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[questions here]

14. Something new you tried this year

so this was a big year for me for longform explorations of non-destiel pairings. which i haven't really done before.

first was wink, which was kind of in many ways now that i think about it, a trial run for what the year would become. it was shorter and not really on an external deadline in the same way (the other two were for bangs, which are pretty serious, but wink was for @spntoxicfemslashevent, which is as far as i can tell pretty lax about "deadlines" and such) and i think most importantly it was about a character who i didn't have that many pre-existing ideas about? like fundamentally wink is a character study of cassie and i just don't feel like i know cassie that well, so writing it felt like a process of getting to know her, rather than a process of trying to translate thoughts i already had into plot and character beats. i could shape the character i was understanding her to be around the necessities of having an arc and a story, i wasn't constrained by a predetermined specific set of personality traits and prior experiences that i was deeply invested in conveying.

obviously that comes with its own minefield. one reason that i'm often hesitant to play in a supernatural femslash space when it comes to other people's fic is that characters can end up voids of personality, squashed into the same five or six pre-made molds like dolls wearing different wigs. and this goes triple for single episode characters like cassie. so i did work really hard to ground cassie in her canonical appearance. i grounded her arc in the death of her father which is like, the main thing we learn about her in the show. i grounded her in cape girardeau (i actually researched some stuff about the city. not much but a bit). i grounded her in her job. i grounded her in the fact that she was willing to have her skepticism shaken by new evidence. i tried to work hard to produce a character and personality actually based in the character and personality we saw in the episode. but there's still only so far you can take it.

and there were other things that made wink simpler to write. it's got a straightforward horror arc which is really where i prefer to play. actually if you're wondering why so many of my pwp fics play out Like That it's because i use horror arcs a lot. like in the end that's just a very simple style for me to write in.

it's also more a character study than a romance. i spent more time with cassie than actually trying to make you buy cassie/meg, which is much easier for me.

and then of course, i know meg very well but i didn't need to bother to really dig into her or show her complexity at all, so that was easy. plus it was a treat to play in a meg 1.0 space, i never do that. a meg who is actively possessing meg masters and whose father is alive is an interesting doll to play with.

but also in the end meg is straightforwardly the villain of this piece. which means she's a convenient rock to throw at cassie. i didn't have to invent any rocks to throw at cassie i already had one built in.

so that's a lot of reasons wink was a lot simpler than the other two fics i want to talk about.

the second one i wrote was not him/not her/not me and this one was actually the hardest! i'm honestly still not totally happy with it, there was a lot of... i guess... meaning that i wanted to put into it that i just don't feel like got conveyed. i'm happier than i thought i would be, though, i think. if i rewrote this, i don't actually know if i would add any scenes, just make the ones in it longer, maybe. i don't know, maybe have more scene repetition. spend more time with cas' guilt towards her.

anyway, i hear you, you're saying megstiel? megstiel was your most difficult fic of the year? megstiel? the megstiel you've ALREADY written a fic for? that megstiel? and to that i say: yes. the thing about a post-canon megstiel is that... they actually lack a lot of tension? a lot of the tension in their relationship was circumstantial, not actually internal really. things kept happening to both of them to cause problems but they didn't really cause problems for each other. certainly not once they were both on the same side.

and if there were problems, it was cas causing problems for meg. like, she's the one who's embarrassed to have squishy little feelings for him. she's the one causing problems for herself to help him. and she's the one who feels left out in the cold when he goes running after sam and dean. so if one is writing from her perspective, there are rocks to be thrown. but for cas? meg has legitimately been pretty much nothing but a positive presence in his life. which means that the conflict basically has to be externally generated. and i wanted to be in cas' head. so.

the other thing is that, like. this was a reverse bang, right? it was for the @spnangelsanddemons-rb. and i saw this super cool art of cas and meg in the empty by @hawkland and i was like okay fab i love to think about cas and meg in the empty. cas and meg afterlife hangouts has been a frequent topic of contemplation for me since i read this fic. and i was fresh off writing he's gonna take my files for the @deancas-stabfest and i felt like there were still meat on those bones. specifically i had intentionally omitted cas' non-dean related memories from that fic for various reasons, but i felt like if i chose a theme to vamp on, instead of just "general bad memories," i could successfully venture outside that limited scope. but the thing is i didn't realize that putting a different spin on a similar premise is like. really hard. especially because like. personally i honestly think he's gonna take my files is really good? like it's a fic of mine that i like a lot. and i think that set me up for dissatisfaction with not him/not her/not me.

