Quick and dirty rundown of some of the high and lowlights of our Japan trip from last month.

Tokyo Anime Fair: Meh. I gather this may have been a worse than average year as a lot of the usual exhibitors pulled out in protest of the new laws about selling manga with sexual content¹ to minors², but what was left wasn’t good for more than a couple of hours’ entertainment, and I’d be skeptical that a few more big name exhibitors would have made much difference. To any future Madman winners who may be reading this: should you be offered the chance to go to TAF for your own prize trip, some renegotiation may be in order. See if you can get them to send you to the World Cosplay Summit, Tokyo Gameshow or Comiket instead – they’re all much more cosplay-friendly.

Osaka Aquarium: Words cannot express the joy several minutes in the presence of a real, live Capybara brought us. Words give up altogether and break down into tears when asked to describe the sea otters.

Disney Land: Missed out on going. Turns out the school holidays in fine weather are not the optimal time to be doing this one. :/

Ghibli Museum: Missed out on this too, same reason. Tickets were supposed to be booked for us in advance, but it seems no-one anticipated quite how far in advance they’d be sold out.

Mt Fuji: Holy fuck that thing is big. Landscape where we come from just does not pull that kind of shit. Also, the dinner they served us at our first night at the ryokan stands as a trip highlight on its own.

Osaka Street Cosplay Festival: Got there late, change room queues took forever, but pretty cool to be cosplaying out in public for once, when Japan is usually so uncomfortable letting that sort of thing happen outdoors. I made at least one girl’s day with my Waka costume and my poingy wings, and I do believe my sister’s Robin costume made just about everyone else’s.

Baths taken: Too many to count

Spending All The Money Saved On Flights On Ridiculous J-Fashion: HUGE SUCCESS!

( Japan 3: The Search for Sakura )

( So you may have heard One Piece is pretty big in Japan right now )

Recent distractions notwithstanding, I have managed to get the penultimate chapter of Summers'son finished and off to the beta reader at long last, but given what a monster of word count and clarity issues it has grown into over the last few months, getting it over that last hurdle may take a little while yet. In the meantime, have yet another epilogue/mini-chapter I tossed out this week to wrap up one of the more glaring plot threads leftover from chapter 8. My beta-reader is not seeing this before it gets posted not so much because it couldn't possibly benefit from a second set of eyes as because I am relatively certain I already know exactly what she's going to say about it.


( On his way back from the bathroom Nathan very nearly walks right into his closed bedroom door, and hesitates for a moment, confused. )

help I have fallen for One Piece and I can't get up

So I'm back from Japan, and also a good 9000 words and two drafts into the next chapter of Summers'son. The upshot of this is that I can now get away with posting about other stuff with a clean conscience again. The unrelated upshot of starting with this particular topic is that for once in my life, I honestly cannot think of anything of substance that an extra four-thousand-odd words of rambling could add to this review.

The Avengers movie was, quite simply, everything I never dared hope it would turn out to be.

It lives up to the hype, people. ALL of the hype.

If by some miracle you do not already have plans to see this movie at your first opportunity, now may be an excellent time to consider reprioritising.

( As represented using pictures of cats )

I've spent less than six weeks total here over a space of over six years, but sometime since that last visit it's morphed into somewhere that gets classified as 'familiar and unremarkable'. Huh.

Would be nice if that meant I was actually confident finding my way around on the rail system unsupervised or anything useful like that.

Four days left before we leave for Japan! *breathes into paper bag* So much packing still to do, but at least our itinerary's sorted. We've got a week in Osaka to look forward to, then a couple of days staying in an onsen near Mt Fuji, then a week in Akihabara in Tokyo. Madman are paying for that last one, plus flights, a week's rail pass and tickets to the Tokyo Anime Fair and the Ghibli Museum. They really go out of their way spoil their cosplay champions. Plans so far include going to the Tokyo Anime Festival (which won't let us cosplay, booo) taking part in the Namba Cosplay Street Festival (which certainly will), and spending all (and I do mean ALL) the money we saved on flights and accommodation on that obscure little fashion brand we came back from our last trip so hopelessly addicted to. It's going to be awesome. :3

The bad news is that despite all my best attempts to make this my unofficial deadline, I'm not going to have the remaining three chapters of Summers'son finished and posted before then. I swear to god I'm getting close - my notebook-draft is only a handful of scenes from the end, but there's no way I'm going to get it all finished by Tuesday at this stage. Least I have the one new chapter to share - after this many months between updates that's a whole lot better than nothing.

---

Title: Summers’son
Summary: Settling into the 21st century is giving a teenaged Nathan some trouble.
Chapter: 8/10
Characters/Pairing: Nate/Wade
Rating: NC-17
Word count: 3540
Previous parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
Notes: Breaking a bit from our previous theme of random things that may have happened in various AU versions of events, here we have a scene that could just as easily happen in more or less any universe where Nate and Wade manage to get together.

( Given the song and dance it had taken to convince Wade that anyone like Nate could ever want him in the first place, Nathan really should have known better. )

This seemed as good a time as any to mention that it kinda dawned on me a few years ago that I seem to be basically bisexual.*

In all seriousness, this is not a big deal. I don't think I could have asked for a more gay-friendly social circle than the branch of Perth fandom I've been hanging out with for the last odd decade. I haven't mentioned it to my parents yet, but I can't imagine them being too bothered by it. It just seems silly to make a big scene out of coming out in that sort of environment. For all I know, half those people never assumed I was straight in the first place.

The only slightly awkward thing about the whole situation is that no matter how confident one might be about everyone's support, it's still not the sort of subject that lends itself to being dropped into casual conversation. ("So what did you do over the weekend?" "Oh, nothing much, sat around the house, had a minor personal sexual revelation, you know.") Without going into detail about what kept me from getting through all this stuff years ago**, when you've spent as long as I had in the semi-conscious habit of not drawing attention to fact that, for example, your eyes might sometimes trail after a pretty girl for slightly longer than is entirely heterosexual, it's a hard thing to break yourself out of overnight. But obviously, I want that information out there. I want to be able to casually mention something like how I might personally find the heroine of series X more attractive than the hero, and without confusing anyone with how that adds up with my having identified as heterosexual back in 2001, or whatever. At the very least, it certainly can't hurt my chances of ever getting a date.

So, yeah. That's about the shape of things.

And with all that and the last month of crazy Wai-con cosplay prep out of the way, hopefully I will be back to my regular schedule of posting about random fannish stuff any day now.


* Well, inasmuch as one can say given my non-existent dating history. Sometimes I crush on guys, sometimes I crush on girls, I'm comfortable with the label, and happy to figure out any remaining details as I go.

** Short version: the supportive environment thing is something of a recent development. Until my late teens practically everything public school and available pop culture had ever taught me about homo/bisexuality was the bare definitions, that no-one ever talked about it, and when they did talk about it it was to sneer or otherwise establish that The People Who Did That Were Not Our Kind Of People. (Had RTD's new Doctor Who been on TV when I was a kid I may have had a whole different adolescence.) When it first began to dawn on me that I found girls attractive my response was to freak out and repress, and repress so effectively that it took an awfully long time and a lot of gradual intermediate stages for the subject to come up again. Anyway, I think we've already established the part where I was never the most emotionally stable of teens out there.

In 2011 I was half of the winning team in the Australian Madman Cosplay Competition, had both my legs sliced by a surgeon and spent over a month recovering, twirled poi on stage in front of over a thousand people, did not get nearly so much fic written as I would have liked (as usual), spent far more time making costumes than I meant to (also as usual), was in a minor car accident, fell head over heels for a stupid webcomic called Homestuck, built a lightsabre, spent an ungodly amount of time installing and reinstalling various operating systems on various computers, and had a lovely Christmas with all my family (genetically related or otherwise).

But the single most important thing that happened in 2011 would have to be getting myself diagnosed with depression, after suffering from it – as the general agreement now seems to go – in one form or another for most of my life.

The short version of that story… well, I guess the really short version is that this is a good thing. I’ve got answers for things I’ve been avoiding talking about for a long time. I’m seeing a psychiatrist and I’m on anti-depressants, and while we’re still sorta feeling through what’s going to work best for me, it’s been helping a lot. I feel better. A number of little things in life are suddenly easier than they used to be. A couple of family friends who don’t see much of me at the best of times and have no idea anything is going on have volunteered the opinion I seem happier than they remember seeing me. It’s the usual story that it means a lot just to have a name and a formal diagnosis for That Thing That You Were Struggling With But Weren’t Ever Sure Was A Thing Until Now. Similar deal to what I went through with the anterior compartment syndrome that was giving me shin splints all those years in skating (see above note about surgery) – just having an explanation is a huge weight off your mind.

( The gory details, which may or may not devolve into sharing my entire life story under the justification of 'context'. )

It's been so long since I last posted fic that I really wanted to at least have something new posted by the end of the year, but it probably goes without saying that I've had more trouble than I counted on getting back into the swing of writing again after all that cosplay stress leading up to November. (All those posts about stuff in recent Marvel comics? You can safely read them as a sort of sideways attempt to get myself back into the writing groove again.) The good news is I'm finally writing again, and I have the next chapter of that high school AU needing only a few last edits and a beta before it's done! The bad news is ahaha no way is that happening by new year's.

But in the interests of having something to share by that arbitrary date, and because I feel the need to celebrate the fact that it appears this will actually still be canon-compliant following X-Sanction, I'm reposting this short fic I wrote for a kink meme request a couple of weeks ago. Very brief context for reposting purposes: the request was for Deadpool and a newly resurrected Cable meeting on the pages of Uncanny X-Force, but I must also credit this recent scene where Spider-Man and Johnny Storm do almost the exact same thing for inspiration as all I could think reading it was, wow, you'd hardly have to rewrite this to do make it Cable and Deadpool instead...

( Script format, as I like to imagine this is exactly how it might go down on page )
And a Happy New Year to you all!