Q1: What are everyone’s favorite comfort meals?
A1: This one is weirdly the same for all of them: beef casserole.
The reason it’s the same is because it was Beverley’s speciality (and not *always* beef), and she’d make it for her favourite family members. So if Gran made you casserole, or you came over to find there was casserole for dinner/tea, you knew she was pleased with you, or you were in favour somehow. It was also mind-bendingly delicious.
Carrie has casserole when she goes over for tea, and that’s her first proper homecooked hot meal in months. She later learns how to cook it, and the others then get it from her on request, so it is then un-weaponised as a meal and becomes one with positive associations, that they can just have whenever they want it. Since they all know the context of the original meal, which is unspoken between them but just a Thing they understand from their family dynamic, it’s The Meal that they sort of re-appropriate/reclaim for their own.
Q2: Give me a fact about ricky that you’ve always wanted to give me but haven’t told me yet? feed me specifically 🙂
A2: Originally – and I don’t know if this is canon or not – Ricky actually lost his virginity to Sasha Shaw who collected all the cousins born in 1990 (same year as she was). They were 15, he was wasted and doesn’t really remember. It lasted less than 2mins. It happened the day he caught Wes and Layla at Aunty Em’s house, and was probably in response to that on some level, and a total waste of time for him, which is another reason why he doesn’t ever think about it or have any feelings about it whatsoever.
Q3a: Tell us about songs that various characters would not listen to most of the time except for when they are feeling a certain kind of masochistic.
A3a: Carrie wouldn’t listen to Both Sides Now by Joni Mitchell unless she was feeling like she really needed to cry.
Ricky wouldn’t put the radio on at all unless he was exceptionally lonely and needed some sound.
Wes only listens to angry emo rock when he’s incredibly pissed off/certain kind of depressed and needs to sike himself up for something: then it’s usually Fall Out Boy, MCR etc.
Katy is pretty easy about what she listens to, but she hates Summertime Sadness and Boys of Summer equally, and wouldn’t listen to them unless she wanted to torture her soul.
Q3b: If they could, what instruments would everyone play?
A3b: Carrie would play piano (always wanted to, never learned, but the house had a music room with a piano forte, and it remembers). Ricky – not sure. He whistles bird calls canonically so maybe the flute, but I think he’d like to play something with strings that requires dexterity, maybe the violin.
Wes – electric guitar. Katy: drums.
Q3c: And to keep running with the music theme, if everyone were to be in a band, who would do what and what would the band name be?
A3c: Something along the lines of Gods & Monsters, or Young Gods & Old Monsters?? It would be alt/emo/glam rock, ironically for Wes in canon. Something like that. Maybe a cross between The Struts and My Chemical Romance.
In this AU, Wes would be the frontman, lead singer/guitarist. Katy on drums, Ricky would be versatile and be the band member who can pick up any instrument and play it really well. If he’s musical in this AU, then instruments would be his hyperfixation. I think Carrie would actually be a roadie, a PA, or part of the team in a backstage way, and that’s how she and Ricky would meet and get together. They may have another band member, but unsure!
This would be a very “Rock Star Romance” type narrative but potentially told through interviews and memoir extracts, with the band on tour promoting a new album, with episodic dramas like Carrie rescuing Ricky from various self-destructive behaviours and situations, keeping Wes from going totally off the rails, and making sure Katy doesn’t get arrested and attends her anger management therapy sessions. She would definitely have slept with Wes multiple times in this AU but it wouldn’t be anything serious – FWB I think – but her and Ricky would be the solid partnership by the end.
The AU novel would be the same name as their band, I’m leaning to YGOM, and I think it would read a lot like a rock star autobiography or a bio compiled by a superfan in the industry/someone writing about their father and his life for Reasons. Ricky would still be ace, but I think would feel a lot of pressure to “overcome” his sex aversion which would lead to him being very self-destructive until he learned to be comfortable in himself, and possibly with a kid he didn’t know he had until later. I think, though, it would turn out to be Wes’s kid, not his, and that would be a fairly dramatic but typical episode that underlines the narrative arc peppered with a lot of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. Everything, ironically, that Ricky says he doesn’t do in THE CROWS.
Gerald’s place in the narrative would be taken by his guitar, which would be a character in the story. I think that Ricky writes the songs, and Wes has a lot of input, but Ricky’s got that creative spark and is a gifted lyricist in particular. Some of his scenes alone with his guitar would have a Ricky/Gerald dynamic, I think, in terms of it being a mask to his deep loneliness and dissatisfaction with the lifestyle he’s got, but he doesn’t know how to change it.
I’m not sure what Fairwood would be in this narrative, but leaning towards the guitar merging Gerald/Fairwood for narrative purposes, but it would be more metaphorical. I think Ricky would definitely have a “dream home” he wants to buy and live in with Carrie, and that’s a ruined manor in the countryside that he wants to do up and have as his project outside of the studio life.
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C. M. Rosens 
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