100 days of enemy recs: 3. Weiß Kreuz

[melannen]

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.

Comments

[ratcreature]

I probably won't read these, but thank you for giving me a summary of the fandom premise. For many years I'd occasionally see it mentioned, but never managed to actually grasp the premise. I kind of thought it was about somebody called Schuldig living up to his name. BTW is there a reason why it is called "Kreuz" in the title? Seeing the fandom name always makes me cringe a little because the adjective doesn't agree with the noun as it ought to, but maybe the two aren't meant to be a unit?

[makamu]

Thanks for the recs and the memories and for having the same favourite pairing I have always followed the most (other ones I liked were and are Aya/Youji and Ken/Omi). And I am oddly relieved to hear that I need not go on the hunt for canon (it looks more complicated than it did twenty years ago).

[to_do_list]

I did watch the anime back I don't even know how many years ago, when it was just released and all of my fandom connections were strictly in Russian... What a trip down the nostalgia lane. Thank you!

The conversation in comments about various meanings of cross were fascinating, I did not know any of it back then and it adds so much meaning now. Both the ideas of burden and the crossing of roads seem to fit so well.