Links to all fanfiction I've written in various fandoms. That I'm admitting to.

( Alias )


( Angel the Series )


( Babylon 5 )

( Battlestar Galactica )


( Breaking Bad )

( Buffy the Vampire Slayer )

( Citizen Kane )

( David Copperfield )



( Doctor Who )

( Farscape )

( Earth: Final Conflict )

( Heroes )

( Highlander: The Series )

( Historical Fiction )

( Lost )

( MCU )
( Merlin )

( Mythology )


( Once upon a time )

( Order of the Air )

( Penny Dreadful )

( Rome )

( Star Trek: The Original Series )


( Star Trek: Deep Space Nine )


( Star Trek: Discovery )


( Star Trek: The Next Generation )

( Star Wars )

( Sunset Boulevard )

( The Americans )

( The Beatles )

( The Borgias )

( The Godfather )

( The Medici )


( Torchwood )

( X-Men )

( The West Wing )


( Crossovers )

In which the delightful season ends with much suspense and heartfelt character scenes for everyone, including the droid 33.

( Spoilers have found dangers and good people everywhere )

In conclusion: this series was charming and just incredibly well done from the start to the end, and I loved it.

In which we get the show's version of Treasure Island's Fifteen Men on a Dead Man's Chest song as well as other more spoilery things.

( Yohoo! )

Black Doves: Netflix Miniseries starring Keira Knightley and Ben Wishaw in the leading roles, set in London. She‘s an undercover spy who has spent the last decade as the wife of a rising Tory politician, he‘s a freelance gay assassin (used to have a steady employer), they‘re bff from her early spy days, and things go pear shaped for both of them in the week before Christmas. There are various dastardly organisations involved, and if there‘s a vibe I‘d say early Alias (the tv show, not the comic) without the Rambaldi stuff as our antiheroes go through various suspensefully executed spyfare set pieces, there‘s of course a shady older handler, Mrs. Reeds (though she owes more to Margo Martindale as Claudia in The Americans‘s first season, actually), and the emotional heart of the piece is their passionate loyalty to each other as they come through for each other in crisis after crisis. In the meantime, our antiheroine while trying to maintain her cover (and the family gained therein) also has a fridged-in-the-pilot (male) lover to avenge (shades of Sydney from Alias, as I said) while our antihero can‘t resist reconnecting to the boyfriend he had to leave after said boyfriend discovered what he does for a living, and also there are a couple of very entertaining female assassins who at various points of the plot are foes and allies.

It‘s very enjoyable if you like spy stuff, and Keira Knightley and Ben Wishaw, all of which I do; I think I may have found a new Christmas story to enjoy rewatching in future years.

Skeleton Crew, episodes 1 - 3 (so far): aka a new Star Wars show on Disney + that started three weeks ago and which I had no real urge to watch until hearing good noises. Squarely aimed at children and incredibly charming. I watched with captions on, so when in the very first scene said captions identified a character leading a bunch of pirates as „Silvo“ and a scene later we got introduced to a boy called „Wim“, I thought, hang on, is this a Treasure Island/Star Wars crossover? And the answer so far is… kinda, kinda not?

( Slightly spoilery from here )

In conclusion, I‘m greatly enjoying this, and would like to thank whichever wage slave or freelancer pitched to the Mouse that the world needed not just any but the pirate story in the Star Wars universe.

This article tells me there's a new play on the London stage about the encounter between J.S. Bach and Frederick the Great, titled Score, which causes the article writer, Michael Billington, to muse about other plays about composers (starting of course with Amadeus), and because this is an English article, and thus German language works do not exist, there's no nod to Mein Name ist Bach (German language Swiss film about that very encounter, used to be in its entirety up at YouTube, with English subtitles, no less, but no more, and thus I can't link you to the thing itself, but I did write an extensive review with screencaps; if nothing else, that film has a claim to fame for being the first movie to unambiguously, on screen textually present good old or rather young Friedrich as gay) or the play Mögliche Begegnung der Herren Bach und Händel about an imaginary encounter between Bach and Händel during Händel's last trip home to Saxony, which a couple of years ago was a stage and audio hit back here. Re: this new play Score: Brian Cox as Bach, eh? Not the first actor who'd come to mind, but of course I would love to see his interpretation.

On to this week's episode of Ahsoka: ( In which we catch up with the villains. )

And speaking of villains:

After a month where I had to do other things, I went on with my Discovery rewatch, and four episodes into s3 I'm filled with even more love for the show. I think one of many reasons why I adore the later two seasons so much is that for me, they solved a narrative problem even my beloved Babylon 5 struggled with in its fifth season and which the Star Wars sequel trilogy avoided altogether by skipping entirely over the New Republic era and creating another scenario where it's Evil Fascist Bad Guys vs Plucky Resistance Heroes. It is this: making a period of reconstruction, of rebuilding a society after some cataclysmic event narratively compelling and exciting.

War, as Sheridan says in one of JMS's self conscious meta moments in s5, is exciting. Teaming up in war against a mutual (usually evil and overwhelming, in fiction) enemy is a feell good narrative, as is defeating said enemy after some temporary set backs. But rebuilding, making alliances for the long term, making compromises where no one gets exactly what they want, and without a Big Bad to boo and hiss at? I'm a staunch s5 defender, and not just because the network screwed JMS over, but while the Fall of Centauri Prime storyline is perfect, everything else would have needed some retooling, and I don't think he ever solved the problem of how to make Sheridan convincingly a good president (i.e. the dialogue keep insisting he is, and the story keeps showing us he's not) the way he was a good war time leader. As for SW and the sequel trilogy, I do think it was a simple calculation on the part of Disney and J.J. Abrams, especially based on the reception the prequels originally got (with their reputation thankfully now somewhat better, says this prequel fan): what people wanted from SW was Plucky Underdog Rebels vs The Evil Empire, and nothing else. Not the plucky rebels transitioning to being the people in power and trying to rebuild a society. So they recreated that scenario, never mind that it meant Our Heroes lived to see their efforts smashed to pieces. (For all that the Disney tv shows can be very different in qualitiy, I give credit where due to Filon, Favreu & Co. of actually tackling the challenge of showing us the New Republic and trying to create a believeable scenario where we see why it fails. Of course, they live in an era where we see democracies all over the world full of people fannish about strongmen again, so I think the theme resonates. However, given that the sequels already established that the New Republic is basically Weimar, the ending is perordained, so that's not really comparable to the challenge I mean: making rebuliding, and specifically rebuilding a democratic society, narratively compelling WITHOUT resorting to the next war against Evil McEvil on the horizon.

Which is what Star Trek: Discovery does show in its third and fourth season. Not that the series is suddenly without villains, or threats and menaces, but they're of a different type, not Evil Empires. S3 very specifically shows us a society that emerged from the breakdown of a civilisatiion - and one that already showed fractures before the Burn -, and the rebuilding of the Federation, the reforging of connections, the need to establish trust that was lost, or in the case the 10c to understand what at first seems utterly incomprehensible, those are the tasks set to our heroes. And it's captivating and emotionally stirring and compelling to watch. That's what I mean when I say Disco has solved that particular narrative challenge.

Also: I'm not sure whether I recced this before or not, but it bears repeating: this is a beautiful vid capturing what's best about the show so well:

The first two episodes of the Ahsoka miniseries have been released.

( Spoilers have a wistful longing for Ashley Eckstein unrelated to the actual episodes content )

For Valentine's Day, the Candy Hearts Exchange went live, and I received two gifts, both SW: The Clone Wars stories: give us something to celebrate and yet peace, both stories in which conversations Anakin has with Ahsoka (and Obi-Wan) make fundamental changes.

I also finished reading A Thousand Ships, a, hm, less than a novel than an interconnected tapestry of stories based on Trojan War related myths by Natalie Haynes. Each of the myths is told from a female perspective, and in a non-liniear fashion; for example, the Penthesilea story (near the end of the war) happens before the Iphigenia story (at the start of the war). Like The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, this one's take on Briseis and Chryseis (and for that matter any of the female prisoners taken slaves by the Greeks) pointedly avoids presenting their relationships as romances. I think this is the retelling whose take on Cassandra was most visceral for me, because the author had Cassandra experience her visions of the future as memories. (I.e. like Doctor Manhattan in Watchman, she experiences past, present and future simultanously and all the time. Unlike him, she remains human. Talk about a curse.) I'm reasonably well versed in Greek mythology, but there were some myths I hadn't been familiar with, and afterwards had to google, such as the story of Hecuba's revenge on Polymestor, which I see is from both a Euripides play and Ovid. Though Haynes made one telling change; in her book, as in practically every modern retelling I've seen save for an intriguing Yuletide story from years past, Agamemnon is an unredeemable villain, and thus the Greek hero who sides with Hecuba in her version isn't Agamemnon but Odysseus.

