Bagheera

I remain fannishly homeless, but one of the brief stops along the way during my absence from blogging was Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch series (consisting of three novels: Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy). It was an actual stop, because look here, I wrote fic for it in 2016! Just one little thing which is rough around the edges, but not bad:

boundaries (bleeding at the edges) (5133 words) by Bagheera
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Imperial Radch Series - Ann Leckie
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Gem of Sphene/Translator Zeiat, Justice of Toren One Esk Nineteen | Breq/Mercy of Kalr
Characters: Translator Zeiat, Gem of Sphene, Justice of Toren One Esk Nineteen | Breq, Mercy of Kalr
Additional Tags: slight body horror, because ancillaries, and the Presger, this is the definition of Category: Other, but also extremely shippy, in a nonsexual way, post-Ancillary Mercy
Summary:

Zeiat expresses a sudden interest in becoming an ancillary.

With that little plug out of the way, let me say a few things about the Radch series. It's a sci-fi trilogy about an evil empire (the titular Radch) which is based on jump gate technology, sentient but enslaved spaceships which more or less require human drones and an Emperor with multiple clones of herself. Note the pronoun - the Radchaii only use she, regardless of biological gender, so one of the fun, mindbending sci-fi aspects of the novels is that either you think of everyone as female or you're sort of left guessing, through textual clues, what the human characters actually look like. The main character, however, is one of the ships, the Justice of Toren, or rather, all that remains of one of the ships: Breq, a single human drone with the ship's memories, who identifies as ship rather than human. For me, these transhumanist sci-fi elements are the best part of the story (although Leckie is also excellent at characters - her secondary characters are sometimes a bit flat/over-drawn but the main characters are lovely and complex and much time is spent on character interaction). My favorite characters are the ships (Justice of Toren and also Sphene) and the Presger translators Dlique and Zeiat (who are best described as 'other', I guess, not in the capital O, lit crit sense, but in the 'weird weird weird' sense). I also like the ending to the series, because you think it's going to be a Star Wars type situation where they take down the evil empire and that's it, but that's not what happens.

(Side note: I was also briefly into Star Wars as a fandom. Hux/Kylo Ren, yes, I know, I hang my head in shame...)

Imperial Radch, like all book-scifi-fandoms, is mostly a Yuletide affair, but it does have a decent following and it's pretty unique in that depending on how you view the gender/sex thing in regards to slash, it's either all femslash or all "???" (technically there are a few possible pairings where you could be fairly certain that it's two biological males, but slash isn't really a thing here). So if you go through the AO3 page it's full of that little back icon that means "other" with some green for gen, so that's cool :)

On a whim today I went on Dreamwidth and looked at my profile page and saw that it was 6 years out of date. Six years? Has it really been that long since I blogged regularly? No, not quite, I was pretty active until 2013, but it sure feels that long.

Then I looked at my friendslist, and at my friendslist on LJ and I almost left again, because I'm not sure anyone here remembers me, or that we've still got things in common, and even if we do - after giving no life sign for two years (my last post is from Jan 1 2015) even the people who did know me might not care anymore. I'm a shoddy long-distance friend. This, by the way, is one of the reasons I'm making a post now: I was thinking of several friendships I had with people where I failed to keep in contact, and my LJ friends are one example. Another reason I'm here is that last weekend my boyfriend gently nudged me into this direction by mentioning that there are a lot of things I loved to do that I don't do anymore. He meant drawing and writing, I think, but blogging is also one of these things. He's right, and blogging is the thing I feel like doing, so I'm here now.

But looking at my friendslist, I also see that I seem to have come at another moment of oh-no-LJ-is-deleting-us, so maybe it's also a good time to rescue my old online presence!

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So, that's it. I think I'll give blogging another try, and see how it goes, and if I feel the itch to write some fanfic, all the better. If you still remember me and don't hate me for being MIA for years, say hello!

Hello 2015! Happy New Year to everyone :) New Year's Eve in the US is /weird/ - no fireworks! No people on the street! No noisy banging and drunken yelling all day long! I went to a pub with some friends and they had free party hats and a screening of the ball dropping on Times Square and people sang Auld Lang Syne, so that was nice, but still it doesn't really feel like New Year's Eve normally does.

Jan 1 also means that it's reveal time on Yuletide. Here's what I wrote this year:

First Steps (11207 words) by Bagheera
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Culture - Iain M. Banks
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: GOU Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints, Lededje Y'breq, Original Female Character(s), Original Male Character(s), Original Non-Human Character(s)
Additional Tags: Minds (Culture), Drones (Culture), Crimes & Criminals, Childhood, Artificial Intelligence, Surface Detail, Cameos, Meet the Family, Special Circumstances
Summary:

"Did I design you a warship or a party clown, child?"

Writing this fic was HARD (so many failed attempts!) but ultimately it all came together, and now that people have commented on it I feel very happy about it. If there was an active Culture fandom on LJ/DW, that could be my new fannish home. I love this series, and do highly reccommend it if you're a) into sci-fi and b) into socialist anarchist utopia and c) don't mind it getting pretty dark and violent at times. Banks had A++ politics, although I recommend starting with one of the later books and not "Consider Phlebas" (I reccommend "Look to Windward", "Excession" or "Surface Detail" [though this one has many triggery things, so beware] as starting points - each book has a different set of characters, so spoilers are rarely an issue). Check it out, people who like space opera like Star Trek or the Vorkosigan Saga!

