once_upon_fic | Member Posts

After a challenging and tiring few weeks, the Friday open thread returns, with a prompt inspired by all the love and activity I've seen around

3weeks4dreamwidth. I haven't been able to be very engaged with this at all, as it coincided with a professionally and personally very busy time, but I was reminded again of what a singularly wonderful little corner of the internet we have here, and how happy I am that this is my primary social internet home.

Therefore, this Friday's prompt is: what is special for you about Dreamwidth, and why do you like it?

I could answer with all the usual things, like the fact that makes money solely from user subscriptions, rather than algorithmic feeds, ads, or selling user data, that it has an ethos built on privacy and persistent pseudonymy, that it's text-based and slower-moving, the icon culture inherited from LJ in which icon use becomes a whole visual language, that there are filtered levels of privacy controlled by the user on a post-by-post basis, and so on, but all that's been said by many people, many times.

As well as all of the above, the things that I find particularly special about Dreamwidth (and which solidified its place as my primary internet home many years ago) are:

The perfect balance that we, as a user community, seem to have built up over the years organically, between the personal and the communal — in the sense that posts and comments are built for conversation and discussion by default, and shared into all subscribers' (chronological) feeds by default, but we all have a very clear sense that a person's posts and journal are that person's individual space, where they have freedom in both form and content. While I'm not going to say this kind of thing doesn't exist here on Dreamwidth, I personally never see the kind of outraged 'why is nobody talking about this?' (or 'why is everybody talking about [this frivolous thing] instead of [this outrage]?'), or people berating one another over choices of style or topic (or trying to drive mobs of followers to descend in outrage on other people's posts). Not every post I encounter on Dreamwidth is of interest to me (and I'm sure that's the same for everyone reading this when they think about my own journal) — although I've discovered so many new interests, and read posts by people on topics that I would never have even thought about, but which are made interesting through the way the person writes about them — and that's totally okay, as the assumption is that people will just scroll on by when required. There's no expectation of constant engagement and paranoia around metrics and short attention spans.

This sounds counterintuitive, but I actually like that Dreamwidth is a bit user-unfriendly to people whose primary engagement with the internet is via very user friendly social media platforms with a low barrier to entry. Obviously I want Dreamwidth to continue to exist, so it needs a critical mass of people to use and fund it to remain financially sustainable, but I appreciate that it requires a little bit of effort (type at least a few words into a post, or into a comment), and that passive usage (scrolling, liking, or the equivalent of sharing/reblogging/retweeting with a single click of a button) is basically impossible. In my opinion, this slight barrier to entry (probably combined with the fact that image hosting is complicated) helps keep it a generally pleasant community space, because the kind of rage-baiting virality that targets people's psychological vulnerabilities would be such hard work here.

What about you? What do you appreciate about Dreamwidth? What keeps you here?

flo_nelja

I missed fanmix day because I'm incredibly bad at fanmixes

Rec post for art (traditional, digital, moodboards, gifs)

Have some of my fave Jack/Rose/Nine fanarts on tumblr!

Fanart by that-sweet-jester

Fanart by leeloii

Fanart by glitter-skeleton and another and yet another

Fanart by eccl3ston

goddess47

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desertvixen

placeholder

flo_nelja

So, I had promised myself I would write a ship manifesto for my favorite Bungou Stray Dogs love triangle, and then

polyamships offered to write manifesto about polyships.

Write a manifesto for your ship (or ships!): why should get into it? what sold you? any particular tropes that are classics for your ship?

I had to stare at my own soul: you say you ship them as a love triangle, do you actually ship them as a poly situationship?
Me: *looks at the fic I'm writing* Ha ha. Ha ha ha. Let's say I'm at least very invested in Akutagawa getting to like both Atsushi and Dazai at the same time. And it's not like you could disentangle them. I think the answer is yes.

(Also, unrelated to what I actually ship, no one will make be believe Dazai can be monogamous.)

TW for themes of manipulation and abuse. To be fair, the manipulation is a big part of what I love in it, so warning for this too.

( Why do you think Dazai wanted us to work together? )

dolorosa_12

I've been extremely busy, and consequently extremely tired, and haven't been around on Dreamwidth all that much in the past couple of weeks. Rather than one of my standard weekend wrap-up posts, I'm going to attempt to go through the various things that have been happening, in brief, in list form.

