laebrumme

[laebrumme]

Ranking All Of My Fanfics From Worst to Best

So uh… it's been two years as of today. I have written 337,636 words across 16 works on my AO3 account, accumulated 91,050 hits, and 3,041 kudos.

It's really strange to think that I started this whole things purely because I was bored. It was the end of my freshman year of college, and I had just taken my last final online at my grandparents' house because I had already moved out of my freshman dorm. I wasn't leaving for home until the following day though, and because my desktop was packed and I only had a shitty laptop on me on which to do things, I decided that I would crack open Google Docs and write about a silly little lesbian ship which had been my brainrot for the past few weeks before that point and to take advantage of the AO3 account I had just been able to create.

This was the start of my little fanfiction writing journey which ended up ballooning into this two year project which is still ongoing now. And since that random night were I posted my first chapter and garnered a pretty immediate audience, I have written many more fics, gathered a little audience, and made some really cool friends! But I think I'm at this point where I want to take a step back and look at all my works I have currently posted and talk about them a little bit while also ranking them from worst to best in my opinion just so we can see how I've grown as an author. So, lets just start talking about my silly lesbian writings!

16: Why A Butterfly Wears a Tied Scarf

Honestly, I should have just marked this fic as finished back when I wrote that last chapter.

This entire fic was just one big experiment. Up until this point, I was of the opinion that fiction written in the first person, unless done by an author who really knew what they were doing, automatically made writing sound more amateur. This fic (modeled after The Reivers by William Faulkner) was an attempt at proving myself wrong. I wanted to write a fic that was written in the first person which, in my opinion, did not come off as amateur and childish and which could carry the same weight as a story narrated in the third person. The approach I took to this was something that I think carried into all of my other fics that employed anything even vaguely resembling first person narration: first person narration is effective when you treat it as someone telling a story as if they were right in front of you. The magic of first person narration is that it can model the oration of a story around a campfire (or something similar), and when used in that way, I think it can very consistently come off as very mature and well written and can be very engaging.

This is literally the entire framing narrative for this fic.

So in many ways I think this fic is very important for my writing, but it is also very hard to ignore the glaring problems that it has, which is to say that it just is boring. There isn't anything to it. It's a less interesting version of a story I already did with Hu Tao, and it's done in a less compelling way. You can tell I stopped caring about this fic by the fact that I didn't really finish it, and that I don't have a whole lot to talk about regarding it.

Idk it's just kind of there.

15: I Owe You A Lot

This was a birthday fic for Arlecchino, and you can tell that this is literally nothing but that. It's generic, it's simple, it's run of the mill, it's short, and once again it's boring. But at least I had the gall to make it a one shot. That's why it goes above "Why A Butterfly…"

I have even less to say about this one.

14: The Kinktober Fic

It's smut.

I ain't good at smut.

Idk I'm not really all that proud of it. Some people clearly enjoy it tho so whatev.

13: Okay, This Is Me

I remember, at the time I wrote this fic, I was incredibly proud of it. I was proud of the concept, I was proud of how I adapted in-game content and expanded it into an entire fic, and I was proud of the story that I told and the emotional weight that it carried.

I honestly think this fic was a very early roadmap regarding the tone of my fics going forward. But there are very obvious issues with it, not the least of which is the pacing. Ten chapters and just under 14,000 words is absolutely criminal. I could have cut the entire thing in half chapter-wise and it would have been much stronger, I think.

I do remember that this was the first fic I ever actually outlined. I remember writing the general structure of the fic down in a notebook and being really proud of myself for doing that, as ever since I discovered I enjoyed writing, I thought I was only ever capable of pantsing. But here we are now, where I plan out all of my fics a chapter ahead at least, and I do it all in these little notebooks that I buy from my school store combined with a very specific brand of pen that I think works best with those notebooks. This is where that all started.

I do enjoy how this fic had a really short and sweet ending that was just a slight expansion of the original Lightcone text. I still enjoy that decision.

12: Ballade

Okay, now is where we start to get into the really really tricky rankings, because from this point on I love each and every one of these fics with all my heart.

I wrote Ballade because I was very frustrated with the lack of exploration of Furina's emotional state during the end of the Fontaine Archon Quest. I felt that Furina was in a very interesting space mentally at that point in the story, and to completely skip over the incredible amounts of revelations she must have had there in that throne of hers, completely emotionally broken, was just criminal. Furina I think is still one of if not the most intriguing character in Genshin, and they just robbed her of even more exploration by just skipping over her at the end there in service of the super flashy thing Neuv does there. Because of that, I wrote Ballade as a further exploration of her feelings and thoughts in that small little moment.

The fic is named and modeled after one of my favorite pieces of classical music ever written, Ballade No. 1 in G minor, op. 23 by Frederic Chopin. One of the most emotionally evocative and intense pieces ever written, and I thought it matched the intensity of what Furina must have been feeling in that moment. This fic really kind of started my obsession with that piece, and it's because, while writing this fic, I kind of unraveled the emotional complexity of the piece and came to understand it even more.

It's a really wonderful piece, I very highly recommend listening to it.

The fic itself takes hints from a fic we'll get to here later into the list, and if you read them side by side you can definitely tell. But I definitely think this is the weaker of the two at that writing style mostly because, again, it's shorter in length and just less substantial. I think this writing style really does well when there's more room for it to breathe, and I think the other fic does better at that.

I still am really proud of this fic regardless. I think I did some cool things with it, even if I didn't execute it as well as I initially envisioned. I think this is the first fic where I really failed to execute on an idea, but it still turned out alright.

11: Fables about the Trailblazers

Yeah, the fic that started it all! Ranking relatively low. What's the deal with that?

