The Fanfiction Question

Suspension of Disbelief in Sci-Fi

The problem with learning anything of significance about history, geography, linguistics, biology and psychology is that it really interferes with the suspension of disbelief you need to enjoy science fiction. Humans are so complicated and so different depending on their culture and region, their language and the time period they exist in that all the alien species that are introduced always seem overly simplified. Not to mention how diverse the planet is depending on where it is, the alien planets are also overly simplified. The thing of it is, I really like sci-fi, I just want more thought given to diversity of alien species and planets.

Sakura’s excitement for her team assignment had faded somewhere around the first hour mark, after all the other teams had been collected by their jounin-sensei. Sasuke has resolutely ignored both her and Naruto the whole time and even the hyperactive blond himself had run out of steam in their long wait. His stupid prank was in place and all three were staring somewhat mindlessly at the chalkboard ahead of them.

It was just as Sakura had resolved to go ask someone if they’d been forgotten that the door to the classroom finally opened. A Kunoichi stepped into the classroom, the eraser balanced on the top of the door fell neatly on top of her head with a plop, prompting a cloud of chalk dust to puff into the air and settle on her head. Naruto immediately started guffawing over it while Sakura jumped to her feet and tried to apologize while internally she was pleased at the silly prank’s success. Sasuke made no real movement.

The Kunoichi who was to be their sensei observed them silently, head tilted slightly. She was pretty, even with most of her face hidden due to the mask covering the bottom half of her face and her hitai-ate tilted to cover her left eye. She was dressed in a standard Shinobi uniform and had her long silver hair pulled back into a ponytail. With a small nod she addressed them, “My first impression of you? ... I hate you, now meet me on the roof in ten minutes.” And with that, she vanished in a swirl of leaves, leaving the three Genin gaping after her.

ROTBTFD Fic Idea

So I was feeling nostalgic for when this fandom was a thing and Harry Potter was still alright and I’ve decided to summarize an old fic idea I had back then.

It starts in a basic Hogwarts AU setting, with the Big Four in their friend group, plus Anna. Jack and Elsa are kind of a thing; Rapunzel and Eugene, and Anna and Kristoff, are fully dating; and Astrid and Hiccup are definitely not. It’s that thing where Hiccup does his best to avoid the rest of the teenagers from Berk, which in this world is a small magical island village off the coast of the UK. (Think where A Thing of Vikings has it located.) The basic dynamics of all those stories.

Anyway, something or other happens and the group of five friends end up performing a spell that goes wrong and they accidentally pull their counterparts from a different dimension to their world, plus whoever were in their immediate surroundings. Of course, I’m talking about their movie versions. This ends up with Hiccup and the gang (I’m thinking sometime after HTTYD 2 and ignoring 3 because I hate it), Merida and her three maybe suitors (I just imagine her dragging them into misadventures because I think that’s a fun idea and she needs friends), Rapunzel and Eugene (I’m working with the theory that she’s cousins with Elsa and Anna so they all know each other), Anna and Elsa and Kristoff (and maybe Honeymaren and Ryder, I go back and forth on whether to have Frozen 2 be a thing), and finally Jack Frost and Peter Pan (this comes out of no where but I really like the idea of Peter being a spirit and acting as Jack’s little brother figure since Jamie is long gone by this point).

All the movie versions exist in the same world, some post post apocalyptic one where at some point civilization collapsed and started over, this time with magic being far more abundant. Jack and Peter are something like 3,000 to 5,000 years old. They hide as soon as they get to the Hogwarts world because they were in the middle of a fight with some shadow spirits or something who make a break for it towards the Forbidden Forest, they’ll spend most of the story dealing with rounding them up and staying hidden while everything else is happening, maybe.

The story is mostly going to be about the clashing dynamic of the groups. Like the movie versions don’t really know each other as anything but fellow nation leaders (I also kind of imagine there being some hostilities between the Highlands and the Barbaric Archipelago to add tension), while the teenagers are all close friends. Hiccup’s relationship with the Dragon Riders is nothing like the strained relationship of his counterpart (and he and Astrid are married), same with Merida and her suitors. Everyone is just really different and I thought it’d be fun to play around with them meeting each other.

At some point, towards the end, Jack and Peter finally reveal themselves and they know how to get back to their world. This will have the biggest changes because unlike everyone else, they’re a different species from their counterparts and ridiculously older. There’s absolutely no romance between Jack Frost and Elsa. Also depending on if this includes Frozen 2, Elsa has maybe been helping Jack and Peter in her role as a bridge.

It’s a lot of vague ideas and a general sense of a plot that I will never write because it has way too big of a cast to balance and is beyond my abilities. But I do still think it’s a fun concept.

That Time I Was Reincarnated As A Slime

This was a really great show and I’m looking forward to the next season, I just hate that so many of Rimuru’s subordinates were made to look more human when they got upgraded. Especially the lizard men.

