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Fanfiction: who you were always meant to be (Death Note)

Back in the Livejournal days, I loved the

1sentence challenge, and I'm thrilled to see the concept has now been brought to Dreamwidth with the launch of

1character! Claim a character; write fifty one-sentence fics about that character; share the result with the world.

To the shock and astonishment of all, I promptly claimed Light Yagami. There's a three-month timeframe in which you can write your sentences; I wrote them in, uh, two days.

My previous attempts at one-sentence fic collections have been fairly disconnected, but there's a little more structure to this one; I've set the sentences largely across the canonical course of Death Note and arranged them in chronological order.

Title: who you were always meant to be
Fandom: Death Note
Rating: 14
Pairing: slight Light/L implications
Wordcount: 2,000 in total
Summary: The rise of Kira and the fall of Light Yagami, in fifty one-sentence fics.
Warnings: It's brief and non-explicit, but this is yet another addition to my embarrassingly large 'Talking About Light Yagami Masturbating' entry collection, and I can only apologise. Relatedly: slight implications of voyeurism.

( who you were always meant to be )

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Dear FIAB Creator

Thank you so much for making something for me! I'm really looking forward to opening my box in a couple of months and seeing what's inside. <3

( Likes and Dislikes )

( Oasis RPF )

( Re-Animator )

( Kyle Murchison Booth stories )

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Like I'm Born To Be.

I loved Kpop Demon Hunters; what a fun film! But I also thought it was a bit of a mess, so I'd like to note down my thoughts about it while they're still fresh in my mind.

( Thoughts on Kpop Demon Hunters. )

Even if I think this film was a bit of a disaster thematically, I had a great time watching it. Sony Pictures Animation has been doing some fantastic work; The Mitchells vs the Machines was also great, and I'm waiting impatiently for the next Spider-Verse film!

Current Mood: apathetic

Thinkin' 'bout storage and Star Trek.

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I'm So Glad I'm On Earth, Where There Are Pianos.

Just realised I've written two different fics within the past two months - Communication (Deltarune) and Common Ground (Star Trek DS9) - that conclude with an arrangement to play the piano between a person and the intangible, inescapable part of themselves they have a complicated relationship with. I know I have a tendency to revisit themes, but this is ridiculous.

Come to think of it, I've also got a couple of earlier fics that conclude with the protagonist deciding to play music, or reaching a point where they're able to play music again. I just like making characters play music when they're in a dark place! It feels like such a hopeful thing to me.

The piano's been on my mind lately; somehow I keep encountering it in fiction! Kris of Deltarune plays the piano. Verso of Clair Obscur plays the piano. I started watching Your Lie in April on a whim, knowing very little about it, and it turns out it's largely about the musical development of a young pianist. When I was writing my DS9 fic, I looked up Joran and went, Oh, he's a musician? Maybe I could use that in this fic. What does he play? Probably some sort of weird future instrument, right? ...no, he's a pianist, of course.

There are other canons I've experienced that involve the piano, of course! (Omori comes to mind. Omori always comes to mind. I cannot escape or forget Omori.) But I feel I've run into a real concentration within the last couple of months.

This is nice because it's got me playing the piano again, after neglecting it for a little while! I'm not a masterful player, largely because I rarely have the patience to learn a new piece - my repertoire mainly consists of songs I've been playing over and over again for a decade or two, with the occasional clumsy and simplified attempt to play by ear - but I do enjoy it. There's something so calming about sitting down and letting instinct and muscle memory carry you through a piece of music.

I wonder how Kris of Deltarune would react if, while controlling them, I played the piano in a way that made it clear to them that I actually know how to play. I wonder if that would change our relationship.

Is this piano rambling going anywhere? No. The rest of this post will be an account of my recent dreams.

( Assorted dreams over the summer. )

Last night, I dreamt I posted a fic to AO3 and tried to title it 'Little Talks' (you've used this title before, Riona!). I did not notice until the next day that I'd accidentally called it 'Coggled Sprogs', which I have at least not used before.

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Movies: Red Sonja and Weapons

Red Sonja (2025). Sword and sorcery fantasy about a young woman who is captured and made a gladiator by the emperor threatening to invade her beloved forest.

This was an absolute joy. I cannot say whether it was good, but I had so much fun, and I'm so glad I got to see it on the big screen on the one (1) day it was in theaters. This movie has all the classic sword and sorcery cheese melted on top of a big ol' overpowered hero(ine)'s journey. Matilda Lutz stars as Sonja, and she is very hot and has great big eyes full of feelings. The other place I know her from is the lead in Coralie Fargeat's movie Revenge, so it kinda seems like she got cast here for her ability to run around being badass in her underwear, but she's great at it, so!

