Trabia Garden

I recently had a conversation with my housemate about how extremely screwed up the Animorphs books were, containing the line, 'Yeah, that's not the first genocide in the Animorphs books.' It reminded me that I once wrote an Animorphs-inspired short story for school, and my English teacher called my parents because she was worried about my psychological health. (Look, we were prompted to write about nightmares! Were you expecting something nice?)

Seriously, though. There's one book where a kid's parents have been enslaved by mind-controlling aliens, so he goes, 'Well, I'll just murder this terminally injured kid and morph into him and go "look, I've made a miraculous recovery!" and then I'll have his parents,' and our heroes end up trapping him permanently in the body of a rat on an isolated island, which gets a reputation for being haunted because passing sailors can hear the rat-kid's psychic screams. One of our heroes, in rat form, is forced to chew through her own tail so their horrible plan will work. I was maybe ten years old when I read this.

Wait, are the Animorphs books the origin of my fondness for the Teenagers Suffering Horribly genre? They're definitely the origin of my writing style; the influence is really, really obvious when I reread my early Pokémon fanfiction. I've kept the 'very straightforward prose, lots of dialogue' aspects to this day. (And, on a content note, I'm still writing about teenagers suffering horribly.)


The theme of the inevitable Linkin Park segment in this entry is 'songs Linkin Park inexplicably never released on an album and don't have on their official YouTube channel EVEN THOUGH THEY'RE GREAT', because I went on a desperate hunt after hearing 'No Roads Left'. I've never heard Mike sing like this before! He usually raps or sings more gently; I had no idea he could manage something this desperate. And 'Across the Line' (warning for suicidal themes) is easily polished enough to be an album song; the buildup of the instruments is great. (The cats just had a DRAMATIC BATTLE while I was listening to it, and it made for the most incredible background music.)

Moving to some softer songs, 'She Couldn't' (again, suicidal themes) is also very good, although at least I can see why this one never ended up on an album: it was recorded in the Hybrid Theory era and wouldn't have fit with the harder sound of their other songs at the time, and the sampling might have created legal issues. And I love the instrumentation and singing on Blackbirds, although the lyrics hurt.

(Hard to think of any song from this band where the lyrics don't hurt. I'm doing a little better now (writing that horrible Until Dawn timeloop fic was incredibly cathartic and helped me claw myself out of a bad psychological dip), but it's been a really tough month. Chester's death in many ways feels like the death of my childhood, and it also got tangled up in my head with the death of a friend of mine under similar circumstances years ago, so I've been grieving on a weird number of levels.

WAIT, CURSES, I GOT SAD IN AN ENTRY AGAIN AND THE RULES SAY I HAVE TO POST SOMETHING CUTE TO MAKE UP FOR IT. Here are Chester and Joe putting on a stupid puppet show with puppets of the band members. I love the 'making fun of friends you know really well' feel of it. I also enjoyed Chester bouncing around ridiculously to a silly version of 'One Step Closer'.)

As he pushed past Harry into the darkening corridor, Zabini shot him a filthy look that Harry returned with interest.

When I first read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, it didn't occur to me that 'with interest' was a metaphor meaning 'with extra filth'. I thought Harry just returned it... interestedly. Going 'hmm, Zabini's giving me a charged look. Intriguing. Where's this going?'

I puzzled over this for some time. It seemed to me unlikely that Rowling had introduced Blaise Zabini as a romantic interest for Harry, but I couldn't work out what else she could be getting at.

The Sectumsempra scene hit me so hard when I first read this book. Come to think of it, Dumbledore drinking the potion in the cave did as well. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is far from the best book in the series, but it does have some really impactful moments.

(The difference between these two scenes: Sectumsempra is horrifying and yet is also possibly my favourite scene in the entire Harry Potter series. Dumbledore drinking the potion is horrifying in a way that makes me squirm and want to look away, rather than in a way that makes me go 'OH NO THIS IS AWFUL but also the best thing ever'.)

Half-Blood Prince is also the book in which Harry finds out that Snape reported the 'Chosen One' prophecy to Voldemort, resulting in the deaths of Lily and James. Dumbledore tells Harry that Snape didn't anticipate the consequences: 'You have no idea of the remorse Professor Snape felt when he realised how Lord Voldemort had interpreted the prophecy, Harry. I believe it to be the greatest regret of his life and the reason that he returned [to our side].'

This is the first time I've reread this book since Deathly Hallows, and this moment really struck me this time around. Snape is such a tragic figure. A deeply unpleasant figure, yes, but a tragic one.


YOU THOUGHT THIS WASN'T GOING TO BE AN ASSASSIN'S CREED ENTRY, BUT NO. I've written a bit more of Visitors (Gratuitous Wish-Fulfilment Edition)! I've edited it into the original post, though, rather than putting it up in a fresh one, because it's silly that I keep flooding your flists with this AU. I'm sorry! It's just a ridiculously fun universe to play around in, particularly now that I've thrown aside my shame and started writing all the platonic bedsharing scenes of my dreams. (ALL OF THESE CHARACTERS HAVE MURDERED HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE.)

reipan gave me some Animorphs books for Christmas, and so I recently reread The Invasion, the first book in the series.

I had forgotten that the Animorphs books are the most depressing children's books ever written. In my memory, the Animorphs at least managed to blow up the Yeerk pool in the first book, even if Tobias was a casualty. Upon rereading, I found that they went in severely underprepared. They did not manage to blow up the Yeerk pool. They managed to rescue one person. One person. They released others from the cages, but all of them were recaptured or killed. The Animorphs' first major mission, and more people ended up dead than rescued. And, on top of all that, Jake ate a live spider. SO DEPRESSING.

(Nothing on the end of the series, though, which I never actually reached but read up on when I was researching for my Glee/Animorphs crossover. Oh, Jake.)

These books were a really big part of my childhood. I used to go to the library and check out as many as I possibly could at once. My first real involvement in fandom was on the messageboard for a fanfiction series called Pokémorphs, in which a Mew gave a bunch of teenagers the power to morph into Pokémon using the 'Ditto Device'. They had to fight the Weederpies: Weedle-Caterpie hybrids genetically engineered by Team Rocket. It was amazing. The world definitely needs more Animorphs crossovers.


Whilst I'm being nostalgic: I've rediscovered my first real effort at fanfiction (EDIT: Just realised that this is at least the third thing to which I have referred as 'my first attempt at fanfiction' in this journal. Look, it was at least ten years ago and I have a terrible memory for the order in which things happen), which was never finished (barely started, in fact). It was called Mew's Pokémon Journey, and it was about a Mew who wanted to be a Pokémon master. I think I'd have been eleven or twelve. Here are some scans of the (now rather yellowed) pages: one, two, three. It looks like there was more writing afterwards, but sadly I think that's been lost.

I've also written it up under the cut, just in case those scans go down in the future and I lose the original (I am a hoarder and like to keep things backed up all over the place). Spelling and punctuational errors are preserved. (I was quite a competent speller, I see, but I clearly had no idea how to punctuate dialogue.)


( Mew's Pokémon Journey: an eleven-year-old's first attempt at fanfiction (probably). )

Alas, we shall never know exactly how Mew was to fare on his Pokémon journey.


To return to the original subject of Animorphs, here is a quote from the construction-site scene in The Invasion:

But then the Andalite's voice was in my head again. {Courage, my friends.}**

And then he psychically transmits courage to the Animorphs.

BLAINE ANDERSON IS AN ANDALITE. My goodness, I clearly missed an opportunity in my Glee/Animorphs crossover.


* this is equivalent to a dog saying 'My name is Dog.'
** here, as in the Mew's Pokémon Journey writeup, I am using squiggly brackets (that's almost certainly the technical term) instead of the pointy brackets of the book because I don't want LJ to interpret it as an HTML tag and make my text too courageous.

Things are a bit stressful at the moment (you know the Mitchell and Webb theory that housemates fall into the categories of 'people who are annoying' and 'people who become annoyed'? I am an annoying housemate; the friend with whom I live is an annoyed housemate, and she is at the moment actively annoyed, and when people are annoyed with me I tend to get very upset and run around trying to cook them meals and buy them chocolates (please do not exploit this knowledge for chocolates)), and so, seeking a distraction, I invite you to share extracts from silly things you wrote in your childhood. (EDIT: Silly things you drew are also very welcome!)

For my part: recently, looking through some of the things I drew and wrote when I was a child, I stumbled across the following poem I'd written about my name:

H is for all of the harvest fruit
A for all the apples on the tree
R is for the redcurrants on the bush
R is rabbits for you and me
I for ice cream
E for eaves
T for Tutancarmoon* the egiptians believed

* lol

I clearly sort of gave up halfway through. Eaves, Little Riona? Eaves? Really? You genuinely couldn't think of another word beginning with 'E'? Tutankhamun was really something you associated strongly with yourself?

There's also a card I've written to my dad. It says, 'Dear Daddy. Happy Birthday! I hope you like your Presents. Love From Reepicheep.'

