Work Text:
Hello! Introduce yourself and what your role was while writing faultlines!
K: Hey there! I’m K, a.k.a Kinaku-Mirai, I mostly edit and help brainstorm, occasionally writing a few paragraphs here and there. I also made the art you see in a couple of the chapters!
chrys: heyo. i’m chrys, and i was one of the writers/artists for faultlines. i also wrote you’re human tonight, which is what the faultlines au is based off of :]
MJ: Hello, I’m MJ, or MarianneDashwood and I’m one of the writers for faultlines! I sent the original message which kickstarted the au, and in retribution everyone else turned a small idea into the most incredible thing in the world.
Mads: Hi I’m Mads/Oracle and I write and come up with angsty ideas to make you cry, with such hits as Karl’s settling, Wilbur soul bonding with Dream and the separation of chapters 24 and 25.
Iz: Hi, I’m iz. I brainstorm, add little bits of prose, and help edit.
Ophelia: Hello! I’m Ophelia. :) I mainly edit and brainstorm, but I add some prose in too!
How did it all actually get written? How tf did you get so many writers to collaborate peacefully on 100,000+ words when doing a group project is like pulling teeth? How do you decide who writes what and who edits?
MJ: Pure dumb luck. Somehow, we managed to collect some of the nicest and most incredibly skilled people into one group and get them to write a fic together. In terms of choosing who wrote and who edited, it was mostly self selected! If you wanted to write, you could write, and if you just wanted to edit, you could just edit. We even had a role in our small discord for people who just wanted to lurk and suggest ideas but not actually write or edit at all! Now buckle up kiddos, as MJ gives a powerpoint presentation on how we got from this:
To 100,000+ words. As you can see, we started in the young god discord server, throwing ideas around in the brainstorming channel, and this one comment on the 3rd of Febuary started at least two weeks worth of daily conversations, snippets of prose and continued ideas (causing us to end up quarantined in a separate channel because we kinda took over the brainstorming channel for a while, oops)
Chrys then must have had the patience of a saint as they then proceeded to collate all of the prose, ideas thrown at the wall and general worldbuilding, into this one, hellishly long doc.
Seriously, none of this would have been possible without Chrys doing this, it’s still incredible to me.
The next step, which, as you can see was about 10 days later, was to make the original “chrono doc”. This was my attempt to make a timeline of events in this au, incorporating as many ideas as possible into a manageable chapter layout. Initially, as you can see, I only had short sentences to describe what i thought would happen, but with the help of the hellscape doc above that Chrys made, I started to put pieces of the prose together, a collage of different people’s words while trying to make sure I kept note of who wrote what.
As you can imagine, the document then got very very long, and a couple of edits later, we started to set up individual docs for each chapter, linking them to the chrono doc to keep it as a central hub for the work to begin. Chapter titles were suggested, and colour coded (red=not started, orange=in progress and green was good to go!)
Within each chapter itself, the same process was repeated - only this time, we colour coded the writing, so we knew who had been editing/writing what and where.
This method then lead to really really colourful docs, and they were beautiful to see - as you can see! (In this example, our lovely Luna was the neon blue!)
Another colorful example from chapter 22!
Mads: I honestly couldn’t tell you how we meshed so well together, we just all had the same goal, to make the readers suffer. We were all inspired by Chrys’ original story and MJ’s au idea, and all of our ideas went so well together, we all built off of eachother and made something greater and greater everytime.
2. Similar to the first question, do all the writers meet up in a voice call, or simply group message each other with ideas? Is there like, a massive Google Doc with tons of ideas or plot lines, character reference sheets? How did you come together to brainstorm? And in general, how did you brainstorm? What was that process like? Has working in a group or community setting helped you? (Pros and Cons maybe?) - Question from the lovely Frondous!
