Fic Retrospectives (2021)
Feb. 10th, 2022 09:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jajalalaAlright, last retrospective until next year! 2021 was a wacky year. Got more used to the whole pandemic situation, changed jobs, moved twice... they were all good changes, but a lot! Still, I had time to write fortunately.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Impostors on the Garreg Mach Enterprise
December 2020-January 2021
My little brother got me really into Fire Emblem: Three Houses... Lots of thoughts on the game, but I'll focus on thoughts for this fic. There's just so many characters who all have various connections and interactions with each other, the idea of writing a fanfic for the game is kind of hard because I don't want to leave anyone out! But at this point even I had been overtaken by the Among Us craze, had played the games with some friends, and enjoyed the concept. Writing an Among Us AU is the sort of thing that can use a big cast, so I thought the FE3H crew would be perfect for it!
And it was a lot of fun! Though the killer is probably obvious to anyone who knows canon, I liked putting in very subtle hints throughout. Also by including the large cast, I got to do a ton of vignette scenes of certain characters interacting. It gave me space to get out a bunch of thoughts and ideas about different relationships, all while couched in a murder mystery situation.
It's by far my least popular work, but that makes sense to me. It's very broad and full-cast, so anyone looking for a particular relationship is likely turned off by the too-much-other-stuff going on. It's also a space AU (and more specifically an Among Us AU, which some might cringe at) which disconnects it from people who prefer canonverse. I remember tagging Sylvain/Felix (as they get a fun scene or two together) and wondering if that would drive up numbers, as it's a popular ship, but clearly it did not. This is the kind of work that reminds me "I'd still write even with no engagement, so long as I enjoy the concept it's worth doing." Ultimately it was broad indulgent excuse to write a bunch of interactions and try out a mystery format I don't usually do. It's not particularly deep, but I had a lot of fun writing and I reread it on occasion for my own pleasure.
Boku No Hero Academia
Shigaraki Tomura’s Walkthrough to Infiltrating a University, Getting a Boyfriend, and More
December 2020-May 2021
Oh Shigaraki/Natsuo! My beloved rarepair... One of the few M/M ships I've written. There's a sort of 'typical' set of crack pairings for Shouto's siblings, that are all somewhat interconnected to each other. DabiHawks is obvious and has a lot of support, but branching off of that you can get Fuyumi/Miruko and Shigaraki/Natsuo as well. I remember as I was ending Mild-Mannered School Teacher/Adrenaline-Junkie Vigilante I was already thinking about writing ShigNatsu (and in fact had them briefly interact in one of the last chapters for funsies), but it took some time to actually get a juicy concept for them.
I passed by a tumblr post about Shigaraki going undercover at a university to access Dr. Ujiko, and really loved the idea. After getting permission from![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
blueskiddoo (who posted the concept) to write a full version, I started this little beast.
Once again: Identity shenanigans are my most beloved. Shigaraki pretending to be a college student, Natsuo getting close to him with no clue, Shigaraki also not realizing Natsuo is Dabi's brother (or Endeavor's son!), and so on and so forth... Aaa! There was so much fun irony to work with in here. It was also very fun to write Shigrakai falling in love, especially as someone who's always been involved in villainy, the strange feeling of being entrenched in normality and with someone who's just nice and how vulnerable it made him feel... hoo boy.
This work ended up having a strong, central romance focus. Not gonna lie, it's a little bit twilight-esque (I know plenty of romance does it but that's my easy pull) with like... "I am a big super powerful monster, but I am madly in love with and at your mercy, completely normal civilian." And I love it!!! I loved writing Shigaraki as a full villain who develops this giant weak spot, and I also purposefully emphasized that Natsuo felt like a background character in his own life, someone unimportant (An issue stemming from his father's neglect? Maybe so!) so the moment when he realizes his 'normal', awkward boyfriend is a huge villain? So juicy. Aaaah I won't go into every detail I loved about the setup of this situation, but I loved everything that resulted (Shigaraki going to Endeavor's house for dinner... #iconic).
