Have been running around madly for several days now, but today's finally been a quiet day of original project + Iceland. Yay, I think. Yesterday was all about the fannish media binge, with the Doctor of the Lecherous Tentacles, sahiya, gloriana, and S's friend for whom I have no LJ.

Things we watched, a partial list:
"Once More With Feeling"
"Hush"
"Smile Time"

One of these scripts was amazing stuff, even better than I remembered.
One of these scripts wasn't as good as the concept of the episode deserved.
One of these scripts made me certain that I haven't been missing anything, despite the high concept.

Guess which is which.

Also there were two Top Gears (Communistical cars and the Africa special), which were fantastic.

ETA: Aha! froxyn has written me Uther/Morgana for the Freeforall! I am off to read nao.

Here's the Dark Horse preview for #28, which shows the cover & the first two pages. The Jo Chen cover is lovely as usual. I might buy this one, though I've long since stopped following it out of, well, boredom.

Brutal honesty fannish question meme answers here! Not much brutality, I'm afraid. And despite my threats, I haven't found it hilarious to lie, so these are all straight answers.

One. violetisblue wants to know about Giles & Ethan. ( Giles & Ethan, in my theory... )

Two. Another commenter asks about Merlin and the recent claims (linked to by metafandomwank) that it's got "skeevy" issues. I am also asked for my take on the assertion that imperfect canon feeds fannish activity more than excellent canon. ( Opinionation follows... )

Three. shitsu_tonka wants to know about Giles and Olivia. ( Pretentiousness and the dangers of Sunnydale... )

Four. What's my favorite ASH ship and why? ( And the staggeringly predictable answer is... )

Five. myhrmaid asks about Giles and his relationship with his father. ( Pure invention behind the cut... )

Six. psychoadept wants rambling about Giles & kink. ( Which I do in a character-focused way behind the cut... )

I've just been rewatching the middle of BtVS season 4 ("Pangs", "Something Blue", and "Hush") and lord, if this isn't my favoritest TV ever. I care about all these characters so much. Except Riley. I never could manage to care in the least about him. Strange, given that "Hush" introduces Tara, about whom I cared a whole lot almost right away.

Anyway. Canon familiarity refreshed. Love of source text refreshed. Plotty bits of various S4 retellings retargeted. I'll either watch "Doomed" next or answer comments or write. Really I should be folding the tremendous piles of clean laundry I have just created.

I have no idea what my subconscious is going to move me to work on next. No flipping clue. I know what I should be working on...

Random: Comic book lettering conventions explained.

Wesley Wyndam-Pryce vs Raymond Shaw: discuss.

I'm about to rewatch "Passion", and attempting to work myself up to it. That is the episode that turned me into a raving fan, but it's painful. Here's a quick rundown of mid-season reactions.

( Cut on the off chance that somebody out there hasn't watched Buffy s2 yet... )

What do you make of Buffy season 2?

Hey, hey! Signups now open for Every Slayer Needs A Watcher in allthejellies. I am, of course, utterly insane, but this ficathon should be a thing of joy. Lots of new Buffy/Giles stories! Yay!

All key dates are Sundays. Signups are open until I get back from vacation. I'll do assignments as quickly as I can when I return, send 'em out before the following Sunday, and get things cooking. I will also send reminder emails, since I appreciate those keenly when I'm signed up for ficathons.

Please feel free to promote while I'm off being distracted. If I've screwed up in any correctable way, throw brickbats at me now while I can still fix things.

At least, it's two years for me. Two years ago today Mr Pedia and I spent the evening watching most of Buffy season 1. The next day I ordered the boxed set of the entire series from Amazon, because it was quite obvious we'd be fans.

I bought season 1 because he'd been watching Firefly and Serenity over and over. Which he still does; he re-watched Serenity just the other day. But I was tired of it, and I told him it was time to watch the show that made Whedon famous. We watched it in bed, curled up together with my Powerbook.

I am still extremely fond of season 1, the high school Scoobies, the library, the Citroen, cute curvy Buffy, geek-chick Willow, and shaggy Xander. And of course Giles in tweed, checked shirts, and striped ties, with his cuffs unbuttoned.

Well, there's.... no, boring. And then there's... no, that's boring too. Er, at least I don't have to do giles_watchers tonight, thanks to the awesome kambee. Which is good, because to be honest, easy as that task is, I think it might be beyond me tonight. Brain == pudding. Was virtuous this morning, at least: packages and other oddments mailed.

I have some Blake's 7 to watch. I also have lots and lots of Doctor Who to watch. And last night's Eureka. Not to mention a movie with Mr Ears, Christopher Eccleston. What will I watch tonight? None of the above. Instead I will try to write.

I've never had Ethan go shippy on me before. But boy howdy, he's shippy in this story.

( Zapping the Potentials: threat or menace? Plus minor comics spoilers... )

Shall I compare thee to Hemingway?
Thou art more prolix and comma-prone
Rough winds do shake the deathless prose of May
And umm... something that rhymes with 'prone' about short-lived-ness.

