Trabia Garden

doreyg tagged me to answer these questions about fanfiction on Tumblr, and I thought I'd post my responses here as well! As I originally wrote this for a Tumblr audience, I'll probably end up reiterating some things I've already said on here.


How many works do you have on ao3?

On my main account, Riona, it’s 234. I also have 130 works across two pseuds on my secondary account, rionaleonhart (for older works and ficlets), so in total I’ve posted 364 works to AO3.

What’s your total word count?

My combined total on AO3 is 1,136,030 words. If I look at the documents in which I keep all my writing archived, it’s slightly higher - 1,266,834 words - because I haven’t posted everything I’ve ever written to AO3.

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

My most popular fic, by a long way, is And Again (Danganronpa, Naegi is caught in a time loop, 7,227 kudos). This was the first fic I ever posted to AO3, and I was startled by the way it blew up! For a while I was slightly intimidated to post anything else in case I let everyone down.

The others in the top five: Life Imitates (FFXV, Noctis/Prompto, 5,566 kudos), Vessels (Deltarune, 2,635 kudos), Visitors (Assassin’s Creed/Sense8, 1,607 kudos) and Memory Error (Doki Doki Literature Club!, 1,551 kudos). Most of these were an accident of timing: I happened to post just when the fandom was starting to get big. The exception is Visitors, which mainly picked up readers because it ended up expanding into a vast cowritten series.

Interesting to note that four of my top five fics are gen; I wasn’t expecting that!


( More talking about fanfiction. )


I've really slowed down on writing crossovers, thinking about it. I should send someone to Silent Hill at some point; it's been years!

I thought I'd started to calm down about Lost, but it turns out this show is still happening to me. Here's a Jack/Kate fic; it's inspired by Sense8, although no knowledge of Sense8 is required to read it.

'I mean, I don't really ship Jack/Kate,' I tell myself, writing multiple fics in which Jack and Kate kiss and scrolling through the 'jate' tag on Tumblr. I am a liar and a fool. Even the Lost fics I've written that aren't explicitly Jack/Kate contain Jack/Kate implications.

There's a quote, attributed to JJ Abrams, although I don't know the source: 'You could put Jack and Kate on a New York City street and have them pass each other at rush hour on a Wednesday morning. And they would stop and turn, slowing to watch each other go by. They know each other within the context of a universal recognition. They have met before this life. And they will meet again, in another.' And I'm not usually into soulmates or attraction at first sight, but somehow I can't stop thinking about the idea that, no matter what universe they're in, no matter what life they're living, they'll be drawn to each other. They'll catch sight of each other and know that this person is somehow important.

It's possible this just hits me so hard because 'people struggling with the sense that they know and care about each other and not understanding why' reminds me of Your Name, my favourite film in the world, which reduces me instantly to tears every time I watch it.

OKAY, THAT'S ENOUGH ABOUT MY STUPID FEELINGS, LET'S ACTUALLY GET TO THE FIC.


Title: Across the Ocean
Fandom: Lost
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Jack/Kate
Wordcount: 4,300
Summary: In the middle of performing surgery, Jack suddenly finds himself in Australia.


( Across the Ocean )

I saw Star Wars: The Last Jedi recently, some months after everyone else. I don't have any massive investment in Star Wars, so I wasn't particularly expecting it to catch my attention.

I hadn't realised it had a Sense8 plot! Combined with one of my favourite things in fiction: two people, at odds, forced to interact and therefore beginning to understand each other. OH NO.

The film really needed to give that subplot more space to breathe, more interaction for them to warm up to each other slowly. Which is what fanfiction is for, of course. But I don't know the Star Wars universe well! And I don't think I'd be able to write either Rey or Kylo Ren! So I can't write fanfiction expanding on their remote, reluctant interactions! How dare you do this to me, Star Wars?


There's a bit in NieR: Automata where you're adjusting the game settings, and 9S mentions that the process is being recorded for posterity. I thought it was just a line of worldbuilding dialogue, but he's not kidding; you end up watching the recording later on! A weird, cool insight into the mind of my past self. I could see that, after changing the voice volume, I paused for a moment before choosing 'there's something calming about your voice, 9S' over the standard 'yes, I can hear you.' I could see that I dropped the music volume a couple of notches and then turned it back up, but I don't know why; maybe I was trying to see whether 9S would react to it?

I'm amused by the tales online of people who wandered off to make a sandwich during the original scene and were then stuck watching the recording for ages.

NieR: Automata is still a very strange, unsettling game. But it's got a lot of cute detail. And a lot of strange features. You can get a game-over from the menu screen.

I woke up to a comment on the Visitorverse saying 'it's been a long four days since I started binging this 'verse, and now I'm done'. I was perplexed: four days? Surely we couldn't have produced four days' worth of binging material since August? And then I checked the total wordcount. 178,000 words. How has this happened?


Title: Visitors (Gratuitous Wish-Fulfilment Edition), Part Six
Fandom: Assassin's Creed
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Shay Cormac/Aveline de Grandpré (occasionally), various others
Wordcount: 8,800 (this part; 52,000 cumulative)
Summary: Visitors was a collection of scenes from a universe in which most of the Assassin's Creed protagonists kept meeting through involuntary time-travel. This is the same, only now they all cuddle and fall asleep on each other. Don't give me that look.
Notes: The full Visitorverse, including stories by others, can be found here on AO3.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five


( Visitors (Gratuitous Wish-Fulfilment Edition), Part Six )

I CAN'T BELIEVE I'M STILL WRITING THIS.

One of these scenes contains a touch of Haytham/Aveline. My fellow writers in this 'verse reacted to this with 'HAYTHAM/AVELINE IS A HORRIFYING PAIRING, STAY FAR AWAY FROM IT'. My immediate response was to throw more Haytham/Aveline implications into a later scene. Don't ever work with me; I'm horribly contrary.

(Said fellow writers had their revenge by making me write a Desmond/Lucy sex scene when a) I don't particularly 'ship it, and b) I can't write sex scenes.)


Title: Visitors (Gratuitous Wish-Fulfilment Edition), Part Four
Fandom: Assassin's Creed
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Shay Cormac/Aveline de Grandpré (occasionally), Desmond Miles/Lucy Stillman (in the final scene of this section)
Wordcount: 8,100 (this part; 33,100 cumulative)
Summary: Visitors was a collection of scenes from a universe in which most of the Assassin's Creed protagonists kept meeting through involuntary time-travel. This is the same, only now they all cuddle and fall asleep on each other. Don't give me that look.
Notes: These side-stories may occasionally conflict with the established Visitors timeline. It's the gratuitous wish-fulfilment edition and everything is permitted.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three


( Visitors (Gratuitous Wish-Fulfilment Edition), Part Four )


Part Five

I have now written over 28,000 words in the Visitorverse, taking into account both the original Visitors and the increasingly inappropriately-named 'gratuitous wish-fulfilment edition'. This means my work in this universe has now overtaken With These Signs Upon Our Souls, my previous longest work of fanfiction.

With These Signs Upon Our Souls took me two and a half years to write.

I started Visitors six weeks ago.

The format of Visitors is 'a billion little ficlets in a consistent universe' rather than 'one big fic', but this is still slightly ridiculous. I just... I just love this concept so much. And I'm having an absolute blast with posting it on AO3; I almost never post things chapter-by-chapter, so this 'gradually getting to know readers as they comment on each new part' thing is exciting and new!

I think most of the people tracking me on AO3 are hoping for Dangan Ronpa fanfiction, though, so I do feel slightly bad about suddenly posting things they don't care about every few days. SORRY FOR THE BILLIONS OF ASSASSIN'S CREED NOTIFICATIONS.

I don't think anyone still watching this journal is looking for Assassin's Creed fanfiction either (this isn't a dig; it's just that I don't think any of you have played the games, so this probably wouldn't make any sense to you!), but I like keeping all the things I write here, so I'm afraid I'm posting it anyway! Here's a second 'wish-fulfilment edition' collection, because I think the first one is probably nudging the LJ character limit by now. This one is occasionally not horrible to Desmond, because I'd been tormenting him so much that my reviewers started begging me to be nice.

(The easiest way to keep track of this universe, if you are reading it, is probably the newly created series page on AO3, which contains both my writing and all the amazing fanfiction that two(???) other people are writing in my AU(?????????). (It's great, don't get me wrong, but I'm still having trouble believing this is happening!))


