After a particularly intense drift and a confrontation: a scene inspired/from one of the amazingly good crossover stories by @fantasiawandering. A sketch I did more than a year ago, after months of “photoshop inactivity”, and for which I think it’s now the right moment to "see the light”.
Thanks to all the authors out there, from any fandom really, that freely share their talent, their time and their intelligence, offering new possibilities and different angles to beloved characters, nurturing other people’s imagination and creating new, beautifully complex fantasy universes in which everybody can get lost.
-Looks around- ...Are ya'll going to make me go first? Because I'm NOT used to being first. ...okay, fine I'll go. My favorite story of Fantasia's is "Stories from the Shatterdome". I LOVE that story. Donnie's technological revenge via coffeemaker. Mikey taking in strays; whether they're human or a giant mutated baby godzilla. Leo's sparkly pink makeover and fanclub ambush. Raph and Casey fighting to the death over a danish. April and her unconditional love. How can I not love this story? Oh and
did I mention Angel's protectiveness of Mikey, and Dominique's sheer awesomeness? I love this story and the whole idea of the tmnt being in a Pacific Rim au, and I still have so many questions about this universe. I keep wondering what happened with Karai, and how she knew to warn Leo about Bishop. I wonder what it's like for Leo to have a bodyguard. Knowing Leo; he probably tries to BE the bodyguard. And is Bishop affiliated with humans first? Verrryy suspicious; he should be investigated. Yep.
NGGGH thank you so much! I miss these idiots so much, and I’m hoping to get back to them after I watch movie 2 and figure out how their story fits in with it, and yeah, finish off Donnie and Casey’s story and a couple other Shatterdome interludes in the meantime. There is more coming about Karai, but essentially, Bishop thought he could use her former animosity toward the gang and recruit her to help him take them down, but had no idea what went down when she and Leo drifted and sorely missed that mark (and she’s a VERY good actress when she wants to be, and can make even him give away more than he intends to). Also, that is pretty much EXACTLY what Dominique trying to bodyguard Leo is like, and there’s something coming about that too.
Since there will be Pacific Rim 2, you know what that means! Another TMNT crossover hopefully! (I just remembered the doodle I made for you with the plasma swords haha)
Yessss! I do actually have a story in mind to explain WHY Stacker tells Raleigh all the Mark 3 pilots are dead, but I’m waiting to see what happens in the sequel to help me figure out exactly where it’s going. :D
I'm reading chapter 5 of your fic "Stories from the Shatterdome". (I never get tired of rereading this fic; and this particular chapter is HILARIOUS lolol poor Leo.) And when I was reading it tonight something else caught my attention (aka Leo's delightfully unfortunate makeover had me pretty distracted up until now haha) and now I can't help but wonder about one thing. What happens when April drifts mad? I'm so curious. What is it like?
Ooooh, yeah. It’s not anything super planted the way some of the other things in this series are, it’s more of a facetious reference to April’s temper. This series relies very heavily on Season 1 characterization, and that was the season where not even full-on angry April got Leo to back down with just a look.
Added to it that April has been through Some Stuff in between the end of Season 1 of the show and the start of this series (which I will write someday, I promise), it’s pushed that temper a bit. She had a lot to do on her own when the guys were stuck in the lab, and she hasn’t exactly had a lot of time to deal with it, so her temper is kind of on par with Raph’s -- the brother Donnie finds it hardest to drift with. It’s not that they can’t drift when April’s mad, because their drift is crazy strong, but it does make things a lot more chaotic.
That’s not to say that Donnie doesn’t have a temper of his own, because he clearly does, but it’s a different type of temper, and it’s very focused, so when they drift and Donnie’s mad, April can pretty easily pull him back to centered and use that anger in a more productive way, but when April’s mad, it tends to pull Donnie along in her wake, and it’s a much more angry drift. Stuff tends to get smashed. Oh, there’s always aPPDC-acceptable REASON for stuff to get smashed. But the statistical significance of the correlation between April drifting mad and smashed stuff is very high.
TL:DR: Drifting with April is Donnie’s happy time, and he doesn’t want his brothers making her Hulk Out and harshing his buzz.
In the early hours of the morning, Leo discovers he’s not the only member of the family who can’t sleep, and realizes that sometimes you have to watch out for the quiet ones.
It’s been a long year, and a lot of brain burnout, but I think the writing gears are starting to turn again, and I wrote this little bit of character study last night for @theherocomplex‘s sprint (and thank you, Bee, for being such a consistent cheerleader for everyone’s creativity).
Happy birthday @jinja-neko, and to everyone else who had something to celebrate during the dry spell, and everyone who stuck with me, it means more than I can possibly say. This is for you. <3
This is an (only slightly) belated birthday gift for the lovely and wonderful @kindervenom. Happy birthday, Wren!
And Happy Holidays to all of you. Whatever you’re doing at this time of year, I wish you all the very best, and thank you so much for taking this wild writing journey with me.
2:What scene did you first put down? in Pacific Turtles. I know you must have had a good bit of it planned out before you started, because AJ had to exist, but where did you actually start?
Plus, from Yellow Anon:
Enemy of my Enemy- 1:What inspired you to write the fic this way? 4:What's your favorite line of dialogue?
Fic meme
Ooooh, okay. Pacific Turtles is one of the ones where I had the overall shape of it first, and filled in the blanks from there. Most of it really started taking shape during the... ummm, second or third time I watched it. I’m not entirely sure. The third or fourth time I saw it in the theatre, I brought a notebook and took notes in the dark. Spoilers under the cut:
1, What inspired you to write the fic this way?
2:What scene did you first put down?
A lot of the story really started with the scene in the opening montage of Pacific Rim with the reporter talking about kaiju blue. I’m still not even 100% sure why, but my brain leaped immediately to “mutagen,” which triggered this kind of thought explosion connecting the PR aliens and the Breach to Dimension X and the sea monster and the Kraang, and everything spiraled outward from there, because New York is a coastal city and the Kraang are ticked, and who are the best people to defend the earth from Kraang? Boom. Jaegerturts.
The way I write is that I will bounce a lot around in my head before I ever start writing it down until the skeleton of the story is there. I need to have either very, very clear scene in my head to act as a seed, or a vague outline and idea of where I’m going. So when I started bouncing, I had no idea what the overall plot was, and the lab wasn’t even a thing (I had no idea how they were going to get the Jaegers), and I started bouncing Leo off Raph as copilots... but it wouldn’t click. It just wouldn’t. What did click was Leo and Mikey, and I wanted to know why. That really started the ball rolling on the backstory of how they got there. I had the scenes of Leo and Mikey getting geared up, of Donnie and April and the roof of the Shatterdome (which bounced around a LOT before I finally figured out where it went), and of the victory parade pretty clearly in my head when I started, but that was about it. I needed an entry point for the story.
Which led to the realization that I needed a new viewpoint character. The story that was starting to shake out in my head just didn’t work if any of the turtles or April were my viewpoint character, because they knew too much about the mysteries that were starting to tease out of the story. I needed an external character who wasn’t really external in the end, but who would have to learn all of this history along with the reader in order to resolve the plot. Casey wasn’t in the series yet, but he was the obvious choice once I knew I needed this external viewpoint. I just didn’t want to be super obvious about the fact that it was Casey, because it didn’t have the same reverberation if you knew from the very beginning that he was for sure going to end up partnered with Raph (which, obviously). So I had to figure out what was different about him. What would change from canon if you start a war between season 1 and 2? Casey likes to help, but doesn’t always like following the rules, so he gets arrested stealing rations for hungry kids, and there was the story. When I actually get to the writing part, it’s almost always done sequentially, so the very first scene that actually got written down was AJ entering the Shatterdome. :D
4:What's your favorite line of dialogue?
It is really hard to pick a favourite (there’s a lot of it), so if I get this question for this story again I’ll pick another, but definitely high on the list is this one:
Raph just stood in front of Leo, placing a hand on either side of his helmet and butting his head against his brother's faceplate. "Bring him home safe, Chief."
It’s a little snippet of dialogue, and very heavily influenced by the turtles’ Season 1 characterization, but that little exchange between the two of them really cemented for me what the push and pull of the relationship between Raph and Leo in this particular iteration of their story was, and it formed the basis for several things that ended up coming later, including Mikey’s characterization, a large chunk of the lab stuff, and the beginnings of the finale.
