Trabia Garden

When I have a fic idea, I’ll usually scribble it down in the back of my diary. It’s time to switch diaries again, so it’s time for the annual fic concept roundup!

This post lists all the fic ideas at the back of my 2023-24 diary. If I’ve written the fic, I’ll include a link to it. If I’ve started the fic, I’ll share a snippet. If I haven’t started it, I’ll write at least a hundred words on the spot.

First of all, here are the fics I’ve written in full. Fandoms: The Quarry, Death Note, Severance, Final Fantasy VII Remake. There may be spoilers for these canons below the cut.


( Written fics from my 2023-24 diary. )


Next, let’s look at the works in progress (or at least the works that were started; I’m not sure they’re actively progressing). Fandoms: Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (2023 game), Severance, Final Fantasy VIII, Final Fantasy XV, Uncharted. There may be spoilers for these canons below the cut.


( In-progress fics from my 2023-24 diary. )


Finally, it’s time for the fic ideas I haven’t touched and now have to write something for. Let’s see if I can do this.

Fandoms: The Quarry, Persona 4/Spider-Man (?), Kingdom Hearts/Silent Hill 2 (??), Final Fantasy XIII-2, In Stars and Time, Death Note. There may be spoilers for these canons below the cut.


( 2023-24 fics I hadn't started... until now. )


As ever, I have no idea whether any of these will end up becoming full fics, but I’m glad to have written at least a little for each concept!

A new prompt post has just opened up on threesentenceficathon, so here's another roundup of my fills! I'm pleasantly surprised to have written so much for the event this year.

I actually managed to keep to three sentences for one of these, and I demand a medal for my restraint.


( Outer Wilds, protagonist, 70 words, prompt: if I stop moving I'll drown )

( The Last of Us Part II, Ellie and Jesse, 37 words, prompt: dig two graves )

( Spider-Man 2 (Insomniac games), Peter/MJ, 200 words, prompt: to love somebody is to know when to let them go )

( Danganronpa 2, Hinata and Komaeda, 300 words, prompt: the song 'Take Me to Church' )


I also posted this response to the prompt 'Romeo and Juliet, add one "fuck" to the canon dialogue or scene of your choice':

JULIET: Go ask his name. If he be marrièd,
My grave is like to be my wedding bed.
NURSE: (returning) His name is Romeo, and a Montague,
The only son of your great enemy.
JULIET: Fuck.

The 2018 PS4 game Marvel's Spider-Man is one of my favourite videogames of all time, and I was delighted to receive the sequel Spider-Man 2 for Christmas!

I've just finished the Coney Island mission. Here are some early thoughts.


( Thoughts on Spider-Man 2 for PS5. )


There's a love for New York that comes through so intensely in Insomniac's Spider-Man games. It reminds me a little of the World Ends with You games, which are clearly brimming with love for Shibuya.

You can get a strong sense of place in other mediums as well, of course - Rivers of London comes to mind - but I'm fascinated by the way a game can let you immerse yourself in a location and explore it at your own pace. In his early teens, my brother learnt a lot about how to find his way around the real-life London by playing the PS2 game The Getaway.

I don't think I'll be able to navigate New York after playing the Spider-Man games, unless I happen to show up there with spider powers. I suspect that walking the streets of New York and swinging over the rooftops are slightly different experiences.

Hey, it's time for an entry that isn't about Person of Interest! (Even if Person of Interest is indirectly responsible for it.)

For each of my major fandoms, I do a little 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.

The latest fandom to qualify was a bit of a surprise for me! I've never thought of Spider-Man as an active fandom of mine, even if I've enjoyed a fair amount of Spider-Man media. But I've now written three fics for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and my Person of Interest/Spider-Man crossover narrowly pushes my Spider-Man wordcount across the ten thousand word mark!

(Technically, I haven't quite written ten thousand words of Spider-Man fanfiction, because one of those fics was cowritten with th_esaurus. But I've published ten thousand words of Spider-Man fanfiction, and I'm going to say that still counts.)


Spider-Man

All the Spider-Man fics I've written are for Into the Spider-Verse, but I think it makes sense to consider Spider-Man in general a fandom for the purposes of this writeup.

I must have been aware of Spider-Man as a superhero before the film came out, but my first real introduction to the character was the first Tobey Maguire film, released in 2002. It's been a while since then, so I can't remember whether I saw it in the cinema, but I think I did? It's not something I'd have decided to see on my own, but my dad grew up with superhero comics, so he might have taken me to see it. I was probably around fourteen.

The first film was good fun! But Spider-Man 2 was where it was really at. The train rescue! The tension between Peter and Harry! I never wrote fanfiction for the Tobey Maguire films, but I did read a smattering.

I never saw any of the Garfield films, but I've seen Holland's Spider-Man: Homecoming. I've vaguely wondered about investigating the films I haven't seen, but, as much as I like Spider-Man, there are too many Spider-Man films, and Holland's era is particularly intimidating because it's interlinked with a bunch of other films in the MCU.

My favourite pieces of Spider-Man media, by a long way, are Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and the 2018 Spider-Man for the PS4. They're not just my favourite Spider-Man film and game; they're among my favourite films and games of all time.

Spider-Man has always been my favourite superhero, and retains a place in my affections even though I'm a little tired of superheroes in general. I like that he's fairly small-scale as superheroes go, more about helping individuals than about saving the world; I think his powers are neat; I love that almost every version of Peter Parker is a psychological catastrophe. He's just fun!


Favourite character: Peter Parker, living disaster. Of the incarnations I'm familiar with, my favourites are Peter B Parker from Into the Spider-Verse and Peter Parker from Insomniac's Spider-Man games. (But he has to have his original PS4 face! I don't approve of the PS5 redesign.)
Favourite pairing: After all these years, I think it's still Maguire's Peter Parker and Franco's Harry Osborn in Spider-Man 2. The way they were simultaneously friends and enemies! That intense scene where Harry discovers Spider-Man's identity! Maybe I should rewatch that film.
Number of words published: 10,084

When I watch things with my housemates, I don't always write about it on here because, well, you can't really pause episodes to scribble down your thoughts while other people are watching them with you. I thought I'd try to pull together a few lines each about some of the things we've watched over the last couple of years, though. Here we go!


Gargoyles (1994): Rei remembered this cartoon fondly from their childhood, but I had never seen it before. It was an interesting watch! Darker and more complex than I tend to expect from nineties Western cartoons, and Elisa and Xanatos are great characters; I'd have loved to see the two of them interact more. I'm annoyed by the 'Macbeth was just misunderstood' plotline, though; don't take away everything that makes Macbeth interesting as a character!

Cowboy Bebop (1998): This was an interesting anime, very stylishly directed, but it felt a bit like two different shows clumsily jammed together. I think it could have benefitted from cutting most of the 'bounty hunting procedural' aspect and becoming a shorter, more focused series. Spike is a fascinating character who feels severely underused, which is perplexing, given that he's the protagonist.

Wynonna Earp (2016): This was fun! It felt a bit like a version of Supernatural from an alternate universe; if Supernatural had been created by women and had female lead actors, I suspect it might look a bit like Wynonna Earp. Wynonna, in particular, feels very like a female equivalent to Dean Winchester; she's a wisecracking disaster who's incapable of coping with anything healthily. She's great. I love her.

Milo Murphy's Law (2016): A cartoon by the creators of Phineas and Ferb, about a boy who's plagued by misfortune. I loved this! In particular, I find Milo himself very endearing; I like his resourceful nature and positive attitude in the face of the certainty that everything's going to go wrong around him. Also, lumberjack-themed boy band song 'Chop Away at My Heart' is a banger.

Trinkets (2019): I'm a little sad that, although the ending was beautiful and perfect, the rest of the show wasn't quite good enough for me to run around recommending it. It's about three girls who meet at a programme for recovering shoplifters. Their friendship is great and I had a lot of feelings about it, but the show as a whole is so Constant Teen Drama that it's slightly exhausting. The finale was wonderful! I cried! The show as a whole is okay.

Batwoman (2019): We only watched the first series of this (and, in fact, I can't remember whether we finished that series). I really enjoyed what a catastrophe Kate Kane was, and her love-hate relationship with Alice was delightfully intense and messy; I feel it's a sort of relationship you don't often get to see between female antagonists! The show felt relentlessly miserable in a way that wasn't that fun to watch, though. We didn't make an active decision to stop watching it, but we drifted away.

The Owl House (2020): I really enjoyed this! Very cute and fun; very Gravity Falls vibes, which makes sense, given that it was created by Alex Hirsch's partner. It does seem like a disproportionate number of the episodes focus on teaching Luz that she shouldn't lie to impress people, though; if your protagonist learns the same lesson in half the episodes of your cartoon, I think you have to accept that she's never going to internalise the lesson! King is very reminiscent of our cat Zuko, who is a beautiful, perfect boy with absolutely no brain.

We Are Lady Parts (2021): A sitcom about an all-girl Muslim punk band. I got much more emotionally invested than I was prepared for; I thought this was just going to be a silly comedy! But then I met angry, self-sabotaging disaster Saira, and obviously I was doomed to love her.

Arcane (2021): A fantasy series based on League of Legends, a game I know absolutely nothing about. This is the most engaging show I've watched in a very long time. It genuinely surprised me on multiple occasions; I quickly gave up trying to predict what would happen in it, because I clearly had no idea! Every character is a disaster and it's great. An excellent series if you enjoy characters screwing up and tearing themselves apart over it. Gorgeously animated, too.

Queer Eye Germany (2022): A heads-up for anyone who enjoys Queer Eye: the German version is just as delightful! Ayan, the interior design guy, is my favourite of the Fab Fünf; he's extremely earnest and sweet.

On a rewatch, Die Hard remains shockingly relevant to my interests. All I want out of fiction is to watch characters physically and psychologically disintegrating, and Die Hard delivers in spades.

I didn't bother to watch Die Hard for so long because I assumed it was just a generic macho power fantasy! John McClane, shirtless and panting with pain, sweating and bleeding and apologising to his wife? That's someone's fantasy, but it's not the one I was expecting.

McClane isn't the unshakable badass I thought he would be at all; he's deeply vulnerable and deeply afraid, and it both makes him a more interesting character and makes his badass moments much more badass.

Verdict on the other Dice Hard I've seen so far: Die Hard 2 was pretty unmemorable, but Die Hard with a Vengeance was an absolute blast. McClane isn't falling apart in the same way he is in the original, which makes sense - he's more experienced, he's less isolated and he's on his home turf - but teaming him up with Zeus makes for a fun dynamic, and I like that they tried something a little different with this one.

I love how desperate and messy John McClane's fighting style is. He's got no finesse; he's terrified and he's fighting for his life. He doesn't care about honour or a good fight; he'd prefer to catch you unawares and slam a door on you repeatedly.

I went far too long without this series in my life. I could watch John McClane having a terrible time all day. He's a terrible fuckup disaster man, and it's great, and I love him.

And he lives in New York, which, come to think of it, is also home to another fictional disaster I hugely enjoy. I'm not necessarily going to write fanfiction where John McClane and Peter Parker team up, or find themselves at odds, or both. I'm just saying I could.

(I've been replaying Marvel's Spider-Man for PS4 and rewatched Into the Spider-Verse on Boxing Day, so I've been thinking a lot about how much I love Spider-Man. It's strange; I tend to bounce off most superhero media, but... okay, I didn't start this sentence with the intention of making a bad webbing pun, but I can now see it barrelling up and I'm just going to stop talking before it happens.)

If anyone hasn't heard about it yet, the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality, available for another three days, offers a genuinely ridiculous number of indie games in exchange for a small (or, if you prefer, less small) donation, to be split evenly between the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Community Bail Fund.

If you're not sure where to start with the literal hundreds of games, Night in the Woods and Oxenfree are both high-quality narrative games with well-drawn characters and great dialogue. The $5 minimum donation would be a ridiculously good deal for Night in the Woods alone, let alone Night in the Woods and HUNDREDS OF OTHER GAMES.

The first new-to-me game I'm playing from the bundle is Celeste, which is cool and polished and very tricky and I have died hundreds and hundreds of times. I'm useless at playing anything with a keyboard and I get the controls mixed up constantly. At one point I tried to pause and instead dashed straight into some spikes.

While I am always here for characters having fraught relationships with the physical manifestation of aspects of themselves, it's very rude of Part of Me to impose time pressure on levels when I was already terrible without it.

Also there's a bit where Part of Me says 'you're not a mountain climber', and the phrase 'mountain climber' wobbles dramatically, and this is hilarious to me and only me because as kids my brother and I used to pretend 'mountain climber' was a terrible swear word.


As I'm already talking about videogames, I might as well run through the trailers from yesterday's PS5 conference that caught my attention! I have no idea when I might actually obtain a PS5, but at least I can look back at this entry for game ideas if I eventually do.

- Spider-Man: Miles Morales is a sequel to Insomniac's Spider-Man, which I played late last year. It was the best game I'd played in years - great story, great characters, great fun - and probably one of my ten favourite games of all time. I'm excited about this!

- The sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn is unfortunately called Horizon II: Forbidden West rather than, as I hoped, Horizon One Dawn, but that doesn't mean I'm not interested. Horizon Zero Dawn was a gorgeous game with a fascinating world and story. The characters never really caught my attention, but everything else was strong enough to make up for it.

- Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart will probably be worth checking out! I don't have any emotional investment in the Ratchet & Clank series, but the writing's entertaining and the games are fun to play. The trailer's really impressive, just in terms of showing off what the PS5 is capable of.

- Stray looks like it might be interesting. Who doesn't want to play a cat in a post-apocalyptic city of robots?

- Project Athia: it looks cool from what little we see here, but we all know it won't come out for fifty years. I know your ways, Square.

- I am not planning to play Bugsnax, but I thought I should link to the trailer anyway, just because it's so bewildering. From the creators of Octodad, apparently. I vividly remember watching my brothers play Octodad: Dadliest Catch on co-op. Desperately shrieking at each other as they tried to pilot an octopus across rafters above a burning room, each controlling a different set of legs.


On a final videogame-related note: I can't believe The Last of Us Part II is out in a week! I really hope I like this game. Ellie is one of my favourite characters of all time, so I'm a bit nervous about what the sequel might have in store for her and whether her characterisation will work for me. We'll see!

Our household's Glee rewatch is now up to the Dalton Academy arc in season two, i.e. the point at which I abruptly became extremely emotionally invested the first time around. I don't have the same intense emotions on revisiting it, but Kurt and Blaine are still really cute.

That said, the Dalton Academy Warblers do feel a lot like a cult. Why do there never seem to be any teachers or lessons at their school? Why are they run by a council of teenagers obsessed with tradition? Why, rather than having scheduled rehearsals, does Blaine suddenly burst through the door singing, with everyone in the room immediately joining in? (I love Kurt's 'Jesus Christ, I was just trying to do my homework' face throughout this performance.)

Rereading the psychological horror Kurt/Blaine fic I wrote in 2010, it looks like I picked up on this weirdness even back then. (It holds up better than I thought it might! I'm glad I've reached a point where I can look back at my older fanfiction without cringing.)

There are some points, early in Kurt and Blaine's acquaintance, where they display more emotional maturity than I thought Glee was capable of. A few points that particularly stood out:

- Blaine, realising Kurt doesn't know anything about sex and worried he might one day go into something without protection, goes to Kurt's dad and goes 'look, I know he's gay and you're not, but I know you have a good relationship and I think he would really benefit if you did some research and made the effort to give him the talk.'

- Blaine mentions being in love with a guy. Kurt incorrectly assumes he's the one Blaine's talking about. On learning that it's actually someone else, Kurt is devastated but decides to help Blaine woo this other guy. It's such a contrast with season one, where Kurt realised Rachel was interested in Finn and tried to sabotage her chances with him. Actual character development! In Glee!

- After Blaine's chances with the other guy fall through, Kurt actually outright tells him 'hey, look, I thought the guy you were in love with was me' and Blaine goes 'oh, wow, I'm so sorry, I had no idea you felt that way' and they have a conversation about where they both stand and what their relationship is. Clear communication about feelings! In Glee!!!

The majority of the time, of course, Glee is still an absolute disaster. I can't believe there's an episode where the moral is 'if you're sad that your friend persistently cancels your plans so he can spend time with the friend he has a crush on instead, you're just USING YOUR FRIEND AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR A BOYFRIEND; why would anyone ever want to hang out with someone else for non-romantic reasons?'


I've slowed down on Psych, but I've now finished the fifth season, so here are a few notes on that as well!

I haven't really been feeling much in the way of romantic chemistry between Shawn and Juliet, but I did really love the kiss at the end of 'One, Maybe Two, Ways Out', and the fact that they don't have the opportunity to talk about it afterwards, so it's just going to hang over them, fucking them both up. Shawn looks like his entire operating system just crashed.

That said, of course, Shawn/Gus is still the OTP. 'Of all the relationships in my life, ours is easily the most stable and the only one I haven't screwed up. If I hadn't come back to Santa Barbara, I don't know what you'd be doing, but wherever I was, I'd be wishing I had you there to lean on.'

'Yang 3 in 2D': Gus thinks he's about to die, and all he wants to do is make sure Shawn knows he doesn't blame him! My heart! It's really, really important to him not to let Shawn feel it was his fault. 

I love Shawn pulling Gus into his family group hug at the end, too.

I sort of feel that Lassiter should meet J Jonah Jameson. They'd just get into arguments over whether Spider-Man or Shawn Spencer is more of a nuisance.

I'm generally suffering from superhero fatigue, but I still occasionally have time for Spider-Man. Qualities that often show up in various incarnations of Spider-Man: screwed-up teenager or young adult, makes bad decisions and worse jokes, suffering from guilt, good-hearted but kind of a wreck. They're all qualities I enjoy in fictional characters.

Plus thebaconfat had recommended me the Spider-Man game for PS4 and th_esaurus had offered to lend it to me, so I thought I might as well check it out.

It was a great decision.

At the start of the Spider-Man game, Peter Parker sniffs his Spider-Man suit to see if it's clean enough to wear, makes a face, and then wears it anyway, and that's the sort of relatable hero I want in my videogames.

Nobody went through this many backpacks in school. Is Peter aware that you can put more than one thing in a backpack? You do not need a separate backpack for every item you own. (I wrote that before he mentioned that he'd won a lifetime supply of backpacks, which I'll admit made me smile.)

The traversal in this game is a lot of fun! I have limited patience for open-world games, and I was expecting to ignore all the side missions and focus on progressing through the story. In this game it's just a joy to go anywhere, though, so I keep going 'hey, let's swing over there and do all the stuff!'

There's also more care put into the writing and details than I expected. You can feel that a lot of love went into this game. I thought it'd be a fun timewaster; I wasn't expecting to be genuinely into it! What a delightful surprise.

The game really wants me to know that I can unsubscribe from J Jonah Jameson's radio show if I want to, and I just can't comprehend why anyone would want to.

I've just reached the point where Peter falls asleep on May's couch. I assumed at first that we were meant to think 'oh, he probably slept at some point' while we ran around and time progressed in the story, but no; the plot hasn't even got going yet and Peter Parker canonically hasn't slept in two days. The boy's a disaster.

The other Insomniac games I've played (the Spyro the Dragon and Ratchet and Clank series) have been excellent, but they were cartoony platformers rather than plotty open-world games, so I wasn't sure how well Insomniac's skills would translate to this title. Evidently I shouldn't have doubted them!

Christmas dinner with my family:

Eleanor's mother: Do you need stuffing, Riona?
Riona: That would be lovely, thank you.
Riona's parents: (both start sniggering)

Thanks, guys.

We had a cake after the meal, and the box had the most incredible instructions:

SERVING: Place cake on a flat surface. Heat a long-bladed knife under warm water. Slice in a vertical direction. Turn cake and slice again in a vertical direction to create wedge shaped portions. Clean knife blade between slices.

Thank goodness. Far too many cakes expect you to be able to eat them without clear directions. I keep trying to slice horizontally.


I've been consuming a fair few things over the Christmas period, so here's a scattered entry about assorted media!


- Into the Spider-Verse reignited my taste for 'thirty-eight-year-old dirtbag accidentally bonds with a kid' stories, so I rewatched About a Boy. I really loved this film in my teens. There was a long period where I owned exactly four films on DVD; three of them were High School Musical, and the other was About a Boy. (I think I now also own Mulan.) It still holds up, I think, although the voiceovers of the characters' thoughts feel a bit dated. I love how Will gradually, reluctantly becomes used to Marcus's presence in his life.

It's really made me want an AU of Into the Spider-Verse where Peter B is the Peter Parker of Miles's universe. Miles goes HELP, PLEASE TEACH ME TO USE THESE POWERS, SPIDER-MAN and Spider-Man goes 'you're on your own, kid' and Miles sneakily follows him to find out where he lives and goes 'hey, I'm here now, in your non-superhero life, please teach me' and Peter goes 'what the fuck'.


- I also rewatched Zootopia, released under the inferior name of Zootropolis in the UK. I don't think I ever posted about it on here, but it's such a cute, fun film, and the worldbuilding is so interesting, and also it made me ship the hell out of a fox and a rabbit, whoops. HE LOOKS AT HER SO FONDLY.

There is, let's be honest, a definite possibility that I'm a furry.


- I finished Gris today; it's a gorgeous little watercolour-style game about a grieving young woman learning to stand on her feet again. 'Literally and figuratively bringing colour back to the world' is something I've had a weakness for ever since Okami. I'd recommend it if you're interested in light platforming and painting-esque animation. (I'll admit I found it sort of hilarious that your options at the beginning were 'walk very slowly' or 'FALL TO YOUR KNEES IN AGONY', and there were two different 'fall to your knees in agony' buttons.)

One thing that really struck me was how good it was at teaching you its mechanics without ever outright telling you anything.


- Spyro the Dragon was my introduction to 3D gaming; my only previous experience of games was on the Master System II and the Game Boy. I went over to a primary-school classmate's house, and I watched her play this game, and I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. It was the first thing I bought when my brother got a PS2 for his tenth birthday.

For my Christmas present to myself, I bought the Spyro Reignited trilogy! And it's a fantastic remaster. It looks and feels the way I remember these games, even though there's no possible way the original games looked as good as they do in my mind. It really captures the spirit of Spyro.

I remembered the level design of the Spyro games being fantastic, and it still holds up. Honestly, in the twenty years since these games came out, I'm not sure I've ever played anything that's surpassed them in terms of level design. I love spotting gems in distant places and going 'okay, how can I get over there?'

Actually, even the first Spyro the Dragon is great, when I remembered it more as something you just had to get through before you could play the superior sequels.

I am constantly running into walls in this game, and Rei mocks me heartily for it. She's also ended up yelling some odd things at me during my endeavours to defeat plane-piloting enemies. 'Fuck the plane! Fuck the plane better! RIONA! You're not fucking!'

(Every time I encounter a small animal in the game, she goes, 'Awww! Kill it. Kill it, kill it, kill it.')

One complaint I do have: I never realised as a child, but there are no female dragons and it's really unsettling. I've encountered thirty-something dragons, all male. I keep chasing down egg thieves; where did the eggs come from? Is it essential for me to retrieve the eggs because the female dragons were somehow wiped out before the game began?