cmbranford | Drabble Meme

I put in a request on

youkai_girl's round of this meme, so here is mine.

The first five comments will get their own drabble (~100-300 words). If you request something, please put this in your own journal (unless you already have).

I don't have time to write crossover fics (and they wouldn't make sense in a drabble, anyway), so none of those. I wil not write non-canon pairings, so any pairings you want me to write must be justifiable in canon (Ichigo/Rukia can squeak by, but Ichigo/Byakuya ain't happenin', sorry). This is to make it easier for me to write short fics for fandoms that I do not normally write for. Also, don't expect too much. I can barely do anything with less than 300 words to work with, so you're not going to get anything particularly erotic.

Please be specific about what you want. Give me the series/universe you want, the characters you want to be in it and some kind of prompt about what you would like to see happen (it can be very specific, like "I want to see these two characters fight over pocky" or vague like the prompt, "stone"). If you do not give me these three pieces of information I will ignore your request until you do. If 5 other fics have been successfully requested (whether they posted before you or not) before you add the necessary information, you will be out of luck, sorry.

The fics may take me a few days to finish/post. I am very busy with work this week, so I will do them as I have time. I apologize in advance for any delays. This meme will remain active until the 5 requests are made (however long that takes: weeks, months, years...).

I will write for the following fandoms and any others not listed here that are present on my FF.net profile bio or in my interests list here at LiveJournal (on the user info page). Keep in mind that fandoms I have already written for are ones I am more comfortable with and will probably result in better fics.

Bleach
Gravitation
X/Tokyo Babylon
Any Makoto Tateno Series/Universe (Aoi Hitsuji no Yume and Steal Moon are in the same universe, for example).

**I have currently received 4 requests and have fulfilled 4 of them.**

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I think it's a pretty presumed pairing by the end of Steal Moon. Especially considering Tateno goes through the trouble of teasingly showing us what they'll look like whne they get older. It's only a few years away, too, so Coyote needs to watch out! ^_^

Hm, maybe we'll get to see more of them later in AHnY? I'm kind of curious how long this series is going to go. It's quite possible for sensei to leave it in a state of limbo with Maria alive and the "war" with Maina ongoing, but somehow that doesn't seem like a satisfactory ending, and if anything, Tateno-sensei seems to like delivering a conclusive, satisfying ending.

Yes, she does like to wrap things up. My theory is that she will introduce Coyote, maybe have him work with them against Maina a bit and then end AHnY on a "and now Steal Moon happens" note. Whether she chooses to continue the storyline after Steal Moon is less likely as she basically wrapped that one up pretty succinctly (Nozomi and Coyote go off happily ever after and all is well in the city of Akatsuki...). It's essentially how wrapped up Yellow was, even though there was plently open-ended that could have continued. Tateno hasn't written anything that long-running in BL before. She ran KIng of Cards for 9 volumes or something, but that was shojo. She hasn't broken the 4 volume mark with any BL yet and I am curious to see if she will someday (will Karen give her the green light to keep AHnY running past 3 volumes?).

The ending of Steal Moon really bothered me. I thought Yellow was a lot more wrapped up than that, even though Sandfish were still free, but at least Mizuki finally realized she had no chance with Taki and Katsuro seemed to "approve" Goh and Taki's relationship.

Steal Moon's pacing was really off. The first volume was okay, but in the second, it was one plot twist after another (and sometimes more than one in a chapter even.) It's part of what were talking about before, how Ratri and Kai are more interesting than Coyote and Nozomi because of their obvious, if not included, depth. I think if she fleshed out the characters more and made it into a slightly longer story, Steal Moon's ending would've felt a lot better. To me, it felt... ended. Not finished or wrapped up.

*nods*

It sort of felt like Tateno originally planned the story to be three volumes, but then the publisher made her squeeze it into two, so she had to cut up two volumes worth of content into the second one. The part where Maria and Ratri fake Nozomi's death felt like it should have been an end of volume cliffhanger, especially since it would have meant that Kai's return would have been a volume after his separation from Ratri (there are three weeks of time lapse that we never see or feel in the story!) instead of a couple chapters.

In the postscript of Steal Moon 1, though, she seemed to be pretty content with the way things were going so... I don't know. =\

Also... wasn't Nozomi's fake death the end of v2ch1? I'm not sure if it would've been the end of a volume because she'd have to fit a LOT of content in there to make up that much room. While I agree Kai's return could've been the beginning a new volume, there was v2ch2, where Nozomi "interrogates" Coyote so...

That's what I'm saying, though. There is far too much time that passes as just "hey, three weeks have passed, isn't this tension excruciating?" Maybe it felt longer for the poor folks reading the chapters in the serialized manga, but for me to go from the end of volume 1 to the first chapter of volume 2 never felt like a long separation. Only Ratri's normal subtlety about his intention to "get Kai back" felt casual. Nozomi's emotions felt forced for the sake of dramatic effect. Sure, he has the right to feel betrayed and upset about Coyote, but we never got to see any of that over the three weeks that are skipped in the story. Some events could have been flipped around to accomodate a different order for a third volume, or at the very least some fleshing out of the tension could have been inserted. If not, the end of volume cliffhanger could have been some other overly dramatic plot device (Viharn's meddling, Coyote's running away, etc. etc.).

The postscripts are written long after the volumes are serialized. I'm sure sensei was in the middle of volume 2 when she had to write the postscript for the release of the tankoban for volume 1, so she probably already knew by then how many volumes she was being given for the series.

Ah, that's true. However, that kind of makes me wonder how she got AHnY pushed through then, if Steal Moon wasn't that popular or was at least forced to be cut short. Maybe more readers showed interest towards Kai and Ratri?

I'd like to believe that AHnY was simply far more anticipated and the fans reacted so positively to Kai and Ratri in Steal Moon that Karen wanted Tateno to hurry up and finish SM so she could start devoting time to AHnY. How true that is will probably remain a mystery.

Actually, you might not be that far. I found this interview recently (which I don't think I've ever seen before... maybe we should get someone to really translate it...), and through the magic of google translation (which is sooo bad. Japanese is so hard to translate) I think she said something along the lines of her readers being very passionate about the series and urging her to continue. But then again, I could be totally wrong because the Google translation makes very basic sense and Babelfish won't work for it...

Yes, I recommend posting it on

makoto_tateno and see if one of the fabulous Japanese fluent members will give us a rundown. ^_^

Drabble Meme

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