Cimorene

Okay, here's the rest of those Due South bookmarks I recently saved. I eventually ran out, so this is tragically fewer than ten. For some reason, ten seems like a good number of recs to post at a time to me.

( Due South, F/K (6) )

So to make up the difference, here's four new Star Wars bookmarks, Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan, which was what I started reading next.

( Star Wars, Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan (4) )

The way that happened was that after I ran out of Smallville, and then Deep Space Nine, and then Due South, I started trying to think of what other fandoms I read about the same time that might be useful to revisit. But I recently went back through Highlander (which I read for much of 2004-2005), and I've reread SGA (which appeared in 2005) much more recently than the others. I originally read Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan (then TPM), in contrast, in... 2002, maybe, or maybe 2001? And I have revisited the fandom in the past, but I think the last time was probably pre-2011, so it was the longest gap I could come up with. There's a whole new era of this pairing now informed by all the new Disney-Star Wars canon, even though, rather amusingly, one of the principal characters was already dead before Attack of the Clones. The Master Apprentice archive, which was where I initially read the pairing, has also now been imported to AO3, so there's both new and old to browse side by side.

No guarantees about the age of the works in question. Although some of them are comparatively new, anyway.

( Due South, Fraser/Kowalski (5) )

( Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Garak/Bashir (5) )

I saw a couple of people on my dlist here post that they'd updated their fandom info and I thought, what a good idea! So last night I skimmed through my DW profile and made some minor changes, then updated my trusty

Ten Things I Assume You Know About Me If You Read My Journal

(That isn't required reading; I'm not, like, mad about it. I just refer to these things without footnotes or background info.)

But I got to thinking about my fandom belonging and my fandom interests, which have changed a lot from the community-based, almost... club-like vibe of lj communties. I still imbibe a lot of visual stimulus from Tumblr daily, but I'm trying to move more interaction here to Dreamwidth, because that's where the interaction happens. Working on having conversations here, and so on. Not so much, necessarily, about fannish interests - fandoms, I mean - but perhaps that's mostly my few fandom interests/the fewer opportunities on dw to talk about them now. And there's more about meta, which interests me perhaps more anyway, because my interest (such as it is!) in reading fanfiction this year has been like...:

↳ Comb through my Highlander bookmarks, recs, and old journal entries in search of other references to check out, and attempt to find up-to-date links to things; fail for the most part. Go through the Highlander fics on AO3. Post updated recs.

↳ Read Steve/Eddie Stranger Things fic all summer, going slowly more and more crazy because it's all written by British teenagers and it's no longer cool to use betas, or apparently even proofreaders, and everybody insists on putting modern British slang in and calling sweatshirts "sweaters", which is a big problem because there's an iconic sweatshirt in canon so it shows up in almost every fic and I just want to get a Tumblr megaphone and make a PSA about what a sweater was in 1980s America to these dweebs who are too young to have learned how to Google apparently... oh, I also posted recs for that in the summer though! Here

↳ Brief 1-week tour of Our Flag Means Death, primarily modern AUs, after the show came out. Cute, but getting twee-er by the minute.

↳ Brief 3-4 week period of intermittently checking the AO3 tag for The Sandman (TV) after it came out. Going through all the stages of grief and then relaxing in a warm bath of surreal amusement because the only part of this incredible and humongous universe that is producing fanfiction is characterization-agnostic wish-fulfillment schmoopangst about Dream and Hob Gadling, the immortal English peasant, and the occasional bit of hilaribble kinkfic about The Corinthian.

↳ I think there was a period in there where I discovered by accident that people write slash about TinTin, which I've never read nor watched, but I was so curious that I had to go looking, but then I had to try to block the trauma from my brain.

↳ Just the last week or two I've been going back through The Dark Is Rising fic because usually I expect a good supply of new Will/Bran fic every Yuletide, but this year there wasn't that much.

On Tumblr, though, your stance to fanfic or fanworks isn't important: you can reblog things just because they're pretty! Or to put it another way, the whole fannish personality can flourish there, not just like... fandoms (media fandoms). I'm a fan of Glass Onion and I'm also a fan of bauhaus lighting, for example! A fan of cats and a fan of dogs! All those things can be shuffled together on equal footing on Tumblr:

• Hannibal is evergreen


• Black Sails is still the best show I've ever seen


• Everything Everywhere All At Once gifsets currently abound


• Basically full time Interview with the Vampire fan there, even though I haven't really tried to read any fanfiction - it doesn't necessarily seem to need it? Although I do still think AUs could be really funny
( Read more... )

Behind the cut are links and headers for ( into the eyes of your creature self by marn_barn; Sanctuary by SpicedSage; I've seen your face before, my friend, but I don't know if you know who I am by HMSLusitania; Cut and Changed and Rearranged by AidaRonan; and i see you by apairofglasses. )

As always, all my Stranger Things bookmarks and recs can be viewed at AO3 here (not all with notes, however). The current total is 62.

I bookmarked a bunch of Stranger Things stories in the last couple of weeks without making notes on the bookmarks and so wasn't able to post any of them until I went back to reread (or reskim), but my notes are all caught up with my bookmarking now, so here's a few more. (Not all the bookmarks. You can see all my Stranger Things bookmarks here, if you'd rather.) Under the cut tag you will find AO3-exported bookmarks for ( settle an argument by cruisercrusher; cover to cover (the mark of a lover) by babyboyblues; sinking in your teeth by mxmushroom; small, weird loves by videcormeum; Rock of Ages by BoudicaMuse; the king is dead by ForsythiaRising; Some Things Cosmic by stereobone; Tim Curry Made Me Do It by LarryPinn; they know all of my habits (but they don't know about you) by steve_the_hair_harrington; My Babysitter's a Stoner by mozbee; Steady as He Goes by Anonymous; and The Worst Mixtape Ever Made by nbfutureboy )

These aren't all my Highlander bookmarks: there are thirty, which you can find all of here (pre-filtered). Not all thoroughly annotated, however. I have finished going through the archive for real this time (I know I said it before, but I went back through the first few pages just to make sure after that).

Under the cut please find Fiction by Aria (the historical romance about Duncan one), Little Blessings by pennywashburne, The Bark of Dante by Taz (Pompeii exhibit at the museum), Decisions on the Road to Damascus by Chris Quinton, The Parting Glass by Kat Allison, and The Dread Pyrate Methos by Taz (historical epistolary humor).


( Read more... )

I'm using AO3's Export Bookmark function here and they take up a lot of space, so. Cut tag. Behind which are links to Strata by Kat Allison, Zig and Zag by merriman, Exposure by starcrossedgirl, Nothing but the Truth by carenejeans, Still Love by cupidsbow (as Thyme), and Social Graces by MacGeorge. ( Read more... )

I've been reading one of those fascinating writers who seem to have a great deal of talent and no self-discipline.

By that I mean they're writing only for pleasure, yes, but that doesn't indicate lack of self-discipline in itself because in principle writing just to please yourself is a very good thing; but sometimes I just think the author HAS to be having a great time since everything is PAINFULLY obviously driven by wish fulfillment rather than taste, logic or characterization. In spite of obvious talent and skill at writing itself, I mean, where the surface level of writing is good or even great, things like narration and dialogue: this is a writer who could produce stuff I'd rate 110% if they were given a detailed plot outline by someone better at plots than they are and then edited by a sufficiently harsh beta.

As a reader, I... don't really enjoy reading about how all my favorite characters from disparate corners of canon, no matter how remote and unlikely, meet and become the best friends ever and subsequently triumph over every single character I've ever disliked through various embarrassments and humiliations while the world in general agrees explicitly how great my faves are and how pathetic their enemies. I did briefly write a few things like that when I was ten or twelve, and I read the slightly more refined wish fulfillment/Chosen One genre avidly a bit longer than that (Mercedes Lackey mostly), but... for my present enjoyment things would have fewer unpleasant people popping out to be vanquished and the skill and renown of the protagonist wouldn't be continuously increasing so regularly and explicitly. Partly it's just that it's so blatant that it's embarrassing to read and strains suspension of disbelief because I keep noticing the characterization being bent out of shape (hence my reference to the 'slightly more refined' version, ie wish fulfillment that is all about the Chosen One being showered with praise and recognition but without straining credulity as obviously and usually, when published as books like Harry Potter or the Vorkosigan books, broken up with more challenges and problems). But it also just leaves me a bit cold in this form because it's not my particular narrative kink, as it were.

I suppose this kind of wish fulfillment reading must feel for some people like the most engaging and soothing and comforting thing to read ever, so... then the question becomes, what DO I want for my favorite characters?

It isn't something I'd given a lot of thought to over time, but fortuitously, just a couple of weeks ago yvannairie recommended me this gen Transformers series, Xenoethnography by Therrae. And this is pretty much that ideal made real. In fact, I don't have a strong preference for gen, but this is such great gen for such a long time that it's an exemplary opportunity to examine the best stuff that can happen to a beloved protagonist personally as opposed to interpersonally: Therrae's OC social scientist is useful, in fact, crucial for her expertise, and she is introduced to the community of extraterrestrials living in secret and helps them and others in important ways while constantly learning more about their alien culture and psychology and gradually getting to know a wide variety of different characters. (It's Transformers fic, which is hilarious because Transformers, so the aliens are sentient robots, but the genre and register is very classic [second wave or later] science fiction.)

Put like this, the description also explains why I love CJ Cherry's Foreigner series, which was my favorite in high school (I haven't read the last few books mostly because it's so long now that trying to reread it all to remind myself what happened can take months and months each time and I keep getting distracted. I probably need all of them as ebooks in order to manage). But this learning and confidently using extant expertise also pinpoints some of the stuff we in fandom often loved about, say, SGA fic (applying to Rodney but also to John), and also to part of what really entices me about my current favorite book series, Catriona McPherson's 1920s Dandy Gilver mysteries. The found family and alien culture window character applies to popular portrayals of Stiles in Teen Wolf (although this dynamic quickly got overrun with the "pack mom" fanon, which felt weird and kinky for me and kept grossing me out to the point of becoming a pet peeve) and to the Nero Wolfe mysteries that I devoured last year at princessofgeeks's recommendation.

Milestone: 155 Good Omens bookmarks.

There was nearly a week where I hadn't gotten around to bookmarking them on the site as I finished them, but I went through the backlog yesterday.