So much for more frequent updates...

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Anyway, onto fandom. I don't remember what I was doing last time I updated, but my most recent fandoms were Dragon Age and Durarara!!!! with some brief forays into the Assassin's Creed fandom.
I've mostly left the Dragon Age fandom except for poking at certain authors and checking for news on any new DLCs, novels, comics, or the new anime movie that is coming out. And yes, that does mean that for once I actually played and beat both games- although I want to replay the first again on my computer since I couldn't import my characters for my PS3 saved games for DA2 even though they're both registered on the Bioware site (stupid lack of cross-system compatability- if I want to share my saved games between devices I should be able to). In the meantime I've decided to check out the Mass Effect series- I just started the first game yesterday.

DRRR!!! is great anime but the fandom is a bit odd and there are only a few fics that actually get everyone in character and are not completely AU or based on weird alternate character interpretations based off of album art and character song names. There *are* a few fics that are worth it if one has the time to find them though. One of theses days when I get the time I want to look up the manga.

Lastly, Assassin's Creed is a fandom that I've randomly poked into a bit over the past few years, but have been avoiding lately since I decided to actually play the games instead of just looking up spoilers on the wiki. Unfortunately I suck at climbing walls, but I hope to get better soon.

Oh yeah, another thing that has changed since my last update is my new computer. I finally got sick of my old one and updated to one I actually *can* play games on. I have updated my version on Microsoft Office from the free version though, since for some reason it doesn't allow for putting in footnotes- I nearly had a nervous breakdown on my last essay trying to find the option to put in footnotes until I googled the free version and found out it simply didn't *have* that option. Good thing I was able to find a freeware word program that *did* let me put in footnotes or I'd've been in trouble.

Re: Old Favorite Fandoms

It sure would be nice if people would stop pulling their fic from the internet when they leave fandom. There have been so many times that I've gone to find an old favorite only to discover that the author has since decided to pretend that they never wrote it by taking it down from all archives, and trying to delete their presence from the internet altogether. It wouldn't kill them to leave the fic up and simply post that it will never be finished and they prefer not to be contacted about it. Actually, there should be a permanent archive just for retired fanfic writers, or for posting work that may be unfinished but still has fans.

Fandom update

As usual I have been through a bazillion different fandoms since last time I updated my blog. The closest thing I've had to a 'main' fandom lately has been the new BBC Sherlock series, which is awesome and which also has a lot of great fic written for it out there for something that has been out there only a year and which only had three episodes its first 'season'. I'm greatly looking forward to the new three episodes this fall. Other than that I'm currently lurking in several different fandoms and am waiting on a few others until I've seen/played/read more of the source material.

Some of the other fandoms I lurk in are: Assassin's Creed, Dragon Age, Doctor Who and Torchwood, Hetalia, Leverage, White Collar, Supernatural, Stargate Atlantis, Fate: Stay/Night, Nanoha, Girl Genius, DC comics, the Tales series, the Final Fantasy series (though I'm not too fond of 13 on account of the complete lack of RPGness in it), and probably a thousand other little fandoms that I've meandered though and will probably wander though again.

Basically even though I tend to mostly focus on one fandom at a time I tend to take breaks and go poke into new fandoms and back into old ones whenever I feel like it. As of right now, having either read or archived most of the Sherlock fanfic I've found that looks good, I'm poking back into the Stargate fandom to see if I've missed anything interesting in the few years since I focused on it, and to look up old favorites and series I was waiting for more on.

So much for consistant updating....

So it's been almost a complete year since my last update. How many things have I done in that time? What's different about what I'm doing now than what I was doing then? Hmm.



Fandom:

This year has been mostly focused on the Hetalia fandom and the Doctor Who/Torchwood fandoms. I've also poked into the Assassin's Creed fandom and probably a bunch of other small fandoms that I can't recall right now. Currently, as I'm pretty much up to date on all my recent fandoms, I'm both in the process of shopping for a new fandom and revisiting old ones right now. Actually, right now I'm poking back into the DC comics universe to see if anything good has been written in the three years since I left it (apparently most of my favorite characters who were killed are alive again, but they've really done a number on the the Arrow clan so I'm a little unsure if I want to actually go back to the comic *books*).


... and that's really all I have to say right now. Maybe later I'll go into better detail.

Dear fandom,

What is *up* with all the gender-swap fics lately? And not the occasionally fun and amusing so-and-so gets turned into a girl (or a guy, though that's actually very uncommon) and wacky-hijinks ensue kind, but the 'so-and-so main character was born a girl' kind. I mean, the 'gets-turned-into' kind is usually either hilarious or a horrifying study in anti-feminism (because, clearly the first thing any guy is going to do upon becoming the opposite gender is to become the ultimate cliche girly-girl, acquire a new personality (or lack thereof), and either a new sexual preference or discover that their usual love-interest is a closeted lesbian). Very rarely is the gender-swap thing done in a way that is either believable or realistic (I've seen a few Stargate fics that actually are both, yay for cannon wacky Ancient tech insanity) and most of the time it's just an excuse to have a yaoi relationship without it technically being 'yaoi' by squemish newbie fangirls who think they're being clever.
This 'main character is *born* female' thing that seems to be all over fandom (I've seen it in Naruto, HP, DGM, and a few other places as well) appears to be both a 'lets have a yaoi couple without the gay' thing and a 'lets insert my oh-so-very-cool original character in the place of the main character, keep some of said characters background angst or give said character *more* angst because angst is the most attractive and fun to read thing ever and pair said character up with so-and-so male character because he's so awesome' thing, aka a not so very cleverly disguised Mary Sue. I mean, I *suppose* that it might be possible that one or two of these fics may be a valid AU whereupon said main character genuinely was born female and is still essentially the same character with minor differences (because realistically there would be some character differences if born a different gender, but not to the point where the character is completely unrecognizable and suspiciously is 'so-much-cooler' than cannon) but it's very unlikely except in the case of dimensional travel whereupon the MC travels to a universe where he was born female- because those ones are usually done well, or at least aren't Mary Sues.

Still, if you're going to write yaoi or a Mary Sue, then just do so- don't try to get around or hide it by destroying perfectly good cannon characters (though considering how OOC all the other characters usually are in said fics, maybe it's a mercy for said characters to be 'killed' and replaced by a defective wrong-gender quasi-clone (because usually appearance, name, and most defining characteristics are erased as well, other than a few physical points such as a scar or tattoo, or seal of some sort). If only people would stop spamming fandom with this new trend... if I want to read a fic staring Naruto, or Allen, or Harry, then I *don't* want to read a fic staring Naruko, Alanna, or Harietta - or Kelly, Melissa, and Chrysanthemum, because half the time they don't even bother to keep the 'new' names anything close to the old, and in the case of anime, the names are either mysteriously western or clearly borrowed form another popular anime (you can tell, because said names are usually uncommon or unique in Japanese to begin with). You aren't as clever as you think you are fangirls and boys.

I can has an update?

As for fandom, well I finally got around to the D.Grey-Man fandom a while back, and boy was I disappointed. Why was I disappointed? Well mostly because I sat down and read the entirety of the manga that has been published and found it to be *made* of awesome to the extent that I was really looking forward to seeing what fandom could have done with all that potential. However, what I found instead was a bazillion bad high school AUs, too many bad vampire AUs, a tonn of pointless and OOC pairing fics (mostly yaoi, which I wouldn't mind if not for the fact that the characters were almost never IC, actual plot was almost non-existent, and most of them were AUs to boot). I won't deny the existence of a few good one-shots, nor that there *was* a few good fics here and there, but there was *nothing* in the fandom that truly *shined* like the manga itself. Usually there is at least something in fandom that is as good as (or in some cases better than) the source material, but here I was disappointed. Thus, the manga was awesome, the fandom not so much (unless you're in it for the Pr0nz, because there *are* a few good fics in that category with some interesting psychological insights on certain characters).

After that fandom disappointment I've mostly been drifting in and out of old fandoms again, rereading old favorites, looking for updates, and occasionally finding a good new fic. I've also been playing Crisis Core and reading ahead in two of my classes. Occassionally, when I'm up to driving myself insane with frustration, I go and play Mario Kart Wii (my sister bought a Wii last month, and a few months prior to that we got an Xbox 360, so now all we need is the PS3 and then collectively our family will finally have all the latest game systems for the first time in years, instead of just one).

And that's about it for my life now.

Also

Come to think of it, now I want an X/Stargate crossover where they realize just how pointless it would be to end the world since humanity exists throughout the whole damn universe and are not anywhere near as ultimately damaging as some of the other races. Or a fic where several years after humanity is 'wiped out' an Ancient device automatically repopulates the world, or people start coming back through the stargate (with the presumption that the apocolypse wasn't instantanious and that enough people knew the world was ending to evacuate). There: that's my new X/TB apoco-fic canon.