dragonlady7 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dragonlady7) wrote2019-02-01 11:26 am
dragonlady7) wrote2019-02-01 11:26 am
Entry tags:
miscellany and fic snippet
It's my Nameday today, which isn't something I grew up caring about, but Dude's family are Baltic and it's a Thing for them. They're like a mini birthday-- it's the day on the saint's calendar corresponding to the saint you're named for, right? So. Anyway, it's handy for people whose birthdays are ill-timed (like Dude, on New Year's Eve)-- and I've been meaning for years to hold a party on my own nameday, because what better time to have a party than today? Nobody's up to anything this time of year, and it's cold so you might as well party, right??
But I have never had a house suitable for hosting parties, and nothing else has ever worked out, so.
So no Nameday party for me. But I think that ice cream joint finally opened up after being lazy useless nothing lumps for the entire blizzard, in my hours of need, so in the afternoon I'm going to find out, and maybe finally fulfill my terrible ongoing ice cream craving. (Last night I was having heartburn before bed and had to eat something but there was nothing in the house. Dude clearly felt similarly, and seemed delighted to eat a bunch of tortilla chips, of all the heathen degeneracy; he has no regrets about us not having any ice cream in the house, and cannot be trusted to look out for my interests, if he can eat Tostitos Hint of Lime tortilla chips for dessert. Ugh!)
(I like Tostitos Hint Of Lime, I bought them myself. But not for dessert.)
At any rate.
I've wasted rather a bit of time indulging myself in writing a tiny bit of fic, sort of? for Uprooted, and I present to you probably the only worthwhile chunk of the whole piece, which is Sarkan writing a treatise on Do As I Say, Not As I Do, or Why You Shouldn't Sleep With Your Apprentice, starring The Guy Who Slept With His Apprentice And Saved The World, largely out of my own sense of dawning resignation at the fact that I was getting super into the ship in a story where clearly the teenage heroine was falling in love with her literally century-old mentor. And like, it's not creepy or gross at all in the story, but on the face of it, he's like a hundred and fifty and kind of a dick, and she's this innocent pure literal teenager, and I usually hate stories like that. (I'm not being all Anti here, it's not pedophilia or anything, I'm just super over the omnipresent literary trope of the middle-aged man who is somehow Uniquely [Inexplicably!] Attractive to the nubile, extremely vulnerable, young protege he's supposed to be teaching. And I get that it's a thing many people are into, it's just always bored me or grossed me out, and I don't mean to judge the many people who genuinely are into it, because you have a right to be into shit you're into for whatever reasons you're into it, I'm not trying to @ anybody and don't @ me kinktomato!) The difference? Ha ha, I bet a lot of it had to do with the fact that a woman wrote this novel. (Because my gosh there is so much consent framework built up, and a whole arc of him proving his respect of her, and an accounting of the ways in which he has unwittingly abused his power over people in the past, and such. Boy does he ever get confronted.) And also since wizards don't age normally, it's not like he's some saggy elderly wizened creature, so it does make a bit more sense than the innumerable literary fictions with thinly-veiled self-inserts of the writer as a graying, paunchy middle-aged bookish sort.
But also, like. Well, my response is to write a literal treatise about it from the character's point of view. (And yes, canonically, his only other romantic entanglement is self-reported, by him, as not a flattering story, and he was made a fool of in it, but the object of his affections was a mature adult woman with a whole lot of agency of her own and it seems apparent that was a feature, not a bug, even though it ultimately meant she was playing him.) And like. Also she clearly can kick his ass and for him that's kind of why it's even appealing, so. (Listen I know what I like and that? That's what I like.)(Shit now I know the next fic I have to write god damn it I wasn't going to even be in this fandom I just wanted to write a treatise.)
. At any rate, here's the snippet.
I may or may not ever publish the rest of it, I clearly just needed to work that out. Also note with my ages, above, this is a story set in a kind of pseudo-medieval High Fantasy kind of setting, so not only is menarche a bit later, so is old age a little earlier, so.
ok i have to do some work so I can justify taking that lunch break to finally fucking eat ice cream
don't worry shitpost february I'll do you justice but here's my contribution until then
But I have never had a house suitable for hosting parties, and nothing else has ever worked out, so.
So no Nameday party for me. But I think that ice cream joint finally opened up after being lazy useless nothing lumps for the entire blizzard, in my hours of need, so in the afternoon I'm going to find out, and maybe finally fulfill my terrible ongoing ice cream craving. (Last night I was having heartburn before bed and had to eat something but there was nothing in the house. Dude clearly felt similarly, and seemed delighted to eat a bunch of tortilla chips, of all the heathen degeneracy; he has no regrets about us not having any ice cream in the house, and cannot be trusted to look out for my interests, if he can eat Tostitos Hint of Lime tortilla chips for dessert. Ugh!)
(I like Tostitos Hint Of Lime, I bought them myself. But not for dessert.)
At any rate.
I've wasted rather a bit of time indulging myself in writing a tiny bit of fic, sort of? for Uprooted, and I present to you probably the only worthwhile chunk of the whole piece, which is Sarkan writing a treatise on Do As I Say, Not As I Do, or Why You Shouldn't Sleep With Your Apprentice, starring The Guy Who Slept With His Apprentice And Saved The World, largely out of my own sense of dawning resignation at the fact that I was getting super into the ship in a story where clearly the teenage heroine was falling in love with her literally century-old mentor. And like, it's not creepy or gross at all in the story, but on the face of it, he's like a hundred and fifty and kind of a dick, and she's this innocent pure literal teenager, and I usually hate stories like that. (I'm not being all Anti here, it's not pedophilia or anything, I'm just super over the omnipresent literary trope of the middle-aged man who is somehow Uniquely [Inexplicably!] Attractive to the nubile, extremely vulnerable, young protege he's supposed to be teaching. And I get that it's a thing many people are into, it's just always bored me or grossed me out, and I don't mean to judge the many people who genuinely are into it, because you have a right to be into shit you're into for whatever reasons you're into it, I'm not trying to @ anybody and don't @ me kinktomato!) The difference? Ha ha, I bet a lot of it had to do with the fact that a woman wrote this novel. (Because my gosh there is so much consent framework built up, and a whole arc of him proving his respect of her, and an accounting of the ways in which he has unwittingly abused his power over people in the past, and such. Boy does he ever get confronted.) And also since wizards don't age normally, it's not like he's some saggy elderly wizened creature, so it does make a bit more sense than the innumerable literary fictions with thinly-veiled self-inserts of the writer as a graying, paunchy middle-aged bookish sort.
But also, like. Well, my response is to write a literal treatise about it from the character's point of view. (And yes, canonically, his only other romantic entanglement is self-reported, by him, as not a flattering story, and he was made a fool of in it, but the object of his affections was a mature adult woman with a whole lot of agency of her own and it seems apparent that was a feature, not a bug, even though it ultimately meant she was playing him.) And like. Also she clearly can kick his ass and for him that's kind of why it's even appealing, so. (Listen I know what I like and that? That's what I like.)
. At any rate, here's the snippet.
She was young enough to still be coltish and awkward; my tastes had, in the days when I still had them, always run toward self-possessed, mature women. I had never understood what glamor the idea of an innocent, teenaged mistress held for powerful men, and to this day I still rather darkly suspect that much of it is not any dewy bloom of youth-- genuinely, you tell me an immature child of sixteen, barely pubescent and not yet at her full growth, is somehow intrinsically more beautiful than that same woman would be at twenty-five, or thirty, in her prime, grown into all her features, secure in her faculties, with her tastes fully developed, discerning and competent? This is not an objective assessment by any criteria!-- so much as it is the knowledge that a very young woman won’t know any better than to be dazzled by whatever mediocre wit an older man can muster.
I may or may not ever publish the rest of it, I clearly just needed to work that out. Also note with my ages, above, this is a story set in a kind of pseudo-medieval High Fantasy kind of setting, so not only is menarche a bit later, so is old age a little earlier, so.
ok i have to do some work so I can justify taking that lunch break to finally fucking eat ice cream
don't worry shitpost february I'll do you justice but here's my contribution until then