Happy holidays, flist! I've been gone for forever, and I'm sad that I don't really have a proper online presence in fandom anymore, but that's how it is. In fannish terms I'm homeless and unemployed, and since I'm fairly bad at making new fannish friends unless it's through writing and commenting, I don't see that changing anytime soon.

But I have somehow managed to participate in Yuletide and write actual fic for it. And I almost posted it just now before I remembered that Yuletide has a reveal and I'm still anon... whew, that was close. So instead here are the two gifts I got:

Something Fishy Off the Coast of Denmark (7209 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Eight Days of Luke - Diana Wynne Jones
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: David Allard/Luke (Eight Days of Luke)
Characters: David Allard, Luke (Eight Days of Luke), Astrid Price, Þórr | Thor, Other(s)
Additional Tags: References to Norse Religion & Lore, Implied Slash, Adventure, Explicit Language
Summary:

Luke shows up to invite David and Astrid on a trip to Denmark. They know better than to expect an ordinary holiday.

Eight Days of Luke was a fandom I also offered and really hoped I'd be assigned - instead I got a lovely long fic for it. It had Norse mythology even I'm not that familiar with, and as you might know it's one of my pet topics, plus some cool real world stuff on Denmark. Add to that the pairing I ship in this fandom, and a great use of female characters and the fact that is long and it's a big YAY for this story!

I also got a treat for a fandom that I offered and requested, and that, honestly, I was terrified I'd be assigned because it would have been SO hard to write - Kipling's "Kim". Why is "Kim" a terrifying fandom? Because a) historical sociolects, b) historical foreign setting involving major research and c) highly questionable and problematic source text. Nevertheless, at least one published "Kim" fanfic exists ("The Imperial Agent" by Timeri Murari) but until now there was no fanfic on AO3.

The Impressionists - Part Two (3219 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Kim - Rudyard Kipling, Stalky and Co - Rudyard Kipling
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Kimball O'Hara, Lurgan Sahib, Hurree Babu, Dickson Quartus, Pussy Abanazar, The Head (Stalky), Stalky Corkran, Colonel Creighton
Additional Tags: Crossover
Summary:

The boys at United Services College are told a tale of Kim and Stalky on campaign.

It's called "Part Two" because the title refers to a chapter title in Stalky & Co. Stalky is another adventure/coming of age/children's novel by Kipling. I don't know if it is more or less well known than "Kim" today (definitely less well known in Germany, but I think that's because Germans have stronger interest in India than in Victorian military boarding schools.) In my request I mentioned that I think "Kim", "Stalky & Co." and "The Jungle Books" are absolutely begging for crossovers, since they're all to some extent about India under the British Empire, and Kim, Stalky and Mowgli are so similar, yet each of them occupies a slightly different position in the Imperial order. I wish I could write that crossover myself, but the biggest obstacle for me is in fact the language of Stalky & Co. (this book is actually about as difficult for me to grasp in all its nuances as Shakespeare - from a purely linguistic perspective). The author of this fic, though, manages the language with aplomb and has done their research, so this is a very credible additional chapter for Stalky & Co.

Stalky, for those not familiar with the book, is a boy hero much like Kim or Mowgli - no parents in the picture, growing up "wild" at the boarding school, clever and self-confident but (and Kipling consciously and explicitly writes against the dominant school story tradition of his time) defiant and rebellious when it comes to authority. Most of the book is about how Stalky's clique breaks the school rules (think Harry Potter without much of a plot) and complain about cricket and military propaganda - and then after graduating Stalky nevertheless becomes a heroic agent of the Empire in India, and is suited for the job precisely because he spent all his school years bending the rules of the system. Weird stuff, and as difficult to judge as all of Kipling.

I think a crossover could really get into some of the tough issues and problematic elements in Kipling. For one thing, there's the race / class issue. Stalky is a proper Victorian British school boy who, the final chapters imply, makes a career in the military/intelligence service. Kim is born white, but culturally somewhere in between, in terms of class he is definitely very low on any social ladder, with some potential for mobility into either direction. Mowgli, if you want to add him to the picture, is Indian and Hindu, but in practice doesn't belong to any human society, and therefore doesn't really have any concept of race or class - but he would instantly experience the barriers if he left the wild (as he does in some chapters of the "Jungle Book"). How would the three react to each other if they met? What would the story look like if you took away Kipling's basic assumption that the Empire is better than any alternatives?

My own story, which I will post once it's reveal time, was a mess to write even though I got a great fandom and a great prompt. My problem isn't really a writers block (all in all I probably wrote close to 30 000 words, more if you count pre-Yuletide drafts in the same fandom) but a mix of low confidence and a short attention span. I start a story, I get into it for a few days or even just a few hours, and then suddenly I look at it and lose interest, or get the feeling that I bit off more than I can chew. Then I start another story... This is a problem that I don't just have in writing, but in all areas of life, particularly relationships, but I find it particularly frustrating when it comes to writing because until a few years ago I was *fine* when it came to writing. I had the occasional dry month or unproductive phase, but I writing fic or term papers was easy and I felt really confident about it, and I experienced it as a constant learning process - and now I feel as though I am unlearning instead. Having a deadline was both a blessing and a curse - the story that I ended up writing would have needed a lot more editing and it should have been longer, but on the other hand I finally finished something!

I haven't posted anything since March! And I haven't really participated in fandom, either. I've read a bit of fic here and there: quite a lot of Blake's 7, but it didn't result in me wanting to write any, also everything good there is for certain pairings in Discworld/Pratchett fandom (namely: City Watch, and some Witches... and I would have devoured every last bit of Small Gods fic, except there isn't any) because I recently discovered the joys of Discworld. And some X-Men fic after the new movie, but I didn't get into the fandom as much as I did after First Class. And I did some work for that big, unfinished DW audio project we started ages ago, but not as much as I should have >__<

Mostly, what I've been doing is preparing for a move to the US! Yeah, big news there, and I completely failed to post about it here. I'll be teaching German language classes at Yale for a year. The decision was really spontaneous - the job is part of an exchange programme that sends German PhD students to Yale to teach German classes, and somehow this year there was one open place still left and my advisor/boss said it'd be a great opportunity. I didn't have much time to decide, so I just said Yes spontaneously, handed in my application and got the job. I'm still not sure what to think about it: on the one hand it's super scary, because Yale isn't just some little university, and the students will probably be way posher than me, and I've never taught German to non-native speakers, so the job part of it is going to be REALLY demanding, plus I'm a little sad about leaving behind all my friends, even if it's just for a year. As usual, I'm anxious about EVERYTHING. But on the other hand, I've never been to the US and going there is super exciting (and I'll be paid for it, heh), and looking back on what I posted this winter, I really wanted an opportunity to get out and do something different. Plus, it'll look great on my CV!

Connecticut isn't really the place I would have chosen to go in the US - if I had the choice, I would have chosen some place that doesn't look so much like Central Europe ;) Does anyone have any opinions on Yale or New Haven or CT? Or just general advice about the US?

I just (well, yesterday evening) came back from a 5 day trip to London. It was extremely spontaneous - I found out Tuesday that I was flying there on Sunday. Our English Department offers a theatre trip to London every spring, organized by my boss/thesis supervisor. This year the date was a bit unfortunate, in the middle of spring break, so he didn't manage to fill all twenty available places, and offered the three remaining ones (for free! they would have cost 300 Euros!) to his TAs/research assistants. I'd never say no to a cheap trip to London, so I went. Luckily I also knew many of the other people who went - the two girls I shared a room with at the hotel are good friends of mine, and there were the other TAs and some of my former tutorial students, so I had good company throughout and it was great fun.

On Sunday, after a terribly early flight and a terrible train ride to London from Stansted airport, I went over to Erin and Katy's place for a quick visit and a late breakfast and met some other fandom people and watched the penultimate episode of Blake's 7. Then I went to the hotel, met up with the other people, and we went on a walking tour of the city that ended in a visit to a pub - I've already forgotten what it was called, but it wasn't that great because it was full of drunk Russian rugby fans (of all things - I didn't even know there *were* Russian rugby fans!).

On Monday I went to the British library with my boss to get a reader's pass and then met up with one of my friends to visit the National Portrait Gallery (which is surprisingly interesting for a collection that consists entirely of portraits) and in the evening we went to the Bush Theatre to see We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884 - 1915 by Jackie Sibblies Drury. This is a very recent play, and it started what turned out to be a common theme of all four plays that we saw. German history: it's a gift that keeps on giving. Namibia used to be a German colony. Germany wasn't nearly as successful at colonialism as England, Spain, Portugal or France, and as a consequence, its colonial history is usually forgotten and overshadowed by the two World Wars, but it is in fact every bit as bloody and horrible as the rest of it. In Namibia, the Germans first cooperated with the Herero and considered this tribe a model of perfection - and when the Herero stopped being colonial poster children at the beginning of the 20th century, the the Germans brutally killed most of the Herero by stealing all their cattle and driving them into the desert. In the play, which is about a rehearsal of a play (the eponymous "presentation" about the Herero) by some young black and white actors, one of the actor characters called the genocide of the Herero a "rehearsal of the holocaust". I'm not sure you can say that, because both genocides were singular events in history, but at the same time it is a connection you can't help but see once you learn more about it.

The play itself is excellent, because it plays with the conventions of theatre, and brilliantly tears down the fourth wall - not just between actors and audience, but between the play and the play within the play. The ending is deeply unsettling because after a brutal culmination of violence it ends with about five minutes of silence and the audience is left unsure if this is really it, which I thought was very well done.

Then on Tuesday we saw War Horse and amazingly, we had seats in the first row - I could touch the stage! This play is an exceptional visual spectacle, so this total immersion was magical. The horses, if you haven't seen them, are fully mechanical props moved by several actors/puppet players and it's incredible, but they look and move exactly like real horses but at the same time they look like these steampunky wooden automatons - I have never seen anything like it. War Horse, of course, is a play about WWI, so again there were evil Germans, but also a "one good German" type character (it is a ridiculously sentimal play, but I admit I did have tears in my eyes at some point - I mean, horses! my inner ten year old was spell-bound). After the show, some of us joked that there was a theme emerging, but we thought that was it, since the other two plays had nothing to do with Germany... but we were wrong.

