Fic: Ti voglio tanto bene
Jun. 24th, 2024 12:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mrsluigivargasTi voglio tanto beneHere’s the thing.
Mario liked Peach.
And he knew she had a crush on him. And by all rights, she was the kind of person he was supposed to be dating.
So, he figured, he might as well give it a try.
Fandom: Super Mario
Rating: General Audiences
Characters: Mario, Peach, Luigi
Relationships: Mario/Peach, Mario & Luigi
Additional Tags: Angst with a Happy Ending, Queerplatonic Relationships, Brotherly Love, Internalized Aphobia, Aromantic Asexual Mario
Length: 11,002 words
This fic is...man.
I’ve always had the aro!Mario headcanon. To me, it was very compelling that in a world that pressed the expectation that Mario and Peach would be a couple due to the nature of their relationship (knight/princess, hero/damsel) Mario himself didn't align with them, and felt uncomfortable about it. In my usual version of things, after Mario Odyssey Peach asks why he proposed, and he ends up talking about these mismatched expectations, and then a few days later Peach presents the word “aromantic” to him and Mario’s life changes. Obviously in this fic Mario and Peach are dating by the time Mario Odyssey rolls around; I felt that changing their relationship to be so would accent the contrast more and heighten my vision a little bit. And make it easier to convey, too.
Someone had left a comment on one of my older aro!Mario fics, so I felt inspired to write another one. This fic ballooned beyond anything I could ever imagine. A lot of it was written in stream-of-consciousness chunks, scattered across a Google Doc, many of which stayed wholly intact during the editing process. This was probably the most try-hard I’ve ever been while writing a fic, haha. And also the closest I’ve come to putting myself in one. I finally understand, now, I think. This writing style is quite the departure from my usual. It’s all quite...floaty? And a bit abstract. I dig it, though.
Mario isn't the same kind of aromantic I am. He’s alloplatonic and experienced the age-old “I’m broken” phase, I’m aplatonic and loveless and was confident and assured in my lack of romantic nor sexual attraction from the get-go. So reaching across the aisle was a little bit tricky, to construct a narrative that was angsty but not to overwrought. Based on the comments, I was pretty successful about it! I also pulled in my feelings about the Mario/Peach ship – which at the time, I was a touch repulsed by due to its over-saturation on my Tumblr dashboard (I still am, tbh). That sort of inescapable inevitability was exactly the energy I wanted to channel while I wrote Mario staring into his own future, the pair of headlights staring back at him in that dark tunnel, getting ever closer. For everything else, I crawled through the #aromantic tag on Tumblr for a little bit, trying to gather common themes and sentiments.
This fic also forced me to spin up a backstory for the bros. I settled on grew up in the Metro Kingdom, lost their father at a young age and lost their mother after graduating from high school, moved to Toad Town to operate their plumbing business. A bit cribbed from other people’s headcanons, but hey – if it ain't broke, don’t fix it. This came in handy during the Mario-has-a-breakdown section especially.
Luigi ended up being a huge part of this narrative – he practically saved Mario and Peach’s relationship! It feels completely right though. Sure, Mario really really likes Peach, but as the fic says, Mario loves Luigi; that relationship is always going to be the most important in Mario’s life. Part of the reason Peach is good for him is that she understands that, too. There’s also very much a, like, "all the love you put out comes back to you" with Luigi in particular as well, especially in specific parts of the story. I think that’s another point to putting yourself into a fic, haha.
Speaking of “Mario loves Luigi”, that repeated phrasing in the fic came about by complete accident, haha. It was just a placeholder between scenes, but I ended up liking it. It really felt like I was actively telling the story to the reader, which was a cool vibe.
This was always going to be a narrative where Peach accepts Mario’s aro, and they shift to a QPR. There was never going to be any room for a lack of acceptance on her and Luigi’s part, and Luigi knows exactly what being aroace based on the research he’d done when he was figuring out he was multi-attractional. It’s that foundational assurance that makes this fic very precious to me, among other things.
I stretched the bounds of my nonverbal!Mario headcanon, too. Usually I don’t have him using sign language at all, but I’d felt that in this fic it would streamline things immensely. So sign language it was! I wrote it in italics, even though conventional advice says to not. But I still wanted to stick with my true internal rule of no dialogue quotes for Mario, so this was the best compromise on the market.
