#as always it's hilarious to be that all of fanon's most popular ideas are easily disproved by a shallow reading of the books

[fromtheseventhhell]

Arya's Braavos arc according to fandom

[tenrousei-kuroi]

I did read Angel Sanctuary! I never finished it, though. I remember that what got me to start was the author’s art style. Her characters are so pretty!

I’m not familiar with A Cruel God Reigns, but by your description, it’s right up my alley (also, with a brief search, I see it has a very traditional style from the 90s/00s mangas that I find very nostalgic). I’ll definitely take a look into it.

As for the Black brothers, I think I discovered the ship around 2017-18, so there was a fairly good amount of work by then, but Blackcest has definitely grown a lot in the past couple of years. I’ve not read many James/Regulus works, mostly because many have a 'cleansed', fanon version of both – which also applies to the Marauders as a whole – and I have very picky views of Regulus’ characterization (my boy canonically had his own fan board of Voldemort 😭 and as far as we know, he never fully – or at all – quit his bigotry, yet in many works, his Slytherin friends and himself diverge completely from this).

But I do think Sirius/Regulus will remain somewhat popular for a long time. The Black family seems to have an appeal within the fandom that I don’t see as much with other families, such as the Lestranges, for example. Also, the idea of two good-looking, rich boys in a complicated family is intriguing (or at least I hope so; if not, you’ll see me signing up to your mailing list). On that note, I'm still hoping for the day Rodolphus/Rabastan gets popular lol

Anyway, thank you for the link, and I'm looking forward fest postings (ngl, I'm pretty confident in my abilities to recognize your writing style in anon fests. Sometimes I read a title and I think "this looks like a title ten would use". Is it a little stalker-ish of me? Maybe 😅).

Yeah Moto Hagio’s a bit more old school, she was most prolific in the seventies and eighties, and her art shows it. I could be misremembering but I believe her work “Sunroom” is typically credited as the first boy/boy manga kiss. And she’s one of the pioneers of the modern boy’s love genre. Real “culture award winning” sort of author.

Jegulus fics are hilarious to me and there’s a reason I call my stuff James/Regulus when I tag it, because that portmanteau has become its own thing. Whenever I read a Jegulus fic in my brain I’m thinking, “you know you can just write Timotheé Chalamet RPF, right? He’s not gonna’ come for you” 😂 And honestly that fanon “style” is bleeding over hard into the Sirius/Regulus section.

No shade, I’m glad people are having fun. Makes it harder for me to find the kinds of fics I like but I’ll survive lol. There’s just a larger selection now. And popular as it all is, I do truly feel people will move on. Because it’s less an attachment to the characters and more to these seriously altered fantasy versions of them, which can be easily grafted onto the next popular thing.

If you had told fifteen year-old me my weird incest and incest-adjacent pairings where two of the three characters aren’t even alive in canon would one day be as common as they are now I’d’ve thought you were high 😂 yet here we are.

I’ve dabbled a bit in Rodolphus/Rabastan but they always end up coming out so similar to my Sirius and Regulus that I don’t like it. I’ve kind of tabled the pairing until I can force myself to be a bit more creative with them. People already put up with all my Sirius/Regulus nonsense being basically the same, I don’t need to be grafting their dynamic onto other pairings 🤣🤣

When I pick prompts for fests I always try to ignore the promoter names until after I’ve chosen, but it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference, roughly 80% end up being yours anyway. Talk about wavelengths.

And let’s blame 2009 LiveJournal for my pretentious and easily-spotted titles, shall we? Specifically a Sirius/Regulus fic from forever ago called “A Thousand Years Good Wine” which basically flipped something in my brain and I haven’t been able to title anything like a normal human since.

That was a stellar fic, by the way. And if anyone ever ever ever finds it back for me I’ll…I don’t know…write them a 100k commission of their choice or engrave their name on my tombstone or something because that fic is LOST beyond belief and it causes me literal pain sometimes lol.

I’m feeling rather inspired today so I might spend my Saturday night plinking away at one of my fics. Odds are it probably won’t be the one that’s due in three weeks but we can always hope TT.TT

[anghraine]

For no particular reason, I’ve been navel-gazing about obnoxious comments I’ve gotten on fic over the years.

Of course, “obnoxious comments” aren’t created equal. I basically divide the ones I’ve personally received into three types: 1) breaches of etiquette, 2) trivial shit, and 3) wtf?

#1 is stuff like leaving a comment on a new fic to ask when I’m going to update an older fic for a completely different fandom. Please don’t do this! But it’s not a huge deal. Or just saying “update soon” and nothing else like I’m some sort of fic-writing machine. Or trash-talking the genre or ship that I’m writing to emphasize that my fic is good even though my taste in ships/tropes is shit or something. I don’t like any of these things, but they’re essentially just different ideas of courtesy.

#2 are things like ... correcting me for making up a title for the blank Fitzwilliam earldom in P&P instead of going with “Earl of Matlock” (an invention of the 1995 P&P—I’ve gotten multiple complaints about not using it). Or the occasional complaint about calling my genderbent Luke Skywalker “Lucy” instead of something more obscure and space-y (as opposed to the obscure sci-fi name Luke, I guess). Or my physical descriptions of the characters not matching the casting in someone’s preferred adaptation (again, P&P 1995 fandom is particularly prone to this—one person felt the need to inform me that they always imagined my Darcy as Colin Firth, despite knowing of my dislike for the 1995 and the descriptions in the fics not matching him, in response to a fic where Darcy is a woman). Or there’s “well actually in the novelization/Expanded Universe/film/whatever...”

#3 is easily the least common. The most objectionable of the “wtf” genre of comment was undoubtedly the person who thought I was implying that Elizabeth Bennet is a WOC in Season of Courtship, and went on a screed about it. The weirdest was the person who asked if leaving Subsequent Connections unfinished made me feel desirable. I was also pretty “wtf” at the person who urged me to stop writing screenplay-format fic because it reminded them of a different fic writer who they disliked. And there was someone (at AO3, of all places) who told me that my fic was great but I was personally shitty.

There have also been some kind of peculiar edge cases, like someone responding to my Ivriniel fic with a pseudo-above-it-all comment about how hilarious they found the idea of anybody in Gondor ever resenting Aragorn (i.e. the premise of the fic). There was also some person who was indignant that the other comments on First Impressions were positive despite Henry not being manly (there actually were plenty of other people who had criticisms of First Impressions, but most were clustered at different sites than this commenter’s). Obviously not anywhere near as bad as the straight-up racism or homophobia, but those still struck me as weird and wanky beyond just fannish obsessing over minutia.

I have gotten criticisms that I don’t think of as obnoxious—some were (non-adaptation-based) corrections of genuine mistakes, like Americanisms and getting Italian phrases wrong and continuity errors and things. Some people have noted where longer fics meandered off track and the pacing got uneven or seemed directionless (fair!). Some people don’t like my readiness to give substantial roles to OCs/near-OCs. Others don’t like specific decisions I made, like the Rebellion’s limited roles for women in the Lucyverse or the justification for Catherine’s proposal in First Impressions. Okay!

Also, while obviously I’ve seen and remembered the obnoxious comments, they make up a small proportion of the overall comments I’ve received over the years. Most people are nice. I’ve very rarely received really nasty direct comments, despite writing sketchy things at times, deliberately rejecting popular fanons, etc.

And ... I mean, my two biggest fandoms by a mile are P&P and SW (in terms of what I’ve written fic for). And Austen fandom has always been the odd one out for me, fandom-wise. If I excluded the responses to Austen fic specifically, my experience of fic comments would be even more overwhelmingly pleasant (and the comments on Austen fic are mostly pleasant, but it is definitely the wankiest fandom I’ve ever been: both very particular about conformity to its norms and very Cult of Nice about addressing pretty much anything). I know that SW fandom does have awful people in it who leave worse comments than anything I’ve ever received—that’s just what my personal experience has been.

So, yeah, the occasional obnoxiousness I’ve encountered seems like ... not nothing, by any means, but given how much I’ve written, what I’ve chosen to write, and the basic contrariness of my nature, I’ve probably come out pretty lucky as far as fandom goes.