God yes that's my issue with 90% of soulmate AU fics, the insufficient attention paid to the repercussions that the soulmate mechanics would have on the world. One of the worse examples I stumbled over was one where soulmates feel each other's pain no matter if they've met or not- bad enough, but this one extended it to them suffering any injuries their soulmates got. Like. Shit, son, how would sports or high-end competitions function if a participant could fall over screaming mid-race at any moment because their soulmate tripped over a cat? What about people trying to sneak around to Do Crimes or for more innocuous reasons, exposed because suddenly they've got two black eyes and a fountaining nosebleed out of left field? How many important public figures could bite it because their (unknown) soulmate was in an accident or intentionally targeted? Possibilities are endless, but this fic (shittily written even besides the concept) didn't do shit with it except have one character being very Concern because their soulmate gets injured all the time forever, and a shoddy bit where they started carving messages into their skin to communicate, never mind that one character shouldn't have known to be writing in English. BAH.
following up on this: soulmark drama with first/last words not meaning what they're initially assumed to mean is so awesome and full of possibilities! :D:D:D acting (plays, movies, tv shows, voice acting), roleplaying, specialized terminology, subcultural slang, people misusing phrases in the language they are speaking in, sarcasm, quotes of/references to media, people connecting over obscure interests (like fandom, for example), misspellings (if the first thing the soulmate says is said by them in writing), writing styles like uwu and crytyping... lots of ways for soulmark words to turn out to mean a different thing than they look like they mean and for drama to result
for simplicity i decided to conceive of it as along the lines of: "Pairs A, B, C, (...) and X meet on Thursday. They all loop Thursday together. When one pair, say Pair C, resolves their differences, they drop out of the loop and become part of the regular non-looping populace. When all of these pairs have done this, the loop ends and time advances to Friday. Pairs 1, 2, and 3 meet on Friday..." (replace "thursday" and "friday" with "week one" and "week two" for longer loops) ...but then, what happens if Pair C finishes their loop, but then Pair B interacts/interferes with them? do they remember? does it disrupt the finished loop & bring Pair C back to looping? what becomes the final timeline? & of course it would be much worse if instead, you not only had to loop til you and your soulmate had your shit together, but until all the other Thursday Loopers were done too... so then that brings me to thinking about individual loops, but then as you said, they would likely overlap and could potentially be disrupted... now that would be something thought: the languages of this world might well include specific words/tenses for time travel/time loop related concepts, like "is about to have never happened" or "future that wasn't" and so forth another thought: science would definitely be motivated to discover ways to insulate against time loopers and/or preserve records of what happened in loops... the message board adrift in time idea is especially amusing "YOU MUST BE IN A LOOP TO JOIN THIS MESSAGEBOARD YESTERDAY'S PASSWORD IS 1099373_funky. MEMORIZE THAT AND YOU CAN LOG IN ON YOUR NEXT LOOP." (or if 24 hr loops are most common, maybe the password changes every 6 or 12 hours) this could also be a thing even if we didn't have the tech to have the messageboards keep records regardless of loops, it'd just be hard to keep track of who said what after a loop reset i also was thinking about like, in the physical world, special clubs / meetinghouses for people currently looping, so that they can commiserate with people and also talk to someone who isn't static* for once *by static i mean unaware of looping and likely to say/do the same things each loop unless the looper intervenes; and even then if you loop long enough you might end up feeling like you've seen/heard all of that person's possible reactions/dialogue for this span of time, even the ones elicited through you changing how you interact with them. kinda like Spoiler: undertale spoilers flowey from undertale, who over an unknown amount of time fuckery, claimed to have gotten every possible ending, befriended everyone, killed everyone, gotten every possible reaction/dialogue/response out of everyone... obviously most people aren't lacking in emotions like he is and prooooobably won't go murdering people out of boredom, but for someone who loops long enough, getting bored of the people around them/frustrated that nothing changes, would be a potential issue.
Or if it's the quote thing, if it's something generic enough (like maybe the starbucks order), how many people have said that thing to you over the years? Which one is the right customer?? And presumably their soulmate quote is something like 'how can I help you?' or 'next, please', something probably customer-service-flavored..... that you've heard hundred and hundreds of times. SLASH, I was trying to think of something that would be incredibly, incredibly confusing for ages and ages, and so of course my brain has shut down on figuring out decent pop culture flavored references. But imagine for thirty years, you had 'oh my god, stop maining zarya if you're always going to waste her ult' and it only starts making sense once overwatch drops. So many ways this could go wrong and/or confusing. I'd love to see more comedy of errors soulmate things instead of it being played straight and sappy.
Huh. If the "first words said are your soulmark" thing applies to text too, even text not directly aimed at them, there's almost definitely going to be someone who's soulmark is a shitpost, and even more definitely there is someone with a massive fucking callout for someone they're never even going to meet smack dab in the middle of their stomach or something.
Imagine going through life with the equivalent of "I saw Goody Proctor with the devil" forever embedded in your skin. The horror.
i'm imagining the other person in that pair having something like "coming from a fucking hanzo main?!" written on their body, for maximum hilarity especially since this would no doubt lead to the people involved deciding to try out zarya & hanzo, respectively, and/or continuing to play those characters even if they weren't any good at them, because of their words
Another gripe: Wooby (Woobie?) characters. Characters that are normally absolute badasses being reduced to crying, shivering, shaking messes anytime something remotely negative happens to them. I love me an emotional breakdown as much as the next person in my stories, but fuck, this person that stuck his hand inside a man's torso isn't going to suddenly burst into tears because his love interest said something rude to him. Brought to you by me being an author for the Hannibal fandom, and people making either Hannibal or Will into big, tremendous crybabies.
Imagine if the phrase was in a language/alphabt you can't even read Trying to figure out who's trustworthy/knowledgeable enough to help you figure out wtf it even says (altho automatic translation would help a bunch if you can just transcribe it accurately enough)
and imagine if the person who originally wrote the callout regrets writing it and deletes it off their tumblr but it is never truly deleted, regardless of whether anyone had even reblogged it on tumblr or not, 'cause it is on their soulmate's skin
Not soul mate stuff, but soul loop stuff: there's this show called Daybreak, 1 season, about a cop who gets stuck in a time loop. His demeanor changes significantly over parts of his arc, and the people around him react to it a bit. It's inconsistent, some things are exactly the same unless he interferes, some few big things manage to echo through after they're resolved, and some stuff depends on how he's coming across.
I just realized one of my current faves would have something like "I've always thought showing up early is a sign of a noble person" if we're doing words, which is adorable, except they're like eleven when they meet and... man, fuck the idea of meeting your one true love at eleven and KNOWING INSTANTLY, that sounds terrible. Plus she has an equally important if less absurdly star-crossed relationship with another character later and separately and it's not Less Real! So in the end I just annoyed myself about the basic conceit of soulmate fiction. Gimme the weird messy cases, damn it.
Very important question: If you and your soulmate are babies in the same ward at a hospital in a "first thing they say" AU, can you both end up with "*incoherent baby noises*" written on you?
