Fanfiction: Master List

[paratactician]

I decided I wanted a fanfic master list, because all the coolkids have one.

Currently pretty much everything I’ve written for Homestuck fandom is gathered on AO3, so you can just look there. But putting it here lets me gather it all on a single page, as well as add some brief commentary (being untumblr’d, I never really get a chance to talk about

Comments

[paratactician]

I am terribly flattered by this, thankyou. :-)

And ohhh dear. You do not really want me to talk about Rose because I will go on for fucking hours.

However! Since you asked, here is the number one rule for writing Rose which I try always to keep in mind:

Rose Lalonde is smarter than you.

By you, obviously, I mean me, or whoever's currently writing her. If you are writing Rose she is already ahead of you. It doesn't matter how smart you are; she's smarter. This doesn't mean she can't do really stupid things, because it's usually the smartest people who do the stupidest things, but the point is that if you the author can outthink her, something is wrong.

It's also important to remember that she's not the straight man. She's the voice of reason, often, but they're not the same thing. Too many people work off her early interactions with John, where he's wandering around being derpy and fucking up his Sylladex and she's all 'John. John, what are you doing. John, please try not to be such an Epsilon semi-moron', and hence characterise her as the Humourless Schoolteacher, the personification of 'Come on, everyone, enough messing around, let's get some work done, stop laughing at the back'. Rose is hilarious. She gets 75% of the comic's best lines. Pick any Rose pesterlog and it will have at least one absolutely glorious one-liner.

My nightmare Rose is the po-faced nagging-mother-analogue who rolls her eyes and tuts at everyone else's wacky antics while inexplicably using nothing but long words. I HATE this. Rose loves words, why are you making her sound like a robot? You want her to say 'I'm going to go and buy some milk', but oh no, wait, better put that in character: 'I shall engage forthwith in a speculative venture whereby I may perchance, via a ritualised socioeconomic transaction, acquire the colloid of lipidinous nodules suspended in carbohydrate-rich fluid referred to in common parlance as 'milk'.' 'haha rose, those sure are some long words!' No, no, no. Rose writers: stop using 'shall'. It cannot just be used in place of 'will' to make any sentence instantly 25% more pretentious. 'I hope you shall forgive me' - that's not English, and Rose would know that, because she is smarter than you.

(This said, there are a lot of writers in fandom who I think have Rose's voice down almost pat, and I make no claims to doing it particularly well myself, but I keep trying.)

Characters I find useful to think with when writing Rose: Laura Dannon from Brick ( here, with terrible out-of-sync audio, but), Marianne de Morangias from Brotherhood of the Wolf (can't find the clip I want anywhere online, sigh), Emma Peel from The Avengers (who also informs my Terezi sometimes, but seriously, watch her. Then watch her again, because she's great).