Ten Little Chances to be Free

Title: As I Would Not Be a Slave
Fandom: Les Misérables
Pairing: Enjolras/Grantaire
Rating: NC-17
Wordcount: 2531
Summary: ...so I would not be a master. Enjolras the reluctant sadist, meet Grantaire the all-too-willing masochist.
Notes/Warnings: For a prompt on the kinkmeme: "the reason Enjolras doesn't have sex is that he can only get off when dominating/degrading/hurting someone (and I mean seriously actually hurting someone), and he hates that part of himself so much he completely bottles up his sex drive. However, Grantaire loves Enjolras so much and has so little self worth that he actually likes Enjolras treating him like shit." True to prompt, so tread carefully if necessary.

( He more than anyone has reason to loathe the very idea of man on his knees before man. )

And now we come back to the exact question that plagued me at about this time in 2011: halp how do I multi-fandom? I am so laughably bad at sustaining obsessive interest in more than one thing at once, which usually ends in me feeling guilty for dropping one thing in favor of another (see: disappearing from Les Mis fandom because Doctor Who ate me), but that is not actually possible right now because I've done a hard 180 back into Les Mis fandom just as a new (half-)season of Who is about to air. And this time I love them both to pieces with active fangirl joy, am not burned out on either of them, and want to keep participating in both. *flaily hands*

Les Mis kinkmeme now bigger than eleventy_kink, heading into Round 4 soon, will probably hit 24,601 comments before Barricade Day, about to get a Big Important Rules/FAQ Organizational Post, and getting me to write fic again. Even if it is all shameless porn. And now a digitized copy of Hugo's original manuscript has shown up, which is not exactly dissuading me from falling right back down the research-and-Brick-geekery rabbit hole. But before I embark on any new translations or anything I should probably trawl through back archives of my LJ tags, dig around on my hard drive, poke through old Abaissé threads, and compile a few massive HERE LET ME SHARE YOU A THING BECAUSE YOU MIGHT NOT HAVE SEEN IT BEFORE link posts for people who weren't here in 2009 or whenever. And ahaha oh Christ the DVD is coming out tomorrow, which opens the possibility of vidding once I'm done watching it sixty bazillion times and weeping.

And then Doctor Who season 7b starts at the end of the month. Am still v. v. interested in Clara, still convinced she's already dead and her brain's in a computer somewhere and she doesn't even know it, still not sure how that connects to Already-Dead People The Doctor Might Be Married To Whose Brains Are Also In Computers Somewhere, still vaguely suspicious that the Doctor might not be going through s7 in broadcast order. But my interest in Moffat Who is still largely cerebral--which, given the way my brain works, is enough to sustain quite a lot of interest! But I'm not sure I have Feelings about it the way I have Feelings about Ten, or Seven and Ace, or One and the Original Team TARDIS. And there is a lot of classic Who for me to go develop Feelings about. (Turlough? I don't know if I have Feelings about Turlough. I like his stupid face a lot, and he hits the same "dysfunctional fuckups who suffer way too prettily" pervy buttons as Ten, but I've only really seen Frontios and Mawdryn Undead--and Planet of Short-Shorts but I was watching that for the Doctor/Master and knew zilch about Turlough at that point--so I will have to reserve judgement until I've seen more.)

Gallifrey One has come and gone, was AMAZING, Happiness Patrol cosplay was a hit, and holy god I met my doppelgänger. We were both running around being Simm!Master and looking scarily alike, except that she's a foot taller and twice as good-looking. Freema Agyeman is the loveliest human and so so nice in Q&A sessions, Sylvester McCoy continues to be a ridiculous man, Philip Hinchcliffe has v. interesting things to say at panels, Frazer Hines is Frazer Hines and he and Deborah Watling make a super-entertaining double act, Nick Briggs miiiight have been at the Big Finish merchandise booth while I was busy giving them all my money and I was too tongue-tied to say anything to him. But HNNNGH I love Big Finish; a few weeks before the con I stumbled upon the "Doctor Who scripts that were never produced" Wikipedia article and almost cried with longing for what could have been, and then I found out BF does audios of some of the lost stories and look, I'm not saying I dropped ridiculous amounts of money for One, Barbara, Ian, and Susan meeting Alexander the Great in a dropped season-one script by a Turkish playwright, except for the part where I totally did.

And then on the last night of con I somehow wound up at the bar with Neve McIntosh, aka Madame Vastra, furtively talking smack about Moffat's writing problems in between mutual fangirling of Vastra & Jenny. She is... pretty much the awesomest, and spent that whole evening drinking like a sailor and flirting with everybody and generally being the life of the party.

Then after Gally work took over my life and I wound up crossing eleven time zones in four days (LA to DC Monday, DC to the Comoros Islands Thursday). And that trip was long and stressful and way too busy and I didn't even really get to go see anything outside a quarter-mile radius of the hotel, which sucks. Because coral reefs and crater lakes and active volcano and I'm really going to have to devise a way to go back there for vacation rather than work sometime. And now I am back. And not really recovered. Because Air France lost my luggage and still hasn't got it back to me, and Air Kenya completely jerked me around and almost caused me to refund my ticket and hop on the next flight to Antananarivo in a panic through sheer boneheaded lack of communication, and I came back to find the Les Mis kinkmeme erupting in its very first honest-to-god wankstorm. It is impressive that it took 15,000 comments for anyone to start snarling at anyone else, and kind of hilarious that the thing that finally broke the kinkmeme's tolerance was a request for a Confederacy AU, but fuck it couldn't have been more ill-timed.

That... is all, I think. Oh, and I am finally on pills that seem to be making headway against the depression-y shit, at least the grey fog of "everything is blurgh" and the occasional downswings into active self-loathing. The "having energy for RL activities and regularly accomplishing basic tasks such as laundry and feeding myself" bit remains to be seen.

Starting what should hopefully become a fic dump of all the fragments I've written for prompts/commentfic/Tumblr crack and then never archived. Whee!

Title: They were schoolboys, never held an anti-tank rocket
Fandom: Les Misérables/Doctor Who
Characters: Seventh Doctor, Ace, Enjolras, Combeferre, Courfeyrac
Rating: G
Summary: Ace at the barricade. What else do you need?

( Ace, you'd never be so irresponsible as to bring anachronistic weaponry to a time period that still hasn't got the hang of rifled barrels, would you? )

First of all: happy Barricade Day! Hopefully I will have some Les Mis fandom goodies for later tonight.

Second: Who midseason finale. ( Spoilers, sweetie )

Also, going to call it right here right now: the 1100-year-old Doctor in Impossible Astronaut is the real Doctor, but his ganger somehow survives and stabilizes. I've seen a lot of people speculating that it's the other way around (that 1100-year-old Doctor is a ganger) but this would be a brilliant way to give all that "gangers really are the same people as their originals" business some unexpected payoff.

Sneaky crossover drabble. ;) If you get it, try tapping along to DYHTPS, you'd be surprised how well it works.

-

"You don't even seem to be of this world," Combeferre remarked one day. "You barely sleep or eat, you don't notice everyday life, you won't even take that old pocketwatch in to get fixed. How do you live in our world and never think of anything but your purpose?"

"Because I can hear it," Enjolras answered. "The call to action. You're a doctor, you know the compulsion to fix things. How could I lose my purpose when it's always there, however faint, like a distant drumbeat calling me to war? Maybe one day even my heartbeat will finally match it."

It is very, very strange to have a life that does not revolve around Les Mis fandom and 19th-century geekery--it's been my primary fandom for what, over five years? And now my life consists of about one part LM/19th-century geekery, ten parts Doctor Who, two parts recreational mathematics, and four parts senioritis/graduation-flailing/plotting how to get the NSA to hire me and train me in the dark arts. On the one hand it is really nice to stretch my mental legs a bit and take a stroll outside of my tiny fandom and my ridiculously narrow niche of geekitude. On the other hand I tend to practice serial monogamy where fandoms are concerned and I am worried about abandoning/neglecting LM fandom to chase after my new shiny, which I really don't want to end up doing. I'm bad at juggling obsessions but I still love you guys and LM and the ridiculous levels of nerditude we get up to.

Did I mention senioritis? I'm still in complete denial about graduating in three weeks and having to enter the real world (my plan is still "desperately hope that if I graduate summa and throw enough letters of recommendation at them the NSA will ignore my lack of advanced calculus and accept me into its cryptology program"), but man, I am so over most of my classes. Greek is a goddamn joke and I'm kicking myself for not taking intermediate German instead. Digital music seminar is a goddamn joke. Kung fu is a goddamn joke. My give-a-shit levels are nearing zero for everything but fencing and linear algebra. And my headlong slide into Who!fandom is not helping--it gives me a neverending supply of ways to eat up the free time I should be using on schoolwork.

Speaking of which, it is now 95% certain that my entry into DW fic-writing will be somehow ignominious and embarrassing, because I keep getting crack!porn plotbunnies. It's just a matter of which one gets finished first. Also, I have not been able to stop myself from looking at all the season 6 "spoilers" (by which I mean promo material and interviews, not for-realz "Snape kills Dumbledore!" plot spoilers) and rampant fan speculation, and OMG Steven Moffat is a terrifying bastard genius. If he's doing what I think he's doing? Terrifying bastard genius. Because if he's doing what I think he's doing, then ( ...cut for speculation )

I finally did something I've been putting off for three years or so: figured out exactly how many times I saw the Les Mis Broadway revival, and from there, how many times I've seen the show total. It got difficult to keep track of about at the point I stopped counting, because instead of pre-buying tickets through Telecharge and taking the Greyhound up to New York, both of which leave digital receipts, I would occasionally drive up to New York, or buy tickets at the theatre through student rush or what-have-you. And I stopped reviewing every show on LJ. So coming up with an actual number involved a lot of backtracking through which shows I had bootlegs of, figuring out whether I'd seen one show or two on a particular day, old LJ entries, Greyhound/Telecharge receipts, and occasionally chat logs.

This has all led to the following breakdown:
London: 12 (once in 2005, five times in 2009, six times in 2010)
3rd national tour: 8 (2005-2006: DCx2, Bostonx2, Waterbury, Indianapolis x2, St Louis)
Broadway revival: 57 (...I think this speaks for itself)
25th anniversary tour: 7 (five times in Paris, twice in the US)
Regionals: 11 (North Shore, Walnut Street, Wolf Trap, Québec, Signature, Lancaster, Pittsburgh CLO, Forestburgh, Québec again, Lausanne, Copenhagen)

Total: 95

There might be one or two more in there that I'm missing from the last four months of 2007, but 95 is now my official obsession count. XD

Title: A Star in the Jaws of the Clouds
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Les Misérables
Characters: Enjolras, Courfeyrac, and various OCs
Word count: 8937
Summary: Trials and tribulations of a teenage Enjolras discovering how ideals are put into practice.
Notes: Christmas present for coloneldespard, which I'm belatedly reposting from santafrenchboys.

( Read more... )

The read-through thread for "À chasse noire, meute muette" finally gave me the necessary kick in the pants to post my last round of Paris photos--Valjean's flight through the Left Bank of Paris and Javert's pursuit. My guide for all of this was the invaluable book companion to Carnavalet's "Paris au temps des Misérables" exhibit, which also furnished me details on the inspirations and probable location of the convent.

BANDWIDTH WARNING: There are almost 50 images at 800x600 under the cut. If that makes your internet connection go "D:", I suggest you instead visit the Abaissé thread, which is identical except that the images are in link form.

( Off we goooo...  )

Had my first special-studies meeting and my first fencing lesson today! Fencing might be one of the few things I will enjoy even though I suck royally at it: not only am I completely uncoordinated (a problem shared by most of the other beginners I think), I am incorrigibly pigeon-toed. My leading foot/knee is always facing too far inwards, and I was cheerfully informed multiple times that I will horribly fuck up my knee if I keep it up. Joy! But it was fun, and exercise is Of The Good, and even with rehearsals on Wednesday nights this means I will probably be getting a workout at least three times a week. More if I keep biking into town. Got catcalled by a bunch of asswipes in a Jeep Wrangler as I was on my bike huffing and puffing up the hill back to school today, so my new goal is to have enough breath left on that hill to cuss them out next time it happens.

I went into the special-studies meeting terrified. Scared shitless. No idea what I was going to say, or how much I was going to be put on the spot. Turns out that having vague ideas for a central thesis makes me 150% more organized than most people going in for a special studies! The meeting itself was half "this is what you have to do/here, let me hunt up resources for you" and half plain old gossiping about people who've been dead for 150 years. Mostly about how everyone was a complete dick to the Duchesse de Duras. Shit, I can write a paper on this stuff?

Prof admitted to being surprised to get a special-studies request from me and discover it was about Gay-Ass Romantic Lit and not Victor Hugo. "I thought you would be doing something on Les Misérables!" Perhaps I should have explained that toi_marguerite already has that covered for this year, and I don't want to undercut her sterling work about how Ol' Vic's political beliefs had a direct effect on his authorial hard-on for Enjolras. Also, Gay-Ass Romantic Lit is fun. And writing a fifty-page paper about Les Misérables would require picking a topic.

...actually, a fifty-page paper on how the musical contributes to fan interpretations of the novel would be fun, but I HAVE NO SOCIOLOGY OR ANTHROPOLOGY BACKGROUND so it would be a bad idea. BAD IDEA. MUST NOT DO THAT SECOND SEMESTER.