oneiriad

So. That was a Year, wasn't it.

I can't claim my private life was especially exciting, though. Mostly embracing my time as crazy cat lady librarian. I did get to go to the US - NY to visit friends and then Boston with a detour to Salem for tourism. It was fun - got some nice souvenirs to take home. Like a proper Kitkat clock. Well, and a bout of covid, which definitely sucked.

I got a fair amount of reading done this year. You can find the full list on Goodreads. (I am currently angry at them, because they've removed the average user's ability to add books and editions).

Some of my favourite reads were Emmy Carell's novel from 1921, Kan mænd undværes, an epistolary novel about an f/f love affair; Roger Zelazny's A Night in Lonesome October;
C.A.Wolters's Den som hvisker; Bram Stoker's Dracula (yes, I read Dracula Daily); and Knud Pedersen's autobiographical Dengang da jeg var pige, about working class gay life in early 20th century Copenhagen.

I didn't get much writing done, I fear. Watching Sandman inspired me to write a very short fic, Serendipity, which I think might have been the first Hob saves Dream fic. I certainly wasn't the last. Following Dracula Daily and thinking how the cowboy Quincey Morris filled the role of noble savage lead me somehow to write a fic of Jonathan Harker's visit to Romania as if it was an Ancient Greek play, and finally there's my Yuletide story this year, Travel Light written for the Norwegian fantasy novels Ravneringene. They are very good novels. The fic? Well, I lost Yuletide as a writer. By the new year it had 3 hits and a drive-by guest kudos. That's not even enough to call it bad, just - guess nobody read the books? I dunno.

On the other hand, I won Yuletide as a recip, getting an amazing Far til fire fanfic, Læg nu smukt din hånd i min, which you should all go read.

What else? I watched a fair amount of tv shows and some movies. My favourites were definitely The Sandman and the new Interview with the Vampire shows. Encanto was probably my favourite new movie, but I also got to see Jaws for the first time and enjoyed it thoroughly.

( Full list of movies and tv shows )

Guess what, fellow kids? Live long enough and the fanfic you wrote for Yuletide 9 years ago (specifically, the one I still mostly think of as my ace Persephone fic) might also end up getting analyzed and found “imperfectly feminist” in some random American’s honors thesis.

Okay, no, now I’m being mean, it’s not a bad analysis, it’s quite interesting (and mildly unsettling) to read your written-in-a-panic-before-deadline-like-almost-all-my-exchange-fics-ever story getting the academic treatment. I do think it’s a bit - if all you have is a hammer (feminist theory), everything looks like a nail. Lots of talk about women vs the patriarchy and what I thought I was writing was more “queer character, subtype: aro-ace struggling against heteronormative and allonormative expectations”. I mean, close?

Googling the author and finding that she - if I understand correctly what adolescent ed means - seems to be studying to be a high school English teacher does make some of it make more sense.

Hello Yulegoat

Looks like you're stuck with me this year. I'm delighted to have you and looking forward to seeing what you'll come up with.

General likes: slash and gen; plot; snark; fluff; banter; happy endings; awesome characters being awesome; crack; twisty plots; angst; canon divergence AUs; surprises.

General DNWs: anachronisms,including gender and sexuality terminology; non-con (dub-con, on the other hand, is lovely); a/b/o, seme/uke, sub/dom and any and all similar power dynamic tropes; very kinky sex (heavy bdsm, watersport, etc.); underage; kidfic; bestiality; mpreg; plot-what-plot; genderswap; incest; unprompted AUs other than canon-divergence

If you're the sort of person, who likes to stalk your recipient, you'll have most luck looking at my tumblr. Probably don't stalk my DW - the fact that my two previous Yulegoat letters are still on the recent entries should tell you how often I post here.

Right, well - on to the requests, shall we?

( Requests )

I'm not saying I just spent the entire day binge watching Sandman and now desperately need a season 2.

