Fandom owns my Soul

oh you wanna make Mic look stupid, Horikoshi?

Two can play that game.

Wanted to make a better calendar laying out all the official birthdays, and ended up going a little overboard. Honestly, I originally made this just for myself to help me figure out the ages of certain characters for a fic rewrite I'm doing—and any other fic I do in the future where I might need it—but I thought I would share it for all my fellow writers; this is free for use, just please give credit if you post it anywhere. Layout is based on the current year, 2026, and the different colors depict the zodiacs.

Individual months under the cut!

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Today is the day I finally start posting this beast of a fic! It's a 3 Baka fic, it's an EraserMic fic, it's even got a bit of plot-like stuff that happens.

Happy Birthday, Aizawa Shouta!

And I apparently couldn't write one featuring Oboro, without adding tons of hurt and comfort... As usual, all my thanks go to @faithinthestory for saving me from my hubristic tendencies by telling me when words don't mean what I think they mean.

So I was thinking about epithets yesterday and how when they're used well they really add to the work and when they're used poorly it feels like the author has thrown a cinderblock in front of you while you're moving at a brisk walk, and then I got floostered (flu vaxx and covid booster) and managed to edit this ugly but hopefully helpful flowchart together through my flooster fever.

The question I always come back to is, "How would I, as the viewpoint character, think about this other character?" I think about my wife by her name or her relationship to me. I don't think of her as "the blue-haired woman," or "the taller woman."

This obviously doesn't cover every single permutation of epithet use out there in the would, but if I can help one person avoid writing, "Scarlett walked into the kitchen, hungry and annoyed about it. The redheaded woman found she had no snacks and grumbled," it'll be worth it.

Yesssss.

Like I was beta-reading a friend's story and they mentioned a character as [bad thing] right when he was profusely apologising, and it worked completely because the POV character was surprised he was apologising because his role in the story was usually not that. He was behaving in a way that wasn't consistent with what she expected from him because previously he'd been a villain to her. It made sense, it added something to the scene, it was contrasting how she perceived him with how he was behaving, and so it made her look at him differently.

Whereas if the POV character had just been called "the blonde"? None of that would've been conveyed.

Like there's absolutely a reason people simplify it to "names and pronouns", but there's very little that is always right or always wrong. But you do things for good reasons, to tell your reader something about the characters, the story, the relationships. That's good writing. That's doing it for a good reason. Learn the rules - such as there are rules - and then break them on purpose, with a reason.