OUAT AU Idea

Killian and Liam are the sons of Wendy Darling and Davvy Jones. At some point Wendy and her brothers end up back on Neverland, only they’re all older and for Wendy that makes her an adult, not something welcome in Peter’s Neverland unless you’re a pirate or a member of the tribe. She’s not welcome with the latter so Wendy becomes a pirate, taking up the moniker she’d thought up for herself so long ago, Red Handed Jill. With James Hook gone the Jolly Roger has been left adrift, none of its crew willing to take the captainship.

When Jill steps in they’re tired enough to let her take command, especially after she promises to help them leave Neverland. She keeps her word and they end up leaving in what is probably a fascinating story that involves Wendy sending her brothers back to England and Peter being forced to give up the title of Pan.

The Jolly Roger ends up in the Enchanted Forest realm and they sail there for a while as pirates until the ship is destroyed in a battle with another pirate ship, the Flying Dutchman. Jill and the surviving crew members, one of which is Smee, end up on the Flying Dutchman with the option of joining the crew or being run through.

Over time Jill and Davvy end up falling in love and he extends to her and the other interested crew members the situational immortality his magic blood and bond with his ship allows. They sail together for decades, Jill becoming known for her love of obtaining book and amassing a great collection. Eventually they choose to settle down and Davvy sends the Flying Dutchman off...somewhere. Jill and Davvy have two children before some kind of event happens that forces them to leave the boys to take care of it. They intend to return but don’t make it and Killian and Liam are left as orphans.

From there their canon story occurs, mostly as is. Malcom takes over Neverland as the new Pan and Killian, after losing his hand, decides to take after the man of his mother’s stories and takes up the moniker of Hook.

The England that Wendy is from isn’t the same as the England of the World-Without-Magic, but is instead a close copy where all the famous fictional stories and characters set in the “real world” take place, like Sherlock Holmes, Alice, Jekyll and Hyde, Frankenstein (who doesn’t live in a world without color and doesn’t try to bring his brother back, it’s the actual book), etc. So, basically Killians is actually familiar with the geography and some of the history of Emma’s world, but he keeps that to himself since you never know what could come in handy.

Code Geass Problem

There are a lot of things wrong with the alternate history in the Code Geass world, it’s like the authors just threw together a few key points in history they thought were interesting and said they went differently without any real follow through. For one, Britannia apparently exists because the Roman Empire never managed to permanently conquer the British isles, or something. That’s a huge fricken deal, it would have caused everything in the Western Hemisphere to go differently but somehow most of the world apparently progressed a lot like the real world. Napoleon as the first president of the EU or whatever really doesn’t make any sense considering who the man actually was and his beliefs but whatever, not to mention Washington’s Rebellion. How did the thirteen colonies even form when all the empires that took over the Americas are fundamentally different? The BS about Benjamin Franklin always manages to make me incredibly angry, of all the founding fathers they could have chosen to be the traitor they managed to pick one of the least likely candidates. Whatever, I’m not going into all the many problems, but the one thing that really bothers me for reasons I don’t really get, why does pre-invasion Tokyo look like the Tokyo of today? That city only exists as is because the original one was burnt down by the American bombing in WWII and then rebuilt, there’s no reasons for it to look like that when it took a very precise series of events to make it, events that didn’t happen in the Code Geass universe. Nothing is more irritating than ill thought out worldbuilding, especially in products I actually like.

Fairy Tail Question

Is Lucy’s luck ever really explored? They hint at there being something special, especially around the Tenrou Arc but nothing ever really comes of it. I think it would have been neat to take that plot device and actually go somewhere with it, Celestial Spirit Magic as a whole really could have gotten more development, I think. The idea of it has so much potential and the Heartfilia family history too, a matrilineal line of celestial spirits who may or may not come from nobility in a country where the Princess/Queen is also a celestial spirit mage? (was that ever confirmed in the manga or it is it anime only?) I guess the worldbuilding in general is a lot of wasted potential. Mashima gave us such a wonderful world and then never really explores it, kind of reminds me of the lost potential in Naruto and its political landscape which could have been so interesting and then was ignored in favor of cliche shounen power boosts and big energy/monster fights.

DC Comics - a thought

So the thing about the BatCat wedding, of which there were so many mistakes but in this particular case my problem is with the wedding party, look, I love Alfred and his relationship with Bruce, but he would not be the best man, he would be his father and whatever role in the wedding that that that would have held. Bruce’s best man would also not have been Dick or any of the other Robins because they are his sons and that is a different relationship.

Bruce’s best man should be Clark with Diana as his second groomsmen, that’s just how it needs to be.

Problem with tagging

One of the best things about archive of our own is it’s tags, it really helps sort through the frankly ridiculous number of stories on the sight for the content you’re actually looking for, mostly. The problem, of course is that some writers seem to add them all over the place even when they don’t actually apply to the story. Like, why would you tag a relationship for a fic where the two characters don’t even actually appear? It’s really frustrating if that’s the pairing you’re looking for but the tag is used where they aren’t even really the content.

Also, there is absolutely a thing as too many tags, some people could really benefit from a little more restraint.