Trabia Garden

Further adventures in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth! I must be nearing the end of this game at last, I think; I've reached the Temple of the Ancients. I've neglected huge swathes of side content, and yet somehow I've still been playing for over sixty hours.


( Notes on Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. )


While I've never been heavily into the Final Fantasy VII fandom, I do have a bit of history with the Cid/Vincent pairing. I didn't exactly have a Final Fantasy VII phase in my early teens; I just had a Cid/Vincent AU fanfiction phase. I was actually reading Cid/Vincent fanfiction before I played Final Fantasy VII itself. When I did play the game, I was a little let down by their lack of interaction!

Playing Rebirth, a small part of me is nostalgically pleased that Cid and Vincent keep hanging back together while the rest of the party go off to do plot things. They're still not really interacting onscreen, but there's plenty of implied space for interaction, and I hope a new generation of Cid/Vincent shippers has a blast with that.

For each of my major fandoms, I do a short writeup talking about how it fits into my fandom history. A fandom qualifies as 'major' if I've written five fics for it, or ten thousand words across at least three fics.

It's only just occurred to me that Red Dwarf technically qualifies. It's the only fandom in which I've permanently lost all copies of a fic I wrote, so I only have four surviving Red Dwarf fics, but I have written and posted five Red Dwarf fics in total.


Red Dwarf

Red Dwarf is the first television series I remember really enjoying. To be clear, I loved Red Dwarf even before I loved Pokémon. I'm pretty sure I first watched it when my age was in single figures.

In some respects, I was too young for Red Dwarf. Most of the jokes probably went over my head, and I remember that the episode 'Demons and Angels' really disturbed and upset me. Lister being forced to kill the angelic versions of the crew was horrifying. Trying to warn them, trying to apologise, but being unable to control his body!

My other main recollection from watching Red Dwarf as a tiny child is how much I enjoyed 'Mr Flibble's very cross.'

The first series came out on DVD when I was fourteen, and I had a blast revisiting it. I watched the episodes over and over again. I watched the cast commentaries over and over again. At one point I apparently attempted to handwrite a transcript of an episode for unclear reasons, a project I was confused to rediscover twelve years later.

Still at the age of fourteen, I wrote a short Lister/Rimmer fic - my first fic for a live-action TV fandom - and posted it to fanfiction.net. Princess Lauren E Scavenger, who I believe was one of the group's founders, left an encouraging comment with a link to a Yahoo! group called the Red Dwarf Slash Society, which I joined.

This group was where I posted my lost fic, Me³, a Rimmer/Rimmer selfcest fic set during the Rimmer-duplication episode 'Me²'. It was my first ever attempt at writing sex; I think one of the Rimmers gave the other a vaguely implied handjob. I suspect it was probably dubcon.

The feedback for my Rimmer/Rimmer fic wasn't in any way unkind, but it was as lukewarm as you'd expect from people trying to be polite about the fact that it was clearly written by a fourteen-year-old with zero sexual knowledge or experience. I was a little embarrassed, which is probably why I made no effort to keep the fic backed up.

My second ever attempt at writing sex, incidentally, was also selfcest with consent issues. Come to think of it, I also wrote a dubcon selfcest fic this year, two decades after my first. Start as you mean to go on?


Favourite character: Rimmer is terrible and petty in a way that makes him a lot of fun. Possibly the first entertainingly terrible character I ever developed a fondness for.
Favourite pairing: Lister/Rimmer, one of my earliest ships. They have such an interesting 'we drive each other mad, we know each other more intimately than anyone else could, we're isolated together in unfathomably deep space' dynamic.
Number of words written: I don't actually know! I have 8,270 surviving words of Red Dwarf fanfiction, across four fics, and I suspect the lost fic was under a thousand words long; most of my fics at that age were very short. About 9,000 words, I suppose.

Lately, I've found myself thinking a lot about an online interaction I had about twenty years ago, which really shaped my approach to online interactions in general.

When I was fourteen or fifteen, I was a moderator on a now-deleted online forum called Final Fantasy Fanatics. One day, a newcomer made a post in allcaps. I left a very condescending 'witty' comment about turning capslock off (something like 'okay, you see all those buttons with letters in front of you? now look to the left...') and went about my day.

The next morning, I saw I had a private message from the newcomer, titled something like 'Being rude'. I assumed she was reporting rudeness from another member and opened the message. I was deeply shocked to see she was scolding me for being rude.

I couldn't take it in. Rude? I wasn't rude. I was a polite person; it was something I took pride in. She thought I was rude? I was just trying to be funny. I would have to explain that this was a misunderstanding.

And then I reflected on what I'd said. And, no matter how I looked at it, I had to admit it: I'd been rude.

I apologised, and she accepted my apology. But the incident stuck with me.

From that exchange, I formed principles for online interaction that I've tried to stick to ever since. The people you speak to online are still human, and, no matter how funny a putdown might be, it's still putting someone down. It's always tempting to be funny on the Internet, but it's more important to be kind. I've tried to put kindness first since then when speaking to people online; I hope I've succeeded.

The way she told me off stuck in my mind as well. I'd made fun of her in front of an audience - the other users of the forum - and she could very reasonably have replied in that public thread to tell me I was being rude. But she didn't. She contacted me in a private message; she didn't threaten my reputation by calling me out in front of everyone.

I wonder sometimes if I'd have felt the need to dig my heels in if I'd been publicly called out, rather than reflecting, acknowledging I'd behaved badly and apologising. I think it's a lot easier to resolve things peacefully in a private conversation, where you don't have to worry about looking like you've lost in front of people.

This is something I think about a lot with regard to platforms like Tumblr and Twitter: platforms where it's hard to conduct an argument without broadcasting it to all your followers, which I think stokes a lot of viciousness. On Dreamwidth, if you disagree with someone, you're more likely to discuss it with them in a comment thread in their own space, where nobody else will be notified; it's easier to have a civil conversation.

I don't think that person stuck around the forum for long; I don't remember her username or any details about her, and I'd have no idea how to find her. So I can't thank her personally, but I'm grateful to her. I think, by changing the way I approach online interaction, she had a really positive influence on my life.

I don't know if there's a point to this entry. I think there are discussions to be had about how we treat other people when there's a screen between us, and how modern social media is designed to fan the flames and encourage audience participation whenever an argument breaks out. But, ultimately, this was just something that happened that was important to me, and I'd like to record it somewhere.

For a while now, I've been making entries talking about how each of my major fandoms fits into my fandom history. I considered a fandom 'major' if I'd written at least ten thousand words for it across at least three fics.

I'm starting to wonder if those criteria are too strict, though. Persona 5 falls short on wordcount; I've written just over nine thousand words for it. But I've written five Persona 5 fics. That's enough for me to feel it has a real presence in my fandom life.

So I'm going to say that, if I've written at least five fics for something, it counts as one of my major fandoms, regardless of wordcount. This also reinstates a couple of my older fandoms I've always felt should have made the list.

This means it's time for some 'my fandom history' writeups!


Jak and Daxter

I'm glad I found an excuse to add this to the 'major fandom' list; it always felt wrong that it didn't qualify!

I must have first played Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy when I was thirteen; it was positively reviewed in Official PlayStation 2 Magazine, which my brother and I used to buy every month. I didn't actually start writing for it until I was fifteen, though, when Jak II came out.

Jak and Daxter was a colourful, cartoony platformer. Jak II was a dark action shooter set in a dystopian future. Jak had been tortured and traumatised and now he was bent on revenge! It was an incredibly jarring tonal shift, but it matched my teenage tastes perfectly.

The Jak fandom is particularly significant for me because it's the first fandom where I felt I really had a presence as a writer. Previously, I'd write a fic or two for a canon and then move on. But I stuck around for a while in the Jak fandom, and it's where I met eva_kasumi, who I think was probably the first fandom friend I ever made.