This is one I put down an actual day-of-the-week schedule for! I think it was every Wednesday? In the past for 'scheduled' fics I usually would say like "updates once/twice/two-to-three times a week" depending, but usually didn't give a specific date. A lot of my previous works usually had 1k-4k long chapters since I was posting so often, but this one tended to average around 3k-5k each chapter because I was spending more time on them. I think I took a few breaks (like skipping the occasional week) but only when I warned folks in the author's notes. When I finally finished it, I got a very cute comment that was like "I'm sad this is ending, this gave me something to look forward to every Wednesday!" and that warmed my heart.
Though not my most popular, this is still one of my more popular fics. Despite being a 'crack' ship, Shigaraki/Natsuo has lots of fans, and those who like them apparently like this fic as well! To be honest I think more recently Spinner/Shigaraki has been gaining more prominence as a Shigaraki ship... but there's still ShigNatsu shippers out there. Actually writing about this has raised some fondness, I might go back and reread it soon to indulge.
Fuck Your Homophobic Boss's Daughter
July 2021
This was written during an odd period of my life... I had gotten a new job, had moved to be in the same city as the job, but hadn't actually started working yet. So I had some free time to kill, and saw some Burnin/Fuyumi fanart... Aah I still love Fuyumi/Miruko, but the hot-and-cold of Burnin/Fuyumi is compelling. Plus the concept of "Burnin is fucking her boss's daughter" gave me a good starting point for something exciting.
And exciting this was! Normally for porn I do a oneshot, but this ended up being a big Porn WITH Plot situation, spanning four chapters and 22k. I love a switcheroo, and the idea of Burnin trying to seduce Fuyumi, only for Fuyumi to turn the tables on her... yummy. This also has some of my wildest characterization of Fuyumi to date, I would not blame anyone for calling this Out Of Character, but it makes sense to me. As per usual Fuyumi is the character I project upon the most, and some time after writing this I had the realization that the issues I gave Fuyumi in this (mostly a lot of 'coldness' hidden under a deliberate performance of a gentle daughter/teacher/sister etc) was just a long winded way of being like "Fuyumi is autistic and heavily masking." Hmm.
I love this one, it scratches something in my id, and everyone is delightfully messy in everything they do... but whenever someone tells me they've read it, I get a little embarrassed! I'm pretty fine with strangers reading my porn, but there are some people I've interacted with enough online that they're more like "internet friends I somewhat know," so when they send me discord messages like "I read your Fuyumi/Burnin fic!" I blush at the idea these human beings actually read the filth I put on the page. One of them even sent me live reactions from when they got a friend to read it??? And although it gave me a lot of joy to see an authentic live reaction between two people, one having read and recommended it to the other, and the other reading it for the first time, it makes me very flustered!
I've also gotten a lot of comments on "the popsicle scene"... Hehehe. Warranted, considering I may have accidentally given myself a popsicle kink while writing it. To be honest I think it overshadows the ending fuck a little bit; I didn't end with enough of a bang probably. I do have somewhat of a concept for a chapter 5/epilogue that I may end up adding some day, but for now it's fine as it is.
Haya Yuyu's Butch Awakening (via Makeup)
August 2021
A oneshot that's not porn... a rarity for me. Seriously though, Yuyu/Nejire is basically canon, and the lack of content for them is abysmal. This ended up being an exploration on makeup and gender somewhat. I really like Yuyu's style, but as a gal who shaved her hair very short, there's stuff to unpack there.
Personally I've been very blessed to generally be shielded from some gender/beauty expectations; I had generally almost no family pressure and I never got into makeup even as a teenager, but there's a societal miasma that's hard to escape... I remember when I shaved my head after a year of college, I felt very freed from a lot of expectations I didn't realize I had been shouldering! It felt kind of like being "It's okay to just wear my hair in the way that's most practical for me." Also one of the creepy customers who used to talk to me a lot at the grocery store I worked at stopped talking to me for awhile after my haircut! Basically all benefits.
But there's a very, very real pressure around makeup and beauty in general for women, and even as someone who stayed away from makeup it is only because I stayed away from makeup that I was able to avoid a lot of that damage. And even so, there are still things like snapchat filters that caused me to look at my face and be like "Ah, wouldn't I be a little prettier if my eyes sparkled like that? If I had those thick eyelashes, and smoother skin, and..." Then I turn the filter off, and I look at my face and I'm like "Ah actually I'm ugly, aren't I?"
So to me part of being butch is declaring very clearly "It's okay to be unattractive." Obviously everyone has different tastes, I personally love butch "styles" and tend to find them hot, but at its core I consider it shedding the traditional beauty expectations of women. So what if you're uglier without makeup on? That doesn't mean you're undeserving of love or respect! Having a practical hairstyle can, in fact, be more important than being pretty!
Anyway because Yuyu has a butch style, I thought it was really appropriate to explore these feelings through her, especially since she does seem to have some opinions and knowledge of fashion etc based on her helping Nejire with the beauty pageant, which could be spun into a history with that sort of thing. Also the inherent eroticism of putting makeup on your friend... Hehehhe.
You Spin My Denim Right Round, Right Round
August 2021
Anyways after writing a gentle, exploratory, thoughtful oneshot, I had to cleanse my palette with more porn. I forget exactly how I stumbled on this concept, but as soon as I linked Best Jeanist's ability to control fabric and Wash's ability to wash fabric, I was like '!!!!!!" Surprisingly, NO ONE ELSE had written for the pairing before, and I had to start the tag. As of me writing this, I've checked and so far no one else has written them on AO3. So I think this is perhaps my rarest pairing I've written.
This was a bit of a creative exercise; I love penetration but I think it's somewhat overrated, so I like to take opportunities to show how other forms of sex can be hot. This particular form... Well, it could not exist outside the bnha universe with quirks, but ultimately it's just a full sensory experience that only the two of them can share.
I wrote this while in a sublet situation where I had a room next to the washing machine... so I could hear it going many of the times I was working on this piece. I researched how washing machines worked to make the smut "accurate", and started to learn what all the different sounds of the washing machine might mean for the cycles! Very informative.
The comments to this fic are a gold mine. It tends to be variations on "This was weird as hell... but hot?" Ahahahah. It's tagged "crack treated sexily" for a reason. I think people expect it to be full crack, and are expecting to just laugh... but I am horny at heart, and I put that energy even into washing machine porn.
Never Too Old
December 2021
The last few months of 2021 I started getting into and learning about "fan events" for bnha. I joined a couple, including a pretty casual "BNHA WLW Week". There were seven prompts for seven days, and the challenge was to do something for them each day of the first week of December. Despite my various oneshots, I actually generally prefer multichapters, so I thought it'd be fun to incorporate all the prompts into a seven-day multichapter bonanza! The Inko/Midnight pairing was inspired by someone (![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p2.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
x_asche_13) chatting about them in the BNHA WLW Week discord, they mentioned it and I read one of their fics of it and was like: I gotta write for them.
Overall this work was pretty grounded and tame. I decided to take a domestic and gentle angle of two adult women having a meet-cute, getting to know each other, and then a little bit of drama with Inko in regards to having a son who doesn't really know her full sexuality or dating life. I also wanted to explore some of Midnight's obsession with "youth", thus the title.
I remember the hardest prompt to make work was the "prom/soulmate" prompt! I generally dislike soulmate AUs (and the concept of soulmates in general) so I knew I didn't want to write that... but Japanese schools don't have prom! I know fanfic is a free space, and probably not everything I've written for bnha is accurate to Japan and Japanese culture etc, but still... that's one of the few things I know isn't the norm, and it felt embarrassingly American-centric to throw a prom into a fic I decided to have in canonverse in Japan! I ended up heavily lampshading the concept, basically being like "The students decided it would be a super fun activity to do on a random weekend, just like in those American movies!" and had a fun bit where they're like "All Might, this is just like American proms right?" and All Might is like "Uhhhh... sure."
I should probably reread this soon as I haven't really looked at it since I posted it. It's a pretty nice medium/short length, so not a huge time investment, but I remember having fun with some particular bits inside, so I'd like to see how it feels to read over again with some distance.
Overall 2021 was less 'productive' than 2020, but to be fair I had some life things going on as well. My smut got wackier, I started joining bnha fan events, and I dabbled in some FE3H. Unlike my other retrospective catch-ups which were about fics written 3-2 years ago, this one is now properly fics I've written in the past year or so, so they feel a lot closer than those others did! Thinking about each piece made me want to go back and reread some of them; as always I'm my own biggest fan!
In 2021 I also started another FE3H fic (Marianne/Hilda camp counselor AU involving a werewolf), but since that's still actively ongoing I think I'll reflect on it properly for the 2022 fic retrospective next year.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Impostors on the Garreg Mach Enterprise
December 2020-January 2021
My little brother got me really into Fire Emblem: Three Houses... Lots of thoughts on the game, but I'll focus on thoughts for this fic. There's just so many characters who all have various connections and interactions with each other, the idea of writing a fanfic for the game is kind of hard because I don't want to leave anyone out! But at this point even I had been overtaken by the Among Us craze, had played the games with some friends, and enjoyed the concept. Writing an Among Us AU is the sort of thing that can use a big cast, so I thought the FE3H crew would be perfect for it!
And it was a lot of fun! Though the killer is probably obvious to anyone who knows canon, I liked putting in very subtle hints throughout. Also by including the large cast, I got to do a ton of vignette scenes of certain characters interacting. It gave me space to get out a bunch of thoughts and ideas about different relationships, all while couched in a murder mystery situation.
It's by far my least popular work, but that makes sense to me. It's very broad and full-cast, so anyone looking for a particular relationship is likely turned off by the too-much-other-stuff going on. It's also a space AU (and more specifically an Among Us AU, which some might cringe at) which disconnects it from people who prefer canonverse. I remember tagging Sylvain/Felix (as they get a fun scene or two together) and wondering if that would drive up numbers, as it's a popular ship, but clearly it did not. This is the kind of work that reminds me "I'd still write even with no engagement, so long as I enjoy the concept it's worth doing." Ultimately it was broad indulgent excuse to write a bunch of interactions and try out a mystery format I don't usually do. It's not particularly deep, but I had a lot of fun writing and I reread it on occasion for my own pleasure.
Boku No Hero Academia
Shigaraki Tomura’s Walkthrough to Infiltrating a University, Getting a Boyfriend, and More
December 2020-May 2021
Oh Shigaraki/Natsuo! My beloved rarepair... One of the few M/M ships I've written. There's a sort of 'typical' set of crack pairings for Shouto's siblings, that are all somewhat interconnected to each other. DabiHawks is obvious and has a lot of support, but branching off of that you can get Fuyumi/Miruko and Shigaraki/Natsuo as well. I remember as I was ending Mild-Mannered School Teacher/Adrenaline-Junkie Vigilante I was already thinking about writing ShigNatsu (and in fact had them briefly interact in one of the last chapters for funsies), but it took some time to actually get a juicy concept for them.
I passed by a tumblr post about Shigaraki going undercover at a university to access Dr. Ujiko, and really loved the idea. After getting permission from
Once again: Identity shenanigans are my most beloved. Shigaraki pretending to be a college student, Natsuo getting close to him with no clue, Shigaraki also not realizing Natsuo is Dabi's brother (or Endeavor's son!), and so on and so forth... Aaa! There was so much fun irony to work with in here. It was also very fun to write Shigrakai falling in love, especially as someone who's always been involved in villainy, the strange feeling of being entrenched in normality and with someone who's just nice and how vulnerable it made him feel... hoo boy.
This work ended up having a strong, central romance focus. Not gonna lie, it's a little bit twilight-esque (I know plenty of romance does it but that's my easy pull) with like... "I am a big super powerful monster, but I am madly in love with and at your mercy, completely normal civilian." And I love it!!! I loved writing Shigaraki as a full villain who develops this giant weak spot, and I also purposefully emphasized that Natsuo felt like a background character in his own life, someone unimportant (An issue stemming from his father's neglect? Maybe so!) so the moment when he realizes his 'normal', awkward boyfriend is a huge villain? So juicy. Aaaah I won't go into every detail I loved about the setup of this situation, but I loved everything that resulted (Shigaraki going to Endeavor's house for dinner... #iconic).
