Fanfiction Confliction, Part 2

About six months ago, I gave in.

I'd been fighting it for months, trying hard not to be one of those people.  I gave it my best effort, I really did.

But I was powerless to resist.

I started writing fanfiction.

It started small -- I'm a writer by nature (I bet you couldn't tell! #sarcasm), and I spent most of early 2015 world-building in preparation for a bigger project.  When I started writing fiction for the first time soon after, I realized something: I needed practice.

I hadn't written fiction in probably 6 or 7 years, and while I had lots of nonfiction writing experience, the skills just aren't the same.

This was probably in July.

I started small: a short story, only about 2,000 words, that was a character study of my forever favorite DAI Commander.  That turned out well, if a little serious, so I took on some humor via Alistair in DAO.   And before long, I found that I was enjoying myself immensely in creating these new scenes, new moments, within my characters' lives.

I spent the first 10K words or so laboring under the illusion that I was just practicing styles for my bigger fiction writing projects, telling myself that as soon as I finished the next story, I was putting fanfiction away and moving on with my own work.

That didn't happen.  Instead suddenly I found myself so immersed in Bioware's Dragon Age sandbox that I couldn't get back out -- and I didn't want to.  I loved my Inquisitor, and I loved the story I was creating inside DAI:  the relationships I was growing, the conflicts I'd created, and exploring the themes of the game and its story in such depth and detail.

So now, when I'm writing this, I'm finally accepting that I'm a fanfiction writer.  It took a long time, and many thousands of words before I was willing to add that to my list of accomplishments on this particular blog -- about two weeks ago, I officially broke 100K words, and this is the first mention I've made of my fanfic hobby to anyone other than my husband.

But I'm ready.

(That's not totally true; I'm still a little hesitant.  But honestly, that's not because I'm ashamed of my work, but because my mom reads this blog sometimes and frankly, several of my stories are quite Not Safe for Work.  At all.  Like, explicitly NSFW.  Adult content ahead.  You've been warned.

Mom, if you're reading this, please skip all the ones rated "E" :-/

Anyway.)

Below, you'll find a link to my work, all of which is posted through Archive of Our Own.  I know there are other, bigger, fanfic sites out there, but AO3 is my favorite, and I'm proud to be part of their community.

Without further ado, and in the spirit of celebrating International Fanworks Day today, I give you: Once More to the Breach, my Shakespeare-allusion-titled series about Dragon Age: Inquisition.
Please enjoy, and thanks for reading!!

FanFiction Confliction

In a haze of events involving my recent fascination with Greg Ellis, I stumbled upon a blog belonging to someone even more obsessed with Cullen Rutherford of Inquisition fame than I am. 

As I wound my way through this blog, including a myriad of pictures and drawings from around the Internet that indicated high-levels of obsession, I was only mildly surprised to find the occasional piece of fanfiction.  I’ve never been one for the practice myself, but I do like to read and I certainly do love Cullen, so I decided to give it a shot.  Why not, right?

What a glorious mistake that was!

Within minutes I was scrolling through this blog as fast as I could, looking for the next post about her version of the Inquisitor x Cullen relationship.  Within hours I was on a fanfiction site called Archive of Our Own, a beta entirely devoted to the craft, and digging through DA:I tagged stories for more. And within days, I not only had my own account on AO3, but I also had poured hours of my life into reading multiple novel-length stories, each creating their own imagined worlds of what Inquisition looks like when the game isn’t running. 

I’ve had such specific, negative ideas about fanfiction for so long that I’m experiencing quite a bit of guilt and/or shame as I read.  And enjoy myself, to my surprise. 

I love to read.  I do it voraciously, endlessly, lost in whatever story I’ve found.  And in the past year, I haven’t done it nearly enough. 

Instead, I’ve been playing video games. 

It’s not a change I regret, per se.  I’m not upset I’ve embraced gaming, nor am I unsatisfied by the games I’ve played.  It’s just... all the time I’ve been playing games (we’re talking hundreds of hours here), I could have been reading.  I could have made that choice, but I didn’t. 

It’s not like I haven’t read at all; hell, in 2014 I read 42 books, so I’m not slacking! But how many more could I have read with an extra 300 hours to spare?

In a way, fanfiction has revived this love – I’ve still been reading, of course, but now I’ve read something like 15 novel-length pieces in less than a month, and I didn’t even turn Inquisition ON between roughly March 7^th and April 10^th.  I know that’s only a few weeks, but it feels like a lifetime when you compare just how much time I’d played it between Jan 2^nd and now (~160 hours…). 

I have thrown myself into this world with abandon, and I have no regrets. 

I have, however, discovered just how cruel a place the Internet can be. 

Sure, the Internet isn’t necessary the most warm, fuzzy community.   But if you steer clear of certain conversations and sites, you’re usually in the clear – I blog here, but I’m not really involved in many online communities. 

The fanfiction community, however, is one I’m getting on board with, and my god! The cruelty of cliffhangers is absolutely horrific!

Since most of these stories are Works in Progress, I am constantly on edge about what’s going to happen next – we’re talking probably 14 out of the 17 stories I’m currently reading are finished, and there are even more novel-length ones (50K words or more) that I’ve just had to give up on them ever updating.  Some of them I’ve been stalking, reading through comments or notes or finding other stuff they’ve written to see if they’re *ever* going to come back to whatever version of Thedas or Mass Effect or others they’ve created.  And when they are straight up discontinued, as has happened… ugh, it’s awful.  I have so many emotions wrapped up in these characters already, and then to find that the story that was JUST HEATING UP will NEVER AGAIN UPDATE??? I can’t deal with it.  *deep breaths till I feel better*

It’s easy to tell that all these fanfic writers are reading each other’s work, so at least we’re all suffering cliffhangers together.  Too many repeated verbs or phrases across stories gives that poorly-kept secret away: fingers ‘rasping’ across skin or armor, desire ‘pooling’ in bellies as things turn slutty, callouses or fingers discussed at length, and so on.  (Sometimes those word choices are hilariously mis-used; the phrase “Cullen fisted his hand into the Inquisitor’s hair” shows up in TONS of stories where things start to get heated, and every time, I can’t help but laugh.  That is SO not what people think when they hear that verb, I’m sorry. I don’t care how innocent your mind -- that word means one thing, and it ain’t hands in hair.)

There’s more of a community than I ever expected.  When late nights of reading finally started to catch up with me and I could barely keep my eyes open, I started searching tumblr for these same authors, these writers with similar DA:I/Cullenite tendencies.  Before long, my brain was wide awake again, flooded with every conceivable type of drawing, painting, gif, you name it, about Cullen and the artist’s Inquisitor.  Flooded with images is hardly the phrase for what I encountered – more like a tsunami – and there, that connection these people had was easy to see.  I started to recognize tags, names, drawings that had accompanied stories on AO3.  Soon, I noticed collaborations and commissions, all delving into this rich Bioware creation and the subsequent ideas that people have developed around him (him being Cullen Rutherford, in case that wasn’t clear). 

It was a community I never expected, and one that I’m happy to explore.  In a life where few of my friends play games, and even fewer understand the obsessions I develop over them (or anything else, really), I’m excited to have a place to venture too and continue the Inquisition’s adventures. 

I have yet to try my own hand at this, but Bishop insists it’s coming.  I’ve already realized (in a moment of shame) that *MY* version of Cullen would definitely smoke (and he’d get the cigarettes from Varric, because duh!)… 

Oh my god, that’s how it starts…