Arctic Light

Recently I made:

• A gifset of Babylon 5 hugs
• A Londo & G'Kar text/image collage

Obviously these are wildly full of spoilers.

( A little nattering about giffing on Tumblr again )

I still have intentions of doing some proper rec posts of all the excellent fic that I read during my initial reading dive into the AO3 tags last spring/summer, but - since apparently that's not happening yet, I may as well start reccing as I go.

These are a couple of longer fics that I marked for later on my initial sweep through the archive and finally remembered to go back and read. One season one genfic, one late-season explicit fic in which I'm sure the main pairing will surprise no one.

( Two recs )

I watched this over the last couple of days. (8 30-minute episodes on D+.) It's really unusual - not like anything else in Marvel's backlist. Somehow it felt like it belonged to a different era, like the type of superhero show that might've been made in the 70s or 80s. It's a comedy-drama-satire about two out of work actors trying to get a role on the superhero movie Wonder Man, which (in universe) is a remake of a cult hit show from a few decades ago. And that's about 90% of the plot. There is SOME other stuff going on which provides a superhero-related throughline for the movie, namely

spoilers for things revealed in the first couple of episodes

one of the actors (the protagonist) actually does have superpowers and is hiding it because in the MCU, super-powered individuals have to carry insane amounts of liability insurance to work in Hollywood and no production would hire him; and the other is spying for the government. So obviously both of these things provide the show's main sources of will they? won't they? who'll find out? tension.

But mostly it's just an indie-ish show about being an actor. It's unglamorous, it's full of slow-paced scenes of people doing ordinary things, trying out for parts, dealing with petty professional jealousy and eccentric directors, having long conversations in cars. The staging and lighting and the very ordinary-looking supporting characters are all more art-film than Marvel movie. It's about people who love movies both personally and professionally, and know them inside and out. It's at least partly framed around Midnight Cowboy, at a showing of which the two protagonists meet, and it's also framed around beats from the script for the Wonder Man movie that the two are memorizing and acting out scenes from. At least some of the actors on the show are simply doing cameos as themselves, in the form of people that the protagonists might have plausibly run into in their careers.

I wasn't on board with every creative choice the show made, and in fact I sort of went back and forth between episodes on whether I actually liked it all that much (though I was sold by the end), but it's fascinating and thoughtful and interesting and a bit unpolished-feeling in a way that Marvel productions never feel anymore. In fact, the naturalistic dialogue and slightly clumsy/awkward way the characters relate to each other felt real enough that I would sometimes stumble a bit when it would hit a more typical Marvel beat, as it sometimes does, because it felt a little out of place.

I'm legitimately unsure who the target audience for this show is, and maybe so were Marvel's TPTB. I'm honestly surprised it got made at all.

( Some actual spoilers )

It made me remember how, in the early days of the MCU, it felt like the movies were all doing something different and being something different, and then they just all kinda came to feel like the same thing. This one is doing something different and being something different - in this case: 1970s arthouse film - and even if I wasn't on board with everything, I liked what it was doing and being.

In between the other books I've been rereading, there were also a couple of rereads of older books.

Mrs. Frisby & the Rats of Nimh - I reread this one a few days ago after randomly finding it while looking for something else on my bookshelves. I still feel as I did the first time I read it, or watched the movie - whichever came first for me, I genuinely don't remember now - that this book has an absolute genius premise in how it plays around with the tropes of classic children's animal literature.

Cut for anyone who doesn't actually want to know the big spoiler in the premise (which is revealed in full about halfway through the book).

( About that book )

Anyway, I really enjoyed it! A fun quick read, a classic for a reason.

A Wrinkle in Time - I had pulled out this one and several others in the series to reread around the time I did my Dark Is Rising reread a couple of years ago, and finally got around to it. I remember a lot of this book really well - I must have reread it a ton as a kid, because I remember the broad shape of the plot as well as, in vivid detail, a number of images from the book, like the kids all bouncing their balls in unison, the disembodied brain, or Meg starting to pass out and dipping her head to inhale from the oxygen flower. What I didn't remember is how it all connected together, how it ended (I can see why), or how absolutely batshit insane this book is.

( A little more about this one )

So I read the fourth book in this series (by accident, not realizing it was the fourth) a couple of years ago, and stalled out on book 1. After reading the SCP Foundation book last week, I decided there would never be a better time for a cosmic horror-comedy book I already owned - and I was so right, I marathoned the entire series this past week and absolutely loved it. There's a new book coming out in 2026 and I cannot WAIT.

These books, and especially the first half of book 1 (by far the weakest part of the series), are dudebro-ish and sometimes very early-2000s deliberately transgressive humor (i.e. South Park - this gets MUCH less as it goes on, but never really goes away), and they are sometimes lovely and insightful, and sometimes just incredibly stupid, and I can see why someone would bounce off them, especially considering how I struggled to get through the early parts of book 1. But after four books, I love these characters so much that I will follow them anywhere. Even through the stupid parts!

These books, especially the first one, are primarily narrated by Dave, a slacker dudebro in the general style of early 2000s movies etc (this is very clearly in the style of the Kevin Smith movies, South Park, and other things of that era). Dave is a depressed loner working at a video store whose best and only friend is John, a Bad Idea Friend who takes every drug he gets his hands on, belongs to a shitty band, and drags Dave into a never-ending series of terrible, terrible life choices.

The plot-relevant one of these is taking a new drug sweeping their depressed Midwestern town of [Undisclosed], a drug which looks like mobile and intelligent used motor oil. It turns out that it kills most of the people who take it, but they are among the few survivors, and are suddenly able to step outside time and space, and see everything going on their small depressed Midwestern town -- all the ghosts, all the cosmic entities. They can uncontrollably travel in time, they can freeze time, and they're swept up in an attempt to fix a series of goddawful cosmic horror rifts in time and space that are wrecking their whole dimension.

The third member of the group is drawn in during the first book when she becomes a victim and later a friend: Amy, who was shattered physically and emotionally in a car accident, and then comes to the attention of cosmic horrors; starts off as one of the people they're trying to help, and gets sucked into weird spacetime shenanigans with things that she (unlike John and Dave) can't actually see. It's with Amy's introduction that the first book feels like it really kicks off and gets good.

The body count is high and gory, there are tons of gore and grossout humor and some incredibly soft, emotional and deeply affecting moments as well. This is a series where

some spoilers for one of the books

the big dilemma can be how do we kill some giant extradimensional maggots that pretend to be adorable human children, who everyone else sees as adorable human children, while they munch gorily on their caregivers and no one else can see it ... or maybe it's the realization that the hideous maggots are also children, deserving of care and consideration as any other children, and maybe the people you need to stop are the government agents coming to kill them.

If whether the dog dies is an important factor in your reading or viewing, please click

this spoiler

there is a dog, and the dog dies.

These books are so hard to rec, because you have to slog through the worst part of the series (the first half of book 1) to get to the almost transcendentally good late middle of book one; it can be lovely enough to make me cry or just spectacularly stupid within a chapter or two. A lot of stuff is brought up and then never explained. But sometimes the explanations made me put the book down and have feelings for a while. It made me laugh a lot. There are so many bodily fluids and terrible bodily function jokes. Some of its best moments involve the characters being forced to contend with the fact that life is complicated and stupid and cruel, and the best thing you can do, maybe the only thing you can do, is to simply be kind, and make the kind choice, if that's the only choice you have to make.

Sometimes defeating the apocalypse cultists means sitting down with them and understanding their heartbreaking loneliness and convincing them to walk away because you can be the person who turns them around and becomes the only person in their lives to ever believe in them and tell them that they can be something better than this.

... And sometimes it involves a triple-barreled shotgun and a plan involving a room full of fake silicon butts. That's what this series is like.

( A spoiler from book 4 )

I reposted some of my longer 3 Sentence Ficathon fills on AO3.

An Immodest Proposal (Babylon 5)
State of Change (Babylon 5)
Hypotheticals (Gattaca)

And a new B5 fic, written a little while back because I had the idea, but not posted until now:

Reliquary (Babylon 5, post-canon, canon compliant, character deaths)

Reposted under the cut.

( Reliquary - Babylon 5 - 1500 wds )

There's a Biggles February prompt fest, Biggletines, going on over at bigglesevents:

https://bigglesevents.dreamwidth.org/18654.html

Feel free to leave prompts, answer prompts, or both!

Authors are revealed, and here's what I wrote!

An Appointment to Keep (1400 wds, Biggles + Erich + An OC [Original Cat])
My recipient liked fluff and animals, so that is exactly what's in this! Set late in canon.

Draped in Glory (1300 wds, Algy/Ginger)
And this was a treat for pinch hitter black_bentley, who it seemed only fair should have a gift too! This is basically an Algy/Ginger take on the Biggles/EvS "putting on jewelry" fic I wrote a couple of years ago; it always seemed to me that it should work for them equally well.

Under Glass (1900 wds, Biggles/EvS)
Not exactly a Sleeping Beauty AU ... but also kind of a Sleeping Beauty AU! Set in canon, but Biggles is under a curse; only true love's kiss can wake him. This was a last-minute treat when the idea hit me out of the blue.

Amperslash authors are revealed! I wrote two things, one assignment and one PH.

And Other Hidden Places (Murderbot, 7200 wds, mature-rated, creator chose not to use warnings)

So in true Amperslash fashion, this one was insanely difficult to tag. It's Gurathin/OC and sort of Murderbot/Gurathin, but also, Murderbot is definitely asexual and sex-repulsed in this, possibly aromantic but possibly also not. Basically Gurathin seeks out rough sex to self-harm; Murderbot finds out about it and tries to figure out what's going on. I had a ton of fun writing it, and I figured the recipient (whose tastes I know pretty well) would love it, but I would never have written this one for someone cold; it definitely skirts the edge of a number of areas that can be either super iddy or hard DNWs depending on personal taste.


And then there was a pinch hit I picked up:

Midnight Road to Indianapolis (Stranger Things, 2K, gennish Eddie/Chrissy)

I like this pairing in general concept and have read a little of it, but I've never tried my hand at writing it, so I decided to jump on the pinch hit, and really had fun with the period ambiance in this one! (Husband reminded me when I was idly musing about the whole deal with cars having cigarette lighters that old cars also used to have ashtrays, which was definitely a thing in the cars of my youth, but I had completely forgotten about! So that makes an appearance in this fic as well.)

9. More scenes from a Babylon 5 fixit AU.

I ended up doing a number of additional prompt fills from the same universe as this fill (#4 in the previous post, major series spoilers).

( 1000 words or so of fixit snippets from the same post-canon AU )

10. And while I'm keeping the spoiler stuff confined to its own post, another B5 spoiler fixit AU based off "War Without End."

( Under this cut here )