I think this fic is the perfect example of why outlining is so powerful. This fic started as something I wrote entirely impulsively fueled only by the worms that infest your every thought with a ship, and it stayed that way until I got tired of it. But because of this, it's just not that great all things considered as a long fic.

Up until this point (and for quite a while after) this was the single longest piece of continuous fiction I had ever written, and you could tell. The fic reads more as a string of vignettes than it does a single cohesive story, and while there is a lot of value in stories that read like a string of vignettes, that was not what I was trying to achieve with FATB. I wanted the fic to read like a single story, and it really doesn't.

It also suffers the same pacing problems my early works suffered from, and is something I think have long since graduated from. Things just kind of happen, March and Stelle get together rather early for the overall length of the fic, and it's just kind of meh in writing style.

I think the biggest sin that I committed with this fic, though, was adhering to the canon way too much.

The central idea of this fic was: what if Stelle and March were just a straight up canon ship? What would their relationship look like throughout the course of the game as each world came by and they faced all the obstacles together? This was an okay idea at the outset, but very quickly became unsustainable.

I'm very very glad this fic never made it to amphoreous.

Also a really funny bit of irony: in the author's note to chapter 19 (the last chapter I published) I say that I have no plans of stopping that fic. Which is just funny now that I haven't touched the fic for like a year and a half now.

10: As The World Falls Apart

This is an interesting little thing. I have this entire fic outlined, and I have some very very cool things planned with it, but because it is so high-concept it is really hard to write and is very mentally taxing, so I haven't gotten past the first chapter. So I'm putting it here as a "I think the first chapter is really neat, and I'm excited for the rest of the concept, but I can't put it any higher since there isn't much to show."

I will say tho: if I execute this fic in the way I want it to, I think it'll slot very nicely into second place on this list.

9: In Search of Vaster Waters

Honestly, this fic is way better than it has any right to be. This is literally just me going "what if my favorite characters kissed" and then doing that. It is entirely self serving, but it also kind of fucks.

For those that might not know, despite the fact that I write a lot about Furina or Arlecchino or whatever other character, my absolute favorite Hoyoverse character is, in fact, Hu Tao. I have been absolutely obsessed with her since her initial release, and there is literally no other character that makes my happy chemicals go off in my brain like her. But, for some reason, I had yet to write a ship fic with her. And when I came up with this idea, I jumped right into it because there was so much I thought I could do with it.

I'm honestly glad I made it a short and sweet three chapter fic. There is a nice story there, it's cute, but it doesn't feel rushed. It says what it wants to say and doesn't stay for a moment longer.

I think it was my first proper attack at wholesome, non-toxic romance that paved the way for stuff like Endless Night and later chapters of SCIMO, and it's one of the first appearances of my absolute infatuation with silence as a concept and a symbol of romance and love. It's also the start of my love for writing Lantern Rite.

I just think it's cute and wholesome, and I think it works as a really nice little benchmark for my own writing. I can use this short little fic as a point of comparison to know if I'm doing the romance thing right or not.

Also, I'm going to be honest, the title of this fic is absolutely incredible. It's one of my few entirely original titles, and I think it goes so hard.

8: Into the Endless Night

I'm going to be honest: I love this fic. I think it's really good. I'm very proud of what I've done with it, what I want to do with it, and I'm pushing myself with it in a lot of very subtle ways. And you might disagree with it's placement here halfway down the list, but I really can't bring myself to put it anywhere else.

I think this is a good fic, but everything else that I've written I think is so much more special or meaningful or powerful or whatever else than this. Maybe if this fic were finished or something and I hit all the emotional beats that I have planned out for it in my head, maybe it would go higher, but as it is right now I think the rest of the fics on my account are just all so much more expansive and expressive than this one.

Something that is very interesting about this fic to me is that it's the first time I'm really forcing myself to write an honest-to-God plot. If you read my works, you'll probably notice that I don't really write plot-heavy works very often. I love my character studies and whatnot, but I rarely dip into the territory of genuine conflict against a bad guy or whatever. But in this fic, the entire point is that they're all Magical Girls, and so I'm playing around with writing an actual bad-guy vs good-guys plot while also writing the romance stuff. So far I think I've been doing a pretty good job, and I hope I can keep it up.

7: 桃花源 (In the Land of Peach Blossoms)

This fic is so so so so special to me.

I like to think I usually don't have much of an ego when it comes to my own works; I compare my works with my other works, and that's it, and I judge the popularity of my fics on a "the customer is always right" mentality. But this is one of the few exceptions to that mindset for me.

I think I absolutely cooked with this fic. I am very proud of the emotional weight this fic carries, I am very proud of the flow of the sentences and the structure of the story and the places Hu Tao's mind goes, and I think it's a shame it is still, far and away, my least popular fic.

My favorite author ever is William Faulkner, and this fic was my exercise in emulating his writing style that appears in novels like Absalom, Absalom!, and while I do not think I got even remotely close to the same quality as Faulkner, I think I created something that is very uniquely mine. I love this concept of narration that is both third person and stream-of-consciousness, and I think I applied it here really well in a way that makes the fic read like you are sort of inside Hu Tao's thoughts, but not quite.

I definitely think I hedged my bets a little too much with the second chapter; I think the work would've been better if I had simply cut it at one chapter, but I don't regret writing the second chapter. I think it was just extra practice, and I am a better writer overall because of it. And out of any of the fics I've written, I come back to this one for reference moreso than any other because it is a perfect example of how well I can use long sentences to evoke extra emotion in my writing style, and when another work calls for such a moment I can come back to this work and see how I did it.

