Mona

Title: The Memphis Flyers
Author: mona
Recipient: kitsunejin
Fandom: Hellcats
Pairing: Marti/Alice
Rating: PG-13
Word count: ~3500
Disclaimer: I don't own these characters or this series. No copyright infringement is intended.
Warnings: No standard warnings apply.
Summary: It's been a while since Marti's been to Memphis, or in contact with any of her old team. But when Mega-Raptor, her only lead on what happened to her father, slithers into the city, she's not far behind him, and finds herself working with a familiar, and - though you'll never get her to admit it out loud - much-missed face. Superhero AU.
Spoilers: Vague mid-series ones, but this is pretty darn AU.
Notes: Oh man, as soon as you mentioned an interest in wacky AUs in your Dear Author letter, I was gone. This isn't as wacky or as elaborate as what I wanted to write (I'm so sloooow, and my banter writing skills are SO rusty), but I hope it's still enjoyable. I'm sorry the \m/ hand gesture found its way into the story so many times, and for a few other questionable narrative choices that sort of got away from me. Thanks to Sonia for looking this over!

( THE MEMPHIS FLYERS )

I just spent 3 hours making Misty/Colleen icons instead of sleeping or, you know, doing something useful. WHY AM I LIKE THIS. Of course, if anyone's worth it to me, I guess it would be them. /tries to justify

...What ship are you shipping the hardest right now, dwircle? Mine is self-explanatory but I'd love to hear about yours!

( quick typical-me update )

Okay and. INSTEAD OF TRYING TO DO AN IN-DEPTH MOVIE REVIEW POST I will just list off the following movies I've watched recently, inquire if any of you have seen any of them, and request your thoughts if you have! THEN WE CAN DISCUSS \o/ Edit: now with thumbs so there's at least someplace to start. :D: But if you disagree or got something totally different out of the movies do not hesitate to share!

* Rajneeti: thumbs up!!
* The Karate Kid (2010): one big heartwarming POC main character movie update thumb up, one thumb down for xenophobia (it tried to deal with this and had some realistic intra-racism intersections in some ways I guess, failed in others. Namely in that the only central, positive portrayals of Chinese characters were the teacher [Jackie Chan's Mr. Morita update, he made me cry because I'm a sap] and the love interest. Why was Dre's first friend in China - and only non-romantic non-surrogate father friend - a blond white boy? Why?)
* Toy Story 3: one big adorable thumb up, one thumb down for heteronormativity (though Andy/Woody was still the central relationship and Jessie/Emily was kept alive) + ceaseless effeminacy-hostility directed at Ken
* Chloe: two thumbs down >:( for classist heterosexist agenda >:( with a pinky up for the acting all around
* Drool: one big thumb down for Magical Negro trope that was almost (almost) transcended by the awesomeness and magnetism of Jill Marie Jones alone, thumb up for wish fulfillment fantasy, the arc of all the family members and how they grew together, and camp
* Exit Through the Gift Shop: thumbs up
* The Runaways: thumbs up!
* Cracks: at least one thumb up!! I can't decide if the reason I didn't love this was because it wasn't the movie I would have liked it to be, being that I found the ( spoiler )

But the growth/arc of the main character was A+.

HELLO gloss! DW TELLS ME IT IS YOUR BIRTHDAY TODAY! I am not sure how you feel about public declarations of affection, but I like to use birthdays as an excuse to wax rhapsodical about people I really like; still, in the event that this is discomfiting I'll try to be brief. I think you are absolutely wonderful, and am so pleased to have you in my internet life! I think my favorite quality about you, in the time since I've started getting to know you, is your uncompromising sincerity. It's a quality that's massively undervalued and pressured out of so many folks these days, but the emotion and empathy you share so generously are always visibly genuine; reading your comments gives me this palpable warmth. You're brilliant and eloquent and thoughtful and kind, sensitive and brave and truly committed to valuing change over comfort, endlessly interesting and so MUCH fun to get fannish with. Your writing is gorgeous and spellbinding and has changed the way I think about fanfiction (to the point that every TIME I try to put together a recs list of my favorite DC or ladyslash fic, I get overwhelmed with how much I want to say, NEED to say, about yours, how deeply I love it), your ethics and your mind and your heart are all so powerful and beautiful and inspiring, and your presence in my circle is something I'm utterly grateful for. I truly hope today, this year, prove to be as lovely as you are!

Now I am off to spend the day helping my mother gather material for her store, but tonight I AM going to get one of the many semi-written posts I have open in tabs posted. At least one. It will happen. Have a great Wednesday, all of you! :)

PS:

Check it out if you haven't! Great prompts, AMAZING fills, still going and going, so more is always welcomed. *___*

( idk )

I so desperately want to recommend Oota Moare's Teppu (spoilery wiki link). It's basically about girls - really really muscly, sexy, atypically-drawn, INTENSE girls - whaling on each other because they enjoy it. The main character is an asshole who wants to become good at fighting because she's so perfect at everything that she has no friends (LOL, THIS IS HER MAJOR SOURCE OF ANGST FOR SERIOUS) and the sweet darling with bushy eyebrows who wants to be her friend beats her in a Mixed Martial Arts wrestling match and enjoys it simply because it's fun...so main character wants to hunt her. Out of spite. For her ability to experience fun and have friends. But the thing is, main character? Is completely, embarrassingly not even close to her league. It's such a fun inversion of so very much - I can't see too many people rooting for the protagonist, since she's about as sympathetic as Light Yagami, but she's deeply entertaining and MASSIVELY atypical as manga chicks and protagonists in general go, and everyone around her is so sweet and lovable that even if jerkfaces aren't your thing, there are plenty of other characters to adore in this series.

And the femslash vibes are over 900000000000. And there are Japanese-Brazilian characters, given positive and non-tokenistic visibility, and misogyny in the sports world is confronted, and yeah, basically, there are only 7 chapters scanlated so far? But every single one is so worth it.

(Tetsuwan Girl is a ladies' baseball manga that is awesome for many similar reasons, btw.)

And now something fandomy for my DC dwirclers (BEING THE DORK I AM I LOVE "DWIRCLE" AND DESIRE TO USE IT EVERYWHERE AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE. TY FOR THIS, zulu)!

I really, really want to kick past my writer's block. I really, really want to do this by writing some DC fic! I'm in a mood, you know how it goes. I love many of these DC prompts. Too many of them, in fact. So, I ask you to vote for one (1) prompt on that list that you would like to see someone - even an inept, badficcing-extraordinaire someone (I say this not out of self-deprecation, but out of pride! I enjoy writing silly overwrought badfic! IT IS WHAT I AM BEST AT!) - attempt to bring into existence. I probably will not actually manage to make it porny, so ignore the fact that it's for a porn fest and just picture this as general shipfic or even gen, haha. Thank you in advance! (AND IF YOU ARE BROKEN INSIDE AND HATE EVERY PROMPT ON THAT LIST, orrrr if you just feel like coming up with your own, feel free. :D This is my favorite fandom ever when it comes to talking the talk and not walking the walk, so I am of the opinion that we can never have too many prompts/fic ideas floating around.)

ETA: ALSO, this is the most random thing to want to discuss but, folks into Community and ATLA, I feel like I only ever talk about lady-and-guyslash with people. When I've been really, really feeling the Aang/Katara, Aang/Ty Lee, and randomly, Sokka/Mai love lately, as well as the Troy/Britta, Abed/Annie and Jeff/Shirley affection (THOUGH TROY/ABED AND SHIRLEY/BRITTA > EVERYTHING FOREVER. IT'S JUST THE TRUTH). Please geek out with me and share your m/f ships!

First of all, I'm slooooow but I just wanna send some semi-belated love out to inkstone - you are supersmart, supercool, superWISE (which is different from smart), and sharing fandoms with you is always SUPER fun. You always get into the greatest manga series, too, I will forever trust recs from you because I have the deepest faith in your taste by now. The more I get to know you the more I find to love, and I'm really glad you're in my e-life. I hope your birthday was as lovely as you are! <333

Second of all, have a big list of Things I've Been Reading!

( Fic! Really just an excuse to rec Blade of the Immortal stuff. IN HONOR OF YOU, V )

( Comics! This is where I will talk about Green Arrow v3 and Outsiders v3, pictures and early early series spoilers included. Also included just 'cause: my fave Jason + New Teen Titans panel which I think I've flung at just about everyone I know anyway but IT MAKES ME THAT SAD/HAPPY. )

Aaaand I think that is all for today! How are all of you? <3

First of all, a VERY BELATED TY to whoever bought me paid DW time! I've been trying to write this huge entry that may never get posted about all sorts of shifting struggles and ideologies, and my insistence on trying to finish it kept me from thanking you in a timely manner, but this was a wonderful surprise and so very appreciated by a total icon junkie like me. Thank you so much. :)

At present, I'm woefully behind on everything that matters, but I've been steadily consuming comics and comics and more comics and they've been making me SO HAPPY, and after catching up on Batgirl yesterday, I pretty much hit my fannish breaking point so: HERE LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THE COMICS I'VE BEEN READING.

Current comics first, since the older stuff I'm reading is a smorgasbord of issues caught here and there (it is so much easier to catch up on series that only have 5 or 6 issues total, heh). A lot of this will be redundant to any memers, too, lol moast obvious.

( Batgirl, Tec, Red Robin, Batman & Robin, Adventure Comics, Gotham City Sirens, WW: BN, Young Justice, Blue Beetle, 2 seconds of Outsiders )

And now I hear that there's some new FMA, Skip Beat!, and Blade of the Immortal for me to read, so off I go! Oh, fandoms, you keep me so happy all the time.

Well, I sorta abandoned my DW for a while there! First I was suffering major heavy-duty serotonin withdrawal and pretty much lacked a brain, and then I got so excited about joining new fandoms for the femslash09 signups that I started ignoring everything else.

