Anghraine

So, I made a light-hearted addition to my old TOS Kirk vs AOS Kirk theory over on Tumblr, involving a bunch of screencaps—I just used old ones I already had for TOS, but I had to search for AOS Kirk ones since the films made basically no impression on me except in retrospect when I started marathoning TOS, and I only had a couple images saved (one for an ancient Star Wars photoset in which I used Saldaña's Uhura as my f!Lando dreamcast).

And in the course of dredging up the right length of screenshots for my silly Pride post, I encountered some exceptionally dreary takes on the greatness of AOS Kirk totally capturing the classic character (/eyeroll), but also occasionally "we had a question about the films and felt the need to ask William Shatner about it, person notably Not Appearing in These Films." In the course of these, I just ended up laughing because... I mean, what did they expect? Literally the first time I read an interview with him, I had to drastically re-evaluate almost every detail I'd fandom osmosed except "chaos gremlin, for love of the game."

Anyway, the main three Shatner AOS opinions I encountered in my search for screenshots, because as far as I could tell people literally just kept asking:

1) One reporter breathlessly asked him if he didn't think AOS perfectly captured his Kirk back in TOS. He trollishly pretended to contemplate this for a few seconds, then very deliberately enunciated: "Bullshit."

(Genuinely kind of cathartic as a TOS Kirk stan who absolutely despises the constant attempts to cannibalize TOS as a whole for the benefit of the franchise and insist each ensuing set of retcons and dubious-interpretations-asserted-as-obvious-facts aren't fundamentally distinct from the original. Pine does great work with a drastically different character beyond anything about the premise.)

2) Also, he was asked what actor he'd choose to play him if there was going to be a biopic or something (I can only imagine what a Shatner biopic would even look like, honestly—the man has lived a lot of life and the tone would have to be incredibly grim without his own layer of zany over it all or exclude a lot). Anyway, he said "Chris Pine" and presumably didn't break into maniacal cackling by sheer force of will.

3) Another time, he was asked how he thinks Chris Pine should handle the pay dispute preventing the fourth AOS film. His opinion was that Pine shouldn't bend an inch, because he's talented and attractive and so identified with his role that they can't really make those movies without him, but Pine can do plenty of things other than Star Trek. So if Paramount's going to make that much money, Pine should absolutely see his fair share and if not, walk, and good for him.

It's still May 15th here! 10 PM, here we go:

1. Take five books off your bookshelf.
2. Book #1 -- first sentence: "Every female wants to be loved by a male."
3. Book #2 -- last sentence on page fifty: "This says you were born in 1963."
4. Book #3 -- second sentence on page one hundred: "He said, No."
5. Book #4 -- next to the last sentence on page one hundred fifty: "I determined, therefore, to be carefully upon my guard, not to betray the imposition, which could now answer no other purpose, than occasioning an irreparable breach between her and the Captain."
6. Book #5 -- final sentence of the book: "If we meet now and in the future, we writers and readers of SF, to give each other prizes and see each other's faces and renew old feuds and discuss new books and hold our celebration, it will be in entire freedom—because we choose to do so—because, to put it simply, we like each other."
7. Make the five sentences into a paragraph: lol probably should have at least selected only fiction or non-fiction for this. Oh well! Let's see, interpreting "paragraph" loosely, but:

If we meet now and in the future, we writers and readers of SF, to give each other prizes and see each other's faces and renew old feuds and discuss new books and hold our celebration, it will be in entire freedom—because we choose to do so—because, to put it simply, we like each other. I determined, therefore, to be carefully upon my guard, not to betray the imposition, which could now answer no other purpose, than occasioning an irreparable breach between her and the Captain. Every female wants to be loved by a male.

"This says you were born in 1963."

He said, No.

For the record, the books in the original numbering order: Book #1 = The Language of the Night (Ursula K. Le Guin), Book #2 = Evelina (Frances Burney), Book #3 = Black Water Sister (Zen Cho), Book #4 = Essais (Michel de Montaigne), Book #5 = The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (bell hooks).

