To the Sixes

I've spent most of the last two weeks dealing with visiting family, leaving me too tired each night to do much creative writing, so I could use something to get the juices flowing again on my Help_Japan Commissions. So it's time for a fanfic meme...


What's a character swap? Well, it's a trope that occasionally pops up in fanfic. Basically you take two characters and swap them, so that each takes the place of the other person. The most famous AtLA example of this would be "Reconstructed Destinies", where Aang and Zuko swap places, so Aang is a Fire Nation prince and Zuko is an airbending Avatar who was frozen for a hundred years. Swapping allows you to explore characters in situations and relationships, romantic or otherwise, they would otherwise not find themselves in, and explores the interplay between nature and nurture.


RULES:
* Each person can have one to three prompts. I may only pick one out of three given, or do all three. It depends on how they strike me.
* The prompts can range from one word to a whole situation. However, please try not to get overly complex.
* It has to be a character swap involving only two people. Everything & everyone remains as per canon. Time, place, or situation is all up to you.
* Pretty much anything goes, but if it doesn't, I'll let you know and you can prompt something else.


This post will have 5 requester slots, with 5/5 filled. Each prompt will be written in the comments. Once the post is finished, there will be a complete list of each filled prompt in an upcoming post.

Go nuts. 

Last month I ran a prompt meme for Zuki (Zuko/Suki) fics. Here's the results:

• yukinoomoni - Suki finally gets even with Zuko for burning down Kyoshi, and wins.
• yukinoomoni - Zuko/Suki, Mai/Sokka: Fair exchange.
• loopy777 - "You found her *where*?"
• loopy777 - The first perverted thought Zuko ever has is about fans.
• avocado_love - The beach has a special way of smoothing even the most ragged edges.
• schwarztkd - Ursa flees the Fire Nation with a young Zuko & goes to Kyoshi Island.
• clockwerkchaos - Firebender Suki

Give me a single character -- in a fandom I write in, like AtLA or Evangelion -- and I will give you my:

+ OTP for them.
+ Runner-up pairing.
+ Honorable mention(s).
+ Crack pairing(s).
+ Ship everyone else seems to like, but I don't. (alternately: ship I like that everyone else seems to hate)

I'm swamped trying to get my Mini-Bang, Maiko Bang, and Rare/Crack Pairing submissions done by their alloted deadlines, BUT my brain needs a bit of distraction now and again...


Via beckyh2112:

Name a character and I'll tell you three (or more) facts about them from my own personal pseudocanon.

I'll be limiting this to the AtLA and Neon Genesis Evangelion fandoms.

Via damn near everyone:

Ask me fandom-related questions. They can be fandom specific, general, or about fandom/lj stuff/fic writing/etc. in general. Questions can be as wacky as you want. Ask me about tv shows, characters, kinks, fanfic in general, fandom issues/meta, anything about any of my stories specifically. Whatever you've always wanted to know.

Stolen from John Scalzi's blog:

"The end of the year is not a bad time to think about some of the things one would like to try one’s hand at moving forward. And to that end, here are some things I’ve been thinking about doing at some point in the future. Note that this is not a list of things I am making a resolution to do, or things I necessarily have planned to do in the next year (and yes, I have things planned for the next year). It’s just a list of stuff that I’d like to get around to before I, you know, am hit by a bus and/or get bored with creating stuff and just pack it all in to do nothing but watch movies on Netflix for the rest of my life."



Here's my own list:

1. Write a full-on romantic shipping-centric fic. I've hemmed and hawed in this field of fanfic, racing up to the line but not crossing it when expected to. I always feel very awkward writing romance-centric fanfics because I'm not particularly romantic myself, so I instinctively keep pulling back in my stories. I only vaguely had Mai and Zuko get together in 'His and Her Circumstances' because of this issue. I was much more interested in the story's worldbuilding and individual character arcs than the Mai/Zuko arc and it shows.

In 2011, I really want to do a fic that has a strong romantic/shipping element as its spine. I've been kicking around a few ideas in particular -- Loopy suggested a Sokkla fic I'm prepping as one possibility for this year's Big Bang, I've got a Maiko Big Bang to write for, and I'm currently chipping away at a TyZula fic -- so there's something to look forward to. 

2. Get back to writing Evangelion fic. I wrote very, very little fanfic for this fandom in 2010. I still need to finish Taking Sights, and my Nobody Dies genderswap, and I have a new Evangelion long-form fanfic that I'm excited to start called "Her Smoke Rises Up Forever". I really enjoy the Evangelion fandom. It was the first one I really got into hardcore, and fanfic-wise it offers opportunities that AtLA doesn't with its setting.

3. Finish All My Existing Projects. I'd like to be able to close the door on all the unfinished crap I have posted on FF.net. I don't want to become one of those authors. 

4. Write More Reviews. I'm a bad reader. I don't nearly review fics often enough. I need to work on that, providing fics I like or find interesting with decent analysis.

5. Write More Regularly. I've gotten really bad at this ever since I went on my hiatus with Facing Fearful Odds. I used to regularly crank out a thousand words a day on FFO. Now it's an exceptional day if I can hammer out five hundred words. I only write a lot in occasional splurges, not with any regularity. That's bad. 

Ganked from askerian by way of suzukiblu by way of attackfish


Inspired by Doctor Who's "Turn Left:" Pick one of my stories and tell me a point in the tale that you'd change. Something tiny (e.g. "and then Gendo decided to play Eye of the Tiger instead of 99 Red Balloons") or big (e.g. "and then the Blue Spirit decided to try escaping from Mai rather than reveal he was Zuko") and I'll tell you how that one difference would have altered the course of the entire story.

Stolen from strawberryburst , via avocado_love


I think it would be fun to talk about stories, but the usual memes are like, "What happens next?" "Tell me about Character A?" Which isn't so much talking about stories as it is writing more of a story. But you know how sometimes you read something and you're like, "I got ___ out of this story, I wonder if I have that right?" or "What on earth was ____ supposed to be?" and it's too awkward to ask the author? Now you could totally ask!

I've heard people say that writing is hard because you have to make decisions, but we never really talk about the decisions we make with stories or why we make them. We talk about plot bunnies, but not about how we actually turn them into a story.

And it seems like a lot more fun to do that than to do working.

So, if you wanted, ask me questions! (Or use this to ask your flist to ask you questions).

What were you trying to do [here]? Why did you decide to ____? This is what I thought about xyz, is that what you were going for? What made you write ____? Why did you decide to do this? And so on.

The result is interesting, if only because I've always tested as an INFP in the past on the Myers-Briggs personality type test. Apparently my heart has become cooler as I've aged into my mid-20s.