i think there should be AU’s and then there should be UA’s
because Universe Alterations would be a good name for when your characters are in the exact same universe but you’re altering just a couple of plot points or a few character traits
So, UA is for things like “Everything is the same except” while AU is for “complete alterations of the way the setting and characters work”?
I can dig it.
I’m writing on ~that FMA fanfic~ again... Looking up new pictures for my OC’s helps me visualize them. Perhaps in another ten years I’ll finish it...
No lie I’ve been on-and-off writing it since 2007. I think it’s about damn time I finish it. For my sanity as well as any readers I have. To those out there adding it to your favs recently... Bless you. And I apologize for the wait.
Amy, Kelsey and Brandon are OC’s that have been re-written soooo many times but I’m finally happy with the direction the story is finally pointing everybody. It took awhile to build but hey I’ve been rewriting sections over the years as well as updating so it really is a totally different story than I began in 2007.
If I ever rewrote it for Archive of Our Own it’d definitely become a smut fest. I love Amy’s character too much not to show her a little canon lovin;’ Brandon too.
A big shot-out to all those who comment on fanfics. Thank you for telling us that you liked our characters. Thank you for telling us that you noticed the details we were hoping you noticed. Thank you for telling us that you read our chapters completely. Thank you for telling us your interpretation and headcanons of our scenes.
Thank you for acknowledging us. Thank you for respecting us. Thank you for giving us the signal that our words reach people and have an impact.
I’m 100% honest when I say that people who comment are the reason I keep sharing my stories and ideas. And from those stories and ideas, more stories and ideas spring from other people.
When you encourage one writer, in many ways you’re encouraging a fuckton more. Never doubt your own power, or the power of words.
I got pretty fed up with looking for words to replace said because they weren’t sorted in a way I could easily use/find them for the right time. So I did some myself.
Here we go again, my 3 oc’s in my fma fanfic from fucking 2007. Except I googled real people from generic searches. Kill me.
Brandon, Amy, Kelsey, respectively.
All three are fans like you and me who watched fma, and accidentally transported themselves to “the other side of the gate” like the ‘03 anime told us was a thing. Don’t read too much into the logistics, because you won’t find anything beyond “it’s storytime, bitches.”
I had this other image for Amy but she looked really young and in this story Amy is involved with the Crimson Alchemist so… older-looking teen is a much needed element for that age gap to function.
I’ll be updating soon on my ff.net account. Hopefully it’ll be finished by this year. It’s a near ten-year thorn in my side at this point. I want these characters to be at the end of their storyline so they stop pestering my mind. ;~~; Read it here.
“Knowing More Than Recommended“ is a rewrite of a fanfic I wrote back in 2005 similarly called “Knowing More Than You Should.” Seriously, it was bad.
The premise for both stories is the same: Three fans of the show, two girls and one boy, are transported to the anime universe through magic. The same magic can’t get them home, so they are stranded with a choice: either focus on getting back, or try to change the plot of the series (hopefully) for the better. The stories follow the 2003 anime.
The original story seriously catered to my pre-teen fantasies and ideas of what “good writing” was. The OC’s names were Amy, Brandon, and Selene.
Around the same time, in 2006, I also wrote this awful Valentine’s Day FMA one-shot with a mary-sue named Kelsey who is short, has red hair “sort of wavy in style” and hazel eyes.
Long story short, the multi-chapter fic is my pride and joy, but the original one was total shit.
I changed Selene to Kelsey in the rewrite to make her less mary-sue sounding by borrowing the name and vague description from the Valentine’s fic. However, I knew better than that to make the short, cute, book-smart girl fall for Edward. Too quickly, that is. I’m on chapter 40-something in the rewrite and they’ve finally hugged. Slow and steady wins the character-development race.
I just want to strangle my 13-year-old self when I look back at the original story. When the three characters enter the anime universe, Selene/Kelsey lands around Ed and Al when they’re with Sheska, Brandon lands in Roy’s office at HQ, and Amy lands around Envy. I believe Amy ended up raped by Envy, later rescued by Greed, and eventually impregnated by Kimblee? She also befriended a talking chimera-dog-lizard which she named Kira. I know. Fucking wild. She was definitely my most embarrassing character. Brandon and Selene/Kelsey try to stop Hughes from getting killed, instead she is forced to shoot Hughes by Sloth, and Brandon ends up getting killed by Envy when he’s protecting Ed in Dante’s mansion. Yeah, I killed off the only male OC in the fic. I didn’t understand what the fuck I was doing back then and what potential I had with the story. In the end, Amy is the only one who makes it back to their home universe, and she loses all memory of what happened, but she’s still pregnant. Kelsey/Selene stayed behind, made babies with Ed, and Amy basically was an emotional broken teen mother who everyone thought was crazy because her two friends disappeared and she couldn’t remember a thing about it.
I even wrote a fucking sequel, where Amy and Kimblee’s son gets transported to the FMA world with his girlfriend after discovering the same magic book that transported his mother and her friends to the anime universe. Amy somehow goes after them... and basically the plot plan was to reunite Amy and Selene, and of course Amy and Kimblee, who wasn’t dead, and have a whole other adventure where the son, Andrew, discovers he can perform alchemy and solve his identity crisis and blah blah blah next generation thing.
Luckily that entire story doesn’t even exist online anymore.
