[fic rec] Firefly/Serenity

_astralis wrote "You Will Know When You Get There", an absolutely breath-taking Mal/Kaylee story which builds slow and bittersweet, and clings to the senses like honey. It's amazing, and any fan of Mal or Kaylee (and especially of Mal/Kaylee) should read it.

[fic rec] Harry Potter, Hermione/Ginny

ruby_fruit wrote "Wet Hot English Summer" which has Hermione researching magical guerilla warfare and hot days juxtaposed with rainstorms and Ginny being distracting and devious. It's wonderful, has great imagery, and a good Hermione voice.

femslash in The Fast and the Furious

femslash06 is taking sign-ups for this year's ficathon and I'm really impressed with some of the wild card fandoms people have requested and say they can write. Lovely fandoms I really enjoy, most of them.

There's been talk about how House and Sports Night are making a really good showing in the wild card requests, when both of the fandoms have a major bent toward male slash (which even I know, at least in regard to House--I don't watch either show, nor have much experience with the fandoms), and it reminded me of my own pet fandom which is dominantly male slash oriented but where I want to see femslash. This is The Fast and the Furious, and I have requested it in my sign-up for femslash06, but if any of you would like to write me some, maybe for my upcoming birthday, I would adore you for all time.

I'm not very involved in FatF fandom (or in any fandom, at this point, I just kind of hover along the edges of many fandoms), but from what I've seen, the majority of the fic (and icons and vids, but I'm a ficcer, so I talk about fic) is male slash, and most of it is either Dominic/Brian from the first movie or Brian/Rome from the second (or variations of those three characters, usually Brian using Rome as a substitute for Dominic). I can see why, both movies are male slash friendly, and there are so many more guys than girls anyway.

(From here on out, I'm going to mostly ignore the second movie, because I've only seen it once, and don't own it, so I can't refer to the source material.)

However, the first movie does have two interesting female characters, Letty and Mia, and they are often ignored and/or abused. Even in the few het stories I've seen, both women are often cast aside in favor of an original female character (usually a Mary Sue).

I just don't understand it, especially with all the stories pairing Dom/Brian. I understand why they're put together (on different levels, from the "oooh, hot guys making out" [even though I don't actually find Brian hot] to the way they interact, which is very slash friendly, etc. etc.). What I don't understand is why there aren't more stories about Letty and Mia, either with other women or together.

Especially together.

Letty is a dominant, angry woman who, in my opinion, wants to be the center of Dominic's universe (or the center of anyone's universe, and Dom is the one she has) but she knows she will never be that to him, because he is the head of the family, he brings everyone together. As Mia says, he's like gravity, and he is the center of all their worlds, so no one person can be the center of his. Letty can drive away outside competition (see the catty comments and the verbal attacks on any woman who dares to speak to him when they are all in public, away from the garage and the house), but she can't do that with the family, and doesn't often try. The most she can do is distract him for awhile (see Letty immediately whisk Dom away from the after-race party to have time alone with him, despite their guests), but he always returns to his duties to everyone else.

This is only exacerbated by Brian's presence. He's the new guy, the bone of contention in the balance of the old group dynamics, the upgraded part which doesn't quite fit into the rest of the car. Brian takes Dom away from Letty; this does not have to be in a male slashy way, either, canonically he's taking up Dom's time in the garage and preparing for Race Wars, and there isn't a thing Letty can do about it.

Within the source material there are suggestions that Brian ties Mia and Dom together in his mind, not sexually, but that he's afraid to go after Dom as the criminal because Mia is related to him, and Brian cares for Mia. It's not difficult to extrapolate that perhaps Mia is a replacement for Dom in Brian's head, the Toretto he can lust after without dealing with the fallout of a homosexual desire. (Many male slash stories do extrapolate just that, in fact.)

I can see Letty doing the same thing to Mia; Dom is distracted by the others, Dom is busy, and Mia is there, always in the background. She is the safer of the Toretto siblings; while Dom is very dominant and argues his position (though he does often give in to Letty), Mia reveals her strong personality only in bursts. She is more subtle in the way she manages the others, and is the least entrenched in the racing mentality. She studies, and, it can be assumed, wants more than just the garage and the street racing life.

Mia also wants to be the center of someone's world, to come first before her brother, who brings everyone together.

