Cimblog

HAHAHAHHA. Come on, world, where is the Tom Felton/Matt Lewis?

Original post on Dreamwidth at http://cimorene.dreamwidth.org/2810654.html. Comment there or read comments.

Doing them out of order meant that I lost track of them! I haven't included any recs for Kris Allen/Adam Lambert, Hot Fuzz, or NCIS:LA, all of which were also present and all of which I read, because they were present in somewhat larger quantities, and aren't really as rare and literary as the typical Yuletide-feeling fandoms to me. So I've filled in this set with just a few recs from H/D Holidays and HP Yule Balls.

1. There's No I in Team by thefourthvine. Sports Night, Casey/Dan. A deeply hilarious story with a brilliant antagonist who comes bearing motivational slogans.



2. Temperate Self-Governance, by speakmefair. A Knight's Tale, post-canon, Chaucer/Wat established relationship, adventure. This is Wat's POV and fun, touching, funny, and very well-written sort of adventure story, that actually has a plot. A GREAT plot. Chaucer gets called into service as a spy for John of Gaunt, and Wat, advised by a well-meaning Will, gives in to his duty to help out, whether Chaucer wants him to or not. Which necessitates a bit of a quest in the company of Adhemar, ahahhaha. And in spite of the est.rel., this story has a new-relationship uncertainty to it that makes for a definite sub-plot of romance.



3. A Hogmanay Carol. HP, Minerva McGonagall/Rolanda Hooch. This is a lovely intimate portrait of McGonagall and her grumpy temper, holiday traditions, favorite literature, and her suppressed sexual attraction to Madame Hooch. Brilliantly-characterized and perfectly executed.



4. The Invisible Wall. George Weasley/Lee Jordan, accidental voyeurism, Harry, Ron, Seamus, Dean. A prank gone awry traps these four, forced to witness a completely unexpected sex scene between George and Lee. The humorous and traumatized commentary is funny, and at the same time the George/Lee, porny as it is, is really touching and very romantic; in fact, it made me say OF COURSE, and start shipping it, and go looking for more, but I didn't find anything else I liked quite as much as this one.



5. Secretary Tuesdays, or: Things Unspoken. Harry/Draco, Portrait Snape, future (Auror) fic, EWE. Unlike typical Aurorfic, this one is a light-hearted comedy of manners/adventure. The post of Harry's secretary is cursed and he's been getting a new one every week... until Draco Malfoy takes the post. Lots of great little moments, not least due to the presence of Portrait Snape over the secretary's desk making caustic comments.

Original post on Dreamwidth at http://cimorene.dreamwidth.org/2798195.html. Comment there or read comments.

HO SHIT

THE RETURN OF VICTORIA BITTER

Where's the goddamn popcorn?! :O

Original post on Dreamwidth at http://cimorene.dreamwidth.org/2787010.html. Comment there or read comments.

So I was among the many new Twitter followers of TomFelton due to his posting tons and tons of twinky photoshoot pics of himself and was kind of struck when he posted this picture a few weeks ago, and have been DEEPLY disappointed in fandom as a whole by the extremely small amounts of Dan/Tom RPS out there. Is it just hiding somewhere where I can't find it with delicious or Google? Because all I've been able to locate is one fairly inactive community, and no actually recent fiction at all in spite of fandom's collective Dracogasm after HBP came out. I think there's more Dan/Elijah Wood out there, honestly. *sigh*

This entry was originally posted at http://cimorene.dreamwidth.org/2727677.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

(Big version here)

Please click for the bigger version. This is based on data taken from two polls performed by thefourthvine, with the data in my tables taken out on 22 Feb 2009.

This plot follows the same format as my earlier graph here, which, of course, did not have any Science behind it, only me squinting at the screen and placing the dots by the seat of my pants. I've reversed the axes in this one, however, so that better-written canons are at the top of the graph and gayer ones to the right this time. I prefer placing slashiness and quality on the two axes so that there's one data point per show and one show per data point, which lets the interaction be more easily seen.

(ETA: The clearest example of skewing I see on the plot is Highlander. LOTR might be skewed, too, by people's childhood memories or something, I guess. But Highlander? Look at it! IT HAS THE SAME QUALITY SCORE AS SGA. I'm pretty sure that it's not just my personal... weirdness, or whatever, that wants to ROFL at that. SGA is bad, but it's not that bad.)