Two weeks ago,

catpuccino came up to Ely to visit. She lives in London, we've known each other since the first day of high school, but what with one thing and another, I hadn't seen her in person since 2024. She's going through some tough stuff at the moment, so it was nice to be able to help her get away from all that for twenty-four hours, at least (and talk foodie things with someone who's even more plugged into that scene than I am).

Almost immediately after that, my father-in-law came over from Germany to visit for a week. He drove, and took the ferry, which meant he was a free agent, and could go out and do things while Matthias and I were at work, and he did catch up with some local friends a couple of times, but for the most part he seemed to just want to chill out in our garden, under the cherry trees. His regular daily life involves a lot of energetic grandchildren (my sister-in-law has three kids), and I think he viewed our place as something of an oasis of calm. My mother-in-law was the real Anglophile in the family — she came over to England on exchange as a teenager, fell in love with the place, and the two of them basically visited the UK almost once a year for their entire adult lives, barring the Covid years and my mother-in-law's increasingly fragile health. So coming back here alone after her death was a bittersweet experience for my father-in-law, stirring up a lot of complicated emotions, but I think he was pleased to have made the trip.

He left on Wednesday, and on that evening Matthias and I went to an author event with Andrey Kurkov, hosted by the local independent bookshop. (Ely is a sleepy small rural town, but it definitely punches above its weight in terms of literary events due to this fantastic bookshop.) He read from and chatted about his latest historical mystery novel (set in 1919 Kyiv), and answered audience questions with patience. (My favourite, somewhat left-field answer: '[In the final decade of the Soviet Union,] I graduated with a qualification in Japanese translation, and they wanted me to do my military service as a spy listening in to the Japanese in the Russian far east, but I didn't want to do this, since it would have prevented me from being allowed to leave the country. I asked my mother, who was a doctor, if she had any well-connected patients who could get me out of this, and one of her patients, who was a senior military figure, was able to instead transfer me to doing military service as a prison guard in Odesa. When the other guards found out I was a writer, one of them asked me to write his speeches for his meetings with the leadership, so I spent my military service reading propaganda magazines and rewriting the articles for him to reuse in his speeches.' This struck me as the absolute peak absurd Soviet experience.)

I've had a run of lots of timetabled, lecture-style teaching, which happens this time every year, but is always a bit exhausting: it's in a huge, echo-y wooden lecture theatre (when the students come through the doors, they slam loudly and make a massive amount of noise), it's to groups of 75 students, repeated three times to different groups, and it's with undergrads rather than the postgraduates and researchers I normally teach (who are a lot more work to keep focused), and I always feel completely flattened by the time the Friday class is over. The one nice thing is that these classes are in central Cambridge instead of out on the hospital site where I normally work, and I can buy decent food and coffee afterwards. I guess it's a good thing I don't normally work in that part of town, because I'd be so tempted to eat lunch out every day, and end up bleeding money.

I read Innamorata (Ava Reid), and with Reid I think at this point it counts as hate-reading, since my expectations are always so low, and they're always confirmed. This is her take on a gruesome gothic novel, complete with purple prose, and the literary equivalent of a child hopping up and down going 'look! look! did you see what I just did?' Did I see her obvious and intentional allusions to Mervyn Peake? Yes, yes I did. Am I shocked at all the gore, bodily fluids and shock value edginess? Shocked that I keep picking up Ava Reid books, maybe.

Then I read Almost Life (Kiran Millwood Hargrave) and Testament of Youth (Vera Brittain), and was a lot happier in my choice of reading material. The former is a novel about two young women who meet, hook up and fall in love in 1970s Paris, then go their separate ways, but continue to haunt and fall in and out of each other's lives, in a mess of intense emotions, difficult choices, and lost chances. The latter is both a memoir of the author as an individual (fighting the parental expectation to marry and instead attend Oxford as a young woman in the 1910s, then serving as a nurse in WWI and watching all the young men in her life be swallowed up into the maw of that terrible war), and a portrait of the absolute wrenching collective trauma experienced by her entire generation, and how impossible it was to go back to civillian life and go on living afterwards.

Then I read The Red City (Marie Lu), which had a great premise (clandestine underworld alchemist syndicates fight a global battle for dominance, operating much like real-world organised crime), and an absolutely wrenching depiction of intergenerational immigration trauma, but was written for absolutely no reason in third person present tense, which for me is the literary equivalent of someone chewing audibly near my ear. I only like present tense when it's used to evoke a sense of stream-of-consciousness-like immediacy, as if you're getting a glimpse inside a character's messy, unedited interior monologue (I prefer it much more in the first person), but when the whole story feels as if it could work perfectly fine in past tense, the use of present tense is distractingly grating.

