Kaomojis

When I first started posting Eat, Pray, Loki, I had to decide what to do with the text breaks. I could have just left a space. I could have used ***. But that just seemed a wasted opportunity to add a little extra personality to my work. Eventually, I settled on using kaomojis for my text breaks. (Kaomojis are just Japanese text-based emoticons—"kao" means face in Japanese.)

This means that every week, I have to look for or make up kaomojis that have something to do with the story. I don't want to just put random kaomojis in there. This has been fun, although at times I've wondered if I never should have started doing it, since it means I have to spend extra time researching kaomojis every week. So far, I've been trying not to reuse the same ones, and for most chapters I need at least three, although sometimes it's less. 

Sometimes it's obvious what the kaomoji should be. Loki turned himself into a cat, here's the perfect opportunity to use a cat kaomoji! Other times, I have to get a little more creative. Sometimes, I can use a kaomoji as I found it, and sometimes I have to modify it, or create something entirely my own.

This is my original Doctor Doom Kaomoji:

( (*◣m◢) \

One of my favorite kaomojis that I've used is my Alligator Loki, which is just a modified alligator kaomoji that I found (I just added the horns).

                          [ _]
〰〰,####,#˚˚＜

This kaomoji appears a little differently on Fanfiction than it does on Ao3. I often have to modify my kaomojis when I post them to Fanfiction, because that site's document editor likes to remove extra spaces or delete repeated characters.

Here are a couple of my favorite kaomoji websites:

https://bestkaomoji.com/ - This one is my favorite, and often I'll start here even though it isn't as extensive as JapaneseEmoticons.me. The ads aren't annoying, and in addition to the kaomojis being broken down into different categories, it has a search function. 

https://japaneseemoticons.me - This one is much more extensive, and has categories that the other site doesn't have, like fighting emoticons. The only problem with it is all the pop-up ads that sometimes take a long time to load or are difficult to close, and the sidebar ads that sometimes cover the kaomojis up if you resize the window. It also has a "create" tab where you can put together different symbols to create your own kaomojis (I actually haven't tried using this yet, because either it's a new feature or I never noticed it until recently).

Those are the sites that I have bookmarked. If I can't find what I'm looking for on one of those sites, I'll try Googling it.