What is this I don't even.

I promised to be succinct and it didn’t happen. Extensive blathering about Portal and HB/BPRD follow.

P: Invent a random AU for any fandom (we always need more ideas)

Oh man, you picked a tough first one! I always have trouble with this sort of thing. I’m in a fandom because I love its universe, so changing it feels odd.

Alright, this isn’t so much inventing as co-opting someone else’s ideas, but I am irrationally endeared by the concept of a Portal-type universe where the cores are corgis. They’ve been experimented on and made immortal and and implanted with mechanical brains, sure, but… they are corgis. Just straight corgis with some mechanical parts inside. Why? Because science.

They can’t talk, they just bark. Wheatley is one of those dysfunctional yap-machines that freak out like everything around them is a squirrel or a mailman or a ball. The researchers put a muzzle on him once and he curled up in a corner and whined until they felt so bad they took it off, at which point he resumed yapping as much as before, if not more to make up for lost time.

When Aperture was operational, the, uh, coregis would jog around following the scientists and engineers hoping someone would play with them. They were tethered to little waist-length rails by their collars. They didn’t have much scientific value, but they were kind of fun to have around.

And absolutely nothing else in this universe changes, except that pressing the button releases kibble for the occupant of the chassis. My AU comes crashing down exactly here because why would GLaDOS ever want kibble? She is not a corgi.

Upon waking, Chell simply accepts the fact that a dog seems to want to lead her somewhere because she’s seen much stranger things in Aperture before. Though she is much more of a cat person than a dog person and does not appreciate Wheatley’s slobbery licks when she picks him up to carry him, figuring his short legs are getting tired from running around the facility.

She gets a pretty bad headache when he’s attached to the chassis because my god, barking over a loudspeaker.

When they escape (and they do) they roll around in the dirt outside and soak up the sun together for hours.

R: A pairing you ship that you don’t think anyone else ships

This is a tough one, I think I’m pretty in line with a lot of people’s ships. In terms of Portal, I have a huge fondness for WheatDOS that very few people seem to share.

I wouldn’t consider them ships because they are ridiculous and wrong and not possible, but boy do I love me some selfcest. Wheatleycest, or Abe/Caul (from BPRD). Maybe a bit of James/PH (from SH2). Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know.

S: Show us an example of your personal headcanon

…I am really partial to my idiotic headcanons for a universe in which Wheatley and the other cores are babies (no, I don’t know what’s wrong with me)

And also this thing about a Daddy Wheatley at Christmas

These aren’t even really headcanons, but rather silly ideas about ‘what ifs’. I try my best to not form headcanons about things I like, at least in terms of the plot itself, though I can’t avoid reading into characters’ motivations and speculating wildly on how different things connect.

W: 5 favorite characters from 5 different fandoms

Portal: Wheatley, this cannot come as a surprise
Half-Life: Dr. Kleiner :) :) :)
Hellboy/BPRD: Abe Sapien, though to be honest I love most of those freaksanature
TF2: The Scout because he can almost fly and is a dickface and I admire those things in a man
MST3k: Mike because hapless dopey doughy midwesterner in a flight suit and did you know I had a huge crush on him when I was a kid well I did

X: 3 OTPs from 3 different fandoms

I actually would hesitate to use the term OTP for a pairing I like, at least for the fandoms I’m in, because… wow, looking at them, only two ever mention actual relationships, and pairing characters up for porn and fluff flies against all logic in terms of their plot and characters if I’m totally honest with myself, so let’s say ‘favorite pairings’ instead.

Portal: Complete tie between WheatDOS and Chelley. He mixes well with scary women.
Hellboy/BPRD: …Kate and Johann always struck me as a pair that would get along very well. Well enough that I wrote smut of them once. Though he’s become quite an ass in the years that have passed since then, and she went and got herself some other German for a boyfriend.
TF2: Scoutcest. Whew, reaching back into history for that one. Oh, there’s another selfcest I like. What the hell, me? What the hell.

Z: Just ramble about something fan-related, go go go
I’m a little sad to have so few people I can talk to about Hellboy and BPRD though I am perfectly fine just shouting my feelings into the void until the right person hears it and comes to talk to me about them. I’ve enjoyed some seriously deep, indepth, long-form discussion on the rare 4chan or plus4chan thread regarding character development, potential links between different plot threads, where the story is going, where it’s been, what someone meant by the tiniest turn of phrase. But maybe the fact that such communication is so rare for me that makes it so special.

I often post ridiculously long reviews and speculation on the Hellboy CBR forums (been a member since 2004) and people will sometimes play along and discuss things with me, debate on some things and join me in enthusing about others, but I have to keep myself restrained there because wow, the creators actually go there so definitely no porn or ridiculous stuff.

I wish these comics had an actual fandom—they honestly should, they have so many unique characters with diverse and interesting designs and so much history to the world, so much stuff going on in the present and in the past, so many bits of story you’re responsible for catching onto and connecting with other bits because they’re not going to hand it to you all nicely packaged… it just seems like the sort of thing people would really go for!

The majority of the HB fandom when it did exist was just 15-year-olds making vampire self-inserts and shipping them with Nuada from the movies :( And here I sit, willing and ready to talk FOREVER about how Abe’s most recent decisions were colored by his time with the Black Flame and how he sees some of himself in Ben and in doing so has lost the ability to tell right from wrong, and how Roger is better off now, and Johann is doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, and what kind of soothsayer Fenix might be and what her actions mean about the end of the world, and the significance of this symbol or that image in this character’s dreams and well…

If nothing else, the comics keep me mentally busy.