Random Insanity

Challenge #14 for the snowflake_challenge is to do a little scavenger hunt with pictures. So I guess I won't be rambling about randomness today. I'm not taking any new photos for this because I'm feeling lazy so these are coming off my hard drive or the internet.

(My desktop wallpaper from the Girl Genius Kickstarter a couple years ago.)

This is going to be another tough challenge from snowflake_challenge because I tend to read stuff and then immediately forget about what I read even with bookmarks. My memory is shot thanks to the brain fog from the Chronic Fatigue.

I basically went through my list of bookmarked fics at AO3 and chose the ones I could recall the plot to without rereading anything. Those were the ones that obviously stood out to me and deserve recs. Of course, I only recently started making an effort to bookmark stories so the list is limited and doesn't take into account stuff I read and loved ten years ago but no longer have links to (and probably can't remember names).

Anyway, here's a short list of memorable stories (in the order they appeared in my bookmarks):

1. Prometheus by nogoaway

Fandom: Red vs Blue
Last Updated: 2015
Chapters: 3/3 (finished)
Words: 17,326
Rating: T
Summary: He's not sure until the day he loses the eye, but afterwards York's certain: The Director is trying to kill him.

My Thoughts: The summary for this one does not do it justice. The story is York-centric and takes place during the Freelancer episodes of the show, following him through the events from his POV as he pieces together what he considers to be a plot by the Director to get rid of him. I loved the way the wove his thoughts and experiences into the canon without distorting things, and they got York's voice just right.

This fic also had my favorite line of any fic. It was enough that I printed it off, and it's still hanging on my wall: What he does remember is being 0 for 8 in paintball, sore and not a little humliated, but having what almost amounted to a good time because watching Agent Texas move was a fucking religious experience.

2. Recover None by RenaRoo

Fandom: Red vs Blue
Last Updated: 2017
Chapters: 61/61 (finished)
Words: 334,356 
Rating: T (I would up it a little for the violence and occasional gore)
Summary: [Canon Divergence AU] When the Mother of Invention crashed, Project Freelancer was in shambles, its surviving agents scattered, its equipment stolen, and an impending investigation into the crash from the UNSC was on the horizon. To regain control of the deeply corrupted program, the Director established a new unit from his remaining supplies -- the Recovery Unit.
My Thoughts: This series was really funny and sweet about Tarvek and Gil during their time in Paris while in university as they start to develop feelings for each other and don't know how to deal with it. The title comes from Bang's constant advice to just send knives because those are the best gifts. There are eleven stories in the series--each complete, but the series itself is, unfortunately, unfinished and the author seems to have moved on to other things. I think the finished stories are still worth the read as are her other Girl Genius series. I also really enjoyed Unreliable Narrators (Gil/Agatha/Tarvek) and Blundering Onward (also Gil/Agatha/Tarvek).

4. Sin and Duty by catie_writes_things

Fandom: Avatar the Last Airbender/Legend of Korra
Last Updated: 2020 
Chapters: 13/13 (finished)
Words: 84,689
Rating: T
Summary: As a child, Bumi knew: his mother was a waterbender, his father was an airbender, and he was a firebender. Something about these facts did not add up, but it would take him a long time to understand.
My Thoughts: This story was so good. It's told through Bumi's POV as if he were writing his memoirs later in life and follows him as he grows up knowing he's a firebender when that should be impossible, through his adulthood as his family deals with the fallout of that revelation, and far into the future as he learns what he wants from life. This is a complete AU and doesn't follow any of the plot from Legend of Korra. Bumi follows his own path that sometimes lines up with facts from the show, but mostly it's independent. The story is beautifully written and made me cry so many times. It also inspired my own ideas for stories about firebender-Bumi (that I probably will never write because they could never compare to this story). Well worth the read for Bumi's voice in the memoirs and the family drama that develops because of his situation.

5. Fate Deferred by catie_writes_things

Fandom: Avatar the Last Airbender
Last Updated: January 2021
Chapters: 30/55 (unfinished)
Words: 223,107
Rating: T
Summary: At the south pole, Katara and Sokka returned to their village with only a few small fish to show for their trouble. “Stupid magic water,” Sokka grumbled, while Katara fumed silently.

Aboard his ship, the banished Prince Zuko admitted with a tired sigh that his search of the southern seas had proven unfruitful. “Tell my uncle...we’re going to try the eastern Air Nomad territories again.”

Underneath the waves, within his frozen cocoon, the Avatar slept still, and the world continued to move on without him.

-----

Aang remains in the iceberg ten years longer. He awakens to a very different world.

My Thoughts: This story, despite being unfinished, really swept me away with its writing style and worldbuilding. It explores how things might have turned out had Aang not been found within the timeframe of the show so he could stop Ozai from taking over the world. The story is Zutara focused as they are the main characters and end up married, but it's really the worldbuilding that steals the show. It takes place ten years in the future but also weaves in events of the past, showing how Aang's absence completely destroys everything. Zuko and Katara wander the Earth Kingdom alone until they find each other and eventually return to the South Pole to be a family, but when they find Aang, the war calls them back. The author does an amazing job of creating an original plot that weaves in events from the show but in a completely different light as the characters are older and more mature (except for Aang). Despite it not being finished (and looking like it probably never will be), it's still well worth the read. 

6. Fragments of Rose Colored Glass by sciathan_file

Fandom: Ouran High School Host Club
Last Updated: 2021
Chapters: 1/1 (finished)
Words: 6,239
Rating: T
Summary: Loss reveals itself differently in each individual. No real tragedy has only a single facet.

My Thoughts: This story was so bittersweet and heartbreaking. I can't count the number of times I cried while reading it. I really liked the way Kyoya was portrayed along with his complicated relationship with Tamaki who, in the story, has lost his mind. It hints at there being deeper feelings from Kyoya, but is otherwise a gen story (unusual for me to read). The writing was good and the portrayal of someone with memory loss was solid. It reminded me so much of having to deal with my grandmother's dementia and how it hurt when she no longer remembered me. We went through the same thing with my mother-in-law and her Alzheimer's. This story, though, is really about Kyoya and the depth of his friendship with Tamaki. Read at your own risk--it's a tearjerker.

---

These are just a few recs. I'm so bad at this. I barely remember reading anything so my thoughts are all jumbled on some of the stories. I really need to start leaving more detailed notes in my bookmarks. And maybe actually bookmark stories I like instead of immediately forgetting about them as soon as I read them, lol.

Challenge #8 at snowflake_challenge is to look back at the last year for things you consider wins. This is going to be a hard one to answer because the last few years have been such disappointments. And I don't just mean being isolated and worried about Covid.

In 2018, I noticed a distinct loss of energy and ability to focus, and by 2020, I was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue. It affects every aspect of my life. Last year (2021) was my year of acceptance. I had to learn, after 2 1/2 years, that I can't do the things I used to. And I had to accept that I may never be able to do those things again. It's been a hard time learning to cope and do things differently.

One of the hardest pills to swallow is that my writing may never return. The Chronic Fatigue gives me serious brain fog, making it nearly impossible to do complex cognitive things. Like writing. Heck, sometimes understanding what's happening on a TV show is too much for me. Reading is a chore now. Writing is nearly non-existent. 

No matter how much I get the urge to write, when I sit down, my brain is so fogged over, the words no longer come. I can't force it. There's just nothing. But I did learn I can usually (sometimes?) brainstorm. Just ramble and word-vomit ideas that often make little sense. They could possibly be turned into stories some day, but I won't count on it. I had to learn to just enjoy the brainstorming process with no expectations of ever writing those stories. That's about as close to writing as I can get. 


Although, I do consider that a win for myself personally (learning to accept brainstorming as my limit), I actually wanted to talk about NaNoWriMo because despite everything, I managed to WIN NaNo last year. And it was hard. I had to remind myself everyday that no one was ever going to read the story I was writing. I had to relearn how to write (pretty much each day). There was a lot of forcing of words I hated. God, how I hated writing most of the days. It wasn't fun because it was so hard to make sense of my jumbled, fogged-over thoughts. But I did it.

It was my first win since 2018, I think.

Sadly, forcing myself to do that much writing (although occasionally I enjoyed it), turned me off to writing even more. I haven't even wanted to look at that project since NaNo ended.

Despite that, I'm still really proud of winning.

For Day 6 of the snowflake_challenge, the task is to create... something.

As a writer, my first thought was to, of course, write something, but my brain just doesn't cooperate these days. I can't just snap my fingers and be creative and write something. Even 100 word drabbles are too much. So I went about my day yesterday wondering what I could create.

Recently I've been working on an old The 100 fanfic I originally wrote in 2016 called Force of Nature. I eventually, finished the story and did major revisions in 2017 but then forgot about it. Last week I found the printed copy I was editing and decided to transcribe all of the changes I had made.

This has been an endeavor (the sheets are a mess of edits and notes in a rainbow of colors from over months of work), but I'm up to chapter 12 of 18? chapters. I don't remember what I added in 2017.

Anyway, last night I got inspired to brainstorm ways to expand the story so that the "slow burn" trope it uses is an actual slow burn over a much longer story. I ended up with over 6,000 words of notes which I then started to make into a useable outline.

So for the snowflake challenge I present two things I created:

First, a header (I use them when I post stories to my blog)

And the second is the beginning of the outline:

So, the third day of the snowflake_challenge is to write about AUs.

I will admit that for a good portion of my fandom years, I didn't like AUs--I mean the kind that completely changes the setting of the canon. I just didn't see the point in them. All those high school AUs or coffeeshop AUs. At the time, I read/wrote mostly in sci-fi fandoms and couldn't fathom why I would want to take the characters out of their canon setting which was part of what made them interesting in the first place.

Things changed, though, when I got into The 100 fandom back in 2015 or so. Out of curiosity, I read a couple modern AUs because the summaries sounded interesting. And wouldn't you know it--I got kind of hooked. They became a guilty pleasure, and I gobbled up all the modern AUs I could find for a while. I think that came with wanting the characters to just have some quiet time together which is nearly impossible within their canon setting where their lives were constantly in danger.

A funny thing... I'm actually working on a The 100 modern AU right now. I wrote most of the story in 2016 and did major edits in 2017, but then got sidetracked with other stories. One of my goals this year is to add to or edit some WIPs I have going so I dragged this one out of a drawer (a literal drawer because I was editing on paper at the time) and decided to type up all of the chances I made years ago.

The story takes the characters and puts them in a modern setting where they are camping out which I thought was kind of funny because they basically live camping out in canon, but in the modern world there is no one around to try and kill them. The characters are also aged up to college age so they all have stuff in common.

It's not the greatest story, but I remember it was the first modern AU I wrote and had a lot of fun with it. I wrote a few others after that, but I can't really remember them off hand. I'm much better at canon-divergent AUs than modern takes or completely different settings.

There is one sort of alternate setting/fusion AU that I always imagine ideas for but never seriously intend to write, and that's dinosaurs. The first of these ideas came to me when I was writing a canon-divergent AU for Stargate SG-1 where I plotted things out like episodes and had a two-parter where they go to a planet that has dinosaurs. At the time I had recently seen Jurassic World so that was on my mind, but the story wasn't a fusion since Jurassic World doesn't exist at their time or anything. The dinosaurs were natural inhabitants of the planet for unknown reasons. 

I remember as I plotted out the "episode," I took a lot of inspiration from the Jurassic Park/World movies which was a lot of fun.

Since then, I've come up with other dinosaur AUs because I guess I just really want my characters to run into dinosaurs. There was an idea for a The 100 fic set late in the series when they arrive at a new planet. In my AU, the planet is, of course, already inhabited by dinos. Another was for Avatar the Last Airbender where Katara and Zuko get trapped in a little valley that happens to be full of hybrid dinosaur-like creatures and they have to work together to escape. This was set between books 1 and 2 so they're still enemies so lots of potential for drama and angst.

Most recently, I came up with a literal fusion between Jurassic Park and Ouran High School Host Club where the Twins suggest the Host Club go on vacation to Costa Rica because they heard about this haunted, run-down amusement park on an island off the coast. I never got farther than that, but I laughed that I had somehow get dinos into a fandom about Japanese high school students.

I guess it's become sort of tradition now that I come up with a dinosaur AU for whatever fandom I'm into.

Not that I ever intend to write these stories. Because of my chronic fatigue and brain fog, the most I can really do is come up with ideas. I do have a lot of fun just imagining the stories. I wish I could share them with people, but it's just not in the cards anymore. I've forgotten how to write, but I can at least, entertain myself.