Oh jeez! This is amazing! Funny, smart, substantial, adorable and serious. I love your fantastic handling of their voices and characters and mannerisms-- I can visualize every scene as if it's from the show, and the extra dimension of their interior monologues makes this world even more itself. And the Troy/Abed relationship makes so much sense. I love your version of this world.
And, I'm not really sure how to say this, but I really appreciated the way this dips in and out of the romantic/mystery-solving genre, both in a meta way (Abed explaining that he's figured out the way this story will unfold in advance thanks to genre cues-- and he is right, but him saying it out loud makes us think about the genre we're also naturalistically experiencing) and in the story itself, as Troy gets into serious trouble and the gang don't find him where they expect to find him. I knew that it would be OK, because I knew they would be able to figure out where the kidnappers had taken Troy, but as Troy started running away from them into a forest which was safer than his attackers but still hostile enough to kill him, I was genuinely moved and worried for him. I was thinking about the fact that, when someone is a victim of disaster or violent crime, there isn't usually a deus ex machina TV-show genius to save them, and even though Abed had the TV-show genius tools to find the place his attackers had left him, he had no way of finding Troy who had run into a random direction in the woods. (Maybe my response to this was more serious than most people's, because a person I'm very close to was attacked and kicked in the head last year and it permanently changed her life, so reading that that had happened to Troy made me have a strong response.) At the same time, I knew Abed would come through, because this this is the type of story that has a happy ending. And I was appreciating that Troy was in real danger, but also appreciating that he wasn't behaving helplessly-- he wasn't capable of saving himself, because he was stranded in the woods with no resources, but he tricked his attackers, successfully ran away from them twice, found himself shelter, and did everything he could have done to keep himself safe.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that the way you pulled Troy in and out of danger, and also the way that you ran an explicit, meta examination of the genre tropes of this type of story, made this story mean a lot more to me than that kind of standard, pro forma h/c-y story of danger-then-declarations-of-love. I took the danger seriously and I also took the love seriously and it also made me think about the media I consume. So, thank you!
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And, I'm not really sure how to say this, but I really appreciated the way this dips in and out of the romantic/mystery-solving genre, both in a meta way (Abed explaining that he's figured out the way this story will unfold in advance thanks to genre cues-- and he is right, but him saying it out loud makes us think about the genre we're also naturalistically experiencing) and in the story itself, as Troy gets into serious trouble and the gang don't find him where they expect to find him. I knew that it would be OK, because I knew they would be able to figure out where the kidnappers had taken Troy, but as Troy started running away from them into a forest which was safer than his attackers but still hostile enough to kill him, I was genuinely moved and worried for him. I was thinking about the fact that, when someone is a victim of disaster or violent crime, there isn't usually a deus ex machina TV-show genius to save them, and even though Abed had the TV-show genius tools to find the place his attackers had left him, he had no way of finding Troy who had run into a random direction in the woods. (Maybe my response to this was more serious than most people's, because a person I'm very close to was attacked and kicked in the head last year and it permanently changed her life, so reading that that had happened to Troy made me have a strong response.) At the same time, I knew Abed would come through, because this this is the type of story that has a happy ending. And I was appreciating that Troy was in real danger, but also appreciating that he wasn't behaving helplessly-- he wasn't capable of saving himself, because he was stranded in the woods with no resources, but he tricked his attackers, successfully ran away from them twice, found himself shelter, and did everything he could have done to keep himself safe.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that the way you pulled Troy in and out of danger, and also the way that you ran an explicit, meta examination of the genre tropes of this type of story, made this story mean a lot more to me than that kind of standard, pro forma h/c-y story of danger-then-declarations-of-love. I took the danger seriously and I also took the love seriously and it also made me think about the media I consume. So, thank you!