reenka

Sometimes I hear a lovesong and it's just SOOOO H/D it hurts, so I can't not share it... (thanks, Ariel! hehehe). Needless to say, 'The Moth' by Aimee Mann is one of those songs for me. And it definitely shows the source one of my main frustrations post-HBP in fandom, and just... in general, because it's very much a Draco-is-self-destructively-obsessed song, haha. Even after that idea became much less canonically feasible & fandom fixated on Harry, I remained in love with that old (fanon angsty!Draco) idea. As much of a canon whore as I can seem, the truth is that I love my own story-- the Uber-story of H/D that I initially encountered through reading all those '03 H/D epics at what was clearly an impressionable age :P

It's really true that I don't need a story beyond this-- as long as I have this eternal dance between the burning moth (who 'believes in an afterglow'...) and the needy flame (that's 'never doused completely')... that's all I need. No happy ending necessary. (And I 'don't care if the flame burns well'...) This sense of knowingly embracing all the darkness and fear and reasons 'why not'... that's always what I wanted from H/D, that's why I wanted more and more and more canon-compliancy, because that's where the flames burned and the thorns were thickest. I just wanted to see this... celebration of hopeless love just like the silly romantic twit I am :P

The truth is, I said this is a Draco-pov for me, but it's also Harry-pov, that's the beauty of it... I think it's like, they switch places, it's just that Draco has to come first in my head, and then Harry perceives him as the flame burning away all his preconceptions and the things he thought he knew-- it works both ways. This personal deconstruction and pain and need goes both ways, and that's what's so mesmerizing to me about it. And they both have that 'love of heat' and Harry's got the self-destructive streak up the wazoo, you just have to get 'im started :> Not that either of them are self-aware, but I think in my head(!) they both feel like the moth, actually. And I can't help feeling that together they'd set their world on fire (till the wings burn black).

Y'know how people say they write the same story over & over again in one way or another... well, knowing that is pretty much all that's preventing from writing it again. Damn if 'A Good Flirtation' wouldn't be an awesome H/D fic title (that involved Death Eaters and Ginny and betrayal and fucking and morning-afters and regret and more fucking and more regret and violence and more fucking and so on), though. Ahhhh. Of course, all throughout, it wouldn't be jaded or really even 'dark', but rather passionate and confused and so... y'know, awkwardly stupidly adolescent, 'cause damn if things aren't on the verge of going straight to hell for both of them, potentially. Mmmm, HELL. :D So yeah, that's why I'm inflicting you all with lyrics (though it inspires me to write more of the novella, so there's that) :P Oh and there's the upload :>

The moth don't care if the flame is real
'coz flame and moth got a sweetheart deal,
and nothing fuels a good flirtation
like need and anger and desperation.

Now the moth don't care if the flame is real.
Now the moth don't care if the flame is real.

So come on, let's go. Ready or not.
'Coz there's a flame I know, hotter than hot
and with a fuse that's so thoroughly shot
away.

Since clearly I've got nothing better to do and no better content to amuse myself with, I've uploaded an album I've enjoyed playing in the background of Barnes & Noble last time I was there. Yeah, that's my idea of socializing. ^^;; I've always liked tinkly bell-like music with fey harmonies, it makes me drifty.

Anyway, it's the self-titled album from The Bird and the Bee, here. After enough repeats, it struck me this first song is actually a bit H/D-like. Sad, because H/D is more like an old mental tick than an OTP right now, really. Really this song could be about my relationship with Draco, my life in general and of course Draco and Harry. Letting them be happy would really be a no-no, 'cause who would I torture then? Who, I ask you? :)) This is particularly ironic 'cause earlier today I talked about H/D & fic with two different people and felt nothing, but this song lets me back onto my old groove like sliding on an old pair of sexy pants that make you want to boogie even though you're 40 & have a saggy butt. -.-

Say my name, say my name, say my stupid name
It's stupid how we always seem to do it again, oh

You're so stupid and perfect
And stupid and perfect
I hate you, I want you
I hate you, I hate you, oh
Again, again, again, again

