#kohakuhime

[hopefulstarfire]

Have a little fortuit drabble for and requested by @kohakuhime because they give me serotonin constantly and I love them dearly they're my comfort ship.

It was nice to have a quiet day to themselves.

Snow was gently falling still, down towards the already thick blanket that had built up the night day before. Raphael had a fire going in the fireplace, helping to warm up the house and he was currently stationed in the kitchen, serving up a fresh pot of his mother's hot cocoa to warm his and Ellies hearts and hands while they worked.

Christmas was coming. They still had about a little over a week left, with all their shopping thankfully and finally finished. The kids had gotten up bright and early that morning, Sylvie going wide eyed at the snow day that was all set to be had with their cousins. It was his and Ellies day to get the house to themselves to wrap presents; Alister and Iris had had theirs a few days prior and Serenity and Valon had theirs before them. They had rotated who would have the honor of babysitting all the kids together to be able to give each set of parents the time and space to work...and get some proper cute, quality time together. Currently, Serenity and Valon had all of them and there was no doubt in his mind that Valon had kicked off a massive snowball war and enacting some form of chaos in Domino Park.

There was only so much he himself or that Rowen could do to keep things wrangled in. He had to have faith that between him and Serenity it would be enough to cancel out Valon.

Raphael topped the mugs with mini marshmallows -- sparingly in his own, and more in Ellies mug -- and looped his hands through the handles to carry them off to the living room.

Two stacks of neatly wrapped presents were sat a couple feet apart from each other, ones being from him and Ellie to various people on one side and the presents from Santa to the kids on the other. A third, now dwindlingly smaller pile of the still unwrapped presents rested by her folded legs.

She was focused in on wrapping the current present, one they'd bought for Joey, in the same way she usually did while working on clothes; her brows furrowed ever so slightly, as a gentle care was put in towards folding the wrapping paper as she kept the cutout lines virtually seamless and the ends as neatly tucked as possible.

A little over a decade into their marriage and it was still just as cute as it was the first time she fell into a concentration state with her seamstress work. He often still quietly questioned how he ever got so lucky to have ever gotten her love, but he certainly cherished it.

He held the mug out in front of her face, drawing her attention away from the wrapping process for a brief moment as she took it, eyes shimmering with adoration. "Thank you, sweetheart."

"It wouldn't a snow day without my mothers hot cocoa." He mused, coming to sit next to her. He rested his mug on the table in front of him; Ellie took a long sip and sat it down next to his. Lifting up one of the presents, he unfurled a tube of the wrapping paper, nestling it down on the ground to pick his work back up.

Ellie finished wrapping Joey's, pressing the tag onto the top left corner and wrote down to whom it was for and who it was from in a bit of a swirled font, and then gently pushed it over to the leftmost pile. "We've made some really good progress in such a short amount of time," she hummed, happily. "We only have a couple more!" She turned, looking over her shoulder back at him before letting out a soft giggle. "Well, those and one more. I still have your present to wrap."

Hers was already done; a couple of days ago while she'd been out with the girls, Rowen and Sylvie both wanted to help wrap her present from them and offered to help with his to her. It was a little wonky looking, more crumpled towards the ends and decorated with several bows, but, that simply just gave it character.

His expression softened, a light in his deep blue eyes as he looked at her. A deep chuckle rumbled from his chest as he shook his head. "You already gave me my present, though."

Ellie cocked her head on question. No, she very much had not and she'd taken great care to hide it. "What do you mean, sweetheart?"

If you had told Raphael Knighton fifteen years ago he had turned sappy and had his edges softened, he would have laughed a cruel laugh. But now...

"It's the same present I get it every year." He told her, keeping her eyes locked on his as he subtly grabbed something off the table.

Raphael scooted forward, his unoccupied hand going to cup her cheek as he smiled at her; her, his world, his love, his person, his guiding light. The woman who willingly kept choosing him and staying by his side through everything, regardless of his past and his grave mistakes. He kissed her softly, lovingly, and took it as his opportunity to nestle the sparkly red bow on her head.

They pulled away after a moment and Ellie reached up, feeling the ribbon and her cheeks flushed a soft pink at realization as he chuckled once again, resting his forehead against hers.

"You. You're one of the best presents I get every single year."

[viviraptor-art]

just sharing a few of my recent commissions! y'all are awesome!! 💕

@ruinlost | @orgyband | @finderseekers | @kohakuhime/@hopefulstarfire

[taiyami]

Some very sweet couple studies I felt like indulging in, starring my girl, along with the very pretty girls belonging to my wonderful friends @hopefulstarfire and @kohakuhime Personally, I think we should make more content of our OCs, like what is the point of it all otherwise !!

