FIC: Death (of Rats) Takes a Holiday

Title: Death (of Rats) Takes a Holiday
Fandom: Discworld
Characters: Quoth the Raven, Death of Rats, A'Tuin
Spoilers: Uses geographical info derived from The Colour of Magic / The Light Fantastic, but should read just fine for anyone familiar with the characters.
Summary: Quoth the Raven takes a holiday with the Death of Rats, sees new sights, and acquires a taste for elephant fleas. Also there's a cat.

My first Discworld fic! Gah, writing in new fandoms is always stressful, especially prose fandoms. I ended up liking this okay, though, even though I wrote it in one evening after I realized that I had misjudged the rarecharacters deadline by TWO WEEKS. (This is also my excuse for the title and the summary.) Half the plot sort of inspired by a fortuitous reread of Cordwainer Smith's story "A Game of Rat and Dragon."

On AO3

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blast from the past rec

I was having a rough day on Thursday, but ignipes' classic Dean at Hogwarts series helped cheer me up. Dean turns eleven and is sent by his grandparents to Hogwarts, where he can't take care of Sam or track down his parents' murderer or anything. It's a series that makes you go AWWWW a lot. Also, one of the later installments suggests that the author really, really love The Secret Garden, which is always a good sign, in my book.

Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Comment here or there. ( DW replies)

comics read, 11/2/13

X-Factor #4-12 - David, et al
I'm continuing to read X-Factor. Generally I'm enjoying the storylines and the team aspect. I love the idea of Mutant Town, a neighborhood that's all mutants - that's the kind of low-level, day-to-day worldbuilding that really turns my crank. I also like the promise of another several hundred issues of this, all (?) by the same writer - that is some kind of achievement, when everything else these days is getting "rebooted" every twenty or thirty issues, or sometimes less, and authors change as often.

At this point, my favorite characters are probably Layla and Rahne. Layla for the mystery about her, for how unflappable she is, for how she defies a lot of the "angsty seer" tropes while still suffering in her own way from her knowledge. I will say that the writing and artists did a poor job early on of conveying her age - I figured she was in her late teens until she ended up at the orphanage, and it's not until the last issue or two, when she's clearly head and shoulders shorter than Madrox, that her age is really apparent.

Rahne has less arc relevance, but OTOH she's a butch uber-Catholic (?) Scottish werewolf with a hair-trigger temper and no sense of humor, so of course I love her. There aren't a lot of religious characters in superhero comics; I wouldn't mind seeing that aspect of her explored more.

The one aspect I'm not much enjoying is the art. I think it's supposed to be noir-ish, which I like in theory but in practice means everything is dark and hard to see, particularly when Sook is doing the art. I'd like this book at least twice as much if the style was something a little better-lit.

Avengers Academy #1-6 - Gage, McKone
I enjoyed this way more than I expected, given I don't usually get excited about the Avengers side of things. I'm just a sucker for teen team books, I guess. I like getting in on the ground floor of these characters and their development, I like the guys fine and love all the girls (Hazmat has so much justified angst! Veil, so insecure! And Finesse is the teen girl version of Cumberbatch's Sherlock), and their introduction and development across the first six books is just very satisfying, with plenty of interesting threads to tug on further along. I'll definitely keep going on this one.

Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Comment here or there. ( DW replies)