Andraste

Stolen from Selena, a meme about my 2024 fandom year! Which was pretty good even though finishing an entire novella in February seems to have exhausted my creative powers for the rest of the year. (My resolution for this year is to write literally anything.)


1. Your main fandom of the year?

Not sure I had one, unless we're counting Our Flag Means Death because it's the only one I actually produced any content for. If we're looking for the one I spent the most emotional energy on, though, I spent ten months impatiently waiting for more Dragon Age and then two months playing The Veilguard, so that.

2. Your favorite film watched this year?

Conclave! A tense thriller about the internal politics of the Catholic church that has the plot of a dumb high school film. If it sounds like those to things should work against each other, let me reassure you that they are in fact a perfect combination. Definitely recommended if you're interested in church politics and/or dumb high school films only everybody in the story is a grown adult cardinal (or a nun.)

3. Your favorite book read this year?

I finally got around to reading The Name of the Rose (yes, yes, I know, at least I've caught up now!) and unsurprisingly I adored it.

In terms of books published this century: I think I loved Translation State even more than the rest of Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch books. Honourable mentions to Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh and The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo.

4. Your favorite album or song to listen to this year?

My self-created Will Wood playlist on Tidal probably got the most playtime, especially Laplace's Angel because I'm trying to vid it. (I just need IWtV Season Three to exist first …)

5. Your favorite TV show of the year?

This was such a good year for TV, I cannot choose! What the hell, let's do a top ten, in alphabetical order.

Agatha All Along: a terrific sequel to WandaVision with a great bunch of new characters and a glorious return for the titular (anti)heroine. Disney should let Jac Schaeffer do whatever she wants.

Fallout: Proving that The Last of Us wasn't just a fluke and Hollywood has actually learned something about making good video game adaptations. All three leads are terrific and Kyle McLachlan is perfectly cast. Can't wait for more.

Dandadan: A contender for my most surprising fandom of the year. 'Raunchy high school anime with a romance between two teens and a generous helping of fanservice' doesn't sound like my thing at all but I checked it out because I was so impressed with the animation and ended up staying for the plot and characters and delightfully weird world-building. It helps a lot that the female characters are properly developed and the male lead ends up in just as many absurd situations in his underwear. Also has one of the single best episode of any anime I have ever watched.

Helluva Boss: Speaking of dark horses: in the space of two weeks in the middle of this year, I went from, 'ugh, I guess I have to watch Hazbin Hotel if I want to hear Keith David sing, even though I'm pretty sure I'm too old for edgy cartoons' to marathoning every episode of that an its sister show and becoming profoundly invested in the relationship between an imp and an owl. Sometimes fandom is like that! Anyway, if you like musicals and/or unnecessarily tall owls and are not too old for edgy cartoons you might as well give it a shot, since it's free on YouTube!

Interview With the Vampire: I continue to be amazed at how this show turns the fascinating but flawed source material into television that is actually good. I think I liked Season Two even more than Season One, and I look forward to more.

A Man on the Inside: Michael Schur and Ted Danson team up again for a comedy about a widower who's hired by a private detective to infiltrate a retirement community. Not as good as The Good Place, but one could say that about most TV shows, and Danson is in excellent form. Netflix should be doing more of this kind of thing and by 'this kind of thing' I mean shows that tell a satisfying story in the space of eight episodes. (And then they renewed it any way! Fingers crossed Schur sticks with a self-contained story for the second season as well.)

Orb: On the Movements of the Earth: An anime about the discovery of heliocentrism that might have been made for me. Almost all of it is people sitting in rooms having philosophical discussions about science and Renaissance Catholic church doctrine, presumably because they have to save all the animation budget for glorious vistas of the night sky and the occasional fight scene. It makes me tear up every single week.

Skeleton Crew: Four kids from the most boring planet in the entire Star Wars universe end up very far away from home and have to find their way back. Is it basically The Goonies in space? Sure. Does it work perfectly on its own terms? Yes. The kids are all great and Jude Law is wonderful. Here's hoping it sticks the landing.

X-Men '97: I made a whole post about this one earlier in the year but the short version is that I loved it and was extremely relieved that it lived up to the legacy of the show that got me into my most enduring fandom and introduced me to my favourite fictional character.

Yatagarasu: The Raven Does Not Choose Its Master: Stunningly gorgeous anime set in a fantasy kingdom that's far too complex to explain in a couple of sentences. If you love interesting world building, court intrigue and complicated master/servant relationships I would give this one a look.


Honourable mention to Brilliant Minds which is bad House M.D. fanfic but if House was nice to his patients, canonically gay and played by Zachary Quinto. (The first episode is outright terrible, but the clunky expository dialogue reduces by about 80% after that and I sincerely recommend it if you like American network procedurals and/or staring at Zachary Quinto.)


6. Your favorite online community of the year?

The FFA Discord, again <3. Amazing how the chat belonging to a hive of scum and villainy consistently manages to be one of the most chill fandom spaces I've ever been in.

7. Your best new fandom discovery of the year?

Probably either Dandadan or the Hellaverse, since most other things on my list I at least knew about before 2024 or they were laser-targeted at me so I was bound to find them eventually.

8. Your biggest fandom disappointment of the year?

The fourth season of Umbrella Academy, in the sense that it had some very good bits but I want to take a red pen to the whole thing. (I know the episode order got cut down but I don't think they cut the correct things to squeeze it into six episodes.)

Additionally, Doctor Who had some brilliant individual episodes but the season arc as a whole didn't end up working for me. Oh well, I've never thought that RTD was any good at finales. At least I love Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor to bits and look forward to seeing more of him.

9. Your fandom boyfriend of the year?

I mean, predictably it is my fandom boyfriend for life: X-Men TAS Charles Xavier! And also his boyfriend Magneto.

If I have to pick new characters: Emmrich and Davrin, my joint favourite new Dragon Age boyfriends. Stolas. Also Jude Law's many-named character from Skeleton Crew arrived at the last minute to sweep me off my feet <3. That man is very good at his job.

Also, honourable mention to Daniel Molloy - he was already my favourite but even more so after the second season. (Sometimes I just randomly think about him playing telenovela music or asking Louis if he's the Zodiac killer and laugh.)

10. Your fandom girlfriend of the year?

Agatha Harkness and it's not even close. (I will have to admire her from afar, though, as I am not dumb enough to fight her girlfriend for her hand.)

Honourable mention to Lace Harding. BioWare finally gave me a dwarf romance after twenty-four years and I was not disappointed <3.

11. Your biggest squee moment of the year?

The end of Dragon Age: The Veilgard contained the most satisfying scene in the entire series for me. (Specifically ( endgame spoilers. ))

12. The most missed of your old fandoms?

I'm glad X-Men '97 came along because oh boy do I not enjoy X-Men comics in the post-Krakoa era. I know that they had to put the toys back in the box eventually and that some other iteration I like will be along eventually but god it all feels so boring by comparison :(.

13. The fandom you haven't tried yet, but want to?

Still need to catch up on Batman: Caped Crusader, Shogun. Not to mention the latest seasons of From, Silo, and Slow Horses.

14. Your biggest fan anticipations for the New Year?

The second season of Severance starts in just a couple of weeks!

Also Alecto the Ninth is meant to come out this year. The next season of The Wheel of Time. More Helluva Boss episodes when they eventuate.

I saw a thread on meme today where you take your two favourite pairings and swap the partners and see if the results are still pairings you would like. This brought me to the realisation that G'Kar/Magneto is a perfectly cromulant pairing of freedom fighters bonding over REVOLUTION and I would certainly be into it.

On the other hand, Charles Xavier and Londo Mollari would just would not work as a pairing on any level. Charles would find Londo fascinating and entertaining in small doses, but also exhausting, and I just can't see Londo being interested at all. Besides which, if Charles was in the B5 universe somehow he would be far too distracted taking over the Psi Corps to date anyone from there. (Obviously he is intending to run it in the best interests of the telepaths rather than EarthGov! Which I'm sure would work out for the best with absolutely no negative consequences at all ...)

Meanwhile, I do not think Jean Valjean and/or Javert have done anything to deserve being anywhere near any of these people. (Javert deserves lots of things, but being dragged into the complexities of mutant rights and/or a very confusing space station is not it.)

Now that I am back home and sort of mostly caught up with my life, a meme.

Give me a show/movie/fandom and I'll tell you:

my favourite female character
my favourite male character
my favourite book/season/etc
my favourite episode (if it's a tv show)
my favourite cast member
my favourite relationship
a character I'd die defending
a character I just can't sympathize with
a character I grew to love
my anti otp

For selenak because this got far too long to be a comment.

who cooks normally?

Vir.

Oh, you mean it has to be one of them? G'Kar, obviously. Because I cannot imagine Londo has ever had reason to learn, and he could probably burn water. G'Kar, on the other hand, seems to like cooking. I think Londo would really prefer it if Vir did it, given what Narn food is like.

how often do they fight?

Ahahaha. I think a better question would be 'how many conversation do they manage to have that aren't fights?' And they wouldn't have it any other way.

what do they do when they’re away from each other?

Well, Londo becomes Emperor and is miserable for a couple of decades. G'Kar roams the universe and is happy but has to appear in Legend of the Rangers. Clearly they are better off together.

( This is also too long for a post. Rest of the questions below the cut. )

Yesterday people on ... uh, a place I visit on the internet (I'm never sure if we're meant to talk about Fight Club or not) ... were talking about their favourite 'ship moments in honour of the date. I started making a list of quotes, and then realised that I would be taking up the whole page. So instead, I'm posting them here. Name the source of the quote, win a prize! And by prize I mean some kind of ficlet about the pairing in question. (I am going to have to make a 'one per customer' rule, though, because some of you could probably name more than half of these.)

Some of them are so easy that anyone familiar with the sources would remember them, but there are also a couple that I doubt anyone will get. Feel free to surprise me, though.

I've refrained from including multiple versions of the same characters, although there's one instance of blatant cheating. They are listed in an order that makes logical sense to me, for what that's worth.

( People - well, mostly people - in love below cut. )

You know, I saw that 'name the character types and tropes you think I like' meme going around and decided it would be too obvious. I think this sort of proves it.

13 – Do you prefer canon or fanon when you write? Has writing fanfic for a fandom changed the way you see some or even all of the original source material?

In my opinion, fanon is the icing and canon is the cake. Cake without icing is edible, but lacks finishing touches. On the other hand, serving up a pile of icing with no cake underneath is just silly.

There are plenty of bits of fanon I like, and some I've made up myself and use over and over. I find fanon most useful when it fills in details that the canon is never going to cover - it's not like we were ever going to get Word Of God on what the Centauri call their tentacles, so when I needed to put that in a story I consulted Selena for ideas and made something up. (This? Is my most enduringly popular bit of fanon. Which I find hilarious.) Fanon that contradicts my view of canon annoys me, especially when it becomes all-pervasive, but I don't see it as harmful in and of itself.

I don't think I've ever changed my mind about the source material because of writing fanfic, but I've certainly written fanfic because of changing my mind about the source material.

( The rest of the questions ... )

12 – Have you ever attempted an "adaptation" fic of a favorite book or movie but set in a different fandom?

No, I have not.

... well, that wasn't a very interesting answer *g*. So, I suppose I should add that there's one I'd like to write one day: the Transformes version of Casablanca.

Well, sort of. The plot isn't quite the same, since is post-war. Ultra Magnus got disillusioned with the Autobot cause after the Great War ended and Optimus Prime was killed (again) and is now running a bar on an out-of-the-way asteroid. One day, Cyclonus walks into it. (You get three guesses about whether Galvatron is really dead or not. The first two don't count.)

( The rest of the questions ... )

10 – Pairings – Have you ever gone outside your comfort zone and written a pairing you liked, but found you couldn't write, or a pairing you didn't like, and found you could?

I don't think I've ever failed at writing a story because I unexpectedly discovered I couldn't write the pairing. (I have failed at writing stories for lots and lots of other reasons, but not that one.) I have always been a pretty good judge of which characters and relationships I can write about.

The reverse has occasionally happened, though - mentor/student pairings squick the hell out of me, but I still managed to write an Xavier/Rogue story that was intentionally disturbing. I also found G'Kar/Morden surprisingly entertaining to write and discovered that I actually could wrap my brain around Londo/Vir as long as it took place in a universe where things were ... different.

( The rest of the questions ... )

8 – Do you write OCs? And if so, what do you do to make certain they're not Mary Sues, and if not, explain your thoughts on OCs.

Sometimes I write OCs. Since none of them have had super powers, violet eyes or romances with the canon characters I don't really lie awake at night worrying that they're Mary Sues. Most of the time my OCs have been purely functional inventions - I needed Larrell to have a new captain after Crais left, so I made one up. More rarely, I've written stories where the original character was the star. I wrote an Astro City story like that years ago, and one X-Men common people story. (There was a whole tradition in the Old Skool X-Men fandom that centered around OTL and CFAN of writing stories about mutants who were ordinary people rather than superheroes.)

I've also written a couple of stories about characters we know exist in canon but have never seen - one about Crais's mother and one about Vir meeting Londo's first wife. They're not technically inventions of mine since Crais must logically have a mother and we know Londo had a wife before the three we encounter in canon, but their characterization is all me.

My main feeling on OCs is that they should serve the story being told. I read fanfiction because I want to hear more about the canon characters and the world they live in, and if introducing an original character advances that goal then I'm all in favour of them. My main problem with Mary Sue in fanfiction isn't actually the super powers, the violet eyes and the romances, it's that she tends to take attention away from the elements that I find interesting.

( The rest of the questions ... )

6 – When you write, do you prefer writing male or female characters?

For fanfiction? Predominantly male characters. There are lots of reasons for that, but what it boils down to is that the fictional archetypes I love rarely show up in female form. If I want to write about middle-aged women arguing about politics and then trying to kill each other, well, there aren't many source texts that are going to provide me with the basic material. I've written more female characters in my recent fandoms (notably Doctor Who) because more of them appeal to me.

I used to feel bad about mostly writing men, until I started writing more original fiction. Not that I've ever finished any of it, but almost all my protagonists in those stories are female. When I make them up, the female characters can be the types of people that appeal to me most as a writer. Almost all the original characters I've ever written fanfiction about have been female, as well. (Not that there are a lot of them, but there was that story about Crais's mother and also the female Peace Keeper captain who shows up in that story about Larrell and a few others here and there. I'm also generally more likely to write about minor female characters than the major ones.

( The rest of the questions ... )