teach me the art of war

AKA a totally unthemed post this evening, because all my plans for book reviews, album reviews, new fic, life updates etc. keep getting dragged under by a rolling tide of Fuck That I Don't Have The Energy. I swear I am actually reading, listening, writing and living in healthy measure - just don't ask me to talk about it, apparently.

fiachairecht recced the album BLACKSHAPE by BLACKSHAPE - self-styled post-mathcore but with strong blackened cosmic drone vibes (to shamelessly steal kimara's description, which is dead accurate imo). Here's my favourite track, with accompanying deeply unsettling music video. Try listening to it while thinking of your starcrossed enemy OTP who can't stop yearning for each other and also can't stop trying to destroy each other it's Reylo, I'm talking about Reylo.



My sister is obsessed with a game called Pathologic 2, and her descriptions of it are tormenting me: it sounds simultaneously so extremely my jam and so extremely outside my cope limits. This video review has 100% sold me on the aesthetics, the plot and the theoretical brilliance of the game mechanics - basically, you're a plague doctor in the world's creepiest city who's trying to help the rapidly dying populace without any of the perks, plot armour or convenient do-overs that most video game protagonists take completely for granted - but the thought of actually sitting down to play something that hard and that grim makes me want to shrivel up. Like, that's my entire stress allowance blown for the whole year, right there. Maybe in some far distant future where life is magically easy and I have ample emotional resources to spare, I'll be able to actually play it. For now I guess I'll just keep making heart eyes at the reviews and meta-essays my sister sends me.

This New Yorker article about the Titan made ... um, interesting reading? If you find senseless loss of life due to farcically stupid, cartoonishly evil rich guy bullshit interesting. I'm a keen enough student of humanity from its less flattering angles, but there's a certain level of sheer delusional narcissism that I find it almost impossible to wrap my head around. He was told it was going to end in tragedy! By everyone! Expert after expert took the time to patiently explain to him that his submersible was definitely 100% unavoidably doomed to implode, and he brushed them all off because he seriously thought his 'I'm an Innovator(TM), I'm special, I break the rules' shtick was going to somehow make him immune to the basic laws of physics if he just committed to it hard enough.

there's no such thing as a post you can't shoehorn a black metal reference into

Question meme via snickfic: What's one of your favorite shippy moments for your ship? Why do you love it?

On the one hand this was hard to pick because every moment Rey and Kylo are on screen together is my favourite shippy moment, but on the other hand there's one really obvious answer which is the moment that first set me seriously shipping them: the aftermath of the throne room fight scene in The Last Jedi, when Kylo asks Rey to join him in ruling the galaxy.



I cannot even TELL you guys how hard this scene hit me when I first saw it in the cinema. The Reylo vibes had been creeping up all movie, through a sequence of psychic bond moments that started out hostile and gradually became more and more intimate. That sense of togetherness, of mutual understanding, culminated in a breathtaking battle scene during which they fought almost like the two of them were one person, swapping weapons and watching each other's backs and at one point Rey even using Kylo's body as a springboard for her next attack. It seemed like an absolutely foregone conclusion that they were on the same side now, on the same page, ready to join forces for good.

The Domestic Revolution: How the Introduction of Coal into Our Homes Changed Everything by Ruth Goodman piqued my interest when osprey_archer reviewed it a while ago, so I was thrilled when a copy turned up on the shelves of my local library. It actually took me a while to get into, because the opening chapters are a very thorough review of pre-coal British fuel options that I found only mildly interesting. But once it gets into the actual use of that fuel in day-to-day life, Goodman's experience as a living historian comes shining through: she has practiced most of the relevant techniques, so her descriptions of period domestic labour - lighting and managing fires, cooking on them, cleaning up after them, using them to heat your laundry water - are full of vivid detail and practical insight. As she points out several times throughout the book, the lives she's reconstructing aren't the kind for which much direct testimony is available: this was women's labour, and more specifically the labour of female servants and poorer housewives who couldn't afford hired help. These women didn't have the leisure or literacy to record their own experiences, and scarcely anyone else ever deemed it worth recording on their behalf. So thorough, disciplined reenactments like Goodman's are often the closest we can get to understanding how they lived.

Aside from all the great content Osprey mentions, I was also really interested to learn how much the switch from wood to coal affected the physical layout of the home. The ancient wood-burning central hearth, which encouraged open-plan, ground-floor living, was impossible to maintain with coal. Previously, corner fireplaces with chimneys were a sort of experimental curiosity available only to very wealthy households (who could afford to swallow the 70% heat loss) and large institutions (whose need for multiple storeys made the traditional 'it'll work its way up and out eventually' approach to smoke management untenable). But coal smoke was much more noxious than wood smoke and, instead of drifting upwards, tended to hang low in people's breathing space. Once coal burning became the norm, people urgently needed a way to vent smoke out of their homes, so chimneys became the norm; and once your fire was off in a corner sending most of its heat directly up into the sky, it became more economical to wall off your living space into multiple smaller rooms that could each be individually warmed or not. The resulting trend in home layout has lasted right up until the last few decades, when central heating made open-plan living more comfortable again.

The Combat Doctor by Dan Pronk is the memoir of an Australian special forces doctor who served in Afghanistan. Being a special forces memoir, it's full of comically understated accounts of personal overachievement ('aw yeah, y'know, I had some free time while I was in medical school, so I decided I might as well pursue several extreme sports, gain multiple firearms competencies, and learn Arabic just in case it ever came in handy', MY DUDE WHERE DO GET YOUR ENERGY) as well as the usual pep talks about resiliency and teamwork. Being a medical memoir, it includes lots of interesting stories - thankfully not too gory - about the patients Pronk treated in the line of duty. He qualified as a GP, and the difference between his mandatory civilian clinic hours and the 'down and dirty medicine' (his words) he practiced out in the field was really striking. At one point, caught without his scalpel during a chaotic casualty evacuation, he had to perform a life-saving operation with a Gerber. 

One thing I'm always weirdly impressed by in these kinds of books is how similar they are, and I don't mean that in a derogatory sense but just in terms of the one very specific psychological profile that seems to dominate at the elite levels of military service. Clearly special forces selection boards know exactly what they're looking for in their soldiers, and how to weed out candidates who don't fit the mould.

The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber is a novel about a Christian missionary who goes into space to preach to a surprisingly receptive community of aliens. I read it once years ago, and remembered it as a flawed book that was worth the effort; in retrospect, I kind of wish I'd left it at that, because it holds up very badly on reread once newness no longer makes up for the bad stuff.

The basic premise is still just as good as I remember: the aliens are satisfyingly uncanny and non-human while still being relatable as people, and the spacefaring stuff is as good as you'd expect from a literary author taking a paddle in the world of scifi. And the twist at the end is still just as heartbreaking: the aliens are so hungry for Christianity because ( spoilers ) But if I'd forgotten why I usually avoid male-authored litfic like the plague, this book sure as shit reminded me. I don't know if I've just had a freakishly bad sampling or if every modern male literary figure is like this, but oh my goodness, the obsession with genitals. Faber couldn't go a fucking chapter without reminding us that his protagonist has a penis and testicles, and filling us in on their exact condition. Morning wood. Heat rash. Shrinkage. Itching. Urine output. It was like trying to have an otherwise civilised conversation with a man who every so often would just reach down and brazenly adjust himself while holding eye contact. I'm not even going to start on the casually, obliviously misogynistic treatment of women, except to say that Faber is very careful never to leave you any doubt as to which of his female characters he does or doesn't consider fuckable. It's subtle enough not to generate lots of outrageous pull quotes but persistent enough to start making me physically queasy after a while.

Another problem with the book is one that probably didn't register with me last time, but feels much more obvious post-conversion: Faber is a strident atheist who's making a good faith attempt to write from a Christian perspective, but I don't feel like it ever really lands. The missionary's faith is strangely shallow, and isolated only to areas of his psyche that Faber thinks are Relevant To Religion. I don't know. It's not like I can point my finger at a passage and say 'he got this part wrong!', but there's just something off-kilter about all the lip service to God that makes it hard for me to buy into the intended characterisation.

- Shadow and Bone s2 was eight hours of my life that I'm never getting back. I don't understand and don't want to understand the choices they made about pacing, or the rationale for trying to cover THREE NOVELS worth of content in a single season along with great piles of extra stuff they just made up all by themselves. Ben Barnes' performance and the excellent Nikolai casting were bright spots, but they weren't worth the mess that was everything else.

- I'm also not enjoying Ted Lasso s3, though less because it’s actually bad and more because it just isn’t giving me what I want. I’m here for feelgood escapism and nothing but feelgood escapism, whereas I feel like this and the last season have been leaning a lot more into being a serious TV drama about mental health and interpersonal conflict and what have you. Happy for the fandom that they’ve got so much toothy stuff to work with, but at this point I think I’m only continuing to watch out of curiosity + a bit of sunk cost fallacy. It just doesn’t spark joy like s1 did.

- On the other hand none of that reeeeeally matters because The Mandalorian is eating my ENTIRE brain. If the writers had all sat down at the first meeting and said, 'right, priority number one is to tell a story that lucymonster will love', they could hardly done a better job nailing everything I want out of this canon. Baby Yoda is now fully fledged Toddler Yoda, with the trail of wreckage behind him to prove it! The ex-Empire/proto-First Order stuff is endlessly absorbing to me, as is the nuanced exploration of what it means to be Mandalorian. Bo-Katan's involvement has exceeded my wildest dreams - she's basically the deuteragonist at this point? And the chemistry between her and Din has been nothing short of scorching. My teeny-tiny little little ship is suddenly the Hot New Thing and there's more art and fic to enjoy than I can possibly keep up with. Every other show in the world can jump the shark, for all I care. I'm getting all my needs met right here and I'm over the moon about it. :DDDDDDD

 - In writing news, I'm once again relearning the eternal truth that the Venn diagram of 'music I want to listen to for myself' and 'music I want to listen to for fic purposes' is very close to being two separate circles. As soon as I'm trying to brainstorm, my taste goes belly-up and all I want is the whiniest post-hardcore and metalcore in my library. I want Bullet For My Valentine, I want A Skylit Drive, I want breakdowns and high-pitched vocals and painfully confessional lyrics about some dude's inability to find or keep a girlfriend. Nothing else gets the creative juices flowing the same way, man, idek.

Man, this was so disappointing. You'd think 'Adam Driver fights dinosaurs' is a premise that would execute itself, but the directors have managed to expertly weave and dodge through their delightfully batshit story, genius casting and lavish special effects budget to produce the one possible version of this movie that is absolutely no fun at all.

In brief: space pilot Mills, of an alien race that looks, acts and organises its society exactly like modern humans, crash-lands his spaceship on our planet Earth 65 million years ago. All his passengers are killed except for nine-year-old Koa (played, very obtrusively, by an actress in her mid teens) who can't speak his language. The ship was torn in two by the crash, and the half containing their escape craft landed on a nearby mountain, separated from them by 12 kilometres of geyser fields, narrow caves and dinosaur-infested jungle. Cue perilous journey.

Or, in other words, cue ninety nonstop minutes of dinosaur jumpscares. That's it, that's the movie. Jumpscare. Looming peril. Jumpscare. Jumpscare. Looming peril. Jumpscare. Every time one life-threatening crisis passes, another leaps in without pausing for breath. The growing bond between Mills and Koa is gestured at but never meaningfully developed. The stakes are self-evidently nonexistent: with only two characters, they're obviously not going to kill one of them off halfway through the runtime. And the runtime is the weirdest part! At ninety minutes, it's not like they were under pressure to squash the movie down to a reasonable length. They could have made it just ten or twenty minutes longer and had ample time for the quieter, character-focused moments that were so desperately needed to break up the action. But instead they deliberately chose to reduce the whole concept to a Jurassic haunted house where you just wander from room to room getting jumped out at by dinosaurs. I spent the whole movie equal parts terrified and bored, which is a hard feeling to describe, but apparently what you get when you consume lots of amygdala-triggering stimuli all at once in a vacuum devoid of any greater meaning or interest.

To be fair, Adam Driver put in his usual award-worthy performance. To be fairer, there was in fact one (1) attempt at a non-dinosaur-jumpscare-related plot point, and it's not the directors' fault that it happened to be my Number One Bold Red Underline DNW:

[Major spoiler]

Mills' young daughter, whose medical treatment he took this catastrophic job to pay for, died while he was on the job and unable to be there with her.

But it is their fault they executed it so weakly that, despite the almost overwhelming DNW factor, I found it merely upsetting rather than unwatchable. If they hadn't directed other successful movies in the past, I'd be tempted to wonder if they decided to focus on dinosaur jumpscares because that's the only trick they actually know how to pull off.

So, yeah, big disappointment. I got none of the fun Lone Wolf and Cub adventures I wanted, a whole ton of pointless adrenaline I didn't, and I was too annoyed by the whole mess to even enjoy the heavy lashings of wounded yet stoic Adam Driver for what they were worth. Interestingly, I've since looked up reviews and the critics agree with me that it sucks, but for reasons so wrong I'm left boggling. They reckon it needed more gore - it was too family-friendly, apparently. Who the actual unholy fuck is taking their kids to see movies like 65? Kid me had enough trouble coping with the mere fact that bugs existed. If I'd had to watch a prehistoric scorpion crawl inside a girl's mouth while she slept and start choking her to death - to name just one wholesome, family-friendly example - I doubt I'd have ever recovered. There's probably something to be said here about desensitisation (if anyone's going to be affected by the current craze for gore and extremity, it'll be the film critics who spend all day every day exposing themselves to it for money) but mostly I'm just making a note not to take any future claims of family-friendliness with a big pinch of salt. What the fuck.

Movies

Glass Onion - I didn't enjoy this quite as much as Knives Out, but I still enjoyed it. The structure is basically the same: Agatha Christie-style murder mystery about wealthy assholes gets subverted to shocking effect halfway through, then re-subverted at the end to bring it to a conclusion that still satisfies the original promise. One of my favourite things about Rian Johnson's filmmaking is that he subverts with affection - he's as much a fan of these genres as anyone - and he always keeps his promises eventually, even if the path to get there is full of surprises.

It's very much a snapshot of this very particular moment, full of jokes about COVID and The Lockdown Experience (TM) that will - at least, I sure hope - be incomprehensible in a couple of decades. And that's not to mention all the celebrity references that will date even faster. But I kind of love it for that. Not all media needs to aim for timelessness. I'm just glad someone thought to have fun with different mask-wearing styles during this narrow window of time where that kind of character detail has meaning.

1917 - I know nothing about cinematography, but the 'one shot' conceit really worked for me. (It was not actually filmed in one shot, and even my untrained eye can make out some of the joins, but that doesn't matter - it's about the impact on the story, not the technicalities of filming.) Two soldiers are on a time-sensitive mission to deliver a message that could save the lives of 16,000 men, and the movie follows them from start to finish without skipping a single moment of their journey. The result is breathless and in places excruciating - I kept expecting to jump to the next 'plot-relevant' event, but instead the cameras sat staunchly with the soldiers through all of it, through suspense, through inaction, through mundane blunders that shaved precious minutes off their deadline.

There's a scene towards the end, after a frantic near-drowning scene, where we float dazed and exhausted down a sparkling clean river watching cherry blossom petals swirl overhead - right into a dam made of bloated, waterlogged corpses that have washed up against a log. That one's going to stick with me. It's beautiful and horrible and not exactly subtle, but I don't blame it for that, because 'don't romanticise war' is a lesson that just never seems to stick with people.

All Quiet on the Western Front - DNF'd at around 40 minutes and bitterly wish I'd stopped earlier. It's a brilliant adaptation that I absolutely do not have the stomach for right now, which I should have realised the moment Felix Kammerer brought his ear-to-ear smile on screen, bouncing with boyish excitement about being sent to the front. The casting is impeccable - he and his cohort look desperately young and vulnerable, all innocent smiles in the face of impending horrors they can't possibly understand. 'We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.' Definitely recommend watching this if you no longer need your heart and would like it smashed to a bloody pulp.


