#and of course posting for sunday six back when i was writing things consistently. RIP.

[danketsuround]

An overdue blog about my fic-writing process with The Immortal Son (and a little about Two Birds)

CW for brief mentions of suicide, bullying, sexual assault, childhood trauma, and emotional incest

Okay so here's some behind the scenes things about my writing process with The Immortal Son. If you read the first fic that I wrote for this AU series, Two Birds, you should know that I sat doing research for that fic for months, then I basically just blacked out and wrote it. I might eventually rewrite some of it, to be honest, so that it connects better with its prequel. But I haven't gotten there yet, and I'm too scared to get there right now.

My original thinking with Two Birds was that I wanted it to be Mitsuru-focused. I actually wanted to do it from his perspective originally, but then I realized he'd hardly know anything about his own situation, so I changed the narrator to Kuwana. This was more of a technical change than emotional. Kuwana is, and always will be for me, an unreliable narrator. But when writing from his perspective, I really wanted to show the reader how much Kuwana struggles with understanding Mitsuru - how he's in his own head too much, and how he doesn't realize exactly how unfit he is to take care of Mitsuru, and how none of that can matter, because no one else will do it. Despite his second chance - or perhaps because of it! - Kuwana is selfish and resented.

I did manage to unearth some of my notes while writing Two Birds. While a lot has changed, the general basis for Kuwana and Mitsuru has always been what I originally wrote as a note to myself, here:

I focused a lot on Mitsuru's physicality. It ended up being that most of my time for this fic was spent doing research about long comas. While that was all fine and good, a lot of what I researched ended up not even being used or mentioned. Both Two Birds and The Immortal Son are focused on emotion - more than realism or accuracy. In fact, a decent amount of the "lore" in either fic is completely made up, and whatever I make up is written somewhere to reference later. Then, I just write it whenever it feels relevant to the narrative, and hope I'm not writing myself into an incomprehensible hole - because, while a lot of it is based on inference, some of it isn't. I wanted to write as if what I had made up was obvious, so I had to try and get out of my own head while reading it over. That was hard.

Anyways, here's some Google Maps screenshots I had taken for Two Birds to reference in my fic. This was back when I wanted them to live in Matsuyama, Ehime - not Masaki - but the "visual" "idea" is the same. When I was drafting Two Birds, Reiko was in a fake prison on an island. I had this vision of them taking a boat to go and see her, but I scrapped it - mostly because I felt like Reiko would not go to a maximum security prison like that. I mean come on, she's not Saejima. She only killed one person, geez!

I liked the mix of rice fields and the view of the sea. I've never been to Masaki. I've never even been to the Kyushu area. If I had to do it all over again, I'd put them in Fukushima. The descriptive visuals about Masaki in Two Birds are actually inspired by where I live.

Of course, Two Birds ended up not really being Mitsuru-focused at all, and that's when I decided to write The Immortal Son. Even though Kuwana is still the narrator, he is sort of a backseat driver to a near-fatal car crash he caused by grabbing the driver's wheel... uh, so to speak. He just watches everything happen. It's not until Two Birds that he feels fit to play his role.

"Two Birds" was the working title for what ended up actually being Two Birds because I didn't have any other ideas. I had written the scene where Kuwana remembers when he first moved to Masaki, and so I just pulled "two birds" from that actual paragraph. I did this before once with a porno I mean sickfic I wrote - calling it "Toothpaste" when toothpaste was never actually involved at all. A while ago I had this habit of throwing darts at one-shots I wrote and titling it whatever word I landed on. For the same reason, when I had drafted the first interaction between Kuwana and Jiro; I titled it "Orange Chicken".

I can't help but love a surprise title drop.

But the title for The Immortal Son just flew into my head, and suddenly it felt really corny to title drop. I debated on calling it "The Immortal Sun" because it takes place in the summer and Kuwana can feeeeeel the heat on his back (metaphorically) but since it ended up being entirely about Mitsuru, the immortal son, I changed it.

The Immortal Son is written to play out pretty soon after the events of Lost Judgement. While Kusumoto Reiko is in her holding cell, she tells Kuwana to keep an eye on Mitsuru. From there, Kuwana meets Mitsuru's father (Jiro, also Reiko's ex-husband) and uncovers a few secrets about her past. For reasons (then) unknown to Kuwana, Reiko confesses to killing Kawai on her own - leading him to take care of Mitsuru and attempt to eliminate her hospital debt.

I gave Kuwana a fading flashback when he went to visit Reiko in prison for the first time. It later informs Kuwana's decision to point fingers at Reiko when her lawyer discovers a flaw in her confession. This isn't necessarily right or wrong of him, but Kuwana's own memory of her in prison forces him to believe she wants to be punished - that they are alike in the desire to atone.

I thought a lot about Reiko in The Immortal Son. My first impression of her when playing Lost Judgement was actually a bit sad. That introduction scene where she is sitting in Mitsuru's dark, wide, and empty hospital room by herself - and knowing she had done the same thing every day for the past thirteen years - seemed really lonely, so I drew bits and pieces of her and Mitsuru's relationship from that.

There were two themes - "preservation" and "violence".

A long time ago, I made a connection between Kawai's frozen body and Mitsuru's "frozen" body - I still can't explain it well enough to make sense.

In Lost Judgement, Kuwana says they killed Kawai on the anniversary of Mitsuru's suicide attempt. Later, he describes Mitsuru as a vegetable that is "as good as dead." So, my best way to explain it is that time stopped for both of them. Kawai is literally frozen from the moment his heart stopped beating, and Mitsuru doesn't change at all in thirteen years. That's where "preservation" came to mind, and how it intertwined with the violence of the original story.

Because Mitsuru is preserved, his pain is preserved as well. The characters see this through the long-term effects of his trauma and suicide attempt on his body, and how Mitsuru eventually grows into himself. But his mind and body are childish, because that's where he stopped at. A dead child never grows into adulthood.

There is an instance when Kuwana and Jiro come into his hospital room, and I mention Mitsuru being "gelded" by both his mother and the natural process of time.

Can I sound crazy for a second? The reason why wrote that line was because I was kinda thinking of Mitsuru as a castrato, like, a choir boy who is castrated in order to preserve his voice, and grows sort of strangely or unnaturally as a result? That's what Mitsuru looks like to me. A small version of that - a thirty year old who still looks seventeen but not quite. Like a less jarring version of Ben Platt in Dear Evan Hanson, lol.

Anyways, I thought Mitsuru's preservation would be an act of violence, too, because Reiko (both in order to protect Mitsuru and her own feelings) wants to turn back time and keep Mitsuru as a helpless child. In Two Birds, she tells Kuwana that she used to pretend Mitsuru had turned invisible as a child, and that she wished he'd cry in her lap again. In The Immortal Son, even Jiro eventually relents to this as well, telling Kuwana that he wished Mitsuru could be the way he used to.

The violence of preservation, in this case, is Reiko's severe attachment to Mitsuru. In his childhood, it made him understand her in ways he should not have - as stated by Jiro. I thought that there had to be other factors in Mitsuru's suicide, and this is what I came up with. That Reiko was too pressing - Mitsuru, too darling - and that he was his father's emotional replacement.

Yeah, so what if I made up the thing about Reiko's enmeshment with Mitsuru? It was always lingering in the back of my mind anyways. Enmeshment is better known as "emotional incest" - I hate that word, even though that's about as accurate as wording gets. The sad and lonely image of a woman overly dedicated to her son; how could I not?

Mitsuru is not only surrouuuuuunded by violence, but he's also - tragically - a tool for it, right? Kawai is killed out of revenge, and seven other people die because of Kuwana's quest for vigilantism in his name - mentioning Mitsuru ahead of everyone else he sought vengeance for. Mitsuru is hardly able to protect himself; he can only watch what happens to him. I wanted to make a connection between this and what Jiro said Reiko did to him - that Mitsuru is singled out and violated by devotion.

When Kuwana takes him on a stroll away from his father, Mitsuru kills a cicada.

I used the word "beheaded" here - not crushed or squashed - to evoke a "feeling of execution". It's Kuwana who runs Mitsuru over that cicada, and it's Kuwana who used Mitsuru to justify violence. So, I wanted to point out that Mitsuru is welded passively in Kuwana's instigation of violence.

Mitsuru, too, has to witness the way everyone talks about his mother, and what she had done for his sake. In that, he searches for her kindness - not wanting to remember how sore her arms felt in her constricting motherhood.

But he is denied by reality. And that reality comes in the form of his father - albeit, definitely not the most objective person in all of this.

Jiro is a character I made for the sake of The Immortal Son, but he's mentioned very briefly as "Mr. Kusumoto" in Two Birds.

