Cimorene

WHAT IS THIS BULLSHIT ( Criminal Minds casting spoiler )

Criminal Minds has been host to a variety of kinds of fail in the past, most notably that horrific episode about the Roma, but it has generally done well on the misogyny front. I've greatly enjoyed CM's variety of different strong, complex female characters, plus one of the most realistic portrayals of women's professional clothing in a crime show (female FBI field agents and cops wear suits and uniforms on CM, not a parade of desperately boobalicious unprofessional shirts and wildly inappropriate heels)(NB: I would not ever like to have a discussion including rationalization or apologism for said sexualization of fictional professional women's dress). Apparently that's all at an end. If this spoiler comes to pass, I see a high probability of dropping it in a rage even though I love the whole cast.

So, how about the Hotch/Rossi this week, huh?

It's really sweet the way they're gradually developing the trust and partnership between Hotch and Rossi canonically, although obviously, if you ignore my slash-goggled eroticised subversive reading, it's just an equally heart-warming platonic friendship. But that doesn't matter! Because they have their emotionally wounded Intense Discussions about Why We Do This and Don't Blame Yourself and You're A Good Man, their reserved manly handshakes and back-pats, their parental tete-a-tetes away from the big ears of the pitchers children. I like that in the Hotch-angst storylines and the Rossi-angst storylines, the other one is always sensitive to the nuances of the angster's behaviour even when the children aren't, and confident and caring enough to offer support verbally and with reassuring bodylanguage.

I need to go back to the beginning of the Rossi eps and rewatch at least the significant ones, because I didn't start shipping it until later and I'm sure that caused me to miss some nuances. Also I'd like screencaps. :/ I was chatting with iscaris about the canonical development of the pairing a few weeks ago (*wave*) and she brought up some stuff that I totally hadn't even remembered about it at all, and I can't allow that state to continue for a pairing I'm actively shipping: I won't know how to arrange my personal canon.

There was plenty of fodder for my currently favourite Criminal Minds OTP, Hotch/Rossi, in the new episode. Of course, that was because in the Metaphor of Best Fit, ie the crime-solving team as a nuclear family metaphor (try it! It basically fits all of the ones on TV. There are ALWAYS two 'adults' with a number of proteges!), right now Hotch and Rossi are the parents, so if one of them has an internal conflict storyline, the other one has to offer some support - not showing weakness in front of the children, right?

But one of the things I really love about CM this season (canonically and not subtextually/slash-gogglesedly speaking) is the careful and somewhat subtle portrayal of the friendship and mutual respect Hotch and Rossi already share, without making the development of that really central onscreen.

It was kind of a stroke of genius, from the point of view of interpersonal developments among members on the team, to have the replacement 'adult' character written in as an old colleague who had left in between, making him new to some characters and old to others. The quiet, coded conversations Hotch and Rossi share that hint at their pre-existing friendship, and the awkward, manly support they offer - it's sweet, and provides a more intriguing texture to the narrative than the whole 'tentative friendship-building' storyline that usually occurs when two characters are introduced for the first time. Also, I really, really loved that drinking-in-Rossi's(?)-office scene when Hotch needed comfort about his divorce.

I've at LAST finished transferring the entirety of my old recs site to delicious!

My delicious account - all fanworks (mostly fiction, but like... 2 vids in there!) - now contains 2 867 bookmarks!

Considering I started this project sometime last March, I think the occasion calls for celebration!

http://delicious.com/cimness : the main account!

( Fandoms with over 50 bookmarks )

It's not exactly right to call this "recent" fandoms, but the ones I've been reading in the past year are

• Batman, which is mostly Christopher Nolan's universe and mostly Batman/Gordon. I read a lot of that this fall. (26)



• Bones. I think probably all of those are Brennan/Booth. (9)



• Criminal Minds. I like Morgan/Garcia and Hotch/Rossi. I think I read some Hotch/Prentiss in there, too. (9)



• DCU. I went through a phase of devouring Tim Drake/Kon-El stories this summer. (28)



• Die Hard. McClane/Farrell exclusively, of course. (16)



