I loved that gif and the meta on food! Also, yay, another fan of both the drama and the novel.

I'm working my way through Guardian fic now and I just read Though Not Every Note Is Perfect yesterday and it was so cute and fluffy (I'm not as good about commenting on fics as I want to be).

I am totally with you on having your take on the canon and characters come out in fic form. When I first get into a fandom, I usually go to the fics before meta discussions because I feel like they, especially the canon-compliant ones, let me get a better sense of how fans are interpreting things...if that makes sense? And I can digest the different interpretations better in fic form sometimes than in a straight-up meta discussion. So I also use fic to work out a lot of my headcanons about the world and the characters, when I do write. (Writing fic also makes me think more deeply about the canon and brings up a lot of questions about different parts of canon that aren't fully explained in the show or in the novel - not that they have to be! I like that there are things left unexplained so that they're open to interpretation.)

Uh, sorry for the long comment. Anyway, hi, I'm Ally, nice to meet you! *adds*