tarigwaemir | Last obligatory Blind Go aftermath post

Lowell House, on the Feast of St. Constantius

Okay, okay, I swear I'll stop talking about

blind_go after this post. ~~Until the next round anyway.~~

Well, now you all know that I wrote Reveille, a.k.a. the Mitani fic. The initial premise was that of "street go", rather like the chess players at the parks and streetside cafés whom you see around Cambridge and New York. (Whenever I actually think about this idea in the abstract, I can only wonder at how ridiculous it sounds.) Mitani would run into this mysterious old man and ~~learn super-secret go techniques handed down from the ancient mists of time~~ renew his interest in go. That part remained intact...however I didn't end it with Mitani entering a tournament and going through ritualistic intensive training to emerge victorious as I originally planned.

Why? What you probably don't know is that I spent most of August writing something completely different where I was trying to consciously disguise, well, everything I could about my writing (i.e. trying something that no one would ever expect me to write), so after that experience, I decided that I was going to go back into my comfort zone for

blind_go. For me, comfort zone = everyday moments in ordinary life, particularly revolving around school. I reread the manga and fixated on that moment when Hikaru is playing his first three-board game to decide whether he's ready to take the insei test, and Mitani says, "I have lost," with no one to hear him except Sai. ;_; And suddenly, although I hadn't intended to include Hikaru in the fanfic at all, the entire fanfic changed into trying to find a resolution for that scene. I adopted all sorts of weird formal rules in the process, e.g. in the beginning, I almost never described other people in the scene with Mitani (they made their presence known mostly though dialogue), but expanded the perspective as the story progressed. I also tied everything around in a circle. (I really should stop doing that.)

When I said I had a "camera" style of writing, I probably should have added that the "camera" is being directed by one of those independent filmmakers who really like closeups and minimalist scenes. -_- Nonetheless, I did leave an enormous hint: out of all my Hikago fics, "Reveille" is the most similar to "Sounds of Afternoon Go Games". ^_~ I was rather surprised that only

orangensaft guessed me correctly...I guess it's because I don't normally write about Mitani? But I was awfully flattered by all the incorrect guesses! I almost wish that I had written those fanfics instead because they were all much more impressive than mine. ^_^

readerofasaph wanted to know how I guessed her fic correctly, and I ended up writing way too much on how I arrived at all of my guesses.

Well, as soon as I had read it, I knew

petronia had written "A Proof by Contradiction". I was so overwhelmed by its sheer brilliance that I impulsively went and left her a comment about it. It takes a certain sort of mind to write a fanfic like that, and Sabina was the only writer I could think of who would think that way. Not to mention the sort of polished prose that makes something hard look easy.

I thought either

aishuu or

issen4 would have written "Blind Go" with its nuanced characters and plot development, but when I noticed that Aishuu used <hr> dividers, that pretty much decided the question. I also knew that Aishuu had said she was proud of her submission, and certainly "Blind Go" was a fanfic that Aishuu, with her high standards, could be proud of. And of course, only Aishuu, who is after all a journalist, would make the newspaper article at the beginning sound so convincing.

I also tentatively noted down

aishuu or

issen4 for "Better Days" because they both write multiparters, but I was dissatisfied with both guesses because the voice simply didn't fit. I'm very familiar with both of their voices, both from reading their LJs as well as their fics, and while the narration in "Better Days" sounded familiar, it wasn't Aishuu or Luce. Then I noticed the use of bolded text for emphasis in italicized thoughts, which is something that Muri does, and in the moment of eureka, I wrote in my text file, "Oh, it's Muri! Of course! Who else would write a fanfic I loved this much?" (Plus a paragraph of gushing, but I'll spare you.)

catwho writes her ellipses in a unique way and also is one of the few writers in this fandom who really knows how to write Akari/Hikaru, so she was a pretty easy guess for "One Hundred Years of Go". Similarly, now that I had

aishuu and

murinae down, Luce was the only one of the great long plot writers left who would write an AU like "Just Add Water". (The punctuation patterns matched as well.)

I was able to guess

readerofasaph and

lucathia_rykatu by their use of dividers ("#" and "-----" respectively).

lucathia_rykatu later asked me to replace her dividers with line breaks to be less noticeable. I'm slightly embarrassed that I didn't recognize Lynn's fanfic right away because I had spent considerable time reading through her Prince of Tennis fics earlier this summer and thought I'd be familiar with her style. >_> But in any case, punctuation gave it away in the end.

I also noticed that there were only three fanfics that used five line breaks as dividers. (You tend to notice these details if you're the person posting the text and making sure there are no HTML errors.) I made a leap of faith and decided that

trixie_chick was the most likely to write three fanfics because she was prolific and also seemed to be the only person not stressed out by the deadline.

I knew

orangensaft would write either Ogata/Ashiwara or Kaga/Tsutsui, so I initially guessed "Unwritten" because the use of repetition was similar to some of her previous Hikaru no Go fanfics. But then I found out accidentally which two fics that

meitachi had written, so I went to my second guess, which was "Misery Loves Company". As for

zoesque, I thought she would probably write humor, and the only humor fanfic that matched her punctuation patterns was "Lonely Rolling Star". I thought

svz_insanity would write humor as well, which is why I initially guessed "In the Darkness". But when I had to revise my guesses, I realized that it couldn't be her. Then I remembered that she had finished her fanfic rather early, and when I looked at "Here With Me", the punctuation once again matched.

Er, let's see, what else? I knew

ladyseishou had an impressive knowledge of Japan, which is why I guessed her for "Out of the Bag" (which had those little details like what the Japanese Engrish for "condoms" was) and that she wrote remarkably eloquent drabbles, which left...well, actually quite a few of the shorter fanfics, but "Of Fathers and Sons" had that sort of little twist at the ending, which reminded me of her drabbles for

31_days.

supacat has a very mature tone to her writing, so I thought she was the most likely to have written "Drunk", which was rather dark, at least for Hikaru no Go fandom. I knew that

katharos_8 often wrote fanfics with a sense of "atmosphere" and had occasionally used quotations to preface some of her fics, so I guessed "Crossing the Bar". I didn't really guess her other fic until the end, when I was matching up the remaining authors with the remaining fics as best I could.

The two fanfics I got wrong...haha, it's stupid but I thought

flonnebonne must have written the Death Note crossover. Probably because she kept mentioning Death Note in her posts around the deadline (then again, who would have given such an obvious hint?). So I mixed her up with

issen4, who I thought wrote "Blind Going In"...as you now know, it was in fact the other way around. I did however guess

flonnebonne correctly for her other fic "Two by Four" because she's the only other author who used <hr> dividers.

And that's the story of how Tari is a total dork and why her roommates are sick to death of hearing her talk about guessing for

blind_go.

Yours &c.

Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Silence

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

silvermuse89.livejournal.com

It's fun to read your thought processes on guessing, especially the parts about punctuation! I usually don't notice dividers, but they are a good way to tell authors apart. Another telling point that I noticed was the use of italics. Still, with so many fics it was certainly a challenge to guess, so only two wrong is fantastic.

Some of the authors seem interested in seeing all the guesses. What do you think? I'm worried about guessers not feeling comfortable with having their guesses revealed, but I don't know whether that would be a problem.

PS: Any ideas when the next round will be? ^_~

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