Meow

MHA tweets pt.12 ✨

Idolish7 fanfic- Morning (1,210 words)

a friend showed me this clip of Idolish7 and i've been binging the show ever since

this is my contribution to the fandom lol

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“Iorin,” Tamaki whined, slumping into the doorframe of their dorm bathroom, still dressed in his pajamas. “Where’s my toothbrush?”

Iori continued straightening his school tie in the mirror, sparing an irritated glance towards his team member. “I’m not your mother.”

Tamaki’s head slumped lower on the frame. “But Iorin, it’s not there.”

“Where else would it be?” Iori shot back, thankful that Tamaki’s closed eyes allowed him to stealthily tally up the toothbrushes scattered around the sink. 

Iori’s toothbrush was resting upright in the cup meant for toothbrushes, as was Sogo-san’s and Yamato-san’s. Nagi-san’s- an obnoxiously pink, wand-shaped thing- was beside the cup at least, and Mitsuki’s was balanced on the tiny line of counter ledge the same way he’d done since they were young, and Nanase-san’s was in the shower like a heathen. 

Tamaki’s toothbrush was not there. 

“King pudding,” Tamaki mumbled. 

Iori stomped on his foot and Tamaki jerked to attention with a cry. “Don’t you dare fall asleep!” Iori chastised. 

“But-”

“Either go find it or go buy a new one, but if you’re late getting back I will leave for school without you.”

Tamaki yawned. “I’ll just have a mint.”

Iori frowned. “That’s unsanitary.”

“Then I’ll ask the manager for one.”

“That’s rude.” Iori pushed past Tamaki to exit the bathroom. “She’s way too busy already to go running errands for you.”

Tamaki groaned, letting Iori’s small nudge of his shoulder turn into a slow-motion pantomime of being shoved to the ground. “I just won’t go to school then,” he said, curling up on the hallway’s dirty carpet. 

Iori huffed and stepped over Tamaki’s limp body to make his way towards the kitchen where Sogo-san, predictably, sat at the table nursing a warm cup of tea. 

The mug was halfway to his lips when he noticed Iori’s approach and he paused, smiling. “Oh, Iori-kun. Good mo-”

“Tamaki’s on the ground because he’s lazy and can’t find his toothbrush and won’t go buy a new one and if he tries to leave the house with me without cleaning his mouth I might kill him.”

Sogo-san hardly blinked while Iori explained the situation, and only after a long sip of tea that had Iori tapping his foot on the ground in impatience did he finally say, “You’re not really a morning person, are you, Iori-kun?”

Iori frowned. “What does that have to do with anything?”

Sogo-san smiled gently. “You’re just normally a lot more…level-headed.”

“I’m being level-headed,” Iori huffed, “I went and got you, didn’t I?’

Sogo-san blinked. “What am I supposed to do about it?”

Iori, maturely, resisted the urge to groan aloud and walked (not stomped) to the fridge instead to pour himself a glass of orange juice. As he watched the glass fill with bright pulpy liquid, he mentally recited, it’s good for you, there are antioxidants, it helps your gut and when he felt marginally more relaxed he turned to Sogo-san. Calmly. 

“You manage him for Mezzo, don’t you?”

Sogo-san made a so-so gesture with his head, mouth twisting with uncertainty and what were probably thoughts he wouldn’t dare let escape his polite mouth. 

“So manage him,” Iori demanded, downing his glass in one go and depositing it in the sink where it belonged. He wrinkled his nose at the myriad of cups still littering the counter from yesterday. 

Iori lived with a horde of pigs. 

Sogo-san continued to drink his tea, lightly tapping out the melody to one of their most recent songs on the tabletop with the soft pad of his fingertip.

The clock continued to tick away. 

Iori marched to the chair directly opposite him and stared- maturely and unflinchingly. 

Ten seconds, Iori predicted. 

Sogo-san’s tapping turned more forced, his gaze darting anywhere but Iori. 

Eight…

“He’s not my responsibility, you know.”

