Remix Reveal!

[selenak]

Or, Return of the Redheads. Because by sheer coincidence, both the remix I first wrote and my pinch hit feature a ginger woman as the central character, which didn't occur to me until recently.

Redhead the first was Atia of the Julii, from the tv show Rome. I've never written in Rome fandom before and probably won't again because while I enjoyed the show very much as a watcher, as a writer my inner historian would probably get in the way too much, and that's just awkward. However, when I saw I got the fabulous kangeiko as an assignment, my mind at once went to her Rome story from Yuletide, Luxury, which featured Octavia and Atia during Octavia's wedding night and managed to draw a great portrait of the two at that point with a few lines, from Octavia's pov. Since the way this mother-daughter relationship changed over the course of the show - the way they relate in the s2 finale is so very different from the s1 premiere, and yet there is one constant - was one of my favourite elements, and since there is all too few fanfic about the relationship between two women anyway, I decided to go for an overall portrait, from Octavia's birth onward, from Atia's pov, using the scene from Luxury as one of the stages they go through. This resulted in:


Survival (The Amy Tan Remix)


As Rome isn't exactly a big fandom, and what fandom there is tends to focus on Pullo and Vorenus, I was very pleasantly surprised by the amount of feedback. My Atia muse tells me this is because not many can deny the Julii, compelling dysfunctional family that they are.

Redhead the second was Lyta Alexander, of Babylon 5. I had volunteered to pinch hit, and B5 is one of my oldest and dearest fandoms, so when I got leyenn - who coincidentally wrote last year's remix of one of my B5 stories - I more or less was sure I'd go for one of her B5 stories. (Though we share other fandoms, too; Star Trek: TNG, for example.) Which one to choose was a somewhat trickier question, since most of them revolve around her OTP, Susan Ivanova and Talia Winters. I like both characters (and prefer Susan/Talia infinitely to Susan/Marcus, if you've got to know), but very few of my stories have a romantic relationship as their primary focus. It's just not the way my writerly instinct works. On the other hand, one of the beauties of the remix is that finding other aspects to focus on is one of the primary challenges. Then I discovered one of leyenn's stories pairs Ivanova not with Talia but with Lyta Alexander, in a one night stand at some point post Objects at Rest. It's a great Ivanova portrait in her Russian cynicism and buried wistfulness, and Lyta is enigmatic, with a few interesting hints as to what her motives might be. Now, though as far as B5 is concerned I'm very much Centauri-centric in my fannish attentions (insert Selena's usual "Londo Mollari is my favourite tv character of all time, Vir is the most adorable one ever, I love Centauri Prime almost as much as Londo does and the Londo/G'Kar arc is the best of the show" rave here), but my secondary interest was probably held by the telepaths. (Well. Most of them.) Which has resulted in some stories about Bester in the past, and one about post-Divided Loyalties-Talia, but until now not about Lyta. I did have, however, a couple of meta ideas about her that somehow never made it into a cohesive fictional whole, and I always wanted to write that story. The situation leyenn had set up reminded me that I had always wondered what it had been like for Lyta to basically kill Talia through sending that command, and this in turn reminded me of some of my old ideas. So the remix became a Lyta portrait, in which poor Susan was relegated to a cameo and didn't even get as many lines as G'Kar while Bester and Talia became the primary prisms through which to regard Lyta:

I Have Become (Death) (The J. Robert Oppenheimer Remix)

So... was either of these two "fingerprinted", oh flist? *is curious*