long live degeneracy

I really enjoy Ryland Grace’s bent toward self-preservation as an examination of what it takes to make the stakes of something personal. Stratt looks at the number of projected deaths and that’s real to her, those numbers are people and she can successfully conceptualize them as such on an emotional level. To Grace, though, the number is just a number. He doesn’t hold anyone on earth truly dear and is therefore unequipped to be able to place their lives above his own. “Someone to be brave for” and all that.

AU where eridians follow the homestuck quadrants system. Gracerocky become THEE pale serendipity story of all time, knockoffs of their life story dominate pale romance fiction for the next two centuries minimum. While Rocky was gone, Adrian had to dump multiple pitch suitors who were angling to eventually vacillate red (this also gets the romance fiction treatment, if more subdued). Rocky turns out to be kind of a pitch slut (this does not make it into the romance novels).

Cursed inversion of Homewrecker Grace: gracerocky are genuinely platonic besties, they get to Erid, Adrian is on the Human Habitation team, and as Grace gets well he comes to the horrified realization that he’s gradually become romantically enamored with his friend’s spouse and said spouse is kinda giving the signals back. Emotional implosion imminent!

Quick advice to writers who are new to posting on ao3 - don’t sandbag your own summary! It can be tempting to add a self-conscious note to the effect of ‘I suck at summaries,’ (believe me I understand the urge!) but all that does is make it seem like you aren’t confident enough in your work to even describe what it is about, which does not make a prospective reader more likely to click. Have some confidence! If you wrote the story, the hard part is done; you are perfectly capable of broadly describing the contents.