Sarcasm is an adjusted stress reaction.

I nicked this from beatrice_otter!

1. What rating do you write most of your fics under?

General Audiences by a long shot ... but I have a second account for anything rated E. Which isn't much, but I split it out a few years ago on account of being An Aspiring Author Of Works For Young Readers, and will at some stage get around to archive-locking those fics.

2. What are your top three fandoms?

1. Doctor Who
2. Legend of Korra
3. Avatar: the Last Airbender

This may come as a surprise to the people who know me as A Star Trek Person, but quite a lot of my Discovery fics are over on the other account. Discovery, at 17 fics, is tied with Harry Potter in fourth place -- and I think I've actually written more HP fics, I just stopped importing them to AO3 because *waves hands at JKR ruining everything*
3. What is the top character you write about?

Super embarrassing, turns out it's the Tenth Doctor. But that's because I tended to ship him with female characters I was obsessed with, so let me note that Lin Beifong and Romana are tied for second place, and then Martha Jones and Katrina Cornwell are tied for third.

(I do not ship Lin or Katrina with the Tenth Doctor, I think they'd both very quickly get fed up with him.)

4. What are the top three pairings you write about?

Okay, this one shocked me.

1. Mai/Zuko (that makes sense! I wrote a lot for those two!)
2. Lin Beifong/Tenzin (sure!)
3. Sherlock Holmes/Mary Russell (this is embarrassing)

Because I tend to fixate on a character and then multiship them, my pairing stats tend to be a bit more diffuse than character stats.
5. What are the top three additional tags?

1. Crack (does anyone else feel like the use of "crack" to denote silly, non-canonical or absurd pairings or fics might be racially insensitive? Or am I wrong in thinking its origins lie in "this is so silly, I may as well have been smoking crack when I wrote it"?)
2. Canon Character of Colour (thank you, Avatarverse)
3. Post-Canon

6. Did any of this surprise you?

Yeah, a male character as my number one most-tagged? Genuinely shocking, and I think I need to write two more Lin Beifong fics so she can take first place.

Actually, if I combined Romanas and included, say, Romana regenerations I made up myself, she's probably safely in the number one spot. BUT NOT OFFICIALLY. So embarrassing.

Nicked from nostalgia, because why not?

What's changed about your fandom life in the last 365 days?

I've started to make peace with the idea that I will, at some point, no longer have time to write fic. Between the day job and wanting a career writing original fiction, something is going to have to give.

Or maybe it won't! Maybe I'll regain the skill of knocking off a short fic in an afternoon! Or I'll fall obsessively in love with a new character -- or SNW will revive Kat -- and find myself making the time. Or I'll make a pile of money from publishing and be able to quit my day job and manage my time differently. (Honestly, SNW resurrecting Kat is more likely.)

But, to be honest ... I have three fannish hobbies: the blog, the podcast and fic. And these days, I average one fic idea per year -- and it's fic which takes up the most time and flexes the exact same muscles as original writing. (Save that fic keeps me in practice in terms of writing for an adult audience. Which I would also like to do professionally at some stage, so I don't want to let those muscles atrophy, but on the other hand, that's what revisions are for.)

( the whole meme )

Apparently I last did this meme in 2017, a more innocent time when my TV boyfriend was Gabriel Lorca, and it was mainly weird because he wasn't a cartoon.

1. Your main fandom of the year?

Star Trek. I was recently reminded that Star Trek: Picard ran early this year, not 20 years ago, which feels like fake news but apparently is not. Then there was Lower Decks, which I enjoyed a whole bunch, and now season 3 of Discovery is almost at an end, and I'm really loving what they've done this season, and how they've addressed every single problem that I had with season 2. Bar one, and it's a big one, but hey, what can you do? 

I also finished blogging season 3 of Voyager over at squiddishly.net, and I'm really keen to get onto season 4! I feel bad that I couldn't keep up with Discovery posts, but hey, 2020. And also, responding to new media that I'm seeing for the first time is a completely different skillset to rewatching a series I know very well, and I just haven't had the energy.

