Overcoming Writer's Block With VTuber Yuri (And FBI Yaoi)I'm back from my extremely stressful semi-hiatus! My next blog post might touch a little bit on that, but I'm still going to be incredibly vague, lol. This site is not about my IRL woes, it's about shipping. But oh man, I finally finished writing something! ...And it was a measly 1k of Hololive shipping. But still! It's something! So I have to give myself a pat on the back anyway, even if it's not exactly what I want to have finished right now. I basically wrote it all in one night at 2 or 3am, which is honestly pretty typical of me... The whole reason I wrote it was basically just because of how much Sensuki I was playing. My first playthrough of the game where I'd chosen Bodoque/Tulio as my ship had to be trashed because of the big 1.0 update, so I decided to start over with a PekoMari save, which is obviously what inspired me to write that fic. I almost did a run with Nick and Ellis, and I even made all four L4D2 survivors* in the character creator, but ultimately decided that OOC fic would rub me the wrong way too hard for them and PekoMari would be a much easier way for me to be able to enjoy the millions of AU fics that are inherent to the game. Anyway... I'd like to post more F/F fic in general, but the F/F ships I do get devoted to tend to either be PWP only ships or complete desert wastelands (and having that as the initial landscape isn't very conducive to me wanting to be the first to post something serious and be either scrutinized or ignored Plus, like I said in the authors notes of that PekoMari fic I posted, a lot of my F/F ends up so incredibly self-indulgent and iddy that I really don't want to post it. It's solidly drawerfic--- As a female-character-liker, I end up putting way too much wish fulfillment into it, which makes it feel a little too revealing to post anywhere. And, I mean, that's not to say that none of my own feelings come through in my M/M slash, because obviously they must, that's just what writing is as a medium--- the author's thoughts and feelings will eventually bleed through somehow--- but I find there's a detachment with M/M, and this is a sentiment I've seen a lot of other people express as well. I do wonder how I would feel writing het, since I've never actually been invested enough in a het ship to write fic for one.* I can already guess I'd get my id all over the place in writing from the male character's POV being in love with the female character, but it really is a moot point since I'll never write het as anything more than a background pairing. (It would be hilarious if I somehow wrote het in the future, rendering this paragraph obsolete--- if that unlikelihood ever happens, I'll try to remember to go back and edit this. Y'know, if Neocities even still exists by that point in the far flung future.) Anyway, I guess writing F/F is just more of a challenge both because I have to try harder to keep it readable and not a journal entry, and because that fiction-detachment isn't there. Maybe in the future I'll post more F/F, but probably not. I'm really an M/M writer at heart. It's just more fun to me to write male characters being stupid and incompetent. Writing female characters as stupid and incompetent often comes with having to feel weird because of all the hangups and baggage with the portrayal of female characters as stupid and incompetent that I've had to sit through in various pieces of media for so long. Hmm... This blogpost was supposed to be about PekoMari and ended up as yet another "Why Slash?" dissertation, huh? Ah well. Just goes to show I'm more of a slasher than a femslasher. Bottom line: I love F/F, but M/M is less challenging--- both from a reader's and writer's perspective. I don't come to fanfic to be challenged. I come to fanfic for my OTPs. I'll let the original works I engage with do the challenging, and leave the pure fun for fandom. ... And all of the above was written directly after I finished and posted Daisuki Na Hito, Taisetsu Na Hito. Since then I also finished up my Hotch/Reid fic where Reid writes Kirk/Spock fic! I really don't have too too much else to say about it other than... It was an extremely nerdy venture, huh? I guess I'll let some of these silly script format dialogue things I said in a Discord conversation about the topic (from before I even actually first started the fic) speak for themselves: garcia: oh sure, of course you can borrow some of my zines.
Maybe not as funny if you weren't there for the conversation, but I just find the idea of these dialogues happening between them hilarious. Reid as a reluctant slasher just because he Has Eyes to see Kirk and Spock being... Like that... And Garcia as his mentor figure as a level 9000 shipper. Perfect. But, yeah! Two fics posted in a relatively short period! I'm on a little bit of a roll maybe! Wow! Now I have no excuse* to not work on that Thomas/Humphrey fic I keep mentioning where Thomas and Julian discover Ao3 (can we see a trend in the silly meta tropes I enjoy?). It's so bad I even wrote a little bit of the sequel to that Zoro/Sanji fic I wrote back in 2023 and practically abandoned the follow-up to when it was 2/5ths written. Anyway, let me tell you how badly I've been struggling on this goddamn Ghosts fic for almost a year now. I've posted about it before, actually, and in fact it was the topic of my very first blog post on this site! That's how much trouble it's caused me. The silly funny bits came easily enough. The humorous scenes where everyones fucking around for the reader to laugh at are always the easiest to write. It's a given. I've realized over the years that as a writer, I slant heavily toward comedy. It's just who I am. Anyway, then I had to structure and write out an actual plot around that, which wasn't as fun, but definitely do-able. I got to (had to?) do a lot of research in the official supplementary books and also by rewatching a couple episodes to get some nuances right, but like I said: it was do-able. Really, as it stands, the fic is easily 9/10ths of the way done. Or I guess I should say 17/20ths or so, because that's roughly how many segments the fic is gonna have in the end. It's been in this same-ish state of being almost finished for like... 6 months? 7, maybe? I have 18 of 20ish chapters written and only 5 or so of those have to be heavily edited and finished up. The thing thats actually holding up the fic is the last two chapters, which I have decided that, thematically, for a satisfying narrative ---and for no other reason, really--- must have some kind of a sex scene. Like, the narrative's just not gonna clinch together unless I write it. And I've been fucking gnashing my teeth trying to get it done for seven months. I won't go into it much, but I've had some recent mental health struggles that involve a feeling of a lack of privacy. So you can see where that might impact someone's ability to write teh epic yowz in a way that is A.) up to my standards and B.) not torturously caked in unreadable metaphor. We are NOT going the way of heavenly pillars here. But even putting that aside, just the fucking historical clothing is such a pain in the ass*. For a canon that is obviously disregarding historical accuracy for comedy's sake at times, you would think that I'd give myself some leeway, but I just can't manage it. Even turning to the books doesn't help much--- yeah yeah, they made Humphrey's entire costume red to help disguise the fact that there's a real actor's head and shoulders underneath the fake decapitated body's head and shoulders, I get it. And yeah, the whole outfit being red does a great job of obfuscating exactly what's going on in there. ...Unfortunately, it also does a great job of obfuscating exactly what's going on in there, which means I have to squint down at the BTS photos in the book and turn up the contrast on my screen just to see where the gown ends and the doublet begins and where the stockings become the stupid Tudor pants and, and, and... What a pain. Ugh. Even when I get in the right headspace to actually start writing smut, I'm constantly having to stop to go Google how the hell his clothes work, and then I'm back to square one having to hype myself back up to resume the writing process. As I write this, I JUST gave up on a set of Pomodoros (which usually work great for me!) out of pure frustration, and I really only got down a paragraph and a half. And that's more than I've written on this fic all at once in months. I have never ever been actually tempted to generate a fic using AI after a few initial tests out of curiosity when the technology was still very new to the average internet user, but my god for a second I really truly did consider just generating a generic smut scene that I could edit to actually be good after the fact. (I'm a little ashamed that I even had the thought. ...Obviously I won't do that, because there's no way in hell AI could successfully produce something worth using or worth editing to be passable, and also it's against my personal code of ethics to post AI generated fic on Ao3, but just the fact that I had the temptation occur to me at all shows how badly I'm struggling with this. Honestly, the actual best case solution would be to get a co-writer to tackle the satisfying climax (heh) of the story so I can have fun writing the build up, but who the hell else even ships Thomas/Humphrey in 2025 but me? And who would I even trust with this task? I would have to have a seriously good rapport with anyone I co-wrote a fic with, especially when I did 9/10ths of it. None of my preexisting fic author friends are invested in this canon, so I'd basically have to go... *gag* make new friends... *retch* on social media... *spew* ...So, if anyone's writing PWP of my ship that I can write the actual plot around, let me know! But otherwise, it's just me trudging through this dilemma alone, squelching through the mires of my own damn hobby. I don't remember who said it, and heavily paraphrased, but: I hate the process of making art, but not making art is even worse.* Oh, also, as a random final thought, I haven't touched Diablo IV since my last blog post about it. Instead, I watched the OVA of Record of Lodoss War, and loved it, and Deedlit is my new wife. ...Well, what else did you expect?
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Recovering
(Link on my 
). The last Live Action series I got really into an F/F ship for was Netflix's Bodkin, which was apparently a huge flop that no one watched. Well, I liked it, and there was toxic femslash with characters played by two actresses that I actually found hot for once, so that's what matters. 
But in any case, at the time of writing, there's literally three fics on Ao3, and neither are the Dove/Emmy toxic femslash that I want, and I just don't feel confident enough in nailing their characterizations to be the first to try. I do have a little WIP written, but I'm honestly doubtful of the canon compliance and general quality... Most of the time, my first tries for writing a new ship end up as practice that never see the light of day, and this is for a reason.
I have a WIP all the way back from 2019 for Watashi Ga Motete Wo Dousunda, written from Nishina's point of view, that is literally just me navalgazing about my own thoughts and feelings and views of sexuality and how it relates to being a fan of yaoi shipping, and it's all just vomited onto the page for way too many words. Like, to the point that it's embarrassing. That shit is never getting posted.
M/M to me is always just a story, and F/F ends up getting too real if I don't make a concerted effort to reign it in as I'm writing.
I think having a yuri constitutional allowed me to get through the rest of that Hotch/Reid. Needed some tsundere boke/tsukkomi routine before wading back into the slashfic waters.
And let's hope I didn't just completely tempt fate by saying that and condemn myself to posting-hiatus hell. Especially because...
