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aestivalis) wrote2021-02-21 10:41 am
aestivalis) wrote2021-02-21 10:41 am
Due to write something horrible next, bad luck characters
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original5k tomorrow and I am almost definitely going to participate!
It's probably not too surprising given the state of the world at present, but I feel like I posted a lot to AO3 last year. And a lot of that came from taking part in different exchanges! So now I am going to look at everything I posted from February last year up to February this year (with sneaky reveals of mychocolateboxcomm stories that aren't actually officially revealed to the public until a few hours time, but shhhh).
Featuring fanfic for: Final Fantasy X (OC centric), Final Fantasy X-2, Tales of Symphonia, Tales of the Abyss/Among Us, Tales of Xillia, and some original work!
Cheating right out the door by including Strange New Dawns despite the fact it was clearly published pre-February 2020, but I want to give this story a special mention. I barely remember anything about writing this story. I don't really remember when I worked on it, what rooms in the house I worked on it in, if I worked on it when I was home alone or when my mother was staying with us or whether Fel had gone back to work yet or not. But I look at the date it was posted, and what I can say is: I must have written this in the two weeks right after being discharged from the hospital post final-chemo and my stem cell transplant. OOP.
September 30th was (I think) the date they released me, after I bravely ate The Panini Of Destiny aka proved to my medical team that I was well enough to eat, I promise, please let me go. Being in the hospital environment was making me very physical nauseous, to the point that even using a feeding tube wasn't helping me to keep food down. So, on the condition that I successfully ate something and kept it down, my team decided I could go home and see if a more familiar less medical environment would help me do better on the nutrition front. And it did! And here I am!
This original story was posted on October 12th. Looking back, that seems pretty wild to me. And honestly, it's not a story I'm particularly proud of just in terms of content. But with the context under which it was written? Woof. Well done, past self. Good job.
BUT OKAY, LET'S ACTUALLY TALK ABOUT SOME STORIES FOR REALSIES.
What You Are, And What You've Been seems to have started a trend of longer wordier titles for things I've written this past year. I don't think this title is the best of them, but it's okay I suppose! And I'm happy to have something for Gippal/Baralai on my AO3 now, because it's one of those ancient old rarepairs that I've got a real soft spot. I latched on to the idea of them when I first played the game (what, like, fifteen years ago or something? good grief), and even after all this time there's still a lot I really like about these two!
I don't usually write "kidfic", as it were, but a lot of the recipients requests talked about how these two might be if they were raising a child together. Thus, Irami! She was a bit of a vessel for exploring some of Spira's collective grief, and more specifically the inevitable trauma that accompanies the mistreatment of the Al Bhed. In that sense I possibly didn't focus on her enough, but my Baralai bias does some through pretty strongly all in all.
Spira is a horrible messed up place and it has no right to be as beautiful and devastating as it is. I think Spira itself might be my favourite character in Final Fantasy X. No other FF game setting feels quite so complete and quite so impactful. It's no wonder we're going to end up here again before the end of this little list.
It's 610 time! Fall Down Seven Times, Stand Up Eight is SOMEHOW the first and only Zelos/Lloyd story on my AO3 account. That's just bonkers considering the amount of fic I posted for them back during the days of fanfiction.net, and the amount I posted for them on Livejournal. I used to hand write and exchange Zelos/Lloyd fic with a friend in college! They have been the Forever Pairing for such a long time now, and yet it was only this last year when they finally joined me over at the Archive.
I wrote this story over the course of about four weeks, and I was so proud of how it came out. I still am, to be honest! Writing over 20k in that sort of timeframe was basically unheard of for me. I also have a strong habit of writing a lot in one sitting, usually over the course of several hours, but THIS story was written in tiny chunks over many many days and then edited once that first draft was complete, and I think it was really beneficial for me to see how that could work out. It's something I've done more of since then! It is something I will continue to do going forward >:(!
The title of this one was taken from one of the in-game Dwarven Vows, but it definitely summed up the overall tone of the tale as well. It was so much fun writing Zelos again, ghjfklsd. Love that sod. And canon divergence is my absolute favourite thing, so this prompt was just delicious bread and butter that kept me very well-fed. I still think about what would come next, how things would continue to play out. And revisiting Symphonia in this way also opened the door for another fic I wrote this year...
I enjoyed writing Zelos so much that I immediately conceived of a canon divergence that removed him from the story. THIS IS HOW WE TREAT OUR FAVS.
By Envy's Hand We Find Our Shape, Through Kindness We Defy It has to be the longest title of the year. Reaaally leaning into this full sentence titles at this point. This story was written with the simple prompt of 'jealousy' in hand, but I already wanted to write a story that explored Colette and Seles interacting and everything else just lined up as a convenient bonus.
I also wanted to touch on the weird relationship between Colette and her father, something that canon itself brushes around the edges of but never really delves into. I'd be hard pressed to name my favourite thing that I wrote this year, but when I think about things that were long overdue this is definitely the story that most readily comes to mind. And it was a lot of fun exploring how Seles and Colette might interact! Seles is a vague enough character in canon that I probably just imposed a lot of my own ideas on to how she might be, but whatever man, it's fanfiction baybee.
I will never ever get tired of exploring the Chosen system and the impact it has had on different characters. And I will never ever get tired of cute girls having crushes on each other.
This story is the first time I ever had someone directly approach me asking if they could write something inspired by it! They even credited as such! Read that alternative take here! I was so happy and surprised;;
Loyalties was written in response to a prompt meme on twitter, and I think you were supposed to write something like three sentences on a given character and theme? As you can see, I somewhat exceeded three sentences. Having gone as far as I did, it seemed wasteful not to post it to AO3!
I considered this story kind of comedic and not something to be taken too seriously, and was really surprised when the first commenter called it 'horribly sad'! Oops, turns out a story that violently kills off the entire cast while one character grapples with the guilt and responsibility of allowing it to happen for a (misconceived) greater good is actually not light-hearted after all!!! ┐(´∀｀)┌
It was fun to write, though! And took very little thinking about, the idea just came to me and rushed right out in one short sitting. Sometimes you just gotta kill 'em all.
highadrenalineexchange came along at the perfect time for me. Lockdown was just kicking off again, and my job can't be done from home which left me with lots of time on my hands. And now, suddenly, here was an exchange that required over 10k of writing in only two weeks? Fine, perfect, bam. There was my structure for the next two weeks sorted out. I would devote myself to this project and make that my work.
Thus, My Empire Grows By One! It's probably a little bit disingenuous to say I wrote over 25k in just two weeks—there was an additional week before story reveals that you could use for additional editing time—but I did complete the original 13k draft in that two week timeframe. I also wrote some prequel stories in that time, the better to understand the characters I would be focusing on. It really helped to do so, even if that stuff never actually made it onto the public page!
25k in three weeks really made me proud of myself. I'm so glad I got involved with this exchange. And 25k of original writing, too! This is the first piece of original writing I've shared with people I actually know IRL, aside fromshinsengumi who gets special "we are literally married" privileges. I was really pleased with this story! I loved getting to know Louiz and Deir, I love knowing more about what life holds for them and being quietly confident I might get to write more of their stories some day. I loved exploring topics of grief and isolation and repression and healing. I loved letting them open up to each other in ways they didn't expect. I loved the implications of worldbuilding I was able to lace throughout the tale, learning what felt like too much or too little and trying to strike that balance.
And hell, I loved the ra-ra-rasputin of it all. bless these boys.
Again, I would be hard pressed to name a favourite thing that I wrote this year. But this is probably the thing I consider most accomplished. The thing I'm most proud of, I guess. And man, it feels good to have reached a point in my life where I can be proud of my own work;;
Back to Final Fantasy X again, this time as a guise for original fiction. Or a guise for original characters, anyway. Pretty disturbed to find that I first started posted Whoever Dies First, Wins back at the end of 2018, boo, but this year I posted chapters 7 through 10! Which is actually a bit more than I realised, if I'm honest, so well done me!
Leonel and Solus have been on the road for a good while now, and things have really shifted around a lot between them. But hah, whenever I talk about this story I can't help but chuckle a little to myself because of how much their names do not mesh with Spira. I guess that's the trouble when the characters precede the setting you're placing them into! Solus just about gets away with it, to be fair, but Leonel is a bit of an absurd name for the setting and I privately wonder if it turns people off before they even really get started, ghfjkds. OH WELL, HIM IS WHAT HIM IS...
But yeah, this whole story is just one extended tragedy so far, and I can't promise things are going to get better any time soon. It's an FFX story, I don't know what you expected. But exploring the awful damaged relationship between these two semi-estranged cousins, Summoner and Guardian, has been a careful gradual delight. And having even a few people engaged with the story is just ;_; a legitimate privilege. I'm so thrilled and so glad that anyone wants to join this ride along with me. These awful boys deserve it.
I'm going to skip over Spare Parts because I technically wrote it a few years ago! I just posted it to AO3 for the first time in January, because I missed having Rideaux content on there. And I thought the best remedy for that was to post 800 words of him being torturously murdered by an alternate universe version of himself, because obviously that's what I thought.
SO!
