A03 Meme

[selenak]

Borrowed from everyone:

I currently have 188 works archived at AO3.

Pick a number from 1 (the most recent) to 188 (the first thing I posted there), and I'll tell you three things I currently like about it.

Comments

[anonymous_sibyl]

171

[likeadeuce]

92

[selenak]

Oh, Heroes, one of the few shows I broke up with while it was still running. Still, I loved it a lot before said break-up, and I think wrote more stories for it than for any other open canon (at the time of writing) show. (Overall, I wrote more B5 stories, but after the show had already ended.) This was was a Claire-between-seasons-1-and-2 portrait, Five Uses For The Modern Cell Phone, and I like:

1) That I started with some follow up on those s1 characters we never meet again (at least not before I stopped watching the show), Zach and FBI agent Audrey Hanson

2) Most Claire stories at the time were Claire/Peter forbidden love romances (or AUs where they weren't related). I have no idea how much that changed before the end, though I suspect a dreadful amount of Claire/Sylar dark fic, since that started before I left. So I'm still glad to have written Claire gen! Trying to show her in that odd state where earth shattering things have happened and you try to adjust back to what's supposed to be a new normal reality and you can't quite, not least because what you've left behind keeps pursuing you, one way or the other.

3) That it ends up with Claire and Nathan. Rereading it, I dimply remember there was that one scene in the s2 opener which showed she must have gotten into the habits of making short secret dysfunctional phone calls to him, which naturally I found inspiring. Don't get me wrong, I was glad Heroes supported adoptive families and was crystal clear on Noah Bennet being Claire's real father, with her love for him never wavering, but those brief extremely awkward interactions between Claire and Nathan were always compelling to me, so I wrote more of same.

[likeadeuce]

Oh, I remember loving this story (esp for Claire and Nathan); will have to mark it to reread :)

[selenak]

Knowing Love, one of my early B5 stories.

I like:

- that it's Vir-centric, which not many B5 stories back then were (I think that improved a bit later)

- that it is explicitly about how love between friends (and I don't mean subtexty, pre-slash love, I really mean non-sexual attachment) can be as strong, layered and powerful as romantic love.

- that I managed to include some humour, too, as in this exchange:

"Commander Ivanova has cushions?" Lennier asks, mildly surprised.

Marcus sighs. "I wouldn't know."

[amatara]

133!

[selenak]

This one, Pretty in Pink, a Babylon 5/Firefly crossover, had been very hard to write. Mainly because Vir is the nicest person in his universe, and Inara is a lovely, charming woman trained to put people at ease. It was a gift story, for hobsonphile, who'd wanted the pairing for the Multiverse ficathon (and had in fact already given Vir an encounter with Inara herself, at theatrical_muse).

Now as I said - these two are really nice people. No conflict. Also, they aren't the types to banter. (Just for contrast: Garak and Bester in a B5/DS9 crossover I'd written had been incredibly easy to write, since they're doublecrossing paranoid bastards with a gift for one liners.) So to think of something for Vir and Inara was HARD. However, eventually the muse complied.

I like:

- letting Inara deal with her Mal issues and reaffirm her identity and letting Vir deal with at least some of the trauma he had accumulated by mid s4 does make for some plausible mutual comfort

- Vir bringing up Lyndisty was obviously me channelling my frustration about the end scene in Sic Transit Vir creatively, but it also, I think and hope, feels plausible within the story and for Vir at that point in B5 canon

- okay, so letting Inara quote Tennesse Williams may be an obvious literary joke, but I still like it

[jesuswasbatman]

Audey Hanson! Another great character!

Heroes could have been so brilliant if it hadn't decided to go with the "fan favourite" Petrelli-Benson-Sylar faction as the central characters and treat everyone else as disposable.

[selenak]

Honestly, retrospectively I don't think that was the basic problem (though it was certainly one of them), because if it had picked another set of characters to focus on, we'd still be left with this: that Tim Kring while good with origin stories (mostly) had absolutely no idea how to develop characters beyond one season. (And was as bad as Chris Carter with making up mythology as he went along. Mind you, I'm not saying everyone has to be JMS and map it out in advance - Farscape mostly improvised and most of the time created a brilliant whole anyway - it still amazes me that the chip had not been planned and only was a belated idea that came to them when writing Crackers don't matter. But both Carter and Kring simply weren't good at making up mythology as they went along.) (Btw, my evidence A for how it wouldn't have been a better show if, say, Niki and D.L would have gotten the type of attention Syler, Noah Bennett and the Petrellis got: Hiro. Who did get that attention. And, well.) So the only thing which could have saved Heroes probably have been if Kring had stuck to the original plan of introducing a different set of characters each season, and only have season-long plots. That would have played to his strengths without exposing his weaknesses.

[jesuswasbatman]

The encounter between Inara and Vir works for me as well because I think Mal has a massive sadistic streak (although obviously not as extreme and much more morally handled than Lyndisty's), so that's another point of connection between them.