#mst3k fan fic

[arconinternet]

The MiSTing Archive (Text files, various years)

An archive of ~2000 MISTings - MST3K fanfics parodying other fanfics and texts - long-vanished from the internet before reappearing (sans search engine and metadata) and then going offline again. They've all been archived on the Wayback Machine - you can read them here.

Examples to start with: the files starting with 'argon' - the fantasy story The Eye of Argon, years before the lost ending was discovered. And the files starting with 'peanuts' - That's Peanuts to Space, a Doctor Who/Peanuts crossover discovered in the late 80's via C64/C128 online service QLink.

(EDIT: the Wayback's partial archive of the site's original location contains multiple partial lists of MiSTings along with data including descriptions, categories and user scores. You can find a list of partial lists here - don't forget to visit different versions of pages using the timeline. The .txt filenames can be used find them in the big archive linked above. A guide to category codes can be found here.)

Want some more? This page has lots of info and links about the genre, including a guide to MiSTings of Sonic fanfics. And another site, The Pink Boy Buffet, has content not in the big archive. And you can find my posts about two other Misting-related sites here and here.

[wheel-of-fandoms]

Great question! ... Moving on... Seriously though I have no idea....

OH wait, maybe I do? Basically, I got into fan fic very late, and even now don't read much of it, and what I do tends to just be... smut. I might read more of other types if I got back into reading more in general, but I have been struggling with that. Anyway, I can't at all what I might have read first on AO3 Anyway that said, what I just remembered was way back in my early 20s when I found a script-style Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffing on the famously bad "The Eye of Argon" short story. It wasn't just generically riffing on Eye, it was with the standard MST3K characters and all. So I suppose that counts as fan fic of MST3K. Even though I only seen a few parts of a couple episodes of MST3K.

It was probably 10+ years after that when I first read any fan fic on AO3 (and nothing on any site in between). I suppose I might have seen like individual posts that might have counted as micro-fics for some stuff.

Oh, and here is that MSTing of Eye if anyone is interested:

I do feel bad for Jim Theis though, he was 16 when he wrote it (and it was 1970, fantasy was full of purple prose in general back then). He died in 2002, only 48 years old.

Some other info about Eye and Jim

[crowtrobotx]

11 and 16!

11. Most unique merch you have for a fandom

Would a depressed person have THIS BAG???? In all seriousness, I obviously have the most Karl merch... stickers, 3 stuffed versions of him (2 official, one crocheted,) a pillow that says "TRASH MAN," a blanket of his big stupid face, a tiny body pillow where he's in thigh high stockings on the back I suppose though that the truly most unique pieces of "merch" I have are the functioning replicas of Crow T. Robot and Tom Servo I use for my MST3K cosplay. :) They always get a ton of attention and they deserve it! 12. Fandom you'll probably end up joining This is so weirdly hard because I have no real desire to join any other fandoms right now lol. You will absolutely be justified in saying this is an insane comment but I'd feel like I was betraying my stinky dollar bin magneto husband lmao it's why I put him in all these different AUs. I guess I'm adjacent to BG3 but I just enjoy the game, I'm not really into actively involving myself with fan activities at the moment. I am trying to think of movies/shows/games etc. that are coming out in the relatively near future and I suppose I could see myself maybe getting into Nightingale, that Victorian-looking survival game? But again, that's probably because I can easily insert my beloved OC's/Karl into stuff like that. I definitely consume other media, don't get me wrong, but as far as what may seize me and compel me to write fic etc. down the road? Very hard to predict!

[kiwiana-writes]

Hi MJ...I have a question and I don't know your protocol so I'll ask it here instead of DMing you. How scary is your Santa Clarita Diet AU?

I have a very weird gauge of horror that's connected to trauma that I won't infodump on you in your ask box. ]

For reference, I have not seen Santa Clarita but loved I Zombie.

Oh my gosh you're so welcome to ask this publicly or privately!

So, the best way I can describe the tone of this fic is "black comedy". The people-eating of it all is off-screen, but referenced: there's talk of Alex being covered in blood, and the upcoming part three has Alex joking quite a bit about the practical realities of killing and eating people. But the whole thing is treated pretty unseriously overall -- I said in the notes of part two that the MST3K mantra is in full effect here, and I described it to a couple of friends as "Extended moral quandaries are OUT, horny zombie sex is IN". Both Alex and Henry roll with Alex's zombieism to an absurd degree.

Personally I think the hardest-to-read part of it is the depiction of vomiting in part one; if you want to skip that and just have a general sense that Alex Throws Up, Like, A Lot, it's the section that starts with "It comes back up with a vengeance around 2am" and goes through to the next horizontal rule section break.

But I am also admittedly a horror fan so anyone who's read it is MORE than welcome to slide into the replies and correct me if you think I'm misrepresenting anything?

[monkeypretzel]

“Hey, glad you made it home for dinner,” Joel said, turning to face Mike. He leaned in to plant a kiss on Mike’s cheek but stopped when he caught a glimpse of his sour expression. “How’d your checkup go?” he asked.

“Not well.” Mike sat down at the table and buried his head in his arms. Joel quickly turned the flame under the stir-fry off and sat next to Mike.

“Honey, what’s wrong?”

“I have to go on a diet!” Mike practically sobbed the words into his arms.

“A diet?” Joel asked. “I didn’t notice you gaining any weight,” he continued as he rubbed Mike’s back lightly.

“Not that kind of diet. I have high cholesterol. Like, super high. So I have to go on a diet.” Mike raised his head and waved around the papers in his left hand. “She wants me to follow this meal plan for the next three months, then come back and see if my numbers improve before we try medication.���

“That sounds reasonable.”

“It’s not!” Mike cried. “Listen to this: no butter, only non-fat dairy, no fried foods, cut way back on doughnuts and pastries, cut the salt, cut the sugar - “

“Honey, we can work with this,” Joel soothed. “I should eat more healthy, too.”

“And the meat...the meat...” Again Mike buried his head, this time in his hands.

“The meat?”

“The meat. She wants me to limit red meat to once or twice a week, only low-fat cuts. Fish twice a week, chicken the rest of the time. Worst of all no processed meat!”

“Processed meat?”

“No sausage. No beef jerky. And no -” Mike’s face turned white. “No bacon.”

Joel sat back in his chair and let out a low whistle. “No bacon?” he asked tentatively.

“No bacon. Joel, I can’t give up bacon. No. I just can’t.” Mike crumpled the papers in his hand. “I can’t.”

“Yes you can, honey. We’ll do it together.” Joel gulped. Well, he’d try to do it for Mike’s sake, anyway.

“You don’t understand! I can’t! I won’t! I’m not giving up bacon because BACON UNDERSTANDS ME!!!”

[rocket-sith]

Also going back to the Usenet/AOL era of X-Files shipping, generally Shipper, in the context of fandom discussions, meant MSR (Mulder/Scully romance) by default. If you were into a different ship, you had to specify, and if it was F/F or M/M (Mulder/Skinner for example), it was slash. Mulder/Skinner slash, or Scully/Any Other Woman slash (OC or not), whatever - it was slash, and you were into whatever/whatever slash.

Antis were called NoRoMos, short for No Romance, and this phrase too pertained specifically to anti-MSR. That being said, the level of hate over ship rivalry (or much of any rivalry) wasn't seen in fandom to near the degree it is in current fandom. (Save for the Joel vs Mike fights in the MST3K fandom, but that wasn't any sort of ship wank at the time, and it's also another matter ENTIRELY.)

There was definitely an X-Files shipper vs NoRoMo rivalry, and definitely some heated arguments, and Shippers would go NUTS when we knew an upcoming episode was written by Vince Gilligan (yes THAT Vince Gilligan) because he was infamous for dishing both hilarity (X-Cops, Unusual Suspects) and the shippiest shippy episodes that ever shipped with ALL the UST (Pusher, Small Potatoes), and some beautiful unholy hybrids thereof (Bad Blood), and the NoRoMos never knew if they were gonna get either extreme or just something really cool in the middle.

I don't recall seeing suicide bait and threats against fic authors from NoRoMos being the norm or even common though, and here's why:

The threats (not suicide bait, but definitely nasty-grams from corporate lawyers and "delete your page or else" type threats) were all coming from Fox, and they were leveled equally at all corners of fandom, trying to shut ALL of us up and all of us down.

We didn't have AO3, we had the Gossamer Archive, dedicated exclusively to all types of XF fanfic. It got takedown notices and DDOS attacks on the regular. So did X-Files fan pages on GeoCities and AOL Member sites and whatnot - fanfic, fan art, digital art, fan-run forum sites - forget the opposing shipper, Fox was the ultimate Anti. Anti their own fans celebrating what we loved, no matter what form we did it in.

So yeah, you had situations were a fan would panic over Fox's latest escapade in sending out copyright bullshit C&D letters to fan sites and fic archives, a person would frantically try and mirror a site before Fox could take it down, so a well meaning fan would accidentally DDOS the site they were trying to save and it created artifical strife within the fandom.

This shit runs deep. We used to hide huddled by faction in small scattered corners of the internet (AOL message boards, email listserves, IRC channels) or bonded together in large numbers, proudly and shamelessly as one fandom (Gossamer, a.t.x-f/a.t.x-f.c) that occasionally gave each other noogies, but dammit we're all in this together, waiting for the hand of the overlords to bring down its next bullshit copyright C&D flyswatter against a fic writer or an artist or a digital collage photoshopper or whatever, so we put blue EFF ribbons on our pages, and we used HTML to black out our fansites in protest long before Dark Mode was ever a twinkle in Agent Mulder's TrustNo1 eye, and we organized counter campaigns to advocate for the right of fandom itself to exist.

Shipper wars? Oh no. We've got bigger fish to fry. Fandom will live on, dammit. You can come for us, you can TRY, but not today CSM Satan, not today.

Edit to add: Ya know, this is weirdly/hilariously similar to both the Mirror Universe as it's presented in Discovery, and the quasi-mirror Q-niverse in Picard, where all these different, normally-warring species and factions had banded together to form a rebellion against the Terrans. Fox was the Terrans. That's kinda how things tend to work socially and historically - the enemy of my enemy, etc - but seeing it play out in fandom space is the ultimate trope of life and art imitating one another.

every few months some annoying motherfucker makes a post asking why it's called 'spirk' instead of 'spork' or 'kock' and the short, easy answer is: spirk is already the silly ship name, the og ship name is 'k/s' and the og og ship name is 'the premise', because spirk is a ship so old that it was around before ship names were invented. now never come into my house again.

[damejudyhench]

Fanfiction greatness

If you read or write fanfic, please reblog this and comment with your favourite brilliant, bonkers or bizarre moment from fics you have read.

Mine is a tie between the Half-Life fic written as an epistolary novel from the pov of a headcrab who has sworn to kill Gordon Freeman. Freeman killed the headcrabs mother, and is also a brony. At one point the headcrab finds his clopping fic.

Or the MST3K slash fic where Joel describes Mike as “a naive, cornfed, Midwestern blonde.”

[redsofadread]

GUESS WHO'S BACK. AND DRAWING FAN FIC PICTURES

[sokkas-fan-lawyer]

Yep. Not to get "old woman yells at clouds" for a minute but...

Everyone giggles about the cheesy ff.net era of self insert author or interacting with characters in disclaimers, lemons, crack fics where the cast react to their own series MST3K style, and song fics or what have you, but dammit, it was a space where fans could just be as silly as they wanted or as serious as they wanted and both were equally allowed to be celebrated.

They didn't have to deliver professional quality writing or art, it was okay to just be a beginner or a casual dabbler. The shipping wars weren't actually wars for the most part--it was us being dickheads in boats splashing water at each other & playing pretend in good fun.

I do wonder if having more access to creatives via social media & cons, and dealing with actual ongoing series, if at a certain point, people seemed more obsessed with fighting fan wars to shape "canon" itself since it wasn't finished and made the stakes escalate, as fans tried to influence their preferred endgame or try to capture awards for their series vs just being fans of it.

Coupled with the rise in mentality of side hustles--you can't just have hobbies, it's expected to be a serious thing that you can sell via artist alley or patreon, particularly with artwork or crafting. Either because it's more mainstream acceptable now or what, part of the exchange of mass recognition of validty seems to be that it can no longer be just fun, just like everyone else's hobbies have to be tools to raise social profile, influence, generate content, and possibly bring in revenue.

It does feel like it's harder to find not toxic fan communities these days and I feel bad for new fans trying to discover these spaces and not feel like they're on borrowed time before the ones they do find inevitably fade into an empty discord server/chat, or turn mean too, like some kind of zombie/dystopian movie.

**end of rant

Lots of cool stuff out there now for sure, but if we could toss the "mid" or "cringe" mentalities into the sun & just let people be, that'd be great.

"Waa why aren't fandoms fun anymore" because you keep policing people's headcanons, make fun of cosplayers,make fun of selfshipers, make fun of beginner artists and just make fun of people for having fun 😐

[postplus-protest]

Oh my god you're an ELDER elder. I bow to you as a former preteen who migrated from Facebook as the last whispers of Superwholock's tyranny echoed off the walls of these caverns and The Big Four was in full swing.

[Image description : a gif of an elderly person in a colorful dress who is sitting in a metal lawn chair in front of a white brick wall while raising a can in a saluting gesture. /end image description]

I started off in the wilderness of geocities and personal websites where the fan fiction was hidden behind passwords or a complex game of word hide and seek. Fanfiction.net slowly took over. I was fluent in lemon, lime, mst3k, waff, don’t like/don’t read, and “no flames plz”. I still even remember the numbering system for Gundam Wing fic.

Then I moved to message boards. When those died out, I discovered livejournal where I happily stayed for a long time (I even think my old personal lj account still has a Katee Sackhoff Starbuck icon)

Then the Strikethrough happened.

I’ve been here ever since, for better or worse. Occasion interludes were had on Twitter but that always ended terribly.

One of the most surreal moments of my life was in 2014, at work on my lunch break, listening to my co-workers talk about their Avengers RP tumblr thinking I had no clue what they were talking about. Then I mentioned the skeleton wars and things got even weirder.

[arconinternet]

The Stephen Ratliff Misting Archive (Website, ~2003/various years)

You can read this collection of MST3K-style parodies of the Star Trek fanfiction of Stephen Ratliff here. Any missing text files can probably found by control+F-ing an early keyword from the title at this huge collection of MiSTings (e.g. A Royal Mess Part 1 is present in the huge archive at royal_mess.SS.txt).

"Jay! Look away from the camera!"

[ouidamforeman]

☀️ I wanted to make a little tag directory for my blog to make it easier to find things now that I’m more organized. This is mostly for me but you can use it too. Links to my shop, Ko-fi, Ao3, art, and other blogs are here as well! ⤵️

My Stuff:

My inprnt

my art blog ☀️ my art tag ☀️ my ko-fi ☀️ my Ao3 ☀️ my aesthetic/inspiration/positivity blog ☀️

Good Omens:

art  ☀️  fic ☀️ meta ☀️ book omens ☀️ radio omens ☀️ musical omens ☀️

Star Trek:

non-ds9 star trek ☀️ ds9 ☀️ art ☀️ fic ☀️

Gallifrey Audios:

art ☀️ fic ☀️ (meta in the general dw meta tag)

Doctor Who:

art ☀️ fic ☀️ meta ☀️ lore ☀️ edas ☀️ vnas ☀️ books ☀️ audios ☀️ comics ☀️ general gallifreyan stuff ☀️  bernice summerfield ☀️ faction paradox ☀️ general eighth doctor stuff ☀️ cast stuff ☀️ extra stuff/links to content ☀️

Other Stuff/Reference Material/Other fandoms I post about enough to have tags for:

art reference ☀️ cultural stuff ☀️ fan culture ☀️ linguistics ☀️ religion/ex-Christian stuff ☀️ history ☀️ general reference and important stuff ☀️ jesus christ superstar ☀️ mst3k ☀️ steven universe ☀️ over the garden wall ☀️ animation ☀️

[vulgarweed]

Thank You Good Omens

This post is going to be stupid long, because I’ve actually managed to fall in love with Good Omens three different times in my life!

In May of 1990, I was a college student in a hippie town in Ohio that had a great comics/SF book shop (STILL THERE), and because staff knew I loved Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, made sure to point out to me that Gaiman had just co-written a novel and I might like it. I bought it. I did like it, very much.

Despite spending a lot of time on co-op in NYC and seeing Sonic Youth live as often as possible and going hard for the sex & drugs thing, I had just fallen off the turnip truck from a tiny Appalachian town of <300 people with a HEAVY emphasis on hellfire-and-brimstone religion. It permeated everything, including school (Yes, public school. Didn’t matter)

A lot of people don’t know this about me, but I had a fervent Christian phase when I was in my tweens. Despite my parents being non-churchgoers, I did go to church. (They’d drop me off and pick me up). Peer pressure was so strong, it was impossible not to. Being thought of an atheist or Satanist would lead to shit, the beating out of.

And at a revival, I GOT IT. Slain in the spirit, speaking in tongues, the whole bit. I was ALL IN. I hectored my parents and cried because I didn’t want them to go to Hell. And yet, it went away just as fast. I am a spiritual person, don’t expect that will ever change, but I had this super intense faith for a while, and then I lost it.

So when I read Good Omens for the first time, I felt weirdly healed. The mockery of that sort of end-times theology, that also had a sort of gentle humanist kindness at its heart, with its failboat antihero demon and angel protagonists and an Antichrist who really just wanted to hang with his friends and saw taking over the world as a responsibility he didn’t want rather than something desirable…

It got to me. Right in the feels. The fact that it’s a comedy is KEY to its effectiveness - laughter is powerful healing magic, and GO turned the light of satire right onto some of my deepest and most secret fears.

That’s also about the time I found my real path. May 1 (Beltane) 1990 is ALSO the 30th anniversary of my Wiccan coven initiation. (And I’ll be in a Discord chat with my old coven tonight, we have all stayed fairly close) My practice has varied a lot since in the details, but not in the faith core.

That’s round ONE of my Good Omens love. Round TWO was in 2004. I was heartsick and gutted by W’s re-election even though I saw it coming. Honestly I think seeing the Religious Right still hold so much power was a literal trigger, I see that in hindsight now. (The projectile vomiting was a clue)

I decided to cope by attempting to read the Left Behind series, in an “understanding how the enemy thinks” way. Although of course I already knew that all too well. I was reading Fred Clark/Slacktivist’s brilliant page by page takedown, and then I remembered my old friends from that book I loved in college!

Surely I could handle Left Behind if I had Aziraphale and Crowley and Adam and Anathema and the rest mentally sitting next to me and helping to MST3K it! I made it through a book and a half of LB, but the GO reread was worth the price.

I was into fanfic by then, so I realized….”Ah, I bet there is fic. I bet people ship Aziraphale and Crowley.” I was not disappointed. The lower-tadfield comm on LJ at its peak had more than 1000 members, and there were DeviantArt groups and mailing lists and a fair amount on fanfiction.net. So I went ALL IN and I got very productive.

I co-founded the GO Holiday Exchange in 2005 (which I still co-mod, and it’s the longest running job I’ve ever had). I met so many friends there - special shoutout to Merlin/Quantum Witch, my dear friend and collaborator, whose illustrations brought my words to life. I was ecstatic to find that she lives within 2 hours of me, and over the last 15 years we’ve visited each other a lot. We got to meet Neil Gaiman together.

My third burst of GO love came with the show, of course. I went to visit Merlin and we watched it together, and squealed. Particularly through the first half-hour of Episode Three of course. GO fandom has produced a LOT of historical fic for obvious reasons, and it looked like a highlights reel.

Also, there used to be wank in the fandom about how Crowley’s name is pronounced. WE WERE VINDICATED. (Certainly he was named after the real sinister historical A. Crowley, right? Who once wrote a doggerel verse mentioning his name rhymes with “holy.”)

There are things that as a longtime book fan, I don’t like or am ambivalent about in the show, but I think the heart of it was captured so very well. Since the first read 30 years ago, I’ve also read almost all of Pratchett’s Discworld, and his style of discoursing through humor just sits right on my brain.

(Pratchett got me through 2007-2008, when I lost a home, a longterm relationship, and a dream job just a few months apart. Bless you Pterry, you are missed.)

So Thank you Good Omens! You’ve brought me laughter, comfort, creativity, friendship, and a permanent influence on my worldview and spirituality. You’ve created the space for a fandom that tackles deep questions about theology and morality, often in the same work with slapstick comedy and smut.

[horselover107]

4, 5, 14

What fandom’s/ship’s fan fiction do you read the most?

Fandom Torchwood, 10th Doctor era Who, Tiger and Bunny, and Spider-Man/616 Comics verse. Janto, Peter/Mary Jane, Kotetsu/Baranaby (all of which are the canon ships in, or the case of Tiger and Bunny the non-canon but obvious one). I’m pretty basic, I guess lol. I also read a lot of MST3K fic although the archive has slowed down a lot there.

5. What’s a crackship you love?

Jack/The Doctor’s Hand has been my favorite joke since forever.

14. (For authors) Post a line of dialogue from one of your WIPs without context.

(This more than one line, but I liked this string dialogue)

“That’s a torture chamber,” said Ianto.

“Either that or someone is having a lot of fun playing out their BDSM fantasies,” said Jack.

“Hmmmm too much spectacle,” said Ianto. “You could accomplish just as much with some rope and a good imagination.”

“Annddd that’s officially too much information,” said Gwen.

“Do you think our Phantom of the Millennium Centre has brought people down here?” asked Ianto, pointedly ignoring her discomfort at his last statement (Gwen was far too easy to tease sometimes).

[monkeypretzel]

Back to School with Tom and Crow

A short little romp through the joys of back-to-school shopping with the ‘bots. Much credit to @fontonascreen, who helped me flesh out my idea and provided three of the funniest bits of dialogue.

“I dunno,” Mike said, squinting down at the sheet in his hand, “I don’t remember needing all this stuff back when we went to school.”

“Back when we went to school, people still believed that education was important,” Joel answered, a little sharply. “The schools actually had money to provide supplies.” Joel was always a little touchy about educational criticisms, as his parents had been teachers before their retirement, Mike recalled.

“Are you two done? I wanna go pick out my backpack! All the good ones will be gone by the time we get there!” Crow whined and tugged at Mike’s arm.

“There’s a whole aisle full of backpacks. They’re not going anywhere, honey.” Mike kept Crow’s claw in a firm grip. No one was going to get lost this Target trip. “Why do they need crayons and markers and colored pencils? And why do the colored pencils specifically have to be Crayola?”

“The influence of Big Crayon has corrupted us all,” Joel remarked dryly. “Do you want a repeat of last year? Just get the stuff on the list.”

“It’s hardly my fault I was being a smart consumer and going with the least expensive option.”

Tom piped up from his seat in the shopping cart. “Have you ever tried coloring with generic dollar store crayons, Mike? It’s like using candles. Picasso didn’t use Cra-Z-Art for his masterpieces. How do you expect my creativity to blossom if you cheap out all the time?!?”

Mike stared at Tom, eyebrow raised. “If someone doesn’t behave himself, everyone is going to lose their McDonald's trip later.” The little red robot stared defiantly back for a moment, then sighed and sank back into his seat. Crow tugged at Mike’s arm again. “That goes for you, too, Crow.”

“But Daaaaaad -”

Mike snorted. “You only play the Dad Card when you know I’m right.”

“Let’s split up,” Joel suggested, grabbing another cart. “You and Tom get the school supplies, and I’ll take Crow to get his backpack.”

“Nuh-uh,” interrupted Crow. “I wanna go with Mike.” The man in question looked down at Crow. He’d been awfully clingy lately, choosing Mike over Joel in almost every situation. Mike filed that away to think about later.

“Fine,” Joel answered, his patience already fraying before they even got started. “Do you want to ride in the cart, Crow?”

“Only babies ride in the cart!”

“Hey!” Tom protested.

“Well it’s true!”

“McDonald's, guys?” Mike reminded the pair. They shut up immediately. “Tom, same black messenger bag like last year?” he asked.

Tom nodded. “It’s much more grown up than some baby backpack!”

“Hey!” It was Crow’s turn to protest.

“Enough. We’ll meet up in front of the cleaning supplies. Give me the list,” Joel said, plucking it out of Mike’s hand. “How you always end up with the easy job, I don’t know,” grumbled Joel, adjusting his glasses and giving the paper the once-over. Mike glanced down at Crow, once again straining with impatience.

One hour later…

“OK, you’ve got your Beauty and the Beast notebook – do you want a Toy Story one too? You need two different ones.”

“That’s for babies,” said Tom disdainfully. “How about X-Men?”

Joel scanned the shelves. “Sorry, buddy, seems like you’re outta luck on that. Harry Potter?”

“No. Unless it’s got the guy turning to ash on it! That’d be cool!”

“I think not. Monsters Inc.?

Tom tilted, considering. “Any with just Sully?”

Digging through the disorganized mess on the shelf in front of him, Joel located one and held it up for Tom. “This good?”

“It’ll do. I still want -” Over Joel’s shoulder Tom spied the Trapper Keepers. “Joel! Joel! Joel! I want the Trapper Keeper with the unicorn on it, right over there!”

“You know the school says no Trapper Keepers, Tom. Plain, solid color, one-inch three ring binder, that’s all.” Joel had memorized the list in the first fifteen minutes of arguing with Tom.

“But I want a unicorn! I want a rainbow unicorn, and that Trapper Keeper is the only one left! Please? Please? I’ll keep it at home for homework!”

Joel looked up at the ceiling and counted to ten while Tom begged. Taking a deep breath he pushed the cart past temptation and stopped in front of the folders.

“Here’s a Star Wars folder. Do you want a Star Wars folder?” Joel asked as he held one out.

“Not THAT one. Do you want me to be depressed every time I look at it?”

Joel glanced down at Hayden Christensen’s image. “Good point.” He tossed it back on the pile, then spied a burst of color on the next shelf up.

“You wanted a rainbow unicorn.” Joel grabbed a handful of folders and threw them in the cart. "Here's a pile of Lisa Frank folders. Go nuts."

Two hours later...

Mike sagged over the shopping cart and glanced at his watch for the hundredth time. “C’mon, Crow, just pick one already! Joel’s gonna kill me for letting you take this long.”

“I’m almost done! It’s a choice between this one,” Crow hefted a backpack with a picture of Spider Man shooting a web in his right claw, “and this one,” nodding at the pack in his left claw that featured a puffy, 3-D close-up design of Spider-Man’s suit.

Exaggeratedly Mike slowly turned to look up the aisle, then down, at the wall of backpacks in front of the two. "Why does it take you two hours to pick out a backpack if you just end up getting a Spider-Man one again?"

"I might want a different one! You don't know!" Crow snapped.

“Well, I do know now, because you’ve got two Spider-Man backpacks in your hands.”

“Which one do you like better?”

“I don-” Mike caught himself. He’d get out of here faster if he expressed an opinion. “The one with the picture.”

“I don’t know,” said Crow, “I kinda like the other one better.”

“Then pick the other one, and let’s go!”

“It’s not that easy! I have to live with this for a whole year! My reputation is on the line!”

“What reputation?”

“I happen to be the foremost Spider-Man expert in school! At least in my grade. Or my class. Anyway, it’s a heavy responsibility I carry,” Crow explained.

Mike dropped his head even lower over the cart. He took a deep breath, willed away the throbbing at his temples, straightened, and tried again.

"Crow, I thought you wanted something different this year? We could just use last year's backpack again if you're just going to get another Spider-Man."

"You can't use the same backpack two years in row! Geeze, no wonder no one liked you in school, Nelson!"

“I didn’t have a backpack. We didn’t use those yet,” Mike explained.

“So what did you carry your stone tablets around in?”

Mike’s eyes narrowed. “McDonald’s,” he reminded the gold bot.

Crow looked down. “Sorry,” he mumbled. Mike was touched. Crow did seem sorry – he hadn’t talked back.

“It’s OK, buddy,” Mike laid his hand on Crow’s shoulder. “You really gotta pick a backpack, though. So which one?”

“You really like the picture best?”

“Yeah, I do,” Mike answered warmly.

“Then I’m getting the other one!” Crow tried to toss it in the cart, but missed and hit Mike in the arm instead.

Mike picked the backpack up off the tiled floor, placed it in the cart alongside Tom’s messenger bag, and grabbed Crow’s claw before he could scamper off. “Next stop Pharmacy Department!”

“But we’re supposed to meet Joel over by the Kleenex!”

“There’s no way I’m going to make it through a trip to McDonald’s without a supersize bottle of aspirin. Or ibuprofen. Or both.”

[unfolded73]

A comment on another post by a recent Schitt’s Creek mutual got me thinking about fandom lineage. For any recent followers, or for any followers who are like, why was I following this person again?, here’s mine:

Pre-internet (or pre-me realizing fandoms existed on the internet): In the 1980s, Santa Barbara, Ghostbusters, Moonlighting, and a very short-lived show starring Parker Stevenson called Probe (which in retrospect was a Doctor x companion-style 2-hander and also omg in googling to try to remember what the hell this show was called I realized that all of it is on youtube. fuck me, it’s not gonna hold up at all, is it?) In the 1990s, Star Trek:TNG (yes, I am *very* excited about Picard, thanks for asking), The Simpsons, MST3K, Babylon 5, and Farscape. Farscape might have been the first show where I started to realize internet fandom existed. I remember downloading fan-videos and maybe reading some John x Aeryn fic. (Man, I need to rewatch Farscape*.)

2001-2003: Buffy x Spike, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. My first foray into fic writing, but please don’t go looking for it. It’s bad. Mainly I watched fandom drama and ship wars (hey, I shipped Buffy and Angel too in their time - it’s all good) playing out in yahoo groups, so it was also my first exposure to how toxic fandom can be. Also fell down an Angel x Spike and Buffy x Faith rabbit hole on occasion, back when it seemed ooh, so subversive. 

2007-2011: Ten x Rose and Ten2 x Rose, Doctor Who. Livejournal was my haunt in those days. Made leaps and bounds of improvement as a writer in this fandom, and made some long-lasting friendships. I also played around in the shallow end of the multishipping pool, and I read and wrote a bit of Ten x Jack, Jack x Ianto, Ten x Master, Ten x Queen Elizabeth (before the 50th anniversary special, yuck), Ten x Rose x Jack, and of course the thing that I and my coauthor are moderately famous for, Ten x Ten2 x Rose. Tried to hang on into the Moffat era but eventually bailed from both fandom and the show. Loving Jodie Whittaker though! Even wrote one gen fic about her and Graham last year!

2013: Pepperony, Iron Man/Avengers. This hardly warrants a mention, but I did read fic around the time of Iron Man 3, and I only mention it because I was inspired to write grief-fic for this ship just a few months ago. 

2014-2015: Ben x Leslie, Parks and Recreation. I debated about putting this on the list, because I never wrote any fic or participated in fandom culture other than to read a few fics, mainly by one author who somehow managed to capture the right silly/sexy balance. Mostly I rewatched the show a lot and soaked in that sweet, sweet serotonin. 

2016-2018: Captain Swan, Once Upon a Time. Never have I shipped something so intensely from a show that I didn’t particularly even like most of the time. Also dabbled in Millian, Curious Archer, and Knightrook, which apparently makes me a fake fan in some corners of fandom. *shrug* Didn’t care then and care even less now.

2018: Starmora, Guardians of the Galaxy. Look, I need hours and hours of TV episodes to sustain myself in a fandom, so I only dabbled here when the angst of Infinity War inspired me. But I consider my interest in this temporarily suspended, ready to rise from the ashes when James Gunn finally gets around to making GotG3.

2019: Ashburn, Star Trek: Discovery. I was only starting to really get into this when the show writers seemingly abandoned this ship permanently. I wanted to stick with it, maybe throw canon out the window and live in a fanon world where this ship is still sailing the high (subspace) seas, but I just didn’t have the mental fortitude for that. Which is probably why...

2019-????: David x Patrick, Schitt’s Creek. I started watching this because a couple of mutuals from Captain Swan fandom were posting cute gifs, and I felt like I needed another Parks and Rec-like warm and squishy show to get a serotonin hit from. Boy, did I ever. My descent from “aww, aren’t they cute” to writing fic was 9 days (seriously, I just checked tumblr and my google drive version history to get that number), and I had to drive from Chicago to South Carolina in the middle of that. I fell hard, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be here for a while.

No, it has not escaped my notice that there is a marked uptick in the frequency  here. I think that’s probably tumblr, and the fact that you can see a mutual is into a thing and then follow them down into the same hole. Which is cool, I like that. I also am certainly aware that I’m mainly a het shipper, but that’s because I tend to be rely very heavily on canon. Unless I see it portrayed on-screen, it usually doesn’t occur to me to ship something. What can I say, I fundamentally lack imagination.

* ETA: Ok I just checked the dates and Farscape ran 1999-2003? So I guess it overlapped with Buffy? I don’t remember it that way at all. Huh.