Scales and Tales

Welp. More than a month ago, I said I wanted to post about some tropes I enjoy, and asked for prompts. schneefink suggested time travel.

It turns out... I don't actually have a lot of thoughts about time travel. :D I'm not drawn to time-traveling plots in canons. Ficwise, I could only think of a handful of stories I've enjoyed that used the trope, and my primary enjoyment wasn't the time travel itself, but the tropes that sometimes accompany it.

Mainly, time travel is a great vehicle for identity porn, or setting up pairings that would otherwise be impossible in canon. :D

Edit: dancing_serpent mentioned the Fish Out of Water trope, and that's definitely a trope I love, as well! I can't think of any time-travel stories where this is co-starring trope, except perhaps H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, but I'd love suggestions.



Anyway, have some fic recs

In My End is My Beginning by Lilith Sedai. The first time-travel fic I really remember reading! A nice blend of the two reasons for time-travel tropes: identity porn (because Obi-Wan can't reveal that he knows Qui-Gon), and smut (featuring adult!Obi-Wan and knight!Qui-Gon). :D

This time travel threesomes Yuri on Ice Yuuri/Victor series by seventhstar. I'm not sure what I enjoyed more, the porn or the little hints about how time travel is a regular phenomenon in this world. More AUs like this, please?

To Memory Now I Can't Recall MCU Bucky/Steve fic by Etharei - excellent weaving of actions and timestreams, which can be tricky.

If the bad time are coming let 'em come MCU Bucky/Steve by Suzukiblu. Winter Soldier does the time-travelling, runs into tiny!Steve.

Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square MCU Bucky/Steve fic by Speranza - The Avengers find a time portal. Steve jumps right in. This proves to be a dumber move than jumping out of a plane without a parachute, and the team has to go in and find him and get him out to undo the damage he's done to the present day.

It's Not Nostalgia by Zekkass - MCU Bucky/big!Steve/little!Steve threesome porn.

All that You Need to Say Nirvana in Fire Jingyan/Mei Changsu fic by Kitsunealyc. Jingyan travels years into the past in a desperate attempt to cure Mei Changsu's mysterious illness. Identity porn abounds, as Jingyan has to pretend he doesn't know Mei Changsu, while Lin Shu pretends he doesn't know Jingyan.



If you have a favourite time-travel fic or canon, please share!

Last week, novembermond posted with a meme to talk about three selected icons.

Here are the ones I was assigned:




An old icon! So old that I honestly have lost a lot of the details. :D I think this one dates back to when I first started using this account; I needed some icons and figured that my limited icon-making skills would probably be better off if I ran with the snake theme than if I tried to make fannish icons. The snake in it came from a Google image search, most likely, and I just trimmed it down to fit. This is/was my "humourous post" icon, because to me the snake looks like it's laughing, or smiling.




A new icon! Very new; I made it on 1/2/19. :D I'd been watching and posting about Nirvana in Fire, and really wanted an icon to go with those posts! Again, I don't actually have icon-making skills, so this is really intended to be a placeholder until I find some nice professional ones. It's just a screenshot of the NiF episode page on Viki, cut down and slightly resized. I like both characters, I like blue, and the lack of background detail meant iconifying it was near my skill level... though I think it still took me half an hour to get it cropped just right. :/




Another new icon! But it's a new icon about being an old fan. :D It was made by china_shop, and I saw it in this icon post along with a number of other old!fan icons. It reminded me of LJ and the way people always had some new fashion to complain about: Why are all the icons full of tiny text nowadays? and People, please stop with the eye-searing custom colours! or What's with all these desaturated pastel icons lately?

I am not quite 40, but I have been in fandom since about 1997 (okay, I chose that date almost at random, because trying to define "in fandom" would be a huge post in itself) and find myself a little nostalgic now and then about the ways it changes and the ways it doesn't.


If you would like me to pick three of your icons for this meme, comment with "Pick me!" Or just comment and tell me about your favourite icon, yours or mine. :D

Instead of Dreamwidth December. :D

Basically, if there's something you want me to talk about, comment with that subject (and optionally a date) and I will make a post about it in January!


( Edit: Dates and topics so far below the cut. )

Feel free to add more items to the list any time before January 31st. :D

If you also missed DW December or just love receiving prompts, please feel free to steal, spread, adapt, or adopt Journaling January as your own! :D

So for Christmas, I finally got round to digging up all the old photos of trips I had taken with a friend back in 2012; this involved digging up the converted-to-external hard drive of my computer from that era and browsing through it.

(I'm organised, in my own very unique way. But it's the kind of way where four years later my filing system may defeat rational analysis, and "where did I put that? What did I NAME the folder for that?!" is a common refrain.)

While I was doing this, I of course ended up browsing through a lot of other stuff as well, including a whole bunch of my earliest fandom-related folders, when I was just a young serpent learning how this whole 'online fandom' thing worked; I've got canon materials, fan art, LJ icons, drabbles I was working on, and miscellaneous tangential materials all saved together in a jumble. (This post was almost a "political cartoons about Harry Potter" post. Why do I have so many of them? Why were there so many of them? One forgets just how much of a sensation HP was, until things like this crop up to remind one!)

Anyway! I felt such a wave of fandom nostalgia while going through this stuff. So many names I remember: Snaples, Brevisse, Seviet, Lizard, Raven Dunbar, Dovie, sine_qua_non767, Nimori, wikdsushi, Telanu, amethyst_lupin, Donna Bond, Gwyllion, Yukipon, Cybele... I remember them all so fondly, and can't help wondering where they are now, and missing them, and just generally missing the way fandom was, in those days. We were all so joyfully talkative, the fic and art and meta and casual LJ posts just pouring out of us! They felt like friends, though we never met in person.

(A few of you are still around! Hi, isis and dementordelta! There's fanart for your fics stored on my external hard drive and it gave me so many lovely feelings to see it again!)

Seeing "c.2003" and "[name] '04" on so much stuff is kind of mind-boggling, too, because I'm not a person who Has Skills when it comes to tracking time; I joke about being an Old Fan, but it's still a little bit shocking to realise that I was downloading explicit fanworks in a year when half of Homestuck fandom was in elementary school. And HP fandom wasn't my first fandom, but it does seem to be the first one where there was a wealth of fan-created artwork as well as fic - especially explicit fanart. One day I should put together a timeline!

It's really interesting, looking back at it so discretely; one notices trends and little signs of the times... The aforementioned increase in fan art generally, and in explicit fan art. A huge amount of fan art done in traditional media, with all the little things that go with it: handwritten captions and speech in comics, scanner blur. Long-URL personal websites under the artist's signature. Lots of meta-jokes about fandom itself.

Anyway, this post doesn't really have a point. I just tripped over some old fandom stuff and fell headlong into ~~emotions~~ and wanted to fling names out into the void in the faintest hope that they might not be gone forever; someone might know where (and who) they are these days, and pass the word that someone still thinks of them and their work from time to time.

Tell me about your old fandoms, and whether you ever peek into the souvenirs of your past fannish days!

This prompt came from seerofbread: "Titles/categories from fandoms that you apply to yourself. (For example, what Hogwarts house would you be in, or do you even think/care about those things?)"

( Read more... )

It's not something I don't think about, because an instinctive part of me wants to be involved in any canon I'm serious about, and that includes "where do I fit in"-type assessments like this, not to mention that it's hard to avoid as a side-thought when doing related types of meta (character analysis, or contrasting the different categories, etc.)! However, it's not something I get deathly serious about, either; I generally prefer to lavish the lion's share of my fannish brain capacity on other forms of meta. But everybody has that thinly veiled self insert OC deep inside them.

What about you, readers? What categories from fandom have you considered, applied, or rejected?

What a great prompt from boxofdelights: "Tell me about a book that you loved when you were a child, that you would still recommend today."

This was in many ways a tough choice, because I read a lot as a kid, and a lot of my reading material was formative for me in some way! I ended up including both my choice and a runner-up.


( I read a lot of award-winning fiction when I was a kid! )

My prompt for the 13th was supplied by blnchflr, who asked me to talk about "Characters who are Good whom you like (unless you don't like any Good characters)."

I spent about three days trying to work out an answer to this one, only to belatedly realise that I may be overthinking it -- I kept trying to figure out the difference between good and Good, and it only occurred to me yesterday that maybe the uppercase was just an attempt to distinguish "a morally good character" from "a good character" in the sense of well-written. *facepalming* blnchflr, feel free to chime in with your intentions!

( Some thoughts below the cut! )

Well, that got long, and kind of turned into a "discuss two tropes you've grown to hate" meta more so than one on good characters and goodness! Sorry. *sheepish* In summary: I have a lot of ~feelings~ about the notion of "Good People" and characters who think they belong in that category, most of which are bound up in the very shallow, platitude-y way that many canons apply it.


Edit: Just discovered my HTML was borked, and half this entry never showed up! Welp. Fixed now, and I did a bunch of editing, too. Hope somebody notices!

Looping back today to cover my prompt for the 1st, which I forgot about. (It's oddly appropriate, considering the topic! This is a fandom that delights in screwing with the temporal dimensions of any number of realities!)

( Prompt by Edenfalling: How did you get into Homestuck? )

Tell me how you got into Homestuck, if you are! Or talk to me about backwards fandoms: have you ever entered a fandom backwards? How long did it take, and how hard was it?

I just discovered fandomthennow/Fandom Then/Now, the dissertation project of Katherine Morrissey, who is comparing her Master's thesis research data from 2008 - shortly before the release of the Archive of Our Own - with new data, post-LJ and AO3.

If you would like to comment, visit the Fandom Then/Now site and check it out! If you'd like to help spread word of the project, you can link to the Dreamwidth account, LiveJournal account, Twitter link, and/or Tumblr account!

Important details, including how to have your identity screened or submit comments via an alterate method, can be found at the Identity Protection page.

Possibly one of the most useful features of a sci-fi/fantasy fandom: it's really easy to weed out fics you don't want to read, just by checking to see which ones can't spell the fandom-specific made-up words correctly. Kismesitude? Paidi Aiji? Valdemarian? NOPE, sorry, no +1 hit count for you!

(Also useful in these fandoms: excluding "human AU" from your search results; but that's another rant for a different day.)