estirose

Well, it's time again to do reveals! I had quite a fun time this year other than some things that made me want to tear my hair out. (I also had some RL stuff that basically torpedoed a lot of the stuff I wanted to do this year, and a DNW that at the time I wrote it made sense due to RL stuff and was not so much a DNW by the time reveals happened.) A lot of my titles were translated c-pop lyrics, most of which were from Youth With You 2, a competition program.

Assignment: Like Cocoa in Winter (Power Rangers Dino Fury)
Title Source: A Little Sweet, Youth With You 2 ("Like the cola in summer, Like the cocoa in winter, you were the right one at the right time")

I actually wanted to write Fern/Izzy fic for this, but then the mother-daughter prompt spoke to me. I like Ollie and Lani, but when it came down to it I identify far more with Izzy than Ollie. I loved "Stitched Up" and the fact that Izzy and Fern's prom date was treated as a totally normal thing, so I decided to base the story around that episode. I have to confess I haven't tried to sew a pattern in years and haven't used a sewing machine for quite a while, so I researched how to read and use a sewing pattern on Youtube and various sites and just had to hope that I got my details right. The story came out easily once I had done the research and I'm very proud of how I put it together.

Heidi and Amira(h) are two characters out of My Time at Sandrock. They're not in love with each other in canon (they're both player-dateable), but I needed names so I poked theirs in.

Pinch Hit: Go down this road till I reach the new (World's Strangest Meet Cute)
Title source: Melody, Youth with you 2 ("Go down the road till I reach the new entrance, stay true to my heart")

I had this fandom on my to-treat list anyway, so when this popped up on the pinch hit list of course I grabbed it! I wanted to write fic about this funny and warm webcomic. I originally wrote "Plant Flowers Yourself" to fulfil the pinch hit, but I reread it and I had doubts about it, so I wrote this one as a 2nd fic. I started with the premise that the one-armed child's parents might not be the bad guys based on the Knight's line that the villagers were most cooperative, and found that, basically, all the villagers were most cooperative. The only issue I ran into was the Mayor, as all we know is that the Knight killed him, and not why. Given how kind of silly the original webcomic was, I didn't really aim for realism but stereotypical "medeval" action.

When I wrote it, I used all "you" and "your" pronouns as I wanted to get the fic done. Afterwards, I changed them out to "thee" (subject), "thou" (object), "thy" (you possesive), and "ye" (kind of a you all), along with doing pseudo-historial verb changes as fit the story.

Pinch Hit #2: Praise me as a bud about to bloom (Zero Escape)
Title source: Flammable and Explosive, Hua Chenyu ("Praise me as a bud about to bloom, yet compliment my clandestine artifice")

I picked up this pinch hit as I love C-Team from Zero Time Dilemma. I remembered the whole discussion that Carlos had (tried to) have with Junpei and Akane about their past early on and decided to go with that. Since Virtue's Last Reward would not and did not happen, I reviewed parts of Junpei and Akane's 999 adventures, in particular Akane's (unknowing? you never really know with Akane) entendres. Carlos still doesn't know who the first Zero so I tried to make sure Junpei and Akane didn't accidentally spill that they did know.

Treat #1: Plant Flowers Yourself (World's Strangest Meet Cute)
Title source: Action, FFC-Acrush ("Instead of wishing for the gift of a boquet, why don't you plant flowers yourself")

As I noted with "Go down this road till I reach the new", I actually wrote this fic as the pinch hit fill for the recipient. I wanted to write mushy family fic about the whole new blended-adoptive family of the Knight and his beloved Warlock. I had fun coming up with names for the various kids, extrapolated that they'd pick up more from the villagers, and generally had fun with the Knight retelling the story of how he met his partner. I stuck in references to the Crossroads of Fate comic by the same artist and all the signs/choices that the Knight could have made. The fifth child in the comic is never named nor is her disability clear, so I decided to give her a disability - there's a slight reference to it in text.

Like its partner fic, I wrote "you" and "your" in the first draft and then fixed it out to thee/thou/thy/ye with pseudo-medeval verbs as needed.