I had completely forgotten that I used to pretend to be Reepicheep when I was younger. I'd walk up and down the house, pretending that I was on the Dawn Treader and had to keep my balance. (He's a swordfighting mouse; who wouldn't want to be him?) The idea of my dad fathering Reepicheep is a tiny bit alarming, frankly.

Also: 'Daddy has his article that he is reading titled "Becketts Bass ruling proves the fallibility of convential wisdom". It does not seem to make sense at all. Why dosen't he just read the Beano?' I concur, younger self; who needs newspapers when you could be reading comics? Honestly. (Ooh, a search turns up the article in question and therefore allows me to date this particular pearl of wisdom! I would have been just about to turn nine. Bit appalled by the fact that I couldn't spell 'doesn't' at that age, although I'll let 'convential' slide.)

And there are the beginnings of a made-up language! To my amusement, 'fic' meant 'shut up' and, although the language had only thirty-four words, one of them meant 'pretend to be a mouse'. I knew where my linguistic priorities lay.

A handful of Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days observations that I failed to mention in my last entry on account of crying too much:

Phil of Hercules: Now, I gotta head back inside to get ready for the next match, but, uh...
Roxas: What?
Phil: Nothin', nothin'. Well, all right then... I'm gonna go.
(Phil starts to walk away; Roxas turns to leave.)
Phil: Hey, Roxas...
Roxas: Yeah?
Phil: (not turning around) Don't be a stranger. (leaves)
Roxas: What, he wants me to come back? For what? More training? Hunh, weird.

...Square, did you intend me to interpret this scene as the unrequited love of a grumpy satyr for his oblivious trainee? Because, if not, something has gone quite badly wrong. (I think the idea was to show that Phil is quietly proud of him, but there was definitely a moment of 'what - what am I reading?' before I realised that. It's probably a similar inability to distinguish between emotions that led me to think Hermione was in love with Hagrid when I was eleven.)

Also, I love that Xigbar calls Axel 'Flamesilocks'. Xigbar is great fun in this game. He's hilarious, and, despite being generally callous and mocking, he does seem to have an odd fondness for Roxas.

Luxord seems to be slightly fond of Roxas as well, giving him advice on life (even if it's so heavily dressed up in poker metaphors that Roxas can't really follow it) and gently poking fun at him. A part of me wants fanfiction in which Luxord is a sort of pseudo-father figure for Roxas. (I find it intriguing that Luxord wears an earring in the shape of the Nobody symbol. Does that mean he's in some way proud of or happy with his identity as a Nobody?)


Speaking of things that make me cry endlessly: zarla's latest entry of Hunter-Smoker-Jockey-Charger comics tore my heart into confetti, and so I'm thinking quite a lot about the ladyzombies at the moment, and so, inevitably, I am coming up with terrible crossover ideas. SMOKER IS A NOBODY AND INSISTS THAT, WITHOUT A HEART, SHE CANNOT FEEL EMOTION. HUNTER WILL SEE ABOUT THAT.

I also want to see an AU in which Hunter, Smoker, Jockey and Charger are all in prison together and try to break out. Yes.

Seriously, there needs to be so much fanfiction about these four. I'm actually weirdly tempted to claim Hunter/Smoker for 1sentence, if the owners of this universe wouldn't mind.


A final note: I've been getting a bit of spam in my journal lately, so I've turned on CAPTCHA for anonymous comments. Sorry if this inconveniences anyone who wants to comment anonymously! You'll still be able to comment; you'll just have to type in a couple of words to prove that you're not a robot first. (If you are, in fact, a robot who genuinely wants to chat, I can only apologise.)

I was just trying to remember what my mental image of Snape was when I first started reading the Harry Potter books, before the films came along and replaced it with Alan Rickman, and then I realised that, although Phineas and Ferb didn't exist at the time, my Snape looked a lot like Heinz Doofenshmirtz. I don't even mean that he looked like a live-action Doofenshmirtz might; my mental images of everyone else were realistic people, but Snape was very clearly a drawing. His nose in particular was Doofenshmirtzish.

Hmmm.

Relatedly, have a handful of thoughts on the first Deathly Hallows film!


( Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One. )

In conclusion, hooray!

Wow, it's going to be so strange when the final film comes out. The end of an era! Although I've never been very involved in the fandom, Harry Potter has been a significant influence in my life since I was ten years old.

(I've just remembered that last night, as I was going to sleep, I wandered along a line of thought approximately as follows: Why did I never really write Potter fanfiction? Maybe it's because there's too much already; it's too difficult to be original. I have to think of something nobody has written before.

