chthonic_cassandra

Letter in progress! One fandom section is yet to be completed - it should be done in the next day or so, so sorry!

Dear Yuletide Writer,

Thank you so much for writing for me this year! Yuletide has been a joyful part of my winter season for many years now, and I appreciate you being a part of it! This year my requests include several held over from past years, which I remain as eager as ever to have filled. The canons and characters I've requested this year are all ones about which I am deeply excited to read more, and I'd be interested in anything you come up with that gives me more of them!

Since treats are opt-in this year: yes, I'm happy to receive them! If you happen to read my requests and feel inspired by them, go right ahead.

If you are the kind of writer for whom more information about a recipient's tastes and interests is helpful, you can find me at AO3 of course here. I'm also on Tumblr, where I am probably most active, as chthonic-cassandra. I've previously said: “I tend to write meditative female character-centric gen about trauma recovery, and/or fucked-up dub-con darkfic, and those are both totally things I love to read about as well, but neither of those are your style, no worries! I also really, really love romance, sexy D/s stuff, and world-building or plot-heavy casefic; I’m just not as good at writing any of those.” This still goes!

All but one of the canons I am requesting this year are all pretty dark (and I have some dark possible requests for the less-dark one!), and so I want to say generally two things: a) if you have an idea for a story but are worried it will be too dark, please write it anyway! I'd happy to have a story that's on the same level of darkness as the content in these canons.

But by the same token, b) if you would prefer to write something fluffier that puts these characters in situations where they will actually be happy, I'd be equally happy with that! I love these characters and would love to see them getting the positive experiences they often weren't able to get in canon.

Some things I like in fic: smart, prickly, messed-up characters especially when they’re interacting with other smart, prickly messed-up characters; complicated or tense relationship negotiation; power dynamics (sexual or not, and either set and formalized or in constant flux); poly relationships; moments of hope/resilience within suffering; canon divergence (‘what if?’ AUs), darkfic/horror, D/s and related kink (especially bondage, humiliation, pain - either healthy and negotiated kink or also fucked-up dub or non-con stuff); moral ambiguity, or characters dealing with situations where there are no good choices; depictions of trauma recovery or otherwise putting one’s life together after devastation; characters who are smart and competent and passionate about things; allusion, experimention, meta-fictional stuff, playfulness with form and language; historical details and world-building; pastiche; things in general being complicated and messy and nuanced

Some things I’d prefer not to read about (though see specific notes/carve-outs for each fandom below): any kind of "it was all in their head" mental illness AU; setting-changing AUs; slapstick humor; heavy focus on bodily fluids other than blood; heavy focus on animal harm or meat preparation; focus on pregnancy or being a parent of young children (though it's fine to discuss where relevant to canon plots); sexual content with anyone younger than late adolescence; dogs; explicit discussion of disordered eating

And prompts below the cut!

( Read more... )

Author's commentary for Tower, part 10 of Compromise. Commentary includes some vague spoilers through the end of the series.

( Read more... )

Dear Yuletide Writer,

Nice to meet you, and thank you so much for writing with me! I've been doing Yuletide for a long time, and it's always one of the highlights of my year, so I am incredibly grateful to you for writing for me this time. This time I am requesting stories in four different horror/gothic fandoms, each of which I find incredibly fun and in whose worlds I would love to read more.

Since treats are opt-in this year: yes, I'm happy to receive them! If you happen to read my requests and feel inspired by them, go right ahead.

If you are the kind of writer for whom more information about a recipient's tastes and interests is helpful, you can find me at AO3 of course here. I'm also on Tumblr, where I am probably most active, as chthonic-cassandra. I've previously said: “I tend to write meditative female character-centric gen about trauma recovery, and/or fucked-up dub-con darkfic, and those are both totally things I love to read about as well, but neither of those are your style, no worries! I also really, really love romance, sexy D/s stuff, and world-building or plot-heavy casefic; I’m just not as good at writing any of those.” This still goes!

The canons I am requesting this year are all pretty dark, and so I want to say generally two things: a) if you have an idea for a story but are worried it will be too dark, please write it anyway! I'd happy to have a story that's on the same level of darkness as the content in these canons.

But by the same token, b) if you would prefer to write something fluffier that puts these characters in situations where they will actually be happy, I'd be equally happy with that! I love these characters and would love to see them getting the positive experiences they often weren't able to get in canon.

Some things I like in fic: smart, prickly, messed-up characters especially when they’re interacting with other smart, prickly messed-up characters; complicated or tense relationship negotiation; power dynamics (sexual or not, and either set and formalized or in constant flux); poly relationships; moments of hope/resilience within suffering; canon divergence (‘what if?’ AUs), darkfic/horror, D/s and related kink (especially bondage, humiliation, pain - either healthy and negotiated kink or also fucked-up dub or non-con stuff); moral ambiguity, or characters dealing with situations where there are no good choices; depictions of trauma recovery or otherwise putting one’s life together after devastation; characters who are smart and competent and passionate about things; allusion, experimention, meta-fictional stuff, playfulness with form and language; historical details and world-building; pastiche; things in general being complicated and messy and nuanced

Some things I’d prefer not to read about (though see specific notes/carve-outs for each fandom below): any kind of "it was all in their head" mental illness AU; setting-changing AUs; slapstick humor; heavy focus on bodily fluids other than blood; heavy focus on animal harm or meat preparation; focus on pregnancy or being a parent of young children (though it's fine to discuss where relevant to canon plots); sexual content with anyone younger than late adolescence; dogs; explicit discussion of disordered eating

And prompts below the cut!

( Read more... )

Author's commentary of Dracula fic Adjust, part 5 of Compromise. Commentary includes spoilers through part 12 of the series.

( Read more... )

Author's commentary on Dangerous Liaisons fic Penance.

( Read more... )

Author's commentary of Dracula fic No Touch of Pity.

( Read more... )

Author's commentary of Dracula fic Jackal, part 3 of Compromise.

( Read more... )

Dear Yuletide Writer,

First: I must offer my most sincere apologies for leaving you with a placeholder letter when assignments went out. I know I would have felt anxious clicking the letter link to find a placeholder, and I am sorry to have given you that experience!

Thank you so very much for writing for me! This is my fifteenth year doing Yuletide, and it always the greatest joy of my holiday season. My three requests this year are each for fandoms and characters that I love so deeply that I know I will be thrilled with whatever story you choose to craft about them.

If you are the kind of writer for whom more information about a recipient's tastes and interests is helpful, you can find me at AO3 of course here. I'm also on Tumblr, where I am probably most active, as chthonic-cassandra. I've previously said: “I tend to write meditative female character-centric gen about trauma recovery, and/or fucked-up dub-con darkfic, and those are both totally things I love to read about as well, but neither of those are your style, no worries! I also really, really love romance (particularly in poly relationships), sexy D/s stuff, and world-building or plot-heavy casefic; I’m just not as good at writing any of those.” This still goes! And I want to emphasize it especially because this year I've requested Dracula, which is also the fandom I've written in the most, so please don't look at my AO3 and feel like you for some reason need to match my own head canons and interpretations! Please, no pressure on that front!

Some things I like in fic: smart, prickly, messed-up characters especially when they’re interacting with other smart, prickly messed-up characters; complicated or tense relationship negotiation; power dynamics (sexual or not, and either set and formalized or in constant flux); poly relationships; moments of hope/resilience within suffering; canon divergence (‘what if?’ AUs), darkfic/horror, D/s and related kink (especially bondage, humiliation, pain - either healthy and negotiated kink or also fucked-up dub or non-con stuff); moral ambiguity, or characters dealing with situations where there are no good choices; depictions of trauma recovery or otherwise putting one’s life together after devastation; characters who are smart and competent and passionate about things; allusion, experimention, meta-fictional stuff, playfulness with form and language; historical details and world-building; pastiche; things in general being complicated and messy and nuanced

Some things I’d prefer not to read about: dub-con which involves ‘they secretly wanted it’ or ‘they didn’t want it at first but then learned they actually did’ tropes (other kinds of dub- or non-con are fine); any kind of "it was all in their head" mental illness AU; traumatic events treated as jokes or insignificant; setting-changing AUs; crossovers (with the exception of Penny Dreadful, which is itself a crossover, and for which more gothic crossovers would be fine and welcome); slapstick humor; PWP (any level of explicit content is fine, but I’m in it mostly for the characters); heavy focus on bodily fluids other than blood; focus on animal harm, or meat preparation; focus on pregnancy or being a parent of young children; sexual content with anyone younger than late adolescence; dogs; explicit discussion of disordered eating

And prompts!

( Read more... )

Apparently this has been a week of Shakespeare adaptations, through coincidence rather than design.

Jo Nesbo’s Macbeth, a retelling of the play as a thriller set in a police department investigating organized crime, was the weakest, and an illuminating example of some of the perils of adaptation. Nesbo carefully matches up most of the plot points and characters of the play with modern equivalents, but the parallels read as shallow and superficial, losing the main emotional dynamics of the story. Partly I think it was the setting that didn’t work, in this example; the charge of becoming police chief just doesn’t have the same power as becoming king, and so the stakes weren’t high enough, either for Macbeth’s rise or Macduff and Malcolm’s response.