Treat #2: Terrifically Terrified Tourists (Power Rangers Dino Fury)
Title source: My Time at Sandrock ("For our terrifically terrified tourists! If you suspect there may be danger, just head on down to the Civil Corps office to file a report" - one of Sandy's PSAs)

I started with the title on this one and kind of wrote the fic around it. I wanted some Fern and Izzy just hanging out time because you don't really get to see a ton of it in canon. I also wanted to tackle the whole "how would the world handle 29+ years of costumed superheroes that hung out together?" thing. I know there are whole channels dedicated to Power Ranger characters and cast (sometimes in the same channel), so I figured something similar would happen on a larger level. At the time the first Rangers around, VHS tapes would have been the general way to tape events, so I mentioned that as well. (The Mastodon instance exists because I've seen geeky Mastodon instances and I figure there would be a Power Rangers one out there.) The whole tourists coming to cities where Rangers were was a take on the dark tourism/disaster tourism trend where people want to be where disaster happen/have happened. In the case of this world, probably people still visit Angel Grove/Mariner Bay/Silver Hills, etc and some of them are thrill seekers who want to visit a town with an active Ranger team.

Trivia-wise, the show that Fern and Izzy are watching is "Scarecrow and Mrs. King", but I used "Mandy" instead of "Amanda" to obscure that. There was no double agent named Logan as far as I remember on that show; he's a My Time at Sandrock reference. Pineapple on pepperoni pizza is a reference to the TV series Starman (also from the 1980s). And yes, there are some (supposedly) haunted hotels/bed and breakfasts/motels out there - the psychiatric hospital-turned-condos is real, as is the motel where the mobsters stayed, and the serial killer's old house (unfortunately).

Treat #3: The Wish of Not Being Lonely (SoftBank's Next 30-year Vision)
Title source: Kissing the Future of Love, Youth With You 2 ("Is it because of sparks at that moment, or the wish of not being lonely anymore?")

I have a whole entry that went into more detail (including technical bits) for this one, but the short of it was that I took a gamble and wrote a short Interactive Fiction piece for Yuletide and had lots of fun doing so! It was my second IF for this exchange after "Let the Struggles Fall Away" (Epistory: Typing Chronicles) for my recipient in Yuletide 2020. "Wish" turned out to be my most popular fic this year (at least pre-reveals). There was a ton of work behind the scenes to get it to work properly and I was still tweaking wording, coding, and html two hours before Madness reveals. (I kept finding instances of "they" that should be "he" or "she", depending on which relative was randomly chosen at the start of the game.)

When I finished it out, I was afraid that the fluffy bits would be the part of the game that readers latched onto and not the unsettling bits. I was also conversely afraid I hammered a bit too much into the "the Company is always good" and the fact that "you" had to scrape together money to do the virtual visit. I was rather hoping that readers ran through the story more than once as I wanted to convey the fact that the reality you see may not really be true and that the Company is altering your perception/thoughts by having a different set of circumstances each time you restart. Thankfully, the unsettling bits were picked up by readers (also, I was amused at how many people followed the cat!).

Treat #4: Ten Times Faster Glide (Witch Mountain (movies - Hough)
Title soure: Romeo and Juliet ("O, she is lame! love's heralds should be thoughts,/ Which ten times faster glide than the sun's beams,")

I was trying to see if I got inspiration for any other treats, and was coming up with a blank, so I decided to treat my friend tptigger. I didn't want it to be obvious so I went through her Yuletide letter and decided maybe I'd watch the Witch Mountain movies. I got to the end of the first movie and had some plot bunnies that I wrote down, and then watched the second movie. I still had that plot bunny roaming around from the first movie and it was too cute to resist, so I wrote it. I figured it was a couple of years down the road so maybe Winky was getting to be an elderly cat (it's not clear how old Winky is, so I guessed).

And because I did this last year and thought it was useful, a hit/kudos count before reveals: Wish of Not Being Lonely (40 hits, 8 kudos), Praise me as a bud about to bloom (34 hits, 5 kudos), Go down the road till I meet the new (20 hits, 3 kudos), Like cocoa in winter (16 hits, 2 kudos), Terrifically Terrified Tourists (15 hits, 3 kudos), Paint Flowers Yourself (15 hits, 1 kudos), Ten Times Faster Glide (9 hits, 5 kudos)