Trabia Garden

I've seen a few of you post this shipping meme lately, and it looks like it could be fun! Let's have a crack at it.


1. List three shipping tropes you love

'I'm a cynic, and you're the idealist who makes me a little less cynical.' Ninth Doctor/Rose, Satoshi/Daisuke, Riku/Sora, Cox/JD, Jeff/Annie, Ikusaba/Naegi.

'You're weird and unsettling and I don't trust you, but I also reluctantly find you fascinating, and in these circumstances we're going to have to spend a lot of time together; there's no avoiding it.' Hinata/Komaeda, Neku/Joshua, Sara/Keiji, Laura/Travis, Battler/Beatrice.

'We'd probably never look at each other romantically under normal circumstances, but we've found ourselves isolated together, and maybe that's changed things.' Mike/Sam, Celes/Sabin, Hope/Serah, Mark/Helly.

BONUS FOURTH ANSWER: 'I'm quietly and intensely in love with you, but I don't ever expect my feelings to be returned, and I don't have any plans to pursue you romantically. I'm just in love with you; it's an inescapable fact of my life.' Riku/Sora, Satoshi/Daisuke, Gilbert/Oz, Goh/Ash.


( The rest of the meme is under the cut! )


I want to give honourable mentions to all the ships I didn't talk about in this meme, but we'll be here all day if I do!

More home karaoke! Yes, it's only been a couple of weeks since the last session. I swear this isn't going to become a fortnightly habit; the timing just worked out that way.

It's time for me to talk about the things I sang in unnecessary detail!

We had a couple of guests I'd never met before, and both they and I were a little nervous about singing in front of strangers. The best strategy for overcoming karaoke nerves, I've found, is to make a fool of yourself straight out of the gate. To this end, I went with the Sonic Underground theme song for my first performance, perhaps the most dramatic cartoon theme song ever composed. I had a blast.

As we now have multiple microphones and don't have to share, Tem and I were able to perform 'Stalemate' from Death Note: The Musical as God intended: stalking slowly around the room, staring intensely at each other as we sang. People in the room were shouting 'Now kiss!' by the end of it.

We did not kiss, but we did later sing the homoerotic tennis duet from the same musical at the request of a guest who'd previously seen us perform it, which is basically the same thing.

I was Light in both cases, naturally! And also wearing a new Death Note T-shirt Tem had given me for my birthday. It seems to have become an unspoken rule that I should always wear a Death Note shirt for karaoke.

To my delight, Rei had been listening to Koethe's 'Haunt Me' since I'd performed it at our last karaoke session, and they suggested we duet on it for this one. I think Koethe's music is fantastic, and I'm very pleased to spread awareness of it!

The song I was most concerned about performing was 'Prayer of the Refugee' by Rise Against; I wasn't sure whether I would be able to get the ferocious shouting right. But I think it went well! I really enjoyed singing this one. At one point I turned around and spotted one of the guests air-guitaring on the solo.

I thought Persona 5's 'Life Will Change' would be a self-indulgent 'pretty much nobody else knows this' song, but it turned out to be a great choice, because it transpired that the two new-to-me guests love this game! They both leapt to their feet at the first notes and spent the entire song dancing enthusiastically. What a banger.

In a return to our teenage roots, Rei and I dueted on 'Byakuya ~ True Light', the theme song to DN Angel. It has several instrumental breaks, and we danced through every one of them. Afterwards, my housemate's boss asked about the anime it was from, and we had to explain, 'It's about a fourteen-year-old boy who transforms into a legendary art thief whenever he gets horny.'

My last performance of the evening was this sea shanty adaptation of 'Rockstar' by Nickelback. One guest went 'oh, no, I hate this song' when they saw the title, but I'm pleased to report that they quickly came around to the sea shanty version. By the end, they were joining in on the chorus.

Some other performances I really enjoyed: Tem draping xemself in a cloak and waving it around like bat wings during BABYMETAL's 'Akatsuki'. A guest's incredible performance of The Little Mermaid's 'Poor Unfortunate Souls' in French. A lovely duet of 'Born to Die' by Lana Del Rey, and a very fun performance of 'Move Your Feet' by Junior Senior, which is a great song for audience participation.

One of the guests, J, is great to have around for karaoke because they always choose massive crowdpleasers that the whole room can join in on, whereas the rest of us can't resist performing weird nerd songs that nobody else will know. Rei and J absolutely belted 'You Give Love a Bad Name' by Bon Jovi, there were intensely enthusiastic performances of No Doubt's 'Don't Speak' and Alice Cooper's 'Poison', and I was compelled to join in on 'Stacy's Mom' by Fountains of Wayne. I kept waking up last night with J's performance of 'Ain't No Rest for the Wicked' by Cage the Elephant in my head.

Rei made vast quantities of shortbread for the party, but people kept forgetting to eat the snacks, so now we have a huge amount of delicious leftover shortbread. How will we cope with this terrible fate?

I wanted to take a week or so to digest Persona 4, and by 'digest Persona 4' I may mean 'read a vast, incredible, harrowing fic where Yosuke is trapped in an abusive relationship with the culprit' (sympathy_crime, upsetting content of all stripes, I'm a couple of chapters from the end and it's honestly one of the best things I've ever read), but I'm now feeling more or less ready to tackle Persona 3 FES!

One of the few things I'd osmosed about the Persona series before venturing into it was 'people summon things by shooting themselves in the head?', so it'll be interesting to play the game that does, in fact, include that.

Given that this series includes a Yusuke and a Yosuke, it's tempting to name the protagonist Yasuke. Maybe not. I might call him Kosuke instead, to continue the 'one letter changed' pattern.

I was just thinking 'what should his family name be?' and then 'well, I went with Hiwatari for the Persona 5 protagonist; maybe he could be Kosuke Niwa, for another DN Angel-inspired name?' and then 'wait a second, wasn't Kosuke actually the name of Daisuke Niwa's father?' Fine. I'm playing as the dad of the DN Angel protagonist. That's what's happening now.

I went to the in-game loo and laughed aloud at 'You relieved yourself. Your condition has become "Great".'

Oh, here's Junpei! I'm very wary of this guy because he's often mentioned in the same breath as Yosuke and Ryuji, respectively my favourite and second favourite characters in the series. You've got very big shoes to fill, Junpei, and I'm not sure I like your hat.

Junpei... looks like he could be a younger Iwai, actually. Huh.

Akihiko, meanwhile, is clearly Draco Malfoy. I'm not falling for this.

Shuji's only just introduced himself and I already don't trust him.

I'll be honest: seeing this kid casually shoot himself in the head in the middle of battle is pretty unsettling.

The problem with going backwards through this series is that every game is slightly more inconvenient to play. The further back I go, the fewer opportunities I have to save. I realise the content of this journal may suggest otherwise, but I can't actually play videogames every hour of the day; please let me leave off when I need to!

The dialogue of Life Is Strange comes in for a fair bit of mockery for being unnatural, and, to be honest, it's not undeserved ('Oh, man, are you cereal?' is one of the worst offenders). But it portrays young female friendship in a way that rings very true to me: perhaps truer than any other work of fiction I've consumed. During Farewell, the bonus episode about Max and Chloe when they were kids, I found myself quietly reminiscing about my friends from primary school. (It's harder to reflect nostalgically on my friends from secondary school because they're still my friends!) And I loved the original Life Is Strange showing the familiarity between Max and Joyce; you do often form a sort of relationship with the parents of your childhood friends, but for some reason that's not something I often see portrayed in fiction.

I cried a lot at the end of Farewell. Life Is Strange can be a bit emotionally manipulative sometimes, but I have to admit that it's very successful at manipulating my emotions.


The DN Angel manga is starting up again in May, apparently! Here come all my very intense feelings about Satoshi from when I was fifteen. For anyone who has not experienced DN Angel, it is a series about a boy who transforms into a legendary art thief as a metaphor for getting a boner and it is incredible.

I also picked up my long-neglected replay of Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance today. I didn't get very far (I love the game as a whole, but I'm currently at the Tron: Legacy world, which is a bit of a visual headache), but it was enough to remind me of my very intense feelings about Riku as well. It's a day for being emotional about self-loathing fictional boys I've loved for half my life!

They also, of course, have 'painfully in love with a spiky-haired optimist' in common. And 'having their bodies taken over by malevolent entities', come to think of it. Maybe I should write something in which Riku and Satoshi interact; they'd have so much to talk about!

Not that they'd actually talk about it, because they're both very private. Why must you make this so difficult for me to write, boys?

R and S are right next to each other, come to think of it! I missed a trick when I was writing ficsnippets pairing characters up in alphabetical order.

I recently found myself thinking 'maybe I should do alphabet ficsnippets where I combine canons in alphabetical order,' but my last set of alphabet ficsnippets took me four and a half years, and I have consumed a very limited number of canons beginning with the letter Q. I don't want to corner myself into writing a Pokémon/QWOP crossover.

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'm unsettled by the thought that some people read or watch DN Angel and come away thinking, 'Ah, yes, Satoshi, there's a young man who's definitely not in unrequited love with Daisuke.' I'm usually open to people having their own interpretations of characters and their relationships, particularly on points that aren't made explicit in canon! But Satoshi is just so painfully, tragically in love.

It will astonish you to learn that I'm rereading DN Angel. I must have first watched the anime thirteen years ago, and I've never really thrown off my emotional attachment to this ridiculous tale of rampant crushes and magical art theft. My feelings about Satoshi will lie dormant for years, and then I remember his tragic existence and those feelings BURN A HOLE IN MY CHEST.

I sort of want to write fanfiction where Daisuke finally realises how Satoshi feels about him (Riku probably tells him, because Daisuke is absolutely hopeless with feelings and there's no way he's ever going to work it out on his own), but I'm not sure where it could go. Daisuke approaches Satoshi to say 'I'm really sorry, I don't feel that way about you,' Satoshi goes 'well, I knew that,' uncomfortable silence, the end? It's not much of a concept.

It could theoretically be possible to make a 'sorry, I don't feel that way' conversation interesting, but it'd be tough with Satoshi. It's generally hard to make Satoshi have conversations. He's very quiet and intense.


Final Fantasy VI was on sale on the Playstation Store recently, and I lost my copy some years ago, so I bought it! Maybe I'll actually be able to finish it this time.

Here's an odd thing about Final Fantasy VI: at one point, a man tells Locke to give his son 'the password', but he can't remember what the password is. When you (as Locke) speak to the son, you're given three possible passwords to say, one of which is correct. So you have a one-in-three chance of getting it right. If you get it wrong, you'll be able to try again, after finding a fresh disguise.

But the three choices are presented to you, the player. They aren't presented to Locke.

Perhaps we're meant to think the son gave Locke the three choices (although that doesn't seem like a great password system), but I prefer to believe that Locke was told 'give him the password, I can't remember what it is' and then got the password, by randomly guessing from all the words in the world, within three tries.

Having read eleven volumes of DN Angel, I can say with absolute confidence that it is my favourite manga. I love the art and the characters and the humour and everything about it. It really makes me smile. You know, when Satoshi's not breaking my heart.

Daisuke: Satoshi! Stay the night! You can borrow my pyjamas!
Satoshi: One day I will destroy you because I destroy everything I love.

Oh, Satoshi. I'd like to write fanfiction in which he's happy, but I'm fairly certain that's impossible.

I've got a stupid idea for a DN Angel/Princess Tutu crossover floating around in my head, purely because two character have similar-sounding names. Daisuke, rather than transforming into Dark, transforms into Duck. I have no idea what this accomplishes; Duck is probably not much of an art thief. BUT ANYWAY, WHENEVER DAISUKE EXPERIENCES ROMANTIC FEELINGS, HE TURNS INTO DUCK. (Duck in her human form, I'm going to say, but maybe Duck can still turn into an actual duck, just to complicate things further.) When he's not transformed, of course, he still has Duck in his head. Daisuke and Duck would get along really well, I think.

Duck probably develops a doomed crush on Satoshi. MAYBE DAISUKE AND DUCK DEVELOP EVEN MORE DOOMED CRUSHES ON EACH OTHER.

Actually, this would be amazing. Somebody write it immediately. (I don't think I have anyone on my flist who's familiar with both DN Angel and Princess Tutu, but it's worth a shot, right?)

This, er, actually isn't the first ill-advised DN Angel/Princess Tutu crossover I've considered. I have a couple of snippets scribbled down in which Duck and Daisuke are attending Hope's Peak Academy, as a Super High-school Level Ballerina and Super High-school Level Art Thief respectively. Because obviously you want to invite people who are really good at stealing things to your exclusive school. Perhaps fortunately, that particular fic doesn't seem to be going anywhere. I'm not sure I really wanted to write a massive crossover in which I threw all my favourite teenage characters into Hope's Peak and made them kill each other.

(I'm about halfway through Princess Tutu and still loving it enormously. th_esaurus has seen none of it but has decided that it is far too silly, which I suppose is a fair enough conclusion, given that she's been exposed to it solely via my exclamations at the screen ('THAT ALLIGATOR HAS ATTENDED NONE OF THE PREVIOUS BALLET LESSONS, SHE IS A TERRIBLE STUDENT').)


For any Dangan Ronpa fans who don't know of this yet: someone has translated Dangan Ronpa IF, an official what-if story set parallel to the first Dangan Ronpa game! It's pretty great. I think I actually punched the air at one point whilst reading. It also goes into detail on a character whom I always wanted to know more about, as we never really had a chance to get to know them in the original game, and gave me a staggeringly doomed pairing to 'ship (yes, even more doomed than the average Dangan Ronpa pairing). If you were wondering why my massive Dangan Ronpa fic (relatively massive, at least; it's actually the longest thing I've ever completed) so heavily featured said character we barely met, this is half of the reason. (The other half of the reason is this excellent fic.)

apiphile has had what I think is a rather lovely idea: write out a poem and leave it lying around for strangers to find. The poem, Poem For The Person Who Finds This Poem, is here, if you'd like to get involved yourself.

