itsalimere

[itsalimere]

In the AO3 Demographics Survey 2024 - an unofficial demographics survey of 16,131 AO3 users - 81% of respondents identified as LGBTQ+, and 25% identified as transgender.

To see more analysis, including comparisons to general population trends, please view the full results on AO3.

#14% poly???? where are all the poly fics then!!!! #over here single-handedly giving extended lore to haikyuu polycules will the other 14% of ao3 users also make up some lore for me #I’m kidding no one owes me anything #unless………

[itsalimere]

just for fun made a little graphic of my fic writing this year! can’t believe my alimere fandom persona only awakened in february. note: months listed are when the fic was posted, not necessarily when the entirety of the writing occurred (although that is the case in feb/mar/apr which was really a wild time lol). all fics are haikyuu except the one umineko one listed (and the yuletide one which is unrevealed)

Legend:

kghn exch: kagehina exchange (apr-jun) gift fic

hqfe: haikyuu flash exchange gift fic

gdc: greatest decoy challenge gift fic

#ali garbage #fanfic life

[itsalimere]

the “moonlight version” of hikari are has changed my life

[itsalimere]

my nano, final day 0 - with pride

[itsalimere]

I’m participating in “nanowrimo”, which is short for “national november writing month”, which means that for the first time this year I actually count roughly how many words I wrote each day and try to do some writing every day but no worries if I’m too tired. (100 words is ok if you’re tired tho)

today (nov 29) was my 5th highest wordcount day with 850 words. the words were my prompts request for a haikyuu secret santa event in which i gave a short rationale for like 7 kenma rarepairs and 4 akaashi ones.

nanowrimo!

[itsalimere]

my keys as of this week… the duality of man…

(sakusa by @yuliapavlovsky & lambdadelta by @angeban!)

[itsalimere]

🍒 🍊🍑!!

Answered 🍊 already from yam!

🍑 If you could make a connection between your favorite character and another work you care about (whether a crossover/fusion or a wonderfully “pretentious” literary reference) what would it be? How would it work?

So (these are nonsensical spoilers for u pin, don’t worry) Lion Ushiromiya was canonically captain of their high school badminton team, so. If Umineko takes place in 1986 then in the Haikyuu era 2020s Lion would be in their like, 60s or something. They’re the older, slightly grizzled coach of the girls’ badminton team at, oh, let’s say itachiyama. And who took up badminton in my niche sakusa/akaashi-in-Oxford fic? It’s sakusa. Lion passes the torch to him to be the new itachiyama badminton coach, or something. And thus I connect my two special interest blorbos…

(This is actually a Real Fic I have planned out in my head… one of Oikawa’s twin daughters (Kaori) goes away to school in Tokyo Skip and Loafer style and Sakusa is the Nao-chan figure. It’s a whole thing.)

🍒 What’s your favorite character dynamic to write? (Can be romantic or platonic, specific or general!)

Isi asked me this one too! I’m also gonna answer her 🍇 ask here.

My favorite character dynamic is something to the effect of “non-romance romance” or something I misleadingly (?) call “unusual romance”. This can look like a lot of different things! A lot of times it’ll be explicitly about aroace feelings (see: the sakusa/akaashi fic mentioned above) but not always. I just love when there are hard-to-categorize important relationships in things (sugimoto & asirpa, shima & mitsumi, I’d even call hinata & kageyama this) and I just like to bring that energy to almost any fic I write.

How about 🍇, but with an alternative version if you want: are there any themes or types of scenes/stories that you want to write/can’t stop writing a million different versions of?

Elaborating on the above:

A lot of times “unusual romances” take this specific shape of like… the idea of characters who have resigned themselves to this level of quiet disappointment with their romantic lives. They feel that they aren’t built for this idea of happily ever after romance, and that’s just who they are and what their life is meant to be, and that’s okay.

But maybe then they discover something about themselves, or find a connection with another person, and they actually do find a lot of meaning in it and it does fit with who they are as a person but it is also like… something they thought they might not ever have! But it’s also different than what they’d imagined, in a a way. A lot of times this isn’t even about aroace stuff, it’s just like… finding this sort of magic in your life that you’d given up on.

This is what almost every one of my fics is about at the core, honestly!! I write it over and over and over. Tapestry Hinata (and lowkey like, the whole tapestry polycule), my recent sakusa/kuroo, that oxford fic I can’t seem to shut up about in these answers, my ushioi, a planned ushisaku thing I’m going to write… idk this theme is just the gift that keeps on giving, to me.

[itsalimere]

hello ali <333!! 🥝🍉🍊, for the ask!!!!

hi gaia! <3 ty for these!!

🥝 What’s your favorite trope/AO3 tag to write?

Probably something like “getting back together” or “missed connections”; I love some pining, but I think it’s more interesting when the characters have real history together, whether they used to date or whether they had an opportunity to (or had a serious rivalry… hi ushioi…) but didn’t. I think it gives the pining an extra delicious depth of flavor.

I didn’t realize I liked this so much until I wrote Tapestry, where kenhina take like 50k words being friends-to-lovers-to-friends-to-lovers and I found it to be 🤌 to write & read back.

🍉 Do you prefer to write short fics or long fics? Multichaptered works or single ones? Why?

Oooh, tough one… I love writing a long (or long-ish) fic, partly because I love making myself some crunchy food to eat later. But sometimes this comes back to bite me when I get too overambitious and feel intimidated trying to finish things… I think the best balance is when I come up with a “manageably sized idea” and then let myself get carried away with it and it ends up as like a 15k fic.

🍊 Who’s a character you don’t write for that often, but keep meaning to write for more? (They’re so interesting! But maybe you have trouble pinning them down, or keep getting distracted by another blorbo…)

@saltedpin asked me this one too so I’ll go on and on a little bit.

In haikyuu I’ve covered a good number of my faves (though I have more I want to write for almost all of them), but there’s a few characters I haven’t written at all that I love. Asahi, Kita, some of the Shiratorizawa boys… I’ve also barely written Iwaizumi, Bokuto, Tsukishima, Yamaguchi—even though they do appear in fics, so I’d like to give them a little more screentime. Would also love to write the older sisters sometime! Miwa&Alisa&Saeko&Yachi photoshoot collab maybe. Honestly I would love to write something for any haikyuu character, haha.

And for characters from other fandoms! I’d love to write a Natsuhi-centric umineko fic. And for fandoms I’ve written nothing for I’ll make mysef pick one character from each… I would love to write Yotasuke from Blue Period, Asirpa from Golden Kamuy, Blackberry from Chicory: A Colorful Tale, Zagreus from Hades, Anne from Amphibia, Shima from Skip and Loafer (or maybe Kanechika?!), Dorotea from Angel Mage… TOTK Zelda maybe?! I’m sure there’s others I’m forgetting…

[itsalimere]

fruit emoji ask game for fic writers

Send a fruit emoji for an answer!

🍉 Do you prefer to write short fics or long fics? Multichaptered works or single ones? Why?

🍓 What’s a fic you’ve written you feel is underrated?

🍎 Is there anything you straight-up won’t write?

🍒 What’s your favorite character dynamic to write? (Can be romantic or platonic, specific or general!)

🍊 Who’s a character you don’t write for that often, but keep meaning to write for more? (They’re so interesting! But maybe you have trouble pinning them down, or keep getting distracted by another blorbo…)

🍑 If you could make a connection between your favorite character and another work you care about (whether a crossover/fusion or a wonderfully “pretentious” literary reference) what would it be? How would it work?

🥭 Rank from most enjoyable/fun to write to least: Fluff, Smut, Angst, Crack.

🍍 What kind of AUs do you like? Are there any AUs you hate or just generally have beef with?

🍋 What’s your favorite spicier trope to write?

🍌 In your opinion, what’s the funniest joke/reference/pun you’ve made in a fic?

🍏 Is there something you overuse, whether it’s a certain phrase, trope, or piece of punctuation?

🥝 What’s your favorite trope/AO3 tag to write?

🍐 Is there anything in canon that you absolutely hate and love to fix in fics? A wrong choice made, a fuck-up in characterization, a misunderstanding never cleared up, a conversation never shown onscreen, etc…

🍈 Who’s your blorbo and what are some of your favorite headcanons/ideas about them that repeatedly show up in your fics? Free pass to rant about blorbo opinions.

🫐 What’s your favorite underrated thing in your fandom? (A ship that only you seem to write for, a character there’s almost no fics about, a trope that criminally hasn’t been written yet, etc.)

🍇 Is there a particular scene/episode/book/etc that you want to just write a million fics about, over and over? Which one?

#i would enjoy doing this

[itsalimere]

ilu for the umineko+gk answer, as you already know

🍉🍑

🍉 Do you prefer to write short fics or long fics? Multichaptered works or single ones? Why? oh gosh. it used to be that i only ever wrote short fics, and to be honest, i kind of like being concise and getting my point across and then just having the idea exit my head forever. but sometimes you just want to wallow around in the mud for a while. this isn’t really an answer… i suppose the real answer is: yes

🍑 If you could make a connection between your favorite character and another work you care about (whether a crossover/fusion or a wonderfully “pretentious” literary reference) what would it be? How would it work? I HAVE NO IDEA HOW IT WOULD WORK BUT i think i should take all the golden kamuy characters and put them in umineko. this would in no way improve anyone’s life but it might be interesting, and honestly i just think tsurumi would have a blast, but it'd be in a nice little container. and honestly i can think of at least a couple of people who’d be more than happy to accept the illusion of the golden land if it meant getting to be together forever and ever.

[itsalimere]

chicory on my mind

#chicory a colorful tale

[itsalimere]

#umineko #lion ushiromiya #i actually drew this as an icon for myself bc I decided to make a dreamwidth account… #i was inspired by a note on an ao3commentoftheday post #idk it sounded fun we will see ig??? #regardless i love to draw a shitty img of lion

[itsalimere]

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately bc I’m coming up on the end of my longfic that I started back in February (doing my very best to try to finish it for nano………) I think I’m sort of an unusual case because this longfic (“tapestry”, currently ~81k and 5/7 chapters, likely to be 110ish in the end?) was also my first ever fanfic after existing on the edges of fandom for my whole life, and I think the same things that let me write a fic *at all* are what have kept me going writing for a long time/lot of words.

1) I started writing this because I NEEDED to read it. Guessing that this is not why a lot of people write fic, but I discovered that it’s pretty much the only thing that motivates me! I stalled out on tapestry at chapter 4 in May-ish, but got back to it because I really wanted to be able to experience and know about the full story myself. That pushed me through ch5 in September and is the primary thing motivating me now. No one I know well has read this fic (this is freeing, in a way) and the only one who is die-hard invested is me, but it’s enough to give me point (7) here. I want so bad to be able to read the whole thing and feel that it’s a satisfying emotional narrative for myself. I want a clear, relivable, in-depth daydream of the exact things I want to happen with all these characters. So I gotta finish writing it!

2) The above thoughts from op are all great and super helpful for me to think about too!!

3) This one is kind of related to my first point as as well as op’s (1) and (4) (about loving the idea and not worrying about planning too much). I have reread what exists of tapestry as a reader a few times (because I’m so invested in the idea), but it also helps me see threads I’ve put in by accident, motifs and emotional moments and stuff. That inspires me to follow up on them and can even point the way to where I want the details of the story to go. When I was really stuck on how I wanted ch5/6/7 to go, I reread what I’d written and realized there could be a nice circular structure where the concluding chapters would sort of mirror and wrap up some character points from chapters 3/2/1 respectively, so at the end I have (hopefully) a bit of a full-circle moment. This is something specific to my example, but rereading and analyzing as inspiration helps me in general!

4) Speaking of inspiration - if I’m stuck on a longer fic I’ll sometimes return to some old favorites by other authors with the same ships/characters, or find some new fics to read of them. This helps me feel excited about my own story again by letting me compare/contrast what I’m doing with what others have done. I love these characters and other stories are so great but they’re not exactly what I imagine, so I want to write my thing too! “This emotional note in x fic is so great, I realize the character might feel a similar way in a situation I’ve put them in, and now I have more direction!” Or “I love how this character acts in y fic, but it’s not how things play out for them in my fic, and I want there to make a satisfying written reality out of what happens in my imagination, just like the author of y fic did!”

Unorganized thoughts but I just wanted to write em down before I forgot/procrastinated too long!

Do you have any advice and how to write a long fic?

I'll encourage long fic writers to add on in the notes, but as someone who tends to prefer short and medium-length fic, I'll tell you how I go about it.

Get a premise that you just absolutely love. You're going to be writing this thing for months, if not longer, so you want it to be something you're willing to spend a lot of time thinking about.

Embrace subplots. You'll have your main plotline that you want to see through from beginning to end, but you can also weave in some subplots here or there. The way I do this so that I don't get lost down a rabbit hole is that I always make sure that every chapter has at least 1 thing that moves the main plot forward and then if I want to spend 1-2K with some side characters doing something fun I can do that as well. Subplots can extend for the length of the full narrative, but they can also just last a chapter or three. If you're used to writing short fic, these might give you that familiar feeling of "completion"

A chapter is only as long as it needs to be. Don't get hung up on having a consistent chapter length. Don't get hung up on hitting some arbitrary number every time. Instead, figure out what the next part of your story needs to include and write however many words it takes to get that chunk across. Varying your chapter lengths is a normal thing to do and not something to stress about.

The next thing that I find important personally may or may not be relevant to you, but I find that I can't plot anything in much detail. If I get too into the nitty gritty with my plotting, it just feels like I've already written it. I need to keep it at the level of "And then A and B meet C and hijinks ensue." I can figure out the particular hijinks later. It's the characters meeting up that's the next important thing for me to figure out. Getting too far ahead of myself is a death knell for me in writing long fics, but there are other writers who swear by it. Test out different ways of approaching it and see what works for you.

As someone who tends to write more briefly, another feature that's common to longer fics is more extensive descriptions. People spend time painting visual pictures of the setting or the characters or the actions that are happening. Write the more bare-bones style that focuses more on dialogue (if you're like me) and then go back and read through what you've just written and see if there are opportunities to add in more detail. This can lead to some really interesting characterization choices and also help you out with worldbuilding.

When it comes to worldbuilding, you don't have to get it all on the page. You just need to share what's relevant for the reader in that moment and what is useful to lay out now so that it's already there in a future chapter. You can have an encyclopedic knowledge of how your world works in your head, but it's not actually necessary. No one is going to be quizzing you later - and if they do, you can always figure it out at that point.

Most important for me when I'm trying to get myself to the end of a longer fic, have a friend or a group of friends who are also into what you're writing - or at least willing to hear you get excited about it. Being able to get excited about your work is so important. It's like a bottle of water being handed to you on mile 10 of a marathon.

#tapestry

[itsalimere]

I carry around a sock with me (special sock for carrying not wearing, they wear out over time and usually have a lifespan of about 6 months…) which I worry in my pocket, rub on my face, flip between my fingers… when I am world-weary I put it over my face or take a long sniff-drag of it as though it is a cigarette.

I don’t think this is “universally understandable” to other people as anything other than me “being autistic or something” but it is what I do for my own satisfaction and self-soothing when I have Had Enough lol. (Though I don’t rly do this in public because I am a “professional adult” and don’t want to be “looked at weird”)

here is an illustration of me doing this

genuine question - as a non-smoker, is there a prop I can use to get across the same level of exhaustion and world-weariness that is exemplified by Ben Affleck in that meme?

I need a universally understandable visual cue, but cigarettes ain't it

[itsalimere]

last night I had a friend who had never played a video game before play “a short hike”. as in: she started the game and I explained that she needed to press a button to advance the text. when she got control of claire i explained that she needed to use the left control stick to walk around. i was worried she would get stuck or find additional controls confusing - but she did not! she found it fairly easy to remember the button to equip items, after a little bit she got the hang of walking around, and she had fun exploring and finding the many delights of hawk peak provincial park. she finished the game in about 2.5 hours with 9 golden feathers all on her own. i was so proud of her and also really felt more than ever before that the game is such a triumph. she had to try a number of times to reach the summit, and it was so exciting each time she tried to see if she would make it! it was a true video game experience of trying a couple of times to beat a “hard part” but with no stress, so accessible, just lovely.

a short hike rules!!!

[itsalimere]

let me recommend the recent novella between blades

keep thinking about the trope where someone has a sentient weapon with its own personality (usually a sword) but which is still ultimately a tool and confined by the limitations of that and how you rarely see the opposite. i want to see a character whose main body, mind and soul is actually the weapon and whose humanoid form is just a tool it uses to wield it.

[itsalimere]

I was just making my partner appalled at how many scenes I put in my longfic chapters and I counted and there are a lot :|

ch2: 15k (ish? idr)/17 scenes

ch3: 20k(ish)/20 scenes (some are rly extended though and are comprised of a bunch of like. locations and povs in one “scene”…)

ch5: 16k/34 scenes

:|

#ali garbage #no one cares #but I counted them so I wanted to record this for future me