You sound like a good parent to me. I don't have kids, but if I did, I'd use a similar approach to yours. I feel that as long as my kids would feel comfortable talking to me (or their mom) everything's fine, and they can make their own choices, including mistakes, all they want in the meantime.

I did, in fact, read the post, but since I have nothing to say about culture, and since the question in the post title and the first paragraph of your post up until the reiteration of the question aren't specifically about culture, I replied based on that, for anyone else stumbling across this topic when looking for posts about Pokémon worldbuilding. If you want your topic to be about culture only, maybe specify that in that in the actual title so you won't get answers you're not looking for.

I can't recall what it was called, but it was a fic from a part of the fandom I usually really don't like. It had all the common tropes for that part of the fandom, yet the sheer chaotic energy it exuded was so much fun I read it all the way through and I enjoyed myself all the way even though I would normally hate most of those tropes.

Stations of the Canon. I love fics that hit all the major canon beats and really only change the plot minimally.

Aside from some random posts (that I see shared on Reddit, mostly), I don't really like Tumblr in general. It's always attracted an audience that just doesn't really vibe with me, and I've never read any fanfics on there. I've come across fics that originated from there (per the ANs), and most of those weren't really my style, either.

I'm always staggered when I see how much research people put into fics. Even for my most-researched stories I don't really go beyond Google and some of my favorite history channels on Youtube, and then I'm just winging the rest. The most I'll include in my fics is remarks on contradictory information on source material wikis.

Lately, mostly pride, and a slight bit of annoyance that that annoying bastard of an author hasn't updated in months.

May's Crush: Final Frontier. It's not just dead, it's been deleted from FFN sometime in the past two years or so. I think FFN may have purged it for some reason, since the author had been MIA since 2008, when he said the rest of the fic was planned out and ready to be written. The profile still says that, so I doubt he came back just to delete that one work. I still hope to see it back one day, no matter how slim the odds.

Oh wow, I forgot about that one. It was so good, too.

I completely get it. For a while, I even avoid reading other fics because I got a bit resentful over how successful some of them were in terms of faves. And honestly, I still sometimes get a bit annoyed when I see a fic that's decent, but nothing particularly special get thousands of faves/kudos. It's natural, I think, to want at least a bit of validation from others every now and then.

Like you, I'm not going to stop writing and posting, since I mostly write to entertain myself anyway, but I doubt I'll ever get that particular kind of jealousy out of my system entirely, even though I am genuinely happy for the success of other writers. I just...sometimes wish I had that, too.

Currently writing for Pokémon again, which was the first fandom I posted for, and I'll probably always keep coming back to it as well. It's just too much of an adventure-friendly world with great shipping possibilities to stay away from it.

There are a lot of words I love, including all the ones you mentioned, but I don't really use them all that often. I try to work 'petrichor' into most of my fics somewhere, though. I also love words like 'wave', 'flame', 'blaze', 'luminous', 'amber', 'align', and plenty of others I can't think of right now.

FFN. I prefer their old-school UI and lack of tags over AO3's interface by miles. I crosspost to both sites, but FFN always gets the update first (even though it's a matter of minutes at most).

The only area I prefer AO3 in is its content policy. For everything else, FFN has my preference.

Generally, my fics start after a particular season/movie/book whatever the source material is, so I don't really need to front load anything. The canon knowledge up until that moment is good enough, and everything new will be explained.

In AUs, the main differences are usually given in the summary or opening AN since they'll be part of the premise (e.g. Voldemort killed Harry in 1981 and took over magical Britain), and everything else will be revealed along the way, as I make it up.

I don't think I've ever really done much in the way of front loading in a story, since it's never been necessary for me.

Mostly in the hopes that my associations of the song with the fandom will spark some motivation to write. The lyrics themselves don't always matter.

I usually focus on one character per chapter, but I honestly like head-hopping, despite people saying it's bad. I've never gotten confused by my own head-hopping even years later, so I'm pretty sure I'll end up using it again in some future fics.

I never write a completely omniscient narrator, though. The narration will only ever know as much as the character it's following at that point.

Post at least one chapter every single day until the fic is done. And I made it, too. 461k words, 143 chapters, four months. It's by far my biggest achievement and I'll probably never match it.

It used to bother me a bit, until I realized that my favorite characters have been written by various writers even in canon, not all of whom have been great at writing them, so I stopped worrying about it and just went for it. All I can do is offer my own interpretation of the characters anyway.

Not really. I tend to enjoy writing and reading the same kind of stories. I'll read things that aren't entirely my taste from time to time, but even then I mostly still go for stories with a certain tone.

I don't care regardless. I really only look at the number on the left to see how many chapters I get to read, and the total is not relevant to me since I can't read beyond what's there regardless.

Wikis, mostly. If I'm familiar with a certain part of canon, then a quick refresher is all I need. If I'm not familiar with a certain part of canon, then the very basics of the wiki will give me enough to go on and handwave the rest. Rarely, I'll look up clips on Youtube to give myself a better mental image, but generally I don't bother.

If it's the protagonist, I'm out immediately. If it's a main, yet not POV char, then I can handle it if it doesn't take over the story entirely.

Honestly, though, it's your story and you should write what you want, regardless of what people think about it.

I know the feeling. I once deleted three fics from my FFN, thinking I still had the original files anyway so at least I would be able to re-read them if I wanted to...except I didn't. The originals were on a PC that was scrapped long ago, and unlike my other fics at the time, I didn't mail them to myself at any point (this being before Dropbox and other easy cloud storage). I have a lot of old junk, including unpublished old junk, but those three fics are gone forever. The only remnants of their existence are 1.5 handwritten fics (which I can't read either due to my handwriting being beyond atrocious) and one chapter of a crack fic starring the Gary Stu OC of the deleted fics.

A speedrun. It was a Legends Arceus speedrun and while they were blasting through the game I saw a couple of scenes that made me ship Akari and Irida immediately, so I wrote a fic based on it a few days later after having played roughly five minutes of the game myself.

I could probably cheat here and use one of my Puella Magi Madoka Magica fics here, who like the show's episodes are titled after lines from the fics, but I'll try doing this for one of my more pretentious titles instead...

"You're the one Whom Death Seeks, aren't you?"