Challenge #8 - In your own space, write a promo, manifesto or primer for a beloved character, relationship or fandom.

Ack, so this is kind of late (I was hoping to do one of these per day, and this took me three days to write!), but since I am a pinch hit in fffx, I thought it would be nice to write some canon promos for some of the more niche canons I'm requesting. For this exchange, the fandoms I was requesting were: Bravely Default (canon promo already written); Kingdom Hearts; Pinocchio (canon promo already written); Soulcalibur; Star Trek: Deep Space Nine; Star Trek: Discovery; and Trials of Mana. Of those, Kingdom Hearts and the Star Trek shows are already pretty popular fandoms and they're also huge/sprawling canons, so I don't think writing a promo to encourage people to pick them up for my pinch hit really makes sense. So that just left Soulcalibur and Trials of Mana. It took me a really long time, but these are now up over here: Soulcalibur promo (2613 words) and Trials of Mana promo (1776 words)

My pinch hit has apparently already been claimed, though, so once again I am too late with these Snowflake Challenges!! Ah well, I assume canon promos are those kinds of things that have long-term payoff rather than short-term payoff, so it's nice to have these up for the future.

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.

(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 )