Intent is Everything

I wrote my first OUAT fanfiction..

bladeinthenorth:

And my first fanfic in years … so I’m a little out of practice :P

It can be viewed here

Wow, Graham feels… it’s lovely. *sniff*

Imagine your OTP after a huge battle, bandaging each others wounds.

aphreal42:

Imagine your OTP after a huge battle, bandaging each others wounds. 

signcherie’s tags: alexia and alistair aphreal42

(I love that Cherie tagged this directed at me because, yeah, that’s a pretty good summary of those two: fight what needs to be dealt with and then take care of each other. But it made me realize that for all of the times I’ve written Alexia taking care of Alistair, I’d never shown the inverse. Clearly that needed to be remedied.)

“Surrender, and you may be shown mercy.”

Alexia pursed her lips, thinking quickly in the face of this unexpected final hurdle to freeing Anora from Howe’s purloined estate. Ser Cauthrien had brought a surprisingly large number of guards to arrest two people; Alexia supposed she should be flattered.

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Guh. I really love Aphreal’s Alistair. She captures him perfectly, I think. And I love the relationship between him and Alexia Cousland.

And I’m very proud if my tags on that prompt inspired this. I should do that more often. :D

Imagine your OTP playing Peek-a-Boo with their baby.

aphreal42:

Imagine your OTP playing Peek-a-Boo with their baby.

(This prompt was intended to be cute and fluffy, so of course my brain immediately went to angst. Also to Once Upon a Time, a fandom I hadn’t planned to write in.)

She pulls her hands away from her eyes, coos out a soft “boo!”, and smiles at the answering peal of tiny, squealing giggles. Unable to resist that sound, she repeats the process, this time joining in with the laughter coming from the beautiful, tiny little girl in the carved wooden cradle.

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Eeeeeeeeeeeee! I’ve been waiting for Aphreal to post this one! It’s so beautiful, but don’t read it if you’re not ready to cry!

Dear World,

foreveronelittlewish:

thatdisnerd:

phoenixwrites:

And this may just be because I’m feeling particularly contrary.

But mostly I just don’t like being told what to do.

If I want to write Rumplestiltskin calling Belle ‘dearie’, then I will.  If I want to write him as a poor peasant, then I will.  If I want to write him as a cold businessman, then I will.  If I want to write him as Ebenezer Scrooge, then I will.  I don’t have to do anything but what I want, because guess what, it’s my fic, and I’ll cry if I want to.  (Always need a good Lesley Gore reference to back up my point)

If I want to write Gold dancing naked in the middle of the square doing the cha cha hitting on Prince Charming, I am damn well going to.  You don’t get to decide how I write, how I incorporate his mannerisms, or whether or not I keep in canon character or just do my own thing.

That’s all.

—Phoenix

This post wins all the things!

I have been waiting for another writer to address this. 

I’m so fricking sick of people throwing a fit in tags about the whole Gold-calling-Belle-dearie thing.

Yeah, we know that in the past, ‘dearie’ has been directed by him in a particularly negative way. It’s not always (or really ever) a term of endearment…but then again, it’s not as if EVERY SINGLE TIME he speaks to Belle is he thinking about endearment. Sometimes he has his mind on other things…other times he cracks some sass. And if he’s talking to Belle, I’m pretty sure we know that (aside from the end of Skin Deep) he addresses her with a very different tone than he does others. It’s kind of easy to tell apart his ‘Regina dearie’ and his ‘Charming dearie’ and his ‘Belle dearie’. They’re all used in different ways and with very different regards in mind. 

Every writer has the right to interpret a character’s behavior and speech pattern as they wish. And if I want to write it like that, I’m going to write it like that. 

Suck it.

Right?  Honestly, some people are so precious in their expectations of how fanfic authors should “do their job”.  Just for these people, when I’m finished some other tasks later today I’m going to write a fic and use dearie in it.  I may even make it super fricken angsty too, just because I can.

I think some habits are very deeply ingrained. And that Rumplestiltskin’s use of the term “dearie” is probably one of them. So even if Rumple were trying not to call Belle dearie (which I kind of find unlikely anyway), it would still probably slip off his tongue sometimes.

Parallel Lives: Tangent: Isabela

aphreal42:

Anonymous asked you:

Have you introduced Isabela to the crossover yet? It might be fun… she could be one of the more seductive asari.

 

To be honest, I hadn’t even thought about Isabela in this AU before getting this prompt. I was going to wriggle out of it by claiming she’s more DA2 and I’m writing Origins, but since Merrill made the cut and Anders got to be blue and glowy when angry, that seemed rather unfair.

 

 

So here we have Isabela as a seductive asari. Working for Sha’ira, the Consort, because you meet Isabela in a brothel, after all. This fic has ended up decidedly NSFW, which is not entirely surprising for Isabela. It’s also my first attempt at femslash and my third/fourth at smut, period. What was I thinking?

 

 

For anyone following along at home, this counts as a “Tangent” because it’s not following one of the six Wardens and thus isn’t “Parallel”. Ha, geek math joke… yeah, nevermind. I’ll quit stalling.

 

 

 

Riana was thrilled to find out her petition to become one of Sha’ira’s acolytes was under consideration. Learning from the legendary Consort was a dream come true for any asari maiden looking to improve her talents in certain non-combat areas. But the interview process wasn’t precisely what she had anticipated.

First off, she had expected – or at least hoped – to meet with Sha’ira herself. Wouldn’t it make sense that the Consort would want to evaluate a potential acolyte personally? She had quite a lofty reputation to uphold, after all. Instead, Riana was ushered into a small chamber that held a different asari and a reasonably wide selection of comfortable furniture covered in soft, rich fabrics of seductive shades. The asari was similarly clothed in rich, seductive fabric, although in her case there was far less of it than what draped the beds and couches. Her face was adorned with golden markings and piercings, all of which somehow combined to make her look exotic and mysterious and inviting rather than cheap or overdone.

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Oh, Maker.

Fic: Penance

rumbelleandstark:

pethics:

Pairing: Regina/Archie (Regal Cricket)

Summary: Prompt fill for iwazbornaunicorn Prompt #1:

During a session, Archie ends up confiding some of his own past/inner turmoil to Regina and she finds herself feeling compassionate towards him. A bonding moment, essentially, where the two realize they have more in common than they thought previously. 

Note:

This is the first time I’ve written for this fandom so feel free to correct me on any characterization errors or other mistakes I may have made. I also haven’t written fan fiction in a while so I’m a bit rusty.

But I started shipping this and I needed to get this story out of my system. Hope you like it!

 FF.net link if you’d like to leave a review (because I’d love to receive feedback, thanks)

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aphreal42:

A random dialogue snippet from my NaNo/DABB Wave Two story. It amuses me, so I’m sharing.

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Awesome.

tamsydoodles:

This is a casual reminder that Wicked is just a fanfic.

continuity for signcherie’s Mica drabbles

aphreal42:

signcherie has now written two wonderful drabbles for my femShep, Mica. She joked that I was asking a lot to expect her to provide continuity between them, so my brain decided to come up with some for her.

The first two sections of this are her drabbles (with a sentence of mine added to the first one for continuity purposes), and the latter two are my additions.

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YAAAAY! I love what Aphreal added to this. I also love her Mica Shepard, and I ship Mica and Kaidan so hard.

More Alex and Lista

aphreal42:

For signcherie, a continuation of the prompt she gave me to genderswap my Dragon Age OTP, Alistair and Alexia. The first part can be found here.

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SQUEEEEEEEEE more genderbent Alistair and Alexia!!! (The first part isn’t in rebloggable format, but you should check it out!)

downtothelastbullet:

tywinning asked you:
2012-08-09 03:37

As a professor, may I ask you what you think about fanfiction?

I think fanfiction is literature and literature, for the most part, is fanfiction, and that anyone that dismisses it simply on the grounds that it’s derivative knows fuck-all about literature and needs to get the hell off my lawn.

