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I'm a little shocked that there aren't already a couple of dozen Signalis fics up on AO3 about cozy, nothing-bad-ever-happened AUs.

Maybe it's just that relatively few people seem to have beaten the game yet, and it isn't really being marketed as a romance despite, in the final analysis, essentially being exactly that.

Still, "my robot girlfriend and I are alone together aboard a spaceship" is, by itself, some kind of romance AU.

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It's a time-travel issue. All four of the FF in that panel are from different eras of the team. Sue's from early days when she and Reed weren't married yet, and Ben's from the '90s when he was sensitive about a scar on his face that Wolverine had given him.

Fantastic Four #35 - “Death in Four Dimensions” (2021)

written by Dan Slott art by John Romita, Jr., Jp Mayer, Scott Hanna, Cam Smith, Rafael Fonteriz, Mark Morales, & Marte Gracia

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One of these days, I'd like to see a file or something in a Resident Evil game where some backwoods super-scientist used a virus or a parasite or a mold or what-have-you to form an ersatz family...

...but it's not something that necessarily has to be solved with three tons of nine-millimeter.

"Oh, yeah, that's the Johnsons. Tried to address their infertility through mad science and instead ended up with this crazy batch of animated sentient tree-people. Treat 'em like surrogate sons and daughters." "So, uh, what do we--" "They don't eat people and they aren't contagious, so we leave them alone, rook." I mean, I know why the horror game focuses on horrific scenarios, but it'd be interesting to hear from the occasional case where nothing is "blow it up and torch the site" levels of wrong.

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I really want to know what happened in, like, the bioweapons community, that Heisenberg of all people knows about Chris punching that boulder in Resident Evil 5.

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So just how many of you are working intently right now on a novel-length AU story about a version of Three Houses that doesn’t actually have the timeskip and just stays as high school drama with swords for the next five years?

Could I comfortably assume it’s most of you?

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Tired: Claire Redfield x [reader] romance/porn stories Wired: [reader] ends up as one of Claire Redfield’s enormous stable of surrogate children/nieces/little sisters, following [reader]’s rescue from an outbreak

(It occurred to me the other day that Claire has been in five major adventures so far in the RE series and ended up with a new surrogate kid/niece/sister--Sherry, Rani, Moira, Marilou--in four of them. Extrapolate the 80% rate to the rest of her unseen endeavors and clearly, Claire can’t do so much as go out for pizza without saving a young girl from an uncertain fate and ending up as her new role model.

(Which means there’s this quiet offstage anti-zombie badass all-girl biker gang waiting to happen.)

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The new RE2 is a little controversial for not having any at all. There were a few in the original and none whatsoever in the 2019 remake.

Off the top of my head, though, you’d want to avoid all of the original games, especially the first one and Code Veronica. There aren’t any spiders in RE4, there’s a creepy bug-adjacent thing in the second half of RE5, and Leon’s game in RE6 has a big insect-ish boss, but that’s more of a fly/mosquito than a spider.

In more explicitly horror-themed games, the first Revelations is mostly about creepy deep-sea fish-looking things, Revelations 2 is surprisingly light on non-humanoid enemies with no bugs at all, and RE7 has an entire bug-themed “second act” that’s at least vaguely spider-adjacent.

Yo, Resident Evil fandom

I’m interested in playing RE2 but I have to ask

I saw a gifset somewhere of a Resident Evil game with giant spiders for enemies, and spiders are one of my dealbreakers.

So my question is, which Resident Evil game has them? Or do all of them have them?

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Side notes, canon and otherwise, for this week’s update on “Partners”:

* One of the things that I’m not sure Capcom really ever figured out about the U.S. military is just how much shit Chris would still get on a regular basis for being ex-Air Force.

* Adam Benford must’ve been elected President in 2008, and reelected in 2012, in the RE universe because he founded the DSO in 2011. There’s a fan theory that he’s the mysterious off-camera voice during Leon’s recruitment scene in Darkside Chronicles, which kinda makes sense to me. He’s also clearly a George HW Bush-caliber foreign policy wonk because he decided to send Leon into a sovereign country’s civil war on a specious pretext in Damnation.

* The human cloning thing is from Umbrella Chronicles (every Tyrant in the series is made from a clone of Sergei Vladimir, which is why they all look like an extremely constipated Agent 47), although I made up the bit about a group of guys in 2010 using the same tech to make “human test subjects” on the cheap. It sounded crimes-against-humanity enough to match the rest of the things we’ve seen the BSAA pursuing.

* Is Biohazard: The Stage actually canon?! Has anyone at Capcom ever said? who the fuck cares, I’m rolling with it

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It’s been gone for a while now, but I stumbled across an archive of the Common People Project a few years ago, which was an old challenge from the late ‘90s and early ‘00s in the X-Men fan community. It was still basically fanfiction, with the additional wrinkle that the participating writers were limited strictly to settings and concepts. It was a “view from the ground” challenge, where established characters could only be referred to in passing, if at all.

It was the usual fan-work mixed bag, but there was a lot of imagination involved, and on the whole, it was a fun read.

I’m back to fan writing after a few years away, and it occurs to me that it’d be fun to transfer the basic rules of the Common People Project to other fanworks, using modern sorting tools like an AO3 tag or a specific Dreamwidth community. If someone’s already doing it, I sure haven’t seen it yet.

Obviously, it’d only work with bigger, less mundane settings, where the story of an ordinary person somewhere else is still remarkable enough to be worth telling. If you’re writing the story of another unrelated CSI team somewhere else in the “CSI: Miami” universe, then you’re really just writing original crime fiction, but you could get some mileage out of a couple of bumblefuck hunters in the “Supernatural” universe who have never even heard of the Winchesters.

I’m working through the resurgence of my Resident Evil obsession, thanks to the RE2 remake, and it’s occurred to me that the series is overstuffed with options for its own Common People Project: new outbreaks in unexplored periods of the official timeline, BSAA squads dealing with different criminals, people who managed to get out of Raccoon City some other way than what we’ve seen (or who didn’t), and so on.

Admittedly, what got me thinking about this was the current resurgence of “Leon Kennedy runs into a cool new survivor in Raccoon City and bangs her ears right off her head” stories on AO3 (the Leon thirst is both extra and unusually real right now), but I’ve had half an idea for something like it for years, ever since a conversation about how to handle something like the old Arklay TV show: a new outbreak in a new city somewhere, meant to introduce a couple of new characters as audience surrogates.

(I’m also kind of curious how you’d do an RE2-style zombie story set in 2019, where you wake up one day and your small city is ground zero for a bioweapons hot zone. It’d be a lot more like a couple of the early demonstrations in the Arab Spring: survivors in the city coordinating and communicating through texts and Twitter, while the outside world watches in gobsmacked horror.)

Just an idle thought. I’d be interested in seeing how some of the current crop of fan writers would handle a theoretical Resident Evil Common People Project, and it’d be a worthwhile exercise in most of the big sf/horror franchises of the moment.

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The tentative plan is to try to update “Partners” a bit at a time, once a week, until it reaches a post-RE7 finishing point. Towards that end, two new short scenes are now up.

This is a little more head-canon-y than some of the stuff I’ve written. The “BSAA lifestyle” joke is basically riffing off of the common crime-fiction trope of cops/detectives who fall in love with their partners or teammates; the BSAA of my imagination thus has an in-universe reputation for partying hard once it’s off the clock.

Also, Leon having a lot of family in Boston is just a joke about how he really is a stock character, a young well-meaning redheaded rookie policeman named “Kennedy,” but he ended up in a zombie story instead of being a bit character in some Irish-American street crime drama.

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My only real RE2 headcanon at this point is that Claire’s “Letter From Best Friend” file was written by Elza Walker.

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You ever start writing something with America Chavez in it and have to go back over it three or four times because you are definitely just writing her as super-powered Rosa Diaz?

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Instead of clearing out my Steam backlog, somehow I ended up writing. Hence, this: a new chapter of an an old story, finally bringing it roughly in line with the other, older story.

Incidentally, no one is allowed to leave kudos on "Identity" anymore. I think once an F/F story reaches 69 kudos, I get a trophy and win the game. (Because I am a child, you see.) If you are so moved, leave a comment that says "kudo" or something instead.

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Shout-out to this old random-bystander dude, who was ready to throw hands at a former herald of Galactus instead of bending the knee. Badass of the year honorable mention material.

(And then Spidey-Ock saves them both one page later, so it’s all good.)

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“That’s Our Ada” is filmed before a live studio audience.

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There’s really nothing preventing you from doing a version of RE2 where Claire meets Ada and Leon meets Sherry. They only kinda meet their support NPC in the first place through writer fiat.

The only problem is that 2019 Claire is not a giant naive golden retriever person like 2019 Leon (initially) is. There’s no way that doesn’t end with her and Ada pointing guns at each other before they’re even out of the RPD. In ship terms, it’s less “I was going to manipulate you but I find myself irresistibly attracted to your awkward but fundamental human decency” and more “there are more important things to do right now but the moment there aren’t I am going to hatefuck you until your legs drop off”

...also, I think that scene in the parking garage with Irons, for Leon, would end with Irons taking the first opportunity he can to try and shoot Leon in the back of the head. Which doesn’t necessarily mean it happens, since Leon is the luckiest bastard on the planet, but if you think he’s bummed now, imagine how he feels once he has to deal with the psychopath who was gonna be his boss.

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you’re doing the Cinema Sins thing where you’re looking for “flaws” so you can laugh at it without checking to see if all the flaws actually exist.

spoiler cut:

* Mr. X’s motive is only explained in the note in Ben’s cell, where he theorizes that X is there to eliminate witnesses in the city * the person who removed the virus is Leon, because William got interrupted in the middle of stealing all the samples and never closed the locker. Claire removed a vial of the virus’s counteragent. * Leon stole a car from the sheriff’s department, not the PD, and sheriff’s departments don’t have onboard radios in their patrol cars as often. he’s also a day-one rookie who just came face to face with zombies out of nowhere. * Ada can’t get Ben out because the panel to his cell was sabotaged, you’re making a lot of assumptions about what she’s doing while she’s offscreen, and everything she says about her “mission” is pure bullshit because she’s playing Leon.

seriously, man, it’s not Shakespeare but you could at least double-check your shit.

Claire is a secret Lara Croft cosplayer on a convention in town and that’s honestly a hell of a better backstory than ‘looking for my brother’. Just saying.

Also, I find it amusing that Leon knows that Chris is in Europe and yet he asks her if she found her brother yet. Seriously, he finds out mins before asking her this.

On their way into Raccoon City they manage to get in with ease, yet the radio states otherwise. Nuking the city will do nothing considering how there are zombies already at the gas station out of town.

Leon steals a cop car and doesn’t bother to radio in his situation since he’s a cop himself. The trucker listens in to a conversation regarding a man who met a woman on a bar in Raccoon City, the same city which is literally 'hell on earth’ yet manages to go to a bar, meet a zombie and call a radio show about it.

Ada claims she’s on a mission but spends a significant amount of time in the parking garage. She’s not advancing whatsoever. She says Ben has helpful information for her and doesn’t bother to get him out, also he has the parking pass, which she clearly needs to get out. She literally goes back to the garage gets inside a Swat vehicle and waits (lol) til something interesting pops up just to ram into it. I can’t get over how funny that is.

The Nest goes on a self-destruct sequence due to an 'unauthorized’ removal of the virus, but Claire is able to do this with a pendant, which is the key to remove it, how much authorize can you get? If you wanted to self-destruct, Nest would just sealed itself not provide a tram out of there.

Mr X spends the majority of his time chasing down Claire in the original because he wants the pendant but spends a lot more time chasing Leon in the remake who has nothing he wants. It never gets addressed in the game Mr X’s motive, Capcom just relied on old players to just know, new players be damn.

I love the remake to pieces but the story is really fucking funny with so many flaws.