"it's a mirror" dvd commentary
Nov. 27th, 2025 02:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
girlrockwrote a terribad fic. ama
it's a mirror / gcu (9.0, t)
the idea of writing post-tlg oc fic amused me for many reasons. first of all i love having blanket permission to write annoying 4th wall fandom meta fic with like, the in-universe understanding that Gay people actually exist, whereas when you do hockey rpf it's kind of more fraught because it's like ok Yes i'm claiming that ep40 is gay here but actually he's straightmarried and will eventually get mormonwifepilled for tiktok views or whatever. yes i'm aware of that please just read between the lines and suspend your disbelief for 5 minutes.
i was surprised to realize earlier that the fic i wrote for the pitt was back in april and the last fic i wrote for landoscar was in january... i honestly did not realize time had passed so quickly. this idea came to me because i enjoyed luca haas as a side character greatly and i thought it was a shame that there was so much unrealized potential for his future romance that may or may not still come to fruition (i feel like it's more likely at this point that rr will do a hollanov continuation with luca's romance as a side, or maybe she'll pick up his book again now that the show is going mainstream. who knows). i also wanted to explore the Shane & Luca parallels (introverted 2oa hockey nerds who had crushes on ilya as teenagers) and shane's integration into the centaurs during his first season there + obviously the team finally becoming contender quality
also OF COURSEEEEE i just thought the idea of writing about the mfing OTTAWA CENTAURS was so fucking funny LMFAO every time i made a little sens pun i had a sensible chuckle... Bell Censplex... Get Cens'd... it's kind of the fucking funniest thing ever. like i love just creating socmed meta content about a fictional team. the hfboards contract bit with fictional hockey player Shane Hollander was such a blast to write... imagine being a random straight bro from sweden or whatever perusing hfboards and the most annoying gay man ever is signing for a middling ottawa team in the name of love. i'd be so unamused
i chose the name anton for luca's oc just because i think it's a nice name and i like that the diminutive is tosha... for his character, i basically built up someone that i thought would match luca nicely; confident and amicable but also parallel to him in sort of unconventional manners of expression/interest/artisticness, not totally cocky like ilya but still able to pull luca out of his shell and match and show patience for his introverted energy. i thought that was cute... i got the sense that rachel kind of wanted to make luca demisexual-ish, or at least just very repressed about sex in a way that shane ISN'T, seeing as shane's repression is much more about his control issues and self-flagellatory habits while luca is by nature more straightforwardly uncertain when it comes to intimacy. like shane isn't embarrassed about sex itself he's embarrassed that he's a whore and likes it so much.
this was a very simple progression of like, i want ilya and shane to be annoying marrieds who meddle in everything + shane is learning that for once he doesn't have to sacrifice his own relationship and desires in the name of being a perfect leader (so the beginning is ilya being annoying overbearing leader from the kids' perspective but really he's doing all this because he KNOWS shane would have forced them to host the new russian rookie in obligatory selfless fashion and he's like well actually you don't have to do this. so i will take care of it for you. and that's marriage) + anton being kind of a foil to ilya in terms of just being a Normal Guy who didn't have a completely traumatic upbringing + luca resisting his own narrative while also finding comfort in shane's similarities to him. and throughout it all i got to pepper in fun social media elements, but i will say i did try to make them actually relevant/most of the time expository to the plot so it wasn't totally divorced from the flow of the story. i'm not sure whether i actually succeeded in that but i did try
tbh the fic itself is bad, like objectively. but i just wanted to fulfill a specific niche that didn't exist yet and i'm ultimately satisfied with having executed it
also title is it's a mirror from perfume genius song because of obvious luca + shane mirrorisms but also because it's a song about mortality and "what do i get out of being established? / i still run and hide when a man's at the door" is very shane coded. anyway...
