#carlward

[gisellelx]

I really am trying to finish a fic novel I started 13 years ago. Where did these 588 words on a new novella come from.

This cursed fucking ship.

[fuckmeyer]

HEY i'm having unhinged carlisle/edward thoughts again and i had to come into your inbox to share them because YOU DID THIS TO ME--

but truly. like. the bond between creator and created. (this may or may not have been inspired by a conversation with su-angelvicioso about yknow. a different ship) the creator recognizes themself in the created, the created knows the creator because they were shaped so fundamentally by them...so any time they're looking at the other person they're seeing themself, but also any time they see themself they're seeing the other...there's no way to define yourself except in the differences and similarities you have to this person who you know more intimately than anyone else in the world, except really your view of them will ALWAYS be distorted by your view of yourself...like!!!!

edward thinks carlisle is perfect because he thinks of himself as a monster. carlisle thinks edward is the best of all of them, the reason to believe vampires have souls, because it's the only way for him NOT to believe he himself is a monster!!! edward hates and fears carlisle for being a standard he can never measure up to, but he loves him because he is that standard, and he keeps forgiving him...but maybe actually the forgiveness just makes him hate carlisle MORE because edward doesn't WANT to be forgiven!!! carlisle thinks of edward as his own redemption, but that means he'll never actually fully see edward and he can't actually forgive him in a meaningful way!!! they're obsessed with each other, but neither one of them can actually express that to the other!!!!!!! holy FUCK they're a MESS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(sorry this is not even a question, my brain is just scrambled eggs about them now apparently)

THIS IS IT I LOVE YOU THANK YOU FOR GIVING ME THE SPACE TO TALK ABOUT CARLWARD I SWEAR I AM GOING A LITTLE FERAL OVER THIS SHIP? FORGIVE ME THIS ASK SHOULD HAVE BEEN MORE POIGNANT BUT IM JUST GONNA SAY STUFF OK

THE BOND BETWEEN CREATOR AND CREATED!!!! YES!!!!!!!

the creator recognizes themself in the created, the created knows the creator because they were shaped so fundamentally by them. [...] your view of them will ALWAYS be distorted by your view of yourself

and isn't it just so beautiful when we put Carlisle & Edward's canon relationship in this context! i wrote this in another post but:

Carlisle believes Heaven exists because of Edward.

Heaven is not a place for the damned creatures like vampires, but a place for humanity.

which means!!!! Carlisle has chosen to see his own humanity in his son. for all it entails. its light, its shadows, all the shades of gray in between. and, yes!, the scary thing is, this is the only way Carlisle can believe he himself is not a monster - to see his progeny thrive within Carlisle's philosophy.

but the beautiful thing is he accepts Edward. he loves Edward. always. no matter what. & this is what allows him to participate in society, to take the Hippocratic Oath, to live a life of vegetarianism: Carlisle loves humanity in all its forms, BECAUSE OF AND IN SPITE OF EDWARD.

and Edward!!! Edward is the physical manifestation of Carlisle's beliefs. for better or worse. on the surface, Edward is a vegetarian vampire, med school grad, etc., and who wants to believe in the value of human life. (he doesn't always live up to this in day-to-day interactions obvi.)

on a deeper level, he has grappled with questions re: humanity, especially his place within his preconceived idea of Humanity. he considers himself damned, just as Carlisle does. (perhaps, even, the darkest part of Carlisle doubts the existence of his own soul.) he spends the entire series rebelling against the idea of his soul & his worthiness of love while battling his own monstrous nature.

but unlike Carlisle, Edward has actually gone out and tested these ideas. can i still have a soul if i'm a vampire? can i still be human if i kill bad people? can i still be human if i take away life? can i still be human if i do x, think y, say z?

because Carlisle doesn't necessarily have the space to do what Edward did. not just because of his busy schedule as a doctor, but his coping mechanisms, his compartmentalization required to live this vegetarian life, his religion (/religious trauma?), & his position as a coven leader do not afford him the luxury of testing these ideas himself.

at the end of the day, Carlisle can never do what Edward did. if Carlisle is going to 'save' other vampires, he needs to be (at least outwardly) secure in the notion that he has saved himself. even if he isn't.

Edward can go further, dig deeper, and that allows Carlisle to go further, too.

and in that context, god, how beautiful is it that Carlisle just has this unwavering, unconditional acceptance of Edward? that through the darkness and mistakes, there is something worth loving? that through this acceptance, Edward finds his soul in the end?

like, the breakdown of the relationship is:

to Edward, Carlisle is a god.

to Carlisle, Edward is a man, i.e., a disciple of his teachings.

& in that context, how beautiful is it that, baseline, Carlisle & Edward share this deep, spiritual love for each other that will never be broken? FUCK that hits

[stregoniconiconii]

my conclusion about twilight is that if Edward was open to considering homosexuality and successfully seduced/been seduced by Carlisle then all the other Cullens likely would have had very human deaths

[edwardsmate4ever]

What?! There's a bonus chapter for Cast Aside? I never thought I'd write any more for this fic, but @edwardskhakipants inspired me with a request, so thank you to her!

This future-take picks up at the end of Eclipse. Read it on FFn or AO3.

[gisellelx]

Twilight Advent, Day 4

Masterpost/prompts

Dec. 4 - Pick a Twilight couple (canon or AU) and tell us/draw their favorite way to snuggle.

Well, that intriguing parenthetical opened up a rat's nest of intertwining (and kinda nsfw? and also slashy--you've been warned) headcanons, here, so, sorry, please buckle up. I've been meaning to write about the role headcanons can play in fic writing for awhile, and at some point an even longer writing meta is due, but today I'll get straight to the point even though this will in no way be brief--I enjoy writing fic precisely because it lets me think about characterization in a deep and complicated way. I'm always writing fic to get at the characters first and the situation second. It's even embedded in the title of my tumblr.

When I write an AU, I don't consider myself to be writing a different version of the characters. I consider myself to be writing the same characters, with all the same personalities, motivations, concerns, and fatal flaws, just having gone through or going through different circumstances. Kairos Carlisle is "Sensitivity" Carlisle is Patroclus Carlisle is Ithaca Carlisle; same guy, different situations. It’s why all my AUs have a clear point at which they’ve diverged from canon—I’m experimenting with the character by changing their world and letting their world change them.

So the underlying headcanon. Carlisle is badly, badly touch-starved. His nurse cuddled him and snuggled him—and he was with her for a long time—but he eventually left nurse and went back to London and to his father, who was much more concerned that Carlisle be saved than that he feel loved. They had little to no physical contact. Just at the very moment when he might have married, become sexually active, and had children of his own to cuddle, he gets stripped of his human life and for his own safety, has to separate from humankind altogether for many years. Then, he finally finds friendship and companionship, but in a man whose touch violates every snippet of his privacy. And still he stays, far longer than he ought, before setting out again for another century and a half, until he brings home a seventeen-year-old boy and spends three entire days just holding him.

Carlisle craves physical contact with those he loves.

Edward does not care for this. He's turned at the very moment in his development in which he is perfectly primed to be absolutely mortified by parental physical contact (and there's no small amount of gay panic on both their parts about it anyway). So it's still mostly just the occasional shoulder pat; the joy and surprise when Edward hugs him on occasion.

It's not until Esme arrives, and after they navigate their collective fears and traumas, that he manages to actually be touched. To have someone who hugs him, and strokes his back, and runs her fingers through his hair, who kisses not just his lips but his head, his shoulders, his chest. Sexual intimacy is his first real physical intimacy of his very long life.

