teach me the art of war

I am currently back in bed again with a virus that just WILL NOT QUIT, so here's a meme yoinked from fiachairecht that is pretty much all I have brainpower for.

I have 238 works currently posted on my main AO3 account and obviously a lot of alphabetical overlap, so I've chosen which titles to link with the ulterior motive of making myself look like a diverse writer and not like someone who's spent the past decade writing enormous volumes of Reylo and very little else. (That said, there are some fics on my account that based on title alone I truly could not tell you what fandom they're even for. No memory! Not even a vague sense of deja vu!)

Rules: How many letters of the alphabet have you used for [starting] a fic title? One fic per line, 'A' and 'The' do not count for 'a' and 't'. Post your score out of 26 at the end, along with your total fic count.

A — After the World Ends (Star Wars Sequels, Poe/Finn/Rey/Ben)
B — beauty is power; a smile is its sword (Chronicles of Narnia movies, Susan/Caspian)
C — Chateau d'Yquem (Marriage Story, Charlie/Nicole)
D — Desert Flower (The Hurricane Wars, Talasyn/Alaric)
E — Every Item Has a Soul (MCU/Tidying Up with Marie Kondo RPF, Bucky & KonMari)
F — Friends Don't Know the Way You Taste (Descendents, Evie/Mal)
G — got no heroes 'cause our heroes are dead (The Rise of Kylo Ren, Ren Prime/Kylo)
H — have to live before you die young (Star Wars Sequels/Solo, Qi'ra/Kylo
I — It's Not Rocket Science (Bleach, Ichigo/Rukia & Renji
J — Jacen Syndulla and the Bendu's Word (Star Wars Sequels/Rebels, Hogwarts AU)
K — Kalikori (Star Wars Rebels, Hera/Kanan & Jacen)
L — Limited-Edition Space Invader Barbie(TM) from Mattel (Captain Marvel, Maria Rambeau/Minn-Erva)
M — Mind the Gap (Venom, Eddie/Symbiote)
N — Need a Teacher (Star Wars Sequels, Finnreylo & Poe)
O — Outgunned and Outclassed (Bleach, Byakuya/Renji/Shutara Senjumaru)
P — Playing the Long Game (Star Wars Sequels, Kylo & Baby Yoda)
Q —
R — Rose Tico's Charity Home for Wayward First Order Scum (SW Sequels, Phasma/Rose & Reylo & Finnpoe)
S — shall I compare thee (The Love Hypothesis, Adam/Olive)
T — time will be the judge of what you deserve (Star Wars Sequels, Finnlo)
U — Unless Acted Upon (Star Wars Sequels, Reylo)
V — Victory Day (Star Wars Sequels, Hux/Leia)
W — Welcome Home (The Love Hypothesis, Adam/Olive)
X — XXX (Bleach, Byakuya/Renji)
Y — Yeah, Nah (Star Wars Sequels, Australian AU)
Z —

Only two letters - Q and Z - unaccounted for! I'm kind of tempted to write two ficlets specifically to fill in those last gaps in the alphabet. I've fallen behind on my fandom_empire bingo card recently, so maybe I can tie the new vanity project in with a couple of fills for that.

Here's the textbox for anyone else who'd like to play:

<b>Rules: How many letters of the alphabet have you used for [starting] a fic title? One fic per line, 'A' and 'The' do not count for 'a' and 't'. Post your score out of 26 at the end, along with your total fic count.</b> A — B — C — D — E — F — G — H — I — J — K — L — M — N — O — P — Q — R — S — T — U — V — W — X — Y — Z —

I feel bad DNFing so many things in a row recently, but it's been surprisingly hard to find anything I feel like reading! This isn't a list of everything I've picked up and put down in the last few weeks, but a curated shortlist of things I disliked enough to want to gripe about.

Rose in Chains by Julie Soto is one of the three big Dramione pull-to-pubs that's getting huge hype at the moment. You guys all know about my fondness for pull-to-pub romance by this point, but this particular one turned out to be squick central for me. In a messy game of fandom telephone, the fic behind this novel was inspired by a different Dramione fic, which was inspired as much by The Handmaid's Tale as by Harry Potter, and the melding of serious feminist talking points with blatant fetish content REALLY didn't work for me. (To be honest, while acknowledging the high risk of hypocrisy here, I pretty much always feel differently about rapey kinkfic published in a fannish context than I do about rapey kinkfic published for money and for a general audience.) I can't trash this book on its merits: if you enjoy het slavefic, it will cater to you very nicely in prose that's pretty much on par with other successful romantasy. But it wasn't for me. It probably didn't help that all the stuff about crushed hearts and burnt fallopian tubes managed to trigger my first vasovagal episode since completing exposure therapy. Fellow BII-phobes, be warned.

Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan sounded so good by its description, but is kind of just...meh? in execution. It's an isekai-inspired novel in which the dying protagonist gets sent to not!Westeros as a villain, but I don't know what happens beyond that because the combination of mediocre prose and unfunny tumblr references has completely put me off reading any further. Maybe I'll come back to this when I'm hungry for deconstructions of villainy as a concept, but right now there are too many other similar works on my TBR for me to feel any pressure to give this one a second chance.

What Happened to Nina? by Dervla McTiernan is marketed as a thriller, presumably because the publisher took the author's word that it revolved around a dead young woman and investigated no further before pushing it to shelves. It's about the aftermath of an intimate partner homicide, in which the victim and killer's families battle it out in the legal system while the true crime fans of the world look on. Or at least, that's what I gather from the summary; I didn't get far enough in to see any of that actually happen. I'm sorry to be so harsh, but this book is charmless. It's too slow and boring to be a thriller, too obvious to be a mystery; the prose is too amateurishly bland for litfic and the characters are too shallow for it to pass as psychological drama. I tried twice, because the cover is appealing and it sold so well and widely that I thought surely it would at least make for easy reading, but no. No, it's an absolute slog, and I have flicked through to the final chapters just to see what happened (which was nothing I wouldn't have seen coming a mile off) and set it aside with no regrets.

By "it", I mean the Knights of Ren turning on Kylo in the final act of TROS. In this issue, we learn what the knights have been up to all this time and why they've had so little to do with their ostensible leader, and it turns out the answer - like all answers to the every mystery of Kylo Ren's life - is that he's a complete fucking dick. Even by the standards of the proudly self-proclaimed being-a-complete-fucking-dick club.



(Perhaps the legions of loyal followers who await my every update on this series will notice that I've skipped a couple of issues. That's because I had very mixed feelings about the last arc but lacked the stomach to publish my complaints. No stomach is needed for this issue, however! I have zero complaints! None! Zip! Nada! We are back to the good stuff!)

So anyway, today's instalment introduces Tava Ren, the woman who has now taken over leadership of the Knights of Ren. She's gutsy and dangerous, passionate in her worship of the dark side, and clearly a much more natural leader than her predecessor was - because when her knights lose their nerve mid-combat and run off leaving her for dead, instead of demanding their blood, she demands an explanation. At which a hardened band of Force-wielding, black-armoured thugs gather around to shamefacedly (shame-maskedly?) tell her of the trauma that reduced them to their current cowardly state.

Kylo's early days in charge, they tell Tava, were some of the group's best ever. They made a killing both metaphorically and literally, roamed the galaxy, partied it up...until Kylo, who they tactfully describe as "never the life of the party", started turning darker even than they bargained for. Constantly talking to someone no one else could see. Massacring their drinking buddies for no good reason. Leading them on missions that seemed increasingly more about some secret political agenda than personal gain. They were assholes with plastic horns on their heads who accidentally fell under the stewardship of a real devil, and no one dared question the drastic change to their modus operandi for fear of drawing his wrath on themselves. Finally Kylo abandoned them very abruptly one day (the day, by the looks of things, that Rey saw in her vision in Maz's castle!) to go join Snoke, but not before blithely volunteering to kill all his now former comrades - right in front of them, while they looked on in paroxysms of terror and betrayal. ("We're loyal," they pleaded with him. "We're your guys.") Snoke told him not to bother and sent a stormtrooper death squad after them instead, and ever since then the Knights of Ren have been on the run, terrified that one day Kylo will return to finish them off.

I love this for a bunch of reasons. Kylo being awful is always fun, and I'm enjoying all this insight into how truly, coldly evil he can be when the presence of Rey or his parents isn't triggering his inner conflict. It's a really satisfying explanation of Kylo's missing transition from the Knights of Ren to the First Order. Tava is AMAZING and I'm already loving the contrast between her "I'll restore this order to its former dark glory" and Kylo's "I'll use them as a stepping stone then kick them back into the water behind me".

