>>121 I hope in a good way, and in a way that isn't detrimental to the narrative. Honestly I'm starting to get sick of myself, with the constant fucking and melodrama and doubletalk. Writing each chapter is becoming an exercise in balancing the frosting vs. the cupcake, and at this point I'm eager to finish so I can start all over with a really clean copy. >>122 I love hearing that people are approaching the Sniper's trials from opposite sides of the stadium; some of us rooting for his freedom, some for his destruction. That's so fucking cool. As for your emotional response, I'm flattered, but feel I must remind everyone that I'm working with borrowed material, here. We only care about these mad lovers because they're Sniper and Spy; I can't take any credit for that. >>123 I like this perspective a lot--a third version of interpreting events. The asphyxiation comes from personal experience. I never killed him, but he probably would have let me. I feel like a lot of this story is a thinly-veiled "MY BOYFRIENDS: LET ME SHOW YOU THEM." That's fine with me. My motto is "Objectify Men Daily". d(-____- )b So, to change topics for a minute, I've been doing a lot of reading on the whole concept of fandom recently. If you guys aren't familiar with the scholar Henry Jenkins, look him up. He's an academic from MIT, now at USC, that focuses on fan interactions within the wider umbrella of media and internet studies. He's done a little work on game fandoms and female gamers, but not much, his focus being mostly on usenet and even small press fanfic/slash in the 1990s. But he's collected all these interesting bits of self-reflection from women (and a few men) who have written or read slash in generations that preceded our own. They say things about their own fandom for things like Babylon 5 and other, more obscure shows that could easily be applied to us--the biggest differences are that TF2 is an interactive franchise, not a passive broadcast, and secondly, that the official canon is so incredibly narrow. With something like Star Trek, you have decades of shows to dig through, to construct a truly comprehensive worldview of how the characters live and interact. Comparatively, in TF2, we have the Meet the Team videos, which probably clock in at under 30 minutes total viewing time, the tiny bits of flavor text, the bits of update text, the short comics, and then the game itself. The latter could arguably be called an "infinite media", in that you never play the same match twice. Then there's Garry's Mod, which is essentially a dollhouse, but which is used by a small minority of fan creators, as far as I can tell. The weirdest thing I've discovered so far in my research for my own paper, is that a very solid number of TF2 fans have never played the game. Don't own it, don't play it, have never worn a hat or clicked on a man wearing the wrong-colored clothes in their life. This, to me, is the biggest and most interesting mystery of the fandom: that such a massive, well-organized, tightly-policed fandom, that consistently produces work of staggering quality, is partially or even mostly based on those <30 minutes of footage, and bits of comic and flavor text. The media consumed vs. media produced ratio there is staggering. And as a devoted gamer and particularly a devoted player of TF2, the idea that there are harder core fans of the franchise than I, who have never touched a WASD, just blows my mind. I also have some books to recommend to you guys but I think I'll wait until I actually pos the next chapter because this is getting long. Anyway, feel free to share your thoughts on Jenkins or fandom or whatever. I'd love to read them.