Scaramouche, Scaramouche

with his scary crabby pants on

WARCRACK FIC LOL

The fall of New Avalon, and what happened after Thassarian left the inn to cause a rucks so’s Koltira and the Ebon Commander (in this case, Kyl's amazing elf badass Nocturne) could get out safely.

Orbaz Bloodbane, Ishandarr, and a conversation about feelz–DK-style. Violence incoming, and douchebaggery. And profanity. They’re both disagreeable dingbats, really. If you don't know who the NPCs are, it's fine. Just enjoy boys being stupid.

( by the pricking of my thumbs, elf is gonna kick your bums )

(I wrote these last night on tumblr in a fit of blargh and am reproducing 'em here because why not XD Also I am kind of ridiculously proud of the Plotty Illidan Smiley that appears within the rant, to wit-- }:D)

( teal deer )

Okay I’m not going to scold people for liking tragic romance type storylines—whatever floats your boat, seriously.

But I’m really not interested in pursuing such plotlines with regard to the queer couples/trios/catpiles I write.

I’m not averse to putting them through some hella gloominous doominous shit—I like hard-won happy endings, the trial-by-fire makes the s’mores at the end taste that much better and so on…

But I’m not in it for the downer ending with regard to the queer romances I write.

So while I will tell tales of Sylvanas and Lana’thel, or Koltira and Thassarian, going through all kinds of difficult and nightmarish malarkey…I’m not going to rob them of their happy endings.

And yeah, i think it is possible for these couples to have such. Seriously, if people in fandom are going to speak of undeath as synonymous to disability--and then turn around and say that no one undead can ever have a happy ending? That’s treading perilously close to the same kind of ‘logic’ that says disability is God’s punishment for a sin, that disabled folks are somehow b0rken and cannot be happy.

People who have been dealt a shitty hand by fate are allowed to be angry; they are also capable of finding happiness and being joyful, and are allowed to do both! Sorry, but I'm not obliged to suffer nobly for anybody's Hallmark moments! Nor is anyone else who's marginalized in any way, shape or form. This narrative bollocks about bearing up oh-so-nobly under great sorrow and strife needs to go away because it serves mostly to perpetuate the suffering.

I’m sorry, I did not come here to dance at that party.

And yeah I know not everyone who likes tragic stuff runs on that rationale! I just resent the stuff that does! A LOT! Tragedy is something that all of us contend with, and I am not saying that nobody marginalized must ever suffer in writing because pfffttt. But when things wander into the territory of 'X is suffering BECAUSE she is Y and oh the TRAGEDY of FORBIDDEN LOVE THAT CAN NEVER BE' I start to bang my head on the desk and seek beer.

For people in positions of privilege, that's just story fodder, but for marginalized people, sometimes that's our lives, so - no thanks. None of those walnuts are going into my brownies.

So yeah. Koltira and Thassarian have a right to be crabby about perpetually cold feet, no heartbeat, and all the WTF that goes along with being undead. They also have a right to sleep in and like pancakes. And Sylvanas and Lana'thel have a right to be annoyed as fuck with Arthas and frustrated with their circumstances (Lana with wing cramps = crabby forever), but also have a right to snuggle and hold hands and enjoy lichboom tea with lots of honey and lemon.

Because, seriously, so fucking many queer folks (and PWD, and PoC, and people who are any and all combos of the aforementioned, because INTERSECTIONALITY IS A THING AND IT MATTERS) IRL -are- denied a happy ending. And if you add in the cultural coding of elves, and the insistence some people have on treating undeath as analogous to disability—yeah, it gets even more facepalmy.

Guys, a lot of my friends have been denied a happy ending through shitty happenstance and terrible circumstances, and I’m writing in the end for myself and my girlfriend—and in the memory of those people who had to stop too fucking soon.

A desire for a happy ending is not childish. The world is often crapsack, and if some people get a kick out of crapsack world fiction, they’re free to get it, but don’t go scolding me for not caring for such stories. I don’t care for bleu cheese either. it’s not because my palate is immature; I just don’t like the taste of friggin’ bleu cheese.

idk where i was going here i had a point lololololol

tl;dr other people are free to write what they want but since I do not like bleu cheese I will continue to write my hard-won happy endings. Fighting for a happy ending doesn’t always work IRL, especially for marginalized people…so I figure I can give myself and others such satisfying endings in my head instead. XD

I really dislike Kalec.

