Trabia Garden

Previously on Old Fanfiction Book Club: Rachel and Danielle met my brothers two guys who are definitely not my brothers. It's not Joseph; it's Jedidia. And it's not Fred; it's Fred.

My original author's note on chapter seven: 'Nother chapter fer my loyal fans. I love you guys so much ^_^

Did I... did I have 'loyal fans'? At this point I'm pretty sure I'd received five reviews, and only one person had reviewed twice. (One person had just said 'DIE SPARKY! *whips out rubber bands and starts shootign them at the Pikachu*)

Also, I see you using 'fer' instead of 'for', twelve-year-old Riona, and I one hundred percent know you stole that from zarla.


( Rachel's Pokémon Journey, Chapter Seven, with annotations. )


My author's note on chapter eight is the worst of the entire fic.

Okay, okay, I admit it, I admit it. I've actually prewritten loads of chapters, up to chapter 15. I'm uploading at a rate of one or two chapters about once a day, but only if I get reviews. The reason I'm not uploading them all at once is because (wait for it) I take aaaaaaages to write a chapter (eternal writer's block) and so you would all just give up on my story. However, I've got SERIOUS writer's block now, so I'm giving out a plea to all you people to e-mail me characters which you would like to join my story. They don't have to be in Rachel's group either - they can be TR members, anthros, runaway Officer Jennies, Pokémon, rivals for other people in the group apart from Rachel and Danielle, you name it. So here's the form. E-mail it to mewofdarkness@hotmail.com

THAT'S RIGHT: I ASKED READERS TO SUBMIT THEIR OWN CHARACTERS. This fic contains just about every possible fanfiction sin.

The e-mail address is no longer valid, but I'm including it because LOOK AT THAT RIDICULOUS E-MAIL ADDRESS.

Name:
Age:
Who/What are you? (e.g. Pokémon (state species) TR member, Rachel's group):
Gender:
Personality:
History (optional):
Other Details (optional):

Your Pokémon (if any):
Species:
Nickname (optional):
Gender:
Level:
Personality:
History (optional)
Other Details (optional)

I love that I apparently needed to know the level. All the mentions of level in this fic are so awkward.

(include a separate form for each Pokémon and state any Pokémon you would like to catch further on, no legendaries!)

If you are in Rachel's group, include in your Pokémon form whether the Pokémon is in the PASS, Sparky's friend, or neutral.

And please remember that your character won't be appearing until chapter 16 or beyond - don't complain!

AND SO, finally, CHAPTER EIGHT!


( Rachel's Pokémon Journey, Chapter Eight, with annotations. )


In the next instalment of Old Fanfiction Book Club: plot at last! The long-awaited plot! Thank goodness; it's taken us far too long to reach - wait, what - wait, Riona, that's too much plot, what are you doi—

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.

( Waterloo Road unfinished snippet. Josh meets Chlo. )


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.

( Glee unfinished snippet. Kurt/Blaine, Glee/Silent Hill, 2010. )


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.

( Uncharted unfinished snippet. Sam/Sully, 2017. )


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'.

( Danganronpa 2 unfinished snippet. Hinata/Komaeda 'hurt/comfort'. )


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.

I've just hit a milestone birthday and I'm coming up on the fifteenth anniversary of my LJ's creation, so it might be interesting to look back at the many fandoms I've pranced through. I thought for each fandom I could name my favourite character and my favourite pairing, talk a bit about my experience with it and maybe dredge up a snippet of unfinished fanfiction.

I've written for about seventy fandoms, and going through every one of them would be a bit much, so I've limited this to my major fandoms, which I'm going to define as 'fandoms for which I have written at least ten thousand words across at least three fics'. This unfortunately leaves out Animorphs (which hugely influenced my writing style), Jak and Daxter (where I first formed real fandom friendships) and Life on Mars (which had a big impact on my fictional tastes), but I think it manages to catch most of the fandoms that have shaped me.