Like about half of Tumblr I've fallen into the Dracula Daily thing, following the adventures of our friend Jonathan Harker on his increasingly no-good-very-bad business trip to Eastern Europe, where he just wanted to do a good job and enjoy the local food, except he's in Dracula.

(If you haven't heard about Dracula Daily, it's really just the novel, chopped into it's dated bits and then e-mailed to the subscribers on the days that the various letters, journals, ship's logs, news articles, etc. are dated on. It's - surprisingly enjoyable.

Anyway, it got me curious about when Dracula made it to Denmark. I mean, Sweden and Iceland were doing some - shall we be generous and call them translations? - around the turn of the century, but from what I can tell Dracula is published in Danish in the 1960s. So I dived into the Danish digitized newspapers and this was the oldest reference to Dracula I could find. From Socialdemokraten for Randers og Omegn, 6th of January 1910.

I tell a lie. There was a newspaper from 1771 talking about Dracula, but, well, I wasn't looking for the historical figure.

And today I looked for Bram Stoker and found that the text recognition software sucks at the old-timey letters, because it had missed a couple of earlier, word to word identical articles. I'm not making a new clip, but the oldest I found was from Thisted Amtsavis, 3rd of January 1910. Well, unless it was mentioned in Politiken before then. Politiken does not play nice with the rest of the class.

I mean, I assume it was possible to buy it and it might have been in the better stocked rental libraries, but in general public knowledge, this was the first mention of Bram Stoker's novel and Dracula, and in English it translates as more or less this:

“A captivating book.

A lady in Pittsburgh, one Mrs.Flint, was very ill and knew, that she was not going to survive. Despite her illness, the lady - being an uncommonly eager reader - started reading a novel, “Dracula”, by Bram Stoker, and having just read a few chapters she found it so fascinating, that she wanted at all costs to finish it. As she knew that her hours were numbered, she sent for her doctor and offered him a fee of 18.000, if he could keep her alive, until she’d finished the book.

The doctor promised to try, and he did this so well that she even lived for a few hours after having finished the novel.”

In short: the first news Danes had about Dracula was all about a fangirl.

So, a few days ago I was introduced to the traditional Danish fairytale "The Princess Who Became A Man", which I had previously been unfamiliar with (long live the Folklore department!).

I don't know if any of you are familiar with it? It's exactly what it says on the tin, and if you read Danish you can find it in this original collection of fairytales collected by Evald Tang Kristensen, starting on page 343.

Anyway, it's actually fun to read a fairytale you're unfamiliar with, because you actually get to pause at all the truly fucked up bits. I mean, most fairytales have them, but since you've heard the stories over and over since you were a little kid, the sundry cases of murder and cannibalism and etc. doesn't really faze you.

And because I'm the sort that wants to share things I find with the internet, and since the internet in general does not read Danish, well, I tried my hand at a mostly faithful re-telling (yes, I know, I could have just translated it straight up, but that felt - inappropriate with something that's supposed to be told and re-told, the way a fairytale is), which I've put up on AO3. I mean, it's not quite fanfic, I suppose, but close enough.

The Princess Who Became A Man (1569 words) by oneiriad
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms, Prinsessen der blev en mand | The Princess Who Became A Man (Traditional Danish fairytale)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Additional Tags: Traditional Fairytale, Magical Sex Change, Threats of Incest
Summary: When her father the King grows mad in the wake of the Queen's death and tries to force his own daughter to marry him, the Princess flees into the woods...

Just did my tiny bit for the "save LJ fandom" effort and imported the tiny and short-lived The Almighty Johnsons community I made once upon a time when we were maybe 3 people who liked that show.

In retrospect that show had so many issues (who am I kidding, it had issues even in -spect), but Grandpa Olaf remains one of my favourites ever.

I meant to write this post more than two weeks ago, and then stuff happened.

Anyway - so, looking back on the fanfic I managed to write in 2021, I'm actually a little surprised at how much of it turned out to be written for exchanges. I don't usually play in many exchanges, apart from Yuletide, but this year I did four.

