strina | Realizations/Observations

Eh, y'all know how I enjoy blathering. Been collecting junk thoughts into a text file the past three or four days, and now I share the contents of said file:

I have come to some realizations:

Angel fic? Apparently makes me want tacos. Lots of tacos, all the time. Okay, Angel fic and Invader Zim episodes.
I heart the morally flexible characters most. Oh, Wesley, you're my favorite.
Mmmm, dark AUs where everyone's gone psychotic. Seriously, check out Crimes Against Humanity. Everybody's mass murderers, and Elizabeth is a cult leader, and Carson is batshit insane, and oh, John and Rodney are like Bonnie and Clyde, except a billion times worse.
I will never, ever be able to listen to Poe's Haunted album without flashbacks to the winter of my junior year, when I was taking that writing class at USAO, and listened to it all the time in the car. I remember being late all the time to my writing class back at the high school and I remember most of my lunches consisting of those gigantic baked cinnamon rolls you could get for a dollar at Paradise Donuts and I remember spending hours in the college library, and oh, that was the best year. Mostly. Overall.
Central archives are love. House Fanfiction Archive? love. 852 Prospect? love. Smallville Slash Archive? love. Buffy Fiction Archive? lovelovelove.

Seriously, sites disappear and journals get deleted, but central archives do not let you down! Okay, sometimes they do. But not without you knowing why! They do not just randomly disappear! Therefore, love.

Oh, and I've never yet seen one on geocities. Geocities = hate. Those damn ads at the side of the page drive me nuts.
I actually find it incredibly cute when Slayers get all protective/possessive about their Watchers, even though really, that makes them seem more like pets than people.
I can only read Wishverse Giles/Oz. And I Just Say No to Willow/Giles and Willow/Wesley, even though I happily read Giles/Buffy, Xander/Giles, Buffy/Wesley, and Wesley/Xander.

Also, I am extremely leery of any post-Chosen Willow/m fics. Because she self-identifies as lesbian, not bisexual, and when she was in love with whatshisface during "Him", she still didn't want him as a man, she was just willing to turn him into a woman.
There aren't enough Buffy threesomes. Not BtVS-threesomes, threesomes with Buffy Summers. On my Buffy-threesomes wishlist are: Buffy/Angel/Wesley, Buffy/Wesley/Faith, Buffy/Spike/Illyria (...I don't know), Buffy/Xander/Willow, Buffy/Xander/Dawn (I know there are people who ship B/X, X/D, and B/D, so why is there no overlap - at least not the kind of overlap that ends in dirtywronghot threesome fic), and my OT3 (which can be blamed entirely on M. McGregor), Buffy/Xander/Faith.
Also? Apparently one of my bulletproof kinks is Xander having a mystical connection to Slayers. A Slayer, all Slayers, the First Slayer, I don't care. Xander + Slayers = love. Or even Xander having a non-mystical connection with Slayers...I'm not explaining this well. I love Xander having a deep nonromantic connection with Slayers. I love Xander/Faith and Xander/Buffy and I will even read Xander/Kendra. But more than that, I love Xander being mystically connected to the Slayer line and I love Xander as a Watcher and I love Xander as denmother to a bunch of baby Slayers (and hey! Facing the Heart in Darkness gives me basically all of the above, so, y'know, I heart it). Basically, Xander + Slayers = OTP4EVAR,OMG.
Something both horrifying and awesome? As absolutely fucked up as the characters of Buffy and Angel canonically are, it's probably not half so fucked up as they should be. I've been rewatching a bunch of episodes of Angel and jesus christ, have you ever tried randomly switching between seasons? Wow. Wow. Season 1 Wesley and Season 5 Wesley really are completely different people (btw, Five Seasons of Angel = awesome book, rocking essays - much better than Seven Seasons of Buffy).
elgrey owns me. I keep reading her stories and going "OMG, exactly" like a giant sycophantic dork. Gunn in Harrogate thinking about Wesley and the crazy, Angel being dumb in Temps Perdu, and oh, Giles getting snippy with Angel about forgiveness in Shadows. FAVORITE TIMES FABILLION.*
Okay, on rewatching Orpheus, there is totally a story there we never got. Lorne talking about Wesley knowing what happens to people on Orpheus, and Wesley's little "it leads you into hell" thing, I dunno. Did Wesley ever do Orpheus? There should at least be fic where he did. Because that sounded a lot like him and Lorne having mutual Issues.
Really now, it's insane when you look at the SGA section on shalott's page. 15 of the 30 are stories that I have gone flaily about, that I have recc'd endlessly, that continue to make my spine curl with love. Seriously. Tango, Feeding Frenzy, Mercy. Transcendental, Time in a Bottle, No Refunds or Exchanges, A Beautiful Lifetime Event. Touch, Loves Me Not, Oblivious, Controverted, Mostly Harmless. Proof by Contradiction, Can't Have One Without the Other, If There Be Thorns.
I've been saving going through the remix archive, so I don't really know what's been remixed (other than Instructional, which yay, and Alpha Centauri, which wow and also daaamn), but I keep thinking of things I'd want to see remixed. Like No Refunds or Exchanges with John's POV, or a deeper look into John's head from Advantage, or Ronon or Teyla from Realm of the Dryads, or hell, something like Transcendental or Impossibilium from the POV of Zelenka or somebody (btw, Transcendental via alternating POVs of Zelenka/Carson/Bates = best ever times eleventy-million).
Possibly I am screwing myself over by trying to do too many lists at once (list50, yo). See, there's this story, of a lovely lady, and the hot sex she had with these other two lovely ladies, and I have actually posted two lists that could have gone on (threesomes or multifandom, FYI), but I've been saving it for my femslash list, because I want my f/f list to rock. And dude, I'm trying to do a BDSM list, because that would be awesome and also would be handy for me, as that isn't something I've tracked before. Anyway, I don't know if I have 50 BDSM stories I'm willing to rec, but I'm still putting stories on the list, which prevents me (mostly) from putting them on other lists.

