#they are fundamentally different genre of novel so it is to be expected

[wasty28]

Reading Trash of the count's family and Debut or die at the same time is so funny sometimes.

In one book the MC curses, kidnap, rob, scam, beat up the bad guys at any given occasion but in the other he's like "these fucking bast-...,no let's calm down", I need to keep being level-headed.

[acerathia]

Side-Character changes the genre! | S. Todoroki

Summary:

Waking up in a novel you have once read, you realize something of utmost importance: your favorite character is destined to die as a tragedy! So, you decide to help him avoid this bleak fate with your knowledge of future events, nothing more, nothing less, right?

Wordcount: 14.6k

Read on AO3

Pairing:

Crown Prince!Todoroki Shoto / Jester!Reader

Tags/CW:

reader is a jester, royal au, but also, isekai, this is unserious, only small amounts of angst, failed assassination plot, pinning and getting pinned down, idiot x competent (both of them tbh)

Note:

I finished it earlier than i thought, this fic is unserious, and too long for me to edit with this headache, enjoy lol (shoutout to my derelict favorite o7)

The sky above you seems endless, as the clouds beckon you to just come closer. And oh, how much you want to, stretching your arm towards them in quiet desperation, straining against whatever force is pulling you down. The tips of your fingers barely brush the underside of the sky, too far away to ever reach again, when everything exploded in shards of pain and darkness.

*-*

A gasp shudders out of your body as you jolt upright, the blanket loosely thrown over your legs, barely covering you. It is almost like your restless body has refused the warmth of the slightly coarse covering. Taking a couple of breaths, your hand clutching your chest as if to support this tiny endeavor of gathering air. After you have exhaled a couple of times, the panic has finally subsided, leaving you with phantom aches and a dizzy mind. You don’t remember going to bed at all, the last moment seared into your mind is the motion of falling endlessly.

A sudden sharp pang drives through your skull as you try to remember more, making you gasp once again. Maybe this isn’t the ideal time to try and dive into the last memories. Rather, you begin looking around, trying to discern if this place is in any way recognizable to you. Because it for sure is not a hospital room. It seems like you have woken up in a tiny hut, one space containing the bed you’re currently residing in, a table with only one chair and a kitchen space. The bright windows show you the depths of the forest, leaves brushing against the pane of glass. There is nothing else, the place almost looking neglected, empty, unlived in. Who might have brought you to this place? You don’t remember any of your acquaintances mentioning anything about a cabin in the woods.

You brush the blanket fully away, sliding off the small bed. Your bare feet meet the ground, and you expect yourself to flinch at the cold touch, yet, your body seems accustomed to the slight chill against your skin. You furrow your eyebrows slightly at this, but you decide to ignore whatever your body is doing right now, especially as you in fact do not mind having a little more resistance to the cold than usual.

With careful steps, you begin to walk around the confined space, looking for any possible clue about your current whereabouts. But you find nothing but untouched dust, and a mirror. Curiosity gets the best of you, and you walk up to the mirror until you can see your reflection. And you see yourself as you’re used to. Only in different clothing, ones almost vintage, something one would wear at a renfaire, not at home. Brushing against the texture of the material, you decide that you quite like it, despite its rough style. Only you do wonder how you came to wear this piece in the first place.

Continuing to explore the nooks and crannies of the tiny space, you stumble across a newspaper. One folded neatly in a corner, almost like the person who put it there knew that you might find it. Your eyes immediately jump to the top corners, trying to look for a date. But the moment you find one, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to you. The numbers feel like they have been put there in a whole new context, one fundamentally different from the one you’re so used to. And rather than helping you decipher your current situation, it only made you a little bit more confused.

Yet, you do not have it in you to give up due to some jumbled numbers without meaning. So, you begin to leave through the newspaper. One page after the other, letting the paper slide against your skin. And you’re not even worried about papercuts, as the material seems to be soft around the edges, something of good quality, yet not high enough to warrant sharp edges.

Your eyes glance over the stories, never truly picking something up, the way the words are formed, structured feels familiar yet too foreign to truly properly digest. The only thing that catches your eye are two words: ‘Todoroki Shouto’

“What the fuck?”, you mumble to yourself, dipping your head closer to the paper to read the printed text containing that particular name. It takes you longer than you would have liked to finish reading it, but it still left you reeling.

Letting the newspaper sink, you stare out of the window, your thoughts running around into a chaos of your own making. There is no way that this is true, is it? That’s just an elaborate prank, it has to be. You could not explain it otherwise why apparently your favorite character of your favorite novel is real. Or rather, how you landed into their world.

A giggle escapes you. Running a hand through your hair you feel the need to rip at those strands, trying to feel if anything is real at all. There is no way that Todoroki Shouto is actually going to celebrate his birthday party in the next few days. Because even if everything is real, and the picture in the newspaper seems to tell you that it is, you could not have chosen a worse time to wake up to. Because as much as he’s your favorite character, Shouto is destined to die at the hands of his own brother, and soon. And with the usurpation of the throne by the so-called Dabi, the whole kingdom is going to drown in flames.

That means, not only is your beloved Shouto going to die, but you also are going to follow suit very soon. And you do not want to die before you even understand what has happened in the first place.

Slowly falling to your knees and clutching the newspaper to your chest, you curse the world. Why couldn’t you have reincarnated into a romfan? Or anything else with barely any conflict, why did it have to be a novel filled with intrigue and wars.

As much as you’ve always wanted to meet Shouto, you didn’t mean to follow him into the afterlife. This thought brings a sudden realization with it. Wait. If you’re in the same world as your beloved favorite character, not only can you meet him, but also, possibly save him from his future. You have poured endless hours into changing the canon in your head during your daydreams, if only to make him survive everything and have a happy ending. So why shouldn’t you dare implement those ideas into this world of a novel. And because this is the novel, everything you do is technically canon.

Another giggle, only to turn into slightly mischievous laughter. With this plot of yours, not only will you be able to save Shouto, but also yourself. Suddenly, all these hours reading canon-divergent fics are worth it. Now, what you need to do is actually trying to discern what parts of your memory are canon, and what are simply the illusions brought forth by senseless hope.

Standing up, you use the newspaper to dust yourself off, before you begin looking for a pen and any form of paper. For this, you had to dig deep in a couple of cabinets, their contents often nothing but dust. But you eventually found exactly what you are looking for. Taking your newly discovered writing utensils, you sit down at the only table in this place. And you begin to write everything you remember. During this undertaking, you had to strike through several points, as with deeper thought, they turned out to be parts of some of the fics you have read. And you can’t have that, as your plan has to depend on the actions of the canon, rather than the ones of the wishful thinking of yours.

The important parts of Shouto’s plot are easily recognizable. His mother has been residing at seaside to recuperate from the sudden illness King Enji has bestowed upon her, while his eldest brother, Touya, who once thought to be the rightful heir to the throne, that is until Shouto came and their father changed his mind for no apparent reason. Of course, he couldn’t simply give Shouto the title of crown prince, rather, Touya had disappeared suddenly during a border skirmish. As this was the perfect opportunity, they immediately declared him dead, now truly putting the younger Shouto on the pedestal of the crown prince. This new position of his meant that every assassination attempt has switched targets, attacking him at every corner. And the ones about to come will be the most vicious of his life, even leading to his eventual death.

You can’t have that of course. Exactly those assassination attempts are the ones you have to sabotage to ensure that he stays on top of everything when the final showdown begins. Only, during writing those points, you remembered that not only is Shouto incredibly beautiful and talented, deserving of unending happiness, but also that he is the crown prince. Which is honestly awesome, he manages to do all his training and education with such ease, nobody else deserves that title. The problem lies with you, of course. Because how are you supposed to protect Shouto from his demise, if you can’t even get into the palace? And you highly doubt that they would simply let you in, if you walked over to the gates and told the guards: ‘Uh, hello, his Highness, the crown prince Shouto is about to be assassinated, and I’m the only one who can protect him.’ That would be absurd, and land you into jail yourself as a prime suspect. No, you had to handle it in another way.

Your head meets the wood of the table with a hollow thud. There is no way to do that, it’s hopeless. You cannot even get into the palace, there is no way to manage that, how are you supposed to save your beautiful Shouto?

Worst of all, you begin to feel dizzy. As your mind is already spiraling about the future of your favorite character, you immediately assume that you’re dying, as not only does your head hurt but your stomach is also cramping. Until you hear a familiar grumble, and every single one of your thoughts come to a halt. And if your head weren’t on the table already, you would have considered hitting yourself again.

“Ah. I’m hungry…”

Getting back onto your feet, you begin to look through every cabinet and cupboard, hoping to have overlooked something during your search for your writing utensils. But exactly as you feared, nothing has appeared during the couple of minutes you have looked away. Leading to one shocking conclusion: there is no food in this entire place. You almost went to your knees once again, but you decided to be stronger than this. You will not allow yourself to starve to death, especially with such an important mission. Even if you have no idea how to muster any kind of food, when all you own are the clothes on your back and a dusty place.

With trembling fingers you open the last cupboard, a silent plea to the author to give you one chance to survive. But even your last hope is crushed when you discover it empty of any possible sustenance. The only thing inside the cupboard seems to be a small leather pouch, too small to contain enough food, if food at all. Still, you can’t ignore this random bag, and because your curiosity is stronger than any despair you might have felt, you grabbed the pouch and peeked into it. And the moment your eyes recognize the insides, you almost let it fall in shock. But your self-sufficiency stops you from doing so, eliminating any risk of losing this precious content.

Because the bag is filled with enough cold coins to almost last you a lifetime if you knew how to use it well. And well, as you plan on surviving as long as possible, you cannot risk even losing one single piece to the harsh environment. So, you only grabbed one single coin with the tips of your fingers before closing the pouch once again to safely stash it away. This one coin should be enough to feed you and for you to get some seeds to plant to grow your own garden, giving you the chance to not only be self-sufficient, but also the ability to sell your plants and get more money.

A grin spreads over your face at the thought of gathering more money for your future life. What these gold coins could do for you. You’d never have to worry about starving, and because you have this place, you will always have a home. With these gold coins you’re settled for life, and if you manage to get a bit more out of them, you could even get yourself some tiny luxuries.

Grabbing the gold coin firmly in your fist, which you shove into a pocket for extra protection, you make your way to the door, steadfast in your decision to get yourself some food and some seeds. In front of the door you find a pair of sturdy shoes, and you’re glad that there is no reason for you to venture outside with your bare feet alone. Without ever letting the gold coin go, you shove your feet one by one into their respective shoes and barely manage to tighten the cords to fit you properly. You’d hate to fall and stumble because you neglected to secure your feet properly. Every misstep could mean the loss of this precious coin.

After making sure that the coin is still deep in your grip, you finally venture outside the hut. Only to see nothing but the vastness of the forest beyond the little fenced in space. And for a moment you can’t help but hesitate in front of the small gate, as your mind tells you to not step any further, in fear of what might be lurking just beyond your door. Worst of all, you can’t even convince yourself to pull through because it seems like you have no memories about this place, about the way to the next village. There is no way for you to do this on your own, you have to turn back and find another way…

Your cheek burns with the aftereffect of your slight slapping. But the slight pain jolts you out of your slight panic. You will go through this forest now, you will get yourself some food and not starve to death, and you will eventually find a way to save your beloved Shouto. You will not allow a puny forest to get the best of you.

With this decision burning inside of you, you finally take the first step out of the gate. And the first thing you notice is a small way in front of you, paved by the time and the steps of the people. This little path is currently your best bet, so with a shrug, you begin to diligently follow it. Despite its rather small size, the path isn’t as bumpy or rough as one might have expected it to be, for which you are glad, as you’d rather avoid twisting your ankle because your mind is slightly distracted from the way in front of you.

It barely takes you any time to emerge from the forest unscathed, not even tired out in the slightest. You begin to feel a little bit stupid at your unnecessary panic earlier, considering how easy it actually was to arrive at this village.

For a moment you stay still at the edge of the woods, simply gazing at what’s front of you as the slight breeze brushes through your clothes. The sky seems to stretch endlessly in front of you, open and a brilliant blue, with only the palace poking its tip towards it, as if trying to grasp some part of the infinite. This immense building is but a shard compared to the size of the sky, of the land, and yet it is the biggest there is. And it is your future destination to deflect the worst possible future.

Seeing the palace in the distance only serves to solidify your motivation, your goals and desires. So, you take your first step towards the palace, towards the village, and you are filled with determination to do everything in your power to change the outcome, for Shouto, for yourself, and for everyone else.

Once you arrive at the village, you take your time to slowly discover this place. You wander along the streets, you peek into the windows of tiny shops, and you even enter several to get yourself a basket to fill with fresh food and the seeds you plan to plant in the near future. It feels a little stupid to have forgotten such a necessity like a basket, but you don’t have the time to feel embarrassed as you simply get what you desire and walk around with an unbridled curiosity.

After some time, you stop in front of a fountain, watching the water bubble and fizz with each second, and you decide to take a break right at the edge of it. You sit down and stretch your legs while watching the low buzz of people walking and talking. Your eyes never stand still, always wandering in every direction, slow and comfortable, with no real focus. That is until you catch sight of an announcement board filled with papers tacked to it. And for some reason you feel the urge to read through every single one of them, because no matter how much you try to avert your gaze, your eyes always wander back to it.

With a sigh you grab your basket and make your way towards the board, weaving between the masses, never in a hurry, but with a set destination in mind. Finally coming to a halt in front of the stacks of papers, you begin to read through them by simply glancing at the headline. Until one contains one of your self-input keywords ‘palace’. You immediately step closer and read the posting with much more focus.

‘Now hiring! We’re looking for a jester to join the troupe for the duration of the festivities for crown prince Shouto Todoroki’s birthday. This includes the ball and [… ] No prior experience needed.’

You immediately snatch the paper and clutch it in your hand. This is it, this is your chance to get into the palace and possibly save Shouto from the first assassination attempt. Maybe the author is actually gracing you with immense luck to survive this. Maybe they absolutely want Shouto to survive no matter what. Of course you’re supposed to take this chance, even if your humor may not be up to their standards, because you’re meant to survive. Nodding to yourself at this explanation of yours, you make your way to the address written onto the paper.

It doesn’t take long for you to arrive at the rather open space with a couple of people warming up and doing rather light tricks. Still, you couldn’t help but watch as these people play with fire as if it’s purely silk, and with silk like it’s water flowing out of their hands. And no matter how much work all these tricks seemed to be, they all appear to have a tremendous amount of joy, laughter erupting with every clumsy mistake, leading to nothing but a loud noise or a knot between their fingers.

After carefully wandering between these people, you try finding someone who does not look to be in the middle of a trick or a warm-up. And eventually you almost bump into two people simply having a conversation.

“Ah, excuse me? I’m here because I’ve seen you’re hi–”

“You’re hired! We’re so glad to have you on board, but you must know that you will carry the responsibility if the kind is angered due to any of your jokes. Now, let’s see, you can go grab the costume over there,” he points to a colorful cart, not even letting you have a word. “And then we’ll meet again here the morning of the ball to venture together to the palace, alright? Alright, great. See ya!”

He slightly shoves you towards the wagon, and you stumble slightly, as the barrage of information overwhelms you the tiniest bit, well a bit more than that. Still, you follow his directions and walk to the wagon, where you knock against the door, trying to get whatever you’re supposed to and maybe some more information.

A head pokes out of the opening door, and the moment you both meet eyes, the younger boy breaks out in a grin. The door immediately swings open and he jumps out, drawing a circle around you before he finally stops in front of you, hand outstretched.

“Well, nice to meet you, I’m Hide, the one responsible for giving all these people fitting clothes. I assume you’re our new jester?”, he grabs your hand and shakes it, as you introduce yourself with a name.

“Great, let’s see, we should have something that fits you just right,” and as fast as he appeared, he dips back into the wagon, and you hold yourself back from peeking in while something crashes inside.

It doesn’t take long for him to emerge once again, this time with a slight wobble in his steps. Once again, he just acts before explaining anything, pushing a bundle of fabric into your chest, and you hurry to hold it before it slips from your grasp.

“That’s your costume. You know, shirt, pants and even a mask. We don’t want to risk you getting arrested once out of your costume. The whole being a jester at court thing is dangerous enough as it is.”

“Wait, what do you mean, ‘dangerous’?”, you interrupt him, because that’s the second time someone mentions something like that, and considering that you only talked to two people this whole time, it is quite a lot.

He shrugs. “Well, king Enji is not famous for being a funny guy after all. Many are scared to perform because they think he might just get rid of them. But the court has certain rules, and a jester at court has technically some immunity. Even if not, well, absolute or anything. So, you kind of have to protect yourself, we give you the mask, you try to keep trouble minimal. We survive, yippie!”

You blink at his explanation and slowly nod. It does make sense, as kind Enji is feared due to his hot temperament and his mercilessness, but well you’d rather not risk your life to burn under his scrutiny. A sigh escapes you, well, what one does for love, or something. You really have no other choice but to pull through, because there is no way you would get into the ball otherwise.

So, you accept these clothes and consequently the role as the jester for this troupe, even if temporary. Stowing the bundle into your basket, you decide it’s time to go home. You bid Hide farewell and you make your way back, a sudden exhaustion creeping up your back.

Maybe you have bitten much more than you could chew. How could someone like you even think of changing the outcome of the plot. Even with your money, do you even possess a chance to counteract the numerous assassination attempts? Or are they going to catch you and blame you for everything in the end, making every single step of yours for naught? Oh, how much you desire your favorite character to survive and to live out his life in peace and bliss, but are you the right person to help him do so?

Maybe it’s just enough if you act as a stepping stone to his way to happiness. Maybe you should be happy with that, never wanting more than to see him truly smile after every adversity is overcome.

