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Corroded Coffin Fest Pop-Up: Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Red Right Hand. Orange Crush. Mellow Yellow. Green Light. Blue Ain't Your Color. The Indigo Streak. Violet Chemistry.

ROY G. BIV

The theme for this event is: Somewhere Over the Rainbow:

So, for this challenge, pick any song that features a color of the rainbow either in the title or lyrics and make something that is inspired by that song. Here's a playlist to help get you started.

Now, I'm not gonna get all up in your color wheel. You want to use Purple Pills instead of Violet Hill? Want to go with Taylor Swift's Maroon instead of her Red? Go for it!

This event runs between June 8th-14th, 2025.

You can interpret the prompt any way you'd like, as long as you've focused on one or more members of Corroded Coffin and a song that features a color of the rainbow.

GUIDELINES:

Please tag us here at @corrodedcoffinfest when you post your entries so we can reblog them!

The word count guidelines for this challenge are for fics between 500-2500 words. Your entries must be posted on the correct color day of the event. (And let us know what song you used!)

You'll get a comment from this blog with a "🌈" when it's been checked and added to the queue.

Submissions can be connected to other prompts from the pop-up, but they should still be able to stand alone.

Feel free to use the ao3 collection after you've been reblogged here!

All submissions should include any pairings featured, a rating and any content warnings (CW) or tags that you think are appropriate. All explicit material needs be under a cut. Headers make my life easier, and a sample of one could look something like this:

Prompt: Blue | Song: Blue Bayou | Word Count: 1250 | Rating: T | POV: Eddie | Relationships: None | CW: None | Tags: Corroded Coffin, On Tour, Thinking of the Past

For the artists! Art is definitely welcome! Any entries for the prompts must be focused on at least one Corroded Coffin pairing, a fit the prompt and guidelines.

Please submit your entries between 12:00 AM EST and 11:59 PM EST on the day of the prompt in order to not be missed for reblogging.

Taste the rainbow. 🌈

Part 4 is here!

Part 1 _ 2 _ 3

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

You're about to close on your very own, suspiciously affordable and comfortable house. Just before you sign the contract, the realtor shows you the required legal disclosure: your new house is haunted by the type of presence you'll get from this spinner wheel.

Of course it is.

An Impossible Choice

Written for @steddiemicrofic

[ AO3 ]

May prompt: "Delay" wc: 408 | rated: G | cw: N/A

Robin is graduating. Eddie isn't. Steve has to choose between following his best friend or staying with his boyfriend. Or does he?

They had a plan, Steve and Robin.

Working at Scoops Ahoy and Family Video had helped them save a bit of money. Adding in the government bribe for the whole Upside-Down affair and they had what they needed to get out of Hawkins.

But it was not enough for both Robin’s studies and an apartment. Which was when Steve’s grandmother came in.

Helen Harrington had decided that her grandson college’s trust fund was not going to be something he could only use for himself. She wanted him to support his future wife by helping her get an education to better follow her dreams, just like her husband had done.

Which was why Steve and Robin were going to marry as soon as she graduated, to get that sweet, sweet trust fund money.

She was still not sure what college to choose, but Chicago was a strong contender, and they had taken a trip there in February to get the lay of the land.

Wherever Robin wanted to go, Steve would follow.

That was the plan.

But now…

Now Steve’s future was fractured.

On one side, there was Robin, his best friend, his platonic soulmate.

On the other hand, there was Eddie.

Eddie with his tender eyes, his mischievous smile, and all his obscure references he always explained to Steve.

Eddie, and the sweet kisses they shared at every corner.

Eddie and the nights spent learning each other’s bodies.

Eddie, and the delay in Steve’s plan caused by the month his boyfriend had spent abed and Principal Higgins’ refusal to let him finally graduate.

Steve wanted to spend his afternoon bitching with Robin.

Steve wanted to wake up every morning in Eddie’s arms.

He had been so sure of his future, before. But now, admiring his boyfriend face glowing in the morning sun, he was hit by the inescapability of his situation.

“I don’t need that diploma, sweetheart” Eddie whispered in his neck. “I can follow you to Chicago.”

Steve’s throat tightened. “I don’t want you to sacrifice that for me, Teddy. I know it would hurt you. Don’t lie.”

“Stevie…”

“Hey, Dinguses!”

They both jumped as Robin threw herself on the bed between them.

“You know I’m taking a gap year, right?”

“You what?”

“I wasn’t going to make you leave your new boyfriend, Steve. And someone has to make sure this dumbass actually studies instead of either pinning or making out with you in a dark corner.”

Something about this makes me weirdly emotional

Tired of stories where the author worldbuilds a whole religion only to chicken out at the last moment by making the main character a skeptic. You mean to tell me that there’s all this richness in lore and culture, but you’ve trapped me with the one person in this society who doesn’t care about it? So bland. I could meet an agnostic easily enough by walking down the street, but your story is my one chance to hear the perspective of someone who follows whatever religion you’ve contrived. You made this whole world; convince me that your character really is from there.

Steve: I swing both ways.

Steve: Violently. With a bat. Come get some, motherfuckers.