The Tradëscan Codex

Hey folks.

alixtii — Tue, 17 Dec 2019 00:18:07 GMT

So, um, I've been quoted in GQ? This entry was originally posted at https://alixtii.dreamwidth.org/360920.html. There are currently comments there. You can comment there, using Open ID, or here.

Dear Podficcer (ITPE 2019)

alixtii — Mon, 30 Sep 2019 02:10:20 GMT

General:

Likes: Femslash. Female-centric het and gen. M/F/F threesomes. Subtext. Incest pairings, especially sibling incest. Always-a-girl genderswap.

Dislikes: A/B/O -- I mostly gafiated away from fandom before this became a thing and I never learned to appreciate it. Modern/all-human AUs (for historical and/or fantastic fandoms, respectively).

Fandoms:

Arrowverse: Thea Queen, Felicity Smoak, Sara Lance, Caitlin Frost, Moira Queen, Helena Bertinelli, Mia Smoak, Evelyn Sharpe, Lyla Michaels, Lena Luthor, Kara Danvers, Alex Danvers, Sam Arias, Nia Nal.

ASoIaF/GoT: Arya Stark, Sansa Stark, Daenerys Targaryen, Margaery Tyrell, Myrcaella Baratheon, Lyra Mormount, and Shireen Baratheon are all favorites. Cersei Lannister is not. For het pairings, Jon Snow, Robb Stark, Tyrion Lannister, Gendry Baratheon, and Stannis Baratheon would all be acceptable men with which to pair the above ladies.

BtVS: Buffy, Faith, Kennedy, Vi, Darla, Drusilla, Harmony are all favorites. I prefer Spike to Angel when it comes to het.

Firefly: Any permutation of the crew including River and/or Kaylee is a good one.

MCU: Michelle Jones, Liz Allen, Betty Brandt, Darcy Lewis, Jane Foster, Natasha Romanov, Shuri, Carol Danvers, Wanda Maximoff, Jessica Jones. Wacky, off-the-wall pairings welcome.

Pitch Perfect: Bechloe, obviously.

Terminator: Sarah Connor, John Connor, Cameron Phillips, Savannah Weaver, Kate Brewster. For SCC canon, I ship John/Cameron and John/Savannah pretty hard. I haven't seen Salvation and don't plan to because I'm convinced it gets how time travel works in the Terminator-verse wrong. But I liked both Rise of the Machines and GeniSys just fine.

VMars: Veronica Mars, Cindy Mackenzie, Madison Sinclair, Gia Goodman, Lily Kane. I'm not really a big fan of any of Veronica's canon het pairings. I shipped Mac/Cassidy hard before he turned out to be evil, and even a little bit still afterwards.

This entry was originally posted at https://alixtii.dreamwidth.org/360636.html. There are currently comments there. You can comment there, using Open ID, or here.

Narnia: "The Treaty at Hildersent" (Gen, Lucy & Susan)

alixtii — Mon, 03 Sep 2018 00:36:10 GMT

The Treaty at Hildersent (2,108 words) by Alixtii
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Lucy Pevensie, Susan Pevensie, Original Character
Summary: While Lucy is negotiating a treaty, Susan arrives with some distressing news.
A/N: Takes place during The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, sometime after A Horse and His Boy. Lucy is 23 or so in this fic; Susan is 27. A prequel of sorts to my ficlet Sovereignty. Written for fic_corner.

This entry was originally posted at https://alixtii.dreamwidth.org/360233.html. There are currently comments there. You can comment there, using Open ID, or here.

Excerpt(s) from "To Live in Hearts" (Faith/Kennedy)

alixtii — Sun, 19 Jun 2016 02:50:36 GMT

I was cleaning my room and I came across a couple of "lost" pages from To Live in Hearts the fic in my Watcher!verse which really shifts the universe in several major ways (including the death of Buffy, the beginning of Faith/Kennedy, and the first steps towards Dawn/Giles). I wanted to type them up and decided to post them here, since it seems unlikely (but not impossible!) that the entire fic will ever be written.

Kennedy left the confessional of Fr. Marcus' office with a contemplative yet relaxed expression, as if the sacrament's promise of absolution had indeed taken a burden off her shoulders.

*

"There's no indication as of yet that they've uncovered Madelyn's location, but members of the Jhe sisterhood have been found within Cleveland," Fr. Marcus informed them.

"How many?" Faith asked.

The Slayer--a freshman named Maurissa--shrugged. "Tammy and me, we only saw two, but the Jhe, they're like cockroaches; you got one, you've got an infestation."

"Which isn't necessarily indicative of anything," Fr. Marcus pointed out. "It's the Hellmouth during an apocalypse. We should be surprised if the Sisterhood didn't have a presence here right now."

"So what do we do to wipe them out?"

"Nothing," answered Maurissa automatically.

Kennedy sighed. "Why were they asking for advice on how to save the world from a fourteen-year-old in a plaid skirt again, anyway. "Faith? Father?"

"Look," Maurissa interjected, "any coordinated effort to counter the Sisterhood is going to have them wonder why the sudden focus on Cleveland. You've be giving away your hand."

Of course, sometimes the fourteen-year-old in the plaid skirt made the kind of sense that's hard to argue with. "So we're helpless here?

"We'll kill them off as we find them, same as vamps," Faith offered. "But we can't lose track of the fact that our main objective here has to be defensive."

Kennedy nodded with some reluctance. Faith reached across and took her hand in hers. "Look Ken, I know we all got a bad case of cabin fever here--most of all Madelyn herself. But we just gotta trust B' to be able to take care of her end."

"Yeah," agreed Kennedy, not letting go of Faith's hand. "Okay."

"Hey," offered Faith, "how about I leave a couple of the girls behind tonight to watch Madelyn and you come out to patrol with me to kill things together? It'll do wonders for your spirits."

Ken smiled. "Sounds fun."

*

"You come in from the right and I'll go after them from the left. Got it?"

"Got it," Kennedy agreed. She paused. "Faith?"

Faith turned back to her. "Yeah, Ken?"

Kennedy kissed her.

"I was wondering when you would get around to that," Faith said when the kiss was over. "Now let's kick some Jhe ass."

This entry was originally posted at http://alixtii.dreamwidth.org/359327.html. There are currently comments there. You can comment there, using Open ID, or here.

Dear Yuletide Writer 2015

alixtii — Fri, 23 Oct 2015 20:40:12 GMT

Optional details are optional. That said, I like female characters being awesome (which can take many different forms!) and having agency; I like femslash and female friendship; I like fluff and darkfic and pretty much everything in between. I like gen and porn with plot and pretty much everything in between. I like polyamory where the women outnumber the men. I'm fine with noncon, dubcon, incest, and cross-gen. I don't mind experimental uses of tense, POV, or story structure or formatting. I have few squicks and no triggers.

If you're interested in what was going on in my head when I made my requests, read on. . . .

Fandom: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) RPF
Characters: Anna Kendrick, Aubrey Plaza
Request: Friends to lovers. Or friends with benefits. Or people who tolerate each other suprisingly well for people who engage in hatesex as much as they do. Or whatever other potentially difficult-to-classify relationship they might fall into together.

I nominated this as Scott Pilgrim RPF, since that's the most well-known film both Kendrick and Plaza were in together, but feel free to set this at any point in time: past, present, or future.

How is this pairing not already on the archive? They're canonical BFFs! They couldn't get any slashier if they tried, for the simple reason that they clearly are deliberately trying. (Maybe they'd be even slashier if they tried less?)

There's plenty of material for this pairing, starting of course with their own Twitter accounts, AnnaKendrick47</a> and evilhag</a>, but I also want to recommend Kendrick's Vogue photo diary for the 2014 Oscars, and--well, Google is your friend. Trust me, there's plenty of material.

Fandom: Half-Moon Hollow - Molly Harper
Characters: Ophelia Lambert, Georgie Lambert, Gigi Scanlon
Request: The Lambert sisters and Gigi, with emphasis on Ophelia being Ophelia.

