Trabia Garden

abyssal_sylph did this fandom meme over the summer, and I thought it looked like fun! The full list of questions was originally compiled by trobadora and can be found here. To keep my entries to a reasonable length, I'll just do a few questions at a time, rather than posting the entire thing at once.

What's changed about your fandom life in the last 365 days?

The biggest change is that I've got a website now! It's great to have a space on the Internet I can just talk about Final Fantasy VIII as much as I want (I say, as if I didn't already do that in this journal).

Your newest fandom.

In Stars and Time, maybe? I've written a couple of fics; does that make it one of my fandoms? It's a time loop game with a lot of charm; I had fun with it, but I don't really think of myself as in the fandom.

The last thing I got into and ended up thinking about a lot is Omori, a game that absolutely haunts me and will probably do so for a long time. I haven't actually written for it and don't have any fic ideas, but I found it fascinating and I often find myself seeking out fanart.

The last thing I got into so heavily that it qualified for a 'my fandom history' writeup was Severance, back in February. Such an interesting concept! One of the most absorbing shows I've ever watched.

Writing-wise, this year has been more about revisiting older fandoms than launching into new ones, now that I think about it.

You've got your OTP, you have to throw a third into the mix (from the same fandom), creating an OT3. Who is the OTP, and in your opinion, why would they make a perfect third for them?

The first pairing I thought of was Nate/Elena from Uncharted, and the ideal third - Victor 'Goddamn' Sullivan, the third point of their adventure trio - is so obvious that I've actually written that threesome already.

Some potential thirds for assorted other pairings that came to mind, discounting pairings (e.g. Sora/Riku) where the third is so obvious it goes without saying:

- Jeff/Annie from Community: I think Britta would probably be the best fit, but I strongly prefer Jeff/Annie on its own. Their chemistry is so weird and intense!

- Light/L from Death Note: Misa, obviously. Or some weird thing with Ryuk, where L is unaware that there's a third entity in their relationship. That had not occurred to me before this instant, but I'm sort of fascinated by the idea now. Ryuk joins Light and L in the bed, forcing Light to suppress his reactions in order to hide the fact that he's having a threesome when, from L's perspective, only the two of them are there. Someone please write this; it's not in my skillset!

- Kane/Abby from The 100: Jaha is the only option coming to mind. This could either sort of work or go very badly, depending on the point in canon that Jaha is coming from.

- Jack/Kate from Lost: Sawyer? Probably Sawyer, as if Jack and Kate don't have enough potential to crash and burn on their own. For less guaranteed disaster: Charlie. For even more guaranteed disaster: Locke.

- Hinata/Komaeda from Danganronpa: I know Hinata/Komaeda/Nanami is popular, but I think I might be more interested by the thought of Hinata/Komaeda/Kuzuryuu. WAIT, NO: there's a correct answer here, and it is Makoto Naegi. Hinata/Komaeda/Naegi would be incredible; Hinata/Naegi would be very cute, and then they'd both desperately have to try to cope with the presence of Komaeda.

- Travis/Laura from The Quarry: Max or Ryan, I suppose? I prefer Ryan, but Max has the fun 'Travis kept me imprisoned' aspect. Travis and Laura aren't great candidates for an OT3, though; they're at their best when they're isolated and weirdly fixated on each other.

- Keiji/Sara from Your Turn to Die: hard to envision, because Keiji has zero interest in anyone who isn't Sara. Maybe some sort of fucked-up situation with Sou?

- Yosuke/Yu from Persona 4: Chie's probably the most obvious candidate, but I think adding Kanji to the mix here would be very funny. Yosuke and Kanji are both disaster boys with a lot of anxiety about their sexuality; it'd be fun to throw them together!

- Zell/Squall from Final Fantasy VIII: Rinoa! Rinoa, no question. This would be adorable.

- Beatrice/Battler from Umineko: oh, God, there's no good answer here. Jessica? Shannon, Kanon? Ange??? (Teenage Ange, to be specific, which by no means prevents this from being a fucked-up relationship but does at least make things a little less fucked up.) There's a huge amount wrong with Beatrice/Battler already (I say, with deep fondness), and adding any possible third would only make things worse.

- Utena/Anthy from Revolutionary Girl Utena: again, there is no good answer here. I think the only way out is to accept that and pivot to choosing the worst possible answer: Akio. An Utena/Anthy/Akio scenario, focusing on how the girls eventually manage to escape him. Wait, that's just Revolutionary Girl Utena.

Oh, wow, I have gone severely overboard on this question. It's an interesting one to think about, though! Feel free to share your own answers in the comments, if you'd like.

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.'

If I've written at least ten thousand words of fanfiction for a particular canon, across at least three fics, I'll write an entry talking about how that canon fits into my fandom history. Your Turn to Die qualified with the Silent Hill crossover I posted a couple of days ago, so here's the 'my fandom history' writeup!


Your Turn to Die

Riona: FUTURESOON WHY WOULD YOU GET ME INTO ANOTHER DEATH GAME
futuresoon: ahahaha YOU WERE EXACTLY WHO I WAS HOPING TO GET INTO IT

Just after my thirty-first birthday, I saw futuresoon posting about a game called Your Turn to Die. I collect weird videogames about murder, and this sounded promising from the title alone, so I was compelled to investigate.

Your Turn to Die turned out to be a) great and b) free, so I felt good about this decision. I'd recommend it to anyone who's into Danganronpa or Zero Escape. (There are some minigames that require a bit of dexterity, but the 'Minigame Auto-Click' option makes them easier.)

My experience with the Your Turn to Die fandom has been an odd one. The Keiji/Sara part of the fandom has been incredibly warm and supportive, and I've received a lot of very long, kind, thoughtful comments from them on my fanfiction! But there's also a very vocal part of the fandom that loathes both Keiji/Sara and Keiji/Sara shippers. It's a fandom at war, and it can be a bit exhausting sometimes.


Favourite character: Keiji Shinogi is guilt-ridden, self-loathing and fascinating. I love that his motives are never entirely clear. I love that he deflects by flirting. I love that he conceals things from Sara, that he'll unhesitatingly lie to her face, and yet he never actually acts to harm her. He genuinely does seem to be on her side, but she can't trust a word he says.
Favourite pairing: Even if I hadn't already written a load of Keiji/Sara-tinged fanfiction, you'd probably be able to deduce it from my 'favourite character' answer. The constant tension between trust and distrust really drew me to the Keiji/Sara pairing. Keiji's shifty as hell and will manipulate Sara for his own ends, but he also genuinely seems to like and respect her. Sara doesn't know whether Keiji can be trusted, but she knows that he's important to her. It's a really fascinating dynamic with some great potential for darkness, and it's hard to think of any other relationship like it.
Number of words written: 13,069

Snippet: This is where I generally include a snippet of unfinished fanfiction, but I have almost nothing for Your Turn to Die, alas! These few lines were all I could find. I think the concept was supposed to be 'Sara wakes up in a world where the death game never happened and tries to track Keiji down'.


Nobody’s answering the door.

The address isn’t right. Of course it’s not right; Keiji’s one of the biggest liars Sara has ever met, and it’s only Sou keeping him from taking the top spot. He probably lied to the force about where he lives. She’s never going to find him.

It’s weird to think of him as ‘one of the biggest liars she’s ever met’ when she’s never technically met him.

I finished playing Chapter 3, Part 1-A of Your Turn to Die and promptly finished this fic I've had lying around for a while! No spoilers for chapter three, though; it just runs up to the end of chapter two.

This is very vaguely inspired by Final Fantasy Type-0, in that Type-0 is set in a world where nobody remembers the dead, and I've been looking for an excuse to steal that concept for AUs ever since I played it.


Title: Blank Pages
Fandom: Your Turn to Die
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: maybe a hint of Keiji/Sara
Wordcount: 2,600
Summary: “We thought we’d show some compassion,” Miley says. “If someone who’s important to you dies, your memories of them will be instantly erased.”


( Blank Pages )

I feel like a part of me went 'you know, I really enjoyed writing my Queer Eye AU for Final Fantasy XV, but it was too cute and now I have to write something horrible to make up for it'.

Not unrelatedly, I've expanded the Your Turn to Die snippet from the preceding entry into a full fic. Many thanks to Rei for offering advice and helping me act things out so I could work out whether they were physically possible.


Title: Across the Line
Fandom: Your Turn to Die
Rating: R
Pairing: maybe a hint of Keiji/Sara
Wordcount: 2,100
Summary: Sara obtains two things in quick succession: a gun, and permanent psychological trauma. Keiji knows what that’s like.
Warnings: Violence, blood, character death. Spoilers up to the end of Chapter Two, specifically the Human Flower route.


( Across the Line )

The Keiji/Sara ship for Your Turn to Die is serving me so well. All the fanfiction is weird and dark and tense and 'shit, I don't know if I can trust this guy, maybe I should have thought about that before I let him put his fingers in me.' I love it.

I've come across exactly one fic for it that was fluffy to any extent, and it went like this:

Fic: Here's some dark stuff! But there are also flashforwards to Keiji and Sara living a fluffy, domestic life—
Riona: Booooooo.
Fic: —because he forcibly erased her memories.
Riona: Holy shit, this is the best ship.

(I'm not opposed to fluff; it's just not what I tend to be in the mood to read!)

The Keiji/Sara shippers are an extremely lovely, enthusiastic bunch who get a lot of undeserved stick, which makes me want to write more fanfiction for them. Astonishingly, it seems the efforts of the faction going 'YOU CAN'T SHIP THAT, IT'S MORALLY WRONG' may have backfired! (To be honest, it's hard to get morally outraged over the thought of a fictional seventeen-year-old fictionally making out with a fictional twenty-something when I, an actual living human, could legally have banged as many buff policemen as I wanted at the age of seventeen.)

None of my fic ideas are clicking, though, which is a little frustrating. It's difficult to write Keiji when he keeps his past and his motivations so close to his muscular chest. One of my ideas is, inevitably, 'Sara wakes up in her normal life with memories of the Death Game, and it's hard for her to process these traumatic experiences that didn't actually happen', but I'd have no idea how to write Keiji outside the context of the game.

A part of me insists on interpreting Keiji as what happens when Carlos of Zero Escape goes through traumatic experiences and ends up kind of dead inside, but Carlos is remarkably psychologically resilient; given the traumatic experiences he's already been through prior to Zero Time Dilemma, he seems pretty open and well-adjusted. Could he really become this screwed-up, secretive, manipulative, dead-eyed man?

It's possible I just went 'I love both of these ripped blond guys who were abducted and thrown into a murder game; maybe that means they're the same guy?' No, Riona. There's room for more than one ripped blond murder game guy in your heart.

How many murder-focused videogames can a human being feasibly write fanfiction for? I am on a perpetual quest to find out. But it's at least seven.


Title: Grounded
Fandom: Your Turn to Die
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: maybe a hint of Keiji/Sara
Wordcount: 1,200
Summary: It's hard to trust Keiji. But there's something comforting about him, even so.
Notes: Spoilers up to and including Chapter Two, Part One.


( Grounded )

Q: Riona, do you really have time to write mini-reviews of every game you've ever played?
A: I absolutely don't.
Q: And yet.
A: And yet!

Some of these are more just reminiscences than reviews, but I've said at least a line or two about every game. Possibly. I've almost certainly forgotten about some.

For the most part these are listed alphabetically, so you can easily track down any games you're interested in, but games in a series are listed together, so, for example, 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors, Virtue's Last Reward and Zero Time Dilemma are all under Z for Zero Escape, and World of Final Fantasy comes under F. I've put a (LP) next to games I've only experienced through Let's Plays. Flash games, text adventures and electronic versions of card, tile or board games are not included.

Games I first played after originally posting this entry are marked with an asterisk.


( Thoughts on every game I've ever played, or close enough. )


I'm glad I've put this very important and necessary entry into the waiting world.