entirely ruined her disposition with books

Since Tumblr seems to be on its way to a slow and agonizing death and I will miss it terribly, I am reminding myself that many a website has gone the way of the dodo and we're all still here, having fun and making art and friends and shitposts.

My own personal Lirazel's Rule of the Internet is: anything you want to last will surely disappear, and everything you most want to disappear will stay findable forever.

Anyway, tell me about a site that has disappeared that you think is a real loss to the either the internet at large or yourself in particular!

Obviously, Livejournal pre-Russian-overlords belongs on this list, as do specific LJ communities that we lost in various strikethroughs (I am ridiculous, so I most sorely feel the loss of the original fandom_wank).

Two sites that I personally don't feel the need to revisit but am sad are no longer out there are Checkmated (a Ron/Hermione archive where you had to apply to get your fic accepted and mine was and I was SO proud) and All About Spike (a Spike from BtVS archive). I know the fic from the latter has been saved on AO3, but it's sad to me that the site itself isn't there! You lose a lot when you can't see the original design/layout/etc.

Now, many sites are available through the Wayback Machine, which is absolutely wonderful, but many people don't know about that, there are broken links for various things, and I'm not convinced that the Internet Archive will be able to continue forever.

I haven't done anything like this in a long time! Stolen from lebateleur

1. Three shipping tropes you love?

+ Slow burn. Honestly, I don't just love this dyanmic--it's basically required. If it's not a slow burn, I'm not into it.* I am ace, hear me roar.

+ Mutual pining. This goes hand-in-hand with slow burn for me. I just need a stretch of time where they're both in love and yearning for one another and aren't together yet. It makes the getting together so very delicious.

+ Hurt/comfort. I love it. Angst with a happy ending is my favorite genre, so obviously this fits right into it. Hurt/comfort is all about the tenderness!

2. Three shipping tropes you don't love?

+ Insta!love. Just. No. Ace me simply does not care if your characters are instantly attracted to each other. I only care if they put in the work for their relationship.

+ Love triangles. I can think of one single love triangle that really worked for me (Tony/Michelle/Sid from Skins gen 1) and the reason it worked was because it was equally about all three of them and their relationships to each other. Each line of that triangle was equilateral, which is rare. If I like all three characters, I end up OT3-ing it. If I don't like one (or more) of the characters, I just get annoyed with the narrative.

+ Makeovers. Where Character A never realized how attractive Character B was (mostly because she's got glasses and curly omg) until Character B gets a makeover and then Character A is gobsmacked. Wow, I really hate that. Note that this is not the same thing as a character finding another character super attractive in formal dress. I like a man in a well-cut suit or a woman in a gorgeous dress as much as the next girl.

3. One emotional aspect of a ship that always gets you?

All the ways people can show that they love each other besides the obvious (saying it, kissing, sex). Character-specific or weird demonstrations of devotion are literally my favorite thing. Things that wouldn't be romantic to any other pairing but super are in the context of this one specific relationship and their history.

4. One physical aspect of a ship that always gets you?

I like snuggling. I also have to say that I love casual physical intimacy. There's this one scene in the Buffy episode "Tabula Rasa" where Buffy and Spike briefly fight and it ends with her straddling him, and then they have this whole conversation where she's straddling him and neither one are paying attention to the fact that she's straddling him. They're just so comfortable in each other's space and I find that appealing.

5. Multiship or monoship?

In my old age (lol), I have become a multiship-but-with-favorites person. So for instance with CQL, obviously Wangxian is one of the great ships of all time, but I also love Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng, and I also love Jiang Cheng and Wen Qing, etc. I don't want to write or read about them nearly as much as I do Wangxian, but they make me happy and I love fanfiction because it lets me explore those worlds where my secondary pairings are together while still having a "main" world that is Wangxian. Or, like, Mulder/Scully is another one of the great ships of all time, but that doesn't mean I don't every once in a while really want to dig into the screwed-up-ness of Mulder/Krycek or whatever.

6. Rare pairs or mainstream?

Totally depends on the fandom/ship.

7. Polyamory or monogamy?

I'm into polyamory where all three (or four) characters love each other equally or are at least all in a relationship together (like, I'm okay with Lan Wangji/Wei Wuxian/Jiang Cheng where LWJ and JC both love WWX more than they love each other, but they're all together). I am not much into Character A dates both Character B and Character C but Characters B and C aren't together. I'd rather have monogamy in that situation.

Though I also enjoy messy polycule situations where everyone has been together with everyone else. I haven't watched Interview with the Vampire yet, but the polycule that is Lestat/Louis/Armand/Daniel is hilarious and I love it. Or the Fanged Four from the Buffyverse. No matter who's together at a given moment, it's all fun. But in these situations, it's all about the codependency and, well, messiness.

8. If the ship is physical, reversible or not?

Does this just mean in reference to "topping/bottoming"? Because if so, reversible all the way.

9. Do you always have romantic ships for fandoms?

No. I do most of the time, but it's definitely not a requirement. I will say that I'm most often drawn to acting fannishly (aka reading/writing fic) for fandoms where I also ship, but there are so many things I love madly that do not involve any romanticalness at all.

10. How important is the sexual part (if any) of your ship?

It can be important to the characters and their characterization, but it's not important to me. I would happily read a million G-rated fics about my ship. I mean, I'd happily read a million E-rated ones, too, but I honestly don't care which it is.

11. Opinion on platonic ships?

Does this mean queerplatonic? Or does this mean relationships that aren't romantic but that make me feral? I mean, I like both of those things. I haven't read a ton of queerplatonic fics, but I love queerplatonic dynamics. And, for instance, I care just as much about Wei Wuxian&Jiang Cheng in a platonic way as I do about Wei Wuxian/Lan Wangji. I'll lose my mind over both of them.

12. Three ships you currently love?

I don't stop loving ships even when I move onto a different fandom, but here are three that I am currently very invested in:

+ Wei Wuxian/Lan Wangji [The Untamed]
+ Art/Tashi/Patrick [Challengers]
+ Eugenides/Irene [The Queen's Thief]

13. Five OTPs from past fandoms?

Again, still love these madly, I'm just not as fannishly engaged with them anymore:

+ Buffy/Spike [Buffy the Vampire Slayer]
+ Mulder/Scully [The X-Files]
+ Parker/Hardison(/Eliot) [Leverage]
+ Kang Yi-na/Jung Ye-eun [Age of Youth]
+ Nick Charles/Nora Charles [The Thin Man movies]

But I could name twenty others!

14. Opinion on the importance of marriage?

Depends on the ship and how important it is to the couple. For Wangxian, for instance, they really need to be seen as each other's person in the eyes of the world. Or the whole joy of Nick/Nora is how much fun they make marriage look. But, like, Buffy and Spike are never going to get married and who cares. For someone like Mulder/Scully...well, if they got married, I'd be happy, but if they didn't and were just together, I'd still be happy.

15. Opinion on OC kids?

Not my thing to read/write 99% of the time, but a really, really skilled writer could pull it off.


* There are a couple of exceptions, actually, like Orpheus and Eurydice form Hadestown, but that works because it's a sung-through musical. Also Peaceable and Barbara from The Sherwood Ring and I have no idea why. I'd have to reread it to analyze why that kind of instant attraction works for me. But I can't think of any other exceptions!

This post is inspired by a conversation I was having the other day on Mastodon about how I can't just accept soulmate AUs as a fun fantasy thing like, idk, time travel or amnesia fic or something simply because it just reads as too Calvinist to me. I am Team Free Will! I am horrified at the idea of choices being made for me by the universe or God or whatever! I will read a soulmate AU if it's written by a writer I already love, but I am never going to seek it out, and it's always going to be a bit ew to me.

And that is so specific to me! If you have zero Calvinist background--if, say, your background is East Asian and you associate soulmate AUs with, like, red string of fate stuff instead of people being predestined to burn in hell for all eternity--you are going to have a very different reaction to soulmate AUs!

So that got me thinking about other tropes or plotlines that I just can't approach like a normal person because of my own personal baggage.

And here's the ultimate one: what happens to Donna on Doctor Who.

Donna was one of my favorite eras of the show--I found her completely delightful. But I have never been able to rewatch her season or even reblog gifsets on Tumblr because of how upset I was that the Doctor ended up wiping her memories in order to save her life.

Why? Because at that time my grandmother was dying of Alzheimer's. The idea of wiping someone else's memories, particularly without their consent, even if it was for "their own good" was so horrifying to me that it ruined Donna's run.

I think objectively that was a gross plotline, but I don't think most other people had the intense emotional reaction to it that I did.

But I will never be okay with memory alteration treated as okay. I just won't.

So what's a trope or storyline that you bring baggage to that completely shapes how you see it?

(Obviously the answer is: every trope or storyline because we all bring baggage to everything, but I'm talking specifically about ones that make you a bit of an outlier and that are easy for you to see: "Oh, yeah, that's definitely why I don't [or maybe do?] vibe with that particular story.")

Let's bring back Fannish Friday!

Tell me about a character arc or plotline that blows your mind. Where a character ends up becoming something you didn't anticipate. Where if you told yourself how the character ended up, you wouldn't have believed it, but somehow the writer(s) pull(s) it off. Or where a story goes in a direction that you absolutely did not foresee and you can't believe it works.

This isn't just a "what's a great character arc/plotline?" though I will ask that another time. This is specifically about one that you did not anticipate.



Spike from BtVS is a classic case for the character question (though I know some of you would say the writers didn't pull it off, it works for me). Where he starts in S2 is lightyears away from where he ends up in S7. Of course, this particular arc wasn't anticipated because it was never planned! It unfolded for the writers as much as it did for us. (Which is one of the joys of longer TV shows that we're missing in the tight, limited-run shows we have now, but that's another topic.)

Same with John Silver in Black Sails--thinking of him trying to charm Flint and claim to be a cook in that first season and comparing it to where he ends up...incredible.

For plotlines, I never knew what was going to happen in the kdrama White Christmas. From start to finish, I just did not know! And I didn't anticipate the last shot at all, but it's PERFECT and adds another layer to the whole show.


What about y'all? You can be vague or specific depending on how you feel about sharing spoilers.

I don't have much emotional energy for DW today, so tell me something that's happening in the next month or two, fannishly, that you are looking forward to.

For me:

+ Yuletide, always. Reading my gift, but mostly seeing if anyone likes what I wrote!
+ Fandom Trees. New this year! I'm excited to see how it goes.
+ The BBC's yearly holiday Agatha Christie adaptation. This year is Murder Is Easy and I hope it's as good as Why Didn't They Ask Evans? was!


And for something I used to always look forward to but haven't really done the last few years: Big Fat Quiz of the Year. That was my jam. I looked forward to it all year! And yet I haven't watched the last couple of years--I kind of feel like it pulled a GBBO and tapered off in quality. I'd love to see something else replace it!

There's nothing better than a satisfying ending. Tell me about your favorites!

This will, presumably, be spoilerific, so enter the comments at your own risk. I'm keeping it vague in the post itself, but feel free to get into specifics in the comments if you wish.

My favorites?

+ Before Sunset. That two-line exchange at the end? Gives me goosebumps just thinking about it.

+ The Third Man. That long, long shot at the end? Love it.

+ Benjamin January #4, Sold Down the River. As I was getting towards the end, I was thinking, "This is so well written but I don't know if I can love it because it's so depressing." And then the ending happened. Eucatastrophe, as Tolkien would say. T

+ Queen of Attolia. Best final line? Best final line.

+ Code Name Verity. I have never in my life cried as much over a story as I cried over that damn book.

+ The Bad and the Beautiful. An entire film about why these people should not do a thing, and the last seconds show why they get pulled back in. SO GOOD.

+ It's a Wonderful Life. Is it sappy? Yes. Do I care? No, I am too busy sobbing. Every. Single. Time.

+ The Untamed. Way to completely undermine the censors without doing anything technically wrong. That smile. We know.

+ KBS's White Christmas. I will say nothing further but the last shot of this is SO GOOD.

I got nothing for Fannish Friday today, so feel free to use the comments to talk about something your fannish about right now or some story you're engaging with and your thoughts about it, even if I know nothing about it at all. Talk fannish to me!

I feel like I have not had room to feel fannish feelings for the last week or two because I've been busy and when I've got downtown, I've just been walking documentaries instead of watching anything narrative and reading nonfiction instead of fiction. Let me live vicariously through someone else's fannishness!

This is probably going to be only relevant to those of us who tend to love genre fandoms of the speculative fiction or historical variety, but I want to talk about mundane AU fanfiction--where you take a historical, fantasy, or scifi fandom and plop the characters down in a contemporary setting. You know--the superheroes are now all working at a coffee shop or the royal court is now a high school, that kind of thing.

I am just curious about how people feel about them and what you feel their relationship to canon is.


When I first get into a fandom, I have ZERO interest in reading these kinds of stories. I am there for the fic that explores the world of the text--missing scenes, post-canon, fix-it fics, and especially canon divergence. I will pass mundane AUs by.

Once I've been in the fandom for a long time and read a lot of fic, I sometimes can enjoy mundane AUs. This happened to me with Infinite (where a mundane AU is literally anything where they're not idols) and with The Untamed fandoms. I read quite a bit of Untamed mundane AUs to this day.

And yet...I don't really feel like they're fanfic in the same way that more canon-observant fics are. There are some that do a marvelous job of adapting all the beats of canon--the character dynamics, the plot points--to a different setting. Those are rare and masterful, and I'm impressed by them. But the rest are just...the characters being written about have the character's faces and some of their personality traits, but that's about it.

Obviously, this is all a spectrum. But there are some that venture so far from canon that I feel like I'm reading an original work of fiction. And I can enjoy some of those, even love them, but I don't love them as fanfiction, I love them as original fiction.

It's interesting to think about how far it has to diverge from canon to not be fanfiction to me. I was reading a Wangxian fic this week that had the same kind of mundane AU plot I'd read before, but this one immediately went to the "this is not fanfiction" realm for me because Wei Wuxian was a lot older than Lan Wangji, and that changed the dynamic between them enough that I didn't even think they were the same characters anymore. I really liked the fic! It was well written and I liked the characters being written about. But I kept going, "This is not actually Wangxian fic."

So for me the spectrum goes:

canon-adherent (either a missing scene or pre- or post-canon fic)
|
|
| A
|
|
pivot moment divergence (where just one or two things change, and we explore what repercussions that has)
|
|
| B
|
|
complete plot divergence (where we're still in the same world and operating by the rules of canon, but the plot is completely different than canon)
|
|
| C
|
|
setting tweaks (say, you add daemons or the characters are suddenly royalty or they have some kind of magical powers they don't have in canon, but it's still loosely recognizable as the same world
|
|
| D
|
|
setting-change AUs (where we're in a completely different setting but you're still trying to translate as much of canon as possible, trying to hit the same beats and get the characterization and relationships just right
|
|
| E
|
|
setting and plot change AUs (where the characters are clearly inspired by their canon personalities, but they're operating under such different conditions that the relationship is becoming tenuous
|
|
| F
|
|
this isn't even fanfic anymore (you've crossed a line--probably a subjective one--wherein the reader is like, "Okay, this essentially has nothing to do with canon other than me picturing the same faces and bodies" but it may be a good enough story to stand on its own)
|
|
| G

As a writer, I stay pretty firmly in the A and B areas about 90% of the time, though sometimes I will venture out into C and every once in a while I will do a full-on E re-write. But even when I completely change the setting, I never make them truly mundane where they're just normal people living contemporary lives; I write, like, a Star Trek AU or something dystopian/post-apocalyptic. I have zero desire to write about any character I love having a normal life if that's not the kind of fandom they originate in. I actually don't understand the appeal of E-G kinds of stories as a writer; I would just write original fic instead. But they are very popular so clearly other people feel differently.

As a reader, I stay with A-B and a little bit of C for most fandoms. It's only in fandoms where I've read a ton of fic that I'm willing to venture further out into the other letters.


What about y'all? What do you prefer to read or write? Or is my spectrum just completely wrong and not the way you think of fic at all?

My continuing question: why why why do people do remakes of good movies? Why don't they do remakes of movies with good premises that didn't quite land?

Not that it's not a good thing when you have two good versions of a film--I, for one, think the original Parent Trap and the remake are both delightful and I am glad they both exist. But in general, it seems like it would be a better use of everyone's time and money to remake a didn't-quite-land film than one that is solid.

So! Today I would like to hear about films or TV shows you think should be remade. Not spinoffs or sequels, but a true remake. (And not something, like, Pride and Prejudice or A Christmas Carol, where various adaptations are part of the point--I'll ask about that another day. Films you think can be remade over and over.)

I'll start: Ella Enchanted. I adore that book so much and the movie is...well, I know some people enjoy it, but I think it's terrible in almost every single way. It doesn't retain anything I love about the book, which I think would make a fantastic movie if done right.


And here's one that I think works pretty well in its original form, but could be better: The Lady Vanishes. It has my favorite suspense premise of all time: While travelling in continental Europe, a rich young playgirl realizes that an elderly lady seems to have disappeared from the train, reads the IMDB summary, but that's understating it. The train has not stopped--the woman cannot possibly have gotten off. And no one else believes our playgirl heroine! She's being gaslit by everyone around her!

I loooove this premise, and there are things I really like about the original Hitchcock film, but I think it gets bogged down by a beginning that's totally unnecessary. This could be the greatest thriller of all time if it was just done right!

Now, I do not think that if Hollywood made a remake of this film right now, it would be any good. But imagine if it had been made in the era of the 90s that gave us The Fugitive and Speed and action/suspense films of that caliber. Or if it were made as a labor of love by some indie team who made sure the script was perfect? I dream of such a film.


And now I want to hear from y'all!

+ INFINITE CONCERT. I mean, it's online streaming, which is very definitely a second-rate concert experience, BUT I am still delighted to get up at 5:00 in the morning to watch them. Literally 10 years after the real-life concert I got to see! Time, man!

+ Today I learned that Richard Siken, poet laureate of fandom circa 2012, writes Supernatural and Sherlock fanfiction. And also that he thinks season 2 of Good Omens is just not very good.

I love every single thing about this. Sometimes I am so glad to be alive in the world.

+ theseastheseatheopensea has introduced me to the Weird Old Book Finder. Me being me, I immediately typed the word "fairies" in the search bar. Allow me to show you the delightful results: