Links to all fanfiction I've written in various fandoms. That I'm admitting to.

( Alias )


( Angel the Series )


( Babylon 5 )

( Battlestar Galactica )


( Buffy the Vampire Slayer )


( Citizen Kane )

( Doctor Who )

( Farscape )


( Earth: Final Conflict )

( Heroes )

( Highlander: The Series )

( Historical Fiction )

( Lost )

( Merlin )

( Mythology )


( Rome )

( Star Trek: Deep Space Nine )

( Star Trek: The Next Generation )

( Star Wars )

( The Beatles )


( Torchwood )

( X-Men )

( The West Wing )


( Crossovers )

This was the opening film of the Berlin film festival which has just started here in Germany. It's based on a novel which I haven't read, so I can only talk about the film on its own merits. I found it worth watching, sometimes moving, and managing a very tricky balance indeed. The main character is Sidonie Laborde (played by Léa Seydoux), one of the readers (or the lectrice) of Marie Antoinette (Diane Krüger), and the time frame is only a few days in July 1789, around the outbreak of the French Revolution.

One of the big accomplishments is that the film manages to remain in Versailles - i.e. we don't get to "meet" the revolutionaries - and yet doesn't sentimentalize the Royals or the French nobility. Part of this is due to the fact that we see them from the servant's pov, and they are far from uniformly devoted (nor are the courtiers). Still, given that Sidonie's love for Marie Antoinette is a driving force of the film, you'd think there would still be some rose-coloured glasses thing going on, but no. This film's Marie Antoinette captures both the frivolty and the vulnerability; the narrative neither condemms nor glorifies her and gives her an elusive quality, with the moments of intimacy Sidonie thinks she gets rare and the queen the equivalent of a modern star, the object of passion and crushes (as well as loathing), but any sense of closeness is a construct, an illusion. Mind you: closeness with Sidonie. The other plot-driving force is Marie Antoinette's passion for her favourite Gabrielle de Polignac. (Historical footnote: the Princesse de Lambarde and then the Duchesse de Polignac were Marie Antoinette's closest friends, soundly hated by the populace at large - especially Gabrille de Polignac, due to her family thriving to no end from the Royal favouritism - and accused of having lesbian affairs with the queen. Because Marie Antoinette's enemies were the ones who said it, her defendants dismissed it as slander. Though as rozk observed, that doesn't mean it wasn't true; we'll never know one way or the other.) I would say that makes it a triangle between three women, but one of the film's emotional punches is that Antoinette and Gabrielle aren't conscious of Sidonie as a woman in her own right and capable of feelings other than "devoted servant".

Which helps with the sentimentality avoidance. We're always in Sidonie's pov, and because we see her interact with servants and minor courtiers alike she comes across as a person not just defined by her pining for the queen. So the big climax of the film ( is a spoilery emotional turnaround for everyone involved. )

The film is also good sketching various characters and relationships; Sidonie's friends among the servants - and incidentally, the film is great in presenting more of the servants' quarters of Versailles than I've ever seen before while also showcasing the big ornamental rooms - , the courtiers like the old Marquis who used to live for the two times a week he saw the king in the gallery and those who are aware enough of the approaching storm to leave while they still can, Madame Bertin the queen's dressmaker and Madame Compon, Sidonie's superior all come across vividly without confusing the viewer. That a film whose main relationships, platonic and otherwise, are all among women passes the Bechdel test goes without saying. All in all a good period piece, not a must but a watch it if you can.

This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/784399.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.

At last, thanks to the it being the second of June, which means a new month with renewed bandwidth, and the last of my Italian pictorial journey. amenirdis, I thought of you and certain historic acquaintances of ours quite often!

( See Napoli and live )

This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/784142.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.

This week I'm on the road again, but in the German North and East, not Italy, and the weather is somewhat on the stormy side. However, there has been the occasional non rainy and even sunny moment, plus all the timber and red brick stone give the northern city their own stern beauty. Have a quick look at Neubrandenburg and Salzwedel!



( Read more... )

This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/784065.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.

The great thing about a big fandom like the Avengers is that so much gets written, which means that once you filtered out the kind of stories you don't care for, there are still more than enough left to filll your particular fannish tastes.  Of course, the flipside of this is that the sheer amount of tales means it's hard work to filter (while in small fandoms you're lucky if four or so stories per year to your liking get written) among the tidal wave of writing. Which is why I find rec posts helpful, and why I'm writing them now and then. :)

In my case, digging as I do the ensembleness and Natasha, it's not hard to figure out what will make me happy:

Anatomy for children: Natasha starts to adjust to her new not-quite-friends. Her pov on everyone sounds completely plausible.

walk a while beside you: Five observations Bruce has about living with Natasha in Stark Tower with the rest of the Avengers. This, conversely, is Bruce's pov on Natasha and the way she interacts with everyone.

