Benjamin January fannish news
Jul. 22nd, 2016 03:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhMy goodness, for such a tiny fandom, there's been a lot going on the last few weeks! Let me see if I can link everything, because I don't want anyone to miss out.
Vita Dum Superest by withinadream. 9k, gen, mature.
YES IT IS THE ZOMBIE AU THAT I HAVE BEEN WANTING EVER SINCE I FIRST READ THE BOOKS. :D But it's not just a zombie AU, or rather, it's not simply about violence and being eaten. It's actually a very effective look at the changes to New Orleans society in the wake of such an event:
January wished he could feel some sense of accomplishment. [...] How could he live in a world where the dead walked the streets and young women were forced to kill their own brothers?
The same way you lived in a world where men sold their half-brothers. And in any case, there was no way to leave. Even if he could, he wasn’t sure he would want to. Of course he would have preferred to return to the city as he’d left it, but given the choice between dying a slow death of grief in Paris and risking his life to spend the rest of his days with family and friends in New Orleans, he was beginning to think that this was the better option by far. Those you loved could be taken from you at any time—at least New Orleans was honest about its dangers. And when he thought about his sisters, and his newfound friends, and even his mother, corpse-ridden streets seemed a pleasant alternative compared to a too-empty bedroom across the Atlantic. He could learn to live here, where life and love flourished among the dead.
This is somewhat structured as an AU of A Free Man of Color, the first book in the series, but characters from throughout the series make appearances, each having adapted in one way or another to the reality of zombies. And in addition to all that, it's also a casefic! I'm always tremendously impressed by people who can write actual mystery cases into their fic; it is not at all one of my skills. Anyway, it's a fantastic fic, I've been eagerly awaiting my chance to read it for months, and everyone should check it out.
Eromenos by ophelia_interrupted. 13k, Hannibal/OMC, explicit. Backstory about Hannibal's first relationship as a teenager. This canon is so detailed and full of interesting people that I could never get tired of imagining backstory for all of them. It's especially nice to read it for Hannibal, since we know so little of his early years. Plus it's a second longfic! :D How wonderful to have two such meaty pieces to get into. A very sweet story with an angsty ending.
Who Sins Drunk (gen, 5k, teen) and its sequel A Midsummer Night's Passion (Ben/Rose/Hannibal, 3k, explicit). In an attempt to get sober (this is set roughly around the time of Dead Water), Hannibal asks Ben to cane him. And then there is a lot of hurt/comfort sex. I am not at all surprised that this particular kink has shown up in this particular fandom; I am only surprised that it took this long. And this is a wonderful take on it! I have to recommend it even if you're not particularly into canings.
On a totally different note, but still relevant to Benjamin January, over on tumblr I've been making book aesthetic posts for the series. It's a thing that I'd seen other people doing – basically you take a set of photographs of objects, landscape, people, etc and use them represent a piece of book, or sometimes a poem or play or other piece of non-visual media. Most of the creative work I do is written, but occasionally I find a lot of pleasure in stretching my visual muscles. Though the hardest part of making them, to me, is restraining the urge to write long explanations for why I chose each particular image.
Here are links to the ones I've done so far:
A Free Man of Color
Fever Season
Graveyard Dust
Sold Down the River
Die Upon a Kiss
Anything I've missed?
Vita Dum Superest by withinadream. 9k, gen, mature.
YES IT IS THE ZOMBIE AU THAT I HAVE BEEN WANTING EVER SINCE I FIRST READ THE BOOKS. :D But it's not just a zombie AU, or rather, it's not simply about violence and being eaten. It's actually a very effective look at the changes to New Orleans society in the wake of such an event:
January wished he could feel some sense of accomplishment. [...] How could he live in a world where the dead walked the streets and young women were forced to kill their own brothers?
The same way you lived in a world where men sold their half-brothers. And in any case, there was no way to leave. Even if he could, he wasn’t sure he would want to. Of course he would have preferred to return to the city as he’d left it, but given the choice between dying a slow death of grief in Paris and risking his life to spend the rest of his days with family and friends in New Orleans, he was beginning to think that this was the better option by far. Those you loved could be taken from you at any time—at least New Orleans was honest about its dangers. And when he thought about his sisters, and his newfound friends, and even his mother, corpse-ridden streets seemed a pleasant alternative compared to a too-empty bedroom across the Atlantic. He could learn to live here, where life and love flourished among the dead.
This is somewhat structured as an AU of A Free Man of Color, the first book in the series, but characters from throughout the series make appearances, each having adapted in one way or another to the reality of zombies. And in addition to all that, it's also a casefic! I'm always tremendously impressed by people who can write actual mystery cases into their fic; it is not at all one of my skills. Anyway, it's a fantastic fic, I've been eagerly awaiting my chance to read it for months, and everyone should check it out.
Eromenos by ophelia_interrupted. 13k, Hannibal/OMC, explicit. Backstory about Hannibal's first relationship as a teenager. This canon is so detailed and full of interesting people that I could never get tired of imagining backstory for all of them. It's especially nice to read it for Hannibal, since we know so little of his early years. Plus it's a second longfic! :D How wonderful to have two such meaty pieces to get into. A very sweet story with an angsty ending.
Who Sins Drunk (gen, 5k, teen) and its sequel A Midsummer Night's Passion (Ben/Rose/Hannibal, 3k, explicit). In an attempt to get sober (this is set roughly around the time of Dead Water), Hannibal asks Ben to cane him. And then there is a lot of hurt/comfort sex. I am not at all surprised that this particular kink has shown up in this particular fandom; I am only surprised that it took this long. And this is a wonderful take on it! I have to recommend it even if you're not particularly into canings.
On a totally different note, but still relevant to Benjamin January, over on tumblr I've been making book aesthetic posts for the series. It's a thing that I'd seen other people doing – basically you take a set of photographs of objects, landscape, people, etc and use them represent a piece of book, or sometimes a poem or play or other piece of non-visual media. Most of the creative work I do is written, but occasionally I find a lot of pleasure in stretching my visual muscles. Though the hardest part of making them, to me, is restraining the urge to write long explanations for why I chose each particular image.
Here are links to the ones I've done so far:
A Free Man of Color
Fever Season
Graveyard Dust
Sold Down the River
Die Upon a Kiss
Anything I've missed?
no subject
Date: 2016-07-23 03:06 am (UTC)Cool!
I like both the images and the color theme of Graveyard Dust very much. Also your casting of Rose in Fever Season. May I ask who the actress is?
no subject
Date: 2016-07-25 12:45 am (UTC)It's Ruth Negga, specifically a shot from the new TV show Preacher, where she plays Tulip O'Hare. I just stumbled across her recently, which was great timing! I'd more or less given up on finding a picture of anyone who reasonably resembled Rose's description + historical clothing + glasses. Not that Negga is actually in historical clothing here, but with the headscarf and the way the shot is framed it's hard to tell.
no subject
Date: 2016-07-25 01:40 am (UTC)She's great!
(Do you like Preacher? I've recently had it recommended to me over the comics, which I also have not read.)
no subject
Date: 2016-07-25 01:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-26 01:01 am (UTC)Well, I accept this casting until such time as it's disproven by an actual show.
Do you have other favorites for the rest of the cast? I see that you've used Chiwetel Ejiofor for Benjamin, Russell Crowe (circa 3:10 to Yuma?) for Shaw, Gugu Mbatha-Raw and an actress I don't recognize for Dominique and Chloë, Gina Torres for—I assume—Hesione LeGros, an actress I don't recognize for Olympe, an actor I don't recognize for Benjamin's father, and some dude in the background for Hannibal. I really like the color theming for each book, by the way.
no subject
Date: 2016-08-31 09:07 pm (UTC)Do you have favorites celebrities for the characters?
no subject
Date: 2016-09-01 07:12 am (UTC)That makes a lot of sense to me.
I seem to be a much less visual reader than most people, at least as far as you can measure that sort of thing.
Fair enough, though there may be other explanations. I do have a fairly strong visual sense when reading (at least if the style supports it) and see below.
Do you have favorites celebrities for the characters?
Not really, no! I don't usually find myself envisioning actors as characters, even favorites of either kind; it happens spontaneously on rare occasions, as when I discovered Bill Nighy in 2006 and thought he would make a terrific Sempitern Walker (until I remembered that the Sempitern is canonically Anglo-Indian and I really shouldn't whitewash him), but otherwise only if I've been thinking specifically about the question, which is the recent case with Frederick Nebel's John X. Kennedy—right after finally writing up the series, I saw Johnny Eager (1942) and now Kennedy looks like Van Heflin c. 1941 (although, for the record, one of the reasons I started reading Benjamin January was