@idonotbitemythumbatyou asked for H!  N!  T! on the fanfic meme!

I’m gonna stick to Pacific Rim/Newmann answers for this since that’s the fandom we share!

H: How would you describe your style?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot late so forgive me if I ramble! 

– I tend to keep a very “close POV” 3rd person/past tense, meaning we’re ALMOST inside the characters heads and see the world filtered through their perspective, but we’re just short of first person. 

– I tend to focus a LOT on description and sensual details. I want you to feel and see things, that’s what I consider “success” as a writer. I also try to be visceral and make the prose itself give the flavor of the story in every line. Though lately I’ve been thinking about and practicing a lot at story structure – I want to writer fanfic where you get more out of it if you’re familiar with the source material but in theory you don’t need to and you can still get the story, as a stepping stone to writing my own original novels.

– I tend to do character-driven (borderline character study) pieces with two people in isolation and their circumstances/an off-screen villain serving as the antagonist. To the point where I probably need to stop locking my ship in a room together with the-evil-creature-that-possessed-one-of-them as the antagonist for every one of my stories because it’s getting repetitive ;P

– For my prose style, I’m influenced by Peter S Beagle and Anne Rice for my more flowery and sensual prose, and some elements of Terry Brooks for my cleaner and more informative exposition. I try to be clear enough that even English-as-a-Second-Language people can have a good time and I don’t feel a need to show off a broad vocabulary. I think a simple, visceral word is always better, but I do love to nail you between the eyes with a beautiful metaphor or the occasional philosophical observation whenever it is elegant and not intrusive to do so. My prose has been described as clean and earnest, with an “aged” feeling (when writing fantasy) and some elegant flourishes. I don’t try to tell you what you should see, I try to describe to you the important elements and then guide your brain to fill in the rest with what would be most powerful to you (ie instead of saying “she had XYZ physical features which were beautiful” say “her beauty gave off XYZ impressions” so you get a sensation more than a portrait?) Sorry to ramble on this one, I think about this a lot though!

N: Is there a fic you wish someone else would write (or finish) for you?

I frickin’ LOVE big action-packed, novel-length angsty-and-epic canon divergence fics where like “One TINY but entirely plausible thing changed so now we’re on a COMPLETELY different adventure and no one dies like in canon but it gets DARK before the dawn.” 

Like I’d love to see a PR1 AU where all the Jaeger pilots survived but they all failed to close the Breach because maybe they didn’t get Newt and Hermann’s intelligence in time, so the bomb bounced off the Breachand they didn’t have another one ready, so Kaiju are just POURING in now and humanity is like, just getting CRUSHED with no hope of holding them back anymore so it’s like post-apocalyptic, Newt, Hermann, Raleigh and Mako in a hidden bunker somewhere trying to clone enough Kaiju tissue to trick the Breach and building like… a tiny submarine to deliver a nuclear warhead they scrounged from somewhere to collapse it on their own, and HOPING they don’t get EATEN in their tiny submarine along the way. Just REALLY impossible odds against them but a much smaller, more intimate and character-driven story of the TRUE final days??

T: Any fandom tropes you can’t stand?

This got a bit rambly because I wanted to ensure all the proper nuance is there in explaining that it’s less things I “can’t stand” and more things I just do differently for my own reasons.

I had a lot more squicks in the Hobbit fandom than I do in PacRim because I spent more time there and I was sort of just this side of being a Tolkien scholar so I had a lot of little pet peeves around the language the characters used (Hobbits using Yavanna as a deity) and the way certain characters were often portrayed (shrinking violet Bilbo and DFP Thorin). 

For Pacific Rim, specifically Newmann I am still early enough in my reading that everything I read is pretty much fresh and amazing sooooo it’s probably less a trope but a thing I felt the need to do differently? Which I guess I would kiiiinda call Shattered Victim Newt and Straight Man Hermann? 

I see some recovery fics where Newt is kinda helpless and battered as a result of his possession where I kinda want to point out that 1) we have no on-screen evidence that the Precursors used pain to control him or that he’s particularly traumatized (as of Uprising). Canonically it looks more like they hid stuff from him in his own mind, dosed him with pleasure through Alice so that he stayed in contact with them but maybe didn’t even realize that was what he was doing, and maybe just swapped out his motivations, asking him “IF you wanted to destroy the world HOW would you do it?”. Evidence points to him unraveling from being lonely and far away from grounding influences like Hermann but not necessarily tortured. 

So on the one hand, I TOTALLY UNDERSTAND why fanon would make his experience traumatic in order to create real world parallels like abuse, addiction, or being a prisoner of war. I did that too in TOWOID and I’ll probably lean heavily into that with the Prisoner’s Dilemma/Kidnapping AU. It makes for a more relatable struggle BUT I’ve seen some common assumptions in recovery arcs that Newt would be broken and shrinking and scared of his own shadow in the aftermath and it’s less that I’m saying “don’t do that” (I abhor telling authors what to do) and it’s more like… “examine the canon evidence, are you doing this because it’s an artistic choice or because you just assume based on other fanon?” 

Basically, I like to think Newt’s courage is still there, as his obnoxiousness, and his flaws, and his combativeness. I totally think he’s once bitten twice shy in a lot of ways and probably got a BIG dose humility served up to him on a LOT of fronts, but I don’t think he’s crying and shattered and unable to raise his voice or anything because he’s So Scared after being possessed? He’s definitely not the devil-may-care wunderkind boy genius whose only limits were what his mind could achieve anymore after. He’s been smacked HARD across the face with the dangers of flying too close to the sun. BUT I also don’t think he’d regret it because he did, legitimately, SAVE THE WORLD with that Drift! The question is the consequences, and how complicit is he in the aftermath? The level of complicity is where I think the most interesting transformation of Newt comes from in fanon, because literally every little millimeter nudge on the dial of how involved he was with the Precursor plan is an ENTIRELY different level of coping afterwards. No complicity? Maybe he’s just pissed! And crying because Hermann almost got killed! Total complicity, or convinced he’s complicit? I mean, if there’s anything of him left to have regrets at all, that’s a lot of guilt to cope with. But I still think, under all that, he’s still Newt? Or at least, that’s how I like to write him (because now that I think of it the fic where he’s really NOT NEWT anymore after is super tragic and  a sadistic side of me wants to read but like… a one-shot because that’s not something I can wallow in). 

As for Hermann, much easier to sum up. I like it when he’s eccentric too. And driven, and an obsessive, and probably a bit of a difficult person to be around. Sometimes I’ve seen Hermann just always being the one sighing at Newt’s antics but even in PR1 HERMANN IS SO EMBARRASSING, GUYS!! Newt is louder but Hermann is WEIRD, and he’s sweeter in Uprising but he’s still WEIRD. And even if he went into full Avenging Angel mode to save Newt I think he’d have a lot of quirks, he’d struggle with the interpersonal relationships needed to win people to his way of thinking, he’d have blindspots and biases about his own behavior and he’d be just a STRANGE PERSON, and that is person for Newt and why they’re perfect for each other because they’re BOTH REALLY WEIRD in different ways and I love that. If that makes sense?