What it means to you/What it means to me

[butterflydreaming]

Because of the current problem with Ebooks Tree selling fanfic that they took without permission off AO3, I did the quick Google search to see if any of mine had been taken. They aren't in big fandoms, but I do have completed long works. Oh, and yes, they were.

Anyway, the first search pulled up a recommendation post on LJ for TC, actually posted a few days ago (like a late, unknowing birthday present). I didn't comment on the post; I don't want to make the rec'er uncomfortable. The thing that got me, though, was how the op, a Touya/Yue shipper, wrote that chapter 27 was the favorite chapter.

Chapter 27 is not a happy chapter. Chapter 27 is sad and desperate. This paragraph pretty much sums up what I was saying:

He felt Touya’s heat fill him like a liquid fire. The energy of physical union was a molten pleasure filling his form, but it cracked when it reached the curves of his heart. Yue’s center remained cold. It made their union brittle. It was pleasure without joy. Yue tried to make it right, but as he and Touya tangled the bedding, that achievement continued to escape him, as slippery as a smooth, heavy stone falling through turbid water. He lost it to a murky darkness that called him to follow.

Chapter 27 is the dark mirror image of an actual Touya/Yue one-shot, "To Thaw the Frost of Years." I wrote that one for the T/Y shippers, and I wrote 27 for me.

I wasn't effective in getting the relationship complexity across, I know. It's subtle and complex, and I'll take responsibility rather than saying that the readers "don't get it." I get amazing, touching feedback on this story for what it does mean to those readers.

Ultimately, my take-away is that the reader still enjoyed the story. A lot. Enough to post a recommendation for it. And that's not about me; that's about my fandom. I share for my fandom.