Candy Hearts Exchange

Title: Tsukihime

Medium: Visual Novel

Approximate Length: Approximately 50-60 hours, depending on your reading speed. Most relevant to my ships/requests are the Akiha and Hisui routes. You must complete one route before you can undertake Akiha's route, and I believe you must do Akiha's route before Hisui's. Arihiko doesn't have a route, unfortunately, but he makes regular appearances in either route you can use to unlock Akiha's, and he's also in Akiha's route often.

Where to (Legally) Find It: Tsukihime OG (the one I'll be requesting) never got an official Western release. Used copies are occasionally available online or in used game stores in Japan. There is a fan translation available from fangroup mirror moon. They offer a patch on their website if you have a physical, used copy of the game. That script was also used to make a web-playable version of the VN. I hesitate to link it here since it's not official nor legally licensed, but it's not hard to find.

Brief Description: From the later creators of the Fate series, this VN also served as inspiration for grassroots-Evo-favorite fighting game Melty Blood. Its protagonist and narrator, Tohno Shiki, is a seventeen year old student who was in a near-fatal accident eight years prior to the events of the story. It left him in fragile health, so he was sent away to live with a cadet branch of the family, and his younger sister Akiha was chosen as heir to the family legacy instead. When the game begins (October 20th, 1999), the father who sent him away has passed, Akiha has become the head of the family, and Shiki has been recalled to the Tohno family home. Meanwhile, in town, a series of mysterious killings has been described by the news as the work of a "modern day vampire," but of course such things don't really exist, do they?

Tsukihime is broadly divided into its "Near Side" routes, which mostly deal with the various vampires that have moved into the city and the forces that oppose them, and the "Far Side" routes, much more concerned with the inhabitants of the Tohno mansion, the tangled family history that takes up all the air in those empty halls, and just what happened before Shiki was sent away.

What You Love About the Canon: Some people get into the Nasuverse for the feats and the stylish fight scenes. Maybe even for the love interests. For my part, everyone in Tsukihime has something profoundly and compellingly wrong with them, and I find that much more immediate and interesting even than the intricate vampire lore ... which is probably why my requests are so strongly slanted toward characters more prominent on the Far Side.

What You Love About Your Ships: Arihiko is one of my favorite characters in the entire VN. Shiki is not the type of person that has a lot of friends, and the boisterous and outgoing Arihiko at first seems like an unlikely match, but his sort of reckless playboy first impression gives way to the realization that Arihiko is actually a very considerate friend who is occasionally more in tune with Shiki's needs than Shiki himself.

I like him with Shiki as a friends-to-lovers thing--Arihiko looks after Shiki's health; Shiki is the designated driver and sober companion when Arihiko drinks; they bicker like an old married couple.

I like Arihiko with Hisui because he's friends with all his exes and likes to spend his free time with senior citizens, and she needs someone who will be extremely patient and kind to her as she acclimates to being in a relationship.

I also like them as an OT3--the game itself jokes that Arihiko might crash Shiki and Hisui's dates. Hisui needs and deserves a lot of gentle treatment, and they can all take care of each other.

Akiha, on the other hand, can be downright cruel and selfish. But she's cruel and selfish because she's so very, very afraid that if Shiki knew everything, he would reject her and she would be all alone in this world. She has adored him since childhood, and everyone else in the world gets held to his standard and is therefore found lacking. I think she truly believes there's no one in the world for her but Shiki. Akiha needs Shiki to pull her out of the dark room of her crushing responsibilities to go play in the garden of life; Shiki needs Akiha to check him when he's being inconsiderate.

Kinds of Things You're Planning to Ask For: Hey, are you familiar with this really dark canon? Can you write me some fluff? =P I'm open to darkfic but most of the prompts I have in mind are pretty lighthearted--dates, feelings jams, reunions.

Content Notes: They're extensive--every major archive warning and then some. Violence and gore abounds; rape is prominent both in backstory and several times on-screen. The plot centers around a series of serial murders and every route has at least one fatal confrontation. Certain endings depict suicide. Certain routes reveal child sexual abuse in a character's backstory. The POV character is 17 and there are detailed sex scenes--mostly with people close to his own age, so both participants are underage, but one love interest is older and one is much older (a centuries-old vampire). (One of these two will be your love interest in the route you must complete to get to Akiha's.) There is sibling incest--implicit and flirtatious as well as explicit; between blood siblings and adopted siblings. There's at least one extended and graphic torture sequence (this is in Ciel's route, which you COULD skip if you're not playing for completion). One character gaslights another; there is also a reference to hypnosis or magical modification of memories. Unreality and psychosis are an element in all routes, but Hisui's route has an extended, especial emphasis on it. There is sometimes medical abuse, and more frequently in Kohaku's route.

Title: The Inquisition series, by Dan Abnett

Medium: Book series

Approximate Length: Eight novels (and counting), one novella, at least a half-dozen short stories, a few audio dramas, and scattered Advent Calendar shorts of approximately drabble length. For my purposes you can probably get away with reading just the Ravenor omnibus, which includes the most relevant backstory short for one of my requested characters. If you want to read everything, the author's preferred reading order is mirrored here.

Where to (Legally) Find It: Black Library, the fiction publishing arm of Games Workshop; other major ebook storefronts; bookstores (B&N carries 40k as a matter of course, your local indie would probably love to order it for you); Games Workshop storefronts.

Brief Description: The Inquisition series is a trilogy of trilogies, each with a different main character. The ensemble casts surrounding and supporting that character often feature old friends from previous books, and they work together to solve mysteries, hunt down heretics, and try to keep worlds from burning.

What You Love About the Canon: Abnett has a hell of a voice for these characters, and I truly love and get attached to so many members of the retinue. You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll groan at his winking references to ancient Terran history (read: modern culture). If you're new to the franchise, or you're a Horus Heresy or space marine focused reader that wants to try something new, the Inquisition series is full of memorable characters and interesting little ideas that have stuck with me for a decade and a half. My preferred introductory texts for anyone who wants to get into "modern" 40k, it was one of the first things I read when I wanted to get into 40K lore, and it's the series I revisit the most.

What You Love About Your Ship(s): At their best these are competent/competent couples, and I like the idea of a loving respite amidst all the horrors they make their careers of facing. These people have decades if not centuries of history together, and lots of canonical rapport and cute moments. More (many more) thoughts in my letter.

Kinds of Things You're Planning to Ask For: Casefic with feelings. Downtime date nights. Post-Ravenor-trilogy canon-compliant fic.

Content Notes: Canon-typical for Warhammer--violence and major character death abound. There's onscreen torture at least once (in Eisenhorn).