MJ: seeing as I answered the first part of this question just above, I just wanted to talk a little bit about those first initial brainstorms, which were so much fun. We didn’t start with an intention to write anything at all, so it was this very casual, very chill session of throwing ideas out there and seeing if they worked together. I think Luna once called it “swinging at each other with baseball bats of angst” because some days we definitely were. There was something super exciting about seeing someone write something incredible and heartbreaking and trying to bring your own writing up to that level. It was almost like trying to out-do each other, but it wasn’t in a mean-spirited or competitive way? It’s how I earned my nickname on the discord - the pain boomerang, because every angsty idea I threw out there, just came back even more angsty (usually due to Oracle, lmao). Overall, definitely positive - as a writer I think it is very affirming and comforting to write something and have other people tell you their utterly honest opinions on it, and having the confidence in your fellow writers to add and change your words until it’s even better. I think the main reason this all worked so well was because, as you can see, we weren’t afraid to meddle with each other’s work. Often, I would end up writing a scaffold of what I imagined a scene to be - either with very basic description, or just lines of dialogue, and other people would swoop in and add their lovely colourful words to it, creating something that was more than just one person’s but everyone mixed together. My favorite thing would be opening up a chapter in the morning and discovering all the different colours all over my yellow words :D I don’t think I experienced any cons (except maybe timezones keeping us from working on it all at the same time) but I don’t think this method would work with anyone else wanting to do a project like this! Like I said, we got incredibly lucky with the people we had, but anyone who has done group project knows that it can only take one person to ruin it for everyone else. We were very lax with who could go in and edit and that worked well for us, but it could have only taken one person who overstepped, who kept taking over or kept deleting our words so theirs took front and centre to absolutely destroy this project.
Luckily, everyone we worked with was amazing and kind and very good collaborators, so it wasn’t actually a problem for us.
Mads: Pros were that I could take someone’s idea and run with it, and someone could do the same with mine. I can’t really think of any cons if I’m going to be honest, we all got along together really well.
Any references that you left in for the readers that no one picked up on that you’d like to expand on?
MJ: If anyone looks at my previous works for different fandoms, it would be no surprise to hear that I am a huge fan of horror. In chapter 21/22, when describing the egg, I wanted to dive deep into body horror. For the initial lead up to the egg in 21, I re-read/re-listened to a lot of Magnus Archives episodes that involved body horror/the Flesh (Particularly episode 171, which included the line “the worst thing that has ever been beautiful” which I thought was particularly apt for the egg.) For chapter 22, I looked at the horror game ANATOMY, which is, to put it bluntly, about a house that hates you. It’s an excellently creepy game, using a grainy VHS aesthetic and voiceover to make an atmosphere more terrifying than any jumpscare could. This quote in particular was one that I tried to emulate in my descriptions of the egg, as well as the quote “When a house is hungry, every room becomes a mouth.” Like I said, delightfully creepy, and not one that I saw people pick up on! I also referenced the Haunting of Bly Manor and other works from Henry James on several occasions, but I’ll leave those for you to find!
chrys: i did a lot of hollow men references because i fucking love that poem, but there are definitely other classical literature references thrown in. i also threw in some of the young god universe references because i’m the only author on the team who knows everything about the yg universe, from how yg!techno regards the members of the sbi to the extent of yg!dream’s godly powers.
What was your favorite part to write/edit?
Mads: It’s a tie between chapter 12 and chapter 24/25. Now, both of these are instances of me deciding to be a menace and make things angstier than they were before. For chapter 12, we had been discussing how Karl would fit into Faultlines, specifically canon Karl, because how Dream’s settling works is by taking hurts and pains from people for himself. But for Karl the problem was a lack of emotions, and the memories that caused them so we weren’t sure how we were going to handle that, and whether yg!Dream would be able to settle him at all. I love Karl though, and I thought that since this wasn’t yg!Dream’s world, that he wouldn’t fit neatly into it, the canon world wasn’t built for his powers. So I reasoned that it would make sense if Dream could break his powers, break himself to save Karl, because he has never lacked love nor the determination and self sacrificing stupidity necessary to go past his limits. Dream has always talked to the stars and for his friends and family he would do anything for them, it’s also been established that he can feel and sort of connect to the world itself. What I came up with was less concrete plot and more desperate love and sacrifice , he can talk to the universe so why not make it so Dream can rip himself apart leading all of Karl’s fraying threads home. I loved this because Dream is fully aware that what he’s going to do is likely to kill him, if not severely injure him, but he does it anyways because it is always love for him, he can never imagine not sacrificing all of himself for the people he cares about. I also adored this because it allowed us to have the Wilbur-Niki interaction and had the double result of allowing us to solidify Dream’s connection with Wilbur, we had wanted to do something similar in regards to Chrys’ explanation of Techno’s voices, ie prolonged exposure to a minor god’s powers. I’m also a sucker for codependent relationships built out of necessity, and platonic soulmates/soulbonds and I thought that it was just deeply beautiful and sad because WIlbur cares so much for Dream and just wants him to choose to be selfish. Dream can’t and doesn’t do that and it ends up being that Wilbur has much the same self sacrificial streak, at least when it comes to Dream. And there is something so intimate about tearing yourself open for another person to give them what they need, and for Wilbur to do it for Dream as a human is so amazing because he doesn’t really know what he’s doing, all he knows is that he loves Dream and wants to save him.
