The Ramblings Of A Creature Of Hobbit

Challenge #11

In your own space, share your love for a trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme.


Years ago, I remember seeing some random meme about tropes doing the rounds on my friends list, and I can't remember the questions, but I do remember I gave up and deleted whatever I was trying to type because I just had nothing to say about forced to share a bed, coffee shop AU or any of the other tropes on the meme.

Since then I've realised what my thing actually is. I love alternate timelines, what if So and so didn't die, that kind of thing. The first idea I ever had for a fic (which I scrapped because it wasn't great) involved Lost's Michael and Walt having been prevented from boarding the plane (for context, Michael was the character I didn't like at the time - this was before I realised that Smokey McSmokeFace aka What's his face Bastard was truly the worst of the worst).

Sometimes I might play it where a character's made an active choice to try and change things - see Reverse Flashpoint where The Flash's Nora, determined to prevent Barry's disappearance, is manipulated by Eobard into giving Barry the metahuman cure (which I was so convinced was the route the show would go down, I was disappointed when the finale ended up being Cicada crap) or The Eleven Mile Game (the end of the original book The Midnight Game totally set this up, I'm still hoping for a sequel because I think there is potential). The first ever series I finished and posted was Once Upon a Time's Zelena trying to erase Regina from existence, with a little help from Jafar who was brought to Gold's shop in the curse - Defying Gravity.

Sometimes I just change it without making it be an active choice by the character. After getting really frustrated when first watching Dark when Ulrich got stuck in 1953 instead of making it to 1986 to rescue Mikkel, I started my current project Caught Somewhere In Time, where Ulrich does get to 1986 - I didn't get into how he managed to do that, just started with Egon returning Mikkel to Ulrich's care. With this one, I have wondered many times if I bit off more than I could chew. At the time of starting, I was still on season 1, so didn't fully understand the ramifications of removing Mikkel from the 1986 timeline (for anyone not familiar with Dark, the timelines and family trees are very complicated. This show comes with family trees, one for each season, so people can keep track of how everyone is related). Instead of giving Mikkel his happy ending, returning him to 2019 would just erase the whole Nielsen family line, and I now feel I'm being drawn to an ending I'd initially wanted to avoid.

And I still want to finish You Are Here, Like A Mystery where Lost's Sun goes back to 1977 instead of staying in 2007 - I lost heart a bit after certain events of season 6 (yes, Smokey McSmokeFace, I'm looking at you) but determined to come up with an ending that also erases that episode.

Speaking of Smokey McSmokeFace, I realised I was a lost cause a couple of days ago when I was at the three sentence ficathon and saw the prompt where the antagonist travels back in time to the start. I now have Origin where said asshole travels back in time to when his fake mother was still alive, and gets the chance to change time so he can leave the island back then. I hate this guy. I haven't forgiven him for killing off my het pairing and one half of my slash pairing. And yet I'm actually seriously considering expanding on this and letting him actually change time. Somebody save me....(*Smallville theme stuck in my head*)

Challenge #8

In your own space, write a promo, manifesto or primer for a beloved character, relationship or fandom.


One I'm really into at the moment is From, about a town that traps anyone who happens to arrive there (this usually happens after seeing a fallen tree in the road). It's a horror (the characters are also faced with creatures that are kind of like vampires who come out at night, their origin story is mentioned in season 3 although there's going to be more to it I'm sure), a good cast - I first became aware of the show via its leading man Harold Perrineau (Michael from Lost) and went on to recognise August from Once Upon a Time and then Professor Shane from Vampire Diaries (even if I did spend the first episode looking at that guy and thinking "I know you, why do I know you?"). There's family dynamics to explore (Boyd and Ellis's initial estrangement and the story behind that), the hope of possibly finding a way out versus those who are reconciled to their fate. And for anyone worried about the idea of another Lost (this comparison has been made, and yes there are similarities) we are starting to get answers now!

Challenge #6

Share your favourite piece of original canon.

The year was 2002, I was in my second year at university, had just come out of a bad relationship, but as we were part of the same friendship group he was in my face all the time, a lot of them proved themselves to be really more his friends...I'll leave that bit there because it's getting off topic and this is a public post. That was just added as context for where my head was when someone had put on the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I had some very vague familiarity with Buffy at that point, but this is the episode that really drew me into it. From relating to Buffy's Going Through the Motions, to feeling cheered up by the Bunnies song and I'll Never Tell. This episode was what encouraged me to watch the rest of the series, and it's remained a favourite ever since. It's inspired some of my later Vampire Diaries fics (Rest in Peace totally fits Klaus/Caroline, for one example, but there were a few) and also inspired some of my icons.

Challenge #4

Since this is the start of a new year, this challenge will be to set your own goals! Of course we can all make large or ambitious goals, remember that small and/or short goals are also good!

Well, where do I start?

I'll start by trying to get some of my series finished. One of them is heading close to a conclusion now, and I know where I'm going with it, even though I had the exact opposite intention in mind when I started that fic as what I thought would be a one-shot. (Let's just say I tried to alter the timeline of Dark, at a time when I was still on Season 1 and didn't have the full context of the complexities of the timeline. For those who don't know, it's...a lot. The show comes with family trees to keep track of how they're all related, and since lots of people are related through time travel, it gets complicated. If Mikkel really had been restored to his own timeline, what would actually happen would have been that the whole Nielsen family line would have been erased from existence, but that wasn't a route I wanted to go down.) At the moment, it's looking possible that it'll end up being 13 chapters, and while I'm probably the least superstitious out of my family, I can just hear their reactions to that now.

I've also been saying for years that I'll go back to the Lost series where Sun went back to 1977 with the others (I got about 3 chapters in back in 2010 and then lost heart after Sun and Jin were killed off. I'm not sure where I'll take it now without killing them off, because this time I can more easily make that choice. But I'll get there.)

Another is to get my book bingo achieved and get my TBR list down. Every so often I say I'll stop buying new books for Lent, or between my birthday and Christmas (my birthday's in August), and never stick to it. Maybe this year I'll be able to make my TBR list manageable.

Another is to get my to-watch list down a bit as well (although the new season of Yellowjackets is coming soon and will take priority at that point).

To get more done with my 100fandoms table.

And I'll keep the one about knowing when it's sometimes easier to let go of goals or modify them if I come to the conclusion that they may not be achievable.

Challenge #2

In your own space, talk about your fannish origin story. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Whether you've been in fandom for a while or just discovered fandom, we'd love to know how you came to fandom! Was it that one book or a TV show or movie or anime/manga or a band/song that gave you that first spark? Or a character or characters that you wanted more of but the canon material just didn't have enough of them? Or were you introduced to fandom by someone?

You can be as brief or detailed as you like: timeline, narrative, bullet points, etc. :D

In the past, whenever I've answered this, I've usually started with the point where I first became aware of online fandom's existence. But having read through some of the other entries to this, I wonder if I should try and go earlier. So if I did, I guess I would start with when I got into Babysitters Club in primary school. Since I'm in the UK, we were a couple of years behind the US, and this became more noticeable once the Mysteries got out of sync with the rest of the series - for example, through the Mysteries I knew that Stacey had briefly quit the club to spend more time with Robert, then rejoined again, before that happened in the ordinary series, and Abby just suddenly seemed to be there with no explanation. Then as time went on I moved on towards Sweet Valley High (although I still have no interest in reading the Confidential - I remember I found out some of what happens and honestly thinking it was a joke at first.)

Those who know me well will know that I have a pet peeve when it comes to the same characters getting too much attention while some barely get any. (Jack and his tattoos, I'm looking at you. My frustration at the amount of Jack episodes on Lost is not about Jack as a character, I'd feel the same way had it been any other character who got an excessive amount of centric episodes, including one about their tattoos, while other characters got nothing at all. Libby, Charlotte, Ilana and Frank should have had their own episodes, and I'd have enjoyed more Ben. I would even have liked more development of the Others. Just don't get me started.) Anyway, that little ramble got a bit off topic, because what I was getting at was the origins of this pet peeve when I was 13. At that time, I'd got into the Making Out series by Katherine Applegate, and there were far too many books centred on the character Zoey. Zoey was a character I ended up wanting to shake by the end of it because I found it irritating how her response to everything was a big dramatic run away. But even without that, there were plenty of other characters who deserved more attention. Christopher never gets his own book at all. Kate doesn't get any POV time in what is technically her first book. The diary entries always began with Zoey regardless of whose book it was. I wasn't aware of the term Mary Sue when I was 13, but if I had been, I would have applied it to her. And the peeve has remained with me ever since, through Jack's tattoos to Once Upon a Time's Regina vs Snow episodes which definitely got into I Think This Flashback's Mostly Filler territory by the end.

Apologies to those who have known me quite a while, because you probably heard this. I first became aware of the existence of online fandom back in 2001, when I was in my second year at university, and some of my ex's friends were writing Harry Potter fic. They were mainly into the porn, (again if you know me well you'll know that I'd rather explore backstory or alternate timelines) and once that particular situation had exploded (without getting into the whole saga, this was an "ex keeps the friends in the breakup" situation) I didn't really want to get too actively involved in that fandom because I didn't want to cross paths with The Piss Artist Formerly Known as Xander (my ex's friend Sal, who had this kind of alter ego Alexander, posted her fics under that name, and when people assumed that was her real name she went along with it and created this whole Xander persona for herself, ended up getting engaged to this Australian woman she met in the fandom and didn't come clean to her for ages...all very odd.) and friends. As time went on, I did participate in it a little bit more even if I'm not super active. However, those who know me will know the sagas of how my ex-managers ended up being nicknamed Fudge and Umbridge (I have a Lupin right now who is unfortunately leaving - please don't let me get a Lockhart next), or my uncle's excessive requests for extra Christmas and birthday presents led to him being known as Dudley Dursley to his face, so you will know that this fandom has continued to have some influence on me.

The first fandom I ever started writing in was Lost - I've since private locked (I don't do deleting, but those should not see the light of day) some of my very early ideas about trying to fix the end of S2 where Michael was prevented from boarding the flight and couldn't shoot Ana Lucia and Libby, but I found myself with lots of material for the underdeveloped characters (seriously, the Others have enough potential for a spinoff). Over time, I started picking up other shows through people's recommendations - Fringe was my next big fandom after Lost finished, then I got into Once Upon a Time, Vampire Diaries, How To Get Away With Murder, Arrowverse, Revenge, Hunger Games - it's a pretty long list. A couple of my favourites now are ones that I knew about via the actors who'd been in my other shows, Yellowjackets through Steven Krueger (Ben) promoting it on his social media, From because Harold Perrineau was starring.

Aside from Lost which has always been my main, my other main fandoms right now are Yellowjackets, The Wilds, Dark and From - anyone familiar with those might have noticed that some of them have very similar themes, or characters, even lines (Yellowjackets' Jeff telling Shauna she's not Rambo is totally Rose and Bernard. Just removed one character comparison for From and Lost to avoid spoiling said new character for anyone who's not up to 3.04.) Fringe and Lost have a lot of crossover potential (my headcanon is that Daniel was in St Claire's with Walter and Miles was a Cortexiphan kid), Once Upon a Time has the same format and some actors. So I guess my first fandom experience has had some impact on my more recent ones.

Squicks - What are some things that squick you in fandom - not necessarily "icky", though it can be. From anything involving blood, to bad grammar.

EYES. Anything at all requiring an eye warning. This is the case for me outside of fandom as well, it stems from unexpected eye drops when I was about 4.

My trouble is that I seem to have acquired a lot of fandoms over the years where something eye related has cropped up. House of the Dragon's Aemond Targaryen and Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Xander Harris both have eye injuries seen on screen, Gotham's Fish Mooney has a self inflicted one, Lost's Mikhail has a long ago eye injury and I could quite happily have never seen what was under his patch, I'm equally happy with never knowing the story behind Torben Woller's eye injury on Dark (that's a bit of a running joke that if anyone ever asks him what happened to his eye, there's some kind of interruption so that he never gets to explain). I can even do without Rumple's remark to Regina in the musical episode of Once Upon a Time that he'd rather scoop his eyes out with a fork than sing (my reaction at the time was "Seriously, Rumple, can you not just sing instead?" even though I knew he wouldn't because even before that episode was written, Robert Carlyle had said in an interview that he wasn't keen on the idea of a musical episode. In fact, I have a friend who agrees with him and would probably have given musical episodes as her answer of a squick).

And I am not here for anything gory involving cats. I got as far as the beginning of S2 of Stranger Things before finding out there was such a gory incident and I haven't gone back to it since - I keep thinking that maybe I will, although it's been over a year now and I still haven't done it.

At one time, I would have added incest to the list - anyone who's been around for a while may have heard how I noped out of a Harry Potter fic years ago where the plot was that Harry accidentally transported himself, Ron and Hermione back to Marauder era and Harry tried to change time to save his parents. From what I remember, he exposed Pettigrew as having Death Eater sympathies in high school, and suggested to Sirius the prank of sending Snape after Lupin at full moon but kept James out of the way so he didn't have the chance to save Snape. So far, so good, those who know me well know that this kind of breaking the timeline is usually my cup of tea. Except then it went down the Harry/Lily route which I didn't feel it needed. But after having watched Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon, where it's pretty much just Tuesday, and Dark where they're all related through time travel but don't understand exactly how they're all related and are therefore in relationships with blood relatives unknowingly (if you want a pairing that's not related at all, well, I hope you like Peter/Bernadette) I think I just got used to it to some extent (although I'd still avoid that Harry/Lily now).

Have you ever found yourself regretting any action you've taken in a fic?

This is one I've found myself thinking about while trying to finish my "old favourites" entry for lands_of_magic - I'm doing Fringe, and ever since the possible future in the season 3 finale, I've been really into the idea of what a future Over There could have been like if it had gone the other way, if it had been Over There that survived and Our Walter who crossed over at the end only to get stuck in the alternate universe as the prime universe was destroyed. AO3 is being annoying at the moment, so this may not be easy to view, but what I have come up with to date for that is here: Henry Dunham!verse

As I write more in that verse, there's a part of me that wishes I hadn't made the decision to let alt!Charlie get trapped in amber. I started this verse with a scenario building up where lots of people have reason to hate Walternate, and Our Walter ends up saving him, and Charlie being ambered was a part of that. And the thing is, if that universe had ever made it to air, I don't think the writers would have shied away from making that decision; they did kill off other main characters, after all. But while I've been writing Charlie for these drabbles, and revisiting the ambering storyline in the Henry Dunham!verse, I do find myself regretting having done it.

Ha. Maybe for some of you titles are easy to come up with. In which case, what's your secret, because that's probably mostly what I struggle with?

One way I've often tried to handle this has been with song lyrics - with The Hunger Games, there's so often been a Les Miserables lyric that fits. In one particular case with Yellowjackets, Ben's imagining he was home with Paul watching the news of the crash immediately took my mind to the Miss Saigon song The Movie In My Mind, so on that occasion I had the title before I fully had the fic.

One particular moment of frustration, which I happened to be talkng about in a comm, was one time when I wanted lyrics about fire, and kept getting stupid shit about metaphors for sex. However, the plot was Janet from School Spirits, who dies in a fire in the 1950s and has been trapped in her high school for years, struggling to deal with anything to do with fire because things like times when some idiot sets the fire alarm off for a joke or the obligatory people having a cigarette at school would bring the fire straight back to Janet. So on this particular occasion, metaphors for sex were exactly what I didn't want and were basically useless!

We've probably all come across at least one show where we didn't like the ending, and also at least one where the ending was controversial in some way/disliked by a lot of people. In a similar vein, we've also all most likely come across a character who got a shit ending. An obvious one that comes to mind for me is Michael from Lost (Harold Perrineau has said that he wasn't happy with his ending) and never get me started on Jin and Sun; Lost as a whole (I never want to hear “so were they dead the whole time?” again, even had to grit my teeth in the From episode where the Matthews family raise that same question), or the Game of Thrones petition. And don’t even get me started on How I Met Your Aunt Robin, which it might as well have been called after that ending!

For the purpose of this Fannish 50 ramble post, I'm not referring to those where they got cancelled too soon and finished on an unresolved cliffhanger because I think that's one for another post. Here I'm sticking to those with a planned ending.

In that situation, would you try and rewrite a better ending? Has a bad ending ever soured you on a fandom or character forever?

I still stand by what I said about the Game of Thrones petition when discussing it with a family friend at my uncle and aunt’s ruby wedding (when it had only just happened); yes, I could see where people were coming from, and yes, there were things I would have done differently myself had I been writing the scripts (I’m referring specifically to Jaime Lannister’s ending here as the first thing I’d change, but there would have been more). However, I didn’t sign the petition, and wouldn’t have done even if I’d thought for one minute it would have resulted in a change of ending. The reason is, and I’m speaking generally here rather than Game of Thrones specific, there was never going to be a way of pleasing everyone. One person’s crap ending is another person’s fitting end for the show/character, and even if hypothetically that petition had resulted in a rewrite of season 8, there were always going to be people who wouldn’t like that either.

As fans, we do have the means to rewrite our own endings. If we want to have Jaime Lannister tell Cersei where to go and live out his days with Brienne, we can do that ourselves. Personally I like the author Olivia Dade’s response which was to write the Spoiler Alert trilogy – anyone with any familiarity with Game of Thrones will recognise quite a few references. In the second book in the trilogy, the actor Alex is very unhappy with a storyline where his character Cupid returns to the family he’d been trying to escape, and as an actor, he felt that the story undermined Cupid’s character development over the last few seasons of Gods of the Gates, and I thought “That’s Jaime”. (While his best friend Marcus responds to it by writing fix it fic, Alex writes pegging themed fic and declares at the final con that it’s an improvement on the scripts for the upcoming final season. I love these characters).

What if it’s difficult to know how else to end it? Dark is the one I’m thinking of here – I feel that a lot of the characters didn’t deserve…the fate they got, and even with the continuation of what I’m working on now where Ulrich misses out 1953 and instead makes it to 1986 to retrieve Mikkel, I’m not sure how easily I can actually save the characters.
Lost, I’ve done it lots of times. Jin becoming a member of the Oceanic Seven and he and Sun escape her father, Michael gets an afterlife in the sideways verse where he gets to save Ana Lucia, and lots of variations on the happy ending for Sayid and Desmond theme!

Yes, I am determined to be better at these!

We've all got one. Whether it's a character you actively can't stand, or it's not quite that strong but they're really not a favourite, we all have the characters we're not fans of. So, does anyone ever write the characters they don't like? if so, do you feel that it makes those fics not your best?

If you know me well, or even if you don't really but have read my posts on Snowflake or something, you'll probably know that I'll try just about any character at least once. Also if you know me well, you'll know that the character that really set me off was The Man In Black/Smokey McSmokeFace/Esau/What's His Face Bastard on Lost (I've used all those at least once for him, I don't use Samuel because it was only ever a casting call name and I don't care what may have been said on a YouTube video, Barry is not an ancient Roman name so I don't acknowledge that one). I never used to have any issues with him and would write him quite happily at one point, until the episode that wiped out my het pairing and one half of my slash pairing, through the actions of this ass. At that point, What's His Face and I were done professionally - this lasted about 2 months, until the old Lost Summer Luau on LJ, where someone's prompt just screamed him, and I put my feelings on him aside. This was the result: https://archiveofourown.org/works/45159793 (ignore the date, it was actually written in 2010, just crossposted last year)

I was thinking about that again earlier while trying to finish off the Moods challenge for lands_of_magic and that ended up suggesting Dark's Hannah, another character who's not as bad as Smokey, but not really a favourite, she was a shit to a few other characters (that may come up in another Fannish 50 ramble about show endings, but that's for another day) - the result was https://archiveofourown.org/works/54568450

Other times I just have nothing to say about these characters at all - Malik from Elite, for example, is one I doubt I'll ever do anything more with than a casual mention in one fic of his ex having blocked him everywhere long since. One I had trouble with was Harry Potter and the Cursed Child's Delphi, who I felt had to appear in an alternate version where Albus and Scorpius accidentally bring Cedric back to 2020, but I didn't know what to do with her. In the end, I figured that one was really Cedric's story, and Albus and Scorpius's, but didn't really need to get that far into Delphi's head, so she remained a peripheral character. https://archiveofourown.org/works/8005297