laura47 asked "Top 5 fanfic authors".

Ah, this is such a difficult question! It depends so much on what I'm in the mood for, and what I've been reading too much of, and a million other factors. Plus, I'd inevitably forget someone, and I hate to leave people off such a list. Instead, here is "top 5 fanfics I've read recently" (in the order I read them):

1. Thistledown by Violette_Royale. 90k Merlin genderswap AU, Merlin/Arthur in non-magical 1140s Europe. Merlin is a nun and Arthur is a knight who seduces her. God, that sounds awful. But this story is amazing and epic, and the writing is so beautiful, and the sex is so hot, and I love it to little pieces.
2. Sing When They Burn by Bagheera. Vikings, Ragnar/Floki, Ragnar/Lagertha/Floki. By the way, did I mention I briefly got into Vikings fandom? Because I did. This story is excellent, and the writing is poetic, and it mixes myth and history into the show in the best of ways.
3. Dans le Défit de la Coutume by Elspethdixon. Benjamin January mysteries, Ben/Shaw, with mentions of Ben/Rose and Ben/Hannibal. Did you guys know there are only four pieces of Benjamin January fanfiction in existence? A fact which I must now concede to be true, having spent days attempting to google up more. Anyway, this story would be great even if it were competing with a larger pool. It is sweet and the character voices are perfect.
4. A Lonely Fire by Eva. Django Unchained, gen, focusing on King post-movie. The writing here is so beautiful, and this story actually made me retroactively appreciate the canon and characters more. This is that rare gem of fanfiction that's better than the original source. (Granted, I wasn't especially enthralled by the original source.)
5. when we lay down our weary guns by GroteskBurlesque. Post-movie fix-it epic (almost 40k), which ends up in a Django/King/Broomhilda threesome. I have to admit that I've spent a lot of time reading Django Unchained OT3 fic due to the lack of fic for certain other OT3s set in the mid-19th century America, but this story is genuinely awesome, happy and touching and so well-written and well-characterized. I did not know I needed this after the movie, but I really, really did.


tsarina asked "Tell me your favorite animes. (I need to watch something new)".

Hahaha, I haven't seen a new anime in ages. You might well be more up-to-date than I am. Still:

1. Yami no Matsuei. My all-time favorite. Incredibly slashy shinigami angst about their abusive childhoods in between avoiding/being attracted to a magical serial killer. That is a terrible description of what is actually an amazing show.
2. Revolutionary Girl Utena. I'm currently in the middle of watching the anime, though I've seen the movie and read the manga years ago. Reworking of fairy tale archetypes to make a point about growing up and gender. The movie is gorgeous, despite lacking a great deal of coherence.
3. Ouran High School Host Club. Incredibly cracky series about a super-rich, super-elite high school, in which the most popular boys form a host club. Starring a poor girl disguised as a boy. The set-up makes no sense, but allows for the self-aware, mocking use of shounen-ai tropes to great comedic effect.
4. Fullmetal Alchemist. The original! I haven't seen the new anime, though I should. Set in vaguely pre-WWII Europe, this starts off as a fairly standard "I will become stronger!" boy's adventure, but quickly becomes about the cost of war, and ends up so much more heart-breaking than you would ever have guessed from the first few episodes.
5. Samurai Champloo. Silly but touching, two samurai and a young girl go on a road trip across a deliberately anachronistic medieval Japan to find the girl's father. The soundtrack consists mostly of hip-hop, and the series uses a great deal of similar cultural markers (graffiti, record scratching, etc), which you would think would be a bizarre combination, but it somehow works so well.

silverflight asked "Top 5 characters you like!"

