#ficmeta

[n7punk]

I didn't do it before because it's apparently easy to still scrape archive-locked fics, but at this point. I'm tired. whatever helps the next time we have to deal with this bullshit. I've archive-locked only my longer fics (8k+) since those tend to be the ones targeted by these things. hopefully people manage to get wordstream shut down for good instead of just "hiding" things and leaving the direct links up (I have a feeling they're waiting for us to stop paying attention and then going to make it all available again), if y'all know which specific fics of mine are on there I'd appreciate knowing, but yeah. I'm just tired

[distractedbylife]

When multiple fics you’ve been dying to read more of all update on the same day.

[n7punk]

2023 Writing Wrapped!

I think I forgot to do this last year but I was a little burnt out at the time. I had so much fun writing this year I wanted to do a little retrospective/celebration for it (which I encourage everyone to do! Even if you wrote just one fic, take a second to congratulation yourself for accomplishing it).

I wrote 34 fics and updated 118 times this year. Almost half of those were for the Children of the Crystal series (16 fics) but that series was so fun and clocks in at 121k so I'm totally okay with that. If anything, that's a bit of equalizing, because I know my fics are a lot longer on average than most people's since I write a lot of longer AUs (quick math off the top of my head is about half my fics are longer AUs) so now my words-per-fic average is probably a bit closer to usual lol. Actually that got me curious and my average is 20,176 which is honestly lower than I was expecting but still almost certainly higher than average since I've seen a lot of profiles without a single fic that long. Okay I'm a nerd and I did the math and it was only 21,041 before this year which is way more surprising since I really would have thought it was more.

Anyway, I posted 610k words this year between all my fics (though I wrote more in WIPs and upcoming projects). I had so much fun with a lot of the fics I did this year. Children of the Crystal is still a stand out for me, but I'm SO proud of 'the long way down' and I spent the first half of the year pretty feral for each idea as I tore through Hurricane Adora, As Many Lives As It Takes (To Be With You), Superzero, City of Angels, Trade Today For Tomorrow, and CotC of course. February through August I averaged 12 updates a month which is. insane. I updated daily for 12 days in a row in July/August for CotC, and I spent most of that fic series updating every other day.

A lot of that creative energy came from the health stuff that has been bogging me down for a few years (and especially last year) improving, and though I'm still dealing with that, I'm doing a lot better and it has really felt like rediscovering my creative passion. I had a span from like March-ish trhough August I called my "unhinged era" between how feral I was for my ideas, how much I was updating, and just how wild some of those ideas were lol. My slow down at the end of the year came from starting a new job that was very demanding and especially exhausting with my health issues, plus health issues for the rest of my family, but I've still been averaging updating once or twice a week since, so I'm happy with that given everything that has been going on.

Now let's get to the two big ones.

Writing streaks: Definitely not for everyone, but for me they're really motivating and 100% the reason I was able to keep up momentum these last three months with work. I wrote every single day this year. I still can't believe that. Sure, some days it was literally 50 words at the end of the day when I was exhausted, but I also had my highest single-word count day since I started recording them this year at 12,738 on July 18th when I was writing CotC. My previous record was 94 days in a row. 364 is a huge leap. I don't know where I'm going to go with my streak from here. On one hand, it was hugely motivating. On the other, you always want to be careful to prevent burnout. For now, allowing myself to count days where I barely do anything as long as I engage with my WIP seems like a good middle ground since it keeps me motivated and connected to what I'm writing while letting me mostly take time off. I'm exploring more creative hobbies like painting in my free time, though, and as long as I've created that day I don't necessarily feel the need to write, so we'll see if I reconsider my writing streak as a "creating" streak in the future, but for now I'm just going to see how long I can go.

And the final one... my stupid goal.

I can't remember if it was at the end of last year or the start of this one when an anon pointed out how much I had written and I realized I was something like .99% of all Catradora fics on AO3, but my ridiculous goal for this year was to get my fics to 1% of the entire Catradora tag. This goal... I half reached. It takes a bit of explaining.

