use your words post-script

[ferdiath]

Hello!!! I am drinking my morning coffee and dissuading my current body dysmorphia so we are just. Doing this! As a thing to do! Killer!

I only write coming-of-age narratives. This is definitely in part a conscious choice, and also I think something subconscious because of the period of my life that I’m in. With only the partial knowledge of being a 20 something years old idiot, I think from like 16 onward just seems to be an odd series of coming-of-age experiences, and you slot from one to the next in whatever way they all are, whatever order. Since I just left one (the transition from high school and the college experience) and am in the (hopefully a little) self-aware throes of another (the transition from college and the experience of New – real – adulthood for me), I think it’s a simple, single-minded focus.

In my usual semi-projecting but mostly just identifying with whatever narrative I’ve given a character by chance, Yuyuko’s feelings of disconnect between her and her peers as they begin college mirror my own experiences currently. Living at home with my parents and having no particular way or plan forward makes me feel—and perhaps seem—stagnated compared to my friends who live on their own or have goals and dreams they’re fighting for. It’s never so simple, I get that (I have a job—like one of those full time salaried gigs with benefits) and my mental health is just. Awful. So who’s really winning.

And then I forgot about this . For two days and now it’s almost 9 and we’re working on it. I still think a lot about my own stupid writing.

Initially the focus was going to be a lot more on their second and third years, but I realize that introducing new characters eventually does result in naming them (especially if there are a lot, and especially if they’re meant to be fully realized people, which is what I’d ideally go for). I love the Rinmeikans.. but..and.. I don’t know. As we grow up the things which feel at one point permanent become transitory, both in terms of the people you know and in terms of the closeness you have to them. Yuyuko becomes close to Fumi; Rui becomes close to Akira of all people, and is implied to be more distant to the rest of them as well—there’s a lot of a lost thread about Rui not having feelings for Tamao anymore and the sort of distance that puts between them.

I’m always so nice about how I portray Tamarui, because I know it’s popular and I don’t want to begrudge anybody’s ire and I also don’t want to use them as a proper plot point. The reality is there’s definitely a much more.. perhaps realistic, way I could have gone about it, with Yuyuko doubting that Rui’s feelings were real because of her preexisting Tamao problem. I don’t like writing stuff like that, and I also think it makes for bad stories and unfair romances. But then it has to go a specific way, with Rui being the one to confess and Yuyuko not making any implication (to Rui) about her still existent feelings for her—it has to be a choice Rui is making because she wants to (because she wants to act on her feelings) rather than any part of it being responding to feelings. Hence the time difference and when Yukko’s confession would be and when the story takes place.

A lot of my stories slot over each other, I think. It’s one of those “hey you have to like my writing style to read my writing” because you can’t push through it, and because I think I’m always building off my prior interpretations of characters—Yachiyo is a lot like that in this I think. As an aside I like to think Yachiyo is really good at French, like Claudine thinks they’re going to spend a lot of time on basics but within way too short a time Yachiyo is asking can they please please PLEASE read Les Mis and just do a weekly book club about it (theater kids (derogatory)).

The Much Ado stuff is because that’s the Shakespeare play I’m reading right now. I think also it’s interesting in terms of the Akifumi plot; Akifumi as Benedick Beatrice doesn’t quite work, but there being a nameless actress playing Beatrice who Akira struggles to act against (two years after their fucking problem) because of Fumi is sort of. It’s the choice I’ve made! And I think it’s obvious what the about was about.

The lines from the first arcana revue were because I’m mean. That was it. They hit hard and I’m mean and I wanted to include them.

Iiiiii’m going to talk about akifumi now because (I’m beary) it’s important. The implications of their whole plot are so funny to me; Fumi genuinely fucks up in a way that forces her to have to apologize and reconcile, but also she fucked up like a year+ ago. They’re in their second year of college. It’s meant to be a more personal and severe slight—essentially implying Akira pined over Fumi for three years, admitted to it and got ghosted, and then was a simmering bottle of rage about it for another year or so—so it’s meant to have a much larger lasting effect on them both personally, but it’s still like. If nothing else Akira can hold a fucking grudge.

Fumi being forced to be a business major is funny—also I think based on her whole “I don’t want to cause issues for my family (so I got a job at 16)” “I went where my parents suggested for school” I could see her giving up theater and any other aspirations to run the family business. Shiori gets involved because I’m imagining a good reconciliation for the Yumeojis (but first I hope Shiori clotheslines Fumi arcana arcadia), and I imagine Akira becomes absolutely bizarre to Shiori after she gets ghosted.

I don’t know if I’ll ever quite capture the intrinsic oddities of growing up the way I want to. Recently a conversation with some friends sent me back to thinking about how our dynamic was in high school, and then how our dynamic is now—the consistent focus on vaguely doting on my sister (youngest of the group) and some of the jokes have maintained—but when I look over the whole, I don’t think this is where a 17 year old me could have seen myself five years later. What I mean to say is, I think no matter how concrete and solid a group feelings—a dynamic or anything like that—it’s all so malleable, and in even a years time we might find ourselves in a completely different place than we were. With different people or the same. I didn’t want to write anyone resistant to change. I think Tamao would be the most resistant to change of the Rinmeikan, but for Yuyuko to sort of be silently stumbling along it, struggling with the way we all project a bit more at ease than we are.

What I’m saying is maybe Mei Fan and Yachiyo won’t even speak after the Frau Platin succession! You never know what may *i am stoned to death for suggesting this*

if I ever return to this, it’ll be 10,000 words of Akifumi hating each others’ guts, and Fumi having the world’s shittiest relationship to how you’re supposed to handle interpersonal relationships.