Trabia Garden

Goodness, you're all being very quiet. A new series of Doctor Who, and there are only three reaction posts on my flist? What parallel universe have I fallen into?


( Reaction to the first episode of the new series of Doctor Who, 'The Impossible Astronaut'. )


I am pretty excited about this series! Let's see what happens.

Here is a highly disjointed entry of bullet points!


- @DerrenBrown: Wow. A really important message in our day and age. PLEASE take a second to watch. link

Derren Brown, my respect for you has just increased tenfold.


- (Talking to my housemate about a chap I'd met once. What I was trying to say was 'I thought he was quite good-looking, but I wasn't attracted to him'.)
Riona: I thought he was quite looking, but -
Riona's Housemate: You thought he was looking?
Riona: I thought he was looking. I thought 'that's a man who definitely has a face'.


- I found it difficult to concentrate on the Supernatural episode 'The Third Man', because I was distracted by how much Balthazar looked like Gordon Ramsay.


- Turning on CAPTCHA, it seems, hasn't dissuaded the spambots; I've just started getting some really weird spam (of which my favourite is possibly 'I found your blog via Google while searching for first aid for a heart attack and your post looks very interesting for me'; it rather sounds as if you might have better things to do than read my entries on Peep Show). I hope it remains manageable, because I really don't want to turn off anonymous commenting (anonymenting?) altogether.


- WATERLOO ROAD IS BACK AND I STILL LOVE IT EVEN THOUGH EVERYONE IN IT IS AN IDIOT. I particularly enjoy the fact that they introduced Timmy and then didn't really use him in the plot at all; they obviously just wanted to include a long montage in which Josh and Finn fail to make the world's friendliest dog attack a teddy bear. I'm all in favour of that. Also, there was a bit in the 'next episode' trailer that made me bounce up and down in excitement. SEXUAL TENSION. JOSH STEVENSON. IT'S ALWAYS GOING TO BE A WINNING COMBINATION.

(Apparently, Troublesome New Pupil is played by George Sampson, that adorable kid who won Britain's Got Talent a couple of years ago with his 'Singing in the Rain' dance. I find this hilarious.)

Okay, I officially have far too many half-finished fics lying around. I'm going to go through my 'Unfinished Fanfiction' folder and list what I have in there, so I can see at a glance what's on the to-write pile. If anything catches your fancy, feel free to ask about it or just verbally kick me until it's finished. Listed in descending order of present wordcount.


( The present contents of my 'Unfinished Fanfiction' folder. )


It seems I have fiction on the go for about twenty different fandoms. I think this is a sign that I officially have too many fandoms.

(Regarding the Peep Show/Harry Potter AU: I know I once said it was impossible to write Peep Show fanfiction with a pre-adulthood Mark Corrigan, but I have since changed my stance. Writing Peep Show fanfiction in which the principal characters are eleven really makes no difference to their personalities whatsoever, in the case of one because he was essentially born thirty and in the case of the other because he retains the mentality of an eleven-year-old for the next twenty-five years.)

What I've realised about my writing habits recently - and this is the reason behind a couple of the 'unlikely to be finished' notes - is that I find it easiest to motivate myself to write if I feel I'm writing something nobody will have done before. It's why I'm able to write canon-compliant stories for Peep Show, whilst my Kurt/Blaine fics for Glee are always bizarre AUs: there's barely any fanfiction for the former, so anything I write will be new, whereas with Kurt/Blaine, a popular pairing in a popular fandom, it's difficult to find a concept that hasn't already been written.

...also, er, this isn't in my Unfinished Fanfiction folder, but I just came across it in my notebook:

"Gotter Rattata," William said, proudly. "An' Henry's got a Weedle an' Douglas's got a Spearow an' Ginger's not got anythin' yet, so we're catchin' somethin' for him now."

Why - why did I start writing a Just William/Pokémon crossover?

GUYS. I WON A FIC AWARD.




Judges' Comments: Lovely, funny, smart. The writing is phenomenal and you can only laugh and be happy with this imaginative tale.

This has never happened to me before! I am smiling an embarrassing amount. Thank you, wicked_awards judges and mysterious nominator! (And particular thanks to angelus2hot for making the banner, including, to my infinite delight, a manip of Sam Winchester with his unicorn brother.)

Oh, I do sort of miss writing crack for the Supernatural fandom. (I never wrote a Pokémon crossover, did I? What a shocking oversight.) Perhaps I'll return to it at some point.

