#and if the character shares nothing with the og beyond a name then i'm outta there

[pokimoko]

🍒 🍊 🍍 n 🥝!

Thank you for the fruit, my fruit. 💜

🍒 What’s your favorite character dynamic to write? (Can be romantic or platonic, specific or general!)

Platonic for sure! Anything found family is my jam, and I particularly love writing sibling dynamics, blood-related or otherwise. I also like writing F/M friendships because I enjoy them and I think they should be normalised more, honestly (though, truthfully, those always end up falling in the sibling dynamic category as well). I also like writing QPRs, though I haven't really had the opportunity to write many, but they hold a special place in my heart.

🍊 Who’s a character you don’t write for that often, but keep meaning to write for more?

Bucky Barnes, definitely; sure, I wrote one fairly long fic about him, but that was one fic; I was obsessed with the guy long and hard enough that there should be at least a few more. But nope. I did plan out a whole sequel to said long fic as well as prequels but those never really came into fruition unfortunately. Not sure if I'll write for him anyone soon but god I've had so many plot ideas about the guy over the years that I just never wrote. Still fond of the 'Bucky bonds with Cosmo the Space Dog' idea I came up with back in 2021. I wrote a post it note but nothing more. Ah. Maybe one day.

Aside from him, I'd say Jake Lockley. I definitely need to write more of him and I want to. He can be a bit hard to pin down character-wise because we were given nothing more than crumbs, but I also enjoy the freedom that offers too. He definitively hasn't been getting enough love from me. But hopefully that will change soon.

🍍 What kind of AUs do you like? Are there any AUs you hate or just generally have beef with?

I generally avoid AUs; in fact, I exclude most of the more popular ones (Collage, High School, Coffee Shop, etc) from my searches because I'm really not fussed about reading them. I just find writers often strip the characters of any distinguishabilty to the point of them being basically a different character (not their fault, really; changing the setting and origin changes the character's experiences and dynamics, which fundamentally changes them, and that can be a difficult thing to wrangle). Some people, though, absolutely excel at using the AU and the worldbuilding therein to explore deeper into the character, their dynamics and motivations from a viewpoint that is different yet still feels like it aligns with what's been established in canon, and I love when it's done right. So I don't avoid AUs completely. Just really picky about them.

As for the ones I like, I like Alternative Universes in the most classic sense of term, where universes are defined by a path not chosen, a mistake not made. That is to say, I really like Canon Divergence and What If? scenarios. Anything that keeps the characters and world somewhat familiar but their dynamics and/or motivations altered. (Also love when alternate selves—or even selves from different points of the same timeline—meet and get to see the verion of themself they could have been if things had been different and/or interact with who they were before that Great Terrible Thing changed them.) For more extreme alterations, I'm not against a well written Fantasy/Sci-fi AU or Fusion AUs (so long as it's not an all-out crossover and the fusion is not all-consuming).

I am not a fan of No Powers/No Magic/Human AUs (or Modern Setting AUs if the original setting isn't modern). That's Just Some Guy in a Just Some Guy world now (which always looks suspiciously like our own). And powers/non-humaness is generally tied up a lot with the character themself, so stripping that from them removes a lot of who they are, in my opinion. And as we established, I'm really picky about characterisation. I don't much care for Soulmate AUs either, but that's a whole amatonormativity essay I won't get into.

Also I wouldn't say I have beef with Coffee Shop AUs, I just will never understand them, and I don't mean in a "urgh why is this so popular" kind of way, I mean I literally don't understand. I don't drink coffee and I've been inside Starbucks maybe once (mostly to gawk because I rarely come across them, even in the city), so words like venti and frappe and just coffee culture in general flies over my head, and I do not care enough about coffee to learn. It is simply a fic space I am not meant to inhabit. I have made my peace with that.

🥝 What’s your favorite trope/AO3 tag to write?

Character Studies are my happy place, my life blood if you will. Is it obvious yet I'm obsessed with exploring characters and their dynamics with others? Because I am. I am nothing more than a clockmaker taking these characters apart to see what makes them tick, and how the gears of the world and those around them fit into it all. Other tags and tropes I'm fond of are and that show up a lot in my writing include: angst (duh), unreliable narrators, memory loss/amnesia (guilty pleasure), dream sequences/unreality, hey! let me patch up your wounded hand, forehead kisses, extended metaphors, horror as a metaphor because I'm pretentious and was fundamentally changed as a person by being taught Gothic and Romantic Literature in my senior school years, and finally mind control/posession (guiltier pleasure).

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Always a blast getting to answer questions like these, thank you! :D. There's more fruits/questions here if anyone else wants to send some in.