Beyond Selidor

In your own space, talk about your favorite trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme.



Why limit myself to just one? Here is a non-exhaustive list of stuff I like — sometimes just in fanfic, sometimes just in professional writing, sometimes in both. I think the boundaries between tropes, clichés, kinks and so on can sometimes be a bit blurred, so I'm not going to define any of these narrative/character/relationship preferences as one thing or the other.

Enemies/antagonists to friends/allies/lovers is something I will eat up with a spoon. I like it in both its variants — where the characters differ in their approaches, methods or aims but are essentially both fundamentally correct, and where one character is clearly in the right and the other one is at best wrong and at worst straight up evil. I guess in essence I like characters being thrown into situations that force them to reevaluate their core understanding of themselves, and these kinds of relationships often do this.

Hurt/comfort is one of my favourite things to read, although I don't like it so much in visual media. Like many people in my Dreamwidth circle, I tend to have firm preferences for which character is hurt, and which one is doing the comforting. I sometimes like this trope in combination with the enemies-to-lovers one, in which one character comforts the other for hurt that they themselves inflicted, but it depends on the fandom.

I don't really know how to describe this one succinctly, but basically stories about women enduring awful stuff at the hands of men in patriarchal societies, and finding a sense of community and common purpose within these terrible situations. Survival is the important thing here — I don't need the women to escape or overthrow their oppressors within the narrative, but they need to be able to find ways to survive and find meaning and connection with each other in the margins. Examples of what I'm talking about include Mad Max: Fury Road, Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls, and stuff like that.

Human/non-human pairings where the human character stays mortal, the non-human character remains a vampire/demon/otherworldly fairy/etc etc, but they both transform each other in other ways. The irreconcilable differences are the thing, here — I don't want them reconciled by the vampire's human girlfriend becoming a vampire herself, or the god who falls in love with a human giving up immortality for love.

Stories in which the ordinary work of everyday life is made magical and heroic, especially tasks typically perceived (whether correctly or incorrectly) as having been 'women's work' in a historical setting. I particularly like this if the story hinges on mentor relationships between girls and women, relationships between sisters (or girls who are raised in a situation that is essentially like being sisters), mothers and daughters, and so on.

Stories about characters who were made to feel frightened once, reacted (to put it mildly) extremely poorly to this, and decided the only reasonable course of action is to warp the world around them such that they will never, never be made to feel fear again — even if they burn down the world and all their relationships with it. An example of this type of story is the Peaky Blinders tv series.

Stories that are fundamentally dystopian (or ushering in something that will result in utter destruction of everything the characters valued — they just can't see it yet or can't do anything to stop it), in which the characters do their best to carve out meaning and joy, build community and remain essentially true to their own ethics, even if their efforts are marginal at best and are like twigs attempting to shore up a torrential flood. Examples of this type of story are — in different ways — The Lions of Al-Rassan (Guy Gavriel Kay), Hambly's Benjamin January mysteries, and the Babylon BerlinTV series.

Do you have any specific narrative/character preferences?

Thank you for writing for me!

I'm pretty easygoing about what type of fic you want to write for me. I read fic of any rating, and would be equally happy with plotty genfic or something very shippy. I read gen, femslash, het and slash, although I have a slight preference towards femslash, het, and gen that focuses on female characters. I mainly read fic to find out what happens to characters after the final page has turned or the credits have rolled, so I would particularly love to have futurefic of some kind. Don't feel you have to limit yourself to the characters I specifically mention — I'm happy with others being included if they fit with the story you want to tell.

Feel free to have a look around my Ao3 profile, as it should give you a good idea of the types of things I like to read. You can also look at my Yuletide tag, which includes past letters, and recs posts of my previous gifts and other fic I've enjoyed in previous Yuletide colletions.

( General likes )

( DNWs )

Fandom-specific prompts:



( The Bone Season — Samantha Shannon )

( The Lions of Al-Rassan - Guy Gavriel Kay )

( The Pagan Chronicles - Catherine Jinks )

Don't feel you have to stick rigidly within the bounds of my prompts. As long as your fic is focused on the characters I requested, I will be thrilled to receive anything you write for me, as these really are some of my most beloved fandoms of the heart, and the existence of any fic for them will make me extremely happy.

And, like much of the rest of Europe, back we go into lockdown. To be honest, given I've been working from home throughout the entire period in which the lockdown was supposedly lifted, and barely left the house, not much in my immediate life will change. What's more worrying is that this second lockdown is happening without the furlough scheme. Don't get me wrong, we absolutely need to go into lockdown — there were more than 20,000 new cases in the past twenty-four hours — but we can't just close the entire retail and hospitality sector with a shrug of the shoulders. (Edited to add that it looks like the furlough scheme is being relaunched for workers in the affected industries, so that's at least one positive.)

I've spent most of this morning prodding at my Yuletide assignment. I think I've written about a third of it, although I was focusing more on just vomiting words out onto the page, so what exists will need substantial editing. I always find it easier to just write as quickly as possible, and focus on the editing later, though, so I feel like I'm moving at exactly the right speed.

In terms of a media roundup for this month, I've not finished very much in the way of TV — just two shows (although Matthias and I have a lot of ongoing series on the go at the moment).

( Two TV shows and a book )

( A video essay about Fury Road costuming, and the latest bizarre real estate listing )

I hope everyone's being kind to themselves in these darkening days.

I have written a ficlet in response to the second prompt of the sunshine_challenge, which is the word 'orange'.

The fic is in the Lions of Al-Rassan fandom, and you can find it on Ao3.

Gather Your Memories Against the Dark (788 words) by Dolorosa
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Lions of Al-Rassan - Guy Gavriel Kay
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Rodrigo Belmonte/Jehane bet Ishak/Ammar ibn Khairan, future Rodrigo Belmonte/Jehane bet Ishak/Ammar ibn Khairan/Miranda Belmonte
Characters: Jehane bet Ishak, Ammar ibn Khairan, Rodrigo Belmonte
Summary:

Late at night in the winter darkness, Ammar, Jehane, and Rodrigo carve out a memory for themselves.

This fic was written for the 2020 Sunshine Challenge, to the prompt of 'orange'.

As soon as I saw the prompt, I knew I wanted to write something for this fandom, and I have spent much of the past two days rereading this gorgeous, tragic, beautiful book, which is among my favourite things I've ever read. Much of the weight of its story is the terrible knowing grief that suffuses it — of a beautiful world and culture dancing towards its own destruction, and of three wonderful, brave, clever people who love this world with all their being, but whose own bravery and cleverness are in part what brings about its inevitable destruction. I don't have it in me to rewrite that ending, but I thought at least I could give the three of them a brief moment of light and happiness.

I got back on Saturday from a week's holiday in Andalusia with my mother, but because I had to go back almost immediately to work, I only just got the time to write about it now. In short: I loved it, I thought it was incredible, and I would go back again in a heartbeat. I had been worried that everywhere would seem too overwhelmed with tourists — more like theme parks than cities, in the vein of Venice and Prague, both of which I've been to — but although the presence of tourists was obvious in all three cities, they were not completely overrun and it wasn't as if we had trouble walking down the street due to the crowds (which is what I found in Prague). If you do visit these cities, however, and want to visit big tourist attractions, I would recommend booking online in advance, as we did, as some of the places allocate most of their available bookings to big tour groups and it's almost impossible to get a ticket on the day.

We flew into Seville and spent three days there, during which time we visited the cathedral, Plaza de España, Real Alcazar (a beautiful old palace with wonderful gardens), and an amazing underground bathhouse with a salt bath (you float around, buoyed up by the salt as in the Dead Sea), spa, steam room and trio of warm, hot and cold pools.

After that we took the train to Granada, where we stayed for two days. The main reason to go to Granada is to see the Alhambra, which we did. I spent the entire time wandering around in complete and utter speechless awe. It's certainly one of the most incredible places I've been in my life, and I was overwhelmed with emotion to be there. Here are some photos I took, and here are some videos of one of the many fountains in the Alhambra grounds. In addition to the Alhambra, we discovered a pretty little park while walking around on our last half-day in Granada, filled with fountains, peacocks and orange trees.

Then it was onwards to Córdoba for our final two days. We again took the train. Our main focus in terms of tourist attractions in Córdoba was the mosque-cathedral, which has the history of the city, and the area more generally, written in layers into its architecture. I have a photoset here, but it's hard to capture the sheer size and scale of the interior. We did not book in advance for this, but I do recommend showing up at opening time (a little before 10am) as we did, as it meant we were able to wander around the building when it was nearly empty, and almost completely free of large tour groups.

After Córdoba it was back to Seville, and then homeward. (The less said about the two-and-a-half hour wait at Stansted for Ryanair to unload our bags and announce the carousel on which those on our flight could collect them, the better. Suffice it to say that I describe flying Ryanair as 'playing Ryanair roulette': you're always braced for something to go wrong, and eventually something will go spectacularly awry.)

I've travelled quite a lot, and seen many amazing places, but I would have to say that of all the places in the world that I've visited, this corner of Spain is probably one of my favourites. It's a really pleasant region in which to be a tourist: trains are cheap and reliable, the cities are easy to get around in by walking (and public transport is good if walking is going to be a problem), and food is both delicious, and unbelievably cheap (I was astonished to find that two people could eat a really nice dinner which included wine and mineral water for about 30 euro). I'm the sort of person who finds places whose difficult, complicated history is written into the architecture to be completely emotionally overwhelming (and I probably didn't help matters by deliberately bringing my copy of Guy Gavriel Kay's The Lions of Al-Rassan and making a point of reading some of it in every city, culminating in a tearful reread of its final pages in the hotel in Córdoba). Andalusia obviously has a lot of this, and it hit me really hard — in a good way.