I simultaneously thank (and blame)
Mai-HiME for luring me into the world of shoujo-ai ("girls love"/femslash/whatever-you-want-to-call-it) fan-fiction. Loads of pretty girls + magical powers + subtext + one dirty-minded 27-year-old = Hilarity Ensuing. It helps that there's an actual lesbian character in canon (Shizuru, though at the point I am in the series, she isn't quite as open about it as
Bleach's Chizuru). Surprisingly, she's not the one character who's the focus of my "pairing du jour", but according to FanFiction.net, she's practically the focus of everyone else's. That honor would go to Mai and Natsuki, two of the main characters. What can I say? I like a challenge. Plus, they both have pretty good chemistry when they're on screen, so...why the heck not?

Sadly, it's very hard to find good fiction on these two at FF.net, since the search engine doesn't recognize the slash ("/"), leading me to find completely unrelated pairings (and I really don't like using "cutesy" portmanteau couple names, which this fandom and
Avatar are completely nuts about). I find this little omission completely absurd, since most of fanfiction is "all about the slash" (bad pun
very much intended). As I've already written 19 chapters of a planned 30 in a story for this pairing, I've been inspired to do even more in this category.
Next up: Sakura and Karin from
Street Fighter, inspired partially after reading
this story written a long time ago by someone named Kaiser Ryouga II. Say what? Rivalshipping? Happens all the time in
Pokémon and
Yu-Gi-Oh! I'm a sucker for these two...rivals on the battlefield, and friends off it.
That's not to say that I don't have other non-femslashy projects waiting in the wings. I have this little
Dark Cloud 2 Max/Monica friendship fic that I sat aside once I started working on my Mai/Natsuki story, and I might later do a little something revolving around
Read or Die's Yomiko/Donnie relationship, which is pretty much central to her character. I plan to get all of these projects off the backburner before the end of the year.
That's all I have today. Oh, wait...a link to the Mai/Natsuki story:
Table of Contents on my LJCheers!