#I dislike how I wrote leia in this but uh | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

anghraine · 7 years

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Fic authors self rec! When you get this, reply with your favorite five fics that you've written, then pass on to at least five other writers (◠‿◠✿)

Oh, thank you very much! This is not set in stone and in no particular order, but

1) boringly, per ardua ad astra

The one where Jyn, Cassian, and Bodhi escape Scarif alive (if barely, in Cassian’s case), but get caught and have to pass themselves off as Imperials. On the Death Star. With the ANH clock ticking down.

I might be biased, because of course the current fic is always the one I’m most excited about. And, of course, it’s deliberately constructed to soothe myself after my faves dying, and highlight what I love about them and my ship, and throw my favourite tropes into a pot (slow burn! whump! competence! domesticity! emotional confusion and inarticulateness!).

So, despite the occasional glitches and glacial pace, I absolutely love writing it. I love planning the twists and turns and, uh, long stretches of dialogue, and thinking about where the characters are at the end of Rogue One but how it would be influenced by not facing down immediate death and different sorts of pressures. I even had fun looking up rib injuries

I’m ridiculously gratified that it’s already one of my most popular fics, can’t lie.

2) we get dark, only to shine

The one where Cesare visits Lucrezia smack in the middle of Sforza’s most overt abuse, and they spiral into S3 territory in the middle of S1. Also, bonus Valencian poetry and quasi-OC historical figures, because I can.

One of the wilder twists of my fannish existence: I’ve gotten OMG SO PROBLEMATIC over things like ace!Luke, disliking tie-ins, defending Kylo Ren, and the like, but meanwhile… I wrote 170k of ~romanticized~ adulterous underage incest between a countess and a Catholic priest and not a peep.

(In all fairness, the characters are sexually active at that age in canon, they’re a canon couple, they’re played by 20-somethings, and I was very cautious about … many things. But still, I kind of boggle at the priorities here.)

Anyway, it’s somewhere between fix-fic and love letter to the show/ship, depending on the moment and the particular element, with a strong side of I DON’T CARE I’M DOING IT MY WAY BECAUSE I WANNA. While it’s too badwrong to be something I would encourage non-fans to read, I love it dearly and think it’s probably one of the best things I’ve done, qualitatively.

3) The Lucy Skywalker series.

The one where Luke is a girl. Obviously.

It’s not the most even or disciplined thing I’ve done, but it’s very close to my heart. When I first heard about the phase when Luke was going to be a girl and saw the beautiful McQuarrie art for her, I was both thrilled and disappointed—Luke isn’t really a gendered character to me, so while it made sense that he could be flipped from male to female to male in the drafting process and I reallyyyyy wished they’d stuck with f!Luke, there wasn’t much to do with that.

And then I started thinking about how incredibly male-dominated the Rebellion is (and everything, but it’s most jarring there), and how the Cloud City duel in particular is drowning in masculinity tropes, and the similar/different ways that f!Luke would relate to Leia in particular, and how Han would most definitely not approach a pretty blonde girl as he did a boy. Even though I did think a lot would stay the same, and wrote it that way (the first in particular verged on novelization at times), the differences were also fascinating and—it’s really just such a fun thing to do and one that I’m satisfied with at its most flawed.

(shout-out to @grumpyfaceurn for encouragement and Inspirational Art!)

4) what are we living for

The one where I have my own Skywalker language headcanons, basically.

I formed a lot of these a long time ago (that is, on lj), but never managed to finish my various attempts to write them out. However, my writing meme helped me concentrate my ideas down to an actual fic.

It’s focused on Luke, but I wanted to also focus on the way that language works to link the various Skywalkers together: Shmi, Beru, Anakin, Luke, Leia, C-3PO.

5) The Letters of Elizabeth Darcy (1796-1798)

The one where I explore the first two or so years post-P&P (assuming a 1795-6 timeline for P&P, which I do) through excerpts from Elizabeth’s letters to assorted loved ones.

It was a close tie between this and First Impressions (the f!Darcy/m!Elizabeth AU—honestly, catch me at a different time and it would be that), but I think this one is probably better. In fact, fractured as it is by the format, I think it might be the most even and focused fic I’ve ever written. It’s not the excitement of ad astra or the discipline+id candy of wgdots, I’m just… satisfied? It’s what I wanted it to be, and remains what I would want it to be.

It was an interesting challenge, really, because the central—conceit, I guess, is that it’s exclusively Elizabeth’s letters, and fragments of her letters, at that. So I wanted to give an idea of what’s going on over those two years without any other voices than hers, and to sound as true to her character as I could imagine. I wanted Elizabeth’s mediation with the Fitzwilliams, her relationship with Jane and her father, the inevitable pregnancies and attendant drama, hints at politics, and of course a sense of the Darcy marriage in general, and cramming that all into a fairly short fic in a natural way was just … I liked it and I still do.

#ladytharen #respuestas #meme prattle #fic talk #wgdots #death star au #lucy skywalker #austen blogging #star wars #political shenanigans and codependent siblings #nice things people say to me #incest for ts #otp: welcome home #otp: you cannot kiss your reflection #otp of otps #letters of elizabeth darcy

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