avidrosette

Happy birthday to the kind and talented dwyld! Wishing a wonderful day to you and yours, sweetie. May the coming year be extra kind to you.

merlinstills



Reasons to join merlinstills, a BBC Merlin Icontest:

• Low pressure - no sign-ups, no time commitment


• New challenge posted every week - participate whenever you have time and interest


• Friendly, welcoming people, quick with a kind comment


• Low-key competition with focus on fun and creativity


• Great source material - work with gorgeous fantasy medieval settings and costumes, as well as beautiful actors in modern day garb and settings

Check it out. We'd love to see you there!

I hope everyone is having good run up to the holidays!

I'm updating my friends list to add some Merlin folks. If I've added you, it's because I've enjoyed our fandom interactions or because I like your writing or your comments / posts / general lovely fandom presence.

Over the years, I've discovered that I alternate between periods where I'm gripped by a major fannish enthusiasm, sort of like feeling in love, followed by periods where real life eats me whole. I'm trying to permit myself to enjoy those fannish moments, without guilting myself too horribly when I have to set them aside to focus on RL, and vice versa.

Wishing safe, warm, happy holidays to everyone!

**waves**

I've been doing some reccing for merlin_hotrecs, and I thought I'd crosspost some of the recs here.

Title: True Heart of Wexford
Author: rotrude
Pairing: Merlin/Arthur
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 20,607
Warnings: none
Summary: Wexford, 1798, Merlin is the Catholic groundskeeper on a manor belonging to Anglo-Irish aristocrat Arthur Pendragon, scion of a generation of absentee lords. While Merlin's day job entails looking after Arthur's property, he's also involved with the United Irishmen, whose object is to unite the people of Ireland against the English. Political upheaval is about to plunge the country into turmoil. In the midst of all this stands Arthur Pendragon, who's become Merlin's staunch friend in spite of everything that divides them: faith, class, position, and obligation.
Why I loved it: This gorgeous historical au takes the master and servant dynamic from canon and updates it to late 18th-century Ireland. Arthur is the lord of a manor and Merlin is his groundskeeper. While that alone was enough to get me in the door, I was delighted to discover that the author transforms the trope into a complex and sensitively told tale of love across divides. The author provides enough historic and political background so that the reader can grasp the events and understand what is at stake, while still keeping the story rushing forward and focused on the human players, especially the relationship between Merlin and Arthur. As always with this author, whether the story is set on a modern-day oil rig, in ancient Rome, or in the 18th-century Irish countryside, the settings are painted with specificity and interact organically with the characters, limiting and influencing their choices. In this case, the physical setting is so vividly evoked, it's almost a character in itself - the bleak beauty of the landscape on Arthur's vast property, the gray chill of the Old World sky and countryside, the sense of Arthur's manor home as lost in the harsh isolation. The story left me with a strong afterimage of this austere environment. The characters are tiny against the vast landscape, and the physical distances between them are immense. In the author's beautifully layered writing, this contrast comes to provide a striking reflection of the smallness of the characters in the face of the vast historical forces that are engulfing them and inexorably pulling them apart. A tone of intense longing as well as something near despair pervades the story. The author conveys that these characters are caught in the jaws of a conflict that they can't win but can't avoid. Merlin makes the choices he feels he has to, with resignation rather than any real hope of their leading to success. The only time we see him spark outside of this grim pursuit of duty is when it comes to protecting Arthur. That is a mission that must succeed, however unlikely; nothing less is acceptable. These desperate moments are the most memorable in the fic. Throughout, rotrude is great at not letting the characters' despair become the reader's; instead, she keeps the readers on the edge of their seats, deeply caring about the characters and desperate for them to be alive and together. In the end, she comes up with probably the only solution within the near-impossible framework to make that happen. I loved the story and hope you will, too!

Happy birthday, dwyld! I hope you have an excellent day and a brilliant, fulfilling year ahead.

Uh oh, I've been Loki'd. Thanks to the one-two punch of astolat and Tom Hiddleston. Joss Whedon might have had a little to do with it, too. :-)

I'm having fun watching the explosion of the Avengers fandom (which The Fabulist calls a Fandom Global Event). It'll be interesting to see how it plays out, given that there is relatively little source material in the movie-based portion of the fandom and long gaps between the movies. Great fun however long it lasts, though.

