December meme: favorite trope

I'm so late with this -- sorry! It was mean to be for December 12. Apparently performance review week at work was just enough added stuff to push me off my schedule.

for sholio: how about your favorite fannish trope? Or any one of them that you'd like to talk about. :)

Oh, there are so many tropes that make me happy. I've been thinking and thinking about this question off and on since Sholio asked it, thinking wow, I'm just fickle; I keep veering from one to another. I mean, I've always known that I don't have a bulletproof trope kink the way a lot of people do, but still - surely I could settle on something.

So I settled on first time, then realized that well, first time but also all kinds of tropes that can lead to first times -- hurt/comfort; cave fic / desert island / Canadian shack; two men, one bed; huddling for warmth...

And then I realized that really, I like all of those for gen, too, if the point of them is warmth. Er, emotional warmth, not just physical warmth. *g*

Which is when the lightbulb went off: my bulletproof trope kink is intimacy tropes in general. And not really established intimacy -- which I also enjoy! -- but growing intimacy, or even surprise unexpected intimacy. I don't think there's one specific path that makes me happiest, but what I love is people realizing that they mean more to each other than they'd thought, or knowing that and finding the courage to say or do something about it, or realizing that the other person feels like that, too.

So in canons, one of the things I'm drawn to is characters who don't necessarily expect to like or trust each other, then that starts changing -- White Collar, where Neal and Peter like and trust each other even when they know they shouldn't, necessarily; Person of Interest, where Finch and Reese, who should be safely isolated from each other in their complementary paranoid distrust of everyone, instead grow together to the point that have rainy-day activities and walk their puppy together and panic if one of them loses contact; Haven, where Duke-the-smuggler and Nathan-the-cop bitch and moan about each other and declare to anyone who'll listen that they don't like or trust each other, but who have each other's backs without a blink (okay, maybe with a blink *g*); Grimm, where Nick runs into people who should hate or fear him, or whom he should be lying to to protect them, and instead just talks honestly to them and builds himself a Scooby gang like no Grimm has ever had before, with people willing to go to the mat for him on all sides (and vice versa); on and on.

Give me a mismatched set of people, or people with obstacles between them that they overcome to deepen their relationship, and I'm there. (Or, for that matter, characters like Magneto and Xavier, who started out friends, realized that they have intensely fundamental differences and wound up on opposite sides, but who never lost their connection; see also Doctor and Master, etc.) Found families ftw.

In fanfic, I like that extra little (or big) push than we tend to see in canon, whether gen or slash -- the h/c, the bed-sharing that isn't played for a joke, the intimacy that can come with isolation. I also like a particular version of WNGWJLEO; not in a "we could never be *gay*, ew" way, but if one or both characters has always thought he was straight, and finds himself falling for his partner and realizing oh, er, not so straight after all - I love that. It's a huge obstacle, and it tends to work best for me in buddy pairs that would expect to get along -- cop partners, fellow soldiers, fellow scientists. Which really should have a different acronym, I guess -- something like Huh, I Never Knew I Was Queer (HINKIWQ). (Which in my head is now "hinky-wick", which is cracking me up.)

So, yeah. Tropes that lead to intimacy; they'll get me every time.

---

Full request list here, still open!

December meme: SG handbook

Another make-up post! This one was meant for December 13.

for princessofgeeks: How you came to compile your absolutely kickass and indispensable handbook for the Gateverse.

Believe it or not, it was kind of an accident.

And oh, hee -- this has morphed in my head over the years to just "I wanted to write SG-1 and was intimidated by the sheer amount of information in the show, and wanted to have a way to look things up by subject rather than episode (which is how existing sites, like the fantabulous rdanderson.com, tended to organize things)." But I've been poking at old versions of the site and just came across a note that says that I started it because I wanted to know what Jack's medals were, which sounds... exactly right.

But the other is also right, if less specific. I'd never been involved in a military-based fandom and didn't have a strong grip on the military stuff, and for all I've been an SF fan forever, I'd never written any before. Plus there were lots of characters to keep track of. I wanted information at hand to look things up as I needed to when I started writing, and going by episode was too cumbersome for me. I wanted things organized by subject so I could see at a glance all the times Jack got injured, or whatever.

So just for myself, I started organizing some vital stats on a webpage so I could get at it from anywhere; I think the very first one was just a plain list. Eventually I organized that into a nice little table, and I think that's the point at which I told a few friends about it, since I knew they were also writing SG1 and thought it might be useful for them.

