Welcome to my pasture for plot-bunnies.

This is where I put plot-bunnies that I have no intention of developing further, either because the muse left or (more likely) because I just don't have the time. They are all free to a good (or a bad, or ambivalent) home. If one of these happens to pounce upon you and force you write it, then awesome! Let me know so that I can read whatever you've written, but you don't need to ask permission or even tell me, if you don't want to.

If you leave a comment on any of the plot-bunnies with a further development, I'll likely respond in kind.

Cheers,

MarbleGlove

LIfe continues to be tough going but there appears to be light at the end of the tunnel. And even if it's an approaching train, maybe I'll be able to hitch a ride, so that would work out, too. Here's hoping.

In the meantime, this article about the end of a turtle marriage makes me sad. They were together for 115 years, but have since turned violent and had to be separated. It brought up the issue, however, of immortal marriage. If you live forever or even for a super long time, marriage seems like it could wind up being a bad idea. But I was thinking: many of the vampires and immortals in fiction these days tend to have mortal identities which they just change periodically, so no one notices that they age. Maybe immortal beings should just always restrict their marriages to the length of their mortal identities. Thus, it is marriage "until death do you part" except that it's the death of the identity rather than the death of the actual person. And if two immortals really love each other, then each successive set of identities can get married, but there would always be that renewable requirement. Plus, if one spouse wanted to get out of the marriage sooner, they could just fake their own death, leaving their spouse to finish out the years of their own identity as a "grieving widow," minus the actual grief, plus some nicely ambiguous raging to the heavens of "why did enter_name_here leave me?!?"

Also, having informed my sister that my cat is "Audrey, Lady of the Leaps" by day, but by night, down at the speakeasy, she goes by "Cat McLegs", my sister told me that there clearly needed to be RPF about my cat. Without having any plans to actually write any thing like that, I have to wonder, exactly how crazy of a cat lady would I need to be, in order to write my-cat!fanfic? 

Real life is, alas, still grinding me down. However, in the mean time, check this out.

Here is Stephen Hawking as a young man, aged 23 (two years after his diagnosis): 



This is Q from Skyfall played by Ben Whishaw:



And: 



Was this intentional? 

And, pretty much regardless, cool!

And is this inspiring fics for anyone else? Because I kind of want to make Q have to deal with having a degenerative condition, too smart and knowing too many secrets to be allowed to leave MI6, but not in good enough condition to pass any of the qualifying exams. The new M would have to figure out what needs to be done to compensate for having such a vital person have such an obvious weakness. And Bond would have to figure out how to interact with someone who has already lived passed his death date and could die at any time just from natural causes that have nothing to do with him.

Also, I wouldn't be against seeing a bio pic of Hawking, starting Whishaw.

I've been reading Atlas Shrugged for the first time (just 400 more pages to go!) and it is an extremely thought-provoking read. As a political treatise, it's awful, but as a piece of literature, it draws you in and makes you think.

One such thought that I had led me to an actual plot-bunny, which I'm fairly sure is not going to be Joss'd in the next 400 pages, but is awesome enough that I want to read a fanfic for it.
( Spoilers ahead...Collapse )

In an attempt to do something mildly productive that has a finished object that I can point to and say "I accomplished something," I've written two new short fanfics. Given that I'm currently in that sort of mind set to begin with, it seemed like a golden opportunity to complete some of the depressing stories that I normally don't write. Thus:

The Trial of Lancelot (on AO3 and on FF.net)
I love Heather Dale's music, but I pretty cordially dislike Arthurian legend. (First season Merlin being a rare exception.) Thus, I have decidedly mixed feelings regarding Heather Dale's song, The Trial of Lancelot. It's on my regular playlist, but it always makes me kind of mad.
Thus, I wrote a short fic on my issues, particularly around the verse:
"The trial's charge was treason,
And betrayal of an oath.
And should his guilt be proven,
Death would fall on traitors both.”

Insanity of Survival (on AO3 and on FF.net)
A while back I was rereading a much of Valdemar stories and thought it would be pretty awesome to have Methos interacting with the Companions of Valdemar, seeing as how they all look like white horses, and he's got something of a past with white horses. With a bit of prompting from Pentapus, I wound up writing two different stories about post-Death-on-a-white-horse!Methos dealing with Companions. Meanwhile, I thought of, but decided not to write a version that has pre-Death-on-a-white-horse!Methos having been a Herald of Valdemar... and then somehow becoming Death on a Horse. Well, here's that story.
Summary: Being Death was merely a side effect of the white horses, and the white horses were a result of having been ripped apart and left to survive.

Real life has been wearing me down lately. It's less that I've been all that busy as that everything I do takes effort and doesn't seem to get anywhere. Urg.

But anyway, here's a crossover idea that had not occurred to me, but that I love:

"A New Fantastic Point of View"

Ha-ha-ha!

Real life has been incredibly busy/messy for me lately. Not only busy, but it's all been mostly unpleasant business, so it saps away my will to do fanfic or anything else fun, other than sleep a lot and read what other people are writing. (Teen Wolf fanfic is highly addictive.)

But while I haven't been being very productive, other people have been and it just brightens my day.

Styxhana (aka styx) just translated a bunch of my stories into Chinese! Is that not awesome?! I am incredibly excited.
Check them out:

何梦将至 (What Dreams May Come)
米索斯的万圣节故事 (Halloween Story)
体验飞翔 (A Taste of Flight)
脱身之途 (Escape Route)
层层伪装 (Layers of Pretense)
任他何名 (By Any Other Name)
窥望深渊 (Into the Depths)

This is actually the third language (third! awesome!) that some of my stories have been translated into.

