Firefly Fic: Off Your Rocker

Title: Off Your Rocker
Fandom: Firefly
Pairing/Characters: River, Simon
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 846
Prompt: For the angst_bingo prompt 'Insanity' and the 100_tales prompt #088 'Thought'
Summary: The worst thing about being mad was knowing you were mad. A stream of consciousness River fic
Warnings: Contains some problematic/potentially triggery discussion of River's condition as it pertains to being a mental illness

also at A03: here // FF.net here
( Read more... )

I'm not a girl

I'm not a girl..

There are aspects of me that code absolutely feminine as far as the Western modern female paradigm is concerned. Show me a puppy, for example :D
There are plenty of aspects that don't match it.
I was burrowing through a box of paperbacks yesterday in a charity store, focussing on the action, gen fic and sci-fi; I'd sometimes say 'I think I read that one' to my sister's amusement that I can announce this when randomly going through a collection of books. I picked up a couple of female-orientated books, read the blurb and tossed them back into the box. Nothing about them appealed.
"I'm not a girl," I said.

Well, I'm supposedly a grown woman, so not a 'girl', and I'm not about to get into definitions of adulthood. Not at this moment, anyway.
But the fact is, I've never loved too much saccharine. I've grown up in a fannish family with parents who love genre tv and don't 'do' soaps or reality. I can and will watch occasional romcoms and romances but they must have a specific hook for me – more com than rom, a particular actor, it's based on a book, or some other quality that makes it stand out.
But I've decided it's not the romance in itself that's the problem. I read romance in fandom a lot more than I ever do in published fiction and in published fiction and fandom alike I like erotica more than I like 'romance' . I think that's because erotica, for me, doesn't have the problems I see with romances:

Romance novels and movies are very constrained. Woman meets man, maybe unsuitable man. They fall in love. There's problems. Problems are solved. Marriage. Babies. Or pregnancy resulting in marriage. Blah.
Erotica allows for polyamory, for relationships without the need to marry, for non-traditional relationships within a marriage, for relationships without children – or that continue to be exciting and fulfuilling on their own terms even after children enter the equation. Erotica allows for problematic relationships and angry sex and other things that aren't acceptable in vanilla romance stories.

I read a lot of Legend of the Seeker fic, and I'm going to include three snippets here of recent fics in that fandom that code to me as romance without making them unpalatable to me – quite the opposite, in fact. Two of them are pirate AU fics written for the pirate challenge at the peoplespalace

( Lie To me )

( The Admiral’s Captive )

(  Pirate Code )

So, perhaps it's not romance I dislike, just a particular subset that makes up the majority of published genre romance fiction. I certainly find I'll read across genres more in fanfic, especially for certain fandoms, characters, and/or authors I trust. I think I also need plot. And OMG, cute guy, must marry and breed with him doesn't make a plot, for me. But OMG cute guy, but Issues and Making Sure He Respects Me and My Choices, now that's different. And if there's vampires, werewolves, aliens, spies, and/or superpowers involved, so much the better.