Masumi doesn’t like being mistaken for a guy, but if she has to choose between that and being in clothes not suited for running or fighting in, she’ll risk the former. She may not know everything about what her family’s mixed up in but she knows enough to value freedom of movement, and the safety it gives her, over aesthetics.

 

 

While she likes living in a hotel (or, at least, living someplace with maid service), there are certain…downsides to her current living situation. For one, Sera is pretty sure she is the only high school student at Teitan who has ever had to tell her mother that she can’t have alcohol because she’s too young and it could affect her brain development. The entire parent/child dynamic is occasionally a little messy for both of them, since Mary has to stand on furninture to look her daughter in the eye and Masumi is capable of physically picking her mother up and carrying her with one arm.

 

 

Seeing Scar Akai on the Mystery Train made her worried about her sanity, because she couldn’t stop wondering if it really was him, even though she knew it couldn’t be. That incident touched off a good two weeks of seeing echoes of her brother in every tired-looking twentysomething with prominent cheekbones on the train, and of having to remind herself that not every flutter of dark fabric she saw from the corner of her eye was him walking by in a dark coat. She also lost about an hour of sleep one night just picturing his face, tracing the outline of the scar and thinking about how he would have gotten it and how much it must have hurt.

 

The thing about her chest size started as a joke. She was used to her old friends’ sense of humor, which involved telling her off in humorous ways when she deliberately broke social norms.  But she came to realize that in Japan, most people fell into one of two categories: either they were too polite to point out her mistake and would just act slightly uncomfortable until she stopped acting outside of what she considered acceptable behavior, or they would say nothing because it was funny to watch the foreign girl screw up. Now, talking about her chest size has become a way of gauging exactly how casually racist and/or generally unpleasant the people around her are.

 

(Look, I know it’s happening in canon because Gosho honestly thinks it’s funny and cute, but I find it disgusting to the point where I was avoiding her episodes for a while so this is the kinda headcanon gymnastics I gotta do)

Originally posted 7/30/2018

 

Shinichi doesn’t have a lot of regrets about deciding to pursue detective work over soccer, but there are a few times, just after becoming Conan, when he has a bad day and he wonders.

 

 

He lowkey enjoyed riding around on that giant dog and kind of wishes the Mouris would let him get a pet. It would be softer than the skateboard, and the kids would probably like it too.

 

 

The stupid, stupid recklessness on cases started out as him forgetting he was tiny, but evolved into him disregarding it instead. It’s a control thing, a way of fighting against the limitations of his own body–if he can still manage the things he used to be able to do, then he wins.  Admitting that he’s endangering himself would be a concession, one that he’s less willing to make the longer he remains stuck as Conan.

 

 

If Shinichi and Kaito aren’t actually related, Toichi was at least a close enough family friend to babysit him as a kid.  This is not a novel headcanon, but I don’t care, it’s dearly held regardless.

 

(Guess who has to remind herself to do the canon version and not my ridiculous AU version, XD)

 

Hakuba specializes in theft and fraud; he never specifies what kind of cases he previously solved during the Detective’s Koshien and I firmly believe that a lot of what he did overseas involved remote detective work and recovery of stolen objects and money. He has solved murders before, but he isn’t a murder detective in the way that Kudou and Hattori are.  If he joins the police, he’ll actually be joining Nakamori’s division.

 

 

Hakuba is functionally bilingual in Japanese and English, but his Japanese slang has a fair amount of gaps when he first comes to the country, since he mostly practiced Japanese with adult relatives and through television.  What I’m saying is that there are certain unpleasant slang terms that he’s sure, based on tone of voice, must mean something terrible, but he’s never learned the meaning of from any source of tutoring he’s ever had.  Anyone who’s ever been to public high school will realize that this becomes a problem rather quickly. (Fortunately, the internet is useful in this regard) 

 

 

He’s never been precisely good with people, particularly those his own age, so Kaito and the group of classmates that gather around him are his first real experience with friendships not born of constantly attending the same high-society functions or being in the same study groups. He’s quite sure that Kaito’s just attempting to get inside his guard. The problem is that it’s working, and he genuinely likes the thief he came to Japan to arrest.

