it's a magical world

So there's a post/rumor going around tumblr that ye olde ff.net may genuinely be going belly up at some nebulous point in the unspecified future, because the maintainers have just...not been maintaining or responding in well over a year at this point, and at some point the domain will go kaput if no one is paying for it anymore. I think it's a TERRIBLE site and will not miss it at all if it does go, but god knows I spent my teenage years on there constantly, so, y'know, pouring one out in advance. Maybe it'll linger like a cockroach after all. Whatever.

But I do have about 20ish VERY old fics that reside there and nowhere else, because any other geocities or fandom-specific sites are long since defunct, and I'm genuinely unsure what to do about that. I don't LIKE any of them, I was very young when I wrote them and it shows, but the archivist in me doesn't want them to just vanish into the ether forever. I don't mind my name being associated with them in the abstract -- as they currently are, if someone manages to stumble across them, wow, good for you, but I'm not gonna make it EASY for you, y'know? But I don't really want them easily findable on my AO3 account, either.

I could just copy & paste them all to my own google drive and let them die off the face of the public internet. Or I could post them to AO3 into an anonymous collection, so that no one sees them on my author page but they're, y'know, accessible in my fic archive of choice. I could also post to AO3 and then orphan them, but I don't like that option -- I'd want to still have control over what happens to them in the future, which orphaning does not allow, so that's a nonstarter for me. Hmm.

So, private download or anonymous on AO3. Or something else I haven't thought of? Any thoughts? I can also just let them die if and when ff.net does, but that doesn't sit right. I cared about them once. Writing them helped me become the writer I am now. And I have my fair share of fics downloaded privately that were written by other people and I can see now objectively they are Not Good but I still have a great deal of fondness for them anyway, and was VERY sad when they disappeared off the internet otherwise. So. Yeah.

I've seen a couple of people on DW posting this, and it seems like a pleasant way to try to engage more on DW, so: June Something prompt list.

Day 1: What's changed about your fandom life in the last 365 days?

*flails in general direction of Old Guard*

I mean, so. That. New fandom hitting HARD out of freaking nowhere that now consumes all my waking hours. It's not surprising, really -- this is how I fall in love with fandoms, suddenly and hard. But definitely didn't see this one coming. I have mixed feelings about the fandom at large, because BOY HOWDY does it conceal a level of toxicity I've managed to avoid in most of my previous fandoms. But I'm here for the fic, and know how to ignore most of the Discourse (TM), and that suffices.

Day 2: You've got your OTP, you have to throw a third into the mix (from the same fandom), creating an OT3. Who is the OTP, and in your opinion, why would they make a perfect third for them? Bonus question: What about adding a third to your OTP from a different fandom? Who and why?

Hrm. I'm gonna bypass Old Guard for this one, because I don't particularly like the options for creating an OT3 with Joe/Nicky as the base pairing. Andy would be my choice if pressed, but I really do read both of those men as gay (which, y'know, is extremely canon, though I very much respect headcanoning them as bi/pan), so that doesn't quite sit right; FUCK Booker, I do not want that dude involved.

So give me Steve/Bucky instead and I have a MULTITUDE of options for the perfect triad. Peggy, obviously, right off the bat; she and Steve complement each other so well (and their love is very real), and I think she and Bucky share a certain dark-edged pragmatism that helps to balance Steve's...everything. So WWII-era, that's the OT3. Modern era, either Sam or Nat (or BOTH, why limit ourselves to a triad once poly is in the mix?). Barbershop quartet all the way. Any configuration of those four pleases me greatly.

...posting regularly is the real challenge for me.

Snowflake #5 was to comment/introduce yourself to someone you've never interacted with before, so I'm gonna force myself to actually COMMENT on one of the fics I read this week instead of just doing my usual kudos-and-run thing, because let's be real, as a writer/vidder who loves receiving any and all comments, it is HELLA hypocritical of me to so rarely leave any myself. I need to be better about that. So, that.

Snowflake #6: In your own space, make a list — anything between one and ten things is a sweet spot, but don't feel constrained by that! - of things that you wish existed in fandom or elsewhere, or that you'd like someone to make for you.

