bironic

1. You know you've got the blues when you scoff at your own Mary Sue fantasy story from last year because there's no way those other characters would treat her as special.

2. The blues only present themselves sometimes, though. This weekend was generally lovely, including attending a Hanukkah party, heckling Fifty Shades Darker with thedeadparrot*, and allowing myself to buy a handful of treats from Cardullo's in Harvard Square, one of which I had been eyeing for years. Then I triumphed over past culinary disappointments by making a roast beef that wasn't overdone! Third time's the charm, I guess. That and cooking it at 275° F.

*2a. Still not as bad as the book, and I think better than the Rotten Tomatoes critics' score of 10% gives it credit for as a close adaptation -- there are several funny moments, most of them seemingly intentional! the character arcs are at least somewhat coherent! the, uh, color palettes are pretty! -- but still, yeah, this relationship makes no sense, the acting and/or direction to not-act is terrible, the main characters are allergic to substantive conversation, it's unfortunate to reinforce the idea that a woman can change a man's lifelong behaviors and deepest values by loving him, it's offensive to claim that enjoying BDSM is an easily corrected pathology driven by a bad childhood, and the pacing choices are odd. My genuinely favorite part was that this mainstream movie not only featured a spreader bar but also showed it being ratcheted open and used for pleasure rather than some villainous torture.

Reviews I liked:

• New Republic - Sustained comparison to Working Girl; appreciation of Dakota Johnson's attempts to transcend the material. "Fifty Shades Darker, which fails so many tests of basic storytelling competence, is all the more stunning for its success at a task that most movies don't even bother attempting: depicting a woman's sexual pleasure."
   
• MTV - Made me laugh out loud; similar appreciation of Johnson's acting abilities; agreement that director did indeed intend to be funny. "Dornan's handsome, even if his cold, accusing eyes make you think of a catfish slammed onto a pier."

3. "Feast or famine," the library clerk said as I picked up another armful of books that came in all at once after being on hold for weeks. Having just finished Unbeatable Squirrel Girl vols. 3-4 and Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection, I'm working my way through the 400-page My Favorite Thing is Monsters, while stacked up on the nightstand are Call Me By Your Name, The Book of Dust, Ms. Marvel vol. 1, Unbeatable Squirrel Girl vols. 5-6, Lumberjanes vols. 1-2, and if I can get to it before it's due back, Alif the Unseen. (I needed to read ~7 books this month if I was going to reach my arbitrary goal of a book a week on average for 2017, so I requested a bunch of graphic novels, heh, not realizing how intense Monsters is.)

4. Help can be hard to ask for, even for small, mundane things. I'm grateful to serenadestrong, seascribe, mollyamory and Mr. disgruntled_owl for ferrying me around while my car is in the shop (yes, still) and now also to thedeadparrot for providing laundry access while our in-house washer/dryer is on the fritz. Between those, the autumn fire-alarm malfunction, the elusive kitchen mouse, and the humidifier and nighttime white-noise fan giving up the ghost this week, it feels like everything is breaking. Much like in the world.

I'm grateful to the wider fannish network for chiming in with guidance on yet more SF/F/horror sources for this auction vid, now that we are down to the TV shows that don't really appeal to me. I sent out the final (?!) batch of pleas last weekend and then had to go sit under a blanket because I hate asking people to do work for me. This is going to be the last multifandom vid I make for a while that involves sources I don't know.

5. Speaking of which, I was invited to co-mod a panel next year at Vividcon on multifandom vids, and I said yes? I'm already nervous. I haven't moderated or presented at a con since 2006, and never at Vividcon. Good thing the other co-mods who've signed on so far are non-scary people. Need to ask jetpack_monkey his thoughts, since he modded a panel on the same topic just last year. Maybe take a longitudinal perspective on multifandom vids in general or lessons learned from each vidder's own experiences over time. Not that I know enough to talk about the former, but our possible VCR-vidder co-mod might.

But there is something fitting about finally doing something like this at the last Vividcon.

Went: To cinco and R.'s wedding, and it was so, so lovely, the ceremony, the celebration, the morning-after brunch, seeing them so happy. As well as the concentration of most of my DC-area friends in one place. deelaundry was able to meet for a last-minute lunch and then was kind enough to drive me from the airport to alpheratz's where I was staying. So I got to catch up with them and corbae and then see ellen_fremedon and jrho and holli and sansets and siegeofangels and inlovewithnight and v_greyson and S. whose online handle I can't remember, and ♥.

Watching: Finished Great British Bake-Off, alas. alpheratz & corbae were (re)watching S1 of Hannibal over the weekend so I saw some episodes of that. At first I found it too dramatic to take seriously, but the one with the girl who thought she was dead ended up suitably creepy and suspenseful. Now I guess it's back to S5 of Gilmore Girls.

Listening: Took advantage of the plane rides to finally listen to the Hamilton soundtrack so I can follow what everyone on Twitter (it feels like) is talking about. It's a brilliant artistic achievement that, arguably even more so than 1776, brings a set of American historical figures to life for today's audiences, like translating Shakespeare into modern vernacular. Other people have talked about the importance and the joy of the casting, and the multiple levels on which the use of rap and hip hop works.

Especially as someone who strives to do similar things in a different field for my job, I love what it's doing for students of history, or students who don't know they're into history. What better way to teach kids -- or anyone -- the formalities of dueling than through "Ten Duel Commandments"? What more engaging way to portray what it might really have been like in early government meetings than "Cabinet Battle #1" ("I'll show you where my shoe fits"/"whatever the hell it is you do at Monticello")? How many more people now have heard of Hercules Mulligan?

It's funny, it's dramatic, it's informative, it's catchy, it's smart. It's clearly inspiring people to talk about these characters and look up historical documents, and it's calling out themes related to modern society as well as the universal human condition. That said, I find that my appreciation for the soundtrack is intellectual; I don't share fan friends' emotional attachments to various characters and relationships, which are themselves another indicator of Miranda's success. Maybe it's a function of only having listened once straight through without reading lyrics, not having been able to tell all the characters apart, not having seen any bodies interacting on stage? Maybe it's that I'm not generally a big fan of musicals? Maybe it's just the way I'm going to connect or not connect with this particular text.

I'm glad to have the mp3 files, anyway, and to be able to experience the show in some way when getting tickets is not feasible right now. Some of the tracks I've found particularly fabulous so far are the two above, "Right Hand Man" (boom! and that neigh!), "Wait For It," "Guns and Ships" (Lafayette!), maybe also "Stay Alive" and "Hurricane." Also kind of hilarious the way King George's numbers sound like songs by Mika.

Doing: Fall/winter arts calendar is picking up. We are going to see a live-scored version of Nosferatu tomorrow night at the symphony. Then National Theatre Live's syndicated Hamlet in December, as well as Joanna Newsom with Alela Diane as opener, whee. Hat tip to ldthomps for letting me know about the concert while we were hanging out Tuesday with a visiting ignaz.

Vidding: On hold for just a few more days until Festivids assignments go out. Only two of the things I offered have been requested so far, which is weird, since all but one were for things other people nominated. I guess more people than I would have expected nominate fandoms that they want to offer rather than receive? In many ways this process felt pleasanter before I was on Twitter and knew about the back-end signups tracking page.

Coping: I was feeling pretty down last week and over the weekend because of this health news. synn, deelaundry and alpheratz are good friends who lent sympathetic ears. Still, the emotional fragility persisted, and on Monday (I took a day off to recover from the weekend trip) I started writing a Mary Sue story set in an AU I constructed last year, almost certainly never to see the light of the internet, to work through stuff. And... it seems to be working? I mean, in combination with taking recommended RL actions, but I think it really has helped. Having Mary Sue voice my insecurities and sadnesses while vampire prince charming offers reassurances. Because while I'm hard on myself, apparently I can write someone being nice to Mary Sue!me. Talk about the power of creative writing. ♥

kassrachel asked: Reminisce about your first fandom: what did you love about it?

This is much harder to answer than anticipated, because my entry into fandom occurred stepwise across 15 or 20 years.

There was the first canon I obsessed over and daydreamed about and encountered ancillary storytelling for in the form of tie-in novels (Star Trek), the first for which I found fic online and engaged with my best friend in what I now recognize as RPing (Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles) [and I started writing stories for Trek and the VC around the same time, as a teen], the first for which I inhaled fic and couldn't figure out how to stop (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), the first I wrote meta/acafan stuff about and went to cons for (Harry Potter), and the first fandom I fully participated in on LJ, including writing fic and commenting on other fans' posts (House).

When I asked kassrachel if she could help narrow down the definition of "fandom" in this case, she said: "First canon you fell in love with and wanted to tell stories about? First canon you actively wrote stories about? First canon about which you wrote stories which you shared with other fans?" Fortunately, for all of those, I think I can answer Star Trek.

( About that: )

Okay, I changed the Robot Chicken vid from f---ing machines to mechanical/technological. There's a difference between creative interpretation and compliance to the Bingo Wiki classifications. I don't have a mech/tech square on my second card, so it'll have to be the free square.

Since I still want to do masters/doms/slaves/subs, this means I'll be doing a line that has verbal humiliation again. Speaking of having a kink for verbal humiliation in Mary Sue stories, here is a new one for the occasion.


Fandom: Original characters in the DS9 universe.
Pairings: OFC/OMC (Starfleet cadet/Cardassian soldier)
Rating: Adult
Contains: Noncon, forced prostitution, verbal humiliation, victim-shaming, begging, biting, bondage, reference to ritual suicide.
Word Count: 1,625
A/N: If you've been following my shameless Mary Sue installments, this scene happens after Makor gives up on Karin and sells her into a brothel (which hasn't been posted yet). If you haven't, all you need to know is there is a Starfleet cadet who has been abducted and sold into a Cardassian brothel.

( 'Humans,' he says. 'Such a proud race. Such a proud little girl. What are you so proud of? You are nothing but a slave of the basest kind.' )

l_eremita made me do it.

Okay, no, she had nothing to do with this other than engaging me in a conversation about Mary Sues tonight. Together with a couple of neat comments I got yesterday on the earlier stuff with the Cardassian, I am again posting old self-indulgent noncon against my better judgment. This time the connection to the Trekverse is even more tenuous, or else I'd think about tying it in to a Kink Bingo square. Anyway—WARNING for noncon/rape. OFC/OMCs, 2,000 words. Same disclaimer applies as before.

Also. Um. Dear new Vividcon friends and old non-Vividcon friends: Once in a while, I post Mary Sue noncon. Please don't judge me.


( 'The Federation's intentions are of no concern to us. You have acted against the Ra'ani and you will pay the consequences.' )

I just wrote this whole thing about how I'm feeling bad about myself today &c &c, but I hate writing those posts almost as much as I hate reading those posts, so instead let's talk about cons.

( A poll! Which actually is only a little bit about cons. )

For those who want to know, this came before what I just posted, though it takes place afterwards. I wrote it last month, and for a while I thought the whole thing would actually stay post-trauma. Obviously the line about the toy ended up spawning its own story and proved me wrong. It's also much more typical of what I write on my own in the sense that it's fragmented and doesn't conclude. Anyway, if you're interested, here's what started this branch of the Karin 'verse.

Characters/Fandom: Karin, Bashir, Odo; implied Karin/Makor (Deep Space Nine) – see author's notes here
Word Count: 3,100
Rating/Warning: PG-13 for implications and discussions of past sexual assault
Note: White space is where scenes skip. Be forewarned that the piece just falls off a cliff at the "end" as well, where I stopped writing when something else shiny caught my attention. And yes, still melodramatic and probably not at all representative of real debriefings or post-traumatic conversations. Other than that—enjoy?

