#but you can tell fire force is his pride and joy bc even the side characters are so well adapted to the main story

[mrskurono]

I feel lile Fire Force isn't as popular as other because 1) there's so many actual adult characters in it, 2) it isn't a highschool setting nor are any of the characters we see actually in school, 3) even though it's fantasy it leans more towards the surreal, Lovecraftian side (like the author's other work Soul Eater), and 4) there's like no romance or very minimal romance that isn't even plot relevent.

I'm also a big Soul Eater fan and I read a lot of fanfics for it and I've noticed that so many good fics get ignored because they feature stuff like the above while the generic romance stuff, especially for the Soul/Maka ship, gets sooo many responses. Like! There's an author who does a lot of Lovecraftian type stuff and another who writes really good AU fics specifically featuring Asura and they're both amazing authors with incredible characterization, awesome settings and descriptions, unique stories, and some insanely creepy ideas and yet! There's not much attention.

Soul Eater itself got moderately popular but it didn't entirely hit that and I feel like it was the lack of a major romance arc and the vague, Lovecraftian lore that had a hand in that. Cause those are often the complaints I hear about the canon material.

As someone whose poured literal months if not years into fics that are huge on lore and intricate storylines that play on each other even 100k words later in one fic. Just for it to get ignored but 500 words about a penis blows up. This is so painfully true.

All the time I've spent watching anime and reading manga all of these are true of any unknown series. And it's so sad bc the authors that I love even now and follow their works decades after they started, never had the big hype that a lot of series get. Be it lack of romance (which sucks bc some of don't like romance genres and avidly avoid them) or being "too involved" for people to follow.

Fire Force is so wonderful bc that mans work is built on so much real world lore and I just salivate for nerdiness that relies on real world themes (be it church related or gods/goddesses or supernatural and so on) And it's such a shame people throw that kinda hard work away from ships or something 😩

As a hole I've never understood the obsession with setting things in high school (even when I was in high school) I always found the older backstories to older characters so much more interesting to act storylines and it sucks 😩 I want a show I can nerd out on and hypothesize on and shit.

[glasyasbutch]

Stella: 13 Roona: 22 Gent: 30

prose boys part one! prose boys part one! under a readmore bc its almost 2k words! thanks for sending them in rebekah i did full scenes for each prompt bc im a whore. bolded are the actual “things they said”.

Stella: Things you said that were important to you (set about six months after her clan’s home in the wood is razed to the ground, and she’s just found herself fully indoctrinated to the nearby city’s criminal ring as an assassin)

Her hands are small, even relative to the rest of her, which as a gnome, is much tinier than most people walking these streets. It's usually an advantage. Makes it all the more simple to just slide her hand into someone's pocket while they were preoccupied at the food cart. Snag a coin while they ordered, snag a hunk of bread while they paid.

She isn't proud of it. She doesn't like having to penny pinch other people's pennies to get by between jobs. But she likes starving to death less, so she swallows her damn pride and got down to it.

The problem is that the figure she’s trying to rob is also a gnome, which means her hands are not nearly as relatively small as she’s used to them being, and she manages to get her thumb caught on the edge of his pocket as she pulls away. His hand is around her wrist before she has a chance to react, grip terrifyingly tight.

"Pardon me, but I don't believe anything in my pockets belongs to - Ester?"

The fake tears she's been trying to push out begin to well up for real, turning her into a breathless, glassy-eyed mess, and she looks into a face she thought she'd never be seeing again. "Gray?"

Gray drops his grip on her wrist, only to clasp her hand between his protectively. "Ester, what are you doing out here doing this?"

She finds her knees start to buckle, and she pushes her weight into Gray's hands a bit to stay standing. "The fire, Gray, I barely made it out, I just ran in the first direction I saw. I ended up here, and when I looked back it was nothing but smoke. I only had my bow with me and I - I thought I was the only one who made it out. I didn't know what to do. I'm just trying to survive in a world I wasn't raised to live in."

Gray's eyebrows furrow, his expression sinks. He reaches his other hand out to grip the side of her face. "There's at least three of us who made it out. I left with Reddy, but he took off from this town a few weeks ago. I was starting to get lonely, but ... then I find you." He smiles, in the crooked sort of way that happens when loss starts to slip through the cracks of joy. "You can do better than this, Es. We're still clan. My house is still your house. Come back with me, at the very least 'til you get on your feet."

"Gray, no, really, I couldn't," she starts, but gets cut off as he begins to tut and takes his hand from her cheek to grip her other hand.

He pushes back her sleeve with his fingers, unintentionally, ever so slightly. He isn't even looking, but it's still enough to make her gasp and stiffen. That, he does notice, and gods damn it, he glances down.

Their clan is from the woods. They don't know a lot of city culture, but the symbol tattooed on her wrist, still slightly red from its freshness, is one of the things they have to recognize. Its something they know damn well to avoid, because these men who take shelter in the woods some nights, with these symbols emblazoned on their wrists and sword scabbards and coin pouches, setting off their hunting traps for fun and leaving their empty booze bottles behind when they go and not putting their fires out properly, are the kind of men who know no rule or law or code, and show no mercy when they feel they've been crossed.

"Ester," he says, voice darkening. "You can do better than this."

She tears her wrist away, tugging her sleeve back down. "My business is my own, Gray."

"As is my home, if you've chosen to turn your back on everything we lived for so quickly."

"I was hungry. I was going to die out here. I don't have many marketable skills, but they saw something worth a paycheck in me."

Gray says nothing, but drops her hands from his with a sharpness that can only indicate disgust.

"You can do better than this," he repeats. Then, for a brief moment, his gaze softens. "I hope you do."

She makes no move to stop him as he turns to go, walking with as big a stride as his gnomish legs can let him, vanishing into the crowded streets. She rubs at her wrist, letting the sting of pressing on the fresh tattoo distract her from the sinking feeling in her gut as one of the last survivors of her clan willingly turns his back on her. She had always figured she had no one left, but now she’s looking right at him and she knows it.

"I'm gonna," she whispers at the space where he has been standing, making up her mind to get back what scraps of her family she still has left. "I'm gonna get out of there, eventually. Swear on the trees."

*****

Roona: Things you said after making a bad decision.

"Vinny Vinny Vinny Vinny Vinny!" Roona pants, running so fast she nearly trips over her feet, "Pouch pouch pouch pouch please please please!"

They tug at the loose piece of leather fixed around their traveling companion's waist, barely waiting for acknowledgement of their presence before scrambling up the leg into the pouch and pulling the flaps closed, trying to look as much like a lute as possible.

Now, most lutes arent quite so lumpy, because they don't have knees to tuck in, and they don't swell and sink because they don't have lungs that are heaving from the mad dash they've just undertaken. But, however much like a lute she doesn't look, Roona supposes the ruse has worked, because no one sticks a sword straight into the flaps and the shrill complaining voice eventually huffs its way out of earshot.

"Is the purple dress lady gone?" she whispers, pulling one very small peep hole open in the mouth of the pouch.

"Yeah," Vinny sighs, still debating whether or not she wants to know what happened this time.

"Okay, good." Roona's head fully emerges from the pouch now, braids more mussed than usual and face still flushed reddish from exertion. They flash a forced smile up at Vinny. "So, don't get mad but. Um."

It seems, whether or not Vinny wants to know, Roona's gonna be telling her anyway.

"You know that really fancy dress shop down the road? I was over there window shopping, you know, like you do. And, well, I went inside, cause they had this really nice yellow thing and this other dress with lilac trim, and I wanted to know how they'd look together? Um?"

Vinny's lips press together, knowing exactly where this story's going.

"So I, uh, I grabbed a pair of shears, and I took a little bit of the trim off the back of the skirt? I mean, it's the back right, no one's gonna see, and it's not like they ever sell the mannequin models anyways, but. For SOME reason, the dress lady didn't like that."

"Roona. C'mon."

She sighs, brushing a few loose hairs out of her face. "No, no. I know. I ... I know. Like, actually. Sometimes people are just stuck up dickheads about their stuff, but like, this one I get. I'll go apologize in the morning, probably. Once she's had the chance to forget where she's left the fabric shears again."

They begin to pull themself out of the pouch, but stop with one leg dangling out over the lip. "On a totally unrelated note. Can I pitch you on a mix and match dress shop?"

*****

Gent: Things you said when you should've been quiet

"Gods," he huffs, flipping over what he's pretty sure is the third page of sigils for what he's significantly less sure is the fifth time. "You really think an archmage with a lifespan like his and absolutely no friends to hang out with would be able to find the time to write a damn key for his notes. Wenceforth! C'mere. Do you know what the fuck these double lines are supposed to be mean?"

The goblin starts at the mention of his name, trotting over on creaky joints from the post he'd be standing by the door. He slips on a pair of glasses, and peers over the piece of paper being held out for him. He spends a good minute tracing a finger across the ink, grumbling and mumbling to himself before turning to face Gent and announcing, very definitely, "No!"

Gent groans and slumps even further in the chair than he has been.

"You've known him forever, Wenceforth, has he always been this illiterate? I mean, god, for all the griping he does at me about penmanship making the difference between a Dancing Light and a Flaming Sphere, you'd think he'd care literally at all about how his own fucking notes look."

"Well, Master Errenis is quite a learned mage, you know, he's really quite skilled, but uh. Between you and me. He's always been a bit more meticulous with his notes since. Well."

Gent immediately shoots up, leaning over the arm of his chair to stare down Wenceforth. "Since what, Wence? You can't just leave me hanging here, man."

"Oh, you know, I don't really want to embarrass him or anything," he mumbles, anxious grin twitching onto his face.

"Oh come on! Please? I'll pay you the rest of my weeks stipend, Wence, I need to know what could've possibly embarrassed Yussah bad enough to change his wizardly ways."

"Oh, all right," he chuckles, leaning in, "but you didn't hear it from me. One time, good few years back, Master Yussah was studyin' this little ball thing, and got himself stuck inside. Had to call in a bunch of his wizard friends to get him back out. And they, ah, barely made it too, I heard, 'cause his map notes were just ... unintelligible."

"You're kidding, Wence? He got stuck. In a ball."

"Sure did, sure did! Had to call that pretty Taldorei lady myself to fix it all up."

"You had to get Arcanist Vysoren to get Yussah out of a ball?" Gent reaches for the goblins shoulders and gives them a good hard squeeze. "Thank you so much for telling me, Wence. You are truly the only man I have ever cared about in my life."

"Come now, surely he's not the only one." someone drawls from the doorway behind Gent.

Gent spins around in the chair, placating grin half way through stretching across his face. "Master Errenis, hello, how are you doing, did you need a hand with something, hope I haven't kept you waiting?"

Yussah gives a wry laugh. "I've been waiting in this doorway long enough, Ms. Avoris. Gossiping about my handwriting won't get those wards copied any faster."

Gent presses his lips together, turning (relatively) apologetically back to his work. Yussah motions for Wenceforth to follow him out of the room, starting to describe some spell components he needed dug out of storage. He stops in the doorway, just to be sure Gent is still in earshot.

"I have got to get that kid to see some other wizards. Let him study with someone really old and crazy, like Waccoh. Then see how he feels about my damn notes."

*****