worldbuildingex | Member Posts

Title: Learning the Steps
Author: Beatrice_Otter
Fandom: The Goblin Emperor
Pairing: Csethiro/Maia
Written for:

dontstophernow in

fffx 2025
Rating: Teen
Length: 10k
Summary: As the wedding day approaches, Csethiro and Maia get to know each other better

At AO3. On Squidgeworld. On Dreamwidth. On tumblr. On Pillowfort.

AN: The Tale of the Loathly Lady is a real story which crops up in Arthuriana and other places. It's the Wife of Bath's tale in the Canterbury Tales, and it was told on its own as Gawain and Lady Ragnell.

***

The original proposal—Csethiro did not know who had made it, whether her father or the Emperor or some nameless secretary—was for the wedding to take place on Nan'desazh, the spring lambing festival. This was the most auspicious date for a wedding in the whole year; unfortunately, it was also a mere three months after the contracts had been signed, and there was simply no way to arrange things in time. Csethiro was not often grateful to her stepmother, but she was in this; the Marquise Ceredaran had flatly refused to contemplate so early a date.

The spring equinox had been suggested instead; it was almost as propitious as Nan'desazh, and would give them an extra month to plan. Besides, there was a certain symmetry in it; Edrehasivar had been crowned just before the fall equinox, and his birthday was the winter solstice, and so to marry him on the spring equinox seemed to Csethiro (and many others at court) to be a harbinger of good fortune.

It was still ruinously short. The preparations for Csoru's wedding had taken a full year.

( Read more... )

beatrice_otter

I have had recs from several recent exchanges, but haven't actually posted them. So! Here we go.

Five Figure Fanwork Exchange is the most recent! I received two fics, both of them lovely:

a star or two beside (5070 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Goblin Emperor Series - Katherine Addison
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Maia Drazhar, Chenelo Drazharan, Shaleän Sevraseched, Shaleän Sevraseched's Wife, Ursu Perenched, Original Characters
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Chenelo Lives, Alternate Universe - Maia Has a Good Childhood, POV Multiple, sailing ships, References to Illness
Summary:

It is something out of a wonder-tale when a stranger arrives at Isvaroë and whisks Maia and his mother away.

Before, After, Always, Already (9151 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Kira Nerys/Keiko O'Brien/Miles O'Brien
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Post-Canon Bajor (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)
Summary:

Keiko was over Miles's shoulder in the video message. "Hi, Nerys!" she said. She looked the same, too, although her hair was up, and she was in uniform. "We're moving to Bajor!"

Other faves from FFFX include:
( Five Figure Fanwork Recs )

( AU5k Rec )

( Fic In A Box Recs )

bunn

primer, paint, varnish all done, I've unjammed the autobailer, and I've been for a little row (Turns out I remember how to row, though I did catch a couple of minor crabs).

Getting her down the hill and into the water was a breeze. Getting her back up was probably no harder than moving the canoe: the Mirror is heavier, but not as long, and the trolley is a lot better designed than the canoe one.

I went for a paint colour that is described on the tin as 'cream' but it's a very rich and buttery sort of cream.

Just need to sort the rigging, and the rudder uphaul. oh yes and find some rope for a painter, and a bailer sponge. Then I get to find out if I've forgotten how to sail...

Boat refurbishment websites are full of people with ridiculously high standards and apparently unlimited time and tools. I keep telling myself: she's a battered old Mirror Dinghy from 1972. It doesn't matter if the varnish isn't perfect, the paint has the odd run visible, the rubbing strake has lost a small chunk at the back of the skeg, or that there are scrapes and stains from her chequered history (as long as they aren't bad enough to be unsound, which I *think* they aren't. And if they are, I'll learn!)

The point is to get the boat to the point where I can go sailing this year, not to somehow erase 50+ years of dings and stains.

I saw two sets of mirror dinghy sails (2x main and jib) advertised on Facebook marketplace locally, so I bought them. The sail numbers are from boats from 1970, but the sails don't look very used, and the sail numbers are not the original vinyl, so either the numbers have been replaced, or the whole sails are newer - though I think they must be from before 2007, since sails newer than that are a slightly different colour. I thought it would be handy to have spares.

I wondered what happened to the boats they belonged to, but the person who was selling them didn't know: she'd bought them to make garden shades out of, and then decided they were too small.

