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phoenixtakaramono · 11 months

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2, 12, 26

Re: Questions for Fic Writers

Thank you for the Ask, anon! So sorry it’s taken awhile to respond but finally I’m on a brief break from writing so I can finally answer this! (๑˃̵ᴗ˂̵)♡

I do have to give everyone a warning. After Question 2, I do get a bit nitpicky and kinda specific of what I personally do not like. Please don’t take offense, luvs. <3

2) Go to your AO3 “Works” page, to the sidebar with all the filters, and click the drop-down arrow for “Additional Tags.” What are your top 3-5 most used tags? Do you think they accurately represent your writing habits?

I had to lol a bit looking at them. So disregarding the Fanart and Illustrations tags (I usually make a cover art for my long fics), what we’re looking at are:

Developing Relationship: You’re talking to a slowburn romance writer. By nature, I am also very much demisexual irl. And I am an avid consumer of light novels and danmei where 100-300 chapters in, they finally hold hands or kiss, and I have to scream into a pillow and kick my feet in delight upon reading it (the number is an exaggerated hyberbole, haha, but you get the gist). It’s the developing relationship that makes the experience special imo so I like to spend more time and effort showing how these characters can come to fall in love with each other in my own works.

Possessive Behavior: So, irl, I would hate this. Dear lord, I would run for the hills if a man showed an ounce of possessiveness and has essentially revolved their life around me to a disturbing degree (it’s not cute being love-bombed and isolated from friends and family, etc). But since this is fictional and the love interests tend to be canonical d*ckheads whereby possessiveness is very much in-character for them, and especially if it’s for a dark fic, I will serve you psychotic yanderes or clingy, obsessive Male Leads who love only the Main Character and would end the world just for them. I am so used to wholesome healthy cookie-cutter relationships irl, so I like to explore the opposite in fiction.

S*xual Tension: Same as the developing relationship. I mean, yes, I can write the NS/FWs and can churn them out with a straight face, but it’s usually not the focus of my works. It’s the s*xual tension where it’s at. I wanna see chemistry. I wanna see it sizzle. I want to see them pine. When I write a romance, I want to make it clear from the start how well-matched these two characters are for each other and, why, yes, you should continue to read my super ultra long fic if you want to see how I will make them kiss and make love to each other.

Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence: Alright, this one is especially indicative of my writing habits and the stories I tend to write, aka Post-Canon AUs. It’s very much What-If scenarios that keep me up at night and inspire me to write what you read. I don’t think there exists a fic of mine which is not either an AU or an AU - Canon Divergence. For me, after I finish a source material, usually I want to see a continuation of the same characters—with their core essence and personality kept as true as possible. And that is also indicative of what I write. What I like to read myself extends to what I like to write.

Fluff: I like fluff as much as the next person, but I like it when it’s earned. When that coldhearted Love Interest who’s grown embittered gradually warms up to the Main Character and entwines their fingers to slowly bring their hands up to their face to softly plant a kiss to the back of their hand, or the Main Character who’s grown to be besotted with the Love Interest and nuzzles their face into their chest as their arms wrap around them, sharing body heat as their bodies spoon up against each other—you see what I mean? It hits better when it’s earned (when you see their journey). Since my fics tend to be long, I also like to inform my readers that, yes, there will be fluff in the story. They’re coming.

Character Study: I do use a lot of my fics as an opportunity to do a character study on some characters that fascinate me, whether it be a character introspection or their POV, etc. Some fics are more obvious think-pieces and character explorations disguised as stories. It’s exploring my love for a character, seeing what makes them tick, and condensing their essence down to mere words on a page.

Canon-Typical Violence: I’m a detail-oriented writer. 99% of the time, what I write is on the graphic end. I go lush with the sensory details and descriptions. And for the source materials with canon-typical violence, I feel obligated to include violent scenes in my own works so it feels like you’re reading an extension of the universe. I also tend to put this warning up just in case, just so readers have been forewarned.

The last tag is pretty self-explanatory I think, considering the fics I write are 🔞 queer literature between two consenting adult fictional men, haha. Nuff said.

12) Are there any tropes you used to dislike but have grown on you?

So, funny thing about me and my love-hate relationship with tropes…. In the spirit of honesty, this is a bit of a landmine to navigate for me, haha. I’d answered an Ask about this (if you do read it, skip down to the Contrarian Tendencies section), as why I tend to develop an aversion to tropes and clichés that’s affected not only what I consume as a reader but also affect the content I write. So if my brain happens to identify a pattern of tropes or clichés or popularly used words or even popular fanon nicknames for characters, I will instinctively dislike the fad 90% of the time on sight and I will go outta my way to avoid any fics/ stories/ shows/ manga/ manhua/ manhwa that even mention them—unless the creator is intentionally satirizing a classic cliché or reinvents the wheel to breathe new life into a tired trope. As an analogy, think of how fatigued some of us have become of the generic superhero movies being pumped out via DCU and MCU—and then think of how The Boys (TV) is like a breath of fresh air. It’s the execution and originality for me. I like it when there’s a clear attempt on the writer’s part to be unconventional. I love trope subversions and deconstructions. That’s kinda how my brain operates with tropes. I can’t exactly explain why my instinctive aversion to fads exists for me. It’s probably the predictability/ unoriginality and sensing a popular fad that kills it for me. It might be because as much as I am a bibliophile (person who loves reading books), I only have a limited amount of free time and don’t like to spend it on something that’s completely unoriginal with the usual tropes that come with the premise/ genre which comes across like beating a dead horse with a stick to me, and it shows me that the writer has put little to no effort into trying to come up with something new. So unless it’s intentional or satire, it’s pretty much become a compulsion for me to dislike clichés, fads, and generic cookie-cutter writing on sight.

This is just me though! It’s not a measure of what I think a writer’s skill or creativity is! I’m just an eccentric contrarian with hipster tendencies, haha. I just typically don’t like following trends in writing, and prefer to pave my own path to do my own thing. This aversion is similar to how I am as a writer. As an example on the smaller level, while not a trope, sometimes in fandoms I see a character affectionately being given non-canonical nicknames. For me…if I see it, chances are I will likely just drop the fic I’ve been reading, no matter how well-written it is and how amazing the plot and characterizations are. If I think a nickname has overstayed its welcome, I have reached a point where I won’t even come ten feet of it in my own stories. When it has reached that level of nausea for me, I have essentially developed an allergy to the nickname—that if I see it in any other franchise I have yet to check out but know that name exists for a character, I will avoid that other fandom like a plague just so there’s no cross-contamination of my writing or reading material. (So I’m not gonna name names because I don’t want writers to think I’m calling anyone out—because this aversion is only specific to me and is not a metric of the true quality of a writer’s work—but as a general example, it’s one of the reasons why I don’t like “Johnny” being used for a certain character in The Boys that have shown up a handful of times across various authors’ works already—because my brain associates that with another well-known character from CoD (🧼) who coincidentally shares the same first name (John) who also canonically has a certain nickname they’re known by (Johnny)—and what a funny coincidence that it’s the same as their nickname for a character I’m reading about in this different fandom. It could be very well that it’s cute so that’s maybe why some writers use it (which, I have to say this: don’t let me stop you; it’s your fic so do whatever you want; I encourage you to continue so in fact; this is just me being nitpicky to a fault) but there are writers I know who are in the CoD franchise as well as The Boys. So I just cannot remove the association my brain has made and that’s personally why it’s not my cuppa tea.)

“A-Yuan” is a good example, for the character Shen Yuan from SVSSS, where I saw it everywhere in the fics I read, disliked the fad because my brain strongly associated “A-Yuan” with a character from MXTX’s other work, MDZS, so it was incredibly jarring to me on principle, but over the years—and especially engagement with my cute readers—it has grown on me. A-Yuan though is probably the one exception I’ve made so far where I will read works with that fanon nickname while also include it in my own work myself. No other fanon character nicknames for other fandoms so far have pierced through the barrier of my initial dislike to the other side. If you ask me for reasons of how this manifests for me, it can differ. 1) It’s too cutesy and can be immersion-breaking if it’s not done right or if it’s out-of-character (especially if no one would call them that in the source material). Or 2) the nickname reminds me of another character from a different franchise, which makes me feel like I’m reading about an entirely different character from that franchise than the character I want to be reading about. Or 3) it makes me feel like I’m reading about a writer’s Original Character and not the actual character I’d wanted to read about so I feel like I’ve been misled by unintentional false advertisement. Other examples are (in no particular order of which fandoms they come from): Hanni, Dray/ Drake, Johnny, Tommy, Sesshy, Sev, Jimmy, BeiBei…I could go on but I already feel my soul has shriveled just mentioning these. In my opinion, just a made-up fanon nickname or petname being mentioned once or twice or a handful of times is okay, or if it’s said mockingly or if it’s like an earned thing to show relationship growth, but dear lord if that cutesy nickname has replaced the actual character’s first name for, like, 90% of a fic and has become their go-to. This also applies for Original Works. If I have to read a character calling someone by something corny like “Little One,” “Goddess,” “little lamb,” “cub,” or “kitten” for the 3,000th time in the same work and it’s not the writer trying to be ironic or funny, I will take a fork to my eyes.

As for actual disliked tropes that have grown on me…gosh, there are none. None, zilch, nada. It’s either A) I dislike it wholeheartedly and will go out of my way to avoid my pet peeves, or B) I like something and will continue to read 100 iterations of it because everyone does it differently so it’s refreshing to see everyone’s different take (I will read any dark fics revolving around a villain or antihero or hero-turned-ruthless with a scheming mind and twisted motives; I eat that up for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and will love it till I’m in my 90s or buried in my grave). There’s no coming back once I’ve become fatigued by something. And if I have come to dislike something, I will loathe it with every fiber of my being and nothing can convince me otherwise once I have put it on my Do Not Like list. We’re talking about tropes I find insufferable like unnecessary miscommunication/ misunderstandings leading to a fall-out/ unnecessary poor communication leading to unnecessary drama, fake-out deaths (if not done right), love triangles (if not done right), damsel in distress (if not done right), unnecessary and undeserved character assassination character bashing to make way for a ship, etc. Now can there be exceptions to this? Yes. God, yes, they exist. But these are the tropes I rarely see executed well. And if it’s not executed well, it grinds everything to a screeching halt for me and I notice its existence even more. I will however make a strong attempt to persevere and patiently read on despite so in hopes that it gets better to see what the hullabaloo is all about, but even I have my limits for how long I can keep holding on.

26) Would you rather write a fic that had no dialogue or one that was only dialogue?

First of all, why? Hahaha. Secondly, I guess I’m going to be nitpicky here as well. So unless it’s a satirical fic where there’s only one character (lmao, y’all recall that infamous Groot masterpiece?), I would rather write a fic that had no dialogue because at least I can differentiate everyone’s introspection and thoughts, interspersed with descriptions and other storytelling elements. Maybe instead of dialogue, they communicate via telepathy or body language. I’dunno, but it’s certainly more flexible. It’s just a small pet peeve of mine where I read a story where there’s a large chunk of dialogue—but I have absolutely no clue who’s speaking. It’s frustrating. And is a surefire way to break my reader immersion and take me outta the story.

#ask #anon #ty for the ask <3 #phoenix talks #questions for fic writers #I very much go scorched earth on things I dislike #which means I have erased it from my life and 99% will not read it or include it in my own writing #it’s even extended to words I will not use 99.9% of the time in my own writing #said words include ‘whine’ (in a 🔞 context); ‘s/he blushed’; the list goes on #you’ll notice such words are virtually almost nonexistent in my writings #I felt bad that I answered two of these questions with negativity but I am being genuine #(hopefully it’s an interesting insight into me as a writer for you!)

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