But I'm most especially pleased because it completely fixes one of my quiet, sad, petty complaints about TROS - namely, after all the hype, that it made literally nothing of the Knights of Ren. There was no depth to their relationship with Kylo. They made a couple of appearances behaving more or less like stormtroopers in weird grubby armour, then they ganged up and tried to kill Ben for no obvious reason, then he matter-of-factly killed them all and moved on with his life. The novelisation made that last scene even worse, by having Ben "realise" the knights had been "Palpatine's all along" and so were basically just pretending to be his subordinates while snickering behind his back. (I'm not saying this is a reasonable lens to bring to the text but I AM saying that this development Did Not Please my inner neurotic teen self who was always half-sure any given social invitation was a prank aimed at luring her out to be mocked for the stupidity of thinking she was actually welcome.) I am far, FAR better pleased by the reveal that actually that was just Ben self-victimising again (old habits etc) and that in fact they'd all admired him immensely until he went bonkers and fucked them over.

I'd like to close with a picture of Tava Ren with her helmet off. As you can see, she is an absolute BABE. Flowing red hair! Cool tattoo! Lots of murder! My crush is probably doomed given Kylo's track record with people who annoy him, but I'm going to stan her so hard for as long as she's around.

( See? BABE. )

I'm not going to tell you guys how many stouts down I am, because it's not actually very many but in my defence I'm on multiple different meds that you're not supposed to mix alcohol with. 🙃 

First, a little Iron Maiden deep dive! The Final Frontier was released in 2010 and usually hovers somewhere near the bottom of everyone's list of ranked Iron Maiden albums. But the other weekend I decided to give it my full attention in a dedicated listen-through, and - man, this band has genuinely never actually released a bad album, have they? The Final Frontier doesn't grab you the way some of their more popular albums do, but it has substance in a way that only really comes out if you pay full attention (and is so, so worth the effort when it does). It's a cinematic, semi-themed collection of songs about adventure and danger, about not knowing if you'll ever make it home, about not knowing whether home will really be there when you do make it back. Favourite songs are Mother of Mercy, Coming Home, Starblind and (#1 winner) The Talisman, but honestly, there's not a single miss on the whole tracklist.

Secondly, Black House by Secrets of the Moon is gorgeously moody, heavy goth rock by a black metal band that finally decided to stop will-they-won't-they-ing and straight-up cross the party floor. I really love the frontman's voice, and how the band's metal origins shine through so clearly in the sense of energy and urgency that infuses every track.

Finally, some singles! 1914 have released a new track, 1916 (The Südtirol Offensive), that hits so fucking hard, especially in the second half. The outro riff has been running through my head for DAYS now, I love it so much, holy shit. I'm extra glad I have this to savour, because the new Aephanemer single, La Règle du Jeu, isn't doing anything for me. There's nothing WRONG with it I don't think - it's just leaning hard on the parts of Aephanemer's style that I don't love and neglecting the parts that I do. Marion Bascoul, please don't go where I can't follow!

My big surge of creative energy seems to petering out, but that means I’ve been getting a bunch more reading done again! Mostly light, tropey and romance-heavy at the moment, because girls chronically exhausted mums just wanna have fun.

Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots: Anna Tromedlov, an underemployed data analyst, scrapes her living by temping for professional supervillains who need henchpeople on demand. When an unlucky encounter with a superhero leaves her devastatingly injured - not to mention costing her the job she needs to pay her medical bills - Anna becomes obsessed with mathematically quantifying the damage heroic activity causes and publishing her findings on her unexpectedly successful new blog. This catches the eye of notorious supervillain Leviathan, who takes her under his wing and sets her to work destroying his enemies using the somewhat unconventional weapons of data analysis and PR savvy. So begins the meteoric rise of a brand new villain: the Auditor.

I unreservedly adored this book. It's a clever, tongue-in-cheek subversion of the superhero genre that balances biting social commentary with straight-up riotous fun. It's very bisexual and chock full of enticing shiptease - I was most into Anna/Leviathan, but could happily be sold on any or all of Anna's romantic prospects. It also, if you'd like a little taster, got this delightful fic written for it a few Yuletides ago (premise: excerpts from an in-universe advice column) that you can absolutely read canon-blind, and that imo does a really great job at capturing the novel's tone and sense of humour.

Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Sutanto: Sixty-year-old first-gen Chinese immigrant Vera owns a shabby tea shop in San Francisco. Her husband is dead, her son is distant, and her customers are almost nonexistent, so when a dead body is found in the shop one morning, she latches onto the rare chance to feel needed and takes it upon herself to investigate what she is convinced (despite the police's opinions to the contrary) is a murder.

