#i'd tag the ships i'm talking about but i dont want vuzi fans out for my blood

[snugglesquiggle]

Do you like juzi or vuzi more

i'm gonna ramble hella hard about this, sorry, but that's the bargain you strike when you shoot an ask my way

but there's a fun story to my answer. you see, V/Uzi was actually my first interest, and in fact when i started kicking around the idea of writing Murder Drones fanfics, the first idea i seriously tried to work out was a V/Uzi fic

(for the curious, general shape of the idea was that Uzi encounters V first, railgun wipes her memory, fails to befriend her like she did with N and has to run away. Uzi then sneaks out again and again, exploiting the railgun-induced amnesia and errors to try and get through to V, leading to a kind of mutual rivalry as V tries to figure out why she keeps having gaps in her memory.

pretty sure it was going to escalate to Uzi hacking into V and potentially going dubious places. the working title for that fic was "Somnabulation". which means sleep-walking, so it would have been kind of ironic for Somnabulation to be the mind control fic and Hostile Takeover the one that spends half its wordcount in memory simulations)

but i'm rambling.

i never ultimately figured out how to make the V/Uzi fic come together into something i liked. and i didn't have that much motivation to do so, as there are good V/Uzi fics out there, like This World Couldn't See Us or Hold On Tight To This Time, This Place

but, as you'll quickly discover if you search the tag now, J/Uzi fics are a lot less numerous. i did like some of what i saw there, so i didn't have a full on "if i don't do this, nobody will" kind of motivation driving me

but then one day, out of the blue, a single thought occurred to me, an observation, comparison, an answer to the question of "what could a relationship between these two possibly be based on?"

and then the whole fic just crystallized around that thought.

(what was thought? i'll leave that as an exercise for the reader, or perhaps i'll save it for a minor reveal later on in Hostile Takeover. it's not very profound, but when it occurred to me i did have the distinct feeling that i'm not sure anyone had thought of the connection i just made.)

and i want to emphasize, when i say it crystallized, i mean it seriously came together, all at once. on October 31 last year, i jotted down the outline, initially as something to post in a discord brainstorming channel, but then i spent all evening writing more and more, and came out the other end with ten thousand words of notes and scene sketches

but anyway, all of that yapping is a long way to say

at the start i preferred V/Uzi (V was my favorite character, and J barely registered as anything but a joke to me), and i began writing Hostile Takeover essentially as a writing challenge or puzzle to prove something, or even just as a practice run for the fic i really wanted to write.

but i think my phrasing here gives the game away, doesn't it? i think very few people would write nearly 160k words in four months out of mere intellectual curiosity

so to finally, finally answer your question, my favorite is J/Uzi and by a long shot. the relationship absolutely grew on me as i wrote it. i'd genuinely go as far as to say my hot take is that it's actually easier to have J/Uzi make sense than V/Uzi, if you're being truly faithful to both characters. is this because J has less character to be faithful toward? shut up.

i think the biggest factor here is that in the course of writing HT, V stopped being my favorite character. i still find her a lot of fun when i'm reading her in other fics, but writing her has just brought a lot of her flaws to the forefront, and it's hard not to be increasingly frustrated with her character. (is this self-inflicted on my part for writing a plot where V causing problems is the central driver? maybe)

but yeah, i've found myself so much less interested in V/Uzi as time goes on. one of my mutuals has describe vuzi as something to the effect of the blander, safer alternative to juzi, and don't look at me i'm just misquoting him.