Let's see if this turns out less one note than last year...

1. Your main fandom of the year?

Guardian (TV). It had some more competition than last year, but I'm mostly still staying within derivatives distance XD

2. Your favourite film you watched in the year?

Fannishly, it would have to be the Heihua movie (Mystery of the Abyss). Otherwise, probably Knives Out.

3. Your favourite book read in the year?

Always hard to narrow down, but probably She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan.
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Thank you so much for making your way here – I hope you can find something of interest that’ll make you excited to write!

Treats welcome.

Some general likes/DNWs:

General Likes: worldbuilding, ace characters, competency, character and/or relationship exploration, hurt/comfort, happy endings, time travel, linguistics, music

General DNWs: PWP, dark fic without hopeful ending, someone being falsely accused of a crime

Requested Fandoms:

Fandom: 盗墓笔记重启 | The Lost Tomb Reboot (TV)

Characters: Wang Pangzi (Lost Tomb Reboot), Wu Xie (Lost Tomb Reboot), Xie Yuchen (Lost Tomb Reboot), Zhang Qiling (Lost Tomb Reboot)

Ships: Wu Xie/Wang Pangzi/Zhang Qiling, Wu Xie/Wang Pangzi, Wu Xie/Zhang Qiling

Notes and prompts:

Not all characters need to be included.

Ships are absolutely voluntary/don’t need to be the focus if you do go with them, I’m very happy with gen fic in this fandom. Some prompt ideas:

- Wu Xie & Xie Yuchen: what’s their friendship/dynamic like at the point of Reboot? How does Xie Yuchen react to Wu Xie’s sickness and journey to Thunder City? A little post-canon meeting between them would be lovely to see

- Wu Xie’s recovery after Thunder City; was everything mysteriously cured? Are there aftereffects of the golden coffin water? How does he deal with having believed for months that he’d die?

- Anything with ace Wu Xie

- General exploration of the Iron Triangle friendship/relationship, particularly something that highlights their respective competencies and nonverbal communication

- random tomb curses/artefacts enabling trope of your choice (i.e. forced proximity, telepathy, can't lie...)

- Wu Xie the Researcher™

Fandom: 许你浮生若梦 | Xǔ Nǐ Fú Shēng Ruò Mèng | Granting You a Dreamlike Life

Characters: Luó Fúshēng (Granting You A Dreamlike Life), Duan Tianying | Lin Ruomeng, Hong Lan (Granting You a Dreamlike Life), Huang Xinghan, Luo Cheng (Granting You a Dreamlike Life)

Ships: Luo Fusheng/Duan Tianying, Luo Fusheng/Duan Tianying/Huang Xinghan

Notes and prompts:

Not all characters need to be included, but I’d like Luo Fusheng to be there. Ships are absolutely voluntary/don’t need to be the focus if you do go with them. Some prompt ideas:

- Any kind of fix-it for the ending; I’m partial to time travel fix its, but it could be anything

- Luo Fusheng & Luo Cheng’s sibling relationship; how did the meet? Why is Luo Cheng so loyal to him? I’d particularly enjoy something dealing with Luo Cheng finding out about Luo Fusheng’s nightmares (and perhaps trying to help), or Luo Fusheng finding out about Luo Cheng’s illiteracy and not letting that stand

- If you go the Luo Fusheng/Duan Tianying/Huang Xinghan OT3 route, I’d find it fascinating to see the different characters thoughts on the dynamics that develop. We know Fusheng and Tianying fit together, and see the shape of Tianying and Xinghan, but what about Fusheng and Xinghan?

- Any sort of H/C scenario where Fusheng gets treated with care and gets some desperately-needed hugs

Fandom: 叛逆者 | The Rebel (TV 2021)

Characters: Lin Nansheng, Lan Xinjie

Ships: gen

Notes and prompts:

I find the way the show sets up their relationship and marriage fascinating. Any look at their dynamic and how it evolves from convenience and forced alliance to trust and care would be great. What does their domestic arrangement look like? When did Lan Xinjie fully trust Lin Nansheng, if she ever did? Small things they do for each other to help bear up under the stress. A softer ending for both or either of them would also be lovely to explore, or a post canon scenario where they’re both still alive and have to figure out what to do with their marriage now that they survived the war.

In my defense, things have very much been Happening over the summer, but I should also just stop pretending I'm ever going to post regularly on here *wince*

The good news is that I've moved successfully and survived my first brush with Covid successfully, for all its terrible timing. The bad news is that I'll be getting busy with work as of next week. Ah well.

Frankly, I think I've forgotten half the things I did in the last three months already, but giving it my best shot:

TV and movies

I watched Contact, the movie based on the Carl Sagan novel, for the first time. Nothing earth-shaking, but enjoyable enough.