This is a funny, cosy mystery novel that's really about found family that's really about the painful cultural tug-of-war between Asian parents and their westernised children. Vera is a wonderful character: she's overflowing with love but only knows how to express it within a framework of filial piety and age-based hierarchy that's incompatible with the younger generation's values. She has never met a boundary she didn't feel entitled to violate. She's both clever and batty, compassionate and insensitive, insightful and oblivious. She's the novel's star attraction by such a large margin that I was kind of disappointed by the choice to alternate her POV with those of her suspects, a pack of hapless Millenials/early Zoomers whose voices are indistinguishable from each other. I really just wanted to stay in Vera's head the whole time. Also the author, like so many authors, honestly needs to have her writing-small-children privileges taken away from her, because the toddler character is at so many wildly different developmental stages all at once that the scenes with her gave me whiplash. Despite those complaints, this was a really fun read brimming with fond humour and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone who finds any part of my description appealing!

Hex Appeal by Kate Johnson: I "read" this as an audiobook, which is new for me. Normally I reserve audio format for rereads of books I already know well enough that it doesn't matter if my attention drifts here and there, which it invariably does when I try to absorb any kind of information without text or visuals to anchor me. As challenges to my preferred information processing style go, a tropey romance novel about witches seemed approachable. And it was! I enjoyed it! But I feel like I need to add a disclaimer that a few points have probably been knocked off my reading comprehension score on this one due to sheer poor listening skills.

Anyway, like I said, this is a tropey romance novel about witches. Specifically, it's about a plump, sensible, emotionally unavailable witch named Essie who lives in modern-day, magic-oblivious England and has weather-based powers. Her coven lives under a memory spell that makes everyone forget they exist whenever they're not directly needed, and her love life came to a premature end some years ago when she accidentally froze the penis off her last boyfriend. When a sad American man inherits the estate that includes the coven's home, he comes sniffing around for rent and gets massively more than he bargained for - partly because of his irresistible chemistry with Essie, and partly because of spooky hijinks involving time travel, witch trials and a centuries-old evil rising from slumber. It was a lot of fun! It did manage to hit a pet peeve of mine (shallow girlboss-feminist takes on historical womanhood and the struggles thereof, ugh go awayyy) but...well, again, tropey romance novel about witches. I came for the vibes, and the vibes sparked enough joy that I'm prepared to overlook a bit of painfully heavy-handed “witch hunters were really just ye olde incels” discourse.

Not in Love and Deep End by Ali Hazelwood: The Ali-verse is moving further and further away from my personal preferences, and I’m slightly bummed about it. I read Ali Hazelwood for pathetic lovelorn dudes with questionable social skills and nonexistent sex lives, and the tastefully younger women who are in Mariana-deep denial about their attraction to them. These last couple of male protagonists have been getting much suaver and more dominant - a little bit Christian Grey, if Christian Grey started caring about social justice and RACK - and the sex has been kicking off with nary a pine, nary a yearn, nary a moment of “she’ll never love me” despair. Good for you, Christian Grey-lite girlies, but that’s not my kink at all. :( Ali’s writing is still snappy and compulsively readable, and I imagine I’ll keep picking her new novels up from the library once they’ve been out long enough to be shelved instead of on waitlists, but I’m not going to prioritise them anymore unless I hear reliable reports that Grumpy Adam Driver is back on the menu.

Honourable (or dishonourable?) mentions to a couple of recent DNFs as well: The Love Wager by Lynn Painter (unreadably bad, I gave up a few chapters in) and Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse (extremely promising, and I’ve loved her work before, but this one started with a scene of heartwrenching child harm that I only wish I’d noped out of sooner). I’m not sure what I’m going to read next. I have some Deep End left, but after that I’m thinking I might pick up something a bit more serious in tone - variety, spice of life, etc. Guess we’ll see whether the whim holds when it actually comes time to choose.

They have cast Daisy Ridley’s actual real-life husband to play Kylo Ren Adam Driver Dr Adam Carlsen in the film adaptation of bestselling Reylo AU The Love Hypothesis.

I’m celebrating by listening to the audiobook while I work on a fiendishly difficult Van Gogh puzzle. The narrator has the most annoyingly nasal accent I’ve ever heard in my life, but her Dr Carlsen voice is growing on me.