#Phlebas blogs her writing

[phlebaswrites]

Phlebas Fandom Year in Review (2024)

Continuing on from the Fandom Year in Review that I did last year, this was me in 2024.

The Basics

New stories: 79 Word Count: 85,671 Events: 12 Event stories: 78

Fandom Event Breakdown

ButsuTaji Week 2024: 9 stories A Year of Asian Drama Tropes 2024: 12 stories Three Sentence Ficathon 2024: 5 stories Izuna Week 2024: 7 stories Tobirama Week: 7 stories Kisame Birthday Bash 2024: 5 stories Mermay 2024: 1 story Prompts for Pride 2024: 2 stories HashiMada Week 2024: 8 stories Naruto RarePair Week 2024: 9 stories Tales Under the Lamplight 2024: 4 stories KisaWeen 2024: 2 stories MadaTobi Week 2024: 7 stories

Fandom & Top 5 Ship Breakdown

Naruto: 75 stories Senju Tobirama/Uchiha Izuna: 16 Senju Hashirama/Uchiha Madara: 13 Senju Tobirama/Uchiha Madara: 11 Uchiha Hikaku/Uchiha Madara: 11 Senju Butsuma/Uchiha Tajima: 10

Dungeons & Dragons Original Work: 1 story Gen, no ship

Honor Harrington Series: 1 story Gen, no ship

Inception: 1 story Gen, no ship

Wiedźmin | The Witcher: 1 story Gen, no ship

(All of the statistics here are taken from AO3 - I don’t keep a personal count.)

The snippets in the images above were taken from the following stories:

January: Warm Hands February: curse misfortune (and choose your own fate) March: Laugh and Live (As Best You Can) April: Sake and Subterfuge May: Mountains and Music June: Dinner Date July: War (What Is It Good For) August: Walking (With You) September: Ladies and Lying October: Teen Halloween November: Spinning Wars December: Snow and Sky

[phlebasphoenician]

Fic authors self rec! When you get this, reply with your favorite five fics that you've written, then pass on to at least five other writers. spread the self-love ❤

Ooooh! This is such a hard question! It's like asking me to choose between my babies! I'll try though!

Escape and Evade Easily my most popular fic, this was the Madara/Tobirama story that spawned my most sprawling series - Courting Culture Confusion.

Silence is Golden Only slightly less popular than Escape and Evade, this is a soulmate story between Tobirama and Izuna in which Izuna's words are a very simple "Fuck you"

Working Together (They Make a Good Team) The first story in the Seducing Tobirama series, it's contains the very beginning of Izuna's attempts to court Tobirama... with varying levels of success.

Suns and Stars (Are the Same Thing) One of my less popular stories, this is an Asura/Indra fix it.

Swimming (Not Drowning) Written for Naruto RarePair Week, this is a Kisame/Itachi/Shisui Modern AU about navigating a polycule. Also, sex. 😝

[phlebaswrites]

I have a bunch of rare pairs for whom I've the only person who has ever posted a fic to AO3!

1 Fic and It’s Mine

Deidara/Hidan/Uchiha Obito

Samehada/Kubikiribōchō

2 Fics and They're Mine

Terumi Mei/Yamato | Tenzou

Hoshikgaki Kisame/Killer Bee/Samehada

4 Fics and They're Mine

Sandaime Mizukage | Third Mizukage/Uchiha Kagami

5 Fics and They're Mine

Senju Touka/Uchiha Hikaku/Uchiha Izuna/Original Character(s)

Reblog and put your rare pair in the tags/comments! I want to see the depths people will go to create, for the most random two characters in the most obscure media.

[recordpaul]

2017 in the Rearview

New Post has been published on http://paulrecord.com/2017-in-the-rearview/

2017 in the Rearview

To say 2017 has been a rough year for a lot of people would be an understatement. I could cast about for something to blame but it’s life. It will happen regardless if we are here or not. Best to not dwell for man may delay but time does not.

The hardest challenge of the year was my Dad’s passing. It was unexpected. I thought I would have him for another 15 years. That he would live to 100 like his father did. That didn’t happen. You could argue that it was denial and you wouldn’t be wrong. In April, we learned that he had bladder cancer and in the middle of May he was gone. One day I will write a blog about how it made me feel but suffice to say it sucks and not just for me. It sucks for his grandkids too.

On top of my father’s passing, we had to move because the rental we lived in was being sold. The Landlord was going through a divorce and part of that procedure was selling the house. Obviously, we don’t have the market cornered on hardships this year. We weren’t too concerned about the move as we had been planning on moving anyway. The hard part was that we had to show the house while Dad was in hospice care in the house. We decided the best way to handle it was to put up signs on his room door saying SICK PERSON INSIDE. DO NOT ENTER. Or something to that effect. Weird isn’t the word for it. I can’t imagine what people thought when they ignored the sign and walked in on my dad struggling in his sickbed.

