marmolita

Ahhhhhhh smutswap assignments are due this weekend which means it's only like another week until reveals! I will be both watching my inbox for any tempting pinch hits and also internally screaming waiting for my gift. I'm so excited about all of my prompts this year and I can't wait to see what someone makes me! Luckily I finished my own assignment weeks ago so it's all good there.

The original project is on hold while my coauthor moves, but I am still super excited about it! In the meantime I've been working on the ardynoct ritual sex soulmate arranged marriage sex pollen fic that I started for ardynoct week last year and never finished. It's at about 6500 words at this point and I'm finally writing the sex scene that was the whole point of it, thanks to the advice and help of my wonderful beta as always. And I'll probably be adding another sex scene to the first portion of it too because there's a great opportunity for "practice sex" which is always a fun trope to write.

Do you ever just look back at your social media posts and emails and such and realize how many exclamation marks you use, because wow, I used a lot of them in those first two paragraphs. Anyway, the only other news I have to report is that I have a serious craving for more ffviii fic but ALAS I think at this point I've read all the good ones.

I didn't check DW for too long and then one of the exchanges I was following went through their whole nominations period without me being aware of it. OOPS, well, guess I'm not signing up for that one because the ships that got nominated are not my cup of tea.

BUT I did sign up for smutswap and am eagerly awaiting my assignment. I'm hoping I match on original fic again this year because despite it really pushing me out of my comfort zone last year, in the end I was really proud of what I came up with. For possibly the first time since I started doing smutswap in 2016 I only have one badwrong request (for Seifer/Ultimecia, unsurprisinly, esp because "accidental incest" is a tag in the tagset and alsjfsdfg). It was hard picking this year because I had a lot of ships I wanted for a few fandoms, and I spent HOURS trying to figure out how to use my ten requests. I also spent forever reading through the original fic ship list and making a twitter thread of my favorites.

Anyway, I'm super excited about smutswap, and ALSO I AM SUPER EXCITED that I am working on an original project with dustofwarfare! And yeah maybe it's kind of inspired by FFVIII but it's not AU fanfic at this point and I'm so asjkhaljghflgkjshf about the idea that I might write a BOOK with someone and we might PUBLISH it! !! !!!

In other non-fic news, Gotham is most of the way through its final season and it's SO GOOD as always. I absolutely loved last week's episode with the fight between Jeremiah and Bruce, and everything with Bruce and Alfred. I will admit I'm tired of Lee and Jim, but I'm definitely enjoying extremely creepy Jeremiah. Kind of regretting not including Bruce/Jeremiah and Bruce/Alfred (don't judge me) in my smutswap signup.

The best thing about checking dreamwidth regularly is finding out about exchanges like waybackexchange via fandomcalendar. It's especially well timed with my recent interest in Final Fantasy VIII, which probably meets the requirements of being an old enough fandom. Still deciding whether or not I want to do it but I'm definitely tempted...

 I feel like it's been forever since I posted here but it's only been like ten days.  Probably because during that time I spent almost all of my free time either reading the FFVIII screenshot LP I mentioned last time or doing the ridiculously self indulgent RP I've got going on with dustofwarfare and freosan.

Now that I've reached the end of ff8, I feel weirdly bereft of the excitement of consuming a new canon.  I think there were a lot of problems with it, especially in terms of pacing and character arcs, but man oh man the plot is one wild ride.  I love everything about the universe -- it's so strange and such a mix of fantasy and scifi (as final fantasy usually is).  There is so much implied badwrong stuff too, like the fact that Squall and Seifer have been child soldiers since age 5 (and Quistis since 10).  The fact that Garden trained them to use GFs knowing full well that it would erase their memories, specifically because if the don't remember anything they won't have human attachments and will be able to kill even their closest friends.  The fact that Ultimecia seduced Seifer into being her Knight with a combination of mind control and his foster mom's body.  (yes I absolutely believe she slept with him in that body for maximal badwrong)

I think what frustrates me the most about it is not what actually happens in it, because I enjoy all of that, but what COULD have happened in it.  How did Seifer go from commanding Galbadia Garden to tattered and broken in Lunatic Pandora?  What does it mean to be a knight and could Seifer have used that role to stop Ultimecia?  How close were they all when they were actually kids?  Were Squall and Seifer really rivals or were they friends?  I mean, out of everyone there, Seifer is the closest thing Squall has to a brother -- they literally grew up together without being separated at all.  Like I know Ellone is his sister figure but he barely knows her, and he's spent his whole life with Seifer.  How does that actually work?  What about Rinoa?  What was her childhood like?  What actually happened between her and Seifer during their summer fling?  How long has she been a sorceress?

In any case I feel like if you don't already know the plot you're not going to fully understand the wildness of this story without this key bit of worldbuilding information: there are monsters that kids on the moon, and sometimes they fall to earth in a giant mass.  There's a space station to keep an eye on the moon.  There's a giant city-sized device/ship/weapon that can artificially cause monsters to fall from the moon.  It's fucking BONKERS.

Anyway I talked about it a bunch on Tumblr and Twitter but yeah, I have some feelings.  (and now I am going to curl up in bed and try not to cough up a lung, being sick sucks)

 Well okay I finished drafting my Yuletide fic, and it meets all the requirements (both in terms of length and meeting the person's request), but it's also the most emotionally absent feelingsless thing ever.  There are words and things happen, but it had zero emotional punch?

Anyway I have no idea how to fix it and like nobody is in this fandom and the only people I know who are are busy this weekend and it's due in two days, sigh.  I don't want to disappoint my recipient and I don't want to publish something I'm not happy with but I'm totally at a loss.

I have like 60 tabs of fanfic open in my mobile browser waiting for me to read them, but instead I'm just poking through my bookmarks and rereading older things.

Probably, I should read some of the new stuff, which is all fic and authors I'm subscribed to on ao3, but man, all I really want right now is dumb fluffy mutual pining brotherhood-era promptis or ignoct.

On that note, I reread this one last night and it was highly entertaining:   let's pretend we're good at this by unwinding_fantasy

How do people even use twitter, I've been trying for a few days and it's unreadable. I can't figure out what sort of order things are in even though I told it I want chronological order, I can't see the delineations between posts, and I can't decide if I'm supposed to retweet stuff or not because I can't see how I can use it for later reference.

What I liked best about tumblr was that my tagging system could be used so that literally years after the fact, I can easily find those terrible photosets I made of teen wolf or the marco polo gifset that was so tempting I walked into a tree while looking at it. I don't see how or if that's possible with twitter. It's definitely doable with dreamwidth, though.

Anyway, I will try to use twitter if that's where everyone goes, but man, idk if I can handle it. It's more overwhelming than tumblr was when I first got it. Anyway I'll try posting here more and try reusing my same tumblr tags I used to use for organization and we'll see?

Hello Dreamwidth! I only have one person reading my journal because it has no content, but I had a topic I wanted to discuss in long-format and tumblr doesn't really work well for that, and it seems like maybe DW is making a comeback because of the LJ TOS? Anyway hi, if you are here, hello.

I was thinking about redemption arcs the other day, and what type I like and what type I don't. The ones I like are the ones where a character through their own actions comes to realize that they are not, in fact, a good person, even though they maybe thought they were. And they decide that they want to be a good person, and are willing to try their best to redeem themselves. Example: Bellamy Blake on The 100 in season 1. He has a great arc of realizing he's actually a terrible person, and deciding to be better. And yes, Clarke clues him in a little bit, but it's not like she changed him -- he did it himself. Or like Natasha Romanoff breaking free of her conditioning and realizing that that's not the person she wants to be, and working to be a different, better person.

The kind that I seriously dislike is the kind where a bad person is somehow magically redeemed because of the fact that a good person loves them. Like, the kind of Star Wars TFA shippy nonsense about "if Rey loved Kylo Ren he'd become good because he's just a misunderstood boy who never got enough love." Fuck that shit. He's an asshole who murdered his dad in cold blood. Loki's not gonna become a good guy if Thor fucks him tenderly enough.

But then there's this weird middle type that I also dislike, where a person who is portrayed not necessarily as a Bad Person but as a Rogue, and then that person falls in love with a Good Person and stops their rogue-ish behavior. This is why I stopped being interested in Hook and Emma on OUAT back howevermany season back I stopped watching it. This is why I'm annoyed at the Lucifer/Chloe storyline on Lucifer. I think the crux of it really is that when a person is being a rogue, they're not actually being a bad person? And usually the "redemption" involves them stopping being promiscuous when they previously were promiscuous? And it all comes out in some kind of weird slut-shaming thing that makes me deeply uncomfortable.

Lucifer stops having sex with other people because he's in love with Chloe. Why? If he's not actually dating her, he has no commitment to monogamy. Why would a person who has thus far had one of his defining character traits being the massive amount of sex he has with extremely happy and willing partners suddenly give that up? The reasoning given amounts to, "because Chloe will never date me if she thinks I'm a slut." And that's such a load of BS, like, she has no claim over you, and why would you want to be with someone who is judging you like that? And if she really wanted to date you, wouldn't she like you the way you are? Otherwise it will never work out. And I'm not saying that in order for Lucifer and Chloe to hook up she has to agree to an open relationship -- once they're actually dating for real, it's reasonable to expect monogamy. I'm objecting to the fact that he acts like because he's in love with her he has to stop having sex with other people, even though they're not dating, and more so, I'm objecting to the fact that that's portrayed in the show as Lucifer becoming a Good Person.

You can be a good person and still have lots of sex with lots of willing partners. Having lots of sex with lots of willing partners does not make you a Bad Person who needs a redemption arc.

Anyway I don't really know what I'm talking about, I am kind of blathering on, but that is why I decided to post on DW instead of tumblr (although I will now go link to this on tumblr, so.).

Vikings, some combination of Ragnar/Athelstan/Lagertha. NC-17. Dirty talk, light D/s, masturbation, shame.

Also at AO3.

Fill for my own prompt from dirty_kinkmeme. Warning for use of the "C" word for female genitals.

( Ragnar catches Athelstan jerking off and watches him while talking dirty about what Athelstan would like to do to Lagertha. )