Maybe you will pull it off, even if barely, You will do anything for that smile, truly. A breath, the thud of the basket against the wooden ground, the rough wool touching your face, and you allow the darkness to overcome you.

*-*

As agreed, you meet the troupe at the same place at a later date. You’re in your costume already, the material softer against your skin as your usual clothing is. The colors are bright and inviting, perfect for the role of a jester, as you would have to pull everyone’s attention towards you. Normally you would hate to receive so much attention, all those eyes scrutinizing your every move, but the weight of the mask against your nose and brows help with ignoring those. Nobody would be able to recognize you outside of your attire, the cap ’n bells covering the rest of your head as the liliripes hang around your face. The costume truly is serving its purpose: to hide your identity.

Yet, during the walk towards the palace, you’re glad to be able to keep your own sturdy shoes. In case something happens, you still would have the right footwear to react, instead of the usual jester shoes with their curling toes.

Finally entering the hall, bypassing the guards by taking the servant’s entrance, you almost stop in your tracks as you marvel over the place. Red and white flowers flow down the walls, their scent tickling the tip of your nose. The huge tables framing the hall are filled with art made of food, and ice sculptures, ones that do not seem to melt no matter the temperature. As you continue to follow the troupe, your eyes wander to the ceiling, only to be awed by the paintings depicting some sort of story you’re unable to decipher, their colors still vibrant underneath the light of the huge chandelier, one seemingly made of pure stars.

You barely notice when the group stops to prepare their acts in their designated area. But once you do, you keep to yourself, standing at the edge and simply watching these people. As your role does not need any preparation or any special space, your thoughts wander while still looking around the hall. And you nod slightly. That’s how the rich live. Very extravagant. You wouldn’t mind experiencing life like them, but you’re also content with simply having a secure future. Well, that’s as long as you manage to successfully help Shouto survive.

Slowly, the hall begins to fill and the music sways through the air, inviting everyone to dance, or to simply relax. As for you, you begin walking around, saying a joke there, doing a tiny prank here. Just whatever is in your capacity without making a big deal out of your presence. Especially due to your lack of experience, you’d hate to commit an irredeemable slip up. So, you focus on simply changing up the mood wherever it’s needed. All while you are waiting for your favorite character to finally make his appearance.

There have been a couple other characters you recognize, if only by the way they mutter or bark their words. Yet, you don’t care for them in particular. Because you know that none of them can be a match to Shouto, be it in appearance or character. Your favorite character truly has the noblest soul out of all the existing characters, and you shall make sure that he can bloom to show his true potential, unlike the outcome of the novel.

You shake your head in disapproval at the simple thought of the novel which brought ruination onto Shouto. Cursing the author in your head, you almost miss the entrance of the crown prince.

“Announcing His Royal Highness, the Crown Prince Shouto Todoroki,” the lord steward diligently does his job as he announces his arrival to the entire hall.

Immediately the whole mass of people turns to face the entrance, almost afraid to miss the chance to get a glimpse. And you’re no different. You even feel the urge to jump to get an even better look. But the thought is unnecessary, as movement sweeps through the people. bowing and curtsying, freeing the view towards him.

His appearance seems to strike you down. Even from afar you’re able to see the smooth, unblemished skin, the straight nose, plush lips and soft cheeks which slowly turn into a sharp jawline. His eyes look like the ocean at different times of the day, his lashes fluttering like a halo. His hair looks like a breeze is caressing him. He’s positively glowing, and you’re unable to move, until someone grabs you, pulling you down.

“Do you want to be beheaded?” the person, Hide, whisper-shouts at you and you realize that for a short moment you were the only one who didn’t greet him properly, practically risking your neck for a glimpse of him.

But his face is imprinted behind your eyelids and you doubt you could ever forget such a sight.

“Worth it,” you mumble, wincing when Hide strengthens his grip around your arm. But all you could do is stay silent with your lips slightly jutting forward. Because even if you don’t regret it doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a foolish thing to do. You only wish you had enough time to see the rest of him too. Maybe that’s the thing you’re actually regretting.

After Shouto has finished his walk through the hall, arriving in front of the dais to greet his father. And as expected, his greeting is short, curt, almost rude. But it’s known that despite him being the crown prince, he does not particularly like his father. Understandably so, if someone asked you for your opinion. King Enji is strong and is able to protect the kingdom with his own power, yet his destructive tendencies have affected a lot of the common folk, especially the ones living on the border of the country.

Of course, as you had read every tidbit about Shouto, you’re well aware how this piece of— this king had treated Shouto and his siblings. Such things aren’t common knowledge though, and you would not dare to utter such facts directly. Well, not as long as your life could be on the line. But even if you wouldn’t start some rumors about him, everyone will eventually know the truth once the allegedly deceased first prince returns.

But you hope to at least avoid it, because the appearance of the so-called ‘Dabi’ is in fact a massive death flag for your favorite character, and you’d rather have king Enji keep his reputation than risk Shouto getting killed.

You can’t help but giggle at the way Shouto immediately turns away to get away from his father. He takes a couple long strides towards the table, and you purse your lips when you notice how long his legs are, and how his thighs look in this particular pair of pants.

You keep your eye on him, not because you’re admiring his profile and how sophisticated he looks, no way, but because you still remember a certain plot point being carried out during this specific ball. But even if you do know that he is going to get poisoned, the novel never specified which glass or beverage had caused that incident. And you hardly could just go up to him every time he picks up the glass and takes a sip before he does, that would be ridiculous. How could you even think of indirectly kissing him, that’s bordering on being blasphemous.

So, all you could do is just keep looking at him and trying to discern if something is wrong with whatever is in his hand. That’s how you watch how he nods at something his conversation partner says, as he slowly raises the glass filled with deep red liquid. And for some reason you feel some sense of deja vu, a shiver buzzing down your spine, and you speed up your steps towards him, sincerely hoping that you might reach him just in time.

You realize too late that you wouldn’t be able to stop perfectly in front of him, so you end up bumping into him. But you take this chance to slap the glass out of his hand, continuing to stumble and to flail your arms, before acting like you found your balance again. You immediately put a hand in front of your eyes when you turn back in his direction, and you utter the first thing that comes to mind.

“Excuse me, your Highness, your beauty has simply blinded me,” you bow before you make your departure as swift as possible, hiding between the groups of people.

You’re tempted to curl into a ball and hide behind one of those heavily decorated pillars, but you reckon that would be too obvious and you would only stand out more than you already do. So, you simply continue to weave between all these people and do your job, this time without bumping into anyone.

Luckily, after some time, you realize that there are no guards looking to arrest and kill you and you start to relax. And as soon as the party begins to slow down, you prepare your leave too, wondering how you might infiltrate the palace once again to offer your help hidden in the shadows. Even if theoretically he does not need any help, because he did not get poisoned, which leads to him being more resistant to the subsequent assassination attempts. But the thing that worries you the most is, that this is a novel, who knows how it might retaliate if only to get to the destined end. So, you’d rather not risk stopping your helpful attempts at distracting the assailants.

Of course, you’re not implying that Shouto needs your help, he’s an amazing character, strong and noble, he definitely can handle himself. But you reckon that your in-depth knowledge of the novel might just give him a better advantage against his villainous brother. Even if you understand Dabi’s motivations, you cannot forgive him for making your favorite character suffer like this, that’s the way of a fan.

Slowly, you make your way towards the exit, the troupe probably assembling outside where there’s more free space to do so. Your attention is too focused on the problems of the future, your eyes trying to see if there’s a hidden servant's passage you could use sometime, you don’t notice the person in front of you until you bump into them.

You stumble slightly, barely catching yourself, and you prepare to either apologize or to say something so out of pocket, the other forgets about what just happened. Yet, the moment you look up, you freeze, as you encounter the beautiful face of Shouto. His beauty is enough to make a poet weep and lament, and sadly you’re no poet, so all you could do is stare. His features are much more insane up close, and even face to face, all you can see is him sparkling. His eyes lock with yours, and you feel like you’re getting swept up in an ice storm, and boy, you would have never been more glad to freeze to death if that’s the last thing you see.

Up close, you notice how broad his shoulders are, how his clothes show his lean, yet well-adorned silhouette, and you have to pull yourself together to not make your stare more noticeable. You immediately prepare to run away, but before you could even think of a way to escape, and you were almost tempted to jump out of the window, you feel his fingers carefully grab your wrist.

There’s no skin contact, as he’s been wearing gloves, but the warmth is the same nonetheless and you feel your veins boil and melt. His grip isn’t bruising, but also not something one can escape so easily. And even if you could, you doubt you would forcefully break the contact. (And you can’t help but be amazed at how a character could be so warm.) So, you follow him wordlessly to wherever he’s dragging you to.

Once you arrive at a secluded spot, he lets you go, and while you mourn the loss of the touch, you don’t let it show on your face. You simply face him and wait for him to say what he wants to say. And you sincerely hope he’s not going to give you the death sentence.

“I want you to stay at the court as my court jester,” he finally says, his eyes roaming over the mask on your face.

You cock your head in confusion, his sudden request something you surely did not foresee. But it is the ideal opportunity for you, as with an official occupation at the palace, you would have access to almost every part of it. Yet–

“Why?”

He slightly shrugs. “My father the king hated you and was annoyed by your presence, that’s reason enough to keep you by my side.” After Shouto explains his reasoning, which makes so much sense with his characterization, you can’t help but shudder at the thought of being at the risk of the king’s wrath. And he seems to notice it, so he adds: “You do not have to worry. I will ensure your safety. My father and his lackeys shall not harm you in any way.”

You cross your arms deep in thought. Shouto is the crown prince and he does wield rather impressive power in the palace. He could definitely keep you safe, but if he truly can keep you safe from his own father is something you can’t help but doubt. But you suppose that this is the only way to stay close to him without breaking in. And as long as you avoid direct confrontation with Enji you should be fine.

You don’t agree immediately, rather, you act like any person with a job offer would, you ask about the benefits, perks and the pay. And unsurprisingly, Shouto is rather generous with his offer, so you end up accepting after taking everything you could get your hands on. You had to make enough to survive after all this is over, and why be stingy?

With that, he leads you back to the exit of the hall, telling you that he’s expecting you tomorrow in the morning. You nod and bow before you hurriedly leave the place. Because no matter how you might’ve acted in front of Shouto, you’re still reeling from the direct experience of seeing him up close and even having a proper conversation. This is much better than simply reading about him.

Returning to the troupe, you make the walk back with them with small talk about how the evening has been for them. And even if you didn’t directly tell anyone about the offer from the crown prince, it seems like Hide is kind of aware of it, as he tells you to keep the outfit, as a parting gift. You thank him profusely, as with this outfit you might be able to keep your real identity a secret for some time.

*-*

The next morning you wake up at dawn, simply staring at the ceiling without moving an inch. You know, you should slowly make your way towards the palace, but you feel hesitant. Due to your interference yesterday evening, the plot has begun to change, but from your experience in reading novels, you’re aware that whatever force is controlling this world can forcibly change the plot back to how it was, especially if you continue to meddle. And you can’t help but worry. There’s no way you’re going to be a challenge for all the assassins or attempts. You’re just a random character now, with no abilities to your name. You would be worried about your life, but you remember that death awaits you either way, so you suppose it is better to at least help Shouto to the best of your capabilities.

With a jerk you sit up and begin to prepare for your departure. You reckon there’s no need for you to take your meagerly belongings with you, so you simply put on your costume and head out.

Arriving at the palace gates, you hesitate once again. He did tell you to come, but how are you to enter the palace in the first place? Did he tell the guards? Are you supposed to introduce yourself?

For a moment, you just stand there, probably looking a little lost, as one of the guards simply walks up to you and looks you up and down. And without a word, he puts his hand on your shoulder, sudden and heavy, to push you through the gate. Wordlessly he returns to his post, leaving you looking around, confused as to why that just happened.

But in the end, it doesn’t really matter, so you walk towards the palace. And instead of entering through the main entrance like you did yesterday, you make your way to the entrance for the servants, as you are technically one now, not a guest.

You find the servants entrance easily, and you thank every author for including maps in their novels. If you hadn’t studied the layout of the palace while reading to understand the details, you might’ve taken a long time to locate the inconspicuous door.

Entering the place, you look around for a moment, before you spot a maid. You did contemplate if you should just go to Shouto on your own, but you reminded yourself that this might look extremely suspicious, in addition to your behavior yesterday. Of course you can’t just wander around even if you know the palace, people might question why you know the layout in the first place.

So, you approach the maid, making sure to make some noise to avoid scaring her. You ask her to lead you to Shouto, and while she does give you a narrow-eyed look, she complies, but not without informing a guard first. You shrug internally at that. Very reasonable of her, if you’re honest.

You follow through the long halls until she tells you to wait as she knocks and enters the room. This isn’t his room, rather, it’s his workplace. And you can’t help but sigh, how could the cruel king give Shouto his work. He is the crown prince, but also, that’s not his job to clean up after the king. Worst thing is, that his underlings are pressuring Shouto, telling him it’s what he’s supposed to do. So, he ends up almost overworking. You can’t imagine how bad it might’ve been if the poison had been added to the overwork he experiences. (Well, you can, but you don’t want to. How could you even think about your favorite character suffering like that.)

After a short while, you’re allowed to enter the room, and as you do, you immediately bow at the sight of Shouto. Partly because you had to and partly because you want to mentally prepare yourself before looking at him directly. You might just freeze again if you see him in his normal attire. While staring at the soft carpet with the intricate details, you can’t help but imagine what he might be wearing at this very moment.

You don’t get the chance to let your imagination run freely for a long time, as he tells you to straighten up with a greeting. Your eyes lock onto him, and you sincerely hope that no one can see where your sight is looking, as you immediately notice the white and fluffy shirt, accentuating not only his broad shoulders and his lean physique, but also frames his revealed assets in such a way you cannot keep looking at this space without imploding.

Averting your eyes, you look at his face, and as you’ve seen him twice already, one time even up close, you thought the effect on you might lessen. That turns out to be not true, as you feel blinded by his beauty once again. So, you resort to simply looking over his shoulders, your eyes twitching as you want to look at him but also avoid looking at him at the same time.

You can’t tell if he notices your conundrum, but you hope he doesn’t. There would be nothing more embarrassing if Shouto of all people realize how you feel about him. At least nobody can hear your beating heart if they’re not too close.

The moment he begins to talk is the moment your strength almost crumbles and you barely hold onto yourself, not doubling over as you hear how smooth and calm his voice sounds. You were too nervous to focus on it when he had approached you last evening, but his voice reverberates not only in the silent room, but also in your chest cavity. It’s slightly husky, and you reckon it’s due to the lack of talking he had done today. You try your best to focus on his words rather than on his melodious voice.

He had begun to explain what is expected of you. Such as performances during events and occasionally during meal time. He explicitly allows you to make a fool out of the king, practically giving you the official jester’s privilege. Now you’re only missing a marotte, you giggle to yourself. Of course you don’t tell him that, as being able to get on king Enji’s nerves is your current job and your shared goal. Maybe you should sometimes imply to know some of his secrets, considering that you’re under protection, if only to get him a little more paranoid.

Outside of your public appearances you’re allowed to go as you please as long as you’re ready at a moment's notice. Food and lodging are of course included in your job, you just have to go to the kitchen at certain times to receive your meals.

This is more freedom than you had anticipated, but that’s even better. That way no one can suspect you as you lounge around the whole place, trying to pick up on possible assassination attempts. As long as you don’t get caught in the several secret passages throughout the palace. This job is such a good deal, you don’t even dare haggle about your salary and possible severance pay, rather you just thank him and leave the room, not only escaping your collapse at the prolonged sight of him, but telling him that you’re keen on exploring the place.

In the halls you take a couple of steps before you lean against the wall, trying to calm your heart. This can’t be healthy, you’re meant to watch Shouto from a safe distance, not this up close. You’re going to get heart palpitations if it continues like that.

You manage to shake this nervousness off, but just as you were going to continue your meaningless walk, you notice a sudden change of guards in front of his door. This is normal, if it were to happen at certain times, but as such change is supposed to happen at regular intervals, ones you’re aware of, this one is rather sudden.

Squinting, you continue to observe the new guard. The one who simply should stand in front of the door. Yet, he is turning towards the door, hand on the handle. Before you know it, you’re already by his side, ramming your foot into the back of his knee, making him lose balance. You don’t give him enough time to get it back, as you shove him down. He crashes to the ground and you immediately get onto his chest, squatting down to get a better look on his face.

The guard curses you and you just cock your head with a grin. And it seems like the noise has caught the attention of the people inside the room, as the door opens to reveal Shouto and some of his advisors.

You jump off of the guard and bow. “Greetings again, it seems like someone wasn’t satisfied with, well, I don’t really know what exactly.” You face the lying guard once again. “What did you not like about working at the palace? The view is impeccable if I may say so myself.”

With view you mean the ability to see crown prince Shouto on a regular basis of course. If you could see his face every day, you would never suffer from any illnesses for the rest of your life.

Acting you’re listening seriously as the guard curses you under his breath and you nod as if in understanding. “I get it, Your Highness, he has been plotting treason! Why else would he spout such nonsense even I cannot repeat.”

For a moment, all Shouto does is look at you, like he wants to know what’s going inside your head. Despite your weird behavior, he complies and lets the guard be dragged away, all while he’s shouting how the king has made a mistake. His cursing is evidence enough, even if you did fabricate some of it earlier, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Meanwhile you’re almost squirming under Shouto’s gaze, avoiding any eye contact, as you know the moment you directly look at him, your heart might just explode. Especially if he was doing something like leaning against the frame of the door, or holding his weight against it, or simply standing in front of the door, all confidence and strength. Your mind begins to imagine all different possible poses you might find him in.