This is one I put down an actual day-of-the-week schedule for! I think it was every Wednesday? In the past for 'scheduled' fics I usually would say like "updates once/twice/two-to-three times a week" depending, but usually didn't give a specific date. A lot of my previous works usually had 1k-4k long chapters since I was posting so often, but this one tended to average around 3k-5k each chapter because I was spending more time on them. I think I took a few breaks (like skipping the occasional week) but only when I warned folks in the author's notes. When I finally finished it, I got a very cute comment that was like "I'm sad this is ending, this gave me something to look forward to every Wednesday!" and that warmed my heart.
Though not my most popular, this is still one of my more popular fics. Despite being a 'crack' ship, Shigaraki/Natsuo has lots of fans, and those who like them apparently like this fic as well! To be honest I think more recently Spinner/Shigaraki has been gaining more prominence as a Shigaraki ship... but there's still ShigNatsu shippers out there. Actually writing about this has raised some fondness, I might go back and reread it soon to indulge.
Fuck Your Homophobic Boss's Daughter
July 2021
This was written during an odd period of my life... I had gotten a new job, had moved to be in the same city as the job, but hadn't actually started working yet. So I had some free time to kill, and saw some Burnin/Fuyumi fanart... Aah I still love Fuyumi/Miruko, but the hot-and-cold of Burnin/Fuyumi is compelling. Plus the concept of "Burnin is fucking her boss's daughter" gave me a good starting point for something exciting.
And exciting this was! Normally for porn I do a oneshot, but this ended up being a big Porn WITH Plot situation, spanning four chapters and 22k. I love a switcheroo, and the idea of Burnin trying to seduce Fuyumi, only for Fuyumi to turn the tables on her... yummy. This also has some of my wildest characterization of Fuyumi to date, I would not blame anyone for calling this Out Of Character, but it makes sense to me. As per usual Fuyumi is the character I project upon the most, and some time after writing this I had the realization that the issues I gave Fuyumi in this (mostly a lot of 'coldness' hidden under a deliberate performance of a gentle daughter/teacher/sister etc) was just a long winded way of being like "Fuyumi is autistic and heavily masking." Hmm.
I love this one, it scratches something in my id, and everyone is delightfully messy in everything they do... but whenever someone tells me they've read it, I get a little embarrassed! I'm pretty fine with strangers reading my porn, but there are some people I've interacted with enough online that they're more like "internet friends I somewhat know," so when they send me discord messages like "I read your Fuyumi/Burnin fic!" I blush at the idea these human beings actually read the filth I put on the page. One of them even sent me live reactions from when they got a friend to read it??? And although it gave me a lot of joy to see an authentic live reaction between two people, one having read and recommended it to the other, and the other reading it for the first time, it makes me very flustered!
I've also gotten a lot of comments on "the popsicle scene"... Hehehe. Warranted, considering I may have accidentally given myself a popsicle kink while writing it. To be honest I think it overshadows the ending fuck a little bit; I didn't end with enough of a bang probably. I do have somewhat of a concept for a chapter 5/epilogue that I may end up adding some day, but for now it's fine as it is.
Haya Yuyu's Butch Awakening (via Makeup)
August 2021
A oneshot that's not porn... a rarity for me. Seriously though, Yuyu/Nejire is basically canon, and the lack of content for them is abysmal. This ended up being an exploration on makeup and gender somewhat. I really like Yuyu's style, but as a gal who shaved her hair very short, there's stuff to unpack there.
Personally I've been very blessed to generally be shielded from some gender/beauty expectations; I had generally almost no family pressure and I never got into makeup even as a teenager, but there's a societal miasma that's hard to escape... I remember when I shaved my head after a year of college, I felt very freed from a lot of expectations I didn't realize I had been shouldering! It felt kind of like being "It's okay to just wear my hair in the way that's most practical for me." Also one of the creepy customers who used to talk to me a lot at the grocery store I worked at stopped talking to me for awhile after my haircut! Basically all benefits.
But there's a very, very real pressure around makeup and beauty in general for women, and even as someone who stayed away from makeup it is only because I stayed away from makeup that I was able to avoid a lot of that damage. And even so, there are still things like snapchat filters that caused me to look at my face and be like "Ah, wouldn't I be a little prettier if my eyes sparkled like that? If I had those thick eyelashes, and smoother skin, and..." Then I turn the filter off, and I look at my face and I'm like "Ah actually I'm ugly, aren't I?"
So to me part of being butch is declaring very clearly "It's okay to be unattractive." Obviously everyone has different tastes, I personally love butch "styles" and tend to find them hot, but at its core I consider it shedding the traditional beauty expectations of women. So what if you're uglier without makeup on? That doesn't mean you're undeserving of love or respect! Having a practical hairstyle can, in fact, be more important than being pretty!
Anyway because Yuyu has a butch style, I thought it was really appropriate to explore these feelings through her, especially since she does seem to have some opinions and knowledge of fashion etc based on her helping Nejire with the beauty pageant, which could be spun into a history with that sort of thing. Also the inherent eroticism of putting makeup on your friend... Hehehhe.
You Spin My Denim Right Round, Right Round
August 2021
Anyways after writing a gentle, exploratory, thoughtful oneshot, I had to cleanse my palette with more porn. I forget exactly how I stumbled on this concept, but as soon as I linked Best Jeanist's ability to control fabric and Wash's ability to wash fabric, I was like '!!!!!!" Surprisingly, NO ONE ELSE had written for the pairing before, and I had to start the tag. As of me writing this, I've checked and so far no one else has written them on AO3. So I think this is perhaps my rarest pairing I've written.
This was a bit of a creative exercise; I love penetration but I think it's somewhat overrated, so I like to take opportunities to show how other forms of sex can be hot. This particular form... Well, it could not exist outside the bnha universe with quirks, but ultimately it's just a full sensory experience that only the two of them can share.
I wrote this while in a sublet situation where I had a room next to the washing machine... so I could hear it going many of the times I was working on this piece. I researched how washing machines worked to make the smut "accurate", and started to learn what all the different sounds of the washing machine might mean for the cycles! Very informative.
The comments to this fic are a gold mine. It tends to be variations on "This was weird as hell... but hot?" Ahahahah. It's tagged "crack treated sexily" for a reason. I think people expect it to be full crack, and are expecting to just laugh... but I am horny at heart, and I put that energy even into washing machine porn.
Never Too Old
December 2021
The last few months of 2021 I started getting into and learning about "fan events" for bnha. I joined a couple, including a pretty casual "BNHA WLW Week". There were seven prompts for seven days, and the challenge was to do something for them each day of the first week of December. Despite my various oneshots, I actually generally prefer multichapters, so I thought it'd be fun to incorporate all the prompts into a seven-day multichapter bonanza! The Inko/Midnight pairing was inspired by someone (
Overall this work was pretty grounded and tame. I decided to take a domestic and gentle angle of two adult women having a meet-cute, getting to know each other, and then a little bit of drama with Inko in regards to having a son who doesn't really know her full sexuality or dating life. I also wanted to explore some of Midnight's obsession with "youth", thus the title.
I remember the hardest prompt to make work was the "prom/soulmate" prompt! I generally dislike soulmate AUs (and the concept of soulmates in general) so I knew I didn't want to write that... but Japanese schools don't have prom! I know fanfic is a free space, and probably not everything I've written for bnha is accurate to Japan and Japanese culture etc, but still... that's one of the few things I know isn't the norm, and it felt embarrassingly American-centric to throw a prom into a fic I decided to have in canonverse in Japan! I ended up heavily lampshading the concept, basically being like "The students decided it would be a super fun activity to do on a random weekend, just like in those American movies!" and had a fun bit where they're like "All Might, this is just like American proms right?" and All Might is like "Uhhhh... sure."
I should probably reread this soon as I haven't really looked at it since I posted it. It's a pretty nice medium/short length, so not a huge time investment, but I remember having fun with some particular bits inside, so I'd like to see how it feels to read over again with some distance.
Overall 2021 was less 'productive' than 2020, but to be fair I had some life things going on as well. My smut got wackier, I started joining bnha fan events, and I dabbled in some FE3H. Unlike my other retrospective catch-ups which were about fics written 3-2 years ago, this one is now properly fics I've written in the past year or so, so they feel a lot closer than those others did! Thinking about each piece made me want to go back and reread some of them; as always I'm my own biggest fan!
In 2021 I also started another FE3H fic (Marianne/Hilda camp counselor AU involving a werewolf), but since that's still actively ongoing I think I'll reflect on it properly for the 2022 fic retrospective next year.
