a conspiracy of cartographers

The Top Five meme, answers edition!

( A good deal of talk mostly about Harry Potter and CKR. And lesbians. )

Feel free to ask me for more top fives!

So not only did I [a] mainline a children's show and [b] actually tear up at the end of it (I am apparently overinvested in CKR's characters having happy family lives, damn yooou, Ray Kowalski) but I then [c] wrote fic about it.

In this particular case it is china_shop's fault for making encouraging happy sounds when I said that I totally wanted Eric and Fraser's adventures Being Good People together. That is ... not quite what this fic is, because this fic is actually a riff on the tune of "Post-quest Fraser goes to take a Canadian posting somewhere without Ray and is not happy," except that in this particular case a Canadian posting somewhere is Gimli. So I decided to write it for the current (nearly expired, ahaha) ds_flashfiction challenge. WHY NOT. (I think it might also have the distinction of being just as random and obscure as the HCL/Slings & Arrows crossover. Can I get some sort of C6D medal for Pointless But Fun Crossover Fic? That would be awesome.)

Anyway: 1500 Kilometers (& A Caboose). For reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, Fraser is BFFs with Eric Johansson. And Johnny and Ray look kind of alike for no particular reason. And Zoë is awesome. And ... mostly I just really like the word "caboose."

I may be slightly flattened by how much I've come to care for the characters in My Life as a Dog. I say this because, um, I am not really much in the habit of watching telly specifically for kids these days (...if we ignore the Magic School Bus episodes I have somewhere) and so I expect to be charmed, not invested. The Sarah Jane Adventures, for instance, charm me like mad, and I may have a bit of a crush on Sarah Jane, but again I am charmed rather than invested. With My Life as a Dog I am actually spending entire episodes clutching at my face going "Johnny Johnny Johnny" in ... remarkably the same way I do with Billy and Ray, actually, so it's not that shocking. But I also care more than I expected about Zoe, and would probably be clutching my face going "Zoe!" too, except that she is sane (mostly) and wants practical things like good windows and not a caboose in the back yard, and Johnny is the one out playing hockey into the wee hours, so Johnny is the one I yell at through the screen.

My actual point, though, is [a] I love Johnny but mostly [b] little Eric has a moral compass pointing due north, and he tries very hard to solve everyone else's problems, and he has a weird encyclopedic knowledge of useful things and a twelfth-grade reading level despite very little formal training, and he always believes the best of people, and he's dealing with a dead mother and endless daddy issues, so basically Eric is Benton Fraser at the age of twelve. Except instead of being raised by traveling librarians he's being raised by Johnny Johansson. Considering how damn funny I find this, I should probably get some new hobbies.

Instead I am off to my summer retail job, but it's possible new hobbies might happen eventually.

Okay, this time Hard Core Logo made me cry at the end. Protip: do not watch just before going to bed, or you will end up laying there staring at the ceiling feeling sad, and not particularly astonishingly the Headstones did not actually work as a cheering-up method. On the other hand this morning I have plans to watch kind of embarrassing amounts of My Life as a Dog, which should do the trick.

The point I'm pretty sure I had before I got sad about HCL is that I am kind of floored that CKR was able to sandwich being Billy in between being Johnny for the surrounding year. Good god. And my other point is that I am endlessly delighted by the massive amounts of love I have for various of his characters, so much so that I really cannot decide who is my favourite. Since it is a weekend and days off mean poll time! I figured this was certainly important enough to take a poll on.

(Ray Kowalski is Sir Not Appearing in This Poll, because I know, and I'd probably choose him too.)


If you ticked that last option, by the way, and then your answer turns out to, say, have anything to do with the time he was a vampire with a mutant Pomeranian, I -- well, I'll probably just giggle. But I figure it is perfectly valid to love someone not in that poll the most, even though I'm pretty sure I covered most of the not-a-sociopath options there, and I'm also pretty sure Leoben doesn't even count.

Now I should probably stop dithering and write more of the massive AU, although I would be equally willing to have hilarious conversations about what would happen if various of CKR's characters met one another. (Like, Newbie and Leoben? Particularly hilarious. Okay, stopping now.)

The "You Should Write..." Meme!
my thread here

I probably should not link to this. Because it's not as though I need more suggestions about what to write. But I like hearing this stuff anyway, and I'm more than half just wanting you guys to do it too, because I am fond of throwing plotbunnies at people.

I have figured out what is wrong with my stupid due South AU s2 F/K/V polybigbang fic, and it is that I fucking doomed myself with Magnetic. Seriously, I wrote the first draft of that thing inside a week, while attending classes, and though it went through two drafts and a bit of overhaul before it was functional, it was still ... possibly the easiest thing I have ever written, one of those rare gifts where the actual writing process was actively fun. And it was awesome but it means that now I am doomed, as I said, because to a lesser extent no other due South fic I ever write will be that joyous, and to a greater extent I'm now sitting here going, "Fraser! Rays! You're in the same room! I expect a perpetual high of writerly delight and possibly some easy banter, please." I am even sure I might get back there eventually, but in the meantime because I am very foolish I actually thought writing a universe where Kowalski meets Fraser-and-Vecchio-as-partners would be interesting, and it is but it means I have to do all sorts of legwork to get them to the Fraser-and-Kowalski comfort levels the show has. Gnahhh.

