For a while now, I've been making entries talking about how each of my major fandoms fits into my fandom history. I considered a fandom 'major' if I'd written at least ten thousand words for it across at least three fics.

I'm starting to wonder if those criteria are too strict, though. Persona 5 falls short on wordcount; I've written just over nine thousand words for it. But I've written five Persona 5 fics. That's enough for me to feel it has a real presence in my fandom life.

So I'm going to say that, if I've written at least five fics for something, it counts as one of my major fandoms, regardless of wordcount. This also reinstates a couple of my older fandoms I've always felt should have made the list.

This means it's time for some 'my fandom history' writeups!


Jak and Daxter

I'm glad I found an excuse to add this to the 'major fandom' list; it always felt wrong that it didn't qualify!

I must have first played Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy when I was thirteen; it was positively reviewed in Official PlayStation 2 Magazine, which my brother and I used to buy every month. I didn't actually start writing for it until I was fifteen, though, when Jak II came out.

Jak and Daxter was a colourful, cartoony platformer. Jak II was a dark action shooter set in a dystopian future. Jak had been tortured and traumatised and now he was bent on revenge! It was an incredibly jarring tonal shift, but it matched my teenage tastes perfectly.

The Jak fandom is particularly significant for me because it's the first fandom where I felt I really had a presence as a writer. Previously, I'd write a fic or two for a canon and then move on. But I stuck around for a while in the Jak fandom, and it's where I met eva_kasumi, who I think was probably the first fandom friend I ever made.

The earliest surviving fic I wrote involving sex was for Jak II, although it wasn't explicit (none of my sex scenes are explicit; it's not an area of writing I've ever been confident in). It was noncon selfcest. I feel I sort of jumped in at the deep end there. (It's possible I included sex in a now-lost earlier Red Dwarf fic, but I strongly suspect that that was also noncon selfcest.)

Favourite character: I'm surprised to realise I've never really thought about my favourite character in the Jak series. Maybe Torn? He's very grumpy, which I enjoy.
Favourite pairing: Jak/Torn. It's a ship with a lot of anger in it, and what more do you need, particularly when you're fifteen years old?
Number of words written: 9,659, across nine fics.

Snippet: I actually have managed to hang on to a snippet of unfinished Jak and Daxter fanfiction, which is impressive, because I must have written this in... what, 2005? Somewhere between 2004 and 2006, at any rate. I've kept my writing obsessively backed up for a long time!

This was saved in a document called 'stupidest jakfic opening ever.doc'.


There are some generally accepted features of love stories. There will usually be some sort of mutual feeling, affection or respect or at least desire. There will often be some sort of conflict, some uncertainty or confusion or falling-out to make the story interesting. The participants will usually be of the same species.

It is also generally acknowledged that the line ‘So, I was two foot tall, furry and riding a missile across a mine-ridden lake’ is not a good opening to a romance. Very few love stories open with the line ‘So, I was two foot tall, furry and riding a missile across a mine-ridden lake’.

This one, however, does.



ShakespeaRe-Told Macbeth

At the age of seventeen, I had a brief but intense love affair with the BBC's ShakespeaRe-Told modern-day adaptation of Macbeth, set in a restaurant and starring James McAvoy. I was absolutely obsessed.

This adaptation didn't have a fandom, but I was determined to be a fandom all by myself. I signed up to write a hundred fics and managed forty-one. In light of this, it's sort of surprising that this didn't hit the 'ten thousand words' threshold! But everything I wrote for Macbeth was extremely short, falling between 100 and 400 words.

In 2020, fourteen years later, I was struck by nostalgia and checked whether AO3 had a section for ShakespeaRe-Told. It did! I left a comment on a Macbeth/Banquo fic by speakertone, mentioning my solitary fannish history with the adaptation and how pleased I was to find that someone else had written for it, and I was delighted by their response:

I just have to say something because this is so amazing to me that it's almost hilarious - I'm pretty sure I've read all forty-one of the ficlets you posted back-to-back-to-back and I loved them! They were the reason I figured it wouldn't be so out of nowhere for me to post this fic online, so I'm really really ridiculously happy that you found this and you enjoyed my writing. Thank you so much!!

I'm ecstatic that my terrible teenage fanfiction could encourage someone to post their own fic for this nonexistent fandom, all those years later.

Favourite character: I mean, obviously it's Macbeth himself, just as it is in the original play. The entire adaptation is ninety minutes of Macbeth making terrible decisions and hating himself and having a guilty paranoid trembling breakdown. I was inevitably going to love him.
Favourite pairing: Equally predictably, it's Joe Macbeth/Billy Banquo. It wasn't the first pairing I'd shipped where one half murdered the other, and it absolutely would not be the last. I was obsessed with the scene where Macbeth strokes Banquo's face and kisses his hand just before arranging his death.
Number of words written: 8,505, across forty-one (very short) fics.

Snippet: I've got a few tiny scraps of incomplete fic scattered around from my fanfic100 attempt. Interesting to look at them again; it's been such a long time! Here's a snippet.


The kitchen seems deserted at first, but then he sees that Joe is there, sitting on the counter and turned away from him, his side pressed against the wall, and it takes Billy a moment to realise that he is shaking.

He stands there for a moment, uncertain, before sitting quietly next to him. When he tries putting a comforting hand on his back, Joe flinches away, presses himself closer to the wall, and the counter is trembling beneath them, he is shaking so badly.

They sit there for a moment without speaking, without touching, without looking at each other.

“I – ” Joe begins at last, and then falls suddenly silent. After a pause, he speaks again. “I – can’t believe he’s dead.”

His voice is shaking as well.



Persona 5

Persona 5 was my first encounter with the Persona series, at the age of thirty-two. Scrolling through a sale of Japanese games on the PlayStation Store, I spotted it for £10 and thought I might as well try it out.

What I'd heard about the Persona games sounded daunting; they seemed very long and complicated, and I wasn't sure what they were really about. But it was the autumn of 2020 and the country was in and out of lockdown; there wasn't much else to do. If I was going to get into a hundred-hour JRPG, now was the time.

What a great decision. The Persona series has been incredibly valuable to me throughout the pandemic, constantly keeping me engaged in a restricted time. It has its flaws, but I love its characters; I love the emphasis it places on friendship; I love its strange blend of normal school life and fighting symbolic monsters in parallel universes. I've hugely enjoyed both playing and writing for these games.

(Here's an alarming statistic: I've spent over 500 hours playing Persona games since I discovered the series in September 2020. This means I have spent nearly 3% of the last two years playing Persona.

Honestly, I'm struggling to regret this. A substantial proportion of it was during lockdown, and I've had such a great time with this series. A worthy use of approximately one in every 33 hours.)

Favourite character: In the original Persona 5, it's probably Ryuji. He can be inconsistently written in a way I find frustrating, but I love how passionate he is and how openly he admires people; he just thinks all his friends are really cool! In Royal... God help me, but it might be Akechi, who was the party member I liked least in the original game. It turns out that, when you scratch his smug surface, you discover an angry disaster, and I've never been able to resist one of those.
Favourite pairing: Protagonist/Ryuji. Let me kiss him, you cowards! He's clearly in love with me; why can't I reciprocate?
Number of words written: 9,497, across five fics. Unusually, I've never written from the same Persona 5 character's perspective twice; I've got one fic from the protagonist's perspective, one from Ryuji's, one from Makoto's, one from Akechi's, and one that pings between various non-party confidants.

I don't think I have any unfinished Persona 5 snippets to include here! I've somehow managed to finish every Persona 5 fic I've ever started.