#also good lord this is the first fic I've posted since February

[mad-madam-m]

Good Omens Fic - A Well-Earned Nap

Title: A Well-Earned Nap Fandom: Good Omens Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley Word count: 1561 Rating: T Tags: Post-s1, Fainting, First Kiss Summary: "Crowley, is something wrong? You don't look so well." Crowley intended to brush it off, to say he was fine, but instead he said "I'm a bit tired" and promptly collapsed. Read it on AO3!

[t1meslayer]

We're so back.

Please ignore the five Pokemon stories that I posted before "Neurocysticercosis" to celebrate leftover sales for PokéPocket. I probably won't be doing a Debrief for them since the collective is kind of its own thing.

But actually, don't ignore them. Go check out PokéPocket! Leftover sales run until July 31, 2024!!!

... That's not what I've gathered you all for today, though. No. If you haven't read my latest JJK fanfic, "Neurocysticercosis," what are you waiting for? Jump on that, and then jump into my little-a Read More below!

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I made this joke in the opening Notes. However, I do once again have to point out:

What can I say?

It's very funny to me.

I'm also a big fan of Jujutsu Kaisen (don't mind the fact I misspelled it "Jujitsu" in the original AO3 summary), there's just too many things occupying my brain at a given time to write about it often.

My first SatoSugu fic "Infinitesimal Distance" came together soon after I learned my good friend and beta reader (you know who you are) also rotates those boys around in their brain. I had just gone to a Kura (revolving sushi bar) JJK crossover event. I won myself a Megumi figure and a felt hat.

Though I can't recall the exact impetus for that story idea, I do love the way it turned out. There's fun bits of horror storytelling, some of the dialogue is pretty sharp, and I leaned on the knowledge of a friend who lived in Japan to set the stage around Tokyo's Shinagawa city. The story wound up being pretty popular on AO3 too, garnering over 460 Hits and exactly 38 Kudos (as of this writing).

More importantly, it was a big hit for the birthday coalition of spiders.

Furthermore, it was a big hit for my friend who lived in Japan — surprise, she's the other birthday haver! To this day she considers "My fingers glide over you like a redacted passage" to be the greatest piece of prose I've ever written. I don't disagree, but you should've been there the night she beta read the piece, interrupting every other event going on in our friend group's VC just to hype me up.

So naturally... I didn't write any more JJK for seven months. This doesn't mean further ideas weren't festering in the back of my mind.

My original idea for "Neurocysticercosis" was pretty simple: Geto and Gojo are in some kind of art exhibit, Geto gets existential about humanity, and then it's revealed they've been fucking around while Shoko gets her ass beat by the Cursed Spirit of the week.

Shoko's brief beat-to-shit cameo was planned from the beginning. Sorry about that, Shoko fans.

That being said, a lot of my original idea didn't pan out as expected.

Late into the story, Geto makes this comment:

"Ask the average human what they think a 'living wall' is, and they'll talk up woven ferns and grass climbing up the side of their high-class mart. Pedestrian. Laughable. Imaginations stretched so thin within their walnut-sized brains that they couldn't begin to fathom what you and I see every day. Real living walls of scar tissue and rotting tendons and bloodshot, oozing eyes."

I originally wanted Geto to be observing a Living Wall, akin to San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art (I visited the museum with birthday friend and one other member of our group a few years ago).

However, I couldn't necessarily plop Jujutsu High students in the middle of San Francisco without over-scoping my vision through explanatory storytelling. And I was having some trouble finding good examples of Living Wall installations in Japan.

Then my fate turned on a dime one legendary night this February, in which I attended a Lord of the Rings watch party for another birthday. At that party I met an excellent cosplayer who, naturally, also happens to love Jujutsu Kaisen. We shared "Infinitesimal Distance" live, and I told them about the idea I was gestating on for a future SatoSugu piece. The current gift fic recipient recommended using the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art as a setting that would make sense for Gojo and Geto to canonically visit.

The rest, as they say, was history.

Once we started approaching her birthday, I knew what I had to do. We haven't finished the 2014 series Black Sails (her current obsession) together, so Plan A was not viable. Plan B was a go.

Having decided to go with an entire art gallery, this meant I needed to pick actual art. Now... I enjoy an art. I appreciate a good drawing. Sometimes I create my own art, especially ceramics. However, I am not a well-versed scholar in art history. This is an especially big roadblock when I have to try and come up with an artist whom folks might see in Japan circa-2008 — around the time when Satoru Gojo and Suguru Geto are in Jujutsu High, as I understand. Not to mention the fact I can't ask my friend since she's the one this fic will be a present for.

My solution?

I kind of just looked up lists of the most influential modern Japanese artists and scrolled a couple of listicles, digging deeper into a few people whose work stood out. Much of that Googling took place over the course of a big family dinner for Father's Day this year.

I sorted through a number of names, including — but not limited to:

Tsuguharu Foujita

Tetsuya Ishida

Tadanori Yokoo

Makoto Aida

Yasumasa Morimura

However, as you all have read this fic (you better have!), you'll know I focused on the work of Chiho Aoshima. The compositions and color in her pieces really struck me, and the surrealist, often beautifully monstrous subject matter felt like a perfect match for the JJK universe.

In particular, this story revolves around A Contented Skull (2003):

Originally I chose this piece as a striking work that would be fun to describe. However, as I began to describe it (during a car ride across the Washington countryside), patterns began to emerge. I realized very quickly that A Contented Skull slots perfectly into foreshadowing the ultimate fate of Suguru Geto.

That's right, it's no longer just an opportunity to have Geto wax poetic about his feelings on humanity, and to reflect all the fucked-up shit he and Gojo experience. We've also got themes in this bitch. Themes of fate and autonomy and death, not to mention parasitic brain worms.

The fic's title is even a reference to a parasitic brain worm. If you had no idea what "Neurocysticercosis" was before now, don't worry. I didn't either. It was 99% big, fancy word to sound interesting, and 1% thematic brain worms.

As far as elements of the writing craft are concerned...

It took a few stabs, but I like the way I formatted painting titles to look like actual minimalist gallery plaques.

Shoko's injured, dying words do a lot of fuckery with text formatting, which I pulled almost directly from the nightmare sequence in my Pokemon ScarVi fic "Paradiso." The Cursed Spirit they're fighting is also notable. I always planned on making a centipede-esque monster, but it wasn't until I actually started writing that I realized the main image in my head was the "Charge Beam Beast" from Metroid: Zero Mission.

Anybody remember this dude? I used to play the beginning of Zero Mission over and over, so he's seared into my brain.

I'm also a fan of the experimental formatting with regards to breaking up dialogue. I finished "Neurocysticercosis" during a long train ride, only one day after I finished reading John Scalzi's The Kaiju Preservation Society. It's a fun little read by an author whose work I tend to enjoy, though given it was his COVID "mindless fun" book, I do think it leans a bit too hard into sounding like a quippy Marvel film.

That being said, he does invoke a fun mid-sentence verb through em dashes that I think creates a great flow. Tried it out here, and will mostly likely use the idea again going forward!

===

Now that I'm done with this piece, I don't know when my next JJK fic will come down the pipeline. There aren't a ton of concrete ideas in my head for the series. However, I do know it'll be time to return to some of my bigger projects...

I'm been dying to write more "Fallout" sooner rather than later.