The Tradëscan Codex

I don't really know what to say about minimerlin 2010, other than it was awesome and I had a blast. As someone or other commented, it's really more of a big sleepover than a con, which multiplies rather than diminishes the awesome. For those interested, here's the sequence of events as I experienced them:

Friday:
• Arrival at con.
• Episode watching.
• Introductions.
• Dinner at a nearby Italian restaurant.
• Vid show, part I.
• Intoxication.

Saturday:

• Re-arrival at con. (Remember, I commuted.)
• Quiet discussion as people trickled into the con suite.
• Free water ice!
• Cheesesteaks.
• Milkshakes!
• The liberty bell. The National Parks agent totally put felt!Merlin into the crack of the liberty bell. ras_elased has pictures.
• Stopping at Independence Hall so agentanachronism could film something.
• Triumpant return to hotel.
• More quiet discussion.
• The drinking totally didn't begin until like a half hour later than it did last year.
• Pizza arrived at 6.
• Vid show, part 2.
• Merlin trivia game. Our team lost by one point in overtime (?).
• Merlin RPF Hollywood Squares, which should probably be have been scheduled for a point in the con when we were a little more sober. Or not, because as it was it was sorta hilarious. I played ASH.
• Reading porn out loud. There wasn't nearly enough of this, IMO.
• There was a lot of wandering from room to room at this point.
• Hanging out in the consuite after most of the con went to bed.
• Return to New Jersey.

Sunday:
• Arrival in Philadelphia early enough to catch the early mass at Christ Church Philadelphia. Score!
• Re-arrival at the con.
• Hanging out in the consuite waiting for people to wake up and prepare for their day.
• Lunch!
• Goodbyes.

But really, the point isn't so much what we were doing (getting drunk, mostly) as with whom we were doing it (awesome fangirls). I wouldn't document semi-private discussions even if I could, but conversation tended to flow through more or less the regular fannish topics I had a lot of great discussions with a lot of different people (you know who you are). Again: big sleepover. With fangirls. Awesomeness.

Only this time with the added bonus of seeing people I'd met before in meatspace, but hadn't seen in a year. (I hadn't remembered how agentanachronism had gotten onto my flist--other than through awesomeness--in the first place until suddenly she walked into the consuite and a couple of things clicked into place.) It's surprising just how vivid my memories of fangirl interactions--both last year's MiniMerlin and WriterCon--are when usually I can't remember a face for the life of me. Maybe it's an effect of not having to divert all my energy into simply overcoming social anxiety.

I'm going to be catching up on sleep for the rest of the week, though.

Dear 3_ships Sailor:

If you check out my userinfo, you'll find a 'thon policy which implores that you be true first and foremost to the prompt and your muse, and to consider whether I'd like a story as, at most, a secondary concern. I relax that a bit for yuletide, in that I recognize there is a sense that a story for it is explicitly a gift in a way which most 'thon fics aren't, but I don't really think about 3_ships like that; I approach it more like a regular ficathon, where the writer is required to craft her story to my prompt but I don't assume I'm even going to like it.

That said, if you want, you can certainly feel free to surf through this journal to get a feel for me, and here's a little bit more, if you are interested, to help you understands how I relate to the specific texts and characters in the fandoms I've requested and what I might like.

I'll ramble a little more, because if I'm going to write this letter at all than I might as well. My particular kinks are those historically disenfranchised, especially children and women, and so in particular young women, being awesome and pwning the universe.

Looking over my requests, though, if there's a theme to them this year over and above "young women pwning the universe" (which is my eternal bulletproof kink) then it's "delicious amorality." Don't confuse amorality with simple unprincipledness, however; every woman (well, maybe not Madison) I've requested has her own code of conduct, whether it be the hacker code or simply complete egoistic narcissism, which she will not be made to compromise easily, if at all. They simply refuse to let anyone else define what those principles will be for them. Lilly Kane would no more sleep with a boy not up to her (unorthodox set of) standards than Adelle would willingly sacrifice a Doll or Nimueh would turn away from her religion.

I'd like a fic which is affirming of these strong women rather than siding with the world (and in some cases, canon) against them.

I like both hate and love as the basis of sexual relationship, and my ideal threesome would have each leg of the triangle contain a different mixture of the two emotions than the other two. My requests are already pretty much set up for that, as most already include a pairing where one he character canonically hates the other (Veronica/Mac, Topher/Claire, Merlin/Nimueh). It was only just now looking over them that I realized in all three cases the hate isn't reciprocal--Topher doesn't hate Claire (how could he?), Nimueh doesn't hate Merlin, and while Madison doesn't seem to like Veronica very much, I don't think she cares nearly as much one way or the other about Veronica as Veronica does about her.

Feel free to go AU (as long you don't erase the dynamics which make the pairing interesting; a Veronica who doesn't hate Madisn just isn't Veronica); indeed, you'd probably have to in order to write Lilly/Mac/Cassidy or Nimueh/Morgana/Merlin, unless you want to write Lilly or Nimueh as ghosts, which would be fine too since there's canonical basis in both cases. (Writing them as ghosts might make porn hard, though.) Both AUs in which Lilly/Nimueh don't die and ones that rewrite canon so the threesome happens prior to their deaths are fine.

Beyond that, I like to think I'm easy to write for. I have few squicks; I'm fine with character death, BDSM, mpreg, dubcon, noncon, chan, infidelity, incest (I can't believe I got through the entire request form without requesting it, although I guess Mac/Madison sort of comes close), you name it, I'm probably okay with it. Just please no bashing of the women. Happy, uplifting fics are good, but so are soul-crushingly depressing ones so long as the moral isn't that being a strong woman is bad. Ambivalent fics where we're not sure whether we should cheer or cry are probably best of all. If I didn't like existentialism and pseudo-nihilism in my fic, I wouldn't be a Joss Whedon fan.

dirty_diana: I'm not a Merlin person, but I checked out merlinrpf and it has 222 entries since creation last October. As RPF fandoms generally go, that seems pretty big to me. Edit: Not huge, but they probably won't qualify for Yuletide again.

musesfool: I guess the question is, then, are they interested in doing remix? And they need to come here and tell me that, if they are.

A gauntlet has been thrown down. Go here to rise to the challenge.

My RPF doesn't fall into any category that has any chance at all of becoming a qualifying fandom ("Jossverse RPF" is totally a yuletide fandom), but the idea that someone remixing one of my stories will have the option of remixing one of the RPF fics just fills me with squee. Because my RPF is pretty meta to begin with, so remixing it, retelling the story in a way that comments somehow on the original fic, would bring it to just truly insane levels of meta-ness, on par with The "All You Zombies" Remix of Incurable.

Title: Camp Camelot
Fandom: Merlin (UK)
Pairing: Merlin/Arthur/Morgana/Gwen
Summary: American summer camp AU. There's not much to do for the counselors at Camp Camelot to amuse themselves once the campers get put to bed, but one night's strip poker game may end up having summer-long ramifications.
A/N: Special thanks to peasant_ for a very useful beta.

( Camp Camelot )