For example, I wish to do a list of Wesley-centric stories, but Pet and Protocol, both of which I would want on there, are on the BDSM list (although I keep wondering if Protocol should be on there...yes, Wes and Angel are in what is very much a d/s relationship, the tone of their relationship is less their choice than something that was decided by outside forces. Eh, it'll probably stay.). Along with several other Wesley stories, because let's face it, Wesley + BDSM works.

Anyway. Doing so many lists at once is difficult, because many stories overlap lists, but I don't want to just keep reusing the same stories, because that'd be a bitch thing to do, therefore I have to decide which list deserves the story more, and then I feel like I'm favoring some lists over others, which makes me feel bad, which ends up making me feel psychotic because really, I am the only one who even looks at these anyway.
When I do stuff like this, lists of observations or facts or whatever, they always start out short and to the point, but eventually devolve to paragraphs upon paragraphs of rambling.
All you people who do the running thing for fun? Y'all are crazy. So crazy it's hard for me to remember we are, in fact, the same species. Man uses tools, bitches, that's why we're top o' the food chain these days. We have tools to faciliate transportation, and have had for centuries, millenia (since at least the domestication of the equine, which was decidedly in the B.C. half of human history).

This realization brought to you by: the crap that was my yesterday. Among other things, my car broke down, I walked the many blocks to the dorm, and it fucked me up. Blisters all over both feet, something horribly painful has happened to my left ankle and knee, and my right hip is killing me, which is not at all lessening my paranoia on the subject (my mom and dad have both had to get hips replaced before 45 - and with Dad, it was this entirely creepy thing where blood polled up by the bone and then was put under pressure and shot a hole through his hipbone. YEURGH.).

To sum up: Christina + walking = endless HATE forEVER.
I love nail polish. I mean, I don't wear it often, because it's crap to get off, and it tends to make people look at my hands in askance, because of the wildly differing lengths of my nails (you can almost hear them think "But why is she only wearing X numbers of fake nails?"). But I broke a bunch of nails recently, so all of them but the thumbs are of pretty much equal length, and I painted them. And they're so pretty.

Apparently this brand of nail polish changes color under certain circumstances (possibly I have had it too long, possibly it's that I left it out in the car too often, possibly it is a nifty and intentional surprise), because this polish started out this pale golden orange that was one of the few colors that 1) looked good with my skin and 2) didn't clash with any of my rings. Now it's this pink color and omg, my hands are pretty. I keep getting distracted by them. Although not as much as when I wore that solar nail polish Dad gave me. Anyway, yay for nail polish.
Kind of want an Angel/Harry Potter story that includes Harry and Wesley bonding over magic and crappy childhoods that included being locked into cupboards by evol relatives. Come on, admit it, that's be awesome. And you know, there're all kinds of Harry/Buffy and Willow/Draco stories, but where're my Xander/Harry and Willow/Hermione? Although, hey, I think I actually remember a Willow/Hermione story. I should look that up. Because I remember it was a good story, I'm just not entriely sure the W/H part of the recollection is accurate. ETA: Found the story. No ships listed in the summary, and it's 63 chapters, so, not so much going to re-read it right now.
I continue to feel ridiculous love for stories that include characters having contingency plans. Because come on now. If your life was pretty consistently endangered, you'd do things like arrange code words that mean you've been kidnapped, or leave "in the case of my death" instuctions, or discuss what to do if you're ever made into a vampire (stake or ensoul, that eternal question). It's just common sense. And I love it when characters show evidence of common sense. Also, it plays into the thing I have about glimpses of characters interacting beyond the scope of the canon. Which is what fanfiction basically is, but that's not what I'm talking about. It's liking things like the throwaway references to offscreen missions that sometimes show up in episodes and crap like that.
Y'know, a while back, MSN replaced the little icon that stands for the MSN homepage with the image of tiny cartoon house and I just can't get used to it. I miss the MSN butterfly.
Bonus thought: I find the new current location feature unnerving and vaguely creepy. Why? Who thought this would be a good idea?

