Oh, the worldbuilding is so much fun.

Subject: Oh, the worldbuilding is so much fun.
Author: Huinesoron
Posted on: 2021-06-29 13:30:14 UTC

The most fun I've had with PPC writing for years was working on the Guide to La Calédonie. It was this madcap game of figuring out a plausible timeline for the place, and what it would actually be like to live in a multiversal city in monkey-puzzle rainforest-slash-mountaintop. Plus playing around with different viewpoints and writing styles. I do still intend to write missions, but, like... one of those has been in the works since well before you left. :O

(Oh, I need to add Kayleigh and the kids rambling on about the beaches... fun stuff.)

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[interlude?] And So My World Awoke, Pts. 1 & 2 by Lily Winterwood on 2021-06-26 05:38:43 UTC Writing Plug Reply

Sometime in summer (? I think?) of 2008, I joined the Board. Board veterans from that time might remember me as being kinda overenthusiastic and obnoxious, with three characters: Christianne (made by my childhood friend), Lily, and Eledhwen.

On 8/8/8, around the time of my first Permission Request, Nesh told me she was more interested in seeing Eledhwen as Christianne's partner, rather than Lily. Looking back at that from now, I find the date fittingly (and hilariously) auspicious.

This April, I started working on a backstory stitch-up fix-it fic for Eledhwen and Christianne's relationship, digging into my oldest and cringiest writing for the PPC and bringing in a little bit more logic and character development. It's designed to work like hS's Agentshipping series, where it's just dipping in and out of the spaces in between existing writing I did for E and C, so I don't know how coherent it is, but I hope it's entertaining to read nonetheless. And for those who did enjoy E and C when they were active, I hope it provides some closure on their strange trajectory between the first missions I posted of them and them ending up in a relationship in 2013.

And So My World Awoke

I have 4 chapters of this, written up to the end of the International Academy of Hetalia Fanfiction's 2nd year (so before E and C started doing BBC Sherlock missions and being more openly flirty to the point they end up getting together after the 2013 Blackout). I'll be sure to let you guys know when pts. 3 and 4 go up.

(This is also an I Guess I'm Back? sorta post because I do have a mission in beta that will be E and C's last, and will introduce a new DBS agent. If Sexy Times With Wangxian returns, the DBS agent will be used, so I've got some other interlude stuff -- cowrites with Zing, illustrations -- to help pass the torch, so to speak. So yeah, keep your eyes peeled!)

Oh gods. XD by Huinesoron on 2021-06-29 10:54:47 UTC Reply

Christianne chuckled. “Were you expecting someone like Miss Cam?” she wondered. “Or Dr Huinesoron?”

“I have no idea who Dr Huinesoron is,” admitted Eledhwen, “though if he is anything like Agent Huinesoron…”

“He may even look like Dafydd Illian,” finished Christianne. Eledhwen snorted.

“You and Mr Illian,” she teased. “Should I warn Constance?”

I love it. I love it XD ^_^

A-hem.

I really enjoyed writing the Agentshipping stories back in't'day, and I really enjoyed reading this version. Lux's bet, the appropriately random Sindarin, all the fill-in details on things like New Cal and the Factories which have been cluttering up the back of my mind for more than a decade now (good grief).

Contrary to the wishes of Captain Dandy and the Weeds, Christianne did something stupid.

hS

((Technically I think there would have to be some timeline jiggerypokery going on for Christianne to know of Dr hS at this point; but then, OFUDisc is entirely made of timeline jiggerypokery, so I can't exactly complain!))

And Another Thing: by Huinesoron on 2021-06-30 07:30:57 UTC Reply

...one of the first (at the time) canon F/F agent pairings at the PPC.

Did you actually manage to find something that hS didn't do first? I think you might actually have! I've done it since - most notably in Agent Kaitlyn's backstory - but back in the day my own-agent shipping was all targetted at getting genetic offspring for the family trees.

So... well done? :D I guess?

hS

I think back then... by Lily Winterwood on 2021-06-30 07:41:38 UTC Edited Reply

The closest it got was Trojie and Pads, and the interlude in which they got together they were both in cis dude bodies at the time? The Wiki also mentions it's a sorta thing, as opposed to E and C being Definitely ~~Girlfriends~~ Wives.

I mean, I sorta disclaim by saying one of as opposed to the, but yeah most canon PPC pairings back then were m/f, with m/m and f/f being a bit more relegated to non-canon content/badfic games content. And also, for me personally, I definitely was not shipping E/C in 2008, partly because C was still very much tied to my friend in my mind then and mostly because baby Lily Did Not Do the Slashing. Now that Christianne's more of her own person (~~and older Lily barely consumes anything that doesn't have at least some LGBT rep or a Big Slash Pairing in it~~), I have no compunctions hahaha

That being said I think if you dig through my old Board posts you could probably watch me switch from "ew E/C is OOC" in 2008 to "I Could Be Persuaded" in ~2011 so that's... pretty funny

Oh wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey! by Lily Winterwood on 2021-06-29 12:08:34 UTC Reply

Parts 3 & 4 actually mentions timeline nonsense for 1) why Lori and Bill were giving directions to the Floaters that show up at the end of IAHF2, who had been sent out on their trip at the beginning of 2008 when Lori and Bill had arrived in fall of 2008, and 2) the DES not noticing the LOMSF break-in that nabbed the Chronotransporter's component parts until... weirdly later, so I guess Christianne knowing about Dr Huinesoron falls under that umbrella lol

I'm glad you like it so far and that I've been doing some fill-in-the-worldbuilding there! Honestly it's not mission-writing that's brought me back so much as the opportunity to collaboratively worldbuild, so hopefully this time I might stick around and do some more of that...

