Just because I don't participate in ssrconfidential anymore - after writing the "Five times Peggy Carter compromised" story on the one hand, and the James Bond crossover on the other, I felt I had said all I had to say fictionally in the fandom - doesn't mean I'm not still fond of the Agent Carter corner of the MCU, so I checked out the new tales, and liked many of them very much indeed, especially:

The only thing I've plenty of: which is a delightful vignette on Peggy, Jarvis and the absent Howard.

Interrogator: Peggy, posing undercover as Dottie, has to interrogate Jack Thompson. Excellent case fic, and the solution to her dilemma lies in how well the two of them have come to know each other by now.

Not from the ficathon, but only recently discovered by me:

trust me, mister agent (my papers are fine): Howard Stark is a thorn in Jack Thompson's side, especially when he kidnaps one of his best agents at every given opportunity. (But he has to admit, the guy isn't half bad sometimes.)

Various neat (and often short) stories in various fandoms from the recent Chocolatebox ficathon.


Agent Carter: After the Storm: The last time Peggy sees Dottie, it’s in 1991, at Howard Stark’s funeral. I have a soft spot for stories tackling older Peggy, and this is a very plausible version of her and Dottie, decades later. Love it both for the Peggy/Dottie and for Peggy's reflections on Howard in the background.

The Defenders: both stories are great slices of life, Jessica pov, for these four post- their respective canons.

Three Times Lucky

Sweetest Thing

Doctor Who:

Save Thyself: Concerning Missy's fate at the end of The Doctor Falls.

Friends make Friends Pancakes: lovely slice of life for Bill and the Doctor

Mongolian History:

Taking Inventory: how Fatima came to be Töregene Khatun's favourite. (Töregene was one of Genghis Khan's daughters-in-law, but you can read the story without previous Knowledge.)

Had a frightfully busy last two days, which is how I feel behind on the book meme. On the bright side, being on my feet all of Saturday meant I didn't gnaw on my fingers waiting for the ssrconfidential collection to be opened. ;) Which it now is! 42 new Agent Carter stories (or vids, or icons) await you here! Enjoy. I'm certainly planning to. The story I received as a gift was this one:



A New Arrangement (3539 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Agent Carter (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Ana Jarvis/Edwin Jarvis, Edwin Jarvis & Howard Stark, Ana Jarvis & Howard Stark
Characters: Ana Jarvis, Edwin Jarvis, Howard Stark
Additional Tags: Pre-Canon, World War II, Canon Jewish Character, Female Jewish Character, Marriage
Summary:

Edwin and Ana love each other, and they're grateful to Mr. Stark. But there are still a lot of details to figure out in their new life.

It's a lovely take on the early days of these three living together, and I'm pleased as punch about my present. On to the book meme:

7. Forgot I owned it

Christopher Clark: The Sleepwalkers. This is no reflection on the book, which I still haven't read - I got it as a Christmas present some years ago and forgot to take it with me when I went back to Munich from Bamberg after the New Year. Then, my father borrowed it and forgot to put it back in my room. And then it fell out of my mind that I had it by the next time I visited my hometown. I was reminded only during a recent visit.

8. Have more than one copy.

A lot of classics which I needed during my university days, from Ovid to Feuchtwanger, whom I wrote my thesis about. I have cheap paperback editions full of markers and broken spines, and I have more solid editions to read for pleasure.


( The other days )

When I got my assignment from ssrconfidential, the Agent Carter ficathon, I thought, no problem, I can do that. Except the AC idea that's been plagueing me for a while is quite dark and angsty, and my recepient asked for shenanigans, which means it would be bad manners to dump my unasked-for dark fic on them. Fine, thought I, they'll get something light, and I'll write the dark story as a treat and gift it to someone else.

Except then a suitable shenanigans inviting, light hearted idea refused to present itself. Comedy being harder than tragedy in 99% of the cases, etc. Until today! Inspiration struck, and now I have a genius idea for exactly these characters, and it will be fun and amusing (I hope), and... hang on. Surely someone has thought of this before? I mean, it's so obvious, once you think about it?

*eyes Agent Carter section carefully, tries out relevant tags*

...No, it doesn't look like someone has. Hooray! Except: if I write this idea, I need an actual plot. Even/especially if it's an absurd one. And I might have to refresh my memory on spoilery stuff.

