0061 | in which I write fic for a cellphone game, & don't really know how to feel about it

[straightforwardly]

► First thing's first: I've unlocked this journal. I did this because a couple of days ago, it occurred to me that I... didn't really have a reason to have it locked? Pretty much all of the reasons which led me to lock my original LJ in the first place don't really apply anymore. I do feel shy at the thought of just anyone being able to read what I write, but that didn't seem to be a good enough reason to keep things this way. So, unlocked it is.

► In a somewhat related note, I also posted fic today. This is "somewhat-related" because one of my goals for this year is to get at least a bit less shy in regards to my writing. While actually posting it is all good and well, I feel like I'm still hiding at least a little bit when it comes to the fic I decide isn't good enough for AO3. Posting fic to a journal where no one can see it is not the same thing as posting it somewhere where I know people might see it.

Because of this, I've decided that, from now on, when I post something— regardless of whether it's just on DW, or if it's on DW & AO3— I also have to mention that I did so on my next DW post. We'll see how this works.

Of course, the first time I do this, it has to be for a fic for an unconventional fandom. /sighs

TITLE: On the Other Side of the Aurora
FANDOM: Animal Boyfriend
FOCUS: Teacher/Student, slight Teacher/Winter Trip Event Tour Guide
WORDCOUNT: 1539
WARNING(S): Second Person Narrative
SUMMARY: You meant for the vacation to be a treat. And even at the end, you can't quite see the ways in which you failed.

Now I kind of feel the need to explain how this came about.

Animal Boyfriend is a cellphone game that I picked up some months back, somewhere around the time I started playing the Shall We Date? series. It's pretty bare-bones, in terms of story: there's your Student (who's an animal studying to become a human), whose personality is determined by how you level up your stats, the Teacher, which is basically an amorphous, faceless avatar through which you interact with the Student/the game, the characters which run the shops / make the announcements, and the various characters which populate the events. Almost no one has an actual, canon name, with the exception of the shop/announcement characters. You obtain a brief scene with your student every 5-10 levels he gains, and it's possible for him to eventually fall in love with you. Oh, and you can also dress up your student in pretty, pretty clothing. That's... basically all there is to it.

I mostly play this game for the events and my desire to hoard hundreds of items of clothing that I'm never going to use. They're fun, they're fresh, and they can have some surprisingly interesting ideas. However, it wasn't until the Invitation From X event that I started getting interested in specific event characters. This is pretty much an exercise in disappointment, since you can't go back and revisit events after they end, but I couldn't resist, not when I found the slowly developing friendship between my student and the punk in that event really, really compelling.

Then I got to the Winter Trip event which is going on right now, and the Tour Guide kept getting all blush-y around me, and it was really, really cute, which made me kind of want to write a Teacher/Tour Guide fic. But then I started thinking about how my student in-game is at max affection, and then I started thinking about the differences between being human and trying to be human, and how watching the person he loved flirting with someone who is Actually Human might affect feelings of jealousy / inadequacy in someone who's just Trying To Be Human, and the next thing I knew, I was writing this fic.

To be perfectly honest, I'm not 100% happy with it? I like the ideas behind it quite a bit, but I don't know if I conveyed it well. I do really love the ending scene— it came out exactly how I wanted it to— but I don't know if I handled the build-up well enough for it to have the appropriate impact. I don't think I did.

I also went back and forth on whether or not I actually wanted to use the second person for this. I originally— and ultimately— went with it because it was the one that sounded the most natural in a story where none of the characters actually have names, but I'm also a bit rusty with it, and I think it might show.

Still, it's written now. And I am not going write a side-story about the stern-but-oblivious tourist and the cheerful tourist who definitely knows what he's interrupting, no matter how much I found myself liking them when I was going through the event again to screenshot the moments I used in the fic.

I don't even know how to tag this. Does Animal Boyfriend count as a video game? Idk what else it could be, though. Also, why do I play games with such embarrassing titles? asdfghjkl;