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(I had very broken sleep, which involved a lot of vague pondering)

In the world of Buffy etc, could you say "I invite you in as long as you're not a vampire"? Or "All welcome except vampires"?

And then I started thinking about the exact meaning of "invitation" and remembered that logic and fantasy don't necessarily mix.

Also, I had a dream where I was one of a group of tiny people from a parallel universe who got trapped on Earth. We eventually settled in a small model village in a DisneyLand-esque theme park and pretended to be little robots as part of the attraction. In the dream I thought "This is like in that movie/tv show" but on waking couldn't remember if I'd actually stolen the plot from anywhere or if I'd made it up (the "pretending to be robots" thing, the setup is rather Diggers-y)

I've spent the last month and a bit bouncing up and down waiting for the remixduello stories to come out and they finally have, yay! For those not familiar with remixes, you choose or (as in this case) are assigned a fanfic to remix, and create a new story which explores the same basic plot in a different way or from a different POV.

The remix I wrote:
Memento Vivere (The Plural of Memento Mori is Memento Mori), a remix of The Plural of Memento Mori by brutti_ma_buoni. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Jenny, Buffy and Joyce, season two.

Writing this was scary, I'd never done a remix before and wasn't sure how to go about it. The fact that someone I knew had just died also made it difficult in some ways, I kept coming up against ideas and going "Nope, don't feel up to writing that", and it felt important to write something that both acknowledged death but showed people not being beaten down by it.

The remix of my story:

Memory and Time Machines by Wojelah, remixing my story The Time Traveler's Guide to Creative Anachronism, Doctor Who, River/Amy and River/Eleven. Amy had been first. Truthfully, it had to be Amy first. Red hair and soft lips and kisses that tasted just a tiny bit of tears.

I didn't have to think very hard about what to submit since "The Time Traveler's Guide to Creative Anachronism" was the only story of mine which fit the criteria. I was curious to see what the author would do with my story, if they'd focus on the timey wimey or the wacky humour or the romance (my bet was the latter, which they did, but since I'm not very good at romance I'm entirely happy with that) Anyway, Wojelah did a lovely job of capturing all the emotion I neatly avoided describing, it's a lyrical and melancholy reflection on the events I breezed through in my fic. I think they make for a nice pair, though I imagine my fic would be rather a strange shift in tone if you read it second :)

I have a headache so am not up to checking out all the other stories just yet, but I look forward to it.

For this prompt. Since I haven't gotten around to replacing my tablet yet so I did it in coloured pencil, it's almost physically painful not to be able to edit my many mistakes. Still, it turned out better than most of my coloured pencil stuff.

Now that it's up, I'll just take a moment to point you towards the fic that goes along with and inspired my thelittlebang fanart: Buffy the Jedi Knight: The Sith Seduction by seriousfic. It has love! Death! Explosions! The fate of the universe! And more!

As it turns out a Buffy femslash story is just the right thing to inject some wit and counteract some of the general gender skeeviness of the Star Wars setting, while still taking advantage of it's fun swashbuckling space opera-y-ness.

Also, I really liked the Briar Rose/Snow White story Memories Of You Being Beautiful, it's strange and atmospheric and sad and has stayed with me.

I haven't gotten to the other stories yet, but I think my favourite of the art has been An Exercise in Politics (Gwen/Morgana).

This vid, Origin Stories, is made of awesome. It's a Buffy Angel vid (mostly S7 Buffy) which perfectly captures some of the serious problems I had with the show, especially Spike. (It focuses largely on race while I personally had more noticed the issues with gender, but that's probably an issue with me not the vid :))

Basically, we are expected to sympathise with Spike above all else, because he is pretty and he is sad, and that is much more interesting than all the boring grumpy people who just had their mothers killed in front of them or whatever. To see anything he's done wrong primarily as a source of Pretty Woobie Angst and to despise anyone who goes against him as a Big Meanie. This despite the fact that unlike Angel there is no clear cut distinction between souled Spike and unsouled Spike, in fact (imho) they deliberately kept him a "bad boy" because it was cool, despite the very negative message this sends about him not making any real effort to distance himself from the mass murdering would-be rapist he used to be (the scene in the vid? Where he takes back his coat? Guh!)

(In my mental version of season seven, Spike is dead, and we have the new character William, who is not the same as pre-vamped William, in the same way that Liam =/= Angelus =/= Angel. But I could have lived with a less problematic Spike-as-Spike-but-with-a-conscience.)