what's your flavor?

...AKA, mei as a fan.

written mostly as a self-reflection where i identify my own preferences and habits, but i think it’s good to have on here too.

fannish behavior

i engage mostly with fandom via art, but some other things i do/have done as a fan include: participating in fanzines or fanthologies, joining bigbangs and exchanges, organizing both, making merch, drawing comics, animating/storyboarding, making playlists, dabbling in fic writing, running a discord server and twitter account for my ship, making powerpoints, building digital shrines on my site, collating screencaps, making character-inspired bracelets, writing meta, and completely reworking characters/ships until they no longer resemble their canon media base forms and have become my OCs.

i’ve been in online fannish/creative/transformative spaces since i was 10 years old, to varying degrees of interactivity, but i have historically been more a lurker than an active fandom participant. (especially now that i am an adult who likes cartoons. my god, i cannot imagine having to navigate...)

i like making friends in fandom – the main draw of participating in fan communities is getting to have sincere, personal interactions with other fans, and posting art is the best way for me to attract new pals. however, i get stressed once i have a following too big for my liking and feel pressured to create "content" for a waiting audience rather than friends who i can talk to. at that point, i usually go back to being a lurker.

i think a lot about my obsessions and would say i make a fair amount of fanwork for them, but very little gets posted publicly. i am a little precious about the characters i care most about, so i'm most comfortable posting any fanwork i make about my more precious faves to smaller, more familiar audiences.

i’ve also noticed that i make more friends who are into completely different (or just adjacent) things, who also don’t mind if we don’t share fandoms. i just like seeing people talk their shit. (this doesn't mean i can't have friends who do share my fandoms, though!)

flavor profile

at a glance

toons, oc/canon, shota, HL, BL, GL, failguys, failgirls, friends to lovers, playfulness and banter, boy yuri, opposites attract, lovesick boys, ace4ace, freak4freak, girls on top, grossfreaky turned sweet, sweet turned grossfreaky.

in detail

i like things meant for a range of audiences, but my main sandbox where i like to play/make transformative work happens to be media designed for children—cartoons and kid-friendly video games. i find that media designed for adults usually already takes the characters in a direction i find creatively satisfying, and kids media characters (or one-off viddy game characters) are far more compelling than the limits of their stories.

i love all sorts of shipping, and i don't discriminate against the taboo, problematic, or transgressive, or whatever else you call it. i like lots of fucked up fiction, love exploring it, and gravitate to others who are the same (or who at least respect that way of engaging with media, and understand that your taste in entertainment is not a 1:1 reflection of your personal moral code).

my favorite taboo themes to read about include incest, shotacon, dubcon, intox / drugging, manipulation + control disguised as care, loss of autonomy, age difference, mindbreak, corruption, power imbalance / abuse of power, interspecies, and lifestyle D/s. (although the last one is a little less "bad", no?)

• just to reiterate (though i feel silly having to): i hold zero to negative interest in (if not active disgust towards) the real life equivalents of the dark fiction i read, watch, or make.

i am a character-driven fan. i don't care too much about story or lore or setting but will get into anything if i'm intrigued by a character. i just like playing with dolls... for this reason, i also enjoy fanworks for source media i've never engaged with, so long as i understand and like what the fancreator is doing with the characters!

i am most likely to enjoy a ship with the configuration of "character i find cute" + "character i can identify with" – although this is not always the case.

• for this reason, the ships i – a girly girl – feel most moved to ideate for are HL usually, and GL sometimes.
• i also have ships i like where i don't necessarily project onto either character (my BL ships, obviously, but many of the HL/GL ones as well).
• i am usually more insane about my BL ships than my GL ships, but BL can also be more of a landmine to me than GL, by a lot...? i don't know why, but it's also not that deep.
• if finding a character to project onto is impossible, i roll up my sleeves and do it myself (aka hit blorbo with the oc/canon beam).
• the oc is not really me, despite being made for the express purpose of projecting onto. more on this soon.

i like HL where the woman is more assertive or has equal (if not more) power in the relationship, or any other HL that is a little weird, unconventional, or unchristian – disrupts gender roles, the guy is pathetic in some way, freak4freak type relationships, older woman/younger man, some other taboo, etc. i also like bi4bi and ace4ace, but only if it's on top of an already good dynamic…!

i like BL where they are silly friends who bicker a lot but know and understand each other very well, both bottoms, or brothers. i also noticed i like BL where one of them is mad at the other one for some weird past reason, and the other one is kind of dumb about it. (see: dimilix, narumitsu, rinharu)

i like GL that is fem x masc but the masc is kind of pathetic. or, honestly, just fem x pathetic. i suppose i’m not really picky about the masc bit, but i do like an aesthetic difference, gender presentation-wise.

with any given character, i usually have one main ship for them that i prefer far above any other ships i might like for them. (the high maintenance multishipper…) sometimes i will monoship them, so any other ships involving them are a landmine, but i usually get over it as the obsession wanes.

i also ship characters monogamously most of the time, with some notable exceptions.

• exceptions are usually either F/M/M or some kind of uncategorizeable queer polycule, rather than any other binary gender combination.

if i have specific power dynamics in mind (typically for HL and GL), ship reversal is almost always a landmine.

• however, i don’t use name order for ships, since for my ships i don’t usually have preferred top/bottom dynamics — i’m a frog fujoshi. i’ll usually call them whatever name sounds prettier.
• (fortunately for everyone, i don’t usually post about ships that have strong t/b discourse…)

ships

sorted alphabetically by media. ships are grouped by their source media if multiple apply, and stray loner ships are all clumped together under "one-offs." name order within ship has no significance.

shipping triangle

created april 2023; not totally accurate. ships not plugged in (because there are too many of them), but this is how i usually ship things. click the image to view it on its own.