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dndeceit · 6 months

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Meta for the fic Never Have I Ever.

Most of what went into this fic was stuff that I had in mind writing Truth or Dare, but I couldn't find a way to fit it. I really wanted the first story to focus on Janus's friendships within the group as a whole, and while his break-up with Virgil was the inciting incident to a lot of his insecurities in that story, I didn't want to make it too much about that.

I was thinking I might find a way to incorporate it into the sequel if I wrote one, but Ace Week seemed like a good excuse to start writing it as shorter follow up, just a brief scene in between here and there. Of course, I didn't actually finish it in time for that, but I didn't finish the first fic for the event it was written for either...

(stuff past here is mostly just personal trivia about me as a writer)

When I was writing Truth or Dare, I needed a source of Drama™ to force Janus into his bad decision making, and trying to figure out what that was going to be wound up being the subject of a lot of frustration.

I'm aromantic, and not especially interested in writing or reading about romance, but when you're in fandoms and want to read about your blorbos, it can be really difficult to avoid it. And often, writing those love stories is what is going to get eyes on your fic in a way that helps make the effort put into fanwriting feel rewarding. I used to write a lot of romance in the past, and while it got me a lot of readers, it always felt like fitting Those Emotions in was taking up space in the story that distracted from what I actually wanted to be writing.

There's a lot to be said about how unconscious amatonormativity can work its way in where it isn't wanted, even if someone's not feeling pressured by it directly. Thankfully, I've never had to deal with feeling like I was broken or wrong for not wanting to find a partner, and I've never been in Virgil's position of having a friend for whom I felt like I had to 'fake it'.

But...it can be frustrating for me as a writer when romantic plots and subplots nudge their way into a story, because sometimes I'm left wondering: "Is this the story I really want to tell, or is this just there because it's a part of the writing 'formula' I've internalized?" Because I've noticed a lot of my stories, despite an intended gen focus, wind up with romantic chemistry hanging on the fringes that...it's just there. And it makes sense for the characters, but I don't particularly feel like seeing it all the way through to the end the way a reader is most likely expecting. And sometimes I'm worried about that coming off as a tease.

Truth or Dare kind of wound up being this messy snarl of a story, where the romance subplot is there, but it's buried far beneath the rest of it. And Janus and Virgil as exes is never going to not make sense to me, so that followed pretty easily. But I wanted the subject of the break up to be something where neither of them were really in the wrong, because that kind of drama is uncomfortable for me to write. So when I was trying to tease out the history between the different characters the idea of that being the root of the conflict...kind of just felt right.

TL;DL: Virgil's aromanticism troubles aren't a 1:1 projection, but they are a sort of commentary on my frustrations with amatonormativity butting its nose into my writing.

Also, yes, if all goes planned and I keep writing stories, expect a lot of them to have the romance subplot go absolutely nowhere. You've been warned.

#my fanfiction #writing meta #fanfiction meta #fic series: party games

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ncfan-1 · 4 years

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2019 Fic Retrospective

It’s that time of year again!

I’m still doing the thing where, for word count, I calculate word count both from fics written and pieces of meta over 500 words written. Because I did spend a fair amount of time on those meta, and in certain cases, they were the only thing I wrote that day.

Total Number of Completed Stories: 43 in total, and all of them were posted to my AO3. Of the 43, 41 are finished and 2 are WIPs. As to the WIPs, whether or not they’re going to be finished… that depends on some things.

Total Word Count:

For fic: 318,770 words For meta: 52,789 words over 35 pieces of meta. Total: 371,559 words

Fandoms Written In: La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast), Adventure Time, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, The Magnus Archives, Star vs. the Forces of Evil, Herbert West: Reanimator, Fire Emblem: Fates, Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, Excalibur (1981), Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d predicted? Quite a bit more. I set a yearly goal of 180,000 words (500 words a day over 360 days), and as you can see, I went way over that.

What’s your own favorite story of the year?

As with past years, I am going to do a Top 5 list, instead:

1. Of Rings and Knighthood and Their Associated Misunderstandings: At the time I wrote this, there were less than two pages worth of fic in the Dorothea/Ingrid tag, and I seriously thought this was going to be a reasonably light-hearted fic. Also, short. Ah, how times change.

2. Hungry Ice: Eldritch books cursed by angry Valar? In my office? It’s more likely than you think.

3. a narrative shape concealing the real thing inside: I just really enjoyed writing from Agnes’s perspective.

