my fetish

my friend's fetish

Usami Tokishige x f! Reader

explicit ; 15k words ; bodice ripper pastiche

You’re not familiar with him, nor his rank. Though dressed in civilian clothes, he had a deleterious air about him, which sparked when his round, grey eyes sought yours out. All he had done was walk from the window to his seat, and you were magnetised to his presence.

Steadfast in your fealty to the empire, you are only doing what you must when you encounter and embarrass Usami Tokishige, a wrathful soldier under the army’s 7th division.

read chapter ONE of TWO here on ao3!

what i liked

the pastiche style. it's a simple plot with the regular bells and whistles of a historical bodice ripper, and i pretty much went down a checklist:

overblown prose and hoity-toity dialogue;

headstrong woman x destructive man;

and one classic "body betrayal" moment

i think fanfic should be super-duper self-indulgent at all times and i love the content here, this is what i set out to write from the start of the drafting. terrible feelings and bad actors galore. usami is a great character for this over most GK characters because he is a very openly passionate character. and what is a bodice ripper without passion??? and could usami be ignited to passion by a woman?? to that question, i turn to Alexandre Dumas (père) when he wrote:

There is a woman in every case; as soon as someone brings me a report, I say, "Look for the woman."

and everything falls into place, more or less.

this fic also got me to revisit some wallpaper romance novels that i like for """research""", which is always welcome!!!

what i did not like (so much)

the sex scene. kind of. hear me out: this fic took ages because i kept scrapping the second chapter and then refusing to look at it altogether; the issue was that i didn't want them to go far. in many heterosexual historical romances, they play with the idea of innocence/chastity (of the woman) but i didn't, not really. so i struggled on how to stick close to the source without stepping into that territory.

ideally, i would have avoided writing any sex at all (heavy petting being the limit), and kept it M-rated to focus on tension/the violence. that obviously did not happen but i hope it still reads okay.

i'm also iffy about the dual pov. this was the first time i featured two POVs (both limited) so heavily and i think it's pretty unwieldy - but an interesting experiment, sure.

andddddd the length. no, this was not meant to be over 15k words at any point. if you read the fic and stuck with it to the end and now you're reading this postmortem, nothing but respect for you wowzers

going forward

i'm going to put usami on the back-burner and focus on others. as i have anguished over through this blog, there are several select GK characters that i should address and put them in Situations.

i also want to stick to oneshots and none of this multi-chapter riff-raff which are clearly fucking my vibes up BAD (keyword is "want") (i will most definitely write a multi-chapter fic in the future)