6: There Must Be Something Here

I think w/r/t concept, aside from possibly As The World Falls Apart, this is my favorite fic. I've always been fascinated with stories about an entire world dying. Not just humans, literally everything. This fic was actually inspired by SCP-2935, wherein the central premise is a cave which leads to an alternate universe of earth which has met this exact fate: every living organism has died. The moment that really stuck itself into my brain and has stayed there since I read it in middle school is the moment where the researchers discover that the food on the table of a family who were eating when they died has not molded because there is no longer mold to infect it. This idea I also stole wholesale because that horror of realizing everything is dead by noticing the absence of something so everyday is so fascinating to me.

Another great piece of art that shares this theme is the MTG card "Depopulate" which has the flavor text: "No screams rang out. No blood stained the streets. In an instant, the bustling metropolis simply fell silent." Incredibly chilling.

Alone, the idea of a completely dead world is very compelling, but I think what makes this fic work so well is the addition of Furina and Arlecchino into this world. I think the addition of a pair of character who already had a strained relationship being thrown into this world that weighs on them with each step they take through dead grass makes the concept of the fic that much more engaging even though, as is a pattern with my fics, literally nothing happens.

Okay, I take that back, one thing happens, and that one moment is still one of my favorite scenes I've ever written. I think I did a really good job of communicating the horror of what they see even though, for all intents and purposes, it shouldn't really be that scary.

I think this fic is a great exploration of the things that I find personally terrifying, and then exploring how those sorts of situations would absolutely destroy a relationship. I definitely think the execution could have been slightly better---the pace definitely drags at points---but I think the concept is something that really makes up for it.

If I were to ever write an original novel, I would definitely consider adapting this concept.

5: The Space Between

THE TOP 5, BABY, LETS TALK ABOUT THE GOOD SHIT

This is my love letter to Hu Tao. Obviously. I think that's rather easy to tell.

Pretty much ever since I wrote my first experimental fic with "桃花源 (In the Land of Peach Blossoms)", I wanted to find a way to incorporate footnotes into a fic. Having read more David Foster Wallace than I would care to admit as well as being an avid fan of House of Leaves, the concept of footnotes being used in fiction has always fascinated me. But I had never really found a good place to include them. At least, that was until I came up with the idea for "The Space Between" shortly after playing Lantern Rite 2025.

I am a Chinese learner, and with that comes a fascination in all things Chinese poetry and idioms. I have stolen a few idioms for things like chapter titles (see Seas Change Into Mulberry Orchards) but I had never really incorporated them into the fics themselves. But since Hu Tao as a character is so rooted in Chinese tradition and culture, and since I knew this fic was going to be just a complete and utter love letter to her from the outset, I knew I was going to have a lot of chances to explain the intricacies and nuances of Chinese idioms and poetry to those reading that might not know anything about the language.

I think this fic was my first time nailing thematic cohesion. I genuinely think that, as a single piece of cohesive fiction, this is my best work. Setting aside the fact that I wouldn't dare touch that perfect 9,000 word count, I don't think I could add anything to this work that would make it feel any more cohesive or complete. I genuinely think that this is the tightest my writing has ever been, and that I explored every corner of Hu Tao's story that I wanted to explore and made a complete exploration of grief, death, and loss in a short 9000 words.

But that isn't to say it's my best work overall. That's why it's only number 5. I think there are works that I do much bigger and more impressive things in a way that is more engaging and more fun to read.

4: What Do You Want?

"What Do You Want?" is a wonderful example of building a fic around a single scene. In the case of this fic, it was the scene towards the end of chapter three. One of the first things I came up with when coming up with this fic was the concept of Furina being so frustrated at the world that she lashes out physically against Arlecchino, and then screams "why won't you hit me back?"

From that little scene (and the help of the album which I took that name of the fic from) sprung this entire 27k word fic which remains as my most popular Genshin fic.

This fic was a turning point for me. This was the fic that taught me where I'm at my best: Angst fics that are somewhere in the ballpark of 30k words. And while I don't write fics of that length very much, I still think What Do You Want? was the fic that helped me fully understand what my strengths as a writer are. This was where I hit my stride, and it only took me roughly seven months of writing in order to do that.

This fic has one of my favorite lines I've ever written in it, and it comes from the beginning of the second chapter where Furina is regarding her body which was on the brink of starvation:

"She discovered this dying version of herself in the mirror when a nurse helped her change for the first time and she saw her body as it was: it was no longer a petite feminine form that she so dearly loved, but instead had no gender, only the horror of a body that had resorted to eating itself from the inside"

Growing up around as many people who had experience with EDs as I did, the understanding I got is that there is a sort of dull, dry horror that comes from seeing your body like that. This sort of understanding of "yeah, that's gonna kill me, but whatever," that your brain conjured up when you look in the mirror. I tried to capture that here: the narration states that there's supposed to be a horrific aspect to it, but it simultaneously delivers the observation in a way that comes off as dry and objective.

It's moments like that which make this fic special. I'm just really proud of the general emotional vibe that this one brings to the table, and the general progression of that vibe over time. I definitely do not think this one is a bad choice for being my top Genshin fic.

3: Letters for Pelageya

"Keep going, and see the beauty this world has to offer, because I promise that there are things infinitely more wondrous to look at than the stones beneath your feet."

I present to you my favorite line I have ever written, and it is from one of my oldest fics.

To this day, I still do not understand what got into me for me to write this fic. I wrote the entire thing in 26 days, and in those 26 days I went to some places that I honestly do not understand. I genuinely think I was possessed for that month.

I have always adored epistolary fiction, and letters in general are one of my favorite forms of writing because of how emotional and impactful and personal they are. They are the perfect use of words, in my opinion, and this fic was kind of my way of expressing that opinion.

