#abaabf

Fanfiction: it feels more like a memory: [https://archiveofourown.org/works/5456225/chapters/12613484] fandom: Hamilton. Aaron Burr is the Seer — a figure of religious and political importance, due to his ability to see how someone dies the first time he touches their bare skin. An extremely detailed series of eight different alternate histories emerge from there. This probably has at least 200k to go, with an existing outline of plot points to hit and scattered scenes written amongst that.

as if it must be pure: [https://archiveofourown.org/works/43954528/chapters/110519095] fandom: Boku no Hero Academia: I am gonchposting my way through a canon retelling healer! Izuku fic. featuring All For One having an existential crisis about a Yoichi-shaped child turning up out of the blue and sure is doing something with this ‘second chance’, big brother Tomura, the entire League of Villains’ original founding tenet being the Izuku Protection Squad, Aizawa is so tired of all these extra Problem Children he has accidentally adopted, All Might did not realize what he was getting into choosing this successor, Class 1-A unanimously deciding that their precious cinnamon roll must be shielded from this world and if the HPSC needs to go down to do it that is an acceptable price, and an incredibly tired hacker! Hitoshi who is not being paid enough to deal with the insanity and also terrible opsec of said Class 1-A conspiracy and almost certainly going to get a spinoff fic of his own.

we raise it up: [https://archiveofourown.org/works/23608963/chapters/56655328] fandom: the Magnus Archives. Jonathan Sims reads a Leitner, gains foreknowledge about the course of canon through the end of season 4, and everyone proceeds to run around like headless chickens with the playing in the background fixing everything. The five remaining chapters + four epilogues are painstakingly outlined and/or partially written, probably tentatively around 50k remaining with 20k of that already written.

to the bottom of the river: [https://archiveofourown.org/works/11066571/chapters/24678171] fandom: Yuri! on Ice. A retelling of the anime with a twist on the world background: people can lease their souls to demons in return for making various supernatural deals. There is a single chapter mostly written remaining that better emotionally wraps up and concludes the whole thing, then some additional content already ready to post as a patreon exclusive.

a buried and a burning flame: [https://archiveofourown.org/works/32158693/chapters/79679947] fandom: Victoria Goddard’s The Hands of the Emperor. A retelling of the canon universe with the twist of two different sorts of culturally specific soulmates.  

Unpublished Fanfiction: the wind, the wind, the wind: lesbian Hadestown in space. need I say anything more.

shade of the morning sun: a crossover of my unpublished novel Opus (characters appearing in a beating heart of stone) with the Star Wars prequels. possibly the most insane and indulgent thing I’ve ever written.

Original Works: Opus I: incredibly tired diplomat is annoyed that his assigned assassin-pretending-very-poorly-to-a-bodyguard’s murderous love polygon drama is going to have political ramifications that will in fact be his problem. featuring: Seers, except this Seer can only see 10 seconds into the future and uses it to be Extremely Good At Punching Things, the red/blue/gold relationship system, a magic system based around hiveminds, and an incredibly complicated and fucked-up language with plot-relevant linguistics. some characters and draft 0 concepts appear in a beating heart of stone to get an idea of the Vibes. This is the first in a series of, like, 15 books that will eventually become a multiverse-spanning space opera.

The Numanok Files: Murderbot Diaries crossed with non-sexist Dresden Files crossed with that TV show that was a psychic and a home inspector investigating supposed hauntings, but like, in space, and sometimes the hauntings are real. Valryka Numanok is a bounty hunter who specializes in dealing with ghosts, except while half of the time, a haunting is a haunting, the other half it is poorly covered wiring being affected by solar flares / an alien fungus / hi welcome to me infodumping about everything that might possibly go wrong in exoplanetary settlements. This is a series of novellas each following an individual case.

Strangeside 7: this is Redline but in the aesthetics of a Miyazaki movie; a civilization that spans a galaxy is constrained by the existence of the ‘Strange’ — think sci-fi Fae Wilds. Every year the Strangeside7 race runs through seven unannounced segments of the edges of the Strange. We follow the motley cast of characters as they attempt to qualify and run in this year’s race in a stand-alone novel.

The Heart And The Heartless: shounen anime of ‘kids going to sorcery-warrior school to learn how to wield their innate sorcerous abilities to hunt down and seal revenants’ except told from the perspective of the Incredibly Tired and Perpetually Overworked teachers. Also a stand-alone novel.  

so there are three and a half major things that I have a problem with in terms of general soulmate tropes that are "there is one person who is your perfect romantic partner" (which to be fair I've seen a number of soulmate AUs do that trope with the addendum "although it only applies to a certain percentage of the population / not everyone has soulmates / everyone has soulmates but not everyone has SUPER PERFECT ROMANTIC soulmates" which at least somewhat avoids the statistic inevitability of abusive soulmates if combined with Fate Can See The Future And So Your Fated Soulmate Just Won't Be) and these complaints aren't even from the "I'm poly where's my poly rep" kind of place which is a whole 'nother bag of worms, but let's go:

1. I aggressively believe that love is a choice. Love is something that is built, not predetermined before you meet someone. There might be initial compatibility aspects going down when you first meet someone, but, like. statistically there are more than seven and a half billion people on this planet. If there is only a single person perfectly meant for you, again, statistically, you are not going to meet them, I've seen the figure thrown that on average a person will meet on the order 10,000 people in their lifetime but let's even go 100,000, you will meet 0.001% of the world's population. Unless you think some sort of divine coincidence or fate is guiding you to a soulmate which throws free will out the window and then I can't help you but, like. discarding the math, I think it is actively harmful to a relationship to believe that it can be sustained on chemistry or predetermined 'but we're perfect for each other' alone. It requires work. You choose who is in your life, you choose who stays in your life, you choose who you want to be important to you based on what they contribute to your life and what you contribute to theirs.

(I am assuming this ask is at least partially in reaction to my soulmate post, which actually the fic in question, a buried and a burning flame, has since gone up. I highly recommend reading Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard first, but besides the setup for arson wizards that alas is never used because the fire mage with a soulmate in question is Responsible, I decided to both tackle 'okay soulmarks trope too let's throw it in', which leads to the not-really-a-spoiler passage that appears fairly early on about actually the full layout (albeit with less detail on the 'yeah for mages it just helps ground their magic, nothing romantic about it' part) of my Soulmate Rules:

Soulmates existed, both in the Empire of Astandalas and across the Wide Seas. They just worked slightly differently in Vangavaye-ve than the rest of the worlds.

The rest of the Empire seemed to view soulmates as a monolith. From what Cliopher had been able to glean, the tradition was grounded in their magic. Magi had soulmates, or rather, magic-workers would each have a soulmate. Cliopher wasn't clear if all magic-workers had a soulmate, or if magic-workers simply could have one, but there was always a mage in soulmate pairs, and it was always a pair. There were no marks, no visible signs involved, as soulmates were something that were sensed with magic. They were permanent, intrinsic, and to be recognized immediately.

To Wide Sea Islanders, soulmates were a choice.

The soul-marks, lana and lani-voa, would appear the first time you touched someone that you had chosen to love, with the full knowledge that you loved them. Cliopher had the marks of his mother and father, his sisters, Basil and Dimiter, Bertie and Ghilly. His skin was covered lovingly with the colors of his love, marks that he had gotten used to concealing with long sleeves in Astandalas when he had gotten tired of the constant staring at his 'primitive tattoos'.

Buru Tovo had been the only one to give him lani-voa, a greater mark of the soul. The pattern, with its thick lines and twisting design in a deep blue, extended over the entirety of his left arm and shoulder. They were the dances of his family pressed onto his skin, and he had traced them over with reverent and feather-light touch for months after he had received them. A lani-voa marked someone who had changed your life for the better in a deep and irrevocable way. It was a great honor to have even one.

And now, with the gold stretching up his right arm, new patterns that he didn't recognize stretching up from a handprint of pure gold that was expanding the longer he held that first contact with Tor—

now he had two.

(Buru Tovo is Cliopher's great uncle, for context. In fact, everyone listed there is either a familial or platonic relationship, with a single relationship that used to be romantic but settled into platonic.))

so. yeah. Love is a choice! The Biggest Of Moods! any soulmate lore that undermines that is a Bad Message, in my opinion.

The emphasis also on platonic soulmates leads into my second point:

2. I have found in my life that platonic relationships that I have are and have always been as important if not moreso than the romantic relationships. the emphasis of a single romantic relationship as the most important relationship that you can be in maybe fits for some people, but as a generalization to absolutely everyone I think is toxic and harmful. and not just for aro people! I'm not aro, but I would be miserable to write off my friends as Less Important And Meaningful to me than my parter, whom I love with all my heart! (I've actually ended up in my life settling into what I call the red/blue/gold system for 'relationships that I treat with the importance that society treats romantic relationships', but that's a personal thing). The standard soulmate trope tends to really solidly deliver the thesis of "there is a single romantic relationship that is the single most important relationship in your life" and I just think that's a very bad thesis.

3. Finally, I think the emphasis on permanent/forever is a harmful one for relationships in general. People change. you drift closer to people or further away from them. you move, they move, your schedules change, your interests change, your life changes. if you are living with a romantic partner you're going to keep seeing each other every day, but that doesn't stop you from changing as a person, which means see Point 1 Love Is A Choice; but even if you choose to remain together, you are probably eventually going to Ship Of Theseus your entire relationship. I think it is an important message that if that happens and it is no longer a relationship that is as deeply positive as it once was in your life, you don't...have to keep it out of loyalty to what it once was.

It's okay for people to drift out of your life that were once the most important person in your life. It doesn't invalidate how important and meaningful that relationship used to be, and it isn't a betrayal to let yourself and them and your relationships change and evolve. The idea that something has to be forever for it to matter I think is the idea about soulmates that I disagree with the most. Probably because that was the hardest lesson for me to learn as a kid and a teenager, and the life lesson that I am proudest for learning.

3.5 your point 'plus if it's just a magic thing it "feels" more justified in-universe that soulmates exist' is exactly on the nose, literally I am unable to write anything without attempting to write down a universal theory of everything for How The World Works. if something soulmate-wise is going down even if it never appears on the page you bet your ass I have either figured out the general cosmology and theology of "are there gods or divine forces who have instituted this policy? if so, why? what purpose does it serve", or in the case of abaabf which already has such interesting magic rules in the original canon of "is there an evolutionary reason for soulmates to exist" which I don't go tracing out full evolutionary biology for a fic necessarily mostly because I would want the full evolutionary biology in canon to make sure mine is compliant enough but that sure as hell does translate to "if soulmates exist and it's not for the reason of Because Godlike Beings Said So, there better be a practical purpose". I find at least long-form soulmate fics (ie things With Plot and a Developed Setting that aren't just "let's do a ficlet with this well-known trope") that Do Not Feel Like They've At Least Thought About Why Soulmates Happen To Exist hurt my soul. which I think slightly intersects with my "I hate it when the rules of the universe/ laws of physics are human-centric" instead of "the base rules which were not designed for humans came first, and how the human world works arose in reaction to them" and. yeah. consistent desire to know at least for myself why things are set up the way that they're set up which gods ifmlam is wild and completely bullshit and pulls from quantum multiverse philosophy I started writing that thing when I was like. eighteen? nineteen? but at least it's there so I can be consistent.