mumblemumble | 2025 Fanwork Round-Up (Reply)

(2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024)

2025 was the year I completely lost my writing mojo, and also the year of Zhang Kangle. For me, personally.

Just for the sake of completeness, I'm including things that were revealed in January, even though I already gathered them up in a separate post.

War of Faith

some faith in the unknown
» Shenlai | 2,000 words | E // for

stultiloquentia |

kat_lair |

fandomtrees

[to arrive where we started]
» Ted Lasso | 860 words | T // for

onetruethree |

fandomtrees

Good Bones
» Original Work | 1,850 words | G // for

sysann |

fandomtrees

I made a home here in unsteady things
» The Dauntless Youths | 5,000 words | M

Gosh, it really looks so sad, this short list of short things and a few longer stories I managed to squeeze out of my brain and onto the virtual page. I have a theory as to why I was so blocked this year, but it's stupid, so I'm going to hide it.

Silliness.

I started the year with some good feelings about my creative output, writing my little stories for a friendly little fandom (War of Faith) and brimming with ideas for a new fandom of one (The Way Home), and then I participated in the Rare Kink Buffet event, and uh.

See the thing is, I spent most of March writing some "original work" porn, i.e. literotica-style fantasies I'm not going to post on main, so I made a sock account and thought, you know, big kink event! At least the prompters will like it? Might get some comments from fellow perverts, it'll be nice. I was warned that the really filthy/taboo stuff usually doesn't get a lot of feedback, but I guess I was still being optimistic. A few fics, around 10k words total, some quality wank material if I do say so myself. It'll be fun! \o/

Anyway, and then reveals happened and I was not prepared for the total lack of engagement, and I guess it broke something inside me, lol.

And then I stopped writing for seven months.

I think the other thing is that I've been in small (c-drama) fandoms for so long now, I'd gotten used to at least having a few enthusiastic readers who'll leave comments or kudos, and yell about feelings with me. I'm never going to get Big Fandom levels of ~engagement, but this is nice. Cozy!

So feeling fannish about shows nobody else has watched (or only close friends 🥹🫶) just... made it really hard to get into writing mode. I've always found well-meaning advice along the lines of "write for yourself, don't care about numbers" kind of hollow, because why would I do that to myself? Writing is hard; if nobody's going to read it I can just stick with daydreaming! Or bounce ideas around in chat. Which is easy.

The thing that finally got me to write again was, of course, a Zhang Kangle drama, and only because the ending was so depressing and I had so many feelings about ✨The Blorbo✨ (incidentally, a character not played by Zhang Kangle), that I really wanted to write a fix-it and worked hard to make it happen. And I had a couple of friends to show it to, if not an audience.

Right now I have no idea how much writing will happen in the foreseeable future, if any. I'm just watching my little shows and making little threads about them on Bluesky, and I guess that can just be it for a while. Who knows!

2025 Fanwork Round-Up

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