(Untitled)

[thistlerose]

To everyone who purchased earrings from my Etsy shop: they are on their way. Expect them in 2 - 3 business days. Unless you are in Australia, in which case, the woman at the post office said they should take about a week. I hope you like them.

So, I decided to do hc_bingo. I'm reposting my bingo card so I can solicit ideas. *g*

Comments

[janice_lester]

OMG your tentacles bunny is awesome and I want to see it! (Also, now I'm thinking of cracky plots involving actual bunnies WITH actual tentacles…)

For domestic abuse (either one), I'd be very interested in seeing a Buffy take where you looked at a Slayer's potential to cause actual harm to a boyfriend/husband who is a human being instead of, yannow, a vampire or a souped-up super-soldier. Post finale, you can invent your own Slayer, you needn't give one of the known ones a dark side. This sort of fic could perhaps also focus on comforting the Slayer after she accidentally injures boyfriend/hubby--eg exploring to what degree a Slayer is responsible for the degree of force she exerts. If you were an ordinary teenager yesterday, didn't even know you were a Potential, and today you're a Slayer--how could you possibly know your own strength? Perhaps you could have Buffy--or even Faith--comforting a newborn Slayer who has seriously injured or even killed someone when she only meant to push him away/stop him touching her/play baseball. ?

Spinal injury--if you did Pike, you could twist this/push this a bit further by having HIM comfort one of his loved ones who seems to think the world's come to an end because he's been injured. You could either have him get his head together pretty quickly (perhaps on that long voyage home without warp drive), or else you could have him still in denial and trying to comfort someone who's not in denial and is actually overreacting to the situation.

Arachnaphobia--I really like your idea of Ron being comforted by Rose. Especially if she's very young at the time and she's very serious and empathetic and lecturing him on how she has a monster under her bed, and it's very scary, and she's allowed to be scared of it, and courage is in running really fast across the room and leaping into bed to avoid the monster and then sleeping well just to spite him. And Ron's not really all that reassured, because he doesn't regard either fear as reasonable (and he knows there's no monster under the bed). But she loves him and she squashes spiders for him and it's adorable. :-)

Turning Parker female could be so awesome, but I think might tend towards the guilty pleasure/revenge fantasy thing, at least if I attempted it.

major illness--there's also McCoy's dad's illness you could bring in here. Reboot fanon seems to have assumed that David McCoy's illness and death took place before the movie and was the inciting incident for the breakdown of the McCoy marriage, but I don't buy this for a number of reasons. I don't see why you couldn't have this happen later on. Again, Spock Prime could comfort--perhaps even make a cure possible.

[thistlerose]

Oooh, I love the Slayer-accidentally-hurting-her-boyfriend bunny! That could be so sad. Poor girl. Her first day as a superheroine, she accidentally kills or maims her boyfriend! I'd love to see Faith comfort her.

The problem with Anya is that her window is so small. I mean, for turning a boy we know into a woman (temporarily). We meet her in the middle of S3, and she loses her powers in the same episode. She doesn't get them back until S6.

Ooh, but Amy could maybe do something. To Xander, possibly? Willow could fix him in the end. IDK. I'd have to tread carefully with that one. I have a close family member who's transgender, and her situation has kind of made me overly sensitive to the whole body dysphoria thing. Still...

Wow, if Spock Prime were able to cure McCoy's father. O_O Maybe to make up for being kind of useless when Sybock melded with McCoy in ST5. When do you think that took place? Between the series and the first movie, maybe? Karl Urban has said that, in his mind, McCoy was depressed because of the loss of his father, coupled with the stress of the divorce, but interviews =/= canon.

You know what? I think I might try to do all of them. Because they only have to be 500 words each, right? Ew, that means I have to do the detached retina. Yechh.

[janice_lester]

I suspect--haven't read the rules--that you don't have to go into detail about the detached retina. You could simply have a character wearing an eyepatch, occasionally going off to sickbay for medical treatments, and focus on his fear/pain/getting by one-eyed rather than the cause thereof. You might even be able to get away with making it an unspecified sudden eye/vision problem requiring medical treatment and a recovery period, which might be easier for you to deal with emotionally?

