clo_again

Had a lovely walk with my mum in Richmond Park; it was a beautifully sunny day. We saw deer! We saw a buzzard being hassled by a crow and then mobbed by smaller birds! We saw three cute little Canada goslings out for a swim with their parents! We saw a kestrel hovering, somehow flapping its wings rapidly while remaining perfectly still; I'd never seen one so close that I could spot the distinctive kestrel colouration before, and I was absolutely thrilled.

Then I caught up with a childhood friend I hadn't seen in thirteen years, which was also a pleasure! We reminisced about being small children obsessed with dragons and Pokémon and Neopets and Petz II, and I learnt a little about what's been going on in her life, which has - and I don't think this will surprise anyone who knew us as kids - been a lot wilder than mine.

Friend: I've been arrested multiple times.
Me: What for?
Friend: Getting into fights.
Me, mishearing: Genocide??

Actually, while I'm talking about the real world, here are a few notes I took on a visit to Paignton Zoo a couple of months ago!

- Just outside the zoo itself, I met the bravest robin in the world, a beautiful little round thing who let me get right up close.


- When a lion is grooming itself, it really does look just like a domestic cat. He was exactly like our cats Zuko and Dipper, only much bigger and considerably more capable of killing me.

- The toucan scraping its beak on branches was interesting to see! I also enjoyed the way wild sparrows would squeeze through the netting of the toucan enclosure to steal food and water.

- A baby king colubus monkey ran across the grass to its father and leapt into his arms, which was extremely cute.

- The cheetahs were out on patrol and looking magnificent! It was clear from the pattern of grass growth in their enclosure that they always followed the same routes when patrolling, which I thought was interesting.


- An army of baboons thundering into food-receiving position at feeding time is a hell of a sight. They were walking around in circles when they knew feeding time was close, which I found endearingly familiar; our cat Dipper rapidly revolves when he knows he's about to get fed.

- A meerkat spotted me looking into its enclosure and trotted up to me, hoping for food. It reared up on its hind legs and looked into my eyes, then leant forward to plant its little hand on the waist-high glass partition between us and looked imploringly up at me again. I was enchanted.


- flingos (this is what my four-year-old niece calls flamingos)


- When I was eating lunch out in the open, a robin sat on the arm of my bench and sang a beautiful little song about how much it wanted my sandwich.

Here are a handful of short Goes Wrong Show ficlets written in response to various requests, mainly on Tumblr! (I put out a call for fic requests, with the caveat that I was likely to make everything Robert-centric.)


( Assorted Goes Wrong ficlets, including crossovers with Final Fantasy VIII and Death Note. )


I had a lot of fun writing these! But apparently I cannot be trusted to stick to the actual details of a fic request.

Robert Grove of The Goes Wrong Show sank his teeth into my throat at the turn of the year and has spent the four months since then shaking me violently, but I think he's starting to relax his grip a little!

I'm still deeply fond of the Cornley Drama Society, of course! But I'm no longer constantly thinking about the Goes Wrong universe, or feeling the non-stop drive to write fanfiction. I can think of other works of fiction again at last, without resenting them for having the temerity not to feature Robert Grove!

In short, I find myself stumbling back into the real world at last, squinting in the sunlight, with 60,000 words of fanfiction scattered around me. This has been one of the wildest, most intense fandom experiences I've ever had. I lost twenty AO3 subscribers. I don't regret a thing.

Does this mean I'm going to start posting entries about other things again? No promises, but it just might happen.

Actually, here's an entry that's at least partly about other things right now! Rather an overdue entry, to be honest.


Towards the end of last year, I wanted to make an entry reflecting on the three canons of 2025 (specifically, canons I'd first experienced in 2025) that had had the biggest impact on me. I was struggling a little to come up with three, though! I knew Clair Obscur would be one, and the Silent Hill 2 remake would be another, but I just couldn't think of a third.

And then The Goes Wrong Show slammed into me, absolutely obliterating me, and I'm now making this post four months late because I've only just regained the ability to talk about anything else.

Of all the canons I first experienced in 2025, here are the three that had the largest impact on me:

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 leapt with impressive speed from 'huh, I've never heard of this' to being one of my favourite games of all time! Loved the gameplay, loved the concept, loved the characters. The art direction is stunning, as is the music; I actually bought the OST, approximately twenty years after my last purchase of a videogame soundtrack. I replayed the game immediately after beating it; I just wasn't ready to put it down. It's not a perfect game - I have severe frustrations with the ending - but it comes so, so close, and even the aspects I dislike are still interesting to think and talk about. I also really enjoy the way it is unapologetically Frencher than France.

I was nervous about playing the Silent Hill 2 remake! The original Silent Hill 2 was so formative for me; it was hard to imagine that a remake would get it right. But it got it so right. I'm absolutely awed by how well this remake captures and expands on the game, and how clearly it's built on deep foundations of love for the original. It was a pleasure to spend time with James Sunderland again. Well, it was horrible, obviously, but I still had a great time.

And, finally, The Goes Wrong Show, which I absolutely lost my mind about for four solid months, going from 'wow, this is some really impressive stagecraft and comic timing and Robert is hot' to 'I kind of want to dig into these characters' to 'wait, where did these theatre tickets come from' to 'somehow this is now my fourth-most-written fandom of all time?'

On a canon level, I enjoy The Goes Wrong Show because it's very funny and well-crafted! On a fandom level... honestly, I think it woke up a side of me that's been dormant since I was a teenager in Top Gear fandom. I heard 'a group of people, everything they do is a disaster, one of them is a big blustery attention-grabbing man who blithely causes problems for everyone', and the part of me that wrote 90,000 words of fanfiction about Jeremy Clarkson at the age of eighteen immediately shouldered her way to my computer and opened up a Word document.