For the WIP meme!: 🗣️
Thank you!!
🗣️Talk about your favourite WIP
In this moment (and for the past 4 years lol) it's In this universal river lol to the surprise of no one XD
The title is from a poem by Fernando Pessoa under the pseudonym Ricardo Reis (fun fact, I actually found the book this poem is in when I went to Lisbon last year but it was like 50 euro or something 💀), and it's about how you can never return to a moment that's already passed, but also about letting yourself experience these moments:
The leaf won’t return to the branch it left Nor form a new leaf with the same stem. The moment, which ends as this one begins, Has died forever. The vain and uncertain future promises No more than this repeated experience Of the mortal lot and the lost condition Of things and of myself. And so, in this universal river Where I’m not a wave, but waves, I languidly flow, with no requests And no gods to hear them.
And I really wanted to explore this immortality of nations clashing with their very human experiences and desires. Are they an idea, an expression of nationhood, a personification of a sentiment, or are they, under that, men? Men who can do wonderful, terrible things. Are they allowed to be selfish, to have real relationships, to love? Sounds a bit cheesy for a fanfiction about hetalia lol but those were the themes I wanted to write about XD
I also wanted there to be 1) more engport fics in the world, and 2) there to be longer engport fics that actually took a deeper look into their history together.
Honestly, this started as 7 one-shots loosely strung together, but the deeper I went into the research the more I felt the need to expand the story. It's too much history, it's too much nuance, it's admiration at certain points and contempt in others, it's how this alliance was never broken despite everything, it's how these two empires grew alongside each other (literally neighboring each other everywhere) all throughout the world not by accident, but by design. And what to me started as a silly writing exercise for a rarepair with 120 fics on Ao3 during the pandemic grew into a ridiculously long word baby that goes a little too hard but sometimes not as hard as it could go haha
I constantly worry if people are still reading and liking because I've poured so much energy into this that to have no interaction feels like a wasted effort, but whenever a friend reads and lets me know they liked it or when I get a comment from the regulars ❤️ it makes it all worth it.
