But It's Evil!

[rionaleonhart]

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.)

Comments

[th-esaurus.livejournal.com]

You are a brave, brave soul.

[amy-wolf.livejournal.com]

You're daring. I don't want to make it too easy for people to find all of my stuff, lest they go "Holy crap, it's crap! Why does she never get a beta?" (Because I'm horribly impatient.) And also, I don't actually want to count how much Top Gear fic I've written.

- 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?

I'd like to write more stuff with female characters, but I'm wary of being pulled into too many new fandoms, and the ones I'm currently in are tiny little RPF fandoms where practically everyone's male. As for the fandoms I've been involved in most recently - Life on Mars has a male-heavy cast, Supernatural kills off all of the women (which somewhat restricts the fic potential), and I'm just scared of getting too connected with Doctor Who fandom again (although I would like to write that weird Batman crossover where the Joker is possibly a Time Lord). And if I write all the weird ideas like the Being Human OT3 fic, or the Farscape Snow Queen AU, either no one is going to read it at all, which would not be fun, or someone's going to jump out and go "Yes! You're in the fandom now! Join all of these coms and write a million more fic!" which is scarier. (My ideal is having something like three people reading my stuff and praising it enthusiastically.)

Plus, if you average out my fannish stuff (where nearly everyone's male) and my original stuff (where nearly everyone's female), it sort of balances out.

[reipan.livejournal.com]

You are indeed a brave soul, although I am joining this community more out of nostalgia than curiosity :) (Man, the Mary-Sue parody! Remember that? We were all so much littler!)

[nomelon.livejournal.com]

I look forward to the old shame. Bring it on.

Also, I think I love your Mary Sue, and YOU MUST MAKE A GREAT EFFORT TO FIND THESE RED DWARF FICS. This is not an easy fandom to find good fic for, or any fic at all for that matter, and even if you thought it was rubbish, I bet it was far better than some of the stuff that's out there.

(Gah. I actually had a Red Dwarf icon that I was looking forward to using, but my extra user pics thing expired YESTERDAY so it would require far too much reshuffling right now to use it. There was use of the words smeg and head. Good times.)

[dancesontrains.livejournal.com]

RE. writing ladies- I like impertinence's philosophy of writing at least half her fics about either ladies or characters of colour, and I want to do the same thing myself. Of course, the fandom I'm now most invested in is a white sausage fest and one of the fics I'm writing for kink_bingo is a crossover pairing of two white dudes (just what fandom needs!). But many ideas I have do involve lady characters and/or non-white people in gen/het/femslash/three or moresome combinations. I guess I'm trying to be the change I want to see in fandom, and work towards removing the idea that white cis men are the only ones worthy of having their story told from my brain.

[thebaconfat.livejournal.com]

Oh, wow! I'm really excited to look through this! Are you going to be posting any snippets or just finished works?

[timydamonkey.livejournal.com]

Ooh, sounds fun! I'm in! I love that you wrote a Mary Sue parody (I also love that she thought an avalanche was a weather condition announced on the news). I can see that going well actually, you write humour well. I don't, which made my past attempt at it lulzy (also, she was "made of sugar, spice, and all things nice"... I don't know why...)

As for writing women... I seem to gravitate towards writing male characters. I write genfic, so it shouldn't really matter, but I was wondering why. I think the real reason is that it's harder to write female characters. It's like there are two positions: cliche (girly, screams a lot etc.) or actively writing against a stereotype which then gets scrutinised as really being stereotypical or sexist in some way or another... I don't write as a statement, I write because I like to write. Writing men at least seems to avoid this particular trouble.

[dracothelizard.livejournal.com]

I think female character thing also has to do with how you've been in fandoms with very few women, like Top Gear. I've noticed that I don't write female characters often in fanfic, but I do write lots of women in my nanowrimo, so I mostly blame the fandoms I'm in :/.

[jira-rd.livejournal.com]

I joined, as I love your writings. And thus would love to be able to see your evolution of style over the years.

[wolfenkahlon.livejournal.com]

To-Do List:
Add 'old shame' tag to list of things to read.
Add Final Fantasy Fairytales to list of things to read.
Work out how to harness Riona's sense of shame to generate energy.
????
Profit!

I'm sure I've seen that Lord of the Rings Mary-Sue parody somewhere... I seem to remember snrking at that quote...

[pointytilly.livejournal.com]

Man, I wish I'd written out more of my old story ideas so I had embarrassing old fanfic to share D:. Instead I just have some that's...kinda old and a bit crap.

Though I do have one page of an abandoned TNG thing I wrote when I was quite young. It had Captain Picard waking up and turning into a dog. I seem to remember there was an Alien Plot involved or something? I DON'T KNOW. I probably wrote it when TNG was still on the air or just freshly off it, so the reasoning is lost to time.

[newbie1990.livejournal.com]

Okay, I am totally reading your Gippal/Baralai.

That snippet is total genius, btw. I love how easily Gandalf agrees to it. What did they do instead?

I have the same problem re: female characters. I write nothing but slash, even in Merlin fandom, where there are AWESOME GIRLS to be written. I did really want to write Bradley/Angel after the DVD extras first came out, but I couldn't write anything awesome enough.

However, in my original fic, ALL I WRITE is girls, and the dudes are poorly characterised.

Do your reading habits mimic your writing habits? Because mine did, so I wonder if that/fandom influences such things. Or maybe I am just making excuses for myself, idk.

Is your title from one of your fics, perchance? CONTEXT IS NECESSARY.

[bubbles-san.livejournal.com]

The fact that you wrote fairy tale aus with the cast in script form makes me worry that we're secretly the same person, because I did the same with pretty much every fandom I was ever in when I was young. The cast did not like me because I purposefully used the most VTF?! castings I could find.