Reading roundup and ship meme
I added a couple of folks in the last several weeks, on LJ and DW, and realized I never actually linked to my intro post from DW, so let me do that now (for anyone who's interested; it's fairly long and definitely not anything that people ~need~ to know): LJ/DW, since it's a locked post.
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Spent some time browsing the newly open Yuletide tagset (I'm not participating, I'm just... lurking and enjoying the festive vibe, and eventually reading). Random musings and notes to self
- Beauty Queens -- including Taylor
- Corfu Trilogy/Durrells -- which skirts a bit close to RPF for my taste, but I'd love to see someone write the Gerry hatches a Phoenix, etc. prompt
- Flora Segunda -- all the Fyrdraaca family drama, basically
- Fangirl
- In Other Lands -- nicely complete tag set, except that I really wonder what whoever nominated Adara and Dale want...
- Kingkiller chronicles nominated with just Devi and Kvothe, hm!
- Kushiel -- Imri, Maslin, Lucius, Mavros, and Sidonie are in the tagset among lots of other people
- Lynes & Mathey -- Ned and Julian, Miss Frost, and Inspector Hatton
- Hexarchate -- interesting combination of POV characters and people I had to google/guess (e.g. Shuos Alaia, Cheris's ex-girlfriend, who I think is mentioned in passing once). I hope it leads to the Mikodez-Zehun-Nija fic that needs to exist.
- Murderbot
- Rogues of the Republic -- from a person who presumaly wants shipfic (and not even for the ships I have any interest in), seeing as how the four characters are Kail and - Desidora and Loch and Pyvic
- Not Your Sidekick -- which might optimistically lead to fic better written than the book?
- Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda (mysteriously missing Nick...)
- Warchild set includes the all-important Cairo (as well as Ryan and Sid... and I guess some actual main characters, too, whatever)
- Watchmaker -- Mori, Thaniel, Grace... and Katsu. I'm assuming the person wants fic around the climax of the book, but I still grinned at that selection
- The Blending, OMG! cyanshadow, somebody other than us is aware these books exist XD
Dragaera is in with a slightly puzzling (and disappointing to me) tagset:
- I get the four ~musketeers of course (Aerich, Khaavren, Pel, Tazendra)
- from the (surprising!) lack of Norathar, I assume Cawti-Vlad-VN (-Devera?) is there for Taltos family fic
- Aliera-Verra-Devera (-Vlad?) for other family fic, I guess... Maybe Sethra here, too?
- Kiera, Kragar, and Vlad for Jhereg hijinks? (Possibly also Sethra, but Sethra could frankly go anywhere)
- Teldra?? I'm really not sure where she fits in here...
There are 14 characters total, so at least 4 different people nominating, and I'm assuming not more than that because of how tiny fandom is, so I really wonder where Teldra came from / who she goes with.
Amused that the JSMN tagset includes neither Jonathan Strange nor Mr Norrell and in fact is a rather odd collection of characters presumably nominated by one person, since there are only 4 -- Arabella, Flora, Drawlight, and John Segundus.
Absolutely everyone, it seems, in RoL is nominated, including a recent comics character (although she's being challenged, I guess), and Peter's mum under her newly revealed name. I'm especially happy to see Varvara and Caroline and Kumar on the list, and hope there will actually be some fic for them.
And Vorkosigan Saga is in for a last hurrah with a large character set. Aww :)
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42. Monstrous Affections (edited by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant) -- anthology I got because it had the In Other Lands-verse story with Luke's POV, but ended up enjoying on the whole, even though it was more tipped towards horror than I normally like my fantasy. Which, given the theme, I should've expected, I suppose, but I read the Luke-POV story first, and it is by far the lightest thing in the book, so it probably skewed my expectations somewhat. The Luke POV was very cute, but the stand-out story for me was Nalo Hopkinson's "Left Foot Right".
One thing I noticed is that apparently writing in first or third person is passe now for short stories. One story was in second person, one was in first person plural, with added pronoun complexity ("Mothers Lock Up Your Daughters"), and one apparently decided to go for broke and include both first person plural and second person singular alongside regular first person (although everything is fairly justified there).
Individual stories, with occasional marked spoilers:
So, as I was reading these, I found that there were three vectors along which the stories could either work or not work for me: premise/worldbuilding (the idea), characters and plot (what was actually happening), and the writing. Very few stories satisfied me on all three counts, but generally even two out of three made for an enjoyable time, and there were also only a couple of stories that didn't deliver at least one.
"Moriabe's Children", Paolo Bacigalupi -- I'd been seeing Bacigalupi's name around for a while and wondering if I should try his stuff. On the basis of this story, no, definitely not. This was one of the few stories that didn't work for me on ANY level -- not because it was a bad story, but because it was not the sort of story I like reading, at all. The writing is lyrical-evocative-repetitive, and I could see it working for other people, but it's just off the mark for me. The premise was sea monsters, which I find boring on the whole. And it was more fairy-tale like, in that there wasn't much sense of character and little dialogue, so there wasn't that either to shore up the story. One of the few total misses for me, despite being put together better than a number of the other stories. Ah well, at least I know not to go looking for more of his work. "Score": 0 for 3 on the idea/characters/writing scale, but I could also see this story being a different person's 2 or even 3.
"Old Souls", Cassandra Clare (spoilery) -- one of the two stories which play vampire as the 'monster' more or less straight (the oter being by Clare's husband, Josh Lewis, which I liked more). Which is cliche, right, and yet not nearly AS cliche as the Shadowhunters stuff, so it was actually kind of refreshing, comparatively. I actually kind of liked the premise -- vampire who feeds on memories, and they have to be memories from a time when he was human himself, in order to keep sane, so he works in a nursing home. The premise is pretty neat, but the short story itself is not very coherent -- I couldn't tell how the other things happening (protagonist having gone through an abortion and spending time at her grandmother's to get over the guy who wouldn't even drive her to the clinic, ultimately calling the girl who got together with him next to offer her support) were related to the vampire-in-a-nursing-home. There's some very perfunctory attempt to connect them, which boils down to, "memories are important", which - duh? Points for the pro-choice message, but other than that, I'm really not sure what the POINT of the short story was. And the protagonist was frustrating for an unusual reason -- a Jewish protagonist, but her family's Jewishness is, like, "let me signal how Jewish they are by inserting random Yiddish words and rattling off a string of synagogue pot luck dishes" in a way that didn't feel real or coherent to me. (For example, Leah's Grandma Ruth is 'Oma' to her, which is German. But timeframe seems to suggest she wouldn't have lived in Germany herself. Stuff like that.) Score: 1.5 for 3, and I'm being generous on the partial credit.
"Ten Rules for Being an Intergalactic Smuggler (The Successful Kind)", Holly Black -- not one of my favorite Holly Black stories, but Holly Black is one of those authors who I think are very good at short stories, so this isn't a complaint exactly. It was definitely one of the more fun stories to read -- the writing is snappy and funny. It's one of the stories narrated in second person, which I'm not sure really adds anything, but it didn't detract anything either, so, fine. This is the one purely sci-fi story in the collection, spaceships and aliens, and as such, it's got one of the least interesting ideas. But the characters feel real, and the setting is sketched in but palpable, and I liked the dialogue a lot. So: 2 of 3. And while I wouldn't recommend this story as an example of Holly Black in peak form, it was one of the most enjoyable stories in the collection to read. Quotes: "Tea making is confusing, because you associate it with comfortably curling up with your holo-reader and sleeping off a minor illness. Monsters aren't supposed to be able to make tea." "Eleven pirates [...] and your uncle, all with their eyes open, staring at a nothing that's even bigger than space."
"Quick Hill," M.T. Anderson -- this was an interesting one! Really intriguing idea, unspoiled by excessive explanation, so you get only glimpses of an alternative 1940s where WWII is being fought with supernatural alongside conventional weapons. The magic is pretty low key -- it's alluded to as common, but relatively little of it is present in the actual story. The plot is pretty neat, too, a modern take on the ~summer king kind of deal. The characters and narration were not the kind of thing I'm normally drawn to, which keeps it from being higher on my list, but it definitely made me curious to check out this author's other work (which apparently includes the 'Octavian Nothing' books). So... 1.5 out of 3 by personal preference, but one of the more solid stories in the book, IMO, objectively speaking. Quotes: "There was a congressional inquiry into how the federal augurs had missed signs that a whole airborn strike force would sink half the US fleet in Hawaii. Senators held up black-and-white photos of wet entrails and bellowed that the American public demanded answers." "Based on the date of Townall's last letter, the Stricklands figured he'd died in one of those naval encounters where the papers said '...escaped with only light casualties.' The late Townall Strickland was not statistically significant." "Don's father said to him, 'You want to serve, don't you? You've wanted to serve.' 'In the air force,' whispered Don."
"The Diabolist", Nathan Ballingrud -- another one of the unusual POV choice stories, this one with "you" and "we" and a kind of omniscient, too. It's actually justified by how everything is tied together, but to me the whole story felt like an excuse for the weird POV, rather than having a real point I could appreciate. 1.25 out of 3 for me.
"This Whole Demoning Thing", Patrick Ness -- this was cute! Set in high school, with all kids growing into demonic aspect. I like the light approach and the humour in the writing, and while the idea was pretty transparent, I thought it was nicely handled. 2.5 out of 3 for me, as the characters were not particularly memorable, but fun enough to spend a short story with. I've been meaning to read some Patrick Ness, but this is actually the first work of his I've made it to (I think). It makes me want to track down more of his stuff, so that's all good. Quotes: "When he sang (at which he was perfectly adequate) and played guitar (at which he was a pretty good singer)"
"Wings in the Morning" , Sarah Rees Brennan (spoilery for story and In Other Lands) -- the Luke-POV 'ending' of In Other Lands. When I read the story, I wasn't fully clear on the order in which things were written, until
umadoshi clarified it in conversation later -- "Wings" was written and sold first, then SRB serially wrote and published on her blog "The Turn of the Story", and In Other Lands sort of bridged/combined both of those things after the fact. That explains a lot about the things that made me scratch my head about "Wings", which was mostly that Luke's crush on Dale seemed to be a real and long-standing thing here, where what I walked away from with 'Lands' was that he got flustered by Elliot badgering him after the coming out scene, figured Dale would be an easy answer, blurted out his name, and then Elliot spiraled the situation out of control. I thought the hilarious thing was that Elliot kept telling Luke's family, in confidence and 'under durress' that Luke had a crush on Dale when it wasn't even true. But 'Wings' seemed to be playing that a lot more straight, with Luke's realization of his crush on Elliot coming much later than I had expected based on the book. Luke's POV does add some important clarity and so I feel is nicely complementary to the book, even though I do feel like it's contradictory in some regards: it explains the baffling-to-me based on book alone bit with the harpies where Luke claims Elliot is his boyfriend, and it gives more/enough context to understand what pushed Luke into having the big fight with Elliot (it's not only that he saw the harpies doing monstrous things, it's that he felt pulled to join them). It also sets up some things that the novel had to work around -- Luke not knowing until this late in the game that Elliot liked guys, which I do think is to the detriment of the novel, but makes that choice more understandable, when it was written to meet up with "Wings". It was also just very nice to get Luke's POV, which is just as adorable as might've been expected. It was good to see Serene through Luke's un-besotted but still devoted eyes, too, and Elliot through someone's POV other than his own, of course. Very glad I read it, even with the contradictions. Oh, right, scores... I don't know that I can fairly score this one, given that it's part of a larger canon I fell for, but I think probably 3 out of 3 for charaters, finding-out-you're-a-harpy, and adorable writing. I think I would've gotten hooked even if I hadn't read In Other Lands first, though I'm glad that I did.
Quotes:
"Why don't you and Sunborn explain to me how Trigon works?"
"Elliot, you are at every game," Luke snapped.
"No," said Elliot incredulously. "Is that what you're running around doing when I sit on my reading stands?"
"He went to stand with Elliot in the ute confidence that Elliot would tell hif he said something stupid."
'"Luke," said Elliot, which shut Luke up, because Elliot never called him that. "Don't be so stupid," Elliot continued after a pause. That was more familiar. Apparently that was all Elliot had to say, as if subjects were closed by mystifying random insults.'
"Left Foot Right", Nalo Hopkinson -- this was such a well done story! Like, I feel like this is what all the stories in this book basically aspire to be -- it's creepy and atmospheric, but you get a real sense of character and plot, which unfolds slowly without overexplaining, and the details are grounded and not over-the-top, and the supernatural elements are unusual (for a Western audience) and really well integrated with the mundane ones, and the prose is memorable and fitting as well. And there are both elements of the supernatural "monster" and the monstrous within a regular person, and they mesh in nuanced and non-cliche ways. 3 out of 3, I should really read more Nalo Hopkinson, because this was good stuff. And the supernatural elements (from Trinidad folklore) were new to me as well, at least in detail, so that was also neat.
"The Mercurials", G.Carl Purcell -- sort of a sci-fi-y post-apocalyptic thing? There didn't seem to be much more than setting to this, and I didn't particularly enjoy the setting. There's a nice aesthetic to the mercurial creatures, and some background detail of the worldbuilding that was intriguing and pleasantly show-not-tell/in universe POV -- the "church music", the "retirement party"... But none of it seemed to actually go anywhere interesting. It might've worked better for me as an opening chapter of a novel (though I probably woldn't have wanted to read a whole book like this), but as a standalone thing, I just didn't see the point. It seems to be doing quite well what it set out to do; I'm just not interested in that thing, so... 1.5 out of 3 for me.
"Kitty Capulet and the Invention of Underwater Photography", Dylan Horrocks -- meh. This was a fast, light read -- no slow-burn worldbuilding reveals or weird POV choices -- but also the least interesting story in the collection, I think. Typical YA protagonist (with a Tumblr; all genre protagonists are required to have a Tumblr now, I think), cutesy title, "monster" who is only notable by being from a non-Western mythology (Maori; Guardian of the Dead did it better, though), and a very cliche plot. 1 out of 3, and it makes me skeptical about the auhor overall.
"Son of Abyss", Nic Houser -- hmm. The setting (~Hell, basically) was intriguing but not my cup of tea. Or, rather, it was fine when it was funny, but the darker it got, the less I was enjoying myself. This one just got way too close to the line for pure horror rather than dark fantasy with the gore. 1.5 out of 3, but without all that much enjoyment. I liked the author's ideas and writing when it wasn't too horror-like, though, so I think I would enjoy reading something by him in a different sub-genre.
"A Small Wild Magic", Kathleen Jennings -- a comic, which I originally skipped but then went back to because I'm a completist. It was in no way worth the hassle of reading it on a phone screen, but maybe I'd have appreciated it more in book form. 0 of 3.
"The New Boyfriend", Kelly Link -- Link is a really good short story writer, and this was an intriguing idea. I was expecting her story to be one of my favorites in the book, and it wasn't quite, but it's still a solid 2.5 of 3, if not one of my favorites of hers. The idea is the one that gets half credit; I really liked the characters -- the way the story captured complicated, shifting high school friendships between girls -- and the writing was, as always, superb. Quotes: "Two more years of equations and sad books where bad things happen to boring people. Two more years of unflattering gym shorts and Spanish that she's never going to use and having to be the person that she's always been, because that's the person that everyone thinks she is." "'The kind of love that makes you want to die. That makes you stay up all night, that makes you feel sick to your stomach, that makes everything else not matter.' 'Oh, Immy,' her dad says. 'That's not real love. That's a trick the body plays on the mind. It's nd trick -- it's how we get poetry and songs on the radio and babies -- and sometimes it's even good poetry or good music. Babies are good too, of course but please, Immy, not yet. Stick to music and poems for now.'"
"The Woods Hide in Plain Sight", Joshua Lewis (spoilers) -- I don't know why Cassandra Clare and her husband both decided to write vampire stories for a 'monster'-themed anthology in this post-Twilight day and age, but I did actually enjoy this story. It telegraphs the monstrous/mundane connection a bit too clearly -- Emiline who's left her suburban high school friends behind to go to college out of town, and considers leaving the mundane all together by becoming a vampire -- but I found the whole of it surprisingly well done for such a well-trod path. The alluring stranger she meets is very clearly a vampire -- so clearly, that I was expecting him to be some other kind of monster instead, or SOME kind of subversion -- but no, that part is played straight. What is subverted is that he's a vampire who has NO IDEA how to make someone into one, and keeps trying and failing horribly, which is revealed in a Bluebeard sort of moment. I like that Emiline and her goth friends are genre-savvy. I liked the way the vampire was done, once it was clear that he was a vampire after all and there wasn't going to be a subversion -- he's alluring and stoic... and also pathetic and dangerous, not because he's a fiendish prince of the night, but because he's crazed by failure and loneliness. I liked the resolution, where Emiline and her friend do feel sympathy for him, but still kill him, because he IS dangerous. So, overall, 2.25 out of 3, which is pretty impressive for a vampire story.
"Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters Because They Are Terrifying", Alice Sola Kim -- this is such an awesome title (which I'm not sure fully goes with the story, although the story *is* about mothers and daughters, but whatever -- it's great!). The story itself is really good, too. I didn't like the ending as much as the rest of it, but the whole story worked for me quite well, and I thought it also had the best use of non-traditional POV (mostly "we" + omniscient) of all the weird-POV stories). I need to read more of her stuff. 3 out of 3, I'm not even going to ding it for the ending. Quotes: "Ronnie went from laughing at Caroline to being incredibly jealous of her. People got drunk just to be like Caroline!"
So, ranking the stories based on the (totally subjective!) scoring above:
- "Left Foot Right" (Hopkinson)
- "Wings in the Morning" (SRB)
- "Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters" (Kim)
- "The New Boyfriend" (Link)
- "This Whole Demoning Thing" (Ness)
- "Ten Rules" (Black)
- "The Woods Hide in Plain Sight" (Lewis)
- "Quick Hill" (Andersen)
- "Old Souls" (Clare)
- "Son of Abyss" (Houser)
- "The Mercurials" (G. Carl Purcell)
- "The Diabolist" (Ballingrud)
- "Kitty Capulet" (Horrocks)
- "A Small Wild Magic" (Jennings)
- "Moriabe's Children" (Bacigalupi)
In addition to the stories, there's a very nice intro by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, and also a cute "how monster are you" quiz, which features this answer as one of my favorite bits in the book: "If you see something move down in the dark of a storm drain you... assume it's not a monster and do nothing. [...] Assume it's not a monster until I'm alone in my room late that night, trying to get the last problem for Physics done, and it's long after midnight now, and I keep taking my earbuds out of my ears because I thought I heard something.Assume it's not a monster until something brushes against the back of my neck and says, around a really impressive mouthful of teeth, 'Vf = -25.5 m/s.'"
Anyway this was a pretty good collection, especially considering I got it purely for one story. And I really should read more M.T.Andersen and Alice Sola Kim and finally read some Patrick Ness, and maybe see if there's something by Nalo Hopkinson that I should track down.
43. Noelle Stevenson, Nimona -- I've been aware of Nimona since gingerhaze was posting the practice sketches on her Tumblr, and even followed a few of the early posts real-time. But I'm no good at following in-progress comics, so very quickly fell off the wagon, and then it was going to be a book, and I meant to check it out, but never got around to it until ikel89 randomly bought it in England and then loved it. I'm not a GN reader; I find the medium mostly a deterrent to my enjoyment of the story, with a few rare exceptions. I'll read tie-in comics like the RoL and AtLA ones for "more of the same", but as far as actual GNs in book format, I've ever only finished three (Watchmen and Sandman, and Pride of Baghdad), and am (very slowly) reading Saga. So, my bar for a new GN is pretty high, both in terms of quality and activation energy, if that makes any sense. And so, I liked Nimona, and even appreciated the medium -- there are some very neat panels -- but wasn't either blown away by it as a story or won over by it as a fandom. Glad to have read it certainly -- it is both neat and very cute -- and glad to see a Tumblr artist make good like that.
I really liked Nimona as a character. You don't see Chaotic Evil(ish) type female characters much, I feel, and not ones that are so gleeful about destruction, and it was really nice to see. She reminded me of Toph from AtLA a bit, in that way, come to think of it). I liked her relationship with Ballister -- she trolls him with sharks! he gives her SCIENCE for Christmas. I liked the relationship between Ballister and Goldenloin, too -- most of all I liked it in the Christmas outtake, where they are boys, but it was neat to see it in the present day also, though I wish there had been more there. The worldbuilding is kind of sketched in, but cute and interesting, so I liked it, too. And there are a lot of funny scenes and cute scenes and great dialogue (my favorite panel being, "Unhand that science!" XD) There are also rather a lot of pages where I really felt that the art was really contributing to the story, that it was taking full advantage of the medium, and was in the hands of someone who really knows what they're doing (I feel like a lot of comics are just, you know, pictures providing backgrounds and visuals to the words, but this had a lot of real synergy with the art, rather than just being a story that I liked that happened to be told through a visual medium). So, all of those are good things, obviously.
But, I don't know, either the pacing was off, or I'm just not used to the pacing of a visual story in book format, but it felt a bit slight for such a thick book, story-wise. And I felt like the ending was abrupt. Something about it was not fully satisfcatory, when it had potential to be. I'm not really sure what, though...
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And a shipping meme, stolen from a couple of folks over the last couple of weeks:
1. Talk about the first ship you ever had.
I've never been super-invested in ships on my own, but it's easy to answer what the first ship was that I read fic for: Harry/Draco. It just so happened that I was introduced to fanfiction via epicyclical -- I saw the "Very Secret Diaries" of LotR characters linked on TheOneRing.net, followed them to her LJ, and from there to... would it have been FictionAlley? Anyway, to the Draco Trilogy -- which wasn't *actually* H/D, but sure felt that way -- and from there to actual H/D fic that lots of people in her circle were writing. I can't say that I even actively shippd Harry/Draco, and I certainly have no deep investment in it -- and in fact soon migrated to things like Remus/Sirius and Harry/Ron. But H/D was my gateway ship, I guess.
Of course, at that point I was already a grown-up, and there were relationships earlier that I was invested in without thinking of them as ships -- probably Hector/Andromache was the oldest one. There were also a lot of proto-slash relationships that I was very invested in as a kid without tipping over into actually slashing them because I didn't realize that was a thing -- Powell and Donovan in the Asimov robot stories, a bunch of other SFF partner types (Junta and Kivrin in Monday Begins on Saturday for instance), probably quite a few others I'm forgetting.
2. Talk about three of the most important ships throughout your life.
I don't... really have huge, monumental ships -- I tend to fixate on canons (/worlds) and on characters, so while I could easily rattle off top 3 fandoms throughout my life (LotR, HP, and ASOIAF, probably, because of community) and characters (Sherlock Holmes, Boromir, and let's say Granny Weatherwax), ships are harder.
Maybe let's go with Aral/Cordelia from the Vorkosigan Saga (because I love both characters, and the tropes of their relationship, and it hit at the right point in my own life as well -- when I was newly married (to a considerably older man) and just had L ("after five-space navigational math, etc."), so we were, you know, in synch.
For number two, assuming Boromir/my Mary Sue is not an acceptable ship (if it were, really it would be right at the top), I'm tempted to say Miles Vorkosigan/River Tam (Vorkosiverse/Firefly). This is an odd example where, quite honestly, the characters themselves are NOT my favorites in their respective canon -- River is actually one of the few principals I don't care about that much (she's in the bottom 3), and Miles probably isn't even in the top 10 of the Vorkosigan Saga for me. But it's one of those rare cases where a ship isn't "character I love and whoever he/she wants" or "two characters I love that make sense together", but where characters from two different canons and even mediums make so much sense together, it's really something that should exist. I even have their children (and grandchildren) all planned out: no, seriously!. There may be other people who independently also came up with this ship -- I know there are several Firefly/Vorkosiverse crossovers in existence -- but I feel like this is something I can claim credit for :)
I'm not sure "throughout my life" is fair to say, but it's definitely the ship that's been eating my brain for the last 6.5 years, so let's go with Vlad/Morrolan from the Dragaera books. I'm pretty sure this was one of the proto-slash ships of mine; it would appear I was not actually shipping them until rereading Taltos in early 2007, where I seemed to think reading fic (apparently, this one) was the catalyst for starting to ship it. Which is a bit hilarious in retrospect, because nowadays rereading the books, there are definitely passages which I don't know how to read platonically, I mean, honestly.
3. What’s your current OTP?
That would be Vlad/Morrolan, see above. I mean, I've always loved Morrolan, as long as I've read these books. But at some point, I guess (well, in 2007) it clicked that the dynamic between him and Vlad was very much the dynamic I prefer in my slash ships -- bickery brothers-in-arms -- with elements that I find interesting in all of my ships -- different cultures meshing in interesting and complicate ways, conflicts between personal loyalty and duty, all that good stuff. The only downsides are 1) the species-based size difference (which is a slight anti-kink of mine, as I've recently discovered via other ships) and 2) a total lack of active fandom.
4. What’s your current NOTP?
I don't tend to have big-time NOTPs, either. And even often am able to enjoy ships that go athwart my "OTP" in a canon, so long as they're well done, and I've started out being squicked or bored by something only to be won over by seeing it written well/thoughtfully or just... getting used to it, I guess. (Like, I was squicked by River/Jayne when I first started reading Firefly fic, and it's still not my favorite, but after reading a couple of really good stories, I would no longer call it a NOTP.) Anyway, what tends to actually be a NOTP for me is ships that are creepy but written in a fluffy way in fanon. Mostly I just tend not to read them, but I do remember, for example, Sansa/Sandor in ASOIAF fanon, where it was all puppies and rainbows and seven kids named after all the dead Starks, and, like, no. At least the people shipping Sansa/Littlefinger were well aware of how fucked up their ship was. (Speaking of ASOIAF NOTPs, I should also mention Rhaegar/Lyanna. Mostly because Rhaegar, but also because it tends to show up in fic like such a romanticized ship, and even accepting fandom theories -- which I do -- I do not see how that was romantic rather than very dumb.)
Oh, wait! In answering one of the questions below, I realized I do actually have a full-blown active NOTP. Harry/Molly in The Dresden Files. I like Molly a lot as a character. I don't mind age-difference ships, and I don't even necessarily mind mentor/apprentice ships (Peter/Nightingale in Rivers of London being a case in point). But Harry/Molly specifically just feels squicky to me. She is not only his student, she is the daughter of one of his best friends -- which I actually also don't have a problem with necessarily -- but most importantly, after Michael gets hurt, Harry is very much an in loco parentis figure to Molly, and that's what makes it squicky to me. I don't think canon is going that way -- it's pretty clear that Harry/Murphy is the intended endgame at this point -- but that's all the more reason I'm incredibly annoyed every time canon brings up Molly's crush on Harry, and Harry goes into how, well, yes, she's a hot nubile young woman now, but he would never! It's gratuitous, and it cheapens their relationship, which I do otherwise like, and it feels like a way for Harry to score some unearned chivalry points. At this point the Harry/Molly vibes are my least favorite thing about these books (which I have somewhat mixed feelings about), so I definitely think it qualifies as NOTP.
5. Do you have any poly ships?
Kind of. If we look at poly ships as one where I prefer the poly version to any individual couple within the ship, I think the only one I have is not from fic but actually from the MORP thing that my friend M and I have been playing around with. There's a character I have (R) who, depending on the universe/boundary conditions, is very much in love with one or the other or two people. They are always deeply important to him, even if he's not romantically involved with them; but if he meets them around the same time and they're good with sharing, then stable threesome (V-ish but not entirely) is the ideal and consistent outcome.
But there are other poly ships I enjoy, canonical and fix-a-love-triangle and probably ones that aren't either, although usually I have a definite preference for a specific couple within the poly arrangement, while enjoying the other relationships, too. Like: Maslin/Imriel/Sidonie (Kushiel's Legacy), where Maslin/Imriel is the side I care most about, although I like Imriel/Sidonie and that Maslin/Sidonie was a thing, too. Similarly, I'm residually fond of Harry/Ron/Hermione, but Harry/Ron > Ron/Hermione >> Harry/Hermione for me, so it's also not really balanced. And I was OK with retroactively accepting Cordelia/Aral/Jole as a thing in Vorkosiverse canon, and fine the on-page Cordelia/Oliver relationship pretty cute, but obviously that's not going to compare with one of my OTPs.
(I notice the poly ships coming to mind are all involving two guys and a girl. I suppose that's the most common kind of love triangle, even though what I ship is mostly not two het ships coming together in a V... Still, that's interesting. I've encountered canonical poly ships with two girls and a guy, and they don't tend to grab me, it would appear. And I know I've read m/m/m polyships in fic, but they don't really tend to stick with me either. I guess m/f/m offers both enough variety (relative to m/m/m) and the best opportunity for including both het and m/m slash, which is what I tend to read?)
6. How do you feel about love triangles?
Not a fan. Like, I'm fine with a character being able to potentially see themselves with more than one person, but love triangles tend to draw it out, and create situations where the person in the middle is being unfair to the others by not choosing, or one or both of the others are being jerks by making demands, or people are idiots because they're oblivious to each other's feelings, or everything just feels very artifical, or one of the love interests ends up being retconned into a bad guy or "actually, I realized I never felt about you that way". It's just usually an excuse for annoying things to do with/to characters, rather than something organic to the characters and the story.
7. How do you feel about RPF?
Not my thing. I can enjoy it as much as FPF if it's about historical figures -- you know, if you could publish a book with them as a character and not get sued -- Alexander Hamilton, Napoleon, Byron, Disraeli. But RPF about contemporary people -- I just don't understand the attraction, tbh. I've read some bandom fic because it was rec'd as readable as original fic, and it was, and that was fine. But I've also read a little bit of LotRps, and, just, meh. And that's without venturing into tinhat territory; just don't see the point.
8. Have you ever shipped yourself with a character?
Um, yeah. Somehwere out there are pages and pages of the proto-Magnum Opus where my Mary Sue rescues, heals, bickers with, and eventually marries Boromir. That was the only character I've shipped myself with, though.
9. Do you have many ships that never got together at all?
I don't tend to ship things in the context of "will they get together?" That is, I don't tend to ship things on TV shows, where the endgame ship keeps being played around with (or, at least, I don't tend to ship things likely to become canonical). In books, the shipping is either not the point, or you can tell who will get together with whom from very early on. And in any case, I either ship canonical, established ships the I like (e.g. Aral/Cordelia) or things that have no chance of becoming canon (e.g. Jaime/Loras in ASOIAF). Getting together in canon is so not the point.
10. Do you ship any characters that have never met?
See above re: Miles Vorkosigan and River Tam :) And lot of other crossover ships which have cropped up via various memes: Nanny Ogg/Uncle Iroh, Lara Raith/Tony Stark, Robert Chase/Sansa Stark, etc. I find crossover shipping almost more fun than regular within-fandom shipping.
I've on occasion crack-shipped people who've never met within a fandom, too, e.g. Daario and Tormund Giantsbane in ASOIAF (come on, it would be hilarious!)
