#squeeingfangirl

omg yes okay so i probably should have said omegas are more cat than dog, because neither cats NOR dogs rut. rut is mostly limited to ungulates [sheep, deer, etc and also elephants? fascinating.] so alpha/rut biology is just. a whole other thing, and quite frankly rut should involve a lot more piss than it typically does [which is fine by me, not one of my kinks personally, but if we're being biologically accurate here...] but imo it's silly to have omegas lose control and not alphas. let the boys have some biologically-mandated loss of control and sense of self fun too! ANYWAY as far as the "more cat than dog" part goes:

neither canines nor felines menstruate, but dogs do experience "periods" i.e. bloody discharge during their heats; it's not the shed of the uterine lining, so it doesn't have accompanying cramps [from what i can find, anyway] but if part of the appeal is "my favorite guy doesn't have to deal with the mess of periods and pads and tampons and such," then it's feline biology you want, not canine.

hard, physically-affecting neck bites during sex? not a dog thing. male dogs will SOMETIMES bite the back of a female's neck, but it's more for stability than to keep the female still. cats, male and female, young and old, can be scruffed to make them easier to handle, and that's the express purpose of the neck bite in feline mating. if you're eroticizing the bite as a physical sensation that makes your omega character more receptive/aroused then that's, you guessed it! feline biology, not canine.

cats display lordosis behavior prior to sex whereas dogs mostly just tail-flag, so presenting [as a position like "for mounting," not as during-puberty, why did we pick the same word for two aspects of the verse] is also more cat than dog, though this one is perhaps. less compelling. given the existence of "doggystyle" as a concept.

dogs have the better sense of smell on paper, but there's significant evidence that cats communicate through scent more effectively than dogs. a character being able to sense someone's emotions changing through the scent they're giving off is more information-dense than how i've seen dog scent-marking described, which is mostly for marking territory or signalling mating readiness, not so much communicating emotion.

cats also tend to have scent glands in more of the places that characters in omegaverse fics do; again, dogs do scent-mark, and have face and paw glands, but the majority of discussion of canine scent marking focuses on anal gland expression. meanwhile bunting is a well-known behavior in cats, and that's using the scent glands on their chins and cheeks. interestingly, neither dogs nor cats have carpal [wrist] glands, which next to the neck and/or jaw is the most frequent place i see omegaverse fics place scent glands; that's another ungulate thing and only in some species of deer and lemurs, apparently? also fascinating.

this is anecdotal and admittedly i've had more cats than dogs in my life, though all my dogs have been female, but in my experience dogs' behavior in heat isn't significantly different from dogs' behavior not in heat? meanwhile every. single. female cat. i've ever had. is SO FUCKING ANNOYING during heat, just constantly screaming "WISH SOMEONE WOULD COME FUCK ME RIGHT NOW. LIKE RIGHT NOW." for a week and a half. they genuinely turn into a different animal, their personality is muted or gone, they just want sum fuk and they want it NOW. much more similar to your typical omega-in-heat fic behavior imo.

🤩 What's the most meaningful comment you've ever received?

🟥How long do you spend in edits?

🦗Do you write in sequence or jump around?

Hiiiiii friendo!!

🤩 What's the most meaningful comment you've ever received?

Okay so that's incredibly hard because so many people have been so kind over the years - every time someone engages at the level that they're asking questions about writing choices I made or calling out specific moments they loved, or are wanting to know more about the threads that have yet to be pulled - is just a joy. Sometimes people will tell me that they remember my stuff years later, or that there was a particular moment they've been thinking about all week and came back to say so, and that always just makes my day.

But I think the one specific one that stands out to me the most is that I once got a message from someone who told me they were very ill and probably dying soon, and they thanked me for a story that made them feel like they had gotten a truly great adventure out of living vicariously through my story when they didn't have any strength left to do things themselves and they were feeling a kind of peace with their mortality from getting to read it. That one will stick with me.

🟥How long do you spend in edits?

Ohhhh infinity time, I edit constantly, I never do like a "here's a first draft, let's take a separate second pass to edit" really. I edit until it feels right and tight and the flow is good. It's also just how writing moods flow for me; sometimes I'm in full-steam-ahead mode and I'm slapping down placeholders for names and details that need to be fleshed out later because I desperately need to get the patter of the dialogue down. Other times I'm running through a scene like a director doing a play rehearsal and shuffling and tweaking and revamping all in the same scene around and around over and over again until it flows. It's all just wherever the momentum is.

🦗Do you write in sequence or jump around?

1) Which of your fics would you keep the basic plot of but rewrite completely?

Poor start to the meme, but honestly, uh, none of them? The point where I stop being pretty satisfied with my writing is the point where I look back and go "oh I was a BABY when I wrote this," like, I'm a decade+ out of touch with the fandom and it'd be like trying to rewind my emotional state fifteen years.

