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.

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 )

I've decided to write up a guide how to request art in exchanges, since this is a question that has come up multiple times on fail_fandomanon, and various anonymous users will crowdsource some advice, which promptly gets lost in post turnover and is not easily linked when a new person comes by asking the same question. So I've decided to collect some advice in an easily accessible place to answer the questions of How do I make good art requests in an exchange? and What details are artists looking for in an exchange request/letter? and What should I say in my requests/letters to encourage artists to treat me?

Note that every artist is going to have their own preferences and opinions on art requests: ways they would like information to be presented, things that excite them, things that are a turn-off, etc. This guide is just one artist's thoughts, and other artists may completely disagree, or not care about the things I've written, or care about things that I personally don't mind. I speak for myself as a single artist, not for all artists, but I hope what I write here is useful nevertheless.

( A guide for requesting art in exchanges )