Iori lightly tipped his head in acknowledgement, then let his gaze track pointedly over all the empty chairs surrounding them. 

Six…

“Tamaki-kun needs to learn to do things for himself,” Sogo-san pointed out. “This could be a learning experience!”

Iori raised his eyebrow. 

Sogo-san’s mouth twisted. 

Four…

“This isn’t even Mezzo related. Not really.”

Iori scoffed. 

Three…

“Maybe…maybe he’s already gone looking for his toothbrush?” he suggested hopefully. 

Two…

Iori discreetly held his breath, hoping to punctuate the perfect silence permeating the dorms. There was absolutely no toothbrush-related ruffling. 

One. 

“Oh, fine,” Sogo-san sighed, rising unhappily from the table and pointing a finger towards Iori, “but I’m not his keeper.”

“Uh-huh,” Iori agreed lightly. 

“I’m not,” Sogo-san repeated, denial thick on his tongue as he walked toward the bathroom, tea still in hand. 

“And I don’t have a thing for idiots,” Iori murmured under his breath. 

There were still fifteen minutes before he and Tamaki needed to leave for school so maybe he could just shut his eyes for a-

Nanase-san suddenly pulled out the chair beside Iori and shot him a grin far too sunny for the early morning hour, placing two plates of toast down. “You don’t have a what?” he asked pleasantly, sliding one toward Iori. 

Iori squinted in the face of such brightness, then cleared his throat.

“Nothing. Is this all you know how to make?”

Nanase-san’s bright smile melted into a frown. “I told you I’ve never lived on my own before,” he complained. 

Iori took a bite of the offering, pleased. 

“You’re pathetic.”

“I am not,” Nanase-san denied halfheartedly, too used to this particular insult to rise to the bait like he had when they had first formed Idolish7. 

Iori would just have to try harder, then. 

“You didn’t even make anything at all! How’re you gonna stay healthy for the group if you’re skipping meals, huh?”

Iori spared a glance at Nanase’s overly sincere expression to ensure he wasn’t making things up but no, Nanase’s best rebuttal was an earnest appeal to Iori’s health. 

How cute. 

Iori cleared his throat. “How could I cook with Tamaki-kun making such a fuss?”

“What? Tamaki’s still asleep in the hallway.”

A spike of irritation shot through Iori. After he’d gone through all that effort to get Sogo-san to solve the problem, too. 

“He better not be. I’ll kill him.”

Nanase-san laughed, unfairly awake and amused at such an early hour. His right hand rested comfortably on the back of Iori’s chair. “You’re not much of a morning person, are you?”

Iori was…not sure what kind of a person he was, yet. 

Still, he knew he found delight in giving Nanase-san a hard time and, mature as he was, Iori couldn’t see a reason to give that up when it made him feel so pleasantly warm. 

Iori shrugged carelessly, tucking away any hint of the smile he felt growing in his chest. “Maybe I’d be cheerier if you didn’t burn my toast.”

“What?” Nanase-san exclaimed. “No way! I didn’t burn anything!”

Iori stared at him blanky until Nanase-san began to fidget, his cheeks taking on a bit of the color Iori worked so hard to see everyday. 

“Well,” Nanase-san mumbled, eyes darting away, “you ate it anyway so it couldn’t have been that bad.”

Iori rose from the table and placed his empty plate in the sink, where it belonged, lips curling upward only with Nanase-san at his back. 

“I’m very polite, Nanase-san.”

“Polite my ass.”

For me, I try to replace words like said with something more specific, but only if the dialogue needs it. So like:

“I hate you,” he said.

can be a lot less effective in an argument scene than,

“I hate you!” he shouted.

So advice #1 is add specificity so you can paint the image that you want your readers to have. If I’m struggling to find the specific word I want to use I’ll sometimes try OneLook Thesaurus, but honestly sometimes the simple ones you think of first work best (he shouted vs he vociferated, yk?)