Soft Skills: The team tries to bring Steve Rogers into the 21st Century. It mostly works. One of the things I really appreciate about the story is that it presents Steve not as some naive manchild and remembers the 1940s weren't the stone age.  It's delightful, and the humor and banter isn't one note. 

This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/783607.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.

Courtesy of angevin2, the (awesome) trailer for the latest filmed Shakespearean histories of which I had posted a clip earlier this week. It's easier to list the few awesome actors who aren't in it than the many who are!




Of course, the ultimate filmed version of the histories has already been done, by my man Orson Welles, as Chimes at Midnight, but he'd be the last to object to new attempts. Have a clip from Chimes at Midnight anyway, Falstaff's acerbic speech about honour:




And also, here's likeadeuce with some terrific headcanon about Falstaff, as the result of a meme, which now I must reciprocate:

1. Pick a pairing or a character
2. Ask me my particular head!canon regarding something about them
3. Post to your journal to share your own head!canon!

This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/783164.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.

I meant to do this before going to Italy, but didn't find the time:

5 instances of theories getting Jossed (fanon or common fanfiction tropes being invalidated by new canon), Kripked (fanon or common fanfiction tropes being confirmed by new canon), or some combination of the two.

1.) Jossed: Snape Manor (Harry Potter). Which I use as a shorthand for the kind of background fanon gifted Severus Snape with pre-Half Blood Prince. Actually, the Jossing already started, if you like, with Order of the Phoenix, because the kind of House of Usher background Sirius Black has there - Gothic rotting mansion, crazy mother, near crazy servant, sibling with mysterious fate - is exactly the type of thing Snape had been given in fanfic a lot, and after this book, it was unlikely Snape would have the exact same thing in canon. Still, Snape Manor, home of Severus, persisted in showing up (not least so, say, Hermione/Harry/Draco/Whichever-student-the-author-ships-with-Snape in War-with-Voldemort fics could find refuge in it)... until it became canon that good old Severus' father had been a Muggle, that there was no manor, and he lived instead in an entirely normal looking house in an industrial northern town. I still get a kick out of this, I must admit.

2.) Jossed: Angelus as Spike's sire/Darla's status in Angelus' life. (BTVS and Angel.) Literally Jossed, what with both being Joss Whedon shows. I once wrote an entire post about why I loved the Fanged Four dynamics as established by AtS and the later BTVS seasons much more than the fanon that had been written before, so check it out. Hooray for vampire matriarchs!

3.) Kripked: Time Lords can change gender and skin colour when regenerating (Doctor Who and spin-offs). Our former Welsh overlord confirmed the later in the Sarah Jane Adventures episode where Eleven shows up and gets quizzed by Clyde on the subject, and our current Scottish overlord allowed Neil Gaiman to confirm the former in my favourite s6 of New Who episode, The Doctor's Wife, when Eleven reminisces about the Corsair.

4.) Jossed: Avon may display a lot of cynicism, but he wouldn't really save his life at the expense of his friends. (Blake's 7.) Of course I came to the show many years later, but fanzines were still sold, and thus I read a great many stories, all written pre-Orbit, in which Avon is in an emergency situation with Vila or Blake and could save his life at their expense, but comes through for them. Well, nothing happened in canon to jettison the Blake assumption, but alas, poor Vila. I must admit my perverse fondness for Orbit results not a little from an overdose of cynics-with-a-heart-of-gold/noble-jerk type of characters who while being interestingly ambiguous in canon were promptly whitewashed into never ever displaying a negative trait in fanon, being meanly judged and misunderstood and what not, etc. And Orbit certainly is a slap in the face in that regard. (Mind you, I've still read a lot of Orbit denial/apology fic in which Avon absolutely knew where Vila was hiding and didn't really mean to space him, but that's fandom for you.)

5.) Kripked/Jossed: Morgana is Uther's daughter and Arthur's half-sister. (Merlin). On a Doylist level, it's somewhat obvious that in the earliest episodes the show's makers hadn't yet intended to have Morgana as Arthur's sister, which she is in most versions of the myth, but in the later s1 episodes, we've arrived at a siblingesque dynamic between Arthur and Morgana anyway, and while there was Morgana/Uther shipping due to their chemistry, as of s2 there was also speculation as to whether or not there was a biological connection. zahrawithaz, for example, argued repeatedly for Morgana as Uther's biological daughter, while I was holding out for Morgause as Ygraine's secret love child with Gorlois. S3 then settled the bastardy question, which retrospectively brings back a bit of an incestious slant on very early s1 where originally none had been intended, but which is, err, sort of traditional. Anyway. I'm not sure whether to call it Kripked or Jossed, but whatever it was, it happened and works for me.

This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/783081.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.

Inspired by my recent re-reading of the novel, here are some excellent fanfics set in the book's universe. (Which, btw, due to its very concept is infinitelely cross-overable.) Some I knew of old, and some I found when checking on the AO3 section yesterday.


Confidence Men : Life, liberty, and the art of the two-man con. Mr. Wednesday and Low-Key Lyesmith through the years. Did I mention these two are my favourite incarnations of Odin and Loki?

Every ending is a new beginning: Eighteen ficlets, one for each charm Wednesday knows.

Forever Lovely Now: Laura and Shadow and their post-mortem, issues-and-tenderness ridden marriage.

Two ships passing In which Shadow has a drink with the (former) goddess of the Underworld. I love this version of Persephone.

do zla boga: Czernobog and the Zoryas arrive in the New World. Gods aren't noted for their trustworthiness.

This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/782829.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.

I must admit I'm starting to get quite anticipatory for Prometheus. At first I was spectical, because our man Ridley is a hit and miss kind of director: meaning that for every Blade Runner and Thelma and Louise, there's a G.I. Jane and Kingdom of Heaven. He always delivers on the visuals, and I happen to prefer Alien over James Cameron's Aliens, but as I said: it's a gamble. Though the trailer was admittedly very tasty. Then I read that Damon Lindelof wrote the script, and now I'm really intrigued. Speaking as someone who watched Lost all the way and for all the ups and downs never failed to find it interesting. (Well, except for the episode about the origin of Jack's tattoo in season 3.) (Sidenote: I always find it irritating when Lost is seen as J.J. Abrams' baby, because as far as I can tell, Abrams never had anything to do with it anymore after setting up the pilot and some initial few things, whereas Lindelof was the showrunner through out, so both credit and blame should be laid at his doorstep.) And Lindelof certainly can write mythic, mysterious and deliver interesting ensembles. As long as there's no love triangle involved, and he gets to play to his strengths (especially with ambiguous characters and ones that prove nice and kind by no means equal dull - hello, Hurley!

And speaking of the joys and terrors of anticipation, does anyone know whether there are any news on the proposed American Gods tv series? Because that will be to me what Game of Thrones is to, well, GoT fans. I recently reread the book, and decided that of Gaiman's non-comicbook writings, tv episodes excluded, I still love this novel best. The Graveyard Book immediately after, but American Gods first among the novels. Back in the day I came to it straight from Sandman, and I used to wonder whether that was the reason, because there are obvious world building similarities - the premise that all gods of every religion exist, came into being because of the faith of various people and fade away as the belief in them fades so they have to take up a variety of crumy (or not so crummy) jobs to still access emotions and survive, plus Gaiman's interpretation of various deities in Sandman (primarily Odin and Loki, but also Bastet on the Egyptian side) is very similar-down-to-identical to the one he gives in American Gods. And let me tell you, these are by far my favourite interpretations of said Norse deities, especially of Odin. (Back when I started to read Marvel comics, I felt terribly let down, which was fortunate because by the time Thor the film came along I had learned to completely dissassociate the Marvel characters from the myth characters and for the most part, certain issues aside, could enjoy the Marvel versions on their own merits without expecting them to be like the beings of Norse myths.) Mr. Wednesday is such a marvellous character/interpretation of Odin, manipulative, ambigous-to-downright-villainous and yet incredibly compelling, and when Shadow at the end after having figured out Wednesday's scheme(s) and what Wednesday did still admits he misses him, without the narrative excusing Wednesday, it captures the effect on this particular reader precisely.

But ten years later, and so many other books later, American Gods still hasn't dated for me. ( Lots of book spoilers follow. )

This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/782457.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.

