Ruugerion

I have been feeling a bit left out because I have been posting fic again recently, but haven't got a single spam bot commenting on my fic, wanting to make art for me :(

But it finally happened!

I posted a Mandalorian h/c fic (quelle surprise) this afternoon, and I just got a comment telling me how much they like the fic and wanting to turn it into a comic "so more manga readers could enjoy it).

I'm finally one of the cool kids!

For some reason I'm always ignored by the spammers and scammers. All my friends on Instagram are getting fake celebrities messaging thems, but I've never got a single fake Pedro Pascal slipping into my DMs.

Seriously, though, this is a PSA to those few people who might not yet have heard of the scammers that are currently targeting AO3 users. What makes them more insidious is that they are not anon and leave comments that seem fairly legit, making it easy to think that they're a real user who has enjoyed your fic. But the tell is that they want you to contact them outside AO3, either via email or Discord, often under the pretense of wanting to make fanart or you fic (or to just give you more feedback). If you get comments like this, do not respond to them, just delete the comment, block and report the user.

So, I finally managed to get around to watch Ncuti Gatwa's second Doctor Who season¹, and I think the fact that I actually managed to watch it already says a lot, even if I had to do embroidery while I did it.²

Non-spoilery review: There were parts that I really enjoyed, and which felt more like the Doctor Who that I love than anything in years, but this also had pretty much every single thing that I hated about RTDs first run.

( bulletpoints of random are spoilery )

¹I just realised that I never remembered to write my thoughts about Fifteen's first season. In short, I clearly liked it better than the CHibnall era, considering that I managed to actually watch it, but was quite disappointed by it in general after loving Fifteen in his first appearance. My favourite episode was "73 Yards", but even that felt like two stories squished into one. And I disliked the finale enough that it took me until now to watch the second season.

²Previously on Ruuger watches Doctor Who: I actually took up embroidery as a hobby to force myself to watch Doctor Who during Chibnall era. It did not work.

I've had pretty much zero inspiration to write for the last few years, partially due to RL being what it is, and partially because I'm again in the downturn of my fannish cycle¹ because season 3 of The Mandalorian failed to rekindle my fannishness, and the other Star Wars shows have been very hit and miss (my very unpopular Star Wars opinion is that Andor was the biggest miss for me).

At the beginning of this year I came up with this idea that to avoid distractions, every Saturday I take the bus to a library 40 minutes away at the other side of the city, and sit down in one of their workspaces for 4-5 hours with an energy drink and a laptop, and just write. Which has been very successful strategy, because in the last 6 months I have actually finished (very rough) first drafts for two novels and edited three short stories.

Now, I've been mostly writing orig fic, but today I forgot to take with me the printed notes for the novel I'm starting the next edit round on, and decided to work on some fic instead. And I actually wrote something! In fact, I took three very rough fic drafts and edited them to a more or less read-to-post state.

I say more or less, because all three are missing endings. Because apparently I cannot write endings anymore. The actual plot (and by plot, I mean Din Djarin recovering from whatever head injury I've inflicted on him) has been resolved, heartfelt confessions have been made, and then nothing.

Here is a gif illustration of how the stories now end:



I'm very close to just going "And then the kissed. The End." just to get these stories off my WIP folder...

¹I don't think I've ever talked about it here, but I've documented a pattern in my fannishness that I can sustain it for exactly two years since the most recent bit of canon that I've enjoyed. After that, my brain sort of starts to lose interest - not in a way that I'd like the canon itself any less, but that the fannishness for it requires active effort instead being constantly at the back of my mind.

(found this in my drafts: I wrote in in November when I saw the movie but apparently never remembered to post it)

I saw Gladiator II a while ago, and I'm too lazy to write a proper review except to say that don't expect a serious drama or even a slick historical action movie like the first - it was more of a messy but entertaining period drama that reminded me a lot of Game of Thrones.

(I genuinely thought Gladiator II had a more interesting storyline, even though I like the original Gladiator more as a movie)

But what I wanted to post about is that it got me thinking about how I never got even the slightest slashy vibe from the original Gladiator, even though it was a dudely dudefest about sweaty dudes in miniskirts fighting each other. This one, however, made me think that if they'd done this story back in 2000, it would have been a juggernaut slash fandom.

I have not looked at the Gladiator tag on AO3 yet, but because I know how fandom works today I predict it will be 80% Marcus Acacius/Reader (because Pedro Pascal), 10% Stranger things AUs where Steve and Eddie are emperors (no incest),¹ and 10% other. But if the movie had been released 20 years ago, I think it would have been almost all slash even if, it being 20 years ago, they had left out all the hints of characters being bisexual (because yes, there was more than one canon bisexual in the movie).

The most likely juggernaut ship I think would have been Acacius/Hanno, even though they only really had one scene together, because their relationship was basically the core of the movie. I thought there were more slashy vibes between Hanno and Macrinus² to the degree that at one point I genuinely thought they might actually go there, and a master/servant dynamic that would have been popular in the 00's, but if we're talking about fandom 20 years ago, uh, fandom back then was quite racist, and I don't think a ship involving a black character, even one played by Denzel Washington, would have been a fandom favourite. Hanno/Ravi, another very slashy relationship with a POC actor playing one half, might have had a slightly better chance of being popular. And then Geta/Caracalla would, of course, be the dirtybadwrong incest ship, with potential to add Hanno, Macrinus, Acacius, or even Lucilla into the mix as a third depending on what flavor of ship dynamic you prefer. There was also one line that I'm certain could have sustained a Maximus/Acacius/Lucilla fandom for years.

(alas, the movie was very lacking of women interacting with each other, but I am sure old school femslashers could have managed to do something with Lucilla/her servant)

Another reason why I was reminded of fandoms of yore was that the showcase of positive masculity that was the Gladiator II press tour also reminded me a lot of the LotR cast's appearances back in the day, because there was so much hugging and kissing and talking about how much they love each other. So there definitely would have been a big RPF fandom as well. I rest my case.

And if you'll excuse me, I'm now off to AO3 to see if I can find any slashy whump that's to my taste.

edit while posting this 3 months after writing it: Turns out that my guess about the fic distribution in this fandom was completely wrong. First of all, to my great surprise, Acacius/Reader is only second most popular ship. I wonder if it's because the writers are hesitant to break up Acacius' marriage?⁴ The most popular ship is actually Geta/Caracalla and I tip my hat at the incest shippers still flying the dirtybadwrong flag in the current fannish climate. To my disappointment, no-one had actually written that Stranger Things AU even though I thought that would have been the most obvious thing!

edit 10 minutes later: No, wait, I got that wrong. Pedro Pascal readerfic fandom still reigns supreme, I just missed that it's split between Acacius/You and Acacius/Reader.

¹ Sidenote: I couldn't remember the names of the characters, so I just googled 'stranger things slash' as a shorthand because I know it's the most popular pairing AND ONLY ONE OF THE SEARCH RESULTS WAS FIC-RELATED. Because I forgot that people don't call it slash anymore :( [insert old man shouts at a cloud gif]

² Macrinus was exactly the kind of slutty, messy bisexual that I bet would have become a big Gen Z queer icon if Denzel Washington was 40 years younger. Also, I'm about 99% certain that the controversial "gay kiss"³ that Denzel Washington said got cut was between Macrinus and Senator Thraex, because there's a scene where Macrinus greets him by kissing him multiple times, everywhere on his face except lips.

³ It really irks me when people refer to the other cut kiss between two men "gay kiss" because from the way that Paul Mescal described it, it was clearly not a gay kiss, but a slashy kiss, which is a completely different thing.

⁴ Which made me think that it'll be very interesting to see what happens with Fantastic 4 fandom. Pedro Pascal fic fandom is super focused on readerfic about his characters in a way that it's pretty much a fandom of its own outside the fandoms of the canons themselves. But FF is, I think, the first time that he will play a character whose main relationship is a romantic one (not counting Strange Way of Life because it was a special case) so will the readerfic writers break up the marriage, or will they pivot to just regular het with Sue Storm? (I predict it will actually be the latter, because I feel like today's readerfic writers are less likely to demonise a female character to get their ship together than old school slashers were...)

Hello, hello, hello! Long time no see, eh? I've been so busy and distracted the last year that I've been mostly lurking here, but I decided that I'm going to get back into the habit of posting by participating in the Snowflake challenge. I had great plans to actually do snowflake challenge this year, but then work happened and here I am doing catch-up almost halfway into the month.



Challenge #2
In your own space, talk about your fannish origin story.

