ginger_owl

how it works - all writers and artists are welcome to join and you'll have around two months to complete a faker-centric fic or artwork - your work can be romantic or platonic but must primarily feature faker. you can create the work using your own ideas, or base your work on the list of prompts for this fest - works will be revealed anonymously starting from may 2, 2025 - on may 7, the works will be de-anoned and creators will be revealed - the fest will mainly be run on ao3 and info/updates/admin will be posted on this tumblr

schedule - sign-up period: feb 3 to 28, 2025 - creator deadline: may 1, 2025 - reveal period: may 2 to 7, 2025 *all deadlines are at 11:59 pm (or 23:59) in korea standard time (kst)

fic requirements - at least 1500 words long, there is no word maximum - all ratings from general to explicit are accepted - must be complete by the deadline (wips are not allowed) - must be posted on ao3 to the fest collection and tagged appropriately

art requirements - can be digital or traditional but must be created from scratch (traced, edited, AI-generated etc. works are not accepted) - all ratings from general to explicit are accepted - must be a completed work in your usual style (i.e. rough sketches would generally not be considered complete) - you can post your work on ao3 or a platform of choice. if you choose to post outside of ao3, please ensure that your work remains anonymous during the fest period

bonus! - participants who complete at least 1 work will have the option of entering a random draw for a set of fan-made (NOT official!) photocards - there will be three (3) winners and the winners will be asked to share their mailing address with the mod so that the photocards can be mailed to them - details about the photocards will be announced later!

sign-up form

link: https://forms.gle/Mfpo377zcGrBiYYv7

questions

please see the ao3 collection details for the faq! feel free to use the tumblr ask box if you have additional questions~

When I started PPAU, it was more of a oneshot that I never expected to finish. Of course, I did finish it, so then I ended up posting it. At some time around then, my art teacher wanted me to draw up some sort of fictional setting, so I cheated and drew the players-as-champions universe I had been envisioning for months, inspired by the initial shots in the Burn It All Down MV of bright lights in a dark, rainy city. (That’s probably why the PPAU version of China has that same vibe of heavy rain and colorful light 90% of the time.) The first fic came out, and… it didn’t seem to draw much attention. Which, by the way, isn’t a problem, but it felt pretty discouraging back then. I came from a really close community in my last fandom where we would always be leaving paragraph-long comments on each other’s works, so getting a grand total of zero comments made me decide that I wouldn’t continue the universe like I had hinted. Much. 

The second PPAU fic was about the most popular North American team at the time, EG. At the time of posting, it was my way of saying goodbye to a universe I didn’t think I’d explore more of. Unlike my first fic, however, this one did get comments and kudos galore (I legitimately thought someone kudos-botted the fic or something since it had more kudos than hits). One comment in particular offered me more than just encouragement—it offered me a question. AryaSage wanted to understand how people got their powers, since it seemed a little inconsistent between fics. I never really answered that question very well, since magical sources of power were decidedly complicated in PPAU. But that  comment was what made me decide to continue PPAU for at least a little longer. 

My third fic was something pretty new for me. Instead of a oneshot that was mostly action or random fluff, I was going to do a multichap with a plot. You see, while trying to come up with championship wishes, I decided to give Scout one that would synergize with his champion, Zoe. I wrote down something along the lines of “boundless energy, never sleeps.” After a second of thinking, I added, “—angst?” Exploring championship wishes, the consequences of being a moron and the bond between teammates sounded like fun, so I went for it. Unfortunately for me, I couldn’t really write a vaguely emotional, character-driven story without understanding the characters. And I knew very little about EDG, considering I have been a Damwon fan for almost as long as I’ve been into esports, and I am also a petty bitch. Rather than research, I went off pictures and their champions. Meiko was Yuumi, so he was generally cheerful, a great support outside of battle, and big on physical touch. Viper was Aphelios, so he was mysterious and cool. (AryaSage later gave him trauma.) Scout had to have a reason to make his stupid wish in the first place, so I made him a little bit of a moron. Jiejie was my favorite EDG member, although that’s not saying much, and I made him sarcastic because of his smirk in pictures. Flandre… was also there. In the span of about a week, I did what I had never done before: I finished a multichap fic. Arya commented on each chapter as it came out, which reminded me of my old fandom and helped motivate me to figure out what the hell my plot was. I call one day you’ll wish you hadn’t the EDG pilot, since I clearly hadn’t figured out the characters yet. 

Going into my fourth fic, I knew it was going to be an LCK fic. One commenter, rakuyou, said they would love to read more, and suggested that I write LCK next. I agreed, since I had written about the other three major regions already. I planned to write about Damwon, because again, I’m a Damwon fan and Showmaker has been my favorite for years. (He made it into EDG’s fic. That’s how you know it’s bad.) But when I tried to write about them… no ideas came to mind. I ended up thinking about a few clips I’d seen of Gumayusi talking about proving himself to Keria, and I typed out a line: “Okay, so in hindsight, this wasn’t the greatest idea.” Since I had covid at the time and therefore nothing to do but blow my nose and sit in my room, I wrote the rest of the fic in one day. My mom chose the title when she came to bring me my Chipotle. Rakuyou and Arya appeared again to cheer me on, and when Arya suggested that I do a Viper-centric fic to figure out his Deal (see note on me making him mysterious), I decided I might as well. 

So I did. And posted my fifth fic. The next day. As one does. The next two fics, while fun, didn’t have as much crazy inspiration behind them. They were both actually written from prompts, since I ran out of ideas. 

And then there was someday both of us are leaving here. I wrote the beginning of the sixth chapter first as a sort of sequel to counting failures, and then decided to make it a multichap 5+1. After chapter 4, DRX beat T1, and my fic ended up getting a lot more attention as people tried to cope with those finals. Two of my readers, a certain axolotl and owl, would later become my friends. Ginger Owl in particular motivated me to make the fic’s ending as good as it could be, since it was one of her favorite fics at the time. 

It’s worth noting that at the time of posting the sixth chapter, I had been dealing with depression for about six years. The pandemic hadn’t helped, and I was convinced that I was a failure compared to who I used to be. That had just started to change, as I realized about a day before my depression’s birthday that I might be able to be okay after all. One of my friends was also struggling with self-worth in comparison to someone else, similar to Gumayusi in the fic. In the seventh and final chapter, Keria tells Gumayusi that he doesn’t have to be Teddy or any of their teammates. All he has to be is Gumayusi. That chapter wasn’t just a love letter to Ginger Owl and my friend—it was a reminder to myself, of what I’d learned. I was vastly different from how I used to be, sure, and I was worse in a lot of ways, but my current self was also better in other aspects. I didn’t have to compare myself to who I used to be or to anyone else—I was enough. 

Yeah so then my grandpa died and I wrote angst to cope. Blah blah. 

But my grandpa dying and my depression isn’t important to this story! Something more important happened: SHOWMAKER LOST IN QUARTERFINALS. Filled with mald and the spirit of NA, I wrote there’s no crown for losing. And this shit is so bad it warrants a section break. 

For the first eight fics, PPAU had a solid identity. It was supposed to be a bunch of fairly short fics, some with self-contained arcs, that took place in the same universe, were canon compliant, and could be read without prior knowledge of the universe. Obviously, this wasn’t fully the case, since someday both of us are leaving here required knowledge of counting failures, but I figured it wouldn’t be too hard for a gumakeria fan to read a short gumakeria prequel. Plus the whole universe isn’t explained at the beginning of each fic, because that would make me die inside. Anyway, these stories were never connected all that much, making it easy for someone to pick and choose which ones they read based on what teams or players they liked. But there’s no crown for losing was the beginning of the end. Funnily enough, the canon compliance (AKA generally sticking to PPAU versions of IRL events and relationships) wasn’t completely destroyed the second I came up with the idea of a DK EDG crossover, since Damwon posted about LOSER FINALS TODAY WE GONNA WIN THIS TIME BROTHERS. DK VS EDG, TIME: WHENEVER YOU WANT. I love tncfl with my whole heart, but there’s no denying it did two very dangerous things to the universe. 

It introduced the idea of what I call a “mcdonalds fic”, where the previously unrelated characters from past stories came together to make something that was decidedly less than canon compliant. A mcdonalds fic, in essence, puts characters together despite the fact that they have barely interacted at all IRL, and therefore defies canon. 

It introduced Showmaker as the main character instead of a snarky, mysterious asshole like he was in his previous appearances. 

But surely there’s no crown for losing didn’t matter, because it was a one-time thing! Right? Well, it would have been, but then brute force and style combine was an even bigger mcdonalds fic, featuring players from all four regions and all TEN of the previous fics. (I’m serious.) Worse, that fic set up a possible plot, what with the ominous ending and hint that something new was coming. Right after that came run away from the faith, which marked the first time two characters had an important interaction that was insanely non-canon compliant. And of course, then there was now I’ll never be the same, and the Ruination arc, which was so, so non-canon compliant. It literally added a plot that was so disruptive that I had to reschedule some of the IRL matches in-universe, and although that might have been fine, it, uh… It was a global crisis with lasting effects, most notably the trauma I inflicted of some of PPAU’s most prominent characters.

The Ruination arc was a little weird, since it was split into eight fics despite having the same central plotline and arc. I don’t think it would have made much sense as a single fic either, since the POVs and focuses vary wildly (which is a problem in the alt ruination fic), and seeing as I had no idea what the plan was when I posted the first fic, there wasn’t much I could do. During the Ruination, if you wanted to know what the hell was going on, you absolutely had to read the fics that came before it, which wasn’t anything like the format I had going before. I was really drained writing the Ruination, since it was such a big project that I wasn’t sure I could finish. That’s probably why PPAU started how it did—so that no matter when I stopped writing PPAU, it would have a clear enough ending. Like a moron, I even hinted at a second Big Plot in the Ruination finale.

I ended the Ruination by celebrating the fact that all the Plot Shit was over and that I could get back to crack and my regularly scheduled programming. Except… I couldn’t. My next fic, while basically a crack oneshot, referenced the Ruination. I couldn’t justify not doing so, since Keria kind of died and saved the world. It was an awkward in-between of the two PPAU styles, since it could be read without context right up until Gumayusi and Keria start talking about an old arc. Most of the next few fics—a heart full of fire, pray for glory, rise up and sing, and even legendary (the stars will remember you)—were more of a return to the oneshot, non-interconnected format. The obvious exception is what are you willing to lose, but that one kind of had to be open-ended. Even though they were more of a return to the format, all of them still at least referenced past fics and arcs, and with Faker’s fic reaching 2023, it’s going to mention the Ruination. Except for rise up and sing, because EU is fundamentally irrelevant in this universe despite being the first region I wrote about. 

At this point, I didn’t have my self-contained arcs or my canon compliance or my oneshots that you could read independently. It was a whole interconnected mess of plot spaghetti, and it still is. At first, the “series” title didn’t really fit PPAU, since they were all just vaguely related fics, but the Ruination really made it a series. While you can still read the first thirteen fics with little to no context, the rest of the series has required reading, and that’s just… not what I meant to do. PPAU spans 50 fics if you count AryaSage and Space_Axolotl’s contributions—which you should, because they’re a) bangers and b) related to the “plot”. You also have to count the alternate Ruination, which I wrote as a fun what-if and now has a bunch of lore for the universe that can’t be found anywhere else. So now PPAU is over 300,000 words. You have to read a bunch of shit to understand one fic. Plus, while having self-contained arcs is good, now that I’m dragging them all together, you can’t just choose to read the fics about your favorites if you want to understand a new fic. So PPAU’s old concept is working against what it’s become. Honestly, if I wasn’t the author and I saw PPAU today, I wouldn’t read it. 

Look… I’m not writing for the sake of external validation, because I know I shouldn’t, but it’s not as if that doesn’t play a big part. Passion can only get me so far, and that was clear as soon as I started, since I would have quit after my second fic. PPAU isn’t exactly new reader-friendly, so most of my readers are what I call the squad: people who have read a large amount of PPAU and are more committed to it as a universe. Which is cool. I love the squad. It reminds me of my old fandom. But—and this is going to sound bad—sometimes it doesn’t feel like it’s enough. Maybe I’m spoiled by my old fandom, because again, we had paragraph-long comments and discord servers where we would live react to fics (and still leave comments at the end). Maybe I’m not. Either way, it doesn’t change the fact that those long comments that give me motivation and dopamine like nothing else are hard to come by these days. And by the way, there is NOTHING wrong with that, or with the fandom as a whole. Well actually the fandom has an issue with not crediting people or asking permission to use their ideas (star guardian anon i mean you /frfr) or supporting authors as much as they should but whatever. Anyway, I don’t blame anyone for not leaving comments, and I’m not saying that you should. Well I am saying that but I mean it generally and not about my works in particular. Writing any non-T1 fic means that you’re resigning yourself to it not being nearly as popular, and I’m not exactly a T1 main. I think I would have more than a few fics that didn’t have comments were it not for the squad, which kind of bothers me. I love the squad, but when it’s just them commenting on a fic, I start to think that if that fic didn’t have my name attached to it, no one would want to read it. Not even me! And at that point, why am I posting it? Why am I writing it? That’s my kind of thought process when it spirals. 

Even without that, it doesn’t change the fact that I’m just not happy with PPAU’s concept. It’s not fully interconnected, but there are a bazillion plot lines tangled up in there, and it’s not a series, but the Ruination definitely is. Canon compliance is a myth at this point. It’s not the approachable little universe it was when I made it two years ago. I’ve spent more than two years writing and drawing almost exclusively PPAU things, and… this is the part where I say that it’s gotten tiring, but that’s not the case. There are so many stories I can still tell, plus a big plotline I could explore. But if I’m putting all my brainrot into this one universe, I want to at least be happy about how that universe works—and I’m not. 

There’s no easy fix for any of this, though. I can’t untangle the plot threads and fics no matter what, and my ongoing fics reflect that. Faker’s fic will eventually answer a question that was asked by the very first fic, which does seem fitting. Because Faker. Showmaker and Canyon’s fic sets up a Noxian plotline (good timing I know) that has been around since a heart full of fire. But I alluded to Showmaker’s backstory in his first big fic. See point about tncfl breaking the universe. Alt Ruination will also be related to the greater lore of the universe, which I resent. It’s meant to be a spinoff, man… Zoomer fic was initially tied to the Noxian plot before I remembered that was a bad idea, but it still introduces a possible plot going forward. JackeyLove’s fic heavily relies on the Ruination and sets up the Void plotline, because it’s him.

Quick aside, JackeyLove is probably my favorite character I’ve created. He wasn’t supposed to be much (despite me liking iG for longer than I’ve liked DK) but while considering what Kai’Sa might exist as in PPAU, I wrote that she was “a girl who underwent a risky operation to save her life,” with said operation obviously being the Void symbiote. I used the same concept for JackeyLove, which was cool and all until I realized that he might have a little trauma about that. So he’s a bit of a mess now. In a good way. He has Showmaker’s sass, Viper’s trauma, Faker’s weird power scaling and plot relevance… 

Okay anyway. There’s no way to fix PPAU, which is upsetting considering everything I’ve put into this universe. Every chapter I post only exacerbates the issues. I still fully intend to post those chapters and eventually write the Void and Noxian plotlines, which should come to a head this year anyway. After that… we’ll see how I feel. Plot sounds painful. I don’t think I’ll outright end PPAU at some point. It’ll just stop. Which is ominous but that’s how it goes ig. 

It would be nice to work on some other projects too. I have to write that T1 novel, which will be in its own universe. Then there’s the fabled “hvau” which has been cooking for forever. Featuring my favorite mcdonalds morons.