(no subject)
Sep. 14th, 2012 02:12 amOkay! Hikago Team Deathmatch is over. Time to reveal myself.
I was... Kazutaka Muraki, part of the winning team (undefeated, might I add) of White Suit Society (clearly a nod to our team's love of Ogata). My teammates were Ai/![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
love (Ash Landers) and Sherri/stillskies (Kyoji Kagami).
Now, let me discuss the fics I wrote a little bit.
Because Ai was out of the country for the beginning of the contest, we requested to have the first week off, so we missed out on "bitter". But, as a fill of the prompt later, I did write The Many Varieties of Defeat.
So, for the "salty" round, I wrote Salted. Because when thinking of salt, the only things that first came to mind were the show Supernatural and cooking. I was not very confident in it at all since it was supernatural with a hint of horror and AU and gen with violent action, so not what I typically churn out. But that was fun in its own right.
For the "umami" round, I wrote A Taste of Tradition. It was something of a return to form for me with the porn, but I was very proud of some of the other writing and very hungry by the end of writing the non-porn section. I was confident in this one, but lost to a very nice Kaneko/Mitani that Tari wrote. I can't be too upset about that. ^_^ The idea came mostly from just going, "Hmm, a lot of these foods that are 'umami' are very traditionally Asian".
For the "sour" round, I wrote Juice. It's actually very slightly based on something that happened when I was just dating my husband. (Plug me into Tsutsui's role.) I really liked this one despite it not being anything terribly complex, and I have to thank Ai for helping me make it not TOO Americanized. I got the idea because I love pretty much any liquor when you add sour mix to it. While second-guessing myself, I started work on another fic to fit the theme (only, completely different) called Tether. But being that it was all about Shindou having an eating disorder, I decided that cute Kaga/Tsutsui was my better shot.
For the "sweet" round, I did my first bits of multimedia with Okashi. First, I made a cake because, well, it's me. But that didn't seem like enough. So, then there was a fic to go with it. And that wasn't enough either, so I made an Akira plushie. It was this project that gave me two of the worst burns I've had in my life. I took a picture, but it's wayyyy too grisly to post. I also created my first video. This was the round where anyone who knows me at all should have known exactly who I was. Because, well, CAKE. The fic itself did get rewritten several times until I was finally happy with it. (Less than a dozen words survived from the original.) This was surprisingly gen-like despite the hint of more at the end, but I liked that about it.
Now, at this point, the tie-breaker began. Because we won all of our rounds, we didn't compete in the tie-breaker, but we had intially thought that "spicy" would be the final round prompt, so I wrote Running Hot. But I felt it was a little lackluster and really didn't fit the actual final round prompt of "metallic".
But by that point, I had already written most of a very strange piece indeed, The Status Is Not Quo. At the point I started writing, we were still thinking "spicy", but the amount of bloodshed easily makes it "metallic". At almost 13k, it's kind of long by Hikago standards. And pretty weird, too. The idea came to me after watching Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog for the 9 millionth or so time. Because, so many of the people in Hikago canon who are good at go are also incredibly attractive, or at least they're the ones who get the focus. It was difficult trying to keep a balance between telling a kind of dark story and adding all of the crack that it needed to accent the fact that it was just such a strange idea. I fought to make Ochi the person that he is in canon while also making him a sympathetic character and someone who you don't hate so much at the end, though I did REALLY villainize Kuwabara. In addition to the fic, I did a bunch of super-cracktacular multimedia. Sherri was the one who suggested the 4koma comics. I am not much of an artist, but I think they turned out okay. There were a few photo manips which are obvious manips and that was the point. There are the utterly cracky gifs of Yashiro and Isumi's heads pasted onto the bodies of models in towels and flying through the air away from a really derpy explosion and of Ogata's car crashing into a van while barely avoiding an ambulance... with a background straight out of Paperboy. And then the most crack thing ever... the AMV. It involved a lot of Photoshop (some good, some purposefully bad) to create bloody Kuwabara and to take my two pics of Ochi and make his outfit the same in each one (in one of the pictures, he was originally wearing a lime green sweater... big difference!) and add in all of the fire effects. Set to Prodigy's Firestarter and with some footage of a burning building straight out of Minecraft, I was amused with myself. I lost the round, but I'm still proud of what I did for it. It doesn't push everyone's buttons, obviously, but I got to work with characters we all typically overlook, I got to use my GIF making software, and I made my first AMV even if it was less than 30 seconds long.
I do want to thank my teammates for being awesome hard workers and for putting some great fic out there. I want to thank the voters for choosing our team to win. And, of course, the mods for their hard work in putting this all together! It's been an amazing experience.