I've been here for so long that I don't think there's anything I can say about this topic that I haven't said before, so I'm just going to copy my answer from 5(!!!) years ago when I last did this:

My first memory of being obsessed with something in a way that I would consider fannish was back in the early 80's/90s, and about things like Knightrider, Robin of Sherwood, High Mountain Rangers, Professor Poopsnaggle's Steam Zeppelin (which is a real thing, shut up), She-Wolf of London and the Nancy Drew books. My love of whump also dates back to these canons.

I then spent most of my (pre-)teens fangirling Harrison Ford and obsessing about X-Files (nerdy, outsider Mulder was soooo relatable, OMG, and I used to wear certain shirt to school because it kinda looked like what he wore in "Little Green Men"), but my first contact with online fandom was when I joined the QMS (Queen Mailing Service) mailing list in 1996. This is also my introduction to wanky fandoms, because boy was that place wanky.

In the late 90's I discovered my Fandom for Life: Babylon 5. The About.com Babylon 5 forums and JumpNow forums were my first real fannish homes, and I still keep in touch with some of the people I first met there. It was also the first fandom where I wrote fic (but luckily didn't post any, and thus the world was saved from the Cringy Adventures of Sheridan and Delenn's Awesome Granddaughter).

A few years later, in 2003, I came across this site called Livejournal, which had just stopped requiring invite codes and, well, 20+ years later and here I am.

Challenge #3
In your own space, talk about a fannish opinion you hold that has changed over time.

The big one, I think, if we consider me as I was in my origin story above, is that I used to not get the point of non-canon shippy fics. I don't think this lasted very long, though, because I was already slashing full speed by the time I joined LJ.

(gonna skip challenge #4 for now)

Challenge #5
Talk about what has improved in your life thanks to fandom.

I've been in fandom in one way or another for over 25 years. Been there, done that, got the Imzy t-shirt. And I have many fannish homes: not just you guys here, and people I interact with on AO3, but I also have many friends IRL who I have met through the Finnish Tolkien fandom and in the last few years I have developed a small group of close friends on discord, who I originally met on the Pedro Pascal sub on Reddit.

So though I haven't been "doing fandom" last few years as much as I used to, still a day doesn't go by that I don't do something fandom-related, because fandom has tendrils in every aspect of my life. It's not a hobby, it's a lifestyle, and I genuinely consider my fannishness to be a bigger part of my identity than my gender or sexuality.

Fandom hasn't improved my life; it has made me who I am.

I meant to post about something completely different, but then I had an idea to redo the test I made in February where I asked Microsoft Copilot about my fanfic to see if I get the same answers or if it has improved.

I typed in the same questions and discovered that

1) I am no longer Cassandra Claire. Woe.

2) The answers it gave were actually almost worse than in February.

( it also doesn't like my fic as much as it used to )

Then I thought, while I'm doing this, how about I ask the same questions from ChatGPT. Here's what it had to say about fanfiction author Ruuger:

( it did slightly better )

tl;dr, I enjoyed Ahsoka more than Andor or S3 of The Mandalorian, and it was my favourite Star Wars thing since Obi-Wan, even though I have not seen Clone Wars or Rebels and had zero emotional connection to any of the characters and plotlines. It was also the first Star Wars TV-show that made me wish that I'd seen it on the big screen because the visuals were absolutely stunning.

( spoilers )

And here's again my updated ranking of Star Wars live-action canon that no one else in the world will agree with:

Return of the Jedi
Rogue One
A New Hope
The Last Jedi
Empire strikes Back
The Mandalorian
Obi-Wan Kenobi
Ahsoka
Force Awakens
Revenge of the Sith
Rise of Skywalker
Book of Boba Fett
Andor
Phantom Menace
Solo
Attack of the Clones

Let's kick of the new year with the traditional fannish round-up of the year. This was again an OK year fic-writing wise, though I started far more fics than I actually finished. My biggest accomplishment by far was finishing the WIP that I started writing literally 15 years ago...

When the Rest of Heaven Was Blue, Chapter 6 (Spike/Buffy)

But I did also post some other fics:

Doctor Who: Pay it Backwards, Chapters 3-5 (Doctor & Doctor)
Doctor Who: Friends Don't Let Friends Be Jerks (Twelve & Bill & Courtney)

The Mandalorian: The Magic Hands Thing (Din/Luke)
The Mandalorian: Duty of Care (Din & Grogu)
The Mandalorian: Family (Din & Grogu)

And then my other traditional end of the year fandom meme:

1. Your main fandom of the year?
Still The Mandalorian, though I didn't get the fannish burst of energy from S3 like I had hoped.

( rest of the questions under the cut )