Sharing Is Caring, Part Cinq! Nostalgia Is Fun!

[strina]

Random fan stuff. Covers both the two weeks I spent re-immersing myself in Harry Potter and the four or so days right after I finished downloading all five seasons of Angel, where I was maybe briefly insane.

• "My Other Left Foot":
  
  Okay, first I was all amused by the thing where Abby knows where Kate's tat is.
  
  And then Gibbs and Kate got to the redhead's house and dude. Gibbs busted out the mad seduction skillz. And he reads chinese! And again, mad seduction skillz!
  
  I mean, yes, we've seen him flirt, but nothing this...blatant. Daaaamn.
  
  Dude. Tony and his crazy olfactory ability rock my socks. I heart him.
  
  
• Oh my god, I'm such a twelve-year-old girl! I just...I was reading this and then I hit the line "Xander winced slightly but made no protest, and when Spike glanced up, the trust in those eyes was enough to beat some measure of sanity back into Spike. It wasn’t an idealistic, innocent trust - I know you could never hurt me - but a sort of resigned, world-weary trust - I know you won’t hurt me worse than I can bear. And that was enough to almost break Spike’s unbeating heart, enough to take some of the edge off his urgency." and I just...Awww. Fucking hell, awwww.
  
  12. Year old. Girl.
  
  I suck. But awwww.
  
  
• Okay, this is awesome. The Shark series has become the fanfic everyone fanfics. Okay, not everyone, but three people so far have written "sequels" to it and it's a flashfic. And it's awesome. It's got the darkest John ever and it's wonderful and I heart all of the sequels, although I think the new one, Kharessa's Incision, may be my fave.
  
  
• Okay, here's the thing:
  
  I broke my ludicrous-switch in sixth grade.
  
  You know, that switch that makes you go "No! This premise is ludicrous! No more, I say!"
  
  I...possibly someone should have been monitoring my reading habits when I was younger, but whatever. I'd been reading freely from the adults section of the library since fourth or fifth grade, and in sixth, I found The Iron Dragon's Daughter.
  
  I blame this book for many things, because it broke my brain a little. And then it broke it some more and possibly there was some kind of domino effect.
  
  I'll be up front: I hate this book. I didn't like it when I read it, and I certainly haven't changed my mind in the intervening years.
  
  But after reading it, I changed. In a few ways. 1) Wow, did I become sketchy about religion. 2) I became a lot less likely to just pull random sci-fi books off the shelf. 3) Nothing will ever, ever be as ludicrous and confusing as the dimension-hopping reincarnation whatever-the-fuck-that-was.
  
  All you people talk about crackfic and I'm just like "lalala, my switch is broken". My mind does not differentiate between the story where the Wraith won and everybody's fucked, the story where Fraser is actually a trapper and RayK is his mail-order man-bride, and the story where John gives Rodney a talking Ancient pony. In my brain, if it's not The Iron Dragon's Daughter, it is all good.
  
  
• Oh, fandom. I love you. Sometimes I just look at you and go "my people!"
  
  "I love non-con. I love weddings. Above all, I love non-con weddings."
  
  
• I have a (heretofore) secret and bizarre weakness for spontaneous telepathy stories.
  
  Shut up! You would be amazed at how often that crops up in actual legitimate sci-fi!
  
  
• OMG, I feel so conflicted
  
  On the one hand, I have this great love for fandom, because there are so many things that give me joy and/or make me want to throw my (virtual) arms open and yell "my people!"
  
  On the other...sometimes fangirls make my soul cry:
  
  "And, don’t be scared because of the lyrics every now and then... This is not a songfic, ‘cause I wrote the song myself, and I wrote it after the fic! ^_^ And I know the song sucks, but it just seemed to fit, and, well... *smirks* It’s my fic, deal with it!
  
  A picture for the ‘Eavesdropping’ scene can be found at http://www.deviantart.com/view/6589538/
  
  *sniffles* Why doesn't anybody review my last fic, "Never Alone"? Come on, it can't be quite THAT bad..."
  
  Soul. Cry.
  
  
• Jumanji was on today and wow, I completely forgot about the part where Robin Williams' sister tries to equate the pain of nobody believing her about what happened to her brother to the pain of being trapped in a board game for 26 years. Seriously? You are seriously going to make that comparison?
  
  Oh, and then the conversation ends, like we're supposed to actually buy into her tale of womyn-pain.
  
  
• One of my pet peeves in HP?
  
  People not getting that the wizarding world is not our world.
  
  I mean, whatever you want to do with it, that's fine, as long as you do something.
  
  But people will do things like...have pure-blood wizards using slang derived from tech terms. They don't have muggle tech! They don't have our movies and they don't have computers and they probably don't even have the dewey decimal system.
  
  
• (with the file name "fannish convergence makes life worth living") Found a girl today who writes HP and Hikaru no Go and IY and Bruno & Boots, and she writes all of my favorite pairings in each.
  
  Seriously, in her vast HP repertoire, she has RL/SB, RL/SS, HP/HG/RW, and HP/DM, among (oh-so-many) others. Fine, she doesn't write SB/RL/SS, which is my bizarre-and-unlikely threesome of choice (I specify "bizarre-and-unlikely" because HP/HG/RW is my bizarrely-likely threesome of choice for HP), but other than that, she's pretty much got it all. Oh! Yeah, no HP/GW, so yay.
  
  It's not quite as cool as the day I discovered Nancy's website, because I don't think anything can beat that (ONMYOJI! NCIS! CSI! FIREFLY! HARRY POTTER! SMALLVILLE! BUFFY! PLUS THE SCADS OF COMPLETELY BRAND NEW FANDOMS! My heart almost burst my chest with joy), but it's still awesome.
  
  
• I cop, I cop. I'm weird. I can't slash John with not-Rodney. I just can't. I try, and then my brain goes bibblebibblebibbleno.
  
  
• Okay, see, no.
  
  I have this incredible problem with fics that have Harry as a Death Eater. Not because I believe in his essential goodness or any crap like that.
  
  Voldemort wants to kill him. Not recruit him, not neutralize him. Kill him.
  
  So shut up with the Death Eater!Harry, unless you want to actually make the effort to negate the prophecy and the 15-odd years of enmity and attempted murder.
  
  
• Aww...I'm having like a nostalgia week.
  
  'Cause I'm doing that HP set for rec50, I went to ff.net, because that was my go-to archive back when I was first into HP. And aww. I loved some of the worst stories! And my profile still has favorites and author alerts and junk from when I only read het. And from when I was a total OTP girl. It was all Inuyasha/Kagome and Harry/Draco, all the time. And then I have the first SessKag story I ever read bookmarked!
  
  It's like looking at the fannish equivalent of baby pictures, really.
  
  
• Harry/Ginny. And I like it.
  
  Fucking good author. Making me ship canon het. Where shall I put my face?
  
  
• Every time I read a summary like this:
  
  "Harry Potter was sentenced to Azkaban for murdering 4 people close to him. Years later his innocence is proven and he is released, but is that a good thing? What will he do?..."
  
  I can't help being like "kill you all, omg" because come on! After Sirius, anyone innocent going near Azkaban is going to make him crazy. You put him in there? omg, he is going keel you hard, h0rs. And then he's gonna do nasty things to y'all's corpses. For days. It'd be like that scene at the end of Mindhunters, with the dancing meatpuppets, except he'll be pulling your strings in the middle of Diagon Alley and nobody's going to say word one. Because as of now? That boy is crazy-powerful and more than a little unstable, what with the visions and the torture and the persecution and all. After a few years trapped in Azkaban with a fiery and righteous vengeance burning deep in his ever-more-unstable heart? omg, KILL YOU ALL.
  
  Of course, I kinda want to see the story where Harry commits cold-blooded, premeditated murder, in front of witnesses, and it's not even an issue. Because of the prophecy. Everyone just goes all hand-wavey about how he may have his little quirks, but he's no You-Know-Who, so really, we must make allowances, that poor boy, all the stress is just getting to him, what were we talking about? What body? Oh, that body. It was suicide. Of course, I'm sure I was right here, it was really something, the way that man just kept hitting himself like that.
  
  
• All those stories about Harry getting kidnapped and trained as a hooker? Fuck off, people, that's not gonna happen. That's like the Olsen twins getting kidnapped and trained as hookers. No, it's like a bizarre mixture of the Olsen twins and Jesus getting kidnapped, etc. He is too famous for that to work. He is instantly recognizable. And not only is he recognizable, he is practically revered.
  
  Last two days? I have seen this storyline five times. HP fandom, no. Just no.
  
  
• You know what frosts my cookies? Embedded A/N's.
  
  
• You know...you leave ff.net for a while and you forget. Yeah, you see the icons mocking the horrible summaries, but you think of those as aberrations.
  
  And then you go back. And you follow some links (as you do), finding good authors, checking out those authors' favorite stories' lists. And on those lists you see things like this:
  
  "All Harry wants is to be normal, but what you want isn't always what you need. Sometimes it takes an extreme act to get either. Add to that Death speaking in your mind, and something crying in the cupboard and things get a little weird."
  
  "PreHBP Harry saves the lives of Snape and Malfoy, finds out he's Salazar Slytherin, and Dumbledore makes him spend the summer with the the two Slytherins. Not long after that, he's thrown back in time to the Marauder's era. Darkish with some laughs."
  
  "7th yr. With the wizarding world left in turmoil, Harry had decided to take a stand against Voldemort once and for all as the leader of the Light. He makes a deal with the devil to merge his present day soul with his past one. A soul named Salazar Slyther"
  
  "COMPLETE! Year 6. NEWT classes, Occlumency, and the impending war are backdrop: Harry's acting strange, can he overcome his guilt and play the hero as only he can? Will he enlist the help of the only one who save him- The one he swore he'd never forgive?"
  
  "Year six and Harry needs rescuing by Dumbledore and Snape. The resulting understanding between Harry and Snape is critical to destroying Voldemort and leads to an offer of adoption. Covers year seven and Auror training. Sequel is Revolution."
  
  "TEEN ANGST. Harry, a slightly depressed, gothy teen working part time in a body art shop waits for the new school year to roll in so he can see his friends. And enemies. There IS a plot! SEVERITUS!adoption! NOTslash! RR!"
  
  "[DISCONTINUED] Beneath the star of Sirius, Harry swore that he would stop Voldemort no matter the cost. Never again would he allow evil to hurt those he cared for! Harry's eyes burned in the night, and all those green orbs revealed... was death."
  
  "Harry's lost his memory thanks to a potion and now he's working for Voldemort. Will he ever remember his past? Chap 16: It's a race to see who can get the OOS first...Harry or Voldemort? Harry remembers his past!"
  
  "-TEMPORARY HIATUS- Voldemort has been defeated, the light has won. Alas, for Light's greatest champion, there will be no rest. Weary and in pain he is asked to be the Hero yet again. Blatantly AU, involves dimension crossing."
  
  "He had it all: the perfect bachelor pad, great friends, a Quidditch career any first-year ever dreamed of--and every weekend free. Until Ginny Weasley came back into his life, Harry was quite happy to be alone. But if you play with fire, you get burnt."
  
  "PostGoF. Harry: NewPowers,NewLook. But the powers of a Magus aren't so easy to control, and they don't make life easy. Voldemort much stronger. Some:OCs,deaths,NewOutlook. No:Slash,MarySue. LiteShips:Harry-?,R-H,MoreLater. SuperHarryButTryIt"
  
  "[AU] Ignored by his family, ever since his 'sister' was born, Harry grows distant and quiet. He defeated Voldemort in front of Wormtail's and Lucius' eyes. A chance to gain greater power, Lucius 'adopted' Harry and gave him the name of Aphraziel Malfoy."
  
  "Ch. 50, complete! AU. Her landlady married a dog and had his baby. Her little sister is far too smart. She helped to steal two little boys, one with a famous scar, and her husband is a werewolf. Her name is Danger. This is her story. Now with a sequel!"
  
  And then you cry, on the inside. Because you just threw up in your mouth a little, and it burned.
  
  
• Okay, so I have this thing where I'm not so much a fan of canon in my fanfiction. When it comes to relationships, that is. And it's not just canon het I object to; I don't read Willow/Kennedy or Brian/Justin either. And that's only a little because I hate Kennedy and Justin.
  
  I like the unconvential relationships, for the most part. Part of it's the slash, yes, but I also heart me some Dawn/Connor and Wes/Faith (and okay, yes, Simon/River). And then there are my many, many polyamorous ships.
  
  And I'll read Xander/anyone. As I've said before and will probably say again. Canon, not, don't care, it's Xander. And I'll read Rodney/almost anyone, and don't expect my tastes to change even if they do make Rodney/Teyla, Rodney/Elizabeth, or Rodney/Cadman canon.
  
  My canon ships that are based on the ship and not just one of the characters, though. Those a rare and wondrous animal. Willow/Tara. Cristina/Burke. Summer/Seth. Zoe/Wash.
  
  Wes/Lilah.
  
  If I'm reading your Wesley story and you try to tell me that he may have fucked Lilah but it didn't mean anything to him, I am sorry, but you are trying to sell me a bill of goods. That relationship was fucked up and blatantly, viciously sexual; it was forged in hatred, self-destruction, and calculation. But it damn well meant something to both of them, changed both of them. More than any other relationship in all of the five seasons of angel, that one moved me. I heart it, and both of them, madly.
  
  
• You know...strange as it may seem, I keep thinking Wes had mad untapped skill with the ladies. No, think about it. There was the awkward Cordelia thing, and then the unrequited Fred thing, both of which would be evidences against my theory. And yet.
  
  There was Virginia, who was quite frankly out of his league, but besotted with him anyway. And then there was Lilah, who loved Wes more than apparently anything ever. And then Fred fell in love with him, but whatever.
  
  And then he made Illyria, God-King of the Primordium, fall in love with him. She cried over him.
  
  Looking at Lilah and Illyria, I can't help it. The man had to've had some kind of super secret powers of attraction or something.
  
  
• Watched The Inside and wow, these people are fucked up. I love them.
  
  Webb is just...he has to be some kind of crazy. Like, no, really, an actual diagnosable mental illness kind of crazy, he's that fucked up. And he just keeps encouraging Rebecca in her escalating fucked-upedness.
  
  She has so completely divorced herself from who she used to be, that she didn't even recognize her hallucination of her younger self. I mean, I watched the suicide episode and thought "wow, she be mighty crazy", but I had no idea how deep the crazy ran. She's repressed liek woah.
  
  Also, pretty sure she was molested by her kidnapper. And that she killed him.
  
  Dammit, I'm all bitter now that we're never going to get to see her messily destruct.
  
  On another note, I want Rebecca/Mel femslash. What with the endearments and the cheek-kissing in ep. 9.
  
  
• I don't want Spike or Angel to ever get Shansu'd. Angel because he is very very bad with a) dealing constructively with the consequences of his actions, so I think he'd see it as not a reward, but as utter absolution, though he'd still have the guilt and the brooding, he'd just be way, way more fucked up about it, and b) people. People, social situations, he's just bad with it.
  
  Spike is just - Spike is not William. Not William the Bloody and not William the Bloody Awful Poet. So much of who he is is bound up in what he is that I think he'd have to completely reinvent himself again if he became human. Which, yeah, he could do, but I don't particularly care to read about it.
  
  
• Y'know, I am emphatically not a fan of the name-changes. Canon nicknames I'm good with, or even canon aliases, but most name-changes just annoy the crap outta me.
  
  But not enough to make me abandon a story. So I have noticed a strange trend. In a lot of the gen or het stories, Xander goes by Alex, while in the slash, he's far more likely to go by Lex. What-huh? Are slashers just used to typing Lex? What's up with that?
  
  
• Know what I just realized? Everybody on Buffy got more tail than Xander. People, that is criminal.
  
  He has slept with two people in his life. Willow got three, Buffy got four, and while Giles only got two onscreen, he did not come to the 'dale a virgin.
  
  
• Little bit in love with James from Heist.
  
  And with Mick. Because I was all "that's kinda a bitch move, faking your own death when you've got a *kid*" and then they had the flashback! OMG! That is a twist! He didn't fake his own death; he took three to the chest and lived, but somehow his partner (who's the one who shot him) appears to have insinuated himself into the hearts of his grieving family.
  
  
• Just saw "Double or Nothing" for the first time and I kinda hate Fred right now. Seriously, what the hell? "He was right to blame you", my ass. Bitch, you are blaming someone for trying to do the right thing! Yeah, you know it's a false prophecy now, but no one could have known that before! You guys would have had to help him steal the baby, and then Angel would have killed you all, so shut the hell up. God, I like Lilah so much more than all y'all right now. Except Wesley. I like Wesley, and I like Lilah, and I kinda want the rest you to be stabbed to death, oh wait, that's pretty much what happens later, hafuckingha. So now I want you guys to be dead, and Wesley and Lilah to have an ever after afterlife together.
  
  
• Rewatched Loyalty. Continue to be more than a little bit in love with the plot device of giant cranky hamburger.
  
  
• Webb is - not malicious, but not anything so warm as benevolent, either. I just - jesus, that man is complex. And we get nothing about him. Except in that one episode where he was suspended, and from that we basically learned that he 1) is crazy beyond the dreams of most men, 2) very, very good at his job, 3) would be a very successful cult leader, judging by what he's done to his agents, who had presumably been trained to resist things like his mad mind control powers, and 4) would go completely batshit off-the-rails crazy if forced out of the FBI, so nobody sane wants him to leave the job alive.
  
  God, The Inside was an awesome show. Fucking Fox.
  
  
• One thing about a Tenhawk crossover...I'm always fair to certain sure I'm only catching about half the crossovers. I have no idea if some characters are OCs or just from a 'verse I don't know.
  
  
• How INCREDIBLY AWESOME is it that my fandom now has AT LEAST two stories featuring, I kid you not, TELEPATHIC SHARKS:
  
  Planet Megalodon Wraith Defense Force
  
  Neither Helpful nor Comforting
  
  
• Dude, it makes me ridiculous happy when I see people on my flist talk about things I like. Not so much things like Stargate Atlantis, which everybody talks about, but things like Bones and NCIS and The Evidence. And if somebody talked about The Inside, I would possibly have their baby. Anyway. Saw people talking about DEBS and Point of Hopes, one right after the other, and went OMG BEST EVER, YAY LIFE.
  
  
• You know a word I can never, ever see Rodney McKay saying, ever? "Gajillion". Just no.
  
  
• Oh god, I missed Buffyfic. I forgot how much. But how can you not love a fandom where you gets recs with phrases like "Xander gets his consort on" and "After 800 years of working for death in other dimensions, he has been sent back to Sunnydale only two years after his death in Earth years."
  
  I don't care what you say, it's awesome.
  
  And mmmmm, Chocolatey Goodness. I almost don't care that's it's a WiP. It's so good that even if it was for sure abandoned, I'd rec it, and I hate people who do that.
  
  Also mmmmmm, Domestic Piranhas. The story with one of my favorite illogical threesomes ever (Angel/Wesley/Gunn, shut up, it works).
  
  Basically? Mmmmm, the Mad Poetess.
  
  Here, have some:
  
  Chocolatey Goodness
  
  Domestic Piranhas
  
  A Long Time
  
  A Part of This Complete Breakfast
  
  
• I. Wow. I have no self-control when it comes to the fanfiction. I have three windows open right now, all stories I've had queued to read for the last couple days. One is Wesley/Doyle. The second is Wesley/Angel. The third is horrifying to me.
  
  Willow/Tara. In the Wishverse. In an AU of the Wishverse. It's called Brave Eyes. Checked the last couple paragraphs ('cause I don't want to read a story that ends up with Tara perma-dead) and it appears that Vamp Willow? Is redeemed through the power of Tara's love.
  
  Going to be so. Bad.
  
  Totally reading it anyway. (ETA: Actually liked it. Possibly it's good, possibly I am broken inside. You know. Whichever.)