#I suppose technically I have 2 dnd AUs

[running2reanimation]

Would you mind fanfic of your DND au?

it's ok if not

- @styck-figure

I wouldn’t mind at all! I’d be delighted, in fact!

[omgkalyppso]

12, 22 and 25 for the end of year asks 🎉

Thank you for the ask!

12.Talk about a new friend you made this year

Two long-time mutuals were new friends this year! I made fanart of @razrogue's oc in february (asked permission first) and that kicked off some conversations, and I invited @boghermit to a digital dnd game that was supposed to be a "one shot" that I thought would run 3 sessions in april but we're on like session 10+.

Idk that I have any completely new friends. Have some mutuals I've been talking with more lately, and perhaps next year we'll be no-filter enough to be friends, lmao.

22.Favorite place you visited this year?

I went to my late grandparents' mother's cottage twice this summer. It's a little over two hours up the river. I made a goo/gle d/oc of some photos from one of the visits that mutuals could ask to see if you like. I shared it with some of you already.

25.Did you create any characters (in games, art, or writing) this year? Describe one

Several. And more, counting the dnd npc's I made up in role as DM. I'll restrict myself to three per media.

In world of warcraft I created and max-levelled more than my usual amount of pc's / oc's during the mists of pandaria remix event. Two of my favorites were a couple of nightborne elves, a rogue named Draughr (I decided this is his code name), and a warlock named Akumyssra. They're divorced with three kids. They were together all during the time Suramar was bubbled and sequestered from the rest of the world, and resentful of one another. I hadn't decided between them which was the parent who nearly sold a child to servitude because of the mana sickness / addiction / arcwine situation, but it was what was irreparable in the circumstances. Their children don't know and it is this unknowing which would allow them to fix things between them in the future Maybe. I also enjoyed crack shipping Draughr and Mudmug, which would further splinter his relationship with Akumyssra either because he was the one who fucked up fatherhood and is now having at least casual relationships or because she is the one who fucked up motherhood and not only are the children technically in the custody of an elf whose name they might not know for years, but he is also having such a good / easy time of it while she can't do anything but suffer for the sake of her magic.

I also started thinking of a daughter for my oc Borgakh and Lor'themar Theron. I was caught up in the tragedy of their romance for ages - and enjoying it - until they gave him a canon wife in Thalyssra. So now, instead, their relationship suffered after the battle for lordaeron, started getting better during battle for azeroth, Borgakh discovered she was pregnant just barely before going through with the ritual to go to Shadowlands, and I hate that they get married around the same time as Lor'themar's canon marriage, I wish it could happen at another time, but it's fine, whatever, and now they have this two year old daughter around the start of the war within.

I spliced some orc, elf and dracthyr sprites together to come up with a what-if concept to help me picture her as a babe and child.

I hadn't settled on a name. Here's the short list: Rok'aria (aria pronounced like the musical movement), Anravenna, Kel'diel, Kel'ariah (ariah pronounced like Karliah), Marzul, Arzula.

.

I came up with my dungeon meshi oc this year. Aelfwin.

Their backstory is up in the air because I don't know how dungeons work or how I'll feel about the story once I've finished the anime / once I crack and read the manga.

At this time, my two floating story ideas for them are: 1) post-canon in a large monstrous form, Alfie tunnels into the eponymous dungeon, from a different dungeon. 2) au where Alfie joins the party around the same time as Senshi.

.

In bg3 I have a few fun oc's that made their fic debuts this year!

Blbxrl - a Fimbrul Devil loyal to Mephistopheles in Raphael's service

Yakrayat - a Rakshasa Demon imprisoned in Avernus, presumably by Haruman in service to the Archdevil Zariel

^ Both featured in A Hopeless Dove.

Upton O'Goode has been conceptualized since at least 2023, but they finally had a little cameo in Upon The Hill.

[vallkary]

Oooo

I have a big shiny collection cause I like hunting them when I beat the game so whoopieeee

BITB is a big part of what inspired me to want to look into running any sort of ttrpg campaign, too! I even wanted to put it in a similar setting but I had other ideas that au think work better for me,,,,, and also I don’t care about the time period because it’s a mountain town that’s basically impossible to reach anyway

Kyren is… such a little guy (lie. they are 5’9” and the tallest of the “party”) They’re a native survivor of the “Blighted Reality,” as their world is currently being unwoven and recycled into becoming a new dimension. This comes with lots of supernatural fuckery and an apocalypse!

2/4 of the characters involved are Reality Benders in one way or another, and one of the character’s ancestors was a reality bender, and somehow traveled to what is now known as the Blighted Reality, making Kyren the only one technically supposed to be there

And that’s just. Their circumstances. They’re 16, the apocalypse has been going on for 14 years, and they’ve been in their own for most if not all of it, essentially.

