melannen: Commander Valentine of Alpha Squad Seven, a red-haired female Nick Fury in space, smoking contemplatively (Default)
melannen ([personal profile] melannen) wrote2021-07-28 10:26 pm

100 days of enemy recs: 3. Weiß Kreuz

Oh random number generator, you do have your ways.

So I was really into reading Weiß Kreuz fanfic for, like, three months about fifteen years ago. It was the sort of fandom where if you mentioned reading the fic but not knowing the canon, people who did know the canon told you that this was a good idea and you should stick with it, so I guiltlessly stayed away. Basically I know enough to know the canon is a glorious mess spread across about five different media and occasionally deliberately inconsistent with itself because reasons? I still poke in to the AO3 tag sometimes just to check in but that's it. So I give no guarantees as to the accuracy of any of the below!

Basically the show is about a team of four people who appear on the surface to be cat-loving florists, but they know a secret - That the rich and powerful, they take what they want, and sometimes the bad guys make the best good guys, so they provide... murder. They murder people. Weiß are assassins working for a semi-government-sanctioned secret organization that that kills criminals that are beyond the reach of the law. Schwarz is another team of assassins (these ones have psychic powers) that work as bodyguards for the main crime family they oppose (the use of German terms is very subtle and nuanced as you can tell). Everyone has complicated and angsty backstories. It's an anime soap opera with murders. It had a fairly large slash fandom for awhile when the anime episodes were coming out in English, and it's still ticking along. People shipped everybody with everybody, good guys and bad guys and all together and there's even a third team of girl assassins if you want a little bit of het in there.

I will admit that I'm looking back at my old del.icio.us bookmarks for this one, so while there are a lot of possible enemyships, I am going to stick to only one here: each of the main teams had a teenager on them, and Weiß's teenager, Omi, eventually discovered that he was secretly the heir of *both* the organization that was running Weiß *and* the organization that was running Schwarz; some plot stuff happened; he embraced his heritage and its moral ambiguity, took on his birth name of Mamoru, grew up and took over leadership the organization, running his own assassin teams, and ended up with Schwarz's former teenage assassin, Nagi, as his personal bodyguard. I think? I think that was all canon, anyway. At least, there is some good fic where adult Mamoru is the leader of the secret organization and Nagi is his bodyguard and they have sexual tension complicated by their pasts, so I will rec some of that for this one, because believe it or not that's at least easier to explain than the necessary backstory for the other enemyships I remember from this fandom.

(...also I was going to exactly date when I was in this fandom c. fifteen years ago by looking up a wip I read at the time that was still updating then, but I found it on AO3 and it's... still updating now... WK will always have a small yet special place in my heart, even if I don't think I'm going to go get caught up on that fic that's now approaching 1000000 words.)

  • My Bodyguard (8139 words) by emungere
    Chapters: 2/2
    Fandom: Weiß Kreuz
    Rating: Explicit
    Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
    Relationships: Naoe Nagi/Tsukiyono Omi
    Summary: After the last episode of Kapitel, Omi meets his grandfather and makes a new acquaintance online.

    Okay I have not read this one in fifteen years but when I scrolled to it on AO3, fifteen-years-ago me was like "Oh yes, that one's a good intro to the pairing setup, you should rec it!" And who can I listen to if not fifteen-years-ago me? (Even if she still needs to finish her wips.)

  • Sailing to Hirugashima (3626 words) (+60000 word sequel) by Daegaer

    Fandom: Weiß Kreuz
    Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
    Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
    Relationships: Naoe Nagi/Takatori Mamoru
    Additional Tags: Space Opera, Alternate Universe - Space, Friendship, space travel, Psychic Abilities


    Space AU? Space AU!! Am I going to be reccing a lot of space AUs in this series? I sure hope so!!

  • You Again (7160 words) by Lady_Ganesh
    Fandom: Weiß Kreuz
    Rating: Explicit
    Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
    Relationships: Naoe Nagi/Tsukiyono Omi
    Additional Tags: Future Fic, Awkward Romance, Competence Kink, Telekinesis, Clairvoyance, Father-Daughter Relationship, Telekinetic sex, Oral Sex

    Twenty or thirty years post canon, two men whose complicated past is now long in the past meet up again over a bomb, go out to dinner, etc. Just a nice story that feels very settled in a way this fandom rarely does but that the characters ought to deserve.
ratcreature: RatCreature in drawn in manga style looks very odd. (manga)

[personal profile] ratcreature 2021-07-29 02:09 pm (UTC)(link)
You know, with the possesive it could then mean Weiß's burden. This is like a Rorschach test... I've never gotten into any anime or manga because I dislike that style of cartoon, and just can't get over it, even for the fun, tropey things I'd enjoy. (I know it's got great variations, and I like some anime influenced things, but the typical anime look just clashes with my preferences. *points to icon*)
ratcreature: RatCreature blathers. (talk)

[personal profile] ratcreature 2021-07-29 03:36 pm (UTC)(link)
Well, in German for a possessive it would need an apostrophe to be fully correct, because it already ends on an s-sound. In general in German we don't do 's for the possessive but just an s at the end of names (though English influence has led to liberal apostrophe sprinkling), but if a name already ends on an s, ß, or z you don't write a second s but just an apostrophe, and the name doesn't sound any different, for example "Hans' Haus". In spoken German you sometimes hear it like "Hanses Haus" so some people spell then "Hans's Haus" but that's not how you are supposed to write. So it should be written Weiß' Kreuz if it was meant that way, but it sounds like the possessive.

And I'm fairly sure that the usage of Kreuz for a burden comes from Christianity just like the English "it's his cross to bear" etc. but afaik the most common German usage eith that is "es ist ein Kreuz mit..." (literally "it is a cross with...") for something or someone being difficult, obstructive or obnoxious and generally hard to bear, so the image there isn't directly somebody carrying a cross around (though that saying also exists), and these days most people might even equally think of lower backpain, because Kreuz also means the lumbar region.
ratcreature: RatCreature is thinking: hmm...? (hmm...?)

[personal profile] ratcreature 2021-07-29 04:47 pm (UTC)(link)
I always thought feeling cross came from "crossing somebody" which presumably comes from the road arrangement. And that has to be pre-Christian, no? I mean at some point it must have meant just the symbol or the two lines crossing.
ratcreature: RatCreature blathers. (talk)

[personal profile] ratcreature 2021-07-29 06:31 pm (UTC)(link)
German borrowed it in the 8th century from Latin and it apparently also was very religion focused for a long time. Surprisingly when I looked it up the noun Kreuzung for a road crossing came only into use in the 19th century apparently, and even the verb "kreuzen" for the directional movement only in the 17th from nautical terms (it also means cruise in German, when you sail against the wind). Before that it was apparently just religious stuff, like putting somebody on a cross or making the sign of the cross, which now got replaced by "kreuzigen" and "sich bekreuzigen" as the previous one got all the plain geometrical and movement meanings.

Now I wonder what people used for their intersections before that if they didn't say "Kreuzung"...
ratcreature: RatCreature is thinking: hmm...? (hmm...?)

[personal profile] ratcreature 2021-07-29 06:54 pm (UTC)(link)
Straßenquerung could work. Querstraße also exists but it is used to describe a smaller street in relation to a main street like an intersecting street not the intersection. Word order matters with these smushes in German. But yeah, probably something with "quer" as root, that seems to be an old word. Now saying just "Querung" on its own seem a bit out of style, usually for crossing something, you now say "Durchquerung" or "Überquerung" or "Unterquerung" depending on the context, but it does exist on its own.