So, to start with the non-exchange fic, I wrote four more of my MDZS crossover outlines (aka too lazy to actually write fic fics) - a Harry Potter, where the trio accidentally summons "the greatest dark lord of Ancient China", a Stargate SG-1 (and my personal favourite), where the cultivators are on an alien planet and Golden Cores are technically goa'uld, a Midnight Diner sequel to the episode with the haunted porn, and a Lucifer with Wen Ning/Mazikeen, just because. (I'd kinda hoped to spend december taking prompts for fandoms for more crossovers, but there didn't turn out to be much interest. Ah well.)

The only non-prompted and non-exxchange fic I did in 2021 was a tiny little ficlet for the Japanese Onmyoji movies - A Patient Fox. It's not much storywise, honestly, but I liked the movies.

For exchanges, the first I wrote was my Chocolate Box fic The Nightingale - MDZS modern AU with soulmates, because that's what the recip wanted. And the thing is - I don't generally write modern AUs for (more-or-less) historical canons, but that was the request - and usually, in MDZS, that means either something set in China (and that wouldn't work for me, because I do not know enough about life in modern China to even fake it, and what I do know would start off with asking questions like "how are there so many siblings in this story?" and go from there, and that would not have been a fun story for anybody) or in modern US (and I refuse to write that, I utterly refuse), so I ended up setting it in Denmark, just pouring it full of as many ridiculous Danish things as I could without ever mentioning the words Denmark or Danish in the entire thing. It worked well, I think - and I got to include stuff like the burial mounds at Jelling, because how could I not?

Second exchange fic, for Fandom 5K, was my first foray back into Pirates of the Caribbean fandom in ages - Of the Wave and of the Flame, an AU where Norrington got to sit movies 2 & 3 out by having had his ship sink off of Tripoli and thus ended up spending a few years as a slave among the Barbary Corsairs. As you do. And then I mixed it up with - one of my favourite Arabian Nights stories is the one about a fisher and a merman making friends, except I went with a different supernatural being and just ran with it. I liked the story I ended up with, my recip liked it and I did get some nice comments - but, let's just say, if I had laboured under the delusion that anybody would actually care if I came back to PotC, well, good thing I didn't. And rewatching the movies reminded me of all the things I disliked about the post-first-movie PotC, so. Not going back there again, methinks.

Third exchange was Trick or Treat, where I had fun with writing Beforeigners - Some Ado About Reðr - aka the perfectly ordinary day in the life of a shieldmaiden working in modern Oslo police, which ended up getting stuffed with as many cocks and pricks and flaccid suggestive balloons as I could put in it, and yet somehow not be porn.

The last exchange was Yuletide, of course, where I ended up doing way too much research than I ought to for a five-minute fandom (I know far more about Ukrainian neo-paganism - sorry, Native Faith - than I used to, and several Chernobyl facts I did not previously know (including the fact that there is a hotel in the Chernobyl Zone -a hotel?!)) of a Eurovision music video, and only a little of it ended up particularly relevant to Білий голос, which is - sort of an attempt at magical realism-ish what if Chernobyl had scared away Spring and gotten a fairly sizeable bit of local area stuck in magic eternal winter?

I think I'll do fewer exchanges this year - probably just Yuletide. I think that'll be better for me.

Yet another Corona year at an end.

Well, I definitely somehow pulled myself out of the not-consuming-media funk I spent a lot of 2020 in. Actually completed my Goodreads reading challenge, for one thing (and might have a lower aim for this year, since I don't want it to feel like a chore (and anyway I cheat because comics count)).

Some of my favourite reading experiences this year were comics, actually. I happened across the first volume of Moriarty the Patriot while doing random searches on bibliotek.dk and fell hard. It's a manga that re-casts Moriarty as a more Robin Hood/Leverage style anti-hero (of the kill the rich variety), and has him becoming friends with Sherlock and it just - hit me right in the id (and I'm currently waiting for the fan scanlation of chapter 66 to become available somewhere). I greatly enjoyed the first two volumes of Xavier Dorison's Le Château des Animaux, which is post-Animal Farm fighting with non-violence against a fascist regime animal fantasy, starring a cat and a rabbit gigolo. And then there's Elfgren's Norse myth inspired Vei, and the French series Seuls by Vehlmann, and Kieron Gillen's interesting rpg-fantasy-meta Die...

Of books, I greatly enjoyed K.L. Berger's YA novel Lugnasad, with a group of teenagers stuck at an island summer camp and gradually realizing that they are not getting out of there alive. Which has a sequel that I've yet to read, because I procrastinate such things. I found Pernille Ipsen's "Et åbent øjeblik", about the seven women who met at the first Femø camp and into whose collective she was born very interesting. I enjoyed Priest's Lord Seventh far more than the sequel and am sad that the main characters were so underwhelming in Word of Honor. And if you like gothic fiction, I can only recommend Astrid Ehrencron-Kidde's Det sukker så tungt udi skoven.

Anyway, you can find my Year in Books at Goodreads.

As for audiovisual media, I watched a lot more stuff than last year's meager outcome. Spending a week at the European Film College for Stegelmann's course definitely helped with that. (So many movies that week. So many.) (I am sad that was apparently the last year he has a class there :-( )

My favourite views this year - well, the Moriarty the Patriot anime, or at least the first half of it. I'm sad they left so many of my favourite bits out. From the film week, my favourites were stuff like original Gojira, which is far more a natural disaster movie than any other kaiju film I've ever watched, the Gamera movie from 1995, which had so much Jurassic Park influence, especially in the opening, The Warriors, which did not fit the week's theme of movie monsters, except possibly metaphorically, and Lifeforce, which is not a good movie by any definition, but a delightfully batshit insane late night sf vampire flick (I read the novel - alas, while also occasionally batshit insane (including the worst offending scene in the entire movie) it is also surprisingly dull and way too into pseudo-science). A friend dropping by during the summer introduced me to both the Japanese Onmyoiji movies, which are delightful, sort of supernatural Sherlock Holmes & Watson stories in Imperial Japan (if you can live with the bad special effects and the absolutely terrible hats) and got me to finally sit down and watch Word of Honor. And literally the last day before the latest shutdown of the cinemas I managed to watch Spider-Man: No Way Home, which is great fun. (As was the Shang-Chi movie, which I understand has little to do with the comics, but it's delightful to me anyway).

( Movies and tv shows watched in 2021 )

Білий голос (2597 words) by oneiriad
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Shum - Go_A (Eurovision Music Video: Steampunk Dance Party in the Woods version)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Additional Tags: Worldbuilding
Summary: The night of the 26th of April 1986 Spring was scared into hiding and Winter came to stay...

A few days late, but the fic I wrote for Trick or Treat Exchange this year.

Some Ado About Reðr (1769 words) by oneiriad
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Fremvandrerne | Beforeigners (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Alfhildr Enginnsdóttir/Urðr Sighvatsdóttir
Characters: Alfhildr Enginnsdóttir
Additional Tags: Minor Canon Divergence - Urðr Survived, Slice of Life
Summary: Just an average work day for a shieldmaiden turned cop.

Hello, dear Yulegoat

Another year, another Yuletide letter.

So, I’m skipping the general likes thing this time in favour of just going to chat about each specific requested canon. Of course I’m going to hope for something along the lines of what I prompt or similar, but honestly? As long as you don’t trip a DNW and as long as you include the requested character - let me see what you come up with? I’m curious. Go wild, Yulegoat.

General DNWs: non-con (dub-con, on the other hand, is lovely); a/b/o, seme/uke, sub/dom and any and all similar power dynamic tropes; very kinky sex (heavy bdsm, watersport, etc.); underage; kidfic; bestiality; mpreg; plot-what-plot; genderswap; incest; OC love interests; unprompted AUs other than canon-divergence

If you're the sort of person who likes to stalk your recipient, you'll have the most luck looking at my tumblr.

( Requests )

Where I made a brief visit back in time to a fandom of yesteryear. Just a visit, mind you.

