#nyeusigrube fanfic

[raevenlywrites]

Raev's Fic Masterlist

Since tumblr can be a little allergic to links, I thought I'd take a second to ramble about all the various little (and not so little) fics I have up on Ao3

Den of Shadows

Jaguar's Midnight: Currently a single chapter of me exploring ideas of a Midnight that is more blatantly BDSM and less human trafficking. Maybe more to come? Who knows

Unpublished Turquoise thing about her time with Daryl (pester me about if it you're interested)

Hawksong/Kiesha'ra

Ties that Bind (ongoing, 30 chps) A queer, polyamorous, Romeo and Juliet with shapeshifters set on a backdrop of the first tentative peace in a thousand year war. Canon's hotter cousin. Not currently explicit but plans to potentially get there

Frayed Knots (ongoing, 20 chps) The place where all the scenes I thought would go in TTB but didn't wind up. Some one offs, some deleted scenes. A mixed bag of spicy adult stuff and just fun character exploration. Iirc spicy chapters are marked as such

Dasi High (abandoned, 4 chps) Highschool AU of Maeve and Kiesha and Co, if their story was on the CW

Forbidden Skies (hiatus, 2 chps) Crossover with Forbidden Game. Julian is a falcon and Jenny and co are avians and serpiente. Basically FB's chars and plot cosplaying as K'r

Forbidden Game

Forbidden Skies, see above

Holy Fire (one off) A sort of song fic where Zach thinks way too hard about Jenny and tries to become a magician

Hearts Desires (ongoing, 2 chps) Still playing with Zach the magician, this one is meant to be a fairly short exploration of magic/runes, Zach's obsession with Jenny, his inability to readjust after the game, and coming out to himself. And tree sex. It's a weird one.

Unpublished pre-canon Jenny thing where she's kind of aware of something (Julian) watching her at night (spicy, pester me about it if you're interested)

Longer descriptions under the cut

Ties that Bind: A queer, polyamorous, Romeo and Juliet with shapeshifters set on a backdrop of the first tentative peace in a thousand year war. Anticipated f/f, m/m, and many other shapes of m/f/m and/or f/m/f, potentially kinky if I ever get it there. Also potentially ace/qpr stuff if I can ever figure out my MC and what is true in this fic vs what belongs in side projects. Canon's hotter cousin with more magic, more setting development, A LOT more romance, and a distant relation to the original in the way that Vaporeon resembles Eevee. It wants to still fit in canon's clothes but really needs to admit its grown too big for that.

This is the big one. I realized revisiting my favorite childhood series that the big epic romance I always remembered was mostly in my head. So I decided to get it out of my head and onto paper. That is... not what happened XD It follows the basic Romeo/Julietness of Hawksong, but I decided to really explore the world and characters and so made a lot of executive decisions bc there actually isn't that much about the world/characters in the original. It's diverged wildly, spiraled out of control into a 30+ chapters novel (lets be honest) and isn't ending any time soon. It's the one I most want to work on so send me asks and encouragement about it so I can get working on it again :P

Basically, Zane and Danica are still deeply dedicated to peace. They think the idea of getting married to achieve it is ridiculous, but they're desperate enough to keep it on the back burner. Dani gets to know Zane (and Adelina) as friends. She explores her relationship with Rei. She struggles with bureaucracy and a well-meaning mother that doesn't always support her in the way she needs. Also there's a bit more magic, a lot more setting, and a bunch of characters I kinda made up to help flesh things out (hello Vasili's made up cousin). Current plans include finishing it with some sort of marriage, but I haven't decided if Zanica is endgame or not (the dynamic currently in the lead in my head is Dani takes Adelina as her Alistair, Zane takes Rei as his Nag, and the four of them all kinda co-rule. We'll see. Everyone is going to kiss everyone else before its done that's for sure)

Frayed Knots (ongoing, 20 chps) The place where all the scenes I thought would go in TTB but didn't wind up. Some one offs, some deleted scenes. A mixed bag of spicy adult stuff and just fun character exploration. Iirc spicy chapters are marked as such Current offerings include: abandoned TTB starts, some BDSM scenes with Z/D/R/A, Dani getting herself off and thinking too hard, an alternative Snakecharm opening from Kel's POV, some Oliza stuff, some Marus/Urban stuff, and some Dasi High stuff. Really, Frayed Knots is a great place to start if you wanna read TTB but are kind of intimidated by its scope. Most FK entries are 1-3 chapters. A sampler platter of my nonsense basically :P

Dasi High (abandoned, 4 chps) Kiesha and Co Highschool AU, basically what if the Dasi was a show on the CW. A fun idea, but not actually my cup of tea. Would probably be more fun to ramble about in discord than actually write

Forbidden Skies (hiatus, 2 chps) Crossover with Forbidden Game. Julian is a falcon and Jenny and co are avians and serpiente. Basically FB's chars and plot cosplaying as K'r. I really loved the idea, but I don't know if it grabbed me enough to make want to wrestle it into submission like I do TTB. With TTB, I don't know the story yet, so I can trick myself into working on it bc I wanna know what happens. With FS, I know what my intended plot will be, so this one would need a lot of outside hype to get me working on it again. But I think it could be really really cool if I did. If this crossover sounds like your cup of tea, pester me for more

Forbidden Game

Forbidden Skies, see above

Holy Fire (one off, post canon what if) A sort of song fic where Zach thinks way too hard about Jenny and tries to become a magician. I have these ideas about Jenny half light faerie, hence Julians obsession with her. In this fic, Zach is trying to learn magic to protect Julian so FB doesn't happen again. He winds up getting the attention of a light faerie, who tasks him with being Jenny's knight until they're ready to come bring her home. Basically, the song Holy Fire by Seeming wouldn't leave me alone one day and this fell out.

Hearts Desires (ongoing, 2 chps, post canon what if) Still playing with Zach the magician, this one is meant to be a fairly short exploration of magic/runes, Zach's obsession with Jenny, his inability to readjust after the game, and coming out to himself. And tree sex. It's a weird one. Basically, I woke up one morning with the ending of it circling around in my head, wrote that, and am now trying to build up the beginning so the ending has anything to jump off of for impact.

Unpublished pre-canon Jenny thing where she's kind of aware of something (Julian) watching her at night (spicy, pester me about it if you're interested) This one I do have plans to publish, I just need to get it (and myself) ready to show to the world. It asks the question "What if Jenny kinda like the idea of feeling watched all the time and deliberately got off for her imagined (or so she thinks) Shadowman?"

#raev does fic #fanfic #hawksong fanfic #nyeusigrube fanfic #the forbidden game fanfic #hawksong #the forbidden game #nyeusigrube #lj smith #amelia atwater rhodes #raev writes

[newmayhem]

Demon In My View Reread Review

Check out my other Den of Shadows reviews HERE.

Pre-read

I haven’t read this in over a decade, guys! I remembered really looking forward to reading this after I had first finished ITFOTN. At the time, I was just dipping my toes into my middle school goth phase, I really wanted to be a writer, and I was also hard core thirsting for Aubrey, so this book was all the way up my alley. I also remember really liking Jessica because she was very different from other YA heroines that I had been reading about at the time. I liked that like Risika, she was not a ‘nice girl’. She was confident and beautiful and had a bit of a mean streak. And, of course, I swooned at the romance. Also, it had a cool cover.

Specific scenes/images I remember:

Jessica being really hot and having black hair, pale skin, and green eyes

Jessica noting that the kid who made fun of her is reading her book

Jessica seeing Alex/Aubrey for the first time and he's wearing his upside down cross

Caryn offering Aubrey her blood

Jessica coming across a black rose bush

Pregnant Jazlyn at her husband's grave

Fala's in this, too

The ending scene where Jessica's says that she can't write without her laptop

Post-read Thoughts

I liked it. It has its problems and I’m definitely well beyond the target age range that this is intended for, but it was a fun time.

