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The Toybox

people for the conservation of limited amounts of indignation

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rec - coming home by xanthe
children of dune - leto 1
Okay, been up for an hour with--shocking!--tooth pain after *four hours* of sleep, so basically at this point, we can just go with I'm clinically insane and no longer responsible for what I do. My first act will be to declare myself queen of--hmm. Actually, I have no idea. But I would like to belatedly thank all the people on my buddylist for distracting me most of last night, since this has been getting steadily worse for the last couple of days. I love you all. Should I ever be queen of anything, I swear, brownies to everyone. And you know. Hot sex slaves. That sort of thing.

Okay, so comfort fic. Currently, and I honestly am still surprised I'm saying this, the prize for making me ungodly happy is Coming Home by xanthestories, prequel to General and Doctor Sheppard (link leads to part 1).

This isn't a conditional rec, but a--hmm. If you really liked General Sheppard, you'll like this one. You are group one. This is not aimed at you. If you, like me, did *not* get into the first one, okay, this rec is specifically for you. You are group two.

I didn't like the first one--nothing against the author, but I'm fairly specific on my bdsm and *really* specific on my John characterizations. The compare/contrast of universes did not work for me mostly because the AU was *too* different and I couldn't get context for a *lot* of the behavior. Coming Home, just for the fact that the author managed--and I have no idea how she did this--to build the freaking universe these people belong to? AWESOME. I mean--seriously, that is freaking *cool*. It's like candyland. Everyone's hot and wearing leather every day and being growly and possessive and seriously, who cannot love Miko in PVC boots, okay? Christ. The internal logic is sound, there are very intersting variations on characterization--but this is a strong enough AU I feel fairly comfortable with a wider field of characterization than I usually do. It's a wonderful, cuddly BDSM romance, Harlequin taking a trip to the toy store, but more than that, it's a good story. Just with floggers and collars and things.

I love that she's trying this, that she obviously put *thought* into this world and how this society might/could work, and frankly, she gets a ton of credit off the bat for attempting something this ambitious. I love how she keeps good internal logic. I love that she's hitting and bouncing on a lot of my kinks, period. I love that I am, for the first time in a long time, *obsessively* following a wip to see what on earth she'll do next. I am happy. I'm hitting *refresh* obsessively from midnight to one-fifteen--which seems to be her window of posting.

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I think if the writer tried to make them more like our Rodney and John, it wouldn't work.

I agree, and I think that's precisely where my hesitation is probably coming from. I guess what I'm struggling with is this: how much of the fundamental characteristics of an established character can you take away, before he completely stops being that character? How much of a pairing's dynamic can you change before it stops being recognizable as the relationship (or at least, the *potential* of the relationship) you see on the show? And if these versions of John and Rodney would never work on the show, then why are they being written as John and Rodney at all (as opposed to making them original characters)? I enjoy a good A/U so long as the foundation of the characters remains familiar to me, but IMO, you could take this version of John and Rodney right out of Atlantis, give them different names and a different setting, and you'd have a terrific, compelling story with absolutely no resemblance at all to SGA. Which leaves me wondering why they've been constructed there, I guess.

OTOH, as I said above, I'm still compelled to keep reading the story, so maybe I'm just full of crap. *g*

*grins* No, I totally get what you mean in that. To me, it's similiar, at least in concept, in making an AU where one character is a different sex in canon--kind of having to pick what fundamentals will stay the same and which ones will be different due to that difference.

OTOH, I am seriously working not to think very hard about it and stay in the 'ooh, pretty' space. *g*

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