Trabia Garden

Here's my final instalment of questions from this fandom question meme!

Name a character that you’d like to have for a friend.

Being a weird fandom person, I tend to get along well with other weird fandom people, so Charlie Bradbury of Supernatural or an older Futaba Sakura of Persona 5 would probably fit comfortably into my social circle.

I think I could get along with Elena Fisher of Uncharted. I don't know if we'd be close friends, necessarily; we might not have enough in common to find a foothold! But I can see us talking whenever we happen to cross paths at events held by mutual friends. I'd probably be troubled if I ever learnt how many people she and her partner have killed, though.

Your rarest fandoms.

I've been in a lot of tiny fandoms over the years! Exit/Corners, Forgotton Anne, Zanki Zero: Last Beginning, Derren Brown RPF, that weird time I became fixated on the idea of RPF for The Real Hustle.

I think the most impressive and puzzling example was the time I wrote over forty ficlets for the BBC ShakespeaRe-Told modern-day adaptation of Macbeth, set in a restaurant and tragically not called MacChef. Literally nobody else was in this fandom. But I was going to write forty ficlets for it anyway.

A fandom you’ve abandoned and why.

I loved the Harry Potter books. I grew up alongside them. That fondness for the characters and the world is still there, but I don't really talk about Harry Potter any more, because the author has dedicated herself to hurting people in a way that's given the canon painful associations.

Do you have any hard and fast headcanons that you will die defending?

I don't know if I've quite interpreted 'headcanon' correctly, but here are some character interpretations I will stand by with complete certainty, even if they may not be outright stated in the text.

Danganronpa V3: Shuichi 'I shouldn't be talking about another boy like that' Saihara is bisexual and I will fight anyone who tries to claim otherwise. I'm looking at you, Reddit.

Death Note: Light genuinely loves his family. He doesn't have a lot of room in his heart for other people, I'll admit! And he likes to pretend he's above being swayed by emotion, so he tells himself that the choices he makes to protect his family are motivated by practicality, rather than love. But he does love his family.

On a related note: Light is constantly lying to himself about his own motivations. A lot of the fandom just takes his claims at face value! 'Oh, Light makes a smart and considered decision to let L know he has access to police information, so L will get closer to him and therefore become easier to kill.' No! Light makes an impulsive decision to give that information away as a 'fuck you' to L, and then he persuades himself that it was a very smart move in their chess game.

To be fair to the fandom, Light is very persuasive! But he cannot be trusted, even in his internal monologue.

A trope which you are virtually certain to love in any fandom.

Weird memory bullshit. Characters being unable to trust their own perception of reality. Characters being trapped or otherwise isolated together. It's no wonder I took so strongly to Lost and Severance.

A trope which you are virtually certain to hate in any fandom.

I like kids well enough in real life, but I tend not to enjoy fanfiction about characters having children, or being deaged to children. One of my cowriters on the Visitorverse really enjoyed writing about kids, so we ended up arranging trades: I'd get to throw in my weird ships she wasn't a big fan of if she got to write about the resulting offspring.

Have you ever tried to write for a fandom or ship, and found you couldn’t?

Jeff/Annie from Community is one of my favourite pairings, but I find it really challenging to write for. Their chemistry is off the charts! But I struggle to envision either of them actually making a move.

I enjoyed Homestuck, but I've never written for it because, let's be honest, it is far too confusing to get a foothold. Umineko is tricky for similar reasons.

Name three things you wish you saw more or in your fandoms.

More people who are openly willing to ship things that are kind of messed up! In recent years, I've noticed that shippers of controversial pairings often end up being driven into private Discords (sometimes with definitions of 'controversial' as mild as 'there's an age gap' or 'this character is seventeen and would therefore be under the age of consent if they were Californian, which they aren't'), which is a shame. We should be out there in the world; it's good for the ecosystem! I know it's easier said than done, though, especially for younger fans who run the risk of being ostracised by their peers or even their friends, whereas older fans are much less likely to feel that depicting unhealthy relationships in fiction is somehow an immoral act.

I would love to see more Dreamwidth/LJ-style commentfic promptfests in pretty much every fandom. I love low-pressure events with no obligations or signups; all you do is show up, look around and see whether any of the prompts inspire you.

And, finally, more discussion on Dreamwidth! It's always such a thrill when I see a post on my reading page about something I enjoy.

On 3 August 2003, at the age of fifteen, I created a Livejournal under the name rionaleonhart.

I moved to Dreamwidth along the way, but I imported all my entries, so this Dreamwidth is functionally the same journal, and I still keep the lights on at Livejournal in case any old friends come by. So I've been keeping the same blog for two decades, from my teenage years well into adulthood.

It's hard to know what to say for this anniversary, really! This journal's been an important part of my life for so long, and I'm so glad that there's still a place for long-form blogging in a forgotten corner of the changing Internet. I've had a blast rambling about anything and everything over the years, and it's been great to share it with you guys.

I'm glad to know the people who've been here from the beginning; I'm glad to know my new friends; I'm glad to know everyone I've met along the way. I don't know if I have any lurkers, but, if I do, I'm glad you're here as well.

Thank you all for being here. I hope I'll still be here and writing in another twenty years.

(My AO3 account also had its tenth anniversary in January. Something about years ending in 3 makes me want to establish long-lasting fandom presences, apparently.)

If there's anything you've ever wanted to know about my presence on Livejournal or Dreamwidth, or about my fandom life in general, or about my ficwriting, feel free to ask in the comments!

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.

I'll be honest: technically, The Quarry doesn't qualify. My three fics for it add up to 9,830 words. But that's so close to ten thousand that I caught myself thinking 'hey, I could write a "my fandom history" post for this if I added another couple of hundred words to this fic' when I was wrapping up Tooth and Claw.

I don't want to start artificially inflating the length of my fics; it's silly to potentially reduce the quality of my fanfiction just so I get to ramble about the fandom on Dreamwidth! So I'm going to allow myself a little flexibility on rambling.

(EDIT: As of Burning, I'm at 13,820 words for The Quarry and this writeup becomes legitimate!)


The Quarry

I have an intense love-hate relationship with Supermassive's horror games. They do such interesting things with choices and consequences! They're so good if you enjoy stories about a bunch of people going through traumatic experiences together! They absolutely scare the crap out of me.

I experienced The Quarry at the age of thirty-four. When it was announced as a spiritual successor to Until Dawn, I was deeply intrigued. I ended up watching a Let's Play of The Quarry rather than playing it myself, having learnt from experience that I find playing Supermassive games unbearably stressful, but I enjoyed it a lot; it was visually stunning and definitely delivered on its promise of traumatising a load of characters.

Two of those characters, Travis and Laura, had a deeply intriguing and weird dynamic. Partway through the game, I checked AO3 to see what fanfiction people were writing about The Quarry, and I was surprised and curious to find that Travis/Laura was the second-most-popular pairing. At that point, I'd only seen them interacting in the prologue, and the ship hadn't occurred to me at all then. I suppose perhaps that primed me to pay attention to their interactions later.

I've mainly been hanging around in the Travis/Laura section of the fandom, which has been extremely friendly and welcoming. Given that the characters have an age gap of thirty-plus years and Travis abducts and imprisons Laura, the pairing is, er, divisive, as you could probably guess. It's one of those ships where the shippers wall themselves off from the rest of fandom and have a party while everyone else throws them sidelong glances. Being on the partying side is a lot more fun than being on the judging side.

I was surprised that I fell so hard into The Quarry fandom! The Let's Play left me going 'well, that was fun, but I doubt I'm going to get fannishly into it,' and then something in me snapped and I started writing fic after fic. I can pinpoint the moment I dropped into The Quarry fandom hell, and it's the moment I watched the potential outcome in which Travis locks Laura up again; I'm so curious about what happens next!


Favourite character: Travis the Creepy Cop was a huge surprise for me. I watched the demo of the prologue long before watching a full Let's Play of The Quarry, so for a long time my strongest feeling about this game was 'the cop is REALLY CREEPY and I want to be extremely far away from him at all times'. But, goddammit, I ended up really enjoying him.
Favourite pairing: I reblogged a Travis/Laura comic by deadlilmoon and tagged it with 'i don't know if i'd say i ship these two' and then wrote three Travis/Laura fics, so, uh, I probably ship these two. I don't know who I was trying to fool; when he creepily woke her up by stroking her face in canon, I rewound to rewatch it three times.
Number of words written: 9,830

I just checked my e-mail drafts and found this in an otherwise empty missive, with no subject and no recipient. I don't know why I wrote this.


Admittedly, Ross didn't have a spotless track record with marriages, but he felt pretty good about this fourth one. He'd figured out the one common factor in all his failed relationships, and this one was going to work out. Probably.

'Hey, man,' Chandler said quietly to him at the reception, 'I hate to be the one to tell you this, but I think your spouse is gay.'

Ross stared at him for a long moment. 'Please tell me you didn't marry me just so you could make that joke.'

'Sorry,' Chandler said. 'I actually have the divorce papers with me.'


In other old-fandom news, I'm rewatching House! It's been so long. I really want Chase, Cameron and Foreman to have a weird threesome where they spend the entire time complaining about their boss.

In a way, this rewatch is a bit embarrassing. I usually like to read my old entries on things I'm rewatching or replaying, so I can see what I thought of it the first time around and how my perception has changed. But most of my entries on House are from about ten years ago, when all my entries were very breathless and fangirly and overemphasised EVERYTHING.

I'm still a breathless fangirl, of course, but I have at least cut down slightly on the italics and allcaps.

It seems I've never entirely let go of my Cameron/Foreman 'ship from all those years ago. There's an episode where Dr Hamilton (the doctor Foreman previously worked under) offers Foreman a partnership. Hamilton asks whether Foreman is seeing anyone, and Foreman replies, 'Kinda-sorta,' and Hamilton asks whether she'd be willing to travel if Foreman took a new job. And the next scene was Foreman telling Chase and Cameron about the job offer, and I really wanted him to take Cameron aside and ask if she'd come with him. I was very sad when I realised his 'kinda-sorta' was actually referring to the girlfriend I'd forgotten he had.

Even though Cameron and Chase are my favourite characters in the show, I always slightly resented the canonical Cameron/Chase for not being Cameron/Foreman.

My favourite moments in House are the ones where House's underlings form very unprofessional emotional attachments with the patient of the week. Particularly when it's Chase or Foreman; I love Cameron, but she forms intense emotional attachments with people who are suffering very easily, so it stands out more when it's one of the boys. DON'T COMFORT A DYING WOMAN BY PRETENDING TO BE HER DEAD HUSBAND, FOREMAN. I mean, do, because it's interesting, but you really shouldn't.

I keep remembering how people really hated Cameron back in the day. She's such a sweetheart! And not just a sweetheart, but an interestingly screwed-up one!

I wonder how House fandom would be different if it were around today. Cameron and Foreman (but, alas, probably not Cameron/Foreman) would be more popular, I think, and House himself less so. On the downside, I fear there would be enormous, tedious arguments about whether it's morally wrong to 'ship House with any of his underlings.

Oh, wow, it's so strange to write fanfiction for Glee after two years of nothing but tiny fandoms. I haven't received this much feedback since writing for Supernatural in 2008. It's lovely, but it does make me worry that I may have trouble motivating myself to return to smaller fandoms afterwards. (Also, I'm trying to reply to all the reviews, but after a while it becomes really difficult to think of things to say.)

Minor concerns aside, hearts for the Kurt/Blaine fandom! Never before have I seen a fandom so given to the bizarre point-missing habit of saying 'Spoilers: only for the fact that Kurt becomes a unicorn in episode γ.π' in fanfiction headers, but the people are delightful and so is much of the fic.


Here, for those of you looking for a means of procrastination, is an entry of Flash games I find intriguing! All of them are fairly short; you'll be able to complete most of them within ten or fifteen minutes. None require too much skill; I've chosen them more because they're interesting than for gameplay reasons. A couple of them could fairly be described as 'a bit pretentious', because, whilst I generally have little patience for pretension in books or films, I seem to have an odd fondness for it in games, but they're all worth playing.

Well. Apart from Steamshovel Harry.


loved is a fascinating, haunting little game about submission and obedience. One to play through more than once. May be triggery for people with experience of emotionally abusive relationships, though, and the opening may be upsetting for trans or genderqueer people, so bear that in mind.

On a vaguely related note, FreeWill, a choose-your-own-adventure-if-you-can game. I'm amused by how entirely some of the comments miss the point.

The Company of Myself is a clever little puzzle game, if perhaps a little heavy-handed with its story. The only game on this list for the actual 'game' aspect. (littlemoose has pointed out that the ending may be upsetting for some people; close it when the screen says 'Are you really leaving?' if you don't want to risk it.)

Steamshovel Harry is just a massive troll. Telling you this rather defeats the purpose, but I like you too much to let you go in blind. The background music for the tutorial is my favourite part. It's time to learn about astronomy!

You Have to Burn the Rope is another one you'll want your sound turned on for, particularly during the ending credits. It may be a little tricky to work out what you have to do to succeed, but I have faith in you.


Not included on this list on the grounds that nobody should play it is Desert Bus, in which the aim is to drive for 360 miles along a straight desert road, in a bus, in real time. If you drift off the road, you will stall and be towed back to the beginning, also in real time. It takes eight hours to complete. I don't know this from experience. Also not included are games in the 'strangely compelling but ultimately unsatisfying' vein of Achievement Unlocked and Upgrade Complete; the games above either have some sense of achievement or are too short to make you feel you're wasting your time.

Well. Apart from Steamshovel Harry.