Travelling with various air planes and trains through Italy left me with time to read Lindsey Davis' newest novel, Master and God. Now Lindsey Davis is most famous for her series of Roman mysteries centered around one Marcus Didius Falco, but she also writes non-Falco historical novels, of which this, as far as I know, is the third. The first one, The Course of Honour, about Caenis, the slavegirl-going-freedwoman who starts out working for Antonia and ends up as Vespasian's life long lover, I enjoyed but fund it oddly dry for what is definitely an interesting subject. The second one, Rebels and Traitors, set during the English Civil War I loved until the last 40 pages or so, which was when the story took a turn that felt like an incredibly let down and very bizarre. But until then, it was everything I had hoped the tv series The Devil's Whore would be and wasn't, the story of an interesting determined woman making her way between parties during the Civil War, with characters from both sides written more dimensionally and sympathetically. Now, with Master and God she is back in the Rome of the Flavians again. If you know your history, this is what Domitian called himself - dominus et deus - and the book covers his reign, though the main characters are two more or less invented ones, Gaius Vinius Clodianus (spending most of the book as a Pretorian) and Flavia Lucilla (hairdresser and freedwoman of the Flavians). They're the archetypical Davis pairing of wise-cracking guy and no-nonsense, unimpressed woman, and this time around, the result is enjoyable throughout the novel, so I don't always buy the obstacles Davis throws in their path.

Now, the the third volume of what is one of my all time favourite trilogy of historical novels by Lion Feuchtwanger also deals with the reign of Domitian, and is a vivid and chilling depiction of a dictatorship written during the Third Reich which nonetheless manages to avoid making Domitian into a Hitler avatar (which means he's a far better drawn character than Feuchtwanger's deliberate Hitler avatar in another novel he wrote at the same time, The False Nero), so my standard of writing for this era was pretty high. Nonetheless, Lindsey Davis managed to convincingly present her own version. Domitian, like Caligula, Nero or Caracalla, became a byword for the mad, bad and dangerous to know type of emperor, though not having the obvious madness of Caligula or the theatricalness of Nero (which reminds me: in Naples they show up the remains of the theatre where Nero performed - th roughout an earthquake, no less, where he insisted the audience was to stay in order not to miss his performance), he doesn't get nearly as much fictional treatment. What surprised me is that Davis is subtle about him. As opposed to his appearance in her Falco novels, where he is already a villain during the reign of his father, her take on Domitian here is somewhat different; he starts out as a mixture of good and bad, and actually quite competent as an emperor, but the combination of paranoia, resentments from days past and absolute power with no more checks and balances combine to turn him and the Rome he rules more and more into a nightmare. Because these days inevitably I have the cinematic Marvelverse on the brain, it hit me that Davis' Domitian is in many ways Loki without the fannish woobie glasses, if, you know, Loki were to actually succeed/remain successful, aka how his uncontested rulership would turn out. Older brother (Titus) with military success, beloved by many, much closer to their father, father preferring same, while self is looked at as a sly schemer by social circle? Check. Traumatic event changing world view? (Domitian nearly gets roasted while his uncle is torn apart by the mob during the year of the four emperors.) Check. Short taste of rulership until Dad and Older Brother take it away again? (After Vespasian, still campaigning with Titus in Judea, is voted Emperor, 18 years old Domitian got to represent him in Rome until Vespasian was back in Italy.) And the narrative as well as Gaius Vinius isn't without sympathy for Domitian on that score, but it at no point excuses him for what he does therafter, and when Lucilla, who is an immensely adaptable survivor, finally says "whatever it takes, he has to be stopped", you're more than with her.

If I have one complaint, it's that Davis' auctorial voice, which is that of an Olympian, all-knowing narrator who occasionally points out that, for example, governor Trajan is going to end up as an emperor himself, is a bit of an odd choice, not least because such interjections are few and far; had she chosen to stick to the usual third person personal narrative, with no very occasional comments, it would have been just as effective. All in all: a good novel, and so far her best non-Falco one.


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Speaking of avatars, history, fictionalisations of same and Marvelverse cross connections, Shakespeare's histories have been filmed yet again, and here's Tom Hiddleston as Hal and Jeremy Irons as Henry IV from Henry IV, Part I. Colour me amused that the clip they choose is Hal getting chewed out by his father, not, say, any of the many other scenes where Hal is being in control and having a go at Falstaff. Maybe I'm paranoid (though as Domitian would say, it's not paranoia if they're really after you), but imo the choice reflects the popularity of Hiddleston's most successful role. Anyway, here they are:



Incidentally, angevin2 will appreciate that the way with which Irons!Henry IV rants about the late cousin Richard's behaviour allows for all sorts of subtext.


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Lastly, some links:


The Skins: a great multifandom vid about the various doppelgangers, clones and other selves haunting sci fi and fantasy. Creepy fun.


Avengers:

To shawarma or not to shawarma : Natasha’s still getting used to rubbing shoulders with living legends. One of the terrific results of The Avengers fandom post-movie release is that the film makes any combination of characters interacting interesting, and the resulting fanfic actually reflects that. Here, we get the combination of Natasha and Steve Rogers, with the rest of the ensemble making strong appearances as well.

This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/782172.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.