It should be noted that mean is only one measure of central tendency and, at these sample sizes - which is to say they're all rather small but they vary from fandom to fandom - it's important to look at the others as well. To that end, here is the table I used to generate the graph:


(big version here)

Median and mode (ie, the most popular rating) are just as interesting as mean in their own ways. Scanning down the standard deviation columns, a few of those numbers will jump out as extremely large, representing a much higher degree of disagreement on the rating in question: the slashiness of Supernatural (no surprise where the primary pairing is incest) and the quality of Merlin (I'm kind of at a loss for this one but there it is), for example.

It's well worth checking out the results in the two posts of thefourthvine's where I took the data because you can easily see the bell curves for some questions, and distinguish others where the distribution shows much higher or lower consensus. (The Science of Slashiness & Moar Science!)

The last two years I didn't have time to make Valentines for you guys, so I started a day early today and I drew these little cartoons by hand, which means they are of lesser, yet probably more amusing quality than the 2005 and 2006 Valentine's Day posts. Pairing-themed virtual cards for 8 of my top pairings this year! (Click to enlarge)

( Batman: Batman/Gordon, somewhat inspired by Lego Batman )

( Criminal Minds: Garcia/Morgan )

( The Devil Wears Prada: Andy/Miranda )

( DieHard4: John/Matt )

( Harry Potter: Harry/Snape )

( NCIS: Gibbs/DiNozzo )

( Singin in the Rain: Don/Kathy/Cosmo )

( Star Trek MIRROR VERSE! Kirk/Spock )

So... RDR books announced their intention to appeal the judge's ruling in the Lexicon case, but then changed their minds and announced that instead they're going to release a different version of the Lexicon, revised to make it legal, in January. (The problem, according to SVA, was that the law about copy-pasting uncredited chunks of text written by other people was unclear before, but now that we know it's hunky-dory! Okay, so I might be paraphrasing.) Anyway, the comments to date are a riot.

By the way, the cutoffs in mid-sentence are completely original to the comments - even when they start in mid-sentence.

• Summary: What would you do if you were given less than a year to live? A beautiful story, well beyond anything I've read in fandom to date. It is profound and it touched me as deeply as 'The Notebook.' Warning: TissueBOX is a must.



• When a magical accident in the heat of battle sends Harry and Snape back to 1943, it



• apologize. He didn't want to hear anything about how it wasn't his fault, or whatever other trite



• When the electric violin duet of Drarry is on stage, they have their passion, but off stage their hearts belong to other men who create something wholly more wonderful.



• Voldemort is long dead and Harry celebrates this day in getting incredibly drunk.
  He spends a night with hot steamy sex with Snape. Severus leaves the next morning and leaves a not but Harry doesn't find it, cause he's blind.

Now I'll have to find something else to read because I'm out of backlogged badfic headers and summaries and out of NCIS badfic. I guess I could go looking for Han/Luke again, but I wasn't really in the mood for it a couple of weeks ago - the fandom's got a kind of, hmmm, ponderous (retrospective, slow, sad) mood to a lot of it, and I kept getting bored. Maybe play catch-up with recent sga? Or just spend my time transferring my recs page to delicious...

In other news, right after I finished transferring all my old Trek bookmarks the other day, Trekiverse.org got domain-stoled and they haven't finished transferring (the main page was at Trekiverse.us but the internal links were all broken and the stories weren't in place last I checked). Bitches. Sigh. Why don't they install the Automatic Archive software, for God's sake?

But I did find a backlog of Bad Delicious Comments from last spring. For the most part I didn't click the links, so you're free to imagine yourselves whether or not the stories lived down to the summaries.

• Harry Potter has returned to Hogwarts as assistant Defence teacher after destroying Voldemort in the summer. Severus Snape on the other hand has finally been given the Defence Against the Dark Arts position, albeit with Harry as his ass



• Harry spends the summer at a whorehouse and returns to Hogwarts very different. Draco fancies himself in love with this new effeminate boy.



• Snape and Harry are Americans, living in Illinois. Snape is a Muggle librarian, and Harry is a deaf patron (and adult, for those who dislike cross-gen).



