screws fall out all the time.

I couldn’t leave him. Not now. Don’t ask me to.

I had a big fanfic in a previous fandom where one of the big reveals was the involvement of a kind of infamous villain, whose presence was built up to and foreshadowed through the whole fic until his reveal without ever mentioning his name, so that the name drop would be a gut punch. It worked especially well because of who the villain was and his presence in that fandom space specifically (it's very complicated) and if it was an original story this reveal wouldn't work at all the way it was written in the fic. Because if you don't have a predisposition to think about that character and his relationship to the hero in a very specific way, then just seeing their name won't do much to you; the reveal and the recontextualisation it pushes upon you hinges on your previous knowledge of the source material.

I think it's an interesting tool fanfic authors are given. One of my favorite fanfic of all time is partially a re-imagining of its source material's canon, and something it does is introduce antagonists much earlier in the story or deepen npcs' stories. It then works to evoke a tragic irony that again wouldn't work if you didn't know the source material, and it's something the author obviously has a lot of fun with.

50 Shades of Carl Morck

Fan art drawn in Procreate.

A fandom is like a community garden; the plants and trees are fanworks, the paths and benches are structures like ao3 and kinkmemes and themed weeks or months. Comments, and kudos? Those are fertiliser. You don’t necessarily see them at work, but they make the trees grow stronger and the flowers bloom brighter. When you comment on a fic or piece of fanart, you are nourishing our shared garden and helping to make the soil fertile for future works.

I want commenters to feel proud of that contribution. Whether you turn up with a wheelbarrow of the stuff to tip on your favourite flowerbed or just drop a heart emoji in the donations box, you are helping to make the soil richer, the garden more beautiful.

And you know what? Sometimes you need to just sit in the garden without feeling obliged to do anything to maintain it. That’s okay. It’s your garden too! As an author, I don’t want people coming to my stories with a sense of obligation; I want them to be able to enjoy them and be restored by them. If they don’t have the energy to comment right now, that’s okay.

But a comment isn’t the price of an entry ticket to someone else’s garden; it’s an investment in your garden, in your community. You won’t always see it bear fruit, won’t always know what part of the whole it helped grow. But you can know what you put in, and feel proud of being part of the team nourishing and maintaining this wonderful space we all share.

Detp. Q 1.02

Hello my name is Clo and I have a soft spot for this Demon (and for his Angel, previously painted..)

I hope you like this portrait 🩵

Looking through illustrations by the recently deceased Moebius the other day, I came across this one of a floating city, as if the island of Mont Saint-Michel had broken loose from the sea.

Floating City illustration by Moebius, date unknown