this story ends in light

• the most ridiculously self-indulgent thing i wrote all year and maybe ever, like this is up there with the oikawa/hana yugioh au i wrote back in the haikyuu days but idc i had soooo much fun. why SHOULDN'T i put dream into a tennis fic it's myyyyy fic. i loved setting dream free in a room full of absolute megafreaks and i loved writing jaemin's creacherisms from an outsider pov who nonetheless is smart enough to see the deliberateness underneath. and i loved making renjun a yukimura stan #YUKIRENJ_REAL
• this is the 82 sequel to a nyotayuri 3b futurefic i wrote in 2020 about marui and niou reuniting just before kirihara and an's wedding. and there's literally nothing i love better than writing tense ambiguous highranker femslash that cracks open at the end to reveal a crazy and desperate depth of feeling. niou suits my writing preoccupations pretty well after all, i think i complained about having trouble with niou pov in 2021 but this fic came out so seamlessly... it may be simply a parade of headcanon-fuelled highranker interactions but at the very least it made me smile and i represented my views accurately. niou who cares so deeply under the nonchalant attitude and runs away from things she loves because it's easier than facing the idea of staying with them...
• in my future visions 82's path comes to a crossroads at the kirian wedding, i love my ship too much to entertain the possibility that they simply part ways again so i haven't thought too much about that option but i do think they either enter World Of Light where they rekindle their connection except in a genuine and sustainable not-too-toxic way this time premised on them being different people who acknowledge that they are different people and move into long-term endgame territory, or World Of Dark where they hurtle headfirst back into their old bad habits and folie a deux their way into mutual destruction (which is also endgame! in a way), or even worse only niou's doom because imo yagyuu has always been the one getting more out of the 82 identity switch/overlap thing. obviously i don't think toxicity or power imbalance is any barrier to true love and in fact could even be a prerequisite, but endgameness is about stability and i think the iteration in 82 can't keep going indefinitely into the future. anyway this fic is the World Of Light route, because i am ultimately a romantic optimist and i want my ship to win. so it's yagyuu making the overtures to niou this time and niou picking up on the ways in which they are not alike And That Is Ok.
• overall i think this is a solid fic with a good jokes/terror balance and some really nice moments of prose and i enjoyed writing it a lot... the standout parts to me are yanagi / renjun / yukimura. i wasn't sure how to end it though so the ending is a bit abrupt but it's passable i guess. the real point was the cameos anyway.

• it's probably obvious i am so obsessed with 3byuki in the context of marui's conscious betrayal of her own (and yukimura's!) ethics in order to save yukimura + how niou would have done the same for yukimura, although it wouldn't register as a betrayal to anyone other than herself because she's been so good at concealing the fact that she does actually also have a sense of ethics... this is drawing a parallel to niou's attitude towards the 82 switch, which i read as niou getting in over her head in that yagyuu is basically The Killer which means niou has to match that despite any discomfort she has about yagyuu's lack of ethics.

• really i just wanted to use pinkette in a fic, ironically unironically yk. also i love a dichotomy and i'm happy with the one i set up here - the way the spotlight is on different things for marui and niou.

• made myself laugh so much with this one ngl best joke i pulled off all year... shoutout to 2020 me deciding to make nyota jirou's name juri and creating theee perfect joke setup 3 years later.

• i think these are nice lines :) i used them for the cut tag text.

• probably obvious my other obsession is niou vs fuji at nats finals and the idea that niou pushed herself so far even though it was harder for her than anyone else due to delicate constitution + added illusion energy consumption 2x combo to deal with, all for YUKIMURA, and then it amounted to nothing because she lost and rikkai lost, and then it turned out that yukimura wanted her to lose anyway, and [yukiniou essay ver 4833894 redacted for length]
• but i think this is a nice balance of jokes and terror just in this one paragraph.

• i think everything about the 82 part of this fic is sooooooo romantic but especially this exchange... the unasked question being why niou left if she still cared so much about them, yagyuu chivalrously offering to take on the burden for her but like in a way that's showing niou it's possible and that there's a genuine future there, the contrast between 82 switch vs niou illusioning marui in the prequel fic or jaemin earlier in the fic, niou being literally tired from physically running and also tired from emotionally running... real true being the same person but actually not being the same person at all LOVE.

• i already did a lengthy dvd commentary <here> including my fave lines but basically i again had a fucking ball in this bitch. probably i had too much fun in 2023. this was an extremely ambitious and experimental project but i think i pulled it off and i'm glad i tested my abilities and i still like the final product... i did reread it recently (having forgotten everything about it) and kind of understood nothing but the vibes were good and this is a strong contender for my personal #1 fave fic of my own, perhaps finally unseating longtime rank holder rtfbt...

• im gonna be honest this fic nearly killed me and it's kind of making me redevelop trenchitis thinking back on the writing process... i actually started a dvd commentary for it and then got too harrowed on reflection to keep going. like first of all the fact that i had to set an alarm for 2am so i could make sure i claimed the prompt i wanted. and then the way i wrote 6k in like the first week before all my inspiration died for the rest of the writing period right up until literally 2 weeks before the due date. AND THEN I DECIDED TO READ THE ENTIRETY OF ORV. i make such smart and wise decisions. i was staying up every night to write in that last week and also writing in court in order to get it done 😭 and yes that was including the porn scene as i always leave those until last, although it ended up being the fastest i've ever written a porn scene since it usually takes me a couple months. and then i still needed an extension after all that. probably the most stressed i've ever been about a deadline and this is including the time i was writing a sex scene to finish my yuletide assignment on my phone with the screen brightness turned down to minimum while sitting next to my parents on a plane on xmas eve.
• but i do feel a great sense of accomplishment for managing to finish in the end, i don't think i'm thattt happy with the end result although on more recent reread it's not as terrible as i remember thinking it was when i posted it, but i am ultimately glad i pushed through with it. i'm already kind of historically revising my own memories to be like well it probably wasn't even that bad... i should do that again sometime... but i am seriously not built for longfic LOL.
• for some reason i was severely in the characterisation struggle mines in this fic even though it's literally dream but i think it's just that mark is one of the hardest povs i've ever tried writing, i really don't do well with earnest types. what's a fire moon idk her. i did want to challenge myself but i think i pushed it too far lmfaoo four years after i vowed never to write mark pov again bc i struggled so hard in fractionation i decided to try again on the grounds of How Bad Could It Really Have Been and the answer is . so bad. but i lived bitch.
• having to come up with new hero/villain aliases instead of using the ones from my other superpower au fics in order to not deanon myself was so hard lmao but i like the names i landed on for everyone except markren(hyuck who will always be full sun) better so in future superpower aus i'll probably combine the sets for maximum verse confusion.
• speaking of deanoning it's so funny to me that my epigraph usage gave me away sorry for being unable to resist the siren call of pretentious poetry excerpt opener... i thought using emojis for scene breaks instead of my usual 7 empty lines would be enough to sow doubt 😔
• time stopped at 5:27 because may 27 is the halfway point between renjun's birthday and mark's birthday btw. also renjun's friend who taught him how to use his powers is jun <3

• longass section but actually started writing this part before i'd even claimed the prompt because i liked the prompt so much and i thought it was so fun not directly naming renjun even though mark (and the audience) knows it's renjun. i like the effect!

• made myself laugh with this conversation, jaemin giving renjun advice on bed choice is one of the funniest jmrn moments to me and i think of it fondly and often. i was originally setting up for a pre-get together bedsharing scene but i couldn't figure out how to do it lol.

• obligatory dream scene... one of the first parts i wrote and it really made me be like damn why's the markmin hitting harder than the markren rn. fellas is it gay to stab your rival with your hand i mean part of your body is literally inside another man's body 🤔

• soooo romantic to me!! writing this part made me feel exactly like how markren makes me feel so i hope that came through.

• this was the first time i'd done yuletide in a few years (i used to be an annual participant until i fell into full-time kpop mainism) and i feel so lucky to have matched with a recip who was up for just about anything and expressed a preference for aespa's mv lore as you know i fucking love superpowers. i'm really happy with the one i came up with for ningning, which is just an extension of her canonical hacker powers in the sense that emotion-reading/mind-reading is basically hacking into humans... although now that i think about it maybe i should've given her mind control powers. but it meant i could do a lot of fun synaesthesia stuff with other people's emotions manifesting mainly as tastes to her and i liked coming up with flavour associations. original winter was an armamenter per canon hence karina saying she never misses, which included her shielding abilities, but winter soldier winter also has lie detection/teleportation/other stuff beyond the scope of this fic.
• i repurposed an old wip which was a sequel to waiting for you to move on (hence giselle's mention of renjun dissolving his partnership with jaemin and becoming partners with haechan instead) but i took most of the parts with dream in them out and then wrote like 11k more.... originally i meant for this fic to be 3k 😭 accidentally doing 4x planned wordcount problem. this can only be the fault of the perfect visuals of DRAMA.
• i had everything except for the actual emotional resolution of the winrina + Ethics Of Supervillainy storylines done by the deadline but i was furiously grinding out the scene where karina shows ningning her memories of winter during cafe writing date with mich in la on her laptop and editing on the plane to singapore... basically shoutout to mich for once again saving my ass lmao.
• i was really struggling with character voicing for a while, i watched a bunch of aespa content for canon review but the problem is that my only other rpf fandom is dream who i've known for 6 years and i just felt so uncertain about my grasp on aespa in comparison. but i think and hope i did my girls justice... it was very hard to make winter recognisably herself when she's mostly just her hollowed-out stage persona in this fic and she's being seen from essentially an outsider pov since ningning never knew her as minjeong, but i tried to give little hints at winter's personality starting to show through as the fic progresses. towards the end i was also starting to get worried about not having any overarching motif/extended metaphor other than the sisterhood of the travelling snowflake necklace but it worked out as usual 🙏 genuinely i do not know what i'm writing until i'm writing it.
• i seriously love writing superheroes/supervillains as a parallel to idolhood lmao, i love the bureaucracy of heroism/villainy being conducted through institutions and agencies and the networks of coworkers and rival-equivalent-of-coworkers and the public vs private divide of having a hero/villain persona and a civilian persona. i've been refining the concept over quite a few fics and i think the iteration here is the one i'm happiest with so far. i think i ended the year on a high note so i'm pretty pleased with my performance overall.

• i had such a vivid image in my mind of this scene and i was really careful about word choice when constructing it and i think i achieved the effect that i was aiming for so i'm happy with this part.

• i love bringing random violent imagery into mundane actions in general but i think it really works as a characterisation enhancer here too.

• i was mainlining the skulduggery pleasant series when i was writing this part and the whole frankenstein convo is sooo skulpleas inspired lol. i think it's funny!

• i like the cadence of this section! and i chose the imagery carefully: net/trawl - callback to ningning trying to sense winter in the courtyard scene + ties in with shipping dock setting. empty basin - another callback to courtyard scene + identification of winter with the empty fountain ie a vessel for something dead. defeat tasting like tears - self-explanatory. distant sound of the sea - ties in with defeat=saltwater=tears + ningning's ever-sharpening senses + the way she can always perceive nature with her physical senses (sound of the wind, coolness/brightness of the rain, sound of the ocean), which is also the only way she can perceive winter and goes back to the natural/unnatural conflict that is winter's existence.

• most romantic declaration of rivalry i've ever written probably, not even for the jokes marriage vow slash graverobbing callback but because they're touching each other's pulses. life in each other's hands literally!! And The Ghost Of Karina's Presence Was There Too, And Even Giselle If You Think About It, I Love You Aespa.

• winter's personality (as in, quality of being A Person) breaking through... also there's nothing more satisfying than doing a bunch of phrase callbacks to bring things full circle :') afterimage of aliveness from the courtyard scene but now for something that continues to be alive + vivid proof of rescue vs karina's vivid proof of care.

• the one-way mirror motif occurred to me at the very end of writing but i'm sooo happy with it and the connotations of expression vs performance vs truth it conjures up. isn't that what being an idol is all about!

• came up with these ending lines very early on and then later went back and made sure i was always referring to karina's hands as cold for the thematic contrasts of it all. also i love a negative comparison.

• [fic] to perfectly perform in reverse
• [commentary] soul weighed down by gravity
• books i read in 2023 q1
• book i read in 2023 q2
• posting about company time on company time - judgment quote roundup
• more recent skincare buys
• no longer quarterly books i read may-aug 2023
• [wip amnesty] an indispensable suggestion from afar - alice in borderland kuzuryu/mira wippost
• books i read aug-sep 2023
• even more beauty product reviews
• books i read oct 2023
• why is it called final fantasy when they keep making new ones though - ff7 fmv compilation

Miraculously, the helmet itself had remained totally intact without so much as a chip in the light red paint, but the faceplate had cracked right down the middle, fissure so clean it looked intentional. Only a coincidence of design. Renjun pressed a thumb to the edge of the broken polycarbonate and the fabric of his glove snagged. If he had been barehanded it would have broken the skin.

Seconds until Jimin arrives, a supernova brightness Yizhuo could see even with her eyes shut. That roiling heart almost brilliant enough to taste now, a promise of acidic sweetness under her tongue like a strawberry. Until then, only until then, Yizhuo is alone. Winter’s fingers had been shockingly warm where they kissed Yizhuo's palm. How counterintuitive, that heat. It lingers like Winter doesn’t.

• finish dreampuri ❌ HELP GIRL...
• write more akam ❌ sorry to my otp... i did pick away at some wips during the year but all my available time was being spent on 1) my coworkers 2) dream, in that order.
• refine my style ✔️(?) i think i've gotten better at more consistently hitting the right balance of comedy and seriousness without compromising my prose style.
• i did achieve my 2022 goal of writing aespa fic though! just one year late.

• finish dreampuri REAL NOT CLICKBAIT!!!
• clear out current wip rotation before starting any new wips. although i'm kind of already failing step 1 of this because i've been vaguely rotating a few ideas in my mind (undercover as vip x bodyguard au although i don't know which ship i would do i've just been really into the idea lately, jisung-centric sungren sequel to future metropolis heart which i have like 5 lines written for in my notes app except they're somehow all about dongren and jmrn, ningning/lexie liu idolverse pwp set at the miumiu holiday event in a canon divergence au where ningning became a miumiu girl instead of a versace girl).
• join another fest or exchange - maybe ggjukebox this year? i'm not familiar with sza's discography but i'll investigate to see if any of her songs work with my ningxie brainworms... i kind of want to get back in the ficmix mines too i miss remixing.