( ... )

So yeah, hopefully this "justifies" everything to the person who whimpered at me over this. ;3

When I was growing up my dad was a gigantimous Gordon Lightfoot fan, and to this day 'Triangle' has a habit of being stuck in my head. (If you happen to go looking for an MP3 of this, go for an older recording--the one from Shadows is the one I've got. Gord sounds a bit funky nowadays.)

And then one day while I was listening to it Eveynna decided to give me alternative lyrics.

Braincanon-wise this is (probably) one of those older folksongs; the locations change depending on where the sailors happen to be GOING. The bracketed locales are the originals; the ones outside brackets are the ones Evey tends to sing.

Stormwinders have a very deep reverence for the sea, obviously. ^^

( I don't know if this counts as filk XD )

I keep wishing we’d got more information about the San’layn.

I mean, I love what we do get about Valanar and Keleseth. Just from their quest text alone, you learn:

-They’re brothers

-They care about each other a great deal

-They’re quite high-up on the chain of command (Kel is in charge of the whole of Howling Fjord—from Utgarde, as we learn later)

-They respect you and enjoy working with you (Kel greets you with ‘hail’, entrusts you with what appears to be his very favourite set of sharp pointy things, and is generally very amiable; Val PRACTICALLY SQUEES after you cannonpwn the Scarlets, gets all excited about the prospect pf Arthas being happy about this, and says he’ll make damn sure that the boss knows who was responsible for the explosions and chaos)

For a pair of guys on the evil side of the fence, they’re certainly a lot nicer to deal with than some of the player’s alleged allies!

( more things! )

TITLE: Arise, Maiden
FANDOM: World of Warcraft
PEOPLE: Agathe the Val'kyr, her sisters Daschla and Arturia, and their Queen.
PAIRING: Sylvanas/Agathe, sort of.
RATING: G because all Agathe does is heartmark XD
SUMMARY: The aftermath of Godfrey finding out the hard way that Sylvanas is extremely hard to kill (all of the bullets are nowhere near enough), and Agathe being terrified at how fragile her Queen suddenly seems to be...
WARNINGS: Minor spoilers-kinda-sorta for the Silverpine quest shenanigans.
NOTES: From Kyl's Great AU. I'm using more Scandinavian/oldschool-y spellings of the Val'kyr Sibling Trio's names, simply because I can.

First posted on Tumblr; expanded a bit here.

Dedicated to my dearest longcat Kyl. ♥

***

"Take care of Arturia," she said, and was prepared to die. She was happy to give of herself, of her soul, for her Lady. It was their place to give of themselves for their Master—or Mistress—and as the eldest of the three sisters, it was Agathe’s place to give all she had.

( ... )

Okay, just to clarify...

If an author pulls any of the following shit over and over and fucking over again, I am highly unlikely to like them or any of their work.

1) Gross dumbass gender bullshit--be it taming-the-ice-queen or lady-is-a-prize or vomitworthy essentialist crud or fucky double standards or punishing someone for ~not knowing their place~ etc.
2) Normalization of abusive behaviour/victim blaming--be it that 'boys will be boys' fuckery that basically insults everybody male ever, that 'oh but they're just STRESSED' backhand crap, passing off emotional manipulation as normal etc.
3) Dunderfuck anti-LGBTQ etc. bullshit, no matter what the fuck it is.
4) More-equal-than-others shit where it's okay for the hero to be a dickyacht just because s/he's the hero and therefore any sketchy shit s/he pulls is handwaved or excused.
5) Unexamined clueless shitbrained attempted parallels to real-life situations, without any examination of the hangups that can make this go horrifically wrong and/or make this get ragingly offensive.
6) Stereotypical fuckery relating to ethnicity and culture. This encompasses the 'this one person represents their entire culture teeheez' shit, model-minority issues, and often crosses over with the humans-are-white crap that is so very very tiresome.
7) Ableist shit. This encompasses just about anything you can think of lol--the PWD naturally being evil, evil albinos amg zamg, the idea that illness or disability is a just punishment for something (see also: the idea of ~generational curses~) or that a disability is an outward manifestation of inner badness, and the usual cackhanded treatment of mental illness and of issues relating to addiction.

