darkrosaleen: (Default)
A quickie this time! I started a crazy new job and am an assistant mod for Battleship (!), so I have limited brain for egregiously long DW posts.

Media Consumed

Conclave + Sinners

Talked about these here! Short version: enjoyed Conclave but not fannishly; loved Sinners fannishly and non-fannishly, I'm an unrepentant multishipping slut who loves secretly powerful twinks/fucked up codependent relationships/cunnilingus.

The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells

I wanted to read the books before I watched the new show, and then I fell in love. Murderbot is a hilarious narrator and a delightfully snarky protector of stupid humans, and it keeps getting into terrible gooey physical peril that hits my whump buttons. This might be the fandom that gives me a wireplay kink.

Étoile

A bilingual Palladino show about ballet companies in Paris and New York that trade dancers and choreographers for a publicity stunt, leading to bickering and sexual tension and quippy pop culture dialogue. I loved the messy situationship between the forty-something many-divorced directors of the New York and Paris ballets. I loved the eco-terrorist star ballerina who terrorizes everyone she works with and sexually torments her male dance partners (and has a love triangle with the forty-something ballet directors). I loved the neurotic, autistic-coded, perfectionist, extremely irritating choreographer and the loudmouth working class male dancer he takes on as a muse.

Bones and All - Camille DeAngelis

The film adaptation was one of my favorite movies I watched last year, and the book is VERY different, in both plot and in theme. While the movie is blatantly bisexual and treats eaterism as a metaphor for queerness, the book is specifically about straight female sexuality: Maren is both attracted to and repulsed by boys showing sexual interest in her, and she deals with that attraction/repulsion by eating them. There's also a theme of attraction/repulsion around eating meat, which I probably wouldn't have noticed if I didn't know about the author's heavy-handed vegan messaging ahead of time. My main issue with the book is that it's technically YA, so all the grotesque erotic cannibalism in the movie is entirely vague and offscreen in the book.

Fics Posted/Gifts Received

I wrote one fic, a pinch hit for Smut 4 Smut:

Georgia O'Keefe Shit - Challengers, Art/Tashi/Patrick, garden party fundraisers and semi-public cunnilingus

I received one gift in the Diegetic Exchange:

Sitting Down with Sammie Moore by plutonianshores

An interview with blues legend Sammie Moore as he begins to take a step back from touring to focus on developing his music venue, Pearline's.

Exchanges Etc.

I picked up one pinch hit, signed up for and defaulted on one exchange, and tried and failed to write two fics for two low-pressure events. I also tried and failed to write Sammie/Pearline/Remmick on my own time, because the way to combat irritating shipwars is with rimming smut.

In Progress/Upcoming

I signed up to be an assistant spreadsheet mod for Battleship, which just hit its signup cap a few hours ago. I've never modded a fandom event before, and it's very intense and stressful and exciting! I like to think of myself as level-headed and calm in a crisis, so I think I can handle some freaked out exchange newbies. Wish me luck.
darkrosaleen: (dark side cookies)
Two of the most recent fandoms I've dabbled in have some thematic similarities (LOL), so I'm making a post about them. I probably would've watched both movies even if they hadn't been hyped to death, but hype still got me here. Yes, this is mostly an excuse to talk about movie #2.

Conclave

I already wanted to watch this movie because of the Oscar buzz, but I ended up watching it because it blew up on [community profile] fail_fandomanon as an extremely horny Old Man Yaoi fandom. I'm no stranger to thirsting after sad middle aged men--I've had a crush on The Terror's Frances Crozier since 2019--but Conclave failed to spark fannish joy for me.

I really enjoyed the movie's cinematography and visuals and tight pacing, but I did not find any of the sad middle aged cardinals attractive enough to ship (except, unfortunately, for extremely bigoted conservative vapelord Tedesco). It was also clear that for FFA, the appeal of this fandom is in shipping anxious neurotic repressed virgins with religious sexuality baggage, and that's really not my thing (part of what makes Crozier hot to me is that he clearly fucks, and all his sexual hangups come from decades of experience and relationships). My favorite cardinal was Stanley Tucci's Bellini, and Bellini/Tedesco is apparently a pretty popular ship, but I wasn't motivated to seek out fic for it.

Sinners

Firstly, aside from some minor gripes about pacing, I think this movie completely deserves its astronomical hype and might be the best movie about the power of music that I've ever seen.

Like Conclave, Sinners has characters struggling with faith and temptation, but there are no anxiously repressed virgins in sight (the only character likely to be a virgin is buried face-first in pussy by the second act). The characters eagerly indulge in sins ranging from blues music to sex to infidelity to violence and murder, and the supernatural element means that all these sins literally endanger the characters' mortal souls. I think the movie is really good at making things like acoustic blues music and consensual sex feel genuinely thrilling and evil and dangerous, the way they would to characters in this place and time.

I expected my favorite character to be one or both of MBJ's SmokeStack twins, but Preacher Boy stole my heart in the opening scene, and love him more every time I watch the movie. I said in my Baby Driver review that I have a thing for "a cute traumatized twink protagonist who's secretly badass and hyper-competent in his chosen field," and baby-faced blues prodigy/cunning linguist Sammie Moore definitely qualifies (I think Sinners/Baby Driver would be a fun crossover, and Baby definitely has tapes full of Sammie Moore records). It would've been really easy to write this character as a sweet, innocent, virginal final girl untouched by the sins of the other characters, but a huge part of Sammie's coming of age journey is him grappling with temptation and breaking his preacher father's religious rules, and figuring out for himself if following the rules is worth the high cost. I won't be surprised if he's my favorite character of the year.

The AO3 tag is pretty active for a standalone non-franchise movie. Most of the characters have opposite sex love interests, so this is a very het and readerfic-heavy fandom, which is a mixed bag for me. I'm not into readerfic or self-insert OCs at all, but I loved all the canon ships, especially Stack/Mary and Sammie/Pearline. I'm also very into Stack/Smoke and Sammie/Remmick, two delightfully fucked up ships filled with very different versions of codependence and obsession. This canon is also great for combining ships into messy polycules. This is the most energy I've had for a fandom in a while, and hopefully I can harness it into fic. Or maybe into a Remmick/Sammie fanmix of sad pining Irish love songs.

Profile

darkrosaleen: (Default)
Black Rose

July 2025

S M T W T F S
   12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  

Style Credit

Syndicate

RSS Atom
Page generated Jul. 17th, 2025 07:38 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags