Riona (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rionaleonhart) wrote2018-07-30 01:54 pm
rionaleonhart) wrote2018-07-30 01:54 pm
I Guess I'm Back To Coming Up With My Own Titles Now That The Streak's Been Broken?
The third of four instalments walking through my fandom history! Apparently my accumulation of fandoms really sped up in my early twenties; I picked up all six of these fandoms within two years.
Waterloo Road
I wasn't introduced to this by a friend or family member, and I didn't see talk of it online and decide to check it out. I got into Waterloo Road by complete coincidence. I was twenty-two years old, on my own in my house in Brighton, with no Internet access. I idly turned on the television. There was some sort of school drama on; two schoolboys, Josh and Finn, were having an urgent conversation in an empty room. This feels oddly homoerotic, I thought, moments before one of them kissed the other.
I watched the rest of the episode for the fallout, then had to look up the television schedule to work out what it actually was that I'd watched. Waterloo Road? I'd never heard of it. But apparently it had been running for over eighty hour-long episodes, and you bet I was going to watch them all. I love stories about teenagers making bad decisions, and Waterloo Road was absolute gold on that front.
(Disastrously, I can feel myself being tempted to rewatch it as I write this.)
Waterloo Road had absolutely no LJ-based fandom; I could only find discussion on soap opera forums, where people did not engage with fandom in a way I was used to. It did have a bit of presence on fanfiction.net, but nobody seemed to be writing about Josh Stevenson, who was the character I really wanted to read about. I took it upon myself to rectify the lack.
My Waterloo Road/Hunger Games crossover attracted some really weird reviews. For example:
this story is very long eh eh
l reely like josh and his dad and jodi (Jodi does not appear in the fic; apparently this reviewer just felt like listing all their favourite Waterloo Road characters.)
i can come to your school
Favourite character: I loved Tom Clarkson, Sambuca Kelly and Tariq Siddiqui, but the subject matter of my fanfiction shows a clear bias towards the prickly, defensive, easily-exploited, struggling-with-his-sexuality Josh Stevenson.
Favourite pairing: Maybe Tom/Karen? I was extremely sad that Tom, who was constantly banging his way through the staff room, never got around to the headmistress. But my main relationship focus wasn't actually a romantic relationship; it was Josh's relationship with his father Tom.
Number of words written: 26,612.
Snippet: I was extremely sad that we never saw Josh meet the girls Tom took in after the death of their mother.
Josh is giving Chlo a strange look. Tom supposes it must be a bit weird to meet your dad and find out he’s got another kid. Sort of. Apparently, he’s never going to get to raise a child from babyhood; he’s just going to keep acquiring teenagers.
“He said you was doing your A Levels,” Josh says. “How old are you?”
“Seventeen,” Chlo says. “How about you?”
Josh looks thunderstruck. “What, so he already had you when he was with Mum?”
“Er...” Tom begins, feeling vaguely as if there’s been some sort of misunderstanding somewhere along the line.
“I can’t believe this!” Josh exclaims, rounding on Tom. “You’re knocking up my mum when you’ve already got a kid?”
“Hey, I never meant to knock your mum up, y’know,” Tom protests, only realising when Josh and Chlo turn simultaneous expressions of disbelief on him that it’s entirely the wrong thing to say. “Chlo isn’t even my daughter!”
“Oh, yeah, disown her. You’re good at that, aren’t you?”
“What, do you think I’m lying?”
“Should never have told you who I was,” Josh mutters, turning to stalk away.
There is a brief, incredulous silence after he’s gone.
“Well,” Tom says, eventually, “thanks for the support, Chlo.”
“I wasn’t expecting it!” Chlo protests. “I didn’t know he was gonna be like that, did I?”
And she’s right, of course. Not her fault Josh jumped to conclusions. “All right. Sorry.”
Chlo twists the ends of her hair between her fingers. “I could talk to him, if you like?”
“Might be a good idea,” Tom says. “Thanks.”
Glee
I started watching Glee when I was just about to turn twenty-two, but it comes after Waterloo Road in this list because I only started writing fanfiction for it six months later, when the show introduced Blaine. I 'shipped Kurt/Blaine ferociously and immediately.
Glee was an intimidatingly huge fandom. You couldn't be in Glee fandom as a whole; you chose one aspect to be interested in and hung out with other people who were interested in the same aspect. Kurt/Blaine was very much my corner.
The show was a bit of a disaster with inconsistent and occasionally oddly spiteful character writing, and the fandom was weirdly vicious and had intense 'shipwars (although at least it was when the main ammo for 'shipwars was 'CLEARLY THIS PAIRING IS THE MORE CANON AND INTERESTING' rather than 'YOU CAN'T 'SHIP THAT; IT'S MORALLY WRONG'). I still had fun watching and writing for it, though. But I don't know if I'll ever be able to watch it again; two of its stars died young, one after arrest for possession of horrific pornography, and it's hard to forget that and enjoy the show.
Favourite character: Honestly, it's hard to pick out a favourite character when the character writing was so inconsistent! In the first season, it was Quinn; she was a bully teetering on the edge of redemption in a way that interested me. In subsequent seasons, which increasingly forgot that Quinn existed, it was between Kurt and Rachel, and then settled as Santana.
Favourite pairing: Kurt/Blaine was the entire focus on my involvement in Glee. I 'shipped it from before Blaine was technically introduced; the 'Teenage Dream' performance was released as a preview and Kurt was just so charmingly smitten!
Number of words written: 20,061.
Snippet: Of course I attempted a Glee/Silent Hill crossover.
“No,” he whispers. He’s shaking and hyperventilating and he’s repeating the same word involuntarily, over and over again, like a skipping track. “No, no, no, no, no,” as if he can make this monster go away by protesting.
But it does. It pulls away and it wanders off and Kurt is left there, barely able to support himself on his trembling legs, unable to comprehend what just happened.
“You have to fight back,” a voice says. It’s very nearly the thing that sends Kurt over the edge into a full-blown heart attack.
“Blaine?”
Blaine steps out from the corner of the road, smiling easily, his hands spread. “Hey, Kurt.”
They’re in a town filled with monsters; how can Blaine look so calm? But Blaine’s always been calm, always been rational, and in any case Kurt is so desperately pleased to see him that he’s not going to question it too much.
(...)
The monster screams – it’s a high F, and Kurt knows this because his mind apparently thinks informing him is more important than actually making his legs move, why can’t he run – and lumbers toward him, and Kurt just stands there, frozen, pinned to the spot as if someone’s driven a nail through each of his designer boots.
And then it’s upon him, grabbing his shoulders in its oversized fingerless hands. It smells of sweat and its slimy, misshapen face is pressed against Kurt’s and even though it doesn’t have any mouth that he can see Kurt has a sudden vision of it tearing his lips off with its teeth –
and then there’s a BLAM and Kurt jerks back, thinks for a wild moment that he’s been shot before he realises that the shudder that ran through him was from the monster’s spasm, and as the monster slumps to the ground it takes him a moment to process what he’s seeing.
Blaine is standing there, the sleeves of his Dalton blazer rolled up over a bloodstained shirt. He is holding a shotgun.
Kurt, shaking all over, manages to take a few unsteady steps back from the corpse before he falls to his knees and retches. He’s ruining the knees of his pants, some part of him registers vaguely, but for once he doesn’t care.
(...)
“I don’t exist.”
Kurt laughs. “I do feel that way, sometimes. You’re too perfect to be real. I’m waiting for the day you cut your leg and I see all the wires.”
“No,” Blaine says, taking his hand. “I actually don’t exist.”
Kurt swallows, and it’s strange that, after everything he’s experienced here, this can still make his stomach lurch. “Are you breaking up with me?”
“I would never break up with you,” Blaine says. He presses a kiss to Kurt’s knuckles. “But I’m not real.”
“Stop saying that.”
“Come on. You go to Dalton, and the first guy you meet is handsome and friendly and charming and gay and ready to take you under his wing?”
“Well,” Kurt says, “someone thinks highly of himself.”
Blaine gives him such a pitying look that Kurt bristles; he’s not a puppy. “I’m not the one who made me so perfect.”
Which makes no sense at all.
X-Men: First Class
I watched this with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
th_esaurus at the age of twenty-two and enjoyed it a lot more than I was expecting. I very rarely get into films in a fannish way, and this is the only film fandom I have that passes the 'at least ten thousand words across at least three fics' test. I've actually never written for X-Men on its own; the three fics I've written for it were all crossovers (with Misfits, Silent Hill and Pokémon).
This film became a lot harder to rewatch after I realised that every scene ends with a terrible one-liner.
Favourite character: Charles Xavier. I think? It's entirely possible I tell myself Xavier is my favourite character just so I have a favourite character for every letter of the alphabet.
Favourite pairing: For X-Men: First Class, it's Charles/Erik. For X-Men in general, it's Rogue/Logan, which I still have to struggle not to write as 'Rogan/Logue'. Technically, I've never written either pairing, although I've come closer to writing Charles/Erik in the sense that I have actually written fanfiction about those characters.
Number of words written: 11,228.
Snippet: Oh, damn, I should have checked my old notebooks when I was at my parents' place over the weekend! I checked them for a couple of other fandoms, but I hadn't realised I don't have any unfinished X-Men fanfiction in electronic form. I think I had something where Charles had very unethically wiped Erik's memories to make sure they'd stay on the same side.
Uncharted
Jak and Daxter was one of the first videogame series I got fannishly into, so I was interested to check out what else Naughty Dog had done. One of my first purchases for the PS3 I received for my twenty-third birthday was an Uncharted/Uncharted 2 bundle. I was distressingly terrible at shooting and quickly gave up. But then Red Dead Redemption taught me to aim, and I came back to Uncharted after finishing it.
It's fortunate that I bought the first two games bundled. The first Uncharted never really clicked with me; I probably wouldn't have picked up the series again if I hadn't already owned the sequel. But I loved the second game.
Every main-series Uncharted game from the second onwards has a sequence where Nate is staggering around in a state of agony and/or delusion. Naughty Dog know what I like.
Favourite character: Elena Fisher! The first Uncharted character I fell in love with (I came to love Elena in the first game, Nate in the second and Sully in the third), and still my favourite. Smart, sharp-tongued, no-nonsense, well-fine-maybe-a-bit-of-nonsense. Kicked her kidnapper out of a helicopter once. My absolute favourite part of Uncharted 4 is the part where she mocks you while you play videogames. I would buy a full Elena Fisher Mocks Your Videogame Skills Simulator in a heartbeat.
Favourite pairing: Nate/Elena, absolutely no question. They've got such chemistry, they have fun together, and I love that we get to see Nate being vulnerable around her.
Number of words written: 16,195.
Snippet: I've never made any secret of my feelings about Sam Drake, who is the worst, but, weirdly, I do 'ship Sam/Sully. This snippet contains Uncharted 4 spoilers.
“You’re getting the guest bed,” Nate says. “One of the perks of being a senior citizen. I’ll make up the couch for Sam.”
Sully folds his arms. He doesn’t look impressed.
“What? Come on, it’s not like I said ‘old as balls’.”
“So you haven’t told Cassie yet?” Sully asks.
“That you’re old as balls?” Nate asks. “Hate to say it, but I think she might know.”
Okay, Sully’s looking pretty serious.
“Told her what?”
Sully drops his voice. “Nate, the wedding’s in two months. She’s gonna have to know sooner or later. I’m not dressing Sam up as Chloe.” There’s a pause. “Well, not right there in the church.”
“Wedding?” Nate echoes, and then, “Sam?”
“Christ, kid, what’s wrong with you? We told you about this last year. ‘Congratulations’? ‘Cassie’ll never forgive me if she doesn’t get to be bridesmaid’? Any of this ringing any wedding bells in your head?”
Nate stares at him. “Well, yeah, but that was a joke. You were joking.”
“Shit,” Sully mutters. “All right. I guess we’re having this conversation.”
Dangan Ronpa
At the age of twenty-three, I was sitting outside a pub in Ealing with a group of friends, and one of those friends said he'd been reading a fan translation of a Japanese murder mystery game. One of the characters, he said, was me. He showed me some pictures of Touko Fukawa.
He later sent me the link to the fan translation. I swiftly realised he'd been rather uncharitable in comparing me to Fukawa, but by that point I was already hooked. Teenagers! Thrown into a horrible situation! Making horrible decisions! Being overwhelmed by guilt!
This is my third-most-written fandom in terms of wordcount, following Assassin's Creed and Top Gear. I have written Dangan Ronpa fanfiction every year for six years in a row, which is highly unusual. Typically, I'll have a burst of writing activity in one fandom and then move on to the next, but somehow I keep coming back to this series. I've written for the original Danganronpa, Danganronpa 2, Danganronpa: Another Episode, Danganronpa 3 and Danganronpa V3, but 2 is my favourite in the series and the one I've written the most for.
This was the first fandom (to my knowledge) in which I got plagiarised! I wrote a time loop fic that got startlingly popular, and someone put it up on their fanfiction.net account. It was swiftly taken down.
(My other experience with plagiarism: someone took my Doki Doki Literature Club fic Memory Error and put it up on their Pastebin account. I was very puzzled when I discovered this. Pastebin doesn't seem like a practical plagiarism website! It doesn't have any sort of commenting system! Surely you want a way for people to praise you for your stolen fanfiction? It's still up there; I wouldn't really know how to go about getting it taken down. Fanfiction websites have rules against plagiarism, but I don't imagine Pastebin does.)
Favourite character: It's moved around a lot, but I think I've settled on Hajime Hinata as my favourite Dangan Ronpa character. He's just a normal kid, insecure and sarcastic, heart in the right place, thrown into a terrible, terrible situation. He feels very real to me. And that makes him the perfect protagonist for Danganronpa 2, because most of the characters in that cast are incredibly over-the-top, and Hinata is a great way to make things feel grounded.
Favourite pairing: Ooh, maybe Naegi/Ikusaba? But Hinata/Komaeda is extremely fucked up and alarming in a way that appeals to me enormously. I 'ship Hinata with everyone, really, but particularly Komaeda, Koizumi and Kuzuryuu. To be honest, I also 'ship Komaeda with everyone. And Shuichi (but especially with Kaito). I also really like Kaede/Rantaro. Look, I 'ship everything in Dangan Ronpa.
Number of words written: 64,899.
Snippet: For a while I was hoping to write a series of Hinata/Komaeda fics based on classic fluffy fanfiction clichés, but I only managed 'huddling for warmth'. This was going to be 'Komaeda nurses Hinata back to health'.
A vague rustling rouses Hinata from his half-sleep. He frowns without opening his eyes, trying to piece together his situation. It feels like someone’s torn up his memories and scattered the shreds in the wrong parts of his mind.
He was...
His frown deepens; he tries to raise a hand to his throat, but his arm feels strange and heavy and distant, somehow, as if it belongs to someone else. He was...
“Good morning, Hinata-kun.”
Hinata’s eyes jerk open.
He was being strangled.
Komaeda gives him a bright, kind smile, and sets a tray down beside the bed. Hinata has no idea what’s actually on the tray. He can’t really raise his head enough to look at it properly.
In any case, it’s hard to focus on anything but the long, bony fingers that were locked around his throat.
You tried to kill me, Hinata tries to say. He manages a “Y...” and a horrible, rusty scraping noise, and he has to stop because his throat feels like it’s closing up around the words.
Komaeda cocks his head, looking politely puzzled.
Again, Hinata tries to bring a hand to his throat, but... it’s not that he doesn’t have the strength to move his arm; it’s like he can’t remember how to move it. Like all he can do is think move, arm, move at it and hope it listens.
He’s completely helpless. Komaeda is going to murder him, and he can’t do a thing to stop it.
He tries again to look at the tray, but it’s hopeless. He’s not sure he wants to see what’s on it, anyway. His mind is screaming possibilities at him – ropes, whips, knives—
“Are you hungry?” Komaeda asks.
Is he...?
Komaeda lifts the tray into his line of vision. Rice balls and a canned drink.
It’s almost scarier than the torture implements would be. For a moment Hinata thought he understood what was going on with Komaeda at last. Komaeda had stopped screwing around, he’d decided to take the straightforward approach and just murder him. But no. Komaeda choked him into unconsciousness, and now he’s offering him rice balls. Hinata still has no idea what this guy is thinking.
Unless... unless this is still a murder attempt.
“Do you need me to feed you?” Komaeda asks.
Hinata manages a grunt that he’s fairly sure is able to convey definitely not. Okay. He can kind of communicate. Which is good, because he absolutely does not want this guy manually feeding him.
Komaeda frowns in concern. “You have to eat, Hinata-kun. Your classmates are going to want you at full strength for the next trial.”
The next trial?
“Did someone die?” Hinata asks, tensing up even more, if that’s possible. Somehow he’s actually able to get the words out, although it’s a painful effort to force them up through his throat. He tries to conjure up some saliva, swallows, twice. It’s agonising.
“Not yet,” Komaeda assures him. “Are you sure you don’t want any food? I did go to the effort of preparing it, you know.”
Not yet.
Hinata stares at the food. He’ll have a central role at the next trial, he’s pretty sure, but it won’t be as an investigator. “It’s poisoned,” he says, trying to open his mouth as little as possible when he speaks, just in case.
Komaeda actually looks shocked, as if this is a totally unfounded accusation. “It’s not poisoned, Hinata-kun! Why would you think that?”
He doesn’t have to answer that.
“I could eat it first,” Komaeda offers. “If you want me to prove that it’s safe.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Hinata says. Every word he says scrapes viciously through his throat. He has to pause, and breathe, and swallow again before he can finish the sentence. “But I wouldn’t put it past you to poison yourself just so you could get me.”
Although, now that he says it, he’s not sure if there’s a right way to take that.
Community
Having heard good things about Community, I checked it out at the age of twenty-three. I thought from osmosis that the show was The Nerdy Adventures of Troy and Abed; I was confused to discover that there were a bunch of other central characters! I knew there was a Britta somewhere, but I had no idea that Jeff, Annie, Shirley or Pierce existed.
I still think the first season of Community is the best series of television I've ever watched, which is impressive, given that it includes a character (Pierce) I don't like at all. Apparently he was not enough to dislodge it from that lofty place in my esteem!
Favourite character: Jeff. Soft-hearted self-interested sarcastic arsehole in love with six people, one of whom is himself. I love him.
Favourite pairing: JEFF/ANNIE. It's a controversial pairing, but, holy crap, that chemistry. I also love Jeff/himself and Jeff/the entire study group.
Number of words written: 11,341.
