Category: Original

Last sentence meme

@iamanartichoke tagged me about 2 weeks ago and at the time I hadn’t gotten any fic written recently, but I finally wrote about a page of the next chapter of First Things while I was on a long flight last week.

The game is to post the last sentence you wrote and to tag as many people as there are words in the sentence!

“I
fear that would only make my distraction worse,” Thor replied.

10 points to your House if you remember from the previous chapter(s) what he’s talking about.

11 words, that’s not too bad. OK, who writes around here? @iamanartichoke, it’s probably been long enough that you have something new. @foundlingmother, @ghostxforest, @illwynd, @incredifishface, @loxxxlay, @neveserene, @seamayweed, @seidrade, @taranoire, @writernotwaiting

For the fic writing meme! 4, 11, 16 ❤️

4. Which has the most “you” in it, however you’d define that?

Desert Flowers, holy shit. Long Nietzsche quotes, Loki’s Jewish coding, Thor and Loki getting high and talking about philosophy… plus an incestuous kiss disguised as a move in an argument.

11. If I’m showing off just one of your pieces to someone, which one should it be?

Kinda depends on the person and their interests. If a Thorki shipper, probably The Tree of Knowledge (hopefully as a lead-in to the rest of the series…); if not… Prince of Darkness has been the little fic that could. It keeps getting random kudos months after I posted it. And maybe someone who likes it could be persuaded to read Abyss (and not be put off by the first-person narration, which apparently everyone has decided they hate).

16. 3 favorite comments ever received on fanfic.

@incredifishface left the nicest long, gushy, frequently all-caps comments with a lot of quotations on the first two installments in my Thorki series, “Desert Flowers” and “The Tree of Knowledge.” I am still extremely proud that one of my favorite fanfictional stylists said of my fic, “Style-wise, not one word out of place” 😛

I also appreciated all the long, thoughtful comments @seidrade left on my fics, which led to some very enjoyable back-and-forth about philosophy and character analysis and ultimately to them joining Tumblr. In the words of the charmingly annoying little sister from The Philadelphia Story: “I did it, I did it all.”

Thank you so much for asking! And here’s the question meme again in case anyone else wants to play.

philosopherking1887:

philosopherking1887:

Now that I’ve finished the @#$%ing paper, I want to write some fanfiction, but I still have teaching responsibilities and a fuckton of job applications coming due starting tomorrow and with little let-up until November 15, and also my brain is a pile of mush.

No rest for the weary, the wicked, or those who are both.

Oh fuck, I need to finish building my academic website.

I’m procrastinating on answering emails by filling out job applications. It’s structured procrastination.

Ship meme

I was kindly tagged by @seidrade… only 3 days ago. I’m not doing as badly as I thought.

1. Ultimate OTP — Thor/Loki, obviously. It’s not like I’m subtle about it…

2. A ship you’ll always love — Charles Xavier/Erik Lehnsherr, or “Cherik.” I watched X-Men: First Class on a plane in February 2015 and got kind of turned on. At the time I had no desire to read or write fanfiction because it was just so blatant in canon that I wasn’t sure what fanfiction had left to do. Since then I’ve read some fix-it fic and AUs – which weren’t nearly as much of a thing during my first outing in online fandom, ca. 2001-2005. “AU” mostly meant canon-divergent, not a literally completely different universe.

3. Your current obsession — Do I have one, other than being pissed off about what the MCU has done with my favorite characters? @loxxxlay has kind of gotten me into Grandthorki, and I also remember reading a fic of theirs with Thanos coercing Thor and Loki into some stuff, which is something I’ve considered writing about… the dynamic is not dissimilar. Yeah, I have some messed-up kinks.

4. A ship you never thought you’d like — I’m not sure I have any of these. If I didn’t think I’d like it, I probably still don’t. Which doesn’t mean I’m not willing to give new things a try… I guess I just know my tastes pretty well.

5. A ship you liked but don’t anymore — When I first got into Loki fandom back in 2015, after finally watching all the MCU movies, I started out reading mostly gen fic but also some het fic, largely as a function of where I was getting my recs. I read some Sif/Loki and some Loki/Sigyn (where Sigyn is, of course, basically just an OFC) that I liked. Now I can’t read most het involving Loki, mostly because a lot of it involves Loki being a dom and he just isn’t (except sometimes for Thor’s benefit). Fics involving Sif/Loki or Loki/Valkyrie are OK if the dynamic is such that Loki is effectively the sub and/or bottom (I know those aren’t the same thing, but there’s some conceptual overlap). It doesn’t have to be pegging, but… well, I don’t hate the dynamic in the one Sif/Loki fic I wrote.

6. A ship you think should be canon — Stevetony, a.k.a. Superhusbands. Joss Whedon totally agrees with me. I mean… “Put on the suit, let’s go a few rounds”? That log-splitting scene? I hear that it basically is canon in some runs of the comics (they got married when Tony got gender-swapped into Natasha Stark) and in the “Avengers Assemble” animated series.

7. A canon ship you hate — Matt Murdock/Karen Page in Daredevil… though I guess they’ve broken up now, fortunately. It never should have been a thing. They had no chemistry whatsoever. (No, I don’t hate Brucenat like everyone else. Deal with it.)

8. A ship you’ve shipped for years — Harry/Draco. I came into the Harry Potter fandom an innocent little 12-year-old and I knew Ron/Hermione and Harry/Ginny were in the cards and I was fine with that… but then I discovered the wild and wonderful world of slash fanfiction. It all started with Raincoat!Draco and I never looked back. Honorable mention for Morpheus/Lucifer from the Sandman comics, which I never read or wrote fic about but definitely fantasized about a lot…

9. A ship everyone loves but you don’t care about — Stucky. Sorry, not sorry. I find it boring because they strike me as so similar… and frankly, Bucky doesn’t even have that much of a character in the MCU. I like ships with contrast and tension, which is why I go for Thorki and Stevetony.

10. Favorite rare-pair — I guess it would have to be Tom Riddle/Minerva McGonagall, which I wrote a very chaste, talky fic about in 2002 or something. I looked on AO3 and there are 75 fics in that ship tag, often as a secondary or tertiary pairing. I have no desire to read any of it, but I still kind of like the idea.

Tagging: @fuckyeahrichardiii (if you want to, I know you’re pretty busy), @ghostxforest, @imaginetrilobites, @impalaforthree, @princess-ikol, @whitemage03, @wouldyouknowmore, and whoever else thinks this looks fun!

wafflediaries replied to your post “You know, it wasn’t until I was talking to someone in person about…”

Thor Ragnarok was the best portrayal of Loki we have ever seen in the MCU. Please stop being bitter just because he wasn’t lifted from your OOC Loki-centric fanfic. Taika Waititi did a fantastic job.

LOL, @wafflediaries, have you actually read any of my fanfiction? (Or were you talking to @studiokawaii, whose reblog of the post I gather you were directly replying to?) I can’t control who reblogs and adds to the original post (short of blocking everyone I disagree with, which is emphatically NOT my M.O.), and I’m sure many of the rebloggers are who you think I am: unconditional Loki justifiers (also known as “apologists,” which is a misleading use of the term) who claim that he is a pure, blameless cinnamon roll, all of whose apparently immoral actions in canon can be excused on the grounds of his victimization by various other characters, and many of whom also ship Loki with themselves and/or write fanfiction pairing him with the reader or a self-insert OFC. (Not that there’s anything in principle wrong with character/reader fic or self-insert OFCs; it’s just not my bag, and tends to be associated with the mischaracterization of Loki described above.)

It’s easy to dismiss criticism of Loki’s portrayal in Ragnarok if you dismiss all the critics as a particular type of uncreditable person. I have never been accused of writing an OOC Loki, and since I am also a Thor/Loki shipper, many of my readers consider themselves Thor fans in the first instance and usually defend Thor against the attacks launched by the Loki-justifiers (sometimes to the also unjustified extreme of claiming that Thor is a blameless cinnamon roll who has no flaws and has never done anything wrong in his life, but that’s another story…). Then again, perhaps the reason no one has called my Loki OOC is simply the very strong norm against any form of criticism of fanfiction, even constructive criticism, and even when it is explicitly solicited (as I do).

The first sentence of a possible fic in my fanfictional universe, which I may or may not ever write (considering how many merely notional fics I have floating around in my head):

“Frigga didn’t know exactly when her sons became lovers, but she flattered herself that she had figured it out within a year of when it started.”