In terms of its formal qualities, I think that it was a good call to write this in 3rd person pov in the past tense (as opposed to 1st person pov in the present tense in ITFOTN). I think the 1st person narration was fine in ITFOTN because it added an extra layer to the story in having the reader question Risika’s reliability as a narrator, but DIMV would’ve been kind of insufferable if told from Jessica’s pov just by virtue of her being an abrasive teenager.

Even though, like ITFOTN, a lot of the relationships and characters needed more time to be fully fleshed out, and I noticed that the storyline did feel more complete than ITFOTN’s. I think this is mostly because it was all told sequentially (as opposed to being told in flashbacks), so it was necessary for the plot to have a clear arc.

There are a lot of digressions that explain more about vampires and witches and the histories of certain characters, and while I appreciated that as a fan of the series and as someone who’s doing research on it, it did distract from the story and I wish it had been folded in more seamlessly. There’s a lot of telling when there should be showing.

As with ITFOTN, I liked how fast-paced it was, but I also wished that it was maybe a hundred pages longer so everything could be better developed and there would be more room to show rather than tell. Like, I wished we could’ve had more time with Caryn and Hasana so that we could learn more about the witch world through their experiences rather than through all these digressions. I also feel like Fala (notably, the only unambiguously nonwhite character in the book) got shafted. I’m all for letting villains be villains, I don’t think we needed to give her some sort of sympathetic background or anything, but it felt like her motives were too petty to take seriously. She only popped up in the book to give some quick over the top threats or taunts a few times before the big showdown to remind us that there was a villain, and that made her feel very cartoonish and less like a real threat.

I also didn’t really buy the whole Jessica/Aubrey relationship. I mean, I could definitely buy it as a really strong attraction/infatuation, but once it was labelled as ‘love’, I got confused. Maybe vampires/immortals have a different definition of love? Like, maybe they take love less seriously (and use it as a catchall term) because they’ve been around for so long and they know that relationships don’t last forever? I might do a post on that actually.

I think both my favorite and least favorite part of this book was Jessica. She’s an asshole and a half, I hate her as a person but I kind of love her as a character. I love a good mean girl and for me, it made sense that she would be really abrasive as a reaction to the chronic rejection she felt from the community she grew up in. I normally hate reckless/impulsive characters, but I liked that Jessica was able to back up her impulsiveness with being smart and having some sort of survival instinct. On a side note, I also appreciate that all of ahar’s heroines so far are confident, unapologetically hot, and know that they’re hot.

That said, I really wished the narrative called Jessica out on being a menace rather than constantly give her what she wanted without having it cost her anything. I think it would’ve been better if the story showed that Jessica’s whole abrasiveness-rejection thing became its own self-fulfilling prophecy rather than blaming everything on the vampire blood and always justifying Jessica being an asshole to everyone. I also think that it actually doesn’t make sense for her to reject her adoptive mother and treat her so terribly. This was the one person who ever made an effort to get close to her, after all. I think that developing this relationship further would’ve made Anne’s death much more impactful. And generally, while I liked that she was this cool, snarky badass...she lacked nuance and complexity, which ultimately made her less interesting.

I’m not going to call Jessica a Mary Sue, but I do think that she’s overpowered (which, I guess is fine because boys get to have their ridiculously overpowered characters). I don’t like how Jessica never had to give anything up in order to get what she wants. I mean, she loses her adoptive mom, but they weren’t even that close. She had no other ties to the human world, no human friends or anything, so she didn’t really have to give that up, either. There's even a loophole for her to get around the big caveat of needing to fight the change/be changed unwillingly in order to be a strong vampire. Generally, she didn’t have to go through any real character development to become the person she needed to be in order to get her happy ending. It makes for a less satisfying/compelling story. Like, the reason why the ending of ITFOTN was satisfying was because (even though it wasn’t perfectly executed) Risika had to finally give up the last vestiges of humanity that she had been holding onto (the only thing she had left of her brother) in order to win against Aubrey and get her revenge and it actually hurt her to do that.

You know, this gives me a fic idea. I’ll do a separate post on it.