All has not been bad though. We managed to move into a nicer house and neighborhood. It’s like a nature preserve with a river, deer, moose and lots of children. Yes, children are animals! I should know. I have four of them! The kids seem to enjoy the area too. This spring they’re hoping to explore the river and the local parks.

Besides the move the other big news of the year was my daughter entering college. She seems to love it. Her favorite classes are the equitation class and outdoor adventures program. She’s made some decent friends and is out there doing things that make her happy. Seeing her grow into a wonderful human being is all a parent could ask for.

Books!

I managed to surpass Goodreads 2017 Challenge. This is my 6th year of beating it. Though I don’t read nearly as much as I should. Here are the best books I read this year:

Sam Shepard Motel Chronicles. We lost Sam this year. Out of all the celebrity deaths this year, his passing struck a chord. I’ve always enjoyed his movies but never knew he was a writer or playwright. My loss because Motel Chronicles is one of the best road books out there.

Consider Phlebas by Ian Banks. Elon Musk got me into Ian Banks but this book was so depressing that I have held off on reading any more Culture books. That said, READ THIS BOOK! It’s an amazing story and Banks was a master of his craft.

Desert Oracle. By far my favorite find of the year is the “Voice of the Desert” edited by Ken Layne. A survival guide for Desert Rats and Non-Rats alike. There is even an awesome podcast to go with it. Check it out!

Videogames!

This is the year I finally managed to catch up on all the Xbox 360 Games that I missed will working at LSSC. Here is the best of the lot:

Red Dead Redemption by Rockstar. Holy Shit this is gooood! Go out and play it now if you haven’t. And The sequel is hitting next year and it looks equally good!

LA Noir. Another Rockstar game but this one is set in LA in the early 50’s. It’s Chinatown as a videogame and you know what, it works. I love it!

Music of the Spheres: The Music for Destiny. No, this isn’t a game but the music written for the Game that Destiny should have been. It’s pure bliss. Here, listen if you don’t believe me! LISTEN

  Movies!

The Last Jedi: Bantha Poodoo! Do yourself a favor and watch something else.

Bright: This was a fun Will Smith movie. Ignore the bad reviews! Unlike the Last Jedi, this movie is fun! Magic, Elves, Modern, Urban! Think Two NPC Townguards dealing with D&D Player Bullshit Plot.

Thor Ragnarok: The comic movie I have always wanted and I was so happy it happened with Thor. The third time is the charm!

  And with that, I’m off to the Desert Southwest! Well, I will be off to Joshua Tree Park in January but by time I write my next blog entry I will be there.

See you in 2018!

[phlebaswrites]

Drawn from the statistics page of my published works on AO3, this is for 2024 only. It does not include stories written in previous years.

January: 8,120

[phlebaswrites]

300 Works on AO3

Thank you so much to everyone who has ever read anything that I’ve written.

I couldn’t have done this without you!

[phlebasphoenician]

This is really interesting post to me because it addresses why some readers don't like these fics, but it doesn't actually discuss why authors post stories like this, and that's something I'd like to talk about.

The Problems With Anthology Fics

I'd personally call this kind of fic - a single AO3 fic which contains multiple short stories as chapters - 'anthology fics'.

And many of the critiques leveled here at them are indeed valid!

Yes, they make identifying which tags correspond to which chapter confusing! Yes, the listed word count in these fics is deceptive and makes it hard to sort/filter them by that metric! Yes, it makes it harder for readers to find a specific chapter in the work when they aren't interested in anything else! Yes, authors may miss readers, and readers may miss fics they'd otherwise have enjoyed because of it!

These are all very good reasons for readers to skip anthology fics like this, and that's fine.

But what isn't being taken into account here is that there are very good reasons for authors to post fic like this.

Why Authors Post Anthology Fics

Some authors may indeed feel shy to post short fics, flash fics, or drabbles as individual works on AO3, and I agree that there's absolutely no reason for them to feel that way - all fic is deserving of the time and space that the author chooses to give it.

However, that's not the primary reason why the authors I know post anthology fics - it's because posting a separate fic takes time.

Posting a new fic requires many things from an author:

title

summary

tags

rating

archive warnings

a decision about who can access the fic

But many authors also include other things, especially for month long events like kinktober or febwhump for which they're writing multiple prompt fills:

the prompt which inspired the story

social media post(s) for the event

All of this takes about an hour for me if I rush it, more than that if I don't, and I know authors who devote days to it. I even know authors who have decided not to post their fics because they couldn't come up with a title they liked.

