Snowflake challenge 2-3, PoI s1, fandom year in review
Challenge 2: Talk about your fannish history
I remembered writing down my fannish history for an earlier Snowflake round (and eventually even found it, despite not having tagged it), but that was 5 years ago and under f-lock, so let's have an updated version (although a lot of it it C&P'd from the older post):
When I look back at it, I was a kid really desperately in search of fandom pretty much since I can remember. I always wanted to *interact* with the things I read/watched and loved -- to play-act my favorite characters as I was going through my day, to come up with fix-it stories where my dead-in-canon favorites didn't die, to throw the characters I like together and watch them interact. I got the neighborhood kids to play Mount Olympus with me, and crawled around the orchard-gone-wild behind our apartment complex pretending I was Pedro Zurita from The Amphibian Man, and drew pirate treasure maps the summer I was obsessed with Treasure Island, and got my grandfather to basically do one-on-one crossover RP with me on our walks. As I got a little older, I started keeping a list of favorite characters, who all lived in a big mansion and interacted with each other: characters from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Chrestomanci and Prydain. Most of this was inside my head, or with whoever I could drag into it for a couple of hours, but at that point I never met anyone else who liked playing these kinds of games.
When I was 11, I met my best friend. I don't know if she was naturally inclined towards fannishness, or just receptive to picking it up from me, but we first bonded over a play we had to write for an assignment, and ended up writing Inspector Gadget fanfiction. Then at 13 I read LotR and fell in love, and dragged my friend into LotR with me -- we made a deal: she would read LotR for me and I would read Lord of the Flies for her (she was studying it in class and really liked it). I ended up liking it, too, though I never became fannish about it, but now I had an actual fellow fan to Do Fandom with for LotR. We made posters and buttons and walked around shouting "Gandalf for President!" and "Frodo Lives!" (well, OK, I was shouting that, because I was apparently really hard to embarrass at that age), and writing these things, too, on every available surface (I still do it with "Frodo Lives"). And, for a change, when I made up stories of what happened with my favorite LotR characters, I had someone to inflict them on share them with. Then we started making up the stories together, in our walks around the neighborhood. They were about as brilliant as you imagine, with our self-insert Mary-Sue characters saving our favorites and marrying them. The very early ones are written down in synopsis form in a binder I haven't dared read through. Fortunately for us, there was no internet back then.
LotR is a wonderful first fandom, because it had been around for so long, an was known around the world. I got to meet a lot of other people, from all walks of life, who were also fans, and it was an instant sense of connection: the kid, three years younger than us, whom we met while camping and who I still keep in touch with on Facebook almost 30 years later; the woman my grandmother's age who overheard us arguing over proper translations of Tolkien names an turned out to be a fellow fan; my boss at my first internship who ha read LotR as it was coming out, reading it as he roadtripped across the country with his girlfriend in their hippie van; the vendor rep from Germany who recognized Minas Tirith on my work laptop's wallpaper and told me about the LotR LARPs he'd participated in; the professor who recognized the Tolkien reference in my email account name and asked me about it, who became a sort of friend for the rest of my time at uni.
In high school, I met two things important to my fannish history: people who were fans of things in their own right -- things I did not know about -- and the internet. My junior prom date introduced me to Babylon 5 (apparently I reminded him of Ivanova, which... I'll take as a compliment, heh), and to the Lurker's Guide, where fans could... communicate with each other! (indirectly and clumsily, but across the world!) With internet access in uni, I discovered other fannish sites: the Rolozo art archive (I spent HOURS downloading pictures on whatever pathetic modem we had at the time), and Ara-na-Kulichkah (the Russian language fansite/hub), methodically traveling webrings (about 95% of them named after puns on The One Ring), etc. Not just Tolkien sites, too -- I remember also spending some time on Whoosh.org (the Xena fansite), though I was never anything like a serious fan. I met a few RL fans of both B5 an Xena in real life, and it was always neat to chat with them about favorite characters and other genre things we liked, but internet fandom was just a thing for me to consume at that point -- people did somehow get their things into the archives I was reading, but it didn't occur to me at any point that this was even something to want to do.
Then in 1999 the same friend who got me into B5, who was not into LotR himself but knew that I was a major fan, told me some guy named Peter Jackson was making a Lord of the Rings movie, and that Ain't It Cool News was a way to keep abreast of developments. I guess it was AICN that led me to TheOneRing.net, but in any case, that's where I ended up, and that was my main fannish home until ~2002. It was also the first place where I interacted with fan people I didn't already know in person online, although I was still primarily a lurker -- I made maybe a handful of posts in those 3-4 years, and exchanged some emails with one person I met on the site.
Then a couple of things happened that changed my focus elsewhere. The first was 9/11 -- I actually have a very clear memory of reading the boards on 9/11 itself (I was at work, but nobody was getting any work done, obviously) -- and the bitter arguments that erupted in its wake about the war and what was justified and who were the Orcs and who were the armies of light in this equation. I'm sure this sort of thing was going on everywhere, but it was actually quite painful to see people whom I had come to respect as fellow fans turning on each other in this context. The other thing was, Fellowship of the Ring came out in December 2001, bringing about a wave of movie fans. A tsunami of movie fans, more like it. And while I went to see the movie and loved it, of course, I also found that I didn't care about the movie nearly as much as about the books. An my focus was different from a lot of the movie-first fans, who seemed to want to talk about Orli!Legolas and ship Frodo/Sam -- which, there's nothing wrong with either of those things, but LotR is not a fandom I'm at all shippy about, and Orli!Legolas never stopped looking wrong to me. So, I was feeling kind of increasingly out of step with the LotR fandom, and there were the unpleasant memories of the 9/11 arguments around the old-timers on the boards, and the new fans were, well, new fans. But I was still following TOR.n, in the absence of anything better to do.
And at some point, probably in early 2002, somebody on TOR.n linked to cassieclaire's Very Secret Diaries, and I followed the link to LJ and discovered... a whole new world. People could have journals! That they updated real time, as opposed to static Geocities pages. And the journals could have a mix of real life and fannish content, which was highly relevant to my interests, because by 2002 I had a kid who was starting to do interesting things that I wanted to record. The other awesome things about LJ was that the journals were CONNECTED. Like Webrings, only much less dorkily. I started in cassieclaire, and then clicked on the various names that appeared in her posts, which is how I originally discovered
aome (although it would be another two years or so before I got an LJ of my own, first thing in 2004 -- once invite codes were no longer required -- and friended her).
This is also how I discovered Harry Potter fandom. It was hard to miss, at the time :P I had actually been a fan of the HP books since college: a coworker of my dad's lent him the first book for my brother, who was about 10 at the time, but my mother and I read it first and then raced through the other books publishe at the time. I have some very vivid memories of bribing myself with Harry Potter chapters (this would've been Prisoner of Azkaban) after each chapter of Kinetics as I was studying for my midterms. But while I knew the book was popular, I did not realize it had an online fandom, with people writing fanfiction, and other people MSTing it. I'd stumbled across fanfiction before: in fact, one of the very first things I found on the internet, when I plugged in "Boromir" into the Alta Vista search engine, like you do, was Boromir/Faramir fic, because of course it was. But HP fandom was the first time I actually read fic and intentionally looked for it: first Harry/Draco, because that was the part of fandom I'd stumbled into, then Remus/Sirius, then whatever random pairings I could find, the weirer the better, because there was just such a breath of STUFF being written in Harry Potter fandom. (Also, some truly high grade wank, which I followed avidly.)
So in 2004 I joined LJ and friended the couple of people whose journals I'd been lurking in for a while. Over the next couple of years I made some good LJ friends, with whom I spent many, many comments discussing our fannish interests and chatting about real life. It was still very much like my RL fannish relationships: chance meetings that led to friendships and one-on-one interactions, just, you know, not limite by time and space -- and the fact that LJ(/DW) enables this is still my favorite thing about LJ/DW. Then in 2006 I joined sorting_realm, a LotR landcomm that had recently started. I was sorted as a Dwarf (which, fair), and I never did much of anything, but this paved the way for me to join westerosorting when that came about in 2008.
I was sorted into House Tyrell, and pretty much figured that would be the end of that, like with the other comm. I had no plans to actually *do* anything. But no, the WS people were just too cool! I found myself getting involved in spirited discussions, campaigning for Tywin for best villain in polls, eventually making my own posts (total crack, all of them). I joined chat for the first time ever (and had tremendous fun sorting Simpsons into ASOIAF houses). I sorta taught myself to use Paint.NET and made icons, first badly, then somewhat less ineptly, so that I could earn points for my house. I entered a tourney with a (cracky) acrostic, and won first place. These things were the first fannish content I posted on the internet specifically for the consumption of other people, which was quite a milestone. I wrote a bunch more poems, made some fannish crafts that would make a kindergartener proud (maybe), and participated in a collaboration for the glory of House Tyrell. I even applied to be a mod, and helped spreadsheet House Tyrell to the Iron Throne a couple of times. But even aside from the fannish milestones, WS was just an amazing place! So much of my present f-list are people I got to know through westerosorting, and a number of people I now consider close RL friends, and many of the LJ folks I miss most are those I got to know in that comm.
This is where my post from 2015 stopped. I mentioned that I'd never gone to a convention or even a fannish meet-up, for instance -- I had plans to go to Azkatraz in 2009 (since it was close to home) but chickened out, because I didn't know what to do there. Well, I finally did go to a convention in 2017 (although just to tag along with the actual fan), and then to Worldcon (!!!) in 2018, complete with fannish meet-ups, which was amazing, and I would go again in a flash. I also wrote that I'd not posted fanfic online (though I had betaed fic for people), and now I've done that too (about hamsters, but, you know. They're awesome hamsters an also it's on brand.) And I've acquired a most amazing item of Vorkosigan swag, when 5 years ago I was writing forlornly that none of them seemed to exist. I've still never done fannish RP or a LARP, but hey, maybe next time this question gets asked in Snowflake, I will have. I've also started listening to a couple of fannish podcasts, which I think back in 2015 I didn't even realize were a thing. I even joined a fannish Discord and a fannish Slack, though I'm not an active user by any means. (Somewhere in there I also got a Tumblr and then abandoned it, because Tumblr is terrible for the kind of fandom interaction I like.)
My interest in ASOIAF fandom has pretty much died off (if an actual new book in the series ever comes out, maybe it will return...), and no main fandom has come to replace it. I've enjoyed watching the renaissance of Babylon 5 fandom, with a new generation of fans discovering a show I've loved for two decades when it appeared on streaming services. I've enjoyed watching Rivers of London fandom grow from first fics appearing on AO3 to a big-for-Yuletide. I'e continued to, like, paleontologically unearth Dragaera fandom or will it into existence, with not much success so far. I picked up a Russian canon I'm fannish about (Olga Gromyko's Kosmo-oluhi), and dipped into Russian fandom, chasing fic, and discovered the alien world of Fandom Battles and Russian fan terminology. I've read a lot of MCU fic, because it was there.
I don't know if another main fandom will sweep me up again at some point. It won't be another LotR, because there's only room for one One True Canon at the foundations of my fannish identity. But maybe another global craze like HP, that'll catch me at just the right time, or another confluence of amazing people like westerosorting was. For now I'm happy with the kind of long, meandering one-on-one discussions about all the shared fandoms and touchstones which were the thing that originally brought me to LJ (and now also to DW).
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Challenge 3: Pimp Your Favorite Communities, Fests or Challenges!
I don't have a lot of comms I follow these days (comms that are active, anyway, but here are a couple):
fanart_recs is one that I think I picked up off a Snowflake rec several years ago. It rotates through fandoms, so the posts aren't always relevant to me, but I discovered some beautiful Tolkien fanart that way, cute MCU pieces, and lately have been really enjoying the Good Omens (TV) posts.
babylon5_love was one I discovered just last year (which I hope will be reprising the B5 Love Month tradition, because that was some wonderful nostalgia)
fandom_stocking isn't running this year, which makes me very sad, as it's really the perfect format for me. I hope it will return in subsequent years, and meanwhile there was
in_a_peartree this year. I didn't end up having a chance to sign up or decorate anything, but I'm still planning to browse the decorated trees.
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Also, end-of-year meme roundups and
sunlit_stone reminded me that I had started watching Person of Interest back in Jan 2019, and then just stopped. I went back an watched a bunch more eps, and then a bunch more, and now I'm done with season 1. It's a really easy show for me to binge, apparently -- my attention waners occasionally, but dramatic music and gunshots swing it back at important points :P The last time I'd posted about it was after I had watched the first 5 episodes. I've now watched 18 (a couple more soon after I posted, and then a bunch just now). I find that I don't have a lot to say about the individual episodes, or rather, it's the same sorts of things after each one (except the season finale): spoilers for s1 from here it's fun to watch John swoop down on the outfit of some small-time low-life thug with his full commando arsenal like an avenging angel of death; it's fun to keep track of all of Harold's bird aliases; John being all mellow, cheerful, and polite in the midst of life-or-death situations, often while being covered in blood, is a very enjoyable character trait. Of specific episodes, the ones that stand out particularly to me are: "Witness" (which was SUCH a cool way to introduce Elias! -- and I liked the backstory we see of him in the other Elias-centric episode, with the dons); the one with the old Statsi strike team (though I liked the present-day case and especially the way Reese clearly identified with Kohl, less so the flashback's to John's past; and I liked "Super" for the role-reversal between Reese and Finch (and I guessed that the "boyfriend" was the stalker way sooner than Our Heroes did, but not that the nebbishy super guy really had had a mansion and a pet tiger and was in witness protection -- that was a cute twist); and the episode where Reese is "hired" by a 14-year-old kid to avenge the murder of his brother (their dynamic was cute, especially with the boy categorizing Reese as a "ronin" and quoting Sun Tzu, and I liked the young actor). I also liked that in "The Fix" Zoe slips John a paperclip after lampshading it with a comment that "you're one of those men who can get out of anything with a paperclip" -- I mean, it's not subtle or unexpected, but it's... oddly satisfying in its purity of intent. I've also gotten to the episode where Reese and Finch temporarily adopt a baby (though, honestly, I was expecting it to be crackier), and the one where Finch gets stoned over the course of a case (and Reese refuses to take advantage an pump him for information). Of the non-Reese-and-Finch recurring characters, Detective Carter and Fusco have both grown on me in the sense that they no longer actively annoy me by taking up screen time, although I still don't care about them at all (I do like Carter's teenage son).
In terms of more arc-y things, I perked up at the mysterious hacker from "Root Cause", who recognizes in Finch a worthy opponent, since I know from fandom osmosis that Root is an important character -- and it was very cool to finally meet her face to face in the finale. I didn't think much of her in the role she was playing with the shrink lady, but the cheerful sociopath that appears to be the real her is quite intriguing! I also know from osmosis that the Machine is more important than just a means of generating the plot of the week, and I'd been watching for those developments, but so far that aspect has not very interesting to me -- although I think that might change now that the Machine and John are apparently going to interact directly. And it was interesting to see some more glimpses into Finch's mysterious past with the fiance. One thing I'm finding an interesting surprise with Finch is that he is so very firm on believing the Machine -- this universal spy with hard-coded zero oversight -- a good thing. I mean, he built it, but given how flawed the human institutions are, it's a somewhat unexpected message to me that this pretty dystopian neural network is apparently a good thing.
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Fandom year in review
1. Your main fandom of the year?
Did I have a main fandom this year? Nothing new came along, but I continued to bring up Terra Ignota at every opportunity (ikel89, who had just started reading it this time last year, finished the books and became a fan herself, so there's been a fair amount of opportunity for it even with willing participants :D The highlight of this is that Best Chat now has both a Brillist emoji (👓, with a variant specifically for peering at trash fires in voyeuristic amusement Felix Faust would be proud of) and a cannibalism emoji (🍗), and also I got to type the phrase "Yes I do have Mycroft's dick highlighted. For science, obviously". It's been a good time!)
I also had a pretty intense couple of months of bingeing Farscape early on in the year and White Collar just before the summer trip, and the former involves some lovely discussion/thoughts from old-time fans, and the latter enjoyed some delightful live-blogging and cracky AU ideas with Best Chat. I didn't finish either, so I don't think I can consider them main fandoms, but hopefully I will recapture that next year and actually finish out both.
Also, ikel89 has been reading the Miles books over the last year, and while my rereading in sync never actually worked out (I got through half of Cetaganda and then got distracted while she finished the whole thing), I still felt involved in the fannishness by doling out curated non-spoilery fic, test-driving Serpent-cast episodes for Vorkosigan spoilers, and shopping for black market Vorkosigan copies for K (as the older books seem to be out of print (in hard copy) and selling at a premium).
2. Your favorite film watched this year?
The films I watched this year were Into the Spider-Verse, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Captain Marvel, Endgame, Spiderman Far From Home, and, on a different note, Ralph Breaks the Internet and Blakkklansman. For Hugo homework I watched Annihilation, Sorry to Bother You, an A Quiet Place. My favorite film was Spider-Verse (it deserved all the awards), and my least favorite, easily, was A Quiet Place, but the only ones I actually felt fannish about were the MCU Endgame + Spider-Man coda (I had more Tony & Peter feelings than I had expected and I'd expected a fair amount), with a tiny sie of Ralph 2 (because aged-up!Vanellope/Shank must clearly be a thing, right? I mean, that was quite clearly a crush!).
3. Your favorite book read this year?
Answered in detail in the book meme, but basically Flowers of Vashnoi in terms of fannish feels, or Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach in terms of cool new world. But not a banner year for reading. There were some other books I thought were good and/or important, but not in a fannish way.
4. Your favorite album or song to listen to this year?
This was the year I discovered, via
snickfic, Billie Eilish, an listened to "Bad Guy" and "You Should See Me in a Crown" a bunch of times -- including tracking own a number of vids using those songs, because they're great vid songs. Speaking of vid songs, via
zdenka I also discovered CHVRCHES' "Gun", and now the idea of an Ancillary Justice vid to that song won't leave me alone, despite the fact that I don't even like fanvids all that much, have not the first idea about making them, and also book fanvids require some sort of sorcery, especially in sci-fi canons.
My actual favorite song, though, in non-fannish context, was Shaov's Kategoricheskij imperativ, a jaunty tune about Kant.
5. Your favorite TV show of the year?
This year I watched a bunch of TV again, most of which is (once again) a thing that is K's fault. The big new things were Farscape and White Collar, as already mentioned above. Oh, and Good Omens, which I keep forgetting about because it didn't feel like television. I also caught up on The Good Place season 3, before falling behind again, and made a start on Person of Interest (which I apparently find an easy show to binge but a hard one to go back to).
I did like Good Omens a lot, but more as a pretty good adaptation of a thing I already loved, so I can't count it as a favorite, even though its existence and execution made me happy.
So my favorite has got to be White Collar, which is just so charming and easy on the eyes. "Forging Bonds" made me laugh really hard, and then made me giggle with glee when ikel89 got to it. Also, it was the one TV show I actually felt fannish about to any degree. I didn't get around to reading fic, but Best Chat spent fun-filled hours discussing what faerie creatures everyone would be in a Neal-is-an-exiled-fae-prince-under-geas AU, and what powers everone would have in a Curseworker AU, and at one point during Yuletide beta discussion we somehow got onto "what rodent would everyone be?" AU (answers available upon request).
6. Your favorite LJ community of the year?
I hung out in
yuletide and related comms more this year than even when doing Yuletide as spectator sport in previous years. Also, I had a chance to contribute a little to
fandom_stocking in January (and I really miss the fact that there won't be a round this year; I saw the couple of substitution comms/ideas, and maybe I'll play in subsequent years, but none of them were quite the format of F_S, which I really like. I also enjoyed a whole bunch of pieces linked in
fanart_recs, especially the profusion of Good Omens art later on in the year.
7. Your best new fandom discovery of the year?
Heh, I suspect White Collar. Getting into TV fandom 20 years too late is kind of my thing.
Oh, wait! also noticing those Sophos cybersecurity billboards on my train commute, because it is totally a fandom now :DDDD (♥ cyanshadow)
8. Your biggest fandom disappointment of the year?
That Perhaps the Stars was pushed to 2020, then pushed again to 2021.
9. Your fandom boyfriend of the year?
I did get to know some very fun male characters this year (mostly in the TV fandoms) -- Neal Caffrey, John Crichton, Crais -- but I would want approximately none of them for my boyfriend. I still love Chidi Anagonye, and still don't want him as a boyfriend either. Oh, and I wouldn't want him for a boyfriend either, but Reese on Person of Interest has really lovely eyes and eyelashes.
You know what, let's go with Tempest, the guy in the "stormy sea" Sophos billboard linked above. That's his name now forever. And he is rocking that coat.
10. Your fandom girlfriend of the year?
I do actually have a book one: Katherine from Dread Nation, whom I liked a lot. And back to TV, Diana from White Collar. Aeryn Sun is not really my type in terms of emotional baggage, but I do like her as a character / the way she looks in her black tanktops.
11. Your biggest squee moment of the year?
I can't think of a single major moment, but some smaller highlights were ikel89 live-blogging "Forging Bonds" at Best Chat (after I had already watched it), an also K getting to a particular Papa reveal in Terra Ignota, which had been one of my flaily moments the year before, so getting to talk about that was great.
Oh, also, not JUST fandom, but reconnecting with
tabacoychanel to the tune of multiple hydra-ing teal deer threads about books and fandoms has been a pure delight over the last week or so :D
12. The most missed of your old fandoms?
Still Dragaera, *sigh*. This year Yuletide didn't produce any fic, which was very sad-making (although at least I did find some more DW folk who are into or have gotten into Dragaera *waves*)
13. The fandom you haven't tried yet, but want to?
In terms of fandom for a canon I have consumed, I guess White Collar -- I know there's a lot of great fic out there, but I want to finish watching it first. Ditto for Farscape; I'm not sure what the fic landscape looks like there, and there are only niche things that (at least currently) I'd be interested in tracking own fic for (John/Crais), but I guess I'll go looking at some point.
In terms of actually trying new canons, I have actually started on Farscape, which has been on this list for years. But The Expanse carries over for another year.
14. Your biggest fan anticipations for the New Year?
New Dragaera canon (in April; Paarfi, but I'll take it); new Peter Grant novel.
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And another quick meme to wrap up the fannish year-end memes:
Favorite main character of 2019: No standouts in books this year, although I liked Rin a lot in The Poppy War, for the brutal consistency of her character, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Tess in Tess of the Road, and Strength and Patience of the Hill in Raven Tower (who is certainly a very unusual narrator). Over in non-book media, I liked both of the Spider-Man kids (Miles Morales in Spider-Verse and Peter in the MCU movie), and Neal over in White Collar. And the Good Omens adaptation had a very nice take on Aziraphale an Crowley.
Favorite villain of 2019: Did my year have any fun villains? The books I read did not. I was not thrilled with the MCU villains any more than I usually am (Endgame made Thanos a little more interesting than Infinity War, but that's not saying much, and I was kind of eh on Mysterio, too, and Kingpin in Spider-Verse just didn't appeal for purely visual reasons). This might actually be Scorpius in Farscape, for all that I haven't finished out the show. (Crais didn't interest me when he was the antagonist, though I'm liking him now that he's something a bit more complex than that.)
Favorite M/F couples of 2019: Peter and El on White Collar are almost isgustingly wholesome. That's about all I've got. I also really enjoyed the friendship between Neal and Diana. And I really like the friendship that grows between Nahri an Ali, though I don't ship them romantically.
Favorite F/F couples of 2019: Isabel/Tamsin, the elderly archivist and her wife, in Record of a Spaceborn Few were adorable, with their space roller coaster date. (I read a bunch of other books with canonical f/f relationships, but they didn't o much for me, not even Kiva Lagos/lawyer lady, although that one was at least fun).
Favorite M/M couples of 2019: I guess Muntadhir/Jamshid in City of Brass, but almost by default. I liked Robbie in Grasshopper Jungle, but he could do so much better than Austin.
Non-canonically, I certainly do get why Neal/Peter was a popular ship, though I'm almost more partial to Neal/Mozzie, I think, as the seasons wore on. Also, where I stopped in Farscape -- with John and Crais on their own -- has intrigued me in a slashy direction, as I mentioned above.
Favorite Crossover couples of 2019: I don't need them to actually pair off crossoverly, but reading some Spinning Silver Yuletide prompts has made me realize that it would be SO MUCH FUN to watch Morrolan e'Drien and the Staryk Lord be high-handed assholes with WAAAY more prie than sense of self-preservation at each other, while Miryem and Vlad just shake their heads and facepalm endlessly at their dumbass ~Elves.
Favorite Polyships of 2019: I 100% get why there are SO MANY Neal/Peter/Elizabeth fics for White Collar, because it's hard not to imagine those plots unfolding, especially in season 1.
Canonically, I liked getting a very high level and indirect look at how the Kiggs/Seraphina/Glisselda relationship is working in Tess of the Road.
Favorite Crossover Polyships of 2019: I don't need them to be sleeping together, but I would love to read a girl's night out fic featuring Susan Ivanova, Zoe Washburne, and Aeryn Sun, with the inevitable ass-kicking that the night will feature.
Also, definitely not shipping anyone, but the psychic conversation in Foundryside gave me just enough of a Vlad novels feel that I would've quite liked to see that crossover, with Vlad and Morrolan finding themselves in the world of Foundryside.
NOTPs of 2019: I'm interpreting this as canonical pairings that didn't work for me, an there are quite a few. Leaving asie books I just plain disliked: Cardenia/Marce in The Consuming Fire proceeded to be super boring; ALL the relationships shown in The Belles were painfully bad (well, unless I'm meant to be intrigued by Camilla/evil princess); and I thought the relationship between Genie and Quentin in The Epic Crush of Genie Lo was tacked on and the weakest thing about the book. Also, just, Jude/Cardan is nowhere interesting enough to need a whole book to be about that, let alone a whole trilogy.
Fandom that you never expected to get into: White Collar was a very random development, considering it's been off air for 5 years and wasn't on any of the available streaming options.
Fandom that made an unexpected comeback: I got all kinds of refreshed Babylon 5 feels, between the B5 Love Months (for which I even contributed Sorting Hat Chats sortings and listening to the Audio Guide to Babylon 5 throughout the year.
Also, the rodents and I went back to Buffy over the summer and got through a good chunk of season 4, which was also nice.
Last fandom of 2019: I usually go by last fandom I got into that I read fic for for this, and I guess that would make it the Tarot Sequence, which ended up having a lovely fic written for Yuletide, which I read with great enjoyment and am looking forward to reading more of at some point.
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1118888.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).