in which i rec the un-rec'able ['only good for legends']
Only Good for Legends is fucking un-rec'able. (Please don't ask how the hyphens and apostrophes are supposed to work there, I have no fucking idea, for realsies.)
The reason for this is that everyone in Trek fandom has at least heard of "that story where Spock is a detective," and that a person describing it as such always has their vague comment corrected four seconds later with caps along the lines of, "OH MY GOD YOU MEAN LEGENDS??? YOU CAN READ IT ALL HERE AND THERE ARE INTERLUDES AND ONE HAS A HANDJOB WITH GREEK POETRY THAT KIND OF MADE SCREAMLET CRY ONCE BECAUSE SHE'S A CLASSICIST IN RL AND A FUCKING LAMEOID TO BOOT, AND IT'S NOT DONE YET BUT IT'S SO EPIC" -- you get the point (and a hideous depiction of me who, yeah, kind of lost it when reading Six Fragments for Atthis and then had to read a fucking Kirk/Spock domestic porn snippet with that as a cornerstone? jfc, leupagus, way to be a bitch and make me feel things.)
(I SWEAR I have gotten more out of Legends than just that fucking poem and the hammock, REALLY.)
But now the big novella-sized chapters of the story have been posted and it's not technically a WIP anymore, though I have it on good authority (like, an end note in chapter 4 or something) that leupagus is going to Dr. Princess Whitelaw that shit and add to it forever/until she gets sick of it, and I am so cool with that and even sent her a wish list of things she needs to placate me with. Anyway! If you are stubborn and still don't think you need to read this series, let me go over a few points and explain why you should:
1. It's (mostly) serious business.
Okay, so if you know of leupagus at all, you probably know her from Pinto fandom and her amazing story with Pru called D:, which is a goddamn masterpiece and I was ready to swear on CPine's blue velvet tuxedo that it was The Thing that got me into Pinto fandom, but the dates don't match up and I was definitely gaying shit up before they posted it. I DIGRESS. You might also know her from our collaborative crackfest, Dr. and Mrs. Princess Whitelaw, which has like, puppies and wine-stealing oceans and a vision of academia with all the horrific torturous parts carefully excised for maximum fluffiness and hilarity. LEGENDS, on the other hand, has plot, intrigue, tension, sexy sex things, and it's fucking funny. The reason it took this bitch like, 40 years to carve a chapter out of her bone marrow is because each chapter is ridiculously all encompassing of every element that makes good fiction good fucking fiction.
2. Sometimes, men have sex with women.
In the first chapter or two of Legends, SPOCK DATES UHURA. DO YOU KNOW WHY? BECAUSE UHURA IS SMART AND FUNNY AND HOT AND SPOCK HAS A PULSE.
I ship the K/S hard, that's obvious. But a story this long and involved has the opportunity to explore the trip it takes to make a functioning couple, and not just a functioning couple, but one with the insane staying power of these bitches. A common route to that in fic is the introspective road: Spock and/or Kirk muse about their ~feelings~ for the other party until a catalyst causes them to fall into each other's arms and stay there forever. Usually, there is an outpouring of emotion, and the other party will say something along the lines of, "OMG ME TOO." I love those stories to bits, but Legends is not one of those stories. It moves absurdly slow and builds for-fucking-ever. Chapters 4 and 5 (and the epilogue, guys, please tell me you're not falling for her trick and missing the epilogue!!!) are particularly spectacular in how they have Real Problems and the relationship is actually in trouble sometimes. The course of true love never did run smooth, and Legends pretty much covers every bump and how semi-damaged people handle them or don't handle them. (omg chapter 5)
3. All the cool kids are reading it.
Hells yeah.
4. It's a fucking AU.
So leupagus was adorbs enough ask whether I would help her beta Chapter 4, and then she could never quite get rid of me, ha. And as she started Chapter 5, she was like, I THINK JIM IS GOING TO DIE. I THINK SPOCK IS GOING TO BE ALONE FOREVER. THAT'S SO DRAMATIC, RIGHT? And after I stopped crying, we talked for like nine years about the whole fucking point of writing an AU like this -- of writing any AU at all. See, homegirl has this tendency to think that a happy ending, or a cleanly resolved ending, is a boring ending, and sometimes she would be right. A trillion lines in gchat and a little more drinking than I'd like to admit later, the conclusion kind of revealed itself -- not literally plot and language wise, but overall arc wise. If you're writing an AU, why are you writing this AU? Because the situation is cool? Fine, that's awesome, more power to you, but you, author, have to keep in mind that there's a reason it's an AU and not original fiction. Why use these characters? Why write in this tangental universe and not in one of your own devising? A good AU should contribute a point of view that the original verse can't or won't cover. TOS had it with "Mirror Mirror" and all those S1 episodes where characters, due to spores or alien liquid or transporter malfunctions or whatever, lose their shit and have to face elements of themselves that they can avoid thinking about in their normal lives (like Shakespeare's green worlds but don't tell anyone I said that -- I'll just deny it all the way home.) Think Kirk in "The Enemy Within" when he's split into a compassionate but ultimately spineless "good" half and a violent but decisive as hell "evil" half, and the characters realize that it's the "evil" half of a person that makes the hard decisions on a starship, the ones that actually define a captain. Even Spock gets a moment when he schools McCoy and points out his own divided halves and the role logic plays in that constant battle that has incapacitated a human and tortures a hybrid day in and day out. In that episode, the viewer and characters re-enter the status quo of the Enterprise with new knowledge as to their limitations and strengths (and that Kirk looks hilarious in a fatshirt.)
Much like that other epic and fabulous Trek Reboot AU, A Beautiful(ly Illogical Mind) by
waldorph (idk if you've heard of her, she's kind of not really a big deal or whatever.) Now waldorph knows what's what because she had a goddamn request post set up, being completely aware that she had set up such a fucking insane universe that she couldn't cover every corner on her own and she was going to miss things, but we the readers could point her in the right direction. My point is that these are spectacular AUs and amazing examples of world building, and just as we don't know everything there is to know about our planet and are finding new things daily, so are these authors. Hop on the bandwagon. It's fun, promise.
Mostly, though, Legends is kind of un-rec'able because a) leupagus has a massive fanbase I don't so it's extremely likely that you're not going to hear about this from me first b) it's my impression that everyone has been on Detective Spock's boner this entire time and c) THIS IS SO FUCKING LONG AND ABSURD AND IT'S PROBABLY LONGER THAN SOME OF MY GRAD SCHOOL PAPERS? AND. WHAT THE HELL.
DAMN YOU, LEUPAGUS. DAMN YOU TO HELL.
Oh right: you can read all of Only Good for Legends here. It's like what, 120k total? Worth it.
The reason for this is that everyone in Trek fandom has at least heard of "that story where Spock is a detective," and that a person describing it as such always has their vague comment corrected four seconds later with caps along the lines of, "OH MY GOD YOU MEAN LEGENDS??? YOU CAN READ IT ALL HERE AND THERE ARE INTERLUDES AND ONE HAS A HANDJOB WITH GREEK POETRY THAT KIND OF MADE SCREAMLET CRY ONCE BECAUSE SHE'S A CLASSICIST IN RL AND A FUCKING LAMEOID TO BOOT, AND IT'S NOT DONE YET BUT IT'S SO EPIC" -- you get the point (and a hideous depiction of me who, yeah, kind of lost it when reading Six Fragments for Atthis and then had to read a fucking Kirk/Spock domestic porn snippet with that as a cornerstone? jfc, leupagus, way to be a bitch and make me feel things.)
(I SWEAR I have gotten more out of Legends than just that fucking poem and the hammock, REALLY.)
But now the big novella-sized chapters of the story have been posted and it's not technically a WIP anymore, though I have it on good authority (like, an end note in chapter 4 or something) that leupagus is going to Dr. Princess Whitelaw that shit and add to it forever/until she gets sick of it, and I am so cool with that and even sent her a wish list of things she needs to placate me with. Anyway! If you are stubborn and still don't think you need to read this series, let me go over a few points and explain why you should:
1. It's (mostly) serious business.
Okay, so if you know of leupagus at all, you probably know her from Pinto fandom and her amazing story with Pru called D:, which is a goddamn masterpiece and I was ready to swear on CPine's blue velvet tuxedo that it was The Thing that got me into Pinto fandom, but the dates don't match up and I was definitely gaying shit up before they posted it. I DIGRESS. You might also know her from our collaborative crackfest, Dr. and Mrs. Princess Whitelaw, which has like, puppies and wine-stealing oceans and a vision of academia with all the horrific torturous parts carefully excised for maximum fluffiness and hilarity. LEGENDS, on the other hand, has plot, intrigue, tension, sexy sex things, and it's fucking funny. The reason it took this bitch like, 40 years to carve a chapter out of her bone marrow is because each chapter is ridiculously all encompassing of every element that makes good fiction good fucking fiction.
2. Sometimes, men have sex with women.
In the first chapter or two of Legends, SPOCK DATES UHURA. DO YOU KNOW WHY? BECAUSE UHURA IS SMART AND FUNNY AND HOT AND SPOCK HAS A PULSE.
I ship the K/S hard, that's obvious. But a story this long and involved has the opportunity to explore the trip it takes to make a functioning couple, and not just a functioning couple, but one with the insane staying power of these bitches. A common route to that in fic is the introspective road: Spock and/or Kirk muse about their ~feelings~ for the other party until a catalyst causes them to fall into each other's arms and stay there forever. Usually, there is an outpouring of emotion, and the other party will say something along the lines of, "OMG ME TOO." I love those stories to bits, but Legends is not one of those stories. It moves absurdly slow and builds for-fucking-ever. Chapters 4 and 5 (and the epilogue, guys, please tell me you're not falling for her trick and missing the epilogue!!!) are particularly spectacular in how they have Real Problems and the relationship is actually in trouble sometimes. The course of true love never did run smooth, and Legends pretty much covers every bump and how semi-damaged people handle them or don't handle them. (omg chapter 5)
3. All the cool kids are reading it.
Hells yeah.
4. It's a fucking AU.
So leupagus was adorbs enough ask whether I would help her beta Chapter 4, and then she could never quite get rid of me, ha. And as she started Chapter 5, she was like, I THINK JIM IS GOING TO DIE. I THINK SPOCK IS GOING TO BE ALONE FOREVER. THAT'S SO DRAMATIC, RIGHT? And after I stopped crying, we talked for like nine years about the whole fucking point of writing an AU like this -- of writing any AU at all. See, homegirl has this tendency to think that a happy ending, or a cleanly resolved ending, is a boring ending, and sometimes she would be right. A trillion lines in gchat and a little more drinking than I'd like to admit later, the conclusion kind of revealed itself -- not literally plot and language wise, but overall arc wise. If you're writing an AU, why are you writing this AU? Because the situation is cool? Fine, that's awesome, more power to you, but you, author, have to keep in mind that there's a reason it's an AU and not original fiction. Why use these characters? Why write in this tangental universe and not in one of your own devising? A good AU should contribute a point of view that the original verse can't or won't cover. TOS had it with "Mirror Mirror" and all those S1 episodes where characters, due to spores or alien liquid or transporter malfunctions or whatever, lose their shit and have to face elements of themselves that they can avoid thinking about in their normal lives (like Shakespeare's green worlds but don't tell anyone I said that -- I'll just deny it all the way home.) Think Kirk in "The Enemy Within" when he's split into a compassionate but ultimately spineless "good" half and a violent but decisive as hell "evil" half, and the characters realize that it's the "evil" half of a person that makes the hard decisions on a starship, the ones that actually define a captain. Even Spock gets a moment when he schools McCoy and points out his own divided halves and the role logic plays in that constant battle that has incapacitated a human and tortures a hybrid day in and day out. In that episode, the viewer and characters re-enter the status quo of the Enterprise with new knowledge as to their limitations and strengths (and that Kirk looks hilarious in a fatshirt.)
Much like that other epic and fabulous Trek Reboot AU, A Beautiful(ly Illogical Mind) by
waldorph (idk if you've heard of her, she's kind of not really a big deal or whatever.) Now waldorph knows what's what because she had a goddamn request post set up, being completely aware that she had set up such a fucking insane universe that she couldn't cover every corner on her own and she was going to miss things, but we the readers could point her in the right direction. My point is that these are spectacular AUs and amazing examples of world building, and just as we don't know everything there is to know about our planet and are finding new things daily, so are these authors. Hop on the bandwagon. It's fun, promise.
Mostly, though, Legends is kind of un-rec'able because a) leupagus has a massive fanbase I don't so it's extremely likely that you're not going to hear about this from me first b) it's my impression that everyone has been on Detective Spock's boner this entire time and c) THIS IS SO FUCKING LONG AND ABSURD AND IT'S PROBABLY LONGER THAN SOME OF MY GRAD SCHOOL PAPERS? AND. WHAT THE HELL.
DAMN YOU, LEUPAGUS. DAMN YOU TO HELL.
Oh right: you can read all of Only Good for Legends here. It's like what, 120k total? Worth it.