We are excited to introduce our next shining star for the Creator Spotlight… @vulcanhighblood!
This is a member’s only activity where we reach out to one of the talented people in our community each month to find out all about them and their kakairu creations, and then show them off to the world!
We hope you enjoy learning about Vulcan & her creations as much as we did. Please give them some love 
Pronouns: Any (she/her, he/him, they/them)
Type of Creator: Writer
Where to find them:
- vulcanhighblood | Archive of Our Own
- https://vulcan-highblood.tumblr.com/
- https://twitter.com/vulcanhighblood
1. How long have you been creating KakaIru fanworks?
Not very long, surprisingly. I really got into KakaIru writing in 2020, though I had been reading kkir off and on since probably around 2015.
2. What are you working on right now?
Oh dear. Uh. So many WIPs. I have 6 (i think??) kkir WIPs on ao3 right now waiting for chapter updates (said chapters are all at varying stages of completion). I also have 3 WIPs in my documents that haven’t been posted yet. My personal favorites of what I haven’t posted yet are an “undercover operatives find out they’re soulmates during a one night stand” AU, and a kakairu twist to my established “Vampire Homeroom Teacher” AU where everything else about Naruto canon is basically the same except that Iruka’s a vampire. I’m also working on the sequel to my KakaIru BigBang fic, which involves lots of seals-master-Iruka shenanigans.
3. What is your favourite trope to create for?
Oh man I love Soulmate AUs, Arranged Marriage AUs, and Fake Dating AUs, but I’m also a sucker for “idiots in love” or “idiots to lovers”. Also I love writing scenes with food, and apparently that’s become something of a trademark for me. Not that I’m complaining.
4. Which of your creations is your favourite, and why?
Wow, making me choose between my beloved children?? How dare you. (haha) Honestly though, it’s very hard to choose. I really love the first KakaIru fic I ever wrote, a fake-dating fic called “You Belong With (someone better than) Me”. It sort of cemented my style as the fic author who can and WILL abuse the “food as a metaphor for love” tag on Ao3.
5. Do you have any WIPs you’re excited about?
I think that out of my current in-progress works, I’m most desperately in love with my fic “You Feel Like Home (and i dont know why)”. There’s something about the way it explores how softness and kindness can be found in the most dark and desperate of places that really gets to me. It’s also chock full of soft and doting domestic Kakashi, which is something I can apparently never get enough of. As far as fics that are NOT on Ao3 yet, the undercover-one-night-stand-soulmate-reveal-disaster fic is one of my favorites that I’ve been working on.
6. Do you have any original characters? If so, tell us about them!
I only really make original characters when they’re necessary to the plot. But! I love to try and use Kishimoto naming conventions by giving them extremely cringey pun names in Japanese, particularly if I think they’ll end up being recurring characters.
7. What was your hardest piece to create, and why?
Definitely my Enemies-to-Lovers BigBang piece, “Making Ends Meet”. First, because I had to figure out how to make Kakashi and Iruka at odds in the enemy stage, and then I had a terrible time trying to make Kakashi and Iruka NOT be enemies anymore.
I also discovered that I have a VERY DIFFICULT TIME writing mysteries that could potentially be solved by the readers while not actually making it so obvious that everyone sees it coming, but also not so opaque that the readers would have never seen the twist coming. Mysteries are SO hard. I think I ran myself ragged asking for advice and harassing my beta reader because I was terrified for a solid ¾ of the fic writing process. Give me some good old emotional drama and a few cooking scenes over actual mission work and intrigue any day.
8. Do you have any favourite scenes from something you’ve created?
OH YEAH YEAH BAYBEE, in a WIP on Ao3 called “Will You Stay The Night (or will you stay forever)?”, I do a Kakashi face reveal when Iruka and Kakashi decide to have an omegaverse equivalent of a one-night-stand (that of course catches feelings), and there’s this moment where Iruka demonstrates this unconditional acceptance of Kakashi and who he is and Kakashi cries a little bit (like 1 tear I think?? Its very small considering how emotionally fraught I feel every time I read it) and I think I cried a TON while writing that scene because the radical acceptance is just … its beautiful. I still get emotional thinking about it.
9. Where does your inspiration come from?
I think that a lot of my inspiration comes from the old adage “if you want to read something, sometimes you have to write it yourself”. I mostly write the stuff I want to read. I definitely read and enjoy my own works, I’m not one of those writers who can just release my creations into the world and never look at them again. I love what I write, I love to read, and I love writing the things that I love to read.
I also get inspiration from other writers, both in traditional publishing and in fanfiction. A lot of my own writing style is developed through the process of me seeing things in other writers’ works and going “I really like that, I want to see if I can accomplish something similar in my own writing”.
Writing is all about building a style that works for you, and seeing what works for other people and trying to apply it to your own works in your own way is part of the fun of the creative process. For me, lately, I’ve been working on giving more vivid and active descriptions. It’s still not where I want it to be, but I have plenty of WIPs to keep practicing on until I’m satisfied with my writing in that regard. Then it’ll be on to the next thing.
10. Which of your creations is the most meaningful to you, and why?
I think there are a lot of works that mean a lot to me, but in different ways. One of my favorite series of works that is less popular is my slow-burn romantic but not (yet?) sexual omegaverse series called “In Your Arms”, where both Kakashi and Iruka end up in situations that in most omegaverse fics would be the preface for some sort of dub- or non-con action but instead I wrote soft and comforting and a little bit awkward moments of companionship between the two of them. I really love that A/B/O can be whatever you want it to be, and that series is a great reminder to me that romances don’t need smut to bring me joy (though of course I have plenty of fics that DO bring the smut, and I enjoy them too, lol).
Another really important work was my first KakaIru fic “You Belong With (someone better than) Me”. It includes a lot of the things that I look for in a romance - the idea of care, compassion, patience, and acceptance being different faces of love is carried throughout it, the themes of stress, anxiety, depression, and being too close to yourself to really see yourself are all present throughout as well.
Those sorts of ideas really set the stage for how I write KakaIru in basically all my fics. So I think it was a really important fic for me, too. But in a more specific “this is how I’m going to be writing KakaIru” sort of way, though I don’t think I realized it at the time.
