laleia

1. I don’t remember if I made an official proper I’m-not-dead-and-I-moved-to-Dreamwidth post. But I did! I still check my LJ flist once every few months to read posts by people who didn’t move over, but I’m pretty much Dreamwidth-only now.

2. With the death of fannish tumblr, I’ve started trying to be less of a lurker. I’ve been checking Dreamwidth (and LJ before that) the whole time! I’ve been reading your posts if you’re on my flist/reading page! I just ...never comment, especially in recent years, but I’m making a concerted effort to be more social (both online and IRL). But if you rec’d a book/TV show, I probably checked it out at some point. If you made a post about your life, I may even have started writing a comment and then forgot about it and left it in a tab for three weeks, and then found it, and then gave up and closed the tab without posting. But I’m trying to post more and I’m even making a post! Here! Now! This post!

3. Recently, I’ve been experiencing the transition from “fandom young” to “fandom old” pretty starkly. Not that I’m saying I’m old - more that when I first found online fandom, everyone in fandom (and especially all the BNFs) were older and wiser and I lurked and learned from people. And now I’ve been around long enough that when I follow a BNF and realize that (1) they’re younger than me, or (2) they have less knowledge of fannish history than me, it’s very eerie because the dynamic is so different. I mean, I lurk either way but the way I react to their fannish output differs wildly from before. This is all to say that when tumblr did The Thing, it was very weird for me to realize how many people on tumblr post-dated the LJ/DW glory days and didn’t automatically think of DW as the next gathering-place.

4. I wrote a fanfic for Yuletide! For the Wrinkle in Time movie, which I loved and previously posted about. This was my first Yuletide experience, but I saw beatrice_otter’s prompt and super wanted to write the fic. Partway through writing it, I realized what I really wanted was to make someone else write longfic on the same subject matter and that writing is as hard as it ever is, but I persevered!

Fandom: A Wrinkle in Time (2018)
Title: The New Normal
Pairing/Rating: Meg Murry; Calvin O’Keefe; Gen/Pre-Relationship; General Audiences
Summary: After everything that happens, it’s a week before Meg goes back to school and she just wants everything to go back to normal.
Link:You can find it on AO3!

5. I recently started working on a Nirvana in Fire fic that, once again, I realize is something I’d rather make someone else write longfic of for me. The problem is that research is hard, and trying to figure out what life was like in 500 AD China for normal people is also hard. This is like when I thought I could write a Regency romance novel (for fun and profit) because I read so many of them and immediately couldn’t handle the basics of figuring out what people did in Regency England for everyday things. (I mean ... I spent forever trying to figure out what people in Regency England wore for underwear, if a woman was likely to wear a dressing gown at nighttime around the house, if a barn in the middle of nowhere would have had addresses, how people figured out directions to addresses, what kind of directions a kidnapper might give for a dead-drop in a ransom note ... and then I just gave up because I’m bad at research and have a short attention span.). But maybe, eventually, I will post a NIF fic here where Lin Shu died during the Chiyan battle but poor Mei Changsu who was just a random peasant who can see ghosts starts getting haunted by Lin Shu’s ghost until he agrees to help Lin Shu carry out his massive sprawling complicated revenge.

I wrote a fic for a movie that nobody has seen, for a pairing nobody cares about!

Fandom: Final Girl (2015)
Title: Devil and the Duchess
Pairing/Rating: General Audiences; Gen (Pre-Femmeslash)
Summary: After Shane's funeral, Jennifer goes to the diner, only to see a familiar face ...
You can find it on AO3!  Much thanks to darklightluna for the beta!

The Explanation For Why I Did This When Nobody Has Asked For It:

So a few months ago, I watched Final Girl (2015), which ... I'm not a movie critic or anything, but I'm going to go ahead and say that it is not a good movie. If I were to put into words why it is not a good movie, I would probably describe it as a female empowerment fantasy written by dudes for dudes.

If you weren't aware (and don't care about spoilers), the premise of the movie is that these high school boys have just been straight up serial-killing lots of girls in the woods by bringing them out into the woods for a "date" and then hunting them. Our protagonist (Veronica) is a blonde girl who fits into the boys' victim profile but who is actually a sociopath who has been trained by some guy since the age of 6 to take down these high school boys (or similar guys who are similarly targeting girls? it's never really explained). There are a lot of dramatic scenes of her running through the dark woods in a red dress, and then a lot of violent scenes of them trying to chop off her head with an axe and her chopping off their head with an axe. Or something like that. It's been a while since I saw the movie.

There are a lot of reasons why I feel it is obvious that the movie was written, directed, and filmed by dudes, from the way the plot plays out, to how the main character (Veronica) is shot/framed, to the fact that they tried to include this super weird and uncomfortable romance between her and the man who has literally been training her since she was 6 (because his wife and daughter had been killed at some point by someone, no further details, but in any case he is old enough to be her father and has raised her since she was a child).

Anyways, the ONLY redeeming feature in this entire film is a conversation between our main character (Veronica) and the girlfriend of one of the high school serial killers (Jennifer). In this conversation, Veronica is basically trying get intel on these people she will be killing later on, and Jennifer is just generally expressing concern about her boyfriend (who she doesn't know is a serial killer but who she slowly suspects of being a little too eerie). This is the only conversation between any two women in this film, and of course it doesn't pass the Bechdel test because both girls' love interests are discussed, but there is a moment when Veronica urges Jennifer to leave town and follow her dreams where I looked at the screen and thought to myself, This movie would be so much more interesting if Jennifer were Veronica's love interest.

And then I started shipping them, based on this 30-second conversation.  I mean, Jennifer has been dating a serial killer for like 6 years!  What harm is it if she dates another serial killer, only this one is more moral and only serial-kills serial killers!  They could be Murder Girlfriends!  They could road-trip across America, taking out serial killers, serial rapists and misogynist pricks, one after the other!  It would be fantastic!

Unfortunately, I don't have the skill to write the absurdist adventures of Team Murder Girlfriends, nor am I good enough to write the Actual Proper Femmeslash I really wanted to, but I wrote this instead!  And that is the story of how I came to write the fic that nobody asked for and probably nobody will read ...

While I am aware that I am far from an active poster in livejournal, I am still here!  I have not abandoned LJ for tumblr, I promise! And I still check my flist everyday! And, apparently, sometimes I get enough inspiration to finish the fic snippets I started years and years ago. Even though law school sucked all my fic-writing inspiration out of me, I have finally regained enough to complete the below offering!

Fandom: Iron Man/Good Omens
Title: il n'y a de nouveau que ce qui est oublié
Characters/Rating: Pepper Potts, Adam Young, G
Summary: Before she was Pepper Potts, her name was Virginia. And before she was Virginia, she lived in Lower Tadfield.

Read it here.  It's posted to AO3 and not duplicated below because it already took me way too long to do a half-assed job checking my formatting there; I didn't want to do it all over again.  Thanks very much to darklightluna for the beta!

Fandom: Vorkosiverse
Title: Barrayaran Maiden
Pairing/Rating: Cordelia/Aral, NC-17 (no warnings)
Prompt: Cordelia/Aral, Barrayaran sex. Cordelia/Aral: "playing" by the rules of Barrayaran sex

( Barrayaran Maiden )

( Chapter 11 )

Epilogue:

( Epilogue )

Chapter 9:

Please see Chapter 1 for the Summary, Author's Notes, additional details, etc.

( Chapter 9 )

Chapter 7:

Please see Chapter 1 for the Summary, Author's Notes, additional details, etc.

( Chapter 7 )

I had all sorts of awesome ideas when I first started writing fanfic. Or at least, I thought they were awesome at the time ...

( I really don't think I knew where I was going with this; I just wanted Usagi being secretly super awesome )

Then I remember: this is my journal, my space, and I can do what I want with it.

So without further ado ... have a Star Trek Mary Sue fic!

Fandom: Star Trek (2009)
Title: Lieutenant Mary Sue Teaches Captain Kirk A Lesson
Rating/Pairing: Gen, G
Summary: Lieutenant Mary Sue comes on aboard the Starship Enterprise to teach Captain Kirk a lesson. Warning: This is a Mary Sue.
Author's Note: Please note two things. One: I know next to nothing about the Star Trek universe aside from what I have gleamed from fanfic. Two: Despite the humorous summary, this is NOT a parody. It is a for-real legitimate Mary Sue, only I have decided to warn EVERYONE of this, and thus NAMED her Mary Sue. If I were a better writer, this would be a subtle character piece instead of a Mary Sue fic, but I am lazy, and also it was more fun this way. What is fanfic for but self-indulgence?

( Her mother named her Mary for the Magdalene and Susan for the suffragette. )

Chapter 6:

Please see Chapter 1 for the Summary, Author's Notes, additional details, etc.

( Chapter 6 )