I don't know how pertinent this one will be to you all, but I found it intriguing, so adding it to the (metaphorical) queue!

Everyone has things they blog about. Everyone has things they don't blog about. Challenge me out of my comfort zone by telling me something I don't blog about, but you'd like to hear about, and I'll write a post about it. Ask for anything: latest movie watched, last book read, political leanings, thoughts on yaoi, favorite type of underwear, graphic techniques, etc. Repost in your own journal so that we can all learn more about each other.

As it's the last day of three weeks for Dreamwidth, I wanted to get in some of the fun "activities" I'd seen and then gotten distracted from. Consider yourself tagged if you see it and also want to do it! If any of the words don't work for you, choose a different word that uses the same letter. That way the meme changes and evolves as it travels around.

The ABCs of me (Anghraine)

A. Age: 40!

B. Bed Size: Queen :)

C. Chore You Really Dislike: Hand-washing the dishes.

D. Dogs: I don't personally have tags, but my family has two elderly dogs, a German shepherd and a lab, Tisha and Beren.

E. Essential Start to Your Day: My tea!! I go full Perfuma without my soothing morning tea ritual.

F. Favorite Color: I vacillate between deep blue and rich red. Both are good!

G. Gold or Silver: I prefer silver jewelry, but gold in many other contexts ... it depends.

H. Height: 5'4", barely.

I. Instruments You Play: piano and flute (the piano much better, though not fantastically, lol).

J. Job: Unemployed currently. Not fired or anything, but my teaching contract was only so long and academia is pretty dire right now, especially when you're tied down locally.

K. Kids: None, thank God.

L. Live: Washington State.

M. Mom’s Name: not saying lol, that's her business.

N. Nicknames: manyyyyy, but my favorite was always Reina.

O. Overnight Hospital Stays: I was hospitalized for a week with an asthma attack that nearly killed me and/or damaged my brain multiple times.

P. Pet Peeve: Oh God, so many. In a fandom context, the Tumblr Bonesfuckers's apologetics/denial around his treatment of Spock and the absolute lack of differentiation between Kirk romances in which he's playing on his in-universe sex appeal in desperation, or falling in love, or being straight-up assaulted (and determined blindness to how markedly different his behavior and feelings are in these) are up there. Also, the Spock gravitational well that prioritizes and props up his feelings as always the most central and angsty in any given situation except when it comes to McCoy's racism. The way that the obsession with denying/minimizing TOS Kirk's comfort with open effeminacy (esp compared to Spock and McCoy) is so very blatantly linked to the obsession with him being fat and depicting him as much less conventionally attractive than he is. Etc. In a non-fandom context, something I find disproportionately frustrating is replies/responses to something I'm saying that basically amount to "why aren't you talking about this fundamentally different other thing" or nitpick some completely minor and trivial aspect without engaging in any way with the main point of what I said (quadruply if the nitpick is wrong).

Q. Quote From A Movie: Father, I won't leave you! always breaks my heart ;_;

R. Right or Left Handed: Right, very.

S. Siblings: None by blood, quite a few foster siblings, though there are only two who have persistently been part of my life. I wouldn't say that I don't think of them as my siblings, but I also do think I'm an only child in some meaningful ways. IDK, it's complicated for all of us.

T. Time You Wake Up: 6:30-8:00 AM, depending. (I don't have to get up that early, I've just evolved into a morning person against my will.)

U. Underwear: Plain and soft.

W. What Makes You Run Late: Navigating public transit because I can't drive. Sometimes this also makes me early, but not usually. Also, sometimes I get distracted and end up having to catch the next bus and blahblah. 

X. X-Rays You’ve Had: Over the last year of respiratory hell, I've had many for my lungs. I don't think I've ever had anything else X-Ray'd, actually.

