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Apr. 29th, 2020 12:53 pmOver on ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fictional_fans, a discussion post asked: What fanwork do you most wish you had finished and posted that you haven't (and let's face it, probably won't anytime soon?)
After consideration, I came up with a top three:
* Back in the day, when The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was new and everybody was coming up with League rosters from different eras, mine was a retro-futuristic team based around fictional visions of life on the cusp of the year 2000. Dan Dare was in it, and John Connor, with Susan Calvin and Umataro Tenma providing technical support. The elderly mentor character was from Nineteen Eighty-Four, because even though it fell short of the target by a decade or so I felt like it deserved a nod, and because I was going to have fun seeing how long I could make it look like the mentor character was Winston before it turned out it was actually Julia. My favorite development was when I realised that Stephen Byerley, from the Susan Calvin series, was born within a year of Tobio Tenma, which meant that if Dr. Tenma brought his family over to America when he joined forces with the League I could have Tobio and Stephen be childhood friends and amuse myself enormously by never, ever letting on whether the fic was set before or after Tobio's car accident.
* When Pacific Rim came out, I was also reading Girl Genius, which meant I had two fandoms that involved heroes fighting monsters with mad-science creations called "jaegers". As a result, I spent a bunch of time doing world-building for a Girl Genius fic with the premise of Bill & Barry Heterodyne inventing the Pacific Rim type of jaeger, an enormous combat robot that can only be powered by the combined brain waves of two people who trust each other implicitly. (In my notes, a character observes that given the world Bill & Barry live in -- where mad science runs rampant, and so do conspiracy and mistrust -- their real achievement wasn't building the jaegers but finding people to pilot them.) I had two ideas for turning this into an actual story: one was about Bill's daughter Agatha rediscovering the jaegers and running up against the pilot problem, and the other was a tale of the jaegers in their prime, as recounted by Theo DuMedd (which would have been fun, because in canon he's been known to tell Heterodyne tales that are almost completely made up, so I could have done the entire story and left it ambiguous about whether it was an AU or not).
* Years ago, I read a Doctor Who AU fic in which the Doctor gets talked out of running away from Gallifrey and instead becomes a respectable Time Lord and eventually Lord President, and it immediately gave me a plot bunny for a story set after his death, in which his granddaughter starts learning about his rebellious past that she'd never known of before, and ends up leaving Gallifrey herself to fill the Doctor-shaped hole in the universe. (I also had partial notes for a sequel showing how "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" went down in this timeline.) I never got it into a shape I was happy with -- I did complete a draft, but it was just two characters explaining the premise to each other for the benefit of the reader, so I scrubbed it and tried again -- and then the revived series kept dropping new information about the Doctor's early life that meant I had to keep rejiggering things. It actually absorbed "The Doctor's Wife" pretty well, and I think ended up richer for it, but the new revelations in the most recent season put me pretty much back at square one and I don't know if I've got the energy to try and rebuild it again.
fictional_fans, a discussion post asked: What fanwork do you most wish you had finished and posted that you haven't (and let's face it, probably won't anytime soon?)After consideration, I came up with a top three:
* Back in the day, when The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was new and everybody was coming up with League rosters from different eras, mine was a retro-futuristic team based around fictional visions of life on the cusp of the year 2000. Dan Dare was in it, and John Connor, with Susan Calvin and Umataro Tenma providing technical support. The elderly mentor character was from Nineteen Eighty-Four, because even though it fell short of the target by a decade or so I felt like it deserved a nod, and because I was going to have fun seeing how long I could make it look like the mentor character was Winston before it turned out it was actually Julia. My favorite development was when I realised that Stephen Byerley, from the Susan Calvin series, was born within a year of Tobio Tenma, which meant that if Dr. Tenma brought his family over to America when he joined forces with the League I could have Tobio and Stephen be childhood friends and amuse myself enormously by never, ever letting on whether the fic was set before or after Tobio's car accident.
* When Pacific Rim came out, I was also reading Girl Genius, which meant I had two fandoms that involved heroes fighting monsters with mad-science creations called "jaegers". As a result, I spent a bunch of time doing world-building for a Girl Genius fic with the premise of Bill & Barry Heterodyne inventing the Pacific Rim type of jaeger, an enormous combat robot that can only be powered by the combined brain waves of two people who trust each other implicitly. (In my notes, a character observes that given the world Bill & Barry live in -- where mad science runs rampant, and so do conspiracy and mistrust -- their real achievement wasn't building the jaegers but finding people to pilot them.) I had two ideas for turning this into an actual story: one was about Bill's daughter Agatha rediscovering the jaegers and running up against the pilot problem, and the other was a tale of the jaegers in their prime, as recounted by Theo DuMedd (which would have been fun, because in canon he's been known to tell Heterodyne tales that are almost completely made up, so I could have done the entire story and left it ambiguous about whether it was an AU or not).
* Years ago, I read a Doctor Who AU fic in which the Doctor gets talked out of running away from Gallifrey and instead becomes a respectable Time Lord and eventually Lord President, and it immediately gave me a plot bunny for a story set after his death, in which his granddaughter starts learning about his rebellious past that she'd never known of before, and ends up leaving Gallifrey herself to fill the Doctor-shaped hole in the universe. (I also had partial notes for a sequel showing how "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" went down in this timeline.) I never got it into a shape I was happy with -- I did complete a draft, but it was just two characters explaining the premise to each other for the benefit of the reader, so I scrubbed it and tried again -- and then the revived series kept dropping new information about the Doctor's early life that meant I had to keep rejiggering things. It actually absorbed "The Doctor's Wife" pretty well, and I think ended up richer for it, but the new revelations in the most recent season put me pretty much back at square one and I don't know if I've got the energy to try and rebuild it again.