All in all, in terms of fiction actually posted to AO3, I logged 67,991 words last year. If I can do anything like that much again this year around, I'll definitely be considering that a win. And oops, I've just realised I never DID include my two things fromchocolateboxcomm! So that would have just about brought it up to around 72k or so, I think. Perhaps we will talk about those two stories some other time!!
original5k tomorrow and I am almost definitely going to participate!It's probably not too surprising given the state of the world at present, but I feel like I posted a lot to AO3 last year. And a lot of that came from taking part in different exchanges! So now I am going to look at everything I posted from February last year up to February this year (with sneaky reveals of my
chocolateboxcomm stories that aren't actually officially revealed to the public until a few hours time, but shhhh).Featuring fanfic for: Final Fantasy X (OC centric), Final Fantasy X-2, Tales of Symphonia, Tales of the Abyss/Among Us, Tales of Xillia, and some original work!
Cheating right out the door by including Strange New Dawns despite the fact it was clearly published pre-February 2020, but I want to give this story a special mention. I barely remember anything about writing this story. I don't really remember when I worked on it, what rooms in the house I worked on it in, if I worked on it when I was home alone or when my mother was staying with us or whether Fel had gone back to work yet or not. But I look at the date it was posted, and what I can say is: I must have written this in the two weeks right after being discharged from the hospital post final-chemo and my stem cell transplant. OOP.
September 30th was (I think) the date they released me, after I bravely ate The Panini Of Destiny aka proved to my medical team that I was well enough to eat, I promise, please let me go. Being in the hospital environment was making me very physical nauseous, to the point that even using a feeding tube wasn't helping me to keep food down. So, on the condition that I successfully ate something and kept it down, my team decided I could go home and see if a more familiar less medical environment would help me do better on the nutrition front. And it did! And here I am!
This original story was posted on October 12th. Looking back, that seems pretty wild to me. And honestly, it's not a story I'm particularly proud of just in terms of content. But with the context under which it was written? Woof. Well done, past self. Good job.
BUT OKAY, LET'S ACTUALLY TALK ABOUT SOME STORIES FOR REALSIES.
What You Are, And What You've Been seems to have started a trend of longer wordier titles for things I've written this past year. I don't think this title is the best of them, but it's okay I suppose! And I'm happy to have something for Gippal/Baralai on my AO3 now, because it's one of those ancient old rarepairs that I've got a real soft spot. I latched on to the idea of them when I first played the game (what, like, fifteen years ago or something? good grief), and even after all this time there's still a lot I really like about these two!
I don't usually write "kidfic", as it were, but a lot of the recipients requests talked about how these two might be if they were raising a child together. Thus, Irami! She was a bit of a vessel for exploring some of Spira's collective grief, and more specifically the inevitable trauma that accompanies the mistreatment of the Al Bhed. In that sense I possibly didn't focus on her enough, but my Baralai bias does some through pretty strongly all in all.
Spira is a horrible messed up place and it has no right to be as beautiful and devastating as it is. I think Spira itself might be my favourite character in Final Fantasy X. No other FF game setting feels quite so complete and quite so impactful. It's no wonder we're going to end up here again before the end of this little list.
It's 610 time! Fall Down Seven Times, Stand Up Eight is SOMEHOW the first and only Zelos/Lloyd story on my AO3 account. That's just bonkers considering the amount of fic I posted for them back during the days of fanfiction.net, and the amount I posted for them on Livejournal. I used to hand write and exchange Zelos/Lloyd fic with a friend in college! They have been the Forever Pairing for such a long time now, and yet it was only this last year when they finally joined me over at the Archive.
I wrote this story over the course of about four weeks, and I was so proud of how it came out. I still am, to be honest! Writing over 20k in that sort of timeframe was basically unheard of for me. I also have a strong habit of writing a lot in one sitting, usually over the course of several hours, but THIS story was written in tiny chunks over many many days and then edited once that first draft was complete, and I think it was really beneficial for me to see how that could work out. It's something I've done more of since then! It is something I will continue to do going forward >:(!
The title of this one was taken from one of the in-game Dwarven Vows, but it definitely summed up the overall tone of the tale as well. It was so much fun writing Zelos again, ghjfklsd. Love that sod. And canon divergence is my absolute favourite thing, so this prompt was just delicious bread and butter that kept me very well-fed. I still think about what would come next, how things would continue to play out. And revisiting Symphonia in this way also opened the door for another fic I wrote this year...
I enjoyed writing Zelos so much that I immediately conceived of a canon divergence that removed him from the story. THIS IS HOW WE TREAT OUR FAVS.
By Envy's Hand We Find Our Shape, Through Kindness We Defy It has to be the longest title of the year. Reaaally leaning into this full sentence titles at this point. This story was written with the simple prompt of 'jealousy' in hand, but I already wanted to write a story that explored Colette and Seles interacting and everything else just lined up as a convenient bonus.
I also wanted to touch on the weird relationship between Colette and her father, something that canon itself brushes around the edges of but never really delves into. I'd be hard pressed to name my favourite thing that I wrote this year, but when I think about things that were long overdue this is definitely the story that most readily comes to mind. And it was a lot of fun exploring how Seles and Colette might interact! Seles is a vague enough character in canon that I probably just imposed a lot of my own ideas on to how she might be, but whatever man, it's fanfiction baybee.
I will never ever get tired of exploring the Chosen system and the impact it has had on different characters. And I will never ever get tired of cute girls having crushes on each other.
This story is the first time I ever had someone directly approach me asking if they could write something inspired by it! They even credited as such! Read that alternative take here! I was so happy and surprised;;
Loyalties was written in response to a prompt meme on twitter, and I think you were supposed to write something like three sentences on a given character and theme? As you can see, I somewhat exceeded three sentences. Having gone as far as I did, it seemed wasteful not to post it to AO3!
I considered this story kind of comedic and not something to be taken too seriously, and was really surprised when the first commenter called it 'horribly sad'! Oops, turns out a story that violently kills off the entire cast while one character grapples with the guilt and responsibility of allowing it to happen for a (misconceived) greater good is actually not light-hearted after all!!! ┐(´∀｀)┌
It was fun to write, though! And took very little thinking about, the idea just came to me and rushed right out in one short sitting. Sometimes you just gotta kill 'em all.
highadrenalineexchange came along at the perfect time for me. Lockdown was just kicking off again, and my job can't be done from home which left me with lots of time on my hands. And now, suddenly, here was an exchange that required over 10k of writing in only two weeks? Fine, perfect, bam. There was my structure for the next two weeks sorted out. I would devote myself to this project and make that my work.Thus, My Empire Grows By One! It's probably a little bit disingenuous to say I wrote over 25k in just two weeks—there was an additional week before story reveals that you could use for additional editing time—but I did complete the original 13k draft in that two week timeframe. I also wrote some prequel stories in that time, the better to understand the characters I would be focusing on. It really helped to do so, even if that stuff never actually made it onto the public page!
25k in three weeks really made me proud of myself. I'm so glad I got involved with this exchange. And 25k of original writing, too! This is the first piece of original writing I've shared with people I actually know IRL, aside from
shinsengumi who gets special "we are literally married" privileges. I was really pleased with this story! I loved getting to know Louiz and Deir, I love knowing more about what life holds for them and being quietly confident I might get to write more of their stories some day. I loved exploring topics of grief and isolation and repression and healing. I loved letting them open up to each other in ways they didn't expect. I loved the implications of worldbuilding I was able to lace throughout the tale, learning what felt like too much or too little and trying to strike that balance.And hell, I loved the ra-ra-rasputin of it all. bless these boys.
Again, I would be hard pressed to name a favourite thing that I wrote this year. But this is probably the thing I consider most accomplished. The thing I'm most proud of, I guess. And man, it feels good to have reached a point in my life where I can be proud of my own work;;
Back to Final Fantasy X again, this time as a guise for original fiction. Or a guise for original characters, anyway. Pretty disturbed to find that I first started posted Whoever Dies First, Wins back at the end of 2018, boo, but this year I posted chapters 7 through 10! Which is actually a bit more than I realised, if I'm honest, so well done me!
Leonel and Solus have been on the road for a good while now, and things have really shifted around a lot between them. But hah, whenever I talk about this story I can't help but chuckle a little to myself because of how much their names do not mesh with Spira. I guess that's the trouble when the characters precede the setting you're placing them into! Solus just about gets away with it, to be fair, but Leonel is a bit of an absurd name for the setting and I privately wonder if it turns people off before they even really get started, ghfjkds. OH WELL, HIM IS WHAT HIM IS...
But yeah, this whole story is just one extended tragedy so far, and I can't promise things are going to get better any time soon. It's an FFX story, I don't know what you expected. But exploring the awful damaged relationship between these two semi-estranged cousins, Summoner and Guardian, has been a careful gradual delight. And having even a few people engaged with the story is just ;_; a legitimate privilege. I'm so thrilled and so glad that anyone wants to join this ride along with me. These awful boys deserve it.
I'm going to skip over Spare Parts because I technically wrote it a few years ago! I just posted it to AO3 for the first time in January, because I missed having Rideaux content on there. And I thought the best remedy for that was to post 800 words of him being torturously murdered by an alternate universe version of himself, because obviously that's what I thought.
SO!
All in all, in terms of fiction actually posted to AO3, I logged 67,991 words last year. If I can do anything like that much again this year around, I'll definitely be considering that a win. And oops, I've just realised I never DID include my two things from
chocolateboxcomm! So that would have just about brought it up to around 72k or so, I think. Perhaps we will talk about those two stories some other time!!
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