Writing my Pinocchio canon promo and writing about Lampwick reminded me that I need to finish a mini fandom meta piece I've been meaning to write up for a really long time.

Basically, late in high school and during college, I got into three things: (1) I played Soulcalibur for the first time (Soulcalibur II), (2) I finished playing Sword of Mana, and (3) I watched Pinocchio for the first time (at least, at an age old enough that I actually watched/remembered the whole thing).

These three canons actually share something in common, which is that, well, I got unreasonably attached to a particular character who made it to the end of the story alive, but who I later found out died in a different version of canon!

Let me go through these one by one:

( Spoilers for Sword of Mana, Soulcalibur, and Pinocchio )

Anyway, I was wondering if you know of any characters like this, where it's possible to go through the whole story under the belief the character survived, only to find they died in another version of the story -- characters who live in one version of canon but die in another. And if you consumed the one where they lived *first* and then got blindsided by their fate in a different version. I wonder if the experience is very different when the order is swapped (you're expecting the character to die and are like "huh, interesting choice" when they survive); I feel like I must have experience with that too, but for some reason, these three examples always stick out in my mind when it comes to these "Schrodinger dead" characters, maybe because it's more memorable that way. Do you find you tend to latch onto these characters who have a habit of maybe-dying in canon, or that those kinds of characters don't really stand out to you?

EDIT: Oh man, I kept feeling there was another example of me knowing a character should die and being surprised when they didn't, but I couldn't think of it. But I finally remembered -- it's actually the opposite: Mild spoiler warning for Magic Knight Rayearth, but I read the manga first, and then I watched the anime. In the anime, Presea dies once she gives the main trio their new weapons/armor. Having read the full manga, though, I was like "Mm, well, that's an... interesting choice..." because I knew Presea would be plot-relevant later. And then I later read that the anime dealt with this problem by... introducing Presea's twin sister, Sierra! Lmao, amazing. Great save.

For promptmepromptly, I got the following prompt:

What tropes that came from Star Trek have resonated most with you as a viewer, possibly with examples of them in alternate medias? If that scope is too broad, feel free to pick a trope and talk my ear off about it.

It's hard for me to tell what tropes Star Trek originated, and what it just popularized. So instead, I just decided to brainstorm some elements that frequently feature in Star Trek, and which resonate with me, and talk about them. I chose two topics:

( Humanistic Renaissance men / random ship concerts )

( Characters caught between different cultures )

A behind-the-scenes / commentary thing for my Quodo comic (n=5366).

( Conceptualization and prep work )
( Drawing the comic )
( Notes and various easter eggs )

So I've been using DeviantArt a lot recently for a personal project. This combined with my Snowflake Challenge musings (where I pondered what is now the best site for posting adult art in the wake of Twitter's struggles) inspired me to write up a long comparison of how DeviantArt and Tumblr compare as sites for posting fanart. n = 4546 words.

( Table of contents and preliminary notes )
( Pages vs. posts )
( Post creation )
( Site performance and loading times )
( Creating an art gallery )
( Userbase activity )
( Browsing experience )
( Summary diagram )

Archiving/crossposting from Tumblr, mainly so I have a cleaner/easier-to-read version of this somewhere:

( Read more... )

(Where's Challenge #6? I've decided to do it later when I have more time and am less panicked about work.)

Challenge #7 - In your own space, interact with a community or a fic.

Done. This one is always easy for me because commenting on fic tends to come quite easily to me. Also, I am really behind on the Quodo tag on AO3, so there's plenty of works for me to comment on at the moment. I am kind of rushing through my reading so I didn't leave as many comments as I liked, but I did leave comment on three different people's works, and I'm still in January in my backwards-moving fic backlog. I hope to leave a few more.

Challenge #8 - In your own space, create a quiz or a poll (or tell us your thoughts about answering quizzes/polls).

I was a bit inspired by hamsterwoman's general ramblings about personality quizzes to share some of my thoughts on what I think make good and bad "What X are you?"-type personality/sorting quizzes.

( Ranting about uQuiz ahead )

I was talking with weaver0fwords about why it is that Odo never acknowledges Quark's more good deeds, like the food/supply smuggling he did for Bajorans during Terok Nor, or why Odo, someone who is concerned more with justice than law, strongly disapproves when (for example) Quark arms the Maquis and similar groups. It's very likely (given Odo's close monitoring of Quark) that Odo knew about Quark's smuggling during the occupation and yet he never mentions or acknowledges it at any point in the show, and when you do have Odo finding out about Quark's illegal activities that seem to be for a good cause, he's usually annoyed/disapproving in a way that indicates that he still very much has a low opinion of Quark. This got me thinking about how I think Quark's morality has been very influential on Odo and that Odo and Quark have a kind of symbiotic relationship when it comes to moral action. There's less evidence of it in canon, but I also think Kira had a similar influence on Odo's morality. Both Quark and Kira through their contrast with Odo's values help define for Odo what he is willing and not willing to do.

This is one of my favorite topics so I decided to expound a bit more on what I think Odo's morality is as depicted in the show, and how I think Quark and Kira shaped that morality.

( Odo's morality )

I originally wrote this for Tumblr, but for various reasons -- among which, being able to showcase Dreamwidth's much more powerful HTML markup capabilities -- I figured it would be helpful to crosspost this to DW as well. So here's my DW sales pitch, for my reference:

( Main selling points )
( Tips for getting started on Dreamwidth )
( More Dreamwidth features and weaknesses )

Anyway, I think I've covered the main things about using Dreamwidth. I always want more people to come talk to me on Dreamwidth because I feel like that site is the only place that facilitates people getting to know me both on a purely fannish level and on a very personal level (I know people can make the personal + fannish sharing combo work on Twitter and Tumblr, but having everything be out in public just really does not work for me). But I realize it's hard to just start using a site you're unfamiliar with, especially one like Dreamwidth that tends to have a bit of a learning curve and is generally out of step with the direction of modern social media. And especially when you don't have many friends there already, which is probably the case for most people. But it's a site I respect and trust a lot, and I think it facilitates deep, long-lasting friendships. More than anything, I think the main difference between DW and Tumblr is that Tumblr is mainly a site for sharing content with other people and reacting to it, while DW is more geared toward helping you organize your life and your thoughts. They have a lot of overlap in terms of the kind of personal and fannish musings and experiences that can be shared, though. Anyway, if you're interested in joining Dreamwidth but it's intimidating/confusing, please reach out! I have lots more recs for active communities depending on your interests, too!

This is kind of random, but I have wanted for years to make a post about trypophobia, which is something I experience. I don't particularly like the name trypophobia ("fear of holes"), though, because it's not exactly a phobia, nor is it limited to holes. So instead I'm going to call it "texture squick," which I think more accurately captures the experience.

Just a heads up that the first part of this post features a lot of detailed description of creepy things that might make you uncomfortable (certainly made me uncomfortable writing them), and the second part of this post features a lot of images which will be highly unpleasant if you have texture squick (but probably look perfectly innocuous if you don't).

( What is texture squick? )
( Creepy texture examples )