headstone | Reading

nnozomi posting in

Furuya Kiyoko was born in Kumamoto in 1875; her maiden name was Ihoshi. She was two years old when the Satsuma Rebellion broke out in Kyushu, a civil war which left Kumamoto Prefecture devastated. Relying on the Japan-Hawaii Immigration Convention of 1886, her family left Japan when she was eleven to work as laborers on the Hawaii sugar cane plantations.

The conditions there were appalling, with Japanese laborers living in camps and frequently beaten while working out their indentures. Kiyoko’s family stayed on after their contracts expired, unable to earn enough money to go home as inflation rose in Japan. It was there that she met Furuya Komahei, a shopboy for a white-owned liquor store who spoke fluent English and was also a black belt in judo. She was probably twenty or in her late teens when they married, opening a general goods store on Honolulu’s bustling King Street; she did the accounting and kept the store solvent. Over the next few years, Hawaii’s sovereignty was to fall in a coup d’etat followed by annexation to the United States; Kiyoko’s personal life was also upset when Komahei was arrested in 1896 for involvement in opium smuggling, caught up with the maverick Japanese missionary and coffee planter Hoshina Ken’ichiro.

As Hawaii became an ever more unfavorable environment for the Japanese, Kiyoko and Komahei picked up and went. First they returned to Japan, where they procured a large quantity of Japanese goods and headed for Cape Town in South Africa, arriving there in 1897 after a six-month journey via Hong Kong, Singapore, and Bombay.

They settled down to found the Mikado Shokai trading house. Although trouble seemed to follow them, with the Boer War breaking out in 1898, orders placed by the English military helped keep their new business afloat. They also served as brokers for the British Museum when it purchased East Asian antiques. Eventually they were employing over a dozen people, two thirds of them white. Kiyoko, almost the only Japanese woman in Africa [citation needed, sorry, I don’t know how to go about researching this] at this point in time, served as a big sister and mother to the young Japanese men working there, while taking an active part in running the store and traveling back and forth to Japan to procure goods.

By the age of forty, in 1915, she was homesick enough to settle in Japan for good. Komahei joined her permanently eight years later as British prejudice against the Japanese worsened; he built them a mansion in fashionable Hakone and continued to do business under the Mikado name, until the Great Kanto Earthquake killed him and his employees at work in Yokohama in September 1923. Kiyoko moved in with Komahei’s niece and her husband, who had worked with them in Cape Town, and adopted one of their children. Decorated by the government for her charitable donations (including the elementary school in Komahei’s home village as well as temples and shrines), she died in 1929 at the age of fifty-four.

Sources
https://www.ndl.go.jp/kaleido/e/entry/14/1.html (English) There are not a lot of sources which mention Kiyoko or even Komahei that I could find online; this touches only briefly on Komahei’s life but offers a lot of interesting background and does include a picture of both of them and Komahei’s niece Kimiko.

mekare posting in

smallweb

I stumbled across this essay on community organisation and core web vs. peripheral web structures today. A fascinating read! It's been written by former organisers of a webring called yesterweb which seemed to have exploded in popularity before being shut down. The reflection on this experience (and general web trends) is really interesting.

Some excerpts:

The peripheral web can be described as the outskirts of the core web, with platforms such as Mastodon, SpaceHey, Neocities, Discord and IRC chatrooms, Matrix rooms, various imageboards, and others, including various functional clones of core web applications. It is the digital countryside of the corporate megalopolis. Advertising, sales, and data collection are substantially reduced if not entirely eliminated, providing better conditions for people to socialize in and a healthier experience overall. It is composed of web platforms that are hosted on separate infrastructure from the core web by individuals or organizations with various sources of funding. The peripheral web is discovered largely through word-of-mouth and personal research. In other words, bridging the peripheral web to the core web takes a significant amount of effort: the vast majority of internet users remain unaware of its existence.

The rapid increase in popularity of platforms like Neocities and Spacehey were a strong indicator that nostalgia was a significant force driving migration to the peripheral web in recent years. The community was first created when pandemic restrictions were just starting to loosen up. Nostalgia was often the first thing that stood out and appealed to new members: there is comfort in nostalgia, especially during particularly rough times.

However, Nostalgia would often lead to a regressive attitude within the space that made it difficult to achieve any sort of change. Users focused highly on nostalgia would value aesthetics as their primary focus which would lead to a distrust of new tools that did not meet their nostalgic criteria.

The organization began as a handful of individuals working to discover and address the needs of the community. As the community grew larger, it transformed into a loose organization composed of staff members. Finally, a well-defined organization formed at the core of the staff that created a distinction between organizers.

In its loosely organized phase, attempts were made to draw the whole community into organizing efforts. Results were poor because of low participation, and because the participants were mostly composed of the newest members who had the least knowledge about the community. We could not ensure an accurate representation from this setup, so we moved the decision-making as a responsibility for staff members. This would not work out either as moderators had varying levels of commitment and we could not reasonably expect them to take a greater responsibility.

maevedarcy posting in

little_details

Hello, everyone!

So, I'm writing a fic where a plane disappears in the US. As in, it drops from all radars for a few minutes and it's presumed down for a few hours. I need to know any plausible flight routes within the US from Boston where this could happen. Any stretches of land where a pilot could make an emergency landing and the plane still be presumed down for like an hour or three is good for me.

ketraia

I didn't do last year's year in books because I felt like I had nothing interesting to say but it occurs to me now I could have just listed them. oh well. here's 2025.

( books read: )

headstone posting in

fancoded

Hi! First time long time.

I'm working on a personal fanworks archive site, and I'd like a section to be devoted to fanmixes, with audio files (that I own locally & would make available to the web server) embedded in a playlist format.

My understanding is that base HTML has fairly robust audio embedding/playing capabilities of its own, but I want to get a sense for whether there are other tools worth looking into, whether because they make for a better music playing experience, easier administration, etc.

I'm interested in any templates, tools, special-purpose themes for a SSG, or just plain tips & tricks that might be relevant for this purpose. Thanks!

forestofglory

Time to reflect a little on the media I read and watched in 2025. My reading goal for 2025 was “Reading Joyfully”. I think this worked out ok – I started out putting a lot of pressure on myself about it and stressing out, but then I backed off and used it as an excuse to think about how reading fits into my life these days.

I was somewhat hoping I could get back to really engaging with new to me SFF, and for the most part that didn’t happen. There were a couple of weeks in there where I was sleeping way better than I generally manage these days and I read several new to me books! It was great! So I think part of my problem is that I’m just not well rested enough to engage with new to me stuff very much. Which is sad, but pushing isn’t going to make me happy either.

Then after the thing with the flood damage, when the whole house was a mess, I was struggling to focus on much of anything. I ended up just reading a ton of fic, so much fic.* Which has been delightful. The comfort of the same thing again but different this time is really not appreciated enough by critics. This reading phase has been very joyful!

In 2025 I read even fewer books than I read the last several years (57) but unlike the last couple of years I don’t feel bad about it. Which was the real point of my reading joyfully goal. I’m more at peace with who I am as a reader these days and that’s really nice, even if I might never be the same kind of reader I was before the pandemic happened.

Another trend that defined my 2025 media was crossdressing girls. I love, love, love the trope of girls who disguise themselves and boys to go out into the world and do things that they wouldn’t be allowed to do. This is a trope that English language media hasn’t really been doing much with recently, but luckily for me it's popular in Asian dramas. It’s such a comfort trope for me, and I decided to really dive into this trope and watched many dramas featuring it. (And read a couple of books too)

I also continue to watch many silly Chinese reality shows, another thing that I find relaxing. Media has really was a source of comfort for me in 2025.

In terms of goals for 2026, I’m going to continue to not have a numerical goal for total books. I find those more stressful than fun. Having a theme for my media last year worked out really well though so for the first quarter of 2026 my media theme is going to be “comfort” . Then I can see I want to keep that theme or change at the end of the quarter. I also want to push myself a bit harder on reading Mandarin so I’m going to make it a goal to read six graded readers this year, which feels very doable.

*Me, very stressed out: I’ll just read this cute sounding fic in a fandom I’m not in. It will be relaxing. Me, several days, and I don’t know how many fics in that fandom latter: I guess I have a new fandom now, opps?

duckprintspress posting in

cnovels

It's that time again (Seven Seas monthly survey).

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScp3j1csWSOu0DJuKZ3Kq0vsJaHY4fo70lV1fhvO8TUQEtLRg/viewform

glitteryv posting in

recthething

Every Thursday, we have a community post, just like this one, where you can drop a rec or five in the comments.

This works great if you only have one rec and don't want to make a whole post for it, or if you don't have a DW account, or if you're shy. ;)

(But don't forget: you can deffo make posts of your own seven days a week. ;D!)

So what cool fanart/fanvids/fics/podfics/fancrafts/other kinds of fanworks have we discovered this week? Drop it in the comments below. Anon comment is enabled.

BTW, AI fanworks are not eligible for reccing at recthething. If you aware that a fanwork is AI-generated, please do not rec it here.

shadaras

The thing about Martha Wells' Queen Demon is that I really adored Witch King and then was mad about the fact that it wasn't a stand-alone book because I didn't feel a need for more in that universe.

Queen Demon is a perfectly serviceable book. I generally like Martha Wells' writing and her casts of characters. However. One of the things that I did not mind in Witch King but do mind in Queen Demon is the dual timelines. I suppose they weren't precisely directly connected in Witch King either, but there it had the effect of explaining who Kai was and providing all the backstory to the world. In Queen Demon, it's like...

I can see echoes but it's not direct. It ended up feeling like I was intercutting between two novellas with a shared world/cast, rather than one book that built its thematic/narrative push along a split timeline.

And yeah that probably wasn't helped by how I read it (in three sittings, more or less, each a couple weeks apart), but...

The main feeling I had about this novel was that every chapter seemed designed to end on a cliffhanger, which is perfectly reasonable design/structure for a novel, but also way more annoying when you know that you're not going to be immediately following up on that bit of time when you begin the next chapter.

This then leads into my biggest "I didn't like this" about the book, which is that it ends in much the same way as any of its chapters end, just on a bigger scale. Which, like, yeah, that's normal for a book in a series, I guess? But it's not how I'm used to Martha Wells books in series ending! She is usually pretty good about wrapping things up instead of ending on "here is a dramatic change in status quo that we are not even providing characters time to have an emotion about before cutting from".

...which then leads to the biggest question I have about bk3, which is:

So if the naming schema so far has been "magic-user + royalty title", does that mean the next book will be named for the Immortal Blessed or the Hierarchs?

( spoiler-tastic specific ??? about the ending )

(yes I will read bk3 when it comes out but I still think that I liked Witch King as a standalone more than Witch King as a series.)

renay posting in

ladybusiness

2025 was the first year my reading started to feel less like a miracle and more like, "oh yeah, reading! I do that without struggling." I read 78 books, although a lot of them were rereads. I'm happy to reread The Murderbot Diaries and a bunch of my favorite romance novels a few times a year. The brain craves familiarity.

I have elevenish favorites this year (I combined books in series, because I make the rules). My top book, which is no big secret as I've been shouting about it for months, is the only one ranked; the rest are here in alphabetical order.

( Favorite Books )

( The numbers and musings )

That's a wrap on 2025! If you read any of my favorites and have readalikes, I'm always hyped for recs. If you wrote a favorites post for your SFF reading, I'd love to see it (and then link it in Intergalactic Mixtape, haha).

forestofglory

2025 wasn’t my best year for writing, I was sleep deprived and not very inspired. But I did manage to write a few longer things so I thought I’d do a quick round up.

I wrote three things for

ladybusiness :
Adventures with Crossdressing Sword Girls
Domestic Labor and Community Building Rec List
Chill Chinese Reality Shows Rec List

I posted one short translation from Classical Chinese:
Magu

And I wrote an annotated bibliography for a friend:
Liao Biblography

geraineon posting in

cnovels

This is your weekly read-in-progress post~

For spoilers:

<details><summary>insert summary</summary>Your spoilers goes here</details>

<b>Highlight for spoilers!*</b><span style="background-color: #FFFFFF; color: #FFFFFF">Your spoilers goes here.</span>*

kingarthurflour_feed

Posted by Rossi Anastopoulo

https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/blog/2026/01/07/high-protein-recipes

Put down that protein shake — there are better ways to hit your protein goals. Specifically, with pancakes and bread.

Not what you expected? Protein and baked goods don’t typically go together, but these clever recipes prove that with a few powerhouse ingredients, they can deliver just as much protein as bars and shakes. They mostly rely on three key protein sources: eggs, cottage cheese, and oats, so if you’re looking to up your protein intake, here are three outstanding recipes to try:

The post 3 high-protein recipes to help hit your January goals : Pancakes, flatbreads, and sandwich loaves that deliver a big protein hit. appeared first on the King Arthur Blog.

https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/blog/2026/01/07/high-protein-recipes

headstone

🎧 music

📚 books

Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

🎥 movies

Son of the White Mare (1981)

📺 shows

Mobile Suit Gundam [rewatch]
Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam [rewatch]
Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team

🎲 games

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel

🎙️ podcasts

Friends at the Table: Twilight Mirage
Zen Studies Podcast

rhodochrosite

compilation of narrative parallels between jannik sinner & oscar piastri. quotes pulled from changeover - giri nathan & oscar piastri: the rookie - andrew van leeuwen.

also re/reading these books side by side was seriously hydrogen bomb vs coughing baby mr nathan are you interested in motorsports...

( my crossover machineshipping... )

shadaras

Over the last ~week,

hafnia and I went "sooooo what if we ran a multifandom remix event" and now it is up and ready for signups! We're hoping it'll be a fun time, and we'd love to have you join us. <3

Remix Through the Seasons is a quarterly, trope-based multifandom event hosted on ao3.

Participants will write one new story (between 1-5k) and then be assigned another story written for the event to remix. These stories can be in any fandom (including Original Work). Matching will be based on the stories' tropes (and creator DNWs) rather than pairings/fandoms. Remixing works from one fandom into another is allowed (even expected).

Schedule:
Signups open: Now!
Signups close: January 24
Assignments sent: January 31
Original works revealed: January 31
Remix works due: March 14
Remix works reveals: March 21
All author reveals: March 28
All due dates etc are at 11:59pm GMT on the listed date

DW Comm:

seasonalremix
Ao3 Collection

(getting everything finalised involved spending a couple hours on a discord call editing the gdoc full of rules and only occasionally getting distracted talking about other things, which tbh is pretty good for how many moving parts there can be for stuff like this and how easy it can be to get sidetracked talking to your bestie. we think the rules are clear! ask questions [preferably on the comm] if they aren't! <3)

wavesagainstrocks posting in

fancoded

Hello! I'm hoping someone here could answer my admittedly really silly question.

I've dabbled in coding and have used websites like Neocities to host my site in the past, which was all fine and well! But I had come across an entry here on DW regarding a Shrine Challenge. I looked through a lot of the published shrines and they all looked like they had "multiple" sites under the same domain (not on anything like Neocities). Is this something you pay for? Are there any free hosts out there able to do this too?

I can give some examples if this question doesn't make sense, haha! I'm having a hard time explaining it, but I didn't wanna just post someone's site link without permission or anything like that!

Thanks so much!

westiec posting in

pinchhits

Event: Just the Tip! Flash Exchange

Event link: Just the Tip Collection

Pinch hit links:
~~IPH #1 - Stranger Things (TV 2016), Push (2009), Original Work~~

IPH #2 - สิงสาลาตาย | Goddess Bless You From Death (TV), KinnPorsche: The Series (TV), Stranger Things (TV 2016), 천둥구름 비바람 | Thundercloud Rainstorm (TV), Thai Actor RPF, We Are คือเรารักกัน | We Are (Thailand TV 2024)

IPH #3 - Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga), Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal, Gravitation, Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V, Xiaolin Showdown (Cartoon), Aladdin (Cartoon 1994), 幽☆遊☆白書 | YuYu Hakusho: Ghost Files (Anime & Manga), Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's, Dude That's My Ghost!

