u/nagatos

I recently wrote and posted a oneshot for a rarepair (my first ever fic on AO3, and only the second fic with that ship!). It’s niche enough that it probably won’t get many readers, but I have a much better appreciation for all the work that goes into writing now, hahahaha.

I’ve always enjoyed the more speculative nature of rarepairs and the potential there (though do understand that ships with a lot of canon interactions or “evidence” could technically still be rarepairs). I tend to gravitate towards them, since it feels like there’s a lot more freedom and flexibility, rather than ships where fandom has a very firm collective idea of how it should be.

Anyway, I’d love to know what your rarepairs are and why you like them. “Rarepair” is pretty subjective, but I would say use your best judgement. If you’ve written for a rarepair or have any fic recs for a rarepair you like, I’d love to read them :)

Sometime between 2007-2009, I read an Ikarishipping (Dawn and Paul) fic in which they both leave Pokemon at the daycare, then come back to find that their Pokemon were watching over an egg together. Since they can’t determine who should actually get the egg, they have to watch over it together until it hatches. In the end, >!the egg hatches, and it turns out it’s an entirely different Pokemon than either of theirs!<

I read this on either deviantart or FFNet, but that’s all I can remember.

We had a power outage of ~8 hour last night.

We have a 25 year old fridge/freezer combo out in our garage (so no indoor temperature control) where we store bulk foods. I checked it this morning, 1 hour after the power returned, and a container full of thinly sliced pork was soft and defrosted.

My concern is the fact that it was defrosted, and the fact that an hour after the power returned, it was still soft. Is this still safe to eat, or should I toss?

Freezer was fairly full, though the pork belly was sitting at the top (no temperature insulation on multiple sides).

We know that Blue was only Champion for maybe an hour, but how long did Red hold the title of Champion?

Red is not the main focus of the fic I’m writing right now, but it’s set in the interim period between RBY/FRLG and GSC/HGSS, so he does come up in the background and there are various references to him.

As of my current writing, I’m treating it as if he was Champion for a year and a half(ish), maybe less. His first year as Champion was spent doing a lot of cleaning up after Team Rocket (see: the Sevii Islands plot), and then he spent time traveling around Johto and challenging the Gym Leaders there to try and find a challenge. He grows fairly jaded in the process, and resigns as Champion not long after his Johto tour, and goes into seclusion to train (whether he immediately goes to Mt. Silver or somewhere else doesn’t come up at all in the fic, and isn’t really relevant).

So I guess what I’m wondering, is: is this actually plausible? Is there anything that actually indicates how long he was Champion for? The only thing I can really think of is his mom mentioning that he’s been away for a while, but that’s so vague.

I read My Best Friend’s Exorcism a few years back and absolutely adored it. Grady Hendrix really nailed adolescent girl friendships, and the ending made me cry (in a good way). Besides a single gross out scene (you know the one), I wouldn’t say that the book particularly scared me, but the characters more than made up for that.

After that, I decided to dive into other Grady Hendrix books, with mixed-to-negative success:

Horrorstör - incredibly strong concept and presentation, but I found it almost… overwhelming? It was hard to sit with everything that was happening and truly digest it, because once things started happening, it felt like a constant bombardment. This really dulled the scariness factor for me, and by the time it was over, all I could think was “thank God, now I can breathe.”

The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires - I’d like to give this another go. I struggled to get into this, and admittedly a big part of that probably comes from the fact that I don’t care as much for vampires.

The Final Girl’s Support Group - don’t even get me started. I have DNFed this book three times. I have given it more than a fair shot, but just couldn’t do it. Could not stand a single character in it, the prose feels like an itemized list, and since I have no attachment to slasher films, I wasn’t able to appreciate any of the references.

I love ghost stories and am particularly interested in haunted houses, but with me finding the author to be so incredibly hit or miss, is How to Sell a Haunted House even worth checking out? Or am I just setting myself up for disappointment again?

For what it’s worth, I really enjoy family conflict (which I understand this story has), and slow burn, gradually increasing sense of dread (which I can’t get an answer on).

What it says on the tin. As much as I like King, I’d like to branch out a bit :)

A childhood favorite of mine was Ghosts on the Coast of Maine by Carol Olivieri Schulte. I want to relive the feeling of sitting inside on a dreary day and reading it, then spending all evening jumping at shadows.

I like dreary slowburns, fog, the woods, deaths at sea, and so on. My preference is usually ghost stories, but I’m open to whatever so long as it feels like it really captures Maine as a setting!