#anyway this is my first time posting anything I’ve written in English so try to be gentle with me | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

toaster-trash · 11 months

Text

@shotofstress

When I tell you I read this I saw it and I WHEEZED I was in TEARS and I shouldn’t be bothered arguing about it but quite frankly I’m trying to procrastinate anyway and I’ve had a god awful week and need to take out my frustrations somehow, ergo, I’m going be petty not because this person disagrees with my reading of the novel, but because they implied that in reading queer or neurodivergent elements in a work, people “can’t see the important themes that the novel is about” which actually does piss me off a fair bit

Right so first before we argue we’ve got to decipher because English apparently isn’t this person’s forte for someone who is, apparently, such an avid reader and esteemed critic of English literature. Also I just realised I haven’t really provided any context here so apologies this was in response to that joke post I made about mischaracterising Frankenstein adaptations (again yes the pettiness is not lost on me but I’m embracing it anyway)

“He is not gay nor autistic” cheers this person disagrees that Victor Frankenstein is either gay or autistic. To each their own. Wonder what kind of backup they’ll have for that argument.

“Pls stop seen representation of us everyone bc u can’t make the difference,” Right so this is where we get confusing, I’m going to take a wild guess and I think they’re trying to say “please stop seeing representation of us everywhere because you can’t make the difference”, and I still don’t know what “make the difference” means, but we’ll go with it.

“read nothing new”, alright so they’re saying people who see representation everywhere read nothing new, and then the kicker that’s kind of the only reason I decided to respond to this anyway, “nor really see the important themes that the novel is about.”

First off, “stop seeing representation of us everywhere”, let it be known that as I make a hundred jokes about Victor Frankenstein being homosexual, I myself am thoroughly through and through without a doubt bisexual as the days are long. Absolutely love men. Also adore women equally. So no, I am not a Disney corporate executive trying to squeeze in as many queers as possible for the entire purpose of using the fact they have representation in media to excuse the fact it’s a shite film but also, not trying to revisit every old piece of media to squeeze representation where it doesn’t really fit or make sense just for shits and giggles. (Also just saying, you made this comment on Tumblr. So even if I was just going haywire with lgbt headcanons on my favourite media with no real backup, who gives a shit? Who actually gives a flying fuck? I don’t. Let people live, man. It doesn’t mean they don’t understand the source material just because they’re having fun and playing loose with it. It’s Tumblr, not a Netflix adaptation. Let people do whatever they want and have fun with it. It’s cool.)

But like I said, I do have backup and a lot of it so let’s get into that, shall we?

First of all, whoo, autism. I’ll be real not really a hill I’m going to die on but the wording you put of “he is not autistic” is just ridiculous because yeah, no, there is a lot of perfectly decent ground to read Victor Frankenstein as autistic and a lot of people do, mostly people who are autistic or otherwise neurodivergent themselves. Just because in the 18th century people didn’t necessarily have the language for things doesn’t mean they didn’t exist, and I mean, now we do. So what’s the harm in using it? They had their own language for things back then, do we have to revert back to speaking in early 19th century English every time we want to refer to a character who was written back then as neurodivergent or lgbt or anything else?? What’s the point in that??

But yeah, Victor Frankenstein. I can’t even be bothered to explain and to be honest every single other person I’ve said “Frankenstein is autistic to” has immediately responded “oh yeah, obviously”, even my father who famously is just hypercritical of all sorts of headcanons just went “oh yeah no for sure the man is definitely autistic no doubt about it”. So instead I’m just going to include some quotes.

My temper was sometimes violent, and my passions vehement; but by some law in my temperature they were turned not towards childish pursuits but to an eager desire to learn, and not to learn all things indiscriminately.

It was my temper to avoid a crowd and to attach myself fervently to a few. I was indifferent, therefore, to my school-fellows in general; but I united myself in the bonds of the closest friendship to one among them.

From this day natural philosophy, and particularly chemistry, in the most comprehensive sense of the term, became nearly my sole occupation.

Two years passed in this manner, during which I paid no visit to Geneva, but was engaged, heart and soul, in the pursuit of some discoveries which I hoped to make. None but those who have experienced them can conceive of the enticements of science. In other studies you go as far as others have gone before you, and there is nothing more to know; but in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder.

Like I said, self explanatory. It’s harder to come up with an argument for why he isn’t autistic than why he is, and frankly, what’s the harm in reading him that way? It doesn’t really change anything about the plot or themes, and his character doesn’t change. It’s just a very probable diagnosis for said qualities. It doesn’t change them, whether you use that word or not. The concept of autism was coined in 1911 anyway, so its not like Mary Shelley’s going to be sat at her writing desk in 1817 writing in big bold letters “BY THE WAY, FRANKENSTEIN HAD AN AUTISM DIAGNOSIS.” It doesn’t change the fact that people still had autism back then, just because the term wasn’t discovered yet. Anyway.

Now, second bit. “He isn’t gay” – now, if you read Frankenstein and thought “ah yes, this man seems perfectly heterosexual to me”, then honestly, sure. Go ahead. But to say that reading Victor Frankenstein as queer in any way means that people “don’t understand the important themes of the novel” is completely bloody ridiculous because, again, there is astronomical ground to read him that way.

Victor Frankenstein never really shows interest in any women in the novel, except for Elizabeth, who he has been raised, since he was five years old, to see as his “gift” and was told by his mother since he was a very young child that he was going to marry her – to the point where his mother, on her deathbed, tells both Victor and Liz: “My firmest hopes of future happiness were placed on the prospect of your union. This expectation will now be the consolation of your father.” Also, they’re cousins/adopted siblings. If you don’t think that’s fucked up, even by the standards of the time, I’m not really sure what to say to you. Of course he married her. And before he married her, he generally expresses very little romantic interest in her bar just expressing as much affection as you would a close friend or sister, or seeing her as his “gift” who he “has to be wed to”. Read any other story from this time period, in this genre, and you will not be remotely questioning whether they’re actually attracted to each-other or not. In fact, here’s an excerpt from The Vampyre, another book born from the same trip to Geneva that Frankenstein was, by John William Polidori, about the protagonist’s love interest:

And that’s only part of it. So. Yeah. Victor’s lack of romantic affection for Elizabeth is not “a product of its time” nor “a product of its genre.” And The Vampyre is a short story.

And so you may be saying, “well, just because Victor doesn’t show any interest in women doesn’t necessarily make him gay”, and yeah, true that (ace and bi Vic hcs y’all are valid) but there is very good basis to take the reading that he is attracted to men.

For one thing, just the fact that he’s so particular about creating “the perfect man” is subject to a lot of queer readings in itself, but let’s be real here, you all know me enough by now to know that I just want an excuse to rant about Clerval and Frankenstein. And rant about them I shall.

First, I’m lazy, so here’s an excerpt from one of my previous essays I’ve written that I’ve never posted everywhere on Frankenstein in general:

Just as The Creature is Victor’s narrative foil, so is Clerval. He's equally ambitious and fascinated with the secrets of life, however he’s healthy with how he goes about it and healthy with how he keeps the balance between taking care of himself and pursuing his dreams, while Victor goes over the edge and neglects himself and his sense of morality to complete what he set out to do. He's supposed to represent the ideals of gothic romanticism in Victor and he's supposed to be his anchor and support, (something the Creature doesn't have), caring for Victor during his illness, (“reanimating” him, almost, once again showing that comparison between both Victor and Henry, as Henry “reanimates” Victor with compassion and cares for him after, and Victor reanimates The Creature in a haze of obsession and mania and immediately abandons him, showing what Victor could have been), and constantly accompanying and being sympathetic and empathetic towards him. I also find it very interesting how he does also seem to have those darker aspects to him, lying to Victor’s family about the extent of his illness and caring for Victor in his apartment despite the fact that, for all he knew, from the evidence lying around his workspace and Victor’s feverish rambling, he very well could have murdered someone, and Clerval chooses not to press him on the issue and instead to intentionally help Victor cover it up. The fact that Clerval exhibits these traits only makes Victor’s own downfall all the more tragic when we consider that it likely very much isn’t a stretch to imagine that Clerval, too, likely exhibits a lot of the same morbid curiosity as Victor; he isn’t a superhuman figure with purely positive attributes who is completely far removed from Victor’s situation, the only difference is that Clerval chooses to prioritise his own sense of morality over his selfish aims, which only emphasises the point that Victor’s downfall is, ultimately, Victor’s own fault. When Victor "kills" the Creature’s chance of the same support and love (his unfinished bride), the Creature kills Henry and sends Victor into a downward spiral of suicidal thoughts and heavy depression because the character that represented that stability, that romanticism, that balance of keeping healthy, is dead, and that throws Victor downward into his inevitable obsession with the monster's destruction and his own death.

On this point, I feel like it’s worth bringing up that a reasonably good case could probably be made regarding a lot of queer subtext in the novel, although I won’t rant about it excessively as it obviously isn’t the focus, the theme of love is a very prominent theme as I’ve previously mentioned with The Creature; familial love, platonic love, parental love, romantic love, and I don’t think it’s particularly much of stretch to suggest that Shelley, intentionally or unintentionally, might have added a lot more romantic subtext than given credit for. Not that it matters particularly narratively speaking what kind of love is portrayed, but in reference specifically to Clerval and the Ingolstadt chapters there’s a very good argument to be made regarding Shelley’s poor relationship with her own husband and how she may have projected a lot of her wish for that kind of care and sympathy into his character, perhaps not taking into account, or perhaps she did, how it would come across – author intentions are mostly lost with time and we’ll ultimately never know for sure, but even for the standards of the late 18th century when the novel was set and the early 19th century when it was written, “I desire the company of a man who could sympathise with me, whose eyes would reply to mine. You may deem me romantic,” and “your form so divinely wrought, and beaming with beauty, has decayed, but your spirit still visits and consoles your unhappy friend,” probably weren’t standard platonic sentiments.

And honestly on that essay excerpt, that still sums my thoughts on that subject up pretty much perfectly. After all, a character in a book talking about his best friend going “I loved him with a mixture of reverence and affection that knew no bounds” as well said best friend tenderly nursing him back to health, and the character talking about how his body is “divinely wrought and beaming with beauty” and gently pressing his hand and referring to him constantly as “my dearest”, “my dear” and “my beloved”, while living together and travelling together and talking about how his voice “soothes” him and “cheats (him) into a transitory peace”, pretty gay!

And yes, before anyone says a single thing, if it wasn’t already obvious from the essay excerpt, I do understand “the important themes the novel is about”. I do understand that there are more themes and characters and subject matter, and more than that, I bloody love it! Because this is one of my favourite novels! Of-fucking-course I’m invested in it on a deeper level than “ooOoooh what classical literature characters can I RUIN with my gay agenda today!” But you commented this on a joke post, a joke post, again, on Tumblr. No harm but Jesus Christ if there is a singular platform I can go on and just post stupid bullshit about two book characters from 200 years ago being soft and gay without having to justify that yes, I did in fact read the book, and shock horror yes, I do know that there are other themes, it’s bloody Tumblr. (Absolutely love you lot btw especially all my lovely fantastic incredible mutuals all your takes and readings and art is 👌✨ chef’s kiss)

Oh and by the way, op, I noticed you reblogged this:

And to be honest if I had to say any take or reading was a misunderstanding of the text, it’d be that one (as well as “Victor is sexist for cutting women out of the creation process” takes – Christ that’s just gross. And feels mildly if not explicitly homophobic.)

So just for shits and giggles to counter that argument, here’s another excerpt from the same older essay as before:

Speaking of Hugo, it is rather interesting how many adaptations and literary criticisms seem to go down the route of the Hunchback of Notre Dame moral of “who is the monster and who is the man?”, suggesting that Victor is the “true monster” of the narrative. And, as much as I am a decent Victor Hugo fan, (I’m over 50% through Les Misérables, have you seen the size of that book? I’d have to be), in reality the point of the story is that neither Creator nor Creation are more monster nor man than the other – Victor mutilates corpses and brings the creature to life, and allows Justine to be executed without owning up to his actions, and The Creature murders a child and a multitude of other innocent people, Clerval and Elizabeth who had nothing to do with anything and Ernest left completely alone with his entire family dead. We can’t acknowledge The Creature’s sympathetic qualities without also acknowledging Victor’s, and regardless, sympathetic motivations don’t make up for immoral actions.

Also this meme, which I can’t for the absolute life of me remember who posted it originally I’m sorry I use it all the time in GCs whoever it was you’re so valid:

#gothic lit #classic literature #gothic literature #goth lit #classic lit #frankenstein #frankenstein weekly #frankenstein or the modern prometheus #essay #Frankenstein essay #Victor Frankenstein #queer lit #elizabeth lavenza #henry clerval #clervalstein #clervenstein

114 notes · View notes

tllgrrl · 6 months

Text

20 Questions for Fic Writers

Thanks for the tag @missamyshay !! Sorry for the delay. Some of these questions were hard to answer, so I ran away, then came back, and ran away, and I apologize for the ramblings.

If anyone has any questions/asks, feel free to…well…ask.

* * * * *

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

70 (Note: Many, of them well under 1K words and one shots. When something starts on Tumblr, it pretty much also goes over to AO3. Even drabbles.)

2. What’s your total AO3 word count?

163,518

3. What Fandoms do you write for?

The Falcon and The Winter Soldier - Marvel Cinematic Universe

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

1. One Quarter of a Year, 2. Language Lessons, 3. Welcome Home (the sequel to One Quarter of a Year), 4. A Front Yard Situation, 5. Bucky, Cass, and the King of Mardi Gras

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

Yes. I don’t always immediately respond, but I eventually do. Why respond? Because I’m already surprised that anyone reads a thing I wrote. No one is required to leave a comment. They can read and go on to the next, and they do. But if someone reads something I wrote, and wants to tell me that something about it made them want to tell me about it what they liked or what touched them and/or ask a question, or in one case complain about it? It’s an amazing thing to me, so much so that a comment always sends me back to read WTF I could have possibly written that made someone feel this.

6. What is a fic you write with the angstiest ending?

I haven’t written one with an angsty ending. Yet.

7. What’s the fic you write with the happiest ending?

Hmmm…lemme think…

They’re all pretty happy, I think, but the most hopeful, heartfelt ending I think is at the end of Ndinawe when Sarah walks out of the therapist’s office building after her first ever session post-Snap/post-Return, and finds Bucky waiting for her with a little bunch of flowers.

I will leave it to readers to tell me what they think my happiest ending would be.

8. Do you get hate on fics.

There’s that one time someone liked, but complained about 6 words (2 short phrases) in a 300 word ficlet/triple drabble where Sarah and Bucky are in a very quiet and intimate moment, and he says something to her in isiXhosa, which we know he speaks. Then he says it in English, and then in Kreyol, which, in my headcanon, Sarah learned from her parents, who spoke Haitian Creole (Darlene’s family) and Louisiana Creole (Paul’s family). Because Louisiana.

This person was annoyed and couldn’t understand why anything other than English was being spoken even though the translation is in the story and a little Glossary is in the notes..

And when I tried to explain why I chose that and that in canon, Bucky and Sam both speak more than one language, the person commented back that didn’t want to read an explanation…which is why I wrote one anyway.

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

I write erotica. To my mind, smut is different. And I don’t like the word “smut’. Like how some people don’t like the word “moist”.

I write two middle-aged grownup adult people for whom Communication is important. Even if things are difficult or awkward, they still at least try.

Also, they’re perfectly able and willing to grab a Quickie, and I’ve written at least one Quickie, but in my stories so far, like to take their time when they have the opportunity. Someone once described it as making love “like adults: long, slow, luxurious”.

I think that’s the kind I write.

Maybe that didn’t describe the kind of “smut” I write. If anyone can describe it to me, please do!

10. Do you write crossovers?

Not yet. But I do have something in mind.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I know of and I hope not.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

Not that I know of, but I would actually like to try to do that myself with help from Google Translate, Language Tutorials on YouTube, and the assistance of native speakers.

13. Have you ever co-written a fic?

Yes!! Bucky, Cass, and the King of Mardi Gras co-written with The @btwxsixesandsevens. The Paul & Darlene Ship Logs is a A Talk Like a Pirate Day day-long speed write, where @btwxsixesandsevens, wrote Bucky’s Journal entries and I wrote Captain Sarah Wilson’s personal ship logs. And also Snitches which was born from a funny “what would happen if” conversation with @shellyac75. I asked if I could embellish it, stretched it out and make a fic, and was given permission to play.

14. What’s your all-time favorite ship?

Bucky Barnes & Sarah Wilson (aka SarahBucky or BuckySarah) from the minute Bucky made it a point to let Sarah know that he was there, and he saw her. And she saw him, right back.

That having been said, if I’d known, when I was a kid, that I could make up my own stories about characters I liked, there is one ship that I would have filled my PeeChee notebooks with: Lt. Nyota Uhura & Spock. Yes, long before JJ Abrams made them a thing, I, in my tweeny brain, felt like something was possible there with those two. Nurse Chapel be damned.

15. What’s a WIP you want to finish, but doubt you ever will?

I don’t have one of those. I have a couple of Finished For Now stories that I have plans to revisit and continue, though. They’re not WIPs though. Plus, I’d never not finish a story.

16. What are your writing strengths.

Beats me. Someone who knows about writing techniques will have to tell me. I have been told that when reading my stories, a reader can see where they are and what’s happening.

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

I overthink and I think I get in the weeds when I write. I’m hyper critical, so I find fault with everything I write. Someone else will have to tell me what my weaknesses are in my writing. I know what they are in my process.

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic.

(See #12j I’m not afraid of it.

19. First fandom you wrote for?

The only fandom I’ve written for: The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

That having been said, I may have inadvertently written a drabble/ficlet/thing as an answer to a question that was posed in a Firefly forum on Ravelry (a multi-use community website for knitters and crocheters) probably 20 years ago. People enjoyed it and one commenter said I should write fan fiction, which, at the time, I thought was ridiculous. If I can find it, I may post it on AO3 for shiggles, though the show is long gone. (I know that there are still Browncoats around.)

20. Favorite fic you’ve written.

This is a really hard question because I find fault with every thing I’ve written. Every single thing. And my answer can change sometimes a couple of times during the span of a day!

I’d rather people tell me their favourite, and why, (Soft suggestion: Please feel free!!) but if I had to pick one today right now:

One Quarter of a Year / Welcome Home

I consider these two a single story that has yet to be joined on AO3.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Whew.

I am soft tagging @khululekile , @philtstone , @btwxsixesandsevens , @spinachgarden, @sarifinasnightmare and anyone who wants to jump in and play. Come on in! (If you’ve already been tagged, apologies! )

#asks answered #asks

7 notes · View notes

heyitssashag · 1 month

Text

The past few week have been a lot. Appointments, meetings, phone calls, emails, voicemails, texts, etc. I’m still volunteering (1-1 health coaching). Then helping the kid with their distance education classes (English & Foods). I took the kid to their volunteer orientation at the aquarium. Well, we both did it because I’ll be volunteering in support of the kid. I have enough on my plate but the kid needs experience and it would be nice for them to be more connected to the community. Having an autistic kid that is transitioning to adulthood comes with new challenges that I’m trying to navigate. It’s a lot. I’m tired.

I did read my first book in a month. Not the Rebel Wilson book that I mentioned in my last post (I started it and was bored AF). So I picked up Stormy Daniels’ book Full Disclosure. That was anything but a boring book. lol. I read it in two days. It was well written… compared to a lot of memoirs I’ve read. Intense, sad, cringy, sickening, gross, fun and occasionally hilarious. She wrote it back in 2018 and we all know a lot has happened since then. I hope that Orange Turd 💩 ends up in jail. If he somehow slimes his way back into being president I think I’ll have to turn off my TV for 4 years and pray a war doesn’t break out.

Anyway, tomorrow I have lab work.

I spoke to my substitute oncologist today over the phone as a check in. It was 1 minute. I’m looking forward to seeing my real oncologist, again. Apparently, he’s back but is still catching up with everything. I’m relieved to be seeing him next month. Haven’t talked to him since the beginning of December before I switched treatments.

Yesterday was the last day of cycle 5 for chemo. My energy is non-existent. I’ve been walking everyday. The last day I tried to run was on Sunday and it was hard. I’ve also been doing my band exercises and practicing meditation every day.

I submitted another article for the magazine I wrote for last year. I’m not holding my breath that it’ll get accepted. The story isn’t as exciting as the last one. They have a different theme every issue and this one was challenging and vulnerable. Apparently, this is one of their biggest issues and they tend to get the most submissions. Either way, it felt therapeutic to write. If they don’t accept it, I’ll still post it here.

The kid and I roasted marshmallows and made s’mores with one of those City Bonfire candle things. They work great but are too expensive. I haven’t toasted marshmallows in like 15 years so it was a fun treat.

I just wanted to check in here and write something. I like to use this space to document life stuff and my breast cancer “journey” (still hate that word) but lately I’ve been on my phone and laptop so much that I’ve been avoiding electronics when I don’t have to be on them.

Time to wind down with a boring book to help me sleep.

#metastatic breast cancer #life update #cancer treatment #blogging on my blog

5 notes · View notes

canmom · 1 year

Text

Animation Night 153: Kara no Kyōkai, part 1

We are entering... a slightly tricky phase of Animation Night. It’s not that we’re out of great animated films, far from it. Hell, we’ve yet to screen such classics as The End of Evangelion or Adolescence of Utena. But that’s the puzzle: a lot of such films are awkward fits for the format, requiring a lot of context, or standing too short or too long to fill the format.

Nor are we short of beautiful, artistic films from Europe. AniObsessive recently did a column on The Swallows of Kabul, which might finally be an answer the question of ‘what the hell could go beside Funan’. But I think we’ve had a bit too much war and genocide on this blog lately, so we’ll save that for another day.

Instead, let’s keep it chuuni!

It’s been a long while since Animation Night had anything to do with the Nasuverse. Back on Animation Night 60, I wrote a fairly brief description of Fate, and we enjoyed the spectacular Heaven’s Feel movies with only mild confusion.

But this was far from the only time that studio Ufotable adapted the the works of the enigmatic king of chuunibyou, Kinoko Nasu.

Let’s set the scene to begin. I’ll try and go over what I’ve been able to find out about the history, bearing in mind that Nasu-san is insanely prolific and his meta-setting is a seemingly infinite rabbit hole of lore...

...but as far as the man* himself there’s only the barest information to go on about his earlier life. He went to Hosei University, and afterwards started creating novels with his high-school buddy Takashi Takeuchi. Their first project was 空の境界 Kara no Kyōkai, lit. The Boundary of Emptiness but titled in English The Garden of Sinners in 1998 - that’s our subject for tonight, so more on that in a minute!

(*Wikipedia offers a citation for ‘man’ to a 2004 blog post where he jokes about being called a girl in a newspaper, in which he remarks もともと女々しいのがワタクシの芸風ですものボンソワー。[My style’s always been feminine, bonsoir.]; no further comment on that.)

In 2000 the pair founded a dōjin circle called TYPE-MOON to publish the visual novel 月姫 Tsukihime (lit. Moon Princess), which was a mega-hit when it launched at Comiket, and from that went on to create another visual novel called Fate/Stay Night, which was an even bigger mega-hit. This led to a forest of spinoffs with increasingly baroque titles like ‘Fate/hollow ataraxia’ or ‘Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya’, the most successful being the gacha game Fate/Grand Order, which launched in 2015. That gacha game has in turn spawned many many adaptations of its various storylines, such as (deep breath) Fate/Grand Order - Absolute Demonic Front: Babylonia or Fate/Grand Order: Final Singularity - Grand Temple of Time: Solomon. Really rivaling Kingdom Hearts there. Some of these films have been described as creative and ambitious, others very staid and playing it safe, but to be honest I am a foreigner in this land and I can’t tell you too much about them.

Anyway, as far as biographical details go, perhaps there’s more buried in an interview somewhere? But if so, I’ve yet to find it.

Our subject for tonight is a seven movie series produced by Ufotable from 2007-9, adapting Nasu’s first work. You might say, Bryn, that’s nuts, seven entire movies! To clarify, these movies are for the most really short, each just about an hour long with a couple of exceptions. So we should be able to pretty comfortably view the whole thing over two Animation Nights.

So what’s it about?

Set when it was written in the late 90s, it follows a teenage girl demon hunter called Shiki Ryougi, who has ‘Mystic Eyes of Death Perception’, which let her see indications of how things will die. She becomes a detective specialising in supernatural cases, alongside her eventual husband, Mikiya Kokutou. So romance and supernatural battles.

Many of these ideas, particularly the death perceiving eyes, would be reprised in Tsukihime. Within the meta-narrative, Kara no Kyōkai is an alternate universe, but not one completely disconnected from the rest, with its characters showing up for minor roles - and even playing a role in the end of Heaven’s Feel.

Except, that’s selling it short, because it’s also the first outing for the more esoteric concepts of the Nasu’s works: the Akashic Record, the Jungian anima and animus, and the paradoxes of the Taiji in Chinese philosophy to name a few. And to ground that, all sorts of dark shit: Wikipedia reels of suicide, rape, patricide, incest and murder, along with DID. It sounds like a lot!

Of course, it’s also about ridiculous psychic powers with long names, magic eyes, and so on. It’s easy to mock all these chuuni elements as hollow and pretentious, but imo the resulting blend is to strike out somewhere fascinatingly weird and achieve effects that a more reserved work couldn’t. We’ll see whether that comes together here!

In discussing the film series, Nasu described the original work - which he came to view as a rough early work - as ‘like a prose poem’, inherently very difficult to adapt. He turned down proposals to adapt it as a TV series and a movie, imagining it would be too hard for audiences to follow. But when a seven-movie series by Ufotable was proposed, he changed his mind:

It was such an off-the-wall idea that I got caught up in the enthusiasm; the offer was so awesome that turning it down seemed rude, so I agreed readily.

So, that’s one of the two characters in our story. What of the other?

Ufotable would later make ‘adapting Fate works’ into a steady line of work alongside popular shōnen like Demon Slayer. But at this time, they were a much more experimental studio. At sakugablog, kVin writes...

[Aniplex producer Atsuhiro] Iwakami had been ruminating about how to put together an adaptation for Kara no Kyoukai that actually lived up to the potential he saw in Kinoko Nasu’s world since 2004, and by the following year, the solution to his woes manifested in front of his eyes. Futakoi Alternative was an eccentric reboot of a milquetoast, twins-themed harem series. It reimagined everything about the original series into a simply indescribable mix of genres and crazy scenarios. The motto of ufotable’s founder Hikaru Kondo resonates throughout the whole series: if making as many things as possible is the way to ensure you’ll get some of them right, why not jump around from noir cinema, to sci-fi epics, then back to face some humanoid squids before some surprisingly earnest romance? For viewers like Iwakami, this irreverent spirit was a wake-up call about new ways to create animation. So, why not approach them when he was planning something grand that wasn’t quite like anything seen before in anime?

In fact, Iwakami’s original idea was merely a trilogy; it was Ufotable founder Hikaru Kondo who was like nah man let’s do seven. Within the studio were type-moon fans such as director Takuya Nonaka and character designer Tomonori Sudo, whose passion inspired Kondo to go big. Recklessly big. The initial plan was to release a new film monthly, but this soon proved predictably impossible. Even so, they managed to complete the series within two years, which is pretty astonishing in its own right.

As you can see from the clips in this post, the visual style of these movies anticipates - if perhaps in a cruder form - the studio’s later Fate adaptations: chiaroscuro lighting and gradients and filters on top of gradients and filters. Not everyone’s cup of tea, but as far as a house style goes, it’s worth acknowledging.

Internally, its direction was shaped by the flatter-than-usual hierarchy of Ufotable (whose name refers to a round table in the Arthurian sense). Each movie was assigned a different director without a structure unify the production as a whole beyond adherence to Nasu’s work.

I’ll pull in kVin to describe the resulting vibe of the project:

At its core, Kara no Kyoukai is a pretty cute love story that asks itself whether it’s possible to stray away from your fate; to put it plainly, Kokutou claims that he can fix her, even if the fixing involves getting over a pesky character flaw such as a predisposition towards murder. While not a groundbreaking scenario, its commitment to that relationship in spite of all the extraneous elements makes it work, and Shiki in particular is a slaughterer with very charming body language that evolves according to the major shifts to her character.

At the same time, these films are also highly atmospheric and committed to the sensorial experience in a way that no other Type-Moon anime is. While the expository worldbuilding and dense dialogue that Nasuverse works are known for are still very much present, the Kara no Kyoukai films are also willing to stay silent for minutes at a time. The mystery aspect to these films—Shiki and Kokutou work for Aozaki Touko’s detective agency after all—is honored with an appreciation for the mystique; even if you know that long-winded answers are likely to come, they tend to relish the opportunity to soak the viewer in the grim, mysterious atmosphere of its world. There is a quiet appreciation of the things that are yet to be known, and those that may not be spelled out.

At the time, he writes, the staff were intimidated by the idea of theatrical animation, which in the 90s called to mind Patlabor and Satoshi Kon - a tough act to follow, no question. But the dense image boards of art director Nobutaka Ike, who worked on those very same films, brought the confidence needed.

The films follow the same release order as the original novels, which is narratively non-chronological.

Nasu, for his part (link again), was anxious about his early works being adapted...

