#and for it to become part of fandom lexicon… oh god

[ojirocardigansniper]

30, 34, 38, and B for blink !

Tahnks for blowing up my whole shit ian i love you.

30. Who do they most regret meeting? 

the second i saw 30 was this i said outloud OH FUCK. onehit kill. can't be any answer other than her best friend. they are pair bonded like parrots (Tragic). girl meets boy because her job is going to be listening for response from the gods he's killing himself to communicate with, and her job is going to be watching him die, teaching the next one to die, and the next, until her drowning day finally comes. she met his predecessor in uer end stages of sickness, so she knows how it will look for him. No matter how much she loves him or how many times she can get away with dumping out his ritual cup, he's committed to what he's doing, what he's been raised to do... so yeah, she regrets meeting him. not that she thinks of it as something she chose to do, seeing as it's all divine-vision-scraps that brought her there. but when she still sometimes wishes for another life for them, often she thinks separate lives would have the best chance of peace.

34. How hard is it for them to shake a sense of guilt?

mm. impossible really. survivor's guilt alchemized into rage at who seemed responsible, but it's still there. she feels simultaneously that she doesn't deserve the losses she's suffered, and that she's still here and alive. there's also insanely complex guilt around everything with her partner's slow ritual death and the death of their mentor the same way. the struggle between prolonging the suffering overall versus staving the worst of it off now. (under my breath) the phrase Quality of Life is not part of their lexicon and it shows . whats that hospice by the antlers you say ? something something shiva4shiva? noooo haha whattt

38. What memory do they revisit the most often?

ah jeez. ah fuck. hard to say. technically i suppose memories of her death (past visions of it) but that's not voluntary. unconsciously i think she very often revisits childhood memories of her brother- always has fragments of them floating about without realizing. one of her core unfulfilled needs is that close companionship she lost back then- she's been trying to fill that hole ever since, no matter if she does so on purpose. i'm really trying to think of things she would consciously try to remember and. mostly coming up with 'tonguing the hole in the gum' type things. don't forget the pain of this or you'll stop letting it drive you. (kicks a rock) she's in my personal bouquet of wretched girlies with baru cormorant for a reason...

B) What inspired you to create them?

time honored tradition of fandom au that got out of fucking hand 🫡 haikyuu au with the highschool bestie, we cooked up a big kingdoms+fantasy setting thru like 2016-2018 and then i continued going feral over a handful of characters that lived rent free in my mind for the next. three years ish? before i finally was like ok i should make it official and stop calling these bitches the names of anime characters. For ayirine specifically some of her core traits have been there since the beginning (foresight, dead twin, death by drowning, kills her best friend) but since filing off serial numbers i transed her gender and made her more actively suicidal (its themes. sorry) and REALLY WEIRD re: her religious convictions. also structurally she's become a prequel tragedy / cautionary tale preceding the main chunk of the narrative, which, not that we had a lot of structure before due to being high schoolers just having fun worldbuilding, but her killing her best friend used to be a W for the then-protagonists bc he was the leader of their enemy, et cetera. by now ive wandered entirely away from the adversarial narrative and into the weeds of other stuff i can personally tell a better story about, due to having Many Thoughts Head Full. i like putting together stories that are dioramas of people and their strange selves much more now than i did when i was a #teen and mostly just liked cool settings and shit. now im like if the characters in the setting arent fascinating then well i almost dont care how cool it is. 

ok swag that wasnt as interminably long as i thought it was. no readmore then (gestures to followers) Look at my melodramatic oc boy

[panlight]

Before BD came out I remember reading fan theories about the ending of the saga. In one of them Bella becomes a vampire but then realizes she was attracted to Edward because of his vampire “glamour” (or whatever it is that makes humans attracted to them). So she gets to be a vampire like she wanted but realizes that she was never truly in love with him and now that they are equals she doesn’t feel attracted to him anymore. What do you think about that?

There were definitely some theories that BD was going to change everything and Bella’d choose Jacob in the end, or choose to go her own way and leave both boys behind. I think that’s part of what the HUGE backlash against BD was about: everyone had their own theories about what the story was really about, thinking it was, in some cases, this deep exploration of what it means to be human, or that it was a coming-of-age story, or that we’d get some Tuck Everlasting sort of ending where Bella would realize the downsides of living forever and choose humanity/mortality, or at the very least it would be a “be careful what you wish for” thing, sort of like you described. A lot of fans were assuming it was That Deep and then Breaking Dawn kind of revealed that . ..no, it wasn’t. It was a YA fantasy romance and we were all reading too much into it.  I think people were expecting too much from the last book, and I was certainly guilty of that, too. I was already reading them primarily as vampire stories rather than romances, so that was always my focus and the lens through which I experienced them. I was certainly expecting some sort of “oh god I’m a vampire” angst because … that… just comes with the genre? The whole “I was born for this! I’m so blissfully happy!” thing was not what I wanted/expected, although in retrospect I guess it’s kind of interesting in how it subverts expectations. But I was HERE for the vampire stuff and wanted to explore that, so Bella just being all “tra la la this is AWESOME” was personally disappointing for me. It’s not that I wanted her to be miserable, but I wanted more vampire tropes and fewer romance ones, I guess. But at the end of the day it was a romance and it was pretty clear SM’s intention was that E/B were true love and I guess we shouldn’t have been too surprised with how it went down. The baby stuff was a trip though and totally unexpected. SM had answered some question on the Lexicon that seemed to pretty thoroughly debunk “vampires can have babies,” which kind of came back to bite her. I mean technically she didn’t address human/vampire hybrid babies, but the fandom as a whole believed vampires having children was impossible and complained about fanfics that had them as being “unrealistic” and “against canon” and then BD happened and everyone was all “…”