okay its plagiarism's birthday so I get a excuse to glaze it
one of the the things I love about plagiarism is how not kanade-centric it is. ive talked about this before, but kanade is a person who puts people before herself. at best she sees herself as a vehicle to other people's happiness. so to have a fic centered on her emotions but not her POV felt right.
somewhere in ep1 theres this line where she realizes all of her songs were dedicated to other people, and I feel like her thought process would work very similarly. k is not able to really formulate her own thoughts on finally confronting this grief, so she souts out others who share (or in this case affected) by these emotions who she can "fix" (ie: pushing down her feelings and letting everyone believe she's fine). however the panic attack left her in a position where, although there's this "possible" ""hypothetical"" that mafuyu is already saved, her own feelings arent resolved. what else is there to do but crumble?
on the other hand, the differing POVs do provide context that k is missing. niigo cares for k, affirm her feelings, and express genuine thankfulness for what shes done thus far. i remember wanting to emphasize both the degradation of her physical and mental health here. we all know how continously composing fucked over k's strength, but i feel like this was the first time girls realized how much innocence she sacrificed to make music like niigo's. like mafuyu in main story, she repeated a cycle that lost her whatever "true self" was before the music. and if we're adding themes from hadal-abyssal, she will never be that true self again. she just has to continue on, loss and all.
i was going to write a k-focused sequel right after, but i got the idea of a certain dopplerganger and got busy for a couple months. im grateful for the breather. to be completely honest, another reason there wasn't as much kanade POV in plagiarism was because i didn't know how to construct it. how to describe the mind of a woman who has discarded her own feelings since she was in middle school towards a sole goal she's only now realizing is only a childhood pipe dream? that, and the loss of family, and the prospects of her father's continued disability, and her growing relationship with the girls she once saw as victims (+ the dopplerganger that will grow up to be one), and the weight of her natural talent as a musical genius... its alot.
there's many things i would change about this fic now, but theres something in me that keeps coming back to it every couple months. i see plagiarism as a story on grief and love, and how love sometimes creates the platform for grief to swallow, and how relieving it is to be able to have something to lean on through the pain. though that may be me being a kanade torture nexus enjoyer lol
au where instead of trying to surpass rad weekend, vbs are birders trying to beat a big year record. vivid bird squad
additional thoughts and context and such below the cut for the interested ✌️🐦🔭
birding has a reputation as a relaxing and chill retirement hobby, but if you're enmeshed in the subculture you will soon come to know the epic highs and lows. the cutthroat drama and betrayal and crashout fights and gossip and grudges and incorrigible, life-ruining, life-saving obsession. the pushing your mind and body and the goodwill of everyone around you to the absolute limit. the property damage and trespassing and run-ins with the law. the exhilarating passion and beauty of it all. joy and idiocy in equal measure. it's extremely easy for me to imagine it as a vbs-appropriate high-octane life calling, lol.
since this is based entirely on north american birding culture, they’re japanese-american and from LA instead of shibuya. sorry. a lot of the specific locations/birds are based off my experiences birding with my gf and friends while visiting california :]
vivid street itself crosses a naturalized strip of the LA river that has colloquially borrowed its name and hosts a passionate naturalist community... i've based it on the willow street estuary - where the concrete encasing the LA river recedes and green things return, great egrets roost on discarded shopping carts and flocks of shorebirds forage along graffiti-lined riverbanks. very resilient and defiant and absolutely brimming with life. ken is a highly-regarded birder who has opened a café-slash-interpretive-centre since completing his own Legendary big year (a Rad year, even) with taiga and nagi 3ish years ago. these days he's mostly left the numbers game behind him but is still an active presence in the community locally.
vivids + bad dogs bird dogs are birding/travel partners, but it's also the nature of the lifestyle that you continually run into the same people as you all orbit the same birds and follow the rhythms of migration, and thusly they increasingly keep winding up in the same places and kinda fully join forces at some point. the order of how everyone meets is directly parallel to canon still, so an and akito have known each other the longest and kohane is pretty new to it all. i think they are a tiny bit older than canon here but not significantly so - probably like late teens or early 20s.
the history / experience / talent dynamics that initially inform a lot of the vbs relationships translate really fluidly to birding in interesting ways, and it was fun imagining which type of birder each of them might be... kohane the motivated, talented amateur with a big camera, an the birder-by-birthright with something to prove, akito the perpetually-in-motion lister with nothing to lose. and to toya, i have given the highest honour of all: the keen-eyed, inscrutable larophile. though obviously they're all listers here which is a particular and hardcore slice of the subculture - remember, all birding (as long as you respect the birds and each other) is good birding no matter if you're “hardcore” or "casual" <3
i have many more ideas I wanna draw (kohane's philosophical development... toyas spark bird and how he met akito.... exploration of akian friendship..... more about the previous generation...), but this is already a kinda hefty post... for now enjoy this glimpse into the funny & chaotic & life-changing & and beautiful world of looking at birds!!! i tried to make it a) entertaining and accessible for people with no knowledge of birding and b) hopefully in-character while still keeping it faithful to the ways birders at this level really act and talk. the intersection is where the fun lies lol
if you're still here thanks for looking at my long post
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