clo_again

This is not that post. As my Twitflisters will know (and probably wish they knew less about by now), I got hit by stupendously bad toothache on Tuesday and have spent the last three/four days crying into my pillow, calling my dentist with crazed demands and abusing non-prescription painkillers. BUT. A day and half after my dentist appointment when he informed me it was very infected and he'd try a root canal instead of just yanking it out, I can actually sit in front of the laptop for more than ten minutes without having to run for ice/hot water bottles/warm milk/toothpaste/painkillers so I figured I should actually do a post to cover a few things I'd been meaning to LJ about.

First! Yes, I have done more Softer World remakes. I was bored and in toothache!pain; it was a great distraction. So, a few tennis and a few Johnny Weir/Stéphane Lambiel SW remakes...

Teaser:



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Second! A few (very) random figure skating recs:

The Surface of the Sea by neery, Johnny/Stéphane merman AU, PG.

Okay. I know; I read the words 'merman AU' and when I stopped laughing I scrolled onto the next post. Then I remembered that I was bored and had nothing better to do, and considered that 17,000 words was a bit long for a terribly written crack bunny. I scrolled back and clicked.

Oh my god. Oh my god. This is a crazy idea that shouldn't have worked seriously and yet, somehow, it works brilliantly. Stéphane's natural crazy translates wonderfully to seeing the world from the slightly-skewed perspective of a merman and her Johnny's the best blend of excited-snarky-sweet.

But it really works on the detail; it's told from Stéphane-the-merman's perspective instead of the much easier Johnny-the-human-meeting-a-merman perspective and while it's a choice that could've gone horribly wrong, it's clear neery's actually thought about how a merman would think, specifically a Stéphane-merman (his joy on being introduced to sequins is both adorable and hilarious) and just how little they'd know about people. The fish scene is absolutely wonderful, all the better because Stéphane's confusion is as understandable as Johnny's horrified reaction. I love that Stéphane's insistence that merpeople aren't fish, they're the people and how that's kept up throughout. Little things, that make this totally not crack and make it an actual fic.

And it just gets better, even with a few bits where technicalities are glossed over (one of the few things that bugged me is the complete lack of of a mention for Stéphane not having a passport or any documentation to prove he exists, so travelling anywhere would involve shady underground dealings that would prove complicated and perhaps impossible. But I get why it's been left out; this is not that fic. I would love to see that fic but I love the fic that this is too and really, it doesn't need it).

Just- don't pass this over at the mere mention of merman AU wtf, like I almost did. It's so much better than you're imagining and the bits that are meant to be funny are hilarious and the bits that are serious are beautiful and just occasionally heartbreaking an oh my god, this is a lesson to me not to write off a fic based on the summary. Read it. And learn how that insanely silly idea you think would never work can be made into a brilliant fic.

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From the kinkmeme, Johnny is an Idiot aka How I Made ZebraSwan Canon by Paris Childers by anon (I hope they deanon sometime so I can worship appropriately)

This is the complete opposite of the merman fic (though funnily, it does briefly reference said fic! I has a theme!) in that it has a perfectly sensible (if hilariously written) prompt of basically 'Johnny loves Stéphane, whines about it, annoys Paris' and the anon who filled it chose to run with that as a fic written exactly as if Paris himself was writing it on the kinkmeme. Only, I don't think real!Paris could be this spectacularly funny; I suspect very FEW people could possibly be this funny and still write so brilliantly in tone and character the whole way through.

It's so hilariously fannishly-aware that it does border on crack, I think, but it is fantastically comically written and deserves every single adoring comment it's received so far and then some. I swear that you will laugh* like a cray cray person. I'm on my fourth re-read and I'm still cracking up.

*caveat This may be a fic best enjoyed with some exposure to the figure skating fandom, (specifically, I suspect, the ontd_skating branch of humour) because some of the humour is almost in-jokes and might lose newcomers in wtf. It also probably helps to have some idea who Paris is and what he's like, though you can probably guess most of that from the first paragraph.

Also, 'Paris' does not like Evan. It's not a big part of the fic, just a few lines but in case there are any Evan-lovers out there you have been warned.

