Trabia Garden

Here's a slightly scattered entry!


A couple of years ago, I wandered into a charity shop and picked up If We Were Villains by ML Rio. This book actually does have a little fandom, I discovered later, which is relatively unusual for novels! But I didn't know that at the time; I just bought it because it looked interesting.

I finally got around to reading If We Were Villains recently, and I was correct to suspect that this book was up my street. Like The Secret History, it's about a group of students with a weirdly intense relationship who end up murdering one of their own and then having to deal with the fallout. Is this a genre? This is the perfect genre.

The book definitely has its flaws. It feels unbearably pretentious at times, and so many of the bracketed parts would flow better without the brackets, and these stupid teenagers won't stop quoting Shakespeare in the middle of serious conversations! I'm sorry, but a character having a breakdown becomes hilarious if he insists on communicating his feelings exclusively through lines from King Lear.

But it delivered hard on my desire for a bunch of murderteens having worryingly intense feelings about each other. I sort of ship the lot of them, but particularly James and Oliver, about whom my feelings steadily progressed from 'huh, is there something going on here?' to 'surely there's something going on here? surely I'm not imagining this?? Oliver took off his shirt and James homoerotically smeared blood all over him???' to 'oh my God I need these two to kiss or I'll die'.

I've scribbled down a few snippets of fanfiction, but I don't know whether I'll actually get anywhere with them; I don't really have a solid direction in my head for a fic. I'd like to write something for this, though!


I've been playing Tales of Berseria lately! This is another canon it took me a while to get around to. I bought it back in 2020, in a sale of Japanese games. But, at the same time, I picked up a little game called Persona 5, and Tales of Berseria was promptly forgotten as I fell headlong into the Persona series.

Now that I'm actually playing Tales of Berseria, I have slightly conflicted feelings on it!

The 'a group of ruthless villains and the small child they're all intensely fond of' party dynamic is delightful. Excellent concept for a group of characters! They'd stab you through the heart without blinking, but any one of them would die for this kid who's never known compassion before.

But I think the poor animation really hurts the storytelling. The occasional anime-style cutscenes are great; the 2D skits with minimal animation are charming. The 3D cutscenes are unbearably stiff and awkward. Ultimately, it makes the game as a whole feel like a missed opportunity; I'm constantly conscious of how much stronger the story would feel with more care put into the animation.

If you're interested in videogame animation, incidentally, I strongly recommend the YouTube channel New Frame Plus, in which professional animator Dan Floyd analyses animation in videogames! In particular, I'm enjoying his ongoing series on the twelve principles of animation in games and the animation of Final Fantasy (I cannot wait for him to get up to Final Fantasy VIII).

I thought I wouldn't like Magilou at first. I really took against her outfit! But she's fun. Just there to be a shit to everyone and stir up chaos. She reminds me a little of Joshua Kiryu.


I keep some of my paintings propped up on my bookcase, and it recently occurred to me, looking at them, that I'd never actually shared one of those paintings here. Here it is! I painted this in early 2018, I think.




This was inspired by a piece of Assassin's Creed: Rogue concept art, which I'm going to link to rather than including in the actual post because my painting looks so bad next to it. (This, I suspect, is why I've never posted the painting before.) This is the problem with basing your painting on another painting; it's too easy to directly compare them!

Finishing Umineko inspired me to do the final touch-ups to this painting, which was not actually intended to be Rokkenjima (I was working from this picture, the source of which I unfortunately can't find) but is, now that I stand back and look at it, totally Rokkenjima.




I'm so restless now that I've finished Umineko. I can't play or read or watch anything else because I just get frustrated with it for not being Umineko! What do I do?

I usually deal with 'I've finished a canon I loved; what now?' by writing fic, but I don't have any ideas, alas. And I struggle to write for unvoiced canons, in any case; it's a lot easier for me to capture a character's voice if I've heard them speaking.

Maybe I should just replay the first six episodes of Higurashi in preparation for the final two to come out on Steam. Or, given that I love Umineko, Higurashi, Danganronpa and, to a lesser extent, Zero Escape, I could hunt down more canons in the 'murder! mystery! despair! plot twists! guilt! struggling against hopeless situations! possibly time loops! also warmth and friendship and love and a general refusal to take itself too seriously' genre.

(I drew this on a napkin and photographed it in poor lighting, so I'm afraid it looks a bit blurry.)

Yuffie, a friend I must have known for close to nineteen years, got married on Saturday! I was overcome with love for my friends when we were dancing to 'Stacy's Mom' after the ceremony, which is nice but does, bizarrely, mean that 'Stacy's Mom' now has deep emotional associations for me.

(I have to respect anyone who's willing to put that song on their wedding playlist. I personally added 'Cotton-Eye Joe' to the playlist, but sadly I had to leave before it came on, so I didn't get to see how people reacted. Still, there's reward in just knowing that you caused 'Cotton-Eye Joe' to happen somehow, somewhere.)

I was the ringbearer, which is apparently a role traditionally given to a nine-year-old boy or an owl (or a hobbit, I suppose). I am none of those things, but I managed not to attack the best man, so I acquitted myself better than some notorious ringbearers.

Rei's father, who I hope is ashamed of himself, made the following contribution to the guestbook:

There was a young lady named Yuffie
Who never was pompous or stuffy.
She got off with Chris
And it's all come to this
And I think that I've wrote quite enoughie.

Overheard during the wedding meal: 'How many times in your life have you thought, "I wish I could shit my pants and get away with it"? The problem is that you can't shit your pants any more without people getting upset about it. Society.'

It was a good day!


We were all asked to create something for the wedding, if we could, so I painted a photograph Yuffie had taken:




('I've really fucked up the left-hand margin,' I said in alarm to Ginger while I was working on this. Ginger's response was 'Fuck up the right-hand margin as well and it'll look intentional.')

It's just as well I started painting, really. If they'd asked me this time last year, I'd have been forced to write wedding-day fanfiction.

I've been in Dorset for the past week! It was very beautiful and I'm glad I went. Largely uneventful (my brothers could only stay for a couple of days, alas, depriving us of the usual holiday anecdotes), but there were a couple of events of note.

Firstly: we stopped at a beach on the way down to scatter my paternal grandmother's ashes, and my dad threw a handful of her into my brother's face.

Secondly: I tried to climb over a gate into someone's garden because they had a pub table there and I mistook it for the dining establishment I was supposed to be going to.

The residents were at said pub table and gave me the most incredulous stare before informing me I was breaking onto their property.

It was extremely embarrassing.




(Editing this entry two and a half years later, because I've just rediscovered this message I sent to RD during this holiday and it made me smile:

Important bulletin: Dorset is beautiful and I have had a lovely day. I saw a rabbit and cows and marbled white butterflies and starlings, which are surprisingly pretty birds, and some magnificent cliffs, and I dug a hole on the beach and shored it up against the sea, but then my brothers and Eleanor destroyed it by throwing rocks at it because the true enemy was man all along. Also Joseph gave me a piggyback ride across a river because I'm a wimp who doesn't want to get my feet wet.)

This is another present, working from a photograph I can't reproduce here. I forgot that I'd promised myself not to paint any more deciduous trees in winter.




If any of you guys would like a painting, by the way, let me know! I bought an A4 pad specifically because it's a conveniently postable size, so I might as well get some use out of it. If you're interested, you can just give me a few examples of landscapes you like - photos you've taken, stills from music videos or television or videogames, existing paintings, whatever - and I can pick one and have a go at it. I could post the result to you, or just put it up here if you'd prefer not to share your address.

(You can put your landscapes in the comments of this entry, but don't put your address there; comments are public! I'll get in touch with you about where to send the painting once it's done.)

I was going 'look, I can't possibly do another painting post, let's do something else' and wrote up a big post statistically analysing my AO3 fanfiction and then went 'oh, God, this is so boring, better mitigate this with a painting'. So I'm afraid you're getting another painting post after all.

The boring statistical analysis of my own fanfiction is under the cut!


( Analysing my fanfiction on AO3. )


Okay! That's more than enough of that. Here's the painting. I can't include the reference picture for this one, because it's a present for someone, using a photograph she took as reference, and I don't want to put other people's photographs up on my blog without their knowledge.




I painted this entire thing before I realised that the sun and its reflection are completely misaligned. Good work.

(Wait a second: I haven't posted the reference picture, so I could just say that the sun and its reflection happened to be out of alignment that day. Extremely mysterious, but I assure you I've painted it perfectly.)

I'm still capable of posting things that aren't paintings, I promise! I think I'll probably finish reading Gone Girl today, so I'm going to write that up for THE BOOKENING. But right now I'm afraid you're getting another painting. This one's a man-made landscape, for a change, from a photograph I took last June.






For the most part I'm happy with how this came out, particularly as I was worried about my ability to paint man-made things (nature tends to be a bit more forgiving; put a branch in the wrong place on a tree and it still looks like a tree), but it bugs me slightly that the... the metal shark-tooth flag things (not sure what purpose those serve; maybe lines ran between them at some point, but they don't seem to now) are so irregular in length.

(It's also possible I oversimplified the scene slightly. I notice I've created a train station with exactly one lamppost on it.)

My dad's observation on my paintings so far: 'They're all fir trees. Why don't you paint some oaks?'

After my latest painting, I can say that the answer is 'because painting oaks is terrible'.






This was a request from my mum, who sent me a photograph she'd taken in Richmond Park and asked whether I could paint it. It turns out I have neither the patience nor the nerve to do all the fiddly little branches on bare oaks; it'd be so easy to slip with the brush and make them too thick!

'When you've got a big stretch of the same colour that looks a bit too uniform and flat, just get a slightly different colour and splotch it everywhere' is not conducive to photorealism, but it is good fun.

In other news, I've started up a new game of Final Fantasy XV, and I'd forgotten how happy it makes me. I love this game! I love these boys! It's so flawed, and yet somehow it's perfect.

Today's painting is an attempt at some scenery from Horizon Zero Dawn, which is an astonishingly beautiful game. Light and water are hard, but it was fun to do something colourful, and the fading in the background worked a lot better than I was expecting.







You may recall my brother commented, on a previous painting, that it was possible to erase some of the lines to create a swastika. Remembering this, I did some hasty last-minute work on this to make the clouds look less like dicks and just ended up making them look more like dicks.

Painting effort number three: a scary cliff we visited in Wales! There's no Bob Ross original for comparison here, of course, but I suppose I've got the original photograph. I haven't included captions, on the assumption that you can determine which is which.







This was my first attempt at painting without Bob Ross holding my hand, which was a little intimidating. Although Rei did try to help by doing her best Bob Ross impression.

(Rei doesn't know who Bob Ross is. Her best Bob Ross impression sounds like a cross between Jeremy Clarkson and David Attenborough. 'Remember, it's your Wales; you can add in as many happy little whales as you like. That's some painting advice from me, Bob Ross.')

The cliff basically ended up looking like a big two-dimensional blob, and I desperately added lines until it looked slightly more clifflike. (Looking at it now, I think I should have used more grey towards the waterline as well. Never mind; I'm learning.) When I sent a picture of the painting to my family, my brother immediately pointed out that you could erase a few lines in one of the line clusters to create a swastika. Thanks, Fred.