Simply put, a requirement to post individual fics may mean that some fics don't get published. And that is even more of a shame than an anthology fic which gets skipped by some readers.

By comparison, posting a new chapter generally requires only one thing on AO3 - new tags - and sometimes not even that.

The title of the chapter can be the name of the prompt. There's no need for a summary unless the author chooses to include it.

It takes far less energy out of an author who is often already exhausted from simply writing the story in time to post for an event, especially if they're posting every day.

What I'm trying to say is that posting individual fics is time consuming for the author. It takes effort, effort that an author might choose not to spend.

And that's okay.

Posting anthology fics is a valid alternative to this!

And so I'd like to introduce a compromise option!

The Themed Anthology Fic

An anthology fic centered around a specific pairing or theme generally has far less tags for readers to sort through, and those tags are far more likely to be relevant to most of the anthology. This solves the 'wall of tags' problem, though admittedly not the inability to filter by word count - it's a compromise after all!

Anthology fics are also helpful for readers who have little or slow internet because they can download the whole fic at once and then scan through it at their leisure.

Now there are problems with anthology fics for the authors as well! Sometimes a flash fic that was conceived of as 500 words becomes a series of 500 word mini fics! Or it becomes a multiple chapter fic which the author would prefer to stand on its own, but doesn't want to delete and re-post because that would destroy the comments on it - many of which contain the conversations which may have inspired this new fics/chapters!

But Here’s the Real Point

No library would refuse to accept a published book of short stories because they're a collection of smaller works. As an archive, AO3 doesn't turn them away either.

What this post really seems to be saying is that anthology fics lose readers.

A reader might miss a fic they might have otherwise read, an author might miss a reader who might have enjoyed their story… simply because some readers have preferences that mean they filter out works like this.

And that is fine.

Don't Like, Don't Read

As with every single fic on AO3, readers read only what they want to.

A collection of works, gathered together by an author is a valid authorial choice to make, no matter what the reason.

Because authors get to control their own works.

An author presents the story they wrote in the way they want to - it may lose them readers, but it’s still their choice.

A Fandom Old Perspective

I've been in fandom for over three decades, read thousands of fan works, posted over 250 works on AO3, and I agree that the collections and series functions on that site are under utilized.

But how an author chooses to post their fics is up to them.

Read what you want, skip what you don't, and remember that no one has the obligation to write for you.

And, when you meet someone who creates what you like, treasure the things they make.

Because they worked hard to make it. 💚

Increasing Author Engagement

Now, if there are any authors who want to increase their engagement with readers, they might want to try these things!

Participate in events - readers who read these are already primed to enjoy stories about that theme!

Use canonical tags on AO3 - unwrangled tags can't be searched or filtered - canonical tags can and readers are more likely to find your fics through them.

Promote your stories - post about them on social media! Make a banner! Ask your friends to reblog it! Make a personal rec list and challenge your fellow authors to do the same!

Most of all, write what you love.

Your passion for the story will shine through, and the readers who want to read your stories will find you. It might take time, but it'll happen.

I have faith in you. 💚

since I've seen it talked about in several places recently:

if you are going to do a whump- or kink- or ANY-tober or other similar challenges please please please don't post them as one fic with 31 chapters unless it actually is one coherent fic. if they're 31 completely separate fics or ficlets then please just make a collection for them or just post them as separate fics. it doesn't matter if they're only 100 words or if you think they're too small or insignificant to post alone, they're not.

and why this?

because if you post all 31 of them in one fic the tagging is absolutely useless. if I look for things to read on ao3 I'm gonna look at the tags, and if the tags include something that's a dealbreaker for me, i won't even click on the fic. I might not even SEE the fic because I've filtered out the nope-tag! so I'm gonna lose out on reading 30 perfectly nice fics because of one fic that my nope-tag applied to.

ao3 is about archiving. it's about clear tagging and being informative. there is nothing informative about it if the tags in the fic apply to random chapters while others have nothing to do with it. it makes so much more sense to have each work as an individual fic with its own individual tags and warnings, so readers can make informed choices.

of course, you do you. I can't police what other people decide to do. but personally, I find it incredibly frustrating to weed through 31 chapters to find the ones I actually want to read. so I don't. I automatically scroll past all works posted like that. and I know some others do, too.

there is absolutely no shame in posting short things on ao3. there is no minimum word count. no one is going to look at you funny if you post a small ficlet on its own, I promise. it's just going to make some readers very happy when they can actually find the things they want to read.

so, please. at least consider the upsides of posting each work as their own fic.

signed, one very frustrated fandom grandma.

[phlebaswrites]

Drawn from the statistics page of my published works on AO3, this is for 2023 only. It does not include stories written in previous years.

