five things

[melannen]

1. Friends appear to have given me something resembling flu, which explains a lot (including why it took me far too long to realize that a sudden onset of persistent mild headache, severe fatigue, achiness, loss of appetite and depression were more likely a cause than a result of me doing unwise internet things.)

Curse you, actual physical existence and social life! *shakes fist*

2. Same friends who gave me what-is-probably-flu also gave me a copy of the Evelyn Evelyn tie-in book, because they are good friends and they like me, or at least I thought they did. (Don't worry, they got it free too, there was no money changing hands here.) I have said I will pass it on to anyone willing to give it the internet sporking it deserves.

...because it is terrible. Yes, it is full of hipster-irony-classism and ablism and whatever, but it is also just plain bad. I can't even get far enough into it to talk about the more systemic things that are wrong with it, because it's just horribly badly written and the art, well, the art multiplies the badness of the writing rather than mitigating it. I would almost hope the badness is more hipster irony except the whole thing is far too smugly pleased with itself for that.

3. Said friends also got together so we could all finally watch the last episode of BBC Sherlock together.

...I'm pretty sure they like me. :P (Actually I've been watching it mainly because it's so much fun to, um, argue politely, about it with lindentreeisle afterward, don't give me away.)

It will probably give away no spoilers if I mention that there was at least one point at which I screamed "WHY SO FULL OF DUMB, SHERLOCK?" at the screen. (There was at least one other point at which I shook my fist at the screen and growled "moffat".)

4. While languishing I have been giving a fair amount of thought to petra et al's Lupercalia multifandom minifest, in which we are all encouraged to give our favorite characters soulbonded psychic wolves of their very own, dubcon gangbang scenarios encouraged but not required.

Now I haven't actually read (yet) Monette & Bear's A Companion to Wolves, which is the main inspiration for the fest, but I have read dira's Every Marine a Wolfbrother stories. Repeatedly. And every time I do, I so very much want to write every other fandom in that AU, but I was hesitant to just take over her worldbuilding. But now there is a fest! Now there an excuse to ask for permission!

So far I have written some Victorian!John Watson (and plan to write at least a bit more), have given a great deal of thought to John Marcone's wolfsister (but haven't quite figured out how to turn it into a story), really really want someone else to write the M*A*S*H-with-soulbonded-wolves story, am delighted that somebody has already claimed Mark Vorkosigan, and am beyond delighted that somebody is putting soulbonded wolves into Frontier Wolf (where they have always belonged.) Also got into a discussion about how somebody should do wolfbrothers-NCIS even though I barely know anything about NCIS (but I know enough to know that adding wolfbrothers would be awesome...)

Really every fandom needs a story like this, though. Every fandom. (Although cypher suggested doing this with Homestuck and my brain broke, Homestuck has a psychic soulbonded wolf already! I can't figure out where to go from there.)

I'm afraid I'm not finding myself very interested in the psychic dubcon gangbang aspect, sadly. The idea seems to have been to subvert Pern, but I have been quietly subverting Pern for years using dragons... and more importantly that's not really how wolfpacks work¹.

5. So. I am now looking for a chronology of the original Holmes stories. There is The Layman's Guide to the Holmes/Watson Relationship which is a pretty good outline of the chronology of events as I understand it, however it doesn't list many of the short stories. All of the chronologies which attempt to list the short stories are far too detailed, and also the vast majority of them either really twist up the order of events or insist on Watson being married multiple times.

Is there any good chronology out there which uses a basic outline of events like the one I linked above, but fits the short stories in? I mostly just want to be able to quickly see "okay, these stories happened early on, these stories happened while Watson was married, these happened after the Great Hiatus", etc., without necessarily needing to check sunrise times in order to get exact dates, and in fact based at least as much on the development of Holmes & Watson's relations as on more specific temporal evidence...

I could probably do it myself (I seem to be in the middle of yet another re-read anyway) but this is Holmes fandom! Surely somebody else has already done it?

¹yes, I know, I have a fetish for biological realism in my crack porn, and? This is why I wind up doing thing like reading scientific papers about the erectile function of turtle penises...

Comments

[sara]

Dira's stories are totally more fun than the source (having read both).

[melannen]

...I had kind of been assuming that. (Of course, Dira's stories are totally more fun than about 90% of everything.)

[princessofgeeks]

I don't have a definitive Holmes timeline for you, but be aware that the canon itself has continuity problems. It seems to suggest that Watson married twice. But maybe Conan Doyle didn't really mean that. Authorities differ.

Now you have got me interested in checking for such a timeline!

I have an old print volume of all the short stories plus the novellas, in order of publication, with some of the original Strand pages in facsimile. I'm not a superfan by any means, but I HEART THIS FANDOM.

[melannen]

Yeah, I have read through enough old Holmes meta to know that the canon contradictions are rife. Which is why I'm looking for a version that just slots the short stories into the fanon Holmes/Watson narrative, rather than making a nitpicky attempt to make everything fit.

(there does not appear to be any direct evidence of Watson having more than one wife, just that the canon date references for stories in which Watson mentioned being married don't make any sense. TBH, I would rather assume that Mary got recruited by Mycroft and spent the next decade in and out of deep cover than assume Watson was married multiple times - either version is equally supported by canon.... it's just that the first version assumes women are nameless and interchangeable, and the second version assumes Mary is secretly kickass, and I know which one I prefer.)

[neotoma]

Also got into a discussion about how somebody should do wolfbrothers-NCIS even though I barely know anything about NCIS

... all I can say is that if Tony has a wolf at all, it's the most dippy, flirty little she-wolf in existence. And Tony uses her to break the ice with women.

[melannen]

Heh. We were assuming RE:Dira's stories that wolfbrothers only go to military and former military, which makes for fascinating dynamics in NCIS, but I think does mean that Tony doesn't get one.

On the other hand, the picture you are painting here of Tony's little she-wolf is fascinating, tell me more!

[petra]

I think you should write whatever makes you *happy* about the wolves. I don't fixate on the dubcon gangbangs as a kink, but as a complication. (They're someone's kink, and that is OK; they're not mine.) I'm in it for "But what happens when you're forced to have sex with someone you don't like? And then what?"

Or, "But what if the pack structure (that isn't how real wolves work) is in direct opposition to how the people involved work?" which is *sort* of what the canon protag's storyline is, according to the authors but not my reading of their work.

And, "Hang on, WOLVES. WOLVES ALL THE TIME. EVERYWHERE."

So, you know, no pressure to write anything you don't want to write. Marcone's wolf vis-a-vis Harry would probably be a goldmine, if you're looking for places to focus. And I bet Gard is really good with wolves.

[melannen]

Psychic dubcon gangbangs are sometimes my kink (although generally I prefer my gangbangs fully consensual) but I think I just find the WOLVES part way more interesting than the mating flight part on this one, so I want them to be like real wolves, even in their mating-imperative-made-us-do-it ways.

The way it works in Dira's stories I really like, although at some point I start wondering when they stop being wolves and start being dogs instead. And then I start wondering about Mouse, and Marcone's sister, and their incredibly bitchy relationship, and what happens when your dog has accidentally pairbonded with a mafia scumbag's wolfsister. :D (and how that is at least as interesting as mating flights.)

[petronia]

I don't know if this is precisely what you want, but it's the one that's proven most useful to me as a reference: http://www.angelfire.com/ks/landzastanza/publication.html

(Not only with regard to what happens in the text, but what ACD may or may not have been thinking. For instance, a lot of the "Case Book" stories that are set around 1902-1903 were written in a relatively short stretch of the 1920s, after ACD tries to retire Holmes for the second time in "His Last Bow." They tend to 1) be consciously retro-Edwardian, 2) have terrible throwaway plots, but 3) contain a lot of reveals about the Holmes-Watson relationship, with precise chronological internal evidence. And what they reveal is odd. XD;

06/1902: Three Garridebs. Everyone knows that one.
09/1902: The Illustrious Client, which is the one that starts off in the Turkish Baths. Watson is NOT living at 221B, but they're otherwise getting along well. Story runs a couple of months and Holmes is under police investigation for a while.
01/1903: The Blanched Soldier. Watson has "deserted Holmes for a wife". o_O I think this is the first and only incontrovertible second-wife evidence in the canon.
(09/1903: The Creeping Man, and they are back to "if inconvenient come anyway". But if anything this is the timeline blip because it was written earlier than the rest of this batch, and publication-wise the next story after BLAN was...)
09/1907: The Lion's Mane, in which Holmes has retired to Sussex and is supposedly not communicating with Watson much.

The even weirder thing about this is that 1902-1908 was the second great run of Holmes stories, so if you believe the internal evidence ACD carefully sets up here, Watson is meant to have been writing about Holmes all through the above. XD;

[petronia]

...I guess I should have made that a separate post on my own, huh. XD

[melannen]

Please carry on! I am interesting, and I love the combining of the Watsonian and Doylist ideas to make it make actual sense.

The timeline you linked is also good but it still leaves a lot of the stories with no chronological listing. I guess it's only including the ones where the date is pretty much inarguable?

[cypher]

Clearly where it goes from there is that the canon psychic soulbonded wolf leads to porn -- which I'm sure it already does somewhere in this glorious frothy chaos of a fandom!

But I haven't written that one yet. And I want to. XD

[melannen]

Oh, god, Feferi/Jade "our soulbonded companion creatures made us have sex" porn? I...I... I WANT THAT. I hope you do write it.

[carmarthen]

Now I haven't actually read (yet) Monette & Bear's A Companion to Wolves, which is the main inspiration for the fest, but I have read dira's Every Marine a Wolfbrother stories.

The book I wanted to throw across the room in RAGE. Dira's stories I enjoyed. They are better-written, better-thought-out, and more interesting (although still not how wolves work, but I suspect you and I may be the only people who want realistic psychic wolves :-P ).

Also, if you have a fetish for biological realism in your crack porn--as I do too! (as well as a great fondness for actual wolves)--you will probably also hate the book with a violent flaming passion.

(Honestly, I think it's a terrible deconstruction, too. I think the authors wanted to write gangbang dubcon porn and then pat themselves on the back for making it ~social criticism~.* Basically they wrote something with bad wolf biology and flimsy worldbuilding that doesn't succeed very well as a deconstruction...but does deliver the dubcon gangbangs, for those as likes them.

*Yes, I'm being mean. I hated that book more than almost any book I can remember reading in recent years, mainly because I feel like it was misrepresented as something more thoughtful than what it was. Also the bullshit wolf biology. It's not a "deconstruction" of what soulbonding with an animal would "really" be like unless the animals behave more or less like actual animals, I'm sorry. It may or may not be a good story, but it's not a deconstruction.)

tl;dr: I believe fandom can redeem the psychic wolves concept, with or without dubcon gangbangs! Woo!

[melannen]

I suspect from the bits I've heard about it that I might throw it across the room in RAGE just for the bad linguistics, but I might see if the library has it anyway JUST IN CASE.

...surely we are not the only ones who want realistic psychic wolves? ): I mean if people want the completely unrealistic version now, they can just go find some omegaverse porn and leave the canines out of it entirely... (I am not holding up great shakes as to how realistic mine will be, because writing nonhumans is hard regardless and there's so much romanticized bullshit out there about wolves even in the academic literature, but there's "unrealistic" and then there's "blatantly ignoring realism".

[feanna]

Let me be the third person who wants biological realism in my crack porn! (I mean I was reading this AU-Pony fic (Steve/Tony) and then I had to remind myself that these were basically sparkly cartoon version of ponies, so I should not expect them to act even remotely like actual (even if gifted with human intelligence) ponies (but still LYING DOWN??).)

So maybe one of you should write it??? (I can't write AND I don't know enough about wolves.)

Though in Dira's verse I usually pretend that wolves who are capable of souldbonding are not real wolves and therefore different!

(An actual exploration of how wolf behaviour changes through exposure to human emotions/bahaviour and through the imposed pack structures would be interesting too. (I think Dira might even have mentioned something along these lines as a potential explanation?)

Re: Turtle peen, there was that time where I read up on cat-peen (there are computeranimated you-tube-video-sims!) because we were having this discussion about Vulcan peen and somebody brough up that Vulcans are supposedly descended from some kind of cat-ape-creature. (Main reaction: OUCH!)

[lady_ganesh]

I have another friend who has pretty much the same thoughts on Companion to Wolves, if it's any consolation.

[kiezh]

A Companion to Wolves felt like two different books to me, one of which didn't quite work for me and one of which definitely did, but was sadly much shorter. The first part is wolf-bonding and fish out of water stuff with dubcon gangbangs, but the matings felt weirdly noncommittal to me, like the authors didn't want to make it kinky/sexy OR seriously traumatic, so it didn't do much of anything.

The part where it started really working for me is when the svartalfar got introduced, the trolls got complicated, and suddenly it's a first contact story about trying to communicate with aliens your culture is hostile to, and possibly stop a mutually destructive war. I described the main character to someone as "Two parts Lessa of Pern, one part Ender Wiggin." I liked him.

Anyway, I wouldn't particularly recommend the book unless it's likely to hit your narrative kinks, and even so, there's probably better-tailored fic out there. I totally support your desire to supply soulbonded wolves to other fandoms, though!

[melannen]

That makes sense - I've heard a few other people talk about how they wished there had been more of the 'plot' stuff and less of the wolf!sex. I heard there's a sequel out now, though, maybe it actually carries the first contact stuff foward?

[lindentreeisle]

It wasn't an argument, it was a debate! With yelling! :D :D :D

Really the idea (expressed above) that the book was meant to be social commentary just puzzles me. I really found the whole thing just lol-worthy, but then as we've already established the same things don't send me into a rage.

(Well, usually. The password scene in Hounds made me go THAT'S NOT HOW COMPUTER SECURITY WORKS in the same way that one thing in Scandal made you go THAT'S NOT HOW CRYPTOGRAPHY WORKS.)

[melannen]

It was the best kind of debate. ^_^

...I feel like if you really want to deconstruct the whole thing you would have to go a lot farther than just rapey wolf soulbonds. Lol-worthy, however, is excellent in its own ways.

(And I am SO WITH YOU ON THE COMPUTER SECURITY OMG. Did you notice that Dr. Stapleton's basic password was actually several dozen digits - which is to say, longer than the super-secure password was even permitted to be.)

[ailelie]

There are several possible timelines that Sherlockians have bickered over. Here's the one I usually reference: http://www.sherlockpeoria.net/Who_is_Sherlock/SherlockTimeline.html

The full site is fun: http://www.sherlockpeoria.net/StanleyHopkinsMain.html

This one is also good: http://www.sherlockian.net/world/index.html

And it has an entire essay discussing different chronologies and difficulty of selecting any one: http://www.sherlockian.net/world/chronology.html

[melannen]

I've been playing with the one at Sherlockpeoria, and it's pretty good (I like that he includes all the actual quotes from the books) but he keeps talking about how everybody should do their own, which is dangerous. Next thing you know I'll be pulling out the spreadsheets, and that never ends well.

[princess]

Since I'm the first to volunteer, I think...

I would be happy to give the book a good sporking. I am even willing to withstand the might of the legions of Palmerites and Gaimanites who will inevitably come to say, "UR SO WRONG! AMANDA IS AMAZING!"

I may even spork their replies to me.

[melannen]

PM me a mailing address and I'll totally send it along!

[brownbetty]

I would be super-interested in your thoughts on Marcone's sister!

(I bet his and Hendricks' sister mount each other when they go into heat, and they're both like, 'yeah, okay, this is awkward' and their sisters are like, 'tell us about it'.)

[melannen]

The problem with thinking about Marcone's wolf with Hendricks' wolf is that I've already written them with paired fire lizards, so I'd have to think of some other direction to take that in that also works for me...

(...it probably says something about me that a difficulty with writing these characters with soulbonded wolves is that I've already written them all with soulbonded dragons.)

[sophia_sol]

I read A Companion To Wolves and quite enjoyed it, but on the same level that I enjoy Pern. It certainly didn't feel like it was a deconstruction of the tropes, and mostly I did a bunch of eye-rolling (when I wasn't busy being way too confused by TOO MANY NAMES). When I read it I kept on trying to interpret it as the deconstruction the authors promised it was, and could not see it. I don't know enough about wolves to be thrown by inaccuracies, but if it's as bad as you're saying then I can TOTALLY GET being frustrated by that!

Anyways, I'd agree with kiezh about the really quite interesting bits with the first-contact stuff and how there ought to have been more of that and less of the other stuff. Ah well.

[lady_ganesh]

See, I can roll with Sherlock being stupid, especially when it can be ascribed to his character flaws. It's when half the cast carries the Idiot Ball around that I start twitching. Wait, this guy tried to blow up a swimming pool and you're letting him go, after letting him decorate his cell with mash notes to your brother, Mycroft? Really? After a press conference thanking Holmes publicly, the Met doesn't know he's been helping on cases? Of course, the 'destroying the hero's reputation' storyline is not my favorite anyway, so I was predisposed to find every single flaw in it (whereas with Baskervilles and Scandal I could just repeat to myself 'it's just a show, I could really just relax' and enjoy the fun bits).