On Wednesday, we saw The Weir by Conor McPherson. This play is more Irish than Ireland. It's a one-acter set in an Irish Pub. The stage was set up, rather hyperrealistically, as said pub, and the characters were all terribly Irish, and the whole play is about them drinking whiskey and beer and telling ghost and fairy stories - it was rather dire, to be honest, especially if you don't like realism very much, but we couldn't help but laugh. Now and then, the pub goers brought up "the Germans" - meaning all the tourists who come in the summer and cursing them for ruining their pub.

Still, the last play was the new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, Stephen Ward, and it had nothing to do with Germany. It's about a British political scandal in the 1960s, the Profumo affair - the war minister, Profumo, had an extramarital affair with a young girl, Christine Keeler, who also slept with a Russian spy. To cover up this affair, the conservative government at the time picked Stephen Ward, a successful osteopath, as the scapegoat and put him on trial for procuring and "immoral earnings" because Christine Keeler lived with him - false accusations, even though Ward led a wild life. The government faked some evidence, Ward was convicted and vilified by the press, and in the end committed suicide. This is a weird plot for a musical, but I thought it did work quite well - I hate sentimental musicals, or musicals that are only about the audiovisual spectacle, but Stephen Ward was more like a normal play with some singing and a rather black-and-white morality (the conservatives were all evil bastards and Ward the innocent victim), plus it passed the Bechdel test with flying colors. Critically, the musical was a flop (Webber's composing was uninspired and unoriginal) and it failed at the box office, too, but I was charmed by the leading man's performance - Stephen Ward came across as charming, graceful, slightly diabolic but at the same time strangely innocent and of course tragic, and his singing was lovely. However, our whole group pretty much face-palmed as soon as the show began: the very first scene begins with the curtain lifting to reveal Ward standing amidst some Madame Tussaud-style wax figures of historical villains - the acid bath killer, Jack the Ripper, Stalin... and wax figure Hitler. That was the only reference to Germany, but it was on the nose enough to leave a lasting impression.

Aside from theatre, we did the usual touristy stuff - various museums, a bit of shopping, Camden Market, pubs, food from all over the world... Two things that did stand out were our tour of the new BBC buildings near Oxford Circus. Compared to the old BBC, they were amazingly modern, and the tour had some fun interactive bits. Among other things, we could stage a radio play, which was really interesting. And the other cool thing was Westminster Abbey - my boss gave us this tip, so three of us went there in the afternoon on Wednesday and attended the Ash Wednesday Evensong service. Anglican services are really lovely, and of course the choir in Westminster is amazing. It was inspiring enough that although I didn't take part in communion and didn't go up front to be signed with ashes for lent (I'm not baptized, so I can't), I did go and get a blessing - it can't hurt, and it was a fascinating experience to take part in this sort of communal ritual in a foreign country.

To sum up, it was a lovely trip, all the more wonderful for being so unexpected :)

I'm gonna talk about books in this post, that is, books I've read in 2014 so far. Most of them are Children's Fiction because I'm doing my PhD on CF. I'm still about anxious about that, because on the one hand I'm enjoying the reading a lot, but on the other hand it's one of those genres that have been quite popular, especially among female lit students, for the last decade or so and I kinda wish I had a topic where I didn't feel the need to add It isn't about Harry Potter! every time I mention it. But it's also about tricksters and that pretty much guarantees 100% fun in my reading. Well, almost. Now, about the books:

Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer: I wasn't sure if Artemis qualifies as a trickster figure, and having read the book now, I'd say no. On the one hand, he's clever, operating outside social norms (he's a child acting like an adult and a criminal) and an underdog (again: child, plus he decides he wants to antagonize fairies even though he can't do magic), plus he's a bit of a fool in an emotional sense because he really doesn't know himself very well. But on the other hand, he's so serious a character that the narrator feels the need to comment every time he makes a (lame) joke, and he's extremely haughty/stuck up. One of the minor characters on the other hand (Mulch Diggums, a kleptomaniac dwarf) is a proper Trickster right down to the scatological humor. As for the book itself, I really didn't like it - it's so over the top that it might be a parody of the spy/heist genre, but combines this with really serious topics (mentally ill parents) and in the end there's hardly any emotional resolution. It's the first part in a series, of course, but there was too much action and too little genuine feeling to make an impact.

Fantastic Mr Fox by Roald Dahl: I used to own this as a kid and loved it quite a lot. It's still a good kid's book but wince-inducingly sexist. Fox is of course a trickster, and there's even a feast full of carnivalesque excess.

Mr Stink by David Walliams: An okay book, a bit paint by numbers - a down-trodden nerdy little girl befriends a bum who turns her life upside down and makes everything better. It's also contemporary satire targeting British conservatives, Starbucks, our attitude towards homeless people, etc. I was rather disappointed when it turned out that Mr Stink used to be an aristocrat, because COME ON - this negates the whole "homeless people are people too" message. But he is a trickster.

Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens by J.M. Barrie: Barrie actually wrote several "original" Peter Pans, and this is one of them. In this, Peter is a baby (no really - this creeped me out to no end! He's supposedly several DAYS old, yet TALKS. WTF, Barrie) living among the animals and fairies in Kensignton Gardens. Not much happens. The narrator is a grown man addressing children and it's super-annoying, creepy AND patronizing. I did enjoy one episode: a feisty little girl who regularly frightens her older brother with a goat "monster" under their bed gets lost in the gardens and spends the night there. Instead of freezing to death, she meets Peter and nearly stays with him. When she returns to her family, she is coaxed into giving Peter her nightmare goat as a gift and it becomes his mount.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Frank L. Baum: Had read this before, and it was more entertaining than I remember. None of the characters QUITE fit the trickster archetype. I think Scarecrow comes closest because he's a wise fool and comedic relief, plus he's got a grotesque body.

