It has been brought to my attention* that I haven't been updating my Livejournal enough. That being the case, I've decided that the solution to this is to do some more Weiss Kreuz metarants. Because as the infinitely patient and long-suffering (and how does he put up with me?!) rokesmith will tell you I am not exactly, shall we say, short on Weiss Kreuz meta.

*Actually this is a lie. It hasn't been brought to my attention at all.

So, here we have a rant idea I found in my text document of rant ideas. God knows how old this idea is. Anyway:

Today's rant, my infrequent readers, is about stupid and massively overused places to set your Weiss Kreuz fanfic. Ignoring, of course, canon locations like the flower shop, those of you who've been round the fanfic block as much as I have will know, two out of every three Weiss Kreuz fics seem to be set in pretty much the same place. So much so that I'm starting to suspect there's one of each of these places in Tokyo being rented out on a weekly basis to anyone who can show up and provide evidence of a mad and implausible villainous plan and who can cackle insanely. The latter is not, strictly speaking, necessary but it will get you a reduced deposit.

It's a pity, really. Given how insanely inventive Weiss villains canonically can be about what they're getting up to, and how very diverse the places they choose to do them in is - come on, a mad evil lawyer's office with a suspension bridge in it? - it's rather a shame that fanfic villains are reduced to operating from what seem to be the exact same damn building as the last three fics took place in. This isn't just the bad guys, either. Weiss themselves seem to suffer from just the same lack of imagination as their opposite numbers do, often choosing to spend their evenings in exactly the same places in exactly the same stupid 'hott' fetish outfits that they spent the last three fics in, regardless of the utter implausibility of their choosing to go there in the first place. I'm lookin' at you, Clubbing!Youji.

So, now I've preambled for my country yet again, here's a handy reference for where not to force Weiss Kreuz characters to hang out.

• Abandoned Warehouses
  Why warehouses, really? Okay, it's a decent place for the budget-conscious bad guy to abduct people to, but the whole point of Weiss's targets is that most of them are rich. Really rich. You'd think a much-monied bad guy with a word-dominating agenda could find a better place to conspire from instead of scrabbling around in the gloom in a dirty old empty building that probably stinks of petrol or fish. A big phallic symbol of a skyscraper, perhaps, or an elegant Palladian mansion. But no, dirty and uncomfortable old warehouses it is, and in most Weiss Kreuz fiction this houses everything from child porn rings to... well, mainly it's just child porn rings and sometimes Schuldig who's practically a porn ring on his own. And it's kind of pointless, really. Warehouses are really useful if a villain's plan actually requires that he has something to store in it; they're pretty suck-ass for anything else, and that includes running a sex ring from them.
  
  
• Bordellos
  This includes strip clubs, pole-dancing clubs, peep shows and the common-or-garden brothel. Pole-dancing clubs show up in Weiss Kreuz once, in the OAVs, and Weiss are in there for about ten seconds before Ken's trashed the place and run out. There's a brothel in an early Kapitel episode. In neither case have Weiss decided that hey! it would be a really awesome idea to infiltrate this target's sleazy sex ring by pretending to be hookers! The fairly simple reason as to why this is a bad idea is because Weiss are not completely stupid and can usually figure out ways to get a target without having to take all their clothes off in front of an audience in the process.
  
  
• CLUBS, WHAT THE FUCK
  There must be easier ways to get Weiss into a club - and pointlessly Gothed-out in clothes none of them are even likely to own - than saying 'oh they have a mission there'. In Kapitel, Weiss had a grand total of two (2) missions that required them to go to a club as clients and on both occasions the club wasn't even where the mission proper was actually set; in one case it was where victims were being abducted from, in another going to the club was the best way to get into the target's building. Clubs in the usual Weiss-fanfic sense of the word (meaning very noisy, dark dance clubs) aren't the best places to try and tail a target or talk with them, and club owners don't tend to make very good dark beasts. They're not that rich, are usually pretty recognizable, and they're also businessmen. If people kept vanishing or dying when visiting their club, they'd quickly lose business and risk going broke. Oh, and on a less professional level, 'Youji and Aya go clubbing and hook up because Aya is such a supersexy dancing queen' is so overdone it's a fanfic meme. It's actually more startling to run across a Youji x Aya fic where hooking up isn't facilitated by a trip to 'The Works Nite Spot'.
  