So. For this prompt, a canon snuggle, and an AU snuggle for this guy for whom touching those he loves is his source of highest joy:

He could lie naked with Esme forever. And he tries to, a lot. Although they know their children are a little squicked out by the idea of hearing or sensing them having intercourse, and of course that's one reason they go to great lengths (islands!) to be separate from them, a big part of the reason they often totally relocate in order to have sex is that Carlisle really wants to just lie there, with both their clothes off, for as long as he can possibly get away with it; days if they can manage it. So they leave so that nobody has to worry about having to scramble back into pants or a dress at an inopportune time, so that he can just place his head on Esme's breasts and they can interlock legs and he can just get lost in not being entirely certain where his skin stops and hers begins. In Kairos, he finally gets to have the physical intimacy with Edward he's always longed for. This AU takes place in a world in which he had a sexual partner for eighty-five years and so his intimacy with Edward takes a different form, not to mention that Edward is still quite bashful about it all. Their favorite snuggle is to sit on the floor, with Carlisle's back against the couch and Edward using him as a recliner as he sits between Carlisle's legs. Clothes, no clothes; doesn't matter as much to these two. From there, Carlisle can run his hands through Edward's hair, kiss the nape of his neck or behind his hear, and bury his nose next to Edward's scalp to inhale his scent. They're not altogether very different things than what he would prefer to do in a fatherly way in canon; the difference is that in the AU world, the chips have fallen such that this time, Edward is willing to let him.

[gisellelx]

What are some of your favorite Carlward fics?

So there are three that you are likely to find me just idly re-reading. Where I’m working on something and I’m just like, “Nope, need to revisit that one.” I’ll go on a bit about them since there are only a handful.  Bittersweet Hurt by Minerva One

This was my first go-round at CarlWard and I love it to pieces. Even though I tread some of the same water in Patroclus Rising, it’s never not fresh. What I love about this is that she starts from the question I always feel is central: why Edward? It’s a question I’m never not trying to answer in my own work. Sometimes I’m in Carlisle’s POV, sometimes in Edward’s, currently in Bella’s, but it’s always about that to me. The saga is about that to me.  The emotion in this one is just pitch-fucking-perfect. The build is slow and hot, the inevitability that the two are going to come together and that Carlisle’s going to be the reason everything goes to pieces--it’s just amazing. It gets at the ways in which Carlisle is utterly inadequate, completely not ready for what he started, and it just strips both of them bare, figuratively and delightfully literally. It also is tight. I think a lot of fanfic benefits from being novella-length--long enough to let the writer stretch out a bit, but short enough it doesn’t leave a novice writer scrambling trying to find the next plot point. This is beautifully plotted and leaves me a little breathless each time. I actually haven’t re-read it in awhile and need to.  Intervention by AllTheOtherNamesAreUsed

Let’s take a left turn. Okay, so now here’s where people are either going to have to come along with me or throw me out, ha ha ha. I er, happen to headcanon that Carlisle, being a kind of uptight, workaholic, who feels like he has to be in control of everything all the time--six vampire children, the process of hiding his family, the lives of his patients--would seek catharsis, somewhere. He needs some way of being safe, of allowing his mind to blank with those he loves. So the fact that this fic, written for a kinkfest meme, also happens to begin with my other favorite Carlisle sex headcanon, which is that he enjoys Esme putting him into subspace, is icing on a really nice CarlWard cake. The middle of the fic (spoiler all the Cullens are poly) I can kind of take or leave--it’s an enjoyable read but I don’t love it the way I love the first and last two chapters. The final two chapters of this kinkfic are romantic, feral Edward/Carlisle. One of the things I love most about it is that she doesn’t back away from the paternal stuff. This is post-BD, and they are carefully re-aligning what it means for Edward to still very much be Carlisle’s son and yet for them to evolve that relationship a bit. There’s a line in there about Carlisle’s love giving Edward roots and Bella’s giving him wings that is just so right. 

