Selenay's Ramblings

So, way back on December 10th, I was supposed to talk about historical romance for netgirl_y2k, but in the rush to finish Yuletide and so forth, it got...postponed. NOT FORGOTTEN. It's just that this is a trickier one for me to write, and my brain crumbled away and died whenever I tried.

I am currently feeling utterly awful due a bad cold, but ideas have had time to percolate so hopefully this will be coherent.

For the December talking meme, netgirl_y2k asked me to talk about what I like about historical romances and give some recs.

( Cut for length )

Today for the December talking meme, captainhillshipper asked me for my favourite fic and why I love it. Which is basically impossible to narrow down to just one fic, in the same way I can't pick just one book or movie (anyone who wants the rundown on those - I'm still taking topic suggestions!), so it has to come down to a list.

Most of these fics are ones I've read in the last five years or so, because my memory for fics I read further back than that is...hazy. Any older fics on this list stood out like woah. Sadly, that means fandoms I was active in for a long time (SG1, Buffy) are not represented well. Er, at all. Everything blurred into a mush.

Also, bookmarking and Kindling today makes remembering newer favourites so much easier than it used to be. There are fics that I remember loving at the time, enough to reread multiple times, but all I can remember is fandom, pairing, and maybe a vague premise. Maybe. The archives they were on are long gone, which makes them pretty much impossible to trace. Hence the bias towards newer fics.

The fics below are the ones that I've read a dozen or more times, the ones I open when I need a pick-me-up or a cosy afternoon with a cup of tea. I love them to little bitty pieces and keep going back to them. Bashing my favourite fics ain't gonna win you points here, is what I'm saying :-)

Launch Your Assault: I've lost count of how many times I've read this. It's a Clint/Coulson college AU by one of my favourite fic writers, and there's something about the mix of angst, porn, self-discovery, and porn, that really registers with me every time I read it. (No, it's just just the porn.)

Ordinary Workplace Hazards, Or SHIELD and OSHA Aren't On Speaking Terms: I might have read this one as many times as LYA, it's hard to tell. It's a Clint/Coulson fic that has one of the hottest non-sex scenes I've read, and it's the fic that launched this ship for me. I love it enough to have it on my Kindle and in two different podfic readings on my iPod.

Motion Practice: An Avengers lawyer AU sounds like it should be the most boring thing ever, but it really isn't. Loads of well-written, novel-length fics. My favourite pairings. Emotionally difficult but hugely satisfying stories. I've read the original fic multiple times and most of the others at least twice. They're gorgeous.

Men of Our Word: I read this so many times when I was Sparrington shipping hard. And then last year I got a craving, spent an evening tracking it down to reread, and I still love it to a ridiculous degree.

#435, The Atlantis Local Stitch'n'Bitch: I'm linking to the text of this, because I have no idea where I got the podfic version of it from. That's the version I've listened to fifty billion times, though. It's maybe my favourite McShep fic and I can't even articulate why.

Drastically Redefining Protocol: By the same author as the last fic, this is the Merlin Royalty AU of my heart. It's my favourite Merlin fic. It's ridiculous and awesome and I'm never, ever getting over it.

So there we go, this is my list, and in about five minutes I'm going to realise there were a dozen other fics that I wanted to list here as well, but never mind. This list is the fics that came immediately to mind when I was asked this question, which speaks to how much I love them.

Anyone else want to share some favourites?

First day of the December talking meme, and this was suggested by selenak. That's a pretty broad topic, so I'm taking my chance to express my love for these characters.

I always say that while the Fifth Doctor is my Doctor, in the sense that he's the first one I grew up with, the Seventh is my best Doctor because he's the one who makes me think difficult things. He's the Doctor, so I always knew that he'd do something right in the end, but I never knew what that right thing would be. He always had a bigger picture in mind, something that had to be done but didn't leave much room to be comfortable and predictable. I've never been able to express why I love him so, why I trusted him, when I knew that the fate of one tiny bit of humanity--my tiny bit--wasn't his priority. But I did and I always will.

Ace is, hands down, my favourite Old Who companion. Donna Noble had to work pretty damn hard to become joint all time favourite companion, let me tell you.

Ace was what I wanted to be. She takes charge, she blows shit up, she beats up Daleks with a baseball bat, but she wasn't a hard terrible character. She was flawed and vulnerable, which made her feel real to me.

Ghostlight breaks my heart every time because of Ace.

The Curse of Fenric is, I think, the episode that showcases both the best and the worst of what those two characters were together. It's brilliant and horrible, and one of the best Seventh Doctor stories they did. It's not my favourite--that would be Battlefield--but it's what I always think of when I try to imagine what season 27 would have been like if the show hadn't been cancelled. In my head, it would have been a mixture of Battlefield's glorious rompiness and Fenric's horrible, terrible grand schemes, with Ace finally reaching her destiny as a Time Lady at the end.

(Shut up, it would totally have been that. I believe.)

Ace and the Seventh Doctor, together, are amazing. There's a moment in Silver Nemesis where the Doctor asks Ace if she disobeyed his instructions and brought some Nitro-9. She confesses that she did, and he beams and tells her to blow up the Cybership. For me, that's what was always at the heart of their relationship. It wasn't just that the Doctor would (after terrifying me that he might not) do his best for Ace, try to teach her about all her amazing potential and save her from the bad things. It was that he trusted her to have his back, too. To pull him out of the fire when he needed it, and to have the explosives on hand when he needed them. Their story is one of the few times in Old Who where we got to see a long-term, growing relationship between the Doctor and his companion, and it was wonderful. It wasn't perfect, it wasn't always pretty, but it was wonderful to watch.

(In my head canon, Ace and the Doctor traveled together until she'd learned enough to travel through time and save the world on her own. And then she set out on her time-travelling motorbike and picked up the threads he couldn't juggle, and they sometimes met and worked together when a problem was too big for just one of them. Or just because they wanted to and missed each other. And, because it's my head canon, Donna didn't lose herself in Journey's End: she's out there with Ace, saving the world and travelling through time, and sometimes they work with this little chap who plays the spoons when he should be running away.)

If I could only have one Doctor-and-companion for the rest of time, it would be Seven and Ace.