#memeses

This is the sequel oneshot to the Tome timeloop fic! In this case I think the excerpt is pretty self-explanatory:

[from this meme]

Did "Found Wanting"!

the story behind "how many guys are in this guy" is that there's a line in Mogami arc where after Mob's unsuccessful exorcism Matsuo says, "They're actually fusing into one now!" Horrifying! We never get any elaboration on this and it never happens again but I think about it frequently. Anyway this fic is a oneshot where a job goes very wrong and Reigen and Dimple get fused into one entity so the rest of S&S has to figure out how to separate them before Reigen's body takes too much damage. Eventually Mob tries to astral project into their mind so he can sort things out there, so the answer to how many guys are in that guy is "At least three." Just like the genders.

Part of the cold open:

As Reigen stood up, apparently unharmed, Serizawa was filled with an equally overwhelming surge of relief. His aura flared around him but he pulled it in close, one hand still clutching the business cards that he wielded like a holy relic. He hurried across the room to where Reigen stood, blinking shrewd but unfocused eyes at him. "Reigen . . ." he said, in an oddly deep voice. Maybe it was Dimple. Or maybe it was the dust. "Yeah. It's his body, so I can be Reigen." That, technically, was the point at which Serizawa actually knew that something had gone very wrong. "What do you mean?" he said. "Dimple, is that you?" The man in front of him laughed. Now that he looked closer, Serizawa could see a strange green cast to his skin, like he was glowing faintly from within. "Sort of," he said. "Maybe. It's complicated." The stack of business cards began to vibrate against Serizawa's hand. "Well, whoever you are, get out of him!" he barked. The man's lips curled up in an exhausted-looking smile. It wasn't quite Dimple's sharp grin. It wasn't quite Reigen's expression of well-practiced authority. It was somewhere in between. Almost like . . . Serizawa's eyes went wide. "You see, that's the problem, Serizawa," said the entity in Reigen's body. "I don't think he can."

"hurting killing and harming him" . . . is a doozy so I'm putting it under a cut. warning for discussion of sexual assault, including my own experiences.

Rules: Make a 24hr poll listing the titles of every WIP you want to work on. (It’s fine if you only have one, still make a poll for the vote count). Whichever WIP title gets the most votes, write 1 sentence for every vote received.

I was tagged by @marypsue (thank you Mary <3) and tagging anyone who wants to do it! Also I will try to (eventually) add a sentence for every vote, not just the winner, because I *do* want to work on all of these. Not including Brassica Heresy bc it's nearly done or the collab I'm doing with Nate bc the issue of who writes which sentences is more complicated there.

[from this meme!]

Found Wanting is the document for when I was foolishly imagining that I could fit the romo ekurei continuity into a single oneshot which I have since realized is not going to happen, so bits of what I've got will have to be split up into a series of fics! The title (which will probably still get used for one of the fics) refers to the crisis Dimple finds himself in after he finally admits to himself that he's into Reigen: the last time he really wanted something, he brainwashed the entire city and nearly killed his best friend. How can he be sure that having another desire won't lead him back to a darker path? Can he actually trust himself to go after what he wants? (Obviously it works out but I'm having fun with the Ghost Insecurities). Here's a scene post-Realization where Dimple goes to bother his emotional support fifteen-year-old:

"I mean, look at him. He's pathetic! Surely that means he'll have low standards, right? And I was almost a god once! Really, I'm the one who's too good for him! Right, Shigeo?" "I don't know," says Shigeo. "I don't know why you're talking to me about this." "Well, who else am I supposed to talk to!?" Dimple complains. He's zipping around the lighting fixture in Shigeo's room. "I've granted a listening ear to all of your problems!" "Hm," says Shigeo. "I would have been able to give you great advice about Tsubomi if I hadn't been erased from existence at the time!" "Well then," says Shigeo, frowning, "Can't you just take your own advice?" Dimple sighs and spirals to the ground. "It's different when you're a spirit!" he grumbles, flopping onto the floor. "We don't usually . . . do this sort of stuff." It's not exactly true. There were evil spirits that still loved people they'd known in life—or that were just obsessed with them. And there were evil spirits that would stalk pretty girls or young men, and even some that tried to lure people into more . . . physical situations. But Dimple wasn't like any of those assholes. "Why'd you have to go and convince me that brainwashing people was a bad idea?" he whines. "I could have skipped all this worrying and just made him—" "Dimple." The kid stares at him with the serious face and intense eyes that make Dimple remember just how scary he can be. "I know, I know, I'm not gonna do it!" he protests. It wouldn't work anyway. All that business with the broccoli had taught him that. He wanted someone to actually choose him, and cheating with mind control was never going to scratch the same itch. "I have to go to sleep, Dimple," says Shigeo. "Good sleep is very important for developing strong muscles." "But—" Shigeo drapes his arms over his knees and stares intently at the wall. "When Tsubomi rejected me," he says, "I was very sad at first. But we talk more now than we did before. It let us be friends." "Yeah, well we're already friends! At least we bother each other all the time. Do you have any idea how mortifying it would be if he found out about this and wasn't interested?" "Yes," says Shigeo, unhelpfully. "What if he tells everyone else? What if he thinks I'm possessing him in a creepy way?" "Are you?" "No!" "Then you shouldn't worry about it," says Shigeo.

In Case Of Emergency is a post-canon ensemble fic where the ensemble is Reigen, Dimple, Tome, Musashi and Onigawara investigating why every psychic in Seasoning City has been taken out of commission. There's 30k up on AO3 already and it's been languishing for years but I do really want to finish it! Here's a snippet from later on, when Reigen's trying to infiltrate a group of former Claw members:

[from this meme!]