What I seem to recall I came up with, as I drifted off, was doves flying out of Hermione's vagina.

In the light of day, this doesn't seem such a great idea. Look, it was half past one in the morning (unusually late for me; I had to walk home from the cinema, as the buses were all hiding from the snow). I was half-asleep. I can't be held accountable for whatever bizarre ideas my subconscious throws at me in that state.

Knowing this fandom, someone's probably written it already, anyway.)

I don't know exactly when I discovered fandom, but I believe it was when I was twelve or so, about a decade ago, and so it seems an appropriate time to begin posting my fanfiction to riona_archivic, which I have created as a way of keeping all my writing backed up in one place. I'm up to mid-2004, working forwards. You don't need to join it - it's really for my own reference, and I'll still be posting new fanfiction here - but you're welcome to join if you're interested. In addition to all the fiction available on the Internet, it contains quite a bit of terrible writing I've later taken down out of embarrassment (filed on the old shame tag JUST SO IT'S EASIER FOR YOU TO FIND IT AND ME TO CRINGE), and I'm planning to archive my unposted and unfinished 2004 NaNoWriMo effort there (I suppose I'll create an 'unposted' tag for things that have never been posted anywhere). Also, I've added a bit of context and commentary for most things in the headers, if you're interested in that sort of thing.

If you do join, the tags page sorts the fiction by fandom, pairing and year written. I would strongly advise not adding it to your flist, because there are hundreds of stories I haven't posted yet and it would become very cluttering very quickly.


Some notes on the experience of archiving:

- I actually wasn't as bad a writer in my early attempts as I'd thought I was. I wasn't good, certainly, and some of my early work makes me cringe, but I was never really terrible. (Although I did occasionally write things that were incredibly ill-advised. DON'T READ THE FINAL FANTASY FAIRYTALES. JUST DON'T.)

- In a way, reading my early works, which simply and obviously weren't good, is less painful than reading later ones, which are almost good but scuppered by a couple of glaring flaws. I suppose I have more distance from the earlier ones, both emotionally and stylistically. Later not-good fics are too close to my present writing for comfort.

- I can see my writing evolving over the years! It is quite exciting.

- In my first few years, I wasn't really 'in' fandoms; something in a canon would interest me, so I'd write a fic about it, and then I'd move onto the next interesting thing in the next canon. I think the first fandom I really felt I had a presence in was Red Dwarf, although my fanfiction for it has been lost. (This is probably fortunate; it was not good fanfiction.)

- I don't write female characters as much as I should, but I'm coming to realise that that wasn't always the case. In my early teenage years, I wrote to explore ideas that interested me, and sometimes those ideas involved girls. What changed? I never stopped loving female characters; why did I stop writing them? Can I return to my original 'the gender of the character is irrelevant; wouldn't this make a cool story?' attitude?

- Of course, the larger number of female characters in my early writing can be in part attributed to the fact that I wrote more about original characters, many of them female. My original characters in my early teens were all such brats.

- I've always been primarily a gen writer. I'd thought this was an inclination I discovered in the Supernatural fandom, because I didn't really 'ship anything in Supernatural, but no; my fanfiction has always been predominantly gen. Supernatural wasn't an anomaly; the anomalies were Scrubs and Top Gear, where most of my writing was slash.

- Sometimes I recognise elements of characters I would later write in my characterisation of earlier ones, which is always a bit disconcerting but was particularly so when I realised that my Gippal/Baralai fanfiction was on some level Jeremy Clarkson/David Mitchell.

- My fourteen-year-old self was not a great wit, but this extract from her attempt at a Lord of the Rings Mary-Sue parody did sort of crack me up:

"We must go up the Snowy Mountain," cried Gandald.

Amy knew there was going to be an avalanche. "Let's not bother. I heard on the weather forecast that there would be avalanches today."

"OK," said Gandalf.


A reminder, in case you missed it: if you decide you want to join the archive, you won't want to add it to your flist. I've still got six years of archiving to get through. There are literally hundreds of entries to come. (Also, please bear in mind the year in which something was written. I certainly hope I've improved over the past decade. If you hold something I wrote at thirteen to the same standard to which you hold the things I am writing in my twenties, you are going to be disappointed.)

Storytime!

Once upon a time, when I was a fairly small Riona and my brother Joseph was even smaller, he and my (also small) cousin came up to me in a state of great agitation and swore they had seen an alien in my room. It was tall and grey, I seem to recall, and had somehow exited through the window.