That's my H/D in a really tiny nutshell, ahaha. One of these days I'll grow up & stop obsessing over desperate teenage boy wizards, and that's when I'll... probably stop writing altogether. But anyway. Ahem. I was thinking I was getting way too emo recently & I should fix that, but. It just struck me that I need to get more emo and generally useless & then the fic will start flying from my fingers; the mistake has really been trying to keep balanced and 'normal'. Ah. It's hard to write when nothing's really wrong and it's just blah. But if I wallow a bit, suddenly I want to see Draco suffer and it all works out, haha. I think it's like... being a certain emotional temperature, cooling till you're ready; the perfect fruitcake indeed. Am I depressed enough to write angst yet? No? Not quite? Must work harder. :> I mean, once I hit that ledge of total angst, I'll swing right back with sillyfic & eventually normal drama, but it's angstfic that gets me going like a shot of adrenaline right where it hurts. Everything else actually requires -effort- and we can't have that, can we.

If I listen to it enough, I'll definitely write totally angsty established-relationship post-Hogwarts fic. I almost want to. Some people get inspired by love and stuff, I get inspired by unhealthy obsession and self-destructive tendencies. THEY SAY TO WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW -.-;;;; And yet... songfic. I would be embarrassed if I wasn't so shameless. Never apologize for what gets you going, and what gets me going is definitely neither romantic nor cute yet satisfying sex fics. Actually, anytime I think of writing either anything serious or purely meant for entertainment I sort of feel like there's no reason not to put it off indefinitely. I think I forget that the reason I generally wrote is just 'cause I was too emo not to. Whatever it takes, right.

It's April and I'm actually starting to feel alive just when there aren't any more rain puddles to skip through. Oh well. Right now I'd probably just fall on my face (...still haven't slept & it's 9am... again. *headdesk*) I wanted to write about Kurt Vonnegut being dead, but... but. But. ^^;

You know, I've been online for 10 years, and... well... I'm no longer a newbie by now, right. And yet... around a week or so ago, I first came to 4chan.org image board, and told myself 'haha, well, I don't need to return there anytime soon'. Little did I know -.-

Leaving the yaoi board aside, I keep returning to the 'Random' board, /b/, and today marked some sort of milestone. Today marks the day I first saw a zillion dorks on /b/ @ 4chan.org... post pic after pic of their cocks... right after a [random] kitten thread. *___* And I mean. THERE WERE HUNDREDS. *cries* SOMETHING IN ME JUST BROKE, OKAY. :((

I'm no longer innocent. ...so I had to make a cat macro from an image on /b/. *__* this completes my journey. o_0

( ...oh my gahd, it's full of COCKS. *___* )

Man... I'm sort of lost, seriously lost in reading the Kelley Armstrong's 'Women of the Otherworld' series right now, but if anything could remind me of the absolute glory that is fanfic and fanfic alone, it's eliade's super-duper-comprehensive list o'kinks. WOW. Even the (...few) ones I don't think I could ever enjoy make me happy somehow, but what makes me happy even more is sort of wallowing in the self-indulgence of it all. I mean, there is no way in hell any commercial novel or even yaoi manga will ever feel this self-indulgent to me.

I don't mean the sexual kink part of it is what makes me happy... it's emotional/sexual/characterization/plot-kink all wrapped together and tied with a little bow the way only good old-school non-PWP fanfic does it. Man. I sort of want to go through all of those and combine some, mess with some, but write every single one. Crazy, and it'd take forever, but man oh man. *___* Oh fanfic, you've been so good to me. ♥ On some level, I really do love & appreciate all those kinks, at least in theory. Man, even the 'woke up gay' one. I am feeling the fandom loffff, okay. This sort of thing makes me proud, somehow. *laughs*

