Part 1 of these rambly notes can be found here. Explanation of the names I use for the Shitennou’s human names is here.

The premise of this story was suggested to me by my sister when we rewatched Act 35 recently. It actually was based on a two-part question:

1. How does Zoisite know that the music box won’t work if your heart is guarded?
2. What does Minako mean by, “I also know how it feels to forget“?*

I realize that this fic is a lot darker and more angsty than most of my other fics. As my sister would say, sorry ’bout it. I’d blame it on the fact that we just marathon-watched Hana Yori Dango, which has a tendency to bring out the melodramatic; but I think the nature of this premise just kind of lends itself to the darker angst anyway. Just… blame it on my sister, either way 

Some things that you might be wondering about in general…

Keep reading…

Tags: melody to forget

This actually got really lengthy, so I’m splitting these notes into two parts. This part kind of meandered into general theorizing about PGSM and its characters. For the second part, which addresses a few specific points from the story, click here.

I wanted to use this story to explore what kind of lives the Shitennou might have led before Beryl possessed them (this is following up on the premise I started with in “First Sight,” which is that all the Shitennou were like Shin—regular humans who were possessed by Beryl and lost their memories). I kind of build here on my own headcanon that the personalities of the Shitennou who served Beryl were a meshing of their past life and their modern personalities. The mileage on this, of course, varies from general to general.

Keep reading…

Tags: melody to forget

Back at the beginning of April, I requested an AO3 invite code, and it came through today! Yay! So you can now find me on Archive of Our Own.

I think I’m getting the hang of the site for the most part, although I am still having trouble with the tags. I had an easy enough time tagging my other fics, but when it came to Guardians, I hit a roadblock. See, the way the suggested tags are set up, it should be, for example, “Mizuno Ami | Sailor Mercury/Nephrite.” I didn’t really like that for Guardians because she’s not really Ami Mizuno. I do call her “Ami” because we were never given names for the Silver Millennium Guardians, and I thought using their Japanese names would make them more identifiable than if I made names up. But even though it was done out of necessity, I’m still not really happy with it because it would make more sense for them to have different names, like Serenity and Endymion.

So when it came to tagging, I kind of just wanted to say, “Sailor Mercury/Nephrite” because that leaves it ambiguous. But when I tagged that, it said it wasn’t an active tag. So I changed the tag to be “Mizuno Ami | Sailor Mercury/Nephrite,” but then I saw when I clicked on it that there are some fics, that pop up under that, that are tagged “Nephrite/Ami.” I guess AO3 staff goes through and groups up all the tags? But I kind of want to avoid that and just go with the pre-established tags, because

1. Going through and manually pruning the tags seems like a pain-in-the-ass job and I want to spare the AO3 staff trouble where I can
2. I want people to be able to find my fanfic and I don’t know how long it takes for the tags to be grouped up
3. Plus, since it’s done manually, I don’t want my tags to fall through the cracks and never get joined up with the other Neph/Ami fics or something
4. And I guess it’s just as well that it get tagged under that, even if it’s a Silver Millennium fic, for the same reason that I used their modern Japanese names in the fic in the first placr—people know what I’m talking about that way.

I’m just an obsessive, compulsive, nitpicky perfectionist. Can’t help it.