trick with a knife

Yuletide!

2017-10-09T03:12:31Z

Oh man, it's Yuletide time already!

To my author, it's important to me that you have fun, so if there's anything in my sign-up or letter that you find obnoxious or whatever please feel free to toss it out the window and go with what you need. Read as much as you need & want to and no more :) I will be very happy with anything in my requested pairings/characters, so if the muse takes you in a different direction from my prompts and letter, please do just go with it.

General Likes
- For the purposes of Yuletide, hopeful (or outright happy) endings are my jam. I would prefer for all of my requested characters to still be alive at the end of the story. I don't mind if the story goes in a darker or angstier direction before that, though (in fact I quite like it).
- I love many of the classic slash tropes, especially fake dating, wake up married, kidfic, emotional misunderstandings, pining. Wacky dilemma tropes like bodyswap, sudden mind reading, cursed to tell the truth, etc are also really fun for me.
- breakup-makeup/getting back together stories are the greatest trope of all time. I love the agony of the break-up and then the cautious learning to trust again.
- I like a range of different tones, many different styles of AU, etc. I like reading stuff close to the tone of whichever canon and I like reading stuff that takes those characters and puts them in stories of different tones - darker, lighter, different contexts, pornier, etc
- I love canon-divergence AUs where one thing happened differently and then ...
- If the porn muse takes you, go with it with my blessing. My significant squicks are bloodplay and scat, and although I love noncon I think probably not for the fandoms I'm requesting this year. Dubcon is not a squick.

General Dislikes
- I don't enjoy rape recovery as a plotpoint
- Deathfic, sickfic, and H/C are also things I would prefer not to receive.

This year I was a little bit more effusive in my sign-up so don't feel the need to add too much to my requests, and this section basically replicates my sign-up.

Stardew Valley
Haley, Penny, Sam, Elliott

First off, I absolutely struggled to pick characters for my sign-up, so please, if my requests/letter inspire you to write something similar about a character I didn't request (especially any of the characters available to date/marry), feel free to write that story! Also, you don't have to struggle to work all four characters here in; if only one or a couple feel right to you, do that.

I adore the feeling you get in Stardew Valley that beneath every semi-stereotypical tiny sketch of a character there are actually deeply layered personalities and relationships, dealing with PTSD, depression, feeling like they don't have worthy skills, feeling unloved, feeling neglected, the desire to get out and make something of yourself but not the knowledge (or, perhaps, ability, financial or otherwise) to do so. I would love anything that explored some of these layers in the young people of Stardew Valley.

I am especially fond of slash and femslash stories because it's just such a joy to play a game where I can romance everyone without worrying about gender but I'll like any story that takes these characters and their dilemmas seriously, like is there a solution for Penny's unhappiness with her living situation that doesn't involve her leaving town, or would that be what's best for her? Does Haley discover her secret depths without romance, is she already highly internally critical but stuck without a roadmap to change her habits? Can Elliott ever actually write anything? Does Sam need to leave Pelican Town to fulfill his dreams, or should his dreams stay dreams?

Contrariwise, I'm also super into the idea of putting any two Stardew Valley characters into any classic dilemma trope or pairing dynamic. Imagine Haley and Penny waking up married! (Did they drink a little too much at one of SDV's festivals?) They'd have a stunning odd couple dynamic but I think Penny could uncover Haley's secret tenderness and Haley could let Penny shine. Sam and Elliot find mysterious sex pollen in the woods. Or a baby washes ashore and Elliot has to figure out how to care for it. Or Or Or. The sky's the limit - and, again, I don't have strong ships in this fandom, so feel free to mix and match with different characters if you prefer.

Young Wizards
Nita, Kit, Ronan

I love this OT3 and all its permutations. Give me Kit and Nita awkwardly proposing occasional casual sex to Ronan. Give me angsty and passionate falling in love and misunderstandings and awkward, awkward conversation. Give me Kit and Ronan banging when Nita's out of town and Nita and Ronan banging because Kit's busy and all three of them banging because: yeah. Give me complicated relationship negotiating and trinary coparenting and Ronan going dancing with Kit when Nita doesn't want to. Give me futurefic or fic set just after current canon or whatever you like, teenage years, college years, Kit and Nita break up and both start dating Ronan and that's what brings them back together, Ronan's secret 10-year crush on both of them, sexual misadventures, sex pollen, aliens making them do it and revealing things none of them realised about themselves, the three of them getting trapped on a planet for 100 subjective years and when they come out they can't yet unspin themselves ... or any ideas you have!

If you can't feel the OT3, I understand. I ship Nita/Kit and Kit/Ronan really hard and I'd love anything you'd like to do. I love adventure stories in this fandom and problem-solving, I secretly want schmoopy wedding or kidfic for Nita/Kit, I adore their frienship and also Kit and Ronan's bromance. Maybe Kit and Ronan bond over fixing the Edsel or go on a roadtrip after a Nita/Kit breakup. (Kit/Ronan might be my exception to my deathfic rule: I think I could just about understand if, a very long time after Nita dies, Kit and Ronan got together. But I'd probably prefer a breakup.)

Sense8
Kala, Wolfgang

Ahhh I love these kids so much and it absolutely kills me that we didn't get to see them meet in person or get their happily-ever-after. I would love to see them meet, or a later snapshot of them in a happy moment even if on the run with the other sensates. I would love to read the heist of the cluster rescuing Wolf or an improbably happy future with babies and homeownership. I adore Kala's good heart and her scientific brilliance and her willingness to push boundaries for her cluster, that unexpected core of steel. I love how Wolf's goodness is hidden even from himself, I love his scary darkness and the tenderness he has for his cluster.

Obviously I love everyone in the cluster and would be overjoyed with any of them who appeared (along with Amanita and Hernando). I don't have a preference for how you handle Kala's marriage; ignore its existence or dispose of it in a sentence or investigate it thoroughly and break them up slowly - it's all good for me. Or even a poly situation though I tend to think there's enough of that within the cluster and Wolf is right that Kala doesn't really love him.

I read pretty much any rating and don't mind canon-typical porn or violence levels :)

Thanks again, dear author, and I hope you have a great time this Yuletide. You can stalk me as required labellementeuse here/AO3/LJ/twitter and birdhead on my (rarely updated) tumblr.

This entry is crossposted from https://labellementeuse.dreamwidth.org/378991.html, where there are comments.

labellementeuse @ 2017-04-15T12:32:00

2017-04-15T00:32:02Z

Kia ora, whanau. I'm going to delete next week. Please hit me up on Dreamwidth (labellementeuse) or twitter (@labellementeuse) so we can stay in touch. ♥

Fandom5k Letter

2017-02-23T20:14:33Z

Hi, author! I'm so excited to write a longer exchange story, and I hope you are too. It's important to me that you have fun - especially in the context of an exchange where you have to write quite a long story - so if there's anything in my sign-up other than DNWs that you find obnoxious or whatever please feel free to toss it out the window and go with what you need. Read as much as you need & want to and no more :) I will be very happy with anything in my requested pairings/characters, so if the muse takes you in a different direction from my prompts and letter, please do just go with it. Also, the same is true of the freeform genre tags - I've picked a handful for each fandom, but feel free to treat them as guidelines rather than specific instructions, and if there's a prompt you like that you feel works better in a genre I haven't ticked, go for it.

General Likes
- Hopeful (or outright happy) endings are my jam. I would prefer for all of my requested characters to still be alive at the end of the story. I don't mind if the story goes in a darker or angstier direction before that, though (in fact I quite like it).
- I love many of the classic slash tropes, especially fake dating, wake up married, kidfic, emotional misunderstandings, pining. Wacky dilemma tropes like bodyswap, sudden mind reading, cursed to tell the truth, etc are also really fun for me. Even if I haven't specifically suggested it for a fandom, I'd be thrilled to receive them.
- breakup-makeup/getting back together stories are the greatest of all time. I love the agony of the break-up and then the cautious learning to trust someone who hurt you again.
- I like a range of different tones, many different styles of AU, etc. I like reading stuff close to the tone of whichever canon and I like reading stuff that takes those characters and puts them in stories of different tones - darker, lighter, different contexts, pornier, epistolary ...
- I love canon-divergence AUs where one thing happened differently and then ...
- If the porn muse takes you, go with it with my blessing. My significant squicks are bloodplay and scat. My significant kinks are the gamut of power exchange, d/s, etc kinks. I am never married to any particular character being the top or the bottom (I do have some preferences for original work, but I'll note those in that section).

General Dislikes
- I don't enjoy rape recovery as a plotpoint
- Deathfic, sickfic, and H/C are also things I would prefer not to receive.

NOTE: there are Shadowhunters spoilers under the cut, and probably also vague Critical Role ones.

Critical Role--Percy/Vax/Vex, Percy/Vax, Vax/Gilmore, Kima/Allura

Generally for Critical Role I'd love to receive any of those classic old tropes - huddling for warmth! amnesia! cursed to tell the truth/swap bodies/read minds! sex pollen! - for any of my pairings, plus also anything else that floats your boat - I am likely to love whatever. My DNWs are deathfic/sickfic/rape recovery and stories with violence within the requested pairing (e.g. I don't mind Kima beating up other people, but I don't want her to beat up Allura).

I LOVE THESE KIDS, so much, every single one of them, and whatever you want to write I will love. I love Vax when he's being a loving, lovable flirt, when he's making stupid decisions about where to go, when he tells Percy "Hello, handsome" when Percy gets brought back from the dead, when he kisses Percy's cheek, when he takes long walks with Gilmore, when he's such a bad listener when Vex is in trouble and needs him (I mean, I'm mad at him then, but I love him), when he stealths away like an asshole and nobody can find him. I love Vex when she's refusing to open up, when she confesses love to people's dead bodies but then can't stand to be alone with them afterwards, when she's standing over Percy's body crying and shooting arrows, when she's cuddling with Trinket, when she's letting Vax braid her hair, when she's haggling, when she's winking. I love Percy when he's a sarcastic motherfucker, when he's so excited to have something crazy happen, when he's tinkering, in those rare moments when you get genuine feelings, when he's writing letters because he fully expects to die and he wants to make sure Cassandra is taken care of. I love Gilmore when it becomes evident that his bold façade is concealing pain, pain in relation to his family, pain because Vax has been a bit of a jerk; I love Gilmore when he's being a terrifying badass when people attack him, when he gets Vox Machina drunk in a dive bar in Emon, when he lets Vex cheat him out of goods, when he's quietly killing himself to protect Whitestone but not letting anyone know, when he's secretly dying to get the hell back to his shop and start selling people shit again. I love Kima when she's punching Scanlan for trying to mess with her mind, when she's giving Highbearer Vord the finger and fucking off with Vox Machina, when she finally gets to beat people up, when she's tender towards Allura. I love Allura when she's suffering trying to explain things to VM, when she takes off her hood during battle (!!!), when she's afraid for Kima.

On to pairing-specific prompts!

Percy/Vax/Vex

A few prompt ideas I like: AMNESIA, maybe a canon divergence AU where Percy forgets way more for way longer after the Feywild - like maybe he forgets years, forgets knowing Vox Machina, forgets his family is dead. While I'm at talking about classic tropes, I also find cursed-to-tell-the-truth stories interesting for these guys - what would happen if Vex had to tell the truth all the time? She is really so deeply reserved and expends so much effort to conceal how she's feeling, except in extremis - perfect character for a truthtelling curse! This is equally interesting for Vax or for Percy or for the lot of them. An AU where for some reason Percy, Vax and Vex meet earlier than the rest of VM would be interesting too. I like some modern AUs, especially crime-fighting ones!

Kima/Allura

Prompts I like: A modern AU, like maybe a university/college AU, or an AU where Allura's a lawyer and Kima's a lay preacher somewhere, or Kima drives trucks and Allura makes coffee (completed with smut in Kima's truck OBVIOUSLY) (a lot of mention of Kima's STRONG HANDS) (to be frank I'd like this in every scenario). Kima and Allura having to solve a problem in the ruins of Emon. Allura has been kidnapped and Kima has to rescue her. Kima has been kidnapped and Allura has to rescue her. Adopting children whose parents have died. I have had a lot of trouble thinking of a good canon divergence plot for these guys but if you can think of one I would love to read that!

Vax/Gilmore

GILMOOOOOORE! I love these two flirty dudes just so much. I'd be happy with an AU of any kind (canon divergence, different canon fusion, modern AUs) where Vaxleth never happened, or with a breakup story if it can be managed while being kind to Keyleth, who I adore. (I actually quite like break-ups with happy endings.) I tend to prefer triangle poly to V so I wouldn't be *wild* about a Vax/Gilmore story where Vax was still with Keyleth, but if you've got something you'd really love to write with that configuration, go nuts. Gilmore breaks a curse on Vax (a curse that forces Vax to tell the truth? to lie? to sing his feelings?) Gilmore rebuilds his shop and builds a relationship with Vax. Finding out why Gilmore hasn't visited his parents for so long. Bodyswap!

Young Wizards - Nita/Kit/Ronan, Dairine/Carmela

I love this fandom but I've been in it for too long and now I want to make it Weird and/or adult. Basically, for all of these I would enjoy any kind of getting-together fic, set in canon or in the nearish or even far future where that might be slightly more age appropriate, anything established, comedy, smut - whatever. Anything that inspires you to Make The Fandom Weird or Make The Characters Adults is a-OK by me. I think the fandom needs more Aliens Made Them Do It, considering the number of aliens ...

Nita/Kit/Ronan
Look, I love Nita/Kit so much, and then I also love Kit and Ronan's chemistry so much, and please think more about how cool Ronan is, Kit, and then I also think Ronan driving Nita crazy is pretty fabulous, and then I think how great would they be together? I generally prefer triangle poly to V poly, but this is certainly a case where I can see it starting off as triangle poly where, perhaps, Ronan and Kit are spending a lot of time together because Nita's away, &c, &c. I'd prefer no infidelity, though - Kit talks to Nita before anything happens, or has already talked to her, or whatever.

Prompts I like: Nita and Kit realise they're both attracted to Ronan and invite him to join them for sex. Maybe it becomes more, maybe it doesn't. Or Kit has a bisexuality revelation when hanging out with Ronan without Nita, maybe working on a car or taking a road trip. Sex pollen again. Ronan being very sarcastic about Nita and Kit but like, lovingly. RONAN SECRETLY BEING A VIRGIN AND GETTING DEVIRGINISED BY KIT OR BY NITA AND KIT. Please don't take the dearth of prompts here for me not caring about this; I'm really hoping you will be inspired!

Dairine/Carmela

Dairine/Carmela is one of my not-so-secret weird OTPs developed by spending way too long in this fandom. They’re huge fun as foils for their respective siblings but I love them for themselves, as well. Dairine is so tough and fiery and snarky and secretly vulnerable and insecure. Carmela is genuinely secure, funny, smart, and so underestimated by the people around her. I truly believe she could conquer the galaxy. Once upon a time I wrote an embarrassing ship manifesto for this pairing. Of course I would be just as thrilled with gen; these guys are just so much fun to read about and I think they have a real spark together.

I would honestly love anything, but some of the anything I would love: AU or futurefic where Carmela is a GALACTIC DICTATOR, futurefic where Carmela runs a chocolate smuggling empire that she uses to fund a life of crime or indulgence or a free language school or a health clinic, Carmela and Dairine flirting at one of those big wizardly parties Carmela always seems to get into somehow, Carmela and Dairine: academic power couple (Carmela would be such a terrible yet awesome academic). Sex pollen! Trying out something Carmela learned about on the interplanetary internet. Maybe Carmela works in publishing in New York and Dairine works for a tech company in California and they meet up once a month to shop at the Crossings and swap stories. Maybe a month after Games Wizard Play Carmela talks to Dairine about being nervous about college and she doesn't even know why she's talking to Dairine when really she's closer to Nita but somehow Dairine gets it. And they somehow keep talking to each other about things they can't talk to anyone else about and after a few years, maybe after Dairine has worked everything out with Roshaun and Carmela has settled in at college and knows where she's going, they realise that they're dating, basically, except without the kissing, and then they fix that.

Shadowhunters - Alec/Jace/Izzy, Magnus/Alec

I am tremendously into these teenagers making bad decisions. I really like in this show how these not-very-old people are all basically treated as professional adults without much need for guidance, so they're all set to quit school and get married and dedicate their lives to their careers while being teenagers, and I like how that leads to them making some pretty accidentally bad choices, but they're all also still trying a lot and are generally really forgiving (very surprising for a teen show) and love each other. Even when they're mad, their anger feels to me like it's being driven by how much they care about each other. Izzy helps Clary when she doesn't know a thing about her, Clary forgives Alec for being possessed and killing Jocelyn, Jace and Alec clearly adore each other even when they're fighting, Alec asks Izzy for sex advice, Alec thinks Izzy is amazing ... etc etc.

Alec and Izzy interacting with children - their brother, random other kids - makes me melt.

Alec/Jace/Izzy - I'm super interested in precanon stuff for this because Magnus, whom I love, breaks up the central tension here around Alec being in love with Jace and Jace not knowing about it. I'd love something where, say, Alec and Izzy screw around to sublimate their mutual unrequited feelings about Jace (there's nothing in canon here really re: Izzy, but it's the vibe I got in some of the early episodes and I've been obsessed with it ever since), or where the three of them are stuck in a bad situation and have to huddle for warmth. Sex pollen would be brilliant for this, or truthtelling curses, or Have To Have Sex To Save The Mission - I can think of lots of ways some of the classic predicament tropes would play in this fandom!

Magnus/Alec - this is a delightful pairing that I love on the show, and another case where I think all of those great predicament tropes would be hilarious. Magnus being bodyswapped into Alec's body and having to fake being the bossy dutiful Shadowhunter would be HILARIOUS (as would Alec maybe having Magnus' magic?!) Have Sex to Save the Mission is good here, too, as would be, like, 5,000 words about Magnus tenderly or sarcastically teaching Alec about sex.

Gilmore Girls - Rory/Paris

Look, I hardly feel like I have to say anything about why this is good, because if you're here for it I'm pretty sure you're here for it for the same reasons that I am, which is that Rory and Paris have always been the only people in each other's lives who fully understood them - understood their good bits and their many terrible flaws, understood and supported their ambition, understood their hobbies and the things that excited them and their priorities ... Rory is at her most likeable when she's with Paris, someone she can't treat badly because Paris won't let her, and exactly the same is true of Paris. Also they have superb chemistry and I want them to get married and maybe have a baby or maybe not have a baby and fight and write and shout and eat terrible food and be activists and go through crises together &c &c &c.

Specific prompts: Rory rocks up to Paris' doorstep after the events of A Year In the Life. Paris takes her in. Rory and Paris messily raising a family together. Canon divergence AU where, when Rory and Paris break up with Doyle and Logan in season 6, they get together with each other, instead - maybe after some ill-advised sex under the influence. Bodyswap - long after Rory and Paris haven't spoken for a while, they wake up in each other's bodies. Great pairing for an epistolary - emails, letters, blog entries ... Also, I have never read any kind of fusion or proper AU for these guys so anything you've got there, if you can think of another world where their neuroses would fit!

I hope there's something that inspires you here - good luck and have fun! I can't wait to see what you come up with.

This entry is crossposted from http://labellementeuse.dreamwidth.org/378660.html, where there are comments.

Yuletide 2016!

2016-10-08T08:42:14Z

Hi, author! I can't believe it's that time of the year again! I'm very happy to be doing Yuletide again and I hope you will be too.

It's important to me that you have fun, so if there's anything in my sign-up that you find obnoxious or whatever please feel free to toss it out the window and go with what you need. Read as much as you need & want to and no more :) I will be very happy with anything in my requested pairings/characters, so if the muse takes you in a different direction from my prompts and letter, please do just go with it.

QUICK NOTE: There will be Critical Role spoilers through episode 70 in this letter, and I typically watch the episodes within 24 hours of them airing, so you don't have to worry about spoiling me. Don't worry if you get jossed halfway through your story, though, I'll totally understand. I have moved Critical Role to the last part of the letter just in case you've matched me for something else and are trying to avoid spoilers!

General Likes
- For the purposes of Yuletide, hopeful (or outright happy) endings are my jam. I would prefer for all of my requested characters to still be alive at the end of the story. I don't mind if the story goes in a darker or angstier direction before that, though (in fact I quite like it).
- I love many of the classic slash tropes, especially fake dating, wake up married, kidfic, emotional misunderstandings, pining. Wacky dilemma tropes like bodyswap, sudden mind reading, cursed to tell the truth, etc are also really fun for me.
- breakup-makeup/getting back together stories are the greatest trope of all time. I love the agony of the break-up and then the cautious learning to trust again.
- I like a range of different tones, many different styles of AU, etc. I like reading stuff close to the tone of whichever canon and I like reading stuff that takes those characters and puts them in stories of different tones - darker, lighter, different contexts, pornier
- I love canon-divergence AUs where one thing happened differently and then ...
- Watch this space, I will probably do a Yuleporn comment this year. However, short form, if the porn muse takes you, go with it with my blessing. My significant squicks are bloodplay and scat, and although I love noncon I think probably not for the fandoms I'm requesting this year.

General Dislikes
- I don't enjoy rape recovery as a plotpoint
- Deathfic, sickfic, and H/C are also things I would prefer not to receive.

Swallows and Amazons
Nancy Blackett

I think the thing I treasure most about this series is the sheer amount of competence!porn and learning and the shared sense of community and family even between the families. All of that hard work and skill thrills me in this context and would thrill me in any kind of AU.

I'd love to read something about Nancy in that uncertain period where John will be off in the navy (I think there are a few years before the war where he'd be gone) - what is Nancy deciding to do with her life? I'd love to read an AU that gives Nancy the opportunities that John has in the canon, whether that's a modern AU or any other kind. Modern AUs would be fun for this cast (how about a university AU with Professor Lee, Nancy's favourite Latin prof?) I'm really fond of wartime!S&A&Ds. Imagine a Foyle's War/Swallows & Amazons fusion (Nancy as Sam? - I'm breathless with delight at the idea), or cast Peggy or Dot as Rosie the Riveter. Which of the women's auxiliaries did they go into? I love Nancy a lot, but I'd really like to hear more about Titty, Dot, Bridgie, even Daisy, too. How about drawing on Roger Altounyan's real life for something about Roger? - or the D's at Bletchley Park! If you like this idea go as nuts with it as you care to. Kill anyone but Nancy if the muse strikes you.

Just to be completely clear if it doesn't come across in my prompts, I LOVE Nancy, and my heart goes out to her in the later books where she is so clearly feeling trapped between what she wants to do and what she is allowed to do. I love her extraordinary understanding of what she is supposed to be and how to do it, as exemplified in The Picts and the Martyrs, and I love her refusal to be that person in Secret Water. I'd love to read anything about her negotiating these barriers. I ship her passionately with John as two-captains-together, up against the world that doesn't quite get them (doesn't quite get her - but John does!), but I also am very keen on Nancy femslash. I love Nancy/Dot especially, a pairing I sold myself on a couple of Yuletides ago - Dot's crush on competent Nancy is SO transparent. So however the mood takes you, including a gen story just about Nancy, I am keen. My only really big DNW in this fandom is John/Peggy and stories where Nancy dies. Other than that, have fun.

Young Wizards
Dairine, Carmela

I love these guys and would love something focused on a developing relationship (romantic or friendly) between them, or on their shared (though differently expressed) love of learning. Really anything with the two of them would delight me - getting together while Carmela is at college, tooling around the solar system togther, giving Nita and Kit a hard time, flirting at Nita and Kit's wedding, having their own relationship milestones, babysitting Nita and Kit's kids (or having their own!), the two of them having their first threesome ...

Dairine/Carmela is one of my not-so-secret weird OTPs developed by spending way too long in this fandom. They’re huge fun as foils for their respective siblings but I love them for themselves, as well. Dairine is so tough and fiery and snarky and secretly vulnerable and insecure. Carmela is genuinely secure, funny, smart, and so underestimated by the people around her. I truly believe she could conquer the galaxy. Once upon a time I wrote an embarrassing ship manifesto for this pairing. Of course I would be just as thrilled with gen; these guys are just so much fun to read about and I think they have a real spark together.

I would honestly love anything, but some of the anything I would love: AU or futurefic where Carmela is a GALACTIC DICTATOR, futurefic where Carmela runs a chocolate smuggling empire that she uses to fund a life of crime or indulgence or a free language school or a health clinic, Carmela and Dairine flirting at one of those big wizardly parties Carmela always seems to get into somehow, Carmela and Dairine: academic power couple (Carmela would be such a terrible yet awesome academic). Maybe Carmela works in publishing in New York and Dairine works for a tech company in California and they meet up once a month to shop at the Crossings and swap stories. Maybe a month after Games Wizard Play Carmela talks to Dairine about being nervous about college and she doesn't even know why she's talking to Dairine when really she's closer to Nita but somehow Dairine gets it. And they somehow keep talking to each other about things they can't talk to anyone else about and after a few years, maybe after Dairine has worked everything out with Roshaun and Carmela has settled in at college and knows where she's going, they realise that they're dating, basically, except without the kissing, and then they fix that.

I have read Games Wizards Play and the material set between A Wizard of Mars and GWP.

Critical Role
Vax'ildan, Vex'ahlia, Percy, Gilmore

I would love anything with any combination of these characters, gen or any pairing, threesome, moresome, or poly arrangement you care for. How about an AU where Percy's Feywild amnesia stuck around longer? How about a bodyswap story with any of these kids - a twins bodyswap would be hilarious, but so would a Percy-Vax bodyswap, Gilmore-any of them would be hilarious. I'd like to know how Gilmore feels about his parents, and maybe he and Vax could bond over that. I would love to read Vax and Vex talking about her feelings for Percy, or his for Keyleth. I would love Percy and Vax bonding over their belief in their own deep dark souls (idiots). Porn? Yes, please, anything you like.

I LOVE THESE KIDS, so much, every single one of them, and whatever you want to write I will love. I love Vax when he's being a loving, lovable flirt, when he's making stupid decisions about where to go, when he tells Percy "Hello, handsome" when Percy gets brought back from the dead, when he kisses Percy's cheek, when he takes long walks with Gilmore, when he's such a bad listener when Vex is in trouble and needs him (I mean, I'm mad at him then, but I love him), when he stealths away like an asshole and nobody can find him. I love Vex when she's refusing to open up, when she confesses love to people's dead bodies but then can't stand to be alone with them afterwards, when she's standing over Percy's body crying and shooting arrows, when she's cuddling with Trinket, when she's letting Vax braid her hair, when she's haggling, when she's winking. I love Percy when he's a sarcastic motherfucker, when he's so excited to have something crazy happen, when he's tinkering, in those rare moments when you get genuine feelings, when he's writing letters because he fully expects to die and he wants to make sure Cassandra is taken care of. I love Gilmore when it becomes evident that his bold façade is concealing pain, pain in relation to his family, pain because Vax has been a bit of a jerk; I love Gilmore when he's being a terrifying badass when people attack him, when he gets Vox Machina drunk in a dive bar in Emon, when he lets Vex cheat him out of goods, when he's quietly killing himself to protect Whitestone but not letting anyone know, when he's secretly dying to get the hell back to his shop and start selling people shit again.

Pairing stuff, for clarity's sake: I'd be happy with these characters in literally any permutation. Percy/Vax? Yes. Percy/Vex? Yes. Gilmore/Vax? Yes. Vax/Vex? YES. Vax/Vex/Percy? Y E S. (You definitely don't have to write the incest, I'm just, you know, putting it out there that I would enjoy it, because it's one of those things most people wouldn't write without firm clarification.) Gilmore/Vex? Well, I'll level with you, I read Gilmore as gay, but in a genderswap world, sure! And, yes, of course, if the gen muse takes you I would love some gen. If you want to work in Polymachina in the background I'm fine with/appreciative of that. (Also, for the record, I love Keyleth and Vax/Keyleth, so if you want to retain that as a canonical relationship I am a-OK with that.)

If you can only work in two or three of these characters, that's OK - don't tie yourself in a knot trying to get Gilmore into a Vax/Vex/Percy PWP, for example. (And if you get really stuck? I like all the other current members of Vox Machina, and also Kima/Allura, quite a bit. You can break away if you need to.)

Thanks again, dear author, and I hope you have a great time this Yuletide. You can stalk me as required labellementeuse here/AO3/LJ/twitter and birdhead on my (rarely updated) tumblr.

This entry is crossposted from http://labellementeuse.dreamwidth.org/378291.html, where there are comments.

meta???

2016-08-22T01:51:57Z

I wrote a little meta in response to this post about creator participation & its effect on fandom spaces over at my tumblr but I thought I might replicate it here because it's a couple of paragraphs long so why not.

I feel like fan attention towards canon and canonical authority was always pretty prominent in het spaces - thinking about the last het fandom space I operated in, which was Harry Potter, huge amounts of the fannish focus there was on what would/might/should be canon. But it is new for slash, maybe, which is a sign of social progress I guess, but like @hotgaydumbledore I am not sure I like it.

I do know that I find increasing creator presence in fandom to be … oppressive is the wrong word, but depressive in the sense that it feels to me like it presses down on the fanworks that are created. My issues with the way this affects the Young Wizards fandom space are on record. I’m not a conspiracy theorist about this, I don’t think it’s deliberate, but I do find it to be a flattening presence. It does push people towards canon ships, especially canon het ships; it does push people away from weird/sideways ships; I think it kinda pushes people away from ATG slash.

I know many people might be happy about that last one and there’s an extent to which I agree, but I do think that the one positive characteristic of ATG stories is that they just don’t give a fuck about what the creator intends, are often written in total opposition to what the creator intends. That means that great relationships are tossed aside for, well, two white dudes, but I do kinda like that insouciance. ATG shippers never or rarely expect their ships to become canon, and I do think that’s a better relationship dynamic - or at least, it’s a dynamic I prefer - with showrunners, a you-do-you-and-I’ll-just-kick-around-in-this-sandbox vibe rather than a give-me-what-I-want-now vibe that I find frustrating.

I want more representation, doesn’t everyone, and I don’t think it’s wrong to demand representation, but I am not a big fan of demanding representation in *this* character and *that* character. Demanding representation doesn’t mean you get to put your ships in your show. It’s OK for your ship to not be canon.

I should say I’m thinking specifically of LGB representation here. That was careless, sorry.

This entry is crossposted from http://labellementeuse.dreamwidth.org/378109.html, where there are comments.

this week's critical role

2016-08-12T11:32:39Z

OH GOD VAX TELLING VEX THAT PERCY'S OFFER IS JUST GILDING THE LILY. I have so many fucking sibling feels. I love Vax. omg.

ok this is just a liveblog now: HOLY SHIT THIS MONOLOGUE FROM TREEBOY ABOUT HOW VEX IS TERRIBLE. FUCK YOU, BUDDY! SHE IS GREAT! FUCK YOU!

MY HEART IS SOMEONE ELSE'S!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This entry is crossposted from http://labellementeuse.dreamwidth.org/377740.html, where there are comments.

labellementeuse @ 2016-05-06T00:34:00

2016-05-05T13:09:44Z

these are just my immediate, just-got-out-of-the-theatre thoughts

1. One thing that I felt about Winter Soldier and also felt about this movie: this is a movie that cares about the shit I care about. by which I mean: it cares about characterisation and relationships. it cares about consequences for superheroes. it asks genuinely difficult questions (without having to be a dire suckfest). in some ways it felt like a direct thesis statement against everything Man of Steel stood for. also, it cares about Natasha being a badass, which I also care about so fucking much.

2. although in a massive ensemble cast there will always be people who are short-shrifted and that was certainly true here, it was amazing how this movie gave double the amount of characters far more interesting character stuff in far less time than Age of Ultron. Wanda was far better served by this movie. Vision was better served. Tony was better served, and Age of Ultron was all about Tony, for crying out loud. Rhodey got so much more in this film than I was even hoping for! Sam! Sharon!

3. a brief and incomplete list of moments I fucking loved:
- sam and bucky in the car
- natasha's every scene (did u guys know I am a Natasha fan?), but particularly her scenes with Tony, and, of course, letting Steve and Bucky go
- t'challa's scene at the end with zemo & his refusal to be consumed by revenge and have I mentioned I am a sucker for Guys Who Care
- eeeeeevery scene with t'challa who was SO SO GREAT and I cannot wait for his movie
- fuck the steve/bucky/tony fight scene was emotionally devastating
- peter's Empire Strikes Back joke, amazing
- "Give me back my Rhodey"
- I didn't love this but I was DEVASTATED when Rhodey hit the ground. I felt it in my body. I thought they'd killed him.
- that scene where they're divided in half and then they're running at each other and some of them are in the air - you know, that shot that is basically a big splash page in the middle of a comic book fight scene? I emotionally hated what was happening but I am a big fucking nerd and I LOVED that SHOT.
- honestly a lot of the jokes were great
- I am meh on Clint but "We're still friends, right?" was a relief to me because I had such complicated emotions about the Avengers breaking up and I liked that it wasn't all about Steve and Tony
- Considering the only development they had was *in this movie*, I cared a huge amount about Vision and Wanda fighting
- tbqh Steve and Tony's friendship was almost all developed only in this movie and yet I still totally believed it and bought it and argh
- Natasha coming to the funeral because she didn't want Steve to be alone. h e l p.
- chris evans arms appreciation moment (the hilariously silly helicopter scene). cheeeeeeesecake
- tony and rhodey right at the end. and I really liked rhodey's lines here. they were thoughtful and in character.
- in the scene where they're talking about whether or not they will sign the accords - I really liked this whole scene. it was thoughtful. everyone seemed genuinely torn - it wasn't like they immediately picked one side and went there. and everyone's rationales for their ultimate decisions made sense. I especially liked Sam and Rhodey here.
- the airport fight scene - look, I'm a former comics fan and that shit is just fun. everybody wisecracking! everybody fighting! it's what everyone wanted to get out of Superman vs Batman and totally didn't.
- speaking of the scene where Natasha lets Bucky and Steve go - one of the things I sneaky loved about this was that Natasha had ultimately cut some of the fighting and gone to where she had known Steve and Bucky would try to get to.
- when Natasha says to Bucky something like "do you at least recognise me" and I had a MOMENT about whether or not the Winter Soldier and Natasha had ever worked together and omg I hope this Comes Back Later
- idek, but Bucky buying fruit at the market. it was so natural and normal and it did things to me.
- t'challa's dad's speech about Wakandan isolationism was terribly interesting. it made the geopolitics of the MCU briefly very interesting to me, which is a feat considering I don't even really care about real-word geopolitics.

4. if I had had control of this movie I would have cut out, in order, Clint, Scott, and Peter. aaaand then maybe I would have thought about cutting Sharon, although I did like her moments a lot and I thought Peggy's funeral was tremendous. (It would have been reasonable for Sharon's involvement to have ended there, but I'm not that mad about her other scenes because cool, character development, nuance, Peggy's ongoing influence...) Peter I would have been saddest to lose because he really was a joy, but this was a long movie and he wasn't necessary. also, I wouldn't have been sorry to see Miles Morales instead of Peter Parker.

5. They didn't end up developing this fully because they tried to do too much but that scene right at the beginning where Wanda tries to stop the bomb and ends up killing people and is clearly devastated and they dwell on that, and on Steve feeling bad about it too - I thought that was very good even though, yes, they ultimately do carry on avenging. it's one of the things that made this movie the anti-Man of Steel and yet was still more thoughtful than Man of Steel - you can acknowledge and be thoughtful about bystander deaths and the superhero paradox, where superheroes appear to draw ever more destructive villains, without sucking the fun out of life and movies and superheroes. and in a way I think it's *more* thoughtful to say yes, this is difficult and consequences are tremendously hard and these people care about it but they are going to go on trying to do what is right than to nihilistically say these deaths are inevitable and the only way to deal with it is to choose not to care.

6. I am such Steve/Bucky trash and every moment where Bucky was captured by the good guys I was going ARGH MY WEE BUCKY. I mean, I realise that is ludicrous, but the scenes where he is in that tiny glass prison and he looks pale and just like he looks before they froze him in Winter Soldier -- argh, my poor wee bucky! yes, yes. I am trash. (also when he starts shouting when dude is using the trigger words! argh!)

7. actually bucky is probably the person, ironically, who is *least* well served by this movie and got the least characterisation

8. I still cared about him way too much

9. despite this I felt for Tony so much at the end. like yes steve is ultimately right, bucky was being brainwashed. but also tony just watched bucky kill his parents on video and bucky doesn't even try to apologise and also steve knew and kept it from him (which! is! TERRIBLE, btw)

10. i'm obviously thrilled steve doesn't die but gosh, you know, tony's turnaround is a lot easier to understand when you have that devastating scene with steve's body.

11. when we came out of the theatre K and L were like "omg the audi product placement was just ridiculous" and I could not have told you the brand of a single car in that movie. this isn't really a thought about the movie but it did make me laugh.

12. some more Natasha thoughts: her characterisation in this movie just shows up how shitty her characterisation in Ultron is. this Natasha has thoughts and feelings and a complex emotional arc and cares about shit and is a pivotal character, but her thoughts and feelings and emotional arc all relate to the plot of the movie, they aren't about her wanting a baby. and look! I'm not saying she can't want a baby or be devastated about her fertility issues or whatever (though it was always terrible to frame that as monstrousness), I'm saying that deciding to explore those issues in the middle of your explosive superhero movie was gross and bad and terrible. she doesn't need to have Special Girly Problems to have problems and an emotional arc. she could have related to Bruce as a monster because of her existing actual backstory as an assassin etc. anyway yeah this is just a "shit on Age of Ultron" moment, because this movie just demonstrates so many of the things Age of Ultron did badly.

13. look. construction wise, this wasn't a perfect movie. there were a couple of different plots and slightly too many characters. it was a tad long. but it hit so many of the things I wanted and it did so many of the emotional things I needed and it didn't kill anyone, thank fuck, and it really made me want to see the T'Challa movie even though I hardly know anything about T'Challa and it loved all of the things I loved about these characters and about superhero movies so yeah, I totally loved it.

This entry is crossposted from http://labellementeuse.dreamwidth.org/377532.html, where there are comments.

hockey exchange letter 2k16

2016-02-19T07:28:31Z

hi friend! I'm excited to do this exchange and I hope you are too. I also hope my sign-up didn't seem intimidatingly crammed or overly sparse - I had some trouble figuring out how much information would be needed in hand-matching and just kind of guessed. I want you to have a great exchange experience, so if you feel you need to go in a different direction to my suggestions I am happy for you to do so. Especially if there's anything you think is obnoxious or inimical to your preferred characterisation, just chuck it. I will be happy for anything in my pairings!

general taste stuff
I am fairly relaxed when it comes to general taste so if you're dying to write something really unhappy for a holiday exchange you may :) I prefer no Brandon Bollig, deathfic, sickfic, h/c, dub or noncon within a requested pairing (negotiated noncon roleplay is fine), scat or bloodplay.

Stuff I really like:
- break-up make-up
- pining
- canon-divergence AUs where one thing happened differently and then ...
- competence porn
- classic wacky-dilemma tropes like wake-up-married or sudden-telepathy or soulbonds, and especially negotiating those in a hockey fandom context
- the marriage and fake dating tropes are especially big for me
- I really think there is not enough bodyswap in this fandom, especially among players on different teams where it would be very weird and difficult. hockey players' bodies are, obviously, really important, and I would love to see some of that for any of the people I've requested
- most kinks tbh
- kidfic (not necessarily via mpreg)
- coming out stories

Stuff I would prefer not to receive:
- scat and bloodplay
- Brandon Bollig
- deathfic, sickfic and h/c
- dubcon or noncon within the requested pairing, with the exception of Stromecest

prompts and pairing stuff

McEichel:

I'd like to see stuff that explores stuff about being new to the NHL, the shared sense of pressure on them, competition ... I'm interested in dynamics that run the gamut from hatesex-to-lovers to secret-admirers. I WILL ADMIT A FONDNESS FOR JACK EICHEL BEING SNIDE. I don't think his entire life is about McDavid tho.

I'm in the throes of new love for this pairing so anything you do I will love. I don't mind how you handle the distance. Awkward realisations would be great with this pairing, maybe they accidentally meet on Tinder or Grindr or, heck, OKCupid.

Stromecest:

Holy shit, anything. Note that I LOVE the existing stories for this pairing so pointless delicious humiliation incest porn is totally fine/good/great. That same porn with a deep undercurrent of affection is totally amazing.

I realise now that this sign-up assumes you want to and are OK with writing porn for these guys! Let me clarify that you absolutely don't have to if you don't want to (I just made the assumption because, well. Stromecest.) Also, it definitely does not have to be JUST porn, like I am not asking you for a kinkmeme fill here (unless you would like to write one). So, uh, anything here would be great.

Carter/Pearson/Toffoli:

Tanner and Tyler call Jeff daddy in bed AND/OR Tanner and Tyler knock Jeff up. (Or the awesome poly getting together story! Or est rel any two of these guys with the third joining them every now and then! Whatever floats your boat.)

So Kings twitter constantly refers to Tyler Toffoli as Jeff Carter's son and because I am a bad human being this DOES THINGS to me. I don't mind if this is an equilateral triangle poly sitch or if any two of these guys are in a primary relationship with the other guy joining them from time to time for fun. I'm not a big fan of poly-V. Other than that, honestly, the daddy prompt is pretty silly, and I would alternatively love to read any getting-together story. Maybe Tanner and Tyler seduce Jeff, maybe Jeff notices Tanner and Tyler are together and wants in, the possibilities are endless, I'd love to read one of them. :)

Saad/Leddy:

I find these guys to both be fairly chilled-out seeming, so I'd really be interested in a coming out story - I'd like to know how they'd handle it. Perhaps they're not as chill as they seem, perhaps they really are. Accidental outing or deliberate coming out would both be interesting in their own way.

Like I said, these guys are so chilled out that I'd be interested in a story where something really ups the tension around their relationship. If you do write a coming-out story I would rather it was set in this universe. Of course, there are lots of other ways to ratchet up tension - injuries, obviously pressure from the existing trades - I would like to read something where the distance was a real problem for their relationship.

Jamie Benn/Tyler Seguin:

I'd love to see a bit of angst with these guys (no H/C, please). A stupid misunderstanding story is ripe for a bit of the old angst or pining; gooey idfic also welcomed.

I feel bad because I don't have a lot to add here (this doesn't reflect relative levels of enthusiasm!) I enjoy reading about these two in a two-assholes-together kind of way. I also like how much they seem to like each other. (Although, man, having typed that I'm kind of interested in the story where they secretly hate each other, although obviously they get over it ...)

McDavid/Nuge:

This is an interesting pairing to me because they're both fairly softly spoken in the media but I reckon have extremely competitive/pushy streaks, potentially. They seem quite reputation-conscious.

I'd love to see something dealing with these guys' role on a team with a glorious past and a really shitty present, a shitty present that seems to be going on and on.

OK! I hope I gave you something to be going on with here. Good luck and have fun writing; I can't wait to see what you come up with.

This entry is crossposted from http://labellementeuse.dreamwidth.org/376845.html, where there are comments.

Yuletide Reveal 2016

2016-02-04T05:23:45Z

Wow, I forgot to do a reveals post for Yuletide! Gosh. I received a wonderful Mansfield Park story that was a Northanger Abbey fusion - WHICH I KNOW SOUNDS CRAZY BUT OMG, it's terrific. Brilliant pastiche. I adored it.

Virtue & Virtuosity (22143 words) by Firerose
Chapters: 6/6
Fandom: Mansfield Park - Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Mary Crawford, Fanny Price, Henry Crawford, Isabella Thorpe, James Rushworth, Mrs. Rushworth (Sr)
Additional Tags: Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Pastiche, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, No Northanger Abbey knowledge assumed, Female-Centric
Summary:

'Fanny was the mute earth to Mary's leaping fire, the gnarled oak to her fluttering songbird, the mirror-bright millpond to her restless waves. If one could somehow, with propriety, squeeze both ladies into a single body, the resultant heroine would be beyond anything shewn by Mrs. Radcliffe! She might paddle down the Amazon, contest a knotty theological point with the Pope, battle venomous water snakes with a hat pin and a bottle of hartshorn, and sink into a dead faint at the villain’s merest glance, as if he were some species of basilisk!' Or, Mansfield Park meets Northanger Abbey

I also got a terrific story in Hockey Holidays! It's Saad/Leddy bodyswap/soulmates and I loved the worldbuilding.

Who Knows What We Are In The Morning? (All I Know Is I Want You) (21156 words) by Firalla11
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Hockey RPF
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Nick Leddy/Brandon Saad
Characters: Nick Leddy, Brandon Saad, Andrew Shaw, Johnny Boychuk, Nick Foligno, Scott Hartnell, Columbus Blue Jackets Ensemble, New York Islanders Ensemble
Additional Tags: Columbus Blue Jackets, New York Islanders, Bodyswap, Soulmates, Telepathic Bond, Slow Burn, Friends to Lovers
Summary:

Nick wakes up to an aching mouth and sunlight shining bright behind his eyelids. One is expected. The other is not.

Or, some people have switch-partners - someone they switch bodies with when they're far apart. Nick's is Brandon. They work it out.

I also wrote stuff for these exchanges! For Yuletide, I wrote a Northanger Abbey post-canon story:

The Newlyweds, Or, Catherine Tilney Thinks Again (6270 words) by labellementeuse
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Catherine Morland/Henry Tilney, OFC/OMC
Characters: Catherine Morland, Henry Tilney, Original Characters
Additional Tags: Cosy crime, Humour, curtainfic, there are literal curtains
Summary:

Catherine really must stop reading horrid novels.

and for Hockey Holidays I wrote a Tyler Seguin/Jamie Benn story, a close-canon Greek gods/Hercules' labours AU.

as journey'd Heracles, and onward (13159 words) by labellementeuse
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Hockey RPF, Dallas Stars RPF
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Jamie Benn/Tyler Seguin
Characters: Tyler Seguin, Jamie Benn, Αθήνα | Athena (Hellenistic Religion & Lore)
Additional Tags: Dallas Stars, mythology in a modern context, Alternate Universe - Greek Mythology, redemption arc
Summary:

Tyler doesn't want to fuck up his new team, but freaking Athena keeps messing with him.

This entry is crossposted from http://labellementeuse.dreamwidth.org/376773.html, where there are comments.

Games Wizards Play: Scattered Initial Thoughts

2016-02-02T11:57:12Z

OK, well, let's just get this out of the way: of course, of course, I enjoyed it, but *man* are bits of this clunky, and I'm a bit sad about it. I re-read the entire series before I read this one and ... the contrast between this and Deep Wizardry ... I just don't know. I mean, where to start:
- the excruciatingly clunky scene where Lissa comes out to Nita as ace. ... it just could not have been more pasted on. And look, I fucking love representation! BUT.
- The need to fit in every single character we've ever met in the books for a scene. Look. I understand the urge for this. Especially because on one level I'm yelling with glee when they show up. BUT: ultimately it's too busy a cast for an individual book. Lay it back. Be controlled. It worked in Wizards at War because it felt like an unusual circumstance, but that's been hit for three books in a row now ... lay it off. It's so blatantly fanservicey and yes, I love it, but also ... enh. Let's get back to basics a bit. You can't fit this all in.
- Honestly, Lifeboats has a better plot and execution and yes I feel like a monster saying this.

Some further random observations:
- lmao OK the scene where Nita's like (clunkily) "How did I not notice Matt was gay! Well, I guess I've made that mistake before," and then Carl is right next to her. On the one hand I laughed; on the other hand, DD, JUST DO IT ALREADY. Just do it. Just make it canonical. It's 2016, your books aren't gonna get banned.
- look the sex stuff. look. OK, I still have no idea how old Nita and Kit actually are at this point but *boy* there's a lot of agonising for one friggen kiss. I know DD isn't a prude! I read the Middle Kingdoms books! Twilight means there can be sex in YA books now! But OK, whatever, I don't actually mind and the dancing scene was fucking great (also, a nice callback to the scene in A Wizard Abroad where Nita mentions that Kit loves to dance, which, btw, is one of my Underrated Facts About Kit which goes with "loves poetry, especially Shakespeare" and "the only thing that wasn't casual about Kit was the way he worked to do what he said he would". Another fun fact about Kit is that I fucking love him and think he's a better fictional boyfriend than Gilbert Blythe). It's very ... hmm, interesting? How Nita and Kit during this book vary from being quite clearly sexual, sexually interested in each other, to being entirely chaste when they're actually with each other. Which I guess is not that unusual for teenagers. Is it? It's been a while :-/
- man, DD working out her own issues about high school a little bit ... I don't remember sex talk being anything *like* that explicit. And again, this weird juxtaposition where on the one level Nita and Kit are barely talking about sex and on another level they're normal teenagers making a slightly bitchy remark about one of their classmates being a virgin ... it's a weird tightrope that I don't entirely get.

Oh, the main plot. It was fine I guess, although like, yeah, what were the themes exactly? It felt more like a filler book than Lifeboats did. I really thought getting Roshaun back would be the next book, but hey. I loved Mehrnaz, who was so sweet, and I liked her family backstory, although ... man it's an implausible wizarding family, eh? Penn, obviously, was TERRIBLE but in a fun way. I did spend the entire book waiting for Nita to beat him up, though, and she NEVER DID. Sadface. I felt like there were some missing consequences from some of the conversations, as well, and plot that seemed to stop in one point and pick up at another with beats uncovered.

Sidebar: Lifeboats makes a lot of sense to me as an authorly reaction to A Wizard of Mars and Games Wizards Play, because Kit does awesome shit in Lifeboats and man does he get hit with the idiot stick in Mars and Games. Like, ouch. Honestly? Honestly? That dumbass fight that comes out of nowhere and isn't even provoked by anything particularly nasty out of Penn? Meh. Meh, I say.

IDK. This isn't coherent but I wanted to get some quick thoughts down.

This entry is crossposted from http://labellementeuse.dreamwidth.org/376424.html, where there are comments.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

2015-12-19T08:50:37Z

In two parts: my thinky thoughts and my flail. I haven't read any other reviews so this is only informed by my long conversation over a post-movie dinner with some of my usual suspects.

With my stand-back-and-try-for-a-tiny-bit-of-objectivity hat, I think this ultimately wasn't a very original movie, and not just in the sense of it being very obviously part of the franchise and doing a lot of things to be as visually similar to the original trilogy as possible. (Visually speaking, btw, I enjoyed it very much - I saw it in 2D. My favourite shot, although it was terribly OTT, was the shot on the bridge of Han and Ben or whatever his Sith name is with the white light coming through. It looked liked Lord of the Rings concept art and I loved it.) But the overarching plot of the movie became evident very quickly.

The same beats were hit. A New Hope has the Death Star; they took the Death Star and made it planet-size. Darth Vader blows up Alderaan; Bill Weasley blows up like seven planets (including, I think, Coruscant?) Obi-Wan dies at the end of A New Hope; Han dies at the end of The Force Awakens. Luke goes off to find Yoda; Rey goes off to find Luke. There was zero suspense in most of the climactic sequences (I had a bit of suspense because I didn't want the sole female X-Wing pilot to die) because you know that Rey is not going to kill Ben, something is going to prevent her from that. So, I mean, this is obviously a deliberate choice to win back the trust lost with The Phantom Menace, but it did make for a movie that felt like very good but not great fanfic: a film that captures and even in a few ways improves upon the originals, without transcending and being terrific in its own right.

Like, the prequel trilogy tries to hit the same beats as the originals (e.g. Qui-Gon instead of Obi-Wan and the identical mentor deaths), and just doesn't do it as well. It is very bad, but it was trying to tell a different story to the originals in the way I don't think The Force Awakens does. I mean, Han even says it: everyone's gone back to doing what they were good at. Leia quit on the New Republic to go lead the Resistance, he went back to smuggling, and our new heroes are a couple of orphans that bump into each other on a desert planet.

I think/hope/wonder if this will change in the second movie, that this movie exists to get people on side, and the second movie will try to take things further. Because this movie isn't adding anything thematic, in my opinion. One thing that might happen that I would like: for this franchise, which is so fundamentally about sons and fathers, to expand its worldview and be, maybe, about sons and mothers? (Or even daughters and mothers. Or both!)

With my more flaily hat on, I did really have a very good movie-viewing experience.
- Rey and Fin are both fantastic, and they had a wonderful chemistry that I really liked. They had a lot of the Leia and Han spark but in a totally different way. I really loved the development of their relationship and of their characters. Fin's story is so good, and I thought the one moment of brilliance in the movie is the moment when you suddenly switch from being in Poe's head to being in Fin's. Really cool and not something we've seen before in this franchise. And a fine bit of acting and directing in terms of the fact that you can't even see Fin's face but you know exactly what he was thinking and feeling the whole time.
- Fin/Poe, obviously. Right? Come on. Ugh.
- REY and being such a badass, omg. Yet this thoroughly good person. I think it would be weirdly cool if she was just some random totally unrelated orphan, but of course SW is far too dynastic for that, she will be some kind of relation - maybe through Padme or someone suggested a possible grandchild of Han and Leia through an older sibling of Ben's (I think the door was open for him to have a sister or sisters, personally).
- A disagreement among friends: I thought Rey had been sold or otherwise deliberately abandoned on Jakku. Others felt her family had been forced to leave her or really had been planning to come back. I look forward to finding this out.
- I don't really enjoy Adam Driver and I was honestly meh on the character but he did have a real Sulky Hayden Christiansen vibe to him, which I enjoyed as a shoutout. It's a lot more bearable in an antagonist rather than a protagonist, too.
- Loved the costumes and the look of the thing, although the Very Obvious Hitler scene was a bit Very Obvious. Clunk, clunk, clunk go the anvils.
- GOD HAN GOD I SAW IT COMING A MILE AWAY BUT FUUUUUUCK OH GOD. the worst bit for me, :(((, is that he and Leia had been APART and they didn't even MAKE OUT before he went away and OH, GOD. oh, god. :((((((((( I will be OK but I'm not OK about it right now.
- Carrie Fisher: fuck you, haters. Still gorgeous. Also, I actually loved her line about them both going back to doing what they were good at. Really unified them as a couple and also in a single brushstroke gave her a lot of adult complexity/flawedness. There was a lot of unhappiness over failure in that line.
- Lupita Nyong'o was amazing (and I loved Mas) but god, wouldn't it have been great to see ACTUAL LUPITA instead of the cgi? yes. it would have. Get on that, sequel, thanks.
- I remember noticing this in JJ Abrams' first Star Trek movie, too: he's about as good as average (i.e., pretty bad) at giving women speaking lines and important roles (although obviously Rey as a protagonist adds a lot from that standpoint, but man, it's still pretty dude-heavy), but I did notice that he made a lot of effort to have plenty of women dressed identically to men and doing exactly the same things as men in his crowd scenes. They weren't 50-50, there weren't necessarily *more* women, but they were just as likely to be fighter pilots or standing around chatting or moving equipment or whatever as dudes were, and I really appreciate that.

This entry is crossposted from http://labellementeuse.dreamwidth.org/376095.html, where there are comments.

labellementeuse @ 2015-11-22T07:55:00

2015-11-21T19:10:55Z

1. I hated every scene so far (I am up to episode 6, AKA You're a Winner!) where a character treated a gun as comforting. Guns statistically are very dangerous things to have around, especially considering none of these characters have any training. You can more easily shoot your friends and family with them than anyone threatening you. Also, of course, people threatening you can take the gun away from you in certain circumstances, and then they have a gun. And finally, the big one for me: having a gun in the house is a huge risk factor for suicide">. In a show where there is a character walking round who can *tell you to do anything and you do it*, I believe having a gun around is a really fucking bad idea. It makes so many things he can tell you to do *so* much more permanent.

