2022 Decade Fic Reflection

[distantattraction]

I read through rionaleonhart’s 2022 fic roundup and thought “That would be a fun thing to do, except that I’ve only written one fic this year. Maybe I should do it for all of my time on AO3 instead!” So here’s a fic reflection for almost all of my time as a serious fic writer. (I really started in 2011, but I didn’t start posting on AO3 until 2013.)

I changed some of the references to “this year” to do a big picture summary. I left one in, though!

Number of fics written from 2013 to 2022: 

47. I have 51 on AO3, but I’m pretty sure that all four of the L.A. Noire fics I posted in December of 2013 were reposts from the L.A. Noire Kink Meme, which I wrote for in 2011.

Fandoms: 

By number of fics: Fire Emblem: Three Houses (10), Aoharu x Kikanjuu (8), L.A. Noire (7), Caste Heaven (4), Sekaiichi Hatsukoi (3), Until Dawn (3), Les Miserables (3), Gintama (3), Hatoful Boyfriend (2), Godsfall (2), The Yogscast (2), Yuri!!! On Ice (1), The Flash/Legends of Tomorrow (1), Supernatural (1).

In chronological order: Les Miserables, Supernatural, The Yogscast, L.A. Noire, Sekaiichi Hatsukoi, Hatoful Boyfriend, Sekaiichi Hatsukoi, Aoharu x Kikanjuu, Sekaiichi Hatsukoi again, Caste Heaven, Yuri!!! On Ice, The Flash/Legends of Tomorrow, Godsfall, Until Dawn, Hatoful Boyfriend again, Gintama, L.A. Noire again, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Until Dawn again.

Best title: 

What We Write in the Shadows is my favorite by far. Bernadetta’s a writer! They’re roleplaying vampires! I love What We Do in the Shadows! I’m a genius.

Worst title: 

Inevitability // Change, also by far. Frankly, I didn’t care much about titling this story, to the point where I couldn’t even choose between two single words for a title. But to be fair to me, Sekaiichi Hatsukoi isn’t a good series, so writing for its main pairing didn’t instill in me a lot of love.

Best first line: 

She knew from the first moment she held him that her son was the most beautiful person she would ever see.

This one’s from Gilded, which is about the mom of a BL protagonist. She appears in under 5% of the manga and she is my favorite character. This opening line took me right back into the mindset of the story immediately, which did not happen when I read the rest of my opening lines. Most of my opening lines feel a little utilitarian, even if they’re punchy openings.

I have also always loved the opening line of Recovery chapter 2, which I don’t think qualifies for this since it’s not the opening line of chapter 1, but I will share it here anyway:

They make it off the mountain, but they don’t come back whole.

I always knew this would be in the overall fic summary as well. It just really encapsulates the Until Dawn survivor story, which is to have PTSD and fail to cope with it.

Worst first line: 

Ink flows freely across his skin; it has done so from the day he was born.

Shifting Ink, chapter 1.

A semicolon? In the first sentence?? Did I just discover semicolons or something? 2013 Vina was a different breed.

Best last line: 

Sylvain stands frozen in the corridor for a full five minutes, his face burning, covering his mouth. He lowers his hand when he finally starts climbing the stairs to get to his room, but he keeps the beaming smile it was hiding.

Romance 101

I have an awful lot of last lines where people who care about each other just go to sleep together, so all of those are at about the same ranking and no single one can be selected for this title.

Worst last line: 

Ah. Maybe Yukimura doesn’t have to ask either. Strange, how he never even considered it.

When the Nights Get Long, chapter 3.

This closes out a conversation about how it’s okay to want things, which is fine, but this is the only ending line that actually stuck out to me as a contender for worst line. It just doesn’t quite work for me anymore.

Looking back, did you write more than you thought you would this year, less than you thought, or about what you predicted?

I’ve been taking a break from fic writing that lasted about 2 years (October 2020 to October 2022). I didn’t end my writing hiatus on purpose, so I did write more than I expected this year because I thought my break would continue.

In the past decade, I’ve posted about 200k words worth of fic. I’m really proud of that! I’m not really a finisher of things, so I think that’s more than I would have expected to write. I’ve also got a bunch of WIPs that I’ll never finish that probably total 50k-100k extra words, so there’s also that.

What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted?

I’m surprised by how long I kept at it for Fire Emblem: Three Houses and just how much content I produced. I posted over 52,000 words for this fandom, and I have tens of thousands of words of FE3H fic that I never finished or posted. It’s a lot of content, and I don’t think any other fandom I’ve written for comes close to matching it for raw word count.

What’s your favorite story this decade? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you the happiest.

The Basis of Everything. As a final product, this fic is everything I wanted it to be. I love love love the part of Hijikata’s character where he is just straight up devoted to Kondo because it reads so much like love. I had this thought years ago that if Mitsuba was Hijikata’s first love, and if Gintoki is Hijikata’s current love, then Kondo is the reason Hijikata loves. The title for the fic also came from an interview with Hijikata’s VA where he states that Kondo is the person who helps him voice the character. “The basis for everything is: for this person’s sake.” I thought about that for years after I first read it.

Recovery is also a contender for this one, but that could just be recency bias. They do have “this idea simmered for literally years before I wrote the fic” in common, though.

Okay, NOW your most popular story.

Only Him, Only You (and His OnlyFans) takes this title when you go by kudos.

However, I have always really valued comment threads as a statistic because they make me feel like the big fish in a little pond that I believe myself to be. Technically Only Him, Only You (and His OnlyFans) also takes the win by this metric, since it has 31 comment threads, but those are spread out over 5 chapters. Romance 101 has 28 comment threads for a single chapter, so it wins the comment thread competition in my heart.

Story most underappreciated by the universe?

The lowest number of kudos I have on any fic is 3 kudos on my one (1) Supernatural fic. I actually think it was pretty good, but SPN was such an active fandom that I think no one saw the fic at all.

I could have said Hollywood Lights here, but seeing as how it’s a fic about a character who appears in one scene of a game with no active fandom and it’s gotten THREE individual comments, I think I’m winning with that one.

Story that could have been better?

Some of my earlier (2011-2014) works and some of my shorter (<3k words) fics could be better. Petals and Thorns comes to mind; I wanted to get this double hanahaki idea out there, but I don’t think I spent very much time trying to really nail the execution. 

I would like to note that Get What You Deserve did everything I wanted it to do, so it’s the exception to this rule even though it’s only 2k long. 

Sexiest story?

This one will have to go to either Only Him, Only You (and His OnlyFans) or What We Write in the Shadows.

With the former, I spent a lot of time packing in a variety of different kinds of sex that the characters would have. There’s livestreamed masturbation, sex that isn’t romantic or emotionally intimate, sex that is romantic and emotionally intimate, and everything I could think of that fell under the category of “spicy vanilla sex.”

With the latter, the whole fic was just one really good sex scene that was really satisfying to write and which I still find fun to read back. It was also my first time writing porn for an M/F couple.

Saddest story?

I killed all the barricade boys off canon-style in ye olde Les Mis 327-word bonus fic (At the End of the Day), so that one if you’ll accept a cop-out answer. I also killed people off in Petals and Thorns. 

Gilded is probably the real answer, actually. It’s got a lot of ways that a sex worker gets mistreated by clients, all leading into her son getting mistreated in similar ways. Also there’s a scene that includes a grown man being sexually interested in a child, so there’s that. I didn’t just make tragedy porn though!!!!! You’re not going to catch me pulling an A Little Life.

I’ve written a lot of stuff that I would describe as melancholy, so I have plenty of fics that fit the criteria for this category, but few that really stand out for being turbo sad.

Most fun?

Jesus, I just don’t really write a lot of people having fun. Wet Hot Japanese Summer is a goofy sex romp, as is What We Write in the Shadows, but I actually think that Carefree and In Denial takes the trophy for this one. It’s a really goofy fic about Sylvain thinking he’s got to be straight because he didn’t enjoy having sex with the hottest guy he knows, all while having a massive crush on his best friend that he doesn’t realize is a crush.

Story with single sweetest moment?

I really like the romance in Romance 101! It’s got the classic “physical contact precedes emotional intimacy” that I love so much, but with a first date as the crux instead of a sexual relationship. I really wanted to show a known womanizer and infamous sex-haver really struggling with a crush for what might be the first time, and I think I got their chemistry exactly where I wanted it. Also, I just like Sylvain/Bernadetta a lot as a ship. They’re cute!

Most fucked-up story?

This is my wheelhouse. The extent to which this is my wheelhouse is bad. The extent to which this is my wheelhouse made it really weird for me when I made my FE3H side account and suddenly antis wanted to interact with me.

Look, I have written a lot of noncon in my day. My most fucked up fic is definitely breach, a story whose concept is vile enough that I required readers to be logged-in AO3 users to see it. It’s a nasty one.

Hardest story to write?

Only Him, Only You (and His OnlyFans). Easy answer. I had never written a fic this long before (~24k), and I felt a lot of pressure to finish it by a deadline because it was for the Sylvix Big Bang. I don’t think the fic is bad at all, but I hated the experience of writing it so much that I took a break from fic for two years. You’re not going to catch me writing long fics for big group projects ever again, that’s for sure.

Easiest/most fun story to write?

I recall knocking out What We Write in the Shadows in like a week, even though that one was also for a project with a deadline. (It’s only about 5k words, so the situation was totally different.) I had a real blast writing this goofy roleplay porn and then I just took it easy while other people struggled to meet the deadline for the project.

Did any stories shift your perception of the characters?

My own stories? Absolutely not. I do nothing but write fics about my own headcanons as a means of solidifying them. I write fics to change other people’s minds about characterization. I’m not even sorry about it. [tumblr post voice] I do not have headcanons, I simply know and perceive the truth.

Most overdue story?

Recovery for sure. I started that fic in 2018, and I would reread the WIP every year and just go “Oh, this is good. I hope I finish it some day!” before not working on it. This year, I finally put in the work to give it its last 5k words, and now I love it deeply.

Did you take any writing risks this decade? What did you learn from them?

Doing the Sylvix Big Bang was a risk, and I learned that I should never ever do a project that requires finishing a story on a deadline. I just can’t rely on myself to actually finish something if I lose inspiration. I could, for example, leave a WIP for four years.

That’s a cop-out answer, I think, but I don’t really consider anything else I’ve done in writing to be “taking a writing risk.” There’s just stuff that I want to do, or stuff that I want to try. The biggest risk is typically the fact that I may not finish writing it, which means I don’t get that sweet sweet approval from strangers. 

I do keep trying to branch out and write threesomes, but I can never finish a fic draft that has one. :/

Here’s to a decade of trying my best to write fic! I hope the next decade is full of improvement and works that I continue to love.