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Hi, y’all!
“The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up” (what, we're not gonna use a Peter Pan reference in this fandom?) is going to be pretty long and kind of complicated, so we thought it might be helpful to provide some notes and explainers here.
First of all, this is a crossover between three vampire properties:
The Lost Boys (drawing elements from both the 1987 movie and the 2026 musical)
- Broadly leans toward the movie but uses Michael's abuse trauma, Lucy staking Max/no Grandpa, musical characterization for Star, and trans Allan
Fright Night (the 1985 film happened, but the sequel from 1988 didn’t! However, characters from the sequel will appear. The 2011 remake is as nothing to us, David Tennant’s leather pants notwithstanding.)
Bit (2019)
It is primarily a Lost Boys fic; when there are conflicting ‘rules’ for vampires, we will generally fudge the canons in favor of TLB stuff. (For instance, in Bit canon vampires can tolerate sunlight and turn just from an incomplete bite, but in this story those characters were changed by drinking vampire blood and have to stick to the nightlife.)
We've tried to tilt things toward letting folks go in with just TLB knowledge and treat the crossover characters as slightly elaborate OCs (with some flourishes for deep cuts), BUT if you would like to check the other movies out, both Bit and Fright Night are streaming for free at time of writing.
Or, if you'd rather, here's some very bite-sized summaries with relevant proper nouns:
Bit: 18-year-old trans girl Laurel heads to LA to visit her brother Mark for the summer. This should be a time to repair their somewhat strained relationship, but almost immediately Laurel gets coaxed to a secondary location by a pretty girl (Izzy) and chomped. The vampire girls’ leader, Duke (who is pretty unambiguously a cisswapped David), spares her on a whim and Laurel becomes a vampire. Roya and Frog are also members of the coven, but like David's boys they are more vibe than character.
Duke ran away to New York in the 1970s to live openly as a lesbian, only to be preyed upon by master vampire Vlad, who kept her in thrall for several decades. When she finally freed herself, Vlad's heart was too old to burn; she keeps it locked up and consumes it one piece at a time.
Duke's vampire coven has three rules: never glamour another vampire, check with her before turning someone, and never turn a man. That becomes a problem when Laurel accidentally turns her brother. In the fight that ensues, Vlad is revived and it comes out that Duke hadn't been following her own rules when it came to mind control. The girls subdue Vlad, put Duke in the same hole in the floor where she'd been keeping coven members who misbehaved, and agree to all consume the heart equally over time.
Fright Night: While watching out his bedroom window, teenager Charley Brewster sees someone moving a coffin into the house next door. As it becomes clearer that new neighbor Jerry Dandridge is, in fact, a vampire, Charley seeks out help from his horror-loving friend “Evil” Ed Thompson and late-night movie host Peter Vincent (who has hunted vampires…in movies).
Their efforts are unsuccessful, mainly because Ed, Peter, and Charley's girlfriend Amy all think that Charley is delusional. This allows Jerry to engage in a campaign of petty revenge against Charley for trying to blow the whistle on him. Jerry seduces Ed into vampirism and sics him on Peter, then turns his attentions on Amy. Charley and Peter are able to save Amy and kill Jerry, while Ed's fate is ambiguous.
…and then Fright Night Part 2 opens with the news that Charley went to therapy for three years to convince himself the vampire thing never happened.
This fic is set in 2020, shortly after the events of Bit. Obviously this means it’s a long time after the other two movies, so time has marched on for those characters… sort of. The Emersons (TLB) and Charley Brewster (FN) have been hunting vampires together for the past few decades, and that’s left a few scars. Meanwhile, the vampires of Bit are trying to avoid killing humans during a pandemic, and various antagonists from everyone’s pasts seem to be making trouble again.
Finally, please please take our tags and chapter-specific content warnings seriously. This fic will be dealing heavily with themes relating to sexual exploitation, a connecting element among vampire stories in general and these works in particular. Trauma around violence done to people's gender and sexual identities also comes up, kind of inevitably—The Bit character Duke is explicitly, in the text of her film, a lesbian who spent numerous years being brainwashed into having sex with men by the vampire who turned her. Issues of consent, age, maturity, and sex work will be explored here. Dead doves galore.
We hope it’s a good read!
~dorothy_notgale & Tromperie