Fandom Alphabet: N, P, S, T, W to Z — Tropes, Headcanons, and Extras

[adevyish]

Last one! Full alphabet here.

N: Name three things you wish you saw more or in your main fandom (or a fandom of choice).

Ok I’m going to focus on fanfic tropes and headcanons, rather than community norms and wank, because I can be here all day with the latter. Which rules out my real main fandom, 1D, since I don’t read fic for that any more.

So: Final Fantasy VIII! (Spoilers ahead but it’s been like two decades.)

Time travel. There’s canon time travel; there ought to be more time travel fic! Batsutousai’s takes are good, and I adore Alis Dee’s now-deleted Futureloop, which explores the consequences of canon time travel and gets a bit science-y.

Politics. Granted, FFVIII’s canon politics are much shallower than FFVII’s, but two of the main characters are children of political leaders and one of them is a military leader. I definitely wish there were more fics that delved into this. Also, Balamb Garden are supposedly mercenaries, but they’re almost always written as very much On The Side Of Good.

(Both of the above are fall into world-building; I think being in a small fandom with a shallow-ish universe where there are world-building deep dives — Tokyo Babylon with AKK’s Decagram and Leareth’s Nukume Dori — has raised my expectations a bit too much.)

More simply though: Heist fic!

P: Invent a random AU for any fandom (we always need more ideas).

I’m writing this right now for Hades so haha I’m not going to say. (If you want to beta a crack-treated-seriously modern AU, drop me a line~)

S: Show us an example of your personal headcanon.

Kanda Natsuki from Nervous Venus is demisexual and gay. Here is my manifesto: 1) This is set in Kanagawa in the ’90s and yet Seki Youji and Kanda pretend to make out “as a joke” to the point one of their male schoolmates actually thinks they’re involved. 2) Kanda declares his love for Seki Youji and it comes across as not-too-serious so it’s ~platonic~, but if you read it minus the facial expressions? It’s romantic. 3) Kanda has dirty thoughts about Seki Reiji who he is close friends with; this is in fact canon. 4) He jokes about never getting married or having sex.

T: Do you have any hard and fast headcanons that you will die defending?

My fave ships are all ’verse ships (ʘ‿ʘ✿)

W: A trope which you are virtually certain to hate in any fandom.

A/B/O.

X: A trope which you are almost certain to love in any fandom.

Heist! Heist! Heist!

Y: What are your secondhand fandoms (i.e., fandoms you aren’t in personally but are tangentially familiar with because your friends/people on your dash are in them)?

Haikyuu, Jujutsu Kaisen, JJBA.

Z: Just ramble about something fan-related, go go go!

I love seeing friends get really into something even if I’m not in it. Random all-caps tweetstorms are such fun to read, even if I’m not in the fandom or out of the fandom now.

Okay, sigh, I said I wasn’t going to talk about wank but: despite what I just said, I do very occasionally blacklist. One of the fandoms I have blacklisted is partially due to Asian geopolitical baggage — Chinese culture is not a monolith. Sometimes I just hang out in the whitest bread fandoms possible to get away from this.