mithen

Title: Cold Feet in the Hydrangea Room
Pairing/Characters: Sherlock/John
Rating: PG
Warnings/Spoilers: None
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Summary: For the prompt on the BBC Sherlock kink meme: "Sherlock and John are not in London and discover that the small inn they are staying in only has one bed available. Cue cliche/awkward bed sharing NOT ending in sex! Bromance or pre-slash is fine and sleep-cuddling is most definitely fine."
Word Count: 2000

( Sherlock's back rose and fell gently, and he could hear Sherlock's soft breath in the silence of the room. He matched the sound with his own breath, letting them ebb and flow together. )

Title: The Dark Knight Descends
Relationship: Clark/Bruce
Characters: Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne, Dick Grayson, Joker, John Stewart
Continuity: Heroes of the Squared Circle, a DC/pro wrestling fusion (click for notes and all chapters).
Warnings/Spoilers: None
Rating: NC-17
Word Count 4300
Summary: Clark and Bruce's relationship moves forward, and Bruce makes his debut against the Joker.

( Have you got some kind of bat-fetish you didn't tell me about? Because I think I deserve to know about that. )

Title: Clarity of Vision, Chapter 31/32
Relationship: Thorin/Bilbo
Characters: Bilbo Baggins, Thorin, Kili, Fili, Balin, Dwalin, Dís, Thror, Gimli, Bard
Fandom: Hobbit
Warnings/Spoilers: None
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 4300
Story Summary: In a Middle-Earth where Erebor never fell, a shadow remains in the heart of the Lonely Mountain. Bilbo Baggins finds himself drawn reluctantly into a quest that will lead him across the continent--from Bree to Lake Evendim to the icy North and beyond--with a party of five dwarves searching for an artifact that will cure the ailing King Thrór.
Chapter Summary: Winter turns into spring in Erebor: bittersweet times as the days grow longer and different partings draw near.

( There was so much work to be done, so much to be set right. So much to do and so much to learn, and for a while it seemed like they had all the time in the world. )

Title: Submission Holds
Relationship: Clark/Bruce
Characters: Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne, Dick Grayson, Wonder Woman, Pamela Isley
Continuity: Heroes of the Squared Circle, a DC/pro wrestling fusion (click for notes and all chapters).
Warnings/Spoilers: None
Rating: R
Word Count 3400
Summary: Bruce is finally back, and soon he and Clark are getting sweaty and grappling with each other. After all, that clawhold needs work, and they have to practice that armbar...

( When Clark admitted he hadn't given any thought to whether Krypton had two moons or three, Bruce had thrown up his hands in disgust and accused him of lacking commitment to his gimmick, and Clark had started laughing so hard that the other diners had glared at them. )

Title: Clarity of Vision, Chapter 30/32
Relationship: Thorin/Bilbo
Characters: Bilbo Baggins, Thorin, Kili, Fili, Balin, Dwalin, Dís, Thrain, Thror, Gimli
Fandom: Hobbit
Warnings/Spoilers: None
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 4400
Story Summary: In a Middle-Earth where Erebor never fell, a shadow remains in the heart of the Lonely Mountain. Bilbo Baggins finds himself drawn reluctantly into a quest that will lead him across the continent--from Bree to Lake Evendim to the icy North and beyond--with a party of five dwarves searching for an artifact that will cure the ailing King Thrór.
Chapter Summary: Thorin returns to Erebor, and Bilbo Baggins enters the Lonely Mountain for the first time.

( Bilbo found himself missing Fíli and Kíli's chatter intensely. Cheering words seemed to falter in the bleak wind, and the locked and hidden door seemed somehow ominous. )

Title: Clarity of Vision, Chapter 29/32
Relationship: Thorin/Bilbo
Characters: Bilbo Baggins, Thorin, Kili, Fili, Balin, Dwalin, Dís, Thranduil, Tauriel, Dori
Fandom: Hobbit
Warnings/Spoilers: None
Rating: PG
Word Count: 3100
Story Summary: In a Middle-Earth where Erebor never fell, a shadow remains in the heart of the Lonely Mountain. Bilbo Baggins finds himself drawn reluctantly into a quest that will lead him across the continent--from Bree to Lake Evendim to the icy North and beyond--with a party of five dwarves searching for an artifact that will cure the ailing King Thrór.
Chapter Summary: The party travels east through the Greenwood, where they are welcomed by Thranduil for an uncomfortable dinner.

