something queer going on

I've just read a very good fic that demonstrates (among other things) that consent and good communication can be extremely sexy indeed.

But (and this is not a criticism of that fic, to be clear), it occurs to me that in every fic I've seen do that, the communication is always ultimately yes, and the consent is always ultimately given. Maybe there are issues, maybe someone's traumatized about something or just plain nervous, and overcoming that to get to a place of joyous consent and pleasure is the point.

What I don't think I've ever seen--and I admit I haven't been looking for it, or indeed reading much fic at all for a long time--is a fic that's focused on communication and consent, but where the communication is no. No, I don't want to do this specific act. No I don't want this, I don't enjoy this. And (this is the key part) where the result is still good joyous loving consensual sex. (NB I'm not talking about fic where a character is asexual and doesn't want to have sex at all. That's its own category; I mean characters who want to have sex together but where certain things are off-limits.)

No doubt it exists, because everything exists somewhere in fanfic. But I'll bet it isn't nearly as common as the other kind.


By the way, the very good fic in question is this one. ( Details and rec under the cut )

My job is making me literally sick with rage and frustration right now. I could really use recs for long (like, novel-length or more) fanfics or for escapist TV. For fanfics I'd really like m/m slash, strong characterization, decent writing, and a happy ending. I don't care if I know the fandom so long as I can make sense of the story without canon knowledge. For TV, I'd like either canon m/m or lots of m/m subtext (the pairing as a plausible endgame would be nice), and preferably but not necessarily a genre story like sff or mystery. No rape scenes, nothing too depressing.

Sorry if that's an obnoxious list of requirements, but I am running very low on cope and I don't watch to watch anything that will make me feel worse.

All recs greatly appreciated. ETA: Please don't hesitate to self-rec if you've written something that fits the bill.

And I'm not looking for advice. I'm doing what practical things I can to make the situation better, and that's not what I need at the moment.

We're at the start of a nasty winter storm here. It's snowing more or less horizontally due to the wind, which is also howling around corners and occasionally rattling the windowframes. I have actually turned the heat on, which I try to avoid because it's not cheap, and I'm currently wearing five layers and am still rather cold. It's supposed to stay bad for about twenty-four hours, but fortunately I don't have to go anywhere. I did go to work today, but only from 7-noon and I was home long before things got ugly.

(Sunday morning ETA: All the really bad weather has missed my area so far. There's just a dusting of snow here, with another inch or two expected today. But east and south of here, it's very bad. If you're there, I hope you're indoors, safe, and warm.)

I had a mellow Christmas, consistently mostly of cheese and movies. I watched Mr. Holmes, which is very good if (I think) not quite as non-heterosexual as people assured me it was; anyway, the performances are excellent, especially Ian McKellen, of course, but also Laura Linney, who disappeared so completely into the role of Mrs. Munro that until I checked IMDB just now I had assumed Munro was played by a British actor, and Milo Parker in one of the best performances by a child actor I've ever seen. After Mr. Holmes and as an antidote to its seriousness, I watched Despicable Me, which I'm probably the last person on earth to see. It was fun! And funny! I liked it best before it started to become heartwarming, but I didn't even mind the heartwarming parts too much--perhaps because I have chosen to interpret them as a story about a single gay man starting a family, and be damned to what apparently happens in the sequel.

Then of course there was Yuletide. I got four lovely fics, thanks to the generosity of writers currently unknown. ( List and links under the cut )

I've been reading other Yuletide fics a bit, but Yuletide Fatigue set in unusually early for me this year and I'm finding it hard to want to read even things that I would normally be over the moon about.

I do have three recs so far, in the fandoms Rejseholdet, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, here at the top of my AO3 bookmarks list.

Last year I said that every year it seems I know fewer Yuletide fandoms, and this year it was more of the same. Here are a few things I've really liked from the end of the alphabet (and there are a couple of longer fics that I haven't read yet because I prefer to read long fics on my ebook reader).

( 4 recs: Raffles, Rivers of London, Talented Mr. Ripley )

Help me, internets, you're my only hope! I have a cold and all I want to do is lie in bed reading good fanfic, or at least something id-y, with queer men who love each other and also save the world, or take over the world, or fight crime, or something. Even male/male subtext would be okay! I'll take subtext if it's a non-fanfic story and it's not actively homophobic.

I've tried fancake, but my tastes (and my fandoms) don't often seem to mesh with those of the folks who rec there.

Please rec me things! Fandom doesn't matter too much--in this mood I'll read things for fandoms I don't know--but there are some fandoms that won't work for me. Some that spring to mind are Supernatural, Teen Wolf, Bandom/Popslash, and sports RPF. Recs for professionally published things are welcome too, though it would help if they're available as e-books.

So bored, so bored, oh god please help.

Relatedly: are Margery Allingham's Campion books really terrible in the sense of being racist/sexist/antisemitic/homophobic? I've been watching a few episodes of the TV series with Peter Davison and it seems like the novels could be fun. But even one of the TV eps was pretty homophobic, so I'm nervous.

