Sophinisba Solis

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.

-I posted a paragraph about the Brazilian movie Madame Satã over at lgbtq_recs. I also made this icon (Dreamwidth only) for Leonera, the movie I recced last week. I've been having fun playing with Photoshop over the last few days and making some Treme icons for kink_bingo. (I had also intended to finish a long-ish podfic before the amplificathon deadline tomorrow but I haven't felt like working on it, so I haven't.)

-omg summerpornathon! Over 56,000 words of sex toy fic by 78 different authors written last week and posted on Friday. So far I've read and voted on one of the three sets of 26. Almost all the ones I read were really good! Fun and hot and inventive and with a lot more variety than I was expecting. Still, I feel so overwhelmed, and I have no idea what to say at any of the party posts, eep, so shy and not wacky enough! And the new challenge just went up, and of course it looks awesome (kink grab bag!) but also eep!

-The June 10th edition of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour starts off with a discussion of X-Men: First Class. Not an especially substantive one, but as with most episodes it made me laugh and made me happy. They also talk about all the awful previews they (and I - twice!) saw before that movie, and about the recent silliness over whether YA fiction has gotten too dark. Could be a nice introduction to the podcast if you haven't listened before.

-I think people who are interested in the subject have already seen thingswithwings's new vid The Price and accompanying thoughts on manpain, but, well, here are those links again! As someone with a long history of enjoying watching men cry over their guilt (ha ha she used so many of my favorite Mulder moments) I have many reactions and feelings! Which I probably won't post about, but the reading and processing has been good. Someone also linked me to cesperanza's reaction post The Missing Link, where my friend and I agreed that Ces makes some smart and interesting points on her way to a conclusion we totally disagree with. :) Good discussion in those comments too - a nice treat to see people with different perspectives making a real effort to understand each other.

-Man, I'd love to read some good meta about manpain and the new X-Men movie, especially if someone wanted to put it in conversation with marina's post about Erik as a Holocaust survivor and/or happydork's less impressed post about that, and idk a bunch of other good meta that I haven't read. That is a post where I would lurk like whoa.

So much happy small fandom reading! Here are my favorites from what I've read so far this Yuletide - several are for fandoms I've requested in the past or would have requested this year, and the fics have all the things I love - it feels almost as if they were written for me! I hope you like some of them too!

( West Side Story, Treme, The Wire, Homicide, Law & Order: SVU, Bend It Like Beckham/My Beautiful Laundrette, The English Patient, The Little Mermaid )