Mass Effect: Discovery (ME1 novelization, complete)
Mass Effect: Labyrinth (ME2 novelization, in progress)
The Wanderers (ME/DA Crossover, in progress)
Shenko Ficlets & One-Shots:
Nathaly Shepard: Dancing | Drunk | Kiss | Whale | Poker | Crazy | No One Is Ever Ready | Crossroads | Work Night | The Woman He Remembered | Routine | Lemongrass | Provocation | Listen | Breaking Ranks | Digital | crutch attract chase
Ben Shepard: Loss | Meeting | Mako | First Kiss | Bunkmates | Waiting Room | Just One More Before We Go
Other F!Shenko: Home | Hot Chocolate | After Mars | A Measure of Devotion | Flotsam | exit criteria
Other M!Shenko: Once More, With Feeling
Shaynor Series:
Jane Shepard: Never Marry a Soldier | Domesticity | Jane’s Fall | Swimming | Back Home
Other Shaynor: Worth It
Mass Effect Gen Ficlets & One-Shots:
Kaidan Alenko: Fireflies | A Shade of Yellow (Liara friendship) | A Cold Day in October
Nathaly Shepard: One Way Out | Sunday Morning (set in Citadelsushi's Western AU)
Other: Flirting (M!Shepley) | Eternal (A Thorian Origin Story) | A Long-Forgotten Complication (Chakwas/Hannah Shepard) | Science | Regret (Jonathan Shepard) | Sometimes We Get What We Deserve (Jack Nought) | Storm Warning (David Anderson)
2020 N7 Prompt Challenge Collected Fics
Dragon Age Ficlets:
Daeroavain Tabris: Serendipity | The Birthday | Older and Wiser
Freeze (Crossover ficlet)
In Dreams (F!Hawke/Sebastian Vael)
Headcanon & Misc Posts:
Solar System Holdouts | Mass Effect Languages | Writing Advice | Writing Military Culture | Turian Sex & Reproduction | Rethinking Virmire | Soulmate AU Culture | Ash Positivity | Writing Resources | Pacing Advice | Directed Energy Weapons | Comparing Kaidan and Anders | Who signed the Systems Alliance charter?
Trick or Treat 2022
BG3: A Happy Feast
Bad Poetry: Burning Iron | grief is not sanitary
Random Stuff Side Blog: @randomactsofpigeon
Dragon Age Side Blog: @pigeonage
[So quick reminder for people who didn’t see or remember the first post: the Virtues are bad people brought back to life by unknown forces, and forced to remain alive until they meet a specific, unknown atonement condition related to their original crimes. Faith is a bad person. She’s meant to be.]
It starts with two powerful crime families who have long been at war.
In life, Faith was the scion of one of these families. At the age of 22, her college girlfriend was critically injured in a hit meant for her. This incident started Faith down a path of misplaced hope and a quest for vengeance that would last fifty years, beginning when she murdered her own father, who refused to support her crusade. After assuming control of his criminal organization, she dedicated all of their resources to two related causes: medical research to keep her only occasionally conscious girlfriend alive, in agony and the constant subject of new experiments, in the vain hope of a fully curative procedure to come, and transforming into a full-fledged private army dedicated to wiping the rival family off the face of the galaxy.
It takes most of Faith’s adult life, but she ultimately succeeds, personally directing an attack that obliterates an entire colony, the last bastion of said family. When she tells her still girlfriend she has finally found her justice, said girlfriend roundly denounces her, in scathing takedown that expresses the vast disgust and contempt in which she holds Faith, witnessing the callous person she has become, and the way she has been denied any personal agency for five decades. Faith does not react well to hearing this. The nurse on duty later reported there had been screaming, as Faith leveled all kinds of insults, and that eventually a shot went off. Not much is clear after that because the oxygen apparently ignited, killing them both and damaging the room (indeed, most of the floor) beyond recognition or forensics.
Like most of the Virtues, Faith awoke without any sense that she was in the wrong. Her story as above is revealed/explored over a number of issues, in which she is serving various missions for the Director.
Faith’s Revenge is her final arc, and the culmination of her story. The Director assigns her to retrieve a fourteen-year-old girl (Hanako) who she presumes to be a runaway, but it turns out she is the opposite—she is searching for her lost family. Though the girl proves to be a real pain in the ass (not unlike Faith herself), they form a rapport. In exploring her uncertainty, anticipatory grief and sense of loss, Faith begins to understand why what she did to her own family, and girlfriend, was grotesque.
They get a major lead and it is believed that Hanako will finally be reunited with her family. Instead, it’s a trap—they find themselves surrounded by the current incarnation of Faith’s family, the monster she built, who are now using the medical technology she developed to help her girlfriend to enhance their own soldiers. Hanako sees their corporate logo and completely freaks out, even as Faith is trying to fight them off. It has triggered a memory from when she was very young, and her house was surrounded and under attack; her father managed to smuggle her out just before the net closed. Her family is definitely dead, and Hanako is the last surviving member of the family Faith dedicated her life to eradicating.
Upon realizing this, Hanako bolts, suddenly and understandably terrified of Faith, and Faith, who has her hands full fighting, cannot go after her.
The final segment of the story involves Faith racing against her own organization to locate and save Hanako. She succeeds, but only at the cost of her own life. The final showdown famously takes place across a series of barges on a water planet; Faith is mortally wounded and sinks into the water, presumably to die.
A small but vocal segment of the fanbase insists she is still alive and will return, since she is never shown dead, though the writer himself has stated otherwise.
everyone has a ship thats just: theyre perfect. they hate each other. theyre married. they havent spoken in 15 years. they have date nights three times a week. theyre divorced. theyre pining, its unrequited. its requited. theyre starcrossed. theyre meant to be. theyre doomed by the narrative. they love each other. theyve never held hands. they wont stop making out at parties. they cant look each other in the eye
If you're a new writer and you're asking yourself "is this too personal, is this too much, will people think this is weird" that feeling is the exact location of your actual voice. The stuff that makes you want to close the laptop is the stuff nobody else could write. The safe version is always worse. Always. I have never once read something and thought "this would have been better if it was a little less honest." go further. It's always go further.
Not to be a bitch but sometimes people engage with fiction in the most boring way possible, and nowhere is this clearer than in videogames. Like what you mean you hate a character just because they were kind of abrasive when speaking to the player character? "They were mean to me" and it didn't occur to you to wonder why? Like, what might their attitude toward you reveal about the world? About the social dynamics within it? About their own perspectives and backgrounds and personalities? Does it even occur you to ask? Would you only have liked them if they bowed to your presence and talked about how great you are? Like I'm sorry but you're so boring. How boring fiction would be if it cathered to you
i will be honest i am so torn about the m/m shipping thing. i see m/m shipping as a refuge from the misogyny perpetuated on women both in real life and in fiction, so i write a LOT of fanfiction for m/m ships. i sometimes write f/f or f/m side ships, or even main ships (i've written a lot of female dragon age characters, for example). i just write for m/m a lot more. writing f/f or f/m means reckoning with whatever misogyny they experience in their canons, like imagine being a fan of the women in The Pitt and wanting to make fanworks set in the canonverse but not having to deal with its misogyny. R-I-fucking-P, my condolences. and canon or not, writing f/m is even worse than f/f because tropes that aren't inherently unequal in a same-gender ship suddenly look a little different with the lens of real world gender based discrimination and violence put over them. fandom is my escape and my refuge, so i just plain don't want to reckon with the forces making my real life worse daily in every fic if i can avoid it. it would suck all the joy out of it.
having explained my reasoning, i still feel like a hypocrite. i have a lot of opinions about female characters and ships and the way they are so poorly treated, and i want better for female characters and female ships - but i rarely am the one to put my money where my mouth is and make stuff for them.
i don't know how to reconcile this. i'm sending this ask because i bet i'm not the only person struggling with this issue, and i wanted to support anyone else who feels the same way. loving female characters can be tough no matter how genuine.
look. no one is telling you not to write m/m fics if that's what you enjoy. this is fandom, it's for fun, and this blog is not about making people feel bad for things they like. with that said, i personally really don't agree with the argument that m/m is the only possible refuge from having to deal with misogyny.
writing about women doesn't have to be about misogyny if you don't want it to be. i mean you could make a similar argument that because m/m is about queer men, you necessarily have to deal with homophobia if you write yaoi. but a lot of people don't do that because it's fanfiction. you can write about whatever scenario you want and deal with whatever issues you're comfortable dealing with. you gave the pitt, as an example, right? write about mel and santos having crazy omegaverse sex after singing karaoke together; write an au where aliens exist and mohan and mckay go on a date in a spaceship (look we all have our crack ships, this one's mine, leave me be); write about dana missing collins so much that she moves to portland to be with her. get creative, go crazy. i just really dislike the idea that it's impossible to write women in a fun escapist way.
another issue i have with this idea is that often the male characters being shipped in popular m/m ships are themselves misogynistic. so, for example, the two most popular ships for the pitt, at least according to ao3 numbers, are robby/whitaker and robby/abbot. now robby is a character that i personally really like and enjoy, but i don't think there's any denying that he's sometimes casually misogynistic (and a little racist) in a condescending old liberal white guy way. so when you say writing m/m frees you from writing about misogyny, what do you do about robby or dean winchester or any other beloved male character who is pretty obviously misogynistic. do you only have to deal with misogyny if a character experiences it, but not if a character perpetuates it? i don't really get that logic.
also, i understand if you turn to fanfiction for escapism from real world issues, but speaking for myself, i sometimes like seeing characters deal with misogyny in fic. i think it can be pretty cathartic to see people actively confront the systemic ways they're mistreated. i totally understand that not everyone enjoys that sort of thing, but i must assume that at least some m/m shippers do actually enjoy it, because i know a lot of m/m fic does actually address how homophobia affects its characters. so if we can do that for homophobia, why can't we also do it for misogyny and racism and ableism and other kinds of bigotry?
again, i'm really not trying to call you out or anything, anon. like i said, if m/m is what you enjoy writing for, then the last thing i want is to make you feel bad about that. but i do think that there are plenty of ways to engage with f/f and f/m without having to deal with misogyny if you don't want to, in the same way that people write about m/m without really engaging with homophobia (or misogyny for that matter). and i kind of resent the idea that the presence of women in a story necessarily sucks the fun out of it.