1. Benjamin January. Honestly, I could just talk about five characters from the Benjamin January mysteries, but I will refrain and only discuss Ben. He is described at one point as a "knight-errant" and that is so true; he's angry at the injustices of the world, he desperately wants to protect those he loves, his sense of right and wrong determines a lot of his actions. But he is also lonely and awkward, a complete and total romantic (in both the capital-R and lower case-r senses of the word), and has a relatively silly sense of humor. He is a bit more earnest and serious than most of his family and close friends, but also very kind. I adore him.
2. Alec. (From Ellen Kushner's Riverside series) Oh, Alec. You are crazy and self-destructive and full of repressed passion and I LOVE YOU SO MUCH DON'T KILL YOURSELF, OKAY.
3. Hisoka. (From Yami no Matsuei) Hisoka, Hisoka, Hisoka. I just want to read about him forever; I want him to have a happy ending at the same time that I kind of want him to break the heavens. He is stubbornness personified, the incarnation of the refusal to submit. I love that about him.
4. Sanzo. (From Saiyuki) He is a priest who thinks (who does?) he knows better than the gods. HOW CAN YOU NOT LOVE THAT? He is fierce and angry and cynical and in complete denial of his own idealism and loyalty, but is all the more awesome for that. Speaking of, I need to catch up with the manga and Saiyuki Gaiden; I still haven't read the last handful of chapters of either. I got spoiled with the Tokyopop editions, and then they went out of business.
5. Peter Grant. (From Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series) Not really one of my fannish favorites, but it's nice to talk about something different. He is not a very good policeman (despite that being his job), but is funny and geeky and sweet and clever, and has one of my favorite first-person narrative voices in a long while.

I'll get around to answering the other questions soon, though the original meme is here, if you'd still like to ask something!

1. True Blood! Oh, True Blood. This show is kinda trashy, and yet I keep loving it more and more. ( Spoilers for last week's episode )

2. Saiyuki Reload 9. Yes, I am a bit behind. But oh! So good! I am absolutely in love with the whole sequence about Hazel as a child. Gorgeous, and creepy, and wonderful. And then Ukoku! I'm trying to avoid spoilers, but: SQUEE. Amazing stuff. You know, at first I did not like a lot of the symbolism in the Saiyuki books- okay, okay, I get it, Sanzo = the sun, whatever- but as time goes on and the symbolism gets more complicated and layers are added, I adore it more and more. I'm really in the mood to go back and reread the whole series right now.

3. Vienna Teng's new CD is really good. Eminem's new CD is boring.

4. Does anyone know anything about Saiyuki Gaiden coming out in English? I remember hearing a rumor a while ago that Tokyopop was supposed to pick it up, but I don't know if anything ever happened with that.

A meme I saw on threewalls's LJ ages ago and which I thought was interesting:

1. Comment to this post with the name of a character that I have written in fic.

2. I will comment telling you the following:
a. What initially prompted me to like the character enough to write about him/her.
b. One of his/her best traits
c. One of his/her worst traits
d. How easy/difficult I find it to write the character
e. The story/chapter/paragraph/phrase where I feel that I truly captured the character
f. My plans (if any) to write the character in the near future (which may be more optimistic than realistic, but rousing old muses does sometimes gets work written)

Hey, remember that Romeo x Juliet anime, with the swordfighting and the crossdressing and the awesome? The first episode is now available with subtitling here! (On Megaupload, which I hate, and if it doesn't work for anyone, let me know and I'll try to upload it on a different server.) I only downloaded it last night and haven't had time to watch it yet, but I thought I'd go ahead and spread the love. If you do not remember, by the way, you can watch an excellent trailer here; it's from the makers of Gankutsuo (The Count of Monte Cristo remade as space opera) and will apparently be a retelling of Romeo and Juliet, except Juliet dresses up as a boy and Verona has been transformed into some sort of lovely anime-esque city on a floating island with crumbling ruins interspersed with more modern buildings.

And speaking of love: two people wrote me stories for my birthday! Squee! Y'all are too sweet. And kind.

You Are the Seal of the Burning Year by veleda_k. Saiyuki, Sanzo and Goku, G. This is lovely and sweet in that totally not-sweet way of the series, and the Sanzo-voice is spot-on.

Scripted by ranalore. Saiyuki Gaiden, Kenren/Konzen, Kenren/Tenpou, PG. Oh, such pretty, pretty language and images, and so totally hot.

Eee. I'm so happy.

It's a day for reposting stories, I suppose. You may or may not have seen these before; they were posted in the comments to the last post where I took drabble requests. Normally I wait until I've finished every request to repost the results, but I'm putting these up now so I can do a year-end fic writeup later.

This does not mean that I don't intend to fufill the rest of the requests! I mean, it's only been ten months. Uh. I don't know how that happened, seriously.

For tad_coast: ( Hakkai, doing his laughing-at-you-but-not thing at Sanzo about something )

For rans_curse: ( Twoflower/Rincewind, subtle slash )

For b_hallward: ( Sanzo dies. Goku doesn't. )

For aoyagi: ( smexy Watari/Tsuzuki )

Paid members! Get a free week of LJ time by clicking here, in return for the recent outages.

Now that dracula1897 is over, anyone wanting classic vampire fiction delivered daily via livejournal should check out gothic_lit, which is currently posting a chapter a day of Carmilla.

Sign up for the Wishes for Kisses ficathon over at wishkisses. Write short stories over the holiday season, get some in return. All fandoms.

Too busy in December? How about yaoi_challenge's Valentine Reverse Ficathon? Good times there, as always. Anime/Manga/Video Game fandoms.

Five Books Tenpou Keeps Next to His Bed and Five Things Kenren Brought Tenpou from the Lower World, and One Thing He Hasn't by springgreen. Saiyuki Gaiden, PG. These are excellent. Read them both, but really read the second one; it breaks my heart.

Rhythms by rm. Swordspoint, PG-13/R. Oh, man, love. Those of you who have been indulging my obsession with crazy swordsmen and scholars must go read this.


In news about me, um, I am too tired to think of news about me. Apparently arguing continuity of cultural meaning really takes it out of me, or perhaps I simply shouldn't try drinking hot chocolate instead of coffee once I've developed a caffeine dependency. Tell me something interesting about you instead!

Gayleen Froese- who you may remember is one of my favorite musicians, and I've put up lots of her music- is apparently nor dead nor disappeared from the internet! Her website is back up, and features an entire CD for download.

Speaking of music, audiography's theme this week is 'road trip music'. Which has not been as fruitful as I'd hoped; I adore road trip music, but too many members on that community just don't share my taste in music. I put up my own post here; there's 13 songs for download.

reading_mix: a community to post reading lists based around a theme. Really neat idea.

20_aus: a community like 30_kisses or 100_themes, except the 20 prompts are all to be used for AUs. This is the best idea ever. Ohhhh, I want to do it so badly, but I should finish my other obligations first.

bb_shousetsu's (original boy's love stories) new edition is out.

Red Thread by springgreen [Sanzo, G, spoilers up to end of Reload 6] Sanzo and attachment and oh, an excellent story.

Salty Dog IV (Minkeura artbook, mostly Saiyuki, with some Bus Gamer and another series I don't recognize)

Saiyuubito (Saiyuki artbook; I've had this for so long I don't remember where I got it from, but I hadn't looked through it until today because it's been stuck on CD-ROMs and then I forgot I had it. But it has a ton of gorgeous art I haven't seen before. Mostly pencil sketches, but I have a secret adoration for those anyway.)

So, the paper that I thought was due next Friday is actually due this Friday, and then I found out I also have a presentation on Tuesday.

...Awesome!

But I wanted to thank everyone who responded to my post last night (even though I'm being lazy and haven't responded to everyone yet), instead of laughing at me for, uh, being whiny and depressive. Have some story recs!

Useless as Next Morning's Sun by b_hallward. Tsuzuki/Muraki and Tsuzuki/Hisoka, and oh it hurts in all the right ways.

Journey to the West by geekerypokery. It's a Saiyuki and Buffy fusion, and oh man it is awesome. I'm only halfway through it, but it's still awesome. You know you want to read about a female ikkou fighting vampires.

Un/scarred by springgreen. Konzen and Sanzo and the difference between them, and god do I love the feel of this story.

Also, here's a song: The Knife - We Share Our Mother's Health (Trentemoller Remix). I didn't know what this song was about when I fell in love with the original version a few months ago, and I don't know what it's about now that I have this amazing remix and someone has finally managed to word out the lyrics. I've got a secret theory that it's about Tamora's children from Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, but it's really far too happy of a song for that. So I dunno. Has anyone else heard this song? What are your theories on it?

I am aware that I haven't yet finished the requests from the last time I did this (but I will! Promise!), and that I also have a yaoi_challenge story to finish (working on it! Really!), but hey, I'm willing to do a lot for a drabble from Rana. ;)

So, it's drabble meme time again! Except that I tend to write more ficlets than actual drabbles, but whatever. Y'all know how the game works: make a request, get a drabble. Anything and everything I know is up for grabs, so be random, be predictable, or be whatever you want. Just comment with a prompt.