#intricate and toxic polycule: you. your former best friend who betrayed the village. and his dead cousin who was previously your teammate

[trans-girl-uchiha-itachi]

EYEBALL POLYCULE UPDATE COMING SOON TO AN AO3 NEAR YOU

i could probably spend some more time rereading chapter 3 for flow but i also don't want to because this has taken long enough as it is. chapter 3 wound up at a nice chonky 13.5k; chapter 4, which has been more or less finished for months and just waiting for me to finish chapter 3, is 7k. so prepare yourselves for a solid 20k double update i guess!!

[trans-girl-uchiha-itachi]

next chapter of eyeball polycule is almost at 10k and it's like 80% written... melting into a puddle emoji

[trans-girl-uchiha-itachi]

pros: have been very inspired, in fact compelled, to write lately

cons: writing naruto fanfiction is SO far down my list of priorities rn and yet it compels me nevertheless

pros: slowly but surely making progress on eyeball polycule chapter 3

cons: sai has unexpectedly shown up and won't leave

[trans-girl-uchiha-itachi]

it's really funny how much my standards for historical accuracy have increased since i started posting fic. back in the far-off days of november 2021 i was like "yeah sure they go to a music festival. daft punk cameo why not" and now i'm like "if i slightly misrepresent the music performance culture of the sengoku period i WILL die"

[trans-girl-uchiha-itachi]

new eyeball polycule chapter possibly (hopefully) incoming tonight...! citizens are advised to get cozy and optionally make a nice cup of tea; further updates to follow as the situation unfolds

[trans-girl-uchiha-itachi]

i thought i was DONE debugging the outline for the next eyeball polycule chapter but im NOT (it needs to develop the hinata/shisui relationship more) and instead of figuring out where amidst all the unfortunately necessary plot shit to cram in some Pining For Your Dead Middle School Crush i stopped by wikipedia to learn about historical japanese calendar systems. and like, my outline for intricate eyeball polycule DOES include approximate dates for everything in the gregorian calendar, so im sorely tempted to convert them all to lunisolar dates that i can put on the upcoming epistolary segments (i don't even know if people commonly dated their letters in the sengoku period.........)

[trans-girl-uchiha-itachi]

writing nart fic rn like "why is itachi the MOST emotionally well-adjusted person in this conversation? that is NOT supposed to happen"

[trans-girl-uchiha-itachi]

in eyeball polycule i named team hinata-itachi-resurrected!shisui Team Mokumokuren after this yōkai. here are some fun Team Mokumokuren collective stats!

team members: 3

byakugan: 2

mangekyō sharingan: 5

poorly-socialized s-ranked geniuses: 2

chill: none whatsoever

social skills: about 2.5

(shisui has two social skills. hinata and itachi split the other half a social skill between them)

[trans-girl-uchiha-itachi]

asdkgfsdlhf i forgot i wrote this and it hit me like a TRUCK

[trans-girl-uchiha-itachi]

okay i'm back on the eyeball polycule grind now and 2 out of 2 housemates agreed it would be fun if i made boba A Thing in naruto land despite the blatant anachronism so it's canon now >:)

[trans-girl-uchiha-itachi]

the first three chapters (prologue, chapter 0, and chapter 1. im aware my chapter numbering scheme makes no sense to anyone other than me but don't worry about it) of eyeball polycule fic are more or less ready to post...

[trans-girl-uchiha-itachi]

what if i make shisui transmasc in eyeball polycule..............

part of the background radiation of eyeball polycule (as with many of my fics) is that itachi is an egg who is going to come to a Significant Realization about her gender probably after she retires, but he's dissociating too hard before that to notice anything. between the chronic illness and the moral injury his relationship with his body is... vague and distant

but it's funnier if itachi is familiar with shisui as his Exemplar of what transness looks like, and shisui transitioned very young, so itachi DID go through some kind of extremely brief gender questioning process along the lines of "well if i were trans i would know about it by now so i'm definitely not trans" and then proceeded to repress any and all gender-related desires

[trans-girl-uchiha-itachi]

me picking intricate eyeball polycule back up (i dropped it on the ground some months ago in favor of writing (A) crackfic and (B) unpostable smut): oh right, i got stuck on this scene because i was writing this infiltration mission for hinata as basically a plot device and i got distracted trying to figure out what the staff composition of a moderately-sized noble house in sengoku period japan would have been like, and whether they'd sometimes have, like, seasonal help or temporary catering staff or something (a question i never DID find an answer to)

@combat-epistemologist: JUST MAKE SOMETHING UP

me: oh right!! i can do that!!!

[trans-girl-uchiha-itachi]

me coming up with missions that team hinata + itachi + shisui can take in the latter half of eyeball polycule fic: okay let's do an infiltration in takigakure because fuck it why not, something in kumo because i need to infodump about my hyūga affair headcanons, and a protection/escort mission for the fire daimyō's third daughter because i gotta make it explicitly clear that hinata is SUPER bisexual

[trans-girl-uchiha-itachi]

*attempts to write shipfic, goes on a three-paragraph tangent about home renovation*

[trans-girl-uchiha-itachi]

i dont know if this is "in" "character" and i dont care because its funny BUT

in the eyeball swap polycule au karin is a BNF in the akatsuki RPF community. she has a brutally defended timeslot of 2 hours a night where she completely ignores all her other responsibilities and either blasts out a bunch of overwrought, aggressively mediocre fic or just absolutely rips someone else on the akatsuki RPF mailing list to shreds. (orochimaru dies during the chuunin exams arc in this fic and karin becomes the nidaime otokage, but she's been writing fic for a few years before that happens. also, hinata, karin, and kabuto are Unhinged Childhood Friends in the hinataverse, btw, but karin & kabuto haven't heard anything from hinata from when she escapes otogakure until after orochimaru dies.)

now, karin is not a sasori girl (sasori being the most popular guy in the akatsuki rpf fandom) because sasori tried to make kabuto a sleeper agent and now kabuto is uno-reverse-card spying on HIM and it just feels too weird, quite frankly, but the second-most-popular blorbo in the akatsuki rpf fandom is itachi and, well, thirteen-year-old karin thought when she was picking a blorbo, she doesn't have ANY weird personal relationships with ITACHI, nor is she likely to form any, right? like, if she ever meets uchiha goddamn itachi irl he's probably going to kill her instantly, at which point the fanfiction is no longer going to be a concern.

fast forward several years. hinata isn't dead after all! cool, karin says, can you beta my itachi/kakashi slash? since you know them irl, and all.

hinata: HORRIBLE. NO THANK YOU, I DON'T WANT TO THINK ABOUT TAICHOU'S SEX LIFE

hinata:

hinata: fine. give it here.

(several minutes pass)

hinata: he would not fucking say that.

karin: which one?

hinata: EITHER OF THEM!! also, i'm banning you from using the phrase "crimson orbs". say ANYTHING else

karin: fine, but i need to get this in the mail by tonight. i need to win an argument with xXx_uchihafucker69_xXx.