But sometimes you don’t even need the specificity in the dialogue tag to make the image clear, you can focus on description and leave the dialogue standing on its own, like:

Tommy gripped Clarence by the collar, his nostrils flaring.

“I hate you!”

As long as it’s clear who’s speaking, stand alone dialogue can be really effective and it’s smth I’ve had recommended to me before. So advice #2 would be to simply drop some of the said’s or ask’s that aren’t doing much for your dialogue. (But this doesn’t mean it’s automatically better to cut out all of them, especially if some of those tags do a lot of work for the pacing of your dialogue, it’s really up to your own judgement as the all-knowing author)

And advice #3 is just that writers notice the said’s and ask’s way more than a reader ever does, bc to a reader those words tend to become part of the landscape of what they’re reading and feel very natural but if you choose a synonym of said that feels really out of place, then they’ll definitely notice it

So overall I’d say don’t get too in your head about it :)

Having a lot of said’s and ask’s is totally normal, it’s really just up to you if you think they’re not doing enough work to paint the picture you want or if it might be punchier to have to dialogue be without tags! Might even be worth it to look at a piece of writing you really like to see that author’s balance of said/asked vs more specific tags vs no tags at all, especially to note which ones you, as a reader, like the most

Hope this helps and best of luck with your novel!!

I'm using said and asked way to many times in my writing. Where do you all get your synonyms from??

And don't tell me 'Google'

this scene actually broke me and i havent even watched the actual episode

personally, i definitely think that these phrases stand out a lot more to the writer than to the reader, but if you feel like those comparison phrases are adding up too much or getting a bit clunky, I’d recommend experimenting with metaphors rather than trying to look for replacements for “like” or “as”

to a reader, something like “her smile was like the rising sun” is super easy to read and can do a lot of work communicating theme and mood and details about the character (or narrator, depending) but switching it up to something more complex like “her smile was akin to the rising sun” can make a reader pause and go ‘huh that’s a little awkward’ unless that’s the style of language you’ve been writing in the whole time

that said, i think the simplest way to cut down on similes if you have too many (or don’t enjoy how they affect the flow of your sentences) is to use metaphors. they can help cut down that barrier between a character comparing two things (e.g. her smile & the rising sun) and instead appeal directly to a reader’s senses or their understanding of the world, so that the comparison just becomes part of the scene itself

for example, I was reading Sally Rooney’s Normal People during the unit on comparisons for a writing course I took and some that stood out to me were how she described “rain silver as loose change in the glare of traffic” and how that rain “[whispered] on slick roof tiles”

the first quote is a simile while the second is a metaphor, but both of them are making comparisons (the first comparing rain & loose change, leaning on a readers visual reference for shiny coins and implying that the narrator thinks these two things are alike) while the second one compares the sound of rain to the sound of whispering by making it part of the scene description directly. rather than say “it was as if the rain whispered on slick roof tiles” Rooney broke down the barrier that similes sometimes put up by directly appealing to the reader’s senses instead (sound here, instead of sight) and that’s effective bc a reader can very easily understand what it means for rain to whisper without the author having to put in a lot of work looking for a natural way to say “the rain seemed as if it was whispering on slick roof tiles”

and sometimes similes just work better than metaphors. it really depends but, as the author, you get to choose what works for you and what doesn’t

these kind of considerations can be hard to remember when you’re in the middle of writing, too, but the editing phase can be a great place to turn some similes into metaphors (or to decide that you like all your similes and to leave them be!)

i know a lot of my writing involves me writing exactly what I mean, and then scaling it back in the editing phase so that I’m showing what I mean instead of stating it all outright- and in that process a lot of similes end up incorporated in different ways (either by using metaphors instead or by dropping the comparison altogether and leaning more on body language and or theme to draw out the ideas and impressions i want a reader to get) so maybe that strategy could work for you too?

i got a little long-winded here but I hope this helps!

As a newer writer, I'm struggling to use similes in more ways other than by phrases like "like", "seeming as", "as if" or other versions of these three.

