Trabia Garden

I've seen a couple of you posting ways to reflect on the year that looked fun, and I'm going to steal them for this post!

Firstly, doreyg posted this entry about favourite characters from the year, both new discoveries and returning champions.

I'm going to do something similar; I'm going to take a quick look at the longstanding favourites who've particularly occupied my mind this year, and then I'm going to comb through my 'first impressions' tag and give my favourite character from each canon I first posted about in 2024. (If no favourite character comes to mind, I'll skip the canon.)


( My favourite characters of 2024. )


My favourites are disproportionately male, I note, but my favourites are also disproportionately the main character, so perhaps the issue here is that the main character is disproportionately male. I'm pretty easily won over; I often just end up liking the character I spend the most time getting to know!

And that's the end of the character rambling, but APPARENTLY I STILL HAVE MORE TO SAY.

walgesang posted an entry on the three canons that had the largest impact on him in 2024. Here are the three that had the largest impact on me!

Our household gave Severance a try back at the start of the year, and it's one of the most compelling shows I've ever watched. We were all silently riveted to the screen. The concept - what if, when you're at work, you can't remember anything of your life outside the office? - is fascinating, and it's executed so well. The second season is expected to come out early in 2025; I'm looking forward to it!

Omori was a real rollercoaster of a game! Sometimes it's charming and whimsical; sometimes it's unsettling; sometimes it fucked me up so badly I had trouble sleeping. It's hard to think of another canon that haunts me in quite the same way. I finished it in May and haven't stopped thinking about it since.

The Coffin of Andy and Leyley captivated me when I played it in November. It didn't have quite the same 'wow, this is really cleverly executed' factor as Severance and Omori; it just went 'hey, I know what you want' and dropped a catastrophically fucked-up sibling relationship into my lap. And, yes, it turns out that this is exactly what I want.

Honourable mention to Metaphor: ReFantazio: I loved the hell out of it, but I don't think I can say it really impacted me. I had a great time while I was playing it, but I don't expect it to linger with me in the way these three canons do.


There are six minutes of the year left, so I suspect this is going to be my last post of 2024. Happy new year! I look forward to discovering what fictional characters I'm going to be weird about in 2025.

Titles are something I've always struggled with when writing fanfiction. I thought I'd take a look back at the fics I've posted this year and note down exactly why I chose the titles I did.

What I'm hoping is that, if I force myself to think consciously about why I choose story titles, the process might become a little easier in future. And, hey, even if it doesn't help, it might be an interesting exercise.

In reverse chronological order, my fic titles for this year:


( Rambling about why I chose fic titles. )


I've kept an eye out for patterns during this title analysis exercise, and what I've deduced is that I like ironic titles and titles with dual meanings or dual relevance. And, er, absolute copout titles where I just grab the first half-relevant word I can think of.

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.

By popular demand, here's another entry on Metaphor: ReFantazio! (When I say 'popular demand', I mean that necrophilia told me to post this. It takes very little pressure to get me to talk about videogames.)

We're just about to leave Virga Island. No real plot spoilers below the cut, but you might want to avoid this entry if you don't want to know which characters have joined your party by this point.


( Notes on Metaphor: ReFantazio. )


I'm still absolutely loving this game. I hadn't even heard of it before the demo came out; it's been such a great surprise!

'Riona, relatively speaking, you're still extremely early in this game. You cannot start writing fanfiction already. You have no idea what you're doing.'

True! And yet here I am. I really want to get to grips with these characters, and writing fanfiction seems like the best way to do it!

I originally called the protagonist Kai (the name he has in my playthrough) while writing this, but, on learning his default name is Will, I've gone with that instead, just because it seems likely to be more comfortable for readers. Fortunately, very few English words contain the letter sequence 'kai'; you can find-and-replace the name Kai much more easily than the name, say, Mark, without the concern that you might accidentally change 'remarked' into 'reWilled'.


Title: Close Contact
Fandom: Metaphor: ReFantazio
Rating: G
Pairing: Strohl/protagonist (implied)
Wordcount: 1,000
Summary: “Will?” Strohl asks. “Room in the tub for two. Do you fancy a wash?”
Warnings: Mentions of canon-typical fantasy racism. No real spoilers, but this fic will make more sense if you've reached the point at which you obtain the gauntlet runner.


( Close Contact )

I've played a few hours of the demo for Metaphor: ReFantazio, which is basically mediaeval fantasy Persona, and unfortunately I love it. Looks like it might be time to sink a hundred hours into another Atlus game.

When the protagonist's dialogue options turned out to be voiced, I was so shocked that I paused and had to take a moment to recover. It's not what I expect from something so clearly rooted in the Persona series!

Hilariously, the background music is diegetic; your fairy companion is magically making music play in your head. Incredible. I also inexplicably find the battle music extremely funny; it's something about the singing!

This game immediately got its claws into me by introducing a mouthy, overconfident young man with a guilt complex and a desperate need to do what's right. 'Kind of a little shit' and 'fundamentally good-hearted' is a very hard combination for me to resist. And then he was nice to our protagonist when everyone else looked at us with suspicion! I immediately loved him and wanted to be his friend.

(To be honest, I've already checked whether I can romance Strohl. The answer: no, because this game has no romance system. I'm going to pretend I'm romancing him.)

At one point an army captain asked me about my skills, and the game presented me with a list of options. 'I can take a lot of punishment,' I replied. The captain's response was 'Really now? I'd not have guessed... Sounds like an invitation to me.'

I felt the game had looked straight at me and said, 'You intentionally made the protagonist say the horniest of the options, didn't you?' and, to be honest, it was right.


The rest of this entry will be a dream roundup!

( Dreams from September and October. )

A few nights ago, I dreamt there was a large, poisonous red and black frog on my bedroom wall, right next to the bed. I dreamt this so vividly that I had to turn on the light in real life to check whether it was really there. I don't usually get confused about whether my dreams are real; it was a very disconcerting experience!

For the benefit of anyone who's concerned: I have not been poisoned by a frog.