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AND THEN SETH GREEN IN FLANNEL GUEST STARRED ON X-FILES
The end of the paid account was like Y2K or something. I was all OH NO OH NO, but in the end all I lost was icon space and poll-making abilities. I didn't even lose my mood theme! So, okay. Also: GIP! If I were still doing the adjacent icons meme, I would be writing a drabble about Susan Pevensie and Bender hanging out.
Speaking of memes,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lovestories gave me 5 things to talk about:
erasure poetry
This is allzempasuchil, actually. She took a whole course about it, and was posting links to Humument.com and other examples, posted her own erasures, and I became intrigued. Erasures appeal to my love of stories within stories. I suggested we erase each other's fics, and to my delight she said yea. Speaking of which, have ya'll already signed up for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
erasureathon?
Merlin/Will
Ah, Will: fandom's buttmonkey. Here's the thing. He is obviously a big part of Merlin's origins story, and he and Merlin obviously adored each otherand perhaps canoodled in the pastures. I like his realistic reaction to certain doom (run awaaaaay) -- but he does come back to fight in the end, guys -- and I like his utter normalcy. Also, he's the only other person except Hunith who knew about the magic! Merlin may not end with Will by his side, but he begins with Will by his side, and this is just as valid as Merlin and Arthur's superspecial destiny. I said most of what I had to say about Will in Halcyon Days, though I suspect there may at some point be an AU where Will survives and follows the gang back to Camelot, then this happens. Have a Merlin/Will vid. I've recced it before but god, it gets me every time.
insanely glorious Narnia AUs
<3! AUs are insanely glorious fun! Oh, the 'what if?' game. These days I tend to blither on about Merlin AUs more, excepting this one I'm on withmarycontraire wherein Merlin and Arthur are FBI agents and the Pevensies are the mafia, and Arthur and Edmund have secret meetings where Arthur tries to wrest information out of Edmund about Morgana's kidnapping. Thing is, I never used to like AUs, but then you start asking questions like WHAT IF ARTHUR WAS A DINOSAUR and how can you turn away?
Peter/Susan
What have I said about them that I haven't before. They are the inappropriate OTP of my heeeaaarrrrt. I think I've Peter/Susaned myself out, in that although I still ship them, I tend to write around them more now instead of directly addressing the issue. In the rambling meme, I talked about Peter/Susan.
Indonesian shadow puppets
I never got around to writing the drabble about Edmund and the shadow puppets, but it would involve comparisons to Plato's cave, and how the shadows cast on the cave wall are like the puppets' shadows on the screen. The 'real' thing may be the leather puppets and the human voices and hands that animate them, but what the audience is meant to see are their shadows. And the brighter the light, the sharper the shadows, and that's where the story lies. So, uh. I guess that's what it means to Edmund.
Here are a couple of things that have improved my Monday. First, a most gracious lady remixed me andzempasuchil's Narnia geek-off, Sea Change, for remixredux09. It is so lovely, please read it: into something rich and strange (the tempus aeternum backbeat). Awesome #1: there is more Lucy. Awesome #2: "Edmund has spent hours puzzling over black holes and maths and the curious turn of gravity trying to find a way to say, in the language of these scientific men, what he himself knows with an utter intimacy." <3 "Einstein's Dream" is now on my to-read list.
Second, my Merlin/Monty Python fusion, Only a Model, has been nominated forexcalibur_award under Best Crack Fic, Best Humor Fic, and Best Crossover Fic. \o/! Thanks, nominator! If any of ya'll are inclined to agree with this nomination, uh, vote for me? I promise to reform the health care system!
Speaking of memes,
lovestories gave me 5 things to talk about: erasure poetry
This is all
zempasuchil, actually. She took a whole course about it, and was posting links to Humument.com and other examples, posted her own erasures, and I became intrigued. Erasures appeal to my love of stories within stories. I suggested we erase each other's fics, and to my delight she said yea. Speaking of which, have ya'll already signed up for erasureathon?Merlin/Will
Ah, Will: fandom's buttmonkey. Here's the thing. He is obviously a big part of Merlin's origins story, and he and Merlin obviously adored each other
insanely glorious Narnia AUs
<3! AUs are insanely glorious fun! Oh, the 'what if?' game. These days I tend to blither on about Merlin AUs more, excepting this one I'm on with
marycontraire wherein Merlin and Arthur are FBI agents and the Pevensies are the mafia, and Arthur and Edmund have secret meetings where Arthur tries to wrest information out of Edmund about Morgana's kidnapping. Thing is, I never used to like AUs, but then you start asking questions like WHAT IF ARTHUR WAS A DINOSAUR and how can you turn away?Peter/Susan
What have I said about them that I haven't before. They are the inappropriate OTP of my heeeaaarrrrt. I think I've Peter/Susaned myself out, in that although I still ship them, I tend to write around them more now instead of directly addressing the issue. In the rambling meme, I talked about Peter/Susan.
Indonesian shadow puppets
I never got around to writing the drabble about Edmund and the shadow puppets, but it would involve comparisons to Plato's cave, and how the shadows cast on the cave wall are like the puppets' shadows on the screen. The 'real' thing may be the leather puppets and the human voices and hands that animate them, but what the audience is meant to see are their shadows. And the brighter the light, the sharper the shadows, and that's where the story lies. So, uh. I guess that's what it means to Edmund.
Here are a couple of things that have improved my Monday. First, a most gracious lady remixed me and
zempasuchil's Narnia geek-off, Sea Change, for remixredux09. It is so lovely, please read it: into something rich and strange (the tempus aeternum backbeat). Awesome #1: there is more Lucy. Awesome #2: "Edmund has spent hours puzzling over black holes and maths and the curious turn of gravity trying to find a way to say, in the language of these scientific men, what he himself knows with an utter intimacy." <3 "Einstein's Dream" is now on my to-read list. Second, my Merlin/Monty Python fusion, Only a Model, has been nominated for
excalibur_award under Best Crack Fic, Best Humor Fic, and Best Crossover Fic. \o/! Thanks, nominator! If any of ya'll are inclined to agree with this nomination, uh, vote for me? I promise to reform the health care system!
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The French shadow theatre was used for big historical retellings, and I think a certain amount of srs bzns lit and religious stories, but also, obviously, quite a lot of bawdy stuff. The funny thing is the chat noir posters are fairly well-known, I think, but the shadow puppets don't get much attention.
Sure! *makes list of predictions for the other four things*
no subject
2) delicious gourmet things
3) mail detectives!!!
4) the vanishing WIP
5) ars crack
BONUS: the strange spiritual convalescence of OT4, after the fall of Uther
What is this ghost story?
no subject
Hm, two out of four (the food and the crack), though I should have guessed WIPs since I must have put it in your head myself with the reference to doorknob syndrome. Or, wait, is that a specific WIP?
Um, the ghost story is a sort of classic big-event-brings-out-hidden-tensions thing (i.e. lots of work). I'm also not actually sure how much it counts as a ghost story.
Futureish, perhaps a couple of years on; rising hostilities on one of the borders, both Uther and Arthur, plus Merlin, ride out with the army, leaving Morgana-plus-Gwen to mind defences and diplomacy (backwards, in heels) back at the castle. Morgana has possibly quietly got involved with one of the knights, semiseriously, seminot, almost-deniably. I think she's making herself safe, collecting small alliances, now that she's worked out just demanding things from not-daddy won't work. Though she may still not really understand the word 'fallible'.
So -- back to Arthur. The army encamps near the border, in a good strategic spot. Arthur goes off with a small party to scout around, leaving Merlin because this is a mission that requires STEALTH. He gets back very late in the day, perhaps he's been delayed running into enemy men, or hiding back from a largeish force headed towards Camelot's borders -- so he's a bit worried when he does get back. But everything seems fine. Or maybe a little odd. Something off in the way his father talks to him. Something almost nice. Merlin's already asleep, so Arthur can't ask him if anything *cough*unusual*cough* might have happened, and Arthur's pretty exhausted himself -- he's probably just tired, he things. He'll ask Merlin in the morning.
And in the morning, in the very wee sma's, he's woken up by Morgana -- she
droverode all night -- who thinks something awful has happened.Cue angst, woez, stoic Pendragon suffering, REPRESSED MUTUAL ADORATION and a minor power struggle. (Gwen knows she'll be picking up the pieces; the only difficulty is, which pieces to pick?)
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OOOOH. I bet Morgana leads a hilarious seance though! Everyone wanting to ask different things, ranging from "Can you pass on a message to my dead friend," and "Make him promise not to watch me while I'm bathing." And then for the first time in his life (er, 'life'), he starts listening and watching more than he talks and acts. He has no choice in that matter.
Morgana likes to annoy him by ignoring him entirely, much like in life. Merlin/Gwen/Uther thinks he/she can feel Arthur though.
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"Do you think," he says, quietly, sun glowing between the clouds overhead them, "do you think I'll stay here, when you die?"
"I'm not even thirty yet, Arthur. I'm not anywhere near dying yet."
He shrugs, turns a smile -- "You found a grey hair yesterday. And that Purple Knight almost took you, last week." His image sharpens, almost opaque, against the scenery. "With swordsmanship like yours, you may not live to see thirty."
"What, like you?" she says, and he shrugs again.
"At least I'll never go grey."
"Perhaps I could make you. With a spell -- maybe I could alter your image a bit. Make you more interesting. Hey, how d'you feel about going bald?"
"No. It can't happen," says Arthur. "Impossible."
"It might not be."
"Hmph."
"You could be all in my imagination, in which case--" she pauses, because perhaps that's going too far. She says, "Anyway, even if you're real, you might be alterable."
Arthur turns away so that she can't see his mouth, and has to acknowledge, more, that she only 'hears' the words in her head: "Am I just a figment of your mind, d'you think?"
"I'm not that masochistic," Morgana tells him.
no subject
They say the halls of Camelot are haunted by her dead. Arthur meets all of them. The stories his nanny used to tell him when he was a boy, they're all true, if somewhat exaggerated. The werewolf in the tower was actually not, but in fact is the ghost of his great-great-great-great grandfather, who had been exceedingly hairy. An elderly duke who supposedly died fighting avenging the death of his brother in fact choked on a chicken bone.
"Can we walk through walls?" Arthur asks.
Aye, of course they can.
"Can we fly?
Fly? What does he think they are? Harpies?
A ghost is bound to his haunting grounds, so Arthur cannot go beyond Camelot's borders. This doesn't bother Arthur so much. If he had to choose a place to haunt for all eternity, he could choose no better place than Camelot.
"I'd have chosen Gaul," says an ancient assassin who haunts the execution block. "'S nice there, 'specially this time of year."
Morgana talks to Arthur aloud whenever she pleases. Although this puts some of the servants on edge, they wouldn't ever dare to comment on it. Merlin is more cautious. He can sense Arthur in a room, though he can't see him without Morgana's sight. As for Gwen, she writes letters and leaves them where Arthur can see. "Dear Arthur," she begins, and then she writes and she writes and she writes.