This + Neurodivergency + Godawful Emotional Constipation makes for some really fun character dynamics, including but not limited to:

Their reality is being eaten and destroyed with them still in it, they she. No understanding or knowledge of the other realities and that half of their begrudging companions play a role in it. They’re so emotionally constipated they believe they have no emotions. We had a DnD-style combat encounter and they got knocked out first after being specifically made to be the “cool survivor competent” character. And then they rolled a 2 on a d20 to see how well they’d handle their injuries

I love them

GRAHHH I have

Uh

I actually have a lot of things to talk about but I don’t think any of them are particularly interesting so :3

hi :333

I meannnnnnnnn what’s the first thing that you thought of to talk about? Maybe it is interesting?

Idk, also I got a shiny Cinderace in pokemon scarlet so that’s cool :3

[stellarspecter]

☕️ 👻 💘

👻- 2 or 3 sentences from something you haven’t posted yet

here's a bit from butterflies and glitter!

Luke looks between them all and sighs. “Fine, I’ll do it.” He looks at Alex with an evil grin. “But only if you also paint your nails purple.”

Alex squawks, but the force of Reggie and Willie’s pleading eyes combined have him relenting impossibly quickly. “You two shouldn’t be allowed to team up, it’s unfair,” he grumbles.

“It’s insanely awesome, I think is what you mean,” Willie says.

(2 or 3 sentences? 2 or 3 short paragraphs is the same thing, right?)

💘- what’s your favorite AU? Least favorite?

my favorite au would probably have to be my daemon au, because i (and miles) spent so much time figuring out everyone's daemons and yes, it's technically also a royalty au bc troped, but we had vague ideas for canonverse too that i would write if i had a direction to go with it. i do want it noted though that my dnd tiefling!bobby au for troped round 1 is so good and fun and i love dnd so much

my least favorite is probably my troped round 2 summer camp au? just because it wouldn't have existed if not for troped. not that i dislike it or anything, it just wasn't something that was already in my mind, you know? also i didn't really spend much time fleshing the world out in that one. and it was very rushed, because troped lol

☕️- favorite passage

as always, it's hard to decide, but here's a bit from my troped round 1 fic (under a readmore bc it's kind of long):

“Don’t lie to me, Patterson!” Bobby shouted, standing up suddenly. Every window and cabinet door in the shop flew open with a loud bang. The boys flinched back in surprise, but Bobby wasn’t fazed. The locked door to his feelings had been flung wide open, and he couldn’t stop them flooding through. “I know you don’t want me in the band because I can’t remember the last time I actually helped write a single one of our songs. It’s always just you three, because with you, the jam session never ends, does it? You get to go to rehearsal together and go home together and write together and you never have to be apart, not for a minute, if you don’t want to! And you spend all that time writing songs and bonding with each other without sparing a single thought for the person you’re leaving out.” As Bobby yelled at them, the floor began to tremble. Was his voice usually this loud? “I thought I was supposed to be your significant other.” Bobby blinked tears out of his eyes, his annoyance at there being tears at all fueling his rage. “But you leave me out without a second thought, and I’m sick of it! You book gigs and forget to tell me! You have inside jokes I don’t know about! You’re more comfortable with each other than I ever will be even with myself, and — and — it’s like you’re all at relationship level fifty and I’m stuck on level five eating your dust.”

“Bobby…” Luke whispered. “I didn’t know, none of us knew you felt like this.”

“We love you,” Reggie added, teary-eyed.

“Then why doesn’t it feel like it?” Bobby replied, voice hard as stone, and watched him flinch back with a mixture of vindication and regret curdling in his stomach.

[pocketmouse18]

Thank you so much to @herosofmarvelanddc @cloudypaws and @mtab2260 for the tag! This was so much fun to think about :)

(fair warning, I wrote too much for many of these...)

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

Just 2 :)

2. What's your total AO3 word count?

450,577 if I did my math right!

3. How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

Officially? Just 1 - Agents of Shield (two, I guess, if you count MCU as separate, since I use characters from both...). Off the record, many more than that! I have lots of bits and bobs from other fandoms that I tinkered with when I was younger, still getting the hang of writing, not brave enough to post things, etc. etc. Some of those include X-Men, Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, the Fosters, Star Wars, the Hunger Games, the 39 Clues, and a few others I can’t remember. None of those will likely see the light of day, mostly because they’re unfinished, not very good, and just not reflective of who I am as a writer anymore, but they were fun to play around with at the time :)

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

I just have the two, but The Important Thing is to Try wins, hands down, with 1227. Shoulder to Shoulder has 95, though, which I’m also very proud of! Important Thing has a definite advantage, being as long as it is, so I don��t know if that’s really a fair comparison between them.

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

Yes! Or at least, I always try to! I just can’t believe someone would be kind enough to take the time to tell me what they thought of my story, so I always want to take the time to thank them and return the favor :) Plus, as I’ve learned, it’s a fantastic way to get to know some really lovely people!

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

Well... I technically only have one story that has an ending, at least on Ao3, and it’s not an especially angsty one, since it ends in Phil and Melinda getting married :) I have some angsty chapter endings in Important Thing, if that counts? I’m not even sure if any of my unpublished fiddlings have angsty endings (most don’t have endings at all lol)... I don’t mind writing angst, but I don’t know if I’m capable of making something without a happy (or at least hopeful) ending.

7. Do you write crossovers? If so, what is the craziest one you've ever written?

Not really, unless you count AoS/MCU crossovers (which I guess technically count, but also I would argue it’s not a true crossover since (and I will die on this hill) AoS is a part of MCU canon). When I was younger I was a fan of playing around with crossover AUs more so than the actual characters crossing paths (so like, what if these characters from XYZ were demigods or went to Hogwarts or what have you, and not so much what would happen if the X-Men met Luke, Leia, and Han on one of their space adventures). I started writing a crossover between AoS and the Marvel Rising cartoon once (which again, not sure if that’s a true crossover, since Daisy was in Marvel Rising, but I digress), where Coulson tasks Daisy to work with Kate Bishop and Rayshaun Lucas to collect and train a team of young Inhumans, starting with Kamala Khan, but I ran out of steam pretty quickly when it got too plot heavy.

8. Have you ever received hate on a fic?

I don’t think so. I’ve had some people not understand some choices that I made, but they asked it in a way that I thought was perfectly nice, and I was happy to talk about it with them. Sometimes people get “mad” at me when I cause pain and suffering, but I know that’s all in good fun :)

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

Nope, not for me. I don’t read it or write it, personally. Writing a kiss is hard enough!

10. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not to my knowledge! Important Thing is probably too long and unwieldy to ever steal :P

11. Have you ever had a fic translated?

Someone once asked me on FFN if they could translate Important Thing to Russian, which was basically the coolest thing I’ve ever been asked!

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

A fic, no. I’d love to try sometime! I had a friend in college who I co-wrote with A LOT, though, so I know I enjoy that process, given the right partner. We wrote several short plays together (ranging from ~15-50 minutes in length, including one that we wrote in a single afternoon!), selected scenes from a larger (unfinished) play inspired by historical letters we found in an archive that were sent between a man from Massachusetts serving in the American Civil War, his wife, and his 8-year-old son, and several scripts for TV sitcoms (2 pilots for 2 different shows, plus additional eps for those pilots, and a couple of later eps for a different show that a classmate of ours wrote the pilot for - we were trying to practice what it would be like to be on a staff with a showrunner haha). The sitcom scripts in particular I’m very proud of, and could talk somebody’s ear off about if asked (one’s about ghost hunters and one’s about a DnD party!), but maybe that’s better saved for another post ;)

13. What's your all-time favorite ship?

That’s a very hard question for me! Mostly because shipping stuff is usually one of the last things to register for me when I’m thinking about shows/books/movies I like haha... I’m always a sucker for Philinda, and younger me was rather taken with Percabeth, I suppose.

14. What's a WIP that you want to finish but don't think you ever will?

Hmm, several, really. The aforementioned AoS/Marvel Rising crossover I think could be really cool if I got it to work, but I don’t think that’ll ever happen. I also have a WIP that’s like an angstier version of a Hallmark Christmas movie AU where Daisy has to come home to her small town right before Christmas and figure out what she wants out of life, but I’m a little stalled out on that one, mostly because I’m waffling on who the charming love interest should be and because I don’t have enough of a plot, just lots of feelings about coming back home to a place you thought you had left behind lol.

I’d put Important Thing and it’s (as of yet) untitled sequel on here as things I want to finish, but I’m much more determined to see those through, so I don’t think they qualify for the “never will actually write” part of this question :)

15. What are your writing strengths?

I don’t know if other people agree with this, but I think I write pretty decent dialogue. My “training” (if you can call it that) is in, as you might have figured out by now, script and screenplay writing (those were the only creative writing classes I took in college). So having a sense of the rhythm a conversation needs to have and how to write dialogue that sounds mostly like how people really talk (but shined and tightened up enough so that it’s not actually like verbatim dialogue, which is far less interesting to read!) is something that I feel like comes pretty easily. I also think I do okay with similes and metaphors - my brain tends to work in that way. It’s easier for me to think of stuff (feelings, especially) in terms of comparing it to more familiar things than to just think of the thing directly, if that makes sense?

