what’s your favourite fanfic trope? i just did this u quiz (the weirdest new medium for poetry and feelings) about it and was thinking of you and your prolific fandomness. (you can publish if you want)

Oh, aww. My prolific fandom, huh. 🙂 You know, the more I watch, the less I read. But I have read a ton over the years, um, hmm. I don’t know if this is a trope specifically, but I very much prefer a slow burn? It doesn’t matter what their dynamic starts as, enemies or childhood best friends or coworkers or college roommates, whatever, I just love the build and the pining and that moment where it all finally comes to a head and they realize oh, it’s mutual. 

I know you know about Clexa but I am like super delighted that you also read fic and stuff I love that Clexa is that gay ship that a lot of people know and were/are into at some point I’m glad I found your blog from juliantina but I wish I had found it way earlier! (Also happy belated eid if you celebrate)

I get that! It feels so nice to have shared something with so many people, to know others were as deeply affected as you. And that was certainly a unique experience, I definitely get wanting to know one wasn’t alone in that. I got into the ship fairly late but I remember it all over my dash for ages.

You know, I didn’t actually read much fic for Clexa, before 3×07 happened. It was one of those canon ships I wanted to enjoy unfolding on TV. I’ve had such a specific kind of experience with shipping, moving from subtext (which I still enjoy and will defend) to canon, and the subtext ones were so much about what the fandom created, I was all about the fics. 

But for canon, while fandom definitely enhances the experience, as people might have observed, I don’t really read ships for my big ones. Juliantina, Kana, Jathea, Jane/Lisbon, Kadena, I was happy with what we were getting on screen. But it’s why I dislike so much when a ship becomes one where you have to read fic. I mean, I’ll read the fic, happily, and omg, the people who write them are heroes, but just that particular switch, when suddenly it’s like the olden days and we can’t catch a break in canon…that part makes me sad. Clexa is the only canon one I did read that much fic for, it was so impossible to escape what was going on and just completely leave that world, so we just stayed with it any way we could.

Hah, don’t worry, you didn’t miss much before Juliantina. And I do celebrate Eid, so thank you!

I know I’m on the non-horny side of things to start with but has fandom always been this thirsty. top/bottom hoopla is kinda new I remember people thirsting over Lexa I guess but idk. aren’t railing/raw or whatever kinda new too so I’m kinda thinking maybe fandom is more thirsty or probably just more articulate in their thirst? It probably is that I have just happened to have seen a lot of smutcourse lately but I know you fandom a lot so just wondering

Heh, I don’t think anything right now is particularly new and in fact is probably somewhat tamed down from a few years back. Fandom does evolve and change but in this particular respect? Nope.

so while I loved that juliantina was is their own bubble separated from the ‘main plot’ (tho for us that’s them) for most of the show, I kinda thought they were eventually going to full on collide with juliantina as a established? Especially post that Camilo scene. Can’t remember who coined it but they said ‘hoping for that scooby doo shit’. Instead we got lips/Sergio. In hindsight I’m not sure anymore, cause that stuff was important. But it was a bit of a bummer to miss out on the former

Also I remember we talked about ek ladki a while ago and it feels like a Similar criticism pattern with the ‘it’s not gay enough’ as opposed to ‘thanks for the gay you gave us’ THO most of my juliantina problems are sorta with the overall writing for the ending (obv I wouldn’t be opposed to more physical thing but not totally what I was missing). There’s a spectrum between wanting more/being happy and then also valid writing analysis! The dead are gone and the gays are hungry

I don’t really consider them separate from the main plot, I would say that’s Guille/Renata. Juliantina were constantly involved with more central plots, they just happened to be written so differently, at least for the first three quarters, that they seemed separate. But their stories constantly involved other central characters. Val was used to bridge Lucia and Leon, Juls was constantly used to reflect the current state of Lupe/Chino and what kind of person Chino was, to balance what we were currently seeing Beltran try to be. They did develop separately, quite a bit, the park, the dancing, the swimming, the party, but I wouldn’t consider that a bubble, simply a separate thread that would then tie back to the main.

And it kind of did, but not really in a very helpful way, you’re right. Juls did discover Chino, they did go to Camilo, and then that all went off the rails. I guess that was too early for them to actually discover it. I think they had a few gay issues they wanted to cross off and Lupe’s homophobia and the mess with Sergio were some of them. But then Juls’s kidnapping was again part of the main plot. In fact, that was probably the one storyline that involved the most main characters. But if we’re talking about simply the transmigration, I do wish they’d had more to do with the actual discoveries instead of a very last minute kind of irrelevant revelation at the very end. They had all the pieces and they were written to be important to it, but not really shown to be in the end.

Lol, as for “it’s not gay enough”, that’s indeed a common refrain, but I don’t really begrudge people it, things can always be gayer. 😛 Though it’s not my own particular criticism for either. I don’t really have one for ELKDTAL but my big problem with the AAM finale was, as you said, the technical writing of it. They failed to deliver on things they set up themselves. After thirty episodes of “I want to be with you but I can’t”, where was the actual scene where we saw them on the same page? I could–and do–forgive most of the other issues but that was the big thing for me.

“There’s a spectrum between wanting more/being happy and then also valid writing analysis!” Definitely agree with this. My own frankly cheery blithe response to the finale also comes with but we didn’t get this or this and that one moment was egregious! And yeah, that’s basically it, I’m happy with so much of it and wanted some bits to be as good as they’ve shown themselves to be. It’s like that sometimes.