Then a while after that, someone on a list asked a question, and someone I'd never heard of linked them to my page. Oh dear god. *g* I'd never actually intended it for broader public consumption; it wasn't that good! I'd never even linked to it from my main page. But clearly it was public now, and I had two options: buckle down and make it better, or take it down quietly (at that point, there was still some info on it basically taken directly from other sites -- when this was a personal project, I wasn't worried about that, since I knew I was using those sites for reference, just reorganizing the notes a bit. So I didn't have disclaimers or whatever up.)

I enjoyed the taking notes and organizing info, though, and honestly it was really happy-making to see people getting use from the site, so I decided to keep going with it. I reworked everything that I'd borrowed with my own notes/observations, I expanded things, I started putting updates pages up.

Note-taking got steadily easier and more complicated at the same time: I went from tapes and a pen&paper to a TiVo (pause and rewind, omg yay) and eventually a laptop (no more transcribing!), then DVDs and a better laptop. Easier and easier! I built myself templates for as much as possible, so I could just plug things in as I went through episodes. But the easier it got to focus on tiny details, the more tiny details I wanted to focus on.

I went from tracking major things happening to the main characters to tracking everything that happened to everyone, every race, every planet, every Earth-based organization, every bit of technology, every scrap of alien language. It originally took me a couple of hours to take notes on an ep, I think, and then another couple to transcribe and format the info to put up. By the end, it was taking me 5-10 hours per ep for notes, and several hours for formatting/inserting into the site (which meant not just putting the info in its own slot, but crosslinking it anywhere it needed to be crosslinked, keeping the Site Index updated with new terms or additions to old terms [like new SG teams, new people in established races, new tech], repeating everything in a structured, easy-to-read format on the Updates page -- there was lots of detail work).

I revamped and/or relocated the site every couple of years, trying to make it easier to navigate and more useful for people. I was really set on keeping it all on one page for many years, though; I didn't have a search engine, and I think I wanted people to be able to just ctl-f to whatever they needed. When I started breaking things out, it was sloooowly.

I loved it; it had become my main form of fannish engagement (I wound up barely ever writing a word of SG-1, I was so caught up in the canonical details of the show), and I just really loved being useful to people. I tried hard to keep the site shipping-neutral, and tried hard not to present my opinions as facts; I included them when I felt strongly about something, but I tried to make sure they were clearly marked as opinions in that case. When it got too unwieldy to include SGA information, I revamped the entire site into CSS and created two versions, one for each show (oh my god, coding a site that big and sprawling, all written in plain html, into CSS -- it is not fun. But for a while there, I was really good at coding basic CSS! Okay, it wasn't good CSS, it was kludgy and odd in spots. But it mostly worked, and I think the site looked cleaner and easier to read.) That took months (I was starting from less than zero, and there were a lot of failed attempts), and that put me months behind on eps. So I spent the next year trying to catch up, and failing, and burning out. Which made me cranky, because seriously, I cannot tell you how much I loved working on that site.

At some point I decided, okay, instead of just failing to catch up, I'm going to take a break, and let myself not worry about it for a month or two. I was clearly burned out and needed to recover. I spent the next several years absolutely convinced I was going to go back to working on it, any day now, and just utterly unable to face starting, because in the meantime I'd rediscovered the rest of fandom. I was reading fanfic again; I was watching vids; I was watching tv and reading books. And I had so much to catch up on in terms of notes for SG-1 and SGA that I knew it would take over my fannish life again. (I was also suffering from an undiagnosed sleep disorder that meant I was beyond exhausted all the time without even realizing it, so looking back on it, it's no wonder I couldn't face the effort it would take to pick it back up.)

And by that time, there were SG wikis, and all kinds of other resources out there. My site was no longer necessary the way it had been originally; people could easily find out whatever they wanted. So it languished, and I've largely stopped feeling guilty about it.

But hey, for what it is, it's pretty complete and useful, and it's not bad for something I started completely by accident, because I didn't want to forget how many times (and when) people got injured. *g*

Every now and then I've had a moment in other fandoms where I wanted to start it all up again for something new; the urge to catalog ALL the details can be really strong for me. But I think the SG Handbook is going to stand alone. <3

( Okay, I'm hijacking this a bit for my own purposes here - I'm figuring how and when I changed things, with links to old versions where I have them )

---

Full request list here, still open!