#or should i say happy sanguinala?

[hotarutheconscience]

Participated in @rt-gift-exchange Drew a gift for @redbatchedcumbermayned

Had lots of fun!

This was an amazing event hehe

[nevesmose]

I did some stories for the 40K Secret Sanguinala and Berserk Clangmas exchanges last year! Been occupied with my usual new year depressive breakdown so I'm only just now getting around to going into more detail about them here...

So the prompt I chose for this one was Konrad Curze/Shang including the requestor's various additional likes of smut, consensual relationship, female Konrad & pegging, fixed power dynamics between dominant primarch and submissive Astartes. And I think I met the brief pretty well, tbh.

Kassandra seemed like a good choice of name for a female Konrad. I've seen it done sometimes with Constance or Konnie or various other ways but this is Warhammer, the "Iron Hand, Primarch of the Iron Hands, who has metal hands and a spaceship called the Fist of Iron" setting. Nothing is too on the nose, and honestly for me that's a big part of the charm. So it felt entirely appropriate to name female Konrad after a seer of the future that nobody believes.

But we know what her real name is, don't we? Night Haunter. It probably sounds better in Nostraman but I always enjoy emphasing how that's his true name in his own perception. Sometimes people view him as having dual personalities of the """"good"""" Konrad versus the evil Night Haunter or something, but since he's Space Batman I tend to think of it more in the same way as some portrayals of the Dark Knight where Batman is who he is internally, all the time, and "Bruce Wayne" is just the palatable disguise worn for the benefit of others when it's necessary to do so.

I wasn't vastly familiar with Shang before writing this, but catching up on his appearances I found his dynamic pretty compelling, especially how he's shown to have genuine loyalty and love for Konrad, and it's mentioned that in return Shang is the only one of his legion that Konrad doesn't hate. Not that he loves Shang back or even likes him all that much, just that he doesn't actively loathe him.

That felt kind of interesting to me because of the wider dynamic that the Night Lords all seem to have of trying in various different ways to finally, finally win the affection and approval of a dysfunctional abusive father figure who hates them and himself and the entirety of existence, and the kind of futile hopes that this time for sure everything will be OK and Konrad will recover from his devastating untreated mental health issues and he'll finally like his army of space serial killers and violent criminals.

There's pegging too. Honestly it was fun to air out some of my favourite femdom elements since it's a good proportion of my fairly sizeable collection of romance novels, but you wouldn't know it from my very yaoi-centric fic output.

This was a treat for @chemos-factories who is a wonderful person and deserves good things, based on his request for Perturabo/Clonegrim with Perturabo wanting to acquire a perfect clone of Fulgrim for reasons that he may not be able to admit to himself. The suggested bodice ripper vibes somehow turned into fairy tale vibes as we explore Perty building a palace full of Saw traps to imprison and torture Fulgrim in, and then getting Clonegrim for entirely rational research purposes that have no twisted romantic elements whatsoever...

In the end Perty does not actually get the precious Clonussy but he does perhaps come close to actually learning something about the pain of bearing grudges and hatreds for millennia. Will he listen or actually change? Nah, of course not, this is Perturabo we're talking about. That's the tragedy of his character. But the opportunity was there at least.

And I wanted to give Clonegrim what felt like a proper happy ending for him as his own person. Like sometimes people say he should go and fight for the Imperium and lead the Sons of the Phoenix or redeem the Emperor's Children or something, and I just feel like even if that were possible that isn't, or wouldn't be, his personal goal or dream. So instead he gets to be his own person, living about as freely as anyone can, and have lots of fun Rogue Trader adventures as he explores the galaxy.

Genuinely one of the darker and more messed-up things I've written! The part of the request I focused on was King of Midland/The Torturer, Alternate Universe - The Torturer Is a Slightly Deformed Twink Erotically Obsessed with the King. That sounded interestingly grotesque to me, especially with the "nasty older men" aspect also mentioned in the prompt.

For all that I'm an alexithymic faceblind autist, I like to think I have a reasonable command of the kind of writing tricks that can be used to manipulate people into feeling things about a character and so I really pulled out all the stops for this one to get people to care about Twinkturer aka Frantz.

His name is taken from the main subject of The Faithful Executioner by Joel F Harrington which is a very, very good history book based on the diary of Frantz Schmidt, the city of Nuremberg's municipal torturer and executioner in the late 1500s/early 1600s.

The element of him being one of Gennon's victims felt like an effective starting point to achieve that, and also led to a fairly reasonable explanation for how his obsession with the King could occur in the first place.

The important aspect (as well as making him reasonably pretty as requested in the prompt) was to have it from his POV since everyone is the main character of their own story and (mostly) perceives their experiences and actions in ways that support or explain themselves and their worldview.

Of course, he's also deeply fucked up so his perceptions of things are not at all reliable, and that only gets worse as the distant effects of Griffith and the Hawks start to impact his life. I deliberately didn't have him ever meet any of the main characters in person because why would he? Everywhere except in his own head, he's an utter non-entity at the very bottom of the social hierarchy who spends his time doing horrible things in a dungeon.

He really could have had something with Alek though. They could have been happy despite everything. Sadly it's irrelevant of course, because of the King being jealous and vindictive. My original idea for the character was a bizarro funhouse mirror version of Griffith who has never had anything go right for him, but he ended up being a bizarro Charlotte instead which just added an entirely new layer of disturbing nasty old man exploitation to the story.

I had a lot of fun with this one, which started out as a quick little treat and ended up being almost 10k words of alternate universe Griffguts where Berserk is a TV show and they’re just actors. It's definitely one of those stories that took on a life of its own as it went on and overall I think it turned out well. I'm feeling particularly positive about the humour and the smut scenes here which, to me anyway, felt a lot more comfortable and natural than some of my other attempts at it. Actual improvement from practicing at doing something? Big if true.

I've always really enjoyed reading books/articles and watching videos about troubled and chaotic productions of movies and TV shows. It's fascinating and entertaining in a way I just can't describe to see these vast projects being changed and warped by all kinds of external and internal factors, and the ways in which this impacts the people who actually have to make the show or movie happen.

So in the AU, Guts has recently quit being a professional wrestler to start an acting career instead. He isn't based on any particular people as I don't actually know anything much about wrestling beyond that Rhea Ripley exists but he's aiming to have a kind of John Cena or Dwayne Johnson sort of trajectory.

AU Griffith is just That British Actor, you know the one, he's been in a few different movies and shows but you might struggle to remember exactly which ones. Sort of a blend of Tom Felton, Tom Hiddleston and a very small amount of Michael Sheen, and maybe Jacob McCarthy looks-wise? In any case he likes Berserk and he will achieve his dream of being Griffith no matter what it takes.

The Coriolanus bits, especially Guts finding the videos of it, were mainly inspired by the 2014 version starring Tom Hiddleston at the peak of his Loki popularity, during which he did in fact kiss Aufidius to the delight of the audience, as well as the 2011 movie version with Ralph Fiennes and Gerard Butler which also did a good job of portraying a more gruff middle-aged version of their enemies to lovers toxic yaoi.

I included a lot of fun little details in this one just to amuse myself with the AU / show within a show concept, but as it went on I was actually pretty entertained by working out how to adapt the Golden Age events into the story's low-budget cyberpunk version. Reassembled Cyberdemon Femto was pretty cool to imagine, and since I mentioned SOMA and Virus (1999) as inspirations for the production team in-story here's some pictures for vibes purposes.

It was really nice to take part and to get so much positive feedback from readers who took the time to comment! I have an inbox full of comments to reply to but just in general I really appreciated hearing people's thoughts on the stories. Thank you all! 🥰

[two-reflections]

Sorry for jumping in with something a bit off-topic, but I just wanted to give this a big YES! I love this take. Not canon, obviously, but this is why I love writing about my OC squad. When you get down to the squad level, you have a manageable number of characters without them all (or any of them) needing to have chapter-defining importance. It can be so much fun to follow individuals through a particular event, to come up with group dynamics and work out how that particular squad reacts to grief or joy, how a new member changes things, etc. Ideally, a squad should exist in perfect harmony. Unfortunately, people don't quite work like that. Some are best friends, some have disagreements, and relationships and hierarchies change over time.

I don't think the concept of a relationship as an exclusive, monogamous, permanent thing would make much sense to an Astartes. A character who tries his hardest to stay by his squad or favourite brother's side to the point that he passes up a promotion? Sure, that's fun drama. But "settling down" is impossible, and grief is inevitable. Makes for some great hurt/comfort and relationship negotiation though.

