mindstalk | qotd: fandom 'home' (Reply)

questionoftheday asks: Is there a fictional world that feels like your home away from home? What is it and why does it appeal so much to you?

My answer:

Strictly speaking, no, that is not a thought I have.

More loosely speaking, Nanoha. It has the most fanfic I have actually written down, not just cycled in my head, and I think the most characters whose POVs I've thought about, and my own OCs. Although these days I've been reading more elsewhere, especially Valinor and Silmarillion fics, Nanoha is like a mental home space for composition.

Why? I like the characters: their good will, determination, prettiness, and yuri subtext. I like the optimistic magical Starfleet full of second chances and adoption, struggling to survive in a post-post-apocalyptic universe. I like the second communication channel of mental telepathy (Madoka has this too, and some brave Macross Frontier fics) and the games you can play with that. I like that I can justify some of the characters being immortal. I like how the various artificial beings raise various issues of ethics and identity, like some SF, only with a more engaging milieu and set of characters than most transhumanist SF.

And on the reading side of things, it's had quite a bit of good (re-readable) fic: funny gen fic, interesting worldbuilding gen fic, hot (to me) smut fic. Though not enough of the stuff I most want. The one (gen) which I know has amused multiple people who knew nothing of the franchise is Ready, Sette, Go.