Trouble Follows by LyricalKris

I am too much of a lover of the vamp world to enjoy AH much. To me, Twilight is indeed as a semi-viral tumblr post put it, the story of a loving adorable couple and their chaos vampire children. I literally lose track of the characters in AH fic; it’s not enjoyable for me to read. I’ve been friends with Kris for--gosh I guess over  a decade now and I forget when she told me I needed to look at Trouble but I finally did and whipped through the 2.333 books in the series in a couple days. As I wrote above, I hc Carlisle as a sub, so I wasn’t sure I could handle an AH with him as a dom. But it works. I link the second one because while erotic scenes are always fun, I find a good plot and character conflict sexier than anything else you can put down on the page. The first book is mostly sexytimes with a little growth sprinkled in, but in this, the second installment, there’s just such a lovely build of conflict around the two and between the two, and she sold me on a perfectly in-canon, non-vampire Carlisle and that’s a tall fucking order. 

These are all mutli-chaps. Three shorts I revisit with some regularity are 

Everything in its Right Place by Avioleta. Again, this is a really nice one dealing with Carlisle wrestling with his feelings for both Edward and Esme; it has some deliciously angsty parts and is brilliantly researched. 

Red Geraniums by Pastiche Pen. Also one of the few AHs I re-read. It’s actually William I like in this story. In fact, I don’t know if she ever named Carlisle’s father in it. His name is William, fight me. :) The coupling in this one is great but like Trouble, it’s the plot here that gets me. A man coming to grips with his sexuality after he’s already done some things he regrets. 

Not a Monster, My Love by dyly. I don’t even remember how I stumbled on this one. It’s less well-written than my brain will usually put up with (I try really hard not to be a writing snob, I promise but some things just pull me out of a story) but the H/C just really works in this short in a way that’s hot and beautiful at once.  So there are six. @edwardsmate4ever I suspect you’ve probably hit all of them before, but perhaps others haven’t. I am never not here for a good CarlWard rec, especially if it’s vamp, so feel free to hit my inbox with them. 

[gisellelx]

I felt like having fun this month.  Fanfiction.net gisellelx.com Author Notes

[edwardsmate4ever]

out of pure curioisity, how long have you been in this fandom and how would you describe the early fandom, especially the jakeward side? how popular was it? my only awareness of the whole thing is info round Masters Of The Universe and that is not exactly the best outlook lmao

Hi! Nice to see you in my inbox again.

Ah, the glory days of this fandom. It was a hell of a lot different than it is now. Now it’s a lot more focus on canon pairings, character histories, and funny memes/ pointing out flaws. Which I’ve enjoyed immensely, don’t get me wrong. But back then, nobody was very woke. Times were different. The inherent problems with Twilight (grooming, gaslighting, the treatment of indigenous people) weren't really on people's radar, and it was acceptable to write underage sex because they were all underage after all. Not so these days. Characters are aged up and problematic behavior is addressed and fixed, and I LOVE that for the Twilight fandom. I love reading fixit stories (like those by @edwardskhakipants) and fics showing the harsh realities and horrors of the Twilight world (like those by @therealvinelle and @thecarnivorousmuffinmeta).

I started reading Twilight in 2008. I saw Twilight in the theater, I was in my late twenties. I was an Edward stan, and I loved the rich backstories of all the vampires. I wanted more content - I didn’t want to just wait for more books to come out, so I found fanfiction. I read a few Edward POVs of the series, and Edward/Rosalie fics believe it or not. I stumbled upon slash with this fic and boy did that SHOCK me. But I sought out more and soon read almost exclusively slash fics. The first fic I wrote was Teach Me in 2011 for the Slash Backslash Contest 3.0 and then I started Hidden Within. The rest came tumbling out after.

Back to fandom. Way back then, things were a lot wilder. There was a massive focus on smut and slash pairings. There were fic contests. There was a censorship campaign on fanfiction.net where a lot of homosexual slash content was deleted, making a lot of authors move to AO3 and FictionPad. We had to change our summaries and titles to avoid deletion, which I did, although one of mine was deleted (I’ve since restored it, and funnily enough, it was definitely one of my tamer fics - Adrift).