*Just in case you don't want to go through the whole stories just to find out what I'm talking about, here are some choice bits of what I was talking about (spoilers for story events):

From Harrogate (post-NFA, Wesley's alive and crazy again):
Gunn thought about trying to explain that Wesley had always been a functioning crazy person. He could still reason and analyse and research and come up with ideas even when in the middle of a nervous breakdown. He suspected Wesley’s family had always had mental health issues, and had developed this way of dealing with stress; they had the meltdown but they did it in a way that meant they could still do their job; because if you were a Wyndam-Pryce all that mattered was the work you did, of course. He felt a pang of guilt about having just looked at the crazy packaging recently while not remembering the complexity of the man underneath.

From Temps Perdu (Wesley's lost his memory, Angel thinks he should stay that way):
There was a long silence before Wesley said: “Isn’t there anything worth remembering? Nothing good at all?”

Angel bowed his head. “I can’t… All the times I remember you being happy it was about something that can’t happen any more. And I’m not the right person to ask. We both know what I… We both know that I miss the man you were. But I gave up Connor so he could have a better life and I’m not going to…” He shrugged. “Go back with Giles. Be Faith’s Watcher. You don’t need a bunch of demon-killing weirdos in your life, Wes, trust me. Lorne thinks I’m not on my path any more anyway. Maybe there’s still time for you get back onto yours.”

From Shadows (Wesley, the Scoobies, and Angel Investigations must team up to stop an apocalypse):
“There’s a bottom line here, Giles, and this is it: I want to help but you’re asking me to join forces with the man who stole my son and I can’t do that.”

“Mea culpa. I was forgetting that you’ve never made a mistake in your entire life, Angel or done anything that ever led to the death of an innocent. Oh wait, actually you made one mistake that led to you getting turned into a vampire, the death of everyone who’d ever known you, and decades of you torturing, raping, maiming and murdering for fun, followed by a wasted century of you doing absolutely sod all to make amends for what you’d done after the return of your soul, followed by a very brief period of do-gooding before you lost your soul again, murdered Jenny, tried to destroy the world, and gave Buffy what came perilously close to a nervous breakdown when she had to send you to hell. Or was that some other Angel, and you really are someone with a right to take the moral high ground about Wesley’s failed attempt to save your son?”

“That isn’t what happened,” Cordelia put in.

Giles glared at her. “Isn’t it? I thought that was a pretty accurate summary of Angel’s life to date. I didn’t mention the nailing puppies to walls, of course, or all his other nasty little crimes of spite and sadism, because if I started on that we’d be here all night, but I thought I’d covered most of the edited highlights.”

“Angel didn’t have a soul when he did those things.”

“So what?” Giles countered crisply. “I don’t care if Angelus is the demon who borrowed his body or the dark side of his psyche his conscience won’t allow out unless there’s an ‘r’ in the month. They’re still his crimes, and he supposedly believes in redemption and atonement. He was fast enough to demand that Buffy assisted him to help Faith escape from the people who were trying to kill her despite the fact that the last time Buffy had seen Faith, Faith stole her body, slept with her boyfriend, and did her utmost to ruin her life. I was certainly expected to work with Angel again for the common good despite the fact he tortured me for hours. Is everyone else supposed to overcome his own grievances but Angel isn’t? On what grounds?”

And, because I just saw this again while I was re-reading Temps Perdu and did the exactly-dance:

“How come Wes managed to pull so many hot looking birds?”

“Because he’s pretty,” Buffy explained. As Giles and Spike looked at her in disbelief, she said, “Well, he is. These days. He wasn’t back in Sunnydale, he was just kind of…a dork. But once he came to LA he got all…pretty. And there’s the accent. And the ‘feed me’ thing too. He’s really got three lines of attack there: ‘Look what big blue eyes I have and how long my eyelashes are and yet what a chiselled jaw I have. Look how thin I am and how I obviously don’t take care of myself so you should take me home and make me a sandwich right now’, and then there’s the: ‘Although I may look all pretty and helpless and in need of feeding I’m actually incredibly clever and sophisticated which is why I sound like this and oh look I can kill demons really efficiently too’.” She shrugged. “It’s an uppercut, a right hook, and a knockout punch combined.”