Fanfic Year in Review

[elenothar]

I'm being pretty bad at posting on DW, what with life doing its thing and also my inability to talk about myself on the internet outside of a fandom context, but I did want to do a fanfic year in review post because it's been a prolific twelve months for me (despite all expectations) and everyone loves some soft data, right?



(I was going to add links to everything, but then that was a lot of work - all of these are easily findable on my AO3.)

Fic Written

January

Reverberance (24,954 words, The Untamed, MDZS Big Bang)

February

Blue Runs the Water (53,101 words, The Untamed)

March

so I live to know (3009 words, Guardian)

Bambi Eyes (4263 words, Guardian)

Lay to Rest (3645 words, Guardian)

April

Extravagant (5671 words, Guardian)

May

Bear With Me (975 words, Guardian, no end to the bears series)

Above as Below (11,209 words, Guardian, Guardian 520 Exchange)

Recast (8,057 words, DMBJ/Lost Tomb, collaboration with achray, Fangirlishness, Hils & teyla)

June

Remnant (6615 words, Guardian)

A Distracting Effort (4,461, Lost Tomb Reboot)

July

The Spring of Experience (10,761 words, Guardian)

Unburied (2740 words, Guardian)

August

Sartorial Splendour (6989 words, Guardian)

Settled (1929 words, Lost Tomb Reboot, Pingxie Exchange)

September

One for the conspiracy theorists (4638 words, Guardian, Guardian Wishlist)

Flowers Blooming in the Night (2516 words, Guardian, Guardian Wishlist)

The Perils of Accounting (1042 words, Lost Tomb Reboot, Guardian Wishlist)

October

Is or Isn't (1498 words, Guardian)

Down is Easy (20,931 words, Lost Tomb Reboot)

Unbearable (1375 words, Guardian, no end to the bears series)

After the Rains (4887 words, Cloudy Mountain)

November

However deep the Lake (11,081 words, Guardian)

Prompted (3165 words, Guardian, tumblr prompt fills)

December

in your vision (1831 words, Guardian)

irritation as usual (4953 words, Lost Tomb Reboot)

Find Your Bearings (2647 words, Guardian, no end to the bears series)

Entrapping Time (1434 words, Time Engraver Commercial, Yuletide treat)

Another Stream (1186 words, Lost Tomb Reboot, Yuletide treat)

In Summary

- 211,563 words in total
- December was the most prolific month by number of works
- October was the most prolific by total words written (leaving aside January’s fic, which was mainly written in 2020)
- Guardian was my most prolific fandom, with 18 works since March, followed by Lost Tomb Reboot with 7 since May
- Overall, I wrote in five fandoms, four of which are Zhu Yilong-related (go figure; I might as well call 2021 the Zhu Yilong year)
- Average word count: 7295
- Most popular fanwork: Blue Runs the Water by kudos, which is unsurprising given it’s by far the longest fic and in a far bigger fandom than the others; it’s followed by Extravagant, though, which was my fourth Guardian fic

In the pipeline for 2022

I’ve got a lot of ideas, but thought I would put down at least the WIPs I’ve already written some words for, that I’m expecting to finish at some point.

Significant amount of words written:

- Hallows zine fic (done, just waiting for the zine to be put together)
- dark energy worldbuilding (done, will post soon)
- Dixing linguistics (done, currently in beta)
- Shen Wei & Li Qian, pre-canon identity reveal (mostly written, but I got distracted)
- Singer HPS AU (the first chapter is written, but this one promises to be long…)
- Accidental Marriage AU (a long first chapter is written, but this one also promises to be long…)
- Lighthouse Keeper (collaboration, timeline tbd)
- Trapped on either side of a barrier fic (this has been languishing since, um, April? Sigh)

Small amount of words written:

- Forest Weilan
- Bear Yashou AU
- Legend of Kunlun & HPS
- YOHE softness

Ideas whose writing is imminent:

- Wu Xie stabbing fic

… I have too many WIPs. Still, where fanfic is concerned, at least, it's been a good year. May 2022 continue that trend.

Comments

[elenothar]

I'm going to do the same thing you did with my post and go "wow, you wrote very long fics for the Untamed". :D It is noticeable that those two are much longer than the fics you wrote for Guardian or DMBJ. :)

Hmm, yes, different fandoms, different approach/vibes. For one thing, those are the only Untamed fics I ever wrote, and the longer one took me six months and shorter one was for a Big Bang (you may notice that I only just scraped the minimum wordcount for that one). I hesitated a lot longer to write fic at all in that fandom, partly because it was my first cdrama fandom and I was very afraid of messing up, and partly because I wasn't inundated by plot bunnies the way I was/am with Guardian. I basically just had the one long fixit idea, and it took 50k to write that.

Otoh, I'm sort of back to working on the weilan accidental marriage canon divergence fixit monster, which I suspect will be quite long.

O_O What how?

I think I came up with this idea when you were super busy, so I must have not spewed it all over you yet (music feels!). Let me find a post on tumblr that tries to explain what the hell I was thinking:

"I may or may not have been obsessed with this concept since it came up on the Guardian Discord server.

The original idea was just HPS on stage, singing like Dimash, i.e. with a super huge vocal range. That could’ve easily been made into some sort of modern AU, but no, my brain goes ‘ok, so what do we need to change in canon to make this as canon-adjacent as possible while still keeping the premise even remotely believable?’.

The answer: a present day Dragon City where Haixingren and Dixingren live together peacefully, making HPS’s role as the arbiter of justice mostly redundant when he wakes up. So if the original treaty didn’t insist on harsh separation between the two peoples and we’ve got 10k years of ways the cultural relationships could grow…

Now, the singing. In this AU, I’ve decided that Shen Wei’s mother used to sing and that singing was much more of a standard communal activity in ye olde dixing, so he learnt early (before tragedy befell). The events of YOHE still mostly happen as in the show, except that Kunlun advocates for a more inclusive treaty because that’s how things are when he’s from, and there’s a lot more singing (around the campfire, while marching into battle, when *cough* wooing the beguiling general who sauntered into camp…) than we see in canon.

When Shen Wei wakes again in present day Haixing, he still helps out the SID with the occasional dixingren offender, but mostly everyone is living together peacefully, so he has more time to pursue other things. He still studies biology at university, but also does a bit of music on the side because he misses it. One thing leads to another, and once Dixingren music scholars catch wind of his expertise, they back him into a 'you’re the only one who still remembers the songs from 10k years ago, these are important cultural artefacts!’ corner. He agrees to do a small concert for them and - things snowball. As they do.

TLDR: Shen Wei now has three identities - Professor Shen, HPS the Dixing ambassador/mythical hero and HPS the singer.

Zhao Yunlan is VERY CONFUSED. Especially since somehow these songs keep… speaking to him? Even though he doesn’t usually care about music beyond it being boppable to?"

[tinny]

I only just scraped the minimum wordcount for that one

Oooh, big bang, well yes that explains it.

I wasn't inundated by plot bunnies the way I was/am with Guardian

Guardian plotbunnies ftw! \o/

I think I came up with this idea when you were super busy, so I must have not spewed it all over you yet (music feels!)

Aaaah no you hadn't, and those are excellent music feels! When I saw the title all my brain provided was some kind of underground bar/disco setting where HPS the anonymous Dixingren singer impresses the young crowd but nobody knows who he is. :D This is what your last sentence implies too, but the rest seems to be much more above-board than what I imagined. :D

In any case: oooooh yes awesome.

[elenothar]

When I saw the title all my brain provided was some kind of underground bar/disco setting where HPS the anonymous Dixingren singer impresses the young crowd but nobody knows who he is. :D This is what your last sentence implies too, but the rest seems to be much more above-board than what I imagined. :D

Well, that's interesting too, someone should write it. My plot bunny is indeed a bit more above-board than that, though once Zhao Yunlan figures it all out I bet he'd try to drag Shen Wei to anonymous karaoke or something XD