kantayra | A Series of Unsurprising Events (Reply)

Let's get right into writing (whee, for homophones!):

Femslash Salad Bar: In the most shocking and surprising twist of all time, I did not somehow complete 6 whole fics and post them in under a week, all while I had a pounding period headache. I know everyone else is as agog as I am. I did, however, complete 3 more, so I had a total of 7/10, which ain't horrible. Links to all that I finished are above. My original plan was to split the 10 fics with 2 each across 5 OTPs (Alana/Margot from Hannibal, Bedelia/Miriam from Hannibal, Eve/Villanelle from Killing Eve, Franziska/Maya from Ace Attorney, and Persephone/Maggie from Whyborne & Griffin). However, it was immediately obvious that my Alana/Margot and Bedelia/Miriam ideas would go way longer, and my Persephone/Maggie ideas were much shorter and also (so I thought) my Franziska/Maya ones, so I realloted. The shorter ideas inevitably got written faster, though, so of the 3 outstanding fics, 2 are Alana/Margot and 1 is Bedelia/Miriam. I hope to finish those up this March. But also! 3 fics is not enough for my whole Bedelia/Miriam idea, so I'm going to be expanding that series into more fics, and also I'd kind of like to add more chapters to my Franziska/Maya fic, so my goal is to do those 2 things in time with the schedule for Femslash Big Bang (which I did not sign up for), just to give myself a sort of deadline. I hope to knock out at least 1 of the 3 pending fics this week. So more news pending!

worldbuilding_exchange, wickedloveex, smut4smut: I'll be working on these assignments this week and hope to finish at least 1 (although ideally 2) this week.

unsent_letters_exchange & hurtcomfortex: I've already signed up for these, and am offering some slightly more unusual fandoms (along with my regular staples), so there will be some added suspense when assignments go out! I already have multiple matches across different fandoms for both, so no guarantees what I'll get.

the_mane_event: I posted my nominations for this, and need to sign up this week. This one has a quick turn-around time, so I'll probably write it as soon as assignments go out. Should be fun!

I did skip all the flash exchanges over the last week. I realized belatedly that I had scheduled all my volunteer hours at my figure-skating club last weekend, and also my synchronized skating team skated our routine at an exhibition, so I had zero free-time this weekend. Oops! But good that I remembered before I signed up, right? 🫠

There are 2 new exchanges starting their nominations process, both of which I'm sorta considering: fluffityfluffexchange for fluff (obviously) and fangfrenzyficexchange for vampires. Neither of which are super relevant to my fandoms at the moment, so I might skip them, but I'm watching what other people nominate just in case.

Rare Kink Buffet is currently in prompting mode, and I'm watching for anything in my fandoms, but nothing is catching my eye so far. I am not super big on 'any fandom' type prompts. My brain just works 'characters/fandom first, then prompts from there'. Hence why I don't do a lot of things like bulletproof, etc. But maybe something will pop up that's in one of my fandoms and directly relevant to my interests. I won't be super disappointed if I sit this one out. I have more than enough to do otherwise.

In other news: I've finished Killing Eve! I have thoughts!

Okay, yeah, Villanelle's death sucked and was weird. o.O Fortunately, it's easily fixable, though! I mean, Villanelle's death looked about as "permanent" as Konstantin's looked at the end of S1, and he was back alive with no explanation in S2, so whee! (Konstantin's S4 death is, alas, very permanent and hard to wank away.) And I think I see what the writers were going for. Like, the show is called 'Killing Eve', and the series starts off with Eve being sort of blah, not really alive yet, and then chasing Villanelle really wakes up the real Eve underneath (who is awesomely a bitch, lol), and then Eve's whole "life" becomes her obsession with Villanelle + her hunting down The Twelve, and we get the preview when Gunn shoots Villanelle with the arrow that that's the first thing that's really hurt Eve. So, in the end, it makes sense that to "kill" Eve, The Twelve need to cease to exist and Villanelle needs to die. However, I am unimpressed with the execution of that plan (assuming I'm not just overly fanwanking like crazy to try to make it all make any sense whatsoever).

