Praise Jupiter, I’ve finally finished a story in this lovely little fandom.

Brass
Jupiter Ascending, Jupiter/Caine

Jupiter’s having trouble accessing Seraphi’s space bucks, so Caine takes a second job on Earth.

A story brought to you by the letters M and M and the number Channing Tatum’s hips.

Yes, this is the Jupiter Ascending story I started because I was blocked on the Jupiter Ascending story I started because I was blocked on my Jupiter Ascending story. But I actually finished this one, so progress!

Hey, it's a list of things.

- I gave in and got a tumblr, because nobody's talking about Jupiter Ascending meta here and I want to talk about Jupiter Ascending meta, or at least read some Jupiter Ascending meta and not respond because tumblr is as confusing as all get-out. Also, I want to talk about how adorable Jupiter and Caine are together and how sad I am there will be no sequels and look, this fandom is so many new things for me, FPF and shipping het and delightful canon femdom* all. I've become surprisingly fond of het the last couple of months -- after I ran out of JA stories (which happened fast, the fandom is small), I watched Pacific Rim and then spent a couple of weeks obsessively reading a lot of Mako/Raleigh. Sometime we need to talk about how fanon moves through a fandom, because I'm watching it happening in a small way in Jupiter Ascending (and it clearly happened in a big way in Pacific Rim, what with the near-universal beliefs that Raleigh Becket loves giving head and being pegged**) and it fascinates me.

- You know the number one piece of popslash fanon I remember to this day? Fred Durst, bad in bed.

- Oh, and my tumblr is here. If you have one, friends, please let me know.

- I wrote a little 450-word Jupiter/Caine story based on some pictures, which is here on tumblr or here on Ao3.

- The story in which Caine Wise accidentally becomes a stripper is about to go to the lovely Ro for betaing, so depending how many things I need to fix, it might go up next week. I seriously can't type that description without laughing.

- Watching videos on youtube of men giving women lapdances is so awkward. (It's funny how strong my urge is to mention here that I was watching them for research purposes. Like, writing sexy things? Great! Watching sexy things? Ooh, better make sure nobody thinks you're a perv.) Is it just because things don't really line up usefully the way they do when the sexes are reversed? Is it because the guys always look self-conscious? Is it my own hang-ups?

- Watching videos of Magic Mike is much less awkward, assuming you watch the ones that cut all the angsty plot and just focus on the sexy dancing.

- Apparently what I needed to find Channing Tatum attractive was wolf ears and subservience, with a side-order of Dear god, his hips.

Hope you're well!

(*Femdom is an awful word, it sounds like a prophylactic***.)

(**Pegging, also an awful word***.)

(***Actually, you know what the problem is? Neither word sounds sexy. Sexy things should have sexy names. Another disappointing word in that regard: cunnilingus.)

...I'm pretty sure I've finally finished the first draft of something.

Not the serious Jupiter Ascending story. Not the goofy Jupiter Ascending/Leverage crossover.

15k of Caine Wise accidentally becoming a stripper. I don't know, friends. I just don't know.

So the Backstreet documentary finally came out here this weekend and we rounded up a small fangirl posse to go and see it. Super-glad I’d allowed myself to be spoiled beforehand, because I think I would’ve been wrecked by all the personal stuff if I hadn’t had the chance to mentally prepare myself first.

Or, as I said: I’d been planning on watching it at home so I could cry there.

Overall, I really enjoyed it. I’m glad we went to watch it in the theatre so we could hang around afterwards and do some fannish post-show analysis. I miss that kind of thing!

Back in the day, some of us local fans used to get together on weekends and watch hours of footage that people from overseas had kindly sent us on video tape and squee and make in-jokes and really, as much as I love Backstreet — and I love Backstreet a lot — what I love more is how many lovely people pop fandom brought into my life. Some I’m still in contact with, and some have faded away, but the memories are still there. It was a really good community for me at a time when a lot of other things were going badly. Pop fandom is also where I learnt to write, how to critique my own work and critique others, and if I’m ever successful with my storytelling, it will be because of my time reading and writing and conversing with you all. I'm feeling the love right now. <3

“So you’re a space princess,” Nate says. His voice sounds kind of dubious, because: space princess.

“Oh my god,” Hardison whispers. “Like Leia!”

Jupiter points at him. “The answer to your next question is no.”

