five words meme
Leave a comment saying, "IT’S TASTING TIME!" and I will give you five words I associate with you. Then post about what they mean to you, along with this, at your journal.
Bay hit me with this meme! The words she chose were 'Lance', 'Naruto', 'Harry Potter', 'writing' and my username, 'purple_drake'. Also I TL;DR TOO MUCH.
Lance: The first time I saw Lance in a game it was Pokemon Gold, Japanese version ROM, and I'd gotten that far through sheer luck and process of elimination. I thought he looked like a vampire and because he was wearing back and sprite was faced away, I was convinced he was a Rocket and refused to talk to him. It took me forever to realise I had to and I went in expecting a battle. Great instincts there, lol.
When I finally played the English version I still thought he looked like a vampire in the overworld but fell in love with his badass sarcasm and flippancy in the Rocket base, and even though people make fun of his GSC battle sprite it remains one of my favourites. When I temporarily left the fandom in 2006 he was pretty much my reason for coming back, because I discovered the manga and heard he had superpowers and wanted to know more (because superpowers are awesome, duh). I haven't really left it again since.
Somehow through all that he turned into my vehicle for exploring the pokemon world in a grittier setting, and remains my first and longest-lasting roleplay muse. Or just my longest constant muse for just about everything to do with writing (and some things that don't have anything to do with it at all). He's also the reason I started liking redheads IRL, which is really pretty sad.
Naruto: I can't quite remember why I first wanted to see what Naruto was like; I think at that point I was just picking anime to check out. My sister and I only got through the first few episodes and then stopped watching because we were kind of bored, though Kakashi struck me as awesome and I wanted to know more about him. A few months later my sister got into the mood to watch it again because of music AMVs, so we tried again and really enjoyed it.
I think the world has fantastic potential and a lot of the supporting characters are really interesting, but I'm also of the camp that Kishimoto's totally effed up the story and has no idea how to handle female characters. Or any characters, really. Thanks to my sister I've developed a hatred of the titular character and the way Kishimoto has mishandled his development in particular. I've pretty much stopped watching and/or reading it, but I still have fics planned in it because it was an excellent series up until something potentially great somehow went wrong.
Harry Potter: Initially I wanted nothing to do with HP and barely knew it existed up until GOF came out, but then I got bored one day and picked up my sister's unread copy of the first book to read it at random. I was hooked after that; I actually remember nearly fainting from hunger in a video store once, because I'd spent so much time reading HP back to back that I kept forgetting to eat. I also remember paying one of my closest friends five bucks to read the first one (I split the fee with another friend), though she still didn't like it. And one of my teachers got me a Scabbers plush. I also have a Norbert.
HP remains the other fandom, other than Pokemon, which I'm perpetually in the mood for, and it's also one of my favourite crossover fandoms because of the whole 'WE'RE SO TOTALLY NOT HERE =D' culture vibe the wizarding world has; it makes it somehow easier to cross things. And I love most characters in it. (Dumbledore is my favourite. And Bill Weasley. And Charlie Weasley. Okay, so I like the redheads. YOU ALREADY KNEW THAT.) Some of my favourite fics of all time are in the HP fandom; it's the one I read fics from the most.
Writing: I think I first started writing fanfic; IIRC, it was the beginnings of a Resident Evil novelisation. Then again, I vaguely remember a whole heap of other semi-started stories, but I don't know how many were original or even what most of them were about anymore, so I might just be saying that because it's the only thing I remember in any detail. Actually, wait, I remember writing Godzilla fanfic with DA POWAH OF LUV in 5th grade for a writing project, so never mind.
I really started writing original stories in my second year of highschool, when I found someone else in my group of friends, whom I hadn't known well before then, also liked to write. We started planning a world together, but our interpretations turned out wildly different and I learned it's hard to co-write with someone, funny that. (I still use the names of the moons as my computer password.) Neither of us have written that particular world in literally years since we both went off and started writing our own things, but that was how it started and I've never stopped since.
I've been writing fanfic 'officially' since 2005, but I've since started wondering if it's stunted my ability to write original stories, or if I just didn't do enough developing as a writer in terms of my own stories. I find it easy to get ideas for original worlds, but since writing one for my thesis I've found it's so much easier to write when I have a canon to base it off, and I simply didn't have enough of it to be really secure in my original story. Now I'm getting near the end of my thesis and I have a better handle on the story and the world than I did, but my God it's so much harder and do I ever know it now.
(It also interested me to hear one of my tutors/supervisors mention that one of her writing classes liked a story one guy had written because 'it read like fanfiction', even though she had doubts as a professional about its quality and viability. It was an interesting distinction and made me realised just how much of a difference there is in styles between fanfiction and original fiction. It didn't help that the original-world setting I used for my thesis was originally based off the Pokemon world, so I had a ton of trouble separating them in my head.)
Writing is something I don't think I could stop doing, even though I'm insanely slow and have an inability to finish many stories because I have no self-discipline. I have too many ideas to ever stop trying to get them out somehow.
Username: Despite the obvious connection, it's not actually influenced by Spyro! (I o play and love the original Spyros, though; I haven't played the latest ones.) purple_drake was originally just for an email account after my yahoo one (which was 'star trek voyager rocks', except with some textual shortcuts I can no longer remember). In highschool I was big into collecting dragon pictures online and did it a lot during school computer time; I started disliking my email name and wanted a handle I could use for everything online.
Then I saw this picture and thought it was the most adorable thing I've ever seen. It was described as a baby dragon, but I thought it looked a little too well-developed to just be a baby, and since by then I was already thinking of drakes as the smaller cousin to dragons I felt it wasa more suitable description. Therefore, purple_drake. I've been using the handle and the email since at least 2003; that's the earliest email still in my inbox and it's not the introductory 'welcome to hotmail' thing, so for all I know it might have been longer.
Bay hit me with this meme! The words she chose were 'Lance', 'Naruto', 'Harry Potter', 'writing' and my username, 'purple_drake'. Also I TL;DR TOO MUCH.
Lance: The first time I saw Lance in a game it was Pokemon Gold, Japanese version ROM, and I'd gotten that far through sheer luck and process of elimination. I thought he looked like a vampire and because he was wearing back and sprite was faced away, I was convinced he was a Rocket and refused to talk to him. It took me forever to realise I had to and I went in expecting a battle. Great instincts there, lol.
When I finally played the English version I still thought he looked like a vampire in the overworld but fell in love with his badass sarcasm and flippancy in the Rocket base, and even though people make fun of his GSC battle sprite it remains one of my favourites. When I temporarily left the fandom in 2006 he was pretty much my reason for coming back, because I discovered the manga and heard he had superpowers and wanted to know more (because superpowers are awesome, duh). I haven't really left it again since.
Somehow through all that he turned into my vehicle for exploring the pokemon world in a grittier setting, and remains my first and longest-lasting roleplay muse. Or just my longest constant muse for just about everything to do with writing (and some things that don't have anything to do with it at all). He's also the reason I started liking redheads IRL, which is really pretty sad.
Naruto: I can't quite remember why I first wanted to see what Naruto was like; I think at that point I was just picking anime to check out. My sister and I only got through the first few episodes and then stopped watching because we were kind of bored, though Kakashi struck me as awesome and I wanted to know more about him. A few months later my sister got into the mood to watch it again because of music AMVs, so we tried again and really enjoyed it.
I think the world has fantastic potential and a lot of the supporting characters are really interesting, but I'm also of the camp that Kishimoto's totally effed up the story and has no idea how to handle female characters. Or any characters, really. Thanks to my sister I've developed a hatred of the titular character and the way Kishimoto has mishandled his development in particular. I've pretty much stopped watching and/or reading it, but I still have fics planned in it because it was an excellent series up until something potentially great somehow went wrong.
Harry Potter: Initially I wanted nothing to do with HP and barely knew it existed up until GOF came out, but then I got bored one day and picked up my sister's unread copy of the first book to read it at random. I was hooked after that; I actually remember nearly fainting from hunger in a video store once, because I'd spent so much time reading HP back to back that I kept forgetting to eat. I also remember paying one of my closest friends five bucks to read the first one (I split the fee with another friend), though she still didn't like it. And one of my teachers got me a Scabbers plush. I also have a Norbert.
HP remains the other fandom, other than Pokemon, which I'm perpetually in the mood for, and it's also one of my favourite crossover fandoms because of the whole 'WE'RE SO TOTALLY NOT HERE =D' culture vibe the wizarding world has; it makes it somehow easier to cross things. And I love most characters in it. (Dumbledore is my favourite. And Bill Weasley. And Charlie Weasley. Okay, so I like the redheads. YOU ALREADY KNEW THAT.) Some of my favourite fics of all time are in the HP fandom; it's the one I read fics from the most.
Writing: I think I first started writing fanfic; IIRC, it was the beginnings of a Resident Evil novelisation. Then again, I vaguely remember a whole heap of other semi-started stories, but I don't know how many were original or even what most of them were about anymore, so I might just be saying that because it's the only thing I remember in any detail. Actually, wait, I remember writing Godzilla fanfic with DA POWAH OF LUV in 5th grade for a writing project, so never mind.
I really started writing original stories in my second year of highschool, when I found someone else in my group of friends, whom I hadn't known well before then, also liked to write. We started planning a world together, but our interpretations turned out wildly different and I learned it's hard to co-write with someone, funny that. (I still use the names of the moons as my computer password.) Neither of us have written that particular world in literally years since we both went off and started writing our own things, but that was how it started and I've never stopped since.
I've been writing fanfic 'officially' since 2005, but I've since started wondering if it's stunted my ability to write original stories, or if I just didn't do enough developing as a writer in terms of my own stories. I find it easy to get ideas for original worlds, but since writing one for my thesis I've found it's so much easier to write when I have a canon to base it off, and I simply didn't have enough of it to be really secure in my original story. Now I'm getting near the end of my thesis and I have a better handle on the story and the world than I did, but my God it's so much harder and do I ever know it now.
(It also interested me to hear one of my tutors/supervisors mention that one of her writing classes liked a story one guy had written because 'it read like fanfiction', even though she had doubts as a professional about its quality and viability. It was an interesting distinction and made me realised just how much of a difference there is in styles between fanfiction and original fiction. It didn't help that the original-world setting I used for my thesis was originally based off the Pokemon world, so I had a ton of trouble separating them in my head.)
Writing is something I don't think I could stop doing, even though I'm insanely slow and have an inability to finish many stories because I have no self-discipline. I have too many ideas to ever stop trying to get them out somehow.
Username: Despite the obvious connection, it's not actually influenced by Spyro! (I o play and love the original Spyros, though; I haven't played the latest ones.) purple_drake was originally just for an email account after my yahoo one (which was 'star trek voyager rocks', except with some textual shortcuts I can no longer remember). In highschool I was big into collecting dragon pictures online and did it a lot during school computer time; I started disliking my email name and wanted a handle I could use for everything online.
Then I saw this picture and thought it was the most adorable thing I've ever seen. It was described as a baby dragon, but I thought it looked a little too well-developed to just be a baby, and since by then I was already thinking of drakes as the smaller cousin to dragons I felt it wasa more suitable description. Therefore, purple_drake. I've been using the handle and the email since at least 2003; that's the earliest email still in my inbox and it's not the introductory 'welcome to hotmail' thing, so for all I know it might have been longer.
