Merlin ficlet: Dusk in the Market Square

Title: Dusk in the Market Square
Fandom: Merlin
Wordcount: 724
Pairing: Merlin/Aredian
Rating: R
Contains: Noncon public sex and humiliation in the context of interrogation.
Notes: Written for the Kink Grab Bag challenge at summerpornathon and for the "humiliation (in public): square on my kink_bingo card.
Link: Merlin had been in this position before.

X-Men recs

Anthem for Doomed Youth by fahye is a really fantastic long X-Men fic, Raven-centric with Charles/Erik, taking place before and during the movie. Very much recommended if you wanted to see and understand more of Raven's feelings, and just in general because the writing is really beautiful and conveys so much emotion. Thanks to lolafeist for the rec!

I kinda want to ask about doing a podfic, because the language is so pretty and I think it would be fun to read because of that (plus there's not a ton of telepathy). On the other hand it is long so it would take a lot of work and not count for kink-bingo! So then I thought well what about using it as my project for ladiesbigbang, seeing as how I signed up and all! But despite it being Raven POV I am not really sure if it's lady-centric enough to be in the spirit of lbb, what with so much of it being about her relationships with Charles and Erik. So I don't know! (And it's possible the author wouldn't want a podfic anyway, or that someone else is already working on it, so it's sort of weird of me to be talking about this in a public post, but yeah.) What do you think?

Also here is a really interesting post of X-Men meta and history by gool_duck, about Israel and Holocaust survivors in the '50s and how that might affect Erik's story.

I rewatched Atonement the other night and I still love it a lot. Like, really really a lot. (I am sorry if that takes away from the strength of my recs for you - I guess some fans really hate this movie!)

Also rewatched the first X-Men movie a couple weeks ago, am now in the middle of watching the second one. I can't actually remember whether I've seen this one before. I find them kind of forgettable but fun, and I do like this second one a bit more than the first. It's nice to have most of the character introductions out of the way so they can focus on sexy stuff like mind control. Also, Erik and Charles are still in love, so there's that.

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In non-X-Men-related news, Why You Should Have Been Watching Treme Instead of The Killing has kind of a silly framing (it's not like Treme doesn't get talked about, and I don't agree that The Killing was that bad, and also it ignores the fact that lots of people would watch Treme if they could afford HBO...) but I like what it says about Treme being a show about creativity. There's been more violence in the second season (and I'm not happy about some of those stories), but

violence isn’t the show’s engine. The artist’s life is. There’s a meta-quality to many of the scenes of artists making art, since nearly all of them touch on debates about which types of creativity are authentic, political, pleasurable, meaningful, or lucrative, questions that clearly apply to the creation of the series itself. But rather [than] argue like an op-ed, Treme feels like poetry, and even better, it has begun to incorporate critiques of its own New Orleans exceptionalism, playfully showing the ways these attitudes can sour into pedantry, as they do on occasion with that Indian Chief, who is currently in New York driving his jazz musician son crazy with his passive-aggressive provincialism.

In general this person thinks the second season has been a lot less preachy than the first, and I guess I agree with that. I'm happy to see Annie and especially Antoine's stories getting more attention and direction, and like the reviewer am kind of amazed that I'm actually starting to care about Sonny.