I was... Kazutaka Muraki, part of the winning team (undefeated, might I add) of White Suit Society (clearly a nod to our team's love of Ogata). My teammates were Ai/
love (Ash Landers) and Sherri/stillskies (Kyoji Kagami).Now, let me discuss the fics I wrote a little bit.
Because Ai was out of the country for the beginning of the contest, we requested to have the first week off, so we missed out on "bitter". But, as a fill of the prompt later, I did write The Many Varieties of Defeat.
So, for the "salty" round, I wrote Salted. Because when thinking of salt, the only things that first came to mind were the show Supernatural and cooking. I was not very confident in it at all since it was supernatural with a hint of horror and AU and gen with violent action, so not what I typically churn out. But that was fun in its own right.
For the "umami" round, I wrote A Taste of Tradition. It was something of a return to form for me with the porn, but I was very proud of some of the other writing and very hungry by the end of writing the non-porn section. I was confident in this one, but lost to a very nice Kaneko/Mitani that Tari wrote. I can't be too upset about that. ^_^ The idea came mostly from just going, "Hmm, a lot of these foods that are 'umami' are very traditionally Asian".
For the "sour" round, I wrote Juice. It's actually very slightly based on something that happened when I was just dating my husband. (Plug me into Tsutsui's role.) I really liked this one despite it not being anything terribly complex, and I have to thank Ai for helping me make it not TOO Americanized. I got the idea because I love pretty much any liquor when you add sour mix to it. While second-guessing myself, I started work on another fic to fit the theme (only, completely different) called Tether. But being that it was all about Shindou having an eating disorder, I decided that cute Kaga/Tsutsui was my better shot.
For the "sweet" round, I did my first bits of multimedia with Okashi. First, I made a cake because, well, it's me. But that didn't seem like enough. So, then there was a fic to go with it. And that wasn't enough either, so I made an Akira plushie. It was this project that gave me two of the worst burns I've had in my life. I took a picture, but it's wayyyy too grisly to post. I also created my first video. This was the round where anyone who knows me at all should have known exactly who I was. Because, well, CAKE. The fic itself did get rewritten several times until I was finally happy with it. (Less than a dozen words survived from the original.) This was surprisingly gen-like despite the hint of more at the end, but I liked that about it.
Now, at this point, the tie-breaker began. Because we won all of our rounds, we didn't compete in the tie-breaker, but we had intially thought that "spicy" would be the final round prompt, so I wrote Running Hot. But I felt it was a little lackluster and really didn't fit the actual final round prompt of "metallic".
But by that point, I had already written most of a very strange piece indeed, The Status Is Not Quo. At the point I started writing, we were still thinking "spicy", but the amount of bloodshed easily makes it "metallic". At almost 13k, it's kind of long by Hikago standards. And pretty weird, too. The idea came to me after watching Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog for the 9 millionth or so time. Because, so many of the people in Hikago canon who are good at go are also incredibly attractive, or at least they're the ones who get the focus. It was difficult trying to keep a balance between telling a kind of dark story and adding all of the crack that it needed to accent the fact that it was just such a strange idea. I fought to make Ochi the person that he is in canon while also making him a sympathetic character and someone who you don't hate so much at the end, though I did REALLY villainize Kuwabara. In addition to the fic, I did a bunch of super-cracktacular multimedia. Sherri was the one who suggested the 4koma comics. I am not much of an artist, but I think they turned out okay. There were a few photo manips which are obvious manips and that was the point. There are the utterly cracky gifs of Yashiro and Isumi's heads pasted onto the bodies of models in towels and flying through the air away from a really derpy explosion and of Ogata's car crashing into a van while barely avoiding an ambulance... with a background straight out of Paperboy. And then the most crack thing ever... the AMV. It involved a lot of Photoshop (some good, some purposefully bad) to create bloody Kuwabara and to take my two pics of Ochi and make his outfit the same in each one (in one of the pictures, he was originally wearing a lime green sweater... big difference!) and add in all of the fire effects. Set to Prodigy's Firestarter and with some footage of a burning building straight out of Minecraft, I was amused with myself. I lost the round, but I'm still proud of what I did for it. It doesn't push everyone's buttons, obviously, but I got to work with characters we all typically overlook, I got to use my GIF making software, and I made my first AMV even if it was less than 30 seconds long.
I do want to thank my teammates for being awesome hard workers and for putting some great fic out there. I want to thank the voters for choosing our team to win. And, of course, the mods for their hard work in putting this all together! It's been an amazing experience.