...I really can't write in this fandom without the urge to do research, it seems. Last year it was German scientists, and the year before that Hungarians in Hollywood. Ah well. But those were more or less character centric mood pieces, not case fic.

Conclusion: shenanigans are work!

Also, whom do I bother with my additional dark fic, should I find the time to write it at all? Potential victims, beware...

Like I imagine a great many people I've spent the last few weeks admiring the Parkland teenagers and the way they refuse to let the massacre at their high school be followed by the usual resounding nothing (other than "thoughts and prayers", and "it's too early", of course). The lunacy of the US gun laws has never failed to baffle and infuriate me for decades, specially since it's gotten worse, not better, at nearly every turn. Which is why I found this article on the NRA lobbyist behind Floriday's gun policy - which was subsequently adopted in at least two dozen US states - both very informative and deeply disturbing. It explains the precise why and wherefores, so take a deep breath and read.

Meanwhile, the Tories continuing to demonstrate delusion and incompetence on Brexit - save the occasional John Major, and if you'd told me in the 80s that John Major would turn out to be the embodiment of sanity and common sense in the Conservative Party... - but that particular lunacy at least doesn't come with regular mass slaughter (yet). Still, this article says it all.

Since the real world continues to make so little sense, it's always a relief to turn to fiction. I was happy to see that ssrconfidential will be running again this year, bringing us Agent Carter stories: this is the post with the time table.

Tomorrow, in a year (8124 words) by Selena
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Peggy Carter & Howard Stark, Howard Stark & Everyone, Abraham Erskine & Howard Stark, Steve Rogers & Howard Stark
Characters: Howard Stark, Peggy Carter, Abraham Erskine, Werner Heisenberg, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Konrad Zuse, Fritz Haber
Additional Tags: For Science!, Dubious Ethics, Ethics, Nuclear Weapons, Chemical Weapons, Computers, Morality, Historical
Summary:

Inventions, the consequences they have and the choices you make: Three encounters Howard Stark has with German scientists he does and doesn't work with.

This was my ssrconfidential story for this year. The reason why I assumed it was patently obvious who authored it was that, well, who else among this year’s participants would write about Howard having debates with a bunch of German scientists?

The prompt had asked for Howard Stark recruiting, via Operation Paperclip, the top German cybernetics expert in order to meddle in artificial life. This to me sounded like it was going for a tale with a Nazi robot on the rampage, which yours truly would not have been keen to write (there were other prompts by my recipient I’d have then gone for), but at the same time, the phrasing left me just wriggle room enough to come up with something more interesting and challenging to me, on the subject of Howard and German scientists. Given that the MCU has Howard Stark as a participant in the Manhattan project, and that I’m a fan of Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen about Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, I already knew there’d be a Howard & German nuclear physicists encounter in my story.

Canonically, Howard worked with Abraham Erskine who in the MCU hails from Augsburg (like Bertolt Brecht) and thus most definitely qualifies as a German scientist, so the first Erskine-Stark encounter was a given opener for the story. Now the MCU Wikipedia has them meeting in 1934 at a conference in Switzerland, which sounds a bit unlikely given the birth year the same entry provides for Howard, but Switzerland in 1934 was also where Fritz Haber died, which made it a must for me. Because if there is someone ideal to embody the two sides of science and to kick start the question as to what the responsibilities of a scientist are, it’s the inventor of fertilizers and weaponized chlorine gas. Also, given Erskine’s age it made sense to make him a colleague and friend of Fritz Haber’s whose WWI experience gave him the original idea for what became the supersoldier serum.
(BTW, having recently had Fritz Haber on my mind for this story made me go “so…does Haber not exist in the DCU?” when a certain character in the new Wonder Woman was introduced.)

But I still needed a computer genius which was what the prompt had asked for, after all. Did we even have those in that era, I wondered, researched a bit, and found out about Konrad Zuse, fascinating computer inventor with a sideline in painting, two of whose war time created computers even were in the city where I lived, Munich. Zuse’s memoirs were also available for reading and contributed such details as his fondness for Fritz Lang’s movie Metropolis, language difficulties and other personal details which made it into the story. I was tempted to call the Zuse section “Zuse and Stark”, after “Einstein and Eddington”, that, or: "Science Bros: The First Generation", but you might as well have called it Iron Man 0.1, because it’s also a riff on Tony’s origin story as well as a contrast – one of my betas, asked to guess the prompt for the story, thought it must have been “Why Howard Stark didn’t become Iron Man”, and while I hadn’t thought of it like that at first, yes, that’s also one of the themes. Father and son are very similar, but there are also differences, both in circumstance and reaction to certain situations.

