Trabia Garden

The third of four instalments walking through my fandom history! Apparently my accumulation of fandoms really sped up in my early twenties; I picked up all six of these fandoms within two years.


Waterloo Road

I wasn't introduced to this by a friend or family member, and I didn't see talk of it online and decide to check it out. I got into Waterloo Road by complete coincidence. I was twenty-two years old, on my own in my house in Brighton, with no Internet access. I idly turned on the television. There was some sort of school drama on; two schoolboys, Josh and Finn, were having an urgent conversation in an empty room. This feels oddly homoerotic, I thought, moments before one of them kissed the other.

I watched the rest of the episode for the fallout, then had to look up the television schedule to work out what it actually was that I'd watched. Waterloo Road? I'd never heard of it. But apparently it had been running for over eighty hour-long episodes, and you bet I was going to watch them all. I love stories about teenagers making bad decisions, and Waterloo Road was absolute gold on that front.

(Disastrously, I can feel myself being tempted to rewatch it as I write this.)

Waterloo Road had absolutely no LJ-based fandom; I could only find discussion on soap opera forums, where people did not engage with fandom in a way I was used to. It did have a bit of presence on fanfiction.net, but nobody seemed to be writing about Josh Stevenson, who was the character I really wanted to read about. I took it upon myself to rectify the lack.

My Waterloo Road/Hunger Games crossover attracted some really weird reviews. For example:

this story is very long eh eh

l reely like josh and his dad and jodi (Jodi does not appear in the fic; apparently this reviewer just felt like listing all their favourite Waterloo Road characters.)

i can come to your school

Favourite character: I loved Tom Clarkson, Sambuca Kelly and Tariq Siddiqui, but the subject matter of my fanfiction shows a clear bias towards the prickly, defensive, easily-exploited, struggling-with-his-sexuality Josh Stevenson.
Favourite pairing: Maybe Tom/Karen? I was extremely sad that Tom, who was constantly banging his way through the staff room, never got around to the headmistress. But my main relationship focus wasn't actually a romantic relationship; it was Josh's relationship with his father Tom.
Number of words written: 26,612.

Snippet: I was extremely sad that we never saw Josh meet the girls Tom took in after the death of their mother.

( Waterloo Road unfinished snippet. Josh meets Chlo. )


Glee

I started watching Glee when I was just about to turn twenty-two, but it comes after Waterloo Road in this list because I only started writing fanfiction for it six months later, when the show introduced Blaine. I 'shipped Kurt/Blaine ferociously and immediately.

Glee was an intimidatingly huge fandom. You couldn't be in Glee fandom as a whole; you chose one aspect to be interested in and hung out with other people who were interested in the same aspect. Kurt/Blaine was very much my corner.

The show was a bit of a disaster with inconsistent and occasionally oddly spiteful character writing, and the fandom was weirdly vicious and had intense 'shipwars (although at least it was when the main ammo for 'shipwars was 'CLEARLY THIS PAIRING IS THE MORE CANON AND INTERESTING' rather than 'YOU CAN'T 'SHIP THAT; IT'S MORALLY WRONG'). I still had fun watching and writing for it, though. But I don't know if I'll ever be able to watch it again; two of its stars died young, one after arrest for possession of horrific pornography, and it's hard to forget that and enjoy the show.

Favourite character: Honestly, it's hard to pick out a favourite character when the character writing was so inconsistent! In the first season, it was Quinn; she was a bully teetering on the edge of redemption in a way that interested me. In subsequent seasons, which increasingly forgot that Quinn existed, it was between Kurt and Rachel, and then settled as Santana.
Favourite pairing: Kurt/Blaine was the entire focus on my involvement in Glee. I 'shipped it from before Blaine was technically introduced; the 'Teenage Dream' performance was released as a preview and Kurt was just so charmingly smitten!
Number of words written: 20,061.

Snippet: Of course I attempted a Glee/Silent Hill crossover.

