Dear author, Happy New Year!! For the fanfic writer asks, how about: (1) What’s your favorite character(s) to write for? (in any fandom); (17) What fanfic tropes do you gravitate to writing for? ; and (31) What was the development process of "Stand Alone Complex New Tokyo: Red Dawn" like? Thank you so much for creating and sharing your INCREDIBLE stories with us!!
Happy New Year @birkastan2018! Thank you so much for this ask!!
1) What’s your favorite character(s) to write for?
This is surprisingly hard to answer as I have so many characters I like to write for!
I would say that in the last year I’ve particularly enjoyed writing from Dabi’s (My Hero Academia) point of view. He’s very impulsive and cynical about the world, and doesn’t hold back at all on what he thinks, which makes him a lot of fun to write (although getting in his head for the first time was also an absolute nightmare). In general I do tend to prefer writing dark characters :)
But in 2021, I’m also excited to try writing from Shisui’s pov for the first time. I feel like he has the right balance of realism, humour and chaotic disaster energy to be appealing. So we’ll see how that goes!
17) What fanfic tropes do you gravitate to writing for?
Oh gosh, um... I guess I love enemies to lovers. Like really love it. Which probably explains why I like KakaObi, because they’re basically the greatest enemies-to-friends-to-enemies-to-friends-lovers couple out there.
I also love hurt/comfort, angst, and AUs. I’ve realised recently that I enjoy writing long plot-driven stories with big focus on character development and underlying themes. Usually based on something completely weird and niche, that doesn’t involve just re-telling an existing story with different characters. Is niche AUs a trope category? Because that’s basically what I write. So it is now XD
31) What was the development process of Stand Alone Complex New Tokyo: Red Dawn like?
Very long and involved? Can I say that? ;) But seriously, I sat on this idea for a very long time, thinking and planning before I even got to writing.
It all started with me re-listening to the Ghost in the Shell music. I wondered how a KakaObi story would fit into that universe. So I started writing down all my ideas in a word document. What the themes could be, major storyline beats, character backgrounds (even their favourite foods and quotes). I decided pretty early on it would need to focus on Kakashi running a team of Section 9 to chase down Akatsuki, but at that point I wasn’t sure whether I was going to set it in New Port City/Niihama (the setting for GITS) or somewhere else.
What followed was an enormous amount of world building. I wanted the story to feel like it took place somewhere you could really imagine the characters living, so the natural choice became to set it somewhere that actually exists. And where better for futuristic cyberpunk than Tokyo? In the GITS series, Tokyo has basically been decimated by nuclear strikes, so hence the “New Tokyo” setting. So far I haven’t been disappointed. It’s given me just enough creative license to make some things up, but the inspiration to draw on real places (some of which have made it into the story in ways I could never have thought of otherwise).
I also spent a lot of time brainstorming the nitty gritty details of the future dystopian world. The economic and political situation was largely informed by GITS, but even that differs between the TV shows and manga, and there were a lot of... gaps. I don’t like gaps lol. I need to know how the world works if I’m going to write it. So I researched and settled on a version of the world’s history (wars and geopolitical manoeuvring etc), wrote lists of common cybercrimes, and how the refugee situation had developed and the politics behind it. I also posed myself a bunch of questions which I was determined I had to be able to answer before I could start writing.
Some of those included: What can cybernetic bodies do? Can they taste, eat, feel, and have sex the same as humans? Do they bleed like humans? What about other senses and sensations? How are cyborgs perceived by the general public?
So basically, in short, a huge amount of work went into thinking about this AU before I even planned out the chapters and got to writing them. I know I’ve been a little absent from it recently, but to be honest, 2020 just wasn’t the year for it! It’s a very complicated and dark story, and I needed something a little bit lighter and simpler.
That said, now I’ve finished my self-indulgent story in the Stucky fandom, as soon as I get far enough ahead in editing it to keep up my posting schedule, Red Dawn is next on my list. And the things I’ve learnt from that story (especially writing 130k words in like 3 months) are really going to help with this one. So stay posted! :D