Oh, the worldbuilding is so much fun. by Huinesoron on 2021-06-29 13:30:14 UTC Reply

The most fun I've had with PPC writing for years was working on the Guide to La Calédonie. It was this madcap game of figuring out a plausible timeline for the place, and what it would actually be like to live in a multiversal city in monkey-puzzle rainforest-slash-mountaintop. Plus playing around with different viewpoints and writing styles. I do still intend to write missions, but, like... one of those has been in the works since well before you left. :O

(Oh, I need to add Kayleigh and the kids rambling on about the beaches... fun stuff.)

hS

Ah, I think I'm done on the mission front, save STWWX. by Lily Winterwood on 2021-06-29 13:38:35 UTC Reply

Which I think got taken off of AO3 again, so I might be off the hook there because I am not jumping through the author's hoops to read it on their Dreamwidth. :P

I like the guide to New Cal! It sorta served as a starting point this time around since y'all added in more infrastructure from the last time I was here. I'll be diving into some of the New Cal stuff I added in other interludes, like Nakamura's, haha. And yes, the writing from different viewpoints is a lot of fun! I have an entire series on AO3 that's just all of my fics that use multimedia snippets, so that tells you just about how much I rely on them as a writer haha

Re: snippets by doctorlit on 2021-06-29 01:42:33 UTC Reply

I very much enjoyed this! I love these kind of fill-in-the-blank stories, since they often make past history relevant again, and give more context to the present day. With chapter one, I like how you use the context of Christianne's past partners and the immediate aftermath of the HQ invasion to influence Christianne's initial view of Eledhwen, only for that framing to break down over time as they worked together. Bringing up the Mary Sue factories also makes Lilith's rise as an antagonist feel more natural than I had previously thought of it from the in-universe time frame.

The epistolary segments fit in quite well with the overall snippet structure, and the letter contents themselves are quite sweet and thoughtful. I get the feeling they're being a bit more "honest" with their feelings in the letters, like a bit more of their subconscious feelings for each other are slipping onto the page?

I'm excited to see more, and also looking forward to seeing some resolution regarding the IAHF invasion. I've always been low-key worried about the folks there in the back of my mind . . .

Incidentally, I've never noticed Christianne and Eledhwen's RC number before. Does that spell something I'm just not seeing, or . . . ?

—doctorlit

Re: the RC number by Lily Winterwood on 2021-06-29 01:46:45 UTC Edited Reply

Oh lord that was me in 8th grade trying to find a ridiculous number that I could actually remember, so it ended up being the name of a friend typed in l33tspeak hahaha. And then I was told it had to begin with a number, so I tacked on 9 haha.

The DBS agent in the mission I have in beta is in RC 1774 for similar reasons: 1774 in Chinese sounds like "let's all go die together" and I think it would bother him a lot :'D

Edited to add: Thank you for reading! I'm glad it's been entertaining for you so far. And I'm glad I've been able to explain/shed light on things that, honestly, back then I hadn't even really thought about. Lilith as an antagonist was originally just... I had this random evil clone of Eledhwen lying around, she even had a PPC trading card but no actual story to... be involved in? And so, bam.

I guess I was lucky to have joined just after the Macrovirus/LOMSF invasion so that that was something I could play with wrt character backstory this time around, now that I knew how to do that hahaha. LOMSF is a very interesting set of enemy groups that I know I personally enjoy working with because other people's fics aren't dragged into it. When I wrote IAHF, I actually ran around Deviantart asking people to borrow their troll Hetalia OCs as antagonists.

Anyway, the IAHF conclusion stuff in pts 3 and 4 will go up once I post my mission because there's some characters in the present day scenes who have origins in the mission. So that's something to look forward to haha

Semi-OT: Trading cards. ^_^ by Huinesoron on 2021-06-29 11:02:58 UTC Reply

Oh stars that was a weird time for me. I'm still sad I never got a decent game out of them, though it... may have worked better had I ever played a TCG before making them. ^_^

Anyway, most of the links for the TCG are borked to Mandos and gone, but the experimental pack generator actually still kinda functions, and so I thought I'd drop in your three cards for nostalgia purposes:

Eledhwen's a Rare card! :D

hS

Oh gosh oh wow. by Lily Winterwood on 2021-06-29 12:14:59 UTC Reply

I actually remember printing out the little cards back in the day! As well as trying to replicate the board game, you know, the one in Rivendell? Somewhere at my mom's there's an old binder with all of my old PPC stuff in it, if I haven't tossed it out during one of my "can't look at old stuff ew" purges hahah

Speaking of nostalgia:

I do believe I snuck Christianne behind the Tomb of the Unknown PPC Agent in that picture, hahaha, oh silly me in 2008