2. Your favorite film watched this year?

I always get to this question and go, "Did I see ... films?"

The last film I saw at the cinema was Birds of Prey, and it was a lot of fun. I was going to see Wonder Woman 1984, but it's been so thoroughly spoiled by Americans livetweeting that I can no longer be bothered.

We did watch a lot of movies at home, and two standouts were The Godfather and The Godfather Part II. I realise that "these two iconic films are actually very good" is a lukewarm take, but I was genuinely surprised -- I watched them on VHS around 2002 (they were assigned viewing for a film writing class I did at uni; the rest of the assignments were Woody Allen films, so you can imagine how much I got out of it) and the sound mixing was so muddy that I couldn't make out any of the dialogue.

I am genuinely sad that I've missed my chance to see the new edit of Part III at the cinema, but I'm sure we'll get around to it one evening at home.

3. Favorite book

I read some pretty great books this year! A lot of series, particularly crime and mystery. Which I don't think we can link to the pandemic or anything, I just enjoy a bit of murder now and then.

I deliberately sought out crime fiction by Black writers, and seized upon the Detective Elouise Norton series by Rachel Howzell Hall -- mainly because her new thriller, which is getting a lot of buzz, had 36 holds ahead of me at the library, but these four books were available. And they were a very good read -- I loved the heroine, and I love fiction which treats Los Angeles as ... you know, a regular city where people live.

Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid was widely recced a couple of years ago as an f/f novel, which is weird to me because it does not contain a single f/f pairing or, in fact, any queer women that I can recall. But it was nevertheless very, very good, capturing the feel and music of a band that never existed. I also read The Unravelling of Cassidy Holmes, another novel about a fictional pop star, this time set in the early '00s and without the conceit of being structured as an oral history -- it, too, was very good, and I strongly suspect (based on the trigger warnings in the foreward and the tone of the author's notes at the end) that the author was in fandom at some point.

Return of the Thief wrapped up Megan Whalen Turner's Queen's Thief series; it had fewer twists and turns than previous books, but also didn't need them. I loved it a lot, but may need to reread it at some point to get all my thoughts in order.

(I also reread all the preceding books. They're quite good! Did you know?)

Unexpectedly enjoyable: The Ballad of Snakes and Songbirds by Suzanne Collins, the prequel to The Hunger Games. This setting really benefits from a third person POV, and I thought young Snow's un-redemption arc was really well-executed. Like, he's completely reprehensible, but he feels like a person in a way he didn't when we only saw him from Katniss's perspective. 

4. Your favorite album or song to listen to this year?

*small voice* 

folklore

I'm generally not a Taylor Swift fan, but I've realised it depends on her collaborators. Swift writing on her own? Terrible. Swift collaborating with artists whose work I generally enjoy? Fantastic.

So folklore was about half a good album for me, and I call that a win. "exile" was a particular standout, and my Spotify wrap-up was appropriately shameful.

5. Your favorite TV show of the year?

Taking Star Trek as read, I'll give you my secondary fandom for the year: A Country Practice. Yes, the Australian soap opera/procedural which ran from 1981 to 199something. I started at the beginning, and I'm now not quite halfway through season 2, which has 92 45-minute episodes and I am absolutely not going to get through it before it leaves its streaming service in a few weeks.

It's just ... like, this is a show I watched with my mum in the mid-to-late '80s (Dr Alex Fraser was my very first hyperfixation, and Alex/Dr Terrence was my first OTP!), but I've never seen the earliest seasons. And it's ... good! Witty without being insincere or unkind, and dated yet progressive. And unexpectedly upfront about sex, for a series that ran at 7:30pm on Mondays and Tuesdays. There's an arc where a character is attracted to a paraplegic, and she comes to her colleague, a doctor, and says, "I would like to take this man to bed. How do we deal with the practical issues?"