 

Hakuba is, at this point, not so much trying to arrest KID as he is to keep the heists from spiraling out of control.  He’s conflicted about arresting KID but he cares too much about everyone involved in heists to stop attending completely.  

Steeplechase is in its final arc.  This story is about Kaito bringing Hakuba home.  Granted, it’s also about a lot of other things, and I do plan to resolve as many of the emotional arcs, side plots, etc. as I can, but that was always the main point of this story.  Granted, getting Hakuba home means more than getting him there physically; it involves convincing him that this is home.   The story has quite a few chapters left in it still–there’s a lot of conversations left to be had in the wake of Hakuba’s return, and I’m not planning to rush through them.  Also I made promises to miladyRanger about the epilogue, and those date back to 2014 or possibly early 2015.   So, given my current posting speed, making firm predictions on whether the story will end this year might be pushing it.  But it won’t still be going this time next year.

 

I’m not going to write another chaptered fic for this verse, or at least, I don’t have plans to do so at the moment.  When I finish Steeplechase, I’d like to take a bit of a break and catch up on ficcing for some of the other fandoms I’ve been neglecting in favor of this fic, and possibly even poke at some original projects again.  But when I come back, I have pretty fleshed-out plans for oneshots set in this ‘verse, and I’d very much like to write them.  While putting together background for this fic, miladyRanger and I wrote some backstory that didn’t really have a place in the fic–adding it would’ve been intrusive and unnecessary, so I left it out.  Also, it would just be fun to write some lower-pressure scenarios with these versions of the characters, as opposed to what I’ve been doing with Steeplechase.  There’s a lot I like about the character relationships I’ve set up in this verse and a lot I’d like to be able to explore with them.  So yeah, I’ll probably write in this verse after this, but it might not be on this scale.

 

…Frankly, if I write on this scale again, next time I might want it to be original fiction.  I really enjoyed this, and I’m so glad everyone else has too, but I can’t emphasize how much the length was not planned.

…How long do you have?

 

No, really, disclaimer because I’m not a fan of the Discourse, I do like some things Gosho does, or I wouldn’t be here.  But I do fandom by analyzing the heck out of things, and there are so many things that Gosho could do better.  Just…keep in mind that if I didn’t like this series I wouldn’t care enough to complain so much.  We are all in the same fandom.

 

I will probably forget some things, but here we go!

 

Gosho doesn’t write women well.  He has the kind of ideas about women secretly needing rescuing by the men in their lives you’d expect from a guy his age.  He also tends to hijack their arcs for romance.  Like, god forbid Jodie or Sato get to be awesome on their own, Akai has to upstage Jodie and Takagi has to at least help!

 

He shuffles emotional arcs offscreen, ignores them completely, or if they have to happen onscreen, he rushes through them.  There are so many cases and heists that should have had a coda involving the characters reacting with some sort of emotion, maybe even talking about feelings (oh horror), and it never happens.  Like, KID just flies off after the Nightmare Heist.  Or Heiji gets hurt badly onscreen and it immediately turns into a joke about how everyone was overreacting (Naniwa Serial Murders).

 

Related to that, he’s fantastic at setting up those emotional arcs and then he doesn’t follow through.  Like, why did a person who barely likes to admit his main characters have emotions besides “justice” and “mischief” get the ability to set up something as brutal as Nightmare. That frustrates me on a visceral level.

 

He’s also really good at writing cases at least sometimes, but other times, heavens, they’re terrible. DC has ridiculously inconsistent quality and it makes me sad.  I know some of that is his schedule being brutal and the sheer output expected of him, but at the same time…he’s got assistants, too, and enough money to hire a lot of them. 

 

He underuses the side characters.  He’s got a lot of really cool ones, and a lot of the best cases IMO have Heiji or the Nagano trio in them, but most of the cases still end up with the main cast only.  Hakuba rarely shows up, Eisuke got put on a bus.  It’s been almost 1000 chapters and some characters still haven’t met–take advantage of untapped wells of character interaction!

 

Gosho’s handling of romance also tends not to be terrible deft.  Like, we can agree to disagree, definitely, but he’s been drawing out Heiji and Kazuha’s romantic out to an awkward degree, if nothing else.

 

Related to that, Gosho’s awkward incorporation of his probable teenagerhood desire to see girl’s underthings into his children’s manga is unprofessional.  No, really, the perverted jokes stopped being funny a long time ago, especially as a girl, honestly.

 

He’s so inconsistent with how reality works in his universe.  People might be able to sense murderers and also rocket skateboards work but you can tell who was the murderer by whether they’ve got the muscle mass to lift the murder weapon.  Everyone fudges physics a little once in a while but he really could do better.

 

One of my biggest complaints is that he really doesn’t seem to realize that he wrote a bunch of dysfunctional families.  Like, Shinichi grew up going to crime scenes and started living alone before high school, Ran’s half responsible for her alcoholic dad, Kaito and his mom vary by canon but there’s always the phantom thief secret looming between…and Gosho never seems to think this might be a formative thing for any of the characters.  Ever.

 

On that note, Gosho almost never writes anyone having lasting trauma unless they’ve killed someone over it.  No one’s upset by seeing the dead bodies unless the plot requires it.  Shinichi is very rarely upset by his near death and when he is it’s because we need to lead into a flashback; while it’s implied that Kaito must be messed up over his dad’s death, this is something we only learn through his decision to become KID, since we don’t really see him mourn at any point.  Ai is the one exception I can think of to this, but I have to go back to the above thing–most of her emotional arc gets shoved offscreen, though I’ll admit what is on screen is actually pretty great. 

 

That’s the thing.  When Gosho does bring himself to write feelings, and people having trauma, and relationships that aren’t built on stacks of lies, it’s often amazing.  (Okay I’m thinking about Fuurinkazan here.)  But he never does it.

 

The timeline.  IT HASN’T BEEN HALF A YEAR GOSHO FIGHT ME.

A slightly pared-down version of my writing playlist for Riddle in Reverse and Steeplechase, for your listening enjoyment.  It’s on Stayed Up All Night, which is a newer site, but one I really like.  

 

The first eight songs are for Riddle in Reverse; the rest of the playlist is for Steeplechase.  There are also some vague spoilers in the song choices if you look for them (particularly for RiR; seriously, just don’t look at this if you don’t want to be spoiled for RiR).

 

More notes (and links to translations of some songs) under the cut if you want them!

 

…I was nervous about posting this because I have a very odd and not necessarily good taste in music, and it has a lot of anime OST stuff  in it, but here you go, internet.  Hope it’s not too embarrassing.

 

I would have preferred to add this version of Ai no Scenario, but there was a copyright issue so I went for the cover that I could actually add to the playlist.

 

I also think I need to credit Raifuujin13, whose excellent (and unfortunately currently copyright-blocked) AMV of Centuries is why a version of that song exists on this playlist.

Lyric Translations:  Hello World | Crying Prologue | Mirai | Eine Kleine

Bonus: Ai no Scenario | Seasons Die One After Another | Sekai wa Anata no Iro Ni Naru

 

So, first of all, you all should be aware that I left a lot of clues to the fact that Kiyoshi was Hakuba in her first scene.  A lot of Kiyoshi’s dialogue is very clearly being answered as Kaito, once you read it knowing that a version of Kaito is behind Kiyoshi’s existence.

 

Second, a note about ‘her’ name.  I can speak and write a little Japanese and I like playing with name meanings when I can; I also note that fanon!Kaito is very fond of wordplay (even if people have of late been arguing that canon!Kaito is less into heist notes than the fans think of him being).  While it’s never given in the text of the story, Kiyoshi’s given name is written in kanji as 白.  KID’s used an anagram of his title as an alias before; in this case, Hakuba just borrows a kanji from a previous alias–the “ 白” (haku) from 白馬 (Hakuba).  

 

Finally, for anyone curious, here’s what the Kiyoshi disguise looked like, along with one of the doves:

 

Ichthyophobia is incredibly prolific and everything they write is beautiful.  They come up with really, really neat ideas for fics and then execute them better than you would’ve hoped for.  Their grasp of the characters and their voices is particularly strong.  Given the wave of Scarlet Arc hype that just swept through Tumblr, I eventually settled on recommending Two-Faced, Half-Faced , a fic with Scarlet Arc spoilers. It’s got a rare combination of characters—I don’t think I’ve ever seen KID and Akai in the same fic, with or without Conan and Sera—and is a little bit closer to the current manga timeline than the other DC fics on this list.

 

brawltogethernow  is really good at writing humor—but also using it to create drama.  Most of their fics are short but incredibly punchy, and simultaneously feel complete and make you wish that they weren’t, regardless.  Their grasp of the characters, both their voices and their thought processes, is flawless.   Makes Me Feel Alive is a MK fic about Inspector Nakamori and is one of the best analyses of the relationship between him and KID that exists. Go read it, you will not regret it.

 

miladyRanger is a friend, and I beta-read for her; that said, she’s also just an excellent writer and if you haven’t found her MK fic yet you’re missing out.  You can see the thought she’s put into her portrayal of the character dynamics in every interaction, and the writing itself flows really well.  Her descriptions are excellent, and she’s got a gift for surprising the reader.   Front Row Seat is an MK fic from Aoko’s perspective that’s part character study and part narrative, and definitely worth checking out.

 

darkcyan  is particularly skilled at using imagery. They’ve also got a firm grasp of Shinichi’s often disorderly thought process.  Their writing is generally top-notch, particularly the descriptions of the character’s tones and expressions, and the dialogue feels entirely natural.  Late-Night Conversations, a Heiji and Conan friendship fic series, is particularly worth checking out.

 

joishbishmyoga  has been writing in this fandom for years, but they’re still quite active.  They know how to construct a story; more than that, they know how to balance everything they need in order for that story to work—not only the genres, but also the characters, the subplots and the often shaky balance between science, pseudoscience and straight-out magic that canon leaves authors with.  They’re incredibly flexible in terms of genre, as well—equally adept at humor and angst. They write a variety of genres, ratings and pairings, so give their archive a look!  Inconceivable is a particularly skilled execution of one of the more common DCMK crossover tropes that distinguishes itself by edging into detective noir territory in places–I particularly recommend it.

 

Ocianne is another one of the older DCMK writers who is still active at the moment.  They specialize in creative AUs and filling in gaps in canon with creative headcanons that make as much or more sense than what Aoyama originally wrote. They also have a special gift for using their understanding of the characters to tear both the characters and the readers apart emotionally.  The way she writes Kaito is basically my headcanon for his thought process, now—her fics were that formative.  I know that not everyone loves crossovers, but if you want to read Ocianne’s work, I can’t in good conscience recommend anything other than the Promenade & The Way Home series.  I can’t do it justice other than to say that it is probably the best multi-crossover in existence, and also a good tour of the headcanons and shared OCs floating around the MK fandom at various points in time.

 

MeridianGrimm writes a lot of KaiHaku  which isn’t my cup of tea, but even when they’re writing gen they’ve clearly got the character dynamics between nearly everyone down. The dialogue in their fic is snapy, and often quite hilarious.  I particularly like the way she writes Hakuba. As for a recommendation, The Confidant is a nice little gen fic with three of four Gosho Boys and all the deducing you could want.

 

The imagery in this opening is pretty–my feelings about the Kaito Corbeau storyline aside, I really like the way they use the black-and-white mirror imagery, the scenery shots are lovely, and the little bit with Aoko and Kaito passing on the staircase is pretty lovely too.  That said, I really mostly love it for the song.  I am a Vocaloid geek and I knew HoneyWorks before I ever heard about the anime–I was pretty fond of some of their stuff, especially “Inokori Sensei,” though I liked “Friday’s Good Morning” pretty well too.  I was interested, if a little nervous, to see what they’d do with an anime opening, since it was pretty different than the type of songs they would usually make (happy-bouncy romantic story songs), but when I heard it I felt really silly for ever worrying. It fit both into HoneyWork’s body of work and the requirements of an anime opening and works well as an opening song and as an independent single. HoneyWorks even went through the trouble to make and post online a slightly altered arrangement that utaites/cover artists could use to make covers (the alterations were so the record label wouldn’t remove covers for copyright reasons).  Gotta love the Vocaloid producers.