There are three original characters I wrote for The Immortal Son: Jiro Kusumoto (Reiko's ex-husband), Kondo Daichi (Reiko's celebrity lawyer) and Naganuma Mimori (Mitsuru's young nurse). I hadn't really mapped out their personalities, they sort of just came and went as I wrote. But I think it's safe to say Jiro was definitely Mitsuru's co-star in this.

Kondo Daichi (or Daiichi, 第一, a pun meaning "number one") was originally meant to be a timid lawyer appointed by the court, but then he sort of turned into an audience self-insert. I thought a lot about the logistics of Kuwana taking care of Mitsuru, and Reiko taking the sole blame for Kawai's murder, and I wondered what that meant Kuwana's response would be. The result was Kondo - a character meant to fully confront Kuwana with the reality of his situation, and his decision to take care of Mitsuru. I wanted to show that, when given the opportunity to confess and face the consequences, Kuwana would cowardly turn away.

Naganuma Mimori is a bit like Mitsuru. Because of that, Jiro also views her as something to compete with Kuwana. Kuwana is kind to her but he sees her as a child. More importantly, though, I used Naganuma as a mark for gender. Kuwana tells Jiro he doesn't have children, and Jiro asks if he'd prefer a girl. Later, when childish Naganuma cries on Kuwana's shoulder, Jiro jokes that he probably couldn't handle a little girl.

Compared with Naganuma, I thought that Kuwana might feel emasculated by his inadequacy to take care of Mitsuru properly. Even so, for my own reasons, I wanted Kuwana to seem girlish in The Immortal Son. I just feel like he's a bit feminine anyways. I wanted him to be treated and scolded the way an inadequate or indecent woman would be. All of that scolding comes from Jiro, who respects him otherwise.

I thought the easy way out would be to make Jiro abusive and mean-spirited and probably an alcoholic. Honestly, the first time I wrote him (which was even before I started thinking about The Immortal Son!) he was sort of... that. But then I realized that's a little boring. Sure, I wanted Jiro to be a little mean, but I mostly just wanted him to be frustrated and honest. I wanted him to be someone who thinks he's only ever done his best. In that way, I wanted him to be someone like Kuwana.

Jiro cannot see himself in Mitsuru, and he blames it on Reiko's influence and enmeshment towards him. At this point - while feeling vindicated - he is mostly just sad. Sad because he was never there for Mitsuru, and sad that he still can't be. He can't stand being around his own son, and that's why he's able to relinquish him to Kuwana's care. Ironically, Kuwana can see much of Jiro in Mitsuru, only because Jiro refuses to see weakness in himself.

I never wanted Two Birds to end on a sad note, though I guess The Immortal Son ended up seeming that way. Or, at least there is some recognition that Mitsuru will never be able to return to himself. Kuwana, of course, can see this because he's the same way. It's not such a bad thing, I think, which is why I sort of hesitate to call it sad - because in my head I know that The Immortal Son is more like "the foundation of trauma" and Two Birds is like "a layer of hope".

That's what my goal was, at least.

Basically, all of this meaty symbolism came from the type of story I wanted to write, which is ultimately about love and normal people in the real world with a hard past. I wanted to expand on Mitsuru and Reiko a lot simply because I liked them. So that's what I did.

Both Two Birds and The Immortal Son came from a long road of dissatisfaction with the original story. I mostly wanted more from the Kusumotos. I thought Kuwana's dedication to them was interesting, too, and I wondered what Kuwana would do with himself after his purpose in life was bested. "What if Kuwana suddenly became very lucky?" - I asked myself, and this came.

I don't think any of these characters should suffer, and I don't think it's necessary for Kuwana to suffer in order to understand the pain he's caused. In fact, it's through love that Kuwana can feel the value of his own miserable life. Mitsuru's situation is sad, Kuwana and Reiko's life is sad - but the story really isn't. Mitsuru is immortalized by pain, and violence, and suffering - but he can live happily through it. Even if he can't be free of it, he lives a kind and honest life. Surely, there are themes of terror and trauma interwoven in both Two Birds and The Immortal Son. I talked about "preservation" and "violence" earlier, but I also felt like it was necessary to touch on normal things, like family, disability and gender. There's no real "point" I wanted to hit with these fics, I just wanted to tell that kind of story.

I'll add in a later reblog some ideas I was floating around while writing both of these. There are tons of scrapped ideas and artifacts from the time between Two Birds and The Immortal Son, including one fic about Reiko's family, and another about Kawai's funeral. I'm going to go find those things now and report back. Later, eventually.

Thanks for reading!

[steveholley]

Seventeen Years and Counting

In February, 2002, the New England Patriots stunned the football world by defeating the Rams in Super Bowl XXXVI in the Louisiana Superdome.

This past Sunday, the Patriots defeated the Rams in the Super Bowl again but things were a little different. The Rams are back in Los Angeles for one, and the game was certainly no stunner; if anything, it would have come more as a shock if New England hadn't won Super Bowl LIII.

In the 17 years since that 2002 Super Bowl, with quarterback Tom Brady and coach Bill Belichick leading the Patriots and cementing themselves as arguably the greatest of all-time at their respective positions, the franchise has won an unimaginable six Lombardi Trophies, tied for the most in NFL history. And that's with New England having a full 10-year stretch without winning the big game. By contrast, only the Pittsburgh Steelers and New York Giants have also won multiple Super Bowls in that span - each with two apiece.

But this story isn't really about who can yell "RINGS!" It's not even really about sports, though we'll cover that.

It's a reflective piece as I sit here writing my own Super Bowl LIII story.

Let's rewind. In the late summer and early fall of 2001 as the Patriots' dynasty first began to take shape, I was a 19-year-old college student plowing my way through school and driving around in my pride-and-joy at the time: a gorgeous 1992 Chevrolet Camaro that my father bought me the year I entered college. I was still living at home with my parents, working a job I hated and still struggling to escape the stench of high school and my hometown, with no purpose or direction for where my life was headed.

I was a loner struggling with severe depression and mental illness that wasn't diagnosed until much later. I weighed upward of 240 pounds, had very little social life or even social skills and never imagined all the many things God would bless me with as I grew older and moved away. My best friend since high school had already 'gotten out' after moving to Virginia Beach following graduation. We lost touch and didn't reconnect with one another until years later. There was no social media to stay in touch with back then. When I graduated high school, few of my classmates even had internet access and e-mail from their homes. Even fewer had cell phones. Texting was still a few years away from becoming mainstream; in fact, I didn't get my first real cell phone until I was almost 23. The point is that she got out. Had I not done the same a few years later, I would have been dead before I even turned 30. The older I've gotten, the more I'm convinced of that.

In 2001, I was still in college and the University of Alabama was in its first season under a then-promising outsider head coach named Dennis Franchione, who came to Tuscaloosa by way of Texas Christian University. Andrew Zow and Tyler Watts were Alabama's quarterbacks then, with Zow leading the Tide past Auburn, 31-7, in that year's Iron Bowl at Jordan-Hare Stadium. As strange as it may seem to some of today's generation of 'Bama fans, beating Auburn in those days was our national championship game (theirs, too). To some fans, it always will be. Thinking of those Alabama teams now, it will always be surreal to me that I've watched my school win not just one national championship but five. When you watch as your school is reduced to living off its glory days while losing to teams like Northern Illinois, Central Florida (before they were the annoying hipsters of the college football world) and Louisiana Tech - twice - because of unprecedented NCAA probation, you don't expect to one day reach the college football mountain top five times in nine years.

At the time, my grandfather was going through the final stages of a terrible but courageous fight with colon cancer that took its toll on all of us as a family. No matter how I look back on it, I'll always call him that: courageous. Courageous for the way he managed to stay alert, awake and coherent even as the cancer kept spreading; for the way he still got out of bed every morning in spite of the pain he was in. On the last birthday I celebrated with him, he managed to get out of bed long enough to spend time with me because he knew what day it was. He was courageous for how he'd still find a way to put his pain aside and try to make me laugh in his darkest hours, usually by needling my grandmother over something or ranting about his love of old-school country music and, just as equally, his sheer hatred of the Republican Party. He was courageous for the way he always searched and found a way to cheer me up even when he didn't know he was doing it.

My grandfather didn't teach me anything about sports. In fact, he hated sports with a passion. He used to say that if he were ever elected president, his first executive order would be to eliminate all sports. I would always quip back, "And your next executive order will be to remove the bullet from the sniper's rifle after they shoot your ass for banning football…"

Regardless, my grandfather was never a weak man. My brother Paul and I used to joke that we were the only kids in our high school who'd have taken an ass-beating from our 70-year-old grandfather had push ever come to shove over anything (not that it ever would). He watched with Paul and I when the Patriots won their first Super Bowl, though the significance of that feat couldn't have mattered less to him. We watched that game through the 841-foot outdoor antenna he had in his garden; you know, the kind that was big enough to serve as a communications portal to life on other planets.

My writing at the time, so far as it existed, consisted of daily Chicago Cubs game stories and general team news for a start-up company, more a hobby and a release and a habit from growing up a Cubs fan than an actual job. The Cubs had a good season that year. They won almost 90 games and stayed in the playoff race until September, Kerry Wood rebounded from Tommy John Surgery to win 12 games and post a good ERA, and Sammy Sosa was still… normal(ish) at the time. I had a front-row seat to it through WGN TV and the internet (hello, RealPlayer!), still relatively in its infancy at the time.

As I've written before, what started out as me merely writing about the Cubs beating the Reds or losing to the Cardinals or vice versa on any given day from April to September later turned into me becoming a de facto beat writer for the team and going on to branch out into covering other professional sports. One of my favorite stories is when I met the late Hall of Famer and San Diego Padres great Tony Gwynn at a Double-A All-Star game in Mobile where he was watching his son play. I said something to him about a father watching his son follow in his footsteps. I thought it was almost romantic in a way. Gwynn must have thought otherwise. "Thanks for making me feel old, dude," he said (grumbled is more like it).

Any of the tales I have and the things I've done in sportswriting have happened in cities hundreds of miles from where I grew up, of course. My hometown has never been known for anything overly noteworthy. It's the hometown of George "Goober" Lindsey, eerie unsolved murders and disappearances, some of the highest rates of spousel abuse in the nation, and numerous odds and ends mysteries. And drugs. Yes, lots of drugs and drug arrests.

Once, Bear Bryant came through town in his green Cadillac and another time Merle Haggard played a concert there when he was flat broke. I think my brother said it best about our home state: "It's a strange place. On the one hand, it's beautiful with many wonderful people and a fine, distinct southern culture. At the same time, it's terrifying and home to some of the downright worst human beings and atrocities the country has ever seen, all existing together in tension and constantly ripping itself apart from within." On that he's very much correct.

Anyway, to show how much time has passed, in the fall of 2001 when the Patriots dynasty began out of nowhere, New England was still playing its home games at the old and outdated Foxboro Stadium. The Yankees were still playing at the real Yankee Stadium in the weeks after the most horrific terrorist attack on American soil, and Wrigley Field and Fenway Park hadn't yet received long-overdue upgrades that have since brought them into the 21st century.

No one watches the Super Bowl on huge outdoor antennas anymore but rather on ridiculously priced cable "bundles" or in many cases their phones, computers and other gadgets. I often wonder what my grandfather would have thought of the idea that 17 years after watching my last Super Bowl with him that we'd have the means and technology to watch the game or the NBC Nightly News (his daily, can't-miss half-hour of television) on our telephones.

My brother called me after the Super Bowl last Sunday on his way back to his apartment in Brooklyn, another occurrence neither of us foresaw growing up. We were talking about the game when he said something that really got me thinking.

"It's hard for me to believe but this Patriots run started back when I was a senior in high school," he said. "They've won six Super Bowls since I was 18 years old. I'm 35 now. Their dynasty has literally lasted half of my life."

And that's what got me started down this rabbit hole.

Thinking back on the places I've gone, all the people I've since met, my grandfather, the New England Patriots (who incidentally once played a regular-season home game at Birmingham's Legion Field vs. the New York Jets), Andrew Zow and Tyler Watts, making Tony Gwynn feel old, getting married and finding my soul mate and the love of my life and the family I have now; all the things and fears and nightmares I escaped that are both real and imagined. And of course my own health battles I've fought despite being a full 100 pounds lighter now than I was 17 years ago.

There will be other sports dynasties in the years ahead. The beauty of dynasties is that no one can predict which team it will be or even when the current ones will end. Or better still, when and where life will take us, who we might meet next, and other things and history we'll experience and bear witness to.

All of which is to say in conclusion, enjoy it. Whatever it is and whoever it is that make history, just enjoy it.

"Buy the ticket, take the ride," Hunter S. Thompson famously said. Completely separate of football dynasties and any Super Bowl, may we all keep buying the ticket, wherever it takes us.