January: 20,916

[phlebaswrites]

Phlebas Fandom Year in Review (2023)

Continuing on from the Fandom Year in Review that I did last year, this was me in 2023.

The Basics

New stories: 91 Word Count: 189,395 Events: 12 Event stories: 73

Fandom Event Breakdown

2023 Year of the OTP: 12 stories Izuna Week 2023: 7 stories Three Sentence Ficathon 2023 : 3 stories Tobirama Week 2023: 7 stories Kisame Birthday Bash 2023: 3 stories MerMay 2023: 3 stories Prompts for Pride 2023: 13 stories Naruto RarePair Week 2023: 7 stories Otsutsuki Week: 1 story Tales Under the Lamplight: 2 stories Hashirama Week 2023: 8 stories MadaTobi Week 2023: 7 stories

Fandom & Top 5 Ship Breakdown

Naruto: 90 stories Senju Tobirama/Uchiha Madara: 16 Senju Tobirama/Uchiha Hikaku/Uchiha Izuna: 12 Senju Tobirama/Uchiha Izuna: 10 Senju Hashirama/Uchiha Madara: 7 Senju Hashirama/Uchiha Madara/Uzumaki Mito: 5

Inception (2010): 1 story Gen

(All of the statistics here are taken from AO3 - I don’t keep a personal count.)

The snippets in the images above were taken from the following stories:

January: Staking a Claim (On Your Heart) February: Riding the Waves March: Playing With Pups April: Suigetsu Sees Sai (Really Sees Him) May: Summer and Sunshine June: Fabulous Females July: The Only Living Boy in Konoha August: The Past (Is Always With You) September: Dango and the Divine October: A Heart (Full of You) November: Seeing Yourself in My Eyes December: Wielding a Weapon

[phlebaswrites]

1 Million Words on AO3

Thank you so much to everyone to has ever read anything that I’ve written.

I couldn’t have done this without you!

[phlebasphoenician]

Alright, I’m infuriated by this for a few reasons.

The first is that the companies know this can be used for plagiarism:

“I think this is going to come to a head in the courts,” says Yu. “It hasn’t yet. It’s still kind of a grey area. If, for example, you put in the words ‘Call me Ishmael’, GPT-3 will happily reproduce Moby-Dick. But if you are giving original content to a large language model, it is exceedingly unlikely that it would plagiarise word for word for its output. We have not encountered any instances of that.”

Quote taken from the article cited in this reddit thread - AI is rewriting the rules of creativity. Should it be stopped?

The AI can plagiarise - if you give it the right inputs.

This is much the same thing as the way that art producing AIs are making artworks with striking similarities to artists original works when given the right inputs.

Companies are now asking artists to label the 'styles' of their art in order to make this kind of thing easier.

I understand why AO3 is a target for this kind of thing:

It's a huge dataset - there are over 8 million works in it.

It's already formatted and tags helpfully label the stylistic choices and common tropes.

It's free to use and easily accessible.

In effect, the companies are saying that this is not their problem by outsourcing the ethics of the situation to the users:

While we will not limit the use of generated images, we ask users to use their best legal and moral judgment and ensure that their work does not infringe on the rights of others in all cases, regardless of whether you use image generation or not.

Quote taken from the announcement that Clip Studio Paint will include an experimental image generator palette in their Winter Update.

You might notice a similar approach in the way Twitter is approaching the FTC requirements that it is legally bound by.

According to messages shared in Twitter Slack, Twitter’s CISO, chief privacy office, and chief compliance officer all resigned last night.

An employee says it will be up to engineers to “self-certify compliance with FTC requirements and other laws.”

From a Tweet by Casey Newton on November 11.

Here's my personal issue with this situation.

Fanwork creators are bound to not make money of our works. That's one of the things which differentiates us from canon and we put in the effort to make our works transformative.

We do it for love.

We make it accessible so that other fans can share in that love.

But now some companies are barging into our spaces - Deviant Art, Clip Studio Paint, AO3 - and using our works to fuel their AIs.

Whose products they are selling for money.

These companies talk about how they are trying to benefit the world, to grow the human experience, to elevate humanity to the highest pinnacle of human achievement.

But what they're actually doing is making a saleable product.

There is one difference here though and that's because AO3 is the Archive of Our Own. It's owned and run by fans, it makes no money.

So please don't send them a ticket trying to raise awareness of this issue. AO3 staff are volunteers, they have a limited bandwidth. They're not a company that needs to be convinced of the seriousness of the problem by flooding them with complaints, that will only reduce the energy they have for dealing with it.

I know that any works which have already been mined will be used. I feel violated by it, but that horse has bolted. I don’t think that my works are in any way special or unique, but they’re mine and I made them with love. I don’t want them used like this.

