true blue retrospective
I keep re-reading the same lines Always up at 5 am every morning Like a baby
THE NATIONAL — I'LL STILL DESTROY YOU
i started writing this during a trip to see my best friend over christmas in 2024, lying next to her on a pullout bed, wide awake at five in the morning. as with all things, insomnia reduced my inhibitions, and i finally started putting down my thoughts about this work, nine months after the last chapter was published.
initially i resisted writing extra commentary or author's notes because any explanation felt redundant. i wanted it to stand on its own as a complete work, to let the reader meet it halfway, but it's also just difficult to put into words why this fic ended up so meaningful to me in ways i hadn't intended it to, so this is perhaps not so much a retrospective as a post-mortem record of the reasons everything came together for the fic to end up the way it did. at this point i can't even pretend this is supposed to be about post-canon shuake; it's all a thinly veiled roman à clef. (and yet when i think about filing off the serial numbers to show people irl that i wrote this whole novel-length thing i find that it's still impossible because it's too persona. in a way it's nice that it has to retain its identity as a fic in order to make any coherent sense.)
anyway this started its life as a very cynical stream of consciousness in my notes app and even now i'm a little surprised i managed to go back to it enough times to flesh it out and smooth it down into what it is now. i have a lot to say about this fic, i suppose, despite thinking for the longest time (and still thinking now) that everything anyone could ever want to know is already on the page. either way, this is less about the writing process (nonexistent) and more about my personal experience and the context in which i wrote it so if you don't want to know what it's Supposed to be about, then don't read this. your interpretation is what makes it art.
OVERTURE
out of all my work, this is the one i've reread the most. every time, i search for something in it even though i already know what happens because i wrote it, and every time i'm disappointed. in terms of execution this is the best thing i've written thus far, a story where the vision worked out and the emotional arc came together better than i could've hoped for at the outset, but there's something missing, some answer, some resolution, something i failed to capture.
after it finished posting i went through a period of hating it, probably for this exact reason. it was trite and unsatisfying. i managed to write 124k without saying what i wanted to say. yet i still kept rereading and looking for a catharsis that ultimately wasn't there. maybe writing that kind of theme is a self fulfilling prophecy (which i'm just now realizing) —chasing after something, and not even in the fun way anymore. maybe it's all just fantasy and projection and it doesn't actually relate to anyone in any meaningful way in the end. maybe that's why it keeps rattling around in my head, because sometimes it feels as if i haven't gotten the words out at all.
my best friend, who is writing her own original novel, talks sometimes about how writing can be haunted, or the ways in which it haunts you. it does feel a little off to say this fic is about grief when i really have no experience with it, but i don't know how else to describe it. most days it's fine as more time goes by, and then some days there is just a hole in my chest about it. there will always be a Before that i can't go back to; maybe writing is just the closest thing to putting it in a bottle to try to keep a little piece of it forever.
it doesn't really work, of course—at least never the way you want it to.
PART I
i didn't think i'd write another longfic after to be alone with you because it takes so much goddamn time and effort. after two years of working on that series almost every night and finishing it in december 2022 (!?!?!) i was going to take a break and chill out and dedicate my evening time slot to playing persona 3 portable instead of constantly chipping away at writing, but then by the end of january the brainworms got me and i started thinking about a p5r postcanon au where goro gets recruited to sees/shadow ops AND i was percolating on writing a fic based on true blue the boygenius song, so i figured i could combine them to get something with both plot and vibes that spans a few short chapters. i started making a playlist and opened a new doc and by may i ended up with like 17k of plot and exposition (more than i expected already) which ended up being part i, so i thought maybe with two more parts of roughly equal length i would end up with something 50-60k. there was no way i could have anticipated writing double that amount.
i am glad though despite the wordcount explosion that i managed to keep the quality of the writing pretty consistent throughout. one of my biggest gripes with tbawy is that it kind of sucks in the beginning and doesn't quite get good until almost the end, which is to be expected of something that starts with the first fic i ever posted and spans over 100k words, so being able to start true blue at a much higher baseline of skill and with an established writing style felt a lot better. i wanted to try slow burn (since everything before this was either established relationship or a one shot where they get together quickly), an actual plot this time instead of meandering character study, more intentional narrative and literary choices, and a long enough story to be able to establish motifs and show instead of tell, the way a lot of my favorite fics do. it helped that this fic is also very very edited, with scenes getting fairly major overhauls even after i posted them, which i never did before because i wanted to preserve how they originally were so i could see my growth from beginning to end. none of that this time.
still, i didn't plan very much or very rigorously despite these goals. i wanted a three-act structure but didn't actually know what having one entailed. all i had was the general progression that as ren and goro understood each other and themselves better, they would end up switching places (between university and shadow ops) to get to where they wanted to be, to not just survive but thrive. i knew i wanted goro to return to tokyo, and i knew i wanted the last scene of the blue hour on the beach. and that was it. everything else i filled in as i went along; i'm lucky i found a lot of good music for major inspiration—everything on the playlist is stuff i listened to many many times that year—and a lot of things to have really conflicted feelings about.
in march of 2023 there was an odd and unexpected confluence of good things all coming about at the same time in my personal life. spring was pushing back the seasonal depression and my health was improving; i made a lovely new friend (hi fire if you're reading this); a close childhood friend invited me on a summer road trip; i made a very terrified phone call to get a lowkey life-changing doctor's appointment the day after not strong enough came out and i blasted it on my phone speaker and made coffee while the afternoon sun shone in through the kitchen window. it was kind of weird, feeling alive. by this point the record was weaving its way into the dna of the fic and i thought this was the feeling i wanted it to conclude with, the burst of joy, the big open blue sky feeling in your chest, the "i don't know why i am the way i am". in the end it did kind of happen, but it took a year to get the story there first, and it's kind of funny in retrospect that the order of these things happened in reverse in real life.
in that same month, my best friend moved from a house five minutes away from mine to the other side of the world. it was to pursue a dream she's had for years and i was happy for her but i think there was a part of me that was hoping she wouldn't actually leave. in hindsight it is so fucking obvious that goro and ren's separation is about this very specific thing, this distance and the fear that you're wasting precious time spinning around in place in a crisis of doubt while everyone else is moving on with their lives. all the epistolary elements are in service of this feeling, because you can only have so much of someone when they're so far away and so busy, and that amount is so relatively little. you can text, you can call, you can write long winded letters but none of it is a replacement for being in the same room together. your lives diverge a little more every day and it's so hard not to worry that they'll never really converge again.
(true blue (the song) has always made me think of her, though i never meant for her to know—the information accidentally made its way to her in the midst of other weird events and she felt so flattered and called out that despite the fact that it was supposed to be a secret i'm kind of glad she ended up knowing. i caved and told her about the existence of this fic too, and how there's really no avoiding the fact that it's about her. whether i ever actually show her remains to be seen.)
PART II
this part is weird. you could probably tell. part of it was that writing goro and ren's reunion after so much prolonged separation and misunderstanding felt so rewarding that i couldn't deny them (or myself) that; the words flowed in a way that they never will again and somehow i wrote 30k in a month (usually takes me more like 3-5 months if i have a steady project). bearing through the expository slow burn was finally paying off. all preconceptions of pacing went out the window in the name of indulgence.
(speaking of which, the fic wasn't originally going to have an E rating. any sex was going to be implied and offscreen, but after so much buildup and tension, a kiss and then fade to black felt so unsatisfying. after lying on the floor under my desk listening to bags by clairo five hundred thousand times i decided it would be worth a try to give it the release it needed, and thank god i allowed myself to go back and edit after posting because making smut sound not stupid is hard. because it is stupid. i think i only got through it by using it for character development. anyway i was worried this would alienate people who expected the initial T rating to stay throughout, even though now i can't go back and cut those scenes without losing some narrative cohesion. oh well, it came out fine in the end and it had themes and motifs and it was fun.)
and yet. though the storm has passed, the tension doesn't quite resolve. they're sort of together now, but they're also not. they still aren't honest with themselves or each other. i wanted it to be the end of their major conflict, i wanted the story to put on its coat and be ready to leave, but it kept lingering in the doorway.
part of it was that a happy ending at that point felt unrealistic. in a ship so defined by tragedy and enmity and fate sabotaging their desires, and for the facets of their dynamic i find the most compelling, it didn't feel right to reach that uncomplicated happiness then, if ever. for lack of a better descriptor, it wasn't earned. i could only let it exist as a temporary reprieve before it started to become forced.
the other part of it was just the influence of events i couldn't have foreseen. in june 2023 i went on that road trip to san francisco with my friend and she casually told me about an incredibly shocking decision she'd made as i was driving on the interstate (which did not do wonders for my ability to process it normally). in the following days we went to a boygenius show (a miracle of good timing) and the aquarium and botanical gardens and amazing restaurants and this news hung over us for a beautiful summery week and a half by the bay. it was surreal and dissonant and i was afraid for her in a way i thought i'd left behind years ago. i remember lying in bed listening to clairo's opening setlist in the little room we rented near the golden gate park while she went on her morning run, trying to figure out what to say to her to persuade her to reconsider, messaging my best friend on the other side of the world because i didn't know what to do.
this eventually nosedived into a massive fallout in august where for a while my best friend and i thought we'd lost this mutual friend of over thirteen years because of this. (at this point i'd just written and posted the first half of part ii where ren thinks that his relationship with goro is destroyed for good and it all felt so fucking cursed that something i wrote came to pass in real life. i looped quiet light and weird goodbyes so many times sitting on my floor, driving in summer heat, trying to process what happened that i couldn't not put it on the fic playlist after.) we all "made up" and were on speaking terms again after a week and a half but nothing felt remotely resolved until much later when i realized it was up to me to let it go if i didn't want the friendship to feel like papering over cracks in the wall forever. even now, things aren't the same with her anymore. me and my best friend disagree in some respects on the way things went down and where we stand now, but it doesn't matter. our group dynamic as a trio never really recovered and probably won't at this rate.
i don't know why but i miss that summer a lot; the bright points were so bright even though so much of it sucked. i think that kind of feeling comes across in a lot of my work to the point where it just happens and i don't realize until after i've written it. i remember i deliberately tried to be introspective about it in next year but it was a lot of telling without showing, which made it feel like it missed the mark. whether i like it or not true blue is the best i've done at evoking that painful nostalgia of trying to look back at happy memories, for reassurance or for comfort, and then remembering that they're inextricably intertwined with the bad ones, now and forever. it's like listening to a song you love, have loved for a long time, being relieved you're not the same person as you were when you first heard it but still missing the way it made you ache then. (that's the thing about missing a point in time—by nature, by definition, it's something that you'll never get back ever again. maybe that's why it feels a lot like grief to me.)
anyway you can probably see how these things became shuake's week in limbo during the monsoon and their fight at the end of ren's stay. their relationship problems were supposed to mostly resolve after this point and part iii would be a short denouement to wrap up their new future; it's telling that their issues just intensified in other ways instead. i couldn't let it conclude as it was. the fic and their dynamic turned out better and more compelling for it, so i can't really complain that i set out to write a story about how loving someone can be so fucking complicated and ended up with exactly that.
PART III
this part is where i feel the gap between reality and wish fulfillment. as of writing this, my best friend has come back to visit me once and i've visited her twice (it's weird to fly to a foreign country for the second time and go oh yeah i remember how this works). i haven't quit my job (yet), and i still need to cut my hair, but no plans for a dog.
looking back, i'm lucky the character arcs for ren and goro worked out as well as they did. i just set them up with their own personal issues getting in the way of their communication and let it simmer into this unhealthy stew of jealousy and bitterness but also codependency and wanting more than the other person can give. as someone who has trouble being forthcoming with anything to begin with, a long distance friendship makes it a hundred times harder to be honest with someone; it's a lot easier to hold your tongue and bottle up the resentment because you know they don't deserve it than it is to risk fucking up what feels like a tenuous relationship. "you've already hurt my feelings three times in the way only you could" and all that. it's nobody's fault in particular that the situation sucks, and here the two of them do want it to work out, but for a million reasons it just doesn't. and it's really really difficult. and i'm so glad i managed to write it into this fic in a way that feels realistic and true but man is it fucking difficult.
with regards to the ren-and-his-parents subplot, part of the power fantasy of growing up is making changes for yourself and being able to defend those choices, the mistakes you might be making, the regrets that may or may not come to be—the burn is a lot easier to bear so long as you chose it, so to speak. in the end notes of my other fic smoke signals, which is parents-centric in a more "positive" way, i say that i'm proud of how well i was able to write it—and i was, when i typed that into the box—but i genuinely can't read it back anymore. all this is to say that true blue is a lot less forgiving about this topic than it might've been had i written it earlier—i definitely did write the big fight vindictively—but i'm a little surprised it ended on the neutral-ish note that it did. or maybe, like ren, i was just tired.
goro's berserk mode incident, their big fight, the shido thing, and his new explanation for the reason he went MIA on ren in part ii were all improvised and not at all planned for. it started because i got bored writing the mementos excursion as normal exposition where nothing of interest happens, and i saw an opportunity to draw in some of the p3 lore with the suppressant pills and a fun action scene until suddenly it became a major plot point and an outlet for catharsis. i hadn't realized how much the story had needed it until it was written and it had moved ren and goro miles through their huge knot of unresolved issues to a more stable place on the other side. after this part i had to go back and edit previous scenes for plot consistency, and even so i feel like goro's problems persona-lore-wise aren't as well explained as they could be (that's what a prequel is for... maybe). the pacing is a lost cause, but it's not so bad as i'm coming around to seeing it as an important turning point and not an unplanned detour. i'll be the first to say that the fight at the end of part ii was strangely written and nonsensical, so it's good that this one worked out eventually, and that i left out the actual escalation. as much as fights fucking suck it's the aftermath and the time in between that's the absolute worst because there's nothing to do but spiral.
and the thing is—and i still struggle so much with this—the thing is that you have to move on. for the sake of a relationship or your sanity or whatever you have to acknowledge it and let go and move on to better things. pretending something didn't happen in order to maintain peace is one of my least favorite things in the world and i still don't know where the line is between that and actually being ok with it. not just with relationships but with life—i'm still afraid that having ren drop out of college and get his dream job with the shadow ops was bad writing because he never had to let go of the fact that being joker was always going to be a temporary thing. there wasn't a big decision or hard work to get there or anything; it just fell into his lap because it was wish fulfillment from me, the writer. and yet i couldn't help but want to give him that happier, more hopeful ending. anything else wouldn't have felt right, but it makes me so sad.
the day i posted the last chapter, about a year after she left the country, my best friend gave me a call and for the first time in a long while we talked about living together again someday. it was a bit of a recurring thing, this half-joke, half-dream that one day we could buy an old castle and restore it and live there, but what kind of coincidence is it that this conversation happened on that exact day, you know?
CODA
i lied i do want to talk about specific techniques and symbolism.
goro being the sun and ren being the moon is an easy one; it's set up in the very first scene. i'm predictably a sucker for celestial metaphors for how inherently they represent something immense and ancient and beautiful, and how easily it leads into other metaphors with gravity and orbits and such. ren feeling like all his light comes from goro is very #codependency and he's very lonely, but also i'd been playing p3p and i wanted him to feel a kinship with another protagonist he'd never met. he doesn't have changing faces quite as much as during canon, since he's grown a little more comfortable with his friends and as a person, but it's still in his nature. goro as the sun starts shining in late spring when they reunite, bringing in a lot more warmth than the story has had up to that point, and then deep into summer he ends up burning everyone, but they never stop loving him despite it. he's the sunbeam that cradles the speck of dust, but he's also the supernova. and of course, ren makes him the center of his world maybe a little more than is healthy.
"the river of time" is not exactly a unique concept—you always get borne back ceaselessly into the past by its currents and all that—but i like the way it ended up in here. it happens to be the title of one of my favorite symphonies, which is explicitly about grief and finding peace, but i personally associate it with things coming full circle and realizing you've come a long way towards healing and being better and doing things you never thought you'd live to do, because time is a river that never stops flowing even when you look away. i thought the riverbend was a clever metaphor for slow, peaceful moments, or the ones you want to stretch out because you miss them before they've even ended. maybe ren comes to think of time as a sea because that's where all rivers eventually flow, or because he's in denial of the fact that time is irreversible. or maybe i just wanted a way to tie all the symbolism together for the ending, and it's not necessarily time but people that keep returning to the same things over and over.
the orpheus and eurydice metaphor that runs through part i and ii is of course linked to hamuko (or minato)'s original persona, and i wanted ren's realizations about why he relates to the myth to be tied to his future and his new connections in sees because it's his enduring bond with goro that brings him there, and then have the throughline conclude by giving him orpheus picaro. as mentioned in the end notes, this was inspired by portrait of a lady on fire and the way it interpreted the myth, being a story where the leads knew their romance was doomed and chose it anyway, chose to look back at each other one last time. it doesn't end quite so tragically for ren and goro (in this universe) but it's very much about clinging on, letting go, going to desperate lengths, knowing in your heart that it's over.
one of my favorite tools to use is setting, because it's so effective at establishing mood, either for an individual scene or across an entire work. i write out my scenes by picturing them as if they're in a movie, using the pacing of sentence structure to determine when the camera cuts between shots, adding warm or cool colors to shift the mood etc (which is funny given how little i watch movies or tv... maybe cinematic game cutscenes are a better comparison) to tell the reader something about how the scene feels without having the narrator or a character voice it, to the point where if i can't picture the setting then it gets cut. the environment is the one thing that's always present no matter what—it's great for marking the passage of seasons in a story that spans a long time, and in this case it also easily ties back to the sun/moon and river/sea motifs i put at the center of this to bring it full circle. for example, i ended up giving the summer a majority of the emotional weight as the backdrop for major plot and character developments and the wild swings from the best day of ren's life to his worst, and throughout all of that it's the same summer but the mood and tone can vary vastly depending on which details are brought into focus. during the buildup before their first kiss, it has the tension of an oncoming storm; when they finally get together it's the release of soothing rain; during their fight it's blazing and oppressive. at the denouement i needed it for its warmth lingering on the cusp between night and day, mirroring the very first scene, except this time we're also bringing together our two narrative foils at the junction of land and sea during the hour where colors and shapes stop being distinct and start melding together, and so we can have contradictions like saying that blue is a warm color. anyway it's kinda funny realizing so many years later that my english teachers were right and everything really is in service of mood and tone, which in turn becomes the backbone of the message you're trying to get across, and all of that together makes up the author's craft.
speaking of the ending, astute readers may notice that this is basically the main beach scene in my earlier fic sea, where they walk by the (you guessed it) sea as the sun sets. of course that fic was a one-shot and didn't have the same weight of a long narrative leading up to it, but the conflict and almost-breakup and then the resolution kind of paved the way for that pattern to recur throughout true blue. i also reused the sea/sky symbolism from there... am i becoming predictable yet? "warmest shade of blue" is also yanked pretty much verbatim from light a roman candle with me.
possibly my favorite subtle thing was being very deliberate about where i used the color blue. i will say that the context of where it appears does change the emotional angle a little from place to place, but the core remains the same and it's one of the biggest throughlines in the fic. as for what exactly it represents, i'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
