Trabia Garden

pict demanded to know all my ambitious fic ideas, which reminded me of something I've been thinking about doing for a while: archiving the fic ideas I've been scribbling down in my diaries.

Every year, I buy the same style of diary, which has a couple of blank pages at the back. I've been using these blank pages to note down fic concepts since 2013. Some of these get written! Many of them don't.

If I type up the unwritten concepts, maybe one of them will inspire me? (Or indeed inspire someone else? Feel free to let me know if you're interested in writing any of these!) At the very least, they'll no longer be languishing in old diaries I rarely look back at.

These are sorted in alphabetical order by fandom; the notes under any particular fandom may contain spoilers for the canon. Some ideas are extremely vague; some are very specific. Crossovers are filed haphazardly under whichever fandom feels right in the moment. The tags on this entry should give you an idea of which fandoms are represented, if you're wondering whether anything you know is in here!


( A huge pile of unwritten fanfiction ideas. )


I'm not sure this exercise has actually sparked any inspiration, but it's good to have all these ideas in one place. If any of these would particularly interest you, let me know!

I doubt anyone remembers this, but I am working my way through a self-imposed challenge ('write a ficlet for each letter of the alphabet, each concerning two characters whose names begin with that letter') at a hilariously glacial pace. Previous instalments are here and here. I was joking when I said I'd have these finished in 2015; now I'm starting to wonder whether that prediction might have been a bit too optimistic.

Here are five more ficlets! I've only actually managed four more letters, but it's five ficlets because for some reason I wrote two for J. Fandoms represented are Uncharted, Tangled, Final Fantasy XII, Final Fantasy XIII, Super Dangan Ronpa 2, Free!, The Mentalist, Red Dead Redemption and Community.


( Same-letter alphabet ficsnippets: E, F, H, J and, er, J. )


According to the emerging pattern, I'll probably be posting the next instalment a year from now. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy these!

I spent today with reipan and Yuffie, two of my closest friends. We rewatched the first and third High School Musical films.

Oh, a making-fun-of-ridiculous-films session! I thought, when the idea of a High School Musical rewatch was proposed. This should be fun!

I had evidently forgotten that there is not a shred of irony in my love of High School Musical. I love those films in an absolutely sincere, wholehearted way. I love the characters. I love the songs. I love TROY AND GABRIELLA, HOW ARE THEY SO CUTE, IT'S OUTRAGEOUS. I started crying towards the end of the third film. I'm not even ashamed.

(Well, perhaps I'm slightly ashamed.)

We had a bit of a singalong when we knew the words (we knew the words, it turned out, to possibly too many of the songs), and I noticed that I always gravitated towards singing Troy's part when he featured in a song. I think I feel a sort of kinship with him because we both have enormous eyebrows.


Because evidently a High School Musical singalong wasn't ridiculous enough, we also accidentally watched (or rewatched, in my case) all six episodes of Free! to date. Afterwards:

Riona: I'm still trying to work out how I can write about Haru losing his virginity to a swimming pool.
Rei: I think he'd just lose his virginity in a swimming pool, but be thinking about the water the whole time.
Riona: Maybe that's the real reason Rin's so annoyed with him.

This is going into the 'UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES WRITE THIS' file, right next to 'the cast of High School Musical are locked down and instructed to kill each other in a Dangan Ronpa situation'. Even though I'm having ideas about the High School Musical/Dangan Ronpa crossover, no matter how hard I try not to. If you're not Sharpay, there's an obvious advantage to committing the first murder: everyone will assume that the murderer is Sharpay, so you've got a good chance of getting away with it. But I'm not going to write this, I swear.


Speaking of Free!: somehow I seem to end up 'shipping a new Haru pairing with every episode. This is an exaggeration, but not a large one. I think I'm now 'shipping Haru/Rin, Haru/Makoto, Haru/Kou and Haru/water. Haru/water beats all the others senseless, of course, but I still seem to be well on my way to 'shipping Haruka Nanase with everyone in the world, possibly including you.

I didn't think Haru/Makoto would ever really catch my interest - it just seemed too nice and functional - but the depth of Haru's concern for Makoto in episode six really touched me. And I'm fairly certain by this point that Makoto is at least slightly in love with Haru. Sorry, Makoto; you're going to have to compete with every body of water in Japan.

Everything about Free! is so, so incredibly stupid.

I sort of love it.

Oh, dear.

Free!, or 'the swimming anime', as it's often called, is - you'll never guess - an anime about swimming! Although saying it's 'about swimming' is slightly misleading, because it's really about swimming as a vehicle for enormous amounts of male shirtlessness. Free! is about swimming in the way in which porn films are about unprofessional pizza delivery services. It features some of the most shameless fanservice you will ever, ever see.

I'm not actually watching Free! to ogle - they're all a bit muscly for my tastes - which raises the question... what am I watching it for? It's not as if there's a rich, layered plot that just happens to feature five hot guys who spend eighty per cent of every episode half-naked; the premise of this anime is literally 'HOT GUYS IN SKIMPY SWIMSUITS', the end. Every motion of Rei's arse is lovingly animated, sometimes in close-up. This is not a subtle show.

But somehow it really makes me smile. There's something so unabashed and joyous about it.

(I couldn't stop laughing during the fourth episode, which featured an extended montage of the guys trying on swimsuits whilst Kou sat off to the side, going starry-eyed over their *~AMAZING BICEPS~*.)

I glanced at the fanfiction.net section for Free! today, just to see what sorts of things people were writing for it, and the first thing I saw was a second-person fic pairing the reader up with Haru. Normally, such things would make me roll my eyes; this time, I just shrugged and thought, Well, that makes sense. Free! might as well erect a giant flashing sign saying IT'S OKAY TO FANTASISE ABOUT THESE BOYS; I can't make myself begrudge its watchers that freedom.


There is something about Free! that puzzles me, and that thing is Rin. Rin used to be friends with our heroes, and then he disappeared for a few years, and when he returned he was a mysterious brooding arsehole with an intense 'destined rival' dynamic with the main character. By 'intense', you may suspect I mean 'homoerotic'; you would, of course, be correct. On paper, he seems like he would be a fan favourite.

And yet it doesn't work. Rin is dull. And I don't understand why. How did Free! manage to screw up the 'brooding arsehole destined rival' character? What is it about Rin that causes him to fail in that regard? What is he missing? I cannot work it out. Is it just that he seems to have been constructed with the aim of creating a fan favourite? Fandom does like to be contrary, after all.

Still, we're only four episodes in, so maybe Rin will become more interesting. We'll see!