I was just thinking that of course I have a kink for bad boys & rogues, say, but I also have a kink for good guys done right! I would even go so far as to say you couldn't have interesting 'bad' boys or trickster types without interesting 'good' boys & vice versa. I think after all these years of reading romance fic, basically I don't have any cliche left unexplored in terms of reading and probably appreciating. Though seriously, I haven't read about kidnapped concubines in way too long... or swords... or people trapped in caves(!!!)... or tentacle sex (*SOBS*)... and man, it's really been awhile since I've seen some good wingfic... dammit!! :D

One of my major beefs with H/D fics has always probably sekritly been that they don't really fulfill my kinks because they tend to be pretty repetitive in terms of what cliches they employ, when there are simply so many to choose from, heh. And also, of course, execution suffers-- like, you -could- make any cliche or kink work, but you also need to pick one that fits the characters if you don't want to work too hard. But yeah, I'm totally okay with reading for kink as long as there's this variety of kink out there coupled with good writing. Man. That's the definition of addictive, right there. *__*

So um, sometimes I'm bored and I read Salon.com (har har), and there's an interesting article right now about Milan Kundera's lit-crit book, here. Apparently, Kundera says something to the effect of all 'true' literature needing to offer some insight into the nature of existence, and it needs to do this through formalism or meta-commentary of some sort rather than a mimetic representation of life. I sort of laugh and at the same time feel bad, 'cause I know where he's coming from, emotionally speaking; it's not so long ago that I thought Harry/Draco fics should answer or at least pose deep questions about the pairing or they're worthless :P
    And I agree with the author of the review in that these 'theories' in a writer really say more about -them- and what inspires them than the literature they're supposedly critiquing. I mean, criticism is inherently about the work itself rather than the critic's issues, isn't it? You shouldn't bring too many expectations/outside influences to your analysis, or it'll automatically be skewed and most likely didactic (so annoying). Which is a lot of the problem I have with some HP meta I've seen... but yeah. -.-;;;

The reason I mention all this is that there's a quote by Roland Barthes included in the article (whose 'Lover's Discourse' is awesome): "Literature is a question without an answer."

I was just thinking that this applies to romance stories in an interesting way, doesn't it; especially 'genre' romance relies so much on answering questions.
    ( blaaaaargh. )
~~

In other, more Zodiac-related news: Robert Downey Jr still super hot even as a drunk bum. Well, he was my teenage crush, what do you want. :/ Jake Gyllenhaal surprisingly much MUCH hotter as a dork. SO MUCH HOTTER. *_____* Like 0 to 60. D:

I'm just curious: does anyone else have the 'too much explaining' or 'information-dump overload' pet-peeve while reading?

Like, you know how popular authors tend to be the ones who make every little fact they introduce totally 'clear' (except it's too clear), and even moreso when it gets into the land of telling-not-showing a character's feelings? Maybe I'm just hating on what's basically a standard third-person narrator; maybe I've become so used to super-narrow limited third-person that regular semi-omniscient third-person just feels like nails on a blackboard.

So okay, a character is introduced, and of course we have to know everything about his background as soon as possible in little asides (how many sisters and brothers, their occupations and personalities, all in nice little sound-bytes). Or the character receives a new 'mysterious object' that he doesn't know the use of, so he just randomly 'decides' to call it something like 'the Key' out of nowhere, wtf (and you can tell this is just another attempt to information-dump 'subtly'). Or because he doesn't want to be seen as a loser 'cause he can't run with his gym class since he has asthma, we the readers obviously need a whole background explanation of exactly what this means about his character and how this reaction came about, and btw, here's what he guesses is the personality types of the other kids around him and the gym-teacher, blah-blah-blah -.-

Just, can I get a little build-up to things naturally unfolding here? Sure, I get that there is a Larger Mystery at hand and -that's- what's getting the build-up (which is why we have all these Clues), but not everything needs to be strategically spoon-fed as a Clue! I feel like I'm being carefully hand-walked down the street and forced to observe all street signs and wait to cross only at the green light when specifically told to by the author, that kind of thing. It's just extremely annoying to me to be constantly 'informed' of things, I dunno :/ It feels very very oddly as if I'm reading nonfiction this way o_0