On the other hand, there's also an arc where the town learns that the two middle-aged men who live together are not, in fact, brothers, and it ends with Gay Tragedy. Though at the same time, it really incisively depicts the links between what was then very mainstream humour -- the inherent comedy of men in dresses -- and homophobia and exclusion.

We have also streamed many shows, some good, some ... less so. Like, we're almost at the end of season 2 of Narcos, and I keep thinking how much more interesting it would be if it knew women were people. The Mandalorian's second season was let down by maybe too many backdoor pilots for other shows, and also any situation where Katee Sackhoff is required to act is going to end badly, but I mostly enjoyed it.

6. Your favorite online fandom community of the year?

The Admiral's Legion Discord, which has been a really chill place to hang out and lament (for example) that sometimes characters blow up for now good reason. And also to swap cat pictures.

7. Your best new fandom discovery of the year?

I don't know that I made any? Save that aggressively curating your feeds makes for a better experience, and, like, I knew that, I just sometimes need to remember it.

8. Your biggest fandom disappointment of the year?

Star Trek: Picard. I enjoyed it, but not because it was in any way well-written. And I say that as a person who loves Discovery, yet wants to go over most of its scripts with a red pen! Picard had great characters and interesting concepts, and mostly wasted them. The writing was downright amateurish at times, which is frankly embarrassing when you consider how much money was behind it.

But, as much as I hang shit on Chabon, I don't think it's entirely his fault. (Although he definitely shouldn't have been showrunner.) "Great concepts, flawed writing" seems to be a problem with a lot of shows on CBSAA, and I strongly suspect the service wants prestige television written on a procedural timeline.

My hope is that the delays brought by the pandemic have given all the Trek writing rooms a chance to stop, consider and polish their work.

Runner up: the collapse of the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen Cinematic Universe. I never had any illusions that Conde Nast was paying its staff well, but I never imagined they were actively underpaying the PoC who appeared in their videos. And then they'd rather just lose all that talent than pay them properly? Amazing.

I've followed the people who left, and thoroughly enjoy their work, but it's not the same. (And a lot of what remains of the fandom is ... just super racist. Like, it's literally just the people who actively don't care about racism left. I had to stop reading r/bon_appetit because yes, it's hilarious that they think Sohla is evil and racist, but is it good for my mental health? No.)

9. Your TV fandom boyfriend of the year?

Save for the version of prime Gabriel Lorca that only exists in my head, I haven't really had one. Though I am very fond of Pedro Pascal's face and think it should not be contained by a bucket.

10. Your TV girlfriend of the year?

I cheated on Kat Cornwell with Laris for a few months -- and if season 2 of Picard wants to be the Laris And Zhaban Fight Crime Show, I'm up for that -- but it's Kat. This meme is probably more interesting for people whose hyperfixations don't last years.

11. Your biggest squee moment of the year?

The whole first episode of Discovery season 3 -- it felt like it was deliberately shaking off the dead weight of season 2, and the fannish expectations that undermined it, and set out to create something NEW and UNFAMILIAR and FULLY BONKERS. The whole sequence where Michael is drugged, and accidentally and hilariously comes to an important realisation about herself: AMAZING.

12. The most missed of your old fandoms?

I am a shark, forever moving forward.

But it has been nice to see Avatar fandom revive, with both series up on Netflix. I've received some really nice feedback on my fic, which was lovely.

13. The fandom you haven’t tried yet, but want to?

I mean, there are things I'm keen to watch, but nothing I want to get fannish about. I wound up blocking The Expanse posts on Tumblr, because I'm just not that intense about it, and seeing the fandom activity made me feel like I wasn't trying hard enough.

14. Your biggest fan anticipations for the New Year?

Uhhhhhhhh. I'd be surprised if we get any new Star Trek before late 2021. And I'd like to finish ENT finally, but I'm not sure I'm anticipating that, or merely dreading the nonsense to come.

There are some video games I'm looking forward to playing? My friend Amie did some writing on Immortals: Fenyx Rising, which looks like a lot of fun. But first, I have to finish The Outer Worlds. Who knows, maybe 2021 is the year I'll play Mass Effect: Andromeda?

