User:TerresDeBrume
| Name/s: | Terresdebrume (formerly: fanderpg) |
| Fandom/s: | Multifandom, The Lord of the Rings, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Digimon Adventure, Supernatural, The Mortal Instruments, Star Wars, and many more. |
| You can find me at: | Tumblr archiveofourown |
| On Fanlore: | My contributions / email me |
Quick bio
(As copy-pasted from tumblr)
Matt 29yo, French trans man. (he/him/his)
Compulsive tagger and tag babbler. I teach French in Cambodia and spend way too much time thinking (and writing) about fictional gay idiots.
Why this page?
Mostly because I discovered the concept of a socknography through this post made by bettsfic and wholeheartedly agreed with the idea that 1. we should try to preserve fic authors biographical information (within the limits of what they're comfortable with, of course) and 2. we shouldn't wait until we're declared BNF and/or someone makes a post about us for that work to be done. With that in mind, I figured making a userpage here would be as good a way to put my metaphorical money where my mouth is as any, and also to familiarize myself with wiki editing because it's not the same as fiddling with light html and I'd like to stop being crap at it :P
The following sections are entirely lifted from betts' post about socknographies and what betts mentioned as interesting information, purely because I have no idea what I'd put here otherwise.
Accomplishments
I was born in France in 1990 and went to school there with almost no interruption save for nine months of being a teaching assistant in Glasgow in 2011 - 2012. Following that, I resumed my studies with a Licence in English Language and Literature, and graduated from university in 2017, after completing a master's thesis about the influence of fanfic reading and writing on people's acquisition of the English language. It is, to this day, one of my proudest accomplishments.
Following my graduation, I applied and was accepted for a post in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where I've been teaching French as a foreign language since 2017, with a specialization in teaching children. I'm still waiting for the fic idea that will make all of this come in handy ;)
Fan history
Discovering fic
I started shipping at the tender age of ten or eleven, when I watched old reruns of Saint Seiya and was completely convinced Shun and Hyoga (two of the main characters) were in love. Then Digimon happened to me and I dove head first into my first major long term fandom...well, fandom of one since we didn't have the internet at home yet, but that show is where I got my name from, so it totally counts.
Around 2002, two things happened. One, Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Lord Of The Rings punched my fantasy-loving heart right out of my chest and put it back in again and, two, I slowly started being allowed on the internet. My parents being mostly uninterested in the web or not very hands-on education wise, I quickly found my way to Yahoo groups dedicated to Harry Potter fanfictions in French and started reading everything I could...and also writing my first fanfic. It was a highly plagiarized version of The Lord of the Rings and probably not very good, but I still regret having lost all tracks of it.
In 2004, following the publication of Pensionnat des Marins, le nouveau ne va pas bien, I was invited to join Le Poney Fringant a forum for French-speaking authors of Lord of the Rings fanfiction (named after the inn of the Prancing Pony) where I mostly lurked but still participated on and off until I sort of ghosted around age...sixteen, I think? No big drama (though what little there was, I'm embarrassed to say, I was kind of at the center of), it just turned out that the Poney wasn't what I was looking for.
I kept writing on my own for various fandoms, mostly Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, until 2007. That year, I had the opportunity to go be a babysitter for a friend of my aunt's in Twickenham for one summer, and while I wasn't a very good babysitter (due in great part to not being very good at being a person at the time) it did afford me the opportunity to read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows months before it would be published in French. When I came back for my last year of high school, no one had read the book, and I could barely utter the words "Harry Potter" without someone instantly shouting "No spoiler!!!" at me. I understood the sentiment but I really had to talk about it somehow, so I did what any lonely fic writer with a shaky grasp of English would do: I wrote my first fic in a foreign language.
Parted Heart wasn't that great a fic, but it did allow me to cry a bunch about Fred's death, and it received more feedback than anything I'd written until then.
Moving to English, discovering tumblr/fandom, and myself
I didn't move to writing in English immediately after Parted Heart. In fact, my next fic in English, Valentine Bunny wasn't published until January of 2010, partly because I wanted to get better at English before I wrote in that language again, and partly because the summer of 2008 marked a serious dip in my mental health--I'm fairly sure I'd been depressed from the age of 12 -13 onwards, but family events that year made everything way worse.
In March 2011 one of my university classmates convinced me to watch Glee simply by stating the main ship of the series, Klaine had just become canon! Having completely missed the Buffy the Vampire Slayer craze, I'd never heard of that happening in a TV show not specifically dedicated to/focused on queer people, and thus I was hooked. At the same time, that same classmate told me the best place to find content for our ship was Tumblr, which I joined immediately.
I'll say it now so we're all clear: Tumblr saved me. While my interest in Glee was quick to wane (it was, after all, a rather badly written show) the discussions it sparked about sexuality, homophobia and sexism were my first introduction to feminism and queer history and activism. The meta surrounding this fandom changed my views on queerness and what women could and couldn't do a lot (I'm from a fairly conservative family) and started me on a much needed path of self discovery that makes it impossible, for me, to separate my personal growth from my evolution in fandom.
It's via Tumblr that I discovered Thor in late 2011 and, through this movie, stumbled into another long-term obsession: Loki. I latched onto this character (and its actor) like I'd never latched onto any character in my life, because I'd never seen a character that shared my deep seated family issues before. My then-fairly new AO3 account (I'd joined in March 2011 to crosspost stuff from Fanfiction.net) was promptly filled with fics where Loki was present, a lot of them being Loki-centric. I got into FrostIron like there was nothing else to eat at the fandom table, and did so early enough that I was a fairly recognizable name for a bit.
In March 2012, I stumbled across an untitled fanart by ladynorthstar depicting Tony Stark crying, with a bottle in one hand and a gun in the other, clearly about to commit suicide. I related to this picture so much that I couldn't help but mull over it until, finally, I just had to write and post what I imagined this Tony's suicide letter would be...and then, because I just couldn't stand the idea that it would end with Tony dead, I decided he wouldn't have used a gun and, since he'd adressed his letter to Loki, that Loki would save him. S.O.S Ecrits Avec De L'Air was born.
I started writing this story at the beginning of the worst stage of my depression, and used both characters to try and express what I was feeling at the time. The positive feedback I received for this story, on top of making me confident enough as a writer to keep churning short fic after short fic on the side (I published something close to a hundred stories that year, the vast majority of which were frostiron), genuinely saved my life. Writing this story, though it didn't lead to the true reasons behind my depression, allowed me to understand that was what I was suffering from, to look for resources on how to deal with it and, once I returned to France, to book myself into therapy. I cannot overstate the impact writing this fic, and seeing the fandom respond to it, had on my life.
During the course of writing SEADLA, I had come to the conclusion that because I was a woman who identified so personally with the lives and issues of gay men, I simply must be a lesbian, and come out as such. At the time, I simply wasn't ready (or educated enough) to realize I was struggling with gender identity, so the writing of SEADLA hit a major snag when I tried to make Loki's narrative fit that of a person discovering themselves as a lesbian...while insisting on having him remain a man. At an impasse, and feeling guilty for not being able to finish the story, I more or less ghosted on the fic, and went on to write for the MCU for a while, until I branched into other fandoms including The Mortal Instruments which was...well, more of a hatedom than anything, really, but for which I did still write about 30 fics of various length.
In March of 2017, determined to write a fic with a female and lesbian protagonist (and also to ge the version of The Mortal Instruments I still think we deserve), I started to write The Immortal Cup which was planned to be a complete rewrite of book one of TMI and a way for me to figure out a narrative in which I would finally figure out how to feel settled and content in my identity as a lesbian. It wasn't the only fic I wrote that year by far, but it was my main project and, much like SEADLA, it didn't pan out... oh, the first snag was the loss of a hard drive and a slid 95% of my first draft, which I'd completed for NaNoWriMo the year before. I think, however, that I'd eventually have found myself at an impasse, much like I was with SEADLA, and the whole ghosting on the fic thing would only have happened a little later.
In October 2017, after several years of searching through self-reflection and fanfic writing, I finally figure out I was trans (hurray!) and understood why finishing some of my fics had become properly impossible. I had to slow way down on the writing and reading of fic (though I did keep engaging with fandom via Tumblr) and do some self-reflection, but in May of 2018, I officially discontinued SEADLA and The Immortal Cup as well as a bunch of projects I knew I didn't want to go back to. It was a bittersweet but necessary step, and I was very pleasantly surprised to see how well people took the news--the well-wishes were truly heartwarming. I managed to produce one fanfiction for 2018 after that, called Rakuen, and the only reason that was possible was because I'd signed up for the TMFU Summer Gift Exchange of 2018.
Then, in late 2018, I was absolutely seized by inspiration for a SuperBat story that would allow me to retrace my self-discovery journey up until then, and process how I gradually came to the realization that I was trans. I signed the story up for the 2019 Edition of the Superbat Big Bang on Tumblr and, on July 14th of 2019, I published Clark Kent, of Krypton, a 98k words behemoth I'm still impressed with myself for finishing. Publishing that story felt like turning a page in many ways, and I'm still far from back to optimal speed writing wise, but I feel like it's really made me a better writer and got me to a place where I appreciate fandom and writing better than I did before, simply by virtue of not needing them to survive and thus having more time to simply enjoy them for what they are.
Fandom participation
Challenges & exchanges
The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Winter Holiday Gift Exchange 2029 - Define Dancing
Superbat Big Bang 2019 - Clark Kent, of Krypton
The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Summer Solstice Gift Exchange 2018 - Rakuen
DigiOTP Week 2017 - Multiple Fics
Popular fics
As per my AO3 statistics, my 10 most popular fics:
S.O.S Ecrits Avec De L'Air - Marvel Cinematic Universe
The Way It Goes - Marvel Cinematic Universe
Once more, with kissing - Digimon
We Shall Have Peace - Marvel Cinematic Universe
Wooer Wooed - Marvel Cinematic Universe
Corny lines for Thanksgiving - Marvel Cinematic Universe
Dots: 2-4, 1-2-3, 1-3-6 - Marvel Cinematic Universe
It's all coming back to me (How I loved you from the start) - Marvel Cinematic Universe
Ridged - Marvel Cinematic Universe
Popular tumblr posts
Fandom is, essentially... - Short post on the nature of fandom
Silly/Fluffy Malec headcanon - Featuring the Mulan soundtrack.
I still hate 'Harry Potter should have been a teacher - A bit of ranting about a popular fan opinion that I disagree with.
Spotlight
This page is already very long, so I'll just put the barest information here, but basically here's the content of my AO3 "Portfolio" series, aka my eleven best fics as voted by me.
Your Own Legend (March 2013) - Supernatural
3 316 words - General audiences - Genfic - Sam Winchester character study.
Your crib burns when you're six months old and your life is forever shaped around this memory you don't possess. You fight it and you try to escape it but you can never quite run away from your own ill-begotten fame and your own reputation. But in due time, you get to decide what kind of legend you want to be.
Little Boxes (June 2013) - The Hunger Games
3 041 words - Teen & Up audiences - Genfic - Family discussing past trauma
“Sometimes when bad things happen to us, we’re very, very afraid. And sometimes, when, the fear is too much, it stays in little locked boxes, with keys in different shapes, and when we see the key, the fear comes right out again, as if the bad things were still happening.” In which seven years old Noah has an important conversation with his parents and extended family.
Killing Zombies (and other fun activities) (August 2016) - The Walking Dead & Battlestar Galactica
4 022 words - General audiences - Genfic
Daryl finds Kara in Griffin, roaring drunk and just about ready to die. Things, as it turn out, don’t quite go according to her plan, but she doesn’t really complain.
Gone (September 2016) - Digimon
504 words - General audiences - Genfic - Yamato Ishida, beginning to mourn after the Digiworld Reboot in Tri
Honestly, how can you even be expected to keep going now?
The Green Teacup (October 2016) - Saint Seiya
8 526 words - Teen & Up audiences - Genfic - How the hell do you recover from lifelong trauma?
Aphrodite, after a week-long absence, is finally back in the Sanctuary, which means Deathmask can just yell at him for leaving everyone behind and let things go back to normal. Except for the part where they don’t.
Once more, with kissing (February 2017) - Digimon
40 995 words - Mature - Taichi Yagami/Yamato Ishida - Recovering from depression and going from friends to lover in four painful steps
In which Taichi has questionable ways to handle his issues, everyone tries to be nice, and Yamato yells at him a lot. Same old, same old, except for the part where there's kissing.
We were always gonna be forever (August 2017) - Digimon
2 413 words - General audiences - Taichi Yagami/Yamato Ishida - Alternate Universe: Zombie apocalypse
Taichi seems willing to risk his life for the weirdest thing.
With what we have (we do what we can) (Octobre 2017) - Voltron: Legendary Defender
14 820 words - Teen & Up audience - Genfic - Really just an excuse to write about Shiro, intercultural relationships, and languages
In which Ulaz doesn’t die, and some conversations happen sooner than they would have as a result.
It doesn't mean never (January 2018) - Marvel Cinematic Universe
888 words - General audiences - Genfic - A look at Thor and Loki immediately after the end of Thor: Ragnarok
It takes Thor a week to corner Loki down. It's long, in a ship like theirs, but it's also shorter than it would have been before.
Never been better (February 2018) - The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
997 words - Teen & Up audiences - Genfic - A study in tension, immediately after the end of the movie
In the early hours of their mission in Istanbul, Napoleon invites his teammates to a drinking contest. It’s not as lighthearted as it looks.
Clark Kent, of Krypton (July 2019) - DCEU
98 209 words - Mature - Clark Kent/Bruce Wayne - A transition story and a slow burn'
Batman crashes on Krypton a few days before the Turn of the Year celebrations, and Kal-El's life takes a sharp turn to the left, on a path that will, ultimately, lead him to becoming Clark Kent.
Policies
You can: Remix, podfic or translate any of my fic. Illustrate my fic. Rec/signal boost my work on other websites.
You can't: Reproduce or re-host my content without permission. If you want to know if a fic is available on X platform, ask and I'll be happy to link you. I'm also willing to consider crossposting myself if needed.
I'd love it if: You'd let me know when you remix/podfic/translate/illustrate one of my works! That way I get to flail about it and signal boost your work :D