For each of my major fandoms, I do a short writeup talking about how it fits into my fandom history. A fandom qualifies as 'major' if I've written five fics for it, or ten thousand words across at least three fics.

I'll be honest: technically, The Quarry doesn't qualify. My three fics for it add up to 9,830 words. But that's so close to ten thousand that I caught myself thinking 'hey, I could write a "my fandom history" post for this if I added another couple of hundred words to this fic' when I was wrapping up Tooth and Claw.

I don't want to start artificially inflating the length of my fics; it's silly to potentially reduce the quality of my fanfiction just so I get to ramble about the fandom on Dreamwidth! So I'm going to allow myself a little flexibility on rambling.

(EDIT: As of Burning, I'm at 13,820 words for The Quarry and this writeup becomes legitimate!)


The Quarry

I have an intense love-hate relationship with Supermassive's horror games. They do such interesting things with choices and consequences! They're so good if you enjoy stories about a bunch of people going through traumatic experiences together! They absolutely scare the crap out of me.

I experienced The Quarry at the age of thirty-four. When it was announced as a spiritual successor to Until Dawn, I was deeply intrigued. I ended up watching a Let's Play of The Quarry rather than playing it myself, having learnt from experience that I find playing Supermassive games unbearably stressful, but I enjoyed it a lot; it was visually stunning and definitely delivered on its promise of traumatising a load of characters.

Two of those characters, Travis and Laura, had a deeply intriguing and weird dynamic. Partway through the game, I checked AO3 to see what fanfiction people were writing about The Quarry, and I was surprised and curious to find that Travis/Laura was the second-most-popular pairing. At that point, I'd only seen them interacting in the prologue, and the ship hadn't occurred to me at all then. I suppose perhaps that primed me to pay attention to their interactions later.

I've mainly been hanging around in the Travis/Laura section of the fandom, which has been extremely friendly and welcoming. Given that the characters have an age gap of thirty-plus years and Travis abducts and imprisons Laura, the pairing is, er, divisive, as you could probably guess. It's one of those ships where the shippers wall themselves off from the rest of fandom and have a party while everyone else throws them sidelong glances. Being on the partying side is a lot more fun than being on the judging side.

I was surprised that I fell so hard into The Quarry fandom! The Let's Play left me going 'well, that was fun, but I doubt I'm going to get fannishly into it,' and then something in me snapped and I started writing fic after fic. I can pinpoint the moment I dropped into The Quarry fandom hell, and it's the moment I watched the potential outcome in which Travis locks Laura up again; I'm so curious about what happens next!


Favourite character: Travis the Creepy Cop was a huge surprise for me. I watched the demo of the prologue long before watching a full Let's Play of The Quarry, so for a long time my strongest feeling about this game was 'the cop is REALLY CREEPY and I want to be extremely far away from him at all times'. But, goddammit, I ended up really enjoying him.
Favourite pairing: I reblogged a Travis/Laura comic by deadlilmoon and tagged it with 'i don't know if i'd say i ship these two' and then wrote three Travis/Laura fics, so, uh, I probably ship these two. I don't know who I was trying to fool; when he creepily woke her up by stroking her face in canon, I rewound to rewatch it three times.
Number of words written: 9,830