Snippet: I think Community is in the rare position of being a fandom where I finished every fic I ever started! That usually happens with fandoms where I've only ever written one fic, with no intention of writing any more (Doki Doki Literature Club, Final Fantasy VI and Jiggy McCue, for example). But with Community I've written four complete fics and absolutely nothing beyond that.
Waterloo Road
I wasn't introduced to this by a friend or family member, and I didn't see talk of it online and decide to check it out. I got into Waterloo Road by complete coincidence. I was twenty-two years old, on my own in my house in Brighton, with no Internet access. I idly turned on the television. There was some sort of school drama on; two schoolboys, Josh and Finn, were having an urgent conversation in an empty room. This feels oddly homoerotic, I thought, moments before one of them kissed the other.
I watched the rest of the episode for the fallout, then had to look up the television schedule to work out what it actually was that I'd watched. Waterloo Road? I'd never heard of it. But apparently it had been running for over eighty hour-long episodes, and you bet I was going to watch them all. I love stories about teenagers making bad decisions, and Waterloo Road was absolute gold on that front.
(Disastrously, I can feel myself being tempted to rewatch it as I write this.)
Waterloo Road had absolutely no LJ-based fandom; I could only find discussion on soap opera forums, where people did not engage with fandom in a way I was used to. It did have a bit of presence on fanfiction.net, but nobody seemed to be writing about Josh Stevenson, who was the character I really wanted to read about. I took it upon myself to rectify the lack.
My Waterloo Road/Hunger Games crossover attracted some really weird reviews. For example:
this story is very long eh eh
l reely like josh and his dad and jodi (Jodi does not appear in the fic; apparently this reviewer just felt like listing all their favourite Waterloo Road characters.)
i can come to your school
Favourite character: I loved Tom Clarkson, Sambuca Kelly and Tariq Siddiqui, but the subject matter of my fanfiction shows a clear bias towards the prickly, defensive, easily-exploited, struggling-with-his-sexuality Josh Stevenson.
Favourite pairing: Maybe Tom/Karen? I was extremely sad that Tom, who was constantly banging his way through the staff room, never got around to the headmistress. But my main relationship focus wasn't actually a romantic relationship; it was Josh's relationship with his father Tom.
Number of words written: 26,612.
Snippet: I was extremely sad that we never saw Josh meet the girls Tom took in after the death of their mother.
Josh is giving Chlo a strange look. Tom supposes it must be a bit weird to meet your dad and find out he’s got another kid. Sort of. Apparently, he’s never going to get to raise a child from babyhood; he’s just going to keep acquiring teenagers.
“He said you was doing your A Levels,” Josh says. “How old are you?”
“Seventeen,” Chlo says. “How about you?”
Josh looks thunderstruck. “What, so he already had you when he was with Mum?”
“Er...” Tom begins, feeling vaguely as if there’s been some sort of misunderstanding somewhere along the line.
“I can’t believe this!” Josh exclaims, rounding on Tom. “You’re knocking up my mum when you’ve already got a kid?”
“Hey, I never meant to knock your mum up, y’know,” Tom protests, only realising when Josh and Chlo turn simultaneous expressions of disbelief on him that it’s entirely the wrong thing to say. “Chlo isn’t even my daughter!”
“Oh, yeah, disown her. You’re good at that, aren’t you?”
“What, do you think I’m lying?”
“Should never have told you who I was,” Josh mutters, turning to stalk away.
There is a brief, incredulous silence after he’s gone.
“Well,” Tom says, eventually, “thanks for the support, Chlo.”
“I wasn’t expecting it!” Chlo protests. “I didn’t know he was gonna be like that, did I?”
And she’s right, of course. Not her fault Josh jumped to conclusions. “All right. Sorry.”
Chlo twists the ends of her hair between her fingers. “I could talk to him, if you like?”
“Might be a good idea,” Tom says. “Thanks.”
Glee
I started watching Glee when I was just about to turn twenty-two, but it comes after Waterloo Road in this list because I only started writing fanfiction for it six months later, when the show introduced Blaine. I 'shipped Kurt/Blaine ferociously and immediately.
Glee was an intimidatingly huge fandom. You couldn't be in Glee fandom as a whole; you chose one aspect to be interested in and hung out with other people who were interested in the same aspect. Kurt/Blaine was very much my corner.
The show was a bit of a disaster with inconsistent and occasionally oddly spiteful character writing, and the fandom was weirdly vicious and had intense 'shipwars (although at least it was when the main ammo for 'shipwars was 'CLEARLY THIS PAIRING IS THE MORE CANON AND INTERESTING' rather than 'YOU CAN'T 'SHIP THAT; IT'S MORALLY WRONG'). I still had fun watching and writing for it, though. But I don't know if I'll ever be able to watch it again; two of its stars died young, one after arrest for possession of horrific pornography, and it's hard to forget that and enjoy the show.