Other thoughts with S4:

So, I was super bored with the beginning again. I can see that "Villanelle becomes a born-again Christian and finds out that Jesus is her in drag and keeps accidentally killing people even though she's trying to be good" is funny on paper, but I found most of it pretty tedious to watch. Like the Aaron Peel plot, it dragged on waaaaaaay too long for me.

The whole S4 opener was baffling to me. We ended S3 with what looked like Eve and Villanelle in a pretty good spot together and maybe teaming up to take on The Twelve. And then we open S4 with... Suddenly, Eve is super pissed with Villanelle and done with her for unspecified reasons. Don't get me wrong: there were many places in the series where this would make total sense for Eve, but just not after the S3 finale. And Villanelle is suddenly convinced that becoming good will make Eve like her... Where did that even come from? I kept thinking I missed an episode (or season). Very weird.

Carolyn defecting was similarly 'meh' for me. Again, I can see how it's got potential on paper, but mostly it was just dull, until she ran off and went rogue. Now, that was awesome! More of that, please, and less sitting around in depressing places in Russia.

I didn't really buy the resurgence of Carolyn's "must find who killed Kenny!" plot. Like... There are a couple of possibilities: 1) Konstantin told the truth and no one killed Kenny. 2) Konstantin did have an assassin with him (who I don't think could've been Villanelle, given where she and Konstantin stood at that point, even thought the final episode was maybe(????) trying to hint that it was her (???????)). And, in either case, Carolyn's revenge kick didn't work for me. It just seemed like the writers wanted an excuse to get her to defect, so that she'd have to do a massive betrayal at the end. I do think that, if anyone was going to kill Villanelle, Carolyn in a thoroughly cold-blooded way was a good choice, but...meh?

I did love Villanelle killing women's abusive husbands in Cuba! That was amazing and hilarious! (And I feel like I wanted more, but maybe it was just the right amount because it left me feeling that way.)

I really, really, really liked Pam! Just: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ She was so much fun! And so good at embalming! And I loved her dynamic with Konstantin (and also Villanelle). I could've watched 3 seasons with her as a regular character. And, while I'm sad Konstantin finally got fully deadened, I am happy that it was Pam and she made his corpse pretty and she got away from that life.

Sad that we didn't get more with Irina and her crazy relationship with Konstantin. That was a fun plotline, and I felt kind of got sidelined when there were way more interesting ways to go. (It could, of course, always be due to the actress' availability, too.)

Villanelle's totally random escapade with Gunn trying to atticwife her was fun! I mean: totally random and irrelevant to the plot. But, still, fun! And just about the right length. This subplot hit for me, the way the born-again Christian thing missed.

Aside from Villanelle's death, I liked the rest of the finale. Eve and Villanelle's roadtrip together (where they totally kissed - and fucked!) was fantastic. I would've enjoyed WAY more scenes like them stealing the "stupid camper" from the annoying kidney-sharing newlyweds. (In fact, overall, I'd say that's my biggest criticism of the series: There was SO MUCH gold in all Eve and Villanelle's shared scenes together, but there were surprisingly few episodes where they directly interacted. It just felt like a lot of 'tease tease tease tease tease ooh one scene! More tease tease tease...' which is frustrating as the audience.)

I'm going to guess that some people complained that Villanelle just went and killed The Twelve in a room, and there wasn't some BIG REVEAL or something. But, honestly, I was good with that. Loved the juxtaposition of Villanelle killing them all while Eve danced at the wedding, too. It was fun and lighthearted, the way mass murder should be. 😝

So, yes, there were some things that didn't work for me, but overall I loved the show and will rewatch (although maybe just the fun parts) at some point. And the finale didn't kill my urge to write! (And may actually have increased it!) So that's all good.

Goals for Next Week: (This is a new section I'm trying!) Complete 1 sign-up. Complete 2 fics (stretch goal of a 3rd). Next weekend I have a synchro competition, so no writing anticipated then. Wish me luck!

ETA: My total 2025 word count as of the end of February was 72K words. Looking good for 100K this year, woo-hoo!

A Series of Unsurprising Events

Post a comment in response: