brightly_lit | Entries tagged with snowflake challenge

Title: An Impossible Life
Fandom: Elementary
Word Count: 8,600
Rating: R
Characters: Sherlock, Moriarty, Watson, Morland, Gregson
Pairing: Sherlock/Moriarty
Warnings: BDSM, dom/sub, drugging and kidnapping, chained up, imprisonment, choking, erotic asphyxiation, autassassinophilia, bruising, scratching, praise, hurt/comfort, aftercare, suicidal ideation, healing, bottom Sherlock

Summary: Realizing Jamie Moriarty has escaped from her prison, Sherlock hunts her down and imprisons her himself. Chained up in a remote location, she's still somehow in complete control of the situation ... and of Sherlock. It is not possible for him to have a healthy, functional relationship with a murderous sociopath and he knows it well, but the fact remains, he has only ever been in love with her, and he always will be.

“Watson is the only person I can live with,” he said, looking out the window, missing Watson, their life together in the brownstone, the only real life he’d ever managed to cobble together. Well, it was Watson who cobbled it together. He just got to live in it there, with her. “But you’re the only person I can’t live without.”

Snowflake Challenge #10: In your own space, create a fanwork.

Well, the timing worked out perfectly for this particular challenge, as I just finished this Sherlock fic I've been working on the past few days.

The warnings are a doozy, eh?? Especially since I don't write anything remotely porny almost ever! (Although this one is more ... philosophical porn? Literary porn? Something like that.) I have a few fics that include sex, never particularly explicit, but gen is my thing. Sometimes, however, the story I want to tell has to include it, and in the case of this fic, some dark, dirty sex is the basis of what I felt, after watching Elementary for so-far 5+ seasons, might be the only thing that could cure poor Sherlock, or at least make him feel better in any measure. Plus, the whole Moriarty plot was sooo good. Would that the show had been seasons and seasons of just that! I looked it up and saw the actress doesn’t return to the show by the end, meaning I guess there won’t be any more Sherlock/Moriarty, sigh ... so I made some myself. Sherlock is always having BDSM sex with strangers in canon; I figured why not make it something that might actually touch him at his core and heal him a little?

In your own space, tell us about 3 creative/fannish resources, spaces, or communities you use or enjoy. (One or two is fine, especially if you're in a smaller fandom or like many people at the moment, fannishly adrift right now) Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Fandom is a fantastic place, and something that brought many of us together. Fandom is also a huge place made up of amazing and creative people doing incredible things. Anything goes, writing, podficcing, artwork, beta reading, commenting, general squee and so much more. It all combines to help make fandom the brilliant thing that it is.

The problem is, sometimes it's hard to find the places which enable you to indulge your passions. Hopefully, this challenge will help that. So, for example, tell us about a stock image place you enjoy, or a favourite archive. Is there a rec list you keep going back to, an online space where you enjoy a chat or a podcast series that always makes your day?

And of course, these places can be beyond fandom, that recipe site that's your go-to. The step-by-step instructions you saved to make your own cheese. Do you garden and have a favourite blog that's taught you how to grow amazing tomatoes?

Wikis, websites, videos, software, games, books, people, communities... anything! Share those places that you love, and hopefully others will love them too.

I'm glad they gave the gardening example, because in fact I am ~~obsessed with~~ quite interested in gardening, and Dreamwidth and AO3 are really my only fandom places these days, except myanimelist! This got me thinking on three of the YouTube channels I utilize as resources or simply enjoy. The first and the last are gardening focused, and the middle is about Japan.

Mossy Bottom: If you're thinking this one is at all risque and talking about bottoms, rest easy--that couldn't be farther from what this gentle, thoughtful channel is like. Daniel is a homesteader in Ireland who keeps pigs, ducks, rabbits, some beautiful cats, and a most lovable dog named Moss. He loves all his creatures, and they plainly adore him. He mostly explores what it means to be a homesteader, how he makes a living off the land and related projects (such as his YouTube channel!), and gardening, but he also has videos on local legends, books that influenced him, and his personal philosophy. Seeing a new upload from his channel is always a treat!

Abroad in Japan: Chris Broad is a Brit who's lived in Japan for over ten years, and he vlogs entertainingly and informatively on Japan, which I know is a subject of great interest to many of us who watch anime. Apparently he's the top English-speaking vlogger who makes videos on Japan now, so you may well have heard of him. I've been watching his channel since well before he was famous, and frankly, I quite prefer his older videos. He has great interest in, and talent for, filmmaking, and has made a number of short films of stunning quality. He complains about what it takes to be a successful YouTuber (especially click-baity titles he despises, but utilizes), and about how his higher quality videos get fewer views, and like ... man, I write fic I know will be unpopular, and who cares? I figure, if one is doing all right financially as a YouTuber, then why not intersperse the money-making videos with those that are personally and creatively satisfying for the creator? That does not seem to be his approach, so I haven't enjoyed his videos as much in the past year or so. I still watch them and they're still sometimes enjoyable, but his old videos are fantastic, so if you're interested in checking him out, I recommend you start there. He's hilarious, with a dry, sarcastic, irreverent sense of humor, and has interesting thoughts on Japanese culture.

Li ZiQi: There's a very good chance you've heard of Li ZiQi, since she holds a Guinness World Record for "The most subscribers for a Chinese language channel on YouTube." She hasn't uploaded in a long time now, but the videos that are available are nevertheless sublimely beautiful, informative on life in rural China, and very inspiring for people interested in homesteading, gardening, and cooking. Now, particularly in the very beginning, her videos weren't especially realistic. (Dyeing a dress with purple grape skins--while wearing pristine pale drapey clothes, no less!--comes to mind ....) She defends this by saying her goal was less realism and more to inspire, and boy does it do that, but also, it's gotten more accurate and realistic as it's gone on, and she covers how to make just about anything from scratch. If you ever had a fantasy of a bucolic life in a beautiful place, living off a lush piece of land all your own and handmaking everything yourself (not that I've ever had such a fantasy! no sirree), boy is this the channel for you.

If you got the opportunity to add one thing to the canon of any of your fandoms, what would that be? Maybe there’s a character who didn’t get much of a backstory/storyline and you’d like to do something with them, maybe a show was axed too soon and you had thoughts on what could happen in a subsequent season, maybe there’s a new episode you’d like to have added.

This is exactly what fanfic is for! Or actually, for me, original fiction. I loved Edward's insufferable arrogance and Alice's terrifying monstrosity (or at least, that was how I took that character), so I zeroed in on those qualities and wrote a series that included two vampire characters fitting those descriptions, casting off basically everything else about Twilight (except what I also read as BDSM death porn). In the wonderful anime Nana, I was most interested in one minor character named Shin, who's a prostitute, so I ended up writing an entire novel about a teen male prostitute that was partially inspired by that character, as I was most dissatisfied with the lack of information given at the end of the show about him and what was to become of him.

That said, most of the time, I just wish for more seasons of a show (as long as the creators are inspired; I've seen far too many shows that went on after the writers were completely out of ideas, argh). A friend and I were joking about the anime Free! She said she didn't think it needed to go on for three seasons. I countered that I thought it should have 100 seasons, so that every person in the audience at that apparently life-altering-for-every-witness relay race they had in elementary school would have their own season. That's my general feeling for every show I love. If it's still good, by god, I just wish it would keep going until the creators feel done. More art in the world! More beauty!! That's what it's all about, as far as I'm concerned.

This has been my favorite challenge so far. I've been greatly enjoying going through everyone's posts and reading their rants. You learn more about someone when you see them be real and talk about something they care about that isn't all sunshine and roses.

Happily, in the rants of others, many of my own rants were already addressed, some quite eloquently. Many, many people are talking about the fandom police and bullying in the guise of 'moral purity.' There is much I could say about how stupid and annoying all that is, and how it ruins the very thing that makes fandom so wonderful, but I'll pick something else--but closely related--to vent about.

"Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences." We've seen that phrase going around the internet for years now, usually gleefully uttered by someone shamelessly visiting "consequences" in the form of bullying upon someone for saying something the bully "disapproves" of.

Now, my degree is in journalism, and I'm a writer who tends to write potentially controversial things (in my original work, anyway), so freedom of speech is very, very dear to my heart. I grew up in a time and a place where freedom of speech was taken quite seriously. (I'm Gen X.) "Piss Christ" was on the wall of the fine art hallway in my high school. Art was understood to be something one could expect to be challenging and offensive. I never heard of anyone complaining to the school library or a teacher about an offensive book being available or being taught in class. I mean, it probably happened at some point, but the complainer would have been regarded as a crackpot and no one was going to make any changes based on the complaint, because school was for teaching things and libraries were repositories for books, and one's personal feelings about these books were not taken into account. We weren't expected to enjoy the books we were taught, or even necessarily to understand them, but by god, we were going to be exposed to the art that had been deemed classic so that we could get a full education, and all of those classics were challenging or potentially offensive in some way. I understood that that was, and is, largely what makes great art great: it challenges us--US. Not "other," "dumber," or "less enlightened" people, but everyone, including myself.

This was how I assumed freedom of speech would always be regarded ... unless conservatives had their way, but even they usually had the decency to respect our hallowed First Amendment back in the day. I was always very proud to be a liberal, not least because liberals were the ones who most often trotted out the wonderful Beatrice Evelyn Hall quote, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." When I saw people say it then, they meant it. A profound respect for another person's right to say whatever they believed lay at the core of all the values that led to a free society. If what that person said offended you, you listened, then proceeded to respond with a counterargument or, if you concluded the other person was too stupid, crazy, or evil to be worth debating, you shook your head and moved on ....

... Which has somehow become regarded as impossible in modern society?? People seem convinced they not only have to fight to defend their own opinion--and go low--but to force the other person to their knees--force them to admit not only that they were wrong, but to change their very thinking--or at least force them to claim they have. We've all seen celebrities claiming to have seen the light after having their livelihoods or their popularity threatened after saying something unpopular. The response is usually to scoff over how transparently insincere the celebrity's apology is, when ... really? You actually expected them to change how they think? The assumption seems to be that if someone is educated on how "wrong" their thinking is, then they better change it to "right" thinking (quite an authoritarian perspective), and occasionally, there is a lack of education that brings about a change, but in reality, people believe what they believe for reasons that make sense to them and no amount of harsh "reprogramming" will change it.

As we all know well. We all have unpopular opinions we know we'd get skewered for were we to say them publicly, since public opinion is constantly shifting and seldom aligns perfectly with our own views. Every person has a unique personality, combined with a unique upbringing and set of experiences. For better or for worse, people decide things about the world, and it would take a lot to make them see it differently. It's incredibly satisfying to educate someone or debate someone so successfully that one can actually change their minds, but a) it is rare, for a wide variety of reasons--pride being way up there, and b) diversity is supposed to be a liberal value ... right? All kinds of diversity ... including diversity of thought.

"Infinite diversity in infinite combinations," amiright? This is how the world was made, and to try to force it to be otherwise causes incalculable harm and suffering. When did folks forget that there will always be people whose beliefs piss one off and that's just the way it is? It can be annoying, but it's better than tearing other people to pieces.

It was undeniably a great disappointment for me to see liberals (well, I'd call them "so-called liberals") being at least as bad about punishing and bullying people for their free speech as the most rabid conservatives--what with "cancel culture" et al. I could rant infinitely about all the evil and cruelty I've seen committed by the people I've always thought of as "my people." So much cruelty! In the name of "moral superiority." Horrific. This shit's gotta stop.

What a great idea for a first challenge--it's all too easy to write your intro and then leave it on your profile just like that forever, no matter how many things have changed!

My profile is up to date. I mention there that I don't have a show right now that's totally sucked me in and has me writing tons of fic for it. That said, I saw some truly awesome shows in 2022 that I'd like to make record of here, and so people can get a feel for the kinds of things I enjoy, including Link Click, Legacies, Raven of the Inner Palace, Shadows House, 86, Sumo Do Sumo Don't, ID: Invaded, Vivy Fluorite Eye's Song, Cyberpunk 2077, Blue Period, Akudama Drive, Moriarty the Patriot (I even wrote a nice, unpopular fic for that one, Evildoers), SpyxFamily, Bluelock, Andor, and Russian Doll Season 1. And how could I forget the greatness that is Prison School?? ;-p Truly, we were blessed with so much fantastic stuff to watch this year!

My heart lies in original fiction, so that's where most of my energy has gone creatively in the past year, but I did write some fic and make a vid this year:

FIC:

Evildoers, the aforementioned Moriarty the Patriot fic, which is a crossover with Elementary. Man, Moriarty the Patriot is a great show! Sooo, so good. It does, however, ship William Moriarty with Sherlock, which I am Here For! But in my fic, William instead despises and desperately wants to kill Sherlock, so I can see why anyone expecting any Sherliam vibes present in the show might be disappointed. Still, I love the fic, and I'm so glad I wrote it.

Beads Everywhere, No Thread, which I talk about in detail in this post. Here's the summary: Dean thinks Sam's a pretty normal kid. But when Sam begins to lose his connection to reality at age ten, Dean will do anything to get him back. Anything.

As I nearly always manage to do, much to my delight, I was also able to pick up a pinch hit for the SPN Summergen exchange. I'm betting this was the final year for that exchange, arguably the most venerable in all of SPN fandom. I've proudly participated every year since 2013! And even helped run it one year. It's one of the things I've most looked forward to every summer, so I'll participate as long as it runs, but if this was the final year, it ended on a high. I loved the prompt: "What if the sitcom bit in 'Changing Channels' had gone for a full (sitcom) episode?" It's an idea I've toyed with myself here and there, and this was the perfect excuse to finally write it. I confess one of my talents--try not to get jealous, here--is to be able to effortlessly come up with Three's-Company-esque innuendo, so that was the direction I took it. The commenters got what I was going for, and much fun was had by all. :-D Supernatural, The Sitcom.

Finally, I picked up a pinch hit for SPN ReverseBang, too. I should have included Travelers on my list of shows I enjoyed this year, because I did! But as it was far from my first viewing, I figured it didn't belong on my 2022-specific list. WHAT A SHOW. God, I wish that show would come back, and that I could write for it!! I HAVE LITERALLY SEASONS' WORTH OF IDEAS. COME ON GUYS. SOMEONE, FUND THIS WONDERFUL SHOW, LET IT CARRY ON! Anyway, so the artist I worked with was kind enough to let me write a SPN/Travelers crossover, and man, it was fun to write some Travelers fic; I might have to do more of it. PHILIP!! My baby!! You can read it here if you like: Savior to Savior, where Sam and Dean are hunting the Travelers! And the Travelers are surveiling them back. And something approaching a friendship between the two parties occurs ... temporarily.

VID:

"Midnight", song by Coldplay, images from Your Name. I was having a rough time when I made and cross-posted it here. I'd badly sprained my wrist (hence why I turned to making a vid! Because that was something I could do one-handed) and really wanted a response to this thing that I'd created and didn't expect one, and then everyone over at

anime_manga was so kind! I met some lovely people who became the core of my reading page here! I've tried to get more involved here ever since, but couldn't really find my way in, so that is part of why I'm doing the Snowflake Challenge. Also, that it just sounds super fun! I did it once on lj way back when, but to do it here on dw where it originates is already pretty amazing--I can't believe how much participation I'm seeing! So I'm happy it's underway and to be participating. Hurray, Snowflake Challenge!