A selection of stories which caught my eye last night:


Der Erlkönig (the Goethe poem and the Schubert song): Our Father, which is another creepy, awesome ballad. Poetry fanfiction in both senses! It's fabulous, and should be comprehensible even if you don't know the original poem. (BTW, if you don't, but want to know, here is a rendition in German subtitled in English and made specifically for people learning German. And if you are German, here's the flippant short version my Dad cracked me up with in my long ago school days: Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind/ Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind/ Kommt böser Mann, quatscht Papi an, ob er Bubi haben kann/ Papi verneint, Bubi weint, am nächsten Tag ist große Not/ Papi lebendig, Bubi tot.)


Labyrinth: Strangers till now: in which an older Sarah is stuck with a powerless Jareth for a day due to a plot MacGuffin, and it's funny and full of verbal sparring and subtext, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.


Star Trek: DS9 Crash Landings: in which, en route back from saving Ishka in The Magnificent Ferengi, Quark gets stuck with Brunt of all the people in an archetypical fanfic trope. Extremely well written, and given I have a soft spot for the Ferengi in general and Quark in particular, which isn't a majority opinion in fandom, I am always over the moon when finding Ferengi starring fanfiction of this quality. Quark, Brunt and Ishka are all given terrific dialogue.

Good Omens (TV): Standing right here: which gives us a look as to how the angel Muriel is doing after the end of s2 and lets her befriend Nina in the most adorable way. I'm not wild about Good Omens the way many of my friends are, but I like it, and was charmed by this vignette inspired by the new canon.

It's been 16 years (zomg!) since I wrote this post about how if German universities were like lj world (as it then was), Goethe/Schiller would be an incredibly popular pairing, listing some letter quotes as to why. The fannish world has turned quite a lot since then, and over the weekend, I saw there's now a neat assembly of fanfiction to choose from. Here are my two favourites so far:


Anakreons Grab: despite the German title, (gorgeously) written in English. Schiller pov, covers the entire relationship, is told in a non-linear fashion and circles around the three "first" meetings they had. (The sort of one when Schiller was still in Würtemberg as a cadet and the ten years older Goethe was visiting together with his Duke, Carl August, where we don't even know whether they talked, the incredibly awkward and unsuccessful one in Rudolfstadt where they were brought together by mutual friends which gave Schiller a few more years to obsess in love/hate from a distance, and the successful one after having both attended a lecture that Goethe later described as "Glückliche Begegnung" where they hit it off and started the most productive relationship between two German writers ever.) This is basically the Goethe/Schiller story of my dreams.


Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen: this one is written in German, and focuses on the successful meeting in question; also an intense Schiller pov, which makes sense, since the Goethe pov on that meeting was already written by Goethe himself, and it has a delightful Alexander von Humboldt cameo to boot!


Still on a literary note, mildred_of_midgard has summed beautifully why the 40-years-long relationship between Voltaire and Frederick the Great is so hilarious, passionate and tremendously entertaining to read about. Talk about two people totally deserving each other. :)

Day Two at the Frankfurt Book Fair was the day of the memoirs; among others, those of Malala which were published simultanously in a couple of languages. Now since she's nominated for the Nobel Peace Award, her German publisher, while not considering it likely she wins, still is fretting because she's currently doing book signings in the US, and IF she gets the Nobel, the news will reach her... in Washington, DC. Which, quoth the publisher, considering that the girl is already the target of conspiracy theories (she never was shot! she's a CIA stooge! etc.) will make it even worse. When on Friday later morning it turned out Malala HADN'T won, he was half glum, half relieved about it.

Meanwhile, Fischer who publishes Alice Munro in German is mightily pleased. So are her own publishers of course; I had a quick glimpse at hall 8, which is where the English-speaking publishers are camping out, though what I have to admit I browsed through most was the comic book/graphic novel "The Fifth Beatle", about Brian Epstein. In which the author goes for a poetic approach, and so does his artist; when Brian meets Elvis' manager, Colonel Parker, on that one and only occasion the Beatles met Elvis, Parker is drawn with demonic red eyes, no less. You know, the cliché of the Bad Manager, controlling and exploiting his artist and the counterpart to Brian's Good Manager (giving all for his artists and loving them). Which I would ridicule, except, um, according to all we can now, it was true? Still think the red eyes are a bit over the top.

Also red: the hair of the girl who is Brian's Head!Six, named "Moxie", symbolizing his ambition and giving him someone to share his thoughts and doubts with, conveniently allowing the reader to do the same. Why Brian has a Head!Moxie is unclear to me but then I only browsed through the pages and maybe a thorough reading will reveal all. (I hasten to add Head!Moxie doesn't mean Brian's homosexuality is ignored or changed, absolutely not. I dare say, though, you could have had Brian monologuing or dialoguieng with, say, several of his pals like Nate Weiss or employes/friends/occasional lovers like Peter Brown and get the exposition across that way.) The comics' stand on the "did they or didn't they?" Barcelona question: there was UST but no they didn't, because John chickened out after first getting Brian to admit he was interested.

The Beatles in general, when they show up (which they don't do too often; as it should be, the focus is on Brian's story) talk in A-Hard-Day's-Night-ese, which, fair enough. (Except for John's solo scenes with Brian; he then talks in quotes from the 1980 Playboy Interview.) Since the comic goes for magical realism, we get a dreaming-into-his-death Brian having goodbye type vonversations which culminate in him having one with ghostly Paul on the note of "it's on your shoulders now, we both know John can't be arsed to work if one doesn't drive him, pray keep the group together, you have the savvy, the work ethics and the drive, but I know I'm also dooming your friendships with that, sorry", which I found somewhere between touching and wistfully amusing, considering one of John's often voiced complaints in ye days of musical feuding was that "Paul behaved as if Brian had died with the worlds "let's make a new album, boys" on his lips". So the author actually letting Brian die with, etc, is among other things black humour and reconcilatory gesture.

Art: Brian, alas, is rarely recognisable on first browsing, and none of the women are (Cynthia Lennon looks like Generic Comic Book Blonde, for example), but on the other hand if you don't look for actual similarities the art goes well with the storymood. (For example, for the whole Manila episode, when things went truly insane, one of the most nightmarish experiences for Brian Epstein and a pretty bad one for the Beatles, it gets more and more abstract and cartoonish to go with Brian's state of mind.) And there are some neat nods to things that don't play a role in this particular story but were long term wise important; at the Sgt. Pepper launching party in Brian's house, there is only one female photographer, blonde. (As indeed there was. This was Linda Eastman, the future Mrs. McCartney.) She isn't adressed by name but I thought it showed both writer and artist did their research.

Non comic books which caught my eye and which I want to read at my leisure outside of the hectic book fair atmosphere: "The Golem and the Djinn" by Helene Weckman and "Abschied von Sansibar", "Farewell to Sansibar" by Lukas Hartmann. I had "met" one of the later's historical main characters as a minor character in a novel by M.M. Kaye many years before, "Trade Winds", so I was aware she had really lived: Salmé bint Said aka Emily Ruete, daughter of the Sultan of Sansibar who'd run away with a Hamburg merchant and married him. That much I knew, but not what had become of Salmé/Emily afterwards and her and her children's story is what this novel tells. She had three children (four actually, the first one died as a baby), and then lost her husband, which meant she was stuck in strange Germany with three children to bring up and an absolutely unforgiving brother on the throne back home in Sansibar who did not want to reconcile, let alone support her. Bismarck used the threat of making her son Sultan as part of his strategy to get a treaty out of her brother that would allow Germany to annex Sansibar after said brother's death, then once that was accomplished dropped her like a hot potato. She ended up living in Beirut for a while (which, as the author said at the book fair presentation, is in the exact geographich middle between Hamburg and Sansibar), but was not allowed to see her home again. Her half Arab, half German children, two daughters and a son, had remarkable fates as well. One married a hardcore Nazi, one, the son, a Jewish merchant's daughter which was why he emigrated. He'd gone from officer to pacifist in WWI already, and then took up the already Don Quichotte like cause of mediating between Zionists and Arabs in Palestine. The novel isn't chronological - we start with the son near his death and only near the end get the story of how young Salmé fell in love with her German in the first place - and going by my hasty browsing well written. There are excerpts interspersed from a letter the real Salmé/Emily wrote to her brother Bargash, the Sultan of Sansibar, in vain pleading with him. According to Mr. Hartman, Salmé in addition to writing her memoirs (which were a bestseller and how she supported herself & the kids for a while", "Memoirs of an Arabian Princess") also wrote letters to herself which were not meant for publication, and in which she voiced the depression and despair she kept out of her memoirs, but also the full story of why and how she left Sansibar, which only gets five or so lines in the memoirs (the later focus on her older siblings and family history instead). It all read and sounded truly intriguing, and I will check it out.

Not all authors are gifted speakers, mind. Rüdiger Safranski, who already gave us a book about Goethe and Schiller and a Schiller biography, has now delivered a highly readable Goethe biography, about which he talked with Goethe expert Gustav Seibt, but alas his voice is still... not the most fortunate to have for such an occasion. However, he still has a nice sense of huimour: when asked about Goethe's changeability, he quoted the man himself who said when accused "but Herr Geheimrat, last year you expressed a completely different point of view", in a nonchalant reply: "One doesn't get 80 by constantly thinking the same things". Mr. Seibt, who always writes the Goethe articles for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, brought up the fact that for all the long life and no drama attitude, Goethe drank a lot - by today's standards, enough to call him an alcoholic (two litres per day), and yet there aren't any accounts of him trodding about drunk. Whereupon Rüdiger Safranski couldn't resist pointing out that Goethe drank the most during his years of friendship with Schiller, hence also the weight gain during said years (that made them look like like Stan and Ollie when walking around), and that good old G. lost that weight again (by dialing back the two litres per day?) after Schiller's death. Sadly, Mr. Seibt didn't ask him about the context of boozing it up and having a rival-turned-best-friend hanging around.

Speaking of boozing it up: the evening receptions at the Frankfurt Book Fair often last until the early morning hours. Now yours truly isn't a night owl, but this is the one time in the year where I really don't get rmuch sleep. Otoh one hears all the literary gossip at those parties, including the one about the lamentable soap opera which is the story of the once famous Suhrkamp Verlag (currently involved in declarations of insolvency, a bitter power struggle between the shareholders and 120 authors threatening to leave it). Sadly, said gossip was told confidentally, and thus I can't share. Right now, I'm off to another evening reception, and hope to return with more shareable news.

Poetry month means a lot of people post poems I've never read before, which can be a great pleasure. Today, I spotted a charming one which is called Jane Austen and John Lennon in Heaven, and is about precisely this.

Now, being me, my train of thought ran thusly.

1.) The potential for crack fic is awesome. Starting with the part where John L. famously expressed a certain opinion on heaven.

2.) Also, it would be a fascinating train wreck of an afterlife relationship. I mean, I can completely see reason for mutual attraction in either a friendly or romantic way. John Lennon had a type, and bossy workoholic perfectionists able to spar with him were it. And his wit, charisma and fondness of puns would make him enough of an enticing conversationalist at first to be of interest to Miss Austen. But then! I may be wrong, but somehow I can't see Jane A. caring to stick around once he starts to throw the inevitable temper tantrums and displays the equally inevitable jealousy about her being bff with Cole Porter.

3.) Also, Jane's a Tory. John's political opinions were actually far more fluctuating than his most popular image allows, but one thing he never was and I never can see him as is being a Tory. Conversely, Miss Austen's opinion on the practicality of bed-ins as a demonstration for peace does not bear thinking about. In a zomg someone must write that kind of way.

4.) And then there's the part where she'd find it completely unfair he won a prestigious literary award for his first book whereas she had to try and try to get hers published and then had to do it anonymously. And never had particularly good contracts. Whereas he didn't even need the money he earned with that book. And was hungover when receiving the award, with the press covering for him and giving him a witty speech when in reality he could just mumble a thank you. Not even the serenity of the afterlife would stop Miss Austen seething about the unfairness of it all.

5.) And that's before she finds out the tale of his first marriage.

6.) She'd totally remind him of the Stanley sisters, i.e. his aunts and mother, and he'd suggest them to her as a novel topic, because they all beg to be written by Jane Austen, but he'd never ever forgive her the John character in the book gets only mentioned eleven times, or, as he would put it, "not at all". At which point he stomps off to make her jealous by hanging out with Charlotte Bronte.

7.) Who is also a Tory and, moreover, went through too much with brother Branwell not to recognize the drug-addled temper throwing daddy issues type immediately and thus throws him out on sight.


***

In other news, there are days when I love the internet. especially if it tells me there is Chinese Goethe/Schiller slash.

Word to the wise: do by all means book a seat instead of just buying a ticket without reservation if you're travelling by train from Frankfurt to Munich. I did, and was very glad about it, as the train is currently crowded like hell with people standing in the aisles.

Which makes it look quite like the book fair itself on the weekend. I don't actually look much for books during the last two days of the fair, the public days, because it's that packed with people. Sometimes you can hardly move. So the weekend is when you meet friends at the fair, go to readings and debates, and wish other people good luck when they try to actually glimpse into a book or two.

One of the book presentations I attended was of a non-fiction book I had read some time ago, Rüdiger Safranski's book about Goethe & Schiller. One question he got was to account for the paradox of Schiller being the more socially progressive of the two (poet of freedom, some of the most famous speeches in German dramatic history, etc.) yet married into the nobility, whereas Goethe was the more conservative yet openly lived with and ultimately married a working-class woman, Christiane Vulpius, who was horribly snubbed by Schiller. (Goethe in his letters to Schiller always includes regards to the wife. Schiller in all his letters to Goethe never once mentions Christiane, not even in thank-you-I-had-a-great-time letters when he had been staying for two weeks in Goethe's house where she would have been his hostess.) Safranski not being wise to the ways of fandom did not bother to bring up the slash explanation but boringly and truthfully pointed out Schiller's wife was the goddaughter of Goethe's ex, the Baroness von Stein who was Christiane's number 1 enemy in Weimar and responsible for most of Weimar society cutting her for near two decades until Johanna Schopenhauer finally offered her a cup of tea. But! he added, suddenly going out of his professor of literature mode and into lighting up in happy fanboy mode instead, he had found a reference in one of Christiane's letters to Goethe from when she was on holidays and happened to be in the same Kurbad where Schiller had gone about two years before his death, and in that letter Christiane writes Schiller not only said hello but offered to row her over the lake in one of the little boats available for the guests, and then did so. "I was so happy when I found that," declared Mr. Safranski. "It was my balm of comfort." ("Mein Trostpflaster.") "I just couldn't stand the idea of Schiller having been horrible to Christiane till the end."

Moving on to the 21st century, Saturday was also when I listened to a presentation by three dissident Chinese writers, all three of whom are living in exile in other countries, and whose number included Bai Ling, one of the two writers whose invite/disinvite/invite caused such uproar and shameful embarassment in September. The others were a co-founder of the independent Chinese PEN and another writer; unfortunately, I have the programm in my suitcase, and I'm sitting in the train right now, so I can't look their names up. Not-the-PEN-founder seems to be a member of the Falun Gong, as he brought up not once but twice that they are the most persecuted of Chinese religions as they are "the most purely Chinese". (I have sympathy for anyone persecuted for their religion, but this singling out and unconditional praise of the Falun Gong made me distrustful of them instead, I have to admit.) All three are writing for an exile Chinese newspaper, The Epoch Times, and had a lot to say about how growing up with the system stays with you even once you've turned against it because of the words, the phrases you use. One of the writers, referencing the Cultural Revolution from the 60s but talking about the decades before and after as well, used an image that stuck with me: "Chinese culture," he said, "is like a beautifully coloured glass. It got smashed irrevocably. Now all we're left with are glass splinters. What the party does is put these splinters into a kalaidoscope, like the ones we use at children, and the image you look at is beautiful, too, in its own way, but it distorts and changes every time you want it to, and nothing is ever fixed." Switching from Chinese - which got translated (the translators were so the unsung heroes of this fair, always having to do three languages - Chinese, German and English) - into German for one sentence, Bai Ling interjected "Die Partei hat immer recht" and said that to understand the China of today we - the German audience, that is - should just think of the GDR, not of Chinese history.

