#salverse

Point being, please don't ever remove them from ao3...I've read thousands of stories published or not, and your series still lands in the top place every time I think about it.

Oh my goodness, anon, I'll never remove them!

The thought had literally never occurred to me. I wouldn't be here, now, still writing and enjoying the heck out of it if it wasn't for those Shadows and Light stories all those years ago.

The folks who enjoyed it then and the folks who find and enjoy it now make me so happy, on so many levels. It really was the fic where I discovered like, so many things about how I like to write, the kind of couples I want to write, the way I want to describe things, and it opened up a whole new world for me in so many ways, and honestly, I would never have been able to do it if it wasn't for fandom and fanart and I can't imagine taking that fanfic out of the world either.

It's going to be there for as long as AO3 is there!

I have made my favourite fanfiction into physical books.

@not-poignant Been making a few, a very few more additions to this in the wake of finally getting around to a(nother) reread of FtDWR. I mean to reread ISWF tomorrow (later today LOL), hopefully identify more tropes (I’m sure there are more than I’ve got so far, honestly), and then move on to Fae Tales, which desperately needs a huge overhaul of its page(s). (I haven’t updated it about The Ice Plague oh my god.)

(I still think Ensemble Dark Horse + Mora is funny. I’m probably too tired.)

(It’s also still funny to me that Vagueness Is Coming is a thing.)

@fanartdrawer (LOL Tumblr why you no autolink+mention) I’ve sent you the ask about whether it’s okay to put your art up on the page. It is already up mostly because I wanted to figure out the formatting and see if I had it right.

....I have like thirty tabs open, folks. And I still haven’t crosswicked the trope references like I’m supposed to, and I have another excellent fanfic series I mean to construct a page for, and also I should probably make like a coherent recommendation post for all these EXCELLENT fics at some point for like the 2.5 followers of my blog who might care.

For now: I MADE THIS TV TROPES PAGE FOR THIS AWESOME RISE OF THE GUARDIANS FANFIC DUOLOGY BECAUSE IT’S AWESOME AND Y’ALL NEED TO READ IT OKAY. It has epic character interaction and development, exciting takes on the Fair Folk, hurt/comfort, SO MUCH HURT/COMFORT, and also extremely hot scenes of two guys explicitly getting it on, and BDSM.

Anon I didn't even think of this but you're so right, it's so much like SALverse Gwyn, who really did just see everyone as pawns to move around on his chessboard.

Ahhhh, thank you so much anon, I so appreciate that.

Also I'm so glad you enjoy those early Rise of the Guardians works! I really should reread the SALverse, it's been a while, but I always remember how much I wanted to live in that house in Kostroma, and how wild it was to write an entire story set mostly in wintry places despite never having seen or touched snow, lol.

Hi anon,

The true reading order in terms of the chronology of me writing it includes fanfiction and it goes like this:

From the Darkness We Rise (fanfic) Into Shadows We Fall (fanfic) Game Theory The Nightingale and Terho the Mouse-Lad The Court of Five Thrones Deeper into the Woods (technically you should start reading this like halfway through your reading of The Court of Five Thrones because they overlapped) Take a year off to do what you like, like I did asldfjas The Ice Plague 1-3 All That We Were, All That We Will Ever Be

The fanfiction introduces Gwyn and Augus, and Game Theory followed on directly from that fanfic as an original story and makes much more sense when it's actually read that way.

The Court of Five Thrones then retcons some of the fanfic to make it truly original, which is why there's a tiny little short story between GT and COFT (the Nightingale).

Deeper Into the Woods was never intended to be a prequel, it was mostly there to explain something that happens in COFT to Gwyn re: heartsongs. So that also often makes more sense within context.

All the other canon side stories, if they're relevant to the plot, are recommended in the author's notes of the chapter where they are relevant, so if you see a 'folks might like to read this story for context' - please read that story then!

