a conspiracy of cartographers

This may be the greatest space faceoff ever.

Today's round has TICKY BOXES. Basically, if I paired everyone off as usual, we'd end up with three finalists, and because it's more ~dramatic~ with two or something, today we're knocking it down to four semifinalists. To keep things consistent, you're still voting for your favorites -- just check the four boxes for the characters you like MOST. Obviously if you only care about one to three of the characters, just vote for them, but anyone who checks five or six won't have any of their votes counted.

( TICKY BOX ROUND. )

Fandom March Madness is making me a bit sad this year, because everyone I love keeps vanishing, so ... I feel like playing it here? Just for fun? And because I suspect that my rlist's tastes skew a bit different from that of a huge comm.

This is not scientifically rigorous, and is for fandoms that I like rather than, necessarily, fandoms up for March Madness, so ... hopefully enough of you know enough of these that it won't be completely silly. And frankly, I'm not sure how to divide categories, so you just get everything alphabetically.

( Preliminaries for 26 fandoms beneath the cut. )

Last night, I dreamed that Sherlock was going to be canceled. Unlikely, self! Obviously I was projecting my ongoing Community anxieties.

In any case, here, have a Sherlock vs Doctor Who meme ( beneath the cut )

i. This week's White Collar: it's a good thing I care about the characters, because oh man I do not care about baseball. Tim DeKay's fanboy face is really great, though! And we are now approaching finale time anxiousness. WHAT ARE THEY GOING TO DO.

ii. As everyone who cares about Community probably already knows, it returns March 15! I am way too ridiculously excited about it considering that I need to remember the show is not actually about Troy, Abed, and Annie's roleplay-heavy threesome adventures in their apartment. Whatever, I'm also excited for legitimate reasons such as I unconditionally love at least 85% of what that show does.

iii. I finally had a legit fucking nightmare about Supernatural. Apparently my mind can conjure a way of dragging Dean to Hell that's significantly more horrific than what the show gave us? Now that I'm awake I can't remember it very well, and I'm sort of fascinated by the wailing Bosch-esque horrors my mind conjured, but it wasn't very fun to wake up in the middle of the night gasping with terror.

iv. I still care about Sherlock? I'm trying to beat these feelings down to manageable levels by writing fic, but as I can't seem to decide whether I'm writing reunion fic or if the reunion bit is just an establishing shot so I can write about John's sexuality crisis and Sherlock kissing for science, my feelings continue at absurd levels.

v. BOMB GIRLS. It's a six-part (so far; it's been renewed for a second season) series about the women working a Canadian munitions factory in 1941. I noticed some corners of the internet being excited about it when it first started airing, but I waited to give it a go until I could watch it all at once, which turned out to be a good move; I couldn't stop. I love love love the characters, who are all complex and flawed and doing their best, and the women are fully-realized people in a way I would love to see on every show, and it's full of girl friendships and this amazing queer relationship that is currently all sorts of tragic but that I am holding out for endgame and ship SO HARD, and I just. Watch this show! Or if you have, talk with me about it! I am in starry-eyed love.

Ever since the last Sherlock episode aired I have been somewhat desperately searching for good post-Reichenbach fic. There was a really specific itch I was trying to scratch, for something canon-compliant, in-character, plotty, that made good use of the ensemble, addressed all the sexual and personal complications that Sherlock/John would entail, and contained a good reunion. This is ... a pretty tall order, and there are definitely a few charming reunion fics out there that I quite enjoyed.

This fic, on the other hand, does every single one of those things and has basically ruined me for not only any other post-Reichenbach fic but quiiite possibly with whatever Moffat and Gatiss come up with.

the sensation of falling as you just hit sleep by greywash. Love is a much more vicious motivator.

This has excellent ensemble (my particular favorites are Molly and Mycroft, but everyone's pretty great), a wonderfully creative version of Moran, made me yell lots of advice at the screen and claw at my couch with feeeelings, and does Sherlock and John perfectly. The author also wrote some accompanying meta (spoilery for the show but not for the fic beyond basic conceptual things) re: how the fic is about the aspects of the show they found most frustrating, specifically "Sherlock's really sort of adolescent understanding of love, Sherlock's deliberate and methodical deceit of John, and the massively overcomplicated and convoluted nonsense that Moriarty and Sherlock (especially Sherlock) seem to think is necessary to do pretty much anything." Which is to say, this is also a fic about awful people learning to communicate. I don't know if you guys know this, but basically NOTHING makes me weak in the knees more quickly.

So um yes! That is your enthusiastic fic rec for the evening.

It seemed about time for another round of Softer World comics! BBC Sherlock, this time.

These come with an apology for any subconscious osmosis of other iterations of Sherlock Softer Worlds; I did my best to not duplicate any of the ideas I've seen around (there are so many Sherlock Softer Worlds, guys, and they are so great) but I may have slipped up, and for that I preemptively apologize. I think these should also come with a warning label for the levels of disturbing easily reached by the combination of Sherlock, Moriarty, and Softer World text. Which is not to say there aren't also a few silly ones! There is, however, a tragic lack of Mrs. Hudson.

( 35 Sherlock Softer Worlds, spoilery for everything. )

Aten't dead! In fact I have been posting to both tumblr and twitter with reasonable frequency, but my life in 140 characters or gifs with capslock commentary is not ... particularly in depth. So: hello! I am here to warn you all that Martin Freeman's face has hypnotic powers of suggestion, because my recent fannish activities have fallen into one of these two categories:

1. rewatch Sherlock/rewatch the Granada Holmes series/desperately seek post-Reichenbach fic/reread the Paradox series & all of Katie Forsythe's fic in a fit of madness/gaze upon Sherlock vids/curse the heavens that I have to wait so long for the next series

2. reread the Hobbit/flop about and make joyful noises about how fucking perfect Freeman's Bilbo is going to be/watch the Hobbit teaser trailer about a million times/rewatch all the cast bits in the Extended Edition Lord of the Rings DVDs/read all the Mark Reads entries of the Hobbit & what he has so far of Lord of the Rings/accidentally trip and fall into the first few chapters of Fellowship, which is fair enough as I haven't done a proper reread in three years

I am combating this White Dudes Doing Stuff thing by working on my novel that has basically one white dude doing stuff, and plenty of ladies and nonwhite dudes doing stuff, which is great! But the fannish channel is all hobbits and detectives right now. (Although no hobbit detectives! There seems to be a pretty low crime rate in the Shire, but I really hope there's a hobbit detective in Bree or something.)

Meanwhile I want to pull out something that I posted last time I was reading Lord of the Rings, because it was SUCH FUN, and it is the One Ring game! The One Ring game basically goes: think of (a) character(s) from a fandom other than LotR, and figure out what would happen if they were given the One Ring and charged to destroy it. So, for example: Neville Longbottom would destroy that sucker; Andrew Wells from Buffy would hide in a dark room with it and call it his Precious and be totally useless; Benton Fraser would TAKE OVER THE WORLD. &c. Give me characters! I will tell you what they do! Epic quests and evil overlords for all!

First the best of Sherlock episodes, now this? A week in television that feels specifically designed to give me the maximum amount of delighted feelings!

( White Collar 3x11, Checkmate: happyflail & bewildered speculation. )