Nuance was especially lost in the representation of the witches, who here are a criminal gang seeking to overthrow the police department before they are caught. There’s no enigma to them or their motivations in the novel, which flattens everything, and eliminates the interest from any of the questions about morality, fate, and free will which wind through the play. And Nesbo makes Hecate (here the boss of the gang) a man! I was disproportionately irritated by this, I’ll admit, but it bothered me; creating a dynamic in which the witches are under the direction of a male leader (even though, by the way, Shakespeare directly states that they’re acting outside Hecate’s commands in Act One! Does no one fucking close read Hecate’s speech?) turns their role into something both insignificant and predictable.

By contrast, I found Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young, an audacious and glittering debut novel which resets King Lear in contemporary New Delhi, effective, smart, and powerful, despite some structural issues which I think are very much understandable in a first novel of this kind of scope. Taneja is actually not much less precise than Nesbo in her matching up of her plot and characters to Shakespeare’s, but her choices are clearly much more thought through, with an attention to what’s meaningfully different - what work can a novel do that a play can’t, what shifts in the setting.

The novel is split into five sections, one from the point of view of each of the younger generation of characters, a device I enjoyed but which I thought worked less well in the second half of the novel than the first. The first two sections, focused on her Edmund and Goneril equivalents (Jivan and Gargu) respectively, hooked me, and I liked the conceit of starting with the pov of the most unambiguous villain of the original play, and ending with Cordelia. But it meant that we lose sight of the Goneril, Regan, and Edmund trilogy just at the point in the narrative when things are starting to get most violent and chaotic, and when seeing their own self-justifications warp might have been most interesting. The voices of Edgar/Jeet and Cordelia/Sita were also not quite strong enough to do a Faulkner and get me fully invested that late in the novel; it was almost there, but not quite.

Taneja’s Lear is a businessman rather than a king, but the novel is engaged with the obscenity of extreme wealth and the depredations of capitalism with a kind of nuance that makes it work; I didn’t have any problem with the stakes here. Taneja’s narration in fact brings out the violence in Lear’s plot in a way that interested me; I was very struck by the scene in which Bapuji/Lear beats Goneril/Gargu’s servant, and the one in which she learns about it - I had a moment of remembering, even though I am very familiar with Lear and had not forgotten that element of the plot ‘oh yes, that is this story.’ The novel can do that in a way that the bantering scenes involving Oswald in the play can’t.

The combination of reading that novel and rewatching Akira Kurosawa’s spectacular Ran (1985) last week left me thinking that maybe Lear is uniquely well-suited to adaptation. Ran of course is a masterwork which one can watch on many level, not solely as an adaptation, but as an adaptation it is in fact extremely subtle and smart. It’s Lear in feudal Japan (a pretty easy translation), partially gender-swapped (Lear’s daughters are changed to sons, and our loose Edmund and Edgar stand-ins are women).

When dealing with the text of Lear you’ll always have the question of sides, of who’s right and wrong, which is partially an artifact of a critical tradition that misogynistically villainizes Goneril and Regan (and reactions against that like Jane Smiley’s A Thousand AcresLear Macbeth is much more my play, but I haven’t found retellings that do justice to the things I see in it.

(I also watched the recent film Lady Macbeth</> (2016), but that is not in fact a Macbeth adaptation, but an adaptation of Lady Macbeth of Mtsenk (which itself resembles Macbeth only insofar as it features a woman plotting murders). And, also, I hated it for its ridiculous levels of racism. Pretty hair and costume shots did not make up for that.)

I wrote my first-ever Xena: Warrior Princess fic a few weeks ago, which is clearly a momentous occasion.

Title: Craft Twined From Craft
Fandom: Xena: Warrior Princess
Rating/Warnings: PG-13/T; dubious consent & mention of backstory non-consent, general concubine dynamics
Character/Pairing: Satrina, Xena, Borias, Xena/Satrina, Xena/Borias
Summary: Satrina is a consummate survivor. Xena is a new type of challenge.

Writing fiction has been very challenging for the past few years, really since I started doing social work full-time. I'm still untangling what's going on with that (I think it has to do with confidentiality, with keeping others' stories inside me, not mine to tell, and this subsequent protectiveness about my own), but I still want to write, and I am fighting to find my way back to it.

Which also means finding my way back to interacting actively in fandom. Xena is a slightly intimidating one to enter; it has such a long and developed history as a fandom, so different from my usual tiny fandoms around pieces of literature that have a history of adaptation, but not so lively and active a community. I'm trying to start with the types of things with which I feel most comfortable, which are these kind of short, character pieces about traumatized women. I love Satrina and, from what I can tell, the fandom doesn't.

I want to use this platform for fandom-related things, but I've lost the knack. LiveJournal felt different, and I was at a different stage in my life then; I was doing RP and all other sorts of things in which I have no interest now. What's working for any of you, my small but treasured circle? What's going well in your fandom life, in the platforms we now have?