Hmmm. I'm kinda stuck on this one. But if you have any post-ROS Finn/Poe(/Rey) recs, I would love those! Nearly all the fics I've been mainlining so far in this pairing were written post-TFA, and while I have zero complaints about those, I'd love to read some that take the more recent movies into account as well.

Also, I've been feeling some intense small-fandom fondness/nostalgia, so I will put out into the world that if anyone wants to write or rec me some good History Boys (particularly Scripps/Posner) or Band of Brothers (Winters/Nixon), that would ALWAYS be awesome.

And last but not least, what are some good femslash fandoms these days? It's dumb that the vast majority of my OTPs are all dudes (and mostly white, sigh, with the notable exception of Finn/Poe), but that's primarily a reflection on the canons themselves. (Like, BoB is amazeballs, but it's not like I've got any real femslash options there, you know?) Lately I've been trying to avoid new media where the vast majority of the canon characters are straight white men, so I need something new to get into. Any recs?

Lately I've been going down the rabbit hole of old fandoms, and luxuriating in (re-)reading fics for OTPs past, mostly in fandoms I never properly touched as a writer. Went through a Man from UNCLE spree a few weeks ago; that somehow transitioned into Inception and now 007/Q. Apart from the white-boys-fucking monotony (and always one dark- and one fair-haired, wtf, why is it ALWAYS that? asks the fangirl who is just as guilty of writing all those OTPs herself), it's been fun swimming through the cloak-and-dagger type fandoms. I'm not sure why I never landed properly in any of these -- they hit most of my favorite narrative tropes, and provide the sort of plotty adventure framework that I most enjoy as both reader and writer.

I guess Man from UNCLE (the reboot film, not the original series, which I still haven't seen) was too short-lived a fandom to ensnare me, and while 007 is an insanely long-running franchise, it's also less active in terms of fandom -- at least in my fannish circles, anyway. And I likely would have tipped into Inception more solidly back in the day if X-Men: First Class hadn't slammed through fandom like a freaking hurricane within a few months of its release. No regrets on that score, though I did orphan a couple of Inception WIPs on my drive that I really, really wish I'd managed to finish before jumping full tilt back into X-Men fandom.

ANYWAY. That's a very roundabout way of getting to: What fandoms are you all excited about these days? Where's the really good fic at right now? What do you really wish more people were talking about? I'm current on the MCU nmovies (but found Infinity War deeply underwhelming and am not really looking forward to Endgame, so that's soured me a bit), but the only TV I'm keeping up with right now is Doctor Who (yay great new cast and amazing Jodie Whittaker, wish the writing were better for them) and The Good Place (flawless perfection). So I'm feeling very out of the loop.

REC ME YOUR CURRENT AWESOME FANDOMS OF AWESOMENESS.

Ok, so I've basically been on an extended fandom hiatus lately. Haven't written or vidded anything in months (though I occasionally poke at a couple of WIPs), am reading fic primarily from my old fandoms rather than anything current (Star Trek reboot and Merlin have both been prominently featured in my reading list lately), only check DW/LJ once a week and Tumblr even less frequently. Between work, Gay Geeks, and navigating a new relationship, my real life has been...busy. (Yes, the girlfriend thing is official, and she's even spent a weekend with my parents now. So there's that. Getting serious happens a lot quicker when you've already been friends for a couple of years, apparently.)

Still not sure when I'm gonna get back in the swing of things. (I'd really thought that the Man From UNCLE movie would kick me back into gear, because it hit a lot of my fannish buttons in truly delightful ways, but apparently not.) But hey, with the fall comes the beginning of the TV season, so, y'know, maybe it's time. Doctor Who is not doing it for me much, still, though I <3 Missy. However, I just watched the season premieres of both Sleepy Hollow and Agents of SHIELD, and I am SO INTO THEM.

Sleepy Hollow - ( very minor spoilers )

SHIELD - ( again, spoilers )

So that's where I'm at. I do miss writing, but I feel like I drain all my creative energies at work, and there's just nothing left when I get home. It's frustrating, because work is not the kind of creative that leaves me feeling fulfilled in any way, but...there it goes. While I was struggling a bit last fall, too, I don't think it's a coincidence that I started this job in January and haven't posted a single fic since. I just need to find a new balance, I guess.

Crowdsourcing time! I'm starting to poke at a multifandom vid, and I need some suggestions beyond my own usual scope of source material. Specifically, I'm looking at the women in refrigerators trope. More specifically, I'm looking for sci-fi/fantasy/comic book movies and TV shows that feature main characters' girlfriends/wives who are 1) killed off and then 2) appear to them later in dreams/visions/hallucinations.

Example: Jean Grey's death in X3 and then reappearance in Logan's dreams in The Wolverine.

I will also accept girlfriends who are believed to be dead and are later revealed to still be alive. (i.e. Bucky Barnes, except, y'know, the female equivalent.)

Any suggestions? :D?

NEW MEME. Because my brain is fried, and it's that kind of evening. Yoinked from tardis_stowaway:

Choose fifteen characters. Then put your playlist on shuffle. Your first song with lyrics is your first character, and so on. For each song, choose lyrics that resonate with the corresponding character.

For the record, I have a LOT of Broadway shows in iTunes, so there will likely be a lot of really difficult to manage lyric-to-character matches.

1. Charles Xavier (X-Men)
2. Martha Jones (Doctor Who)
3. Abbie Mills (Sleepy Hollow)
4. Joan Watson (Elementary)
5. Spike (Buffy)
6. Zoe Washburne (Firefly)
7. CJ Cregg (West Wing)
8. Pepper Potts (MCU)
9. Charles Gunn (Angel)
10. Dana Scully (X-Files)
11. Zuko (A:tLA)
12. Tyrion Lannister (Game of Thrones)
13. Alanna of Trebond (Tortall)
14. Don Scripps (History Boys)
15. Remus Lupin (Harry Potter)

( let's do this )

I completely forgot I hadn't posted anything about Yuletide! I received an AWESOME fic, Hear That Call, which is League of Their Own fic that made me super, super happy, and which I will surely reread a whole bunch. I only watched that movie for the first time sometime in September, and I don't know why it took me so long -- WWII ladies kicking ass and playing baseball, all of these things are right up my alley! And this fic is Dottie/Jimmy, which I sort of guiltily shipped during the film but the author made it work, with hints of Mae/Doris in the background (my primary OTP, ugh I love them so), and, yeah. You should read it!

Still a little time left before reveals, but for the first time, my own recipient has not responded to the fic at all, and that does sour it a bit for me. :/ I mean, I've received gift fics for Yuletide and other challenges in the past that haven't been great (NOT THIS YEAR, OBVS, SEE ABOVE), but I always, always find something nice to say to the author and thank them for writing, because this is a thing that they made for me, and that's a wonderful gift regardless. So now I'm really worried that the fic I wrote is really, truly bad, and I feel guilty about having written something crappy for someone else, and at the same time I'm slightly annoyed because the prompt was interesting but not an easy one for me to write, and I really tried to give the recipient what she'd wanted, and it's a fandom and character that I do love quite a lot, and just ugh. I'm probably being petty, and it's really not a big deal at all, but it is kind of a letdown.

But the fic I received really was amazing, so I shall console myself by rereading it a bunch because it makes me happy.

So I've been vidding more or less nonstop (barring breaks to eat and sleep) since early yesterday evening, which feels MARVELOUS. Vidding is the first fannish activity I drop completely when RL gets insane, because it requires a certain amount of uninterrupted time at home (with my external hard drive) that can be very difficult to come by. But once I get going, man, it sure is a buzz. So is writing, when I get into the right headspace, but that's rarer -- something about vidding is just naturally soothing to me. The repetitiveness of it, maybe, of rehashing a song beat by beat over and over again while placing clips. It's a different sort of creativity than writing -- writing is hard to push, for me, and if I struggle too hard to force words out it becomes impossible to write anything at all. Vidding requires less mental energy. Dunno why.

So I've got a complete draft of my Festivid, and more than half of a Doctor Who vid that been sitting in the back of my brain for months and months and months. So that's fun! But the Festivid badly needs a beta, and I'm not sure if my usual go-tos are familiar with the source. Fortunately, I have more than a month before it's due to find someone.

Of course, this means I have NOT spent my day off working on my Secret Mutant fic, which is due in less than a week. Oops. Fortunately I have tomorrow off as well (it's like an actual weekend! Except not at the end of the week!) so, that. Remind me that I'm not allowed to do any more vidding until this fic is done. And then Yuletide, fuck, I don't even have an idea for that one yet. But this has been a recurring theme for my Yuletides, and I always manage to pull it off somehow...

Stolen from penknife, this one looks like fun:

The Six Degrees Of Separation Meme:

Give me no less than two and no more than four characters from any of my fandoms, and I will write you up to six ficlets connecting them to each other somehow. (e.g.: 'Six Degrees Of Separation From Dean Winchester To Chloe Sullivan', 'Six Ways Susan Ivanova Doesn't Know She Knows John Matheson', or 'From Dana Scully To John Winchester In Six Steps Or Less'.) Obvious or not, your choice. Crossovers or not, your choice.

Fandoms I will definitely play in: X-Men movieverse, Doctor Who etc, Avengers movieverse, Buffy/Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse, Harry Potter, X-Files, West Wing, Sports Night, Inception, History Boys, Sherlock. But really, I'm game for just about anything I've ever written/vidded/mentioned, and would totally be willing to try fandoms I only know through fannish osmosis. :D

Bit of random meta, mostly because I feel like rambling about stuff I love to take my mind off stuff that stresses me out.

So, again, on a bit of a Buffyverse kick at the moment, and I was thinking about trying to come up with a list of my top ten episodes or something, which made me think about what I'd consider my top episodes of any show I love, which made me think about what episodes define my favorite shows. And I realized that for me, at least, what makes me fannish about a show -- as opposed to "oh, yeah, that one's fun" -- tends to boil down to two specific types of episodes: the Hook, and the Game Changer. I need to encounter both of these episodes to want to dive into a fandom.

You all know what I mean. First, there's the Hook: that episode that really sells you on the show. Its placement can vary, but usually -- if you're watching the series in order, anyway -- it probably needs to fall somewhere in the first season, or you'll give up watching. (Alternately, it's that random episode you stumble across somewhere in the middle of the run of the show that drags you in without your actually knowing anything else about the show at all but holy jebus that was awesome, where can I find more?) It's the episode where a new show finds its footing, starts to figure out what it's really going to be about. It's the character moment that just NAILS it, or the plotline that really speaks to you personally, or just a really friggin' cool shot that makes your breath catch and you think, hey, this is nifty. And you never forget that moment.

Then there's the Game Changer. Episodic television is generally formulaic by nature, and I'm not saying that in a bad way. It has to be. That's what keeps its viewers coming back, week after week after week. We know what to expect, we know the characters, we know the types of story we're going to be told, and we're familiar enough with it to know we'll probably enjoy it. Totally cool. And most decently successful shows ride that wave all the way through the end. But the really good ones, the ones that develop obsessive crazy awesome fans, are the ones that test their own limits, push the edges of the formula, blow it all wide open -- if only for a story arc or two. The Game Changer is that episode. The one that dramatically raises or outright changes the stakes for the characters, the one whose repercussions ripple throughout the rest of the series, the one from which you can never go back. Sometimes it comes right in the first season. Sometimes it takes years before it happens. But oh, man, do we ever sit up and take notice when it does.

There are plenty of other episode archetypes, if I really wanted to sit around and come up with a few more catchy and overly simplistic labels for them. But the Hook and the Game Changer are the two episodes in any given show that will always, always, always turn up in any "best of" episode list I could ever think up. Any given TV show could have any number of Game Changers, depending on how you classify them; there are certainly degrees. For example, in Buffy, I'd consider "Passion" the first huge Game Changer -- we're shown the full extent of Angelus's evil for the first time, and our first major recurring character is killed, brutally, onscreen. But you could also argue that the "Surprise"/"Innocence" two-parter is the Game Changer, for giving us Angelus in the first place, or "School Hard", where Spike casually and deliberately kills the Anointed One, subverting all the expectations set by the first season's arc; or to a lesser extent, go back to "Prophecy Girl", where Buffy actually confronts the fact that she is going to die, which changes her personal stakes for the rest of the series (though I think that's more a logical continuation of the first season's overall story arc than a change, exactly). So, yeah, to a certain extent, the Game Changer is subjective; the Hook even more so, because that's very personal to each individual fan. But you've got to have both to really become fannish about a show. This is why I gave up on Supernatural -- I'm sure there are plenty of Game Changers over its run (and could probably list a few by sheer fannish osmosis), but I never got my Hook episode, so while I've certainly been entertained by the episodes I've watched, I never could get into it properly. My big frustration with Merlin is that while I certainly got my Hook (for me, "The Beginning of the End" -- Merlin's darker side and the Mordred reveal, oh my stars and garters), there has never been a proper Game Changer, and it started pissing me off so much it drained all my enjoyment out of the show. (While certainly there were episodes that had major repercussions, the basic status quo of Merlin's secret and Arthur and Merlin's twisted sort of friendship have never, ever changed, so even as other circumstances changed drastically, I feel like the show itself remained utterly static.)

So now I'm going to ramble on a bit about my favorite TV shows. You've been warned.

( Buffyverse )

( X-Files )

( Avatar )

( Whoniverse )

( Sorkinverse )

Stopping there because it's late and I'm sleepy, but I could do this for a bunch of other shows. (And ETA, realized I really had to add Avatar in here.) What are your Hooks & Game Changers for your big fannish loves? Is there another type of episode that you need to get involved in a fandom, or is it all about the characters and the individual episodes don't matter at all, or something else entirely? I like reading people's meta about these sorts of things. :)

'Tis the season, clearly. By which I mean, Yuletide is upon us!

(I have been participating in Yuetide every single year since it started. I feel so old school.)

SO. Dear Yulebat,

Basically, you are awesome. Because there is nothing about the fandoms I requested that I don't love. (Except the Dating Plan. If this is the fandom we matched on, you know of what I speak. But anyway.) More importantly, there are no characters in any of these fandoms that I don't love with an all-consuming passion, because seriously, THEY ARE ALL AMAZING AND BRILLIANT AND SPARKLY. Yes, even the dumb ones. I don't care, I love them all.

So here are some quick and dirty things that I like and don't like in fics in general:

LIKES: witty banter, wacky hijinks, random shenanigans, everyone being a BAMF in their own particular way, long plotty fics, quick incisive character studies, romance, friendship, TEAMS, gen, ensemble casts, happy (or realistic but generally hopeful) endings, boys being boys, girls kicking butt and taking names, first time fic of any rating.

DISLIKES: torture porn, excessive angst, excessive schmoop, mpreg, hardcore kink, kid!fic, character bashing of any kind, humiliation, death!fic.

But really, my dear Yulebat, I'm pretty easy. As long as you avoid the "dislikes" list, write whatever suits you and the fandom and the story you want to tell, and I will LOVE it. Sure, I'm a fan of happy-ish endings, but if you want to break my heart instead? Go right ahead and shatter it into a million pieces, it's all good. The "likes" list are by no means mandatory in any way, write what you want, I have complete faith in you. Why? Because you love the same fandom I do, because we matched on it, and that means you have preemptively won Yuletide. :D

I have nothing fandom-specific to add that wasn't on my sign-up form, but for posterity, here it is: ( Sports Night, Mairelon the Magician, The Sting )

For some reason, I become a very productive writer when I'm on a long bus trip. And then I sit at the reception desk at work for eight hours doing nothing and don't write a single word. My brain, I don't even know.


Way behind on TV Meme:

Day 12 - An episode you've watched more than 5 times

Most episodes of Firefly, particularly "Out of Gas". MANY episodes of the X-Files, which I watched and rewatched compulsively for a few years, though I haven't in a while -- particularly the mytharc episodes in seasons 1-4. Most of Coupling, particularly "Her Best Friend's Bottom" and "Inferno". All of QAF UK. The BSG mini-series. Most of Band of Brothers, particularly "Points". The very last episode of MST3K. Oddly enough, probably not anything from Doctor Who or Torchwood, though if I have, it's "Empty Child"/"Doctor Dances" (Who), or "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" and "Fragments" (TW). I don't rewatch television as much these days unless I'm introducing a show to a friend, so. But yeah.