Trabia Garden

About a week ago, I posted an unfinished fanfiction meme to Tumblr, and I thought it might be fun to play here as well!

Name a canon you know I have at some point enjoyed, and I’ll dig up and post an excerpt from the unfinished fanfiction I’ve almost certainly got lying around. (If you name something I don’t have any unfinished fanfiction for, I may write a few lines on the spot. We’ll see!)

I’ve posted this before, many years ago, but don’t worry about avoiding canons that were requested back then; I’ll just try to dig up something else.

Here are the excerpts I posted in response to requests on Tumblr:


Cinder_Quill: For the fanfiction ask meme: any unfinished stories about DN Angel?

This was tricky! But I dug through an old notebook, and I managed to uncover a tiny paragraph. This was from a Kingdom Hearts/DN Angel crossover I have zero recollection of contemplating, in which Kingdom Hearts Riku is talking to Daisuke. Both Riku and Satoshi are self-loathing teenagers who are intensely in love with someone they feel they don’t deserve, and I have a lot of emotions about them.

“Maybe it’s not my place,” Riku says. He glances in Satoshi’s direction. “Or maybe I’m just… projecting or something. I don’t know. But I think you’re important to him.”


academicgangster: Ace Attorney for the unfinished fanfiction meme?

Here’s a snippet in which Apollo and Athena stay up working too late and end up accidentally falling asleep on each other.

( Ace Attorney unfinished snippet: Apollo and Athena. )


futuresoon: Danganronpa!

I took this to be a request spanning the entire Danganronpa series and dug up a little Danganronpa 2 snippet. Major Danganronpa 2 spoilers under the cut.

( Danganronpa 2 unfinished snippet: Hinata and Komaeda. )


wyomingsmustache: Okay so I know it's been well over a decade since you've written anything Top Gear related but I was showing my roommate an episode the other day and telling him stuff about my Top Gear fandom days so now I am curious if you've got any bits and pieces leftover from back when, so for the fanfiction meme, Top Gear? (And if you don't, completely understandable)

We’re really getting into the deep lore here. Here’s something… mildly weird and dark? By Top Gear standards, at least. Because apparently I decided I should write two crossovers between Top Gear and Silent Hill. But Silent Hill is in Wales, for some reason.

(I know the reason. It’s because this was also going to be a crossover with Torchwood. It’s probably for the best that it never got finished.)

( Top Gear unfinished snippet: the trio unknowingly approach Silent Hill. )


doreyg: Death Note for the unfinished fanfic meme!

I responded with a Death Note/Silent Hill snippet I’d previously posted on this journal. So it wouldn’t just be material I’d already posted elsewhere, though, I also uncovered a few lines from a notebook (a regular non-death notebook):

In another world, you might have been someone else. Nothing special, but enough. Light Yagami, an ordinary man with an ordinary life.

But this is the world you’re in, and you’ve become a god.


tweetymcbastardface: Waterloo Road. Do it.

I can’t believe anyone would do this to me.

( Waterloo Road unfinished snippet: Tom/Izzie/Lorna. )


And that’s all the unfinished fanfiction requests I received on Tumblr! Feel free to request a fandom in the comments here, and I’ll see if I have anything lying around for it, or, failing that, I’ll see if I can scribble something down.

A couple of people responded to my question about male love interests in videogames by saying they were having trouble thinking of games they'd played with female protagonists. So, in case anyone's interested, here's the list of games I've played in which the main playable character is female!

In cases where control is split between two or more characters, I've taken who's presented as the protagonist into account. Final Fantasy XIII, for example, has you controlling different characters at different times, but the protagonist is definitely Lightning, whereas, although you could argue that Sam is the main playable character of Until Dawn or that Mizuki is the main playable character of AI: The Somnium Files: nirvanA Initiative, those cases aren't clear-cut enough to be listed here. I haven't counted games in which you can choose the protagonist's gender; these are games that were specifically designed around a female main character.

I've listed these games in alphabetical order and included some brief notes about each one, in case anyone's wondering whether to pick any of these games up. I've put asterisks next to games I particularly enjoyed. (Which isn't to say I didn't enjoy the others; there's only one game on this list I'd actively advise against playing (spoiler: it's Beyond: Two Souls).)

I've also only included games I've played myself, not games I've experienced through Let's Plays or watching friends play them, which is why I've omitted Assassin's Creed: Liberation, Danganronpa Another Episode, Life Is Strange: Before the Storm, We Know the Devil and The Zodiac Trial. But then I changed my mind and included We Know the Devil anyway. You can't tell me what to do.


( Videogames I've played with female protagonists. )


I noticed while writing this how often I used the phrase 'young woman' in the game descriptions, so I took a moment to work out who the oldest protagonist in this list actually was. The results were slightly discouraging. By a long way, the oldest of these female protagonists is Chloe of Uncharted: Lost Legacy; I'm having trouble establishing her exact age, but I think she's around forty when the game takes place. I think second place goes to Red of Transistor, at the grand old age of twenty-seven.

My depiction of stopped time in this fic probably makes zero sense, but it's what you're getting.


Title: Snapshot
Fandom: Life Is Strange
Rating: 15
Wordcount: 2,100
Summary: Max stops time to save Kate. She can't get it started again.
Warnings: Attempted suicide.


( Snapshot )

I've been rewatching Gravity Falls, but TURNS OUT I NEVER FINISHED IT THE FIRST TIME AROUND, and I was not braced for that incredible, horrifying multi-part finale at all. What a fantastic ending.

The shift in the opening sequence for the finale is genuinely terrifying. I would have been so upset if I'd seen it as a child!

If you're curious, the normal opening (which is fairly unsettling and cool in itself) is here; the finale opening is here.

I love Dipper and Mabel. What good kids. Their relationship is incredibly endearing; they love each other so much!

There's a moment that hits me really hard, when a giant robot grabs one of them in each fist, and as they're lifted into the air they're not trying to fight against the robot; they're trying to hold on to each other. You can see it just after the 1.40 mark in this clip. Just a second of animation, but it says so much about these two.

Mabel is a delight, but Dipper's probably my favourite character: this awkward, anxious, selfconscious, soft-hearted kid who takes things too seriously and gets really excited about knowledge and would do anything for his sister and is struggling with a completely unattainable crush. He may be terrified, but he'll never back down if someone's in danger.

Although of course the actual best character is Waddles.

I was very touched when Mabel found herself trapped in a cycle of unwanted dates with Gideon, and Dipper saw how upset she was and offered to break up with Gideon on her behalf. He's an extremely good brother!

Stan's dynamic with Mabel is also pretty charming. It hadn't really struck me the first time I watched this show, but he's so fond of her.

I think Gravity Falls is one of the best shows I've ever watched. Not just one of the best children's cartoons. One of the best shows.

I sort of feel I should try to cross Gravity Falls over with Life Is Strange, just because they're both set in tiny Oregon towns where weird things happen. I'll... probably need more of a concept than that.

drawsaurus tagged me on Tumblr for a meme:

List your Top 5 Canon and Top 5 Non-Canon OTPs.

As the below was originally written for an audience that doesn’t read my Dreamwidth, it might occasionally restate things I’ve said in previous entries.


This is tough, actually! I ship pretty much everything on a low level; it’s hard to pin down the ships I have more intense feelings about.


CANON:

Nathan Drake/Elena Fisher (Uncharted)

These guys are so cute! They balance each other so well; they have such good chemistry! What a great adventure duo. When I saw I’d been tagged to do this meme, Nate/Elena was the first pairing that came to mind.

I love that Nate and Elena have fun together and they make fun of each other, but they also have moments when they’re vulnerable with each other. In particular, I love that Nate, the big action hero protagonist, is allowed to be vulnerable with Elena, and not just the other way around; Uncharted 3 is great for this.

The sequence in Uncharted 4 where Elena just mocks Nate’s videogame skills is my favourite part of the entire series. I would buy a full Elena Fisher Mocks You While You Play Videogames simulator in a heartbeat.


Jeff Winger/Annie Edison (Community)

The episode ‘Debate 109’ is the fastest I’ve ever gone from ‘I’ve never thought about this pairing’ to ‘I ship this with every fibre of my being’. Jeff Winger and Annie Edison have, by far, the most ridiculous chemistry I’ve ever seen in fiction. It’s absolutely absurd. He’s almost twice her age and I just can’t care!

I was not expecting them to kiss for real in the first-season finale, and I flipped out when it happened.


Mukuro Ikusaba/Makoto Naegi (Danganronpa)

THERE ARE CANONICAL IMPLICATIONS THAT SHE HAS A CRUSH ON HIM; I’M COUNTING THIS FOR THE CANON SECTION.

Danganronpa IF gave me a lot of feelings about Ikusaba/Naegi. I’ve got a huge weakness for redemption storylines, and Ikusaba sort of breaks my heart as a character who has the potential to be redeemed but never had the chance. I also tend to like pairing up cynics with the idealists who make them a little less cynical (other ships I have that fall into this pattern: Jeff/Annie, Sora/Riku, Satoshi/Daisuke, the Ninth Doctor/Rose Tyler), and Ikusaba/Naegi is a rare example of that dynamic with a female cynic.


