem to play out this way. Stilted and slow, like a series of over-calculated chess moves, every acknowledgement of newly shared territory fine-tuned and choreographed to the edge of teammate sensibility. Pushing the door ajar, clumsily plunging a hand across and searching around in the dark for the other's breaking point. Lobbing the ball back and forth until it sank its way into Oscar's court. They both had limits; it was only a question of how far they were willing to take them.(gesturing) it's lichrally about Limits... and what it really means to "know" someone...... and the inherent gaychickenness of having to interact with someone knowing that you are simultaneously strangers and teammates and parasocial pr figures destined for relentless socmed scrutiny
Oscar keeps his hands to himself the moment they're no longer being coaxed into touching Lando, away from the blinding sensation of his body heat. He clasps them tightly behind his back, content to track how Lando's fingers wrestle together unendingly, the way he lifts a thumb to his mouth to bite near the cuticle and inelegantly chews on his nails for the cameras to see. Lando is like a wind-up toy that's been set off to run through its reserves of kinetic energy. Barrelling on without purpose, all nervous jagged movements until there's nothing left in him to release.
(also old thoughts sent to risa)
me: lando is so socially adaptable it's fascinating
me: like i think he has a very apparent true self but it's kind of like there's this baseline lando that is at the core of every interaction and then extra cosmetic surface adaptiveness depending on who he's talking to
me: and i really think he does this more than the other guys around his age which is why he gets along so well with everyone
me: and oscar will always only be oscar. what does that mean of their dynamic i'm not sure...
i also desperately wanted to inject maxf layers into this fic because i'm always talking about the weird triangulation they have in a kind of indirect unintentional way (aka maxf & oscar are friendly and have rsa history but they aren't actually friends, maxf sending out congratulatory tweets for each junior championship oscar won makes it seem like they aren't on a Private Texting Basis, and everything that happened to maxf doesn't actually relate to oscar but they're still embedded in each other's racing history in an interesting enough way that it makes nrtrll codependency especially fascinating). the way him reacting to the who's more likely video literally fried my brain:
karting backstory
>honestly where would oscar have even seen videos of lando karting that was definitely bullshitted for narrative simplicity. but i do think oscar's fascination with lando's f3 days/liking obscure tweets of his career throughout the years was born of his time with rfm, and there's an article that's explicitly like yeah they emailed rflynn because they saw the success they were having and lando had just won the championship. vewy dewishus... and fsr i really just like the idea of oscar harboring this secret admiration/obsession with lando during the days when lando had an actual spotless & stellar junior career, "When they were younger he watched him dominate every car he ever got his hands on, dispatched each and every championship with rapid, clinical precision" - aka winning everything up until f2 which he conceded to gr63, and which he & gr joked in the recent rookies reflection video was because ln was too focused on making it to f1 later on lol - whereas a lot of lando's irl image NOW is a very clownish exaggeration and bad faith misinterpretation of his winless streak & supposedly (un)competitive mentality. so... well.
Perhaps the story starts here. Mere childhood curiosity. Single-minded hunger mistaken for admiration, or jealousy, misappropriated desire forged along the lines of teenaged tenacity. Oscar wanted to win. Badly.
>unrelated sorry for referencing lando maccies dmgate it will happen again.
He looked down at his hand. Where his phone had once been was now empty space, just air sifting through his fingers. With some trepidation, he glanced over and saw that Lando was already jabbing away at his screen, probably auto-locked in the kerfuffle. "What's your password?"it's about lando being ANNOYING AS FACKKKK
"Not telling you."
"Honestly," Lando chastised. "You're such a child. Can't believe I ever thought you were the mature one here."
"I— You." It was a trap. Oscar knew that. Any declaration of his own maturity would immediately negate its sanctity. He couldn't give Lando any more than he'd already taken, the satisfaction of seeing him fluster. Damn it, he was good.
"Mark texts Ann, who tells him to turn his message requests off" scene
>so random but you ever think about how mark was on the grid during like the Fun celebculture slagclaren days and was all like "at first i thought oscar needed to inject more urgency into his personality but then i realized that's just his frequency :/ he's chillin'" and oscar is literally Some Guy who's like the most thrilling part of silverstone was getting chicken nuggets at a service station afterward. love ha
>i realized i have way too many deeplore references in this fic. why did i do all that
But one more stream quickly became two, because Lando was actually kind of funny without trying to be, or—especially when he wasn't trying to be. He showed his face online way more than was professionally advisable, and the longer he went live the more his self-imposed filter seemed to wear down around him, the more he cannibalized the lackluster scraps of his PR character; the more Oscar truly saw him. Or felt like he did.
