Trabia Garden

When 2020 was looming, I posted an entry about the media that had made a real impact on me in the 2010s. I had fun with this, but it's hard to narrow things down across an entire decade! Maybe I should start doing these media roundups more frequently? Every half-decade, perhaps?

Oh, hey, it's 2025.

In alphabetical order, here are ten canons from the last five years that I think I'm going to remember! Note that this is media I originally experienced between 2020 and 2024, rather than necessarily being media that was originally released in that period.


1. Celeste. One of my absolute favourite games. Great music, charming characters, satisfying gameplay. It's tough, but I rarely found it frustrating, and I was delighted to realise how much I'd improved when I went back to replay from the beginning. Playing Celeste is a lot like playing the piano, learning the right pattern and timing of button presses through repetition until you can run smoothly through a level. I'll often find myself replaying Celeste levels when I've got a little time and nothing else is grabbing me, in the same way I'll often take a moment to sit at the piano and play a few pieces I know by heart.

2. The Coffin of Andy and Leyley. The relationship between these siblings is just so awful and intimate and fascinating; I can't get enough of it. I want to swim around in all this hideous codependency. When I first drafted this list at the start of the year, I noted, There's a chance I'm being too hasty with this one; I discovered it right before 2024 ended, so I haven't had time to be sure it's going to be a lasting interest. But, having had my mind obliterated by the latest chapter, I can now say with confidence that I am never going to stop thinking about this horrible game.

3. Lost. What an experience! I love it when characters are stranded together and forced to bond under high pressure, and this is an absolutely stellar example. Went in some wild directions, too; I said 'what the fuck' so many times while watching this show. Jack Shephard is a wreck of a man in a way that I find fascinating.

4. Omori. This game fucked me up. A lot of it is fun and charming! And then there are the parts that severely messed with my head. Two separate aspects gave me trouble sleeping. Some really interesting uses of gameplay, including one of the best-executed plot reveals I've ever seen.

5. Person of Interest. In a lot of case-of-the-week shows, the case itself is the least interesting part for me. In Person of Interest, I found the individual weekly cases absolutely gripping. The fact that the murders they're investigating haven't happened yet gives each case a living main character, usually the would-be victim, which makes them so much more fun to watch. I really enjoy Reese as a character, too.

6. Persona 5. I picked up Persona 5 in lockdown, when it was heavily discounted. I'd heard good things about the Persona series, but I'd always been intimidated by how long and complicated the games sounded. Still, it was 2020, and I wasn't able to leave the house, so it seemed like the right time for a hundred-hour RPG. It was an incredible decision. What a stylish, fun game! What great kids! I played it non-stop for a month and a half and had an absolute blast.

7. Persona 4. I was a little concerned about going back to Persona 4 after playing 5. I'd loved Persona 5 so much; what if the previous game was a disappointment? But I ended up loving Persona 4 just as passionately, largely because of Yosuke; he's a good-hearted but slightly shitty disaster of a teenage boy who's helplessly in love with the protagonist, and I find him endlessly endearing.

8. Severance. I've always been compelled by stories about weird things happening to people's memories, and by stories about people developing intense relationships while isolated together, so Severance is essentially the perfect canon for me. By a long way, it's the most gripping show I've ever watched. I'm so nervous when I sit down for a new episode; I never know what to expect!

9. Taskmaster. What a show. It makes me laugh like nothing else. The way it keeps a single set of contestants for each series adds a lot to the experience; you really get to know the contestants and their approaches to these ridiculous tasks over the course of a series. The New Zealand and Australian versions are just as great to watch; Greg Davies remains an unparalleled Taskmaster, but, if I'm honest, Paul Williams is my favourite assistant.

Wait, that's only nine! Okay, I'm going to add a tenth, but this is definitely cheating:

10. Death Note. I absolutely did not first experience Death Note between 2020 and 2024; I've enjoyed it since 2008! But I feel it sort of fits in my 'canons of the last five years' post because I got back into it in 2023 in a way I'd never been into it before. I watched the stage musical, absolutely lost my mind and spent months thinking about nothing but Light Yagami. Let's say the tenth canon here is Death Note: The Musical.

Honourable mention to The Quarry for the burst of intense ficwriting it inspired in me! I wasn't that drawn in by the canon itself, but the potential in Travis and Laura's relationship really grabbed me by the throat.

EDIT: WAIT, I just thought of a legitimate number ten!

10-2: Die Hard. We were locked down for Christmas in 2020, and I was sorry that I couldn't visit my family, but the upside was that I joined in my housemates' Christmas tradition of watching Die Hard. This film was such a delightful surprise for me! I went in expecting a badass, stoic action hero; I got a desperate, terrified mess. I found John McClane's suffering so compelling. What a blast.

Here are a handful of ficlets I’ve written recently, in response to prompts on Tumblr! Fandoms: Taskmaster, Death Note, Final Fantasy VIII, The Quarry, Omori.


( Taskmaster, Alex/Greg, 280 words. )

( Death Note, L/Light/Ryuk, 150 words. )

( Death Note, Light/reader??, 280 words. )

( Death Note, Light and L, road trip, 280 words. )

( Final Fantasy VIII, Squall/Rinoa/Zell, only one bed, 460 words. )

( The Quarry, Travis/Laura, first kiss, 480 words. )

( The Quarry, Travis/Laura, post-breakup, 130 words. )

( Omori, Sunny/Basil, 270 words. )


I’m glad I’ve kept up my tradition of writing a little bit every day in November; it’s been good to have something to focus on. I haven’t written anything for today yet; I’m going to have to think of something!

About a week ago, I posted an unfinished fanfiction meme to Tumblr, and I thought it might be fun to play here as well!

Name a canon you know I have at some point enjoyed, and I’ll dig up and post an excerpt from the unfinished fanfiction I’ve almost certainly got lying around. (If you name something I don’t have any unfinished fanfiction for, I may write a few lines on the spot. We’ll see!)

I’ve posted this before, many years ago, but don’t worry about avoiding canons that were requested back then; I’ll just try to dig up something else.

Here are the excerpts I posted in response to requests on Tumblr:


Cinder_Quill: For the fanfiction ask meme: any unfinished stories about DN Angel?

This was tricky! But I dug through an old notebook, and I managed to uncover a tiny paragraph. This was from a Kingdom Hearts/DN Angel crossover I have zero recollection of contemplating, in which Kingdom Hearts Riku is talking to Daisuke. Both Riku and Satoshi are self-loathing teenagers who are intensely in love with someone they feel they don’t deserve, and I have a lot of emotions about them.

“Maybe it’s not my place,” Riku says. He glances in Satoshi’s direction. “Or maybe I’m just… projecting or something. I don’t know. But I think you’re important to him.”


academicgangster: Ace Attorney for the unfinished fanfiction meme?

Here’s a snippet in which Apollo and Athena stay up working too late and end up accidentally falling asleep on each other.

( Ace Attorney unfinished snippet: Apollo and Athena. )


futuresoon: Danganronpa!

I took this to be a request spanning the entire Danganronpa series and dug up a little Danganronpa 2 snippet. Major Danganronpa 2 spoilers under the cut.

( Danganronpa 2 unfinished snippet: Hinata and Komaeda. )


wyomingsmustache: Okay so I know it's been well over a decade since you've written anything Top Gear related but I was showing my roommate an episode the other day and telling him stuff about my Top Gear fandom days so now I am curious if you've got any bits and pieces leftover from back when, so for the fanfiction meme, Top Gear? (And if you don't, completely understandable)

We’re really getting into the deep lore here. Here’s something… mildly weird and dark? By Top Gear standards, at least. Because apparently I decided I should write two crossovers between Top Gear and Silent Hill. But Silent Hill is in Wales, for some reason.

(I know the reason. It’s because this was also going to be a crossover with Torchwood. It’s probably for the best that it never got finished.)

( Top Gear unfinished snippet: the trio unknowingly approach Silent Hill. )


doreyg: Death Note for the unfinished fanfic meme!

I responded with a Death Note/Silent Hill snippet I’d previously posted on this journal. So it wouldn’t just be material I’d already posted elsewhere, though, I also uncovered a few lines from a notebook (a regular non-death notebook):

In another world, you might have been someone else. Nothing special, but enough. Light Yagami, an ordinary man with an ordinary life.

But this is the world you’re in, and you’ve become a god.


tweetymcbastardface: Waterloo Road. Do it.

I can’t believe anyone would do this to me.

( Waterloo Road unfinished snippet: Tom/Izzie/Lorna. )


And that’s all the unfinished fanfiction requests I received on Tumblr! Feel free to request a fandom in the comments here, and I’ll see if I have anything lying around for it, or, failing that, I’ll see if I can scribble something down.

It's time for the end-of-year fic meme! I realise December has only just started and it's not impossible I'll write more before the year is out, but I'm impatient and I really enjoy doing this meme.

'What icon should I use for talking about writing?' I thought, before the obvious answer hit me.


Number of fics written in 2023: twenty-four. You can find them in my 'fanfiction (really this time)' tag or on my AO3 account: Riona.

Fandoms: Person of Interest, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Lost, Zanki Zero, Little Hope, The Quarry, Final Fantasy XVI, Death Note, The Last of Us. Five videogame fandoms, two television fandoms, one anime/manga fandom, one film fandom. I went through several distinct fandom phases this year - Person of Interest, then Lost, then The Quarry, then Death Note - so I did a little less rocketing around than usual.

One crossover: Connecting Strands (Person of Interest/Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse). While it's not strictly a crossover, there's also Across the Ocean, a Lost fic inspired by Sense8.


( End-of-year fic meme, 2023. )


The Quarry might be a bit underrepresented here because I wrote six thematically similar fics for it in the space of a month. I had a blast with all of them, but it can be a little hard to distinguish them in my memory!

It's time for a roundup of ficsnippets I've posted here and there!


( Silent Hill 2, James/Maria, 100 words, prompt: nonconned by dead spouse (non-explicit) )

( Your Turn to Die, Keiji/Sara, 200 words, Sara seeks a distraction. )

( The Quarry, 150 words, Laura sees Travis shopping post-game. )

( The Quarry, 300 words, prompt: Travis has to interact with Laura's family. )


I just caught myself thinking 'when's the last time I wrote for a pairing that isn't a huge mess?' and then 'wait, Jack/Kate from Lost, not that long ago' and then 'hold on, Jack/Kate is absolutely a huge mess.'

I can't believe this is still happening to me. Here is a Travis/Laura Quarry fic filled with blood and atrocious coping mechanisms.

Perhaps regrettably, this fic is named after a line from Kirin J Callinan's 'Big Enough', the song with the screaming cowboy in the sky.


Title: it wouldn't give us any closure
Fandom: The Quarry
Rating: somewhere between PG-13 and 15. So... 14? I'm rating this 14.
Pairing: Travis/Laura
Wordcount: 4,700
Summary: Laura jerks awake with blood in her mouth and seven stab wounds in her chest.


( it wouldn't give us any closure )

I've identified a pattern in my shipping habits, and it's 'creepy person who hovers between ally and antagonist'/'determined protagonist who has an intense relationship with aforementioned creepy person and doesn't know how to feel about that'.

It's not a dynamic that's guaranteed to captivate me; if it were, I'd have spent my intense Lost period writing Jack/Locke. But the description applies to Travis/Laura of The Quarry, Keiji/Sara of Your Turn to Die, Hinata/Komaeda of Danganronpa 2, Neku/Joshua of The World Ends with You and Beatrice/Battler of Umineko, so I think it's fair to say I have a weakness.