This was the first fic I wrote that landed in that 30k word ballpark, and while I think I solidified my ability with the form in "What Do You Want?", this was the first time I really truly nailed a story from start to finish. Do I think this work is perfect? Fuck no. It's rough, it has some really strange moments, it could be a few thousand words shorter, it has a lot of problems. But it's special to me, and based on the comments from the last two chapters, the people that read it think the same.

Out of all my fics, I think the comments that I get under this fic are still my favorite. Although trout comes pretty damn close, but we'll get there when we get there.

2: Seas Change Into Mulberry Orchards

I genuinely do not know what it is about this fic, but whenever I open the project file for it and start writing for it, I swear I become possessed by the ghost of a very specific writing style that manifests itself through this fic and this fic only, and then refuses to do the same for anything else I write.

All of the comments I get about this fic call it "calm" or "peaceful" or something similar, and it's always wonderful to see those comments since that's exactly what I'm shooting for with it. The entire point of the fic is to be okay with gradual change without feeling pressured to do anything about the things happening around you. And considering the fic is currently sitting at 52,291 words as of writing and the two lesbiabs still haven't even confessed to each other, I think it's doing pretty good at that.

I'm honestly glad this is my most popular fic. I'm glad my most popular fic is this ship, as well, because this ship is kind of dead now. Back in the hayday of this ship, there were three fics that were the most popular: SCIMO, "Morsels of Fate" by AmniMarine, and "The Beginner's Guide to Consensual Workplace Relationships" by twelvekittensinatrenchcoat. Out of any of the big FuQing fics, SCIMO is the last one still running. Amni has moved on to other things, and kittens has done much the same.

The FuQing writing has been taken up by other folks, though. There are a few one-shots that pop up here and there, and the author Shifra4899 has been writing a really cute series of FuQing fics that carries on the torch that Amni, kittens and I lit.

Sometimes, when I think about this fic, I feel like those two immortals looking over the East Sea together, thinking about how the world has changed so much. This little corner of the internet has changed, yet I'm still here, and it's kind of cool. One day though this fic will end, and I'll look back on these few years with fondness.

1: it's possibly a trout

Oh trout, my beloved.

If you have read this fic all the way through and have read the author's notes for it, I doubt I have to explain to you why this is my favorite fic I've ever written and why I think this is my best work.

I came up with this concept off of a DarlingMistaken tweet, and then proceeded to spend multiple eight-hour work days doing nothing with my time on the clock except mulling the concept over in my head. I very rarely obsess over works, but I can say for absolute certain that I was obsessed with this fic. I did not start writing until I knew the layout of every chapter.

One of the things that I knew I wanted to do from the outset was try to emulate the ending of Everywhere At The End of Time which is still one of the most emotional moments in music I've ever heard. For those that haven't listened to the entire 8 hour project, the ending is pretty much impossible to put into words except to say you can feel what it's like to pass away through the music alone. I wanted to somehow emulate this experience through writing, and that's how I came up with the idea of Furina's narration slowly degrading chapter by chapter until the end, where there's very little except for the sparse sentence here and there until the last moment where she regains all of her lucidity.

Something I've wanted to write for a very long time has been a novel based on my Grandfather. That man was genuinely the most remarkable man I've ever met, and his story is something I have wanted to adapt into a proper novel since even before he passed. And one of the things that caused me to come up with this idea was a story that my aunt told about how my grandfather would continue to lose his toothbrush and how she would keep having to go to the store to buy him a new one. From that story, the line popped into my head: "The morning was fresh and my mind felt clear, yet I forgot where I had put my toothbrush."

Alzheimer's is a scary fucking disease. It's particularly insidious too because, unless you are particularly metacognizant, you won't realize what's happening for quite a while, hence "my mind felt clear, yet I forgot where I had put my toothbrush"; her mind felt perfectly fine, yet she was forgetting where she was putting mundane things that are genuinely very difficult to misplace. These sorts of things are incredibly unsettling, but are also so simple and mundane that it is not uncommon from those developing dementia or Alzheimer's to completely hide this stuff from loved ones or caretakers. They decide to bear the frustration on their own because they believe it's their fault entirely since, again, they do not know something is wrong. This is what my own grandfather did.

Furina's mental decline is modeled after what I saw happen to my own grandfather, and that alone is why I'm putting this fic at number 1. I just can't put it anywhere else.

But I also think this fic stands on its own merits. Even if I didn't have the emotional attachment to it that I do, I think I would still put it number 1 regardless.

The penultimate chapter I think is my best writing. I am genuinely so proud of what I pulled off in just a few hundred words. I think I portrayed Furina's mental decline really really well. I think I wrapped up the entire story really well. I think the addition of Madeline as a little symbol for Furina still being with Arlecchino even after her death is a really nice way of emotionally tying everything together. I just think I did everything to the absolute best of my ability.

And, again, I don't think I will ever write anything better than the second to last chapter.

I did that perfectly.

And honestly, if I never top it, I'm perfectly fine with that.

That's the one thing that I want to be my best writing: the writing I dedicate to someone as remarkable and amazing and caring and loving and sweet as my grandfather.

Apologies. I can't really talk about this fic w/o talking about my grandfather. But yeah that's that. All of my works ranked in order of what I think are my worst to best.

Thank you guys for making these two years absolutely wonderful, for allowing me to come out of my shell as a writer, for allowing me into this space, for being my friends, for sending me all the nice comments, for giving me all the suggestions, and everything else all y'all have done for me. Genuinely, these two years have changed me as a person so much ever since I posted that first chapter from my Grandparents' guest bedroom, and so much of that can be attributed to the things that have happened because of the people that read and enjoy my works about silly lesbians.

So again, thank you, and here's to many thousands more words <3333

[laebrumme]

Arlefuri is Interesting, Actually

So I was put onto a twitter thread that's been circulating around the Arlefuri community, and I was feeling to be in a bit of a fighting mood and I found a couple points brought up by the author to be the starting point for some more interesting discussions regarding fandom culture, so I decided it wouldn't hurt to have a "little" discussion around this thread and the points that are brought up.

A quick reminder here that I am not going to link the thread or use the author's name anywhere in here because this is not an attack post. While I am here to defend a ship that I really like and see a lot of value in against a really silly twitter post, I am not here to attack or be aggressive to anyone. This is something we really need to understand and my least favorite part about twitter is how it discourages thoughtful and elaborate response, which is why I'm writing this on my tumblr instead of writing a QRT or something. I want this to be thought out and civil, and there's a very good chance that the thread was written entirely in good faith, however questionable some of the arguments made are.

the amount of arlefuri shippers ive seen that keep going "you just hate it bc its yuri" without actually seeing an explanation why its such a good ship and why they keep defending it like its so canon.

Something that I've noticed as someone who has only been engaging in fandom for about a year and a half now and who got to see Arlefuri pretty much grow from inception to now is that, after a while (especially on platforms such as twitter that are so thoroughly infected by hate and aggression) communities will develop defense mechanisms based on certain patterns of how they've been attacked before. Especially in communities which are highly antagonized for one reason or another, it's easier to have a short list of most-likely reasons someone is attacking their ship than to actually engage with the argument. One of the most reliable and effective canned arguments that one might find in a particularly combative yuri enthusiast's toolbelt is the "you don't like yuri," or, in more extreme examples, the misogyny argument.

I'm not going to get into the MLM vs WLW in fandom discourse here because, quite frankly, I'm not interested and it's completely not related to anything going on here, however the argument is common within WLW ship communities because of the tension that exists between MLM, m/f, and WLW communities, especially because in a huge number of fandoms, MLM far outnumbers the WLW. It's a reliable argument to so many because, more often than not, the anti's argument is coming from a place of anti-yuri sentiment.

In the case of Arlefuri, attacks are so frequent that, for those that decide not to block and move on, it's more efficient to pull out a tool from the toolbelt instead of engaging with each and every anti post. Arlefuri shippers are, to put it bluntly, sick and tired of it and just kinda want to do their own thing.

yes, this sounds very yuriphobic as smn who ships renheng but i do ship yuri ships like acheswan, bronseele, clorivia, eimiko, and many more. not that im against rarepairs, but arlefuri is hardly a rarepair anymore, and the way the shippers are defending it, makes it feel like its as implied as the ships i mentioned above

I mean, doesn't everyone do this? Something else I've noticed is that every single HYV ship that has even the smallest basis in the canon has people that consistently go on about how, because of certain observations regarding design/symbolism/voice lines, the ship is canon. It's important to remember, though, that lot of it is playful banter or reactions borne of excitement, and very rarely are people actually insisting that Arlefuri is canon or even implied to be canon. Because with the exception of HI3 bronseele, there isn't a single HYV ship (that I know of) that is downright confirmed. And yes, that even includes Acheswan.

I think the observation being made here is a result of two things: Arlefuri as a ship just getting bigger, and how fed-up Arlefuri shippers are of being antagonized. The first point is very obvious: the more people there are out there to talk about a ship, the more confident and loud those discussions are going to become. The second one though is more interesting because I think, as a community gets antagonized more and more, a very natural response to people talking poorly about a thing you like is to engage with it even more. A lot of people, instead of taking the fight back to those that are attacking the ship, instead back away from the argument and, as if almost spitefully, engage with the ship even more. Hell, I've even seen some of my fellow arlefuri shippers talk about how this discourse is going to make them ship arlefuri even harder. It's just a natural response almost.

Also I genuinely don't understand what rarepairs have to do with the discussion at hand. It's brought up again later in the thread, and even there I'm not sure what point it's trying to get across. There's a though process there, but whatever it is it isn't communicated in the thread, which is no fault of the thread author since twitter is stupidly restrictive as a platform for arguments and expressing thoughts (that's why I'm writing this on tumblr).

literally what is the 'flavor' and 'dynamic' in arlefuri other than 'happy and grumpy' and 'enemies to lovers'??? they barely have any backstory together other than "girl one traumatizes girl two and gives her cake as an apology because it doesnt benefit her to be on bad terms with girl two". there is nothing appealing about their relationship, and honestly i feel like furina should just be her own person without that romantic nonsense.

Well I'm glad you asked!

Arlefuri is a ship that has a lot of layers and a lot of different interpretations, and I think the only way to get a proper understanding of why so many find the ship appealing is to go out onto the Arlefuri tag on ao3 and read some of more popular fics that are out there. However, I'm going to offer my personal understanding of the ship and why I enjoy it so much.

In short, the allure of Arlefuri to me lies in a simple concept: safety.

I think a lot of the misunderstanding around Arlefuri and why Arlefuri gets accused of being proship so often lies in a misunderstanding of Furina's story and what Arlecchino represents in said story. Namely, Arle wasn't the only person that made Furina feel unsafe during the events of the archon quest. Literally everyone that was involved in that quest was doing practically the exact same thing that Arlecchino did: cornering her into a position which would force her to reveal her identity as "false" archon. So coming out of the archon quest in Fontaine, Furina has not a single soul she can trust in Fontaine anymore because of how thoroughly traumatized she was in those last few days of her run as archon. Every single person involved in discovering the truth behind the Oratrice betrayed Furina in every sense of the word.

Obviously, the game has to make Furina warm up to the traveler for marketing sake (which is one of the only gripes I have about Furina's story), but aside from that, she still has a distaste for people outside. Evidence of this can be seen with how she talks in two distinct vocal modes which I'll get into here more in a bit.

This is all to say that, one, Furina is starting from scratch relationship-wise and can trust nobody, and two, that Arlecchino is no more of an antagonist than anyone else. The only difference is that Arlecchino was more forward with it, and Furina had built her up in her head as the big bad that would finally out the entire operation (that's where Furina's fear of Arlecchino comes from).

Where this all gets interesting is when you consider Arlecchino as pretty much a symbol for all that betrayal that Furina faced. Arlecchino, just like the traveler and crew, cornered her in a position by complete surprise that would, with one more move, force her to either prove herself as archon in one way or another, before they discovered that there's more to the story and moving their attention elsewhere. When you consider Arlecchino as a symbol of that, then what a relationship w/ Arlecchino represents is Furina learning how to trust and feel safe in the presence of other people.

This is a dynamic I explore in my own fic, "What Do You Want?" and is something that is explored to even more depth in the Arlefuri bible, "A Fatui Harbinger in Lady Furina's Court." Hell, even the biggest chapter of my own fic which is the catalyst for the relationship that is explored for the rest of the fic is literally called "Safety." The entire point of the ship is for Furina to find safety in someone and, through Arlecchino, to learn for the first time in her 500 years of life how to trust and love people.

I could continue on about why I enjoy about Arlefuri all day, if you can't tell, and I could start discussing the nuances of their grumpy/happy dynamic and all the gender stuff and various other examples of incredible writing and interpretations of the ship, but I think you get the idea. There's depth here. You just have to look for it.

arlefuri shippers+ships are fine IF you acknowledge that your ship is barely even canon (maybe until more infois released) and that there is no reason to be defending them so hard over very very very little crumbs, when most of those crumbs are actually headcanons that you made up yourself.

Again, nobody is earnestly going out there and defending the canonicity of Arlefuri. We're defending something completely different which I'll discuss in the next section. But even then, why should we? Why is a ship okay only if we acknowledge the lack of canonicity in a ship? We all are taking part in a culture that was literally borne of taking one canon or another and doing really silly things w/ it. That's why our fandom ancestors borrowed the term "canon" from religious studies and applied it to fandom: they needed a way to differentiate the stuff that was officially a part of the media and what was being written by fans.

We're all here to have fun. We're playing with dolls and making them kiss. There is absolutely no harm in us doing our own thing and engaging in a ship just as, say, a renheng shipper would. Just because a ship isn't canon doesn't mean that the shippers have to wear big signs on their backs that say "our ship is not canon and we are aware of that." This point feels strangely targeted in that way.

im not an arlefuri hater, infact, i was indifferent to it because i knew many people would ship it eventually, but seeing the ship grow more and more and the shippers attacking nonshippers with NO explanation on why they are defending such a copium ship is starting to make me hate it.

Okay, here's where the main discussion point is, and this right here is why I'm writing this whole essay/response thing.

This is a strawman.

This is not happening.

Every single Arlefuri shipper I've personally talked to could not care less if you don't like Arlefuri. Not every ship is for everyone, and there's nothing wrong with that. But there's a very big difference between not liking a ship and antagonizing a ship.

One of the things I absolutely hate about fandom is how much power lies in the accusation of being "proship." If someone is able to accuse someone of being proship and that accusation sticks, whether it's true or not, that person is screwed. And the same thing goes for ships. If a ship is successfully labeled as "proship" then that means that everyone that might publicly engage with that ship is going to also be labeled as proship, and that means they're going to be antagonized, even if there is nothing wrong with the ship itself.

Because people misunderstand a single cutscene in the game, people tend to label Arlefuri as, at best, toxic, and at worst, proship. And after a while, this gets tiring, especially for a community that is relatively small.

As stated before, Arlefuri shippers are so tired of being attacked and accused of various things, and because of that, engaging with people that attack the thing that we like in a respectful way becomes really really hard, and at some point, these defense attempts have started to lean more and more aggressive.

This is where I think that perception of Arlefuri shippers being so militant come from: they're defending a ship that they like in a rather aggressive and fed-up way which is very easy to interpret as attacking people for just having opinions.

Like I said before, there's a big difference between not liking a ship and antagonizing a ship.

For some reason, so many people antagonize Arlefuri. And because of how much it happens, responses have become, more often than not, either canned as discussed before, or angry.

i am lgbtqia+, i support and love love lgbtqia+ ships (including hetero ships bht thats for another conversation) but i really dont see why arlefuri is such a popular ship.

I agree, that is a separate conversation, but I find it really odd that the author found it important to spend valuable characters pointing this out.

like i said before, rarepairs are fine and fun, go for it. but if youre going to mindlessly attack people without explaining your reason, you're going to be just like most neuvifuri shippers who like to see 'nonchalant tall person' have sex with 'smaller, more childish (mentally) and petite person'. its not the ship you like, maybe its just the image, the fantasy, the thought. or you're just projecting.

There is a lot to unpack with this last point.

First of all, setting aside accusing arlefuri shippers of attacking again which we've talked about, this is straight up infantilizing Furina. Again, I'm assuming this thread was written in good faith, but if it wasn't, that's an insidious thing to throw into the thread to make that implication. As much as I'm not a fan of nvfr shippers, even they don't deserve that.