It turned out that he liked it, having something he could hold close to the chest, something entirely for himself. Cataloguing the secret memory of Lando's cherry-red blush, the breathy echo of his voice when he pressed himself too close to the mic, how Lando always twitched and shifted around in his seat. Oscar closed his eyes and could reconstruct the mannequin display of him.everything is about pseudoparasocial relationships............ it's acceptable because oscar is actually normal. but also deeply abnormal. but also he's chill about being abnormal so it circles back to being normal. aka it wouldn't work in any other context with any other people. also i truly struggled so much injecting enough Horniness into oscar's pov because i am a lesbian with a biological resistance to any and all of lando's fashion decisions... but i tried!!!!
Okay. So, maybe it was a little bit of a thing.
>"The problem is that Lando is too kind to ever feign dishonesty" actually one of my fav landocharacterization lines.......... his biting honesty IS his greatest kindness. oscar is nice and polite because he was socialized like a boy who sat his a-levels (actually he didn't because covid but he got results lol) but lando truly believes in the mercy of not entertaining pointless optimism or feeding white lies in imitation of artificial sympathy. unrelated to this i apologize for having extremely evident piastrella brain later in this fic
Lando ⛳️ok random but something i Always Overthink when i write fic is whether a character should lapslock text. i honestly feel like less people lapslock text than fic writers assume because even OnlineGuys leave auto-caps on, and i used to mostly write k-pop fic and i'd never lapslock then because there is really no syntactic equivalent (assuming characters are communicating in korean). like i guess lapslocking "conveys" tonal informality but i also believed you should communicate this through vocabulary and varying levels of formal address instead, so i never lapslocked in k-pop fic (or only did but basically i didn't mix them)..... anyway i went back and changed some lines around after i posted so that it's like >lando doesn't lapslock at first because he's trying to be Normal and Respectable around oscar but then it slowly slips away because he starts treating him like one of his mates. LOL this is a tiny detail/nitpick that does not matter at all tho
??? Hello
Watch the hippocrisy bruv
Lando's dumb typos really shouldn't make Oscar smile, but he's long accepted the logical fallacy of their situation.
+ the rest of this scene and the give/take callback... ofc it's about lando SINCERELY ENJOYING his parasocial relationships & the proximity he has to his fans (and having been a fanboy himself when he was younger; "his hero above heroes is Valentino Rossi [...] it was funny, almost, the way he carried the fluorescent imprint of his childhood affections like a heartbeat" aka fluo yellow obsession and making it his/quadrant's color), whereas oscar is very much like........ i didn't have any heroes growing up i just kind of liked mark because he was australian and i respected lewis for everything he's done for the sport and i thought the 2k19 rookies were cool when i was going up the junior ranks i guess but that was mostly just begrudging acknowledgment of their success and rapid trajectory whatever. the layers and nuances you can pull from all of that...
>SILVERSTONE SCENE WITH MAXF..............
i already talked about wanting to explore this dynamic but i just love the weird awkward presumed heterosexual male socialization sort-of toxicity of "why is my best mate obsessed with you" and then YOU literally being the guy who beat your ass the year you retired from racing.
It's excruciating, stilted small talk. But Max accepts it, snorting in agreement. "Good thing you got the upgrades this week, yeah?" he says. Then he makes a funny face, looking contemplatively off into the distance. "Shit. I mean. Front row at frickin' Silvo. The guy's mental."
Right. So back to Lando it was, then; that had lasted about a good thirty seconds. Oscar's almost impressed.
That was the last of them, before Lando. The real memory of Max in Oscar's head, the one who must have sat in his Hitech motorhome stewing through briefings on the impossibility of his self-fulfillment. Tough, that.re: ~what Oscar remembers most about Max is how mentioning Lando had been like a compulsion to him~ scene... i had to be less sympathetic to nrtrll than i am in reality in this fic because it's through oscar's lowkey highkey judgy pov. also timeline wise all the rsa stuff happens Before lockdown-induced ln4 obsession so it's very much like "wow, you're obsessed with your childhood f1 driver friend even though You Personally Suck? how embarrassing" and then 3 months later he's like, actually, I'M obsessed with your childhood f1 driver friend but in a more disengaged and socially acceptable and extremely woke and secretive way. also i'm on his level so you wouldn't get it mate 🤷♂️ like it's important that oscar is nice but not sympathetic and that he doesn't care about people's racing careers ending because it is simply a skill issue at the end of the day. whereas lando like, doesn't give public consideration to his competitors and also will not feel Functionally Bad for someone when they suck, but he still cares deeply for his non-racing friends and literally took maxf in after he stopped racing (and lowkey created a viable career path for himalsdfkhsdfhsdf). oscar on the other hand simply cannot envision having non-racing friends like there is no other world for him. the entirety of his social circle encompasses a girlfriend who is smarter than him and wants to work in motorsport
[...] Oscar and Max had both been baby-faced, awkward and growing, shaped by diverging convictions. One boy's waned with the pressure, the isolation, the realization that he might not be enough. The other's grew the more he got to sink his teeth into.
