sleeptowns

[sleeptowns]

a year (or so) of fics, in retrospect

once every handful of years i remember to look back at the collection of projects i’ve finished recently and to simulate a critique as if i’m an art school student — and also as if i’m the haunted teacher’s assistant who wants to be gentle on the prof’s behalf but actually hates your work and also i am the other students who have been sitting there for seven hours straight and can’t offer much more except say, “it’s fine.” a one-man critique day, all parts played by me. 

sometimes i do this and the last period of writing has been drier than a pizza slice left in the winter sun, but this time i’m lucky that these last couple of years have been the closest i’ve had to a writing pax romana.

with that said, i’m not entirely sure how valid i am whenever i think these days that my writing has gone through some drastic changes in the last year; i’m not even sure if it’s accurate to call any of it growth, though i’m aware it’s the sort of thing i won’t have a clear perspective on until a few years after the fact. but i do know that i’m lucky to have so many works to act as markers for different periods of my writing, and while it’s far from a sure method of evaluation, there are parts there that i’m able to at least assess, if not outright measure. in the last year or so, my fics have started mutating towards — not really a separate sort of output than my previous ones, but definitely older somehow. older and quite different because of it: stylistic choices i would have steered clear of before, failed and/or lacklustre genre explorations, even relationship dynamics that were previously unfamiliar territory. my most recent fic feels like a culmination of all my attempts at wrestling with my writing in the ring, and now that it’s a few weeks behind me and i get to look at it with fresh(er) eyes and accept that it’s my favourite child (i’m sorry flls... you’re not too far behind), it’s also reminded me that i have a now overdue fic roundup to write. 

tangentially speaking, it’s interesting that you never really hear about self-taught writers. self-taught artists, yes, and self-taught musicians, but never quite self-taught writers. i don’t exactly purport to have taught myself everything i know about writing, and i know you can’t really be self-anything as a writer; what i lack in technique and finesse learned from proper writing classes, teachers, and/or workshops, i owe to the media i’ve consumed, good and bad, as well as to the creators i love and to all the thoughtful readers i’ve had over the years. if i’m self-taught in any way, then the self as a teacher was reared by countless others who have honed in me a limitless capacity to be an observer to stories, mine and all else. 

this post is just a roundup of all my fics from december 2020 to january 2023, including only the ones with enough substantial content to write about, which disqualifies a lot of the fics i left at one or five scenes max but qualifies the ones i abandoned at one chapter. just a little something for me to reference as i figure out where to take my writing next and hopefully move towards some kind of ✨ growth ✨ lol 

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FIRST LOVE, LATE SPRING december 2020 to march 2021, jujutsu kaisen trial element | dual pov romance, multimedia (?)

i covered a bit of the early chapters and conceptualization for flls in a separate post, but as i was reflecting on how to write a continuation, it occurred to me that if there’s a clear before and after to the current state of my writing, then the first portion of flls chapter five is where i’ll find it. 

when i was drafting my 58393th version of that chapter — nothing was working, none of it was the right vibe i needed, most of them too detached or too on-the-nose but never the perfect middle — i happened upon trying second person pov by accident. i’m not the biggest fan of second person (though to be fair, i don’t think anyone is) but by that point i was so sick of writing and rewriting this one section and not getting anywhere that i wondered if i should just lean all the way into that disgust. why not do something i hated entirely? and act of desperation as that was, the moment i started writing in curt, nauseating second person, i knew it was the right choice. 

the thing about writing flls!yuuji is that he felt both alive and unfamiliar. flls!megumi was easier to understand, even if he was trickier to write — but yuuji, i had to really work to get to know. one thing about him that i knew to be careful about from the very beginning of jjk is that it would be too surface level to think this boy is an extrovert. yuuji is usually painted as an energetic, sunny person, and i don’t think he’s not that, but there’s something about yuuji that’s also very internal and almost innately… isolated? i don’t know if that’s necessarily the right word, but there’s a lot about him as a character that’s out of view or grasp, which ironically i find people taking at face value. in flls, he required a lot more balance than megumi, who was a dam waiting to be relieved of its duties. flls!yuuji knows who or what he is — how could he not, when he’s never had a choice but to be this person, this kid who lost his grandpa, this kid who needs love but doesn’t know how to ask for it because he doesn’t even know there are forms of it he can ask for? 

how to write a character like that? how to nudge someone who doesn’t reveal even at his most revealing towards the christmas eve fight i had set up in the beginning of flls chapter one? back before chapter six of flls came out, i saw a lot of people argue that megumi and yuuji just needed to communicate, and yes, of course they do, but i was also very adamant as i started chapter five that the real tragedy about them is that communication will do nothing in the end. even if they magically became master communicators about their needs and wants and insecurities, none of it will change the fact that neither of them are ready to love and be loved by the other person. at least not in any way that constitutes a relationship that feels like love. 

i think that’s the key to writing the relationship in flls. it was never a question that they loved each other, and how much. never. this is probably the first piece of ~growth i appreciated about flls. it would be easy to write a romance where the main conflict is them not knowing the other loved them back, but flls got rid of that quite early. i left no room for doubt — or at least this is the hope — that flls!itfs loved each other in a way no one else would be able to compare to. they’re it for each other. but if it had been as simple as portraying that, then i never would have finished flls at all, and it definitely wouldn’t have been my longest fic at the time. 

instead — what if it was a given that they loved each other, and it still wasn’t enough? what kind of story can we spin about that? what kind of questions and answers can we find?

that’s actually such a pretentious way to frame that, but the fact of the matter is that i needed to not waste space now that we’re five chapters in. this is the beginning of the end. how do we shift gears and take the tone of the entire story along with it? i don’t know if there’s something about second person pov that’s just inherently full of dread, but it did quite a bit of work in chapter five. it felt disembodying for me as a writer, and i could only hope the same for readers. i was really, really worried some people will give up reading altogether thinking all of chapter five will be in second person, but i didn’t want to compromise. it was going to be second person for most of their real relationship or nothing: vaguely dissociative, intensely drained, with no room to actually enjoy being each other’s boyfriend. the main challenge was to not go from zero to a hundred in a snap. i had the room to do so in only one chapter, but i had to find a way to keep a tight rein on the pace or else the whole fic will fail. 

there also had to be love. and longing. and a desperation to make it work. i think that was yuuji in a nutshell — someone desperate to make it work, whatever this thing is. that’s what constitutes his strengths and his weaknesses, in canon and in flls. i wanted to find a way to make that palpable to a reader the way it was palpable to me while writing yuuji in second person. somewhere along making sure to tether myself to him by knowing what pieces of media he’d reference (high school musical and fullmetal alchemist) and his life outside of megumi (work, basketball, tea with nanami, skateboarding), i had to also drown with yuuji in the hope that the reader would follow. chapter three afforded me the luxury of only examining yuuji from the omniscience of a writer writing in third person — i could dismantle him through the therapy scene, could show myself and the reader a way to understand him, but i could not take us there to where he is. 

i don’t know how successful the second person pov was, ultimately, though i’d be lying if i said it wasn’t what i thought was truly best at the time. it probably wasn’t that creative to anyone but me, but it gave me a nudge towards different ways to explore… vibes. atmosphere, maybe, is the more formal word for it. if not for the second person pov choice in flls, i wouldn’t have been nudged towards kamo’s newsletter to act as the midway point of the story, the last palate cleanser i’ll allow myself and the reader, and i never would have written please let me love you forever and days of brutalism and hairpin turns the way i did. i owe a lot to that tiny but crucial choice, as does flls as a whole. everything that followed that section — the fight, the aftermath of the fight, the breakup — relied on it to make themselves work, and it’s funny (and valuable to note) how it’s something as seemingly inconsequential as a pov choice that set the tone. 

especially because there’s nothing special, really, about those following scenes. the christmas eve fight, megumi’s conversation in the car with geto, the break-up itself — all of it followed my standard flow of dialogue. sure, there’s more tension when you’re writing an argument, let alone when writing scenes that will inevitably lead to a break-up, but all scenes, particularly dialogue, have to feel fraught with some kind of energy and inevitable anyway. for the remainder of chapter five and six, i just coasted on the tone set up by the beginning of chapter five, and that’s knowledge that has served me quite well since. atmosphere goes a long, long way, and with my writing style, a healthy balance between dialogue and introspection will take me the rest of the way to the finish line. the part of flls that i’ve heard people find the most heartbreaking were also its simplest. all of chapter six is dedicated to one wedding, and chapter seven to one evening. i wish i could say there was a trick there, that i agonized over how to write such important scenes, but my personal takeaway is that there is no trick. the point is that you get the story to a point where those scenes write themselves; there’s nowhere else for the flow to go, and geto’s gentle unpacking of megumi, the last few scenes before megumi and yuuji break up, and the bittersweet reunion after two necessary years — i can only hope they carried a sense of “this is the only way it could have gone” the way they did for me. geto doesn’t tell megumi anything we don’t already know from earlier chapters, if only just now put into words. megumi and yuuji also don’t tell each other anything, in the breakup scene and the getting back together sections, that we haven’t already gleaned from them. from the moment kamo’s newsletter ended and we headed into act two — everything was just wrapping up what i left for myself.  

it’s worth noting that i did try to complicate the final chapter a bit. i tried a split pov between yuuji and megumi at first, as a way to finally reconcile their two perspectives, but that felt too cheesy. i tried an outing to nagoya for nobara’s birthday, tried to divide the pov amongst the people in their lives (junpei, nanami, nobara, etc), and even to do my usual cyclical structure of starting with the same image we did in chapter two, this time in yuuji’s funabashi apartment — but those all felt too on the nose. i trusted my flls readers. maybe that’s what all it came down to. i trusted them to know these people, and this story, and i didn’t want to do too much and compromise that trust. and in the end, i would argue, returning to simplicity made the story what it was. 

something i love to think about is how to explain my fics to others. i know it’s been said a lot that the ao3 tagging system has convinced a mini generation of writers that tags and names of tropes are all you need to pitch/be pitched a story, and i wholeheartedly agree. or i might just be terrible at advertising my work, with an obnoxious aversion to learning how to do it better to boot, but to be fair, i think my premises are all just as boring as they are ridiculous. flls is a college au with two friends with benefits turned fake boyfriends turned real boyfriends turned exes. that’s it. there’s nothing else in the plot but that. yet it’s a lot more to me than that, and sometimes that’s all you have when you send a story out into the world. the knowledge that it was briefly yours, and now it isn’t, but that doesn’t at all devalue what you’ve taken away from spending time with it. 

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US april 2021, jujutsu kaisen trial element | short form, childhood friends

this is one of a handful of attempts at writing a trope i don’t love all that much, inspired largely by the atmosphere in “horatio” by t.j klune. i was very conflicted about this fic when i first published it, primarily because it was so short and written in a sparse style i didn’t know how to evaluate, and partly because it didn’t feel substantial. in a post i’ve put on private since, i’d written: 

what if i repeat the same themes in another context? that doesn’t make the theme carry any less weight as long as i put heart and sincerity and compassion into how i’m writing about it. there’s something that is equally as much self-deprecation as it is borderline vanity in me placing these rules upon myself. i’ve always known i wrote first and foremost out of love, out of what makes me excited to write — and that still applies here. i was thrilled to be able to experiment with a short, snappy fic. and that’s far more important, isn’t it, than whether i’m writing a different dissertation angle on love or friendship or family or career? it doesn’t feel like it, no, but it should, because i know it is. i know that what matters to me is that writing is fun and compassionate, and i know that as long as one person finds comfort in a world i’ve built, it’s enough.

i don’t sound very convinced there, and i wasn’t. i still don’t know what to make about us. i like that it’s short, and i endeavour to write more short fics with nothing specific or significant about them — but it’s hard to stomach its existence, let alone see it as something to love. it just feels so… not empty, but definitely less than what i’m used to asking from myself. it’s short, it’s sweet, it’s snappy. it’s also formulaic in its own sparse way, and i think it works because of the sweetness, but the truth is that if i hadn’t written it for itafushi week, i would never have greenlit it for publishing. i still wrestle nowadays with wanting to delete it, but it matters so little to me that i can’t even justify that much. it’s a weird limbo of a story, though i still hope to explore this kind of writing more in the future. 

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SOME KIND OF WE june 2021, jujutsu kaisen trial element | sequel to existing complete story

broke my own rules here by revisiting a story past its run, but to be very fair, it was less out of sentiment (though there was also that) so much as me startling at my first proper reread of the latter half of flls and realizing there are still unresolved arcs for megumi because the final chapter set two years later only had yuuji’s pov. not many of them, and none especially urgent, but i thought it would be a good opportunity to reorient the story to something quieter and more mature than what the central conflicts in flls left room for. i’m not convinced the back-and-forth between pieces of their recent few months being together and the present evening worked as seamlessly as i wanted it to, but it was still a nice opportunity to use a non-linear narrative to explore the growth and development of a relationship that i left at quite the bittersweet open-endedness. what was only delicately certain by the end of flls was made concretely certain through some kind of we, even if it did run a bit too sentimental and saccharine. but i think it can be forgiven, considering what yuuji and megumi went through in flls proper. 

the main challenge of this fic was figuring out which portions of their life post-flls were worth including, and the first draft had five potential sections:

tokyo, for megumi’s first visit back after moving to chiba, mostly dedicated to him realizing that home — after being rooted for so long to this city, this one apartment with his dad, the same neighborhood and transit lines, to the gojo-geto household — now finally belongs somewhere else, with someone else. 

funabashi, most of which was preserved in the version that was published. 

sendai, to visit grandpa itadori’s grave, which i decided to streamline into a single scene at the end of the final some kind of we draft to cut away the excess and break it down to the core of why i wanted them to make this visit — which is to hammer home for yuuji that he isn’t alone anymore, that he has someone taking care of him and loving him without fail and with care, and to give megumi the agency to solidify, for his own sake, that he’s someone who means the whole universe to yuuji. enough that what place is his will always and solely be his, and enough that megumi will be allowed to love and take care of another person in a way that’s both eternal and an ever-evolving work in progress. 

okinawa, for a trip that was only referenced as a backdrop in the final version but that i still like to think a lot about even now. a cc anon said once that the gojo-geto household must be so lonely with all the kids grown up, but as i talked about in another reply once (it’s too far back for me to have time to dig out at this point), i do love to imagine yuuji and megumi being uncles to the next generation, even if not outright parents themselves. sometimes you don’t know what you’re capable of giving as someone who was denied so much as a kid until you see someone so young, a stranger to the world, and know what to give them precisely because you didn’t have it once. and between yuuji not having much family and megumi’s life being complicated by the fact that he has too much family, i think they’re well-equipped to be uncles to tsumiki’s kids and beyond. and i was tempted for a bit to show this in the annual okinawa trips i mentioned in the final version of skow, but there just isn’t enough space without becoming superfluous. 

kuantan, to visit nanami, mostly to reconsolidate the rather serious interaction megumi and nanami had in flls into something gentler, considering he’s still family to yuuji and while nanami might say yuuji doesn’t need his blessing, yuuji will want it anyway. i never did end up writing this part, so it’s not exactly canon to the au and i’m hesitant to make it so, but the idea was to end with megumi asking for both nanami’s blessing and help to propose to yuuji on that malaysia trip.

the end result for this fic was a little lesson for me in cutting and cutting and keeping my hand light on the source, until i’m left with what i consider necessary. the final version of some kind of we is more a collection of vignettes than a straightforward account of megumi and yuuji’s life together post-flls, which i found much more strangely fitting. i feel like i spent so much of flls trying to get them to a point where they’re ready to be with each other, and i just wanted to dedicate skow to them not just making it work but building love on top of the foundations they secure. it’s one thing to portray that through a whole fic dedicated to each milestone; it’s another to write ordinary moments that are made extraordinary because they have chosen that for and with each other. neither of them say i love you out loud in the entire fic, but i wanted there to be no doubt that they do say it. that they do love each other, and that this part isn’t the obstacle it used to be. they’re just some kind of them, together, and this time it doesn’t feel bittersweet for me to send them off to the world for good knowing there’s love falling out of the spaces between each vignette i wrote. 

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HAND IN UNLOVABLE HAND october 2021, jujutsu kaisen trial element | fantasy au

yikes. one of two fics in this round-up that i abandoned at chapter one. started this because an idea occurred to me while reading the atlas six, wrote until i had to stop, then didn’t look back once even when it would have served me to. 

i flew too eagerly close to the sun with this one, truly, but as far as intentions go, i think both my mind and heart were in the right place. it’s quite clear where this one went wrong: i had neither time nor the energy to dedicate to it; i started it on the same whim i start most other things but this time didn’t have the passion for it — and i confess i just didn’t have the patience required to work on writing the story i wanted to write.

it was also one of those lessons in how often big ideas — or an attempt at them — cannot sustain a story. i had what i thought were clear ideas and intentions about the themes i wanted to cover in this one (the downfall of religious devotion, reconstruction, academic institutions versus personal/individual responsibility, all of which just look like buzzwords now that i’m typing them out, omg), but it just didn’t leave room for the kind of story i like to write. i guess my main takeaway here is that the pitfall of high(er) concept genre stories is that you have to make space for the world at the cost of room for character writing; it’s just the nature of how much space in the narrative you can allot for each individual aspect of the story, and with stuff like fantasy and sci-fi, the worldbuilding takes up a significant amount more than your run-of-the-mill slice of life story where the only world i have to worry about sketching is where someone lives and works. 

i do like some parts? it’s kind of crude, how i tried to reconcile my writing style with genre-specific bits, but it’s not all terrible. this sequence is alright:

Megumi was seven the first time he restored something. 

Every part of it had been an accident, and he remembers it now only in fragments. The wet rag in his hand as he wiped down the dining hall tables, having to climb the chairs to get to each corner. The horrible echo of something shattering in the kitchen, where Tsumiki had been tasked to do all the dishwashing for the evening. The panic on her face when Megumi got to her, both of them crowding around the shards of ceramic left by what was once a plate. The spill of harsh candlelight from above the sink, the harsher shadows it sent dancing around the broken glass. 

But he does remember the remembering. The knowing of what the plate had looked like once, the image behind his eyes anchoring him in place as he latched onto the curl of the shadows on the floor. It would be more intuitive, more rudimentary, than anything he’d learn to do later in life, propelled by the worry on Tsumiki’s face and the footsteps he swore he could hear coming towards them from the other end of the servants’ quarters they called home back then—but it had taken only a single blink for the shadows to cover the plate, tighten around it into darkness, and then retreat to where they were, leaving a clean, untouched plate in the middle of the kitchen floor. 

it could be better, but it still could be worse. and i do like the overall architectural imagery and how i managed to scrounge up some standard fare coziness somewhere in the cold, almost-medieval setting. 

as far as disastrously failed ventures go, this one could be a lot more embarrassing than it is. i’m not mad at it. it’s far from good enough, and if i didn’t write it in such a frenzy, i probably never would have allowed it to be published. but. it’s a useful failure. 

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PLEASE LET ME LOVE YOU FOREVER march to june 2022, blue period trial element | five-character gen dynamic, multimedia

what a... headache of a project. bit off more than i could chew without choking and decided to take even more bites each new chapter because why the hell not, apparently. i do appreciate how un-edited this fic is, despite it all. it feels the most bleeding-heart of all my fics from this past year or so, and it’s nice to look back at this and know exactly when i shifted my approach to it altogether because, again, why not. it’s such a valuable “why not?” to have. it’s nice when i don’t feel quite as… under surveillance? when writing a story. and i get to just go off the rails a bit. a lot, actually, with this one. it’s nothing crazy because i don’t think i can write anything crazy (though i think hairpin turns had blinks of it), but there’s definitely plenty of choices that i’m surprised i decided on with a sober mind. 

to be fair, they weren’t exactly mindblowingly successful. if i were to rate this fic out of five, despite all my fondness for it, i’d maybe give it a 2.75. it’s a well-earned mark, and i have a special soft spot for people who have read it, but i’m not mentally proud of it. emotionally so, maybe, in whatever way i can be, but if this fic didn’t feel so intimate with a much cozier readership and comment section, i’d be a lot crueler to it than i am, i think. as it is, it makes for wonderful conversation and reflection for me, and it’s always fun to consider how a story about a disbanded idol group became a metaphor for childhoods lost to growing up too fast and also involved alternate universes. 

but cycling through five povs really is too much, i think, and if it was exhausting for me to write then i imagine it was just as exhausting to read. a nicer alternative would have been to stick to one pov for each chapter, but even that was a lot to juggle considering there were also smaller dynamics going on in the background with each character. within the core group of five alone, there were thirty-one variations of scenes to write, including individual introspection and pairs — and that’s not to take into consideration trios, or groups of four or the whole five plus a secondary character, for example. i don’t know how i pulled off my usual character study here. i don’t know if i did. 

another thing about this fic is that i’m still not sure why a time loop didn’t work. i wanted it so badly to work. i thought it would be fun, but i guess time loops aren’t necessarily compatible with prose. there’s something about repetition and looping that’s best visually, but even if i had been able to stick to imagery and vibes, it would have gotten tedious at some point for me and a reader considering the quantity/length i tend to need. just something to keep in mind if i get the urge to keep trying time loops in future works and wonder why it’s not sticking seamlessly. as with a lot of things in life, if you have to force it then maybe it’s not meant to be there. or maybe you have to go shortform, narrow down the playing field?

one thing i’d commend this fic for is how it managed to unpack so much between dynamics that barely exist in canon. that, and how it managed to pack so many formats into one story — song lyrics, album reviews, tweets, a play, nonfiction, a profile, wikipedia pages, messages, i don’t even know how many more — while maintaining a semi-cohesive tone throughout. there was a lot of fun there, in figuring out how to adapt your typical characterizing to a format you haven’t tried before: how would kuwana write a preface to hashida’s book? would this particular character include rhymes in their song lyrics, or are they more of a diaristic stream of consciousness kind of lyricist? what medium best translates this character’s personality? what medium best conveys this dynamic’s under-the-skin knowing of each other? who sees more than the others, and how can i show that without using the same structure of two or three characters talking in a setting that doesn’t change? 

my favourite part is probably the fake album review at the top of chapter four? there’s something giddying about the research-like quality of figuring out how to perfect the tone that music reviewers tend to default to, but also sobering about how easily adapted this fake idol group’s history is from real life. the easiest part of the entire fic was making this group feel real to me, situated in the real life history of j-idols and beyond, even if i admit to shying away from being explicit about the worst things that would still have been grounded in reality. some references to real life idol incidents worked a little too well, but there was also how clean it felt to spin fictional lore for this group in that fake album review. from their individual songwriting styles to tobi’s own background in-story to the kind of themes and concepts a faux pretentious pitchfork reviewer might like to talk about — it was just incredibly fun. i don’t know when else i’d get the chance to write something like that. everything else paled in comparison to it soon after, though i do also tolerate whatever my writing was doing at the end of chapter five, even if some parts of that chapter also feel lacklustre through a hypercritical lens. it doesn’t hold up under extremely rigorous scrutiny, even if i consider the fact that i’d just wanted the fic wrapped up as soon as i could at the time. it could be better, more so than all the other fics in this post could be better. but i don’t mind too much that it isn’t better. i mind it a little. just a little. but its flawedness is also what forced the multimedia format to happen in the first place, and that, i like a lot.

there’s a fair amount that this fic did quite more than alright, i think. if nothing else, it was useful as a playground that i didn’t have to be too finicky about. it will be one of those projects i’ll look back at someday and laugh deliriously over because how did i think that was the only way to make it work, but with the facilities i had at the time, it’s definitely not a shitshow. it has a lot of heart — which doesn’t necessarily redeem awful works, but in passable ones, those parts of the writing meet each other halfway. please let me love you forever holds its own weight, which is plenty more than i can say for most of my other experiments. plus it contains a background relationship that is not at all the focus of the story yet will probably haunt me forever. it’s always the ones you least expect to matter that will ripple further down the line, etc.

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LOSER TAKES ALL july 2022, tomodachi game trial element | soulmates, mystery au

another unpublished little guy left to rot at one complete chapter. i don’t really have any huge problems with this one, just that i tired of its demands very quickly and didn’t have enough attachment to the dynamics in it to muster up any motivation for. but tomodachi game, and especially yuuichi and kei, are so uniquely positioned for a fic like this, and i don’t resent past me for approaching it this way at all. is a soulmate bond that fosters a telepathic link between people who come back from a brush with death kind of an unhinged premise for a mystery au? yes. but so is remodeling a breakfast restaurant with my mom and the guy i didn’t know confessed to me in high school and who is now literally displaced in more ways than one by said remodeling, and even also acting is all i know so here i am trying to find the love of my life by dating anyone for an entire month on a first come first serve basis only to be shocked when that doesn’t work. 

again. boring yet equally ridiculous elevator pitches. if i cemented anything for a fact from this abandoned wip, it’s that my premises have always been questionable, and that time and time again, the only path forward is to lean all the way into it — which i did with hairpin turns, thankfully. hand in unlovable hand and loser takes all are apart by about a year, and there’s palpable change here in my approach to worldbuilding even if i abandoned each for unrelated reasons. granted, i might just be better suited to one side of speculative fiction than the other, but that’s such a copout. when it comes to trying new things in writing, the “if he wanted to, he would” logic applies, even if the he in question ultimately finds that it doesn’t work the way he wants it to (like in hand in unlovable hand). 

loser takes all worked fine for me, and i loved the inherent intimacy in having two incredibly smart and perceptive characters in each other’s minds while trapped in this soulmate bond that isn’t necessarily romantic. not to mention yuuichi is a deeply unwell person, and his ways of showing attachment to kei range from drastically protective, such as offering to fire the receptionist that was rude to kei, to:

Sometimes, watching Kei asleep right against him, Yuuichi wants to press his lips against Kei’s pulse. To feel it warm and alive under his mouth, to hear that little sigh of ticklish laughter Kei does if someone so much as runs a soft cloth against his neck. 

And sometimes—sometimes Yuuichi is also seized by a strong thought, a strong urge, to sink something sharp into that pulse. His teeth, a fork, a shard of broken glass. Sink it in hard, deep enough to leave a bloody bruise, a scar, a puncture. Hard enough to maybe even sever that heartbeat, to tear it, slit it into silence somehow. Hard enough that it feels almost the kinder choice to imagine himself wrapping his hands around Kei’s neck—tightening them without hesitation, itself a mercy of a kind as the blood quickly drains out of Kei’s cheeks. Yuuichi imagines then how Kei will struggle, whether he’ll kick or bite Yuuichi, if he’ll reverse their positions with one twist of a martial arts trained body, or if he’ll just accept it, resign himself to it knowing that not even this, if it’s Yuuichi, could possibly be meaningless.

But it would be. It would be meaningless to kill Kei. Meaningless because Kei is singular in his position within Yuuichi’s life, loyal and intelligent and a force to be reckoned with like no one else is, not even Yuuichi’s sister, not even the only friend he trusts most. Meaningless because every time Yuuichi pictures it, every time he wonders if he’ll have it in him to press two killer’s hands around Kei’s neck, it doesn’t take long for the accompanying sting to come like a splash of boiling water on exposed skin. A kind of scolding, a kind of reminder, that just as much as it would be difficult for anyone to kill Kei—so impervious to physical harm, whose broken bones and bleeding wounds will always heal even if he jumps off a twenty-story building—it would be just as difficult for Yuuichi to do him harm and survive it without any damage done to his own heart at his own hands. 

the temptation to keep writing this is not entirely absent, to be honest. but a mystery takes care and attention, and i just don’t have that in me the way this story deserves. but this fic was delicious to write, and i think it gave me a hunger to write more dynamics that feel just as juicy. dynamics that aren’t necessarily geared towards healthy love, but ones that ooze if poked anyway. 

i definitely want to revisit the telepathy plot device i explored here someday, but for now, this fic, abandoned wip as it is, is kind of the goldilocks midpoint between failed venture (hand in unlovable hand), almost-passable venture (please let me love you forever), and basically there if being there counts taking your literal first baby step into a new frontier (days of brutalism and hairpin turns).

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HONORARY MENTIONS

i don’t mean to ignore the canonverse fics (here and where you are, i’ll give you something so real, detour, and the two manhwa fics, that is) out of favouritism, but i’m afraid there’s nothing much to say…? not that these weren’t lessons in themselves, but canonverse takes a quarter of the energy and brainpower to write, and i’ll be lying if i don’t go about them essentially all no thoughts, head empty. i talked a bit about here and where you are here, while the logic for detour, which i was happy to write for and based on exchanges with a friend, is pretty self-explanatory. i did love getting to write a character like loid (and i’m relieved that the chapters that follow the ones i took into consideration for that fic hold up the characterization i imagined for him) + it was interesting to give sexual content and the philosophy of desire or whatever a shot in i’ll give you something so real. they were effective at what i needed them to do — which is, really, just to check the temperature of the water. i always feel so rusty when any amount of time passes without me writing, and these small, low-maintenance fics work as a burst of ice cold water before jumping in. i don’t value these fics any less for their place in The Process, and i might even be extra happy when someone likes them, but as far as Advancing The Craft 🤢 goes, all of these are simply necessary bridges to get to the next checkpoint. sometimes you gotta scratch the tip of the pen before the ink starts bleeding like it’s supposed to. words are the same. it takes a while each time to get my writing to a place i recognize, and sometimes a while is an entire fic before i can write the next chapter for an ongoing multi-chaptered story.

(that said: shoutout to the particular flavour of introspection in detour, within which my favourite line was written the literal minute before i sent it off, and a big heart emoji for the fact that i’ll give you something so real unfolds in a span of barely half a day. both are very interesting to think about moving forward.)

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DAYS OF BRUTALISM AND HAIRPIN TURNS january 2023, blue lock trial element | a romantic triad, sci-fi, memory loss (finally!) 

my angel. my darling. my love. who is far from being perfect but is the closest i’ve had to at least being sure i won’t just wake up one day loathing the soul out of it. i’ll laugh at it, probably. i’ll think it’s hilarious and cringy someday soon. but it’s a work i can’t not appreciate wholeheartedly. 

my cc tells me that the first time i put it on record that i won’t mind doing a blue lock fic is may 16, 2022, and the fact that i didn’t even make it a year and did so in the most Hard To Pitch If This Was An Actual Novel And Not Just A Fic For Fun way possible is worth at least a salute of disbelief, i think. my journal from my writing hiatus also tells me i’ve been trying to make memory loss work since 2020 and managed to scratch the itch minutely with here and where you are (which is… a pretty janky piece of work, looking back now) — but i’m just really, really content, even proud, of how i managed to weave it into a fic adapted from a story about football battle royale. 

it’s almost kind of unnerving how satisfied i am with the premise of hairpin turns, even if the execution leaves quite a bit to be desired — as it always will, really, and therein is the joy of finding the next writing project. i laughed a lot at myself while writing hairpin turns, and of all the inside jokes that my works started as, this one is by far the fic to feel most like it — a fun little joke that got funnier and funnier the more of it i wrote, and so i wrote more, chasing that laughter until it was time to catch my breath. and i think with how much i require writing to feel urgent and single-minded to be fun, there’s a part of me that’s easily... bored, for lack of a better word, when something doesn’t give me that. without this fast-paced almost-violence, i get bored and restless, the way i was around all the projects i had lined up after please let me love you forever. i’m making a face as i type that but maybe i just mean to say that there were a good few months there where nothing scratched the itch in need of stimulation. i’d write scenes and they wouldn’t be awful, wouldn’t even be bad, but they weren’t exciting to me. they weren’t thrilling. they didn’t feel like i was dissecting anything, just poking at skin with a scalpel and rolling my eyes when i didn’t draw blood from a dead body — you know? 

but projects have an uncanny way of arriving in your life when you most need it, and just when i have peeled and replaced my wallpaper and assembled and reassembled my keyboards and poked at this manuscript i refuse to rewrite until i did a warm-up that felt substantial enough, the blue lock anime started airing. i knew vaguely what dynamics i wanted to write even back when i had only the manga, but i know i could not have tortured this fic out of me then. not before please let me love you forever, not before loser takes all, not even before all my failed attempts at pitching speculative fiction stories to myself at 3 AM and gritting my teeth at my own disgust. the best aus fall into your lap fully formed and fully realized before you even know what you’ll be shaping it into; they’re a little predestined that way, and aus might be why i owe fanfiction my certainty that the author is just as possessed by the narrative if the narrative has its own pace and direction. i think that’s logic that should be applicable to original projects as well. 

i did hesitate in the very beginning of hairpin turns because sci-fi was such a huge deviation from my comfort zone and i have the misfortune of being both a taurus sun and an enneagram type five. i’ve never tried writing proper sci-fi, not even a little, let alone enough to be comfortable with knowing where to start something that wasn’t merely regular slice of life with a slight sprinkling of specfic. i was sure my writing style wouldn’t be a good match for it. i still don’t think it’s a match, necessarily. my prose is a bit too sentimental for some of the demands sci-fi asked of me — and that’s fine. i wouldn’t know the precise nature of that incompatibility if i hadn’t jumped into the pool of sharks and came out of the tank somehow, disbelievingly, friends with them. i began wary of relying too much on technobabble since i’m not exactly the most stem-oriented person around, but even the background of this au wrote itself, half because blue lock was a shockingly perfect match for the world i had in my mind and half because i found that the technology i imagined for the plot was both possible and easy to break down into the narrative. even now i’m still shocked at how scientifically sound the core pitch of the story is, and the fact that it married itself well to both the overarching plot and the character dynamics i wanted to highlight was just icing on a cake i would have tried to politely finish anyway. 

it could very well be that hairpin turns is just a fluke, its parts too seamlessly glued to each other that i’m not sure it could have been anything else except luck doing the work there, but i think there’s also credit to be found in how nothing is sacred in blue lock. these are characters who have done ridiculous things and said ridiculous things, and it was a matter of matching their energy. therein is the same lesson from loser takes all: if i’ve always known that characters decide the pace, tone and atmosphere of the story and everything else in it, then doesn’t it also go to say that in order to write a story far out of my comfort zone, i need only start with characters far outside of my comfort zone?

i think with au fics in particular, a lot of the work begins with justifying why certain things are in character for them in this universe based on what we know from canon. but because those boundaries are expanded by what blue lock innately is, it doesn’t feel as weird to posit something like, what if you and your android bf get tasked with rescuing his older brother’s android bf and find out along the way that you might also both be in love with your childhood best friend? as with most other of my initial ideas, this quickly spiraled into something significantly different — which luckily for me included the memory loss idea that i’ve been wanting to explore for forever now. proper sci-fi was the perfect backdrop for it, and bachira the perfect person to willingly do it, and isagi and rin the perfect people to be left in the aftermath of that loss. stars aligned, truly. i’m incredibly grateful for it. 

whatever challenges i encountered writing this fic had nothing to do with writing it. it was as smooth to write as it was an absolute pain to edit, because the three povs are so vastly different from each other, and with no outline to mentally check each time i add a new scene, i was reliant on going back and forth again and again to make sure the worldbuilding is cohesive and the plot is coherent. at some point i couldn’t look at it anymore, and it might even be a testament to how much i appreciate the fic that i still can’t look at it now yet cannot deny how fond i am of the final result. 

with sci-fi in particular, it really is a case of faking it till you make it, and whatever lies don’t feed into each other, you can always revisit and adjust later. that’s the common sense magic of fiction, i suppose. there’s a degree of patience i held onto writing hairpin turns that i wouldn’t have had with any other previous work, and i think it benefited me more to have all three chapters written in varying increments, out of my usual linear order, than publishing it chapter by chapter. i had all the room to experiment — what does the world look like in 2070? is 2070 even the right year to set this in? is there anything big happening around that time period? how does the lingo change in the time between present and this potential future? when i run into things that feel too out of my depth to write, like isagi’s pov for instance, do i actually have a justification for saying no other than how it will be easier than trying? are there benefits to giving bachira the final chapter that i’m being biased against because i think it would be a challenge? and between all of these choices, how do i adapt existing blue lock canon, from their playstyles to the favourites listed in the egoist bible, to worldbuilding in other forms of media that i’ve always wanted to try a different approach to? 

i used to think it was unnecessary and superfluous to go into writing something while getting bogged down by stray facts about characters, in both fic and original projects, but at the same time, it’s truly the tiny details that will humanize more than knowing a character’s birthday or what traumatic events lie in their backstory. tiny details that breed more tiny details, until it’s about the fact that bachira and isagi are childhood friends in this au yet when we meet bachira again he’s calling isagi by last name, or how rin understandably questions the validity of his own humanness because we can only assume sae had recreated him in grief or defiance against mortality or whatever other emotion that we’ll never know for sure because we only ever see sae in this fic through rin, and that matters a lot more than if i gave sae a pov — and yet rin manages to love through the small things, in how the warehouse is in an eternal sunset waiting for bachira to return to him and isagi. it’s about how first love, late spring was about learning how to love someone else the way they need you to when you weren’t loved the way you needed to be, but hairpin turns is about how spending your whole life never questioning if you were loved can rob you of the facilities to put a name and shape to what you feel for someone who’s always been in your life. the things you don’t take for granted, necessarily, but you do love for granted by not calling it love.

hairpin turns is about the pieces obscured from view and all the more present because of it. it’s about lost memories, the phantom outline of a person like a haunting. it’s about how sae never once appears in a direct scene yet he looms over rin’s existence. it’s about how rin’s chapter represents the past, isagi’s the present and bachira’s the future, but time matters little in the end — how could it weigh any more, in a story about memory? it’s about the uneasy momentary peace that’s the only scene we can count on as a happy ending. it’s about the lengths you’ll go to get the chance to be ordinary about your love, even if all else about it is unconventional. 

and yet above all, what i like best about this fic is that it works towards questions that feel like being given answers. some of my other fics try to provide answers to its characters and the readers they resonate with, to give them a way to be well-equipped to move forward, while a few other fics settle on non-answers because uncertainty is the only ending there is. but hairpin turns moves outward only to ask more questions, questions that are the answers and the thesis, yet in a way that isn’t strictly open-ended. and i have no fucking clue how i managed it, but this feels like the target i’ve been itching to catch sight of this entire time. this is the kind of story and process i would like to aspire to this year, and even though it had taken me 80k to glean what i needed from it, i’m glad i stayed with this fic as a warm-up. 

anyway. this got a bit away from me, and who knows, maybe this level of pretentiousness is only because i’m still riding the high of affection for my most recent brainchild to make it to college — but i’m not totally blind to the flaws in hairpin turns. the execution of the ending itself is clunky, not because it doesn’t resolve anything but because it does, and by then, the post-rescue section has gone on for long enough that even an ending feels like an epilogue. the story overall lacks complete confidence in what it is, with some parts shadowed by a slight hovering hesitation and others weighed down by a heavy hand showing too much kindness to my non-confidence. it’s never too heavy-handed, and definitely not so much that i’ll send it to the bin, but enough that if i want something to pick apart, there are stray choices hiding in places that i’d circle as an editor for feeling too sentimental, or the tone too dissonant with the pacing, or, ironically, not explored enough. in the genre i’m used to writing, the adrenaline rush is in finding the right balance within a new choreography for a dance style i know well, but in my first real foray into speculative fiction, i think i was just trying to find my footing the whole time. i’m still surprised i made it to the other end of the tightrope, honestly. i didn’t expect to applaud myself for the bare minimum, and i still don’t. 

but all of this is a lesson for me, too. what i do know is that it’s interesting to tell a story about what’s missing, about the unsaid and the unseen, and if that’s what it will take for me to rediscover excitement in what i write so that i don’t have to sink back into the ennui of these last couple of months, then that’s a pretty darn fun goal to spend the rest of the year unpacking. 

[sleeptowns]

first love, late spring: the autopsy report

some postmortem thoughts on conceptualizing, writing and editing the first half of my favourite project so far, partly for my own relationship with the "craft" and mostly bc writing this like a blu-ray bonus commentary was immense fun.

・・・・・・

in retrospect, it’s always a bit of a miracle every time i finish a fic.

it might not feel like it for a lot of them, but considering i’m a [spins wheel] kind of person in so many aspects, from writing to travelling to cooking, i sure have a lot of audacity falling headfirst into stories knowing full well that i don’t have a single clue where it will go until it’s all finished. i was very lucky with my 20-50k fics, especially since one of them was a dual narrative/parallel pov situation or whatever yours, mine, ours was. i was probably even luckier with the 70-80k ones, seeing as i was a broke college student in a new city acting like i can do something like a 27-year-old end-of-career actor justice. but to write 113k words’ worth of so many things i’ve never done before, with the same messy method of figuring it out as i go along — i don’t even know how that happened.

as it stands, i have neither a planning doc to look back on and unpack nor even a vague outline that i probably wouldn’t have listened to anyway. and that was all well and fine before; i’ve made peace with not having the kind of mind that knows to conceptualize arcs and secondary plotlines before i even write the thing. i know i work best when i let the characters do the heavy lifting for me as i’m writing: they tell me where something needs to go next, i listen, and if i listen long and hard enough, the one scene i initially wanted to write as a standalone becomes a much longer monster because it felt wrong for it to be anything else. and the kind of story that could not have possibly been anything but what it ended up as? that’s the writing i love best. it works out.

i am, however, trying to be a more mindful writer-person this year, and while there’s very little to be mindful about when the entire process has been seemingly mindless, it doesn’t mean i can’t at least try to look at this complete jigsaw puzzle i’ve ended up with by moving my eyes from one piece to another. will that tell me how i realized that so-and-so piece belonged in this spot? no. but will it inform what to look for in the angles and edges of a lone puzzle piece the next time i try to build a puzzle? i don’t know for sure, but it might, and possibility is a very hefty thing to have when you’re writing.

which, honestly, i’m only saying because i read matthew salesses saying a few months ago that “to become a better writer is to make conscious what may start out as unconscious.” and since it shook the very foundations of my self-pitying “i don’t feel comfortable claiming i’m a proper writer because everything i do is unconscious and i’m just fooling everyone into thinking i know what i’m doing because i know for a fact i do Not” mindset — this is me trying my best to move beyond the parameters of my chaotic writing non-process and reflect on how first love, late spring came to be what it is.

that said, i started this as a genuine attempt at being writerly about flls but then i got very uncomfortable and, looking at the end result now, it’s really more like one of those director’s commentary things that they include in the blu-ray, complete with division into small multiple parts and the writing equivalent of outtakes.

but this was still fun! and probably more valuable than not in the long run! so! here’s to making the unconscious conscious!

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01 | ROOTS & SEEDLINGS

i’ve had time to think about it, and i blame three things for first love, late spring.

① jay, who had to listen to my sleep deprived self break off in the middle of a spiel about restorative justice so i can wonder out loud what megumi would be like in a polisci class — and who somehow decided 5am was a good time to pitch a fun little joke of a college au where nanami is a philosophy prof and mahito is his unbearable teacher’s assistant

② jjk chapter 132.5, which caught me at a point of almost-breaking in the middle of the shibuya arc and soothed what it can with basketball player yuuji & turtleneck-clad, coffee-drinking, definitely-shops-at-muji megumi.

③ dash & lily, a netflix limited series from which i retained nothing except the song stay by gracie abrams. it played maybe once in the entire show yet haunted me for days after, looping could you hold me without any talking could you hold me without any talking could you hold me without any talking like some spell incantation.

a spell incantation that did its job frightfully well, because by the end of that weekend, i was at a bus stop in -13° furiously typing scraps of a scene into my google keep so it stops rattling around emptily in my brain:

Itadori’s eyes are wide when he opens the door, as if he hadn’t actually believed Megumi would be coming over.

He looks tired. Not in the sleepless way.

He stares blankly at the paper bag that Megumi has tucked under his arm.

He opens his mouth, but Megumi announces, "I have bath bombs."

"What?"

"My sister brings them to my place. I never use them. Here—pick one."

then two other scraps:

"We’ll get in the bath, then sleep. Okay?"

"We? Are you staying the night?"

"When have I ever not stayed the night?"

"Right, you’re the only one who always does." Itadori sounds absentminded. “But I mean—we’re not—tonight—"

"Why does that matter?” says Megumi. "I can take the couch. I’m not leaving you alone like this, Itadori."

That feels too honest, but it’s the right thing to say.

[…]

“Fushiguro?”

Megumi’s half-asleep already, but he shifts, makes sure Itadori slots better against him. Closer, more secure. "What is it?” he says, but it’s mostly a hum under his breath.

“Thank you.”

as with every time this kind of haunting happens, i felt immediately better after having gotten fragments out of my system. but also as with every time i listen to the need to manifest one of these, it finds a new way to follow me around. who are these people? why is yuuji coming over? what happened? why is megumi giving me “i will” by mitski energy here? what is their relationship, if they seem close & comfortable enough for yuuji to come over like this but still with enough hesitation that they can’t possibly be in an established relationship yet?

so then i started thinking about a scene that might come after the bits i wrote, and because i had a stray thought about what yuuji & toji’s dynamic might be like while i was in line at the grocery store, this is what came out:

When Megumi leaves his room, he finds his father sitting at the dining table — with Itadori.

“What,” he says.

“I met your boyfriend at the grocery store.”

“How do you even know what he looks like—“

“Oh, Tsumiki sent me a photo.”

Itadori waves at the collection of half-opened bags on the counter. “We just came here to split the groceries! I would have made too much if I was home anyway, so—”

which just complicated my question of what yuuji & megumi are even supposed to be in this world that my brain keeps trying to feed me. not boyfriends, definitely, but there are feelings and tried-and-tested intimacy there. fake boyfriends? friends with benefits? both?

the final, final straw was — because why not — a video on my fyp. a student living in tokyo was doing a series on their favourite restaurants nearby, and one of them had beautiful footage of a place called ukai toriyama. i looked it up out of curiosity for more, became enamoured with all the photos and videos i found, and thought, wow, this place would be nice for a wedding reception.

and because one plus one plus one plus one plus one equals five, i cracked under the weight of all the little things rattling around in my head, decided to hell with it, and sat down in front of a doc.

1.1k words later, the first scene of first love, late spring was set in stone, and the world it belonged to had me in the tightest chokehold that a story seedling idea has had in years.

only i would argue that this story wouldn’t be what it became without flls!yuuji being who he is, and that had to come a bit later, long after megumi had established what kind of world we were at first. because before yuuji, before haibara, before the scene and chapter that i think would define the structure of flls and what their relationship ultimately became about, i had to first go a few weeks back in time and figure out what megumi’s deal was.

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02 | THE SWEATER AND THE CUP

the thing is, though, i wish i knew why i wrote chapter 2 like i did, but i just really, really don’t. by this point, i hadn’t written anything in two years except news articles & the occasional personal essay, and i’d argue you can see some of the rust peeking in while i try to hash out what on earth is going on in this quarter-realized au. i was lucky that megumi’s perspective felt very natural for introspection, so i had a lot of space for exposition that was, to be honest, more for my purposes than any reader’s. my main objectives were to figure out what would have to happen to lead to the two fragments i had written out, and since i think i like to write based on one detail first, i latched onto how cold my room was at the time and started imagining scenes that feel similarly cold. i typed up a scene in a classroom at the top of an old campus building. that didn’t work after i shuffled through what i remember about the university of tokyo from writing 2 a.m. and realized i can see megumi going there but not yuuji. then i tried a scene at a party, but that wasn’t cold or winter-y enough; it was too much to start on, sensory-wise, and i knew i didn’t want the heat and lights of a party to be part of the ~aesthetic of a christmastime fic.

with that in mind, then, i tried something simpler: a cold apartment, the characters in it just barely starting their morning. and after i latched onto that and followed it a little farther, my head came back to me with a kind of cold that’s not just cold because it’s winter in the story and the floorboards are unheated and the windows are frosted — but cold because the bodily warmth is reserved for the space between night and morning, and this scene must then be a moment beyond that space. with a few more minutes of typing and twirling a pen while i talk to myself, this became: megumi out of bed, standing cold and not fully dressed in the middle of the bedroom; yuuji still cocooned, warm and half-asleep, in the middle of the bed; sunlight streaming in, steady and warm on the sheets, shining fully into the room and onto the bed but not directly on either one of them.

looking back, this is i think the first mention of light in the fic, and probably the precursor for all other mentions i write later on, whether consciously or not. if i am to pull out something deeper out of the intuitive stuff, i’d say that i put the sunlight in to maybe signal to myself that the warmth was there between them, literally and figuratively, but they’re not seeing each other in the light yet. which changes later on, when megumi sees yuuji waiting outside the subway station in the ✨ glow ✨ of the sunset, and again further on, once more a little differently, under the streetlights. but for now, to be completely honest, i also think i just decided to start with a sunlit room because it’s the easiest indication of morning coziness, and therefore the easiest thing to subvert and break.

so. visualizing sunlight in a bedroom means visualizing the rest of the room, and the laziest way to do that is to start from what’s already a given: the sunlight, the blinds, the bed, the wall, and then the floor, none of which has anything interesting about them worth jumping off on for the next paragraph — unless there’s something missing. the thought process went, probably word for word, a little like: “let’s say something’s missing. that would explain why megumi’s standing half-dressed. something of his must be missing, then. why is it missing? maybe he left it in the living room. maybe it’s under the bed. or maybe yuuji has a dog. a cat? what would its name be — oh, wait. sukuna is a thing. i don’t know what to do about sukuna.” as such, cat sukuna was unceremoniously born, and suddenly, not only was megumi’s sweater missing, it was also torn to shreds. because cat sukuna.

now i got megumi out of the bedroom and i needed him to do something, and while there’s intimacy in preparing coffee/tea for himself and yuuji, sure, that won’t really give the scene momentum. but i figured i could reuse the same logic i did with the missing sweater and this time add something that’s there when it shouldn't have been. and having a cup in a literal cupboard isn’t the most creative or shocking thing, i know, but because it had to be shocking to megumi somehow for it to be worth including — it was. it was, because (and i’m still so sorry about using you like this, yuko) it was for someone else, because it was permanence and invitation that wasn’t for him, and what more useful emotional beat is there to end a chapter’s opening scene on except tension over something mundane that wouldn’t be tension over something mundane if only megumi’s thoughts & feelings didn't work a certain way.

and when you’ve got direction like that, the thoughts and feelings themselves can start to find a place in the structure of the story. introspection is my favourite to write because it flows once i’ve justified including it; it’s comfortable and free and nice, and it forms the backbone of characterization while at the same time indulging thoughts i’ve had about canon. i’m guilty about starting nearly all of my pre-flls fics with shameless character-centric introspection, but because this wasn’t the case with flls (and continued to not be, for reasons i’ll get to later), wherein everything i wrote at the start was in medias res, i had to hotwire that justification into existing within the actual scenes instead of leading to them. not having introspection in the beginning, before the actual story begins, means i’m still in the middle of a scene during all of these blocks of introspection, and it had to make space for action somewhere. we had to return to the story somehow.

except, this made me realize soon after, there’s no story yet. there’s no spark that would make the tension from the cup boil over and let the actual story find its foothold.

luckily, though — bless her and whatever photo-taking technique she had that we never even got to see in full swing before she was gone too soon — nanako happened.

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03 | THE GOJO-GETO HOUSEHOLD

before there was a single cemented thing in this universe — minus maybe mahito giving eyeroll-edgy kinda nihilistic advice, but even he had to become a newsletter writer somewhere down the line — there was the ginormous network of people that megumi, at times grudgingly and resignedly, calls family. i knew this was going to be an everyone lives au, because what kind of college au would it be otherwise (and yeah, this at first included yuuji’s grandfather), and i went into it knowing that if nothing else, i wanted to write yuuji interacting with toji + megumi interacting with nanako & mimiko. (because why not. where else would i get the chance to explore those dynamics.) for the first one, i already had a scene fragment; i just had to get there. but for the second, it meant indulging in the concept of stsg raising the girls & the fushiguro siblings together, whether or not they were in a romantic relationship in this universe, and if i wanted to preserve at least a bit of the canon stsg backstory, it meant conceptualizing all the complications that would have led to even the well-established family we see in flls.

this would later turn out for the best, because stsg’s pseudo backstory running quietly under the main story formed the foundation for how i’ll characterize yuuji & megumi and their relationship. not because of the parallels, though there are those, but because even in the idyllic surface of being the product of a family instead of loss, megumi will still carry the burden of the kind of love he didn’t receive. which is not the same thing as not receiving love and care. he got that. he knows he got that. but as i hope i made a point to say in flls, receiving love broadly is not the same as having the kind of love you specifically need. and i don’t think that’s a point i would have been able to make if stsg weren’t there — if gojo wasn’t there to serve as a catalyst for megumi’s first decision to stay stubbornly brave for yuuji in ch 4, and if geto wasn’t there, in ch 6, to gently but firmly tear megumi apart.

but before all that, i just wrote the beginning of flls wanting to see a megumi that grew up with three sisters instead of one. i wanted monthly catch-up dinners at a ridiculously expensive 6LDK house near the university of tokyo, full of ridiculously expensive shit. i wanted the loud, chaotic household that i felt they deserved in this au. i wanted to see remnants of the dynamics they would have had as teenagers, from megumi being the sulking youngest to nanako being domineering and tsumiki being reasonable and mimiko being the healthy middle between them. i wanted a weary but affectionate geto. i wanted gojo that no one really sees as a guardian in this set-up but is somehow the person to benefit the most from having people in this gigantic house that he probably never would have bought thinking it will help raise four kids.

and so i tried writing a scene where all these dynamics collided like two trapeze artists that you think would crash against each other but doesn’t because this is a well-practiced routine and they all know each other very well, not because they were family from the beginning but because they’ve had time to learn to be a family altogether. but again (this is starting to become a running thing in this post, note to self), as with any indulgent choice, i had to justify its existence in the story somehow, to give it a place in the forward momentum of the plot. and so nanako’s social media came into the fray, and more and more people started entering the room as she confronts megumi, and the energy heightens — and at the center of it all is yuuji and a dating misunderstanding, and somehow boom, there we go, we finally have what the cool kids call an inciting incident.

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04 | FAKE DATING, I GUESS

i’m not a fan of billing flls as a fake dating story. like, that has to be a scam, right? they fake-date for about half a chapter at best. i’m genuinely sorry it was so blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, but the fruits of the trope were too central to what the first four chapters became for me to take it out — so there you go. fake dating it was, for like the three days before yuuji caved and confessed his heart out.

but. okay. i’ve had time to think about why i actually kept it and didn’t just find another way to play with what fwb tropes offered, and i think fake dating was only insofar useful to the story in how it didn’t do anything for them. i’m learning recently that there’s merit in that, too. in making a point, that is, out of a point that a trope can’t make for me. or whatever. what i’m trying to say is that — fake dating doesn’t change anything about yuuji & megumi’s dynamic, really. they kiss, they’re friends, they go on not-dates. and a younger me would have restarted and taken fake dating out altogether since it’s not introducing something new, but ultimately, i guess i kept fake dating because it reinforces what yuuji & megumi already are. what they already do. the level of ease and comfort they already have with each other. all these things they haven’t been honest to themselves about quite yet. haven’t been honest about it all meaning more.

and that’s all the use fake dating was, to be honest: bringing them both to a point of necessary realization. megumi alone at first, with asking for all of yuuji, with realizing no, he doesn’t want a fake relationship, and essentially just continuing the emotional beat that the cup started for him and will take us to a point of no return at the end of chapter 4.

but then i reached the end of chapter 2 and found myself wondering about yuuji’s side of things, about what he’s thinking, why he’s saying yes. i never intended for his pov to be in this story, and maybe flls would have been a lot shorter if it wasn’t, but i finished chapter 2 and immediately started writing the bistro breakfast scene in the beginning of chapter 3 and found a yuuji who sees his feelings for megumi with more directness if not clarity, with more understanding for nobara pointing out that he and megumi are pretty much just in a relationship at this point — which, i’d argue, is the first sign of all the contributing factors to how their relationship goes wrong. because of course nobara is right, and her being right means all of this is a convoluted mess, except yuuji is at this point the equivalent of someone getting home tired from work and finding his phone charger knotted and more nest than cable, but he’s so exhausted, and the charger still does its job as long as you plug each end to an outlet and to a phone, so why would you spend energy/emotional capacity you don’t have to untangle something that works tangled?

and that was the turning point for flls, i think. i only wrote a scene on the side to warm up, to feel more comfortable about writing yuuji — but instead i was left with a yuuji who feels so much, who had all these reasons for sleeping around just waiting for me to sink my teeth into, who already has a crush & maybe more on megumi, and man... how do you not give him his own chapter after that?

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05 | 胸がはち切れそうで

what even was flls before chapter 3 was a thing. i think a lot about what it could have become if this chapter isn’t how it turned out to be, but with the way things ended up, it’s the point where the whole story shifted on its axis and became something i never intended it to be.

i vividly remember taking a break after finishing the first attempt at the bistro breakfast scene and going on youtube; one of the recommendations was the therapy scene from fleabag, which is just one of those pieces of screenwriting that you can’t help but admire for everything it does in so little time. you can’t say the same for the therapy scene in flls, but there remains that the fleabag scene was the foundation for it, and, consequently, for yuuji’s entire arc in flls.

i also think a lot about how my younger self would have written this therapy scene much later in the fic. as a resolution of sorts, a guidance towards a happy ending. the same way i know i would have written something really loving and sappy for geto’s speech at the wedding. as it is, we don’t hear the speech at all, and the therapy scene comes in yuuji’s first chapter. it’s how we’re introduced to him, because the first and only thing we know about him otherwise is that a) he has no family, according to gojo, and b) that, based on what we can gather from the breakfast, his life is a little bit stuffed full and he’s maybe not doing the best.

with yuuji, there was no luxury of the same introspection that megumi has. i’ll deal with it later, in the chapter 5 switch to second person, but right now, yuuji doesn’t so much examine as he does just feel. and instead of the therapy scene becoming a resolution scene, it became exposition instead, with haibara doing the more analytical characterization that megumi at least gave me the space to do from within his head. in yuuji’s case, it had to be teased out, said out loud, a push-and-pull that painted, for me, at least initially, the picture of a boy who’s trying so hard to transcend his childhood and yet is very much a product of it.

but first, i had to decide who would be the therapist in this scenario, and because fleabag already gave me the prompt of having a therapy voucher (i did not google if those actually existed), the question became about who would give yuuji one. and since the first clear answer was nanami, it easily became: who would nanami trust with yuuji the way gojo entrusted him with yuuji in the light novel? who would he have had that conversation with? to whom would he have said “there is a boy whose feelings i want to be careful about, and i know you can do it”? and though there were other contenders before this, the only real answer had been haibara.

the dialogue for this scene came easily, in that i had a point of reference. at the time, i was in twelve-week therapy for something a lot more specific and not at all related to yuuji’s situation, but i found myself paying attention to my therapist’s pattern of guiding our sessions — the kind of questions she asks, when she asks them, how she asks them. the things she says to preface certain thoughts, the clarifications she asks of me.

apply this to how i imagine haibara’s sunniness would have mellowed out if he’d had the chance to become the kind, empathetic adult i like to think he would have been, plus throw in some thoughts about yuuji’s grandfather telling him to die surrounded by people in canon, and i had the bare bones of a conversation. a lot of the prompts there were narratively situational: what happens to a kid who had to watch his only family member left die alone, and be left, as a young teen, to live his life by himself? what coping mechanisms would have had to come out of that, and how do i connect that to the ways we see canon yuuji wrestle with his own thoughts and convictions in canon? and how do i justify the presence of yuuji’s pov in the story now? how does it connect back to megumi’s established arc in the previous chapter? does it?

it did, in the lack that yuuji was a product of, looping back to the loneliness that i realized megumi thinks about at length in chapter 2. i also didn’t want fwb tropes to be there only for the sake of fwb tropes; it wasn’t something i felt comfortable doing, and i was worried about ending up being indulgent when i don’t mean to. so i started thinking about why someone like yuuji, with already so much on his plate, would take the time to spend his nights with so many different people? what is the end goal?

i just wasn’t expecting that goal to be something as simple as being held.

flls came out of that therapy scene a changed story. if we stayed with megumi’s pov, it would have maybe been a lightweight story with, at best, an undercurrent of loneliness at its core — which is all fine, too, but i’ve written loneliness / homesickness / lonesomeness in a handful of different shapes before, and if this had been the case, flls would have been an abandoned wip, never to see the light of day.

but the haibara scene turned flls into something i’ve never tried writing before not only in having dual perspectives on the same relationship, but for that relationship and its dynamic to be the defining core of the story. on a very simplistic sense, we had a boy who keeps his world small and finds order in it that way, and we had another whose order is found in the big-ness he wants to maintain. loneliness is there, sure, but in different ways and only as catalysts to how they love each other — because they do, already, by this point. it’s been love, for a while, and love was itching to be the main focal point of flls. love, love languages, what it means, what it entails, how it can soothe in its smallest form and also harm in its biggest. i didn’t know that yet, in chapter 3, won’t know it until i go back to chapter 1 and realize i hinted at conflict between yuuji and megumi, but i also already knew that i wanted flls to be a relationship > character fic if i was gonna go through with it. and i figured if that meant taking a different angle on the romance than i previously have, then all the better.

the final nail in the coffin was the end of chapter 3, where i was exhausted writing a 20k+ chapter and thinking, “wow, it’s been such a long day, yuuji should have burst with something by now” — and then that became a serious thought, because it just hadn’t made sense, with canon yuuji’s tendency to blurt things out, for him to not react in some way to everything that’s happened that day. things have to come to a boil somehow, and for flls yuuji, that meant a confession.