( 'It was like I forgot everything I learned at the Academy. I didn't fight well, I didn't fight hard enough, it was like I never learned combat training at all. I panicked. I didn't want him to hurt me.' )

Or not. I was going to make this a poll with radio buttons—"Which of the following embarrassing sentences did bironic not write once upon a time"—but you know what? I had too much fun picking out passages. So: All of the following come from stories I wrote between the ages of about 13 and 18. Hope you enjoy.

Warning for indirect references to noncon. Also bad writing.

( Vampire Chronicles, Star Trek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Stargate movie and original fic. Oh, my darling Mary Sues, angst and artsy run-on sentences. )

(I wish I had my other laptop with me. There's a lot more on there.)


The moral: Although it may happen on what feels like a geologic timescale, our writing does change and improve as the years go by.

---

Despite the above, I do want to say that I still read my old writing, that most of it is better than these excerpts suggest, and that every single story in those archives on my computer still has something I love—something that's true to me and/or to the characters, something that still moves me after all these years, after all the growing I've done. There's something much more personal in these stories than in a lot of my posted fanfiction, because they were written at a time when I didn't have an audience; they were for me (and very rarely for very close friends, with one big exception), and I wrote about what I wanted to, no matter how angsty or depraved or silly or clichéd or egotistical or anything. It didn't matter if the girl was an idealized stand-in for myself. Most of the time that was the point; or I realized what I'd done halfway through the writing process, or even years later. The situations were exploratory, reflective, deeply personal, sometimes scary, sometimes thrilling, always honest. It didn't matter if the story never got finished, once I'd written the part(s) I wanted to. It didn't matter if the story consisted of multiple disjointed scenes that contradicted one another. It didn't matter if I repeated themes from one story/universe to another.

There's a reason I reread these stories far more than I reread my posted fic, even though it's the latter that I'm more proud of.

Fanfic—or more accurately, posted fanfic, fanfic on LJ—is another sort of creature for me. These are complete stories, with a beginning and middle and end; Mary Sue-free; emotionally subdued or understated; mundane rather than melodramatic; short; written in the third person; very carefully constructed; often gen or slash rather than het (would any of you have guessed that the majority of what I used to write, and still sometimes write when I revive the desire to write something just for myself, is kinky Mary Sue het noncon?). These have to have a point to make about the characters. They have to be good. They're going to be seen by other people, and I'll be judged by them. If they're going to be about me and/or my desires, they have to be constructed in a way that perfectly suits the canon characters. Goes my thinking.

This was what I was getting at the other week when I mentioned that my creativity has been stifled for a few years in part because of audience problems, whether real or imagined. What I meant was this: When I try to write fanfic for posting now, all the LJ fandom people and their stories and comments are in my head with me. This causes two problems: one, when I sit down to write a story, it's hard to tune out the background noise of other people's ideas and characterizations and find my own; and two, I'm thinking about what people's reactions to the writing might be when I finish and post, which makes me nervous about phrasing and originality and maturity and—just about everything, and can shut me down before I've gotten very far, or as I get near the end. It affects the kind of stories I write, too. PWPs tend to die ugly unfinished deaths, if they even reach birth. I've become self-conscious about posting stories whose main point is sex, as if I'll be respected less for it. (Which is stupid; I know this; I read plenty of PWPs and love them and their authors; but there it is.) And it has affected my stories-for-myself writing. People are still with me in my head when I open up those old files or a new document, and when I do manage to clear them away, it's still hard not to think things like, "Well, if I like this when it's done, maybe I can post it," which brings back the audience-reception nerves. I've never gone so long without writing my own stuff as I have since joining the LJ community. Overall, LJ has been an unquestionably positive influence—for one thing, my writing has improved in many ways, and I don't think anyone wants to write snippets of Mary Sue stories for their entire lives—but I've also lost what used to be my greatest outlet. One of the things I want to get back to this year, as school decimates my online time and pushes me back into myself while upping the stress levels that once led to writing, is the for-my-eyes-only stuff. Maybe relearning how to do that will rekindle the fic-to-be-posted "muse"; maybe it won't; but I would like to get back in touch with that part of myself that has lain dormant for so many years.