Baron Munchhausen by Erich Kästner: Munchhausen is one of the German folk tricksters (although he is an actual historical figure and of relatively recent origin - 18th century - so he's perhaps more a literary figure than a folk hero). He basically tells outrageous stories his manly yet completely implausible exploits in the Russian army and fighting the Turks. Not sure if I'll include non-English CF.

Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi: We're not in Disneyland anymore. Wouldn't give this to present day children to read because there would be SO MANY questions. I mean, it starts with a drunk guy who thinks that he's delirious when a piece of wood talks to him and it only gets more inappropriate - there's an episode where a farmer catches Pinocchio stealing grapes, puts him in a dog collar and forces him to become the farm's watchdog... and compared to everyone else in this book, this farmer is nice and sane. Still, amidst the insanity and cruelty, there are some visuals that stay with you - the boys transformed into donkeys, the fishes eating the donkey skin off Pinocchio, the talking puppet itself.

Watership Down by Richard Adams: Utterly brilliant and lovely, but marred by outdated sexism and other ideological baggage. Still, would read this to my children. IIRC, in the cartoon series they made Blackberry (the smart rabbit) a girl and added more female characters, and that is sorely necessary. But like the Jungle Books, I can't bring myself to dislike it. I was also amused by how utterly British Hazel and Bigwig are - for some reason, Hazel especially makes me think of Lawrence of Arabia and imperial lit, maybe because befriends "natives", i.e. non-rabbit animals in order to exploit their skills and local knowledge (and he ends up scarred and slightly broken). Bigwig, otoh, makes me think of the Brig. I think there will be some interesting things to say about the overlap between British heroes in imperialist adventure stories and trickster narratives.

The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett: Pratchett and Diskworld is hit and miss for me, but I ADORE this book. It parodies the Talking Animals genre of children's fiction (if you've read both: Dangerous Beans is Fiver and Peaches is Hazel and Darktan is Bigwig y/y?) and the Pied Piper of Hamelin but despite the humorous elements, it quite a serious and touching (and gruesomely dark) story. Maurice the cat and the rats have recently and by accident become sentient and they're only just developing a culture, discovering philosophy and politics and ethics and it's a rather frightening and painful process. The rats have discovered a Beatrix Potter/Winnie-the-Pooh-type children's book about talking animals ("Mr Bunnsy has an Adventure") and it has become a kind of promised land/utopia for them and without giving away the ending, there's a tragic element to this.

Eight Days of Luke by Diana Wynne Jones: if you're a Loki/Norse myth fan (especially a kid!Loki fan, since Loki appears as a boy in this novel), or a Diana Wynne Jones fan, RUN DON'T WALK to this book. DWJ gets Norse myth - she gets it SO right. Loki is great in this, but I SQUEED when Thor showed up, and Odin is also perfect. The basic plot: a Harry Potter type neglected/emotionally abused orphan (David) frees a pre-Ragnarok-post-Balder's-death Loki from imprisonment and then protects him from the rest of the Norse pantheon - there is trickery on all sides, and setting office buildings on fire and wagers with Odin and an amusement park that is actually Valhalla and magic and bittersweet endings (can't have Norse gods without tragedy). This was published in 1975, and suddenly, Neil Gaiman's American Gods seems much less original - he does acknowledge this as an influence.

I also read bunch of secondary lit works, and Corpus Christi by Terrence McNally (a modern passion play; what if Jesus was a gay kid from small town America - quite good, would like to see on stage), and a Star Trek tie-in novel, The Crimson Shadow by Una McCormack, who I sort of stumbled over on LJ while looking for Blake's 7 fic. As the title suggests, it's about Cardassia and Garak (about a decade post DS9), but it also has Picard, and Garak and Picard being diplomats and discussing literature and a bunch of enjoyable female OCs and political intrigue. Basically: excellent novel-length fanfic.

I'm trying to upload more of my fics to AO3 and the most annoying thing is trying to find all the stuff I wrote on kink and anon memes because I NEVER bookmarked any of it, and I only remember a few things and sometimes I come across something and think: Did I write this? I think I did, no one ever de-anoned, it feels terribly familiar, it's got a few mistakes that were probably made by a non-native speaker, but what I DIDN'T write it? That'd be really awkward... Like, did I write that one Loki/Tony with the failed assassination and the ice cream? I probably did - there are some awkward lines that I'm itching to edit - but there's no way to tell now.

The last of these posts is for xparrot, who wants me to talk about villains and why I like them.

My first impulse was to write a justification, as though liking villains is something that you need to apologize for - when in fact I think it's a near-universal human reaction. Villains are fun to watch and read about. Which is why you find most of the really good villains in popular entertainment and not so many of them in high-brow literature, I guess, because high-brow literature often thinks it doesn't need to be fun. And another thing about villains: there aren't very many of them in real life. The word itself implies fiction, and when we call a real-life person a villain it's either humorous or a failure to describe the reality of the situation.

Other than that, though, what's villain really? Wikipedia suggests "evil", "bad guy", "antagonist", and "devoted to wickedness and crime". I don't have much use for "evil" as a label except in some truly horrible cases where sensible description isn't possible. And as wiki also points out, not all villains are antagonists and not all antagonists are villains. "Devoted to wickedness and crime" is a great description, though, because it's so ridiculous it's perfect. I mean, have you ever met a person who is devoted to wickedness and crime? I know or have known a number of people who have committed crimes (and so, I think, does everyone else, although the severity of the crimes may vary), and I've met my share of awful people as well, but none of them were DEVOTED to it (thankfully, I guess). But villains? Yep, villains - that is: fictional characters who truly deserve this label - do indeed devote their life to the pursuit of wickedness (even though they may of course not think of it as wickedness), and if they're really good villains, they do so with relish and style. It's that devotion that makes villains fun, the same way a hero's devotion to some good cause makes them inspiring. In real life, except for a few terrible fanatics, most people do bad things because they're lazy or ignorant, because they don't question what they're told, or because they don't know how else to get what they want or express their frustrations. Villains, though, like heroes, have a higher purpose, a true goal, an all-consuming passion - something larger than life. I think the true wish-fullfilment potential of villains lies not only in the fact that they can step over the line, it's that they have the criminal energy to do so over and over again. Even when they're not particularly good at what they do, they keep doing it, enthusiastically.

I guess that what I'm saying is: I prefer my villains camp. But if they aren't camp, then I like them sympathetic. For me, a sympathetic villian is a villain whose motives are relatable, if bad - a character that makes you think "on a bad day, under the same circumstances, maybe I'd be just as bad."

I'd say that I also really love redeemable villains, except I'm not sure what exactly we mean by "redeemable". Does it mean that they're sympathetic enough that we're willing to forgive them entirely? Does it mean that they have a chance of making up for the evil they've done by doing good? Is it the severity of a crime that makes a villain irredeemable, or is it their inability to change? Still, leaving aside the questionable terminology, I'm a sucker for redemption, like 99% of fandom. I like both a bad guy who embarks on guilt-ridden atonement and a bad guy who changes sides out of pragmatic reasons or because they just happen to like the good guys more.

Here are some villains I've loved:

Mr Freeze: as a kid, I once saw that Batman movie in which Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Mr Freeze. I don't remember if I actually cried, but I thought Mr Freeze was an extremely sad character. His wife is dead! He's frozen! His only choice in life is supervillainy. Or something. No, Arnold Schwarzenegger can't actually act. I know. I was a kid, okay? I'm listing him here because that's the first time I can remember liking a villain.

Spike (Buffy): Spike is a borderline case because he becomes an anti-hero around season 5, but Spike is awesome from the moment when he arrives in Sunnydale as a chaotic crazy punk vampire. The funny thing about Spike is that he's a villain motivated mainly by love - he loves Dru, he loves his unlife, and he loves what he's doing entirely too much to let the world be destroyed. The other reason I love Spike is because he's such a rebel (until S7). Buffy herself is a bit of a rebel especially in the first couple of seasons, but she increasingly becomes a straight-forward heroine, and Spike brings some much needed anarchy and disrespect during S4-6.

Alex Krycek (X-Files): Krycek, like Spike, is a recurring villain who keeps changing allegiances as it suits him and has great chemistry with the protagonist. His motives are mysterious, his skills are many, and you know it's gonna be a good episode as soon as his name shows up in the credits. He's a traitor and a double agent and still you can't shake the feeling that he's just one face-heel-turn away from turning out to be a good guy after all.

Lex Luthor (DC animated universe): There are many great things about animated Luthor - he's there from the first episode of Superman:TAS to the last episode of JLU, so the two series are as much his story as they are the story of Superman and the Justice League. Like Spike, he actually ends up as a good guy, but only after losing all his money, getting cancer from kryptonite, embarking on a career as a crazy spandex-wearing supervillain, going to jail, blackmailing his way out of jail, embarking on a political career, going crazy, going to jail again, escaping from jail (still crazy), accidentally causing the apocalypse (still crazy) and finally throwing himself into a giant powersource to become a god (no longer crazy, but too enlightened to be evil). Seriously, this guy has all the good luck AND all the bad luck.

Nikola Tesla (Sanctuary): He's Nikola Tesla! But he's also a vampire. He's clever, snarky, way too arrogant for his own good, he has rubbish megalomaniac plans and half of the time he actually ends up helping the heroes (because he used to be best friends with the protagonist) or needing to be rescued by them. Also he's Nikola Tesla.

The Shade (DC comics): Originally, the Shade was just your average cackling comic book villain who bothered Golden Age Flash and teamed up with the Society of Evil or some such nonsense, but in the Nineties, the "Starman" series re-invented the Shade as a stylish gentleman villain with a strange fondness for heroes who becomes a mentor and sometime ally to the new Starman. It's revealed that the Shade is actually more than a hundred years old and began life as the Victorian Richard Swift (which explains why his supervillain costume is a Victorian outfit complete with top hat!) and became a supervillain after some of his friends performed a spell that grafted "shadow matter" onto his soul. His power is that he controls shadows which manifest physically (similar to Green Lantern but cooler looking) and can travel through the Shadowlands, plus he is immortal and thus quite knowledgeable. He's a criminal, but mostly for fun, because really the Shade lives outside normal human society. He'd be an anti-hero except for the fact that he actively cultivates a villainous persona. Aside from this interesting backstory, the Shade is extremely camp, unfailingly polite, honorable (especially where his nemesis the Flash is concerned), stylish as hell and more than a little sad.

The Master: The Master comes in several flavours (as Time Lords do) so there's a degree of versatility to him that he shares with all my favourite villains - he can be fun and tragic, polite and gleefully evil, extremely cool and extremely rubbish. Delgado, Ainley and Shalka, my favourites, exemplify my three favourite types of villain: gentleman, camp and redeemed.

Crowley (Supernatural): played by Mark Sheppard, so he's automatically awesome. Crowley is every bit as witty and charming as a demon should be. The first time we meet him, he actually helps the Winchesters against Lucifer (he's pulling a Spike because he likes the world the way it is and doesn't want Lucifer's post-apocalyptic empire), later on he seizes the oppportunity and becomes King of Hell, after which he unfortunately becomes rather nastily evil...

All of these characters have things in common, but one is especially striking: they're men. There are some female characters I could have added: Catwoman, Mystique or Cylon Six for example. Cylon Six is really more an anti-hero, though and so are the iterations of Catwoman and Mystique that I like. There may soon be a female addition to the list, though, because at some point during S2 (well, Pressure Point, to be precise) I've begun to like Blake's 7's Servalan rather a lot and she undeniably fits in here :)

blindmapmaker asked: Robots/AI or any more or less mechanical/digital life-form. Is SF better off with using them a lot or better without them? (The Culture vs. Vorkosigan for example).

I love this question!

I like AI, yet at the same time I'm often dissatisfied with the way it is treated in science-fiction. Usually, artificial intelligences (be they robots, spaceships, digital lifeforms, cyborgs, holograms or whatever) in science-fiction fit into one of these categories, all of which could just as easily apply to aliens:

1) Monsters - AI is often portrayed as unemotional and therefore ruthless/evil. Quite often they're also inimical to biological life. Examples would be the machines in Terminator or Matrix, the Borg in Star Trek (the Borg are cyborgs, but their collective consciousness is only achieved via their machine parts, so they qualify at least partly as AI) or the Cylons in the original Battlestar Galactica. If they're just plain evil, this is usually boring, but sometimes it works because artifical intelligence can be very alien and therefore uncanny, and its motivations aren't necessarily the same as those of human villains - a good example would be "Dark Star" in which the sentient bomb explodes not because it is evil but because it believes that this is the only way it can prove its existence.

2) People - the majority of all AI characters probably falls into this category. From a storytelling persepctive, these artifical lifeforms are really just people with unusual personalities or abilities. Examples would be Data or the holographic Doctor from Star Trek, ORAC from Blake's 7, JARVIS in the Iron Man films, K9 in Doctor Who, the human cylons in the new Battlestar Galactica, Cameron in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles etc. These characters all have personalities that could just as easily belong to a human or a biological alien, although in some cases, there are some uncertainties - are the Voyager's EMH or ORAC sentient or just very good simulations (both of them would pass the Turing test easily, but I don't think that really proves anything)? Can Data or Cameron experience feelings the way humans do? What makes these characters interesting is on the one hand their struggle to become fully formed individuals but on the other hand also their potential to grow beyond human limits. They can access and store more information than a human could in an entire lifetime, and they can process it much more quickly. Sometimes, physical embodiment isn't as important to them as it is to biological lifeforms, or they are capable of changing their bodies almost indefinitely. AI is almost invariably not mortal. Detractors of these characters usually complain that they're too powerful or versatile (and it is true that once you've got a Data or an ORAC, you hardly need humans anymore - which is one of the main points of the Culture series, in which humans would be completely superfluous except the AI characters gladly indulge them and consider them worthwile companions) but I love it when these possibilities are fully explored (such as in Voyager's "Renaissance Man" or "Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy"). What annoys me a great deal is when AI characters believe that their ONLY purpose in life is to become more human - why would they, when that is only one of many options?

3) Gods - once you take the potential to its logical conclusion, AI can and does become godlike (usually not an infallible God as in monotheism but at least divinely powerful as in polytheism). In some cases, their power is limited to a certain realm, such as in Shadowrun or Neuromancer, where the AIs exist in the Matrix and can influence the outside world only indirectly. In other cases it isn't. Many sci-fi fans (and also some roleplayers I've met) complain that once you get godlike characters, a universe becomes boring and everyone who isn't godlike could just as well quit. I think that's silly - but then I love mythology and fantasy. There's something very appealing (in a wishfulfillment fantasy kind of way) about the idea of benevolent or mysterious super beings. I do however prefer stories in which these godlike beings do not interfere with lesser beings to the point where they cease to have free will.

As for the second part of the question: the Vorkosigan novels and the Culture novels really are quite similar in many ways, aren't they? Banks and Bujold are both excellent when it comes to gender equality and exploring the possibilties future technology offers in that area, both of them love to play with the contrast between very liberal, highly advanced societies (Beta Colony and the Culture) and sort of primitive, feudal/classist/capitalist societies. Cordelia's Honor, the first Vorkosigan novel, is what Use of Weapons would be if Use of Weapons was about Diziet Sma falling in love with Zakalwe and deciding to spend the rest of her life with him on some barbaric non-Culture planet - of course Zakalwe is a thousand times more fucked-up than Aral Vorkosigan, and the Culture is way cooler than Beta Colony, so it's not surprising that Diziet doesn't do this... and also I think it'd be a massive abuse of power if Diziet entered into a relationship with Zakalwe, on top of all the other shit the Culture does to him: and indeed, it's the one thing she doesn't do. Anyway, back to AI!

