For all you shatter is our seeming, And in breaking we are free

There are moments when I realise that the continuum between fanfic, AU and original story can be very, very short when it comes to my writing. It makes me wonder somewhat about my writing impulses.

There are several original worlds/storylines that I basically run as comfort stories in my head. I mean, when I'm walking or thinking or somewhere without access to external stories, or when I'm lying abed trying to sleep and kind of failing at it, or just when I want to ramble around in some world that isn't this one, I tend to grab around among the stories in my head until I find one that feels good right now, and let it run awhile.

I'm mentioning this now because I was running one earlier, and tracing it back through earlier iterations out of curiosity's sake, and abruptly remembered that that story had initially started out as a fandom AU. It'd been more or less morphed beyond all recognition by the present iteration, but it had actually started as a mental fanfic.

And there are a couple of those, now that I'm remembering them. I tend to write AUs at the drop of a hat, and to imagine AUs for half the bloody canons I've ever seen/read, and some of the ones I don't end up actually writing as fanfic have a tendency to shift on me. Just as an illustration, a couple of the ones I actually ended up writing fragments of in their orig-fic forms:

Um. This is a direct result of my basically failing to successfully post meta earlier. So, as the natural solution, I post a meta about posting meta (and making safe spaces and commenting on other people's fic and being baffled by the social end of fandom and this whole 'fandom, how do you do it' thing). Because that'll work, obviously. Extremely personally biased/based, to warn you.

Ah. For reasons that will be perfectly obvious from the post itself, I may have trouble keeping this up/responding to comments on it -_-;

Or. Um. My interpretation, specificially as an Aspie, of same. I'm not sure I want to post this, and may take it down later? But for now:

I recently found a link to a meta by Saucery about OTP pairings, and how they're based on a fundamental dichotomy between the two characters that the viewer finds appealing. Like Arthur/Eames (solidity/fluidity) or Steve/Tony (responsibility/irreverence). Like that. And I was looking at my own pairings, and the only one that immediately pinged for that was Spock/McCoy (logic/emotion), except it was more complicated than that (mind you, I suspect it always is).

So I ended up thinking about that. About that binary and the way I interact with it as presented in media. Logic vs emotion, the perpetual war that people seem to think exists between the two. The old romanticism vs enlightenment debate, which seems to run in cycles through most of modern history (and thus a lot of media). And about Spock/McCoy, and why that pairing pinged so visceral a response because of that.

Okay. So. The second part of my 'slightly annoyed about Holmes' essay (yes, I'm going to be slightly stubborn about this). This one is on ACD Holmes' interpersonal relations in the original stories.

I feel I should clarify, before I continue, that I'm not necessarily annoyed by the adaptations themselves, though I prefer some over others. It's the fact that people seem to be saying the original was such-and-such a thing in light of the adaptations, when in fact he wasn't. Much as you generally can't really judge canon characters sight-unseen based on fanfic characterisations of them, so too you can't judge the original versions sight-unseen based on the versions seen in adaptations. If you want to tell me the original Holmes was such-and-such, please provide the original stories that prove so, yes?

And in that cause ...

[Again, links to online versions of the stories used, the ones I could find, are provided at the end. Most of them are hosted at Wikisource]

*muses* I've been watching a lot of Western series lately (The Magnificent Seven, The Wild Wild West, and Alias Smith and Jones), and thinking about crossovers between them (because I like crossovers, and because all three have at least one trickster/conman I'd like to see go up against each other - there's also Chris Larabee vs Kid Curry on a fast draw).

The thing is ... crossing them is actually slightly more problematic than it looks initially. Well, not M7 and WWW, that might actually be relatively easy, but either of those with ASAJ would be quite problematic, at least if you're going for a direct, time-frame-of-the-series crossover.

Because they're actually set around about a decade apart. Season 2 of WWW is set in 1872 ('The Night of the Brain', the date on the newspaper), and judging by the pilot, M7 is set roughly in the early 1870s too. But ASAJ is set at least post-1883, since Heyes learns about fingerprinting by reading Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain in one episode ('Something to Get Hung About'), though probably not too much past it, since Heyes and Curry were orphaned in the Kansas Border Wars as kids (1854-1861) and neither of them is much over 30 years old (er, well, provided the Kid wasn't lying to a nun at the time, and provided their wanted posters at least got the ages right).

(This does, mind you, put Heyes and Curry as teenage runaways at around the right time to run into anyone you like from the other two casts - bounty hunter Vin, Chris in his drunken gunslinger phase (Kid, oh, the Kid), teenage Heyes versus Maude Standish, their first arrest in Four Corners, from M7, or their first job as outlaws being trying to rob the Wanderer -or Loveless, that would be funny, or possibly tragic, depending- from WWW. So there is that. *grins*)

*tilts head, smiles faintly* My point being, though, that just because two works may be set in the same period (eg Old West) doesn't necessarily mean that they're set at the same time (eg less than a decade apart from each other). Ten years mightn't make a lot of difference historically speaking, but it sure as hell makes one to the characters. Heh.

*muses* Just a random thought, looking back at the three movies Tony Stark was in. IM1, IM2, Avengers. Is it just me, or is the Iron Man basically one of the flashiest, most heavily armed distractions ever?

*rubs face* Right. The past week or so has been a cluster of really heavy, often painful, and sometimes aggressive conversations in my family. (Clusters like that tend to happen occasionally, when too many factors converge on too many people - they also tend to domino). Because some of those discussion are my mother and sister attempting to navigate the differences between their general understandings of things versus mine and my father's (with some big differences emerging between the two of them, too, and some between my father and I, but, y'know, different people, even outside of the gross divides of brain chemistry), my mother started researching Aspergers again. (Which, as a general response, I can't fault. When in doubt, acquire more information).

There were a lot of things that bubbled up during the week, most of which I don't really want to talk about. But there was one thing, because my mam was reading Baron-Cohen and it came up, that sort of fascinated me.

In the book she was reading, the author said two things that impacted me (not sure about the rest).

Just something that has been bugging me, lately. Where did the idea of Methos the invincible, godlike ancient badass come from?

Just a quick digression on the subject of movieverse Nick Fury. Trying to figure out his timeline, particularly in reference to the Starks. Correct me if I'm wrong, yes? (No, seriously. Please do).

Just a question relating to my own fic. *tilts head, muses* After the meta post about shipping v. gen, and some conversations in the comments there about definitions of gen, particularly traditional style gen as in longer, action/adventure and/or casefic ... Basically, you know, plotfic. Anyway. I was looking over my own long fics, and ... well, the conclusion I came to was that either my genfic was very shippy, or my 'shipfic was very gen. *shrugs sheepishly*