#my proudest accomplishment as a wrangler

[nineratsinatrenchcoat]

You can now filter works by “Bisexual Disaster Carmen Sandiego | Black Sheep” on Ao3. You’re welcome everyone

[dinosquad-central]

Btw, it’s thanks to me that the Dino Squad character tags on ao3 are all correctly spelled now. You’re welcome.

[veliseraptor]

A Decade of Fanfiction: 2009-2019

I’ve seen artists I know and love doing this, and I figured I’d self-indulgently make my own fic version of it. So: I’m choosing one fic a year for the last 10 years that I feel is somehow ~representative~ of that year.

I don’t know that I have any overarching observations, except that hopefully I got better over the course of these (I feel like I did) and I think my writing in general has...shifted in terms of focus. Earlier in the decade I wrote a lot of short pieces and character studies; also a lot of very dark and depressing endings. Moving forward I started picking up things with more plot, writing longer stories, writing series and multi-chapter things. 

And I also started ending my fics, generally speaking, on a more hopeful note. Still a lot of pain; still a lot of sorrow. But more and more, I tend to end on a note that says that if things aren’t perfect, if everything isn’t fixed, it is still better, and there might be brighter still to come. 

2009

The Damned, The Silmarillion. This was a year where I wrote a lot of short fic from a lot of different fandoms (A Song of Ice and Fire and The Silmarillion, mostly, though also Doctrine of Labyrinths). This was my first long, multi-chapter fic I actually completed - the AU where Curufin dies after they leave Nargothrond, and Celegorm goes off the rails. I have no idea how well it would hold up - I haven’t reread it. Though someone did make art of it (cw: horror) only four years ago, so it must at least have some good bits in there.  

2010

The Sky Is Darkening Like a Stain, Supernatural. I thought about picking one of my Death Note fics (this was a year of Death Note) as the fandom with my first real hero/villain slash ship, but this was the year where Supernatural started to make an appearance (late in the year - the first fic I have is from September 2010). It’s also the first Sam/Lucifer fic I wrote, which feels significant.

I did also consider a number of “fics where the main character dies at the end” because I wrote a lot of those both this year and next year. It tapers off later on, but boy, did I love killing my own favorite characters and/or writing about their canonical deaths.

2011

Silver Glass, The Silmarillion. This felt in some ways like a year I should have chosen a Supernatural fic, since this was a year when Supernatural by far dominated what I was writing. But I’m going with this one, because it was my first ever foray into second person, and it’s a weird little fic stylistically speaking that shows me starting to experiment a little more. (The date on AO3 for this one is 2012; I’m going from the FFN date, which was the original posting.)

2012

I heard you killed your only friend last year, MCU. This was the year the MCU showed up, and there are a lot of candidates I could have chosen for this one - I almost went with Life in Reverse (still might, for the year it’s finished) but ultimately...this fic was never meant to be the first installment in a series that is now 800,000+ words and still going, seven years later, but here we are. It almost never got posted. 

This was hard, though! This was also the year of Curufin/Finrod becoming a thing, of Clint/Loki, of some of my last really brutal major character death fics. But ultimately this has to go to recognizing the beginning Remember This Cold.

2013

Perdition, MCU. After waffling around with a couple others, I realized that it had to go to this one, because @portraitoftheoddity and I might never have met without it - specifically, without the fanart she made for it that very much caught my attention and got us talking. For that reason alone, I’m calling this the most significant fic of 2013.

2014

Road to Nowhere, MCU. Oh, yes, a classic in the Lise genre of “awkward road trips forcing characters to talk about their feelings, eventually.” I considered one of the two major character death, hella bleak fics I wrote this year, as well as one of the (many) Remember This Cold fics I wrote, but I’m going with this one.

2015

There are fics from this year I like more (The Children of the War, for one, and Birthright) but I’m going to go with the fic that surprised me most just by existing, which was Now Three, MCU. I said for years I’d never write mpreg fic. And then I did it. I think that’s where I learned not to make categorical statements about what I’ll never write.

2016

Shit, man, this was a year of some personally iconic fics. This was the year of I have lived with shades, a shade, of The Vivisection Mambo, of there’s a hell of a good universe next door. It was the year of The Villain Wrangler, the fic I wrote in one sitting that is one of my most popular fics ever, no I don’t resent that a little. I wrote a lot of really good fic in 2016. (If I do say so myself.) 

But I’m going to have to go with to face unafraid the plans that we’ve made, MCU, because this was the year that Steve proposed marriage to Loki in Remember This Cold and that was kind of a big fuckin’ deal.

2017

This was another tough one - do I go with one of the first Wheel of Time fics I wrote in years, because this was the year of the Wheel of Time reread? Do I go with Seven Years because it remains one of my favorite fics I’ve ever written and was the first glimmer of a return to the Silmarillion after a couple years of silence? My first Dragon Age fic ever? One of my Loki/Grandmaster fics (a new ship appearing on the scene late in the year)? The middle fics of the Tapestries series, which series is in many ways closest to my heart emotionally?

But ultimately I landed on the obvious candidate: we’re not friends, we’re strangers with memories, MCU was finished this year. It was the longest thing I’d written and finished to date, and I ended up feeling really good about how I closed it out. I’m still proud of it, which is no small thing.

2018

Yeah, okay. I wanted to pick a Loki/Grandmaster fic for this year, because it feels like the year I wrote a whole fuckin lot of those and they’re very much...uhhh representative, in some way. 

But this has to be Life in Reverse, MCU. The labor of six years, over 200,000 words, blood, sweat, and literal tears, and I finished it in 2018. I feel like if I’ve left a mark on the MCU fandom at all, it’s with this fic. And you know what, I’m good with that.

2019

We’re not quite done with this year yet, but I’m done posting fic for it, so I feel okay choosing one here. And while I’m going to go more in-depth with a 2019 fic recap with a different post, if I had to pick just one fic that feels emblematic of this year I think I’d go with gather frankincense, Lymond Chronicles. Not just because it’s one of my proudest accomplishments of the year, but also because this was a year where I branched out when it came to fandoms. The MCU still dominated, but for the first time in a long time I was writing semi-regularly for other fandoms - Good Omens, Lymond Chronicles, Doctrine of Labyrinths, The Silmarillion, even some Wheel of Time.

It was a good feeling. I used to be a very multifandom writer, and I like the feeling that I’m circling back to that. Especially when it comes to small book fandoms, which were my first internet home.