My Works for SpecReqs
me: I wrote three works for SpecReqs last year, which was in fact too many. I will write fewer fanfictions this year because I am more busy and do not want to burn out
me@me: you’re going to write four works this year. only half of them will be in the collection. good luck.
proserpine for @theharellan: So, proserpine is my actual assignment, taken from the prompt (paraphrased) “bittersweet vibes for Shepard/Samara”. Which, of course, is my jam, so I was very excited to get this as my assignment.
proserpine is about the asari outlook on mortality, how they cope with their own deaths and the deaths of shorter lived species, especially the ones they love/are reproducing with. proserpine is about Samara, who hasn’t had a friend in centuries, trying to figure out what to do with herself when she isn’t lonely. proserpine is about Samara figuring out how to live when her life is more than a pile of grief and regret.
and, perhaps most importantly, proserpine is a single, gigantic excuse for me to make a thousand metaphors about spring, flowers, and blood blooming like crimson petals. I love writing Samara’s internal monologue, it gives me a great excuse to try my hand at being pretentious and poetic.
(And yes, proserpine refers to Proserpina, the roman equivalent of Persephone, because titling this fic Persephone would be a little bit on the nose, even for me.)
erinye: man, it’s gotta be awkward to meet your mother’s new girlfriend when that girlfriend is literal centuries younger than you, helped your mom to kill your sister, and was involved in the one time your other sister and the people you’ve lived with for centuries all got turned into monsters and died. pour one out for Falere, whose problems are only beginning. it’s also an excuse for me to think about ace vibes wrt asari, and how that would work with ardat-yakshi.
this is lowkey a sequel to proserpine, if you would like to believe that that one has a happy ending.
what do you MEAN nobody wrote f!shali for @keita52: ok. look. ten people offered to write tali/female shepard for specreqs this year. zero tali/female shepard fics got written. there’s only one possible response to that, and the response is:
so, I wrote 3.5k of fic in two hours and posted it with zero regrets, as one does.
by necessity (i.e. the player character is invented by the player and not the game), all the romances in Mass Effect are somewhat one-sided. you care about their problems, they can’t get involved in yours. I wanted to explore the other side of the Tali romance with this one - we all know what Tali gets from Shepard, what does Shepard get from Tali?
so, relatedly, Tali starts off being interested in you because you save her life and you look super cool doing it. I wanted to write something about the (extremely bumpy) transition between Tali being in love with the idealized hero Shepard she met and Tali being in love with the human being Shepard, who is a hero, but also has less emotional intelligence than a sea sponge and more issues than the entire Spider-Man comic series.
and thus, this fic, in which Tali and Shepard, after an attempt at a relationship in ME2 which ends in tears for everyone, start to slowly figure each other out and get to a place where they might be able to for real have a functional love affair. good times.
and, finally, the one you’ve all been waiting for:
she broke your throne and she cut your hair (1/2) for @ferusaurelius: the time-travel fix-it sequel to i looked over it and i ached, my Shepard/Saren Shepard-roleswaps-with-Anderson-and-canon-ensues AU that I wrote for SpecReqs last year. if you haven’t read that one, read it first, it’s great. but, you know, mind the tags. canonical character death ahead :)
after a lot of screeching in the comments and a lot of brainstorming with the lovely @ferusaurelius, I figured I’d write the fix-it fic for my own fic that I had to come up with in my head so I wouldn’t chicken out of killing Saren in the ending.
this one is about two dysfunctional assholes with zero compunctions about murder trying to figure out how a “relationship” works. it’s about getting another chance at his life and trying to fix your mistakes and about the difficulty of figuring out what those mistakes were in the first place. it’s about hope in the face of impossible odds and having faith in the people you fight for. and most importantly, it’s about Saren realizing that possession by giant evil space squid was really only responsible for half of his interpersonal problems.
and man, i’ve written like, five-to-eight fics with the same Shepard. maybe I should write some meta on her...
