Love In The Asylum

For two days in a row we've been having major internet outages - going out around 1 or 2 in the afternoon and not coming back until after 8pm. Really massively tedious, and there isn't anything we can do about it. My dad's already called the cable company, and it's not our house specifically, they are having service problems all over our area. Just one of the hazards of living out here in Nowheresville, I guess. I'm hoping it won't recur again tomorrow in the middle of the football match, but I'm not holding my breath.

At least it's given me plenty of time and motivation to read real books. I'm halfway through a collection of Lovecraft shorts, started a Neil Gaiman collection, finished vol 3 of the Justice League International trades, and finished Unseen Academicals. For the third time. I know it's not everyone's favorite, and I can admit that it has serious structural and pacing problems, but I am just completely incapable of being objective about that book. I read it for the first time last year just as I was getting seriously into football, and I have so many emotions tied up messily into it that I cry big soppy tears all over the ending every time. Also, Glenda/Nutt=OTP forever.

I have also been using all of this unanticipated free time to think about Oscar Wilde. It's interesting - out of all the characters in the Poetsverse AU, I think he has the most character growth built into his story arc. Aside from a little will they-won't they, Mary and Percy Shelley are on a pretty straightforward romantic trajectory. Tennyson and Hallam get together, break up, and get back together again, and hopefully get a little less co-dependent, but their relationship is essentially the same at the end. Wilfred Owen made most of his mistakes before the story starts, and his arc is about following through on the character growth that he's had already. Byron...is always Byron. By we're starting Oscar Wilde out as a dilettante playboy, throwing him into a disastrous affair with Bosie that almost ruins his career and his life, and then, once he gets out of prison, giving him a long and arduous redemption arc in the form of courting Robert Ross. This is the storyline that colourofsaying and I have been talking about nonstop this week, because the idea of Oscar Wilde struggling through a serious romantic relationship for the first time is really fascinating. He really wants it to work! But for Ross to trust him enough to even start a relationship, Wilde has to be a completely different person that he was at the start of the Poetsverse. It's a good thing we love him and want him to be happy, or this could end really really badly.

Five AUs I Wish The Universe Would Write For Me:

1. BBC Sherlock

The one where John Watson is a college professor and Sherlock is a...uh...well...no one's really sure what he does (or which department he works for), but he brings in a lot of grant money so they don't ask too many questions. Lestrade is an assistant professor of criminology and Sherlock likes to show up at his lectures and correct him in front of his undergraduates. Mycroft is a dean of something at a rival university and doesn't understand why Sherlock insists on working at an undefined position at a different school. And Moriarty, of course, is an evil biology researcher who has very questionable standards about what you can do with your animal test subjects (and your graduate students). He and Sherlock are constantly publishing academic papers that are mostly full of bitchy comments about each other's research, and neither of them are allowed to attend academic conferences together after they got into a slap fight at the last one. Look, this mostly exists because I want John Watson in tweed, alright?

2. 19th Century Literature RPS of Extreme Crack

The one where all the great English poets of the 19th century are in a boy band together. I cannot even explain this one except to say that is the product of a three-year-ongoing joke with colourofsaying and has only got more elaborate and silly the more 19th century poets we've read as good little English majors. It also completely ignores a) all question of period (Yeats plays back-up, Percy Shelley is on drums, Byron is the pretty-boy front man and Tennyson writes all the lyrics) and b) good sense in favor of ridiculousness, boykissing, and stupid literary jokes. Oscar Wilde is a music critic who's had sex with almost everyone in the band at some point. Wordsworth tried to start his own weird acoustic folk-psychedelic thing with Samuel Coleridge to compete with them, but it didn't really catch on and Coleridge wandered off to be a solo artist. MY GOD WE ARE DORKS.

3. Due South/Torchwood Crossover of Doom

The one where Jack Harkness is Ben Fraser's biological father and they accidentally found Torchwood Chicago. I know I've posted about this before, because it is one of my pet not-remotely-related-to-canon-in-any-way crossover theories (like Lord Vetinari being the Master's older brother), because John Barrowman just looks weirdly like Paul Gross from certain angles. This one actually had a plot! Which is mostly about Team Torchwood going to Chicago to hunt aliens and running into a guy who looks suspiciously like their boss. And then the Fraser and Ray and Ray have to help them fight the alien mafia while Fraser comes to terms with being related to Jack and Jack deals with having a kid he didn't know about (we're still pretending CoE never happened) and Ianto quietly loses it because wtf is his life, seriously? At the end, Fraser and the Rays start Torchwood Chicago (I guess it is sort of a side department of the Chicago PD?), and everyone has plenty of sex, which is how every Torchwood story ends, I suppose.

4. German Football RPS

The one where Marko Marin is a spy and Denni Advic is the double agent with the tragic backstory assigned to work with him on a mission. I don't even like Werder Bremen, but Marko Marin is made of adorableness, and this is an awesome noir AU where he is a sweet, innocent guy being blackmailed into crime in order to rescue his evil ex-boyfriend from certain death. Denni Advic shows up to take the package Marin's supposed to drop off for the bad guys, and when he tries to leave Marin makes him take him with him, because he thinks he'll lead him back to the guy holding his boyfriend. And then explosions! Gun shots! People chasing them and trying to steal back the Macguffin! Advic falling for his naive charm and crack marksmanship while Marin is won over by his tragic backstory and unbelievable cheekbones! Eventually, they defeat the bad guys, Marin realizes his evil ex is evil, and Advic reveals that he was a double agent actually working for the government. Yay happy endings.

5. Tumbling (J-Drama)

The one where the boys are slightly older and supposedly don't know each other, except they are actually all superhero crime-fighters together. Yuuta is a quiet, super-organized, king-of-the-file-folders kind of secretary, and everyone at the company he works for is very confused when Wataru, motorcycle thug turned manga kissa owner, starts showing up at their office to bother him in the middle of the day, and Yuuta has to make up stories about how they are best friends from high school and not guys who spend their free time in tight spandex and body armor fighting supervillains. Tsurumi is a kind of sort of mostly reformed supervillain, and he and Yuuta share an apartment. Kiyama is a broody anti-hero that Wataru bribes into fighting on their side via sex. Basically, everything is the same, but with more transformation sequences.