The final entry in this adventure through my fandom history! I've really enjoyed this.
The Last of UsThe Last of Us came out just before I turned twenty-five. I wanted to play it, as I'd loved Naughty Dog's other work, but couldn't afford to buy it new. My brilliant plan: tell
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th_esaurus, with whom I lived at the time, about this game where a middle-aged man and a teenage girl travel through the apocalypse together (this concept is absolute catnip for her), then sit back and wait for her to buy it. It worked like a charm.
All of my fics for
The Last of Us are over five thousand words long, which is unusual for me! Apparently it gives me ideas that need some space to explore.
The Last of Us is also unusual amongst the things I've written fanfiction for in being really,
really good. I'm usually more drawn to write for messy, flawed canons.
Favourite character: Ellie is such a perfectly drawn character. She makes the game so human. It would never have worked without her.
Favourite pairing: This isn't a fandom I'm in for 'shipping purposes, especially, but Ellie/Riley is really cute.
Number of words written: 20,418
Snippet: This tiny thing is all I can find. It was meant to be something about Ellie's perspective on the world before the outbreak, I think. Warning for... discussion of miscarriage?
( The Last of Us unfinished snippet. Ellie and Riley, 2014. )Assassin's CreedI tried out my housemate's copy of
Assassin's Creed when I was twenty-six. It was a bit repetitive, but I enjoyed it enough to check out the later games in the series, which were
great fun.
I've written a couple of Kenway/Kidd fics, a couple of Frye-sibling oneshots, but my main involvement in
Assassin's Creed fandom was with a single series. A single, cowritten,
extremely long series.
Visitors was originally supposed to be a oneshot. One chapter, containing eight short scenes from a
Sense8 AU. I wrote it, and then it was over.
But I couldn't stop thinking of other scenes. So I wrote another eight and posted them as a second chapter. And then I posted a third, and, look, by that point I might as well keep going until I'd written for all twenty-eight possible two-character combinations.
Then salanaland started writing scenes in that universe, and I just kept going, and VampireBadger joined in, and we started making all sorts of plans in Google Docs, and and we all just wrote frantically in this one universe for a year and a half. By the time we drew the
Visitorverse to a close, it was 900,000 words long. (Although over half the total wordcount was by VampireBadger, who is terrifyingly prolific.)
It was an absolute blast. We had a table to keep track of who had hugged whom, because it was our duty to make everyone hug and we took it very seriously.
A lasting impact of my time with the
Visitorverse, when I was posting a new ficlet every couple of days: I'm now much better at finishing fics. It taught me how to look at what I've written so far and go 'okay, what needs to be added before this is ready to post?' So I've generally got less unfinished fanfiction lying around for my post-
Assassin's Creed fandoms; if I start writing something now, I'm much more likely to see it through.
Favourite character: There are a lot of games and a lot of characters! But possibly Haytham Kenway? Repression, sarcasm and fraught parent-child relationships: always good. I wish I enjoyed the gameplay of
Assassin's Creed III more so I'd be more willing to replay it.
Favourite pairing: Edward Kenway/James Kidd, for pairings that actually make sense. For pairings that
don't make sense: Shay Cormac and Aveline de Grandpré never canonically meet, but I've 'shipped them ever since writing their first scene together in
Visitors.
Number of words written: 122,813, of which 116,519 are in the Visitorverse.
Snippet: This was a concept for a
Supernatural AU where the Frye twins become hunters.
( Assassin's Creed unfinished snippet. Assassin's Creed Syndicate/Supernatural, 2017. )Until DawnI have no idea what made me think that investigating
Until Dawn was a good idea. At the age of twenty-eight I went 'I should watch a Let's Play!' and then 'NO, I HAVE TO BACK OUT, THIS IS WAY TOO SCARY' and then 'NO, I
CAN'T BACK OUT BECAUSE THEN I'LL NEVER KNOW THE FATE OF THESE KIDS AND
THAT'S WORSE.' I ended up having to spoil myself for everything before I could handle watching. Then I started uncontrollably writing fic after fic where the entire plot was 'IT'S POST-GAME AND EVERYONE'S TRAUMATISED'.
Favourite character: Mike! He combines two character types I have a weakness for: 'confident, kind of a jerk sometimes' and 'desperately trying to atone for a horrible, horrible mistake'. Also, he gets his fingers caught in a bear trap and it's hot.
Favourite pairing: I love Mike/Sam a
lot. It's got shades of Nate/Elena, both in their appearance and in their dynamic. I was so happy when they teamed up.
Number of words written: 16,881.
Snippet: This isn't actually a snippet from an unfinished fic; it's a bit from an early draft of a
finished fic. My
Until Dawn time loop fic,
New Game?, was originally going to be much lighter in tone and have Mike and Sam trapped in the time loop together.
( Until Dawn unfinished snippet. Mike/Sam, time loop, 2016 or 2017. )Final Fantasy XVWhat a mess. What a masterpiece. I first posted about my anticipation for this game when I was twenty; I finally actually got to
play it when I was twenty-eight. There's so much wrong with it and I love it so fiercely. What a strange joy of a game. The only game I've ever played for over a hundred hours on one save file.
I leapt straight into the fandom and swam happily around in it. I was expecting the fandom to be horrendous, but it turned out to be surprisingly relaxed! Everyone was there to have fun, and I never saw any shipwars or 'you can't 'ship that; it's morally wrong'. I had lots of fun writing for prompts on the kinkmeme.
Favourite character: Prompto! Simultaneously the most fun character in the cast and the most heartbreaking. An absolute joy to write. Suffers extremely well in fanfiction.
Favourite pairing: Ooh, hard to choose. Might have to be the Noctis/Prompto/Ignis/Gladio OT4, although I've got a particular soft spot for Noctis/Prompto. I also like horrible Ardyn/Noctis and Ardyn/Prompto.
Number of words written: 36,651.
Snippet: Here is a
Queer Eye AU for
Final Fantasy XV, because that's obviously a perfectly sensible fanfiction concept.
( Final Fantasy XV unfinished snippet. FFXV/Queer Eye, 2018. )Zero EscapeI enjoyed
999 and
Virtue's Last Reward well enough, but they didn't capture my attention in a fannish way at all. I barely even mentioned them on here. I certainly didn't expect to write any
Zero Escape fanfiction.
And then
Zero Time Dilemma happened. I bought it when it was heavily discounted, at the age of twenty-nine, and I played through it at great speed, and I wrote seven fics in the space of a month. I came to the fandom late and there was very little activity (at one point I had written a full third of the fics on the front page of the AO3 tag), but the lack of an audience couldn't prevent me. It was a perfect excuse to write fanfiction about not knowing what's real, which is one of my absolute favourite fictional themes.
Favourite character: Bizarrely, my favourite
Zero Escape character is a nice, relatively well-adjusted young man (who I can then make much less well-adjusted in fanfiction). I can't explain why Carlos appeals to me so much. I also think Akane is fascinating.
Favourite pairing: Carlos/Akane. I also love Carlos/Akane/Junpei, but Carlos/Akane is definitely the axis of it that appeals to me most.
Number of words written: 21,136
Snippet: Again, this is a cut scene from a posted fic rather than an extract from an unfinished one. (As I said,
Assassin's Creed made me better at finishing fics, so in my later fandoms I have fewer unfinished works and I'm more ruthless about cutting scenes that don't fit.) This was originally going to come in
So Close, So Far, my Carlos/everyone fic, at the end of the Carlos/Phi scene.
( Zero Escape unfinished snippet. Carlos/everyone, 2018. )Detroit: Become HumanI caught a bad case of
Detroit: Become Human shortly before turning thirty. I initially put on theradbrad's Let's Play of this for background noise and ended up getting really into this disaster of a game.
My
Detroit: Become Human fanfiction is
horrible and I'm not sorry. It's got so much awful potential! Android programming raises so many horrible, fascinating questions of consent! Android limbs are so intriguingly detachable!
Some of you have got into this game because I started posting about it, and I'm extremely sorry about that. But I've been rewarded for my evil deeds with great fanfiction by
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magistrate, so it's hard to feel too much remorse.
Favourite character: Hank! Grumpy, sarcastic, cares more than he'd like to admit, made entirely of unhealthy coping mechanisms.
Favourite pairing: I still haven't really pinned down whether I feel I 'ship Hank/Connor or just enjoy its potential for horribleness, but either way it brings me a great deal of joy. I also like Connor/Kara and Connor/Connor, and
magistrate has been sending me extracts of an ambitious fic-in-progress in which I am 'shipping
everything, including but not limited to Connor/Markus, Hank/Markus and Hank/Kara.
Number of words written: 12,063.
Snippet: All I have are these few sentences from Hank's perspective, in a document entitled 'detroit feeeeelings.doc'.
( Detroit: Become Human unfinished snippet. Hank/Connor, 2018. )And that's the abridged version of how I got here! I look forward to finding out which fandoms await in my future.
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