If you wanted it to be Anya, couldn't you simply make it a wish of one of Parker's subsequent conquests? (I admit that I"m not recalling too clearly what happened to him--maybe he got eaten at some point so that this won't work?) Or you could have Anya trying to get Buffy to make a wish (perhaps getting her drunk first, so she's not watching her words too well?) and have Buffy make some sort of blanket wish about every man who's ever screwed her over or something? (Hehe, then you could have a whole lot of men show up at Chateau Summers wanting to know what's going on, and some of them got caught by the wish because, IDK, they stole Buffy's favourite HEllo Kitty pencil in kindergarten or something. :-) But you're right, that's playing to comedy and not really all that sensitive to people whose bodies don't match their souls and who understandably don't find that at all funny. (I'm currently writing Joanna McCoy as trans, and I can really feel the weight of needing to get it right, you know?)

I thought that McCoy's father looked old in ST V, so I always read that "secret pain" of McCoy's as being fairly recent, perhaps even during the interval between IV and V (which is generally not acknowledged, but I think has to be there to make sense of the condition of the Enterprise in V vs at the end of IV). But I'd certainly buy between TOS and TMP--it would help to explain why McCoy left Starfleet so completely, which is a problem, if he had to resign in order to be allowed enough time to go home and be with his father. I have some trouble buying it as something that happened very soon after he qualified as a doctor. YMMV.

[thistlerose]

The problem with Anya is that, between "The Wish" in S3 and "Hell's Bells" in S6, she didn't have any power as a vengeance demon. And I feel like, in the episodes after S6, there wasn't much time for that sort of thing. Thought ... IDK. Maybe.

I don't think it's necessarily wrong to play to comedy. I mean - it's the Buffyverse. And I think comedy can be handled tastefully. Forced!Permanent!genderswap gives me the heebie jeebies, but I think I could handle a short fic about one guy magically transformed into a woman for a couple of hours. He'd be disoriented and unhappy, but it's possible he'd learn something. Maybe there's a boy at school whom Dawn doesn't like?

I wonder what would happen if a Slayer were turned into a boy. Would she lose her powers??

You're right about McCoy's father looking old in ST V. When I write about AOS Bones, I get around that by having his father being considerably older than his mother. Or - for whatever reason - deciding to wait to have children. But your version makes perfect sense too. That would be an interesting angle. Spock Prime knows how badly McCoy's father's death hurt him, so he either figures out the cure (though I don't know how he would) or goes himself or sends someone else (Kirk?) to be there for him.

[janice_lester]

In my head version of the Buffy world? Wearing a boy body can be another way of being a woman and wielding female power and therefore would not be incompatible with being the/a Slayer. But if you accept that the new boy body makes you a boy, and let that physical change alter your whole identity and self-image, I think that might be a whole different ball of wax. So IDK.

You seem to want to stick close to Buffy canon, but you don't have to. There's at least one canon AU, after all (Vampire!Willow's world), so it's not really pushing much beyond canon to create your own. Perhaps an AU where Anya returned to the vengeance demon fold sooner? (Perhaps she died during the battle against Glory, and her old boss offered to bring her back as a demon?) There's also who knows how many of Anyanka's old colleagues skulking about the place looking for trouble. :-)

Spock Prime has at least the advantage of knowing that a cure is possible within David McCoy's lifetime. Perhaps he's even found the time--you know, in the last hundred or so years of his life in the TOS universe :-) -- to look into that, in which case he might even know who develops the cure and when (and possibly how). At minimum, he should be able to say (if he chooses)that he has reason to believe that David McCoy's body is physically capable of holding up until a cure is found. That might be enough to give both McCoys hope enough to hang onto, and to avoid traumatising either of them further by revealing how the whole thing played out in Spock Prime's world.

[thistlerose]

I wonder what that would mean for a Potential who's biologically female, but psychologically/emotionally male. Or maybe such a person couldn't be a Potential.

*g* I like sticking with canon. I like my guidelines. I find them helpful. But you're totally right. And we know there are multiple universes - like the one without any shrimp.

I really like your idea about Spock Prime giving the McCoys hope. I love the idea of Spock Prime looking out for McCoy, period. I ship them in TOS, but I also feel like Spock owes McCoy for the katra-in-the-head thing.