No, I cannot ~*just look past this*~. The older I get, the more and more it leaps out at me. And? I was taught to hunt this kind of thing down in my own work (my advertising prof was very big on not repeating past grossness) and burninate it with vigour--repeatedly if necessary. I can't help but see it now. And to see it so often in the work of quote-unquote professionals, and see it go unexamined, and see it perpetuated by people...well, that gives me rabies XD

And now you know why I skim most WoW novels and refuse to use certain authors' characters and make up my own instead, and why a lot of mainstream popular media makes me want to bite things. ;p Whee!

And! Yes! I know everyone has ingrained issues and such, because Society Is Deeply Hosey And Issueladen and we all pick up nonsense without realizing it much like socks picking up lint. The key here is whether or not you're onto yourself and examining why you did XYZ Thing. I screw up a lot, I am no paragon, but I do take the time to consider what the heck I am doing and why. The authors I get annoyed with very obviously skip this step and think everything is just hunky-dory wall-to-wall and it's ~just~ a book or a comic or something.

Well. I do not agree with that assessment. Intent isn't magical, if you elbow someone by accident it still hurts etc. Summing up--I'm gonna quote my prof here: it's rare that a piece of media is 'just' a piece of media. Everything comes from somewhere.

So if you've played through or read up on the revamped Scarlet Monastery and Scholomance dungeon quests, you'll know that Lilian has something to do with both. The events of the Scholo one made me blink a lot.

I'll spoiler-cut just in case, and also declare that I do not take this as part of my own AU brain-canon. AU Lilian has joined the Forsaken (who are not generically evil FFS) and is sort of unofficially apprenticed to Nathanos and Koltira, who consider her one of the precious few sensible people they've met.

Anyhow. Spoiler cut now!

( Ellipsis goes here! )

So I was taking Aerionn the b'elfy holy/protadin punklet through the beginning Pandaria quests last night, and the following occurred to me:

As much as I love the Hozen and I seriously want to hug all of them, I kind of wish they were more developed. I also kind of wish they were more like the original Monkey King. Like Sun Wukong. Not with the UBERHAXX necessarily, but the general attitude and cleverness and most of all identity. The Hozen have some solid foundations, but their cultural identity and their culture fullstop isn't fleshed out as much as it could be.

The little bits and pieces that we get about their culture are neat--how and when and why you get a double name, their hilarious poetry, their linguistic quirks...yeah there's some deeply, DEEPLY facepalm-worthy gaffes and stereotypes to be found, but homework WAS done. It doesn't quite make up for the *GROAN* moments completely, but it's there?

And that just makes me want MORE dammit. XD I'm not sure how much development the Jinyu got, as I am FAR AND AWAY NOWHERE NEAR PANDARIA with my Allyside characters (the highest-level one is Eveynna, Stormwinder-Theramoran pally extraordinaire and queen of the epic !Newfie accent, at 30), but yeah. I do wish we'd gotten more. Compared to the amount of work done with the Pandaren, it's like an Ensure pudding cup next to creme brulee.

I know that not everything can be put into a game, and that Pandaria is light-years better than Cata with regard to the completeness of questlines (even if a lot of the storytelling is still execrable...the stuff dealing with the Pandaren and Jinyu and Hozen and Mogu and Co. alone is fantastic but the second practically any named mainstream NPC besides Anduin gets into things, everything spirals rapidly down the flush-hole), but...yeah. When you put one up against the other you get wistful. (Well...you do if you're me. :B)

I'm probably going to end up fiddling around and expanding upon a lot when I get to writing about Pandaria. Because well that is what I do. If something feels too spare and I'm still hungry I make more snack food.

And also it will feature AU!Garrosh not being made of fail, and a distinct lack of stupidness with legacy characters. :D