4, 13, and 14 for the end of the year ask meme (*´ω｀*)
thanks for the ask ♡ a lot has happened lately but i hope i can get back on the request grind again! fair warning, my answers get lengthy under the cut. i’m chatty and sentimental.
4: total number of words you wrote this year citowon words: 35,221 total words (approx): 96,971 the fun thing about this is that i wrote a LOT of fic this year. i always do, but 2021 was probably my best writing year ever, and at the beginning of 2021 i didn’t expect this much success at all! not all of it is published on citowon nor ao3, but there’s a bunch of little scenes i’m very happy about and want to continue into 2022.
13: favorite writing song/artist/album of the year i’m a HUGE music lover and i’ll listen to any genre, so i switch it up all the time based on whatever my vibe is, not the text. i made some playlists for a few characters and fics, but i have to give the reward to limbo by royal blood, but for a pretty unexpected reason. see, sometimes i’ll loop a song if i really like it, but i usually can’t go more than 45 minutes before i have to skip. i’ve listened to limbo for over 2 hours at a time. my record was 4 hours and 40-something minutes one all-nighter over my us history exam! the album it’s off of, typhoons, is one of my top 5 releases this year and also has gotten me through so many writing slogs. none of the songs have gotten old, and trust me, if they could be, i’d know by now considering how many times i set the full album stream on loop. despite that, it feels wrong not to mention the tower (theme from the work) by rivers of nihil. i haven’t made a list, but i feel confident that the work is my no. 1 favorite 2021 release, and this song is one that inspired so much content i’d like to get out soon. it’s beautiful and harrowing, and i think a lot about some character dynamics by running them through the song, you know?
14: a fic you didn’t expect to write this one is strange and also really fun to answer, because there’s so much i didn’t imagine myself doing! i made a #fic-ideas channel in my private discord server, which includes so many stupid jokes, sleepy text, and just straight-up wild concepts. in november 2020, i wrote a very simple scene-or-two-plus-a-bad-summary chikaita doc about chikage’s past catching up with him, and itaru getting kidnapped because of it. the original was... really garbage. i reopened it in august, tried to figure out what the fuck was going on for about thirty minutes before the concept came back to me, and then wrote another few paragraphs, and forgot about it again. october, i made some ocs, and it light a fire under my ass to keep getting the words out. it’s now one of the docs i’m most passionate about continuing, and- i’m usually a fluff writer, but i feel like this one specifically is very grounding since i apply a lot of real-world logic to it (be honest: if you just got kidnapped because your boyfriend kept his espionage double life a secret from you and you had the self-preservation itaru does, would you stay with him?) and it’s a very welcome return to angst, which is what i did before i joined the a3 fandom.
in a more sobering example than that i also impulsively wrote a vent fic, kazunari opens like four cabinets, a few days after a pretty rough patch with some loved ones (content warning for suicide attempts/idealization and underage drinking), and out of respect i’m not elaborating any more than what the fic itself says. i remember the night i wrote that fic, it was the one day where i had a super chill online class and that was it, so once that ended i was just alone with my thoughts, and barely keeping myself together, so i just had to write something and get the thoughts out of the way. i felt just disgusted with my everything afterwards- you know, writing fanfiction, what i was going through, how nasty my thoughts were, just depressed things- but then the next day i reread it, and then again, and then again, and it was so cathartic that i couldn’t help but love it. didn’t even edit it properly before i posted it. it’s strange in a way, because it’s one of my favorite pieces all year now. i like to think of it as a character study, just as much as it is a vent piece. you see, i’m a theatre kid, and when i’m writing, i envision everything like it’s being acted out. the number-one rule with every single theatre teacher i had is to never just cry on stage. you have to do something with it. you can’t wallow, or else the scene withers, melts together and becomes a slogfest. my last high-school production was a very real, very harrowing drama, but it was so easy to forget because the playwright did such a good job balancing out the weight of the plot with so many jokes. that’s what i tried to do with this fic. after all, even in the worst of times i try to be as witty as i can be! i’ve read this fic over and over so many times, and i could tell you exactly how taichi and kazunari speak every line in it. they never really get caught up in just sadness, there’s always something that they push in front of it so it has substance, like they’re not allowed to be just sad. and there's a lot of little things in the fic, too, that represent something going on there. i won't go so far to say it was all fully planned, but there's so many eensy things i love about it. the blueberries, the way kazu responds to taichi telling his story, how they trade the bottle and the glass, "the worst part”, the unwritten actions made, the pacing. kazu has so many lines here that i love, but "they get the best of me sometimes but i’m better than i was in high school” has to be one of my favorite lines ever.
i feel like it’s such a cop-out not even to reference a citowon fic. there’s so many things i love that y’all’ve requested! i’ll never shut up about how thankful i am for y’all. my last pick is one that’s a contender for my favorite citowon of the year, masumi and a reader that’s siblings with izumi. i’m super proud of how i wrote him here! obviously, i get his whole obsessive almost-yandere thing is his charm, but i’ve always taken it as him being that one arrested development clip like masumi: i have feelings for you narrator: the feeling was friendship, but he had never felt it before so writing him actually falling in love with someone- and then having that family resemblance to compare his feelings with- was an opportunity i ate up, and i really couldn’t have expected if it weren’t for someone requesting it, since i wasn’t too interested in masumi before i got this request. i feel like this fic was just as much of a character study as it was an x reader, and a really interesting dive into how his brain works. writing this fic actually shot masumi up a few places in my book, and ever since i’ve been having so many thoughts about him, which is one of the reasons why i’m so impressed with this fic. on another note, i’m really fond of how tsuzuru and citron advise masumi. i grew up learning that every story has a moral if you squint, and i’m a believer that you believe the things you consume. tsuzuru’s little scene about how what will be will be especially hits imo, it’s something i take very seriously, while i think of citron’s bit about not rushing as something i wish i knew in the past. masumi’s a chaser, but only that fervently when it comes to izumi. so when he has this moment of reconsideration now that he might not be so into izumi, i think of tsuzuru and citron being a really needed reality check, and really puts his (real and deep!) feelings for reader into perspective compared to his izumi obsession. even with my requests, i only write things that i want to write, and this fic is one that i pick up all the time as a bedtime story of sorts. i’m super thankful for the ask on this one, on a meta level it’s not only a fic that i love, but also one that really helped me realize where my writing skills stand and what i’m capable of 🌟