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This year's Chocolate Box assignment was very exciting for me, because the fandom I matched on was an adorable four minute long music video about a James Bond-like spy and his nemesis. And I'd never written for a canon so tiny before, or one without dialogue or even names for the main characters!

In some ways, it was very freeing, because the canon was incredibly easy to review as many times as I needed to (and somehow I never did get tired of it); in other ways, it was a fascinating challenge, because I needed to fill in whole areas of the story space that most other canons would have provided for me, making it almost like a midway point between the kind of fanfic I'm used to and original fiction. It was both nerve-wracking and incredibly fun to work on!

Plus, I had the supreme pleasure of joining the fandom trend of incorporating the song's lyrics into story titles, bit by bit.

Title: And Dip Into When We Need
Fandom: Genghis Khan - Miike Snow (music video)
Pairing: Gold Nose Villain/Secret Agent
Rating: Teen
Contains: Action, combat, heists, sinister plots, accidental telepathy, angst, enemies to lovers, and a happy ending.
Word count: 2103
Summary: It was all in a day's work, really -- until it wasn't.

( It was all in a day's work, really. The fight in the lobby, the sniper in the stairwell, the race to rewire the elevator followed immediately by assassins dropping in through the ceiling as it ascended to the roof. )

And I got two delightful and gorgeous gifts this year! Once again, they make a really delightful contrast of flavors:

Honestly, those humans... is 1k of Imperial Radch gen, with Athoek Station and Mercy of Kalr chatting about the foibles of their residents and crew. It's so adorable, and there are some really delicious moments of Radchaai and AI sensibility, as well as hints about the direction of the Ro2S after the end of the trilogy and some lovely little mentions of several characters we've come to know and love. It's so sweet!

Hunting Strategy, meanwhile, is 1k of smoking hot Person of Interest f/f smut starring Control and Schiffman. It's anything but sweet, a short sharp shock of viscerally intense emotional edgeplay. If you don't remember Schiffman, you might like to admire this excellent gifset the author linked to refresh your memory of her awesomeness, but basically what you need to know is that she's Control's loyal right hand woman. And she's amazing.

I am honestly so lucky when it comes to this exchange. ♥ ♥ ♥

READ

Some more of The Fifth Season, until The Good Place kicked me in the tender bits and I reverted to reading fanfic until my brain recovered. Fortunately, it's all been really good fanfic!

Something You Somehow Haven't to Deserve by dsudis deserves ( content warnings ) It's 10k of Eskel from The Witcher, mainly -- with some Geralt/Eskel too, but I wouldn't really call it a primarily shippy piece. It was a good fic for me to find this week.

The latest installment of the Xenoethnography series by Dasha_mte is as wonderful as ever -- it's this amazing epic series in which Optimus Prime seeks an anthropologist to help bridge the culture gap between Autobots and humans, and I love it to bits. It also deals with some heavy subjects, like war and death and a variety of social ills, but honestly, I find it a joy to read.

Most recently, Winter in London by Waid, which I happened on while skimming through old entries of violsva's, is a beautiful 45k ( content warning ) fic set among the original Sherlock Holmes stories, written alternately from Watson's and Holmes' points of view. It hits so many of the favorite tropes I mentioned recently -- noncon, hurt/comfort, mutual pining -- but it's also just a gorgeous character study of two people who have grown very close but are still learning more about each other.

WATCHED

( Doctor Who through episode 12x03, "Orphan 55". )

( The Good Place episode 4x13, "Whenever You're Ready". )

Oh, this is a fun one!

( Noncon )

( Hurt/comfort )

( Sad robots/werewolves/otherwise not-quite-humans )

( Mutual pining )

( Good consent )

( Found family, but like, literally )

( Online relationships )

READ

i think you're so good (i'm nothing like you) by MulaSaWala for the poi_fanworks big bang book club. Both the fic and the book club discussion were super fun! I do think I appreciated the fic more than I would have if I hadn't read its prequel, but this is also the installment in which Reese (aka my terrible feelingsful fave) enters the Everyone Lives AU, so I can see good sides to starting here too!

( Four shorter fanfics... )

( Three short stories recced by pink_ink! )

Dragon Pearl by Yoon Ha Lee is a middle grade book about a young fox shapeshifter whose older brother has gone mysteriously missing from the Space Forces. Unsurprisingly, it's very different from the Machineries of Empire trilogy, but I'm liking the worldbuilding so far!

The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin, also recced by pink_ink, is not for the faint of heart, but is extremely good at what it's doing. In a world where cataclysmic earthquakes and volcanoes have destroyed civilization after civilization and no one knows when the next might come, where people with the rare ability to control the earth are either killed by anyone who discovers them or carefully trained and selectively bred (which is exactly as awful as it sounds)... well, a lot of stuff is happening, and I'm still in the process of figuring a lot of it out. But it's all deeply compelling, and I can't wait to keep reading and find out what happens next!

Also worth mentioning is this insightful if pessimistic twitter thread by Courtney Milan on the poisoning of the concept of compromise in US politics.

WATCHED

Jupiter Ascending, which is exactly as everyone in fandom described it. The CGI is gorgeous! The incest vibes are off the charts! I'm not sure I really understood anything that happened at any point! And I especially don't understand why they asked Channing Tatum to grow that unfortunate facial hair. But that last scene was so pretty!

( Stumptown 1x11 and 1x12, "The Past and the Furious" and "Dirty Dexy Money". )

( Doctor Who through episode 11x08, "The Witchfinders". )

I've also watched the entire first Netflix season of Astronomy Club, ( which is a fantastic comedy sketch show threaded through with social awareness. )

The Good Place 4x12, "Patty", unhappily discussed here.

But in more cheerful The Good Place news, I also watched and adored All Star by maristu, which is the Jason vid I never even knew I needed. ⭐ ♥ 🐆

It turns out that going a week without adequate sleep really makes it hard for me to keep up with this challenge, go figure! But I think I'm finally starting to catch up again, so here goes.

I had to think a lot about what canon or canons I wanted to rec for this challenge. There are so many shows I love! amovingtarget even suggested that I could use this post to rec a canon I haven't seen yet to myself, and for that I know exactly what I'd pick: The Great British Bake Off, which from everything I hear is really sweet and soothing and something I definitely need to try.

But finally I realized what I need to rec here, and it's the romance novels of Courtney Milan!

She's someone whose books I'd seen recced for ages, and I even wanted to give them a try once I saw someone talking about the one with a shy black mathematician being wooed by an Irish pro-suffragette satire columnist, but although there have been romance novels that I've admired and enjoyed, it's never been my genre as much as science fiction and fantasy and fanfic all are, so I guess it was easy to leave her work on my to be read list.

Then one day I learned that Courtney Milan is the pen name of Heidi Bond, whose witty and insightful blog I'd followed wayyy back in the day when she was a law student. And once I knew that, I absolutely had to try her work -- more than ten years after her blog's deletion, I still remembered it fondly, so obviously I had to read her published writing! And luckily enough for me, the prequel novella to her Brothers Sinister series was (and is) available as a free sample, so I was quickly able to discover that her published fiction is really, really good.

Mind you, she isn't an entirely traditional romance author. As she says about her decision to self-publish in her FAQ:

In case you’re wondering, the push I was getting from my traditional publishers was that the books I was writing for them were already too quirky.

So do I think I would have been able to write the Brothers Sinister as I did? No, hell no. What would have changed?

Everything. I mean, completely everything. The notes on everything would have come back as “NEEDS MOAR JERK.”

So if she doesn't write alpha assholes, what does she write?

