Ah, the classic of all classics of enemy ships! The tale of a city torn by a feud between its two greatest families, and of the heir of one of the houses, and also the cousin of the prince who just hates said heir so purely that he's perfectly willing to throw over his family's traditional neutrality just to get the chance to fight him in the street.

(Also I guess there's a couple kids called Romeo and Juliet involved somewhere in the background?)

• Make it a Word and a Blow (2819 words) by NotTonightJosephine
  Fandom: Romeo+Juliet (1996), Romeo And Juliet - Shakespeare
  Rating: Explicit
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Mercutio/Tybalt, Mercutio/Benvolio Montague
  Additional Tags: Everybody Lives, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Mercutio's Hero Dick Saves the Day, Oral Sex, tiny bit of knifeplay, some accidental voyeurism, some less accidental exhibitionism, Canon-Typical Violence, Benvolio is ace-spec, Benvolio and Mercutio are in an open and loving relationship, potential future Mercutio/Benvolio/Tybalt, lots of banter, forgive my attempts to be Elizabethan, and american, I took Some Liberties with the Text, men in lingerie, Tybalt shows his pride in weird ways
  
  And but one word with one of us? couple it with something; make it a word and a blow.



• Flick of a blade (5019 words) by drcalvin
  Chapters: 2/2
  Fandom: Rómeó és Júlia (Színház)
  Rating: Explicit
  Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
  Relationships: Mercutio/Tybalt
  Additional Tags: Knifeplay, Not Safe Sane and Consensual, Edgeplay, Outdoor Sex, Antagonism, Love/Hate, UST, Knifeplay Game of Chicken, PWP, Dirty Talk, Oral Knifeplay, Switchblade, Frottage, Mindfuck
  Series: Part 1 of A game of chicken (with knives)
  
  Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down.


• what lies lurk in kisses (3922 words) by Cinaed
  Fandom: Rómeó és Júlia (Színház), Romeo And Juliet - All Media Types
  Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
  Warnings: Underage
  Relationships: Mercutio/Tybalt
  Additional Tags: Unresolved Sexual Tension, Brothels, Canon-Typical Violence, Kissing, Epilepsy, Yuletide, Yuletide Treat
  
  that I mean to make bold withal, and as you shall use me hereafter,

Despite being basically the extended embodiment of the "Oh. Oh no," scene, Much Ado About Nothing was never one of my favorite Shakespeare comedies - baby ace!me was strongly in favor of stories where the people who have spent their whole lives saying they are happy to be single and never wish for anything more get to be right about their own lives - but the Tennant/Tate version did a lot to sell me on it. The fandom headcanon that Beatrice and Benedick are both gay-leaning disaster bisexuals who are extremely mad about the discovery that their one true love is not same gender!!! sold me on it a lot harder - if you read their protestations as "I am perfectly happy fucking around with girls/boys and see no need to change so I will sublimate my attraction into bickering!" it hurts my ace heart less. And stories about bi people dealing with their sexuality are nearly as rare as ace ones.

Also the Tate/Tennant version did a lot for that interpretation. A lot. It is a gift. I have seen Much Ado in several community theater productions as well as the filmed version from the West End, and like a lot of Shakespeare comedies, how well it works depends entirely on how (not-)straight the leads play the lines they're given, and Tennant/Tate do nothing straight in that play. And, look, the bickering is very good. (Though I am still dreaming of a version that takes it all the way and puts in plenty of stage business to make it clear that Beatrice and Benedick know exactly what their friends are trying to pull and they fake ham it up on purpose.) (I would also be there for a version where Beatrice and Benedick are both coughing flowers the entire first half of the play but it never comes up in dialogue because they glare daggers at anyone who even looks like they are thinking about commenting.)

I sometimes wonder why the Much Ado trope isn't used more in fandom though. There are so many fandoms where "our friends got tired of waiting for us to get our shit together, so they lied to both of us separately that the other had confessed to pining, and then I decided that if you were going to pine I could damn well pine harder than you" would work really well. Like! Nie Huaisang, sweetheart, all it would take was wandering into a Sunshot camp and letting Lan Zhan guilt you into admitting that Wei Ying had said the reason he was so ill-looking is that he was pining for Lan Zhan, and letting Wei Ying badger you into admitting that the reason Lan Zhan has been so cranky is that he was pining for Wei Ying, and Bob's your uncle. And basically anyone at Hogwarts could have done that to Harry and Draco at basically any point after about Book 4 and I'm pretty sure it would have worked...(Does anyone have recs for these? I feel like I have read at least a few. The key bit being the friends are lying about having been confessed to. I can think of plenty where the friends are telling the truth.)

OK actual recs: This is one of those tiny fandoms where general fic quality is very high, but Shakespeare fic is always very tricky because you have to decide between keeping the character voices just like canon, keeping the language they are speaking Early Modern but going for a more novelistic cadence, or going full out modern; and then you have to decide if you're going to match the description to the dialogue or not; and if you're working from a version that updated the staging but not the dialogue you've got another layer on top of that. And any of those options are actually really hard to pull off? So the caveat here for the canon setting ones in particular is that if you're really sensitive to that kind of thing you may have trouble in this fandom.

• No more than reason (7420 words) by jamjar
  Rating: General Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Beatrice/Benedick, Claudio/Hero
  Additional Tags: newlyweds, Married Life, Wordplay is foreplay
  Summary:

  Newly-wedded bliss, Beatrice and Benedick style.
  
  This is Benedick and Beatrice bickering their way into their unexepected happy-ever-after - along with their first real solid disagreement, and some good news to share. It is very good and the language choices are pitch-perfect, the banter gives me life and the things it says about canon are settled deep down in me as true ever since I read it.




• One Foot on Sea, One on Shore, OR; Where the Bachelors Sit (3752 words) by Cottia
  Chapters: 3/3
  Fandom: Much Ado About Nothing - Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing (2011)
  Rating: Explicit
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Beatrice/Benedick (Much Ado About Nothing)
  Additional Tags: heteronormativity is a prison, Cousin Incest, Genderfuck, Dick Jokes, Run-On Sentences, Bad Sex, Shakespeare-concordant wilful ignorance of Italian geography, Cunnilingus, Femdom, Queer Themes, Bisexual Character, what is gender??? we just don't know, if you're wondering if something's a dirty pun the answer is yes, greco-roman mythology in lieu of using one's words because you're a dramatic gay bitch, Anal Play, Anal Fingering, Comeplay, Come Swallowing, Come Shot, as in Shakespeare-style kissing cousins but tagging just in case, Blank Verse, Oxfordians don't interacy
  
  This one leans real hard into the Tate/Tennant dynamic and I love it a lot: Beatrice and Benedick have some trouble with the wedding night, until Beatrice suggests she top and gets and very enthusiastic response. It's mostly just filthy porn but it's filthy porn all in Shakespearean language and elegance and I can see the characters from the play still perfectly in voice.



• Ad Astra Per Nihil (18005 words) by Talls
  Fandom: Much Ado About Nothing - Shakespeare, Star Trek
  Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Beatrice/Benedick (Much Ado About Nothing), Claudio/Hero (Much Ado About Nothing)
  Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Star Trek Fusion, try it it's good, Doesn’t require knowledge of either fandom to be understood
  
  Star Trek AU? Star Trek AU! Does the really good fusion AU thing where it uses some of the silliness of the Star Trek canon to make some of the silliness in the original storyline better.


(I am adding a new rule: 6. You are permitted to re-read no more than two of the recs before posting, for your own sake.)

I have been told I need to update already so that people know I am still here.

Let's see: what have I been doing since my last update?

Messing around on the internet; fighting off huge internet-induced bouts of self-loathing; watching old episodes of Top Gear; applying for jobs; fighting off job-search-induced bouts of self-loathing; reading Top Gear fanfic; watching the news and falling into bouts of loathing the entire world; working on interrobang studios stuff with RL friends; horrifing RL friends by telling them that Top Gear fandom is awesome because instead of genderswap slashfic where somebody is turned into a girl because it's okay to have sex with girls, it has turned-into-a-car slashfic because it's totally okay to have sex with cars, obv.; playing the terribly addictive flash game that RL friends introduced me to in order to distract me from talking about having sex with cars; helping Mom with her volunteer & church work; helping former roommates move & attempting to deal with post-move out issues; falling into massive bouts of self-loathing RE:inability to actually be a grown-up; listening to NPR because if I can't be watching Top Gear or HIGNFY I can at least be listening to Car Talk & This Just In; continuing to go through my massive collection of STUFF in an attempt to manage it; fighting off lack-of-money induced fits of self-loathing; and writing Top Gear/Doctor Who crossover fanfic.

Mostly, I haven't been posting because things I did in one of the last massive anti-oppression discussions have left me unable to say *anything* fandom-related without becoming despairingly convinced that what I am saying is full of fail and privilege and will hurt people. (This is my problem, not anyone else's, but just fyi I am probably going to have to work through a lot of crap on my own part for awhile before I feel comfortable speaking in *any* kind of meta discussion whatsoever, which, frankly, sucks, because I love meta. Also, it isn't helping that the fandom I kind of became obsessed with in the meantime is basically the story of three middle-aged rich white men being as rich, white and male as possible on camera.) (Edited to removed language-of-privilege, WHY IS THIS SO HARD.)

ANYWAY.

I have been around, although reading & commenting a lot more sporadically than I had been, in an attempt to manage the self-loathing.

I have also done the last four Spink comics *all by myself* while the main studio had no internet, about which I am quite proud! And I did the Friday's Trigger Star strip all by myself! And posted about the first quarter of this years's book reviews on librarything, though I still have a bunch of read-this-year books waiting to be reviewed.

And I had signed up to do a fanmix for polybigbang, and ended up claiming the very first fic on the claims list, tania_sings's amazing, epic, gloriously kinky story in which Ariel the Sprite sleeps with basically every other character in Shakespeare, Perfection, which was just an utter delight to mix for & illustrate. I did get the mix & art done & submitted in time, & my author loved the mix about as much as I loved her story, despite me being so flaky to workwith lately! So yay! The mix, which contains only songs that are vaguely, by some definition, in-period for Shakespeare, by which I mean lots of bawdy ballads via dreamsquirrel and niquerio, is at Ariel Sings Stormy Weather (.zip file) and here is the Ariel cover art. I was playing with using vectors/paths for the cover art, which I haven't done seriously in about ten years, and was impressed with how well it came out. (And listened to about thirty times as much new music as I actually put on the mix, which means I actually have a hope of being able to navigate my current mp3 collection now, yay!)

What I did *not* do, see re:self-loathing above, is finish the second disc of the mix and make a proper mix post with tracklistings & explanatory notes like I said I would, because the notes started growing in length exponentially as I started looking for actual attested dates for the period music. I am still hoping to finish that post very soon, but I have realized that if I wait to post until I've finished that, it would be quite easy to keep not posting for a very long time.

Reading polybigbang and rpf_big_bang have been great fun, too, (and partly responsible for my giving in and reading Top Gear slash, because I think there is more un-flocked Top Gear stuff there than anywhere else on the net up until now) and I am full of general reccingness for them.

I am probably not doing nano this year - I know, first year since way back before I was even in fandom, but it's beginning to seem a bit silly to keep signing up and writing less than 12,000 words - unless of course the Top Gear/Doctor Who crossover of doom keeps writing itself as fast as it has been. <_< I am doing yuletide, though. There's only been one year in history where the self-loathing was strong enough to keep me away from yuletide.

Sirius ISN'T dead!!11!!one!!

The Dramatic and Angfty Tragedy of Draco, the Melancholy Malfoy,
Being a Play in Five Acts.
In Which: Everybody Dies
Bafed Upon the True Account of the Hiftoria Danicae
(and alfo those books by J.K. Rowling.)

Dramatis Personae
THE GHOST
DRACO, son of the late Lucius Malfoy and Narcissa
NARCISSA BLACK, widow of Lucius, now married to Sirius
SIRIUS BLACK, cousin to Narcissa

GINNY
RONALD, her brother
ARTHUR, father of Ginny and Ronald, trusted friend of Sirius
PERCY, son and assistant to ARTHUR

HERMIONE, friend and confidant

CRABBE and GOYLE, school friends to DRACO

FRED and GEORGE, sons to Arthur and members of the DA
NEVILLE, also a DA soldier

HARRY, the Boy Who Lived
REMUS, leftenant to Harry

SYBILL, a Seer, and her TROUPE of STUDENTS
LUNA and MYRTLE

And Others, Asst'd.