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Aug. 15th, 2023 06:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kradeelavtitle: rose bloom and sword
rating: M
pairings: gunter x f!corrin (fates)
after me whinging about it for a week on the gunter tumblr and calling him a wrinkled nutsack, he started letting me in his head with fanfics; here's the first one. to be honest it is definitely not my best work! i fully intended this as a crash course, and it is absolutely more of a crash than a flight. :P
* things started finally coming out when i figured out that his voice (to me) feels halfway between 1) how a friend writes walter dornez from hellsing and 2) how vau sounds in republic commando. vau's a little too controlled/ice king, but he's got that 'hired trainer' shtick and his 'train the clone troopers on kamino years' feel eerily similar to gunter's northen fortress years, and then walter's also got the butler/bodyguard shtick but has a cruder/bitchier side to him that gunter has. also the huge resentment about getting older.
* i did a lot of things wrong in this fic, and I'm very happy learning from them LOL. number one would be starting with a sex scene with writing is just. a really bad move especially with my writing style. i'm much better with drawing smut than i am writing it; there's a few more tools i have there. interestingly it feels like you can go much higher-faster with the "dirtiness" dial in drawing than you can with writing - writing, you have to build it up slowly.
after writing this i raided the Ao3 gunter tag to compare and contrast what (in general) works with him. and personally there's two types of gunter fics that seem to work: the first is like, 'fuck decency this is just going to be a thinly veiled dead dove porno'. there are some unbelievably well written, smoking hot fics there, holy shit. but there's like 0 characterization (listen, i get it, my brain's been in the gutter). the other kind, the kind that i rarely see tho, is when it's one of those delicious character studies. but they're all platonic! love them too, but!!!
in full honesty my absolute goal with this fandom is to bridge that gap and do one of those 40k slow burn novels that takes the time to go over this deeply nuanced, complicated man in a way that actually respects him, corrin, his backstory, the messiness - and still have my cake and eat it what with the endgame relationship. i want to knuckle into that weird sense of physical trust they have, despite everything.
watch this become nanowrimo's goal lol
* but i feel like for a short fic, you actually can't try to do both at the same time or it feels much cruder than you actually intended it to; i'm reminded of how like, in order to subvert expectations with an archetype, you actually have to let the characters live a little as the archetype; it's a writing problem i used to have a lot with Vau when I was much younger and much less confident writing a-holes, so it's no surprise it's coming back here.
* choppy pacing aside here, i'd say i'm 70% of the way there in terms of like, him talking at me with a mic, with not too much effort needed to expand which is fine by me; the 30% finesse will come with practice and time. this fic feels slightly too squishy-feels and jokey for where i want to go ( my internal voice for hardin may have slipped in slightly as well since he's the last guy I've RP'd to any extent) but it was a fun romp.
* both of those men could be a little chauvinistic/patriarchal (vau more so. god he was so much fun to RP.) i kind of want to turn it up even more with gunter so he's forced to actualy confront it given how i'm headcanoning he was the head of security in the northern fortress whiiiich means he was the one to keep corrin trapped there. :l yikes dude. and also was the one to almost execute silas. really uncomfortable shit, but in a fun way. i also want to get good at writing stubbornly messy old dudes in a way that feels realistic. bit of that crunchy pulp quality.
* one of the earliest consistent verbal tics is noticing when he calls Corrin by what title. "Princess." is when he's either lightly teasing her or pissed (Princess Corrin being like a mom calling somebody their full name lol), "milady" is kind of the neutral baseline, "my dear" is when his guard's down and recently fucked ("my love" being a much rarer version of that), and Corrin is when like, shit's real, like he needs to get her instant attention. It's a little cute seeing how insistent he is on those, and i feel like it roughly holds consistent across both the JP/EN script too -- like which terms he switches to if they're married and in private. cute. :3 honestly i feel like 'my love' is lowkey OOC and more a bone thrown to his fangirls in the my room petting simulator (no shame, hell i eat it up), but in terms of accurately finding a voice, hm. :thinking emoji:
* last bit is copypasted from the aformentioned gunter tumblr; also relevant here with writing:
something really interesting to me, is drawing gunter feels the most honest when it's at its dirtiest.
now you're probably all, sure krad, real convenient to you heh (and i mean i'm not complaining lol-)
but like, i pay attention to characters and when they fight me when drawing certian situations. (i hope i don't have to disclaimer this with 'obviously characters are fictional'. to which, obviously. you can do whatever the hell you want with these figments of imagination).
but i like getting into characters heads. enough that they start telling me what they like, what they don't like. what their body language is, same as their speech patterns. at their most transparent, it's like mentally handing the mic over and them dictating what they'd do. sure i could draw, say, zihark being OOC and tune out, but if i'm intentionally drawing him, i know what he does almost as easy as breathing.
i haven't keyed into gunter's dialouge-voice yet (he's being stubborn) but dear god that man is very transparent in some other ways. and the times i absolutely nail his interiority, imo, is that sweet spot of being the most vulnerable (and again, honest) at the dirtiest.
that, to me, is telling.
rating: M
pairings: gunter x f!corrin (fates)
(Ao3 link, mirror on the website coming later."It'll make an exquisite view for me, riding behind you. Excellent morale raiser, milady."
It wasn't the first time Gunter had appreciated her surprisingly curvaceous and revealing armor; he had never been blind. A beautiful pert ass held appeal no matter the years.***
some real one-handed sad romantic porn and pillow talk afterwards to break the cherry on writing this (redacted). Conquest route, post S-support.
after me whinging about it for a week on the gunter tumblr and calling him a wrinkled nutsack, he started letting me in his head with fanfics; here's the first one. to be honest it is definitely not my best work! i fully intended this as a crash course, and it is absolutely more of a crash than a flight. :P
* things started finally coming out when i figured out that his voice (to me) feels halfway between 1) how a friend writes walter dornez from hellsing and 2) how vau sounds in republic commando. vau's a little too controlled/ice king, but he's got that 'hired trainer' shtick and his 'train the clone troopers on kamino years' feel eerily similar to gunter's northen fortress years, and then walter's also got the butler/bodyguard shtick but has a cruder/bitchier side to him that gunter has. also the huge resentment about getting older.
* i did a lot of things wrong in this fic, and I'm very happy learning from them LOL. number one would be starting with a sex scene with writing is just. a really bad move especially with my writing style. i'm much better with drawing smut than i am writing it; there's a few more tools i have there. interestingly it feels like you can go much higher-faster with the "dirtiness" dial in drawing than you can with writing - writing, you have to build it up slowly.
after writing this i raided the Ao3 gunter tag to compare and contrast what (in general) works with him. and personally there's two types of gunter fics that seem to work: the first is like, 'fuck decency this is just going to be a thinly veiled dead dove porno'. there are some unbelievably well written, smoking hot fics there, holy shit. but there's like 0 characterization (listen, i get it, my brain's been in the gutter). the other kind, the kind that i rarely see tho, is when it's one of those delicious character studies. but they're all platonic! love them too, but!!!
in full honesty my absolute goal with this fandom is to bridge that gap and do one of those 40k slow burn novels that takes the time to go over this deeply nuanced, complicated man in a way that actually respects him, corrin, his backstory, the messiness - and still have my cake and eat it what with the endgame relationship. i want to knuckle into that weird sense of physical trust they have, despite everything.
* but i feel like for a short fic, you actually can't try to do both at the same time or it feels much cruder than you actually intended it to; i'm reminded of how like, in order to subvert expectations with an archetype, you actually have to let the characters live a little as the archetype; it's a writing problem i used to have a lot with Vau when I was much younger and much less confident writing a-holes, so it's no surprise it's coming back here.
* choppy pacing aside here, i'd say i'm 70% of the way there in terms of like, him talking at me with a mic, with not too much effort needed to expand which is fine by me; the 30% finesse will come with practice and time. this fic feels slightly too squishy-feels and jokey for where i want to go ( my internal voice for hardin may have slipped in slightly as well since he's the last guy I've RP'd to any extent) but it was a fun romp.
* both of those men could be a little chauvinistic/patriarchal (vau more so. god he was so much fun to RP.) i kind of want to turn it up even more with gunter so he's forced to actualy confront it given how i'm headcanoning he was the head of security in the northern fortress whiiiich means he was the one to keep corrin trapped there. :l yikes dude. and also was the one to almost execute silas. really uncomfortable shit, but in a fun way. i also want to get good at writing stubbornly messy old dudes in a way that feels realistic. bit of that crunchy pulp quality.
* one of the earliest consistent verbal tics is noticing when he calls Corrin by what title. "Princess." is when he's either lightly teasing her or pissed (Princess Corrin being like a mom calling somebody their full name lol), "milady" is kind of the neutral baseline, "my dear" is when his guard's down and recently fucked ("my love" being a much rarer version of that), and Corrin is when like, shit's real, like he needs to get her instant attention. It's a little cute seeing how insistent he is on those, and i feel like it roughly holds consistent across both the JP/EN script too -- like which terms he switches to if they're married and in private. cute. :3 honestly i feel like 'my love' is lowkey OOC and more a bone thrown to his fangirls in the my room petting simulator (no shame, hell i eat it up), but in terms of accurately finding a voice, hm. :thinking emoji:
* last bit is copypasted from the aformentioned gunter tumblr; also relevant here with writing:
something really interesting to me, is drawing gunter feels the most honest when it's at its dirtiest.
now you're probably all, sure krad, real convenient to you heh (and i mean i'm not complaining lol-)
but like, i pay attention to characters and when they fight me when drawing certian situations. (i hope i don't have to disclaimer this with 'obviously characters are fictional'. to which, obviously. you can do whatever the hell you want with these figments of imagination).
but i like getting into characters heads. enough that they start telling me what they like, what they don't like. what their body language is, same as their speech patterns. at their most transparent, it's like mentally handing the mic over and them dictating what they'd do. sure i could draw, say, zihark being OOC and tune out, but if i'm intentionally drawing him, i know what he does almost as easy as breathing.
i haven't keyed into gunter's dialouge-voice yet (he's being stubborn) but dear god that man is very transparent in some other ways. and the times i absolutely nail his interiority, imo, is that sweet spot of being the most vulnerable (and again, honest) at the dirtiest.
that, to me, is telling.