  
• Sex Clubs?!
  Because the idea of Weiss going clubbing in the line of duty wasn't quite ridiculous enough without them going out in bondage gear and indulging in exhibitionist sex in the line of duty as well. Once again, there are better ways to take down a target, even if said target is the club's owner - it's not likely he actually lives there after all, and there are too many witnesses around when the club is open. And, once again, there are better ways to get Weiss members to hook up than 'Aya and Partner To Be Determined have to pretend to be a couple'.
  
  
• Random Labs
  Weiss loves the bullshit science so it's no wonder that the fandom does as well. Even so, random evil science complexes that are clearly based more on the Laboratory of Doctor X than anything the real world could ever have dreamed up are also getting a bit on the overused side, especially if they come complete with jail cells (and, all too often, the cells come complete with special flange-powered Sues). The problem is that even taking Masafumi into account the scientists in Weiss Kreuz usually have some idea of what they're doing and why, and it isn't just about abducting innocents and making them unconvincingly special. I'd have no real objection to more fanon mad science if it had even the vaguest resemblance to actual science, with an actual hypothesis and a goal, as opposed to scientists grabbing random teenage girls and/or Weiss members (read: Aya) off the streets and turning them into vampires or nekomimi because Science Is Evil. Some kind of explanation as to why they think this is such an A-1 awesome idea in the first place when a cure for cancer or AIDS would be so much more useful and profitable than yet another protracted and unethical programme to create a sexy teenage flange-powered super-soldier might be helpful when anyone who's watched Full Metal Panic! can tell you they're often more trouble than it's worth.
  
  
• Schuldig's Pad
  In canon, this may not actually exist. In fanon this is an infinitely variable place, ranging from a perfectly plausible plain if tasteful apartment to a frankly fucking bizarre kinky BDSM sex pit complete with no windows, meat hooks in the ceilings and soundproofed walls. Guess which one's most common. It's entirely possible Schuldig has a little place to live, because Crawford is not his dad and not wanting to sleep in the same building as Farfarello is perfectly understandable. It's rather less likely that he's had the place detailed for 24/7 sexual abuse, complete with lavish four-poster bed (to tie Aya up on) and white-walled dungeons full of bondage equipment (to tie Aya up on).
  
  
• Alleyways O' Sue Rape
  Stop getting characters raped in alleyways! Honestly, if Weiss Kreuz fanfiction was any guide, you'd think that Tokyo was made up of one flower shop, one high school, a scattering of clubs and abandoned warehouses, and Schuldig's sex pit - all connected by a positively labyrinthine network of alleyways. Furthermore, that every single one of those alleyways contained a veritable mob of leering gang rapists - some more canonical than others - waiting for anyone who looked vaguely like a Weiss Kreuz character to wander in so they could be savagely beaten, tied to varying magically-appearing pieces of sidewalk furnishings (including in one case, I shit ye not, four metal spikes to allow a girl to be chained to the ground there) and subjected to the most predictable fanfiction plot twist the world has ever seen. As for fact that it's often broad daylight and the lurking rapists should by rights have been interrupted several times over, that simply doesn't get a look-in. Surely there are better places to set a rape scene than a goddamn alleyway?
  
  
• Schwarz's HQ
  In canon, this is made up of the creepy fucking space room and Farfarello's padded cell, and absolutely nothing else. In fanon, this appears to translate to mean 'Stately Schwarz Penthouse'. Stately Schwarz Penthouse is a luxurious duplex or sprawling suburban development in which all of Schwarz (with or without an incoming Mary Sue) will be seen to live together in some kind of 'dysfunctional rooomates' deal with Crawford as Daddy-in-Residence. Not only is this a ridiculously overused setting, there's absolutely no canonical proof the members of Schwarz even have to live together, still less that they have a luxury penthouse suite to do it in.

There may well be others. Hell, I know there are others, I just can't be bothered to think of any right now, because I'm tired and ill and I want to go to bed so for now, this'll have to do.

Now, I'm not saying there's no excuse to ever set a fanfic in any of these places, ever. I've done it before. So have a lot of people. I just think that relying on them to this extent is symptomatic of a lack of imagination on the part of the fandom as a whole. In a number of cases another, slightly less generic location might have worked rather better and it's obvious that authors are falling back on things that have been done and double done for no more reason than they're somehow seen as safe bets. There's no actual reason for Schuldig to abduct a character to an abandoned warehouse or for a target to have to be cornered in a dance club, it's just easier than trying to work out what the alternative could be.