I may also be suffering from "oh god, it's getting too long" syndrome, which I have not trained myself out of despite understanding that plotty due South fics are necessarily massive. The thing is, though, that I've hit 10,430 words in the doc and the corresponding section of outline is ... 400 out of 3575 words. Which means, um, if my math is correct and the ratios are anything like corresponding, that it'll come out around 93,218 words. Dear lord no. That's two Dreamwidth posts! Even DW does not exceed 50,000 words! And neither did either of the Doctor Who seasons, nor do I actually want to kill oliviacirce nor sionnain's souls when I send it over for beta.

AH WELL I SHALL CARRY ON.

Big Bang that is the F/K/V s2 AU: 6740 words long, most of one episode remixed, maybe one third of part one (of six) completed. Times listened to Hard Core Logo soundtrack on loop: I have lost count. New Canadian Actor Bingo square filled: Bucky Haight as an unexpected tattoo artist in The Promise; I'm pretty sure I've finally stopped laughing. Maybe. At least he did not actually give Fraser a tattoo of a Candian flag with an oak leaf in the middle.

I had a horrible pounding headache earlier, probably because I was busy writing until my eyes crossed and forgot that I sometimes need to do things like eat; I have had toast and apple juice (little kid comfort food is TOTALLY VALID) and the room has decided to stop spinning. I am pretty sure the axiom about laughter being the best cure is still true, though, because I am feeling decidedly better now that I have come across Canada Does Hogwarts. It's basically one big inside joke, and possibly a little to my horror it succinctly explains my love for the C6D fandom -- I say to my horror because I now think that Callum Rennie earnestly explaining that really you are playing Quidditch against yourself is the height of humour. It also seems that I have seen exactly enough C6D stuff to get every single one of the jokes, about which I am irrationally pleased. And the room is still stable, but I am pondering the wisdom of going to bed early (rather than trying to write more, wtf self) and I cannot actually think of a graceful way to end this entry. Read the fic! It is extremely short and quite funny! Good night.

Doctor can has costume, companion can has name. I'm kind of wildly digging the silly incongruity and the BOOTS, and my god Amy is kind of meltingly adorable. I -- I appear to have Who squee. Time to go to work before this sort of thing gets out of hand.

Okay, so I have this book lying around the house called Summon the Keeper. It was recommended to me in high school on the basis of, I believe, the fairly awesome talking cat; my copy is beat-up enough that I seem to have read it a number of times. It's not particularly great, but it's good fun -- basically, this woman Claire (along with her aforementioned talking cat, Austin) is a Keeper, charged with keeping the balance of good and evil righted in the world, and closing rips in the fabric of reality. She ends up stuck trying to seal a hole to Hell in the basement of a guest house in Kingston, which also houses the fabulous ghost of a Quebecois sailor and is tended by a handsome young man name of Dean McIsaac.

The reason I actually picked this book up again, specifically, is because I had the sudden revelation that, hey, uh, Dean? really freakishly a lot like Benton Fraser. I went back through to see if my recollection was accurate, and lo -- Dean is pretty much exactly what you'd expect twenty-year-old Fraser to be like if he was a handyman instead of a Mountie and from Newfoundland. It's a closer match than you might think.

( And then I go on about that and this book for a while, because I am easily charmed. But you totally want to read excerpts of the adventures of twenty-year-old handyman Fraser. )

i. DO YOU KNOW WHAT CLICHE BINGO HAS MADE ME DO. IT HAS MADE ME WRITE HARRY POTTER FIC.

I mostly blame this indirectly on feverbeats, because he has been going on about how Harry Potter is kind of his one true fandom, and deep down I have an inner fifteen-year-old who wants to just write Sirius/Remus fic all the time because that is baby's first OTP, and if I actually know how to write kisses now, why am I not writing Remus/Sirius kisses all the time?? This is more or less one last indulegence.

So, for the fairly fabulous cliche_bingo prompt 'woke up in bed together' I give you Several Ways to Apologize, in which Sirius Black does, indeed, find several ways to apologize for that hilarious thing he did that one time in sixth year that upset Snape. Y'know, that thing. Features legumes, some Padfoot POV, Peter with an actual speaking role, and naked Remus. Okay, I guess I still like this fandom after all.

ii. (which is related to i.)

aria: Sirius Black's narrative voice: still easy after five years without. O.O
polarisnorth: That doesn't actually surprise me. Sirius is pretty much the first of many characters of his type that you've fangirled over the years.
polarisnorth: RayK is only the latest.
aria: ...yeah, I am kind of eyeing it going "This is easy because it is sixteen-year-old British!Ray with ~magic~."
polarisnorth: ... have you written the crossover prompt yet?
polarisnorth: Because.
polarisnorth: That would be hilarious.
aria: dsddsfdfslkljdfs OH MY GOD

YEAH GUESS WHAT I'M GOING TO BE WRITING TOMORROW. But not right now because now I am sleeping.