He lingers over his grip tape, keeping the tension perfectly even with each pass around the handle, lining up the overlaps in precise parallel diagonals. He drags a thumb over the ridges, sharp with the definition of newness. Not yet worn smooth by his palm. So many more hours of work, and then once he’s done with this one he’ll have to start the process all over again. By the time he finishes the task and looks back up, the room is empty.
//
“Huh?” Jeno glances up. “Oh, the logbook entries. Me and Renjun have been editing your self-evals after you do them so they actually have some useful data.”

All the 3s Jaemin circled have been mercilessly crossed out and the 0 in each row circled instead. Jaemin feels this is a little unwarranted.

“How cute,” Jaemin says. “I didn’t know you were watching me like that.” Jeno gives him a look. “I didn’t know Renjun was watching me like that,” Jaemin amends.

“Renjun is monitoring you. Kind of like how a national security agency monitors a flight risk,” Jeno says. “He thinks you’re going to leave.”

“Hello, Rye,” Bourbon says. He tilts his head and smiles, a closed-mouth expression that still communicates the baring of teeth. His gloved hands, ostentatiously white, rest folded over the gun in his lap with an exaggeratedly telegraphed casualness. “Long time no see. Though it’s FBI Special Agent Akai Shuichi now, isn’t it?”

“Bourbon,” Akai greets. “Here to kill me?"

“We’ll see,” Bourbon says. “You know, it was a little too easy to break in. Anyone could have done it. Put a bullet through your head you before you even noticed the trap.” Smugly: “You let your guard down.”

Since Bourbon is clearly here for a reason there probably isn’t any danger in turning his back. Akai heads over to the kitchenette, opens the cupboard over the never-used stove and takes out a couple of glasses. "Want a drink?"

Beyond the doorframe there was only white. Snowstorm void that would envelop him as soon as he stepped outside. The wind was all he could hear. Under his hand the doorknob felt like ice. He wanted to twist his head back, check to see if Chenle was still looking at him, if there would be the same flash of understanding that passed between them on the stage. Something to reassure him that Chenle would be there on the other side in the moment when he reached out.

"How are Minion One and Minion Two?"

"I wish you wouldn’t call them that," Renjun says, "but they’re good. It’s just this new customer we have who’s kind of a problem."

Yizhuo’s voice hardens to steel. "Problem as in, Karina and Alexandra should pay them a visit?"

"No, no, not that kind of problem. Problem as in, we keep having to buy out pretty much the entire flower market to keep up with his orders.” Renjun hesitates. “Also problem as in, Full Sun can never find out about this if I want a single moment of peace for the rest of my life.”

"Oh," Yizhuo says knowingly. "A handsome young man problem. A rich handsome young man problem."

“We’re not what?” Livia sets her glass down on the grazing table and puts a hand to Clemensia’s elbow, leaning forward into her space again. She smells like roses. In the tastefully dim light her eyes look more grey than blue. “Come on, Clemmie. I’m a Cardew. You’re a Dovecote. We get to have everything—why shouldn’t we? It’s practically our birthright.”

“What about Coryo?” Clemensia can barely flatten the tremor out of her voice.

“I hardly think Coryo would mind.”

“I mind.”

Livia scoffs. “When did you get so boring?” But she snatches her glass back up and whirls away into the glittering crowd.

Barely thirty seconds later Coriolanus appears. He hands Clemensia a glass of wine and slings an arm over her shoulders, easy and familiar. She accepts the wine. She allows the arm to rest there for the span of three breaths. Then she shrugs it off and turns to face him. If he’s upset by the dismissal it doesn’t show in a single relaxed line of his posture.

He looks devastating, in the sense of capacity for destruction. The sapphires at his cuffs gleam the same deep blue as Livia’s dress. As Clemensia's earrings.

“Look at that,” he says. He raises his glass to her. “We match.”

• i think this is a really solid fic that achieves what it intended to do, which was #JUSTICE_FOR_KIR, and i'm happy with how it turned out!! i love kir a lot and i really enjoyed doing a deepdive into her interiority and her conceptually hilarious multi-level coworkers without benefits relationship with bourbon. like kir's entire cover and thus life hinges on akai being dead because she killed him, which is the very thing bourbon is devoting his entire life to disproving, so their aims are fundamentally opposed and totally incompatible... and yet they barely seem to know each other, bourbon doesn't even appear to register that his pursuit of akai is directly endangering kir's life, it's like they're operating on adjacent parallel tracks bridged by the people they have in common--vermouth, akai, and in this fic scotch (TO MEEEEEE. scotchkir my beloved tragedy tinhet.....)--and if there's one thing i love it's highrankers ranking highly next to each other without actually interacting.
• also kir is like at ground 0 of the corrosively toxic fallout caused by akam being around each other, which is really funny but also my poor kir... i tweeted this already but akam are like the inverse of the post that's like the guys in this ship may make each other worse but at least being together quarantines them away from inflicting their problems on everyone else. akam are literally totally capable of having nontoxic relationships with others individually but as soon as they're together they become so obsessively violently hyperfocused on each other that everything and everyone around them gets blown up as collateral damage. and kir is first in the firing line 😭 i hope they both send her some nice and expensive flowers and fruit baskets for all the agonies they have put her through.
• anyway i don't really think this fic has any standout lines but overall it's a story of decent quality with just enough thematic cohesion to tie the whole thing together, and there aren't any parts that jump out at me as being lazily or poorly written, and i had fun seeding my fave agendas (i kinda wish i could have snuck a bit more akam in there but it just wasn't directly relevant... but it very much is the driving force behind the entire situation lmao).

• i took care with the word choice here and i'm super happy with the result... and the ghost of scotch was there!!! i think both kir and bourbon loved him (SCOTCHKIR REAL IN MY MIND) but neither of them know the other felt the same way

• verkir sexy recon/honeypot mentorship is sooo important to me i think vermouth specifically does enjoy self sabotage by fixating on + helping out traitors

• literally the entire thesis of this fic... it's about being the same but not the same... it's about viewing and being viewed... it's about the crushing weight of the many griefs both kir and bourbon are separately secretly bearing...

• idk i really like the rhythm of this paragraph and i think i chose good verbs

• this is the final part in my 3byuki series which was originally two unrelated dw fics i decided to collect together when crossposting to ao3, which meant i had to reverse engineer a narrative throughline, which meant i needed to write yukiniou to complete the triangle. this one taking place in the future after the u17 world cup gave me a bit of trouble because i severely hate the actual canon surrounding this particular point in time for rikkai so i didn't want to canon review even though i obviously was just going to ignore the parts i didn't want to acknowledge in my personal version of tenipuri canon.
• ummm anyway yukiniou is my favourite dynamic within 3byuki because it's the most difficult for me to pin down and i think they have a lot of trouble understanding each other even though yukimura really really wants to know niou better and niou is one of yukimura's most loyal followers even if it doesn't seem that way at first. and on top of that they also have to deal with the godzilla of niou knowing that yukimura purposefully let him lose/die at nationals finals but not being able to help forgiving yukimura for it even if he wanted to hold a grudge. like i think niou is the only rikkai member who has a complex about his yukimura complex, everyone else has either consciously accepted it (yanagi, marui), doesn't actually have one (jackal, yagyuu), or simply doesn't even realise that what they feel about yukimura is in complex territory (sanada, kirihara), so the levels of Awareness and resentment that never actually becomes fully-fledged resentment because niou literally cannot hold that kind of feeling towards yukimura make yukiniou So Fucking Complicated... but in the end it is LOVE. terror and incomprehensibility and all.
• i always struggle a lot with yukimura's voicing, i have terminal CannotWriteOnepickitis and i find it really hard to strike the right balance of polite society lady / viewpoint that doesn't quiiite align with a normal human moral outlook / the terrifying yawning chasm of yukimura's feelings about tennis. but i think i did pretty well here and also with yukimura's somewhat unreliable narration in that he thinks he is understanding niou but he seriously isn't. yukimura's main problem when it comes to rikkai is that he has these very strongly held assumptions about everyone, and because they love him so much they do their absolute best to fulfil those assumptions even if it's causing them intense psychological damage, but since those assumptions are not always entirely correct they will ultimately fail to be what yukimura wants from them. that's the tragedy at the heart of rikkai. and even though this is a hopeful fic about Growth and Future i think that's the bittersweet element underlying everything that yukimura doesn't quite clock, but niou maybe does.
• i do like this fic a lot!! i think it's the strongest out of the trilogy on a technical level and represents my views well and has good dialogue and strong atmosphere and includes some lines i'm super proud of, and i think i did a good job of tying the "plot"/things that are actually concretely happening to the metaphorical/narrative aspects of yukiniou's relationship i wanted to explore. probably my favourite thing i wrote this year :')

• this feels like an extremely Me section it makes me very happy to read back over... i think the prose has swag and the dialogue has yolo and the pacing and tone is exactly what i wanted to achieve and i loveee the technique of breaking up a conversation with an introspective paragraph in the middle. i'm not sure what my writing style is or if i even have a style but i think this is a good example of writing that i can recognise as typical of me, like if i had amnesia specifically about my fics and i had to pick my own writing out of a blind lineup

• i think that more than anyone else niou relies on structures and archetypes and titles to define the world and his sense of identity, even though he's meant to be the unpredictable trickster chameleon, so rikkai is even more synonymous with yukimura in niou's mind than it normally is. niou is yukimura's niou!!!

• 1) summer is theeeee most fucked up season of all time 2) yes i'm constantly writing garden metaphors about yukimura/rikkai but as if it's my fault it is right there in the text

• i already wrote a massive dvd commentary post <here> so i won't go back over all of that but i'm glad i finallyyyy wrote idolverse for nct that properly reflects my current understanding of the meta. i love jaemdongren... i hate writing explicit fic so i will always feel negatively about the actual porn but i think the rest of it is a good jokes/terror balance and thematically tight and i also think this fic has the largest quantity of Good Prose both in absolute value terms and ratio of normal writing to writing i would consider special/pretty so i would say that this fic is probably 👍 overall.

• 1800 i love writing light imagery...

• sorry to c/p in this huge chunk but this conversation is really funny to me i love contrarian jaemin

• reading back over this made me bite lemons and die a bit from AGHHHH MY SHIP COULD HAVE BEEN REAL so i think it also warrants a multi paragraph c/p... this is the default image i have of jmrn in my mind, the two of them in a dark and quiet room where they can't see each other's faces, everyone is holding their breath, everything is very delicately paused so even though the contact is temporary in the moment it feels like it could last forever. i also think this section is a good representation of my """style""" insofar as it exists

• i think this part is nice

• i also think this part is nice

• surely it is a privilege to approach the end still believing in something!!!

• literally just a silly meaningless storyless cute jokes fic but iiiiiii enjoyed myself :) i started this halfway through last year as a brief writing exercise to get past writer's block and indulge in one of my favourite tropes WOUND CARE which i literally haven't written since..... 2019? except i ended up getting severely blocked on this and approx 800 words in i decided i actually wanted to write jaemren emotional anguish porn instead of markren dorohedoro style gory romcom. so i cannibalised the fic premise into waiting for you to move on and made everything 500% more depressing. and then this year markren quiet down glass box simulated sex reignited my desire to create markren content so i dusted this wip off again... but as the slowest writer in the world it still took me another 4 months to finish lol.
• i was especially struggling with the lighthearted tone + ending it's really out of my comfort zone... it does kill me a bit to write straight up romance without some kind of antipathy or anguish in the mix i find it soooo randomly embarrassing like yo look at this loser writing unabashedly about LOVE -_- but i got over it with the power of michsprints! i think i am still too close to this fic to tell if it's good or bad but i do think it's pretty funny, i had to cut some of the jokes because i wasn't sure they were in character but i was definitely prioritising comedy over like... accuracy and quality. but i also think jokes are the most important thing in the universe so like on god i hope this fic is funny to other people and not just myself.
• i don't even think i like superheroes/supervillains that much, i'm most interested in the POWERS part but i Fucking Love bureaucracy and administration and institutions so i keep finding myself writing about professional superpower users lmao. anyway can you believe it's taken me four years to finally finish a fic for my second favourite nct ship........ my gdocs is a veritable graveyard of abandoned markren wips *pained smile* i have had my ups and downs with markren over the past year or so but the return to my preferred mark<-ren dynamic during candy promos feels so fortuitous :') it's all coming up MARKREN... except for the part where i literally could not stop bringing up jaemin. you can't blame me for being jaemin no onna though.

• this conversation is really funny to me (guy who loves laughing at their own jokes) and i do think it's the kind of stupid debate evil dream would get into heated arguments over and also ndr of light(?) with the jokes/terror meter firmly tuned to the jokes end makes me smile in contrast to the ndr of dark in my last fic... i kinda love bitchy supervillain coworker classmates trio ndr i feel like i keep writing them like this

• henchman jokes are so funny to me personally and the idea of jaemin in particular being a henchman is even funnier, though i think jaemin would make a great starscream like he just needs to decide to commit to the bit

• sylvix crimson flower route paired ending - abandoned wip post
• rating all of the night world novels
• adventure (singular) in music arrangement - my piano arrangement of color by fuji syusuke & hirakoba rin
• love isn't a word - favourite quotes with the word 'love' in them
• skincare routine update again
• thoughts on gundam seed
• i love you miss mystery 🎶🎵 - top 10 detective conan ops/eds
• i love scents and smells - my favourite perfumes
• who said triangles had to be stable - discussing my favourite dream 3ps and triangulations
• fave jokes tennis songs
• fave terror tennis songs
• fmv (fuck my vlife) - collection of my favourite fmvs
• tropes are so good tho - favourite examples of my favourite fic tropes
• desire path commentary
• you will become a swallowtail butterfly - summary of my fave scenes in turn a gundam
• ranking char clones by handsomeness
• skincare routine update reup the reloaded
• randomly heart touching quotes from my legal philosophy class readings
• i could fix him (yugioh arc v) - rewriting the plot of my favourite and least favourite anime of all time yugioh arc v in an attempt to make it maybe not the worst story ever told in the history of humanity
• and the lake was frozen in a lightning flash - gundam witch from mercury playlist for my otp 4sule
• that guy, he is a JAEMIN - powerscaling various fictional jaemin clones
• books i read in 2022
• buying beauty products is my passion - review of various recently-trialled beauty products
• cc archive (ongoing)

“So we were thinking,” Donghyuck says, offhand, as he drops into the seat beside Jaemin, even though there is plenty of unoccupied furniture real estate on the other side of the table where Jaemin would not be required to acknowledge his presence. There are only four out of seven of them present, which is actually quite the impressive ratio these days; meals involving more than half of them are a rarity, now that they’ve largely dispersed out of the Dream dorms.