We have another foster kitty, Star. She's been helping with the renovations. The smallest adult cat I've ever seen, I think but she has no difficulty at all jumping up into the boat. She came from a bad situation and has had some immune system issues, which is why she has that scar on her face. We think it's healing up, but it's not a quick process.

yvannairie

Me, a fake flautist, listening to Ravel's Bolero and going "the clarinet and bassoon parts are my favourite :)"

yvannairie

Amanda Swell Entertainment made a video about a black model having her photo stolen and having some white influencer paste her face onto that image and instead of focusing on the meaningful issues like digital blackface and content theft the video is all about how the white influencer said "AI did this"

And she just.... takes her at her word and doesn't question it and just complains about people using AI.

I love her but this fucking sucks. Why are we not calling out a liar to her face for trying to shift blame to AI or "AI companies" doing this shit. Someone made a clear touched up image of her face on another woman's body and we're blaming the technology used?

Fuck it. Welcome back "Button That Makes Beautiful Art" discourse. I hope you die.

cahn

Last week: Titus saving the day single-handedly as a millenium-old trope. The synoptic gospels foreshadowing these events, and discussion of the abomination of desolation. The Yom Kippur service description of the priest in his vestments. How much Titus might have intended the destruction of Jerusalem, and when, and how much that question may be different from how Josephus feels like he needs to justify it? A mention of R. Yochanan ben Zakkai, which all of you should definitely tell me more about :D

This week: Jerusalem is under siege. It's quite awful for those under siege, what with famine inside the city and getting crucified by Romans if they try to escape. Titus and Josephus continue to be blameless and awesome.

Next week: First half of Book 6: "...from its rebuilding by Haggai in the second year of the reign of Cyrus to its capture under Vespasian was 639 years and 45 days" (270).

longmagpieroads

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evandar

Dear Author,

Thank you so much for writing for me! I'm really excited to see what you come up with.

This letter contains a list of Likes and DNWs as well as a couple of prompts. If none of the prompts catch your eye, then write whatever you like. As long as it doesn't hit any of my DNWs, we're good.

( Read more... )

Thank you for reading this letter. If none of the prompts here appeal, please feel free to write anything that you want to, and as long as it doesn't include any of my DNWs, I'll be delighted to receive it.

I can't wait to read what you create for me!

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: Hanoi - Vietnam
Current Music: Sure is Fun - Shinedown

desertvixen

MAYBE: no-harm dubcon (sex pollen or “fertility artifact”) | period typical attitudes | infidelity | power dynamic

I love treats!

My theme for this final Fandom 5K is "fandoms I requested but never had fulfilled in this exchange" so at least one of them will change!

Apologies for the lateness of the letter!

( Our Last Fandom 5K :( )

hokuton_punch

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Current Mood: ecstatic

desertvixen

My general preferences are here.

MAYBE: no-harm dubcon (sex pollen or “fertility artifact”) | period typical attitudes | infidelity | power dynamic

I love treats!

My apologies for my lateness!

( Itty Bitty Requests )

cahn

5/5. I am having SO many feelings about this book that I am not sure I can actually articulate them all. But also I am very aware that my feelings are entangled partially in, uh, currently being obsessed with a fanon ship that maps super easily on to this one, so you know, as usual, I am not to be trusted about my feelings and I'm very willing to believe that it might not hit quite right if one doesn't happen to be exactly in that situation? Anyway... it's about these two eighteen-year-old boys who start the book at boarding school together in 1914. Sidney Ellwood is half-Jewish, social, charismatic, demonstrative, loves and writes poetry. Henry Gaunt is half-German, intense, introverted, anxious, loves ancient Greek. (...I also have Feelings about characters who quote poetry. And, as it turns out, ancient Greek.) The two of them have strong and more-or-less repressed feelings for each other. (Gaunt's feelings are particularly repressed.)

But. It being 1914, it rapidly starts being about something else than boarding school.

I should probably also mention a huge, extremely gigantic content note for trench warfare and historical levels of wounds and death.

( no spoilers, perhaps mild meta-spoilers, but at least I am more-or-less coherent )

Major spoilers, starts reasonably coherent but rapidly devolves into word-vomiting

I was so sure that one or both of Elly and Gaunt would die because it struck me as That Kind of heartbreaking book plus which I guess I've been socialized to understand that Teh Gays Always Die (and Carruthers and Sandys died so early on!! :( :( ), and I really REALLY wanted them to have a happy ending, I can't actually think of the last time I've wanted that so much for a couple, and when they got together I felt like, okay, at least they got one happy time before one of them died! All I wanted was for someone somewhere to get some happiness in the end.

