'dragon's breath' was the fourth fic posted for 'dark star - an izch anthology.' As of writing this post, it is in-progress.
Discussion of dark themes, threatened and feared rape/non-con, mating cycles/in-heat elements and loss of control during sex for magical reasons, human/non-human sexual relationships, and other triggering content below this cut. There will also be spoilers for the fic, if you want to read it for yourself first.
Fic stats:
~49,000 words at time of writing
7 chapters at time of writing
E rated (explicit sexual content, human/non-human sexual relationships, mating cycles/in-heat/sex pollen elements, threats of and attempted rape/non-con, past torture and rape/non-con)
Archive Warnings (AO3): Graphic Depictions of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Fantasy AU (nominally a rendition of the 'official' fantasy AU for BNHA shown in the popularity polls/anime ending theme)
'dragon's breath' is a long-form fantasy AU multichapter fic, based loosely on the 'official' BNHA fantasy AU which has appeared in popularity polls and one of the ending animations of the show. It concerns Princess Ochako Uraraka, a roughly nineteen-twenty year old woman with minor magical abilities, who is grappling with impending arranged marriage and the period-typical sexism of a vaguely medieval society. She meets Deku, a young, wounded dragon, and it changes the course of her fate. It also has... a bit of an odd history to its writing.
As of me writing this post, it's the only fic in 'dark star' that is ongoing, rather than completed. I began writing it in June of 2022, and I wrote the first five chapters before posting it. However, it actually began life in June of 2021, as an experiment in writing 'darker' and 'grittier' fic. It was originally inspired by a piece of Deku/Shigaraki art, where adventurer!Deku ran into dragon!Shigaraki in a cave, and the latter was quite menacing. I actually attempted to write that fic with that pairing, only to give up on it about four thousand words into things.
Deku/Shigaraki is an interesting ship, incidentally one of my real life partner's favorite BNHA ships. It's not so much that I dislike Deku/Shigaraki, personally. It's a pairing that fandom gets antsy about, as they have an age gap of roughly four-five years. I actually think that's totally fine, given that Deku is going on seventeen in the manga, while Shigaraki is just about to turn twenty-two, I believe. That's the least problematic thing about them, considering their canon context. Most of my issue with Deku/Shigaraki is that while they have a lot of cool subtext and themes surrounding them, their actual personal dynamic in canon is insufferable to me romantically. It's a more appealing idea in AUs, but that in turn shaves off most of their complexity, naturally.
Shigaraki in canon is, unfortunately, an annoying gamer dudebro shut in who yells slurs at teens over voice chat while playing ranked League of Legends matches. No amount of uwu softboi twinkification in fanon will change this reality, and I think it if anything makes him less interesting. But it also makes me very disinterested in shipping him with Deku, a character you have to bend over backwards to give him a personal relationship with. They have a good dynamic as a hero and a villain, but that's about it, really (to me).
So to make a long story short, I wrote about thirty thousand words of dragon Deku and witch Ochako with the same basic premise, instead. The original version actually played out mostly the same as what's now posted, Ochako just wasn't a princess. Instead, she was sort of a local hedge witch/healer/alchemist-type, and she ran into Deku in the cave while searching for ingredients. In this version, Deku was more straightforwardly 'sinister'/off-putting, and after they had their brief tryst in the cave, he flew off. The second chapter, of what was planned as a two-shot, involved him finding her several years later, coming back to apologize to her for treating her disrespectfully when she helped him.
This version in 2021 I clearly wasn't actually ready to write yet. The characterization wasn't consistent, I didn't know how to handle AUs so severely divorced from canon, and I wasn't ready to push dark concepts to the edge. I ended up hard scrapping it, then regretting it later when the Google doc was already gone. Such is life.
In 2022, after I began 'dark star,' I was writing 'fantasies,' and I started daydreaming about the formal fantasy AU that BNHA has. This was originally (to my knowledge) drawn by Hori for a popularity poll, then it was animated for the show for its second season. It's super cute, but of course, this is 'dark star,' so I started imagining this sort of broad feminist dark fantasy centered on Princess Uraraka of the Kingdom of Uravity overcoming her given station in life as the unlucky daughter of minor nobles.
When I was writing 'fantasies,' I had already written the first few chapters of 'dragon's breath.' I was writing a lot at that stage, often doing several WIPs at once, so this was pretty easy to do. That's how the implied framing device of 'dark star' happened, where novelist!Ochako was writing 'dragon's breath' as her in-universe novel. This will appear again down the line, with the broad implication that fantasies!Deku eventually wrote 'BNHA' in-universe as a comic book series, and that Ochako began to incorporate that into her novels as a sort of recursive element.
Now, regarding 'dragon's breath.' Other than that how I got here is very long and meandering, it's just an odd duck of a fic. What inspired me to revisit my abandoned dragon Deku concept was art by Twitter artist 'AroaKeyna' for her 'Dragon!izch' AU. She's a furry artist, and I really like her art. Wanting to do a homage/adaptation of her work, I incorporated the 'Ochako is a princess' angle, and I used her design for dragon!Deku, who in the original had more of an angular appearance to him. Popular izch author 'SevenRenny' (@sevenrenny) is a dear friend of mine, and their furry anthro AUs for izch have been very influential on me as well, so this served as a good gift for them.
Personally, I'm not very interested in furry content in the pure abstract sense. Not so much that I 'dislike' it, it just doesn't make me feel anything special. That is to say, I wouldn't characterize myself as a furry, per se. But furry AUs of izch are something I really like, which I find fascinating. I don't think this is any great, deep revelation about my sexuality or anything - and I have had those through my time in fandom, plenty much so - but it does interest me as a point of introspection.
So while 'dragon's breath' has some furry/anthro elements, I think it's pretty clear that I don't really 'go here,' so to speak. Still! I did my best. It will come up more as the fic goes on. Deku as a dragon is written with ideas about 'domination' and 'inequality' in mind, threading the needle on the feminist fantasy and the themes in canon of 'not all men are created equal.' It's significant that Ochako in this fic is surrounded by awful people who want to use her, and the one person she meets who categorically is meant to dominate her instead bends over backwards to please her. Of course, that's a very obvious notion, but I was very committed to making this idea work, and it will be explored more.
In practice, this means that Deku's magic involves aphrodisiac/sex pollen elements not entirely within his control. This makes having sex with him an inherently dicey prospect for Ochako, as it's sort of by definition consensual non-consent. This evolves over the course of the fic, and their dynamic will mature over time. I also just gave Deku a lot of bizarre, alien biology, like having a self-lubricating, nubbed cock, or the fact that he doesn't have nipples or a belly button, since he was born from an egg. Dragon's in this setting aren't 'evolved' creatures, more like traditional vampires where they are 'designed' a certain way by a higher power, and this element will come back, as well.
That brings me to the other elephant in the room: as of writing this post, 'dragon's breath' is unfinished. Indeed, where the story is at right now, there's no end in immediate sight. I actually wrote out the entire next chapter, and it's been sitting in my Google drive since last July. But it ends on a fairly substantial cliffhanger, and to be blunt... I didn't know what happened next after that.
I actually do know what happens next now. There's some important revelations to discuss regarding the 'true nature' of both Prince Shouto and Barbarian Prince Katsuki. Both of them have very unflattering portrayals in this fic. Bakugou in particular was modeled after a number of 'rape fetish' Ochako/Bakugou fics I was exposed to, where I was riffing off of that idea, but without making it something meant to be seen as 'appealing.' Of course, I think it's fine to write non-consent as a fetish thing, I just think the consistently awful characterization of Bakugou by fandom as this hypermasculine, dominant sex god is aggravating, to be honest.
Still, no point in standing on a soap box about it. The fic speaks for itself on the matter, I think. I broadly know what I want to do now. The next few sequences concern the introduction of some important characters: Chisaki, Dabi, Shigaraki, and Toga, primarily. They also concern some backstory mysteries being solved for the audience, such as what drove All Might's motivations, or the nature of Nana, the Lady of the Lake. I think this fic has at least 8-10 chapters to go, probably around 120k words when it's finished, but we shall see.
This fic is very Ochako-centric, which I think is fine. It's easy to write Ochako-centric izch fics for me, as Deku is my absolute favorite character, possibly of all time, but the series is already about him. Of course, I love Ochako, too, but it just works easily for fic, as she has a lot of space to work with as a character. One common criticism I hear of izch as a ship, which I actually empathize with, is that they aren't interesting in canon because Hori doesn't write enough about Deku's feelings for/about Ochako. I think people are selective with this criticism, as Deku has a lot of problems with his writing in general, yet they conveniently will forgive this with Bakugou or Todoroki, but the point stands, regardless. Consequently, I often receive feedback to the effect of 'I don't really care for izch, but I really enjoyed your fic about them.'
I take this as proof that people don't really dislike Ochako or izch on principle, they dislike Hori's poor planning in canon, and they probably dislike the insufferable cishet male fandom for BNHA that lurks on Twitter and Reddit. Can't really blame them there, even if they sound stupid insisting that their favorite generic anime boy that Hori wrote just as foolishly is somehow exempt from his poor planning. I digress.
I'm proud of how this fic has come out so far, insofar as I consider it a valuable learning experience. I really didn't know much about how to write fantasy before 'dragon's breath,' and I think I learned a lot. There are two more fantasy AUs planned for 'dark star' at the time of writing this post: one is an adaptation/homage to an existing izch fic by another author, and one is a direct AU of another mainstream media property, a sort of setting fusion. They will both riff off of 'dragon's breath' thematically, as 'dark star' has a lot of deliberate intertextuality, but neither will be expressly related as such, and neither will be based on the 'canon fantasy AU' for BNHA.
I think given the chance to do 'dragon's breath' over, I wouldn't have posted it until it was done. I learned valuable lessons about how to write and post ongoing, long-form fics from this experience, too. I hope the rest of 'dark star' won't have this problem, as I no longer plan to post fics for the series that are not already completed. I also plan to do a proper weekly release cadence from now on, rather than every other day or every five days, which I experimented with via other fics.
Still, 'dragon's breath' is a neat little fic. It's implicitly a take on 'Ochako has One for All,' or more accurately that izch share One for All, which is a common idea in izch fandom, but one which I feel the ship fandom often executes poorly. There's so much thematically necessary to touch on with that idea, and so much of izch fandom is consumed by juvenile power fantasies, instead. The curse, such as it were, of being into a ship popular with cishet men. If only that was not the case, we might be free of so much trash harem and 'overpowered Deku' fic that clutters the tag.
I plan to finish writing this fic sometime in 2024, as I meander through my ever-growing list of ideas for 'dark star.' It's the kind of series I can write forever and ever, as it's an anthology, not something that requires heavy linear reader investment. You'll probably enjoy it more if you read it in the order it was written, if only because that's the logical way to read nearly anything, but you don't have to.
I do find it curious that this was the most popular of the original few 'dark star' fics. It makes me wonder what about it is so appealing. Is it that people are craving 'izch fantasy AU?' In the time between when I first wrote it and now there have been several notable, popular izch fantasy AUs, mostly by the always wonderful Rainglows (@leahfrog), which I think you also ought to read. Perhaps people just have a mighty, unfulfilled need for izch fantasy, or perhaps 'dragon's breath' resonated with them specifically. It's hard to say, really; no one talks to me much about the things I write. I wonder sometimes if I am scary!
And don't worry. We'll come back to Rainglows' fantasy AUs for 'dark star,' soon enough.
But if you like BNHA fantasy AUs, I'd love to hear about it! So if you enjoyed 'dragon's breath,' please let me know! Or if you didn't, I don't mind hearing why. I hope you have something intelligent to say, rather than boring pro-/anti- discourse stuff or 'your ship is bad,' though. These fics are for adults, and I expect you to engage with them like adults.
Have a nice day.
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