• harry is sold into sexual slavery. snape mentors him. he finds family with the weasleys. some gratuitous insane!hermione as a plot device to avoid mpreg. worth a read through.

cimness: Emma Watson went to RDA last summer.
wax_jism: >:/
cimness: Are you frowning because you're trying to remember who Emma Watson is, or because you're trying to remember what RDA is?
wax_jism: What is RDA?
cimness: Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.
wax_jism: Oh, you mean RADA.
cimness: XD Oh that's right. RDA is Richard Dean Anderson. I knew it was one of those acronyms.
wax_jism: 'Royal... Dramatic Arts? What is she doing with Richard Dean Anderson?'

me: My... fifth great-grandmother's maiden name was Evans! Maybe I'm related to Harry Potter!
wax_jism: Potter and Evans are really common names.
me: ... And Harry Potter's not real.
wax_jism: Right.

AUUUGH IN THE DECENTFIC I'M READING HARRY JUST SAID THAT FLITWICK WAS BLOWJOB-HEIGHT

Which, by the way, is actually a word in Finnish.

It would be interesting to see a story where the Accidental Magical Power-sharing Spell wasn't with the romantic interest. I mean, a lot of times with that trope the spell forces the principals to either have sex or fall in looooove, but a fair number of times it just acts like magical handcuffs and/or telepathy, and the sex part is volutary (presumably to preserve some laughable illusion of free will in a trope whose entire allegorical purpose is to assert the absence of free will in romantic love).

But like, a story where the amusing hijinks arise from the fact that a romance is developing between Harry and (whoever) while being telepathically linked and magically handcuffed to, like, Justin Finch-Fletchley or Zacharias Smith or... well, it could even be a major character, I suppose, just a different one. Maybe even to Dumbledore. His stereotypical attitude of absent-minded semi-batty laissez-faire would add a certain hilarity if he were dislodged from his customary role of Random Exposition Provider Who Actually Does Nothing. Then the romance could be springing up with Draco or Snape or... who else do people slash him with - Ron, Neville - and seriously hampered by Dumbledore's constant presence. Yes, that would be pretty great. Maybe I'll do it sometime.

The story I've been gnawing away at for the last three days has gradually been mentally downgraded from goodishfic to decentfic to kindofbloodyridiculousfic to, finally, badfic (specific sub-variety whatthefuckwasshethinkingfic). It's a bit disappointing because it was so very pleasing at the beginning, despite early indicators of its untrustworthy quality - long, slow to develop, full of UST and reasonably good dialogue and characterisation, and pushing buttons if you like Maaaaaaagical Telepathic Bonding stories, which I do. Alas, as is so often the case, once the sexual tension was prematurely resolved characterisation went out the window, and has since picked itself up from the under-window flower beds and made its escape. I think it's somewhere in the outer solar system, or possibly even all the way outside the Milky Way by now. It might have vanished entirely from existence, in fact, especially if the dialogue being attributed with outrageous bald-faced cheek to Snape is anything to go by. ...I'm actually still kind of enjoying myself, though. I definitely can't stop reading yet. At least nobody is a vampire!

But why is it that so many people jump the gun in resolving the sexual tension? And why is it that so many people completely abandon characterisation once the UST is resolved? Is it a case of just getting carried away and forgetting that characterisation exists? Are they deluded into thinking the characterisation is good, perhaps because they've been moving away from the realistic kind only gradually (it takes longer to write a story than to read one, after all)? Are they driven insane when they start thinking about some story kink or other?

I just had a completely cracked out idea: Harry Potter / Star Trek fusion.

It could explain Kirk's phenomenal luck and apparent psychic sensitivity!

I can't decide if I want Kirk and Spock to meet at the hidden wizarding adjunct to Star Fleet Academy and the romance to play out there, or for just Kirk to be a wizard and Spock talented but ignorant of the magical world because of not having been living on Earth as a child, and thus getting no letter of invitation to school, or for both to be wizards trained at different schools who, observing the secrecy laws, didn't realise the truth about each other at first...

