#i love the relationship i've made between art and alfie

[sugaredbloodcells]

hyacinth, lily & rose!!

SORRY this has taken me so long to get to... i've procrastinated a lot and plus i've found words stuff a bit hard as of late so. buttttt i am finally getting to this <3 finally!

warning: there will be terrifier 3 spoilers!

lily: do you try to fit your s/i into canon, or do you just do whatever you'd like with them?

answering this one first because it's needed before hyacinth. i usually do try to fit my s/is into canon as best as possible, that makes the most sense to me, and my autism doesn't allow me to see other pathways than that? this is mega reminiscent of my oc sunny because i tried so hard for her timeline with johnny to match up with the real time events of jackass. i had a conversation about everything not having to be perfect because this literally isn't real, but my autism thinks everything has to match up and make sense to the canon, whatever that may be. so, yes, i do absolutely try to fit my s/is into canon.

hyacinth: how did your s/i meet your f/o(s)?

in the third movie, in the scene where art and vicky are in the house and they kill those two guys (this is vague but i'm too lazy to completely describe the scene), alfie had explored this house himself and found art. (a bit of an explanation: alfie loves exploring abandoned places, so he will go to places illegally. he pretends he doesn't give a fuck, but he is actually very scared and paranoid about getting arrested. he loves to take photos on his adventures as well.) back to how they met, alfie found this house and decided to explore it, figured he could get some cool photos out of it. this is where he finds art, which does scare the ever-living shit out of him. art had decided to murder him, but since alfie seemed so... not afraid about it... art just stopped and look at him in fascination. like in a "wow maybe you're just like me, fucked in the head" way, which is true! alfie does have a bit of a death wish even if he is kind of a pussy about things. but yeah, art chose to not murder alfie out of fascination. and later on, art somehow found alfie's address and just showed up one day...? and the rest is history. fucking freaks (affectionate).

rose: is your s/i more like yourself, or are they more of an oc you project on?

for alfie particularly, it's a mix of both? i guess? i want him to be like me when i thought i were a trans man. i was... really depressed during this time, and i do want to make alfie like this. but i want to give him a happier way of living after befriending art. i know it's weird but just having one person, despite how fucked up they are, can make such a difference. and art would fully accept these parts of alfie because... art is so much worse. like he murders people. and yes, that makes alfie a bit more fucked in the head for being loving towards art while knowing this information, but art gets alfie in whatever way, and they accept each other's most ugly parts. and that is love any way you want to look at it. i want alfie to have the kind of love i didn't get during this time. he also carries parts of me i feel ashamed about, like my fear of literally everything. but i do make him seem more brave about it than i am actually. and i also want him to have my desire for connection quite largely (obviously, with what i've just said before). he has bpd too, so he often has breakdowns over art. alfie definitely gets more angry than i do. he has rage episodes more often, he breaks things, and feels so much rage that he cries. this says a lot because alfie has been conditioned to not cry even when he wants to (projecting). his anger is all-consuming, something he cannot control (this is the reverse of my own bpd with fps, i get severely depressed, so i'm making alfie have rage instead). so, i'm not quite sure? maybe he is more like an oc instead of being more like me? that's a hard thing for me to say because i always make my ocs so much more like me subconsiously than i realize.

[itmeansapricot]

Two Households, Both Alike in Dignity

My relationship with Harry Potter fandom is so complicated now. I got into the fandom during the Three Year Summer, the period between the publication of POA and GOF, which you might recognize as a long-ass time ago; the entire time I was active in the fandom was before the series actually ended, when the main activities were arguing about what would happen and writing fics that everyone knew would be jossed. The Potterdammerung actually happened after HBP came out, as it made it pretty clear where the ships stood, and things just kind of dissipated after DH. (For that generation of fan - obviously more people picked it up around that time and the fandom is collectively still going. There is literally one other person from my online friend group from that period still around in fandom, as far as I can tell.)

Then, of course, years later, JKR reveals herself as a TERF and so many people do not seem bothered by this at all. It's hideous and really does taint my view of the work and my ability to/interest in actually engaging with the fandom. But at the same time ... I have enormous amounts of nostalgia for the fics I read, I still have all the old thoughts in my brain, the OCs that I've come to realize qualify as my special interests.

This book is a bound copy of the first three fics in Mad_Martha's Two Households series, going by publication order: Two Households, Both Alike in Dignity, Two Households II: Two Weeks Over Easter, and Two Households III: Growing Pains. The premise of this series is an AU where a) Harry shakes Draco's hand on the train in PS/SS, provoking Ron to break up with him and Harry to choose Slytherin, b) Sirius is exonerated after POA, and c) Harry falls in love with Ron. Because so much of the concept and even the title relates to Griffindor vs. Slytherin, I wanted to reflect that with a lot of red and green in the cover and endpapers. I think this makes the endpapers look too busy next to the cover paper, but ultimately I couldn't not use these two.

I used two shades of grey for the headband and footband to contrast with the bright red and greens, and also because the point of the series is to explore moral nuance and, well, shades of grey.

My graphic design skills are nearly nil, but I knew I wanted a background for the main title page that looked a bit like a stone wall to hint at a tower, as in the famous balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet, the play that supplies the title. Well, I really wanted line art, but this was fine.

Old Alfie for the title font gave both old-fashioned floridness that likewise pointed at R&J and thorny bits like the roses on the endpapers. (Each of the three fics in the book has a title page like this.)

Do I use too many fonts? I think there's no such thing as too many fonts, and that it's perfectly acceptable to combine them this way. Others feel differently. At least I think we can all agree that that's a very good handwriting font (Brittany Signature).