#noiseycatvoid

https://x.com/rxvxrly/status/1559606188123340801?t=pam-9XPAOZMhuUnS0cmXoQ&s=19

OMG MERMAN EREN?!?! 🤩🥵

Poor leon

But love his expression 🤣

DID YOU DRAW THIS THIS IS SO CUTE ;______;

jk but not really

[nsfw link]

thank you so much for this question!!

i'm not sure i have a sneak peek that that is good enough to share, because for a long time, despite rewriting nearly 25k words, i couldn't pinpoint what was wrong with it. I thought changing pov might be able to tell the story better, but that was a tool, not the material itself.

thanks to all the reading and writing i have been doing on other projects, i have been thinking about bylb a lot. i think one thing i'll have to do, a kill-your-darlings of sorts, is to cut down a lot of details about other characters, and sometimes whole characters themselves.

the story i really want to tell demands a lot of interiority, and i think i'm way better at it now, but it also makes me understand then, that i cannot devote the same kind of attention or perspective to levi's backstory with petra. to his dynamic with hange. The incident that occurred between Cherry and Hange. I can't just throw them in there like I did last time and expect those things to resolve themselves.

I'll explain it this way. In my first draft that's up on ao3, I'm trying to talk about:

Levi, Hange, Levi's late wife and their relationship to the sex work industry. All of their relationships are different and filled with different types of pain. Levi was a cop that fell in love with a sex worker who became his CI, and then got caught and murdered for it. Hange is a trans character who wants to undergo a sex change surgery and is trying to save up for it, but at the same time they want to invest in creating a better environment for the girls who end up in similar situations. With Cherry we see a situation where Hange feels like they have failed in that endeavour, because Cherry refused to follow the boundaries laid out by Hange, and ended up being abused at the hands of a customer who claimed to love Cherry.

Mikasa on the other hand is trying to reclaim the ownership of her body by making it work. quite literally. she's been mothered by hange, fathered by levi, and this industry whilst dangerous, has been a playground of exploration for her. because she's been so protected, she doesn't consider the aspects of it that she doesn't want to. she's a good dancer, and she's proud of it. she wants to get a kick out of turning men on, so she does. But where Levi and Hange feel like shit for exposing her to this industry, she is trying to assert a "Why can't I do this if i feel safe and free?" kind of attitude.

Mikasa's sexuality: Mikasa is somewhere on the ace spectrum, demi i guess. she's felt broken for so long because her body doesn't experience desire the same way as others, but she's grown up knowing that her body elicits desire in others. and she's tried to push and prod and poke at that sensation until it's sore. Now for whatever reason, she finds it in the arms of a man who is supposed to be off limits to her. She is willing to disregard these limits, but this man is hot one minute, cold the next, hung up over an ex, and mostly unreliable.

Eren's backstory and divorce: Obviously Eren comes into the story with a really key perspective, the opening scene is about him and his friends, and his inner turmoil. What I was trying to do was write a man on the precipice of change. Here you have a man who thought he was doing all the right things in life, and suddenly he's found out it doesn't work. What is a moral choice anymore? He isn't so sure. What am I doing with a stripper? Why am I getting a divorce? How am I in love with someone else when I promised to be with my wife forever? Why do I feel like a different person when I am with this mysterious girl? etc.

Historia's sexuality and cheating: I obviously have sympathy for her, the way I wrote her into the story. She married her best friend but fell in love with a woman much later, something that she never expected would happen to her. This is not something she has an understanding of, herself. She has a controlling father whom she genuinely fears for, and is still very fond of her husband. So even though she wants to leave him, she is scared to leave him behind. He's one of the few people in her life who has been good to her, after all.

I have 2 choices to make here,

1) either I write a dual pov story from Eren and Mikasa's perspective, in which case I would really massively cut down point 1, and just briefly mention point 5 and change Mikasa's back story because there is so much to unpack in the dynamic itself, OR

2) I would keep the story from Mikasa POV and try to tackle all the above whilst featuring Eren as just a love interest. you know what i mean?

I THINK i am leaning towards the former, but this is a thing that keeps me spinning every three business days. Ultimately I am also conscious of "writing what I know" and the idea that I could be making an offensive commentary on sex work does scare me. On the other hand, I love romance and writing about Eren unravelling feels so compelling to me.

Regarding character changes: I like the character I have fleshed out for Mikasa. where I lean into her wistfulness, devotion and submissiveness in other fics, here I wanted to explore her pride and obstinacy, and desire to fight. So I like the character that I have here. In an original, I would call her M, and have her whisper her name to her lover, and the audience would not know it until the very end.

One thing I have toyed with seriously, is making M an onlyfans persona who breaks a lot of rules for a man who says he's never done this before, and kind of taunts her by asking what's so special about her. this is what i would do if i choose to option 1 as I explained above, because then I can just really make this an obsessive love story that takes place in the shadows. And I can still touch upon points 2, 3 and 4 in proper detail! If I got this route, I picture M's persona to have pink wig and a pole installed in her room. I wonder if she would be a rich girl. We'll have to see lol.

Eren on the other hand... oh boy. I just would not know what to name him. I have grown attached to the name 'Mr Jaeger' and it kinda sounds sexy, idk what else to say lol. Also while writing original fic, I also feel somewhat of a fraud writing names of people that are so far removed from the names and cultures that I know intimately. I've toyed with the idea of making the MMC an indian man, because I can then relate to the cultural obligations family thrusts on you especially in a marriage. i think i just need to give myself permission to do this, and a lot of things will fall into place, because here then is an archetype of man that i know LOL.