First, when I first set that goal, I think needed to write twenty-something more fics to reach it. Obviously, I well exceeded that goal at 34 fics, but as I was writing, so was everyone else, so the number of fics I needed to write to reach 1% increased. In the sense of my original benchmark, I definitely passed my goal.

Second, as I write this, AO3 shows there are 11,632 Catradora fics. You can consider 1% of this to be either 116 or 117 depending on rounding. I have 117 She-ra fics, but one of those is a Glimbow fic with no mention of Catradora, so that takes me to 116. However, one of those 116 is tagged as Adora & Catra because it's the CotC fic from when they're small children and meeting for the first time. I consider it a Catradora fic, but it's not actually in the tag and thus doesn't contribute to it. As such, I've fallen short at 115/117, but I really do consider this goal complete for this year given that I passed the initial milestone, the rounding makes the final number debatably 116, and I do actually have 116 "Catradora-centric" fics. That said, I'm very aware those are technicalities and I have a special celebration planned for when I actually, officially become 1% of the tag, so look out for that :) It'll be a great way to celebrate the new year. I'm hoping/planning to do it in the next week or two.

The future: I'm ending this year and starting the next trying to clean up a bunch of WIPs since my fic folder is getting a little ridiculous with the (mostly Outside of the War) one-shots I've written one scene or just a description for, which feels like a really fitting way to end off the year, accomplishing my goals and making everything neat and tidy. I have like 7~ to work though, though my actual goal is maybe 4-5 since I don't want to "force" myself to work on an idea if I'm not feeling it at the second, but I also have a longer AU calling my name, and I don't want to ignore an idea interesting me either... so we'll see, but I'm excited for everything I'm working on right now, and that feels really good. I finished last year in kind of a rough place writing/creativity wise, and I'm finishing this year really excited for everything I did and everything upcoming, so that feels pretty great :)

Thank you to everyone who read and commented this year! I know I ran out of energy to keep up with comments a lot, but they really made me smile so much and I appreciate them so much. Some days they were the difference between the motivation to write 1000 words versus 50. Thanks for another great year!

[n7punk]

'catcher' Fic Notes

EDIT 31/1/21: I came back and edited this a little to fall more in line with how I do these fic notes now, but this was the original and it has developed a lot.

i’m bored, and i still have so many thoughts and feelings about catcher, so i thought i would do a little post with a bunch of facts about it that never made their way into the fic or its notes since there was just so much going on already

The actual name of the fic is catc(her) as in “catch her” referring to recurring theme of Adora chasing after Catra. In the show this is literal with Catra often luring Adora away to chase her in battle, but it is also less literal in how Catra is often running, hoping Adora will chase after her (choose her). It’s kind of a recurring theme in my She-ra fics and it especially fit with this one where Adora has spent five months trying to catch up with Catra and get her to stay long enough to hear her out - she just kept saying stupid shit before she could get there. Calling it catcher also references the Foxcatcher wrestling team, like I mention in the first end note.

In chapter one Adora mentions that she can’t get off without Catra, and then Catra expands on that by saying she can, she just struggles to get off without a partner. That is a really quick summary of the true thing that was going on there: Adora is a total service top, and to me, with all her hangups about ignoring her own needs, for her to get off she needs to know she is causing her partner pleasure. This means she can get off on fantasies about taking care of her partner - but she could not do that in catcher because she would have to think about Catra in order to get off, and every time she thought about it she was consumed with guilt and had to stop. After a while she just gave up. The bathroom was only the second time she had managed to get off since they broke up - she managed to power through her guilt one time when she was wound really tight.

I made Drunk Catra like a cat high on catnip almost exclusively because I have never actually been drunk, only tipsy, and even that has been years, so I honestly did not know what to write for that. I know how drunk people act externally, but I didn’t know how to write from that perspective, so I thought it would be cute to go the catnip route instead. I have now decided this is Catra would act when drunk in canon too because I think it is fucking hilarious. I wouldn’t have actual catnip get her high, though.

