#(if it was in september then it Must have been the saucy xv fic abt the sharp teeth bc pure identity didn't come out til oct)

[hua-fei-hua]

hey! i stumbled across you on ao3 through genshin (i think? that was in september i have no idea at this point), went to check out your profile and saw my hero academia works there. i am currently very much into it, so i was like let's gooo sooo I found B♭ and that has been a wild journey.

firstly, i don't have any experience with american school system, so a lot of worldbuilding was new for me. moreover, marching band is something from another universe(aka music lover but never got educated on the matter), so fic constantly challenged me with new details-concepts-vocabulary. stepping outside of your comfort zone while reading? great idea! i think i never learned so much from a fic while enjoying it so much ^^

secondly, i am simply amazed by sheer amount of effort you put into it. i decided to read in publishing order, so non-chronological really impressed me. you're honestly a mastermind being able to pull that off. also, having a song for every chapter with specifically picked out lyrics relevant to the content is so, so cool! the diversity of your playlists should be astonishing, i'm jealous :)

thirdly, the characters are just so real. i love all the canon references, i love the reactions that don't feel exagerrated or too mild. they are acting...exactly as i would expect them to in that circumstances and setting. i just accepted leads' ways of thinking and reflecting so naturally

i also read the extra notes when they were available and just...how much thought is put in is mezmerising. for some reason i never thought pulling directly from your life experiences when writing? but it actually makes a lot of sense and it brought me some ideas to try out so hehe ;)

as i am very smart and hadn't scrolled down on the order post, i didn't see until quite late in the reading that the end of perfect harmony is published as notes, so that was a surprise. i understand your reasons and the fact that you're not even in the fandom anymore, but you mentioned in some extra notes that it's ok to ask for them even if years passed so...here i am three years after, complimenting B♭ :D

anyway, i finished it a couple of days ago, and even the notes are quite detailed. images of described shenanigans popped into my head just like that, and i really appreciate that you published them and i got to know what happened next!!

i actually wondered why were the comments disabled since i really wanted to comment on a few chapters bc your work deserves it so much...but yeah, that's what led me here so i guess congrats, you get my thoughts all nicely packed in one place ^_^

there's probably a lot of specific pieces, details, ideas i liked about B♭, so that is merely a summary of exciting things i remember!

i'll say goodbye using my favourite oneshot title:

thank you for the music ✩°｡⋆⸜(ू｡•ω•｡)

not gonna lie i'm kind of obsessed w/the way you just glossed over the fact that you (probably) found me through my (anonymous) genshin fics, which means you jumped through the (minimum three) hoops required to get here, my (named) fandom blog, and then proceed to gush abt a bnha series i did. like i would assume that if someone put in the effort to find my other fandom fics from my genshin stuff, then there must've been smth really worth looking into w/the genshin stuff lmao

for the sake of my mutuals' dashboards, since this ask is so long i'm just gonna chuck the whole (long) answer under a cut lol

anyway yes Bb!! the amt of effort n planning i put into that series was legitimately insane. i made school schedules for EVERY SINGLE BNHA CHARACTER and PUT IT ON A SPREADSHEET so that i could PLAN WHO COULD WALK WITH WHOM TO THEIR NEXT CLASSES n have PLOT-RELEVANT CONVERSATIONS LIKE THAT. i made little profiles for each of the characters, where i chose their favorite musical key (and why), how many years/instruments they play, and gave them each a funny little quote/catchphrase!!!

what possessed me to do this for ~20 different characters i honestly could not tell you

i definitely loved working on Bb a lot. i remember sitting down three years ago, practically to the day by this point, n hashing out the events of every single chapter to the epilogue, then reorganizing them into a proper timeline (i also kept a calendar in my notes with the chapters in order), all while occasionally looking out my bedroom window n thinking how wonderfully bright n warm n sunny the world was becoming again. bc really, 2019 was a very struggle year for me, n i didn't take the time to appreciate the sunlight then the way i have every year since. from there, i worked off that very strict outline, and most of the note-chapters that were eventually put up are primarily just copy-pasted straight from there.

i remember being on youtube a lot for music recs when working on perfect harmony too!! a bunch of them changed in the years btwn walking away from the series n actually publishing the notes (which were actually published mid-december last year, then backdated to 2020 a few days later ahaha), with a number of the tour arc alternate chapter title songs coming from songs that didn't even exist at the time of the fic's original planning. my mp3 collection grew a lot during the planning phases of Bb lmao.

i'm glad the characters felt so real!!! while no one character was based entirely off one single person i knew irl, one could say that writing Bb was a bit of a love letter to my time in high school band in some places, both the events i partook in n the people i knew there. it was a very "write what you know" type of fic.

anyway haha yeah the end of my bnha days were not fun, but i still loved Bb enough to hold onto the idea of returning to it Soon(tm) that i put off publishing the chapter notes for almost two years. even then, that was a difficult decision for me to make bc a part of me wasn't ready to close that chapter of my life. i think ultimately it was the best decision to make though, since the fics are p heavily tied up in a much sadder part of my life that i'd just rather not return to.

the main reason comments were turned off of Bb (and indeed, the majority of my bnha fics) is most simply described as "resentment". it's different from how i feel abt my old snk fics (where i turned comments off of them so that i could pretend no one's really reading them anymore), which is more impersonal "oh my god i was so young back then and i give fewer than negative shits abt any mistakes i might've made on them or what anyone thinks of them" bc in bnha it's kind of hard to avoid the fact that i had a Name in the circles i typically traversed for a while. it wasn't that big of a name, but it's certainly more than nothing.

it's not really a feeling i like to dwell on, so i just archive-locked the responsible works n turned off comments for the most heinous culprits (mostly sparklers, but even tho i love Bb as a story, i do not love Bb as a publishing experience, if that makes sense), and for the most part, that keeps the resentment contained.

still, i'm genuinely happy that you enjoyed the au so much!!! i honestly love love love how goddamn SPECIFIC the premises are for this fic. the world was truly built with love, and the music puns for every title were always such a joy to come up with c':

thank you for the ask!!!! :D