2021 - My Year in Fanfic

I meant to write this post more than two weeks ago, and then stuff happened.

Anyway - so, looking back on the fanfic I managed to write in 2021, I'm actually a little surprised at how much of it turned out to be written for exchanges. I don't usually play in many exchanges, apart from Yuletide, but this year I did four.

So, to start with the non-exchange fic, I wrote four more of my MDZS crossover outlines (aka too lazy to actually write fic fics) - a Harry Potter, where the trio accidentally summons "the greatest dark lord of Ancient China", a Stargate SG-1 (and my personal favourite), where the cultivators are on an alien planet and Golden Cores are technically goa'uld, a Midnight Diner sequel to the episode with the haunted porn, and a Lucifer with Wen Ning/Mazikeen, just because. (I'd kinda hoped to spend december taking prompts for fandoms for more crossovers, but there didn't turn out to be much interest. Ah well.)

The only non-prompted and non-exxchange fic I did in 2021 was a tiny little ficlet for the Japanese Onmyoji movies - A Patient Fox. It's not much storywise, honestly, but I liked the movies.

For exchanges, the first I wrote was my Chocolate Box fic The Nightingale - MDZS modern AU with soulmates, because that's what the recip wanted. And the thing is - I don't generally write modern AUs for (more-or-less) historical canons, but that was the request - and usually, in MDZS, that means either something set in China (and that wouldn't work for me, because I do not know enough about life in modern China to even fake it, and what I do know would start off with asking questions like "how are there so many siblings in this story?" and go from there, and that would not have been a fun story for anybody) or in modern US (and I refuse to write that, I utterly refuse), so I ended up setting it in Denmark, just pouring it full of as many ridiculous Danish things as I could without ever mentioning the words Denmark or Danish in the entire thing. It worked well, I think - and I got to include stuff like the burial mounds at Jelling, because how could I not?

Second exchange fic, for Fandom 5K, was my first foray back into Pirates of the Caribbean fandom in ages - Of the Wave and of the Flame, an AU where Norrington got to sit movies 2 & 3 out by having had his ship sink off of Tripoli and thus ended up spending a few years as a slave among the Barbary Corsairs. As you do. And then I mixed it up with - one of my favourite Arabian Nights stories is the one about a fisher and a merman making friends, except I went with a different supernatural being and just ran with it. I liked the story I ended up with, my recip liked it and I did get some nice comments - but, let's just say, if I had laboured under the delusion that anybody would actually care if I came back to PotC, well, good thing I didn't. And rewatching the movies reminded me of all the things I disliked about the post-first-movie PotC, so. Not going back there again, methinks.

Third exchange was Trick or Treat, where I had fun with writing Beforeigners - Some Ado About Reðr - aka the perfectly ordinary day in the life of a shieldmaiden working in modern Oslo police, which ended up getting stuffed with as many cocks and pricks and flaccid suggestive balloons as I could put in it, and yet somehow not be porn.

The last exchange was Yuletide, of course, where I ended up doing way too much research than I ought to for a five-minute fandom (I know far more about Ukrainian neo-paganism - sorry, Native Faith - than I used to, and several Chernobyl facts I did not previously know (including the fact that there is a hotel in the Chernobyl Zone -a hotel?!)) of a Eurovision music video, and only a little of it ended up particularly relevant to Білий голос, which is - sort of an attempt at magical realism-ish what if Chernobyl had scared away Spring and gotten a fairly sizeable bit of local area stuck in magic eternal winter?

I think I'll do fewer exchanges this year - probably just Yuletide. I think that'll be better for me.