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.

Tem has been showing me Star Trek: Deep Space 9! I have very little prior experience of Star Trek - I'd only previously seen a handful of original series episodes and the 2009 film - so this is an interesting experience.

I'm not currently experiencing any desire to jump into the DS9 fandom, but I am enjoying the show. We're in early season five; we've just seen 'Looking for par'Mach in All the Wrong Places'. Here are some scattered thoughts:

- This show feels surprisingly contemporary! There are a few entertaining details, e.g. the fact that every document appears to be on a separate electronic tablet (very much in the vein of Red Dwarf's 'VHS tapes are triangular now, because it's the future!'), but it rarely feels dated. It also feels a lot more intentionally homoerotic than I tend to expect of shows from the nineties!

- Sisko is probably my favourite character. I really like his relationship with Jake, and how much he cares for his crew, and the insubordinate streak he has to keep carefully masked with surface courtesy in his position as the station's commander.

- I really enjoy the friendship between Sisko and Dax, but also I sort of ship them a little, largely because introducing a romantic or sexual element to their dynamic would be so deeply weird for Sisko. I just like it when characters are unsettled and confused by their own feelings!

- Nobody on this space station knows how to stand a normal distance from each other. This was also an issue on Lost, come to think of it: whenever two characters are in the same shot, it feels like they're about to make out. I say 'issue', but in fact I am absolutely not complaining.

- We started this watchthrough when I was very much in Death Note mode, so it was weird to learn that DS9 includes a character called Kira! Both DS9 Kira and Death Note Kira are strong believers in solving problems through the power of murder, too. ('Kira is so violent,' Tem commented, 'and she thinks that's morally bad of her, whereas I think it's morally cool of her.')

- I find it very funny that everyone's into Kira. Kira may not be the protagonist of the show itself, but she's the protagonist of a dating sim going on off to the side. Has anyone made a dating sim in which you play as Kira Nerys? Someone should.

If I played the hypothetical Kira dating sim, incidentally, I'd be most interested in pursuing the Odo route (Odo's crush on her is very sad and sweet), the Gul Dukat route (their 'mutual hostility, but also Dukat is really into her' dynamic is incredible), and the O'Brien threesome route.

- I'm going to linger on the subject of a Kira/Miles/Keiko threesome, because Kira being pregnant with Miles and Keiko's child is the storyline that finally made me go 'okay, I have to write an entry about this show now'. The show dealing with the real-life pregnancy of Kira's actor by transferring Miles and Keiko's foetus into Kira's womb: insane, incredible, I could never come up with such a stroke of genius. And then Kira moves into the O'Briens' quarters!

- I mentioned earlier that I love characters being unsettled and confused by their own feelings, and 'Looking for par'Mach in All the Wrong Places' was iiiiiincredible for that. Miles and Kira having weird feelings about each other in their already very weird 'cohabiting while she's carrying his child' situation absolutely delighted me. Perfect episode.


Tem: DS9 is the Star Trek where I'd be least surprised to learn that all the main characters had had an orgy.
Ginger: Sisko doesn't seem as horny as the others.
Riona: But he'd still be part of the orgy, I think. He wouldn't cry if he missed out on it, in the way Bashir would, but he'd be up for getting involved.
Ginger: Oh, wow, Bashir would be heartbroken. You should write the fic where everyone except Bashir has an orgy, and then Bashir finds out.
Tem: No! That would be so sad! You can only write it if it ends with everyone making up for it with a gangbang focused on Bashir.

I am at ms_treesap's house at present, struggling with the tiny keyboard of her Eee! Yesterday, I came here to watch the original series of Star Trek with her, rhaegal, fera_festiva and heyorion, all of whom were delightful.

The extent of my Star Trek knowledge prior to this experience:

- There is a spaceship.
- There is someone named Kirk.
- There is someone named Spock, who is half something called a Vulcan.
- There is someone named Chekov, and if he had a Pokémon it would be an Eevee.
- The characters wear differently-coloured uniforms, which, according to freakish_geek, represent the Hogwarts houses into which they were sorted.

So, yes, I went in with very little idea of what to expect.

My first observation: yes, I can see why Kirk/Spock was the pairing that gave birth to slash. I have seen only six episodes, but there has already been plenty of homoerotic wrestling and Spock placing his hand tenderly on Kirk's face, and there is a great deal of emphasis on the fact that their minds are linked, and unless circumstances have conspired to separate them they are more or less always together.

Other thoughts:


- Kirk always looks a bit pregnant. I don't know why. Is it the clothes? Is it that he is a bit pregnant? (I have learnt very quickly that nothing is entirely impossible in Star Trek.)

- I like Uhura very much! She is an intelligent, sensible woman who occasionally wrestles guns off people. Thumbs up.

- The first half of 'Amok Time' seemed so like the setup for a slashfic. Oh, no, Spock will die if he doesn't have sex! Kirk's superiors will not allow Kirk to redirect the ship to Vulcan so Spock can take a wife! Whatever will Kirk do?

- In 'The Naked Time', there is no reason for the 'oh no we're all going to die' plot whatsoever. Just admit that you wanted to make an episode about all the characters acting drunk, writers. The ship doesn't have to be in deadly peril.

- I bet the sole reason tribbles are named 'tribbles' is because the writers really, really wanted to make that 'no tribble at all' pun.

- McCoy is a terrible doctor. He seems to diagnose people by merely glancing at them and saying 'HE'S DEAD.' His accuracy rating in this does not appear to be terribly high. Yes, all right, sometimes he's deliberately giving a fake diagnosis of death, but I am still not terribly impressed by his doctoring skills.

- In 'Mirror Mirror', the Evil Mirror Universe episode, Evil Mirror Spock backs someone up against a wall and electrocutes him.

It's sort of hot.


ms_treesap and I also watched the new film today, and Spock quoted Sherlock Holmes, and had I not already fallen a little in love with him that would have been the moment. Of course, Sherlock Holmes was exceedingly logical, so it makes sense that Spock would admire him.

PERHAPS SPOCK IS SHERLOCK HOLMES. Time travel is canonical! Is it not plausible that Spock might have travelled back in time and become the greatest detective ever to live? (Well, one of the greatest, at least. I can't really see Spock travelling back in time to become L.)

Hang on, does this make Watson Kirk? I do so hope it does.


(Due to ms_treesap and the extremely odd communities on her flist, my first experience of Star Trek fanfiction involved a woman's pubic hair being described as 'soft as a baby tribble'.

Thanks, ms_treesap.

Thanks.)