You Don't Have Any Legs.

Jul 31, 2018 15:27

The final entry in this adventure through my fandom history! I've really enjoyed this.

The Last of Us

The Last of Us came out just before I turned twenty-five. I wanted to play it, as I'd loved Naughty Dog's other work, but couldn't afford to buy it new. My brilliant plan: tell th_esaurus, with whom I lived at the time, about this game where a middle-aged man and a teenage girl travel through the apocalypse together (this concept is absolute catnip for her), then sit back and wait for her to buy it. It worked like a charm.

All of my fics for The Last of Us are over five thousand words long, which is unusual for me! Apparently it gives me ideas that need some space to explore.

The Last of Us is also unusual amongst the things I've written fanfiction for in being really, really good. I'm usually more drawn to write for messy, flawed canons.

Favourite character: Ellie is such a perfectly drawn character. She makes the game so human. It would never have worked without her.
Favourite pairing: This isn't a fandom I'm in for 'shipping purposes, especially, but Ellie/Riley is really cute.
Number of words written: 20,418

Snippet: This tiny thing is all I can find. It was meant to be something about Ellie's perspective on the world before the outbreak, I think. Warning for... discussion of miscarriage?


She’s still a little weirded out when the books she reads talk about having kids like it’s something normal. A woman got pregnant in the quarantine zone, once, and people treated her like she was infected.

“They’ll probably cut back on her rations,” Riley said, eyes harder than her voice. “They won’t say they’re trying to make her lose the baby, but it’s not like anyone doesn’t know.”

“That’s so fucked up,” Ellie muttered.

Riley shrugged. “At least it won’t have to deal with all this crap.”

Assassin's Creed

I tried out my housemate's copy of Assassin's Creed when I was twenty-six. It was a bit repetitive, but I enjoyed it enough to check out the later games in the series, which were great fun.

I've written a couple of Kenway/Kidd fics, a couple of Frye-sibling oneshots, but my main involvement in Assassin's Creed fandom was with a single series. A single, cowritten, extremely long series.

Visitors was originally supposed to be a oneshot. One chapter, containing eight short scenes from a Sense8 AU. I wrote it, and then it was over.

But I couldn't stop thinking of other scenes. So I wrote another eight and posted them as a second chapter. And then I posted a third, and, look, by that point I might as well keep going until I'd written for all twenty-eight possible two-character combinations.

Then salanaland started writing scenes in that universe, and I just kept going, and VampireBadger joined in, and we started making all sorts of plans in Google Docs, and and we all just wrote frantically in this one universe for a year and a half. By the time we drew the Visitorverse to a close, it was 900,000 words long. (Although over half the total wordcount was by VampireBadger, who is terrifyingly prolific.)

It was an absolute blast. We had a table to keep track of who had hugged whom, because it was our duty to make everyone hug and we took it very seriously.

A lasting impact of my time with the Visitorverse, when I was posting a new ficlet every couple of days: I'm now much better at finishing fics. It taught me how to look at what I've written so far and go 'okay, what needs to be added before this is ready to post?' So I've generally got less unfinished fanfiction lying around for my post-Assassin's Creed fandoms; if I start writing something now, I'm much more likely to see it through.

Favourite character: There are a lot of games and a lot of characters! But possibly Haytham Kenway? Repression, sarcasm and fraught parent-child relationships: always good. I wish I enjoyed the gameplay of Assassin's Creed III more so I'd be more willing to replay it.
Favourite pairing: Edward Kenway/James Kidd, for pairings that actually make sense. For pairings that don't make sense: Shay Cormac and Aveline de Grandpré never canonically meet, but I've 'shipped them ever since writing their first scene together in Visitors.
Number of words written: 122,813, of which 116,519 are in the Visitorverse.

Snippet: This was a concept for a Supernatural AU where the Frye twins become hunters.


“Jacob?”

Jacob grins at her.

“You’re in India,” Evie says.

Jacob looks down at himself. “I suppose I am.”

Is this a dream? “Why are you in India?”

“Oh, I have to have a reason, do I? I can’t just want to drop in and see my beloved sister?”

“Your sister who lives half a world away?” Evie asks. “I have to wonder whether I’m quite that beloved.” Her heart is still pounding; her body hasn’t yet caught up and realised there’s no intruder to fight after all. “You broke into our house.”

“Well, I didn’t have a key.”

“Did you write in advance? Did you tell us you were coming?”

“And rob you of this lovely surprise?”

“Jacob,” Evie says. “What are you doing here?”

Jacob grins again, his eyes gleaming. “Did you know ghosts are real?”

Until Dawn

I have no idea what made me think that investigating Until Dawn was a good idea. At the age of twenty-eight I went 'I should watch a Let's Play!' and then 'NO, I HAVE TO BACK OUT, THIS IS WAY TOO SCARY' and then 'NO, I CAN'T BACK OUT BECAUSE THEN I'LL NEVER KNOW THE FATE OF THESE KIDS AND THAT'S WORSE.' I ended up having to spoil myself for everything before I could handle watching. Then I started uncontrollably writing fic after fic where the entire plot was 'IT'S POST-GAME AND EVERYONE'S TRAUMATISED'.

Favourite character: Mike! He combines two character types I have a weakness for: 'confident, kind of a jerk sometimes' and 'desperately trying to atone for a horrible, horrible mistake'. Also, he gets his fingers caught in a bear trap and it's hot.
Favourite pairing: I love Mike/Sam a lot. It's got shades of Nate/Elena, both in their appearance and in their dynamic. I was so happy when they teamed up.
Number of words written: 16,881.

Snippet: This isn't actually a snippet from an unfinished fic; it's a bit from an early draft of a finished fic. My Until Dawn time loop fic, New Game?, was originally going to be much lighter in tone and have Mike and Sam trapped in the time loop together.


“Do you ever get déjà vu?” Sam asks.

He can’t resist. “What did you just say?”

“Do you ever get déjà vu?”

“Yeah, just now.” He sends a pair of finger-guns her way.

“Oh, my God,” Sam says. “If we were in any other situation, I would just stop talking to you.”

(...)

“Did we ever make out?”

“What?” she asks.

“No, look, I know we’ve never actually made out,” he says. “But did we ever make out?”

“Wow, yeah, that definitely clarifies things,” Sam says. “Congratulations on all that sense you’re making, Mike.”

He waggles the totem at her. She gives it a sceptical look.

“Take it,” he says.

She does.

There’s a pause.

“Oh, my God,” Sam says. “We made out.”

Mike puts his hand on the totem, and the jolt of memory flows into him again, the two of them pressed into a tiny alcove in the mines, trying to stay still, trying to stay silent, knowing that at any moment the wendigo was going to find them. So close to Sam he couldn’t tell which heartbeat was his. And they met each other’s eyes, and...

“I might just hold on to this one,” Mike says.

Sam snorts. “Don’t be creepy. I was probably only going along with it to confuse you on the next loop, anyway.”

“Well, excellent work,” Mike says. “It’ll probably confuse future me even more if we do it again right now.”

“Nice try,” Sam says.

Final Fantasy XV

What a mess. What a masterpiece. I first posted about my anticipation for this game when I was twenty; I finally actually got to play it when I was twenty-eight. There's so much wrong with it and I love it so fiercely. What a strange joy of a game. The only game I've ever played for over a hundred hours on one save file.

I leapt straight into the fandom and swam happily around in it. I was expecting the fandom to be horrendous, but it turned out to be surprisingly relaxed! Everyone was there to have fun, and I never saw any shipwars or 'you can't 'ship that; it's morally wrong'. I had lots of fun writing for prompts on the kinkmeme.

Favourite character: Prompto! Simultaneously the most fun character in the cast and the most heartbreaking. An absolute joy to write. Suffers extremely well in fanfiction.
Favourite pairing: Ooh, hard to choose. Might have to be the Noctis/Prompto/Ignis/Gladio OT4, although I've got a particular soft spot for Noctis/Prompto. I also like horrible Ardyn/Noctis and Ardyn/Prompto.
Number of words written: 36,651.

Snippet: Here is a Queer Eye AU for Final Fantasy XV, because that's obviously a perfectly sensible fanfiction concept.


“So who’re we fixing up this time?” Gladio asks.

“His name is Noctis,” Ignis says.

“Oh!” Prompto perks up. “Like the prince?”

“Exactly like the prince,” Ignis confirms, his eyes on the road.

“You can practise your love confessions on him,” Gladio says.

“I’m not - I’m not in love with the prince,” Prompto protests. “I just think he’s interesting.”

Gladio leans back in his seat. “Noctis, huh? So he’ll be young.”

“Nineteen,” Ignis says.

“How’d you know?” Prompto asks, craning back to look at Gladio.

“Name didn’t get popular until His Highness was born,” Gladio says. “Wasn’t exactly hard to figure out.”

“We know anything else about this guy?” Prompto asks, looking over at Ignis again.

Ignis doesn’t say a word.

-
It takes a while for their knock to be answered. “A late riser,” Ignis observes, quietly. “His father mentioned as much.”

The door opens at last, and Ignis launches into his usual introductory speech. Prompto edges to the side so he can see past him, through the doorway. This is one of his favourite parts: seeing what a mess the guy’s living space is when they first show up, and then seeing how great it looks once Ignis has been at it.

Discarded clothes, half-eaten food. Blankets and cushions lying everywhere, for some reason. “Wow,” Prompto says. “Yeah, I can see why you might need hel- aah! Aaaaah!”

The prince blinks at him, looking sleepy and confused. The prince. Actual Prince Noctis.

There is no possible way this is real.

“Ignis,” Prompto hisses, yanking him back into the corridor. “Ignis.”

“May I assist?” Ignis asks, mildly.

“That’s the prince in there! That’s Prince Noctis! We are literally making over the prince.”

“Is that so?” Ignis asks. “I suppose that would explain why he looks familiar.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Ignis only smiles.

Zero Escape

I enjoyed 999 and Virtue's Last Reward well enough, but they didn't capture my attention in a fannish way at all. I barely even mentioned them on here. I certainly didn't expect to write any Zero Escape fanfiction.

And then Zero Time Dilemma happened. I bought it when it was heavily discounted, at the age of twenty-nine, and I played through it at great speed, and I wrote seven fics in the space of a month. I came to the fandom late and there was very little activity (at one point I had written a full third of the fics on the front page of the AO3 tag), but the lack of an audience couldn't prevent me. It was a perfect excuse to write fanfiction about not knowing what's real, which is one of my absolute favourite fictional themes.

Favourite character: Bizarrely, my favourite Zero Escape character is a nice, relatively well-adjusted young man (who I can then make much less well-adjusted in fanfiction). I can't explain why Carlos appeals to me so much. I also think Akane is fascinating.
Favourite pairing: Carlos/Akane. I also love Carlos/Akane/Junpei, but Carlos/Akane is definitely the axis of it that appeals to me most.
Number of words written: 21,136

Snippet: Again, this is a cut scene from a posted fic rather than an extract from an unfinished one. (As I said, Assassin's Creed made me better at finishing fics, so in my later fandoms I have fewer unfinished works and I'm more ruthless about cutting scenes that don't fit.) This was originally going to come in So Close, So Far, my Carlos/everyone fic, at the end of the Carlos/Phi scene.


Phi lies on her back, staring at the ceiling, her arms folded across her chest. She looks troubled, which is not an expression Carlos would prefer to see on her, given the circumstances.

“You okay?” he asks.

“Just remembered something.” She sits up and gives him a very hard look. “Wasn’t there a universe where I walked in on you getting screwed by my dad?”

“What?” Carlos asks.

Detroit: Become Human

I caught a bad case of Detroit: Become Human shortly before turning thirty. I initially put on theradbrad's Let's Play of this for background noise and ended up getting really into this disaster of a game.

My Detroit: Become Human fanfiction is horrible and I'm not sorry. It's got so much awful potential! Android programming raises so many horrible, fascinating questions of consent! Android limbs are so intriguingly detachable!

Some of you have got into this game because I started posting about it, and I'm extremely sorry about that. But I've been rewarded for my evil deeds with great fanfiction by
magistrate, so it's hard to feel too much remorse.

Favourite character: Hank! Grumpy, sarcastic, cares more than he'd like to admit, made entirely of unhealthy coping mechanisms.
Favourite pairing: I still haven't really pinned down whether I feel I 'ship Hank/Connor or just enjoy its potential for horribleness, but either way it brings me a great deal of joy. I also like Connor/Kara and Connor/Connor, and
magistrate has been sending me extracts of an ambitious fic-in-progress in which I am 'shipping everything, including but not limited to Connor/Markus, Hank/Markus and Hank/Kara.
Number of words written: 12,063.

Snippet: All I have are these few sentences from Hank's perspective, in a document entitled 'detroit feeeeelings.doc'.


Is it real? Is there any real feeling or consciousness under that plastic skin, anything close to a soul, or has he just been fooled by some well-placed ones and zeroes?

Does it make a difference, whether it’s real or not? It’s still better than anything he had before.

And that's the abridged version of how I got here! I look forward to finding out which fandoms await in my future.

zero escape, fanfiction, supernatural, final fantasy, until dawn, detroit become human, queer eye, assassin's creed, my fandom history, fandom nostalgia, crossovers, fanfiction (really this time), the last of us, final fantasy xv

Previous post Next post
Up