Also a lot of my fic doesn't really have... plot... as such. Some do, but I also do a lot of little vignettes with plots like "Jason Todd reads a magazine" and "Jiang Cheng has weird dreams." When the meat of the fic is style/mood/image, fucking with those things turns into a Whole New Fic pretty fast, I think.

28) Any writing advice that works for you and you feel like sharing?

I've never actually read a Chuck Palahniuck novel (I should, probably) but this essay of his about replacing thought/knew/remembered type verbs with the details that make your character think so? is probably responsible for the biggest single jump in my writing quality. as with all things, there's a time for thought/knew -- I usually use them when my narrator is opining about someone else's internal thought processes, so it's clear there's still a layer of narration, and sometimes you just need to jam some exposition in there -- but it absolutely made my writing so much more immediate and present and immersed in the character. 10/10, Chuck, I owe you for that.

35) Thoughts on writing challenges/contests.

God, I haven't done one in years, but some of my favorite things I've ever written came out of challenges / exchanges, and would never have happened if I was working on my own. (This Yuletide fic for A Memory Called Empire is some of the best work I've ever done.) They're a commitment, which means needing to be pretty confident in my energy/time/direction of hyperfixation, and they also require... like... seeing the right post at the right time, that you may know they are occurring, but I might like to do more again.

I'm not sure because I'm not all that familiar with japanese culture, but to me it looks like people wearing western culture goggles are trying to explain something they take note of because it's pretty drastically un-american, but they don't realize that what they're looking at is mostly just like, cultural difference, so they try to attribute it to a trait of personality instead.

I don't really get how else we could've gotten to izuku crybaby hero midoriya being widely regarded as repressed otherwise, but idk maybe I'm just missing something huge and obvious...?

I think the initial idea about it comes from DvK2 (@bakuhatsufallinlove).

(If not from there, then it comes from the bit after the Joint Training Arc where some people posit that Izuku is lying about how he doesn't know what triggered Black Whip. I am not on board with this interpretation.)

That said, I do think the concept has been taken a little far lol. It's not that Izuku is repressed. It's that he keeps some things inside. He's not in denial about his thoughts for Katsuki above, he's uncomfortable sharing them.

hiiii! ahh thank youuu!! i'm glad you liked it! 💕💕

1 is montero by lil nas x (though I swear I listened to other stuff more I'm v confused)

2 is E-GIRLS ARE RUINING MY LIFE by CORPSE (I. Don't have any excuses I was writing a character that's Like That)

99 is.... Uh I don't have a Cyrillic alphabet hang on.

It depends a bit for me how people write it & why but it always makes me feel uncomfortable if the reasons he's unhappy link to his being quiet and not overly social, having "boring" interests & liking routine and especially if it gets too into him not drinking being somehow sad o-o & that he needs someone like WWX to fix his life up somehow. I think a lot of the time it just comes across as some people believe if you are that way you can't possibly be happy.

Yeah, I definitely feel this. It bothers me a lot when Lan Zhan’s personality and way of being is described as something that needs to be fixed in some way, and Wei Ying is in some way his ‘saviour.’ While yes, in canon Wei Ying does give Lan Zhan the impulse to change perspectives and be more critical of the world around him, the point of the entire thing is that his fundamental character never changes. Wei Ying did not fall in love with him because he was suddenly more outgoing or fun. Both of them learn something along the way, but until the end, they remain the same people, a little wiser now.

squeeingfangirl

yup, sometimes it can be in a kinda ableist way if it's like @rinielle said, about fixing him so learns how to be happy in The Correct Way, or in a kinda racist way if it's about how rules and discipline and obeisance is Inherently Evil and he's opressed victim actually

I’m not sure if it can be called racist, but I do guess there is a certain flavour of Western (particularly ‘’‘American,’’’ probably, not all Western cultures are highly individualistic) individualism at play. Part of that stems (I’d argue) from the fact that LWJ is always perceived to be ‘in’ the system, and WWX ‘outside’ of it, and individualistic culture tells us that the WWX-style rebel is somehow... morally superior through his rejection of the system altogether? While LWJ is, idk, complicit/victimised by adhering to the system in place?

I haven’t really dealt with canon too much lately, but I think it’s pretty clear through the juniors and LWJ’s reputation and the respect he enjoys that he’s been putting a lot of work into reforms during the years of WWX’s death, while remaining fundamentally the same person. It shows that LWJ is by no means unhappy with who he is - on the contrary, he willingly carries the responsibilities of his clan and family, and submits to a punishment he does not agree with. He will go to bed at nine, but likewise, he will be an immovable object if he believes himself to be in the right.