2019 in Review

[corpsebrigadier]

Here's what I wrote for the year. According to Ao3, it totals 89,073 words across 50 works and 11 fandoms for my main mostly-not-porn account, which is... a lot more than I anticipated I would be writing for pleasure last year. The breakdown of what got written for each major fandom of mine is under a cut, as is a meme reviewing my thoughts on the whole writing fic process.

My 2019 Works

Final Fantasy Tactics (32 works | 30 fics, 1 interactive fiction game, 1 shipping manifesto)

Time is but a Paper Moon (Various | series of 20 ficlets | 11K total): These shorts were pretty much how I got back into writing. I did a ton of anon meme prompts as a reward for editing however many words of my deep thoughts on changing trends in literary medical discourse I felt I needed to do for the day. As a result, I got to do a lot of fun fleshing out of all of my arcane and bizarre headcanons about Ivalice and came to the sobering realization that I really really like inhabiting the POV headspace of Dycedarg Beoulve.

"Living Still" (General, 1K) "Compositor" (General, 0.7K) and "Like There's No Tomorrow" (Teen, 1.4K | Yuletide): I apparently have a lot of feelings about Ramza and Delita's ability or inability to meet again and have a meaningful human connection post-canon, and this recurred throughout my three short Ramza/Delita pieces for the year.

"Detail Work" (Agrias/Mustadio, General, 2.4K | Pining Exchange): Agrias and Mustadio have a bunch of feelings for one another after suffering robot-related injuries; involves a few paragraphs of sweet sweet Worker 8 POV.

"Ex Ornamentis" (Wiegraf/Zalbag, Explicit, 9.8K): The first phase of my scheme to make 2019 the year for writing Ramza's morally questionable war hero brother having angry, emotionally weird sexual encounters with everyone's favorite revolutionary sheepman.

"The More Ardent, The More Selfish" (Agrias/Ovelia, Teen, 1.2K | Press Start): Lassarina prompted the idea of "Ovelia comes back but wrong," and I did not realize how much this was an AU I really wanted. I've only written a little over 1K about this, but jeez... this is a concept I really want to revisit. A lot.

"Sum of Our Deeds" (Agrias & Orlandu, General, 2.4K | Exchange on the Big Bridge): Teenage Agrias meeting up with Orlandu and discussing concepts of chivalry and how much Druksmald Goltanna's name sucks

"Let Your Curse Be On Me" (Dycedarg & Zalbag, Teen, 16K | Unconventional Fanworks): Reishiin gave a general prompt for IF games in any fandom and this was like absolute catnip to me (the whole Unconventional Fanworks exchange was like catnip to me...seriously). I used this opportunity to write a piece about Dycedarg and Zalbag having less-than-fun times in Ordallia, and it involves a dual first person POV, timed story progression choices, lots of multi-pathing sad childhood flashbacks, and gratuitous use of that funky Ivalician font.

"ZombieSheep: A Wiegraf/Zalbag Shipping Manifesto" (Wiegraf/Zalbag, Teen, 10K | Unconventional Fanworks): Much as Reishiin was graciously willing to receive any fandom's IF for this exchange, fencesit was enthused to receive any type of shipping manifesto, and hence I wrote this massive diatribe trying to explain why my completely bizarre OTP should be a thing despite the characters having never met.

"Coins" (Teen, 5.1K | Fortune Favors): I used my Fortune Favors tarot card spread to do a more intensive version of the obscure, worldbuildy stuff I worked on in a lot of my short pieces; features three different types of minor villain villaining enthusiastically and the least intuitive POV character I've ever written.

"Fetters" (Wiegraf & Alma, Mature, 10K | Yuletide): This is my longest FFT piece that's traditional, straightforward prose, and it's very very very unhappy; it was written in response to noahfronsenberg's prompt for an AU where Wiegraf Folles does not die and everything is terrible.

Final Fantasy VI (4 works | 2 fics, 2 art pieces)

"Mantra" (General, 2.1K | Yuletide): A short, feel good piece about Gau and Sabin visiting Mobliz and Terra post-canon; it involves some contemplations on the death of magic and a lot of Gau doing cute feral child stuff.

"Poisons" (Teen, 2.8K | Yueltide): A double drabble sequence telling alternate narratives regarding whether or not Sabin dies in the house collapse at Tzen. Everything is themed around biological or mineral poisons, and this was one of my more high concept, arty pieces of the year.

"That Imperial Witch" (Art | Exchange on the Big Bridge): A floaty, Amanoesque Terra

"Bloom" (Sabin/Cyan, Art | Yuletide Madness): I'm so happy that this is a ship what people ship now, and I was psyched to see somebody requesting art for it.

Final Fantasy VII (3 works | 2 fic, 1 pamphlet)

"Things are Different" (Agrias/Aeris, General, 0.4K): This is my most genius ship for the year, and everyone is welcome.

"Ghost of a Chance" (Rude/Tifa, General, 2K | Exchange on the Big Bridge): A cute, post-canon Rude/Tifa piece set amidst the tacky Halloween decor of the Gold Saucer's hotel

"ShinRa Corporation: Bringing You a Greener Future" (General, 0.9K | Unconventional Fanworks): An informative pamphlet about how you can be an environmental ambassador for ShinRa; it was largely inspired by my desire to draw Rufus angrily holding a duck.

Ultima (3 works | 1 fic, 2 art pieces)

"Half Sunk a Shattered Visage Lies" (Teen, 2.4K | Trick or Treat): A horror piece that really leans into my favorite portion of Ultima Underworld II, in which you have to convince a dead king that he's actually dead and his world has been conquered.

"Cat's Lair" (Art | Press Start): A quick pencil sketch of your standard adventuring party having the mouse in their party freak out; involves many cat

"A Humble Celebration" (Art | Trick or Treat): Katrina the shepherd chilling in old Magincia with some terribly ill-proportioned skeletons; yet another good glimpse into last year's struggle to learn how to do art on a computer.

Other Fandoms (9 works | All of these are weird)

"Alcestis" (Teen, 1.2K | Unconventional Fanworks): A Hadestown epistolary postcard sequence describing a potential fix-it for Broadway's least fixable romantic narrative

"Filling in Blanks" (Teen, 1.3K | Unconventional Fanworks) and "A Place I Would Like to Travel To" (Moodboard | Unconventional Fanworks): Two pieces I did for the film Death and Cremation, which is a fantastic 2010 black comedy about a disaffected goth teenager making friends with his town's misanthropic discount-crematorium-owning serial killer. Crossword puzzles are a recurring motif throughout it, and I did a neato thing where I generated/coded one into the fic.

"Major Arcana XIII and XIII" (Art | Unconventional Fanworks): A two card tarot deck for Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

"Merciful" (Image-Based Fanwork | Unconventional Fanworks): A Watership Down coffee shop AU twitter thread concerning worrying issues of employee abuse.

"Mind's Special Issue on the Recent Archival Findings at Kaliningrad: A Final Thought" (Aliens/Immanuel Kant, Mature, 1.5K | Unconventional Fanworks): A fictional article about the scholarly community's reaction to eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant being gangbanged by alien emissaries; probably the thing I'm most proud of having written this year in terms of style.

"A Softer Roar" (A Softer World Remix | Jennifer Egan's "Black Box" | Unconventional Fanworks): Some stylin' pieces I did that remix text and images relating to a short story told entirely in tweet-sized chunks and put them into the format of "A Softer World" comics

"Stage and Sonnet, Fall 1609: Featured Review" (General, 1K | Unconventional Fanworks) and "Poesy's Tempo" (116 words, G | Unconventional Fanworks): A fake post-canon magazine review and sonnet inspired by the Broadway musical Something Rotten!; contain very obvious evidence of every Early Modern literature seminar I have been in.

Fanfic Meme

Pairing/Genre/Fandom you wouldn’t have predicted in January, 2019: I really wouldn't have predicted I'd be making any fanworks whatsoever, let alone so many for a JRPG I hadn't played in over a decade. At most, I might have imagined I'd write a thing in December for some book or another, but that's just not how things went.

New Fandoms Written In: I'd written a few Ultima pieces before, but every other fandom was new to me.

Biggest surprise: I was not expecting that I would be writing Kant/Aliens fanfiction last year.

Biggest disappointment: I'm not disappointed in anything I composed this year, but I feel like "Alcestis" had a much poorer balance of visuals to text than it ideally should have, even if I was exceedingly pleased with said visuals.

Hardest to write: It's a toss up between "Ex Ornamentis" and "Fetters." I really feel most comfortable with bite-sized, dramatic little <1,000 word ficlets or weird things where I can meander around instead planning a traditional plot. Trying to pace things for linear narratives around 10K was a new experience, especially when there was so much angst to try to plot out.

Most Fun: "Mind's Special Issue on the Recent Archival Findings at Kaliningrad: A Final Thought." Period. No real competition on this one.

‘Holy crap, that’s wrong, even for you’ fic: Nothing on this account, although I'm eventually planning for "Ex Ornamentis" to have a messed up sequel.

Most underappreciated: I really think there should be more self-indulgent fic about floriography and/or the inner life of Ruvelia Atkascha, but the world is not aware of this necessity. I really love the Time is but a Paper Moon ficlets "Boreas in the Field," "Slave of Nature," and "Grace of Sundays" a lot, but I recognize why they aren't most people's thing.

Best Fic: I think that "Coins" honestly has the best sense of cohesion and narrative pacing for a traditional piece, although as a fic featuring Rad the zero-personality squire, I get why it has all of three kudos. For non-traditional pieces, "Poisons" is really high up there, and I'm just very happy that all the parts of it seem to have come together so well. "Mind's Special Issue on the Recent Archival Findings at Kaliningrad: A Final Thought" is also a serious contender.

Favorite Fic: I really have a lot of emotions about "Let Your Curse Be On Me," which was a sort of self-indulgent piece full of experimental mechanics that I probably wouldn't have made without an exchange prompt. "Ex Ornamentis" is also really dear to my heart owing to its similarly self-indulgent nature.

Risks: I wrote almost exclusively for tiny fandoms, frequently doing weird experimental formats or focusing on niche characters; risks didn't really register a lot. I think some of the works I did last second for emergency pinch hits had an element of risk that other works didn't, but I was on the whole pleased with how they turned out.

Angstiest Fic: "Fetters." "Fetters" was just a complete misery slog from top to bottom. If you are a character appearing in "Fetters," you were lucky to die, and I'm sorry.

Best Banter: The little Time is but a Paper Moon ficlet I did with Rad, Ramza, and Gafgarion chilling in a brothel ("A Disorderly House") probably, although I generally like the Gafgarionisms in "Coins" as well.

Porniest Fic: "Ex Ornamentis" is the only explicit porn associated with this account, and it is honestly not that porny. It takes several thousand words of ideological/religious angst for any dicks to appear. "Mind's Special Issue on the Recent Archival Findings at Kaliningrad: A Final Thought" isn't explicit porn, but it reads as much pornier at its porny parts. So yeah... the most porny thing CorpseBrigadier put out this year is about "the sundry holes of an aged and infirm transcendental philosopher."

Schmoopiest: Probably "Detail Work," which isn't super schmoopy but is much schmoopier than I typically write

Sexiest Fic: "Ex Ornamentis" is obvious the one with the sex in it, although I find a lot of the basic concept of "The More Ardent, the More Selfish" incredibly hot even if I didn't go very far with it.

Best Sex Scene: Do you mean "only sex scene"? The awkward scar foreplay in "Ex Ornamentis" is seriously where it's at.

Sweetest Fic: "Mantra" with Gau and his confusion about babies and potatoes.

Best Humorous Lines:

• "You know... I've really come to think of you and Rod as... well almost like sons to me." / "His name is Rad." / "And he deserves a father who wouldn't have done that to him" (Ramza Beoulve and Goffard Gaffgarion, "A Disorderly House")


• “You’re too cute a Turk to spend the evening in a coffin.” (Tifa Lockhart, "Ghost of a Chance")


• "Zalbag is at the perfect intermediary stage of Beoulve development where he has emerged from Ramza's larval twinkness and not yet calcified into the evil bear form of Dycedarg, and he looks damn fine for it. Wiegraf is blond and broad-shouldered and looks like he would be the protagonist in a 1990s film about a man from fantasy Arthurian times accidentally entering a portal to the modern age and being confused and suspicious of a microwave" ("ZombieSheep: A Wiegraf/Zalbag Shipping Manifesto")


• "I freely confess that this attack is unprofessional and out of keeping with the behavior expected of a scholar of my caliber. I will direct those who have complaints regarding it to read my forthcoming essay “I Have Tenure and You Cowards Can Lick my Balls” which will be forthcoming in the Chronicle of Higher Education." (A. Sorenson, "Mind's Special Issue on the Recent Archival Findings at Kaliningrad: A Final Thought")

Best Serious Lines:

• "You were my first broken vow, you know…I suppose it was somewhat romantic, though, to believe that I or any knight could persist forever in the perfection of their honor." (Agrias Oaks, "The More Ardent, The More Selfish")


• "In the mindless progress of their lust, his hate slipped from him. He hadn’t room to think on anything but the immediate particulars of the act, and in that moment he drifted without tragedy or despair. All things moved as they ought. Each contour of his body seemed suddenly fitted to the one beneath him, and he did not desire anything more than to cling a while to what he had." ("Ex Ornamentis")


• "Everything else in nature lives if it can. Lizards and salamanders keep on even when you cut them to bits. A sprig of purslane grows new roots if you put it in a glass. There are toads they've dug up that have lived airless in stones since before the war. [...] It's rotten that they do this to us [...] You aren't dead, and while you can't live by wishing, I hope you do it anyway just to spite them. I hope you don't die until you've outlived the whole lot of useless old men in this castle--until you've slaughtered all the Ordallians so I don't have to anymore." (Dycedarg Beoulve, "Let Your Curse Be On Me")


• "If you set one clock always by another, you’d know when one was off—you’d know that you no longer kept time.” (Edgar Roni Figaro, "Poisons")

Conclusions: I should probably write an actual Ramza POV fic someday, given that he's the main character of the game. I really really really enjoy using the words "foxfire," "sedge," and "sanguine" and I am always ready for somebody to confuse laughter/sobbing, to feel overwhelmed by the intensity of the sun, or to have a fever dream flashback.