My other favorite part of this book were the references to how it’s been a few years since Aubrey lost against Risika but he’s still not entirely over it. Like, all it took was seeing a somewhat accurate artistic rendering of Risika on the cover of Tiger, Tiger to get him so angry that he had to leave the room. Just one quick taunt about it from Fala and he’s ready to kill her over it.

Speaking of Risika, this book also gave some insight into Aubrey’s involvement with Risika’s story, revealing that Aubrey had been drawn to Risika before Ather had even taken notice of her.

Additionally, I noticed some interesting parallels between Jessica and Risika:

They both have mysteries surrounding their birth mothers

They, as natural-born supernatural beings, grew up in an all-human community

Aubrey was drawn to both of them because they exuded a great strength that mirrored his own and because of that, he played a big role in their respective vampire origin stories

Most importantly, they both slapped Aubrey and lived to tell the tale

I’m not sure if this was intentional on ahar’s part or what I might do with this information, but it feels significant. And I think that it’s pretty significant, too, that Aubrey used Alex as his alias, even though I (and apparently ahar, according to the Nyeusigrube discord) don’t know exactly what that is.

Also, I just thought of this- has Risika read any of Jessica’s books? If she’s read Tiger, Tiger, does this mean she now knows about what happened to her mom?

And to close this out, I spotted a bunch of continuity and factual/logical errors:

In ITFOTN, Risika walked by Jessica’s house and called her ‘Concord’s young writer’ and saying that everything she writes is true. How would Risika know this if Tiger, Tiger was Jessica’s debut novel and was just published at the beginning of DIMV, which takes place a few years after ITFOTN? Also, Jessica doesn’t start writing until after she moved to Ramsa.

Kala’s death via vampire hunter was noted in ITFOTN, which doesn’t make sense because DIMV made it clear that it happened recently and as a result of Jessica’s writing, which hadn’t been published until the beginning of DIMV, which takes place a few years after ITFOTN.

If Ramsa is so full of vampire energy, as Caryn states, then why are the humans not used to it? Why do they reject Jessica because of her vampire energy?

Moira is stated to be ~500 years older than Aubrey, who, according to Word of God was from Sparta (which stopped being a thing around 192 BCE)...only the text says that shortly after she was changed, she ripped out the heart of an Aztec priest. The Aztec empire didn’t exist until the 1400s CE.

But that aside, this was all in all a fun read and it gave me a lot of valuable info that I can use in the fanfic.

#Demon In My View #amelia atwater rhodes #Nyeusigrube #Den of Shadows #reviews #digressions

[nyeusigrube-haven]

Nathaniel Stevens: background info

(originally posted in November of 2003 as a review of a fanfic on Fanfiction.net)

Thanks for the sweet note, first off. I’m doing a lot better since coming home and focusing on my writing and real work, but thank you for your offer of help. And now for review... it’s mostly commentary... "Sight is the easiest sense to fool..." - again, you managed to creep me out, but only momentarily there, since it's not as unusual as accidentally named names... That exact line is in Falcondance, regarding illusion spells. Felt like sharing... "I'm not sleeping on anyone" - that line amused me... this chapter in general was odder to read, as are all those that are told through the eyes of one of my boys. I liked how this chapter set Katama up as a potential threat, instead of just an easy ally. I also liked how it explained (or, said it would be explained) his telling everything to a little blind slave who would tell Jaguar everything if asked, which was bugging me a bit before. It seemed like a chance meeting at first, so realizing it was set up makes us want to know more. I know you'll probably need to play with his character to fit your storyline, but since you seemed concerned to fit Nathaniel to his self, I can try to give you a little background if you'd like. Or, actually, whether or not you like since I'm going to post this before I know... just ignore it if things don't fit with your story. Nathaniel Stevens (Christian name, he doesn't know his birth name) is one of Midnight's few inhabitants who was actually brought to the Americas by the human triangle trade. This happened when he was very young, so he grew up a slave... by human standards, anyway. His Master was a man called Elliot Stevens (hence the last name). Nathaniel fell in love with a girl named Ellen, Elliot’s only daughter. Obviously, this didn't go over well once her father found out. Jeshickah, with recently-changed Taro in tow, discovered Nathaniel tied to a post after Elliot had beaten him. For reasons Nathaniel doesn’t really know or understand (and certainly didn’t care about), she demanded Elliot sell him to her. I haven’t finished writing this book, but I do know that Jeshickah intended Nathaniel to be a trainer, and he was the only one of the five men she chose over her career who outright refused her, in every way. Among the many tricks she pulled was giving him Ellen as a gift, after Jeshickah had broken her... one of the many reasons Nathaniel hates Jeshickah. Long story short, he angered her so much she broke several of his ribs, crushed his windpipe, etc, without intending to. When Katama pointed out that a human man had bested her (gotten her to kill him before he broke, which had been his intent at that point), Jeshickah changed him instead. Unfortunately for her, fortunate for Nathaniel, he managed to claim freeblood status after his change (he’s a quick study, picked up on that law swiftly) since she had never broken him, and Katama backed him. He needed to stay connected with Midnight, since there was no other power for his kind (until, obviously, Mayhem’s rise), but he became a mercenary instead of a trainer... putting him into a good position to get the best information, etc. As for personality—and again, if this doesn’t work with your story, don’t feel forced to stick to it, I’m just offering it in case you want something to play with— Old-Midnight Nathaniel considers himself a green-blooded mercenary with no loyalty to anyone, but at the same time is proud of the fact that he has more “rules” (too green-blooded to admit they’re morals) than the rest of Jeshickah’s brood. He won’t extend money or energy to save someone who’s worthless... he says... and usually it’s true... but he also doesn’t abuse people by nature the way the trainers will. He doesn’t lose sleep over Jeshickah’s slaves, mainly because when she says “slave” it’s a mindless creature and far too late for it to be saved. He picks his battles by those he can win. There’s a long ramble for you that you may or may not want... I didn't really intend to go on so long, but I'm going to post this anyway. yours in nyeusigrube, ahar

#nyeusigrube #tdos #the den of shadows #nathaniel #nathaniel stevens #ahar #character info

[raevenlywrites]

Happy World Building Wednesday! What's your favourite legend, fairytale, story or prophecy from one of your worlds or from this one?

So, Asylum's earliest versions were me trying to write a kind of Nyeusigrube world fanfic. My love of worldbuilding meant it quickly spiraled out of control into it's own thing, but I've always kept that homage to the inspiration in the form of a famous story, The Love That Broke The War. Its Hawksong, basically, and it's been everything from an epic poem to a well beloved ballad to a full blown stage musical. Serpents LOVE the tale of the brave avian priestess who fell in love with a serpent general and brought their peoples together to stop the war that had waged between them for generations.

Fun fact: I actually wrote several pairings (collectively called my serpent/avian shipfics) of the "real life" people that myth wound up being based on. Thete were actually... three, I think? that each lived different parts of what would eventually become The Love That Broke The War. One was a serpent boy who fell into the space between life and death, and had to be pulled out by an avian girl who kept dreaming about him. Another was a badass lady general and her avian lover. The third is their son, a serpent boy who doesnt want to live up to the glorious war prowess of his parents, and the avian high priestess who foresees doom for their peoples but not what or why--or how to stop it.

What none of the stories managed to keep track of was the fact that all three of these love stories are set in a group of serpents and avians already living together--the followers of the D'Anhkkhna (ask me about D'anhkkhna and Danica at some point :P). They split from the main avian and serpent kingdoms when they went to war, and wound up becoming both groups only refuge from the rampage of the Anhki Dai.

Whew! Thank you for coming with me on that long ramble! I love Hawksong so much, and I love how we were able to keep a nod to it in what Asylum grew into. Seriously, I dont know what my writing would look like without those books. Influential is not strong enough a word

#wbw

[raevenlywrites]

Happy STS! Have you ever written fanfiction? Would you consider writing some?

In Search of Asylum started as a Kiesha'ra/Nyeusigrube fanfic. But my worldbuilding ran out of control, and it quickly became it's own universe :P

#Storyteller Saturday