mithen

Title: Clarity of Purpose, Chap. 19
Chapter Summary: The Fellowship heads across the plains of the Wainriders on their way to Saynshar--until Bilbo is mistaken for a rabbit by a hunter on the steppes.
Relationship: Thorin/Bilbo
Characters: Bilbo Baggins, Thorin Oakenshield, Denethor, Gimli, Dis, Arwen, Aragorn
Fandom: Hobbit/Lord of the Rings. Begins in 2968, twenty-six years after the events of "Clarity of Vision" and fifty years before the canonical events of "Lord of the Rings." Thus, characters' ages and the geopolitical situation will be different than LoTR canon!
Warnings/Spoilers: None
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2600
Summary: Thorin Oakenshield and Bilbo Baggins have been parted for many years now, despite the love they bear each other. Now Thorin's research has uncovered a dire threat to Middle Earth--the Ring he carried a little while and then gave to Bilbo. Together with a group of companions composed of the different Free Peoples of Middle Earth, they must attempt to destroy the artifact before its Dark Lord can re-capture it.

( If your road takes you to Saynshar, it is a dark road indeed. )

aralias asked me about being on Freedom City back in the heyday of mailing lists! A little background: Blake's 7 had (has) two major mailing lists--one was more general-interest, and Freedom City was more free-wheeling and open to fic and shippiness. I got accidentally unsubscribed from Freedom City at some point and never got back in, so I'm mostly describing a period of time from 2005-2007 or so (and just my own personal impressions, of course! There are people on my flist who may well have been there too!)

Mostly I remember the meta with fondness! There was a constant flow of discussion about characters and episodes, and because of the feeling of a mailing list, you felt pretty comfortable saying anything, knowing that the people hearing you were all interested in B7 as well. The shift to LJ was actually hard for me, because I feel uncomfortable posting things that are definitely not the reason people followed me. Tumblr is...well, I guess once you reach Tumblr you have to just embrace the chaos, but it still makes me unhappy at times! Freedom City was opt-in, so everyone wanted to talk about B7. And because it's a closed canon that's been over for decades, you could be pretty sure that everyone was well-versed in canon. There were people who had favorite minor characters (Carnell, Jarriere, Og, Bayban, Brian the Spider) that they promoted with zeal and humor, lots of favorite conspiracy theories about how to explain odd quirks in the show. There was also a fair amount of fic, a lot of which wasn't overtly shippy (both a con and a pro for me). There was a lot of focus on creating clever, unexpected, experimental fic, which was a lot of fun to read even if I have no talent for writing it.

I learned two important lessons from Freedom City that have been useful in my fannish life! The first I learned when the topic of whether Blake was a sociopath terrorist or not came up for the first time, and the list became embroiled in heated debate on the topic. Everyone had very strong views, forcefully argued. Eventually the dust settled, the debate died down, and I thought, "That was interesting! I'm glad we've got that settled for good now." What can I say, I was young and foolish and had not learned the essential fact of fandom: wank is perennial. It slumbers beneath cordial exchanges, ready to break out afresh with a new stimulus. I think we had basically that same argument every three or four months--someone would make a glancing reference to Blake's character and suddenly we would all be having the same arguments over again. It was like the WWI Christmas Truce in reverse--usually everyone would be playing cricket and singing songs together, and then everyone would dive into their established trenches for twelve hours of intense sniping, then back to the cricket-playing. I thought that was odd at the time, but it was my first lesson in the fact that every fandom has these sorts of flash point issues that are always ready to ignite.

The other lesson I learned when someone--I think it was Predatrix, and am ashamed I don't remember--posted a short story to the list. She's a better writer than I am by a long shot, but I guess I was in a snarky mood or something, because I forwarded it to my husband with some snotty opinions about it.

Except instead of forward, I sent my bitchy message to the whole list.

Words cannot describe my utter mortification--I actually laid down on the floor and wept with shame, I felt so horrible. I'm blushing right now just remembering it. Predatrix was amazingly gracious about it, much better than I deserved, and my humiliated apologies were generally accepted. And this is where I learned to never be snarky at all if I could help it, and if I MUST get something off my chest, to do it as privately as humanly possible. But mostly from then on I have just resisted the urge to rip things up. What the hell, it's just a story or a post, what am I going to gain being nasty about it? If the person in question saw my "clever" remarks, how would it make them feel? Because who knows, they might. To be honest, probably that mistake, coming so early in my fannish life, served me pretty well, because it drove home that being positive is a LOT less likely to make me feel horrible in the long run than being negative. I was very, very lucky that people were forgiving to me--but Freedom City’s atmosphere was like that.