There were LOADS of jakeward fics, carlward fics, edward/jasper was really big too (lots of people even shipped Seth/Jasper). I’m sure a lot of them are still out there. I got lots of hits and reviews back then. Not so much anymore, but there are some people who are still reading and appreciating that I’m still providing niche content. I’m happy to do it. It’s been fun, and it still is. I’ll write until it isn’t fun anymore. I hope you’re enjoying the content I’m putting out there :)

[edwardsmate4ever]

All My Fic: on FFN and AO3

Works on AO3 are only available for registered users due to AI bots stealing work.

Recent completed fics:

Embry and the Trials of Fate

Jakeward: Full Circle: Back to the Beginning

Visions Interrupted plus Outtakes (Alice's Breaking Dawn/complete)

Carlward: Cast Aside

Humor/Crackfic: Emmett Tries to Understand

Smutty One-Shots: A Bit of Distraction

Graduation Blanket Meme

Rocky Horror/Twilight Photosets:

Edward as Brad, Bella as Janet, Carlisle as Brad, Esme as Janet, Rosalie as The Usherette, Jasper as Riff Raff, Charlie as Criminologist, Billy as Dr Scott, Victoria as Magenta, Alice as Columbia, Jacob as Eddie, Emmett as Rocky, set1 and set2, Edward as Frank N Furter

[gisellelx]

“you should be scared if I wrote a BD AU” —-please write a BD AU. ily

So, not taking it off the table but I have become a "slow af" fic writer, so that's a thing. (Somebody asked me if I would write a second book this year. I said yes. So now I have to revise a mess of a thing into a book before October. This is why I am slow as shit writing fics these days.) My version of Breaking Dawn ends quite differently. Some of my ideas on that fic have made their way into my current WIP, so I don't want to spoil too much.

However, I made that tag comment with some existing fics in mind! I actually have three short fics that are technically BD AUs or post-BD AUs. They're all on a scale from a little bit to a lot tragic. It just doesn't make sense otherwise. Stephenie Meyer wasn't wiling to do justice to what she set up, but I am happy to do so. Also beware EdBella stans, there is no functional EdBella after BD in giselle's head.

Seventeen—what happens when Bella agrees she should stay human

For a Season—Carlward slash; the confrontation doesn't go as smoothly as it does in canon

The Verities We Knew—I never even posted this publicly but I was exploring a canon-compliant version of a prompt for a post EC fic where there was no Renesmee.

[gisellelx]

Helloo Could you perhaps expand on the idea of Edward/Carlisle? Honestly, i never actually believed they had a father-son relationship. I think neither Carlisle is comfortable being called 'father' nor Edward wants to call him that. The general vibe i get (mind you i only ever read! twilight) is that they share a close relationship that is more on the friends-who-understand-each-other, choosing to be companions instead of two separate lonely people, and maybe even guide-follower tho not too much

Okay. So. 

They orbit each other. You can see that so obviously in MS. Edward’s brain operates on two channels—what is Bella thinking and what would Carlisle think. Every time he is stressed, worried, trying to summon something beyond himself—Carlisle, Carlisle, Carlisle. 

Now, I don’t have SM’s take on Carlisle to spring from since she never wrote from his POV (and I actually think she misunderstands/oversimplifies him but that’s not really at issue here). But having spent a decade(!) now plundering his thoughts, I’ve found it doesn’t feel true to have his thoughts be anything but reciprocal. Edward was the first one he turned, and so everything about him is attuned to Edward’s needs. They are both one of the first thoughts that the other has. 

That being said, I absolutely believe that one way this close, “I am always thinking of you first” relationship manifests is as father/son. In fact, given the era in which Edward was turned, and Carlisle’s Puritan upbringing, I think it was the *only* way for them to move forward. It is the easiest way, in 1918, for them to make sense of such an intense amount of love. If Edward is Carlisle’s son, for them to share this incredibly close bond, in which they shadow each other, and in which Carlisle absolutely dotes on him, is perfectly fine.  But it is so easy to make a tiny tweak to the storyline here or there and re-read all those meaningful glances and silent conversations they have throughout the saga as homoerotic. It works really well either way. 

I suspect this is actually going to get cut from the fic I’m working on by the time I reach the chapter for which I originally drafted it, so I’ll put it here. It sums up how I think their relationship works: 

 "I loved Edward in all the ways I could love Edward. Philos, storgé, agape and yes, eros too. My love for him was—is—all-consuming. Like the fire in the bush on Sinai. Burning, always burning, and yet, somehow, not reducing me to ash.”

It’s about having a really intense connection to someone and being in a time when that connection has to find a particular outlet. But change the time, and change the willingness to explore other kinds of outlets for that connection, and you get a different result without re-reading the characters very much, which is...really cool. Whether they’re in bed together or just being men with their women, Edward and Carlisle have a fascinating, kind of co-dependent, kind of mutually redemptive relationship that is really fun to write and read about.  So a few recs that I re-read over and over because they really get at the complexity of this bond: 

Bittersweet Hurt by MinervaOne. Places a sexual relationship in 1918, dovetails to canon.  Intervention, by AllTheOtherNamesAreUsed. Content warning: this fic heaps on massive amounts of kink (it also happens to satisfy one of my other headcanons about Carlisle’s sexual life, let’s just say). At the end, however, it dares take the idea that it is possible for E & C to both be with their mates and with each other, in the most beautiful way.  Trouble, by LyricalKris. I am not an All-human Twificcer AT ALL. I fell in love with sparkle vamps and I want them in my fic. And it took until book 2 of this 3-book series for me to buy this incarnation as being in-character. But Trouble Follows Carlisle just lets himself get destroyed for Edward’s sake and if there isn’t anything more canon than that, I can’t tell you what is.  Trouble Ahead has been set aside by the author for now, but is still worth diving into. (This one also involves no small amount of kink, but it takes a decided backseat to the story.) Oh and how could I forget the CarlWard contest. In 2011, several dozen authors pulled out all the stops and went to town. Some are All-Human, some are vamp, some are dang near canon. Almost all are great. 

My explorations:

Patroclus Rising. 1918-1921, eventually dovetails back to canon.  Kairos. 2007 and present-day. Takes Breaking Dawn to an AU at the point of the confrontation with the Volturi and spins our guys off in a different direction. 

[edwardsmate4ever]

Writers ask: 14, 25, 34, 36, 40.

14. How do you deal with self-doubts?

Not that well, lol. Seriously though, I have strong doubts about my next project, which is a fourth part to my Consequence of Heat series. I have one chapter almost done, but I’m plagued by fears that no one will want to read it, or that I will ruin my most popular series, so that’s been paralyzing me. I’m dealing by going slow and not putting pressure on myself, making sure I have a backlog of at least 5 chapters ready before I ever post the first one so I won’t get discouraged when I inevitably don’t get the response I wish for, even though I know I’m working in an already niche and dying ship. It is sad for me because I really believe it’s my best work, but too many people have aversions to the pairing.

25. Favorite part of writing

That my favorite characters can do whatever the hell I want them to do, and they can be fleshed out in ways SMeyer never dreamed of touching.

34. What was the hardest scene you ever had to write?

The scene in Cast Aside when Edward confronts Carlisle after his performance. I started writing that fic years ago when I was in a totally different headspace, so it was difficult to recapture the voice I’d been writing in at that time. Plus, I’d never planned what I wanted to happen and didn’t want to disappoint the faithful readers that were still following the story.

36. Last sentence you wrote.

I answered this for @jessicanjpa previously, and the sentence remains the same, as I haven’t written more since yesterday!

‘Oh well, there was no denying what a freak I was.’

This is for the story that I mentioned in the ‘self-doubts’ ask.

40. Share some backstory for one of your characters.

Most of my stories are Jakeward, Carlward, or canon, which have the backstories typical of the pairings.

A different one is Adrift, in which Seth is one of the last survivors of a post apocalyptic world where the ice caps have melted and the earth is covered completely by water. Seth has lost everyone he loves and is drifting on the ocean alone, until he happens upon another raft…

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9583615/1/Adrift

Thank you for the asks! Sorry I took so long to answer!

[rfiu]