The earliest surviving fic I wrote involving sex was for Jak II, although it wasn't explicit (none of my sex scenes are explicit; it's not an area of writing I've ever been confident in). It was noncon selfcest. I feel I sort of jumped in at the deep end there. (It's possible I included sex in a now-lost earlier Red Dwarf fic, but I strongly suspect that that was also noncon selfcest.)

Favourite character: I'm surprised to realise I've never really thought about my favourite character in the Jak series. Maybe Torn? He's very grumpy, which I enjoy.
Favourite pairing: Jak/Torn. It's a ship with a lot of anger in it, and what more do you need, particularly when you're fifteen years old?
Number of words written: 9,659, across nine fics.

Snippet: I actually have managed to hang on to a snippet of unfinished Jak and Daxter fanfiction, which is impressive, because I must have written this in... what, 2005? Somewhere between 2004 and 2006, at any rate. I've kept my writing obsessively backed up for a long time!

This was saved in a document called 'stupidest jakfic opening ever.doc'.

( Jak and Daxter unfinished snippet. Some sort of Daxter pairing, circa 2005. )


ShakespeaRe-Told Macbeth

At the age of seventeen, I had a brief but intense love affair with the BBC's ShakespeaRe-Told modern-day adaptation of Macbeth, set in a restaurant and starring James McAvoy. I was absolutely obsessed.

This adaptation didn't have a fandom, but I was determined to be a fandom all by myself. I signed up to write a hundred fics and managed forty-one. In light of this, it's sort of surprising that this didn't hit the 'ten thousand words' threshold! But everything I wrote for Macbeth was extremely short, falling between 100 and 400 words.

In 2020, fourteen years later, I was struck by nostalgia and checked whether AO3 had a section for ShakespeaRe-Told. It did! I left a comment on a Macbeth/Banquo fic by speakertone, mentioning my solitary fannish history with the adaptation and how pleased I was to find that someone else had written for it, and I was delighted by their response:

I just have to say something because this is so amazing to me that it's almost hilarious - I'm pretty sure I've read all forty-one of the ficlets you posted back-to-back-to-back and I loved them! They were the reason I figured it wouldn't be so out of nowhere for me to post this fic online, so I'm really really ridiculously happy that you found this and you enjoyed my writing. Thank you so much!!

I'm ecstatic that my terrible teenage fanfiction could encourage someone to post their own fic for this nonexistent fandom, all those years later.

Favourite character: I mean, obviously it's Macbeth himself, just as it is in the original play. The entire adaptation is ninety minutes of Macbeth making terrible decisions and hating himself and having a guilty paranoid trembling breakdown. I was inevitably going to love him.
Favourite pairing: Equally predictably, it's Joe Macbeth/Billy Banquo. It wasn't the first pairing I'd shipped where one half murdered the other, and it absolutely would not be the last. I was obsessed with the scene where Macbeth strokes Banquo's face and kisses his hand just before arranging his death.
Number of words written: 8,505, across forty-one (very short) fics.

Snippet: I've got a few tiny scraps of incomplete fic scattered around from my fanfic100 attempt. Interesting to look at them again; it's been such a long time! Here's a snippet.

( ShakespeaRe-Told Macbeth unfinished snippet, circa 2005. )


Persona 5

Persona 5 was my first encounter with the Persona series, at the age of thirty-two. Scrolling through a sale of Japanese games on the PlayStation Store, I spotted it for £10 and thought I might as well try it out.

What I'd heard about the Persona games sounded daunting; they seemed very long and complicated, and I wasn't sure what they were really about. But it was the autumn of 2020 and the country was in and out of lockdown; there wasn't much else to do. If I was going to get into a hundred-hour JRPG, now was the time.

What a great decision. The Persona series has been incredibly valuable to me throughout the pandemic, constantly keeping me engaged in a restricted time. It has its flaws, but I love its characters; I love the emphasis it places on friendship; I love its strange blend of normal school life and fighting symbolic monsters in parallel universes. I've hugely enjoyed both playing and writing for these games.

(Here's an alarming statistic: I've spent over 500 hours playing Persona games since I discovered the series in September 2020. This means I have spent nearly 3% of the last two years playing Persona.