Furina is bubbly and energetic, silly and a bit out there, but she is not childish. If you pay attention to any of the quests she's in post Masquerade of the Guilty, you'll notice that (at least in the English dub although I'm assuming it carries to other dubs as well) Furina has two vocal modes with which she speaks: one for when she's in public situations with people she isn't super familiar or trusting with, and one for when she's talking one-on-one with the traveler or otherwise in situations where she feels safe. That latter vocal mode is what almost all of her voice lines in the character menu are spoken in, and is what you can consider her true self (her Ousia version of herself) which is much more thoughtful, calm, and straightforward. When she is acting as her true self, she is incredibly mature and her 500 years of life and stress really start to show.

What I'm assuming the author is thinking of when they call Furina mentally childish is how she acts when she's around various people. This is an act. She still pretends to be someone she's not when she's out and about, and that version of herself (her Pneuma aligned self) is one that is designed to be as appealing as possible: energetic, silly, and slightly arrogant. Once again, it's a character, or if you're more partial to Autistic/neurodivergent Furina headcanons, it's her masking.

Another really weird implication that comes out of this last point (at least to me) is that any and all Arlefuri content is just smut. That's obviously not true--just take my corpus of Arlefuri work as three examples out of however many. And I think it's not fair to judge the morality of most ships purely on the smut. Yes, sex can be a very useful tool for exploring the dynamics of characters, and that is used quite often in Arlefuri (same as literally every other ship known to fandom), but, w/r/t Arlefuri specifically, so much more interesting discussions exist outside of the bedroom, and some of the most seminal and impressive Arlefuri works are those that do not focus around sex. "A Fatui Harbinger in Lady Furina's Court" by DarlingMistaken, yes, is rated Explicit, but only because of one or two chapters. The entirety of the fic is an exploration of Furina's PTSD and the safety dynamic I talked about earlier. Eris's "All Bark No Bite" is completely Arlefuri sex free for the first 16 chapters and has a lot of interesting discussions of Furina's loneliness leading up to the smutty chapters. "Embers" by ChonkCatto is a slow burn romance which dives even deeper to the psychological trauma both Arlecchino and Furina have faced, as well as an exploration of Furina discovering her sexuality. And while I'm not a huge fan of tooting my own horn like this, I'm personally really proud of the discussions I have about power, trust, agency, and how love needn't be loud and passionate in my sister arlefuri fics, "What Do You Want?" and "There Must Be Something Here".

And I also want to point out that literally every ship any of us likes is purely because of the image, fantasy, and thought. That's the point of fandom. I know the author is particularly talking about the sexual side of things, but even then, that's why we do what we do. We like the idea of our favorite characters smooching, and so we make them smooch. Sometimes it's for reasons that takes an essay 3k words and counting to explain, and sometimes it's because "I find both of them hot." There's nothing wrong with that, and there never has been. If you want to read more about my thoughts on this topic specifically, you can read my previous post on here, "A Short Discussion on Fandom Culture"

Finally, I want to leave y'all with a reminder that discourse like this a fire that only you can fuel. Twitter as a platform is designed to both encourage saying things that will bait a reaction and to encourage responding to said bait in as reactionary of a way as possible. And because of the character restraints built into the app, that makes communicating your full thoughts incredibly difficult, and starts forcing people to rely on gotcha's and mantras instead of properly discussing things. And when people start echoing the same things over and over, distain in those spouting those mantras is developed in people, no matter the intention. So just block and move on. Take a page out of the fuqing shippers' book and just move on, because unless we all engage in long discussions over thousands of words, nobody is going to listen to each other because twitter is designed for people to not listen to each other.

This is a war that nobody is going to win, and it's so much better to pack up your things and return home from the front lines. It's so much better if you let people like what they like and not like what they don't like and say what they will say. We're all just a bunch of random ass nobodies beefing about fictional characters.

Just block and move on. It's so much better.

Trust me.

[laebrumme]

A Short Discussion on Fandom Culture

I’m going to admit: I’m very unfamiliar with fandom culture. I only really got into fandom in the past handful of years, and before that I observed from a distance. I always was one to enjoy media in a very insular way and my internet usage existed elsewhere. Because of that, coming across fandom discourse that seems to be run-of-the-mill to folks who have been in these circles for a long time has been a little jarring for me, especially because of how emotionally people engage with said talking points. It definitely does not help that these points are being discussed on twitter, a platform notorious for limiting your ability to communicate to the best of your ability, but even then I find it kind of fascinating how emotional fandom spaces are. As somebody who has problems with not approaching anything with her emotions and keeps things very analytical and logical, I kind of love it. Sometimes. Other times, it tends to make my brain bootloop trying to comprehend the kind of stuff people say.

For an example of this, I want to approach a particular twitter thread from my perspective as somebody who is new to this whole fandom thing and only started engaging in full capacity through fanfiction just under a year ago. I’m also just curious to see what happens when something like this is thrown into the ringer.

So the tweet goes as such: in a quote retweet asking for what amounts to Honkai: Star Rail related hot takes, a twitter user writes:

“Headcanoning a characters[sic] sexuality is the cheapest way to relate to a character. And many of you in this fandom who do so, only do so because that's all YOU are. No character, no life experience...just a bunch of robots who have nothing more to them than their sexuality.”

Rhetorically, the first tweet of this thread has holes more numerous than moldy cheese, but that’s something I’ve been trying to keep myself from picking at because, at the end of this day, this discourse doesn’t have much room for rhetoric or anything of the sort. Like I said in the opening, it’s almost all grounded in emotion, and it seemingly always has been if my many hours of watching fandom historians talk about the exploits of various characters on early fandom internet are to be believed. And it’s important to remember that’s really where fandom comes from: this entirely emotional and completely illogical connection we have with characters and stories that make us incredibly giddy and excited to even think about. It’s an excitement that leads us to draw, write stories, and create headcanons because the only thing better than the characters we like are versions of characters we like that we can relate to.

