cest_what | Entries tagged with fic

Ugh why does January 1st have to be followed by January 2nd. January 1st was really nice, I read fic and watched Camp and hung out with

toujoursgai singing bits of the Sound of Music and eating ciabatta and feta and stealing all her movies. I'm the only member of my team in the office other than my manager, this sucks. ALSO one of the other editors sent round an email while I was away to say she'd just quit because she was moving to Europe for a year. MY LIFE IS SO POINTLESS.

*coughcough* anyway, so Yuletide author reveals happened. I really wanted to do treats this year, I guess, since even though I didn't get my assignment done till right before I had to go away, I then spent the next day at work plotting out two different treat ficlets, and wrote them both that night instead of packing.

Knew You When for

vtn
Chihayafuru | Shinobu/Chihaya | 3900 words | teen
Summary: In the last year of elementary school, one of the most promising young karuta prodigies of the decade transferred to a new school in Tokyo. From Kyoto. (Canon Divergence AU.)

Notes: Actually really hard! I find it so difficult to get a hold of Chihaya's motivations, especially. I think because she's a really internal character, but in a really non-verbal way? Maybe it would have been easier to write her from her own POV, I don't know. A Chihaya-POV would have been the more natural choice for this conceit - swapping out Arata for Shinobu as the one to teach Chihaya karuta - but Shinobu was my recipient's favourite character, so I wanted to make it her story.

Probably it just needed to be longer; canon-divergence AUs do, really. Still, I'm quite pleased with it.

Touch Shy for

softintelligence
Ookiku Furikabutte | Abe/Mihashi | 1700 words | teen
Summary: It took Abe longer than it should have to realise that when he touched Mihashi now, Mihashi shivered and stuttered and just about fell apart.

Notes: Lol this is so shamelessly not!ficcy. I actually had a bunch of notes already, for the beginning part of it, but they were all character motivation, not story, and when I wrote the fic I essentially just threw the notes at the page and scribbled around them.

Encore for

eglantiere
No. 6 | Shion/Nezumi | 1500 words | teen
Summary: Shion wasn't prepared for it to be such a replica of the first time.

Notes: So zero thought and insight and originality went into this one, it was late and I was just kind of typing FEELINGS ABOUT SHION AND NEZUMI AND REUNION YES, but I think it's actually the best-formed of the three, structurally. Or at least it's my favourite, maybe. It was also fun to write for someone I know, I haven't done that in a while :)

So a million years ago I asked for prompts to write ficlets! And then I got stalled on an unwritable prompt, so I only ended up writing two, both Hikaru no Go.

Tonight I finally got around to uploading the second one to AO3, so:

Morning Light
Shindou/Touya, 1400 words, PG
Akira has never woken up with no knowledge of how he got to bed before. (Woke up together prompt!)

First Pass
Isumi/Waya, 1100 words, G
Isumi comes home to find Shindou sitting on his front steps, scowling in a weirdly un-Shindou-ish way. (Bodyswap prompt!)

It is retrospectively a little hilarious how diligently I avoided the actual point of both of these tropes.

One Direction | Harry/Louis | 6500 words | PG

Summary: A Sixth Form AU. Harry and Louis have always done things like this, always messed around. Louis doesn't know why it's not funny this time.

Something Real (AO3)

... and on that day I finally gave up on double posting, welp.

*

Posting fic for a massive OTP in a massive fandom is this weird mix of attention and anonymity. I uploaded this to AO3 three days ago, and it got 600+ hits in the first twelve hours or so, and then immediately dropped to a handful. Which I sort of expected, on both accounts, but it still feels a bit strange.

Anyway, despite the fact that this is the worst ship for the worst fandom, I enjoyed writing this seriously a lot, and I'm really fond of it now it's done. I adore this kind of high school AU, in all its tropey shamelessness.

I hung out at the 3-Sentence Ficathon for a bit a while back, and ended up liking a couple of my fills enough to post the lot to AO3, so:

30 Sentences, feat. various micro fills for Hikaru no Go, Anne of Green Gables, Gunnerkrigg Court, Code Name Verity, Calvin & Hobbes, Harry Potter, Adventure Time, Homestuck and due South.

____

Here is my latest fannish pet peeve. It's bothering me enough that I've started slipping passive-aggressive references to it into pinboard notes and conversations with non-fannish friends, so perhaps it bears saying so that I can, you know, stop:

I am so over AUs in which European characters are inexplicably American.

Obviously this all ties into the weird set of expectations and assumptions that we all have about what are acceptable changes to make to a character in an AU setting. Turn a rockstar into a librarian but don't change their surname. Turn a bunch of canonically adult characters into teenagers in high school, but don't change their ages relative to each other. Turn a human character into a vampire but don't change their freaking nationality.

I know that those are subjective lines, and that there are plenty of people who are bothered by none of those things, or completely different things that don't trip me at all. So I guess what I'm actually complaining about is the mindset that makes what is starting to feel like far too many people not tag or in any way signal the nationality change in the headers.

If you're writing One Direction, you can't just call it a bookshop AU and leave people to work out two thousand words in that the reason it's so badly britpicked is that it's a bookshop in freaking New York. If you're writing Les Mis, you can't just call it a Modern AU and expect people to understand by that that the reason none of the street names sound very French is because everyone is supposed to be Californian. I am not going to assume that Enjolras is American just because he's in a modern AU. That isn't a natural assumption to make! Paris is also a place that exists in the 21st century! And has university students and social justice clubs and cafes!

(All that said, I will freely admit that it hasn't actually bothered me much in the past when American or Canadian characters in historical AUs were inexplicably English. Hypocrisy, it's a beautiful thing? ... I think that it would bother me to read it now, though.)

