The trouble with putting Chris and Robert in bed together, and I say this as a fan of the Chris/Robert pairing, is that I feel Robert is romantic and vanilla in bed, whereas Chris has a masochistic streak a mile wide and just wants someone to tie him up and whip him. I once attempted to write fanfiction in which Chris asks Robert to hurt him, and it never got anywhere because Robert's response was just '??? that doesn't seem right.'

Robert will hurt you unintentionally in the course of acting, and he'll hurt you deliberately in order to steal your role, but he just doesn't think the bedroom is the place for that sort of thing. Which is, I'll be honest, Robert, extremely inconvenient for me personally. Just let me write these things!

Is Robert vanilla in bed, though? After making the above declaration, I received an anonymous message:

sorry but you will not convince me that robert is vanilla, when in summer once again he wrote in his diary about another spanking from mother :P i wonder what would happen if chris misjudged a choreographed fight maybe, or robert tripped and got a spanking on accident?

Which is an intriguing point!

As we see so little of the characters offstage, a lot of Goes Wrong characterisation is an exercise in extrapolation. When I say I think that Robert is romantic and vanilla in bed, I’m largely extrapolating from:

• Robert’s insistence that it’s impossible to depict sadness without tears.
• Robert really wanting to make sure that, during his romantic getaway with Chris’s mother, there will be flower petals on the bed.

My conclusion: Robert is a man who thinks there is a Right Way to do things, and that ‘right way’ is usually the most obvious, surface-level way you can get. If you’re sad, you should cry; if you’re happy, you should smile. If you’re making love - and I’m convinced Robert uses the phrase ‘making love’ - it should be what you’d see in the most clichéd romantic film you can imagine: tender and slow, lots of kissing, flower petals, candles, maybe some violin music if you can browbeat Jonathan into standing in the corner and playing the violin.

However! I think this message is correct; there’s a part of Robert that just wants to get dommed by a mother figure, hence the multiple times he’s slept with the drama society’s literal mothers. Chris's mother definitely tied him up, and he loved it.

This is unfortunately of limited use on the Grovebean front, because Chris could not dom anyone if his life depended on it. Chris misjudges a choreographed fight and strikes a genuine blow, Robert groans in an inescapably sexual way, and Chris promptly changes his name and leaves the country.

Having written the above, I received another anonymous missive:

annie might actually love to dom robert, lol. she wouldn't be serious domly dom, but more i think she'd find it amusing/fun to push around a big guy like robert, more in a fun acting kind of way but also gratifying? i think if chris found out about it he'd immediately wish he hadn't. and then spend too much time thinking about it.

Which is absolutely correct; Annie would have a great time domming Robert. What I’m envisioning:

• Robert is an arsehole in some way (hard to imagine, I know); maybe he says something over the line to Dennis.
• Annie scolds him.
• Robert starts repeatedly transgressing in the same way, looking hopefully at Annie every time he does.
• Annie eventually goes, “What’s wrong with you? It’s like you want me to yell at you.”
• “Would you mind?” Robert asks.
• Annie brightens. “Wait, you actually do want me to yell at you? I can definitely do that. You don’t have to be mean to Dennis for it.”
• They experiment! Things escalate!
• Eventually, Chris walks in on Annie using a nude Robert as a footstool. He is deeply uncomfortable and tells them it’s incredibly inappropriate to use the playhouse for sexual purposes.
• Both Annie and Robert look at him like he’s lost his mind. Sexual?? What’s sexual about this??? You’re imagining things, Chris.

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