Due date: January 12 at 10 PM EST

Claim by sending a PM to

westiec or an email to toastedanon+jtt@gmail.com with your ao3 username, an email address, and the pinch hit you are interested in claiming.

rhodochrosite

STATS

total number of completed stories: 6 (▲1)

ace attorney [1]
formula 1 rpf [4]
prince of tennis [1]

total wordcount: 31,850

most used tags: Ambiguous Relationships [2] (really should be [3] but i left it off you’ll know it at once because it was a bit too overtly romantic to justify the tag use), Alternate Universe - Always a Different Gender or Sex [2], Background Canon-Typical 2010s Grid Sluttery [2]. spiritually, it was Rivals With Benefits [5, possibly 6 if you count the mialana] but i only actually used that tag once although i did also use Rivals With Benefits Without Benefits and Academic Rivals to Lovers. huge year for rivalshipping for me.

most used rating: e [6] i cannot explain how this happened.

most tagged character: sebastian vettel [2] & charles leclerc [2] & max verstappen [2] omg first year since 2021 that it hasn’t been renjun…

FIC MASTERLIST & COMMENTARY

an indispensable suggestion from afar | ace attorney, mia fey/lana skye

Lana had fully twisted around in her seat to face Mia. Her face shone with intent. This wasn’t the violence of a switchblade; Mia revised her initial impression. It was the incisive examination of a scalpel, a curiosity that cored through flesh in its search for answers. She saw it in the mirror, sometimes.

notes:

writing 10k for a 300 word minimum exchange everyone point and laugh… i really just could not shut the fuck uppppp i was too excited about getting to write lawyers finally lol. i think i did more reading for this fic than my actual legal ethics and jurisprudence classes i was locked the fuck in studying up on kantian ethics and californian law. obviously i am no expert in moral philosophy so i have no idea how correct the depiction in this fic ended up being and i also can’t tell if it was giving infodump snoozefest. hopefully it was fun and yuriful and not didactic to read about.
pea came up with the idea of basing this around the trolley problem and having mia and lana take opposite stances on the solution, so i do owe her everything!! i think it’s really important that lana strongly supports sacrificing the few to save the many in principle but ultimately in sl9 her love for ema outweighs all other moral considerations, whereas mia doesn’t believe in sacrificing anyone but feels extremely guilty that it means she doesn’t prioritise maya over everyone else. it was a really fun ideological clash to write about, i genuinely loved these stupid philosophical arguments because i’m really pretentious at heart.
pretty much every conversation mialana have about the various judges they mention is based on real conversations i’ve had with my coworkers. one thing law nerds love to do is psychoanalyse judge haptics and proxemics much like an rpfujo except maybe half a step less parasocial because there is a fair amount of direct or indirect interaction lawyers have with judges.
working title was morality / mortality, borrowed from kamm, but i wanted it to be more hopeful in the end, so i went with a quote from gadamer in conversation: reflections and commentary - gadamer & dutt which was in my own uni jurisprudence class readings:
- DUTT: ... The neo-conservatives announce the end of socialistic utopian thinking. With the collapse of socialistic dictatorships in the east such thinking is said to be no longer in favor. Must one accept this view, or may one hold fast to your writings from the seventies, according to which for our praxis utopia remains an indispensable "suggestiveness from afar"?
- GADAMER: Yes I certainly do believe this, and I believe it will continue to be valid in the future...
and similarly thematically relevant:
- GADAMER: Yes, I am very skeptical of every kind of pessimism. I find in all pessimism a certain lack of sincerity.
- DUTT: Why?
- GADAMER: Because no one can live without hope.
but also the utopia conversation in the last scene borrows about as much from alice in borderland as from gadamer.
lana is associated with: labwork, the military, scientific inquiry, observable phenomena. contrast with mia’s association with ghosts and the supernatural identity fuckery of channelling.
silly pun names: phillip owen soffi = phil o. soffi = philosophy, ino saint = innocent, o’kaigh = okay, dowtt = doubt, watskryme = what’s crime, chattabocks = chatterbox, tanjent = tangent, killian d’agye = kil d’agye = killed a guy, marnie sayver = money saver.
i am really happy with how this fic turned out i think in the long run it will probably be one of my best of all time.

best lines:
Couched in those terms a pleasant apparition of nostalgia arose. She allowed it to pass directly through her, disembodied, so that it did not sour into homesickness.

connecting law to medium work, which mia does repeatedly through the fic even though she has ostensibly given up medium work for the law.

Things she had observed about Lana Skye: Lana was one of about four other people in the class who actually did the readings, and out of those four the only one who did not put their hand up solely for the opportunity to listen to the sound of their own voice. Whenever she spoke it was to add something substantive and insightful to the discussion, even if the substance was heinous and the insights fundamentally incorrect.

some of the first lines i wrote in the fic i think it’s so funny of mia to respect lana academically but absolutely disrespect the actual content of lana’s academia.

Sometimes the sheer scope of what she didn’t know threatened to overwhelm her. But: Gregory Edgeworth shimmering over her mother’s face like light seen from underwater. Maya in the sun by the sea, agreeing to shoulder the weight of their world. Mia could face anything.

stylistically this is how i want to write always but i am not managing it most of the time because i say too much. but this is the goal.

When everything was over, when the truth had come to light, when she was no longer gambling with her family’s lives in the path of a legacy two millennia heavy—then she would tell Lana everything. She’d tell Lana how much she’d wanted to tell her everything. How much she would have treasured hearing anything Lana had to say.

kurain is another trolley. and also i think it’s so romantic that mia specifically wants lana to know that she wanted to tell her everything because she always wants to know what lana thinks.

The echelons of law school Mia intended to shoulder-charge her way through ran on gossip, sourced from someone’s cousin’s friend’s sister who was a clerk in the Supreme Court or a family friend of the Chief Justice or dating a court reporter, so nepotistically insular that Mia was immediately annoyed by the tastelessness of the blatant cliquery even as she triaged familiarity with those subjects as a key social priority; she knew she would need allies, contacts, networks, to do what she came here to do. At least in Kurain they were upfront about the precedence of bloodline, no limp pretence at meritocracy.

But Mia listened to her classmates and committed the recurring names to memory. Flashy tax litigator Marnie Sayver had been appointed to the Court of Appeal and the public announcement was imminent; opinions varied as to the wisdom of the Governor’s decision. Byrne Faraday had brought his daughter to Justice Gavelle’s latest chambers party; opinions concurred that she was a charming little girl. The precocious von Karma scion was preparing to make her prosecutorial debut in Germany; opinions were nervously reserved just in case Manfred von Karma was lurking bogeyman-style around some shadowy corner.

She’d heard Franziska von Karma was the same age as Maya. All Mia could imagine was Maya alone in the summoning chamber, swathed in ceremonial white, their mother’s headpiece slipping down her forehead. What Mia had laid down to come here, what she had left to Maya to bear. Two decades of preparation shed like a robe. She wanted to shield Maya from it as long as she could but it was, after all, her own actions that had crowned Maya with that cold weight, Maya’s future taken as consideration for a chance to exhume the truth. Her own hands tying Maya to the tracks. Mia rarely prayed anymore but sometimes she still found herself interlacing her fingers and shutting her eyes. Oh, mother. Please let me be right. Please let me have chosen the right thing to do, so I have not turned Maya into a living mausoleum for nothing.

forgive the longass excerpt but this whole section is my favourite part of the fic i think i did a good job with the prose here. mia sacrificing maya for her pursuit of justice is really fucking her up because of her competing moral responsibility to her sister and even though maya has given mia permission to do it which according to lana would make it acceptable in the kantian sense because maya’s agency is being respected mia is still understandably really conflicted. in a lot of ways this whole fic is about the insulated circle of university academic discussion and how it intersects or doesn’t intersect with what happens in the real world / the gap between intent and act.

Part of Mia’s training regimen back in Kurain had involved meditating behind a waterfall, which was meant to improve her resilience and focus in the face of great adversity or maybe just keep her too hypothermically miserable to muster up the energy to complain. That great icy deluge of water, all its shattering, lethal force, separated from her only by the span of a hand. Sitting on the smooth granite slab that had borne the weight of hundreds of damp and shivering Fey women before her she had felt the sting of the sheer concentrated cold radiating out from the torrent more acutely than the spray that misted over the parts of her skin her robes left exposed. You did not escape the deadly thing simply by moving aside.

really like this section too especially in context in the middle of dialogue. the point is that the trolley problem isn’t even a binary kill one save many / let many die save one because so many other consequences flow out from the decision including for the lever puller.

Lana flinched but stayed silent. With some difficulty, Mia pinpointed the feeling sloshing through her ribs as envy.

“It’s not a criticism,” Mia said softly.

“You’re a sister, too,” Lana said. “You know.”

again very important to me that mia envies lana’s ability to prioritise her sister above all else because mia thinks that’s what she should do as well, but she can’t because of who she is as a person.

They had gotten through their customary post-Soffi library study session and the rest of the evening into the night without talking about the fight, but it hung so near over Mia’s head, unresolved and maybe unresolvable, she almost felt it kissing her brow with the coldness of metal. She didn’t have to drag it out again. But Mia could not resist speaking. The advocate’s curse: it was impossible to let a sleeping witness lie.

callback to previous section about maya taking on the kurain ceremonial headdress. also yeah one thing about mialana they are talking about something or other no matter what because they really rate each other even if they disagree. it’s like… if they drove for competing teams but had really clean and enjoyable wheel to wheel battles… Just Like

see the static from a mile away | formula 1 rpf, mark webber/sebastian vettel (r63)

Somehow, without his permission, Mark’s body has walked itself closer to Sebastian, as if magnetised. She has to tip her head back to look at him, baring her throat. It’s not such a bad view.

notes:

i think this is the worst thing i’ve ever written, in the value judgment sense. I’m Sorry Women. i genuinely got kind of upset during the writing process because mark pov required me to be so mean and uncharitable about seb i was getting really defensive over seb mistreatment and erasure like girl the words are being typed by your own hands. you ever accidentally become a hater for your ship in the course of writing fic for your ship lol.
but i do think this is my rb era markseb manifesto even though it just looks like toxic evil hetslop pwp because it is ultimately about mark being so paranoid and insecure and resentful and delusional and complexed about seb and on 500 levels of cognitive dissonance and self-justification. like he’s enacting all this violence and humiliation and force on seb in an attempt to exert power and control over her but seb baited him into it on purpose so really even when mark ostensibly has the upper hand seb is still winning, which mark is also cognisant of but purposefully refusing to confront every time he comes up against it. unfortunately for mark seb wants everything he could possibly do to her.
mark feels entitled to victory and red bull’s favour by virtue of his seniority and having put in the years of effort only for all of what he thinks he has surely earned to be stolen from under his nose. it’s the classic hardworking veteran vs upstart prodigy rookie storyline except mark is of course ignoring all the hard work that seb puts in too. and also the fact that seb has never done anything wrong ever. and also the fact that SKILL ISSUE. and in the end my driver took home 4 wdcs in a row and mark never even got a runner-up. what was i saying?
it is r63 into het because i was really trying to make this as evil as possible. also mark’s sense of entitlement and the violence that he wants to do to seb because of his wounded pride and his dismissal of seb’s abilities and her right to be in the position she is becomes even more awful bc of the specifically gendered element of older man vs younger woman which the fic doesn’t directly look at because mark isn’t overtly thinking about it but It Is There and very much informing his attitude towards seb. iiii think it’s fun and hot, a little bit of misogyny as a treat.
seb and nico being girls (who did not work it out on the remix) is soooo important to me btw they should always be the same, my beautiful two sides of the same coin blonde (loosely defined) german divas. whether seb actually did anything with nico or if she’s just winding mark up is up to the reader which is why i only tagged jenson/seb since there is objective evidence that it happened. although i did also then write the sico prequel so it did happen to me.
i don’t think this fic succeeds at doing much else other than being evil but at the very least it exorcised the markseb demons from my mind (temporarily??) like there was a solid month where i genuinely could not think about anything else i was getting so distracted at work it was so bad for me. anyway it cracks me up that markseb immediately started liking each other so much and undivorcing the moment they stopped being teammates but this also caused me to lose all interest in them, i only want markseb at max toxicity and antipathy in their teammates of dark era, i get my real true love fix from 3316.
title from ohmami - chase atlantic, my kings of feminism card declined music.

best lines:
“I am thinking,” Sebastian repeats, more loudly, “that you are angry at me because you are out of the title fight, but really if you are angry at anyone it should be yourself, or maybe Felipe for the Monza DNF, though if you were not so far down the grid you wouldn’t have been fighting him for P6 anyway. But you couldn’t even beat Jenson today. And I was already one hundred and seventeen points ahead of you after Monza. What makes you think you were fighting against me?”

i could hear this in seb’s voice in my mind so i think i did a pretty good job with the german esl diction and the (justifiably! seb’s 2011 season was incredible!) cocky attitude.

For a moment that post-race paralytic fury overwhelms him so completely he forgets how to breathe. He could hit her. He can almost see it like a cooldown room replay: the snap of her head to the side, the shock in her eyes, her hand moving to shield her reddening cheek, too slow for once. His palm prickles with the phantom sensation of it, sweet as clean air.

my favourite section of the fic 🙂‍↕️ markseb crazy size & strength difference meaning that even a light tap or push from mark has seb stumbling and losing balance → mark should slap seb around it would be hot and also satisfying for both of them.

She’s not interesting to look at. He can’t stop looking anyway.

i love writing extremely unreliable narrators… mark wants to devalue seb sooo bad but the objective reality is that seb is a very good driver who is performing better than him and he is in fact psychologically fixated on her. Mark’s Sebastian Complex!

Mark has wanted her since he looked at her slumped and cradling her neck in her hand and glowing with exhilaration in the passenger seat of his car on the way to the airport and thought, well, she’s probably never gonna make it to F1, that’s a shame. Mark wants her even when he wants to cave her skull in. // He shifts his grip on her throat so his palm curves around the side instead. Gently now. A cradle for a sore and unready neck. Maybe that had been the last time he’d really been in the driver’s seat, when it comes to Sebastian.

one of my fave bits of markseb lore i had to get it in here plus the whole thing about seb’s neck being too weak when test driving back then worked so well with the choking kink parts of this fic. it’s telling also that mark can’t help but have these flashes of gentleness towards seb in between the violent sexual fantasies/acts, i think he genuinely did like seb but the bitterness and paranoia and toxic competitiveness made everything go sour and once the cause of that was removed he went back to liking seb.

He has the sense of snuffing a candle out, the stinging flare of heat just before the nothingness.

this is literally top3 lines i wrote this year. and like brother YOU’RE the one who is about to be nothing.

cruel with my intention | formula 1 rpf, sebastian vettel (r63)/nico rosberg (r63)

Sebastian keeps looking at her. Intent and relentless as a knife. Under the dimly strobing lights all of her shines silver.

“Here,” Sebastian says. Her fingers at Nico’s jaw suddenly gentle. “I will show you what it’s like, with him. Close your eyes.”

notes:

two drunk girls making out at the club for the male gaze panopticon is unfortunately one of my favourite brands of yuri. i wanted to write toxic and evil companion yuri sico fic to my markseb fic about sico competing over a man, or really several men. prissy superfeminine ice princess nico and tomboy demon baby seb having coreografia de britney spears (lol) rivalry sex i would like to see it… not that i really even ended up writing very much of it.
the yuri is a trojan horse for the het which is a smaller trojan horse for the yuri. basically i am intending to alienate all possible audiences. but i think all of that is really just a red herring for what this fic is really about which is how nico wants to win sooo badly she would ruin literally every other aspect of her life to make it happen. and she does <3
i did intend for it to be a lot more about lewis than it ended up being but i think that’s kind of what sico are like… you think it’s about lewis and it obviously quite fundamentally is but also it isn’t. but it is but it isn’t.
i think early 2010s / pre silver war nico is sooooo especially cutely transparently insecure and emotive <this video> is never too far from my mind, the way nico’s face visibly falls when he thinks his dad said something uncomplimentary about him like omg youuuu are so desperate for external validation it’s unreal. the seeds of mid 2010s absolute nightmare menhera gf nico are in there but not yet sprouted and it’s seb who is the terrorist demon baby for now. obviously beyond the scope of this fic but i really am so obsessed with how seb and nico trade narrative roles over time with lewis as the fulcrum and i would really like to write 2015/16 trenches sebcedes for real eventually! there is a little bit of dramatic irony terror at the end because it’s true that it’s seb’s reign now but nico’s time is coming in a couple more years and seb will never reach these heights again and nico is going to take SO much vindictive delight in every moment of seb’s downfall, darkest day of seb’s career putting it in the wall at his legendary home race which he has never won etc, but at the same time when nico is trying to psych out her ex mid-divorce it’s still seb she turns to for assistance and cooperation, and it’s seb who defends nico’s right to the title because she saw and understood the work nico put in to get it.
like i think sico being two sides of the same coin, sometimes i think you might hate me sometimes i think i might hate you maybe you just wanna be me, is so narratively special and important! i love nico’s inferiority complex about golden girl seb and i love seb bullying nico in the way that a child stomps on ants and i love the looming shadow of schumi and the offscreen locus of lewis. the image i have is of seb who is unapologetically herself in all of her cockiness and greed and ego being this very pure existence, the freudian id so to speak, not actually malicious and actually quite nice even, whereas nico who is constantly trying (and failing) to repress how badly she is gagging for Literally Everything that she wants ends up worse off because she cares about how she looks from the outside and stops herself from going after the things she wants and then doesn’t get them and is bitter and spiteful and mean about it, of course culminating in her ultimate pyrrhic victory of world championship at the cost of true love. which is to be fair a trolley problem that seb has not ever had to face. but also i think that even if seb had won the championship in 2017 or 2018 against lewis things between them would not have gone like they did for brocedes they would have made it out fine, the love would not have died. being teammates has ruined more soulmates than all the volcanoes lmao.
at this stage in the timeline obviously sewis aren’t really that close yet, they’re just friendly coworkerivals with benefits and they won’t fall in love until many years later, so nico genuinely doesn’t even have anything to be concerned about. in my mind her feelings for lewis are reciprocated but lewis probably hasn’t realised it yet unlike the way that nico is agonisingly pining and by the time lewis does it will be too late for them. lowkey like omg girl just sleep with him already you’re already both separately hooking up with all the same people. but of course what nico feels about lewis is too closely-held and huge and awful for her to do that. which is, as usual, nico’s loss.
title from reprogram - kilo kish, which is a song that is kind of way too beautiful for this fic but it has this simultaneous icy artifice and glassy confessional fragility that registers as so nico to me. probably i should have saved it for a serious brocedes fic but we are here now.

best lines:
And she prefers, in principle, to be where she’s wanted. The practice is trickier. The principle presupposes the want.

i think this is very nico… pr princess desperate enough for external validation to subject herself to various mortifying ordeals… and ofc the extreme emotional masochism displayed in the post silver war era by constantly putting herself in situations where she has to face The Concept Of Lewis. girl you are lowkey doing it to yourself.

Finally Nico manages to wrench her hand free of Sebastian’s grasp, or Sebastian lets go, or both at the same time, equal and opposite. She clutches her hand to her chest and stares, speechless and furious at herself for it.

two opposing forces that cancel each other out… two sides of the same coin… nico always being on the back foot around seb despite all her attempts at diplomacy and image management <3

“Sure,” Nico says, and then she must suffer some kind of horrific aneurysm in the part of her brain responsible for oral motor skills because she finds herself blurting out, “Is Lewis—”

Sebastian pulls back. Her mouth is shiny with spit and Nico’s smeared lipgloss. “You want Lewis to see?”

“No,” Nico says. Her heart has become a gravel trap, pulse skidding and slowing and spinning out. “No, of course not. It’s—we’re just friends. Why would I—no.”

ya romance emotion. And Lewis Was There!
i really like the combination of nico’s miserable crush that she has been circling around for years vs seb’s tactless directness. i like the gravel trap metaphor also, i am always feeling like i’m doing too much or being too cliche when i do racing related figurative language but i think this one was good.

Her head swims, oxygen deprivation, heatstroke, symptom of something that might kill her. She’s raced through worse.

associating seb with unpleasant/deadly things but that’s also part of racing.

Lewis’s hand on the nape of her neck. Sebastian’s hand on the championship trophy. Nico’s hand on the nape of Sebastian’s neck, the skin there smooth and warm like metal that’s soaked up the sun. What that shining ridged silver might feel like against her palm. Sebastian knows, Lewis knows. Nico will know.

obv linking seb/lewis/nico/the wdc trophy together, nico’s conflation of seb and lewis and victory is all about Things She Wants. it’s narratively important that nico ultimately feels unsatisfied/unhappy when she gets off with seb not just because it’s oops all bottoms but also because it’s foreshadowing how she’ll feel about lewis and how she’ll feel about the championship too.

“Seb,” Nico says, not entirely sure what she means to follow it up with. Five languages worth of words and she’s still at a loss. She is always floundering for grip, for pace, around Sebastian. The knowledge does not make it any easier to bear.

nico… oh nico… my glasshearted ojousama trying so hard to do mind games but not being able to pull them off… trying to launch psychological attacks on seb only for seb to nuke her right back twice as hard and with half the effort because seb doesn’t have any image maintenance reasons to hold back like nico does. and nico knows this and keeps trying anyway. that’s what seb really means when she says you are always trying because seb knows this also.
my favourite brand of sico is nico trying to gain some upper hand over seb and seb effortlessly turning the tables and nico being at a loss as to how to respond. And Lewis Was There.

you’ll know it at once | formula 1 rpf, max verstappen/charles leclerc

The scent hits Max like a bullet. So sweet and heavy it is a violence. It dislocates him completely; it’s like he’s looking at Charles from somewhere slightly to the left of himself.

notes:

i started this like 5 days before mich’s birthday thinking i’d probably be gifting it belatedly with apologies and then locked in so hard over the weekend i was done 2 days early and then i just had to sit there with the draft not saying anything which was agonisingggg. as with the rest of my f1 output i do not know what came over me lmao sometimes the omegaverse devil speaks into my ear. i’ve written secret omega trope before and i was intending to fully self-plagiarise and do Extremely Resolved Sexual Tension But Extremely Unresolved Emotional Tension 2.0 but i literally unironically believe in 3316 real true love too much. it is actually so bad. yes i took the government propaganda yaoibait everyone point and laugh. all mich’s fault btw. this fic is so horrifically sappy i am never going to be able to reread it without looking through my fingers like i’m watching a horror movie. but i could not have done it without the power of friendship so in the end Thank You Mich, i do love and care mich so much i gave up the bit i had planned for my sports pseud debut and posted f1 instead of tennis rpf first.
ssfwl is the most capital-L Love song that i know so i couldn’t think of a more appropriate title source. working title was you knew you were breakable from <one-act play in which no knives are used - dalton day> which is also a top5 most romantic poems of all time to me but a bit more terror and a bit less sparkly shoujo screentones than the fic ended up being so i had to switch it out. i cannot emphasise enough how much i did not intend for this fic to be so gayass_song.mp3, it just happened somehow. as if it’s my fault 3316 is just so inherently romantic?? yes i’m delusional. but so are they.
i did continuously forget i was writing omegaverse instead of normal sex and had to go back and add more omegaverse trope indicia like slick / glowing eyes (literally love this trope btw its so funny) etc i guess i mostly just wanted to microdose biologically enforced d/s. i just feel like it’s so embarrassing to do worldbuilding in pwps lmao so you can really see where i gave up explaining anything. it was most important to me to 1) make brocedes da bus driver 2) mention 2x oscar podium for the hOPium of it all 3) make my ge0rge and p1astri stances clear although let me clarify also that it’s 3381 in that order, max is my superseme.
what happened in 2016 was of course nico deciding that omega pheromones are fair game when it comes to psychological warfare techniques and weaponising the fuckkk out of strategically timed heats and “forgetting” to use scent blockers to mess with lewis (haven’t decided on his dynamic so i’m leaving it open LOL) which did take some delicate tactical balancing to execute without affecting his own driving and this created a paddock / cooldown room environment so toxic and chaotic as naturally lewis was not the only person affected by nico’s biological terrorism so the fia were like ok so this can absolutely never happen again. seb was having the time of his life though, brocedes divorce only toxic to miserable people he was having a fucking ball.
i have also just remembered i was going to microdose misogyny as well but i forgot to actually do it. in my mind mating meant that the alpha can force the omega to obey them which is why max refused to do it even though he obviously wouldn’t ever actually order charles to submit in a racing context because competing against charles is his passion. but it’s ok they are both too reckless to hold off forever so i think they get mated during #charles1stwdc celebration sex and it’s fine things are exactly the same as they were before except they can do biologically enforced d/s too for fun. yay for true love!
on review i should have put more praise kink in but i also forgot i was doing that. dude i forgot literally everything like the way the sheer thought of 3316 romance instantly mindwipes me. i definitely also should have picked a specific season/race for spatiotemporal grounding other than vaguely european but i couldn’t decide on which one so i picked nothing.
it’s not really a standout line but i did want to point out max cushioning the back of charles’s head with his hand so he doesn’t hit his head on the tile even in the middle of fairly rough and mindless sexpollened sex. this is the sex version of max racing charles more respectfully than he races other people.
wanted also to point out that charles went to red bull when he was instinctively seeking the closest possible safety, obviously because he could subconsciously sense that max would be there as well, because they are perfect soulmates and the universe will conspire to bring them together trusttt. they don’t know that yet but i do.
max biting charles’ wrist is ofc intended to be mating bond lite but also charles biting max first is important for equality and fairness and balance reasons, which i think is sooo vital to endgame ships even when there is a clearly defined and unassailable 1/0 dynamic. there must be equilibrium in order for things to last forever and mark my fucking words 3316 will last forever. in case it wasn’t clear they’re meant to be touching each other’s pulse points at the end so would be able to tell that their heartbeats are synced up even though they aren’t mated again because they are perfect soulmates <3
all in all i really like this fic despite the horrible sappiness i think i represented my views, which are horribly sappy, accurately and it gives me heartfluttering romance feelings even though i am the one who wrote it and usually that would prevent me from having any positive feelings about the fic. just goes to show how much i like 3316 damn they really got me with this one.

best lines:
He can see now that Charles isn’t actually still at all. He is trembling, minutely, with the effort of holding himself in place. An engine primed and ready to leap forward. Any moment the lights will go out.

like i said before i am scared that doing racing metaphors in f1 fic is coming off a bit florals for spring? groundbreaking… but i think this is a nice image and conveys the massive effort of restraint teetering on loss of control.

Adrenaline breaks over Max’s head like a cold plunge.

i liked this line. trying to get a bit more creative with the language i reach for.

The thing with him and Charles is all context. Track limits, the four corners of the paddock. A decade and change of adjacency, shared podiums, peripheral vision, the best and brightest and most beautiful part of his life, and absolutely nothing outside of that. It’s just that they don’t have much in common, except for the only thing that matters. He hadn’t always been looking out for Charles, necessarily, but at some point Charles had become so integral to his conceptualisation of what it meant to race that it turned axiomatic. A race necessitates someone to race against. And there’s nobody Max can imagine racing against more vividly than Charles.

whenever i got stuck i just started typing out my 3316 meta thoughts into the gdoc which is why there’s random chunks of navelgazing studded throughout the fic but this really is my 3316 thesis… extreme situational closeness and imaginary fated rivalry is the most romantic thing in the universe?

“I’m not going to knot you in a fucking bathroom,” Max says. “My PT will kill me, and your PT will kill you and then also kill me a second time.”

i thought this was funny :)

Max has no doubts that Charles has the capability for it, the same way he has no doubts about his own. He expects it from Charles: you will match me. However far I go, you will be there to fight me for it.

anyone else die and blow up over max saying very matter of factly that he always expected charles would make it to f1 if max himself did.

The imprint of the tiles against his cheek looks almost like balaclava marks.

everything is sex except sex which is racing… or everything is racing except racing which is sex.

It’s how he looks on a podium, radiant in his contentment, something serene under the elation like the world is only settling into the shape it should always have been.

thinking specifically of how relieved charles looked on the podium at monaco and monza which genuinely moved me almost to tears i’m ngl. but i literally think it’s trueeeee that charles belongs on the podium and if he isn’t on there it’s the universe(/FERRARI) that is wrong.
this whole paragraph in general i really like even though it’s so sappy the rest of it should not be in this section. but well 3316 real true love my final message goodbye.

set that crown on the ground | prince of tennis, kirihara akaya/echizen ryoma

Kirihara glances back down at his phone screen. On the opposite side to Kirihara, the only other name on the drawsheet that matters: R. ECHIZEN.

notes:

wrote this in like 1.5 crazed sessions and then nearly died waiting for fiab reveals which kept getting delayed for a full month or something omfg like… keep fucking my girl bro i don’t even care anymore. it is really unfortunate that it’s taken me 3829382992 years to write giftfic for ciel and it should have been dreampuri but… well…. world’s flakiest writer and friend that’s me… did laugh that ciel and i ended up both gifting boysboysboys kiriryom of light to each other. really grateful to ciel for having prompts that finally gave me the right impetus to write for kiriryom.
lots of futurevision seeding here, i was pulling from some extremely old wips and rotations including kiriryom brazil arc fic. relevantly: marui is an idol, yukimura sanada tezuka are pro players, shiraishi is studying medicine, tokugawa is ryoma’s unnamed coach. ryoma has a fila sponsorship naturally, kirihara is signed to nike like 90% of the rest of the tour.
i think what makes kiriryom special amongst all their other rivalries is that they are weirdly able to ground/humanise each other despite generally being huge freaks unlike eg ryoma’s young gods fated rivalry with kinchan. like they can pull the Just Boys out of each other when they need it the most / when they’re feeling alienated from their tennis. which is a function of their shared history in general but also junior selectionals and hero/villain narrative framing roleswap panel sequence my beloveds. kirihara is of course wired to love anything that kills him but i think he is highly intuitive and would Get It when ryoma is going through some shit.
a lot of character development has taken place offscreen and i am not sure if that was coming across appropriately or if they just seemed ooc but i think it is a natural progression from kirihara’s shinteni onwards therapisation and world of light that he would be able to learn control and restraint even if it takes him more effort than a normal person and is an unnatural state of being to him.
still, so nice to be writing for real tennis again! very comforting and familiar waters to me. nice to not be second guessing every characterisation and dialogue choice since i’ve done such comprehensive tennis studies already lol.
anyway i really need kiriryom and sincaraz on the atp tour together… my rookie ace prodigy rival shippings <3 sinnerkiri would make me smile… kirihara famously likes a guy with religious motifs after all.

best lines:
Sinner blew him out of Indian Wells last year in a straight-sets second-round crashout so awful that one break down in the second set his vision had briefly gone red and staticky, in the way it hadn’t since he’d met Shiraishi.

“awful” maybe one of my words of the year. jannik cameo sooo self-indulgent here but i think the comparison to yukimura and ryoma is justified!! i’ve been on that jannik~yukimura parallels grind… biblical themes (aesthetic only), unkillable guy who is killed anyway by one specific guy, polite society media trained spokesperson offcourt terminator killbot oncourt, delicate victorian maiden constitution, hiatus from sport due to unavoidable external factors, playstyle that prioritises brutality and efficiency over flashiness, europeanocity.

Tennis settles him too. It always does, or at least it does now, the old uncontrollable fury bridled and wrestled into a definite shape. A weapon is only useful if it does what it’s told. Another thing he’s learned. What has Echizen learned, since they last met on the court?

precursor to re/discovering tenimuho together? the weapon in question is tennis techniques, but also kirihara himself.

Tennis does not always love him as much as he loves tennis. Kirihara’s used to that; things rarely do. Echizen, probably, is not.

my favourite lines i wrote all year! i know ciel loves ryom having a torture labyrinth struggle era so i was alluding to it here. and i think kirihara would have a fair bit of sympathy for it as guy whose entire life has been torture labyrinth struggle era.

It’s what he imagines Muga no Kyoichi must have felt like; he doesn’t have any memory of the state. It passed through him and left no trace. He’d ask Echizen, if he thought Echizen had an answer.

orgasm==muga made me laugh a bit but i do describe them in quite similar ways so the comparison insisted on itself really. this is meant to be a bit wistful though in the sense that kirihara is on the outside of the magic, only intersecting briefly with it via muga which he isn’t conscious for, and possibly permanently locked out of tenimuho for the same reason that yukimura is. like it’s fine because kirihara can win and deserve to win without tenimuho, which is what yukimura proved to him. i really like postcanon fic that is heavy on nostalgia/wistfulness so that was kind of an underlying tone i was trying to hit despite the various jokes and banter.

two’s a crowd | formula 1 rpf, max verstappen/oscar piastri/charles leclerc

What is anyone supposed to say in this kind of situation? Hi. Our mutual coworker-slash-rival sent me here. I'm pretty sure he wants me to have sex with you. Hope that's okay.

notes:

ok so yes i technically finished and posted this in 2026 but i am backdating it into 2025 soon because i don’t think i want it on my 2026 slate 😭 I WISH THIS WAS BETTER THAN IT IS. one day i will accept that i am simply not built to write sex comedy but i am going to keep trying probably. i think the difference between this and you’ll know it at once is laughable and not in a good way. i’m sorry ellen i will show a better image to you in the future 🙏
the way this fic came about is that i spent weeks complaining about really wanting to write more porn but not having any ideas for what to write and then charles was at the fia gala even though ferrari didn’t win shit in f1 and then max who was supposed to be there was not. and obviously oscar was there. also the 2024 gala had beautiful images of 3316 using oscar as a messenger pigeon between them which was priming me for 338116. previously i made a joke about max being like i’m gonna go do le mans oscar can you keep my wife company (although i mean charles would probably also be doing le mans as part of max’s genetically engineered frankenstein supersoldier driver 331416 dream team lineup) so i saw the opportunity for max to lob cute new boytoy at charles in his absence. also the thought of max doing engineer roleplay for 8116 made me laugh. and nothing is more motivating to me than jokes.
the dynamics i had in mind (obv with Rivalry and Competition as bedrock): 81->16 oscar down atrocious silly spaghetti dropping middleschooler crush, 33<-81 cargijinka4cargijinka mentorhero worship want him want to be him crush, 3316 IN LOVE WITH EACH OTHERRRR but haven’t talked about it so they just have a lot of sex instead. in my mind they started hooking up on race weekends in 2023 “casually” and now they’re established in every way except actually but they have a job (racing each other) so they don’t really care about that rn. and they both like oscar :) rookie prodigy sandwiched between veterans And They Were All Competitionpilled Race Freaks. in this fic it’s mostly 3316 whacking each other with the baseball bat that is oscar (they’re having fun) but as oscar gains experience he will be more active. though of course the order will always be 338116.
key oscar traits i tried to highlight: extremely fast rate of learning / the I Get It Now of it all, sarcasm to cover up nerves and or preemptively steel himself against rejection, “He always thought everyone was his mate, and he'd get bullied, bullied off the road”, undying perseverance, car. i know every 81 fan and their dog has complained about the media iceman branding because it’s so laughably untrue like just because my close personal friend oscar piastri has dry humour and a bit of pr training and a #contemplative resting face doesn’t mean he has no feelings or doesn’t care?! i think it’s fairly obvious that oscar in fact has a lot of feelings and is actually even quite expressive it’s just a bit more subtle on him and also i think he has defense mechanisms up on top of being less outwardly emotive and good at keeping his calm. oscar get behind meeeee.
did touch a few of my landmines but it was jokes so it was okay probably… still feel conflicted about the c*ck chair joke cause i kind of really dislike the word as a stable societyist but you know in the end max is handling the situation and i have nothing to worry about.
is this a safe space to say that i really do not understand the appeal of nipple play like i thought i would challenge myself to write it for the sake of diversity in my explicit fic but i still don’t get it and i don’t think it ended up sexy anyway because i just wanted it to be over so i could move onto the parts of the sex that were actually hot. i’m just going to stick to breathplay going forward i hope nobody has any problems with reading vanilla sex with mild choking pwp #94835794389438435 from me i’m the most one trick pony of all time.
i have noticed with my past few pwps that i keep doing like explicitnesspadding by referencing sex that the characters could be having but are not currently having because i don’t want to write it. this fic also suffers from this problem. i will probably keep doing it.
working title was run it all from my 2025 mvp song money on the dash - elley duhe which has been working double shifts on my running playlist and my writing playlist, my two most listened to playlists of the year although my brocedes playlist put in a decent last minute challenge, but then when i was doing irl sprints with mich in a cafe that was playing normal ed sheeran acoustic guitar ballad cafe music suddenly hotel room service came on and it really was like a divine sign that ellen was in the room with us. and it feels much better to have a jokes title for this fic. was tossing up between meet me at the and two’s a crowd and ultimately went with the latter but i do kind of like the effect of the unfinished title.

best lines:
Charles is genuinely so beautiful it induces an agonised and abstractly despairing breathlessness in Oscar every time he allows himself to really look at Charles, a bit like being lightly stabbed in the lung by a snapped rib; Oscar would know. // The perforated-lung feeling intensifies.

i think this captures the feeling of having a horrible and extremely embarrassing crush.

“The Garmin clashed with the suit so I didn’t bring it with me,” Oscar says. “Sorry. No way for me to show you the data.”

i wanted to make a garmin joke soooo bad. apparently oscar uses a “whoop” but it just doesn’t flow the same like wtf is a whoop… mich suggested to change it back to garmin so i did. i actually don’t even have a garmin myself i just use my phone to track my run stats but all my coworkers who are serious about running have garmins so this is my attempt at rectifying the fomo.

“It is of course good to win, but better when it is a challenge. Why else do we go racing? I mean, I might as well do laps by myself.”

i could hear this in max’s voice in my head so i think i got his speech patterns right :)

Shining and monumental in Oscar’s field of vision.

again… oscar your crush on charles!

“Ha! He does that,” Max says. “He’ll push you, so just push back until he stops.”

this line makes me smile. i may be biased.

The grand slam at your home race, Qatar before it all went to shit, my Turn 9 overtake on Lando in Abu Dhabi, what did you think, how am I doing, is this how it felt for you.

i really like this line so much and i couldn’t tell you why because it isn’t even that good. but every time i started feeling like i was unfixably flopping i would just scroll down to this line and reread it and feel better enough about my abilities to keep going.

It’s not a question. Max speaks like he’s willing the world into the form he wants it to take and the world has no choice but to comply. And Oscar is all formless want, ache up to his teeth, desperate for direction, tuned to the exact frequency of Max’s voice with shattering gratitude.

oscar your crush on max… it’s really cute to me how much he loves talking to max about racing. when you are both car freaks <3

“I think probably that was Zone 2 cardio the whole time. Maybe I will log it on Strava.”

stole the zone 2 cardio joke from a beloved (& garmin wearing, ofc) coworker but the strava joke is my own and it does make me laugh.

REFLECTIONS

looking back, did you expect to write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d expected?
more than i expected even though it wasn’t even that much, mostly because f1 unlocked jobless levels of writing motivation and productivity in me in late q4 except i do have a job so that wasn’t good.

what pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January?
um…………………………. well here is the exact chain of events that led to the position i am in right now:

SOMETIME BETWEEN 2004-2006: arbitrarily i decide that ferrari is my favourite car brand because it is a nice assortment of letters to look at and say.
JULY 2021: youtube algo shows me a video about rookie rising star jannik sinner being the future of men’s tennis so i semi-arbitrarily decide he will be my nextgen pick to keep an eye on in the post-federer era.
SOMETIME IN 2021 OR 2022: during a call with dia she tells me that if i ever got into f1 i would probably onepick charles leclerc because i am a known enjoyer of fate and doom narratives. i immediately forget his name but i do remember his Il Predestinato epithet due to being known enjoyer of fate and doom narratives.
AUGUST 2025: twitter fyp shows me a tweet about jannik sinner and carlos alcaraz allegedly wearing the same jacket and as an average boyfriend jacket enjoyer [i was unaware they are both sponsored by nike so it probably wasn't even actually boyfriend jacket]. i decide to investigate and spend my birtheve night clicking into every tweet in a yaoi moments compilation thread made by an italian fujo to highlight the captions and google translate them individually. i engage in 5374958394843 pages of heated debate with myself over order and regretfully conclude that it is probably governed by match outcomes and/or atp ranking even though it pains me as a switch/reverse hater.
SEPTEMBER 2025: i wake up at 4am on a work day to watch jannik sinner lose the us open. twitter fyp shows me a tweet about formula 1 driver charles leclerc seeing a fox on the track. notable fox-associated individuals who i watch with interest famously include jannik sinner, amuro tooru and huang renjun. i find out that charles leclerc drives for ferrari. i find out that jannik sinner is a tifoso whose onepick is charles leclerc. i re-find out that Il Predestinato is charles leclerc. i make unwise jokes about being susceptible to signs and symbols and cults and hype moments and aura. i make even more unwise decisions to watch the baku race so i have something to tide me over until the next sincaraz tournament which carlos alcaraz ends up pulling out of anyway. i obviously understand instantly that charles leclerc is the 0 of all time and enquire about any relevant 1s in his vicinity and mich confirms that there is indeed driver number 1 himself in close narrative proximity. i continue to make unwise decisions. i ignore mich’s warnings about taking this tifosi shit too seriously. i get my nails painted rosso corsa. i write nearly 20k in a month. i buy a 1:43 scale model of the sf24 for my work desk. i go off the deep end about 3316 to extents not seen since sanayuki 2020. i experience misery to extents not seen since i literally don’t even remember when. i don’t have another good day for the rest of the year except for the brief euphoria of mcl double dsq at vegas. etc etc…

i really really like 3316 if that isn’t clear lmao i am extremely not immune to NothingWhereThereShouldBeSomething ships based on mutual delusion and historical revisionism, as you may know. real true rivalrymarriage love btw like instant ship of all time status. i wish i had any sense of emotional object permanence so i could powerscale 3316 against my other All Time ships (jmrn, compromise, serenade, snyk/ykak, akam, clato, etc) accurately but i will have to wait until the honeymoon period is over to compare. i am assuming i will become less hysterical and stupid about 3316 at some point this year.

did you take any writing risks this year? what did you learn from them?
i guess i wrote a lot of porn including tropes i don’t usually do (r63 into het, a/b/o, phone sex). as usual i don’t think i really learned anything, although i was joking with pea that i’m training my ability to write linear action. don’t know if i improved in that though.

best story of the year?
an indispensable suggestion from afar, which is also the only non pwp fic i wrote this year so kind of an automatic winner as it has actual substance. but i do also think it has some of my best writing and imagery and extended metaphors and #meaningful #themes in it. i’m still really proud of it and i think i executed the things i set out to do well.

favourite story of the year?
it’s you’ll know it at once purely because 3316 is my favourite ship of the year. i think out of my f1 output this year cruel with my intention was my best objectively but i am so unbelievably biased i love my fucking shippppppp. i really cannot emphasise enough how much 3316 makes me smile and giggle and kick my feet and feel like i’m dying so much that it doesn’t even matter what i actually wrote just the idea of having made My Ship Real is enough, it’s unfortunately really that serious for me.