I need to stress that Sonja is hilariously overpowered, and it's fucking delightful. Sometimes you just want a woman beating the shit out of bad guys who are hurting animals. (I love that her first important character note is having a soft heart for the funky CGI fantasy rhinos.)

There are also some other characters! Emperor Dragan has a surprisingly complicated backstory about being a slave child who invents a bunch of new technologies, is probably gay, and is maybe fucking his giant mandrill-guy captain. Annisia is Dragan's star gladiator-turned-concubine except they don't sleep together, and she is haunted to the point of incapacitation by... ghosts? mental illness? who can say. She gets a surprising amount of focus and has a lot of very pointed chemistry with Sonja, and I will say my only disappointment is that the movie didn't really take that to any kind of logical conclusion. And also there's Osin, hot fellow gladiator and Sonja's nominal love interest, who's honestly very charming, not least because he takes no more attention from Sonja than he ought to.

The CGI is dodgy, but the scenery is lovely, and some of the casual worldbuilding is a lot of fun. (What's the deal with the mandrill people, anyway?) There are a lot of horses running everywhere when they should be walking. There's a whole thing where Sonja sings one of the songs of her people, and according to the credits it's a traditional Irish folk song.

There's also a bunch of plot, which you can discover for yourself once the movie's on streaming at the end of the month, which you should absolutely do. Again, I do not promise that this movie is good, but if any of what I've said sounds like fun, run do not walk.

--

Weapons (2025). One night, a bunch of children ran out of their houses and didn't come home again.

This is Zach Cregger's sophomore outing after Barbarian, which came out three years ago and which I liked quite a lot, partly for tackling a lot of chewy thematic material and partly for its absolutely fearless disregard for conventional Hollywood narrative structure. I would not say Barbarian was entirely successful at what it was trying to do or that it even knew precisely what that was, but boy it was trying a lot of things in a lot of directions, and it gave me a lot to think about.

Weapons, by contrast, feels more conventional and generally more successful in its aims, but those aims are so much less interesting to me than Barbarian's. It doesn't appear to have any themes it's trying to tackle at all. It feels like Cregger decided he just wanted to make a fun horror movie about [spoiler]. And I'm not opposed to that! I think overall Weapons is a lot of fun and definitely has its good points. However, I wish it'd shown some more ambition.

I also wish it had any sense of character development in it. The gimmick is that this movie is being told from successive overlapping perspectives of more or less the same time frame. This is absolutely my shit; I love stuff like this. (In this Cregger reminds me a bit of early Christopher Nolan, who also loved weird structural stuff in his movies.) Unfortunately, I didn't feel like these multiple perspectives really built to anything other than eventually revealing the mystery. We get to reevaluate certain characters as we go, but there's only one character who feels like they get any kind of arc to speak of, and we don't get to dig into that character until halfway through the movie. There's no one like Tess from Barbarian who acts as an emotional throughline for the audience.

( spoilers )

Overall: less messy than Barbarian, less ambitious, not quite as pee-your-pants scary (there's nothing on par with the multiple tunnel scenes in Barbarian), but a fun time and still enough creativity and interesting angles on things to keep me looking forward to more movies from Cregger. And from the box office numbers, it looks like we will definitely be getting more from him. Yay.

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Battleship: things I wrote!

I wrote six things in six days for Battleship (and made a tiny art) and promptly burned out, which was okay, because I then left on my trip and didn't get back until after works reveals.

First, I wrote a bunch of Oasis fic!

adastreia kindly threw in some prompts for me so I had at least one person to write for who I knew would like some Gallaghercest, and then a teammate kindly adopted one as well. This was so lovely and much nicer than combing through the Creator's Choice of Fandom requests for someone who looked like they might enjoy an RPF incest ship.

You Know That I Would Give You My Hand, 1.7k, Liam/Noel, fisting PWP. Set ???. One of the things about Battleship is a lot of the details I'd normally worry about, like era, just kind of get glossed over. However, I am incredibly proud of the title (which comes from their deep cut Sad Song).

“Oh fuck,” Liam said. He squirmed, and Noel could feel his every tremble and shiver of breath, because he was up to his wrist in Liam.

one in the oven, 2.1k, Liam/Noel, semi-public omegaverse pregnant sex PWP. Silly and porny and kind of schmoopy.

If anyone had asked Liam beforehand, he’d have guessed Noel would only get more squirrely once Liam had a very public baby on the way that was also very secretly Noel’s. Instead it was like the weird soup of hormones simmering in Liam was so strong that Noel was getting high off the fumes.

maybe tomorrow, 600 words, Liam/Noel. This ficlet is pure vibes, inspired by the "liminal spaces" tag. It might be my favorite thing I made for Battleship. Contains one of my favorite lines I've written this year:

A brother and a tune and a beer, which will never run out so long as he doesn’t drink any more of it.

And some other fandoms!
the land of gold seemed to hold him, Re-Animator, 1.6k, Herbert/Dan, wilderness survival and h/c. Another one that's mostly vibes, but this time the vibes are "the world has ended and all we have is each other." This is fact the THIRD fic of around this length that I have written for this ship on this theme, all with slightly different apocalypses.

A part of Dan wanted to be angry that they’d come up to here to begin with. So the world had ended, more or less; that didn’t mean they needed to run away from what little world there was left. They didn’t need to break camp this morning when the weather looked foul, and they didn’t need to take the shortcut Herbert insisted was indicated on the map, and—

But looking at Herbert’s face, pale and pinched with discomfort, all Dan wanted was to get him somewhere warm. “It can’t be that much farther, right?”

putting the ick in ichor, Buffyverse, 600 words, Buffy/Faith sex pollen. My forever fandom. <3 My most popular fic during the anon period (before I redated all the Oasis fics). I'm very pleased with this title, too.

“Crap. Didn’t Giles say the blood was poisonous?”

“I think the phrase was ‘mildly toxic,’” Faith said. She was still smirking, which meant Buffy… probably wasn’t going to die a miserable painful death? “Pretty sure I’m already feeling it. Aren’t you?”

steak, rare, Stardew Valley, 2k, Abigail gen horror with animal transformation and cannibalism. Out of all the stuff I wrote, this is the one I feel least sure about. I'm not sure it really works tonally, although there are some individual lines I liked, and writing the Abigail-Sam-Sebastian trio was fun.

“It just makes me so angry,” Abigail said. “We were here first, and Dad’s prices are cheaper than Joja Mart’s. He has a booth at all the community events—” Not that Abigail’s mom was always thrilled about that, but the rest of the town seemed to appreciate it. “—and our store even sponsors the egg hunt every year. And we don’t sell Joja Cola, which I’m pretty sure is what turned Shane’s teeth blue last month, so that seems like a point in our favor.”

“Hmm,” said the wizard.

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Fanfiction: Common Ground (Star Trek DS9)

I've watched Star Trek DS9 fairly idly for the most part; I've enjoyed it, but I haven't been passionate about it. I certainly wouldn't consider it one of my fandoms.

And then I hit episode 7.13, 'Field of Fire', the best episode of television ever made. Intense selfcest sexual tension! Between Dax and a past version of herself nobody but she can see! While that past version tries to groom her into becoming a murderer! Absolutely incredible. I had to keep reminding myself that this was mainstream television from the nineties and these two were unlikely to launch into the vicious hatesex they constantly felt on the verge of.

This episode single-handedly smashed straight through my writer's block, and here's the result (although it's regrettably not vicious hatesex).

Title: Common Ground
Fandom: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Rating: 14
Wordcount: 1,100
Summary: After they catch the killer together, Ezri lets Joran linger for a while.

( Common Ground )

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Battleship!!

I signed up for Battleship this year, my second time, knowing that I would leave for vacation nine days in. That seemed fine, since I figured eight days of Battleship would probably be enough for me, and then I burned out in six days. 😅 Still, I received some things and I wrote a bunch of things, and as always the team atmosphere was very fun. I'll put the stuff I wrote in a different post.

Things I received:
no alarms and no surprises by

ElasticElla, Suspiria 2019, Susie/Madame Blanc, 800 words. A trippy little post-canon piece, and the one gift I received for one of my requests.

Dirty Water by

darkrosaleen, Jaws/The Witch crossover, Martin Brody/Thomasin, 900 words. I got offered this in DMs (as someonetimes happens in Battleship), and the combo was so wild I couldn't resist.

Wrist Day by

Nary, Letterkenny, Jonesy/Katy/Reilly, 1.5k. A very silly PWP with the humor and voices of the show, which I adopted when it was offered up on discord (as also sometimes happens in Battleship).

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OASIS CONCERT

On July 26 I saw Liam and Noel and the rest at their second night of five at Wembley Stadium in London, which has a capacity of around 90k and was completely sold out.

( So much more. So much. )

So yeah. Great concert, absolutely mind-blowing tour, my ship has gone from "will they ever speak to each again" to NIGHTLY HUGS AND HANDHOLDING. Everything about this reunion has exceeded my wildest dreams.

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fandom

Fic anniversary

It was on August 11, 1999, that I (terrified, heart pounding, with a newly chosen pseudonym that I wasn't even quite sure I liked) hit Send on the message that put a Sentinel PWP called "Anoint" out on the SXF mailing list.

(This is really not meant to encourage anybody to go read that story, because I put it on AO3 for what felt like historical reasons, but I do not in any way think it's GOOD.)

I'm still happy to be here.[waves at old and new friends]

Current Mood: full

This weekend I've eaten nothing but sweet corn, peaches, raspberries, and nachos w/homemade salsa.

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fandom: mcu

MCU Stuff I Have Seen

Meme yoinked from

muccamukk and

sholio, because I can never resist a list.

( big list )

( musings )

Current Mood: drained

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comics,
year 2025

Mistakes have been made

I waffled for weeks on whether to get the Humble Bundle of James Tynion IV's stuff (as of posting, there's five days of the offer left), before finally getting it and forgetting how weird my brain gets when I binge on creepy media.

BASICALLY, I should not have read The Department of Truth before bedtime. Even when I got Nice House on the Lake, I don't read a whole volume in one go! There's such a thing as pacing things out! Plus I made the other mistake of reading Deviant first without processing the consequences of it only being volume 1, i.e. the story is not done.😢

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more new horror movies

I have been to the theater a bunch since I got back, and am going again tonight to see Weapons, so before I build up even more of a backlog, here are my latest watches.

28 Years Later (2025). 28 years after the original rage virus that turns people into mindless flesh-eating monsters, a twelve year old boy named Spike leaves his safely quarantined island community and ventures to the mainland in hopes of finding medical help for his mother.

I have heard very mixed reviews of this movie, things like "interesting but messy." I honestly find this a little confusing, because on the whole I found this movie beautifully executed (it's Danny Boyle, after), emotionally coherent, very well-acted, and with only as many unlikely bits as one gets in any zombie/post-apocalypse movie. It's very earnest; I saw someone call it "sentimental, in a good way," which feels about right. I liked the island community, I liked the complicated relationship between Spike, his mom, and his dad. The moments the movie wanted me to find beautiful and moving generally worked for me.

I didn't love it the way some of my friends did; I think it just didn't have enough of my own personal id-bait in it. I thought it was a perfectly competent post-apocalyptic coming of age story, though.

The one fly in the ointment is the ending/cliffhanger, which feels like a visit from the schlockiest era of Mad Max. It's easy enough to just ignore that scene, though, at least until the second movie in the trilogy comes out. IMO this movie works fine without it.

Together (2025). Real-life spouses Dave Franco and Alison Brie star as a longtime couple whose stagnated relationship gets more strained when they move to the countryside, and then things get really weird after they go hiking and fall into a weird hole in the ground.

I feel like this movie knows exactly what tone and mixture of horror, humor, metaphor, and relationship drama it wants and mostly succeeds. Unfortunately that tone didn't really work for me, and I found the main couple annoying, especially Franco's character. Meanwhile the movie is NOT interested in the mechanics or backstory of its horror, fair enough, but those are the parts that I would have been most interested in.

The deal with the third significant character is pretty fun, and I appreciate the foreshadowing. I also appreciate that this is yet another horror movie this year with a casual, unmarked queer relationship in it.

Overall, this felt like a perfectly fine movie that was just not for me.

Strange Harvest (2025). A true crime mockumentary about one man's series of ritualistic killings.

If "Lovecraftian serial killer mockumentary" sends tingles down your spine, then this movie is for you. I would not say it does a lot over and above that description, but the slow unspooling of events and the eventual reveals (which mean more to us horror aficionados than to the people being interviewed) are all very solidly written. It also manages to be quite gory, which I feel is impressive given it's literally all shown via photographs and video taken after the fact. There's one particularly grisly kill that is not like anything I've seen before. Plus, you have to be charmed by a movie so indie that the guy playing the serial killer is also the production designer.

Watching this, I wondered why there aren't more horror mockumentaries. They feel like probably just one step up from found footage in terms of budget and complexity (okay, maybe two steps), and they allow for a lot of the same kind of storytelling. I would absolutely watch more of this kind of thing. (Any recommendations? I've seen Lake Mungo, and that's about it.)

Anyway, this movie is a solid example of the kind of thing it is, which happens to be a thing I like. If you watch it, be sure to stick around through the end credits for the little stinger.