For now, though, I need to finish this Josh/Finn fic, because the Supernatural fandom has no shortage of crackfic but the Waterloo Road fandom has literally none of this pairing. JOSH KISSED FINN IN CANON AND THEN SPENT AN EPISODE CRYING OVER HIS SEXUAL CONFUSION AND THERE IS STILL NO FANFICTION. THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR THIS STATE OF AFFAIRS. With any luck, though, I may be able to remedy this within the next couple of days!


To prevent myself from becoming too smug, here is a tale of my being A Bit Thick: recently, I was trying to remember which popular soap opera was set in the East End. What was it? It couldn't be Emmerdale; that looked a bit too rural, from what glimpses I'd caught of it. Was it Coronation Street?

And then I realised that it was EastEnders.

This is like the time I exclaimed, with genuine surprise, 'Oh, is Piccadilly Circus on the Piccadilly line?' Apparently I am incapable of taking hints from a name.

I said in my last entry that Finn of Waterloo Road was dead inside, but of course that's not strictly true, because he craves love. He's been deprived of love in the past, and so he's obsessed with making the people who care about him prove that they love him. If he sets up flaming hoops and you refuse to jump through them for him, he assumes that you're a fraud. If you really love him, why won't you perform a huge, dangerous symbolic gesture? Any failure to do exactly what he wants is a betrayal in his eyes, proof that he was an idiot to think you cared. He is an incredibly tragic character. But, Finn, that's no excuse for being a massive git.

I still want the fic in which Finn and Josh do get into a relationship and it leaves Josh completely broken down and miserable. And then Tom comes to his rescue and SURPRISE, IT WASN'T ACTUALLY ABOUT THE SLASH, THIS IS A FIC ABOUT JOSH'S RELATIONSHIP WITH HIS FATHER. And then they freaking hug.

(I do feel that Josh's storyline in Waterloo Road could eventually come down to a choice between his malinfluential* friendship with Finn and his relationship with his dad. I hope that doesn't happen. I don't want to lose either relationship, but if he chooses Finn over Tom I shall cry until my ankles are damp.)

* I don't think this is technically a word, but I think there's a space in the English language for an adjective meaning 'badly influencing', so let's make it a word.


I've now seen the first episode of the second series, and I just have to say:

'Brian Nolan? Janet Seymour? And Chlo Grainger.'

What sort of register order is that? In my entire educational experience, it's been 'alphabetical order by surname', not 'the most plot-significant name is read out last, damn the alphabet'.

Also, if you show a character apparently committing suicide and then have her show up perfectly well, some part of my mind is going to be convinced that she's a ghost. Waterloo Road, you are a school-based drama that attempts to be at least fairly realistic. You're not Supernatural. (She's a really cute, heartbreaking ghost, though. I hope she doesn't turn into a vengeful spirit. Finn, being a bit of a Dean Winchestery figure in some ways, might be able to handle her, but he doesn't show up for another three series, and I think he'd be around eleven years old at this point in the timeline, which is perhaps a touch too young to be fighting the paranormal.)

Watching the present series of Waterloo Road alongside the early series is quite a weird experience, because I love Current Tom, whereas Early Tom needs to be whacked over the head with a hardback copy of Lord of the Rings. I'm quite interested in seeing how his character makes the transition from 'selfish, cowardly git' to 'someone who may not always get things right, but tries so hard to'.

Here is the second half of the alphabet ficsnippet meme! A reminder of the concept: the first snippet contains one character whose name (first name, surname or nickname) begins with A and one whose name begins with B, the second a B and a C, the third a C and a D and so on until Z and A. In this half I've cheated a bit by reusing characters.

Fandoms represented beneath the cut are Doctor Who, The Odyssey, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Phineas and Ferb, Silent Hill 2, Final Fantasy VIII, Final Fantasy IX, Final Fantasy X, Supernatural, Sherlock (BBC), Sherlock Holmes (Conan Doyle), Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Little Mermaid, The Mentalist, Harry Potter, Kingdom Hearts II, Pokémon and, of all things, the Just William books by Richmal Crompton.


( Alphabet ficsnippets, M to Z )

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.)

Oh, my goodness, who renewed my Paid time? Thank you so much! I was just resigning myself to being without comment-editing and polls and userpics and protection from advertising, and all of a sudden: unexpected anonymous loveliness! Amazing!

