#this one is not substantial enough to go into the tag bc it relies on my extensive personal cinematic universe

[clonerightsagenda]

To fuse two of my recent posts I think a funny additional twist to the ‘Doug and Miranda are friends’ situation is, given Eiffel hated Maxwell’s vibes on sight for unspecified reasons, if when alien clone Maxwell shows up again he still hates her vibes on sight. Maxwell does not give a solitary shit what he thinks of her but when she sees him excitedly showing Miranda Cracked.com she’s like. ok not to take it personally but what the fuck.

[the-cryptographer]

I should not have dropped eight thousand words of a new WIP.

I mean, it was the one unposted WIP fic I allowed myself to work on at all, and for a microfandom, so it’s not like I had no idea what I was doing. It’s just a lot on my mind and on my plate, and I’m just kind of meh about the parts of the chapter I rushed to finish. I felt myself struggling through parts of the Trish conversation, and I completely BS-ed a section - one that should have been longer - in a very poor attempt to preserve the original pacing and scene changes that I drafted two years ago. But after sitting on the thing for so long, I figured it was just better to go ahead just bc... I want this fic to exist.

It’s really weird for me, because it’s not even a fic that’s entirely mine - it was something brainstormed in response to someone’s yuletide prompt from 2015. I’m not sure I would have conceptualised the concept as I did without that prompt. I have some major reservations about the ship, for one, particularly the Gig/Levin side of the triang. Gig’s mass exploitation and the control he leveraged over Raksha in the backstory is kind of fucked up in a way I can’t really excuse as the backstory for a relationship, regardless of how terrible a person Raksha is. But even though I’m finding myself edging over to the abandoned fandom corner of Levin/Revya OTP, I kind of want Gig there for this anyhow. He’s great to write dialogue for, for one. He’s observant in ways the other two aren’t. And there’s something in his relationships with each of the others... The kind of codependence he has with Revya - they way they hide their identities behind one another, and draw together in solidarity so easily. And that Gig and Raksha, for all that ugly, ugly, history, were really the only two to make it out alive and together and in an understanding of what had happened - all those attempts to grab power and control - was all utterly futile. So even though I have issues with Gig being there, and I’m not entirely sure it’s something I would have happened upon myself, I kind of realised that there isn’t really a story without him. How would Revya and Levin even begin a conversation if it was just them? They get so easily tongue-tied. And it’s also just kind of hard for me to imagine Revya... not wanting Gig to be a part of this. ...And also bisexuality and polyamory and genderfuck are life, lol. Like, I’ll write and enjoy het ships, but this is really what I’m here for - let’s not lie to ourselves.

Other issues I have with it...

Chapter two will be better in this regard, but the first chapter relies too much on incidental meetings. I don’t think they’re impossible to believe, and I think on a meta level they can be justified considering the amount of narrative mileage that’s milked out of them - the first setting up the plot, and the second being the centerpiece of comedic schadenfreude. But I’d prefer to have a more substantial reason for characters running into one another on an in-universe level.

The mental health stuff is all over the place. It was another thing requested by the yuletide prompt. I got the idea for depressive, bipolar, and psychosis trifecta with Revya, Levin, and Gig respectively. But, while I’m kind of attached to bipolar Levin in particular, I realised I don’t really have the background or personal experience to write much more than depression with any certainty. It’s kind of integrated into the plot at this point, so there will definitely be moments of lapsed health, but I kind of feel it’s going to be both disappointingly vague and disappointingly left hanging.

The prompter also specified they didn’t care much for Tricia or Danette. And, yeah, I don’t /not/ get that. I’m not too fond of Danette myself. It’s just hard for me to make Revya not attached to her. The same way i won’t write Red not liking Pikachu. Or Yuugi not liking Atem. So that, but also it’s hard for me to leave this kind of fandom mindset where... I really /want/ to like female characters. Even when I don’t. Despite all the incredibly shoddy writing surrounding female characters, and despite the fact that I don’t think it’s really a fan’s responsibility to make allowances for that, I’m still kind of super... meh... about the way female characters get treated in fandom. I live irl around enough women that are 500x more critical of other ladies than any of the men in their lives. And it’s just... really hard for me to not read that kind of misogyny into fandom attitudes. Especially considering how viscous and charged and controlling I’ve seen fandom get about what female fans are allowed to do. So I kind of inevitably want to write stories where the female characters are given weight and importance in their relationships with each other, and the resultant product of this impulse combined with trying to follow the letter of the prompt was something very ??? where Tricia and Danette are kind of left out of the story while still being rather over-present in it. I kind of wonder at this point what niches they would have filled in the story if I hadn’t tried to limit them. But it kind of is what it is at this point, and I have trouble wanting to fix what isn’t broken, even if it could potentially be better maybe(?)

So, in spite of all my many reservations, I... care about this thing. The kind of grim comedy and exuberance to Soul Nomad struck a chord with the grim comedic fatality of my teenage self, and every once in a while I’m kind of overcome with how much I love the cow siblings. They are just a mess of abuse and biological weapons engineering and deception. I kind of realise dancing around the soul nomad tags... how much I disproportionately love Levin, lol. And how much I need content about him and Euphoria that goes into their identity struggles, and having been trafficked, and the kind of ugliness and control that sits between them. Content that largely doesn’t exist.

And I also like the kind of aftermath to what is a quest that gathered a number of different party members - all of different political allegiance - and set them to a common goal. The idea that they’re all still friends that enjoy each other on a personal level, but still all have their own agendas and priorities that clash, is one of those things that intrigues me. And that Revya and Gig and Levin can kind of move through that landscape (mostly) unaffiliated and detached from it. Outside observers.

Anyhow, these are all the things I’m kind of thinking about. and I just wanted to ramble for a bit.