2. People have said a lot that the show is darker than Daredevil. I think that's interesting because I am actually finding it more pleasant to watch. I think that's because despite the circumstances *around* Jessica being very dark, and Jessica being, basically, an unhappy, traumatised person self-medicating with alcohol, she still seems like a good person who understands very well complicated factors acting on people who do bad things. She cares about making sure guard dogs aren't hurt! The first thing she says when a little girl calls her a bitch is "I'm sorry this is happening to you." She fakes a fall off a building so a mindwiped guy won't be anxious about it. There's one big, bad thing she's doing, but other than that ...

3. Hey look, a character on a TV show wanted an abortion and got one and nobody told her she should keep her baby.

This entry is crossposted from http://labellementeuse.dreamwidth.org/375989.html, where there are comments.

AO3 stats meme

2015-10-25T20:37:55Z

Via china_shop. Just cos I finally have more than, like, 5 stories on the AO3 ...

Account Created: 18/11/2009
Link to AO3: labellementeuse

Total Works: 16
Total Wordcount: 70,552
Average Wordcount: 4409.5
Longest Story: Camaraderie and sense of belonging
Shortest Story: Momentum? I hardly know him

Total Kudos: 1786
Average Kudos: 111
Story With the Most Kudos: Camaraderie and sense of belonging with 348

Total Comment Threads: 165
Average Comment Threads: 10
Story With the Most Comment Threads: Second Time Lucky (22)

Total Author Subscriptions: 21???
Total Story Subscriptions: 8 (I have never posted a work on the AO3 that was unfinished so ??? why???
Story With the Most Subscriptions: and remember who I am

Total Bookmarks: 363
Story With the Most Bookmarks: Camaraderie and sense of belonging
Stories With No Comments or Kudos: All of my earliest stories on the AO3 are Yuletide stories (in fact, 10 of the stories on there are Yuletide stories and 2 of the others are for other exchanges) so everything has at least one comment ported over from the old archive.

What I find really noticeable about this is what a difference it makes writing in a juggernaut pairing. My Benn/Seguin story has more hits than anything I've ever written and it's only been up since May (it's also very long, and I think it's quite good). The Yuletide comment culture is also notable. My Howl's Moving Castle story from last year is the only story giving Camaraderie and a sense of belonging a run for its hit-count money, and it's leading in comments. Similarly, my 392-hit Swallows and Amazons story, Dispatches, is beating, comments-wise, seven different stories with at least twice the number of hits and kudos.

This entry is crossposted from http://labellementeuse.dreamwidth.org/375807.html, where there are comments.

Yuletide Letter 2015

2015-10-24T23:57:41Z

Hi, author! I'm very happy to be doing Yuletide again and I hope you will be too. It's important to me that you have fun, so if there's anything in my sign-up that you find obnoxious or whatever please feel free to toss it out the window and go with what you need. Read as much as you need & want to and no more :) I will be very happy with anything in my requested pairings/characters.

General Likes
- For the purposes of Yuletide, happy or hopeful endings are my jam. I would prefer for all of my requested characters to still be alive at the end of my stories
- Some of the classic slash tropes, especially fake dating, wake up married, kidfic, emotional misunderstandings, pining. Wacky dilemma tropes like bodyswap, sudden mind reading, cursed to tell the truth, etc are also really fun for me.
- breakup-makeup/getting back together stories (the greatest trope of all time)
- I like a range of different tones, many different styles of AU, etc. I like reading stuff close to the tone of whichever canon and I like reading stuff that takes those characters and puts them in stories of different tones - darker, lighter, different contexts, pornier
- canon-divergence AUs where one thing happened differently and then ...
- I haven't done anything for Yuleporn chiefly out of laziness. If the porn muse takes you, go with it with my blessing. My significant squicks are bloodplay and scat, although I would prefer for noncon and humiliation not to show up in Young Wizards stories or between John and Nancy. (Noncon would be a way to take my Mansfield Park request to a ... very dark place that would probably conflict with my happy/hopeful ending Prime Objective as well as my Be Nice To Mary request but, um, I think I would. enjoy that.)

General Dislikes
- I don't enjoy rape recovery as a plotpoint
- Deathfic, sickfic, and H/C are also things I would prefer not to receive.

Mansfield Park
Mary Crawford, Fanny Price

Anything, modern or regency or anything in between, that is a little kinder to Mary than Mansfield Park's narrative would delight me - something that was as generous to Mary as Austen was to Henry when she says, roughly, that Fanny's love would have made him a better man.

I would love a modern AU for these characters that allows them both the opportunity to be less dependent on the vile people who have damaged them. A university AU, a high school AU, they meet doing local drama that they've been dragged along to by their brothers, they meet because Henry falls for Fanny and Edmund falls for Mary but Fanny and Mary each realise that the other woman is far better than her sib ... Alternatively, if you like the regency, perhaps some kind of AU where Mary is super gay and that affects her actions in the book? (Mary the super gay angry feminist in a modern AU would totally work, haha.) Stuff set in the regency I would be fine with either a fictionally tolerant attitude to queer people or closeted stuff (or, of course, gen/canon stuff!)

I would be happy with femslash for these two but it's not necessary. I read Mansfield Park for the first time this year and found, as is not unusual for me, that my sympathies rested a lot with the Bad Girl, in this case Mary. The narrative is not kind to Mary but I liked her a lot (well, maybe except for the bit where she's like "Hey, if Tom dies you could totally afford to marry me!") She's not vicious to Fanny the way other characters are although obviously she's not observant, but generally speaking the damage she does to Fanny is unintentional and driven by Fanny's (perfectly understandable given her upbringing) inability to stand up for herself. I don't need Mary to be a saint - her practical nastiness is a bit of a joy most of the time, actually - but I would like her to be given the opportunity for redemption Austen didn't really offer her.

A sneaky off-the-wall crossover idea: I'd love to see Isabella Thorpe (from Northanger Abbey) interacting with Mary.

Young Wizards
Dairine Callahan, Carmela Rodriguez

I love these guys and would love something focused on a developing relationship (romantic or friendly) between them, or on their shared (though differently expressed) love of learning. Really anything with the two of them would delight me - relationship milestones, babysitting Nita and Kit's kids (or having their own!), just generally sitting around snarking on their sibs, Carmela going off to college and keeping in touch with Dairine, the two of them having their first threesome ...

Dairine/Carmela is one of my not-so-secret weird OTPs developed by spending way too long in this fandom. They’re huge fun as foils for their respective siblings but I love them for themselves, as well. Once upon a time I wrote an embarrassing ship manifesto for this pairing (that actually now that I re-read it lacks one key element: WOW THEY'D BE HOT TOGETHER. Dairine kind of twitchy and passionate and, you know, her personality is shaped like an arrow, sometimes angry and Carmela so laid back and relaxed but still passionate and mm it's just a dynamic that really works for me in a relationship. Like a short skirt and a long jacket iykwim.) Of course I would be just as thrilled with gen; these guys are just so much fun to read about and I think they have a real spark together.

A random by-the-way: should you be moved in a different direction, Nita/Kit/Ronan is another of my not-so-secret weird OTPs, especially in the context of Kit and Ronan's budding friendship and the material in Lifeboats, which I loved. Kit/Ronan would also be fine.

Swallows and Amazons
Nancy Blackett

I think the thing I treasure most about this series is the sheer amount of competence!porn and learning and the shared sense of community and family even between the families. All of that hard work and skill thrills me in this context and would thrill me in any kind of AU.

This is my year of asking for AUs, I guess: I'd love to read an AU that gives Nancy the opportunities that John has in the canon, whether that's a modern AU or any other kind. Modern AUs would be fun for this cast (how about a university AU with Professor Lee, Nancy's favourite Latin prof?) Prefer gen or slash, or not to go AU? No worries! I'm really fond of wartime!S&A&Ds. Imagine a Foyle's War/Swallows & Amazons fusion, or cast Peggy or Dot as Rosie the Riveter. Which of the women's auxiliaries did they go into? I love Nancy a lot, but I'd really like to hear more about Titty, Dot, Bridgie, even Daisy, too. How about drawing on Roger Altounyan's real life for something about Roger? - or the D's at Bletchley Park! If you like this idea go as nuts with it as you care to. Kill anyone but Nancy if the muse strikes you.

Notes: I LOVE Nancy. I ship her with John as two-captains-together but I also am very keen on Nancy femslash, so however the mood takes you, including a gen story just about Nancy, I am keen. My only really big DNW in this fandom is John/Peggy and stories where Nancy dies. Other than that, have fun.

Rainbow Rowell - Fangirl
Simon Snow, Baz Pitch

I'd really read anything you came up with for these characters - is Baz a vampire, isn't Baz a vampire, why is Simon so paranoid about Baz being a vampire, a falling in love story ... one of my favourite things in Fangirl is the HP parody aspect, so any of that you want to work in would be great fun :)

This is a tricky request to manage but I've requested Simon & Baz from Fangirl rather than from Carry On because I guess I'm sort of interested in competing fanfiction for Rowell's fanfic of her own fictitious Harry Potter parody. Of course it's difficult to know what is Carry On canon and what isn't. I have read Carry On, but don't mind if you haven't - either way the Simon & Baz dynamic as portrayed is fun/funny to me as a HP fandom veteran. (And, of course, so passionate in Carry On ...) Anyway, I don't mind if you do draw on Carry On or if you don't, I'd love to read something/something more about Simon and Baz at school or after.

Here's one prompt that is very spoilery (highlight to read) for Carry On: Simon losing his magic at the end of Carry On is incredibly painful to me, for example - do you think this is likely to have happened in the "real" eighth Simon Snow book? How do you think Simon and Baz deal with it - especially Simon, given the beginning of the book and how he talks about the magical world?

Thanks again, dear author, and I hope you have a great time this Yuletide. You can stalk me as required labellementeuse here/AO3/LJ/twitter and birdhead on my (rarely updated) tumblr.

This entry is crossposted from http://labellementeuse.dreamwidth.org/375539.html, where there are comments.

Hockey Holidays Dear Author Letter

2015-10-11T19:36:44Z

Hi, author! I'm very happy to be doing this exchange and I hope you will be too. It's important to me that you have fun, so if there's anything in my sign-up that you find obnoxious or whatever please feel free to toss it out the window and go with what you need. Read as much as you need & want to and no more :) I will be very happy with anything in my requested pairings/characters.

general taste stuff
I said this in my sign-up: I am fairly relaxed when it comes to general taste so if you're dying to write something really unhappy for a holiday exchange you may :) I prefer no Brandon Bollig, deathfic, sickfic, h/c, dub or noncon within a requested pairing (negotiated noncon roleplay is fine), scat or bloodplay.

Stuff I really like:
- break-up make-up
- pining
- canon-divergence AUs where one thing happened differently and then ...
- competence porn
- classic wacky-dilemma tropes like wake-up-married or sudden-telepathy or soulbonds, and especially negotiating those in a hockey fandom context
- the marriage and fake dating tropes are especially big for me
- I really think there is not enough bodyswap in this fandom, especially among players on different teams where it would be very weird and difficult. hockey players' bodies are, obviously, really important, and I would love to see some of that for any of the people I've requested
- most kinks tbh
- kidfic (not necessarily via mpreg)
- coming out stories

Stuff I would prefer not to receive:
- scat and bloodplay
- Brandon Bollig
- deathfic, sickfic and h/c
- dubcon or noncon within the requested pairing, with the exception of McEichel

prompts and pairing stuff

Jack Eichel/Connor McDavid

Like, I think, most people, I'm pretty new to this pairing and so far I enjoy it in some predictably tropey ways. You can sell me on most characterisations of these guys because I'm still only becoming familiar with them - if you've offered them I assume you have some convictions about their personalities and I'd love to see that! I'd like to see stuff that explores stuff about being new to the NHL, the shared sense of pressure on them, competition ... I'm interested in dynamics that run the gamut from hatesex-to-lovers to secret-admirers.

Obviously, these guys would be fun for some of the dilemma-trope stuff!

Nick Leddy/Brandon Saad

I find these guys to both be fairly chilled-out seeming, so I'd really be interested in a coming out story - I'd like to know how they'd handle it. Perhaps they're not as chill as they seem, perhaps they really are. Accidental outing or deliberate coming out would both be interesting in their own way. Alternatively, because I'm still so sad they're separated, this would be a fun pairing to write many AUs for :)

I forgot to mention beardporn so uh, you know, that. I really like these guys, you could write anything and I will be into it :) Feel free to throw in as much Isles or Blue Jackets content as you can.

Jeff Carter/Tanner Pearson/Tyler Toffoli

If you see this pairing and are struck with the epic of them coming together in a poly relationship with months of soul-searching and an eventual settling into a beautiful and stable threeway and eventually Jeff retires and raises the kids/dogs I would so be here for that, but, um, also, here's a prompt: daddy kink, and here's a related prompt: Tanner and Tyler knock Jeff up. Um, I would be super super into that, or either of those things separately! Or the one where any two of these guys are in an established relationship and the other guy occasionally joins them for sex?

I have no idea why I was so struck by this threesome on the list but I absolutely was. Give me all the 70s line stories! Maybe Carts teaches Tyler and Tanner a few things off the ice ... or maybe they teach him some things. OR MAYBE THEY KNOCK HIM UP and like, they're not sure who the father is, but does it rly matter? TANNER AND TOFF MAKE JEFF A DADDY.

Martin Jones/Tyler Toffoli

Obviously post trade there are lots of opportunities for Trade Feelings Resolution Stories for this one, but if you want to set it before Jones got traded that's fine by me, too. Stuff about them making the team, stuff about them, say, breaking up over the trade and then getting back together after a while ... or failing to get back together ... breaking up and ending up with other people. This would be a great candidate for break-up fic in many ways, either break-up-make-up (my favourite plot of all time) or breakup. Is it hard because Toff still has Pears and Joner's by himself with the Sharks and he can't help being a bit jealous? Do they stay together but it's so hard to see each other that they each start developing feelings for new teammates (or, worse, just one of them does)? Are they able to negotiate that and stay together or does it just not work?

