#here’s my thing w fanfic. I’m either reading it bc it’s genuinely a good piece of writing or interesting character exploration or whatever

[macbethz]

Society if POV outsider fics were as popular as shipping

[satellitesoundwave]

9, 11, 23?

9. How do you find new fic to read?

ah well, i used to read fanfic and original fic voraciously, but a few years ago some mental health stuff happened and my capacity for reading got wiped out for the most part (i’m hopeful this will improve. my ability to play videogames took a similar dive, but as i’ve been putting work into rebuilding my wellbeing that has been coming back to me - in related news Rain World is fantastic and i love it to pieces - which seems like a good sign that over time reading will come back to me too. thank god bc i miss reading fic so much ;w; ). so these days i hoard update notifications from writers and fics i’m subscribed to, and pick out one of those when i’m having a particularly good reading day

back when i used to read a lot i my go-tos for finding new fic were; when i really like something i’d check out everything else that author has written, looking through the author’s bookmarks bc if i like their fic there’s good odds we’ll have similar taste, and searching the fandom tag + additional tropes i enjoy to see what’s around

11. Are you partial to a certain character/pairing or are you more equal-opportunity? If you are partial to any character/pairing, why do you think that is?

in terms of reading? well, i’m more likely to give fics a go if one of the main characters is someone i find interesting, but i find a lot of tf characters interesting so it effectively becomes equal opportunity

now in terms of writing i’m more narrow, but i’m not partial to a certain character/pairing so much as to dynamics where the ‘complicated relationships’ tag is applicable. taraprowl needs no explanation here, i like writing jazzwave most when they’re enemies grappling with being unfortunately very compatible as people, and even cdrw has shades of this with the patterns of poor communication and lying. i just really enjoy dynamics that involve strong positive and strong negative feelings simultaneously

23. What’s a trope, AU, or concept you’ve never written, but would like to?

god okay this is very much a ‘no i am not allowed to think about doing anything like this when i already have other big projects going on’ thing but. i’ve been kicking around this idea for like, established relationship Jazz/Soundwave where the war is over and it’s all peace and good times… until Megatron gets assassinated. and the plot is a Soundwave pov where grief and hunger for revenge drive him to investigate who did it - not just who pulled the trigger, but everyone who was involved in forming the plan and making it happen. and of course the crux of the tension is whether or not Jazz was in on the plot. was their whole relationship a calculated distraction to keep Soundwave from seeing this coming and stopping it? i like the idea of there being strong evidence to support Jazz being involved and also strong evidence that he wasn’t, the tension of Soundwave (and also the reader) being genuinely unable to tell which is true is a tension i vibe with. which i think is why trying to cement whether or not he was involved then drains away the things about it i find compelling to write. so i’ve got this neat idea but no ending for it, and leaving it as a vague ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ‘i guess we’ll never know’ isn’t satisfying either

and a separate thing, which also brings me around to the question, is that a concept i’ve never written but would like to is one where Jazz and Soundwave are in love but such a significant personal/philosophical line has been crossed that even that doesn’t stop them from fighting to the death. the energy of that would be electric. except also in a sad way bc wow that would be a downer ending, i'm not too hot on the idea of getting people invested in a story only to do that to them

the breakthrough happened when i was talking to my friends about our yearly tradition of getting together and playing the new Dark Pictures Anthology game when it comes out; more than once during our first playthrough of these games we’ve gotten endings that are ‘bad’ in the sense of how they fit into the established genre schema of Good Endings & Bad Endings in videogames, or lack closure, or are incredibly tragic (thinking about part of the ending we got for The Quarry for this one, which is not a DPA game but is by the same developer) - but the ends never felt unsatisfying to us because we’d gotten there through choices we’d actively made and we knew it was just one ending of several. this conversation later made me realise that hey, i have experience with game programming. if i dust off those rusty skills i could probably make a text based game… and that would sort out the issues i’d been having with the above concepts! my programming knowledge is a bit basic, but using it to make a fanwork is also a concept i’ve always wanted to try since it seems like an interesting challenge 

the really exciting part about this imo is the possibility of having tracked variables. with those i could give the story branching paths based on decisions readers make, something like 1) Jazz is an active participant in the assassination plot, 2) Jazz was involved in the plot but stopped being part of it before the assassination happened (perhaps he opted out of his own accord? or was kicked out bc the others worried his attachment to Soundwave has compromised him?), 3) Jazz was not involved, or 4) Soundwave never uncovers whether Jazz was involved or not. having that branching + something like a loyalty meter for Jazz that tracks how loyal he is to the assassination plot/people involved, and something similar for how dedicated Soundwave is to getting revenge, allows for really interesting variation/directions for the story to take based on reader decisions

all in all this is something i’d really like to do at some point, but it would be a very big project so i’ve firmly parked it behind doing (Re)Experience and Networking first