I really didn’t want the word “aromantic” to come up in the fic at all. Part of my struggle reading aro fics is that they all basically boil down to “Aromanticism 101”. But I’m way past 101; I want a 105 or a 203 or something. I’m not writing this for the allos; I’m writing this for me, an aroace, and all the aroaces, too. The allos can do their own research and catch up on their own time. That’s why I put links in the end notes.
...This is still a coming out/discovery narrative at the end of the day, though, haha. But only a fraction of it is dedicated to that specific point! Everything else is an aroace navigating the world as an aroace!
Someone had left a comment on one of my older aro!Mario fics, so I felt inspired to write another one. This fic ballooned beyond anything I could ever imagine. A lot of it was written in stream-of-consciousness chunks, scattered across a Google Doc, many of which stayed wholly intact during the editing process. This was probably the most try-hard I’ve ever been while writing a fic, haha. And also the closest I’ve come to putting myself in one. I finally understand, now, I think. This writing style is quite the departure from my usual. It’s all quite...floaty? And a bit abstract. I dig it, though.
Mario isn't the same kind of aromantic I am. He’s alloplatonic and experienced the age-old “I’m broken” phase, I’m aplatonic and loveless and was confident and assured in my lack of romantic nor sexual attraction from the get-go. So reaching across the aisle was a little bit tricky, to construct a narrative that was angsty but not to overwrought. Based on the comments, I was pretty successful about it! I also pulled in my feelings about the Mario/Peach ship – which at the time, I was a touch repulsed by due to its over-saturation on my Tumblr dashboard (I still am, tbh). That sort of inescapable inevitability was exactly the energy I wanted to channel while I wrote Mario staring into his own future, the pair of headlights staring back at him in that dark tunnel, getting ever closer. For everything else, I crawled through the #aromantic tag on Tumblr for a little bit, trying to gather common themes and sentiments.
This fic also forced me to spin up a backstory for the bros. I settled on grew up in the Metro Kingdom, lost their father at a young age and lost their mother after graduating from high school, moved to Toad Town to operate their plumbing business. A bit cribbed from other people’s headcanons, but hey – if it ain't broke, don’t fix it. This came in handy during the Mario-has-a-breakdown section especially.
Luigi ended up being a huge part of this narrative – he practically saved Mario and Peach’s relationship! It feels completely right though. Sure, Mario really really likes Peach, but as the fic says, Mario loves Luigi; that relationship is always going to be the most important in Mario’s life. Part of the reason Peach is good for him is that she understands that, too. There’s also very much a, like, "all the love you put out comes back to you" with Luigi in particular as well, especially in specific parts of the story. I think that’s another point to putting yourself into a fic, haha.
Speaking of “Mario loves Luigi”, that repeated phrasing in the fic came about by complete accident, haha. It was just a placeholder between scenes, but I ended up liking it. It really felt like I was actively telling the story to the reader, which was a cool vibe.
This was always going to be a narrative where Peach accepts Mario’s aro, and they shift to a QPR. There was never going to be any room for a lack of acceptance on her and Luigi’s part, and Luigi knows exactly what being aroace based on the research he’d done when he was figuring out he was multi-attractional. It’s that foundational assurance that makes this fic very precious to me, among other things.
I stretched the bounds of my nonverbal!Mario headcanon, too. Usually I don’t have him using sign language at all, but I’d felt that in this fic it would streamline things immensely. So sign language it was! I wrote it in italics, even though conventional advice says to not. But I still wanted to stick with my true internal rule of no dialogue quotes for Mario, so this was the best compromise on the market.
I really didn’t want the word “aromantic” to come up in the fic at all. Part of my struggle reading aro fics is that they all basically boil down to “Aromanticism 101”. But I’m way past 101; I want a 105 or a 203 or something. I’m not writing this for the allos; I’m writing this for me, an aroace, and all the aroaces, too. The allos can do their own research and catch up on their own time. That’s why I put links in the end notes.
...This is still a coming out/discovery narrative at the end of the day, though, haha. But only a fraction of it is dedicated to that specific point! Everything else is an aroace navigating the world as an aroace!
But anyway, this fic is this year’s magnum opus for sure, and it’ll sit next to last year’s — no words can say how much I care. Wonder what it’ll be next year?