What are some of the other, if any, ways to compare something to something else, to avoid a book turning mundane?

Chapter one of my new de-aged bakugou fic is posted on ao3 as of earlier today! Had it in my files as “katsuki self-love agenda” lol but the official title is frenemy is far too simple a word

Check it out if you’re interested!

Begging kindly asking for comments :)

sometimes I look back on my past writing and think it’s the worst thing ever written but occasionally there will be a killer line hidden in there that saves me from the depths of despair

like, yeah I wouldn’t write it that away again if given the chance but that one line?? etch it in stone, my guy

sponsored by this line from a merthur s1 ep03 re-write I wrote ages ago (you can find it here if you’d like)

“All he could see was Merlin walking peacefully from the room, his stupid neckerchief flowerless and hanging from his throat like a poor man’s noose.

When his father adjourned the council, Arthur was still trying to figure out where in the folds of that tattered fabric a part of himself was hidden because he had ceased to be whole the second his manservant disappeared around the corner.”

Fractal | Shouto & Touya Todoroki | poetry/prose | 580 words

Shouto’s world changed when he woke up in the hospital. 

Touya’s world changed when he woke up in the hospital.

His face had been burned, the doctor told him. 

He had burned his body, a stranger told him.

Shouto remembered the shouting. 

Touya remembered the desperation.

The kind of argument that felt like it shook the walls around him. 

The disappointment in his father’s eyes, twisting up his insides as Endeavor shouted and raged and forced Touya to stop. 

(He was being burnt up)

(He was being replaced)

Long after the echoes of his father’s voice had faded, Shouto remembered walking into the kitchen. 

He remembered watching his mother’s unmoving form while she refused to say anything- anything- and then Touya blazed out the door without looking back to see if her expression had crumpled with regret.

He remembered watching his mother’s face flit from terror to anguish in the span of a breath as he entered, looking like she had been shattered by his soft-footed, pattering approach. 

By then, Touya knew better than to search for regret in his father’s eyes. 

And then the woman before him became unrecognizable.

Endeavor didn’t think Touya was strong enough but he was. He could be. 

Shouto burned with the memory of a pain more intense than any he’d ever felt before. 

Touya remembered the screaming in his veins, remembered the burn- harsher than anything he’d ever felt before. Remembered a startling break in the anguish and thinking, with his last shred of clarity, that this had to be good enough for his father. 

It left Shouto numb and shivering beneath the thin, white hospital sheets. 

It had to be. 

“Mom..?” Shouto croaked and the doctor shook his head no.  

It had to be. 

Shouto didn’t cry when he saw the scar marring his face, but something inside of him felt sick.

Touya didn’t cry when he saw his mottled, purple reflection held together by crude stitches. Or when they told him he had died. 

Shouto let the shock pool over him like ice and held the freezing shards close to his chest, hoping that they might be enough to douse the monstrous pain in his chest. 

The disappointment was his own when he realized that he hadn’t been enough, after all. That he never was and never would be. 

Shouto thought of the heat that always seemed to lick at his father’s eyes and fists when he shouted- warm enough to be felt even when Shouto couldn’t see the flames through his closed eyes or hear the words through his ragged, warbling breaths. 

The bitterness was his own, too, but the expression in the mirror was startlingly familiar. 

Heat thrummed uneasily beneath Shouto’s veins and the second he realized that the fire within himself was nothing more than his father’s furious legacy, pawned off onto Shouto like a lead shackle, was the second that Shouto Todoroki decided to freeze. 

The second that Touya realized he was wearing the face his father had always greeted him with was the second time Touya Todoroki died and left a rotten shell of himself to walk the earth. 

Shouto cast his eyes downward and didn’t respond to the doctor. 

He didn’t notice that his father couldn’t look him in the eye. 

Shouto grew older and decided that he and his mother were both victims of Endeavor. 

Touya grew smarter and decided that the world would soon know who had driven him to an early death.

The General's Bride

Chapter 3

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