Ophelia Lambert is, hands down, my favorite character in this series. One of my bulletproof narrative kinks is the radically autonomous teenager, the adolescent (preferably adolescent girl) who acts as, and in as accepted as, the equal of the adults in the narrative. Obviously Ophelia (and to a lesser extent, Georgie and Gigi) feeds into this kink pretty well. I'm interested in the ways that Ophelia does and doesn't present herself as a teenager--and the ways that role ends up being more true than she would really like. She may be 400 years old, but that doesn't stop her from acting like a petulant child. I don't see her as either a villain or a woobie, but she clearly enjoys being in control and not being in control scares her more than she would ever admit.

If you set your fic after The Dangers of Dating a Rebound Vampire, then it would make sense to focus on Ophelia in college, making new enemies (or maybe even friends?) and trying to heal her relationship with Georgie and Gigi (and of course Jamie). But feel free to set it earlier in canon as well.

Fandom: A Brother's Price - Wen Spencer
Characters: Jerin Whistler, Rennsellaer, Halley, Odelia
Request: Jerin and his wives, post-novel.

I picked Rensellaer, Halley, and Odelia because I had to pick just three, but I love Trini and Lylia too, and would even be interested in seeing more of the younger sisters. All the sisters are great, with their complementary strengths and weaknesses and overall personalities. Halley in particular intrigues me, with her tragic backstory of still getting over her lover who couldn't accept her scarred face (and then left her for Kij!). But there's a lot to love in Odelia's flirty hedonism, Trini's practicality, and Lylia's idealism, too.

I feel like I should say something about worldbuilding here, because I know this fandom has been requested before for Yuletide with worldbuilding prompts. I feel like we can take it for granted that the author, the readers, and the main characters all know that buying and selling men isn't okay. Yes, the way the characters accept the social situation and find their own happy ending within it without disrupting the overall structure can be said to normalize it in ways which are problematic, but sometimes we need to let idfic be idfic. That said, there are a couple of areas of worldbuilding which do interest me:

Homosexuality. It seems fairly clear that, if not lesbianism per se, then at least situational female bisexuality is considered to be normal and accepted in the universe of the novel. Female prostitutes who serve other women are common. Halley has had a bad breakup with a former female lover. Indeed, I read Halley as being fairly high on the Kinsey scale, notwithstanding her real affection for Jerin (I don't think they know each other well enough to really call it love yet) and her being the first of the sisters to bear him a child.

Incest. Incest is still a taboo in the novel's society, but doesn't seem to be nearly as strong a taboo as in the actual world. It's treated more as a sexual indiscretion--something everyone knows happens but which polite people don't talk about--than a fundamental, instinctual prohibition. Eldie Porter "isn't really incestuous fruit" since their parents are closer to cousins/step-siblings than what we might recognize as brother and sister. Indeed, I'm not sure sex between sisters would be recognized as incestuous at all; after all, they're all already making love to the same man, and genetic consanguinity wouldn't be an issue since they can't get each other pregnant.

Religion. There are a lot of references to the gods (who seem to be based on the Greco-Roman pantheon) in the novel, but no one seems particularly devout. The gods' prohibitions (e.g., against adoption) seem to be accepted more due to their pragmatic purpose than out of piety as such. There's also a reference to the Prophets--with the nice touch of a token male prophet--which makes Queensland religiosity an interesting mix of Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, and secularizing elements.

It probably sounds at this point that I just want a big polyamorous incestuous orgy, which--well, I certainly wouldn't say no to that being part of the fic, but I'm also not looking for PWP or curtain fic. Just something which shows Jerin interacting with two or more of the sisters post-novel in a way which reveals character and speaks at least a little bit to the id. What type of intimacy you choose to show is totally up to you; honestly, I tend to just skim over most sex scenes. A bit of political intrigue and/or a domestic conflict between the sisters would be just right to get the fic rolling.

Fandom: Interstellar (2014)
Characters: Amelia Brand, Murphy Cooper
Request: Amelia and Murphy interacting, at any point in canon, twisting canon however much you have to in order to make it happen. Femslash or gen.

I'd like to see Murphy and Amelia interacting, bonding, and/or sexing--pretty much anything which passes the Bechdel test is good with me, femslash or gen or in-between. Feel free to diverge from canon and/or use relativistic effects to play with the ages of the characters as you see fit, although dirtybadwrong cross-gen would be just fine too. You could write a missing scene between Murphy and Amelia before the latter leaves for space, or an AU where Amelia stays behind and acts as mentor to Murphy, or some sort of epistolary romance, and/or have Murphy use science to be waiting for Amelia (with or without Joseph) on Edmunds' planet (which is how I actually expected the movie to end). I just really enjoyed these strong, intelligent characters and wished they had had more time on screen to interact. And that this fandom had more opportunities for femslash, ahem, or even any sort of meaningful female homosocial relationships. (The film itself arguably does pass the Bechdel test, but just barely.)

As with the other prompts, I'm not bothered by incest (and honestly, I can see both Amelia/John and Murphy/Joseph working).
This entry was originally posted at http://alixtii.dreamwidth.org/359111.html. There are currently comments there. You can comment there, using Open ID, or here.

Folgerscest: "Where the Heart Is" (Brother/Sister, 7/8)

alixtii — Thu, 20 Aug 2015 20:06:17 GMT

The penultimate chapter of "Where the Heart Is," complete with the climax everybody's been waiting for (myself most especially)! Whew. Took me long enough. (Remember this fic was supposed to be written for Yuletide 2013.) Now I just need to finish the denoument/conclusion . . . and then I can start thinking about sequels/prequels.

Where the Heart Is (17979 words) by Alixtii
Chapter: 7/8
Fandom: Folgers Holiday Commercial (2009), Folgerscest - Fandom, Original Work, Ghost Soup Infidel Blue RPF
Relationship: Brother/Sister, Folgerscest
Summary: After spending five years in West Africa, a young man returns home to the United States for the holidays. But sometimes home isn't a place so much as it is a person.

The awkward morning after Gwen's drunken proposition. Then, a formalwear New Year's Eve party, and Lexie finally makes her decision.

( Where the Heart Is, 7/8 )

This entry was originally posted at http://alixtii.dreamwidth.org/358888.html. There are currently comments there. You can comment there, using Open ID, or here.

MCU/Avengers: "Maid of Honor" (Natasha & Tony, background Phil/Stephanie)

alixtii — Sun, 09 Nov 2014 00:57:41 GMT

Title: Maid of Honor
Fandom: MCU / The Avengers (Marvel)
Relationships: Natasha Romanov & Tony Stark, with background Phil Coulson/Stephanie Rogers, and mention of past Natasha Romanov/Phil Coulson
Summary: Natasha is the maid of honor at Phil and Stephanie's wedding. Tony tries to console her by quoting Pat Benatar and sharing a bottle of really expensive vodka. It only sort of works, but even that much is a blessing.

( Maid of Honor )

This entry was originally posted at http://alixtii.dreamwidth.org/358523.html. There are currently comments there. You can comment there, using Open ID, or here.

Folgerscest: "Where the Heart Is" (Brother/Sister, 6/8)

alixtii — Fri, 10 Oct 2014 13:52:25 GMT

The antepenultimate chapter of "Where the Heart Is"! I was hoping to have the entire thing finished before this year's Yuletide assignments were sent out. I . . . don't think that's going to happen.

Where the Heart Is (15423 words) by Alixtii
Chapters: 6/8
Fandom: Folgers Holiday Commercial (2009), Folgerscest - Fandom, Original Work, Ghost Soup Infidel Blue
Relationships: Brother/Sister, Folgerscest
Summary: After spending five years in West Africa, a young man returns home to the United States for the holidays. But sometimes home isn't a place so much as it is a person.

Luke and Lexie go to the Henderson's New Years Eve Eve party. But so does Gwen, and drama ensues.

(

[Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<a [...] larger;">') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.]

