A Certain Slant of Light

The Yuletide reveal is upon us! I can finally share my fics!

I defaulted on my main story (I'm hoping to pull myself together and write it as an NYR), but I did write three treats, so here they are.

Thirty-Three Kisses and Counting, Macdonald Hall, Bruno/Boots. Well, Bruno/everyone, actually, because he bet Cathy that he could make out with more Macdonald Hall boys than she could, which clearly is his own special Bruno-riffic way of telling Boots he loves him.

I am pretty sure this story is the most ridiculously adorable thing I have ever written, unless that honor goes to the second treat:

Troy and Abed in the Yuletide, Community, Troy/Abed. In which Abed writes Yuletide fic for his own movies and everything is meta like a meta thing. I am so proud of the second-to-last line.

(entwashian, I really cannot believe that you haven't seen this show. It's everything you would love! It's the most meta show ever - seriously, like half the episodes are riffs on some TV show or movie - and half the characters are characters of color, and fandom's favorite character is Abed, who is half-Polish half-Palestinian all-obsessed with pop culture.

The writers are less clued in on gender issues than you might prefer - the female character are all awesome on their own, but the writers don't seem to have any idea how to have them interact with each other - but otherwise it's made of win.)

And finally, Half-Sick of Shadows, a Shadow Unit fic which features Daphne and Hafidha chatting after Hafidha has been imprisoned.

This fic basically grew out of one of my frustrations with Shadow Unit: we hear about how Chaz & Daphne & Hafidha are this great trio of friends, but what we actually see is Chaz and Daphne being great friends, and Chaz and Hafs being great friends, and Daphne and Hafidha never interacting about anything but Chaz, which ARGH.

Admittedly, 90% of everything Shadow Unit is about Chaz, because Chaz is a sucking black hole at the center of the story. But I have Feelings about Shadow Unit and they are long and complicated and probably belong in another post.

1. Dollhouse, episode three. Again, all right; again, not top quality; I'm still watching the show to see if it improves. My favorite scene was the one with Ballard and the Russian mobster on the roof, where Ballard is explaining why he's sure Dollhouse exists - "Because the first thing people do with any technology is destroy." A hackneyed thing to say, but said with conviction, and the mobster's (who is, I think, an active?) response is good.

I think the Dollhouse could have been a really cool Macguffin, but it would have been better to make the show's main character either the FBI guy who is trying to bring them down, or one of Dollhouse's leaders, or really anyone who doesn't get her mind wiped at the end of everyone show. As this cogent discussion of the show points out, a main character who gets reset at the end of every week is death to character development.

2. Shadow Unit, episode 2.1. Not as harrowing as many of the first season episodes, but still solid, and it does feature the squirm-worthy spectacle of Reyes apologizing. Twice.

I must confess that Daphne's Wiccan-ness threw me for a loop. I didn't expect it, and it somehow didn't fit the image I had of the character, and I'm not sure why.

3. This is apropos of nothing, but I love this review of Eichmann in Jerusalem, which I blew my mind when I read it last year (the book, I mean, not the review). If you've never read it and you have any interest in Nazis at all, it's a fascinating book and I urge you to give it a try.

I've been meaning to write a post about the awesomeness of Shadow Unit for a while, and as my Yuletide present is a Shadow Unit story I figure this as a good a time as any.

Shadow Unit is, in a nutshell, Criminal Minds except the serial killers have magic; but that doesn't begin to capture how intense and exciting and awesome and brutal it is.

( Cut for excessive squeeing )

I hope I've convinced someone to give Shadow Unit a try; it really is very, very awesome.