The only thing that surprised me was that Gaunt died when the book was only half over. (BURGOYNE.) I was sure then that the next half would be Ellwood writing poetry about him, like Tennyson, or like Sassoon. I was SO surprised when he turned out to have survived! And then my reaction was that the book was now going to find new and exciting ways to break me (true, but not in the way I thought), and I spent most of the second half of the book worried Gaunt would die in some other way, and expressed that I was never going to forgive Winn if Gaunt died, or Ellwood did, without Ellwood finding out that Gaunt was still alive.

I absolutely absolutely adored Hayes and his friendship with Gaunt and his more prickly friendship with Ellwood and the contrast between him and the public schoolboys (who always get promoted over him, the poor guy), and him looking after Ellwood (both physically and e.g. warning him away from Watts) even though he thought Ellwood was looking down on him. I was also convinced he was going to die because I loved him so much (I actually said that I thought he would make it to the end of the war and then die, just to spite me. I actually said this!) And he didn't die but he ended up with BOTH LEGS (or at least 1 1/2) gone! I was like. Winn. Could you not have left him ONE leg?! COME ON. I would rather Gaunt or Ellwood had lost their legs. HAYES.

(Also Hayes panicking to Ellwood and Ellwood trying very very badly to reassure him (no wonder Hayes doesn't want to write him), then Ellwood having that exact panic after he's invalided out, omg)

I absolutely loved that Elly was into poetry and used poetry to basically articulate his emotions (I do the same kind of thing -- a lot of how I understand the world is made up of quotations from novels and poems and songs; my head has been full of Sassoon and Owen writing this post) and that moment when he declaimed Keats at Gaunt and Gaunt had to accept that he was in love with him, except that was when Gaunt knew he was going to die, auuuuugh. And also when Elly lost his poetry and then -- that little glimpse of how he might be getting it back at the end -- auuuuuugh

And also Gaunt and his ancient Greek and how sometimes he just quotes in Greek and I love it

And also I love that Winn doesn't just give us the one side, when Gaunt gets captured by the Germans it's a very stark reminder that although we've been POV English, the English aren't the only ones dying in this war and that even if it's easy for the English soldiers not to see the German soldiers as people and vice versa, they both are. And Gaunt being half-German of course knew this from the beginning, which adds another layer. This line, augh: Had it not been for his khaki uniform, no one should have known he was the enemy.

(And that shattering German POV, for just a minute.)

And also the prisoner-of-war scenes which are almost comic, we needed some of that at that point in the book, and ALSO Pritchard and Devi totally being like oh, yeah, no big deal at all about Gaunt being an "invert," and making ordinary jokes about it like they would about anything else and being totally accepting, instead of all the rejection and awfulness Gaunt's been fearing (and might have gotten from someone else), and that healing something in Gaunt so that he can face his love for Elly and actually tell him that, and be okay with it even if Ellwood can't love him back, I LOVE THIS and I know it's absolutely wish-fulfillment, but we already saw the part where Caruthers basically committed suicide so he didn't have to deal with the terrible consequences of being homosexual (augh!), so yeeeeeah I didn't need that to happen again, that was quite all right.

And then I read the bit where Maud says she's not going to marry Elly and I was cheering for her and also thinking that okay, even if everyone else's life is messed up (I still worried that Ellwood and Gaunt wouldn't find each other again, at this point) maybe Maud is the one character things will work out for, because it would be awful if she married Ellwood

AND THEN THEY DID MEET AGAIN
And they were both so damaged! Except that Gaunt, having been in the POW camp instead of fighting for a while, had recovered a bit mentally if not physically, and Ellwood was completely broken, augh. I had not thought that they would have to deal with shell shock instead of death, but of course they did

And Maud and Gaunt making up, and Maud being supportive and Gaunt apologizing (he really has been awful to her) and them speaking in Greek to each other <3

This bit: "Sometimes I think the War is harder on parents than on soldiers," said Pritchard. Gaunt could tell he was lying, but Gaunt would have lied too, if he had thought of it. And then, having learned from Pritchard, he says it to Mrs. Ellwood AUUUUUGH

(I said this before, but, now that I have the spoilers to back me up: all the little moments of kindness between characters that didn't have to happen, but did anyway, are I think what make me so hopelessly a fan of this book)

I think as we get close to the ending my thoughts just get more and more incoherent as Winn breaks my heart over and over again and I hadn't at all thought it would be because things were more-or-less going to be okay except that they can't exactly be okay but they can be as okay as possible:
Devi being ALIVE
CYRIL ROSEVEARE giving them the Brazil out!

"You don't have to give me your answer now, of course," said Roseveare. "I've already written to my uncle about you, just in case--"
He didn't finish. They both knew what he meant: in case I'm killed before I can help you.

Also: KEATS
Gaunt giving Hayes a JOB (and not a job as his freaking valet, either, not that I don't love Lord Peter but... like, let's let Hayes have a little class mobility here, that's the LEAST we can do)
"I'm not playing, either."

I mean, the rational part of my brain knows that the book is doing a few backflips to give them an ending where they can be alive and together ~~and not be Alan Turing~~ (although hi I found while writing this post that Robert Graves actually had the experience of almost dying of a lung wound and being reported dead, like Gaunt, though not because he was a pow, so it's not like she's completely making UP backflips, either) but the rest of my brain does not really care -- I think because we saw all the ways in which things could go wrong, it's a little like Carruthers and Sandys ( :(((((( ) and Aldworth and the Roseveare brothers and Lantham and -- and everyone else -- are the other stories that didn't work, that ended tragically, so in a sense my brain thinks of it like survivor bias; not everyone did die in WWI, or even most of everyone; someone had to survive; it might as well be them.
And also because they didn't survive unscathed. At all. Either physically or mentally. Which also seems -- reasonable, statistically speaking.
Also because no one should be Alan Turing (including especially Alan Turing) and I don't at all mind a universe where my characters ARE NOT (now, can I have a fix-it AU for Turing)

Physically speaking: Sassoon (who admittedly did not get his face shot off) lived until age 81 and Graves lived until age 90 after getting shot in the lung, so my headcanon is that Ellwood and Gaunt lived a very long time together :P

And then that last, awful twist of the knife. OH COME ON, the book was DONE and we were all going to live happily (or at least hopefully) EVER AFTER and now the third Roseveare brother is dead (as he dreamed back in the beginning, that was a shoe I had been bracing to drop for forever and when I finally let my guard down...). (While I was reading about WWII poets... I guess this happened to Wilfred Owen. Augh!)

And the LAST PARAGRAPH which didn't even register for me the first time -- I might not have actually read it properly then, because I was too busy trying not to throw the book across the room because Cyril was dead: Let us, like the soldiers of Waterloo, have our century of peace and prosperity, for we have paid for it in blood.

:(
Well, I'm thinking about that a lot this week.

( Here, have the Sassoon poem 'They', because it's been rattling around in my head for days now )

And I suppose reading this book, now, is: well: I think this should be required reading for anyone who tells the old Lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

hokuton_punch

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Current Mood: excited

beatrice_otter

I use the same name everywhere so I am

beatrice_otter on AO3. Treats are awesome.

I would rather get a story you were happy with than "well, she said she liked x, so I guess I have to do x even though I don't like x and/or am not inspired that way." This letter is long with lots of suggestions and preferences if you find it helpful, but feel free to ignore it if it is not helpful. I'm fairly easy to please; I've been doing ficathons for a long time and am usually very happy with my gifts.

The most important thing for me in a fic is that the characters are well-written and recognizably themselves. Even when I don't like a character, I don't go in for character-bashing. If nothing else, if the rest of this letter is too much or my kinks don't fit yours, just concentrate on writing a story with everyone in character and good spelling and grammar and I will almost certainly love what you come up with.

I have an embarrassment squick, which makes humor kind of hit-or-miss sometimes. The kind of humor where someone does something embarrassing and the audience is laughing at them makes me uncomfortable. On the other hand, the kind of humor where the audience is laughing with the characters I really enjoy.

( General Likes and Dislikes )

( Crossovers )

( Rivers of London )

( SWOT )

( DS9 )

( Moon Knight )

( Enterprise )

( TNG )

( TOS )

( Voyager )

cahn

Happy day-after-Easter!

Last week: Eyeliner shows that the Zealot faction is really bad! (No, really!) The Year of the Four Emperors, and those emperors discussed. Nero and his end. Lord Hervey of Frederician salon makes a surprise appearance!

This week: Titus attacks Jerusalem, but the factions have already done a lot of the work for him...

Next week: Rest of book 5!

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Worldbuilding Exchange

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Fic: Learning the Steps

Fic recs from FFFX, AU5k, and Fic In A Box

She floats!

LEP 15.4.

LEP 14.4.

The Jewish War: Last half of book 5

Crosspost: Suicidal Ideation and Friendship in The Pitt

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The Jewish War: First half of Book 5

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