Internets

This short, accessible analysis of Triumph of the Will breaks down the myth of its supposed cinematic greatness: not innovative, actually, just really fucking expensive! A valuable contribution to Project Let's Stop Discussing the Nazis in Exactly the Terms They Wanted.

In lighter news, I'm still lapping up ACOUP's ongoing critique of Rings of Power. This week, he's analysing battle tactics during the major showdown in episode 6: 'Udûn'. The topic itself is nitpicky, but the theme that emerges - of the show prizing 'clever' tricks and the element of surprise above all else - is emblematic of its flaws, and I think of a trend in blockbuster media lately where creators are desperate to 'outsmart' fans at all costs. If your foreshadowing and internal story logic are good enough that people can predict where things are going and post about it on the internet, that's Bad, actually! Far better to keep viewers on their toes with a neverending stream of shock!!! twist!!! moments that no one saw coming because they make no fucking sense. It's the exact opposite of the Rian Johnson 'affectionate subversion' vibe I was just talking about and I hate it.

Speaking of Rian Johnson, I really enjoyed this video essay about The Last Jedi's subversive handling of male hero arcs. At the start of the movie, Finn, Poe and Luke are all positioned to suggest a traditional male heroic archetype, only to be challenged by a woman who's explicitly portrayed as holding either institutional or moral authority over them. The subversion is only a temporary roadstop - they all three get to fulfil their heroic potential in the end, but only after learning a valuable and humbling lesson from a woman who is not seeking to 'emasculate' them, but who genuinely cares and has important wisdom to impart. I thought I was done feeling over-emotional about TLJ (after what, five years???) but this made me slightly teary.

AKA 'multifandom gift exchanges are a great way to hoist colours on my teeny-tiny ships that would otherwise never float, and I've been abusing the privilege for a while now'. All these ships have less than 100 fics on ao3 (and usually a lot less). Most of what I'm linking here is either for me or by me; the remainder are also exchange fics, but have nothing to do with me except that I like them. All fics are comfortably under 10k (most within the 1-5k band).

This might end up being part one of two, because I have enough recs for Kylo/various trio members to flesh out a whole second post.

Qi'ra/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren

I'm starting with this ship because it was my first, emboldening experience willing a non-existent ship into existence (six fics on ao3 are tagged with this ship; five of them have my name attached somewhere). Consider: hot older lady/messy disaster lover she can wrap around her finger! Both of them have betrayed Han Solo! Qi'ra literally used to date Ben's dad! It's just such a terrible idea, and terrible ideas make for wonderful stories. If that sounds appealing, here are two great places to start:

a million ways to toe the line by spookykingdomstarlight draws deep from the well of Han Solo angst to portray a desperately unhealthy fling that nonetheless meets an important need for both characters involved and me, it also meets an important need for me. It belongs to the laudable genre of 'sex scene as character study' and (to quote from my own comment) "the overall effect is intensely claustrophobic - like, get them both out of here, let this all be a bad dream, let this not really be their lives." It's deliciously angsty.

Ostinato by ambiguityisnoonesfriend is just as dysfunctional on the romantic front, with a really satisfying 'actually quite an effective match in the professional sphere' angle - Ben has fled his Kylo Ren identity, made up yet another new name, and is working as Qi'ra's bodyguard in the dangerous world of intergalactic criminal cartels. This fic looks Qi'ra's past with Ben's father dead in the eye in a way that's equal parts poetic and (intentionally) crude, and the result is as beautiful as it is uncomfortable. 

Zorii Bliss/Ben Solo

Now for something even rarer! To the best of my knowledge, there's only one canonverse fic for this ship on ao3. It's a lot less twisted than Qi'ra/Kylo, though not necessarily less fraught - Ben headed the regime that destroyed Zorii's homeworld, first by conscripting all its children as soldiers and brutally oppressing its remaining citizens, then by literally blowing it up. 

But Harm Reduction by magnetgirl is a masterclass in the kind of redemption story I like best: one where Ben is truly willing to work at making amends with or without the prospect of being forgiven, and where Zorii's forgiveness is more about finding her own peace than helping him find his. Plot-wise, it's a super fun riff on Leverage in which Zorii heads up a small crew of misfits who devote themselves, after the war with the First Order is over, to trawling the galaxy and mopping up the damage by questionably legal means.

Ren/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren

The character of Ren was introduced in The Rise of Kylo Ren, a four-part comic miniseries that was released in the lead-up to the final Star Wars sequel movie. He's the former leader of the Knights of Ren, an opportunistic Force-sensitive criminal with a deeply nihilistic, 'survival of the fittest' type outlook. World's most predictable spoiler alert, Kylo kills him and takes his place.

got no heroes 'cause our heroes are dead is my shot at fleshing out Ren's character a bit more, and exploring his failure of perception re. the power dynamic between him and Kylo: in canon, he misreads Kylo's struggle with the dark side as a lack of aptitude for it, and gets himself super dead as a result. He strikes me as someone who has a really crude, simplistic, blanket kind of understanding of strength vs weakness, and I thought that would be fun to play out in the context of an intimate relationship. He thinks he's found himself a boytoy; Kylo thinks something else.

One other fun tidbit of characterisation we have for Ren is that he's image-conscious: the first thing he does on allowing Kylo to join the Knights of Ren is insist he go change into an outfit of fitted black leather, in keeping with the gang's reputation. From that fertile soil grows Doing the Right Thing by thedevilchicken, which contains both excellent clothing kink and a really compelling portrait of the unbalanced, somewhat pathetic state Kylo's in around the time of his fall to the dark side.

Ben Solo | Kylo Ren/Rose Tico

lay him down on a bed of thorns by lamiacalls is richly angsty, darkly smutty needleplay-as-character-study and I don't know how better to sell it than that. I love how this fic showcases Rose's compassion and rage in equal parts, as well as Ben's broken relationship with pain - this is a man we've seen deliberately punch himself in the fresh gut wound, so I'm more than willing to believe that his version of intimacy veers towards the masochistic as well.

Across Enemy Lines by igrockspock features pre- (or non-?) redeemed Ben living a compartmentalised little life as a nerdy mechanic when he's not busy stomping around battlefields as Kylo Ren. He and Rose fall in love without either of them really knowing who the other is (at least in part because they don't want to know), and the resulting affair is as fraught and bittersweet as you could dream.

I'm also proud of my own writing for this ship! I've written a few fics, but my favourite is you tell me we can start the rain: Ben, who post-redemption is living in exile as a subsistence moisture farmer on Tatooine, has to look after a Rose who's been corrupted by a dark side artifact. Rose-who's-not-quite-herself was a really fun perspective to write from, and I also enjoyed turning the more natural dynamic - volatile Ben and grounded, righteous Rose - on its head.

Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren/Rose Tico

Tension bysyrupwit is a delightful pre-threesome fic: Reylo is a foregone conclusion in all its Force bond weirdness, Rose is desperately besotted with Rey, and getting close to Rey means putting up with her other half as well. 

Poe Dameron/Luke Skywalker/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren

Lost in Translation by naughty_sock (archive-locked) is as much a love letter to fandom in all its unabashed weirdness as it is to this ship in particular. Ben and Poe, pre-canon, are travelling with Luke on a Jedi excursion that ends in tentacles, mpreg, and wildly inappropriate use of the Force. It's bitingly funny, tongue-in-cheek without being mocking, and hot even if tentacles aren't your usual thing (or at least, tentacles aren't my thing, and I still found it hot).

Ben Solo | Kylo Ren/Voe

Okay, now I'm just being self-indulgent: this ship is probably my hardest sell, not least because in canon, he kills her (but what if he DIDN'T though???). Voe is another character from the Kylo Ren backstory comics, a fellow padawan at Luke's Jedi training temple who has a deeply lopsided competitive relationship with Ben - he's Luke's prize student, and she never quite feels she measures up. Their relationship is dismissive on his side, hostile and jealous on hers. But in my head, it's an epic love story for the ages in which Voe survives the comics and comes back to haunt Ben later in life.

Anyway, so far no one other than me has written the ship at all, and my only contribution has been a single piece of bite-sized kinkfic. But here it is: Losing Strategy, featuring fight sex, broken promises and very dubious consent.

Today, for reasons too dull and convoluted to be worth recounting, I experienced the mortifying ordeal of rediscovering one's teenage fanfic. I daresay it's done me good. From now on, if I'm ever tempted to get sniffy about Kids These Days with their issuefic and their thinly veiled self-inserts, I can remind myself of the time I published angsty teen-mental-health-crisis fic about fucking Haldir from Lord of the Rings and eat some nice, nutritious humble pie.

(Thank goodness I used to change pseuds so often. Fifteen-year-old me is not untraceable, exactly, but you'd have to work bloody hard and the payoff would be shit.)

-

I think I'm probably done tinkering with my candyheartsex  signup? I've taken a radically different approach this time: instead of my usual maximalist requests, I've whittled myself down to just three teeny-tiny rare ships/gen combos. I think it's the right call. I wanted all the things I was originally planning to request, but these are the ones my heart seems to be most set on right now. Two of my three fandoms already have offers, too, so it's possible I won't even be a pinch hit!

It feels bizarre not to be requesting anything Reylo-adjacent. Have I literally ever done an exchange without requesting something Reylo-adjacent? There was Rare Male Slash Exchange one time, I guess. I can't think of anything else.

I've already written 1.5k of fic for [redacted]'s [redacted] request, too, after vowing to myself that I was going to keep it lowkey. So that's equal parts 'yay I can still write!' and 'oh fuck the plot has only just started'.

-

I've been in a reread/rewatch mood: [redacted] for Candy Hearts, Rings of Power for my boy Adar, a bit of Murderbot, dribs and drabs of old fanfic from years ago. The thought of consuming anything new-new is just exhausting right now, but I'm holding out for Shadow and Bone S2 in March, and OFMD S2 whenever they release it in Australia. I feel like my attention is all over the place, and I'm honestly kind of enjoying it - I'm usually so monofannish, despite my best efforts. It's a rare thrill to have more than one fictional world alive in my daydreams at once.

Happy New Year, flist! Let’s do this thing.

So, my fannish style has always been more OTC (one true character) than ship centric. My process for getting into a new fandom generally goes:

1. fall consumingly in love with a character who ticks a couple of my very predictable boxes
2. dive headlong into whatever the most obvious ship for that character is because that’s where the content lives
3. spiral off into massively multishippy rarepair hell with heavy lashings of gen.

Often at some point I develop hype backlash from step 2 and start avoiding the big ship in favour of my rarepairs, though this doesn’t always happen: I can’t stomach Stucky at all anymore, but I still love Reylo as much as I did the day I saw TLJ. Another trend is that I start out a bit glarey at the main rival non-fave pairing (b/c uncomfortable when we are not about me my fave) and then resolve my issues by shipping it as an OT3: cf Finnreylo, Darkling/Alina/Mal, Byakuya/Renji/Ichigo.

I mentioned in my signup that my favourite characters are all really just the same couple of traits in different hats, and - look, there’s SOME variety, but I’m not really exaggerating. The following ingredients are not guaranteed to make a fave, but any fave I do have WILL contain some combination of:

• floppy dark hair
• track record of destructive behaviour that harms self as much as others
• aspirational toughness undermined by glaringly obvious emotional messiness
• some deep, deep unmet need or yearning I can pine over with them.

Kylo Ren is the only fave I can think of who checks all four boxes, and that’s probably why he has so thoroughly outstayed his rental term in my head (usually the consuming phase of an obsession burns out for me within about two years). Other faves I might blog about for this challenge include Faith Lehane, Kuchiki Byakuya, the Darkling, Ash Tyler, Adar, James Potter, movie Caspian, Aphra, Minn-Erva, James Norrington and Xue Yang.

So, villain-heavy, but not all villains by a long shot. I joke sometimes about being a villainfucker, but really, the “does horrible things on purpose” aspect is way less important to me than the “makes bad choices due to messy emotions and Suffers as a result” bit. There just happens to be a lot of overlap with common sympathetic villain tropes that makes my tastes look edgier than they actually are.

I'M SO FUCKING HYPED THIS NEEDS TO BE OUT ALREADY.