All these speeches on part of the exile writers were very heartfelt and moving, but you know, there was one problem: they were basically preaching to the converted. There were Chinese attendants as well as German ones - actually the room was pretty packed, with all age groups represented - but the Chinese all seemed to be locals from Frankfurt. None from the Chinese delegation. And I don't think the German audience was labouring under the delusion that China is anything but a dictatorship, either. So attention was paid, but not from the people who would have been able to do something with these words.

Saturday evening I met a friend of shezan's, but arrived a bit early at his hotel and thus was sitting in the lobby for a while. Whereupon one businessman type sauntered towards me, looked me up and down in my Saturday outfit (because the fair is so crowded on Saturdays and Sundays, it's wise to wear the lightest things you can get away with instead of the trousers and jackets you wear for the rest of the weak, so in my case I was wearing a short knitted purple dress) and enquired: "Are you free?"

Note to self: now you can say you've been mistaken for a hooker at the Frankfurt Book Fair in your memoirs.

Today was mostly about the Friedenspreis, the peace award of the German book trade handed over in the Paulskirche. This year's recipient was Italian essayist, journalist and novelist Claudio Magris. The laudatory speech returned time and again to Magris' hometown Trieste as a symbol of European strife, European multiculturalism and European unity. Magris' own speech, which was riveting, managed to address patterns and injustices in past and present alike, starting with Italy once having exported fascism and now and more recently populism, that deadening of democracies. (Insert open loathing of Berlusconi here.) He pointed out that we did and do have a war after WWII in Europe, one we're in denial about and which involves organ trade, the camps for refuges, the way they're treated and often sent back, all the dead of illegal immigration and that wasn't counting Bosnia and currently our involvement in Afghanistan. Listening, I decided I needed to read one of his books now; this was a man who knew how to engage his audience on both an emotional and intellectual level.

Also present was nobel prize winner Herta Müller, which later at the celebratory lunch led to Gottfriend Honnefelder (remember, the head of the booktrade association) telling everyone that he had wanted to congratulate her in his own speech at the Paulskirche (there are always four: one by Honnefelder, one by the mayor of Frankfurt, one laudatory speech and one acceptance speech) but she had asked him not to, as this was Claudio Magris' big moment, but now we could congratulate her, yes? So everyone got up and cheered and toasted. Mind you, I bet most of the people present, including yours truly, hadn't read Müller's work, but never mind.

"So," said a lady at my table, "why do you think the Bildzeitung didn't have a headline saying "We won the Nobel prize"?
(Footnote: Bild is our biggest yellow press paper and prone to such embarassing headlines as "We are Pope" - back when Joseph Ratzinger was elected.)
Replied an ex Mr. Speaker of our parliament: "Because the Americans got there first?"

On that note, once I'm back in Munich, I must read all the delicious fanfic I saw tantalizingly referred to by other people on my list, as well as watch The Sarah Jane Adventures. And then I'll probably sleep like a stone. But truly, I would not miss the Frankfurt Book Fair for the world.

From londonkds

Comment to this post and I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your LJ and elaborate on the subjects given.

history

My great passion. Well, one of them. I grew up in a town which wasn't just over a millennium old but also had avoided being bombed during WWII, which means an incredible amount of history in one's every day life. Also, I loved historical novels as a child - among the earliest I read were the usual suspects by Alexandre Dumas, The Egyptian by Mika Waltari, and the Angelique series by Anne Golon. Later on, as a teenager, I graduated to Stefan Zweig - who wrote some of the best biographies romancees in the German language; the first of his that I read was his Fouché - and the joys of first hand accounts, of memoirs, diaries, letters etc. of people that interested me through the ages, as well as some understanding of developing societies through the ages in terms that didn't rely on the great man theory of history. I've always seen it as complimentary - interesting individuals (who didn't have to be of the ruling classes; one of the most touching and enraging historical documents I've read is the letter of a man from my hometown Bamberg who had been caught up in the witchcraze of the 1620s and tried to smuggle one last letter out to his daughter before he was executed; the letter was intercepted, ended up in the files, and thus we have the rare description of a witch trial from a victim's pov) and structural analysis, I mean - not as either/or.

Goethe/Schiller

See my post about why if they were fictional and/or in a novel or on tv, people enthusiastically would slash them. All kidding aside, though: I like them both, and I like how they, who were very different in terms of personalities and writing, made up that intriguing whole, die deutsche Klassik. And that they were the antithesis of megalomania, and of nationalism in the increasingly poisonous 19th century sense. Something like the scene where the Marquis Posa demands freedom of thought from Philip II of Spain in Schiller's Don Carlos - Sire, geben Sie Gedankenfreiheit! - works just as breathtakingly well if you read it today; start Goethe's Faust with the very first scene (if you can find a decent translation), the discussion about how to stage a play, between the poet, the director, and the clown, and it's witty and biting (and Goethe pokes as much fun on the poet as on anyone else) and defies the cliché that classic = boring; it also still works for just about every theatre production you thank think of.

Fanged Foursome

I think I would have fallen for Darla after her reappearance anyway, but the fact she made what until then looked like yet another version of the vampire family dynamic as set up by Interview with the Vampire or Forever Knight into something far more interesting and different (with a gender reversal as to who held the power there) was the cream on the cake, so to speak. Here's an essay which goes on about this in detail. There have been times where the Spike Wars made me stay away from any fanfiction or essay that focused on him (or even had him in it), but either fiction or meta that presented the four of them together was always the exception to this. My feelings for Angel during the course of both shows were varied (going from okay but not overly invested during the first three seasons of BTVS to very fond during the first two seasons of AtS to eye-rollingly impatient and emotionally disconnected with in s3 to fond and interested again in s4 and 5), but even during the s3 down, when I seriously considered giving up the entire show, not just the character, again Fanged Foursome meta and fanfic was the exception. Dru I always loved, but her drawback as a character is that she doesn't grow or change, as opposed to the other three, after her big change, so I hardly looked for fanfic that featured her on her own. Lastly: one unwritten fannish commandment for me is Though shalt not watch Fool for Love or Darla on their own, but always together.

Londo/G'Kar

You know, I recently found the post with my first slash story about them, and I sound absurdly apologetic in the preamble. Now of course I was hardly alone in seeing the relationship between Londo and G'Kar, their arcs together and alone, as the emotional core of Babylon 5, but there was frustratingly little fanfiction about them for ten years. By "frustratingly little" I don't mean slash, I mean anything at all. At the old B5 archive, I found one story. Only one. And I couldn't understand it. So I did something about it and lured Andraste into the fandom so she could do something about it, too. I think what makes the enduring appeal, regardless as to whether one sees the relationship as utterly platonic or slashy, is that they're both so richly realized characters you can't consign them one to one category, and that's true for their relationship with each other as well. Depending on when in the show we are, either of them can be hero, villain, antihero, comic relief, or everything at once. I've written an entire essay about why Londo's fall-and-redemption story still remains unequalled on tv for me, so let me say something about G'Kar's here, because it's as remarkable, in a different way. "Ambiguous character ends up as wise and enlightened hero" could have been dull instead of being incredibly compelling; but because G'Kar never loses his - Narnness? I can't use the term "humanity" here, can I? -, his ability to throw a petty tantrum because people won't listen (see Day of the Dead), his eagerness to flirt (Tragedy of Telepaths, Objects at Rest) or his sharp tongue, let alone his outrage and anger when he sees something like Na'Toth's imprisonment, his enlightened state always rings true, hard-won, and as endearing as his early incarnation as a wily ambassador and still bloodthirsty ex freedom fighter. Lastly, so many fandoms try to pull off storylines where enemies become first allies by necessity and then friends and/or lovers, either in fanfiction or on the show proper. But so often it feels that what originally made them enemies is ignored or downplayed. Not so here. When at the culmination of their storyline together G'Kar says "my people can never forgive your people, you understand that, don't you? But I can forgive you", it works, and feels right in every way. (Including the differentiation of personal forgiveness versus general forgiveness - two very different things.)

