#-as the baseline... which I feel can definitely come across as a bit conceited? Not deliberately but I do feel that the concept of-

[true-blue-sonic]

Silver's Powers not being unique to him kinda makes sense because Silver doesn't think of himself as special and is canonically considered a loser at this point.

I personally would say it's mostly the IDW comics that wildly oscillate between the amount of respect they give Silver. They give me the feeling that they simply just can't make up their mind on who or what they want Silver to be, which I would say is because the end goal of the plot is entirely driving the bus here, not the characters and their actions. So that means in the comics, Silver is either a bumbling idiot who needs to be hand-held by the more powerful smarter OCs while nearly getting wiped out by one random Egg Pawn in a flashback, or someone hella OP and serious whose powers while Super can clear an entire planet of a virus that changes its victims on a molecular level. And I think Silver has absolutely amazing moments in IDW! I love the issue where he and Sonic take the six Chaos Emeralds and make a mad dash for Zavok to get the seventh one, where Silver is a crucial component and shown off as his powerful self. And also during his fight with Zor he's no-nonsense, clear about what he stands for, and even shown as unforgiving to an extent. That is definitely why I find it so unfortunate that these moments are counteracted by Silver either being innocent uwu bapy boi, or just being written as incompetent because that's what the plot needs him to be to get to what it wants to achieve.

But that is just the comics. Forces painted Silver a lot more respectably in my opinion (e.g. shown as being capable of making a stand against Infinite, who's been callously murdering people in the streets beforehand with nothing they could do to fight back having the slightest effect), and TSR did too if you ignore the trash talk scene (e.g. Silver being the first to learn of Eggman and Dodon Pa's plans, and keeping an eye on things with help from his friends). Furthermore, the Sonic Channel stories and information about Silver give a much more respectable view of the character, that leans far more towards his positive sides: his straightforwardness, kindness, desire for justice, willingness for peace, reliability, the fact people feel endeared to him, etc etc. Simultaneously, they are not afraid to mention that Silver can take things too far, and can be put on the wrong track at times. Generally, those stories thus paint him as someone serious and incredibly strong (e.g. able to stop the Eclipse Canon beam with a shield of PK) while still being naive and having slight tunnel vision (e.g. not understanding why he was not taken seriously when he told the Soleannan officials about the bridge collapsing, which he knew because he came from the future). It's... better than what the comic is giving us, in my personal opinion; it's at least more enjoyable if you like Silver's personality from the actual games. So I do not at all agree with the idea he's "canonically a loser" currently. It just depends on what media you look into, and how that media treats the character in regards to what Silver's actual personality is like.

[hyacinthetic]

end of the year writing meme 2k17

because i did this last year and i want to gloat over my truly embarrassing uptick in wordcount.

Total number of completed stories: 8 + 1 wip + 1 snippet.  Total word count: 151,100, MOTHERFUCKER. Fandoms: voltron, persona 5, natsume’s book of friends.

Overall Thoughts

Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you'd predicted? TOO MUCH VOLTRON. WAY, WAY TOO MUCH VOLTRON.

What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January? i have 40k of lotor/matt sitting on my hard drive. it's going to break 60k after edits. i don't want this life.

What's your own favorite of the year? the post-series winter cult au was my favorite bit of writing, but i am gonna clutch the pseudo-utena pastiche (disclaimer: not actually related to utena in any way) to my chest all the more because nobody else will. 36K WORDS, MOTHERFUCKERS.

Did you take any writing risks this year? mmm. i've used the second-person pov before to varying degrees of efficacy, but the junior detective kurusu akira fic and the every day au were the first times i really tried to use it as a proper conceit -- a choice that related to the way the character wanted the story framed. ymmv on how well they worked (ha! ha! most of the second-person punch in the junior detective fic happens in the ~20k after the prologue, oh god, nobody even knows what i'm talking about). at the v. least, i still think the every day au's ending wouldn't pack such a punch from any other perspective.

Do you have any fanfic or profic goals for the new year? WRITE STUFF THAT ISN'T VOLTRON, FOR FUCK'S SAKE. i've been reduced to just clawing at doors hissing LET ME GO... LET MY PEOPLE GO ...

From my past year of writing, what was...

My best story of this year: definitely the post-series winter cult. people keep describing it as hard to get into, which, yeah, it is. but it's also the most polished piece from this year.

in general, my best fic is always still the dazai/yosano thing from 2016. i didn't even round out all the subplots for that one, but because it's a crack ship, the whole dynamic is something i made, and i think that earns it a place on the trophy shelf.

My most popular story of this year: the shrine guardian au, i guess? which is bewildering, frankly: it's very fluffy, but i don't see that it does anything better than my other works. not to be all lucille bluth, i love all my children equally!!! and its prose is fine, but i wouldn't call it a standout piece.

Story of mine most under-appreciated by the universe, in my opinion: it is a tie between my two big voltron aus -- i understand why the pseudo-utena flopped as hard as it did (60k worth of fic crammed into 36k, badly edited, had to cut two subplots and it still turned out a mess), but the darkest timeline auniverse fic was decent work with mediocre prose and a fuckton of worldbuilding. i'm this close to digging up a worldbuilding meme and answering all the questions that literally nobody will ever ask. THERE WAS SO MUCH TIMELINE BUILDING IN THAT ONE.

Most fun story to write: fun & joy are lies. all fic is suffering. only the motor fic came close, and that was awful in a different way: two characters with little established personality having to build chemistry and worldbuilding at the same time. fuck you both.

Story with the single sexiest moment: hilariously, despite the amount of porn i like to write, none of my fic's been personally sexy to me since 2013's mikorei pwp in which mikoto blew up some buildings and then convinced munakata to fuck him into a wall. what can i say, i'm an arson kind of girl.

Most "holy crap, that's wrong, even for you" story: nothing posted this year! but i'm gonna talk about my impending january posts because god, fuck, i'm not waiting a year so that i can talk excitedly about my 60k nightmare, i plan to be fucking burned out on voltron by february.

anyway: the first time i tried to explain lotor/matt to my best girl, she promptly texted back in horror: "DID YOU WRITE FIC WHERE LOTOR SOULBONDS MATT AND LEAVES HIM TO GET GANGBANGED." and, like. i want to explain, but the actual explanation wasn't really that much more comforting. so, there'll be that. i guess.

(there's actually no non-con involved! it's not even dubcon! IT'S NOT EVEN MATT WHO GETS LEFT.)

Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters: the fucking motor fic. i knew what i liked about lotor as i was going in -- 90% of my motivation in writing it was "okay, i can't make any of the existing major lotor ships work for me, let's just throw this ridiculous spaghetti galra at a shipping wall and see what sticks" -- but matt was much more nebulous to me. i know fanon matt isn't all that far off from the matt we actually saw in season 4, but i was interested in someone who wasn't an older, cheerful, ingenious, meme-loving version of pidge. and the detail that i really got stuck on was the fact that he was a cadet when he went to kerberos, even though keith was the best pilot in his class and keith couldn't go. why?

obviously the simpler answer's "narrative convenience" and "why would anyone trust keith enough to send him into space with millions of dollars' worth of space equipment". but i really did want to play with the alternative too.

Hardest story to write: fucking god. the european travelogue was downright awful to get out. i think it's partly that there's an emotional density to it that isn't really present in my other fic, and partly that it's 25K OF SHIRO DESCRIBING ARCHITECTURE THAT IS PERFECTLY EASY FOR ANYBODY TO GOOGLE AND LOOK AT WITH THEIR OWN EYES.

i also found sheith particularly hard to build as a convincing slowburn. i have no idea how anyone does it. the ship's selling point, to me, is that keith would give shiro anything. if shiro weren't romantically interested, keith would live and die for him in every other way and be absolutely satisfied by that. i never write keith as secretly wanting more than shiro can give -- he'll do it by accident, when he misunderstands what shiro's capable of, but ultimately that's not what keith wants himself to be. shiro plays by the rules a little better, understands the risks + selfishness of dating someone only to leave them for a dangerous ten-month expedition -- but when it comes down to it, i can't write them as anything other than two people who understand each other at the baseline, where it counts. like, shiro may not actively acknowledge it, but i don't think he DOESN'T know that keith has no breaking point when it comes to him, and that there is very unlikely to be anyone else who could ever be what shiro is to him.

anyway: 25k of no-plot fluff! jesus! it was a fun little experiment, and i'm still amazed and delighted that anyone hunted my tumblr down to ask for fic. but i'll probably never write anything like that again.

Biggest disappointment: can you believe that i wrote 36k of psychic bonding fic and it didn't lead to telepathic porn? there's a lot in the utena pastiche that made me go "mm, not enough", a lot that was flatly messy first-draft fumbling, and i've never been happy about how it turned out, but that's still the biggest outrage to me. like. what was even the point. there's so much about it that makes me itch to rewrite, but the number-one reason that i never, ever will is that i'd have to find somewhere to fit porn to make it worth my time AND SOME THINGS ARE JUST IMPOSSIBLE.

Biggest surprise: i!! posted!! 100k+ words!!!!!!! WITH OVERFLOWING PUNCTUATION BECAUSE I DESERVE IT, MOTHERFUCKER. ficwise, though -- the lotor/matt au. why the fuck would you ship two characters who literally have no screen time together, share nothing in common, and are unlikely to develop a dynamic in future seasons, let alone this one? answer: ME: You have to promise to read the Lotor/Matt thing even though I've realised that their portmanteau is "Motor". MY GIRL: WELL now i have to read it ME: ME: Never mind, your boner killed mine.

but the joke's on me, because the one way to guarantee that i'll write something is a hot girl telling me she'll read it.

i love how most of this meme is grim self-encouragement to finish a fic that feels like it is literally killing me by dint of being the longest goddamn thing i've written in my life.

Most unintentionally telling story: well, it was GONNA be the junior detective kurusu akira fic, but i DIDN'T FINISH THAT.

on a more personal note: the every day au's ending was never in question for me. i'm rarely in the mood for conversation, but i can't stand keeping my feelings to myself: i don't feel real unless someone else can see me. it's why i like to yell in my post tags and do memes even though i follow like three actual personal blogs and a significant portion of this tumblr's designed to actively discourage 90% of people who stumble across it from adding me. the idea that, when you strip the viewer out, the object disappears -- that's probably as 'me' as a story gets.

Highlights + Wrap-up

Favourite Opening Lines (3):

The courthouse's a brushfire of camera lenses.

You wake up. [ ed. nt: not really the most unique or interesting of opening lines, but i've started to appreciate how this echoes throughout the piece and then builds into a clusterfuck chorus by the end. ]

[ nope. the other first lines weren't that great. fuck you, meme.]

Favorite 5 Line(s) Ficbits from Anywhere: [ ed. nt: fuck you, word limits & punctuation. ]

"I knew you were gone—long gone. No one could've called you back. But I just kept saying—if they were really Voltron, you'd be with them. You'd have come back for me."

"You stand," Allura whispers, "on territory that was consecrated by the five rituals of essential transference. You stand within the walls that my grandfather built, the walls for which my father sacrificed everything to keep from enemy dominion. The planet Altea remains because I lay claim to it, because I have not yielded to time and I will not yield. You may have served as Zarkon's witch; but in these halls, your very life hangs on Altea's mercy, my mercy. Either you'll remember an Altean's manners or a prisoner's—but so long as you speak to me, Haggar, you will choose one." -- so this fic was a series of dramatic triumphs that i did not build up to and therefore had no right to put in, but i don't care. if i'm going to write 100k++ of fic in a year, it's gonna be spread out over like ten different fics. and this is my favorite of the dramatic non-love confessional speeches that i wrote this year.

Keith lisps briefly and nastily under his breath. "Why would anyone pronounce an apostrophe?” <-- me throwing shade at a hundred years of scifi.

[ fuck you, listicles. ]

[ fuck you pt. 2. all the other sentences sucked. ]

Trivia left out of three fic:

pidge survives the events of the every day au and does eventually go on to form voltron. i left the fic where i did as a dramatic stopping point; in my head, i always knew where things were going to go afterwards. this clarity was helped in no small part because i had to immediately spill my guts to my best girl after she finished reading and realised in outrage that i'd given her a 19k fic in which her otp kissed zero (0) times. but yeah, everything works out -- albeit with a superdose of trauma -- and keith and pidge in particular have a moment which appeals to all my friendship kinks. i couldn't write the sequel in second-person, though, which is probably why i'll never do it. if i can't be pretentious and tragic, and i still can't work in any porn, then what is the point.

shiro, in the weird tattoo porn thing, has no idea of the effect he's having. in his mind, he's just being reasonable. this ties into my preference for writing s3-4!shiro as someone who thinks of himself as the same man who fell to earth a year ago, someone who has survived the galra over and over, someone who wants to lead in the war and deserves to do it. the trouble with this is that about one-point-five of those things are not necessarily things that the original shiro actually believes. i love this discrepancy between writing the two: there's one who buys into his own mythology of being a hero, and there's one who just wants everyone to survive and be happy and safe. in an ideal world (note: ideal to nobody but me), project kuron would be a thing where they created a perfect clone of shiro with all his memories but accidentally infused it with just enough galra beliefs about strength and the importance of war that it sabotages voltron's mission. that particular shiro doesn't mean to be fucked up, but his beliefs are, and he doesn't realise it until after the fallout of everything he's done hits the team. it's the entire basis for his behavior afterwards. this is one of those character development things that fell into the margins between the tattoo porn and its weird au sequel. i should have written the fic in between, i'm sure it would've been less confusing for everyone who read the goddamn sequence, but honestly, you could not pay me enough to write about keith and shiro's relationship falling apart.

this was never made explicit in the fic itself, though it seems pretty clear to me, but here goes. of the ten photographs, nine are pictures that shiro takes for keith to remember them by. the last is one that keith takes for shiro.

Lessons learned about writing in 2017:

when in doubt during edits, read the paragraph out loud. you don't have to do it very loudly, but people respond to something that flows off the tongue even if they aren't actually reading it out to themselves.

you're a niche writer. you write for you. that means you don't really have to edit if you're tired.

deadlines are bullshit. don't sign up for any more events featuring those.

with the way i write, there's always an element of mistrust. in my shorter fics, people are breaking up because they can't trust each other, or they're teetering on the brink of getting together -- but. in my longer fics, i really, really love to throw an unexplained element of mistrust into the mix (see: the fic where shiro leaves his own dimension and refuses to go back without any explanation) and only 'reveal 'it at the end. mistrust is an easy shortcut to tension. it's a good way to reframe the story, but it's also ... hm. predictable if it's literally all you write? i like to think that i'm capable of writing plots whose value isn't entirely based on the way they're told. i just need to let the story breathe once in a while.

the comma before 'too' is grammatically incorrect when that's the end of the sentence. my entire life is a goddamn lie.

there's such a thing as overdetail. a loose sketch and a twinkle of atmosphere will do better than three dense paragraphs detailing exactly where all the cathedrals are. my god, i never want to leave this continent again.

the best writing feeling is posting something and then tweaking all the small mistakes out of it. the second-best writing feeling is bringing someone you like a freshly-killed (read: edited) piece of prose, then demanding pets and cuddling for your great act of magnimity and courage.

looking back on my life, i should have been born a cat.

Fic-writing goals for 2018

post/finish all 80k of my existing drafts, THEN LEAVE VOLTRON FOREVER, I'M SO DARKLY EXCITED ABOUT THIS EXODUS.

seriously, write for any fandom but voltron. oh my god.

maybe i can just dive headfirst into ocean's eight and write a lot of bantery f/f until everyone forgets my embarrassing gay robolion phase.

a sci-fi au for nirvana in fire, heavily influenced by recent military scifi, in which (contrary to all the imperial death traditions) the chiyan army's memories and consciousness are ostensibly deleted from the imperial archives as punishment for their betrayal. several years down the line, jingyan finds his political influence rising with the advice of a helpful and very insistent ai advisor. IT'S TOO COMPLICATED AND I'M STILL THINKING ABOUT IT.

did you know that the natori/matoba section on ao3 has no explicit fic at all? like, zero. 2018 goals, baby. i don't care that nobody needs to know what horrible things they'd do to each other in bed. i'm gonna be this ship's rule 34, or the arsonist who burns down the house of the person who gets to it before me.