( Glee unfinished snippet. Kurt/Blaine, Glee/Silent Hill, 2010. )


X-Men: First Class

I watched this with th_esaurus at the age of twenty-two and enjoyed it a lot more than I was expecting. I very rarely get into films in a fannish way, and this is the only film fandom I have that passes the 'at least ten thousand words across at least three fics' test. I've actually never written for X-Men on its own; the three fics I've written for it were all crossovers (with Misfits, Silent Hill and Pokémon).

This film became a lot harder to rewatch after I realised that every scene ends with a terrible one-liner.

Favourite character: Charles Xavier. I think? It's entirely possible I tell myself Xavier is my favourite character just so I have a favourite character for every letter of the alphabet.
Favourite pairing: For X-Men: First Class, it's Charles/Erik. For X-Men in general, it's Rogue/Logan, which I still have to struggle not to write as 'Rogan/Logue'. Technically, I've never written either pairing, although I've come closer to writing Charles/Erik in the sense that I have actually written fanfiction about those characters.
Number of words written: 11,228.

Snippet: Oh, damn, I should have checked my old notebooks when I was at my parents' place over the weekend! I checked them for a couple of other fandoms, but I hadn't realised I don't have any unfinished X-Men fanfiction in electronic form. I think I had something where Charles had very unethically wiped Erik's memories to make sure they'd stay on the same side.


Uncharted

Jak and Daxter was one of the first videogame series I got fannishly into, so I was interested to check out what else Naughty Dog had done. One of my first purchases for the PS3 I received for my twenty-third birthday was an Uncharted/Uncharted 2 bundle. I was distressingly terrible at shooting and quickly gave up. But then Red Dead Redemption taught me to aim, and I came back to Uncharted after finishing it.

It's fortunate that I bought the first two games bundled. The first Uncharted never really clicked with me; I probably wouldn't have picked up the series again if I hadn't already owned the sequel. But I loved the second game.

Every main-series Uncharted game from the second onwards has a sequence where Nate is staggering around in a state of agony and/or delusion. Naughty Dog know what I like.

Favourite character: Elena Fisher! The first Uncharted character I fell in love with (I came to love Elena in the first game, Nate in the second and Sully in the third), and still my favourite. Smart, sharp-tongued, no-nonsense, well-fine-maybe-a-bit-of-nonsense. Kicked her kidnapper out of a helicopter once. My absolute favourite part of Uncharted 4 is the part where she mocks you while you play videogames. I would buy a full Elena Fisher Mocks Your Videogame Skills Simulator in a heartbeat.
Favourite pairing: Nate/Elena, absolutely no question. They've got such chemistry, they have fun together, and I love that we get to see Nate being vulnerable around her.
Number of words written: 16,195.

Snippet: I've never made any secret of my feelings about Sam Drake, who is the worst, but, weirdly, I do 'ship Sam/Sully. This snippet contains Uncharted 4 spoilers.

( Uncharted unfinished snippet. Sam/Sully, 2017. )


Dangan Ronpa

At the age of twenty-three, I was sitting outside a pub in Ealing with a group of friends, and one of those friends said he'd been reading a fan translation of a Japanese murder mystery game. One of the characters, he said, was me. He showed me some pictures of Touko Fukawa.

He later sent me the link to the fan translation. I swiftly realised he'd been rather uncharitable in comparing me to Fukawa, but by that point I was already hooked. Teenagers! Thrown into a horrible situation! Making horrible decisions! Being overwhelmed by guilt!

This is my third-most-written fandom in terms of wordcount, following Assassin's Creed and Top Gear. I have written Dangan Ronpa fanfiction every year for six years in a row, which is highly unusual. Typically, I'll have a burst of writing activity in one fandom and then move on to the next, but somehow I keep coming back to this series. I've written for the original Danganronpa, Danganronpa 2, Danganronpa: Another Episode, Danganronpa 3 and Danganronpa V3, but 2 is my favourite in the series and the one I've written the most for.

This was the first fandom (to my knowledge) in which I got plagiarised! I wrote a time loop fic that got startlingly popular, and someone put it up on their fanfiction.net account. It was swiftly taken down.

(My other experience with plagiarism: someone took my Doki Doki Literature Club fic Memory Error and put it up on their Pastebin account. I was very puzzled when I discovered this. Pastebin doesn't seem like a practical plagiarism website! It doesn't have any sort of commenting system! Surely you want a way for people to praise you for your stolen fanfiction? It's still up there; I wouldn't really know how to go about getting it taken down. Fanfiction websites have rules against plagiarism, but I don't imagine Pastebin does.)

Favourite character: It's moved around a lot, but I think I've settled on Hajime Hinata as my favourite Dangan Ronpa character. He's just a normal kid, insecure and sarcastic, heart in the right place, thrown into a terrible, terrible situation. He feels very real to me. And that makes him the perfect protagonist for Danganronpa 2, because most of the characters in that cast are incredibly over-the-top, and Hinata is a great way to make things feel grounded.
Favourite pairing: Ooh, maybe Naegi/Ikusaba? But Hinata/Komaeda is extremely fucked up and alarming in a way that appeals to me enormously. I 'ship Hinata with everyone, really, but particularly Komaeda, Koizumi and Kuzuryuu. To be honest, I also 'ship Komaeda with everyone. And Shuichi (but especially with Kaito). I also really like Kaede/Rantaro. Look, I 'ship everything in Dangan Ronpa.
Number of words written: 64,899.

Snippet: For a while I was hoping to write a series of Hinata/Komaeda fics based on classic fluffy fanfiction clichés, but I only managed 'huddling for warmth'. This was going to be 'Komaeda nurses Hinata back to health'.

( Danganronpa 2 unfinished snippet. Hinata/Komaeda 'hurt/comfort'. )


Community

Having heard good things about Community, I checked it out at the age of twenty-three. I thought from osmosis that the show was The Nerdy Adventures of Troy and Abed; I was confused to discover that there were a bunch of other central characters! I knew there was a Britta somewhere, but I had no idea that Jeff, Annie, Shirley or Pierce existed.

I still think the first season of Community is the best series of television I've ever watched, which is impressive, given that it includes a character (Pierce) I don't like at all. Apparently he was not enough to dislodge it from that lofty place in my esteem!

Favourite character: Jeff. Soft-hearted self-interested sarcastic arsehole in love with six people, one of whom is himself. I love him.
Favourite pairing: JEFF/ANNIE. It's a controversial pairing, but, holy crap, that chemistry. I also love Jeff/himself and Jeff/the entire study group.
Number of words written: 11,341.

Snippet: I think Community is in the rare position of being a fandom where I finished every fic I ever started! That usually happens with fandoms where I've only ever written one fic, with no intention of writing any more (Doki Doki Literature Club, Final Fantasy VI and Jiggy McCue, for example). But with Community I've written four complete fics and absolutely nothing beyond that.

I've just hit a milestone birthday and I'm coming up on the fifteenth anniversary of my LJ's creation, so it might be interesting to look back at the many fandoms I've pranced through. I thought for each fandom I could name my favourite character and my favourite pairing, talk a bit about my experience with it and maybe dredge up a snippet of unfinished fanfiction.

I've written for about seventy fandoms, and going through every one of them would be a bit much, so I've limited this to my major fandoms, which I'm going to define as 'fandoms for which I have written at least ten thousand words across at least three fics'. This unfortunately leaves out Animorphs (which hugely influenced my writing style), Jak and Daxter (where I first formed real fandom friendships) and Life on Mars (which had a big impact on my fictional tastes), but I think it manages to catch most of the fandoms that have shaped me.

