#goodbye my lovelies <3 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

hoe-doroki · 2 years

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hello! thank you for all your fics <3 may i please ask why you no longer write x reader fics? You don't have to answer, I've just been seeing so much negativity and entitlement from anons making writers stop doing what they love, I hope that's not the reason for you.

Ahh, sorry I don't know when this was sent in; I hope you haven't been waiting long. Don't worry, it's nothing negative. I'm really lucky never to have received any hate or been a part of any drama. I've made lovely reader insert friends and it's been a great community to be a part of. I so appreciate your concern, tho. And I'm glad you've enjoyed my stories. <3

Longer answer beneath the cut.

It's kind of a long story, so I'll start off with the tl;dr. Reader insert was always going to be transient for me. I'm a shipper and always have been, and I kind of knew that from the beginning. If you dig reeeeally deep into this blog, you'll see MONTHS of tags where I say "once I find a ship, it's all over here" and "this ship is calling me over, I swear" etc. Tbh, the breadcrumbs have been laid since near the beginning.

I've been reading fic since I was 12, and it was always shipfic. I never liked OC-centered stories, and was only ever drawn to reading and writing canonverse and stuff that felt similar. I don't enjoy deviating from canon. I talk to reader insert friends who have been into fic as long as I have and they talk about making OCs or pairing their faves with characters they could project onto and that was just...never my game. Idk if it's my demisexuality or my lack of imagination, but it's always given me butterflies to read about two characters who I see as really, truly in love. Whereas with reading and writing reader insert, I never cared about reader-chan. Even when I was modeling her exactly after me. I tried to give her depth and make her a good match for her bnha boy, but it was just that. A match to the boy. She was a stand-in, but not for me. For a character that whoever I was writing for would actually love.

I fell into reader insert by accident. I liked Todoroki upon my first watch of the series, and I wanted to read fics with him, but I wasn't jazzed by his ships. I'm usually pretty easy and get into whichever ships are pushed in canon. Like, if they tried harder with IzuOcha, I'd probably be an IzuOcha shipper, lol. But bnha isn't really committed to its, like, 4 or 5 het ships, so I wasn't either. So I clicked around random stories with Shou, stumbled upon reader insert, and I was like eh, that'll do. If there had been a ship I liked, I never would have read a single reader insert fic ever.

And then I got pulled in. Not by reader insert, exactly, but by the community. The blogs, and the friends I started making quickly, which was crazy to me, because I've never been in a fandom as active as this. In other fandoms, I would make a friend or two, but stuff like discord and tumblr friends and groupchats were new. And exciting, especially in the loneliness of covid.

Then I entered a feedback loop. I started reading bkdk as early as November 2020, and I only started reading reader insert in August, writing it in September. But November was also when I joined my first reader insert discord. All my friends were talking about reader insert, and we were all promoting our stories, reading each other's and so my brain kept on being flooded with fic ideas, headcanons, requests. Especially since I was writing all oneshots, mostly nsfw ones which, for me, didn't take a whole lot of effort or time. I started writing for a more (read: the most) popular character, Bakugou, and my fics were becoming popular, in January 2021 I hit 1k followers, I had decent interax, everything was going well.

By this point, I said at least to friends, if not hidden in tags somewhere on this blog, that I was ready to leave reader insert as soon as I had an idea for a bkdk fic. Cold turkey. I was one foot out the door for months before I actually started writing bkdk. But because of that feedback loop, I kept on having reader insert ideas and I wasn't in the same way talking about bkdk, thinking about it, taking the time to try and conjure up a fic idea. I still had wips for reader insert and I wanted to fulfill those promises as well.

Just some discord screenshots with dates, so you can see that the descent is much earlier than you'd think. Plus, past!me says some of this better than I'm managing to here.

The truth is, that I feel nothing towards reader insert now. I kind of want to delete my fics for it all the time because, like, I don't even know who that person was who wrote them. Who was Ana? Not me, and that's why I go by my real name now. I'm not a person who goes through phases, usually. I'm a pretty consistent person, and when I latch onto something, I tend to stick with it for life. Bkdk will be with me for life, I am 100% sure. This was a very strange, out of character blip for me.

And I know that sounds kind of disparaging towards the genre, and I don't mean that at ALL. Reader insert holds so much value as a genre, and it did for me too. You can see from my chat above that it was holding the entirety of my mental health for months. And I'll always value the friends I made. I love that these fics are still enjoyed, so I never will delete them. But I wish that I could fully detach them from myself too. I don't want to give up being able to read the lovely comments and reply back, though. Still, I wish with all my heart that I'd been with bkdk during all that time instead. Bkdk gives me butterflies. It makes me feel warm, makes me feel something like love. Reader insert just doesn't.

There's also a similar story in here about how I got caught in a feedback loop of writing smut too, and I never wanted to be a smut writer. I've written 50 fics or so for bnha, and none of them are my favorites (even the bkdks). My favorite fics, now, are all sfw, shipfic ones I wrote years ago. I don't like that. I want to like my current stuff more. This is why, in addition to retiring from reader insert, I've retired from smut. Smut is also a genre that I love and have mad respect for, but it needs to be as a reader, not a writer. I want to be proud of my fics again, for me, not because they've gotten popular because they're kinky.

So yeah. I left because I never liked reader insert in the first place, but it was a ton of fun to be able to write so prolifically in such a lively community. I'm terribly sorry if this taints my fics in any way to you, like I was flippant while writing them. I wasn't. I always cared about writing them, there was just something big missing for me, and I stayed longer than I should have. That's all. I do appreciate you asking the question; it wasn't an intrusion at all. I give all my love to this community, because it was truly meaningful to me during, as we all know, a terrible, terrible time. But I'm much happier now, and hopefully my next fic will be one I'm truly proud of again.

I hope this answers the question adequately <3

#and with that #goodbye my lovelies <3 #goodbye hoe-doroki <3 #bless everyone in this lovely community; keep doing what you do #ask ana #johnsrevelation

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solarisfortuneia · 2 months

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— 𝐟𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐮𝐭𝐞𝐬.

and the smell of camphor dancing in the wind.

✦ info: he didn't know he'd lose you so soon. (come back, please. even if it is just for five more minutes.)

✦ featuring: alhaitham.

✦ warnings: angst, character death (reader), heartache, 1.2k words, somewhat proof-read.

✦ notes: i cried so goddamn hard writing this. why is my first work after hiatus pain. why did i pick up the angst wip. but!! i'm writing again, so that's good. (more notes at the end.)

he didn’t know that it was your last day together.

he didn’t know that the smile you gave him that afternoon, your eyes sparkling like sunlight upon the serene waves of the ocean, would be the last he’d ever see. that the playful light in your gaze would fade so very soon, slipping through his fingers like sand.

he didn’t know that last night would be the last time he held you close while you drifted off to sleep. he didn’t know that today would be the last time he’d wake up with you.

he didn’t think he’d lose you like this.

he didn’t think he wouldn’t be able to save you from that blow.

“please, please,” he begs, both to you and to whatever force that is just barely holding you together. “just stay with me for five more minutes, please. until i can get you somewhere.”

the rain soaks him to the bone, clothes and hair sticking to his skin. your lips stay motionless, eyes shut.

“wake up, please,” he bargains. “you can have all the five minutes of extra sleep you want later, i promise. just—” his vision blurs, and something shines on the ground before it is gone, swallowed by damp earth, lost amidst drops of falling rain.

desperately, he tears off parts of his traveling cloak to staunch the bleeding. deep inside, he knows it is futile. he knows your wound is too great. he knows what lies ahead. but he cannot help but press the cloths to your wound and pray.

please, please tell me it’ll be okay.

please stay with me, beloved. i’ll read you all the books in the world. i’ll sleep in with you everyday, even if we end up whiling away our time.

please. stay. stay with me. i can’t lose you yet.

“— just wake up, beloved.”

by some miracle, your eye flutters. just a bit. just enough to set hope ablaze, just enough for the grip on his heart to loosen a tiny bit. he buries his face in your shoulder, resting his head against your neck, uncaring of the blood that stains his clothes. your blood. on his clothes. his hands. everywhere.

no. no. this can’t be happening.

he feels you strain beneath him, your unwounded arm gently, weakly brushing his back. he jolts upright, eyes trained on your face. you send a frail smile his way. he clasps your face softly as you nuzzle into his palm.

“alhaitham—”

his full name. archons, how long has it been since you called him that?

“— take good care of yourself, okay?” you tell him, chest heaving, your fingertips touching a tear on his cheeks. “i love you. so much.”

those are the last words he hears fall from your lips. he presses a kiss to your forehead, to your eyelids, and to your cheeks and to your lips, over and over and over until he feels your breath slow, hoping they’ll say what he knows he cannot manage to choke out.

i love you.

he stays there next to you for who knows how long, holding you until the rain slows and a faint rainbow smiles in the sky.

until he can’t smell camphor anymore.

—

every person has their curiosities.

they’re just the little traits that set them apart from others, the things that make them tick just a little bit differently, the things that make them, them.

for instance, someone may be obsessed with collecting tiny furniture, while another eats the crusts off their sandwich before actually consuming it. someone may have an affinity for the most niche aspects of linguistics, while another can accurately predict the next raindrop that slides down a window pane.

after all, no two people are exactly alike, are they?

alhaitham knows he’s got his fair share of these curiosities himself. his aversion to soup and all things that resemble it, to name one. and with you, he’d noticed two things.

number one: the scent of camphor that seems to linger on every inch of your person.

he’d caught whiff of it almost immediately the first time you met. you were but one of his juniors in the akademiya, filled with bright-eyed curiosity and anxiety to match. you had tripped over a stair and bumped into his table in the library, bringing the mountain of books in your arms crashing down.

and with subsequent coincidental meetings, he learnt that the subtle scent of camphor dancing in the air meant you weren’t far away.

you were, unfortunately, one of the poor souls who seemed to be cursed with constantly recurring minor illnesses, and almost always walked about with a stuffy nose. and so, you always carried a small disc of camphor in a handkerchief, as well as in your pocket.

you swore up and down, left, right and center that sniffing the vapors helped make breathing easier.

‘it’s my grandmother’s remedy, alhaitham! camphor always works wonders. well, that and eucalyptus oil.”

alhaitham may not know the validity of your claim or the legitimacy of the cure, but he knew to never, ever question a grandmother’s remedy. that, and he’d much rather refrain from starting a back-and-forth about something so small.

and number two: your neverending pleas of different variations of ‘just five more minutes!’

“five more minutes, ‘haitham. please.” you’d whine grumpily when he woke you up to start your day. “let me sleep in for five more minutes.”

“five more minutes, habibi,” you’d ask when he put down the story you’d requested he read out to you before bedtime. “read me the part where she finds the music box?”

“five more minutes, baby,” is what you’d tell him when he asks how much longer you’d take getting ready. “you can’t rush perfection!”

those five more minutes were never five minutes long.

but he’d always, always indulged you and those pleading eyes of yours. as stoic as he appeared to be, you lived in his heart. of course he could never deny you anything under the sun.

—

alhaitham remembers that silly little song you sang over and over, the one you’d learnt from a kid in the bazaar. he’d taken you to see one of nilou’s performances, and, friendly soul that you were, you’d struck up a conversation with some of the eager audience members before the play.

“oh, how i wish i was a bird flying free,

i’d see the world, every mountain and every sea!

oh, how i wish i was a cloud in the sky,

wouldn’t you like to wave to me as i pass by?”

you’d hum that rhyme on every idle afternoon.

loss is inevitable. he knows that, with how logical and rational and straightforward he is. he’d lost his parents, but he was far too young to remember. he’d lost his grandmother, but she passed in her sleep of old age, serene and wise.

but you? he didn’t think you’d leave him this soon. a singular wish sits in his soul, making its home in his bones.

a wish that you’d come back, somehow.

he wishes you gave him five more minutes, just as he always did. but he knows that you could’ve given him five more hours, five more days, five more years and five more decades and it would still not be enough time spent with you.

a blue feathered bird comes to perch on his shoulder, interrupting his musings just as he raises his face to the sky. he sees the heart shaped cloud that floats idly above sumeru city.

he thinks of the rhyme again, and something in him tells him to wave. and so he does. a scent so familiar lingers, faintly brushing his nose in the wind that picks up.

“alhaitham, it's time to go.” kaveh calls his name softly.

alhaitham doesn't move. “five more minutes,” he says, echoing your favorite phrase. “i smell camphor in the breeze.”

✦ extra notes: my alhaitham characterization for this fic stems from how i believe that when alhaitham is attached, he's attached. so i focused more on that, and less of all that rationality and whatnot. this one loves deeply, yk?

that camphor thing is a real grandma remedy in our household (my mom would tie some in a hanky and put some under my pillow and still to this day reminds me to do it when i'm sick) which is what originally sparked the idea for this

when i'd initially started this wip, i didn't expect it go this way. usually i write with my brain, but i think i wrote this one with my fingers working faster than i can think hsjhsj so sorry if it's kinda out of place lmao but yk what? i'm happy with it still even though i feel like it doesn't have my usual quality.

thanks for reading.