#not that i've really had anything to do with the ff8 fandom for years but w/e

[deet-doot]

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[kitkatt0430]

For your salty ask questions : 7, 20 and 22 love your options on things

7.) Is there anything you used to like but can’t stand now?

So the show Eureka. The fandom itself had issues while I was a part of it, though I did a pretty good job of steering clear of the worst of it until towards the end of the show's run.

Eureka was a SyFy channel show that aired while I was in college and for the most part I really liked it. But... one of the main characters, Allison, had an autistic child whose treatment by the show made me very uncomfortable for reasons I didn't really understand at the time because, well... I was pretty ignorant about autism at the time.

They basically treated this kid as a plot device. The mom didn't seem interested in figuring out how to communicate in ways the kid was comfortable with but instead being devastated that the only time he communicated in ways she was comfortable with was when he was semi-possessed by some science-magic-thing. That was killing him. The kid eventually creates an Einstein-Rosen bridge (wormhole) to facilitate his mom and some others to time travel in order to butterfly effect the future just enough that he's not autistic. Like, it's heavily implied that the kid did that. on purpose. after which he finally became a real character and not a plot device and his mom sabotaged the other characters attempts to fix the timeline because she liked this version of her son better.

... yeah...

And usually this is where I'd go looking for fix fics and I did look for some because even with not knowing much about autism at the time even I knew that last part with the kid erasing himself from history to replace himself with a not-autistic and not-really-him version of himself was really bad writing. If you have to replace your autistic character with a non-autistic version in order to make him an active character in your show, you're a shitty show runner and/or writer.

But honestly I just wasn't finding any at the time. Maybe there are some now, maybe I wasn't looking in the right places. But I was starting to run more and more into misogynistic or racist treatments of Allison as I became less and less interested in fics that included her directly. At which point the show was over, I wasn't really enamored with either it or the fandom anymore, and it was time to move on.

To some degree I do miss it. It started while I was in high school and it was something I continued to watch on weekends with my parents during college (along with Doctor Who and a few other shows). It had a lot of really fun things going and I had a good fandom friend for Eureka and FF8 who I've since lost touch with. But in retrospect, and having since learned more about autism and why the quest to 'cure' it is basically eugenics... it's really hard to look back on the show without being appalled by how ableist it really was. So though I might miss it, I sincerely doubt I'll ever rewatch it or return to the fandom.

20.) What is the purest ship in the fandom?

Yeah I have no idea. I think 'purest ship' is kind of a silly metric because nothing is every going to be perfect or 'pure'. And with the rise of purity culture here on tumblr over the last several years, even though I would be just joking around to name a ship as the purest... it still feels like I'd be invoking the idea of moral superiority for shipping the pure ships. So honestly, the question makes me a little uncomfortable for how it's phrased.

If I were to rephrase it as the ship with the least baggage attached, then maybe Barrisco, Westhawne, or Snowest for the Flash. The characters still have to work out problems that arise between them over the course of the show, but these three have what feels like - to me anyway - the least amount of baggage weighing them down in their interactions together and canon relationships be they platonic or romantic. But I wouldn't call them pure ships because I really just don't think there's any such thing.

22.) Popular character you hate?

It's hard to think of one because even villains I tend to hate in a love to hate way. At the characters I don't hate in the love to hate way - like Mark Blaine - are more often than not fandom unfavorites anyway.

I don't hate Felicity, but I don't like her the way I used to either. Characterization marches on and all that.

I'll still pop in on the Supernatural fandom sometimes despite the show eventually making all the main characters kind of unlikable (or maybe it was the trauma conga line getting forever darker that made it feel hard to like anything while watching it anymore...) but the fanon versions of the characters are still enjoyable to me.

I don't hate Steve from the MCU but by the time he was written out of the franchise he was... very much not my Captain America anymore. Largely because they made him too much of a self centered hypocrite with never my fault/consequences avoidant tendencies that are at odds with what I like about the character from the comics I've read. (Admittedly not a lot of comics, as I prefer other marvel comics characters over Captain America like Miles Morales and Gwen Stacy as Ghost-Spider and Jane's run as Thor...) But honestly... what else could I expect when the movies were taken over by people who were on the record as hating all the characters? I may not like this version of Steve anymore, but I find it hard to hate a character I know was being deliberately written badly.

Gwen from Torchwood mind raped her fiance/future husband to avoid him leaving her for cheating on him and... I really don't like her for that but given all the shit the other Torchwood characters get up to it feels a little strong to say I hate her for it. I hate the way the narrative treated her as a morality pet but she was, in many ways, just another victim of the way working for Torchwood - even Jack's Torchwood - eventually eroded a person's sense of ethics. And the show runners trying a bit too hard to be edgy. (Though admittedly, sometimes I do hate her for it, usually when I'm rewatching that part of the show in the wrong mood.)

[case-of-traxits]

Headcanon: so I only just got here, but I definitely get the sense you've been wading in the FFVII water a long time!

[For this game, where you can submit HC you might have about me.] [Still taking asks!]

HAH. So long. So, so long.

I was nine when the original FF7 released, and I vividly remember watching my cousin, who was twelve or thirteen, play it on his PlayStation the winter of 1997 because he got it for Christmas. I fell in love with Tifa in the early Midgar scenes. I then begged for my own console and copy of the game until I finally got my own console in 1999. Unfortunately for me, my mother bought me the "new" Final Fantasy game (FF8) that had just released, not realizing that they were radically different games. I didn't get to buy my own copy of FF7 until I'd saved up enough money to do so, which was probably another six months or so? Maybe even another year.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love FF8. I probably love FF8 a little more than I love FF7. There's a certain... Mm. I'm not sure. I don't know that I can really explain why I love FF8 more.

But I have written far, far more for FF7 than I ever have for anything else. I've spent way more hours engrossed in RP and meta and fan projects over the years (I've been a part of two separate novelization attempts of the OG, both of which fell apart due to shipping wars back before AC released) and at this point... My time spent with FF7 has affected a lot of things about me, from how I approach media to how I write.

I started with RP for FF7 back when I was... eleven or so? I'd found where someone had posted a script, read the whole thing before I ever got to play it, and joined an old e-mail based RP, where everyone had different characters and like, it was a mad free-for-all where any one of like, eight people could reply after someone else posted in it. I started out with an OC Turk, but then rapidly ended up with Reeve and Reno both and I just... never let go of either of them?

So now, here I am, 35 and still writing these two bastards. As well as a whole host of other FF7 characters now. So I guess next year, I get to start saying I've been in the fandom for a full 25+ years. It's kind of crazy, honestly?

[kitkatt0430]

🌈🌩️

So, I've been setting up an old computer to run a diy home cloud and using that to backup all my old WiPs. And I took advantage of this to completely re-organize my WiPs folder to sort out transcript docs into a separate space, better track finished or 'retired' files, and digging through older fic ideas that I'd forgotten about over time. So I'm going to answer this using some of my older files from fandoms I'm not usually active in these days.

🌈 Share something soft/fluffy from your WIP.

Shawn grinned and considered making a bid for the gift, but decided to stay quiet. Odds were he was on the naughty list anyway; he was lucky to have been picked for the Polar Express at all. Someone else would get the gift... but he was okay with that. The entire experience had been an amazing gift all in itself.

And then, above the din, he heard Santa call out, “Shawn Spencer, come with me.”

From a Psych/Polar Express x-over fic. This is from the prologue where young Shawn gets one of the bells from the reindeer harnesses as the First Gift of Christmas. He's not sure what's going on is really happening, but he believes the magic and spirit are more important than real versus fake. And this is from the last part of the prologue where Shawn's spent the whole trip a bit worried he isn't really good enough, so Santa picking him when he's not being loud and acting out validates that the times he does so with his dad don't actually make him a bad kid.

It's just meant to be a silly little fic with a lot of soft moments. In part about how, despite being unconventional Shawn is a good person who cares about helping others. But its also about Lassiter getting to have a happy Christmas after his divorce from his wife is made official, when he felt like he was really struggling to be happy. And him learning to recognize that opening himself up to new friendships is worth the risk in making himself vulnerable.

I really only got this one so far as the prologue, but re-reading it has made me want to do something with it, whether it's write the fic I once envisioned or just split off the prologue and expand it into it's own fic about kid Shawn.

🌩️ Share something funny/cracky from your WIP.

“There’s something unusual about the Force today,” the ginger haired knight mused. “Perhaps we’ve been summoned because of that. Though… why Master Yoda would say that all Ani and I will be there for is moral support is beyond me. It’s not like you’ve done anything worth reprimanding… lately.”

Anakin snickered, earning a sharp, teasing glare from his master. “You wound me, both of you.” Seifer flung his right hand dramatically against his heart. “Oh, the pain… shall I ever survive?”

“And I’m supposed to learn from him?” Anakin cast a doubtful glance in Obi-wan’s direction.

“Just think, Ani; you’re stuck with him for at least ten years… if not more.”

Mock horror stole across the nine-year-old’s face and he scurried over to cling to Obi-wan’s robes. “Help me, Obi-wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope!”

From an old WiP where the resolution of Time Compression at the end of FF8 sends Seifer to Coruscant and the Jedi in particular. There's speculation that he might be the Chosen one and gets taken as the padawan. The main fic, however, is Seifer and Obi-Wan as adults, sharing 'custody' of Anakin. Having someone else who might be the Chosen One around makes things easier on Anakin so he feels less pressured to be perfect, Obi-Wan is more laid back because he isn't having to jump straight from being a padawan to raising one all by himself, and the council is a bit more relaxed about inter-personal relationships here so Seifer and Obi-Wan are supposed to be openly in a relationship. This one is from... I dunno, my early college years? I still really like the idea of Seifer getting transported to the Star Wars prequels, though I'm no longer sold on the ship. That said, I really love this interaction here. It's silly and fun, with a shout out to one of the most iconic Star Wars lines of course.

I think I actually had a few different variations on this idea anyway, though I don't know that I wrote them all down.

[kitkatt0430]

1, 4, 18, and 21 for the behind the scenes fic game!!

1.) What was the first fandom and/or pairing that you wrote fic for?

So before I even knew what fanfiction sites were or heard of the term fanfiction, I wrote little stories about Captain Janeway and Seven of Nine from Star Trek Voyager on the old Windows 3.1 that my dad gave me when he got the Windows 95. These weren't shipping fics or anything - I was still pretty young when Voyager started airing. I was... six when the show came out? And it was a couple of years after that he let me have the computer.

Sadly, the computer didn't last long. So the fics I wrote on it were lost when it died. I switched back to writing in notebooks... but I didn't write long form a lot because it made my hand cramp to write too much. Unfortunately that means that all my old Voyager fics are long gone. (At the time I was upset about losing what I'd been writing... but even more upset about not being able to play the Kings Quest games anymore since they didn't run well on the 95 and what games did run on the 95 I could now only play when dad wasn't using and I had permission to play.)

4.) Do you outline before you start writing? If so, how far do you stray from that outline?

Sometimes. But more often not. The more outlining I do, the harder it becomes to write because often the story evolves in ways I just can't predict and the outline becomes useless. Or it just makes it too hard for me to write at all because I outlined.

But a sort of generalized outline can help too, sort of like as a bookmark when I need to set aside a WiP to pick up later. It gives me a better idea, when I pick it back up to work on, of where I was at with the story and what my plans for it were. They're also useful for when I have an idea that doesn't really work because I can look over the outline and retool it into something else down the line. The City on the Hill is a good example of a fic that I took an outline for a massive crossover idea I had years ago, stripped it down to the underlying plotbunny and turned it into something that stands on its own really nicely. (Though I do still want to write some follow ups to it...)

18.) What is a line/scene you’re really proud of? Give us the DVD commentary for that scene.

Since I've already brought up The City on the Hill in the answer for #4, how about we go with Drax's regeneration scene.

The whole fic itself was retooled from a plot intended to play out later in a series where the Master was hiding not as Professor Yana at the end of time, but as Seifer Almasy from FF8, protected from detection of the Time Lords by the temporal parodox the game is built around. The first 'season' would have been built around Seifer!Master 'waking up' during a Cyberman invasion on his world - they'd have been coming from the moon from a base The Rani had left behind. It would have turned out that the 'draw points' on the world where magic was siphoned from were actually formed of artron energy that dulled the sound of the drums. He'd help deal with the Cybermen and then escape with Fujin (one of Seifer's friends) to seek out the source of the drums and put an end to them over the course of several episodic fics. Honestly, I'm still really like the idea here, but it's been so long since I last played FF8 that my drive to write it kinda... waned. But it might still wind up happening down the road.

The second 'season' involved the Doctor and the Master traveling together and discovering a number of Time Lords had survived the Time War under various circumstances. The Rani would have been the source of the Sorceresses - her body in stasis somewhere (the moon?) while the fob watch had been opened by humans and infected several women. If one Sorceress held too much of the Rani's mind, she'd go a little... mad with power. The Master would have been there for Ianto waking as Drax and there would have been an entirely different crisis going on with Torchwood. The Toymaker would have been revealed to be a Time Lord possessed by... I don't really remember what, exactly but I intended to have the White and Black Guardians involved (which would not make the Doctor happy at all)... That was where a lot of tv shows that I used to be interested in (NCIS: LA for example) were supposed to start tying in.

The plot out of 'season two' for that outlined series (do you see what I mean about outlines? Had a whole 2 or 3 seasons worth of fic ideas and couldn't get any of it written) was Ianto being a Time Lord. It's a plot idea I love and just can't get enough of. So I had to remove the Master because he no longer fit and I wanted to set the fic post season 2 of Torchwood and thus after the year that never happened since those events happened between season 1 and 2 of Torchwood. Can't have a redeemed version of the Master if I'm using canon up to that point, after all. I was initially going to keep the aliens I'd planned from the outline and tease the Rani as a future villain, but the plot with the Axons was convoluted and was meant to be a nod to the Master's past. The whole thing took away from it being Ianto's story, so the Axons got scrapped too.

That was when I started looking at the Rani as the main villain, which worked very well once I started spinning that idea in my head. I did actually have a version of the scenes where Drax is lured to the Earth by Rani and getting forcibly regenerated already written. It needed to be reworked for the new version of the plot but the bones of it remained. I split it into several scenes, becoming the first part of each chapter - Drax and the Rani meeting up on Earth, the Rani's plan involving Strange Matter and attempting to convince Drax to build her a version of Mentalis to manipulate Strange Matter for her, the Rani deciding Drax would be more cooperative as a child, forcing him to regenerate while trapped in a Chameleon arch, Drax calling her a bitch... it's very different in the final version, but all those plot points are there in the original prologue I'd written. I just moved the Rani from being a greater scope villain to being the main problem, allowing the focus of the 'present day' setting to be on Ianto's hidden identity as Drax.

I really liked the idea of weaving in older Doctor Who canon with the new canon, which was a heavy feature of the series I'd outlined, and I do want to repurpose a lot of those plot ideas I had into stories eventually. So who knows, maybe I'll eventually write an entire fic with Seifer Almasy as the Master after all. But some of those ideas may wind up as a continuation of The City on the Hill instead. I'm still particularly fond of the plot I called 'The Blow Fish Fiasco' which was meant to be a Torchwood story about Ianto and the rest of the team settling in with the knowledge he's actually a Time Lord. Mostly intended to be a silly fic involving a revenge plot over the death of the blow fish alien in the Torchwood S2 premiere.

21.) What is the one fic that got away?

Well, there's that Seifer Almasy as the Master series. But since I still have hopes of some of that making it into fic form one way or another, I'll talk about something else instead.

For The Knights of the Old Republic games, I had an idea for remixing the plots of the two games so that both Revan and the Exile's plots were playing out simultaneously. Instead of being brainwashed by the jedi, Darth Revan would be have been put in carbonite by Darth Malak in case he ever needed her again (female!Revan, though I think if I wrote it now I'm might go with canonical male!Revan or have Revan as non-binary) but of course thanks to the war she wound up on a ship that crash lands in Kashyyyk, so she winds up waking up with amnesia and Jolee Bindo watching over her. Meanwhile the Jedi recall The Exile, who has been working with Atton since a few months since he defected from the Sith. Since Malak deposed Revan, several other Sith Lords have been popping up - specifically a certain three from the second game - and the war has gotten even more chaotic as a result.

It's still an interesting idea to me, but I could never get the pieces to fit right and eventually I just kinda gave up on it. And then I lost the file I had with bits and pieces already written or otherwise outlined. Or I deleted it? I might have deleted it so that it would stop bothering me when I saw the file. Honestly I was pretty frustrated with the whole thing refusing to come together and it came back whenever I opened the file, so there's a good chance I just got rid of it for my own peace of mind.

Even if I had the file still... I don't really think I'd ever put any effort into rewriting it or trying to finish any of it. And I don't think I'll try to restart a new file for it (I mean... I can't say never, but...) because while it's an interesting idea, I'm not really as invested in the KotOR games as I used to be. Not the way I still am with something like Doctor Who or the Flash.