#like idk maybe it’s the history nerd in me but the preservation of these fanfics | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

zyxyz-xyzzy · 7 years

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some assorted ramblings from discord chat

somehow the talk of games like Sonic and the Black Knight got me thinking about self-insert fanfic, maybe due to the similar levels of goofiness this thing keeps happening where I'll start in on a really long self-insert fic, and it'll be just good enough to keep me interested for a while, and then it pulls some really dumb twist that makes me regret spending time on it

I think the thing about self-inserts with me is they can kinda be a form of canon-divergence AU if you squint ("ok how does adding this new character and their extracanonical knowledge change the course of the plot?"), which as I've prob said here before is an endlessly fascinating genre to me

also they can very easily carry over to idle daydreaming in the sense of "hmm, how would I do if I were in this situation, how would that go down"

(or more accurately maladaptive daydreaming!zyx uses an alternate version of me that is more of a functional human being, for the sake of plot convenience—like, still just as much of a nerd and bad at social as the real me but capable of living on my own/having more basic life skills as well as not having some of the really nasty internet shit internalized so I'm not a complete wreck)

I mean, it's a fun enough thought experiment

also said daydreaming shit is Literally Never seeing the light of day or even being discussed in specifics with other people so that's a bit different from self-insert fic published on the internet in that regard

though the upside to that is not bringing it outside my own head means there's no set "canon", so the stories/scenarios are continually morphing and evolving as I come up with new ideas and tweak existing ones

also once again going to take the opportunity to reminder/shameless plug that I can link my fic rec list here whenever if wanted—I Sifted Through the Sea of Fic So You Don't Have To

(seriously though, I amaze myself sometimes thinking about the amount of time and effort I've put into that thing)

(over 15 million words of fic very neatly sorted and labeled, all done pretty much manually)

the funny thing is the idea of polishing up and publicizing the list didn't start until later when I had realized just how big it had gotten, initially I just made it as a way to be able to easily find my favorite fics in case I ever wanted to reread them, and then the combination of lots of free time + fast reading speed + being very dedicated to and having fun making those sort of large organizational Projects led to it ballooning to epic proportions

thinking about it I guess it's not surprising that site of mine I linked is primarily functioning as a gfaqs topic archive in addition to hosting the rec list, the way it purges old topics on certain boards has always bugged me preservation of knowledge/information and all that

yeah it can be fun to see someone else's reactions to a game the gfaqs playthrough topics are really the same sort of thing as a tumblr liveblogging of a game/show, just without the screenshots

expanding a bit more on the preservation thing, it's like, obv for big projects like the playthrough topics that's something that had significant time and effort put into it and should stay available for future readers, but even archiving the more mundane and inane topics of a forum can have value, as a sort of snapshot into the internet culture of that time and place to make a maybe pretentious comparison it's like how when reading about history I get upset by when things with historical/cultural value get lost or destroyed, and how there are whole ancient civilizations we know nothing or almost nothing about--I guess I just put a lot of innate value in being able to say "this is what it was like, this is how these people thought and acted and lived their daily lives"

yeah, and it's fun to see stuff like that one thousand-year-old parchment of a kid doodling on his homework, or the sumerian tablets complaining about a merchant selling low-quality copper--it really humanizes the history, I guess you could say that people are people in any era

also only very tangentially related but I've been going to the local graveyard for pokemon go raids sometimes lately and have realized that I find it weirdly fascinating to go around reading graves like, finding the earliest birthdates, people with particularly long or short lives, people with unusual names, the different styles of gravestones... maybe a bit of an irreverent thing to be interested in lol

while I'm doing these long random musings, here's one more--I think one thing that makes fanfiction as a genre (for lack of a better term) interesting to me is the sheer openendedness of it (prob not the right word? but idk), from both a literary and content standpoint like, you don't have to stick to a particular length or writing style/format, you don't have to concede to the demands of a publisher or what will "sell well", as long as you have an internet connection and the imagination to put words to a page you can put just about anything out there and people will read it so you can see some real interesting experimental/unusual writing as well as things underrepresented in mainstream works like more minority representation etc. and ofc I know these things aren't exclusive to fic, it's just a really nice example of it that not a lot of people think about that way

#not a reblog #idk if anyone will see this long post at 2 am on a blog with 40 followers that's technically still on hiatus #but I realized I typed a whole lot of words and some of it is pretty interesting stuff #so didn't want it to be lost in the archives of chat

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