there may be words

Challenge #8

In your own space, celebrate a personal win from the past year: it can be a list of fanworks you're especially proud of, a gift of your time to the community, a quality or skill you cultivated in yourself, something you generally feel went well. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Learning how to gif! With extra proud-ness given that I (a) started from basically 0 knowledge of Photoshop save whatever remnants I remember from using GIMP like a decade ago, (b) generally don't consider myself as being any good with colours, and (c) managed to pull off pretty much every moderate-to-very unhinged gif idea I had, including some animations done from scratch.

Probably a whole 90% possibly more of everything I made was Zhou Shen because I'm single-minded like that (full gallery here!), with the rest scattered across various fandoms, starting with a particular SecUnit-favoured show…


( WOH/SHL and more gifs under the cut! )

All can be found in my gif tag on Tumblr, including some before/after comparisons and effect breakdowns if you're interested in the process.

(Non-fannishly, it'd be cooking! Which was a development I would never have seen coming.)

Challenge #3

In your own space, put some favorite characters into an AU, fuse some favorite canons together, talk about your favorite AU/fusion tropes, or tell us why AU/fusions aren’t your cup of tea. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Really, you might as well ask if the sun likes to rise. Admittedly much-earlier me used to do only the occasional canon-divergence back when I cared more about complying to canon, but these days literally anything goes. Pretty much the only kinds of AU concepts that I'm "eh" about are cases where the setting is overly specific in a way I don't care for (solid pass on college or high school AU, doubly so if it's extremely Americanised) or that I simply don't see the point of (as someone who's been known to question what difference an otherwise-canon-ish soulmate AU makes). For crossovers, I tend to prefer some kind of fusion between the universes rather than straight up mashing all the characters together. Unless it's a crack scenario, in which case collide away.

Anyway. Highlights of variously-implausible AU things I have committed in full seriousness:

• MCU!AU of Detective Conan that started out just from CA:TWS and spiralled from there
• also literally all of the DC/MK fic in this series
• Murderbot!AU snippets of Guardian and Heaven Official's Blessing, respectively
• MDZS!AU of FMA because zombie Hawkeye, so why not
• modern day FMA where Alphonse is [redacted for spoilers]
• Welcome to Night Vale Resembool
• Nirvana in Fire wingfic
• The Mentalist but spookier
• modern day MDZS because – once again – necromancer detective Wei Wuxian, why not
• multiple ones for Murderbot: MedUnit AU, building AU, and (possibly most bizarrely, if only because of my unfamiliarity with the subject matter) figure skating AU
• and also ATLA: bodyswap Toph and Zuko, and zombie apocalypse AU taken 100% in seriousness despite how it might sound

…and that's nowhere near an exhaustive list, just the more recent ones. I write a lot of AU, to put it mildly.

And a final obligatory mention to my longstanding vendetta against coffeeshop AU. Anyone's guess how much in jest that is by this point.