Lastly: I apologize for giving Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker my “Hydra makes no sense” rant. But Hydra makes no sense.

Dear writer, thank you so much for participating in this challenge and creating a story for me. I included some prompts in my requests. Know that if none of these speaks to you, you can still make me happy simply by "Peggy and Jarvis fight crime" case fic. My prompts tend to go in a gen direction, but I'm not averse to shipping, either slash or het or multi, provided you don't put down another another relationship in your story. What I am averse to is character bashing: by which I don't mean character A having a bad opinion of character B, if this is the case in canon or can be extrapolated from it, plus one of my prompts involves villains in central roles, and these people are canonically responsible for horrendous acts. However, there is a difference between that and "ugh, X is the WORST, says every other character ever" type of storytelling, and I trust you, writer, are able to see it.

Re: all the characters not named in my prompts - I'm an ensemble fan and fond of everyone, though of course I have my favourites. Still, just because they're not listed doesn't mean I don't enjoy reading about them, though if you want to work your own favourite into one of the prompts in a prominent role, go ahead, as long as my listed characters have one, too.

( Now, about those prompts )

So, the trailer for Spiderman: Homecoming debuted, and I find myself looking forward to a new Spiderman movie for the first time in eons. (I did end up liking the first Garfield movie, but I also felt it deeply unnecessary, and then the second Garfield took away what I had liked about the first one, so.) Which means Tom Holland's debut in Civil War has done its intended job for me, I suppose. And I freely admit one aspect I'm looking forward to is Tony Stark getting the morally ambiguous mentor role this time around. (Plus it won't be an origin story, THANK GOD. We really don't need to see Uncle Ben dying for the third time in a row.)

Incidentally, Tony saying "don't do anything I would do" suddenly made me wonder whether someone has done the glaringly obvious and made a vid about him and Howard to the tune of Harry Chapin's Cat's in the Cradle, preferably using the Johnny Cash version. So I checked YouTube, and sure enough, someone did, but the vid is four years old, which means they can't have used any of the Howard footage from Agent Carter (and probably none of the Tony footage from Age of Ultron), and of course not the virtual memory from Civil War, or the Tony and Peter interaction there. And the vid of my dreams would really be focused on the Tony-Howard parallels rather than just being about Howard's lack of time (though that of course would also be there, it's in the lyrics, after all). Using Ultron (Tony's creation) and his devastation possibly intercut with Doctor Faustus and the movie massacre (Howard's creation), the Howard-Peggy argument scene from "The Blitzkrieg Button" intercut with Tony and Steve early on in "Civil War", Howard and Tony both making presentations and speeches in their flamoboyant ways, Howard in the plane over Manhattan with Tony as Iron Man near the end of "Avengers", and so forth.

Not only are Yuletide nominations now a go, but here is the Yuletide Confirmation Post, where you can see what everyone else (who comments) has nominated - handy, to avoid doubling, etc. (As I expected, for example, in Black Sails Flint, Silver, Billy and Vane were nominated immediately, and for The Americans Elizabeth and Philip - this is why I knew I wouldn't have to bother and could nominate someone else.)

Meanwhile, fanfic recs:

The Hunger Games:

From such great heights: Caesar Flickerman, the Tributes and Snow. Just how Caesar related to the people whose deaths (and occasional survival) he helped to sell, and where he came from is up for speculation, and this is a great reply.

MCU:

Snuff: Peggy finds a certain surveillance video. As someone who wrote a story in which Peggy also almost finds out the truth about the Starks' deaths, I'm always intrigued of how others do it if they don't go the AU route and keep it within canon. This version of the conclusions Peggy draws feels plausible.

Seems that British Politics show I mentioned a week or so ago has written half of their leads out (and all of those pushing for that unbelievable potline). briefly tried to promote a new female villain but then settled on making the lead one of the former minor supporting characters, also female.

Meanwhile, the flashback episodes are still going on. If you want to catch up:

The Chilcot Report, Digested Edition (because it's better to laugh than to cry)


On that note, fanfic from a recently cancelled show, Agent Carter:

Il diavolo rosa: Nonna Manfredi versus Bernard the Flamingo. It's the showdown of the century!