Luckily, instead of interrogating you, he instead simply dismisses you and returns to his office without another word, sparing you a direct glance in his direction.

The door closes and you wait a couple of seconds before pulling out your hands from behind your back. A dagger is glinting when the light refracts against it, almost like a promise for its sharpness. This is something you have just purloined from the assassin. It’s a little hand trick to make it disappear from the sight of others, especially if they’re distracted by something else.

You’re thankful some of your skills remain, despite being in a strange world, as this short moment reminded you that even if you had managed to stop two attempts as of now, you’re actually completely defenseless without a proper weapon. And you couldn’t really ask the prince to hand over something so dangerous into the hands of someone like you, a mere stranger, only occupying this place for some momentary gain.

With a sigh, you push the dagger into your waistband, its tip dangerously digging into your thigh. You should’ve gotten the sheath too, but your fingerplay was simply not as fast as you were used to. Well, as long as you don’t move wrong, the chance of getting hurt is rather slim, so you’ll take it.

After making sure the dagger is not visible through the spacious and thick fabric of your costume, you continue your walk through the halls almost like nothing has happened.

*-*

Boredom is going to kill you at this point. Since your official employment, there had been no chance to actually work, as there were no events planned and Shouto was and still is swamped in his duties as heir. At least he’s healthy enough to work, you suppose.

At first, you didn’t even mind doing nothing, but at some point there truly was nothing to do. You have explored every possible nook and cranny of the palace, and it seems like the assassination attempts have ceased for the moment, because everything has been pretty quiet. Nothing was suspicious. Well, this might’ve been your influence, partly. Because you’re pretty sure the people behind those assassins probably did not expect their attempts to fail like that. So they’re backing up for the moment, if only briefly.

That’s what you thought, and the reason why you have started exploring the garden. You were enjoying the soft breeze and the smell of flowers it carries, until you accidentally stumble across a pavilion, one which Prince Shouto has been resting under, drinking tea on his own.

Coming to an abrupt halt, you immediately bow and begin to back away so as to not disturb him any further. But before you can properly disappear, Shouto locks eyes with you, and even if you don’t freeze up this time, you don’t get the possibility to get away, as he calls you to step closer.

“Please, join me,” he simply instructs as he gestures towards the empty seat opposite of him.

His words don’t seem like a command, rather they sounded genuine, and who are you to say no to snacking with a snack. So, you bow again and take a seat.

Despite being excited about eating with him, you can’t help but avoid directly looking at him, clenching your muscles at the mere thought of being perceived by him.

You’re not sure he noticed the mix of excitement and nervousness swirling through you, but either way, he simply tells you to eat whatever you want as he sips on his still hot tea. Peeking at him, your heart begins to race at the sight of him holding his cup so elegantly. Better said, his whole posture is absolutely regal and you think you might see rays of light radiate off of him.

Grabbing anything in front of you and almost clumsily stuffing it into your mouth, you try to distract yourself from the perfect being sitting right in front of you. You really can’t say anything rash in his presence, or you might regret it, not only for the rest of your life, but for all eternity.

That’s what you decided on, to be a calm rational person. Sadly, your body didn’t agree with you, because the moment your eyes meet his, the crumbs of whatever sweet thing you have stuffed into your mouth slip down the wrong path, and you begin to choke. At first, you tried to free yourself from their hold discreetly, and you sure are glad that the mask is covering your face, because you doubt your predicament isn’t visible there, but these particles of dough are determined to make your life worse and worse. Because at some point you could not hold back anymore and just began to cough. And it isn’t just a normal, ‘one cough and you’re free' type of cough, it’s a ‘you’re going to eject your lungs’ type of cough. You barely had enough time to turn your face and to bury it into the crook of your arm before the attack started.

Tears are running down your cheeks, and you’re pretty sure a big part of them are from your broken heart. How could you embarrass yourself in front of Shouto like that? This is even worse than being the jester, a person meant to make people laugh, this situation isn’t even particularly funny, just horrible. How could you show your face after all this?

A cup of tea is carefully put into the palms of your hands, the porcelain warm against your skin, but there’s another warmth much more potent resting against the back of your hands, guiding you to take small sips from the tea. After the aromatic drink frees the blockage in your throat, you take a deep breath, relishing in the way you can breathe again.

That is until you feel that kind of pressure on your hands, which should not be caused by a simple cup of tea. You almost hesitate, but when you finally look up, you immediately lock eyes with Shouto, but this time, he’s so much closer to you than you would have anticipated. If your mouth was still filled with something sweet, you likely wouldn’t have only choked, but probably even done something much worse, you don’t even feel the need to think about it.

In your haze of admiration and embarrassment you nearly miss the way he almost imperceptibly furrows his eyebrows. You immediately hurry to calm his worries.

“Your Highness! I’m totally fine now, please, do not worry. You might develop wrinkles way earlier this way,” the last part is mumbled, as you lift a hand towards his face. But before you could even press the pads of your fingers against the crease to soften them, you stop in your tracks. You really shouldn’t do this, as it’s not your place, you’re not meant to get close to him or to touch him. Even if he is more than a simple character to you, even if he’s the realest thing you would ever have in your life.

You open your mouth to say something, you’re not even sure what exactly, but before you could do something about this tension between you (his hands still clutching yours, he’s still crouching in front of you, looking up to you in worry, like you’re worth the worry and–), there’s a crash.

Something has flown past the both of you, barely missing your bodies and hitting the table filled with food. The table which now has an arrow embedded into its wood. There’s no time to hesitate as you let the cup drop, porcelain shattering on the ground at the same time as you throw yourself onto Shouto, pushing him to the ground. Another arrow grazes your back this time, only noticeable by the breeze and the sting of split skin.

There are no other arrows following, as the moment the first arrow has arrived under the pavilion the surrounding knights have immediately assessed the situation and began their own attack. But before they could catch the culprit, it seems like they escaped just after the second arrow had been shot.

Only when you’re sure about the safety of the situation, do you roll away, letting yourself fall onto the cold ground, far from the spilled tea. Pain shoots up your spine, but you ignore it as you watch the knights fuss over Shouto. Shouto who is safe and merely with some scrapes from the dodge.

Slumping against the cold marble, as relief floods through you. Nothing of importance has been harmed, they didn’t succeed, once again. And you hope that this whole ordeal will lead to the security around Shouto tightening. Even if it means you might lose your position due to your foggy, practically non-existent past.

You simply take a breather on the ground, trying to ignore the possible consequences affecting you, because if you get kicked out, how are you supposed to stay by his side, uh, to protect him. There’s no way you’d want anything more. Even if he is the most attractive man you have ever encountered in your whole life, but that’s another whole bomb to defuse, you’ve got bigger problems. At least the knights have taken Shouto inside already, not even giving you the chance to see him to say goodbye or to admire his face, you mean, to make sure he’s alright.

Silence coats the once rowdy pavilion, only you’re left behind. And you don’t mind, you shouldn’t, because in their eyes, you’re no one. No one but someone who’s supposed to bring them joy at the exact right moments. Nothing more. Even if you put effort into being more, it simply won’t matter. And you know it, you know it and you’ve accepted it. That’s why you slowly sit up again, your fingers trying to touch the torn skin at your back, barely grazing it before sharpness drills into you. Yet, the wound isn’t deep, merely a touch of the blade. Something you can simply leave to heal on its own. If it leaves a scar, then it does so, as there’s no reason for you to abhor or be scared of leaving marks on yourself. That is simply life.

Yet, you don’t immediately stand up to go back. You simply stay. Trying for a moment to forget the impending doom and the task of having to stitch your shirt back into one piece. You simply stay and let the air cool you down until the tips of your fingers feel stiff. Only then do you get on your feet, intent on finally going back. But before you could even leave the pavilion in the first place, a knight taps your shoulder.

Turning around to face him, you notice that he doesn’t have the air of a knight, rather one of a noble, with the way his green eyes sparkle and his equally colored hair is styled. You also notice his clothes, which do have some elements of an armor, yet too elegant to be truly one. He smiles at you.

“Excuse me, but Shouto would like to see you,” he tells you simply, but you can see in the way his eyes wander over you that many more thoughts are bubbling over in his head. He’s simply accustomed to keeping them inside, rather than sounding them out.

You simply nod, and you’re silently grateful he wasn’t expecting you to actually bow to him. Because it would be so embarrassing to do so, only for him to notice your ripped shirt. So, you’re readily following him back to the palace and to–

The door you’re standing in front of is not his office. You glance at the noble in front of you as he knocks on the door. It opens and he invites you in, yet stays outside himself.

A moment, a blink, and you do as you’re told, entering something akin to a parlor. And there he is, Shouto, in another set of clothes and impeccably clean, but safe nonetheless. He’s sitting on one of the couches, and you simply bow the moment you see him.

He murmurs your name and you look up. “Take a seat.”

For a moment, you hesitate, unsure if you’re actually allowed to comply, as sitting on the same eye level as royalty is not something you should actually dare (even if that would be your second time, but that only makes it worse, as it could develop into a habit. You don’t want that).

Yet, you follow his command, because he continues to simply look at you, and you could not bear to have his gaze on you for such a prolonged time. So, you sit down on the edge of the couch opposite of him.

But it seems to have been the wrong move, as a small furrow appears between his eyebrows, a small crease, barely noticeable on his smooth face. Upon seeing the change on his face, you tense, ready to immediately stand up and to leave, or do whatever Shouto wants from you.

Before you could throw yourself off the soft cushions, he stands up and walks around the tea table, only to take a seat by your side.

You turn to face him at such a speed, your mask almost got flung away. And you wish you could express yourself with speech bubbles instead of words to articulate ‘???’ properly. But alas, all that comes out of your mouth is a series of warbles, akin to a keysmash. You’re almost inclined to pushing yourself towards the farthest end of the couch, especially with the way his eyes wander over the lower half of your face and–

“Take it off,” he instructs you before you could do anything rash.

“My mask? Your Highness, I’m sorry, but I won’t comply with that, my identity–”

“I mean your shirt. Take it off.”

In a weird reflex, you cross your arms in front of your body. “Wh-What’s that supposed to mean, Your Highness?”

He glances at your arms before looking back at you with a new furrow between his eyebrows. “You got hurt earlier and need medical attention. I will just do that.”

“Oh.”

If the blood didn’t rush into your face due to your surprise, then embarrassment will do the trick just fine. How could you misunderstand him like that, Shouto would never do something like, like that!

You purse your lips, another thought popping into your head. “Your Highness, not to be rude, but why would you of all people do that?”

A slight tilt to his head and his hair falls beautifully onto his cheeks, and the sun hits at the right angle and he glows. You’re doing your best to not straight-up stare at him wide-eyed and amazed by his sheer beauty. You’re so focused on appearing normal, you almost miss his answer.

“Well, you did protect me, so I suppose the injury is due to me, and I cannot leave it just like that.”

You furrow your eyebrows. Technically it’s not his fault, it’s theirs and maybe a little bit yours for being reckless. But definitely not his. But you don’t know how to explain how you’re always on guard due to the rebels always targeting him and how you wanted to protect him from the very beginning. So, you simply comply.

Of course, you don’t take your shirt off, rather, you turn your back towards him with a murmured apology and lift the hem just enough for the wound to be visible. Clenching your teeth, you wait for his next actions.

A cold burn seeps through the edges of the wound and your skin feels hot and cold and tingly. This sensation continues in small jumps all over the open skin and you barely manage to breathe through it, hissing silently between your teeth when the worst part got touched by the cold fire of pure alcohol.

The dabbing stops and you barely feel his touches after that. Nothing but a ghost as the dressing is carefully taped to your back, covering the wound to protect it.

Only after the sensations of the tips of his fingers vanish (you think you might’ve felt them graze your skin a little bit more than necessary, but that surely is nothing but your wishful thinking), do you let your shirt fall back into place. Turning back to face him again, you smile.

“Thank you so much, Your Highness,” you say with a bow, trying to express your gratitude properly to him, but you suppose only actions will truly do that work for you.

For a moment, he just looks at you, gaze unfazed and calm. Just as Shouto opens his mouth to say something, does it seem like uncertainty is tainting his dazzling pupils. Closing his mouth again with a sigh and shutting his eyes, he simply dismisses you without any other explanation.

You’re almost keen to just stay and ask him for his motivations, but you know that no matter how close you feel to him, it’s all in your head and you’re nothing more than a mere subject of his future kingdom. So, you leave. Barely time for a simple glance towards him, meeting his eyes for a second, before the door closes behind you.

Despite your need to get away, to put some distance between you and him, you just stand in front of the door. The last attempt made you realize how close death could be, how precocious you have been acting, thinking that your mere presence could actually be of help to anyone, when actually all you were is an obstacle, standing between the assassins and Shouto. And while it might prove useful, to be a shortlasting barrier, the dull ache in your back made you realize that you want to be more, need to be more.

Something clicks in your mind, something that changes how you view this world, this world that once consisted of fictional beings merged into something more. A world filled with life and death and opportunities and missed chances. And you’re in the middle of it.

Straightening your back, you shove the rest of the implications to the side. There’s no time for you to actually dive deeper into this realization, what this could mean for you especially. Rather, you begin to walk down the hallway, towards the training hall, a certain objective in mind.

*-*

The sun is barely peeking behind the horizon, almost blinding you as you take a breather. At the beginning of your random training regime, you had barely managed to finish one lap around the training grounds before you started to lose your breath. Now, you just finished your second lap and your lungs started to burn towards the end of it. So, you suppose that you gained some stamina by just desperately putting one foot after the other. And normally, you would start another lap until you feel like you’re about to collapse, but today you want to try something new.

At least new to this body. You’re still not quite sure if this is your body or if it’s just one that looks like you. Especially because it feels like some muscle memory of your old life is still ingrained in you, but of a lower quality than you’re used to. That means you need to try everything with caution and act like it’s your first time to avoid any serious harm.

That’s why you had concentrated your efforts on building stamina and muscle with simple exercises. But today feels like you’re ready for a step up. So, after you catch your breath, you make your way to the rack filled with wooden weapons and grab one in the vague shape of a sword. It’s balance is alright and it’s comfortable in your grip. You actually don’t really want to wield a proper sword because it could be turned against you easily due to your lack of experience in actual fighting. That means that a wooden sword is just perfect. It gives you range and it can hurt enough to distract someone without actual injuries. (Unless you shove it into someone’s throat or stab it into their eyes or give them a heavy concussion or —)

Anyway, less harm but still quite effective for your endeavors of protecting Shouto in some way, even if it means to be a competent distraction.

You swing a couple of times to test your grip.

“What are you doing here?” a familiar voice sounds from behind you and as you almost jump out of your skin, you barely keep a hold of the wooden sword slipping out of your hand.

Hurriedly, you turn around, only to actually face Shouto. You immediately bow and mumble a greeting, glad that bowing to him makes him disappear from sight, because you caught a glance at the way his training pants hug his thighs and if you would have seen them for even one second longer your mind might’ve erupted.

Only when Shouto tells you to straighten up, do you fumble for an answer, eyes glued to the wooden stick in your hand.

“Uh, you see, I was just very curious about swords, uh, especially ones from wood. Just wanted to touch them, to feel their texture, uh,” with every word coming out of your mouth, you wanted to slap yourself so badly.

Even if you are supposed to be a jester does not mean you’re meant to be stupid after all. You really don’t want him to think of you as stupid.

You press your lips together to shut yourself up, you can’t even curse under your breath anymore. The heels of your feet dig into the dirt and you’re ready to speed away the moment he dismisses you, but–

“Then, let’s spar. Curiosity can only be satiated by knowing more than anticipated after all.”

He reaches past you, and suddenly his body is hovering over yours, his throat right in front of your eyes and you see as his soft skin dips into his fluttery shirt. If you lean towards him even the slightest bit, your lips would meet the tender spot where throat meets collarbones. Your hands are cramping by your side, one move and they would be able to reach him way too easily. The tips of his shoes tap softly against yours and his arm brushes your shoulder as he pulls back, a wooden sword in hand.

Only when he takes a couple steps away from you and towards the middle of the training ground do you release the breath you have been holding in. Despite your past inability to use your lungs, you notice how his smell still lingers around you. Some sort of mix between the smoky smell of a fire place and the refreshing one of mint, and you wonder if his lips taste like the mint he chewed–

You shake your head before the thought evolves and for a moment you want to excuse yourself and step back, but then you remember that Shouto had an almost fatal weakness. He continues to leave his left side open, and while his friends have helped him improve, sparring with people he’s familiar with will not help him grow. So, you decide to actually have a spar. Even if it’s just one.

Standing in front of him, you try your best to copy his stance. And as you’re only a beginner, he allows you to have the first move.

You rush towards him and he easily parries. Another strike, another parry. He stays on the defensive and you’re focused on getting to know how he moves. And then, you notice the opening. With a feint, you manage to get a hit on him. One that feels like it hurt you instead of him. But you can’t allow yourself to slack just yet. You continue to hit him on his left side every time he allows an opening. Until you take your chances to trip him.

While he’s falling, you don’t expect him to grab you by the wrist and pull you with him. That’s why you flounder and lose your chance to pin him down properly, as all you can think about is how you’re stradling him and how firm his muscles feel underneath your touch, weapon forgotten and limp in your grip.

If only you didn’t get distracted by the way he appears as he looks up to you from between the strands of hair and how the breath leaves his soft lips, and how much contact your bodies are making. If you had managed to react timely, then Shouto wouldn’t have had the chance to grab your waist to flip you over, pinning you underneath him. Your legs trapped between his and wrists caught in one of his hands. And due to the lack of support, he’s almost laying on top of you.

The worst thing is the look on his face as he glances down at you. He looks at you like you’re something to be astonished by, like you’re something truly worthy to wonder at.

