Potassium hydroxide dust in my eyes:

Challenge #12: Make an appreciation post to those who enhance your fandom life.

If you've ever stopped by to talk to me about rarepairs or favorite characters or niche AUs, here or on Discord or Tumblr or in the AO3 comments, thank you! You're the reason I've written as much as I have. (I'd still write for those rarepairs/rare characters/AUs, but knowing I'm writing for someone makes it that much more fun.)

If you followed me over here to Dreamwidth because I would not stop talking about it everywhere else, welcome :D I'm really glad you're here and gave it a shot. And if you've been on Dreamwidth way longer than I have, thank you for being here! It's my favorite place on the internet, and I'm enjoying it so much.

And if you write fic, or meta, or make art or moodboards or memes or anything else fandom-adjacent, you're the reason I got into fandom in the first place, so thank you! I've had a great time here and I'm looking forward to sticking around for a long time. I hope you do too. <3

Guess who gets to put those kitty-medicating skills into practice this week! And needs to learn how to bathe two cats who will not like it, all by herself.

(Someone got worms, and now they both have them. Not a big deal, but definitely cause for a long, tired sigh.)

Challenge #9: Talk about your favorite tropes in media or transformative works. (Feel free to substitute in theme/motif/cliche if "trope" doesn't resonate with you.)

Listen, I'm not saying I have an extremely specific preference for ships between two very competent characters*, both a little bit abrasive but one a lot more blunt about it than the other**, with a professional connection in which one technically outranks the other and there's potential for a right-hand-man dynamic even if canon doesn't deliver***, at least one of them canonically has a really baffling career progression****, if they're human it's going to be some variation on blond/brunette and if they're robots their colors contrast similarly, and their backstories are vague enough I can work some kind of long-term personal connection between them into my headcanons if that's not actually canon - and also it's a rarepair, at least one of the characters involved has a much more popular (sometimes canon) ship with a different character, and at least one of the characters involved frequently gets underestimated/underused/forgotten by both canon and fandom.

I'm just saying it's weird that it happened to me four times.

And I didn't even notice until I was lining up a bunch of my favorite ships and went "...huh." Sure, some of it is headcanon because a lot of the characters involved are also underdeveloped, but if I'm coming up with similar headcanons for all of them, I think there's something there! It's so specific I don't think it even counts as a trope. Birds of a Feather + Right-Hand Man + a touch of Opposites Attract except they're not really that different, one just hides it better + Competence Kink + uh, whatever the trope name is for contrasting colors but specifically not red/blue?

*Look, I know popular Ace Attorney fanon is that Daryan's an idiot, but he's pretty clearly canonically not. He makes bad decisions under pressure, which is a different problem. He keeps up with Klavier fine.

**I think Ema and Franziska can match each other's abrasiveness beat for beat, but I know which of them I'd rather be locked in a car with for three hours.

***Did Transformers canon give me the Carly-and-Mikaela teamup it should have? Not even a little bit. But the compatible skillsets are there. Official diplomat/team mechanic is great, actually.

****Does any piece of Transformers canon manage to be consistent about what Elita's actual rank is, let alone Chromia's?

Today's writing project: The Daryan-in-prison sequel to Sonata. I have a rough draft, I have thoughts, I just need to sit down and start writing on it. Someone come yell at me in ~8 hours to see if I did that.

I also have at least three fills I could be working on for the kink meme and a couple I never crossposted here. So if I'm going to procrastinate on the sequel, I can do it with that.

(For anyone who saw the Snowflake post yesterday: this, too, is part of the creative process. Just Sit Down And Do It.)