having adventures on your own

[reflectedeve]

Hello from my air-conditioned cave, friends ...

I've been dabbling in various new exchanges this year! Mainly, there's been a run of racy art, which is always a lot of fun to do.



scene slayers (BtVS, Buffy/Faith, T)
femslash_kink is supposed to be for more explicit works, but this was an extra treat, so hopefully nobody minded that it was more on the suggestive side. This is the happiest I've ever been with a likeness of either slayer, although as the BFF pointed out, apparently I really struggle with drawing anyone as skinny as SMG actually is/was. Still, Rubick's prompt, "undercover at a BDSM club," was way too fun to miss. ;)

the dimly-lit library (Utena, Juri/Kozue, E)
Pretty damn dubious consent. Drawn for AkaUsa for femslash_kink, who prompted me to draw something sexy based on Kozue seducing Juri while disguised as her brother. I kind of wish I'd gone a more stylistic route? But it was an interesting challenge! The concept keeps nagging at me, too, so there's a non-zero chance I'll revisit it at some point.

unforseen (Original F/F, ghost/psychic, E)
Could be read as dubiously consensual. I didn't sign up for smut4smut, but picked up an Original Works pinch-hit and had a blast with it. Ghostly somnophilia art for ToTheWolves. God, those curves were fun to draw.



I'm especially proud of myself, however, for the one bit of writing I did ... the first time I've written fanfic (of a sort) outside of Yuletide in fifteen years or so.

une sororité sanglante (gen, M)
An adaptation of La Barbe Bleue, by Charles Perreault (this version!), for once_upon_fic. Written for Missy.
The letter arrives unexpectedly on the second day of her new husband's abrupt departure (urgent business, he'd said, unavoidable), addressed to her married name, and dated five years previous. The contents turn her world upside-down.

I've been reading a fair amount of contemporary gothic fiction, historical fiction and horror recently, which might explain some of this, although for a Bluebeard retelling it's not especially bloody. In fact, the eponymous villain--Mr. Barbington, in my version--doesn't appear "on screen" at all, as it were; the entire story is told from the perspective of his most recent wife, alternating with a long letter from her predecessor, sent posthumously by attorneys (an idea somewhat inspired by Good Omens).

Framing Bluebeard as a misogynist serial killer who likes to "punish" women for their "disobedience" and curiosity (after dangling an obvious temptation in front of them, very Eve-esque) isn't exactly new, but unsurprisingly, I just wasn't very interested in trying to explore his theoretical humanity; I wanted to write about his wives, I wanted them to outsmart him, and I wanted them, somehow, to work together. I started with ghosts, but I tend to prefer my ghosts a lot less ... articulate than might have been called for here. Besides, I was absolutely tickled by the idea of the letter, a way for the women to realistically communicate around the barrier of death and Barbington's isolating influence on them. (I mean, I couldn't resist including some haunting to up the ambiance, and to give my protagonist a nudge, but technically it could have worked without that.)

So: Susan receives a letter from Agatha, who finds Marie's diary, where she mentions discovering [unknown/named prior wife]'s warning scratched into the bed frame. A chain of murder victims (one of them would-be) "working together" to take down the murderer. Each of them isolated by him, taken to live on a remote estate out of easy reach of the few people (none of them powerful - a widowed mother and unmarried sister, a less than caring widower father who just wants the dowry money, and a few French nuns) who might have cared enough to help her ... but in the end they manage to help each other (at least, to stop him at last, if not to save most of their lives).

The original story is so inconsistent and ambivalent about its cast; the (current) wife has a crowd of guests over when she performs her disobedient act (I think to highlight just how reckless and shameful her wanton womanly curiosity is; she leaves her own guests to sneak around opening secret closets in the middle of a party etc), but they're never mentioned again, and she faces her husband's wrath alone (except for "sister Anne," a named character out of nowhere, who can do no more than look out a window on her behalf). So, I stole them to use as Susan's solution to her dangerous position, her deliberate weapon to break the cycle. Mutual aid and cooperation against isolating and controlling forces, etc - the same thing the wives (with various degrees of intention) employ.

Agatha kind of steals the story for me; Susan makes a largely level-headed, sympathetic and compassionate protagonist, and she's the right one to make it out alive, but Agatha! Clever and solitary and wry and rather inappropriate in places, with her "disinclination" towards men, her love of telling stories, her barely-suppressed dramatic tendencies, and her unshakeable need to learn everything she can, even when she knows that it will kill her. I'm not sure I've ever invented a character who jumped off the page at me so quickly. I need to figure out how it happened, so I can try to replicate that.

I have no excuses for the very lax, under-researched, pseudo-nineteenth-century-English setting. It was easy to build ambiance and implied worldbuilding from, I suppose--I've read quite a lot both written and set in the time/place--and it's arguably the era of gothic fiction's greatest popularity, so it felt natural. With better time management, I could push myself on things like that, but in a fairly last-minute rush this is apparently what happens.

I realize this ramble lacks any structure, and apologize. The long and short of it is that I had so much fun adapting this fairytale in shamelessly feminist and nerdy ways, and I will definitely have to do that exchange again! Also, I'm feeling weirdly inclined towards prose in general, lately, for a trained and thoroughly self-identified cartoonist.



What was the old maxim - three things make a post? Taking art and fic each as a "thing," my last is short and sweet: of course there's going to be a second season of the Good Omens show, and of course I'm feeling something between disgruntled and indifferent about it. I could certainly be surprised, but ugh. It's one of my favorite books, and the show already gets too dark and full Gaiman for me in places, you know? I suppose we'll see.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled occasional Dear Creator letters, though maybe I'll manage to write an entry that's a bit more substantial and present again in the near future. Who knows? We can hope that the brain fog won't last forever. And at some point I may feel inclined to blather about The Magnus Archives (which I did finally listen to).