In the Loki portion of the fandom, I'm particularly enjoying the way many writers have gone back to source texts, like the Poetic Edda, to deepen and expand the universe of their stories. Such a cool blend of pure fun and spectacle on the one hand and rather challenging background material on the other - just the sort of thing that fandom pulls out of its hat that makes you say "wow."

Some fic recs:
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There's a big article on Supernatural in tomorrow's New York Times!

Heaven, Hell, Brothers and an Impala by Ginia Bellafante
Sunday, 2/27/11, Arts & Leisure section, pg 18, with a lead-in on pg 1

Spoilers for season 6 in the article but not in this post.

I've only read the first couple of paragraphs (to avoid being spoiled for s6, which I haven't seen), but I thought the writer got some things right and some things wrong right off the bat. I think she's mistaken about the demographics, for one: this isn't a show for 15-year-olds. But even though I wish the article had been written by someone who had a real, personal love of and familiarity with the show - like Maureen Ryan demonstrates in her SPN articles for the Chicago Tribune - it's still very exciting to see it get some mainstream publicity. I don't think I've ever seen Supernatural written about in the Times before (unlike Buffy, which got a number of mentions during its run).

First DW post and first icon post - whee! :-)

Icons to share:
40 SG-1

  
  

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prehistoric_sea wrote me comment fic and it's smart and funny and sooooo good! It's here - J/D AU set in the advertising world - along with a whole bunch of other terrific ficlets.

jd_junkie is in the midst of a self-challenge to write a drabble a day to prompts of words, lyrics, or poetry. She wrote me a gorgeous one yesterday, I Took Some Comfort There (J/D). Two other beauties so far are I'll Take Option One, Please (J/D) and Veritas (J/D).

And now I'm off to catch up with sidlj and jd_junkie's Jack/Daniel Baby-A-Thon, which has my entire SG-1 flist a-squee. :-)

1/4/09 - 1/6/09 (mid-day)

paian has several new installments up in her serialized novel, Come What May (J/D). (Apologies for living under a rock and not realizing this sooner!)

sg1_jubilee posts the Masterlist with Authors for the SG-1 Jubilee Ficathon.

New SG-1 and multifandom icons from stardustescape, halfbloodmeicon, bleeding_muse, magnavox_23, lenyia, and leesa_perrie. New SGA and multifandom icons from emily_reich.

sg1_five_things unscreens responses to Set 61.

solutions_blog shares news on the third SG-1 movie based on an interview with Brad Wright.

graculus is trying to gauge interest in a Teal'c Ficathon. Comments are screened. (Thanks to princessofg and rydra_wong for the pointer.)

otw_news urges vidders to assert their right to fair use at YouTube and offers resources for doing so: Is YouTube Blocking Your Vids?.

prehistoric_sea points to her fic from sg1_jubilee, (Let's Give Them) Something to Talk About (Daniel/Rodney, bg Jack/Daniel, John/Rodney preslash).

oneill_icontest announces winners in the the Bigger and Better challenge.

whimsicalwhims posts her 2008 Fic Round-up.

sidlj archives her sg1_jubilee fic, Resistance Is Futile (Jonas/Carson).

paian recs princessofg's A Walk in the Snow (J/D) at stargateficrec.

prehistoric_sea recs a new vid by Clara, You'll Be Coming Down (Daniel/Cameron), and shares a crossover fic idea.

lilyleia78 archives her sg1_jubilee fic, Holidays Suck (J/D) and points to her new five things fics.

paian shares SG-1 and multifandom fic recs.

blue_meridian has SG-1 and multifandom fic recs.

stagnation13 has a new fic, Left in the Hands of the Diplomats (J/D).

Jillie has a new fic, Twice in a Lifetime (J/D) (spoilers for Continuum).

sidlj archives her fic Five emails General O'Neill sends to Colonel Carter in the earth-to-Atlantis databurst (Jack, gen) and points to two more five things fics.

andreas_ri shares high-res promotional shots of the S10 team. Friendslocked after a few hours; comment at top of LJ to request addition to flist.

Posts from 1/6/09 evening will be included in next edition.