I have been trying to write this fic for three years and I swear it will be posted someday! It's the one where Reigen is sex-repulsed but doesn't know it because he's never heard of anything related to asexuality, so he and Dimple start sleeping together because they're both like, "Well, this is what you're Supposed To Do in a relationship, right?" and it's perfectly consensual but also leads to Reigen having panic attacks in the massage room because he hates it so much. Eventually I will force them to talk about it. Unfortunately getting Reigen to talk about anything is a nightmare which is why this has taken me three years.

Excerpt under the cut (because it's longer, not because there's anything explicit in it):

[from this meme]

Just did "Hurting killing and harming him," so The Horrors it is! I also got two other asks about this one, so Horrors Anon and @philcoulsonismyhero this is for you as well.

The background for this one involves some stuff that only happens in the manga version of the Mogami arc, some stuff that happens in the spinoff manga, and also some stuff that happens in one of my wips that I haven't posted yet. So it's a little more complicated to explain!

Basically, I really love Shinra and I think constantly about a scene in the manga version of Mogami arc where all the other psychics decide they can save their own skins if they kill Minori and Shinra tries to stop them. It doesn't work, and the rest of the psychics beat him brutally into submission while Reigen looks on in horror. And this never really comes up again because the story is about Mob and not these adults but like. It haunts me a little bit not gonna lie.

So part of the impetus behind The Horrors was to manufacture a similar situation where all the other members of the Rising Sun Spiritual Union descend into "kill or be killed" mentality and then actually take the time to examine that and make them face the consequences of it.

The other impetus was that I have a fic that will someday have a real title but is for now just "Ghost Polycule" that's Reigen/Dimple/Shinra and I was having so much fun with the dynamic that I felt the need to throw a plot at them.

So the basic setup is that Jodo, who is full of vindictiveness and also hubris, arranges a retreat for the Union members where he will exorcise part of the most cursed and evil place that he knows of! Even more cursed and evil than the place that he was exorcising a few feet of in the Reigen manga to show off his vast power and that Mob then completely cleared without breaking a sweat! And also because he knows that Shinra and Reigen have been spending more time together he invites Reigen along in what he claims is a gesture of reconciliation but is actually an attempt to saddle him with a bad-luck curse that will finally take him out of the psychic business. Because Jodo sucks.

And, well. The exorcism goes wrong. Instead of driving the evil presence back, Jodo releases it, trapping the whole group in its domain until it can be appeased by an appropriate sacrifice.

Reigen is very unpopular with the Union. They're pretty unified in deciding who the sacrifice should be.

Shinra and Dimple manage to escape from the group with a severely injured Reigen and find a place to hide. But they can't just wait things out, because they still need to find a way to get the evil spirit to let everyone leave, and Reigen is fading fast . . .

(Short version: I am planning to lure everyone in with intense Reigen whump and then force you all to care about my favorite side character)

This is definitely going to get some edits, but a snippet:

*limps into the wip meme four days late with Starbucks*

I already did Found Wanting, but I will tell you about Tanka prose! As you know I love poetry and including songs and poems in stories and also just writing in verse, and a while ago I was getting a hankering for something poetic but since my current fandom is Japanese it felt a little weird to do Western-style poetry about it. So I did some research on Japanese poetic forms and various things that people have done with them in translation and ended up reading a bunch of articles about English-language Tanka prose. This is a type of prosimetrum (a piece of writing that combines poetry and prose, also incidentally my new favorite word) that combines five-line tanka poems with short prose passages. There's a lot to be said about what counts as a tanka and to what extent English tanka are actually related to the Japanese form, but I didn't necessarily want to get into the weeds of all that. I wanted to write weird anime fanfiction.

. . . and then I got stuck on pronouns, because tanka are usually in first-person but I don't know that the Vibes of that are clicking for me in this peice, but third-person also sounds wrong and I can't get away with the whole thing being in sentences with no clear pov no matter how hard I try. It might end up second. Ish. We'll see.

This wip is also not a classic example of the form because I'm also attempting to do some stuff with non-linearity and contextless dialogue and various other things. It'll be a wacky little piece. Kind of dream-state. I don't want to explain too much of what it's about because I think it'll be most effective to go in blind, but here's the two tanka I've got about Tome and Mob respectively (I like them as poems but don't know how good they are at being tanka specifically. But that's why we practice.)

[from this meme]

You've actually heard a lot about Hashtag Feminism 2! That's my document title for the Tome timeloop fic. The genealogy is that when I was writing my BttF fic "Time Is Out Of Joint" it was the first time I'd really played around with major character death (even though it was technically temporary), so to make myself feel better I kept joking "Look, I'm killing off the men for the woman's character development! Hashtag Feminism!"

And, well, this fic is doing the same thing (sorry Reigen). However the working title is now doing double duty because I decided that the villain has to be an evil woman! For thematic reasons and also because there aren't enough women in Mob so whenever I have a chance to make an OC I add more in.

You know most of this, but since I don't think I've fully explained it on here before, the conceit of the fic is that there's a former Scar with time manipulation powers who eventually reaches a point where she can rewind time to try to make past events play out differently. She's still bitter about Claw dissolving and has learned that Mob and his master (because obviously a child couldn't have done it by himself) are the ones who stopped the world domination attempt, so she decides that she'll just go back in time and take them out before they become a problem. Tome's the only one who retains her memories because the rock she got from the aliens appears to protect her from time distortions. Unfortunately for the Scar, Mob proves surprisingly difficult to kill. Unfortunately for Tome, Reigen doesn't. Faced with ???%, the Scar jumps back in time again, and this time Tome knows what she's planning, so they enter a series of increasingly elaborate loops where the Scar attempts to secure Claw's ultimate victory and Tome tries to find a way to get back to the timeline she's used to, or, failing that, at least make sure that everyone she cares about survives.

Here's a snippet of Tome on the first loop before the horrors start: