Now my feedback expectations are all messed up and i'll always be mad about it

Finally all set to post the last fic in the Egg in a Trying Time series tomorrow (today) after work, with a few days to spare! *\(^o^)/* I'd wanted to get it out before the year is over so it wouldn't fuck up my fic stats for next year, haha
Like, look at my cute little bar graph for this year:

fucked up!!!!!! awful!!!!! disgusting!!!!! ao3 should let me filter out outliers!!!!!! 😡 (<- joking) (but actually though this bar graph makes me so sad, lmao) (the outliers...😔)

Anyway, the most delightful thing about finishing this fic for me is how much of a…cleansing experience it felt like, near the end of writing and editing it. It was like I took all the Romance-Sludge that'd accumulated in my brain over this past year and threw it all into a Google Doc. And I do mean all of it; this fic is approximately 6.7k words of Bowser and Luigi doing fuck-all. Even though they should be doing something that isn't fuck-all, given the fic summary. But, eh. No one's gonna be here for the lost child, anyway. Not with all the hand-holding and blushing and what-not. (No kissing, though. At the end of the day I'm still aro, after all XD)

I'm honestly quite excited to get back to writing these two platonically; it's a way simpler task overall, because writing romance is still so hard to do OTL Loved the practice I'd gotten with this ship, though! It really was the ideal training ground for me, considering how darn flexible it is — honestly out of all the ships I've ever encountered that flexibility makes this one my favorite ship by a lot, for reasons I could get into but won't because I've rambled enough, I think.

But now i never* have to write a romance thing ever again, hurray! (*aside from the necessary Mareach for the aroace!Mario fic. But in that one the romantic relationship is portrayed as a net negative so it won't be the same vibes as this one at all lmao) But also the funny thing about this particular fic I'm writing is that i explicitly put a sentence in there in the beginning that's in essence "these two aren't dating - they're in a trial period to figure out if they should be dating", because if I committed to them dating then i'd have to figure out Dating Social Norms and Rules and I would rather walk into the ocean a la Luigi in PMTOK than do anything close to that so in order to preserve my sanity they're just...making themselves real comfy in that gray area I guess XD Even when writing a romance thing i find a way to cheat it to something else...how hilarious and aro of me 💚

That's all beside the point, though. The point is I'm posting a fic tomorrow (today) and then I get to work on other stuff, like aroace!Mario or scared-of-the-dark!Mario or that new idea I had a week ago where a sleep-deprived and overworked Kamek passes the fuck out mid-conversation with Bowser and freaks him out real bad. Or maybe something else entirely; that's for the new year to decide, I guess!

Fic: A Calm(ish) and Relatively Relaxing Time

A Calm(ish) and Relatively Relaxing Time
Wherein Luigi and Bowser were watching their Baby Yoshi and they’d only taken their eyes off it for a second, they swear, where the heck did it go —?

Fandom: Super Mario
Rating: General Audiences
Characters: Bowser, Luigi, Daisy, Kamek
Relationships: Bowser/Luigi
Additional Tags: Fluff, Humor
Length: 6,774 words

The postlude to An Egg in a Trying Time! I'd really liked writing Bowser and Luigi interacting as themselves and not under the influence of hindbrain instincts or otherwise, but there was so little of that in the original fic itself that I wanted to write some more so I could poke at that dynamic.

I set the scene as them doing a meet-cute do-over rather than jumping into dating, mostly because I didn’t wanna write them actually dating, lol. That would require me to learn the Rules and Norms of it, which is very very uninteresting to me. The one upswing about writing romance is that I can take the parts I like and leave out the parts I don’t. That’s why there’s no kissing, but I think the build up to the kiss on the cheek is just as good if not better ;)

Loved writing Kamek in this one. He gets to be a little bastard and embarrass his pseudo-son! He still has a grudge against Yoshis, but he’s gonna have to deal, lol. This was basically my first time writing Daisy, as well. Was very consciously trying to not make her Bowser 2.0, and I think I succeeded! She’s got her own brand of fiery personality to her~

I also really liked writing out how Bowser fell for Luigi in the first place. I’d read a lot of Bowser/Luigi fic, and this sort of process is one of my favorites: when it creeps up on Bowser slowly, and then all of a sudden he looks up and everything’s changed. And Meanwhile Luigi’s just being himself :)