As a result, I'm now fully infatuated with Skins fandom, especially the twincesty, fictional-queer-homophobe character that is Katie Fitch (I LOVE FICTIONAL QUEER HOMOPHOBES. RL ones are crazy-enraging or crazy-depressing, usually both, but just like repression overall, they're damn entertaining to read about), and the fact that other people actually love her and ship her with girls, in well-written ways, oh it's like heaven; I'm busy working my way through the Sarah Connor Chronicles, whose titular character is phenomenally hot but frustratingly difficult to slash; I'm reading Promethea, which sort of demonstrates how very much Alan Moore is a white dude of the era where ~Western Civilization~ is the only history and culture that matters, and he's never really considered that it might be a worthwhile thing to fight past that. Also he has sex issues. But I'm still enjoying it for its lovely and sexy fictional-queer-homophobe; I'm watching K-ON!, which is probably the cutest Azumanga Daioh ripoff I've seen yet; I went and watched some ICarly...you get the idea. Also I read the new Skip Beat yesterday and ( angry spoiler!! )

But now I'm trying to be bloggy again! Except I don't have anything to say! Hmmm. Well, I've gone and re-obsessed myself with GTO, and I guess I now consider it to be my favorite series, but it's in this weird way where if more of my friends were already into it, I'd probably qualify it a lot more when I recommended it, because it's a series that is on the one hand incredibly, gratuitously misogynistic. But on the other hand it treads ground, in terms of breaking gender roles and subverting heteronormativity, that no other series I've read has. That's not to say GTO holistically escapes gender roles or heteronormativity, just that it approaches these things from angles that I've been dying to see my whole life and now finally can. So like, there are so many things a million other series out there do better than GTO on the gender front, but it's still special to me for weird, halfway-there feminist reasons: It privileges same sex friendships and a few really lovely platonic m/f friendships over heterosexual romances (only two characters are actually paired off romantically by the end, out of a HUGE cast) and lets schoolgirls bond with each other in substantial, boy-free, and fascinating-unique-flawed ways. It allows women to be multi-dimensionally awful and imperfect and scary and hateable like I've never seen before, and respects and accepts them for this (putting aside the one or two very frustrating exceptions), and lets most of them have the kind of fraught, self-actualizing journey so often reserved solely for male characters. It somehow manages to portray a ( spoilers )

IDK, I've been rereading it, and it's all so...iffy. My first time through, I was so excited to see girls who dominate everyone around them, and girls who are vicious in a way that goes beyond the superficial, and an internalized misogynist so familiar to me I hated her on sight, and just so much atypical, non-idealized, non-phallocentric writing it made my heart flutter, but one reason I daydream about GTO having a larger fandom is because none of that is unqualifiably positive, and it would be so much fun to really get into the nitty-gritty of GTO's deeper gender fail and gender successes. It's a HUGE MESS, is what it is, and you can see the way it presents the characters and relationships from so many different angles, some so positive and some so negative, and man, I could just talk about (and fanwank) those things forever.

So I started creating some dreamwidth comms to deal with my hungry fannish urges! None of them are set up, so this isn't really a pimping so much as a me reaching for things to talk about, lol.

gto_mangaverse, because we all have our dreams
monster_closet, uh yeah this is just a mirror of my lj comm - for "Monster" fic and art and so forth - because I love that place so very very much
and yuri_talk, which is the comm I'm most actively trying to set up and get together! Besides getting re-obsessed with GTO, I spent a lot of time these past few weeks getting, um. Enraged...by offsite yuri fans. Ahahaha. They all have the same arguments about the same things over and over and over again, certain opinions ("Simoun rules! Utena rules! Everything else sucks and/or isn't yuri!") are established as yuri gospel, and instead of trying to hash out anything new, the interactions tend to be about keeping that gospel established should any n00bs come in and challenge it with their independent thinking delusions of queerness and yuri goggles. Everything I read seemed to be one big attempt to prove no f/f couple in an anime series has ever been truly queer together, and it's the most self-hating, misogynistic, queerphobic (because we're all straight deep down!) attitude I've ever fucking seen. Not to mention the OPPOSITE of conducive to fandom growth and fanwork creation. ANYWAY it all made me want to talk about f/f subtext in animanga forever and ever, to see NEW meta on NEW topics spring up and to see non-canon subtext be embraced, not dismissed, and just, shoot. To be able to talk about yuri in a fun, interesting way. And it occurred to me that DW (and LJ, where I created a mirror comm) could be a fantastic place for that. Because there are a lot of people here who are actually, like, intelligent and stuff. So I'm going to try! I'll put up some posts and pimp it out and see what happens! MY FINGERS ARE CROSSED.

There was also some fun femslash meta going around a few weeks ago that inspired me to make a big post of my own for fem_thoughts, but then I lost my head (or at least my center of gravity) going off my meds and haven't touched a serious thought since. It's back now, though, so maybe I'll get off my ass and finally put something up tomorrow. We shall seeeee.