#sopffic

APTITUDE – "It appears under Sophia's name, in the ever-expanding file of initial assignments and rote personnel data he receives each time the four of them return to Cornelia anew: aptitude, swimming, deep water."

(This one comes with an images. I still think this is very fun; I had fun coming up with that & it ended up looking SO swagful in the fanbook. the ao3 version is also okay. nice n clean.)

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ shoot your shot do weird shit. everyone should be doing weird shit more our medium is SO manipulatable!!! you can put information in all kinds of places. and I intend to.

Fed Animal – "Neon misses the damp, sprawling forest outside more for every hour they spend down in the ruins, now that they've finally found them."

⭐⭐⭐⭐🌚 it sets multiple aspects of the scene AND an emotional tone, and in so few words. it's straightforward, like neon, but also has surprisingly complex implications the more you think about it, just like neon. fuckyeah. the craft.

Cat Person (wip status: fuuuuuck aaaaaahhhhh!!!) – "The first night after they leave Crescent Lake, Jack can feel Astos' eyes on him from the minute he stretches out on his side of the tent.'

⭐⭐⭐🌚🌚 serviceable, but nothing special. I'm pretty sure it does its job. you can tell how much cocksucking is going to occur in here just by reading this, right? nonzero amount? I hope that's evident. please look forward to it (checks my watch) god fucking someday I hope

Desire Path (wip status: big edits) – "He feels it in his guts when he finally manages to knock Astos to the floor, just far enough from the corner of the room to be haloed in still-spinning bits of busted furniture, halfway up the so-called 'Crystal Mirage'—his so-called 'guide' hits the translucent blue tiles with a thud and the breath all rushes out of him in one pained forceful groan."

⭐⭐⭐🌚🌚 also serviceable, and Also, it's fun to start during An Action for once!

Coherence – "In retrospect, Jack probably should've known that heading out to put his foot down on the feud between those nightmare herds down south on what amounted to a whim—starting out as late in the day as he did, and not bothering to reassess when it started to look like every horse in the goddamn valley was gonna come at him before they gave it up—was more or less the same thing as painting a big, stupid target on his own idiot back."

⭐⭐✨🌚🌚 yeah that's right; we're doing half-stars. this one is right down the middle. it has a lot of information in it, and accordingly is kind of unwieldy. that does suit me, though.

Asking for More – "There’s never been any doubt, officially or otherwise, that Elfheim is lost, and it’s no answer to any of the questions Astos is meant to be asking."

⭐⭐🌚🌚🌚 it's opinionated (good) and involves some intrigue ("what could that possibly have to do with gay sex," you may be asking?), but not very exciting as a sentence. also, the fic really and truly is not about this subject. it is about gay sex.

Mortification – "Astos arrives at the threshold of Lich's chamber well after the sound of his too-harsh breathing has already announced him."

⭐✨🌚🌚🌚 one and a half stars. I have no specific beef with it; it's okay. a utilitarian beast.

Keeper – "About eleven months after Jack got over himself and finally kissed him—sitting right on the cobbles of some sleepy Cornelian backstreet in the middle of the night with that light, cool hand wrapped loose around his forearm, drunk—Astos took the full bite force of an adult coeurl to the throat and bled out."

⭐🌚🌚🌚🌚 one star because this one pisses me off. I didn't think to come back around and double-check what you'd Actually die of if a big cat bited you in this way at the time, and I think about that every time I read this. DOES ANYBODY BUT ME CARE? fuck no. am I going to do this research retroactively Now? FUCK no; that ship has sailed; who give a shit; but even making peace with my own idiot hangup, it's not an outstanding sentence or anything. I mean, it's fine; everybody loves a good hard left turn; but it indicates NOTHING about what the rest of the fic is actually gonna be about & it's borrowing 2/3 of what's interesting about it from the end of cat person, which just makes me wish that fic was done so I could read it instead. this piece has one of the better titles, imo; I guess something had to even it out.

AND FINALLY, to get us to 10... the very first sentence of My Other WIP... you might see the arbitrary numbers here change, but probably not, because the only thing that super matters about them is, like, approximately which half of this specific century they put us in to start... smile.

[REDACTED] ("Long WIP") – "Fifteen hundred and seventy-one years, two months, and nine days after Chaos is first made manifest on unmeddled-with Cornelian soil, the sharp inhale of reality itself disturbs the chilled winter-night silence of the Chaos Shrine's innermost and most crucial hall."

❓❓❓❓❓ – I leave this one up to you. rate my sentence out of five stars. does this make you want to read my evil behemoth of a longfic? are you intrigued yet?? vote on your phones...

MARILITH

BEST - self-indulgent mad-with-power Gay Annoying Emotional Arc Pivot Construct grows legs here

WORST - amount of "characters + concepts I am going to have to slap names onto for worldbuildy reasons" is so high I am still refusing to look at it directly at this time

TIAMAT

BEST - you might not realize this but you actually have not seen me Write Sophia yet. You Will.

WORST - this is where the Pacing Adjustments I might maybe have to make at some point start getting scary

KRAKEN

BEST - there's a cool "is that bad"-type plot thread in here that ideally culminates in a VERY FUN couple of scenes

WORST - figuring out how to make the aforementioned work & then writing it down so my beloved beta reader can help tell me if I'm stupid or not has so far taken like idk a year or something

LICH

BEST - I get to air my opinions on a lot of topics that are weirdly hard for me to talk about in normal-person sentences and also violently kill-shake the concept of "canonical information" a lot

WORST - so much stuff in here REQUIRES "playing ff1 in a slow and insane manner" before it can become Substantial + once I've done THAT there's a bunch of wires I'm gonna have to go plug in throughout the whole rest of the fucking fic up to this point guys this shit is so muchw ork og my god. and my chances of Sounding Like An Asshole are going to probably be very high as well

THE LAST PART

BEST - I can See what it's going to feel like to read the title for the final chapter for the first time & open it up & start reading the chapter & finish reading the fic and it is going to own so insanely hard

WORST - matching "chapters" to "titles" and also "evening out the number of each of these items that there will need to be" is either going to be inexplicably the easiest thing about this part or it's going to be hellish and I won't know which until I'm there ALSO, I may or may not have given myself a Chore to do for the second-to-last chapter that is going to eat up a ridiculous amount of my time and make me EXTREMELY ANNOYING the whole time it's happening. lol