Fandom Snowflake 2018 #14, Limited Edition Trade Version: Various Fannish questions.

[silveradept]

Clearing out the tabs brought on some question bits, so I thought they might be worth a go, just for fun.

1. What was the first fandom you got involved in?

By recollection, the earliest fandom I got involved with, as in wanting to watch the programming on the regular, was either the original series of Power Rangers or X-Men: The Animated Series. But it's a little hazy at that point, because there was also a lot of really good animation going on at the time. Batman: The Animated Series, Darkwing Duck, Tiny Toon Adventures/Animaniacs, the various incarnations of Carmen Sandiego on the televsion, Square One Television, and so forth.

If you want to count "first time writing fiction" as first involvement, that would be the 60s Adam West Batman series. But that's a lot later than the other ones I mentioned.


2. What is your latest fandom?

As of right now, Brooklyn Nine-Nine is the show I have most recently started watching. But I'm a fannish magpie, so that will inevitably change.


3. What is the best fandom you’ve ever been involved in?

Define "Best." I'm not exactly elbows deep in a lot of fandoms, mostly because I can never seem to find people and because for a very long time, I mostly constructed my fannish identity in other people's comment sections, talking about all sorts of aspects of shows and media. So, my best fandoms have been the places that have welcomed me in and let me sit in their virtual living rooms to talk about things.


4. Do you regret getting involved in any fandoms?

No, no regrets about any of the fandoms I've been involved in. Some of the creators in those fandoms have turned out to be people less worthy of emulation than others, but most of the venues of fandom that I hang out in have also been very good at explicitly calling out those creators for their missteps.


5. Which fandoms have your written fanfiction for?

AO3, help me out.
• Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis (4)
• Leverage (4)
• Final Fantasy VI (3)
• Once Upon a Time (TV) (3)
• Avatar: Legend of Korra (2)
• Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling (2)
• Avatar: The Last Airbender (2)
• Welcome to Night Vale (2)
• Quest for Glory (2)
• White Collar (1)
• Firefly (1)
• Chess (Board Game) (1)
• Bone (Comic) (1)
• 絵猫と鼠 | The Boy Who Drew Cats (Mukashibanashi) (1)
• R.O.D: Read or Die & Related Fandoms (1)
• Babylon 5 (1)
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1)
• Greek and Roman Mythology (1)
• Arthurian Mythology (1)
• The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. (1)
• Xenosaga (1)
• Doctor Who (2005) (1)
• Dragonriders of Pern - Anne McCaffrey (1)
• Psych (1)
• Angel: the Series (1)
• Final Fantasy XII (1)
• The Tempest - Shakespeare (1)
• Pushing Daisies (1)
• Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms (1)
• My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (1)
• Mad Max Series (Movies) (1)
• Person of Interest (TV) (1)
• Final Fantasy XIII (1)
• The Princess Bride - William Goldman (1)
• Tenkuu no Escaflowne | The Vision of Escaflowne (1)
• Final Fantasy VIII (1)
• Final Fantasy X (1)
• Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer (1)
• Grimm (TV) (1)
• Star Trek: Discovery (1)
• Star Trek: The Next Generation (1)


6. List your OTP from each fandom you’ve been involved in.

Hah. That could take some time, because not everything I've written has been everything I've been fannish about. That said, I'm also not particularly OTPish, given that I watched the Harry Potter Ship Wars while they unfolded and got to see the broadsides delivered back and forth about people championing their particular causes and ships against each other. I also find that I can adapt my own thoughts relative to the work I'm looking at, so if things are done well, I can hold both the idea of Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes as a couple simultaneously with the idea of Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanov as a couple, and neither intrudes upon the other or causes grief or distress.


7. List your NoTPs from each fandom you’ve been in.

Similarly, there's really only one pairing that I've been adamant is not actually a thing, and that's because it has the fingerprints of Executive Meddling all over it, as if showrunners or others saw what was happening and decided that they couldn't actually stand to have two queer heroes get together at the end. So, sorry Pete, but Myka was never supposed to be yours. At least not in the way expressed on the screen.


8. How did you get involved in your latest fandom?

A recommendation, since I've been sort of restoring myself to full functionality after a decade of survival mode. The good thing is, B99 is hilarious. It's a police procedural crackfic brought to life with a great set of actors. (And someone wrote a story about Santiago writing fanfic for Mathnet. Isn't that the best thing?)


9. What are the best things about your current fandom?

Mostly, the good things about my fandom(s) is that there are plenty of people out there enjoying it as well, and creating works that I will eventually come across and read or view or listen to and things will be excellent and glorious. And also that the source material is often good.


10. Is there a fandom you read fic from but don’t write in?

I'm sure there are, but I think that's more due to not having been prompted to write it rather than not having an interest in writing it.


11. Who is your current OTP?

See above about multifannish magpie who can see multiple facets all at once.


12. Who is your current OT3?

Same answer.


13. Any NoTPs?

Not really. I might think, for example, that Luke/Elliot from In Other Lands is a terrible ship that will cause plenty of trouble, but I also think it will work out in the end, because they care for each other, even if neither of them really feels like admitting it to anyone at all.


14. Go on, who are your BroTPs?

And again, can conceive of a lot of things and put them into the context of a story.


15. Is there an obscure ship which you love?

I'd think most of the ships that I enjoy reading about aren't that obscure, or that they're Yuletide things, so they're small, but from the looks of random works I come across, I'd say that ships involving Luna Lovegood are relatively more obscure than others in the HP fandom. Which is a shame, because Luna is quite clearly a competent person and could have used more than tertiary protagonist status


16. Are there any popular ships in your fandom which you dislike?

Less "dislike", more "don't quite understand why everyone flocks to this ship". Which was the case for a very long time about Draco and Harry, or Severus and (appropriately aged-up) Harry, for example. As with much in fandom, reading/seeing/listening to the right work can make all the difference and help you understand.


17. Who was your first OTP and are they still your favourite?

I suppose Helena/Myka is my only full-stop One True Pairing, but that's because it was so ham-handedly derailed by the people who wrote the show. I still think of them as the correct pairing for the show, so yes, I still like them.


18. What ship have you written the most about?

Well, as it turns out, since I mostly do exchange prompts, I haven't apparently yet repeated a relationship. So, all of them, I guess.


19. Is there a ship which you wished you could get behind, but you just don’t feel them?

That's more a question of quality of work and quantity of work, isn't it? The idea that there are so many people who are definitely engaged with the ship, but they're not producing anything to your specific tastes, which either results in a "I'm'a do this thing myself" or in lurking somewhat and waiting for the rush to die down so that you can sieve the material and then follow the recommendations chains to find the material that others thought was the best. If I want to back a ship, I can back that ship. I may give the side-eye to fellow fans that are taking the ship and behaving poorly with it, but that's a question of personal taste (most of the time).


20. Any ships which you surprised yourself by liking?

Nope! Good works make good things happen.


21. What was the first fanfic you ever wrote?

Actually written? This requires a certain amount of memory of childhood that's not there any more, but I'm going to say that I was likely pennning 60s Batman fusion works as the earliest thing I was writing, because that's the thing that I can remember most clearly putting down on paper and not showing anyone, especially not when my older sister threatened them over something.


22. Is there anything you regret writing?

Not really, since I see writing as a continuum of improvement from early stages to my current set of early stages. Just about everything I've written has helped develop me as a writer. There are things outside of my fiction output where I might have regretted writing something because, with hindsight, it was tasteless and offensive, but even that's something that helped me grow and change.


23. Name a fic you’ve written that you’re especially fond of & explain why you like it.

I like my works pretty well, but things that I am especially proud of are when I took someone's offhand comment about a fic they would like to see and brought it into existence. TRUTH SHOP and Promotion both fit that particular mark, and they both got quite the amount of squee and commentary from their recipients and other readers, so those two are especially job well done for me.


24. What fic do you desperately need to rewrite or edit?

I'm sure there are plenty of typos and other errors in all of my works. I blame autocucumber. But none of them really need a rewrite or an edit. Some might do with an expansion here and there, or a sequel, but I'm pretty happy about them as they are.


25. What’s your most popular fanfic?

If we're going by raw numbers of hits, kudos, or bookmarks, then The Many Proposals of Nick Burkhardt wins handily, because the Grimm fandom was exceedingly hot, and Nick/Adalind was a very popoular ship at the time. By comments, Around the Campfire: Pardon Me, Wife ends up on top.


26. How do you come up with your fanfic titles?

There's almost always a pun in there somewhere if it's a comedy work (or if there's one that's too good to resist), but mostly I think about them and then they happen.


27. What do you hate more: Coming up with titles or writing summaries?

Titles, because I suspect a good title works better for drawing in the reader than a good summary.


28. If someone were to draw a piece of fanart for your story, which story would it be and what would the picture be of?

Fanart would be lovely of any of the stories that have been written, really. I'm sure there are some evocative images and sequences in all of the stories that could be captured well in fanart.


29. Do you have a beta reader? Why/Why not?

Generally, yes. It may change from story to story, dpending on the expertise of my in-house beta, but I usually have someone look it over at least to make sure that I'm not being innocently insensitive about important things.


30. What inspires you to write?

The thought of being able to bring someone's plotbunny to life or to write something that they'll enjoy. Occasionally, there's a story idea that makes a lot of noise and demands to be written out, but those don't happen all that often.


31. What’s the nicest thing someone has ever said about your writing?

"not!Luna is still perfectly, effortlessly, Luna."


32. Do you listen to music when you write or does music inspire you? If so, which band or genre of music does it for you?

I do, but I'm usually listening to music anywhere I am, just as a thing. Since I rarely listen to music with vocals, you'll usually find me with something uptempo or downtempo or reflective of my current mood.


33. Do you write oneshots, multi-chapter fics or huuuuuge epics?

One-shots, generally. I've used the chapter divisions as scene-switches and the like, but there's no burning, 75k novel or multi-hundred-k epic in my brain. I'm probably going to end up reaching several hundred thousand k when the Pern work is all done, but that's all in essay instead of fic.


34. What’s the word count on your longest fic?

Promotion clocks in at 6,609 words, officially making it my longest work by 609 words compared to the next contender.


35. Do you write drabbles? If so, what do you normally write them about?

I certainly can. Usually, though, I'm not writing in drabble exchanges, so 100 words is about 1/10th the size of what I actually need as a starter.


36. What’s your favorite genre to write?

I'm not sure I have a favorite, necessarily. I might enjoy writing comedy a touch more than drama, but I don't generally stay in a single genre lane.


37. First person or third person - what do you write in and why?

Third-person, generally. First-person P.O.V. requires essentially having your character be in the right spot at the right time for the entirety of the plot. Which is reasonably difficult to do, given the way that many stories quickly spin up to big things. It's why head-hopping is a popular way of doing it.


38. Do you use established canon characters or do you create OCs?

Canon characters, unless there's absolutely no way that the canon covers the thing that I want to write about. F'rex, if I got it in my head that I wanted to write a university lecture about the history of magic and set it in the Potterverse, but in the United States, there's no canon character that I know of in the literary works that would serve as a viewpoint, and even then, there might have to be character creations for the students involved.


39. What is you greatest strength as a writer?

Fantastic question. I'm not sure I have a greatest strength other than, perhaps, knowing when to take a break. If a prompt or an idea isn't writing for me at the moment, I'll often backburner it and let my brain work out the tangles while I do something else or write something else. More often than not, my brain will get back to me in a little while with something brilliant that will move things forward from that point, and it's off to the races again.


40. What do you struggle the most with in your writing?

Action is difficult for me to write. I can often see things cinematically, but then trying to translate that to the written word and to not give a character powers of perception they wouldn't already have is tricky. I'm also a bit worried that my prose might take on the occasional shade of purple while I'm trying to make sure I convery what I see happening.