My first translation (and I was so excited that I actually forgot to mark down the date) was by black_leather, a Russian translation of Halloween Story by Methos: check it out!

My second translation (in September of 2008) was by Franavu, a Dutch translation of Halloween Story by Methos: check it out!

And now I have Chinese translations by Styx! Awesome!

Also, I have two illustrations made for me!

I got an illustration from IceAgeSurvivor123 for Icarus in October 2010. Coolness!

And an illustration from Pentapus in May 2012 for Seventh Time's the Charm and Every Ending a Beginning and Every Beginning an End. *grin*

Real life has been beating me down recently, but fandom is made up of so many awesome people doing wonderful things.
 

Okay, so I went to see The Bourne Legacy this weekend. It was fun, even though, wow, it had more than a few flaws. One of which is not really a spoiler but Jeremy Renner should never, ever have facial hair. Luckily, the facial hair doesn't last long.

Anyway, the rest of this is a rant that is maybe spoiler-y? Given that it's about a recent release, I'll put the rant behind a cut.

( Potentially Spoilery RantCollapse )

Let us consider Thor’s Hammer, a mystical-magical weapon named Mjolnir, inscribed with: “Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor.”

Wowza.

I’ve read various fics in which other Avengers try to pick up Thor’s Hammer and occasionally they succeed. They have been found worthy! Cool!

But then, I was wandering around online and found this awesome analysis of a scene in the movie Thor, (by Alis Dee, the author of the (awesome, awesome, awesome!) series, Agent Loki: International Man of Mayhem.) In the analysis, she points out that Thor’s big redemptive scene? Isn’t so much him sacrificing himself to save others as it is him refraining from using others as his meat shields. Which, wow, sets the bar kind of low for what “worthy” means. Which makes it all the more depressing that no one else on Earth can lift the hammer.

However, then I had some thoughts:

Thought #1: Worthy or not-worthy, in this case, is being judged by a mystical-magical hammer. What’s the scale here? And what’s being measured? What exactly counts as being worthy here? Given that one aspect seems to be refraining from using friends and innocent bystanders as meat shields, I’m guessing that the hammer is judging worth on a whole different system than most modern Earth cultures judge, and only includes a nominal nod towards empathy.

Maybe it’s warrior ability and prince-like behavior, or having just the right amount of empathy (not too little and not too much), or something.

Following this train of thought, I kind of want a story in which none of the other Avengers can lift the hammer, but someone else completely inappropriate can. Is it one of their current enemies? Maybe a Lex Luthor type of enemy who wants to rule and, while vicious and deadly, is only as vicious and deadly as is required for taking over the world? Or is it Director Fury who already seems to be the great and powerful Oz to a certain extent? Oh, the possibilities.

However, that actually lead to…

Thought #2: Thor was perfectly capable of using Mjolnir when he went to Jotunheim, when he was fighting the Jotun, when he returned to Asgard, and when he was back-talking Odin. It wasn’t until he was cast down by Odin that he failed to lift the hammer.

So is part of being worthy being in Odin’s good graces? Because is sounds like that one sets the bar for worthiness pretty darned high. And makes the definition of being worthy completely dependent on the opinion of one being rather than based on behaviors or feelings.

Then, actually, pretty much in writing this description up, I had…

Thought #3: There are multiple ways of interpreting what it would mean to possess the power of Thor. Now, I know that in comic book canon various other people have picked up the hammer before and the interpretation is that they get a lot of extra “power.” Okay. But, ignoring that canonical interpretation, let’s consider alternatives. For instance, what happens to Thor, in the mean time? Is it that the wielder will have an equivalent amount of power, or is it that they’ll have Thor’s power, in which case Thor will not have Thor’s power?

Or, better yet, is it that they’ll be able to control Thor. Maybe it's a kind of a slave connection. If some suitably worthy person gets a hold of Mjolnir, they have Thor at their command?

Because this interpretation would actually solve some of the previous problems. The original issue that prevented Thor was using the hammer wasn’t that Thor didn’t have enough empathy or Odin’s approval necessarily, it was that he didn’t have control of his own life. He had acted based on Loki’s taunts and Odin’s commands and it wasn’t until he was cast out and learned to act based on his own thoughts and desires that the hammer considered him master of his own fate and thus worthy to captain his own soul and all that?

In which case, wouldn’t it be kind of funny if, having settled on Earth to be an Avenger for a while, Thor acquired a personal assistant to help keep his life organized and she (or he) was perfectly capable of lifting Mjolnir? Or even that was the test? Could the applicants for the position lift Mjolnir?

Anyway, I would love to see some fanfiction which delves into the issues of what counts as "worthy" according to a mystical-magical weapon.
 

I have mentioned before how I really think there needs to be some crossovers between Valdemar (with their white Companions/horses) and Highlander (specifically Methos aka Death on a White Horse). 

Well, pentapusmade me an illustration for just such a story! It is awesome! (I love how expressive her characters are.) 

Thus: 

Every Ending a Beginning and Every Beginning and End (on AO3 with the illustration) or on FF.net

and then, when that story got a bit angsty, because, well, it's Methos post-DoaWH being confronted with a white horse, I decided to write a somewhat lighter and fluffier: 

Seventh Time's the Charm (on AO3 with the illustration) or on FF.net

which is also Methos post-DoaWH being confronted with a white horse but sillier

Cheers!

mg