netgirl_y2k

I managed to peel myself away from the fall of the British government in real time (good fucking grief) long enough to watch the season finale of Game of Thrones.

I have really, really enjoyed the sixth season, especially after finding season five excessively weak. And I do think that one of the biggest problems with it, and to a lesser extent season four, was that they were pootling around in gentle circles hoping that Martin would publish another book. And that once they gave up on that, it was full steam ahead.

( Game of Thrones S6 )

The mildly depressing thing is that as soon as the show overtook the book I felt my interest in eventually reading The Winds of Winter diminishing. Cynically though, I'm pretty sure that any lingering interest GRRM may have had in finishing the series pretty much vanished as soon as the show overtook him.

More cheerfully, I am excited that got_exchange is back up and running just when I'm getting excited about the fandom again.

-Agent Carter has been officially cancelled. And, well, season two was ten episodes of television that I... watched. There were good things about it; the Peggy and Dottie team up was excellent, and Whitney Frost was a good villain. But mostly it was hamstrung by a change of setting that never quite came off, and bogged down in unnecessary love triangles.

I don't know, maybe a lot of viewers main interest in Peggy always was 'who will Mr Agent Carter be?' and not 'so how did the founding of SHIELD go down?' or 'I would like to see Director Carter in action, please.' I liked Daniel fine as Peggy endgame love interest, and had since mid season one, but Peggy's love life was never what I was interested in.

It's a pity, I suppose, given how crazy I was about the first season, that my reaction to the cancellation wasn't 'it's a shame we won't be getting a season three' but instead 'I'm not sure we should ever have gotten a season two.'

At least, between this and being so very underwhelmed by Civil War I am now free of whatever tenuous interest I had in the non-Netflix MCU. My interest in the Netflix shows is being upheld by the prospect of Luke Cage and a second series of Jessica Jones; and maybe The Defenders, depending on how annoyed I am by Matt by then.

-Speaking of things I am probably free of, I kept up with The 100 until the S3 finale and I think I'm done now. ( The 100 3x16 )

Anyway, the back half of the season was pretty incoherent even from a show not noted for its narrative coherence. So, yeah, that was a weird, whiplash-y fandom fling.

-I was a wee bit nervous for the sixth season of Game of Thrones, as the show was finally going to overtake the books, but I've really enjoyed the first half of the season; I will forgive a lot for a bit of narrative momentum.

( GoT 6x01-6x04 )

-The final season of Person of Interest is finally airing, although I don't understand the schedule. First a hiatus that lasts forever and a day, and then burning through the episodes in some sort of incoherent, impossible to keep up with way. I have mixed feelings about the new canon; on the one hand, yay, new episodes; on the other, I am so not ready for this show to be over, and I kind of wish I was getting more time to process the new episodes. Particularly the Shaw episode, which blew. my. fucking. mind.

( PoI 5X04 )

-Tumblr always makes me feel like an old fandom lady, never more so than when it took my dash about forty-eight hours to go from doing cartwheels about Agent Carter's renewal, to panicking about the change of setting for S2 and the possibility of Haley Atwell being the only returning cast member. I don't know-- well, nobody knows. It could be brilliant, if they're doing a time skip then we're into early fifties Hollywood which is pretty cool. It could well be that I was right the first time, in my failure to have much time for the MCU, and Agent Carter S1 was just a brief, glorious aberration. Either way, I don't have it in me to worry.

Plus, I came to Agent Carter via Merlin (which crashed and burned into a toxic mess of misogyny, bitterness, and resentment), Doctor Who (which at the very least teaches us not to fear change), and the endless, endless bloody sniping in ASOIAF/Game of that's your adaption choice? So I think I have earned my slightly condescending Oh, you sweet summer children moment.

-Speaking of Game of Thrones, my overwhelming reaction to S5 continues to be: I understand why you made these adaptation choices, I don't necessarily agree with you with you about all of them, and I think in a few cases your execution leaves a lot to be desired. But my ambivalence is mostly drowned out by my gratitude that you're moving the story along before I was forced to perform a one woman reenactment of the Get On With It! crowd scene from Holy Grail.

And from episode five we learned ( Kill The Boy )

- I have signed up for remix, and I think other people should too. There's no qualifying fandoms this year, which I like, because I always thought they skewed towards old, slashy fandoms and locked people into offering fandoms they were otherwise pretty much done with. But I'll be interested to see how matching shakes out, and if it actually changes what people are writing that much.

See, this is what happens when you grow old in fandom, you start noticing changes in fandom trends, which is a highly specific and difficult to explain hobby.

sageofthesky asked me to talk about Dorne.

First, a fact that might get me run out of ASOIAF fandom on a rail, the first time I read the books I didn't care for Oberyn Martell as a character. I wasn't actually interested in Dorne at all, really. But I think a lot of that was that by AFFC... you know how at this time of year if you're going to a lot of parties, and drinks, and Christmas whatevers, there comes a point where you're going: No, George, I can't possibly meet any more new people... Well, it was like that.

But then I wasn't interested in Sansa either during my first read of the books. Clearly I didn't know my own mind.

Oberyn I didn't really connect with until season four of the show, and the casting of Pedro Pascal, which was basically the only thing the show did right this year, and they're lucky that they got it so, so right. It's actually bought them more good will from me than they frankly deserve at this point. This is why I'm not too perturbed by the spoilers that Jaime's heading for Dorne in S5; Oberyn made you want to see more Martells, to visit Dorne. Was there anything about the show's take on the Tullys and Riverrun that made anyone want a season of Jaime wandering around the Riverlands?

This actually brings us neatly to the elephant in the room when it comes to S5, which is the show's writing out of Arianne. I'm... miffed, but perhaps not as miffed as you might expect me to be. I think because I'm not at all surprised; I remember thinking, ages ago, before we even knew that Dorne was going to appear in S5, certainly before any casting announcements happened, I thought, I bet the show will leave out Arianne and make Trystane the heir to Dorne.

Actually, the thing that annoyed me more than the omission of Arianne - and on some level I've accepted that Arianne was the sacrifice I had to make in exchange for never having to see a Greyjoy nuncle on my screen - was a tiny little thing. There's a scene in Tyrion's cell when Oberyn says that his father took him and Elia to visit Casterly Rock. It was his mother! His mother who was the ruling princess of Dorne! And why change that? It's such a tiny little thing; it'll mean nothing to non-book readers, and a lot to me some people. I mean, if you're writing out Arianne anyway the fact that Dorne has equal primogeniture isn't really going to be a plot point, but why not just let it exist quietly in the background?

Actually, when I want to annoy myself, I indulge my suspicion that one of the reasons Arianne was written out (another, I think, and a not totally invalid one, was to make the Trystane/Myrcella romance more prominent) was that with the Sand Snakes there too, they didn't want that storyline to be too female heavy.

I will concede that Arianne is not immediately the easiest character to like or sympathise with, but then look at the wonders the show has worked with Cersei Lannister and thwarted avenues of female power.

I'll also say that I adore that huge swathes of tumblr have mentally fancast Ayisha Hart as Arianne and just carried on like the show isn't ass-backwards stupid. I also adore that literally the only time I see Atlantis on my dash is when people have chopped up footage of Ariadne scenes to recreate the Arianne ones. I was especially impressed with this one.

Back to the books, obviously I love that Dorne practices equal preference primogeniture. For all the canonical parallels between the North and Dorne I wish this was another one. I want Sansa Stark, reluctant and kind of rubbish heiress to Winterfell. I mean, I like the Queen in the North stuff as never gonna happen wish fulfillment, though I can see her as regent/castellan for one of her younger siblings; but I think Sansa has to go south to realise how much she wants the North.

I love how many great female characters Dorne gives us. The Dornish/Rhoynar stuff was worth the price of AWOIAF to me; I was a little surprised that Nymeria of the Rhoynar wasn't the warrior queen a lot of fandom had cast her as, but ultimately I really liked what we saw of her; I could completely see how she'd be Arianne's hero. As an aside, I love that Arya names her direwolf Nymeria; I love that Arya knows about Princess Nymeria, and Visenya Targaryen, and Wenda the White Faun. I think the fact that Arya, and Brienne and Asha too, essentially like and respect other women is one of those awesome little details that sometimes gets lost in translation.

I love Meria Martell, a fat old woman, whose response to people trying to conquer her country with dragonfire was basically, no, you fuck off. I love that, ultimately, she won. I like to think of her as the logical predecessor to Genna Lannister and Olenna Tyrell.

I want all the fics about Elia Martell that make her the protagonist of her own life. The ones where she survives on a wave of righteous, impotent fury; the ones where Lyanna survives too, and well, this is awkward. As an aside, I sometimes get into fannish arguments about Sansa or Dany and whether it was normal for girls in Westeros to be married in their early teens; and my argument is that a) as far as my layman's knowledge will take me, that wasn't even true in medieval Europe, and b) doesn't even seem to be true in Westeros; girls (and boys) are betrothed at an early age, but unless there's some sort of immediate land grab happening the actual marriage takes place much later. Catelyn and Cersei were both wed in their late teens; Elia in her early twenties. Although, I have a headcanon that the reason Elia's marriage was so comparatively late was that up until Arianne was born she was Doran's heir and couldn't be married outside of Dorne. Actually, not that I harbor any ill-will towards Doran, but what I wouldn't give for ruling princess of Dorne!Elia and her biggest supporter Oberyn fic.

