💝what is a fic that got a different response than you were expecting?
I'm not sure! I guess the first fic I ever wrote, which was it's a heavy lift, really took me off-guard because I wasn't expecting anyone to read it and people did lol
🤍what's one fic of yours you think people didn't "get"?
I don't really have one, although I was really pleased with how many people took Mirabel's unreliable narration to heart in Birds of Paradise and didn't pick up on her being wrong about something in the plot until she herself did.
I have it very easy in my genre. I think if someone fails to "get" a fic that I wrote to be kid-appropriate, that's on me for not writing it clearly enough. I imagine I'd have lots of misinterpreted fics if I was writing, say, explicit romance, or hororr. 🤷♀️
🕯️was there a fic that was really hard on you to write, or took you to a place you didn't think it would take you?
Hold on. There's an old image on my computer I have to show you.
One time I was lacking inspiration and I asked for prompts, and this is the sum total of all of the prompts that people gave to me. I meant to post this when I actually finished the fic they were for, but I forgot about it until now!
Annoyingly, most of these get referenced to some degree in Rumble Thy Bellyful!, but not that one by @youmaycallmeyourhighness. I wanted to have Alma or someone drop a line in response to Mirabel's interference like, "I knew we should have enrolled you in the Catholic boarding school in the city", and I totally forgot, and now it's too late. Damn.
Anyway, most of the prompts were quite interpersonal, so I took that as a sign to write a drama -- a story that revolved soley around the relationship between Dolores and Pepa framed through Mariano's perspective. Chapter 2 ends with this line--
They had no way, fortunately, of knowing how catastrophically wrong things would go.
It would start with the hurricane, and it would end with the gun.
I had no idea at the time of writing that the hurricane and gun were referring to. I wrote that line specifically because I realised I would run out of steam to write the fic if it didn't have some kind of action/adventure element, so I though it would be funny to trap myself in a corner in that way and find a wacky way out of it.
I reblogged this ask meme then passed out immediately. Whoops! Anyway, you had the misfortune to send me this just as I finished my entire series. I'm about to hit you with literally every thought I've ever had.
EncantoTV: A Retrospective
My goal in Encanto fanfic is always, as best I can, to re-create the tone and style of the original movie. I called the series "Encanto TV Episodes From Another Timeline" because that's the level of canon compliance I wanted, not just from the plot but also from everything else, with the tone and the humour and the themes and the characters we focus on - I wanted to write something that felt like Disney had greenlit it.
(It's entirely PG except this part, which I removed briefly in early 2022 and then remorsefully put back because I literally couldn't replace the line "de-bitched their grandmother".)
Fun fact: I literally did not care for Camilo one iota the first time I watched Encanto. I don't mean I didn't like him; I mean I straight-up forgot one of the characters could shapeshift a couple of different times during the movie and had to google who the hell he was afterwards.
I put Camilo in When the Cat's Away because I thought he would be a funny narrator to a story that was primarily about Mirabel and Bruno, and then by necessity of being the narrator he got his own character arc, and that character arc spiralled into being the main emotional hook of the fic. Whoops.
The character who did get plenty of screentime from me, though: Bruno!
Here's the thing about fanfiction. Most people watched Encanto (2021), a Family-Adventure-Comedy, saw Bruno, thought he was hot, and then proceeded to write fiction about him that was also hot, such as porn, angst, porn/angst, and the great many variations of those things that exist on AO3. I watched that movie and went: "Great! I want more of this attractive, compelling character. He is a side character used primarily for comic relief, with a tragic backstory that is only ever minimally explored. Therefore, that is exclusively what I am going to write."
Hence: Bruno only appears as a major supporting character, and his main roles are to act as foil to Mirabel and comic relief, much the way he does in the original movie. I don't know what it is about that that I enjoy writing when, as far as I can tell, every other Bruno stan on the internet went down the logical route of writing fic that was about... well, him. Maybe a bit of narrative irrelevancy is just something I find attractive in a man?
Whatever about Camilo and Bruno, though. I thought Mirabel was a great character when I first watched Encanto, and now, having written 100,461 (fuck!) words about her, my feelings have only deepened. Mirabel, my daughter, life of my life!!! I adore you!!!
Seriously: I love this girl. I wound up spiralling into a whole series because there's just not enough I could say about her. I love the way the world feels when you're at a certain point in your teens, and you're smart and empathetic enough to understand the injustices of it, and you've got this whole life ahead of you to fix them and all these things to do around you and suddenly, for the briefest period of time, you have nothing but big ideas and burning passion to see them through. I wanted to capture that type of kid, somebody who's clearly very passionate and brilliant and inspired, despite the crushing lonliness and insecurity that sometimes comes with being fifteen.
Mirabel and Bruno's relationship is very dear to me. Mirabel is a teen who's pushing away her parents and the other adults in her life, feeling misunderstood. Bruno knows how to interact with the teens in a way that makes them feel treated and seen as adults, that validates their adult feelings and actions, while never actually crossing the boundary into being a friend. Bruno is a mentor, good at showing vulnerability when he needs to get through to someone and holding it back when they need strength instead. Mirabel desperately wants someone who makes her feel seen, and she needs an adult in her life she can trust. They go together like that.
The thing I'm proudest of about EncantoTV, though, is the plots. Because deciding that something is meant to be a cartoon TV episode, not a movie, not a novel, is just... a different type of story. TV plots can be bad. There are holes, there are wildly unrealistic natural disasters and uses of weapons, people run on and off the screen, and the whole thing needs to get wrapped up in a way that you can theoretically miss this episode and it still makes sense.
My finest achievement? I have gotten SO good at writing plots that are STUPID AS ALL FUCK. I'll write fucking anything in there. I put a ghost in the Encanto. I destroyed a whole fucking mountain then NEVER referenced it again. I brought back Bubo. Antonio went to JAIL. The places the characters go in Birds of Paradise? That shit makes NO SENSE WHATSOEVER when you look at the timeline, because they could only have been walking for a few hours AT BEST but they still hike an entire watershed AND drive the same distance within AT MOST a couple of hours.
And you know what? AIN'T NOBODY IN THE COMMENTS TELLING ME IT WAS STUPID, CAUSE THEY CHECKED OUT BEFORE THEY GOT THAT FAR. Belissimo.
Anyway, it's 4am, and I'm definitely rambling. Here's my last point, which is about having readers!!!
My webcomic used to get a comment every 2-3 months. My fiction has been rejected from a couple of litmags. Something that has been mind-blowing, life-changing, awe-inspiring? Readers! People who read what I wrote and they liked it, and not only that they told me they liked it!!! I have written lots and lots of things, and I have never, in my life, had people go out of their way to contact me and tell me what they enjoyed and why, the way that people have done for these fics, and it's... damn!!! It's world-ending!!!
This was a long-ass post, I guess being my goodbye to the series... I want to thank you, @youmaycallmeyourhighness, for sending it, and for the various comments and messages, that shit means the WORLD to me. I am a humble college student, my grades are bad, and it is surreal that my writing is something that interests you.
To @bitchykuromi, @malewifebruno, @pinwheelwhirl, @greenvillainredemption, @originalavenuefox, @ramblesanddragons, and several others who either aren't on tumblr or I just can't find rn because it's 4am: I hope you all know how much it means to me that you liked my fics enough to read them over all this time, and find the time to tell me about it, and you are all such cool people it brings me such delight to think that I actually might have made you laugh irl.
THANK YOU WORLD FOR THE EXPERIENCE OF MAKING ENCANTOTV: IT'S BEEN REAL. Goodnight!!!!!
For the director’s commentary: I’m always thinking about that passage in Rumble Thy Bellyful when the kids are making Bruno a get well card and Dolores can hear a lot of what the adults are keeping from them. I always wonder about that period of their lives, when Something’s Up with Tio Bruno but the extent to which the kids are aware of it varies depending on age or gift (poor Dolores) or sensitivity.
The thing about writing real light, low-stakes YA-ish stuff is that I have to deal with things like mental illness and dysfunction with a really light touch. (Well. I don't have to. I choose to. The Disney Execs that Live In My Brain have me on a tight leash.)
To that end, my favourite things to do with Bruno and Dolores, two of the movie's SADDEST CHARACTERS IMAGINABLE, is just to leave a lot of "negative space" - all the context you need to imagine what kind of trauma they've been through, and just a touch of what it was actually like, and then leave the rest to the reader's terrifying imagination.
Definitely that scene is the darkest one... I've ever written in my encanto fics, unless you count a particular Macondian Giftshop update?
My fics have a real easy-going, idealised, simplified version of the family's dynamics after the events of the movie. Sometimes I like to counterbalance that by depicting the dynamics before the movie as just a little bit hellish.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
The end of the story! In which the dead rise, the kids dance, and Alma has a conversation with someone important. Oh, and Agustín plays Mambo No. 5, which was written in 1949. Did you know that? I sure as heck didn't.
This is the second-last episode of EncantoTV, which concludes with the completion of the Macondian Giftshop. <:
For the “fic I wish you’d write” ask request…literally anything about Bruno’s mental health. That’s very broad. But whenever you allude to it in your fics (or explore it more deeply, like you did in some parts of Rumble Thy Bellyful) it seizes me by the throat. Somewhat related, I’d love to read your take on Alma’s request for a vision the night of Mirabel’s ceremony. Or your headcanons about any of these things. Kinda grim, but you do grim so well! Probably b/c you mix it w humor so well
Gosh, thank you...! But I do think the reason why the angst hits so hard is because I do it in very tiny spoonfuls. I have no idea how I'd handle a whole story that revolved around the themes of Bruno's mental health. I tend to dance around it almost as much as the movie does.
Although now that you mention it, I did actually rewrite a handful of scenes from my old fics from Bruno's POV, just to be self-indulgent, and they're significantly more intense when narrated by him. I ought to post that to my drabbles collection sometime... But I'm a little embarrassed about it, so I'd have to polish it first.
Sneak preview:
Ooh, but if you want a story about Bruno's mental health that does the funny parts extremely well, I'd recommend the Encanto fics by @thisstableground. If I wrote angst or psychological fanfic, I would want to do it exactly like her. I laughed out loud at several parts then lay in bed unable to sleep after.