So I'm doing the only thing I can which is to lock all of my works so that they're only viewable to people who are logged in to AO3.

I don't like doing that, I've never done it before, and I hate that as fans we are now left with the unenviable choice between letting our work be stolen and hiding it from other fans who might want to enjoy it.

It's a loss on both sides.

If you're a writer or an artist who chooses to go this route, just as I have, here's how.

Step 1: On your dashboard is a button that says 'Edit Works' - click on that.

[image id for this image and all following images:

screenshots showing the locations of the buttons referenced in the text.

end id]

Step 2: That will take you to a page titled 'Edit Multiple Works' where you'll find a button in the top right corner that says 'All'. If you click that it will select all of your works. You can of course also work through your list of works and decide which ones to lock and which to leave open. Then click on the button labelled 'Edit'.

Step 3: You'll then be taken to a page that looks just like a page for editing any existing work. Here's the important part to remember for this bit:

Your edits will replace the existing values! (If you leave a field blank it will remain unchanged.)

Leave everything blank except for the section called 'Visibility' - change that to the option 'Only show to registered users'.

Click on the button at the bottom of the page labelled 'Update All Works' and you're done.

Good luck to us all.

I love it when anons/guests find my works and kudo/leave reviews, but given the new revelation that Elon Musk is using bots to mine AO3 fanfiction for a writing AI without writer's permission, my works are now archive-locked and only available for people with an AO3 account.

[phlebaswrites]

Tobirama/Izuna wip number 6, who gets amnesia? And can you give a somewhat more detailed plot for it? Totally understandable if you want to keep it more of a secret for now.

Aha! Numbers 6 and 7 are a matched set for the same prompt, but in the first one Tobirama is the one who loses his memory and Izuna is the one who loses his memory in the second one.

The one you asked about is the one where Tobirama gets amnesia, so you can have my initial thoughts on it!

They're a bit long, so I'll put them under a cut though! 😅

Tobirama is coming home from a mission and is ambushed. He kills everyone, but passes out with a concussion. And when he wakes up, he has no idea what is happening.

Where is he? What is he doing here?

And, most importantly, who is he?

Somehow, he can feel that this direction - he knows that it's east, but he has no idea how he knows that - is the right way to go.

It just…. feels familiar.

On the other side of things…

Izuna is out on patrol, when he sees Tobirama on the other side of the river.

Which is weird as fuck because Tobirama never comes here.

For all that they meet and they fight, he's never once seen Tobirama break across the border and he sure as hell wouldn't do it alone. Not when he can surely sense Izuna right there.

So what is going on.

Maybe it's a message from the idiot tree. In fact, that sounds exactly like something Hashirama would do.

Having failed at persuading nii-san to agree to a treaty by screaming at him on the battlefield - the stupidest idea that Izuna has ever heard of, no one can fucking hear anything over the roar of nii-san's fireballs, Hashirama's proposals have gone unheeded at least partly because they are unheard - this is probably an actual, formal message.

Well, fuck. Alright.

So Izuna squares his shoulders and steps forward to attract his rival's attention. "Well? Hand it over."

He may have to accept it, it's a freaking official message, but no one said that he had to be polite.

But Tobirama just stares at him.

And then he smiles.

What the hell.

Tobirama can actually smile! Izuna would have sworn that his face would crack before he did any such thing!

"You're Izuna!"

Okay, Izuna's day has officially gone from weird to weirder.

"Yes, that's me, you know my name, congratulations! We've known each other since we were eleven, fuck, just had it over already!" God, he wants to get back to the compound and away from whatever shit is happening here.

"It? Oh, of course."

And then Tobirama crosses the river.

Like it's nothing.

Like this is not the spot where they met, almost got killed by each other's fathers, and almost lost their brothers.

Like Tobirama has not just performed an act of war.

Izuna is so shocked that he does nothing as Tobirama walks right up to him and kisses him full on the mouth.

All he can say is "mph!"

He shoves his rival off.

He can feel the words crowding on his tongue but there are too many of them and they come out as incomprehensible gibberish. He waves his arms and stamps his foot.

Tobirama just looks at him with a mildly confused expression. "I'm sorry, did I do it wrong? Let me try again."

As Tobirama bends towards him again, obviously going for another kiss, Izuna finally finds his voice.

"WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU!"

Tobirama scratches his head, sheepishly. "Well, you asked, so…? I must admit that I'm guessing a little. I don’t know what it is about you…I just know that I can trust you. That you're important to me. Can you, perhaps, tell me who I am?”

Izuna boggles. "You don't know who you are???"

Tobirama blushes, obviously embarrassed. "Not really. But you obviously know me, so maybe you can help me out?"

Izuna blinks.

That.

That is flirting.

What. The. Fuck.

What is even happening right now!