4. One of the Most Confounding: I finally got to write an aroace character in a non-amatonormative relationship with someone, natch.

5. would have wanted it for myself: This was originally just supposed to be a fic with the premise ‘what if Dorothea and Dimitri got a support chain,’ but then Dorothea took over, then it got really long, and it was super-fun to write.

Did you take any writing risks this year? Beyond the typical risks of writing multi-chapters, writing for small fandoms, and writing for new fandoms, no, I don’t think I did.

Do you have any fanfic or ofic goals for the New Year? Well, I would like to continue working towards my goal of just giving no fucks and writing whatever I want to write, regardless of whether or not I think it will be particularly well-received by the fandom. I’d also like to finish my two WIPs, if I can find the time (And the motivation).

My best story of this year: I’m just gonna pick something that isn’t on my Favorites list (It’s always a little hard to choose). I’m going to say A Blessing Sweet as Gall—it was my first time writing from the perspective of one of the King’s Men, and it went a lot better than I thought it would. I am sympathetic to the King’s Men up to a point, and that point is where they start instituting language bans and disappearing people and conducting forced migrations.

My most popular story of this year: Oh, that’s Of Rings and Knighthood and Their Associated Misunderstandings, hands down. In terms of hits, kudos, comment threads, and bookmarks, it far outstrips the rest. And I’m content with this. There were fics of mine that I wish had gotten more attention than they did, but I poured so much time and effort into this one that I’m glad it was a hit.

Story of mine most under-appreciated by the universe: At this point, I think it’s Face to Face, which is part of the reason I’m having such a hard time committing to coming back to it. I knew it wasn’t going to get as much traffic as a fic written for a large fandom and a popular ship would have done, but I spent months just plotting this thing out, and then to get so little feedback on it was disheartening.

Most fun story to write: I think that’s probably a tie between a narrative shape concealing the real thing inside, Not My Wheelhouse (I’m Trying Anyways), and Frail Memory.

Story with the single sexiest moment: Pfft.

Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters: Well, as of having finished The Sacred and Profane, I still consider Rhea a well-written villain, the archetypal “villain with a sympathetic backstory.” That has not changed. What has changed is that I now consider her experiments with creating children so she can kill them later even more screwed up than I originally thought they were, because the thought finally occurred to me late in the writing of this fic: she is eternally preoccupied with the murder and butchery of her mother and most of her siblings for their blood and bones and Crest stones, and she is going to end up butchering this kid’s corpse to get at the Crest stone in the kid’s body. Welp.

Hardest story to write: I’m not really sure. I think Fumbling Towards Understanding gave me a bit of trouble to write.

Biggest Disappointment: Celica vs. Deadbeat Parenting was a lot different in my head, just gotta say.

Biggest Surprise: I’m not sure it’s a surprise, exactly, since I had noticed on my playthrough of Echoes that Kliff is a lot milder around Alm than the only other person we see him talking with (Tobin) and, it’s implied, most everyone else, but I don’t think shippy feelings entered into it until I was actually writing the fic, so your heartstrings are covered in rust.

#Fic retrospective #ncfan's writing process #Writing

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arofili · 6 years

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Aro Kel Masterpost

ETA: I wrote a fic about aro!Kel/Dom, read that if you want ;)

After Tamora Pierce revealed that Kel is aro, I was elated. To finally have representation of any kind, especially from an author and a character I really love, felt so good. Now, it’s not really good representation - I would have preferred to have it explicit and there from the beginning, but this is still incredible for me. So, naturally, this new information spurred me to reread the Protector of the Small series with Kel’s aromanticism in mind, and I unearthed a whole lot of interesting things.

A lot of this was fairly obvious, but much of it was subtext, and there’s still a lot of parts of Kel’s love life that required a bit of effort to see as part of her arospec experience, but I would say that she reads as pretty darn aromantic to me now. In this post, I’ve compiled a bunch of quotes/scenes (mostly paraphrased, sorry) and thoughts about Kel’s aromanticism and how it was portrayed in the books.

This post has been more than a year in the making, mostly because I’m lazy as fuck, but I finally managed to finish it up for @aggressivelyarospec week 2018! Also, the wonderful podcast @tortallrecall is coming up on Kel’s arc soon, and I hope they’ll discuss Kel’s aromanticism, so I wanted to provide an aro person’s opinion on Kel being aro for them to have as a resource if they want to use it :)

Overall: I don't think Tamora Pierce wrote the series meaning for Kel to be aro, because I doubt she would have included the “romance” with Neal, Cleon, or Dom, though that is still justifiable with her being aro [see my explanations below], but I think that she did write it with her being less interested in romance than her peers and Pierce’s other heroines and I think she very intentionally gave Kel a happy ending without romance. And so looking back, the aro label fits. She is definitely arospec, and I am delighted to read about an aromantic character.

First Test

There’s a part where Neal is being all dramatic and talking about the glory of knighthood, but Kel says something along the lines of “Well, sure, but being sung about will take a lot of hard work”. Neal responds, “You aren’t a bit romantic, are you?” and I know that it’s a different kind of “romantic” in this context but also PUNS!

“she'd had experiences with crushes—none her own, of course”

I know Kel is 10 at this point, but also, that is exactly what I was thinking at age 10.

Whenever Cleon fake flirts with her, she's so exasperated and amused. At one part he says he'll pine for her until she returns and she thinks “He'll pine and I'm a holly bush”.

And she's always so sympathetic about Roald's arranged marriage. And sure, anyone could be because they’re not ~in love~ but Kel just seems really sympathetic about marriage in general.

Neal has a crush on Daine in this book, which I had forgotten about, and Kel is so exasperated every time he talks about it. She consoles him, but she's so confused and amused by his feelings.

Page

So here we get to the part where 11-year-old Kel thinks she likes Neal. It’s funny, because it happens at the same time when Neal has a crush on Uline of Hannalof, so I think there’s definitely an argument for her reacting of jealousy. She definitely has some feelings for him, but I don’t think they’re quite romantic, and she doesn’t understand them. At least, that’s how I’m choosing to read it.

And she keeps making fun of him about his feelings, and the part where she and her friends all get together to sing him a sappy love song is really funny.

Also, she keeps complaining to Lalasa that he won’t actually do anything about his feelings. Even when she thinks she has a crush on him, she’s annoyed by romance.

@buffintruda and I were talking about this, and I wondered how we hadn’t thought of Kel being aro before the announcement, and they said something I think is very true:

Too be fair, for me at least, the last time I read her books was before I knew I was aro, and her relationships and crushes deterred me from considering it, even though now that you point them out, they're pretty weak and aro-y

At some point in the story, Cleon’s fake flirting becomes real, but Kel doesn’t realize it. She still thinks he’s joking up until halfway through Squire. Even when he’s being really obvious and blushing and commenting on her appearance, she’s just confused as to why he keeps doing this and doesn’t even consider the idea that he could be sincere.

Honestly this is such a GEM of a quote. Like, same:

“I can flirt just as well as my gelding can dance”

When Kel is talking to Joren about how he’s “changed”, and he tells her that she should get married and her immediate response is “I don’t want to be married”. She does think of Neal, but it’s an afterthought. When I used to force myself to pretend to like someone, before I knew I was aro, I would do the same sort of thing - “I don’t want to marry anyone, ew! Wait, no, I would totally marry [insert fake crush here]...” It’s something she feels like she’s supposed to think, not something she actually feels.

Honestly, Kel’s whole crush on Neal is not really a big deal, even to her. She’ll pine over him when a situation comes up that makes her think about romance, and she’ll occasionally have that “heart flutter” thing, but it’s mostly them being great friends and she seems to forget she’s supposed to have a crush on him while she’s hanging out with him. This seems a lot more like a squish than a crush, at least to me.

So this isn’t technically related to Kel’s aromanticism, but I couldn’t leave it out. Before their third examinations, Kel and Neal talk about their friends and Neal says something like “I wouldn’t trade your friendship for anything”. Ahhh I was so emotional when I read that!! Their friendship is so good and heartwarming and beautiful that I wanted to cry!

Kel made a joke out of it, but it was really sweet and that moment was truly beautiful and relateable. It’s great to see strong friendships shown in books, even if one of the people thinks that they’re in love with the other one.

And in this scene, Kel didn’t think about her “crush” even once, even though it was a pretty intense moment for both of them.

Squire

When Kel finds out that Alanna wants Neal for her squire, she has this silly line about “I can’t not be his friend even if I can’t be his love” and Kel, please. That is far too melodramatic for you! This is so out of character it feels forced, which, if we view it through an aromantic lens, it probably is.

Aw yeah, Raoul is back! I love him. Another aro icon! @buffintruda and I couldn’t believe that we could imagine him as arospec, but totally overlook Kel!

When Kel joins the Own, she meets Dom! She’s wondering why Dom makes her feel all weird and “romantic” moreso than she ever felt for Neal, and I’m like... It’s because you’re making this all up! It’s amatonormativity and heteronormativity! Once you’re not around Neal, you forget you’re supposed to like him, so you find someone else to project your confusion and insecurity onto! You’re not “fickle”, you’re just a confused aromantic.

Kel wonders why “Lalasa never mentioned this”, and that’s pretty obvious. Lalasa is canonically in a relationship with her friend Tian...this girl is a lesbian.

“Who falls in and out of love in a summer?”

Probably someone who was never in love in the first place, Kel. This quote comes the next time that Kel sees Neal, and she realizes her romantic feelings are gone like they never were there in the first place.

“Were her feelings even real?”

Ding ding! Now you’re starting to get it!

Cleon is ridiculously awkward around Kel, and she is just as ridiculously oblivious of his feelings and exasperated by his flirting. (Relatable.) When he kisses her for the first time, she’s so shocked that she doesn’t know how to react which is a mood.

“They won’t be able to talk sense for weeks!”

When Yuki comes to Tortall, Kel makes fun of all the pages and squires for “falling in love” with her. She thinks “her messmates were romantic” in a way that totally excludes herself from that line of thought, because obviously she’s not romantic! That would be ridiculous!

“She hadn’t seen Cleon privately since that astonishing kiss. She couldn’t decide if she wanted to see him or never to see him again. She didn’t know which would be worse, finding that he’d done it on a dare or that he’d done it because he wanted to. Either meant a rat’s nest of problems.”

She liked the kiss, so we know she likes kissing, but that does not mean she isn’t aro. She doesn’t really want to like Cleon romantically. Unlike with Neal and Dom, she isn’t tricking herself into feeling something for Cleon; his feelings surprised her. “A rat’s nest of problems” is true not only politically, but also very much personally.

Tamora Pierce has also called Kel asexual at different times; this post is about her being aro, but there was one little ace thing I wanted to mention. When Kel meets George Cooper, she cannot figure out why Alanna is attracted to him; she only finds his eyes attractive. Kel is struggling to find anything attractive about him, and when has she ever before focused on the physical side of things when she’s forcing herself into liking someone? It isn’t something she even considers.

“Nice eyes hardly seemed to Kel like grounds for marriage.”

Yeah, well, for you it would be hard to find anything that would be grounds for marriage!

When Kel and Cleon (finally) talk about their first kiss, Cleon is trying to convince her that they should be in a relationship and Kel says something along the lines of “If people knew, they might not know it was friendly” and that’s literally the most aromantic thing I’ve ever heard. She is literally incapable of forming a reason why she would kiss someone outside of being friends. She likes kissing but doesn’t have romantic feelings.

In the same scene, she wants so badly to be interrupted by someone so she doesn’t have to deal with Cleon’s romantic advances. In the end they do get together, and some of this conversation was in jest, but Kel is truly terrified of romance and uncomfortable with her situation no matter how much she is genuinely fond of Cleon.

During the Progress, she talks to her mom about sex and Cleon. Her mom says, “you can choose if you want to have sex”, and Kel’s immediate response is “I don’t want to choose that!” Her reasoning is “I don’t want to be distracted”, “I just want my shield”, “I certainly don’t want babies” and if that ain’t the most aroace thing then I don’t know what is.

Shortly after this scene, Kel talks to Cleon, which goes something like this...

Cleon: Come down and let me hold you! Kel: No, you come up, and no holding.

Kel is terrified of sex but simultaneously struggling with her self-worth and wanting to be fuckable.

Once Kel and Cleon are officially together, their relationship is pretty romantic, which explains why I didn’t consider she could be aro at first. But even then, I see it as more that she enjoys Cleon’s company and the physical side of their relationship even though they never actually have sex. And the whole time, Cleon is so much more scared than Kel of the inevitable end of their relationship. Kel is much more practical and sees their relationship as doomed from the beginning.

Not related, but I love how Raoul and Buri’s relationship develops. They’re basically mutual beards and best friends. Buri’s such a lesbian, and Raoul is so aro!