11. Talk about your favorite first kiss.
Because most of my fandoms with serious ships are not visual media, I don't have a ready answer for this -- I remember dialogue more than I remember first kisses (and then, there's also all my non-canonical ships). So I don't have a strong favorite, but let me mention two that I am fond of: Ron/Hermione in HP (I liked how it was very much a character moment, rather than something generic, and it had been building to for a long time), and Ronan/Adam in The Raven Cycle. I can't even say that I seriously ship Ronan/Adam, besides wanting Ronan to be happy with whomever he wants, which happens to be Adam, but I thought the description of the kiss was lovely, unusual, and effective. Stiefvater's prose is very much hit or miss for me, but it worked for me there.
12. Have you ever been disappointed when your ship finally got together?
Generally not a problem for me as noted above, because I ship either stuff that never becomes canonical or established couples from the start, but I do have one, sort of: House/Cuddy on House MD. I liked their dynamic a lot in the early seasons, the way she could hold her own against him, and never seemed to take him too seriously. And then they actually became a thing in season 5, and I wasn't really enjoying it. In fact, I stopped watching the show before finishing out the season, in part because I became aware of the Kutner spoiler, but in part also because baby-obsessed, House-dating Cuddy wasn't working for me particularly well.
13. Has a ship ever broken your heart?
Canonical ships where a partner dies tend to do that -- [Vorkosiverse and Firefly spoilers redacted] -- and also Dumbledore/Grindelwald in HP was pretty darn heartbreaking, knowing how things turned out for them.
14. How do you feel about will they/won’t they?
I actively dislike it. It's a cheap way to generate drama, usually at the expense of the characters' consistency, intelligence, decency, etc. That said, because I feel like it's mostly a TV show thing, it's mostly not an issue for me.
15. Have you ever “shipped at first sight”?
Not usually, because, again, don't often have ships in a visual medium, BUT I went into the Star Trek reboot with a vague dislike for Kirk (which turned out to be actually a dislike for William Shatner rather than the character) and very little awareness of who Bones even was, and walked out shipping the two of them pretty hardcore, from just about the first moment they meet. As did I think pretty much everybody else watching that movie. Part of it is just what somebody had termed "Chris Pine's do-me aura", which is undeniable, but they really did have great chemistry together onscreen, and the script seemed to ship it, too.
16. Talk about a ship you initially disliked.
And then grew to like? I don't think I have one of those. I had ships I disliked that I then came to terms with - I mentioned Jayne/River (Firefly) up above,
17. Talk about a pairing you’ve stopped shipping romantically.
I never actively shipped it, but I used to read Londo/G'Kar, and then concluded I really didn't want romance in the mix there. I also find that I mostly prefer House and Wilson and Sherlock and John to be platonic rather than shippy; it's just more interesting that way, to me.
18. Talk about a moment which made you question an entire ship.
So, up until Broken Homes (RoL), I shipped Peter/Lesley in a sort of low key way. The spoilery moment made me rethink their whole relationship with each other, not just any romantic possibility, and a lot of other things besides. But it definitely killed my desire to ship them romantically, at least for the time being.
19. Have you ever shipped something despite yourself?
This is a slightly weird question. Like, have I shipped things that would (if real people were involved) be unhealthy, and where I would be urging one or both people to dump each other if they were my friend? Sure, plenty. I think probably ASOIAF has the most examples of that -- Jaime/Cersei being the ur-example, sort of, and I also cheerfully read Sansa/Littlefinger, and lots of other fucked up stuff in that fandom. And there's stuff like Lucius/Snape (Harry Potter), and Aral/Ges (Vorkosigan Saga) -- things I read not because they're "good" ships, but because they put characters I'm interested in in interesting situations. This doesn't involve any internal conflict on my part.
Or is this talking more about a canon I dislike, but being hooked on shipping something in it anyway? In that case, maybe some of the things from the Dark Orifices Artifices books -- Kit/Ty (which is legitimately super cute! ...at least for now) and Mark/Kieran(/Cristina).
20. Talk about a ship you feel alone in shipping.
Ahaha, so my Dragaera OTP is already fairly rare -- I mean, it's a Yuletide fandom -- and while it *is* the most popular pairing by AO3 stats, that means it has 6 stories up (vs Cawti/Norathar with 4 and Aerich/Tazendra with 3) -- that's, you know, not a lot of fic. But I have EVEN MORE obscure Dragaera ships, which I'm pretty sure I am legitimately alone in shipping, courtesy of the Paarfi books. To wit: Tazendra/Morrolan c. Lord of Castle Black (as a fling in between teaching him sorcery and things) and a UST/AU sort of Zerika/Morrolan (not going athwart Zerika/Laszlo, but sort of complementary to it. And, to show that I am also capable of shipping things in this canon that don't include Morrolan (just barely, though), I also like Tazendra/Kytraan and Ibronka/Roaana. I would also include Aliera/Sethra on this list, but there is actually a fic out there that I feel qualifies, if you allow for the you-know-what spoiler.
21. Is there a ship you just don’t get, but have nothing against?
There are lots, probably? I mean, usually I can see the attraction of a ship, if I think about it, even if I don't see it myself. But to pick an example, I don't really get the atraction of Peter/Beverley in Rivers of London. I like Bev well enough, and I'll even read fic with that as a pairing, if it's well written and focuses on Peter (as well as not minding it in canon), but I don't find the Rivers interesting as characters, and I definitely don't see anything interesting in Peter's relationship with Beverley.
22. Which of your ships have the best chemistry?
How does one rank things by chemistry, especially across media types? Let me randomly say Kirk/Bones in the Star Trek Reboot, for the compelling reason of Chris Pine.
23. Which of your ships deserve better writing?
Harry/Murphy in the Dresden Files. Butcher hasn't screwed it up yet, but I'm not really liking the direction of the last couple of books, or the drawn out game of it. And I'm worried that when he does write them together-together, it's going to suck, because I *hated* Harry's first canonical ship (with Susan) and was also very >:/ in how the whole Luccio thing was handled. This is not an area where I trust Butcher at all, to the point where I'm not even sure if I ship Harry/Murphy anymore, or if I've sort of weaned myself off it preemptively to avoid disappointment. Same goes for other possible Dresden Files ships I'm intrigued by -- Thomas/Molly and Carlos/Molly -- except that I think they are "safer" because they are a lot less likely.
24. Do you mostly ship canon pairings?
Not mostly, although I do ship canon pairings too, if they have a dynamic I like.
25. Have you ever shipped a pairing before you even started watching the show/movie simply because of gifs and graphics or similar?
No... though getting into House MD via
copperbadge's icons and fic meant that I was predisposed to ship House/Wilson, I think, before I decided I preferred them platonic.
26. Have you noticed a pattern in your shipping? Is there a romantic dynamic you’re more drawn to?
There's definitely a pattern. I'm very fond of badass girl/goofy guy dynamic in het ships (for example, Zoe/Wash in Firefly), or power couples (Sam/Sybil in Discworld, Aral/Cordelia in Vorkosiverse, Tywin/Joanna in ASOIAF), and for slash ships, bantery brothers-in-arms with various degrees of antagonism (Vlad/Morrolan in the Taltos books, Jaime/Loras in ASOIAF, Tony/Steve in the Avengers), or just brothers in arms played straight (e.g. Corwin/Bleys; shh, incest is canonical).
27. Is there a ship you’ve shipped for most of your life?
Does me/Boromir count? :P (That's been going on for roughly 3/4 of my life :) Other old ships, even older than that, are Hector/Andromache and Napoleon/Josephine.
28. Does shipping come easily to you?
What does that even mean? Shipping is not a skill, it's just liking stuff. But, well, 20 years in fandom has certainly refined my shipping/slashing goggles.
29. Do you need to ship something to really enjoy a movie/book/tv show/comic?
Definitely not! I don't even need to ship something to be fannish about a canon / want to read fic in it. I just need to really like/obsess about one or more characters.
30. Name a couple of fandoms in which you have no ships.
Some old fandoms: LotR, Babylon 5 (there are canonical relationships I like, mostly minor or unrequited ones, but I don't ship anything). A very new fandom: Machineries of Empire.
31. Talk about one of your favorite headcanons for a ship you love.
That would probably be the Miles/River children headcanons linked above.
32. Share five must-read fics.
I'll do one for five different favorite ships.
1) Aral/Cordelia (Vorkosiverse) - everything by philomytha, but especially The Practice of Barrayaran Sex
2) Vlad/Morrolan (Dragaera) - Witchcraft (an old Yuletide fic)
3) Jaime/Loras (ASOIAF) - Brothers-in-arms by curtana
4) Kirk/Bones (Star Trek Reboot) - Transferral by canistakahari
5) Powell/Donovan (Asimov's Robots) - Nice Work If You Can Get It by astolat
33. Name your favorite fanartist(s).
Ahaha, as if anybody actually draws art in numbers for my tiny book ships :P I mean, art does exist, occasionally, and I've even had some shippy art drawn for me (<333), but there isn't really a body of work to point to for my best-beloved ships, with a few exceptions. For example, I love
ileliberte's Star Trek art, but it's not shipping my ship. But here's one: reallycorking (now on Tumblr), whom I knew primarily as a Harry/Ron artist, but I also really like her other HP shippy art (Ron/Hermione, Harry/Ginny), but there's also some lovely Korrasami art and Ronan/Adam.
34. Share your favorite fanmix for your OTP.
I'm not really a fanmix person, but even if I was, I doubt that such a thing exists for the ships I like.
35. Recommend 1-5 shipper blogs.
Rub it in, meme. Rub it in :P
36. Do you create fanmixes/gif sets/fanart/fic/fanvids and so on for you ships?
I think the shippiest things I've created have been a vaguely Jaime/Loras limerick for ASOIAF and the Sherlock quote icon with Vlad and Morrolan on it. I mean, I would icon art if it existed! But it doesn't.
37. Do you have a favorite trope and/or AU for your OTP?
Hmmm. Looking across my serious OTPs, I think one trope I'm drawn to is "meeting the family" sort of thing -- I think it provides for interesting dynamics.
38. Do you like and use ship names?
No, and not for ships that I'm serious about. I think it sounds silly. I mean, I did just use "Korrasami" above, but that's a bit of a special case, and plus I like it but don't actively ship it.
39. Is there a fictional relationship you’d really want for yourself?
The one between Sybil and Sam in Discworld is pretty good. Something to aspire, to, really -- they complement each other nicely even when they don't fully understand each other, and make each other happy without needing the other person as a crutch.
40. If you could change one thing about your OTP, what would that be?
There would be (more) fic and art for it, dammit! :P
This entry was originally posted at http://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1056119.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).
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Spent some time browsing the newly open Yuletide tagset (I'm not participating, I'm just... lurking and enjoying the festive vibe, and eventually reading). Random musings and notes to self
- Beauty Queens -- including Taylor
- Corfu Trilogy/Durrells -- which skirts a bit close to RPF for my taste, but I'd love to see someone write the Gerry hatches a Phoenix, etc. prompt
- Flora Segunda -- all the Fyrdraaca family drama, basically
- Fangirl
- In Other Lands -- nicely complete tag set, except that I really wonder what whoever nominated Adara and Dale want...
- Kingkiller chronicles nominated with just Devi and Kvothe, hm!
- Kushiel -- Imri, Maslin, Lucius, Mavros, and Sidonie are in the tagset among lots of other people
- Lynes & Mathey -- Ned and Julian, Miss Frost, and Inspector Hatton
- Hexarchate -- interesting combination of POV characters and people I had to google/guess (e.g. Shuos Alaia, Cheris's ex-girlfriend, who I think is mentioned in passing once). I hope it leads to the Mikodez-Zehun-Nija fic that needs to exist.
- Murderbot
- Rogues of the Republic -- from a person who presumaly wants shipfic (and not even for the ships I have any interest in), seeing as how the four characters are Kail and - Desidora and Loch and Pyvic
- Not Your Sidekick -- which might optimistically lead to fic better written than the book?
- Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda (mysteriously missing Nick...)
- Warchild set includes the all-important Cairo (as well as Ryan and Sid... and I guess some actual main characters, too, whatever)
- Watchmaker -- Mori, Thaniel, Grace... and Katsu. I'm assuming the person wants fic around the climax of the book, but I still grinned at that selection
- The Blending, OMG! cyanshadow, somebody other than us is aware these books exist XD
Dragaera is in with a slightly puzzling (and disappointing to me) tagset:
- I get the four ~musketeers of course (Aerich, Khaavren, Pel, Tazendra)
- from the (surprising!) lack of Norathar, I assume Cawti-Vlad-VN (-Devera?) is there for Taltos family fic
- Aliera-Verra-Devera (-Vlad?) for other family fic, I guess... Maybe Sethra here, too?
- Kiera, Kragar, and Vlad for Jhereg hijinks? (Possibly also Sethra, but Sethra could frankly go anywhere)
- Teldra?? I'm really not sure where she fits in here...
There are 14 characters total, so at least 4 different people nominating, and I'm assuming not more than that because of how tiny fandom is, so I really wonder where Teldra came from / who she goes with.
Amused that the JSMN tagset includes neither Jonathan Strange nor Mr Norrell and in fact is a rather odd collection of characters presumably nominated by one person, since there are only 4 -- Arabella, Flora, Drawlight, and John Segundus.
Absolutely everyone, it seems, in RoL is nominated, including a recent comics character (although she's being challenged, I guess), and Peter's mum under her newly revealed name. I'm especially happy to see Varvara and Caroline and Kumar on the list, and hope there will actually be some fic for them.
And Vorkosigan Saga is in for a last hurrah with a large character set. Aww :)
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42. Monstrous Affections (edited by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant) -- anthology I got because it had the In Other Lands-verse story with Luke's POV, but ended up enjoying on the whole, even though it was more tipped towards horror than I normally like my fantasy. Which, given the theme, I should've expected, I suppose, but I read the Luke-POV story first, and it is by far the lightest thing in the book, so it probably skewed my expectations somewhat. The Luke POV was very cute, but the stand-out story for me was Nalo Hopkinson's "Left Foot Right".
One thing I noticed is that apparently writing in first or third person is passe now for short stories. One story was in second person, one was in first person plural, with added pronoun complexity ("Mothers Lock Up Your Daughters"), and one apparently decided to go for broke and include both first person plural and second person singular alongside regular first person (although everything is fairly justified there).
Individual stories, with occasional marked spoilers:
So, as I was reading these, I found that there were three vectors along which the stories could either work or not work for me: premise/worldbuilding (the idea), characters and plot (what was actually happening), and the writing. Very few stories satisfied me on all three counts, but generally even two out of three made for an enjoyable time, and there were also only a couple of stories that didn't deliver at least one.
"Moriabe's Children", Paolo Bacigalupi -- I'd been seeing Bacigalupi's name around for a while and wondering if I should try his stuff. On the basis of this story, no, definitely not. This was one of the few stories that didn't work for me on ANY level -- not because it was a bad story, but because it was not the sort of story I like reading, at all. The writing is lyrical-evocative-repetitive, and I could see it working for other people, but it's just off the mark for me. The premise was sea monsters, which I find boring on the whole. And it was more fairy-tale like, in that there wasn't much sense of character and little dialogue, so there wasn't that either to shore up the story. One of the few total misses for me, despite being put together better than a number of the other stories. Ah well, at least I know not to go looking for more of his work. "Score": 0 for 3 on the idea/characters/writing scale, but I could also see this story being a different person's 2 or even 3.
"Old Souls", Cassandra Clare (spoilery) -- one of the two stories which play vampire as the 'monster' more or less straight (the oter being by Clare's husband, Josh Lewis, which I liked more). Which is cliche, right, and yet not nearly AS cliche as the Shadowhunters stuff, so it was actually kind of refreshing, comparatively. I actually kind of liked the premise -- vampire who feeds on memories, and they have to be memories from a time when he was human himself, in order to keep sane, so he works in a nursing home. The premise is pretty neat, but the short story itself is not very coherent -- I couldn't tell how the other things happening (protagonist having gone through an abortion and spending time at her grandmother's to get over the guy who wouldn't even drive her to the clinic, ultimately calling the girl who got together with him next to offer her support) were related to the vampire-in-a-nursing-home. There's some very perfunctory attempt to connect them, which boils down to, "memories are important", which - duh? Points for the pro-choice message, but other than that, I'm really not sure what the POINT of the short story was. And the protagonist was frustrating for an unusual reason -- a Jewish protagonist, but her family's Jewishness is, like, "let me signal how Jewish they are by inserting random Yiddish words and rattling off a string of synagogue pot luck dishes" in a way that didn't feel real or coherent to me. (For example, Leah's Grandma Ruth is 'Oma' to her, which is German. But timeframe seems to suggest she wouldn't have lived in Germany herself. Stuff like that.) Score: 1.5 for 3, and I'm being generous on the partial credit.
"Ten Rules for Being an Intergalactic Smuggler (The Successful Kind)", Holly Black -- not one of my favorite Holly Black stories, but Holly Black is one of those authors who I think are very good at short stories, so this isn't a complaint exactly. It was definitely one of the more fun stories to read -- the writing is snappy and funny. It's one of the stories narrated in second person, which I'm not sure really adds anything, but it didn't detract anything either, so, fine. This is the one purely sci-fi story in the collection, spaceships and aliens, and as such, it's got one of the least interesting ideas. But the characters feel real, and the setting is sketched in but palpable, and I liked the dialogue a lot. So: 2 of 3. And while I wouldn't recommend this story as an example of Holly Black in peak form, it was one of the most enjoyable stories in the collection to read. Quotes: "Tea making is confusing, because you associate it with comfortably curling up with your holo-reader and sleeping off a minor illness. Monsters aren't supposed to be able to make tea." "Eleven pirates [...] and your uncle, all with their eyes open, staring at a nothing that's even bigger than space."
"Quick Hill," M.T. Anderson -- this was an interesting one! Really intriguing idea, unspoiled by excessive explanation, so you get only glimpses of an alternative 1940s where WWII is being fought with supernatural alongside conventional weapons. The magic is pretty low key -- it's alluded to as common, but relatively little of it is present in the actual story. The plot is pretty neat, too, a modern take on the ~summer king kind of deal. The characters and narration were not the kind of thing I'm normally drawn to, which keeps it from being higher on my list, but it definitely made me curious to check out this author's other work (which apparently includes the 'Octavian Nothing' books). So... 1.5 out of 3 by personal preference, but one of the more solid stories in the book, IMO, objectively speaking. Quotes: "There was a congressional inquiry into how the federal augurs had missed signs that a whole airborn strike force would sink half the US fleet in Hawaii. Senators held up black-and-white photos of wet entrails and bellowed that the American public demanded answers." "Based on the date of Townall's last letter, the Stricklands figured he'd died in one of those naval encounters where the papers said '...escaped with only light casualties.' The late Townall Strickland was not statistically significant." "Don's father said to him, 'You want to serve, don't you? You've wanted to serve.' 'In the air force,' whispered Don."
"The Diabolist", Nathan Ballingrud -- another one of the unusual POV choice stories, this one with "you" and "we" and a kind of omniscient, too. It's actually justified by how everything is tied together, but to me the whole story felt like an excuse for the weird POV, rather than having a real point I could appreciate. 1.25 out of 3 for me.
"This Whole Demoning Thing", Patrick Ness -- this was cute! Set in high school, with all kids growing into demonic aspect. I like the light approach and the humour in the writing, and while the idea was pretty transparent, I thought it was nicely handled. 2.5 out of 3 for me, as the characters were not particularly memorable, but fun enough to spend a short story with. I've been meaning to read some Patrick Ness, but this is actually the first work of his I've made it to (I think). It makes me want to track down more of his stuff, so that's all good. Quotes: "When he sang (at which he was perfectly adequate) and played guitar (at which he was a pretty good singer)"
"Wings in the Morning" , Sarah Rees Brennan (spoilery for story and In Other Lands) -- the Luke-POV 'ending' of In Other Lands. When I read the story, I wasn't fully clear on the order in which things were written, until
umadoshi clarified it in conversation later -- "Wings" was written and sold first, then SRB serially wrote and published on her blog "The Turn of the Story", and In Other Lands sort of bridged/combined both of those things after the fact. That explains a lot about the things that made me scratch my head about "Wings", which was mostly that Luke's crush on Dale seemed to be a real and long-standing thing here, where what I walked away from with 'Lands' was that he got flustered by Elliot badgering him after the coming out scene, figured Dale would be an easy answer, blurted out his name, and then Elliot spiraled the situation out of control. I thought the hilarious thing was that Elliot kept telling Luke's family, in confidence and 'under durress' that Luke had a crush on Dale when it wasn't even true. But 'Wings' seemed to be playing that a lot more straight, with Luke's realization of his crush on Elliot coming much later than I had expected based on the book. Luke's POV does add some important clarity and so I feel is nicely complementary to the book, even though I do feel like it's contradictory in some regards: it explains the baffling-to-me based on book alone bit with the harpies where Luke claims Elliot is his boyfriend, and it gives more/enough context to understand what pushed Luke into having the big fight with Elliot (it's not only that he saw the harpies doing monstrous things, it's that he felt pulled to join them). It also sets up some things that the novel had to work around -- Luke not knowing until this late in the game that Elliot liked guys, which I do think is to the detriment of the novel, but makes that choice more understandable, when it was written to meet up with "Wings". It was also just very nice to get Luke's POV, which is just as adorable as might've been expected. It was good to see Serene through Luke's un-besotted but still devoted eyes, too, and Elliot through someone's POV other than his own, of course. Very glad I read it, even with the contradictions. Oh, right, scores... I don't know that I can fairly score this one, given that it's part of a larger canon I fell for, but I think probably 3 out of 3 for charaters, finding-out-you're-a-harpy, and adorable writing. I think I would've gotten hooked even if I hadn't read In Other Lands first, though I'm glad that I did.
Quotes:
"Why don't you and Sunborn explain to me how Trigon works?"
"Elliot, you are at every game," Luke snapped.
"No," said Elliot incredulously. "Is that what you're running around doing when I sit on my reading stands?"
"He went to stand with Elliot in the ute confidence that Elliot would tell hif he said something stupid."
'"Luke," said Elliot, which shut Luke up, because Elliot never called him that. "Don't be so stupid," Elliot continued after a pause. That was more familiar. Apparently that was all Elliot had to say, as if subjects were closed by mystifying random insults.'
"Left Foot Right", Nalo Hopkinson -- this was such a well done story! Like, I feel like this is what all the stories in this book basically aspire to be -- it's creepy and atmospheric, but you get a real sense of character and plot, which unfolds slowly without overexplaining, and the details are grounded and not over-the-top, and the supernatural elements are unusual (for a Western audience) and really well integrated with the mundane ones, and the prose is memorable and fitting as well. And there are both elements of the supernatural "monster" and the monstrous within a regular person, and they mesh in nuanced and non-cliche ways. 3 out of 3, I should really read more Nalo Hopkinson, because this was good stuff. And the supernatural elements (from Trinidad folklore) were new to me as well, at least in detail, so that was also neat.
"The Mercurials", G.Carl Purcell -- sort of a sci-fi-y post-apocalyptic thing? There didn't seem to be much more than setting to this, and I didn't particularly enjoy the setting. There's a nice aesthetic to the mercurial creatures, and some background detail of the worldbuilding that was intriguing and pleasantly show-not-tell/in universe POV -- the "church music", the "retirement party"... But none of it seemed to actually go anywhere interesting. It might've worked better for me as an opening chapter of a novel (though I probably woldn't have wanted to read a whole book like this), but as a standalone thing, I just didn't see the point. It seems to be doing quite well what it set out to do; I'm just not interested in that thing, so... 1.5 out of 3 for me.
"Kitty Capulet and the Invention of Underwater Photography", Dylan Horrocks -- meh. This was a fast, light read -- no slow-burn worldbuilding reveals or weird POV choices -- but also the least interesting story in the collection, I think. Typical YA protagonist (with a Tumblr; all genre protagonists are required to have a Tumblr now, I think), cutesy title, "monster" who is only notable by being from a non-Western mythology (Maori; Guardian of the Dead did it better, though), and a very cliche plot. 1 out of 3, and it makes me skeptical about the auhor overall.
"Son of Abyss", Nic Houser -- hmm. The setting (~Hell, basically) was intriguing but not my cup of tea. Or, rather, it was fine when it was funny, but the darker it got, the less I was enjoying myself. This one just got way too close to the line for pure horror rather than dark fantasy with the gore. 1.5 out of 3, but without all that much enjoyment. I liked the author's ideas and writing when it wasn't too horror-like, though, so I think I would enjoy reading something by him in a different sub-genre.
"A Small Wild Magic", Kathleen Jennings -- a comic, which I originally skipped but then went back to because I'm a completist. It was in no way worth the hassle of reading it on a phone screen, but maybe I'd have appreciated it more in book form. 0 of 3.
"The New Boyfriend", Kelly Link -- Link is a really good short story writer, and this was an intriguing idea. I was expecting her story to be one of my favorites in the book, and it wasn't quite, but it's still a solid 2.5 of 3, if not one of my favorites of hers. The idea is the one that gets half credit; I really liked the characters -- the way the story captured complicated, shifting high school friendships between girls -- and the writing was, as always, superb. Quotes: "Two more years of equations and sad books where bad things happen to boring people. Two more years of unflattering gym shorts and Spanish that she's never going to use and having to be the person that she's always been, because that's the person that everyone thinks she is." "'The kind of love that makes you want to die. That makes you stay up all night, that makes you feel sick to your stomach, that makes everything else not matter.' 'Oh, Immy,' her dad says. 'That's not real love. That's a trick the body plays on the mind. It's nd trick -- it's how we get poetry and songs on the radio and babies -- and sometimes it's even good poetry or good music. Babies are good too, of course but please, Immy, not yet. Stick to music and poems for now.'"
"The Woods Hide in Plain Sight", Joshua Lewis (spoilers) -- I don't know why Cassandra Clare and her husband both decided to write vampire stories for a 'monster'-themed anthology in this post-Twilight day and age, but I did actually enjoy this story. It telegraphs the monstrous/mundane connection a bit too clearly -- Emiline who's left her suburban high school friends behind to go to college out of town, and considers leaving the mundane all together by becoming a vampire -- but I found the whole of it surprisingly well done for such a well-trod path. The alluring stranger she meets is very clearly a vampire -- so clearly, that I was expecting him to be some other kind of monster instead, or SOME kind of subversion -- but no, that part is played straight. What is subverted is that he's a vampire who has NO IDEA how to make someone into one, and keeps trying and failing horribly, which is revealed in a Bluebeard sort of moment. I like that Emiline and her goth friends are genre-savvy. I liked the way the vampire was done, once it was clear that he was a vampire after all and there wasn't going to be a subversion -- he's alluring and stoic... and also pathetic and dangerous, not because he's a fiendish prince of the night, but because he's crazed by failure and loneliness. I liked the resolution, where Emiline and her friend do feel sympathy for him, but still kill him, because he IS dangerous. So, overall, 2.25 out of 3, which is pretty impressive for a vampire story.
"Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters Because They Are Terrifying", Alice Sola Kim -- this is such an awesome title (which I'm not sure fully goes with the story, although the story *is* about mothers and daughters, but whatever -- it's great!). The story itself is really good, too. I didn't like the ending as much as the rest of it, but the whole story worked for me quite well, and I thought it also had the best use of non-traditional POV (mostly "we" + omniscient) of all the weird-POV stories). I need to read more of her stuff. 3 out of 3, I'm not even going to ding it for the ending. Quotes: "Ronnie went from laughing at Caroline to being incredibly jealous of her. People got drunk just to be like Caroline!"
So, ranking the stories based on the (totally subjective!) scoring above:
- "Left Foot Right" (Hopkinson)
- "Wings in the Morning" (SRB)
- "Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters" (Kim)
- "The New Boyfriend" (Link)
- "This Whole Demoning Thing" (Ness)
- "Ten Rules" (Black)
- "The Woods Hide in Plain Sight" (Lewis)
- "Quick Hill" (Andersen)
- "Old Souls" (Clare)
- "Son of Abyss" (Houser)
- "The Mercurials" (G. Carl Purcell)
- "The Diabolist" (Ballingrud)
- "Kitty Capulet" (Horrocks)
- "A Small Wild Magic" (Jennings)
- "Moriabe's Children" (Bacigalupi)
In addition to the stories, there's a very nice intro by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, and also a cute "how monster are you" quiz, which features this answer as one of my favorite bits in the book: "If you see something move down in the dark of a storm drain you... assume it's not a monster and do nothing. [...] Assume it's not a monster until I'm alone in my room late that night, trying to get the last problem for Physics done, and it's long after midnight now, and I keep taking my earbuds out of my ears because I thought I heard something.Assume it's not a monster until something brushes against the back of my neck and says, around a really impressive mouthful of teeth, 'Vf = -25.5 m/s.'"
Anyway this was a pretty good collection, especially considering I got it purely for one story. And I really should read more M.T.Andersen and Alice Sola Kim and finally read some Patrick Ness, and maybe see if there's something by Nalo Hopkinson that I should track down.
43. Noelle Stevenson, Nimona -- I've been aware of Nimona since gingerhaze was posting the practice sketches on her Tumblr, and even followed a few of the early posts real-time. But I'm no good at following in-progress comics, so very quickly fell off the wagon, and then it was going to be a book, and I meant to check it out, but never got around to it until ikel89 randomly bought it in England and then loved it. I'm not a GN reader; I find the medium mostly a deterrent to my enjoyment of the story, with a few rare exceptions. I'll read tie-in comics like the RoL and AtLA ones for "more of the same", but as far as actual GNs in book format, I've ever only finished three (Watchmen and Sandman, and Pride of Baghdad), and am (very slowly) reading Saga. So, my bar for a new GN is pretty high, both in terms of quality and activation energy, if that makes any sense. And so, I liked Nimona, and even appreciated the medium -- there are some very neat panels -- but wasn't either blown away by it as a story or won over by it as a fandom. Glad to have read it certainly -- it is both neat and very cute -- and glad to see a Tumblr artist make good like that.
I really liked Nimona as a character. You don't see Chaotic Evil(ish) type female characters much, I feel, and not ones that are so gleeful about destruction, and it was really nice to see. She reminded me of Toph from AtLA a bit, in that way, come to think of it). I liked her relationship with Ballister -- she trolls him with sharks! he gives her SCIENCE for Christmas. I liked the relationship between Ballister and Goldenloin, too -- most of all I liked it in the Christmas outtake, where they are boys, but it was neat to see it in the present day also, though I wish there had been more there. The worldbuilding is kind of sketched in, but cute and interesting, so I liked it, too. And there are a lot of funny scenes and cute scenes and great dialogue (my favorite panel being, "Unhand that science!" XD) There are also rather a lot of pages where I really felt that the art was really contributing to the story, that it was taking full advantage of the medium, and was in the hands of someone who really knows what they're doing (I feel like a lot of comics are just, you know, pictures providing backgrounds and visuals to the words, but this had a lot of real synergy with the art, rather than just being a story that I liked that happened to be told through a visual medium). So, all of those are good things, obviously.
But, I don't know, either the pacing was off, or I'm just not used to the pacing of a visual story in book format, but it felt a bit slight for such a thick book, story-wise. And I felt like the ending was abrupt. Something about it was not fully satisfcatory, when it had potential to be. I'm not really sure what, though...
*
And a shipping meme, stolen from a couple of folks over the last couple of weeks:
1. Talk about the first ship you ever had.
I've never been super-invested in ships on my own, but it's easy to answer what the first ship was that I read fic for: Harry/Draco. It just so happened that I was introduced to fanfiction via epicyclical -- I saw the "Very Secret Diaries" of LotR characters linked on TheOneRing.net, followed them to her LJ, and from there to... would it have been FictionAlley? Anyway, to the Draco Trilogy -- which wasn't *actually* H/D, but sure felt that way -- and from there to actual H/D fic that lots of people in her circle were writing. I can't say that I even actively shippd Harry/Draco, and I certainly have no deep investment in it -- and in fact soon migrated to things like Remus/Sirius and Harry/Ron. But H/D was my gateway ship, I guess.
Of course, at that point I was already a grown-up, and there were relationships earlier that I was invested in without thinking of them as ships -- probably Hector/Andromache was the oldest one. There were also a lot of proto-slash relationships that I was very invested in as a kid without tipping over into actually slashing them because I didn't realize that was a thing -- Powell and Donovan in the Asimov robot stories, a bunch of other SFF partner types (Junta and Kivrin in Monday Begins on Saturday for instance), probably quite a few others I'm forgetting.
2. Talk about three of the most important ships throughout your life.
I don't... really have huge, monumental ships -- I tend to fixate on canons (/worlds) and on characters, so while I could easily rattle off top 3 fandoms throughout my life (LotR, HP, and ASOIAF, probably, because of community) and characters (Sherlock Holmes, Boromir, and let's say Granny Weatherwax), ships are harder.
Maybe let's go with Aral/Cordelia from the Vorkosigan Saga (because I love both characters, and the tropes of their relationship, and it hit at the right point in my own life as well -- when I was newly married (to a considerably older man) and just had L ("after five-space navigational math, etc."), so we were, you know, in synch.
For number two, assuming Boromir/my Mary Sue is not an acceptable ship (if it were, really it would be right at the top), I'm tempted to say Miles Vorkosigan/River Tam (Vorkosiverse/Firefly). This is an odd example where, quite honestly, the characters themselves are NOT my favorites in their respective canon -- River is actually one of the few principals I don't care about that much (she's in the bottom 3), and Miles probably isn't even in the top 10 of the Vorkosigan Saga for me. But it's one of those rare cases where a ship isn't "character I love and whoever he/she wants" or "two characters I love that make sense together", but where characters from two different canons and even mediums make so much sense together, it's really something that should exist. I even have their children (and grandchildren) all planned out: no, seriously!. There may be other people who independently also came up with this ship -- I know there are several Firefly/Vorkosiverse crossovers in existence -- but I feel like this is something I can claim credit for :)
I'm not sure "throughout my life" is fair to say, but it's definitely the ship that's been eating my brain for the last 6.5 years, so let's go with Vlad/Morrolan from the Dragaera books. I'm pretty sure this was one of the proto-slash ships of mine; it would appear I was not actually shipping them until rereading Taltos in early 2007, where I seemed to think reading fic (apparently, this one) was the catalyst for starting to ship it. Which is a bit hilarious in retrospect, because nowadays rereading the books, there are definitely passages which I don't know how to read platonically, I mean, honestly.
3. What’s your current OTP?
That would be Vlad/Morrolan, see above. I mean, I've always loved Morrolan, as long as I've read these books. But at some point, I guess (well, in 2007) it clicked that the dynamic between him and Vlad was very much the dynamic I prefer in my slash ships -- bickery brothers-in-arms -- with elements that I find interesting in all of my ships -- different cultures meshing in interesting and complicate ways, conflicts between personal loyalty and duty, all that good stuff. The only downsides are 1) the species-based size difference (which is a slight anti-kink of mine, as I've recently discovered via other ships) and 2) a total lack of active fandom.
4. What’s your current NOTP?
I don't tend to have big-time NOTPs, either. And even often am able to enjoy ships that go athwart my "OTP" in a canon, so long as they're well done, and I've started out being squicked or bored by something only to be won over by seeing it written well/thoughtfully or just... getting used to it, I guess. (Like, I was squicked by River/Jayne when I first started reading Firefly fic, and it's still not my favorite, but after reading a couple of really good stories, I would no longer call it a NOTP.) Anyway, what tends to actually be a NOTP for me is ships that are creepy but written in a fluffy way in fanon. Mostly I just tend not to read them, but I do remember, for example, Sansa/Sandor in ASOIAF fanon, where it was all puppies and rainbows and seven kids named after all the dead Starks, and, like, no. At least the people shipping Sansa/Littlefinger were well aware of how fucked up their ship was. (Speaking of ASOIAF NOTPs, I should also mention Rhaegar/Lyanna. Mostly because Rhaegar, but also because it tends to show up in fic like such a romanticized ship, and even accepting fandom theories -- which I do -- I do not see how that was romantic rather than very dumb.)
Oh, wait! In answering one of the questions below, I realized I do actually have a full-blown active NOTP. Harry/Molly in The Dresden Files. I like Molly a lot as a character. I don't mind age-difference ships, and I don't even necessarily mind mentor/apprentice ships (Peter/Nightingale in Rivers of London being a case in point). But Harry/Molly specifically just feels squicky to me. She is not only his student, she is the daughter of one of his best friends -- which I actually also don't have a problem with necessarily -- but most importantly, after Michael gets hurt, Harry is very much an in loco parentis figure to Molly, and that's what makes it squicky to me. I don't think canon is going that way -- it's pretty clear that Harry/Murphy is the intended endgame at this point -- but that's all the more reason I'm incredibly annoyed every time canon brings up Molly's crush on Harry, and Harry goes into how, well, yes, she's a hot nubile young woman now, but he would never! It's gratuitous, and it cheapens their relationship, which I do otherwise like, and it feels like a way for Harry to score some unearned chivalry points. At this point the Harry/Molly vibes are my least favorite thing about these books (which I have somewhat mixed feelings about), so I definitely think it qualifies as NOTP.
5. Do you have any poly ships?
Kind of. If we look at poly ships as one where I prefer the poly version to any individual couple within the ship, I think the only one I have is not from fic but actually from the MORP thing that my friend M and I have been playing around with. There's a character I have (R) who, depending on the universe/boundary conditions, is very much in love with one or the other or two people. They are always deeply important to him, even if he's not romantically involved with them; but if he meets them around the same time and they're good with sharing, then stable threesome (V-ish but not entirely) is the ideal and consistent outcome.
But there are other poly ships I enjoy, canonical and fix-a-love-triangle and probably ones that aren't either, although usually I have a definite preference for a specific couple within the poly arrangement, while enjoying the other relationships, too. Like: Maslin/Imriel/Sidonie (Kushiel's Legacy), where Maslin/Imriel is the side I care most about, although I like Imriel/Sidonie and that Maslin/Sidonie was a thing, too. Similarly, I'm residually fond of Harry/Ron/Hermione, but Harry/Ron > Ron/Hermione >> Harry/Hermione for me, so it's also not really balanced. And I was OK with retroactively accepting Cordelia/Aral/Jole as a thing in Vorkosiverse canon, and fine the on-page Cordelia/Oliver relationship pretty cute, but obviously that's not going to compare with one of my OTPs.
(I notice the poly ships coming to mind are all involving two guys and a girl. I suppose that's the most common kind of love triangle, even though what I ship is mostly not two het ships coming together in a V... Still, that's interesting. I've encountered canonical poly ships with two girls and a guy, and they don't tend to grab me, it would appear. And I know I've read m/m/m polyships in fic, but they don't really tend to stick with me either. I guess m/f/m offers both enough variety (relative to m/m/m) and the best opportunity for including both het and m/m slash, which is what I tend to read?)
6. How do you feel about love triangles?
Not a fan. Like, I'm fine with a character being able to potentially see themselves with more than one person, but love triangles tend to draw it out, and create situations where the person in the middle is being unfair to the others by not choosing, or one or both of the others are being jerks by making demands, or people are idiots because they're oblivious to each other's feelings, or everything just feels very artifical, or one of the love interests ends up being retconned into a bad guy or "actually, I realized I never felt about you that way". It's just usually an excuse for annoying things to do with/to characters, rather than something organic to the characters and the story.
7. How do you feel about RPF?
Not my thing. I can enjoy it as much as FPF if it's about historical figures -- you know, if you could publish a book with them as a character and not get sued -- Alexander Hamilton, Napoleon, Byron, Disraeli. But RPF about contemporary people -- I just don't understand the attraction, tbh. I've read some bandom fic because it was rec'd as readable as original fic, and it was, and that was fine. But I've also read a little bit of LotRps, and, just, meh. And that's without venturing into tinhat territory; just don't see the point.
8. Have you ever shipped yourself with a character?
Um, yeah. Somehwere out there are pages and pages of the proto-Magnum Opus where my Mary Sue rescues, heals, bickers with, and eventually marries Boromir. That was the only character I've shipped myself with, though.
9. Do you have many ships that never got together at all?
I don't tend to ship things in the context of "will they get together?" That is, I don't tend to ship things on TV shows, where the endgame ship keeps being played around with (or, at least, I don't tend to ship things likely to become canonical). In books, the shipping is either not the point, or you can tell who will get together with whom from very early on. And in any case, I either ship canonical, established ships the I like (e.g. Aral/Cordelia) or things that have no chance of becoming canon (e.g. Jaime/Loras in ASOIAF). Getting together in canon is so not the point.
10. Do you ship any characters that have never met?
See above re: Miles Vorkosigan and River Tam :) And lot of other crossover ships which have cropped up via various memes: Nanny Ogg/Uncle Iroh, Lara Raith/Tony Stark, Robert Chase/Sansa Stark, etc. I find crossover shipping almost more fun than regular within-fandom shipping.
I've on occasion crack-shipped people who've never met within a fandom, too, e.g. Daario and Tormund Giantsbane in ASOIAF (come on, it would be hilarious!)
11. Talk about your favorite first kiss.
Because most of my fandoms with serious ships are not visual media, I don't have a ready answer for this -- I remember dialogue more than I remember first kisses (and then, there's also all my non-canonical ships). So I don't have a strong favorite, but let me mention two that I am fond of: Ron/Hermione in HP (I liked how it was very much a character moment, rather than something generic, and it had been building to for a long time), and Ronan/Adam in The Raven Cycle. I can't even say that I seriously ship Ronan/Adam, besides wanting Ronan to be happy with whomever he wants, which happens to be Adam, but I thought the description of the kiss was lovely, unusual, and effective. Stiefvater's prose is very much hit or miss for me, but it worked for me there.
12. Have you ever been disappointed when your ship finally got together?
Generally not a problem for me as noted above, because I ship either stuff that never becomes canonical or established couples from the start, but I do have one, sort of: House/Cuddy on House MD. I liked their dynamic a lot in the early seasons, the way she could hold her own against him, and never seemed to take him too seriously. And then they actually became a thing in season 5, and I wasn't really enjoying it. In fact, I stopped watching the show before finishing out the season, in part because I became aware of the Kutner spoiler, but in part also because baby-obsessed, House-dating Cuddy wasn't working for me particularly well.
13. Has a ship ever broken your heart?
Canonical ships where a partner dies tend to do that -- [Vorkosiverse and Firefly spoilers redacted] -- and also Dumbledore/Grindelwald in HP was pretty darn heartbreaking, knowing how things turned out for them.
14. How do you feel about will they/won’t they?
I actively dislike it. It's a cheap way to generate drama, usually at the expense of the characters' consistency, intelligence, decency, etc. That said, because I feel like it's mostly a TV show thing, it's mostly not an issue for me.
15. Have you ever “shipped at first sight”?
Not usually, because, again, don't often have ships in a visual medium, BUT I went into the Star Trek reboot with a vague dislike for Kirk (which turned out to be actually a dislike for William Shatner rather than the character) and very little awareness of who Bones even was, and walked out shipping the two of them pretty hardcore, from just about the first moment they meet. As did I think pretty much everybody else watching that movie. Part of it is just what somebody had termed "Chris Pine's do-me aura", which is undeniable, but they really did have great chemistry together onscreen, and the script seemed to ship it, too.
16. Talk about a ship you initially disliked.
And then grew to like? I don't think I have one of those. I had ships I disliked that I then came to terms with - I mentioned Jayne/River (Firefly) up above,
17. Talk about a pairing you’ve stopped shipping romantically.
I never actively shipped it, but I used to read Londo/G'Kar, and then concluded I really didn't want romance in the mix there. I also find that I mostly prefer House and Wilson and Sherlock and John to be platonic rather than shippy; it's just more interesting that way, to me.
18. Talk about a moment which made you question an entire ship.
So, up until Broken Homes (RoL), I shipped Peter/Lesley in a sort of low key way. The spoilery moment made me rethink their whole relationship with each other, not just any romantic possibility, and a lot of other things besides. But it definitely killed my desire to ship them romantically, at least for the time being.
19. Have you ever shipped something despite yourself?
This is a slightly weird question. Like, have I shipped things that would (if real people were involved) be unhealthy, and where I would be urging one or both people to dump each other if they were my friend? Sure, plenty. I think probably ASOIAF has the most examples of that -- Jaime/Cersei being the ur-example, sort of, and I also cheerfully read Sansa/Littlefinger, and lots of other fucked up stuff in that fandom. And there's stuff like Lucius/Snape (Harry Potter), and Aral/Ges (Vorkosigan Saga) -- things I read not because they're "good" ships, but because they put characters I'm interested in in interesting situations. This doesn't involve any internal conflict on my part.
Or is this talking more about a canon I dislike, but being hooked on shipping something in it anyway? In that case, maybe some of the things from the Dark Orifices Artifices books -- Kit/Ty (which is legitimately super cute! ...at least for now) and Mark/Kieran(/Cristina).
20. Talk about a ship you feel alone in shipping.
Ahaha, so my Dragaera OTP is already fairly rare -- I mean, it's a Yuletide fandom -- and while it *is* the most popular pairing by AO3 stats, that means it has 6 stories up (vs Cawti/Norathar with 4 and Aerich/Tazendra with 3) -- that's, you know, not a lot of fic. But I have EVEN MORE obscure Dragaera ships, which I'm pretty sure I am legitimately alone in shipping, courtesy of the Paarfi books. To wit: Tazendra/Morrolan c. Lord of Castle Black (as a fling in between teaching him sorcery and things) and a UST/AU sort of Zerika/Morrolan (not going athwart Zerika/Laszlo, but sort of complementary to it. And, to show that I am also capable of shipping things in this canon that don't include Morrolan (just barely, though), I also like Tazendra/Kytraan and Ibronka/Roaana. I would also include Aliera/Sethra on this list, but there is actually a fic out there that I feel qualifies, if you allow for the you-know-what spoiler.
21. Is there a ship you just don’t get, but have nothing against?
There are lots, probably? I mean, usually I can see the attraction of a ship, if I think about it, even if I don't see it myself. But to pick an example, I don't really get the atraction of Peter/Beverley in Rivers of London. I like Bev well enough, and I'll even read fic with that as a pairing, if it's well written and focuses on Peter (as well as not minding it in canon), but I don't find the Rivers interesting as characters, and I definitely don't see anything interesting in Peter's relationship with Beverley.
22. Which of your ships have the best chemistry?
How does one rank things by chemistry, especially across media types? Let me randomly say Kirk/Bones in the Star Trek Reboot, for the compelling reason of Chris Pine.
23. Which of your ships deserve better writing?
Harry/Murphy in the Dresden Files. Butcher hasn't screwed it up yet, but I'm not really liking the direction of the last couple of books, or the drawn out game of it. And I'm worried that when he does write them together-together, it's going to suck, because I *hated* Harry's first canonical ship (with Susan) and was also very >:/ in how the whole Luccio thing was handled. This is not an area where I trust Butcher at all, to the point where I'm not even sure if I ship Harry/Murphy anymore, or if I've sort of weaned myself off it preemptively to avoid disappointment. Same goes for other possible Dresden Files ships I'm intrigued by -- Thomas/Molly and Carlos/Molly -- except that I think they are "safer" because they are a lot less likely.
24. Do you mostly ship canon pairings?
Not mostly, although I do ship canon pairings too, if they have a dynamic I like.
25. Have you ever shipped a pairing before you even started watching the show/movie simply because of gifs and graphics or similar?
No... though getting into House MD via
copperbadge's icons and fic meant that I was predisposed to ship House/Wilson, I think, before I decided I preferred them platonic.
26. Have you noticed a pattern in your shipping? Is there a romantic dynamic you’re more drawn to?
There's definitely a pattern. I'm very fond of badass girl/goofy guy dynamic in het ships (for example, Zoe/Wash in Firefly), or power couples (Sam/Sybil in Discworld, Aral/Cordelia in Vorkosiverse, Tywin/Joanna in ASOIAF), and for slash ships, bantery brothers-in-arms with various degrees of antagonism (Vlad/Morrolan in the Taltos books, Jaime/Loras in ASOIAF, Tony/Steve in the Avengers), or just brothers in arms played straight (e.g. Corwin/Bleys; shh, incest is canonical).
27. Is there a ship you’ve shipped for most of your life?
Does me/Boromir count? :P (That's been going on for roughly 3/4 of my life :) Other old ships, even older than that, are Hector/Andromache and Napoleon/Josephine.
28. Does shipping come easily to you?
What does that even mean? Shipping is not a skill, it's just liking stuff. But, well, 20 years in fandom has certainly refined my shipping/slashing goggles.
29. Do you need to ship something to really enjoy a movie/book/tv show/comic?
Definitely not! I don't even need to ship something to be fannish about a canon / want to read fic in it. I just need to really like/obsess about one or more characters.
30. Name a couple of fandoms in which you have no ships.
Some old fandoms: LotR, Babylon 5 (there are canonical relationships I like, mostly minor or unrequited ones, but I don't ship anything). A very new fandom: Machineries of Empire.
31. Talk about one of your favorite headcanons for a ship you love.
That would probably be the Miles/River children headcanons linked above.
32. Share five must-read fics.
I'll do one for five different favorite ships.
1) Aral/Cordelia (Vorkosiverse) - everything by philomytha, but especially The Practice of Barrayaran Sex
2) Vlad/Morrolan (Dragaera) - Witchcraft (an old Yuletide fic)
3) Jaime/Loras (ASOIAF) - Brothers-in-arms by curtana
4) Kirk/Bones (Star Trek Reboot) - Transferral by canistakahari
5) Powell/Donovan (Asimov's Robots) - Nice Work If You Can Get It by astolat
33. Name your favorite fanartist(s).
Ahaha, as if anybody actually draws art in numbers for my tiny book ships :P I mean, art does exist, occasionally, and I've even had some shippy art drawn for me (<333), but there isn't really a body of work to point to for my best-beloved ships, with a few exceptions. For example, I love
ileliberte's Star Trek art, but it's not shipping my ship. But here's one: reallycorking (now on Tumblr), whom I knew primarily as a Harry/Ron artist, but I also really like her other HP shippy art (Ron/Hermione, Harry/Ginny), but there's also some lovely Korrasami art and Ronan/Adam.
34. Share your favorite fanmix for your OTP.
I'm not really a fanmix person, but even if I was, I doubt that such a thing exists for the ships I like.
35. Recommend 1-5 shipper blogs.
Rub it in, meme. Rub it in :P
36. Do you create fanmixes/gif sets/fanart/fic/fanvids and so on for you ships?
I think the shippiest things I've created have been a vaguely Jaime/Loras limerick for ASOIAF and the Sherlock quote icon with Vlad and Morrolan on it. I mean, I would icon art if it existed! But it doesn't.
37. Do you have a favorite trope and/or AU for your OTP?
Hmmm. Looking across my serious OTPs, I think one trope I'm drawn to is "meeting the family" sort of thing -- I think it provides for interesting dynamics.
38. Do you like and use ship names?
No, and not for ships that I'm serious about. I think it sounds silly. I mean, I did just use "Korrasami" above, but that's a bit of a special case, and plus I like it but don't actively ship it.
39. Is there a fictional relationship you’d really want for yourself?
The one between Sybil and Sam in Discworld is pretty good. Something to aspire, to, really -- they complement each other nicely even when they don't fully understand each other, and make each other happy without needing the other person as a crutch.
40. If you could change one thing about your OTP, what would that be?
There would be (more) fic and art for it, dammit! :P
This entry was originally posted at http://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1056119.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).