Title: Visitors (Gratuitous Wish-Fulfilment Edition), Part Two
Fandom: Assassin's Creed
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Shay Cormac/Aveline de Grandpré, occasionally
Wordcount: 7,500 (this part; 16,500 cumulative)
Summary: Visitors was a collection of scenes from a universe in which most of the Assassin's Creed protagonists kept meeting through involuntary time-travel. This is the same, only now they all cuddle and fall asleep on each other. Don't give me that look.
Notes: These side-stories may occasionally conflict with the established Visitors timeline. It's the gratuitous wish-fulfilment edition and everything is permitted.

Part One


( Visitors (Gratuitous Wish-Fulfilment Edition), Part Two )


Part Three

And finally we come to the end of this journey! Somehow this fic ended up being 400% of the length I was expecting. At some point I became determined to write interactions for all twenty-eight possible pairs.

Keeping the chronology of this straight caused me such headaches towards the end. I thought I'd sworn off writing time travel after my 'Canton Everett Delaware III causes a billion ontological paradoxes' Doctor Who fic.

In this episode: tragedy, camaraderie, I accidentally give myself a ridiculous new 'ship. (To be honest, I think I've ended up 'shipping everything imaginable in the process of writing this.)

It's possible the final scene is too cute. I don't care. I've spent half this story making myself miserable about the Kenways and I'm allowed.


Title: Visitors, Part Four
Fandom: Assassin's Creed (I, II, III, Liberation, Black Flag, Rogue)
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 3,400 (this chapter; 12,700 total)
Summary: Who are we, who have been so blessed to share our stories like this? To speak across centuries? (Altaïr, Ezio, Edward, Haytham, Shay, Connor, Aveline, Desmond: eight people strangely bonded, able to meet and converse and occasionally attempt to murder each other across the boundaries of time and space. Inspired by Sense8.)

Part One
Part Two
Part Three


( Visitors, Part Four )


Visitors (Gratuitous Wish-Fulfilment Edition)

Why am I writing so much at the moment? I'm not complaining, certainly, but I wasn't expecting this!

I wasn't actually planning to write more of this ill-advised Sense8 AU for Assassin's Creed, but most of my reviews said 'hey, you should write more!' and, rather than thinking 'grumble grumble I said it was a oneshot', I found myself thinking 'actually, there is quite a lot more I'd like to see in this universe'. And then another set of scenes happened.

This has no plot whatsoever. It's just 'a load of characters from different Assassin's Creed games hang out in various combinations', because that is all I've ever wanted from Assassin's Creed.


Title: Visitors, Part Two
Fandom: Assassin's Creed (I, II, III, Liberation, Black Flag, Rogue)
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 3,400 (this chapter; 6,600 cumulative)
Summary: Who are we, who have been so blessed to share our stories like this? To speak across centuries? (Altaïr, Ezio, Edward, Haytham, Shay, Connor, Aveline, Desmond: eight people strangely bonded, able to meet and converse and occasionally attempt to murder each other across the boundaries of time and space. Inspired by Sense8.)

Part One


( Visitors, Part Two )


Part Three

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is an interesting and rather a bleak book. In contrast to Philosopher's Stone or Chamber of Secrets, each of which are year-long buildups to Harry discovering and thwarting Voldemort's plan, Order of the Phoenix is a year-long buildup to Harry screwing up horribly and getting someone he loves killed. I was so upset whenever I noticed a point where everything could have been averted.

A few more thoughts:

- Harry, Hermione, Ron, Neville, Ginny and Luna all go to the Department of Mysteries. A six-person party, three male, three female. A perfect party for a Final Fantasy game, in other words. Get on that, Square. Or someone could write fanfiction in which they're all l'Cie.

- It never really occurred to me before how confused Neville must be during the entire ending sequence. 'We're going to fly to London to save someone named Sirius? Well, this is obviously really important to Harry, so I'll help out, even if I don't really know what's going on.' (Bless you, Neville.) And then Sirius actually shows up. 'Oh. So, um, we came here to rescue Sirius Black? Death Eater Sirius Black? Sirius Black, the guy who broke into our dormitory and tried to kill Harry two years ago?'

- I'm liking Ginny more this time around. I've never disliked her, exactly, but I had trouble believing in her sudden offscreen shift from 'quiet and shy' in the first four books to 'bold, outspoken, spirited' in the fifth onwards, and I suppose that made it hard for me to appreciate her as a character. I still think the shift could have been done better; if it's true that she only came across as quiet and shy at first because of her crush on Harry, perhaps we could have seen her spending a lot of time with Harry and gradually getting more comfortable with him over the course of a book? But I am enjoying her more than I used to.

- The room in the Department of Mysteries where love is studied is always kept locked. They leave open the room with the literal veil of death, but the love room is always kept locked. What the hell is in that room?


On a related subject: I recently loaded up my Pokémon White file from 2011 and went through my PC box to see the nicknames I'd given all my Pokémon. A few of them made me smile (I'd named my Trubbish 'WHAT' in allcaps, which I think accurately captures my reaction when I first saw it), but my absolute favourite was the Litwick I'd named Filius. Filius Litwick. I'm so happy with my past self. (I'm also quite fond of Severus Snake the Seviper.)

In SoulSilver, meanwhile, I have a box containing twenty-five male Eevee (I was breeding for a female). You can see my gradual breakdown if you look through them. I started out giving them individual nicknames, then started giving them all nicknames beginning with E, then eventually named one 'EEEAAARRGH' and gave up; the rest are nameless.

(Oddly enough, one of the Eevee of Suffering is named Ezio, even though I must have named him well over a year before I started playing Assassin's Creed.)


On a less related subject, here is a terrible tale of Sense8 references gone wrong:

Riona: There's a really strong smell of cat urine. It's troubling me.
RD: ?
Riona: ...I'm the only one who can smell it, aren't I? Someone in my cluster is at a cat urine convention, and I'm experiencing the things they can sense.
RD: ...a cat urine convention.
Riona: ...
RD: A cat urine convention.
Riona: (breaks into giggles)
RD: You said 'cluster', and I thought 'okay, I'm following this'. And then you said 'cat urine convention'. That's what came to your mind.
Riona: I don't want to be psychically bonded to someone who goes to cat urine conventions!

The trouble with Sense8 is that there are too many characters. A full hour is a long running time for an episode, but it's still not enough to give even ten minutes to each storyline if you've got eight separate stories running at once. I have to wonder whether the number of main characters was chosen purely for the sake of the pun. It should be called Sense6.

The great thing about Sense8 is that 'characters feeling like they're slowly losing their minds' is something that always fascinates me in fiction, and it's the case with almost every character in Sense8. There are definite parallels to be drawn with the Bleeding Effect of Assassin's Creed, i.e. my absolute favourite concept in the Assassin's Creed series.

I also love seeing a group of disparate characters slowly getting to know each other after being thrown together by chance (it's something that crops up in the Dangan Ronpa games and a lot of RPGs), which makes this doubly great. I get so excited whenever the sensates(?) actually interact. I like them all (even Wolfgang, who probably took the longest to grow on me but got me in episode four) and, to be honest, I sort of 'ship them all as well. Eight-way long-distance telepathic relationships are probably fairly complicated to maintain, but I'm sure they'll manage somehow.

I've never had an OT8 before. It's fun! It'd probably be a nightmare to write fanfiction for, though. Not that I'm at the stage of writing fanfiction for it. I'm just musing.

There was one point in the third episode where I thought, Man, is this going to be one of those series where everything is bleak and awful and just keeps getting bleaker and more awful forever and everyone's helpless to stop it? Because I'm not sure I'm in the mood for that. And then Capheus stood up and went 'I'M GOING TO FIX THIS' and actually did fix it (with Sun's help). This is a show where good things can happen and most of the characters seem to be decent people, and I'm finding it oddly refreshing. I suppose the television dramas I usually get into can be a little miserable. Sense8 does have its fair share of misery, but I really like that the characters tend to go 'right, what can we do to make this situation less miserable?' and take action.

And then came the fourth episode, which made me smile so much. The world in general needs more sexy playful telepathic karaoke sessions.

I'm really curious about whether anyone in the cluster is going to recognise Lito. It's possible he's not that well known as an actor outside Mexico, but the reporter did say he'd been voted one of the sexiest men in the world.

So, yes, six episodes in I can say that Sense8 firmly has my attention! The concept is fascinating (and deeply weird), and I very much hope it spawns thousands of fascinating (and deeply weird) AUs in every fandom. If you have Netflix access and you're in the mood for something ridiculous, it might be worth taking a look! (Be aware that there's a fair bit of sexual content, just in case you'd rather people didn't walk in on you watching a screen filled with breasts.)