Settling

Oct. 15th, 2025 07:57 am
kalloway: Athrun from Gundam SEED Destiny facepalming (Athrun Epic Facepalm)
[personal profile] kalloway
Apparently it had been more than four years since the last time my father and I meaningfully settled our accounts with one another. I suspect I hadn't pushed for it because I thought I was heavily in debt. Four years covers an entire hot water heater, kitchen cabinet, tablet, and various other gribblies. But in the end, I had started off ahead and ended up still ahead though by about half. I definitely need to pick out some more things to go on eBay, though.

At some point I'll make more Accidental Advent posts. It's been about five weeks now and I can honestly say this is one of my better ideas! I drifted away from the shelf of floppy comics and have been working through piles on the mounded desk in my bedroom but it needs attention more so this is a feature not a bug! Anyway, I have definitely been reading and watching a lot of stuff that I wasn't getting to otherwise and honestly, I think I've been shuffling a third or so to the sale box. (Percentages may change as I go, but at least I'll know what I have even if it's all keepers?)

Built MG Astray Blue Frame D, though she needs a few stickers before I declare her actually done. Built an EG Strike that I found while straightening up, and then built an HG Dagger because of a conversation on discord. The Dagger was a nice build, the EG was good, and Blue Frame was sure a build. ^^;; And this morning built an easier-than-it-looked brick kit called Keiji that M got me about 200 years ago. IDK if it counts as Accidental Advent or just normal backlog clearing, hmm. (It's honestly me avoiding the Throne Zwei and its incredibly poor color separation, more likely.)

Overnight I noticed that the one blog doing the Astray 'translations' (despite claiming to be translations with multiple editors, they are clearly just MTL and have a shitton of errors like basic name and term mistakes) had some chapters of Destiny Astray B up and since I apparently don't know when to stop touching the electric cupcake, read through them. And seriously, I feel gross for having done it. Seriously, they're gross. Where VS Astray is just bad fanfic, D Astray B is gross. Like half a chapter over-describing the female performers in a strip-club and that's after repeated descriptions of Elza naked. WHY. This is not what I want in my giant robot stories dammit.

This all started from quietly Lensing a few things in one of the old black-spine Dengeki books. And finding actually interesting material.

2025 week 41

Oct. 14th, 2025 08:35 pm
larissa: (FFXIII-2 ☄ ⌈Lightning ; glare⌋)
[personal profile] larissa

uh, late post because i forgot. oops.

hand still hurts. i did see the doctor, but we'll see if what he gave me actually helps... i really hope so, because this sucks! i'm tired of my hand hurting! sob.

in other news, i have managed to play a little bit more video games, though not that much. i really want to get into tactics, but i'm mostly waiting on my hand before i properly dive into it. even writing has been shaky some days when i haven't been able to type much.

still been reading a lot in lieu of other hobbies. the fact that i read 3 books in full last week and got 40% through a third before i DNF'd it tells you a lot...

rionaleonhart: revolutionary girl utena: utena has fallen asleep on her schoolwork. (sort of exhausted really)
[personal profile] rionaleonhart
I received an incredibly lovely anonymous message on Tumblr today, which I'll reproduce here with my response, in case anyone finds this rambling about my writing process useful or interesting!

I'm always so impressed at how fast (and how well!) you can write for different fandoms, it's something I truly aspire to be on the level of. I wanted to know if you have any kind of writing routine or tips, especially for perfectionists who worry about canon details and "getting it right"?

I was so honoured to get this ask! Thank you so, so much! I don't know what specific areas you're struggling with, other than perfectionism, but I'll talk a little about my personal writing approach in the hope that it will be helpful and/or coherent.

As a caveat, I mainly write short one-shots; 90% of the fics on my AO3 account are between 1,000 and 5,000 words. I don't know what sort of thing you personally write, but I doubt my 'dive in, zero planning, work it out as you go' approach would be much good for anything long.

Anyway! Here's how writing works for me.

Step one: get a fic idea! This part, unfortunately, is up to the whims of fate. There are ways I can try to inspire a fic idea, e.g. by revisiting the canon or looking through other people's prompts, but mostly it just happens when it happens.