a messy, unthought-out confession and easily the most fun & visceral of any i’ve ever written. up until flls, confessions were usually for the big, pre-climax moments after an entire story’s worth of romance, and for this reason, i’ve always kind of dreaded writing them. how do i make it fresh when we already know we want these people to be together? how do i make it a novel thing to hear, for the first time, that the person whose pov we didn’t get in the story feels the same way as the third-person narrator? maybe a “twist” moment like in 2 A.M. or the event in lie to make me like you?

but with yuuji in flls, it wasn’t going to be a surprise no matter what. we knew how he felt about megumi, we knew they would be together somehow prior to the wedding, whether on pretend terms or not, and i knew that the only reason this confession was going to be a thing is because yuuji’s had a long day and he’s done, so done, with not saying anything.

so we start small and specific, and we stay small and specific, with yuuji just realizing that love for him is wanting to hold someone and not just wanting to be held, that love is being home for another person instead of someone just being a second home for him on nights where his feels a little empty. in any other situation, the therapy scene would have prevented the pov character from confessing, from pursuing a relationship, but because it’s yuuji, his first instinct is to avoid the loneliness he felt briefly on the subway, when he realized he could just hide his feelings for megumi forever if he really wanted to, and so he blurts it all out. sweet (i hope), genuine and awkward. but also impulsive. rambling. unthinking.

in doing so, yuuji gave me a second inciting incident. one that feels more true to him. it’s equally reactionary as megumi responding to the screenshot situation, but there’s something to be said about how megumi was cornered by so many external elements into the spark that launches his arc in their relationship while yuuji blurts everything out from sheer urgency and exhaustion. which has roots in equally external factors, but the slight difference in their confessions will carry them through to the end — so, i suppose, from here on out in the story, we’ll always return to everything i unknowingly set up in chapter 3: the thoughts yuuji has in the breakfast scene, the truths pulled out of him in the therapy scene, the little things that come into play on the way to and at and after disneyland, and finally, what’s blurted out in the confession and how, why. the things they ask of each other, for each other. the things they want to do for each other.

(and it hurts my heart a little, i admit, to return to this chapter months later and see this same earnestness that will propel their story along, for better or for worse, and know it will have to end before they begin again.)

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06 | GOING BACK TO CHAPTER ONE

having cemented chapter 1 as a prologue of sorts, i had to go back to add yuuji’s perspective now that he, apparently, was going to have it in this fic. it felt safe to give him a scene with nanami in parallel to megumi’s with toji; it wasn’t my conscious intention to have these scenes end up being reflections of how they handle emotions as a result of what was maybe lacking in their childhoods, and it was just lucky that these two scenes will serve as a decent jumping off point for what i’ll decide to do when writing chapters 5 and 6.

looking back, too, the first scene stuck without a concrete plan because it had the bare parts of a full story: exposition with megumi’s family, a little hint at action with toji asking after yuuji, and, for reasons i can’t remember the root of now, also a show of conflict. i knew i wanted a christmas eve fight, and maybe dash & lily is to blame for that, too, but maybe i was also just itching to write a ~fight because it’s not something i’ve ever done before and i was pretty set on flls being the fic where i just keep throwing in things i haven’t tried with any previous pairings.

i also knew i had to set up nanami & yuuji’s relationship somehow if i was going to justify the therapy voucher in chapter 3, and the scene wrote itself with that in mind. i knew we were going to be somewhere inside since the megumi scene before it was outdoors and i don’t like staying in one place for too long, but everything else was all the tenderness intrinsic to nanami & yuuji’s dynamic rearing its head. that, and a few on-the-nose elements scattered around to set the scene for yuuji’s life — hot chocolate & fresh bread for warmth, yes, but also to show that he’s a regular visitor to nanami’s apartment; snow out the window because it’s Winter™ and we’re feeling a lil’ wistful; the hammer in the head paternal-ness of a guardian figure teaching you how to knot your tie. all things that yuuji didn’t have at a certain point in his life — or, more accurately, all things that yuuji lost and regained only years later. again, in the back of my mind, i was thinking, what does that kind of loss do to someone at that age? for what are we if not a series of responses and reactions to the things that happen to us? and i was thinking, too, that the opposite of love isn’t hate, is it? it must be loss. it must be lack.

i realized halfway that these thoughts echo something i wrote into megumi’s first chapter. and so i packed them away to think about later, letting only some of it bleed into the wistfulness that colors the warmth in yuuji & nanami’s first scene together. when i write chapter 5, i would joke to myself that it’s a “boil until tender” kind of recipe, but in retrospect, yuuji’s entire character is a slow boil. he was strangely mysterious to me, even as i was writing him; we know his trauma, we know his days are busy and overwhelming, but i felt that he could be more reactionary. he needs more momentum. not just for the story, which he accomplished when he confessed, and not just for megumi’s arc, which shows itself in his response to yuuji and yuuji’s problems, but for his own self, too. the haibara scene is only scratching the surface of who and what yuuji is, and the worst of it is still under getting ready to boil and bubble. and not just in the form of a panic attack in chapter 4, but something else. something bigger.

which had me looking back again to life and identity as a series of reactions and how the opposite of love is loss and lack — and that equalled to: isn’t the way we love also, by extension, a reaction? to what, though? to how we were loved? to how we weren’t loved? both. it’s both. and that brought up a lot of questions, all rooted in chapter 1: we see megumi and yuuji around father figures that care for them in their own ways, and one would argue they’re well-adjusted in the face of being loved — but are they? what would they fight about, then? sure, there’s megumi’s jealousy over ozawa but that’s too shallow. too cheap. megumi would never distrust yuuji like that. where would their differences lie, then? their love languages? their contrasting worldviews and life schedules? furthermore, why aren’t they in a relationship yet? why is yuuji only confessing now? neither of them are fumbling teenagers about the intimacy of their relationship, and yuuji was fairly clear in not expecting anything out of megumi. why is that? why is he leaving that space? insecurity? no. too easy an answer.

as it turns out, i didn’t finalize a single answer about any of these. not until chapter 5 and 6. but i knew, after having written yuuji’s perspective into chapter 1 and seeing it side-by-side with megumi’s, that their relationship can’t continue being fake with all the variables we have by the end of chapter 3. not with yuuji’s confession, not with the fight that i’m letting myself keep for no other reason than writing an argument would be thrilling, and not with the tension that won’t be solved just because they start dating. problems don’t end just because a couple is together. if anything, new issues to consider crop up once you put a label on it. it shifts the dynamic that’s there, and that will always come with its growing pains. any evolving relationship comes with growing pains. the matter here is figuring out what those growing pains look like for yuuji & megumi.

so first, i had to throw them into a real relationship.

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07 | DONBURI ON THE TRACKS

chapter 4 is so chaotic under the surface that it haunts me. this doesn’t mean i don’t like it, or that i’ll do it differently. i’d maybe argue that it was a necessary chaos, or at least that it was chaotic because it’s doing a lot in much less space than yuuji’s chapters do. there’s no moving from shibuya to kichijoji to work to disneyland to back home. there’s no takada & nobara to haibara to ozawa. it’s just megumi propelled along a thought process by nobara and into action by toji, from one evening to the day after.

with that, i’d maybe call it a bridging chapter? when i first started flls for real, i gave myself seven chapters to sort of act as guiding parameters — three chapters for them each, on top of the prologue — and opened up a blank doc. there’s no rhyme or reason for that count of seven; i guess i hadn’t expected each chapter to be around 20k words long, and even less that yuuji would be confessing by chapter 3. but it made sense, if there was gonna be a fight. it gave me enough space to bring their relationship through a healthy amount of conflict to get to the meat of the ~themes i wanted to write about, while giving an indulgently happy epilogue at the end.

(okay, clearly, these plans changed, but that was the reasoning at the time 😅)

i had a good chunk of chapter 4 vaguely mapped out somewhere in my head by the time i actually sat down to write it in full, but while i knew this chapter would have the first two scenes i wrote before flls was even flls, i still had to tweak them to fit the aftermath of the unexpected confession. i have a better idea who these characters are this time (not as much as i will yet, i think, because that part will come in chapter 5 and 6 each; we pretty much only have the foundations by this point), but i figured there was no point in keeping the story going if we don’t also get to know the characters even more as the story unfolds. the plot needs momentum, sure, i see that as i write this, but even now, that is only as valuable to me as how much that momentum parallels or, better yet, takes along the characters themselves. there has to be more layers to be peeled back; there has to be more to yuuji and megumi that we’ll only get to see eye-to-eye with in the later chapters.

the way i view it, plot or trope or twist shouldn’t ever be alone in being that. they should only be a thing in service or in response to a character being the way they are. this isn’t always the case, of course — but it’s the way i prefer to write. i’m heavily biased towards character-first writing, is what i’m realizing as i type this, which i honestly don’t see changing any time soon. characterization is a hefty chunk of the fun of writing for me. i love writing because i love my characters. even when they do questionable shit like fail to examine themselves before asking out the fake boyfriend they’ve been seeing for like five months now.

but alright. let’s backtrack. back to plot bowing down to character. the only way i could justify throwing yuuji & megumi into a relationship is if characterization necessitated it, and the only way i could justify keeping those two original scenes in some form is if they serve the plot. so: scenes are worth keeping if they are in service of plot momentum, and plot momentum is only what it is because of character, and character informs what the scenes look like, etc. i’ve always preferred thinking of writing as a circular diagram feeding off each other in turn, not a line graph. it has to be a juggling act, though not a complicated one. there’s a point where it feels right, and i think that’s what i mean about chapter 4 being necessary chaos. it’s the chapter where everything — almost audibly — clicks in place for the momentum of the rest of the story. it’s where everything kind of wisps up towards the top without surfacing quite yet. going off the juggling metaphor, chapter 2 and 3 were one ball each thrown into the mix. chapter 4 is the third ball, is the first time all the balls in the act are at play.

as an aside, i think it feels that way for their dynamic, too. writing their relationship from yuuji’s perspective always felt like a balancing act — because he had so many things going on, yeah, but also because all these precarious elements that shift with the evolution of their relationship are so much more apparent on his side. that isn’t to put the blame on yuuji for what happens in chapter 6. i was very stubborn about making sure yuuji isn’t portrayed as helpless because of all the shit he had going on in this fic. if anything, it’s him taking charge of himself and his understanding of how he’s doing that centres the fic into what it is.

and that was one of the main things i had to ensure this chapter. that his panic attack still feels like him, and not someone desperately in need of megumi’s help. i want him to be full of agency and strength here, something that i also had megumi reinforce in the end of the panic attack scene. it also would have been easy to make this subversion about “it’s okay to ask for help” — because it is, but that would have been too simple for this fic’s purposes. yuuji knows it’s okay to ask for help. he doesn’t always feel like he deserves it, but he knows he has received help from many of his loved ones and is very appreciative of all of it. he just works a little too hard to give it back tenfold. so, here, i wanted to frame megumi as someone that yuuji explicitly knows he shouldn’t ask help from. and, with that, megumi as someone who’s only one name in an entire list of people yuuji can ask.

and i wanted to bookend that with yuuji putting some distance between them after the confession. he doesn’t know why yet (and neither did i at this point, to be honest, haha) but the confession isn’t quite right with its timing. but then he has a rough night, everything feels like it’s piling up, and there’s really one person he wants to see. not to sleep with (and i imagine yuuji’s heart sinks for a bit when megumi offers to take him home, at least until he realizes megumi intends to just look after him and nothing else) but just to see, whatever that would mean. he just wants to be with megumi. he just wants megumi to be there.

and megumi is there, except he’s also battling with the sheer panic of having to be there for a person he cares about so much. i don’t think we acknowledge enough how difficult it is to be there for someone going through a hard time — how lost and helpless that renders even the person helping, and how tripled that might be for someone who sees the world and wants to find order in it like megumi does. and i took the chance to form megumi’s idea of strength and weakness through gojo and his implied backstory with geto, something that megumi might actually romanticize a little without even knowing. you can’t singlehandedly help someone, no matter how much you love them. there’s hubris, in thinking you can. there’s self-destructiveness, in that hubris. megumi is so focused on bravery, on strength, that he leaves yuuji in the bath alone, regulating his breathing for himself. he cooks for yuuji, cares for him in his own way, yet he doesn’t even realize yuuji might want to be in the bath with him. that he doesn’t care about his spilled food anymore. he’s done this before. this time, megumi’s presence is the difference, yet he doesn’t truly get it until they sleep — at which point he holds on tight and only falls into peace then.