In Kara no Kyoukai, the first story, "Overlooking View" (俯瞰風景) is the clumsiest. I've always thought I wanted to do something about it, and I told a staff member, "If we're making this into a movie, I'm going to rewrite the first story; please let me do that." But he said, enthusiastically, "No, I want to work with it the way it is. I want to animate this!"

Then, when I read the finished script, they'd cut out over half of the unnecessary excess fat and had turned out something more interesting as a story, so I thought, "If it's like this, they don't need me to rewrite it."

In Nasu’s view, each film ought to stand alone, but the full picture can’t really be understood from just the first - but he claims that with all seven films, the viewer would have enough to understand the story without having to turn to the books. Which is lucky, because the only version of the books in English is a widely disparaged fan translation.

To support all this comes haunting music by composer Yuki Kajiura and her group Kalafina, who would later create the renowned soundtrack to Madoka. In fact these movies are the origin of Kalafina, with Kajiura putting together a new group with a couple of members of her previous project FictionJunction.

Anyway, please read the rest of kVin’s article (perhaps after the movies! x3) if you fancy a detailed retrospective on all seven films.

Tonight my plan is to screen the first four parts of The Garden of Sinners, namely...

I: Overlooking View - an introduction to the series. In 1998, Shiki lives alone in her apartment, occasionally visited by Mikiya, and working for an occult detective agency. She learns of a series of strange suicides at an abandoned building. Investigating, she finds the building is full of hostile ghosts. Someone is drawing the girls to the building by astral projection...

II: A Study in Murder - Part 1 - in 1995, Shiki and Mikiya are highschool students. A spree of brutal murders break out in the area. Mikiya discovers that Shiki (式) is plural, with a male alter called SHIKI (織) who is the inverse of her personality. But who’s doing the murders?

III: Remaining Sense of Pain - A teenage girl called Fujino is raped by a group of gangsters, and pursues revenge with her psychic powers. Shiki and Mikiya are pulled in to the case, and realise that Shiki once knew Fujino - a girl who could not feel pain. But that seems to have changed...

IV: Hollow Shrine - a direct sequel to the second film. Shiki ended up comatose, and now in the psychic void, confronts her alter. We learn about her backstory and how she got involved with the wizard detectives.

I think these summaries should convey the level of Content(TM) we’re dealing with here. Guards up!

Next time around, we’ll pick up with Paradox Spiral, Oblivion Recording, and then at last A Study in Murder - Part 2. Which will actually be longer, because PS and ASiM2 are two hours long. (There’s also an eighth movie, released in 2013, titled Future Gospel which is a new sequel written by Nasu for movie form.)

I think that will suffice for an introduction. Animation Night will be going live 7:30 UK time, about 40 minutes from this post, and at 8pm UK time we shall begin the movies! Join me at https://www.twitch.tv/canmom~

#animation night

7 notes · View notes

the-lonelybarricade · 1 year

Note

Did you ever felt self conscious while writing? I’ve never posted anything and I never really started a fic but every time I try I’m like this is ridiculous why am I even doing this. I know the answer is just write but honestly I feel like I can’t

I definitely do! Constantly! I'm personally very aware of the fact that like, I've never honed this craft outside of my high school english classes. I'm a math major, and in the UK that means exclusively math classes since they don't do general ed in universities here. The first time I got a note on my fics saying I was telling instead of showing, I had to go look up what that even meant lmao. Sometimes I panic because I'm sure my writing is scattered with tells that I'm not a professional writer but then like, so what? I'm not.

And sometimes I'll read fics from exceedingly talented people and I'll definitely start to feel the chafe of inferiority. But I just remind myself that I'm doing this for me. I think it's fun, and it's nice to have an outlet for my constant daydreaming and feel like I'm using it productively. I feel proud of myself when i finish something, even if it's objectively not as well written as what more talented people would write. It's just... it's really fucking cool to be able to create things. I wrote the first part of ACoFD because I needed to. It was literally rattling in my brain and I couldn't stop until I got it out. I wrote the fic in a week and I finished it intending to just keep it for myself.

People have ended up enjoying some of the things I write, which is an incredible feeling, but it's never been the purpose. Whenever I start to compare myself to other people, or catch myself worrying that engagement has dropped, I always come back to that feeling. Even if everyone stopped reading my fics, I'd keep writing them, because I'll still read them.

Anyway my advice to you anon is to just write, but more specifically to write something that you're not planning on posting. Give yourself the freedom to write thinking no one else will look at it. If you're really struggling with not being critical of yourself, then try making your font white while you type (or black if you use dark mode) so that you can't see what you've written. At the end, you can change the color and read it back, but removing the ability to read as you go might help you with being so self-critical.

#Oof this got away from me #I hope this is helpful?

9 notes · View notes

dyspunktional-revan · 1 year

Text

This is not a “this is why you’re chronically ill” post. This is an “if you’re chronically ill your body might not have the strength to handle this that it otherwise might have” post.

Also: English is my second language and I’m audhd.

If you want to ask anything about the post, please do.

If you’re chronically ill, you might want to cut yeast out of your diet and take some antifungal.

Backstory: my mom believed in anti-yeast conspiracy theories, plus/because my sister had an allergic? reaction to it as an infant. So most of the bread I have consumed in my life has been yeastless. Because of health drops, for the last couple of years I have only been able to consume one brand, as the others were too rough. And there was a time in early Autumn 2022 when the quality of that bread became shit. I got fed up, and started eating regular white bread (I used to be able to do it fine when I was healthier).

My digestive health got worse.

I really didn’t want to prove my mom right about yeast, so I kept eating yeast-made bread for a while, my health kept getting worse, ultimately I stopped eating that bread but didn’t take antifungal yet. This resulted in several months of progressively worse digestive health no matter what I’d do and me becoming almost certain I am terminally ill.

Finally somewhere closer to the New Year I have concluded that taking a Fluconazole capsule at least won’t hurt.

I felt better literally from the first capsule. Not only did my digestive health improve but also my mental health, and my migraines. I had horrible time with both in Autumn but attributed to other things. Mom at first suggested take three? capsules a week apart each, but ultimately my digestive health became much worse again earlier than a week passed, so I took another I think it was five days after the first but I should have earlier. I don’t even remember if I took three or four capsules ultimately, sorry, and I don’t remember how many days apart it was, only that I planned originally to take the third three days after the second. Look from your own health, I guess. Now, my digestive health is finally actually beginning to get better.

…and also, what I forgot when first typing the paragraph, even though I was thinking it through: yeah. That was me who ate yeast for maybe a couple of weeks, and then left it for months. I guess most people constantly eat yeast, and if they need to get treated from it they’ll need more than me.

I originally was going to write about this right after the first capsule, but decided I needed to first look at how it would go a bit later; then I also got some other issues while I was treating that and needed to sort that out, yeah. And ultimately, I.. I don’t think I completely forgot when I finally recovered, but it feels like it. I’m sorry; anyway, the important thing is, I’ve written. I’m scared it’ll be taken as fearmongering, or that I should polish it better, but I think I should really just post this.

Do tell me if you’d like this post better polished, though, I’ll try.

#chronic illness #chronically ill #disabled #disability #spoonie #health #leviathan.txt #digestive issues #don’t know how to tag #still tbh feel like an eastern orthodox grandma even tho this is a thing that actively happened to me #and other people might benefit from hearing this

6 notes · View notes

latibvles · 2 years

Text

jarring realization that i haven't actually haven't done a proper introduction post — no time like the present I suppose?

Anyways you can refer to me as either Poet or Lexi ( or any variation of those two nicknames, Poe, Lex, etc. ). I am nineteen years old ( as of June 2021, because I will no doubt forget to update this as I age so please feel free to do that math ) and go by any pronouns ( although I must ask if we are not close, please stick to she / they ). I'm currently in college pursuing a degree in english, with hopes of being an editor in the future. I've been writing since I was eleven years old and like to think I've gotten pretty good at it. This is my first time posting any work on Tumblr, despite being a reader of stories on here for quite some time.

I am a self-proclaimed "war boy enjoyer" — so you can safely assume I've watched Band of Brothers, The Pacific, and a few different films. Haven't gotten around to Generation Kill quite yet. Outside of period pieces, I enjoy tolkienverse, animanga, and thai dramas primarily. I also play a lot of Dungeons & Dragons and play a lot of video games ( and for all our sakes I am a Gemini, ENXP, and 8w7 ). I’ve got a puppy named Loki who likes to bite my hands to prevent me from writing, and I’m prone to impulse posting AUs at 3am because all of my friends are enablers (affectionate).

My pride and joy, my current focus work is Sad, Beautiful, Tragic, which you can read here on Tumblr and here on AO3. It’s sister work and some extra fun bits are also posted on my AO3. I’ve also got an OC Masterlist here featuring some OCs from my next work, With A Fighting Heart, which I am quite fond of. They’ve got their respective tags if you’d like to read about them too.

SOME USEFUL TAGS

" poet's think thoughts " — alternatively titled "the poet screams into the void and now you must all listen." this is first and foremost a place of safety and comfort, as my url suggests. also just

" poet's mail box " — anything from my inbox goes here including answers to games & writing challenges

" poe's pals " — anything from friends / mutuals goes here

" poet's notepad " — i try to update this fairly regularly with whatever drabbles / ficlets i’ve written which aren’t apart of the main fic

“ poet’s secret friends ” — my anon tag, for those of you who are a little too shy to say hello, but I love you anyway

“ hi pretty boy ” — gifsets of my favorite war boys ( so .. a lot of ron + dick + some snafu sprinkled in there too ) alternatively, for my favorite women — try “ hi pretty girl ”

SOME FIC RECS alternatively titled "what is getting Poet through the semester?" complete with AO3 / masterlist links (and their tumblrs, if I have it) — can also be found under #fic recs

The Names We Call Upon by TysMisadventures ; for my Dragon Age enjoyers. I am Elera's number one fan and also her wife. If Solas won't make a move I WILL! Also I love a good Modern AU.

A Garden In Bloom by Arlana ; it has Hanahaki and Medieval AU in Haikyuu. Also the first AO3 fic I ever read and life just hasn't been the same since. I love princes falling in love.

Fire on Fire by liebgotts-lovergirl ( @liebgotts-lovergirl ) ; I am going to war for Alix Martinelli. If she asked me to jump I would ask how high. I am her number one fan.

The Darkening Sky by MercuryGray ( @mercurygray ) ; If you see me crying over Annie Sutton in a public restroom no you don't. I'm cheering Joan Warren on with pom-poms whenever she does anything ever. I am her ride or die forever.

Barren Soul by softspeirs ( @softspeirs ) ; If Kat Gray has million numbers of fan i am one of them . if Kat Gray has ten fans i am one of them. if Kat Gray has only one fan that is me . if Kat Gray has no fans, that means i am dead . if world is against the Kat Gray, i am against the world.

as spring makes promises outside by shoshiwrites ( @shoshiwrites ) ; shoshi will write an au and I will think about it for the next month and a half and that’s not even a joke. anyways flower shops and joe toye and jo brandt will save 2022 and if you disagree argue with your momma.

#introductory post #poet’s think thoughts #band of brothers #fic recs #helpful links #poet’s intro

11 notes · View notes

seaside-stars · 1 year

Text

There’s so much prep I did for my fic (If two’s company then three’s a good time) in the background and I wanted to share some of it so here we go

First I did some worldbuilding even if most of it is irrelevant for this fic. Then I came up with some things for the OC. Since part of the fic takes place at the Abbey, I looked up abbey floor plans and sketched out one I liked

Then I modified some things so it worked for what I wanted to use it

I did keep some of the things in the same place (kitchen, great hall), and tried to make modifications that made sense (warming room became the common room, chapter house became the Papa’s office and room, the lay monk dorms became the Siblings of Sin’s dorms, the monastic monk dorms became the Ghoul’s dorms, the library stayed in the same place but became bigger)

After I had the floor plan, I began working on the fic, writing a pretty detailed plan for it in a notebook (it ended up being 4 pages)

Then it was time to write the fic. First I planned for 2 chapters, but as I was writing it became obvious it was longer than I anticipated so I split it up into 3 chapters. Towards the end of Chapter One I realized I didn’t know how to include some notes the OC leaves so I ended up drawing those. All in all, including writing the plot, it took me 4 days to write and it ended up being the longest thing I’ve written (22 pages). It was also my first time posting a fic to AO3 since 2016, and my first time trying to write anything nsfw. I had fun but at the same time I struggled so much writing it because writing in english is so hard, I had to constantly google words, translate words, and look up synonyms (and I had a small crisis when I came across the fact that some people call Dewdrop/Sodo the same fucking name I picked for my OC and that delayed me in uploading the fic because I didn’t know what to do)

Anyway, I rambled on long enough, I’ll leave a digital version of the floor plan and the route Dew and the OC take to and from the kitchen in Chapter One

#I only discovered the band like a month ago and the brainrot is still going strong #I wish I had mutuals/friends who are also into it #rn my poor sis and bestie are the ones who have to listen to me talk about them #the band Ghost #Ghost bc #if you see any typos.. no you don't :)#also the floor plan is not proportional it's just made so I can reference it easily

4 notes · View notes

the-travelling-witch · 2 years

Note

Okay so I started writing, HOW DO YOU WRITE?!

I am trying to think of things to write but it is literally impossible to think of things to say. I know what I wanna write, but when it comes to typing it I'm completely lost

ah yes, the eternal question which strikes both reverence and absolute terror in creators far and wide

“where do i begin?”

[everything below this cut was written in a sarcastic 2am frenzy, read at your own risk]

i guess it depends on what you already have: is it a character, a setting, a plot or a dialogue prompt; sometimes you might only have ✨a vibe✨ but none of the formerly mentioned, which is, to put it lightly, the absolute worst in that case i pray upon thee good luck my friend

i mostly start off with a line of dialogue because that’s just what usually comes to me first, everyone’s a little different in that regard though and there’s absolutely no right or wrong answer to what motivates you

from what i have i try to fill in the rest of my blanks, mainly “who could say that?” and “in what context could this line be said?”, often enough i can imagine a scenery and a rough story line around that already; if not, it’s though luck and i procrastinate until the missing puzzle piece just comes to me, forcing it wouldn’t help anyway

it can also really help to bounce your ideas off of someone else; even if they don’t contribute anything new or helpful at all, voicing and describing your thoughts to someone else can help visualise what you’re working with and often enough inspiration strikes you in the process; also every now and then, others do have a sensible thought too jsjsh /lh (to everyone who’s ever had to listen to me ramble about me fics, you’re a god-sent, i love you, mwah mwah <3)

that’s when i usually sit down and prepare to meet my arch nemesis: the first sentence

my tip: just rip the band-aid off; you have to start somewhere and contemplating the first five words for hours on end does absolutely nothing but hold you back and you can come back and edit it later anyway (i almost never actually do that bc spoiler alert: the first sentence won’t make or break your fic; a “bad” first sentence won’t make it unreadable but a neat one also can’t save what is unsavable)

then i proceed to word vomit onto the page, have a couple mental breakdowns every now and then, finish about 95% and procrastinate the ending again (same tip as before: just get it over with, not writing it is not finishing your fic either; also, believe it or not, the end is changeable as well)

i continue by promising myself i will go over and rewrite the abomination again, then i throw it at my best friend so she can tell me that a) i’m in fact not delusional and people won’t think i’m completely weird for writing that and b) yes, i have in fact used the language known to most as “english”; although, deep down, i know i mainly do it so i can further procrastinate actually posting my fic and opening myself to potential criticism from people i do not know

if i’m feeling particularly motivated, i might actually start formatting my tumblr post, putting in the tags and writing the head of the fic (summary, pairing, warnings, author’s note etc)

i receive feedback from my friend, reread my fic a bajillion times just to miss a bunch of typos and grammatical errors, proceed to break my promise and not change my fic at all, paste it into tumblr, and hover over the post button for a disgustingly long time

once i’ve actually decided to press the damn thing, i immediately close tumblr and bring a safe distance between me and the app

now all that’s left to do is wait for validation from strangers on the internet in form of tags, comments or asks

those were a lot of very sarcastic words to basically say that you should just get started and not worry about it too much; every fic is different and sometimes the words seemingly don’t stop flowing and other times it feels like you’ve never seen a word before in your life; you can also flip-flop between these two stages within the same fic

at the end of the day, we write because we like torturing ourselves visualising our ideas on a page so we can share them with others; art is hard so this is the next best medium to share the headcanons and the brain worms and the rants and the incoherentscreaming the voice in your head does when you see your favourite character

we’re no professionals, we’re just silly little people on our silly little blogs sharing our silly little stories with other silly little people on their silly little blogs who in turn share their silly little stories with us

this is my guide to how i write 90% of my stories; why only 90% you ask? because every now and then a monster comes by, takes up all your brain space, ends up being 11k+ words and you just know you would’ve gone absolutely mental writing it without some form of planning before hand

if you don’t write anything like that, the dumpster fire above might help (mainly the beginning because it just got weirder and weirder with every added paragraph)

to close this off, i’ll leave you with some wise words

roses are red,

violets are blue,

don’t ask me for advice,

i ain’t got a clue

this is your sign to never let me write a writing guide, ever

#coffee & tea break #letter from: the lovely yourloc lgh0st ✿#it started off good #and turned weird really quickly #blame it on anything but me #i do hope this somehow helps #and if you didn’t think i was a complete and utter idiot before #how’s your perception of me now?#if you came here looking for actual advice #i’m sorry #i might sit down and write a more serious guide if people are interested #i’m trying to demystify the process of writing with some sarcasm #it’s really not that scary

4 notes · View notes

ryqoshay · 2 years

Text

TA Side Story: Say It Like You Mean It

Primary Pairing: RyoYuki Also Starring: Shizuku Words: ~2.5k Rating: G Fandoms: Love Live Nijigasaki Parent Fic: Tri-Arame Time Frame: Sometime after college Event: Wake Up Challenger 2022 Source: Idol Fanfic Heaven Discord Challenges: 5, 6

---------

Author’s Note: Challenge 5 is to write a fic with a character I’ve never written before. Challenge 6 is to write a fic based on a title from a provided list.

I’ve had a rough idea for this scene sitting in my WIP and Notes Warehouse for several months, but it’s never made it into my active queue. Until now.

Summary: Koyuki sees something she didn’t want to see, and starts to contemplate how things reached that point

---------

“<Masquerade!>” The Ensemble sang in English.

Pas de chat. Koyuki thought to herself before letting her muscle memory work through the practiced motions.

“<Leering satyrs, peering eyes…

Masquerade!

Run and hide – but a face will still pursue you!>”

Pirouette. No, don’t look.

Shizuku and Ryo meandered through the throng of chorus dancers as other members of the main cast sung through a conversation. Eventually, their lines neared, and they made their way toward the front of the stage. Signaled by the clink of glasses, they emerged from the chorus.

Soubresaut. Focus.

Koyuki continued to dance along with the rest of the Ensemble as Shizuku and Ryo, playing the parts of Christine and Raoul, sang their parts. She turned again towards the other two and…

Eh?

Wait. Foot down! Foot down! Koyuki commanded herself before nearly stumbling into the other dancer next to her.

“Cut!” The director called, loud enough for those in the orchestra pit to hear.

Oh dear, did I mess up that badly? Koyuki found herself grimacing. However, it wasn’t just the fear of having made a mistake that caused her frown, but also the sight she had just witnessed.

“Osaka-san, you missed your line.” The director continued. “And Aikawa-san, what was that kiss all about? That’s not in the script. And for good reason, Christine and Raoul are trying to keep their engagement a secret.”

Oh, so it wasn’t me… But still, why was Ryo kissing Shizuku? Even if it was only on the cheek? Sure, they had kissing scenes in the script, but those were supposed to be stage kisses. What Koyuki just saw had not looked like a stage kiss. Why…?

“My apologies.” Ryo gave a slight bow “May we try that part again?”

“Eh, it’s about time for a break anyway.” The director dismissed with a wave. “Alright, everyone, take five.”

Ryo turned to Shizuku and bowed even deeper. “It seems I got caught up in Raoul’s passion. Please forgive me, Shizuku-san.”

Koyuki felt heat rise in her cheeks as Ryo’s natural charm radiated out, affecting many of the others on stage. Then, she felt something else…

Wait. No. No… Not here.

Koyuki fled the stage, ducking past the other actors to find the nearest, hopefully secluded area.

By the gods, she felt stupid, as the first tear slid down her cheek. She had known Ryo since primary school, and had known she was in love with her since at least high school. And yet, she had always, always been too shy to actually do anything about it.

Of course, the fact that despite Ryo’s debonair demeanor, she seemed utterly clueless when it came to recognizing Koyuki’s feelings for her. Or anyone’s feelings for her for that matter… Memories filled Koyuki’s mind of Ryo shrugging off a locker filled with love letters or chocolates or the like on Valentine’s or casually dismissing the confession of the umpteenth underclassman like she had no idea how devastated she was leaving the other girls.

Also, it hadn’t helped that they were two years apart. Koyuki had enjoyed a wonderful first year in both middle and high school, being able to spend time there with Ryo. But those were followed by two years of scrambling to find time outside of school. Sure, the two lived near each other, but the older they got, the busier their lives became, and the harder it was to find time to be together. And post high school managed to make things even more difficult as they had attended different schools.

They had, and continued to share a chatroom on LINE, as they both loved the stage, even if Ryo preferred acting while Koyuki preferred dancing. But it was not the same as meeting in person. School idols had been common ground for them, and Koyuki had been thrilled to continue to see Ryo show up for many shows even after graduation. But again, high school passed, they both stepped out into the adult world, and would have completely lost track of each other had it not been for LINE.

It was as if by some miracle that a mutual friend had recommended that Koyuki apply to a local community theater upon graduation. She had been accepted, and immediately recognized one of the theater’s top stars as Ryo. Koyuki had mentally chastised herself for not realizing the theater Ryo had been talking about on LINE had been the same one she had just joined. Not that it would have affected her choice to apply… or rather, perhaps it would have made her that much more anxious?

And with her stardom had come many admirers, both on and off the stage, whom Ryo handled in much the same manner as she had back in high school. She would hold herself with the air of a prince, smile grandly, add unnecessary flourishes to her movements and regularly speak in an almost regal manner. And then she seemed not to notice when girls swooned, fumbled their lines, or flat out forgot how to act.

Of course, not everyone was affected by Ryo’s charm. Shizuku, for example, was nigh unflappable once she got herself into her character’s mindset. In fact, the light dusting of pink on her cheeks after Ryo… after… Koyuki didn’t want to remember it, but the memory came anyway… after Ryo kissed her, was the most reaction Koyuki had seen of Shizuku. Had Ryo finally breached her barriers?

Was Ryo pursuing Shizuku? That was the age-old trope, right? The protagonist never went after the girls who threw themselves at their feet, but instead wanted the one that didn’t; the one that required the protagonist to chase her, to actually put effort into romancing her.

And why wouldn’t Ryo want to pursue someone like Shizuku? She was a rising star at the theater, hot on the tail of Ryo, with a rapidly growing fanbase that was pulling in new patrons. She probably could have earned the main role of Christine, instead of understudy, had it not been for the fact that she had only joined the theater earlier this year. And not only that, but Shizuku thrived in the spotlight, like Ryo herself, and unlike Koyuki, who was more comfortable blending into the corps de ballet.

“Yuki-chan?”

Oh no. Koyuki flinched. No. No. No. No. No. Why did it have to be her that found her? Literally anyone else would have been better…

“Are you alright?”

A hand landed atop Koyuki’s head, causing her to instinctively push up into it. It was a long-standing tradition between the two that had actually been started by Koyuki. Ages ago, when Ryo was the timider and more prone to tears of the two, Koyuki would pat her head in an effort to comfort her friend. Then, as Ryo grew into her confidence, she began to return the gesture. And nowadays, with their height difference, it was almost exclusively performed by Ryo, though Koyuki still managed to get in a few pats here and there if she caught the taller girl sitting.

“Yuki-chan?” Ryo repeated.

“How did you find me?” Koyuki heard herself ask, before her conscious mind had a chance to reconsider.

“I’ve been here over two years.” Ryo explained with a chuckle. “I know all the places my dear Yuki-chan might seek to hide.”

Koyuki quickly wiped her eyes on her sleeve, thankful that she was not wearing makeup as it was merely a rehearsal.

“Oh dear.” Ryo said as Koyuki stood and turned toward her. “Whatever might have upset my dear Yuki-chan to the point of tears?”

Something wrenched within Koyuki as she was reminded that Ryo was asking because she honestly did not know. But how to even begin to tell her…

“It’s nothing.” Koyuki decided to say.

“Nonsense.” Ryo dismissed. “The Yuki-chan I know may cry easily, but she doesn’t cry over nothing.”

Koyuki wasn’t sure she liked the phrasing, but at the same time, she couldn’t deny it either.

“Are you stressed by being on a professional stage? Have you been eating alright? Or sleeping alright?” Ryo pressed. “Did you happen to step wrong at some point? Are you hurt in any way? Would you like me to carry you?”

“… Kiss…” Koyuki finally murmured.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You kissed Shizuku…”

“I most certainly did not.” Ryo stated. “The Viscount de Chagny kissed Christine. ‘Twas certainly a mistake in timing. But we shall rectify that henceforth.”

Of course… Of course, Ryo would see it that way. When she got into character, she truly got into character. And Koyuki knew this. And yet…

“<If perchance I have offended.>” Ryo suddenly spoke in English. “<Think but this, and all is mended. I shall not kiss whom I love not. Lest… For? Uhm… I… no…>” She fumbled. “<It seems I lost my train of thought?>”

Koyuki couldn’t help giggling a little as she realized the line technically worked.

“A-anyway.” Ryo continued, trying to recover. “Fear not, Yuki-chan. Fair as she may be, Shizuku-san shall never be the girl for me. None shall ever be as precious to me as my dear Yuki-chan.”

Koyuki repressed a sigh. There she goes with the dramatics. She thought to herself, watching Ryo accentuate her words with unnecessarily flourished hand and arm movements.

“Yeah…” She said softly.

“Thou still doth not believe me?” Despite the formal wording, Ryo seemed to have deflated a bit.

“No, I believe you. We are the best of friends, right?”

“Friends, yes, of course. Always.”

Wait. Something felt… off. Koyuki reviewed all that had just transpired over the last few minutes. What was she missing?

“Ryo-chan?”

“Yes, Yuki-chan?”

“Are you alright?”

“I beg thy pardon?”

“Are you alright?”

“O-of course I am. Whatever reason would I have to not be alright?”

“Ryo-chan… I told you what was bothering me just now. Why won’t you do the same for me?”

Ryo squared her shoulders. “Yuki-chan. I would have you know that I treasure our friendship above all else.”

Koyuki smiled, though she sensed a “But…?”

“But I must beg thy forgiveness. For the longest time, I have desired more.”

What.

“And to that end, I have occasioned confessions. But thus far, to no avail. ‘Twould seem you are only interested in maintaining our friendship.”

What?

“Again, please forgive me if I have spoken out of turn. I do not wish to damage or lose our friendship.”

“Ryo-chan… you…” Wait… Koyuki mentally balked. “When did you confess?”

“Numerous times.”

“But…”

“The most grandiose would likely have been after our performance at the School Idol Festival hosted by Nijigasaki.”

Koyuki scanned her memory. She remembered the event overall, as well as the follow up event a couple months after. She had loved performing on stage with her fellow idols, especially Ryo of course. And their celebration afterward had been… wait…

“Ryo-chan… did you… confess with all of your…” how best to put it… “melodramatics and such?”

Ryo blinked. “Perhaps.”

“Ryo-chan…” This time, it was Koyuki who felt deflated.

By the gods, she felt stupid. All this time, she thought it had been Ryo who was romantically dense, but it had been herself.

Well, Ryo was probably still was dense as well, but…

“Maybe… you could just say it like you mean it?”

“But… I have always meant it.” Ryo insisted.

Koyuki shook her head. “Without all the dramatics. Please. Say it as the Ryo-chan I’ve always known off stage. The Ryo-chan who was worried and searched for me just now. The Ryo-chan who gently patted my head to reassure me, even before she knew what was wrong.”

Ryo swallowed and held Koyuki’s gaze for a long moment. “Yuki-chan.” She finally spoke but paused to swallow again. “I love you.”

Koyuki felt her heart skip a beat. And moisture began to gather in her eyes. Geez, was she going to cry again?

“I… I love you too.” She said as a tear slipped down her cheek.

“Yuki-chan.” Ryo closed the distance between them and placed a hand under Koyuki’s chin.

Oh, was this happening already?

Koyuki pushed up as far as she could onto her toes, with her ballet training giving her at least an extra centimeter over someone else of her height. All the while, Ryo leaned toward her, bringing their faces closer.

Closer.

Closer…

Koyuki closed her eyes.

Contact.

Koyuki was unable to stifle a slight whimper. Gods, she had wanted this for ages, and now that it was finally happening, she could scarcely believe it was real.

And she wanted more.

However, as she was already on the tips of her toes, Koyuki was unable to push herself up anymore. Thus, instead, she wrapped her arms around Ryo’s neck, hoping to pull the taller woman down a little more to deepen the kiss. Thankfully, Ryo wasn’t dense about this and responded appropriately.

“Ah, there you two… Oh, um, please excuse me…”

Koyuki yanked her arms off Ryo’s neck and tried to push away, only to remember too late that she was still standing on her toes…

“Woah, I got you, Yuki-chan.” Ryo lurched forward and slid an arm around Koyuki’s back.

However, even though her actions had steadied the shorter girl, Ryo continued to stoop and slipped her other arm behind Koyuki’s knees.

“Eh?” Koyuki uttered as Ryo hoisted her up into her arms, bridal style. Or was it princess style? Either or, it didn’t matter as she could feel her face burning with a strange mixture of embarrassment and delight.

“Thank you for fetching us, Shizuku-san.” Ryo said as she stepped out of the alcove. “I presume our break is over and rehearsal is to resume?”

“Yes, that is correct.” Shizuku confirmed from where she had moved just outside the hidden area. “Oh, and… congratulations, Ryo-san, Yuki-san.” She added with a genuine smile. “You two look lovely together.”

“Thank you.” Ryo acknowledged. “I believe this has been long overdue. But that is neither here nor there. Right now, what matters is the stage. Let us make haste.”

Koyuki laughed lightly. Of course Ryo would want to get back to acting as soon as possible. It was one of her greatest passions, and one of the things Koyuki loved most about her.

However, “Uhm… you can put me down now, Ryo-chan.”

Had she blinked, she might have missed it, but Koyuki was sure she saw a flash of an expression that made her believe Ryo wasn’t ready to put her down just yet. And it was quite adorable. Nonetheless, she relented.

“Thank you.” Koyuki said as her feet found the floor again.

“Will you be alright to dance?” Ryo inquired.

“Yes. Thank you” Koyuki nodded. “But… uhm… maybe…” She moved in close.

“Right, see you two out there.” Shizuku said, quickly stepping through the wing and onto the stage.

Without a word, Ryo leaned down and pressed her lips against Koyuki’s for an all too brief moment.

“Thanks…” Koyuki said as the taller girl righted herself.

Ryo offered a grand smile and held out a hand. “Come. Let us return to the stage.”

“Right.” Koyuki accepted and let herself be led out, amusing herself for second or two about being able to leap significantly higher than she ever had before once rehearsal began again.

---------

Author’s Note Continued: This was a fun one to write. Even if I probably worried a bit too much about keeping the two characters, well, in character. But I suppose if I didn’t, there will be at least one individual who will correct me.

That said, I’ve written Ryo a handful of times, and have plans to write more for her when I need an extra actor for whatever situation. And if I’m going to pair her with Koyuki, because I’m a sucker for childhood friends getting together, I should probably look to write more for the two together as well.

I guess that means I should assign them monster types for PoH. And while I think I have an amusing idea for Ryo, I may have to think a bit more for Koyuki.

And finally, for any readers unfamiliar with these two characters, here are their initial cards from SIF:

#RyoYuki #Aikawa Ryo #Shirase Koyuki #Tri-Arame #Wake Up Challenger 2022 #Love Live Nijigasaki #fanfic

3 notes · View notes

limi-pie · 2 years

Text

About TTORW Min Yoongi fanfiction

Alright, this is my third attempt💀 to write this f*cking darn update post but Tumblr keeps crashing on me and my f*cking ass! 💀💀💀

Erhmm, so this is super awkward for me🤠 to write and explain myself. But my bestie called me out for my whack behavior. Anyways, so you’ve probably been wondering about what’s been going on with me or the Mafia fanfiction I’ve been writing. I’ll explain in detail what happened under the ‘keep reading’.

Let me start by saying yes, I’m the author of the mafia-au Min Yoongi fanfiction “The taste of Red Wine” aka ‘TTORW’. For those of you who may not know, she was my first ever fanfiction that I wrote. (I’m actually lowkey proud of her, ehehe.)

I believe I posted the first chapter back in the 2020 summer, I was extremely sad and unmotivated to do anything (I believe we all were due to covid and quarantine, but I also lowkey have summer sadness) so as the smart individual I am🤓 I began reading K-pop fanfictions or even watch them on Youtube at 2 or even 4 AM instead of sleeping💀 (mind you at that time I had also just received a new full-time job at a cafe lmfao I kept f*cking my sleeping schedule so hard, ahaha.🤠)

I’m sorry letter

So yeah, first of let me apologize to those who’ve been reading TTORW and been waiting patiently for part 9 or an update. I’m usually not the type to write or update anyone on social media at least about my whereabouts or hiatus, so I just usually just disappear without telling or explaining it to anyone. Sorry about that it’s a bad habit and I’m a bad person for doing so. But I owe you an explanation and I’ve finally pulled myself to get to write this long a*s post!

Where it all started

I originally posted a prologue to that story before part 1, but I deleted it. I think it was due to the many grammar errors in it or because I thought it was awful who knows. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ So yeah back then I would regularly post each new chapter at least once a week? Even though it had like 8000+ grammar errors, no f*cking spacing, improper English, and it was awfully written too💀

I thought being a “great” fanfiction writer was to post or update frequently despite how badly structured or written it was. I thought to myself, this is sumn good sh*tz🤓 at 3 AM posting without even reading through it several times before posting it.

Also, maybe the fact the “Y/N” I created in this story is a woman of color and I thought fanfiction writing is a lot of fun. And I sorta wanted to give a unique personality or at least write her differently in contrary to the typical shy and quiet Y/N. (nothing’s wrong with that type of Y/N I just wanted something else or at least I tried to write a different Y/N.)

Another thing, since I’m a multi fan I find it very fascinating to include other idols from other groups in this mafia universe, ehehe. (I hope some of you can like see some of the small easter eggs/references🌝 I’ve placed in the chapters, ehehe.)

To be honest I actually do like writing fanfictions and I’m surprisingly very passionate about it too. I like making a plot and putting much thought into the side characters and how the dynamics affect the others too. It’s not that I stopped writing or updating on TTORW because I lost interest in fanfiction writing.

Why did you stop writing/updating on TTORW?

It’s because of several reasons I’ve listened down below.

1. I’m lowkey very insecure and often doubt myself, whenever I find myself enjoying something. I always somehow end up comparing myself to other great fanfiction writers (which you obviously shouldn’t because people are at a different level of writing and some people are obviously more experienced in writing. But I end up doing it regardless) and I end up being so harsh on myself, like saying things like “no one is going to read this or like this” or “this is extremely bad” etc. (I’m trying my best to not do that but sometimes it’s just very hard. Especially when you’re always so harsh on yourself for no reason…)

2. I’ve been super busy with work, I’m actually in the process of resigning from my old job since I’ve received a new job. This b*tch (me) keeps overworking herself because I’m a Mark Lee fan, I can’t afford to be broke and I’m planning on saving money to finally and hopefully move out or travel who knows.

3. Writing block is hitting me so hard. Sometimes I get that fire moment of just getting down and listening to my K-pop playlist and BANG! I’ve successfully written paragraphs of good Mafia/fanfiction writing. You guys don’t want to know that I have countless of long Google docs files just dedicated to NCT/BTS smut writing because I’m h*rny and can’t think about anything else than abs and f*cking… You know I might post them one day but when? I can’t answer that maybe an anon will ask me about it? Or maybe one day I will get out of my comfort zone and give in to temptation then finally I can post smut. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

4. I’m somewhat of a perfectionist. Sometimes when I’ve finally released a chapter I kept going back and forth to check if there’s something wrong with it or any wording that’s terrible. (we love bad habits in this household🤠)

5. I’m a sloth, I’m so lazy🦥 sometimes that I’m not in the mood to like to write or even think about fanfiction. Sorry about that. Also, I’ve been spending too much time on Tik Tok🦥 (it’s become a bad addiction of mine at this point.)

In conclusion

Now I’ve thought about it for a while I do plan to keep continuing and writing on “The taste of Red Wine”. To me personally, fanfiction writing isn’t about gaining the most likes and reblogs, I just do it because it’s a lot of fun and I want to keep trying in order to improve my writing skills too. I had a lot of exciting things for the story line and I’ve really looked forward to writing Y/N’s character development!🤠

I’ve read tons of good K-pop fanfiction lately here on Tumblr. I want to make a master list later when I’m home because I think it would be a great idea to keep all my chapters linked in one post. Thanks for reading and I guess for being patient, part 9 is on the way I’m expecting to release it soon.

Sincerely, Limi 💞

#Yoongi Fanfic: The Taste of Red Wine #Min Yoongi #Suga #BTS #I’ll try my best to keep updating and not just ghost you guys anymore🙏🏽#It do be like that sometimes #BTS Angst #Yoongi Imagine #Bangtan Sonyeondan #I forgot to mention that I still have no clue on how to tag things correctly or organize the genres and such...#Yoongi x Y/N #Yoongi x Reader #Mafia AU #K-pop #Kpop fanfic #Kpop fanfiction #Suga x Y/N

4 notes · View notes

tmisaccidentreportbook · 2 years

Text

MAG017, The Boneturner’s Tale

Case #9991006, Sebastian Adekoya Release date: May 4, 2016 First listen: 15th October, genuinely no memory of where I was but can catalogue it as ‘the point where I started to loose my shit about Leitner’.

This whole blog is the result of a need to dissect and inspect aspects and themes and imagery and ideas that plague my mind and dodgylogic’s inbox, because at heart there will always be a part of me that’s an A-Level English Literature student. There will always be a part of me looking to take a work and hold it up to the light before ripping it open like Rafiki with a baobab tree fruit and daubbing on the walls with the juices.

So, no surprise, I love Chaucer. Considered an OG of English Literature and Poetry. Thing is, Chaucer was writing late 1300s. It’s Middle English. It’s flipping hard. Take English, German, Latin, French and Italian but to name a few, blitz that all together, then strain it through a cheese cloth of social strata with one language for the court and another for the courtyard. It’s madness. I’m trying to remember which ones I actively studied and which ones I remember from that one time I accidentally watched part of the animated series when I was about 8. Fairly certain it was The Merchant’s Tale and The Franklin’s Tale we studied, there was some heavy comparisons between ‘courtly love’ going on.

Anyway, while some tales were funny or had little morality tales attached to them, some where just dark. The Knight’s Tale, two cousins fight a battle for a woman that doesn’t really want either of them. The Franklin’s Tale, a man tried to extort the love of an already happily married woman. The Wife of Bath’s Tale opens with sexual violence. The Pardoner’s Tale, 3 friends kill each other out of greed. Death, hypocrisy and violence is seen again and again in Chaucer’s work and they way it hurts ordinary working folk.

- ‘Books are amazing, aren’t they?’ - Sir, I love you. There have been statement givers I’ve sympathised with, some I have flat out disliked. Sebastian and I need to go get a pot of tea somewhere and talk books.

- That whole opening section is just me flailing my arms around, wishing I could articulate like this. Jonny, I have major word envy. I mean, this whole blog is me just rolling around in my thoughts and feelings and weird little tangents that this show inspires in me. Ugh, this is so poetic I might cry.

- ‘...though if (a thought) find a host, then they can lodge there, proliferate, and maybe spread further.’ See, now you’re making it dirty. We’re spreading, eheh, into the idea of virus and infection and get outta ‘ere The Corruption, this one ain’t about you. But yeah, I’m back to thinking about parasitoid wasps again...

- ‘… humans are fragile creatures.’ Oh buddy. Buddy, you have no idea. But give it, checks notes on time line, 7 years and you’ll see.

- Sebastian goes off on a line of thought about ‘written texts that have outlived the civilisations that created them’, and that makes me so sad. Words written for prosperity but the people they were written for haven’t prospered. Thinking about various posts I’ve seen of (white) experts saying ‘we have no idea what these markings mean, it’s a mystery!’ and then seeing a screenshot of a whatsapp to someone who asked the native language users saying, ‘yeah, naw, that’s a list of names.’ ‘We had no idea what happened to the Franklin Expedition until Global Warming meant we could look.’ ‘No. We knew where the lunatic white folk were but we didn’t want anything to do with that nonsense and you didn’t ask.’ OK, I’m going to try not fall face first into an anti-imperialist rant. There would be no recipients or citations, only rage. But yes, writing systems and languages dying out is such a heartbreaking strand of the imperialism cat-o-nines.

- There are a lot of people who have spoken very long and well on this sort of topic, far better than I could ever hope to, but I wanted to give Overly Sarcastic Productions a shout out. Especially with consideration to the line ‘corrupted, or translated, perhaps, by a culture that does not understand them.’ Blue, the history half of the duo, did a wonderful video looking at Sappho and her writings. Now, accusations for why we don’t have much of Sappho poetry left is usually leveled at he the burning of the Library of Alexandria and then the Christian Church and scholars censoring her. But in reality, it was much more likely that her work fell victim to linguist drift as her naive Aeolian dialect of Ancient Greek was overshadowed by the Koine dialect that Alexander the Great wielded lingua franca. Anyway, I love these kids, I so want to be friends with them in real life, go check their stuff out. Red does literature and mythology, Blue does history, hijinks ensue. They also have a podcast.

- ‘Will the thoughts that first ran through Shakespeare’s head ever stop being thought by someone, somewhere?’ *sigh* I love Shakespeare, I do, I will forever go to bat for The Bard. But I also have Netflix’s The Sandman brain rot and I am Dreamling trash… Hob Gadling, my beloved.

- I wonder how The Archivist felt reading this statement? Hearing the words of someone who found the same solace in books that he himself felt once, as a child?

- ‘…an old library, with heavy tomes covering every wall, seems to have such a weight to it.’ That’s L-space baby! Ook!

- ‘...cash-strapped local councils than of the rich majesty of knowledge.’ Mood. Also, support your local library. This is your PSA, support your library. Don’t let Amazon have a goddamn penny if you can help it.

- ‘The barcode and ISBN.’ Confession time; this bitch doesn’t know how the dewey decimal system works. I don’t know what it is. I sort my own books by topic so I think I’m sorta aping it, but I don’t know. I hardly used the library at Uni, it was scary and full of arts and business students. I just spent my time in the computer lab we had at the science quad, trying to scrabble over scientific article paywalls with my peers.

- I don’t know if the selection of Ruth Weaver’s name was given a lot of thought or not, but I really like that she has a surname that comes from a profession. Will the name itself may evoke ideas of The Web, the profession surname feels in keeping in this dark draw on the Canterbury Tales, where near all our story tellers are identified only with their profession.

- I tried to see if there was any significance of the book being returned as Trainspotting, but as I have never read the book or seen the film I’m not sure what a quick wiki dive will yield. I suppose we have friendships going sour in both stories.

- Michael Crew! Lightning boy! His second mention. And it’s connected with another Leitner… I’m getting angry with you Mike, if you are going to shop around for a new Entity to save you, can you at least burn the ones you’ve decided you don’t vibe with and not, you know, drop them in a public library were anyone could find them? Gerard Keay would snap you like a twig if he knew.

- Jared Hopworth, beef boy. So many boys. *Griffin McElroy voice* Too many beautiful boys!

- I like how Sebastian starts to describe a ‘campaign of petty terror’ and not a minute later, Elias is on the scene.

- Ah Elias… Jonny Magna, Mr Bitchard, Bastard Rat Man, Peter Lukas Ex-husband to the power of 12. Hell make it 13, a divorce of each of The Entities. Voiced by Mr Ben ‘I’m going to give this MF a voice like a chocolate dipped orgasm and there’s nothing you can do about it’ Meredith. Urgh, illegal.

- ‘Do you have a moment?’ Always fucking dangerous words to hear from a line manager.

- The Archivist is so defensive straight from the off, it’s so funny. Elias doesn’t even specify the nature of the complaint, he is just ready to throw down with Ms Herne and her rancid attitude. Sod Naomi Herne and her ‘I want to speak to the manager’ vibes.

- You didn’t need to throw Rosie under the bus, but now I have an answer as to why the Archivist was present for the recording of MAG013. Also, if the complaint was lodged day of the incident or soon after, this from Elias is coming now at least a month after the fact. Yet the Archivist is still so snitty, delightful.

- ‘I would prefer that you not antagonise anyone connected to the Lukas family. They are patrons of the Institute, after all.’ First, ‘connected’ to the Lukas family seems like a weird word considering their whole deal. Second, ‘patrons of the Institute’... is that what we’re calling it these days Elias?

- ‘Fine, fine, I’ll be more lovely.’ Oh the derision, the scorn. I can picture the look of contempt on his little face.

- ‘…(Martin’s off sick) Blessed relief if you ask me.’ RUDE!

- Being stuck in a situation at work, where you have to be professional and calm and controlled, but there’s a member of the public who wants to go off or has decided to make it your problem… Bad times. Bad, bad times.

- The noting of the look in Jared Hopworth’s eyes when he held the book, ‘not entirely unlike fear’, is interesting. As far as Sebastian mentions, he didn’t feel anything amiss with it when he first handled it, so what made it see something in Jared. Was Sebastian perhaps too well read, in that he’d read The Boneturner’s Tale and while it may disgust him, as it does when he reads a section, is there always going to be a voice in the back of his head comparing and contrasting to the original Canterbury Tales, too much that it wouldn’t hook him? Did Jared had a fear in him already? One that could be cultured? I may be drawing this out of nowhere, but am I right in remembering Jared having a bad home life? Was his father abusive? I can’t remember, but did The Flesh see a fear in him and utilise that? Give him a way to wield fear like weapon and not cower behind it like a shield? Did it see building blocks and potential? A Judas goat to bring in more fearful minds? Maybe Sebastian had no such fear in him to be of use to The Flesh.

- Oh god I’d forgotten about the rat! The poor pet rat with no bones in the back legs and the head at a distressing angle! It was on the same day too, Jared evidently works fast.

- ‘But as the days turned into weeks I started to feel something I wouldn’t have expected to – worry.’ Looks like Jared wasn’t the only one with some left over childhood affection. Or maybe Sebastian was projecting when he first considered the state of their friendship.

- With the arrival and state of Jared’s mother, I wonder how much of her, erm…, rearrangement, was maybe accidental and how much was practised and deliberate? Did it happen when she got the book away from him? Also, I’d like to know how she’d gotten the book away from him. And if the injuries done to her were done deliberately, would he have not fought her for the book. Or was this perhaps in the wake of a terrible accident, and in the aftermath she takes steps to protect her son and herself, but Jared goes after the book.

- ‘Should I have destroyed it? That last thought was quickly pushed away. I wasn’t sure I had it in me to destroy a book, even one with such a strangeness to it.’ OK, I know book burnings and the destruction of books evoke very vivid thoughts of Nazism and cultural genocide down the centuries and part of me is proud of Sebastian for baulking at the impulse. The rest of me wants to take him by the shoulders and shake him until all the ‘bleeding heart’ falls out and then tell him to find some matches.

- ‘…my hand came away wet.’ THAT. IS. NEVER. GOOD.

- ‘Red dripped and pulsed from the cart.’… ‘Pulsed’… Not just covered in blood, no. Actively bleeding. Who’s blood was it? It wasn’t coming from The Boneturner’s Tale, but the other books. Was it the blood of their readers? Authors?

- I HATE it when things that shouldn't bleed, bleed. Why was there blood in you in the first place? What was it doing in there!?

- ‘…written in modern English.’ Listen, I will defend fanfiction til the day I die, but… oh fuck. Although, sounds like a pretty cool concept in a gnarly way...

- ‘In the Prologue, over a hundred tales are promised, but the most complete surviving version doesn’t even reach two dozen.’ Hey, the Canterbury Tales were written between 1387 and 1400. Our good man Chaucer dies 25 October 1400. Maybe the stories died with him. Maybe that epilogue is him signing off knowing he’s approaching his death. Or maybe he’d just gotten busy, maybe circumstances had changed. *thinks about my AO3 account with its’ shivering WIPs and multiple incomplete series and sweats*

- The switching and smuggling in of the book and the slightly clumsy altering of the frontispiece by Michael. Didn’t care for Michael when we met him and now, in the relisten, I’m seeing all the little ripples he set in motion.

- ‘…the library of Jergensburg or Jurgenleit or Jurgerlicht or something like that. It didn’t help me.’ Yeah, Leitner be like that.

- It’s very lightly done, but there are a few points through the statement where word choice has be wondering if we’re talking about a person as a human or as an animal. There’s a point here where Sebastian describes Jared as being ‘longer’ than he had been. Not ‘taller’ or ‘wider’. ‘Longer’. Like you’d talk about an animal being long.

- It’s a well worn image, and lord knows I’ve used it enough in my writing because I am a sentimental hack that in many ways understands animals better than people, but I’ve always loved the way various emotions can be described as a ‘beast that lives in the chest’. Be if something hot like fury or lust, crawling at the bars or something small and frightened, like a heart beating like a bird in it’s cage. But then we get ‘his ribcage (was) trying to bite me’… and I know we’re onto something different.

- ‘He had… added some extras.’ Yup, just… urgh god, vague is so terrifying because it let your imagination kick our own arse for it.

- ‘It wasn’t my book, it wasn’t my responsibility and I had no idea what I was dealing with, so I didn’t.’ I feel you may have been a bit late to the party on this type of thinking so while you fall short of Joshua Gillespie levels of ‘do not engage with this shit’, I think you defiantly deserve an honourable mention.

- ‘God knows how I explained the bloody books, because it wasn’t some disappearing phantom. It took weeks to get out.’… How?! God may know but I don’t and I want to know! Also, part of me wonders what you might have found out if a sample had been taken for testing… Who’s blood was it?… Was it even human?

- ‘…last I ever need to hear or speak about Jared Hopworth or The Boneturner’s Tale.’ Well, sorry bud, but you’ve got at least one more instalment. And we’ve got several.

- So, so far the two Leitner’s both have a connection with Michael Crew. We’ll find out more about Ex Altiora in MAG046, but on the relisten, I really don’t like Michael. He can’t keep his business clean.

- ‘I’ve seen what Leitner’s work can do.’ …. Archivist? Explain please. Oooooh wait… Nope, sorry, I’ve remembered… I thought perhaps he’d seen the aftermath rather than… the event.

- ‘… he passed away in 2006.’ So we have another death of a statement giver, I believe the second confirmed and connected with the inciting incident, after Carlos Vittery of MAG016. As I’ve said, it’s about 7 years after the statement was taken, almost 10 after the event took place. So in world, Jared’s been… like that… for about 20 years now.

- The fact that it was chalked up as a ‘hit-and-run car accident’ makes sense, given how and where he was found, but I think it also plays into the more animal fear response The Flesh plays too. The idea of being left in the middle of the road, by a higher functioning unfeeling power, in a truly terrible state, like so much road kill.

#MAG017 #the magnus archives #The Flesh

0 notes

nevermindirah · 3 years

Note

Do you have any thoughts on the use of AAVE for Nile (or lack thereof) in TOG fanfiction? I've been reading some Book of Nile fic and some writers seem to write her as a Millennial™ (using words like "fave" and "woke") but never acknowledge her Blackness in her patterns of speech. I know we don't see her use as much AAVE in the films, but I would argue she's in situations where code-switching would be valued (first in a "professional" environment in the army, then around a group of non-Black strangers).

Hi anon! I have many thoughts on this and I'm honored you asked me! But I should start by saying I'm white and any thoughts Black fans and especially Black American fans have on this that they want to share would be beyond lovely. (I'm not gonna tag anybody bc that feels rude but please add onto this post if any of y'all see this and want to!)

The main reason I personally avoid AAVE for Nile in my own fics is because I'm not Black. But Nile-centric fics by Black writers tend to avoid using much of it too, at least from what I've noticed/understood, and my guess is it's largely for the reason you mention, that she's in situations that encourage code-switching.

In movie canon Nile is highly competent at tailoring her language to each situation she finds herself in. This fantastic linguistics analysis meta shows how skillfully Nile chooses her vocabulary and grammar to meet her goals with different conversation partners in different contexts. In comics canon Nile had a bunch of different civilian jobs before joining the Marines, so she would've had experience code-switching in the ways that made sense for all those different contexts as well as the Marines and her family and high school and wherever else she spent her time before we met her. And now she's spending her time with a handful of immortals none of whom are native English speakers and a fellow Black American but one with a Queen's English UK accent whose professional experience is in the CIA where high-status code-switching is often an absolute must for success or even survival.

Fics featuring Nile are charged with extrapolating from that to how it might show up in her use of language that she's coping with a traumatic separation from her family and her career and pretty much everything she's ever known and now she needs to be able to make herself understood to people who seem to care about her and each other but are super duper in crisis, three (soon to be four) of whom predate Modern English entirely and the only one who's anywhere near her contemporary she's not supposed to talk to for a century. All of these people are telling her that pretty much any contact with any mortals poses an existential threat to her and the rest of the group. How the FUCK is she supposed to cope with that, like, generally? And would it be a more effective way for her to cope if she talked to Andy Joe and Nicky using the speech patterns that she used to use with her mom and brother, to at least retain that part of her identity even if it means having to do a lot of explaining, or would it meet her needs better to prioritize Andy Joe and Nicky understanding what she means with her words over using the particular words and grammar forms she used with her family?

I've seen several fics, both Nile-centric / BoN and otherwise, explore this a little bit in how/whether Nile uses Millennial™ speak. It's often a theme in Nile texting Booker despite the exile because of the popular headcanon that he as The Tech Guy is the only other immortal who understands memes. But Nile's much-younger-than-Booker mom probably uses Boomer and/or Gen X memes and Andy has been adapting to new communication styles for forever as evidenced by her canon high level of fluency with standard-American-accented English.

Which brings us back to people avoiding AAVE because they're not Black and they don't want to make mistakes (or they're not Black and they don't want to get yelled at for making mistakes, though I think many people overestimate how much they'll get yelled at while underestimating how much these mistakes can hurt). I can imagine some Black fans hold back from using much AAVE in fic because they don't want to share in-group stuff with white people who are likely to then adopt and ruin it, as white people so often do with Black cultural stuff. Some links about this including a great Khadija Mbowe video. I'm saying this gently, anon, because you might not know: woke, an example you cited as Millennial™ speak, is AAVE, and that's gotten erased by so many white people appropriating it and using it incorrectly online.

And also there's the part where fandom is a hobby and you never know when you're reading a fic that's the very first thing someone's ever written outside of a school assignment. This cultural considerations of language shit takes a level of effort and skill that not everybody puts into every fic, or even could if they wanted to because they haven't had time to build their skills yet. It's definitely easier for non-Black fans to project our millennial feels onto Nile than to do the layers of research and self-reflection it requires to depict what Blackness might mean to Nile, and it's not surprising that often people sharing their hobby creations on the internet have gone the easier route. There's not even necessarily shame in doing what's easier. It's just frustrating and often hurtful when structural white supremacy means that 3-dimensional Black characters are rare in media and thoughtful explorations of them in fandom are seen by the majority of fans as not-easy to make and therefore Nile Freeman, the main character in The Old Guard (2020) dir. Gina Prince-Bythewood, has the least fic and meta and art made about her of our 5 main immortals.

I've been active in different fandoms off and on for twenty years and I barely managed to write 5,000 words about Sam Wilson across multiple different fics in the 7 years since I fell in love with him. There's an alchemy to which characters we connect with, and on top of that which characters we connect with in a way that causes us to create stuff about them. Something about Nile Freeman finally tipped me over the edge from a voracious reader to a voracious writer. It's not for me to judge which characters speak to other individuals to the level of creating content about them, but I do think it's important for us to notice, and then work to fight, the pattern where across this fandom as a whole Nile gets way less content, and way less depth in so much of the content that's in theory about her, than any of these other characters.

Anyway, back to language. My two long fics feature Nile with several Black friends — Copley and OCs and cameos from other media — but all of those characters except Alec Hardison from Leverage aren't American. It's very possible I'm guilty of stereotyping Black British speech patterns in I See Your Eyes Seek a Distant Shore. I watched hours and hours of Black haircare YouTube videos in the research for that fic and I modeled my OCs' speech patterns on what I heard from some of those YouTubers as well as what I've heard people like John Boyega and Idris Elba saying in interviews, but the thing about doing your best is you still might fuck up.

I'm slowly making progress on my WIP where Nile and Sam Wilson are cousins, and what ways of talking with a family member might be authentic for Nile is a major question I need to figure out. For that, I'm largely modeling my writing choices on how I hear my Black friends and colleagues talking to each other. I haven't overheard colleagues talking in an office in a long-ass time, but back when that was a thing, I remember seeing a ton of nuance in the different ways many of my Black colleagues would talk to each other. Different people have different personalities! And backgrounds! And priorities! A few jobs ago my department was about 1/3 Black and we worked closely with Obama administration staff many of whom were Black and there was SO MUCH VARIETY in how Black people talked to each other, about work and workplace-appropriate personal stuff, where I and other white coworkers could hear. There are a few work friends in particular who I have in my head when I'm trying to imagine how Sam and Nile might talk to each other. From the outside looking in, God DAMN is shit complicated, intellectually and interpersonally and spiritually, for Black people who are devoting their professional lives to public service in the United States.

One more aspect of this that I have big thoughts on but I need to take extra care in talking about is the idea of acknowledging Nile's Blackness in her patterns of speech. There's no one right way to be Black, and Nile's a fictional character created by a white dude but there are plenty of real-life Black Americans who don't use much or even any AAVE, for reasons that are complicated because of white supremacy. (Highly highly recommend this video by Shanspeare on the harms of the Oreo stereotype.)

