Five Things Meme

[icarus_chained]

Comment to this post and I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your LJ and elaborate on the subjects given.

Steampunk (The Wind At Midnight) -

The first long fic I ever finished. 54 000 words +. Most fun I ever had writing anything.

I think mostly that was because Steampunk is a genre I adore. And this fic let me play with everything in it, everything Jules Verne ever taught me to adore as a child. I mean, flying cities! Heroism, honour, betrayal, loyalty! Brass and steam and gears and mechanical men! Love and romance in the old sense of the word, when romance was any dream of greater things, and love the greatest part of all. Hope for the future, and the honest dreams of what technology would one day bring us. Dreams of human potential, and the universe beneath our feet, and the honour and courage and intelligence to reach out and touch it. Knowledge of human evil, it's terrible power, but hope that we have greater good in us to overcome it. Exploration, vast and wondering. Society, military and layered and full of forms, strangely beautiful despite it's stiffling nature. The slightly archaic tone that brings the past all the way along with us into the future, the touch of dreams we dreamed when we were young, and that even now colour our view of the world. What child never dreamed of flying to the moon, or the robot teacher, or the dashing hero, or the troubled prince, or piracy and adventure in the skies? What adult does not yet hope, in some secret part of their heart, for those dreams to one day come true? Steampunk is those dreams, for me. And foolish me, I hope one day they happen.

Selina -

Oh, Selina! Truly, one of the most beautiful and tragic and proud women in the DCU, and indeed anywhere. Fragile and catty and playful and bitchy, aloof, outside the law, outside all the social norms we believe in. Socialite, yes, but it's a game. Diamonds and playboys, all a game, an acquisition, something to soothe the place in her heart that was always empty and outside and alone, surrounded by ugliness and grabby men. Such power she seeks! The power to bewitch and beguile, to slip catfooted through others lives and steal from them all that was denied her. A game of power, that means everything to her. Freedom, from everyone and everything that sought to bind her, to put her in a box and define her, curtail her, make her just another woman to be used. And oh, but how she loves. Expecting nothing, hoping for everything, holding out her heart knowing it will be crushed, playing distant and hard-to-get, the come-hither that leaves him free to leave, for all she hopes and needs him not to. Oh, Bruce, honey-baby, there are times when you are so stupid!

Victorian Age -

The Dream of Steel and Steam, the Age of Empire, the Industrial Revolution, the age of crime and brutality and exploration and expansion and wonder. The age of stifling societal norms, and lurid underground escapades. The age of Jack the Ripper, the Wild Wild West, of Queen Victoria and the Indian Mutiny and Petrie and Tesla, and a thousand larger-than-life figures in an age that gave us the original celebrities. An age that craved excitement, bottled up inside their living rooms, drifting in clubs, bowed beneath the weight of poverty and drudgery, beneath wealth and expectations and boredom. An age swinging between extremes, populated by explorers and archaeologists and soldiers and spies and court intrigue and international plays for power, and also factories and orphans, criminals and policemen, high-necked dresses and booming prostitution. The era of the prospector and the card-sharp. An age ruled by the clockwork flow of the trains and ships that moved the world, timed to a tee, expansion marked by the gleaming steel snail's-trail of railways. An age where everything seemed possible, all at once, and the world never seemed so vast and understandable and wonderous, fraught with danger and brutality and cheap perfume. The gaslit age, full of brightness and shadows and broken dreams, and glorious figures of stern queens and daring men that defied it all. Notorious and beautiful. The age of dreams.

Archaeology -

We build the future on layers of the past, everything sinking in it's turn beneath the ground, everything waiting to be discovered, years and centuries and millenia later. Bones of ancestors, cooking pots and jewellry, graves and hearths and petrified corn. We touch the past, with archaeology, touch with our own hands something someone centuries past held in theirs, something that means something, that gives us a glimpse of those lost lives, that shows us what our future will be built on.

Areas I love, in particular, would be Viking archaeology (my specialisation in college), Egyptology, environmental archaeology, and random ecclectic bits from Norman Europe, Ancient China, South America, and basically any other place or time that catches my interest. I've even taken a class on meteorological archaeology, tracing weather patterns and their effect on society through the past thousand years. It just ... catches me, the layer of past upon past, of influence upon influence, the tracing of weather and society and people and geography and history, and all the facets of life, back through time and place, linking them together, trying to understand, to see the world and its people in all their myriad glories from now back to the beginning, and using it to extrapolate forward to the future.

And also, on a basic level, I'm a tactile person. Archaeology is history you can touch.

Film Noir -

The aesthetic. The black&white, the trickery of it, because in noir nothing is ever, ever so simple, and what black&white really means is shades of grey and brown and sepia. Where nobody ever says anything straight, and the dames are tricky and fragile and beautiful and bad, and the heroes are dirty and flawed and romantic, and the crime is low-key, ugly and corrupt, grey ugliness to make the love and honour shine out all the brighter and more desperate and doomed. The air of a world made cynical by too many wars, too many betrayals of the bright and child-like dreams of earlier eras, the feel of a people aged by hardship, turned inward and corrupt, and clinging to the last vestiges of hope and beauty. Claustrophobic, in many ways, indoors and night and rain, the world wrapped close around you like a dirty, clinging lover, desperate to hold you, crushing you inside it's embrace. Where all the love is for now and only now, because no-one has faith in the future, but that doesn't matter. Because it's beautiful while you have it, and after all we've suffered, we've learned to love things while we have them.

Film Noir comes from a time when all that was true, when the World Wars had worn everyone down to the bone, when our faith in humanity was shattered, but we couldn't quite restrain the hope despite it all. It was a genre that celebrated the more fragile, immediate beauties, having lost touch with grander dreams. It was close and intimate and dirty, cynical and faded, and bright despite it all, beautiful and in love with the here-and-now, with all that that could give us as the only thing we could have. It was beautiful, a genre that makes you love the little things, and treasure people for the little time you have them, despite all their flaws.

And yes, I am a desperate romantic. Sue me. *smiles*