Toward where the Big Dipper leads

Challenge #9

Talk about your favorite tropes in media or transformative works. (Feel free to substitute in theme/motif/cliche if "trope" doesn't resonate with you.)

Longer talk about one trope rather than a list: I like soulmate fic as a form of mystery fiction! ( Or, what if I could have a form of mystery fic that didn't so often involve my blorbs getting surprise!offed at the end of chapter 1? )

Challenge #10: Big Mood (Board)

CHOOSE SOMETHING YOU LOVE AND CREATE A MINI MOOD COLLECTION OF THREE (or more) ITEMS THAT EVOKE YOUR FEELINGS ABOUT IT. You don’t have to limit yourself to visual media, or collect the items into a special format like a square (though you can if you’d like).

Well, the thing I most hoard is musical associations (and use them to make playlists to put on in the background for writing/drawing particular faves), but at the same time that feels embarrassing to talk about. Weirdly more revealing than actually posting fic or whatever. So, here’s some songs off a playlist for the ship that keeps pulling me on-off back into YGO:DM (Jounouchi/Kaiba), because I’m not in a phase of being deep into YGO right now and consequently won’t get weird about posting that. Yet also it’s one of my longest-term ships: it and Raine/Sheena both turned 20 for me last year.
( Three songs + a line from each )

Challenge #5

In your own space, create a list of at least three things you'd love to receive, a wishlist of sorts. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it and include a link to your wishlist if you feel comfortable doing so.

1. So I like to make graphics, and I like the Tales series. But I’ve never played any of the mobile games and I got looking on this front so late that any imgur etc gallery links I could find were down. If anyone has a link to a site, wiki, tumblr, anything with good-quality Rays-style* skit faces, on a plain background or transparent, for any of the following characters, I’d love it. Even just one image for one character would be more than I have for any of them now!:

List of characters I'm looking for

- Atwight Eks
- Beryl Benito
- Dist the Rose/Reaper
- Ivar
- Kongwai Tao
- Mary Argent
- Pierre de Chaltier
- QQ Selezneva
- Raine Sage
- Regal Bryant
- Sheena Fujibayashi

*may also be Link or Asteria style, but I’m pretty sure most to none of these characters had them until Rays


2. Recs for your fave anime character songs that came out after ~2015 and aren’t from an idol franchise, Digimon, Sailor Moon, or Precure. It seems like they’re a lot rarer in the 2010s and onward outside of idol stuff + a yearly Precure album. Digimon occasionally puts out new ones (though Appmon was the most recent non-nostalgia-project set), as does the Sailor Moon reboot. What else is out there that just may not be on my radar?


3. My first virtual pet site back in the day was Powerpets, which at the time had very early-2000s animesque pet art, much of which has since been revamped and is no longer on the web afaict. If anyone has any of the following old pet art saved, I’d love it dearly for nostalgia’s sake b/c these were My Guys:
- Gray Fox
- Holland Lop
- Maine Coon
- Red Fox
- Samoyed
- Somali

Challenge #2: Pets of Fandom

Loosely defined! Post about your pets, pets from your canon, anything you want!

I don’t have a pet, so “look at this fandom critter” it is.

Quickie (pictured on Meredy’s head here) is a little turquoise rabbit-like creature with a big fluffy squirrel tail, and he accompanies playable character Meredy in Tales of Eternia. I admit his relevance to battle stands out to me more than his writing, as he’s a non-speaking non-major-character companion critter. He’s smart enough to understand speech, so he does respond (with his own name, Pokemon-style) to other characters in cutscenes, and you can get a sense of his mood/opinions.

Quickie acts as caster-character Meredy’s normal phys attacks (running up to the enemy and attacking in her place while she keeps a safe distance; even the other caster Keele has weapon-based normal attacks), which allows me to play as Meredy and both cast and keeping up enemy stun as needed, while not having to fight my character’s battlefield position as much as I do the actual enemies. As a Meredy main, that’s of course going to be my strongest memory of him, over any story moment!

*eyes the fabric I’ve had since like 2021 to make a plush of Quickie* Someday. :|;;

(Still backdated!)

Challenge #15: Talk about an unexpected joyous moment you experienced last year.

I'm going to keep it low-key and talk about some unexpected joys I got from various video games.

( BKO, OT, Tales )

(Backdated so I don't have to mess around with multiple sticky posts.)

Challenge #3: In your own space, talk about a fannish opinion you hold that has changed over time.

I know the "Symphonia fan who had only played Symphonia, expected Legendia to be just like Symphonia, and hated Legendia as a result" is sort of a 200Xs Tales fan cliche... but in my case, replace Legendia with Abyss, since I was able to find a copy of that locally first.  I hated Abyss so much the first time I played it!  The characters, the art direction, the game mechanics, you name it.  These days, while Abyss still isn't my personal fave, it is a game I on balance find interesting, with a lot of depth to its worldbuilding, and I appreciate its attention to sequence of events.  I'd say overall it's one I like.  (I still have some bugbears about some parts of TotA, especially sidequest design.  But that's in part because a lot of good character work and world detail is hidden behind those sidequests, with multiple steps and narrow time windows to find them.  Some lingering criticism with a reason I can articulate instead of reflexive "I don't like any of this because it's not the one I already am a fan of.")

What changed my opinion was just plain playing more video games.  As I played more of them, I found that I could like a wider variety of things for what they were, rather than looking for more of a tiny handful of specific games that were my first faves.  Not sure how that works, but I appreciate being able to appreciate more things!