So like, this is a children's book (by Garth Nix, btw, called 'Mister Monday'), but I don't think it -has- to be this way just 'cause it's a children's book, and besides, lots of 'adult' popular novelists (and popular fanfic writers) write this way too. One of the worst examples is James Patterson and also Piers Anthony and hell, most of the popular fantasy authors (JKR is pretty bad about this too, to say the least). It's not -just- the tell-not-show thing (which is generally about feelings being ideally shown through action, right?), 'cause really it's also reflected in any writing style you can tell is meant to be 'clear'. Except instead of being 'clear', it's beating the reader about the head with clue-by-fours and spoon-feeding every piece of info with carefully measured constant doses, where -everything- that happens very clearly Means A Very Specific Thing.

I feel totally robbed of a lot of the pleasure of reading itself like this; it's like, by over-defining everything to such a degree, they're preventing me from having room within the story to imagine. Without that room, what's the use of reading fantasy lit in the first place? And yet, a lot of times the actual content of these sorts of books is quite imaginative on the surface level, at least, and they're often full of adventure & are addictive to read. Or, they would be if I wasn't constantly being thrown out of the narrative when I notice that once again, I'm being Told Something Important. Meh. -.-

I really wonder if the writer has a long list of Information They Must Import in their heads and/or laptops, and every paragraph is there to meet a quota of needed informativeness and usefulness to the plot. Plotplotplotplotplotplot... *killkilldestroy* :/ The funny thing is really that you can just -tell- how the events/character types themselves are clearly made to be 'fun' and easily understood/identified with, it's just that the writer goes way overboard making the worst sort of Hollywood movie from the fun material till it's just inane.... Yeah, inane is definitely the word; it's that leeching of mystery until every 'weird' event and 'quirky' character seems flat as a pancake.
    I don't know what happened with Garth Nix, btw; 'Sabriel' was super-awesome. *wibbles*

Randomly: I notice that I care more about disproving the minor errors and inadequacies of people with whose philosophy and overall approach to life and things I basically agree, rather than with those I emphatically disagree.
    It's not that I don't like to be disagreed with-- that's quite invigorating, actually; it's more that I feel there needs to be an agreed-upon approach to an issue for it to be open to productive discussion, and more than half the time the approach is already half the battle. So much of the time, the reason people disagree is because at heart, they don't have the same basic ideas about 'what's important in life' (or about the subject). People will even build perfectly logical chains of thought that I'd respect, except their basis is so cracked out there's no saving them.

...Perhaps that kind of says a lot about the joys and pitfalls of my experience in fandom :>

Mostly, though, I am too lazy and also too easily frustrated to try and converse with people who're utterly convinced of things I consider to be utterly idiotic. Which is why I wasn't cut out for a debate about politics with my friend yesterday (which she seemed to want). My friend has a pet issue she was trying to present to me as the Ultimate Solution to Our Ills, and she kept telling me certain things that I could nod at or say small things about (which she discounted because they were 'merely fact'), but in the end, in the face of someone's utter conviction, I have nothing much to say (to their face) unless I immediately and instinctively agree. Alas.

Perhaps she sensed my disagreement & was frustrated by my refusing to voice it; but it wasn't that I refused or was consciously avoiding conflict so much as unable to enter the fray without having a common language. I have no desire to talk past someone, and I'm willing to have a discussion only if I sense the other person's open to if not persuasion then a certain open-endedness of thought. (This is also why I pretty much don't talk about politics with -anyone- and avoid politics in general; it seems there's something about the subject that makes everyone a lot less open-ended and a lot more dogmatic. But maybe that's just me.)