I also really love how Astartes don't seem to be built to be alone - tbh, that's one of the most human things about them. It's especially easy to have fun with that as a fan of the Salamanders because they tend to be affable and seem to pack-bond with anything if they can find a bit of common ground, (Agatone and Issak come to mind for canon, though the fic I received for Secret Sanguinala has SUCH a fun version of this involving a Necron Deathmark's head!) but imo, needing others seems to be true of most if not all Astartes, Loyalist and Chaos alike. Looking outside of the Salamanders, I'd say the poster boys for this are Barabas Dantioch and Alexis Pollux.

As for sexuality, I see most Astartes as ace too. Several aroace. I'm not convinced they'd be particularly sex-repulsed in general, though. I tend towards "they are largely disinterested in the standard biological concept of sex and are unlikely to desire or seek out sexual pleasure, but various forms of physical intimacy can be used to show trust or love between two or more Brothers. Some of these forms of physical intimacy may appear sexually charged, sensual or kinky." This may be a weird take too, but I tend to go with the headcanon that a standard loyalist Space Marine couldn't get hard easily even if he did decide to have penetrative sex.

(Caveat: I'm happy to ignore all of that for spicy fic. I hope people never stop writing about Space Marines pounding each other silly. And I do have that one guy who is in a somewhat conventional relationship, though his situation is extremely context-specific.)

Unfortunately, none of my own Salamander-centric stories are finished, and it feels a bit weird to gush about my squad when no one has any reason to care about them. So, let me just say that I wish there were more people writing about their squads and the relationships (loving or otherwise) within them. I know I'd enjoy lending and borrowing characters if more people were doing that, it's a lot of fun to see your character pop up in the background of someone else's story. And it can be inspiring to see what others are doing! I've fleshed out my techmarine now after a lovely Admech fan shared their OCs with me, for example.

Last note - Now I'm wondering what Space Marine relationship self-help books would look like. "The 5 Love Languages: Astartes Edition." "Techpriests are from Mars, Astartes are from [Planet Name]." "The Ethical Squad." And this one isn't about love but for the Sergeants, Captains and Chaplains out there, "How to Talk so Marines will Listen and Listen so Marines Will Talk."

Do you consider an Astartes/Astartes relationship to fit within canon lore? Of course without Slaaneshi corruption that is. Everyone goes on about how Space Marines are indoctrinated and modified to not want such things, even if their interactions are incredibly shippable. Just wanted to know your take!

In my opinion, it always depends on the definition of a relationship.

Astartes are no longer fully human, especially in their emotions. They get extra glands that produce extra hormones, have a number of interesting enzymes at their disposal that would kill a normal human being and, finally, have gone through an extremely inhumane child-soldier indoctrination. That stuff does things to people!

That's why I believe that a "normal" (in the sense of "100% like other people") relationship is no longer possible with them.

But something of their own, born out of their physiology and psychology? Absolutely!

Because the Emperor is not stupid and has the experience of millennia, which he certainly won't just leave out when he's assembling super soldiers again. He knows that a bond of love and friendship makes a squad incredibly effective. He has seen this in Sparta, in the Roman legion or with the Knights of the religious Orders. Small units that are not only built on function, but are emotionally connected, achieve much more! The whole is actually greater than the sum of the parts.

That's why I believe that Astartes tend towards squad-sized, tight-knit asexual-polyamorous constellations. Ideally, they love their squadmates unconditionally and do everything for each other. This can also lead to problems, as even super-soldiers still have a human foundation - but in general it's all very romantically orientated.

With variations depending on the legion/gene-seed, of course. In the case of Emperor's Children, even this bond manifests itself with a lot of competitive behaviour, while Ultramarines together compensate for their fear of not always having everything under control, sometimes turning into aggression and needing very clear hierarchies to feel comfortable.

As a result, Astartes find it difficult to operate individually for prolonged amounts of time - as you can see with He'Stan or Narek, for example. This quickly leads to depression.

But these are all just observations on my part - please take them with a grain of salt!

And it doesn't stop me from believing in romantic relationships (Lucius and Saul!) because I like drama.