Y. Yummy Food You Make: I make a streusel coffee cake to die for! I can barely cook otherwise and that is ridiculously complex, but there we are.

Z. Zoo - favorite animal: Cats of all kinds as far as land animals go. Orcas are easily my favorite sea animals, probably because they are also cats, spiritually.

For as much as I'm a very hardcore Kirk/Spock shipper with big gay!Spock feelings, it probably says something about my tastes that the moment that absolutely sealed TOS Kirk as my Star Trek blorbo was not "he seems a generic dude hero but we love him because he adores Spock so much" but this:

KIRK: At least try cutting him off!
UHURA: Sir, if I could cut him off, don't you think I—!
RILEY: ♪ I'll take you home again, Kathleen— ♪
UHURA: Yes, sir, I'll keep trying.
KIRK [penitently]: Sorry.

"The Naked Time" lingers on this for a few seconds more, mid-crisis, to give the distinct impression that receiving immediate public apologies from a man in power is not an everyday experience for Uhura:





I'm actually reminded of the more famous, fantastic scene from "Balance of Terror" in which Kirk gets progressively more menacing as he shuts down Stiles' racism towards Spock, and Nimoy absolutely plays Spock as having to emotionally process that someone leaping to his defense is a thing that could even happen; Nichols and Nimoy play these reactions properly for their very different characters, but I think the emotional beat is similar.

Also, the single most purely heartwarming time anyone is called beautiful is when Kirk is describing Uhura's *checks hand* facility for brazen lying and trickery in "I, Mudd":

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So, one of the major inspirations of a major location in my original novel is the Catacombs of pre-Searing Ascalon in Guild Wars: Prophecies, which seem fairly dreary at first (as might be expected!) only for you to discover beams of light filtering through the more ruinous sections, and then areas that are just really mysterious or cool, and then awesome "secret" areas. I wanted to see if I could capture that first experience of going into the Catacombs because you have to, ho hum, that underground dreary quality -> oh there are actually some cool oddities -> WHOA of playing as a teenager.

Screenshots don't really capture the whole experience (especially of the bridge; from a better angle you can see that the bones beneath the latticework are gigantic curved ribs, probably of a dragon or something comparable that goes completely unexplained). Still:

Incidentally, my best friend J happened across a copy of the famous novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and gave it to me for Christmas last year. We have been doing dramatic readings of the chapters to each other, complete with air quotes and loudly emphasizing the many, many, many unnecessarily quoted or italicized words/phrases/paragraphs. Although it was fun in its own unhinged way, it was also kind of shocking to realize just how terrible Roddenberry's... like, everything was without being able to lean on good writing/editorial staff like Sturgeon and Fontana, figures like Gene L. Coon to temper his worst impulses, the visual brilliance of people like Jerry Finnerman and William Ware Theiss, and the warmth and charisma brought to even much of the weaker writing by superb theatrical actors like Nichols, Shatner, and Nimoy. For all the novelization's extreme sleaziness, it is one of the coldest and most inhuman-feeling published novels I've ever encountered.

The attempts to salvage the footnote are largely nonsense, IMO—like, yes, it does accidentally imply that Kirk is just a bisexual who rather prefers women rather than a totally super manly straight guy, and his description of Spock and their super special eternal psychic bond does sound incredibly gay, but this is clearly because Roddenberry was constitutionally incapable of writing about any relationships in a non-horny way and loathed women. He was definitely going for desperately recuperating Kirk as the hypermasculine hyper-heterosexual seasoned middle-aged commanding captain figure with a weakness for women but also distaste for them that he'd always envisioned for his ideal of "the captain" (it's all over his writing of April and then Pike), and his resentment of what TOS Kirk actually became in the show is extremely visible (his Kirk dismisses TOS Kirk as a twee fictionalized version he actually hates and TOS in general as terrible and fake, unlike the real story in the novelization, etc). Like, it's 100% an attempt at no-homo and gender essentialism, he's just very bad at no-homo and also at writing people.

