Sometimes, you become a pen pal with someone, and you kind of fall in love with them? A little? Just from the words they write? And then you finally meet them in person and it turns out they're an utterly insufferable asshole, but unfortunately also hot. And it's too late to do anything about it because the two of you are the only geniuses who can save the world, so you spend years working in close quarters under unimaginable stress with only each other to take it out on. And then it turns out that in order to save the world, the two of you are going to have to merge minds with each other and a monster - and it'll probably kill you, because you're obviously not compatible, but then it turns out you two are compatible? Like super compatible? Like soulmates compatible? And you save the world together and everything is amazing.

But then one of you drifts away, and it hurts, but there's no reason that needs to be a reason, until years go by and then you discover that maybe you were also compatible with the monster and the "girlfriend" you thought he had left you for was actually a monster brain in a jar and the "drifting away" was a bit literal and his mind has been completely taken over by the monster and also he's going to destroy the world if you don't stop them - stop him, this time - and it has to be you, because you're the only one who can get through to him even a little. And you do, you save the world, but you haven't saved him yet, because he's tied up in a basement cell with the monster still wrapped around his brain - and the story ends there because they didn't get funding for a third movie.

Luckily there's fanfic. (Most of it goes AU after the first movie but there's a fair amount where you save him after the second, too.) This is just a tiny sampler of it.

• ich hasse dich (3418 words) by que_sera
  Fandom: Pacific Rim (2013)
  Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Newton Geiszler/Hermann Gottlieb, Raleigh Becket/Mako Mori
  Additional Tags: Secret Relationship, POV Outsider, Foreign Language, Deutsch | German
  
  Having a second language in common is useful sometimes.



• How to Train Your Kaiju (21753 words) by psikeval
  Chapters: 6/6
  Fandom: Pacific Rim (2013)
  Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Newton Geiszler/Hermann Gottlieb
  
  The one where they adopt a baby kaiju!



• i bring scientists (you bring a rockstar) (14102 words) by pseudoanalytics
  Chapters: 1/1
  Fandom: Pacific Rim (Movies)
  Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Newton Geiszler/Hermann Gottlieb
  Characters: Newton Geiszler, Hermann Gottlieb, Amara Namani, Vik Malikova, Ou-Yang Jinhai, Ilya (Pacific Rim), Suresh (Pacific Rim), Tendo Choi, Hannibal Chau, Mako Mori, Raleigh Becket
  Additional Tags: Team as Family, Found Family Dynamics, Post-Movie: Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018), Mission Fic, Ghost Drifting, Post Recovery Newt, K-Science (Pacific Rim), Getting Together, First Kiss, Making Out, fluff with plot, Jurassic Park References, Domestic Fluff, Kidnapping
  
  Telling them that he was getting along with Newt was supposed to be an unmissable signal that he was only speaking under duress, Hermann is not sure why it's not working.

I just saw Pacific Rim uprising!This review is 100% accurate in every way and I don't really have much to add.

Except I'm pretty sure I know which slash fic Burn Gorman was reading to prep for the role because ( spoilers )

So last night I went to see Big Hero Six at the new cheap movie theater! I approve of the new movie theater. It's nice to be able to just go to a theater and see a movie without first having to walk through a quarter-mile of mall and endure an "entertainment experience" or whatever. Plus, 1/3 the price, and showtimes that work with what I want to see!

Also Big Hero Six was lots of fun. Definitely worth seeing on the big screen if you can. Very very pretty with some great design work and I love how much the whole thing was a love song to the tech we're just on the verge of having. Fun characters. Other than the one giant gaping plothole, nice story. why is all the fanfic incestshipping

Then I came home last night and this happened:

"They couldn't even manage ten years without destroying it?" Newton Geizsler exclaimed, surveying the still all-too-familiar devastation that had flattened several blocks of the center of San Fransokyo. ( ficlet, mildly spoilery )

1.

Leave Us Time To Waste (5457 words) by melannen
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Pacific Rim (2013)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Newton Geiszler/Hermann Gottlieb, Raleigh Becket & Mako Mori, Newton Geiszler/Kaiju
Characters: Newton Geiszler, Hermann Gottlieb, Tendo Choi, Raleigh Becket, Mako Mori
Additional Tags: Aliens make them not have sex, Post-Canon, Drift Side Effects, Platonic Relationships, Sleepy/Unconscious Sex, Dubious Consent
Summary:

One of the side-effects of Drifting is that Drift partners are no longer capable of being sexually attracted to each other. At all. Dr. Newton Geiszler is not happy about this.

Look, look, I finished a fic!


2. For the talky meme, alasse_irena asked for: Tell me something (or somethings, if you like) you would like to see more of in the fantasy genre.

Well, first, I have a confession to make: I don't read a lot of fantasy these days. (And don't watch much TV or movies, either.) There are a lot of fantasy novels I read back in the day that are still very dear to my heart, but in the last twelve months, I have read a total of six grown-up fantasy novels for grown-ups - if reading a five-book series about Edwardian vampires and one book about She-Hulk counts. (If you add in kids' novels and comics it's a little better but not much.) So it's possible they're already doing all the things I like and I just haven't noticed... but hey, when did not knowing what I'm talking about ever stop me?

My first version of this post was going to be "things fantasy novels could do to make me more likely to read them", but that really quickly turned into "reasons I enjoy fanfic more than published novels". Which was actually really interesting to write out, but not really the question I wanted to answer here, so I may post it later (I do still have slots open for the last week of meme....)

So instead I am going to talk about one thing that I would like to see less of in all the stories I consume, but especially in fantasy novels: the good guys only winning because they find the Cheat Codes of Destiny.

( Or, explained at much greater length... )

Also I would like more diversity in characters and worldbuilding, obviously. And less heteronormativity and gender essentialism. And for it to be exactly like fanfic in every way. And more Capital Letters of Emphasis, obviously.

But mostly I would like a ban on using Cheat Codes of Destiny to take out the Assholes In Charge, and more of whatever we come up with instead.

1. The sheet music offer is still open to people in my circles, since I didn't exactly get overloaded with requests. (and I haven't gotten around to putting the scanner away yet.)

2. The reason I haven't posted anything substantial here since con.txt is... *drumroll* .... I am feeling guilty about not doing the con-txt followup I said I should do. So if there's something I told you I would do at/after con-txt and I haven't done it yet, pls poke me again? Either I've forgotten or I've been marinating in procrastinator's guilt and need somebody to kick me in the reset button.

3. So I finally watched Pacific Rim! It came in at the library, and people were still excited about it at con-txt, and also I acquired this DVD projector I wanted to test, so we watched it projected on a sheet taped up to the screen porch, because that seems like the right way to watch a movie like that. (Then I watched it on my laptop so I could actually catch the details. Like Raleigh's drivesuit scars that there is NO FANFIC AT ALL ABOUT, wtf fandom.)

Anyway not going to bother with a spoiler cut since it's a year old and I'm not discussing plots, but here are my thoughts:

Both the worldbuilding and the plot are 100% incoherent, the giant monster fights were okay but I kept getting distracted from the awesome by trying and failing to make them make sense, they really really really dropped the ball on diversity otherwise even though Idris Elba is amazing and Mako is also amazing, but don't let anyone tell you her story was groundbreaking, it's pretty standard and it's mostly about the men in her life.

BUT

This will probably remain a favorite of mine, because it is approx. 0% heterosexuality by weight. And that doesn't mean it's particularly queer either - there's just no portrayal of sexuality in it at all. This is a movie where you can easily argue that not only all the protagonists, but also the entire society, is asexual and aromantic.

And for a movie that is almost entirely about close, intense relationships, that's astonishing - but all the relationships, from Newt and Hermann's working partnership, to the various family relationships, to Mako and Raleigh's adorable bffs-at-first-sight, this is a movie that glorifies the nonromantic and nonsexual to the extent that it seems to forget that romantic and sexual exist. Other than one line in a flashback where a tertiary character casually mentions a semi-successful date, there's nothing - no offhand attempts to establish the heroes' het cred, no background advertisements selling sex, no casual references to attractiveness, not even any mentions of, like, people having parents who were a couple, that I can recall. (Even the Kaidonovskys, iirc, aren't mentioned as a couple in the movie canon, and don't interact in any blatantly romantic ways - taking the movie as a standalone, they could be, you know, cousins.)

And that was - it was so restful, you can't even imagine. Finally a movie that felt like home, it was so great.

..so then I went back to the fanfic and of course it's like 90% shipping by weight. I know I almost always end up dissatisfied with the shippy fic once I watch canon, but in this case it left me ... itchy, probably because of the way the canon just felt so comfortable in its total lack of shipping and sexuality.

So I read some of the Newt/Hermann fic I'd been saving until I saw the movie, and it still did what Newt/Hermann fandom does so well - body mods, soulbonding, relationships with long histories, social maladjustment, disability, extremely smart people who like showing off, competence porn, snark hiding affection, xenophilia, unconventional domesticity, weird telepathy stuff, people two feet beyond the end of their rope who can't even remember how to fall, etc. -- all things I like in a pairing, and it left me deeply unsatisfied.

So then I checked out the novelization because I'd heard it was good and it seemed like it might be what I wanted in terms of More Of Canon, but I still get too antsy to have gotten very far, because something in me knows exactly what I wanted out of Pac Rim fandom, and that's not it.

So finally I sat down and asked myself, okay, what is it you do want out of this fandom that you're not getting?

I want some fanfic that's novel-length, about the doomed, hotshot pilots who risk their lives fighting to protect the defenseless, in the last days of the Resistance, with an aesthetic of abandoned WWII bunker + neon and tattoos + sweeping vistas + SF technology taken for granted, in a war where the stakes are so high that entire planetary ecologies are just minor collateral damage, and a society's been torn apart so long that nobody hasn't lost something, heart and home. With a cast that's blatantly, in-your-face diverse on a bunch of axes, dealing with disabilities and scars both mental and physical and loss after loss of loved ones, but resilient and idealistic despite that, drinking their pain away in makeshift dive bars deep in massive, hastily-assembled military installations. Most of the important relationships aren't romantic, and there's lots of stuff with organized crime intersecting the resistance, plus aliens and robots and maybe some poorly explained psi powers.

..and then I went "oh crap, I know what that is" and started re-reading the X-Wing novels instead.

So there's that.

I did start a Newt/Hermann fic where one of the side effects of Drifting is that you are no longer neurologically capable of finding your Drift partner sexually attractive - because that's the other thing that I *definitely* wanted out of this fandom - but even odds now if I'll finish that before I finish the one about Master Pentecost and his motley band of Jedi Pilot trainees and washouts, one last holdout on the Planet of the Kaiju in the decades after the clone wars, and how former Knight Beckett showed Mako Mori the way to her Jedi trials.

(The X-Wing novels hold up surprisingly well, better than I feared! I'm noticing some of the really awful stuff with how the universe handles aliens-as-metaphor-for-race more now that I did fifteen years ago, but the X-Wing novels try really hard to give you real diversity anyway, even if you do know that one of the nonhuman female pilots is always going to die first.)