I also loved writing chapter 24/25, it’s just, at its simplest, love, Dream’s love for this broken world, for its people and for Wilbur, Wilbur’s love for Dream. I also love writing codependent relationships, where its ‘me and you and you and me together all we need i need you and you need me’ and that’s what Dream and Wilbur become.
K: For me it’s definitely the Karl chapter, chapter 12! As Mads said, writing about him and how he would interact with yg!Dream’s settling was super interesting. I also just blatantly love Karl’s character in general. I remember fondly the time me and Luna were just brainstorming about him in the Discord server, most of what resulted got in the chapter, I think? Also Mads’ prose? Excellent. My favorite part about writing it was trying to find cool ways of describing what Dream found when he tried to settle Karl, that endless ocean of calm nothing, filled with the waters of Lethe…
MJ: As much as I love chapter 12, my favorite chapter has got to be Last Rites (Chapter 20). I love writing vignettes, small, interconnected scenes that tie together into a whole. It allowed us to clear up a couple of loose plot/character threads before the final confrontation, and build a sense of tension at the same time. Within that chapter, I adored writing the callback to lida with Techno and Tubbo’s very brief conversation, as well as drawing on Jack’s post-Tommy’s death streams to write his little interlude.
Iz: My favorite part to do, that I helped with, was the prose for chapter 25. When it talks about c!Dream ‘hiding his heart of gold behind his pandora’s box of netherite ribs’ - that was us bouncing off of each other, and it was honestly the most gorgeously poetic brainrot i helped with in maybe all of Faultlines.
Ophelia: My favorite part to write was definitely chapter 23! I didn’t write too much in this fic, since I did more editing and added in some sentences of prose every here and there, but I actually wrote a lot for chapter 23 (when Dream goes to the void). I’m a pretty big fan of nature imagery, and I love space as well as Dream’s character, so it was a lot of fun to combine those three!
chrys: my favourite parts to write were probably the quiet, in-between (no reference intended) moments. everyone on the team did such amazing jobs with the action and emotion and strong, punchy moments of the fic that i rarely felt like i needed to add more to what was already a perfect scene, and i’ve always found that drawn-out scenes with nothing particularly happening are fun for me personally to write, so - the part in chapter three when c!dream wakes up in the yg world, or yg!dream reading the emotions of c!tubbo, c!jack, and c!fundy, or c!dream feeling tempted to give in to the yg!world’s kindness - these are the scenes i enjoyed writing the most.
Does writing these types of chapters exhaust or excite you? What's been your favorite audience reactions? (Again from Frondous, though we already answered the second part of your question!)
MJ: writing any c!dream chapters really knackered me, just because his character was so hard for me to grasp in the beginning. Almost all of his chapters were written last (apart from chapter 13, which had been written during the initial brainstorming sessions) and I know that I, for one, felt very shaky with his characterisation until very late in the process. Which meant, the audience reaction to his chapters was huge. We didn’t think there would be such a demand for c!dream content in this AU, and the amount of love there was towards his character development actually impacted the later chapters, in order to give him the conclusion that we felt he deserved. Not that he didn’t have one before, but it was a lot vaguer, and left a lot up to the readers imagination, and we felt you guys would appreciate a more concrete ending for our favorite terrible boy! In terms of what was exciting to write, I was super excited to write the fight scenes. I love writing fight scenes.
Iz: honestly I was the exact opposite. Anytime I got to write c!Dream was really really fun. Actually, either Dream, plus yg!Wilbur, yg!Phil, and c!Techno. Those parts were ones that I felt that I could actually make contributions with, other then adding word-imagery bits (and body horror).
chrys: on the flip side of what i said, i kind of struggled to contribute to big action scenes. i tend to struggle with punchy, fast-paced scenes (which, thankfully, the other members of the team were really good at), and ultimately, all i really did was add details (movement, direction) and bits to dialogue ajsdhf
Mads: I loved when everyone thought we ended the story at chapter 24, everyone was so mad and upset. It truly was my magnum opus, it was super angsty and I don’t regret a thing.
What is your favorite line that you wrote and your favorite line that someone else wrote?
Mads: My favourite line I wrote is ‘young god star child’, my favourite line that someone else wrote is oh god I can’t choose I might come back to this later. Coming back to it I’m still having trouble choosing but if I had to it’d be this one from the last chapter from MJ “This is a human trying to play with the instruments of the divine, unpracticed fingers flayed to the bone for trying, for want of more.” It encapsulates three of my favourites things, Techno being soft for his loved ones, Wilbur being desperate to save Dream, and Dream and Wilbur’s connection.