If you're curious, the breakdown:

- twelve videogame fandoms (I'm counting Pokémon as a videogame fandom)
- six television fandoms
- three real-person fandoms
- one film fandom


Pokémon

The fandom that introduced me to fanfiction! I used to get up enthusiastically to watch Pokémon before school, much like every other child in the nineties. My first online username was 'Mew'. I spent my early days on the Internet, when I was eleven or twelve, looking at all the billions of personal Pokémon websites there were at the time, and I came across a fic on one of them (the site was called 'Mewtwo's Dungeon', so of course I was never able to find it again amongst all the hundreds of Mewtwo's Dungeons). I don't remember any details, but I remember that it involved Mew and Mewtwo and I thought it was the most incredible thing I'd ever seen. A story! About Pokémon! Just sitting here on the Internet! I forced Joseph to read it and went ISN'T THIS AMAZING and he seemed rather less enthusiastic than I was. Then I discovered zarla's Neglected Pokémon Lovers Unite and was inspired to attempt a fic of my own.

Favourite character: I've always been more into the Pokémon themselves than the characters, but probably James of Team Rocket. My favourite Pokémon is, of course, the best Pokémon, Bulbasaur. I didn't have a plan for which starter I'd choose when I first started up Pokémon Red, but the little Bulbasaur sprite was just so cute.
Favourite pairing: Again, this isn't what I'm into Pokémon for, but I've always had a sneaking fondness for Ash/Gary.
Number of words written: 51,804. Mainly crossovers. The first fic I seriously wrote was an unfinished, rambling multichaptered Pokémon journey fic about OCs (mine, which were transparently based on family and friends, and those of others; I asked people to submit their own characters, which on reflection seems a bit bizarre), but since then I've only written about Pokémon in crossover form.

Snippet: I'm actually struggling to find an unfinished Pokémon snippet! I've got a snippet of Finn and Puck from Glee training Pokémon, but those characters have far too many weird, sad, horrible associations surrounding them now. So instead here's a small Full Moon wo Sagashite/Pokémon snippet, based entirely on the fact that Negi Ramen have a Team Rocket-esque motto. (I originally outlined the idea for this fic over here. This is all I ever wrote of it, alas.)

( Pokémon unfinished snippet. Full Moon wo Sagashite/Pokémon, 2013. )


Final Fantasy VIII

First played at the age of thirteen. Probably the single work of fiction that's most important to me. It helped bewildered, isolated teenage Riona to understand other people. It also introduced me to some online friends I've now known for half my life (hi, thebaconfat, squeemu, kadrin, magistrate!), and they introduced me to Livejournal, so I probably wouldn't have met most of you without it. And one of the people I met through Livejournal was th_esaurus, who's now a close real-life friend of mine and with whom I lived for several years, so it was a genuinely life-changing moment when the GAME employee accidentally sold me Final Fantasy VIII instead of Final Fantasy VII.

Favourite character: Squall Leonhart means a lot to me. I'd never identified with a character before! People were an incomprehensible mystery to thirteen-year-old me, but I could understand Squall's thought processes, which gave me a foothold in starting to understand other people. (If you're curious, my use of his surname in 'rionaleonhart' was born of my similarity to Squall Leonhart; it never crossed my mind that it could suggest I wanted to be married to Squall Leonhart.)
Favourite pairing: Squall/Zell was the first pairing I really 'shipped and the first one I wrote fanfiction for, and I still look back on it fondly. It was hard to find Squall/Zell fanfiction that didn't bash Rinoa, though!
Number of words written: 31,201. This includes With These Signs Upon Our Souls, the longest continuous story I've ever written.

Snippet: Final Fantasy VIII/Final Fantasy X, Squall is Yuna's guardian.

( Final Fantasy VIII unfinished snippet. FFVIII/FFX. )


Final Fantasy X series

First played X at the age of thirteen, X-2 at the age of fifteen. I wasn't sure whether to count this; neither Final Fantasy X nor Final Fantasy X-2 qualifies if I consider them alone. But I suppose they're technically part of the same fandom. I don't know why I'm so bad at thinking of these two games as taking place in the same universe.