Abby Griffin/Marcus Kane (The 100)

In the early episodes of The 100, I got into the habit of referring to Kane as ‘Councillor Dickface’. I was very confused, during the second series, to realise that Councillor Dickface had at some point become my favourite character.

A lot of the canonical pairings on The 100 follow the formula ‘they have a couple of scenes together with some contrived furtive glances and then they make out’, so Kane/Abby, where they had loads of scenes together and loads of chemistry and persistently didn’t make out, really stood out to me. Taking the time to build the dynamic up made a huge difference. I had such intense feelings when they finally kissed.

One of my favourite parts of the buildup: Abby kissed Kane just by the mouth! And I love kisses by the mouth; they create such a strange tension. They’re halfway between a kiss on the cheek and a kiss on the lips: too intimate to be considered normal, not quite intimate enough to be unambiguously romantic. I rewound to watch it seven times.


Chloe Price/Rachel Amber (Life Is Strange: Before the Storm)

One aspect of Life Is Strange I really love is its portrayal of very intense, slightly unhealthy relationships between psychologically damaged teenage girls. There’s genuine love between Chloe and Rachel, but there’s also manipulation, and things can get a little dark sometimes, a little frightening. Sometimes there are beautiful moments: sharing earbuds on a train and watching the scenery pass by, a kiss on an empty street at night. Sometimes Rachel drags you out of school while concealing her real intentions and ends up starting a forest fire while you watch in helpless alarm.

I love that the Chloe/Rachel pairing isn’t overly idealised or included in the game to titillate; they’re humans, sharing intense experiences, and it’s complicated and beautiful and painful and interesting. Chloe/Max is also great, but Chloe and Rachel make this list because their chemistry is slightly stronger in my eyes.


NON-CANON:

Mike Munroe/Sam Giddings (Until Dawn)

Do I ship these two just because they look like Nate and Elena? I’ll be honest: it’s probably a factor. I was so thrilled when the two of them met back up after their horrible experiences, and suddenly they weren’t alone in this terrifying situation any more. I love that they’re clearly not close friends when the game starts – they just happen to move in the same circles – but they bond so intensely and become such a strong team over the course of this terrible night.

If both Sam and Mike survive, the game ends on a shot of Mike clutching Sam’s arm like it’s the only thing keeping him anchored to the world, and I can’t get over it. It’s also possible for Mike to sacrifice himself to save Sam in the last few minutes of the game; he knows full well he’s going to die, but she’ll die if he doesn’t do anything, and he can’t let that happen.

I have a lot of feelings about these two, and I’ve always been sort of amazed they’re not a more popular pairing.


Mark Corrigan/Jeremy Usbourne (Peep Show)

I shouldn’t have actual feelings about these awful people, but somehow I do. These terrible, terrible men who incessantly ruin each other’s lives. They’ll never escape each other. They sort of hate each other, but they wouldn’t be able to survive apart. It’s the bond of knowing that someone else knows what an absolute mess of a person you are, knows all the worst aspects of you, and yet is somehow still willing to associate with you.


Patrick Jane/the entire CBI team (The Mentalist)

This may not technically be a pairing, but I’m listing it anyway. Jane is so casually flirty and tactile and intimate that I’m convinced he’s in love with everyone he works closely with: Lisbon, Van Pelt, Cho, Rigsby. (I love the episode where he buys all of them ludicrously expensive presents out of his blackjack winnings.) I also feel he’s in love with Hightower; it’s a shame she couldn’t be the boss for longer!

I really wanted to put this in the ‘canon’ section.


Noctis Lucis Caelum/Prompto Argentum (Final Fantasy XV)

I’ll happily ship all the FFXV boys with each other, but I’ve got a particular weakness for Noct/Prompto. Prompto falls intensely in love with anyone who’s even vaguely nice to him! There’s all the ‘I’m a commoner; he’s the prince’ insecurity! They’re both kind of useless with their emotions! Plus their interactions are just really, really cute.


Hajime Hinata/Nagito Komaeda (Danganronpa 2)

If I say I ship two characters, it could mean either ‘I genuinely think these characters would work together’ or ‘I think these characters would be a fascinating disaster, and I want to watch it all burn’. Hinata/Komaeda definitely falls into the ‘fascinating disaster’ category. I love that Komaeda adores Hinata (and all their classmates) and expresses that adoration by manipulating people into murder; he just wants to help everyone achieve their full potential! I love that Hinata is simultaneously repelled by Komaeda and sort of fascinated by him. Trying to keep Komaeda at arm’s length, trying not to think too much about him, never entirely succeeding.

(I’ve also got a soft spot for Hinata/Koizumi and Hinata/Kuzuryuu, which are slightly more functional.)


Honourable mention to Shay Cormac/Aveline de Grandpré (Assassin’s Creed Rogue/Assassin’s Creed Unity), which I considered, because I do ship it a lot, but decided against because the characters, er, aren’t from the same game and never meet in canon. I wrote a huge Sense8 AU for Assassin’s Creed once and accidentally landed myself with this stupid nonexistent pairing.

And I just remembered Arthur/Merlin! I need to stop thinking about ships, because I’m just going to come up with an endless number I regret not including.


If you're reading this and think it might be fun, I encourage you to steal this meme for your own journal! I'd love to see you talk about your ships.

Well, someone had to write this; it might as well be me!


Title: Torchbearers
Fandoms: Life Is Strange/Life Is Strange 2
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 2,616
Summary: Sean and Daniel meet Max and Chloe in Arcadia Bay.


( Torchbearers )

The dialogue of Life Is Strange comes in for a fair bit of mockery for being unnatural, and, to be honest, it's not undeserved ('Oh, man, are you cereal?' is one of the worst offenders). But it portrays young female friendship in a way that rings very true to me: perhaps truer than any other work of fiction I've consumed. During Farewell, the bonus episode about Max and Chloe when they were kids, I found myself quietly reminiscing about my friends from primary school. (It's harder to reflect nostalgically on my friends from secondary school because they're still my friends!) And I loved the original Life Is Strange showing the familiarity between Max and Joyce; you do often form a sort of relationship with the parents of your childhood friends, but for some reason that's not something I often see portrayed in fiction.

I cried a lot at the end of Farewell. Life Is Strange can be a bit emotionally manipulative sometimes, but I have to admit that it's very successful at manipulating my emotions.


The DN Angel manga is starting up again in May, apparently! Here come all my very intense feelings about Satoshi from when I was fifteen. For anyone who has not experienced DN Angel, it is a series about a boy who transforms into a legendary art thief as a metaphor for getting a boner and it is incredible.

I also picked up my long-neglected replay of Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance today. I didn't get very far (I love the game as a whole, but I'm currently at the Tron: Legacy world, which is a bit of a visual headache), but it was enough to remind me of my very intense feelings about Riku as well. It's a day for being emotional about self-loathing fictional boys I've loved for half my life!

They also, of course, have 'painfully in love with a spiky-haired optimist' in common. And 'having their bodies taken over by malevolent entities', come to think of it. Maybe I should write something in which Riku and Satoshi interact; they'd have so much to talk about!

Not that they'd actually talk about it, because they're both very private. Why must you make this so difficult for me to write, boys?

R and S are right next to each other, come to think of it! I missed a trick when I was writing ficsnippets pairing characters up in alphabetical order.

I recently found myself thinking 'maybe I should do alphabet ficsnippets where I combine canons in alphabetical order,' but my last set of alphabet ficsnippets took me four and a half years, and I have consumed a very limited number of canons beginning with the letter Q. I don't want to corner myself into writing a Pokémon/QWOP crossover.

I was thinking, 'Hmm, maybe I should get into a routine of doing a painting every Saturday,' and then I did a painting today because I didn't have the patience to wait until the weekend. help help I can't stop painting

Today's subject is Life Is Strange. To my credit, I did three entire paintings before trying to reproduce a videogame screenshot.









I tried to work a bit of blue into the sky and the sea, but there's absolutely no sign of it. I suspect I should have used the dark blue, rather than the light. Never mind.

Slightly concerned to realised that my sad little trees in this storm look much the same as my happy little trees in Bob Ross landscapes. I really need to step up my tree game.

I'm so confused by the fact that this is apparently a hobby of mine now! I've never done any form of visual art, unless you count 'editing Pokémon into Supernatural screenshots'. What other things do I not realise I'd love because I've never tried them? Show jumping? Boiler repair?

My housemate Ginger is now playing Until Dawn while Rei and I watch! I robbed myself of the opportunity to play this game unspoiled myself, so this is my vicarious first playthrough. We've only just finished the first chapter, so not much has actually happened yet.

It's been an absurdly warm day, or at least it's been absurdly warm for anyone who grew up in England, so there were a lot of envious noises at all the in-game snow. 'Lucky bastards. I mean, yes, they're probably about to die, but at least they'll die cold.'

The game really can't shut up about the butterfly effect in its first hour or so. We ended up cracking up at every mention of it, which slightly impaired the atmosphere.

Ginger commented that the butterfly shown in the opening ~ooh butterfly effect~ sequence has the same colouring as the butterfly representing Chloe in Life Is Strange. Chloe Price is behind the events of Until Dawn. It all makes sense now.

Ginger doesn't get along with the controls. 'It sort of makes me want to kill all of these characters, just as revenge on the game.' Please don't deliberately kill all the characters, Ginger.


Ginger finds the first totem (showing a glimpse of a possible future event in the game). I explain the concept:

Riona: So, if the totem shows you choking to death on a pie, you turn down the pie when it's offered to you later.
Rei: I'm not sure about that. I do really like pie.
Ginger: Are you willing to die for pie?
Rei: I am willing to chew very carefully.


Mike's intro screen: Intelligent. Driven. Persuasive.
Rei: Dick.

Ginger agrees. I'm not at all surprised that my housemates immediately decided Mike was a dick (I can't even say they're wrong), but I still hope in my heart that they'll warm up to him later on.

Stupid Mike. Of course the arsehole ended up being my favourite character. Not that this game is short of arseholes.

I hope you like it when I talk at excessive length about videogames, because it's that time again. Ginger, old friend and new housemate, is replaying Life Is Strange, and it's got me thinking about narrative choices.

In the last year, I've experienced three games - Life Is Strange, Until Dawn, Oxenfree - in which the gameplay consists almost solely of making choices. There's the occasional puzzle in Life Is Strange, there are QTEs in Until Dawn, but fundamentally these games are about the player making choices to shape the story.

In theory.

In practice, these games have a linear story to tell. You can't drag the game down wholly different paths, in the way a Choose Your Own Adventure novel might offer. There are a handful of variables, but every playthrough will hit more or less the same story points and end in more or less the same way. Even in Until Dawn, where the way you play determines who lives and who dies, it's not possible to kill everyone off in the first few hours and make the game go '???? roll credits, I guess?' - certain characters are guaranteed to survive long enough to steer you to a predetermined endpoint. Ginger is currently doing an arsehole run of Life Is Strange, making all the horrible decisions they avoided on previous playthroughs, and at moments it's painful to watch, but it's still much the same story I experienced on my own run.

I mentioned this to Ginger, and their response was something I wasn't expecting: they put forward a case for games like this following roughly the same path and ending in roughly the same way, regardless of player choice. I'd always just assumed that 'your choices have as much impact as possible on the narrative' was the ideal point for these games to reach, and the current 'your choices can change small aspects of the story without actually changing the story's direction' situation was a result of budgetary and time constraints. But Ginger pointed out the social aspect to playing games like this: when you've finished a chapter or a game, you'll want to discuss it and theorise with other people playing the same game. If your choices could make Life Is Strange branch off onto one of ten different paths, that wouldn't be possible; you'd go, 'Hey, wasn't it strange when Max drank from the magical fountain and became a unicorn?' and nobody else would be able to discuss it with you, because only 10% of players even come across the magical fountain.

Thinking about it, this applies to fanfiction as well. In total, I've written ten works of fanfiction for these three narrative choice games, most of them set post-ending. If I hadn't been able to go 'yes, I know that the reader's playthrough will have ended in roughly the same way as mine and therefore they'll be able to tell what's going on here,' I'd never have been able to write them. I feel 'we'd better make things easier for the fanfic writers' is possibly not that high on the list of game developers' priorities, but I'm still glad that I was able to create things inspired by these games.

Life Is Strange also has strong themes of memory and nostalgia, of beautiful fleeting moments, of returning to where you came from and realising you're no longer the person you used to be. Would it be possible to write a game with twenty different endings and make its themes feel coherent?

You could argue that a game shouldn't try to be a film, and, while the developers going 'we know the story we're telling here; you can nudge the tiller occasionally, but we're the ones steering' makes for a better narrative, 'the reins are entirely in your hands! go wild!' would make for a better game. But I think I've been persuaded that greater freedom of choice shouldn't necessarily be the goal of all choice-based narrative games. Maybe Life Is Strange isn't an example of a genre that needs to develop; maybe it's a genre that's exactly where it needs to be.

It could still be fun to have the occasional cinematic game where your choices really do shape the narrative. But, for the moment, with all the budgetary issues involved, that might have to remain the domain of visual novels.

I do think choice-based games could do with fewer endings that explicitly undo the effects of all your choices, though. If the entire game consisted of the player making decisions, don't render those decisions meaningless!