That last line. Help.

( Buffy. Ah, Buffy. I like Buffy. Except when I want to smack her. )

Here's an essay worth hopping over and reading right now: ginmar on Buffy, depression, and bad season 6 writing.

I suspect you know what I make of Buffy's state of mind after her "friends" resurrected her. A lot of my take on Buffy is that she has to be suffering from PTSD pretty badly. And that coping with this is one of Giles' big tasks in life. Slayers suffer and fight and die. Watchers are given to them to make their time a little better. It's grim, yes... the setup is grim at the core, and all the popcult wit in the world can't disguise it.

I think Joss Whedon ought to have bent the fabric of space-time to convince ASH to stay with the show full-time in season 6. Though perhaps, given the quality of season 6 writing, I'm happy his character wasn't there to be degraded.

Dear Joss--

Thank you for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It's... well, I could go on at length. I often do. But I'm happy that I finally got around to watching the adventures of Buffy, Willow, Xander, and Giles. Those are some neat people you have living in your head, and it's great that you decided to colonize my head with them too.

I'm writing fiction again thanks to one of them in particular, and that's been working out well for me. So, you know, nice work!

signed,
just another fan

I think I'm a sucker for the world-building aspect of AUs. I want explanations for the origin of Slayers that are cooler than the slapdash one the show gave us. Also, I want a Council of Watchers that behaves in some sane fashion that has a deeper explanation than "this is what we needed it to do this week".

So apparently I am cheerfully supplying many answers. One per story series. I just wrote an origin of Slayers story for this new Greek-myth-influenced series, and it was a lot of fun to do.

I've got a totally different origin story for the "Breaking Glass" universe stories. And another one for "Cloud Animals". A magic system in "Breathing". Another magic system in "Reconnection".

I think I have the most fun when I stop worrying about whether things are good in some abstract sense, and just worry about whether they're good in the "I'd think this was cool to read" sense. When I write for my future amnesiac self, I do best at pleasing all of you as well as me. And my inner amnesiac wants neat backstories.

My inner amnesiac wants to write "A rose for Ecclesiastes." It also wants to write Against a dark background, but probably with a less horrifically grim ending. (That's a good review, by the way, and I strongly recommend Banks if you have any interest in SF. Best living writer of it, to my taste.)

What do you want to have written?

The Buffy of Ars Draconis is a lot smarter than the Buffy of Reconnection. I just realized this while writing her. The Reconnection-Buffy is more, er, an idiot savant? Which is exaggerating. She's sweet, and ditzy, and serious when she needs to be, and completely willing to do her job, but not entirely conscious of what makes her a sound tactical thinker. Whereas the ArsDraconis-Buffy is conscious of her skill acquisition and her training, an active participant in her Slayerness. And is a little less sweet.

AD-Buffy is aware that Giles is male, and attractive, but also aware that he's not for her. At least not that way. It's a Giles-Buffy partnership story. It's season 5; the relationships among the Scoobies are healthy, and the threat is external. But Giles' role among them is shifting because of the sword, especially his role with Buffy, and thus they must adjust. And then there's the mutter mutter issue, hinted at in part 2, which part 3 makes clear.

There are several editions of Giles co-existing in my head, some of them harder-edged than others. I've known this for a while. I was interested to note that my internal Buffy has begun to take on variations.

There are some similarities. I tend to class Buffy as a tactical thinker (assess a roomful of threats accurately; make judgments on the fly about immediate combat) and not as a strategic thinker (putting her in charge of larger battles or campaigns would be a mistake; that's what Watcher-training is for). Also that she has completely trustworthy instincts about who's evil and who's not. And that her #1 repeated mistake is going to be not trusting the people around her to help her, even when they've proven over and over that they can.

This is exactly the thing that fanfic gives you that standard writing does not. If I were to write a series of stories about an original character (which is, btw, exactly my goal in the next year), I would aim for consistency of character. Or a single growth arc, perhaps. I would not write variations on the character. Or write several takes on how the character would act in a fixed (canonical) situation. But we do this in fanfic, and enjoy it.

buffyversetop5 is now open for posting, and all sorts of lists are showing up. Lots of Spike, lots of Spuffy. (Though I note there's a Xander/Riley recommendation, which wins on sheer whackiness.) Is that what most of Buffy fandom is, the reanimated middle-aged bleached-blond corpse and Buffy?

This is a thing I do not get, the appeal of Spike/Buffy. I like Season 2 evil Spike a lot, mind you. As enemies go, he's fun.

Hey! Dulcinea updated Pointy Horns or Black Hats with a new chapter the other day, and nobody told me!

Anya normally drives me mad. One note samba, as written in canon. My reaction is usually "exterminate this character please because she's choking Xander's character to death and I lub Xander".

But then I read something like "Hugh Grant Explains It All For You" by ljs (one, two, still in progress) and I say "Oh, okay, I get it now. A good writer can make me believe anything. I am putty. Please to be giving me more of the Giles and the Anya."

Though sometimes I suspect that the attraction of Anya is that she's more of a blank slate than some of the characters are. Set the vengeance tediousness aside, and you have a great deal of latitude for building a more interesting rounded human being. And thus fanfic!Anya can be vastly more tolerable to me than canon!Anya.

So I arrive home in sunny, warm California, collapse on the couch with the dogs, and find that my welcome home present is a pervy Core Four fic from secondalto!

part one
part two
part three

gilesbabe updated "Somewhere in time" today with chapter 7. As a public service, and since I went scrambling to find them, here are links to all seven chapters:

chapter 1
chapter 2
chapter 3
chapter 4
chapter 5
chapter 6
chapter 7

Fun concept. I like the "Buffy gets to do it all over" story concept, though alas I am not aware of any finished stories in the category.

This is our first day in London and we're pretty darn jetlagged and unslept. I am writing about this on my regular blog, though. This is the fanfic/writing blog, not Yet Another Boring Life Story blog.

I've been trying to read a long Giles/Oz series of stories that I saved to my Macbook before leaving, and utterly failing. I think the core of the problem is that in this story he is gay, and I do not read Giles as fundamentally gay. I don't see him as that Kinsey extreme. Or either Kinsey extreme, to tell the truth. I see him as bisexual. Or maybe toward the het end, with some intense affairs with the same sex now and then. I cannot ignore the canonical affairs with Jenny and Olivia (and the fling with Joyce).

I do know that fanfiction's purpose is to stray from canon in these ways, and I damn well hope that authors take these characters in the directions they want without worrying about my opinion. I can just skip the stories as "not working for me" and move on to something that does. I was just noting my reaction, which surprised me a little until I figured out why.

This explains why some other Giles stories haven't worked for me either. I read a fairly hardcore short series a while back that had Giles doing watersports and leather and getting a guiche and then dumping Buffy as his Slayer entirely. This story didn't sit well with me, and now I understand why. That author's Giles wanted nothing to do with women, and the Giles in my head likes them just fine. (Though I confess to not being able to cope with watersports personally. Piercing kink works, oh yeah, and I may write that for Giles some day.)

So in the previous entry I said my favorite pervy ship is the Core Four. It seems, however, that there's very little Core Four smutfic to be had. I know of two:

Let us never speak of this again by Trekker
Whiskey Worse by Alex Wort

Wouldn't it be nice if there were more stories in this category?

Tell you what. I'll do my best to provide one if you (yes, I'm looking at you, dear reader; no squirming and pretending I don't know who you are) try to write one too.

The parameters:
Core Four (Buffy, Giles, Willow, Xander)
nobody else
any rating (but smut is nice)
try for a happy ending (but if you can't, I understand)

Today's bit of fun is Who watches the Watchers?" by Mouse Lady. Because Steed is so... Steedy.

So I've seen tons of Photoshop manipulations, some of them quite nifty. Lots and lots of screenshot-tinkering. But I haven't seen any Buffy fan art that's the traditional pencil and paper, pen and ink stuff. Does this exist? The HP world has a ton of this, with some great artists doing interesting work.

I'd like to take a stand on a hot controversy, the big issue of the day, the one that is causing fights all over the Inturwebz.

I think Giles would ride a Ducati.

Not il Mostro, either. I see the man on a 748. Yellow. Dry clutch rattle, desmo valve drone, and all. I don't think he would go all out on the 996 monoposto, though that might be the single sexiest bike Ducati ever built.

But Brit pride! I hear you cry. Okay, a Speed Triple. I see him going streetfighter if he chooses the sweet bikes of his mother country. The cafe racer thing would remind him of the bikes he stole in his youth.

I will now expose my reasoning.

Giles likes funky. Evidence: the Citroen.
Giles has European tastes. Evidence: the 2-door tramp.
Giles was having a mid-life crisis. Evidence: 4th season.
Giles is secretly cool. Evidence: need I write that essay for you, dear reader?

I will now answer all your objections.

Why not a Beemer, the bike of wonks from all nations? Because: not thrilling, too damn nerdy, best suited for long tours, which Giles isn't going to take.

Why not a cruiser, some under-engined American thing weighted down with an extra hundred pounds of chrome? See above statement about Giles being cool. Also, European. Also note that he's in California on the coast. California is sportbike heaven. All he has to do is point the thing uphill from town and he's in the twisties. And I will testify to you that heading north from where he is on highway 1 is also fun. Though you have to be willing to twist the wrist and pass the motorhomes when you get the chance.

Okay, you've made the sportbike argument. Why not the Daytona, then? Well, it's just not sexy, somehow, the way the Speed Triple is sexy. Or the Duck.

Why not a J-bike, something like the Honda CBR? Very practical, scary fast in any displacement, sweet to ride, yes, but not funky. The sound of an inline four is the sound of an angry bee. Contrast with the sexy grunt of the twin on the Duck, or the distinctive sound of the triple.

You may consider this entry to be my attempt to wash out of my mouth the taste of fics that put him on a "sleek black motorcycle". Specificity, people, specificity.