Guava Continent Outpost

Since last year, I've been drafting my fanworks with my Trello account after leaving it dormant for almost a decade. I never thought that I'd look forward to opening my Trello every day, specifically to my page for fanworks about Exceedraft and the other Rescue Police shows. It's not the first note-taking platform that I've got attached to and it's not one seen as "trendy" in general. My growing attachment to Trello is like falling for a familiar friend who's similar to my flashier ex (other note-taking tool Notion) yet is far more low key and brings me more comfort.

Trello is an online platform for creating kanban boards. The kanban board was first created for the Toyota Production System before becoming integrated into note-taking and Personal Knowledge Management tools as a database for organising data and workflows.

I first signed up for a Trello account to organise my research for my Bachelor's graduation thesis. But I didn't find it useful and inspiring for academic writing, and pretty much abandoned my account soon after creating it.

Fast forward to many years later with me trying out different solutions for saving episode guides, timestamps and other notes for creating different kinds of fanworks. I returned to Trello after becoming dissatisfied with simple checklists for laying out my projects. It's much neater to save text in Trello cards that I could colour-code and label with a big heading like they're paper notecards, then easily drag and drop them into different columns labeled according to a fanwork's stage of completion. My current setup involves a board for a series or franchise with two columns for each show; one for works in progress and for completed fanworks that also double as a detailed episode guide.

I first became familiar with kanban boards while actively using Notion, but I didn't particularly like them until my return to Trello. Perhaps because on its free plan, I could only create a limited number of kanban boards with unlimited cards, which concentrated my attention on developing my projects with the kanban board's features.

From just planning GIFsets with Trello, I've also started to store and draft my meta on it. It's not optimised for drafting long pieces of text, but it has a feature that many digital writing tools lack: separate areas to input the title and the main body of work. I just like the division that appears kind of old school, even if it's unimportant for whatever I want to do with the text saved.

I've created more GIFsets and meta since sticking with Trello, and I'm thinking about turning to it more for creating fanvideos and fanfiction. Yet unlike when using Notion had boosted my creativity, I lack any desire to promote the benefits of Trello to other fanwork creators.

Most seem to pick up tools and methods that they've arrived at on their own with suggestions and advice from others playing a minor role in influencing their decisions. And in my case, what has been valuable isn't the discovery of any brilliant features, but instead a journey in personalising my approach to using what I already know and have for building with what inspires me.

On BSky, I've created an account to share fanworks centred on episode 13 of Exceedraft. I post one fanwork on each day and will continue until I get to 100 fanworks posted over 100 days. My daily posts started since the start of April and I'm currently almost midway through my project. I've shared meta, GIFs of single scenes, collages, memes and screenshots to compare Exceedraft E13 with another creative work.

My BSky account is basically like a Xitter (X formerly Twitter) 'fan account' common in K-Pop fandom. I did run a K-Pop fan account before for my SF9 OTP, which taught me that I dislike posting on Xitter. On the surface, BSky is more or less a Xitter clone, but it has been much better posting there, perhaps more likely due to the kinds of posts I chose to put out rather than BSky's offerings.

Community engagement would be minimal anywhere as I'm posting about an old, obscure and non-English TV show. Most support that I've got so far are from sharing the BSky links of my fanworks on Discord.

I wanted to try sharing new fanworks every day after finding it an energising and inspiring habit during my participation for TokuShipping Week. Like for that fanweek, I created fanworks for my BSky fan account in advance, saved them as drafts to later share one by one. As I share more fanworks and further populate my fan account, I could better pretend that I live in a world with a consistent stream of a variety of appealing and interesting fanworks about my favourite show and character (lol). For edits in particular, as opposed to any kind of writing, it's easier to pretend someone else has made them.

Link to everything I've created for the event. It's the first ever fanweek that I've completed from start to finish! I happened to come across it just when it aligned with my current re-immersion into tokusatsu shows and when I had enough time to think up and create fanworks that fit the prompts.

I started with at least one fanwork to post every day for the entire fanweek. What's a pleasant surprise was getting ideas for new fanworks during the event itself! Perhaps browsing what others made had inspired me even for fanworks about shows I'm unfamiliar with. I ended up posting two meta and two AU drabbles on top of what I had in my drafts, and managed to complete all the prompts for two out of seven days of the fanweek! It was back to the '90s for me with fanworks created for '90s tokusatsu shows Turboranger, Winspector and Exceedraft.

I must say it's been a successful and lively event with the mod's open stance towards fandoms and types of content to include. The mod went as far as creating a sideblog for NSFW content, for which I've submitted a couple of pieces, and even if SFW works far outstripped NSFW ones as usual, it's relaxing to be able to start creating with minimal mental restrictions in place.

For now, I've emptied out my drafts of shippy fanworks to post! And as an unrepentant shipper, it shall always be TokuShipping Week in my heart 😍

Crying and shipping seem all I do, yet I get through all my fanworks for my favourite ships way too quickly 😣 I always think I've created way more fanworks than I thought since it does amount to quite a lot relative to what's out there for my rare ships. Still too little by my own insatiable standards 😝 Fantasizing to not just board a large and bustling cruise ship but to enter the lost city of Atlantis lmao.

From when I started actively posting about my fannish interests, I wanted my volume and variety of fanworks to more closely reflect the level of my obsession, but I guess I get too self-conscious too soon when there appears to be few others screaming about their ships or just talking about character dynamics or character arcs. While I'm in my obsessive phase, I'm in a frame of mind to steamroll over my self-consciousness, and respond and comment on my own posts if that's what it takes to inspire and entertain myself while absorbing new influences and changing across time.

I'm really excited over posting the first a) slash and b) NSFW Special Rescue Exceedraft fanfiction that I want to announce it right away rather than just including it in a future round up of my most recent fanworks.

The story is available only on Squidgeworld. Some day, I'll import to AO3 my fics exclusively posted there once I could better deal with getting hits and nothing else for my rare pair fics of little known fandoms.

Special Rescue Exceedraft, which is the third and final installment of the tokusatsu Metal Heroes Rescue Police trilogy, has been fully subbed for about 4 years but has hardly any fanworks in spaces frequented by English-speak tokusatsu fans. That is, until I started creating and posting my fanworks! Now at least I know it's untrue that 'nobody' watches the show, which for now is a common perception in the larger toku community. ('Nobody' also includes those on Xitter who posted liveblogs and screencaps and encouraged me to marathon the show to get to the episodes that look most interesting).

In a Discord I'm in, I got inspired to imagine how an author could create a bunch of fics to post as treats for a holiday exchange. I went further to brainstorm the potential fics as Camping AUs of one big larger story taking place at the same time for which the different exchange recips could later piece together like one big Super Sentai mecha 😂

These are the plots I thought up that would perhaps fulfill many of the holiday exchange's open-ended requests:
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Then perhaps each fic could include hyperlinks to other fics in the larger interconnected story. Hopefully the recips and all other readers would not only be extra entertained, but also extra inspired to complete their end of year reviews and reflect on the larger picture of the past year 😌

me: with all the high quality files of subtitled old shows available, why haven't there been more GIFs and GIFsets made out of them? all anyone has to do is —

me: [lists many steps that involve opening different software and looking at different files]

me: oh

Just finished creating Turboranger GIFsets. I've tried to make it a weekly routine since I've returned to once more posting on my Tumblr fanworks blog. Editing graphics always takes more effort and care than I thought, but immediately after posting, I'd inevitably crave more edits of my obscure favourites.

Commentary for: "Drabble Compilation: Melto and Asuna in Different Sentai Teams"

To complete a set of Ryusoulger drabbles based on Toku100 Challenge's Prompt Set 06, I wrote about Melto and Asuna in different kinds of Sentai teams to finish five out of six 'Writer's Choice' prompts. Each drabble sequence for these prompts feature a specific Sentai AU and the use of dual perspectives with one drabble told from Melto's perspective, then the next from Asuna's perspective or in reverse order.

I had written a Sentai pairing in multiple Sentai AUs before in my Lupinranger VS Patranger story "Parallel Red Strings". It has Kairi and Keiichirou in different police teams and sticking to the same theme for each AU, which matches the theme of the pairing's original show, made the story easier to write than my Ryusoulger Sentai AU drabble sequences. Meaningfully portraying a different theme, along with a pairing's unique dynamic, while sticking to a low word limit turned out more challenging than I thought.

But in taking on the challenge, I got to think through what distinguishes the various official Super Sentai teams and the tropes that inspire the adventures in their respective shows.

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To get in the mood for writing about knights back in 2019, I bought from Bandcamp Antti Martikainen's 'Northern Steel'. Out of the Celtic metal tracks, my favourite is "Lords of Iron"



I blasted it again when posting my first Ryusoulger fic in 6 years. The matching of the music with majestic landscapes of acres of forests and rushing water has once more stirred me to capture the awe-inspiring grandeur of nature in my writing.