Oz the Great and Terrible (original) (raw)

Thu, Mar. 30th, 2023, 10:25 pm

Seeking Robin Fic

Back in the day, everybody I knew writing post-"Chosen" separated Faith and Robin almost as quickly as they separated Willow and Kennedy.

This I get.

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Thu, Mar. 16th, 2023, 02:38 pm

Plot Bunny: "Damage"

At the end of "Damage", Andrew is getting in Angel's face with a dozen Slayers behind him, and then they put Dana in their van and drive off.

When Andrew is doing the pissing contest with Angel, he rubs in the spice with "... and none of them have ever dated you".

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Fri, Mar. 10th, 2023, 11:26 am

Fandom Thoughts on Poker Face, filtered through Buffy

We're watching Poker Face. The concept is that a woman, Charlie, has a "power", in that she can instantly listen to you say something and know if you're telling the truth. She had been using it to see through bluffs in various poker games, until she gets found out and frozen out. Then the first episode happens and she's on the run, hiding from the public eye and working cash-under-the-table jobs. If you can imagine a 40-year-old woman as Peter Falk as Columbo, you pretty much have the vibe of the stories.

And we watch because Columbo is my wife's jam. She likes Criminal Minds and such, and when I pushed her to watch Buffy, she said "That's Nicholas Brendan! That's Penelope's boyfriend, Kevin!" But Columbo has been her jam since before I knew her. But Columbo is a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department, and so his investigations will always be within L.A. Poker Face changes locations every episode, because she's in hiding, and when a thing like a band's social media prank or an errant but necessary ATM transaction occurs, she has hours to get out of town before the people following her come around.

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Mon, Mar. 6th, 2023, 04:06 pm

The Tale of Shahrazad and Delhemma (BtVS, post-"Chosen")

So, No Fair Fights.

I had a conversation among Buffy friends years ago where I conjectured that the reason Riley wasn't there to green-light Spike's unchipping was that there was that they made demon eggs WMDs in canon, so what would a demon-fighting Marine be doing in 2003 but invading Iraq? And, after May, you definitely have many young women suddent blessed with Slayerdom, and there is likely one among the thousands in the invasion/occupation force.

In creating that world, I created a character who has had several names. I finally decided to go with Shahrazad, the heroine of 1001 Nights. There is something very specific she does that I couldn't make anyone else do in context. But No Fair Fights is largely about not knowing the history before you, and was largely told in flashback, and while I think Shahrazad has a very specific part of that narrative, there wasn't much of her there.

So I decided to write her story, and by doing so, go against everything that's blocking me in NFF. Need to be very parsimonious with explanation? Instead, have fun with exposition! Stuck in the POV of one character and one writing style? Jump around! Write as if it's folklore, or a transcript of a tapped phone! Even a nursery rhyme! Repurpose and rewrite things you released years ago!

I don't know that a lot of this really makes sense without knowing the reality and characters that I have in my head but haven't fully written out. When I put it on AO3, I'll put it out after NFF, but who knows when that'll be.

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Mon, Mar. 6th, 2023, 10:16 am

New Fic — Just Shadows

So, the last word that Mutant Enemy gives us on the state of Slayers in the Slayerverse (minus the comics, which I don't accept (although No Future For You is pretty good)) is the Angel season 5 episode "Damage", where an emotionally damaged and institutionalized young woman comes out from under Thorazine to go on a killing spree. At the end, it is revealed that Buffy's Slayer Crew no longer trust Angel and his team, because they're at the top of the L.A. office of Wolfram & Hart, and a lot of Slayers flood the zone and take Dana, making her their problem and no longer Angel's.

So, there's a woman with deep and debilitating problems, and with the Potential to make it everyone else's problem, and a woman and her team who are used to handling problems at a larger scale but haven't been as good at the personal level. I thought there was a huge story there.

I'm also one to want to see the "deep and debilitating" in this. When I see fic with Dana in it, I see a Dana who is somewhere between wacky and disoriented but ultimately functional, and I am desperate to see how Dana got out of her head.

So I wrote "Just Shadows", a fic from Dana's POV (mostly) about the steps and missteps of her recovery.

Mon, Dec. 12th, 2022, 10:53 am

Question for Writers

Do you have problems keeping up with your muse?

For example, I'm in a job where I have enough extra cycles to start thinking about narrative again, and pulled out "No Fair Fights" about 20 years after "Chosen". "NFF" is a story about a specific OC Slayer, who, because of where she was when chosen, is slow to pick up the details about what happened with Slaying. There has to be a lifeline to start to connect her with everything, and I put together that lifeline, and I start thinking there's nine months in personal development I have to account for.

Then I get an idea that both does that and resolves my outstanding "Scatterlings and Orphanages" obligations, and I start writing "How I Got To Memphis". Actually getting to Memphis, and what happens once we get there, is a hard part. It was intentionally non-arc, all episodic, because getting to know Rona and Xander post-"Chosen" is the point, but I wanted to end with a bang so I introduced a bit of arc, and now my brain avoids it.

It starts thinking about my OC slayer and Xander, while Memphis and No Fair Fights. My muse is far from the place I need it to be to get the first thing done. Any advice for muse-wrangling would be appreciated.

Thu, Dec. 8th, 2022, 10:37 am

CwDP Fic: Faith and First!Kendra

So, I'm somewhere in greater fandom and the topic of "Who else could've been visited in "Conversations with Dead People"? Some people opined that seeing Faith visited by "Kendra" would be interesting. I really didn't think so, and argued as much. I think the fact that Faith walked into the office of Evil and said "You got a job opening?", and that it really was a "Come to the Dark Side; We have cookies!" thing, and that she'll never be welcomed like that again is the strong point, and ME did that well in late S7, and that, even if Faith saw "Kendra", she probably wouldn't recognize her or have anything to say to her.

So, I wrote it. I wrote it to see what I thought would happen.

Enjoy.

Tue, Nov. 29th, 2022, 08:15 am

An idea I can't use

On TikTok, I'm seeing a number of people with specialty prosthetic eyes. Like really wild ones.

I think, because trauma, it would take Xander a while to want anything but an eye-looking eye.

But, seeing that Eliza Dushku was in True Lies with Arnold Schwarzenegger, having her suggest he get a crosshair prosthetic like the villain from Last Action Hero. Of course Xander would object, in part because he's not the villain.

I have played with Xander learning to tap his eye with a knife, like Gangs of New York, but rejecting it because he didn't think he could pull off that level of intimidating.

I could drabble some things together, but nah.

Mon, Nov. 28th, 2022, 11:13 pm

How I Got To Memphis: Togo

I've been writing something, and I probably would have been WIPing it if I was happy with the first section, but I'm not.

I like this section, it's early, and I'm hoping to hear a little feedback before I push.

How I Got To Memphis: Togo