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[melannen]

While my sister was here, we went through and cleaned out a lot more of the Star Wars junk, so all that's left now fits on and around one bookshelf. (The junk we cleaned out is now sitting on the back porch, while we figure out what to do with it. I was in favor of just emailing the Star Toys museum about another mass donation, but sister wanted to see if anything was worth trying to sell, and meanwhile I'm trying to decide if I can bear to open all the mint-in-box action figures so I can play with them (and store them better), or just donate/sell them as mint in box, and also trying to convince our cousins to take it all.

...so uh anybody want any Star Wars junk?)

My sister gave me a list of the books we have that I haven't read that I should, starting with Jedi Apprentice, so I started with those.

You guys. Jedi Apprentice. I know that I've previously been told, when asked why Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan blew up into a giant fandom, that the reason was Jedi Apprentice, but somehow I was still assuming that most of it came from the fandom. NOT SO MUCH.

Book 1 is all about how Obi-Wan desperately needs a Master, and Qui-Gon feels an instant connection to him, as if their destinies are linked, but his heart is still broken because his last padawan went dark, and he will never love take a padawan again. Book 2 is about how they are so destined to each other that they managed to forge an accidental mind-link that can reach across a planetary diameter, and how Qui-Gon's old padawan wants to break them up by telling Obi-Wan that Qui-Gon will never really love him.

We didn't have book 3, but book 4 is about -- well, actually book 4 is about how income inequality leads to societal collapse and coporate interference in elections is the enemy of good government. But other than *that*, it's about how it doesn't matter that, as Jedi, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan don't have families, because they have each other. We don't have 5 either, but 6 and 7 appear to be about their first big fight...

What I am saying is that these books are very silly, and I can't find any Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan on the AO3 that is quite as gay as them.

***

I also had some crochet I needed to get done, so I decided to start watching Community. It is you guys's fault. Yes, you. YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE, Community people.

I am watching in silly mixed-up order, starting with the five legal free online streaming episodes (all from later in S3) and then at the beginning of S2. (since I have already read ALL THE FIC - and wow, Community people, that didn't take long, get on the ball there - and been to the con-txt panels, and been subjected to many people discussing it - I had already been spoiled, so that seemed like a good order to go in.) I'm about a third of the way through S2 now. Here are my comments:

1. JSYK, if somebody had told me that John Oliver had a brilliant recurring guest role on this show, I probably would have started watching two years ago. :P

2. Uh. So, in the latest installment of Melannen-is-bad-with-the-visuals, apparently when I was reading All The Fic, I had Shirley and Britta's physical appearances mixed up. Considering my main initial exposure to Community was sorting art cards by character name for Interrobang Studios, you'd think that wouldn't've happened, but no.

3. Everybody gave me the impression that Jeff was a fairly boring handsome white guy sitcom lead and I didn't need to pay attention to him! Okay. That is not true. Jeff is pretty damn amazing okay. Con-txt panels implied that he's annoying in S1 and improves with time, so starting with S2 may be a factor in this. Probably so is the fact that I was primed for the general character type by Alan Shore and Harvey Specter (and Terezi Pyrope of course) (and seriously somebody still needs to write me a fic where Mike gets kicked out of Pierson Hardman so Harvey sends him to his old friend Alan's new firm, which is the only place wacky enough to take him. Because reasons.)

4. I am not getting embarrassment squicked by this show! Mostly I think because it's so self-aware, and so are the characters, but also because it is (generally) kind. I was watching the one where Abed is Jesus, and going "I should be too squicked to watch! Why am I not squicked?" and I realized it was because I trusted that the show wasn't setting this up just so we could watch Abed be humiliated, that they were going for something else, something kinder and smarter. And I was right! It was some sort of miracle.

...I do still generally have to not watch when Chang is around, though. They haven't been kind to Chang.