As a one-shot writer, I find it helpful to have a single core concept that I can structure a story around, something straightforward enough to be expressed in a sentence or two. For example, the fic concepts I've noted down include 'Ace Attorney/Death Note: Phoenix Wright defends Light Yagami' (which became Always Believe) and 'Death Note: L abducts and imprisons Light to see if the killings stop' (which I never actually wrote, but someone should).

Step two: quick, write the idea down before it escapes! A lot of my ideas never get past this stage, but at least I have them written down, so I can pull inspiration from them in the future if necessary.

Step three: start writing the fic. This one's tough; I can't just sit in front of a blank page and decide to get started. I'll mentally toy with my fic concept as I go about my day, and hopefully a potential passage from the fic itself will eventually form in my head: an exchange of dialogue, for example. As soon as I have something, I'll write it down. Once I have a starting point, it's a lot easier to build on it.

I have friends who write in order, but I can't do it myself! I'll just write whatever scenes come to me in the order they come. The first thing I write will usually be partway through the fic, and I usually end up writing the end before the beginning. Speaking of which...

Step four: find the fic's direction. This is crucial; this is the thing that will actually enable me to finish a fic.

While I write, I'm always asking myself where this fic is going. What goal am I working towards; what would be a satisfying conclusion to the story I'm telling? Is there a theme developing as I write it, and, if so, what sort of ending would fit that theme?

Basically, from the moment I start writing a fic, I'm trying to work out how it ends. Once I've established an ending, everything else is easy.

Step five: use the ending as a guidepost to finish the fic. Everything moves a lot faster once I've found the ending. If I know what goal I'm working towards, the question 'what needs to happen after this scene?' will usually have a clear answer. I'm no longer writing whatever scenes pop into my head; I'm looking at what I've written and going 'okay, what do I need to add or change in order to reach the ending I want and make sure this story feels thematically consistent?'

Step six: great, you've written all the required story bits! But you've forgotten to write a beginning, and, because you've written things out of order, you now have to write the boring bits linking all of your disconnected scenes together. sigh, fiiiiiiiine.

Step seven: read through the finished fic in full to make sure everything holds together, make final tweaks.

Step eight: post!

(Step nine: refresh AO3 obsessively for three days straight to see whether anyone liked it, don't look at me.)

Perfectionism can be a tricky issue! I mainly write in videogame fandoms, which helps when I'm obsessing over getting canon details right; it's usually easy to find a Let's Play online and track down exactly the moment I need. It's always a nasty shock when I need to check a detail in a canon where those details aren't as readily available!

If I'm having trouble confirming a canon detail, to be honest, my usual strategy is to rework things so that the detail is no longer required in the fic. For example, if I'm unable to establish the layout of the room a scene is set in, I'll either make my descriptions vague enough to bypass the issue or set the scene in a different location. It's not always doable - sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and do the research - but you can save yourself a lot of time by being willing to go, 'Wait, if I just cut this line about the Doonsword of Gongolblath, I won't have to look up how it was forged.'
rionaleonhart: twewy: joshua kiryu is being fabulously obnoxious and he knows it. (is that so?)
[personal profile] rionaleonhart
For each of my major fandoms, I do a short writeup talking about how it fits into my fandom history. A fandom qualifies as 'major' if I've written five fics for it, or ten thousand words across at least three fics.

The latest addition to the stable is a little weird!


Fanganronpas

The Danganronpa games have a very distinct formula: a group of people, each with a specialised talent, find themselves trapped in an unfamiliar location together. They're told that the only way to escape is to kill one of their fellow captives and get away with it; if they succeed, the murderer will go free, but everyone else will be executed. Every chapter is its own little murder mystery: someone turns up dead, and the survivors have to escape execution by working out which of their friends is responsible.

It's a great formula! The murder mysteries are fun, and the fact that you get to know all the potential victims and killers in advance really heightens the emotional impact of the cases. If a beloved character is killed or, worse, turns out to be the murderer, it's genuinely devastating, both to the characters solving the mystery and to you as the player.

Because the Danganronpa formula is so distinctive, some ambitious people have taken it upon themselves to create Danganronpa-style stories of their own: fan Danganronpas, or Fanganronpas. And then I got into these fan projects, and then I started writing fanfiction for these fan projects, and here we are now!

I didn't originally plan to check out any Fanganronpa projects; I love the original games, but I wasn't sure fan replicas would scratch the same itch. But I became vaguely aware of one Fanganronpa in particular, the YouTube series Danganronpa: Despair Time, because I follow someone on Tumblr who's very passionate about Ace, a character from it. I was a little surprised to learn via his blog that this fanmade character had won a Danganronpa character poll on Tumblr, beating multiple well-liked canonical Danganronpa characters; was this fan project really that popular?

When AO3 created a new canonical tag for Danganronpa: Despair Time, meaning Despair Time fics were no longer folded into the general Danganronpa tag, I messaged the aforementioned Ace enthusiast to let him know. I was very surprised to learn, in the process, that Despair Time had over 1,400 works on AO3. Apparently people really liked this thing! Given my love of Danganronpa, and the fact that at the time I thought we'd probably never see another official Danganronpa release, maybe I should at least give it a try.

I watched Danganronpa: Despair Time at the age of thirty-seven and went insane about it. It had its rough edges here and there, but it absolutely nailed Danganronpa's tone and emotion, it had a lot of fun plot developments and twists, and I really enjoyed the characters. One character in particular is up there with my absolute favourites from the official Danganronpa games.

The other Fanganronpas I've investigated since then are Project: Eden's Garden and Danganronpa Another, the latter of which I'm still working through. I really enjoyed Eden's Garden; I don't think it gets the tone as well as Despair Time, but it's a stunningly polished achievement - it honestly looks better than the official Danganronpa games do - and I'm looking forward to seeing where it's going. I'm struggling more with Danganronpa Another, largely because of translation issues, but I'm finding it interesting as a historical curiosity - it's an early Fanganronpa project that had a big impact on the overall Fanganronpa scene - and it does have a terrible boy I'm really enjoying.

As a side note, the large Despair Time AO3 work numbers that originally provoked my curiosity are actually a little misleading! It turns out there are four specific incredibly prolific authors who have, between them, written approximately 750 works for Danganronpa: Despair Time; the most prolific of the four has personally written 285 Despair Time fics. I have to admire the dedication that leads people to write literally hundreds of fics for a niche fan project, especially when there's not much of a readership to be found; half of the 1,600 fics in the Despair Time AO3 tag have under ten kudos.

Favourite character: David Chiem of Danganronpa: Despair Time, by a long way; I was not expecting to lose my mind this hard over a character in a fan project, but it turns out he's absolute catnip for me. My favourite character in Eden's Garden is Wolfgang; my favourite character in Danganronpa Another is Kinjo. Come to think of it, all three of them share the quality 'this seems like a pleasant young man - oh, no, something is very wrong with this boy', meaning they appeal to the same part of me that adores Light Yagami.
Favourite pairing: I really like David/Arei from Danganronpa: Despair Time; they have some very cute moments, and I was surprised by how invested I became in their dynamic. I'm also absolutely here for horrible David/David selfcest.
Number of words written: 9,645 across five fics: four for Danganronpa: Despair Time, and one for Project: Eden's Garden.


Absolutely historic development: if my Fanganronpa fics are counted, my latest fic means the overall amount of fanfiction I've written for Danganronpa (92,000 words) beats the amount I've written for Top Gear (90,000 words), making Danganronpa my most-written-for fandom by wordcount.

...apart from Assassin's Creed (128,000 words). Assassin's Creed is kind of a special case because I wrote about 120,000 words for a single project, which is very unusual for me; I almost exclusively write short one-shots. Let's discount that project for a moment, because 'another fandom has finally dethroned Top Gear after eighteen years' sounds a lot more impressive than 'another fandom has finally de-second-placed Top Gear after Top Gear got knocked into second place nine years ago'.
rionaleonhart: final fantasy xiii: lightning pays intense attention to you. (speak carefully)
[personal profile] rionaleonhart
David/Teruko did not occur to me at all the first time I watched Danganronpa: Despair Time, but then I saw assorted fun fanart and went 'actually, you know, I could get behind this.'