Because I was not quite small enough to be entirely credulous about such things, I went into my room to investigate, and my brother followed. (My cousin, I think, may have refused to go in.)

There was a small grey pebble on the inside windowsill, and my brother decided that the alien must have left it there. I was beginning to see what was going on here: they had put a pebble on my windowsill, and now they were trying to persuade me that an alien had been in my room. Well, I wasn't falling for that.

"Look, it's only a pebble," I said, reaching out towards it.

"Don't touch it!" my brother exclaimed.

I touched it.

It exploded.

I have no idea how such a ripe puffball had managed to grow on my window without my noticing, but it certainly made for a traumatic childhood experience.


Shall we share amusing stories about our childhoods in the comments to this entry? I think that could be quite fun. (Whilst we're on the subject: I've been short-sighted since birth, but I didn't have my eyes tested until I was seven or so. Because it is difficult to see rain when one is short-sighted, I used to think it was invisible, like wind. One day, when it was raining particularly heavily, I realised I could actually see the rain if I concentrated hard enough. I thought I had superpowers.)

I was going to play Pokémon Crystal, you guys. It was going to be the first time I had ever played a second-generation Pokémon game. I was really excited.

And then it turned out that the cartridge was corrupted and wouldn't register saves.

I am genuinely woeful. I WAS GOING TO HAVE A CYNDAQUIL AND I WAS GOING TO NAME IT MERLIN. (And my Red-version save also appears to be corrupted, so I have to start again. Fortunately, the cartridge still registers saves. Had my beloved Red cartridge been rendered entirely useless, I would probably have wept. I got it for Christmas when I was ten. It was my first ever videogame. My first Pokémon was a Bulbasaur named Bulby, and oh how I loved him. (Oh, how I completely failed to train any of the other Pokémon on my first team.))

In order to make up for this sad, sad lack of Pokémon-playing and soothe my ten-year-old soul, I would like to request that you either share your own Pokémon-related stories (what was your first Pokémon? Which is your favourite? What do you always have on your team? What do you name your Pokémon?) or write Pokémon-related ficsnippets (crossovery or otherwise) in the comments. Pokémon-related photomanips or doodles would also be very welcome. JUST POKÉMON UP MY COMMENTS, GUYS. YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO.

To kick things off:



"Where's Merlin?"

"I'm afraid Merlin is busy, sire," Gaius replies, rummaging through his bookshelves.

"He's not busy. What's he doing? Where is he?"

"I believe he is running an errand for Morgana."

"He's not Morgana's manservant," Arthur points out, straddling the wooden bench by Gaius' worktable. There is a creature on the table, he notices: some sort of large, dark-furred rodent. It is staring at Arthur in a most disconcerting fashion. "Do you have a rat problem?"

"Just a pet," Gaius says, glancing over. "A whim, if you like."

The stare seems almost familiar. Arthur has the unpleasant feeling that Gaius' pet thinks he is an idiot. "What sort of creature is it?"

"A species of mouse," Gaius says. "They're very common in the western regions. I wouldn't go too near if I were you; he can be quite vicious."

He can't be sure in this light, but Arthur would almost be prepared to swear that its fur is blue. He reaches out to touch it.

There is a burst of light and heat, and Arthur immediately draws his hand back to shield his face.

A moment goes by.

"Gaius," Arthur says, "your mouse is on fire."

I just stumbled across the following conversations with sazzlette and wanttobeatree and laughed until I wept. The first is a long build-up to a beautifully appalling punchline; the second just makes me crack up every time I read it.


( The first conversation. You may not want to read this if you have not yet seen the first episode of the fourth season of Supernatural. )

And the second, which is entirely devoid of Supernatural references, spoilery or otherwise:

wanttobeatree: I very almost spat a mouthful of soup out to lol at you
sazzlette: ahaha ir ead that as soap
sazzlette: i was like LOL YOU'RE EATING SOAP WHAT
rionaleonhart: I once ate soap.
wanttobeatree: ... for
wanttobeatree: a reason?
rionaleonhart: It was shaped like an apple and smelt like an apple.
wanttobeatree: sauidfkdlgfosdap
wanttobeatree: omg
wanttobeatree: you are shit
rionaleonhart: I wanted to see whether they had covered all the senses.
wanttobeatree: I once tried to eat a stone
rionaleonhart: I BET YOU HAD LESS EXCUSE
wanttobeatree: a friend had this bowlful of them and he told me they were that magical stone-looking candy
wanttobeatree: but no
wanttobeatree: it was just a bowl of stones