Nick Leddy/Andrew Shaw/Brandon Saad
OPTIONAL TAG: Gen

I'd be happy with anything, gen or otherwise, for this gang, and in fact any of the internal pairings are also very good for me, but this is my gen request because I was thinking about a story about Andrew "all my friends got traded" Shaw. When I say gen it doesn't have to be totally gen, like if you want to write a relationship inside or outside this threesome or sex or whatever that would be totally fine, but I'd be interested in something focused on Andrew Shaw and the fact that, uh, all his friends got traded & how he develops/moves on/learns to live with that.

I'll just reiterate that gen or otherwise is totally optional, and any permutation of these pairings - I'm just interested in this dynamic.

I hope this has been a helpful letter! Good luck/have fun writing, and I can't wait to see what you come up with.

This entry is crossposted from http://labellementeuse.dreamwidth.org/375272.html, where there are comments.

Wellington on a Plate Week 1

2015-08-17T10:11:28Z

So tamarillow wrote up last year's Wellington on a Plate and this inspired me to do the same thing for this year! I'm going to try to go weekend by weekend and here's a post for this last weekend. At some point in the near future I might do a life stuff update too?! Anyway. Click on the links in posts below for menus and arysteia's food photos.

Friday: Foxglove

On Friday we had a later dinner booked at Foxgloveso we started out at One Red Dog where we had fairly ordinary cocktails (the mojito was fine, the rosebud EXTREMELY sweet. I still liked it but you would really need a taste for sugar. Neither of them were in danger of overpouring). Then we toddled off to Foxglove, slightly soused.

I have to say that easily my favourite thing about this was the cocktail. One of WOAP's innovations this year is doing a cocktail + tapas thing, and Foxglove's one was a truly tasty deconstructed gin hot toddy and tuna tartare (there was some dressing and I think watercress underneath but the tuna starred). The hot toddy came with a cube of saltwater jelly and lots of lemon zest plus two little jugs, one of hot water and one of gin. You poured the hot water over the jelly to melt it and then dumped in the gin. Gosh this was very tasty, and I'm not a big gin fan in any way. It foregrounded the gin without being overpowering. And the tuna was just gorgeous as well, an ever-so-thin layer of beautiful crispness and then, you know: tuna. Raw tuna's so good.

The starters were little sliders and I went out on a limb and had the crab, which I had never had before, with bloody mary mayonnaise. Turns out I like crab. It was delicious, and so was the main, a pulled lamb burger with slightly soggy but very well-seasoned chips. The bread was tender and slightly sweet and delicious and they were both deliciously moist with lots going on. I did find the lamb my least favourite part - I think I'd just been expecting a classic minced lamb burger. The choux pastry "burger" was fun although obvious in its conceit. Really, it was just a giant and glorified ice cream puff (which is fine because I love those). I think the pear was my favourite bit. The affogato looked like fun with its chocolate spoon, though :) In all cases the alternative dish (the beef sliders and the halloumi burger) was heartily well-reviewed by its subscribers.

Saturday

Mishmosh ticked us off to start by refusing to let us order all three courses, insisting we pick two. We've been doing extensive Dine Wellington dining for 3 years now and I think this is the first place ever to do this and I have to say it annoyed me. They said that they had an agreement with WOAP and if they didn't do it this way they would run out of food or not get the balance right, which I think is frankly silly and kind of doesn't make sense? So that bugged me. tamarillow and I decided to get around this by one of us ordering a starter and one of us ordering a dessert, and that actually worked pretty well considering the portions were very generous. We had the hot dog because I love hot dogs - unfortunately there isn't a photo of this. I liked it and the sausage was very tasty - beefy and delicious. And the onions were perfectly done in my opinion - not too sweet (I like a v sweet caramelised onion sometimes, but not with a beef sausage - they were allowed to stay a bit sharp and I really liked that). Still, I will admit to a little envy over the oyster sliders, which also looked v tasty and a bit more tender than the hot dog.

Next up was burgers - for some reason it was a very burger-heavy weekend. I had the beef burger, which was very nice indeed (again, great bread) except that the patty was just hugely, dreadfully dull and underseasoned. The sauces were good, the other fillings were good, the cheese was nice, and the meat was certainly generous ... but it was not very interestingly flavoured and honestly was just crying out for some salt and pepper. Also, it could have been more rare for my tastes, but I know that's not what everyone likes in a burger. We had a similar review from the fish burger - perfectly cooked snapper and crayfish, great tapenade, but it needed, said our expert reviewers, some tartare sauce or something (like the one that had been on the oyster sliders) to just round it out and moisten it up. Kind of a shame since the fixes are so easy.

Finally, we had the PB&J gelato with trimmings. The gelato was nice of course but the caramel popcorn was the standout here. Really, really delicious. Waffle ladyfingers were very nice too :)

I would have to say with Mishmosh that it was really good value for money at $25 for two courses and a drink. If I went again I'd get the oyster sliders and the beef and not be embarrassed to flip open the burger and put some salt and pepper on the patty. Also, just a warning that you are very likely to be seated on tall backless stools.

Sunday: El Matador

El Matador has been great whenever I've been there so I had pretty high expectations. I opened up with the bavette with chimichurri which was, first off, HUGE. the picture doesn't do it justice. This was a very large steak, basically. It dripped juices and chimichurri and was delicious.

It was followed by pork loin with apple sauce, crumbed fried cauliflower and walnut and lentil salad. Again, this was HUGE - like, so big I didn't finish, and let me tell you: I can eat. I took some home in a doggy bag and had it for lunch today and I was very happy I did, since I otherwise risked a trip to Rome. The pork was really lovely - beautifully seasoned with chili, tender as anything. I don't much like big pieces of pork generally because they are usually dry, but this is the second year in a row it's been great at El Matador - obviously they know how to do the thing. The cauliflower was delicious and so was the walnut and lentil salad, especially with the chili apple from the pork mixed in. I have to say that the salad by itself could have been a meal. Protein density: VERY HIGH.

I had the panqueques for dessert - these were basically crepes with dulce de leche sauce and ice cream with a praline topping. I'd had them last year too and they were yum then and yum this year. I will just add a tip: definitely go to El Matador at lunch and order dessert separately. Their WOAP 2 courses is $35, dinner for 3 courses is $55, but the desserts - and the panqueques at least are on their regular menu - are only $10 or $11. So I got 3 courses at lunch for $46 as opposed to $55. Bit of dodgy accounting there, especially as there is no way in hell that servings could be larger at dinner or anything.

Overall I found this meal (huge and) lovely. Unfortunately K and C, who had the vege burger, found it very dry and difficult to get through, which I think is a huge shame because they've done good vege burgers there before.

Little Beer Quarter

We went to LBQ last year and had one of those bad-experiences-through-no-fault-of-the-restaurant, so I wanted to go again and give it a make-up exam, so to speak. Last year we'd gone on a busy Friday full of the post-work crowd. They weren't totally ready to do food and it was packed to the gills, so we were all boiling hot. Then the starter was enormous and bread-heavy. Although its components were delicious - I especially remember the deep-fried gherkin - we all ate so much that we struggled through the sloppy joe. Generally we were crowded and hot and slightly nauseous and so even the food was good we weren't that happy. (I do remember really liking the banana split at the end, though!)

Anyway, we were much happier this year - although we did end up on tall backless stools again, sigh. (I guess at least LBQ and Mishmosh have an excuse for this - they are generally bars, not restaurants.) We were in a far less crowded corner and I thought the serving sizes were rather better judged. I had the beef and beetroot cured salmon gravlax with guac and popped capers.

Sidebar: I LOVE popped capers. Popped capers rule the world. The best light brunch in Upper Cuba is a salmon and cream cheese bagel with popped capers from Fidels. So, so great.

Anyway this was a delicious starter (and attractively plated - actually the presentation here was great, probably the best all weekend, which is sort of wild for a place that is, you know, mostly a craft beer bar that does bar snacks). You could really taste the beer in the cure, but not in an intrusive way, just in a tasty and interesting way. The pumpernickel bread was a nice combo, the guacamole was lovely - this all just went together really beautifully, both on the plate and in my mouth.

I had the Lamb Wellington, obviously a spin on Beef Wellington, for my main - chiefly because I've wanted to try Beef Wellington since they made it on Great British Bake Off a few seasons ago. (I like my photo better than V's photo of C's plate but if you're not twitter friends with me you may not be able to see it.) This was just beautiful. The lamb was so beautifully cooked and just had this incredible lamby lamb lamb lamb purity about it. My god it was good. The mushroom duxelle around it was delicious too, which makes it the second mushroom duxelle I've eaten this year and found incredibly tasty, so this year's plan to make myself like mushrooms has at least reached a tender beginning. The beans were perfectly (i.e. barely) cooked and the poached tamarillo was an amazing accompaniment that I would never have come up with - just set everything off perfectly.

One sour note: the pastry was pretty well undercooked everywhere except the very top and in some bits basically uncooked. But who cares, you're not in it for the pastry, if that's the trade-off for the perfectly-cooked lamb chunk I'll take it.

I also tried the gnocchi in bloody mary sauce which I have to say was delicious, with a real kick to it. Other people at the table felt there were too many onions, though.

Dessert was stout & chocolate pots with orange biscotti. These were a bit of a letdown because they had this very weird aftertaste/texture that was basically heavily cornfloury. I still liked them, especially with the biscotti, and thought the flavour was great, but other people weren't big fans of the texture or consistency - V described it as basically like chocolate pudding you make from a packet (I thought it had a subtler flavour than that :P) Anyway, that's a bit of a shame, but even so for me it was a good accompaniment to the mains - I like to finish off with something sweet. I would say this was my favourite meal so far.

Next weekend: the Epic Weekend of stickmarionette's visit, with Fratelli, Cafe Polo, Coco at the Roxy, Duke Carvell's, Ti Kouka and Basque. We might die.

This entry is crossposted from http://labellementeuse.dreamwidth.org/374833.html, where there are comments.

Why am I taking a picture of my face every day?

2015-05-29T23:10:37Z

A couple of weeks ago there was a really bad article posted on Stuff about the amount of time women purportedly spend taking selfies. (Supposedly 48 minutes a day, but since they include the time it takes women to dress and do their makeup - stuff they would probably be doing whether or not they took a picture at the end - it's pretty transparently bullshit in my opinion.) In response to this and the seemingly never-ending criticism of selfies by everyone who doesn't take selfies, my pal S decided she'd take a selfie every day. (She does great selfies where she's, like, doing stuff! Mine normally end up being me up against the wall in the bathroom, which has the best light in my house.)

Anyway, I decided I wanted to join her. Actually, I've been mostly taking two a day - one without a filter, and one with a random B612 filter, usually just the same photo twice. I've been doing it for just over two weeks now, and I thought I'd post a bit about why. Not that I think I need a reason. If people want to take a photo every day because they're gorgeous, that is A-OK with me. But there was other stuff going on for me, and it wasn't just the resentment of the endless nastiness.

Selfies and Me

You guys know about vampires? … You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, “Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist?" And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it.

-- Junot Díaz

I'm a Pākehā woman. There is plenty of me on my own TV screen and in my reading diet. That Díaz quote still speaks to me, though, and reminds me a lot of the way queer people watch television. We will watch any old bullshit if you tell us there's a lesbian in there somewhere. (I haven't seen The Celluloid Closet but there's a great gif set of a woman saying something similar.) Fat people, too - if a fat person is allowed to be a protagonist. (Blackout day on tumblr, a day where people posted only pictures of black people, was a far more powerful and meaningful version of this, of seeing people who the culture refuses to let us see.) And this, I guess, is how I feel about selfies. I love seeing these faces. I love seeing faces of people like me - women, fat women, queer women, fat queer women - and also people who aren't like me. I want us all to be reflected.

Selfies are the most direct way I can imagine for that reflection to happen.

A lot of people think selfies are vain (despite the evidence that many people take selfies making faces, eating food, jumping off things, shrieking, whatever.) The perception is that people primp and fuss and do makeup and whatever, and then take a picture so they can get compliments. I don't think there's anything wrong with that (big shout-out to some of the amazing makeup I see in selfies, which is art and deserves every compliment it gets), but I don't think it's the totality of the experience. Just like people want to see themselves, they want to be seen, and not in an oh-I'm-so-pretty way. When I take a selfie it's to say I am here. I exist. Damn right, my face is publication worthy.

I think it's particularly valuable that so many women do this in a culture where women are constantly being told that they are not worthy.

Of course, this is why the media has had to turn it into something negative. Look at all these women who think they are worth seeing! Quickly, let's correct them.

They are worth seeing, though.

Me and Me

I'm really pretty inside my own head. I don't know if that's a universal experience or one that not everyone has. I remember vividly some of the times I realised that this was not the case outside my head, like being at a sleepover with my two best friends and neither of them being able to tell me they thought I was pretty; like the guy who told me that the only reason I didn't like the Blackhawks' ice girls was that I was unattractive and jealous.¹ I also take pretty bad photos - I'm usually making a weird face or my chin is in the wrong place or I'm at exactly the wrong angle. So sometimes I feel like I'm walking through life with my outside and inside completely at odds. It can get annoying, like I want to yell, why can't y'all figure out what a babe I am? But also mostly it's crushing.

I have found that I can get the inside and the outside to match up a little more if I dress extremely carefully and use a lot of makeup. I find it really tiring, though. I admire people who can get up every morning and do that but it's too much effort for me, and it's so clearly a gendered double standard that it bugs me every morning. I recently left a job that I disliked and was bad at for one that (so far, anyway) I like and am good at. As part of the transition process I wore a lot more makeup than I usually do (i.e., I wore some most days at work and a bit on the weekends) and so many people said to me: "Gosh, you look so much happier!" My aunt, visiting from Australia, at a family party where I had put some makeup on said that to me too. I am happier but I don't know that that is actually reflected on my face, I think that was pretty much just the makeup.

That confusion that I have is another thing I like and don't like about wearing makeup. It's nice, I guess, to know that if I do some work I can change my outside. But it's a weird thing to think that your less pretty face is somehow a more sad face, you know? My sister wears makeup almost every day and she went into work without it one day. A coworker said to her: Can you please go and put some makeup on? You look really sick and it's worrying me. Your face without makeup looks sick? (There was a post to this effect going around on tumblr the other day, a picture of the same women. In one photo, she was wearing party-style makeup with heavy eyeshadow. Under the picture: "Why do women wear so much makeup?" In another photo, natural-style makeup. "See, you look so pretty without makeup!" In the third, no makeup: "Gosh, are you sick or something?" It made me laugh but it also made me angry.) I don't want to promote that disconnection for myself, I feel weird enough about my looks. I think that's why I'm taking two photos. The B612 photos often really wash out or change my face, and make it look like I have makeup on. I want to make that connection clear to myself.

The Faces of People I Love

On the other hand, all of my friends are beautiful. All children think their mums are beautiful, right? I know I did (I still do, actually). There is something about the familiarity of a face and the personality I associate with it that makes me feel the same way about everyone I'm close to. Like, I don't really see the bits of their faces. I see them, and I love them, so I think their faces are great, because I think they're great. (That's why you guys should definitely take selfies.)

After all those words, that's what I'm trying to do with this project, chiefly for myself. I'm trying to turn my face into the face of a person I love, the face of a person who I think is worth having her face splashed across my twitter timeline once a day. I'm trying to see myself, and be seen.

¹ He didn't understand, because he was not a very nice person, that I don't have a problem with the ice girls, who are just people out there doing what everyone does to get by; I have a problem with what the existence of their job says about the organisation. More power to the individuals, who I'm sure are hard-working and talented.

This entry is crossposted from http://labellementeuse.dreamwidth.org/374689.html, where there are comments.

Yuletide reveal!

2015-01-01T04:34:56Z

Second Time Lucky (5726 words) by labellementeuse
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Howl Series - Diana Wynne Jones
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Sophie Hatter/Howl Pendragon
Characters: Sophie Hatter, Howl Pendragon, Calcifer (Howl Series), Witch of the Waste
Additional Tags: Weddings, Fluff
Summary:

“I refuse to get married twice,” Sophie snapped.

Although as usual for Yuletide I had periods where I felt like everything was awful, I would never come up with anything interesting or pleasing to read, could never capture a fraction of the tone of the wonderful canon, etc, this on the whole went pretty smoothly - perhaps because I've done a bit more writing this year than I usually do between Yuletides, or perhaps because I had a lovely prompt by the very sweet Oshun, or - and this is probably it - perhaps because I had regular write-ins with K and V and it forced me to do heaps. Anyway, it was really great fun and I had a fantastic Yuletide experience.

I was privileged to beta a couple of things although I do regret not getting in my usual beta-for-a-random-stranger this year! However, I beta-read:

Rangers Knead the Way by aworldinside. I don't know the canon but it was supremely fun to do a baking beta :D And even without canon knowledge and feels, I can tell that it's rilly cute and if you do know Justified I commend it to you.

A Trip to Sydney by sixthlight. I *do* know this canon and I love this fic, which is casefic about Mac on the grounds that gdi, Mac deserves some loving attention. I really liked Mac's voice in this and, of course, casefic is the dream.

I had a great Yuletide this year, on the whole :) I have a few recs tucked away in private bookmarks and I might post those this weekend if I can manage.

This entry is crossposted from http://labellementeuse.dreamwidth.org/374022.html, where there are comments.

!!!!

2014-12-25T06:19:45Z

a) Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate it!

b) If you like WORLDBUILDING or JOYFUL POST-APOCALYPSES or CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT, or alternatively if you've read 7 Seeds, YOU SHOULD DEFINITELY READ THE THING I GOT FOR YULETIDE.

Germination (6451 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 7 Seeds
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Asai Semimaru/Iwashimizu Natsu, Aramaki Takahiro/Ayu, Shishigaki Ran/Nijiko
Characters: Asai Semimaru, Iwashimizu Natsu, Ayu (7 Seeds), Aramaki Takahiro, Shishigaki Ran, Saotome Botan, Nijiko (7 Seeds), Kusakari Hotaru, Tendou Matsuri, Suguruno Hana, Taiami Chisa, Amacha Fujiko
Additional Tags: Future Fic, Pregnancy, Dinosaurs, Herbalism, Road Trips
Summary:

It's amazing, the things that can grow in this world.

I am in LOVE with this and it has a whole 3 hits and it deserves to get a MILLION of them and 324983409 comments and kudos, especially because I gave a HORRENDOUS prompt that they absolutely ran with. READ LIKE THE WIND, FLIST.

This entry is crossposted from http://labellementeuse.dreamwidth.org/373897.html, where there are comments.

Legend of Korra finale spoilers

2014-12-21T06:11:32Z

KORRASAMI IS REAL KORRASAMI IS REAL KORRASAMI IS REAL DON'T YOU DARE TRY TO TELL ME THAT'S NOT WHAT HAPPENED IN THAT SCENE KORRASAMI IS REAL

This entry is crossposted from http://labellementeuse.dreamwidth.org/373724.html, where there are comments.

Yuletide letter 2014

2014-10-23T22:05:40Z

Dear Yuletide writer,

Hi! Happy Yuletide! Thank you so much for matching with me on whatever fandom we matched on. I am so thrilled to be playing, just as I am every year, and I can't wait to see what you produce! It's really important to me that you have fun with Yuletide, so please treat my requests with exactly the degree of attentiveness that you need for a good Yuletide experience, and no more. If what I say below bugs you or is going to, like, mess with your creative impulses, feel free to ignore it: if I requested it for Yuletide, I will pretty much read absolutely anything.

With this in mind, I deliberately kept my sign-up as low-key as I could (except for my super-specific 7Seeds prompt so SORRY IF YOU HATE ME NOW) and if that works for you, please run with that and don't read any further.

But if you're like me, you probably need more information. I like a nice thorough letter, so I write my letter with people like me in mind (i.e. it's ridiculously detailed). It's in two parts: general stuff about my likes and dislikes, and specific stuff about my fandoms. Feel free to read any of it, part of it, or none.

This is my eighth Yuletide; you can see previous letters here, here (2012), here (2011 letter), here (2010 yuletide letter), here (2009 yuletide letter), here (2008 letter), and here (2007 letter, holy shit).

Me Generally

Things I like: I really prefer happy endings. Slash (both kinds!), het, and gen. Porn. G-rated friendship or romance. Kidfic. Breakup-makeup! The appearance of cooking, music or handcrafts in fic. Professionalism and competency, children, careers, futurefic, makeouts, camping, conspicuous consumption of caffeine, adventure stories, gratuitous use of magic, slash cliches, reinvented romance tropes, feminism, women, unusual relationships, siblings being siblingy, emotional misunderstandings and/or RESOLVED emotional neglect, third person narrative, music and people playing musical instruments.

Things I'm not so big on: Major character or requested character deathfic; stories featuring rape as a major plot point.

I have no triggers and my only real squick is scat. However, I don't enjoy dubcon that is portrayed and dealt with as if it were consensual.

Did that give you an idea? Maybe you don't need to read my more specific notes! You can go away again now if you like!

If you want more, lay on.

Young Wizards: Dairine, Carmela

I said:

I'd love some Dairine/Carmela fslash or budding friendship fic - maybe a first time? (any kind: milestones, first spells, Ordeals ... and the sexy kind too, of course: first time, first threesome, first whatever.)

More detail: Dairine/Carmela is one of my not-so-secret weird OTPs developed by spending way too long in this fandom. They’re huge fun as foils for their respective siblings but I love them for themselves, as well. Once upon a time I wrote an embarrassing ship manifesto for this pairing (that actually now that I re-read it lacks one key element: WOW THEY'D BE HOT TOGETHER. Dairine kind of twitchy and passionate and, you know, her personality is shaped like an arrow, sometimes angry and Carmela so laid back and relaxed but still passionate and mm it's just a dynamic that really works for me in a relationship. Like a short skirt and a long jacket iykwim.) Of course I would be just as thrilled with gen; these guys are just so much fun to read about and I think they have a real spark together.

Secondly - I have often requested “Any characters” for this fandom. If you got matched with me on this fandom and you don’t like Dairine/Carmela, Dairine, or Carmela, or if you just can’t get something with the combo going, I really recommend that you take a look at some of my other letters and see if there’s something there you like. I hope you might find those inspirational. I really truly adore this fandom and every character in it, and will be thrilled with whatever you put together.

Protector of the Small: Keladry

I said:

Kel's Sex Adventures!

More detail: Oh, I hope you don't hate me for this, but listen, I was filling out my Yuletide sign-up and simultaneously performing my annual Kel re-read and got to thinking about how one of my favourite things about the Kel books is that they don't have the serious endgame romance that most of the other Tortall books have. And also, that Kel thinks practically about sex. And then I was thinking about some of the things I was reading about casual sex and polyamory and ethical sluttishness and blah blah blah and it all came together: wouldn't Kel just be the best person in the world to have casual sex with? I think she'd be GREAT at it. OK, she's a little bit serious, but she's so honest and direct and I think she'd be willing to give just about anything a try. Can't you just see her, knight-erranting from town to town, just having sex with randoms? Randoms she knows and trusts, of course, probably. Men, women, hey, couples. Especially since she can't really have sex with men under her command or, really, I imagine, with fellow knights. IMAGINE THE POSSIBILITIES. Kel butching it up with a young widow! Kel being tutored in The Arts of Love by an experienced widow! Kel having athletic sex with one of the Queen's Riders! Kel banging a carpenter to thank him/her for fixing a bookshelf! (As well as paying him/her cashy money, obviously.) Kel helping Lalasa teach self-defense to women and getting seduced by one of her students! Probably Kel would have sex with men too! (I do like het plenty, I am just better at coming up with femslash prompts, haha.) oh em gee. Vanilla sex! Kinky sex! All sorts of sex. (Feel free to throw in any characters you like and, if it's your preference, you can handwave existing canon couples. also: I wouldn't mind if you handwaved safe sex the same way Tammy handwaves contraception, i.e. Magical Protection From Diseases.)

Of course I know it's possible that you would rather write gen or something PG. (Of course, I think you can totally write Kel Having Loads Of Sex PG. Sexually charged scenes and draw a curtain over the porn! It's not the porn that I'm fascinated by, really.) I TOTALLY UNDERSTAND AND SYMPATHISE and so, if you'd rather NOT write Kel's Sex Adventures/are totally horrified by the very idea, feel free to write Kel having OTHER kinds of adventures. Bringing in bandits! Saving children and/or kittens! (Getting thanked by the kittens' owner WITH SEX! wait, wait, that was the last prompt. Maybe she gets thanked WITH A KITTEN, I wonder how the sparrows and Jump would get along ...) Being hilariously faily at carpentry and hilariously perfect at literally everything else! I love everything about her; if you want to write a romance with just one character, or a sweet polyamorous romance, or some regular old gen, I will totally enjoy that too.

7 Seeds

I said:

So, this is a very specific prompt, but I would really love some 7 Seeds future fic where there are some established village-type-things (can be within Japan or include other nearby locales if you want) that are actually running and doing some of the work to rebuild society but some people, specifically Natsu and anyone else you feel like, sort of roam between villages doing a kind of communications-mail-news-gossip route and also environmental-awareness ranger-type stuff. Natsu, specifically, does it because she's a natural historian and so she travels a lot to learn as much as she can about plants and animals and then she spreads that information to the people on her route.

If that is a ridiculously specific prompt for your tastes, feel free to do pretty much anything with Summer Team B - Natsu and Semimaru makin' out! Botan teaching the group stuff and being a general badass! Arashi and Semimaru makin' out (come on!) I am also a big fan of Spring Team, and of Summer Team A being awkward turtles when they have to interact with humans ...

I am a little behind on scanlations but don't mind spoilers so go for your life.

I am FULLY aware that this is a dreadful prompt and I won't mind if you want to blacken my name in every fannish circle you run in - but it's an idea that came to me, fully and perfectly formed, in this thread, which contains a lot of my other thoughts about the canon (which I'm a bit behind on at the moment). However, as I said I would also love anything about the rest of Summer Team B and all their friends! The positive, rebuilding-society aspects of this dystopia are something I really love.

Okay. I'm sure by now you're absolutely replete with detail! I'll repeat myself: please feel free to take as much or as little from my letter as you need. If we've never met, I can't wait to meet you; if we have met, I still kind of can't wait to meet you on 25 Dec. For stalking purposes, you can find me as labellementeuse on LJ, DW, Ravelry and, of course, the AO3; and I'm @tui_talk on twitter (locked, sorry, but I do add obviously fannish people back). Take care and happy Yuletide!

This entry is crossposted from http://labellementeuse.dreamwidth.org/373476.html, where there are comments.

labellementeuse @ 2014-07-01T21:17:00

2014-07-01T09:35:32Z

I saw Edge of Tomorrow tonight and I quite enjoyed it actually, but god what a terrible ending. It really seemed to betray the entire story that preceded it. It didn't offend me the way, say, Cage surviving and everyone else dying would have, but I liked the way the movie seemed to be about to subvert the everyone-else-sacrifices-themselves-so-the-manly-or-rarely-womanly-action-figure-can-survive trope. The ending seemed awfully easy. I would have cut off with him floating dead in the water and cut to documentary footage or something of the aftermath, like everyone on the battlefield when the mimics suddenly die, and news reports and so on. Found-footage collage-style ending. It's still a difficult ending but at least it's not the non-ending that actually happened. (You could also cut to him just waking up on the helicopter but a) that doesn't really make sense, like why then? and b) that introduces a stupid Inception-style ambiguity and ugh.)

Anyway I'm going to try to hunt down the original and see if the ending's different!

I thought Cruise was reasonably good and Blunt was fantastic. It was great that she had such an important role. But, also, on the weekend I saw The Long Kiss Goodnight (which I loved) with some friends and we were talking about female action heroes and how they don't goddamn look like action heroes, like Geena Davis and say Katee Sackhoff and Sigourney Weaver do - or the woman who plays Brienne in Game of Thrones. V said she blamed Joss Whedon and in a way she's not wrong - these girls who have superpowers so they don't have to physically look strong, they can just magically be strong. So from that perspective I found Emily Blunt's hairdo really distracting, even though they have the mecha suits that mean she doesn't have to be super-strong or whatever. Just. IDK. It's a thing I was thinking about while I was watching, just like I was thinking about the way male action heroes aren't necessarily inevitable. You can make the dude the sidekick some of the time. Hey, maybe someday we won't even need a dude sidekick ...

I was pretty impressed by the way they dealt with what could be a pretty draggy set of material with the looping. They had a pretty light hand with repeating things and I think did a great job of showing what was new and what was repeating and so on. I did think, though, that there wasn't a lot of tension. Which was great for me because I fricking hate tension, so I found it really relaxing to go through a movie for about 90% of which I wasn't worried at all about anyone dying. But I don't know if it works as well for real action fans. Maybe it does because action fans are really interested in the pain and difficult journey of the hero and that all happened? Maybe it's better because the hero is experiencing not just pain but actual death all the time? IDK. I don't really know what action hero wants.

In completely unrelated news, I'm going to be in the US in October (a few days in San Francisco, New York, at least a day in Boston and a few days in Chicago) so hit me up with recs or let me know if you would like to hang! :)

This entry is crossposted from http://labellementeuse.dreamwidth.org/373025.html, where there are comments.

hmm

2014-03-14T11:33:58Z

Trying to work out my feelings on this. See - I enjoyed, heaps, this movie. I was thrilled at all the fanservice, I loved SEEING everyone all GROWN UP and glimpses of their lives, that was all delightful to me. Like here are some things:

- The amazing cameos, shoutout to Leo, Cliff and Mac (omg what a babe Mac was
- omg VERONICA ASKING WALLACE TO LOOK UP A STUDENT RECORD! A++++
- I know it makes me the worst fan but I LOVED all the little callouts and references and stuff
- Dick was pretty flawlessly Dick

-- but --

-- at the end of the movie I felt profoundly unsatisfied. It was everything I wanted in terms of fanservice, and I liked the vast majority of the plot, but I really didn't like the way they wrapped the movie up by rebooting everyone to their high school characterisation. (I particularly HATED this when it came to Weevil. That was TERRIBLE and completely unnecessary; that scene with Weevil getting on his bike existed specifically so Veronica could narrate over it and the audience could go ooooh, yeeeah, just like Veronica and Weevil! Which I think is fucking bullshit and turns Eli into a pawn for Veronica's story and I HATED hated hated that.) But other than the Weevil thing I didn't hate it, I just felt dissatisfied.

Look, I'm OK with Veronica coming back to Neptune, I'm OK with Veronica being with Logan (in fact I ship that). But what I'm frustrated with is - the movie set Veronica up as happy. She had a nice relationship with Piz (ugh), she was moving on with her life. Adult, growing Veronica, in the context of this movie, is a Veronica who has moved away from investigating.

And so at the end of the movie they've pretty much rebooted Veronica back to high school. And not just Veronica - literally everyone in the movie. With the maybe exception of Logan, except we don't really see the transformed Logan - we just assume he exists because of his snazzy outfit.

As I'm typing this out, I'm beginning to wonder if this is the point. Like, this felt like an incredibly feelgood, fanservicey movie (with, uh, murder. I was pretty sad about Gia actually, I always liked her), but the ending is ... kind of incredibly dark but treated as a feel-good conclusion, and I feel really weird about that. Maybe that was on purpose, instead of by accident as I currently feel, and the movie is really a tragedy. But they didn't play it as a tragedy! IDK.

alllllso the whole women dying thing, I know it's a noir trope but it still sucks and will always suck. (They also really handwaved the whole "evidence" thing. I guess Veronica was still recording her convo with Gia?)

This entry is crossposted from http://labellementeuse.dreamwidth.org/372544.html, where there are comments.

Yuletide! and the Hobbit, briefly

2014-01-03T09:20:52Z

Happy New Year! You can check out my annual stuff I read last year post if you want.

In other news, Yuletide is upon us once again! I had a really really fabulous time doing Yuletide this year actually, including a couple of desperation writing parties with the Yulecops of Twitter that were both delightful social occasions and also really good at cudgeling me into action. I ended up being really proud of the thing that I wrote, not that it's necessarily all that great shakes but it was something new for me - new fandom, new pairing I'd never really thought about before, and new sensation of ... feeling like I could really see the development in my writing from my older Yuletide fic?

Dispatches (4644 words) by labellementeuse
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Dorothea Callum/Nancy Blackett
Characters: Dorothea Callum, Nancy Blackett, Peggy Blackett, Titty Walker
Summary:

Do come up and visit me next time you get a bit of leave. Love, Nancy.

I received two fics that I really loved in Gentleman Bastards, an incredibly tough fandom that I'm truly awed anyone could offer. The two pieces are very different, which reflects the breadth in tone of the canon and also obviously makes for a couple of awesome gifts.

a glass poured to air (1717 words) by Raven
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Gentleman Bastard Sequence - Scott Lynch
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Sabetha Belacoros/Locke Lamora, Locke Lamora/Jean Tannen
Characters: Locke Lamora, Sabetha Belacoros, Jean Tannen,
Additional Tags: Spoilers, The Republic of Thieves
Summary: Redacted for spoilers

This is very spoilery for Republic of Thieves and I don't want to cut this so I'm not going to say much more but a great follow-up to that book if you needed a breather after it. It incorporates a number of things about the Jean-Locke and Locke-Sabetha relationships that I really love and has a brief passage about one of the things I find most intriguing about Locke, his relationship with religion.

The Goddess of Suffering Scam (4266 words) by Edonohana
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Gentleman Bastard Sequence - Scott Lynch
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Jean Tannen, Father Chains, Locke Lamora, Calo Sanza, Galdo Sanza
Additional Tags: Don't Have to Know Canon, No Spoilers, Con Artists
Summary:

In the early days of the Gentleman Bastards, Locke impersonates a self-flagellating acolyte of the Goddess of Suffering, and Jean stands by as the muscle in case the mark catches on. You know what they say about the best-laid plans.

Completely different in tone to the other fic and yet, like the other fic, also totally like canon! This is a fun little caper fic, not at all spoilery, set during the gang's childhood/teenage years in Camorr. It's vicious, violent and fun in just the way canon can be - I particularly loved the flagellating apparatus, which fits SO seamlessly into Camorr.

For other recs, I'm still barely anywhere with my reading (I have about fifty open tabs in a special Yuletide window) but my recs I'm bookmarking on the AO3 here. I particularly commend the Rivers of London fic, which is excellent, and the Merlin Conspiracy fic, which had one thing I really disliked but was a very interesting and thoughtful fic that you definitely need to know canon for but is very rewarding if you do. I'm really impressed by people's ability to add to that canon which I think is awfully tricky.

Finally, I saw Desolation of Smaug the other day.

I liked this much more than An Unexpected Journey although, where with An Unexpected Journey there were several bits that I thought were great adaptations and several bits that I thought were awful, with DoS there was nothing that I thought was really good but also much less that I thought was really bad. Overall, I just think Peter Jackson added too many fistfights and extraneous plotlines. Of the extra plotlines (Tauriel, Tauriel/Legolas, the Laketown politics, the necromancer plotline) I would have kept a good bit of Tauriel and most of the Laketown politics (which are in the book but sort of sketched out retrospectively), cut the necromancer down a shitload (reduced it to hints and mysteries) and, honestly, reduced Legolas to a cameo. I like Legolas a lot, I really enjoy the way you can see how he's going to develop into the person he is at the beginning of Fellowship of the Rings, but the extended fight scene/revenge plot with the stupid orc drove me mad. Getting a named/recognisable orc or two in LOTR really worked; I just find it frustrating in the Hobbit because SO MANY EXTRA UNNECESSARY FIGHT SCENES. The Hobbit isn't an action movie; it's a heist movie! Or, well, it should be, but PJ is definitely, definitely making an action movie.

It's also frustrating to me to see Beorn reduced to a confused thirty seconds while introducing, e.g., the twenty-minute dash-around inside the Lonely Mountain. I understand that Beorn, like Tom Bombadil, is basically extraneous to ... everything (actually he's probably super crucial in the Silmarillion which I haven't read whatever) ... but, well, so is Tauriel. And Legolas' orc grudge match DEFINITELY is. Tauriel at least adds something (ovaries). The Beorn passage is probably my favourite bit in any Lord of the Rings book and it chafed at me a bit to see it done so very badly. The way he's introduced, Gandalf just straight-up expositing his entire story ... ehh. The barrel-roll fight scene (which while so super Jacksonian I still kinda liked) could have lost a few minutes to do Beorn properly.

Smaug. I liked Bilbo with Smaug a lot. I thought the Smaug fight scene was entirely unnecessary and I didn't understand why the timeline was SO compressed. They can take a couple of days to sneak around, for crying out loud.

Bard. He was fine.

Tauriel. What a babe. Romance plotline is idiotic. Did you notice that when she's holding hands with Kili her hand is half the size of his? HELLO. HE'S A DWARF. HER HANDS ARE BIGGER THAN HIS.

The additional Kili plotline ... just ... why ...

tl;dr I'm frustrated at the extraneous crap Jackson is putting in these movies in order to justify the fact that he turned my favourite childhood book into three movies of Greek tragedy when really it's a heist book with a Greek tragedy underpinning its plot. I understand that to Jackson the Hobbit is a Lord of the Rings prequel; but to me, the Lord of the Rings is a Hobbit sequel. You can have the tragic elements without adding in what he's adding in, the Lord of the Rings are already very very long movies, they didn't NEED a nine-hour prequel, damn.

This entry is crossposted from http://labellementeuse.dreamwidth.org/371767.html, where there are comments.

Yuletide letter

2013-10-12T07:55:23Z

Dear Yuletide writer,

Hi! Happy Yuletide! Sorry this is late. Thank you so much for matching with me on whatever fandom we matched on. I am so thrilled to be playing, just as I am every year, and I can't wait to see what you produce! It's really important to me that you have fun with Yuletide, so please treat my requests with exactly the degree of attentiveness that you need for a good Yuletide experience, and no more. If what I say below bugs you or is going to, like, mess with your creative impulses, feel free to ignore it: if I requested it for yuletide, I will pretty much read absolutely anything.

With this in mind, I deliberately kept my sign-up as low-key as I could and if that works for you, please run with that and don't read any further.

But if you're like me, you probably need more information. I like a nice thorough letter, so I write my letter with people like me in mind (i.e. it's ridiculously detailed). It's in two parts: general stuff about my likes and dislikes, and specific stuff about my fandoms. Feel free to read any of it, part of it, or none.

This is my seventh Yuletide; you can see previous letters here (2012), here (2011 letter), here (2010 yuletide letter), here (2009 yuletide letter), here (2008 letter), and here (2007 letter, holy shit).

Me Generally

Things I like: I really prefer happy endings. Slash (both kinds!), het, and gen. Porn. G-rated friendship or romance. Kidfic. Breakup-makeup! The appearance of cooking, music or handcrafts in fic. Professionalism and competentcy, children, careers, futurefic, makeouts, camping, conspicuous consumption of caffeine, adventure stories, gratuitous use of magic, slash cliches, reinvented romance tropes, feminism, women, unusual relationships, siblings being siblingy, emotional misunderstandings and/or RESOLVED emotional neglect, third person narrative, music and people playing musical instruments.

Things I'm not so big on: Major character or requested character deathfic; stories featuring rape as a major plot point.

I have no triggers and my only real squick is scat. However, I don't enjoy dubcon that is portrayed and dealt with as if it were consensual.

Did that give you an idea? Maybe you don't need to read my more specific notes! You can go away again now if you like!

If you want more, lay on.

Young Wizards: Dairine, Carmela

I said:

I'd love some Dairine/Carmela fslash or budding friendship fic - maybe a first time? (any kind: milestones, first spells, Ordeals ... and the sexy kind too, of course: first time, first threesome, first whatever.)

Kel's Sex Adventures!

Bitterblue left me with a craving to know more about this universe and this cast of characters. There are so many empty spaces - what’s the nature of Saph’s relationship with Teddy; Raffin and Bann’s relationship, will Raffin marry a woman in the end, what will it be like if he does; what will happen when the Seven Kingdoms and Bitterblue’s kingdom in particular spend more and more time with Fire’s people. I’d love to read more about the Council’s work, about the nobles and commoners they work with in the other kingdoms; I’d love to read about what happens with Bitterblue’s Ministry of Stories.

Oh god, the dreaded "any" request! This request is a bit more detailed so I have quite a bit less to say. I’d just love anything exploring the Seven Kingdoms. Slash (m/m or f/f), het, gen, plotty, romancy, smutty, slice-of-life - whatever! Random OC Graceling? Go for it! I know I’ll love whatever you write. Feel free to get in contact through the usual channels if you need more detail with this prompt.

Republic of Thieves: Jean, Locke

I said:

Just anything about young Jean and young Locke - preferably from Jean's point of view - it's so clear what Locke gets out of their friendship and less clear the other way around, perhaps. If you felt like throwing in some casual boys-will-be-boys handjobs I certainly wouldn't say no :) I love the rest of the crew including Sabetha so feel free to chuck in anyone, set it anytime, etc. I will have finished reading Republic of Thieves by yuletide time so no worries about spoilers. :)

I have totally finished Republic of Thieves so, alternatively, if you would like to write something spinning out from the possibilities of that book, please do! This is an annoyingly non-detailed prompt: I know I'd love something with Jean and Locke but I don't have any specific useful scenarios or ideas to offer you/inspire you with. Something Jean-focussed would be really cool. He's so outwardly steadfast: does he doubt often? Why is Sabetha so jealous of their relationship? What books does he read? etc, etc.

Okay. I'm sure by now you're absolutely replete with detail! I'll repeat myself: please feel free to take as much or as little from my letter as you need If we've never met, I can't wait to meet you; if we have met, I still kind of can't wait to meet you on 25 Dec. For stalking purposes, you can find me as labellementeuse on LJ, DW, Ravelry and, of course, the AO3; and I'm @tui_talk on twitter (locked, sorry, but I do add fannish people back). Take care and happy Yuletide!

This entry is crossposted from http://labellementeuse.dreamwidth.org/371473.html, where there are comments.