#but maybe the two fandoms just don't overlap much

[not-the-living-ghost]

I cannot be the only one seeing the parallels between Willie from JATP and Monty from DBDA. Like they're both side characters who are in cahoots with the antagonist, and are also also potential love interests for the gay ghost main character ?? hello???

[cepheusgalaxy]

look guys i very strongly disagree with the "trans men hold privilege over trans women" point of view and i'm finally able to articulate why:

I think trans men don't hold privilege over trans women, because privilege is kind of a consistent thing.

Like, bear with me: I'm an abled person. I have privilege in relation to disabled people. Because, if me and a disabled person are in a Situation where this distinction is relevant in some way...I'm literally never gonna come out with the worst hand. Never. No matter what the situation is. This is a consistent fact.

Now, when we talk about different transgender identities, I think this gets more shady, because the "who has privilege in relation to who" is a relative statement. One example I saw of people explaining why in their view trans man have privilege over trans women is kind of like this: Imagine there are two passing and stealth trans people, a trans man and a trans woman, in a workplace. Then, it comes a coworker, being blatanly misogynist. Regardless of their views on trans people, in this situation, the trans woman is gonna get the worst of it, in relation to the trans man, because he will be viewed as a man.

It makes sense, and I don't think this hypothetical situation is inaccurate or anything, but I'd also like to point out why it doesn't work as a good point to why transmascs have privilege over transfems. Imagine we change about any variable in this situation. Let's say the trans woman is closeted as a guy, and the trans man is openly transgender. The misogynist coworker then would very much target the trans man in their points, especially if they are particularly transphobic. Now imagine both of them are out and openly trans, with the bonus that now both the man and the woman are gnc. Depending on other specifics, the misoginyst coworker might be bigoted to just one or both of them.

Like, do you see? In different situations, the different trans people have the worst hand. So that doesn't mean that because of the first case, trans men have it generally better. Because there are many kinds of trans men, and simply not all of them have privilege over trans women. In some cases, they might even have it worse precisely because they are trans man. So the privilege the trans man in the first example has is not a consistent thing over trans man! Maybe it's common, I don't know, but when we compare it with someone who has real privilege, like me, an abled person, I ain't ever encounter myself in a situation where I'm having it worse because I am abled in comparison to someone who is disabled.

That's why I think trans woman and trans men simply don't hold privilege over one another, simply because it varies. It depends on who the trans men and women are, it depends in what situation they are in, it depends on the people around them, it depends of so much!!! So saying that trans men have privilege over trans women sounds simply surreal!

I think that, also, the different patterns of the situations in which trans woman have it worse are important to be discussed, and that's why we have the word Transmisoginy, to discuss these issues pertinent to the nuanced oppression trans woman face (and on a similar note, that's why it's also important to have fucking words like Transmisogynoir, because a black trans woman's Situations will be different from a white trans woman's Situations and it's important to to recognize that). THAT's why I also think that we need words like Exorsexism and Transandrophobia, to identify the patterns of situations where trans men have it bad precisely because they are trans men and not something else or because nonbinary people have it bad precisely because they are nonbinary.

SO, in short, my opinion on the "trans man have it generally better than trans woman and that's why they have privilege" debate is that trans man don't generally have it better than trans woman, but some trans man in specific situations have it significantly better than trans woman and that in other situations trans woman have it significantly better than trans man and that is basically a case-to-case scenario and that's also why we need the specific words for different shapes and faces of transphobia to better understand these cases and why x happens with y at z situation. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

[anistarrose]

So the thing is, if people ship characters who are explicitly not into romance (whether aromantic or otherwise), that ultimately doesn't affect me on a level beyond "annoyance" — I can blacklist tags, and blacklist or block people who don't tag it. What I have to ask myself every time I see these things, however, is this:

"Does this reflect how this person feels about romance-averse people in real life? Does this reflect how this person treats romance-averse people in real life?"

Because how someone engages with fiction doesn't have to be a reflection of how they treat real people, obviously — and in this case, I would of course hope that it isn't. But if you know anything about what being aromantic is like, in real life or on the Internet... you'll understand why I'm not optimistic.

Thinking two characters are so cute together that you reject a bunch of their characterization to make it happen is just annoying, not a crime! But the second you make the leap to telling a real human person things like:

"I don't care how much you say you're not interested, because you just won't realize that you and X would make such a cute couple,"

or:

"I don't care how much you say you're not interested, because you're clearly just in denial which the Right Person has to come along and fix,"

or:

"But — but — but not falling in love is just so tragic! I want you to be happy, not sad and lonely your whole life!"

like the rationales that apparently motivate so many people to ship? Then that has crossed the line into harming real people.

I don't actually think that shipping aromantic characters is the primary cause in the cause-effect diagram, when it comes to the correlating the shipping with "likelihood to say these terrible, invalidating, autonomy-undermining things to real people." Precisely, I don't think it's a cause to a meaningful degree when you compare with the opposite direction — I think people who say these things to real aromantics (or anyone else who just isn't interested!), because of what they think about these real people, are in turn more likely to think amatonormative things about fictional characters. I think that there exists a feedback loop to some extent, because fiction can influence people's beliefs to some degree, but it's not symmetric. Real-life amatonormativity causes mass amatonormativity in fandom spaces.

So... at this point, do you see why aromantic people in fandom get a little defensive about aro characters, and about other characters who overlap with aro experiences? You see why we get kind of pissy when people very selectively throw a very specific part of their characterization out the window? You see why we maybe don't want to associate with those people? Why it makes us so uncomfortable?

"Stop shipping romance-repulsed characters," in my opinion, is a understandable outcry from the community that I obviously sympathize with — but it nevertheless conceals the core of the issue, especially from non-aromantics who aren't living with amatonormativity shoved down their throats at all times, and therefore might not be able to read between the lines. At the core, this isn't actually a debate about the morality of shipping in fiction, despite overlap with that discourse on the surface.

The real cry for change isn't "stop shipping that character." It's "start accepting me for who I am, without trying to either undermine or mourn it at every opportunity." Because at the moment, the overlap between people who erase fictional aromanticism and real aromanticism is significant — and even where they don't overlap, you know what? Romance-averse folks just trying to live in peace can't fucking tell the difference.

[cassowariess]

Unpopular BCS/BRBA opinions?

Oooh. Er...I dunno if these are unpopular. I guess I'll know if I get hate for it, but maybe these:

- Breaking Bad has a tighter plot than BCS, even though I love BCS and still think it's one of the best things TV ever made and made the Breaking Bad lore richer in a good way.

-I don't think Mike feels any affection towards his coworkers post Werner and pre Jesse. I think the knowing look him and Gus share at the end of Fun and Games mirrors the 'little bit of hate' Gus has for Don Eladio. It's just that Mike has accepted this is his lot, and he can't really judge Gus after being schooled by Manuel. I think Mike likes it when his coworkers are efficient and wants to make sure they're paid, but affection doesn't really come into it.

- Chuck was right about Jimmy, but for all the wrong reasons.

-Nacho is a bad person. He has a good heart when it comes to innocents, even outside his father (anger at Hector shooting the Good Samaritan, feeling bewildered Arturo blocks the mum and child in Pollos Hermanos, the old folks at Lalo's hacienda) but boy was stupid to think innocents and the criminal underworld could never overlap. Jesse is a bad person too. I love them both anyway. Likeable=/= good person and I hate the mental gymnastics people do to make a character seem more morally good than they actually are to justify liking them. Just like the fictional Bad men! It's fun! See also: Mike.

- Maybe not so much an unpopular opinion in the gilliverse, but perhaps overall cross fandom: I think BCS and Succession were the last two truly great shows on TV. Everything else seems to be going downhill. Severance is good so far, but it's not a complete series yet so I can't judge it. Sometimes, a show can have a banger first season, and then the writing will go downhill in the second. Look what happened to House of the Dragon. They messed that up so bad and they had complete source material to work from.

[my-autism-adhd-blog]

Hi! I have a question: can a person be autistic *without* having a special interest? I have identified with a lot of the posts from the autistic community, and the online tests I've taken suggest the possibility that I could be autistic (which I know should be taken with a grain of salt), but the main thing that keeps me from taking the possibility more seriously is that I'm not sure I have a special interest? I mean, I've had plenty of (usually fandom-based) hyperfixations over the years, but they've all been just that—hyperfixations. The only two things that I could remotely think of as being special interests would be bugs (with a heavy emphasis on isopods, which aren't technically bugs but fit the vibe) and the Legend of Zelda series. Both of which I feel like I don't actually have enough real knowledge about for them to be special interests, and there have been stretches of time where they did not have any active role in my life. Maybe I don't have a clear understanding of what hyperfixations are, and/or maybe I am only ADHD (because I know there's quite a bit of overlap), but mostly I really like reading and learning from your posts, and so I thought I'd see if you have thoughts on the matter! /gen

Thank you!

Hi there,

A special interest is basically something someone is a very focused point of a topic. Hyperfocus/hyperfixation however, is a bit different. It’s where you focus on something so much that it even interferes with your ability to do common things and tasks and it doesn’t last as long as a special interest. Like how I’ve loved collecting rocks a a kid and I still do to this day.