On the TV show front, the watchalong finished The Long Night, which was amazing but also very depressing - I'm very glad I did it as a group watch, because I'm pretty sure I would've got stuck otherwise. The same group has now started Ancient Detective, which is good fun so far. The Tomb watchers group has moved on to Ultimate Note, which hasn't grabbed me thirteen episodes in, but we'll see how it goes.

I watched Heartstopper with tinny (cute, but suffers from my lack of interest in teenage protagonists) after finishing Detective L (very pretty, let's not talk about the plot). We've now moved on to The Romance of Tiger and Rose (too early for an opinion).

(Finally) finished watching The Lost Tomb 2 with eirenical (bit of a pacing slog in parts, but I got quite fond of this version of the Iron Triangle). We've moved on to Love and Redemption, which I expect will take a while.

On my own, I've pretty much continued the Yang Yang bender. I've watched most of The King's Avatar, which I didn't expect to get as invested in as I did (see under Books for more), and binged You are My Glory while I was sick (perfect show for that frame of mind; lots of fluff and pretty people and barely any tension). I also watched an utterly bizarre 30-minute mini series called I Am Your Bleating Phone. Am currently hemming and hawing over what to watch next, aka the usual.

The one bit of English media I've been consuming is the newest Star Trek series, Strange New Worlds, which is very Star Trek: not very subtle about its messages but with some flashes of brilliance, fun worldbuilding, and characters I could get invested in.

( Books and Fandom under the cut )

Brief interlude of me asking whether anyone has read Little Mushroom 《小蘑菇》, in particular the Peach Flower House English translation. I'm considering splurging on volume 1 as I've heard interesting things about it, but if someone has read it (in either Chinese or English) and is willing to give me a slightly more in-depth view on it so I can better predict whether it'll actually be my thing, I'd be grateful.

Says a lot that I managed to do one monthly review post at an appropriate time before crashing and burning. Figured it'd make more sense to just shove the two months together, particularly since March was... not a great month (read: busy at work, health issues, and a death in the family), so I didn't do a lot.

First off, thanks to the kind soul who paid for an account upgrade! <3 I'm having a lot of fun with the increased icon count and am eyeing that Guardian mood theme...

TV and movies

Three movies this time (I think? The problem with doing these review posts too late is that my memory is already going again): the new Dune film (pretty and some good acting from mostly side-characters, but otherwise un-engaging), Embrace Again (surprisingly good, and to no one's surprise I liked Zhu Yilong in it), and Drum Youth, which is Zhu Yilong's first movie (? possibly? He's very baby-faced anyway) and pretty decent, though I don't much care for high school settings.

On the TV front, I'm still bouncing off of things, but I did watch Wheel of Time, which was largely enjoyable, kept up with all my watchalongs and re-watched Our Song, the Chinese music competition show of Qingshenshen fame (a comfort watch, basically).

Books

Most of Seven Years in Tibet until I got distracted, a good chunk of the Chinese classic Journey to the West (translated by Anthony C. Yu, the unabridged version), Ursula K. LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness, which was a very interesting read, and Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies, which was very vivid and well-written, but generally reminded me of why I don't often read 'literary' novels, i.e. why do they always have to be so grim. I also re-read one of my favourites, Tanya Huff's Sing the Four Quarters

Fandom activities

I signed up for the Guardian 520 exchange, which I'm very excited for. Assignments will go out next week, so hopefully I'll jive with mine and get writing on that. Guardian Bingo is proceeding apace - I have strong doubts I'll be able to fill all the squares, even in a year, but I'm giving it a good go.

I posted four fics in February and March, two in each month (which seems a fairly standard rate for me these days - Guardian continues to be very good to my writing muse).

Variable (Guardian, 7.5k, my take on tiny dragon Shen Wei)

Gilded (Lost Tomb Reboot, 5.5k, part of a series of us stabbing poor Wu Xie)

Delusions of Universality (Guardian, 1.5k, Dixingren & gender & Shen Wei)

what the weave tells you (Guardian, 4k, intimate Weilan featuring non-sexual dark energy bondage (no, I don't know what I was doing there either...))

Here's to hoping April is a better month overall. Hope everyone is keeping well!

This one's right up my alley...

1st foreign language learned

English. We started learning it in school in year 5.

1st language you self studied

Leaving aside all the languages I learned at school, I guess Spanish? My sister lived in Barcelona for years and I got curious. I never got super far with it, but there's enough overlap with languages I do know that it's not completely hopeless.

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Thought I'd do the occasional snowflake_challenge that catches my eye.

Challenge #9

In your own space, list your Fandom Wrap categories. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

What are your top five fandoms for 2021 based on the amount of time you interacted with them?

1. Guardian
2. Lost Tomb/DMBJ
3. various other Zhu Yilong fandoms
4. The Untamed/CQL
5. Tolkien

... probably. Not like I have any actual data for this.
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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?

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Everyone seems to be doing it and it's a fun meme (I love me some statistics) - questions copied from china_shop

1) How many works do you have on AO3?

74

2) What’s your total AO3 word count?

879,276

3) How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

AO3 counts 33, but some of these are doubled up because of varying fandom tags.

Cleaned up slightly


镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018) (10)
The Hobbit - All Media Types (9)
Star Wars - All Media Types (9)
The Avengers (Marvel Movies) (6)
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies) (6)
James Bond (Movies) (5)
Star Trek: Discovery (5)
Mission: Impossible (Movies) (3)
Stargate SG-1 (3)
X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies) (3)
NCIS (3)
陈情令 | The Untamed (TV) (2)
Sherlock (TV) (2)
Tortall - Tamora Pierce (2)
盗墓笔记重启 | The Lost Tomb Reboot (TV) (2)
The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien (2)
Lewis (TV) (1)
Sherlock Holmes (Downey films) (1)
Doctor Who (2005) (1)
The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien (1)


4) What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

13,275 - lay down your sweat and weary head (The Hobbit)
9,195 - Attachment Issues (FBAWTFT)
6,963 - Roar (FBAWTFT)
3,600 - Arrest the Sun (FBAWTFT)
3,556 - when in doubt (trust a wizard to set everything right) (The Hobbit)

which basically just goes to show how important it is to be in a fandom at exactly the right time for kudos (shrug).


5) Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

Absolutely, every single one! I love getting comments, and answering them is the least I can do.

6) What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

when the sun goes down (and no stars light the night) (James Bond movies), which ends with MCD. That's the only really angsty ending I've got though. It's not really my thing.

7) What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

Almost all my fic has happy endings, so I can't really choose? I don't think you can really give happiness a degree, most of the time.

8) Do you write crossovers? If so what is the craziest one you’ve written?

Not often, but I've written a couple in the past. Nothing I would call crazy though.

9) Have you ever received hate on a fic?

I've been lucky to escape that. I've had a couple of complaints re: relationship tagging on one of my more popular fics, but people were at most a little bitchy about it, and it was only a handful of complaints to begin with.

10) Do you write smut? If so what kind?

Not so far.

11) Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I'm aware of.

12) Have you ever had a fic translated?

Yes! Four of my fics have been translated into Chinese.


13) Have you ever co-written a fic before?

One so far - Recast, with a group of fellow Lost Tomb moots. That turned out very fun, and I'm no co-writing a Guardian fic with one other person. That'll be a while yet though!


14) What’s your all time favorite ship?

I usually don't get hugely hung up on specific ships, but I suppose at the moment Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan is pretty high up there.


15) What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

I think I only have one WIP posted on AO3 - Satellites (Star Wars). I don't usually post unfinished things I'm not certain I will finish, but I posted the first part of this for someone's birthday and never got around to finishing it because the worldbuilding just exploded.


16) What are your writing strengths?

Very bad at judging this. If anyone wants to tell me, feel free :D

17) What are your writing weaknesses?

Dialogue and intricate plotting.

18) What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

I've never done full sentences in another language. I go back and forth on having single words noticeably in other languages (very relevant for all the cdrama stuff at the moment; Professor Shen vs Shen-jiaoshou in dialogue, for example) - depends on my mood. Generally, I think if the reader isn't likely to understand what you're writing, it slows down reading and enjoyment.


19) What was the first fandom you wrote for?

On AO3 it's the Marvel films. Overall, I think the first real fic I produced was for the Star Wars prequels, back in LJ days.

20) What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

Oh man, I don't think I could choose. Usually I like the stuff I've written most recently the most. Sartorial Splendour was certainly a blast to write.


If anyone wants to check anything out, my AO3 account is here.

A palate cleanser while I'm working on longer fic, which for once I did manage to keep pretty short, despite my many feelings about Shen Wei's backstory. Soft HC ahoy!


Unburied (2.7k)

Beta and prompt by fangirlishness

Summary:

The newly-instituted monthly Dixing Studies show-and-tell seminar is a great opportunity to safely showcase Dixing powers and artifacts to Haixingren and bring the two cultures, still so suspicious of each other on the heels of an almost-war, closer together.

Except when a strange artifact turns out to be somewhat less innocuous than Shen Wei had hoped.

Tags:

Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon (the handwavey fix-it version), dixing artifacts do what i want them to do, Flashbacks, that time Shen Wei was buried alive for ten thousand years, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD