sarasa_cat

http://fandom-talks-back.tumblr.com/post/13808739479/30-day-fandom-meta-challenge

When I first saw this 30 Day meme about a week ago I felt like answering it for DA2 because, at that time I felt like reminding myself why I like DA and why that canon grabbed me. Although, at the same time, I considered doing the same meme for FFXII instead. A few days back I decided that the FFXII version of this meme could wait for a month or three … and then today I made the mistake of looking at tumblr beyond my short list of trusted blogs.

After thinking about ditching this meme for DA2, I decided I am going to do a deathmatch version of this meme and write shorter answers for FFXII and DA2. FWIW, I started answering some of these meme questions over the past weekend. Might as well not wait text although I might edit some of it down so both receive equal treatment in words.

I will reword and change the meme questions as needed. I mostly plan to using these questions as springboards rather than answering them directly.

1. How (and why) did you get into this fandom?

FFXII: By Accident.

I was playing a purposefully underleveled game shortly after FFXII came out and I was stuck on the demonwall battle. I didn’t want to go back out into the world and level grind so, after hearing the Game Over music yet another time, I crafted a google search that had something to do with Battle Strategy, Basch, Vossler, and Raithwall’s tomb, and one of the top three links Google coughed up was … Vossler/Basch fanfic???

Not even sure why I clicked on it. Maybe I didn’t even realize it was fanfic. At that time I firmly believed I had negative interest in fanfic except … well, the first sentence hooked me, it was only 1200 words or so, and DAMN IT WAS GOOD.

I mean really good. Really. Really Good.

Good prose, good pacing, amazing characterization … wait, there is good fanfic??? Oh, how ignorant I was back then!

I left that tab open, read the battle strategy faq I was looking for, demolished that demon wall (okay, barely survived but killed it before it killed me), gamed a little longer and then I went back and found other FFXII fanfic. There wasn’t much back then. The game was new, but what I found was surprisingly omnomnomnomnomgood.

I spent a few hours here and there digging around the community of people (LJ & Fanfic.net) posting this fic and realized, dammit. I need to do this too.

At the time, I was extremely burned out by a horrid multi-month genre-fiction writers workshop that just … don’t even get me started on it. Fanfic suddenly looked like a good antidote for that horrid workshop. The folks writing this fanfic appeared to be heavily into meta analysis, trope deconstruction, and the craft of writing. So I just dove in.

I was only going to do it for a year. Never left.

DA: Oh No. Not another fandom.

I was mostly (but not entirely) monogamous with FFXII fandom for 5 years.

I never planned on writing for another fandom because FFXII served my needs. But when I played DAO, I thought about a story I wanted to write that did the typical fanfic thing: fill in missing scenes and fill in internal thoughts for a character whose motivations are subject to interpretation.

At the time, I thought I would get in, write the story, and be done.

But, I happened to play DAO, DAO:Awakening, and DA2 back to back over a period of a couple of months and so many aspects of DA2’s setting, characters, conflicts, and lore sucked me in.

I went from having one DAO novella I wanted to write to having two novel-length epics plus a long list of kmeme prompts. I generated at least 125,000 words in a few months.

Although, unlike FFXII fandom where I wrote an ocean of words and posted most of them, I held back on posting DA fanfic. In short, DA fandom felt nothing like FFXII fandom or other final fantasy fandoms, for that matter.

Two reasons: (1) I wasn’t finding enough fanfic I wanted to read, which made me wonder if I was in the wrong fandom for the kinds of writing that interest me, (2) I saw endless amounts of viscous fanwank. BSN was ugly as hell and tumblr wasn’t entirely pretty either.

So, as inspired as I was, I kept feeling like “this isn’t my fandom.”

That said, I’m a persistent person. I made a point of posting meta that provided different viewpoints from what I commonly saw, I selected a small portion of my ever-growing pile of DA fanfic to post, I converted at least one other person to DA, and I found my small happy space off in the margins.

Reflection All These Years Later.

FFXII fandom was creative joy. Creativity that kept on giving. Good fic, good conversations, and a lot of ideas are still sitting in draft … and a few that have sparked new life into original fiction ideas. I continued thinking about my old-hold FFXII stories while active in DA fandom and, recently, I went back to my FFXII fanfic and started reorganizing it for my new fanfic archive. I even considered adding and expanding to it… When I dove back in I found words that made me squee. Beautiful words. Lovely prose. Stories that make me feel so much yesness.

DA fandom, on the other hand, has been a giant bag of mixed feelings. I am literally sitting on one million words (this is not a joke. I really mean one million. in scrivener and dgocs) of partly posted, partly edited fanfic plus a good chunk of meta too and, as much as I love those stories (and the meta), I have a hard time motivating myself to share the fanfic that hasn’t already been posted. I think my quality of storytelling in DA fanfic is more consistent than in FFXII because in FFXII some of my fanfic was cliquish fannish in-jokes whereas all of my DA fanfic is meant to be read by anyone. But the prose doesn’t always sing to me. Feels, oh, yes. They exist. But. Always a but. In fact, my most popular DA fanfic was written as a tongue-in-cheek parody of an entire genre (although I’m not sure that is how readers read it???). And, TBH, watching 4 years of endless wank in the fandom has been tiring. It has also driven away people who are interested in aspects of canon that I find interesting.

I am still attached to both fandoms via all of the creative energy I have poured in and I still want to use fanfic as a fun way to blow off creative steam in a low-stakes social environment. Fanfic == pubtalk. It’s a way to still talk shop after my real work is done.

I’ve been looking at my mountain of fanfic and I cannot decide what I want to play with. I really don’t know.

That is why I am writing this 30 day meme.

Also, I should probably grab a few prompts from