(Poetry and I haven't really got on for most of my life, and I always assumed that this was because I simply wasn't a poetry person, rather than a case of not yet having discovered the right poet.

As it turned out, apiphile was the right poet, and I am heartily in favour of spreading her words around.)


I really haven't been able to write lately, which is distressing. I suspect this may be because I have developed an interest in too many things lately and cannot settle on one fandom.

In an attempt to remedy this, I am going to steal a prompt table from 1sentence and write a little bit about everything that is clamouring for my attention, in the hope of clearing some space in my mind for a longer work.

And if it doesn't work, well, at least I'll have written something.

(As this isn't actually for the community, I reserve the right to exceed one sentence should I feel the need.)

I've filled twenty prompts below; I may or may not attempt the remaining thirty later. Organised by fandom, rather than prompt number. Fandoms represented are DN Angel (a tiny bit), Derren Brown, Silent Hill (in a crossover with Derren Brown), Kingdom Hearts, Merlin, Death Note, Top Gear, Iji (is there even an Iji fandom?) and Hetalia. Also, sos_your_face appears in one of them.


( DN Angel )

( Derren Brown )

( Kingdom Hearts )

( Merlin )

( Death Note )

( Top Gear )

( Iji )

( Hetalia )

As I seem to be rediscovering old fandoms and anime, I thought I would rewatch DN Angel, which I have not seen for at least five years.

I had forgotten how much I love Satoshi and his ridiculously creepy crush on Daisuke. The poor boy! (By 'the poor boy' I mean poor romantically-doomed Satoshi, rather than Daisuke, although Daisuke does have to suffer Satoshi's rather unnerving affections.)

After watching the fourth episode (dear Satoshi: please stop pretending that you lose your hold on Krad around Daisuke because Krad is somehow 'reacting to Dark's presence'; it is because you are madly in love with Daisuke and you know it), I scrolled down a bit and thus stumbled across what is possibly my new favourite quote from a YouTube comment:

homocidal does NOT mean gay, it means you like killing people.

Oh, YouTube, you never fail to amuse and depress.


Note to self: when you're back in London, start playing Metal Gear Solid 2. After all the things I've learnt about it from browsing TV Tropes and firefly99's journal, it seems to be:

a) the most confusing game ever created, and
b) completely awesome.

From the Wikipedia article:

The storyline explores many philosophical and cyberpunk themes in great detail, including meme theory, social engineering, sociology, artificial intelligence, information control, conspiracy theories, political and military maneuvering, evolution, existentialism, censorship, the manipulation of free will and the nature of reality.

In a videogame! I can't miss this! I become terribly annoyed when people say that videogames are incapable of depth, or take an 'oh, it's a videogame, of course it's not going to have a real storyline' attitude; it'd be nice to be able to point and say, 'YEAH, WELL, THIS VIDEOGAME CHALLENGES THE NATURE OF REALITY.' (I can already say 'FINAL FANTASY X MADE ME CRY', of course, but it's always nice to have more cases for the argument.)

I am, I suspect, going to be completely rubbish at playing a stealth game, generally being more of an RPG/platformer/action-adventure person, but it wouldn't be the first time I've played a videogame purely for the themes it explores (see also: Silent Hill 2).

If you have any stories of times videogames have made you cry (er, storyline-wise, rather than out of frustration; the ending of Final Fantasy X certainly did it for me, and oh the prologue of Kingdom Hearts II, and I became a bit teary during the final boss fight in Ōkami), or times they've made you feel guilty for an action you took as a player (asdjfghfjdhsggh I'm sorry FFVI Cid I didn't know), or times you've picked up a game you wouldn't have played otherwise because things you'd heard about the plot interested you, please share! Because videogames are a legitimate storytelling medium, and it is very frustrating when non-gamers dismiss the emotional effect they can have.

While I'm trying to get back into writing, it's time for The Most Masochistic Fic Meme Ever.

1. Name a fandom. Preferably one that I'm familiar with, but if you can think of a fandom you'd like me to do this for and you don't know whether I know it or not, try it anyway.
2. I will then have to take a pairing that I cannot stand from that fandom... and write a fic containing it. Ignore any screaming coming from my general vicinity during this part.
3. If you so choose, put this in your journal.

(Also, I think that apologies are in order to the people I've metaquoted without telling them. So, uh... sorry to Patrick, Patrick and code_epic, Patrick and magi, heyblackdress and, uh, Patrick again. Apologies are also probably due to Thorne, but as approximately three hundred and seventeen people have found her journal through it she's probably aware of it.)