I was looking at my AO3 page, and … I have a pretty jumbled mix of feelings about what I’ve written, honestly.
I don’t expect many people to care, but going with the top 11:
1. Season of Courtship (Austen): I wrote it at 19 alongside The Rich Are Always Respectable, alternating on a schedule, in fits of depression and mania. A few years later (in a better frame of mind), I revised it—some sections quite substantially. I’m glad people like it but feel kind of weird about it being The One.
2. per ardua ad astra (Star Wars): I wrote this in a haze of Rogue One feelings between early 2017 and mid-2018. I was dealing with some mental health issues, but not 2005 hell, and it helped with them. I feel vaguely bad about the perpetually unfinished half of a chapter on my Drive, but I am fond of the fic generally.
3. But Thou Didst Not Leave His Soul In Hell (Star Wars): I was listening to The Messiah and had the idea of a bunch of short SW fics set to various lyrics; this is one of them. It was a strange but fun project and super soothing after Austen fandom, so it’s nice to see such a short thing up here.
4. we get dark, only to shine (The Borgias): I wrote this during my MA, and the academic and fic research crossed over heavily, which made both easier. I’d finally gotten diagnosed as bipolar and put on mood stabilizers, I was getting A’s in everything, and its fandom was the absolute nicest I’ve ever been in. Best fandom experience bar none.
5. tolerably well acquainted (Austen): I had some P&P feelings and started self-indulgent drawer fic that just kind of grew. Slowly. Very slowly. But eventually it reached the point where I decided to post what I had, and … it’s still ongoing.
6. Contradictions and Varieties (Austen): this comes from my better Austen fandom days. There was a prompt at Firthness and the first half of the fic was my fill for it, and then I tacked on an ending later. I feel like the division is very obvious and it’s pretty uneven, so I’m kind of meh about it.
7. Anomaly (Austen): the ace!Darcy fic, inspired by the ace manifestos community on Dreamwidth. I thought of actually writing a manifesto for him, and then just wrote fic instead. It’s not my best fic, but it is my precious child and every nice comment warms my heart to this day.
8. Ten Facts About Harry Potter (Harry Potter): my take on Slytherin!Harry, something I’ve always deeply loved in concept and very rarely in execution. It’s … eh.
9. First Impressions (Austen): also not my best fic, but I planned it for a year and then wrote it for a big bang, and it largely turned out the way I wanted it to turn out. That doesn’t often happen! And I had friends who were super encouraging the whole time, and was in a good place mentally, and … it was a joy, really.
10. The Talk (Austen): It sure exists. (More seriously, it’s not really “me” and feels very remote.)
11. Redemption (Star Wars): this was my first SW fic ever and I shoved a lot of my ambivalence about ROTJ and the PT into it while trying to stay away from fix-fic implications. It was really fun to write for a new fandom, so I just did whatever popped into my head, and … it doesn’t bother me, since I had such a good time writing it, but in retrospect it’s a strange little thing.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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jubaah replied to this post:jubaah responded to this post:I think it’s partly frustrating because there’s so rarely a counterweight of major characters who, for instance, advocate for the same essential cause (treated as The Right Idea by the narrative!) as the villain but don’t go too far. Maybe it's partly because defining what is and is not “too far” is something a lot of creators are pretty skittish about, but I think if you’re going to bring in these kinds of issues, you … don’t get to be skittish, really.
jubaah responded to this post:venndaai said:heckofabecca responded to this post:Yeah—it’s not necessary to have an overarching plot, strictly speaking, but I think there are places where it would have helped to be building towards something the whole time, even if it wasn’t apparent what that thing was until we got there/in retrospect. I do love Korra’s overall character arc, but it bears a lot of weight as pretty much the only thing holding the series together as a whole.
I do think books 3 and 4 flow together a lot better than 1 and 2 or even 2 and 3 (not to argue that they’re individually better, just that B3 very clearly leads into B4 across multiple levels), but as far as Kuvira specifically goes, I agree. Her descent would be much more powerful if we actually knew her in some capacity, as would her ultimate surrender, but there’s no real connection to her until B4.
But, of course, nothing says she has to marry at a historically typical age. Maybe she was younger than usual! Make her 19, pick the shortest likely duration of marriage, nine years, and then she’d be 28—Darcy’s age. So it is possible, yes.
Tagged: #i do feel like the dynamic with elizabeth makes more sense with a larger age gap than 7-8 years #but it's not beyond the realm of possibility at all! #ngl even with my preferred version #it's weird to think of her as my age
Mrs Bennet:
“The venison was roasted to a turn—and everybody said, they never saw so fat a haunch. The soup was fifty times better than what we had at the Lucas’s last week; and even Mr Darcy acknowledged that the partridges were remarkably well done; and I suppose he has two or three French cooks at least.”
It’s like—he complimented Mrs Bennet! He’s trying!
… but just comes across as a human ice cube anyway. :P
Tagged: #honestly it's one of my fave things about the end of pride and prejudice #or rather the whole second half #there are so many suggestions that they still have the same flaws they always had #it's less about /actually/ overcoming them than putting in the effort to try #elizabeth keeps jumping to wrong (but now well-meaning!) conclusions #darcy works himself up to icy civility #baby steps!
Murranus was boasting of his ancient lineage
Stretching back to Latin kings, when Aeneas
Hit him with a huge stone
Tagged: #rip virgil you deserve it for those three lines alone
heckofabecca responded to this post:tree could probably answer this question better than I can.So, to begin with, it’s less that Darcy did or didn’t intuit that Wickham was dangerous than that, due to upbringing (rather than temperament), Darcy initially didn’t register anything as important unless it touched on his own “family” circle—a circle that is inclusive of his friends and dependents, but not of strangers or simple acquaintances. Once Wickham wasn’t on his radar, eh.
With regard to Jane, we’re told that Darcy wanted Bingley to marry Georgiana, and that this factored into Darcy's involvement in the whole situation, even though he tried to keep it from affecting his judgment of Jane. I think the pretty clear implication is that he failed.
But the thing I find interesting about Darcy is that, despite his pride, and despite his biases, his judgments about people’s underlying characters are right a lot more often than you’d expect. He’s not wrong about Mrs Bennet and the younger girls. He rightly has reservations about Mr Bennet. He, also rightly, considers Mr Collins lucky to have married Charlotte, even though he barely knows either of them. He’s right that Elizabeth and Jane are concerned with propriety and excludes Jane as well as Elizabeth from his condemnation of the family in general.
And I don’t think these judgments are really following from considered observations that have eventually led him to a conclusion (sometimes he thinks so, but IMO he’s already reached his conclusions). They’re fast, influenced by both his general beliefs and by quick, subconscious observations coming together. What gives him the appearance of a more deliberate, straightforward thought process, I think, is his need to account for the new information he keeps accumulating after reaching a judgment. He will adjust his early conclusions to make all the data work, even though changing his mind troubles him.
Basically, he’s someone who has good intuitive judgment of character, but gets so caught up in his own ideas and thoughts that he sometimes misses what’s right in front of his face, though his need to keep integrating all information he receives usually keeps him from going too far astray. As I said, I’m no MBTI expert, but that just doesn’t sound like an ISTJ at all to me. I think Ni+Te makes a lot more sense.
(That said, I do think that a lot of readings of Darcy sound pretty ISTJ-ish, very much including academic ones. I just don’t think the character himself is.)
Tagged: #i saw a gifset the other day with him as istj and i was just like ... lol no #maybe in the movie i guess but canon darcy? no