16. What are your writing weaknesses?

If I was being honest, this would be a very long section, but I know it’s not fun to read a big ol’ paragraph of someone self-criticizing, so I’ll keep it to one or two items ;) A big one for me is pacing, I think. I tend to write more than I need to and to over-explain things, so my chapters get very long and sometimes don’t really go anywhere? Until all of the sudden, they DO, because things need to HAPPEN! I’m a pretty rigorous self-editor, but I do have a really hard time cutting out sections (unless they’re really just not working), so even if it would help the pacing to leave out this conversation between character A and character B, I often can’t make myself cut it. I also think I struggle sometimes with balancing my ‘showing’ and my ‘telling,’ especially in the sense of me over-explaining certain things - like when it comes to feelings/facial expressions/etc, for example. I compensate for that in Important Thing by making it a part of a few people’s POV, but it’s not really a good habit to have in general. Also spelling! I’m really bad at spelling and run my stuff through robust spellchecks and text-to-speech before I post anything to make up for it :)

17. What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

I do it with some regularity, although I always get nervous about doing it wrong! It’s hard to avoid in AoS, where characters are spies and should (in theory, at least) have a working knowledge of multiple languages (”We’re spies, I thought we all learned languages?!”). Even in an AU, where characters aren’t spies, I like to try and pay homage to that, plus pay homage to certain characters’ native languages or just general multilingualism. I’ve spent a fair amount of time around people who speak more than one language, so I feel like it’s a natural part of groups of people to have more than one language spoken. I have a pretty good handle on written Spanish, a patchy idea of French, plus I know some Russian phrases from my dad and some German words from my grandfather, but I do rely on internet translation a lot. I usually run stuff through google, then run it backwards to see just how far off the initial translation was, then consult some actual, like, language learning sites to see if there’s particular idioms or common phrases that use different words than what google will give me, then run those words through backwards in the place of the original words to see if I can massage the whole thing to sound reasonably competent. Languages like Russian or Mandarin (which have their own alphabets/characters) are the hardest, since I have to also try and do a transliteration. I always try to put an apology/disclaimer in the notes any time I write in a language that isn’t English, because I’m sure I make lots of mistakes.

Also, I tend not to italicize words that are in other languages, because it looks weird on the page to me to set the other language apart like that (and because I italicize mainly for internal thoughts or emphasis, and usually what’s being said in another language isn’t internal or being emphasized). I put a rough translation at the end so we don’t have to pause the story for a parenthetical translation, but because the translation’s not right there, I try to either put in enough context clues that a person can still understand what’s going on, or I make sure that what’s written in another language isn’t critical to the overall understanding of the scene.

18. What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Officially, it’s AoS, since that’s the only fandom I’ve published for. I think the first true fandom I wrote fic for was probably either Harry Potter (entirely populated with OCs lol, I just liked using the world/setting), Percy Jackson (a mix of OCs and canon characters), or X-Men (all canon characters). I was a bit of a latecomer to fanfiction, though, like, I wrote a ton as a kid, but mostly original stuff, because I didn’t know that fanfiction in its current form was even allowed until I was in high school lol.

Oh! I almost forgot one! I’m not sure if this really counts as a fandom, but it’s definitely the earliest version of fanfic I wrote haha... I was like 12 and I wrote more than one story of an OC joining Robin Hood’s band of Merry Men, and then also one of that same OC becoming a knight of the Round Table, so like... do what you will with that information haha.

19. What's you're favorite fic you've written?

I can’t choose between my two darlings :( I mean, okay, technically it’s probably Important Thing. That story’s my baby. It’s huge and I’ve been working on it for almost 2 years, and I’ve poured a lot of my heart and soul into it. I’ve fallen in love with the universe I built in it, so much so that I wrote an entire prequel and have very concrete plans for a lengthy sequel. But I can’t not crow about Shoulder to Shoulder (the aforementioned prequel!), too... I’m just really proud of that one - it has a lot of firsts for me. First completed story. First romance-focused story. First foray into expanding the Important Thing universe. But yes, if I have to choose, then Important Thing wins. That’s a story that I started writing exclusively for myself - to give myself characters I could relate to and to explore a style of AoS fic that I loved reading - and that’s a story I will always and forever be proud of.

I think most people have probably answered this tag game at this point, so I don’t want to accidentally retag anyone! If you haven’t yet, and would like to join in, please do! This is your invitation <3