MJ: oh man uhhhh - possibly a toss up between this description of Sapnap before Karl comes home in chapter 14 - “He sees red rimmed eyes and shoulders slumped in grief and a downward slope to his mouth precipitating an avalanche of heartache“ or “i can feel it like a seed feels the sun and the mud and the rain and the earth i can feel it as a fish feels the pull of the tide i can feel it as a bird follows the call of home again” from techno and Dream’s chat in chapter 20. In terms of other people, it’s so difficult to choose but I think Chrys’ line of “People say dead man walking but no one says dead boy limping” which was about Tubbo, lives in my head rent free. Again, alternatively, “Bracketed by the two people he loved the most and lost last”, also from chrys still makes me cry. Special mention to “young god star child” from Mads, because it ended up being a huge cornerstone for chapter 23!
Iz: ‘Techno’s jaw clenches and he crosses the room in three strides and kneels, paladin at the altar, knight in service, oath-sworn, all the things he would, could never be, all a-clink of armour unshed and weapons concealed, and bows his head to the hand Dream extends and says, “Sure. ‘s me, Dream.”’ - this phenomenal wordplay from Chapter 9 was written by Chrys and MJ. I lost it.
‘a song a melody still echoing in your ears desperation on your tongue phantom touches on your skin tears of blue cracks of gold on your cheeks coming back coming home a voiceless promise kept shattered saved icarus to roost eurydice to life breath anew’ - and this piece from 23: ‘and the universe sings’, is my line. I just loved showing how they (Wil and Dre) connected themselves so much, that when Dream comes crashing back down - their senses overlap for a bit.
Ophelia: My favorite line that I wrote would have to be “it [loving Dream] is like loving the wind as it sings softly to you with every breath, like loving the sea as the cool splash of the waves upon the rocks becomes a hand brushing against your cheek, like loving the trees as their sturdy branches shelter you from the storms and rain, like loving the earth and the planets and the atoms that form your very being and knowing, knowing that you are loved in return, tenfold, a hundredfold, as infinitely as the universe itself.” I am a huge fan of nature imagery, and I really like how I wrote this bit. There’s something incomprehensible about nature, something that we never really will fully understand no matter how much we search, but it makes us feel such strong and powerful emotions. The universe is filled with mystery and love, and so comparing the love of a minor god to the love that echoes throughout the universe shows how mystical and overwhelmingly powerful Dream’s love is.
And ohhh man, for my favorite line overall, like the entirety of chapters 23-25??! Every time I read any of them I cry so hard, something about the idea of the universe’s unconditional acceptance and love just makes me emotional jsdgfjskfhdg. Also the prose is just beautifully written, and I really love how all of those chapters are filled with color because all of us wrote a lot for each of them. There’s something so poetic about the chapters talking about the universe filled with color we can and cannot see being the chapters that are the most filled with our own colors.
For specifics, though, one of my favorite lines would have to be Oracle’s “young god, star child.” Do you know when random words get stuck in your head, like songs but it’s just words? Young god, star child gets stuck in my head on a daily basis, and I’m not complaining sjhfdjsgh, it’s such a beautiful phrase.
MJ’s, “everyone has a choice, Dream. Even gods,” also is one of my favorites. No matter who we are or what we’ve done, we’re human, and it’s really important to remember that we have a choice and we can always choose to do better.
Also, I love Oracle’s “he thinks of the uncomplicated, all-encompassing love that bursts from his chest like a symphony of which only the universe can hear.” This is another example of Dream and the universe’s love, and it’s also written so beautifully; it really resonated with me ahaha!