that’s another thing i wanted to keep track of, in writing this chapter. that being overwhelmed to the point of cracking is a tried and tested routine for yuuji, that his panic attack wouldn’t be anything dramatic and intense. his breaking point was something so simple and mundane, just that spilled takeout onto the train tracks, but it’s enough to push him over the edge. and i think that captures the feeling of being too full for what life keeps giving, more so than any big trigger. more often, it’s the sudden last straws. a laptop crashing before you can save your work, even though there is such a thing as recovery and backup. biting your tongue in the middle of a sentence and finding yourself tearing up because you’re suddenly so fed up with the world. it’s that over-inflated lump in your throat. the heat behind your eyes that prickles more than it floods. and that’s what i wanted yuuji’s panic attack to look like. something almost resigned, because, again, this isn’t the first time. he knows he’ll get through it. but he’s just so, so tired and wants to be held. held by no one else but megumi.

megumi, who’s still reeling from his conversation with nobara at the top of chapter 4. i maintain that this fic doesn’t have enough nobara (part of it is that i was sure i was gonna be able to write a nobamaki storyline on the side, of which you can see hints peppered throughout), but i’m glad that the scenes of her that are there are very definitive. i always think that nobara is in such a difficult position in any version of itafushi, including their canon selves; she has so much insight to who the boys are in themselves, which you can really see in how she talks and thinks of yuuji and how she deciphers megumi, and while i’m frustrated that i had to relegate her to a Dispenser of Insight and Wisdom role in flls, it also had to be her. it had to be her to squeeze yuuji’s hand at the breakfast bistro. it had to be her, later, to have the pre-wedding talk with megumi. and it had to be her, this time, bumping into megumi at work and forcing him to sit down (literally) and think about how he sees yuuji.

this scene also serves as a breather — as close to one, at least, as flls gives. it’s an interlude, almost. a break right in the middle of the fic. it’s meant to recentre megumi, though that doesn’t really work when the chapter ends with him asking yuuji out.

but — again. scene, plot, character, all intertwined. they have to be in a relationship for plot purposes, but the panic attack scenes ensure that megumi’s characterization is pushed into the only decision that makes sense for him after that. which is, circling back, to ask yuuji to date him. i know a decision has clicked into the right place when it feels final, when it doesn’t feel like i’m forcing anything into being what it is. or, best case scenario, when it feels like the only way this could have gone.

i think the ending to chapter 4 is, unfortunately, the only way it could have gone. it would come back to bite them, hard and painful, but it made sense with their psyches the way they are in that moment. it’s the start of the end, this chapter’s ending, but it’s still a start at that, and i think, when you love someone as much those two did, that matters a hell lot more than anything else.

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08 | LOVE LANGUAGE INTERLUDE

do i like toji in canon? i do. i think he’s a great character in terms of his place in the narrative. do i think he’s redeemable as a father? in complete honesty — i don’t know. my answer changes every day. but i know that while there are plenty of fictional fathers that i strictly, coldly don’t want to entertain the idea of redemption or empathy or understanding for, out of stubborn very personal bias, toji is definitely not one of them. if only when it comes to him, i detest the idea of thinking there are easy answers. this doesn’t mean there is no right or wrong answer, just that whatever the final answer might be, there will be plenty of factors that go into it.

but i was very generous to him in flls. that much is for sure, from the prologue to chapter 4 to everything else that came after. even i was surprised with the nuance he ended up containing, if only insofar as a foil to flls!gojo in megumi’s life. i think he’s a fucked up man in canon, and i think he did and would have made a fucked up father no matter how good the intentions, a fact that i promise i state gently, but i also think that can coexist with him being a fucked up product of his fucked up upbringing. does that excuse or justify or redeem him for anything? no, but and outside of canon and in the indulgence of flls, which semi-started for the indulgent reason that i want to see what an exchange between yuuji & toji would be like, this did give me themes to hone in on in examining love and how we learn to love as we grow up.

because i feel like — there’s been a lot of talk about how understanding your partner(s)’s love languages is key in a relationship. but then, going back to the way we love as a reaction to how we’ve been or haven’t been loved, isn’t your love language — at least for some people — just a reflection of the love you lack(ed)? i don’t know how true this is on a broad sense, of course, but it certainly was for flls yuuji and megumi. and it’s where i was able to justify writing megumi into the family networks that i did. writing about gojo and toji as his parental figures was one of my favourite parts of writing flls, but i’ll get to that in chapter 6.

for now, i was heading into chapter 5 knowing that there was going to be a fight at the end of it. and that if i was going to go into it assuming that love languages are a product of what was lacking in childhood, the focus is going to be on the friction between where yuuji & megumi differ on that front. except these are things we already know, even if subconsciously. their differences are things we know from canon, things we can tell from these first four chapters. so how do i shift this understanding a little bit so it lands a little harsher, digs a little deeper to the point that it’s almost uncomfortable? where it would make sense when they fight at the end of chapter 5?

i knew it was going to take a while to find an answer, so i decided to post the first four chapters in one go for megumi’s birthday and sit on it so i can get to a distance where i’ll (hopefully) be able to reevaluate where i should take the rest of it. i have a soft spot for this fic that i don’t often have for my work, and i was so attached to the world that i didn’t want to stop writing it, but i also knew it remained true that i wrote 49k in around three weeks and just. didn’t look back. so i was anticipating a lot of loose unintended threads that i’d have to tie up in the remaining three chapters, and i didn’t trust myself to see all of them until i’ve had some time away from the story.

the break lasted a month, and it admittedly left me rusty and frustrated. returning to flls to write chapter 5 resulted in 12k words’ worth of deleted scenes — but a necessary 12k, i maintain, because eventually, my divine solution came in a moment of remembering that flls is free playground real estate and i can try even things that a lazier me swore once i wouldn’t try. and to this day, i still think i couldn’t have done that chapter in a way that i would have allowed to be published if i hadn’t thought to throw everything to the wind and try second person. it unclogged whatever needed to be cleaned out of the way — and set me down the path for the second cour of the story.

・・・・・・

note: this is all i've had sitting in my drive since march, but i do cover the latter half + some kind of we in a separate roundup post. 

[sleeptowns]

stream give it back cö shu nie 🚗💨

alternatively: rambling about complex shades of grief, post-canon ambiguity & leaving here and where you are alone

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i'm on record saying that i started conceptualizing the premise to here and where you are after i tweeted — in my efforts to squirm away from ✨ sad & sad-adjacent emotions ✨ — that the new jjk ending had the same energy as one of those angsty hollywood romances featuring a dead girlfriend. but that’s not fair, because a) the ending is much more beautifully animated than a nicholas sparks movie could maybe hope to be and b) i’m doing it a great disservice by trying to downplay the complete tragedy of yuuji filming his friends from a distance, whether or not i even believe the memories featured here are real or not. 

and i made the tik tok joke in that tweet precisely because i wasn’t immune to the devastation that this new ending left in its wake. i’ve seen enough sad yuuji-centric art to last me for the rest of the year, and even my tik tok fyp in the past week has been nothing but people reacting to it — but even with all the saturation and exposure, it hasn’t stopped making me so sad every single time i remember or revisit it. at some point, i reached a level where i was physically ill just listening to “give it back” — and so, true to enneagram type 5 form, i thought this was the perfect mood to be productive about something i can’t help and tackle one of my writing resolutions this year. mappa said, “here. be sad.” and i said, “thank you. i will. after all, i resolved a few weeks ago to write more non-happy endings.” then i proceeded to word-v*mit into a doc for 17k words over a day and a half. 

i wish now that i waited a bit longer to write it. or spent more time on it, just because i wasn’t expecting it to pull so much of the canon universe into it and to require so much brain power in properly doing so. but i have a college au i miss like hell and wanna get back to asap, and when i opened the doc for here and where you are, all i really wanted to do was write one (1) scene. not even anything yuuji-related, because i have nothing left to contribute on that front save for my broken heart and all that fun stuff, but a scene between megumi & nobara. part of it is that i’ve always adored the little exchange they have after yuuji dies in the cursed womb arc: how they’re sitting a step apart on the stairs, the overpowering noise of the cicadas in the anime, the way that nobara takes charge of the conversation even though she’s one wrong exhale away from crying, the little sideways glances megumi keeps giving her without saying a single word. it says so much in the silence, that entire scene; even now, so many arcs later, i find myself thinking sometimes about how grief might have informed the dynamic that megumi & nobara developed with each other in yuuji’s absence, how they were able to find trust in each other through that. 

(i also like that in the jujusanpo where megumi talks about yuuji teaching him how to make meatballs, it’s nobara who breaks the silence first — delivering a joke that doesn’t sound like a joke, or like she’s trying to make megumi feel better. that, to me, sounds like they’ve cemented a way to talk about yuuji’s death. it doesn’t sound like they’re grieving with each other; it sounds like they’ve reached a stable level of understanding about each other’s grief, an understanding how best to navigate that around each other without doing it together. and that’s very them, i think. their relationship is so quiet, so steady and firm and full of unspoken understanding.)

so when episode 14 made me realize a detail i completely passed over in the manga — that nobara full on tears up at seeing yuuji again, and that megumi looks weirdly surprised by this — i knew i wanted to dig my teeth into what’s going on there. but then the episode ended with “give it back,” and these lyrics were stuck in my head, in the shower, washing dishes, trying to sleep:

どこにあるの 寂しいよ

Please give it back

いつになれば 楽になれる

i’d sit up in bed and think, at 4am, where is who ??? why are you lonely? give what back? when will what get easier? and it’s one thing to entertain those questions through yuuji and his loneliness, to attach that sadness and loneliness to him — but i was still stuck on nobara’s tears and megumi’s reaction to them, still stuck on their shared moment at the end of the cursed womb arc, and at some point i remembered the part in the ending where nobara goes up to megumi to ask where yuuji was — and something clicked. kind of. 

i thought i could purge the feelings out by exploring megumi & nobara’s different manifestations of grief over yuuji in one scene where they go through yuuji’s phone together post-execution or whatever it would have been. i want to believe that — if the photos / videos are real — the two of them will get to see it at some point. there’s a lot of love nestled in the act of yuuji filming them, even in the distance he places on himself by being the one behind the camera, and my only initial intention, truly, truly, truly, was for megumi & nobara to find some closure in knowing how much yuuji loved them all to the very end. 

but that’s very martyr-y, i thought. not that there’s no martyrdom in what i ended up writing. but it just felt overall a yoi era me thing to write if i settled for a scene like that. which is where the nicholas sparks-esque tik tok joke came in: what if it was a the vow (2012) situation? what if yuuji does lose his memories? how about a situation where yuuji’s still alive, except he doesn’t remember them? what if we reverse the tragedy everyone thinks will happen where yuuji’s gonna be the forgotten one? on that vein, where does grief go when loss is not cemented? how do you juggle your grief in a situation like that? in what kind of position does that place the people that love him? and, going back to the questions in those “give it back” lyrics stuck in my head: what if the thing that causes the loneliness, the thing that doesn’t get easier, is this twisted, complicated sort of grief? 

and so i got out of bed at 6am without even having fallen asleep yet, and started writing.

this, however, meant constructing a fake premise that will explain for a couple of sentences what happened to yuuji. and because i tweeted this on priv last december —

— and it started kind of making actual sense to me as i progressively got loopier farther into the night —

— so i figured i might as well do something with that before akutami inevitably turns it on its head. which led to: what can happen to this yuuji that won’t kill him but take his memories? any kind of authority left in the aftermath won’t be so generous to just let him stay alive. then i thought about nanami carefully choosing his dying words for yuuji, how he was worried, even in those few remaining moments, that he’ll curse yuuji — and i thought about this slightly unhinged 3am new year’s day priv tweet, too: 

i know. i know. i really thought i mic-dropped for a moment there. which — let me be straight up here. i am definitely too stupid to theorize about jjk canon. and that’s okay. i acknowledge that. i accept it. that’s not me being self-deprecating or anything. i’m one hundred percent happy to not have a single working theory about where we’re going. if i’d known how canon-dependent this fic would turn out to be, i wouldn’t have attempted it. or at least not let it pass the 3k mark. or — i don’t know. i’d have attempted some kind of damage control. but it was too late by the time i realized how much i was rambling, and by that point, i was just picking and choosing from vague canon events and conjectures as if i’m getting a footlong sub and the person behind the counter is asking me what i want on it. like: anything can be a curse if said with enough emotion? sure, let’s go with that. megumi was for sure going through it in the goodwill event arc when he said that. like, my boy was having a mini flashback to yuuji saying please at the juvenile detention center while bleeding out. akutami saying at jump festa that — of gojo and the three first years — it’s either three will live and one will die or three will die and one will live? fine. let’s kill gojo off because i don’t think he’s going to survive the series anyway + use that as self-justification for why yuuji will still be alive in this hypothetical post-canon. 