encapsulating shane & luca / anton & ilya bits:
and i think i just overall enjoyed doing Team Ensemble Banter. LOL
coding process
anyway definitely the most intensive part of this experience was doing the work skin but it honestly wasn't that bad. this was super fun though and i'd love to reuse this skin in the future for more socmed stuff.
ok so my thing with ao3 is that you have to understand one of its grandest limitations—NO SVGS!!!! on top of this, i wanted to make a skin that works with and without creator style, because i know some people don't know how to turn them on or just don't like reading fics with them, and i respect that and hate a broken fic layout! many times when people use social media work skins, they insert the img directly into the html and style it via css, which means that when you turn OFF the work skin there's suddenly 1234859 full-width images on their own lines that break the entire fic and take 10 minutes to scroll by. i wanted something that would be clean and cohesive and adaptable to both versions.
to code everything, i tackled one platform at a time and started with the base of what i'd want the screen to look like WITHOUT creator style on. by this i mean i added the simple b/i/blockquote etc. tags that ao3 is capable of converting. from there, i tried to envision the blocks that would need css styling and where i wanted to break into div/p/span, and i added those tags in before adding blank matching classes on the work skin side. working that way helps to keep things organized and structured, and then it was just a matter of slowly filling out 192342934 css declarations.
here is the html side:
meanwhile the css is literally 1k+ words and 100+ blocks LOL. the sites i recreated were hfboards, twitter, tumblr, reddit, and the nhl.com gamecenter scoring view.
some thoughts:
— ao3 only allows web safe/system fonts, which means no roboto, but because so many social media sites nowadays use system-ui in their font stack anyway it actually makes things easier to replicate. so you can do a stack with system-ui and then fall back on helvetica or default sans-serif.
— because no svgs, i didn't want to insert retweet, like, etc. icons in my replications because i find the images uncouth, but in the end i liked the way the social media elements looked a bit cleaner without. i've never really felt like retweet/like numbers tell that much in a story unless there's an intentional progression or contrast to the numbers (e.g. a character becoming more popular, a hot take being ratioed, etc.) and since this fic didn't require those elements it was fine without.
— ao3 does have simple blockquote styling, so definitely utilize that when writing social media snippets that have nested replies or any kind of block you want to differentiate. use that as the base for creator style off, then completely bastardize it and restyle it in css.
— one thing i'm pleased about is that i added a ton of hover styles so everything is actually accurate to when you hover over a username/url/tag etc.! and when you hover over a tweet or the top of a tumblr post the background color will shade too. i didn't have to replicate things in this much detail but i enjoyed it
— i managed to include pure-css profile images using a ::before pseudo-element! turns out pseudos are unpredictable and if you wrap them in a flexbox they will assume that nature, which is EXACTLY what i wanted in centering the images with user profile information. annoyingly ao3 does not support full flex properties (notably gap), but it's enough that it makes the process relatively simple.
anyway here are the final products with their respective creator style off / on version:
hfboards
tumblr
twitter
reddit
nhl.com
—
anyway it was all very fun and i would like to do more socmed stuff in the future! yay. or recreate other random websites. who knows
actually i just want hollanov kidfic... but it is what it is. i don't want to write it!
it's a mirror / gcu (9.0, t)
the idea of writing post-tlg oc fic amused me for many reasons. first of all i love having blanket permission to write annoying 4th wall fandom meta fic with like, the in-universe understanding that Gay people actually exist, whereas when you do hockey rpf it's kind of more fraught because it's like ok Yes i'm claiming that ep40 is gay here but actually he's straightmarried and will eventually get mormonwifepilled for tiktok views or whatever. yes i'm aware of that please just read between the lines and suspend your disbelief for 5 minutes.
i was surprised to realize earlier that the fic i wrote for the pitt was back in april and the last fic i wrote for landoscar was in january... i honestly did not realize time had passed so quickly. this idea came to me because i enjoyed luca haas as a side character greatly and i thought it was a shame that there was so much unrealized potential for his future romance that may or may not still come to fruition (i feel like it's more likely at this point that rr will do a hollanov continuation with luca's romance as a side, or maybe she'll pick up his book again now that the show is going mainstream. who knows). i also wanted to explore the Shane & Luca parallels (introverted 2oa hockey nerds who had crushes on ilya as teenagers) and shane's integration into the centaurs during his first season there + obviously the team finally becoming contender quality
also OF COURSEEEEE i just thought the idea of writing about the mfing OTTAWA CENTAURS was so fucking funny LMFAO every time i made a little sens pun i had a sensible chuckle... Bell Censplex... Get Cens'd... it's kind of the fucking funniest thing ever. like i love just creating socmed meta content about a fictional team. the hfboards contract bit with fictional hockey player Shane Hollander was such a blast to write... imagine being a random straight bro from sweden or whatever perusing hfboards and the most annoying gay man ever is signing for a middling ottawa team in the name of love. i'd be so unamused
i chose the name anton for luca's oc just because i think it's a nice name and i like that the diminutive is tosha... for his character, i basically built up someone that i thought would match luca nicely; confident and amicable but also parallel to him in sort of unconventional manners of expression/interest/artisticness, not totally cocky like ilya but still able to pull luca out of his shell and match and show patience for his introverted energy. i thought that was cute... i got the sense that rachel kind of wanted to make luca demisexual-ish, or at least just very repressed about sex in a way that shane ISN'T, seeing as shane's repression is much more about his control issues and self-flagellatory habits while luca is by nature more straightforwardly uncertain when it comes to intimacy. like shane isn't embarrassed about sex itself he's embarrassed that he's a whore and likes it so much.
this was a very simple progression of like, i want ilya and shane to be annoying marrieds who meddle in everything + shane is learning that for once he doesn't have to sacrifice his own relationship and desires in the name of being a perfect leader (so the beginning is ilya being annoying overbearing leader from the kids' perspective but really he's doing all this because he KNOWS shane would have forced them to host the new russian rookie in obligatory selfless fashion and he's like well actually you don't have to do this. so i will take care of it for you. and that's marriage) + anton being kind of a foil to ilya in terms of just being a Normal Guy who didn't have a completely traumatic upbringing + luca resisting his own narrative while also finding comfort in shane's similarities to him. and throughout it all i got to pepper in fun social media elements, but i will say i did try to make them actually relevant/most of the time expository to the plot so it wasn't totally divorced from the flow of the story. i'm not sure whether i actually succeeded in that but i did try
tbh the fic itself is bad, like objectively. but i just wanted to fulfill a specific niche that didn't exist yet and i'm ultimately satisfied with having executed it
also title is it's a mirror from perfume genius song because of obvious luca + shane mirrorisms but also because it's a song about mortality and "what do i get out of being established? / i still run and hide when a man's at the door" is very shane coded. anyway...
encapsulating shane & luca / anton & ilya bits:
Hockey haunted everything they did, in the end. Reality was like a specter looming over the enormity of his feelings and desires. Luca Haas had only ever dreamed of one thing, and now everything else terrified him.
"I think I understand," Shane says, because he's Shane Hollander. So maybe he does know everything.
Anton is impossibly younger than him. At his age, Ilya was already sneaking into hotel rooms and meticulously taking Shane apart, holding him down and fucking him deep so he'd feel him for days, wanting more than anything for the memory of each ephemeral encounter to hold. They'd been transient nothings. Schrödinger's lovers.
and i think i just overall enjoyed doing Team Ensemble Banter. LOL
"Well, I hope our room is next to Dallas Kent so we can bother him all night," Ilya shares cheerfully.
Miikka, who already sees enough of Shane as his liney and does not need to be subjected to any more of their marital hijinks, blinks. "Oh, so you do know that you're obnoxiously loud on the road."
"Well!" Shane flushes.
Ilya shrugs. "What? I am good lover, I have beautiful husband with perfect hockey ass, of course I must pleasure him with my massive—"
"Ilya," Shane warns in a deceptively light tone. His terrifying, frozenly polite Canadian smile sends shivers down the back of Luca's spine.
"Hah! Oh, Luca. This makes me so very happy. And now Shane owes me one hundred dollars."
"What the fuck," Luca mutters. Because honestly. What the fuck.
The first practice back, Ilya takes one look at him and knows. Luca resists the urge to pull at the collar of his shirt and sniff it surreptitiously. Does he smell like he got sexed up in Mexico? Is this some freaky extended form of gaydar that only old gay married men are equipped with? Did Ilya waterboard this out of Anton before practice over Telegram?
"Do not worry, Haasy, is okay. I am just the most perceptive." A pause, slightly too pregnant. "And also it would maybe not hurt to wear a neck guard."
coding process
anyway definitely the most intensive part of this experience was doing the work skin but it honestly wasn't that bad. this was super fun though and i'd love to reuse this skin in the future for more socmed stuff.
ok so my thing with ao3 is that you have to understand one of its grandest limitations—NO SVGS!!!! on top of this, i wanted to make a skin that works with and without creator style, because i know some people don't know how to turn them on or just don't like reading fics with them, and i respect that and hate a broken fic layout! many times when people use social media work skins, they insert the img directly into the html and style it via css, which means that when you turn OFF the work skin there's suddenly 1234859 full-width images on their own lines that break the entire fic and take 10 minutes to scroll by. i wanted something that would be clean and cohesive and adaptable to both versions.
to code everything, i tackled one platform at a time and started with the base of what i'd want the screen to look like WITHOUT creator style on. by this i mean i added the simple b/i/blockquote etc. tags that ao3 is capable of converting. from there, i tried to envision the blocks that would need css styling and where i wanted to break into div/p/span, and i added those tags in before adding blank matching classes on the work skin side. working that way helps to keep things organized and structured, and then it was just a matter of slowly filling out 192342934 css declarations.
here is the html side:
meanwhile the css is literally 1k+ words and 100+ blocks LOL. the sites i recreated were hfboards, twitter, tumblr, reddit, and the nhl.com gamecenter scoring view.
some thoughts:
— ao3 only allows web safe/system fonts, which means no roboto, but because so many social media sites nowadays use system-ui in their font stack anyway it actually makes things easier to replicate. so you can do a stack with system-ui and then fall back on helvetica or default sans-serif.
— because no svgs, i didn't want to insert retweet, like, etc. icons in my replications because i find the images uncouth, but in the end i liked the way the social media elements looked a bit cleaner without. i've never really felt like retweet/like numbers tell that much in a story unless there's an intentional progression or contrast to the numbers (e.g. a character becoming more popular, a hot take being ratioed, etc.) and since this fic didn't require those elements it was fine without.
— ao3 does have simple blockquote styling, so definitely utilize that when writing social media snippets that have nested replies or any kind of block you want to differentiate. use that as the base for creator style off, then completely bastardize it and restyle it in css.
— one thing i'm pleased about is that i added a ton of hover styles so everything is actually accurate to when you hover over a username/url/tag etc.! and when you hover over a tweet or the top of a tumblr post the background color will shade too. i didn't have to replicate things in this much detail but i enjoyed it
— i managed to include pure-css profile images using a ::before pseudo-element! turns out pseudos are unpredictable and if you wrap them in a flexbox they will assume that nature, which is EXACTLY what i wanted in centering the images with user profile information. annoyingly ao3 does not support full flex properties (notably gap), but it's enough that it makes the process relatively simple.
anyway here are the final products with their respective creator style off / on version:
hfboards
tumblr
nhl.com
—
anyway it was all very fun and i would like to do more socmed stuff in the future! yay. or recreate other random websites. who knows
actually i just want hollanov kidfic... but it is what it is. i don't want to write it!
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