“So make sure you come back to us soon,” Yukimura says. “I’ll be waiting.”

And Niou smiles, that classically sly and opaque tilt to his mouth that could mean truth or mockery or both in the way only Niou can manage. “For you?” he says. “Anything.”

• finish dreampuri ❌
• write itzy or aespa fic ❌
• academy era hagimatsufuru 3p ❌ (but i did write a different detective conan fic!)
• write something good that doesn't make me feel disappointed in myself ✔️

• finish dreampuri 😭🙏
• write more akam!! i still have a rye/bourbon a/b/o pwp without porn wip from last year but i'm not really feeling her, i kiinda want to write akai/bourbon in the handful of years after akai's cover got blown but before the start of canon, but obviously if i were writing akam it would have to be porn otherwise it's a waste of their crazy chemistry and i don't know if i have it in me to write any more explicit fic. i hope the fujobait critical mass in next year's detective conan movie since akai and amuro are both going to be in it will kick me into gear
• refine my style, i think my writing has become a lot more boring and plain and dry recently and i feel a little bit sad reading back over my fic from like 2016 which was worse story-wise, sure, but my prose was so much more interesting and creative back then. i've been working mostly on improving my dialogue skills these past few years and while i think i've gotten a lot better on that front i feel like it's come at the cost of being able to write beautiful descriptive and introspective passages that Convey Emotion and i want that ability back!! like i truly think my writing is so clinical (comparatively) these days idk... some of it is down to pov choice but i'm pretty sure i used to be able to do emotional intensity with pov characters with outwardly controlled images... i think i forgot how to feel emotions myself. maybe i need to rephrase this goal as Re-Remember How To Have "Feelings"
• i think i need to drastically lower my goals i'm honestly not even sure i will have enough spare time to write even one fic next year since i'm starting full time work with really long hours so i will legitimately be happy if i can just manage to do that. one thing about me is that i will never have a consistent output :''''')

“Your concealer’s melting off,” Jaemin says. “I can see the moles on your neck.”

Donghyuck swears and shoves his hand into the outer pocket of Renjun's sports bag, fishing out a slim tube and a phone. Squinting at his reflection in the phone screen, he unscrews the top of the concealer and dabs at his neck with the applicator. “You know, Renjun usually does this bit for me,” Donghyuck says, closing the tube and tossing it back into the bag. He pats the pigment into his skin with the pad of his index finger. “You could make yourself more useful.”

“You have a perfectly good reflective surface right there,” Jaemin says.

“Come on, Jaemin, play along a little,” Donghyuck says, heaving a gusty sigh. “It won’t kill you.”

Aeri flicks a tiny shard of light at Yizhuo. It bursts apart when it hits her skin, fizzing into the air with a gentle tickling sensation. "Hey!" Yizhuo protests. “Don’t attack me!”

“I’m not attacking you, I’m literally giving you free LED light therapy,” Aeri says. “People pay a lot of money for this, you know. I can do different colours and everything.”

Yizhuo laughs. “Is that your new business model?”

“Totally. I’m offering a murder-plus-spa-day combo. It’s my special self care package, like, getting rid of the stress in your life at every level.”

Yukimura is unreadable to Niou because she is so fundamentally different from her she might as well be an entirely alien being; Niou has accepted that she will never be able to place herself in Yukimura’s shoes and thus Yukimura will forever remain miles out of reach. Yagyuu occupies the precise opposite extreme in terms of distance from Niou and yet she is just as unreadable. The gap between an object and its reflection in a mirror is no less a gap for its asymptotic approach to zero. We’ve been together for a really long time, Renjun had said, but hadn’t Rikkai, too? Invincible Rikkai, infinite immutable Rikkai, and none of that had helped them to know the difference.

She has not become a good woman like her brother hoped, but she can live with that. She is, after all, still living.

She does not return to medicine. She does not trust herself not to cut away more than is strictly necessary to heal.
//
In her mind’s eye her brother is always leaving and she is always reaching for him, pleading for him to stay, and this time he isn’t yielding to her like he used to. Again and again the pattern repeats itself. When she’d seen the Zaku for the first time, red and backlit from fire, and her legs gave out beneath her before she even registered the sight, her body understanding before her mind. In the sandstorm with her face bare and his still masked. Amidst the debris of A Baoa Qu when he’d held her and told her to become a good woman and she’d thought, flash of terror or precognition, this is the last time we will ever—

• He has seen, by now, the end of himself reflected with pristine clarity in three sets of irises scintillating with fearless joy, that insurmountable, terrifying height he already knew that first time with Echizen that he would never be able to scale.

• But it always comes back to him. Slowly and bitterly, but unfailingly. What Sanada had given him years and years ago, that surety, that faith. Did he love so lightly, to concede defeat so soon? All those trembling sweating hours in the rehabilitation centre, pain so total it could have cleaved him in half, slicing the weakness, the dead growth out of himself inch by inch, so he could stand on the court again. So he could stand on this rooftop, here with Shiraishi. Sun over their hands, wind in their hair. What an inheritance. What a weight of love.

• All the tightly-furled potential Yukimura had glimpsed in him the first time Kirihara challenged him to a match exploding out of him at last, as Yukimura had known it would; he’d staked everything on it. He had believed, then, that it was worth it. He still does. That’s what he’s tried to give Kirihara, over and over again, on the Rikkaidai courts in the spring of his second year, at Nationals as Kirihara dragged his mangled body back to its feet, at the World Cup facing Tezuka luminescent with the Pinnacle of Perfection on the other side of the net. I have opened the gates for you. Now all you have to do is step through.

• Two years of caring for Kirihara, watching him grow. Yukimura has been careful about cultivating the distance, even as Kirihara’s eyes burned the back of his neck with desperate and badly-concealed longing, to make sure Kirihara will never stop pushing himself, reaching forward. He does not fear the possibility of being overtaken, but he almost wishes he did. He is waiting, as ever, for Kirihara to surprise him.