Seven recs: ( 16th Century CE RPF, The Importance of Being Earnest, The King Must Die, The Last of the Wine, The Left Hand of Darkness, My Beautiful Laundrette, Windows 95 Tips )

I haven't had problems with insomnia in quite a while, but tonight, after going to bed earlyish because I have to be at work at 6 am, I woke up at a little before midnight and could not get back to sleep. I could quite happily sleep now, at 3:30 in the morning, but there's the whole work at 6 thing. Not good.

It did give me time to work on my post for today, so there's that. Thanks, insomnia?

As requested by likeadeuce, today's topic is: some characteristics of my favorite fanfics.

Narrowing down "my favorite fanfics" is really hard! Especially as I've been reading fanfic for over ten years. I've pulled up my old Delicious account so this won't just be stories I've read recently, but I keep second-guessing myself. Yes, this is a great story, I think, but is it one of my favorites ever? So let's just call this "some characteristics of fanfics I really like."

Here are some, in no particular order.

Great character voices: If I can mentally hear the characters, or in book fandoms if they have the right speech patterns, I'm sold. Example: Wait Wait Don't Eat Me, by Nestra (National Public Radio RPF with zombies).

Subversion: I love it when a story calls into question, in a non-preachy way, the assumptions underlying a canonical situation or a fanfic trope. It's a feeling of revelation and insight. Two examples: Modern Love, by Penknife (Discworld, explores the implications of dwarf gender norms, and how they're affected by contact with humans, in bolder ways than Pratchett); We'll Burn Like Falling Stars Tonight by Challengeaccepted (Sherlock, Moriarty/Moran, destabilizes and denaturalizes the alpha/beta/omega trope and as such is the only a/b/o story I've ever read that I've liked).

Stretching the limits of form: Although I enjoy conventional narrative, I also love it when stories push the envelope with non-linearity, multiple narrative voices, documents, graphics, and so on. Unconventional narration doesn't have to mean a "difficult" story, although I don't mind when it does. This example is extremely readable as well as being a brilliant use of form and metanarrative: The Kids Aren't All Right by Samdonne (Iron Man).

The perfect detail: I'm a fan of details generally, because I love worldbuilding and closely-examined characters. And in particular, I love details that are more than the sum of their parts, that encapsulate important things about the world or the characters. My example story, halotolerant's A Sweet and Proper Thing (War Horse, Jim Nicholls/Jamie Stewart) includes one of my favorites sentences in a fanfic ever: "His parents, who had met each other during a demonstration about the Transvaal, believed in socialism, atheism and carbolic soap, in more or less that order." It's a whole history in 26 words.

New perspectives: This can be as simple as focusing on a minor character whose view of events differs from the main characters, or as extreme as offering a "secret history" inside the canon. It's different from subversion because there's not usually an element of critique, just finding the new in the familiar. Example: The Anatomist by Rosa_acicularis (Sherlock, Molly Hooper; this has been jossed by subsequent canon developments but is still a hell of a story).

Metaphorical intensity: It's hard to explain what I mean by this, but I'm thinking of stories where a metaphor or image is explored to the limit, so that it becomes central and even structural. Example: The Space Between Opposites by Storyseller (Doctor Who, Tenth Doctor/Simm!Master), which is about the Gallifreyan language and what can and cannot be said in it, and also about the Doctor and the Master, and what they are/cannot be/must be to each other.


This isn't (can't be) a comprehensive list, and I'm not entirely sure it's even a representative one, by which I mean that these aren't, by any means, the only kinds of stories I enjoy. They're exceptional stories that have stuck in my memory as special, long after the initial pleasure of reading them. Still, it pains me to think of all the fantastic stories I haven't mentioned.

I finally got around to watching The King's Speech and enjoyed it a lot. Colin Firth is very good, good enough that I forgave him for being too old for the role and noticeably older than Guy Pearce, who is supposed to be Firth's elder brother. I'm not a Geoffrey Rush fan, but he was less annoying here than usual.

It's a good story, although as I quickly found out on Wikipedia, the real history of Bertie's work with Lionel Logue is less dramatic. I particularly enjoyed the skewering of the vapid, Nazi-sympathizing Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, whose relationship is nauseatingly over-romanticized in most other stories about this period.

Does anybody have fanfic recommendations? I've looked on AO3 but there's nothing there that works for me. I'm interested in Bertie-centric gen, Bertie/Lionel slash or friendship fic so long as the author can make it emotionally convincing and not just go straight for the porn, or anything that follows up on what I thought were some pretty obvious hints of incestuous something between Bertie and David.

Four more recs. I feel bad that it's so few, but there just aren't a lot of Yuletide fandoms that appeal to me this year.

( Aubrey/Maturin, Black Books, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Lewis )

So, anybody have any Skyfall fic recs? I'm up for a variety of things: M or M-and-Bond gen, Eve gen (preferably acknowledging that (skip spoiler) missing one extraordinarily difficult shot does not mean she's not good enough to be a field agent), Bond/Q, Bond/Mallory, baddirtywrong Bond/Silva, the story of Bond's (skip spoiler) first time with a man, other Bond backstory, Silva backstory, and so on.