Every now and then, this stupid franchise I love throws out something meaningful. Something significant. Something worth remembering.

But what's going through my head at any given moment is this:



Unless it's 8:25 on a weekday morning, in which case it's this:



"That nebula" in this case being the espresso machine at work.


Day 30 - Favourite Trek Series

My first instinct was to say that I wouldn't date any of these giant disaster people. Messes, all of them. Yes, even Picard.

But then I remembered ... Tuvok.

Respectful. Funny. Won't burden you with his emotions. Has great pyjamas. Plays the lute. Sings. Breeds orchids. And he spends the better part of a decade on the other side of the galaxy, which is exactly what I would want in a spouse.

T'Pel's a lucky woman.

The remaining days don't even need a cut tag anymore:

Day 28 - Name Your Own Starship
Day 29 - Favorite Trek Quote
Day 30 - Favorite Trek Series

Though "Lethe" was the episode where Kat Cornwell walked into my head (where she remains, despite all attempts to evict her), my actual favourite Disco episode is "The War Without, The War Within".

It's the closest thing we get to a Katcentric episode (the perils of attaching oneself to a mere recurring character), and also a pretty chilling look at the Federation on the brink of collapse: Kat is vapourising fortune cookies; Sarek's so stressed out he's becoming an empathetic and supportive parent.

It also gives us the "I don't have to tell you it's the middle of the night" scene, for everyone who wants to ship Michael with an older female authority figure but found her relationship with Georgiou too overtly maternal. AND Kat meets Emperor Georgiou. Or, for the hetshippers, there's her claim that prime!Lorca was "reasoned" and "measured"; to which I say, FOOTAGE NOT FOUND.

Some stuff also happens that involves other characters, and it's all great (okay, I take issue with Tilly's attitude towards Michael and Ash, but it makes sense for her character), AND L'Rell has her second big scene with Kat -- OH NO I'm talking about Kat again. This is what it's like living in my head, it's very dull.

( Five days left! )

Obviously it's the replicator, our ticket to fully automated luxury gay space communism.

As long as we're doing prequels, one of the stories I want to see is the evolution from whatever vaguely capitalist system existed between First Contact to what we have by Discovery's era. Because surely the entire human diaspora didn't embrace the new technology right away? I feel like this is a potentially interesting story, although maybe only to me.

The great mystery of replicators: why, in a world where you can make any article of clothing you dream of, everyone's wearing jumpsuits instead of dressing like Lady Gaga every day. Only Lwaxana Troi and Amanda Grayson have embraced the full potential of the technology.

( The remaining days. )

The first time I saw nostalgia refer to Odo as a fascist, I was like, "Hang on, that's a bit unfair."

Then I watched DS9 again, and frankly, with each successive rewatch, it becomes increasingly obvious just how fair it is.

(I'm not technically rewatching right now, but between The Greatest Generation: Deep Space 9, sohotrightnow's blog posts and nostalgia doing a rewatch, I may as well be.)

"Character is biologically determined to seek order; is naturally authoritarian as a result" is an interesting premise, but DS9 doesn't really consider the logical next questions, ie, "Is that a good thing?" and "Can he change?" Worse, much of the time they don't seem to realise what it is they're depicting: harassment by law enforcement as comedy; straight-up collaboration.

That's the nadir: the bit in ... season 6? When the station is under Dominion control, and we cut from Quark saying, "Odo would never collaborate" to ... Odo collaborating.

["My Odo is not a collaborator. He may be a liar, a pig, an idiot, a collaborator...but he is NOT a porn star."]

But he's forgiven in the end, even by Kira, and then we all move on as if nothing happened.

Then we come to the worst thing about Odo: his relationship with Kira diminishes her. Admittedly, none of her love interests are much good, but with Odo, she basically becomes an object to be nice guyed into submission.

Runner up: Vic Fontaine, Odo's PUA trainer. Aside from the fact that I find his personality irritating and resent that he takes up so much screentime which could, for example, be dedicated to developing Ezri, it's just kind of obnoxious how DS9 is suddenly doing stories about the personhood of holograms without, for example, doublechecking that Voyager hasn't been covering this exact ground for years.

( The rest of the days. It's weird to have this one negative question amidst an otherwise positive and fluffy meme, isn't it? )

[Yes, I took a day off. I'm sure you were all very relieved.]

Bearing in mind that I've only seen the first two seasons of ENT: "Regeneration", the Borg episode.

I remember when it was first announced, because I wasn't watching Star Trek at the time, but I still poked my head up from writing Snape fic and went, "Oh, come on, the Borg? Don't they care about canon AT ALL?"

But it turns out they ... really, really did. This is the best kind of fanwank, taking old plotholes (how did the Hansens know to go Borg hunting a decade or so before "Q Who"? Why were the Borg destroying bases along the neutral zone in season 1 of TNG?) and weaving them -- forgive the mixed metaphor -- into something coherent.

It's also tense, scary, disturbing, all the things you want from a Borg story. It uses the ensemble well -- although I think Phlox's recovery from near-assimilation was too easy -- and was just a really fun episode to watch.

And yes, it created some new plotholes, eg, how didn't Picard or Data know to connect the Borg to this incident later on, but my headcanon is that the Federation's approach to information management is nearly as bad as the Jedi's (and that's how they think they can get away with "We're just gonna tell people never to talk about the USS Discovery and their crew ever again".) It's Section 31's fault, probably.

Runners up: any episode with Shran. Even the ones I haven't seen yet, probably.

( The rest of the days. )

Recency bias is a factor here, because the book I'm about to name is the one I've read most recently -- but, in my defence, I was reading it because it was my favourite when I was young, and I was delighted to learn that it holds up: The Devil's Heart by Carmen Carter.

If you listened to the Antimatter Pod episode about formative tie-ins, you'll have already heard me rave about it, so please hold while I try to come up with something fresh to say...

*drinks coffee*

RIGHT! Okay, so I'm writing an essay/blog post (it has footnotes, but also gifs) about the gender gap in Trek tie-ins, and at one point I got to rambling semi-coherently musing about the differences between tie-in fiction and fan fiction.

Have a sneak peek:

Fan fiction and tie-in fiction are not, to my mind, interchangeable -- setting aside issues of quality and editorial gatekeeping, I believe they serve similar and often overlapping, but ultimately different needs.

To me, the best tie-in fiction is basically plotty gen -- or, at least, has no more overt romance than the series it's based on, although that gives you a pretty flexible range depending on the series. And the character growth it has to be consistent with the series as well, and where the series is likely to go in the future (which is, I suspect, why the Discovery novels so far have all been prequels). But, at the same time, there has to be as much affection for and interest in the characters as you'd get from fan fiction, or else it's just ... flat.

Fic writing has a lot more freedom to get into the iddy stuff, to change everything, to ignore or alter details of canon that the author doesn't like, to focus entirely on one character (or one relationship) to the exclusion of all else. That's why it's so wonderful!

But sometimes, I want a straightforward adventure with a lot of plot, and fic can't always provide that. And it's what The Devil's Heart does so well. Carter's love for the characters (except Worf, she doesn't seem too fond of him) is evident, her crush on Patrick Stewart and Picard/Crusher shipping are both extremely obvious, but this is also a romp through the history of the alpha quadrant, with a sideline in fanwank (Iconians! The T'Kon Empire! Surak!) and some really strong, diverse original characters, a significant proportion of which are women.

(It's difficult to choose a favourite, but it's a toss-up between the moody Starfleet officer whose career has hit a dead end in the form of commanding a dodgy old starbase, or the Mysterious Bartender who becomes her best frenemy.)

My only complaint, reading it a few months ago, is that the Kindle edition is poorly formatted, and has a handful of errors which look like the product a scan-to-text that wasn't properly proofread. Maybe it's time to hit eBay and find a paperback copy...

( The remaining days. )