chrys: my favourite lines that i wrote would be the stuff i wrote for chapter twenty-three - such lines as “And now the words gush like an oil spill in earnest, now that his voice has been unstoppered - bard, poet, and songwriter indeed, he can’t keep the desperate, hunted thread out of his words as he pleads, as he fucking begs, ‘Oh, no no no no - Dream, Dream. Dream please, not like this, anything but this - come back, fuck you, come back - you can’t do this to me, you can’t do this to us - ’ Their family waiting back home, these broken people he gave everything to, and for what, and for what - ‘We have to go home - we have to go home - you fucking promised, not like this, you told Toms that you wouldn’t, why did you have to - always like this, innit, you stupid selfish fuckwad - don’t make me go home and tell them what you did, please don’t do this, please please please don’t go - ’” or “‘Puffy,’ whispers Sam, his voice catching, cracking, yawning open, like the chasm of the country that buried every good thing that came of it. / ‘Sam, my son,’ Puffy says, stricken. ‘He’s - Sam - my baby’s dead.’” My favourite collaborative line is probably this blurb of settling i wrote with mj: “inevitable inevitable with a siren’s call a war a loss an ever-winding ever-wanting ever-wary thing always always it always comes down to rent flesh to spilt blood will we survive this want this hurt will life be begotten of this if we do not fight now then we lose all of it all all all the sun on the levees the light under their skin do we win this do we live past this do we do we do we live”
Now we’ve finished, is there anything in earlier chapters you would change or add (for example, more current lore)?
MJ: Considering that a lot of the current lore would require a significant restructuring of the chapters and characterisation (Quackity’s lore, for example, and Tommy’s death in the prison) I’m happy that we wrote it when we did with the lore we had at the time, but one thing I wish had been a thing when we started writing was the beeduo platonic marriage + Michael. It seems really weird now to read over the early chapters and there to be no mention of that at all, but it wasn’t really a thing until well into production!
Iz: I completely agree with the fact that we missed out on the Underscore-Beloved family dynamics. But I also propose that we toss in the fact that c!Wilbur was lying in his letters pog???
Mads: I kind of wish we could have involved Foolish in the lore a bit more but ultimately I don;t think I could be happier with what we made.
Who was your favorite character to write (and why!)
MJ: wilbur soot? what a loser i hate him i- *trips* *thousands of pictures of wilbur soot spill from pockets* fuck those aren’t mine i swear i’m just holding them for a friend i- *slips on a pile of pictures* fu ck no they’re not mine i hate him i just- *three in depth wilbur character studies fall out as i fall to my knees, desperately trying to pick them up* hang on a sec jUst LISTEN
If not Wilbur, then what really surprised me was how much I enjoyed writing Techno, despite him not actually appearing all that much. I’m incredibly proud of how his chapter came out and it felt like I actually understood his perspective on Doomsday for the first time after writing it, even if my interpretation may or may not be canon. I think he’s an incredibly interesting character, even if I do want to punch him 99% of the time.
Iz: It was actually surprisingly fun to write yg!Wilbur! Normally Wil just isn’t my character (but I do love Ghostbur), but writing him with the Young God characterization was ….carthridic to say the least.
chrys: i had a good time writing c!dream, fl!wilbur, and c!puffy, i think. all three are kind of surprises, but i think it’s because fl!dream turned out pretty different than yg!dream, and i had trouble writing fl!dream because i didn’t want to mess with the established character style with my own knowledge about what yg!dream is like and add on character inconsistencies akdjfh. fl!wilbur, in contrast, stayed pretty similar to yg!wilbur, if angrier and more willing to start a fight, and i ended up writing him a lot as a foil to fl!dream. as for c!dream, i handled the more grey-area aspects of him and i’ve always enjoyed analysing his character. c!puffy - i mean. sheep lady. and i love her character, like her nobility and hypocrisy, like that she’s so good and yet makes mistakes and strives to better them but isn’t sure where to start. she’s brilliant, i love her.
Mads: yg!Dream hands down, I adore that loving self sacrificial minor god with my whole heart, and maybe I identify a little too much with someone who gives and gives and gives and rarely ever asked for anything in return. He’s just such a fun character to write.
What’s next?
chrys: crying over thom and brainstorming atlas mostly hagdjshd
MJ: I have a couple of one-shots written/planned for post-faultlines, but other than that I think it’s very unlikely that I’ll be doing another longfic any time soon, let alone for mcyt/dsmp! Then again, when I started watching I told myself I wouldn’t end up writing anything and, well, here we are…. Either way, consistently, I know that Chrys will make me cry with thom and it will be awesome.
Edit: between writing this initially and then posting it, they did indeed post a new chapter of thom and made me cry. And it was awesome.
Iz: So, so many things <3. I hope you enjoy the rest of the Compound Fractures collection!!! :)
Ophelia: This was the first fanfic I’ve ever worked on, and through this process I’ve realized how much I genuinely enjoy writing, so I really would love to work on some fics of my own! I’d love to maybe work on a post-faultlines one-shot, but for now I’ve got a few ideas for my own one-shots. I’d also love to write a longfic of my own too at some point! In the meantime, I’ll definitely be crying over atlas and thom jskfhdjsgh!!