Another decision any author tackling the Trojan War myths has to make is whether or not to use the Gods. Haynes does include them, and provides some intriguing twists, most of all by using the non-linear storytelling to reveal bit by bit the underlying true reason for the Trojan War. There are some surprising yet effective decisions, like ( a spoiliery one regarding Thetis the mother of Achilles. ) Unfortunately, one of the very few intallments that don't work for me are the Penelope passages, perhaps because all the other female povs come across as telling their own stories, whereas Penelope tells that of Odysseus (except for the first time she speaks). I mean, I do see the basic problem - evidently Heynes wanted to include the Odyssey stories and she wanted to include Penelope as a pov, and so she has Penelope tell those stories via letters to her absent husbands where she repeats what she heard from the bards about his adventures with her own sarcastic commentary. But that still makes them not Penolope's stories, and I wonder whether a better solution would have been to divide the Oddyssey tales between Penolope, Circe, Kalypso and Nausicaa.

Lastly, as opposed to some other modern retellings where the brutality of the male characters' actions is preserved, but not of the female characters, here this doesn't happen, which means the various revenge acts by women fall on the guilty and innocent alike (true for both Hecuba's and Clytemnestra's revenges, for example), and thus several the female characters are victims and perpetrators alike. It's a compelling book, but definitely not one for escapist purposes.

Dear Writer,

this is my first time in this exchange - I haven't done Chocolate Box before, either - and I'm very grateful to you for creating something for me in a fandom we share. My prompts are just that, prompts, not absolutes; if you have an idea that doesn't fit with any of them, but features (some of) the characters I asked for, I'll love it with added joyful surprise.

General DNWs:

A/B/O - if you want to write a werewolf AU for any of the canons I nominated, be my guest, but I'm really not into this particular type of story -, infantilisation, golden showers. Character bashing. (If the characters in question canonically loathe someone, you can of course include this, but I think you know the difference between that and having all characters agree about how terrible X is. Rape, unless it's canon and you want to explore how Character Y deals with the aftermath, or something like that.

General likes:

Character exploration, characters helping each other recover from trauma, messed up and/or co-dependent family relationships, witty banter, friendship against the odds, the occasional light moment in a darker story or conversely some serious character stuff thrown into a comedy fic.

Treats: are very welcome, including for fandoms from the tag list I did not list but which you know me to share.

( Highlander )

( The Hunger Games )

( James Bond (Craig Movies) )

( Star Wars: The Clone Wars )

( Farscape )

( Around the World in 80 Days (2021) )

( 18th Century CE RPF )

The first draft of my Yuletide story is done and off to be beta'd, phew. This time, I intended to write nothing but frothy fun, but then I thought about the basic premise some more and it turned into, well, not an angst fest, but there sure as hell is angst and emotional slaughter along for the ride.

Speaking of slaughter: I watched more Star Wars, to wit: The Book of Boba Fett, as I had liked the two seasons of The Mandalorian released so far. The Book of Boba Fett is basically three shows in a miniseries - one that covers the time between Boba Fett getting swallowed by a Sarlaac in Return of the Jedi and his showing up remarkably undigested in the second season of The Mandalorian, one that covers what happens next with him, Fennec and various new characters, and season two and a half of The Mandalorian in its last three episodes, in which the Mandalorian & Grogu duo is absolutely central.

Like The Mandalorian itself, The Book of Boba Fett is blatantly a Western, if at times more by way of Kurosawa than Sergio Leone, and having fun with all the tropes. Also, Dave Filoni gets to make another of his animated Clone Wars characters into life action canon. I mean, given the Western of it all, it makes sense they picked this particular one to show up next, but I'm not sure how said character works for new viewers who encounter him here for the first time. I guess he's trope-familiar enough to work without knowing the backstory?

All in all not a bad way to pass the time, and between The Clone Wars and The Mandalorian I had come to care about Boba Fett (who'd have thought), but otoh it's also nowhere near the league of Andor in quality, and definitely not a must. Except for Mandalorian watchers, because I guess if you go from the end of season 2 to however s3 starts without having seen these events, it must be very confusing.