most popular story of the year?
the stats on you’ll know it at once scared me i think it hit 100 kudos after one day despite being archive locked and it’s now sitting just over 300 even though it is substanceless omegaverse pwp. this was especially shocking to me because the other f1 fics i had previously written were for 2010s grid ships so obviously a smaller readership but i had not looked at the 3316 tag before posting mine so i had no idea what kind of numbers 3316 fics pull. 3316 readers have been very generous to me but perhaps should be more discerning. like i will write a good 3316 fic that has something meaningful to say i promise it will just take me some time…

most fun story to write:
honestly i had a pretty fun time writing everything this year! maybe see the static from a mile away was the most fun because it is the most evil. i also think it is the first time i have posted explicit het which feels like about time since i am such a staunch het rights activist. other than that well yes you’ll know it at once is up again because myshiprealtonins kind of the most powerful force in the universe.

hardest story to write:
probably two’s a crowd because i was writing it mostly on my phone while travelling and it kept getting longer like i thought it was only going to be 2-3k and then it ended up over 7k. i think anything over around the 5k mark is too unwieldy to manage on a phone because i write so unstructuredly/nonlinearly that it’s too much scrolling up and down to find the part that i want to work on or to move sections around. like i really struggled to conceptualise how much i had left because i couldn’t see the whole doc easily. also omg words just would not work for me like it really felt like i suddenly forgot how to string sentences together, everything was coming out looking like ai generated slop. it was genuinely shocking to me how bad my performance was like not even in the usual catastrophising i am an untalented hack who should retire way it was like, i know i can write better than this!! what’s going on!! but i think the thing that was going on was motion sickness from being on that damn phone on the mrt.

favourite opening lines:
from two’s a crowd:

The Tashkent Hyatt lobby is done up in glossy beige neutrals so shiny under the lights they could rival the championship trophy Oscar isn’t holding.

not a very strong showing from me this year in opening lines ngl, but when is it ever…

favourite closing lines:
from cruel with my intention:

Sebastian hums. “You will be up on the podium with me next year, yeah?” she says. She touches Nico’s cheek, the tip of Nico’s bare shoulder, Nico’s elbow. She leans in. Against Nico’s mouth: “But I’ll still be faster.”

Nico says, “You don’t even know how fast I could be.”

going through my ending lines over the year it’s looking like i’m obsessed with a vaguely ominous and dramatically ironic line of dialogue to close a fic. girl let’s try for some more variety in 2026 <3

favourite tag used:
tie between Schrodinger’s Rivalry and Background Canon-Typical 2010s Grid Sluttery. i love a silly jokes tag i do think i’m doing a pretty good job coming up with fun f1 tags.

goals for 2026:
i’d like to write something around the 20k mark again, i am thinking about doing a 3316 time loop au because i’ve always wanted to write a Someone Else’s Time Loop fic and also ever since i said max’s lotus eater dream is 1 million km long wheel to wheel battle with charles i have just really thought that… but anyway i would need to decide what race to loop and why so let me relax i will cook later. i definitely want to write a lot of 3316 in general <3 and i want to also write sewis/sebcedes because they are soooo important to me but i fear i might just be genuinely too fucked up about sewis to confront it in fic form, and also i don’t think i have anything to add to the impressive body of literature that is already out there. i would like to write brocedes but again i doubt i have anything useful or interesting to say. so it’s looking like i’m just gonna be 3316 sex merchant which is fine too. if anyone has any ideas for what kind of sex they could be having can you let me know please i’m out of ideas again.

i never got around to doing my 2024 wrap-up post so i didn’t have any goals for 2025 oops… well i didn’t finish dreampuri that’s probably about all anyone needs to know lmao.

CURRENT WIPS

divine; seamless | tennis rpf, jannik/carlos

The moments they drew close: only the walk towards the net at the end of a match, the momentary contact of a handshake or embrace, Carlos's face in his neck, Carlos's hand on his shoulder, the coin-face counterparts of victory and defeat flipping over and over in the air forever.

bro i fucked up my timing on this one so bad, it’s meant to be my usual #nothinghappens vague tension shipfic set circa cincy/uso but i took too long detouring through car yaoi and in the meantime sincaraz stopped having ambiguous distance and started being super effusively solicitous about each other on main so now i’m straight out of the meta. i am going to observe how they are acting in the korea exho and ao and recalibrate… i really do want to write for sincaraz i love them dearly just need to lock in.

no new friends | formula 1/tennis rpf, oscar/jannik

Jannik tilts his head. "Thank you," he says, slowly, the ghost of a question mark in his intonation. "It's not something I hear. From one person, maybe. My tennis, it is not so lovely.” He says it matter-of-factly, as unapologetic as the rest of him.

“But you love it?”

“Of course,” Jannik says. “It is my tennis, no?”

“Yeah,” Oscar says. “Yeah, I get that.”

i need to rework this so it’s set in abu dhabi 2025 but literally my narrative parallels ship<3 when you are pr trained orange themed rising star prodigies always fighting the machine/iceman/unemotional allegations and also have an older retired pro australian mentor figure<3 i think it’s so funny that oscar’s onepick is jannik and jannik’s onepick is charles. again a #nothinghappens fic and shouldn’t be too long i just need to like stop being distracted by 3316 long enough to think it through.

you must have been very far | formula 1 rpf, all/charles (max/charles endgame)

Lewis is not the first world champion teammate Charles has had, but Sebastian was never so far away. The difference, Charles knows, is that he has come to partner Lewis too late. He is neither teammate nor rival in any sense other than literal. The part of Lewis that he can reach is only a peripheral flash of a person Charles will never entirely see, already half-apotheosised into something greater than the dream they share. A man calcifying into artwork, a cordoned-off room in a red museum.

been calling this one cursefic in my mind, basically i’m plagiarising my qcyn2 fic about kxe being cursed and trying to break the curse with true love’s kiss which she has to goldilocks test her way through her fellow contestants to figure out. it’s that but for charles so i can feel like i too am contributing to the development of this year’s car while making him kiss a bunch of his coworkers. this is my main priority wip rn, i would like to get it done before the start of the season but if i think of more sex that 3316 could be having i might get sidetracked by that who could say.

getting off the subject | sakamoto days, nagumo/osaragi(/shishiba)

She moves directly towards him as if she’s excising the space in front of her rather than walking. Without so much as a hello she crawls onto his lap, heedless of the way her skirts crumple between their bodies. She’s warm but not febrile, a cocked-hammer tension of purpose. The scent of iron clings to her skin like a signature perfume. She’s definitely going to get the blood splatter of whichever miserable sucker recently found themselves on the business end of her circular saw all over his nice leather upholstery. He definitely should have hung out at an Order safehouse today.

very silly post-assassination adrenalin rush coworkers with benefits naguosa sex where both of them clearly like shishiba more than each other. i don’t know if i like sakadays enough to make the effort of finishing this although it is fairly progressed so it sure would be a shame if it all went to waste…

hold me down for one night | nct dream, jaemin/renjun

They do this dance every time; Renjun could recite the dialogue himself. The usual magnanimity masquerade from Jaemin, or less generously an abdication of responsibility. “You're the champion,” Renjun says. He could still smash the bottle in his hands, just for the sake of making something happen. The glass, the foam, the shatter of adrenaline. “It's your decision.”

Apparently in no hurry to get started, Jaemin sits down on the edge of the bed and says, “You drove well today.”

ostensibly jmrn f1 au winner’s room fic except all i’ve managed to make them do is discuss team lineups so it’s really just room. this is my other main priority wip though, i definitely should have finished this in 2025 to keep my streak of posting dream fic every year since 2018 </3 but i will do my best to resurrect the streak in 2026.

BONUS ROUND: SUPERLATIVES

ship of the year: max verstappen/charles leclerc
- m/m of the year: other than 3316, jannik sinner/carlos alcaraz
- m/f of the year: nagumo/osaragi (with shishiba/osaragi premise)
- f/f of the year: elena rybakina/emma raducanu
- polyshipping of the year: lewis hamilton/sebastian vettel/nico rosberg
1 of the year: max verstappen
0 of the year: sebastian vettel (sorry charles 2026 will be your year)
oshi of the year: charles leclerc
song of the year: reprogram - kilo kish (2025 release) / 3 strikes - terror jr (first listen in 2025)
album of the year: purity ring - purity ring. but addison - addison rae was veryyyyyy close.
movie/tv/anime of the year: medalist…? i guess. i mean i liked it but its only competition was like, the f1 movie. i don’t watch anything.
book of the year: changeover - giri nathan
game of the year: can i be honest it is the otter's treasure minigame in the aliexpress app. since i didn't start playing king's lynn farm until 2026.
concert of the year: tds4 in seoul
sports event of the year: ~~mclaren double dsq~~ jannik sinner and elena rybakina atp & wta finals champions
run of the year: hoka half marathon
perfume of the year: criollo - voyager
treat of the year: hojicha kakigori from kaiji
word of the year: vivid

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