This is not a complete list of everything I have ever created (some things should stay buried forever), but spotlights a few favourites from the last years in both Harry Potter and Heated Rivalry fandom.
Anything over 1k will be posted to AO3 directly, but ficlets usually get posted to Tumblr first and only make it to AO3 when I remember to port them over.
You can subscribe to my AO3 account or here on Tumblr to the acari writes tag to get alerted to any updates.
I also post a lot of recs. You can find the masterlist here.
Blanket Permission Statement:
I give blanket permission for translations, fanart, podfics, remixes or any other type of fanwork that builds on anything I have created. Two caveats: no commercial use whatsoever (no ads, patreon, kofi, commercial ficbinding etc.); and absolutely no AI, handmade only. Please link back to the original work and give proper credit. Thank you.
And since I am part of Harry Potter fandom—and also as a general PSA—just so we're clear, JKR can fuck right off. And if you support TERF shit, you can too.
last updated: 02.03.26
Heated Rivalry RPF
we don't pray for love
Hudcon, M, 5k
Beware the inherent messiness of soulmates.
Or: How to develop a stress-induced ulcer before thirty.
Heated Rivalry
1410
Hollanov, E, 4k
Shane gets a tattoo. Things escalate from there
The Nuclear Option
Hollanov, (Ilya/Miles) E, 2k | tag for ep4
Ilya watches Shane leave the club with Rose. But instead of going home alone, Ilya chooses the nuclear option.
Harry Potter
Drabbles, micros, ficlets
Joint -- Pandalily, cottage core cannibal lesbians | [...] he won’t be a problem anymore.”
Give In To the Love -- Draco, dancing under strobe lights...
Saviour Complex -- explicit | Draco knew the signs, knew when Harry needed to forget himself; forget the Boy Who Lived and obligations and duty and being Chosen.
Curio -- It was Draco's first time visiting the Burrow as Harry's boyfriend, and Harry was apprehensive. Just a tiny bit. "Oh, please," Draco scoffed, "I'm a delightful guest."
When He Was Draco -- trans!Draco | When he was six years old, he stopped answering to his birth name and insisted on being called Draco instead.
Magic is Might series: Voldemort won. Everything is terrible.
Redress and Redemption | dark | The annual gala celebrating the end of the war was in full swing. Draco had gone all out for the fifth anniversary. Everybody who was anybody was gathered in the ballroom of the Manor, sipping champagne and taking turns on the dance floor. "You're being rude, dear," Draco admonished and squeezed Harry's hand, the edge of Draco's signet ring biting into Harry's skin.
Do Not Let Good Blood Go To Waste | non-con | Harry/Ginny | Ginny looked up from where she sat on the bed–white sheets, white covers, antiseptic. The corners of her mouth ticked up, but the smile did not reach her eyes, until her gaze flickered over Harry's shoulder. Draco kissed Harry's cheek. "Have fun, darling."
Love Letter -- animation | text by me + animation by @mystisblom
Longer Works
Your Body's Speaking My Language
Pandalily, Jegulus, E, 5k | ace vampire Regulus, lesbian vampire Pandora
A vampire on a mission and her prissy sidekick walk into an 80s Muggle club to meet her goddess and his Mr Right. Or: Lily gets railed in the loo by Pandora while Regulus is a romancing James.
Wormwood
Regulus Black, M, 14k | creepy shit
[...] and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters became wormwood, and many died from the water, because it was made bitter. (Rev 8:10–11)
or: The Life and Death of Regulus Black.
Human
Drarry, E, 28k | werewolf!Harry, cabin fic
(Official Summary) Harry isn't dealing well with being bitten and turned into a werewolf. Draco isn't dealing well with Harry packing up and leaving like a thief in the night. Things come to a head in a forest cabin in the German Ore Mountains.
An Improbable Bout of Summer Madness
Drarry, E, 16k | dad!Draco, artist!Draco, shop owner!Harry, soft boys
Draco had planned a quiet, peaceful summer holiday with his son. The last thing he expected was to find Potter here, in Draco's little Cornish retreat. Making fudge in a shop? The idea was too ludicrous for words. (In which alarming amounts of sweets are consumed, Cornwall is thoroughly explored, Scorpius is a darling boy, and Harry Potter is a horrid assault on Draco's sanity.)
