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So the commentary meme worked in that I have been writing fic again!
Really weird fic that will probably never see the light of day, but at least I'm heading back toward the groove.
Also![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
seekingferret introduced me to the Paradelle poetic form, which is v. v. dangerous.
Meanwhile, I have remembered why I write fiction: because talking about this stuff in plaintext is hard. Anyway,lannamichaels requested most of the last half of Mu, which is a Dresden Files kinkmeme story. Here is the best I can do for commentary!
Commentary is in italics and font color=blue; story is in normal.
Okay, so is a story I'm very very conflicted about, in that I do like it, but on the other hand, it is (like a lot of my kinkmeme ouvres) incredibly self-indulgent to the point of being bad writing. Possibly beyond the point. There is going to be a lot of confessing to self-indulgence here. :P
I wrote it based on somebody's prompt about Mouse being turned into a human, and again like a lot of my kinkmeme fills, I wrote it mostly because I had a very distinct idea of what human!Mouse would be like, and I didn't want somebody else doing it *wrong*.
Hendricks gave me a look. "Don't be ridiculous. Apparently there was something involving Dresden's fairy godmother and an intercepted transformation spell. It'll wear off in 72 hours, he said, and in the meantime he's not letting unexpected opposable thumbs interfere with his duties."
72=three days. It's so nice to be able to just go with fairy-lore for this stuff instead of having to attempt to scientifically justify it like we did in SGA.
Also, Hendricks frequently thinks Marcone is being faintly ridiculous. Much like Mouse thinks of Dresden. (really the parallels between them were almost too easy to try to hang a fic on.)
"Of course. Dresden's fairy godmother turned his dog into a human. I should have thought of that immediately; why do I always leap to the complicated explanations first?"
Just before this excerpt, Marcone has been speculating wildly about what sort of complicated alliance or time-bending adventure might have led to the situation and how this will have to shift around some of his other plans. This is simultaneously him being sarcastic about the fact that fairy godmothers and adopted temple dogs *are* the simple explanation, being sincerely critical of his tendency to overanalyze, being cynical about the state of his life, and being meta about the sort of crackfic we get away with.
"Good question, boss," said Hendricks. "Hey, do you think they're sleeping together? On the one hand, Mouse is his dog, but that didn't stop him from being really obvious about West back in the day. And, unlike certain people, he's never seemed to suffer from overactive scruples about dependency and consent. Plus, on the other hand, speaking objectively, you have to admit: Phwoar!"
So there is a ton of stuff packed in here: First, I'd realized this could theoretically fill one of the animal-related squares in my kink bingo, so I was letting it go to the innuendo/tension place. Second, I really with Tera West showed up more in fic - she's an interesting character, an intriguing concept, has this backstory that's an entire saga separate from whatever Harry thinks his epic is, and also yeah the fact that he keeps being attracted to her even when he knows she's a wolf and doesn't really find that at all weird -- is interesting. Just. You know. Interesting.
Doesn't suffer from overactive scruples about dependency and consent = doesn't understand consent at all, of course. Hendricks knows this, has talked about Dresden's consent issues with Marcone multiple times, and knows he is pushing it. (The Hendricks in this story is fully self-actualized and comfortable in his role in the world and his bisexuality and the weird shit he deals with all the time; he just wants Marcone to loosen up a little, too.) (Dresden's consent issues and history of assault are one of the reasons Marcone refuses to do anything more than flirt and pine over him; this is another thing Hendricks finds faintly ridiculous, and he pushed on the Marcone/Dresden thing too, even though he personally thinks he's got enough drama in his life just dealing with Marcone.)
I wasn't going to touch that one. Hendricks knows that there are some things that I simply cannot afford to confront openly. But he also knows it's his job not to let me get complacent, so he's never, quite, stopped pushing.
So deep backstory for purposes of me writing this was that Hendricks and Marcone hide *nothing* from each other, and thus they both know that they're attracted to each other, and they're each possibly the only man the other could safely be with, and the only reason they're not in a sexual relationship is Marcone's scruples about consent etc., see above. Hendricks thinks this is nuts because they both know he only serves because he chooses to, but he also knows he's not likely to change Marcone's mind. Marcone lets him push because he's terrified that he'll someday start to abuse his power and this is a way of safely testing himself. (yes, any consensus-sane person would think Marcone already abuses his power, but there are no people like that in this story.)
I have no idea what this reads like to people who don't know all that private backstory; I would be interested to find out.
"Is that why you still let Dresden call you Cujo?" I asked instead. "And let him treat you the way you do?"
Marcone would back Hendricks up against Dresden any time Hendricks asks, and the way Dresden treats Hendricks bothers Marcone, but the balances of the relationships are such that he's not going to do anything about it unless Hendricks makes the first move. Hendricks, meanwhile, thinks of Dresden as a small wayward puppy and is also kind of amused to continue to be underestimated. (again with the parallel to how Mouse deals with him.)
"But I am my Lord's faithful dog."
Bothari's signature line from the Vorkosigan books. I have a whole rant that's been sitting on my hard drive since, like, 2001 and the height of the CC debacle, about the role and value of quotation and referencing in fanworks, but for now let's just go with 'self-indulgence' and I did add a footnote! :P
I spun grabbed him by the shoulders, pushed him against the corridor wall. He let me do it, of course. "Don't ever call yourself that," I said. "You are so much more--"
I have a bad tendency to have people shove people into walls to shorthand that it's a sudden moment of high emotion. Especially when I'm being lazy. Of course, this one does have the additional resonances of pack dominance - given the whole dog theme that runs through the story - that yes, Hendricks lets him do it, and given their relative sizes it's really obvious that's the case, but also that Marcone doesn't doubt for even a second that he will.
If you postulate that they've both read the Barrayar books (which if Marcone's read any recent SF it would be that, because what other SF epic is about justifying a crime family keeping power for the greater good despite all the terrible shit they have to do? Hendricks probably read them first and then gave them to Marcone, like all of Marcone's pleasure reading these days) he's explicitly pissed off that Hendricks is comparing himself to Bothari, because Bothari turned to his lady as his conscience, whereas Marcone think of Hendricks as his conscience. Hendricks on the other hand likes the comparison, because he thinks of Marcone as giving him purpose, aiming him like a weapon when otherwise he would just be wasting his powers.
They are, of course, both wrong.
If you don't postulate that, I guess Marcone's just pissed that he's called himself a dog and Hendricks is trying to make the point that being called a loyal dog is not an insult.
He looked down at me, all softness in his eyes, in the broad strokes of his neck, and said quietly: "Would you prefer 'I am the Baron's hound, to lie at the Baron's feet'?"
This is a quote from The Eagle of the Ninth, because I wrote this just after the movie was out and I was too busy being ecstatic that OMG other people would know what I was talking about when I shipped Marcus/Esca!!! to worry about plausibility. (I first encountered that book as a teeny baby slasher - not yet active in fandom - on the shelf at a school library.) If you don't know it, Marcus and Esca meet each other's eyes across a crowded arena and all but spontaneously soulbond; much of their relationship is about negotiating their friendship/love for each other with the master/servant roles that are required of them by society, and also willingly granted out of love. The 'I am the centurion's hound' line is a pivotal one there, and it's probably shaped a lot of my storytelling since.
In my head Marcone has always had a thing for Ancient Rome and they read Eagle of the Ninth while they were going to high school together, and this is actually a quotation Hendricks has used on him before, but see again: self-indulgence.
I couldn't afford to answer that one either. I let go, took a deep breath, turned away. "What did you and Mouse talk about so intently, anyway?"
"The nature of nonexistence and will."
I wasn't even going to try to make an intelligent comment on that one. "Smart dog?" I asked.
Marcone tries to encourage Hendricks in his philosophical and academic pursuits without being in the least interested in getting involved himself; he's strictly a pragmatist.
"I asked him whether dogs had the Buddha nature," Hendricks said, and answered my ignorance by adding, "It's one of the most famous of the Zen koans. The traditional answer is most often translated as, essentially, 'null', but there's enough cultural shift, deliberate ambiguity, and inherent unknowability that the interpretation can still be questioned. I thought he might actually know the answer."
This probably took longer than the rest of the fic put together, because I knew I wanted a Buddhist philosophy reference here, preferably something that involved dogs. This was the obvious one, but it seemed a little bit on the nose and too cliche in terms of shallow American versions of zen, and also I'd have preferred something Tibetan. It's really hard to find reliable stuff about Tibetan buddhism on the internet, though, and I wasn't getting anywhere, so fine, zen koan. It does kind of work thematically, anyway, and besides fu dogs aren't Tibetan, so if Butcher can mix it up so can I.
"And what did he say?"
"'Does a human have the Buddha nature?'"
"Ah. Good answer," I said.
"That answer's actually a lot closer to traditional Western modes of dialectic than what we Westerners expect from Zen-type philosophies, but of course Mouse has had at least as much influence from Dresden's sort of muscular post-Christian humanism."
By which of course he means "Socratic answers are a cheap shot". 'Muscular Christianity', by the way, is an interesting rabbit-hole to fall down, and Hendricks is almost certainly subtly criticizing his gender presentation in that description - although I'm sure he's also had a lot of entertainment trying to figure out just *what* Dresden's religio-philosophical foundation *is*.
"It's good to know you're making other friends. And I mean that with utmost sincerity."
He does, too. Marcone thinks that by keeping Hendricks so closely tied to him he's holding Hendricks back, but he needs him to much to actually try to set him free, and he thinks that makes him a coward, thus the cloaking in sardonicism. Hendricks of course disagrees, but then he also has a much wider social circle than Marcone already.
Hendricks laughed at me, gently. "He's agreed to look over the chapter in my thesis comparing Jamesian epistemology with Mahayana meditative practices, on the strict understanding that he never had the full training. We're meeting on my half-day next week."
One half-day off a week is of course the traditional schedule for personal servants in Regency romances and early 20th century detective novels, although Hendricks gets his class times off too, because Marcone is a softy.
Jamesian epistemology + Mahayana meditative practices: I have read this book! In fact, here's a picture of me reading it. It work pretty well actually, though I'm sure Hendricks' thesis is better (I specifically wanted his thesis to be something that's pretty far removed from the ethics of his day job, and since I happened to have read this book, there it is! Ways to make yourself look smarter and less lazy, #4: find ways to throw in references to obscure stuff you coincidentally already know.
(commentary meme is still open, no promises on speed.)
Really weird fic that will probably never see the light of day, but at least I'm heading back toward the groove.
Also
seekingferret introduced me to the Paradelle poetic form, which is v. v. dangerous.Meanwhile, I have remembered why I write fiction: because talking about this stuff in plaintext is hard. Anyway,
lannamichaels requested most of the last half of Mu, which is a Dresden Files kinkmeme story. Here is the best I can do for commentary!Commentary is in italics and font color=blue; story is in normal.
Okay, so is a story I'm very very conflicted about, in that I do like it, but on the other hand, it is (like a lot of my kinkmeme ouvres) incredibly self-indulgent to the point of being bad writing. Possibly beyond the point. There is going to be a lot of confessing to self-indulgence here. :P
I wrote it based on somebody's prompt about Mouse being turned into a human, and again like a lot of my kinkmeme fills, I wrote it mostly because I had a very distinct idea of what human!Mouse would be like, and I didn't want somebody else doing it *wrong*.
Hendricks gave me a look. "Don't be ridiculous. Apparently there was something involving Dresden's fairy godmother and an intercepted transformation spell. It'll wear off in 72 hours, he said, and in the meantime he's not letting unexpected opposable thumbs interfere with his duties."
72=three days. It's so nice to be able to just go with fairy-lore for this stuff instead of having to attempt to scientifically justify it like we did in SGA.
Also, Hendricks frequently thinks Marcone is being faintly ridiculous. Much like Mouse thinks of Dresden. (really the parallels between them were almost too easy to try to hang a fic on.)
"Of course. Dresden's fairy godmother turned his dog into a human. I should have thought of that immediately; why do I always leap to the complicated explanations first?"
Just before this excerpt, Marcone has been speculating wildly about what sort of complicated alliance or time-bending adventure might have led to the situation and how this will have to shift around some of his other plans. This is simultaneously him being sarcastic about the fact that fairy godmothers and adopted temple dogs *are* the simple explanation, being sincerely critical of his tendency to overanalyze, being cynical about the state of his life, and being meta about the sort of crackfic we get away with.
"Good question, boss," said Hendricks. "Hey, do you think they're sleeping together? On the one hand, Mouse is his dog, but that didn't stop him from being really obvious about West back in the day. And, unlike certain people, he's never seemed to suffer from overactive scruples about dependency and consent. Plus, on the other hand, speaking objectively, you have to admit: Phwoar!"
So there is a ton of stuff packed in here: First, I'd realized this could theoretically fill one of the animal-related squares in my kink bingo, so I was letting it go to the innuendo/tension place. Second, I really with Tera West showed up more in fic - she's an interesting character, an intriguing concept, has this backstory that's an entire saga separate from whatever Harry thinks his epic is, and also yeah the fact that he keeps being attracted to her even when he knows she's a wolf and doesn't really find that at all weird -- is interesting. Just. You know. Interesting.
Doesn't suffer from overactive scruples about dependency and consent = doesn't understand consent at all, of course. Hendricks knows this, has talked about Dresden's consent issues with Marcone multiple times, and knows he is pushing it. (The Hendricks in this story is fully self-actualized and comfortable in his role in the world and his bisexuality and the weird shit he deals with all the time; he just wants Marcone to loosen up a little, too.) (Dresden's consent issues and history of assault are one of the reasons Marcone refuses to do anything more than flirt and pine over him; this is another thing Hendricks finds faintly ridiculous, and he pushed on the Marcone/Dresden thing too, even though he personally thinks he's got enough drama in his life just dealing with Marcone.)
I wasn't going to touch that one. Hendricks knows that there are some things that I simply cannot afford to confront openly. But he also knows it's his job not to let me get complacent, so he's never, quite, stopped pushing.
So deep backstory for purposes of me writing this was that Hendricks and Marcone hide *nothing* from each other, and thus they both know that they're attracted to each other, and they're each possibly the only man the other could safely be with, and the only reason they're not in a sexual relationship is Marcone's scruples about consent etc., see above. Hendricks thinks this is nuts because they both know he only serves because he chooses to, but he also knows he's not likely to change Marcone's mind. Marcone lets him push because he's terrified that he'll someday start to abuse his power and this is a way of safely testing himself. (yes, any consensus-sane person would think Marcone already abuses his power, but there are no people like that in this story.)
I have no idea what this reads like to people who don't know all that private backstory; I would be interested to find out.
"Is that why you still let Dresden call you Cujo?" I asked instead. "And let him treat you the way you do?"
Marcone would back Hendricks up against Dresden any time Hendricks asks, and the way Dresden treats Hendricks bothers Marcone, but the balances of the relationships are such that he's not going to do anything about it unless Hendricks makes the first move. Hendricks, meanwhile, thinks of Dresden as a small wayward puppy and is also kind of amused to continue to be underestimated. (again with the parallel to how Mouse deals with him.)
"But I am my Lord's faithful dog."
Bothari's signature line from the Vorkosigan books. I have a whole rant that's been sitting on my hard drive since, like, 2001 and the height of the CC debacle, about the role and value of quotation and referencing in fanworks, but for now let's just go with 'self-indulgence' and I did add a footnote! :P
I spun grabbed him by the shoulders, pushed him against the corridor wall. He let me do it, of course. "Don't ever call yourself that," I said. "You are so much more--"
I have a bad tendency to have people shove people into walls to shorthand that it's a sudden moment of high emotion. Especially when I'm being lazy. Of course, this one does have the additional resonances of pack dominance - given the whole dog theme that runs through the story - that yes, Hendricks lets him do it, and given their relative sizes it's really obvious that's the case, but also that Marcone doesn't doubt for even a second that he will.
If you postulate that they've both read the Barrayar books (which if Marcone's read any recent SF it would be that, because what other SF epic is about justifying a crime family keeping power for the greater good despite all the terrible shit they have to do? Hendricks probably read them first and then gave them to Marcone, like all of Marcone's pleasure reading these days) he's explicitly pissed off that Hendricks is comparing himself to Bothari, because Bothari turned to his lady as his conscience, whereas Marcone think of Hendricks as his conscience. Hendricks on the other hand likes the comparison, because he thinks of Marcone as giving him purpose, aiming him like a weapon when otherwise he would just be wasting his powers.
They are, of course, both wrong.
If you don't postulate that, I guess Marcone's just pissed that he's called himself a dog and Hendricks is trying to make the point that being called a loyal dog is not an insult.
He looked down at me, all softness in his eyes, in the broad strokes of his neck, and said quietly: "Would you prefer 'I am the Baron's hound, to lie at the Baron's feet'?"
This is a quote from The Eagle of the Ninth, because I wrote this just after the movie was out and I was too busy being ecstatic that OMG other people would know what I was talking about when I shipped Marcus/Esca!!! to worry about plausibility. (I first encountered that book as a teeny baby slasher - not yet active in fandom - on the shelf at a school library.) If you don't know it, Marcus and Esca meet each other's eyes across a crowded arena and all but spontaneously soulbond; much of their relationship is about negotiating their friendship/love for each other with the master/servant roles that are required of them by society, and also willingly granted out of love. The 'I am the centurion's hound' line is a pivotal one there, and it's probably shaped a lot of my storytelling since.
In my head Marcone has always had a thing for Ancient Rome and they read Eagle of the Ninth while they were going to high school together, and this is actually a quotation Hendricks has used on him before, but see again: self-indulgence.
I couldn't afford to answer that one either. I let go, took a deep breath, turned away. "What did you and Mouse talk about so intently, anyway?"
"The nature of nonexistence and will."
I wasn't even going to try to make an intelligent comment on that one. "Smart dog?" I asked.
Marcone tries to encourage Hendricks in his philosophical and academic pursuits without being in the least interested in getting involved himself; he's strictly a pragmatist.
"I asked him whether dogs had the Buddha nature," Hendricks said, and answered my ignorance by adding, "It's one of the most famous of the Zen koans. The traditional answer is most often translated as, essentially, 'null', but there's enough cultural shift, deliberate ambiguity, and inherent unknowability that the interpretation can still be questioned. I thought he might actually know the answer."
This probably took longer than the rest of the fic put together, because I knew I wanted a Buddhist philosophy reference here, preferably something that involved dogs. This was the obvious one, but it seemed a little bit on the nose and too cliche in terms of shallow American versions of zen, and also I'd have preferred something Tibetan. It's really hard to find reliable stuff about Tibetan buddhism on the internet, though, and I wasn't getting anywhere, so fine, zen koan. It does kind of work thematically, anyway, and besides fu dogs aren't Tibetan, so if Butcher can mix it up so can I.
"And what did he say?"
"'Does a human have the Buddha nature?'"
"Ah. Good answer," I said.
"That answer's actually a lot closer to traditional Western modes of dialectic than what we Westerners expect from Zen-type philosophies, but of course Mouse has had at least as much influence from Dresden's sort of muscular post-Christian humanism."
By which of course he means "Socratic answers are a cheap shot". 'Muscular Christianity', by the way, is an interesting rabbit-hole to fall down, and Hendricks is almost certainly subtly criticizing his gender presentation in that description - although I'm sure he's also had a lot of entertainment trying to figure out just *what* Dresden's religio-philosophical foundation *is*.
"It's good to know you're making other friends. And I mean that with utmost sincerity."
He does, too. Marcone thinks that by keeping Hendricks so closely tied to him he's holding Hendricks back, but he needs him to much to actually try to set him free, and he thinks that makes him a coward, thus the cloaking in sardonicism. Hendricks of course disagrees, but then he also has a much wider social circle than Marcone already.
Hendricks laughed at me, gently. "He's agreed to look over the chapter in my thesis comparing Jamesian epistemology with Mahayana meditative practices, on the strict understanding that he never had the full training. We're meeting on my half-day next week."
One half-day off a week is of course the traditional schedule for personal servants in Regency romances and early 20th century detective novels, although Hendricks gets his class times off too, because Marcone is a softy.
Jamesian epistemology + Mahayana meditative practices: I have read this book! In fact, here's a picture of me reading it. It work pretty well actually, though I'm sure Hendricks' thesis is better (I specifically wanted his thesis to be something that's pretty far removed from the ethics of his day job, and since I happened to have read this book, there it is! Ways to make yourself look smarter and less lazy, #4: find ways to throw in references to obscure stuff you coincidentally already know.
(commentary meme is still open, no promises on speed.)