Oddly, I am mostly ambivalent about real!life Evan but I dislike any sort of Johnny/Evan fic pairing with a hatred bordering on the excessive so I laughed. A lot.

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I have other kinkmeme stuff I'd like to rec - I can't memory comments and there's pieces of stuff everywhere now with the new kinkmeme comm so it's getting tricky to follow things - but that's a whole separate post. I will say that the Summer Camp councillors AU, contin here and the Viking AU which starts here, continues here and then here are the two fills-in-progress that are absolutely worth catching up on. Both are updated regularly enough that I'm fairly sure they'll be finished, the Summer Camp one more so than the Vikings but there's still enough brilliance there to be worth reading. Everything else Johnny/Stéphane is still being tracked on this most excellent list.


And now it is almost 1:30am, my tooth is starting to ache and tomorrow brings my aunt and uncle to stay which means I need to be awake early enough to tidy my room. I doubt they'll even look in there but my mother's been twitching like a fly on crack all day so it has to be done if I'm to avoid her OCD cleanliness wrath. Sigh.

I will actually catch up with old comments and such this weekend, now that life is calmer and I'm not convinced I'm about to die of toothache or a Neurofen overdose. I'll also make a proper RL post at some point. ILLUSTRATED WITH PICTURES. Be excited! ;-) Or not.

Outtakes by the_spin, Johnny/Stèphane, rated R and a hug-warning ("It’s 90% hugging, anyway").

It's- it's probably the Johnny/Stèphane fic I've most been waiting for, their relationship andnot-relationship and friendship fitted (with some tweaks) around canon events and beyond. It's written brilliantly from Johnny's POV but her Stèphane is the exact mix of hyperactive and charming and slightly-awkward that he needs to be with appearances by all the other skaters who need to be there done with a casual ease that as a newbie to the fandom I envy because fuck it, I spent six years learning the intricacies of tennis and I still find it tricky to do background characters this well. I can't even really explain why this fic is so fabulous in words, it- it just is. This is up there with probably the three top Johnny/Stèphane fics I've yet come across and if it came down to it, I'd probably be leaning heavily towards naming this my favourite. It's brilliant.

I re-read two-thirds of it trying to pick on section to quote and settled on this because even though it's later on, it's more middle than end and it kind of shows why so much of this fic is wonderful (although I changed my mind about three times before I picked this one because a lot of quoted sections could do that):



By the end of the week Tara is about ready to propose to Stéphane, which is kind of pissing Johnny off because sometimes it’s a little grating how everyone fawns all over him. Johnny’s doing his make-up for the show as she scrolls through her email, and he kind of snaps the third time she mentions how fantastic he is.

“He’s not fantastic, he’s selfish and annoying.” Tara rolls her eyes at him, so he just shouts, “Stéphane, I’m telling Tara you’re selfish and annoying!”

“Thank you!” Stéphane calls from around the corner, and that was actually a bad idea because now Stéphane is going to come bother him forever and he’ll never get his hair done on time. Sure enough, he appears ten seconds later and presses himself against Johnny’s back, wraps his arms around his waist and cuddles up with no regard for how badly he’s screwing up the eyeshadow application process.

“Don’t be mad at me. I’m sorry for taking the costume you wanted.”

“You’re really not.”

“All right,” he says unrepentantly, and grins at Johnny in the mirror. “I am not. I’m very happy I am faster and craftier than you.”

Johnny makes a face at him in the mirror, and Stéphane takes the opportunity to press a spitty, smacking kiss against the back of his ear.

“Ugh, you’re disgusting,” and Johnny tries to kick him but Stéphane dodges away.

“Am I forgiven?” he calls once he safely rounds the wall back into the main locker room.

“Never!” but when he turns back to finish his eyes, Johnny realizes he’s smiling.



I am not kidding when I say this fic is everything I want from fic and stumbling across fics like it is the reason I keep reading fanfiction. The only downside is that now I don't know if I can keep reading stuff that doesn't measure up (although to be fair most of my heading-fast-toward-crazy-length recs list measures up fairly well because this fandom is ridiculously good at the fic thing on the whole).

Oh, this totally made my morning. And now afternoon. I should probably stop fawning and head to get dressed now, if I can drag myself away from a third re-read. ^_^