WORLDBUILDING? I'D LOVE SOME.
0. those drunk ficlets I write
Yeah, I have no idea. Literally, I got a comment on one once and ended up reading the commentfic I wrote and I was basically "Did I write this? I sort of remember this happening..." the entire time.
So you know how it sucks to want to read something of a certain type and you wrote a fic like that but you can't read your own fic because obviously it's not the same at all? Yeah apparently this might be a solution, I don't even know. But really, I have no excuses and no explanations for any of it.
1. The HDM Crossover
Kaliope because I like Greekish names, canine because John is a soldier and that's a trope to follow, female because he's mostly normal and because Sherlock's already male. Husky because I was looking for a dog that was smart and followy and dangerousish. Highly Intelligent, Observant, etc, etc. is lifted from while I was reading about huskies and that's how it described them, which also struck me as a really accurate way to describe Sherlock, so I tacked it on as a title.
2. The Technopathy One
Part Micah from Heroes, part that book by Jane Lindskold, part that fic on the meme that gave John or Sherlock or someone clairvoyance, with some of the enthusiasm for the laptop pulled from a) the SCP vending machine thing, and b) the way the um... "Shadows in the Wall", I think the title is, fic had the probabilities sometimes being kinda perky, and c) this one scene in that Jane Lindskold book where the main char tricks an electronic keypad or combo lock or something to tell her its combination (and this is where the title comes from).
So like basically every "let's personify objects" literature ever.
3. The Ghost One
The cost for John to become solid starts at "blood sacrifice" and increases parametrically. I had a longer explanation about this but I totally lost it to LJ so I'm too sad to rewrite it right now but yeah, basically Mycroft stopping it immediately was a good thing because if John was more desperate to be solid, and Sherlock was more in love with him, bad things would have happened and it would have ended up really dark and stuff.
4. Werewolves
I just really like werewolf fic. I wrote this when I got bored of what I was doing for NaNo (which is now a half-completed WIP lololol), and it basically is werewolves how I like my werewolves -- wolfy, fluffy, and in-control-but-different.
Sherlock's a werewolf, Mycroft's a werewolf, Mummy Holmes is a werewolf -- she had miscarriages (v early stage so I dunno if they count as miscarriages) before them because the aborted fetuses weren't werewolves, and it follows I dunno generic punnet squares hierarchy or something but female werewolves can only birth baby werewolves. Everything else gets spontaneously aborted.
5. BDSM AU
I started this kinda like Helenish's TCOAD first, with it being more 1950's and stuff, but then decided I liked the universe in aris_writing's Directed!Verse more because it was lighter and gave the subs somewhat more social power (sort of?) and rewrote the first part of what I had accordingly.
Also I totally stole a piece of worldcanon from a bandom fic I read even though I'm not into bandom, which is basically "so once you hit puberty you basically get these ~feelings~ and ~impulses~, and basically instead of just being generically horny like RL, you're confused and want to pin the pretty girl you like against a wall or you want her to pin you against a wall".
I also gave it a minimal domination/alpha thing from a werewolf series of books I read (shut up guys, don't judge) where a more dominant wolf (I think they were all male too, I don't recall) could sort of alpha roll a less dominant one, but then watered it down supermuch so that anyone can resist anyone else if they decide to. And on that note, the "unexpectedly-on-their-knees" thing I pulled from also the Directed!Verse, House to Cameron, sort of.
6. Good Omens!
I like Good Omens. Um, the feather thing, I didn't originally have John rescuing Sherlock with the feather (he was gonna just break the circle) except that then someone left a comment after I posted the feather thing being like "oh man I bet that comes in handy" and then I realized a) yeah it really should guys, and b) dude how cool would that be, so I wrote it like that.
The apocalypse-that-never-happened, I couldn't decide if it still happened in this verse, and then settled for no, because it was a fusion not a crossover, and also because I'm pretty sure Mycroft would have done something totally awesome and been like "whelp crisis resolved" or something.
Oil on Sherlock's wings is 100% because I realized I wanted Sherlock to have his wings out and for John to touch them and I didn't think Sherlock would give in so easily if he didn't have a legit reason.
I don't know if Sherlock would have backed out at the last second and killed the guy trying to de-wing him, or if he would have gone through with it, but if he'd gone through with it that would have been a much darker fic because that's basically worse than amputation okay, and I don't think John would have been enough for Sherlock to have gotten over it.
7. Asexual!Sherlock
Seriously I wrote the first draft of this in like three days during my week off during winter. I think it was like the only thing I did that entire time and it just like mysteriously happened. Also I think I tried really hard to give it more explicit sex scenes than "everything you won't tell me", because that was really funny at the time. Also I ran it through some word frequency checker and the top word after the articles and junk were taken out was "warm", which is cool for pulling the tone of the fic; I should do that more often.
8. Dollhouse!AU
I wrote the first part (prologue~) in Sherlock's POV and got away with how dark/disturbing it could be because I knew there was a happy ending (I like happy endings), and basically it started as "So Moriarty sends Sherlock John's heart in a box", and it was a response to whoever was like "SO IS IT DOLLHOUSE!JOHN" as a response to the original prompt, and then I was like "Dollhouse is cool I like Dollhouse".
Mycroft is basically setting shit up for immortality, Sherlock's basically sketchy about it but also like "well this gets me what I want so", and John is like, "I... what, this is really weird you guys but it looks like Sherlock needs me and I love him so".
9. Anthea
I don't know, someone wrote a thing about face-blindness and how they thought Anthea had it, and it made a lot of sense, and then I read that Merlin meta AU fic and decided I really wanted to do something with a blog-type format too because hey that's cool, and then Daunt was like "i lost my comic pages :( does anyone want to write john/anthea?" and Daunt's really cool, I like her, so I was like, "HEY THIS IS A GREAT IDEA YOU GUYS".
Because it makes sense that if Anthea can't see faces and also spends a lot of time on her smart phone, then she probs does online stuff a lot and so, giving her an ElJay is like, not a completely ridic idea. And then that gave me her handle and the fic title. I think the post I read about face-blindness ALSO suggested that she give people coded names to remember them better, so that's where that came from too.
10. Mycroft/Sherlock
I just like Mycroft/Sherlock okay, and had been meaning to write something for it for basically like I don't even know how long, but starting from about when I read all the Mycroft/Sherlock fic on delicious and ran out of more to read. And then I read intro's Anthea|Anthony fic and it made me really want to write something in second person. The first one was supposed to be short, and then porn happened and made it longer (that's what she said), and then I wrote the second one because I was getting really OCD about it feeling like it needed a companion piece.
Also I spent like 20 minutes researching age of consent in Britain (answer: when Sherlock's 17 the law still says age of consent for gay sex is 21, in late 1994 they change that to 18, but now it'd be sixteen if they weren't brothers, so I tagged it as dubcon (because Mycroft should have known better and then he manipulates Sherlock a little (Sherlock knows and doesn't mind but that doesn't make it okay)) but not underaged (and marked the ages in the notes for people)).
11. Mycroft is two people
The kink meme is just like, I don't even know. I threw up a random snippet and then people were like "this is awesome write more" or something I think, so then I did because it was a neat concept. The way it works is a mix of the following: playing a video game when you have two units to control, having two hands, and having a dual-core computer.
Mostly, having a dual-core computer -- if you separated them you'd have two functional computers, as long as you had an OS (a consciousness) to run them. If you kill one, you'll have a single-core machine set up as a dual-core so it'd be like, weird. The two cores can both be running at full capacity at once, or you can shift resources off one process to work on a diff one. Mycroft, then, has literally twice the brainpower and attention and capabilities as anyone else.
He learns twice as fast and while he needs the same amount of sleep, you can optimize your actions pretty quickly to make things awesome for yourself. Also, faster-than-light communication is p cool.
I did worry a bit about how Mycroft's gender identity is mostly male, and how Mycroft's his primary, but then it was like, it doesn't matter, they're just empty bodies that he uses (I'm left-handed and there is no "fairness" involved in using my left hand for most stuff -- I do it because I want to, and neither hand has an opinion or a say, so I tried to make that more expressed in it.)
I dunno, it was a really weird fic.
12. the other werewolf one where sherlock isn't a werewolf too
I really like this idea that John is the weird one (also one reason why I wrote the addams family crossovers lol), not Sherlock. Also in the other werewolf fic, no one knew werewolves were real and John was turned in Afghanistan and basically super mistreated by the army.
So instead of that, I made him a born werewolf and made it an AU where werewolves were totes part of the general population and stuff, where it's just a medical condition. And also this kinda helps with the whole "why are you getting shot at, you're a doctor and doctors are noncombatants" thing.
Also I like this idea of John being dangerous, and having this great potential for violence, and I wanted Sherlock to have to back down and not run roughshod over him all the time (a warning bite is still a bite -- won't turn anyone, but it'd hurt pretty bad and probably need stitches). I see John as kind of being aggressively normal (also reflected in the Addams family thing, so more on that down there), so him lying to Sherlock and saying the army made him dangerous, when really it's the exact opposite (the army tamed him), was a reflection of that.
The scar on his shoulder is from a silver bullet shot by an enemy human during the war, during the full moon. Harry may or may not be a wolf, their mom is a wolf, their dad is not. The first time he turns, he's at home (justincase), and he's pretty harmless -- a juvenile wolf who recognizes his loved ones? Yeah like Harry makes fun of his ears and his dad pats him on the head and his mom is around in wolf form too so it's fine.
The problem is that there's tests (you use them on stray dogs too) where it's stuff like, you give the dog a bowl of food and stick a fake hand in the bowl when he's eating, and if the dog gets aggressive you're in trouble, and if the dog bites the fake hand, you're in a LOT of trouble, because you can't put the dog up for adoption if it doesn't have bite inhibition. And stuff like that, so he just goes to a center for aggression testing, and he's like in a cage and stuff.
And he's just hanging out, and Harry or his dad can come in and stick their arm through the bars of the cage and pull his tail or play tug-of-war with his food or whatever and at most he'll growl and whine and grumble a little.
But the second a stranger (someone who isn't a blood relation, someone he doesn't recognize) walks in, he becomes basically this big slavering ball of "ragerageragekillkillkillyou'reinmyspaceiwillendyourawr" and throws himself at the bars and tries to get out and is basically really scary. So for the longest time, he's not allowed near humans in wolf form, only other wolves (and even then, that's because the wolves don't kill each other, just fight sometimes).
But the army disciplines him and teaches him how to get used to strangers at least enough that he won't attack them on sight (he bites tho, and afterwards is the kind of dog where it's like "oh hey can i touch him" and his owner's like "no leave him alone. he doesn't like strangers.", and the greytag is basically that sort of warning), and so John had a really positive military experience and is really grateful to them for that.
Also, book rec: Bareback by Kit Whitfield was a really great werewolf book that was kinda dark and hurty but so good. No relation to this verse or anything, aside from (vaguely) the "werewolves are treated as more or less normal and they've always been revealed to normal peeps" premise, but I did like it.
13. the addams family crossovers
the first one is a backstory to the second one; the second one's the story i had in my head (starting with the whole poisoned cookie scene), and the first is all the backstory stuff that it needed to make sense. Also I like John + Harry siblingness, and in this verse, their split is because Harry wants to be different, while John wants to be normal.
John, here, is aggressively normal. He learns what normal people do, and he memorizes them, and then he does them; it didn't come naturally to him, but he's pretty good at it now. Also yeah, this is just more of the "john's the special/different one and sherlock's normal in comparison" theme.
I see the Addams as very naive -- in the show and the movies, they're very innocent, very lighthearted, despite Weds and Pugs being very macabre and playing with dangerous things and trying to kill Pubert and all that. So I figure the only way that works is if a) nothing bad happens when they do it, and b) they're not used to bad things happening.
So Weds seeing that leg freaked her out because she saw a supernatural visualization (the shadow things) of violent death, and she's never properly seen death before. Not death in the sense of "gone forever" and all that, and that's why she was also scared when Sherlock fell in the Thames and was Not Okay after it. Because in her mind, there's no such thing as pain, and no such thing as being gone forever. So, like, John shows her that because as a grownup she'll have to know it, and the whole fic's basically an excuse to have Weds and Sherlock meet up and chillax together.