#i'm no longer in my overwatch fandom phase but

[bixels]

What did/do you like about Pharah?

Uh, gameplay-wise, I really love characters in shooters who rely on three-dimensional movement techs. Chaining together hover and jump to stay in the air for as long as possible and keep momentum is so satisfying, and picking enemies off from the sky made me feel like a bird of prey. I was a good Pharah main.

Story-wise, there unfortunately isn't much to canonically go off because Pharah is so underutilized and neglected. Her personality's pretty boilerplate "heroic hero" (she's literally inspired by Captain America).

But it's the crumbs/bits and pieces that I really latched onto. Pharah's a confirmed lesbian; her short story with Baptiste implies she harbors a crush on Mercy (fucking thank you.). She's biracial Egyptian/First Nations. She has major mommy issues, having grown up both admiring and resenting Ana. She's the bridge between Old Overwatch, inspired by the idealized heroes who surrounded her childhood, and New Overwatch. She's one of the only inter-generational characters in the cast; someone whose experiences span the gap, which is why I seriously believe Pharah would make a great main character.

There isn't much to go off of, though; she's a very uncomplicated character (she's a soldier for a private military corporation, lol.). But that just means she's a blank slate character, so I've seen fanfic writers run wild and create some really interesting takes on her. My favorite interpretation of her's a dense, herbo gym-bro type (a lot of her liens are about work outs, exercising, and playing sports) who's easily excitable under her seemingly self-serious, armored visage. We see how she tends to gloat and hype herself up when she's on a streak too, so Pharah definitely has a competitive and boastful side under her more professional and militant performance.

Now Mercy? Mercy is a real complex character.

[kinaesthetiqueer]

You've more or less single-handedly altered my entire perception of Nora as a character, and I mean that in the best way possible, making me enjoy her so much more every time I rewatch RWBY (which I gotta do again at some point, but that's neither here nor there)

However! This leads to my question :3 I noticed you had a few fics about her, and that she's also a very present character in your brain space, I kinda wanna know more about Satya Vaswani (which I now know her name is!!! Which is so cool!!!) and specifically your thoughts about her, what about her appeals to you, basically sharing as much as you want to!

I had a mild overwatch phase some years ago, so I know some Basic lore, but I always love learning and hearing about people's favorite characters :3

Oki thank you byeeee!~

aksnskajdhskanjs WONDERFUL QUESTION AND THANK YOU THIS TOOK DAYS TO WRITE BUT IT WAS NICE TO BE REASSURED THAT I DO STILL LOVE HER (AND HER GIRLFRIENDS, BY PROXY).

quick psa below for anyone who follows me for overwatch; otherwise, you can skip to the blue text & read more for sym gushing

im gonna preface this by saying my knowledge of overwatch ends in about mid to late 2019, which is right around the time i finally and miserably acknowledged that i could no longer play sym in the game because i could not adjust to sym 3.0. (for context, when blizz announced her 3.0 rework in 2018, i crawled under my desk and cried; there are pictures). while i also played rein and lucio, my real joy was playing sym and once i could no longer do that, i basically stopped playing. i'm not good at fps. there's a lot going on. i scream a lot. i cannot aim. overwatch remains my first and only fps. i just couldn't handle letting my friends down as a bad support-turned-dps as i cannot aim (even though they insisted i did not let them down) plus eventually a lot of other folks stopped playing, i got busy, blizzard continued to suck ass, etc. sym 3.0 was a personal death knell for my SI in overwatch

SO the last thing i read was the bastet short story and the last new chara i cared about was baptiste. i got soured on the fandom and the shipping base and crawled out of it into a perfectly happy ot3 isolation bubble. i say all this NOT to sound unhappy about this question, but to set up for the single boundary that i MUST enforce when it comes to overwatch:

i do not want to know anything about ovw post 2019!

this may sound harsh but i don't care about overwatch lore anymore!this is simply to prevent my brain from just absolutely self-imploding. i have a clear and complete outline for the take to the skies series and i only care about that series (and the demons/witch au) and a few other things that ive written; i do not want to corrupt that. i've heard whispers about sym lore updates and im simply not engaging with that. i don't need to know nor do i want to! thank you, good night! i'm content to willingly live in denial.

you see, my satya "symmetra" vaswani lives safe and sound in my brain. blizz can't touch her.

satya vaswani, also known as symmetra to her teammates and also her enemies, is a character near and dear to my heart! i knew nothing about her until i stumbled upon the fact that she was intentionally written as autistic. this was at a time in my life where i had recently discovered i was too, in a fun (not) series of events, and so i latched on immediately, not to mention when i started playing her, i found a niche and became a rather successful sym (which to me means being helpful, getting kills, STAYING ON THE FUCKING POINT, and not getting in the way). i don't remember what my hours ended up being on her but im pretty sure it was well over 100 and since the servers are gone??? i'll never know? im not downloading ovw 2 to find out. it's probably on my old blog. GAH. im not here to be be salty about blizz.

SATYA.

satya, much like nora, is a side[ish] character that i have taken every scrap of canon lore and extrapolated to the stratosphere. i acknowledge that i have surpassed canon and inserted my own, especially when it comes to her childhood.

that being said

here's canon:

After she was identified as one of the few capable of becoming a light-bending architech, young Satya Vaswani was plucked from extreme poverty and placed in the care of Vishkar's architech academy, never to return home. Isolated and lonely in her new life, Satya immersed herself in her education and training. She quickly grasped the applications of the technology and was one of the top students in her class. Satya approached hard-light manipulation differently than her peers, with their more procedural, mechanical constructions, instead weaving her constructs in the motions of the traditional dance of her homeland.

and then i, to recap practical ghosts to some extent, made it worse. she was singled out for a scholarship by the vishkar academies who intentionally sought out young kids with high compatibility with hard light tech. she has an older brother aditya and a younger brother krishna and her mom karishma. her father died when she was three; she is, at the time of pick up, eight.

she's taken away to the fledgling vishkar town of utopaea where she atends the prestigious vishkar dawn academy boarding school. fairly quickly she takes to HL. it just makes sense to her and she loves it! never mind that she's without her support net for the first time ever. higher up staff order her teachers to excuse her 'problematic' behaviour because they don't wan to damage the prodigy in the making. her mother fights to have satya come home regularly and succeeds in making sure she gets to visit. the higher up staff even court these wishes, hoping that karishma will see the good in vishkar's training and ABA therapy but satya's mom sees her daughter's personality changes and misery and the way she talks about her autism now, the bullying she receives from both adults and students, the way she only seems to focus on architecture. she doesn't like it one bit. and after four years of this back and forth fight between vishkar execs and karishma over the 'budding jewel' of vishkar, karishma finally finds another school closer to home and begins to make moves to take satya out of vishkar academy at the end of the school year.

in response, vishkar ensures that satya has no family left to go home to. they also make sure that not only it looks like an accident but a specific architectural failure that galvanizes satya's single track minded drive to make the world a better place in which no one ever loses their family to a building collapse again. she becomes a ward of vishkar through a series of legal dominos vishkar had in place; she's only twelve. she never finds out that vishkar is the one who killed her family (except for in this little riff i did on twitter that may or may not load). ALSO funny that i named it indomitable, bc i didn't know what rwby was when i wrote that XD. anyways i have all my tweets downloaded but it's not that important.

practical ghosts is a fun narrative because it's told completely outside of satya through documents about her (with the exception of three little chapters at the end, only one of which is from her POV) it's my fave of my satya vent fics. PG is in line with on the run from tomorrow and thursday's daughter's genre of 'no one asked me to go this deep with canon plausible backstory but i did anyway!'

satya NOW though. she comes to the watchpoint, essentially surrendering her vishkar insider info in return for asylum, and proceeds to have the meltdown of a lifetime the second no eyes are on her. she throws herself into discovering how much of her life is a lie (her first comic, where she begins wondering, inspires much of this, as it obvs happens before; while i have read her 2020 comic, i don't use it at all except to smile because it did not contradict my HCs or if it did i ignored it; i was made vaguely aware against my will that she has history with LW but again, i don't care)

she's sassy, she's deadpan, she's devoted, she's practical. she loves dance and cooking and all forms of gymnastics, skating, and ribbon arts. she'll take you to task for doing stupid shit and explain how you should fix it in the same breath. she's ruthless when it comes to making other's take care of themselves. she's harder on herself than anyone else dares to be. she likes birds. she likes making new ways to stim that aren't obvious. she has reclaimed her arm and her relationship with it. she's done an absolutely stellar job of reinventing herself in the wake of everything she's done and been involved with. she's taken all of vishkar's tech and made it better and more accessible. she prefers rebuilding missions more than combat ones. she loves drinking tea with ana. mei was her first human friend outside of vishkar; athena was her first friend at the watchpoint. her and lucio actually get along fine eventually. she is fearlessly devoted to those she loves. she's an early riser and early sleeper. she still cries sometimes when she allows herself to stim unhindered. she is a huge fucking demiace lesbian. she doesn't give a fuck about gender. she wears heels so she can discretely toe-walk and dresses because they're easy to move in. she can and will talk your ear off about her special interests but only if she loves you.

NONE OF THIS IS CANON

last i checked in canon, and based on voicelines, satya hasn't even LEFT vishkar. she's just doubting. she's still there under their thumb and i mean sure yeah that's fine but that was the great of overwatch HUGE sandbox, no plot, WOMEN, and oh my gods an autistic woman of color with the most wonderful voice and voice actor ever (hi ms bhimani i hope you're having a LOVELY day)

i took to sym because i wanted a more hopeful future for myself and i am awaaaaaaaare ive projected on her very hard but i gotta admit the fact that i turn 28 (her age) this year might have actually just made me grin like an idiot because oh my god i could NOT imagine that when i first got into overwatch in early 2017. jesus fuck i was twenty, i could barely see past my own nose. i REMEMBER tho, being like heeheehoohoo one day i'll be satya's age that'll be wild. complete hypothetical. ANYWAYS

i don't think im really answering the question here.

haven't even got to my favorite fuckin head canon. i SCREAAAAAAMED SO LOUD when i realized this. fuckiing rip to my friends bc i was in game and i was playing with a skin i had just unlocked and i noticed something incredible-

satya has a prosthetic left arm. she has two skins though where she looks more like she's wearing a school uniform. i think they're called architech and utopaea? but hey. hey. hey you know what she doesn't have in those skins?

her prosthetic.

SO. my second saddest and most favorite headcanon is that as an 18th birthday gift, when satya technically became an adult and thus could leave vishkar, vishkar offered her a choice. to quote 'nothing here to run from':

Just shy of her Academy graduation ceremony, an offer was made to officially cement her place in the Vishkar Corporation. “We only offer to the best and the brightest, Satya,” Sanjay had said, grasping her left hand in his right. “Wouldn’t you love to be the perfect architech, ready to change the world at a moment’s notice?” By the time she was eighteen, Symmetra only had room for perfection.

BECAUSE YEAH

i heavily headcanon vishkar to be just as bad as talon, since they are heavily intertwined. i would not put it past them.

so yeah, heavy heavy heavy disclaimer that i love satya 'symmetra' vaswani a normal amount but due to the inherent need to extrapolate a million things from a game that initially had three rubber bands and a paper clip worth of lore for her, i humbly recognize that the version of her that i love does only live in my head. and im okay with that!!!! but i love her canon self too, otherwise i would have never gone so feral about her to write over like 100k of her being loved, growing, living and learning!!!!!!!!!!!!!! gods i need to write her again.

also she has the best skins in the fucking gaaaaaaame she's so pretty and i am GAY

[aki-natsuko]

20 Questions for Fic Writers

thank you @mdelpin for the tag!

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

It's currently sitting at 643, across 50+ fandoms.

2. What's your total AO3 word count?

4,616,142 words and counting/

3. What fandoms do you write for?

I am hugely multifandom and have dabbled in 50+ fandoms, but my main ones are Fairy Tail, Overwatch, Critical Role and K Project.

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

How to Care for Your Wizard (Critical Role)

What Lays Beneath (Critical Role)

A Tangled Web of Fire (Critical Role)

Fairy Tail Drabbles (Fairy Tail)

Scorched Bonds (Critical Role)

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

Sometimes. I'm a bit of a hermit, so I tend to do it in phases and then retreat into the ether for a bit. But I appreciate every single comment.

6. What's the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

Ah, there are so so many fics I could put for this. But I think I will go with Lightning Falls (Fairy Tail), it's part of a series that absolutely has my highest death count by far.

7. What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

I have a tendency to lean towards angsty stuff, and happy endings cover such a spectrum too. So I am going to go with What Price Humanity? (Fairy Tail) which is both angsty, but does have a happy ending.

8. Do you get hate on fics?

I have on a couple of fics.

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

Sometimes. I find it the most challenging thing to write, and it certainly takes me longer to write. But, I've dabbled from vanilla to more kink related smut.

10. Do you write crossovers? What's the craziest one you've written?

Not proper crossovers. I'll sometimes do AUs inspired by something else, but that's about it. I'm not a huge fan of reading crossovers so I think that's bled over.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Yes.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

Honestly not sure.

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

No, and I think I would be a nightmare to co-write with just because of how I write lol.

14. What's your all-time favourite ship?

I am nearly as multi-ship as I am multifandom, but I think my all time favourite has to be Sarumi (Yata and Fushimi from K Project).

15. What's a WIP you want to finish, but doubt you ever will?

Grim Reaper. I absolutely love the story and the inspiration behind it, but it was the subject of a targeted attack for some time and it has soured it somewhat for me.

16. What are your writing strengths?

Description and Angst (not sure that should be a strength... but my collection of tears has to count for something).

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

Smut - I can do it but it's a challenge, and humour. I am not a fan on comedy anyway, and it's even more of a struggle to write it.

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic?

I don't mind it, as long as it fits the flow of the story and works for what the author was trying to achieve.

19. First fandom you wrote for?

Supernatural

20. Favourite fic you've ever written?

Hmm, probably one of my ongoing ones - Tainted Red (K Project). It just grew so much from the original idea and is a lot of fun to work on.

Not sure who else is still around so if you see this consider yourself tagged if you want to have a go.