Trabia Garden

And still more Final Fantasy XIII!


( Final Fantasy XIII, Chapter Eleven (and the opening of Chapter Twelve). )


So, yes, the entire Chapter Twelve opening cutscene is amazing. I'm usually wary of things that are obviously gratuitously cool, but beyond a certain level of gratuitous coolness you have to get swept up in it.

Also:

Snow: (of the returning fal'Cie) Can't take a hint!
Lightning: You're one to talk.
Snow: ...huh?

I want a reluctant-buddy-cop series about these two.


* Then again, one of my friends looks enough like me to have been mistaken for me by an acquaintance of my father's. She was serving at the pub where said acquaintance was drinking; neither I nor my father was present at the time. He asked, 'You're [Riona's father's] daughter, aren't you?'; because of the weird coincidence of our being friends, she was able to say, 'No, but I know her.' It was a very odd thing to hear about later.

I'm a young woman on Livejournal. I see my friend's posted a series of adverts, so I check them out, and I'm laughing so hard I wreck your car.

Somehow.

Despite being in my room.

Why is your car in my room, anyway? That's just asking for trouble.


Here's a meme I haven't done in a while!

- Write a list of characters and number them.
- Input the number of characters into this random number generator as the maximum and generate two numbers.
- Ramble about how the corresponding pairing/partnership/general interaction would (or, indeed, wouldn't) work. Perhaps write a snippet/one-sentence fic for it if you're feeling brave.
- Repeat to your heart's content.

(Although I haven't actually done this meme in over a year, I've kept my numbered list and continued to add characters to it as new ones enter my awareness and my affection, hence frankly ridiculous numbers like 143 cropping up in here.)


( Represented below the cut: Peep Show, Pokémon, Just William, Glee, Silent Hill, Sherlock Holmes, Disney's Mulan, Supernatural, Kingdom Hearts, High School Musical, Waterloo Road, Fullmetal Alchemist and, erm, Arnold Schwarzenegger. )


Finally: have you always wanted to see strangely adorable zombie ultraviolence set to an upbeat Japanese pop song? zarla knows you have, and she has provided. (She's made an entry about it here, if you'd like to learn about some of the detail that went into it or leave her a comment.)

Okay, I officially have far too many half-finished fics lying around. I'm going to go through my 'Unfinished Fanfiction' folder and list what I have in there, so I can see at a glance what's on the to-write pile. If anything catches your fancy, feel free to ask about it or just verbally kick me until it's finished. Listed in descending order of present wordcount.


( The present contents of my 'Unfinished Fanfiction' folder. )


It seems I have fiction on the go for about twenty different fandoms. I think this is a sign that I officially have too many fandoms.

(Regarding the Peep Show/Harry Potter AU: I know I once said it was impossible to write Peep Show fanfiction with a pre-adulthood Mark Corrigan, but I have since changed my stance. Writing Peep Show fanfiction in which the principal characters are eleven really makes no difference to their personalities whatsoever, in the case of one because he was essentially born thirty and in the case of the other because he retains the mentality of an eleven-year-old for the next twenty-five years.)

What I've realised about my writing habits recently - and this is the reason behind a couple of the 'unlikely to be finished' notes - is that I find it easiest to motivate myself to write if I feel I'm writing something nobody will have done before. It's why I'm able to write canon-compliant stories for Peep Show, whilst my Kurt/Blaine fics for Glee are always bizarre AUs: there's barely any fanfiction for the former, so anything I write will be new, whereas with Kurt/Blaine, a popular pairing in a popular fandom, it's difficult to find a concept that hasn't already been written.

...also, er, this isn't in my Unfinished Fanfiction folder, but I just came across it in my notebook:

"Gotter Rattata," William said, proudly. "An' Henry's got a Weedle an' Douglas's got a Spearow an' Ginger's not got anythin' yet, so we're catchin' somethin' for him now."

Why - why did I start writing a Just William/Pokémon crossover?

Here's an attempt at a self-imposed writing challenge: alphabet ficsnippets! The first snippet contains one character whose name (first name, surname or nickname) begins with A and one whose name begins with B, the second a B and a C, the third a C and a D and so on until Z and A. (You're welcome to try it yourself, although this will obviously be easier for people who have eight million fandoms.)

Below the cut is the first half of my crack at this challenge: A/B to M/N. Fandoms represented are Pokémon, Supernatural, Blackadder, The Mentalist, Phineas and Ferb, Doctor Who, High School Musical, Fullmetal Alchemist, Final Fantasy V, Final Fantasy VIII, Merlin, Life on Mars, Katawa Shoujo, Sherlock Holmes (Conan Doyle version), Avatar: The Last Airbender, Top Gear, Jak and Daxter, Death Note, Harry Potter, Peep Show, Shakespeare's Othello and zarla and jazaaboo's Left 4 Dead OC survivorverse.

There is a possibility that I have too many fandoms.


( Alphabet ficlets, A to M )


It's only been a couple of months since I last wrote something, but I still feel oddly rusty. I hope you enjoy these, anyway!

A couple of nights ago, I dreamt that I was being attacked by flying daggers in Middle-earth because I had slept with Nick Clegg.

I just thought you should know.

(I mean, I should clarify, that my sleeping with Nick Clegg resulted in the attack in the dream-world, not that sleeping with Nick Clegg in real life caused the dream.)


A few months ago, I made an entry about zarla's original characters for the Left 4 Dead games, female versions of the Smoker and Hunter zombie types; I'd never played the games in question, but I had fallen in love with these characters. Since then, she's drawn a lot more about them; you can find it on her Left 4 Dead tag or on this page, although that hasn't yet been updated with this entry, which brings in jazaaboo's OCs, female Charger and Jockey. I was afraid I might resent Charger and Jockey for getting in the way of the Hunter-Smoker dynamic, but it turns out that I love them as well. Hooray!

I've started thinking 'in the world of Pokémon, Smoker would be perpetually followed by a Koffing or two' or 'ooh, what would their Hogwarts houses be?', and then getting annoyed because they are original characters and as such do not have a real fandom.

BUT I'M GOING TO TREAT THEM LIKE A FANDOM ANYWAY.

Hunter is absolutely-no-question in Gryffindor. I think Charger might be a Gryffindor as well. Jockey is probably in Hufflepuff. Smoker is a bit trickier than the others; maybe, maybe a Ravenclaw? Or perhaps she turns out to be a Squib and becomes the caretaker, BECAUSE OBVIOUSLY ALL SQUIBS BECOME THE HOGWARTS CARETAKER, THIS IS CLEARLY THE RULE, smoking in the corridors and resenting the students, until Hunter befriends her. Ooh, this could explain why Smoker is still at Hogwarts when Hunter is there, because she's a bit older than Hunter. Although it doesn't really explain the presence of Charger. Perhaps Charger could be the Care of Magical Creatures teacher?

I'm thinking far too much about this. THIS ISN'T EVEN A REAL FANDOM.


In slightly less obscure news, th_esaurus has pointed me towards this incredibly gorgeous map of the TARDIS. Take a look!

Something that struck me whilst playing Shadow of the Colossus: A COLOSSUS'S FIST if you call Agro whilst fighting a Colossus, Wander's cry is much more urgent than it is when you call her in a Colossusless situation. It's a tiny detail, but a rather nice one.

Also, if you're not holding a weapon and press Circle whilst riding Agro, Wander will pat her neck. It is sort of adorable.


The eleventh Colossus is so tiny I am not sure it really counts as a Colossus! Many months ago, I dreamt that I was fighting a 'Colossus' of about the size of a cow and was amused when I woke up by how thoroughly my subconscious had missed the point of a 'Colossus'; I hadn't realised it was foreshadowing.

Then I fell off a waterfall twice on my journey to the twelfth. It was embarrassing and rather horrible. Struggling helplessly against the current! I'm sorry, Wander.


After defeating the twelfth Colossus, I managed to swing the camera at such an angle that it gave me a close-up of Wander, and then paused, puzzled, when I noticed that he appeared to have black veins on his face. Had those always been there? He seemed quite young; it struck me as an unusual character feature.

Then I read up to where I was in twilit_wanderer's gamelogs and realised that she'd been commenting on the weirdness of Wander's appearance for some time; I'd kept thinking, 'hmmm, I didn't notice anything, but I'll check that out the next time I play,' and then completely forgetting.

So I reloaded the game, steered Wander into a corner so the camera could have a good look at him, looked up an image from the opening for comparison, and, no, I'm not imagining things. His hands and face and neck are veiny; his clothes are dirty and tattered; his hair is matted and almost black (it was red when the game began). With every colossus Wander kills, his appearance deteriorates just a little more. His girlfriend, meanwhile, is looking far more vibrant than she used to.

I think this is basically the awesomest thing in the world. It's horribly unsettling, of course, but it's such detail in such a minimalist game. I'm trying to think of another character whose appearance gradually evolves over the course of the game, and the closest I can come up with is Seifer's trenchcoat becoming tattered in Final Fantasy VIII.

(I was terrified that one of the effects of Wander's slow transformation was that he NO LONGER AFFECTIONATELY PATTED AGRO WHEN HE DIDN'T HAVE A WEAPON EQUIPPED, OH NO, but then I realised he just didn't pat her when she was actually moving. Thank goodness. Wander's love for Agro is so true, and I would be immensely distressed were he to stop caring about her.)


On the subject of awesome details in videogames: I've never played Left 4 Dead, a zombie apocalypse first-person shooter, but I've looked at screencaps, and this made me laugh really hard. Even in a world of immense danger and no Internet, you can't escape anonymous trolling.

(image source: cowgirlmaxwell's comment in zarla's L4D picspam (fascinating, but beware of many, many, many large images).)