I did a quick digital type treatment/fanart for astolat's Thor fic Athelas! I just really wanted to see Thor as a frost giant.



♥

Okay, back to work!

Sherlock/London and Sherlock/John (sort of)! <3 Oh, Sherlock.

1. I've been playing Mass Effect, a sci-fi exploration/action game, and I just realized the male main character's name is JOHN SHEPHARD (I was playing with the female version of the main character). So I tried to make a hero that looked as much like Sheppard as I could but the face/hair options during character creation are pretty limited. But--hee. <3

2. I've watched all of Sherlock and I'm dying for more episodes. The second one was a doozy though, right? I spent most of it cringing. Why'd they have to go ruin a perfectly good series with that? Why? Why?

3. I got nostalgic for Invisible Man a couple days ago and tried to look up Chalie Ruocco's fic, but it got lost in the Geocities purge, I guess. Bums me out.

You! ♥ In NYC and related areas! Let's hang out (grab breakfast, lunch, dinner, picnic, comic store trip, whatever)! May 5th to 7th! I will draw you stuff. ( TдT)ﾉ

And then it's off to Toronto Comic Arts Festival. Oh man, it's a bus trip from hell from NYC to Toronto--three transfers in the middle of the night, and then straight to the con after that. There's another bus trip from Toronto to Buffalo that has me sleeping in an airport for six hours, which is actually better than what I was planning to do.

I learned my lesson this time--no more trying to combine NYC and Toronto into one mega-trip. This is some hollow-cheeked horror right here: щ(°Д°щ)

( Under an LJ-cut because it is slightly NSFW. )

I know I said the Sherlock Holmes movie came off as The Gay Love Story of Holmes and Watson, but upon reflection, Sherlock Holmes '09 could also be the Depressing Comedy of Holmes Learning To Let Go Of His BFF Watson Who Is Growing Up And Getting Married or the Depressing Tragedy of Holmes and Watson In Tempestuous Secret Gay Victorian Love And Denial. Also depressing: They Were Once In Love But Now It's Over And They Have To Split Custody Of The Dog And Holmes Is Just Being A Jealous Ex And Needs To Get The Fuck Over It Already. Though it might be a very uplifting sort of story if you see it from Watson's point of view: Watson Breaks Free From A Co-Dependent Relationship With Holmes, Finally, Thank God.

That's a lot of capital letters.

I have found an vast, untapped resource for long, plotty Holmes/Watson fic for the new Sherlock Holmes movie:

Holmes/Watson fic based directly on the Arthur Conan Doyle canon (or the older adaptations).

Well, duh, you say. Wait, hear me out! I was in Sherlock Holmes fandom for a brief period after reading up on the stories to learn how mysteries were conducted, and I batted around the idea of slash with the characters. But I discovered that my personal interpretation of the characters made reading Holmes/Watson fic based on the ACD canon an awkward experience, no matter how well-written they were. I wanted to enjoy them but I couldn't imagine Holmes being that handsy and affectionate towards Watson outside of a life-or-death situation. It was hard for me to think of Holmes as a sexual being at all, to be honest.

But after watching the movie and tearing through sherlockkink and the new holmeswatson09 community, I was still hungry for more fic--specifically long, plotty, satisfying fic--so I wandered back to the old H/W archives based on ACD canon. To my surprise, I found that the characterizations dovetailed perfectly with the movie versions of Holmes and Watson. RDJ's Holmes is handsy and affectionate, jealous and playful and sexy, and the old guard of Holmes/Watson writers captured this reading of Holmes well before the movie came out. The old H/W fic totally works for me now if I keep movie-Holmes and movie-Watson firmly in mind. (No disrespect intended to the ACD canon fic writers and I'm sorry for visualizing RDJ and Jude Law's portrayals when reading your fic! But now I can read your amazing stories and I love you for it!)

The trick is simply to visualize RDJ and Jude Law's portrayals of the characters and it works 100%. I just spent the day reading katieforsythe's wonderful Cauldron: A Love Letter and The Three Favours, which are delightfully, eerily prescient:

Some of [the telegrams] inquired rather charmingly after my health. Some were dinner invitations, or notices that he had reserved a box at the opera. Others were terse and frankly exceedingly droll accounts of deductions made regarding acquaintances of ours at the Yard, or minor reflections upon passages in books, or ironic descriptions of how the plane tree visible from my old room was faring. I would calculate that a quarter of them were variously worded apologies, some amusing and others abject though never inappropriate. Finally, a further ten percent, perhaps, were summons to accompany him on cases of varying interest. I discarded each and every one of them, save the last.

I will not pretend that I did not read them. I threw one in a public dustbin without glancing at its contents and in a fit of unreasoning panic some two hours later returned to find it had already been incinerated. After that, I took care to read them through, whether they brought a horribly painful constriction to my chest or no, before I destroyed them. The less efficacious of them were crumpled and consigned to the nearest receptacle, and his more effective efforts I deliberately burned. Finally, at long last and after having received 196 telegrams from the same party, I jotted down a furious reply:

Cease writing me telegrams. You must give it up.

I had already received my quota for the day and was preparing for bed when a fourth was delivered to me, shortly before midnight:

I do not intend ever to give it up, even if the only beneficiary is the London postal service. Sleep well.

It slipped from my fingers onto my desk as I shook my head exhaustedly, and I vaguely wondered as I drifted off what I had done to deserve any of it, and what I ought to wear when I arrived at Baker Street the next morning to throttle the life out of Sherlock Holmes.

P.S. I'm always starving for good fic! Anyone got recs?

Oh man, oh man, I finally watched Call of the Wild for the first time yesterday. I've avoided watching CotW every time I watched the show before because, well, that's it, that's the last episode, the end, you know? I'm so glad I watched it, of course. It ends on the perfect note. I may have cried a little bit.

I have returned bearing vastly improved drawing skills learned from My Other Life (which is going great, by the way). My friend's been trying to get me into Supernatural, which inexplicably made me feel an intense wave of nostalgia for Due South instead. So here's RayK and Fraser, my One True OTP (One True One True Pairing?):

Hello world! :)

Everything Tsukizubon Saruko writes is a gutpunch. It's original fiction, but before you run off screaming at that, it is not the lame "original slash" stuff you see around. Her characterization is so deep and so rich and three-dimensional, and her stories are-- they're like that song you used to listen to in high school that your friend put on a mix tape for you, and when you hear it again, later, after you've forgotten all about it, you can't quite place the melody but an ache builds in your gut. I don't know. I don't know how to do it justice. Everything she writes knocks me over.

We Are More is her most recent story. I also loved Canaan Falls and Wolf at the Door, but everything's good.

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I wanted to "update" her look to 70s retro rather than awkwardly modernize her like the modern Scooby Doo stuff is doing. :3 (Man, when I was younger, you could barely watch cartoons without constantly running into Scooby Doo reruns. I eventually let them wash over me like white noise.)