When Kel first suggests that Raoul should ask Buri to go to his party with his aunt, she says that Buri “won’t get any romantic notions” which 1) shows how gay Buri is and 2) shows how Kel’s thought process about romance works.

This speaks for itself:

“She had decided years before that she was no prize on the romance market.”

There’s this lovely conversation while the Own is helping some town...

Kel: Why don’t people talk about hard work when it comes to war? All I hear about is glory. Dom: Pretty girls want to hear about glory, not work.

Kel wasn’t thinking about romance as a factor; she didn’t even consider it. While the Own is at Giantkiller, Kel completely forgets about her crush on Dom and it’s pretty much never brought up again.

Another gem of a quote:

“Kel thought asking her for wedding ideas was like asking a cat how to raise a horse, but she did her best.”

Kel and Cleon’s forbidden words are “love” and “marriage” and oh my god that is the most aro thing ever.

Lady Knight

There is so much less romance in this book! That’s great it in general, but it also really establishes Kel as aromantic because this is the book in which she becomes more sure of herself. She thinks about romance much less, which means there’s less things to specify how her reaction to romance proves her aro. I think it was at this point that Tamora Pierce decided that Kel wasn’t going to end up with a romantic partner at the end of her series.

On the way to the Scanran border, Neal and Roald are complaining about being separated from their fiancees, and Kel is so exasperated with them. She feels sorrier for Roald, but she approaches the whole subject with way too critical an eye to be alloromantic.

“She wanted love and children, too—someday.”

She thinks about Cleon, but it’s so distant. She’s imagining that she’ll feel different in the future, because that’s what’s supposed to happen to people, right? But she doesn’t really want love and children.

Kel’s thought of “romance was more pleasant than reality” proves that she doesn’t believe that finding romance is realistic. And as we know, Kel is practical above all.

“Friendship was there, but passion was gone.”

When Kel sees Cleon again after a few years of separation, everything she thought she had felt for him has disappeared. And multiple times she feels bad about not loving him anymore; that’s textbook aro guilt. She emphasizes that “she could still be his friend even if she couldn’t be his lover.” She isn’t at all surprised that she doesn’t love Cleon anymore. She expected this, and she’s relieved that she was right.

“She wanted no lovers until she had settled the Nothing Man’s account.”

Kel will look for any excuse to not have to deal with romance, and everything that justifies her lack of love will do.

“Beyond kisses, Cleon was her friend.”

This proves that she always saw Cleon mostly as a friend, just a friend she also liked to kiss. To aro people things like that aren’t always cut and dry; she likes to kiss but to her kissing is not a romantic action.

She’s relieved that Cleon isn’t trying to keep things going, because it would hurt too much for both of them and because she didn’t want to have to keep faking romantic love. She’s upset about the end of their relationship because change is hard, not because she wants Cleon. She understands that now and talks to Tobe about it. I’m so proud of her!! She’s coming to terms with herself.

At Haven, Kel sees Dom again and remembers that she had a crush on him, but it’s a minor afterthought after a paragraph of her considering their friendship. When he leaves, she misses his friendship and support and doesn’t even think about romance.

And finally, the second to last paragraph in the whole series all but makes aro Kel explicit representation:

“Lovers, Kel thought, rolling her eyes. At least there was one headache she didn’t have. She was about to tell her friend [Neal] he could wait when she remembered that she’d get to see Dom at Steadfast. It would be nice to able to sit and chat for a while without kidnapping, flight, and war to distract them.”

Sure, that could (and has been) interpreted as Kel’s crush on Dom continuing to manifest, but to me it shows her value of friendship, especially as it immediately follows her declaration that lovers are a headache.

In conclusion, my point at the beginning still stands: this is not necessarily good representation. Kel’s story was written without authorial consideration of her aromanticism. But it is representation. And to me, a queer who grew up reading Kel and identifying more with her than with any of Tamora Pierce’s other heroines, even post-canonical, Word of God revelations of Kel being aro matters a lot. This is especially relevant because of the void that is aro rep—I can only name one or two canon aromantic characters from popular media, and Kel is one of them.

An aromantic lens is required to see Kel’s aromanticism, but it is there. It means something. And even though this post has been like two years in the making, Kel still means a lot to me.

#aggressivelyarospecweek #aaw #tortallrecall #keladry of mindelan #aromantic #my meta #tefain nin #tortall #i wanted to write some fic for this week but i.....didnt rip

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