also "Oscar had made his way to Renault with a year of acclimating to the austere bureaucracy and distorted expectations of a French outfit under his belt" → this is a reference to an interview on i think jhughes pod where they were like teehee how was it being in a french team for formula renault (r-ace) 🤭 and he's like it's fine!! they get a bad rap!!! french people are normal!!! when he was still innocently an alpine kid who didn't know what was awaiting him LMFAO. too funny to pass up... also this entire fic is dedicated to my favorite bitchy oscar tweet❤️
>singapore ice bath scene was truly just to drive home their physical tension reaching its boiling point & their general obsessive impulsivity around each other. for an 814 writer it is such a free card for developing mutual voyeurism
>"Oscar had always liked the idea of Lando. This would turn out to be the foundation of everything." scene → DEEP_814_LORE = 2020 BAKU VIRTUAL GP 4-5 FINISH. WHY AREN'T WE TALKING ABOUT THIS! lol jk but anyway this entire section just boils down to the line between reality & fantasy and oscar's self-contradicting attachment to lando. knowing too much (of the image he's created for himself, the one he propagates for profitable means) but also being constantly driven by a desire to know more, feeling like he can never know enough... etc.
a few more 814 character excerpts:
There was an idea and there was a reality.
The reality wasn't too different from the idea, though. Which was kind of the problem.
Lando is hungry. For more, for better, beating himself bloody in subjugation of excellence, starving to the point of desperation.
(szka scene) He'll get it right, he tells himself. And he does, in Qatar, or at least he gets it less wrong than everyone else does. First sort-of win in the Sprint. Best of the rest when it actually matters. Lando's frustration is clear as day, because that's how they work, interminably. Lando gives, and he takes.sides of a coin...... pseudoparasocial relationships flattened by pursuit of equal footing, driven by a need to be directly and actionably better than him in every metric you care to measure self-worth by. the push-pull of it all!!! et cetera
So does Oscar.
>reddit scene
"D'you want to explain to me why you've written twelve different comments defending my honor to Reddit strangers?" Lando asks, lifting another hand to blindly scroll at the screen with his index finger.SO OBJECTIVELY RIDICULOUSLSKDHFH but i also DO believe that if oscar were ever to involve himself in pointless wank on the internet it'd be on a burner account putting idiots in their place on random r/formula1 threads. also i think oscar is fully capable of this behavior because of that time he politely argued with random people about his covid test tweets when he was flying through spain lol. and then afterward he was like damn i regret tweeting that now (implied: people are so stupid and annoying)
Hm.
No, he thinks. Not really.
Frankly, the when or why didn't matter now. They were already way past the tipping point of being normal around each other. Neither of them did things in halves, it turned out, only by quarters or in full, so there was no symmetry to their relationship, the steps they'd taken to reach this current conclusion, only unnecessarily complex fractions that required constant deconstruction to make sense of. Lando was just another corner that needed coaxing. Oscar had to get the tyres into the right window, feel out the grip. It was just a game of timing.i think this encapsulates everything basically *__*
anyway out of the whole fic i truly hate the ending the most but i have to accept that writing romanz is inherently cringe and that's simply reality. embrace it...! in the end it boils down to lando enjoying the Idea of oscar's tunnel vision, the vague unacknowledged knowledge of his fanboyisms that passively rests between them, and then unintentionally chasing his attention and trying to reciprocate that affection in order to have some semblance of equal ground, but then oscar just being so a) resistant to codependency and b) used to liking lando that he reflexively compartmentalizes it to the point of not rising to lando's bait, hence the nonsensical asymmetry and why none of their communication MAKES ANY SENSE. because lando is like please stroke my ego some more!!! and oscar is like...... well obviously i'm dtf but why does that matter here. LOL
When Oscar opens the door, Lando is on the other side, looking exhausted and beautiful and podium-worthy. His hair is wet and his mouth set into a deep, sullen line.so ridiculous....... unfortunately i quite enjoy them.
"You knob, making me work for frickin' everything," he mutters, like it's an entirely new concept to him, having to put himself out there and actually ask for things. God forbid anyone on this grid try and maintain a semi-adult conversation.
this commentary is way too long!!!!!!! so sorry. next up on the menu... nothing ❤️ but thank u for entertaining my hopeless rambling if u made it this far T__T