Of the Wave and of the Flame (13433 words) by oneiriad
Chapters: 5/5
Fandom: Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: James Norrington & Original Male Character
Characters: James Norrington, Original Male Character(s), Elizabeth Swann
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Wherein James Norrington does not die, Fix-It of Sorts
Summary:
I nearly had you all, off Tripoli. I would have, if not for the hurricane.

Wherein the life of a certain Commodore takes a detour between the first and second film.

I might have spent my time productively the last couple of days mainlining the manga version of Moriarty the Patriot, a Sherlock Holmes retelling with Moriarty as the, well, deeply fucked up villain protagonist with good intentions.

Also a very nice Sherlock Holmes.

I think this might be one of my favourite Sherlock Holmes stories (and not just because Sherlock and Moriarty are friends and won't stop flirting as long as they are in the same room). I mean, the creators have a pretty odd perspective on some parts of Victorian England, and the whole thing is mixed with just a dash of James Bond (a very nice version of James, who gets a prototype automobile at one point and does not wreck it), but hey? It's manga, it should be a little weird.

Of course, now I am left sadly scratching at the language barrier because the two latest chapters haven't been translated yet.

Life continues mostly eventlessly. Pandemics are dull. The most exciting thing at the moment involves trying to catch my cat when she comes in from outside before she leaves tiny muddy paw prints quite everywhere.

Anyway, I participated in Chocolate Box for the first time, and got two very nice presents: in the breaking light by alessandriana, a short post-canon Untamed fic, and a very nice bit of Raksura fan art by Unlos.

My recip wanted The Untamed and they really wanted modern AU, so - I wrote an absolutely generic modern AU soulmate fic. Extremely generic. Could be set anywhere.

The Nightingale (9062 words) by oneiriad
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 陈情令 | The Untamed (TV), 魔道祖师 - 墨香铜臭 | Módào Zǔshī - Mòxiāng Tóngxiù
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Lán Zhàn | Lán Wàngjī/Wèi Yīng | Wèi Wúxiàn
Characters: Lan Zhan | Lan Wangji, Wei Ying | Wei Wuxian
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting
Summary: In a world where you find your soulmate by touching an object they have previously touched, interlibrary loan librarian Wei Wuxian touches a book from another continent.

As always starting with the last, namely my 2020 Yuletide fic. Which in this case ended up being Jumanji, the original movie fra 1995.

Rubicon (4213 words) by oneiriad
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Jumanji (1995)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Judy Shepherd, Peter Shepherd, Alan Parrish, Carl Bentley, Sarah Whittle (Jumanji), Nora Shepherd, Van Pelt (Jumanji)
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence
Summary: In another, kinder world Alan Parrish's final roll of the dice won the game. This is not that world.

Yuletide was my second exchange this year. The first was the Fandom 5k exchange, where I wrote Tetrao Lepus Pseudo-Hybridus Rarissimus L. for the new Constantine comics run (which I recommend, if you liked the first ones. We are very much back to the classics in story style here). I liked writing it and had fun reading up on weird cryptids for it, though maybe not my most amazing exchange experience.

Apart from that, I found a new fandom this year. I spent a good deal of the early year and then lockdown first reading my way through Mo Dao Zu Shi the novel and then watching The Untamed. And since I've been dabbling in writing - nothing long, nothing truly serious, and several crossovers.

Midwinter is a bleak little glance at a world where nobody came for WWX and the Wens.

One Guest Does Not Trouble Two Hosts is, well - I couldn't not write a story featuring Sun Wukong.

Terrible As The Dawn is a glimpse of Yiling Laozu!Lan Wangji, and All That Is Gold Does Not Glitter is a doomed to be unfinished WIP for the idea of what if the core transfer had failed and left both WWX and JC coreless.

Rule Number 4077 is just silly.

A Funny Thing Happened at the Qinghe Games was written for a prompt asking what if it was "possible to re-form one's core when one has it taken out".

Ophidian is a crossover with a bit of Chinese Lovecraftiana I read this year. If you like Lovecraftiana, I'd recommend the short story collection, "The Flock of Ba-Hui" by Oobmab (though the translators added a framing story that annoyed me).

Puppetry was a pinch hit for an exchange starring Xue Yang.

A Matter of Taste is - my very dirty and utterly ridiculous little fic about Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian working on certain sexual issues in their life? I don't know what I was doing there.

And then there's MDZS Crossover Outlines, which is exactly what the title implies.

So, sometime in the middle of the spring lockdown I just - stopped making these posts. Which were one of the few things I still make on DW. Partly because of, well - life - between moving and Covid-19 lockdown and nobody really reading this anyway.

I think, if I should make a New Year resolution, it should be to actually write reviews for at least some of the things I read over on Goodreads.

I did read quite a lot, though not nearly as much as other years. I didn't even reach my reading challenge goal, though 151 books at the end of the year isn't bad, is it?

You can find my 2020 reading on Goodreads.

And as for what I watched after the first couple of months:

( Not a lot for most of a year. )

Hello, dear Yulegoat

Let me just start by telling you thank you for writing for me. I'm looking forward to seeing what you'll come up with.

General things

General likes: slash and gen; plot; snark; fluff; banter; happy endings; awesome characters being awesome; crack; twisty plots; angst; canon divergence AUs; surprises.

General DNWs: non-con; a/b/o, seme/uke, sub/dom and any and all similar power dynamic tropes; very kinky sex (heavy bdsm, watersport, etc.); underage; kidfic; bestiality; mpreg; pwp; genderswap; incest; OC love interests; modern setting AUs (actually, for Yuletide, just setting AUs in general).

If you're the sort of person, who likes to stalk your recipient, you'll have most luck looking at my tumblr.

( Requests )

So, during the long, dark months of this Corona spring, I first finished the novel and then watched all the episodes of The Untamed. And now I've found myself writing a few fics for the fandom, because apparently, I appreciate fake!ancient Chinese necromancers and all their works.

My latest - and so far most succesful fic in the fandom (because fandoms like smut, don't you know?):

A Matter of Taste (3383 words) by oneiriad
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 魔道祖师 - 墨香铜臭 | Módào Zǔshī - Mòxiāng Tóngxiù
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Lán Zhàn | Lán Wàngjī/Wèi Yīng | Wèi Wúxiàn
Characters: Lán Zhàn | Lán Wàngjī, Wèi Yīng | Wèi Wúxiàn
Additional Tags: Crack, Smut, Sexual Experimentation, Possibly not the sexual experimentation you expect
Summary: Wei Wuxian is very happily married to his Lan Wangji. There's just one small thing...

So, I participated in this year's Fandom5K exchange, and just wanted to share the fic I wrote with anybody who wants to read it. It's Hellblazer, drawing on the current comic run by Simon Spurrier, though really, as long as you know who John Constantine is, I'd say you're good to go.

Tetrao Lepus Pseudo-Hybridus Rarissimus L. (6040 words) by oneiriad
Chapters: 4/4
Fandom: DC Comics, Hellblazer
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: John Constantine, Nat (Hellblazer 2019), Tommy Willowtree (Hellblazer 2019), Davinder Dole (Hellblazer 2019), Zatanna Zatara, Lucien
Additional Tags: No skvaders were harmed during the production of this fic, Sandman Universe era
Summary: Being a narrative of sundry encounters with fauna most unreal.

2022 - looking back

(no subject)

Dear Yulegoat 2022

(no subject)

Dracula

Prinsessen, der blev en mand

(no subject)

2021 - My Year in Fanfic

2021 - my year in media

My 2021 Yuletide fic

My Trickortreat Fic

Dear Yulegoat 2021

My Fandom5k fic

Moriarty the Patriot (aka flirty boys and villain protagonists ftw)

My Chocolate Box fic

2020 - A year in fic

The rest of what I read and watched this year

Dear Yulegoat 2020

Mo Dao Zu Shi fanfic

My Fandom5k fic

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