Tuesday, December 27, 2005

sqoi

Someone over at Thirty for Three claimed Setzer/Locke/Edgar.

And turned Setzer into Gambit.

XD Oh man. I- I have no words. I am filled with so much glee- my love for Setzer, of all Final Fantasy characters, is eclipsed only by my love for Cain, which is immense and mighty beyond all immense and mighty things. It just makes me so, so happy to see my favorite characters getting any kind of attention, even if I never find them written quite how I picture them. Setzer as Gambit? That should have been an obvious association, since part of my love for Setzer probably sprang out of my deep and abiding love for Remy LeBeau (because come on, everyone loves Gambit).

However, my Setzer pahks his aihship in Hahvahd Yahd, and comes from one of the snobbiest aristocratic families in Jidoor. He speaks Italian better than English (or Japanese), and sings it better than he speaks it- he spent several summers in the children's chorus at the Opera House before he met Daryl and devoted his life to her and her dreams. (He's also incredibly farsighted, dying of lung cancer, exceedingly fond of blackberry wine, and fully prepared to be dead by the time he is forty.)

Monday, December 26, 2005

Laaaazy Jane

Oh, man. I love Jason Mraz. And Yoko Kanno, and live piano mixes of Elm and Ganymede Elegy, and live performances of Tank! Mmm, music. I'm going to have many gifts to give Renegades once I get off my arse and start doing stuff. Right now I'm still coasting off of Christmas, but that'll change soon enough.

I have ideas spinning out of my head like gyroscopes, perfectly balanced and floating off into the distance. I'm still nearly two weeks behind on DIP, of course; if I do catch up (and I hope to), most things will be from the original storylines and the cracked out AUs. I've got the Las Vegas roadtrip crew back in the head, and they're always good for some cracked out silliness.

Typos are wonderful things; "suicide rates" become "suicide rats," and oops! There goes another gyroscope.

Aaannd...my family members have this compulsive need to read whatever is on the computer screen whenever I'm sitting here. (And whenever I'm not, the brother tells me, as he stands behind me, reading over my shoulder. Also while beating me. It's good to be home.) It's a bit annoying, having to keep switching windows to something non-incriminating. *sigh*

Don't want to go to work. Want to stay home and read fanfic. Bleh.

Saturday, December 10, 2005

Rantypants

(*cough* *sings* All I want for Christmas is some Kabuto/Itachi...or any Sandsibling interaction...or some Turkfic...or Ikkaku with no shirt...*shuts up*)

Semi-brief rundown of things I cannot stand about the Naruto fandom/Naruto fans/Naruto fanfiction -or- Pairing rants with little to no rationalization:

Sasuke/Sakura. Yeah, I know, "Don't like it, don't read it." I don't read this pairing (or any of the other pairings I dislike), but the fact that it exists at all irritates me. Particularly when it's written in such a way that the two of them are happily in love; Sasuke has far too many issues to ever be in a happy relationship with anyone, and Sakura has far too many issues to ever be in a happy relationship with Sasuke.

Naruto/Hinata just sort of makes me go "ow," because Hinata's social anxiety around him is just that painful. I don't hate the pairing intensely, but I can't ever see it working without Hinata being able to say more than three words to him without hiding behind a wall. (Post timeskip Hinata, for all that we've only seen two panels of her, disappoints me immensely.)

Neji/Hinata. Hate this pairing. Hate hate hate hate hate it. Hate it like poison. Hate it so much I don't even have words to express my hate. Hate it more than Sasuke/Sakura. He's emotionally reticent when it comes to expressing affection (not completely emotionless, just reserved) and still bitter at the main family, and she's kind of in love with Naruto and kind of socially retarded and emotionally fragile- which would lead to her being miserable and afraid to express herself around him, and him being either afraid of shattering her, or impatient with her shyness. But aside from that, you've also got the whole first cousins and children of identical twins.

Given that the Hyuuga are probably already full of inbreeding (I like to think they keep a few buildings in the compound reserved for the care and feeding of genetic disasters- the children no one talks about, whose parents refuse to claim, the ones that would've been left on hillsides before the third Hokage declared that practice inhumane...*far top uninterested in House Hyuuga to ever write that fic*), they would share a bit more genetic material than normal first cousins would, even with the identical-twins parent thing. Incest in fics = occasionally interesting (but not often). Inbreeding in fics = NO.

I want someone to write a Neji/Hinata fic where they get married and fix the clan and then have a beautiful, drooling, three eyed baby. Only I probably still wouldn't read it, because I cannot stand the pairing.

Kakashi/girly!Iruka. Paxnirvana's Kakashi/Iruka series is what got me into Naruto in the first place; I reread it the other day and it made me cringe, because my perception of the characters has shifted so much since last year. Part of it is the fault of the manga for downplaying Iruka so much (I refuse to treat the anime as cannon); part of it is that Kakashi/Iruka is the default sidebar pairing for Sasuke/Naruto, and much of that is written by people who swallow yaoi/shounen ai stereotypes without question. (Occasionally, I hate Japan.) I've got a very short list of Kakashi/Iruka fics that don't make me want to stab someone. Very short.

Mysteriously powerful!Iruka is also kind of annoying. *glances at Blindsided* Good thing I'd never think of doing that in my own fic...(To be fair, I just haven't covered those plot points. Not that anything in that bloody story actually makes sense, mind you.)

Gaara/any female character. HATE. Sakura/Hinata/Ino/TenTen/your Mary Sue/the Ramen Girl isn't going to work him through his mommy issues in this lifetime, let alone soon enough for them to have a meaningful relationship. (Okay, he doesn't really have mommy issues in cannon. But he ought to.) Oh, and people who write Gaara/Temari? Stop that. Just- stop. I mean it, don't make me get the newspaper.

Itachi. I hate Itachi. That's all, really. (But I love Kisame so, so much.)

Yeah, okay, I'm done now.
(DIP: 8/10. I wasn't on my computer at all yesterday, aside from keeping the logs for Renegades, and I haven't done today's yet.)

Thursday, December 08, 2005

AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

ASLDKJFDKFL. ZIJSDFLK. A:KFJDS.

KINGDOM HEARTS 2. SETZER. WHY DON'T I OWN A PS2 FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, WHY.

GUH. ZIFFLE. *whimper* *DED*
...but where are the scars? And why is his hair all spikey? He's supposed to look like an albino heroin addict ex-gang member, not a bishounen, damnit! On the other hand- Setzer. *wibble*

And I realized last night that when I finish up DIP, I'm going to end up spamming all your poor flists like whoa. Whoops!

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

tired

Writing...skills...atrophying...using...too many...words...*dies*

Currently six for six on DIP; seven for six if I count my short story for Creative Writing, which I won't, since it sucks and is about as subtle as a Hawai'ian shirt.

Current score:
4 Naruto (Orochimaru, Tsunade; Ino, Sakura; House Hyuuga; Ino)
1 Seventh Hour (wtf, Marcus, since when do you speak to me?)
1 FFVII (wtf, brain, we really didn't want a Hojo)

I'm going to spend most of New Year's Eve editing stuff so that it doesn't suck. Blech.

I have to write a personal evaluation for Creative Writing; my biggest problem this year, aside from the standard problems with plot and originality, was that I always knew much more about the situation than the reader. I wouldn't purposefully conceal anything, but I'd leave out a lot of useful details. Like the fact that Tyler and Dei are half brothers, or that Sabatini was wearing a gun under her jacket when she got out of the car. Or even that Dove got to take a shower and do some laundry before he left; a lot of little details, but things that make my characters and their situations a lot more real to me.

I suppose my real problem was that I didn't actually expend any effort on the class, but shh, that's beside the point.

Thursday, December 01, 2005

Fandom thoughts, continued

On the evolution of fandom in general, Livejournal, and a bit on Naruto in particular (somewhat a continuation of the previous post, and a response to Loren's comment- which I do mostly agree with). Beware of enormous lurking parentheticals; they have teeth, and very little to do with anything.

I should clarify what I meant by my comments on the general move to Livejournal and other blogging mediums. Eight years ago, you'd have to go searching through fic archives to find a pairing or a genre you wanted to read; if you were lucky, your favorite author would have her own website or archive, and you could rely on link exchanges to lead you to other things within your scope of interest. But that was tedius and often frustrating; broken links and un-navigable or ugly layouts were a definite problem. If you wanted discussion or interaction, you joined a mailing list or a message board that may or may not have had an archive or personal site as a counterpart.

Now, you can find dozens of livejournal communities that serve the same purpose those message boards and mailinglists did- and most things are public for anyone to see, whether they belong to the community or not. This is what I meant by encouraging mob mentality; everyone can join in. There's a transparency of information that wasn't there years ago, when fandom was spread out and difficult to navigate.

It's not about your link exchange and your personal website with its mini-library of fics and your personal bio and your guestbook, floating out in the middle of nowhere. It's about the community of your friends' list. Suddenly your favorite authors are more than a few sentences in their message board profiles; they have lives and can be present in more than just a few scattered fic archives. There is more people to people interaction in fandom now, because it's easier to find a person behind a fic or an essay. It's easier to give and receive feedback, and much easier to start up spontaneous conversations. Things are as much about the people as they are about the source material- and that's not a bad thing, at all- in many ways it's better, and in many ways it's just different. It certainly makes life easier for those of us who are socially retarded, lazy, or bad at html.

Livejournal does segregate fandom; if you don't feel like reading het or slash or gen or what-have-you, you can just avoid the communities or authors that write that sort of thing. You don't have to sift through large archives anymore (though I suppose fanfiction.net has become such an institution that there will always be a large, poorly organized archive to search through; that's kind of comforting, really). It simultaneously brings people in from the fringes and decentralizes areas of interest. Again, not necessarily a bad thing, since it's still fairly easy to expand your interests into other genres and whathaveyou. There are still issues with organization and archiving on LJ, of course- the memories feature is notoriously faulty. But that's just a design flaw, and the LJ people are working on it, albeit slowly.

Me? I'm socially retarded and lazy, though I like to think I'm halfway competent when it comes to html. I'm also resistant to change, which is why I still lurk at the fringes of things and keep my fandom journal off LJ. I do appreciate the decentralization of my fandoms and the ease with which I can stalk my favorite authors; I just find the movement towards decentralization a curious thing.

Heh. To use a horrible but fairly apt simile, the move to livejournal is a lot like a fandom equivalent of a migration to the suburbs. And BNFs are the SUV-driving soccer moms instead of the town politicians. *facepalm*

My previous rant was meant to be less on the changing nature of fandom as a concept over time, and more on the change within fandom over time- mostly because I felt like complaining about how difficult it's become to find decent speculative fic in my favorite fandoms. Both aspects of fandom pose interesting questions, though.

(Other things I like to examine- fandom explosions. A year ago- just one year- there were less than seven thousand fics in the Naruto category at ff.net, and less than 300 at aff.net. (A year ago, at the beginning of my obsession with the series, I did actually search through the entirety of the ff.net archives. Several times. It was still possible to do that back then; now, not so much.) Now there are nearly 20,000 and over 1000 respectively. Explosion. And yeah, ninety percent of everything is crud- I believe that's part of the definition- so it's certainly plausible that the fandom explosion has a lot to do with the declining quality of the fandom output, but I do like to think there's more to it than that. The popularity explosion is fascinating in and of itself. Naruto isn't unique in this, though. Yuugioh actually expanded at a similar rate between '03 and '04, and has since doubled in fic count. But there are fundamental differences in not only the series themselves, but in the release of the series to the non-Japanese market. (Both are distinctly shounen series, but both represent different kinds of shounen-ness, which is an interesting thing in and of itself.) Of course, I neither know nor care about the inner workings of the Yuugioh fandom; I might have, had fate not conspired against me in regards to the series. (I ended up missing the show constantly in highschool because of marching band, I didn't have access to the manga, shows that are blatantly built around merchandising irritate me, and the shippers all seemed to suffer from the Chickenwuss syndrome- something that has absolutely nothing to do with the people themselves or with the series, and everything to do with the depth of my hatred for the Seifer/Zell pairing in FFVIII. And god, don't even get me started on FFVIII, or I really will write that Sorceress!Selphie fic where Rinoa turns into Ultimecia a few generations early and all of the orphanage brats are mako junkies.))

It's true that Naruto, as a fandom, doesn't really have any BNFs according to the generally accepted definition of the term- it's outgrown them. This seems happens whenever a fandom gets too large, particularly now that fandoms generally center around livejournal, which contributes to the phasing out of Big Names by segregating people according to their ships, genre preferences, or RP groups. I would say that there were BNFs according to the accepted definition of the term, but all of them have since left the fandom. Kind of like Elvis, and the building. If they hadn't left, the size explosion probably would've rendered them obsolete, anyway.

(I'd go on an aside rant about how well-known authors and BNFs are not automatically good writers, but that's so been done before. I'd probably just end up being mean, anyway, and there's no point in flaming people if they aren't going to hear about it. Sometimes quasi-anonymity does have its drawbacks.)

Someday, perhaps, I'll dig up all my disjunct thoughts on fandom and compile them into something coherent. Perhaps. Until then, you get my meandering, procrastinatory discussions of things that have very little to do with what I ought to be writing right now. I'm sure my roommate is convinced that I'm working hard on my paper, though. And keeping up appearances is so very important. :)

December's Impossible Project (DIP) current score: one for one, Naruto. (Good to know I haven't completely lost interest in the actual series, eh?) Let's see how long I can keep this up.