Honestly, I'm struggling to regret this. A substantial proportion of it was during lockdown, and I've had such a great time with this series. A worthy use of approximately one in every 33 hours.)

Favourite character: In the original Persona 5, it's probably Ryuji. He can be inconsistently written in a way I find frustrating, but I love how passionate he is and how openly he admires people; he just thinks all his friends are really cool! In Royal... God help me, but it might be Akechi, who was the party member I liked least in the original game. It turns out that, when you scratch his smug surface, you discover an angry disaster, and I've never been able to resist one of those.
Favourite pairing: Protagonist/Ryuji. Let me kiss him, you cowards! He's clearly in love with me; why can't I reciprocate?
Number of words written: 9,497, across five fics. Unusually, I've never written from the same Persona 5 character's perspective twice; I've got one fic from the protagonist's perspective, one from Ryuji's, one from Makoto's, one from Akechi's, and one that pings between various non-party confidants.

I don't think I have any unfinished Persona 5 snippets to include here! I've somehow managed to finish every Persona 5 fic I've ever started.

I picked up my neglected Final Fantasy X replay and finished it at last!

Even though I never actually played it at her house, I associate this game so strongly with visiting my grandmother when I was a teenager. I remember daydreaming about it in her garden.


( Spoilers for Final Fantasy X. )


I always spend hours getting Auron, Yuna and Rikku's ultimate weapons and training them up to do comical amounts of damage, complaining all the time about how tedious it is, and then I go all surprised-Pikachu when I kill all the final bosses in two hits. 'Grinding is a pain' and 'there's no challenge in the final fights' have exactly the same solution, but will I ever learn? Absolutely not.

You may or may not remember Old Fanfiction Book Club! Back in early 2019, I started rereading and annotating Rachel's Pokémon Journey, the first fic I ever posted, written between the ages of twelve and fourteen. It was never completed, but it got up to twenty-one chapters. However, I only annotated up to chapter fifteen.

This is because we're about to hit the point where thirteen-year-old me cheerfully mishandles a serious topic that adult me has very strong feelings about, and I'm not sure whether I'll be able to annotate without getting too personal.

Still, I've just reread zarla's Howl of a Growlithe, the fic that originally inspired twelve-year-old Riona to start writing this twenty years ago, and it's put me in a nostalgic mood. I've found myself thinking fondly back to Old Fanfiction Book Club. I had fun annotating this! I'm going to try to start it up again.

Just... be aware that this section of the fic is going to attempt to tackle a sensitive subject, and it's going to do it badly.

Fuller details, if anyone wants them in advance (highlight to read, just in case anyone's concerned about spoilers for Rachel's Pokémon Journey): there's an apparent suicide that later turns out to be murder.


Previously on Old Fanfiction Book Club: Rachel defeats Brock and meets a mysterious girl named Leena, who gives her a Dratini that apparently demanded to be brought to Rachel specifically. How this Dratini knows who Rachel is, or why it wanted her to own it, is never explained.

Original author's note on chapter sixteen: Yes, the reviewer chars are coming... starting in this chapter, actually. And the storyline is gonna get darker. Much darker.

I wrote the first fifteen chapters before I started posting them to fanfiction.net, so this is the first chapter I posted as soon as I wrote it, meaning I can pinpoint when it was written! Both of these chapters were written and posted in May 2002, so it's been some time since October 2000, when I first started writing this fic. I'm thirteen and cool now and that means I'm going to make things dark >:(


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


Original author's note for chapter seventeen: *grins* Another chapter for you people!


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


In the next instalment of Old Fanfiction Book Club: drama! emotions! Sparky's tragic backstory! suddenly I remember this is a Pokémon story and make someone catch a Pokémon!

Back in the year 2000, twelve-year-old Riona (or Mew, as she called herself at the time), bright-eyed and enthusiastic and fairly new to the Internet, created a genuinely terrible Pokémon website. Every page background was a mosaic of anime screenshots or tiny animated Pokémon GIFs, rendering any text completely illegible. My solution to this was to highlight all the text on the website in bright yellow. It was magnificently hideous.

I have seen my childhood website cited in multiple places as an example of bad website design.

People can be cruel, so you might think this negative attention would have led to flames, perhaps discouraging twelve-year-old Riona from having a visible presence on the Internet in the future. Fortunately, I misspelled my own e-mail address on every single page, so I never received any direct feedback on my website at all.

My terrible website lasted a lot longer than it had any right to, but eventually the hoster did take it down. I was too embarrassed to even glance at it for a long time, but earlier this year I dug into the Wayback Machine to salvage what I could find of it. I'm not the sort of historian who can just ignore the ugly aspects of my own history (although that may in part be because I'm not a historian at all).

Anyway! I didn't actually come here to drag my heartfelt childhood attempt at website creation; there's another reason I'm making this entry. Here's what I wrote on the website's update page in October of 2000 (although I was unhelpfully unspecific about the actual date; the entry is just dated 'still in October'):

Oh, and I've begun a fanfic called 'Rachel's Pokémon Journey'. My FIRST EVER Fanfic! 4 chapters are up already- go take a look!

It's now October of 2020, and that means I've been writing for twenty years! I've written over a million words of fiction in that time, and I've had a blast doing it.

What a great hobby. I don't know what I'd have done without it. I've found work that relies on skills I developed by writing fanfiction. I've made excellent friends through fandom (hi!). I've received so many lovely comments. I've improved my confidence. I've spent countless pleasant hours writing fun dialogue and/or psychologically devastating my favourite characters.

In good times, writing's fun. At times when I haven't been doing so well, it's helped me to keep my head up and keep going; my psychological wellbeing stands on a sea of broken fictional characters. Whatever my state of mind, it's always been a good way to spend my time.

I don't regret a moment I've spent writing, even if some of my early work is embarrassing to look back on now. If I hadn't written the Pokémon self-insert or the terrible Friends angst or the gratuitously dark Jak II fanfiction, I'd never have improved!

It's hard for me to express how glad I am that I picked up this habit twenty years ago. You may have had some questionable ideas about website design, twelve-year-old me, but I can't fault your decision to try out this fanfiction thing. (I'm also pleased with my younger self for being brave enough to start posting it online; I wouldn't have expected it of her!)

It seems appropriate to end this entry with the 'home' button I created for my childhood website. Please enjoy this genuine masterpiece of early-2000s graphic design by a twelve-year-old. I was very proud of this. (From the update page: 'I did a pretty big update to the Moving Pictures Section, and made a Home link button. See- there it is, down at the bottom! Isn't it CUTE?')

We finished our household rewatch of Community! It's still such a good show, and Jeff/Annie still has such a hold on my heart. Put a cynic and an idealist in the same room, have the cynic glance at the idealist with a little fond smile, and I will have an OTP for life.

I love Jeff Winger so much. Earlier in this rewatch, I said he might be 'ten favourite characters of all time' material; now that I've finished it, I have to wonder whether he's actually a candidate for my all-time favourite character from any medium. This charming, self-obsessed, intensely loving disaster of a human being, who wants to be a cool loner but is absolutely terrified of abandonment.


The 'rewatch comforting, familiar sitcoms' strategy seems to be a good one for coping with lockdown, so we're following Community with Red Dwarf!

Rimmer is, inevitably, my favourite Red Dwarf character. Put any cast in front of me and watch me make a beeline for the worst person in it.

Rimmer actually sort of reminds me of Scriabin, in some aspects. Angry and petty and insecure. Completely powerless, able to see and hear the world but unable to interact with it. Isolated; there are almost no people he can speak to, and he doesn't get along with them at all, but it would be worse to be alone.

The similarities particularly struck me in 'Bodyswap'. Psychologically needling Lister until he agrees to swap bodies, then abusing the chance!

If Rimmer and Scriabin ever somehow met, they would absolutely loathe each other.

Writing fanfiction about Scriabin recently has been a blast; I'd forgotten how much fun it is to write a character who's just the absolute goddamn worst at all times. I think Arnold Rimmer might be the first 'absolute goddamn worst' character I ever developed a fondness for; Red Dwarf is the first television series I remember enjoying, after all. I'm fairly sure I loved Red Dwarf before I loved Pokémon, even though a lot of the jokes probably went over my head when I was a kid.

The end of 'Terrorform' genuinely breaks my heart a little. Everyone being uncharacteristically nice to Rimmer helps to revive his long-dead sense of self-worth, and then he realises they were just doing it to save their skins and they really do think he's a git! I mean, to be fair, they think that because he is a git, but it's still slightly tragic.

Of course, even though Rimmer and Lister don't get along, there's still a strange intimacy between them. They're isolated together; they're each the other's only form of human contact. I was struck by Rimmer's genuine panic when he finds Lister unconscious in 'Confidence and Paranoia', and by Lister speaking at Rimmer's trial in 'Justice':

Kryten: Would you describe the accused as a friend?
Lister: No, I'd describe the accused as a git.
Kryten: Who would you say, then, is the person who thinks of him most fondly?
Lister: (pause) I do.

'Quarantine' is an extremely weird episode to watch in lockdown. When I first saw it, as a child, the idea of being isolated together for twelve whole weeks to prevent potential infection seemed ludicrous.

When I first saw 'Demons and Angels' as a child, meanwhile, it absolutely terrified me. Lister being remote-controlled into doing terrible things was really upsetting! I seem better able to handle it now, fortunately.

I'd thought Scrubs was the first sitcom I ever watched without audience laughter; I'd forgotten that series seven of Red Dwarf dropped the studio audience. At the time, it seemed like a bizarre decision. Looking back, I think series seven of Red Dwarf was ahead of its time. It still feels strangely silent when you've just blasted through the six series preceding it, though.

Also: not enough Rimmer. What a great, awful character.

My teenage efforts at Red Dwarf fanfiction have been lost forever, which is perhaps for the best, but maybe I should try writing some now.

WAIT, NO, I just managed to dig the Lister/Rimmer fic I wrote when I was fourteen out of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine! And it's SO BAD. It's so bad! It's awful! I can barely bring myself to look at it. But it's still a part of my writing history, so I'm glad I was able to rescue it.


...oh, wow. For easy backup purposes, I have a copy of every fic I've ever written stored in a single Word document that I occasionally e-mail to myself. I just pasted this recovered Red Dwarf fic into the master document, and the wordcount now stands at 1,000,319. I guess I've written over a million words of fiction!

It's a nice time to hit the 'million words' milestone, actually. I started writing fanfiction in October of 2000, so this year will be my twentieth anniversary.

Five hundred of those million words are the word 'blood' or 'bleeding'.

Congratulations to the Netherlands on their Eurovision win! It was a good song, although I'll admit my favourite was Norway's entry, with the couple and the incredible bald third wheel, which I keep dancing along to when there's no one else around.


'Doppelgangland' is a fun Buffy episode. I love Giles, Buffy and Xander grieving over Willow being turned, and then their reaction when they realise she's okay. I went 'aww' aloud when Giles hugged her.

I want to know which of the gang changed Vampire Willow's clothes.


On a whim, I've started rewatching Scrubs, which I haven't seen in at least a decade.

It's always weird to experience a canon when you're younger than the characters and then go back to it when you're older. I'm still not over going from 'Squall Leonhart is cool and grown-up and four years older than me' to 'Squall Leonhart is ONLY SEVENTEEN.' That's been on my mind with Life Is Strange 2, actually; it probably feels very different to people who are younger than Sean and not necessarily going 'oh, my God, this kid is sixteen and trying to raise his nine-year-old brother in the wilderness.'

So now I can look at JD and go 'no wonder this kid's so overwhelmed' rather than 'okay, JD's sort of a mess, but most people in their mid-twenties are adults who have their lives together, right? right???' (Spoiler: nobody's got their lives together.)

I'd completely forgotten that Carla and Elliot didn't get along at first!

JD and Turk's behaviour around women bothers me more nowadays, but I do like that JD, after concluding he's in the friendzone with Elliot, goes 'well, I guess I could do with more friends.'

