This is a silly thing, done on a ridiculous scale. But it was fun for me and I hope it’s fun for you too.

Daphne & Dylan is an original work of fiction told through a mix of gifs and text. I was inspired to take a (non-related) ship that I loved and re-purpose it to create an entirely new narrative with original sibling characters. At first I was just going to do a single gifset for Tumblr, a slice out of their love story. Like everything I do it grew wildly out of control into a multi-chapter story involving hundreds of gifs and eventually had to be hosted for simplicity’s sake on its own blog. Daphne & Dylan is now complete, with 144 episodes total. Please note that although the original blog on Tumblr still exists, this version on WordPress – due to Tumblr’s adult-content filters and some revising I did while my Tumblr account was down – and the posting on AO3 are the only final and complete versions of the story.

The gifs you will see here are taken from the relationship between Shelby and Caleb from Quantico, a TV series about a group of trainees at the FBI Academy. The premise for my original narrative is very similar – Daphne and Dylan Kane are new trainees together at the FBI Academy – but they are siblings with a very competitive relationship and a tense dynamic.

(If you think that sounds stupid, you’re right, but I’ve put too much work into this to be too embarrassed to share it. And, well, inspiration strikes where it strikes. Caleb and Shelby was the ship I wanted to use and if they were at the FBI Academy than Daphne and Dylan had to be too.)

The idea behind this project—behind revisioning these two characters as siblings—was getting to watch them fall in love the way we so rarely get to see incest love stories play out onscreen. Hopefully that benefit outweighs some of the awkwardness of the format and the compromises that had to be made in order to tell the story I wanted to tell and use as much of the source material as possible.

Fun relevant trivia about Caleb:

  • He actually does call Shelby “Sister” at one point
  • He refers to his family as the Lannisters
  • Caleb actually does have a sister in the FBI who we never see, and everyone in his family has names that start with the same letter

Here is a trailer I put together that introduces the setting and the relationship, complete with elaborate 30-second title card at the end that I now regret:

Some disclaimers if you’ll allow:

Having only the footage from Quantico work with obviously restricted in some ways what could happen and what could be said. I got pretty creative (if I dare say so myself) with what was available but I just want to remind everyone I didn’t have that much freedom. I couldn’t be a perfectionist about it or else I would never finish it. Sometimes the “new” dialogue doesn’t match up with the mouth movements as well as one would wish (there’s bad lip reading and then there’s bad lip reading) and sometimes you’ll be able to tell that the scenes are out of order from the original source material. I favored what I wanted them to say and what I wanted to happen, and that required some small sacrifices.

The worst offense is probably that Caleb and Shelby from Quantico didn’t need to be nearly as discreet as a brother/sister couple would have needed to be, but I didn’t want to abandon great scenes just because it looked like Daphne and Dylan were being a little too reckless and semi-public. One thing you will be sure of is that I have never been a trainee at Quantico. A realistic depiction of the FBI was not the goal here, that will be obvious enough, I’m sure.

Some things to keep in mind while looking at the gifs is that Quantico uses something they call a speed ladder – it’s a device used to speed things along – to be able to show, for example, someone walking away and have it take one second rather than 10 seconds. It involves displaying only a select few out of however many total frames. I just wanted you all to know that that was in the source material and not a creative giffing choice made by me. Another thing to keep in mind is that sometimes gifs will look different – they’ll be darker, cropped different, sized differently, whatever. There are a lot of reasons why they might look different, but there definitely is a reason and the less you try and figure that reason out the happier you’ll be.

Some notes about format: You will need to view the episode list page to see the chapters listed in chronological order. Or you can view it listed by post. I recommend opening each post in a new tab if you have a slow connection so that the next one can load while you’re reading the current one. Most of the posts have at least 10 gifs, and a few of them have considerably more than that.

Thanks!