Browsing through the delightful Chocolatebox 2021 archive, here are some of the stories that immediately captured me:

The Aeneid:

we are a woven thread (find the strand): in which Aeneas on the occasion of his visit to the Underworld encounters Cassandra again, in a most unexpected fashion. Beautiful and poignant.


Babylon 5

Prison of Glass: Garibaldi runs into Bester post-canon. Perfect voices for both.

Keep your enemies close: hilarious fanart for Londo/G'Kar.

Discworld:

Here There Be Dragons: how Sam Vimes and Lady Sybil kissed for the first time. Lovely and fun.


Shakespeare's Histories:

All the water in the rough rude sea: in an AU where Bolingbroke has died and Hal has become Richard's heir, this vignette imagines their relationship and comes up with terrific parallels and contrasts to canon. And with sparkling dialogue befitting two of Shakespeare's most eloquent monarchs.

Evil lingering cold is evil. And tomorrow a cousin's wedding, too.

On the cheerful side of things, The Bletchley Circle was as great as advertised. The basic premise - four women who used to be among the 80% female part of Bletchley Park employees (aka busy breaking codes in WWII) team up again to solve a case of murders nine years after the war is over and they've tried, with varying success, to cope with "ordinary" life in the 50s - should be good for a longer series, but if the miniseries of three parts i all there'll ever be, I'll still be content because it was fabulous. Not flawless - the third part was weaker than the first two, since the denouement depended on a very clever and sensible character doing something eminently stupid - but the good far outweighed this: the four women (Susan, Millie, Jean and Lucy) were all competent, interesting, with distinct personalities, and the revival of their war time comraderie under the very different circumstances they're now in was compelling.

With all the hiati and season premieres, it occurs to me that I've now dropped three shows I used to watch, all in the same year - Fringe, Dexter and now Downton Abbey. DA is painless, Fringe had such a lot going for it that dropping it leaves the kind of ache that dropping Heroes caused me a while back, but just as in that case, it has become necessary, and the decline of Dexter in s6 (though the rot set in earlier than that) still infuriates me.

It also makes me nervous because Homeland had its season premiere last night (haven't had a chance to watch yet, will do so soon), and the first season for me was terrific but also good in a way that makes me wonder whether this particular premise is sustainable for more than one season, and I should hate to see it decline the way Dexter did. I'll access my inner optimist soon!

Maybe, cold aside, I feel a bit in the doldrums because we've been doing media tie ins over at b5_revisited for a while now, having exhausted all the on screen canon, and while that was fine when we were talking about the telepath trilogy, it's become depressing for the most part since, because I dislike so much about the the Centauri trilogy (oh my beloved Centauri!), and of the JMS and Fiona Avery short stories, I loved The Shadow of his Thoughts, was fine with Genius Loci, but then came the appalling Space, Time and the Incurable Romantic and now Ms. Avery's story True Seeker, which I didn't know before, turns out to contain more coals than gems as well. So that meant I've been writing negative reviews for weeks now. And it's depressing. I don't like doing that, I really don't, it's just that hardly anyone else writes reviews at all and it's the Babylonverse which I still love discussing because of my ongoing affection for the show proper. But it's incredibly depressing. :( ...so much more fun to squee, I can't tell you. Speaking of which:

Discword/Avengers crossover of genius: Ankh-Morpork, Avenged. Which absolutely had to happen. It made my Monday.

...during the last ten or so days:

1.) The "birther" hysteria culminates in Obama producing his birth certificate (longer version, as apparantly the White House already released a shorter version eons ago). My possibly unfair thought on this was "only in America". More seriously, I also thought about our last president (note: German presidents are only heads of state, not heads of goverment, i.e. they're only there for representation, not for actual governing, that's what the chancellor does), who flounced off (it can't be expressed differently) because he thought the media was too mean to him. I kid you not, and thus forced Ms. Merkel to come up with an emergency replacement. And he never, ever, would have been asked to present his birth certificate.

2.) Then I gathered through fannish osmosis and newspaper articles that there is now a new Superman story in which he - not Clark Kent, Superman in his Superman persona - renounces his American citizenship, because people around the globe keep blaming the US goverment for his actions and see him as a tool of same. Well, if you drape yourself in the flag colours, they would, Supes. (Also, ask Dr. Osterman and Mark Milton about this.) Anyway, so Kal-El, immigrant from Krypton, is no longer an American. Apparantly this was the second most talked about thing after Obama's birth certificate and caused much indignation. Again: only in America. I don't mean that in a negative way. As a comic book reader (though more Marvel than DC), I find it endearing they care that much.

Footnote: now the Doctor, despite also being an alien with an exploded home planet, does not have British citizenship to begin with despite mostly hanging out on the island. And our own most successful sci fi hero in Germany was originally American to begin with (in the 60s, when the pulp fiction series Perry Rhodan started), not German, and immediately renounced American citizenship once the plot kicked in with a vengeance and he discovered an alien ship with high tech that no single nation on Earth should have. Basically: aliens and nationaless cosmopolitism are a very European thing.

3.) And then a high profile terrorist died after, I'm told, more than 500 billions of dollars were spent on a decades long manhunt. To no one's surprise, he hadn't gone very far, just to the neigbouring country from where he was last seen before ordering the death of about 3000 people in the World Trade Centre. The way this event was presented in the media felt a bit as if Obama was an action hero played by Samuel Jackson, at last firing the decisive shot that kills the film's villain. And then there is a happy ending. It occured to me that if Osama bin Laden had been captured alive, it would have been incredibly inconvenient and messy for all parties concerned. Would he have ended up in Guantanamo? Would he have gotten a trial? If so, would he have used all the money from his very rich (and quite familiar with American business) family to hire a team of lawyers, or would it have been a military tribunal? What would the defense have brought up? It was all Mohammad Atta's idea, and our client can't be judged by any unbiased jury because there can't be any? The US was fine with our client as long as he was busy agitating against the Russians in Afghanistan? Or maybe he'd have insisted on defending himself and would have behaved as contemptously of the court as Slovodan Milosevic did when they tried him in Den Haag.

There is a reason why so many films prefer to kill off their villains. (Unless they're already planning the sequel.)

But. I can't help but remember. Fiction, again, one of Terry Prattchet's Discworld novels, one of the darker ones, Night Watch. At the end, our hero, copper-turned-watch commander Sam Vimes finally has caught up with the story's main villain. Who is a repellent individual, responsible for many deaths. Both directly and by influencing other people, showing them new ways to torture, more ways to kill. And as a last act, once he figures out he's well and truly caught, he tries to provoke Vimes into killing him. It would fit his own narrative: that they're really not that different, that it just matters who has the upper hand, is the better killer. But Sam Vimes does not. He's making an arrest instead, grimly sure that this man will face what he did - in a trial.

Well, you know. That's fiction. Out of this world.

There is something about you and my journal, Astonishing X-Men, there is definitely something about you.

Other good things that happened to me yesterday were watching the recent tv adaption of Going Postal. Which was great fun, the actors were excellent (Charles Dance as Vetinari took a moment of getting used to because of the hair colour and his recent stint as Aredian in Merlin, but no longer than a moment; he was good in the part), and combined with honorh's reading of the Watch novels gave me a powerful case of nostalgia for Discworld. It also reminded me of a silly idea the Ashes to Ashes finale inspired: ( which is spoilery for the AtA finale ) Angua would not have time for Gene's bullshit, though with her family she's got plenty of baggage to deal with. Vimes and Gene would loathe each other on sight precisely because what they share is what they dislike in each other, mostly, aside from good detective instincts. Also, mighty battle of the alpha coppers would ensue. Carrot would drive Gene crazy by sheer unrelentingly cheerful righteousness. And moving on from Discworld, Michael Garibaldi and Gene would be a recipe for disaster not only for the same reasons Vimes & Gene would be but also because Garibaldi is an alcoholic and more prone than Vimes to falling off the wagon. But the absolute best recipe for "entertaining disaster I will not write, do you hear me, plot bunny, I will not!!!!!!" would be a crossover with American Gothic. No matter what you think Lucas Buck is (err, other than sheriff of Trinity), you have to admit that the idea he spent his brief American Gothic finale coma anywhere near Gene Hunt, well, it has something. Which I will not write.

Iron Man:

Movieverse:

Remember that fabulous meta-as-fic-and-fic-as-meta in the guise of a Vanity Fair profile of Tony Stark, written by Christine Everhart, a couple of weeks ago? The fabulous samdonne has written another rich and lengthy Iron Man story, this one both focusing on Tony's relationship with Jim Rhodes (it's a Rhodey pov) and undertaking the ambitious project of adapting the comicverse Extremis arc for the movieverse. She pulled it off splendidly:

The fullest possible use


Comicverse:

And speaking of the Extremis arc. It introduced Dr. Maya Hansen, that rare thing in comics, a female morally ambiguous scientist (usually moral ambiguity in science is a a comicverse boy's game; the only other current one I can think if is Dr. Kavita Rao whom Joss created for Astonishing X-Men) and I still recall only one fanfic using her, and that one wasn't about Maya at all but about Tony. So I was delighted to discover an excellent story which, while investigating her relationship with Tony as well, is mainly about Maya and her own attitude towards her project and her responsibilities: but only vaulting ambition. Go, read!


Torchwood:

Devil in the Details: which hits two of my fannish buttons - it covers the Jack-less period between seasons 1 and 2, and it's well-done email fanfic. I am still giggling; the voices of the Torchwood team are dead-on, and so are their reactions to Jack's absence.

Doctor Who/Discworld:

How to successfully and completely get yourself into dire situations: pure genius, I kid you not. The Doctor and Donna end up in Ankh-Morpokh, in front of the Watch, and... read it! Now! I'm not kidding! Even if you aren't into Terry Prattchet, which you rather should be, but if you aren't - it's a Donna pov, and she has no idea what this place is, either.