So here are two women, both looking for validation and wanting to be wanted. One defies stereotypical female roles (Letty races, works in the garage, embraces her sexuality, is treated as "one of the guys" to the point she plays games and watches movies with them after dinner instead of doing dishes, which is Mia's job because she is female); one feels trapped within both female roles and familial roles (Mia wants to live somewhere where she doesn't have to cook and clean because she's the female, she wants to escape her brother's influence, she has greater dreams than street racing and theft). These two women watch their male sexual interests spend more time interacting with each other (sexual or not) than with them.

Why are they not paired? Mia wants out of her "place" as a woman and as a sister, which Letty has done; Letty wants to be important to someone, and Mia is looking for someone to love. Letty wants Dom, but if she can't have him constantly, why wouldn't she turn to Mia? Mia is an extension of Dominic, which she hates, but is used to people treating her as such.

Plus, if you're just looking for the hot, have you seen them? Yes. Yum.

I want to see stories where Dom's off with Brian (sexually or not), so Letty goes to Mia. Stories where Mia crushes on Letty for being so different from the female definition Mia is thrust into by her family (especially stories set before Dom notices Letty, and even stories where Mia is the experiment for Letty, thrust aside for Dom when he comes calling, and this makes Mia's need to be the important one, over and above Dom, even stronger). Stories where Mia and Letty are together after the movie, healing physically and mentally, which leads to sex. Stories where Letty overwhelms Mia, seduces her because she can. Stories where they sneak together at night, steal minutes wherever they can.

There is so much potential for them, why is it never touched?

So I hope someone writes me Mia/Letty. I'm working on at least one Mia/Letty story, and now I have more ideas. And if anyone has any links, I'd appreciate them.

[fic rec] Supernatural/Buffy the Vampire Slayer

stone_princess wrote "White Noise in Black Room Dust", a deliciously hot story about Faith visiting Dean and Sam on the road. Yeah, you can imagine what happens after she shows up. You should go read it, because wow.

conceptualizing livejournal space and Livejournal Cultures

fabu wrote an excellent post about how we conceptualize livejournal space, which is an extension of the debate about whether to ask permission/comment before linking to a public post, but for me the interest is really in the comments to this post (not that fabu's post itself isn't interesting) and especially linaelyn's comment about the divisions between Livejournal Cultures and how each of those Cultures decide what information should be locked and what should be left open.

She says:

In fandom, the tendency is to lock mundane, personal daily life issues, and to leave public the outré, fannish extremes, because that's what the LJ playground is for, for fans -- the meeting place where we find folks who share our edge-case extremes, our kinks and our quirks. For the less-fannish social-interaction circles of LJ-land, it is more typical to leave public the mundanities of laundry, dinner menus other things you'd speak of to your grandmother, and hide under deep friendslock the excellent sexual position you and your partner discovered the night before.

The differing conventions between which posts should be public and what should be carefully filtered to those one trusts make crossover between the two Livejournal Cultures difficult thing.


This is exactly the problem I face in my journal entries (and which I realize I could easily change by combining the two journals, but I don't know if that's the best solution either, even though having two journals also isn't the best solution for me). I want to have both those Livejournal Cultures in both of my journals, and the two do not work together well (at least not for me).

I have this journal, what I call my fandom journal, because I wanted to have open fandom discourse (and mindless squee) without worrying about people using the personal information I (sometimes inadvertantly) slip into it for negative purposes. I've had this happen before on the other journal, which is part of why I changed its name and why I have this one and include few of the identifying details of the other one.

However, the more I exist in each journal, the more I want to post personal details here as well. When I started on livejournal, years ago (when it was free the first time 'round), the other journal was mostly friended by people I knew from fandom. As livejournal gained popularity, more people from my non-fandom life joined and friended it, and then some of the negative, stalker occurances happened, and it was locked down tight. I feel fandom interaction is at its best when it is open to anyone to come talk (at its worst, too, unfortunately), but I didn't want to only publically post fandom squee and stories on what had become a flocked personal journal. So I created this fandom-friendly journal.

Now I feel I'm only putting part of myself into either journal (well, even more than normal, because I don't think there is any way to put all of the self into a strictly written format, whether the person in question is actually trying to hide aspects of the self or not), and I dislike it. I want to share more of my non-fandom self here, but I don't want to start flocking. I don't know.

The simple answer would be to either join both journals again or to just start using flocked posts here, too, but I don't know. There's no real point to this rambling, except to link to the things I found so interesting.



On another note (or two), my winamp playlist does not do random so well; it keeps playing the same songs over and over again, despite the wide variety on it. Also I am posty today (spammy, even), and you can blame thestalkycop. When she leaves me to my own devices, I ramble at you instead of at her.