The story where gypsies are actually magical creatures with strange powers who MATE FOR LIFE was mentioned in passing in a post on fandom wank last year here (thanks to kyuuketsukirui for reminding me), but the post is mainly about a public blow-up that occurred thanks to an equally appalling story about Native Americans (who apparently also mate for life - I guess in Mediocre Harry Potter Fandom Slushpile Land, all non-caucasian/white/whatever races really are animals!). Apparently whatever happened about the gypsy story happened in a locked post, and it isn't summarised. In fact, the post doesn't make clear that gypsies are creatures who mate for life in the story, which is why I didn't remember it in the first place, no doubt.

If you look at the post, though, you'll see that quite a lot of back-and-forth went on about the other story, which had essentially the same issue (plus many other offensive stereotypes in a horrifying sort of Accidentally Pick Up One, Get Ten or Twenty For Free deal). So... either (a) a lot of people are so completely clueless as to be incapable of grasping why OTHER RACES = ANIMALS is offensive even after it's been explained repeatedly, or (b) a small but vocal minority are. Either way, it's pretty nauseating, in that can't-look-away way. I mean, you know that people who are this clueless exist, but it's hard to wrap your brain around it, so you tend to be surprised/revolted/despairing anew every time you run into them.

I just read a story in which gypsies are magical creatures who MATE FOR LIFE and share many of the properties of fanon Veelas (a la Draco-is-a-Veela-and-Harry-is-his-mate fic). I just. What? They're creatures?

The most completely flabbergasting part is that the author seems to have not a hint, not the slightest clue that there could be anything offensive about that. wax_jism suggested that perhaps the author thought gypsies were magical creatures, ie she didn't realise the Rom really exist outside of fiction; but a throwaway line of dialogue about how they're "related to" "Muggle gypsies" made that unlikely and made everything worse. I'm flashing back to the Miscegenation Kerfluffle... which, perhaps not coincidentally, was also in Harry Potter fandom...

For someone who loves Harry Potter fanfiction as much as I do, it's strange to admit that I dislike several characters.

In many ways Harry, in canon, is a blank slate, because the point of view is so thoroughly focused on him, and his main character traits are bravery and thickness. He's not as completely thick as Ron, but he's thick enough to get on well with him - he occasionally figures things out on his own, just never quickly. I don't exactly hate him in canon, but I hate to read his point of view. The books, while told almost entirely in his point of view, have some saving graces - like the fantastic world-building - but are still, in my view, somewhat of a trial to read (boring, long-winded, requiring frequent breaks to breathe deeply and think of calm blue oceans and rant about the stupidity of the characters). Fanfiction doesn't have those saving graces, usually, at least not in the same degree. Fortunately, most fanfiction isn't too accurately characterised.

I find that my favourite fictional takes on the world keep the thickness, stubbornness, recklessness, and loyalty (and not infrequently, some or all of the prejudice) of Harry and Ron but make them bearable to read. (If they don't, I back-button. I'm not going to put up with an accurate characterisation of Harry or Ron for anyone but Rowling.) I suppose it's not too hard to achieve these things - although I've never seriously written in the fandom myself (parodies, very short pieces, and somewhat purple now-jossed Marauderfic don't count) - because many writers manage it admirably, even when there are other flaws in the stories.

But it's a funny thing when edging closer to canon characterisation becomes a flaw in my point of view.

Once, at the Batcave, I had a drink made out of grapefruit juice, vodka, and absinthe.

The badfic I've found now is the perfect badfic equivalent of that drink. It's powerful! It's nauseating! It might well induce hallucinations, but even if it doesn't, it will leave you feeling like it did!

Not only are Harry and Snape magically OOC telepathic soul-bonded kinky D/s vampires, and not only did Harry grow six inches of hair, six inches of height and six inches of muscle (I'm estimating) in one month before he also grew his VAMPIRE WINGS, but Neville and the twins are his new best friends; he now has a tattoo and a lot of piercings; Fawkes is his telepathically bonded familiar and Dumbledore is evil; and his name is Harrison. Now, okay, the Dumbledore being evil part is kind of bigger in a way, but seriously... HARRISON? That was about when I started giggling uncontrollably.

Poll #1187902 Random. Definitely Random.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 35

You know how sometimes you're dying to watch a movie but your attention span won't last five minutes?

You know how that long-haired metal head cashier with chipped black nail polish in the music store yesterday gave me a distinctly supercilious, yet dubious look when I bought a recorder?

Weirdest Harry Potter premise: