Fanfiction
Listen, I know this isn’t very professional of me to include on my professional portfolio website. I’m not including this page because I think it makes me look more hirable or mature or anything. I’m including this page because there are a few works of fiction I’ve written in the past few years that I’m actually pretty proud of, and which demonstrate my writing and personal editing abilities. Unfortunately, a lot of those are fanfiction.
Metal Flowers, a Six of Crows fanfic. A comedic (but played straight) take on a popular fanfic trope, the Hanahaki Disease. Most Hanahaki stories are about people in unrequited love, whose bodies start to grow flowers in their lungs; in this story, the flowers are replaced by bits of thievery tools, and the lover refuses to acknowledge his emotions.
I wrote Metal Flowers in a week, drafted and edited in an obsessive rush. It’s written in third person, present tense, and features some very mild romance and body horror.
Waking Dream, an Ace Attorney fanfic. A short, sad, character introspective story exploring the immediate fallout of a major event in the first video game. In the game, a major character learns an important detail about a traumatic event from his past, reconciles with it, and moves on. My story in an effort to explore how this trauma might continue to linger even after catharsis has been reached.
Waking Dream is written in third person, past tense, and features some intoxication and mild drunken romance.
Enlightenment, an Assassin’s Creed fanfic. This is a historic romance, exploring the development of a relationship between two characters who have an off-screen romance in the video game series. I was not expecting to care much about this series when I played the first game, and was surprised by how much I enjoyed the protagonist of the first game. In that game we see him meeting his future wife, and his feelings for her beginning to develop, but we don’t see how she develops feelings for him. I wanted to explore how that could have happened on her terms.
Enlightenment is written in third person, present tense, and features some highly historically inaccurate world travel. This was my first real attempt at writing a romance, a thing which I feel wholly unqualified to write.