Happy Valentine's Day from these soft boys
11K • Explicit • Firstprince • Urban Sketchers AU
Upon opening the hardcover of a found sketchbook to locate the owner's contact details, Alex discovers only this inscription: > In case of loss, please return to: Instagram @henryfox.usk He, of fucking course, knows who Henry Fox is. That striking yet humorless, rude, and self-righteous British prick he met on the first day of the symposium.
Or, an AU where Alex and Henry are urban sketchers. A short story of how they get to know each other, fall in love and in bed within one day.
Please note that the sketches in this work were all generated with ChatGPT and then manually edited by myself with Procreate. They were not entirely hand-drawn by me, although I do wish I had that level of skill. 😭
for casey hehe
ooo i'd love to hear more about the casting day announcement from your pov if that's ok! like how did people react? did you think they looked the part but wasn't keen on their past acting work? did everyone freak out lmao
HELLO!!! i love talking about it!! let's gooo
so the day of the casting announcement for me was also the day i found out they were making rwrb into a movie, idk how it was for other people, but before that day i hadn't realized we would get a movie
so i was just SO HYPED about getting a film at all, you know?
then we got this announcement:
and i looked at them and IMMEDIATELY went to taylor's instagram and i was like "is that the dude from the kissing booth?" (i have never seen the kissing booth before that, but i have seen people on youtube doing some of those commentaries where they make fun of every single movie under the sun for views - the person i was friends with at the time loved watching those, so i have seen a few)
and i IMMEDIATELY became obsessed with him because i thought he was the most beautiful man i've ever seen. height aside, he was pretty much what i imagined alex to look like. back then, i'm pretty sure he hasn't been in many things so i watched tkb2 & 3 for him (or mostly his and joey's scenes because i didn't like jac*b el*rdi) and i watched minx, where he was AMAZING.
meanwhile nick creeped up on me much slower - but he did have many more movies out so i also watched all of those. at the begining he hadn't been dyed blonde yet so it was a bit harder to imagine him as henry, but the second they made him blonde i thought he was spot on as well. the filming was in progress around the same time purple hearts came out so i waited for the premiere with him and the rest of the cast, because they were all SO excited for nick - they even had a watch party and they all watched it together when it came out, and on the day of the premiere they decorated nick's trailer with tiny handmade purple hearts which was super sweet and he was adorably blushy about it.
okay back to the casting announcement day.
we got the announcement and immediately EVERYONE was negative. and i'm not exaggerating. everyone said they looked nothing like the characters, they said taylor is too pretty to play alex, that neither of the boys deserves to play these characters bc they're both straight and "sTrAiGhT acToRs sHoULdn'T pLAy quEEr cHaRaCteRs." it was just CONSTANT negativity. if someone was excited they were made fun of. people would go into nick and taylor's comments on insta and say pretty bad things.
the fandom for the movie on tumblr was nonexistant tbh. there were a few people who were fans of the book and were very vocal about how awful the movie will be with those awful actors. see, people had fancasts for alex and henry and they weren't willing to let those go. even if the guy they had in mind for alex wasn't even mexican and the guy they had in mind for henry wasn't even an actor.
i was still patiently waiting for any news to come out and for tumblr to get on with the program. at the same time first updates accounts on the movie, firstprince and nick & tay started appearing on instagram so i was mostly there, having thought that tumblr will just hate this film forever. i reread the book then and having many feelings about it i went into the tumblr tag again - there wasn't much change, but there were a few people who seemed to be just as excited as i was and i would have blocked all the negative people back then.
one of the people i saw being excited about the movie and the boys was @sincenewyorks so after some time and after gathering some courage i messaged them and we talked. there were also a few other people who were being positive by then, but all in all the fandom was pretty small and people still negative especially when they found out that june and rafael luna won't be in the movie - that brought a whole new wave of hate. some hardcore book fans have already decided the film would be awful.
i was just happy to follow the boys and the rest of the cast through the filming process, a little bit here, but mostly on instagram and in private messages with like-minded people here.
fun fact: the nick and taylor tags on tumblr were practically empty by then - taylor's had a few gifs of his naked scenes from minx and a few gifs from the kissing booth. nick's tag was almost completely empty.
flash forward to the day we got the trailer. this is the day EVERYTHING changed, because the trailer came out and suddenly? all the haters went silent. (take into account the fact that i had blocked some of them already so that might also be why lol) and the movie started reaching more and more people. overnight there were a lot of gifs from the trailer and people started posting about the movie more.
in the following weeks, more and more people were talking about the movie and nick and taylor and the bad comments were mostly kept to minimum. we could all see how excited taylor and nick, but especially taylor were about the film.
the the strikes started and we were all heartbroken that the movie wouldn't get the premiere it deserved and secretly hoping the strikes would be done by the time the movie was supposed to come out, but that didn't happen, unfortunately.
then the movie came out and some people really loved it, some others said it was disappointing, there were a few really weird takes, but mostly people REALLY loved it. the fandom has already grown bigger at that point and there were many more people willing to freak out and talk about it. then people started watching nick's and taylor's previous movies as well and their tags filled out and the rest is history, i guess.
sorry that it got SO LONG omg. some people were annoying about the casting announcement, and there was a lot of negativity at first but to be honest? i still had so much fun and the whole experience will always remain in my heart as a positive one <3
if you have any other questions, please do ask me, i can always talk about it more, i love trips down the memory lane lol
"I'm tired of pretending! I cannot continue acting as if I do not love you. Because I do. "
--
Dear Reader, Let it be known that Alex and Henry love each other in every universe. ☔️💕
Comm for @springforaspell ♥️
my contribution to the pink henry dtiys 🫡
hey, hi, have I mentioned my notes app? let me tell you about my notes app! I’ve been writing in obsidian for over a year now, for fanfic and original fiction/worldbuilding (and dungeons and dragons, and life organisation, and a myriad of other things) and so far I’ve gotten at least three people to also start using it, and I am in fact on an endless quest to get more people to try it.
obsidian.md how do i love thee, let me list the ways:
It’s offline. you are not beholden to the whims of wifi!
Did i mention it’s free? it’s free!
you can pay to support the devs, or to access the sync service, but honestly I just use a free file sync service to move things between my desktop/laptop.
It’s super lightweight at its core. you can (and I do) run it with a bunch of plugins and customisation, but at it’s base it’s just text, in simple files. plaintext. readable by anything. your writing is not trapped in proprietary file formats.
HOWEVER you can in fact customise every aspect of it and if you like Making Your Notes Cute I cannot recommend it enough as a Way To Procrastinate Actually Writing
Crucially, you can link your notes. This is phenomenal for not only worldbuilding, but planning, research, outlining and connecting characters and events. You just make a note, type in square brackets, and boom. linked notes. You can make yourself a little writing wikipedia with approximately 0 effort.
I have separate vaults (Instances, pretty much. Big overarching folders with separate sets of content) for my Valloroth project, my day-to-day notes/fanfic, and my D&D game. They’re aesthetically very different, which is so so so great for getting in the right headspace for the work I’m doing.
OH and we have obsidian canvas now! which is a simple mind-mapping feature where you can make and connect note cards, which can also be notes in your vault. I haven’t had a chance to do timelines with it yet, but it’ll be fun for that. I have made relationship charts with it, and it was great for that. If you like visually laying out boxes of information and connecting them into a pepe silvia board of plot, canvas is incredible
this is a pointcrawl map I made for my D&D game. Those red words in the boxes? links to the locations in the city the players were exploring. phenomenal
do you like split screen? you can have multiple notes open at once in horizontal and vertical configurations, and you can also open multiple tabs in each split window. it’s SO great for research and outlining, when you need like ten documents open at once to move between
finally, there are so many addons to COMPLETELY CUSTOMISE your Writing Setup. styling for tags. kanban boards. LINKABLE MAPS. ways to label scenes with metadata and pull just so many different tables/lists of story information. AND SO MANY MORE. I’m gonna do a whole post of my favourite writing plugins at some point so i can yell about them
the only downsides are that it’s somewhat clunky still to export things out of obsidian—I copy my fics into googledocs for my beta, and I have a plugin to make exporting to html easier to post on ao3, but it’s still kinda fiddly. Also, if you want a program that Has Everything and Just Works, this is…not that. you can build a lot of really useful writing specific features, but you do have to build them. it’s a sandbox, so if you don’t like sandbox-style programs, this may not work for you.
that being said, I do think everyone should try it and play with it and love it like I do and convince all their friends to start using it like i did. come play with obsidian with me! it’s fun! there’s a great community in the official discord that’s very active, plus an ever-growing collection of resources, particularly on youtube (highly reccommend Danny Hatcher’s videos as a jumping in point, they’re super accessible imo)
anyway, come try obsidian!
First firstprince from me! ❤️🤍💙
Shoot Your Shot, Alex/Henry. M, 4.2k
Jimmy raises his eyebrows in anticipation. “First celebrity crush?”
As usual, Alex’s mouth is moving before his mind can catch up.
“Oh,” he gestures, like this is both obvious and the easiest question he’s ever been asked. “Prince Henry.”
— ☆
Blue and white stripes (same as PR handshake)
Formal and serious, navy is the color of authority
Dark blue with red dots
Required formality, even alone he still needs to wear clothes suitable for a royal. Red can mean danger or his enclosed love
Red with light blue and white stripes
Public image, wearing red is attention-grabbing and, even if he doesn't want to get public after the emails leak, he's forced to
Royal blue and white stripes again but thinner
Power and authority, it's Henry's moment to stand up for himself and fight for his own future
Yellow roses
Hope and youth, as Henry says, it also has a link to Texas history: "Yellow Rose of Texas" is a popular song since the 1930s with a full story on it's own. (You can read here.) Henry is finally getting the happy future he deserves and can hope for a bright sunny future with the love of his life
Side addition: solid tie is the basic pattern that doesn't add anything to the tie and lets the color speak for itself; polka dot adds playfulness and/or sophistication; stripes mean classic and elegant but can differ from one another (Henry always wears the British type with stripes that run from left shoulder down to the right side)