June Something Day 9: Drop the cast of a fandom you follow into a reality tv show - who/what/why?

i'm gonna use this prompt to talk about a crossover i had kicking around my head a while back: Danganronpa/Total Drama Island. (okay, so i'm sort of stretching the "reality tv show" thing -- Total Drama is a cartoon parody of reality tv shows.)

now, i'm hardly the first person to think of this crossover. just look at any of the memes comparing Chris McLean to Monokuma. and on top of that, both canons involve an eclectic cast of teenagers who are slowly whittled down one by one... it's just that one of those scenarios involves death, and the other one involves being voted off the island.

but as far as i'm aware most of the crossover fics currently out there put the TD kids in a DR context (aka the TD characters are forced into a DR-style mutual killing game.) so i think a fun subversion of that would be to put the DR characters in a TD-style harmless reality tv show.

back when i was into TD (the second time, around 2016-17; i first got into the series in like 2010) i even planned out a vague timeline for a potential crossover series with this concept. the first two fics would be analogous to the first two seasons of Total Drama, featuring the casts of the first two DR games. and then the twist would be that during the climax of the third "season," Junko would hijack the plane and crash it on an island, turning it into an old-fashioned killing game after all.

...or something along those lines. not sure if i'll ever write this (after all, i didn't write it even when i was enthusiastic about Total Drama, whereas these days i occasionally poke at fic or art but mostly have moved on. but maybe it'll creep back into my head!)

June Something Day 7: What's the longest time you've been in a fandom. Not necessarily your oldest fandom, but a fandom that you started and still continue to read/write/create content for in some way.

This one's probably gotta be Danganronpa. I first discovered DR in 2013ish, back when it first became a trend on Tumblr and was only accessible through the fantranslation/LP on SomethingAwful. I loved the first game and wrote a fic of it, and then SomethingAwful put up a paywall when I was like, one chapter into the second game, and I wandered away into some other fandom. But in 2016 my brother (who I had introduced to DR previously) encouraged me to play the second game myself, since the official English localizations had been released on Steam, and I became enamored with the fandom again.

From there, I watched DR3 and eagerly played NDRV3 when it came out the next year. My participation in the fandom waxes and wanes, but never entirely fades; I consistently write at least one, and usually more, fics for it each year. Soon I'll finally have posted more DR fics than I have Homestuck fics. (The current count is Homestuck: 14, Danganronpa: 12.)

The other candidate for "longest time I've been in a fandom" is Harry Potter. However, these days most of my Harry Potter interest actually goes to my favorite HP recursive fandom, the Rigel Black Chronicles fanfic series. And hey, maybe that counts, in which case yeah, I guess I've been in HP fandom longer than DR fandom. But it feels less consistent than DR (and as far as writing goes, I've only written one HP fic that isn't recursive fanfic of the Rigel Black Chronicles.) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

June Something Day 5: Compare and/or contrast your very first fandom obsession and your very latest fandom obsession.

ok, very first fandom obsession was the movie 9, dir. Shane Acker, released 2009. this would have been at the beginning of seventh grade. (side note: i was also a big fan of Harry Potter and Star Wars in elementary school, but i didn't know what fandom was then and i didn't do any fannish activities back then.) i saw the trailer and i was hooked, probably the most excited i'd been about a movie since Revenge of the Sith. i saw it multiple times in theaters, and i was fully obsessed.

at some point while searching for 9 content i discovered 9 fanart, most likely on deviantArt. and from there i discovered fanfiction.net, and began to read and write 9 fanfiction. i think i was in that fandom somewhere around 3-9 months, and posted 2 fics for it (both WIPs that didn't get finished), before i moved on to Order of the Stick.

as for my latest fandom obsession... hmm, do i go with Magnus Archives because it's the thing i got into most recently, or do i go with Hollow Knight because, while i first played it several months before i got into TMA, i'm currently more obsessed with it than i am with TMA? let's go with Hollow Knight.

comparisons... okay, both 9 and Hollow Knight are post-apocalyptic settings. from what i recall, 9 features nine "stitchpunk" dolls that are a foot or so tall, animated by a mad scientist (i think?), left to roam the wreckage of humanity. Hollow Knight's protagonist explores a ruined kingdom, so that's similar. also, both canons feature small characters, it's just that 9's characters are size "like 8-12 inches" and Hollow Knight's characters are bug-sized. because they're bugs. though this is emphasized more with 9, since they're navigating human-sized ruins, while Hollow Knight's setting is sized appropriately, so the size difference is less noticeable.

also, i don't think i've seen the movie 9 in ten years, but i remember it being sad/having a bittersweet ending, and Hollow Knight has that in spades.

(side note with a comparison to a different fandom: 9 is not the only fandom i've been in with a theme around the number 9 and characters named after numbers. [points at Zero Escape: Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors]. insert the meme about how if i had a nickel every time that happened, i'd have two nickels, which is not very many but it's a little weird that it's happened twice. both of them were released in 2009, but only 9 was lucky enough to release on 9/9/09.)

contrasts... well, aside from being in different mediums, the protagonist of 9 is a kind-hearted but naive character, trying to unite the other characters (i think? it's been like 10 years), while the protagonist of Hollow Knight is a silent protagonist. there's also a wider array of characters in Hollow Knight (though many are fairly minor), while i believe 9 is mostly limited to its 9-character cast.

this was a fun question!

June Something Day 3: What's a favorite, or at least memorable fandom meeting/interaction that you've had?

i met my best friend through the Rigel Black Chronicles recursive fandom! though it feels a little odd to list that as a fandom interaction since the two of us don't usually talk all that much about RBC? but it is how we met :D

honestly maybe i should just cite RBC fandom as a whole; a good chunk of my current online friends are people i met via RBC! i'm very grateful to the person who made the RBC discord 3 years ago, my online social life would look very different if it had never been created.

June Something Day 1: What's changed about your fandom life in the last 365 days?

i've gotten back into exchanges? not that i had totally abstained from them before, but i only did 3 (plus two treats for multifandomdrabble) in 2019, and then 1 in early 2020 -- which was for an exchange that i ran. but in august 2020 i signed up for crossworks and afterwards i started getting in the groove of exchanges again.

...in fact, in the last 365 days i've posted 21 fics for exchanges, which is about 30% of my total works on ao3, which i've been posting on since 2012. i didn't realize how much i'd written in the past year compared to other years. (i also wrote 2 non-exchange fics in the past year. as per usual i rarely finish & post fic without some sort of exchange, challenge, or fest.)

i've also embarked on co-running a big bang for my recursive fandom! so that's definitely new for me, i've never run a big bang before.

hmm... what else is new in the last year? well, i finished my first 10k+ fic, so that's my new highest-wordcount fic (it was for highadrenalineexchange, which was a lot of fun.) posted my first explicit fic (i think i've written some before but never posted it.)

oh, and new fandoms: i got into The Magnus Archives, which i fixated on big last summer and have written several fics for since. i also quite enjoyed the Among Us trend and wrote a few fics for that too.

and i think that's about it!

happy pride month :D