the wrong end of the telescope

Snowflake Challenge Days 2, 3 and 4

Day 2: Recs for fanworks you haven't created

This one is hard, because I read very fast and I read a lot, so narrowing down my stories-I-liked of the last week is difficult, let alone trying to pull from a wider pool. But. From my favorite tag at pinboard, these are some stories I love very much and that mean the world to me:

1. Trigger Discipline XMFC, Raven gen. Because Raven deserves a story in which she doesn't leave her brother to die on a beach (as if she would, ever), and this is a very good one.

2. Perdition Downton Abbey, Thomas/OMC. Because Thomas ought to have a boyfriend, and this story deals with him so sweetly but so fairly that I had my heart in my throat the whole time. It doesn't pull any punches, either, when it comes to being queer at that time, but there's no unhappy ending. For once.

3. New Beautiful Things Come XMFC, Charles/Erik. Because I reread this story when I want a story that deals with disability well and with queerness in a fucking stunning way and does justice to social activism and art and ordinary people trying to love each other and live well. And Raven, oh Raven.

4. The War is Over series XMFC, implied past Charles/Erik, Alex/Darwin. This was written for me, and it's--well. Post-movie, slowly putting themselves back together, an AU in the fact that Darwin's alive but the beach happened, and it's perfect. And you should read it just for the moment when Rogue, very young and with a very dangerous mutation, meets Darwin, who can survive that too.

Day 3: Introduce yourself/talk to someone new

You're just going to have to trust me that I'm working on this.

Day 4: A list of fanworks you'd want to exist/receive/etc

1. I want more Leverage OT3 fic. Because there is badly any, and it ought to exist.

2. I really adore fanmixes. And fanart, obviously, but that seems so big it's hard to ask for (and I got the best fanart EVER from absenteye once). And podfic, but you know what? Someone just podficced one of my stories, my Brendon/Peter Parker ficlet, and that's getting a SEPARATE REC, but I am beyond thrilled.

3. More Raven stories. More stories where Natasha is treated fairly and like a person with characteristics that don't get attributed to her because she's a girl (there are some! There are some glorious stories, but I want there to be more.). More stories where h/c means being there for someone until they can stand on their own, not fixing the other person.

My brother's 21st birthday is tomorrow. He just had knee surgery, in another three months he will have MORE knee surgery (fuck fuck fuck, I feel so bad for him) and I need a present that will help him sit still this summer when he needs to rest.

So. He and his girlfriend just finished watching all of West Wing and they LOVED it. I need long series that are just as good and engrossing, which I realize is complicated, but yes. Help? He's seen Game of Thrones, and it's also not quite long enough yet (more than 2 seasons is preferable but not absolutely necessary).

Also, I'm still taking Avengers or X-men cuddling prompts in my last post.

I got my Yuletide! It's a LOVELY pre-canon The Hour story, where Freddie is pining and Bel is bright and everyone is a little drunk (or a lot) and they're feeling so much, and oh, I love it. Ugh, this show. Ugh, this story. Wall Clock in the Top Drawer, go read and tell the author they are wonderful. SO wonderful. ♥




I am also going to rec this verse again, because while reccing my Yuletide I realized I never told you lot about the last story in this verse (which was written for me on the worst day of December) and Christmas is a good time to reread stories about bb!Rogue and Darwin hugging and a post-canon XMFC verse where everyone needs cuddling and it's both sweet and sharp and amazing. &Tora;

Yesterday I saw a .gif going around on Tumblr from that ATL video that said something like "fucking boys in bands doesn't make you famous". I'm so sick of this, you guys. So sick of this. (ETA to clarify: 1. stop making videos/in general act like women have one place in the scene and one only, and 2. if they want to fuck boys (or girls) in bands, they don't need to be ashamed of that.)

On the other hand, I woke up to posts about The Like in Australia, and god, that was cathartic. Girls on stage, girls who have such skills, girls who captivate an audience like it's nothing out of the ordinary. I need that. Especially right now, when women's rights seems to be going backwards in the US. Which makes this seem trivial, maybe, except the ways that women are devalued in the scene, the way their sexuality is simultaneously a commodity and derided, the way their skills are doubted, the way their stories aren't told--it's all very familiar.

A little less than two years ago, I posted more than this, a post about women in music, inspired by the zine Pretty Good For a Girl.

I said:
I want Lyn-Z and Kitty to not be so rare that (misogynist asshole) security guards refuse to let them backstage after playing because somehow the drum sticks, the bass and the stage sweat still isn't enough to convince him they're not groupies. I want to be able to not flinch when I turn on MTV and there are music videos playing. (Come to think of it, I want more videos like Ciara's Like A Boy.) I want female musicians in bands to not be A Big Deal. I want female fans and techs and managers and performers to be respected. I want this to be our scene, in every sense of the word. This is our scene; this is our space.

I need a new album with The Like, I need more music by women. So what I want right now, please, are recs. Rec your favorite female musicians. Any genre, any era.

Here, I'll start (and I'm not reccing The Like, simply because I talk about them a lot anyway and they are, in fact, my favorites):

Adele:

( Hometown Glory )

Beverley Knight:

( Shoulda Woulda Coulda )

The Noisettes:

( Scratch Your Name )

Now you. ♥

There's been some conversation about diverse characters and fandom again--inlovewithnight has a fascinating entry about the mechanisms of that over here.

In that vein, I just found 6 Degrees for Band(om) Femslash, and oh man, it is the best thing in the world. It is now easy to figure out how a whole bunch of female musicians may have met through a series of different links--they use Vicky-T as a starting point, but its entirely possible to extrapolate. So if you're like me and hate doing canon research for RPF, look no further. Also, this project has short primers for 700 female musicians. Uh-huh. That number is indeed correct. Go tell them they're awesome.



In other news, I had a birthday two weeks ago! And people were wonderful, as they tend to be. ♥ There were birthday posts and emails and fic IOUs and a lot of love going around, and then--yeah.

blindmouse posted what she tells me is a placeholder for a different story, which, okay, if you're going to post a short not-the-real-present-fic for me and have it contain Z/Tennessee, mermaids, magic, THE SEA, and us-against-the-world, well. You win at placeholders. ♥ Sea Child. ♥

And then, okay, torakowalski? She just--she wrote me a story that has everything I love IN THE WORLD. And she's the biggest sneak, too, because she mentioned the idea to me in London and I went *____* and then she went quiet, but I HAD NO IDEA. It is THE BEST STORY, you guys, THE BEST STORY.

Seriously. It's called Normal Life Like Sleepwalking, it has Bob-as-a-girl, Bob/Brian, Bob being competent and quiet and funny, it has The Like, it has LAENA AND A VIOLIN, it has violence and people being stupid about caring about each other--IT IS THE BEST STORY. I'm repeating myself. But oh, I love it so fucking much.

See, here's the thing. You lot know I will read and write pretty much any pairing, up to and including Lyn-Z/Mac from Veronica Mars and Bob/Batman, right? But I have an OTP, I've come to realize that. An OTP that I can deviate from, sort of, if the story or the idea is compelling enough--emotions and relationships depend on the underlying characterization, after all, and I certainly don't loathe alternative pairings at all (Bob/Batman, for example). But ultimately, I find them so interesting together that I default to writing them when I can, and I love reading them, love it so much.

( a bit of a love letter )

Darlings, darlings. Things are a little tiresome right now, so I'm not around a whole lot. When I'm in a fandom space I'm mostly writing.

Speaking of writing! I wrote Have The Night, The Morning Too for athenejen, and okay, so, you will now understand why it was so obviously mine. The fandom is "Delilah," the Dresden Dolls song, and it's the story of Mandy, the graduate student at the University of Minnesota, who falls helplessly in love with her best friend. Only, well, she's an impossible girl, right? Bright and wanting to change the world and beautiful and--it's a little difficult for Mandy.

I loved writing this story more than I've loved writing anything in a while. I actually had this fandom on my list of requests but removed it because I realized I had a specific story in mind, and that never works out, so I took it off. (Children, take note: it is rarely a good idea to tell someone else to write a story that you have already planned out.) Imagine my surprise when I got my assignment: the prompt was on the list. I could write my story. I had marvelous betas: thesamefire and bexless were awesomely helpful and made it so much sharper and cleaner. I LOVE YOU TWO.

So if you read it, I'd love to hear what you think. Over there or over here. ♥


And if you want more femmeslash, you could go read Scrap, the lovely Lyn-Z/Amanda story that someone wrote for me. It's a quiet story, despite the fierceness of the two ladies, and I really like that, I like it a lot. I also love that the author wrote me a slow progression, and also managed a story where the sex wasn't automatically something that meant love, not right away. Also, this moment: Later, onstage, she had a sudden sense memory of pressing her face into Amanda's stomach, the welcoming warmth of Amanda's flesh. During the next guitar solo Lyn-Z did a backbend and stuck her bare belly straight up at the blazing sun. That's my girl, right there.

You could also always read Through The Grapevine, which is my Yuletide and was written by the lovely schneestern. It's not femmeslash, that's true, but it's Allison Fucking Hargreeves, Rumor my Rumor, and it's a sharp and perfect story. I still love how vicious it is, how right it feels. It's everything I wanted, everything. It has early Rumor, it has the first time she used her power, it has her families, her power (holy fuck, the way her power works here)--yeah, perfect.

Two stories I've been rereading for the past couple of days:

mahoni's Vertigo, which is a wonderful, wonderful story about Bob getting kidnapped in Gotham and rescued by you-know-who. I mean, okay, her Bob pov is perfect, the story is scary (it would be scarier if we didn't know Batman was on the case), and the ending is, ow, oh, THIS BAND. In addition to those awesome things, I love all superheroes and especially this particular dark and brooding one with his family of misfits, so I adore this story to bits. PERFECT.

which_is_golden's Bruises To Prove It, which is an Ashlee Simpson AU, about her as a boxer. Oh man, I can't tell you how much I needed to read this story this week--it's triumphant and lovely, sharp and sweet and amazing. Adjectives are stupid--I finished reading it and promptly had to read it all over again. Just read it, just read it. I want more stories like this forever.

Yes, yes, the meme was going around two months ago or so. Look, I've never been the punctual sort, but better late than never, right? Anyway, today I found this vid of much joy and gleeful grinning (well-timed, in a lot of ways--I really needed to see something like this).

So, if you feel like seeing what happens when Edward Cullen tries his stalking thing on Buffy, this is the vid for you. I'm sure people have seen this already, but if not, it's a pretty brilliant fusion of the two source materials (it's not seamless, but it's really, really well done, especially when you get past the first minute), and, um, you should perhaps not watch it if you like Edward?


( Get out, or I'll throw you out headfirst. )

First rec post. So much awesome, you guys, I love this fandom. *beams* First set of recs--there might be some mild spoilers in the reviews, but I honestly don't think I have anything in there that isn't in the summaries. Also, these are merely the stories I loved the mostest--there are a lot of other great ones as well, I just had to limit myself to the ones I'm going to be rereading a lot.


( big bangs have I loved )

Now I'm going to maybe take a walk if I can face going outside in this gloriously awful weather--me and my cat are a lot alike, when it's raining and chilly we stand at the front door making frowny faces. The difference is that he generally has more of a choice about actually leaving the house. Sigh sigh. But the rain is highly necessary, so I'm not complaining. It also makes going swimming at the outdoor pool AWESOME. It's a public one, just down the hill, and when the air is colder, no one goes, so I get the pool to myself and it's so warm.

Oooooh, actually, I'm going to go watch Brazil play soccer on the TV. Much warmer. And with the added benefit of awesome soccer.