23. ship you've unwillingly come around to

will you laugh if i say griddlehark........ 0:) too many sauceless renditions i read early in my fandom journey + a natural disinclination for the juggernaut had me bridling at it early on. and i am still an advocate of the ship only achieving its true potential after gideon's suicide and a disliker of most modern AUs UNLESS their canon relationship is replaced by something equivalently shocking, sordid, miserable, tragic, and mutually entangled in a modern translation. but after all that now i'm the preeminent griddlehark author in the fandom (lmao) having written SIX whole fictions

"Or"? Let's do TLT and YJ.

7. what character did you begin to hate not because of canon but because how how the fandom acts about them?

TLT: I still wouldn't say I "hate" Cristabel, but I fully adopted @mayasaura's negative view of her well before NtN came out and more or less confirmed that view, and it was largely because I didn't buy how the rest of the fandom was understanding her at that time. I might be misremembering the specifics, though.

YJ: I think I'd have much more patience for or tolerance of Jeff if it weren't for the show's awful little moments of overt fanservice for genpop audiences who are head-over-heels in love with the guy.

16: you can’t understand why so many people like this thing (characterization, trope, headcanon, etc)

TLT: I'd say John the one-dimensional bad guy, but I actually can understand why so many people prefer to see him that way, so instead I'll say Wake the one-dimensional good guy. I love Wake, but she fully intended to blow up a baby, all the better to do a genocide with!

YJ: Not no-crash AUs in general because I do actually think that those can shed interesting light on the characters and setup, but the specific kind of no-crash AU where there's just no undertone of vicious, angsty, quasi-sacral hostility between the main girls at all. What's the point?

25: common fandom complaint that you’re sick of hearing

TLT: Any and all attempts to make this fandom have a conversation about race. We're not good at it and we won't be made to get good at it by main force.

YJ: Blaming everything on the writers, as opposed to the other people and places and things that are demonstrably behind many of the flaws that have emerged.

A full-cast multivoice of @liesmyth's excellent pre Nona the Ninth fic about John's upcoming midlife crisis, plus lots of fun cohort worldbuilding :D

Rating: Teen and Up No Archive Warnings Apply Length: ~48 min

Cover by irrationalpie

With the voices of: @tipsyxkitty @notesofadelfa @thefluxqueen @sierrajanesims @flightlessnotfightless @boppinrobin @polynomialpandemic and more.

13. Is there a fic you remember but haven't been able to find again?

hmmm there are a few chalex fics that were deleted 😓 but also one in specific that they had morning sex or something like that and it was so soft… and hot…

18. What makes you back out of a fic immediately?

yes omg this is one of the approximately three books by a living author I have actually read!! I remember licherally fuck all except as u have so aptly and succinctly put: the Alien friend jazz hand communication 😭✋️ which started pissing me off after like three pages. andy weir u will never be liu cixin 🙏

so i thought this was something i had just spitballed in old dms, and had a vague memory of it being pre-nona and involving some kind of concept where pal achieved lyctorhood but was able to talk to a version of cam inside his brain. (honestly, now that we have nona, i think it might be more compelling to do the same sort of body-sharing situation for this sort of concept.) but then i went to check if i ever wrote anything down for this, and it turns out i wrote 1100 words of it in 2022 that i never finished?? i completely forgot about it. it was pal/augustine and inspired by a kinkmeme prompt. i think i stopped because i have literally never been able to complete a fic with cam in it, because i love her, but for some reason i am absolutely incapable of writing her voice without feeling like i've gotten it Wrong somehow. i've written several thousand words of fic featuring her and never finished any of them, lol.

i'm not sure where this story was going, but i am compelled by various AUs where at least one more necro from canaan house ends up as a lyctor and the dynamics on the mithraeum get even twistier and weirder. in this one, it's harrow and ianthe and pal. my long bang fic had harrow and ianthe and silas, which was hilarious to me. if i ever write again, i'd love to try an abigail/cytherea concept.

anyway. have an excerpt:

37. Talk about your current WIPs!

There's three! One is F/F Lestappen (my brand) which is deeply personal indulgence and means a lot to me, one is Carlos POV Lestappen as eldritch horror soulmates (and Carlos having a weird psychosexual obsession with divinity as a result) you can find this under creatures from heaven on by writing blog, and one is a vague idea and a few paragraphs of a Lewis Ferrari 2025 fic with Brocedes and Lestappen with themes of transhumanism, religion, love, legacy, duty, sacrifice, and everything you could even want in your standard F1 RPF you can find this under meteor becoming on my writing blog.

38. Talk about a review that made your day

Full disclaimer, any and all reviews/comments make my day, nay, my week, even if I don't reply to them I see them ALL. But my personal favourite (which I also never replied to) was this one on grid dynamics

OH. If you feel like elaborating on this I'm *eyes emoji* @ u

hehehe, sure!

So here is the passage in question:

“I’m the Messenger,” said the Angel simply. “We are the Message … the message has two parts left, and you are looking at one of those parts. The name for this part of the message was ‘Aim’ when the message was passed to us through my forebear Emma Sen. The message is too simple for human beings like us to understand. What do you think the message is?” 

Nona couldn’t guess.

“The message is too simple for human beings like us to understand.”

Nona’s not a human being.

She also doesn’t lie. We see her fudge her wording on a few occasions to avoid lying on a technicality, and “Nona couldn’t guess” just strikes me as the kind of very specific response she might give to wriggle her way out of a lie. Aim asked what Nona thought, but what we’re told is that Nona couldn’t guess.