I am now starting to write a new Esmanur-focused fic where she is ten years old. Nigar and Ibrahim will mainly feature in it as her parents.
My WIPs: :(((
I love writing my fics. Their quality is a very mixed bag and not many people read them but I do love writing them.
1. Quote from “Chapter 7” of Aşk-ı Memnu
2. Painting “Girl with the Cat” (1892) by Berthe Morisot
3. Quote from “Chapter 9” of Aşk-ı Memnu
4. Unfortunately I couldn’t find its exact name but it was a Dutch or German painting from 16th-17th century
5- Quote from “Chapter 15” of Aşk-ı Memnu
6- The last line of my fanfic “The Innocent Persecuted Heroine” (yes I am presumptuous enough to put my shitty fanfic in the same web-weave as Halit Ziya’s actual words, deal with it).
I haven't checked how credible this source is yet but I think this would have been a very interesting plot point in Ibrahim's journey on MC.
He did actually give his father and brother official jobs in the show and renamed them Yunus and Şahin. It is in Episode 18 I believe.
Also now I realize that I made a mistake in my Nigar/Niko fic by having Niko convert to Islam to marry Nigar. He probably would have already converted by then since he got an official job in Ottoman Empire in 16th century and non-Muslim people couldn’t do that until 19th century. I won’t change it though, I am too fond of the circumcision joke I have made. Sometimes the fic calls for things that might be historically or canonically inaccurate.
1, 15, 26, 46 😀❤️
1. Do you daydream a lot before you write, or go for it as soon as the ideas strike?
I tend to have the idea for a fic (or a chapter of a fic) for months before actually getting the motivation to write it. So it is the former option.
15. What’s your favorite time to write?
I used to write my first fanfic on every Friday night for a while, that was fun and something to look forward to during the week. I do technically prefer moments when I have nothing else to do besides writing my fic, but I have to admit that procrastinating on writing a difficult academic paper can also weirdly motivate you to write your fic lol.
26. What’s your least favorite part of the writing process?
Research on niche topics. I don’t do a ton of research for my fanfics to be honest, but sometimes you just have to have an idea on an extremely niche topic (what did women wear in mid-16th century Parga?) and it is not super fun to research because of the absolute lack of resources.
46. If you could only write one type of AU for the rest of your life, what would it be?
Fairy tale/myth AUs, maybe?
This is how I had Ibrahim describe Nigar in his inner thoughts in May of 2022 in my fanfic “An Insignificant Death”.
It sounds a bit too smug even for Ibrahim’s inner monologue, but it is still a good paragraph in my opinion.
So, we now discovered that Nigar both looks like Ottoman miniatures and has a name that literally means “miniature”. But what can that mean for her character? Is it pointing towards a lack of depth and individuality (figures in miniatures lack dimensionality and tend to look like one another) or to hidden depths (far from being a faceless servant, she is beautiful like an artwork)? Is she somehow more “Eastern” than Hürrem (who looks like Renaissance paintings) and Ibrahim (who is associated with Western arts) despite being a convert like them?
I doubt that too much thought had been spent on choosing her name by the creators, but this doesn’t mean that us the fans can’t add meaning to it.
“An Insignificant Death”, the best Magnificent Century fanfic I had written:
A year and a half ago I wrote a fanfic where Littlefinger had the Westerosi equivalent of Wuthering Heights as his favorite story.
What would actual canon Littlefinger think of Wuthering Heights? It is too gritty to be a chivalric romance that he would idealize as a teenager, but it is too extravagantly romantic for him to openly buy into as an adult. It sits in that uncomfortable middle ground.
Maybe he would have a relationship with it similar to the French painter Balthus’s, who read Wuthering Heights at the age of fourteen and then kind of modeled his relationship with his upper-class sweetheart on it.
Important questions.
Okay so it feels weird that Mr. Earnshaw adopted a kid out of the blue and decided to raise him as a son. I wonder if Heathcliff is a distant illegitimate relative.
Mr. Earnshaw seems like a good man so he decided to adopt Heathcliff and raise him. I don't think Heathcliff's his illegitimate son though. It just doesn't fit. Or maybe Heathcliff is just a strange kid he felt sorry for. I don't know. Maybe something is revealed later.
My guess would be that Heathcliff is related to someone who Mr. Earnshaw knows and is bound to by some measure of duty, but who isn't necessarily a blood relative. Maybe son (illegitimate or otherwise) of an old friend?
In the Japanese Wuthering Heights retelling A True Novel by Minae Mizumura the Heathcliff-equivalent was an illegitimate nephew of the Joseph-equivalent.
I myself made “Clyffe Stone” the illegitimate child of “Lord Brunty” (I am proud of this name), a family friend of the “Eyrnshaws”, in my Asoiaf AU Fanfic “Westerosi Heights”:
But of course in actual Wuthering Heights the start of the story is intended to be a bit “fairy-tale-like”, so there is no elaborate explanation.
My new Nigar/Niko fic:
I am pretty satisfied with it for now. It ended up being a Rorschach test of a fic. You see what you want to see.
Does Turkey has a specific variation of the vampire mythos, as China and other countries have theirs, that don't necessarily feed on blood? And Ninal could be that variation?
So it turns out that Turkic mythology very much has its own form of the vampire mythos, “Ubır”. Some scholars even seem to think that the word “vampire” comes from “ubır”.
Here is an illustration of an Ubır in Bartu Bölükbaşı’s Turkish Mythology Dictionary I have at home:
Nihal is of course a more aristocratic sort of vampire imo, but it turns out that Ubırs can transform themselves into a pretty girl to go undetected, so she can still be an Ubır.
Thanks for this ask. I was thinking of continuing my Aşk-ı Memnu fanfic where Nihal is a vampire feeding on Beşir’s tears. Now I will factor in Ubırs into it too.
Tagging people who might find it interesting:
