Mosaic Fragments

[The ex post facto subject is from a comment by Neuroretardant in response to an article about fansubs on ComiPress.]

Two links from kalquessa I wanted to pass along...

Thinking Fourth Dimensionally, a short and amusing Hermione fic. Please be warned that close examination of the site banner may cause you to run away in terror. I'd like to think of myself as pretty open-minded when it comes to ships, but the teacher/student Harry Potter pairings make me squeamish.

[As you will soon figure out, linking to the fic was just an excuse for me to blather aimlessly about shipping for a post.]

I mean, I've read some hundreds of thousands of words of this guy's Lina/Xelloss epic, Absolution, in spite of being a devoted Xelloss/Filia shipper. [Not to mention, although I wouldn't say I ship them, I tend to shy away from anything that's not Lina/Gourry and Zelgadis/Amelia.] But the fic does argue a reasonably convincing case for Lina/Xelloss, and doesn't just pretend Gourry doesn't exist, as I'd imagine a good number of such fics do.

When I was composing this entry in my head, I was going to say that my ships are so canon it's boring, but thinking about it more, I guess that's not really true. For the most part I don't like mushy romantic pairings [with notable exceptions like Haruka/Michiru and Arc/Kukuru], so I tend to go for pairings that are hinted at but never quite happen in the actual series, like Ryouga/Ukyou, Amarant/Freya, and ShinKumi. [ZOMG SHINKUMI OTP SQUEE!] Tension makes things interesting, after all.

Though to be honest, I tend to fangirl characters much more than ships, and I tend to like the loners anyway. I doubt I'd ship Amarant/Freya if it wasn't for a few amazing authors, notably Guardian with her snarky!Amarant and wussy!Fratley. Otherwise I might have thought Freya/Fratley kind of cute. My introduction to Xelloss/Filia similarly began as a Xelloss obsession, which partly explains why I put up with Absolution.

Anyhow, the other link was to the Fandom Biography of Ms. Scribe, which gave me more than an entire day of enjoyment and drama. Since then, I've had random moments in which I felt that my life was suddenly devoid of anything interesting, like I needed a good flamewar, or maybe some fandom wank. It really is quite amazing some of the things she orchestrated, but I can't believe how sloppy she was in other respects. Mixing accounts? Not keeping your sockpuppets' stories straight? What's up with that? My first thought was that she should have played some online mafia first. That would have taught her to proofread her posts to avoid inconsistences and to carefully disassociate herself from her scum buddies. Then again, usually in online mafia, your scum buddies are real, other people. [Although a friend did joke once about signing up multiple accounts for the same game; I don't think it would have worked.]

Actually, I also had quite a bit of fun with just the first chapter of the biography, which is just a background of the HP fandom. There was so much melodrama. But now that I think about it, it's not so different from my own experiences in other fandoms. I remember a rather lengthy exchange I had with one close-minded guy over gay acceptance in one Sailor Moon list... I guess it must have started with Haruka/Michiru, but I don't remember it being even remotely on-topic afterwards. Also, at first I thought it was crazy that shipping wars would be so impassioned, and then I remembered the Subaru x Seishirou versus Subaru x Kamui wars that raged through the X fandom way back when. There were cliques and webrings and fansites, and it got pretty nasty with the exclusion and the insults. I remember one argument that SxS was incredibly dark and violent and evil, and supporting it made you a bad person, whereas Subaru and Kamui could heal each other from all the horribleness, or something like that. Yeah. [I was still wary of the whole thing when I posted my SxK Winamp skin, hence the disclaimers on the site and in the readme.]

...ah, now I really do feel like my life is so boring these days. But I don't have the time to enter or keep up with any fandoms, and I generally arrived to all of them late anyhow.

Yeah, just some pointless rambling from me. Trying to clear out my head of comments I want to make and my bookmarks of links I want to post about.