Alas asked me to talk about "strong female characters"! So...here goes!

I confess, I don't do very well by female characters in my fanfic! As a fanfic writer, I'm kind of obsessed with picking apart male narratives and male/male interactions; it's like studying a foreign language and neglecting to get better at my own native language, you know? And I'm always a little leery of the term "strong female characters" because I fear it getting used to reject female characters who aren't considered "strong" by certain standards but are still interesting. But given the topic, here are a few female characters from my favorites canons that I've particularly enjoyed:

Steph Brown, DC Comics. I never read her as Spoiler or as Robin, and the scans I've seen of her at those times never endeared me to her. But I fell in love with her as Batgirl in Bryan Q. Miller's run: the patron saint of sheer cussed stubbornness, who refuses to even stay dead, who makes a way no matter who tries to stop her, be it her father or Batman or Black Mask or Dan Didio.

Dors Venabili, Prelude to Foundation/Forward the Foundation. Isaac Asimov was not good at writing women. His most memorable female character was Susan Calvin, roboticist, who was one of those characters that's much better than the writer realizes. Asimov, I think, mostly just wanted her to be a frigid girl-scientist, but generations of fans have read a lot more awesome into her than Asimov ever meant. However, in two of his last books, Asimov finally created a female character who's interesting and fully rounded: Dors Venabili, Hari Seldon's wife. And all it took was making her a robot! Asimov always loved robots more than people, not that I blame him.

Charlotte Flair, WWE. If you haven't been following me on Tumblr you've largely missed my tumble into professional wrestling fandom--missmithen is about 25% superheroes, 25% Tolkien, 25% professional wrestling, and 25% other right now. Charlotte Flair is the daughter of (in)famous wrestler Ric Flair, and she's amazing. She's fierce and contemptuous in the best ways (her finishing move is called Natural Selection), and has developed into a very charismatic wrestler who isn't there to be eye candy. The way she shut down a crowd chanting for a different wrestler last week ("YOU DO NOT CHANT when a genetically superior wrestler addresses you!") made me want to crow with delight, as did her delighted smile when they shut up (it's not always easy to shut up a bunch of professional wrestling fans).

Morwen, the Silmarillion. Probably my favorite Tolkien woman. Her husband Hurin was taken prisoner in a terrible battle, and she attempted to raise her children on her own in enemy-occupied lands. She was proud and stern, and spoke little, and her family suffered more than perhaps any other family in Middle Earth (Morwen sends her son away to try and save him, and after a long series of cursed mishaps he meets up with his sister and marries her without knowing her identity, and they both commit suicide when they find out). Her death--she finds the graves of her children and her long-lost husband sitting at it, and dies in his arms there--is one of the saddest in Tolkien for me.

I'm missing many, I know it, but those are the ones that pop to mind when I consider my current main fandoms! There's a theme there of being strong-willed, stubborn, and never giving up, I think...

rileyc asked me about this pairing, which I just wrote for the first time for Yuletide, but have loved for a couple of decades!

OK, I could go on for a LONG time about R. Daneel Olivaw and Elijah Baley. They're the main characters from Isaac Asimov's Robot mysteries: the two of them appear together in The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, The Robots of Dawn, and (in flashback) Robots and Empire. Baley is a detective from Earth, while Daneel is a humaniform robot from an Earth colony. Baley--like most Earth people--distrusts and dislikes robots, but comes to first respect and then love (the word is used at least three times to describe how he feels about Daneel--the first time it is qualified to be love "like a friend," but the second two times it's simply love) his robotic partner.

Asimovian robots have three Laws that are necessary to function--later books explicitly argue that they're not programmed that way, their brains will not function without these Laws in place. The third, weakest Law is that a robot must protect its own existence. The Second Law is that a robot must always obey a human. And the First Law of Robotics is that "a robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm." Asimov created these Laws in the 1950s as basically a logic puzzle: most of his robot stories revolve around mysteries that play with the Three Laws. As the books progress and Asimov develops the society he's created, they also become ethics puzzles: what does free will mean to a robot if it must obey the three laws? Are they slaves to humanity, or purely altruistic beings? Or both?

Baley and Daneel make a very classic odd couple: Baley is homely (Asimov's descriptions make it clear, I think, he mentally cast a more rumpled Humphrey Bogart in the role) and Daneel is basically perfectly handsome (I would cast Chris Evans in the role if I were making a movie of it now--superficially blandly blondly pretty, with more underneath than it seems). Daneel is unemotional; Baley wavers between gruff and demonstrative. Daneel goes by the book (or Law); Baley trusts his intuition and instinct.

Asimov writes Baley as moving from resentment to friendship to deep affection for Daneel: there's a beautiful scene where Daneel re-asserts that he would be willing to die for Baley, and Baley, overcome with emotion (for a stoic noir detective, Baley is overcome with emotion a lot in these books) asserts that he feels that would be a poor exchange indeed. There's another great scene where Baley suddenly realizes the villains of the book are after Daneel, not him, and he has to try to convince Daneel to leave him and flee to save himself, Daneel is extremely reluctant to leave him in danger, and Baley is terrified at how the First Law might lead to Daneel's destruction. At the end of his life, Baley asks that Daneel come to him and holds on to life until they can have a last conversation. He sends Daneel away at the last second because he fears the sight of his death would hurt Daneel, and dies the moment Daneel leaves his side. MY KRYPTONITE.

In the long run, the last conversation Daneel has with Baley leads him to an ethical epiphany: the Zeroth Law, that a robot must not hurt HUMANITY. Armed with this breakthrough, in Baley's name Daneel dedicates his life to guiding humanity toward a utopian future.

Daneel is close to immortal. So for 20,000 years he works in the background, trying to ensure the survival and happiness of the human race--all for Elijah Baley, as he explicitly states much later. His efforts eventually cross over into the Foundation series, once a totally desperate space opera by Asimov, where we discover that he orchestrates the very creation of psychohistory, the science that at the end of the series appears to be leading humanity toward a perfectly harmonious collective mind.

And so a grumpy, agoraphobic noir detective ends up shaping the history of all humanity for more than twenty millennia, because a robot loved and admired him. If that's not romantic, I don't know what is.

I had a really fun Yuletide! I haven't posted a link to my own delightful gift yet, so to welcome in the new year I'm going to do that and then links to my own--they're in pretty miniscule fandoms so feel free to skip if they're not up your alley. *grin*

Happy happy new year to all of you and may your 2015 be bright and wonderful!

My gift:

Your Name (2064 words) by marmolita
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Doctrine of Labyrinths - Sarah Monette
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Relationships: Felix Harrowgate/Murtagh | Ferrand Carey, Felix Harrowgate/Malkar Gennadion, Felix Harrowgate/Other(s)
Characters: Felix Harrowgate, Mildmay Foxe
Additional Tags: Character Study
Summary:

A series of glimpses into Felix's life and journey toward self-acceptance.

It's a small book canon, but I got a wonderful introspective exploration of Felix's life and personae. The tags are spooky but the author was being cautious, there's nothing too terrible there!

My fics:


Everything That You Are Not (16008 words) by mithen
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: NXT
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Sami Zayn/Tyler Breeze
Characters: Sami Zayn | El Generico, Tyler Breeze, Charlotte Flair, Bayley | Davina Rose, Enzo Amore, Colin Cassady, Hideo Itami
Additional Tags: Kayfabe Compliant, Gen or Pre-Slash, Friendship, Canon-Typical Violence, Yuletide 2014, Enemies to Friends
Summary:

When Tyler Breeze gets on the General Manager's bad side, he finds himself with six uggos sharing his Daytona Beach seasonal residence.

This Town's Filled with Rattlesnakes (1836 words) by mithen
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: NXT
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Antonio Cesaro/Sami Zayn | El Generico
Characters: Antonio Cesaro, Sami Zayn | El Generico
Additional Tags: Oral Sex, Enemy Lovers, Friendship and Betrayal, Kayfabe Compliant, Yuletide 2014, Yuletide Treat
Summary:

One of his best friends was ready to attack him with the championship belt to win a match. Another of his best friends just turned on him in his moment of triumph. So Sami Zayn, new holder of the NXT championship title, is having some bitter thoughts about friendship.

Fortunately, the person waiting for him in the locker room is no friend.

NXT is maybe the most limited of fandoms available--it's a wrestling show that (in the US at least) is ONLY shown on the monthly-fee WWE network. So, you know... not a big potential audience. But I had way too much fun writing it!

Praise (1153 words) by mithen
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Musketeers (2014)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Aramis/Athos/Porthos (Trois Mousquetaires)
Characters: Aramis, Athos, Porthos (Trois Mousquetaires)
Additional Tags: Bondage, Praise Kink, Drunkenness, Yuletide 2014, Yuletide Treat, Oral Sex
Summary:

Aramis and Porthos decide that the only way to get Athos to listen to their praise is basically to tie him up and gag him.

The Musketeers is a lot more approachable, especially since this is basically a PWP... *grin*

Locked Room (6581 words) by mithen
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Robot Series - Isaac Asimov
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships:  Elijah Baley/R. Daneel Olivaw
Characters: Elijah Baley, R. Daneel Olivaw
Additional Tags: Consent Issues, Huddling For Warmth, Agoraphobia, Yuletide 2014, Yuletide Treat, Fuck or Die Scenario, Three Laws of Robotics, Trope Subversion, Fade to Black
Summary:

When Elijah Baley and Daneel Olivaw are kidnapped by a mad scientist, they find themselves in an intolerable situation that forces them both to confront certain truths about their relationship. Set immediately after "Robots of Dawn."

I LOVE THIS SERIES SO MUCH and it was a lot of fun writing this pairing! There's some annoying wank in the comments from some dude who takes umbrage at the idea that anyone would sully the pure platonic friendship of these two, since Asimov, being a dude in the 60s, OBVIOUSLY disapproved of gay people (uh yeah, NO, not true). Please don't feed the troll; I should have ignored him from the beginning...

Title: Confrontation
Relationship: Bruce Wayne/Clark Kent
Characters: Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, Dick Grayson, Jean Paul Valley, Superboy, Wonder Woman, Waylon Jones
Continuity: Heroes of the Squared Circle, a DC/pro wrestling fusion (click for notes and all chapters).
Warnings/Spoilers: None
Rating: PG-13
Word Count 3505
Summary: Things come to a head with Jean Paul Valley as the Dark Knight.

( Selina’s words broke off in a gasp as Jean Paul launched himself from the turnbuckle away from the ring into a shooting star press: jumping forward and throwing in a backflip and a corkscrew for good measure. )

Title: This Be the Verse
Relationship: Bruce Wayne/Clark Kent
Characters: Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, Alfred Pennyworth, Dick Grayson, Jean Paul Valley, Superboy, Tim Drake, Cassandra Cain, Stephanie Brown
Continuity: Heroes of the Squared Circle, a DC/pro wrestling fusion (click for notes and all chapters).
Warnings/Spoilers: None
Rating: PG-13
Word Count 3505
Summary: Clark is back, but he discovers that tensions have been rising in the locker room of the DCW.

( Like, I’m your clone but I want to be my own person, not your shadow. )

Title: Rehabilitation
Relationship: Bruce Wayne/Clark Kent
Characters: Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, Alfred Pennyworth, Shondra Kinsolving
Continuity: Heroes of the Squared Circle, a DC/pro wrestling fusion (click for notes and all chapters).
Warnings/Spoilers: None
Rating: PG-13
Word Count 3800
Summary: Clark stays with Bruce as he recovers, but the world of gimmicks and kayfabe is never far from their minds.

( The Kryptonian was never going to be a legend. Whatever you’re going to be next, that’s where your heart is. )

Title: Wayne Manor
Relationship: Bruce Wayne/Clark Kent
Characters: Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, Leslie Thompkins, Alfred Pennyworth
Continuity: Heroes of the Squared Circle, a DC/pro wrestling fusion (click for notes and all chapters).
Warnings/Spoilers: None
Rating: PG-13
Word Count 2800
Summary: Clark searches for Bruce--and finds more than he bargains for.

( Young man, I am only doing this because I have heard Bruce speak of you, and I have seen his face when he speaks of you. )

Title: Moving Forward
Relationship: Bruce Wayne/Clark Kent
Characters: Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, Dick Grayson, Tim Drake, Barbara Gordon, Jason Todd, Lex Luthor, Jean Paul Valley
Continuity: Heroes of the Squared Circle, a DC/pro wrestling fusion (click for notes and all chapters).
Warnings/Spoilers: None
Rating: PG-13
Word Count 3000
Summary: In the wake of Bruce's injury, the DCW keeps moving forward, because it must. Clark Kent, however, has a harder time of it.

( At this moment, in Akron Ohio, the DCW is putting on a show. If he were to turn on the television, he would see them there: Hawkman and Green Lantern, Batgirl and Poison Ivy. Gleaming and glowing like phantasms, stories come to life. )