As far as the “Scorpia ditching Catra at the party goes” it was supposed to kind of mirror her leaving in season four, but here’s what actually happened in her defense: Scorpia drove Catra and Entrapta to the party from practice. Scorpia had been driving Catra to and from practice every day since she doesn’t have a car and they live together. It was easy to assume Scorpia would drive her home after the party, but they never actually discussed it. Catra decided she wanted to drink at the party because it was not offering enough of a distraction for her, and then Adora showed up immediately and she decided she wanted to get wasted. Scorpia had one shot with Catra at her insistence, but she was sober, as was Entrapta. Entrapta’s girlfriend Emily was supposed to pick her up after the party in Darla, so even if Scorpia could not drive Catra home she assumed she would be safe going back to Entraptra’s and Emily’s place. She left Catra with Entrapta, and then Catra realized she was an inch from a break down and told Entrapta she was going to call a rideshare and go home. She didn’t know her phone was dead until she went outside and Adora found her.

Remember how I talked about chapter 8 turning out nothing like I intended? Instead of their love confession (which was supposed to happen in chapter 10, after winning the game, and then there was going to be some angst of Catra worrying it was just the adrenaline rush, and then the smut was going to be borderline makeup sex of Adora showing her no, I fucking mean this. That’s where the idea for how their proposal would go came from), they were supposed to instead have a “confrontation” where Catra admitted she had been breaking into the apartment for the entire five months to water the plants on the balcony. This is not canon anymore, hence why it was cut as it just did not fit with the fic, but the idea was she would let herself in with her key, get water from the kitchen, and then go straight to the balcony to water them and leave. She felt super guilty about it every time because it felt like a violation, but she never did anything else or looked around while she did it, and she just needed to pretend everything was fine, and Adora was about to come home, and they were still together for the 2 minutes it took. She could justify it to herself because she knew Adora would not remember to water them or notice and she was fucking right lol. An excerpt: “I have, um, a confession, and then I swear we will be caught up on the last five months, at least on my end.”

In the very first note of the fic I said Adora was this AU’s equivalent of the Lindbergh Baby and then was SHOCKED no one asked me about it. It’s alluded to later when Catra muses that they thought Shadow grew Adora in a lab because she seemed the “eugenics type” but Shadow actually kidnapped Adora as a baby, kind of like in the show. She managed to get her to be her legal foster baby later, but Adora was the child of a famous athlete who was proponent of eugenics. Shadow thought his child must be the perfect athlete either biologically or from interference, and so stole Adora. That’s like, super dark and never made it into the fic mostly because Adora and Catra never find out, but it is a true piece of worldbuilding I had in my mind from the very start.

I literally did not know what net-ball was until chapter four, and then I had to scramble to invent a sport that fit with all the random sports-sounding nonsense I had already spouted. My knowledge of sports is limited to what I learned about hockey and the NHL from Check, Please! and that’s literally it.

The fact that Glimmer is very weirdly rumoured to be Adora’s new partner is a reference to some meta on the fic. I’ve mentioned how this fic started as a dream, and in that dream Glimmer and Bow were longtime partners, but when they brought Adora in she was only really effective with Glimmer. Perfuma was on Bright Moon, and Bow and Perfuma ended up being re-paired together (like their dates at Princess Prom). This meant that Bright Moon had two effective duos rather than one HIGHLY effective duo, however, so they were really eager to get Catra to come in and reinstate the old duos.

In the initial outline of the fic (aka my dream) after the fight with the team, Shadow suspected the truth and showed up at their apartment to catch Catra in violation of her contract. They called the police, and Shadow basically tried to break down their door. She was arrested, and when they ran her fingerprints, they found out she was using a false identity and was on the run from a child neglect/murder investigation after a child she used to coach died. Hordak KNEW this and actually helped cover it up so he could have her as coach since she was highly effective at it. This got Shadow thrown in jail and the Horde suspended from the league, freeing Catra from her contract. Yeah remember when I was joking about how “we haven’t even reached the murder yet” in the tags? That’s what I was referring to. Obviously that did not fit the tone of the fic, but it is how it happened in my dream. A lot changed from dream to writing.

I’ve said how much the characters possessed me and just completely wrote this fic themselves (which is how literally every one of my fics is written) but I did not realize HOW MUCH they had done this until I was writing chapter nine and I got the idea for Scorpia to have always known, and for why the team was so mad at Catra. I wrote that, and then realized I had already foreshadowed this in chapters five and seven (both of which I had already posted), despite having no fucking clue I was going to do it. I added a bit in chapter eight to lead to it because I hadn’t yet posted it, but I really had no clue that was happening until after I did it. The characters were just doing their shit and not telling me about it. 

I’ve mentioned this replying to comments before, but this fic was initially supposed to be a slowburn fic spanning 3 months. The party hookup was supposed to happen when they had been apart for 5 months, but Catra was supposed to have another 3 months left on her contract after that - I changed this pretty quickly when I saw the trajectory of the fic was changing, but I still kind of wrote myself into a corner where they would have to be apart for another month because they just got together so fast. That’s why Catra has 2 months left in chapter 1, and then it is revealed to actually be 6 weeks in chapter 4 - just because I realized I needed to close the gap as much as possible, and that was a way to do it without being contradictory. Catra was actually supposed to wake up mad, make out with Adora a little, and then storm out. It would then kick into gear her starting to text Adora again because it made her realize how badly she missed her. They would then meetup/hookup once or twice before the chapter four explanation happened, and then continue to meetup, getting more tender each time, a few more times before they properly got back together. Catra and Adora DID NOT COOPERATE with this plan. The second Adora admitted she thought she had taken advantage of Catra the whole thing changed because Catra may have been fucking pissed at Adora at the time, but she would never let her keep on thinking that, and she needed to comfort her. That moment of comfort is what really opened the gateway for their sit-down and get back together.

Horde Prime (Mr. Prime) is the owner of the Horde, Hordak is the manager, and Shadow Weaver is the coach. Angella is the owner and manager of Bright Moon, and Castaspella is the coach. There were initially multiple scenes including Casta, but they all got cut when this fic moved from a slowburn to a fucking roller coaster.

Almost the entire fic was written with folklore on repeat. I know that seems bizarre given the folksy tone of the album versus the horny/aggressive tone of the fic, but a lot of the fic is about trauma and folklore is about stories and their effects, so I think it actually kind of makes sense why it worked out that way.

Anyway that’s all I can think of, I swear I’m probably done with this fic now. Thank you to every who read and commented!

As a bonus, here is a scene I cut due to deciding I wanted this conversation to take place in person rather than via the phone but I enjoyed it so have a draft snippet.

--

Adora notices her eyeing the notification on her screen. "Bad news?" she asks, bringing her plate over to the table.

"Let's find out," Catra replies, unlocking her phone.

>> Please don't be mad at me

"Hang on, I'm about to be mad at Scorpia," Catra tells her, putting her fork down to type out a question back.

[n7punk]

'catcher' Extra #1: Net-ball

Court: Each team has one side of the court. The court has walls, climbing shit, etc set up like an obstacle course, so players are dodging, climbing, flipping, etc about the court. You score if you get your duo’s ball in the other team’s net (shocking). The net is surrounded by the endzone – your point only counts if both halves of your duo are within the endzone when the ball goes in. Each team has five duos for a total of ten people on their team (at least, out at once. Most teams are 20 players with line-ups changing every game to account for their rival’s line-up, although duo pairs remain consistent).

Duos: Everyone has a net (lacrosse stick-style) and each duo has a ball. They are color-coded to be distinct. You can’t just carry the ball in your net, so you either have to be adept at keeping it nearby or tossing it between you and your partner. The balls aren’t just used to score points though – if you hit someone on the rival team with your ball they LOSE a point. So you can focus on scoring or on penalizing or balancing the two. Games can finish with negative points on both sides – whoever is overall higher wins. You can use the net to catch balls from the other team to protect against stolen points. Balls caught from the other team need to be immediately fielded back or you get penalized. Duos usually stick together on the field in order to score, though the overall team might spread out and split apart.

Basically it’s like riding into battle with a beloved partner. You know each other, defend each other, cover their back while they make plays to get your ball in, and then turn around and do the same for them. You have other people on your side in the war, but when it comes down to it you’re supposed to be there to support your partner.

