#i stopped myself from turning it into an essay about metal gear tho so lets all be proud of me

[megaparsecs]

this is just me writing about me and laras long gay metal gear fanfic

this is pretty silly but I'm like so nervous about posting the last chapter of the fanfic I've been working on with Lara for the past no joke almost two and a half years because it's like a silly really trope-y fanfic about a bad video game series but like, I've Grown A Lot during the process of writing it and my life has changed so drastically in so many ways during the process. It's taken two and a half years because the further we get in the editing process the more I drag my heels -- it's been like four months since we posted the penultimate chapter and the final chapter doesn't even need that much editing (just a lot of me regretting putting ppl texting each other in it)

ok im putting in a read more because predictably i went on forever. 

But it's weird, actually finishing something this long. And it's weird because I'm proud of it but it's like, a fan fiction, but I'm legit proud of it. And it's weird because like --- I write achronologically so parts of the last chapter I wrote over two years ago. The very last scene is one of the parts that's like, survived pretty much intact through the nine or ten different massive google docs we have. And parts of the last chapter are legitimately extremely important to me in a personal way and it's a fan fiction that's just 60k bad homestuck jokes and bad xfiles jokes and self indulgent recursive meta fiction. It's a story I continuously feel silly about because it's like, nice. I try very hard to make it a kind story, tho I gravitate by nature to being as grimdark as possible because if you write nice things about things you like then people know your vulnerabilities and thus how to destroy you etc. 

and also these awful video game characters are Important to me and Lara and I have a very particular vision of them that I think is different from a lot of peoples perception of them -- i of course simultaneously believe that 1. i am totally right about all of my interpretations and they are the most correct and 2. these are fictional characters that don’t exist as real people so many different interpretations of the characters are equally valid. so this whole fanfic is like, me pitching our iterations of these characters to other people, like, “hey. . . what if just, like, what if we all just sort of chilled out a little here, and thought up like, some nice stuff.”  and that’s important to me. 

and the fact that the characters i’m writing are able to form like, a healthy adult relationship --- that’s really really important to me, because like, not a lot of what i would consider healthy adult communicative supportive romantic relationships are portrayed in like, anything i read? certainly not in a lot of fanfic, certainly not in a lot of metal gear fanfic. which okay partially is because like half the protagonists in metal gear are awful people and the other half are written i would say “with dubious quality” by their original creators. but partially i have some Huge Issues with a lot of things. . . centered around metal gear. . . because i think there’s shit in metal gear that’s fun and interesting but there’s a lot of shit that like, we should all maybe just go ahead and consign to the trash heap. but that’s neither here nor there. 

anyway, a lot of writing this was also kind of figuring out what a healthy adult romantic relationship was, while also situating that in the context of like, other important friendships. i struggled a lot with not falling into some of the pitfalls i think fics like this (one centered around the main m/m couple in the fandom but one that also attempts to include a lot of female characters -- we’ll call it “the rosemary problem” and ya’ll probably will know what i mean) fall into, and i don’t think i always succeeded, but i think we did okay.  i don’t want to get into like Too Much Stuff about why that was so important to me at this particular point in my life because i have a huge difficulty like, sharing personal info about myself that i think reveals Weakness or something Silly, but yeah. i’ll probably end up writing about that anyway because i love to hear myself talk. 

literally like three of you have read our fanfic so this is a lot of bloviating about something i’ve spent way more time thinking about than like anyone else ever (save Lara), and so like, talking about what i wish i’d done better and what i’m really proud of in it isn’t like, really going to mean anything and i’m going to instead just make an insufferably long author’s note at the end of the final chapter.  i do feel Deeply Silly about something thats not original fiction being this Important to me and something that i treat this seriously, but i’m incapable of creating things without taking them very seriously, i put the exact same amount of effort into fanfic as i ever have into like, writing original fiction. and it’s important, and i created it with someone that i love so very very very much, and it’s a thing we made together so it’s always going to be very special to me, and i cannot fucking believe i put so many things that i’m going to have to format in the last chapter, thanks past me.