His rival can smile! Kiss! Flirt!

aaaaaaaaa!

He spins around and stomps off.

Nope. That's it, he's officially done with today! It's over, he's going back to bed and when he wakes up tomorrow the world had better go back to making sense!

And then he hears the scuffle of leaves behind him.

He refuses to look around, even as he knows - he just knows - that Tobirama is following him.

He walks all the way home, blatantly ignoring his rival, pretending that there is No One There.

Right past the patrols, the sentries, and the gates.

All the way home.

But Tobirama never peels off.

Just walks right on his heels, right into the heart of Uchiha territory.

Until nii-san sprints out of the house and then comes to a screeching stop. "Izuna…" he says, slowly, "is there a reason that you brought the White Demon home with you?"

"Aha!" Tobirama says brightly, "So that's my name!"

And Izuna drops his face into his hands.

Fuck his life.

Just….

Just fuck it all.

[phlebaswrites]

WIP Tag Game

Thanks @kalira for the tag!

Rules

In a new post of your own, reveal the titles of the documents in your WIP folder and tag as many people as there are documents. Let others ask questions about the ones that interest them and post snippets or explain the contents as you see fit!

As will surprise no one whose talked to me for more than a minute, the list of my WIPs is insanely long, so I'm putting it under a cut!

Also, I will not be tagging as many people as I have WIPs - that's just Too Many People - but no-pressure tags for @dark-elf-writes, @maphel-n-doodles, @fiyasgideon, @tarutaruga, @devotedanarchy, @writhingbeneathyou, @artbythedarkside, @momo-ceros, @shinigami-mine, @woofgang69, @heyitswrenn, @longliveustherecklessandthebrave, @hellotheremaryrose, @silverutahraptor, @good-grievance

And please do ask about anything that sparks interest, though - I always love to talk about my WIPs!

I organise my WIPs by my series and then all other stories by pairing, so that's how they're listed here.

Courting Culture Confusion

Konohans Crash - the shinobi space race

Akatsuki Adventures - the last story in the series (I hope)

Other Naruto Stories

Madara/Tobirama

Untitled Single mother Tobirama - based on an idea by Madlen_Fade and borrowed with permission, four different versions plotted, running the gamut from angst to crack romantic comedy, and every one with a different pairing!!!

Tobirama/Izuna

Untitled Seelie Winter vs Summer Court story - Izuna is the King of Summer in love with the General of the Winter Court - Tobirama

Untitled djinn story - Izuna is a djinn, Tobirama is the king’s son who owns the bottle

Untitled Izuna is a pipe fox story - Tobirama is his sorcerer

Death is Not the End - Tobirama and Izuna novel, first part on AO3, is complete until I add everything else…

Untitled Tobirama is the Prettiest Princess - Tobirama/Izuna Modern AU with fashion porn and shy transwoman Kurohime

Untitled Tobirama/Izuna enemies to lovers amnesiac speedrun - amnesiac!Tobirama

Untitled Tobirama/Izuna enemies to lovers amnesiac speedrun - amnesiac!Izuna

Untitled Pacific Rim fusion - Pilot!Izuna/Engineer!Tobirama

Hold Your Children Precious - In a world where the Senju and Uchiha don't hunt children, the Uchiha win. Tobirama learns what it means to be married for peace.

A Confusion of Weasels - Izuna’s summons are weasels. Omegaverse.

A World Without You - fusion with the Matrix

Untitled Swan Lake AU, based on Odile and Odette

Untitled Mahō Shōjo Founders AU - complete and utter CRACK

Hashirama/Madara

Untitled Madara is a Disney princess - 500 Kingdoms fusion

Untitled Hashirama is a Disney Princess - Based on Enchanted

Untitled Romeo and Juliet quote parody - utter crack

Untitled Romeo and Juliet cannon era crack style romantic comedy

Untitled Romeo and Juliet modern AU - Hashirama and Madara are actors playing Romeo and Juliet

Rite of Passage - In which the only way to become a ‘true Senju’ is to eat Uchiha. Not dark, crack comedy

Untitled Edo Tensi Fourth War - Hashirama accepts Madara’s invitation to dance

Untitled extremely NSFW comedy in which Hashirama has an enormous dick and that's why he wears hakama whenever he's not in battle

Untitled Magic Coffee Shop AU

Founders Polycules

Untitled Girl Genius fusion - Necromancer Tobirama, Mechanicsburg sparks Madara and Izuna (they’re Hetrodyne equivalents)

Untitled sequel to Snow White - Hashirama/Madara, Izuna/Tobirama, Hashirama/Madara/Izuna/Tobirama

Suffered from the Night - Gothic Horror in which the Uchiha are vampires and the Senju are monster hunters

Untitled Madara/Tobirama/Izuna not really unrequited love - three versions, all of which are based on this amazing comic by @kurakura0-0

Kisame/?

Untitled A/B/O Kisame & Samehada hit on an Omega - Long, Kisame/Mei romance

Untitled Itachi fucks his way through the Akatsuki modern AU - Kisame/Itachi romance, SUPER LONG, the Akatsuki are a D&D group, Naruto and Sasuke are their dungeon masters, it’s BANANAS

Untitled Kisame/Itachi story - Itachi is a geisha about to have his mizuage. Kisame is the shinobi who bought him.

Budgie Smugglers - Itachi/Kisame porn in the onsen

Bridge of Birds - a retelling of Orihime and Hikoboshi

Laugh and Live - a retelling of The Tsarevna who Would not Laugh

Untitled Samehada/Kisame/Itachi story about scenting

Untitled Comfort Sex Kisame - or Kisame fucks his way through the Akatsuki

Other Pairings

Things that Zetsu Gave (and Gained) - Zetsu redemption angst fest

Untitled Zabuza/Kisame/Mei home repair modern AU

Untitled Team Ro polycule - All of Team Ro is in love with Iruka, but they don’t know about each other. Their only guide on how to woo him is Icha Icha. Oh no.

Untitled Arabian Night AU - Sakura/Hinata, Naruto/Sasuke. Hinata is the queen in an arranged married to Naruto, but he doesn't love her. Her only solace is her handmaiden, Sakura.

Untitled Deidara/Sasori - Everyone thinks Deidara uses ‘danna’ sarcastically, and that’s just the way he likes it. Two versions, one happy and one sad

Untitled 1920s Mob Uchiha - Series based on the art of @good-grievance​

Untitled Senju Breathplay - Two versions - Hashirama/Tobirama and Tobirama/Tōka

Untitled Kisame/Itachi/Haku/Zabuza College AU

War of the Dōjutsu (Now Fight!) - Hashirama/Hikaku

Untitled Tobirama/Hikaku story - they bond over paperwork

Untitled series - four unrelated stories, all of them based on the music video Dude (Looks Like A Lady) by Aerosmith. Each one featuring a different founder.

Gen

Untitled Izuna is the heir - Gen, long and utterly violent mix of angst and crack

Untitled Modern High School AU - Gen, probably about 20K, pretty wholesome story about growing up, now with a Hashirama/Madara cat cafe sequel, a Mito/Tōka/Naori Much Ado About Nothing sequel, and a Tobirama/Izuna sequel

The Feeling of Falling - Kakashi is a self-insert into Naruto, Kakashi-centric Naruto/Inception crossover

Untitled Tajima and Mountains - Tajima named his kids after mountains. This is why.

Minecraft Madness - Obito and Zabuza are on the same Minecraft Server. It doesn’t go well.

Untitled Akatsuki run a restaurant Modern AU

Untitled cannon era story in which the Hatake have nine lives - an unholy mix of angst and crack

The Past Is a Foreign Country (they do things differently there) - metatextual commentary on cannon, similar to In All the World

A Clowder of Cats - A series in which the Uchiha are all cats

Ladybug, Ladybug, Fly Away Home - a series of stories about Fū being brought up by the Akatsuki

Les Misérables

Rapunzel Enrolas

27 Dresses AU

Other

All the Tropes in Asian Drama story

And… I think that’s everything.

It’s more than I thought, but less than I was dreading.

That’s good.

I think.

[phlebaswrites]

So as someone who loves the game of playing K-Drama trope bingo (the game does vary for J-Dramas, Korean movies, etc. but also fun), I have to ask about the All the Tropes in Asian Drama story??? 👀

Aha! The idea for this spawned off this tumblr post, and I decided to write something for it, a story which eventually became The Past Cannot Be Cured.

However, there are just so many tropes, that I've kept the list around as a kind of ongoing prompt list. 😝

I'm considering the idea of running an event with them as prompts in 2024 actually...

[phlebasphoenician]

This is exactly the kind of thing that makes writing stories set in this time period so fun! 🤩

[phlebasphoenician]

I don’t know how to phrase this ask properly 😭 but how do you like… know nart and write fics when u’ve not read or watched it? I’m so confused. (I don’t mean this rudely or anything I’m genuinely????? Because there is So much. How????? Im actually flabbergasted this is so wild to me😭 😭 😭)

Don't worry, I'm not offended! I've been asked this before and I'm always happy to talk about it.

The short answer is that I don't need to know canon to feel comfortable in a fandom space or to consume the works made by and for that fandom.

The long answer is much, much longer so I'm putting it behind a cut.

There are two parts to why I'm like this, and the first one is the fandom I started out in.

My first fandom was the X-Men and I began with the very first X-Men comic - The X-Men #1. (Yes, it was published in 1963. Yes, I'm fandom old… 🤣) From there I jumped to the wider Marvel comics universe as a whole.

And with every new storyline, with every change in the creative team, I just accepted the stories as they came.

When people died, often several times over (Jean Grey, I am looking at you), when they time travelled, met their alternate selves, became villains, became heroes, changed their costumes/personalities/de-aged/became old/got married/forgot they were married/pretended they forgot they were married (Vision, whyyyyyy), I just kept reading.

I got used to the idea that the characters were always the same characters but that they'd be constantly changing, be written differently by every new writer, and that they were always in flux.

This meant that - to me - canon wasn't a stable static thing. No, it was a fluid amorphous collection of ideas, simultaneously recognised by creators, publishers, and fans alike.

Because fans have always had an impact on comics.

Dead characters come back because fans want to read about them again and creators are keen to make it happen. Characters are redeemed to become heroes or fall to become villains because fans want to read those stories and creators want to tell them. Characters get spin off mini-series (and sometimes whole series) because fans will buy those comics.

Fans are a crucial part of the creative process.

I've always accepted transformative work - because what else is a new creative team coming in to make Jane Foster the new Thor but a stunning piece of transformative work? - as an equal to canon.

Because, to me, it is.

I consume both kinds with equal facility and ease, without thinking of either as less than the other.

Here's the second part - I will follow professional creators from story to story, from series to series, and enjoy it because I like their style.

I won't like every work, probably not, but there's a high probability that I will enjoy at least some of them and I'll buy those works because of it.

Because I like Honor Harrington, I've also read David Weber's Safehold series. Because I like the Valdemar series by Mercedes Lackey, I've also read her Heirs of Alexandria series and her Five Hundred Kingdoms stories. Because I love Sandman, I've also read Good Omens (multiple times, it is excellent), Neverwhere, Stardust, and American Gods. Because I love Summer Wars, I've also made it a point to watch other films by Mamoru Hosoda, including Wolf Children and Mirai. I fell in love with Inception and then went on to watch other Christopher Nolan films - some were to my taste (Dunkirk, The Dark Knight Rises) and others were not, but I still try and catch them in cinemas where I can.

I don't think that's unusual behaviour.

But I also treat fan work in exactly the same way.

I'll follow a fan author from fandom to fandom, reading stories to see if the new fandom is to my taste. Sometimes, it's not - no harm, no foul, kink tomato - but all to often it is, and that is entirely because of the strength of that author's writing.

Most of the time I don't even touch canon - why would I when I'm here for this author's particular interpretation of it? I don't need to know canon when the author builds the world of their story so beautifully it stands on its own.

And, if by chance the fandom is so much to my taste that I want to consume other works in it, there are other fan work creators! All of them easily accessible! It's marvellous!

I never worry that the works I'm reading are out of character for canon, because I don't care about canon.

For me, reading fanfiction is just like reading original fiction.

Now writing it is quite another matter.

I didn't know that I was going to be writing in the Naruto fandom. My first story in this fandom was supposed to be a 1600 word joke fill for a prompt that wouldn't leave me alone.

But hey, somehow, people asked me what happened next, I knew the answer so I wrote it, and then the whole thing snowballed.

That meant that my ideas of how the world of Naruto worked and what the characters were like was entirely based around fanfiction I'd read.

I acknowledged that at the end of Escape and Evade:

I always intended for this to be a little story, written just for me, because I couldn’t get a drabble from nirejseki and a comment from YumiStar out of my head.

But, along the way, it’s become a bit more than that for me.

I haven’t written fan fiction since 2005 and this has stretched me in ways that I’m not even sure I know yet.

And it’s in a fandom whose cannon I have never actually watched or read.

Which means that my understanding of these characters who I have come to love, is based entirely on the amazing work of the authors who put their time and effort into sharing their stories with the world.

This story is quite literally my love letter to Founders Era Naruto Fandom.

Truly, my little effort stands on the shoulders of giants.

So here I am, and Courting Culture Confusion has become a 648,934 word reboot of Naruto (it's still not over, I'm still publishing a new chapter daily) which means that I have to think about canon! Because how can I reboot it when I don't know what's going on?

And the answer to that is I ask other fans.

As with most fandoms, all I have to say is "I'm thinking about writing this character, would anyone care to tell me what they're like?" and at least six people will pop up to give me their opinions. From there, I'll try and figure out how to make them into a cohesive whole that also matches with what's available in narutopedia (thank you to everyone who works on that, I could not write without it as a handy reference!) and then I sit down to write.

It's really that simple.

So how can I write without knowing canon?

Because you know canon and you're willing to tell me.

Thank you. 💚