Hi, Zig. I've been reading some of your fanfictions on Ao3. Can I say that you got me hooked! I'm not really into any KnY ships but I've been seeing fanarts of them and I think they're really cute. What is your favorite KyoTan trope? 💙
hello, anon! waah... thank you 🥺🥺💙💙
I honestly don't know what to say aside from welcome, I hope you have fun here! There are lots of really good creators too.
My favorite rentan trope? I don't know how far you've explored kimetsu but aaaah this is so hard to choose because I love all of them including the weird ones like maeda Kyoujurou that's been popping up around my tl. I will not spoil dw
I do have a soft spot for canon divergent stories. I wanted to upload more AU but I can't stop thinking abt canon what ifs like post-canon domestic bliss, role reversal, BDA made me do it, and reincarnation!
as for AU I guess I really like recycling the same thing, that's why I made the little blazing heart series. I've thought abt making spin offs of oftc that can be read separately so yeah, the fwb to lovers AU
Lately I am also really into KonPon (the kitsune/tanuki one) and werewolf/jiang shi
I also love kimegaku but I had to admit it's often an afterthought. I still read it and love it ofc. It actually helps build the foundation to almost all my modern AU so that's what I mean. It's always there but I just pick and choose what I want whenever I thought abt a modern AU. I did make something with a similar set, it was a rentan hikomomo twin au and I haven't finished any of the wip. I did tease it a little on twitter ORZ
(sorry for the unprompted vent but yeah I hope I can finish all my wips)
also, I'm so sorry if it's confusing with some of the terms but I can help explain each of them if you want 😅 😅
but yeah these are basically my current favorite rentan tropes
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Kill the Dead - Liveblogging
While reading a book. So this is going to be in my drafts for a long time, probably. Well not really. For once I actually sat down and let myself by drawn into a traditional book. Anyway. There’s vague spoilers for the plot below, but nothing explicit: some vague hints and some quoting from early on in the story. If you want to read it completely uninfluenced, perhaps don’t proceed (and don’t look at the fanlore page either).
Remember this? I am reading it. "To Valentine”, here we go.
1) Wasn’t there a B7 tarot fanart thing that had Avon as the King of Swords? I can’t find it but seem to remember something like that, because lmao: “Card-casting and similar divination generally foretold his [Parl Dro’s] arrival in the shape of the ominous King of Swords.” (I remember this because I never thought the King of Swords really fits Avon - I don’t find the card that ominous, actually: I don’t find the ability to lead and judge non-emotionally all that appalling, especially if associated with absolute fairness and justice. While the analytical/intellectual aspects may fit Avon, he is by no means a force of that kind of justice, nor, as I have said before, is Avon in any way as non-emotional as he is sometimes read. I can see that it may fit Dro, though. That said, I am very much a learner when it comes to tarot, so maybe I am missing something.)
2) I am only a few pages into Kill the Dead, but I am finding the prose difficult to get used to - which I was expecting to a degree, it being Tanith Lee, but still: "Parl Dro was a remarkable looking man. Not as young, maybe, as he had been ten years before" - who is?!?! - "but with an extraordinary handsomeness that had laid a velvety somber bloom across a concert of strong features." Oof. I can appreciate flowery language if used sparingly, but this is not the first or only sentence that reads like this. Perhaps (hopefully) I'll get used to it.
3) This actually reminds me a lot of Garth Nix’s Abhorsen trilogy (which I have never actually finished, even though I adored Sabriel and it is easily still one of my favourite books). Or perhaps it should be the other way around, in that Abhorsen may well have been inspired by this. I have a thing for necromancers that work the other way around, it’s a great trope.
4) Lmao the first thing Vila - excuse me, Myal Lemayal - does is pick Avon’s - sorry, Dro’s pockets. For real? XD
5) Honestly, so far he reads only kinda like Avon if you squint, but I can DEFINITELY see how he could be PD-while-acting. Having seen PD in two more extensive roles as well as IRL, I definitely get a sense that his mannerisms are reflected in Parl Dro’s.
6) That said, I am amused by the fact that this Parl Dro has a chronic limb when I did the same to Avon in BDaS.
7) I am getting used to it, but the prose still sometimes hurts me: “The trees gave color, shade and a pleasant noise of air swimming through leaves.” The editor in me is screaming. I also hate the needless (read: no stylistic or narrative pace reasons, though there are those, too) use of incomplete sentences.
8) I cannot help but imagine Myal (whose name I don’t even officially know yet at this point) as Vila. Look, you cannot describe a musician-thief with blonde-ish hair and a patchwork outfit with reds and greens and use the word “fool” and not expect me to jump to this connection. (I have been thinking how apparently my favourite characters all broadly fall either under “byronic hero” or “the fool” archetypes (or both at the same time) and I wonder what that says about me. [Percy and Scanlan are a case in point, as are Avon and Vila, as is Mieka.])
9) Oh go away:
“You see, in my sort of career, you need a song to make your name. One unique, marvelous, never-to-be-successfully-plagiarised song. It came to me, one night when I was really done - I mean really down - on my luck, that my song was in Ghyste Mortua. Not that I am one of those courageous idiots who’ll run his neck into a noose for a two-penny piece. Myal Lemayal, which is me, is the cautious type. And I know when I need guidance. As for you, you might like some music on the road.”
“And then again,” said Dro softly, “I might not.”
“And then again you might not. Incidentally, about that girl in the old house, I consider the trouble you’ve caused her stinks. I went down there with some of them. They were bellowing that you’d gone, but they hadn’t, and they were throwing stones at her door. You’re not a particularly splendid hero, are you?”
Dro smiled.
“Compared with you?”
“Oh well, if you’re going to be offensive.”
10) “He tasted it, and kept on tasting it. Dro let him.” You know for how often there are some genuinely clunky bits of prose in this, there are also some true gems.
All right I stopped trying to write about it while reading and sat down to finish reading it instead. Final thoughts:
11) Some familiarity with Tarot definitely helps. There are some very “Sarcophagus”-like aspects in this story that get easier to swallow if you know your way around Tarot at least a little, as there is no real in-universe explanation provided for these mystic elements.
12) The Dro-Myal dialogue is very Avon-Vila. In fact, there is too little character work to make sense of the Myal-Dro dynamic without that backdrop link to B7, I’d say. There’s even the thing that Myal Lemayal is usually just “Myal” but Parl Dro is “Dro” for the most part, for which there is no in-story justification, other than Kerr Avon is Avon and Vila Restal is Vila (no matter how much the author may claim that Myal’s NOT Vila). But more on this issue below.
13) I saw the “oh so clever” twist coming before the reveal (merely knowing that there was a twist, and having so far studiously avoided the odd KtD fanfic I have come across). The one factor that didn’t fit to making the twist work is essentially handwaved away - the handwave makes in-universe sense, but I still prefer twists that have no handwave-y aspects. There are also some badly executed hints at the handwave-y element of the twist very early on: I say badly executed because their existence makes no in-universe sense, in retrospect, except as hint to the reader. So yeah. Probably the worst element.
14) BUT: reducing the book to an avatar story does it an injustice. It is awkward in places and too short, really, but it is a clever little story, with some intriguing shades of worldbuilding and an ending that just invites a sequel (the final chapter is “Chapter One”, again). So it stands its own as a fantasy novella - though I think it reads more like a pilot, in TV terms, than a finished work: This novel really is what sets up the characters in the first place, and then it’s over as you finally really know them, at the point where their story really begins. That’s what I mean when I say the character dynamic makes little sense without assuming that we somehow know it already, because the whole novella is the setup - it’s basically the setup to an AU, or the way I would write an AU without wanting to develop it into a massively long fic: establish the universe, establish the characters’ new positions in that universe, make them meet - and then let other fans imagine the rest of their journey in that universe, because they know these characters already.
13) Either the clunkiness of the prose gets less as the story goes on or I did get used to it, but being me I have to say the one thing I’d wish is that it relied less on heterosexual sex. Not that it is an explicit story by any means, just... there’s too much of it for so short a story. The hinting that Myal may be bi doesn’t really help with it, either, though it is very welcome.
14) Strangely, I found myself finding it more compelling as an avatar of Vila than Avon. What I said above about Parl Dro’s body language being PD’s stands, but it becomes less noticeable as the story goes on - whereas Myal’s character gains prominence. Their interactions remain very Avon-Vila, but in terms of characterisation individually there is actually more here for Myal than Dro/Avon. I find myself reminded of the fact that “Sarcophagus” has some very illuminating elements regarding Vila - I find a similar take happening here with Myal. So like... if you were reading it for the avatars only (which I was partially, but also not, because I love fantasy and this kind of necromancy, as I said above), I would recommend it more readily to Vila fans than Avon only fans, no matter that the author has said that it’s not supposed to be any relation to Vila/MK.
15) Strangely, rather than wanting to write fanfic, this has made me want to write original fic again. I love the “reverse-necromancy” thing.
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