Please keep in mind that individuals can have hyperfocus and have a special interest at the same time. While others only experience one of these.

(To my other ND friends, feel free to correct me if I got something wrong. I wish not to spread misinformation).

I’ve found some sources that help differentiate between the two. I hope it helps. Thank you for the inbox. I hope you have a wonderful day/night. ♥️

[vladdyissues]

I feel like there's a good amount of the Danny Phantom fandom that would prefer the Space Ghost franchise if they knew what it was and the Space Ghost fandom wasn't a few dozen, not even 100 people, including the few people who worked on Space Ghost Coast To Coast that are still active online (Start with C2C and ignore all comics until you finish it and at least the original series and Cartoon Planet)

Maybe. Probably not. Space Ghost and Danny Phantom are two very different cartoon shows with a massive 40-year gap—four decades' worth of innovation in animation, writing style, humor, character design—with very few similarities.

Speaking as someone who watched Space Ghost: Coast to Coast in the early 00s, I can tell you that people who enjoy DP are probably not going to enjoy SG, especially the original series, which was the product of 1960s Hanna Barbara animation (read: low-budget, corny-to-the-point-of-camp writing, mediocre voice acting). It would be extremely dated now. And scientifically inaccurate. I mean, this is a cartoon that predated man setting foot on the moon. How well is it going to hold up in 2024? Probably not well.

Furthermore, many DP fans are too young to remember the Coast to Coast era. They may enjoy the humor; I know I did. But one would already have to be a fan of—or at least appreciate—old animation and its fuddy-duddyness to be both a DP fan and a SG fan. And I just don't think there's that much of an overlap. Maybe a few pixels.

I know you've sent several people this same ask, and the fact that all the ones I've seen have been some form of "I have no idea what Space Ghost is" should be answer enough.

[cerosin-bis]

might I ask for a handful of just random cod trivia ..

and/or ! just your thoughts on the games and reboots, if you’re comfy w that?

I feel like you always have some random notes or tags about weird trivia in the game but obviously this isn’t specific At All so feel free to just ignore this if it’s weird sjdndjhd

Hi! no this isn't weird 🥺 I think what gives this impression is "just" that I played most of said games a lot and got interested in the lore that's not necessarily accessible to people who, big quotation marks, are superficially in the fandom. as in people who aren't interested in multiplayer or secondary gamemodes, let alone lore and are more focused on the main cast or one particular mp character (such as könig)

This got VERY long so, my rambles and opinions about the Modern Warfare games and their reboots below.

I played mw2 and mw3's campaigns in 2010-2013. I wasn't playing multiplayer at the time, I started it with BO4 in 2018. But I fell hard into MW's multiplayer with the first reboot, mw19, in early 2020.

Just so that my words have a bit of "the player's weight": I have around 900 hours on mw19, 400 on MWII and I believe 200-300 on MWIII.

Regarding campaigns: Call of duty is Call of duty. It's literally funded by the US army. it's blatant propaganda, and I expect no less when I run a campaign. With that being said, what I expect from a CoD campaign is either being over-the-top and extra (like the original trilogy and in some ways MWIII specifically), or rooted in reality and wanna be serious like mw19. This is minding the blatant history 'rewriting' it's doing (eg. chemical attacks in syria, highway of death mission). My honest opinion on it is that the reboots don't know what they want and it's especially visible in MWII. In my opinion, the original games nailed that "american action movie" feel that the reboots kinda lost by instead veering towards something overlapping with real-life maybe a bit too much while still wanting to include crazy shit. Like, I don't think it's a balance that can work. I do like that we had more character development with MWII and it felt fun to play (in that regard I have no complaints, and I even liked the semi-open missions that a lot of ppl disliked), but it feels a bit less like call of duty. I'll be curious to see what direction they take for the next MW game, but I sure hope IW get their shit together and have a clear direction.

Transitioning to multiplayer with that. This feeling that the MW games are now an amalgamation of things sewn together hastily started with the Warzone fusion and the BOCW implementation. It became especially visible in multiplayer with the addition of crossover bundles, providing less and less "mil-sim" skins, and it was obvious that by MWIII IW would step away and let other developers (treyarch, SHG, which are both turned more towards arcade gameplay) take over the multiplayer development. Which is kinda insane: MW was always Infinity Ward's flasgship initially.

In my opinion the MW multiplayer started feeling different (in my eyes, falling off) for 3 reasons:

Catering to a younger playerbase, notably the "tiktok crowd": younger gamers want games that are incredibly fast-paced (mirroring their use of social media and those yknow "adhd videos") and like extremely flashy skins. Therefore, they'll spend money to get them. I'm not saying this to say "it's bad!" it's just an observation

The absolute success of mobile games and fortnite-like collaborations. This is mostly due to the current way people "consume" social media and games, with everything being quick and instant and fleeting. The sheer impact that these two things have had on video games as a whole is absolutely insane: they started adding microtransactions in games because it started on mobile & they realised that if you let people buy skins with real money w the press of a button, spendings increase tenfold. Same goes with the battle pass model: it's incredibly lucrative.

Crunch, changes of leadership, writers and artists probably being allowed less communication and therefore focus; and, in MWIII's case, the arrival of AI giving us some tasteless slop in cosmetics. That they sell. For real money.

I've said it countless time but I really regret mw19 multiplayer's artistic and narrative direction. It had a story that's completely absent from MWII where characters are just empty shells with a few lines of marvel-like, mary-sue grade bios. Where's the cohesive story? Where are the outwardly morally grey or flawed characters, the sub-squads, the interaction lines, the bundles that made sense with the characters' backstories?...

Long story short, I don't know if the MW series will ever go back to what made it MW. I hope so, but seeing how between 2020 and 2024 the multiplayer entirely lost its soul & the campaigns don't know what they want to show, I'm afraid it might either never come back or take a dozen years so that a reboot of reboots gets out or a new series takes over.

'til capitalism and cashgrab leadership ruins it again and the cycle begins anew.

[messrsrarchives]

Just lasted three days on marauderstok to see what it was like and oh my? Why is it so mean over there?

three days you're so brave i feel ready to welcome you back here with a nice pint and some sleep meds.

this might have been a throwaway rhetorical question but i'll answer anyway because we all know i've thought about this a lottttt, so i have five reasons:

1) lack of anonymity

tiktok allows you to see the person, their name, their appearance, even their mannerisms if they're speaking etc, you know the person. that being said, of course, you only know as much as they are willing to give. but because you are *seeing* them, i think you naturally assume that this is all they are and it opens up that connection for negativity. it's easier to take it from "i don't like this headcanon" to "this person pisses me off"

and it's an unequal balance a lot of the time between commenters on private accounts, or even people posting faceless content, where they have more anonymity and therefore say what they want. it feels safer to drop a hate comment when you're private, and someone public who shows their face is an "easy target"

2) traction

there's two parts to this - the hierarchy and the algorithm.

algorithm wise, hate gets more traction. i.e the recent trend of "what's a (character) headcanon that you hate", you're going to get a lot more comments than "what's a headcanon you love". people get more traction when they say something hateful because then people argue in the comments, their video gets boosted and boom, traction.

the hierarchy is a bit more complicated and varies person to person but how i see it on tiktok is: faceless accounts (i.e carousels or editors) -> rec accounts -> whatever the fuck i do -> cosplayers -> fanfilm "actors" (cosplayers, fandom is not a job like acting is, regardless of your skill). and even then this varies because of followers etc but the hate follows up. and maybe that ties into anonymity as well actually but i think the main thing is that the more "content" you're "producing", the more hate you get from people who dislike it - "customers" who dislike the "product" they've gotten.

these two tie together a lot because people view likes and followers as desirable so they become more hateful to get up the hierarchy, and they're hateful to those that are already up there even when they put them there. it's very complicated and dumb but to sum it up in one word: capitalism :/

3) algorithm

tiktok has a looser algorithm. you can "curate" your fyp and you can "curate" your space, but it isn't secure. you will get things you dislike esp if, say you hate jegulus, the video has #marauders and #jegulus, and you've liked a lot of #marauders stuff, the jegulus video will come up because you can't block # on there.

but that doesn't explain the hate, what does is the fast-paced algorithm and how that affects attention span and empathy. yes, i sound like a grandad saying "it's the damn phones!!!" but it is. you can watch a video and scroll, and by the time you make it two videos down, you've forgotten what the first one was. it's very fast-paced and i think that adds to how comfortable people are sending hate. once they scroll, they forget the video, but the poster won't forget the comment as easily.

