kudostest things

[cest_what]

So I've been updating the kudostest pinboard eight months now (bookmarking all new AO3 femslash with a 10%+ kudos/hitcount ratio). Here are some things that I've learned:

1) Dangan Ronpa has an f/f ship that the fandom refers to as Despaircest. I don't know what to do with how weirdly appealing that sounds to me. Although I haven't reached the tipping point and actually checked out the visual novel yet.

2) Teen Wolf and Avengers are pretty much the only femslash-friendly fandoms that pinboard is into. Those fics are the only ones that will already have notes when I save them.

3) Once Upon a Time is a fucking monster of a femslash fandom, and I have no idea where the fandom even lives. I only ever see OUaT mentioned in passing in my corners of DW and Tumblr, by people who like it but don't fic, but somewhere there is a community of people churning out 100k Regina/Emma epics every day and twice on Sundays. Despite the fact that the ship is built on hate UST, and Regina's canonical character tag includes the words "Evil Queen", they are almost all about Regina being brave and misunderstood while everybody except Emma is mean to her.

4) OUaT is also super into ship portmanteaus, but they're all kind of charmingly evocative and none of them are smushnames, so on the whole I tentatively approve. Snow Queen (Emma Snow/Evil Queen Regina) is the most common, but I've also seen Sleeping Warrior for Aurora/Mulan, and a bunch of Ruby ships along the lines of Red Queen, Red Snow etc.

5) Despite all the attention they've gotten, there's still very little fic for Orphan Black and Orange Is the New Black.

6) There is a person who has been writing a Judi Dench/Fandom Insert Character series for five months now.

7) I have no idea how the Marvel and DC universes work or how to tag them. I sort of thought I would start to get a sense for the interconnecting sub-canons, but noooooo.

8) Fic summaries make RWBY sound so exactly like my kind of thing. I wish I liked the animation style enough to watch more than an episode.

9) There is apparently no better character name for the playable video game characters where you can choose their gender than e.g. 'Female Hawke'. It took me ages to work out whether this was a name or a Rule 63 tag.

10) If I've never heard of a fandom, it is almost definitely a video game. If I've seen something mentioned on tumblr that I assumed was an anime, that's also a video game.

11) There are kind of a lot of video game fandoms.

____

So I missed last week because I wrote a Dear Femslashex Letter instead (apparently ... two posts a week is not possible for me?), but here's my favourite fanwork encountered this week:

Home by Harukami

It's No. 6 again, and Nezumi/Shion again, and it's what I basically want 90% of all No. 6 fic to be: a complicated but happy reunion preceded by thousands of words of being lonely, and painfully, epically missing each other. Thank you I will take twelve hundred.

Also Shion talks to mice.

Comments

*waves video game femslasher flag happily*

[alias_sqbr]

The Despaircest sisters don't actually get much time on screen together but their relationship is pretty wonderfully terrible if you like that sort of thing and there's a very good Dangan Ronpa Let's Play (translated transcript plus screenshots) if you don't want to play the actual game.

Haha yeah the tags for Dragon Age etc are a often bit sad. And it can get convoluted eg I have written a few stories about my PC Martya Brosca, who is a Female Dwarf Commoner (or equivalently Female Brosca) both of which are a subset of Female Warden and of Dwarf Commoner/Brosca which are both subsets of Warden. Deciding how specific I should be with the tags can be tricky.

EDIT: Also thanks for putting that together! *browses* It's interesting that the one Dragon Age story of mine that got in is one I think of as fairly unpopular, but I guess it's just an unpopular pairing and the few people who bothered to read it must have liked it!

Re: *waves video game femslasher flag happily*

[cest_what]

Ooh, thank you for the Dangan Ronpa link! That could be great.

Oh my god none of that Dragon Age paragraph means anything to me at all, my eyes are crossing. Now I'm even more paranoid about getting my tagging laughable wrong, ahaha.

but I guess it's just an unpopular pairing and the few people who bothered to read it must have liked it!

That's what I like about using kudos ratio rather than absolute numbers to guess whether something's worth clicking on - it's still a bit hand-wavey, but it's fairly egalitarian about popular and unpopular ships and pairings.

Re: *waves video game femslasher flag happily*

[alias_sqbr]

In Bioware games you can choose certain aspects of your character (first name, gender, and certain aspects of your background) and these affect the story a little bit. You also get to control other aspects of the story as you play. You can usually get by with "Female (character title)" eg Female Shepard, Female Warden, Female Hawke. But here's some extra details in case it's useful.

Mass Effect: The character's name is Commander (first name) Shepard, and everyone in-game calls them "Shepard". Usually all anyone in fandom cares about is their gender, thus "Female Shepard/fShep/f!Shepard/..."

Optional extras: You choose from the Colonist, Spacer and Earthborn background and Ruthless, War Hero or Sole Survivor service history but it doesn't affect much so fandom usually doesn't care. If you are nice all the time you get "Paragon" points, if you are abrasive you get "Renegade" points, and these have various plot/gameplay effects. So a story tagged "Ruthless Renegade Earthborn fShep" is about a female character with the Ruthless and Earthborn background who was played to mostly pick "renegade" options. But if you just tag them "Female Shepard" people can figure out if they like the characterisation choices from the summary.

Dragon Age Origins: The main character is a Grey Warden and everyone calls them "Warden". The background you choose here makes more of a difference to the plot (including to romantic options!), so people are more likely to tag it. Your surname is set by your choice of background, and people use them interchangeably. Thus "Female Dwarf Commoner Warden" is equivalent to "Female Brosca", since a dwarf commoner Warden gets the surname Brosca.

Dragon Age 2: The main character has the surname Hawke, thus "female Hawke". There are usually three colour coded options for dialogue, so you may see some references to "Purple Hawke" etc (a character played to choose the purple sarcastic options) but it's not a huge deal. There is also the option to have argumentative "rivalry" romances instead of more conciliatory "friendship" romances, kind of like kismesis in Homestuck, but tagging tends to ignore it.

I hope that was helpful and not overwhelming! I haven't played enough of older Bioware games to say how they work but they don't get much fic these days anyway.

Re: *waves video game femslasher flag happily*

[cest_what]

Ooh, ok, thank you! That's interesting.