The antepenultimate chapter of "Where the Heart Is"! I was hoping to have the entire thing finished before this year's Yuletide assignments were sent out. I . . . don't think that's going to happen. <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/1094798/chapters/5388002">Where the Heart Is</a> (15423 words) by <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/users/Alixtii">Alixtii</a> Chapters: 6/8 Fandom: <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/tags/Folgers%20Holiday%20Commercial%20(2009)">Folgers Holiday Commercial (2009)</a>, <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/tags/Folgerscest%20-%20Fandom">Folgerscest - Fandom</a>, <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/tags/Original%20Work">Original Work</a>, <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/tags/Ghost%20Soup%20Infidel%20Blue">Ghost Soup Infidel Blue</a> Relationships: Brother/Sister, Folgerscest Summary: After spending five years in West Africa, a young man returns home to the United States for the holidays. But sometimes home isn't a place so much as it is a person. Luke and Lexie go to the Henderson's New Years Eve Eve party. But so does Gwen, and drama ensues. ( <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/1094798/chapters/5388002>Where the Heart Is, 5/8</a> )

<img src='http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png' alt='[Dreamwidth] ' width='20' height='20' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' />This entry was originally posted at http://alixtii.dreamwidth.org/358144.html. There are currently <a href="http://alixtii.dreamwidth.org/358144.html#comments"><img src="http://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=alixtii&ditemid=358144" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments</a> there. You can <a href="http://alixtii.dreamwidth.org/358144.html?mode=reply">comment there</a>, <a href="http://becomeyourfursona.dreamwidth.org/6438.html">using Open ID</a>, or here.

Dear Yuletide Author 2014

alixtii — Thu, 09 Oct 2014 23:03:45 GMT

(N.B.: Portions of this letter have been lifted from previous years' letters: 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007.)

Thank you for signing up to write a story for me! You're one of a very small group of people who offered to write for one or more of my fandoms and I love you for that alone. All three of my requests this year are repeats, so you can be assured that whatever we matched on and/or you decide to write for me, it'll be something I'm looking forward to very, very much.

If you check out my userinfo, you'll find a 'thon policy which implores that you be true first and foremost to the prompt and your muse, and to consider whether I'd like a story as, at most, a secondary concern. I stand by that, but I also recognize there is a sense that a yuletide story is explicitly a gift in a way which most 'thon fics aren't, so feel free to surf through this journal to get a feel for me, and here's a little bit more, if you are interested, to help you understand how I relate to the specific texts and characters in the fandoms I've requested and what I might like. OTOH, don't be intimitated; this letter might demonstrate that I've thought long and hard about why I want what I want, ~~because I'm full of myself and like to navel-gaze~~ so you can get a feel for my tastes, but the specifics of what I'd like are intentionally vague even in my own mind.

As a reader (and, for that matter, as a writer), I'm perhaps most interested in female characters--in particular, adolescent female characters with agency--and in the relationships between them. I'm also drawn to what I call will-to-poweriness, the adolescent fantasy, the desire to exceed oneself that also draws me to things like superhero comics (one of my fandoms is, indeed, X-Men) and fantasy shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which is my main fandom). Female children and teenagers who prove themselves to be the equals (or betters) to adults because they are just that awesome are some of my favorite people to read about, and I think you can see this in many of my requests. I talk more about my love of radically autonomous young female characters in this post from 2006 and provide more examples of the specific dynamic I like and why I think it rings for me; I go on to talk about incest, but since that's not relevant for any of my requests this year you can feel free to ignore that part.

Beyond that, I like to think I'm easy to write for. I have few squicks--I'm fine with character death, BDSM, mpreg, dubcon, noncon, chan, incest--you name it, I'm probably okay with it. Just please no bashing of my favorite characters. Happy, uplifting fics are good, but so are soul-crushingly depressing ones so long as the pairings and characters get to be awesome. Ambivalent fics where we're not sure whether we should cheer or cry are probably best of all. If I didn't like existentialism and pseudo-nihilism in my fic, I wouldn't be a Joss Whedon fan.

Fandom: The ILLUMINATUS! Trilogy - Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson
Character: Miss Portinari
Request: What is it like for a teenaged girl to be the spiritual leader of the Lief Erikson? Show me Miss Portinari being awesome and wise and a teeanager (with a sex drive) and having fun all while she's at it.
I'm interested in learning more about Miss Portinari. She hits all my kinks: a girl who is both a teen and the spiritual leader of the Lief Erikson, commanding a position of authority and respect while being sexually and spiritually and practically liberated. (Also I sort of love that she is always referred to using the honorific, even if that means we don't know her first name. Assuming of course that her given name isn't actually "Miss"--which I think is a fairly safe assumption to make, especially given her Catholic parents and the fact she was born prior to the Second Vatican Council.) Talk about being will-to-powery! She also reminds me of one of my personal heroes, St. Clare of Assisi: both were teenaged girls from rich Italian families who ran away from home to follow a charismatic spiritual leader and eventually become a spiritual leader and religious authority in her own right.

Pretty much any point in canon would be great, although I would especially like to see some of Miss Portinari after Hagbard appoints her the spiritual leader, and setting it after the Lief Erikson becomes a spaceship in RAW's Schrödinger's Cat trilogy would be just awesome. (For some reason, I have this image of her being the spiritual leader of not only the ship, but also a planet named Fred that the Lief Erikson is in orbit around. Don't ask me where that came from, and I'm not asking you to write it.) But finding out more about the time when she had just joined the crew of the Lief Erikson, and everything was shiny and new and just a little bit scary and intimidating, would be cool too.

Possible questions to answer:
What is it like to have reached enlightenment when your body is still changing and being flooded by hormones--and where do you go from there, when you still have the rest of your life in front of you? (Apparently, in the universe next door she visits a man in prison.)
How does she interact with the rest of the crew, before and/or after her appointment as episkopos? (We know George Dorn was intimidated by her immediately after her elevation. Does he ever get over that? Are there other crewmates who react differently?)
What is it like being the youngest person on the ship, before and/or after her elevation? Does she miss the company of other people her age?
What is her relationship with Hagbard? We know from the appendix that she and Hagbard occasionally have sex (but "never became lovers"); does she have any other partners, and how does she approach those relationships?
What does a day in the life of the episkopos of the Lief Erickson look like? We know that it involves meditation and mentorship, but what else does it involve in actual practice?
Basically I just want to see more of this very cool character we saw relatively little of in canon (and much of what we did see only in an appendix), taking control not only of her own life, but being responsible for the spiritual well-being of an entire submarine.

Fandom: Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm - Kate Douglas Wiggin
Characters: Emma Jane Perkins, Rebecca Randall
Request: The super-'shippy chapter at the end of New Chronicles of Rebecca notwithstanding, these two are so married to each other. I'd like femslash which emphasizes the way they complement each other. Perhaps futurefic where Rebecca the famous poet travels to Paris with Emma Jane at her side as trusty companion?
Emma Jane is the Alice B. Toklas to Rebecca's Gertrude Stein. These two are just so incredibly married that showing them at pretty much any stage of their life would be awesome. You could write a first time, showing their first date or first kiss or first time they had sex, or you could go established relationship because the books already have done everything needed to convince me of them as a couple. You could write a missing scene from the periods of time covered by the two books, or show what happens after the end of the books, or you could write a futurefic like suggested in the prompt above. Anything really goes here, from a small comfortable vignette like those found in New Chronicles of Rebecca to something more serious wrestling with the historical context to something truly wild in which Emma Jane and Rebecca fight off aliens or travel in the TARDIS to something more solidly romantic to PWP where they roleplay in the bedroom. Or all of the above. Just so long as Emma Jane and Rebecca keep that married vibe which is so--unintentionally, of course, or so one assumes--strong in canon. The more femslashy the better, of course!

Feel free to just ignore the het romances gestured towards in canon; I suppose I don't have a problem with Adam Ladd appearing in the fic, since he obviously has been a huge influence in the lives of both Rebecca and Emma Jane, but the focus of the fic should be on the relationship between the two girls.

Interestingly enough, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm actually plays a central role in one of my Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles fics, Some Thing to Watch Over Me, in a way which I think maybe casts light on how I understand the character:
"I loved this book as a kid," [Riley] tells Cameron, who followed her into the bookstore, as she flips through the pages. She remembers hearing it read to her by her parents, before Judgment Day. She remembers carrying it around with her as she hid from the machines, wishing that Aunt Mirandy would protect her from them, or that Mr. Aladdin would give her one of his marvelous gifts, until the book became so dirty and worn it fell apart in her hands. If only she could escape that post-apocalyptic landscape the way Rebecca did Sunnybrook, she had told herself, then she, like Rebecca, would have been able to succeed through sheer virtue and willpower.

[. . .]

She should have known that life, even life before Judgment Day, wouldn't be like Riverboro, the universe bending out of shape just to acknowledge a little girl's awesomeness. But she had allowed herself to hope, to believe that just because Jessie had taken an interest in her, that meant she would be as good as an Aunt Mirandy or Mr. Ladd.
I never did figure out whether we were supposed to think Rebecca's poetry was wonderful, horrible, or in between, but I suppose it doesn't really matter, because the only way to improve is to practice, so even if it does start out horrible she could still become a great poet in later life.

Fandom: That Guy with the Glasses/Channel Awesome
Characters: Nostalgia Chick, Nostalgia Critic, Mara Wilson, Evilina
Request: The aftermath of the Critic's resurrection. Does Mara return to her constant quest for revenge? How does the Chick respond to the loss of her nostalgia monopoly? Work in Evilina somehow, throw in a bunch of OTT meta humor, and stir.
I got into TGWTG after meeting agent_anachronism (who is, of course, one of the core members of Team NChick) at mini_merlin 2009 and subsequently adding her to my friends list. I really enjoyed Nostalgia Chick and soon moved onto other webseries hosted on the site (in particular, Nostalgia Critic, Obscurus Lupa, and those which now fall under the Chez Apocalypse label). I've even written my own fic in this fandom, for Yuletide 2011: Nostalgia Chick Must Die!.

I love the fundamental flawedness and complexity of the Chick and the Critic as fictional characters: their near-sociopathic megalomania, the Critic's existential angst and anger management issues, the Chick's alcoholism and how she's not nearly as enlightened as she thinks she is, etc. But I also love the levels of pathos, drama, and real emotion possible in the TGWTG-verse--just as Doug notes at the end of To Boldly Flee, they've taken on a life of their own.

Mara Wilson's two appearances were of course both awesome, but in the wake of the Critic's resurrection after "The Review Must Go On" I'm left wondering what consequences it would have on Mara's quest for revenge. Would she once again set out attempting to smite him? I do follow Mara on Twitter, so if you want to draw on her personality there for her characterization, that's fine. Or if you want to restrict yourself to just the characterization we get in TGWTG canon (since Mara on Twitter presumably isn't, you know, undead), that's okay too.

And how would Nostalgia Chick fit into it? We haven't really seen her react to the loss of her nostalgia monopoly--but of course, we haven't really seen all that much of her in general since To Boldly Flee, yet alone "The Review Must Go On." I can't really imagine she'd take it any better than RPF!Lindsay did in that fascinating meta-verse we saw in"The Review Must Go On" (which intrigues me quite a bit, I must admit), though. As the Chick notes in the "Matilda" review, calling Chick!Lindsay and the Critic "allies" is a bit strong; so does Lindsay help Mara to take the Critic down? Or does she take her place alongside her fellow producer and sort-of leader against the fury of Mara's vengeance?

As for Evilina, I know I'm not the only one who really enjoyed the character. As awesome as Tamara is, I know I miss Rachel and this character is a large portion of the reason why. The mixture of gleeful childhood innocence and the lingering threat of Satanic fire works really well together, Rachel played her beautifully, and she has some really great chemistry with the Critic. Of course, the whole spawn of Satan thing might mean she has some mutual acquaintances with undead, demonic Mara. Maybe the two of them have already met in the underworld. Maybe Evilina's father has already endorsed Mara's quest, and Evilina is powerless to protect the Critic from Mara without invoking his anger, and is forced to choose.

If you're looking for other characters to include, some of my favorites include Obscurus Lupa, Nella, Drs. Block and Tease (I wonder what happened to them after To Boldly Flee!), the Makeover Fairy, Elisa/Maven, Sursum Ursa, Oancitizen, HyperFanGirl, and Diamanda Hagan (a visit to Haganistan would be amazing). Just please no porn involving Nella, since we've met IRL. (Everyone else is fair game!)

BtVS Podfic: "Tiens, Voilà Dix Sous, pour la Salle-de-Bains" (Buffy/Darla)

alixtii — Sat, 13 Sep 2014 01:27:08 GMT

Title: Tiens, Voilà Dix Sous, pour la Salle-de-Bains
Author: alixtii
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Pairing: Buffy/Darla
Summary: Taking care of one another is what this world is about.
A/N: Set in an AU season 6 where Darla was chipped instead of Spike. Spoilers for everything up to "Once More, With Feeling," say. Title from T.S. Eliot's poem "Dans le Restaurant."

Format: MP3
Length: 0:23:40
Size: 21.9 MB

Links
Original text at AO3.
Download or stream from Google.
Temporary download from Sendspace.

This entry was originally posted at http://alixtii.dreamwidth.org/357801.html. There are currently comments there. You can comment there, using Open ID, or here.

Alice in Wonderland: "To Dream a Dream"

alixtii — Sat, 13 Sep 2014 00:09:57 GMT

So, during the 20 minutes before I left for church on Sunday, I may have committed this fic_corner treat...

To Dream a Dream (469 words) by Alixtii
Fandom: Alice In Wonderland - Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Related Fandoms
Characters: Alice (Alice in Wonderland), Alice Liddell, Original Female Character

Summary: The dreams haven't stopped for Alice Liddell, but she has learned to control them.

( To Dream a Dream )

This entry was originally posted at http://alixtii.dreamwidth.org/357530.html. There are currently comments there. You can comment there, using Open ID, or here.

Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist: "Punk and Circumstance" (Nick/Norah)

alixtii — Tue, 09 Sep 2014 16:28:05 GMT

Here's the story I wrote for fic_corner:

Punk and Circumstance (3607 words) by Alixtii
Fandom: Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist - Rachel Cohn & David Levithan
Relationship: Nick O'Leary/Norah Silverberg
Characters: Nick O'Leary, Norah Silverberg, Caroline (Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist), Tris (Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist), Ira Silverberg

Summary: Nick attends the Sacred Heart graduation ceremonies--and the surprisingly intimate afterparty.

( Punk and Circumstance )

This entry was originally posted at http://alixtii.dreamwidth.org/357174.html. There are currently comments there. You can comment there, using Open ID, or here.

Fic Corner, Yuletide, and Me

alixtii — Fri, 05 Sep 2014 22:57:07 GMT

I left a comment on the Yuletide fandom promotion post advertising Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. I'd also like to promote the other two fandoms I plan on nominating, The Illuminatus! Trilogy and That Guy With the Glasses, but I really don't have the least clue how to go about it. They're not easy fandoms to explain, exactly.

(All three fandoms are ones I made requests for last year, so my Dear Yulewriter Letter ought to be pretty easy to write this year. And whatever won't get written will qualify for the Some Day My Fic Will Come Challenge.)

In the meantime, I'm making last-minute edits to my fic_corner story. Stories are supposed to go live tomorrow, but there's still one participant who hasn't yet gotten a fic written for them, so if you can write something for Dreamdark series - Laini Taylor, Snow Eyes series - Stephanie A. Smith, Toaru Kagaku no Railgun | A Certain Scientific Railgun, or Ultra Maniac then go here; if you can write for Dark Is Rising Sequence – Susan Cooper then go here.

Looking at the fandoms, it looks like the fic_corner story written for me will be either Ender's Game or The A.I. Gang both of which would be awesome.

I had hoped to have completely finished Where the Heart Is by the time Yuletide assignments went out, but that's looking unlikely at this point. Although the antepenultimate chapter is mostly finished at this point, so hopefully I will get a chance to post it at least sometime in the next few weeks. I really do love those wacky incestuous kids. The sequel Where They Have to Take You In and prequel "One's Birthplace, Ratified by Memory" mostly just exist in my brain at this point. As does quite a bit of MCU fic, including a bunch of genderswap fic (Stephanie/Coulson, Toni/Natasha, Clint/girl!Thor) as well as sequels to The Caged Birds (including Coulson/Darcy, Tony/Pepper/Jane, and Bruce/Natasha fics).

This entry was originally posted at http://alixtii.dreamwidth.org/357090.html. There are currently comments there. You can comment there, using Open ID, or here.