Something that's not the same but has enough similarity that I think it's worth talking about is my personal experience with authenticity and American Jewish speech patterns. My Jewish family members don't talk like they're in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and I've known lots of people who do talk that way (or the millennial version of it), some of whom have questioned my Jewishness because I don't talk that way. That hurts me. Sometimes when another Jew tells me some shit like "I've never heard a Jew say y'all'd've," I can respond with "well now you have asshole, bless your Yankee-ass heart," because the myth of Dixie is a racist lie but I will totally call white Northerners Yankees when they're being shitty to me for being Southern, and this particular Jew fucking revels in using "bless your heart" with maximum polite aggression, especially with said Yankees. But sometimes I don't have it in me to say anything and it just quietly hurts having an important part of me disbelieved by someone who shares that important part of me. The sting isn't quite the same when non-Jews disbelieve or discount my Jewishness, but that hurts too.

Who counts as authentically Jewish is a messy in-group conversation and it doesn't really make sense to explain it all here. Who counts as authentically Jewish is a matter of legal status for immigration, citizenship, and civil rights in Israel, and it's my number 2 reason after horrific treatment of Palestinians that I'm antizionist. But outside that extremely high-stakes legal situation, it can just feel really shitty to not be recognized as One Of Us, especially by your own people.

It can also feel really shitty to be The Only One of Your Kind in a group, even if that group is an immortal chosen family who all loves each other dearly. Sometimes especially in a situation like that where you know those people love you but there are certain things they don't get about you and will never quite be able to. I'm definitely projecting at least a little bit of my "lonely Jew who will be alone again for yet another Jewish holiday" stuff onto Nile when at the end of I See Your Eyes Seek a Distant Shore she's thinking about being the only Black immortal and moving away from the community she'd built with a mostly-Black group of mortals in that fic. Maybe that tracks, or maybe that's fucked up of me.

Basically, this got very long but it's complicated, writing about experiences that aren't your own takes skill which in turn takes time and practice to build, writing about experiences not your own that our society maligns can cause a lot of harm if done badly, it can also cause a lot of harm when a large enough portion of a fandom just decides to nope out of something that's difficult and risky because then there's just not much content about a character who deserves just a shit ton of loving and nuanced content, people are individuals and two people who come from the exact same cultural context might show that influence in all kinds of different ways, identity is complicated, language is complicated, writing is hard, and empathy and humility and doing our best aren't a guarantee of avoiding harm but they do go a long way in helping people create thoughtful content about a character as awesome and powerful and kind and messy and scared and curious and WORTHY as Nile Freeman.

#nile freeman #linguistics #TOG POC Love Fest #nileweek2021 #tog meta #tog #long post #mine #antiblackness #jewish things #hi i'm an antizionist jew no i don't really want to talk about it

229 notes · View notes

jiilys · 3 years

Text

warm front

featuring The Line, also on ao3 here

“You’re a lot better at this than Ron.” Harry said into the phone.

“Well that’s not hard,” Ginny said, not mentioning how she still occasionally picked up the receiver upside down. “Speaking of, he’s started growing a moustache since you left. It’s ghastly.”

“Oi!” Ron’s voice, annoyed, in the background. Harry grinned.

“Oh yeah?”

“It looks like he’s got biscuit crumbs on his upper lip.” Harry laughed, and Millie glared at him from behind the post office counter, “Oh, lovely, he’s giving me the finger.”

“I’ve started growing a bit of a beard actually.”

“Come off it.”

“Feeling left out?” Harry joked

Ginny snorted. “Yes, desperately. Isn’t it hot?”

“Well I think so.”

She laughed, clear and quick, and Harry could imagine her, all limb, leaning against the kitchen cupboard curling the phone wire around her wrist. He’d bought the phone as a bit of joke before he’d left, and then as a joke she’d installed it, and then for a joke he’d rung her, and then this was how they talked now. Arthur had apparently worn a suit when the electrician came to install the power plug.

“Isn’t it hot though? Bill says Australian summers are killers”

Harry looked at Teddy, sat on the post office floor in nothing but shorts sucking an ice-pop. “I’ve been sunburnt in places I never have been before, but it’s mostly fine.”

“Wow, sexy.”

“Bet Ron loved hearing you say that to me.”

“I’m sorry Harry, you want to do what to me? Put that where?”

“Gin-“

“No, we couldn’t in my room, there’s not enough room. Lounge is better, more space. On the dining table.”

Harry could hardly talk. “Stop,” he choked, “He’ll never speak to me again.”

“He left when I said the bit about the lounge, said I was being ‘very immature.’”

Andromeda, desperate to get out, away, gone, bought the land in Australia six months after the war ended. She’d said it was because she’d always liked the heat, but when Harry got there he knew why. He’d never seen anywhere so unlike England, the Australian countryside was all scorched earth, red dirt, dry trees. It could have been a different planet entirely.

He’d followed her six months later to be with Teddy, who at almost a year had hair permanently sunshine yellow, except when it rained it went as grey as concrete. Harry liked the spiders, sand, sunburn of it all. Sometimes, dumbly, he found himself missing sheets of rain, but only when it was so hot he could barely see straight.

Mostly he liked how there was nothing to do there, nowhere he had to be. He was teaching himself how to drive, burying things for Teddy to sniff out (dog nose), going into the tiny town to talk to Ginny on the post office phone, and helping Andromeda build a shed out the back. He’d never used magic less. The days were long and the nights were longer, but it was so different here that that too felt right.

He didn’t know when he’d go home. He kept meaning to set a date and then just didn’t, and then everyone stopped asking. It was stupid, but he felt like he’d know when he was done.

“Dad won’t let me see the phone bill,” Ginny said, picking up on the third ring and not saying hello, “It arrived this morning and he’s been locked in his office all morning with it.”

“Oh, God, I can-“

“Don’t you dare offer to pay for it. I don’t even think it’s that much, I think he’s just trying to recreate the logo at the top or something.”

“I-“

“Stop trying to pay for it- “

“I’m not– “ Harry, who had been, was silent. Then: “Gin, please-“

“No- “

“But- “

“Shut up-“ she said, unbothered, “Mum asked if you got the stuff she sent.”

“I did, the biscuits were excellent. And the tea bags” Harry had cleaned out the tin so Teddy could use it as a hat, which he had been wearing for two days now.

“I told her they already had tea in Australia but she didn’t believe me.”

Harry smiled, “I didn’t mind.”

“She said that even if they did have tea they wouldn’t have English Breakfast, or they would call it something crazy like ‘Australian Outback Breakfast’.”

“How thoughtful of her.”

“Stop being nice about it, it’s ridiculous.”

“It was nice of her.”

“Australian Outback Breakfast, Harry”

“I hate tea and hate that it was graciously sent to me by your mum.” Harry obliged.

“There we go. Killed any snakes yet?”

“Oh yeah, loads. Bears too.”

He could hear her smiling, “Bears, huh?”

“All in your honour.”

“Naturally. Still no success in seducing Millie?”

Harry looked around to the post office reception desk, a stones-throw away from the phone, to where Millie– middle-aged, cardiganed, glasses– was pretending to read the paper and not hate him.

“Haven’t you heard? Wedding’s in the Spring.”

“Damn. Well, we had it good there for a while but true love always wins.”

He laughed, and Millie gave him a look. He waved. She ignored him and went back to the paper.

Ron sent letters, barely legible, by owls that had to be nursed back to health in the bath.

Harry,

Sorry for the writing but I’m on the muggle train because we’re going to Ireland for a few days to stay with her Hermione’s Aunt because she’s ‘dying to meet me’ (???). Anyway, Hermione also says to tell you that Ginny is thinking of cutting a fringe, because apparently that’s important. Apparently girls do that in a crisis, or whatever, she’ll write and explain it.

Ginny is basically living at ours now. The other day she put a Hollyhead Harpies poster up in the living room and when I tried to charm it off all the players screaming at me like Sirius’s fucking mum, so I just moved the cabinet in front of it. Bloody nightmare.

Honestly it isn’t even half bad having her around, she knows all these drinking games and set up your room and sometimes has a go reading over Hermione’s policy reports to the Ministry when I’ve sworn off them. Do not tell her I don’t mind her being round she’ll be annoying about it. I’m getting that Harpies poster off the wall.

Hope Teddy is good and everyone is demanding more photos as usual. All Victorie has to do is chew the carpet around here and everyone gets a bit teary, including me. George jinxed Perce’s glasses into binonoulars the other day and for a weird second everything felt like before and Vic giggled and then George looked like he’d been hit the fucking nightbus. I don’t even know how to explain it– kids really just have no idea about any of it.

Hope Andromeda is good and that the driving is going better. Dad’s framing all of the phone bills he gets which Gin probably already mentioned but I can’t tell you how weird it is to go into my old room and it’s just a bunch of framed bills. Hermione says hello which I’ve already written but she said I didn’t make it clear enough.

We miss you mate. Home soon yeah?

Ron

Often, he thought of the week he’d told them he was leaving. Hermione, drunk, talking to Ginny on the patio of the burrow when she thought everyone was inside. It makes sense, really, she’d said, He’s never been anywhere he wasn’t hunted too. Ron had looked at him and then loudly dropped his firewhiskey and the girls had jumped, turned around, stopped talking, but still. He’s never been anywhere he wasn’t hunted too. Huh.

“How’s driving?”

“Oh, fine. I killed a swan.” Harry said, demoralised. Ginny laughed for a good two minutes.

“What?”

“I hit the wrong pedal and speed up instead of slowing down. I didn’t know what to do so I just moved it off to the side of the road.”

“Ah, the Boy who Lived strikes again.”

“Stop,” He was smiling, “What if Teddy had seen it?”

“He’s not even two. He probably would have thought it was, like, having a lie down or something.”

Harry was laughing now, “A lie down?”

“Yeah, a spontaneous, truck-induced–“

“–Permanent–“

“–Permanent, lie-down. I’m almost jealous now actually.”

Andromeda was in her garden a lot. Getting anything to grow was near impossible, but she wouldn’t stop working at it. She kept saying that soon they’d be able to have a green beans salad, so Harry just drove to a market and stuck a few green beans in the ground to make her laugh. As a sort of joke they’d started calling the land ‘the farm’ even though nothing ever grew here.

They took Teddy to the ocean for the first time and his eyes went blue the second he saw it. The beach where they’d buried Dobby was overcast, water as grey as dishwater, but here the it glittered like glass, blue light come alive. Teddy sat in the shallows, trying to flatten waves with his fists, laughing.

Andromeda sat on a towel by the dunes under an enormous hat, tears running down her face, abruptly laughing when Teddy tried to eat sand or fell over a sandcastle. Harry knew how she felt. Impossible, how two years ago Teddy had two living parents and Harry had been seventeen, dead and walking, and now they were sat on the beach, people they loved dead for real, as Harry and Teddy lined up shells on the shore.

It was three in the morning but Harry snuck in through a backdoor, cloak on, having to jimmy the lock because he forgot his wand. The streets were pitch black, only three streetlights in the whole main street, with two of them not working anyway.

“Why’re you awake?” Ginny said lightning quick, knowing the time difference by heart, and Harry’s chest unlocked. It was stupidly comforting, Ginny’s voice, how she never said hello on the phone because she never learned, how if he really made her laugh she’d hold the receiver away from her, like he wasn’t desperate to hear it.

“I thought I saw Sirius today,” he couldn’t stop himself, “There was a dog on the farm and it was huge and I thought– I forgot he was dead. Isn’t that stupid?”

There was only Ginny’s breath down the phone. Picture: her in the kitchen, gripping the receiver, still. The memory looped in his brain, how Sirius’ name had risen in his throat, how odd it felt there, how long it had been since he’d said it aloud.

“No.” He almost didn’t hear her it’s so quiet, “I went to the shop yesterday and asked Ron if Fred was in the back. I forget too.”

His heart slowed, the memory of the shop: solid and real, running again, made for laughing, rose up, only then he shut his eyes and saw everyone laid out in rows, glassy eyes, and somehow he was walking through the forest again, going to die, but not soon enough–

“Harry.” Ginny’s voice, dragging him back to earth, “You did everything you could. Sirius knew. Everyone knew. No one could have done better.” She sounded so sure, voice as clear as glass, he’d be a fool not to believe her, “It hurts because they loved us. They loved us. That’s the part to remember.”

“You are kidding-!” This time Harry didn’t say hello.

“I’m sorry, who is this?”

“Harpies reserve!” Harry was yelling in the post office and Millie looked appalled, “They’ll promote you in two weeks, you genius, I knew it– “

“I’m sorry I really have no idea who this is.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t say anything.”

“I sent the letter!” Ginny dropped the joke, indignant.

“We spoke two days ago! I can’t believe you didn’t tell me then–”

“–I sent our fastest owl.”

“Marius is currently passed out in the sink–“

Ginny laughed, “I wanted you to get the letter,” she said, finally, “I wanted you to see it. Did you see Madeline McKinnon signed it?”

She sounded like a kid. He grinned. “I did.”

“Best beater this century sent a letter to my house, asking me to be on her team. Madness. The English team are after her you know, it’s all over the Prophet.”

“I hope you’re not expecting me to send the letter back because I think that really will finish Marius off.”

“Please, you think I sent the real thing? Dad made twenty copies. He hung two on Ron and Hermione’s fridge and sent one to Aunty Muriel.”

Harry grinned, “You’re brilliant, I’m hanging my copy on the front door, framed.”

“The moving logo may cause problems for the muggles”

“Who cares? I want to tell everyone about this. Chaser for the Harpies–“

“I’m a reserve.”

“For now.” He could hear her smile through the phone, “What did everyone say?”

“Ron said I was a traitor and that he was also proud. Mum cried. Hermione promised to actually watch a game, George reminded me about nicking his broom all that time so technically he was also partly on the team, Bill bought a season pass, Charlie hung a giant Harpies poster in his shite apartment and sent a photo, Luna sent me awful flowers that won’t stop smoking, and Percy called to congratulate me on my admission to the ‘Hollygrove Harps.’”

Harry laughed, “Incredible.”

“Yeah, Perce’s was particularly heartfelt.”

Harry,

I’m sat at the dining table and everyone’s still here, but Mum wanted me to recap Charlie’s birthday dinner right now because she doesn’t want you to miss anything. Hermione also agreed with this mental idea.

Dinner Summary:

Food was good

Hermione tried to explain the electric collage or whatever decides American elections to Dad, it was stupid.

Hermione says it was electoral college not the eccentric cage or whatever I wrote

George got Charlie a life-size model of the Horntail that he almost opened in the house. Mum had a fit.

Dad told a story about how the Muggle Foreign Minister ended up with a bathtub cursed to drown anyone in it.

Ginny wants me to say Percy is wearing a cardigan Millie would be proud of. I do not know what this means. Better not be a sex thing.

Hermione says hello (again she insisted I write this down like it isn’t obvious)

Mum wants me to say we all miss you still (again, obvious)

She also wants to know if you need her to make you any shorts (do not answer this)

Charlie wants to say cheers for the gift – apparently they only do that burn cream in Australia and it’s hard to come by

George doesn’t have anything to say he just wanted to be involved so I’ve written this so he’ll bugger off.

