fresh starts
Aug. 17th, 2021 08:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitI'm having a bit of a home clear-out because of The Situation. (The Situation is still not resolved. I'll spare you the details, because it would only bore you and annoy me all over again. Let's leave it at "I think the apartment management is about 40% genuinely incompetent, 40% weaponized incompetent, and 20% absolutely indifferent even to good tenants--and I have been a very good tenant for over 8 years.")
The clear-out is kind of painful, but also a relief. I noticed this the last time I did a really major clear-out, almost exactly ten years ago when I was preparing to move across the country with nothing more than I could pack into a Honda Civic. I'm not quite a hoarder, but having grown up poor and been intermittently poor as an adult, getting rid of things makes me uncomfortable. I might need that! (Fortunately I'm also slow to acquire things, because I dislike spending "too much" money.)
Well, now I finally have a reason to get rid of those elderly spices* and those socks I'm never going to wear again, and those scented candles I got for free from my old job and never really liked the smell of, but somehow kept. (*I'm not convinced I actually have to empty the kitchen cupboards, but see above re: management incompetence. And now that I'm on a streak of getting rid of things, I might as well.)
The books . . . are harder. Technically I don't have to dispose of any books, but it was probably time to pare down anyway. I have a lot of unused cookbooks, for example. I'm still keeping a considerable number of books, but I'm trying to only keep the ones I genuinely love that are not easily replaced.
I wish I could donate things, rather than throw them away. But even for books, while the risk of creating a Situation for others is small, it's not zero. I'll donate any cooking equipment I decide to be rid of--that should be safe enough--but that's about it.
I guess I'm thinking of it all as prep work for moving out of this place. No idea when that will be possible, but I'm making the actual packing and moving part easier!
Enough about the Situation. Have some more of the shippy meme I've been doing intermittently.
7. Most innocent ship: Innocent how? That's a word with some baggage. Anyway, I'm going to go a bit weird here and say Ted/Ralph from The Fast Show. They manage most of a courtship without ever acknowledging it, and Ralph, at least in my headcanon (but reasonably extrapolated from the text!) has loved Ted since long before he knew what it meant.
The most guilty ship, of course, is Hannibal Lecter/Will Graham.
8. Most fluffy ship: Fluff doesn't really do it for me. I'm gonna say that Melanie/Georgie from TMA might have a nice fluffy future ahead of them, and they deserve it.
9. Most angsty ship: Angst is pretty much how I ship. Guilt, regret, separation, longing, love that is or might be sacrificed to other commitments, grief (long ago now, I wrote an entire dissertation chapter on the queer erotics of grief), lacrimae rerum, time's winged chariot, the inevitability of death. All the good stuff. It's hard to pick only one, but since I've already mentioned Xavier/Magneto and Hannibal/Will in other answers, I'll say Giles/Ethan from Buffy.
10. Most smutty ship: I was never really a smut-focused shipper, which doesn't mean I'm immune to the appeal of what we used to call the baddirtywrong ship. And in that spirit, I will say Jon/Elias from The Magnus Archives.
11. Ship that you would never have wanted in canon but like in fanworks: I'm going to stick with TMA and say Elias/Peter Lukas. Except not in fanworks, just in my imagination. TMA fandom has severe fluffication tendencies, and I've seen a lot of posts cooing over "LonelyEyes" like these two aren't literally monsters. No doubt there's fic I'd like, where they're selfish, amoral, and casually murderous, and yeah fucking's all well and good but there's no need to get emotional about it, and yet somehow they're all tangled up together anyway. But I'm not willing to wade through a whole swamp's worth of dreck to find it.
12. Character that you can only imagine in one ship: Okay, I said I wasn't going to repeat ships, but I think I have to here. There is no one in the world for Ethan Rayne but Rupert Giles. Ethan's slept with a whole lot of other men, maybe hundreds. But only one ever mattered.
13. Most shippable character: Maybe Logan/Wolverine from the X-Men movieverse? I ship him with Jean (a rare het ship I like, though mostly in the context of Jean/Scott/Logan), and with Scott, and with Charles Xavier, and with the mutant whose name I can't remember who was helping him out in Logan. That's quite a few, for me. I tend not to be very multi-shippy with a single character.
14. Character that you can’t imagine in any ship: I feel like it would be cheating to answer with a character I hate. And I can't think of anyone canonically aromantic in fandoms I know. I guess I'm going to cheat a little, then, and say Trexel Geistman from Stellar Firma. I don't hate him, because he's a fascinating wreck, and the traumas that made him that way are all too apparent. But he's also a selfish, callous nightmare boy with no real possibility of redemption. No one deserves Trexel.
The clear-out is kind of painful, but also a relief. I noticed this the last time I did a really major clear-out, almost exactly ten years ago when I was preparing to move across the country with nothing more than I could pack into a Honda Civic. I'm not quite a hoarder, but having grown up poor and been intermittently poor as an adult, getting rid of things makes me uncomfortable. I might need that! (Fortunately I'm also slow to acquire things, because I dislike spending "too much" money.)
Well, now I finally have a reason to get rid of those elderly spices* and those socks I'm never going to wear again, and those scented candles I got for free from my old job and never really liked the smell of, but somehow kept. (*I'm not convinced I actually have to empty the kitchen cupboards, but see above re: management incompetence. And now that I'm on a streak of getting rid of things, I might as well.)
The books . . . are harder. Technically I don't have to dispose of any books, but it was probably time to pare down anyway. I have a lot of unused cookbooks, for example. I'm still keeping a considerable number of books, but I'm trying to only keep the ones I genuinely love that are not easily replaced.
I wish I could donate things, rather than throw them away. But even for books, while the risk of creating a Situation for others is small, it's not zero. I'll donate any cooking equipment I decide to be rid of--that should be safe enough--but that's about it.
I guess I'm thinking of it all as prep work for moving out of this place. No idea when that will be possible, but I'm making the actual packing and moving part easier!
Enough about the Situation. Have some more of the shippy meme I've been doing intermittently.
7. Most innocent ship: Innocent how? That's a word with some baggage. Anyway, I'm going to go a bit weird here and say Ted/Ralph from The Fast Show. They manage most of a courtship without ever acknowledging it, and Ralph, at least in my headcanon (but reasonably extrapolated from the text!) has loved Ted since long before he knew what it meant.
The most guilty ship, of course, is Hannibal Lecter/Will Graham.
8. Most fluffy ship: Fluff doesn't really do it for me. I'm gonna say that Melanie/Georgie from TMA might have a nice fluffy future ahead of them, and they deserve it.
9. Most angsty ship: Angst is pretty much how I ship. Guilt, regret, separation, longing, love that is or might be sacrificed to other commitments, grief (long ago now, I wrote an entire dissertation chapter on the queer erotics of grief), lacrimae rerum, time's winged chariot, the inevitability of death. All the good stuff. It's hard to pick only one, but since I've already mentioned Xavier/Magneto and Hannibal/Will in other answers, I'll say Giles/Ethan from Buffy.
10. Most smutty ship: I was never really a smut-focused shipper, which doesn't mean I'm immune to the appeal of what we used to call the baddirtywrong ship. And in that spirit, I will say Jon/Elias from The Magnus Archives.
11. Ship that you would never have wanted in canon but like in fanworks: I'm going to stick with TMA and say Elias/Peter Lukas. Except not in fanworks, just in my imagination. TMA fandom has severe fluffication tendencies, and I've seen a lot of posts cooing over "LonelyEyes" like these two aren't literally monsters. No doubt there's fic I'd like, where they're selfish, amoral, and casually murderous, and yeah fucking's all well and good but there's no need to get emotional about it, and yet somehow they're all tangled up together anyway. But I'm not willing to wade through a whole swamp's worth of dreck to find it.
12. Character that you can only imagine in one ship: Okay, I said I wasn't going to repeat ships, but I think I have to here. There is no one in the world for Ethan Rayne but Rupert Giles. Ethan's slept with a whole lot of other men, maybe hundreds. But only one ever mattered.
13. Most shippable character: Maybe Logan/Wolverine from the X-Men movieverse? I ship him with Jean (a rare het ship I like, though mostly in the context of Jean/Scott/Logan), and with Scott, and with Charles Xavier, and with the mutant whose name I can't remember who was helping him out in Logan. That's quite a few, for me. I tend not to be very multi-shippy with a single character.
14. Character that you can’t imagine in any ship: I feel like it would be cheating to answer with a character I hate. And I can't think of anyone canonically aromantic in fandoms I know. I guess I'm going to cheat a little, then, and say Trexel Geistman from Stellar Firma. I don't hate him, because he's a fascinating wreck, and the traumas that made him that way are all too apparent. But he's also a selfish, callous nightmare boy with no real possibility of redemption. No one deserves Trexel.