It's just a bit ironic that I have so little of use to say about something so obviously 'meaningful' and applicable as current politics, and yet have so much to say about the ideological details of a fantasy book I'm reading (to the point where I'd easily-- and passionately-- discuss its internal politics with someone who cared). Perhaps it's at least partly that I do agree with 70% of Alison Croggon's cosmology, stylistic concerns & her ethics and think her execution is sometimes off or her follow-through is lazy, whereas I just can't identify to that extent with anything commonly said about current affairs by... pretty much anyone (though I find people have 'good ideas', it's nothing to fire me up). So. I dunno, I don't have a point ;P

I think part of my theoretical willingness to talk fantasy-world politics might be that we can (usually) agree on starting points; in the real world, it seems everyone's much more free to make up their facts (or more specifically, the salient facts) as they go along, and it's a major achievement if you feel you're reading from 'the same canon' >.> I guess that's why so many people have 'causes' and organizations they particularly support; they like to feel they're working with people who have a similar slant on 'salient facts'. Somehow, though, I can never find groups that have around 10 (at least) focus issues from all sorts of different ideological areas (not something like 'human rights', which is just a grouping of related issues), and to me, a holistic understanding is the only one I'm that interested in. Really, I'd like to ideally address as much of the real-world 'canon' as possible, but most people think that's hopeless so I just shut up. Meh. *babbles*

I'm really sort of embarrassed about this, so I put off posting it, but if shaggirl says go, then it's go :D

This is what happens when I see too many mangas with extra-explicit kissing scenes where one person is always holding up the other as they swoon, clutching at them like a drowning person. Um. -.-;;; They say write what you know, but I write what I read. *facepalm*

( `The Kissing Clause' - in which we discover that Harry is really a teenage girl. Or not. But Malfoy has a wicked tongue. )

So yes, to my own surprise, I wrote a V-Day H/D fic, the first one I remember finishing for February 14th. Um. It's all furiosity's fault, 'cause her fic reminded me of having written another pub fic ages ago ('Fighting Dirty') and I got all nostalgic for H/D, and also I realized I've never actually written smitten!Harry as such, much to mistful's onetime woe, hehe.

Well, I tried. Couldn't keep the sarcasm off the premises, but you can't say I didn't try! :P Anyway, um, enjoy? heh.

( `Gagging for It' - H/D, baby - they say everyone's a fool for love, but Harry Potter is really an idiot. )

I think I just realized something: one of the big-ass reasons (if not -the- reason) I'm more into analyzing fanon than canon for fun is because the sort of analysis that amuses me the most is comparative analysis. As much as I hate (hate... HATE) cliches, repetitiveness and so on, my ear is so tuned to its birth and construction that I can't help fixating. Where would I -be- without cliches to rail against (ahh, the horror of originality and/or 'merely canon')? You cannot appreciate what you cannot pervert :D

Anyway, this lovely thought occurred to me as I was skimming the pdf file for the 4th issue of 'Subterranean', an original fantasy/sci-fi fic & crit magazine. There's a lovely article by Teresa Nielsen Hayden called 'Remarks on Some Clichés I Have (by Definition) Known Too Well' :D And as much as I can commiserate and bemoan the horrendous lack of intelligence and judgment shown all too often by aspiring genre writers, there's just something so... deeply satisfying seeing them nailed down (and watching them SQUIRM, MWAHAHAHA!... ahem.)

She lists some of the doozies in a section of her article called 'A bestiary of cliches', and these are my favorites:

   - Mysterious alien technology generally takes the form of a single giant object.
   - If you need more power, you could always find it somewhere-- most often, by Trying Harder.
   - Attractive women can sometimes fall for weird-looking nonhumans, but attractive men only fall for attractive women.
   - Humans go crazy in hundreds of different ways, but crazy androids invariably become homicidal.
   - It's always a scientist who goes too far, rather than an engineer or the marketing department or the county board of supervisors.
   - Turning evil gives you a big power boost, but your dialogue deteriorates and your wardrobe just gets bizarre.
   - Future societies may be more technologically advanced than our own, but if they think they're more advanced than we are, they're always wrong. (except Star Trek!! awww....)
   - Any life-threatening medical problem afflicting a significant character can be alleviated by screaming "You can't do this to me! I love you, goddammit!" at them.
   - And if you hit someone over the head and steal their Stormtrooper armor or hooded robe, you can take their place in a complex ceremony without missing a beat. :D :D :D

Man, this is the stuff that makes my life WORTH LIVING (...sometimes. *cough*)