Yesterday was Eel Day in Ely, which involves, among other things, a giant cloth eel on a frame being paraded through the town, trailed by an incongruous juxtaposition of local groups (think Morris dancers followed by a girls' rugby club, followed by musicians playing steel drums, followed by a Scout group, etc). We were in the market buying vegetables, so missed the actual parade, but did witness all these various participants marshalling in front of the cathedral beforehand. We did a quick swing around the stalls afterwards, but it was pretty hot, and we'd already eaten lunch, so we didn't stay long.

We watched the recent Wuthering Heights adaptation yesterday, and I regret to report that it was 90 per cent vibes and dramatic scenery, and I was not particularly impressed.

As it's a long weekend, there was a food and craft fair outside the cathedral today, and Matthias and I wandered around, eating lunch from one of the stalls, people- and dog-watching, before meandering on home, having picked up a box of macarons to eat over the course of the week with our tea and coffee.

We've made a start at booking tickets, etc for our summer holiday, which makes it start to feel a bit more real. I love the planning stage — investigating food, activities, transport, and so on, with the days of the holiday unfolding, and given greater shape.

badritual

letter to come

Current Mood: sick

dolorosa_12

It's been a busy month (about which more later in a further post), and that's meant I've only managed to complete three TV shows, all of which were fairly short in length. These shows were:

The latest season of The Capture, a BBC crime/spy/political thriller whose premise is that the British police and security services have been engaged in a clandestine programme of 'correction' — planting nonexistent deepfake evidence in order to convict people of crimes for which there is no real evidence, supposedly justified as serving some greater security or political good. At the end of the last season, this was all exposed and out in the open, and the latest season deals with the ongoing messy fallout (surprise surprise, simply revealing the shadowy iniquities perpetuated by the British political and security elite does not result in an immediate transformation of the country for the better). In this season, along with the deepfakes, there's generative AI to contend with, and everything proceeds at breakneck pace with terrifying consequences. The sense of not having a solid grip on observable reality, and the sickening ease with which the characters justify the unbelievably unethical things they do is terrifying. The acting and writing are as sharp as ever, and the show is the televisual equivalent of a page-turner, but I couldn't help but find the plot completely ludicrous: not because the UK police, military, or security services wouldn't be attracted to doing all the dodgy technological things they're portrayed as doing, but because their competence at doing so and seemingly bottomless funds to support these actions strained the bounds of credulity.

Kleo, a surreal, darkly comedic spy thriller set in the dying days of partitioned Germany, in which the titular Stasi assassin gets framed and thrown into prison by those above her in the chain of command, released several years later after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and immediately sets about trying to hunt down those responsible for the stitch-up and attempting to uncover the larger political reasons why it happened. The story barrels along on an international chase, zipping from a Berlin left reeling at the overwhelming political and social changes bursting forth, to Spain and Chile, filled with a fabulous cast of characters (the side characters are particularly fun), against a backdrop of crumbling modernist architecture and an absolutely glorious soundtrack. I enjoyed this immensely.

Midnight at the Pera Palace, a Turkish historical drama in which Esra, a struggling journalist, gets assigned to write a puff piece about the history of a (real) luxury Istanbul hotel, and gets sucked back in time to 1919, where she has to foil a nefarious British plot to assassinate Mustafa Kemal. I wanted to like this more than I did: it has all the seeds of a silly piece of popcorn TV (ludicrous premise, the potential for lots of humorous time-travel shenanigans — to be fair there were some of those, like the point at which Esra needs to read a plot-relevant diary, but can't, as it is in Arabic script, which got replaced by Latin script as part of the reforms introduced in the wake of the founding of the modern Turkish state — a gorgeous setting, and a glimpse back into the cosmopolitan world of this hotel in its heyday), but it was just a bit too melodramatic and overacted for my taste.

flo_nelja

Self rec time! what poly fanwork of yours are you most proud of? share it here! Not a creator? Then who's your favorite fandom creator? Time to share!!!

There's a fairy tale I love that ends in poly, Gold-tree and Silver-tree, and I wrote some more detailed polyamory negotiations and romance
Dreaming while awake

Oh and i wrote this get together for the main trio of Mysterious Cities of Gold
Mariage de cultures
And! Initially it was in French! But someone nice translated it in Englih: Culture mariage

Rec post for fics
This is a post to recommend poly fics exclusively. You may comment or edit your comment as many times as you want, but please, only recommend fics on this post. All ratings, warnings, and ships welcome.

Yessss, fic recs!

This is one of the first polyfics I read. On ffnet, never reposted on AO3 :D
It's a one-shot, it's cute and funny and a bit nostalgic
Some kind of love by Sunfreak (Digimon, Daisuke/Ken/Miyako, PG)

This one has humor, sexiness, a good plot, and superb illustrations
Supermassive Retinol Overdose! by oxfordRoulette (Lupin III, Lupin/Fujiko/Jigen/Goemon, focus on Lupin/Jigen, M)

And this one is in French, but it was written as a gift for me for an exchange, where I was like, please fix this love triangle with poly :D
La seule maison dont j'ai besoin by Eilisnande (Marcel Comics - Runaways, Xavin/Karolina/Nico, PG)

tellshannon815

flo_nelja

The comm

polyamships is having a small event, and for now I have only answered in the comments, but you know, I don't post things these days because I'm blocked in writing, so I'm gonna share it too! And if it advertises the cmmm it's even better!

What is/are your current favorite poly ship/s? Want to share a little bit about them with us?

I have reread the whole of Girl Genius since the beginning of the year, and I've been sold again to the possibility of Agatha/Gil/Tarvek

They're all mad scientists, my Girl Agatha is trying to survive as her evil dead mother wants to possess her and everyone in Europe wants to kill her because of the possibility her dead mother comes back. Gil is a badass adventurer and the son of the tyran of Europe (whom I love, by the way) and thinks she's the most incredible woman he ever met (he's right). Tarvek is a brilliant schemer who kind of betrayed the side of Agatha's mother for her. Tarvek and Gil were childhood friends until both their family secrets separated them, making each of them believe the other was the asshole.
Technically they're a love triangle, but there have been many hints that Agatha should just date both (and even if it's not the canon endgame, which would be sad, we'll always have fanfic)

They're my happy healthy(ish :D ) poly ship for now. That I hope will become canon. <3

How did you discover poly ships? What makes you write/read/draw them?

When I was young, before discovering Internet fandom, it was hard to me not to ship things that weren't canon or canon-adjacent.
So my first poly ship was Hikaru/Lantys/Eagle in Magic Knight Rayearth, which is... kind of implied.

And I think the second was Jack/Rose/Nine in Doctor Who after they all kiss.

I don't have that many poly ships, compared to two-people ships, but I still have far more than at the time, and... I don't know what makes me ship something. Once again, it's not only true in poly, it's true in general.

goddess47

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flo_nelja

( Le Sang de la Sirène, Anatole Le Braz ) 7/10

( The Dispossessed, Ursula Le Guin ) 9/10

( La Russie fantastique ) 8/10

( La prophétie des soeurs-serpents, Isis Labeau-Caberia ) 7/10

( Train de nuit dans la voie lactée, Miyazawa Kenji ) 7/10

( The Bog Wife, Kay Chronister ) 7/10

Progression : 29/52
"Risques de lecture" : Le sang de la sirène, The Dispossessed, La prophétie des soeurs-serpents, Train de nuit dans la voie lactée, The Bog Wife -> 20/26
Bingo-livres : 23/25
Reddit fantasy bingo : 6/25

sarriathmg

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chocolatepot

Okay, I think I might have found my new home? It's the same vintage as my current house, with all the same woodwork and then some, plus pocket doors with leaded glass panes, greater square footage, and a functional(?) laundry chute with little doors in the walls! It's reasonably priced but there's always the possibility of being outbid; I'm heartened by the fact that my dad called up a list of recent sales and most of the time they go for the price that was given, and when it's more it's usually like $20k more, not 50+. I also suspect that most buyers would see the historical nature of the house as a negative rather than a selling point.

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Once Upon a Fic Exchange

Fairy-tale story exchange!

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Friday open thread: Dreamwidth

Poly ships - Day 7

Pillows - Stargate Atlantis (PG)

IPQ 2026 Letter

Ship manifesto - Akutagawa/Dazai/Atsushi (Bungou Stray Dogs)

Catching up, in bullet points

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April TV shows

Poly ships - Days 3 and 4

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Poly ships - Days 1 and 2

Rescue - Stargate Atlantis (PG)

Lectures d'avril

Dear Creator(s): Id Pro Quo 2026

Pretty close to downtown Rochester, too

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February 2026

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