whynot | shake the internet until angels fall out

Things that happen in chat when you're supposed to be sleeping: Castielfest, ya'll! Raise your hand if you'd be interested in a Castiel-centric fic exchange. Gen, slash, het, whatever -- as long as Cas is top-billing. We're thinking sign-ups begin a few days after the S5 finale airs, stay open for a week or so, then participants have a month to write at least 1000 words upon receiving their assignments.

vikki has a poll here to gauge interest, and it would be awesome if you could fill it out and let us know your questions/concerns/disagreements/suggestions.

It's Three Weeks For Dreamwidth time, trying to generate more Dreamwidth activity to celebrate its 1-year anniversary, hence the cross-posting. If you, like me, are still like "Dreamwhat?", it might behoove us to check out

stepps's Lonely Planet guide to Dreamwidth. And, here's something cool that DW-clicking did for me recently:

ephemere's thoughts on Filipino identity and writing about other cultures led me to the post that sparked it ('No Foreigners Allowed' by Charles Tan), which in turn led me to the sidebar of Charles Tan's blog, which is stuffed full of links to Filipino speculative fiction fkdjsfklkjk AWESOME.

This old meme:
1 - Leave a comment, saying you want to be interviewed.
2 - I will respond; I'll ask you five questions.
3 - You'll update your journal with my five questions, and your five answers.
4 - You'll include this explanation.
5 - You'll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.

maboheme asked me five fannish questions

1. To start off, how long have you been in fandom? What drew you to fandom? (If you want to list your past fandoms here that'd be awesome!)

Oh my god, like forever? I remember being in fourth-grade fifth-grade and looking for Jonny Quest fanfic on the internet. I didn't even know it was called fanfic, I just wanted stories expanding upon Jonny and Jessie's troo lurve. I was reading fic long before I was in fandom, and writing Hanson mary sues before I knew what fic was. I was reading Mulder/Scully porn in middle school, and I was there when ffnet still allowed RPF and NC17 stuff. Goddamn.

My major fandoms (i.e. read AND wrote fic in) were - in order - Weezer RPF, X-Men movieverse (mostly the second movie because I <3ed Pyro), LOTRips, Boondock Saints (Connor/Murphy is my One True Brocest), Narnia, and BBC Merlin. Harry Potter is a constant background noise.

2. What brought you to SPN and to the SPN fandom? (You can totes talk about Cas here too <3)

Dean/Cas brought my ass to the yard. They were my preconceived notion. Someone on my flist was like, "Dean gets the angel who rebels against heaven for him and eyefucks him all the time, and Sam gets--" I forget what Sam got, 'cos this was the Dean/Cas straw that broke the SPN camel's back. From what I had heard of Castiel, he seemed like a character that would enable the kind of stories that move me. And yeah, he's a good platform from which to ask What is true exile? What is human frailty? What is the difference between faith and devotion? What is love? ~~BABY DON'T HURT ME NO MORE~~ It's like the religion angst of Narnia plus the destiny angst of Merlin, balled up together and set in a phantasmagorical retelling of the American dream. (Or at least S4 and S5 are, anyway...)

I meandered through S1, got impatient with S2, then made a flocked LJ post from which the following is excerpted: "I'm done watching SPN chronologically basically. I was somewhere in S2, but have jumped to S4 because I kept hearing about how this Castiel fellow makes googly eyes at Dean all the time, being all like, "I'm a rogue angel ON A MISSION!! With a mancrush." Or something? Like Castiel is earnest but has issues, kind of like how Dean has issues but is earnest, and apparently occasionally they do the sex. Sociopathic angel/taciturn demon hunter OTP? I dunno, I heard it from fandom, who heard it from Mildred down the street, who heard it from Ted the postman who heard it from, idk, unicorns who eat rainbows and live in the sky."

So there I was, the apocalypse to the left of me, unraveling faith to the right, and suddenly it was time for Sudden Onset Dean/Castiel Syndrome, and all was lost.

Is it me or is SPN fandom's attitude more srs bsns and thus rifer with haterade than other fandoms? Is it me or is it difficult to do SPN half-assedly because it is just that brain-consuming? Are these two questions related?

3. What's your favorite pairing to write and why.

As much as I love Dean/Castiel and Castiel/Anna (and Castiel/Scully), I'm gonna say Chuck/Becky because they are ridiculously fun to write. Sometimes it's more difficult to write ships that I ~*trooly*~ ship because I have so many ideas about How They Are that it slows me down (see also: Morgana/Gwen), and then I just end up writing subtextual gen. With Chuck/Becky though, I just run with it and let loose the nerd jokes.

As for non-SPN ships, I have a weakness for Susan Pevensie/her brothers, and crossover pairings.

4. Favorite TV show of all time.

Of all tiiiiiime? I don't watch enough TV to have an all-time favorite, but I watch enough of it to have a bunch of stuff I like, so: Bizarre Foods, Futurama, Robot Chicken, Adventures of Pete & Pete, Parks & Recreation, classic Disney cartoons, Iron Chef America (GET IN MY PANTS, CRAZY CHAIRMAN). Alas, I have not watched the original Iron Chef. I hear it is twice as delightful. Maybe I should include Supernatural and Merlin here, but I have a different kind of love for shows I fic for, because I also judge them on the quality of fanon fodder.

5. Favorite piece of fanwork you yourself created and why you love it.

Point A to Point A | Fight Club | pre-narrator/Tyler, Narrator/Marla | NC17 | ~4100 words

I'm tempted to choose something more recent, but it's probably too soon to have real perspective on those. This Fight Club fic, on the other hand, I wrote seven years ago (HOLY FUCKING SHIT HAS IT REALLY BEEN SEVEN YEARS D:) and I still like it. It's not perfect, but it did challenge me as a writer, if by challenge we mean "inspire me to try and rip off Chuck Palahniuk". He writes entirely in punch lines, and I suppose there are worse writers to imitate. Fight Club is one of my all-time favorite movies, and I listened to the soundtrack nonstop in my senior of high school. Perfect for senioritis, y'know. Hey, Edward Norton, remember when you did cool movies?

Also, Marla Singer is totally Bobby Singer's niece.

[originally posted at http://whynot.dreamwidth.org/19904.html |

comments]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

By which I mean, GILLIAN/MISHA HIGH SCHOOL AU PLX

OMG IKR. She lied about her age to audition for Scully!

People only use the bathroom in the old science building in times of dire emergency. They are full of questionable stains and suspicious odors, though this particular afternoon there is one suspicious odor in particular that dominates.

"So," Misha says, eyes rimmed red. He has three sandwich bags in his hand filled with varying amounts of weed. "This one's sixty. KB shit. This one's kinda shwaggy, so like, thirty-five. This one's half stems or something. Thirty."

Gillian says, "I'll give you forty-five for the KB."

"Get real."

"I'm real. You trying to rip me off?"

"Looks like you are."

It occurs to the both of them that maybe they should have completed this transaction before they smoked up.

"Maybe you can take David for a sucker, but not me," says Gillian, and tries to look like an immovable object.

Misha thinks this over, crossing his arms and tapping his chin with his bags of drugs. "Forty-five," he decides, "and you do my calc homework."

"Forty-five and just the derivations."

He stares at her dispassionately.

Gillian says, "Forty-five, the derivations," she reaches into her bag and pulls something out, "and this Twinkie."

"Hmmmm," Misha responds, contemplative.

The transaction takes place quickly, then they skedaddle and not a moment too soon. Heading back to the main hallway, they see Coach Morgan coming from the opposite direction, and they awkwardly converge in the middle, muttering a "hi coach" with eyes averted.

"Lunchtime's almost over," says Coach Morgan. "You better get to class."

"I have history next," Misha supplies, and Gillian grabs his arm and pulls him down the hall.

You really do <3 me. Or the sheer anarchic potential of Gillisha. (I had to make up obnoxious portmanteau!)

IS THIS REPRESENTATIVE OF MURKAN HIGH SCHOOL PRACTICES OR STH. BECAUSE MINE WAS DECIDEDLY MORE REPRESSIVE.

MILLIAN??

I've never gone to an American high school, so this is just what I've inferred from the TV and the anecdotes of friends. But in the AU of this high school AU, Gillian and Misha are expat kids who go to an international school!

In the AU of the AU of that AU, Gillian and Misha are English kids who have been back in England for just a year and who go to live with their Scottish aunt while World War II rages, and they meet two rugged Scottish youngsters Jay and Jenny. They are a little older than the usual crowd in Enid Blyton, but this hardly prevents them all from enjoying their egg and tomato sandwiches and cold lemonade and bathing in the sea and exploring eerie castles and, at some point, having an underage orgy with some sexy Irish pirates who are supposedly ~Nazi spies~ but actually aren't.

...

And then eventually they fall through a magical wardrobe into a magical land, which they have to save from the winter witch. (Jenny hates witches.) The lion god of the land rewards them by making them the sovereign rulers over this dominion, and the sketchy colonialist overtones are glossed over and never mentioned again.

and the sketchy colonialist overtones are glossed over and never mentioned again.

No, these will feature in the later part when, after delusions of grandeur, plans of homicide and global warfare and ~free love~ all fail, they end up in prison and an acclaimed filmmaker named Uriel begins work on his documentary on their group.

They're put in separate cells, and cursed to be voiceless. (Uh, Kurt Fuller carries their voices in a pocketwatch that he carries with him everywhere.) But they improvise a Morse code of sorts, tapping their existence against the cell walls. "I'm still here," and "I am too," tap-tap-tapping with varying degrees of urgency and desperation.

unbeknownst to them, however, the code they devise is the closest approximate to the only language in the six worlds, long thought to be lost, that was used by initiates to summon Lightbryngr, unspeakable demonic emperor and inventor of a dark magic, also thought to be lost, that used music as a highly refined instrument of torture, forth from the depths of his abyssal prison...

THEY ESCAPE. They escape their prison and they're hiding in the woods but they still don't have their voices. And Lightbryngr is walking the earth. Jay sighs, very heavily, in a manner that probably means to express, We are so boned.

Misha finds it hard to sleep that night, the woods too loud after being surrounded by silence for so long. But then Gillian wraps her arm around him and rests her head on his shoulder, and she taps out the familiar pattern on his skin: I'm still here. Cold fingers, and small, and Misha covers them with his hand: Me too, and unable to hide the simplicity of it.

shake the internet until angels fall out

no subject

only because i <3 u

derivations unf unf

Re: derivations unf unf

Re: derivations unf unf

Re: derivations unf unf

Re: derivations unf unf

what

Re: what

GOSH