I Played P5r And I Fell Into Shuake Hell

My Secret Santa gift for this year's Phoenixflare event is live!

In the aftermath of Phoenix Gate the Undying are too late to rescue the Phoenix, and Joshua Rosfield is spirited off to the empire of Sanbreque. There he will lay in slumber for five long years. The best imperial physickers will tend to his needs, as well as the Dominany of Bahamut. For Dion Lesage refuses to give up hope that his friend will one day reawaken.

in honor of 2/2 coming up

The Saga of Hulkenberg's Brunch (Source: 30% Iron Chef)

the gang

Happy Fanfic Writer Appreciation Day!

So back in May/June I finished my first playthrough of Persona 5 and fell HARD into the shuake/akeshu ship. This fic was one that I read and immediately messaged the author about doing for this event.

And it turned into probably my favorite book I've made yet. The one I am happiest with overall.

The series (both fics are in the book) is First Step. The main fic is "the first step to find your way is to mark where you have been" by @futuresoon

It's a fantastic post-Royal fic that explores the idea that Akechi's spirit is trapped in a Palace, and Akira has to work through the Palace of Akechi's trauma in order to save him.

Also thank you to @munidraws for letting me use their fanart for the fic.

Process details under here

The typesetting was designed based on both canon elements from the game and motifs from the fic. The fic is set mostly in a labyrinth of black stone walls, so I used that for the chapter openers. And the Chapter titles and text messages in the book use the actual fonts from the game (or ones recreated to be very close by fans).

Text messages are shown in very stylized black and white boxes in the game. I decided I couldn't recreate the shape of the boxes without both a lot of work and taking up a lot of page real estate. So I settled for plain black and white boxes. Shoutout to Manda and Des from Renegade for teaching me how to do these easily in Affinity.

The title page took me....more time than I'm willing to admit. Because of the labyrinth theme and long title I wanted a winding brick path for illustration but it proved really difficult to find anything like what I wanted. So I went through a lot of image manipulation to get something like what I wanted. (Shh, it's not a snake.)

I did my first solid painted edges, with a couple fails until I went and bought some black acrylic ink, which worked like a dream. The endpages are linen textured cardstock.

The case is bound in black bookcloth and marbled fabric made into bookcloth. I used purchased black bookcloth for the author copy and made my own paperless bookcloth with acrylic medium and paste from some thrifted fabric. You can tell the difference in person, but it's subtle. The marble is quilting fabric from Joann's which I also turned into paperless bookcloth and then folded and glued down as a strip.

The spine is titled with heat foil quill in red foil. It's not perfect, but came pretty close for using foil that is not fantastic in quality.

*whispers* hang out with me before I die

more persona doodles with actual personas (and some requests from twt that i have YET to post on twt)

Fanfic Bookclubs and sharing comments

I've seen a few posts about how fics are being read in private discords and the author never even knows (no comments, no kudos, nothing). 

I wanted to share about the fanfic bookclub that I'm a part of because I think it is run really well. It's super fun, and we do share with the author, and I feel like it creates a lot of positivity in the community.

What we do:

Our Discord has a Bookclub channel with a link to a Google Form document where any discord member can submit links to fics. In our case, since our server is dedicated to a specific ship, we have a rule that the fic must be about that ship, and also that the fic must be complete. 

A random number generator helps pick the next fic. A meeting’s chosen fics may include: 1) a size-able one shot, 2) multiple short fics, 3) a few chapters of a longer fic, with subsequent meetings on subsequent chapters, or 4) a few chapters of a longer fic plus a very short fic. There is a little juggling required based on fic lengths to figure out how many to fit in a week, but our thoughtful mod only bases it on fic length, not on submitter, title, author, or tags.

We read fics of all different ratings, but we understand that some members have tags/tropes they don't like. Members simply choose to attend or not attend based on the tags and based on their availability. Easy peasy.

We meet once a week.  Timezone can be a problem, and definitely it is not a time that will be accessible for everyone.  We initially tried to have two meetings to accommodate all timezones, but did not have enough attendance.  But like with all global things, we just do our best.  

The conversation focuses on the positive. Things we loved, things we thought were clever or funny or such delicious angst.  There may be general conversation about how frequently we see this headcanon in fics (and that's a fun thing), etc. There may be some questions like "I found this confusing...what did this mean?" but there is no critique.

(The conversations often include some readers pointing out themes or easter eggs or some interesting details that others may have missed…truly, it is so fun)

One person volunteers to take notes the old-fashioned-way..typing!  Not via AI or any other recording.  The notes do not show who said what, so that people can feel comfortable speaking. 

Sometimes the author joins if they are able to, which is super fun! If the author is not a member of the discord, we may invite them, especially if anyone knows them, but we don't actively reach out because we don't want the author to feel overly pressured.  But we are always extra excited to have an author join. 

Since we intend to share our discussion with the author, we keep all the notes positive and focused on the fic.  We do not put anything that came up in conversation that is not relevant (like if we talk about other fics or HCs outside the fic). 

The notes are posted into the author's comment box in ao3.