G, Q & T! ♥
G - Do you remember your first OTP, if so who was in it?
Ohhhh, the halcyon days of my youth ... My veryvery first OTP was Merry and Pippin from Lord of the Rings. A friend introduced me to the concept of fanfiction because her big sister was really into it, and I very quickly went from “well this is weird” to “actually I love this”. My entire justification for shipping them was pretty much “they’re my two faves”, lol. In my defense, I was in like seventh grade and the LOTR movies had just come out (dating myself here), and my friends and I were all absolutely obsessed with them. Like, watching all the deleted scenes and actor commentary ... it was a whole thing. Anyway, that was back in the day where a lot of content was scattered across people’s private websites, various LiveJournal communities, and (gag) fanfiction.net. So it was really hard to find content, which there wasn’t a lot of for that ship to begin with, and I pretty quickly moved on to other ships and fandoms.
Q - A ship you’ve abandoned and why
I used to be a huuuuuge WolfStar (Remus x Sirius from Harry Potter) shipper. That was back when the Harry Potter books were still actively being published (between books 3 and 5 I believe), and there was so much content, which I absolutely soaked up like a sponge. I can’t really say why I moved on from it. I just sort of gravitated to other fandoms after the last book, I guess. I’ve occasionally dipped back in to see if I could catch some of that spark again because, genuinely, my obsession with them was consuming--I read so much fic, I made art, I make mixes, I made collages on the floor of my bedroom--but I just haven’t ever been able to really recapture it. And of course in recent years, canon has left an increasingly sour taste in my mouth, so it’s hard for me to imagine returning to it.
T - Do you have any hard and fast headcanons that you will die defending, about anything at all (gender identity, sexual or romantic orientation, extended family, sexual preferences like top/bottom/switch, relationship with poetry, seriously anything)
My headcanons are generally pretty flexible? I sort of start out fresh and new with each story and build around what I want the story to be about, rather than having a preestablished fanon world in my head. Hell, I bend canon to fit my needs all the time too.
The one thing I would say I really, really feel strongly about is that interpreting Gaara’s violent childhood as the result of schizophrenia in modern/non-Naruto AUs is a fundamental misunderstanding of his character and the nature of his mental health in canon. Gaara does not experience psychosis in canon. He has neither the positive (hallucinations, delusions) nor the negative symptoms (withdrawal, self-neglect, catatonia) of schizophrenia. He is perfectly aware of the division between reality and his own thoughts, it’s simply that what is going on around and within him is, y’know, magic bullshit. If anything, he’s too firmly immersed in the pain of his reality to the point that it’s inescapable for him and the only way he can cope with it is through externalizing. And using the fact that he had a literal demon sealed inside him and that he was an extrajudicial murderer as a teen (because all the Naruto characters are murderers, really, it’s just a matter of whether or not that murder is sanctioned by the state) is just ... a gross misinterpretation of both what Gaara went through and why he was the way he was AND what schizophrenia is at the same time. Plus it plays into very nasty, very ableist tropes about people with psychosis being violent and murderous, especially when the AU has Shukaku manifesting as a command hallucination that makes Gaara hurt people. I can be sold on a lot of different mental health issues as a modern OR canon interpretation of Gaara’s experiences (and I’ve written him with a variety of different struggles in my own fics), and I’m not wholly opposed even to him having psychotic symptoms, as long as the line isn’t drawn from “he has psychosis” to “and that’s why he hurt people as a child/teenager”.
fandom meme: come at me friend!
