alimere

I answered a few questions from a fruit emojis themed fanfic ask meme (lol) on tumblr & thought I’d crosspost here for fun! thanks gaia, pin, and isi for asking me questions <3

here’s the list of all of them if you’re curious!


🥝 What's your favorite trope/AO3 tag to write?

Probably something like "getting back together" or "missed connections"; I love some pining, but I think it's more interesting when the characters have real history together, whether they used to date or whether they had an opportunity to (or had a serious rivalry... hi ushioi...) but didn't. I think it gives the pining an extra delicious depth of flavor.

I didn't realize I liked this so much until I wrote Tapestry, where kenhina take like 50k words being friends-to-lovers-to-friends-to-lovers and I found it to be 🤌 to write & read back.

🍉 Do you prefer to write short fics or long fics? Multichaptered works or single ones? Why?

Oooh, tough one... I love writing a long (or long-ish) fic, partly because I love making myself some crunchy food to eat later. But sometimes this comes back to bite me when I get too overambitious and feel intimidated trying to finish things... I think the best balance is when I come up with a "manageably sized idea” and then let myself get carried away with it and it ends up as like a 15k fic.

🍊 Who's a character you don't write for that often, but keep meaning to write for more? (They're so interesting! But maybe you have trouble pinning them down, or keep getting distracted by another blorbo...)

In haikyuu l've covered a good number of my faves in my fics (though I have more I want to write for almost all of them), but there's a few characters I haven't written at all that I love. Asahi, Kita, some of the Shiratorizawa boys... I've also barely written Iwaizumi, Bokuto, Tsukishima, Yamaguchi -even though they do appear in fics, so I'd like to give them a little more screentime. Would also love to write the older sisters sometime! Miwa&Alisa&Saeko&Yachi photoshoot collab maybe. Honestly I would love to write something for any haikyuu character, haha.

And for characters from other fandoms! I'd love to write a Natsuhi-centric umineko fic. And for fandoms I've written nothing for l'll make myself pick one character from each... I would love to write Yotasuke from Blue Period, Asirpa from Golden Kamuy, Blackberry from Chicory: A Colorful Tale, Zagreus from Hades, Anne from Amphibia, Shima from Skip and Loafer (or maybe Kanechika?!), Dorotea from Angel Mage... TOTK Zelda maybe?! I'm sure there's others l'm forgetting...

🍑 If you could make a connection between your favorite character and another work you care about (whether a crossover/fusion or a wonderfully "pretentious" literary reference) what would it be? How would it work?

So Lion Ushiromiya was canonically captain of their high school badminton club. If Umineko takes place in 1986 then in the Haikyuu era 2020s Lion would be in their like, 60s or something. They're the older, slightly grizzled coach of the girls' badminton team at, oh, let's say itachiyama. And who took up badminton in my niche sakusa/akaashi-in-Oxford fic? It's sakusa. Lion passes the torch to him to be the new itachiyama badminton coach, or something. And thus I connect my two special interest blorbos...

(This is actually a Real Fic I have planned out in my head... one of Oikawa's twin daughters (Kaori) goes away to school in Tokyo Skip and Loafer style and Sakusa is the Nao-chan figure. It's a whole thing.)

🍒 What's your favorite character dynamic to write? (Can be romantic or platonic, specific or general!)

My favorite character dynamic is something to the effect of "non-romance romance" or something I misleadingly (?) call "unusual romance". This can look like a lot of different things! A lot of times it'll be explicitly about aroace feelings (see: the sakusa/akaashi fic mentioned above) but not always. I just love when there are hard-to-categorize important relationships in things (sugimoto & asirpa, shima & mitsumi, l'd even call hinata & kageyama this) and I just like to bring that energy to almost any fic I write.

How about 🍇, but with an alternative version if you want: are there any themes or types of scenes/stories that you want to write/can't stop writing a million different versions of?

Elaborating on the above:

A lot of times "unusual romances" take this specific shape of like... the idea of characters who have resigned themselves to this level of quiet disappointment with their romantic lives. They feel that they aren't built for this idea of happily ever after romance, and that's just who they are and what their life is meant to be, and that's okay.

But maybe then they discover something about themselves, or find a connection with another person, and they actually do find a lot of meaning in it and it does fit with who they are as a person but it is also like... something they thought they might not ever have! But it's also different than what they'd imagined, in a a way. A lot of times this isn't even about aroace stuff, it's just like... finding this sort of magic in your life that you'd given up on.

This is what almost every one of my fics is about at the core, honestly!! I write it over and over and over. Tapestry Hinata (and lowkey like, the whole tapestry polycule), my recent sakusa/kuroo, that oxford fic I can't seem to shut up about in these answers, my ushioi, a planned ushisaku thing l'm going to write... idk this theme is just the gift that keeps on giving, to me.