sweet dreams (are made of this): author's notes

[kradeelav]

i threatened a week or so ago to write muarim/zihark slash and ...

happy pride bitches. :D

• aside from wanting more of these two characters specifically, this got started when I was in the car thinking about my personal feelings towards a lot of slash/femslash. I hate saying this, but the vast majority of slash/femslash just does not feel believable to me in the sense of how messy or lopsided real relationships look on the surface, versus something idealistic and generalized -- shit's like a wet noodle.
  
  • so you know me. if something annoys me to that degree, and it's something i still care a lot about, my first instinct is 'okay, how do we fix this then?" tricky given pure id doesn't drive me with ships (though i do need a strong jolt of power dynamics). i started with thinking about the queer couples who I actually know of, and have read about in the old leatherman biographies and shit. who in tellius feels plausibly like they would swing that way (would they have the life circumstances to be able to? would they be closeted, resentful, bearded, some mixture of those? Would they be forced to do favors? how does two semi-closeted cis(?) dudes cruise around their desire in a plausibly deniable way re: awareness of casual background homophobia vs other folks?). what specific body language gives me those vibes. what do men get horny about with a bara body build, the specific flavors of deliciously kinky horny that lesbians and trans folks get behind closed doors to boot, why age gaps in homoerotic couples are a thing in terms of emotional value of what one provides to the other and vice versa, where is the real knife-blade of 'believable but also a little uncomfortable' (because that's where the eros is, whether it be pining or reciprocated. the brain doesn't give a shit about optics when it's that risky, the dick does, and it's hyperfixated to boot, especially when there's that little room to breathe.)
  • idk man, you take the ever present paranoia out, or the inherent kinkiness of humanity and shit just doesn't make sense.
  • /rant rant
  • anyway this list is fun, in addition to this fic, there's a also one-sided pining of mist-titania (if psuedo-incest doesn't get me canceled fucking finally i swear to god...), some petrine-lethe, even some petrine-nailah I'm playing with. Trying to very slowly expand my pool of tellius characters who I'm comfortable writing with.

• the beginning of this fic also works from a very old headcanon that zihark's sexual history has been somewhere in between 'actual disaster' 'in denial bicurious tire fire' and 'oh honey....' (this bullet point is also deeply, morbidly, tastelessly, outrageously funny to me when paired with something else i wrote recently that y'all will see soon. tl;dr putting him through emotional hell is fun.)
  
  • but like, i know FE is remarkably G-rated considering it's literal armies fighting wars and the occasional War Crime(tm), but it's just a disappointing, consistent fact of humanity that there's all kinds of sexual favors that go on in armies. it just feels like it's tiptoing around something obvious to ignore this point that young prettyboys without a support network are going to end up in that situation, especially if they're trying to numb other shit.
  • speaking of other headcanons: a large part of the middle drinking scene was inspired by my favorite muarim/zihark fanart I found on JP webrings a decade ago where it illustrated pretty much the same thing (with slightly more, ah, dignity?). Something about that artwork always felt more believable than most shippy artwork, to the first point, and it was lovely being able to do that piece some spiritual justice.

• muarim was not the easiest character, but he's not the most difficult one I've run into my recent fanfic career with tellius ... that one would probably be sephiran, if I'm being honest. or izuka. izuka was very simple, remarkably funny (seriously), but getting into his head is like a cursed beehive. wheras sephiran has the problem of being so far removed from how humans think with his age that he's both easy to over- and under-think.
  
  • speaking of, it says everything about my lack of sanity but lol why the fuck is zihark so easy to write, fuck. lol. i can see how he'd be insanely difficult with being obtuse as hell opaque - and yet, sharted most of this thing out in one go. i wish I was exaggerating when I say it genuinely feels like he's dictating this most of the time behind my shoulders, and the hardest part is WRITING FAST ENOUGH to stick on paper. or editing it.
  • (kooky writer's tip: I've always subconciously written zihark with a libran mindset, which was pretty delightful when having it confirmed by an astrology nerd friend. but sometimes when trying to write a specific relationship that tick s in a different way (versus say, nailah/zihark), I'll pick a star sign that has completely different vibe to it, and read through a passage from this site so at the very least the mental conversations flow really differently.
  • I could see muarim being a taurus or a cancer for various reasons (earth element, surprisingly stubborn for the former, very (found) family-oriented for the latter, surprisingly sensitive yet has a hard "shell" to get through). jury's still out personally, though I'd love to hear if you have thoughts one way or another :P

• funnily enough while i was blazing through the initial chunk and was starting to stall out in the end dithering over whether I wanted burn wounds or arcwind wounds or whatever, I happened to look at my RSS feeds and literally -- i'm not shitting you -- the first article was about this fascinating story on a lady who survived a lightning-bolt, complete with gnarly description of her initial wounds. what else can an author do but take that as sign that the fates and the muse wanted this to keep going. :v

• apparently going through your music playlist curated from the early 00's does still work as far as selecting an apropos title at the very last minute :P :P  (yes, it's the little on the nose but damn if the lyrics aren't a perfect refrain...)