skygiants

I was supposed to do five favorite anime/manga for cinaed on the 14th, a full week behind on my December meme posts! I am shamed. :( ALSO this is a hard question to answer. Five? Only five?!

OK, I can muster up a pretty clear top five, but I refuse to rank them! REFUSE. Here goes:

- Revolutionary Girl Utena was not actually my first anime (that was Evangelion, about which I have now forgotten most of everything) but it was definitely one of my most ... confusingly formative. And it's so good! So often inexplicable, but so good! Just such an amazingly incisive and scathing condemnation of everything that is toxic about gender roles and savior complexes, wrapped in twelve layers of metaphor and boxing kangaroos.

- and Princess Tutu was my fourth anime! I started out strong, well done self. Perhaps part of the reason I love it so much is because it is in direct conversation with Utena, and not arguing with it exactly but providing a different slant -- a less brutal but no less incisive look at the kind of stories that shape people, and how they do it. Also it's SO ADORABLE. EVERYTHING IS ADORABLE.

- meanwhile Fullmetal Alchemist, in a different category, is emphatically my favorite shonen. It's a theoretically straightforward quest story, which is actually a nuanced exploration of sacrifice, responsibility and loss, dealing solidly along the way with issues of genocide and national guilt and national healing. Also, Hiromu Arakawa is one of the most charming mangaka that exists IN THIS WORLD.

- rivaled only perhaps by Yumi Tamura, author of 7 Seeds! I am a little bit obsessed with 7 Seeds, a post-apocalyptic manga that manages to be incredibly brutal and incredibly optimistic and INCREDIBLY HILARIOUS all at once, because Yumi Tamura's character development is a beautiful, complex thing and Yumi Tamura's plotting and worldbuilding are like Jurassic Park on crack. "And then we found these things in the desert and poured water on them and it turned out they were DEHYDRATED DINOSAURS!"

- I don't actually know enough about Naoki Urasawa himself to know if he is charming? Anyway, 20th Century Boys is my other all-time favorite manga, about ... a bunch of people running around to thwart the apocalypse! This wasn't an intentional theme. Anyway what it's really about is the way that the things that absorb you as a child do and don't continue to affect you as you grow up, and the power of things like music and stories, for good and for ill (also perhaps a theme running through this list, OK, I never said I wasn't predictable.)

OK THERE THAT'S FIVE. Honorable mentions go to Baccano!, Gokusen and the first 200 or so chapters of Skip Beat! as well probably as several other things I am forgetting. (I can safely leave Twelve Kingdoms off the list though because I like it best as a light novel series. SO THERE.)

I have no explanation for this except that it's genarti's fault.


Title: Fort Briggs and a Little Lady
Fandoms: Fullmetal Alchemist, Yotsuba&!
Characters: Falman, Buccaneer, Miles, Yotsuba
Word Count: 627
Summary: Of all the babyfic I ever thought I might possibly be perpetrating in my life, Fort Briggs babyfic was not top of the list. You probably don't actually need to know Yotsuba to enjoy this. You probably do need to find the concept of Fort Briggs + five-year-old-child inexplicably hilarious to enjoy this . . .

( It had been over a decade since Fort Briggs had concluded an enemy encounter with anything less than a crushing victory. )

kd7sov asked me for my top five 'most awesome relatively-underpowered characters.' As I said when I was talking about bulletproof tropes: I LOVE underpowered characters. I especially love underpowered characters when the narrative allows them to be awesome despite the fact that they're the only one not shooting laser bullets with their mind, although sadly this doesn't happen nearly as often in fiction as I would like. But whenever it does, I'M THERE SO FAST, guys. SO FAST.

( Cut for images and babbling! )

Talk to me about your favorite underpowered characters, flist!

Other things I discovered while backing up documents: some not-quite-as-old fic-bits I never posted. Most of which never will be posted, but on consideration I have decided I like this well enough to inflict it on the world.

Title: Gone Fishing
Characters: Roy Mustang, Riza Hawkeye
Word Count: 987
Summary: In eight or so years of nonstop political scheming, there may have been one faint doomed attempt at a vacation.

( “Lieutenant,” he says, “do you know much about fishing?” )

As a sort of corollary to my last top fives post, I guess, evil_little_dog asked me for the top five AUs I would like to see for FMA. Which seems a little redundant, but I have valiantly tried to think of new ones!

( Cut, once again, for images and terrible photoshopping. )

If anyone is inspired by this to write snippets, I, um . . . will be happy? Will write a snippet back perhaps? SOMETHING.

It has been a very, very quiet day at work. (I am the best employee.)

Title: Cautery
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Words: 189
Characters: Marcoh, Scar. Postcanon.

( Anonymity is a reward that he's not sure he wants anymore )

Those of you who are sick of seeing me pimp out fma_ladyfest: you are in luck! Because sign-ups end tomorrow (Wednesday) at midnight EST and therefore this is the last pimping post you will probably have to see. (Unless you belong to the FMA comms, in which case, uh, you'll be seeing like four more. Sorry?)

So basically, if you have been thinking about signing up, now is the time, this is the place. Join us! We have cookies. Well, okay, that is a lie. But we have awesome ladies and awesome writers, which is possibly better!


In other news, in honor of all the fantastic fic that is to come (AM I STILL TOO EXCITED ABOUT THIS? MAYBE YES A LITTLE) I am following in vivien529's footsteps and reviving the songfic game!

Name a work of fiction - book, movie, tv show, whichever; obscure is fine and welcomed, as long as you know that I know it - and whatever the next song is that comes up randomly on my iPod after I see your comment, I will describe to you the plot of the amazingly angsty and terrible songfic that would emerge from this combination! As a bonus, if the song is uploadable, I will upload it for you when I get home from work.

Example: You say, "The Cat in the Hat;" the next song that comes up on my iPod is "Don't Fear the Reaper"; clearly, this would generate a fic about the Cat trying to talk the fish into letting the Cat dump him out of his bowl, leaving his confined life for a passionate and freeing death!

(And then by the rule of the internet, of course, that fic will spring spontaneously into existence, but we can ignore that bit.)

Top Fives continued: blacksheep91 asked me for my top five Princess Tutu fics. Normally I would do this in a comment rather than a whole post, but sneakily I am also hoping to get some recs out of it for myself.

( Five(ish) Princess Tutu fic recs )


So guys, if you wanted to toss me your favorite Princess Tutu fic that I tragically left off this list, that is something I would definitely appreciate!

Also, while on the topic of fic - sjk;djfdsa okay so, as of a week in, we have 24 signups for fma_ladyfest (not counting ourselves, since . . . we're not actually sure that we count, in this case). I am kind of unreasonably excited about this, given that when we first came up with the idea genarti and I were fully prepared to be exchanging stories for a two-person ficathon.

You can also consider this your mid-signups reminder that there's one week left before signups close. The post to sign up is over here, and while Gen and I may not be doing any more dances together due to being in different cities, I can assure you guys that I at least will continue to chairdance in a highly undignified fashion for every new person who joins.

For pretty much every request on the Fannish Top Fives, you can take it as a given that my reaction falls affectionately somewhere on the spectrum between "you know well how to play to the judge" and "YOU ARE ALL WEIRDOS." *laughing*

Okay, Top Fives #1, from nevacaruso: top five crossover characters you'd like to see Akio seduce, and why. (So basically, after going quite happily for several years without posting at all about Akio's seduction habits, this journal has apparently become ALL AKIO SEDUCTION, ALL THE TIME. I am sorry! I promise after this no more posts about Akio sexin' for a very long time.)

I limited myself for this to canons which I had not already written up in this dream crossover list, because redundancy! Which did help me narrow it down a little.


( Images are occasionally shirtless but as worksafe as anything involving Akio! )




. . . . so yeah, I'm done. But feel free to contribute your own top lolarious Akio seduction!

Drabble roundup, part 2!

For oneechan19: ( Howl's Moving Castle/Young Wizards crossover: Howl as a YW!verse wizard )

For varadia: ( Milliwaysverse: That time Dave walked by when Mary and Galadan were discussing her future career path )

And also for varadia because that was terrible: ( Homeward Bounders/Ouran crossover: Jamie stuck in Ouranverse )

For shati: ( Avatar: Dangerous ladies! )

And then I felt bad, so I wrote shati another: ( Avatar: Appa )

And then somehow that still did not quite work out to cheerful, so, also for shati: ( Avatar: Zuko attempting to write poetry for Mai, and Sokka's reaction )

For elspeth_vimes: ( Monster/20th Century Boys crossover: post-series Tenma meets Kenji )

Also for elspeth_vimes: ( Sun Sword/20th Century Boys crossover: Kallandras gives Kenji singing lessons )

And, since that one was very short, also for elspeth_vimes: ( Sun Sword/Fullmetal Alchemist crossover: Serra Teresa and Hawkeye discuss political strategies )

For lacewood: ( Fullmetal Alchemist: Mustang/Hawkeye shippiness or UST, OH TWIST MY ARM )

LAST ONE. Also for lacewood: ( Fullmetal Alchemist: Team Mustang hijinks, also Briggs hijinks, CUNNINGLY COMBINED )


AND OKAY THAT IS ALL.