I'd love to do something for you, anonymous benefactor, but of course I don't know who you are and so I don't know what would interest you. I HOPE YOU LIKE SNIPPETS OF UNFINISHED FANFICTION, BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT YOU'RE APPARENTLY GETTING. (Obviously these are for all of you, not just my anonymous benefactor.)


( Doctor Who/Final Fantasy XII: Jack Harkness introduces Balthier and Fran to the Doctor. )


( Kingdom Hearts II: Hayner and Seifer meet Leon in Hollow Bastion. )


( The Mentalist: Jane and Cho have fairly unsuccessful phonesex. )


( Derren Brown/Doctor Who/Supernatural: Derren and the Doctor, post-restless-spirit encounter. )


( Derren Brown/Supernatural: Castiel and Dean discuss Derren-the-angel. )


( Peep Show/Silent Hill: Mark goes to Silent Hill and Jeremy follows him. )


( Charlie Brooker/David Mitchell: awkward steps towards a relationship. )


( Merlin: Merlin and Gwen swap bodies. )


Some of these may eventually be finished! Some of them, alas, probably won't be. In any case, I hope you've enjoyed the snippets.

All right: the fic in which Charlie Brooker and David Mitchell find themselves thrown together in the midst of a zombie invasion definitely needs to exist. I say this largely because petrol has introduced me to the mental image of Brooker fighting zombies with a baseball bat, bloodied and sweat-soaked and exhausted, and, for reasons I'd prefer not to examine too closely, it is incredibly hot.


Anyway, more character-number questions! The first instalment is here. Represented are Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Who (and Torchwood), Peep Show, Supernatural, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Merlin, Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy XII, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Derren Brown, David Mitchell and Charlie Brooker.


( Possibly rambled for slightly too long on a couple of these. )


Yet more to come!

There really should be Mark Corrigan/Big Suze fanfiction. His pathetic crush on her is so lovely. Also rather lovely is Mark/Dobby; at one point he thinks with regard to her that 'I hardly have to modify my behaviour at all in her company', which I find far more touching than I should really find anything in Peep Show. Mark Corrigan, my heart breaks for you.

I was going to ponder whether Mark was one of those characters I would be able to happily pair up with anyone, but then the thought of Mark/Super Hans crossed my mind and I actually flinched. WORST PAIRING EVER.

(I love the character names in Peep Show. Toni and Tony, Big Suze, Dobby, Super Hans. Goodness knows how the writers come up with the names for the supporting characters, but they are brilliant.)

Mark/Jeremy, of course, remains the true and perfect love story. At first I thought I was simply imagining things between them, and then I came to recognise the core theme of Peep Show: the women (or, in the case of Mark's crush on Johnson, men) they pursue always leave, and once again Mark and Jeremy are left with each other. It's Jeremy and Mark who drive off into the sunset after Mark's wedding; it's Jeremy who offers to dance with Mark at his party, when everyone else is taken. They resent each other, and they fight, and Mark tries to get out, but in the end they'll always be together. Jeremy knows it, but Mark hasn't quite realised or accepted it yet.

To make a weird comparison, Mark is a bit like Sam Winchester in the first two seasons of Supernatural; he still thinks one day he'll be able to break away from hunting and have a normal life, not realising that he's already in far too deep ever to get out. Jeremy is Mark's hunting; they're permanently married to each other, whether he likes it or not.

And I love that. I love their doomed, inescapable, inevitable love. I love that Jeremy leeches off Mark and Mark tries to kick Jeremy out and Jeremy does endless stupid things that ruin Mark's life and both of them constantly screw each other over by prioritising sex over their friendship, but that friendship is there and occasionally, in its messed-up and destructive way, shines through. In the end, despite all that Jeremy owes him, Mark will let him stay in the flat and even pay to keep him from being arrested. When Jeremy ruins Mark's business prospects, it's because he can't bear having Mark leave him.

When Peep Show eventually ends, it should end with Mark finally acknowledging that, in spite of all his searching, Jeremy is the one for him. Shit.

I honestly can't imagine anything else making sense. (And I honestly don't think I have ever 'shipped anything as much as I do these two. It's ridiculous. Peep Show is a sitcom! Mark and Jeremy have an appallingly unhealthy relationship! But they are so wonderful. They'd be miserable together, but that's nothing compared to how miserable they would be apart.)