What I’ve Read
So, I have finished nothing that was traditionally published in the last week, but I have read a non-trival amount of fic, and worked thru a lot of books that I hadn’t actually had a chance to finish yet.
For the finished things, I’m trying to pull back into the format I used for recc’ing works, because if I preserve more info, then it’s easier to find things if they are later taken down

Title: The Legend Of Liob by Killbothtwins
Fandom: Star Wars Clone Wars
Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/38656698
Length:19K
Summary: The Republic sends a combat photographer to be attached to the 212th until further notice, citing the need for a morale boost. The clones make up a fake clone, citing the absolute fact that it is very funny. Somehow, these two things save the galaxy.
Why I love it: I love Cody’s point of view on this fic, as he tries desperately to reign in the nonsense that several thousand bored soldiers get into while playing a joke on their newly assigned war correspondent.  I love the original character’s general willingness to do what she can to help the clones out and use public opinion to help them. The troopers of the 212th are having some fun in the middle of some of the worst possible things that could happen to a person, and it is truly hilarious. This is just a very fun fix it fic!

Title: Triumvirate by celinamarniss
Fandom: Star Wars ex-canonical pre-disney works by Timothy Zahn
Link: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1494842
Length: 77K
Summary: (Mine) Mara Jade and Prince Luke Skywalker of Naboo are given as concubines to Admiral Thrawn. Surprisingly, this works out well.
Why I love it: Welp, I did not expect a threesome where Thrawn the meat in a Luke and Mara sandwich, but, hello, we are here. It’s a bit kinky, a bit dark, a bit sweet, a bit of an AU

Title: Seeking Shelter By sphagnum
Fandom: Original work
Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15648981
Length: 7k
Summary: Guns down, gentlemen. Oscar protocol. The betas lowered their rifles instantly, pointing them at the ground in front of Max instead of his chest. Max took a deeper breath in, his tension easing a bit as he moved past the part of the plan where he might just get shot dead before he had a chance to try to bargain. It had always been a risk; it had just seemed like a better death than slow starvation.
Why I love it: I unrepentantly adore writing where characters are operating thru a hard language barrier. In this case, one character has a form of fictional virus-induced aphasia and it’s really well written and interesting to see the world thru his eyes while also getting the dialogue of the people around him.

What I’m Reading:
2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson - book club, descriptive heavy but interesting. Someone I love who typically has deeply different reading tastes than me truly hated this book, and I took that as the recommendation that it usually is.

Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film by Lee Clark Mitchell - Reading for the Great Queer Supernatural Rewatch - we’re thinking about westerns and masculinity! And how that genre of work says things about The American West as a setting and what it means for the kind of masculinity that the characters of Supernatural are dealing with. Related to the third chapter, we also watched Stagecoach (1938) which had some fascinating elements to it in terms of writing and an ensemble cast. (It was the first movie in which I found John Wayne to be charming and a good actor - I normally get deeply grossed out by him!) The racism in Stagecoach felt generic, by which I mean, it’s an inherent part of the genre and cannot be removed, but was also not pointed or with a lot of motivation behind it. Racism as wallpaper. Had a nice long discussion with a friend of how that compared to the John Carter of Mars novels that they’re currently reading, which really wants to pound into your head that the Martians cannot actually feel love and are terrible people who deserve to be conquered. Compared to Stagecoach, where Geronimo is a boogeyman and the Apaches are portrayed with all the inhumane violence of a twister, the John Carter novels are far less palatable to us. But I have a sneaking sense that Stagecoach’s racism has a longer tail because as a viewer of the film, you have to accept The Bargain that a Western movie is making in order to get any pleasure from it.

Darth Maul: Son of Dathomir by Jeremy Barlow - a bit spare. I recall that this was a means to publish plots that had been cut short by the end of the Clone Wars cartoon, and it’s a got a little bit of that feeling - I keep thinking that this would be better with performances behind the characters.

Ocean’s Echo by Everina Maxwell - continues great! I'm about halfway thru and the main couple, who started the novel by trying to pull off scam to fake a mental bond that would put one of them permanently in control of the other, are now in a situation where the power dynamic has swapped! The whole thing is running on a basis of trust, admiration for each other's deeply different skill sets, and a solid basis of unacknowledged lust, so it's pretty much catnip.

What I’ll Read Next

Library books in the house
Maul: Lockdown - Joe Schreiber
The Whale Rider -Witi Ihimaera
Tiger's Daughter - K Arsenault Rivera
Riot Baby - Rochi Onyeuchi
The Silence of the Wilting Skin - Tlotlo Tsamaase
An Unkindness of Ghosts - Rivers Solomon

Recently purchased and need to read: NK Jemisin's The World We Make, Frey Marske's A Restless Truth, California Bones

Newly purchased: Even Though I Know the End by CL Polk - this apparently started life as a Destiel fic and I didn’t know that and I have Polk $11 for the good of the fandom collective even before I got into the book

Also newly purchased - To Seek and to Find by Tamryn Eradani - I found this on a list of books that had started their lives as Supernatural fanfic and I bought it almost as an act of solidarity - I’m hopeful that it’s good, but if it’s not, it’s still only $5.

