Trabia Garden

Looking through my old notebooks, I have stumbled across a bizarre snippet of a Real Hustle/Final Fantasy XII crossover. The Real Hustle, for those unaware, is a BBC Three series that demonstrates various scams, refunding the victims afterwards, and gives advice on how to avoid them; here is an example. The figures who actually perform the scams are called Alex, Jess and Paul, and I totally 'ship them. And, apparently, at some point I saw fit to write a snippet of them swindling people in Ivalice, narrated by the slightly tedious voiceover from the show itself.

Who writes Real Hustle fanfiction? Nobody writes Real Hustle fanfiction. I wrote a fairly silly Alex/Jess piece three years ago, and rhosyndu wrote a drabble in the comments, and I think emmarrrrr has a snippet or two somewhere, and that's basically the extent of the fandom output.* So many things for which I write have fandoms of about three! Coming across this did sort of amuse me, though, so I'm going to post it.


( The Real Hustle: Ivalice )


* Actually, I do also have some unpublished snippets in which they steal Gene Hunt's Cortina in 1973 and then return to the present via TARDIS and then try to take Jeremy Clarkson's Ford GT and get arrested by Sherlock Holmes, but that fic was abandoned long ago on account of being far too complicated.

There is a Female Characters Drabble-a-thon going on at the moment! If you're like me and feel that you don't write about female characters nearly often enough, here's your chance to redress the balance. (Sadly, there are almost no videogame prompts.)

Also, a rather fun meme. Stolen from eva_kasumi:

- Arrange the characters in your icons in alphabetical order.
- Pair the first character up with the second, the third up with the fourth and so on.
- Write a mini-ficlet about every pairing.
- Profit!

The results of my attempt at this are under the cut in varying degrees of cop-outness. It starts with Albus Dumbledore/Allison Cameron and goes downhill from there.

( Perhaps I shouldn't have included the Pokémon. )

A HUSTLE ALMOST WENT HORRIBLY WRONG. I have wanted to see one of them go a bit awry ever since I started watching The Real Hustle, so I was really rather thrilled by this. Although I have to admit that I was genuinely worried that the mark might actually drag Alex off the motorbike and horribly injure him or something.

I do wish Paul and Jess had mocked him about it. The Real Hustle would be so much better if they actually showed the hustlers chatting to each other a little more. There's always the rather frustrating sense of 'these three have a lovely bantering mocking friendship but you are not allowed to see it ha'. Take a leaf out of Top Gear's book, Real Hustle producers! People like it when factual programmes take on a more personal tone! They also write more fanfiction, but that is obviously totally not what I am desperately hoping for at all.

Also, ahahaha, the telling-the-truth hustle! Brilliance. The people who'd been taken in seemed almost more amused than annoyed. "Well, I suppose I technically got exactly what was advertised..." And I loved the 'can be made in less than three hours' and the 'no-money-back guarantee'.

(newbie1990, WHO TOTALLY NEEDS TO UPDATE HER JOURNAL MORE OFTEN, came up with the frankly brilliant idea that Jess is a new incarnation of the Master, trying to take over the world through hotness. This would be amazing. Are you listening, Doctor Who writers? Have the Master played by Jessica-Jane Clement in his/her next appearance. Genius. Also, I've never found Tennant particularly attractive, but I have to admit that Tennant-as-the-Doctor/Jess-as-the-Master would be really rather hot. AND THEY COULD HAVE A CANON KISS OR SOMETHING AND IT WOULD SPAWN ALL SORTS OF INTERESTING (and by 'interesting' I mean 'lol watch the Internet explode') QUESTIONS ABOUT TIME LORD SEXUALITY.)

I am absolutely delighted to discover that there is, in fact, a small audience out there for The Real Hustle fanfiction. Does this mean that any of you might be persuaded to write it? It would make me very happy indeed if you did.

While we wait for lots and lots of glorious Real Hustle fanfiction to spring up (SHUT UP, I'M NOT DELUDED), it is obviously time for more of rionaleonhart and dracothelizard's Deranged E-mail Adventures. This is the Stargate SG-1 edition. Some spoilers, but nothing serious, and only for the first and second series.

( Slightly alarming 'House' and 'Top Gear' Stargate crossover ideas ahoy! )

Now that two of my friends are writing (at least) six-way crossovers, I feel terribly disappointed in myself. I love and adore crossovers, but I don't think I've ever written a full-length one that incorporated more than two fandoms. That's shameful. It really is.

This insecurity about my position as That Crossover Girl means that if I ever manage to find a way of making a House/Scrubs/Harry Potter/Britain's Got Talent/Kingdom Hearts/Pokémon/Pirates of the Caribbean/Top Gear/Doctor Who/Life on Mars/Sherlock Holmes/Silent Hill/Torchwood/The Real Hustle/Final Fantasy VIII/Final Fantasy X/Final Fantasy XII crossover work, you're all going to be in trouble.

It couldn't be too difficult, could it? After all, Doctor Who has an Instant Crossover Device built in. 'The Doctor, feeling lonely, had decided to find out just how many companions the TARDIS could hold...'

All right, it's an utterly rubbish premise. I'll have to wait until a better one comes along. You're safe for now.

(The Real Hustle team are the Doctor's companions until, due to an unexpected attack by Monstro, the flying space whale, he is forced to drop them in 1973. They survive by working cons and eventually find themselves being pursued by a certain Mancunian police department...)

By the way, both dracothelizard and draegonhawke's goodness-knows-how-many-way crossovers are bloody amazing. I can't wait until they're both finished so I can point you over to them and we can all judge which is the more insane. In the meantime, why not try to think of an outline for a crossover involving every one of your fandoms? (MY METHODS FOR ENCOURAGING MORE RIDICULOUS-NUMBER-OF-FANDOMS CROSSOVERS ARE BRILLIANT AND SUBTLE.)

Richard Dawkins is such a bastard. I found myself becoming insanely angry barely a minute into The Enemies of Reason, and it only kept mounting. I am by no means a religious person, but he makes me wish I were a faith healer Creationist just so I wouldn't have to share any of my beliefs with him.

In other news, something that happened just now:

(RIONA is waiting for her rather misshapen attempt at brownies to cool in the kitchen. The younger of her brothers, FRED, walks in.)
FRED: Can I play your ukulele?
RIONA: (half-glances at him out of the corner of her eye) Yeah, all right.
(FRED whacks the ukulele against the table.)
RIONA: (YELPS)
RIONA: What--
'UKULELE': (is actually a piece of thin wood, carefully painted to look like RIONA's ukulele)
RIONA: ...
RIONA: ...
RIONA: That seems like a lot of trouble to go to in order to give me a heart attack.

In other other news, I, er, may sort of already have a few sentences of Alex/Jess scribbled down in one of my many notebooks. I cannot believe I'm writing The Real Hustle fanfiction. I'm usually able to resist for at least a month after a horribly inappropriate fanfic idea occurs to me! This one hasn't even taken three days!

When it seems as if the phrase might fit their speech patterns, it is incredibly difficult to remember not to have characters say 'How on Earth?' or 'Where on Earth?' when they are not, in fact, from Earth. Argh.

This is apparently going to be an entry of Laments About Writing. Hurrah!

- Getting the tenses clear is bloody confusing when characters have travelled into the past and are talking about their present.

- The Captain Jack Harkness in Torchwood is far too different from the Captain Jack Harkness in Doctor Who for me to feel entirely comfortable when writing the character. I don't know how to reconcile the two characterisations.

- Fran is far too quiet and also incredibly difficult to write for. She just sort of fades into the background while the other two take over the story and make it into the Balthier and Harkness Show. This is entirely unfair, because Fran is awesome and should really have a larger part than she's getting.

- In fact, although I feel fairly all right when it comes to Balthier, I find myself completely at sea when it comes to characterising any of the other characters from Final Fantasy XII. This is an enormous shame, as I had sort of hoped to be able to have the Balthier/Fran/Jack team encounter them occasionally.

- Why can't I work out how Withnail and Jeremy Clarkson would interact? They obviously need to meet (in order to put the fear of God into their long-haired friends, if for no other reason), but I have no idea what would happen. I really want to write this crossover, but I can only actually come up with the tiniest of snippets:


He reaches over, appropriates Jeremy's scotch and downs it, apparently entirely ignorant of the fact that this is a fairly large violation of the rules of etiquette.

"James and whatsisname seem to be getting on well, don't they?" Jeremy observes. "What is his name, anyway?"

"How the fuck am I supposed to know?" Withnail asks, irritably.


- I wish I'd stop accumulating Inappropriate Real-Person Threesomes. Clarkson/Hammond/May (Top Gear) is - well, it's completely insane, of course, but on its own it's all right. Then, of course, I had to fall for Morgan/Holden/Cowell (Britain's Got Talent (the shame!)), and now I find myself thinking about Alex/Jess/Paul (The Real Hustle). This latest is probably at least partially due to the fact that, when they're talking about the psychic scam, there's a point at which it looks as if Alex's hand is on Paul's leg; I realised after looking more closely that it was actually Paul's hand, but by then it was too late. I think that the lesson here is that I really, really need to stop watching non-fiction programmes with any sort of trio at the core. (This may not strictly be a lament about writing (unless I ever actually write Alex/Jess/Paul, which would be an awful thing to do and please don't let me do it), but that does not stop it from being true.)