The Problem of Non-Euclidean Geometry
Drarry, M, 1,2k
Two straight lines in a plane that do not intersect at any point are said to be parallel. (Or, 1.2k of angst and geometry)
Podfic
📍Still Warm, Still Warm by tsauergrass
Drarry | 38 min | bee keeping | The oranges ripened and grew heavy; the branches dipped under their weight. They picked some for breakfast every morning: Harry twisting the fruit off with a snap, Draco carefully tugging each one off. Harry peeled an orange and handed a wedge to Draco. Their fingers grazed, and Draco took it. The tender flesh; if he pressed just a little harder with his fingers, it would burst into a juicy mess. Harry is up to something. Why else would he keep giving Draco presents?
📍Nascent/Descend
Drarry | mcd | ~5min | "There was debris everywhere. The Bombarda Maxima trap had brought down half the building. Draco found himself lying face down amongst the rubble, his head ringing like a bell..."
You are JJ and you have two best friends. They room together all the time and that's fine-- they need it more than you do. You're a black guy from an immigrant family in a very white sport and you survive what is probably the second-most evil locker room in the entire league by being very very friendly. You can handle rooming with your teammates.
One of your best friends comes out and it's awkward as hell in the room but you do your best to help. Scott Hunter is getting married and he's doing just fine so maybe if you can find your friend a guy he'll be less stressed all the time. It doesn't work.
He starts a charity with Ilya Rozanov of all fucking people but whatever, you support it, you go coach at his camp and YOU USE YOUR CUP DAY FOR IT because he's your best friend and you are supporting him.
He has a crush on Ilya Rozanov and your heart is breaking for him so you try even harder to find him a guy. It doesn't work.
A video comes out and your two best friends have had this secret the entire time and they didn't tell you. You comforted Shane after the plane thing and asked him to tell you the truth and he didn't. He trusted Hayden and he didn't trust you.
You are JJ and you thought you had two best friends but it turns out they had each other and you were just some dude.
You go to your friend's house and you say some shit and he says some shit and he throws your less-than-perfect reaction in your face and you ask if Hayden took it well and he has nothing to say because Hayden has been talking serious shit about Rozanov the entire time, but sure, you're the guy Shane can't talk to.
And it turns out your friend has been hurting under this secret the entire time you've known him and you could have helped because you are a goddamn master of surviving a hostile situation through social grace and you thought there was trust between you but there wasn't.
You'll build that trust back in time, probably, but it hurts, and you're angry, and you have to put it away because you have a playoff to win. So you make a joke to make him feel better and you put your feelings away. And then it's game seven, and he trips, and for a second you wonder, and you ask him about it, and he says no, and you believe him.
But the rest of the room doesn't, and it seems the rest of the fucking city doesn't, so you apologize for even asking, because that sucks.
And you build back your friendship and he abandons you to that evil-ass locker room and you get why he does it but it still fucking sucks and you show up at his wedding because you're friends even if maybe your friendship never meant as much to him as it did to you and he's already replacing you, probably, with his non-evil team who is going to beat you every single time with like, the power of love and friendship and the two best players in the entire league because your team is evil and also stupid.
You are JJ and your next season is going to fucking suck.
She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.
She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.
81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.
The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.
Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.
Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.
The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.
She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.
Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.
When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.
The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.
When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.
The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.
You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.
For fans in Kenya, Nigeria, and Burundi, “uncringing” non-English fanfiction is an endeavor in decolonialism.
Our latest piece is live! The brilliant Soila Kenya writes about the dominance of English in fandom and especially fanfiction spaces, and why for her and the fellow fans she interviewed from Kenya, Nigeria, and Burundi, this is partly about the global dominance of English-language pop culture, but especially about the legacies of colonialism:
The deep psychological imprints of this language disparity remain. And therefore, when I encountered fanfiction, it didn’t even occur to me that there were fanfics written in any language but English, let alone Swahili or any of the 42 indigenous languages in Kenya.
Click through to read the whole piece or listen to a full audio version! And if you enjoy it, please consider becoming a (free) member or especially a paying subscriber—we want to commission more pieces from Soila and other smart writers and we need your help to pay them!
(As a reminder, we have a discount rate for anyone who wants it, no questions asked—if you're a student, educator, un/underemployed, have a lower income, or literally any other reason, just email [email protected] and we're happy to provide!)
ok so, I approached my local library with a proposal to donate a mural as a way to A: build portfolio/gain practical experience and B: give back to a beloved public institution. The director was very enthusiastic about it and i've been working on it since the beginning of March. Come with me as I endeavor to paint what is in all honesty an excessive amount of birds
I wanted the birds to look like they were actually in the space so first thing after doing the draft was to do a lighting study
after that I covered the walls in letters in lieu of a projector/vr headset bc i have neither of those :) Then i take a picture of the section of wall and superimpose the lineart over top of it so I can pencil in the lines
et voila
and that was a whole week on it's own so next comes the paintin' >:)
On the subject of AI, I have a confession to make: I use it. Not to write for me, but to help me check for inconsistencies, to brainstorm ideas, to write outlines, to give me a couple of lines when I've been stuck for hours, to be my beta reader, if you will. Generative AI is bad? Yes, but it also a useful tool if one isn't lazy. I don't ask: write me a story. I go with my story and ask: help me with continuity. Look, this paragraph is clunky, how do I make it better? The demonization of generative AI is fair, but to be honest, I also understand people who use it. Maybe they're afraid of writing themselves, maybe they're insecure and don't trust their prose. Maybe they have brilliannt ideas but they need help to make them become fics.
To me, this is very much connected to my last ask where I was talking about how we don't have enough mentors in fandom to support the influx of people entering it.
All of the things that you're asking AI to do used to be done by a beta reader (or more than one!). A fandom friend (or even a random stranger who volunteered) would read through your work and help you with those issues.
Betas are amazing. They can help with grammar and spelling. They can regionalize language. They can provide sensitivity reading if they're from a marginalized community that you're writing about and aren't a member of. They can track canon, help with research, even just be a sounding board to discuss ideas with.
And sometimes, they're just a cheer reader - someone reading your story and telling you how awesome it is because they love it just as much as you do.
I understand turning to AI if you 1) don't know beta readers exist or 2) don't know how to obtain one. The need for that kind of support doesn't go away just because you can't access it.
But for anyone out there who needs this kind of help and wants to avoid Gen AI, you can write a post on your blog, add it to an author's note, check out resources like @needabeta or - if the time of year is right and you have the funds - place a bid on beta reading services during @fandomtrumpshate
Beta readers are often involved in fandom events like big bangs and exchanges, and if anyone is looking to host such an event, it's a great way to get people involved who aren't writers or artists but would love to help out.
I get it, anon. We use the tools that are available to us. But here's another potential tool if you're interested in branching out?
Sometimes it's scary to post a message asking for beta readers, you are putting yourself out there, you have no idea who might respond to your message (if anyone at all) and nowadays a lot of bots are muddying the waters.
I definitely recommend searching a beta reader within the fandom you're writing for rather than someone who knows nothing about it.
And when you don't immediately get a response, ask again. This comes from a person (me) who is now two and a half years into dating the girl who replied to my 'I need a beta reader' post that I was debating to reblog that day.
Sometimes I wonder where our lives would be if I hadn't reblogged it or if she had skipped past the post.
Fandom is a community of people with shared interests. It's supposed to make it easier for us to become friends, hang out and talk for hours.
Not a single AI tool in the world is capable of giving (fandom) writers/artists/creators what they actually need.
i know that ilya's ass is SO dramatic about getting his goodbye kisses after he and shane are together
shane forgets because he's running late for a meeting one day and has to rush out of the door, and he then arrives at the studio for the photoshoot he has booked to see a text from ilya with three different headstone styles with "one of these, i think"
and is just "for?? what??"
"when i am dead from broken heart because my husband does not love me anymore and does not kiss me before i will not see him for twenty years"
"ilya, i will be home in like four hours"
*pictures of two different casket models* "i am thinking the darker wood one, but perhaps that is too nice for your taste now that you do not love me anymore. perhaps you will bury me in cardboard shoe box like sad, dead hamster."
I feel like I need to share this because idk if Europeans are familiar with the presence of Aldi in the US, but at least especially in my area they’ve been growing a lot recently. Like Aldi bought out some local failing grocery chains where I live (Louisiana) and have opened Aldis in all these somewhat rural communities and small towns, which for the record I’m fine with
But as a result of this they are advertising a lot more in my area and also in many cases, the people in these areas have never been confronted with Aldi or any European grocery store. So the ads that Aldi is pushing out to its new US customer base feature a cowboy shopping at Aldi who is explaining to new Aldi customers how Aldi works. Like this cowboy is explaining you gotta put a quarter in the shopping cart and why there are very little name brands. A cowboy is how they want to reach their American customer base. They gave us a cowboy
Pls. do not re-post/reupload or use outside of tumblr without my permission.
Both pairs of pants won't fit. One is too tight around the waist, and the other won’t go past the 🍑