Actually, I've always wondered how marriages work with equal opportunity primogeniture. Not so much inside Dorne, where you arrange the marriage of your heiress to somebody else's second born son and vice versa, but when an heiress marries outside Dorne-- Like, we know Arianne harbored hopes of marrying both Edmure Tully and Willas Tyrell. How would that have worked. I mean, time share? Would Arianne have given up Sunspear (seems unlikely), did she think either Edmure or Willas would have given up their claims and ruled as her consort?

To be fair, all that really tells us is that teenaged Arianne was a hormonal idiot who thought she could have her cake and eat it, which only makes me like her more, really.

lareinenoire asked Following the massive influx of new canon from The World of Ice and Fire, which story do you want to write the most?

Huh. There were things about awoiaf that delighted me (that there are about three generations of Tullys named after muppets; there's a Ser Kermit who is succeeded by his son Ser Elmo. This, I assume, was a prime example of the thing where you get stuck, write something obviously silly - I favour a string of swear words - to remind yourself to come back later and fix it, only they forgot.) Things that interested me (I have adopted the headcanon that the Dornish bought peace and continuing independence by promising to put Rhaenys Targaryen, who they'd been holding in some dungeon somewhere for years, out of her misery), but nothing that really made me sit up and go I must have fic about this at once.

I don't know, very little of my fic features the historical characters, I tend to focus on the characters who're kids now and their lives post civil wars/apocalypse a la dragons and ice zombies. And if I do write more historical fic it'll probably be something about the league of dead mothers (something where Elia survives on a wave of righteous, impotent fury; something where Joanna lives and it changes nothing in the bigger picture because Tywin isn't a jerk because his wife's dead, and he doesn't hate Tyrion because his birth killed Joanna, he's a jerk because he's a jerk, and he hates Tyrion because his pride can't cope with having fathered a dwarf)

By the way, if you are at all interested in historical asoiaf fic check out lareinenoire's AO3 page at once. Start with the Within the Hollow Crown series.

I am interested in historical Targaryen women. I want a fic about Visenya and Rhaenys Targaryen and what their relationship was like independent of Aegon. I want to know more about Rhaenys Targaryen, the queen who never was. The tales of the Dragonknight and his love for his sister are great romantic stories in canon, and I sort of want to deconstruct that to give Queen Naerys, trapped between a brother who was actively trying to kill her with childbirth, and another who was too devoted to his own vows to actively help her, a voice.

As an aside, I wrote my all female Night's Watch AU before The Princess and the Queen came out, and the set up was that years ago Rhaenyra Targaryen had been lady commander after the Dance of the Dragons; I'd had Rhaenyra in mind as a sort of Visenya Targaryen type character. It still works with what we know of her in canon if you assume that having fought a war and sat in on her father's councils since girlhood she could be a pretty decent general without being herself a warrior, and more so if you handwave that she was allowed to take her dragon with her when she was exiled to the Wall. Still, you have to squint, and to this day it irks me.

One of the things that really pleased me about awoiaf was the amount of homosexuality there was in the world. I like how the assertions that Rhaenyra's sons were bastards were as much that her husband's preferences were well known as it was character assassination. And I liked the canon confirmation that in Dorne nobody cares. And I loved the description of Sabitha Vypren as "enjoying killing men and kissing women." Fic about this lady pls.

The asoiaf I really want to write, and this has nothing to do with awoiaf, is the one where Sansa Stark is a lesbian, and her attraction to knights is aesthetic, but not romantic (at least, not after she meets a few of them up close) or physical, and how you would possibly navigate that in a world that has no language for it.

I have been watching a truly outrageous amount a football these last few days. With the time difference from Brazil the first game of the day starts just as I get in of an evening, and the last is finishing at about the time I put my jammies on and climb under the duvet with my teddy bear - and it is proving shockingly easy to do little else.

I actually wasn't that excited about the world cup; a combination of the controversy and upset it was causing in Brazil, and a lack of hoopla on the part of of the BBC which had suppressed my usual Scottish Oh, God, anyone but England tendencies. I've tried to explain this to my English friends, that it's not the idea of England winning that most Scots object to, it's the fact that we get the English commentators and analysts and sports news, and can't stop hearing about bloody England, even in the commentary of totally unrelated games. That, and going on past form, if they actually did manage to win we'd be hearing about it for the next three hundred years.

But a lot of the football has actually been really good. I have been turned into a Holland fan, and think if they don't top their group it'll only be because they've been too busy picking bits of Spaniard out of their studs to train. I am also supporting Germany; partly because I've really liked Germany whenever I've been there, and partly because I like it when they contrive to beat England, ideally on penalties.

I unwisely played a tiny bit of football when I was first in uni. Partly because running around a muddy field in the fresh air was a great way to shake off a hangover, and partly because I thought it would be a great way to meet girls. The reason I gave it up was threefold: 1) I was shit at it; 2) an equally effective, if not superior way to shake off a hangover was to eat a bacon roll, drink half a pint of irn bru, and go back to sleep until the Eastenders omnibus came on; and 3) well, any girl who liked the sporty type went for the actual sporty lesbians; fortunately for me there were other girls who liked the bookish, indoorsy sort of lesbian.

My presence on tumblr has become even more intermittent than it usually is. After some experimenting I have decided that the only sensible way to approach tumblr is to not even try to keep up with it. I look at it when I've got the computer on, but not actually for anything in particular, and then I scroll back until I either get bored or my browser starts struggling. And that's worked quite well for me, but right now a few people I follow are liveblogging the world cup, and more than a few are really pissed off about the Game of Thrones finale, so--

In between all the football I did manage to watch the Game of Thrones finale, largely because, like a lot of people, I was having trouble caring about the outcome of Iran v. Nigeria.

( The Children )

Two different remixes that I'd written over the last month or so de-anoned this weekend, and I thought I would self-indulgently talk about them. Because I think they're both kind of interesting in that I don't think they're as obviously by me as a lot of the things I write. I have a very distinctive style, I've been told.

So for remix_redux I remixed an ASOIAF five things fic called I Believe The Children Are Our Future, which is about various characters (Lyanna, Bran, Cersei, Arianne, Jon) being fostered out young and brought up in a different house. And each segment is basically a ficlet of a few hundred words (nothing wrong with that, I've written stories in that style myself) so my idea as to how to remix it was to expand every section into a longer fic; because why write one remix when you can write five?

The biggest change was that one of the sections (Arianne being raised in the Targaryen court in exile as Viserys' intended) was exorcised completely. Partly because I ran out of time/fannish energy, and partly because I had a lot of trouble with the idea of writing a sane future King!Viserys; I guess the you are the chosen one vibes I get off Dany are too strong, even as the narrative itself actively works to undermine those vibes. And I know it smacks of excusing my own laziness, but I think the remix works better as a four things than a five, because this way it's all about the Starks, really: three Starks who were brought up by other families, and one Lannister raised by wolves.

Hence the funky remix subtitle.

Live For Just These Twenty Years (the wolves in sheep's clothing remix)
ASOIAF; PG; 7527 words; Lyanna Stark, Bran Stark, Jon Snow, Cersei Lannister

Political fostering, yea or nay?

(Lyanna Stark, fostered at Sunspear; Bran Stark, a ward of Pyke; Cersei Lannister, a lioness in Winterfell; Jon Snow, a southron knight)


I also signed up for the Merlin fandom remix, which could have easily gone very wrong, because Merlin fandom is even more overwhelmingly Merlin/Arthur centric than it was in my day. And it's not that I particularly object to remixing M/A, it's that my interpretation of the M/A relationship is So Very Different to the majority of fandom's that nobody who ships them really wants me remixing their fic.

For the curious, my take on their relationship can be summed up thusly: the only thing creepier that Merlin's canon obsession with Arthur, is the way fandom romanticises it.

Anyway, I was very lucky with matching that I got someone's who's oeuvre included Lessons Learned which is a post series fic where Arthur has returned, and Merlin is pre-emptively killing Arthur's enemies (Mordred, Morgana, etc.) as they rise again; only it's strongly implied that these aren't the old foes come again, they're just random people, and Merlin is just violently paranoid.

So, I made my remix explicit that these weren't the reincarnations of anybody, just innocent bystanders, and I split my remix between two perspectives. Between the boys; Arthur, and Merlin teaching him about the modern world, which I'm sure has been done in 1001 fics before, and the detective who's investigating Merlin's killing spree.

I am weirdly proud of this remix. Mostly because I don't like Merlin as a character, nor do I like M/A as a ship, but I think I managed to respect the original fic, and the ship, while making my problems with it (not just the dead women, but the co-dependence, the way that Merlin manipulates Arthur, and how Arthur doesn't realise how much Merlin controls his life) pretty explicit.

Lessons Learned (a little bit of history repeating remix)
Merlin; R; 3200 words; Merlin/Arthur

Merlin has always killed for Arthur, ever since Camelot, but they're not in Camelot anymore.

I am generally a defender of Game of Thrones, both as adaption and a show in its own right, but even four episodes in and this season seems more WTF?! worthy than usual.

( Oathkeeper )