#i'm glad i finally got to write all this down cohesively it's always been super vague lmao

[one-winged-dreams]

@goldenworldsabound

-manically sweeps everything off my desk-

I'M GLAD YOU ASKED!

So the backstory for my s/i has always been that he was a former Shinra biologist, he specialized in xenobiology so he was often forced to rub elbows with Hojo. They happened to be working on the same fringe science bullshit and he came across Hojo's research notes on basically what he did to Vincent, trying to refine the shapechanging experiments. He was like "Nooope nope nope, this job isn't worth it" and requested to be transferred to another project, but they basically told him they had sent the request to HOJO HIMSELF to approve. According to the OFFICIAL report, he was transferred off-site somewhere out of Midgar, but in REALITY, Hojo yoinked him off to use HIM to try to refine the shapechanging experiments. I want to say he escaped when Avalanche came and caused havoc when they freed Aerith and Nanaki, and then after Meteorfall, Reeve tried to offer a good-faith gesture in hiring him into the WRO, which he very graciously accepted.

BUT ANYWAY, snek form is basically what Hojo managed to cobble together. He was somewhat of a minorly successful experiment, nothing too spectacular, but hey, he changes forms without dying, so.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And only at the cost of MASSIVE amounts of PTSD and his eyes being permanently bloodstained so that he remembers what happened every time he looks in the mirror ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ

#i'm glad i finally got to write all this down cohesively it's always been super vague lmao #i'm trying to anchor myself rn because HOO BOY we're having a doozy of an anxiety attack right now lads #s/i #we came alive somehow

[theashemarie]

First of all, I’m in LOVE with Aftershocks! It’s everything I’ve been looking for in a post-movie fic. Buf I’m super curious about how Aftershocks came to be and how you guys manage to create a cohesive story with such a large group of writers!! How did you even find each other? How does this all work?

omg I'm so glad you're enjoying so much!! :DDD!! Thank you for reaching out to let me/us know! (This got long, so I'm putting part of it behind a read more.)

Okay so for a bit of history the five of us have been friends for years and @katiemonz basically dragged me kicking and screaming into watching Rise a few weeks before the movie came out because she wanted to rewatch it and she knew I would like it. And, basically, I latched onto it super hard super quickly. When this happens, I do the typical special interest thing where I talk about it nonstop and make my other friends watch the stuff I'm obsessed with. First my brother in autism (Ben) @dunkalfredo fell into my trap and soon enough we were off to the races. @octolingkiera and @mcbethins followed shortly thereafter.

The five of us have always been writers in some form or another, so, after we all watched the movie together on premier night, it felt natural to float the idea of a giant collab fic where we each take a POV and run through the aftermath of the movie. I volunteered to post first because I'm the fastest writer out of all of us, with a promised post-date of the next Saturday (a week after the movie dropped) and I got to work. Originally, the fic was supposed to just be five chapters--one from each of us--but the plot line we agreed on turned out to be a lot bigger than we intended, so I got to the end of the first day in my first chapter, looked at the projected two weeks we were supposed to cover, and consulted the council with my worries. I was already 5k words in and there was no way I was going to finish in a timely or concise manner, so we agreed to bump it out to 10 chapters (2 each).

While writing my second chapters, I cracked 10k words and realized that we would need 15 chapters. Everyone agreed.

As to how we wrangle this thing: what I wanted to happen was for everyone to write simultaneously, but that didn't exactly happen. What ended up going down was I did the initial exploratory writing with Mikey's chapters, established a timeline, and wrote the whole thing, and then everyone else kinda used my chapters as a skeleton to hang theirs off of. There's nothing wrong with this and it ended up working out, but it did/does require a lot of cross-referencing from my collaborators, while I was allowed to kinda just write what I wanted. It's a fair tradeoff, I suppose; I had to do a lot of the legwork, so I got to set up the timeline and write to my heart's content.

We brainstormed a lot on Discord, but a lot of it actually happened between Katie and me because we live together. Emotional Trauma Uno actually started as a sort of joke, but then I took it and spun it into a serious recovery ritual. I'm glad that it came into the fic, but it wasn't something we discussed ahead of time and I'm grateful to my collaborators for running with it. I remember the moment when I introduced the poker chips, because originally the Uno games were supposed to be a lot like the one that happens at the beginning of Mikey's third chapter: no chips, just raw vulnerability.

For cohesion: everyone was really good at latching onto small details that were mentioned in other chapters, and we tried to run major character beats past each other. (For example, when Ben wanted to have Mikey use a poker chip on Donnie in his chapter, he made sure to okay it with me so that I could slip a reference to it into my chapter). I also edit every chapter (except Ben's because he's a good noodle) and read everything as a sort of final continuity check.

Even now, as we pump out the final chapters, we're cross-referencing and running things past each other. Kiera's working on a Splinter POV scene and McBethins has made sure to remind her that Raph already had a talk with Splinter; Ben made sure to ask me how many days occurred between events because Donnie is very attuned to the passage of time while the days blended together for Mikey; Katie is closely counting the blue chips the rest of the family has to use on Leo and running checks to make sure she hasn't missed any; when I was writing my chapters, I made sure to explain my thought process for non-Mikey character actions so everyone knew both how Mikey was perceiving their actions and how I was actually picturing them reacting to things.

Quite honestly, I've always wanted to do a giant collab like this, so it's been a LOT of fun! I didn't expect this story to balloon this much, and I certainly didn't expect it to be this fun and easy! Even with the few hiccups we experienced, it was a blast, and I can't wait to collaborate with my friends again!

#ashe talks #aftershocks #rottmnt fanfiction #ask #anon #lads