But the thing is, the footnote (and the other material straining to find a heterosexual explanation for TOS) may be - and is - homophobic, but this is actually the least of the novelization's problems. It is even more misogynistic, racist, incredibly petty, and so incredibly awkward that I was starting to think "justice for the OG Mary Sue writers, they were far better than this and honestly seem to have understood Star Trek itself rather better," given the weird 70s dystopia aspects he's got going.

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I posted this on AO3 a little while ago, actually, but wanted it here, too!

Despite having increasingly felt "oh, so everything I've heard about how TOS Kirk/Spock was overblown by fandom was just brazen lies, though otherwise I think I might disagree with about 90% of the fandom at all times" as the show went on—and shipping them like crazy—one of the TOS relationships that I found most endearing (and also surprisingly persistent) was actually a platonic friendship. So, in a shocking twist here at Anghraine dot Dreamwidth dot org (>_>), my first posted TOS fic ended up being a ... gen brotp AU one-shot. I've written more of it, but I posted it as a one-shot because the rest would entail a much longer fic that needs to bake in the drawer for a lot more time.

title: the only ones who can do it
characters: Spock, Nyota Uhura, James Kirk; Dr. Piper
length: one-shot, 2k
stuff that happens: Uhura is the captain of the TOS five-year mission, but not because Spock and Kirk aren't there.
notes*: all of my TOS fic is only for TOS; part of why the show clicked so hard for me was that it felt fundamentally different from other ST I'd seen (the original movies, TNG, AOS etc) to the point that I couldn't reconcile them in my head, even when I like them.


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Challenge #2: Pets of Fandom— Loosely defined! Post about your pets, pets from your canon, anything you want!

I would have gone for a pet in a canon, but I recently visited my parents and was enthusiastically greeted by the beloved family dogs. Tisha in particular, the older dog, is now ~13 years old and one of her eyes has gone from kind of hazy to entirely clouded over, but she has medication that makes her life comfortable and seemed very happy to snuffle at my hands and get her paw petted (imperiously holding forth her left paw to be stroked has been her weird princess behavior from puppyhood) and receive scritches and chatter at me in her crotchety old German Shepherd talk.

This was Tisha as a puppy in January of 2013:



This was Tisha taking the then-new kitten under her wing (almost literally) back in December of 2019, about six years ago:



This is Tisha as of just a few months ago, with the same feline protégée/partner in crime (they're definitely the Machiavellian geniuses of the two dogs and two cats of the family):

I've been happily chewing on TOS for the last, uh, several months over on Tumblr (still laughing at myself that all I needed to finally get fannishly obsessed with ST was watch the first season ever; even the first few episodes aired at all were really enough to ensnare me, though it was actually the distinctly flawed S3 that made me completely obsessed, while J and I are currently at S6 of TNG in our ST marathon of ultimate destiny, and it's been a ... messier experience, let's say #justicefordeannatroi). But I've wanted to post more over here and I was lured by a meme from shadaras (and now, several others on my f-list!).

Rules: How many letters of the alphabet have you used for starting a fic title? Use one fic per line. ‘A’ and 'The’ do not count for 'A' and 'T.' Post your score out of 26 at the end, along with your total fic count!

My rough rules for myself: fics posted (even as WIPs) got precedence over fics that I've titled but have only posted in scraps or not at all, and fics that represent some particular significance for me took precedence over those that might be better or more complete but not as prominent in my own mind (if none fit that, I generally favored complete over WIPs).

A - Anomaly

• Austen: canon-compliant Darcy/Elizabeth fic about Darcy being demi/grey-ace (complete).

B - Beneath a Pale Moonlight

• Legend of Korra: AU in which the old theory that Amon/Noatak and Tarrlok were actually working together in S1 is (or rather, will be) true, but their pre-Amon backstory is the same; the fic is a one-shot about how that alliance could have been struck pre-S1 (complete).

C - climb a mountain and turn around

• The Borgias: Modern USA AU in which they're not a crime family, just cutthroats in the publishing industry; the broader AU is abandoned, but I did finish the one-shot dealing with the fracturing relationship between wannabe novelist failson Juan Borgia and his overachieving twin sister Lucrezia (complete; there are some hints at the canon Cesare/Lucrezia incest, but it's mostly focused on Juan and Lucrezia).

D - Distaff Lines

• Star Wars: fic about relationships among the Skywalker women, though it only got to Shmi Skywalker and Beru Whitesun (WIP).

E - The Edge of Darkness

• Legend of Korra: AU ft. f!Tarrlok, but centered on Noatak/Amon and his relationship with his sister (the specific fic linked, dealing with their dynamic until Noatak's escape, is complete, but the series it belongs to is a WIP).

F - First Impressions

• Austen: m!Elizabeth/f!Darcy re-telling of P&P (complete).

G - the gift of men

• Tolkien (book only): Eldarion/OFC one-shot and canon-compliant sequel to LOTR, focused on the young Eldarion and his politically-motivated, but affectionate-turned-loving marriage to Faramir and Éowyn's younger daughter, who dies of old age long before he becomes king (complete; features an assortment of Fourth Age headcanons).

H - her earnest desire of being loved

• Austen: brief, canon-compliant one-shot/P&P sequel about the first baby steps in the relationship between Elizabeth and Georgiana as sisters-in-law (complete).

I - in tongues and quiet sighs

• Star Wars: Rogue One AU in which Jyn and Cassian live and are together, but centered on the relationship between Leia and Cassian and the undercurrents involving their more or less shared language; it was an attempt to take the "Space Spanish" trope that at the time was applied without differentiation to almost any character played by/adjacent to a Latine actor, and make it fraught and messy rather than blandly eroticized and often rather racist (complete, one-shot within a wider WIP universe).

J - The Jedi and the Sith Lord

• Star Wars: the third of the main Lucy Skywalker fics (my long f!Luke AU), but the first to explore drastic long-term consequences; I felt it was pretty evident that Darth Vader's daughter would be a considerably harder sell than a son, given ... uh, everything about the OT Empire, so the immediate test from ESB is less urgent for Vader than capturing and turning her to the Dark Side before Palpatine writes her off altogether, and this is the fic about Lucy's captivity as experienced both by Lucy and Anakin, and the effects on both and their relationship (the fic is complete, the series is not).

K - kiss away everything I'd planned

• Legend of Korra: an Amorra (Amon/Korra) side-story in an AU in which Korra is the Avatar in the iceberg, but she's broken out by siblings Tarrlok and Noatak decades "late" (compared to Aang). Azula is Fire Lord at this point in addition to many other changes, but this one is just a small side-story about Korra and Noatak's romance after all three flee Yakone into the blizzard (this one-shot is complete, the larger fic very much is not).

L - Love, Pride & Delicacy

• Austen: a P&P femslash Darcy/Elizabeth AU that is not the direct re-telling of P&P that First Impressions was going for, but considering what I think are likely consequences of the change in their actual social context, with the RL homophobia and gender roles etc etc (it also includes racebending, insofar as it doesn't assume the Fitzwilliams must be 100% white). Catherine Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet have barely met in person, though Elizabeth has already gotten an earful from Wickham, but it follows the initial changes following from Darcy's absence in Hertfordshire as well as their romance (WIP I'll actually continue).

M - Man of Sorrows

• Star Wars: AU of Revenge of the Sith in which Anakin dies in the Battle of Coruscant, but persists as a Force-ghost still very much prone to attachment (as complete as it will ever be, if fairly ephemeral).
  

N - The Natural Daughter of Somebody

• Austen: technically canon-compliant prequel in which the common fanon that Darcy's father had an illegitimate child near in age to him is true, but the child is not Wickham; it's Mrs Gardiner, here an oblivious young girl visiting Pemberley (as she mentioned in P&P that she had previously) and having a chance encounter she doesn't fully understand with Mr Darcy's glamorous half-sister, who is fully aware of the connection (complete).

O - One More Tomorrow

• Legend of Korra: the sequel to The Edge of Darkness, the f!Tarrlok & Noatak sibling drama fic above. Like the first, it focuses heavily on Noatak, now shifting into the Amon identity and projecting his sibling baggage onto his non-bending "brothers and sisters" he recruits as followers, only to be confronted with the reality of his actual sister he abandoned to their abusive father's mercies years earlier when she arrives in Republic City as the new, ambitious councilwoman representing the Northern Water Tribe (WIP that I'll definitely return to, halted after Amon captures Taraka and strips her bending).
  

P - per ardua ad astra

• Star Wars: a Rogue One Jyn/Cassian AU in which Jyn, Cassian, and Bodhi escape Scarif (+ Jyn seizing Kaytoo's head) in their Imperial shuttle, with Cassian still very severely injured, only for the shuttle to get caught in the Death Star's tractor beam. Jyn exploits the Imperial paraphernalia and an established false identity of Cassian's as an Imperial captain, as well as his very real injuries, to pass herself off as an Imperial aide-de-camp desperately trying to escape the Rebel attack with the only people she managed to save. She's resourceful enough to squeak them past security in that guise, and Bodhi enough to disappear into the influx of stormtroopers brought onboard, while Cassian recovers enough to step into his own role, forcing all three to scrape by undercover on the Death Star and infiltrate actual Imperial social groups as the ANH plot plays out, including the destruction of Alderaan (WIP, though a long one with some major points of tension resolved; they've just reached Yavin 4).
  

Q - The Quality of Mercy

• Star Wars: an old ROTJ sequel that aggressively rejects everything outside the PT and OT, particularly what I've always found the strange, underbaked treatment of Force Ghost!Anakin and Luke as an embodiment of PT Jedi dogmatism, but ended up having some odd similarities to the sequels—it ostensibly centers on Han and Leia's younger daughter, Padmé Organa, a steady young Jedi on good terms with her entire family, but the real ghost haunting the story is her difficult, brilliant, restless older sister Lyra, who has become increasingly more of a merciless, self-righteous zealot as a Jedi while also increasingly fixated on her Skywalker ancestry, alarming not only Padmé, her parents, and Luke, but also Anakin himself (complete in itself, though the larger universe it's part of never got anywhere near as filled out as I'd envisioned: news at eleven).

R - Revenge of the Jedi

• Star Wars: also very old, an AU of Return of the Jedi inspired by some discarded earlier concepts like Luke's twin being a new character, a more gradual redemption for Anakin entangled with his evolving relationship with Luke, and Leia gathering and taking up leadership of the remaining Alderaanians, but also weaving in material from the PT even though it's of course drastically AU: Padmé still exists as Leia's mother, for instance, and her death was still pivotal for Anakin, but they were platonic best friends and she was reciprocally in love with Bail Organa (complete in an unresolved sense: I had planned a sequel that I never wrote and had some side fics I never finished, and a lot of the ideas for it actually got funneled into the Lucyverse later, but Revenge itself was meant to work on its own even if it doesn't wrap up the OT plot).

S - Since We Were Children

• Matchmaker: a canon-compliant one-shot about the initial friendship between Francesca Haughston (then Lady Francesca Fitzalan), her brother Dominic, and their much more prestigious and wealthy neighbor, Sinclair Lilles, the future Duke of Rochford (the friendship is a canon detail from Candace Camp's Matchmaker series of Regency romances). I believe this may be the only fic I've written where mine remains the sole fic for the fandom; the quartet has four romances, but the real attraction is the one that develops along its strange, winding route through the whole series and its backstory, the love story of Francesca and Rochford. We meet them as two hypercompetent 30-somethings: childhood friends turned youthful sweethearts turned estranged former betrotheds turned friends still transparently deeply in love as beautiful fashionista widow Francesca Haughston, who conceals her ongoing financial straits via "gifts" she receives from the grateful parents of youths she expertly shepherds and matchmakes for (she's the matchmaker of the title), and Sinclair now the discreet, virtuous, scholarly, and immeasurably reliable Duke of Rochford. Camp, unfortunately, rarely trusts in the strength of her own characters to carry the interest of the story rather than melodrama, which unfortunately infects the quartet finale centered on them, but there's still a deeply compelling quality about their dynamic that got me interested in imagining how it all began (complete).

T - To Live Forever

• Eddings: a 2.7k canon-compliant one-shot sequel to the Belgariad/Malloreon (and my sole Yuletide fic) that's essentially a guided tour through the post-Malloreon world as seen by a later Angarak scholar traveling through Maragor etc, as she looks for proof of the historicity of canon figures like Garion, Polgara, Belgarath and so on, while it becomes increasingly clear that she has a deeper agenda for seeking them out (complete).

U - until the last chance is spent

• Star Wars: this is another Lucyverse fic, a one-shot set early in The Imperial Menace (after the destruction of the Death Star), but really all about Rogue One and how their sacrifices fit into the psychological space of this AU and into the relationship between Lucy and Leia in particular. I actually waited to see Rogue One before I decided if I was going to try and accommodate it in the Lucyverse, but it was such an ideal OT prequel for me that I promptly decided HELL YEAH and vented my RO feelings here (complete).

V - the voices of the sea

• Tolkien: this is a 1.8k one-shot from one of my (multiple >_>) f!Faramir AUs, the one in which the Númenórean throwbacks of LOTR are all genderbent. In this one, Míriel (Faramir) discovers Boromir's death as a follow-up to an earlier one-shot centered on Aranor's (Aragorn's) grief after finding him dying. Míriel is, of course, no warrior and wouldn't be camped at night on the Anduin or any other body of water, but I still wanted to figure out a way for the mystical vision to occur and make sense as something carried via water, so instead had the idea of her vision of Númenor's destruction ft. Tar-Míriel being the appropriately watery conduit for the vision of Boromir's death (complete).

W - whatever we deny or embrace

• Star Wars: unusually, this is a Tumblr link, because I have yet to figure out how to shift the older version to the revised version on AO3, but in any case, it goes to the last section of my Jyn/Cassian femslash AU (with links to the previous ones), ft. some Baze/Chirrut and Luke/Bodhi (the premise is that the entirety of the Rogue One main cast is queer in some way, ranging from lesbian Cassia to grey-ace gay Bodhi). Unusually for a multi-chapter loving genderbent fic of mine, it's complete!

X - x machina*

• Star Trek: this requires more explanation (issuefic of ultimate destiny!), but the asterisk is there because it's not actually posted and I've only written the earliest section (though outlined a lot), so it's very much "in the works" and I wasn't sure it quite counted for the spirit of the meme. But: it was basically inspired by how deeply annoying I find the "how could you possibly think TOS Kirk is anything but (binary) transmasc lol top surgery" Tumblr/AO3 thing, when I think binary trans man is easily the least probable trans reading of a character who we're told was, at age 13, one of nine boys/men to survive and witness a genocide; who argues onscreen that gender difference isn't actually real, but who actively leans into pretty explicitly feminine roles and makes them work where he's viscerally repulsed by comparable masculine ones (e.g., his revulsion from the role of strong masculine ideal father-figure in "Charlie X" vs manufacturing motherhood in "The Changeling," Helen's coolly unsentimental sexy dude Lothario fantasy of him in "Dagger of the Mind" as a violation of the real Kirk vs his actively sultry, calculated Lauren Bacall-type femme fatale flirtations to escape trouble in too many episodes to count); and who literally ends up in a woman's body (played by a very good actress—the only actor to really capture Shatner's Kirk), proceeding to argue while in that body and deliberately dressed and made up in femme-androgynous style (for 1969) that everything that defines him as a unique individual can be contained in that body. Despite all this and copious evidence that the 23rd-century Federation hasn't progressed as far with bigotry around gender and sexuality as the show tries to suggest it has with other bigotries, transfem Kirk is vanishingly rare in the fandom and nb!Kirk of any kind is barely more common, even via the obviously available sci-fi tropes/mechanisms. But binary defined-exclusively-by-masculinity Kirk is everywhereeeee (including among the crowd who describe anything Kirk does around gender as "butch" including declaring himself a mom but seem like they'd crumble into dust before suggesting he could be transfem for real). ANYWAY, I decided to be the change I want to see rather than just complaining, and write the "Turnabout Intruder" AU of my dreams in which Kirk and Spock (who is very much the "I am not a man" Spock) do succeed in running away hand-in-hand, Kirk is navigating being stuck in the body of his abusive ex yet also mysteriously more comfortable with it in some ways (helped by promptly dying his hair, wearing contacts, and changing his make-up to cover their trail), the Kirk-Uhura brotp is front and center, and realizing Janice-as-Kirk may well have poisoned the well at Starfleet, Spock instead manages to surreptitiously reach out to the VSA about the bodyswap machine and get Kirk sanctuary on Vulcan in the interim (the AU assumes no convenient time-out on the effect with Kirk and Janice light-years apart; instead they just get some minor though intriguing-to-the-VSA effects on their DNA). The title, of course, is a reference to the deus ex machina trope, but also to the literal bodyswap machine that serves as a deus ex machina for both Kirk's and Janice's gender treks in their different ways despite all the fuckery involved (let's just say that Janice isn't waxing their chest any time soon while Kirk is basically "I'm whatever gender gets me the Enterprise back and couldn't care less what pronouns make it happen").

Y - Yours, Et Cetera

• Austen: this is an epistolary side-fic to First Impressions, my m!Elizabeth/f!Darcy retelling of P&P listed above, because my earliest phase of structuring First Impressions involved just writing the letters for that universe and I'd had an idea of actually finishing all the letters happening in the background as a separate fic (though entirely consistent with it). I never actually finished them, though I had fun enough with what's there, so it's a forever unfinished hiatus piece at 3k.

Z - zone of omission*

• BG3: this is the f/f/f/ fic I nicknamed "the worst OT3": cleric of Mystra!Tav/f!Gale/Mystra, inspired about equally by a wise post from my friend venndaai about how every BG3 companion would be a bit better if genderbent (goth priest m!Shadowheart, dashing Blade of Frontiers f!Wyll, etc) that hit especially hard for Gale (middle-aged ambitious lady wizard nerd with the allure and talent to attract Mystra herself and all the f/f drama there, a compelling mix of real kindness and little moral fiber, and a need to chew down magic boots to keep the world from exploding? <3) + the intrinsic hilarity of cleric of Mystra/Gale + the wildly suggestive way a cleric of Mystra can talk about Mystra herself in emphatic agreement with early Gale. The title is a pun on the cleric spell "zone of truth" because all three people involved (Larissa, Gaila, Mystra) have a strong habit of lies of omission that aren't exaaaactly false, but. This is one I've talked about and posted a few scraps for, but it's still far too primordial for AO3 or anything like that, so I wasn't sure about "counting" it.

And that's every letter, for 24/26 or 26/26, depending on how you count them :D BEHOLD MY STUFF

We won't talk about how long this meme has been in my drafts, lol, so I think most people I'd ordinarily tag have already done it. If you've gotten far enough to see this and haven't done it, though, consider yourself tagged!