I'm personally rather fond of "Bluenette" Bonus points if you can guess what fandom this fic was from. This is hard mode.
The specific one I'm referring to is actually a western cartoon. Spoiler: The solution to this week's riddle It was Ed, Edd n Eddy
yeah I've seen that in so many fanfics. it's hard mode in the sense that 'guess which of 50 oak trees this one oak leaf came off' is hard mode.
It was a combination of me snarking about that fact and the obscurity of the fandom that the fanfic was from :P
No wonder I had such fond but vague recognition for it, okay. But yeah, bluenette is clever, I love it.
AGREED. I'm imagining it as kind of like a Machine of Death style thing! And speaking of Machine of Death, there was actually one story in the second anthology that's kinda similar to your celebrity-releasing-fake-soulmate-words idea... Spoiler: spoilers! A famous musician had released his cause of death as "ROCK AND ROLL"; it turns out his actual death prediction was "HEART ATTACK" or something equally boring, and he'd given the fake one as a publicity stunt of sorts, IIRC. Different reasons than the soulmate words one, but it's what I thought of. Also, I'm pretty sure I've seen the Timer setup used in a few Homestuck fics, but I never actually read any of them (none of them were for ships I was into--I think a lot of them were EriSol?), so I may be misremembering.
Well... that's certainly one way to get around "these two characters platonically hate each other's guts in canon" I guess.
man, I don't even know where to start with my fanfiction gripes. I haven't been reading fic a lot lately, but... I mean, I'm kind of a snob about it, honestly? or at least, I hold it to the same standards as I do published writing that's gone through an editor. consistent grammar mistakes? nope, sorry buddy. recurring errors in dialogue punctuation? HELL NO. style that gets on my nerves? out you fuckin' go! and that's with fic I've already filtered for content via tags/summary/etc. honestly, most of what I read comes from finding a writer whose style I like and then going through and reading everything in the fandom that author's published. works pretty well. :P (I am also a snob about published writing. this is equal-opportunity snobbery.) OH I REMEMBERED A SPECIFIC ONE and that is the existence of the fic I wrote in seventh through eighth grade and published on, you guessed it, fanfiction.net. and never finished. the giant-ass document it's in is 63,000 words, though (and I had a tendency to go LOOK AT THIS COOL HISTORICAL FACT I INCORPORATED IN THE CHAPTER in the author's notes, plus ff.net... doesn't let you respond to comments normally, so the published stuff is like 70,000+ words), and it ate so many hours of my life. also it's in one of those tiny-ass book fandoms that no one's in. also it's kind of terrible. I mean, it's not bad, I was probably the second-best writer in that teeny fandom (the best writer was my beta, and I was so excited when senpai noticed me!!!), sad as that is, but it does have copious amounts of the stylistic elements I try to avoid in my writing now. it just doesn't have panache. and I was so proud of it... I haven't published anything since then, either. edit: ALSO THE FOCAL SHIP, WE'RE TALKIN' THE ONE BETWEEN THE TWO VIEWPOINT CHARACTERS, WAS AGGRESSIVELY STRAIGHT.* I HAVE SO MANY REGRETS *although I maintain that one of the members of said ship is some kind of trans, probably a guy but that might just be me projecting, but 100% something because she lived as a guy for, like, a year with zero dysphoria and liked it much better than presenting female, so I guess it's not entirely straight. but none of that is in the story. I'm actually not sure I knew that trans guys were, like, a thing, and I definitely was not familiar with the nuances of dysphoria. but anyway.
I have been getting fussy at the way people are posting fanfic to Ao3. Not the fanfic itself, just little quirks like using the summary box for authors notes, adding tags like "lol this is garbage, haha don't read my trash." So far as I can tell it's defintiely a clash of community etiquette from people coming to Ao3 from other platforms. This stuff is normal in FF.net, but Ao3 is more... I'm not sure if professional is the word I'm looking for, but it's a very organized archive that has features and functions to streamline fic posting AND promoting, and watching people misuse or outright ignore those tools is driving me batty.
[returns high-five] what was your fandom? mine was for Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan trilogy, circa 2014. (books are alternate-history steam/biopunk Great-War-era. I know a lot about the First World War. and fake bioengineering.) the really sad part was that while the best writer was indubitably way out of my league (she had a very nice style of her own, for one thing, while I was mostly just really good at imitating Westerfeld's), I'm pretty sure she was over 30 (definitely 25+), while I was, uh. thirteen. edit: actually I wrote a sizable chunk of it while I was twelve (and plotted all of it), and maybe the last couple chapters when I was fourteen? point still stands, though.
Mine was Onmyou Taisenki, a boys' anime from the 2000s. Kids and their magic god-furries fight for the spiritual balance of the world and/or thousand-year-old revenge.