( So, the Exiled Prince returns to the Lonely Mountain. Will there be rejoicing at your return, I wonder? )

Title: The First Mouth-Collision is the Sweetest
Pairing/Characters: Superman/Batman
Rating: PG
Warnings/Spoilers: None
Fandom: Justice League Animated Series
Summary: Written for the Let's Talk January meme, a request by lakiunderwook, "a kiss happened by accident that led to many hidden feelings."
Word Count: 450

( It had been an accident. A complete and total accident. )

navaan asked me for some Blakes 7 thoughts!

First, a quick introduction to Blakes 7. B7 was a BBC science fiction show that ran for four series in the early 1980s. It was a dystopian show about a rebel against the oppressive Federation named Roj Blake, who steals a super-high-tech spaceship while being transported to a prison planet and escapes along with a motley group of smugglers, burglars, and embezzlers, who he then drags into his rebellion. It is most notable for being witty, sardonic, morally gray and bleak while also managing to sport some of the most utterly insane costuming choices known to humanity.

Blakes 7 was the first fandom I ever wrote fic for, and I entered it in the most roundabout way possible: I was in a graduate-school class on media theory and there were readings on fandom, something I had never heard of in my life. I found and read Henry Jenkins's "Textual Poachers" and Camille Bacon-Smith's "Enterprising Women" (both highly recommended, by the way, although the fandom they describe is pre-Internet and thus very different in some ways) and both of them mentioned Blakes 7 as a key text, so I decided to find and watch it, and I was hooked immediately. The relationship between passionate idealist Blake and the cynical, cold-hearted Kerr Avon was so very interesting, and their tug-of-war about trust and friendship was completely enthralling. It didn't hurt that they spent a lot of time staring intently at each other or saving each others' lives by throwing their arms around each other.

Here are some images of Avon and Blake Being Intense together (the images and text are taken from this page:

( Really old but very specific spoilers below the cut. Also, 80s BBC fashion. YOu have been warned. )

starsandsea asked me to talk about the Silmarillion a little bit, and I was happy to oblige!

When I first read Lord of the Rings as a kid, I tried to read it something like four times and every time I stalled out at the Council of Elrond, where everyone sits around talking about history and myth. I finally could only get through the series by skipping that chapter entirely. So it's odd that the Silmarillion--which is basically pure distilled essence of Council of Elrond in book form--is a book I love so passionately. And yet I do!

Part of it is that I've always loved formal, archaic language for its own sake: I've been known to read the King James Bible for fun, and I adore The Worm Oroboros, which has passages like:

So the Silmarillion, which is entirely Tolkien at his most formal, with no hobbits to keep things grounded, has an immediate linguistic appeal. That said, the lack of hobbits (or any other character who isn't Fulfilling Their High and Glorious Destiny) is obviously the book's weakest point as well. Everything is Epic and Overwhelming, and one yearns sometimes for Pippin to show up and tell Turin that maybe he should stop and smoke some pipeweed and chill out. And in my copy of the book, the spine is cracked at the family trees, because I never did fully grasp the difference between Maglor and Maedhros and Maeglin or Finrod and Fingon and Fingolfin.

But oh, the stories! They're beautiful on their own, but part of what's so amazing about them is the depth and richness they give to the rest of Tolkien's work. Hobbit and LOTR do stand on their own, but once you've absorbed the greater world...well, knowing the story of Beren and Luthien in full adds so much depth and sadness to Aragorn and Arwen's story. Knowing that the White Tree of Gondor comes from a cutting from the tree that grew in Numenor, which was a sapling of Telperion, one of the two Trees hallowed by the Valar--it adds so much bittersweetness when you're more aware of the depth of history, the way things play out over and over in ever-diminishing yet still beautiful ripples. Or, to tie into my essay on Thorin, if you know what Gondolin was and what it means to the elves, then the moment when Thorin lifts Orcrist and Gandalf says it was "forged in Gondolin before the Fall" will give you an extra shiver. And if you know what dwarves did to Thingol, King of the Sindarin elves, then the fact that Thranduil allows Orcrist--a sword probably wielded by Ecthelion, one of the greatest of elf-lords; a sword that probably slew a balrog--to be buried along with Thorin is an absolutely staggering show of respect.

I actually love the Silmarillion so much that I've read and enjoyed much of the series Tolkien's son put together collecting his reams of notebooks and tracing the development of the themes and stories and characters in his work. It's some pretty amazingly dry stuff, but worth it for things like discovering Tolkien fretted over the fact that his origins of the Sun and Moon didn't match actual cosmology--for a while he even toyed with the possibility of having the moon be an orbiting fortess of Morgoth's. And he wanted to find a way to change the fact that there were trees in eastern Middle Earth before there was a sun and moon, because it wasn't realistic to have trees growing without light. Thank goodness his son kept to the older drafts, otherwise we might never have had the beautiful passage of the rising of the first moon as the Noldor leave Valinor in exile: "The servants of Morgoth were filled with amazement, but the Elves of the Outer Lands looked up in delight; and even as the Moon rose above the darkness in the west, Fingolfin let blow his silver trumpets and began his march into Middle-earth, and the shadows of his host went long and black before them." The moon as a fortress of Morgoth, blasphemy!

So, uh, yeah. I might have a lot of thoughts about the Silmarillion! It's not an easy read, but I've found it to be incredibly rewarding and I've re-read it countless times.

rijsg asked what attracts me to a pairing, which is...a dangerous thing to ask, because oh boy, do I like to talk about stuff like that. I've actually turned this over a lot in my head, because there's a difference between "I like this pairing, they're good together" and "OH I CLUTCH MY HEART WHEN THEY SPEAK TOGETHER I MUST WRITE THEM FIC THIS INSTANT." I ended up with three things that tend to show up a lot together--any one or two and I ship them, but put all three together and DAMN, it's my Kryptonite.

0. Oh, first, a baseline: I generally need a LOT of canon interactions between the two--or at the very least, their relationship needs to be very central to the story. I have a hard time shipping anyone who doesn't have a nice rich canon together, I'm not someone who can enjoy making up my own head canon for relationships, sometimes to my chagrin. Part of why the reboot has been hard for my Clark/Bruce muses is that at a certain level, these two (new) characters have had almost no interaction we've seen together. Yes, there's still lots of other canons out there and I can graft the pre-reboot history onto them, but at some level it feels hollow. Same for rebooted Kirk/Spock, although they're making progress there.

1. Complementary opposites. I don't tend to ship canon enemies (Batman/Joker and Sherlock/Moriarty leave me cold) but on the other hand I don't tend to ship buddies either (Ron/Harry, Pippin/Merry, Booster/Beetle, Armin/Eren from Attack on Titan are all very nice but lack the spark I need for a true OTP). What draws me in are pairs where the backgrounds, the motivations, or the personalities lead to friction, but the emotional connection transcends that friction. I love Batman/Catwoman, for example, because the playful/serious personality and selfish/altruistic motivation clash creates sparks for me. Holmes and Watson are often called "the heart and the mind" and I tend to adore pairings with an extremely intellectual person and a more gut-level (but still intelligent) person (hello there Kirk/Spock, Blake/Avon, Bruce/Clark, Illya/Napoleon, Stephen Maturin/Jack Aubrey). It especially helps if the two are complementary opposite types working together in service of a cause bigger than themselves--a ship or starship or country or organization or cause. Give me lots of passionate arguments about means and ends and goals and I'm a happy shipper.

2. Loners. I tend to love pairs in which both members are isolated and have a hard time making meaningful human connections, in part because it's such a thrill that they have each other. Everyone I've listed above fits that pretty well (Aubrey/Maturin maybe the least) and I'll just add Alan/Denny from Boston Legal while I'm at it.