[milliekou]

Full color Chibi commission for @kohakuhime of Raphael and their oc, Ellie. 💙💚

✨COMMISSIONS PAGE | Support Me on Ko-Fi ✨

[icychill]

Thank you @kohakuhime for the fun prompt of drawing your beloved oc Ellie!!

That was such a treat to draw and I hope I did her justice 💕

[theimaginatrix27]

My Personal Approach to Fantasy AUs

I have received a number of comments on my Deep Space 9 Fairy Tale AU, Seven for a Secret, to the effect of "I love how you've kept everyone so in-character!"

I also recently sent a friend part of the first chapter of a prequel fic in the same setting, and they said they're not usually interested in AUs of this nature, because too often, they've seen characters written in ways that make them less recognisably themselves. But they did like my writing.

So I'm going to try and explain my process in a way that hopefully makes sense to everyone reading it. I'm absolutely not making this post to gatekeep fanfic, or to tell someone how to write their story, I'm just explaining what I do when writing a Fantasy AU within a fandom context.

For clarity, this post is about AUs where the characters were born into a high/epic/secondary world fantasy setting (I have heard all these terms before). It is not about charas being isekaied into fantasy settings for crossover purposes (that genre encompasses portal fantasy, doesn't have to involve the charas dying), though tbh I love those, too. Excellent fun. But the characters in those cases are still the canon ones, just being put in a situation. I actually plan on writing a series of DND campaign fics with the casts of my three favourite classic Trek series that are basically this premise, but that's not what I want to talk about today.

In a lot of cases, when someone has written a fantasy AU, the characters are changed so much that you could, theoretically, file off the serial numbers, switch out canon references and turn it into an original novel. This is also not strictly a bad thing—I've done it myself, and although that story never got finished, it paved the way for those that followed, so it's helpful in the creative process to recognise when you have enough material for an original spin on something.

However, for me especially, it is more fun to see and recognise the fandom characters, and then watch them navigate a story that is both unique and would not be the same without them.

Presenting Exhibit A: The Princess and the Dragon, a fanfiction for Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters, written by my dear friend, @kohakuhime

This was one of the first fics of this nature that I came across in my wanderings through the blighted wastelands of FFN—Kohaku's fics were very much an oasis in the desert, so refreshing and vibrant were they, but this was her big fantasy baby, centred around a ship we both loved, and rich with lore and magic and mystery. It was also peppered with canon references, and all the characters were kept breathtakingly in-character—I won't get into spoiler territory, but let's just say I could hear the voice-actors saying so many of these lines, they were so good! My bar for this type of AU was set pretty high in large part because of this fic.

To be quite fair, Kohaku has said she could probably file off the serial numbers of TPATD, change some of the components of the magic system and release it as an original novel, as the concept itself (again, avoiding spoilers by going into details out of respect for this friend and her excellent story) is a fun twist on a particular trope. But although there are many original elements, it still feels like a Yu-Gi-Oh! fic, because of all the grounding points woven throughout, and how familiar the characters are.

This fic was not the only story I found that helped shape my approach back in 2012—there were a couple other fics in the Dragon Ball Z archive on FFN that also contributed, but they were both written a long time ago and I'm not sure they'd hold up nearly so well today. One of them was a fairy tale retelling (well, a Disney film retelling, but it was really good from my perspective as a fic newbie!), and this plus some other—shall we say, less interesting adaptations in the Yu-Gi-Oh fandom inspired me to write the fic now known as Wild Swans of Domino, which I'm not linking here because I am in the process of editing it up to my current standards. Seven for a Secret is, in its way, a spiritual successor to WSoD, though I do intend to finish the latter (and the sequels I developed over the years). WSoD was my practice ground for developing the approach I wrote this post to explain, and it kinda shows in the current version, because I started out simple, and then my brain started generating lore and places for more canon references to go and the story got away from me. That—happens to me a lot.

My approach with this type of AU comes down to one major point: If I am writing a fairy tale adaptation (it's usually a fairy tale adaptation that starts this for me), or some other fantasy story in an alternate universe which these characters are, for the purposes of the fic, native to, then both they and the setting must have some familiar aspects tying them back to the source material. The characters, especially, must still feel like themselves, or you may lose readers' interest, because "Benjamin Sisko wouldn't do that!" or "Seto Kaiba wouldn't react that way in this situation! Stop making him quote the movie's dialogue, it sounds so contrived it is painful to read!"

... Ahem, moving on from bad memories of bad fics.

WSoD and Secret are both based on a fairy tale I already have an original story idea for (several, actually), so I don't need or want either of them to be unique enough to divorce them from their fandom origins. Therefore, while developing them, I have done/am doing my utmost to weave in as many threads from canon as possible within the boundaries of the setting, and have also done my best to preserve the characters' personalities. And according to those aforementioned comments, I'm doing pretty well!

To be absolutely fair, in both cases, the fandoms in question are either another form of Fantasy or as close to Fantasy as a Sci-fi setting can get (Sisko's an honest to the Prophets Chosen one, for goodness sake!). But I do believe you can do this with any character, from any setting, if you put enough thought into it.

And maybe that's part of why I don't see it around as much, because some (often younger but not always) fic authors can have a concept float into their head or sent to them by another fan, and bang out a fic in a week that hits all the points they wanted it to without too much brainstorming behind it. Whereas I, a perfectionist and possesser of an increasingly plot-tribble-infested brain, can't make a single plot decision without pondering it for several days, and fret over little logistical details until I'm purple in the face (probably. I don't have eyeballs and thence can't look in a mirror). But I still think it's doable for any character.

To do this well, you must consider what fundamentally makes this character who they are. What traits would you absolutely have to keep (aside from physical appearance in most cases) to ensure this character was familiar to the reader who clicked on the fandom tag and subsequently your fic. If you ran across Sherlock Holmes in, say, the Pokémon world, how would you know he was Sherlock Holmes? Why, he'd be solving mysteries, and doing so by analysing all sorts of details, noticing things others failed to, putting pieces together that formed a solution others wouldn't have even considered, because the majority of those puzzle pieces were overlooked! And he'd probably be skulling shuckle juice when he didn't have a mystery to solve. And obviously he'd be autistic.

Are you imagining it? I hope you are. Now imagine a character, or several, from one of your fandoms, that you love. Imagine what you love best about them, what makes them who they are, from your perspective. Now imagine a setting that's different from their source material—there are any number of AUs you could pick. Now, think carefully about how you would write them in this setting, while focusing on changing as little about them as possible.

In Secret, Ben and Julian are both princes (this is revealed in Chapter 1, I don't mind telling you). The Dax symbiont is a Fae being magically bound to Jadzia, who is a mage. Their personalities are still familiar to the reader. Miles O'Brien has barely changed at all, because he doesn't need to.

And there's the single golden rule: When writing an AU like this, only change as much or as little as you absolutely need to for your story to work. You can, of course, have fun with how you change things—just check out Innate Conditions and its companion fics by @tokidokifish for a DS9 example (Cardassians are shapeshifting dragons! How cool is that?)

I hope all this makes sense. And again, this is not an attempt to dictate how you, personally, write your stories. I do hope you at least give it a little thought, though, if you haven't already. Most importantly, have fun!

[kira-quartz]

My Sims Yu-Niverse: Biker Boys

Previous: The Ishtars | Next: Who knows?

Happy Sim... Smonday? It’s still Sunday in at least one time zone, right? This post took longer than I expected, but I didn’t want to leave it until next week, so here we go. ^^;

In honour of my main save being *almost* playable again, I’ve decided to post the next household on my schedule - well, the next one after Serenity graduates. (I nearly spelt that “scheduel”, appropriately enough. XD) I’ve never played them before, so there’s not much to say about them yet, but hopefully something interesting will happen later. :)

Raphael’s aspiration is Super Parent (I dunno, I thought a family-related one would fit but I didn’t want him to need to have a certain number of kids), and his traits are Genius, Good, Cat Lover, Calm (by Kuttoe) and Loyal. Not much of his canon personality really translates to TS4 traits, so I kind of borrowed from @kohakuhime​‘s interpretation (I hope you don’t mind.)

Alister’s aspiration is Renaissance Sim, and his traits are Genius, Slow to Warm Up (by Chingyu), Loner and Detached (also by Chingyu). I’m not sure about all of these (it’s entirely his fault that I didn’t get this posted on Saturday! XD), so feedback is welcome if anyone has any!

Valon’s aspiration is Chief of Mischief, and his traits are Active, Hot-Headed, Thrill-Seeking (by Chingyu) and Jealous.

I didn’t even notice that he was doing that face until I went through my screenshots, but it works. XD

I think I did a pretty good job with them. Raphael took the most work, and even he turned out okay. ^-^ Valon doesn’t look quite right without his goggles, but there’s not much I can do about that apart from actually making his floof, and I am not on speaking terms with Blender at the moment. XD

Let me know who you want to see next! :)

[dragontamer05]

@mpuzzlegirl @kohakuhime

[hopefulstarfire]

Raphael: What if nobody actually falls in love with me?

Ellie: bursting through a wall Haha, that's where you're wrong.

[viviraptor-art]

rolling out my second batch of chibi commissions! thank you guys!!

@dogsoatmeal | @pastacatlover | @hopefulstarfire/@kohakuhime

[alkonoststorm]

Tag 10 people you want to know better

Tagged by @iffylogic , let's do this!

Relationship status: Long-distance relationship with bf

Favorite color: SEA COLORS.

Song stuck in my head: https://youtu.be/6qV6uCI8Eb8?si=77iuIY6TPJs2KTg9 Hell of a Team

Last thing I googled: The definition of fetish. XD

Current time: 9:33 pm EST

Dream trip: Uh...too many places. But would like to visit Japan again.

Something I want: A new home and better income. Preferably a fully paid out home.

Tagging: @cyggiestardust , @baratheas , @kohakuhime , @gwen-skyes , @kintatsujo , @melody-garnet , @sailorsanghelios , @tonberryqueen , @comtevengeur , @eeriecrafts

[hopefulstarfire]

@kohakuhime @taichouu @icychill OUR GCS IN A NUT SHELL THO

living and dying for my friends in the group chat we sure do like to hurt each other with characters

[starfiresyugiohocs]

6, 32 and 38 for Starcrossedshipping; 2, 13 and 39 for Shieldshipping?

Oooo you got it bud thank you for the ask!!!

6. When did they realize they loved each other?

For Bakura, he's known for millennia. He fell in love with her past life, Kema, when they were young, and fell harder when they reconnected after he finds her at the palace. When he saw her as Kat, seeing her alive and happy and still at her core the woman he fell in love with, it just all fell back into place.

For Kat, while she definitely has a crush on him, doesn't really remember their past life together -- she might get a brief memory like how Seto will of his past life -- but she feels in her heart she knows him on a level she can't put into words. The romantic attraction is there and it just deepends in their time together. She realizes it's love I wanna say around Battle City, but she doesn't admit it to him until the following arc, the Camelot arc I'm creating.

32. How do they resolve their arguments?

I want it to be said that the majority of any argument that they have is a result of Bakura and his bullshit shenanigans that stresses her out and the little punk smirks about it. The other reason they'll have an argument is he's being a bit overprotective, because he's lost Kat once, he can't lose her again (and then this bitch proceeds to get sent to the Shadow Realm during Battle City and then get her soul stolen during Waking the Dragons).

It depends on the argument. Kat is very big into talking things out and trying to find a way for them both to do better from there on out. Bakura can't always go for growth, as, again, he's a 3000 year old vengeful spirit that can be stuck in his ways (especially when you're sharing a room with the embodiment of all darkness), but he does go out of his way to make it up to her when he's hurt her and he does make an attempt to do better.

Having some down time to just cuddle up together after is also nice for them because it lets them unwind from the harsher emotions they'll feel from an argument and show they still care about each other.

38. What was their most memorable date?

They actually have some really good dates (and some crazy ass adventures they also jokingly refer to as dates) but the most memorable one comes shortly before Millennium World transpires.

Bakura knew that it was drawing close to when the Pharaoh would have to face his memories and he knows what will come of it. While there's the night before they fly off to Egypt that happens, there's a date at least a couple weeks before that.

Him and Kat go all around town on little adventures, rolling a dice on her phone to decide what direction they'll walk towards to find places to go have mini adventures in -- shops, places to eat, what have you. They ended it off with driving to the lake outside of town and going to watch a meteor shower and a midnight swim. It was just something that was all them, and a memory he could hold onto before everything goes to hell.

2. Any sleep habits either had to get used to?

Honestly? It was mostly just sleeping next to someone; especially with Rishid, because he's not as used to waking up in the middle of the night to someone cuddling with him/sprawled out over him. But it's something that he very quickly comes to love. They both also have to deal with each other's long hair though in the middle of the night, just faces full of hair, rip.

13. Which member steals borrows the other ones clothing?

Maddox loves Rishid's outfits and they always smell like him, those are his now. Rishid does not mind one bit though, he thinks his husband looks great in his clothes. He evens it out by stealing all of Maddox's favorite mugs.

39. What other couple would your otp get along with the best?

Listen. LISTEN. Them and fortuitshipping (@kohakuhime) are usually the go to double dates. Hell, Maddox is the number one ride or die shipper for Ellie and Raphael, he wants them together so much. That's his cousin and his best friend, he loves them.

I think also naturally they get along really well with the sunflowership babs bc yeah that's Ishizu and Nana who doesn't? And I think they'd do really well with Mai and Joey too because Joey and Rishid are buds and Mai and Maddox are constantly looking for any reason to be gossipy bitches together.

[hopefulstarfire]

Alright because @kohakuhime and I cannot find this name being claimed;

Miho/Duke is gonna be Vanityshipping

Bc they're both people that would be proud about their looks and both of them can be a lil vain and also it sounds cool.

Cool? Cool

[epickiya722]

💜

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[mpuzzlegirl]

@kohakuhime