throbbing light machine

Hi; here are some vids.

title: hades & persephone
fandom: Labyrinth
music: Anais Mitchell
length: 3:21
summary: Sarah/Jareth mytharc
download: 60.06 mb at sendspace
( streaming behind the cut )

title: Bedtime Stories
fandom: due South
music: Madonna
length: 3:22
summary: Fraser-centric, multipairing-with-RayK-endgame, sex/sexuality is hard when you're a perfectionist control freak from the frozen North.
download: 55.45 mb at sendspace
( streaming behind the cut )

title: 57821
fandom: Battlestar Galactica 1978
music: Janelle Monae
length: 3:17
summary: show overview vid, Apollo-centric
download: 57.63 mb at sendspace
( streaming behind the cut )

title: what's in the brain that ink may character
fandom: multi
music: Hildegard von Bingen and Richard Souther
length: 3:46
summary: imagination visualized
download: 72.49 mb at sendspace
( streaming behind the cut )

Abbey/orangeblossom did an AMA over at her journal about VB/Andy/thanfiction over the weekend. All of her retrospective writing on Bit of Earth is fascinating to me - I was there, but on the outside. I interacted with all these people without knowing what was going down in meatspace. Some of the stuff about LotR being real came through, but it seemed like pastiche play at the time, taking Tolkien's mock-editorial stance very faux-seriously. Spoiler alert, it was not.

Abbey left me some of my first ever fic reviews, back when I was just getting started, and I will always think fondly of her for it. But it's such a strange experience to be poking around in the back of an old fandom and recognize one of Andy's pseuds. I wouldn't engage with his work now, but ngl some of the old VoyagerBabe stuff in Due South gets me there, mashes the buttons nicely. idek.

I don't know why, in due South fic, lakewater is always described as bad-tasting and foul-smelling, dark and nasty. I mean, I know that Chicago's watershed is a little different than my more pristine northern Lake Michigan, and I guess dS is set before the invasion of the zebra mussels that contributed to the lake's clarity.

But still: the smell of lakewater is, for me, one of the sweetest scents in all the world, and the taste is sweet and fresh and delicate. Now, the smell of dried-in lakewater can be quite different. But I never feel more happy, more at ease, than when I catch the smell of the Lake they call Michigan on the wind.

I am trying to get back to being able to do things with words, but right now pretty pictures and music are easier. This vid is one part anti-violence fussing, two parts rampant overidentification with an overserious and solitary protagonist, and one part glee in a source canon that makes Gerard Manley Hopkins poems so delightfully relevant. Also, it's kind of weird that they cast Paul Gross' wife as Fraser's mother. Just sayin.

title: To a young child
fandom: due South
music: Natalie Merchant
length: 3:07
summary: Áh! ás the heart grows older/ It will come to such sights colder/ By and by
download: 51.4 MB at Sendspace, 33.6 MB at Sendspace
( streaming behind the cut )

It's sort of weirdly hilarious that apparently everyone I know in fanspace is having the exact same problem that I am - everyone's in input-only mode, reading instead of writing, feeling quiet and disconnected. And we all seem to keep going around apologizing to each other for it! I'm sure some of it is seasonal - it's a sleepy time of year. And I've been extra sleepy, because I guess they weren't kidding about the drowsiness side-effects of my antidepressant. I'm sleeping like a champion, and also having dreams that I'm consciously aware of, which is weird for me. I've never been a big dreamer; I'm sure I have them, because everyone does, but I've always gone dark in sleep, not dreaming or even moving much. Now I'm having - I guess dreams the way most people do, random and weirdly heavy, and it's weird dealing with. Night before last I fell asleep listening to explicit Fraser/RayK porn and dreamed that I had a dick. It was freaking wild.

I'm really falling hard for due South. But interestingly, I really needed the fandom to mediate it. I think I was initially frustrated with the show's, ah, gentleness - I like shows that play hard, emotionally speaking, that go for the big buttons and mash them hard, and dS does this thing that I find really frustrating where it walks up to the big buttons and just sort of tickles them. But, relaxing into it - oh god is it touching some of my major buttons. I'm kind of vibrating back and forth between dS and Slings and Arrows - and oh god and all his angels, Slings and Arrows. I'm so in love with this show. So, so, so in love. I'd heard of it before, but I had a fanbrain fail and somehow thought that it starred David Tennant, and that was why fandom was into it. And I'm not a Who girl, so I thought it was not for me. But oh it is, it feels like it was made for me. The third season in particular - Charles Kingman is so familiar to me, so like my own wonderful brilliant failing actress grandmother, and it feels really good to watch him with Geoffrey, to see that relationship from the outside as well as experiencing it from the inside.

Anyway, I think the antidepressant is doing me good, even if I feel a little over-tranquilized - it's easier for me to work through sleepiness than it was to work through anxiety. I'm getting going on my dissertation prospectus, which is terrifying but it's so nice to be back to writing, making an argument with words. All quiet on the midwestern front.

... okay I'm charmed. Really charmed.

( reactions & rambling & whatnot )

Making a beeline for cesperanza's work in this fandom now. Best part of picking up classic fandoms = the ability to wallow in years' worth of excellent fanwork yay!