• my shirayukiaka mentorship legacy thesis… i already did a lengthy dvd commentary <here> but i’m so glad i did actually write this one even though i struggled so much with yukimura pov, i really wanted to explain the key parts of what makes yukiaka my tennis 推しカプ and i think i did alright on the meta front. it’s like barely romantic at all but that’s what is so romantic about it. To Me. yukiaka is so romantic because it isn’t!! it's about the outgoing leader->incoming leader mentorship of someone you recognise yourself in and whose potential you believe so strongly in except you are a fucked up person so you fuck him up while trying to make him into the best version of himself but he needed to be fucked up in order to reach that height and he loves/fears/envies/admires/loves you for what you have done to him and what you represent
• i think the opening is pretty weak but the ending is really REALLY good, which is a problem that plagues all my fic, so like… It Could Be Worse? i’m not too mad about it though like it’s not so bad that i would exit the tab if i were reading at the start so i hope the bangerful ending makes up for it

• She has the distinct impression of being manoeuvred around on a chessboard towards an unknown endgame, but she’s trusted Atobe to lead her true since first year and she supposes she has no reason to doubt her now. Atobe is always playing the long game, the visionary strategist to Oshitari’s tactician, even if Oshitari isn’t sure what Atobe’s vision here is other than enabling a weird threesome.

• "You see, I'm not in the habit of thinking about Rikkaidai members sexually." [redacted] "I can only imagine the experience would be like a praying mantis ripping the head off her partner after mating. Please, no comments about what you plan to do to Tezuka."

• Oshitari is drawing closer to the point where the short-term shades into the long-term, the region of overlap between her expertise and Atobe's. They have been caught in this balancing act for three years, but Oshitari still does not know whether she is the one gaining on Atobe, or vice versa.

• i had such a horrible time writing femslash porn last year i don’t know what possessed me to try to do it again 😭 but i was really gripped by the hyotei elite bitchy cliquey private school girls vision… writing this and working out my concept of atooshi literally made me become atooshi main. I LOVE 1FOR1SHIPPING and unofficial leader x second in command dynamics and situations that seem like they could be triangulation but are actually just chill and tension-free
• i really liked oshitari’s pov i love longsuffering thinker types and the atooshi banter was also very fun to write… also reading back over this some of oshitari’s narration is legitimately funny to me. this fic may not be sexy but it IS pretty funny and in-character

• Buoyed by a surge of savagely delirious euphoria, her front drenched with blood, gripping the handle of the knife so tightly she couldn’t feel her fingers, she’d forgotten for a moment who she was, made a motion to push up a pair of glasses she wasn’t wearing. Niou’s arrival, timely after all, had settled her. It’s always easier to define herself by negative space, a mirror in which she can see what she isn’t.

• Niou’s eyes kindle. The breathless exhilaration on her face reflecting Yagyuu’s, as if it really had been Niou in Yagyuu’s place earlier, as if their switch is rooted in something deeper and more profound than a handful of cosmetic adjustments, some alchemy of deconstruction and reconstruction at its core that enables a true exchange of self. Yagyuu slides her hand lower, curling her fingers around the column of Niou’s neck. The visible trail of her touch mapped out in dark red across Niou’s skin. Now the deed belongs to both of them. Niou’s pulse slams against the heel of Yagyuu’s palm, insistent and frantic, a dead giveaway.

• “Are you scared?” Yagyuu murmurs.

• omg i’m shocked by how much i like this one on reread, i didn’t think it was that good when i first posted it but i really did get down the gist of my 82 thesis… a bit sad i can never post this one to ao3 because it’s blatant spitefic. but yagyuu (and specifically nyota yagyuu) really is like the perfect narrative pov for my prose style, the polite british high society formality + repressed seething violent intensity fits the way i write so well and i think this fic has the most natural feeling narration out of everything i wrote this year, the meta parts are blended into the actual fic with somewhat more finesse than most of the other fic i wrote this year
• more dvd commentary <here> but i’m like so especially impressed by how GOOD the dialogue is like i really went hard on the multiple layers of meaning and ambiguity of who exactly is talking to who… good job me… spite literally works sometimes

• Zaizen has, in fact, been avoiding them—Haruko moreso than Yuuri, but Yuuri takes the whole one-flesh-one-mind thing very seriously and is never too far from Haruko's vicinity—for reasons that are a roughly sixty-forty split between knowing that Haruko will see through him within two minutes of conversation, and not wanting to test if he can handle the patented Haruko-and-Yuuri saccharine loved-up modus operandi.

• Zaizen mumbled something like Kenya-san should be more careful and Shiraishi laughed and said, maybe he’d listen if he heard it from you.

• That’s generally when Zaizen’s self-preservation instincts kick in and cut the mental cameras. Zaizen isn’t a dreamer. In the Shitenhoji vocabulary of demented idealism this makes him a defeatist, though he isn’t that either; he has a healthy respect for his own skills. Zaizen’s no data specialist, but he’s got good instincts, match routes unfolding or closing up with every shot, and he knows an unwinnable set of circumstances when he sees it.

• “Oh, Zaizen-chan,” Haruko says, squeezing Zaizen’s hand. The terrifying acuity of Shitenhoji’s best gamemaker gleaming out of her eyes, no less keen for its sympathy. “It’s only your first love. You’ll have other loves. You’re cute and handsome and everyone will want to be with you. I know, I know, you don’t want everyone,” Haruko adds, lifting a finger daintily. “You only want Kenya-kun.”

• my attempt at gay indie coming of age story lmfaooo i’m glad i pushed my comfort zone and wrote this one because it’s an important part of my tennis agenda world and i needed to have it in my body of work. probably one of the worse fics i wrote this year but you know… i tried. and sometimes that is all that matters
• i suffered deeply trying to figure out a believable Group Tsukkomi zaizen pov and i think i did okay, and i also think i got the insufferable ott gay energy of rbrs but genuine emotional concern for their fave kouhai underneath the performance. so at least the characterisation holds up i think

• The Child of God, in his infinite benevolence, extending a chance for redemption to Sanada, to Yanagi, to Kirihara. And the flipside: his closed fist pulping the rest of them, a necessary sacrifice for his grand rebirth. How perfectly he’d orchestrated it. An exact inversion of their Kanto results. Yukimura has always been the furthest-seeing one of them all.

• Yukimura’s love is an impersonal thing, scalar and directionless.

• What does Niou know about love? Singles Two against Fuji, sweat plastering his jersey to his back. He’d squinted past the haze of Illusion and the sun-glare to Yukimura on the bench, the steel trap of Yukimura's game face giving nothing away. And then, a little beyond Yukimura, Yagyuu seated in the stands with his hands clasped primly in his lap. It was too far to tell for sure what expression Yagyuu was wearing; Niou could guess, could conjure up the mirror on his own face, but he wanted the reassurance of absolute certainty. He felt like he was moving through honey. His left elbow had the blown-out deadened feeling of anaesthesia, a pain staved off. Briefly, childishly, he wished Yukimura's mouth would relax into a smile. He was no Kirihara, but in that moment he probably would have cut off a limb for a visible sliver of Yukimura’s approval.

• Tell me something. When you were watching me play, up there in the stands, Niou said. What were you thinking?

• i really wanted this to be better than it ended up T__T it’s about an extremely vital part of my tennis vision due to being my 3byuki thesis + my yukimura-rigged-nats-finals conspiracy theory but i think you can really tell the parts where i was trying too hard to convey the meta aspects and it’s jarring because it doesn’t blend well into the actual fic part of this fic
• i think it’s also a bit too obvious that i was struggling so hard with how to end this fic so i just cut it off randomly
• on the bright side i think this niou voicing is not too bad considering my chronic writing equivalent of sameface syndrome!