Not everything with the original story was awful. There was just a lot of room to expand on character development or emotional impact. For example, I had a good scene where Roy was really torn up about Selene/Kelsey killing Hughes, even though she was technically innocent, and he made a tough decision to forgive her and go after the allegedly “real” culprits.
Again, I am really really proud of the rewrite. Mostly because I know where I came from.
Amy, Brandon and Kelsey are more fleshed out than their previous counterparts, and it’s been an adventure to explore all of the canon characters more deeply. The unexplored emotions and deep character turmoil touched on in the original has been better utilized in the rewrite. In the newer version, Hughes is kept alive thanks to Brandon and Kelsey, but each plot point they change leads to several other changes in the story. After awhile, the trump card they held with “knowing the future” aka “knowing how the plot goes” disappears because they change too much shit. Particularly Amy, who spends a significant amount of the story cut off from her friends, relied on her “knowledge” as a bargaining chip with Greed at the Devil’s Nest, where she carved a place for herself in order to get off the streets after coming to the anime universe. Later, this knowledge paints a target over her head by the big-bad state government, and Dante eventually has this idea that a body from beyond the gate will solve her problem of body rotting.
I suppose because I most identify with Amy, I took extra care to make her suffer, but in a more well-rounded way than the old story.
Back when I started it, there were many many stories where “FMA-fan OC gets transported to alchemy world,” but they usually included a mary-sue (or maybe even two mary-sues) who would fall in love with any or all of the main characters. Reviewers told me that they appreciated a male OC, so I really tried to complicate his character just as much as my females.
Alchemy and Magic in the new story versus old:
Basically in the original story, the OC’s could perform alchemy, but they had to learn it. Which, of course, they seemingly did very quickly for the plot. I cut that OP shit and made it so Brandon and Amy actually saw the “truth” that Ed saw when he opened the gate, but every time they used alchemy, they lost some of their memory of their home world. This made it equivalent and added character tension between them and Kelsey, who didn’t see the truth and can’t wrap her head around alchemy, as well as make her frustrated when they can’t remember something vital to their friendship.
The friends get transported to the world through magic, like Wiccan Magick, which I was interested in during my early teens, but I’m still not perfect at portraying it in my writing. For story-telling purposes, Kelsey is a witch who accidentally taps into the gate when her friends pressure her into a prosperity spell. In the alchemy world, magic doesn’t work, but she later finds that witchcraft did exist at one point, and that it was actually a crude form of contemporary alchemy. After she learns that, she’s able to tap into it, but her powers are unchecked due to a flaw in equivalent exchange. She spends most of the story being a weak little whiner, so by the last half, I’m letting her become OP to the point of a tragic flaw.
Let’s talk romance for a second:
The KimbleexAmy pairing was too much fun to get rid of, no matter how ooc it may be, but I definitely took my time with their relationship. Instead of making Kimblee completely reformed and a somewhat functional part of society, I took the route of making Amy kinda fucking crazy tolerant of his murderous behavior. It’s not so apparent in the current draft, but I want to imply that spending time in the Devil’s Nest, along with her previous life traumas, have hardened her and darkened her to the point that she’s cool with a war criminal for a life partner. Like, she lets someone die in order to protect her friends in chapter 40-something. I think I’m going to escalate her character to straight-up murder for the protection of her friends, because I don’t think it’s realistic for an innocent blossom to end up with Kimblee tbh. I’m sort of blending manga-Kimblee with 2003-Kimblee for story purposes, because 2003-Kimblee really was a loose cannon, haha.
Not sure if I’m going to carry that pregnancy detail over to the new draft yet.
Brandon and Winry have a thing going on, it’s pretty cute. Typical high school sweethearts. While Kimblee brings out the darkness in Amy and she brings out the sympathy in him, Brandon and Winry only bring out the good in each other. They’re definitely the most “normal“ relationship going on. Which, admittedly, is boring. But it is what it is.
And Kelsey and Ed... it’s like a mutual admiration currently. I actually sort of want Kelsey to end up with Al, but I haven’t put any indicators into the story. A love triangle is definitely a no-no, so think I’m going to stick with the original plan with Ed.
Character trauma:
In the rewrite, Brandon and Amy carry a heavy trauma from their past. Amy was taken advantage of during her junior prom, and Brandon’s little sister was killed when he was young. I have read so many guides to character trauma and I still feel like I missed the mark with them. That’s something I want to go back and fix... eventually.
I admit that I focus a little too much on Amy in the story. I’m trying to get better with that. I guess I’m drawn to her story because it has the most intricate tension, and in a way, she is the main of the main characters because I open the story with her. Perhaps my plot plan is the real problem here! Speaking of, I have the end planned out and do intend to finish it. I’ve been writing the rewrite since 2007, and I’ve even rewritten some of the beginning chapters since then, but only in a way where I updated the writing, not changed the plot. Working on a story for 8 years begs for updating the beginning chapters, trust me.
The story has slowed down a bunch because the plot doesn’t follow the series at all anymore. One thing my characters often ask themselves is “What difference can one person really make?” and the answer is a FUCKING BIG ONE. I’m having a hard time weaving a complicated plot but rewarding ending to this 50+ chapter fic. To help myself, I’m taking a few ideas from the manga’s expanded universe, which is barely mentioned in the 2003 anime. Rocky relations with Drachma are going to play a role, I’ll just say that.
I haven't updated in a year and a half. But it's been on my mind. Several snow days (in Texas, no less) have made me stir crazy enough to work on it seriously again.
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