Carmen's Journal

Dear Yuletide Author: Thank you so much for writing for me! I'm very much looking forward to reading whatever you come up with.


Some things I like: Emotional interaction, banter, worldbuilding, things that happen around the edges of canon.

Things I don't like: Rape, incest, gore, unhappy endings.

Specific fandom notes:

Spider-Man 2099: I love Miguel O'Hara so, so much. I am also super fond of his brother Gabriel and am fascinated by their complicated relationship. I would adore basically anything with the two of them--Miguel apologizing for sleeping with Gabriel's girlfriend, Gabriel finding out who Miguel's real father is, Gabriel having to inexpertly patch Miguel up after a particularly bad night, Miguel and Gabriel coping with their problematic relationship with their mother, the two of them having a lot to talk about after Miguel gets back to the future at the end of his 2010s run, Gabriel teasing Miguel until Miguel threatens to throw him out a window, seriously, anything. Other characters I like are Kasey and Xina in the original run (though I prefer Xina as an understandably prickly ex rather than a love interest), Tempest and Roberta in the newer run, and of course Lyla, Miguel's indispensable emotional support hologram. Also, Miguel having to deal with Thorite worship is always a good time.

Spider-Gwen: I just really want more of Gwen interacting with her friends and family. I particularly love the Mary Janes--what Earth-65 films do they watch on movie night? Do they ever get involved with Gwen's heroing? Did they help her through Peter's death?--but there's also her dad, Reed, Captain America, the Parkers, even the Bodega Bandit. Not looking for romance with this one, but fluff, casefic, angst would all be great. There’s that whole unexplored year when Gwen is in prison, too; I'd love to hear how the other characters dealt with that, like the Parkers visiting, or the band sending mixtapes. Other Spider characters are fine as long as they're not the only focus; I would love to see Captain Stacy's reaction if Spider-Ham showed up for dinner!

Hellspark--I really like Om im, and have always wanted to know how Tocohl's distracting next meeting with him went--bonus points if Maggy is trying Very Helpfully to get them together. Aside from that, though, I am just generally fond of Maggy and Tocohl and their relationship, and would be happy to see anything featuring them--another cultural clash for Tocohl to judge, Maggy trying to figure out Weird Human Stuff with Tocohl's help, family time with Bayd and Shandon, whatever.

Falling Free--Anything about what happened after the book. I'd love a look at Leo and Silver's growing relationship, but I'd be equally happy with the characters trying to get the Habitat's latest mechanical disaster fixed on three hours' sleep, or more general worldbuilding as the quaddies try to reinvent their new social structures.

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I do not need this Lego set. Really. Really. I'm running out of space for the Legos I already have, because my sales resistance to the siren song of tiny brick characters is...minimal. But I don't need this one, even if it has Flash vs. Gorilla Grodd and Captain Cold (and a banana truck, heh) and a Bat-mech and Wonder Woman's freaking invisible plane! That is value for your Lego superhero money, you know?

Well, okay, I don't know that I necessarily need a Bat-mech in my life, and since that's about half the set that's a serious drawback. (Although I guess he could fight Lego Lex Luthor in power armor, because see previous point about my lack of sales resistance.) Still. Wondy and her invisible plane, plus two Flash Rogues...um. Um. Help?

(I also don't need this, even if it looks pretty cool and has Supergirl and Martian Manhunter in it. Some days I think life was simpler before Lego had licensing deals...)

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I'm going to respond to the movie properly later (possibly after going to see it again :) because I loved it so much, way more than I was really expecting to, and I do want to say things about it. But I do have one very heartfelt reaction...

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After seeing Frozen three times already, I'm now checking out the times for the theater singalong performances. I think I may like this movie. Just a little.

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The gods are coming! (Well, technically they're already here, but whatever.) I'm planning to go see Thor 2 at the AMC Courthouse theater on Saturday, probably the 5:30 showing. Anyone else interested in coming?

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...or, how trying to dispose of your old comics is more emotionally difficult than you might think.

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So my current Saiyuki enthusiasm coincided with the re-release of the boxset of the first anime series, which I've watched some of but never owned. I figured some things are just fate and went ahead and bought it. (Okay, so possibly I should not be buying any more DVDs, but I've been weeding! There's space! Sort of!)

And the striking thing about this particular boxset (and the original DVDs, where the art comes from) is its desire to show us basically the entire cast artistically bruised and bleeding. Which is certainly eye-catching and textually appropriate and probably demonstrates that they're perfectly aware who their audience is, but I have to admit that the reaction I keep having to Sanzo bleeding all over his robes is "god, their laundry situation must be a nightmare."

I mean, okay, the basic premise of Saiyuki is four guys in a jeep (not a lot of space for extra clothes) trying to drive to India, which is taking them forever because, among other things, somebody tries to kill them every ten miles or so. They keep getting stabbed and shot and beat up and thrown into things--never mind all the people they stab and shoot and etc., some of whom must bleed on them, at least in the manga where the bad guys don't politely turn to dust--and it really can't be good for their clothes. Especially the priest who's wearing formal white robes most of the time (because of course even Sanzo's clothes have to be difficult). Even if I assume that Hakkai, who I'm fairly sure always gets stuck with the job, if only because he's positive his teammates won't do it right, knows every method of getting blood out of anything--and I absolutely do believe this of Cho Hakkai, world's most terrifying den mother--it's a wonder he has time for anything else. Maybe he has bottles of Clorox stashed in the trunk? Maybe he's worked out special chi techniques for getting clothes clean (which, again, if anyone would...) Maybe Hakuryuu secretly turns into a washing machine as well as a jeep, just off-panel?

Or maybe Hakkai really does it do the long way, carefully and by hand, every time. In which case I feel really bad for the youkai who tries to take a swipe at Sanzo when Hakkai has just finished that last load of laundry...

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So I'm shelving and reshelving and flipping through books as part of the redecoration process (theoretically in the hopes of finding things I'm prepared to get rid of, which is...not really happening) and ran across this bit in Melinda Snodgrass's Tears of the Singers:

[Uhura] wanted a ship and a command of her own, and she thought she had a good chance of getting them--but it was going to cost. The price of a starship was ceaseless devotion to work and career. She had seen it with Captain Kirk. However much he might yearn there was only one lady in his life and her name was Enterprise.

But do I want to become a lesbian? she thought rebelliously. Devoting my life to a mass of circuits and metal that by some ironic quirk of phraseology has been designated a she?

Or did she want the comfort of home, husband and children? And was it possible she could have both? Or was that a foolish dream placed forever beyond the reach of a woman in Star Fleet?

'80s Star Trek novels: they really, really do not make them like that anymore. I never actually got around to reading this one (I bought it because, hey, Uhura novel) but now I'm morbidly curious what else is in here.

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On Friday, neotoma and I are going to see a midnight showing of Star Trek: the Wrath of Khan at E-Street Cinema. If anyone else is interested in coming, we're meeting at the theater around nine before we find some place to have dinner.

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Well, okay, at present it's just sitting there in boxes waiting to achieve true shelfness, but still, appreciable progress in making my apartment habitable again. (Even if it did require about an hour of last-minute dithering about colors in the Ikea showroom. You would not think it would be that hard to decide between different shades of brown, and yet.) I even got some pretty magazine files for the comics, so I can pretend like they're decorative.

I also went to see the last performance of Synetic's Three Musketeers with neotoma. As expected, it was an enormous amount of fun, lots of banter and swordplay everywhere. I particularly liked D'Artagnan, who was a gloriously endearing dork, and Richelieu, who was both effectively acted and staged as the Manipulative Menace Behind Everything--at one point, M'lady De Winter and Rochefort come to report to Richelieu, who has not appeared yet and is standing behind a gate. But since the characters are looking towards the audience as they speak and it's not clear where Richelieu is, the impression you get is that he's a bodiless and omnipresent malevolence. (The fact that the gate is circular and lit up in red like the Eye of Sauron does not help dispel this impression, either. I love Synetic's staging.)

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