Behind Closed Doors Challenge - Results
(banner by craponaspatula)
To keep expectations low, princess_george, mistress of double-entendres, announced this post on the schedule by calling it THE CLIMAX. Can it live up to the hype? We're about to find out! At any rate, it’s time to see the fruits of our collaboration and find out what everyone came up with for the Behind Closed Doors Collaboration Challenge, hosted by princess_george and moi!
The original challenge announcement is here, in case you want to refer back to it. The idea was to divide Leslie and Ben’s relationship up into 6 chunks, as you will see below, and have a different writer tackle each chunk, one from Ben’s POV and one from Leslie’s.
12 writers in total took on the challenge, they’ve had 3 months to come up with their pieces, and, although one person had to be replaced, we should now have all 12 pieces written and ready to go (NO PUN INTENDED)!
HOW WE’LL DO THIS:
- We’ll put in a comment for each chunk (i.e., for each POV for each section). If you’ve written a section, please post a link to your section below, as a reply to the relevant comment. Please indicate in the comment itself what the rating is.
- Once all or most of the writers have put their links in, we’ll add them to the listing of the different sections immediately below, so you can grab the links a bit more efficiently.
- On Monday, once we’ve had a chance to read through and recover from all the hot hot heat, we’ll have a post-mortem on the entire nutty exercise so people can weigh in on how it all turned out, from the perspective of writing, reading, and both.
- READ and enjoy! And if you’re reading but haven’t taken part in the challenge, please remember that each piece was written by a different writer who was given complete freedom to do with it whatever she chose to do (provided it’s canon-consistent). The goal is NOT to have all the pieces fit seamlessly together, but to produce a kind of patchwork quilt of fic that combines very different styles and perspectives (and perhaps even very different interpretations). If you go through this in order and notice that it contradicts itself--well, that’s just in the nature of the thing. It “contains multitudes,” after all. ;)
- Please comment on each individual writer’s piece separately in her LJ. Comments are basically the only reward for writers and the only way of knowing that people are actually reading. Plus, they also really help facilitate interaction between different parts of the community. We can’t stress this enough--comments are awesome, the more specific the better, and if you don’t comment, we end up in a situation like this, which is just a sadness. So, please, do comment! If you can, of course, please comment at length and in great detail - but a quick comment is also hugely appreciated. The writers will thank you for it.
Here are the different sections - remember for each section there’s one piece from Leslie’s POV, and one from Ben’s:
- Fantasies: How do we get from early antagonism to obvious crush? From The Master Plan → Road Trip (but NOT including the night after Road Trip, so, just what we see in the episode itself).
- Leslie POV by ashisfriendly (R, 5,107 words)
Ben POV by saucydiva (R, ~2,000 words) - Exploration: How do we get from the first kiss to Leslie's statement, "But I really like sleeping with my boss."? From just after Road Trip ends → I'm Leslie Knope.
- Leslie POV by bowlsohard (Hard R/NC-17, 7,760 words)
Ben POV by americnxidiot (Hard R/NC-17, ~5,500 words) - Starvation: How do we get from the breakup to "I miss you like crazy, I think about you all the time, so let's just say screw it."? From Ron and Tammys → Smallest Park (but NOT including the night after Smallest Park, so, again, just what we see in the episode itself).
- Leslie POV by stiffleaves (NC-17, ~10,100 words)
Ben POV by sullen_aquarian (NC-17, ~4,800 words) - Consolidation: How do we get from the high drama of their reunion to them working together as a team again? What was that like in private? From the night after Smallest Park and The Trial of Leslie Knope → The Comeback Kid.
- Leslie POV by shornt (Hard R/NC-17, ~2,300 words)
Ben POV by jncar (NC-17, ~12,500 words) - Relish: How do we get from "You need to get tougher." to "I'm just really into you/Give me a spin, baby/He's like a sexy little hummingbird" etc., i.e. Leslie's obvious horniness and Ben's equally obvious confusion about it? (Or is he just confused about the public display of it? And does she really want him to be taller? Basically, WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?) From Campaign Ad → Live Ammo.
- Leslie POV by rikyl (R, 3,600 words)
Ben POV by stillscape (Hard R/NC-17, 6,250 words) - The Team: They were clearly very in sync (and very busy) during the last few episodes. And they had some extremely intense experiences together. And Leslie wanted to live on the bus. And then Ben left for DC. How did all of that play out when it was just the two of them? From The Debate → Ben’s departure for Washington (this time you can go slightly beyond the episode itself!).
- 7 scenes with alternating Leslie and Ben POVs by synecdoche and princess_george (R, ~5,800 words)