#fic:hopeless

[allaganexarch]

i wave my wand & command u to speak on hopeless, a fic that has lived in my bookmarks for time immemorial.

ohhhhh thank youuu!!!  hopeless was my first wolgraha fic!  It was based on 10 kiss prompts that I decided to make loosely related and kind of flesh out a story for my WoL.  I was just going along cheerfully enjoying FFXIV until Shadowbringers but idk man several things about that part of the story just have my number on speed dial you know!  I was like okay I’m gonna have to write for this to get the rocks out of my brain, ergo I’m gonna have to actually develop an OC.

I pretty much made Adrienne specifically to ship her w/ G’raha so I find it extremely funny a. how quickly I became attached to her for her own sake and b. how I feel her chemistry w/ other characters developed since she was initially conceptualized to complement G’raha specifically LOL.  I previously had a hard time “bonding” with my own OCs and I feel this really marked a turning point in that regard where I was able to focus in on character ideas that really appealed to me enough to form that connection, if that makes sense.

There’s also like a huge gap in my AO3 works from March 2020 until January 2021 when I started writing for FFXIV.  I remember I kept wanting to say something about what I was going through at the time and how I was feeling about my writing and about writing generally, but anything I tried to say barely made any sense because I think I didn’t even know what was going on with me.  There was a period of time where I felt like maybe I just wouldn’t write anymore because I didn’t have it in me.  Nothing inspired me, and nothing I had been working on pre-pandemic even remotely appealed to me anymore.  I felt like it had been written by someone else.

In retrospect, it makes perfect sense, right?  But it was hard to understand the feeling from the middle of it.  And I didn’t want to be cold or disrespectful to the people who have loved my work over the years, but I also couldn’t find a good way of venting my frustration about how I was feeling, so I think I often ended up coming off that way despite my best intentions.

So my main goal in doing the kiss prompts was to not angst about them too much, to just get them done without much editing, and to write something fairly different from what I usually wrote in the past.  I felt like it would be a good challenge for me because as I mentioned I really love unresolved tension and agonizing slow burn, but I think maybe I love it too much LOL, so sometimes when it finally came time for the culmination of the tension I would freeze up because I had built it up so much that I was afraid the payoff wouldn’t be good enough!  Ten shortish prompts where they literally had to kiss felt like a perfect low-stress challenge to help shake my brain loose on this very specific issue, and for that reason I think it’s very sweet and pleasant to read where a lot of my other work is more fraught and angsty LOL.

I really don’t even know if this dialogue feels particularly in character, I was straight up just calling myself out for a laugh:

A dull terror is beginning to take root in her heart, the one that has borne the loss of countless others, the one that has already lost him twice over, and she searches her mind frantically for something to say, something that will keep her from spoiling the moment with things she can’t do anything about. “Is that your idea of a proper courtship?” she wonders, instead, trying at a teasing tone. G’raha looks up.  “Is it not to your liking?” he counters.  “If you’d prefer, I could go and sit across the room.” “You’ll do no such thing!”  Adrienne tightens her grip on him instinctively. G’raha’s grin widens, and his tone turns dramatic.  “Perhaps in a few months, our hands will brush, and I’ll write you a sad letter about it.” “I hate you so much.”  Adrienne laughs weakly, but she cannot bring herself to loosen her grip on him, lest he slip away from her yet again in her negligence. “I don’t think that’s true,” says G’raha pleasantly.

It’s funny, now that my life is like pretty normal and okay again, I’m back to mostly liking fraught and angsty things, but at the time I feel my personal life was so bad that I really needed sweet and pleasant in my escapism!

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