Beyond Selidor

This weekend feels more efficient than others so far this year — I've done almost everything I wanted to do, and it's only 1.30pm on Sunday!

Every year, I know this specific snowflake_challenge prompt is coming: In your own space, create a fanwork. And every year, I swear I'll start working on something so that it will be ready to post by the time the prompt comes around, and every year I end up being completely unprepared.





However, this year I'm lucky, in that threesentenceficathon is also happening, with some great prompts, and so I have fanworks ready to post! I've grouped all my fills together in an AO3 series, so if I fill more prompts, they can just get added on, but at the moment there are three ficlets posted. The fandoms covered so far are Greek mythology (Hades/Persephone), Peaky Blinders (Ada Shelby), and the Rumpelstiltskin fairytale (Rumpelstiltskin/Miller's Daughter). There are a couple of other prompts that caught my eye, so I'll see how many more I can add.

halfamoon will be running again this February. This is a fourteen-day fest focusing on female characters. Every two days, there's a new prompt, for which you can create fanworks, or share recs for other people's work that fits the prompt. The prompts list for this year is out in advance.

The detailed nomination statistics for last year's Hugo Awards have
finally been made public, and there seem to be a lot of problems (most notably, a number of works or individuals that were eligible for shortlisting and achieved the requisite number of votes to be shortlisted appear to have been arbitrarily ruled ineligible for reasons that are as yet unclear). Cora Buhlert's blog post is probably the best starting point, as it's a good summary in its own right, and links to pretty much every other piece of discussion of the matter.

Reading-wise it's been a slow week. I've only finished one book, The Last Sun (K.D. Edwards), the first in a series of urban fantasy books in which characters with supernatural abilities have washed up on the shores of Earth after their home in Atlantis was destroyed, and in which powerful, aristocratic Houses (based on tarot — the Tower, the Lovers, the Hermit and so on) vie for control of their new, closed community. Our point-of-view character is the last remaining survivor of the destroyed Sun House, and he works as a sort of supernatural private detective for hire.

It's incredibly tropey, everyone has incredibly angsty backstories and unresolved trauma, and in general I found it fun in an escapist sort of way. I wish more of the secondary characters were women, and that we got to know more of the interior lives of the female characters we do meet, but hopefully there's more of that as the series progresses — it's not going to stop me reading future books, nor indeed the free short stories that the author has posted online. In fact, once I've finished catching up on Dreamwidth, I'm going to read any of those that fit chronologically with what I've read so far.

In your own space, talk about your favorite trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme.



Why limit myself to just one? Here is a non-exhaustive list of stuff I like — sometimes just in fanfic, sometimes just in professional writing, sometimes in both. I think the boundaries between tropes, clichés, kinks and so on can sometimes be a bit blurred, so I'm not going to define any of these narrative/character/relationship preferences as one thing or the other.

Enemies/antagonists to friends/allies/lovers is something I will eat up with a spoon. I like it in both its variants — where the characters differ in their approaches, methods or aims but are essentially both fundamentally correct, and where one character is clearly in the right and the other one is at best wrong and at worst straight up evil. I guess in essence I like characters being thrown into situations that force them to reevaluate their core understanding of themselves, and these kinds of relationships often do this.

Hurt/comfort is one of my favourite things to read, although I don't like it so much in visual media. Like many people in my Dreamwidth circle, I tend to have firm preferences for which character is hurt, and which one is doing the comforting. I sometimes like this trope in combination with the enemies-to-lovers one, in which one character comforts the other for hurt that they themselves inflicted, but it depends on the fandom.

I don't really know how to describe this one succinctly, but basically stories about women enduring awful stuff at the hands of men in patriarchal societies, and finding a sense of community and common purpose within these terrible situations. Survival is the important thing here — I don't need the women to escape or overthrow their oppressors within the narrative, but they need to be able to find ways to survive and find meaning and connection with each other in the margins. Examples of what I'm talking about include Mad Max: Fury Road, Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls, and stuff like that.

Human/non-human pairings where the human character stays mortal, the non-human character remains a vampire/demon/otherworldly fairy/etc etc, but they both transform each other in other ways. The irreconcilable differences are the thing, here — I don't want them reconciled by the vampire's human girlfriend becoming a vampire herself, or the god who falls in love with a human giving up immortality for love.

Stories in which the ordinary work of everyday life is made magical and heroic, especially tasks typically perceived (whether correctly or incorrectly) as having been 'women's work' in a historical setting. I particularly like this if the story hinges on mentor relationships between girls and women, relationships between sisters (or girls who are raised in a situation that is essentially like being sisters), mothers and daughters, and so on.

Stories about characters who were made to feel frightened once, reacted (to put it mildly) extremely poorly to this, and decided the only reasonable course of action is to warp the world around them such that they will never, never be made to feel fear again — even if they burn down the world and all their relationships with it. An example of this type of story is the Peaky Blinders tv series.

Stories that are fundamentally dystopian (or ushering in something that will result in utter destruction of everything the characters valued — they just can't see it yet or can't do anything to stop it), in which the characters do their best to carve out meaning and joy, build community and remain essentially true to their own ethics, even if their efforts are marginal at best and are like twigs attempting to shore up a torrential flood. Examples of this type of story are — in different ways — The Lions of Al-Rassan (Guy Gavriel Kay), Hambly's Benjamin January mysteries, and the Babylon BerlinTV series.

Do you have any specific narrative/character preferences?

I'm back for another three answers to the June fandom meme.

( Days 4-6 )

( The other days )

(Not because nothing has happened, but simply because I do not have the energy to keep up.)

I don't normally log TV viewing in the way I do books read, but I've watched so many shows recently — beloved old favourites finishing forever, perennials returning for another batch of episodes, new things popping up on my radar — that I felt I had to write a little bit about each one.

( TV shows behind the cut )

Matthias has gone out to meet up with a friend from the US who was a visiting scholar in our former academic department in the year I did my MPhil, but I decided to stay at home and just rest a bit. I've spent the morning doing yoga, housework, and reading every Vasya/Morozko fic (in the Winternight trilogy fandom) on Ao3. This evening is the alumni event for my old department (this weekend is alumni weekend in Cambridge), so I'll head out to be sociable in a few hours' time. Tomorrow will be more socialising — spending the afternoon in Ely with notasapleasure, her husband, and a couple of their friends. All in all, it should be a good weekend.

I know it's a bit late, but I was in Germany without my laptop, and then flat out at work this week, so this is the first chance I've had to post a bunch of links to Yuletide fics. This was my first year participating, and it all went a lot better than I was expecting.

kmo wrote Ouroboros (Wise Child series, Juniper and Wise Child, gen) for me.

I wrote one gift fic and one treat, and both were well received, considering they were for very tiny fandoms.

Beyond the Ninth Wave (Wise Child series, gen). After being driven from their home by Fillan Priest, Juniper and Wise Child adjust to a new life on Finbar's ship.

Reverberations (Romanitas trilogy, gen). Several years after the events of Savage City, Una, Makaria and Noriko meet. All three feel the effects of the war and slave rebellion in different ways.

I really enjoyed many of the fics in the collection this year. Here are some of my particular favourites:

Far from the Blessed Isles by Miss_M (Greek Mythology; Penelope, Circe, Nausicaa, Calypso; T). The dead talked a lot among themselves, there being little else for them to do. Conversation tended to run along circular paths. I love this because it's absolutely unflinching in how it reveals what a raw deal women got in Greek mythology, but still allows these women a space to express their anger about the injustice they experienced.

The Banishing of Winter by Skeiler (Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell; John Uskglass; G). In 1202, The Raven King "quarreled with Winter, and banished it from his kingdom so that it enjoyed four years of continual Summer." This is that story. This is absolutely fabulous, managing to retain the whimsical, scholarly tone of the book while also perfectly capturing the spirit of a folk tale.

The Price of Honor by keilexandra (The Lions of Al-Rassan; Rodrigo Belmonte/Jehane bet Ishak/Ammar ibn Khairan; M). Jehane and Ammar try to make a life for themselves in Muwardi-occupied Al-Rassan. Some things, a very few of them, may be more important than honor. What-if? AU. Warning for implied sexual violence. If this isn't what happened, this is what should have happened. I particularly appreciate that the author managed to resolve the love triangle in a way that still included Rodrigo's wife, Miranda.

Robbing Peter by cantstoptemplarswillgetme (The Musketeers; d'Artagnan, Porthos, Athos, Aramis, Constance; T). There's no summary, but this is a very silly heist fic, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Somebody's Waiting for Someone by stellatundra (Peaky Blinders; Ada Shelby/Freddie Thorne; T). It might be Tommy he goes to France for, but it’s Ada he comes home for. A Freddie-centric fic examining his relationship with various Shelbys.

I also loved almost all the Clarke/Bellamy/Raven fics for The 100 fandom.

I wrote a review on my Wordpress blog about Peaky Blinders, a gangster miniseries set in Birmingham in 1919.

That’s not to say there aren’t tensions. The young Shelby men have returned, traumatized, from the battlefields of World War I, only to find that the women – shrewd, tough-as-nails Aunt Polly, and angry, romantic Ada – have been running things just fine, if not better, on their own. Tommy Shelby, who views himself as the gang’s de facto leader, has to reconcile his own grand vision for the Peaky Blinders with the more limited, but safer, scope planned by his aunt.

At the same time, the gang relies on its ability to control the shifting network of alliances of the streets, contending with IRA cells, communist agitators attempting to unionize the factory workers, Traveller families who control the racetrack, Chinese textile workers who moonlight as opium den operators, and, one of my favourite characters, an itinerant fire-and-brimstone street-preacher played by Benjamin Zephaniah. It’s a complicated balancing act of carrot and stick, and when it works, it works because the various players have understood correctly the psychology, needs and fears of their opposite numbers.

The review's a bit late - the first season aired some months ago - but if my description piques your interest, it might be worth catching up, as there aren't that many episodes, and the new season is due to air soon.

This is one of my favourite times of the year, because IT'S EUROVISION TIME! I have a deep and daggy love of Eurovision, but luckily, so do my partner Matthias, and many of our friends. This time last year, we had a Eurovision party, but we were unable to do the same this time around, as most of our Eurovision-loving friends were away. Our friend B did come over, and we had a great time snarkily deconstructing all the acts. My greatest triumph of the evening? Inventing the Tumblr tag 'erotic milk-churning' to describe the Polish act. Honestly, it has to be seen to be believed. I was very happy with the act that eventually won, and a good time was had by all.

ETA: I made a new mix on 8tracks. It's called 'Love Will Tear Us Apart, Again and Again and Again', and consists of the best cover versions of 'Love Will Tear Us Apart', as well as the original. Because I'm cool like that. (Bizarre story from my past: one night, my dad and I did nothing but listen to every cover version of this song, drink red wine and generally work each other up into such a frenzy of maudlin feelings that we both ended up crying our eyes out. Good times, 2007. Good times.)

Love Will Tear Us Apart, Again and Again and Again from dolorosa_12 on 8tracks Radio.