To carry forward with the theme

Diagnosed friday the thirteenth, seeing the oncologist on Halloween. Geez. At least the appointment happened within 24 hours of asking.

So let me just dive into the fandom stuff today with a look at...well I don't really like the cinnamon roll term because most of my character faves are good, not all of them are sweet though but they all do tend to share one thing, they take a lot of abuse.

I mentioned this a while back, but when Emergency! hit the oldies channel I rewatched it for the first time in over 35 years and realized my love of the good guy getting whumped and good old fashioned hurt/comfort dated back to one of my oldest fandoms with Johnny Gage. I even saved a few of the whumpiest faves on my DVR for right now.

In the 80s early 90s I took a bit of a break from this simply because my fandoms of that time, Pern and Elfquest did not allow you to use canon characters (as hard as that might seem to the young fans) In the late 90s I fell for Buffy and Angel which gave me Giles and Connor and I had a lot of fun hurting those guys (especially Connor, in spite of a good chunk of fandom hating him. Ah well)


Then came Fullmetal Alchemist and Saiyuki. In the latter, no one has a good time. I didn't write nearly as much as I would have liked for that one (and really I need to move so much more of this stuff onto AO3 or pull the trigger on squidgeworld or both)

Now I did write a ton for FMA (138 stories on AO3) and Edward and Roy were a delight to work with (not to mention Maes, Riza, Al an Winry) There is something truly amazing about these characters. There is a depth or character to them, to the plot, frankly I find FMA a master class in story telling. Yes occasionally Ed can be a little one note with his rage over being small (and that is one thing I AM glad to see anime moving past for the most part, the chibi cutesy for no reason bullshit. That always annoyed me. It wasn't in anime in the early days but man in the 90s -2010s it was everywhere).

Oddly enough much of my FMA stuff is either post canon or shippy. In some ways that might be because of the tightness of the plot. There are more stories I wanted to tell there but fandom hit its dispersal mode at that time, fracturing into LJ/DW and tumblr and now it's that Twitter, Discord and who knows what all.

I was getting into a fandom lull, a deep one. And then came Prodigal Son with Malcolm Bright and in 4 years I'm at nearly 260 stories, a half dozen of them novel length. Something in this speaks to me. That said, occasionally I get a bit meh with the fandom as ALL they want to do is whump Malcolm. There needs to be a bit more variety in the storytelling for my tastes but it is a relatively small fandom so I hold my peace.

And in the last year I've written 50 The Owl House stories, now most of them are on the short side and I'm not hiding it, Hunter is a delicious character to whump. (as I was just decrying that a second ago) that said, yes I do want more than just that and this fandom does give it.

So who are some of YOUR favorite fandoms/characters/character types?