Own but reminding myself - Penric's Demon! Get on that! Fansplaining podcast just described it as Venom but in the middle ages, good god, ride that like you stole it. 

Coups, huh?  

"Don’t Prosecute Gotham’s Supervillains for Their Latest Scheme" by the Joker

*****
Some other reading I am doing!

Title: Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film
Author: Carol Clover (originally 1992, my copy is the 2015 Princeton Classics edition)
Link: Jstor actually has the full text!
Why I love it: This is actually a tricky one, because I am reading it slowly as part of the background reading for the Great Queer Rewatch of Supernatural, and so I am on Chapter 3. That said, it's really interesting, and I am using it both as a resource on its own and pulling its citations for my own reading. It's made me a much more careful reader of Supernatural. I'm also planning to read a good number of other things about gender and sexuality in film, and particularly in horror, so there's a lot I'm thinking about here.   There are some flaws - her analysis needs a lot more gender studies than it has (the field was pretty young in the late 1980's), so I'm planning to supplement with Gender Trouble and The Epistemology of the Closet. That said, this is a really approachable classic for thinking about film and horror, and as a person who really benefits from having a specific set of examples to look at when diving into a new field, this has been great!

**

Title: If I'm Haunting You, You Must Be Haunting Me 
Author: Mardia 
Fandom: Knives Out ( 2019)
Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22042492
Author Summary:
It seems horribly fitting that when Marta’s soulbond arrives, it’s in the most absurdly ridiculous, horrible way imaginable. It involves the Thrombeys, so of course something that should be wonderful just ends up being terrible in the end.
Why I Love It:
Oh, oh, I love this. This is a soulmate Marta/Ransom fic. Let's be real - Ransom is the fucking worst and there is something deeply wrong with me for enjoying this pairing so much. But he's so entertaining, and so amorally loyal to Marta in this fic that I really, really enjoy setting the moral analytic part of my brain aside for a bit while reading it. I find there is something deeply attractive about indulging the fantasy of having someone really lean into that amoral devotion. (The line where Juliet calls Romeo, "The god of my idolatry" just sends shivers down my spine.) As Marta spends so much of the film being a good and noble person, this feels indulgent and fun and deeply sexy. Highly recommend. 

**

Title: Ernesto de la Cruz vs. The Court of Public Opinion
Author: skater_of_the_surface
Fandom: Coco (2017)
Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13573815
Author Summary:
The thrilling sequel to Coco that you've all been waiting for! Miguel visits ... wait for it... wait for it... A LIBRARY.  Or : Miguel probably can't prove that Ernesto is a murderer, but stupendous fuckbucket is still on the table.
Why I Love It: It's epistolary fiction! A story told thru a series of article and tweets, detailing what happens when Miguel tries to spread the story of what really happened to his " no-good dirty rotten guitar-playing great-great-grandfather." It's charming and fun to read. (The author is not Mexican and does not speak Spanish.)

**
Two Related Recs: 

Article: FAQ:THE “SNAKE FIGHT” PORTION OF YOUR THESIS DEFENSE by Luke Burns

Fanfic! 
Title: The Best Defense
Author: Neveralarch
Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28298529
Author Summary: 
You had to fight a big snake for your thesis defense. One of the largest ones you'd ever seen—and you'd attended plenty of defenses, seen the fear in the doctoral candidates' eyes as they sought out their snake in the shadows. You don't actually know if it's the biggest snake the facilities department had to offer, because they don't like to give out that much information. But it was a very big snake indeed.
Why I Love It:  The "Snake Fight" Portion of Your Thesis Defense is just a perfect absurd encapsulation of the complete absurdity of academia and the way it grinds you down. Literally everyone I know who went thru a Ph.D program have major horror stories about the toll the process took on their mental and physical health and personal lives. This, makes a joke of it. The fic itself imagines the Snake Fight Portion of Your Thesis Defense turned back on the unkind and awful advisor who selected the snake for you, and imagines, What if the snake was on your side? 

Yeah, so the show with the characters who cannot stay dead is, apparently, not staying dead. The end of Supernatural has felt like a shockingly active time for the fandom! 

Which is not to say that I recommend getting into it. I don't. This show is Not Good. As Benoit Blanc says, it compels me, though. 

I've been undertaking what I'm calling A Fully Spoiled Rewatch with my friend, iphys. My idea is largely modeled on a podcast I have really enjoyed (and highly recommend!), Still Pretty , a 'fully spoiled' podcast with Lani and Noelli hosting it and analyzing each episode in the context of the canon and their media studies background. 