i also struggled with my theme? like the sort of direct parallel [parent figure (evil version) -> replacement god -> each other] was fun in theory but it was hard to make it work. mostly actually because differentiating between meg's relationship to azazel and her relationship with lucifer is kind of hard.

and then also while i was working on this fic i wrote the fic dog pit, mostly because i was already playing in that space for not him/not her/not me, like that's where dog pit came from. and that worked really well but then i had to find a way to not just basically rewrite dog pit for nhnhnm (<- good lord look at that acronym i've never typed it out before).

so really stressful and hard fic experience, like just much more difficult than you might expect.

then of course i also wrote every relationship has its stuff. which was somewhat less difficult than nhnhnm but a lot more work, obviously. it's the longest fic i've ever posted to ao3, which isn't that long, just 10k, but it was a lot for ME.

i ended up having a lot of similar experiences working on erhis as the other two. it has a kind of similar basic premise to wink in that it's about two young people dating in [a twisted version of] a pretty normal way. erhis was actually harder in this regard because at least in wink they were kind of doing girlbestfriendisms? erhis was kind of hard to create meaningful romantic tension because jack was quite literally doing exactly what people expected of him at all times. it's hard to make it clear what he wants and what he's just doing because he assumes he's supposed to because he's literally doing what he's supposed to. the furthest he steps outside that boundary re: harper specifically is 1) lying about her to tfw in the first few scenes and 2) being into it when she gets scary.

and then of course erhis has some intensely similar themes to nhnhnm. they're both basically immediately oedipal stories. they're about how the main characters are doomed to recreate their own worst parental relationships throughout their adult lives. except erhis is more constrained than nhnhnm because i don't really bring up jack's history. (man, that was also like crazymaking. i had to keep repeating trust your audience trust your audience to myself so that i could convince myself that people would like, remember the vibe in season fourteen and get what i was doing).

i've talked about this but it was often a struggle to write the harper scenes because like. i've already talked about this above with cassie, but she's a one episode character. except with harper it's hardmode because 1) she's not the main character of the fic so i have way less opportunity to draw her out, 2) i am trying to actually make her appealing. whatever else is going on in erhis i do want it to be in some way legitimately a romance fic, so i need harper to charm both jack and the audience at least somewhat? in a way meg didn't need to in wink because in the end that's horror. she's the villain. and 3) relatedly i needed harper to be more complex than just like. evil crazygirl. i wanted her to have personality beyond that and also to be grayer than that. in the end it's important that despite the fact that jack is kind of dating a little copy of dean in a lot of ways, he's also kind of getting his freedom through doing that. it's more complex than plain replication and it is a place where jack has power in his life. despite how much dating harper replicates his formative household lol. and i also, like nhnhnm and unlike wink, wanted there to be a degree of mutuality. as much as jack is the guy that went on a second date with the girl who kidnapped him for a first one, harper is the girl who went on a third date with the guy who infodumped to her about killing people with guns for a second date. as much as there is a specific kind of toxicity coming from harper that jack is specifically drawn to because it reminds him of dean, they are both the children of serial killer dynasties and there is a kind of sick innocence to their mutual derangement. neither of them really comprehend the idea that it's bad to kill people on an intellectual level, even as both of them exhibit visceral disturbance reactions to the reality of violence.

anyway writing harper and jack-and-harper was often a struggle. i frequently found myself feeling like the scenes between jack and his dads were tasty little treats to keep me going between the scenes of jack alone in his room or interacting with harper, which were a lot harder. like sam, dean, and cas are all rocks to throw at jack and i know them very well. i couldn't let harper just be a rock to throw at jack she needed her own stuff going on. also this was kind of a low conflict fic.

i want to compare it to i fold in half so easily, because there's definitely a similar vibe there in terms of a quiet domestic holding pattern fic where it's mostly about underlying sickness in relationships, but things are way more understated in erhis, for a lot of reasons. one is that the primary source of rock throwing and the love interest are, y'know, different, so you can't just have every love scene double as a rock throwing scene, lol. another is that i've, y'know, become a better writer. i look back on ifihse and it feels overblown and obvious in a way that makes me cringe, as much as i have a lot of affection for it. so i wanted to be subtler. and then of course there's the fact that in a destiel fic you expect dean dean to be a good guy, you know? he gets some benefit of the doubt. so there is some complexity lent there by virtue of him being the main character of supernatural. but harper is less the villain of erhis than dean is of ifihse, and harper is a minor, one episode villain in the show. she's exactly the type of character a fanfic writer would cast as unequivocally evil. so i had to work harder to avoid that assumption, you know?

anyway that's the new thing i did this year.

22. An idea you had that didn’t make the cut