So many fantastic things! She writes about men who are virgins and unmarried women of breeding who aren't; about peers and the sons of coal miners; about scientists and journalists and activists in spades -- and this is just in her Victorian era Brothers Sinister series, which is about not a family of sinister reputation, but just about a handful of nerds who think it's funny that they're all left-handed. She writes about bad sex and great sex; about contraception and past sexual assault; about blood family, and found family, and the times when the two overlap. She also writes fantastic secondary romances I sometimes love even more than the primary ones -- and one of them is sapphic!

I think my personal avorite of the Brothers Sinister series is number three, The Countess Conspiracy, but all of them have characters and moments I love. And so far I've only read one of the four series her website lists -- I think next I need to try the Cyclone Series, which is contemporary and looks super intriguing.

So yeah -- if you're into het romance that's refreshingly low on toxic masculinity, consider giving Courtney Milan's writing a look!

READ

Some more of Reparations by Saras_Girl. The plot is thickening and feelings have definitely been caught!

I have also, in the interests of taking part in POI book club next week, happily devoured learning to fall (don't try this at home) by MulaSaWala, which is the shorter prequel to this month's story. It's a delightful pre-series what-if where Nathan and Grace fall in love, and I'm totally looking forward to reading the sequel!

I also finished Gideon the Ninth.

If this novel were a fic on the AO3, I would expect to see it tagged with ( many content warnings. ) It's also incredibly vivid, gripping, and often hilarious when it isn't breaking your heart. It reminds me a little of Tanith Lee, except with even more necromancy and lesbians.

( I will now proceed to discuss every twist in the novel. )

WATCHED

( Doctor Who through episode 11x03, "The Ghost Monument". )

( The Good Place episode 4x11, "Mondays, Am I Right?". )

What do I wish existed in fandom or that I could get my metaphorical hands on? Let's see...

• I'd love to find more reaction posts or thinky meta for shows I'm watching! So I guess right now, that would be Stumptown, The Good Place, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and maybe Fleabag. (And Sym-Bionic Titan, although that's a decade old...)
• I'd also love more meta on pretty much any topic. I feel like I used to follow a lot of blogs talking about things like gender, kink, writing, psychology, politics... And of course I still see posts like that, but I feel like a lot of the discussion has moved to twitter, where it's harder for me to follow, so I'm always looking for more.
• Longfic recs in fandoms I read in, or even in fandoms I haven't! I don't mind jumping into the deep end for a story that has rich characterization, cool worldbuilding, and/or soothing angst.
• Recs for original short stories available online, especially if they're SF or fantasy. I always forget how much I like getting tastes of new characters and worlds until I click on a story and remember again. #OwnVoices a plus!
• Fanfic with inventive new premises, like rionaleonhart's awesome FFXV fic Becoming Strangers, in which Ignis wakes up to find that none of the other bros remember who he is. That's not an established trope, as far as I can tell, but once I read it, I was like, damn, why is it not??
• Active kink memes for fandoms I'd like to write for! meme_of_interest is still responsible for the only smut I've ever posted, as well as a couple of gen ficlets (and a lot of WIPs). I'd love to get to experience that kind of energy again.
• And of course, I'd be incredibly delighted by any fanworks inspired in any way by my own. I'm still tickled that one of them was translated into Russian, and that was years ago. ♥

Since I've seen other people mentioning community norms they'd like to see for this challenge... I guess I'd also wish for fans who are privileged in some way, especially fans who are also in the majority, to do a better job of listening to people who don't share that privilege. If cis feminists would listen to trans women, for example, or if white fans like myself did a better job of listening to fans of color, I think we'd all be the better for it.

I'm not usually much for setting explicit goals, a fact which I think causes some sorrow to my more organized friends and family members. But there are a few things I'm hoping to work towards this year!

( Chocolate Box )

( Driving lessons o_o )

( Cleaning up )

( More and better connection )

( Moar muscles, moar Strong )

And you know, this entry actually felt a lot better to write than I was expecting, so points to snowflake_challenge once again. ♥