A Kiss Beneath the Mistlefoe

In honor of chapter 13, Willow and Luz share their first kiss beneath the mistlefoe! After hearing how much Luz has gone through to be the person she is today, Willow gives in to her heart's desire. As you can see, her feelings are very much reciprocated. This scene is from my fanfic, Your Touch | Freedom to be Me, part of the Broken and Beloved AU. In this universe, Luz became homeless at an early age and spent several years on the run, only arriving in the Boiling Isles two years after the events of canon had already taken place. So much is different, but some universal constants remain... The artist behind this amazing piece is Gib.

As usual, time for a little expansion after the Blaze burns out. ^_^ I actually had never intended to write Willuz content, but discovered midway through the scene where they first meet that I had crafted two versions of these characters who needed each other very badly. I take it as a major compliment how many people have admitted that they don't ship Willuz, but love the way I've written them. Of course, the fact that I'd begun this fic for Lumity content and still intend to make it happen does mean something's going to have to change, doesn't it? Maybe folks would be interested in reading along to find out how that develops...

A home for Luz

Gib has done it once again! Commemorating chapter 6, "What we Owe to Each Other," we have a beautiful domestic scene of our owl family coming together, finally acknowledging the familial bonds between them. It's taken a long time for Luz to heal enough to trust that this is real and won't be yanked away from her, but at long last, she has finally found a home and people who love her. Gib's art Your Touch | Freedom to be Me

Hello all who appreciated this! I'm not very good at navigating tumblr, so I'm not sure if any of my replies went out to anywhere they actually get read, heh. A few general comments on this piece: The artist is @gibbledygoo and I cannot recommend their work enough. I've commissioned them three times and they're brilliant when it comes to taking my meandering prose and turning it into exactly what I imagined. I have aphantasia, meaning I can't picture things in my head, so their ability to consistently take my blather and turn it into a gorgeous piece is nothing short of magical to me. I've blazed the last couple of pictures they did because work this nice deserves to be seen. If I can drive any new traffic to their commission page, so much the better. This particular picture is for my fanfic Your Touch | Freedom to be Me, an alternate timeline AU in which Luz ran away from home at the age of 11 and spent five years homeless before finding her way into the Demon Realm, two years after the events of canon took place. Many of those events continued in her absence, meaning that the timeline is very different from the show canon. It was primarily inspired by HomeLuz, but makes several nods to other influences such as MoringMark's comics and fics such as Painted Green, Covered in Red. A recurring theme throughout the fic is mental health, as many of the characters face real challenges which shape their outlook and impact the way they function in school and society. Luz in particular carries the trauma of homelessness and suffers guilt, a distorted perception of herself, and panic attacks from having had to live so long in survival mode. Characters struggle, are supported, and are loved regardless of the challenges they face. As an older writer (to put it one way, my last fanfic was written in 2003), I approach the worldbuilding as if the reader were new to the series, intertwining headcanons with established canon in ways I hope make the writing both accessible and intriguing. It's also very, very queer. I reckon to be about a third of the way done, so I'm expecting around 60 chapters or around half a million words before calling this one good, but I could be very wrong! After all, I expected to be much, much further along in story development by this point, so maybe this will turn into the next Angel of the Owl House. Who knows! Hopefully I make it worth reading regardless. You can read it here.

the people i love don’t hate me enough

In my fic, Luz thinks of herself as a bad person trying and failing to be better. That's her core character trait, her innermost motivator: the ways people hurt her and what she had to do in order to survive have imprinted upon her as evidence that she's irredeemable, but it doesn't stop her from trying. She can't help her past self, so she seeks to help everyone else today and will never feel like it's enough to make up for what she's done. The fact that no one is condemning her is drowned out by how much she hates herself first and foremost among the humanity she hates at large. When they broke her, they broke her faith in people. She gradually regained her trust in others with the unconditional love of Eda and her owl family, but that faith in herself remains shattered. She is Broken and Beloved.

Boscha (1/2)

It doesn't work with how I interpreted Boscha in my fic (no major surprise since there isn't even an AO3 tag for how I decided to headcanon her), and yet not incompatible with a scene I have in mind for the future. Amused that weaponized kindness seems to be the evident approach we'd both think of for this witch. "Oh, so that's your problem. Guess what? I care about you now. And no, you don't deserve it. Tough; I'm gonna do it anyway. Deal with it."