One of the Ghostfacers from Supernatural is a patient in an early episode! (He does not survive it. Now he's a ghost, and he can face himself.)

Jordan responding to JD's attempt to assert himself with 'okay, well, now we're going to bang' and then turning out to be Cox's ex-wife is considerably more up my street now than it was when I first watched Scrubs.

Jordan: Even though you're terrified the good Dr Cox'll find out, if I wanted you to go to his apartment right now and have sex with me in front of him, you would.
JD: Please don't do that.

Look at this perfect fic concept that completely escaped my notice when I was seventeen!

I haven't reached 'My Screw Up' yet (I'm still early in the first season), but that episode was very formative for me. I played Silent Hill 2 when I was sixteen, I watched 'My Screw Up' when I was seventeen, and that was it; I'd been defined as a person. I've been writing about characters being guilt-ridden and delusional ever since.


While I'm talking about assorted television: I've now actually watched the final episode of Community at last! I watched up to the penultimate episode a few years ago and then just... never watched the finale, perhaps because then there would be no more Community, which is clearly an unacceptable state of affairs.

I wasn't that into seasons five or six, so I wasn't sure whether I'd actually enjoy the finale, but I liked it a lot! I think it was a good way to close out the show (and it had a nice scene for my inappropriate OTP, which I wasn't expecting!). Jeff and his fear of abandonment absolutely broke my heart.

Yesterday's fic put me over ten thousand words, so it's time for a 'my fandom history' writeup for Life Is Strange! (I do these for all of my major fandoms, which I define as 'fandoms for which I have written at least ten thousand words across at least three fics'.)

Maybe I should count Life Is Strange and Life Is Strange 2 as separate fandoms, as they have different stories and concern different characters. Neither game qualifies for a writeup, in that case. But I've decided I'm going to count them together; AO3 does, after all.


Life Is Strange

I generally keep an eye out for projects Square Enix is involved with, so I was aware of Life Is Strange when it first came out in 2015. I remember checking reactions on the Tumblr tag just after the first episode came out, wondering whether it would be worth investigating further. And then timydamonkey commented to say 'hey, I think you'd really enjoy Life Is Strange' some months later, so it stayed in the back of my mind.

In mid-2016, just after I turned twenty-eight, the first episode was made free across all platforms and I went, 'Well, I suppose I've got no excuse not to check it out now.'

So I played the first episode, and then I immediately bought the rest of the game. Something about it felt so compelling and nostalgic.

I enjoyed the first Life Is Strange a lot; it was a bit bleak sometimes and the dialogue could be awkward (I still haven't forgiven Max for the number of times she said 'wowser'), but there was still a warmth to it. I loved the character interactions, and the visual and musical style. And it was good to see a game that focused on relationships between women.

That said, I fell in love with Life Is Strange 2, immediately and passionately. It's a game about an emotionally compromised teenager on the run, trying to look after his younger brother! I love stories about siblings; I love stories about emotionally compromised teenagers; I love stories about people who bond when they're isolated from the world and thrown into adversity together. This game was made for me specifically. I loved the twenty-minute gameplay preview so much I bought the season pass without even trying out the first episode. No regrets.


Favourite character: I love Sean Diaz, this fucked-up kid who's trying so hard to be responsible but has no idea what he's doing. Sarcastic and bitter and wary and loving and vulnerable.
Favourite pairing: Ooh, hmm. Max/Chloe is simultaneously cute and a little fucked up, which is always good, but I think Rachel and Chloe might actually have more chemistry. Their dynamic is an interesting one, Rachel compelling and manipulative and dangerous, Chloe a little blinded by awe.
Number of words written: 11,700

Snippet: I didn't think I had any unfinished Life Is Strange ficsnippets, but, poking through notebooks, I've come across what appears to be an unposted snippet from Split, my fic where Max is torn between three universes. (This snippet is from the 'Max is trapped in a room with the villain' timeline and is therefore a bit unpleasant.)


( Life Is Strange unposted snippet, Max and [spoilers], 2016. )