Yuletide Recs III

Blood Ties

Liberation: plotty, UST and other -tensions soaked story around Mike, Henry and Vicki, solving a case in the aftermath of the Father Mendoza incident. Mmmmm.

Dollhouse

For Those Rebellious: futurefic, in which Priya-Sierra and Tony-Victor are trying to figure out who they are after the Dollhouse.

It starts somewhere: Topher backstory, mixing bright, cheerful and absolutely chilling, very appropriate to the character.

Iron Man

Chaos Magic: post-Secret Invasion, just pre-World's Most Wanted, this is a great Tony Stark portrait at this point.


Momo

Several Architects: lovely, lovely Michael Ende fanfic which as much of what Ende wrote is also great meta on the art of storytelling.


Oresteia

Last Days: Clytemnestra, ruling in Argos, encounters Odysseus. Sharp and memorable.

Der Ring des Nibelungen

Das Lied von der Erde: the story of Wotan and Erda, great to read even if you're not familiar with Wagner's interpretation of Norse mythology. (BTW, the story is in English, not German, non-German speakers.)


Twin Peaks

And Devil Makes Three: absolutely awesome story about the first meeting and subsequent first case Albert Rosenfield shares with Dale Cooper. The snark, the suspense and the mixture of funny and creepy rules, and the character voices are brilliant.

And a treat for friends of Doctor Who and the Latin language:

In Pompeium: given that the family from Fires of Pompeii was from the Cambridge Latin Course, this is only fair!

Fannish Year In Review Meme, from nolivingman

1. Your main fandom of the year?

I remained a committed multifandom girl.

2. Your favorite film watched this year?

It's a tie between Star Trek XI, for the sheer nostalgic fun of it and the new cast gaining my affection on their own, and Milk, which was both a good film based on real characters and a cinematic expression of the romance of political activism. If pressed, I'd pick Milk, though.


3. Your favorite book read this year?

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, hands down.

4. Your favorite album or song to listen to this year?

There was that band from Liverpool whom you might have heard of, and whose entire ouevre went out on CD again. I think my overall favourite Beatles album is probably Revolver, but this year I listened to Rubber Soul a lot. Especially Norwegian Wood and In My Life on it.

5. Your favorite TV show of the year?

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. So very, very, very good. Favourite tv event of the year, which is not quite the same thing, was Torchwood: Children of Earth, hands down. Some of the best tv I've seen in years, and who'd have thought that, as Paul Cornell memorably put it, "this hard beast grew out of the corpse of dear old campy slash fiction Torchwood"?

6. Your favorite LJ community of the year?

B5_revisited. It's great fun to discuss the old episodes on a weekly basis, though we seem to be on Christmas hiatus right now. What's up with that, ruuger?

7. Your best new fandom discovery of the year?

It's a tie between Vaughan's Ex Machina with its clever combination of politics and geekdom, and the recently marathoned Merlin.

8. Your biggest fandom disappointment of the year?

Not the BSG finale, which I was mostly okay with, but the previous storyline, or lack of same, for Laura Roslin post Revelations. There were other problems for me in the last half of s4, too (along with elements I appreciated and enjoyed), but Roslin going after three and a half years as one of the best female (or for that matter, of either gender) characters on tv to Bill Adama's love interest is something I will never completely get over with. Despite reaching a sort of zen state via fanfic.

9. Your TV boyfriend of the year?

The aforementioned Star Trek movie triggered a rewatching of not TOS but TNG for me, which put me in Captain, my Captain mood about Jean-Luc Picard all over again.

10. Your TV girlfriend of the year?

Either Gwen Cooper (Torchwood) or Debra Morgan (Dexter). I went from being mostly indifferent to Gwen in the first season of TW to liking her in the second, with the teaser for Something Borrowed mid-season being the point where the sympathy was transformed in love, to absolutely adoring her in Children of Earth. Which means Gwen bashing now makes me even more furious than it used to when I just objected out of general principle. With Deb, I liked her from the get go, but didn't immediately love her. By now, I do, passionately so. She's had fantastic and consistent character development over four seasons, and is probably the character about whom I mostly want to know what she does next.

11. Your biggest squee moment of the year?

Scotty mentions he tried out transportation on a moving object with "Admiral Archer's Beagle". For some reason, this example of the one of the trekkiest of ST inside jokes ever made me laugh and beam so widely my face hurt. Closely matched when the Muller sphere, invented by Milo Rambaldi, found its way from the Alias to the STverse. Oh, J.J. Abrams, you may be on crack sometimes (sometimes?), but I am rather fond of you when you pull these kind of stunts.

12. The most missed of your old fandoms?

Every now and then I think about theatrical_muse, and all the intense and fantastic role play I experienced there with some wonderful fannish writers, and feel both nostalgic and very guilty for leaving. But it was both a time issue and an issue of my muses not talking to me anymore, so I really had no choice.

13. The fandom you haven't tried yet, but want to?

Slings and Arrows.

14. Your biggest fan anticipations for the New Year?

Getting my Hamlet dvd and watching the production I saw live again, the new and final season of Lost, and Iron Man II.