Fandom Snowflake Challenge Day 3: Check Yourself Before You Rec Yourself

[healyg]

Note: This is a post for the Fandom Snowflake Challenge. To learn more about it, click the banner below:





In your own space, post a rec for at least three fanworks that you have created. It can be your favorite fanworks that you've created, or fanworks you feel no one ever saw, or fanworks you say would define you as a creator.

Okay! There's no particular rhyme or reason to these recs, they're just the things I felt were most worth mentioning. So! Going in roughly reverse chronological order...

Muffet Makes a Sale (Undertale): Somehow over the past year I have mastered the art of writing the 100-word drabble. Or, well, maybe just learned how to freakin' write one at all. Whatever. Anyway, I wrote a bunch of these for Yuletide Madness, and, judging by hits and kudos, this one was my most popular by far. I don't think it requires any canon knowledge to enjoy; all you need to know is that Muffet is a spider lady who really, really wants people to buy her pastries.

Storytime (12 Dancing Princesses): I was really proud of this one, but unfortunately it didn't get the attention I felt it deserved. It's a horror take on the old fairy tale "The 12 Dancing Princesses", and I'm very pleased with how it turned out. Give it a look!

Ocean Star (#FindTheGirlsOnTheNegatives): This is my second most popular drabble this Yuletide, going by kudos. There are parts of it I'm not happy with, but overall I think I did a good job with it! Most people seem to interpret the eponymous girls on the negatives as mermaids or aliens or what-have-you, but when I looked at the pictures I felt a different, more prosaic sense of loss. This was my attempt to put it into words.

My IF Comp 2015 Reviews (The 21st Annual Interactive Fiction Competition): What? Reviews are kind of a fanwork. Anyway, these were really a lot of fun to do! I made a goal to post here every day in September, and it got me pumped up enough to write these reviews when the Comp started in October. I'm a semi-regular judge of the IF Comp, but I usually play around 5-10 games. This year I played and reviewed around... 25? I think? So, yeah, that's a big increase.

Frank Castle Comes to Gotham: A Crossover (Gotham, nominally): A deliberately terrible fanfic, about Frank Castle teaming up with kid Bruce Wayne, that I wrote for the Bad Bang Exchange. I'm not gonna lie, this was the most fun thing I've written last year. (I'm also not lying in that first author's note, by the way; I don't watch Gotham, although I kept up with the show through recaps.) Chapter 5 in particular is one of my favorite things I've written. Here's another bit that I really love, from Chapter 3:

“Okay bruce” said Frank “Poops” Castle “if your going to be a vigilante superhero you need to be real buff and stuff and also get good at fighting, to do that you need to punch this tree”

“Okeydokey” said Bruce, he punched the tree with his hand. “Ow that smarts”

“Yeah I wouldn’t recommend doing it myself” said Frank Castle “that’s why I say you should get a gun instead and shoot criminals with it”

The Gostak Rasks Five (The Gostak (the IF game by Carl Muckenhoupt)): I was waffling on including this in my list, seeing as it's just a dumb, silly joke, but then the last fic I recced is just a dumb, silly joke, too. In fact, one might say nearly all my fics are dumb, silly jokes. Anyway, it was written for AO3's International Fanworks Day last year; the theme of the day was drabbles (write a drabble about your favorite characters doing fandom stuff, that kind of thing), which they abbreviated as #IFDrabble. As an IF fan, how could I resist the pun? I also had a joke in my head involving Gostak's weird invented English and... something else that twists the English language into knots. This fic let me get it out. Anyway, sorry for rambling longer than the fic itself (68 words, because I hadn't quite got the handle of writing exactly 100 yet.)

The Lost SBemail (Homestar Runner): What if Homestar Runner parodied those crappy "lost episode" creepypastas you used to see everywhere? I imagine it would look something like The Lost SBemail. The genesis for it came when I read Kharasma's Yuletide letter, which gave "Strong Sad writes a crappy fanfic" as a prompt. This isn't quite that, but...

Like a "good" (bad) horror story, the "twist" at the end makes no sense if you think about it for more than ten seconds, but I needed a good punchline, and since Kharasma mentioned Coach Z in her letter, I decided to add him in as the real writer. I was unsure about the twist at first, as I got in some good character beats for Strong Sad and this seemed to invalidate it, but thinking about it now, that was definitely the right call. The twist comes late enough (after another, different twist) that the reader can ignore it if they want, and Coach Z being able to get in Strong Sad's head so well makes for a funny (and a little disturbing!) mental image.

And-- Hey, wait, didn't I rec this for the challenge last year? Oh well, it's not like it's any less great. Still the best, 2k16.

So there you have it! 7 recs of my own work. And it's super long, too! It must make me look like the most conceited writer on the planet, haha! Hahaha! Hee hee.

So yeah boy am I gonna look like a chump when the next challenge is "describe something you worked on in detail" and I could have saved some of these words for that.