Trabia Garden

In retrospect, my entry into the Metaphor: ReFantazio fandom may have been slightly disconcerting. I started out with two cute fics about the most popular pairing, so it's possible people were expecting my third offering to be another cute protagonist/Strohl fic, rather than 'all the party members have to bang in order to give each other superpowers'.

People who don't know me already, I mean. I don't imagine the unromantic everyone/everyone fic surprised anyone here.

(I got so excited when I thought up an excuse to get everyone to sleep together! I originally considered 'the protagonist has to sleep with everyone who joins the party', but then I realised that 'each party member has to sleep with the next person to join' had more potential for a fun variety of dynamics; it means nobody really has a chance to get used to it, and some of them are going to feel a lot more awkward about the prospect than others.)

Now that I think about it, I write about characters having unromantic sex pretty frequently! This year alone, I've written multiple fics about characters having sex for non-romantic reasons. Hold on; I'm going to tally these up. (None of these are very explicit.)

- Power Exchange (Metaphor: ReFantazio, everyone/everyone, having sex to transfer magical powers)
- New Experiences (Death Note, Light/Ryuk, having sex to prove you can)
- Above It All (Danganronpa, Togami/Kirigiri, having sex in an effort to gain the upper hand)
- Closing the Circle (If We Were Villains, Oliver/everyone, having sex with other people to distract yourself from the person you're in love with)
- One Lucky Resident (Scrubs, Cox/Elliot, having sex to get the idea out of your system)
- The Fourth Temper (Severance, Mark/Helly, having anonymous sex as part of a workplace ritual, NB consent issues)

Six??? Six fics about characters having sex for non-romantic reasons this year? Oh, wow, I write about this a lot more than I'd realised.

It might actually be seven. I'm not sure whether to count Regrets (Final Fantasy XVI, Clive/Joshua, NB incest); Joshua is genuinely attracted to Clive, but Clive only acquiesces out of a sense of obligation to him.

It's a fun concept, in any case! When two characters aren't actually attracted to each other, they're unlikely to end up in bed together organically, which is always an interesting challenge to overcome. I enjoy writing about characters having awkward and tense interactions, and forcing them to have an 'uhhhh, hey, I know this prospect probably hasn't crossed your mind, but we should have sex' conversation is a great source of those. I'd say 'I should write this sort of thing more often', but it turns out I already write this sort of thing a lot.

Here's a slightly scattered entry!


A couple of years ago, I wandered into a charity shop and picked up If We Were Villains by ML Rio. This book actually does have a little fandom, I discovered later, which is relatively unusual for novels! But I didn't know that at the time; I just bought it because it looked interesting.

I finally got around to reading If We Were Villains recently, and I was correct to suspect that this book was up my street. Like The Secret History, it's about a group of students with a weirdly intense relationship who end up murdering one of their own and then having to deal with the fallout. Is this a genre? This is the perfect genre.

The book definitely has its flaws. It feels unbearably pretentious at times, and so many of the bracketed parts would flow better without the brackets, and these stupid teenagers won't stop quoting Shakespeare in the middle of serious conversations! I'm sorry, but a character having a breakdown becomes hilarious if he insists on communicating his feelings exclusively through lines from King Lear.

But it delivered hard on my desire for a bunch of murderteens having worryingly intense feelings about each other. I sort of ship the lot of them, but particularly James and Oliver, about whom my feelings steadily progressed from 'huh, is there something going on here?' to 'surely there's something going on here? surely I'm not imagining this?? Oliver took off his shirt and James homoerotically smeared blood all over him???' to 'oh my God I need these two to kiss or I'll die'.

I've scribbled down a few snippets of fanfiction, but I don't know whether I'll actually get anywhere with them; I don't really have a solid direction in my head for a fic. I'd like to write something for this, though!


I've been playing Tales of Berseria lately! This is another canon it took me a while to get around to. I bought it back in 2020, in a sale of Japanese games. But, at the same time, I picked up a little game called Persona 5, and Tales of Berseria was promptly forgotten as I fell headlong into the Persona series.

Now that I'm actually playing Tales of Berseria, I have slightly conflicted feelings on it!

The 'a group of ruthless villains and the small child they're all intensely fond of' party dynamic is delightful. Excellent concept for a group of characters! They'd stab you through the heart without blinking, but any one of them would die for this kid who's never known compassion before.

But I think the poor animation really hurts the storytelling. The occasional anime-style cutscenes are great; the 2D skits with minimal animation are charming. The 3D cutscenes are unbearably stiff and awkward. Ultimately, it makes the game as a whole feel like a missed opportunity; I'm constantly conscious of how much stronger the story would feel with more care put into the animation.

If you're interested in videogame animation, incidentally, I strongly recommend the YouTube channel New Frame Plus, in which professional animator Dan Floyd analyses animation in videogames! In particular, I'm enjoying his ongoing series on the twelve principles of animation in games and the animation of Final Fantasy (I cannot wait for him to get up to Final Fantasy VIII).

I thought I wouldn't like Magilou at first. I really took against her outfit! But she's fun. Just there to be a shit to everyone and stir up chaos. She reminds me a little of Joshua Kiryu.


I keep some of my paintings propped up on my bookcase, and it recently occurred to me, looking at them, that I'd never actually shared one of those paintings here. Here it is! I painted this in early 2018, I think.




This was inspired by a piece of Assassin's Creed: Rogue concept art, which I'm going to link to rather than including in the actual post because my painting looks so bad next to it. (This, I suspect, is why I've never posted the painting before.) This is the problem with basing your painting on another painting; it's too easy to directly compare them!