• Hot Fuzz. (11)



• Ironman. Tony/Pepper, that is. I didn't read a lot of it before I got sick of the same things that always quickly enough drive me away from het. But rest assured, I did read it in all seriousness for a while - I just didn't find much that I liked enough to bookmark. (3)



• Merlin. Haven't watched it, just read it. Fortunately, it seems a bit familiar. (21)



• NCIS. I was reading this one, oh, a couple of months ago, until I ran out. I mean, I still give it a look when new pieces come up, of course, but the rate's not terribly fast... (51)



• The Devil Wears Prada. I think a lot of us rediscovered the beauty of girl/girl this year (or, well, last year, but she's still writing it) thanks to Telanu's DWP fic.

I signed up for 11 fandoms for Yuletide and somehow forgot The Dark Knight. But I suppose it might possibly be just as well since I have more than ten thousand words of an unfinished TDK story on my harddrive already...

In retrospect it was probably correct to remove Criminal Minds from Yuletide - a glance at the newsletter will show you that it's quite active, but the problem is that it's not active with good fic. I've only read two or three pieces that I could even call decent, so every Yuletide always greatly increased the chances for something readable out there. The fandom used to be dominated by Gideon/Reid, which grossed me out because G. practically adopted him in canon, but at least I could see the logic for that. Recently, however, Hotch/Reid has outstripped Morgan/Garcia in popularity, and that just makes no sense at all. What makes even less sense is that by far the most popular pairing is Prentiss/JJ, which just... you know, ok, lesbian is good, but even before JJ's boyfriend, there was barely a few minutes of female bonding between the two of them - the entire rationale was apparently that they're cute and female! If anything JJ should have been slashed with Garcia, hello? And it's not like anyone who would slash JJ with Prentiss is susceptible enough to logic to consider Garcia's Mulder/Scully thing with Morgan. Which, you know, I haven't disinherited anyone for shipping Morgan/Reid either, and the fact that it's not all that popular helps with that, and also the fact that canon obviously doesn't intend to do anything with Morgan/Garcia except keep the UST at the same level for seasons and seasons and seasons without ever resolving it. I can't even say that's a bad decision on their part. Anyway, Morgan and Garcia are both obviously going to be hooking up with other people in that time, and while we as fans have access to the metatext, as long as we're going against it consciously there's nothing particularly wrong with going against it (which is why tinhat Harry/Hermione shippers are alarming, whereas reasonable people who are just like 'hey, H/H might have been a better choice because Ron is a moron' are... reasonable!). Of course, preferring Morgan/Reid to Morgan/Garcia is indicative of bad taste by my lights, but I don't have to read it, and I've known worse. Wax's mom serves two kinds of gross pickled fish things AND these disgusting jars of mutton rolled up with fat, like a big Twinkie of Evil and Animal Bits, at every single Christmas, and that's in a hundred times worse taste than Morgan/Reid.

I still think they should remove Sherlock Holmes from Yuletide too, though. I mean, the quality of Yuletide writing is generally higher, so it's good for me personally that it's there, but in all fairness, the lj community has been increasingly active the last couple of years and it's pretty steadily healthful at this point.

Apparently I wasn't alone in starting to want some Hotch/Rossi after that one episode last season, because I've gradually seen more and more cropping up in the fandom newsletter. Nothing to write home about - this fandom's big on short vignettes which are barely long enough to tell if it's good or bad - but in the future, who knows...?

I'm going to try to make an exhaustive list of my OTPs (which I define as 'important ships which I read/ship', because occasionally I have two that overlap even if in general I refuse to break OTP and read the characters involved with anyone else). If I forget any of them, and you manage to remind me, I lose! And then, uh, I don't know, this seems like it should result in a drabble promise. I suck at short things, and I probably won't forget any anyway (I am forbidden from checking my recs page/delicious/tags/wip folders/etc!), but... what the hell. Drabbles, okay, drabbles of any pairing that I forgot.

( I made this list without cheating! )

Via isilya:

Kirsten Vangsness just came out on her official Criminal Minds blog. Could she get any MORE awesome?