and all this staccato picking and choosing left me with: curse-human hybrid yuuji staying alive without his memories intact because megumi cursed him to not die. and that fit right in line with the grief themes i wanted to poke around with. so it was settled.

all that’s remaining was to flesh out megumi & nobara’s differences in this scenario, and i ended up zeroing in on how nobara seems to have this certainty that megumi & yuuji are just a little bit closer. she refers to megumi in the ozawa chapter as “a guy who knows itadori much better than me” — and it’s a very matter-of-fact statement to make, nothing she holds against anyone. i imagine, reading it, that it’s the same tone she uses to make that “itadori’s legacy” comment about the meatballs. and in my head, in this hypothetical future where megumi kills yuuji, there’s a fair amount of imbalance there in the way they grieve. just as there was imbalance there the first time: megumi got a few more days with yuuji, got the whole saving him act going for both of them, was the person who had to struggle to get sukuna to save him only to watch him die. on the other hand, nobara knew him for a small pocket of time that she doesn’t think is enough to grieve over. she makes the distinction for both of them post-cursed womb: she asks megumi if it’s his first time watching a 仲間 die, but makes sure to say there’s no way she’ll be crying about someone she only knew for a couple of weeks. i know it’s not that deep, more a reflection of her personality than anything deep-seated, but i sorta just internalized how difficult it is to mourn with someone who has a separate set of memories and emotions to grieve than you do. and if i wanted to write a scene with megumi & nobara going through yuuji’s phone, i cannot, in good conscience, do that without also addressing the differences that can and will converge in this one shared moment. since i set out to write this thing for megumi & nobara and not yuuji / megumi, i needed the real catharsis here to be this realization that for all that megumi has all this guilt and unarticulated romantic love while nobara has nothing concrete to serve as foundation for a proper goodbye, yuuji loved them both the same, and so, so much at that. they were everything to him, no matter what he left behind for each of them, and that doesn’t stop the grief, doesn’t give them less to mourn, but it places them at the exact same level. no matter what they have, no matter how differently they loved the person they lost — they were loved right back by that person, and in the phone scene, that matters a hell lot more than anything else. 

still, i wanted megumi to be the one to bring them to that point. i wanted him to acknowledge that as painful as the guilt is, the lack of closure over someone he’s deeply in love with, nobara feels just as — if not more — lost than he does with her own grief. when yuuji died the first time, they both got to channel that into training for the goodwill event. this time, megumi has his nightmares, his regrets, all the memories he’ll have to just live with. nobara has — well. nothing, really. not even the opportunity to deny her grief the way she did before. she did know yuuji well this time. he was one of her best friends. she cried when she lost him. she cried when she got him back. she would have wanted to cry again, on march 20th. but there’s no release here for her. yuuji is alive. yuuji is safe. there’s nothing to grieve, not really. no death, whether by her hands or not. at least not until megumi recognizes that and gives her the phone. gives her something to call her own. gives her something to properly, guiltlessly release her grief over. 

it balances their situation out as much as it possibly can. and i like to think that when megumi leaves at the end of the fic, nobara’s not thinking she’s gonna lose him, too. i want to believe that’s her saying, hey, wherever you go, you’ll have this place to come home to. despite everything. so come back. come back because you can. is that her also believing yuuji will come back to them at some point? i don’t know. i’m trying not to think too much about it. i very nearly cracked and started writing a happy ending where although yuuji doesn’t get his memories back, he does realize there’s something off and allows megumi to take him through everything — but then i checked the word count, looked at the fic as it is, and was just like. nah. we’re trying to do better at writing non-perfect endings this year, folks. we’re doing it. that, and i didn’t want to get into ship of theseus debates with myself about whether a memory-less yuuji is the same yuuji megumi fell in love with. i meant it, when i had megumi point out that nobara & yuuji could still be friends in this universe. i’m not so sure about him & yuuji.

anyway. some writing reflections: i’m still definitely more comfortable writing aus than i am canon anything + i still need to get much, much better at writing shorter things — but overall, this fic was a fun little exercise in something i genuinely feel has no real answer. and that’s very freeing! it’s a bit of a moral conundrum to me, megumi’s situation, knowing the endings i usually write; while it was a struggle to just let myself address the complicatedness of this kind of ordeal without seeking out to solve it, narratively speaking, it was a well-needed little writing experiment. jjk has given me the rare chance to quietly play around with my writing, and i think i really took advantage of that with this fic. which is good! i feel really good about writing here and where you are. the end product not so much, but when do i ever feel great about that. it’s a work in progress etc etc the progress part is what matters yes yes

in any case: “give it back” by co shu nie is out on all music platforms today stream stream stream 🤎

—

p.s. as much as i love an itafushi bonding moment, why was nobara not making the meatballs with them? i had to indulge myself and throw in her developing the habit of making yuuji cook for her after he returns, even though i’m sure she must have some cooking skills.

p.s.s. a lot of credit due to the part in godspeed that’s like “i let go of my claim on you, it's a free world [...] but you'll have this place to call home, always” and and and the part in white ferrari that goes: “i care for you still and i will forever / that was my part of the deal, honest” :) :) :) 

[sleeptowns]

january 2021

kicking off (what will hopefully be) a year of writing resolutions & learning to be okay with the taste gap

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admittedly, i have never been the best at new year’s resolutions — by which i mean i’ve never trusted myself enough to even come up with some, much less make an attempt to stick to them. i also have never been the best with any kind of pre-writing goals or plans or even deadlines: i’m wholly unable to write story outlines, for one, and while i have learned in the past five years to write nonfiction in various deadline-driven environments, i can’t imagine writing fiction the same way. the expectations inherent to things like outlines & deadlines seem so suffocating in that context, so intimidating in that suffocation, and wherever expectations exist, i believe, some form of disappointment is sure to follow. it’s partly why i’ve always been hesitant to participate in fandom big bangs or exchanges; not only am i never clear on where a story is going before i write — and, in fact, prefer it best like this — i also squirm in the face of any kind of expectation re: my fiction writing, which (maybe a touch childishly) i am most comfortable doing on a whim, by impulse, with indulgence. 

but these are unreliable & unpredictable elements as far as daily life goes, and because i haven’t had anything to move me to that point since 2018, when v*ltron frustrated me so badly that there was nothing left to do but indulge that frustration, i also hadn’t really written fiction in two years until jujutsu kaisen hit me out of nowhere and did what so many other fellow hyperfixations failed to do before it.

while haikyuu!! did come very close, it also has the unfortunate luxury of having a vast fic community and the available readership to back it up — and that is just far too terrifying to me. i’ll be lying if i didn’t say that part of the initial appeal of writing for jjk was in how young and small the tag still is — especially compared to the likes of hq!! — and how much more freedom i feel writing for that. there’s so much room for a good, serotonin-rich amount of whims and impulses and indulgence, without the pressure of knowing i’m contributing to a busy, booming tag, and so that’s exactly what i set out to appease with first love, late spring.

and honestly? that fic doesn’t even have an ounce of competition in being my favourite of all the ones i’ve ever written. 

as schmaltzy as it is of me, first love, late spring reminded me why i love not only writing, but writing fic, and writing aus at that. working on it has left me wistful about why i didn’t try to write more in those two years and how much of my own growth i stunted in simply not trying harder, regardless of whether those attempts end up in a finished product or not. this wistfulness only tripled when a writer i’ve admired for years posted a 2020 retrospective on all the writing they did for the year, self-reflective and lovely as their words always are and leaving me all, damn it, i could have written one too if — you know — i actually wrote. 

and because, to quote the secret history, i am nothing in my soul if not obsessive, i started 2021 knowing nothing except the fact that i also want to be able to write a retrospective at the end of this year. to have content for one, however, means i have to actually write quite a bit — and this loops me back to resolutions and how, for the first time in possibly my entire life, i came up with some. all of them writing-related, six each for fic and non-fic, twelve overall expectations placed on the shoulders of future me. 

did i come up with these in under ten minutes? yes. will i still hold my end-of-2021 self accountable for the likely inevitable event that they are unable to fulfill every one? absolutely.

with that said, here are the six resolutions for fic writing: 

write more non-romantic/gen fic

be more comfortable with non-happy and/or incomplete endings

(maybe) participate in an event

be happier with writing shorter things

100k total word count for the year

try a wildly new genre and/or trope

and the six for non-fandom writing: 

finish at least one novel

next original work cannot be romantic

introspection > dialogue

try a fresh pov

venture farther in world-building

write a short story

looking at them now, they don’t seem very realistic in consideration of all my other life responsibilities — but oh well. too late. they’ve been carved into stone as far as my obsessive mind is concerned. they could be a lot worse, too, in that i do have my reasons for these, with each of them targeting something i’d like to see ✨ evolve ✨ in my writing and most of them designed to ensure that i never corner myself into boredom and stagnation. 

but thinking about my writing in serious terms like this is, i confess, extremely bizarre. it’s weird calling it “my writing” at all; it doesn’t feel like a term i’ve earned enough to be able to throw around like this. it’s too official, too heavy-weighted, the way that you can’t really be saying things like “my field” unless you are, in fact, a professional or expert or even an intern working in said field. like a pre-med student referring to the universal healthcare system as their field, or a physics major sophomore calling neil degrasse tyson his same-field colleague. you know what i mean? i don’t feel like i should be calling myself a writer, and referring to what i do as “the writing.” not for lack of professional accolades or whatever, but simply because this isn’t a frame i’m used to applying to myself. it gives people far too many expectations — expectations they won’t have if i make it clear from the get-go that i’m just a person who happens to write sometimes. which is true as well — but that’s beside the current point. 

in any case, this reluctance is also something i want to try to get better at this year. it’s not something i’ll ever feel about another writer; it’s a strictly me thing, this overinflation of what makes someone a writer. and that’s — that’s not cute. i want to be able to say i’m a writer and mean it, without adding the footnote that i don’t take it seriously. because i do. maybe not too much, because writing is the one thing where i am guaranteed to value my own fun above all, but that fun is also a kind of seriousness in itself, i think. to say i don’t take it seriously makes it sound like i don’t examine my writing critically. i do. of course i do. sure, my work always somehow ends up being more serious, more existential, and just all around more than the self-indulgence that founded and fuelled it, and i am the first person, every time, to mock and poke at that escalation — but you know? i really, really love writing. i love that first moment of catching on a half-formed idea and entertaining its potential to be a something. i love being so attached to a concept that i wake up at odd intervals during the night to ramble on a new google keep note with only one eye open. i love being stuck in a position that will permanently hurt my back because i just can’t stop typing. i love filling out a page of nothing but dialogue with scenery, with body language, with inane descriptions that make me like a character even more than i already do. i love the period where all songs and quotes and movie screencaps are about this story idea, as if i’m a teenager falling in love for the first time and this story is the person i’m smitten with. 

i just love, love, love the act of writing. now i have to learn to love my writing with that same intensity. 

but i know that stuff doesn’t happen overnight. i’m trying to tell myself these days that this is more than okay. i am far from doing the writing that i want to be doing, still trapped in that stage that ira glass would call the gap phase where my work just hasn’t caught up to my taste yet, but i also know that i wouldn’t be writing 20k+ aus over and over if i didn’t love and trust in the process so much. and this, i am also learning to find peace with. loving the process even if i don’t love the end result as much as i love what came before does have its own weight, its own significance, in the long run. i’ve always known this, but i believe it these days because i’ve been writing novel-length shit since i was 15 and only now, at 23, have i finally written the first one i love as much as i do the act of writing it. it is still far from perfect, but it’s my first taste of the light at the end of the tunnel, i guess, and you know what they say in elementary school assemblies: gateway drugs make all the difference.

so future me — i am shamelessly placing the onus on you to fulfill these resolutions because i want us to get better. i want us to write more. i want us to make up for the past two years. i want us to not have another prolonged period of silence again. i want us to be writers. 

but, most of all, i want us to be able to write that retrospective. 

no pressure.