vegetablearian | Entries tagged with .fandom

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It's been like a year and a half since I made any real progress on httwsb. I still look at it... sometimes. I nearly wrote a whole 5k words last year!!! :o What happened to the vegetablearian who made that ^ family tree? What kind of demon ritual am I supposed to be doing to get my Fallout insanity back?

I wish I'd been using DW more, but I think I'm just too forgetful for the reading page. I can only seem to keep up with anything via rss. I think there's a way to log in and get locked posts but either it doesn't work (safely?) with Thunderbird or I was just too lazy. Or I made it up. (I just looked it up and it's mostly laziness, lol. I could use another rss client, but I'm too lazy for that, too.) But I keep resolving to come back more. I come back in five minutes, no new posts. Another 10, wow still none. Then I come back in 3 months...! Also, I can't get to grips with the new interface still :/ I guess because I am not using it.

Anyway, I mostly came back today because it seems like the best place to cry about the state of fanfic communities nowadays. I just saw a Fallout fic (in my rss feeds natch) that said a relationship between a 17 year old and a 26 year old is "lolicon" and "DD:DNE" and all the rest. And I wondered how old I'd last hced Ian as when he takes my 17 year old Natalia's virginity, so I dug out the family tree, and it looks like it was 25. So, thank god, they just slide under the threshold of what's morally acceptable. I can't blame annoyance at having to use AO3's underage tag for such things for not yet finishing that fic - that's just sheer laziness, obviously. But it was chafing me, but then someone else out there who's also writing about people in the post-apocalyptic wild west wants that kind of age gap to be creepy? Maybe I can't get on my high (low?) horse - I've also written he's a sexual predator but like, not really fic about the exact same character, rofl. Maybe it's just perennial european frustration with this particular glaring difference in standards, but I feel better for complaining nevertheless :)

I let my DW membership lapse because I was never reading or posting here. I kind of regret it rn because I wanted to use one of my cutoff icons - of my sweet cat Flea who died in October. Well, I'll just upload it again, lol:

the cutest cat in the world, happy in the garden

I miss my fat baby!!! I'm going to make a proper tribute to her on my website, but I haven't felt up to it yet.

On AO3, of the 4079 Fallout: New Vegas works today, 264 are Boone/Female Courier. That's the most popular relationship. (And my current OTP.) Boone/Male Courier is the 6th most popular and combined it'd be 359 Boone/Courier works, which would leave the 2nd place of Arcade/Male Courier firmly in the dust at 250 works.

359/4079 is 8.8%, well below the suggested rareness metric in

thisaintbc's Rarepair Hell Weekend post of less than 1/3 of the fandom's total content. However, I know from sad experience most of the Boone/Courier fics are actually just the first chapter of a novelisation where the Courier is only talking to Mitchell about the whole shot in the head thing and hasn't even met Boone yet.

( Lots of Fallout AO3 numbers )

So, I don't think there's any metric at all that could identify Fallout rarepairs. We can't even say less than 10 fics or something because some people have been so productive with their one person ship. Same with fanart - for example, there's one really great Natalia/Ian fanartist (

partialvolume /

refinedstorage) and like, nobody else. Part of this will be age - FO1 turns 25 this year and FO2 is only a year younger, and FO3 and FNV both came out after AO3, but only FNV came out after it went into open beta, and the site was still in its very early days then. But, you would imagine that it's all recent enough that people would have been importing old works, so who knows?

I guess with small fandoms like these, that are still very definitely fandoms with active fans making fanworks (as opposed to like, the book you wanted fanfic of and literally nobody has ever written any) it's difficult to draw lines, but I think it's also how OC-centric everything is making everything more diverse. It makes it harder to find what you're looking for, but maybe more interesting in general because you're encouraged to browse by character or even fandom more often, and you find new ships (this is how I got into Arcade/Vulpes...). It also encourages people to make their own fanworks because of necessity, but I wonder if that's swings and roundabouts, and as many people aren't happy about shipping into the void. Which makes me think that maybe yeah, it's all rarepairs! With all the pros and cons that they have.

Nevertheless, I would feel ridiculous calling Boone/Courier a rarepair. I have a tumblr devoted to it (and Boone in general) and there's loads of fanart for me to feature, a fair amount of discussions that I don't start, and plenty of fic on AO3 - again, it's literally the most popular FNV ship on AO3. But I'm still over the fucking moon when I meet another Boone/Courier shipper - or even if I find their abandoned blog, their 5 year unfinished fic.

I have some super rare Fallout rarepairs, mostly FNV. 2/3 of the FNV ones would get brand new AO3 tags when I publish HTTWSB if I weren't planning to upload the whole thing as one fic (after this discussion) and probably just tag it as Boone/Courier, Arcade&Courier, Arcade&Boone, Arcade/Manny, Veronica/Christine. Which is painful to me because everyone there but Boone literally gets shipped with at least one more person within the story (technically so does Boone...), but what can you do?

against entropy

once the light is on in the universe, it will never go out

Entries tagged with .fandom

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May 2025

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25-1 ♡ poor neglected journal

22-38 ★ Common rarepairs, rare commonpairs?

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