4) separation

in a fandom space, i think tiktok feels very separate to the writers. which sucks on one hand but also,,, i'm glad a lot of them aren't over there. because tiktok views their fics as a product and are horrible about them. but that separation aids to that negativity because you assume they won't see it. the same with "bigger" accounts, pepple assume they won't see their one negative comment but they will.

there's also, conversely, a lack of separation on tiktok. this is most relevant i think to my jkr discussions where marauders spaces and potterhead spaces overlap. and yes, i'm generalising, there are fans on both sides that hate jkr and fans on both sides that support her, but that mixing adds to the latter. you'll see content from universal on your fyp and repost it, and then it's in marauders spaces, or you'll see someone posting marauders merch and repost it because marauders, and the two are now so intertwined that you can't separate pro from anti even with the disclaimers in bios.

the reason it doesn't add to the former - no matter how much you try - is that tiktok, because of its fast-paced algorithm, isn't built for long form discussion.

which. yeah. oops, sorry. tried to rectify that, but tiktok isn't built for the kind of discussions people have over here, so no positive change really ever comes, just negative change.

5) social media in general is mean.

that's it. that's the whole point.

but yeah !! that's a few of the reasons i've deduced !! again, i sound like i complain a lot but generally tiktok was LOVELY and i met so many incredible people. unfortunately for everyone else, my degree is lit and politics and i can't engage in a fandom space without analysing it. engaging in discourse? no. studying the discourse.

but to summarise? tiktok is just very,,, capitalism based. not necessarily just with money (but yes, fanfilms i'm looking at you and your 50k start ups) but also just traction and the constant race to the top.

which is so sad because half the people "at the top" didn't even want to be there, people simply liked their stuff then got mad when they weren't sitting on this crafted pedestal "right"

but mostly, tiktok tends to view fandom and fandom content as a product. fics aren't shared with them, they're produced for them - which is very gross and icky (again, fanfilms im looking at you but i'd ramble on if i elaborated on this point oh i'm doing it anyway okay but !! paying for this film to be produced? asking fans to donate so you can make this film directly contributed to this who product mindset. and yes, people donate willingly so but sigh. i'd much rather get the film then donate if i see fit than have to pay to receive it? and i think that faction of fandom being so big on tiktok really messed up the fandom ideology over there)

sorry i'll shut up. tldr; capitalism :/

[batsarebetterthanpeople]

#edward teach#im an adhd ed truther & this is so fucking true.#also shows how you view people w/ adhd if you’re specifically using it as an excuse to do this. (via @ourflagmeanscatboy on this post by @jaskierx)

I don't want to derail a post about racism, but I do feel like this shit needs to get talked about.

Because people will say literally the most deranged shit about Ed. I've heard the idea that he's gonna lose interest in Stede because he views people as hyperfixations floated. He's volitile and unstable (citation needed) he's messy (but he thinks pets befoul the ship and he couldn't believe he was living like this after letting Stede's cabin get covered in maybe a weeks worth of depression clutter) he needs a minder (despite constantly minding other characters). And all of that shit when pointed out as racist invariably gets explained away with "but I think he has ADHD"

And it's like, first of all that's a headcannon you have, where as his race is very much cannon. so I think even if you have the adhd headcannon, which to be clear, I do, you still need to lend more credence to the marginalized identities that are in fact cannon about him. That's not to say that these two things are contradictory it's just to say that you need to treat your headcannons about a character of color with awareness for how their race overlaps with other identities they might have and how their race might be impacting their behavior, and how projecting issues onto them, even if those issues are things you yourself struggle with, might be perceived by fans of color who are already constantly fielding racism both in fandom and in their every day lives.

but second of all, and I cannot stress this enough, yall are ableist as fuck.

Like, I simply do not know how to explain to you people that Ed losing Interest in Stede like that would not be a symptom of ADHD because treating PEOPLE like HYPERFIXATIONS is not a symptom of ADHD. If someone loses interest in you because they have adhd, and I feel like I've said this before, one of three things happened. A. they did not lose interest in you they are just forgetful and do not experience friendship decay so they think you are still friends, B. You were never a friend to begin with you were someone they exclusively did their hyperfixations with, or C. you are blaming the ADHD for something completely unrelated friendships fall apart all the time.

And it's like that example is just the most egregious. half the time when I see ADHD headcannons nobody's talking about like... Ed picking up a brand new activity on a whim, or him tattooing himself because he's experiencing the evil boredom. It's all gotta be traits contradicted by canon. And often it has to be about pain and suffering, and often it really just feels like an excuse to make up bullshit about Ed while beating the racism allegations.

and there's two enormous issues with this. The first one is that if you're gonna have a headcannon about a character you have to figure out how to apply the headcanon to that character without making up a brand new guy. Ed is in the 99th percentile in terms of executive function. His executive functioning skills are genuinely a strength for him. He can't stand mess and he keeps a clean ship, he doesn't get angry unless directly provoked. He also has a large number of shitty tattoos on his person, he stims, he's probably got some hyperactivity going on, and some emotional dis-regulation in terms of managing his disappointment and catastrophising. You have to actually look at the character and figure out what cannon things translate into ADHD and what adhd traits are contradicted by cannon and if you're just hollowing him out and putting an ablist idea of ADHD in as a stand in for a personality.

Like.. ok. My favoriate cannon ADHD rep in the world is the Percy Jackson series. Every one of those kids has adhd and dyslexia. This does not stop Annabeth from being a very functional character with a million irons in the fire who's an avid reader and a Smart Girl TM. Percy by contrast cannot focus for five seconds especially when you put a book in front of him, but he can think on his feet really well. Both of these characters are fairly realistic representations of ADHD because sometimes ADHD is severe executive dysfunction and mess and emotional dis-regulation, sometimes ADHD is having a million projects going at once in a desperate attempt to beat the evil boredom and sometimes it's being able to pick up new things with relative ease. Different people have different levels of these things, which is why in my favoriate childhood book series Rick Riordan was able to have so many different diverse characters with distinct personalities and have them all believably have ADHD.

But a lot of people who headcannon Ed as ADHD don't seem to be interested in figuring out how Ed's personality is compatible with that headcannon, they just want to hollow him out and give him every symptom ever and it's just like... oh, so that's what you think of us then. got it cool.

[surelysilly]

@potatoeofwisdom

#I love this beyond words#but lads#do we think maybe we have seperated so far from the source material we are now just playing with oc’s of our own design?#not a complaint#loving the uptick of this crossover btw#I’m a bit confused as to how it hasn’t happened sooner? unless it had and I’m only now hearing about it#wasnt DP and supernatural two of the pillars of tumblr a few years ago? no? am I crazy? probably#potatoe rambles

sure, separately DP and SPN were/are very popular in their own right (Dannypocalypse, SuperWhoLock / I Love You news meme), but the superphantom xover was alwayyyysss much, much smaller and most active in the early to mid 2010s. (don't quote me on that, that's when I was most active and contributed to most of the fic then with some others and where my ideas still come from)

superphantom is kinda like a sleeper agent sort of fandom nowadays it feels like, and it boasts somewhat under ~200 fics on ao3 and FFN (who knows where else, and with what overlap to art), but it still relies heavily on the source material to work!

my king of hell Danny would not work without danny phantom or supernatural lore to fall back on even if he seems to be divorced from those origins (i promise he isn't!) ^w^;; but im glad you like him anyway!!! <3

hope this helps!

[soweirdondisney]

First, I want to say thank you for all you do to keep the So Weird fandom alive. I know many of us are silent fans because, though we love the show, it's difficult to find much new to say at this point. Second, I know that a So Weird revival is unlikely (which is a shame, because I genuinely think it could be really good, unlike so many of the revivals that have already been done), but I was wondering if you had any plot ideas of your own for a potential revival. Just for fun of course.

Maybe you had no idea when you wrote this, but you sent this at the perfect time. I was dealing with some drama behind the scenes (nothing serious and it's over now) that made me wonder if I take So Weird too seriously and should ease up on the effort to keep up with it all. Then I logged in to find your message and it was validating - a reassurance, if you will. So thank you, too.

As far as my own plot ideas… I'm not sure if you meant for one-off episodes or one that's part of the bigger plot, so I'll answer both.

(Putting it beneath the cut because this is going to be long.)

I once read about ghosts in the aftermath of natural disasters (think the New Orleans hurricane and Japanese tsunami). The ghosts (previously living people) don't know they're dead but are able to flag down taxis. Drivers would accept them but once at the destination no one was in the car anymore to pay the tab. Other instances include riders saying street names and towns that no longer existed or had been abandoned after evacuation. Cab companies reportedly stay out of certain areas because of this, and it would make a great So Weird episode.

I would love for Fi to meet a group of witches around her age who practice witchcraft. Fi spends so much time with her brother and "shared" friends and the one time we saw Candy it was mostly about Rick. I want Fi to experience some sisterhood bonding with people who get her. But if Disney wanted to do a Hocus Pocus crossover that could work too.

Other episode ideas - the boys go to a haunted house that is actually haunted, a retelling of The Monkey's Paw, spotting the loch ness monster, a Disney-friendly version of saying "Candyman" or "Bloody Mary", Molly is a guest performer on a historical ship as paranormal happenings ensue.

In terms of the bigger plot, I'd love a two-part episode where Molly and the gang go to Europe. It would be a special event like a lifetime achievement award for Papa Bear or a PKB Hall of Fame induction.

While exploring the area Fi discovers fairies who "know" she's met a will o' the wisp. (Not sure how this would be, maybe how the banshee acted toward her?) It's a parallel to Jack following Bricriu, but this time she's lead to a leprechaun.

Her ring keeps him at a distance, almost as a protection barrier, and he wants nothing to do with Fi until she makes a comment about a gold award her family/family friend is getting. He's intrigued, and after looking at her closer, mistakes her for another Fiona, even remarks they haven't seen each other in ages.

Fi says something like, "Fiona's my great-grandmother" (yes, another parallel) and the fella runs off, reappears, and runs off again as she tries to question it. Exasperated, Fi says something to the extent of, "You remind me of someone too." And his response is a serious, "Yes, but you knew that didn't you?"

And this baffles Fi to no end - the realization that her great-grandma knew what was going to happen? Was the other Fiona destined to save the world, too? Did she fail and that's why it's on Fi now? And if she doesn't complete it then future generations in her bloodline will have to try? Who knows!

All through this Jack can't enjoy the trip. Poor guy's having massive headaches (like the people in Memory because this special is full of callbacks) cause he's living his current life in the location that overlaps with his past life as a knight. Dude keeps dreaming of the Strangeling events he experienced with Fi and also of an older lady named Fiona who he would recognize if he wasn't in so much pain.

None of this has been researched so the mythology might be off, but that's what I came up with to your question and hopefully it was fun to read. Thank you for writing!

[daily-rayless]

AO3 Wrapped: Writer Edition

Got the idea to do this from @deemoyza

Words written this year: 25500

Works written this year: I wrote four fics this year, though two of them came pretty late and haven't been posted yet: "After the First Time" (Aerith, Final Fantasy 7), "Tenuto" (Tales of the Abyss -- I'm counting it as one fic because it's a drabble collection), "Matter Recollected" (Fate, we'll see about that title), and "Mother Paws" (Narnia, we'll also see about that title). (Other fics I posted this year had been written earlier.)

Work Most Proud of: "Matter Recollected". Most of the word count comes from that one, but it was an attempt to tell a bigg-ish story in a short-ish amount of space. I think I did pretty well establishing scenes and the characters' circumstances, then letting them stew in their own angsty juices for a while.

Work with Most Hits: Between the two that have been posted, definitely "After the First Time". FF7 is a much bigger fandom than Abyss.

Fav title: "Tenuto" gave me so much trouble, trying to find something to unite ten drabbles, so I fell back on music (appropriate for Abyss), and the fact that ten is there in the word was a bonus.

Pairing You Wrote the Most For: None of the pairings overlap, though the ArcherHakuno (technically ShirouHakuno) "Matter Recollected" is the longest, so we'll say that.

What Work was the Quickest To Write: "Mother Paws". I was thinking about Narnia while I was exercising (sure, that's a thing that happens) and ideas started leaping out of my brain; so I stopped what I was doing and hammered it out in thirty, maybe forty minutes.

What Work Took You Longest To Write: "Matter Recollected" took about a month, in forty-ish minute bursts every night. "Tenuto" also took a fair bit of time in the editing stage, getting the drabbles down to 100 words.

How Many WIPS do you have for next year: No first drafts. Things are being edited, though, right until they're posted, so we can count stuff from The Muse Trilogy there. Still wondering if I should even post the earlier Fate stuff, and I have one outstanding Abyss fic from a few years ago I might post.

Longest Work of the Year: "Matter Recollected" at 21100 words.

Shortest Work of the Year: "Tenuto" at 1000 words.

Fav character to Write: I really enjoyed dipping into different povs for "Tenuto", including characters I'd never really touched before. But if I'm honest, I love writing for Hakuno, my impression of her as a character is still developing, and she's just a lot of fun. So we'll say Hakuno.

Which work of yours have you re-read the most: Maybe "Tenuto"? Editing was all about repeated whittling.

Total Kudos this Year: 55. (Most of that is for Aerith.)

Total Hits This Year: 497. (Ditto!)

Total Bookmarks This Year: 6

Total Subscriptions This Year: 0

What Do You Listen To While Writing: I tend to listen to my music on shuffle. In most cases, having lyrics doesn't bother me, and I listen to a lot of folk and piano pop, so it tends not to be very intrusive to start with. It definitely helps mentally separate me into a writing mindset.

Fav line or passage: I don't know if I have a favorite, but I like this one: She watches Cloud walking ahead of her, turning to say something quiet to Tifa. She has to pull away from him now. But in the days that follow, she doesn't. Maybe she can't, but she suspects she merely doesn't. She did, after all, warn Cloud that the only thing she was really good at is giving up. Because she knows she'll probably die, and the Whispers still cluster around her and take from her, and the Lifestream, as beautiful as it is, doesn't have the same tenderness of being alive.

[justanotherhh]

Hi! Love your blog! I have a question:

Maybe it's because I listen to a lot of crime podcasts, but I have never associated psychopathy with being aro and/or ace (despite or maybe because I'm on the aroace spectrum myself?). Is this one of those things where there are people out there equating – I imagine especially aromanticism – with being emotionless? I feel like I've mainly heard the – also horrible – comments of aroace people being "like robots". Then again, I'm not "fully" aroace, nor have I had the need to be super open about it, so I don't pay much attention to this stuff.

Anyway, while I agree that calling Alastor an "evil psychopath" is simplifying things something that frustrates me in parts of the Hellaverse fandom in general....or just fandom in general, tbf...I don't think considering him to be on the ASPD spectrum is incorrect?

Enough rambling and onto my main question: in your opinion, should I always clarify that when I call someone a psychopath and that person also happens to be aro and/or ace, that the two things are not correlated? I don't want to accidentally imply something hurtful/feed into a horrible social mentality. P.S. I want to be clear that I don't want to imply that all people with ASPD are murderers/rapists etc either. Though clearly Alastor is the former. Of course they're not. And I can only imagine how much of a struggle living with such a disorder might be.

hello hello, thank you for the questions. i shall try to be methodical and not rambly (we'll see how it pans out)

yeah there's a big ableist and queerphobic cliché around "emotionless" characters being psychopaths who don't love -- basically it's an oversimplification of psychopathy and often conflates it with being psychotic, and of course, it assumes a correlation both between psychopathy and being evil, and being aspec -- especially the kind that's further down the end of repulsed and loveless and aplatonic -- as being evil (with "love" being the opposite of these things, which, tangent, do have a whooole other post on with this show, because it's done some very fun and potentially future-interesting things on love and sex)

the key here is that aro and/or ace is often never spoken of in narratives when this happens because well... people don't know wtf that is, so it's got that similar flavour to "oh well buffalo bill isn't transphobic, because actually the character isn't trans, the cisgender psychiatrist said so!" (actually... whole other thing on that too, but not on this blog... basically jame gumb is underrated and i root for them every time i watch the movie), but it's the Idea that "love makes you human, and sex is always assumed with love, and if you don't feel those things, it's a clue that you're evil, and the shorthand for that is psychopathic" -- generally the person writing this has never actually researched the words psychopath or psychotic, it's not about being interested in those concepts in characters, it's just a synonym for Bad

and yeah, the "like robots" fully ties into this -- the other side of the coin is aspec people as children, but alastor sooo far doesn't seem to be read this way, although the whole "but if he just discovers how to do Love/Touch/Sex in [insert whatever is wanted for this narrative] he'll become better" does play into some of those tropes too, that there is inherently something mentally ill about being aspec, and that being mentally ill is a sign of Badness (there really is a whole Essay i could do on this, and the general overlap between aspec-writing and trans-writing but! i will resist!), and it's about whether or not the Badness can be cured. if not, he's a psychopath, if yes, it's through normative relationship structures/fundamentally changing the character

it all comes down to actual curiosity -- hc'ing alastor as ASPD is totally fine (i also hc blitzø from helluva boss as BPD) and can open up a lot of doors for interrogation and interest, it's whether someone is using mental health as shorthand for shutting down further interaction with the character (think Psycho's "ah yes, this character is schizophrenic and has mother issues, hence why wearing women's clothing, the end"), or if this allows further play with the character, opens up potential doors, considers the character as rounded, rather than one-note. some aspec people do have a history of trauma or have personality disorders or are autistic, but is someone actually interested in exploring the rich variation of queerness within a character, or are we "explaining it away" as something that's merely a symptom (often one that is imagined to be fixable)

generally, im so into poking at villains and i think alastor is one of the juiciest characters ive had to play with in awhile, mainly because it feels like a lot of his writing is intentional and isn't me deciding to delve into the motivations of [slasher/monster/villain/etc] that doesn't actually exist in the text -- and i think alastor definitely does have some Stuff that could be unpacked from a neurodivergent and mental health perspective, even and including parts of his aroaceness

so in the end, picturing him on the ASPD spectrum and even linking that to aroaceness... I mean, totally chill. al-old-pal does have low empathy, and a pattern of reckless, violent behaviour, and fundamentally views relationships differently from the norm. im making arguments that he hasn't been able to create the kind of intimacy that works for him, except for perhaps with rosie and maaaaybe mimzy and niffty (@creepysora has had some very cool ideas of him connecting in alternate ways that work with his way of being and boundaries), but that doesn't mean he's suddenly More remorseful or empathetic about how his actions affect others

it's about whether or not one is using that as a way of minimising or pathologising aroaceness, and/or as a way of making aspec identities all about self-hatred (and that in turn fuels villainy), and/or generally as an explanation of his villainy as some inherent degeneracy, and/or using the word "psychopath" to mean something completely different from what it actually is... that's when we get into sticky territory

and in the end, it can be hard -- something that's perfectly reasonable to one person, could be crossing a boundary for someone else and we just have to live with that, so don't wait on my blessing, i just think as long as one's caring and curious it's heading in the right direction. i watch a lot of horror, and i can usually recognise when something is well-meaning and something is lazy, and even times when it's the latter i can still find enjoyment (think angela from sleepaway camp -- on the flipside the movie they/them was well-meaning and a complete miss in its final political statement)

i recognise also im bringing up a lot of trans villainy as-example, rather than aspec villainy. that's a. because my special interest is trans horror so go figure and b. because that overlap is soooo real

(another example, not horror unless you're a karate kid 3 truther, is the character terry silver, who is never stated to be aromantic, but whose villainy on the later show cobra kai is intimately tied to an unspecified madness that includes low empathy and... no love, vs all the happily monogamous (het) relationships around him. he's not aromantic, he's not diagnosed with anything, it's not of interest to the story that he may be mentally ill or have PTSD or be aro and possibly loveless or that he may be gay -- because yes, he's coded that way too and that overlap is also real, and a whole other tangent i could go on -- it's just subtext to add to the villainy)

now another tangent, but loosely connected: was reading a transcript of the 1974 TS/TV conference (the first of its kind that was organised in the way it was) -- a series of talks over the course of a weekend discussing trans rights, especially in healthcare, and it fully contained a section of someone saying that "true" transsexuals can be recognised because before they physically transition (into binary genders)... they're asexual. because they hate their bodies so much that they can't feel sexual attraction to others. lot to unpack there, but really in this little conversation as example, what i mean is that the roots of pathologising aspec identities run very very deep, including within the wider LGBT+ community, and since alastor is quite a complex character that has done some very bad things, it's worth really thinking about what headcanoning him as one way or another says about the character for oneself. what does it add? what does it potentially demonise or minimise? what does it allow?

the neat thing about hellaverse is the sheer amount of queer characters meaning we can go beyond "if x character is Bad this represents Every person within this group" but with alastor being (so far) the only character who's not doing the whole love-and-sex game (although i think striker counts in this as well, personally + listen... sir pentious givin' real demi vibes. and if we're looking for a link between trauma and asexuality, well, angel is right there. and, and, and...), it does bear going the extra length to learn about -- especially since a lot of people really don't know that these biases even exist in the first place, which leads to a lot of unthinking perpetuating

i think a good place to start would honestly be: "would this feel like a queerphobic and ableist coding if the character were gay? trans? bi?" not because we're totally over queerphobic writing in general (lol, can you imagine), but as a starting point: are we treating aspec identity in text in a way that makes the idea of being aspec in and of itself degeneracy?

but like. hell yeah villains. hell yeah neurodivergency, mental illness, low empathy, lovelessness, unhealthy coping mechanisms, Bad Mean Queers, cannibalism, and characters you just can't quite suss out. big into a fucked up little guy

how did i do on the ramblyness

[linskywords]

From this post!

How many fics have you worked on since January? 12, not counting snippets I've started and not finished. (I posted 299,668 words, which is so painfully close to 300K. Should've been less concise somewhere...)

What’s something new that you tried in a fic this year? I had never written a wandering heart story before, and I'd never posted two stories with overlapping timelines in conjunction with each other. I'd never written an ace romance. I'd never written a four-person polycule. I'd also never turned anyone into a worm.

What piece of media inspired you the most? (This can be the fandom you wrote the most for, the one that spawned the most ideas, the one you thought about the most, etc.) I would have to say anonymous tumblr asks.

How many fandoms did you write for this year? Just the one!

What ships captured your heart? I wrote a lot of Jack/Nico this year and a lot of McDrai, and a lot of assorted others. I'm really enjoying the overlapping recent eras of USNTDP players and siblings.

What characters captured your heart? I just want Connor McDavid to be happy 😭

Did you write for any new fandoms or ships this year? So many new ships! Roope/Wyatt, Jamie Benn/Joe Pavelski, Jack/Quinn, the Edmonton polycule, Macklin Celebrini/Will Smith.

What fic meant the most to you to write? Oh man, tough call. Maybe the one where Connor turns into a worm.

What fic made you feel the happiest to work on? Probably the Where You Lead 'verse fics. Writing sub perspective is just the best.

What fic was the most satisfying to finish writing? Probably Help Me Hold Onto You, the Trevor/Jamie WYL story. I had had so much of it in my head for months by the time I started writing it, and the fic itself was such a long journey.

What fic was the most difficult to write? Like a Handprint on My Heart, the Jamie Benn wandering heart story. I made Jamie waaaay too depressed in the first draft and had to tear it all out and start again.

What fic was the easiest to write? The Great Leon Draisaitl Lookalike competition. Practically that entire story came to me in the shower, and then I wrote it in a single morning.

What were your shortest and longest fics posted this year? The Great Leon Draisaitl Lookalike Competition was the shortest at 2,092 words. Help Me Hold Onto You was the longest at 75,926 (though the Quinn wolfverse story will almost definitely be longer than that when it's all posted).

What were your go-to writing songs? I don't usually listen to music while writing, but I did get into Gracie Abrams and Maisie Peters and Olivia Rodrigo this year.

What was the hardest fic to title? Titling is the WORST. I either have a great title from the start, or it's a nigh-on impossible quest. The Hughescest story and the 1988 wolfverse timestamp were both posted around the same time and I had titles for neither of them, and then the titles I found were annoyingly similar to each other (What a Fire Feels Like and And His Heart Is Burning). Kinda Wanna Kiss Your Boyfriend (If You Don't Mind) was hard to find and required a lot of discord brainstorming. And I spent a while agonizing over various possibilities for the Jack wolfverse story, Like Juliet or Guinevere or Eloise, because I wanted to use a Marianne quote from the Sense and Sensibility movie but I also didn't want people to think Jack was going to die. 😅

What's your favorite title of the year? I'm really fond of But the Punchline Goes, from the Roope/Wyatt soulmate story, because I think it fits the story on its own and it also has the delightful (to me) easter egg of being the lyric from All Too Well right before Taylor snaps back at her ex about their age difference ("I'll get older but your lovers stay my age"), which was very relevant to the fic. I also really like Proof Enough of a Broken Heart, because Quinn is SUCH an Elinor Dashwood.

Share your favorite opening line: I tend to use opening lines as sort of...preliminary thesis statements? Things to be disproven? Something like that. So most of them contain a big chunk of the story premise but aren't necessarily all that punchy on their own. My favorite is probably from the Will/Mack story: "Mack finds out he’s pregnant in the usual way: from a blue stripe at the bottom of the toilet bowl." Totally confusing and a piece of worldbuilding I continue to be delighted with.

Share your favorite ending line: How dare you make me look at the last lines from all my stories. Last lines are the worst.

Share your favorite piece of dialogue: Don't know if it's my favorite, but what's coming to mind is Mitch and Dylan at the end of The Great Leon Draisaitl Lookalike competition, after Dylan has successfully set Connor up with this guy who is totally not just actual Leon Draisaitl, nope. Dylan is congratulating himself on finding such a good lookalike, and Mitch is like, “You used to play in the pacific division, right?” “Yeah, why?” says Dylan. “No reason,” says Mitch.

Share your funniest line: Woof. No, that's way too hard.

What's something that surprised you while you were working on a fic? Did it change the story? I was super surprised by how intensely piney the ace!Quinn/Brady fic got. I thought my ability to write pining was powered to a large extent by sexual tension, and it turns out that was not true.

What writing programs did you use? Did you write by hand? Scrivener, baby! Hahaha I would not be able to write this much by hand.

If you had to choose one, what was THE most satisfying writing moment of your year? Moment? Sheesh. I don't know, writing is a pretty satisfying activity in general.

Did you do anything special to celebrate finishing a fic? Posting feels like enough of a celebration for me.

How did you recharge between fics? I don't, really. By the time I finish posting a long thing, I've spent so much time editing that getting to start drafting again is refreshing in itself, and short things don't really require a recharge.

Did you create fanworks other than fic? Not unless you count responding to tumblr asks.

How many events did you take part in? (bangs, exchanges, ship weeks, zines, prompt memes, they all count!) Lol, I think just the HRPF CestFest. Though a lot of my stories were prompted, directly or not, by people on tumblr.

If this were an awards show, who would you thank? My wee hrpf discord. makeit-takeit. My irl bff who gets to hear all my story ideas in great detail despite not being into hrpf. My husband who thinks it's great and not ridiculous that I spend all this time writing.

What's left on your to-do list for 2024? Not much, fortunately, since it's over.

What would you like to write next year? Ah, the most important question! I of course want to finish the Quinn and Jack wolfverse stories, which is more about editing at this point. I have 2-10K written on no fewer than four different Where You Lead 'verse stories, and I'd really like to finish at least some of them (::cough:: Connor ::cough::). I'd also maybe like to start wolfverse stories for Trevor and Cole; I have somewhat specific plans for Trevor, and some vague notions for Cole. Aside from that, who knows? Maybe more WillMack, maybe some Nate/someone (Jo???). There are a lot of other couples I've been meaning to add to the wolfverse (gotta add TK/Patty to at least ONE of my 'verses). I've had a psychic wolf companions McDrai story bouncing around in my head for a while. Would still love to write a Persuasion AU (maybe that's the Nate/Jo). A Cyrano de Bergerac AU would also be fun, maybe via tindr. So many possibilities!!

[crimeronan]

On the topic of How Do You Handle XYZ Comment, I've always wondered how you handle terrible responses on your toh takes. Like I know the toh fandom doesn't lack piss on the poor reading comprehension and they also really enjoy wildly out of touch takes, but I've never seen any comments on your princess luz stuff of that nature. I'm sure they must be there but maybe I'm too early? But anyway, how do you tend to deal with the "acktually shipping luz and Hunter is incest" and the "ur not a real lesbian because putting amity in a poly ship is lesbian erasure" and the "as a white person kinda sus you make the poc woman an empress" kind of responses? Ones that are technically not hate and maybe if you squint could be from people who aren't inherently trying to do bad but just lack the maturity needed to engage with the internet at large?

this ask made me giggle. honestly, i haven't received as much pushback as you might expect! way less pushback than i expected. in the princess AU, i've gotten a LOT more "this is actually too grotesque for me to stomach" comments than "this is problematic" comments, which is fine. horror-thriller isn't for everyone, those comments do not upset me.

i have had a Few run-ins with bad faith people, whom i mostly block. there's one prolific commenter in toh tumblr fandom who would repeatedly write angry essays on my humor meta posts -- essays that were all about how belos is too evil to be sympathetic and/or about how hunter is a soft gentle boy who shouldn't be jokingly referred to as evil. then they'd go "i can't help my active and conscious decision to type a bunch of rude fucking words and then my active and conscious decision to send those rude fucking words because i'm autistic :(((" around the fourth or fifth time this happened, i was fucking done with that nonsense and finally blocked them. shoulda done it after the first comment tbh!! no more autism exceptions.

as for the rest of it, my main management strategy is to simply.... preempt the bad faith comments?

i had a LOT more unpleasant and conflict-filled fandom experiences when i was in the raven cycle fandom. that was my first exposure to "you can't ship multi-gender polycules if anyone involved is gay" and "queerplatonic het relationships are just heteronormativity shipping that you're trying to get away with." having dealt with those takes before, i've found a few different ways to disarm bad faith readers before they get started.

first is to be super open and honest about my interests. i talk about what i find compelling in different relationships All The Damn Time. it's really hard for anyone to accuse me of only wanting hunter to fuck amity if they've seen, like.... anything i've said about hunter and amity.

same with hunter and luz. the only negative reactions i've really gotten to how they're written in the princess AU is like.... two people being squicked by camila thinking they're romantically involved. i REALLY expected more pushback on the touchyfeely bed sharing stuff, but from what i remember, there's never been Any....? not even from people who consider them siblings.

i expected a lot of pushback on how mean hunter and amity are to each other, since it's taken So much farther than the canon. but it turns out that there's a very large overlap between people who like dark horror AUs and people who like hunter and amity murdering each other. (in a fluffy fic i don't think this characterization would fly Nearly as easily.)

i find that being funny really disarms people, too. when you look at any of my toh meta posts that could be controversial, they're basically all funny. people are a lot more willing to listen to what you have to say if you make them laugh, and it's harder for them to get angry at you.

and then the last thing is that i think i'm in sort of a privileged position in toh fandom. i've written a lot of controversial subjects and relationships and characterizations.... but i've also written some WILDLY popular mainstream fic. and people who like the mainstream fic don't really want to beef with me about differing niche opinions, bc there's a level of respect there. which they might not have for a writer they don't like.

but anyway. when things Do happen, i almost always just block and move on. there are so many people here who get what i'm talking about that there's no need for me to try to convert people who don't, you know??

[rockinlibrarian]

Two AO3-Writer Year-End Surveys that astonishingly don't have THAT much overlap in questions.

And I believe they were both originally meant to be "Ask Me a Number" Games so they wouldn't be as long as this is? But I'm using it as a proper yearly wrap-up. And I've done so for the past two years at least. So there.

I apologize to whomever wrote these surveys that I no longer have your info because I just dumped them both in a Scrivener file. I'm pretty sure I personally got both sets of questions from @uniasus. So that's sort of credit. Anyway, to begin:

I better put it under a cut for length, even though I'm afraid no one will click through. You can click through and THEN skim! I give you permission!

Survey Set 1:

How many words have you written this year? 36,643 new words POSTED to AO3. Don't even know how many words I've WRITTEN. But it's more than that.

2. How many works did you publish this year? Seven. And this year I didn't even update any previously posted ongoing fics.

3. What work are you most proud of (regardless of kudos/hits)? Mayyyybe "The Beginning of Something Else Entirely"? Because it does a really fun job of combining characters from two different fandoms, and some of those characters were quite complicated to write and I think I pulled it off.

4. What work of yours has the most hits? This is always weird to answer when you've done Yuletide and inevitably the work that WILL have the most hits— and kudos, and comments (judging by one year's previous Yuletide at least)— will get them all in the very last week of the year. But AS IT CURRENTLY STANDS, the answer is "New World Symphony" — by a lot (936), actually, so maybe the Yuletide fic WON'T be able to catch up.

5. What work of yours got more feedback than you expected? I have a kind of complicated answer for this, involving my two new multichapters, because it's not so much more feedback as "not the feedback I expected). When I started "The Beginning of Something Else Entirely," I thought it would get more attention than "New World Symphony," because it's Gen and a post-season-4 fix-it, as opposed to the latter with its controversial ship. But even AFTER I posted the former, "New World Symphony" got way more kudos (and, as you see above, hits). Someone on the TUA Discord pointed out that it's about finding a niche— something can be more generally appealing, but it's got loads of competition that way, people may never find it— whereas they're going to come LOOKING for your weird ship if they also ship it. ON THE OTHER HAND, though, I'd also figured "The Beginning of Something Else Entirely" would get relatively more attention from TUA fans, because it's a bigger fandom than Legion…but instead, Legion fans came out of the woodwork to be the primary readers of that one! Now if they'd just go and read "The Magic Man of Oz" while they're here…!

6. Favorite title you used. If you stick only with titles I've actually PUBLISHED… possibly "Viktor Squares a Love Triangle" in "Beginning of Something Else Entirely." But my absolute favorite title I wrote this year is for Chapter 5 of "New World Symphony": "Fugue for Strings and Synth." It is SUCH a good title you have no idea. Maybe in three years when I finally post Chapter 5 of "New World Symphony" I'll say it again.

7. If you use song lyrics, which artist’s songs did you pull from the most? No use of song lyrics this year. I don't think. I may have made lyric references without thinking about it too hard, since I do that in real life, but nothing's standing out, and nothing in the titles. No Sound of Music ones since I didn't update "Captain with Seven Children"…

8. Pairing you wrote the most for this year? Um, Fiktor. Still. A couple just platonically, even. And I worked really hard to keep the platonic ones that way! If you ask I can still point out the places where my shipper heart was poking through…

9. Favorite pairing you wrote for this year? Well, obviously Fiktor as far as / pairings go. But & pairings I can't narrow down, because I found so many fun ones combining the Legion and TUA characters for "Beginning of Something Else Entirely." Those characters were destined to meet! On the obvious side, the Chaos Couple of Lenny & Klaus is RIGHT THERE, but I'm probably proudest of pairing up Allison & Syd, who just— their relationships with their powers and their similarly checkered pasts, they're so good for each other, especially with Syd's post-Astral-Plane growth to lead the way. And speaking of the astral plane, Oliver Bird & absolutely anyone.

10. What work was the quickest to write? "Brother and Also Brother Home for Christmas" literally took me an hour, and part of that was just watching the commercial it was based on a few times. Somebody on the TUA Discord server pointed out that the Folgers Incesty Christmas commercial was practically a ready-made Fiktor fic and as the only Fiktor writer there, well… I responded. —I started filling this out before I spontaneously posted "Did Anyone Ever Tell You You Look Just Like Aubrey Plaza?" which was probably physically written in even less time, but I'd been telling it to myself in my head for a few months already so I'm not sure that counts?

11. What work took you the longest to write? No idea, especially since two are multichapters that are still in progress.

12. How many WIP’s do you have in your docs for next year? Well besides the two I started posting this year, there's "Captain with Seven Children" and "Tesseract" which are still slowly in progress, a couple more bits and pieces side works for the Legion/TUA crossover now-series, aaaand… I think that's it? How many is that?

13. What’s your longest work of the year? "The Beginning of Something Else Entirely" at 18,377 words posted so far, and that's not even counting the additional 2,248 I've drafted. Then again, "New World Symphony" has a LOT drafted, so with its 12,655 posted… no, with draft chapters it still only comes to 18,305, so "Beginning" wins.

14. What’s your shortest work of the year? That would also be "Brother and Also Brother Home for Christmas" because it's a retelling of a 30-second commercial. Unless you count "happy birthday," which is a piece of visual art and therefore appears on AO3 as having a Wordcount of 0. It technically has a wordcount of 12, which is still the shortest, but @destinyandcoins wrote those words, anyway. See... some number below for more.

15. What WIP are you taking into next year with you? ALL OF THEM.

16. What’s your most common “Additional Tags” tag? For just this year, it's a tie between "Remix" and "TUA Masked Author Summer Remix 2024 (Umbrella Academy)," with two each, because I did two remixes for said event. And otherwise none of the fics had ANY overlapping tags! … For all time, it's still "Backstory." …oh, after I added "Did Anyone Ever Tell You You Look Just Like Aubrey Plaza?" I double-checked because I thought there might be some overlap with "Brother and Also Brother," but no, I tagged one "ficlet" and the other "flash fiction," and only one of them as "crack" even though they both probably count. And apparently "Brother and Also Brother" is the only one I tagged "pseudo-incest" in. Because they're NOT brothers in "New World Symphony," I guess. It might be… pseudo-pseudo-incest?

17. Your favorite character to write this year? I THINK it may still be Oliver Bird. He just keeps consistently delighting me, enough that I felt the need to squee about how much I love writing Oliver Bird on social media several times. There's also a character in my Yuletide fic that I kept having to STOP myself from squeeing about how much I loved writing, being that it's STILL A SECRET that I WAS writing them. I'll tell ya later.

18. The character that gave you the most trouble writing this year? I had a lot of trouble getting into Diego Hargreeves's internal voice when I first started trying to write his scene in "The Beginning of Something Else Entirely," but once it clicked I ended up really enjoying it! I also found writing David Haller's alters butting in to a conversation to be an interesting challenge, but that one really did feel more like a puzzle, a challenge to overcome, than that it was actually giving me trouble.

19. What’s one pairing you want to explore next year? I don't… know really? No, that's not true, I have been thinking a lot about the father/daughter aspects of Oliver Bird and Syd Barrett. Maybe it's me still missing my own dad; and I'm writing this crossover full of crappy or at least absent dads in both sources, EXCEPT for this foster-father relationship that was only established in one episode and never got to be explored further, but now that they're living together again post-Astral plane, I just feel like Syd and Oliver are going to be hanging out a lot, especially since she's been avoiding David— Oliver's really the closest thing to a best friend she has at Summerland now (though also now she has Allison!). I did throw that soup-making scene into Chapter 2, but I love the idea that it's just COMMON for them to be doing father/daughtery stuff around all the time, and maybe you'll see more of it in the chapters to come.

20. Which work of yours have you reread the most? None are really sticking out. Either "New World Symphony" or "Beginning of Something…"

21. How many kudos in total did you get this year? Again with I KNOW I'm going to get a boatload in this last week on the Yuletide, and I just posted another new fic that has gotten two kudos in the twenty-four hours since I posted it, so— as of me writing this it's 156. Oh, and that's just on new fics! I got a lot of kudos on old fics, too! ("The Invitation" is still going strong at #1)

22. Which work has the most comments? Currently (again, Yuletide people are so good at leaving comments, so this may change in the next week) it's "The Beginning of Something Else Entirely" with 36! And most are from Legion fans! Holy Legion fans Batman! To cross your Marvel/DC streams!

23. Did you do any collaborative works this year? Yes, technically! The TUA Masked Author event was focused on Remixes, and I did TWO! One was an elaboration on a drabble written by @faithfulcat111 , the other was an actual piece of VISUAL ART based on @destinyandcoins' "Notes from Nowhere" when I realized I could actually do art for it that didn't require me to draw people!

24. Did you write any gifts this year? YES BUT I CAN'T TELL YOU WHAT YET. Unless you count the remixes, which were also kind of gifts for their original writers. I mean I would have considered a remix of my work a gift at least.

25. Did you receive any gifts this year? Yes! TWO! One proper Yuletide gift and a BONUS one in Yuletide Madness! I do a happy dance! But I can't actually read them for another couple of days! I'm still so delighted though!

26. What’s your most common category? Gen

27. What do you listen to while writing? This year I listened to my Legion playlist (combining the actual score-soundtrack with the needle-drops) a LOT lot while writing "The Beginning of Something Else Entirely," because Viktor is also listening to it in the story. But to be honest I listened to the Legion playlist a lot when I WASN'T writing, too. IT'S JUST SUCH A GOOD SOUNDTRACK!

28. Favorite work you wrote this year? Eh, tie between "Beginning" and "New World Symphony." Depends on what I'm more in the mood for. That goes back to the one I reread the most question, doesn't it.

29. Favorite line/passage you wrote this year? Okay, the next survey breaks this question down farther, into beginning lines, ending lines, dialogue, and funny bits, so see down there, but I guess I can put my favorite lines that aren't any of those four things here:

He giggled, and Five set a new goal for the week: to make the little Russian boy laugh at every opportunity. —that was my ship threatening to slip in the otherwise platonic "What's In a Name?"

Less hopeless than he thinks? What did that mean? He'd have to deflect and think about it later. —Just the right amount of a look at the way Klaus works.

Blonde, conventionally pretty. The kind of girl she used to have to Rumor studio execs into not wanting as their lead. —Allison's first impression of Syd is just exactly what she would think.

[Allison to Syd Re: the Birds]: "You're their daughter?" Syd startled, then slowly broke into a wry smile. "Well….Yes." She nodded sharply, as if she'd only just decided this. "In a way. The Birds have been second parents to me. Sometimes more literally than others." --Because! Like I said in #19 above. I just feel like Syd genuinely considers the Birds to be her parents now, and she's maybe not put it into words until this moment.

It wasn't like someone could sneak up on Viktor. Especially not someone with his own musical motif— a high, looping piano, melodic lines joining in canon. —there is so much potential for the ways Viktor's powers could work, and I love coming up with new ones.

"OH." Cary's eyes lit up. He started shaping an imaginary sphere in his hands. "I invented— but I didn't, you see, that's the fascinating part— this orb came from the future to kidnap David and warn him about this— catastrophic future if he didn't— well, I don't know, but I do know my own work, and I could tell I invented it— but that future never happened and I never did invent the orb, but the orb itself," he emphatically tapped the table, "remained." —It's just so Cary, and I've missed writing Cary.

On the lower level was a big round atrium with a large tableau in the center: a hill of real plants and trees and taxidermied mountain goats, as if the building in the middle of the forest couldn't bear to remain separated from the forest by anything as silly as walls. —sometimes I write good description. Actually is this good description or just nicely metaphorical description?

"And, Viktor—” She leaned in. “When I say 'power,' I'm not just talking about the ability to manipulate energy waves. You have power just by existing in the world— in a society. In a family. You've always had that power, even when you felt the most powerless. What you choose to do— or not to do— can have huge effects on those around you, whether you realize it or not." —Melanie is directing this right through the screen at ME.

"Not me. I don't get to be loved. I don't get to be happy. I am…fated to wander from universe to universe, alone. I can't even get annihilated from existence properly!" —best single line of angst I wrote this year.

And the whole of Viktor discovering smart phones in "New World Symphony."

30. Biggest surprise while writing this year? I don't know. I am tempted to answer with some interesting facts I learned while writing my Yuletide piece. Oh, here's one: when I was first writing David and Viktor's conversation in "Beginning" Chapter 2, and suddenly realized I'd been writing Divad instead of David Prime the whole time.

ALRIGHTY THEN, here's Survey Set #2!

1.How many fics have you worked on since January? Maybe…9? 10 if you count "happy birthday" as a fic? I have a couple side things going on in the "Beginning of Something Else" crossover universe that I'm not sure how much count as separate. —Actually one of those was "Did Anyone Ever Tell You You Look Just Like Aubrey Plaza?" which I just posted.

2. What’s something new that you tried in a fic this year? It's not something new to ME, but I never POSTED a fic written in script form before "Brother and Also Brother Home for Christmas."

3. What piece of media inspired you the most? (This can be the fandom you wrote the most for, the one that spawned the most ideas, the one you thought about the most, etc.) I guess Umbrella Academy, by sheer numbers.

4. How many fandoms did you write for this year? Just three (and two of those in the same fics). Or at least I POSTED fics for just three— worked on some others.

5. What ships captured your heart? Um, nobody new. I'm still not a shipper, and I'm still inexplicably obsessed with Fiktor.

6. What characters captured your heart? All…of them? I've never written so much Klaus before this year, and he kind of writes himself, which is quite fun, so maybe I'll go with Klaus.

7. Did you write for any new fandoms or ships this year? Nope. Spoilers for Yuletide I guess— yep it's one I've written for before. But I have quite a few obscure or at least rarely-written fandoms on my list so don't get cocky.

8. What fic meant the most to you to write? I think— I think this question is making me oddly uncomfortable actually. It's probably "The Beginning of Something Else Entirely," because it was my response to TUA Season 4 and there was so much negativity around so I was like "No, see this? I've got an idea. I'm gonna make it work. It's gonna be great." And I think I put a little too much on its metaphorical shoulders, and I got a little desperate, like I was going to save the fandom, but nobody actually cared so I got all Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria about it, like everyone was yelling "STOP TRYING TO MAKE 'Everyone loves Beginning…' HAPPEN! IT'S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN!" But then, like I said above, the Legion fans found it and made me remember everything I loved about it, so now I'm just writing it for the fun of it again.

9. What fic made you feel the happiest to work on? Conversely, "New World Symphony" was really just for my own enjoyment, and it's very happy because things are actually working out WELL for everyone for once, so I think that one was the most pure enjoyment.

10. What fic was the most satisfying to finish writing? Not sure any really fits the bill. Getting the Yuletide fic in on time was satisfying for that reason, but also unsatisfying because I know I could make it better if I just had more time…!

11. What fic was the most difficult to write? I don't think the fic ITSELF was difficult to write, but real life and the writing of my Yuletide fic were vying VERY hard for my attention. It was down to the wire, and I really wish I'd gotten more of the fic done BEFORE the last minute when I've also been prepping for Christmas.

12. What fic was the easiest to write? Not actually sure. Oh, now that "Did Anyone Ever Tell You You Look Just Like Aubrey Plaza?" exists— that one. Like I said, Klaus writes himself, Lenny almost writes herself (she's so much more crass than I am that it does take a LITTLE work to get in the mindset), and this totally crack conversation between the two of them definitely wrote itself.

13. What were your shortest and longest fics posted this year? See 14 and 13 in set 1.

14. What were your go-to writing songs? As 27 in the first list said, I listened to the Legion playlist on shuffle. But if I had to pick just one song, at least to start, I'd usually go with "Darkness (Full Suite)" because it captured the whole mood best, and was also instrumental so perhaps better for writing than the needle drops. Though if I was putting the playlist on and NOT necessarily trying to write, I usually started with "Undiscovered First." For no reason other than I love it. (I just looked at the comments on that YouTube video and 2/3 of them are "Who's here from Legion????")

15. What was the hardest fic to title? "The Beginning of Something Else Entirely." I even put up a Tumblr poll.

16. What's your favorite title of the year? See #6 in Set 1.

17. Share your favorite opening line: "Klaus had more experience with the Afterlife than any living person, and this wasn't it." This is the only one I don't feel compelled to give multiple answers for, because how can you beat that?

18. Share your favorite ending line: My ending lines suck in comparison. Plus I have this problem of extending my natural endings with little epilogues. For example, I think my answer to this is from "What's In a Name?" which emotionally ends with, "They could make of themselves whomever they wanted to be," which is a GREAT closing line on its own. But then I add this little scene:

The three giggled through the keynote speech, drawing a cumulatively bizarre caricature of the speaker together. Ben had started the doodle, then encouraged the others to collaborate. It was silly and subversive and utterly language-barrier-demolishing. The tall blonde boy who’d joined their table waved impatiently backward at them, keeping his eyes dutifully on the keynote speaker. “Tyst! Our lecturer is speaking!” Ben added the tall boy to the doodle.

—which I ALSO love, actually, but it's much less of a closing line. Also, yes, that was Luther making a little cameo there. Don't know how subtle or not it was. I figured pointing out that his nametag had a Swedish flag and an aerospace symbol on it would be a little too obvious. The other ending vying for this answer is from my Yuletide story, which has even LESS of a standout ending line and is more like Very Short Concluding Scene than Epilogue too, but I love the imagery of it. Tell ya later.

19. Share your favorite piece of dialogue: Conversely, my dialogue is my favorite part of my writing, because it tends to come easiest, and is basically hearing the characters in your head so— I have a lot of contenders, but I think I'm going to go with this scene (first speaker is David Haller, I add since he doesn't get a tag until far into the conversation):

"I heard about what's going on with you and your wife. And all I can say is, time travel sucks ass." The irritable jitters were back. "Hey, let me pose a scenario for you guys. Is it cheating to hook up with a future version of your own girlfriend?" Diego and Luther exchanged a glance. "What, like…in the future?" "Whenever. She came from the future. You went to— time travel. It's confusing, is what I'm saying." Luther frowned, and drew in the air as if connecting the dots. "Well, is that really different than hooking up in the future without time travel?" "That's what I said! But if there's also a version of you in her future, who's very different from you now—" "So you're cheating on yourself?" Diego clarified. "No, they broke up. And that future ended up not happening." "So it's a separate timeline." "But they're still the same person," Luther offered. "Wait, no. That's like saying our Ben and Sparrow Ben are the same person." "But aren't they? In a way?" "No." "But you're talking about two versions of a guy who was raised differently from birth," David said. "I'm talking about a potential future version of the same girl." "So she was going to turn into the future one?" "She didn't. But she could have, is the thing." Diego shook his head. "Damn. Time travel." Luther looked sympathetic. "I'm sure if you just explained to her—" "Hah. Too late for that. She's gotten all kinds of new ways to be pissed at me since. This is where Divad used to butt in to remind us that we're fundamentally unlovable, but no, he's trying to self-actualize or some shit now don't even think of it, Divad, it's my turn, we need to be angry."

I love it for so many reasons. First, it just flows nicely, like you can hear these guys having this "philosophical" discussion, it's just how it would go. Second, I kind of lied about the first speaker, because it IS technically David, but he switches to Dvd during the first sentence (find the moment!), and it amused me that Diego and Luther are completely oblivious to the fact that this guy's alter personalities are having an argument right in front of them. Third, the seeming randomness of the topic, which sounds theoretical at first, unless you know (or until you realize) that it's not theoretical, and this has been nagging at David— or at least at Dvd— for a year or so and suddenly he's talking to someone ELSE facing time-travel-complicated-fidelity-issues so he can't resist getting an outside perspective.

Runner up: every single conversation Oliver Bird has with anyone whatsoever. Wait, I'm going to give you a preview of "Beginning" chapter 4, because this is exemplary of one of those times I just kept squeeing "I LOVE WRITING OLIVER" after:

"She's right, you know." "What?" He turned to see Oliver Bird poking his head out of a room. "Your— what should you call her. Conscience?" "You heard… Delores?" "Is that her name? Old-fashioned, but charming. Our Lady of Sorrows. Martini?"

20. Share your funniest line: Hard to choose, first being that I don't know that I'm the best judge of my own humor; second being that they inevitably are probably all in my Yuletide fic, which is the only straight-up comedy I wrote this year. Again, I'll get back to you on that.

21. What's something that surprised you while you were working on a fic? Did it change the story? I answered the first part in 30 above, but it DID change the story a bit, in that it made me way more aware of which of David's alters might be fronting at any time, and I realized I could do more with them intentionally. For example, the scene at breakfast referenced two questions ago.

22. What writing programs did you use? Did you write by hand? I keep most of my stuff in Scrivener, because I love the ease of adding interconnected files and pages, particularly as I tend to write out of order. I compile it into Word before printing and/or posting it. And I do write by hand, usually in the middle of a draft, when I have the basic shape of the chapter/work down and need to fill in the gaps. I also edit by hand.

23. If you had to choose one, what was THE most satisfying writing moment of your year? What drives me nuts is that I had an answer to this— I remember distinctly feeling "Wow, was THAT satisfying to write!"— but I forget what it was, now. Maybe Viktor and David's conversation in "Beginning" chapter 2. Talking to a guy with a dissociative disorder was REEEELY enlightening for Viktor on a lot of levels.

24. Did you do anything special to celebrate finishing a fic? When I posted my Yuletide entry, I went to bed. It FELT like a special thing to do!

25. How did you recharge between fics? I was so busy in real life I don't think I noticed much. I just wrote whatever I felt like writing in the moment.

26. Did you create fanworks other than fic? *preens* as referenced in 14 and 23 in the previous survey, I made an Art!

27. How many events did you take part in? (bangs, exchanges, ship weeks, zines, prompt memes, they all count!) Two! The TUA Masked Author and Yuletide!

28. If this were an awards show, who would you thank? First I'd like to thank @versaphile for doing all the research and posting it on AO3 on How the freak to write David Haller (Not to mention the deeper characterizations of his alters in "When My Fist Clenches…" which I was probably drawing on even subconsciously). And secondly, to Guest User Valerie, who's most recent comment on "Beginning…" was just what I needed to hear to stop feeling like it was all Pointless, made me feel motivated again. And thirdly, @sunnymarbles, who was sitting across the room most of the time I was writing and gamely put up with me speaking my thoughts out loud and occasionally asking them questions like "Which one of these concepts is funnier?" and also supplying a made-up brand name for my Yuletide fic.

29. What's left on your to-do list for 2024? My annual round-up post of life events and media reviews!

30. What would you like to write next year? Continue "Beginning" and "New World Symphony" and maybe get back to "Captain with Seven Children." And as I've said for like the past three years now, I SWEAR I'm going to update "Tesseract" and finally post "Child of Hypnos"! But maybe this time I mean it!