Child, death is a dance on the forest floor

 I should probably do one of these, yeah?

Name: I go by Dae or Silico.
Age: 30s
Based in: USA (unfortunately)
Pronouns: they/them
Fannish things I do: writing, cosplay, beta reading, geeking out over fandom as a phenomenon in general, roleplay, fic exchanges, OTW volunteering
Other things I do: Make noises about learning languages, make noises about science, make noises about fibercraft, kvetch about RL and the current state of the world

I'm an enthusiastic beta reader when I've got the energy for it; mutuals can feel free to hit me up for that when you need, and I'll help if I've got bandwidth at the time.

I have a PhD in chemical/biomolecular engineering that I'm still recovering from.  Grad school is the tenth circle of hell.  But hey, if you have biology-related questions for some reason, chances are I can answer them.  (And I'll be happy to do so because I'm terribly pedantic when given any encouragement whatsoever!  :D)

My current main obsessions are the Sandman, the Pitt, Cultist Simulator, and the Lord of the Rings, but I've got a pretty big handful of 'forever fandoms' I keep coming back to (and I can't decide what the threshold should be for whether or not I list a fandom as an Interest on my profile, honestly - I've enjoyed media from plenty of fandoms that I don't necessarily consider myself to Be In).  I also do some original fiction occasionally.  I'm super enthusiastic about indie video games and tabletop RPG systems (and non-indie ones as well), so you'll see me posting about those sometimes.

I have a long, somewhat cranky history with Blizzard games. Diablo I was the very first non-kiddie video game I ever finished.  I played WoW like it was my job in college (shadow priest and resto druid, mostly), and I played altogether too much Overwatch when it came out in my last year of grad school (I quit when 2 was released).

I have a fluffy demonspawn cat that I love to pieces and talk about sometimes.

Transformative Works policy: I welcome translations, podfic-ifying, remixes, and other works based on my fics - please send me a message to let me know about the thing, and I will link to it on the fic.

Friending & Interaction: I welcome comments from anyone and everyone on all my posts, unless explicitly stated otherwise (and I have yet to have a reason to state otherwise), whether or not we follow each other.  If you add me to your circle, I will most likely add you back (when I notice it, I mostly use this site for exchanges these days).

Languages: English is my first language.  I speak/understand French well enough to have a conversation in text (my spoken French is rusty as hell, unfortunately, though I could get by if I needed to), and I'm currently applying myself enthusiastically to German.  (If you speak either of those fluently and otherwise want to interact, I'd welcome the practice!) 

Yuletide's been revealed, so here was my entry!  I'm going to try to do a rec roundup later, because I've already read some fantastic fics in the collection.

Title: Spinning Sugar
Characters/Pairings: Kade West, OFC, Onishi Sumi (gen)
Rating: T
Word count: 2065
Summary: A new student arrives at Eleanor West's School for Wayward Children.

 The Wood is more of a why than a where, and more of a how than a why.  Or maybe a why not.

Read on AO3 here.

Hi!  I've never done this exchange before!  Hopefully the following will be useful to you.

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Pimp Your Favorite Communities, Fests or Challenges! Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

While I've been here a year now, I still feel pretty new, but aside from Snowflake, I've very much enjoyed:

sunshine_challenge - summer counterpart to Snowflake

femslashficlets - what it says on the tin

100prompts - also pretty much what it says on the tin - you can sign up to do prompt tables (haven't finished my first one, of course, but at least I've gotten a few fics out of it!)

questionoftheday - good for when you want to post but not sure what about

watchpoint_gibraltar - for the Overwatch folks

hannibal_fans - I think every fannibal I know on here is already in this one, but IF YOU AREN'T, COME HITHER!

Apparently this is a thing again this year, and a lot of people are doing it in January rather than December?

Anyway, I really like Dreamwidth and I have no idea why I've been avoiding it lately, so let's change that, I suppose.

Any questions/topics you might be interested in me expounding upon over the next month, hit me up with a topic (and a day, if you like; otherwise I'll just pick one) on this thread.  Fandom stuff, personal stuff is fine too for the most part, hobby stuff.  Anything on my Interests lists or that you've ever seen me reference is fair game, as far as fandoms go. 

Probably not going to be seeing my therapist too much longer (in the good, we probably don’t need to do this anymore and also hopefully me moving way), and I kind of wonder if I could convince her to watch Hannibal by telling her that a lot of our conversations would suddenly become side-splittingly hilarious in retrospect. >_> Because they would. Oh, they would.  (At least, from my point of view.)

Like, just imagining her combination of outrage at how non-therapeutic and otherwise silly some of the "therapy" scenes are combined with

the fact that

literally today we had the most fucking Hannibal conversation about trees as metaphors, complete with me dragging WB Yeats into it.  (And this was not an atypical conversational branch.  Heh heh, branch)

is giving me the giggles as I type.  

Somewhat ironically I've never felt the urge to make a cannibalism joke in her presence, but I have narrowly avoided "Nietzschean fish" and not at all avoided "Any sorrow can be borne, if you put it in a story" or "I don't hide from God."  And I think she'd also retroactively appreciate my amusement when I found out that the show outright quotes one of the books she suggested I read, more than once.  

Anyway, I don't really have a point here except I'm Amused and wanted to share that.  It's a peculiar sensation when you're going "no, self, you can cackle about how this fucking sounds like Hannibal RP later; right now you need to focus on what you're doing with this metaphor rather than laugh about it."

I have an occasional habit of watching things because of gifsets.  Usually gifsets with The Gay.

So when I saw Gillian Anderson kissing Archie Panjabi on Tumblr, I (correctly) assumed that it was really just "ambiguously bi/pan woman kisses straight woman to get an annoying man to go away" but nevertheless since 1. it was Gillian Anderson and 2. the show was only three British seasons long, I impulse-watched it.  (Or, well, most of it.)

Premise: Rockstar cop (Gillian Anderson) comes to Belfast to catch a serial killer (Jamie Dornan) who's been preying on successful young women in high-powered fields.

(Hilarious thing: Gillian's character here, Stella Gibson, looks exactly fucking like her Hannibal character, Bedelia du Maurier.  Blonde hair, icy demeanor, pencil skirts and all.  But this time she's a cop!)

My takeaway, I think, is that I appreciate the show's major themes and Gillian's performance, but think she was underutilized as an actress and that the show really suffers from the assumption that Jamie Dornan's character, Paul Spector, is actually interesting.

He isn't.  He really fucking isn't.

Maybe Jamie Dornan can give an excellent, nuanced performance when the character he's playing has more depth than "misogynistic abuser with great abs," but since that's all I've personally got to go on, I'm really not fucking impressed.  (Apparently he won at least one award for his performance in this?  Which is a travesty.  He demonstrates maybe three facial expressions, and the one he's wearing 80% of the time is "brooding stoicism."  This character is such a cliche it's embarrassing.)  The show spends approximately equal screen-time on him as with Gillian's character, and that was a mistake, as far as I'm concerned.  I applaud the obviously very intentional decision to make him "normal" - he has a wife and two kids and he loves his daughter very much - but it lingers so fucking much on his day-to-day life hugging his daughter and lying to his wife and it's just... boring and unnecessary. 

The fact that he's a believably normal guy is central to one of the themes - Gillian's character gets to call that out when one of her male colleagues calls him a "monster," and she says no, he's just a man who's taken his misogyny a bit further than most do.  That's good and important.  But his angst and his family drama isn't actually interesting, because he's not interesting.  He's just another fucking misogynistic piece of shit who lies to his wife a lot and kills women who are more successful than he is because he gets off on it.  Very few of the scenes focusing on him give the audience information we don't already know.

Gillian's character is largely interesting because she's both a badass and so untouchable in ways women aren't conventionally expected to be, while showing nothing but solidarity and empathy toward other women who don't have her brazen disregard for cultural norms.  (No whiff of "I'm not like other women" from her, which is fucking refreshing.)  There's a whole otherwise-superfluous side-plot in the first season that really only serves to slightly flesh out a one-night-stand that other characters repeatedly attempt to slut-shame her for.  But it almost actually works because she gets to drop some serious truth bombs about gendered double standards without it coming across as shoehorned in.  

The second biggest problem in the show, to my eyes (the first being how much time and cinematographic energy is spent on a boring antagonist), is how little she's given to play off of in terms of other characters.  Her scenes with Professor Reed-Smith (Archie Panjabi) and Farrington (Niamh McGrady) are the most dynamic and deep-feeling in terms of character interactions, yet both these interactions with Stella in a colleague and mentor position, respectively, are few and far between.  Stella's direct superior is a weak man who can't remotely match her personality or competence.  The challenges internal to the police that she faces feel toothless, manufactured, because there is no credible same-side antagonist.  Her interactions with the main antagonist are very limited, and always (at least up to S3E2, where I stopped) obviously under her control.  Gillian is a spectacular actress, but she doesn't have very much to work with, throughout the show, in terms of rapport with other actors.  I don't think that says anything about the other actors around her so much as it says the writers should have given her a character whom she could consistently be on the same, or similar level with.

Anyway.  I stopped watching and just read a summary for about 2/3 of S3, because S3 (after a pretty great extended emergency medicine sequence!) introduces an amnesia subplot for Spector.  Which.... as I already was bored by him, I am even less here for mooning over the fact that he suddenly can't remember being a serial killer.  I just... no.  I read a synopsis of the rest.

I can semi recommend the show for Gillian Anderson fans and crime drama fans, with the caveat that there are serious weak points.  It's certainly been an interesting study in contrasts for me, in terms of what defines good drama and good dramatic tension, and how the writing can either enable or confine the skills of the actors.  

I just got reminded that this is a thing, and I am in fact actually trying to work on the next chapter of my Hannibal fic, so here are six rather long sentences: