Trabia Garden

Here's the third instalment of these fandom questions from trobadora!

A pairing – platonic, romantic or sexual – that you initially didn’t consider, but someone changed your mind.

I'd never thought about Kirigiri/Togami before, but doreyg opened my eyes to the ways in which the characters echo Light and L, and that was all I could think about on my next Danganronpa playthrough. Before I knew it, I'd written a fic.

What was the first thing you ever contributed to a fandom?

A genuinely terrible Pokémon website, which I have since seen cited in multiple places as an example of bad website design. The first fic I contributed was Rachel's Pokémon Journey, a thinly veiled self-insert I started writing at the age of twelve; you can find an annotated version in my Old Fanfiction Book Club tag.

Do you remember your first OTP? Who was in it?

The first pairing I shipped was Squall/Zell from Final Fantasy VIII. The first pairing I got really invested in was probably James/Mary from Silent Hill 2, which absolutely broke my heart, although Satoshi/Daisuke from DN Angel might also be a candidate; I definitely shipped Satoshi/Daisuke earlier, but I can't remember quite how invested I was. The first pairing I wrote fanfiction for in large quantities, rather than just a fic or two, was the Ninth Doctor/Rose Tyler from Doctor Who.

What is your favourite source text for fandom stuff (e.g. TV shows, movies, books, anime, Western animation, etc.)?

Videogames! Most videogames contain a lot of detail that isn't strictly plot-relevant and let you personally explore the setting, meaning you can get to know the world very intimately. They also tend to be long, so you have plenty of time to get to know the characters. And the popularity of Let's Plays on platforms where it's easy to skip to a specific timestamp, such as YouTube, means it's often easier to double-check a canon detail in a game than in, say, a TV show.

All of this means that, when writing for videogames, I'll usually have a strong grasp of the required elements, and there's plenty of scope for fanfiction ideas. I've written about 1.25 million words of fanfiction in total, and over half of it is for videogames.

How many fandoms have you written for? How many have you been in, and how many are you still in?

Oh, God. The exact number depends on how you count, but I've definitely written for slightly over a hundred fandoms.

How many I've been in is trickier. Going by the 'five fics, or 10,000 words across three fics' criteria I use for 'my fandom history' writeups, I've been in about forty fandoms.

If we take 'being in a fandom' to mean 'belonging to and actively participating in spaces dedicated to discussion of a particular fandom', things narrow further: Pokémon, Final Fantasy, Red Dwarf, Jak and Daxter, Silent Hill, Doctor Who, Scrubs, Top Gear, Glee, British comedy RPF, Derren Brown RPF, Assassin's Creed (sort of; the fandom space in question was a series of Google Docs in which two fellow fans and I enthusiastically plotted out a lengthy cowritten AU), Life Is Strange, Your Turn to Die, Lost, The Quarry, Death Note and, weirdly, Lord of the Rings, a canon I enjoyed but have never actually been that into. And, uh, I went to a Supernatural convention, so that probably counts.

How many am I still in? I'm not actively in a community for any specific single fandom at the moment, but there are plenty of canons I still talk about and occasionally write about, and I'm always just a rewatch or replay away from flooding your reading page with rambling about something I haven't thought about in years. I am still in all and none of my fandoms.

Has social media caused you to stop liking any fandoms, if so, which and why?

The author's social media has severely complicated my feelings about Harry Potter.

For the most part, social media doesn't usually harm my feelings about a canon. If I don't like what I'm seeing from fans on social media, I'll just seek out fans whose approach I prefer.

What fandom broke your heart?

Oh, dear. That would, of course, be Linkin Park. The lead singer died right when I was at the peak of fannish obsession, and I, er, didn't handle it very well. On reflection, I think my subsequent year-long mental breakdown would probably have happened sooner or later anyway, but that's what ended up breaking the dam.

Linkin Park recently reformed with a new singer, which I was excited to see! I think going with a female singer is a smart choice; any male singer would inevitably be compared to Chester constantly, whereas welcoming a woman to the band makes it clear that they're doing something new, rather than trying to replace him. Their new single, 'The Emptiness Machine', is pretty cool.

Say something genuinely nice about a character who isn’t one of your faves. (Characters you’re neutral about are fair game, as are characters you dislike or even loathe.)

I'm going to stick specifically to characters I dislike so much I wish they weren't in the canon at all, which makes this a challenge!

I like the way that, after his time in prison, Sam Drake of Uncharted is a little out of step with modern technology; that's a fun little detail.

Pierce of Community has a few good lines; 'If it's so serious, why don't they call it meningitis?' really got me.

Teddie of Persona 4, er. Oh, God, I can't do it. I'm so sorry.

Probably one instalment of these questions to go!

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.

The official Deltarune Spamton Sweepstakes page is absolutely fascinating. It makes me so nostalgic for the Internet around the turn of the millennium, when there were countless maze-like personal websites filled with spinning GIFs and music files and weird little secrets.

The Internet's a lot more polished these days; it's easier to avoid viruses, and to find what you're looking for. But it's so much less fun and less personal, now that everything's commercialised and clustered onto a handful of sites.

I'm so programmed not to click on banner ads; it took real effort to tell myself 'no, the banner ads are part of this, there's obviously going to be more Deltarune content behind them, you should click on them.'

I love the entries you can uncover from Noelle's blog (and that she's a Livejournal/Dreamwidth-style blogger!). The stories of being unsettled by game glitches or assigning a weird significance to them; I was like that as a kid. My brother and I would obsess over glitches in the Sonic the Hedgehog Master System games and try to uncover the secrets behind them. There were no secrets; they were just glitches. But we were convinced there had to be some hidden meaning, some secret room they were pointing to, something for us to find.

There's something so magical about videogames when you're a kid, before you really grasp that everything in there was intentionally programmed in, and there's only so much they can feasibly contain. There were whole unfathomable worlds in those discs and cartridges.

As an adult playing Final Fantasy VIII, when Squall falls asleep and you start playing as Laguna, it's a weird event, but you accept that it's just part of the story. As a kid, I thought something had gone wrong; I thought the game had decided to make me someone else by itself; I was afraid of saving in case I never went back to playing as Squall. The game could have done anything; the story could have gone anywhere.

Anyway, going back to the sweepstakes! Although I love the videogame tales, my favourite of Noelle's blog entries isn't videogame-related; it's this entry about Kris.

Kris and Noelle's relationship is absolutely fascinating to me, and it becomes more so with everything we learn about it. Their strange childhood friendship that it doesn't seem Noelle's ever known how to interpret. The unkind pranks Kris plays, the odd sense of distance and loss between them. And then Snowgrave.

I don't know when we'll get to play more Deltarune, but I can't wait to find out more about what's going on. I've got so many questions about that game and just how deep its shadows go. In a way, perhaps it's managed to capture a little of the unknowable magic of games when I was a kid.

A friend of mine expressed confusion over the acronym TFW today, which got me thinking about Internet acronyms and how intuitive they are. This is something that really interests me. TBH ('to be honest') is easy; I suspect that most people manage to work that out from seeing it a couple of times in context. TFW is impossible unless you've already seen the phrase 'that feel when' in the wild. I'm still not sure whether SMH is supposed to be 'shaking my head' or 'so much hate'; either works in the contexts in which it's used. In the case of GPOY, you can't really intuit either what it stands for ('gratuitous picture of yourself') or what the phrase it stands for actually means (usually 'this isn't actually a picture of me and may not even be a picture, but in some way it reminds me of myself (not of you, despite the "yourself" in the acronym)').

When I first started using the Internet, around the turn of the millennium, the only mysterious acronyms I remember encountering are LOL (and its variants), WTF and, unfortunately, A/S/L (not to be confused with American Sign Language). I'm pretty sure I had to look up or be told what LOL meant; I wonder whether I'd have been able to intuit it if I'd been older. Might have been tough, because it's often used on its own, whereas things like TBH get more context from the sentences they're in.

I didn't even realise WTF was an acronym. I thought it was just a confused noise. I pronounced it 'wuhtuf'.

Anyway, doing a bit of investigation into the history of online acronyms, I came across this online newsletter from 1989, which includes (on page 11) a list of emoticons and acronyms apparently in use at the time. Some of these acronyms, like BTW and LOL, are very familiar! Some, like OLM ('On Line Message') and H ('Huh?'), are less so.

It particularly strikes me that :O apparently means 'shout/yawn' and they've gone with the extremely ineffective 8) to represent surprise. For some reason there are also a lot of cup/mug/glass representations I've never seen in use; had they died out by the time I started using the Internet, or were they just not used in the largely Pokémon-related circles I moved in?

Come to think of it, I can't actually remember when I started seeing smilies on the Internet. Were they widespread when I first got online, or were they confined to certain communities? Oh, wait, people were using ^_^! That's right: I saw ^_^ a lot in my early days on the Internet, and :) only came along later. Or at least it did from my perspective, because apparently it was being used in 1989.

^_^ is from Japan, to my knowledge (it might just be Japanese-influenced), so it makes sense that I saw it a lot in my early fandoms (Pokémon and Final Fantasy). But I seem to recall seeing it in Lord of the Rings fandom as well. Was it big in fandom in general, and only later displaced by sideways smilies? I feel I saw a similar move away from Japanese influences in the terminology shift from 'shounen-ai'/'yaoi' to 'slash', but it's entirely possible that shift never happened; maybe it's an illusion that I only saw because I started getting into more UK/US fandoms.

Going back to the 1989 newsletter, I enjoyed 'For some reason, the ICONS in a past Fido Newsletter, were not the icons I have seen in use the past several years!!! Where did the nose come from?' Apparently the noseless/nosed smiley debate is almost as old as I am!


Entirely unrelatedly, I recently saw a dreamcatcher and had a sudden flashback to my childhood. I had a dreamcatcher in my room, and people who slept in there complained of bad dreams, so my mum concluded the dreamcatcher was evil and she set fire to it, stamped on it and threw it in the Thames.

Apparently, zarla's Pokémon website, Neglected Pokémon Lovers Unite!, had its tenth anniversary a few days ago!

'What?' you may ask. 'You've never mentioned this website before. Is it important?'

You probably weren't actually asking that, but I am going to tell you anyway. It is important. It is so important.

There are two specific writers I can pick out as huge inspiring influences in my personal fannish development. thebaconfat is one; back in 2003, her Final Fantasy VIII fanfiction made me aware of how vastly inferior my writing was, and my aspirations to reach her level led (I hope) to a great improvement over a period of years.

Before that, zarla was the reason I began writing fanfiction in the first place. ( More rambling about Zarla's early Pokémon fanfiction and my childhood. Probably not terribly interesting. )


Anyway, this anniversary has put me in a hugely nostalgic mood, and so I would like you all to share your stories of early fandom life. Here are mine:

- Prior to discovering fandom, my primary Internet activity was searching for Anti-Pokémon websites and writing stories about the website creators being attacked by Pokémon on their guestbooks.

THAT'S RIGHT: WHEN I DISCOVERED THE INTERNET, THE FIRST THING FOR WHICH I USED IT WAS BEING A TROLL. I am not proud of this.

- Nor am I proud of the first work of fanfiction I ever posted to fanfiction.net, an entirely directionless Pokémon-journey fic that reached twenty thousand words before I took it down in shame, asked for character submissions from reviewers and opened with the author's note 'Heya! ^_^ I'm Riona, a new author, and this is my FIRST EVER FICCY!' Oh, past self.

- My first fandom was Pokémon, obviously. The earliest work of fanfiction I remember reading - not the first I read, certainly, but one that lodged in my memory because it upset me so much - was one in which Ash committed suicide. That's right. Ash Ketchum. Ash Ketchum killed himself. This is the sort of thing I was reading when I was eleven, apparently. I have a very clear memory of Misty and Brock later seeing Pikachu apparently playing with someone who wasn't there. Little Riona (or 'Mew', as she called herself back then) found all of this most distressing.

- I am fairly certain that one of the first stories I read on fanfiction.net (earlier I had been using Pokémon fansites for my fanfiction needs), and possibly the first m/m story I ever read, was a vaguely written Legend of Dragoon fic in which Lloyd raped Dart in a public lavatory. I was probably thirteen. I did not know that this was what the story contained when I clicked on the link, and I was mildly perplexed. (Again, it was zarla's writing that was responsible for my later developing an active interest in slash and eventually writing it myself.) (EDIT: Thinking about timelines, I don't think it can have been the first slashfic I read; I discovered the NPLU before I played Legend of Dragoon! But it was certainly the first noncon fic I read, and I think it was also the first fic I read that involved on-page sex.)


So! Do you remember how you got into fandom? Do you remember the bizarre early things you read or wrote, the mistakes you made, the most amazing fanfiction in the world when you were ten? Who were the authors whose writing shaped yours? It is nostalgia time.