Due South is not really a fandom that has a huge enemyship vibe. I mean, I guess Fraser/Victoria absolutely is - did anyone ever ship Fraser/Victoria as anything other than the H in the H/C? And some of the rare side character pairings like Thatcher/Welsh kinda went there sometimes I guess? And okay I guess a lot of Ray/Ray and Ray/Ray/Fraser had that really good "two people who get on each other's last nerve have a lot of sex with each other about a third person" thing that I am weak for (...I ...may have just realized that the reason I swing both Rays isn't just lack of patience about the Ray Wars)...

But the real reason this fandom was on the list is that you can't talk about enemyslash without somebody bringing up the Speranza fic where Fraser goes undercover as a criminal, gets amnesia, and has taken over most of the Chicago underworld (and seduced his partner under the misapprehension that they are a star-crossed enemy romance) before anyone manages to convince him that he is not, in fact, a criminal.

So here it is!

• Chicago's Most Wanted (42595 words) by Speranza
  Fandom: due South
  Rating: Explicit
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski
  Additional Tags: Amnesia, Romantic Comedy, Chases, Criminal Masterminds, diabolical, nutritious, Italian Mafia, Slash, First Time, Action/Adventure, Head Injury
  
  Fraser goes undercover as a criminal, gets amnesia, and has taken over most of the Chicago underworld (and seduced his partner under the misapprehension that they are a star-crossed enemy romance) before anyone manages to convince him that he is not, in fact, a criminal.
  

List of fic I am not currently writing, no, absolutely not:

"Four times it wasn't Harry, and one time it was":
1. Wherein Herewiss s'Hearn and Sunspark go through a Door looking for other men who have the Fire, and meet Harry Dresden and Bob the Air Elemental instead, and there is a lot of playing around with Soulfire/Flame and annoying of Wardens and Wardresses (and possibly setting buildings on fire. Or sex.)
2. Wherein Howell Jenkins is trying to visit Wales but winds up somewhere under Edinburgh instead, and gets help from a certain Warden in staying under the Council's radar.
3. Wherein Har of Osterland, searching for a rumor of a shadow of Suth, instead meets a strange wizard of winter's ice in the Northern Wastes and plays a riddle-game with him.
4. Wherein the enchanter Sir Harold Shea is visiting Queen Mab and Queen Titania as an emissary of Queen Gloriana, and provides a much-needed dose of scientific rationality and clinical psychiatry to everyone involved.
5. Wherein Harry Callahan is never letting Dairine do a transit spell for him ever again, Ways are walked, and parenting advice is exchanged.


"Five More Days In Paradise"
1. In which Kincaid and Murphy visit Hawaii on a working holiday, and bring Ivy along this time. Lots of things blow up, Detective Kelly remembers their last visit all too well, and Ivy makes a new friend and gets to swim with the dolphins.
2. In which Joe Dawson and Adam Pierson came to Hawaii for a quiet retirement, which seems slightly at odds with the mysterious headless bodies and localized lightning storms that 5-0 keeps hearing reported on their private beach.
3. In which Danny Williams refuses to believe there is a full-rigged pirate ship just offshore, even after Captain Jack Sparrow shanghais him onboard. (Well, for definitions of "shanghai" that involve Steve, flirting and a lot of rum.)
4. In which Danny is uncertain why it is 5-0 who are explaining why they're in Hawaii to a couple of Canadian cops, but the phrase "killers of his father" gets bandied around a lot.
5. In which Superboy meets Steve McGarrett. And territorial displays happen.

...on the plus side, I seem to be mostly out of my all-RPF phase for now.

I am now almost halfway through Dresden Files canon. And almost halfway through dueSouth canon, which partly explains why DF is taking so long.

And, OMG: the RayK episodes: that is nearly up to Boston Legal levels of slashy. I mean, I know the dS ptb had admitted to playing up on purpose by that point, but !!!! (And hey now they can even get civil-unioned too!)

Also, I watched Call of the Wild, so now I have written my official, obligatory post-CotW dogsledding fic. It has the Winter Lady and her court in it, but you don't really need to know Dresden Files for this, as long as you buy that RayK could go meet a fairy queen in Chicago's undercity.

Title: One Warm Line
Summary: Ray Kowalski meets the Winter Lady. And the Winter Lady meets Ray Kowalski.
Notes: If other people don't write more dS/DF crossover I shall still be forced to keep doing it myself. (This is now my first official series on AO3, omg.) ~4000 words, post-CotW for Rayk, early in her canon timeline for Maeve, nothing that needs warning for. Also, yes, you still have to completely ignore relative timelines to make this work; just pretend some fair folk got their hands on it? ETA: This story hits 37 of my 101 fic kinks. In less than 5,000 words. Um, \o/?
AO3 link: One Warm Line

( Maeve, of course, knew about the mortal policeman as soon as he started poking around the edges of the Undercity. )

They say that the first fic you write in the New Year will be an omen for the rest of your writing that year.

..if that's the case, the new year will be interesting. And full of id.

I don't even know. I really don't know. I can't believe I'm posting crossover fic between two fandoms where I don't know the relevant canon for either. And yet I am.

Title: Inconvenient Spirits
Summary: The Bookman and Gentleman Johnny meet in person at last. And Raymond Vecchio has the start of a very bad day.
Notes: I have not read any Dresden Files! And I have only watched S1 of dueSouth! ... I've read a lot of fic though! And honestly! Why is there not more Dresden/dS crossover fic? Why? If other people don't write some I shall be forced to keep doing it myself. ~2000 words, in-character language of varying offensiveness, not much else. Also, you have to completely ignore relative timelines to make this work; just pretend some fair folk got their hands on it?
( You need to get that paranoia looked at, Marcone. Supernatural influences? Seriously? )

I was going to save this to post after I had done some of the other things I am supposed to be doing (finishing up yuletide, making those two recs posts I owe people, answering comments, etc and so on) but it is becoming increasingly clear that I need to post this now so that I can at least attempt explain why those other things aren't getting done.

So, here it is:

How melannen Gets Into A New Fandom

( A Case Study using The Dresden Files )

So I have been trying not to get to emotionally involved with the politics (though I still want to do that "Sarah Palin or TGP: Who Is More Qualified?" point-by-point comparison), but I have been following fivethirtyeight.com pretty closely. And OMG, if Obama takes the South? That will be not only win, it'll be the most important thing to happen in American politics in my *lifetime*.

***
Anyway.
1. Comment on this post.
2. I will give you a letter.
3. Think of 5 fictional characters and post their names and your comments on these characters in your blog.

stellar_dust gave me "D".
...I had a list of twenty-five characters to pick from, and that was before I checked my notes. So, um, have the short list as meme x 3.

And hey, while I'm at it, why not give me two numbers between 1 and 15 and I'll write you a comment-fic where those two characters meet. :D (Random or calculated, I don't even care.)

( Five Large Fandoms )

( Five Small Fandoms )

( Five Nonexistent Fandoms )

...Yeah, I should probably stop there. Even if it means I have to leave out David Starr, and Mike Doonesbury, and Dick and Dorothea (the D's), and Diana Fowley, and Dick Grayson**, and Dickon Sowerby**, and Daystar, and Death**, and Doli the Dwarf, and ....

(** marks characters I have either written in fic or tried to write.)

Have now watched Victoria's Secret (after a short hiatus caused by MY SISTER BREAKING MY LAPTOP.)

My primary reaction -- and I realize I am not normal, and of course it doesn't help that I was thoroughly spoiled, although how did I not know about Ray's dad from the fanfic! Anyway I now want EmperorOfTheArcticNights!Fraser fic. (And if you actually have the right fandoms to get that reference, I love you forever.)

...Because, dude, when he's with a woman he's actually *interested* in, he's /smooth/, and he didn't get that way from one week in a snowstorm and some adolescent hockey fumblings. I want the story where the only thing that made Victoria different from all the others was that he had regrets about how he ended it. I want "Well, Ray, one thing you quickly learn in the territories is that when there are opportunities around, you make the most of them" and "a gentleman doesn't tell, Ray," x about 300. I want the story where the reason he doesn't mind spartan quarters is that he only rarely spends the whole night in them. I want the stories where he calls back all the women who give him their numbers, and makes it very clear that for reasons which don't need to be explored at this juncture, he can't offer them more than a companionable night or two, but if that's what they're looking for--.

Pls to be telling me where this fic is. (And no, the post-Victoria-letting-loose stories, while awesome, are beside the point. I want the story where's he's *always* been that way.)

Er, as for feminist shtuff - it was better than I expected but not as good as I hoped on that front. I quite like Victoria, though. Where are the stories where Victoria gets to be sympathetic? I mean, she's basically what Faith would've turned into if Angel had slept with her instead of listening to her, and she's hot (and not just because she reminds me of Cuddy), and she's tragic and she's no more evil than half the characters fandom falls for. But I think the best I've seen her get in fic is "I think she might've actually loved him, in her way" followed by painting her as a sadistic psychopath, which there is no evidence for in the episode, since everything she does is carefully, minimally plan to find her one way out of an impossible situation. (And she could have been so much crueller to Fraser. She could have treated him like Ray treats women...)

Of course, I liked Phoebe Green, too, and she probably *is* a sociopath. :P (Ooh, fic where Phoebe is tracking Victoria! And they run off together and have hot sex!)

I'm now nearly at the end of dS season one, and Fraser is still cute and Diefenbaker is still amazing and Ray is still Ray (and the Riv's cigarette lighter is totally a very young baby TARDIS) -- but.

The thing is, if there's one thing that's a recurring theme in this show's universe, it's that you've got to treat everybody like people. White, black, hispanic, Chinese, young kids and old ladies, mentally ill street people, dogs, cars, Mafia dons, rich, poor, in-between, criminals, cops - you have to always treat them as *people* first, and then everything will work out right.

...and then there's women.

Women, apparently, are strange alien creatures whose lives revolve entirely around men but whose actions are unpredictable and whose motivations are incomprehensible. Oh, and if you try to treat them like people rather than women you're walking into a trap and it'll lead to nothing but trouble.

Now I could maybe buy this coming from the main characters - Fraser takes his social clues from Vecchio, and Vecchio is a total douche with women, okay, but the *show itself* buys into this. In the same episode where we're expected to learn that crazy raving guy is wiser than you know and has unexpected depths of character, there'll be a woman wandering in who we're just supposed to throw our hands up at, because, hey, *women*.

I think there were maybe three female characters between the ages of seventeen and sixty in the first 19 episodes who I could buy as actual people. And two of them were strongly coded as Mothers rather than Women.

I stopped to write this before the last few eps because I know from fandom that there's a major *thing* coming up that involves a female character, and I have hopes that said story will be set up in such a way that Our Heroes get themselves screwed *because* they're treating her as a Woman and not a person, and all the more egregious stuff in the earlier eps was setting us up to learn that lesson and learn it hard. But I have a feeling my hopes will be dashed upon the rocks of Sexy Danger.

Even so, I want to like this show, I'm still hoping it improves in later seasons. I get the impression that RayK is capable of having actual relationships with women, unlike RayV, and Thatcher supposedly rocks, although I'm not getting my hopes up about her either. And Elaine, admittedly, did improve once she was convinced that Fraser doesn't go for women, though she's still basically just Designated Self-Insert For Girls.

But I've recently seen a fair amount of criticism of the way several more recent fannish shows of this type have dealt with female characters, and they do have their issues (major ones, sometimes!) but they're all *so* much better than dS. Maybe too many of the female characters do just get jerked around to motivate Our Heroes or dilute the gay UST, but they at least get to be people, too. Sometimes they even get to be people *first*, once in a while.

So I am now partway through downloading the entirety of Frobisher's run in the Doctor Who Magazine comics, because also_not_a_pipe made me realize something:

If Ray from dueSouth is actually a Time Lord who came to Earth as a refugee from the Daleks and, for reasons which don't need exploring at this juncture, remained as a cop in Chicago --

Then Diefenbaker is obviously a Whifferdill. See, he's an animal, but he's of at least human intelligence, and he changes what variety of animal he is from time to time, and he's a detective, *and* he's named after one of the great men of Canadian history. ... clearly a Whifferdill.

So now I have to read the Frobisher comics too before I write the crossover, but that's okay, because I think it gives me the first beginning of a plot hook for the crossover (and an excuse to use Six or Seven as the Doctor! Yay!)

So my newest Early Review book for LibraryThing is The Art Of Darkness, about undercover work; and there's been all this talk about the far north lately; and I had a whole bag of mending to do, and needed something to watch. So (as could be clearly deduced from that list of circumstances) I pulled out the tape I got at con.txt of the dueSouth pilot.

Several things:

No amount of fanfic, icons, picspam, or squee posts can possibly prepare you for just how indescribably, irrepressible-grin-inducingly cute Constable Fraser is.

No amount of fanfic can prepare you for how *bad* Ray's fashion sense is. I am more convinced than ever that he's actually a Time Lord. (Though another thing that fanfic hadn't conveyed is that Ray is apparently already doing primarily undercover work, which does make that whole two-Rays thing make a lot more sense without having to bring in regeneration.)

(Ray is also indescribably cute. And Dief is a much better actor than I was expecting him to be. Remember when I was talking about watching Old!Who, and it's like being a historian who's heard all the myths and read all the theories, who gets a chance to actually *be there* and *see it happen* and it's so much more amazingly amazing than any reconstruction? Yeah, like that.)

Also, this song will *get stuck in your head*.


Undercover book is also making me really want fic exploring the Master's tendency to go into deep cover at the slightest pretext. And making me want to re-read A Howling In The Factory Yard, again, but, y'know, that's kind of a given.)

So rather than going home, packing some, working up a real con report and doing the follow-up stuff I promised, I went to stellar_dust's apartment and she mixed us both Sonic Screwdrivers and we watched DW 4x10 and Torchwood (Meat) while I taught myself how to tie cherry stems in knots with my tongue. (It seems like a useful skill.)

DW was generally good, and we spent about ten minutes afterward being annoying-sisters to each other in one of the traditional ways, but it was *creepy* this time (seriously, I bet all the mothers in Great Britain are cursing RTD by now) but OMG, Rusty, ( spoiler )

Meat was awesome, my first actual Torchwood ep after lurking the fandom for two years, and Rhys rocks, and I agree with sister (and Jack!!) that Rhys and Jack have mad, mad UST and need to do something about it STAT, preferably with Gwen in the middle and Ianto and Owen off having sex somewhere else, because OMG.

I remember the reaction when the episode first aired - the old-school macros, the anti-gwen panic - but am I the *only* Torchwood fan who's read enough bad Highlander fic to immediately realize why immortal Jack was so determined to give that story a happy ending? God, talk about nightmares, and I hope it never comes out that it actually *did* happen to him (or, bad thought but knowing Jack, he *volunteered* for it.)

So anyway sister also downloaded a bunch of John Barrowman singing showtunes which I need to steal off her hard drive and then bed. But first, for my own memory, list of fics I was told I needed to write while at the con:
( Read more... )