Favourite character: Honestly, it's hard to pick out a favourite character when the character writing was so inconsistent! In the first season, it was Quinn; she was a bully teetering on the edge of redemption in a way that interested me. In subsequent seasons, which increasingly forgot that Quinn existed, it was between Kurt and Rachel, and then settled as Santana.
Favourite pairing: Kurt/Blaine was the entire focus on my involvement in Glee. I 'shipped it from before Blaine was technically introduced; the 'Teenage Dream' performance was released as a preview and Kurt was just so charmingly smitten!
Number of words written: 20,061.
Snippet: Of course I attempted a Glee/Silent Hill crossover.
“No,” he whispers. He’s shaking and hyperventilating and he’s repeating the same word involuntarily, over and over again, like a skipping track. “No, no, no, no, no,” as if he can make this monster go away by protesting.
But it does. It pulls away and it wanders off and Kurt is left there, barely able to support himself on his trembling legs, unable to comprehend what just happened.
“You have to fight back,” a voice says. It’s very nearly the thing that sends Kurt over the edge into a full-blown heart attack.
“Blaine?”
Blaine steps out from the corner of the road, smiling easily, his hands spread. “Hey, Kurt.”
They’re in a town filled with monsters; how can Blaine look so calm? But Blaine’s always been calm, always been rational, and in any case Kurt is so desperately pleased to see him that he’s not going to question it too much.
(...)
The monster screams – it’s a high F, and Kurt knows this because his mind apparently thinks informing him is more important than actually making his legs move, why can’t he run – and lumbers toward him, and Kurt just stands there, frozen, pinned to the spot as if someone’s driven a nail through each of his designer boots.
And then it’s upon him, grabbing his shoulders in its oversized fingerless hands. It smells of sweat and its slimy, misshapen face is pressed against Kurt’s and even though it doesn’t have any mouth that he can see Kurt has a sudden vision of it tearing his lips off with its teeth –
and then there’s a BLAM and Kurt jerks back, thinks for a wild moment that he’s been shot before he realises that the shudder that ran through him was from the monster’s spasm, and as the monster slumps to the ground it takes him a moment to process what he’s seeing.
Blaine is standing there, the sleeves of his Dalton blazer rolled up over a bloodstained shirt. He is holding a shotgun.
Kurt, shaking all over, manages to take a few unsteady steps back from the corpse before he falls to his knees and retches. He’s ruining the knees of his pants, some part of him registers vaguely, but for once he doesn’t care.
(...)
“I don’t exist.”
Kurt laughs. “I do feel that way, sometimes. You’re too perfect to be real. I’m waiting for the day you cut your leg and I see all the wires.”
“No,” Blaine says, taking his hand. “I actually don’t exist.”
Kurt swallows, and it’s strange that, after everything he’s experienced here, this can still make his stomach lurch. “Are you breaking up with me?”
“I would never break up with you,” Blaine says. He presses a kiss to Kurt’s knuckles. “But I’m not real.”
“Stop saying that.”
“Come on. You go to Dalton, and the first guy you meet is handsome and friendly and charming and gay and ready to take you under his wing?”
“Well,” Kurt says, “someone thinks highly of himself.”
Blaine gives him such a pitying look that Kurt bristles; he’s not a puppy. “I’m not the one who made me so perfect.”
Which makes no sense at all.
X-Men: First Class
I watched this with
th_esaurus at the age of twenty-two and enjoyed it a lot more than I was expecting. I very rarely get into films in a fannish way, and this is the only film fandom I have that passes the 'at least ten thousand words across at least three fics' test. I've actually never written for X-Men on its own; the three fics I've written for it were all crossovers (with Misfits, Silent Hill and Pokémon).This film became a lot harder to rewatch after I realised that every scene ends with a terrible one-liner.
Favourite character: Charles Xavier. I think? It's entirely possible I tell myself Xavier is my favourite character just so I have a favourite character for every letter of the alphabet.
Favourite pairing: For X-Men: First Class, it's Charles/Erik. For X-Men in general, it's Rogue/Logan, which I still have to struggle not to write as 'Rogan/Logue'. Technically, I've never written either pairing, although I've come closer to writing Charles/Erik in the sense that I have actually written fanfiction about those characters.
Number of words written: 11,228.
Snippet: Oh, damn, I should have checked my old notebooks when I was at my parents' place over the weekend! I checked them for a couple of other fandoms, but I hadn't realised I don't have any unfinished X-Men fanfiction in electronic form. I think I had something where Charles had very unethically wiped Erik's memories to make sure they'd stay on the same side.
Uncharted
Jak and Daxter was one of the first videogame series I got fannishly into, so I was interested to check out what else Naughty Dog had done. One of my first purchases for the PS3 I received for my twenty-third birthday was an Uncharted/Uncharted 2 bundle. I was distressingly terrible at shooting and quickly gave up. But then Red Dead Redemption taught me to aim, and I came back to Uncharted after finishing it.
It's fortunate that I bought the first two games bundled. The first Uncharted never really clicked with me; I probably wouldn't have picked up the series again if I hadn't already owned the sequel. But I loved the second game.
Every main-series Uncharted game from the second onwards has a sequence where Nate is staggering around in a state of agony and/or delusion. Naughty Dog know what I like.
Favourite character: Elena Fisher! The first Uncharted character I fell in love with (I came to love Elena in the first game, Nate in the second and Sully in the third), and still my favourite. Smart, sharp-tongued, no-nonsense, well-fine-maybe-a-bit-of-nonsense. Kicked her kidnapper out of a helicopter once. My absolute favourite part of Uncharted 4 is the part where she mocks you while you play videogames. I would buy a full Elena Fisher Mocks Your Videogame Skills Simulator in a heartbeat.
Favourite pairing: Nate/Elena, absolutely no question. They've got such chemistry, they have fun together, and I love that we get to see Nate being vulnerable around her.
Number of words written: 16,195.
Snippet: I've never made any secret of my feelings about Sam Drake, who is the worst, but, weirdly, I do 'ship Sam/Sully. This snippet contains Uncharted 4 spoilers.
“You’re getting the guest bed,” Nate says. “One of the perks of being a senior citizen. I’ll make up the couch for Sam.”
Sully folds his arms. He doesn’t look impressed.
“What? Come on, it’s not like I said ‘old as balls’.”
“So you haven’t told Cassie yet?” Sully asks.
“That you’re old as balls?” Nate asks. “Hate to say it, but I think she might know.”
Okay, Sully’s looking pretty serious.
“Told her what?”
Sully drops his voice. “Nate, the wedding’s in two months. She’s gonna have to know sooner or later. I’m not dressing Sam up as Chloe.” There’s a pause. “Well, not right there in the church.”
“Wedding?” Nate echoes, and then, “Sam?”
“Christ, kid, what’s wrong with you? We told you about this last year. ‘Congratulations’? ‘Cassie’ll never forgive me if she doesn’t get to be bridesmaid’? Any of this ringing any wedding bells in your head?”
Nate stares at him. “Well, yeah, but that was a joke. You were joking.”
“Shit,” Sully mutters. “All right. I guess we’re having this conversation.”
Dangan Ronpa
At the age of twenty-three, I was sitting outside a pub in Ealing with a group of friends, and one of those friends said he'd been reading a fan translation of a Japanese murder mystery game. One of the characters, he said, was me. He showed me some pictures of Touko Fukawa.
He later sent me the link to the fan translation. I swiftly realised he'd been rather uncharitable in comparing me to Fukawa, but by that point I was already hooked. Teenagers! Thrown into a horrible situation! Making horrible decisions! Being overwhelmed by guilt!
This is my third-most-written fandom in terms of wordcount, following Assassin's Creed and Top Gear. I have written Dangan Ronpa fanfiction every year for six years in a row, which is highly unusual. Typically, I'll have a burst of writing activity in one fandom and then move on to the next, but somehow I keep coming back to this series. I've written for the original Danganronpa, Danganronpa 2, Danganronpa: Another Episode, Danganronpa 3 and Danganronpa V3, but 2 is my favourite in the series and the one I've written the most for.
This was the first fandom (to my knowledge) in which I got plagiarised! I wrote a time loop fic that got startlingly popular, and someone put it up on their fanfiction.net account. It was swiftly taken down.
(My other experience with plagiarism: someone took my Doki Doki Literature Club fic Memory Error and put it up on their Pastebin account. I was very puzzled when I discovered this. Pastebin doesn't seem like a practical plagiarism website! It doesn't have any sort of commenting system! Surely you want a way for people to praise you for your stolen fanfiction? It's still up there; I wouldn't really know how to go about getting it taken down. Fanfiction websites have rules against plagiarism, but I don't imagine Pastebin does.)
Favourite character: It's moved around a lot, but I think I've settled on Hajime Hinata as my favourite Dangan Ronpa character. He's just a normal kid, insecure and sarcastic, heart in the right place, thrown into a terrible, terrible situation. He feels very real to me. And that makes him the perfect protagonist for Danganronpa 2, because most of the characters in that cast are incredibly over-the-top, and Hinata is a great way to make things feel grounded.
Favourite pairing: Ooh, maybe Naegi/Ikusaba? But Hinata/Komaeda is extremely fucked up and alarming in a way that appeals to me enormously. I 'ship Hinata with everyone, really, but particularly Komaeda, Koizumi and Kuzuryuu. To be honest, I also 'ship Komaeda with everyone. And Shuichi (but especially with Kaito). I also really like Kaede/Rantaro. Look, I 'ship everything in Dangan Ronpa.
