#all that being said I think reworking the outlines properly is sadly a bit too hopeful

[asachuu]

Alright, BSD/AO3-related “confession” time, although this shouldn’t have really become a confession.

While my works over on AO3 are occasionally quite dark, the full extent of which is entirely subjective, yet still one I could describe as such objectively, I do sometimes try to water a lot of it down out of fear I’m starting to sound “edgy for the sake of it”, as nonsensical as I personally find that description. Though I’m aware the thought process goes against what I personally believe on these matters, I still don’t want anyone to look at anything I write and assume it’s nothing but a mindless pile of brutality treated without proper seriousness and/or something to exaggerate for “no real reason”, and I often find myself worrying whether or not it’ll come off as such, even though I understand each author has their own visions and motives, me included, and not everyone will assume those correctly, nor will people ever universally agree on them, enjoy the content or even have the willingness to accept the mere existence of art that isn’t pure or sanitized, therefore one shouldn’t feel anxious over this when nobody owes any sort of explanation or justification for their creations to strangers anyway, but…let’s just say I’m still trying to get past that. Unfortunately, I suppose spending too much time around audiences who consider going into any type of ever-so-slightly darker territory in one’s works as an act only terrible, cruel individuals would do may have had its long-lasting effects…but I digress.

There was one work which was initially meant to be entirely unfiltered, “uncensored”, if I should say so, and that work was meant to be what would eventually become both A Second Chance and No Retakes, given the two are merely two varying iterations of an alternate universe I wanted to create for the ship I’m writing about. I suppose it’s the third, never spoken about version of it, and although there are four to five total versions as of today, this one in particular had almost made it through, had I not completely washed everything I were to include away just a few days before I got to writing my “first” fic. In fact, it was precisely the fully clean version which became A Second Chance; the series is essentially only different in its beginning, past and subsequently the way said past would affect what was happening, yet the more general events stayed intact, unlike No Retakes which is still not being too truthful to its original introductory disclaimer as of the last update.

Now, I felt like I had to tidy this one up, and if I am to be honest, it was mainly thanks to my only “enthusiastic” audience at the time always focusing on any sadder element of my writing and pinpointing how much it ruined the whole work, which was…a rather demotivating experience, aside from all else I could say about it. Considering this was a work I would be posting publicly with the intention of actually having others see it and associate it with this chain of accounts instead of someone’s random throwaway I could just ditch at any time, and not only that, this would also be something of great personal importance to me, I didn’t want to discard what I assumed to be my only chance at making something I could look back and be satisfied with. There is certainly far more to this story, but all that is to say, I didn’t want— and frankly couldn’t even afford— this to be dismissed as someone’s “horrible” work with such “unnecessary cruelty” in it, or however else it would have been described.

Even after a long time, after I had started publishing far more “risky” things, such as my whole Rimlaine-related series, and detached myself as much as possible from an audience which would ultimately never find any enjoyment in what I actually wished to be creating and would only serve to bring me down or make me dislike my own content, there was one thing I didn’t change my mind on, and that was feeling as though I still wouldn’t have been able to write the original concept of the ChuuArt series/fic/etc. I had in mind, even after everything I had written by that point and even after many chapters of No Retakes. In fact, I changed my mind a mere four weeks ago, which is the only reason I’m writing this.

If you’ve never heard me describe what the original consisted of, I’ll have to slightly disappoint you this time as I definitely don’t have enough confidence to actually state what it could have been, but as is probably very obvious, it wasn’t for the faint-hearted. I feel as though it’s no exaggeration if I say it was far more dark than every single Rimlaine fic I have ever written combined. I don’t believe I ever considered it “unreasonable” or any other such descriptor, not even when I was too afraid to write it, though— in truth, I sincerely believe both A Second Chance and No Retakes are extremely unrealistic and don’t represent practically anything I had been envisioning. Right now, I’ve decided to see if it’s possible for me to rework the outlines for the latter as it’s obviously very far from done and nobody apart from me would know what the original was meant to be, steering it a little bit closer to its long-lost predecessors, but even if I do manage to pull this off, the concept has been lost from the very beginning, and nothing can replicate it unless I somehow wholeheartedly try to overwrite people’s memories.

Of course, not stating it directly doesn’t mean I can’t imply it, and I will have to, just for the sake of what I’m trying to get at. The initial premise was always having Arthur survive the events of Fifteen, that much is obvious, and while there is one other version of the AU in which he survives on his own accord without any interference from the Port Mafia, the rest of them did require him to fall into the organization’s hands. Now, here is where I feel like ASC/NR completely fail at being anyhow logical, and this has hit me more than ever recently, though I’ll explain why afterwards, despite being somewhat confident that you could figure it out even without my input from here.

Naturally, there is absolutely no reason for Arthur to have been entirely safe and intact until meeting Chuuya in any iteration (…maybe aside from that one exception, but I think you’ll get what I mean more specifically), and no horrible living conditions I place him in are even remotely comparable to what I believe an organization such as the Port Mafia would do to a traitor if he were to be kept alive for any reason instead of immediately assassinated, as implied in Fifteen. I will give off somewhat plot-important spoilers here for No Retakes, so please beware, but NR tries to give some flimsy reasoning for this as I seemed to have become more and more self-aware of it while writing the initial outlines— I thought that perhaps, if Arthur regained his memories and could have potentially held some valuable information about other organizations, it would have made sense to try and keep him alive and well, and while it would have definitely been more straightforward for any PM member to just…let’s say…“standard-mafia-procedure” the information out of him, nobody would have had any reason to do that if he’d either been completely unconscious or he forgot everything again, right…? And one more “spoiler”, although it’s been slightly hinted at in the fic itself already and I heavily regret giving it such little relevance— even that much didn’t sit right with me, so he doesn’t escape entirely unscathed, but nonetheless, all of it is extremely tame, in my opinion. (Spoilers end) It feels more like a last resort to attain more realism points which simply aren’t really there, or so I believe.

The original, however, went all-out with this “realism” I so speak of, and I’ll just say that every variation of this AU has a five year gap between Fifteen and its present at the very least, but in both I’ve written about so far, Arthur isn’t particularly conscious for any of those five or more years. In that version, for one reason or another that hasn’t been properly worked on before being discarded and turned into one of the newer ideas, he’d been reluctantly kept alive, but not a soul would have given him the luxury of just leaving him be for ages until he would have most likely rotted away like in ASC, or until he’d woken up again like in NR. I believe everyone can have their own interpretation of my words here as I don’t even know how I would type this out in the first place, but essentially, at that point, Chuuya wouldn’t have simply carried him away for the sake of it or been tasked to watch over him, it’d be more of him just outright saving whatever was left of his life. I’m sure that anything one could imagine here would also lead to an obvious difference between how this AU’s Arthur would act, as opposed to both AU versions of him currently existing, yet to write all that simply felt…wrong. Not wrong because it didn’t make sense and felt like a pointless gore fest— the complete opposite, actually, but wrong as in, according to my mind and my mind only, something “too dark for AO3” or the BSD fandom as a whole. I probably would have had the tendency to overdescribe it as well instead of letting the reader make up their own mind, which would have added onto that factor, and I was too worried to even dare venturing there. Some of it certainly also had to do with fearing I wouldn’t be able to pull it off as a more amateurish writer, but it wasn’t the main driving force.

Now, anyone could sit here and tell me that my reason was complete bullshit, and I can’t believe I’ve only arrived to this conclusion myself so late. What led me to it, you may ask? Simple— Bungou Stray Dogs itself.

I’ve drafted this very post those four weeks ago when I changed my thoughts on these matters and just edited it to make it fit recent events, but at the time of writing this initially, I was only on chapter 40 of re-reading the manga, and that has been enough to convince me none of my fics, not even the original AU I had in mind, are “too edgy” for anything to do with BSD (and AO3, of course, I think that site has seen it all). Though I firmly believe no such thing even needs some kind of “justification” to be written in the first place, as for my observation, all of my harsher ideas would still be reduced to mere dust if compared to that or the light novels. There is not a single thing I could have ever written that would have gone “too far” by my own anxiety-driven standards, and even if I genuinely took that entire concept and wrote it to the full extent I’ve had in my mind, it would only be dreaming of being on par with something like Atsushi’s backstory or Q’s treatment, both of which are basically at the mere start of the manga. If not that, it would absolutely pale in comparison to the entirety of Stormbringer, for example, and if one was to put it simply, the amount of missing limbs, dead bodies, torture, on-screen and described gore in this series would make my own concepts…I want to say laughable, but it’d actually make them just a tiny bit more BSD-worthy.

Nothing I’m writing feels like BSD itself from this perspective, and I understand that I’m writing fanfiction— I’m in a space where people don’t always want to match the mood and tone of the media they’re making their own spin on, and there is not a single thing out of place if I make any of my works more toned down, peaceful and whatnot, but at the same time, there will also be nothing out of place if I don’t. Honestly, this may be somewhat clear already, but I don’t want to write works which are fully sanitized, clean and light-hearted only, and while yes, I believe a couple of those exist on my page, those aren’t meant to be the majority as that was never my goal to begin with. I didn’t even have one at first, but when I both actually tried to think of one somewhere along the way and reflected on all my old drafts and notes, the answer I got was to make the opposite of what I look for while browsing AO3 myself, ironically— as I don’t usually spend my time reading much, not even on there, I only ever read short fics that I can go through in one sitting which don’t leave me thinking about anything surrounding them and I feel as though I’ve read them from their true beginning to their true end, with the plot being only what was in the 4000 or so words I skimmed through rather than something much different, something I’ve only looked through a window into, and, simply put for what I think is my case, something far more pretentious than that, of course. Hopefully, there is no need for me to clarify I clearly do enjoy the shorter, less complex fics and am in no way trying to devalue them, they’re just not what I personally would like to write myself— I would be delighted if someday, I could feel as though I have created something which has a full, proper story in itself, and additionally, seeing as it’s BSD fanfiction, absolutely not have this story be one in which you could almost believe all the characters are regular office workers with rather mild problems in their lives. The only thing which is closest to this, yet which still fails to meet the former criteria, is probably all to do with Rimlaine that I’ve written, but that was not the initial plan, and now I’m seeing that it didn’t really have to be this way.

Not that I regret it too much, seeing as I could fix this if I truly wanted to— No Retakes was mostly born out of late regrets after I’ve fallen in love with that version of the AU and spent months wishing I had worked on it from the very beginning instead of having a thousand separate worries about it, all before I realized there were more people encouraging me to write it than people who would have insinuated I’d already written a ChuuArt AU and another “similar” one wasn’t necessary anymore. I could undoubtedly go back and show everyone one more of the originals, the one which would have rivaled every single work of mine in terms of just how dark it would have been, but I’m not sure whether it’s my ongoing WIP or general exhaustion stopping me more here, aside from the fact that I simply don’t have that much of a desire to do it when I could still try and pray to salvage said WIP a little bit and find a middle ground that doesn’t require me to start another project I will inevitably have no time to work on without getting too worn down.

Anyhow, I suppose I’ll get to looking through the outlines again, perhaps cut out some chapters on the way if I can and hope not to add more by accident. For better or for worse, while the reason should have probably been a bit different, I’m glad to be a bit less willing to censor half my works now that I’ve at least realized what media I’ve actually been using this whole time, and I’m hoping it will have some impact going forward as I really want to write what I alone want to write, not what people who don’t even care about my works want to see me create.