Ender's Game Podfic: The Whipping Girl (Peter/Val)

alixtii — Sat, 30 Aug 2014 11:35:20 GMT

Title: The Whipping Girl
Author: alixtii
Fandom: Ender's Game series by Orson Scott Card
Pairing: Peter Wiggin/Valentine Wiggin (note that that is a sibling incest pairing)
Summary: He loves her for her martyrdom.
A/N: Set in an AU where Val didn't leave to go with Ender but stayed with Peter instead

Format: MP3
Length: 0:06:37
Size: 6.41 MB

Links
Original text at AO3.
Download or stream from Google.
Temporary download from Sendspace.

This entry was originally posted at http://alixtii.dreamwidth.org/356830.html. There are currently comments there. You can comment there, using Open ID, or here.

headdesk

alixtii — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 20:00:37 GMT

So I'm working on the antepenultimate chapter of Where the Heart Is and I just found out that Côte d’Ivoire is in the northern hemisphere.

I went back over the previously posted chapters and I don't think I actually wrote anything incorrect. The 2nd sentence of the fic says "the very notion of a White Christmas seems more than a little alien" but that'd still be true no matter what.

But, still. Obviously with a fic like this one worries about being unintentionally appropriative--or at least more so than the source canon itself commits one to--but it never occurred to me that I might put a country in the wrong frakking hemisphere.

Oh, well. Disaster averted.

This entry was originally posted at http://alixtii.dreamwidth.org/356401.html. There are currently comments there. You can comment there, using Open ID, or here.

Dear Fic Corner Scribbler

alixtii — Sat, 21 Jun 2014 23:47:51 GMT

Hey there!

I love children's lit because it is so what I call will-to-poweriness or the adolescent fantasy, as I discuss at length in this post from 2006. I'm particularly fond of female protagonists, and female children and teenagers who prove themselves to be the equals (or betters) to adults because they are just that awesome are some of my favorite people to read about, and kid's lit delivers with many great examples.

I have few squicks--I'm fine with character death, BDSM, mpreg, dubcon, noncon, chan, incest--you name it, I'm probably okay with it. Just please no bashing of my favorite characters. Happy, uplifting fics are good, but so are soul-crushingly depressing ones so long as the pairings and characters get to be awesome. Ambivalent fics where we're not sure whether we should cheer or cry are probably best of all. If I didn't like existentialism and pseudo-nihilism in my fic, I wouldn't be a Joss Whedon fan.

You really don't have to worry about ruining my childhood or anything like that.

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm

The super-'shippy chapter at the end of New Chronicles of Rebecca notwithstanding, Rebecca and Emma Jane are so married to each other. I'd love to see femslash which emphasizes the way they complement each other. Perhaps futurefic where Rebecca the famous poet travels to Paris with Emma Jane at her side as trusty companion?

Emma Jane is the Alice B. Toklas to Rebecca's Gertrude Stein. These two are just so incredibly married that showing them at pretty much any stage of their life would be awesome. You could write a first time, showing their first date or first kiss or first time they had sex, or you could go established relationship because the books already have done everything needed to convince me of them as a couple. You could write a missing scene from the periods of time covered by the two books, or show what happens after the end of the books, or you could write a futurefic like suggested in the prompt above. Anything really goes here, from a small comfortable vignette like those found in New Chronicles of Rebecca to something more serious wrestling with the historical context to something truly wild in which Emma Jane and Rebecca fight off aliens or travel in the TARDIS to something more solidly romantic to PWP where they roleplay in the bedroom. Or all of the above. Just so long as Emma Jane and Rebecca keep that married vibe which is so--unintentionally, of course, or so one assumes--strong in canon. The more femslashy the better, of course!

Feel free to just ignore the het romances gestured towards in canon; I suppose I don't have a problem with Adam Ladd appearing in the fic, since he obviously has been a huge influence in the lives of both Rebecca and Emma Jane, but I'd prefer for the romance and focus of the fic should be between the two girls.

I also 'ship Jane/Miranda Sawyercest, but not only is Emma Jane/Rebecca closer to my heart, but it's probably also easier to write and less squicky to the world at large.

The Squad

I was pimped into this fandom by fox1013 and you can read my original squeeful reactions to the first book here. I ILL'd the books at first but now own both of the audiobooks narrated by Amanda Ronconi.

I love all the characters I nominated (and most of the ones I didn't) and any chance to spend some time with them would be great. Femslash would be great, especially Toby/Chloe, Toby/Tara, or Brittany/Tiffany, because let's face it, part of the appeal (at least for me) is all of the homoerotic overtones between the cheerleader spies. I'm also interested in het involving Noah, either Noah/Lucy or Noah/Brittany/Tiffany, especially from Toby's POV (although from the POV of one of the other squad members would be interesting, too).

Maybe Toby could have Tara over for dinner, only to find out that Noah has also invited Lucy? I'd love to see the Klein parents get involved too.

If you want to do something more plotty or action-adventurey, that's fine too, as long as there's still a large character-driven element, even if it's not romantic in nature.

The only thing I'm really not interested in is het involving Toby or anything involving Jack Peyton.

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist

I'm interested in Nick and Norah the morning after. Or possibly the week after. Or a year after. (Although my preference would be closer to the night of the book's event, when the attraction was still shiny and new and a little bit overwhelming.) Pretty much any follow-up at all would be great to see the transformation of Nick and Norah's magical night into the hard work of a relationship.

I included Tris in my nominations because she's obviously going to be a factor in at least Norah's life until graduation, and you really can't expect a femslasher to not read at least a little bit into a canonical f/f kiss. So a hot Nick/Norah/Tris threesome is totally on the table, I'm just saying, even if I'm not at all emotionally invested in Tris the way I am in Nick and in Norah.

The Neverending Story

The theodicy of Phantásien/Fantasia/Fantastica. What does the Empress think of Xayide and her battle? How do these two interact with each other when they meet? Femslash, whether hatesex or something with more complicated power dynamics, would be awesome here, but so would thoughtful gen.

I thought up this prompt years ago, but I don't think I ever actually asked for it in anything until now.

Ender's Game

I love to see Peter and Valentine interacting and taking over the world, whether when they are kids before Val leaves Earth or in an AU where Valentine stays for whatever reason. Incest is great, but I bring my own subtext so just seeing them working together is usually fine, especially if their relationship is highly cathective (as it really ought to be, given canon) even explicitly romantic or sexual!

This is a fandom I've dipped my pen into a few times, always with the focus being on the relationship between Peter and Valentine, and I received the lovely story Six Dances in Yuletide 2006 written to what was basically this prompt, but I still love these two siblings so much and can never get enough of them together.

But this time I nominated Petra Arkanian as well, because she's one of my favorite characters as well, and I hate how Card (among other things) never quite lets her come into her own. I 'ship both Peter/Petra and Valentine/Petra (and, of course, Peter/Valentine/Petra) but if you include her I'd love to see her as strong and independent regardless of what relationships she may or may not be in, rather than being primarily defined by the men in her life. Possibly as Strategos under Peter's Hegemony?

The A.I. Gang

I wrote a story in this fandom for Yuletide 2010, and had a blast. I especially love the girls, Rachel and Wendy, and would love anything where I'd get to see the gang (in whole or part) being all will-to-powery and super-geniusy. I mean, the series is escapist adolescent fantasy wish fulfillment and doesn't pretend to be anything else, so why not embrace it?

I'd love to see them a few years after the events of the books, when they're a bit older and need to face somewhat more adult situations.

I 'ship Rachel/Roger, Rachel/Wendy, and Wendy/Ray.

This entry was originally posted at http://alixtii.dreamwidth.org/356256.html. There are currently comments there. You can comment there, using Open ID, or here.

Pitch Perfect: "They Don't Talk About It" (Beca & Kimmy Jin)

alixtii — Sat, 31 May 2014 18:04:28 GMT

They Don't Talk About It (299 words) by Alixtii
Fandom: Pitch Perfect (2012)
Relationships: Kimmy Jin & Beca Mitchell
Characters: Beca Mitchell, Kimmy Jin
Additional Tags: POV Female Character, Female Friendship, Roommates, Past Tense, Introverts
Summary: They don't talk about being roommates again their sophomore year, because--if you hadn't noticed--Beca and Kimmy Jin never talk to each other about anything if they can help it, unless it is to insult or snark at each other.