So, what's the ethos behind this rewatch?
1. Queer Reading - The show does not really *want* a queer audience or a female audience, but, we're here and we're going to be reading the show with a particular interest in that. Why do people read Dean as queer? What parts of the text support this? What parts have heterosexual explanations that we, two queers, would not have noticed without careful analysis? 

2. Fully Spoiled - Taking each episode in the larger context of the canon, and drawing parallels where we find them. (Example: Season One's "Faith" has the DNA for Season Four's "Lazarus Rising," and also echoes into the Series Finale.)

3. What You See Is What You Get - Fandom tends to really encourage reading the text with an understanding that there are generous margins, places where you can set a story or speculate a headcanon into being, or tease out a thread they left dangling. Fandom lives and breathes in the nooks and crannies of a text. But, there's also something to saying, This is what the show put on the screen, so let's give that more weight in our analysis than the spaces they left blank. As a corollary, deuterocanonical sources like the Journal of John Winchester (as available online) are also sources we're looking at - but where the show contradicts those external sources, the show wins. 

4. Do Your Homework - Season One is really a love letter to horror films, so we've been doing our homework and watching those (Example: Season One's "Home" does not really make sense without watching Poltergeist, and I liked the episode a lot more after having watched it. I watched Texas Chain Saw Massacre yesterday! It was really good!) Kripke cited Kerouac's On The Road as an influence, so we're going to read that.  We're also doing some academic reading - I've got Carol Clover's Men Women and Chain Saws out of the library for this very reason. 

5. Who's the Main Character? - Some episodes are clearly meant to highlight of the Winchester brothers above another, some are balanced, and some of the later ones are not even really about the Winbros at all! It makes it a fun question to ask. 


Already, this approach has yielded some really interesting insights!

One of the weirder, but more revealing episodes of season one, "Home," where the Winbros return to their childhood home to find it haunted, are really much more comprehensible with the source material that they are drawn from -the film Poltergeist, which focuses really intensely on a mother saving her child from a spiritual/supernatural danger.

Likewise, I had a really interesting insight into John Winchester that I never had before - that he reads to a straight audience as feeling tremendous but unspoken *guilt* for failing to save his wife from a supernatural death in their own home prior to the start of the series. Which might be one of those things that the show's writers, largely straight, had assumed would be Too Obvious To Need Saying, but honestly was quite a revelation to me! (Not one that reflects well on John, not even a little, but inflects his abuse towards his sons in a different light.) It's implied that he failed as a husband/man in a duty to protect his wife - and that's not a dynamic I had ever once considered as being even a little bit part of *my* conception of marriage! But is very clearly part of some ideals set out for a heterosexual couple. 

I have been less active because, in the wake of the ending of Supernatural (boo! and also hiss!) I have found that Tumblr fandom also kind of rose from its grave to have one last absurd hurrah, so I've been reblogging an absurd amount of stuff there.

Supernatural feels:
(relatively spoiler free) 

The ending was like the pilot run in reverse - they packed the boys up and put them on the shelf like toys they were finished playing with, instead of characters who'd had fifteen years of development.   The ending feels like a tragedy, but was portrayed as a happily ever after. 

In the end, the last three episodes and the story behind the vaunted love confession of 15X18 have convinced me that much of the elements of the show that I loved was created by accident. It was not written for me. The creators had absolutely no idea who their audience was, or what made their show great in the eyes of so many. 

I have been watching this show, on and off, for 11 years. I started watching in college, I know exactly which episode I saw first, I have felt joy and hope and despair and euphoria and righteous anger at this show for years. 

Going forward: Inspired by the podcast Still Pretty, a "fully spoiled Buffy podcast" that brings in analysis from all over the Buffy cinematic and comics universe, I have started a re-watch with my dear friend, and we are rewatching from Supernatural from the pilot onwards. It's deeply fun! My friend has never watched horror movies, so the elements of that genre in the early series are very much my area of expertise. I'm also reading a bunch of things that were inspirational for the show's creators. 


Real Life:
A birthday was had! It involved a surprise Zoom party, which, uh, was fine, because I was spoiled for it by the considerate people in my life who understand that I do not like surprises! But the main activity of the party was very fun. I got a lovely mug from my sister, as well as a NEW KINDLE from my dear husbeast. This one has the power to just download fic directly from AO3, a power which I have craved mightily in the past

Thanksgiving, which usually falls on the week of my birthday and is therefore My Holiday, was a bit sad. The parents rightfully had cancelled the family meal months ago and each of our little households cooked separate meals and chatted on a vidcall after. It was a lovely meal and we're still eating the leftovers, but. Well. A bit sad. 

I have not been sleeping super well recently, but I made some minor changes last night and I woke up not feeling groggy or gross or tired! It's a lovely change. 

I think I might go thru my recent reading history and pick a few fics to share.