Most of the history of Western literature (and probably much of non-Western literature, but I can’t speak to that) is adapted or appropriated from something else.  Homer wrote historyfic and Virgil wrote Homerfic and Dante wrote Virgilfic (where he makes himself a character and writes himself hanging out with Homer and Virgil and they’re like “OMG Dante you’re so cool.”  He was the original Gary Stu).  Milton wrote Bible fanfic, and everyone and their mom spent the Middle Ages writing King Arthur fanfic.  In the sixteenth century you and another dude could translate the same Petrarchan sonnet and somehow have it count as two separate poems, and no one gave a fuck.  Shakespeare doesn’t have a single original plot—although much of it would be more rightly termed RPF—and then John Fletcher and Mary Cowden Clarke and Gloria Naylor and Jane Smiley and Stephen Sondheim wrote Shakespeare fanfic.  Guys like Pope and Dryden took old narratives and rewrote them to make fun of people they didn’t like, because the eighteenth century was basically high school.  And Spenser!  Don’t even get me started on Spenser.

Here’s what fanfic authors/fans need to remember when anyone gives them shit: the idea that originality is somehow a good thing, an innately preferable thing, is a completely modern notion.  Until about three hundred years ago, a good writer, by and large, was someone who could take a tried-and-true story and make it even more awesome.  (If you want to sound fancy, the technical term is imitatio.)  People were like, why would I wanna read something about some dude I’ve never heard of?  There’s a new Sir Gawain story out, man!  (As to when and how that changed, I tend to blame Daniel Defoe, or the Modernists, or reality television, depending on my mood.)

I also find fanfic fascinating because it takes all the barriers that keep people from professional authorship—barriers that have weakened over the centuries but are nevertheless still very real—and blows right past them. Producing literature, much less circulating it, was something that was well nigh impossible for the vast majority of people for most of human history.  First you had to live in a culture where people thought it was acceptable for you to even want to be literate in the first place.  And then you had to find someone who could teach you how to read and write (the two didn’t necessarily go together).  And you needed sufficient leisure time to learn.  And be able to afford books, or at least be friends with someone rich enough to own books who would lend them to you.  Good writers are usually well-read and professional writing is a full-time job, so you needed a lot of books, and a lot of leisure time both for reading and writing.  And then you had to be in a high enough social position that someone would take you seriously and want to read your work—to have access to circulation/publication in addition to education and leisure time.  A very tiny percentage of the population fit those parameters (in England, which is the only place I can speak of with some authority, that meant from 500-1000 A.D.: monks; 1000-1500: aristocratic men and the very occasional aristocratic woman; 1500-1800: aristocratic men, some middle-class men, a few aristocratic women; 1800-on, some middle-class women as well). 

What’s amazing is how many people who didn’t fit those parameters kept writing in spite of the constant message they got from society that no one cared about what they had to say, writing letters and diaries and stories and poems that often weren’t discovered until hundreds of years later.  Humans have an urge to express themselves, to tell stories, and fanfic lets them.  If you’ve got access to a computer and an hour or two to while away of an evening, you can create something that people will see and respond to instantly, with a built-in community of people who care about what you have to say.

I do write the occasional fic; I wish I had the time and mental energy to write more.  I’ll admit I don’t read a lot of fic these days because most of it is not—and I know how snobbish this sounds—particularly well-written.  That doesn’t mean it’s “not good”—there are a lot of reasons people read fic and not all of them have to do with wanting to read finely crafted prose.  That’s why fic is awesome—it creates a place for all kinds of storytelling.  But for me personally, now that my job entails reading about 1500 pages of undergraduate writing per year, when I have time to read for enjoyment I want it to be by someone who really knows what they’re doing.  There’s tons of high-quality fic, of course, but I no longer have the time and patience to go searching for it that I had ten years ago. 

But whether I’m reading it or not, I love that fanfiction exists.  Because without people doing what fanfiction writers do, literature wouldn’t exist.  (And then I’d be out of a job and, frankly, I don’t know how to do anything else.)

(Source: onlyalittlelion)