I'm going to take a moment and mention that very often the "warmer" person in my OTP tends to be taken as more emotionally accessible and open and expressive than the "cooler" one--and that it's often not so at all, it's just a different way of keeping people at a distance. Jim Kirk, Clark Kent, John Watson, Bilbo Baggins are all people who seem more able to make human connections than Spock, Bruce Wayne, Sherlock Holmes, Thorin--but canonically they tend to be just as lonely and isolated, just in a different way. Kirk has plenty of flirtations, but almost never anything deep and meaningful (when it is, she dies, of course--an unfortunate theme with all these characters). Command isolates him. For all his vaunted love and affection for all, Clark Kent is shockingly low on people he lets get close to him. If I'm keeping track correctly, in the reboot only four people alive seem to know his secret identity: Diana, Lois (she just found out and I think the knowledge is temporary, but we'll see), Lana Lang--and Bruce. His alien background always lends an element of loneliness to his character--I'm not a big fan of the storylines where he mopes and broods about it, but I like it as a melancholy thread that runs under his interactions. It's the Fortress of Solitude, not the Fortress of Hanging Out With My Buddies. Bilbo Baggins lives alone of his own choice, never seems to regret it, and is something of a misanthropist in general it seems--he likes people, but on his own terms. And I'm sure theses have been written about the fact that John Watson is maybe even more unable than Sherlock Holmes to easily express emotions and connection. Everyone thinks of him as the warm and affectionate one, but nearly all of his connections (everyone at that Christmas party) are in his life because of Sherlock. Even Sholto, his commanding officer who he admires greatly, he pretty much never actually interacts with. Mary Morstan is a distinct exception (a little oddly, considering in canon he only met her because of Holmes), and she does complicate things a bit, but that's a topic for a few days from now.

Even my few het OTPs (I ship lots of het and femslash, but not many reach the passion of the m/m pairings for me) have isolation as a theme--for example, Jarod/Miss Parker from The Pretender, two very isolated and lonely individuals who, even though they're technically enemies, end up having more in common than anyone else. The femslash pairing that comes closest to an OTP for me is Huntress/Power Girl in the new continuity, and in part that's because they have that same "two outsiders against the rest of the world" dynamic (they're very like Kirk and Spock in that Karen has a lot of casual relationships and Helena stays aloof, but they're the most important thing in each others' lives beyond a doubt). "You and Me Against the World" is probably my OTP philosophy theme song.

3. Teleology. This is maybe a strange one, and one I hadn't really teased out until answering this question! Teleology is the study of endings and destinations...I've always been struck by how, considering how much I love fluffy stories, I end up so very often drawn to pairings where one member dies next to the other, and often where one member kills the other. Qui-gon's death scene with Obi-wan impressed me enough that it overcame my teacher/student squick, and that is saying something. Thorin/Bilbo, Kunzite/Zoicite from Sailor Moon, Picard/Q...all the same. Kirk/Spock and Holmes/Watson (lots more about this in the coming Sherlock post) have their own weird takes on it (and how much does it kill me that Spock wasn't there when Kirk died? SO MUCH). Denny Crane and Alan Shore in Boston Legal don't get there in canon, but they're on their way.

And then there are the OTPs where one member actually kills the other...Londo/G'Kar, Blake/Avon, Ian/Hamish, to be honest if I had a Harry Potter OTP it would probably be Dumbledore/Snape (again, overcoming my teacher/student squick). And of course Clark and Bruce manage, in alternate continuities and Elseworlds and dystopian futures, to die together AND/OR kill each other over and over again.

I think in part this is because, in some ways, I am a hardcore endgame shipper. A clinch or a wedding isn't enough for me--"till death do us part? I require proof." When characters die together or kill each other, it means that at the ultimate end, they were there for each other. They were, in the final moments, the most important things in each others' lives.

It also gives me something to save them from, through the power of my imagination. I don't usually even go for full-on AUs that rescue them from death, it's enough to write (on the screen or in my mind) the brief happy moments of connection snatched from the inevitable ending. Thorin and Bilbo are one of the few OTPs that I have ended up giving a complete pocket-universe AU, and I suspect that's because there just isn't enough time for a lot of stolen happy moments before the end. Generally it adds pleasure to the creation for me, knowing the bitter awaits and thus writing the sweet.

So give me any one of these and I'll probably find a pairing interesting. Give me any two and I'll ship it. But give me three, and watch me fall head-over-heels for it!