(There is nothing in the above about Troy and Abed and the general geek-friendliness and Annie and Britta and Pierce and Shirley and the Dean and postomdern magical realism and the episodes themselves and etc. because the fandom did prepare me adequately for how awesome all of that is. Yay!)

***

Oh, so the last part of the Avengers-are-geeks fic went up on AO3 a few days ago, and so did that not!fic I posted on here a few months back, The One Where Tony Stark And Princess Leia Hook Up, since I was writing about Avengers and Star Wars anyway.

My writing has been going interesting places this year! I signed up for inkingitout with a wordcount total for the year, and it's the last half of July and I'm actually ahead by a comfortable margin!

The main thing I am learning about my writing is that writing hard things is hard, and writing silly crossovers is easy. So while I have a bunch of Hard Things that I am still pounding away at (including the Avengers fics I was talking about at con-txt, and some Homestuck things, and the next bit of the October megacrossover, and a couple of DF WIPs, yes, before you ask), it makes it easier if I am working on something silly at the same time, to turn to when all writing seems a pit of despair and failure.

Unfortunately once I let myself decide that I immediately got overrun with silly crossovers, so I need you guys to help me out.

Poll #11252

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 29

View Respondents

Which crossover that I have started in the last couple weeks should I focus on finishing next?

View Answers

The sequel to the Tony/Leia one, in which Jedi Knight Steve Rogers served with Tony's father in the Clone Wars
14 (48.3%)

The one that follows the careers of the first twelve Alternian initiates to the Jedi Temple
2 (6.9%)

The one where John, Jade, Rose and Dave move in next door to Abed, Troy, Annie and Britta, and discover that Abed and Troy broke the new universe by somehow reaching God Tier without playing sburb
3 (10.3%)

The Vorkosiverse/Study In Emerald one that's Lannamichaels' fault where all Barrayaran Vor are hybrids of humans and Lovecraftian tentacle gods
10 (34.5%)

...okay, I'll be honest, regardless of the poll, it's probably going to be the Avengers/Star Wars one, if only because it only needs about five hundred more words of snappy dialogue for a complete first draft. Unfortunately, despite being a silly crossover, I am filled with angst about what to do with it then.

a) Because it really wants to be Part One of [yet another] epic, in which Tony and Steve go to occupied Coruscant, find a bunch of other AU-ified Avengers, and then go searching for the slightly-off-model clone of Master Windu that the Emperor grew (in one of his stupider decisions). Unfortunately, not only would it be epic, I would also have to re-read or re-read (let's be conservative) about a dozen of the EU books to get the necessary background, and that's not counting if they head off into the Unknown Regions after Thor.

I have long reconciled myself to posting a sort-of-stand-alone Chapter One as a complete fic, because otherwise I would never post anything, but I have not quite lost my sense of shame about it.

b) Because the part I have written is a story about Steve and Tony. It's almost definitely a Steve & Tony story. If I rewrite it for a clearer emotional arc, it could probably even be a Steve⋄Tony story, or something close. And they flirt a lot, and Tony is blatantly jealous of the fact that Coulson seems to get along with Steve more easily, but there is no kissing or declarations of love or sex, nor do I plan for there to be.

I could just call it Steve & Tony, but I like it when people read my stories, and I know that anything tagged Steve/Tony on the Archive gets about ten times the traffic. (I tested it empirically once.)

And I really doubt anybody's going to complain that a story that's about Steve and Tony's relationship and has UST is tagged with the pairing tag, but it seems like I do that kind of iffy 'ship tagging a lot (my spreadsheet of stories-worked-on-this-year currently has 4 labeled gen, 1 labeled slash or het, and 12 labeled ambiguous/other.) And besides, I feel like I'm letting down the side when I do that.

What I really want, I guess, is for there to be a generally accepted way to label a story "This story has no explicit romantic or sexual content, but fans of x pairing would probably like what their pairing do in it." The options with current terminology seem to be label it pairing + gen (which is used to mean a bunch of different things, from "this is a romance story with no sex" to "this is a casefile story where they happen to have sex a lot); to label it pairing + preslash or pairing + UST (both of which are okay? But there are good reasons that some people dislike the preslash label - as useful as I find it - and UST is a term I've never liked as a fic label for a variety of reasons); or use the & pairing (which means people surfing the pairing tag won't find it.)

AO3 currently seems to have come down on the side of "even if it only has a tiny bit of slashy content it counts as a pairing fic" because tags like "A/B if you squint" get combined with the main pairing tag, so I guess I could just go with one of those, but they always seemed kind of twee...

Augh. And of course the temptation is to just figure out a way to shoehorn in some kissing so you don't have to worry about it.

(While I was working on this lettered wrote a much more coherent post on the topic of pairing tags, which covers the same ground, you should go read that instead.)

Comments

[catpella]

All those SW toys sound appealing, is there any way that wouldn't be too hard on you to make a partial kind of list? (or at least pictures?)

[melannen]

I am trying to avoid looking at them too closely now for fear I'll talk myself out of it. :P Although other than the in-box action figures (which are going to be either sold or opened and kept, I think) there's not that much in the way of toys qua toys, though, except an action-figure scale AT-AT that was just too big to keep. There's some jigsaw puzzles and school supplies and masks and books (mostly nonfiction and picture books) and Happy Meal toys and Pez dispensers and all sorts of random things. Oh, and a bunch of original trilogy micro-scale playsets that fold up into heads of characters. And things. You looking for anything in particular?

[catpella]

I know nothing about Star Wars toys, heh, I just love certain characters, so I have no idea if anything I'm asking for even exists. Are there any EU people in the in-box figures? Anybody like Mara Jade, Corran Horn, the Solo kids?

[melannen]

They did make figures of some of the EU characters, but I think the only non-movie characters that might be in the get-rid-of pile are some Shadows of the Empire ones. (And if you're dying to own a Xizor figure I might have to judge you. :P) I think there are figures of Dodonna and Madine, if you fell in love with them from the X-Wing stuff?

[fenellaevangela]

1. JSYK, if somebody had told me that John Oliver had a brilliant recurring guest role on this show, I probably would have started watching two years ago. :P

Ha! Yeah, the only reason that I've been watching Community since the beginning is that I saw John Oliver in the commercials before the first episode aired.

[melannen]

Why didn't he at least say something on The Bugle? :P I feel betrayed.

[monksandbones]

Oh wow, my youngest brother and I used to be obsessed with those Jedi Apprentice books back in the day... obsessed with mocking them, that is. We sharpened our snarking teeth on them!

In fact, I seem to have blogged about some of the later books in the series for World Blog Haiku day in 2004:

Reading Jedi Quest.
Book so bad it's almost good.
Meem and I amused.

Meem says this to me -
He values her friendship and
Remember Qui-Gon.

Qui-Gon was in love
In world's worst literature.
Then love died. *Snicker.*

Good times, good times. Aw man, Qui-Gon's epic revenge quest in book like, 15 or so...

[melannen]

Well, I was expecting silly boys' adventure novels. I just wasn't expecting silly boys' adventure novels that managed to outgay the Victorian ones!

...I am probably just going to read the ones we own, I don't really see me caring enough at this point to try to find the rest at the library.

(I did legitimately love the Young Jedi Knights books back in the day. I am hoping I can go back to them and still like them. Hope.)

[lannamichaels]

Oh my god, Jedi Apprentice made me hate Qui-Gon. I already was unimpressed with him in the movie completely dropping his current comitments to go after the younger, newer model, and then guilting the guy he dropped into training the younger, newer replacement-that-never-was. And then in JA, to make it worse, he didn't even want him anyway. And it made me hate the Jedi, because apparently they steal kids from their parents, train them up, but they have a huge surplus so not all of the kids get to become Jedi. But instead of sending them back to their parents, they basically draft them into shitty jobs and fuck them all, fuck them all so much.

Um.

The Vorkosiverse/Study In Emerald one that's Lannamichaels' fault where all Barrayaran Vor are hybrids of humans and Lovecraftian tentacle gods

YOU SHOULD TOTALLY TOTALLY WRITE THIS. *cheerleads*

[melannen]

I have a great deal of sympathy for the Jedi Apprentice books! I can see how the author is doing his very best to deal with the really, really, *epically* terrible worldbuilding and characterization he was handed in Episode One, the J novel series formula, and the fact that he's probably working on really short deadlines. And from a Watsonian POV, it's actually not the way they treat the kids that bothers me? Because this is very clearly a society with different values around children and morality than our society, and that's actually kind of fun. The problem is that they don't commit to that, and I get whiplash between "twelve-year-olds are treated as full adults and life is cheap" and then random bits of modern morality show up as if they don't see the contradiction.

Also yeah, that aside, pretty much everything set in the post-Ep 1 period is a body of evidence for why it is hard to feel sad that the Jedi Order fell, because it was clearly very overdue for it. (I have this whole backstory set up in my head where Yoda could have stopped the Emperor if he wanted to, but he knew that the Republic and the Order were both corrupt beyond saving and needed to be utterly destroyed before something better could be built. It doesn't put Yoda in a very good light either, but it makes it all make SO MUCH more sense.)

[cest_what]

The Vorkosiverse/Study In Emerald one that's Lannamichaels' fault where all Barrayaran Vor are hybrids of humans and Lovecraftian tentacle gods

I will admit I voted for the Alternian Jedi initiates in your poll, but wow, this is an awesome image. I'm so curious.

(I'm also curious about your non-crossover Homestuck things! One of the things I regret most about HS being tumblr-fied as a fandom is that tumblr doesn't seem to have that tradition of talking about fic you're working on.)

[melannen]

Right now I am just doing snippets of AUs of scenes from canon for the Vorkosigan thing, so what it looks like is canon, only with more cosmic horror and more tentacles. :D

And I am always dying to talk about my WIPs, I just try not to bore other people! But since you ask, the contents of the Homestuck folder in my WIPs file are currently:

Hexakosioidodekarion; or, the book of the Six Hundred and Twelve: being the story of how Legislacerator Redglare faked her own death under the very eyes of His Honorable Tyranny, began the first true Sufferist Uprising in partnership with the E%patriate, made contact with the Disciple, and, with the help of a famous Gamblignant, rescued the Dolorosa (who had risen from the dead, glowing with the light of Truth) from vile durance. (This is set in the same continuity as my other Ancestors fic but will probably never be finished because So Much Plot;)

Slurry, which is a connected set of xenokink threesome pwps set on the Asteroid of Hot Interspecies Loving;

Ace of Spades, which is a Nepeta-centric story about how trolls do queerness (and also how trolls do social justice activism, spoilers: nonviolent protest is not a thing on Alternia);

This really nebulous thing that's mostly a lot of notes set on a post-Sburb Alternia, where some of the still-with-godtier-powers human kids decide to tag along and help rebuild the Empire (the Condesce having been killed in gamespace and not resurrected;)

Egbert's Aces, which started out as a Hogan's Heroes fusion where the kids are organizing a rebellion from within a POW camp run by Vriska, but it needs so much worldbuilding that it officially got kicked out of the 'silly crossovers' category;

And oh look, there seems to be several thousand words of Highlander crossover where the Gathering happens and it turns out the Game at the end of the world is less of a metaphor and more of a video game sort of thing.

...and the two that are listed on the poll.

[sara]

...there's an Asteroid of Hot Interspecies Loving?

OK, yeah, I can see that.

[melannen]

Well, there is no canon one.... yet (although Dave and Karkat came awfully freakin' close in that intermission.) But I think you know which fanon version of which asteroid I mean!

[sara]

(Yes, yes, they...really did. In their very failboaty we-are-14 way. I mean, I never got that much action when I was 14. Aww, dooooorks....)

That's the asteroid where there's nothing but Barry White on anyone's iPod, right?

[melannen]

Oh please, Barry White is only allowed on the asteroid if Strider has remixed it with a more ironic bow-chicka-bow backbeat first. :P

(and Kanaya and Rose go for k.d. lang because Rose isn't going to let Dave out-irony her.)

[sara]

Now I want to hear that.

And please. Indigo Girls all the way.

[cest_what]

being the story of how Legislacerator Redglare faked her own death under the very eyes of His Honorable Tyranny, began the first true Sufferist Uprising in partnership with the E%patriate, made contact with the Disciple, and, with the help of a famous Gamblignant, rescued the Dolorosa (who had risen from the dead, glowing with the light of Truth) from vile durance.

Oh fuck yes. Would this be an AU or just parts of canon we never saw?

Ace of Spades, which is a Nepeta-centric story about how trolls do queerness

That would be really interesting!

[melannen]

Canon-ish, I think? It's meant to fit in around the canon we have for them, but I reserve the right to a) ignore new canon that contradicts it and/or b) have Aradia turn up as part of a plan to change the path of the universe.

[gramina]

Clearly, regardless of what you do *first,* you need to do the Barrayaran Vor - Old Ones crossover *next.*

*nods emphatically* See? The poll says so!

[melannen]

That is probably going to happen in one way or another!

[starlady]

My sister and I read a LOT of those Jedi Apprentice books. Even now I can remember the first several books really clearly, the slashy angst is so vivid. Also I have a lot of Jedi Apprentice fanfic moldering on floppies somewhere still.

[melannen]

You need to excavate it all and post it to AO3! :D

[alexseanchai]

What I really want, I guess, is for there to be a generally accepted way to label a story "This story has no explicit romantic or sexual content, but fans of x pairing would probably like what their pairing do in it." The options with current terminology seem to be label it pairing + gen (which is used to mean a bunch of different things, from "this is a romance story with no sex" to "this is a casefile story where they happen to have sex a lot); to label it pairing + preslash or pairing + UST (both of which are okay?

Over at spn_bitesized we use 'bob'. Genesis of the term. Of course I've never seen the term used anywhere but bitesized, so.

[melannen]

I've seen people use "Bob" other places! Moreso I think right after the term was coined, but there are a few diehards who still use it everywhere. I always got the impression that it was more "this is a story that is not about relationships but has relationships in it" than "this is a story about relationships, but they are ambiguous ones", which tends to be my problem.

Also "Bob" is a term of deep religious significance with me, so I always do a double-take when I see it on fic. :P

[torachan]

Haha, I couldn't stand John Oliver's character. He was mostly in the beginning of season one and I was really glad when they dropped him. The few times he reappears later aren't as bad, but I'm still glad he is not a major character.

[melannen]

I haven't seen season one! I have to admit the alcoholism thing got tired very, very fast, and they seemed to have dropped it by early in S2. I can see how he might have been annoying in larger doses.

[sara]

well, actually book 4 is about how income inequality leads to societal collapse and coporate interference in elections is the enemy of good government. But other than *that*, it's about how it doesn't matter that, as Jedi, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan don't have families, because they have each other.

*dies* Well, it's good to get a little plot in there sometimes. I have been reading some romance novels this week and they have no plot whatsoever and it's hard to appreciate the fucking when there's no story anywhere and they're original characters.

[melannen]

Not to be misleading, it is only a very *little* plot. But then, they are very short books, even compared to category romance, and once all the Qui/Obi hurt/comfort is in there, and also Qui-Gon continuing to be creepy with every youngish humanoidish femalish person he meets (which hey! movie continuity!), and the statutory requirement for lightsaber-waving and spaceships has been met, there are not many pages left for plot.