Number of words written: 64,899.
Snippet: For a while I was hoping to write a series of Hinata/Komaeda fics based on classic fluffy fanfiction clichés, but I only managed 'huddling for warmth'. This was going to be 'Komaeda nurses Hinata back to health'.
A vague rustling rouses Hinata from his half-sleep. He frowns without opening his eyes, trying to piece together his situation. It feels like someone’s torn up his memories and scattered the shreds in the wrong parts of his mind.
He was...
His frown deepens; he tries to raise a hand to his throat, but his arm feels strange and heavy and distant, somehow, as if it belongs to someone else. He was...
“Good morning, Hinata-kun.”
Hinata’s eyes jerk open.
He was being strangled.
Komaeda gives him a bright, kind smile, and sets a tray down beside the bed. Hinata has no idea what’s actually on the tray. He can’t really raise his head enough to look at it properly.
In any case, it’s hard to focus on anything but the long, bony fingers that were locked around his throat.
You tried to kill me, Hinata tries to say. He manages a “Y...” and a horrible, rusty scraping noise, and he has to stop because his throat feels like it’s closing up around the words.
Komaeda cocks his head, looking politely puzzled.
Again, Hinata tries to bring a hand to his throat, but... it’s not that he doesn’t have the strength to move his arm; it’s like he can’t remember how to move it. Like all he can do is think move, arm, move at it and hope it listens.
He’s completely helpless. Komaeda is going to murder him, and he can’t do a thing to stop it.
He tries again to look at the tray, but it’s hopeless. He’s not sure he wants to see what’s on it, anyway. His mind is screaming possibilities at him – ropes, whips, knives—
“Are you hungry?” Komaeda asks.
Is he...?
Komaeda lifts the tray into his line of vision. Rice balls and a canned drink.
It’s almost scarier than the torture implements would be. For a moment Hinata thought he understood what was going on with Komaeda at last. Komaeda had stopped screwing around, he’d decided to take the straightforward approach and just murder him. But no. Komaeda choked him into unconsciousness, and now he’s offering him rice balls. Hinata still has no idea what this guy is thinking.
Unless... unless this is still a murder attempt.
“Do you need me to feed you?” Komaeda asks.
Hinata manages a grunt that he’s fairly sure is able to convey definitely not. Okay. He can kind of communicate. Which is good, because he absolutely does not want this guy manually feeding him.
Komaeda frowns in concern. “You have to eat, Hinata-kun. Your classmates are going to want you at full strength for the next trial.”
The next trial?
“Did someone die?” Hinata asks, tensing up even more, if that’s possible. Somehow he’s actually able to get the words out, although it’s a painful effort to force them up through his throat. He tries to conjure up some saliva, swallows, twice. It’s agonising.
“Not yet,” Komaeda assures him. “Are you sure you don’t want any food? I did go to the effort of preparing it, you know.”
Not yet.
Hinata stares at the food. He’ll have a central role at the next trial, he’s pretty sure, but it won’t be as an investigator. “It’s poisoned,” he says, trying to open his mouth as little as possible when he speaks, just in case.
Komaeda actually looks shocked, as if this is a totally unfounded accusation. “It’s not poisoned, Hinata-kun! Why would you think that?”
He doesn’t have to answer that.
“I could eat it first,” Komaeda offers. “If you want me to prove that it’s safe.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Hinata says. Every word he says scrapes viciously through his throat. He has to pause, and breathe, and swallow again before he can finish the sentence. “But I wouldn’t put it past you to poison yourself just so you could get me.”
Although, now that he says it, he’s not sure if there’s a right way to take that.
Community
Having heard good things about Community, I checked it out at the age of twenty-three. I thought from osmosis that the show was The Nerdy Adventures of Troy and Abed; I was confused to discover that there were a bunch of other central characters! I knew there was a Britta somewhere, but I had no idea that Jeff, Annie, Shirley or Pierce existed.
I still think the first season of Community is the best series of television I've ever watched, which is impressive, given that it includes a character (Pierce) I don't like at all. Apparently he was not enough to dislodge it from that lofty place in my esteem!
Favourite character: Jeff. Soft-hearted self-interested sarcastic arsehole in love with six people, one of whom is himself. I love him.
Favourite pairing: JEFF/ANNIE. It's a controversial pairing, but, holy crap, that chemistry. I also love Jeff/himself and Jeff/the entire study group.
Number of words written: 11,341.
Snippet: I think Community is in the rare position of being a fandom where I finished every fic I ever started! That usually happens with fandoms where I've only ever written one fic, with no intention of writing any more (Doki Doki Literature Club, Final Fantasy VI and Jiggy McCue, for example). But with Community I've written four complete fics and absolutely nothing beyond that.