Year in Fandom Meme 2023

[darkrosaleen]

I wrote 10 fics in 2023, which is a respectable 4+ over 2022. My expectations were sky high as always, and I failed to meet them as always, but it wasn't a bad turnout. I wrote only for exchanges, seven of them: six that I posted one fic for (one treat, three pinch hits, two proper assignments), and Battleship AKA exchanges georg. I wrote four fandoms for the first time, including two that I consumed specifically for a pinch hit.

FICS POSTED IN 2023

Love For The Devil Brought Her To Me
Original Works, Male Trucker/Male Hitchhiker, kinky gory 1970s serial killer goodness

Under an Opal Moon
The Untamed, Jiang Yanli/Nie Huaisang, what if you date the ghost

I Know It Hurts (I'd Quench That Thirst)
The Untamed, Jiang Cheng/Wei Wuxian/Wen Qing, omegaverse forced marriage femdom

Loyal to its Master
Romantic Poets RPF, John Keats/Percy Shelley, puppy play double drabble

Golgotha
Jesus Christ Superstar, Jesus Christ/Judas Iscariot, Judas has a spooky dream

Hey Little Monster
The Untamed, Xiao Xingchen/Song Lan/Xue Yang, BDSM AU where brats get punished

Fascination Street
My Neighbor Totoro, Kusakabe Satsuki gen, futurefic psychological horror about liminal spaces

Hungry Like the Wolf
Stranger Things, Steve Harrington/Nancy Wheeler, puppy play and body hair

Shake the Glitter Off Your Clothes
Guardians of the Galaxy, Nebula/Rocket Raccoon, waking up in femdom space Vegas

Smoke Signals
Fall Out Boy, Joe Trohman/Pete Wentz, (not sexually explicit) jailbait shotgunning

END OF YEAR FANDOM MEME

Leitmotif(s) of the year

I wrote two horror fics about spooky symbolic dreams, three AUs about societies built on kinky power imbalances, two very short puppy play fics, two fics where a small guy tops/doms a big beefy guy, and two fics with drunk sex and morning-after hangovers.

My most popular story

By hits, kudos, and bookmarks, it's Hey Little Monster by a landslide. Not surprising - it's explicit BDSM fic for a popular OT3 with popular dom/sub roles. Most comment threads goes to Fascination Street, which has my lowest hits and second lowest kudos.

My best story

Love For The Devil Brought Her To Me. I struggled a bit when I first got this assignment, but once I settled on a time and place and character dynamic, I absolutely nailed the vibe I was going for. The 1970s are a time period I'm really drawn to, and it was the perfect setting for some super dark murder of hot teen hitchhikers. I also love the beauty of long night drives through isolated tree-lined highways, and the loneliness and independence of the long-haul trucker life. And I'll never pass up the opportunity to write top/dom/perpetrator POV.

My favorite story. Not the most popular, but the one that makes me the happiest.

See above.

Story of mine most underappreciated by the universe, in my opinion

My lowest stats are on Fascination Street, which isn't surprising - it's gen fic for a 34-year-old children's movie. But it did get the most comment threads (and lengthy comments too), so maybe it's not underappreciated?

On a semi-related note, I took major inspiration from the classic Totoro AMV Something Wicked This Way Comes, which edits the beloved wholesome children's movie into spine-chilling monster horror.

Story of mine the universe appreciated way more than I expected it to

Also unsurprisingly, my most popular fics were BDSM and omegaverse PWPs for a megafandom, plus original darkfic smut. I guess Fascination Street getting most comments is surprising, but it doesn't have a crazy amount of comments.

Biggest disappointment

A moment of silence for my many unfinished fics of 2023, including:

-The three separate Raven Cycle fics I started for a "happy tenth birthday darkrosaleen" fic
-The nasty historical fantasy noncon for Trick or Treat
-The "what if I make this terrible man a woman" femdom for a Battleship teammate
-The Joe Troh underage crossdressing I abandoned to write Joe Troh underage shotgunning
-The extremely hot porn for an extremely niche kink written in second person, which no one other than me wants
-The hot punk with mosh pit injuries I started for Goreswap

Biggest surprise

Last March, FFA got really into Alex Turner and Miles Kane's homoerotic onstage antics during their 2016 Last Shadow Puppets tour, and it dominated FFA for several months. I've been a fan of Last Shadow Puppets and Arctic Monkeys since their debut in the mid 2000s, and Alex Turner has been my subby femdom muse since 2007 (if you search FFA for "Alex Turner femdom," you get two comments five years apart which were both written by me), so it was surreal to see an eight-year-old slash ship of his suddenly blow up on meme. I've complained on this very journal that not enough people write Alex Turner femdom! And now Saltburn fandom has latched onto Arctic Monkeys for the totally wrong character. And I hated The Car.

Hardest story to write

Twice this year, I was super excited by an exchange prompt and gamed for that assignment/leapt on that pinch hit, bursting with ideas for what fic to write. Both times, I left it until the last minute, posted a bus pass by the deadline, and made major revisions between deadline and work reveals, which is a very stressful experience I do not recommend. Both stories ended up fine, but I'm not super happy with them.

Sexiest story

Smoke Signals, which contains nothing steamier than marijuana and underage kissing. I feel like I really nailed the eroticism of both kissing and smoking (and the combined eroticism of shotgunning). And none of the actual sex scenes I wrote this year blew me away.

Truest story

Two of them are true for two different reasons, but even stating those reasons makes the whole situation obvious, so I'll let you believe I summoned my friend's sister's ghost and married a disgraced omega sect heir.

Favorite title

Golgotha. Most of my fic titles are song titles/lyrics, and sometimes the non-song titles are the best in their simplicity. This one is creepy and ancient and heavy with religious significance that the POV character doesn't understand.

Favorite opening line

Golgotha: "The night before Passover, Judas Iscariot dreams."

Something I love about Jesus Christ Superstar is a Judas who believes in God and the coming Messiah, but thinks his beloved friend Jesus is just a beautiful, charismatic, idealistic human who will lead their people to disaster. It was fun to frame what the reader sees as a prophetic vision from God on the eve of the Savior's death as an ordinary nightmare before a holiday.

Favorite closing line

Love For The Devil: "By morning, Bill will be nearly to Calgary, and Mick will be yet another beautiful boy sleeping under the trees by the highway, blanketed forever by the wet dirt and the towering pines."

As a writer, I love to get inside the head of a monster and see the beauty and romanticism in their cruel actions. The working title for this fic was In the Pines, In the Pines from the Nirvana unplugged cover of "Where Did You Sleep Last Night," and there are still Pacific Northwest pines scattered throughout the story.

Pairing/genre/fandom that I wrote that I never would have predicted last January

The Untamed/MDZS had been chugging along as a megafandom for four years when I finally watched it, after I wrote a drunk osmosis summary for EAD Birthday Bash (it was mainly the gorgeous fanvids I watched after that hooked me). I'd never watched a Cdrama before, and I hadn't seen much Asian media generally, but it has a huge cast of fucked up codependent pretty boys so I'm not too surprised.

Fandom(s) I was active in but didn't write anything for

Adding a new question because this happens to me a lot. This year it was The Raven Cycle/The Dreamer Trilogy, which I devoured in September and fell (back) in love with. I mostly read Adam/Ronan, Blue/Gansey(/Henry), and Jordan/Declan because that's most of what's on AO3, but I still have a soft spot for dom Gansey/sub Ronan, fucked up Kavinsky, and Lynchcest. Book review on dreamwidth still pending, still hoping I can write something new for the fandom.

Writing risks and lessons learned

If an exchange prompt makes you giddy with excitement, write it immediately instead of waiting until 12 hours before the deadline and hating yourself and the fic. Battleship always seems fun, but "IDK, whenever, but faster than the fastest writer on your team" is my least favorite kind of deadline, and I'm zero percent surprised that I wrote 3/4 Battleship fics the week between Tower team winning and work reveals (aka when there was an actual deadline). In general, the less I'm giddy about a prompt, the more fun and less stressful the writing will be and the more I'll enjoy the end result.

FANDOM GOALS

I didn't have goals last year, so here's my list of things I wanted to write in 2023:

❌ The Will Byers post-canon grunge fic
❌ Will/Mike/Eleven baby OT3 set between seasons 2-3
✅ Something gory for goreswap
❌ More ageplay
✅ More petplay
✅ A juicy AU with lots of worldbuilding
❌ Fucked up hot mess Shiv Roy domming her subby brothers
❌ Baby dom Sam Obisanya domming slutty Jamie Tartt
✅ Something for MCU now that I've finally seen Endgame
❌ Something posted outside of an exchange/bang/event (a girl can hope)

And here are my goals for 2024:

Post a Raven Cycle fic for this account's tenth birthday
Post one of my unfinished treats from 2023
Write something that challenges me as a writer
Write something that challenges me as a kinkster
Write something that shamelessly indulges my id
Sign up for no more than 2 exchanges (including pinch hits), and write for no more than 4 exchanges
Do NOT sign up for Battleship
Clean up my Birthday Bash badfic sock and post a fanmix there
Post quarterly fandom updates on DW
Post three works outside of an exchange (already posted one, for the first time since 2020!)

Comments

[snickfic]

I would enjoy seeing quarterly fandom updates. :) And that Totoro horror vid is really fun. Do you happen to know where the music is from? I know I recognize it, but I can't place it...

[darkrosaleen]

It's the theme to Requiem for a Dream! I first saw this vid at an anime convention and it's since been scrubbed from YouTube, so it was hard to track down.