PoT: snails and oysters
(oooh, I know I have to return comments. Sorry guys! I'll get to it.)
For midorinomizu, because she requested it, although I don't think this is quite what she had in mind. For hopsakee, because this is still her 'yaw' universe. For lesstraveled, because I promised her I'd steal her title from her one of these days ('snails and oysters').
( snails and oysters: around 2300 words. niou/marui, innocuous yanagi/marui, implied rikkai d1. yanagi and marui on the beach, likening themselves to the sea. )
For midorinomizu, because she requested it, although I don't think this is quite what she had in mind. For hopsakee, because this is still her 'yaw' universe. For lesstraveled, because I promised her I'd steal her title from her one of these days ('snails and oysters').
( snails and oysters: around 2300 words. niou/marui, innocuous yanagi/marui, implied rikkai d1. yanagi and marui on the beach, likening themselves to the sea. )
I think one of the characters you write best is Yanagi because, well, I don't think I have ever read a fic with Yanagi is well characterized as this. You manage to give him depth through his repulsion, his expectations, his stone-skipping. It's like he's omniscient, and you manage to put this into realistic scenarios and words so it's not so much as, okay, Yanagi this anal analyser as opposed to Yanagi a real person.
I appreciate too your take to the entire Yagyuu/Niou relationship. Mainly because I haven't actually GOT to them in the manga - they've perhaps said like, two lines so far - my own perception of them is really based off uh, gut feeling? Or Niou's hot badboy looks? ;P I'm not really sure.
Yanagi has always thought of Yagyuu and Niou's relationship with analogies like that. Doesn't hold water, a sunken ship-a vessel out to sea. Sailing with a broken mast, an oar bobbing to shore, the single desolate fragment of beach glass hidden in the sand in the winter.
"I want him to listen to my heart as he sleeps," Niou had told Yanagi then, his lips dry with sleep and his voice thick, watching Yanagi's turned head carefully, pulling Yagyuu's head even closer.
Sometimes I think you make Niou too soft on the exterior, because most times I think he really is soft but never likes to show it, especially not to someone like Yanagi? But that is probably just a personal take and I might be wrong anyway. :P That was one of my favourite Niou moments, though. I love Niou so much, possibly because his name starts with "Ni"? ._. The way he holds hands with Marui too, most of the time I don't think Niou would really care, because it seems to me like Niou would be the oblivious while trying to be completely evil but failing in most aspects kind.
Instead, he is a stranger. (Instead, he is the stranger.)
Uh, I really didn't get that, man. Could you possibly explain? <3
You killed me with Marui and his sloppy kiss. Manga Marui didn't make much of an impression on me, but fandom Marui is slowly winning me over, this though - Marui says as he tries, but he makes a move that looks like he's hitting a serve instead - I think "but" would work better as "and"?
And the ending. It is forever your Yanagi, man. Love you. <3.
Reply
I actually think one of the characters that is weakest for me is Yanagi, because I really have no clue what he's all about, his motivations and such like. Like, I have a basic idea of what my Yanagi would do, but as I once told Bing, my Yanagi is really a screwed version of Yagyuu that thinks too much. so in the end I don't like how my Yanagi ends up; he isn't really Yanagi. He's a conglomeration of a lot of really serious characters.
A lot of things you mention that you like and you have concerns with are mostly tangents of the fact that this story is a sequel to Anibe's 'yaw' and my companion story "tailspin". I'm sure Anibe washes her hands of this universe because I've screwed it up so much for her, but! The Niou/Yagyuu relationship she paints is one where Niou is an almost vulnerable character because he is constantly being hurt by all the things Yagyuu won't do in their relationship (for one, actually have sex and admit they have a relationship). The sentence that talks about Niou walking out of the lockeroom with a tear in his uniform is supposed to refer back to 'yaw', where Niou and Yagyuu make out in the lockerroom and later Yanagi gives them weird looks because Niou has a tear in his uniform. The same thing where Niou and Yagyuu take naps closing in on one another; anibe has a similar scene in her story. So Niou is softer in this story than I would have written him if this was entirely canonly based (anibe's story is set when they are, like, in college, and they travel all over Japan playing games against other schools).
In 'yaw', Niou and Marui basically end up having sex when they are going swimming at night with nothing on. This is a little after Yagyuu finds a girlfriend in Nara and takes her to a baseball game and Niou, in essence, realizes that he won't even be able to have a relationship with Yagyuu like he wants to. Marui, then, is his solace; I wanted sort of play on that with the vast about of frenetic attention Niou gives Marui because once Niou and Yagyuu were very close and almost a couple but they weren't, so I think Niou would be both desperately holding onto whatever Marui is giving him and at the same time careful to show Marui how much he really needs this and not pretend that everything is all right, like he would've with Yagyuu.
I took a lot of creative liberties with anibe's story in 'tailspin', because I ended up making Marui in love with Yagyuu for a long time, ever since the beginning, basically, which is why there is so much talk in the beginning of this fic about change and Yanagi expecting them to be different. Yanagi expects things to have changed since Niou and Yagyuu are no longer together; Marui is worried, though, that things haven't changed and that the only reason he is doing this with Niou is because Niou is a part of Yagyuu. Hence Yanagi telling Marui that he has to let go of things, not throw them, that he wants the rock to sink, not like Niou and Yagyuu's relationship which is "a sunken ship, a vessel out to sea".
This leads back to the idea of Yanagi being "the stranger" as well as "a stranger". He's a stranger to them all because he holds so much of himself away from them and observes them. This is probably the reason Niou opens up to Yanagi and tells him about the heartbeat in the hands thing, because telling Yanagi is like telling nobody, he stores it all away. At the same time, Yanagi is "the stranger", because even though he's in love with Marui, he never does anything about it, unlike the others. Marui, who is in love with Yagyuu and later Niou, at first has a sort of "taken-for-granted" relationship with Yagyuu in 'tailspin'. Yagyuu, who is in his own way in love with Niou, tells Niou in his own way that he loves him in 'yaw'. Niou, who is in love with Yagyuu and later needs Marui, has had his own relationship with Yagyuu, and he is with Marui now. Yanagi, on the other hand, is always watching and always holding what he feels in so that he is the stranger in their lives because he never fully puts himself into their lives. (in truth Jackal is really the stranger, but he doesn't matter because he really doesn't love anyone. ahahaha.)
Reply
As for the "but he makes a move...", I thought alot about it too. I settled for "but" because I wanted to contrast what Marui was doing with what Yanagi was doing. Yanagi throws like you should, almost horizontally, with his arm swinging around his side, but Marui does it almost vertically, with the arc of his arm next to his head. He basically throws it overhand. So it sounds a bit more awkward, but I think it makes it a little clearer what he does as opposed to actually skipping the stone? Basically that whole paragraph is supposed to mean "Marui tries too hard".
<33333333 the ending being, of course, the thing that I started out with.
Reply
& also I think the entire reason why I never really did get that Yanagi liked Marui was because of that MISSING PARAGRAPH WHICH YOU DID NOT POST! And thus I was all "okay, Yanagi is simply observing and later he tries to listen to his own heart because he's fucking weird like that", and not because you know, he liked Marui, and yes.
And though you don't really have a particular well, objective for Yanagi's characterization, I am still jealous because the Yanagi you write is the Yanagi I've always visualized, so. <3.
Reply
Leave a comment