“You don’t know what my next question is,” Hardison says.

“No, fanboy, I do not own a space princess slave outfit.”

“…lucky guess,” Hardison mumbles.

So this is apparently happening: a Jupiter Ascending/Leverage crossover that I started today because my serious (so serious) Jupiter Ascending story is kicking my ass.

I'm not sure who else is writing JA, but if you'd like to chat and hash out plots and whatnot, I would totally love to do that with you. (:

It's been a strange couple of weeks. Soon after I said I felt far from fandom, I fell into a new one. I haven't felt this way for a very long time; probably not since popslash, actually.

I'm not sure how long it's going to last, but the ride is pleasant and you can't beat the view.

Lovely fanart by Strannaya Anna.

Jupiter Ascending is kind of a mess. Dropped plot threads, shaky worldbuiding, leaden dialogue, and fight scenes so frantic it's hard to tell which side you should be cheering for. And yet. And yet...!

And there's fic, my friends! Fic with more twisted relationships than you can poke a stick at, and also way better dialogue. Recs to come when I've finished working though Ao3.

One to start:

Sirius Ascending by Aeolian
(Jupiter/Caine)
Billed as The post-credit scene you can't take your kids to see and indeed it is; this is what I walked out of the cinema wanting.

(Although it does have unexpected knotting, a kink I've never really gotten. It makes sense in this context, and it's very briefly mentioned, but, yeah.)

I'm now writing my own JA story and I find myself thinking about it from the other side, like maybe the hookers at the brothel your Legion-brothers take you to give you side-eye because nobody wants to have to deal with an hour of that. In other words, I find myself having Questions About Knotting (Fictitious Half-Human Half-Wolf Style), and it's not really something I can look up on Wikipedia.

I really enjoyed reading everybody’s year-end round-up posts, and seeing my flist return to life!

So I wrote one myself, and now, six weeks later, am getting around to posting it. Seems about right.

Five months of pop culture, GO!

Orange is the New Black uses a typical protagonist (white, blonde, privileged) to tell stories about a bunch of non-typical characters (women of colour, bisexual/lesbian women, and a trans woman). The more I think about the season’s climax, the more I think it does the series a disservice, but the show as a whole is well worth watching.

Graceland took a nice cast (Aaron Tveit! Daniel Sunjata! A bunch of other people who are not white and/or male!) and squandered it away with stupid storytelling and cheap T & A.

Arrow is way better than you might expect, if your expectations are mine and you’re not really into superheroes. Good characters, good storytelling. The biggest problem is the female lead, who is both badly conceptualised and poorly acted, but there’s a bunch of other women who are awesome, including a blonde, glasses-wearing, delightfully awkward hacker girl.

You do need to get through the first half-dozen episodes, which are the very definition of patchy. Around episode three, I thought, “You know, this writing is pretty good,” after a particularly nice bit of dialogue; literally thirty seconds later, somebody infodumped with, “Have you forgotten your brother died doing [plot thing]?” (To which I would’ve loved it if the responding character had said, “OMG! I had forgotten!”) But there’s a lot more good than bad here, and I love that they’re trying to build a larger world and not just do monster of the week episodes. It actually reminds me quite a bit of Buffy — not as witty, not as clever, but possibly better acted.

Does Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. get any better? Even my love of Ming-Na Wen and hackers couldn’t keep me interested.

The Bling Ring (non-fiction book) is fascinating. The Bling Ring (Sofia Coppola movie) is stylish but empty. The Bling Ring (Lifetime movie) is surprisingly not horrible, but nobody would call it good. Somebody’s going to tell the definitive fictional representation of this story, I hope, but neither of these are it.

Before Midnight was a huge disappointment, with uneven storytelling, terrible pacing, and a male lead who’s never called on his crappy behaviour. Before Sunset is one of my favourite movies, which made this one all the more frustrating. I cannot understand how this film is topping so many end-of-year Best Of lists, and nobody was primed to love it more than me.

Enchanted is a lovely twist on the Disney princess story, and Amy Adams is so winning. I’d forgotten how much I liked it.

You’ll notice there’s hardly any books mentioned above. That’s because I ended up somewhat impulsively becoming a student again, so everything I’ve been reading the last four months has been assigned. I’m studying novel writing, which has been exhilarating and wonderful and terrifying all at once. Exhilarating and wonderful are probably self-evident; terrifying because it feels like this might be my now or never moment. I’ve always had problems with plotting, and have hundreds of thousands of words of mess to prove it. If I cannot learn how to do it even when I’m taking an entire course dedicated to it, I fear I never will.

I have stuff to talk about. I really should talk about it sometime.

But for now! Does anybody have a recommendation for a one-off mail forwarding service from the UK? I'd like to buy a small box boardgame from France via amazon.co.uk's online marketplace, and they're quoting me £56 to send it to Australia, which seems kind of insane when it's only £12 to send it the UK and I know from buying stuff on eBay that postage from the UK to Australia would probably less than £20.

I remember there used to be bit of a cottage industry of women who would do this for a reasonable fee if you wanted to buy clothing or make-up or whatever that you couldn't get in your country, but the one I could recall the name of has closed up shop. Has anybody used anyone, or have any tips?

In which I watch things.

Much Ado About Nothing

I loved this. It has its flaws, of course, some of which are inherent to the original play and some of which are introduced, but I enjoyed the humanity and the sweetness it brought to what is, I suspect, my favourite Shakespeare. I had several conversations with people in the days prior that went almost exactly the same way -- "I want to see it, but I really don't know about Amy Acker as Beatrice…" -- and that's something I feared, too, especially since Emma Thompson steals the show in Kenneth Branagh's version. But not to fear! She was great, especially at the dramatic parts, and although less sharp than most productions I've seen, I wasn't bothered by it. (Indeed, I have sometimes thought Beatrice can be a little one-note with the sarcasm. Acker's portrayal had a nice amount of nuance.) Alexis Denisof was delightful as Benedict, particularly at the physical comedy, and everyone else was pretty much fantastic. Even Nathan Fillion was perfectly cast as Dogberry, using his hammy acting to portray the hammiest of characters. The only real let-down for me was Jillian Morgese as Hero. It's a pretty blank role to begin with, but she didn't do a lot with the scenes she had.

(Is it too much to expect some tears in the wedding scene? I want tears, damn it!)

Interesting change that worked: Making Conrade a woman, even if sometimes the actors seemed unsure what to do with the resultant pronouns. I'm pretty sure she was referred to both 'he' and 'she' at some point.

Interesting change that did not work: Having Don John and company initially brought to the house in zip-strips (those modern plastic handcuffs). It didn't make a whole lot of sense given that Don John walks around the house freely throughout the course of the play and easily gets away when he needs to.

Interesting change I was neutral about: Giving Beatrice and Benedict a one-night-stand backstory. It fits with the play (there's a series of lines that seem to refer to a past affair) but I don't know that it added much. Or rather, I wish it could've added more. There's a nice sense that could be drawn from the idea of them having a one-night-stand but being unable to express their love for one another, but it couldn't really be explored within the play the way that it's written.

Though I had walking out of the theatre: This four-hundred-year-old play that pivots around a woman's virginity is still more feminist than most Hollywood films today.

I also enjoyed the light, jazzy feel of the music, which apparently was largely composed by Joss Whedon. Is there nothing that man can't do? For comparison, the song Sigh No More (which Shakespeare wrote the lyrics for) from the Branagh version and the Whedon version.

A Courtship of Rivals: Magic & Bird

In the late 1970s, the NBA was floundering, and even college basketball games were receiving higher ratings. Then along came a couple of young men who would become two of the greatest players the game had ever seen, Ervin "Magic" Johnson and Larry Bird, and the fact that they were so different was just icing on the narrative cake. Magic was African-American, gregarious and beloved. Bird was white, introverted, and kind of a dick. Together, they were rivals: for the NCAA final their senior year of college, for NBA rookie of the year, and then they met each other five times in the NBA finals. They were the story that pulled the NBA into mainstream media attention.

(Remember the Nike commercial This Is Where It Starts? Magic and Bird were basically like that, though they probably made fewer fuck-me eyes at each other.)

Still, goodness is this slashy. I mean, really, really slashy. By the last fifteen minutes, the producers aren't pretending they're making anything other than a love story. It's a nice little documentary and you could to worse things than watch it sometime. (Snakes, say. Anything involving snakes would be worse.)

Available on YouTube.

Jock Strap Cowboys

I'm just going to leave this here.