Oh What Can It Mean?

Here's the original post: question_for_those_with_selfinsert/

(note after posting a frinxing novel: sorry, got carried away. maybe I should post this to r/aspiememes as a special interest infodump.)

I'm not sure what you mean by "justify" in this context. My justification is that it's fun?

I treat each fandom or combination of fandoms like a holodeck. I create a character for myself, find a way to insert myself into the plot where I get to interact with the characters I most want to interact with, then I walk in and do the thing.

I do tend to daydream in snippets. I've written very little in the past several years but I still think of myself as a writer because when I'm not internally narrating my own life, I'm narrating whatever bit of story my current para is in. And sometimes I'll spend hours or days getting the actions and conversation beats just right for, like, a ten-minute conversation. And I'll bounce around in time to whatever my mind wants to latch onto at that time. (Right now I'm re-working my entire current daydream based on a realization I had about part of my own worldbuilding--the post is here and the blog is so far just my current paracosm.) I've learned to sketch stuff out a whole bunch in Notepad--and my DW--and maybe never actually post stuff as fic to AO3 (as opposed to these two stories that are all there's gonna be until I get back to that daydream). I'm remembering that so few read original characters anyway that enjoying the daydream is more important than writing it down for anyone else, even if it is excellent writing practice.

[Star Trek: TNG and VOY] My very early daydream selves were just me but older because I was an adolescent (after all, a sixth grader can't date Geordi La Forge, but her 25 year old daydream self can). I even used my legal name [not my "real" name, in my late 20s I gained a non-binary vocabulary and now I have my "given name" and my "chosen name"]. There was a 'verse where late-teens me and a made-up friend (after all, real people aren't friends) run through a plot hole onto Starfleet Academy during the YA Starfleet Academy novels that feature Geordi, and most of the fic takes place on the Enterprise-D. Later I rename this version Trisha Sanderson and publish a few fics with her on AO3 (some of them are crossovers with the punditry fandom). >> The other my-legal-name character was kidnapped by the Briori in her early 20s (I was in my early 20s at this time) and winds up with Harry Kim.

[Supernatural] I have a character named Mina Talley, nee Abbot, who's the widow of Jake Talley and the mother of their genderfluid child Sammy. She becomes Bobby Singer's assistant and helps the traveling hunters that stop at Bobby's place with research and resupply. Minor crossover with Numb3rs when Mina becomes close with Ian Edgerton.

>> [Supernatural/BBC Sherlock] In another version, after Sam Winchester becomes soulless!Sam, Min and Sammy move to London to live in the spare room with Mrs. Turner's "married ones." The married ones are active hunters. Mrs. Turner and Mrs. Hudson are retired hunters, and Mina winds up with both Mycroft and Lestrade, because it's my daydream dammit. I never wrote either of these out.

>> [Criminal Minds/Numb3rs] Everyone is an unaltered human in this one. Mina Abbot is single and poly. Jake Talley is active duty army and a "comet partner" of Mina's. He doesn't show up often. This is the story on AO3. I've seen a few plot holes and I want to re-write it someday, but I watched a whole YouTube series on "copaganda" last year and while this is the story that started my "I can't write a story without both kink and polyamory in it," I might never go back to it. Though I'll be honest, most of it is because when my old external hard drive died, I lost a long story about Mina and Ian Edgerton doing a kink, and while I tried to re-write it, it's just not the same. The main pairing is Spencer/Mina (though that relationship might end later in CM when Spencer has his mom move in with him, because I doubt Spencer would have asked, and the last straw would be Diana Reid flushing all of Mina's ADD meds along with her own schizophrenia meds), with background Mina/Dave (not quite romantic, not quite platonic, after the events on AO3, Mina saves Dave's life and gets injured in the process and he invites her to live with him and start her life over in Quantico; she gets a job in the same building Dave works in doing data entry, and she and Dave do some kink but mostly a carefully-negotiated sexual age play), and Mina meets Ian at a dungeon. I do have most of that story that somehow got saved on my Google Drive, so I might post that on this DW after I'm done with my current SW prequel-verse daydream.

>> [Marvel Cinematic] I also use Mina and Sammy for this one, but instead of one of Azazel's special children, the late SPC Jake Talley is a mutant, and he dies in Afghanistan. His twin brother James feels it and tells Mina. Jake is really MIA but the US military think he's a deserter, and it kills the last of Mina's patriotism. In the present of the story, Mina lives in NYC with her dominant, Mary Ann Morita-Jones and her wife Shameka Morita-Jones. In this 'verse, Mina is the granddaughter of Dum Dum Dugan, Mary Ann is the granddaughter of Jim Morita, and Shameka is the granddaughter of Gabe Jones, the three surviving Howling Commandos.
>> There are several versions of how they meet one or the other Avengers:
>> >> In one Mina and Co are helping shelter Bucky when he's a wanted "terrorist"
>> >> In another Bruce Hulks out when someone is transphobic to Mina about Sammy's gender presentation
>> >> In another Steve sees the person being transphobic about Sammy and tells the person off, then asks what that was about and Steve realizes that he's genderfluid and the three go shopping for girl clothes for Sammy (the original purpose of the outing) and Steve. At one point Sammy asks if Steve wants to pick a "girl" name and Steve is at a loss in the moment. Mina says, "the first thing that comes to mind is Stephanie Grace, but I'm sure you'll come up with something that's a lot less derivative." But Steve likes it. He says, "It sounds like what my ma would've named me if I'd been born a girl."
>> >> There might be one or two more, but I can't remember them at the moment. In each version, once or twice a month Mina takes her car out of storage and drives Sammy to the Jean Grey School for lessons on controlling his/her (Sammy is sometimes a girl, sometimes a boy, but never neither or both or something else, at least so far) powers (Sammy has super strength like his dad and his Uncle Jim, and he can also pull emotions from people or place emotions into people).

[The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings] There was a very brief daydream where I was so much in the habit of creating a daydream character for every fandom I'm in that even though I was fine just reading other people's fics--even their OC fics--but it happened anyway because when I was in high school I was invited to play D&D with some acquaintances and I wanted to be a three-quarterling (half human and half halfling) and they said that wasn't a thing so I wound up not playing, but I made myself a three-quarterling character in Middle Earth. This one didn't go anywhere, most of what I came up with was that the character (I don't remember her name, or if I settled on one) has a mother who's a sex worker in a brothel, a father who's a regular and sometimes brought them gifts from his travels, and eventually when my OC is an adolescent, develops a friendship (non-sexual) with movie!Bifur. Maybe there's something more when the OC is an adult, but that daydream was pretty short-lived. Like humans as opposed to Dwarves or Elves.

[Star Wars Sequel Trilogy] This is where this bit of not much happens. My OC's name is Elia Garek. She's a tailor and her name is an allusion to Elim Garak from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. There's a shaavit-ton of stuff on Notepad and on Google Drive that isn't in the two AO3-published stories that I intend to post here eventually. Elia comes from the made-up planet of Nordin, from a family of textile manufacturers. Nordin is basically Space Scandanavia, and the human supremacist melanin weirdos at the First Order start making overtures to Nordin when Elia is about ten standard. Her grandfather is Alderaanian (who moved to Nordin long before the destruction of Alderaan and stayed on Nordin after, and married the boss's daughter who is Elia's grandmother), and he knows this is Empire 2.0 and convinces the family to move--to Hosnian Prime. Elia finishes her primary and secondary schooling and then goes to fashion school to be a designer. She also gets into kink and when a scene goes bad, she's rescued by volunteer dungeon monitor Davros Werid. They hit it off right away and Elia learns that Dav is a New Republic X-Wing pilot. Eventually they marry, and after that Dav is recruited for the Resistance, and they ask if their wife can go with them. They explain that his wife is a recent fashion school graduate and while the Resistance probably doesn't need any fashion design, she can draft patterns and do some tailoring. General Organa says that their family would be welcome regardless, but that their wife's skills would be useful. Elia tells her family, and they allow her to cash out their inheritance. Several members of her family also donate funds of their own, and they offer to let her take as much fabric from the out-of-season "clearance" section as she wants. She and Dav buy a light freighter (Dav looking out for the important piloting stuff and Elia focusing on creature comforts for the crew) and load it up with supplies and funds and go to the Resistance base on I-made-up Cresemba. (I'm a pharmacy tech, I made a joke of using brand drug names for different stuff in this 'verse.) The events of "A Memorable First Impression" happen, Elia and Dav have been doing age play for years and Snap enters the relationship as "Uncle Tem" and a bit later Iolo enters the relationship as "Yoyo" the family dog (Iolo is a real Glup Shitto, only in a comic and one of the Road to TFA YA novels, so I based him a bit on the Puzzle in a Thunderstorm podcaster Heath Enwright's excitable dog lover character) aka a puppy player. Poe is in charge of all the X-Wing pilots so he can't hook up with Dav, Iolo, or Snap, no matter how much all four of them want it. He does wind up in a poly relationship with Elia. After about a year on Cresemba, they have to evacuate to D'Qar (a real place in canon), and Dav and Kare die protecting the caravan. Steev and Kerrin Stoneskipper, the base tailors who welcomed Elia to their little shop, also die, and the tailor shop is destroyed, leaving Elia initially with just the sewing stuff in her quarters, which did survive. I use the pod system from the "Stars and Skies" fic universe. Then they're on D'Qar and Elia and Poe are both switches who perfer to submit, but only-Dom Snap is consumed with his wife Kare's loss, unederstandably, and Poe tries to be there for Elia the way that Dav was, but he can't, and eventually Elia goes to Snap and they start to move forward. And on Cresemba and on D'Qar there's what they call The Down Low Club (hence the series title, could've come up with something better but it's too late now), for kinky and kink-friendly people to let their hair down, talk about kink stuff, and do scenes with DMs watching. Eventually the events of TFA happen (and are immediately followed by the events of "Permission to Fall Apart"), and there was going to be a lot more happening on D'Qar, but eventually (because I read the TFA novelization) I realized that D'Qar would have to be evacuated as soon as possible because Darth Incel got the base's location info when he invaded Poe's mind. So this story is in flux a bit too. But it's on indefinite hold now. When I was getting into the sequel-verse, I was making reading lists for both Canon and Legends, and I started watching and reading Prequel Canon stuff, and sure enough, I got into the Prequel-verse, which leads to literally every other post in this Dreamwidth Journal so far.

[Star Wars Prequel Trilogy] And now we get to my current daydream, the Arala Melnau 'verse. As mentioned in the previous entry, this story is being majorly re-written to deal with the realities of Ara aging at 2/3 the rate of an unaltered human. I changed her from being two years younger than Obi-Wan to being two years older, and a few other things. Those are in the Notepad master file still, but I'll be posting the new too-much-detail timeline over the next week or so as I make timeline decisions.