...I was going to say 'it's strange that I only wrote one fic for Final Fantasy X itself when I loved the game so much,' and then I realised I'd blocked my self-insert fic out of my mind. Whoops.

Favourite character: Yuna! Yuna, in all her stubborn, playful, self-sacrificing determination.
Favourite pairing: Auron/Jecht/Braska, probably. (I realise this is not technically a 'pairing'.) But the pairing I wrote the most for was Gippal/Baralai. I had a lot of fun with it, but, looking back, I'm not sure how I got into that pairing! I barely remember any of their canonical interactions. Maybe I read other people's Gippal/Baralai fics and enjoyed them?
Number of words written: 14,061.

Snippet: More of the FFVIII/FFX crossover from above.

( Final Fantasy X unfinished snippet. FFVIII/FFX. )


Silent Hill

The town called to me when I was sixteen, and I developed a weird obsession with Silent Hill 2 without having played it; I was reading the game script, I was reading symbolism analysis, I was reading fanfiction. I was extremely bad with horror, but eventually I gave in and bought a copy. It messed up my fictional tastes permanently.

Favourite character: James Sunderland! What a formative character. He's an awful selfish delusional guilt-ridden mess and I love him. I once signed up to write a hundred fics about him, although sadly I only managed forty-nine. (Surprisingly, my other fanfic100 claim, Macbeth from the BBC's ShakespeaRe-Told adaptation, didn't make it to 10,000 words and therefore doesn't qualify for this exercise, even though I wrote forty-one fics.)
Favourite pairing: James/Mary. An awful doomed trainwreck of a pairing and, again, pretty formative. My most-written pairing in terms of number of fics, although most of my Silent Hill 2 fics are very short.
Number of words written: 52,547. This is another fandom I've written a lot of crossovers for, although I've written more non-crossover fanfiction for Silent Hill 2 than I have for Pokémon.

Snippet: The Mentalist/Silent Hill, Patrick Jane visits the town.

( Silent Hill unfinished snippet. The Mentalist/Silent Hill, circa 2009. )


Doctor Who

I'd written a fic here and there for Red Dwarf and Friends (my Red Dwarf fics are the only fics I've ever written that have been permanently lost), but this is the first live-action fandom I wrote a substantial amount for. I got into Doctor Who when I was sixteen, with the Ninth Doctor's run; my parents were watching 'Aliens of London', and I happened to be in the room, and I was fascinated by the opening, where Rose discovers she's been missing for a year. Apparently the subsequent 'farting aliens' storyline was not enough to put me off.

Favourite character: Donna Noble. Stubborn and outspoken and good-hearted and fun. This is a slightly weird case where, although I've written a fair bit of Doctor Who fanfiction, I've never written my favourite character; Donna came along when I was past my writing phase for it.
Favourite pairing: The Doctor/Rose Tyler; I don't think I'd ever 'shipped anything so intensely before. Very specifically the Ninth Doctor; the dynamic between Rose and the Tenth Doctor didn't work for me at all. I also love Doctor/Jack/Rose.
Number of words written: 42,543. This is another fandom I've crossed over a lot. For some reason I'm particularly drawn to crossing it over with Silent Hill.

Snippet: Some sort of weird antagonistic Jack/Ten fic? I don't remember the idea behind this at all. Why were you flipping wildly back and forth between using and avoiding contractions in the narrative, seventeen-year-old Riona?

( Doctor Who unfinished snippet. Jack/Tenth Doctor, late 2005/early 2006. )


I thought this exercise might freak me out about time passing, but actually I'm enjoying it! It's reminding me of the fun I've had in all these fandoms.

Five down; seventeen to go. I might need to visit my parents' place and hunt down some old notebooks for some of these. I've definitely got some unfinished Scrubs fanfiction somewhere, but it's not on my laptop!