five things

Ah, "five things that never happened..." I encountered this fanfic format first on lj, in a Farscape story about Aeryn Sun, I think, and it fascinated me when I tweaked that each of the five things was independent from the others. Each asked basically "what if canon had gone differently at one specific point" and explored the consequences for the character it focused on. Until then, the most AUs I had seen were of the dreaded high school type ("aka "everyone is human and in high school") or of the wish fulfillment type (aka "in MY universe, X and Y are still together!"). But the "five things" stories were different and were a fantastic way to explore the canon characters and their relationships, because they didn't just offer one version, and the portrait that emerged usually made the character in question even more intriguing. The first time I tried it myself was for BTVS' Warren Meers, partly due to a discussion with andrastewhite about the Trio in general and Warren in particular, and partly because londonkds' "Mary Sue Goes Septic" essay had given me a lot of ideas about Warren and Willow I wanted to try out in fictional form.
Then iamsab challenged me to write Kira/Dukat. Now I've always regretted that Dukat, post-Waltz, was written as a one dimensional evil madman on the show. And he and Kira undeniably had great chemisty, as well as a very interesting relationship (pre-Waltz). But even if Dukat had remained a, pardon the bad pun, shades of grey character, it would not have changed his prefect-of-Bajor past, and a romance with Kira would have been, to put it mildly, extremely unlikely. However, the "Five Things" format allowed me to explore several angles without whitewashing Dukat (or repeating the Evil Madman thing, for that matter), or making Kira behave in an ooc "you're so sexy, all is forgiven" way. And it allowed me to be wilfully perverse. In the variation where they actually have sex, it's not about Dukat at all for Kira, it's about her depression and anger during the second occupation and also about Odo. In the variation where they genuinenly love each other, the relationship isn't sexual at all but a family relationship, as in this AU Kira Meru raised her children, not her husband and thus Kira Nerys grows up as Dukat's daughter, and AU!Nerys is so passionately pro-Cardassian that she becomes one, which is of course the worst thing regular!Kira could imagine. And so forth. No sooner had I written this that altariel wanted to have a "Five things which never happened between Garak and Bashir" as well. Which she received, after some delay. It made me aware of a difference in gender perception by myself because while during the Kira-Dukat five things I had been very conscious of the occupier-of-planet / member of the brutally occupied population problem, I didn't feel the same burden with Garak/Bashir, though Garak, with his Obsidian Order past, definitely was no less guilty of war crimes (torture and assassination we know about; others are plausible guesswork) than Dukat was. Possibly because Bashir wasn't Bajoran, but also because Bashir was male, and thus there was no chance of falling into a squicky subtext about colonialism with the woman embodying the occupied people. Though again, these Five Things weren't five ways to get the characters together, but focused on traits they brought out in each other, and which particular changes in canon forced them to deal with in somewhat different manners.
I've used the "Five things..." format in other fandoms since, but these three attempts still remain my favourites and the ones I'm proudest of, as a writer.

Okay, one of my christmas presents was a Schiller biography. And being utterly corrupted by fandom, I found myself thinking that if German universities were more like lj world, Goethe/Schiller would so be the OTP of all OTPs.

Behold, English-speaking world in ignorance of the saga: When they first met, they were profoundly irritated by one another. Goethe was ten years older and had left the Sturm und Drang behind which Schiller was just embarking on, and was busy trying to be respectable in Weimar. Schiller was all youthful rebellion and thought Goethe had sold out and most of all was angry that Goethe ignored him. Which resulted in him writing to a friend that "Goethe was like a proud bitch one had to get pregnant in order to humiliate her in front of the world", I kid you not. (The original German is "eine stolze Prüde, der man ein Kind machen muß, um sie vor der Welt zu demütigen".)

Then Goethe went to Italy for two years, found himself again as a poet (and had lots of sex), and when he returned to Weimar, Schiller had settled into married stability and the bourgeois life. He also had just founded a new literary paper for which he needed well-known names as co-workers. Which led to a meeting with guess whom and a letter. This time, they hit it off. Even in his very old age Goethe got misty eyed when speaking of the "happy event" (das glückliche Ereignis) when they had their very first friendly argument, resulting in Schiller saying, re: one of Goethe's points, "but that's not an experience, that's an idea!". The next day, Schiller wrote a rather long wooing letter, and the result was German classicism, i.e. intense correspondance, lots of meetings, and the poems and plays these two literary giants are most famous for. The relationship also kept being compared to a love affair. Quoth August Schlegel (he who co-wrote the most famous Shakespeare translation) and had something of a feud going with Schiller:

"In any case, Goethe tried to mediate between us rather charmingly. His delicate concern for Schiller, which resembled the care a tender husband takes with his hysterical wife, did not stop him from being friends with us." ("Us" being the Schlegel brothers, the Coen brothers of their day. In the German original: "Überhaupt trat Goethe auf eine sehr liebenswürdige Weise vermittelnd ein. Seine sorgsame Schonung für Schiller, welche der eines zärtlichen Ehemannes für seine nervenschwache Frau glich, hielt ihn nicht ab, mit uns auf dem freundschaftlichstem Fuße fortzuleben." )

And here's Schiller's most famous summing-up of the relationship, in one of the letters:

"...it has become a kind of religion for me to make your cause to mine, to form all which is reality in me to the purest mirror of the mind which lives in this form, and so to deserve being called your friend. How vividly did I find out on this occasion that the sublime is a power, that it can only be felt as a power even in a selfish heart, for there is no freedom against him who is sublime but love."

(Sounds better in German: "....und das schöne Verhältnis, das unter uns ist, macht es mir zu einer gewissen Religion, Ihre Sache hierin zu der meinigen zu machen, alles was in mir Realität ist, zu dem reinsten Spiegel des Geistes auszubilden, der in dieser Hülle lebt, und so, in einem höheren Sinn des Worts, den Namen Ihres Freundes zu verdienen. Wie lebhaft habe ich bei dieser Gelegenheit erfahren, daß das Vortreffliche eine Macht ist, daß es auf selbstsüchtige Gemüter auch nur als eine Macht wirken kann, daß es, dem Vortrefflichem gegenüber keine Freiheit gibt als die Liebe.")

As for Goethe, years later after Schiller's death, the recitation of a Schillerian ballad was enough to let him burst into tears and tell the actress who was doing the reciting: "I cannot, cannot forget this man!" (And Goethe was avowedly not the bursting into tears type, especially not in his old age.) They got sick at the same time, only Schiller died of it and Goethe lived. Now if this was a film or a tv show or a novel, you can bet the slashers would have been salviating eons ago. True, both men had their canon love interests as well. Schiller was married, and Goethe was living, scandalously for the time, with his mistress Christiane Vulpius whom he married years later. Which didn't stop the Weimar society from cutting poor Christiane, both for the long living together unmarried thing and because of her working class origins. I must say Schiller wasn't behaving well at all in this regard - in Goethe's letters, there are always greetings for Mrs Schiller, but Schiller managed to spend weeks at Goethe's house where Christiane was the hostess without even mentioning her in his thank you note. However, if you take the slash explanation, then everything is clear - he was jealous!

Anyway, canon relationships never stopped 'shippers of any calibre. So, if German literature were a fandom, you'd have the initial enemies state, then the meeting of minds state, and then the two-of-us-against-the-world state (they even got into flame wars with other writers; brush up the Xenien). And then the heartrendering death plus post-mortem angst and grief on the part of the survivor.

Am I glad I got my doctorate years ago. They'd never take me seriously now. This is fandom. Fandom did this to me...

...but I still wonder why there are no G/S 'shippers around...