And then beyond that just do what you like re: the AUs or you can come back and I can give you a fresh chronological reading order, but a warning, most of those stories heavily overlap with each other, there is no true 'one after the other' reading order for most of what I've written. Like if someone wanted the chronological reading order for Underline the Rainbow they'd have to be reading a lot of stories at the same time sldakjfas

I hope that helps! It's confusing because it was all done very confusingly, but the canon was written in a sort of order and that's the order above. Most people don't want to start with fanfic anymore which is why it's omitted but honestly? I do think it's still the best way to get into the stories and I think the fanfic reads easily enough for folks who have no experience with the movie (or books) that you'll have no trouble. :)

Hi anon,

It definitely wasn't during SAL, though I had started to put foreshadowing in, because I knew there was something big and traumatic in his past. (Serials have taught me that foreshadowing is everything, even if you don't know what you're foreshadowing for yet, lmao).

I can't remember exactly when it was otherwise because I wrote a lot of Game Theory out of order, which meant I had the Unseelie reveal written much earlier than when I actually published that chapter. I know it wasn't like, the first 1-3 chapters when I fully planned on ending it with tragic hate sex. But I'd say around the time that I wrote the Liver chapter, I probably had a fair idea of where I was headed.

But I can't say for certain, it definitely wasn't when I started conceptualising GT (which was before SAL ended - the og folks will probably remember that I started releasing GT chapters actually before Into Shadows We Fall even finished! I waited long enough for Augus' defeat in that and then literally started releasing chapters nearly immediately after that).

So yeah, there was a while when I didn't know!

7. What's one way your OC has changed since you first came up with them?

In some ways, not much, and in other ways, so much. He's been on some real journeys, hasn't he? Ash has gone through it. When I came up with him, I needed a character who would humanise Augus, because he possesses a lot of two-dimensional villainous aspects, and because Unseelie were supposed to have high loyalty to family, I really loved this idea of a very kind of loving Augus deep down, towards very selective people.

But I needed someone who could hold his own, in a way. Someone who was in some aspects the opposite of Augus. Extroverted where Augus is introverted. Wants to travel the world while Augus just wants to stay home. Wants to eat junk food and drink to his heart's content while Augus is vegan and prefers water or herbal teas. Wants to fuck around and make other people find out, and hates BDSM tools because it's too 'fussy' vs. Augus and domination.

And what Ash had in spades was this boundless, open love for humans, his brother, and well, just about everything. He was, for a long time, the true embodiment of radical acceptance.

But he met the Nightingale, and he met Gwyn specifically in relation to imprisoning Augus. He was cut off from the human realm and unable to eat, and he poisoned himself with self-hatred via rejecting his Glashtyn.

In a way, Ash grew nuanced within himself, and more capable of holding his dissonance. In that way, he changed a lot, but he'll still always be recognisable as Ash to me.

23. What emotion is the hardest for your OC to process? How about express?

Hm, I'm not sure what the emotion would be, but whatever is behind his bloodlust and drive to kill and enjoy torture and sadism. The emotions that the Glashtyn carries - a lifetime of feeling trapped while Ash travelled, a lifetime of being starved while Ash glutted himself.

I think Ash hates feeling helpless to his own needs, and he responded to that by deforming himself internally, to the point where the once-King of the Unseelie fae calls him out on it.

25. What is your favorite thing about your OC?

There's something about Ash that always feels soothing to me (when I'm not writing his perspective, and then it's the opposite and it feels chaotic and intense). But reading Ash and writing Ash from other people's perspectives, even when he's being the literal opposite of soothing, still makes me smile, and still makes me feel calm.

There's something about Ash which for a long time was like yeah, I can see why everyone looks forward to him visiting the party, and I can see why he was so necessary during The Ice Plague. While not a pacifist like Julvia, he was still more there in his capacity as support and soothing, than anything else.

Ash also gave me the key to unlocking a shred of sympathy towards Augus in many folks who didn't have any up until that point. And at the time, that felt incredible and was wonderful to kind of write out, from the Game Theory scenes of a tortured, bitter Ash, to Augus tendering care towards him in Into Shadows We Fall when he tells him to be careful, so that he won't slip. Ash just...offers something soft to the harshness of the fae realm, and especially to his brother, and I'm so glad he gets to exist.

~