fandom snowflake: day 1 + 2

Gonna jump on this snowflake_challenge bus...

Day 1:

In your own space, talk about why you are doing the Fandom Snowflake Challenge? What drew you to it as a participant? What do you hope to accomplish by doing these challenges?

I've been out of fandom a long time! I've never totally gone, except maybe in 2012, but I've effectively been a ghost since 2009 for a whole host of personal/professional/educational reasons. It's strange, considering that I've made very good friends through fandom, learned my voice through fandom, and been given more joy/hilarity/wtf in fandom than a lot of things in my life.

While it'd been very nice to sort of have five years of not caring much about what was going on online, I suppose fandom is... a great big creativity dump? No matter how good my RL friends are, unless I'm creating with them, something's missing. It's the special K, the little something-something, the rocket fuel for my brain, and I'm so glad I got my writing together because of fandom and the people I've met through it. Serendipitous things have happened to me because of fandom, and coming back is a bit like... coming home?

I'd like to just get writing more, honestly. Once a day, even if it's just a post like this, and since fandom_snowflake runs for the first half of January that should be easy enough!

Day 2:

In your own space, create a list of at least three fannish things you'd love to receive, something you've wanted but were afraid to ask for - a fannish wish-list of sorts.

• A sort of object-permanent no-frills chat space where fandom people can just hang out. I'm thinking of putting together a Slack for it! Since sometimes it's nice to just see if people are about and to talk, regardless of common fandoms/whatever.


• Porn prompts! I read a ton of it, but I never write a lot of it publicly - I'd love to just get (back?) into the groove of it and get used to writing pieces I'm proud of, because god was it a fun way to explore things and it's still fun and I hope it continues to stay fun. COME LEAVE SOME, random comm people! I have really got no squicks, and if I don't know the fandom I'll just say "pass." Or be convinced...


• More canon/ship introduction posts. Pimp posts, manifestos, whatever they're called these days - it feels like on tumblr I'm just meant to get into something by virtue of having had my eyeballs bombarded with a bunch of gifs and fanart and it just straight up doesn't get me involved the way a good post or fic used to?


• ONE DAY, TO COMMISSION ART FOR MY OCs. I have a whole... series and set planned out.

This is oddly cathartic! Looking forward to day 3.

fandom snowflake: day 3 (self-recs)

Day 3: In your own space, post a rec for at least three fanworks that you have created. It can be your favorite fanworks that you've created, or fanworks you feel no one ever saw, or fanworks you say would define you as a creator.

Oh boy.

My best received fics happen to be the fics I had the most fun writing, always and without exception. Ones like:

• Naruto: Model Behaviour (finance AU Kakashi/Iruka)
• Discworld: 'Tis Impossible To Be Sure Of Any Thing (Moist, Vetinari)
• Hikaru no Go: Machine Learning

Fun things flow, and things with flow write better and read better and lend better to just... everything. They might not be the most "hard hitting" of fics, and they might not be fics that ventured to say something important, but they are important and hard hitting to me (and hopefully some people out there!) because they stretched the imagination and were fun; they were play!

My personal favourites?

FFVII is my homeground, and Empery - a Tseng backstory AU - stands out in my memory. While it's not my best written piece anymore, or the subtlest crayon in the box, it helped me find my headspace on a lot of issues, including bicultural things and post-colonial things, and I just remember sitting down at 12 in the morning and writing it all in one long, electric go. A similar fic, Year One (Reeve and Midgar), also hits the list for similar reasons, though I like it better as an objective piece of work. If you like Midgar worldbuild, I can rec that one in all good conscience!

That said, I'd written in FFVII for so long that I never really quite feel like an... independent? Or mature? writer in that fandom - so much of what I write is derivative of derivatives, and while that's not a bad thing, it's not my own voice, per say. Batman Beyond (and DCU in general) is where I hit my stride, and Counting Down The Hours (Terry, Bruce, looking into the past) lives on in my memory of being lyrically strong and emotionally plugged-in.

Without a doubt, though, collaborative works are where I feel I learned the most, was pushed the most, and had the most fun. Executive Reform (FFVII/Pacific Rim apocalyptic AU) was born from a prompt from Elemental, is the gen fic I never knew I could write, and was somehow the seed inspiration for Crim drawing amazing doujin. It's strange, it's tiny, it doesn't get read by many people, but I love it to the bottom of my black heart and it's been a joint fandom bus effort.

And what an ingrate would I be if I didn't mention Nasdack, the FFVII/FFXII stockmarket AU (Tseng/Rufus, Tseng/Balthier, Tseng/Rufus/Balthier???) that I swore nobody would read but me and pendency. It was born out of the '08 crash, written on what I'm pretty sure were the dregs of the dregs of whatever energy she and I had leftover from real life, the desire to see Balthier fuck anything that moved and a good few systems that couldn't, and was just one giant route from beginning to badly defined, never written end.

If you do decide to try and give this a go, ignore the AO3 order and start with:

Is that a trust fund in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me? (18393 words) by karanguni
Chapters: 3/3
Fandom: FFXII, FFVII
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Balthier/Tseng/Rufus, Tseng/Rufus, Tseng/Balthier, Balthier/Rufus
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Real World, Stockmarket AU
Series: Part 4 of Nasdack
Summary:

'He's a Bunansa. You're a Shinra. Tell me how this will go well, Rufus.'

Tseng's in New York, Balthier's in London, and Rufus is in the sky as the world burns around them. Hedging on futures can be such tricky things.

Then:

There is No Witty Euphemism For Dividing And/Or Conquering (15382 words) by karanguni
Chapters: 3/3
Fandom: FFXII, FFVII
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Balthier/Tseng, Tseng/Rufus, Balthier/Rufus
Characters: Veld, Reno, Elena, Rude
Additional Tags: Stockmarket AU, Alternate Universe - Real World
Series: Part 13 of Nasdack
Summary:

Tseng's in New York, and so is the fledging Shinra-Bunansa empire: whether that is the point or the problem is anybody's guess. Hedging on futures can be such a tricky thing.

The fact that these collabs end up crossovers more often than not is a strange quirk of fandom that I will roll in till the day I'm too old to type. Good times!


(As I dug back through my AO3 to find all of this stuff, I've got to point out that AO3 isn't where the story begins: as much as I'd like to imagine I was always a decent writer, I started off with a Mary-Sue more-or-less self-insert Lord of the Rings fic on FFN. If that's not wince-worthy enough, I even stuck in little A/Ns involving the words "slash" and "yuck." I'm grimacing even thinking about it now, but that's really the fic that opened my eyes: I got flamed about flaming slash, and it made me think about why I'd said "yuck," and here I am like a million years later. I also got defended - people stood up for my (really shitty) writing, and told me to keep going even if haters were going to hate, and I wonder what might've happened to me if I never did get that boost of encouragement. I might never have written another word. My whole life would have been different – and that's... not really an exaggeration? I've met my best friends through fandom and fic; I've become an excellent academic writer (with third-party whatevers to prove it) because of writing fic; the way I think changed because of writing and fandom.

But that's not so much a rec as self-reflection. *g*)