If you're curious, the breakdown:

- twelve videogame fandoms (I'm counting Pokémon as a videogame fandom)
- six television fandoms
- three real-person fandoms
- one film fandom


Pokémon

The fandom that introduced me to fanfiction! I used to get up enthusiastically to watch Pokémon before school, much like every other child in the nineties. My first online username was 'Mew'. I spent my early days on the Internet, when I was eleven or twelve, looking at all the billions of personal Pokémon websites there were at the time, and I came across a fic on one of them (the site was called 'Mewtwo's Dungeon', so of course I was never able to find it again amongst all the hundreds of Mewtwo's Dungeons). I don't remember any details, but I remember that it involved Mew and Mewtwo and I thought it was the most incredible thing I'd ever seen. A story! About Pokémon! Just sitting here on the Internet! I forced Joseph to read it and went ISN'T THIS AMAZING and he seemed rather less enthusiastic than I was. Then I discovered zarla's Neglected Pokémon Lovers Unite and was inspired to attempt a fic of my own.

Favourite character: I've always been more into the Pokémon themselves than the characters, but probably James of Team Rocket. My favourite Pokémon is, of course, the best Pokémon, Bulbasaur. I didn't have a plan for which starter I'd choose when I first started up Pokémon Red, but the little Bulbasaur sprite was just so cute.
Favourite pairing: Again, this isn't what I'm into Pokémon for, but I've always had a sneaking fondness for Ash/Gary.
Number of words written: 51,804. Mainly crossovers. The first fic I seriously wrote was an unfinished, rambling multichaptered Pokémon journey fic about OCs (mine, which were transparently based on family and friends, and those of others; I asked people to submit their own characters, which on reflection seems a bit bizarre), but since then I've only written about Pokémon in crossover form.

Snippet: I'm actually struggling to find an unfinished Pokémon snippet! I've got a snippet of Finn and Puck from Glee training Pokémon, but those characters have far too many weird, sad, horrible associations surrounding them now. So instead here's a small Full Moon wo Sagashite/Pokémon snippet, based entirely on the fact that Negi Ramen have a Team Rocket-esque motto. (I originally outlined the idea for this fic over here. This is all I ever wrote of it, alas.)

( Pokémon unfinished snippet. Full Moon wo Sagashite/Pokémon, 2013. )


Final Fantasy VIII

First played at the age of thirteen. Probably the single work of fiction that's most important to me. It helped bewildered, isolated teenage Riona to understand other people. It also introduced me to some online friends I've now known for half my life (hi, thebaconfat, squeemu, kadrin, magistrate!), and they introduced me to Livejournal, so I probably wouldn't have met most of you without it. And one of the people I met through Livejournal was th_esaurus, who's now a close real-life friend of mine and with whom I lived for several years, so it was a genuinely life-changing moment when the GAME employee accidentally sold me Final Fantasy VIII instead of Final Fantasy VII.

Favourite character: Squall Leonhart means a lot to me. I'd never identified with a character before! People were an incomprehensible mystery to thirteen-year-old me, but I could understand Squall's thought processes, which gave me a foothold in starting to understand other people. (If you're curious, my use of his surname in 'rionaleonhart' was born of my similarity to Squall Leonhart; it never crossed my mind that it could suggest I wanted to be married to Squall Leonhart.)
Favourite pairing: Squall/Zell was the first pairing I really 'shipped and the first one I wrote fanfiction for, and I still look back on it fondly. It was hard to find Squall/Zell fanfiction that didn't bash Rinoa, though!
Number of words written: 31,201. This includes With These Signs Upon Our Souls, the longest continuous story I've ever written.

Snippet: Final Fantasy VIII/Final Fantasy X, Squall is Yuna's guardian.

( Final Fantasy VIII unfinished snippet. FFVIII/FFX. )


Final Fantasy X series

First played X at the age of thirteen, X-2 at the age of fifteen. I wasn't sure whether to count this; neither Final Fantasy X nor Final Fantasy X-2 qualifies if I consider them alone. But I suppose they're technically part of the same fandom. I don't know why I'm so bad at thinking of these two games as taking place in the same universe.

...I was going to say 'it's strange that I only wrote one fic for Final Fantasy X itself when I loved the game so much,' and then I realised I'd blocked my self-insert fic out of my mind. Whoops.

Favourite character: Yuna! Yuna, in all her stubborn, playful, self-sacrificing determination.
Favourite pairing: Auron/Jecht/Braska, probably. (I realise this is not technically a 'pairing'.) But the pairing I wrote the most for was Gippal/Baralai. I had a lot of fun with it, but, looking back, I'm not sure how I got into that pairing! I barely remember any of their canonical interactions. Maybe I read other people's Gippal/Baralai fics and enjoyed them?
Number of words written: 14,061.

Snippet: More of the FFVIII/FFX crossover from above.

( Final Fantasy X unfinished snippet. FFVIII/FFX. )


Silent Hill

The town called to me when I was sixteen, and I developed a weird obsession with Silent Hill 2 without having played it; I was reading the game script, I was reading symbolism analysis, I was reading fanfiction. I was extremely bad with horror, but eventually I gave in and bought a copy. It messed up my fictional tastes permanently.

Favourite character: James Sunderland! What a formative character. He's an awful selfish delusional guilt-ridden mess and I love him. I once signed up to write a hundred fics about him, although sadly I only managed forty-nine. (Surprisingly, my other fanfic100 claim, Macbeth from the BBC's ShakespeaRe-Told adaptation, didn't make it to 10,000 words and therefore doesn't qualify for this exercise, even though I wrote forty-one fics.)
Favourite pairing: James/Mary. An awful doomed trainwreck of a pairing and, again, pretty formative. My most-written pairing in terms of number of fics, although most of my Silent Hill 2 fics are very short.
Number of words written: 52,547. This is another fandom I've written a lot of crossovers for, although I've written more non-crossover fanfiction for Silent Hill 2 than I have for Pokémon.

Snippet: The Mentalist/Silent Hill, Patrick Jane visits the town.

( Silent Hill unfinished snippet. The Mentalist/Silent Hill, circa 2009. )


Doctor Who

I'd written a fic here and there for Red Dwarf and Friends (my Red Dwarf fics are the only fics I've ever written that have been permanently lost), but this is the first live-action fandom I wrote a substantial amount for. I got into Doctor Who when I was sixteen, with the Ninth Doctor's run; my parents were watching 'Aliens of London', and I happened to be in the room, and I was fascinated by the opening, where Rose discovers she's been missing for a year. Apparently the subsequent 'farting aliens' storyline was not enough to put me off.

Favourite character: Donna Noble. Stubborn and outspoken and good-hearted and fun. This is a slightly weird case where, although I've written a fair bit of Doctor Who fanfiction, I've never written my favourite character; Donna came along when I was past my writing phase for it.
Favourite pairing: The Doctor/Rose Tyler; I don't think I'd ever 'shipped anything so intensely before. Very specifically the Ninth Doctor; the dynamic between Rose and the Tenth Doctor didn't work for me at all. I also love Doctor/Jack/Rose.
Number of words written: 42,543. This is another fandom I've crossed over a lot. For some reason I'm particularly drawn to crossing it over with Silent Hill.

Snippet: Some sort of weird antagonistic Jack/Ten fic? I don't remember the idea behind this at all. Why were you flipping wildly back and forth between using and avoiding contractions in the narrative, seventeen-year-old Riona?

( Doctor Who unfinished snippet. Jack/Tenth Doctor, late 2005/early 2006. )


I thought this exercise might freak me out about time passing, but actually I'm enjoying it! It's reminding me of the fun I've had in all these fandoms.

Five down; seventeen to go. I might need to visit my parents' place and hunt down some old notebooks for some of these. I've definitely got some unfinished Scrubs fanfiction somewhere, but it's not on my laptop!

Riku is so in love with Sora. He's so in love. I just can't get over it. Why was my terrible Kingdom Hearts fic when I was fourteen about Sora being in unrequited love with Riku? I was a fool.

(In my defence, Dream Drop Distance had not come out when I was fourteen.)

He can never let go of the things he did in his past, but Sora is able to make him feel like he's worth something. Rikuuuuu.

I found myself thinking 'they're such a wonderful duo' earlier, and then it struck me that that was an odd thing to think, because they're not supposed to be a duo; they're supposed to be two points of a trio. In my defence, I'm not the only person to have forgotten that; so, I'm fairly certain, have the creators of Kingdom Hearts.

Poor Kairi. The way the series has handled her has been such a mess. Half the Kingdom Hearts games seem to forget she exists entirely, and the others occasionally go 'OH, YEAH, KAIRI, SHE'S REALLY IMPORTANT, WE SWEAR, now back to the characters the writers actually care about.' They've poured so much time and effort into building an intense relationship between Sora and Riku, but they've forgotten that this is supposed to be a trio!

It's as if Harry Potter kept going, 'Harry, Ron and Hermione are a trio! Harry's relationship with Hermione is SO IMPORTANT.' But Ron's relationship with Hermione is barely mentioned, and Hermione never goes on their adventures because she's busy doing homework in the common room, and there are three books in a row in which Hermione's name only appears twice.

No matter what they do with Kairi in Kingdom Hearts III, it's going to feel weird. If they continue to neglect her, we'll go 'but she's supposed to be an important character! How did you forget about her so entirely?' But, if she's suddenly prominent and there's a lot about her relationship with Sora and Riku, it'll feel odd because there's such an imbalance leading up to it; there's so much development of the Sora/Riku relationship, a few nods to the Sora/Kairi one and barely anything on the Riku/Kairi front.

We've seen so little of the Riku/Kairi relationship, in fact, that when I think 'what's their relationship?' the first thing that comes to mind is that scene, early in the first game, where Kairi goes, 'Hey, Sora, let's sail away and leave Riku here.' That's not what you want people to remember when you're telling a story about the power of friendship! There are a couple of nice moments between the three of them in Kingdom Hearts II, but even in that game, which is probably the best in the series for the Sora/Riku/Kairi relationship, Sora and Riku fight the final boss without Kairi and then have a 'hey, might as well live alone together in the void forever' moment.

The Kingdom Hearts series has built such an intense bond between Sora and Riku that giving Kairi the prominence in their relationship that she should have had from the beginning risks making her feel like an intruder. It might work if they have the trio acknowledge they haven't been spending enough time together, and we see them making an effort to push through any awkwardness in that and rebuild their relationship. I doubt they will, but it's a thought.

If they go 'well, we've been neglecting Sora and Kairi's relationship, but SORA/KAIRI IS CANON NOW, WE DON'T NEED TO PUT ANY EFFORT INTO THIS, THEY'RE OPPOSITE-GENDER CHILDHOOD FRIENDS, WHAT MORE DO YOU NEED,' I shall be very unhappy.

How much of this is genuine storytelling concern, and how much is fourteen-year-old me fighting her way to the surface, going 'RIKU/SORA OTP >:( NO KAIRI ALLOWED'? Troubling. Kingdom Hearts does feel like it forms a bridge between my current self and my past self, in a way; it's a work of fiction I've followed since my early teens, and it's still putting out new content with the same characters I fell in love with all those years ago.

There's definitely room for Kairi in my heart, if they're prepared to give her the screentime she deserves at last! That shot in the opening of Kingdom Hearts II where Sora, Riku and Kairi are all lying on the beach, holding hands, is one of my favourite moments in the entire series. I'm still really hoping for a Kingdom Hearts III world in which Riku and Kairi are your battle companions.

(I keep thinking 'at some point I'm going to run out of Linkin Park lyrics to use as entry titles' and then realising I have something eerily suited. 'Drop me down to the dream below'? I never realised that 'Castle of Glass' was written about Dream Drop Distance.)

alwaysbeenasmiler asked this question, and I thought it was interesting, so I've stolen it to ask here: who was your first favourite fictional character? Who was the first character you really loved? Is there a story behind that love?

I won't go into too much detail because I've talked about this before, but Squall Leonhart of Final Fantasy VIII was the first character I really connected with. I was an insular, awkward, confused thirteen-year-old, bad at interaction, bad at reading people, and suddenly I found I wasn't alone in any of that; here was a guy who was just like me, only he had a cool gun-sword and fought dinosaurs. I was so excited.

It's a good thing I loved Squall so much, because I was terrible at playing Final Fantasy VIII, and he was the reason I happily persevered with it.

Unsurprisingly, I hate the popular theory that Squall died at the end of Disc 1 and the other three discs were ~just a dream~. It's not interesting; it just makes most of the game feel like a waste of time! Also, Squall is my favourite, so he's alive. Solid reasoning, I think you'll find.

My preferred answer to the question 'why does Squall wake up without a wound after being impaled?' is 'Seifer begs Edea to save him. NOT THAT SEIFER CARES OR ANYTHING. Obviously he just wants Squall to live so they can interrogate him. Obviously. Edea is so amused by this that she heals Squall.'


I'd forgotten how messed up the Second Hand of Time arc in DN Angel is. A young woman is reunited at last with her lost love! Her lost love is a sword that romantically impales her through the chest. DN Angel, you seemed to be a romantic comedy when you started out.

I always resented the fact that the Second Hand of Time arc went 'oh, it's a school play! Satoshi and Daisuke have been cast as the romantic leads! Oh, no, wait: we've set up this classic slashfic premise, but now Daisuke's out of action and Dark has to pretend to be him, so you don't actually get Satoshi and Daisuke acting out romantic scenes together.' But, on this reread, I will concede that Satoshi and Dark trying to get through a romantic scene when they loathe each other is pretty hilarious.

(Speaking of classic slashfic premises: the manga is better than the anime in many ways, but the anime does has an episode where Satoshi and Daisuke are locked in a freezer and have to huddle for warmth.)


It's only just occurred to me that we say dial to mean 'enter a person's number on a telephone' because of the dial on rotary phones. What an odd linguistic fossil.

I seem to have fallen very suddenly and sharply back in love with Final Fantasy VIII. The plot may be completely incoherent, the love story may be awkwardly told, but oh, that cast. Particularly Squall, who I think may actually be my favourite Final Fantasy character of all. Probably one of my top ten fictional characters of all time, in fact.

I think Squall was the first character I really fell for. Before, I'd fallen in love with concepts and worlds: I loved Pokémon and Animorphs and Harry Potter, but I didn't really love any of them for their characters. And then along came Squall Leonhart, the first character with whom my thirteen-year-old self really identified and empathised, and I discovered that the best thing about fiction could be the characters populating it. Rather an appropriate lesson to take from a game in which the main character slowly learns to care about the people around him.

I blew the dust off my PS2 today and started up my most recent VIII save, which I'd left off... probably about three years ago, actually. It was just before the clash between Balamb and Galbadia Gardens. I felt bizarrely proud as I watched Squall running around, giving instructions, keeping the situation under control, and as I saw the respect that his fellow students obviously had for him. And then Dr Kadowaki told him, 'You probably don't know, but everyone in Garden looks up to you. They like you', which... really hit home, for some reason. I've always had a hard time believing people like me.

That and Squall's later (Everyone is trying to get us together. It's so obvious even I can tell) - he's both completely oblivious in the field of human interaction and uncomfortably aware that he's oblivious - made me realise Squall is still the single fictional character I most identify with, although I'm considerably more socially competent than I was when I first encountered him. I'm very glad he was created, because otherwise the title of 'single fictional character with whom I most identify' would probably be held by Mark Corrigan of Peep Show. Nobody wants that.

(I even still use his surname online!)

Possibly because of said massive overidentification with Squall, Irvine managed to tick me off. Galbadia Garden is attacking from all sides! Soldiers are coming through the windows of the room in which the junior classmen are hiding! It's an overwhelming situation, and Zell tells Squall that Rinoa is in trouble, and Squall points out that she's not the only one, which is true - he's going to have to make a decision here - and Irvine calls him heartless. GOSH, IRVINE, SORRY SQUALL CAN'T SPLIT HIMSELF IN TWO AND SAVE RINOA AND THE CHILDREN SIMULTANEOUSLY. YOU'RE THE ONE WHO BASICALLY JUST LEFT HER DANGLING THERE SO YOU COULD GO TO SQUALL AND SAY 'ONLY YOU CAN SAVE HER SQUALL!!' AS PART OF SOME BIZARRE MATCHMAKING SCHEME.

This is probably just lingering resentment from when I was thirteen. The first time I played the game, I took against Irvine for no particular reason. I think it was just because I'd become attached to all the characters already and he was the last to join the party by some way. Who is this new guy trying to muscle in on my perfect party? I thought indignantly. Although what I actually thought was Who is this new girl trying to muscle in on my perfect party?, because it took me some time after Irvine's first appearance to realise he wasn't a woman. (Wouldn't that be a great design for a female character, though?) His exaggerated confidence and womanising also didn't sit well with me at first. We're friends now, but he still annoys me at times. Like when he calls Squall heartless for not immediately going 'SCREW THE KIDS, THEY CAN DIE' when presented with a difficult decision.

All that said, I suppose I can't really expect Irvine to be rational and compassionate when his friend is in danger, so perhaps I'm being just as unfair to him as he was being to Squall. Sorry, Irvine. I'm just hurt that you called me heartless by proxy.

Of course, Rinoa has the most incredible upper body strength, so there was no need to worry. Perhaps that's why Rinoa's natural Strength stat is higher by far than everyone else's: it's to explain how she managed to cling onto the side of Garden whilst Squall saved the junior classmen, gave a rousing speech and had a fistfight whilst dangling from a jetpack.

This game is ridiculous. I love it.

Anne McCaffrey may have said some weird things in interviews, and her books may have included some weird implications (we have very different ideas about how much sexual assault a hero can commit before he starts to look rather less heroic), but she was the first woman to win a Hugo or a Nebula or to get a science-fiction book onto the New York Times bestseller list and, on a smaller-scale note of influence, I really loved the Pern series in my early teens.

I - I think I may have been involved on a Pern roleplaying guild on Neopets once? With a brown dragon named Zephyrith (no relation to the name 'Sephiroth'; this was before I discovered Final Fantasy) or something, despite the fact that women can't Impress browns because look I'm special okay. McCaffrey wouldn't have liked that, of course - she was opposed to fanfiction of her books - but it was nonetheless an act of love for her world. (Oh, hang on, I've just searched and found that she did eventually relax her stance on fanfiction. My inner twelve-year-old is suddenly itching to write reams of Mary Sue; my outer twenty-something-year-old wants dragonrider crossover AUs everywhere forever.)

(EDIT: On further reflection, I think Zephyrith may have been a green! But I think I had a special brown dragon in a different Pern roleplay I was briefly involved in.)

Curious fact: the (male) Tai in An Exercise in Pointlessness, my 2004 NaNo effort, was indirectly named after the (female) Tai from The Skies of Pern. In my first Final Fantasy VIII playthrough, I named both Squall and Rinoa after female dragonriders from the Pern series: Rinoa was Lessa, and Squall was TAI (I'd never played a Final Fantasy game before and at that stage hadn't realised that, if I named him in allcaps, EVERYONE WOULD BE SHOUTING AT SQUALL ALL THE TIME). 'Lessa' never stuck, but I recycled 'Tai' as a name for various original characters before it found a permanent home in my NaNo Tai.

What I'm trying to say is that I'm sorry to hear McCaffrey has died. Maybe I should pick up my Pern books again.


Have some quick thoughts on television:

Misfits, episode 3.04: It's a little strange to watch Misfits when I also love so much television of questionable quality, because Misfits really is excellently written (although Simon and Alisha seem to have become slightly less interesting to me now that they are no longer such a massive failure at humanity and terrible person respectively). Kelly is still my favourite, and I find myself unexpectedly 'shipping her and Power Dealer Guy to tiny adorable pieces. I'm a little worried about the possible fate of their dynamic, though, because Misfits is an extremely hostile environment for adorability.

Glee, episode 3.06: I did have a few tears in my eyes towards the end. Santana's storyline is my favourite on Glee at the moment and I want her to take the lead on more songs. I have listened to the Adele mashup approximately a squillion times.

Waterloo Road, episode 7.20: oh my God Linda Radleigh what is wrong with you

Thank you so much for the birthday wishes! You are all so lovely. ♥! I've now been plunged back into the tremendously stressful world of housemate-hunting, but the day itself really was wonderful.


Still in the process of posting my old fanfiction to riona_archivic; I'm around the end of 2005 now, and have stumbled across the first instance of my becoming far too involved in something that had literally no fandom, something I was to do many times in the future.

In late 2005, in a fit of madness, I wrote about forty (admittedly very short) works of fanfiction for a modern adaptation of Macbeth, set in a restaurant. This adaptation was produced by the BBC as part of their ShakespeaRe-Told series; it starred James McAvoy and Keeley Hawes (I was amazed to discover this on looking back at it, as at the time I'd never heard of her), and the prophecy came from supernatural binmen. Few people watched it, even fewer talked about it, and certainly nobody was writing ridiculous amounts of Macbeth/Banquo fanfiction. Except me.

Out of nostalgic curiosity, I just checked YouTube to find out whether the scene that made me feel the need to write ridiculous amounts of Macbeth/Banquo fanfiction had been uploaded.

Here it is. It's at 8m35s; the link should lead directly to that time on the video.

It is even gayer than I remembered, and I remembered that scene being really, really gay. Torchwood has nothing on this. (Banquo, I should note, in case earlier parts of this entry have caused any confusion, is not played by Keeley Hawes.)


The realisation that Keeley Hawes was in this adaptation is making some part of my mind wonder whether an Ashes to Ashes/Macbeth crossover could work. The answer: almost certainly not. Definitely not with Alex Drake in the role of Lady Macbeth, as killing Duncan wouldn't even have occurred to her. MACBETH: THE TALE OF A MAN WHO WAS TOLD HE WOULD BE KING AND THEN DIDN'T REALLY DO ANYTHING.

Perhaps Gene and the team try to solve the mysterious murders of Duncan and Banquo? NO NO NO THIS IS STILL A TERRIBLE IDEA.

Speaking of stupid Shakespearean crossovers, though, I'd love to see a production of Othello in which Iago is played by the parrot of the same name from Disney's Aladdin.

I don't post about it much nowadays, but I still love Top Gear so much. It is a beautiful, brilliant series about three charmingly useless friends who go out and have adventures. It's tense (that part where Jeremy was trying to get around the other car on the Road of Death, augh), it's touching, it's hilarious, it is generally wonderful. The full-episode specials wouldn't look out-of-place in a cinema. I wish full-series DVDs were available; I really can't understand why they aren't.

I miss writing for it, actually. I haven't written Top Gear fanfiction for about two years, but the trio really were a delight to write for. I just don't know whether I'd be able to fall back into their voices after such a long period away from them. Also, very few of those of you I first met in the Top Gear fandom are still active there; it is now full of strangers, which is a bit scary. I do occasionally yearn for the days when the Top Gear fandom was ridiculously close-knit and we all met up to be dorks in West London.

Jeremy Clarkson is one of my favourite characters ever. He is such fun to write and watch! He is an amazing, ridiculous lunatic who will strap an enormous engine to a pickup truck and drive it across the English Channel, who is incapable of venturing near anything remotely flammable without somehow setting it alight, and the fact that he is a real person (even if he is putting on a bit of a persona) just makes it so much better.

(And more terrifying, admittedly.)

With particular reference to yesterday's Bolivia specia: my goodness, that trio are dedicated. I am awed. The number of times they nearly got themselves killed in the name of making good television: ridiculous. The oxygen-deprivation and parts of the Road of Death were actually painful to watch.


More musing on Shadow of the Colossus: how many videogames are there in which the fact that the hero becomes stronger with every enemy he kills is a plot point?

I love it when videogame stories do things that wouldn't work in any other medium.

I really need to stop playing Shadow of the Colossus, though. It's not good for me. I'm trying to get the Time Attack items at the moment, but killing the colossi is more harrowing every time I attempt it. The fight with the thirteenth is my favourite, in terms of both visuals and gameplay, but my enjoyment is somewhat hampered by the fact that it is also the fight that makes me feel most guilty. It is so pretty and graceful and doesn't even try to attack you! Shadow of the Colossus is making me hate myself.

It's actually making me feel guilty for my actions in other games as well. In videogames, I am used to 'Here are your enemies; they are evil, or at best mindlessly vicious. Kill them to save the world.' In Shadow of the Colossus, it's more 'Here are your enemies; they are unique and beautiful and, given the emptiness of this land, probably not hurting anyone. Some of them don't even want to attack you. Kill them for, essentially, personal gain.' And now I am questioning my true motives in other games. I WASN'T KILLING ALL THOSE SOLDIERS IN FINAL FANTASY XII TO SAVE THE WORLD; I JUST WANTED THE ITEMS FROM CHAINING.


Last night, I half-watched quite a lot of Peep Show, then fell asleep and dreamt that Mark and Jeremy (Usborne, not Clarkson) were snogging on a bed whilst Mark internally freaked out.

Not that I am complaining about such a dream, but now I have a bizarre urge to write Mark/Jeremy fanfiction. This is a bad idea for many reasons. My writing and Peep Show have entirely incompatible styles of humour! I'm not sure Peep Show even has a fandom!

IT IS TIME TO SHARE EMBARRASSING OLD FANFICTION. I shall start us off by quoting a few paragraphs from the Final Fantasy X self-insertion I wrote a few chapters of between the ages of thirteen and fourteen. Please join in by sharing your own shame-inducing fanfiction in the comments, because otherwise I'm just going to hide in a corner for ever.

THE STORY SO FAR: Riona, who has an embarrassingly large crush on Tidus (ACTUAL QUOTE: She hit the ‘New Game’ button, and watched as the opening scene played out. She grinned to herself at the close-up of Tidus on the cliff. Wow, he was a bishounen (bolding of appalling fangirl Japanese-use mine)), has just woken up in Zanarkand at the beginning of Final Fantasy X, having been ~mysteriously transported~ into the game. Her reaction to this is essentially 'I've been sucked into the videogame I was playing? How peculiar. OH MAN I'D BETTER WARN DREAMY TIDUS ABOUT SIN.' (Come to think of it, I never did learn to write realistic reactions to clearly absurd events. But I like to think I'm at least a little better than 'Huh, I'm in Zanarkand. Wonder how that happened. Well, as I'm here, better go and warn a fictional character about the upcoming fictional disaster.')

Below the cut, you may see Riona's exceedingly smooth attempt at telling Tidus what is about to happen. I have made no changes to it, much though I'd like to.

( In Which Riona Makes A Fool Of Herself. And Overuses Ellipses. And 'Almost Melts', Apparently. )

SMOOTH. What worries me is that I can actually see myself behaving like this today.

(This is by no means the worst thing in my fanfiction folder - it's not even the worst part of this fic; later on you'll find the line 'Agony beyond anything I have ever felt!' used completely seriously, exclamation mark and all - but it's the worst I can actually bring myself to show you. WHY THE CRUSH ON TIDUS, SERIOUSLY.)