I first identified this pattern by thinking about similarities between Travis/Laura and Keiji/Sara, so I thought at first that I just had a penchant for shipping determined young women with creepy men who are too old for them. But it turns out that age and gender aren't a major factor; the important thing is just that one half of the pairing is being weird and the other half is feeling weird.

Maybe young woman/older man dynamics are just likely to include the requisite sense of creepiness, in the same way my fondness for 'cynic'/'idealist who makes them a little less cynical' dynamics also often leads me to pairings with significant age differences. Older characters are more likely to be portrayed as cynical; younger characters are more likely to be portrayed as idealistic.

Thank you all for joining me for this episode of navel-gazing about why I'm unstoppably shipping the woman in her twenties with the man in his fifties. I'll be honest: I'm having a great time. The Travis/Laura corner of Quarry fandom is lively and friendly and enthusiastic (it's possible their approach is 'another shipper! we'd better be really nice to her, because nobody else is going to be'), and the dynamic between the characters is just so interesting to explore.


For something that's not about The Quarry, I've been replaying Insomniac's Spider-Man for PS4 so Tem can watch!

Spider-Man immediately shot into my ten favourite videogames of all time when I first played it back in 2019, and it remains an absolute pleasure every time I revisit it. So much love and care has gone into every aspect of it, and so much fondness for Peter's character.

It's not a perfect game. There are moments that feel uncomfortably like copaganda, although apparently Insomniac's aware of that criticism and planning to make changes in the sequel, and the base battles go on for too long. And, er... no, that's it, I love literally everything else about this game.

They could so easily have made a game that's just 'Spider-Man beats up loads of bad guys', but instead you get things like 'Spider-Man spends so much time beating up bad guys that he fails to sort out his rent payments, returns home after two days without sleep to find himself evicted, and has to use his spider powers to chase after the garbage truck taking away his stuff', and I think that shows a much deeper understanding of Spider-Man.

I love how many non-combat optional things there are to do, too. You can fight loads of guys if that's your thing, but you can also spent hours swinging around the city without throwing a single punch, collecting backpacks and photographing landmarks and conducting research and chasing pigeons.

The character writing is great. The animations are great. The battle system is great. The traversal is great; there's a fast travel system I absolutely never use, because getting to places is just so much fun. Listening to J Jonah Jameson calling me a menace on the radio as I swing across New York is great. It's just a great game.

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

It's my birthday, and as my present to myself I decided to write a load of inappropriate tension.


Title: Security
Fandom: The Quarry
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Travis/Laura implications
Wordcount: 3,200
Summary: “I need you to lock me up,” Laura says.


( Security )

As I seem to be on a Supermassive horror game kick at the moment, I've watched theRadBrad's Let's Play of The Quarry, the spiritual successor to Until Dawn!

The trouble with Supermassive games is that Until Dawn offered me Mike Munroe, the perfect character, and Mike/Sam, the perfect pairing, and no characters or interactions in subsequent games have quite been able to measure up. Mike's an obnoxious but basically good-hearted guy who makes horrible mistakes and struggles with guilt over them; he fights desperately to save his friends; he befriends a wolf; he has chemistry with pretty much anyone he interacts with; he gets his hand caught in a bear trap and cuts his own fingers off; what more do you need in a character?

While I did have more investment in Mike and Mike/Sam than in any aspect of The Quarry, though, I do like the Quarry kids! I took a quick liking to Abi (she's quiet, she's compassionate, she seems reasonably level-headed, she has cute little bat wings on her backpack), and over the course of the game almost all of them won me over. I didn't passionately love any of the characters, but I was invested in their survival.


( Thoughts on The Quarry. )


I enjoyed The Quarry a fair bit! Supermassive continues to be a great videogame developer if you like stories about a bunch of people going through bizarre and traumatic experiences together, even if I find their games too stressful to play them myself.

I'm not experiencing the drive to write fanfiction right now, but I'll think about it; the ending was a little abrupt and it definitely felt like there was room to follow up on the characters.