Just ... tag it. Mention New York in the summary. Do something to warn me that if I want to read this fic, I'm going to have to read all of Louis Tomlinson's dialogue with a New York accent and nobody's going to drink any tea.

ETA: Just to clarify, as with all rants, the "you" here consists probably entirely of people who will definitely never read this.

This is ridiculous. Just so you know. It's set early in the meteor journey, because that's when I started writing it, and it's somewhat AU as a result.

Homestuck | Rose & Karkat, Rose/Kanaya | 4300 words | PG | AO3

Summary: Love hurts. It's supposed to.

( Love Song no. 31 )

Second Yuletide fic, this one was a last-minute treat.

Disney Animation | Mulan/Belle | 1300 words | PG | at AO3

Summary: "Wait, no, wait, don't shoot!" Belle cried, hopping and untangling a cord from her foot as she followed the robot into the workshop. "Chip, it's all right, she's the ship's security officer. She's a friend." (A Space AU.)

( Whole New Worlds )

Cross-posting my yuletide fics. This was my gift for

tvconnoisseur.

Lizzie Bennet Diaries | Lydia & Lizzie | 1400 words | G | at AO3

Summary: Lydia Bennet, bringing the adorbs and laying down the truth.

Notes: Canon threw a curveball at Lydia and Lizzie's relationship, with the fallout from Lydia's 21st, just after I finished this.

Thank you to rumpleghost and blottingtheink for looking at this for me.

( Reasons Why Lizzie Bennet Is Perpetually Single: A Helpful List Compiled by Her Awesomer, Sexier, Totes Adorbs and Amazing Younger Sister )

For the "our song" square in my cottoncandy bingo card. More Hogwarts 'verse.

Homestuck | Roxy & Dirk | 1500 words | PG | at AO3

Summary: The end of Seventh Year is coming too soon for Roxy.

( Celestina Warbeck Ultimate Mixtape )

For the "candy" square in my cottoncandy bingo card.

Homestuck | Feferi♥Sollux, Sollux♠Eridan | 2900 words | PG | at AO3

Summary: Sollux didn’t plan to start Fourth Year playing terrible travel games with Slytherin aristocracy, but the honour of Ravenclaw House is at stake. Apparently.

( Taste Test )

Voting results for Round 1 of the HSO are up! So, I get to link this one, finally. The word limit was a bit of a bind, and avoiding using the words eyes, see and look turned out to be a bigger technical challenge than I'd anticipated, but on balance I'm really happy with this one. This ship is such a good ship. It placed 17/109, which I'm comfortable with.

With thanks to

blottingtheink, who not only beta'd this but also talked through every idea about blackrom dynamics I've ever had.

Homestuck | Terezi♠Vriska | 3000 words | PG

Summary: They have a conflicted and difficult friendship again now, but Terezi wouldn't be preparing to be in the same room as Vriska, for the first time in nearly two sweeps, if they hadn't been paired up for a trainee examination. (A non-Sgrub AU.)

Read at: AO3 | DW

This was supposed to be a much longer story about all the ways John has met Rose for the first time, through timeline shenanigans and unfortunate bouts of unconsciousness and grimdarkness, exploring the things I love most about the dynamics of their friendship. Also: grimdark throes! Totally were going to be a thing. That story tied itself into knots and fell in an unworkable heap, but I really liked this pesterlog and I thought it could stand alone as a ficlet.

Homestuck | Rose & John | 800 words | G | at AO3

Summary:
TT: That's what I mean.
TT: I am not a good friend.
GT: i bet that's not true.
TT: That would be a singularly ill-conceived bet.

( Past John: Pester Rose for the first time )

This is one of the Homestuck Shipping Olympics Bonus Round 1 fills I linked a few days ago, now cleaned up and expanded a little. Written for the genre prompts 'Medical Romance' and 'Gangsters'.

Character dynamics will be jossed the moment Vriska actually interacts with either of the other two in canon, but in the meantime, have two Serkets and a fishgirl in my favourite underwritten quadrant!

Homestuck | Vriska♣Aranea♣Meenah | 1600 words | G | at AO3

Summary: It's the third time this week that Vriska and Meenah have brought their street conflict to Aranea's ER.

( Things That Come in Threes )

So hey, I wrote truth-or-dare tropefic for

such_heights' Female Character Trope Fest (which is still ongoing)! Any excuse to write alpha kids high school AUs is by definition an excellent one.

Homestuck | Jane/Roxy | 2300 words | PG | at AO3

Summary: "This is an emergency beffsy situation," Roxy said. "Priority, like, 8.3, which is a totally bullshit number I just made up that basically means 'Outranks the fuck out of whatevs bs class full of stuff I already learned years ago that we have next'."

Acknowledgements: Thanks to

blottingtheink for the quick and excellent beta!

( Tell Me True )

This pairing is impossible. I love it to bits, but Rose and Kanaya as a duo are the enemy of engaging pacing, and I'm still trying to work out how to push them enough, or get them to push each other enough, to overcome that. Here's a first go; I had to write it four times to get it to something I didn't despair of.

Homestuck | Rose/Kanaya | 2,600 words | PG | at AO3

Summary: Kanaya is usually good at offering caring and reasonable comfort. But this, right now: this she isn't equipped for.
Acknowledgements: With thanks to blottingtheink, who was right on every count.

( New Ways to Fall Apart )

Oh man, you guys, lookittt. kuzujuk drew the most darling art for my John/Karkat fic No Quiet Sleeper.

I can't close the tab, I just keep beaming at it. John Egbert, your face is inappropriate.

( Chatter about today's update )