I’m bloody sending this now, I feel like a quick quotes quill (Fleur asks how you are). Have a good one mate.

Home soon yeah?

Ron.

Sometimes, when he was driving home from the post-office just after the sunset, everything sat in the new-dark, he’d remember when he used to be on watch, sat in front of the tent holding Hermione’s wand with everything going wrong, and how only then he’d let himself think about Ginny. Her voice, long laugh, longer legs, telling him to move over, pass the milk, look left, met her later, skip that flashcard, relax, put Luna in as chaser if it all goes arse up– she’s Ravenclaw but I’ll vouch for her. Dumb hours spent on the Quidditch pitch, sun going down, watching her get shot after shot past him like she even needed the practise. C’mon Potter at least try to save these, you’re making Ron look like Wood. Her hair everywhere, laughing, head back, both of them impossibly far from the ground

I really don’t want to die, Harry would think in the dark, wand out, ready for it, I really don’t want to die and miss out on you

Harry,

Sorry I couldn’t call but everything’s been nuts here and I wasn’t sure when I’d get to talk to you. Malcotti’s fucked her ankle so I may actually get put in for a game?? She’s been told to take it easy for a week and we play the Magpies in four days, so?? I’ll let you know when I can call. I’m currently writing this at the post-office desk and running late for practise.

Sidenote: this express owl cost me four galleons so I hope it does a dance on its arrival or at least arrives within the day. Tell Andromeda hello and that I’m still rooting for the green beans. Also, good luck for the driving test!! I’m sure you won’t hit anything living or dead and/or drive into a lake, but also if you do just confund the instructor. I solemnly swear not to tell Hermione.

Thinking of you. Kiss Teddy for me,

Gin

The click of the receiver: “I only have five minutes, we’re about to eat.”

Harry smiled, “How’s home?”

“Absolutely nothing to note. Victorie threw up on Bill yesterday, so that was a joy.”

“Supportive as usual.”

“Hey, I am supportive.” Harry could tell the phone was jammed between her shoulder and her ear, heard a knife on a cutting board, “Supportive of Victorie’s right to throw up on Bill whenever she wants.”

“Are you cooking?”

“I’m cutting potatoes by hand to avoid the lounge because Fleur and Mum are talking about how to discipline children.”

“Sounds tense.”

“You don’t know the half of it. Ron had to pretend to be on the phone with you earlier for ten minutes just to get out of there. He says hi– fuck!”

Harry heard the phone fall, “Ginny?”

A scrambling on the other end, distantly: “You’re bleeding on the potatoes!”

“Hi,” Ginny’s voice, a little breathless, “I cut myself.”

“You alright?” Harry asked, quick-shot.

“Oh, yeah. Just blood. Admirably everyone is showing a lot of concern” (Percy’s voice, distant and mournfully, “well there’s no way we can eat these now”)

He thought about going home sometimes, about the flat with Ron and Hermione he was currently paying for that he’d never lived in, what he’d do back in England. No one had ever come out to visit him here, some unspoken agreement they’d all made to give him space. Except, knowing Ron and Hermione and Mrs Weasley and he’s never been anywhere he wasn’t hunted to it probably was very much spoken, it’s just he wasn’t there for it.

The thing is, if he went home that meant no more seeing Teddy every day, sitting around eating cereal, watching him walk into walls or turn his nails pink, giving him ice cream for lunch and strap him into the truck, driving around the farm doing spins just to make him laugh. Even after all this time Australia was so far from the familiar, every night him and Andromeda sat on the deck lazily casting cooling charms, looking at all the stars.

On full moons Teddy got in bed with all the curtains open, blinds up, just to look at the moon. He couldn’t sleep unless he saw it. Harry wondered if he ever did anything like that, got pulled towards something of his parents without realising it. Quidditch, probably. Looking for something without knowing, not sure what you were really missing. Teddy’s huge eyes, the moon, and that familiar feeling: Stop, wait, I can’t believe I’ll never see you again. Come back, I wasn’t done yet. I don’t know how to do it without you.

It was pitch-black, four in the morning Queensland time, but it had been the only time she’d had free. Harry was leaning against the booth wall, letting the cloak slip, exhausted. Ginny cleared her throat in an odd way.

“So, you know I hate asking about this. It makes me– I don’t want to be that person” She sounded, wrong, uncomfortable, like white knuckles gripping the receiver, “But everyone’s been asking and I want– when do you think you’ll be coming home?”

Harry was quiet. All this time away– almost a year, eleven months, it occurred to him– and she’d never asked. She was the only one who hadn’t. “Oh, I don’t know. Soon, I guess.”

“Yeah.” She said, unreadable. A beat went past, and Harry could feel the shift, how that was the wrong thing. He could hear her breathing. “Do you want– if you want, we could take a break-“

“No” Harry said, so fast, “No, no I don’t want that. Do you want that?”

“No. No. I just– I don’t want this to be difficult. I don’t want you to feel, like– obligated. If you want like room away from everything I get it. Just tell me– I don’t want– Just tell me.”

Harry’s heart was going into his chest like an endlessly slamming door. How to explain it? You wouldn’t believe the space here, all this room, all this time I have. I didn’t think I’d get it. I want space but never from you.

“I’m not with you because I feel obligated. I’m– That isn’t how I feel. I don’t want space or a break or anything.”

Silence, endless, pouring down the phone. He could be sick. Then, Ginny’s voice: “Okay.”

“I’m coming back to England, Gin. I’m coming back, just, when I’m– when I’m done. I’m coming home. Soon.”

“Okay. I just wanted to make sure that this– that this is still good.”

“It is.” He was so stupid. A war ends and everything finally works out, everyone safe for real, and he goes running to the other side of the world and doesn’t say when he’s coming home. Ginny, at home, getting a phone wired up just to call him. He had no luck for seventeen years and then it all came at once, and now he doesn’t know what to do with it.

“I love you,” he said, which he never said because it felt heavy, full of gravity, and he spent all his time trying to make her laugh.

Deep breath. He could hear her shoulders unknotting through the phone. “I love you too.”

“Harry?”

“Ron?”

“Can you hear me? Is this?– how do I know if this is on?”

“It’s on,” Harry said, hurriedly, “Is everything alright?”

“I tried to give Pig a letter for you this morning and he bit me and flew into the window.” Harry started laughing, “So I thought I’d try give him a break.”

Harry pulled himself together, “Yeah maybe that’s for the best. How are you?”

“Oh, the usual. The shop is still nuts so Hermione stopped by to help out on Saturday and ate half a Bile Biscuit thinking it was shortbread– hilarious. George threatened to charge her. If Ginny’s not at a practise she’s at our place drinking all the milk, and Luna came by the other day and threw all the stuff in the fridge out because she said it was infected with ‘Mimilice’. You?”

“The same. Teddy turned his leg into the end of a snake the other day and I had a fit. Andromeda put him in the sink so he couldn’t slither away before phasing back. It’s currently 39 degrees.” Ron laughed.

“God, even your voice sounds hot.”

“Woah, mate. I’m seeing someone and so are you.”

“Ha ha.” Ron said sarcastically, “I wish I could turn this up so everyone in the empty living room could have heard that.”

“Please don’t try to use the speaker phone, you’ll accidentally dial the embassy or something.”

“’Speaker phone’? What could the phone have to say?”

Teddy turned two and Andromeda make him a cake by hand with a spider on it that moved. He blew out the candles and looked bemused, sat in a top Hermione had sent, still holding onto a scrap of ribbon. Harry took him outside and sat him on his Nimbus Seven Series, entirely too long, and Teddy did slow circles while Harry held the end, watching him laugh, tiny hands grasping the handle. Suddenly, like being thrown through a window, Remus was in front of him, standing in the Hogwarts Hallway, breathless and happy, saying his sons name.

The post office has been closing for a good fifteen minutes, but Harry brought the cloak, pretended to leave, then snuck back and picked up the phone again.

“I think I just saw Millie’s husband.”

“You’re kidding.”

“A guy came to pick her up, he had a hat on, she got in the front seat–“

“What kind of hat?”

“I don’t know, normal. Like a normal old-person hat.”

“You didn’t say he was old.”

Harry grinned, “You really thought Millie seemed the type to be with a 25-year-old?”

“Hey, you’re going out with me after all–“

Harry spluttered, “I’m a year older!”

“Year and a half–“

“You’re unbelievable. That is not the same.”

“Just because you like younger women–“

“I don’t like younger women, I like you, or I did until a few minutes ago. I’m now reconsidering.”

“You like me.” Ginny said, not really serious but also deadly so.

Harry smiled, said dryly, “What gave me away?”

Harry had started dreaming of home, the staring in the street, dishes washing themselves in the Burrow, Hogwarts lake dark and silky as eels. He couldn’t tell what had brought this on, only that he was now driving into town every day to talk to Ginny, and now Ron, Hermione, even Neville were coming to the phone.

“They miss you” Andromeda said, unprompted, drinking muggle wine on the deck one night after dinner, “Molly wrote last week asking if you mentioned when you’d be coming back.”

“Oh,” Harry said, because he couldn’t think of anything else. “Do you think you’ll come back?”

The question hung between them. Terrible thought: Teddy never back in England, Teddy growing up where Harry couldn’t see him.

“I will.” She looked back at him, unbearably, and it was everything that went unsaid.

“How?” Harry asked, unthinking.

Andromeda looked back out the window, the pressing dark, the unbearable heat. Even after all this time, making dinner, sitting on the dark deck, weeding the garden, she was still unreadable. Grief undid you in layers.

“Because Nymphadora would want me to.” She said, simply. “Because I want her to think I’m brave.”

The post office shuts for a week because Millie goes out of town, and the place is small enough that that means it’s not open till she gets back. Harry makes it four days before apparating hundreds of miles away, almost splinching himself in the heat, dizzy from lack of practise, and stumbling to a payphone at the side of a highway.

Click. “Didn’t expect to hear from you so soon.”

“Yeah, I went out of town to call.”

“Out of town huh? Miss me that much?” Ginny’s voice, joking.

Unbelievably, Harry thought. “Yeah well, Teddy isn’t much of a conversationalist.”

“Don’t let him hear you say that, you’ll knock his confidence.”

“He’ll get past it. How are you?”

“Fine. Well– actually, you won’t believe what happened at practise on Thursday, I hope you’re sitting down–“

“I’m not–” Harry grinned

“Squat then,” Ginny said blithely, “because Jacqueline has actually gone full bonkers–“

“My parents say its incredible “ Hermione’s voice, the only person in his life who spoke in a normal tone on the phone

“Yeah, we’ve been actually.” Harry didn’t have the heart to tell her that Teddy had found the Great Ocean Road blindingly boring and had only made it an hour in before him and Andromeda had decided it wasn’t worth the screaming anymore.

“Yeah, Mum and Dad were thinking of coming down, doing it again.”

Harry played along, “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She was endearingly fake-casual, “Maybe Ron and I would come too.”

“Ron wants to drive 150 miles along a stretch of boring road with your parents?”

“You didn’t say it was boring.”

“Slip of the tongue,” Harry smiled, “What about the Ministry? And the shop?”

“We’re thinking about doing travelling.”

“The year we spent in a tent in various country-sides not enough?”

“Funnily enough seeing the sights wasn’t top of mind then.”

Harry smiled darkly, “If we’re going travelling let’s do Italy, or America, or something. Soon. Somewhere none of us have ever been.”

Hermione left it a beat too long for it to be a normal silence, “I heard Italy is beautiful, the history there is incredible…”

Harry could almost hear talking to Ron later: “and then he said if we’re going travelling, ‘we’re’, Ron! And ‘soon’! he thinks he’ll be travelling with us ‘soon’!. And Ron, “so you didn’t ask when he’s coming back then?, and then Hermione: “didn’t you hear? soon! He said soon!”

He was walking back to the car from the post office one day, Teddy plodding beside him infatuated with a passing goose, with Ginny’s voice still swimming around him, the sound of Ron telling her to shut up, pass the receiver, I’ve got to tell him the Cannons score, and he walked into the travel agents and booked one-way ticket to England for next week. Just like that.

Stupid, really, how he heard their voices all the time (walking in the street, making a sandwich, fixing the plumbing) but had never made the connection. He was in the street like always, hearing the call all again, and thought I wish they were here for real, and then walked into the air-conditioning and pulled out his chequebook. It really was that easy. The goose was still outside when he left holding his ticket, Teddy squirming to get closer to it with a full-on beak that Harry was trying to hide with one hand.

Home soon Harry thought the whole drive home, the thought expanding in his chest, the window open, his hair blowing everywhere– longer than it had ever been. Even when he got back to the farm, told Andromeda (who promised to follow in a year), made dinner, went to bed, he imagined he would feel different. Something huge and unfelt before, but really everything was the the same as ever. He just missed them, is all. He was learning that sometimes love really was that simple, that it was reason enough.

“I read that people sometimes make signs at airports.”

Harry smiled, phone cord wrapped around his palm. “Saying what?”

“Guess you’ll find out tomorrow.”

“Oh, God.”

“Don’t worry, no magic involved. We don’t want to alarm the muggles. Luna asked if she could bring her lion hat but Hermione got intervened.”

“Luna’s coming?”

“Yes, duh. Everyone is. It’s been a year a half.”

Harry, who had had visions of kissing Ginny ridiculously for an hour in front of the plane, adjusted his expectations.

Ginny, as usual, reading his mind: “Don’t worry. I’ve briefed Ron that I’ll still be kissing you senseless so he had better start getting over it.”

Harry grinned, “Bet he loved that.”

“He called me a cocksucker, and then I pointed out that actually I hadn’t been in a year and a half–“

“Gin!”

“–and he said my name exactly like that, yeah.”

Harry couldn’t stop laughing, bright red in the post office for the last time as Millie shushed him, “You are unbelievable.”

“Well, believe me.” she said, dryly, “I’ll be seeing you in 29 hours.”

Harry, also counting, ducked his head, grinning. It turned out all his best luck was waiting at this part of his life, who knew. Thank God, Thank God, Thank God.

“I’m going to be totally unusable, you know. The flight’s twenty-one hours.”

“Yeah, you’re an idiot. I know you’re on a whole no-magic kick but this really is the limit. What are you going to eat?”

“Hermione says they serve eggs and stuff.”

“Wow, really? How?”

Harry considered. “I actually have no idea. Maybe please bring some chips or something to the airport.”

Ginny laughed, the best sound in the world, “Only if you bring me some eggs.”

#sorry this is late sorry to all my unanswered messages i had to post this today i had to get it away from me!!!#hinny #hinny fic #harry potter #ginny weasley #otp: several sunlit days #i have to run everyone is waiting on me sorry everyone i love you all lots i turn 21 in three days who could believe it!!!#carolineswritingtag

618 notes · View notes