When I first read this tweet, one of my first thoughts was “what does ‘cheap’ mean in this context?” Because it really is kind of an empty word in this context since it’s assigning value to something that simply doesn’t. What constitutes a “cheap” way of relating to a character? Why is relating to headcanoned sexuality less valuable than relating to something like headcanoned race or gender or trauma? In fact, how is any of that less valuable than relating to canon race or canon gender or canon trauma?

Later in the thread, OP brings up an example with a web manga called She Loves to Cook and She Loves to Eat. I will admit first hand I have not read this, but the summary they gave talks about one of the characters having an upbringing which did not discuss any concepts of queerness and ends up having a discussion with another character about being gay, where she comes to the conclusion that she is gay. They then go on to say:

“THAT'S a real relatable story and that's what the story is about, so for me in comparison slapping a "she's lesbian" onto a character who's story is not about that In an attempt to relate to them feels cheap, when there are REAL relatable gay characters who's stories tackle these sorts of issues. Like make a Doujin/fanfic those[sic] never hurt anyone but all this fanon being canon stuff just feels kinda cheap from where I'm standing.”

I’m going to get out of the way the one single point out of this thread that I agree with: and that’s the fact that I’m not a huge fan of people asserting things that are very much not canon as being such. There is a difference between canon and implication, and a lot of people jump the gun rather quickly when they see something that softly implies queerness and call it canon. Now, will I admit that the line between canon and implication is rather fuzzy? Of course. At what point did Kavaithem become indisputably canon? I don’t know, and I don’t know if anybody could point it out. But as far as I’m concerned, even as somebody who isn’t into BL, it is as close to canon as something can get without there being an Azure Waters moment.

Aside from that, I think something that needs to be kept in mind is that why people want to relate to characters differs wildly. I would aline myself somewhere in the same realms as the OP in terms of why I relate to characters: I find a lot of value in headcanoning certain characters in certain ways and exploring those relationships. That’s why I love writing Arlefuri so much: there’s layers to it. It is a really fascinating ship to engage with on an intellectual and artistic level, because it is toxic if you choose to depict it that way. That’s also why I love headcanoning Hu Tao as ace, even though I am very much not ace. Hu Tao is such a fascinating character to me, and especially as a character that gets very sexualized all over the place online in a very specific way, giving her back sexual agency to me is very fascinating.

But there’s an entirely different side of the story: people headcanon characters as a certain sexuality because it makes them happy. And if you really want to be reductive, you can take the entire previous paragraph and translate it to “I headcanon Arlecchino as a lesbian and Hu Tao as asexual because it makes me happy.” Just because I can throw some intellectual reasoning behind it doesn’t mean that it’s automatically more valid than the person who headcanons Robin as a Lesbian purely because she’s pretty and has jewelry on her face with the colors of the lesbian flag. And again it goes back to that idea that this entire fandom thing to me is letting the emotions win over the logic and doing whatever makes you feel happy. And for some people, that’s headcanoning their favorite character to be their sexuality because they have no other way of expressing their sexuality, didn’t get to grow up expressing their sexuality, or because their sexuality isn’t expressed commonly in media and they want to feel represented.

“… Relating to a character has gotta be something deeper, so slapping a "She's lesbian" onto a character who's story isn't about that when there are stories that protray[sic] real and relatable struggles is cheap to me. A good amount of my favourite[sic] characters aren't my sexuality and I don't have to headcanon them as such, just for me to relate to them. So here's where it is, if you need to rely on some headcanon to make a character relatable then what does that say about you?”

I really don’t think there are people that headcanon a character as a sexuality purely in order to relate to them, and instead I think it’s the other way around. People will relate to a character and headcanon them to be their sexuality just to make relating that much easier and more enjoyable. (Again, the idea that this is all just for fun and people do it to make their time interacting with things more enjoyable.)

So no, I definitely don’t think that relating to a character has to amount to something “deeper,” because, putting aside the fact that “deeper” doesn’t really mean anything, it’s important more than ever to remember that maybe to me or you saying a character is a lesbian might not mean much, but to someone else, it might mean the world. And beyond that, there is nothing else anybody can say about the person behind the screen aside from that person themselves. Nobody can say how shallow or deep of a person they are, because we’re all people hiding behind screens and keyboards that only share very curated versions of ourselves to the people out there, even if reflexively, so the person that headcanons a random character as a lesbian for no other reason than they want to might have the most interesting life behind the screen, and they interact with such “simple” headcanoning because they want some normalcy or simplicity in their life.

To me, how somebody chooses to headcanon characters tells me nothing about who they are because there are an infinite number of reasons why they might do such a thing in such a way. And after watching toxic fandom for a while now, I really think that’s where things break down: people forget that the person on the other side of the screen isn’t them. They make the assumption that the person on the other side of the screen has their life or their belief system, but was led astray. That’s not true: even the OP of this thread lives in a completely different situation from my own, has entirely different life experiences from my own, and has a completely different belief system to my own, and when toxic fandom forgets that, they go into discussion with the belief that some strongly worded tweets will “set them straight” so to speak, when in reality even a two thousand word essay talking about a short tweet thread probably won’t sway the OP at all, and I accept that. That’s why my main purpose for this is to talk about toxic fandom culture I’ve seen at large, using OP’s tweet as a starting point. I want to share my opinion just as much as OP did.

And, for the record: as a person who likes to headcanon and relate to characters much the same as the OP of this thread, I can pretty confidently say that I have a lot less character and life experience compared to the people on my timeline that headcanon out of nothing but vibes. People that are willing to engage in pure and fanatical whimsy just because they feel like it are often the most interesting.