I really think science-fiction without artificial intelligences needs to explain WHY there is no AI, because it seems to me that AI is one of the most likely technological developments once you've got computation technology. I don't think the Vorkosigan series ever explains why there are no artifical lifeforms. Probably Bujold, who doesn't do sentient aliens either, decided that she didn't need aliens or AI for category 1 and category 2 (you can have weird and evil humans just as easily, and indeed some of the human civilizations in the Vorkosigan universe would definitely be aliens if this were Star Trek - for example the Cetagandans) and that she didn't want category 3 beings in her universe. That's the outside explanation, but there's no good in-universe explanation (unless I've forgotten it!). Some of the early Vorkosigan novels are more fun than the Culture novels, because Banks's human protagonists (especially in "Consider Phlebas"!) are much less engaging than Bujold's characters, but otoh the Vorkosigan novels get successively less good (Captain Vorpatril's Alliance was AWFUL) whereas Banks actually improves or stays the same in terms of quality.

As I said, I like both category 2 and 3 AI characters, so I have no problem with the Culture series. If you're not familiar with the Culture series, it's basically the Star Trek universe if the Federation managed to survive for another few millenia, formed a galactic civilisation of humanoid races and also developed their AI until it reached a very benevolent category 3 (which might not happen in the Star Trek universe, since they have a habit of treating their AI very badly unless someone does a "Measure of a Man"). The Culture is a socialist-liberal post-scarcity utopia. Basically, everything went perfect for this civilisation and they're as happy and powerful as can be, and its mostly due to the fact that the Minds, their godlike AIs, organize most things. There are also category 2 AIs, the drones, but I find them rather boring because they're usually just quirky people with a (non-anthropomorphic) robot body.

What makes the Culture novels interesting is a) it's a functioning and well-described utopia (world building makes up 60 % or more of Banks's narration) that doesn't shy away from exploring potential weak points and b) the Culture obviously comes into conflict with other civilisations, usually because the Culture believes in the Prime Directive about as much as your average Starfleet Captain, i.e. when it suits them, which it rarely does and c) it's never quite clear to what extent the Minds and the humans really are on equal footing. Outsiders usually believe that the Minds rule the Culture and the humans are little more than indulged pets, and the series implies that this is to some extent true. Which isn't that different from the situation in, say, Greek or Hindu or Norse Mythology, so obviously I enjoy it a great deal.

Fascinatingly, in some of the novels (Excession, Look to Windward and Surface Detail, which are among my favorites), it is implied that one of the very few remaining taboos in the Culture, which is otherwise extremely liberal when it comes to personal life choices (as in: they're a society of Captain Jack Harknesses), is Minds and humans getting too close to each other. Their worst insult one can direct at a Mind is "Meatfucker" (humans also use this as a swear word, but it doesn't carry the same weight as it does when Minds use it) - it's not a coincidence that it sounds like motherfucker, because this is the Culture version of the incest taboo (although presumably they do have an actual incest taboo as well). In Look to Windward, the whole plot hinges on the fact that Minds do not EVER use their powers to invade human thoughts, even though they are for all intents and purposes telepathic and do use these powers to communicate with each other - but not with humans. In Excession, there's a ship, the Grey Area, which has been re-named "Meatfucker" by its fellow Minds and is ostracised because it uses its telepathy to uncover war-crimes committed by less-developed civilisations - and it also kills the perpetrators. In Surface Detail, finally, the ship Falling Outside Normal Constraints is called meatfucker by its scandalized peers because he uses these powers to turn human bodies into his avatars (and it's more or less explicitly stated that he has had sex with humans while using such a "meat" avatar). No reason is ever given in the series as to why this taboo exists - presumably the reason the Minds would give if asked is that "meatfucking" constitutes an abuse of power, but if I remember "Totem and Taboo" correctly, Freud says that one of the reasons taboos have an almost magical power is that they usually concern our oldest and strongest desires. It would make A LOT of sense in the Culture series if the Minds had a deep-seated desire for an (impossible) union with humans, because that would explain why they stick around at all.

As a side thought: there are a few AI-related plots that Banks never did in any of his novels and that I would have LOVED to read. We never got a story in which the Culture interferes with a lower level civilisation that enslaves its AI (that'd also be a cool plot for a Culture/Star Trek crossover) or a lower level civilisation in which artificial lifeforms are at war with their biological creators (crossover with BSG!) or a story in which an outside AI encounters the Culture's Minds and asks: why the hell are you so fascinated by these meatbags?! Plus there's the question of how it all ends - most the higher level civilisations in the Culture universe eventually "sublime" (that is, they link all their minds together and become gods, sort of like the Q Continuum), but it appears that only biological lifeforms do this. So what happens when the human side of the Culture sublimes?

And because I'm watching Blake's 7 at the moment and spoilers tell me that ORAC survives the show until the end: he'd be a prime candidate for joining the Culture, because he's basically a Culture Mind already (they're mostly benevolent, that doesn't mean they're nice) and he deserves to be treated a little better. Or he could just go and meet the holographic Doctor and they could bitch about being switched off and on whenever the humans please...