In this fic, I get behind it in the form of writing a bunch of hatesex. (Also including a touch of... consensual voyeurism for practical reasons?)


Title: Mutually Regrettable
Fandom: Danganronpa: Despair Time
Rating: 16
Pairing: David/Teruko
Wordcount: 2,200
Summary: David wakes with a blade to his throat.


Mutually Regrettable )
rionaleonhart: death note: light's kind of embarrassed that he poured all that fake sincerity into an obviously doomed ploy. (guess not)
[personal profile] rionaleonhart
I've gone down with COVID, alas, so I'm self-isolating in my bedroom and a bit physically uncomfortable. In search of distractions, I put out a call on Tumblr for people to ask me questions about my writing from this list, and here are the results!


What is your fave fic to receive comments on?

With These Signs Upon Our Souls, my decade-old Final Fantasy VIII/Final Fantasy XIII crossover, in which the FFVIII characters become l'Cie! 27,000 words may not be a huge amount, but it’s by far the longest continuous story I’ve ever written, and it’s about two different divisive Final Fantasy games, so it’s not something that was ever likely to draw much interest. I’m always thrilled when someone actually reads it!

What is something you recently felt proud of in regard to your writing?

I’ve been getting a little braver about including on-page sex! It’s never especially explicit, but I’ve been more willing lately to give at least a little idea of what’s going on, rather than always fading to black or being as vague as possible.

If one of your fics was going to get you arrested, which one and why?

hey wait I’m not falling for this

I’m going to say it’s my unfinished fic for The Quarry in which Laura and Travis swap bodies, which gave me, as a British person, the following research experience:

Me: Hey, Internet, fic research question: could a woman in her early twenties just go into a shop and buy a shotgun in New York state without any sort of licence?
Internet: Yep, that is absolutely something you can do.
Me:
Me:
Me: But surely that won’t seem right? That doesn’t feel right.
Me: If she just goes and buys a gun, surely the readers will go ‘obviously she wouldn’t just be able to buy a gun’. Surely I’ll look like I haven’t done my research and have lazily assumed that you can just buy a gun in America.
Me: You can’t just buy guns, right???


Various other questions and answers about fanfiction! )


If I had to get ill, I’m glad it’s at least happening after my visit to Devon, rather than before. I got to stroke five different owls, and my body can’t take that from me.

Fun fact about my recent holiday in Devon: we were staying with my ex-aunt (my uncle's ex-wife). She likes Clarkson's Farm and David Mitchell, and when they came up in conversation I just had to go 'ah, yes, I am aware of the work of these men, I am completely normal about them and always have been.'

If there are any questions you'd like to ask me about my writing in the comments (whether from the original list or not), please do!

2025 week 40

Oct. 6th, 2025 10:44 pm
larissa: (FFVIIR ☄ ⌈Cloud/Tifa ; got your back⌋)
[personal profile] larissa

late post because i was traveling.

my brother's wedding was very nice. this kind of thing is not really my scene, and never has been (i am the opposite of a social butterfly), but i love my brother and wanted to support him, so i'm glad i went. a bunch of his friends came long distance for the wedding, and since he doesn't live nearby it was a great chance to see who's important in his life. i'm very happy for him!

my hands still hurt like fucking hell. my gp suggested seeing an ortho about it, which i think is probably the right call, so i'll have to make arrangements for that this week.

a ship week for one of my favorite ships (cloud/tifa) is next month, and the themes match some of my favorite things to write about for them. so i'm hoping to spend some time this week planning what i'd like to write, and maybe writing some fic. this is assuming my hands cooperate... but we'll see.

other than that, i see a lot of reading in my immediate future as i rest my hands. lucky i have a lot of books i gotta read.

kalloway: Dextera and Sinistra from Kiddy Grade sititng back to back (Dex & Sin 2)
[personal profile] kalloway
Kissdum R Engage Planet - I almost feel like reading about the production of this series is as interesting as the series, also wtf this actual show. Kissdum is a 2007 Satelight anime with mecha designs by Shoji Kawamori, also it is not actually a mecha anime and I don't know what it is. It might've, at one point, been a mecha anime but it's basically the poster child for Troubled Production. Anyway, I actually want to watch this again someday.

Dive!! - this is not actually a Free! rip-off, I swear. But it's mostly-naked anime boys diving so it's... a lot of what you'd expect. This has pretty terrible reviews and I actually ended up really liking it.

VC Andrews Four-Film Collection - a Lifetime collection of Flowers in the Attic, Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns, and Seeds of Yesterday. Are these faithful to the source material? Yes and no. Flowers was okay, but Petals is impossible to squeeze into a made-for-tv movie and they cut a lot. Honestly, Petals is a really dense book, and I never much liked Thorns... It's probably been three decades since I've read the lot of them and don't actually remember much of Seeds but it seemed okay. The actors are all pretty good.

WKRP in Cincinnati: In Concert - I had a post-it with a note on it from my father to watch this episode, and it's probably been in my planner for a year or more. This is the episode about The Who concert disaster, in Cincinnati, and it's a difficult watch. My father had a ticket to see The Who four days later and still talks about how difficult and polite and strange that concert was.

Gundam Build Divers - I'm not sure how this ended up in the basket to watch, but it did, and the beginning is still a lot of fun and the second half is still an absolutely hot mess and there's a middle in there with some interesting gunpla at least?

Nothing's Like Before.

Oct. 5th, 2025 03:48 pm
rionaleonhart: kingdom hearts: sora, riku and kairi having a friendly chat. (and they returned home)
[personal profile] rionaleonhart
For each of my major fandoms, I do a short writeup talking about how it fits into my fandom history. A fandom qualifies as 'major' if I've written five fics for it, or ten thousand words across at least three fics.

With my recent fills for the kinkmeme, Kingdom Hearts now qualifies!


Kingdom Hearts

When I was in my early teens, I got most of my videogame news from magazines - my brother and I used to buy Official PlayStation 2 Magazine UK and PSM2 every month - so one of those magazines (most likely the official one) was where I first heard that there was an upcoming Disney and Square collaboration. As a Final Fantasy fan, I was surprised but intrigued; it sounded like fun! The magazine had some art of Sora on Destiny Islands, and I cut it out and put it up on the wall of my childhood bedroom.

The original Kingdom Hearts came out when I was fourteen, Sora's age, so I was exactly the right audience for it! I absolutely loved it. It was fun and charming, and I shipped Sora and Riku hard. I read a lot of Sora/Riku fanfiction on fanfiction.net, although the Sora/Riku writers of the time tended to bash Kairi to a pretty ludicrous extent; I didn't have much interest in Kairi at the time, but I could see that the monstrous character she was presented as in fanfiction wasn't Kairi!

As further Kingdom Hearts games came out, my investment only grew. The cast expanded, the plot became steadily more involved, and the series started to focus heavily on memory and identity, which are a couple of my favourite themes in fiction.

I've played and hugely enjoyed most games in the Kingdom Hearts series, and I have to give 358/2 Days a special mention for being the hardest a videogame has ever made me cry, but Dream Drop Distance is my favourite. It's fun to play, it lets you explore new worlds rather than just reusing old ones, and, most importantly, it contains plenty of Riku/Sora material.

Although I've loved the Kingdom Hearts series consistently for a couple of decades, my fics for it have been scattered and rare. I wrote my first Kingdom Hearts fic in the June of 2003, my second in 2009, my third in 2019, and my fourth and fifth here, in late 2025. I've always wanted to write more for it, but it's so sprawling and confusing that it's hard to know where to start!

Favourite character: I mean, Squall Leonhart is technically a character in the Kingdom Hearts universe, and you know how I feel about Squall Leonhart. But my favourite Kingdom Hearts character is Riku. He spent the entire first game making terrible decisions and has quietly hated himself for it ever since, and that's what I want in a character.
Favourite pairing: Sora/Riku must have been one of the earliest pairings I ever got really invested in, and every new Kingdom Hearts instalment since has only made them shippier. I've said before that one of my favourite pairing dynamics is 'I'm quietly and intensely in love with you, but I don't ever expect my feelings to be returned, and I don't have any plans to pursue you romantically. I'm just in love with you; it's an inescapable fact of my life,' and I wrote that description while thinking of Riku's feelings towards Sora.
Number of words written: 9,303, across five fics. Unusually, I've never written from the same character's perspective twice in my Kingdom Hearts fanfiction; I've got one Kingdom Hearts fic from Sora's perspective, one from Kairi's, one from Roxas's, one from Riku's, and one - please don't ask questions - from the perspective of real-life stage magician Derren Brown.

Snippet: I've got a few unfinished attempts at Kingdom Hearts fanfiction lying around. Here's a snippet I scribbled down around 2021 for a never-finished fic, with the slightly silly concept 'Riku confesses his love, and Sora is absolutely mystified because he had literally no idea it was possible for boys to fall in love with each other'.

Kingdom Hearts unfinished snippet, Sora/Riku, 2021. )

Weekend Again

Oct. 4th, 2025 11:14 pm
kalloway: Strings of Star-shaped lights (Xmas Lights 13 Stars)
[personal profile] kalloway
A strange week...

September was a decidedly expensive month, so October's personal theme involves being a bit frugal if possible. Nothing is wrong! It was a just a collision of larger bills + events.

This last week was busy: house-sat, had some grout come loose in my shower and had to acquire grout supplies and learn all about grout, got the windows washed (and finally got the screens back in), took the big comforter to the laundromat and washed it...

[community profile] ficortreat is live, as is [community profile] octobercest, though the latter hasn't had any activity yet. I suppose I'll advertise both in the days to come.

Finished up the... 1/72(?) Mailes Kenbu, who was a decent-enough build. I might still get the Ghost from that line.

Working on MG Astray Blue Frame D, and when I get annoyed with her, I'll get back to Zwei? No polls for awhile; I really want to enjoy the feeling of grabbing whatever looks interesting and building it. (Next MG-or-1/100 will be a Wing kit though.) I have another kit on the way as audition for Revenant's backpack since I'm not entirely sold on my current choice. Eventually I'll have to decide on colors. IIRC Reverent was mostly white and Revenant decidedly is not.
rionaleonhart: final fantasy versus xiii: a young woman at night, her back to you, the moon high above. (nor women neither)
[personal profile] rionaleonhart
Another fic for the Kingdom Hearts kinkmeme! NB: the prompt was 'Kairi/Riku, villains made them do it', so this one's pretty dark.

(I spent a moment thinking 'what Disney villain would force two teenagers to have sex??' and then 'Frollo. Frollo, obviously.')

I just accidentally started typing 'kinkdom hearts' instead of 'kingdom hearts' while trying to tag this entry.


Title: Lessons on Desire
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts
Rating: 16
Pairing: Riku/Kairi
Wordcount: 1,200
Summary: She's going to hate him, isn't she?
Warnings: Mutual noncon.


Lessons on Desire )
rionaleonhart: kingdom hearts: sora, riku and kairi having a friendly chat. (and they returned home)
[personal profile] rionaleonhart
Attention to Kingdom Hearts fans: there's a new Kingdom Hearts kinkmeme over at [community profile] khkinkanon, if you'd like to request or write some Kingdom Hearts smut! (Or non-smut, which is fortunate for me, given my general lack of smut-writing abilities! Although it isn't mentioned on the prompt post itself, the FAQ post specifies that all ratings are welcomed.)

I saw a cute prompt for Hayner/Pence/Olette/Roxas, which is an OT4 I've always liked the idea of but never actually managed to write, so here's a fic! I... think this is actually the first fill on the kinkmeme, and I'm slightly embarrassed to kick things off with something so unkinky, but I enjoyed getting these four together nonetheless.


Title: The Taking Part
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Hayner/Pence/Olette/Roxas
Wordcount: 1,500
Summary: “A kissing contest?” Hayner demands. “Seriously?”


The Taking Part )

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