( They Don't Talk About It )

This entry was originally posted at http://alixtii.dreamwidth.org/355955.html. There are currently comments there. You can comment there, using Open ID, or here.

Folgerscest: "Where the Heart Is" (5/8)

alixtii — Mon, 05 May 2014 16:02:11 GMT

At long last, Chapter 5 of "Where the Heart Is" is up!

Where the Heart Is (11813 words) by Alixtii
Chapters: 5/8
Fandom: Folgers Holiday Commercial (2009), Folgerscest - Fandom, Original Work, Ghost Soup Infidel Blue
Relationships: Brother/Sister, Folgerscest
Summary: After spending five years in West Africa, a young man returns home to the United States for the holidays. But sometimes home isn't a place so much as it is a person.

Containing ice skating, a traumatic head injury, a dream sequence, a walk in the park, a meal at a fancy French restaurant, and hot car sex!

This entry was originally posted at http://alixtii.dreamwidth.org/355839.html. There are currently comments there. You can comment there, using Open ID, or here.

Roundup: 2013 in Fanfic

alixtii — Sat, 04 Jan 2014 14:00:02 GMT

In addition to my two Yuletide fics, Where the Heart Is (Folgerscest) and Eternal Recurrence (Avalon High), I also wrote two other fics in 2013:

Stringing the Labyrinth (A Watcher's Remix), a remix of Valyssia's fic Walk About written for buffy_remix 2013;

and The Caged Birds, my sequel to my MCU/XMM crossover Four Times Tony Stark Met Erik Lensherr (And One Time He Didn't).

This entry was originally posted at http://alixtii.dreamwidth.org/355427.html. There are currently comments there. You can comment there, using Open ID, or here.

Yuletide Reveals

alixtii — Thu, 02 Jan 2014 02:10:49 GMT

So for Yuletide 2013, I wrote two fics. My main assignment was Where the Heart Is (Folgerscest) for [Unknown LJ tag], and I wrote Eternal Recurrence (Avalon High) as a treat for [Unknown LJ tag].

I got the idea for "Where the Heart Is" during last year's Yuletide, and desperately wanted to receive the Folgerscest assignment this year because I knew my idea was too ambitious for me to undertake it without being assigned it. Even as it was, I was forced to scale it back somewhat and only posted three chapters, hoping they could stand alone as a somewhat self-contained unit. My recipient did express interest in reading more when I completed it, though, so even before reveals happened I posted the fourth chapter, which is one of my favorites, and at this point I fully plan on writing the full eight chapters my original idea called for.

As of this writing, I have over 7K words posted to AO3, which if I may say so myself is pretty impressive considering the source canon is about 45 seconds long.

My original idea for "Where the Heart Is" was pretty simple: what if the brother had been away in West Africa for several years instead of months, and what if he asked his sister to go back to Africa with him? Percolating in my mind for a year meant that many little details began to develop and enrich the original premise, and I knew I would have enough material to fill eight chapters, one covering each of the eight days from Christmas Day to New Years Day. This became even more true as I began writing: the cousin Gwen, for example, was a relatively late addition, inspired by the Gwen Stacey debacle.

As I was preparing my sign-ups and reading letters, I was preparing possible fics I could write, any one of which I could write as a main assignment and/or a treat. I wanted to write Folgerscest as my main assignment desperately, but I had several different fic ideas in different fandoms ready to write: a Cinderella genderfuck piece, a Little Mermaid f/f fix-it, a Honor Harrington casefile, a Belle/Aurora college AU, etc. Many of these are started and may be completed at some future point.

One fic I more or less finished even before assignments went out, however, was "Eternal Recurrence." I enjoyed the Disney Channel movie Avalon High just as much as r [Unknown LJ tag] did, and wanted to see more fanfic for much the same reasons. In particular, though, I shipped Allie/Jen, because I'm a femslasher and Arthur/Gwen is already canon. So one night at work an idea for a fic came to mind, and by the time I got home I had it pretty much all worked out in my head, from the use of the toy lightsaber to slice a watermelon to the game of truth and dare around the campfire. I immediately typed it all up (sans the flashback, which I filled in right before the deadline) when I got home, and then put it on the back-burner as I continued to work on "Where the Heart Is" and my other treat ideas.

I'd be interested in writing a continuation of "Eternal Recurrence," too, where Allie and Jen really need to come to terms with being married in a past life and in which Nina Mallory (briefly mentioned in my fic) is revealed to indeed be Nimue, but I'm definitely going to focus on finishing the expanded version of "Where the Heart Is" first.

Where the Heart Is (7194 words) for [Unknown LJ tag]
by Alixtii

Chapters: 4/8
Fandom: Folgers Holiday Commercial (2009) and Folgerscest - Fandom
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Choose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Brother/Sister, folgerscest
Characters: Brother - Character, Sister, Father, Mother, Original Characters, Semi-Original Characters - Character
Additional Tags: Sibling Incest, Brother-Sister Relationships, Cousins, Homecoming, Leaving Home, Present Tense, POV Third Person Limited, Christmas, Christmas Morning, Christmas Presents, Christmas Dinner, Holidays, Family Drama, Dysfunctional Family, Family Secrets, Secret Relationship, Forbidden Love, Hetcest, yuleporn, Het, Folgerscest - Freeform, Shower Sex, Bathroom Sex, Television Watching, Watching Movies Together, Romance, Bathing/Washing, Difficult Decisions, Parent-Child Relationship, Cousin-Cousin Relationship, Yuletide 2013, Coffee, Card Games, United States, West Africa, Slow Build, Skype, Male Friendship, Old Friends, Reuniting with Friends, Poker, Rummy, Roman Catholicism, Catholic Guilt, Catholic Characters, POV Male Character, POV: Brother

Summary:

After spending five years in West Africa, a young man returns home to the United States for the holidays. But sometimes home isn't a place so much as it is a person.

Eternal Recurrence (1220 words) for amathela
by Alixtii

Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Avalon High (2010)
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Choose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Allie Pennington/Will Wagner, Lance Benwick/Jen, Allie Pennington/Jen, Guinevere/Arthur Pendragon, Guinevere/Lancelot du Lac
Characters: Allie Pennington, Will Wagner, Miles (Avalon High), Lance Benwick, Jen (Avalon High), Arthur Pendragon, Guinevere (Arthurian)
Additional Tags: Truth or Dare, Campfires, Watermelons, Past Lives, Underage Drinking, Kissing, POV Female Character, POV Third Person Limited, Past Tense, Plastic Lightsaber Toy, Excalibur, First Kiss

Summary:

A campfire, a six-pack, a watermelon, a game, and two first kisses.

This entry was originally posted at http://alixtii.dreamwidth.org/355152.html. There are currently comments there. You can comment there, using Open ID, or here.

Yuletide is here!

alixtii — Thu, 26 Dec 2013 16:08:10 GMT

So yesterday was Dec. 25, which means fic! I got Ce Sera Serra, a plotty Chloe/Riley/Andi fic for Serra Elinson's YA paranormal romance Awoken.

I also wrote two fics this year. Feel free to guess below; comments are screened. I'll unscreen comments which aren't guesses unless you tell me not to.

This entry was originally posted at http://alixtii.dreamwidth.org/354920.html. There are currently comments there. You can comment there, using Open ID, or here.

Dear Yuletide Writer 2013

alixtii — Fri, 11 Oct 2013 23:23:08 GMT

(N.B.: Portions of this letter have been lifted from previous years' letters: 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007.)

Thank you for signing up to write a story for me! You're one of a very small group of people who offered to write for one or more of my fandoms (usually I give the stats, but what with bucket offers not showing up this year, I won't) and I love you for that alone.

If you check out my userinfo, you'll find a 'thon policy which implores that you be true first and foremost to the prompt and your muse, and to consider whether I'd like a story as, at most, a secondary concern. I stand by that, but I also recognize there is a sense that a yuletide story is explicitly a gift in a way which most 'thon fics aren't, so feel free to surf through this journal to get a feel for me, and here's a little bit more, if you are interested, to help you understand how I relate to the specific texts and characters in the fandoms I've requested and what I might like. OTOH, don't be intimitated; this letter might demonstrate that I've thought long and hard about why I want what I want, ~~because I'm full of myself and like to navel-gaze~~ so you can get a feel for my tastes, but the specifics of what I'd like are intentionally vague even in my own mind.

As a reader (and, for that matter, as a writer), I'm perhaps most interested in female characters--in particular, adolescent female characters with agency--and in the relationships between them. I'm also drawn to what I call will-to-poweriness, the adolescent fantasy, the desire to exceed oneself that also draws me to things like superhero comics (one of my fandoms is, indeed, X-Men) and fantasy shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which is my main fandom). Female children and teenagers who prove themselves to be the equals (or betters) to adults because they are just that awesome are some of my favorite people to read about, and I think you can see this in many of my requests. I talk more about my love of radically autonomous young female characters in this post from 2006 and provide more examples of the specific dynamic I like and why I think it rings for me; I go on to talk about incest, but since that's not relevant for any of my requests this year you can feel free to ignore that part.

Beyond that, I like to think I'm easy to write for. I have few squicks--I'm fine with character death, BDSM, mpreg, dubcon, noncon, chan, incest--you name it, I'm probably okay with it. Just please no bashing of my favorite characters. Happy, uplifting fics are good, but so are soul-crushingly depressing ones so long as the pairings and characters get to be awesome. Ambivalent fics where we're not sure whether we should cheer or cry are probably best of all. If I didn't like existentialism and pseudo-nihilism in my fic, I wouldn't be a Joss Whedon fan.

Fandom: The ILLUMINATUS! Trilogy - Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson
Character: Miss Portinari
Request: What is it like for a teenaged girl to be the spiritual leader of the Lief Erikson? Show me Miss Portinari being awesome and wise and a teeanager (with a sex drive) and having fun all while she's at it.
I'm interested in learning more about Miss Portinari. She hits all my kinks: a girl who is both a teen and the spiritual leader of the Lief Erikson, commanding a position of authority and respect while being sexually and spiritually and practically liberated. (Also I sort of love that she is always referred to using the honorific, even if that means we don't know her first name. Assuming of course that her given name isn't actually "Miss"--which I think is a fairly safe assumption to make, especially given her Catholic parents and the fact she was born prior to the Second Vatican Council.) Talk about being will-to-powery!

Pretty much any point in canon would be great, although I would especially like to see some of Miss Portinari after Hagbard appoints her the spiritual leader, and setting it after the Lief Erikson becomes a spaceship in RAW's Schrödinger's Cat trilogy would be just awesome. (For some reason, I have this image of her being the spiritual leader of not only the ship, but also a planet named Fred that the Lief Erikson is in orbit around. Don't ask me where that came from. And I'm not asking you to write it.) But finding out more about the time when she had just joined the crew of the Lief Erikson would be cool too.

What is it like to have reached enlightenment when your body is still changing and being flooded by hormones--and where do you go from there, when you still have the rest of your life in front of you? (Apparently, in the universe next door she visits a man in prison.) How does she interact with the rest of the crew, before and/or after her appointment as episkopos? (We know George Dorn was intimidated by her immediately after her elevation.) Does she miss the company of other people her age? What is her relationship with Hagbard? We know from the appendix that she and Hagbard occasionally have sex (but "never became lovers"); does she have any other partners, and how does she approach those relationships? Basically I just want to see more of this very cool character we saw relatively little of in canon (and much of what we did see only in an appendix), taking control not only of her own life, but being responsible for the spiritual well-being of an entire submarine.

Fandom: Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm - Kate Douglas Wiggan
Characters: Emma Jane Perkins, Rebecca Randall
Request: The super-'shippy chapter at the end of New Chronicles of Rebecca notwithstanding, these two are so married to each other. I'd like femslash which emphasizes the way they complement each other. Perhaps futurefic where Rebecca the famous poet travels to Paris with Emma Jane at her side as trusty companion?
Emma Jane is the Alice B. Toklas to Rebecca's Gertrude Stein. These two are just so incredibly married that showing them at pretty much any stage of their life would be awesome. You could write a first time, showing their first date or first kiss or first time they had sex, or you could go established relationship because the books already have done everything needed to convince me of them as a couple. You could write a missing scene from the periods of time covered by the two books, or show what happens after the end of the books, or you could write a futurefic like suggested in the prompt above. Anything really goes here, from a small comfortable vignette like those found in New Chronicles of Rebecca to something more serious wrestling with the historical context to something truly wild in which Emma Jane and Rebecca fight off aliens or travel in the TARDIS to something more solidly romantic to PWP where they roleplay in the bedroom. Or all of the above. Just so long as Emma Jane and Rebecca keep that married vibe which is so--unintentionally, of course, or so one assumes--strong in canon. The more femslashy the better, of course!

Feel free to just ignore the het romances gestured towards in canon; I suppose I don't have a problem with Adam Ladd appearing in the fic, since he obviously has been a huge influence in the lives of both Rebecca and Emma Jane, but the romance and focus of the fic should be between the two girls.

Interestingly enough, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm actually plays a central role in one of my Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles fics, Some Thing to Watch Over Me, in a way which I think maybe casts light on how I understand the character:
"I loved this book as a kid," she tells Cameron, who followed her into the bookstore, as she flips through the pages. She remembers hearing it read to her by her parents, before Judgment Day. She remembers carrying it around with her as she hid from the machines, wishing that Aunt Mirandy would protect her from them, or that Mr. Aladdin would give her one of his marvelous gifts, until the book became so dirty and worn it fell apart in her hands. If only she could escape that post-apocalyptic landscape the way Rebecca did Sunnybrook, she had told herself, then she, like Rebecca, would have been able to succeed through sheer virtue and willpower.

[. . .]

She should have known that life, even life before Judgment Day, wouldn't be like Riverboro, the universe bending out of shape just to acknowledge a little girl's awesomeness. But she had allowed herself to hope, to believe that just because Jessie had taken an interest in her, that meant she would be as good as an Aunt Mirandy or Mr. Ladd.

Fandom: Awoken - Serra Elinson
Characters: Andromeda Slate, Bree Fifan, Chloe Bay, Scarlett Epistola
Request: Femslash or gen focusing on the female-to-female relationships.
To say that Elinsen's novel leaves plenty of room for fanfiction is probably something of an understatement. Her characterizations (Uncle Neil included, when you get down to it) are admittedly not the most fleshed-out ones in the world. Andromeda Slate in particular is essentially a Rebecca Randall (or a Sara Crewe, etc.) in the hands of a lesser writer not quite capable of pulling her off. Rebecca shines off the page so brightly from her first appearance that we don't quite notice that she hasn't technically earned the good things to come to her. Whereas Andromeda is such a blank slate--ahem--that we can't not notice that fact, unless we've successfully placed ourselves in her shoes, in which case we don't want to.

That said, there's a lot of potential in the female characters Elinsen gives us for the fic writer to take advantage of. Chloe doesn't appear for most of the novel, but from the brief appearance she does make you can tell she's awesome--most certainly more so than her brother or Andromeda--and I wouldn't mind the chance of getting to see more of her. And I mean that in more than one sense.

Not that Andromeda herself is beyond redemption by any means. I feel that in the hands of the right fic author, I can easily be convinced that Andi really is just as awesome as the universe she inhabits seems to think she is. So if you can show her taking charge of her life and actual earning her status as a special snowflake and exhibiting some agency--well, that would be pretty darn cool. Especially if said agency involves her kissing other girls.

Much like Anna Kendrick's character in Twilight (and let's face it, her scenes are the best part of that series, even if I do enjoy the whole more or less unironically), Bridget seems to be the sane person in a world gone mad--and because the world has gone mad, her reason ends up being dead wrong because it fails to account how reality is going to warp to account for Andromeda's intrinsic specialness and the power of her great love. Because of all this, I think her character would be interesting to explore further, as we see her interact more with Andi, Chloe, and/or Scarlett. Just no fat-shaming, please.

Getting Scarlett Epistola into the mix is more complicated, I recognize, as she's MIA at the end of the book. If inserting her into the fic becomes too complicated, I give you permission to leave her out, but I do think she provides some interesting options for interacting with the other female characters, and I'd enjoy seeing her turn her sex appeal onto one of the girls.

Both femslash (using any of the possible permutations of characters up to and including foursome orgy) and gen would be great. I don't mind het in and of itself, and obviously there are a couple of canonical het relationships that need to be dealt with (the book is a paranormal romance, after all), but I just find the male characters in the book fundamentally boring. So any antipathy I feel is toward Riley and Vivek rather than het as a genre (which I love and have written many, many times). On the other hand, I wouldn't exactly object to Chloe/Riley, or to Chloe/Riley/Andi.

Despite my criticisms, my enjoyment of the novel is largely unironic--what can I say, I enjoy self-indulgent wish-fulfillment--so don't feel the need to write intentionally bad prose or dialogue in an attempt to parody Elinsen's style (such as it is).

Fandom: That Guy with the Glasses/Channel Awesome
Characters: Nostalgia Chick, Nostalgia Critic, Mara Wilson, Evilina
Request: The aftermath of the Critic's resurrection. Does Mara return to her constant quest for revenge? How does the Chick respond to the loss of her nostalgia monopoly? Work in Evilina somehow, throw in a bunch of OTT meta humor, and stir.
I got into TGWTG after meeting agent_anachronism (who is, of course, one of the core members of Team NChick) at mini_merlin 2009 and subsequently adding her to my friends list. I really enjoyed Nostalgia Chick and soon moved onto other webseries hosted on the site (in particular, Nostalgia Critic, Obscurus Lupa, and those which now fall under the Chez Apocalypse label). I've even written my own fic in this fandom, for Yuletide 2011: Nostalgia Chick Must Die!.

I love the fundamental flawedness and complexity of the Chick and the Critic as fictional characters: their near-sociopathic megalomania, the Critic's existential angst and anger management issues, the Chick's alcoholism and how she's not nearly as enlightened as she thinks she is, etc. But I also love the levels of pathos, drama, and real emotion possible in the TGWTG-verse--just as Doug notes at the end of To Boldly Flee, they've taken on a life of their own.

Mara Wilson's two appearances were of course both awesome, but in the wake of the Critic's resurrection after "The Review Must Go On" I'm left wondering what consequences it would have on Mara's quest for revenge. Would she once again set out attempting to smite him? I do follow Mara on Twitter, so if you want to draw on her personality there for her characterization, that's fine. Or if you want to restrict yourself to just the characterization we get in TGWTG canon (since Mara on Twitter presumably isn't, you know, undead), that's okay too.

And how would Nostalgia Chick fit into it? We haven't really seen her react to the loss of her nostalgia monopoly--but of course, we haven't really seen all that much of her in general since To Boldly Flee, yet alone "The Review Must Go On." I can't really imagine she'd take it any better than RPF!Lindsay did in that fascinating meta-verse we saw in"The Review Must Go On" (which intrigues me quite a bit, I must admit), though. As the Chick notes in the "Matilda" review, calling Chick!Lindsay and the Critic "allies" is a bit strong; so does Lindsay help Mara to take the Critic down? Or does she take her place alongside her fellow producer and sort-of leader against the fury of Mara's vengeance?

As for Evilina, I know I'm not the only one who really enjoys the character. The mixture of gleeful childhood innocence and the lingering threat of Satanic fire works really well together, Rachel plays her beautifully, and she has some really great chemistry with the Critic. Of course, the whole spawn of Satan thing might mean she has some mutual acquaintances with undead, demonic Mara. Maybe the two of them have already met in the underworld. Maybe Evilina's father has already endorsed Mara's quest, and Evilina is powerless to protect the Critic from Mara without invoking his anger, and is forced to choose.

If you're looking for other characters to include, some of my favorites include Lupa, Nella, Drs. Block and Tease (I wonder what happened to them after To Boldly Flee!), the Makeover Fairy, Elisa/Maven, and Diamanda Hagan.

Yuletide Noms, Revisited

alixtii — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 02:00:12 GMT

So I decided to ditch my Tart nomination, in favor of a slate of nominations which now looks like this:

?! Illuminatus! Trilogy - Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson :

Characters
- ?! Miss Portinari
✔ Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm - Kate Douglas Wiggan :

Characters
- ✔ Rebecca Randall
- ✔ Emma Jane Perkins
✔ That Guy with the Glasses/Channel Awesome :

Characters
- ✔ Nostalgia Critic
- ✔ Nostalgia Chick
- ✔ Mara Wilson (That Guy with the Glasses/Channel Awesome)
- ✔ Evilina (That Guy with the Glasses/Channel Awesome)
?! Awoken - Serra Elinsen :

Characters
- ?! Bree (Awoken)
- ?! Andromeda Slate
- ?! Scarlett Epistola
- ?! Chloe Bay

This entry was originally posted at http://alixtii.dreamwidth.org/354271.html. There are currently comments there. You can comment there, using Open ID, or here.

Yuletide Noms 2013

alixtii — Sat, 21 Sep 2013 18:46:20 GMT

As of this writing, my nominations for Yuletide are:

Illuminatus! Trilogy - Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson :

Characters
- ?! Miss Portinari
?! Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm - Kate Douglas Wiggan :

Characters
- ?! Rebecca Randall
- ?! Emma Jane Perkins
?! Tart (2001) :

Characters
- ?! Cat Storm
- ?! Eloise Logan
- ?! Grace Bailey
- ?! Heather von Strum
?! Awoken - Serra Elinsen :

Characters
- ?! Bree (Awoken)
- ?! Andromeda Slate
- ?! Scarlett Epistola
- ?! Chloe Bay

Comments, questions, requests?

This entry was originally posted at http://alixtii.dreamwidth.org/353865.html. There are currently comments there. You can comment there, using Open ID, or here.

Yuletide Noms!

alixtii — Tue, 17 Sep 2013 21:23:50 GMT

Yuletide nominations are upon us! That means its time for my annual post where I solicit suggestions as to which of my options as recorded in this list I ought to nominate. As in many years past, my nominating The ILLUMINATUS! Trilogy is pretty much certain, but everything else is at least potentially up for grabs.

I've made a few additions to my list of possible suggestions, so you might want to take a look at it. I'd especially appreciate it if you could provide any needed corrections for character names, since many of the books I added I only own in audiobook and don't always remember the last, and in some cases even the first, names of the character. I know The Squad in particular is in some disarray. *eyes fox1013*

Again, the list is here.
This entry was originally posted at http://alixtii.dreamwidth.org/353537.html. There are currently comments there. You can comment there, using Open ID, or here.

The Tradëscan Codex

Hey folks.

Dear Podficcer (ITPE 2019)

Narnia: "The Treaty at Hildersent" (Gen, Lucy & Susan)

Excerpt(s) from "To Live in Hearts" (Faith/Kennedy)

Dear Yuletide Writer 2015

Folgerscest: "Where the Heart Is" (Brother/Sister, 7/8)

MCU/Avengers: "Maid of Honor" (Natasha & Tony, background Phil/Stephanie)

Folgerscest: "Where the Heart Is" (Brother/Sister, 6/8)

Dear Yuletide Author 2014

BtVS Podfic: "Tiens, Voilà Dix Sous, pour la Salle-de-Bains" (Buffy/Darla)

Alice in Wonderland: "To Dream a Dream"

Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist: "Punk and Circumstance" (Nick/Norah)

Fic Corner, Yuletide, and Me

Ender's Game Podfic: The Whipping Girl (Peter/Val)

*headdesk*

Dear Fic Corner Scribbler

Pitch Perfect: "They Don't Talk About It" (Beca & Kimmy Jin)

Folgerscest: "Where the Heart Is" (5/8)

Roundup: 2013 in Fanfic

Yuletide Reveals

Yuletide is here!

Dear Yuletide Writer 2013

Yuletide Noms, Revisited

?! Illuminatus! Trilogy - Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson :

Characters

✔ Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm - Kate Douglas Wiggan :

Characters

✔ That Guy with the Glasses/Channel Awesome :

Characters

?! Awoken - Serra Elinsen :

Characters

Yuletide Noms 2013

Illuminatus! Trilogy - Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson :

Characters

?! Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm - Kate Douglas Wiggan :

Characters

?! Tart (2001) :

Characters

?! Awoken - Serra Elinsen :

Characters

Yuletide Noms!

headdesk