I'm Going To Kill You, Edgar.

Once again, I find myself compelled to ramble about something nobody's heard of, just when my journal was in danger of becoming accessible. A seventeen-year-old fic should do it.

Ginger: Are you okay? You've spent a lot of today just lying in bed, staring at your phone.
Riona: I've been reading a fic I loved as a teenager! It's about a guy falling into a reluctant friendship with a serial killer while arguing with the dark reflection of himself who lives in his mind.
Ginger: ...yes, that does sound very you.

It's strange to go back to something you loved at a formative age and realise how much it influenced your tastes.

I've been rereading zarla's Vargas, a Johnny the Homicidal Maniac fic I first read when I was fifteen. I have never read so much as a page of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac itself. But I read this fic, and I loved it intensely.

And, on this reread, I've noticed a lot of themes that I've been drawn to in fiction ever since. The self-loathing protagonist has an intense, unhealthy, antagonistic, sexually tinged relationship with a duplicate of himself who may or may not be imaginary; there are so many things I love in that one sentence! (Other fictional themes I love in here: intense relationships with a constant undercurrent of distrust or fear, massive levels of repression, a strangely thin line between love and murder.)

(Just as a heads-up if you're checking it out: the fic is long, violent and unfinished, and it was written between 2003 and 2015, so there's some of the natural development of style you'd expect from a fic written over the course of twelve years.)

Vargas really had an impact on me, I've come to realise. It didn't seem right that I'd never mentioned it here. So I thought I'd give it a quick salute in this entry. THANKS FOR SCREWING ME UP, ZARLA.

And now I've got to resist the temptation to write about Scriabin, because writing fanfiction about someone else's OC for a canon I've never consumed would be ridiculous.

I mean, yes, I technically have done that before. Shhh.

I'm curious now: what are the works of fiction you'd consider particularly influential in forming your tastes? In my case, apart from Vargas, the biggest ones are probably Animorphs, Life on Mars and Silent Hill 2. Animorphs also had a heavy impact on my writing style.

(I've asked the same thing over at fictional_fans, a general fandom discussion community, if you'd prefer to answer there.)