things ppl often get wrong in academia AUs (specifically ones in modern university settings with focus on graduate students & professors):

• no one is spending enough time complaining about writing
• hierarchy is wrong. your grad student TA is not a professor or faculty and might not even be considered an employee. that 32 year old man is not a full professor no matter how talented he is or how old you think 30+ is, and he should be talking more about “the tenure clock”
• grad students only ever taking or TAing classes & never doing research or working on their thesis/dissertation. there are masters programs with no thesis component so i’m sure there are ones that have no research requirement, but you can’t get a PhD only taking classes
• everyone has too much money. but also if it’s set in the US there’s an obsession with accumulating student debt for positions that generally you would not have to take out loans for
• relationship with academic advisor never sufficiently unhinged
• not enough discussion of stats where it’s obvious everyone only barely understands what’s happening

sometimes for narrative purposes you can’t let a side character actually be very helpful, because you need a main character to be solving the plot problems. so you have to come up with some reason why the side character with useful powers is not actually very helpful. and one of my favorite tropes to come out of this is “people who can see the future are just fucking weird and mysterious about it for no reason and will not help you in any way shape or form”

i want to write

plasticity social media au……………

someone once told me that plasticity seems like “you read one of those old school ‘real world girl falls into the akatsuki lair’ fics and have been mad about it ever since” and this person has perhaps understood me better than any other person ever has

don’t get me wrong. i love those types of fics. that’s why i wanted to write one. however. one thing that always got me was how frequently the girl ended up in the role of emotional support and, like, literal homemaking. i can think of multiple where she worked as their maid. somehow she always ends up cooking or helping someone through their trauma. her love can fix him. which him? all of them.

i didn’t want that for tori and even had some vague ideas about lampshading her denial of the trope. i was going to have her assigned to clean and then have her ask what ratio of bleach to vinegar she should use (do NOT mix bleach and vinegar) and then she would be actively banned from house chores. however i think the way i integrated her into akatsuki, it would not really occur to anyone to use her for cleaning/cooking. you can drag her out of her fuuinjutsu cave to figure out how to order more supplies, because those are. her jobs. also if given the opportunity, most members assume she will just try to kill them, and everyday her chances seem better. no one wants her to cook for them

however. let’s move over to reborn au. different set of circumstances and challenges

what if she gets mistaken for the tea girl at a meeting

random memory 4 u. in my eighth grade science class, we had an assignment where we were to make balloon powered can cars. we were all given a soda can to take home and add wheels to, and then in-class we attached a balloon to the top. inflate the balloon, let it go, and the car shoots forward.

i found this assignment fun because i like doing arts and crafts type things. but in hindsight it was a really weird assignment because we had no lessons leading up to it to teach us relevant concepts for designing a toy car. no mechanical physics or anything like that. like i used coffee can lids as my wheels, which were HUGE compared to the can. and i remember being surprised at how far my car could go. something about bigger wheels -> more space moved per rotation.

so like i learned something, but most kids didn’t. a lot of kids couldn’t figure out how to get their tires to rotate. (i accomplished this by taping piece of a drinking straw to the bottom and pushing shish kebob sticks through. i then impaled the coffee can lid wheels on sticks, and the whole axel could rotate freely in the straw.) and then in class, we just sort of set off our cars and did i worksheet where we calculated how far and how fats they moved. that was it. no unpacking any part of the design process. and then, we got graded on how far our cars could go.

my car was the only one that could get across the whole classroom. it kicked every other car’s ass. so, being fourteen, i didn’t actually question the assignment at all. i had fun and i got a good grade and all seemed right in the world. but my friend made her car wheels out of clay and her car couldn’t move at all and she got a failing grade and cried in class lmao

social media au. remember when i made a post a while ago like “nintubers constantly take out hits on each other. someone takes out a hit on tori and they simply can’t find her”

i think this has to happen BEFORE she starts publicly collaborating with itachi. however maybe it comes out this happened AFTER the collab starts. like maybe one of the three influencers she doesn’t have active beef with messages her like “hey! so glad you’re in a safer position now <3 hope so-and-so sending assassins after you don’t make you feel forced to change your brand” and tori is like: H U H?