• These days Yukimura has the thinly clean smell of generic soap. It isn’t unpleasant, in the way that nothing about Yukimura could be unpleasant, but it lacks recognisability. Everything about Yukimura’s presence is supposed to be distinctive, overwhelming. Even squashed shoulder-to-hip beside Marui he should take up more space than he does. Marui knows Yukimura on instinct, but the blade of the reflex is dulled. Yukimura’s memory swallows up Yukimura himself. This is, by now, an old sadness.

• “Yips,” Yukimura says cheerfully. His grin takes up the entirety of Marui’s field of vision. “Now you can’t move.”

• Absence, Marui understands. The seven of them locked in tense orbit around the blank of a missing body. But even with its heart sliced out Rikkaidai will not fold. They’ve made sure of that.

• A serve-and-volley player is constantly crossing the widest possible distance in tennis, baseline to net, so Marui has always parsed observation through its tiered gradations, the broadest strokes all the way down to the minutiae of finest detail, the view from afar and up close synthesised into a single image.

• the better 3byuki fic except it’s stillllll not as good as i wish it were and niou isn’t even in it. except it also has probably the best line i wrote all year (Yukimura’s memory swallows up Yukimura himself.) so that’s a redeeming factor. and i think the characterisation and the dynamic is really good, it’s just that i sacrificed like. pacing. and writing an actual fic. in service of creating a vehicle to say what i wanted to say about the yukibun dynamic
• i consciously try to personalise my figurative language to the pov character so it’s not just like Any Random Metaphor but actually something with meaning in the context of the story itself too, except the execution was like laughably clumsy here… the cat’s cradle simile makes me die (derogatory)
• i really like writing precanon fic because i’ve increasingly realised this year that there’s nothing i love more than doom and inevitability and foregone conclusions, i like the external terror of characters desperately believing in an outcome that the audience knows will never happen!! and i think i did a good job with the dramatic irony through the last section where yukimura tells marui he wouldn’t want anyone to go through what he’s gone through (when we know in shinteni marui inflicts injury requiring similar painful physical therapy on tohno for yukimura’s sake but w/o yukimura’s knowledge → so it’s like the added guilt marui feels knowing yukimura expressly wouldn’t have wanted him to do it at all but marui loves yukimura so much he’s still willing to break his own AND yukimura’s moral codes in order to save yukimura) + yukimura saying he won’t break his promise (when we know rikkai loses at nats)

• Ootori still has something of an instinctive aversion to serving in Shishido’s direction when Shishido isn’t even holding a racquet, despite the countless grim hours they’d spent doing exactly that after Tokyo Prefecturals; that bitter, harrowing week in Ootori’s memory has the unreal sheen of a hallucination or a mirage now. But Shishido’d dismissed the concern when Ootori raised it. You won’t hit me, he’d said. Your control’s too good for that.

• Briefly it disappears from view at the apex of its flight, obscured by the sun, but Ootori doesn’t need to see it to guess precisely where it will fall. His soul knows. Faith drives his racquet forward.

• Shishido’s shadow falls over him, before his face appears in Ootori’s field of vision. Ootori blinks the sunbursts away, sense of vertigo flaring up, receding again. Distance restores itself. Separation and spaces between every single thing. He lets his arm fall back to his side.

• i’m glad i could dip my toes into my favourite trope of all time LOTUS EATER DREAMS and i think i did an ok job with the Something Is Slightly Off atmosphere + the dreamlike calm vs the bursts of desperation in ootori’s narration that make it clear that he is working really hard to maintain that calm. ootori has the highest emotional stakes in the 3rd years graduating due to the fragility of his new truelove romance with shishido so he seemed like a natural fit for the trope. i'm most happy with the Distance=Relief motif set against ootori's separation anxiety because like regency era pining energy
• i also really love like… personifying schools? like making the school its own kind of character. i really got that feeling off hyotei in the game of future prologue story this fic was inspired by so i wanted to give hyotei the school a strong sense of presence as well. i spent a lot of time thinking about hyotei's clubroom and tennis courts and hyotei as an institution but it probably didn't come through very well in the fic because it's quite stylistically sparse (for me. i'm a chronic overwriter so this IS restraint to me)

• He enjoys the rush of a high-stakes gamble as much as the next guy, but there’s something to be said about the security of a foregone conclusion. Fixed matches, uneven odds, stacked lineups; he likes dealing in guarantees. Luck and fate and the fluid boundary separating the two, always in flux.

• Still, he thinks Ryoma had been happy, too. Playing him. At least towards the end, when there had been only each other, no teams or messy loyalties to muddy the waters, the ship emptied of everything except for him and Ryoma and the tennis they shared. Surely the recognition was reciprocated. Surely Ryoma saw in Ryoga, too, some part of himself, something he could point to and say I know you, I remember you, we were each other's before we were anything else.

• Water breaching the hull of the ship and the hunger had torn through him the same way. But Ryoma's still got a long way to go to the top and Ryoga wants to see him reach the pinnacle first, so he'd hauled the halves of himself shut, taken the temporary defeat.

• So he'll win, and he'll eat his brother. He'll swallow Ryoma whole, all his monstrous strength and incandescent potential. Ryoma's tennis will burn so bright it'll light Ryoga up from the inside and then everyone will see what they are to each other. Everything that makes up Echizen Ryoma ensconced safely inside Ryoga and he'll keep him so close nothing could ever sever them from one another again, not even themselves.

• i have zero memory of writing this but i think it was probably the combination of becoming obsessed with ryoga via tnrb valentine’s event + rewatching cruise + catching up to the echizen brothers chapters in shinteni + generally rotating echizen brothers on tl thanks to some rather emotionally damaging fanart… it still gets me every time how ryoga is generally a really terrible person but he is so totally devoted to ryoma… and ryoma doesn’t even want it from ryoga!! ryoga is charming and talented and resourceful and lacking in morality enough to get anything he wants but the only thing he really wants (HIS BROTHER’S LOVE…) he can’t have
• i think there’s definitely too much navelgazing (haha navel. Like the orange. get it.) in this fic and not enough Stuff Actually Happening to balance it out so the pacing is extremely strange. but if you think of this as an echizen brothers metapost and not a fic then it’s probably ok. this was really the main problem that plagued all my fic this year, all of it was just poorly disguised metaposting. which is generally what all my fic is but i didn’t put enough effort into properly ficifying anything because i had so many ideas i wanted to finish, so they’re all riddled with severe pacing and voicing and flow problems...

• Rin's pale hair shines silver in the low light, more familiar to Kai now than its original black. It can't have been that long ago when he’d first gone blond but it feels half a lifetime away. Rin’s hair had only just hit his chin back then. He was still wrangling the curvature of the Giant Habu under Kite's instruction, prone to impatient outbursts when the ball wouldn’t go where he wanted it to go that inevitably led to heated rows with Kite, the sound of their bickering a background fixture of that summer in Kai’s memory. Sun on his shoulders, the grip of his racquet worn smooth in his left hand, and Kite and Rin spitting fire at each other the next court down.

• Kai doesn't think he's ever seen Rin put his hair up. Kite mentioned offhand once in a rare moment of uncritical honesty that he liked Rin's hair and Rin's been keeping it long ever since, though neither of them will acknowledge this.

• “It’s our year,” Kai says. The reflection of his face floating beside Rin’s. These are Kite’s words, too. He wonders if there’s an echo of Kite in his voice, that intensity he’s brought them all to inhabit. Whether Rin hears Kai, or if he’s remembering how Kite sounded when he first said it to them, or both overlapping, like everything else Kite has given them: their appearances, their tennis, their dream.

• from the peak of my higa oshi phase… i love henchmanshipping so much. i think it’s so good that kairin are like bff classmates and also super captain complexed about kite but in a way that’s separate to their relationship with each other, but still unmistakably present. like it's about kite but not about kite at all
• there’s too much tension between kai’s stupid dogs narrative voice and my natural prose style and i think it gets overly obvious at times because i’m really bad at writing any type of narrator that isn’t like british private school asshole so i keep slipping back into that style even if it’s completely at odds with the pov i’m writing… it’s too much of a challenge i probably won’t do it again. any more higa fic will have to be kite pov only

• He zeroes in with laser accuracy right on where Kirihara's standing half-hidden by shadow on the stairs, seriously, does he have fucking x-ray vision or something, and Niou Masaharu, Major-General of Academia and major pain in Kirihara’s ass, an entire dimension away from where he’s supposed to be, lazily makes the Rikkai Force hand signal for all clear at Kirihara.

• Kirihara is kind of uncertain whether Tezuka speaks at all; he seemed to have challenged Echizen to a duel via externally-impenetrable telepathically-communicative stare that made Kirihara abruptly, viciously homesick.

• spitefic written due to my intense hate for evil the movie and its mistreatment and erasure of nioukiri but it didn’t turn out very good so i still didn’t win. this is part of the really complicated tennis x arc v fusion universe in my mind i think like… i was really struggling with kirihara’s narrative voice, and also the massive world i had built in my head, very little of which is actually in the fic itself, so this fic is like a pretty mediocre execution of a really really good concept (to me)
• the section with the ranking leaderboards is my favourite even tho i don’t think it has any standout prose, i borrowed the idea from idol survival shows and i think it’s a really solid headcanon for the cutthroat competitiveness i imagine academia embodies. really great encapsulation of the way this fic is soooo premise >> execution

• Amuro’s seen Vermouth slip in and out of identities with the perfection of water filling the shape of its vessel; he’s done the process himself. So if Okiya is only a construct, anybody else could inhabit him for a night as a diversionary tactic while Akai moved elsewhere. Highway standoff at night, voice over the phone, and Amuro had been right all along in the conviction he refused to characterise as faith.

• So much of him has warped around the memory and the betrayal and the hunger for vengeance spiralling out from it that he doesn’t know what would be left of him after it’s carved out. How he'd felt looking in the mirror after Vermouth had finished working on him and seeing the face he could never forget reflected back at him, as though there really was some part of himself that was also inextricably Akai and now it had been brought to life.

• “I’m not a detective like you, so I don’t know if I can explain it in a way you can understand. I’m only an engineer,” Okiya says. Moonlight and shadow. He looks so unlike himself he’s almost recognisable again. “I think in terms of systems. Which parts are built to bear which loads, and which are not.” He touches Amuro’s cheek. Abrupt and inexplicable yearning to turn his face into Okiya’s hold; Amuro nearly comes undone. “There are some weights that even an extraordinary waiter may not be so suited to carrying. But I don’t think I could stop you from trying.”

• The sense of vertigo crescendos. Again he can’t shake the nauseous doomed feeling that everything he’s done, everything he will do, has been seen through already. Fate closing in around all of his selves like a garrotte.

• the actual porn is like… ugh… but i’ve always hated writing porn anyway. but i think the non-porn parts of this fic are surprisingly really good… the atmosphere is good, the i-know-that-you-know-that-i-know dialogue between okiya and amuro is solid, the sense of dramatic irony and extreme denial works pretty well, the confirmation bias split conversation feels authentically like something that could happen in canon
• i edited it a little when i crossposted onto ao3 but my conceptualisation of ryebourbon has evolved too much since i wrote this fic so the takes are a bit too reductive here, but not so much that it can’t be chalked up to unreliable narration so i think i can still give myself a pass
• also the narrator name switch at the end is sooo gimmicky and cliche but it’s satisfying TO ME though i definitely won’t be able to get away with reusing this narrative device lol
• but ultimately i'm really happy i wrote my own sacred text for my ship of the year, i think this is probably my personal favourite work this year despite its flaws

• It shouldn’t be surprising that Jaemin is still fluent in this, the process of taking him apart like a favoured gun. Jaemin is as much a creature of habit as Renjun is unable to resist the lure of nostalgia, two facets of the same tendency. Both of them always caught halfway to turning back, one foot in the past.

• Every time Renjun runs into Mark while he’s working, Mark does his heartfelt best to sway him to the side of law enforcement via impassioned speechmaking about Renjun’s inherent goodness while smashing Renjun into buildings, cars, or whatever other unforgiving surface is closest. He’s pretty sure Mark doesn’t know Renjun can’t actually heal himself and generally relies on a combination of timely escape manoeuvres and close working relationships with people in possession of healing powers to maintain a functional body; Mark would go easy on him if he did. Sometimes Renjun wants Mark to go easy on him. But if Renjun relents an inch he’ll give in entirely.

• The Jaemin in his memory is more distinct than the figure in front of him, blurred through the filter of involuntary tears. Like this the old affection rises so easily. How much he’d liked Jaemin when they were younger, how simple it had felt. What changed? Nothing. Everything. He drags a hand up to touch the corner of Jaemin’s mouth, feeling its upwards quirk underneath his fingertips.

• blatantly akam inspired? it’s like beat for beat exactly the same fic as the only way out is to give in except kind of worse and i was uncomfortably aware of this while writing LOL but i really did want to drag pyrophane out of the grave at least once this year and i guess 2pick otp 1s and 0s is a reliable way to do it… i always used to feel kind of embarrassed about all my jmrn fic being explicit but it’s fine actually. as you may know i have a very difficult relationship with jmrn so like i will do whatever mental gymnastics allow me to actually write for my main agenda
• i personally had a good chuckle over titling this with a friends - chase atlantic lyric since it’s like 70% this song’s fault i got into jmrn in the first place so i feel like *tuxedo mask* my job here is done. except it’s not because i still have to finish dreampuri. but other than that my job here is done!!

• yuryo complex relationships shipping meme
• favourite ship dynamics
• ai and the weight of grief
• top 5 canon yugioh hets
• detective conan ep review 1-500
• being fixed preferences fucker
• the killer (pt 1 / pt 2)
• my ideal 1s and 0s
• 1140 dynamics summary
• favourite akam triangulations
• identity in detective conan
• akam secret 5 AR conversation analysis
• akam secret 4 AR conversation analysis
• detective conan gundam reference compilation
• top 5 canon conan hets
• detective conan plot predictions
• rye/bourbon dynamic hypothesising