The heat is slowly getting to your head and you quickly surrender before you blurt or do something embarrassing. Because there’s no way you would be able to stay still if he holds you any longer in that risquée position.

Shouto slowly pulls back, freeing you bit by bit, at such an excruciating pace, you almost try to pry your wrists out of his hold. But his soft skin against yours is something you want to continue to feel, the warmth of another person, of Shouto specifically.

After he straightened up, he still hasn’t let go of one of your wrists, gently pulling you into a sitting position. Still holding you, he lets his gaze travel over your covered face. (You refuse to pull off the mask outside of your assigned room, wary of the King and the rebel spies. That’s why you have been even wearing it during training.)

Still, despite the coverage it feels like his eyes are able to see you, to truly see the you behind the thin facade of the jester.

“I know what you’re doing,” he suddenly drops, and you stiffen up underneath his touch.

“What– What am I doing, Your Highness?”, you ask, afraid of the answer, no matter if it’s the right or wrong one.

A small sigh. “Since the moment you’ve stepped into my life, well, rather stumbled into it, you were always involved with the assassins around me…”

“Wha– No! It’s purely a coincidence! That’s all I do, stumble around!” you hurriedly try to deny whatever accusations are thrown your way.

Yet, none of your words seem to have any impact, he continues without regard for your protests. “You have been protecting me, why?”

That’s what makes you lose all words, all arguments. You can’t answer him. You can’t tell him that you have known everything from the very beginning. You can’t even tell him a half-truth half-lie, that you heard all kinds of conspiracies. None of these would work. Everything you might say will make you look suspicious. And you’d rather not lie to him.

So, you simply slip his hand off of you, and he lets you go without resistance, just with furrowed eyebrows at your motion.

“I’m sorry,” you mutter as you leave, avoiding answering him, risking breaking the fragile trust he has been building towards you. But it doesn’t matter. All that matters is his survival, and effectively yours after everything is over. There’s no need for it to be more between you. (Even if you wanted to confess everything to him, to tell him how much you appreciate, even love him. But you can’t, you never will.)

(How could you tell him anything, to confess to him about you and your feelings when you’re all-too-aware of what’s about to come, what’s about to happen. You can’t afford to distract him during such a vital time, especially with all the effort you have put in towards making sure he’s alive and healthy… You might’ve accepted this world, but that does not mean that you have a place between its people…)

*-*

It’s supposed to be a simple meal with the royal family. That was the plan. Just King Enji with his children, trying to have some sort of get-together once again. It’s supposed to be simple, as normal as a family of their caliber should be. Shouto has even requested your presence during the meal, as a means to get the King to have an early death due to his blood pressure, maybe.

But you know. You know what’s supposed to happen. And you still came, still decided to have his back even during the climax of his story. One where he’s supposed to perish, but now won’t. Your interference has led to him still being strong and healthy as the Crown Prince is supposed to be.

He won’t lose. The story won’t end in a tragedy.

The door breaks. Pressure putting cracks into its hard wood and splinters fly everywhere. Surrounding knights immediately step forward, building a line of defense between the royal family and whoever is on the other side. Kind Enji barely glances from his meal, even if Shouto has risen to his feet, ready to protect his family if needed.

Your own fingers find the hidden hilt of the stolen dagger, still buried in the space of your clothes. But you don’t step forward. Your fate lies in him, no matter what happens, he shall rise triumphantly.

For a moment, only the clatter of silverware permeates the silence. Until footsteps echo through the hall. Their beat indicates a slight swagger, one confirmed once a black haired individual comes into your sight. You swallow back a gasp. The descriptions in the book would have never led you to believe the extensive scarring stretching over bones, barely healed burns with a shine of purple. Something of pain and suffering. Something a child never should have gone through.

“Ah, Father, did you miss me?” a raspy voice rumbles and fills the air, choking everyone who hears these words.

A crash. The chair resembling a throne has fallen with the vigor of movement from King Enji.

“Speak no lies! Touya has perished long ago!” his powerful voice on the verge of a crack, resembling a man standing at a cliff refusing to see the way down to his end.

“Father, dearest. Your words wound me so, I shall do my best to prove my worth to you,” Tou– no, Dabi clutches his chest dramatically, laughter tinting his voice, another type of crack, one that desires the jump oh-so-much.

Before any of the guards could react, everyone too shocked by the reveal in front of them, Dabi grabs a pitcher filled with water, water meant to be served to royalty.

Yet, he does not simply take a swig, rather, he lets the liquid pour onto his hair, staining his shirt with the blackness that once stained him, revealing white with such purity as snow, a white resembling the one the heads of the royal offspring.

This time, everyone else gasps, you think to see wetness rimming Princess Fuyumi’s eyes at the sight of her long lost brother. Worse even, Kind Enji’s shoulders seem to sack down, as if a sudden weight has returned to him after thinking he was free of the burden.

But no one gets enough time to process the dead coming back to life, as the whisper of metal death resounds. Dabi, who managed to get closer with each person shocked by his appearance, is now wielding a sword. The distance between him and the King is but a jump, one he’s eager to commit, even if it may lead to his demise.

“I’m remorseful, truly, but we have to say goodbye, Father, you possess something I desire and only your death shall allow me to bring it into my possession,” he grins, swinging the blade towards his very own father.

Before cold metal meets warm one, there’s noise of metal against metal. Shouto has jumped in front of Dabi and has parried his intent to kill with the will to protect. You watch as he glances towards the guards, the ones who had gotten busy with the barrage of rebels in the meantime, blocking any effort to try and defend against the true adversary.

But Shouto is still here, his sword steady in hand and mind as clear as his eyes as he locks not only swords but eyes with the brother he has never known.

“Well, isn’t it nice to meet the perfect little Crown Prince? The one who took everything away from me!”

The grin Dabi has worn turns upside down into a snarl, one filled with a different anger, an anger caused by what might have been, one that knows that everything was out of their control, yet why does he have to suffer so?

His attacks seem never stopping, only thinking about moving forwards, about defeating the opponent, barely noticing the way his skin strains, the way Shouto’s blade glides over him, making him bleed oh-so-slowly.

A slash towards the left side of Shouto, and you wince, but blood shall not be spilled and Shouto manages to parry it, even if barely with the touch of a feather. The metal clashes and vibrates, and it seems like the unending cuts and wounds, alone amounting to nothing, but together building a fountain, have started to make an effect. Dabi’s swagger turns into a stagger. His hands tremble as he holds onto the sword with all his might, still swinging and swinging and swinging. But never hitting.

You will never know what motivated Shouto, you will never know what the future holds anymore. But that’s a good thing. Nobody is supposed to know that much, and your lack of knowledge about the coming events means that doom has been subverted. So, you will never know why Shouto has simply decided to wound Dabi, to give him a last act of mercy as he saves him from himself. Maybe he wants to give him another chance, a life where he could be whatever he wanted to be, and maybe Shouto wanted a little bit more freedom. But those are your guesses, and this Shouto is the one you have known for such a long time, but a different one nonetheless.

But that doesn’t matter, you love him all the same, and with his safety secured, you don’t need to know more.

With silent steps you leave the hall, walking towards the room Shouto uses the most. With this ending, there is no need for you in this place anymore. And you should be content. But you can’t. You feel sorrow burying in your heart, digging itself into your veins at the thought of leaving him behind, of never seeing him again. But you must. How dare you stay for no reason at all? You’re not needed, and they –he– won’t miss a mere jester.

Opening the door of his office, you don’t look around, too afraid that you might change your mind at the sight of his belongings. You leave a letter, one to resign, but also one to say goodbye, and by its side you rest your mask, something that has belonged to you, but shall no more. You leave it behind to close this chapter behind you, to refuse to remember everything at its sight in your home.

And then the door clicks behind you and there’s nothing but home, nothing but the little hut in the woods waiting for you.

*-*

It has been some time since you have last visited the village. You’re going to be honest, you don’t need to. Despite the amount of money you own being enough for you to survive comfortably, you decided to make your own little garden, to cultivate your own food and to distract yourself, among other reasons.

So, of course you’re surprised when a couple of soldiers stop by your place, as most of the news never reaches your little place. They barely talk to you, rather, they ask if you live here and simply nod at your response before marching off again.

Scratching your head as you look after them, you shrug it off. As far as you’re aware, you’re not violating any laws or something. This is technically your property, so you suppose you would have a pretty strong standing if there’s a court or whatever they do around here.

What you did not expect is for another person to emerge. One that practically glows under the rays of the sun, his dual-colored hair shining like ice and fire as the breeze plays with them. At this sight you immediately drop whatever utensil you’ve been using to work in the garden. A curse under your breath and you push the hat you’re wearing lower in a weak attempt to hide your face.

Until the tips of his shoes appear in your vision and you can’t help but take a peek. Your eyes meet his and recognition flits through them.

Before you could utter any rambling excuse, Shouto kneels and takes your hand in his. He guides it to his lips. “My Savior”, he mutters against the back of your hand before he presses a soft kiss on your knuckles.

“Ah, Y-Your Highness, please, stand up,” you fret over him, yet not pulling your hand out of his grasp, a part of you had missed his feathery touches against you, him being oh-so-careful every time skin touches skin.

He stands up and his free hand brings something to your face. You can’t help but close your eyes, only to feel a smooth surface against your face. Your mask. And his hand cups your cheek as he leans down. Your eyelashes flutter, his lips meet yours and you melt into him.

You fit into his touch as a mask fits a face, and you realize that this is where you belong, this is where you should be. Not only because fate has brought you to him, but also because he made you a place by his side from the very beginning. Love can be given and received, but a place to be loved has to be made, after all.

[suzannahnatters]

Subplot Romance

Over the years I've created some twitter threads on writing and history and I've decided it's a good time to start compiling and sharing them on this Tumblr. I'm going to tag them "writing".

-

Here's what I've learned about writing subplot romance. (People who write genre romance probably already know this stuff. It's those of us who are mainly leavening romantic subplots into fantasy novels that need this info).

1. Romance = fundamentally character-driven. All internal conflict & internal growth. (Can these two trust each other? Will their character flaws drive them apart?) The more study you put into creating characters and building character arcs, the better your romantic writing.

A romance arc is not the SAME as a character arc, but it 100% NEEDS solid character work undergirding it.

2. Romance needs two ingredients: a compelling reason for the characters to be TOGETHER, & a compelling reason for them to be APART. This forms the conflict in the romance so do not skimp on either.

Eg, a common mistake in male-penned stories: female lead has no compelling reason to want male lead. "He's a good-looking warrior dedicated to winning her throne!" Yeah nah, she's literally surrounded by good-looking warriors dedicated to winning her throne, why's he different?

3. Romance needs chemistry = a believable spark of attraction. Something that blew my mind when I realised it: romantic chemistry =/= sexual chemistry. Sexual chemistry (purely physical attraction) is simply PART of romantic chemistry.

Romantic chemistry is a good deal broader. (Read/watch some good romances to see how chemistry is built by different storytellers. One fave of mine is the Romola Garai EMMA. Peerless friends-to-lovers chemistry. Watch the actors' body language; the way they gravitate to each other; the way their faces light up)

Chemistry tip A: if the driver behind sexual chemistry is lust, the driver behind romantic chemistry is trust. Protag needs/wants someone to trust. It's the way you play with trust/distrust that will create romantic tension.

eg: love interest holds protag's hand. With sexual chemistry, protag simply feels a jolt at the contact. With romantic chemistry, protag feels comforted and trustful - then betrayed when it turns out LI is tracking her pulse to see if she's lying to him (see: MISS SHARP 😇)

Chemistry tip B: if protag is falling for someone, that person should occupy their mind. LI should be mentioned/thought of each scene, even when absent. When present: LI consistently provokes unaccustomed emotion - either positive or negative, depending.

Chemistry tip C: make the characters their best/most lovable/most iconic selves when with each other. Quirkiness, smarts, hilarity. Make these the most fun character scenes in the book & the audience will ship them. Passionately.

4. Build romantic chemistry/attraction through escalating moments of trust and tension. If aiming for happily-ever-after(HEA)/for-now(HFN), then the overall arc is towards greater trust, but you need those moments of tension to give the big payoff scenes appropriate catharsis.

OTOH, if you're writing a tragic/backstabby romance, you need the trust/comfort moments in order to sell the big tragedy/betrayal.

5. Trust, comfort, & happiness are POWERFUL. This is what genre romance thrives upon. Even in dark/spiky stories, the most surprising thing in the story can be the moment when the LI DOESN'T betray the protag. That too can be wildly cathartic. Use it.

6. Just as character-driven skills help you with romance, so if you master romantic writing, you'll be better able to write ALL types of relationship - platonic, friendly, hostile.

OK that's all so far. Two book recs: ROMANCING THE BEAT by Gwen Hayes & THE HEROINE'S JOURNEY by Gail Carriger teach you the rules/expectations of genre romance so you'll know what the rules are for a happy romance subplot & how to break them for a tragic version.

[dailyadventureprompts]

i think you had a good analysis on the grimlocks & how to fix them overall, but i disagree that taking an "ancient aliens" route is a good way to fix them. i know it likely wasnt your intent, but all the ancient aliens stuff is also based in racist ideals of which societies were "advanced" enough to make certain things, and are also often quite antisemitic. sprinkling some stuff from that into the grimlocks gives it a good chance of just becoming racist in a different way

Friend I am all too familiar with the conspiracy theory/quack archaeology headspace so when I touch on that iconography I do so with deliberate intent.

The fundamental context of the ancient alien theory is "These buildings are too impressive for nonwhite savage people to build, they must've been constructed through advanced technology handed down by a white atlantian/interdimensional/alien civilization from whom the white explorer claims decent."

I'm a big fan of playing with problematic fiction tropes (especially in the pulp genre) by swapping perspectives around to the people the author doesn't expect you to sympathize with, and in the case of the ancient aliens setup it's something along the lines of "Man it sucks that this asshole with lazerbeams showed up, enslaved us, fundamentally altered what we were and forced generations of our people to labour to death building him a palace. We should unionize and kill that guy"

I was specifically inspired by the brilliant Innsmouth Legacy novel series which reinterprets Lovecraft from the perspective of the people his fiction acted as a veil for his (and the entire pulp genre he was a pillar of) prejudice.

[teddy-stonehill]

Top 5 books read in 2023

I'm gonna claim I was tagged by @thevagueambition lol

Somehow 2023 was actually the year I started reading books again, so it was actually a little bit difficult for me to narrow it down to 5 favorites, but I did my best. In no particular order:

Ammonite by Niccola Griffith

Ammonite has the feeling of a true classic golden-era sci-fi novel, and has an almost cliche high-concept sci-fi premise: What if a mysterious disease wiped out all the men on a planet, and the women who were left somehow evolved to survive as a species without them?

But the way Niccola Griffith approaches the concept is far from cliche. She takes an anthropological approach to it, rather than a bio-essentialist one. Often, writers will use single-sex societies as a sort of excuse to explore and highlight the specific things that they think make women fundamentally different from men or vice versa, and it ends up being a roundabout way of enforcing our societies naturalized ideas about the gender binary. Niccola Griffith doesn't do that. Instead, she takes the opportunity of a single-sex society to ask other questions, like, "How might a society organize itself if sex was not a viable category to define people and assign them roles by? How would the notion of 'family' change if the whole process of pregnancy and childbirth was fundamentally different? What other sorts of differences between people emerge, if sex difference is removed?" and so on.

And more than that, it's just an incredibly well-written book that also very thoughtfully explores themes of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. It has compelling characters and one of the sweetest, most tender lesbian romances I've ever read.

When I recommended the book to my parents I described it as a Robin McKinley style fantasy book (thinking particularly of Dragonhaven) meets and Ursula K. Le Guin style sci-fi novel. So if that means anything to you, that might tell you a lot about what's going on here. I highly recommend it!

The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows by Olivia Waite

I actually read the entirety of Olivia Waite's Feminine Pursuits trilogy this year, and while they were all enjoyable enough, The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows was by far my favorite. It's standalone enough that I would actually recommend reading just that and skipping the rest of the trilogy, unless you're very into historical lesbian romance (as I am) and out of stuff to read.

The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows is a romance about a printer and a beekeeper, both of them on the older side for romance-novel protagonists (which I appreciate). Agatha, the printer, even has a grown adult son. The book takes a really grounded and thoughtful approach to the historical elements, and the romance blossoms really naturally out of their growing friendship.

If you end up looking it up, don't let the goofy cover fool you (although I actually really like the goofy cover lol). This is a very sweet and down-to-earth novel in a way that I found pleasantly surprising in the genre.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

This is also a book that took me by surprise. I wasn't really sure what to expect from it when I started it, but what it ended up being was a novel I would compare to a season of a really good ensemble sci-fi TV series.

The plot structure was oddly episodic for a novel, which is part of what enhances the "season of a TV show" feeling, but somehow I found that I didn't really mind that. The characters, worldbuilding, and themes were all strong enough to keep me engaged throughout. I especially appreciated the focus on the labor which would be required to make advanced technological civilizations function in this kind of a setting.

And if any of that sounds appealing to you, you'll definitely like this book.

Every single book ever written by KJ Charles

Okay, this is a slight exaggeration, because I haven't quite managed to read every book ever written by KJ Charles just yet, and some of the more fantastical ones of hers don't really interest me that much. But in a year where I read a lot of gay historical romance fiction, KJ Charles stood out as, consistently and by a wide margin, my absolute favorite author currently working in the genre.

In particular I want to shout out Proper English, Think of England, Band Sinister, The Gentle Art of Fortune Hunting, and The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen as my absolute favorites of hers. Yes, I know including 5 favorite books nested within my list of 5 favorite books is cheating. I don't care.

The Tombs of Atuan by Urusula K. Le Guin

It honestly is shocking and shameful that I had somehow never read the entirety of the Earthsea books before this year, and I'm sure none of you need me to tell you that Ursula Le Guin is a good writer, but damn... Ursula Le Guin is a good writer.

The Tombs of Atuan in particular was SO extremely up my alley in every single way that I actually at times felt genuinely jealous that I wasn't the one who had written it. I only hope I can one day write something at least half-as-good, because holy shit.

Honorable mention to The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

I haven't actually finished this book, partially because it's SO far up my alley that reading it is such an intense experience that I've had to be careful about when I'm actually feeling up to reading it. It's a fairly dark book, and difficult to read at times, but it's also beautiful and compelling and again, just so grounded and well-researched in its historical setting it's incredible.

If you like slow historical burn tragedies about women trying to survive in difficult circumstances... you gotta read this. You just gotta.

I won't tag anyone, but if you want to share your favorite books of 2023, make a post and say that I tagged you! I'm genuinely interested in hearing about what people are reading, because I'm running out of stuff to read and I want to know what's out there. :)

[tonydaddingham]

LWA: I'm circling back to the problem of trying to somehow identify Crowley's Angel-identity from extant Biblical precedents, and some posts from yesterday about novels that have inspired or will inspire aspects of S1 and S2--TALE OF TWO CITIES, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, and THE CROW ROAD--have accidentally highlighted what's bothering me about this (even though I fell into it myself!).

There are so many ways that novelists, filmmakers, etc. can rework their literary antecedents, and assuming that we can go back to the Biblical (or Miltonic, Dantean, etc.) source to decode what Gaiman is doing rests on assumptions about how Gaiman--and Pratchett and Finnemore--are engaging with other texts. That /is/ something you can do with, for example, Akira Kurosawa's Shakespeare films (THRONE OF BLOOD/MACBETH, THE BAD SLEEP WELL/HAMLET, RAN/KING LEAR), where the films are extensively in conversation with Shakespeare, fundamentally share Shakespeare's plots, inhabit the same tragic mode, and have characters who can be mapped directly onto Shakespeare's. And yet the films /aren't/ Shakespeare, but Shakespeare reinterpreted through Japanese cinematic and theatrical genres (jidaigeki, Noh), cultural and historical referents, and twentieth-century preoccupations. They often signal differences through inversion--the gender-flipped characters in RAN, the silent protagonist in THE BAD SLEEP WELL--and they experiment by pulling threads. How would we reinterpret KING LEAR if Lear had a backstory? What happens if you pull a major character out of HAMLET?

But this is not how GOOD OMENS--the novel, S1, or S2--works with its own antecedents. Instead, it invokes antecedents to fracture them and then shoot off in its own directions; they appear in the text or series to establish expectations that are then abruptly undercut. You can't do an extended reading of GO's "conversation" with THE OMEN, because it isn't having one (in S1, the major points of contact are done with in ep1). Instead, we have THE OMEN banging up against the JUST WILLIAM series, THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS, John Le Carre, the Bible...The genres and modes deliberately don't shake hands. Characters may or may not be parallels, but they are at best partly so and the analogies soon break down. In the series, yes, A TALE OF TWO CITIES inspires the appearance-swap at the end of S1, but it is so wildly different that it doesn't help the reader interpret what GO is doing. (Among other things, Sydney Carton /actually/ dies--obviously!--and Charles Darnay doesn't, meaning that it's a true self-sacrifice; Carton's underlying motivations are different; Darnay is upset by the proposal and effectively forced into it by being knocked unconscious; etc.) It's less a conversation and more a starting-point for play.

Similarly, S2 invokes and plays with PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, but it /isn't/ PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. (This time, PRIDE & PREJUDICE bangs up against Richard Curtis films, the cozy mystery genre, the Hollywood Biblical epic...) If anything, Aziraphale's ball serves as a metafictional warning to /not/ try to force an interpretation of events through P&P's lens. (It's also a bad misreading on Aziraphale's part, since Jane and Bingley fall for each other at the ball, but the protagonists exit it disliking each other!) Aziraphale and Crowley absolutely occupy aspects of Darcy's and Lizzie's roles, including the "both right/both wrong" problem and the relationship meddling (which is the opposite of Darcy's strategy with Bingley), but the series is far more invested in miscommunication as a problem than the novel is. The plots don't track and character parallels break down pretty quickly. It's impossible to maintain a good analogical "fit" between Heaven vs. Hell and wealthy vs. relatively-impoverished gentry (among other things, pursuing the analogy would leave us with Crowley eventually deciding to return to Heaven, which, no). Aziraphale and Crowley are nowhere near the same emotional space that Darcy and Lizzie are during the proposal scene, and while Darcy has not adequately communicated his intentions to Lizzie in the lead-up to his first proposal, the problem /during/ the proposal is that he's being a jerk and she has every right to be aggravated with him, not that they're mutually misunderstanding each other. The stakes, narrative contexts, and mental hang-ups are different. Etc. Presumably Gaiman will invoke and then disrupt THE CROW ROAD in the same way.

So, again, with the Bible. We can't use the Bible to predict anything that will happen in the GO universe because we have no way of knowing what GO will declare to be /wrong/ about the Biblical record. In S1, we discover that it's a Principality guarding the Eastern Gate, and that there's a minor matter of a missing sword; we also find out that the Flood is local and that Crowley felt that Jesus just needed a bit of a vacation break. (If you've read the novel, you also know that Aziraphale is dismissive of Revelation, thanks to John's addiction to shrooms.) In S2, we have the Job minisode, and it would take a really, really long time to break down just how far that minisode departs from the Book of Job (and this ask is already long enough!). The point, as Crowley might say, is that we approach the series with expectations set by the Bible, but then we discover that the series never takes the Biblical narrative as set. It's unpredictable (as Crowley also says).

evening (morning technically, currently at 0050hrs and will probably be done around 0300) LWA, hope you're good!!!✨

this is obviously far more eloquent, nuanced, and empirically evidenced than i could have ever put it, but im going to view this as going some way to being validation for the thought processes on a couple of theories/speculations that have been floating around in the wake of s2. meant kindly, i think the allegorical element of GO can sometimes misconstrued, and fans can sometimes get so caught up in what they believe is the only true inspiration for the story, and miss that it is a work of fiction. it is literally made-up. it stands to reason therefore, and has been demonstrated time and time again, as having been inspired at its core from lots of different places.

there is representation of so many things in GO, and it's truly one of the aspects that i love most about it. it is not representative of any one set rhetoric. specifically about your example of who crowley was before the fall; this caused so much underlying discourse that i fully appreciated and considered perfectly valid. crowley was described by neil as a jewish-coded character insomuch that he asked questions (tbh by extension from that the whole story could be described similarly?), and then, as ive since learned, a lot of the angelic names mentioned are hebrew in origin. since having a plethora of asks flood me contradicting that crowley cannot or should not have been an angel of christian origin, or otherwise, ive educated myself more. but im not going to go back on what i myself have speculated on because it is a story, and it can take inspiration, and rework that inspiration in kind, from anywhere. that, i think, sometimes gets missed. ive usually speculated and analysed based on where the narrative, to my mind, has been heading, taking cues from what we've seen so far, and then researched off the back of it what might fit or would support it - not the other way around.

religious representation is important. speaking personally- being someone non-religious and raised largely secular (as said many times) i will never fully understand what it means to have that representation portrayed in popular media... because how on earth could i begin to? but i would like to say i understand emotion and how people think, and i can understand why representation is important to people. that is valid, in every respect. but GO is not a reworked version of any one biblical text, as you said. inspirations not shaking hands, but flitting around each other in a dance. it pokes holes at, reimagines, and validates as well as invalidates elements of multiple religious texts and teachings (one of my favourite and imo funniest book lines was the mushrooms recollection, was gutted it didn't make the show in full!)

again, this is part of why i love it - because whilst these different allegories provide the backdrop to the story, it is not the story. the reason why the story is so important to me is because it is an examination of the human condition through the eyes of beings that are not human. the story could be told from the pov of a human-form pot plant and reach the same kind of conclusions, but the religious inspiration gives the story more consistent context, dichotomy and insight, more depth and philosophy. and it's much more entertaining. but yes - let the narrative be inspired by anything; bits and pieces from this, pinches and dashes from that... it creates a story that is so arguably unique that way, frames its own questions and problems, and remains to true to being a work of fiction - set to inspire and challenge in kind on to other present and future works - and so on and on the cog turns - isn't that the point?

GO is not the only religious-inspired work that ive loved for these reasons; favourite book (no offence to anyone by daring to type this sentence as a GO blog; it's sentimental to me) is andrew davidson's the gargoyle. it very scrupulously follows, at times, elements of dante's divine comedy and makes overt references to it given its a key part of the story, but it's manifestly allegorical too. but the best part of the story is how it interprets religion's often tumultuous relationship with mental health, love being flawed and discriminatory, and the concept of salvation. again, religious imagery and inspiration as the backdrop, human condition being the narrative.

i haven't really remarked on any else that you've mentioned, LWA, which is par for the course with me, so going to speedrun slightly.

P&P: when i watched s2 i must admit i was almost surprised that this work had so much weight, because i felt it had more relation to other austen works (emma and persuasion particularly) but then i remembered that was the Whole Point

Kurosawa: will admit that i haven't seen these but based on what im assuming is your recommendation i will duly add to the watchlist (seen Kagemusha, but that's it for my foray into his works!)

Le Carré: ah, im so glad you said this! when ive been thinking idly about the corruption in heaven and the risk in looking back on it with the metaphorical rose-tinted glasses, this is the same feeling as when i read his work - bits from TTSS, and constant gardener, but TLGW especially in my mind... not sure if you were referring to these works in particular and in this context, but huge fan of Le Carré and happy to see it mentioned!!!

richard curtis: i... yeah. this was a revelation for me. enough said.

ultimately im so excited about the unpredictable; i love speculating, and whilst it's fun to have gotten something right (s2 was not a good track record for me, the only things i got that were even a smidgeon near the truth were half-arsed shitposts and if that doesn't humble a girl, nothing will), i want to be taken aback by where the narrative has gone, the dilemmas that have been raised, dialogue and exposition choices... i want to be wrong, because that's infinitely more fun!

(0220 - not bad)✨

[gothprentiss]

my line about the whole 'fanfiction includes more than just the stuff written under the label or tradition of fanfiction' thing (e.g., "paradise lost is bible fanfiction") has long been that it's creating a portable concept out of a genre or practice or media form which is more fundamentally characterized by its material reality. it is more characterized by its community setting than it is, for example, characterized by its form; fanfic is more like fanvids than it is like the novel, for example. i think you could also make the very real argument that a lot of fanfiction is made against its original work, or with some desire to subsume or replace it. this is a fairly unique relationship that gets elided when you get a bit too juiced up and start describing parody as fanfiction; the symbiosis is distinct.

but also: fanfiction is surely a practice (of relation) more than anything else, e.g. a genre. you can probably identify instances of it well before the latter part of the 20th century, but to start flinging the label at anything that smacks of derivation basically just makes all literature "reality fanfiction" (or all fiction "reality au"), and then look what you've done.

for example the "paradise lost is bible fanfiction" thing (which seems less intended to provide a good-faith account of the historical status of fanfiction than it does to tacitly lambast the Dead White Men canon): you can't really go on to make the case for milton as a writer of fanfiction for a variety of reasons, e.g. that the long tradition of "bible fanfiction" predates notions of copyright and ip; or that there weren't separate channels for the "transformative" and "original" works; or that different sorts of transformation, derivation, etc. are not only expected but basically mandated by christian religious practice. by this same token prayer is bible fanfiction, as are sermons. to apply this notion widely quickly runs into nonsense territory, and overlooks the immense presentism inherent in assuming a different category or value for 'original' works. i do think that most people who are arguing that [Big Name Of Canon] is fanfiction are doing so polemically. the idea that this is an attempt to vindicate the practice of fanfiction seems obviously outweighed by the fact that none of the faculty i have seen making this argument have fan texts ready to discuss or even namedrop, let alone to assign to their students.

[tozettastone]

@n1ghtmeri sure thing!

Reader fics seem intended to place the reader into the work. They are clearly designed for the reader to read through and go "yes, this work is a fantasy about me." That's why they have the conventions they do, like naming the character a placeholder like "Y/N," (for your name) and frequently being written in second person.

Self insert fics are the writer constructing a character that is like them (but probably not actually identical to them) and putting them inside the world of canon.

As to why the difference is very stark to me... I generally do not find reader fics at all compelling but I love self insert fics. Reader fic DOES appeal to some people. Those people are not better or worse for finding that appealing. They are welcome in fandom and I am annoyed when people talk like they're not LOL.

But for me: I have tried to be interested in reader fics and generally I do not like them. I think this is because reader fics are beholden to this idea of The Reader, a presumed audience of similar-enough readers who can strongly relate to and project onto the main character. In my view this really hamstrings the characterisation of the main character. Because it needs to be relatable to many readers, any really distinct character trait is now forbidden. So you instead see fics like "this character is The Reader but now they're PLUS SIZED," as though plus sized is a personality. Sometimes writers of reader fic do try to give the reader a few key personality traits, but I have found in my reading that this leads to a confused and inconsistent characterisation, or a very flat one.

(Reader fic also shows a tendency to land you with extremely hetero female main characters who romance canon male characters in the most Girl In A Romance Novel way imaginable, but I have yet to determine if this is fundamental to the genre or if it is a tendency that has appeared because of the preponderance of hetero stuff on Wattpad, which appears to have been the stronghold of reader fic up until the last few years.)

A self insert character can be absolutely feral. I would cite @mixelation's ongoing Plasticity series as a strong example of how a self insert fic does not really have the same characterisation restrictions and expectations as a reader fic. Tori is not necessarily a character onto whom an individual reader can easily project (...except mixelation themselves, perhaps? hmm), but she sure does have some strong personality traits.

(By contrast, I will not offer a specific example of a reader fic because I have been pretty open about my dislike for them. Seems rude.)

Anyway TLDR if you want to read some unhinged bullshit worldbuilding exploration via a character who is interesting, my experience is that reader fic is not for you but self insert fic might be.

The difference between a self insert and a reader fic is incredibly stark to me personally but I think not even very evident to a lot of people, ha

[proofofburden]

Spoilers and the Prestige Trap

It might be less obvious from my online presence, but I have a long and vitriolic campaign against the concept of a "spoiler"; if a story is ruined by knowing what happens, as a rule, it is not a very good story. There's a small number of a stories that rely on an unpredictable twist (usually with a genre or tone shift) to develop their themes. Bridge to Teribithia, The OA, and both Knives Out movies all come to mind. I am ambivalent about the mystery genre as a whole on this; the low re-consumablity of most mysteries is probably indicative of quality, though at the same time the audience participation in solving the mystery is both a one-off quality and a good feature of the genre. But in general, stories should be more than their reveals.

As an aside, both Season 1 of Game of Thrones and the book do not have a twist! Ned Stark's death is foreshadowed in the first episode with the dire wolf! Characters tell him he's marked for death! Both works establish the rules for deaths and Stark's death follow them! I know we all tired of GOT being called "subversive" but it was subversive because it subverted our genre expectation that the Aragorn stand-in would rise above! Half the modern prestige trap is built on not understanding the difference between narrative and genre expectations!

A lot of the conversation around these shows is not about what makes them satisfying, but about what makes them novel. Dripping out mystery, even when it makes sense for characters to be more direct, makes for more discussion of the show; 1899 fails because everyone is characterized in service of the mystery and not the other way around. I liked Rings of Power more than anyone, but the weakest part of the show was the "which one is Sauron" mystery, not least of all because Tolkien went in for telling you which one was Sauron and then reveling in the dramatic irony. Had they gone with the Stranger being Sauron and played with our Third Age expectations, I would have defended the departure from Tolkien's conventions because that is the heart of adaptation. I just don't understand what they were trying to say, but I do understand they were trying to power buzz about the show.

Fans, and especially fans on this exact site, ask for this kind of thing, if not deliberately. Marvel is basically unwatchable to me at this point because virtually every finale is a big, "Here's what is coming next from the comics!" teaser. Loki's emotional growth, rather than having time to breathe onscreen and give us catharsis, was shunted into revealing Kang. Without any meta-context, and I am not a comics reader, this was a new character monologuing over the catharsis I came for. It was a first act in a finale. But hey, he's in Quantumania, so I can pay movie ticket prices to go find out what teaser will come next and talk about it online. It's about generating buzz, speculation about how they are going to work Kang into future products, and reviewing the comics. It is not about the characters and the story they are experience in the present tense of the work.

I don't even hate these fan discussions! When these reveals sing with character beats they can totally enrich the show. Russel T. Davies is very good at getting his Doctor Who callbacks to have present tense resonance, and I look forward to his work on that again in coming years. I love how smoothly you can move between the story at hand and the deeper lore in Tolkien's works, and I think that's something the Amazon show captured a lot better than its given credit for, partially because some of the show is not harmonious with the wider lore, but partially because people were determined to hate every aspect of it. I'm a trash millennial, and I love a good callback and self-aware writing. Just, please, get your writing fundamentals down first.

Anyway, the prestige trap is writing for buzz. I am begging people to stop rewarding it.

[howtofightwrite]

The Rapier: Seven Minutes in Hell Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (Gideon the Ninth and the Perils of Pop Culture)

Anonymous said to howtofightwrite:

Have you read Gideon the Ninth? What did you think of the swordplay? I found it ridiculous, Gideon is supposedly so “strong” she uses a “Greatsword” with one hand.

I’ll be honest, I got about seventy pages into Gideon the Ninth before I gave up due to the novel’s pacing issues. So, in terms of sins, the swordplay itself rated pretty low. The reason one reads Gideon the Ninth is for lesbian necromancers in space, and it’s good for that. I’ve no judgments on anyone who enjoyed it, dumb space fantasy fun is one of my favorite genres. Gideon’s combat sins are the same as pretty much every other novel, they’re the same legion of sins you see when any writer takes conventional wisdom and pop culture knowledge at face value without giving it any thought. 

The short answer to Gideon the Ninth and pretty much anything to do with swordplay from conventional understanding of weapon utility to training to the wisdom spouted by the main character’s titular teacher is: it’s all wrong, often hilariously so, to the point of being nonsensical. So wrong, in fact, that I question whether or not this character was actually trained to fight because she couldn’t grasp the fundamentals. (Longsword and rapier? Not that different.) However, while Gideon was exceedingly wrong with great confidence, she’s very in line with our cultural perceptions of swords.As a result, Gideon is very convincing if you don’t think about what she’s saying too much.

Let’s start with the basics:

The longsword is the battlefield warrior’s weapon. 

The rapier is the tooty fruity dainty noble’s fancy dueling weapon. (It’s super fancy because it’s French.)

And if you just nodded along to those descriptions, oh boy, is this post going to blow your mind.

Here’s our first foray, rapier is not a French word, rapier is derived from a French word, but is an English and/or German word. They didn’t care enough to get the pronunciation right, which sounds exactly like the English and the Germans in regards to the French. It’s also a horrible mistake if you follow suit. The French happen to be great at stabbing people. You’re welcome.

I’m not going to focus on Gideon’s issues with the zweihander or claymore. We’ve discussed the weight of swords at length in the past and how these large weapons only weigh about eight pounds because, in the real world, you’re expected to use them all day. (No, really.) In this post, we’re going to focus on the sword Gideon truly does dirty in quintessential fantasy fashion and that sword is the rapier and it’s shorter sibling, the smallsword.

One of the major problems of Fantasy as a genre, usually pulling from Dungeons & Dragons, is it tends to look at the past as The Past. A bleary amalgamation of stuff slammed together in an incoherent jumble that doesn’t really make sense but seems like it does if you don’t look too closely. Any fantasy setting, for example, that lets you have a greatsword but not a single-shot handgun is a little confused about history. So, a lot of weapons that are actually sequential technological evolutions during society’s growth and progression toward the modern era get held up as the same as their ancient counterparts. Oftentimes, these are weapons separated by hundreds of years and, in some cases, thousands. The zweihander, for example, is not a medieval weapon, it’s early modern and post the invention of the gun. It’s a 16th century weapon, and requires the smithing technologies of the era in order to exist. Your DnD Barbarian patterned off the Visigoths or the Norse using a greatsword is the same as your hard bitten 1920s P.I. using a goddamn phaser. It’s anachronistic. Now, why is this important to the rapier?

The rapier comes from an era when everyone got to have swords and the swords themselves were seen as status symbols. The rapier was not just the weapon of the super rich, but the weapon of the rising middle/merchant class. While it did see battlefield use, they were also weapons carried for self-defense and in polite society. Due to its light weight, they could be carried as a fashion accessory, just like high heels for both men (and women.) Which is where our cultural bias for the rapier being a non-serious weapon comes from, but it was the military fashion of the time because it was the military sidearm. The rapier is a weapon for killing and it is very efficient at its job. The rapier, if you didn’t know, is one step off Europe’s pinnacle of sword technology. The epee stood at the peak, which was a weapon so quick it was famous for what was called the double suicide where the duel ended with both duelists killing each other at the same time. The rapier, the smallsword, and, really, all the thrusting swords epitomize, “you’ll be seven minutes in hell before the Devil knows you’re dead.”

This is a problem that follows the weapon into modern sport fencing where we have to use electronic scoring because it is too fast for the judges to follow with their eyes. As an Olympic sport, it’s one of the reasons why fencing really struggles to draw an audience because your brain genuinely cannot process what’s happening. Again, one of the most common injuries for smallsword masters (and these are instructors who trained others professionally) was the loss of an eye. The thrusting family is fast.

Ignoring for the moment that Gideon confuses the rapier with modern fencing as most pop culture does, the narrative runs into a basic issue when it comes to training. The narrative wants Gideon to maintain her smug attitude in regards to the rapier’s frippery, so Gideon never gains an appreciation for the rapier’s rather absurd lethality (even in comparison to other swords.) This is functionally impossible from a realistic standpoint because you can’t train on a weapon without gaining some appreciation for it, even if you don’t like it or it’s not your preference. 

I’d actually say the greatest sin of Gideon is the way it writes off modern fencing without attempting to understand it. I say modern fencing because neither Gideon nor the narrative is utilizing the historical techniques of the rapier but rather falling back on the audience’s conventional understanding of fencing, which is modern fencing. Modern fencing grew out of the military sabre and the smallsword or epee, respectively. It is important to note that Gideon is not using historical smallsword fencing either, but rather the idea of it. In essence, Gideon’s fencing is Mel Brooks’ Robin Hood yelling, “Parry, parry, thrust, thrust! Good!” at the Sheriff of Rottingham.

The problem is that any character who has a juvenile disdain for the weapon they’re training with is a major red flag for an author’s inexperience. Experienced writers who’ve worked with weapons will write characters who have disdain for certain weapons and preferences for others but the character will express a grounded, detailed reason for their preference. Those reasons may be petty, as real world complaints often are, but they can provide you with a reason regarding the weapon’s function beyond “this is a girly sword.” (The rapier is three and a half feet of fuck you. The rapier is a needle razor blade of death.) I’ll put it in blunt terms, at the beginning of the novel, Gideon essentially whines about one of the most lethal swords ever created not being masculine enough for her tastes. And to that, we all say, fuck you too.

This is why we do our research. Remember, the Musketeers carried rapiers. As did most other soldiers of the period. So, complaining that it’s not a battlefield sword is kind of stupid. Especially since the battlefields of Gideon’s setting aren’t really explained very well.

So, now, I’m going to go over some pieces from Gideon’s text that really stood out to me as wrong and we should address why they’re wrong so you don’t replicate them in your own work. Then, I’ll give you an example from an author who famously did it right.

“She spent six hours a day learning where to put her feet when she wielded a one-handed sword,”

Gideon the Ninth, 59

This is the sort of statement that sounds good when you don’t think about it, but I’m not actually certain what it means in context. The longsword, which is a 19th century term and usually what we think of when referring to the Arming sword (which can be wielded two handed when it has a longer hilt for greater leverage) can be wielded with one hand and often was either on its own or in conjunction with a shield. The rapier/the thrusting blade family are not the only weapons you wield with one hand, most swords can be, even those that normally use two.

The idea that martial combat is ultimately and fundamentally different between weapon types is untrue, the stances do change between weapon types but the same rules usually apply. So, if Gideon is used to training with swords, then the rapier wouldn’t be totally alien.

“Where to rest (what seemed to her to be) her useless, unused arm,”

Gideon the Ninth, 59

Raise your hand if you’ve ever looked at the fencing stances in films like Princess Bride or Robin Hood: Men in Tights and gone, “well, that’s just dumb.” You and Gideon have something in common, but you shouldn’t because Gideon is trained in swordplay. Gideon should understand the fundamental importance of balance. Gideon does not. (Gideon’s teacher does point out the balance part later, though rather nonsensically and the knuckle weapon makes no sense, but Gideon should already know this from her years of training.) The bagh naka and the katar/punch dagger are amazing melee tools in unarmed combat, but not useful as the offhand guard against a rapier.

Useful offhand tools for the rapier — the buckler, the parrying dagger, the cloak, and the whip. (Yes, Zorro was right.)

What is the point of that off-hand position in fencing? Balance. Yeah, those hand positions are about helping you maintain balance in your stance, allowing you to move and strike cleanly without falling over or stumbling. No matter what weapon you choose, even if you’re going hand to hand, martial combat is built around your central balance point. (In fact, there are a great many styles and techniques that focus specifically on disrupting your opponent’s balance to gain an advantage in combat.) If you haven’t guessed this, falling over is very bad.

The off-hand allows for a narrower sideways/diagonal stance (making yourself a smaller target/ more difficult to hit, more on this later) while maintaining your central axis, which also, ironically, plays into the importance of your footwork (more on this later.)

Another, very important, practical reason for the position of that off hand is it brings your shoulders into line while in your stance, allowing you to take the weight of the sword off your arm and carry it in your back. This way you take the strain off the arm, and fight longer, or fight multiple duels in succession. The rapier only weighs about two pounds, but with your arm constantly extended, it becomes a lever and the weapon grows heavier as time progresses.

One of the key aspects of martial combat that is most difficult is holding position in your stance, you’re in a constant battle against gravity and your own muscles. This is why, when you watch fights progress, you’ll see stances get shallower, hands drop from their defensive position, the arms fall out of line, etc. A well-balanced stance conserves energy.

Your shoulders being in line is one of the aspects you give up if you choose to duel wield. Why did some people just fight with one sword if other tools were convenient? Well, there are several, but one is conservation of energy.

Gideon being derogatory about this and not knowing makes Gideon look like a really shitty warrior. (Which, ironically, were my feelings at the time of reading the book.)

“How to suddenly make herself a sideways target and always move on the same stupid foot.”

Gideon the Ninth, 59

This one really caught me, “make herself a sideways target.” The weird thing for me with this is, why “suddenly” and why is being sideways bad? All martial combat happens on a diagonal, some more so than others, but everything is on a diagonal. Nobody fights squared up, nobody, no one. It’s a terrible position that is out of balance. You can literally destabilize someone by stepping between their legs and shoving their chest with one hand, and they will stumble. You fight sideways on diagonals, on specific degrees, your feet spread and in balance, with your central axis protected. Combat with a rapier is, ironically, not more sideways/on a diagonal than with a longsword.

Then, the second line “always move on the same stupid foot.” I get what this phrase is referencing, but it’s also wrong. In martial combat, you always move with the lead leg first (there are exceptions to this rule, there always are, but by and large) and then the back leg. Or, when moving forward (advancing,) the back leg and then the front leg. One foot always acts as your central balance point while moving so you don’t give your opponent an opening in your defenses or the opportunity to destabilize you. This is basic combat training. Gideon is whining about basic combat training which would apply with any weapon she trained on, including the longsword.

This is really how we tell a writer isn’t approaching combat with the idea of their character being at risk of dying. Gideon has no concerns about being up against other characters who have trained their entire lives with one of the deadliest swords, mostly because the author hasn’t fully processed that there isn’t a major difference in outcome between a battlefield and a duel to the death — both will kill you. Now, this should be a point of tension in the narrative, but it isn’t because Gideon doesn’t take the rapier or dueling to the death seriously. Your POV dictates how your reader responds.

Moving on, a very important one for all you swordsmen out there:

“This isn’t your longsword, Nav, you block with it again and I’ll make you eat it!”

Gideon the Ninth, 59

A parry is, essentially, a deflection or redirection of your opponent’s blade. Instead of taking the force, you redirect that force away from you and counter strike if the opening presents.

A block involves taking the full force of your opponent’s strike and stopping it cold. Which, I’m sure, sounds cool and tough. (Far more so than it actually is.)

You don’t block with swords, at least, not swords with edges. If you block with a sword that has an edge, you will damage the edge or break the blade. Both are bad to the functionality of the weapon. Hollywood has a variation of sword combat that’s called Flynning (after Errol Flynn) for eye-catching moves where the blades bang against each other, it looks very pretty and has no relevance to real combat. All swords parry, not just rapiers, sabres, and smallswords. Estocs can block, lightsabers (beams of pure plasma) can block, longswords? No. Or, at least, you shouldn’t.

I will forgive any reader for thinking they could because pop culture trains you to believe it’s a normal part of sword combat.

So, what does the response look like from a writer who understands the art of fencing. I’ll give you an example from Rafael Sabatini’s Master-At-Arms, which was written in the 1940s. For reference, Sabatini was popular in his time for his contributions to the swashbuckling genre.

This scene is a training scene between a main character, Quentin de Morlaix (our swordmaster) and Chevalier de Saint-Gilles (one of his inevitable rivals.)

The Chevalier complied. He launched the botte with which he had twice got home. This time, however, the stroke was not only parried but with a swift counter Morlaix hit the Chevalier vigorously over the heart.

He lowered his blade. ‘That should not have happened,’ was his quiet comment to the hotly answered: ‘That shall not happen again. On guard!’

The attack was repeated, with an increase of both vigor and speed. Yet once again it was met and answered by that hit in quarte.

The Chevalier fell back and spoke sharply in an annoyance that was shared by his scowling, startled brother. ‘But what is this, then? Were you trifling with me before?’

Morlaix was of perfect amiability. ‘You confuse a master-at-arms with an ordinary opponent, Chevalier. That is an effective botte of yours, to which I must suppose you have given much practice. The fault in its execution lies in that you offer too much body. Keep yourself narrower. Then if you are hit it will be less fatally. On guard again. So. That is better, but not good enough. Swing your left shoulder father back, more in line with your right. Now, hold yourself so, whilst making your attack. Allongez! Excellent. For whilst I counter-parry it thus,and make my riposte on the binding of the blade, I can only touch you in quinte. Thus.’

The blades were lowered again and Morlaix expounded to the discomfited swordsman. ‘That correction of your position to an unaccustomed one will have cramped you a little, so you have lost pace and force, and left it easier for the counter to get home. With practice, however, that will be overcome. When it is corrected we will come to your other faults,’ he promised, and added the cruelest cut of all: ‘You display so much aptitude it should be easy to render you really formidable.’

Master-At-Arms, 29

What should really stand out from Sabatini’s passage is the detail both in terminology and in explanation, a lot of writers skirt around detail and explanations because they don’t know and didn’t do the research. Research is hard, but when you have a solid grasp of what you’re working with, it ultimately creates better material.

The teacher who doesn’t explain, while an easy cheat, is a crappy teacher. 

What Sabatini is referring to with quarte and quinte are the eight classical parries and attack in foil fencing, basically the parts of the body he’s hitting. (I’ll point out, Quentin knows why you stay narrow and informs both Saint-Gilles and the audience: so you don’t die. Learn things, Gideon.) Interestingly, this chapter serves to establish both Quentin de Morlaix’s skill as a fencer, his rivalry with his cousins, Chevalier de Saint-Gilles and Constant which are central to the novel’s plot, and that he’s a little shit.

In short, given poor training, poor understanding, and dismal interest, Gideon would probably be murdered by a real duelist on the first strike of her first duel and then necro’d back to life. Fortunately, she lives in a setting where the rapier is not an effective weapon with which you might thoroughly humiliate your opponent.

-Michi

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The Rapier: Seven Minutes in Hell Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (Gideon the Ninth and the Perils of Pop Culture) was originally published on How to Fight Write.

[chocolate-parfait]

I see the askbox is open 🙂 You don’t know the speed at which I raced here.

But I was really hoping that you could do headcanons for Arthur (vamp), Masamune (Sen), and Mitsuhide (Sen) with a s/o who is an author? Like Tolkien almost, she writes high fantasy and is super well known? (bonus points if she goes back in time with one of her novels on her to show them exactly).

I hope it’s not confusing^^

I adore your writing so I hope to see whatever you publish in the future!

Thank you so much!!

Waa thank you sm for your support!! It really means a lot, thank you ❤ ❤ I hope you enjoy!

Author!MC who writes high fantasy novels - (Arthur, Masamune & Mitsuhide)

Arthur

Arthur is extremely amused and intrigued when he hears about your occupation, and even more so when he discovers that you’re a pretty big shot, too. For once, he completely discards appearances (although he still thinks you’re very pretty) and is genuinely interested in your job, frequently asking details about your writing process, your stories and such.

Your books come from two completely different universes, as we have realism and crime against fantasy and supernatural. Yet, when you offer your book for him to read, he falls absolutely in love with it. Although it may not seem like it, Arthur is quite the superstitious man, and has always had a certain interest in the occult and paranormal. Long story short, he becomes your number one fan.

He asks Comte to bring back your books from the future so that he can read them all (if you find out he’ll admit it with a sheepish smile and a blush on his face), and even then he feels like he doesn’t know enough about the different worlds described in your books and about their writer, you. If the topic pops up during conversations he'll take his chance and curiously ask you more and more questions about your job; if not, he'll pick up hints along the way whenever he can.

Your writing schedule will easily adapt to the domesticity of your relationship. You both write together in the same room (sometimes his, sometimes yours, or even in the dining room) as it can be very motivational, and you’re both ready to comfort the other whenever a lack of inspiration puts a stop to your writing. Furthermore, it’s very practical when it comes to taking breaks! He’ll cuddle with you while asking how everything’s coming along and if you need him to help you get some ideas. (this man will def sneak kisses whenever you're absorbed in your own little world because he adores the pout that magically appears on your lips whenever you're concentrated)

Overall, he’s very supportive of what you do. He understands the struggles of being a writer, but he also adores how much of a professional you are. Would probably be a fanboy even if you two didn’t know each other (he’d buy your books in secret so that Theo doesn’t tease him; the great mystery writer who adores realism, falls in love with high fantasy books. The man would never let him see the end of it)

Masamune

Even before knowing that you actually come from the future, Masamune is extremely curious to see some of your works once he hears that you’re a writer. As someone who writes poetry, knowing that you have the same passion makes him like you even more; although your occupations are as different as they can be, he still enjoys finding a common ground with you. Sometime later, after he has already discovered about your particular situation, he’ll also come to learn about the differences between what he thought you did and what your job really is. Fundamentally the job is always the same, but the whole process and the final products are almost completely different than what he had expected.

He doesn’t know what high fantasy is, but when you do tell him about all the various genres and such, he finds himself not too weirded out by the idea; it’s very similar to popular folklore, after all.

When he asks you to tell him one of your stories, you find the perfect situation to show him a physical copy of one of your best-sellers. He’s amazed by the weird-looking book. It’s experiencedly crafted and perfectly written (that’s printing for you<3), and he curiously fidgets with it as he asks endless questions about it. Unfortunately, he can’t read anything (even if it was written in modern Japanese he’d probably be able to grasp 3 words in a whole page or smth, lol), so you find yourself narrating your stories to him. (you receive great in-depth feedback for each chapter in return!! Masamune will be 100% honest with you and takes it v seriously). It becomes a daily occurrence that neither of you wants to miss. Each night, just before bed, you read out loud part of your book as Masamune quietly listens to your every word, wholly enraptured by the story.

He’s the most supportive partner one could wish for, and he’s always ready to show your works off to everyone he knows. He’ll help you get in touch with local printers and see what he can find amongst all the imported goods to make your job easier. If you ever find yourself stuck, he’ll gladly take you on a stroll to help you get your mind off writing for a bit to come back more refreshed and inspired.

Mitsuhide

Mitsuhide is a man who mostly communicates through lies, vague descriptions or distorted realities just to confuse others. As such, he finds your writing skills and wide imagination to be quite useful and admirable. He can be a capable storyteller if needed, so you often wonder why he doesn’t try writing every once in a while.

This said, he never expected for his kitsune story to strike up a chord in you to the point you’d write a story with a character heavily based on him as the protagonist. He’s quite flattered to say the least. When you hand the finished manuscript to him as a gift, he reads it all in one night. (let's pretend he'd be able to understand ahahah...) He’s amazed by your skill and the world you managed to describe through such vivid wording, but you'll have to read between his teasing words to grasp his real feelings about the gift, although he sincerely thanks you profusely.

The novel is the first work of yours he has ever had the chance to read, so he stores it away very carefully in a corner of his room, but curiosity makes him wonder about your previous works though he doesn't directly ask you anything about them. Sure, he'll probably drop some hints here and there concerning this hidden wish of his, but that's totally up to you to understand. Sooner or later he finds two copies of some of your books in the bag in your room (it was totally accidental, he wouldn't just barge in your room and look through your things like that), and he feels like he's fallen in love all over again. There's this particular level of mastery with which you handle your words that leave him spellbound and amazed. Who would have ever thought that his little clumsy mouse was such an expert writer?

In general, Mitsuhide is the closet fanboy. He won't be as open about his love for your stories as Masamune, but he's not afraid to be direct about his feelings every once in a while, especially if you really need to hear supporting words from him. If anyone ever brings up your skills during a conversation, he'll hum in affirmation with a rare, genuine smile gracing his lips.

[inky-duchess]

Writing Theory: Writing Romance Prt 1- Mastering the Tropes

Romance is a staple in most books today, whether it is a subplot or the main vein of a story and it pays to write it believable. Romance is not always easy as most tropes to write, it can be incredibly complex to write a romance arc that does not make your reader roll their eyes.

Romance Tropes

Though tropes can sometimes be considered the bane of any genre, but readers expect- even demand- them within the story. When writing romance, don't shy away from using them- in moderation, of course.

The Love Triangle

Perhaps the bread and butter of most fictional romances. It involves three (or more, then it is a square) participants. Usually two participants are in love with one love interest protagonist and argue over who is better for them (The Hunger Games, Twilight, Reign, Shadow and Bone). Love Triangles can sometimes be entertaining but if only each party as an equal chance of winning the protagonist's heart. It really makes no sense if one party has a better chance at winning than the other, leading the trop not to be a equalateral triangle but a skewed scalene (look I used maths 😊). Love triangles should never be one sided nor be dragged out until the reader gets tired of the Trope.

Friends to Lovers

Friends to lovers is probably the most favourably acclaimed romance Trope as it is realistic. Friends to lovers might be an overused Trope but it is one most readers don't tire of as long as its done correctly. Friends to lovers should never be rushed for most friends take their time to emerge from the friendzone. However, you must avoid the Ross and Rachel, where it is teased and milked so long that the reader just gives up on it all together. Friends to lovers has a tiered system that takes many years to evolve into a full blown romantic relationship: Friends, Questioning Friends, Angst over crossing the line, Crossing the Line to Romantically involved.

Enemies to Lovers/Villainous Love Interests

The villain is always somehow hot in most books today. Whether it be the Darkling in Shadow and Bone or Maven Calore or Anakin Skywalker, there is something exciting for both reader and protagonist to see the villain in this new light. Despite being a popular Trope, it has actually not died out but has yet to become the norm where it is expected in canon. It goes against the preconceptions of the reader and humanizes the villain to some degree, giving us just enough hope that they may come to light side. HOWEVER: enemies to lovers/villainous love interests should NEVER cross the line between intensity and abuse. NEVER EVER EVER EVER.

Opposites Attract

Oppostes attract is basically two characters who fall in love despite being two fundamentally different person, divided by opinion or affect. Opposites attract can only work if the two love interests have enough chemistry for the relationship to be believable and have just enough common ground so not to strangle one another. Now, from my own experiences and watching other opposites attract relationships, these usually run on conflict which is exciting but burns out fast. To create an opposites attract scenario, the two love interests must be able to meet on some kind of common ground be it an interest, a hobby or a task.

Forbidden Love

Forbidden Love is the backbone of a thousand romance novels and arcs. The lovers are often on opposite sides of a conflict or on different sides of time or a class system. The angst of breaking the rules fuels the story. Forbidden love or the Romeo-Juliet Scenario can often mastered by drawing the lines firmly throughout the narrative. The reader must understand why these characters cannot be together, there must be a valid reason that seems almost impossible to get around. For example, I never understood Twilight at all but what I really could never understand was Edward's refusal to turn Bella into a vampire. She was willing, she knew the risks and had asked him multiple times. Even if the relationship didn't work out, he would have made her immortal. Its a win-win for Bella. Forbidden love must also be believable. Characters must have real chemistry with each other and have a relationship worth risking the world for.

Soul Mates/Bound by Prophecy/Fate

Soul mates and fate is usually reserved for characters within fantasy or sci-fi genres though invoked by rl couples & contempory fiction heroines. However, souls mates is often labelled as a "set in stone" ultimatum and can considered to be boring. Yet, most soul mate and fate bound love, does not have to be boring or predictable. Soul mate tropes should branch out and use the prophecy element to turn the reader's expectations on their head. Soul mates tropes do not require romantic love. It can be any kind of relationship, including platonic.

[solacefruit]

hmm... so what would be the difference between writing a fanfic and a book sequel then? especially longer series typically include less and less exposition as they go on and have a built-in fandom. is there even any difference in how they are written at that point?

This is such an interesting question. I had to do a good think about it so I could articulate my answer in a way that’s going to make sense. 

The short answer is: one is fanfiction and one is a novel. This matters, because they are functionally different mediums. It’s not as simple as different modes of novelisation and, because of that, fanfiction and book sequels might share some similarities but ultimately you couldn’t successfully exchange one for the other without coming across some strangeness. At least, that’s my theory. 

The long answer is: by virtue of being fanfiction, fanfiction is read differently than published work, and the reverse is also true. Published fiction (and I’ll talk specifically about novels since you mentioned those) is fundamentally different to fanfiction because it is mediated through commerce. Publishing is a business. In other words, unless you’re entirely self-publishing (which is its own kettle of fish that I won’t get into here right now), your work will be expected to meet with certain standards and expectations for genre, style, grammar, etc., not to mention the editors’ opinions and recommendations. 

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, either. The benefits of editors are the insights and guidance of highly experienced people skilled in understanding and honing narrative, language, so on. The benefits of genre is the ability to approximately categorise the expected reading experience of a work, so you know not only what you’re in for (and if it’s for you) but also it teaches you how to read it. If you want more on what I mean by this, I can elaborate elsewhere, or you can check out “the horizon of expectations” by Hans Robert Jauss. 

A tl;dr version: we know how to read a romance novel, for instance, because we understand what a romance novel is and what it does. We understand how to recognise it (i.e., what characteristics and tropes it typically contains) and we understand how to read the story in the light it is meant to be read. In other words, if you go into a romance novel not knowing how to read a romance novel, you are likely to end up saying, “well, that was the worst zombie apocalypse novel I ever read! There weren’t even zombies, and no-one died, and it was all about kissing. Yuck.” 

Published fiction is highly codified, because that’s how you sell books. Because of that, if you want to sell books--which is to say, get your work professionally published--your knowledge of tropes, genre, conventions, etc., will shape your work, both subconsciously and intentionally, and it will also guide your editors’ feedback. Even if what you’re doing is subverting genre conventions with your work, you are still very aware of those conventions, and you are relying on your reader to also be aware of those conventions so they recognise how you’re subverting them.

The reason I’m saying all of this is because fanfiction as a medium has basically no oversight whatsoever compared to any published fiction. You can quite literally do whatever, more or less, and publication is not an obstacle or consideration unless you want it to be. The creative liberty available there is fantastic, but the drawback is that you’re not guaranteed that anyone’s going to care--if you’re writing original fiction on a fanfiction site, that is.

 Instead of the horizon of expectations being dictated by familiarity with genre (which is what Jauss talks about), I think it’s more useful to approach fanfiction from a perspective of horizon of expectations being defined by familiarity with canon. You are on some level relying on your reader to understand canon enough to recognise the ways you are reshaping it, whether that’s reinterpretation of characters or rewriting of scenes, so on. 

By that measurement, we can say that a “good” novel is one that does something interesting and potentially innovative with how it relates to genre; and a “good” fanfiction is one that does something interesting and potentially innovative with how it relates to canon. (Saying “good” in quotation marks because that’s so subjective, but I hope I’m getting across what I mean clearly enough).

So anyway, second tl;dr: even though a novel sequel has similar requirements to fanfiction in that you typically need to know the canon to get the best experience of the work, I think the immense set of underlying rules and expectations for published fiction in terms of structure, language, genre, narrative, etc. etc., mean that they aren’t really comparable as mediums in the way you’re suggesting. 

It’s sort of like comparing film and novels, for example. Obviously fanfiction and novels are both written, but just as cinematography has its own language, style, conventions, and rules that can be somewhat translated but not really accurately imitated by novels, I feel that fanfiction and published novels have a relationship kind of like that. You can’t create visual vectors in written fiction the way you can in film, for instance, and similarly I think fanfiction can do things that the far more rigid world of contemporary publishing typically cannot. 

Final tl;dr: novels have to follow rules and jump through certain hoops of expectation to be published that fanfiction simply doesn’t, and this is actually quite a major factor in the end results for both mediums. Thank you for asking! I hope this made some sense. 

[maxwell-grant]

What’s the difference between a pulp hero and a super hero?

There is a common sentiment when discussing pulp heroes, when compared to superheroes, that positions the two as if they were separate by entire eras, with pulp heroes being as distinct from the superheroes as the dinosaurs are to mankind. But then again, the dinosaurs never really went away, did they? 

Oh sure, they endured a great extinction, they downsized and ceded their thrones to the tiny little rats that scurried in their shadow, who then grew to become just as big, and then even bigger, but they never went away. They simply adapted into new forms and formed new ecosystems. We call them birds now.

The gap between Superman and The Shadow is merely 6 years, hardly much of a generation. There are those that argue that the Marvel and DC universes still have pulp heroes, that Batman is (or was) one, that characters like The Question and Moon Knight carry on the tradition. We have characters like Hellboy, Grendel, Tom Strong and Zack Overkill as original, modern examples of pulp characters, strongly identified as such. Venture Bros had in 2016 the best modern take on the Green Hornet. Lavender Jack is still going strong. So the idea that pulp heroes are defined solely by being old and outdated isn’t exactly true, when clearly there’s still enough gas in the tank centuries later for stories with them to be told.

Is there any meaningful distinction between pulp heroes and superheroes? If not, can we identify one?

Costume is definitely a big part of it, as Grant Morrison famously argued in his own summation. Of what he considers the big difference between the two: 

“What makes the superhero more current is the performance aspect. That's what The Shadow and those other guys don't really have. Their costumes are not bright, and they don't have their initials on their chest, and everything isn't out front and popping like the superheroes. I think we can relate to that about them because in the world we live in, everyone has a constant need to be a star. I think superheroes are keyed into that parallelism. They're performers. They're rock stars, and they always have been.

And he’s right, to an extent. It’s definitely tied into the central differences between The Shadow and Batman, as I’ve elaborated. While The Shadow was far, far from the only type of pulp hero, the superhero’s costume has long been defined as THE thing that sets it apart from every other type of fictional character. At least, when it comes to American superheroes. 

Because the “criteria” for superheroes is nowhere near as set in stone as some would like to believe. Our basic definition of superheroes is based around comparisons and contrasts to Superman and Batman, and how they fit into what we call “the superhero genre”. The existence of a superhero genre is, in and of itself, debatable, and any working definition for superheroes is inevitably going to have too many exceptions. 

Superheroes are not defined by settings, like cowboys or spacemen, or their profession, like detectives. They can’t be defined by superpowers (Batman), a mission statement, having secret identities (Fantastic Four, Tony Stark), being good people, or good at their jobs. The costume, the closest there is to a true, defining convention, still has a considerable share of exceptions like Jack Knight’s Starman, a great deal of the X-Men who do not wear uniforms, or most superheroes created outside the US. The most basic definition of superhero is of comic book characters with iconic costumes and enhanced abilities who fight villains in shared superhero universes, but even that falls short of exceptions by including characters who are not superheroes (John Constantine and other Vertigo characters, Jonah Hex, the Punisher). Some people would call Goku or Harry Potter or Lucky Luke or Monica’s Gang superheroes, Donald Duck has literally been one. “Character with a distinctive design and unusual talents who fights evil” includes virtually every fictional hero that’s ever achieved a modicum of popularity in a visual medium.

Even telling stories with super characters doesn’t mean you’re going to be writing a superhero story (Joker). Superheroes are not defined by settings and genres, but they can inhabit just about any of them you can imagine. Horror, westerns, gritty crime drama, historical reconstruction, romance, space adventure, war stories, surrealism stories. As Morrison put it, they aren’t so much a genre as they are “a special chilli pepper-like ingredient designed to energize other genres”, part of the reason why they colonized the entire blockbuster landscape.

Aviation became a thing in the war years, so they started producing en masse aviation pulps as a subgenre. Zeppelins became popular, so they had a short-lived zeppelin subgenre. Celebrities starred in their own magazines. The American pulps were different from the German pulps, or the Italian pulps, or the Canadian pulps. In China, wuxia arose at a similar time period and with similar themes and distribution. In Brazil, we have “folhetos”, short, poetic, extremely cheap prose often written about romantic heroes and “cangaçeiros”, the closest local equivalent to the American cowboys. In Japan, “light novels” began life as pulp fiction, distributed in exactly the same format and literally sold as such. Pulp fiction has long outlived any and all attempts to define it as 30s literary fiction only.

Likewise, “pulp” and “pulp heroes” are terms employed very, very loosely. Characters like The Shadow and Doc Savage arrived quite late in the history of pulp fiction. You had characters like Jimmie Dale, Bulldog Drummond, Tarzan, Conan, a billion non-descript trenchcoat guys, and before those the likes of Nick Carter and Sexton Blake, dime novel detectives who made the jump to pulp. You had your hero pulps, villain pulps, adventure pulps, romance pulps, horror pulps, weird menace pulps. Science fiction, planetary romance, roman-era adventures, lost race adventures, anything that publishers could sell was turned into pulp stories starring, what else, pulp heroes. 

How do you make sense of it all?

The main difference to consider is the mediums they were made for. 

Pulp heroes were made for literature, superheroes were made for comic books.

Superheroes NEED to pop out visually, to have bold and flashy and striking designs, because comic books are visual stories first and foremost, who live and die on having attractive, catching character designs and the promise of an entertaining story with them. Pulp heroes, in turn, can often just be ordinary dudes and dudettes and anything in between in trenchcoats or evening wear or furry underwear, or masters of disguise rarely identifiable, because the only thing that needs to visually striking at first glance in a pulp magazine is the cover, so your imagination can get ready to do the rest. Smoking guns, bloody daggers, a romantic embrace, monsters hunched over ladies in peril, incendiary escapes. The characters can look like and be literally anything.

Comic books are a sequential art form where art and writing come together to tell a story, and every illustration must serve the story and vice-versa. It needs to give you an incentive to keep being visually invested in whatever’s going on. Pulp literature stays dead on the page unless animated by your expectations; you may have the illusion of submitting to an experience, but really it’s you expending your imagination to otherwise inert signals. You have to provide the colors and flashy sequences and great meaning yourself, and as a trade, you get much more text to work with in novels than you do in comic books, where the dialogue and narration are fundamentally secondary to the visual, whether it’s a superhero punching stars or a monster covered in blood.

Each art form has its strengths and weaknesses, of course, which are only accentuated when each tries to be of a different kind. There's been pulp heroes that tried making the jump to comics, and comic heroes that made the jump to literature. There’s good, even great examples, of both, but even at their best, there's always some incongruity, because that's not the medium these characters were made for. 

Superheroes are characters defined by being extraordinary. The pulp heroes are too, in many cases, distinguished from their literary antecessors because they were too uncanny and weird, a middleground between the folklore/fairy tale heroes and the grounded detective and adventure characters such as Sherlock, and the later far out superheroes. But they don’t necessarily have to be extraordinary. Sometimes they can very well just be completely ordinary characters, caught in bizarre circumstances and managing them as best they can, or simply using skills available to anyone who puts in effort to do good. Often enough the extraordinary comes in the form of a bizarre villain, or a tangled conspiracy, a monster from outside the world, a unique time period. The extraordinary is there, but it doesn’t have to be in the hero. 

That is, I’d argue, the other big fundamental difference between the two. "Superhero” is a name we use to define a type of character who fits an extraordinary mold, a Super Hero. It’s a genre, it can be every genre, it’s a shared universe and a stand-alone epic. There are guidelines, structures at work here. Grids, page count, illustrators. The Big Two and their domain over the concept. Academic usage of the term, standards that rule the “genre”, when it is defined as a genre. Malleable and overpowering and adaptable and timeless as the superhero may be, it’s still bound by a certain set of rules and trends.

The term “pulp hero” is a term that we use to label just about any character that happens to star in something we recognize as “pulp fiction”, even if it isn’t literally written in pulp, even if it’s decades later. It’s a “metaphor with no brakes in it”. Superheroes can be pulp heroes. The most powerless, unlucky, homeless bum can be a pulp hero, there were entire subgenres of pulp stories based on homeless protagonists or talltale stories told in bars. The cruelest villain can be a pulp hero. Boris Karloff about to stab you with a knife named Ike IS a pulp hero, and so is a space slug on a warpath (look up what happened when Lovecraft and R.E Howard collaborated).

As much as I may dislike the idea of pulp heroes largely only existing in the shadow of superheroes nowadays...that is kinda appropriate, isn’t it? Of course they are going to live and make their homes in the place where the sun doesn’t shine. Where Superman and co would never go to. 

Of course the 90s reboots of these characters failed. Because they tried turning these characters into superheroes, and they are not superheroes. They can visit those world, but they don’t belong in them, or anywhere else. They live in places where the light doesn’t touch, worlds much bigger and darker and more vast than you’d ever think at first glance, worlds that we still haven’t fully discovered (over 38% of American pulps no longer exist, 14% survive in less than five scattered copies, to say nothing of all pulps and pulp heroes outside of America). Not lesser, not gone, despite having every reason to. Just different, reborn time and time again. The shadow opposites.

In short: One is represented by Superman. The other is represented by The Shadow. There are worlds far beyond those two, but when you think of the concepts, those are the ones that things always seem to come back to.

[letterboxd]

Noir Zealand Road Trip.

Breakout noir filmmaker James Ashcroft speaks to Letterboxd’s Indigenous editor Leo Koziol about his chilling new movie Coming Home in the Dark—and reveals how Blue Velvet, Straw Dogs and a bunch of cult New Zealand thrillers are all a part of his Life in Film.

“Many different types of feet walk across those lands, and the land in that sense is quite indifferent to who is on it. I like that duality. I like that sense of we’re never as safe as we would like to think.” —James Ashcroft

In his 1995 contribution to the British Film Institute’s Century of Cinema documentary series, Sam Neill described the unique sense of doom and darkness presented in films from Aotearoa New Zealand as the “Cinema of Unease”.

There couldn’t be a more appropriate addition to this canon than Māori filmmaker James Ashcroft’s startling debut Coming Home in the Dark, a brutal, atmospheric thriller about a family outing disrupted by an enigmatic madman who calls himself Mandrake, played in a revelatory performance by Canadian Kiwi actor Daniel Gillies (previously best known for CW vampire show The Originals, and as John Jameson in Spider-Man 2). Award-winning Māori actress Miriama McDowell is also in the small cast—her performance was explicitly singled out by Letterboxd in our Fantasia coverage.

Based on a short story by acclaimed New Zealand writer Owen Marshall, Ashcroft wrote the screenplay alongside longtime collaborator Eli Kent. It was a lean shoot, filmed over twenty days on a budget of just under US $1 million. The film is now in theaters, following its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January, where it made something of an impact.

Erik Thomson, Matthias Luafutu, Daniel Gillies and Miriama McDowell in a scene from ‘Coming Home in the Dark’.

Creasy007 described the film as “an exciting New Zealand thriller that grabs you tight and doesn’t let you go until the credits are rolling.” Jacob wrote: “One of the most punishingly brutal—both viscerally and emotionally—first viewings I’ve enjoyed in quite a while. Will probably follow James Ashcroft’s career to the gates of Hell after this one.”

Filmgoers weren’t the only ones impressed: Legendary Entertainment—the gargantuan production outfit behind the Dark Knight trilogy and Godzilla vs. Kong—promptly snapped up Ashcroft to direct their adaptation of Devolution, a high-concept novel by World War Z author Max Brooks about a small town facing a sasquatch invasion after a volcanic eruption. (“I find myself deep in Sasquatch mythology and learning a lot about volcanoes at the moment,” says the director, who is also writing the adaptation with Kent.)

Although Coming Home in the Dark marks his feature debut, Ashcroft has been working in the creative arts for many years as an actor and theater director, having previously run the Māori theater company Taki Rua. As he explains below, his film taps into notions of indigeneity in subtle, non-didactic ways. (Words in the Māori language are explained throughout the interview.)

Kia ora [hello] James. How did you come to be a filmmaker? James Ashcroft: I’ve always loved film. I worked in video stores from the age thirteen to 21. That’s the only other ‘real job’ I’ve ever had. I trained as an actor, and worked as an actor for a long time. So I had always been playing around with film. My first student allowance that I was given when I went to university, I bought a camera, I didn’t pay for my rent. I bought a little handheld Sony camera. We used to make short films with my flatmates and friends, so I’ve always been dabbling and wanting to move into that.

After being predominantly involved with theater, I sort of reached my ceiling of what I wanted to do there. It was time to make a commitment and move over into pursuing and creating a slate of scripts, and making that first feature step into the industry. My main creative collaborator is Eli Kent, who I’ve been working with for seven years now. We’re on our ninth script, I think.

But Coming Home in the Dark, that was our first feature. It was the fifth script we had written, and that was very much about [it] being the first cab off the rank; about being able to find a work that would fit into the budget level that we could reasonably expect from the New Zealand Film Commission. I also wanted to make sure that piece was showing off my strengths and interests—being a character-focused, actor-focused piece—and something that we could execute within those constraints and still deliver truthfully and authentically to the story that we wanted to tell and showcase the areas of interest that I have as a filmmaker, which have always been genre.

Do you see the film more as a horror or a thriller? We’ve never purported to be a horror. We think that the scenario is horrific, some of the events that happen are horrific, but this has always been a thriller for me and everyone involved. I think, sometimes, because of the premiere and the space that it was programmed in at Sundance, being in the Midnight section, there’s a sort of an association with horror or zany comedy. For us it’s more about, if anything, the psychological horror aspect of the story. 

It’s violent in places, obviously, but there’s very little violence actually committed on screen. It’s the suggestion. The more terrifying thing is what exists in the viewer’s mind [rather] than necessarily what you can show on screen. My job as a storyteller is to provoke something that you can then flesh out and embellish more in your own psyche and emotions. It’s a great space, the psychological thriller, because it can deal with the dramatic as well as some of those more heightened, visceral moments that horror also can touch on.

Director James Ashcroft. / Photo by Stan Alley

There’s a strong Māori cast in your film. Do you see yourself as a Māori filmmaker, or a filmmaker who is Maori? Well, I’m a Māori everything. I’m a father, I’m a husband, I’m a friend. Everything that I do goes back to my DNA and my whakapapa [lineage]. So that’s just how I view my identity and my world. In terms of categorizing it, I don’t put anything in front of who I am as a storyteller. I’m an actor, I’m a director. I follow the stories that sort of haunt me more than anything. They all have something to do with my experience and how I see the world through my identity and my life—past, present and hopefully future.

In terms of the cast, Matthias Luafutu [who plays Mandrake’s sidekick Tubs], he’s Samoan. Miriama McDowell [who plays Jill, the mother of the family] is Māori. I knew that this story, in the way that I wanted to tell it, was always going to feature Māori in some respect. Both the ‘couples’, I suppose you could say—Hoaggie [Erik Thomson] and Jill on one side and Tubs and Mandrake on the other—I knew one of each would be of a [different] culture. So I knew I wanted to mirror that.

Probably more than anything, I knew if I had to choose one role that was going to be played by a Māori actor, it was definitely going to be Jill, because for me, Jill’s the character that really is the emotional core and our conduit to the story. Her relationship with the audience, we have to be with her—a strong middle-class working mother who has a sort of a joy-ness at the beginning of the film and then goes through quite a number of different emotions and realizations as it goes along.

Those are sometimes the roles that Māori actors, I often feel, don’t get a look at usually. That’s normally a different kind of actor that gets those kinds of roles. And then obviously when Miriama McDowell auditions for you it’s just a no-brainer, because she can play absolutely anything and everything. I have a strong relationship with Miriama from drama-school days, so I knew how to work with her on that.

Once you put a stake in the ground with her, then we go, right, so this is a biracial family, and her sons are going to be Māori and that’s where the Paratene brothers, who are brothers in real life, came into the room, and we were really taken with them immediately. We threw out a lot of their scripted dialogue in the end because what we are casting is that fundamental essence and energy that exists between two real brothers that just speaks volumes more than any dialogue that Eli and I could write.

Matthias Luafutu as Tubs in ‘Coming Home in the Dark’.

What was your approach to the locations? [The area we shot in] is very barren and quite harsh. I spent a lot of time there in my youth, and I find them quite beautiful places. They are very different kinds of landscapes than you normally see in films from our country. We didn’t want to go down The Lord of the Rings route of images from the whenua [land] that are lush mountains and greens and blues, even though that’s what Owen Marshall had written.

I was very keen, along with Matt Henley, our cinematographer, to find that duality in the landscape as well, because the whole story is about that duality in terms of people, in terms of this world, and that grey space. So that’s why we chose to film in those areas.

Regarding the scene where Tubs sprinkles himself with water: including this Māori spiritual element in the film created quite a contrast. That character had partaken in something quite evil, yet still follows a mundane cultural tradition around death. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah. I’m not really interested in black-and-white characters of any kind. I want to find that grey space that allows them to live within more layers in the audience’s mind. So for me—and having family who have spent time in jail, or knowing people who have gone through systems like state-care institutions as well as moving on to prison—just because you have committed a crime or done something in one aspect of your life, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t room and there aren’t other aspects that inform your identity that you also carry.

It’s something that he’s adopted for whatever reasons to ground him in who he is. And they can sit side by side with being involved in some very horrendous actions, but also from Tubs’ perspective, these are actions which are committed in the name of survival. You start to get a sense Mandrake enjoys what he does rather than doing it for just a means to the end. So any moment that you can start to create a greater sense of duality in a person, I think that means that there’s an inner life to a world, to a character, that’s starting to be revealed. That’s an invitation for an audience to lean into that character.

Erik Thomson and Daniel Gillies in ‘Coming Home in the Dark’.

What is the film that made you want to get into filmmaking? The biggest influence on me is probably David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. I saw that when I was ten years old. A babysitter, my cousin, rented it. It’s not a film that a ten-year-old should see, by the way. I was in Lower Hutt, there in my aunty’s house, and it was very cold, and there’s a roaring fire going. My cousin and her boyfriend were sitting on a couch behind me, and they started making out. I sort of knew something was going on behind me and not to look. So I was stuck between that and Dennis Hopper huffing nitrous, and this very strange, strange world opening up before me on the television.

I’ve had a few moments like that in my life [where a] film, as well as the circumstance, sort of changed how I view the world. I think something died that day, but obviously something was born. You can see what Lynch did in those early works, especially Blue Velvet. You don’t have to go too far beneath the surface of suburbia or what looks normal and nice and welcoming to find that there’s a complete flip-side. There’s that duality to our world, which we like to think might be far away, but it’s actually closer than you think.

That speaks to Coming Home in the Dark and why that short story resonated with me the first time I read it. Even in the most beautiful, scenically attractive places in our land, many different types of feet walk across those lands, and the land in that sense is quite indifferent to who is on it. I like that duality. I like that sense of we’re never as safe as we would like to think. Blue Velvet holds a special place in my heart.

What other films did you have in mind when forming your approach to Coming Home in the Dark? Straw Dogs, the Peckinpah film. The original. Just because it plays in that grey space. Obviously times have changed, and you read the film in different ways now as you might have when it first came out. But that was a big influence because there was a moral ambiguity to that film; those lines of good and bad or black and white, they don’t apply anymore. It just becomes about what happens when people are put under extreme pressure and duress, and they abandon all sense of morals. The Offence by Sidney Lumet would be another one, very much drawn to that ’70s ilk of American and English filmmaking.

‘Coming Home in the Dark’ was filmed on location around the wider Wellington region of New Zealand.

Is there a New Zealand film that’s influenced you significantly? There’s a few. I remember watching The Lost Tribe when it was on TV. That really scared me. I just remember the sounds of it. Mr. Wrong was a great ghost story. That stuck with me for a long time. The Scarecrow. Once I discovered Patu! [Merata Mita’s landmark documentary about the protests against the apartheid-era South African rugby tour of New Zealand in 1981], that sort of blew everything out of the water, because that was actually my first induction and education that this was something that even occurred. I think I saw that when I was about eighteen. That this was something that occurred in our history and had ramifications that were other than just a rugby game.

And Utu, every time I watch that, it doesn’t lose its resonance. I get something new from it every time. It’s a great amalgamation of identity, culture, of genre, and again, plays in that grey space of accountability. Utu still has that power for me. It’s one of those films, when it’s playing, I’ll end up sitting down and just being glued to the screen.

It’s a timeless classic. I will admit that when I watched your film, The Scarecrow did immediately come to mind, as did Garth Maxwell’s Jack Be Nimble. Yeah. [Jack Be Nimble] was really frightening. Again, it was that clash of many different aspects. There was a psychosexual drama there. You’ve got this telekinetic mind control and that abuse and that hunkering down of an isolated family. There are plenty of New Zealand films that have explored a sort of similar territory. They’re all coming to me now.

Bad Blood has a great sense of atmosphere and photography and the use of soundscape to create that shocking sense of isolation and terror in these quick, fast, brutal moments, which then just sort of are left to ring in the air. But I love so much of New Zealand cinema, especially the stuff from the ’80s.

Kia ora [good luck], James. Kia ora.

Related content

Leo’s Letterboxd list of Aotearoa New Zealand Scary-As Movies Adapted from Literature

Dave’s Cinema of Unease list

A Brutal Stillness: Gregory’s list of patient, meditative genre films

Sailordanae’s list of Indigenous directors of the Americas

Follow Leo on Letterboxd

‘Coming Home in the Dark’ is available now in select US theaters and on VOD in the US and New Zealand. All photographs by Stan Alley / GoldFish Creative. Comments have been edited for length and clarity.

[liathgray]

yello its me writing anon 👋🏼

i was gonna honestly wait till you finished posting blackwell cuz spoilers but like im Impatient so here we are:

im not the best at writing horror! honestly if i do make an attempt i just follow my gut feeling that says im going Too Far and push it but usually everything just ends up being Weird but not necessarily Scary. do you have any tips?

as usual you dont have to answer! especially not while youre still posting blackwell, i dont mind waiting 💗💗💗

anyway i love you stay safe 💜💜💜

OKAY I CAN FINALLY POST THE ANSWER TO THIS!!!!

The is a bit long some im gonna put it under the cut.

I’m just going to start by saying I am pretty new to writing horror. At least in long form prose. I’ve written a lot of short stories, but a short vs basically a novel length story is very different and they horror of it can’t just be momentary like how it can be in flash/short fiction. 

What I will alway recommend in this particular genre is to write something that scares you. Write about things that you think about or even draw on your own experiences because then you will be able to like... really sink your teeth into the topic and write the reactions to it well.

Here’s a little list of things that I think help with long form horror:

1. The details

That instinct? in your gut saying this it too far? follow that. It’s not bad if things get a bit odd because things that are unfamiliar are also in a very innate way, scary. Describe the little tiny things that you wouldn’t normally notice. It doesn’t have to be gruesome or anything! It’s just good to have details present because it feels more alive.

2. Contrast

Pretty things are horrifying, horrifying things are pretty. It’s all the same. Blur the lines between the two and find mundane things that could be turned terrible with juusssttt a little tweak.

3. Put things where they don’t belong

What do you expect to find in a kitchen cabinet? Certainly not a jar of teeth. Having jarring moments like that to spice things up is always a good time.

4. What’s something that you find fundamentally scary? Write about it

This leads into the next point but its really important to use ideas that you think can be a fear for anyone. Even if you narrow it down later on, a good starting point is always universal spooky things.

5. Themes

This is especially important if you’re wanting to write a long horror story and also... hard to explain. Which is why im gonna use Blackwell as an example.

So a lot of the themes revolve around 1) morality and what humans are capable of 2) fear in the face of uncertainty 3) no longer being able to trust someone 4) isolation. All of these loop back into each other in ways I could write an essay on because lemme tell you I put a LOT of thought into this shit and they are all thing that I myself find really fucking scary.

SPOILER WARNING FOR CHAPTER 15

It starts with isolation and moves through the rest, shown from Roy and Ed’s different viewpoints. How they experience the themes (god does that even make sense wtf) is in juxtaposition to one another. For Roy it is his own morality and wrestling with that throughout (if you go back to the earlier chapters he has a lot go Not Good intrusive thoughts). It’s stoked by fear in the face of uncertainty and the fact that for Some Reason, Ed doesn’t seem to trust him anymore, and it compounded by the fact that they’re alone.

So he just. snaps. Thats the answer on his end. What are humans capable of in the face of all this terribleness? More terribleness. 

For Ed, he starts out feeling the pressure of being totally isolated and uncomfortable, and as things start to be revealed he goes into more of s downward spiral of what he can't and can believe. Everything is uncertain. Then the gotdamn tellers plant the seed for mistrust and in the end those suspicions are kind of confirmed. 

With horror theming, looking at what is plausible will always be what I would suggest. Even in the realm of the super natural, draw on primal fears. The ones I choose were ones that make me scared. The ideas that an authority figure, an adult, a parent, a guardian, etc. might sudden become a threat to you. Being alone. Poking around the dark underbelly of human nature.