The shot-caller is the team leader. They coordinate all the duos on the field. Most teams keep the same one for years because it takes a special kind of person to be able to coordinate with their partner while essentially setting the battleplan for your entire side on the fly.

Times are how long it takes a duo on average to score one point, taking into account points lost. You have times for a single game, for a season, or for a duo over all time. These aren’t used in game scoring, but in ranking duos and player skills/stats. Game points are tracked by duos, and at the end of the game all the points for a team’s duos are added together. Scores are usually much higher than this but for example, if you had five duos with the overall scores of +1, +2, -3, -1, and +2 then basic arithmetic brings that team’s score to 1 when time runs out on the game.

Basically it is dodgeball meets lacrosse meets trench warfare with the obstacle aspect, hence why it is wildly popular because it is intense as fuck and it is really easy to get invested in athletes and individual duos. Duos getting married is REALLY common in the sport, and messy breakups between duos have been the subject of movies before. Usually teams are less important than the duos, which is why teams guard their duos so closely from poaching, because they know the duo’s chemistry and skills is more important to the spectators. They came to see Catra & Adora, not just whoever was playing for the Horde.

League: the National Net-Bell League (NNBL) standardizes the professional sport. It is very heavily regulated, because otherwise, you can imagine it would be a very dangerous sport for both players AND spectators. Teams can still set individual policies to a certain degree, but the league has a lot of rules that must be followed in order to hold legal net-ball matches.

Season: Net-ball is a six months on, six months off sport. Pre-season is not too important, post season more so. When Adora left it was still in the post season, so that did not help the feeling of abandonment.

And that’s this very weird sport in my head. Honestly sounds metal as fuck but super dangerous imo.

[n7punk]

i love writing from catra’s perspective she’s like “of course i dont care about that” *spirals into complete disaster over the thing*

[n7punk]

im writing maybe the most challenging, softest filth of my life

[n7punk]

'catcher' - Catra's Dress - Ref #1

Chapter 4 of “catcher” went up today. For those curious, this is the dress I was picturing as being the one Catra stole in Chapter 3 and will continue to wear into Chapter 5. It is designer, so the actual dress would be the fast fashion knock-off version. It would look basically the same but have less lace and be a little shorter. This is the Afton Mini Dress from For Love & Lemons’ Summer 2020 collection.

I do not think Catra would normally wear nor enjoy dresses, but she was going specifically for something that would affect Adora (and that she wouldn't want back) so she selected this from her limited options.

[n7punk]

@super-zrhueiao replied to your post “@super-zrhueiao replied to your post “someone take my computer away...”

yes. yes. this is exactly what the doctor prescribed for the useless lesbians who do nothing but pine and refuse to believe that they're really in love or even being loved by each other and come up with the worst excuses to keep being repressed. i am ready to be in Pain.

this honest to god might as well be the fic summary right now. i have an outline for a scene where catra is just watching adora from a distance in public being like. god i wanna go over there and just STAND near her but i cant and she doesnt want me to

[n7punk]

someone take my computer away from me so i stop writing catradora modern aus

[n7punk]

if we could just preemptively pour one out for catra’s instagram followers in ‘tip of her tongue’ because i know i haven’t started posting it yet but they are going to go through some shit for a few months

[n7punk]

I ended up deciding i wanted this conversation to take place in person rather than via the phone but i enjoyed this so have a draft snippet

[n7punk]

adora really is like "I know catra likes girls, and she can get quite jealous and possessive with me. she attacked lonnie when we were kids because she thought I liked her better, and straight up told me I'm hers. wow we must be really good friends" and I love her for that lmao she is so repressed and clueless

i was going to say “in adora’s defense” and then realized there is no defence she’s just repressed and clueless and yearning so damn hard. she was just like “im HER best friend that makes me hers ok that makes sense” and meanwhile catra was Dying Inside

[n7punk]

in no way related to the fic im working on, does anyone have the quote molly said on the stream about glimmer and catra having a spicy affair

[n7punk]

adora’s healthily processed emotions folder

vs

her worry about later folder

[n7punk]

horny perfuma rights