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Title: Not a tree, and not grass either

Summary: Variation on a theme by Hugo: Enjolras and Grantaire have a contentious conversation about the legwork that goes into a revolution. Set in the run up to the April Revolution (Seoul, 1960), and genderbent, because. 1725 words. Thanks to

skygiants for the beta!

( under the cut )

I feel like it's especially important to say for this one: any and all comments, corrections, and criticism are welcomed.

Fun facts: (1) "Combeferre" apparently gets transliterated into Japanese as "konbu ferre", which in turn Google translates to English as "kelp fail" (h/t sclez) and (2) kelp was an important historical source of sodium carbonate. This explains everything, except why I somehow took this as a fic promt, for which you probably have to blame my extreme sleep deprivation at the time.

( kelp fail )

Also here on AO3. Sorry for the Les Mis spam, everyone.

—and all this so that a peasant can say to-day to the traveller: Monsieur, give me three francs, and if you like, I will explain to you the affair of Waterloo!

( mad walls of text )

(I am tempted to post this one on AO3, actually, now that meta is apparently ok there, but I'm torn -- I'm not sure whether people actually want AO3 to be a meta archive.)

Ugh, I have fallen down on crossposting. (I suspect I really only have time to manage presence on one platform. This is...not optimal.)

Here are a collection of live!brick reaction posts, mostly for archival purposes, because (1) oh Tumblr, and (2) I suspect anyone reading me on Les Misérables over here has already read this on Tumblr anyway. (But if anyone is interested enough to want to respond, please do!)

( accumulated aggravation with Marius rises to a simmer )

( facepalm.gif )

( A Selected List of Topics Upon Which Hugo and I Have Decided Differences of Opinion )

( Live!bricking WITH A VENGEANCE, or, thoughts on Argot )

link to more discussion.

So! I have discovered what that meme is good for.

Who wants to write me the utterly fantastic AU where Les Amis are azi and plot to overthrow the oligarchic Union government? Just imagine: armies of cloned Enjolrai rediscovering revolutionary imperatives in logical and utterly ruthless azi style. And the dry faux-lab notes about how the AEX type typically does better when paired with a ACBFX type, and the sudden belated discovery of danger when they are placed on work detail with a BCFR...

If that doesn't float your boat, how about Azula palling around with Sachiko (and with her ulterior motives), manipulating circles around her, and convincing Sachiko that Sachiko can set things on fire by snapping her fingers? Or Cho Seon trying to throw Azula out of Morangak and not get fried, or turned in to the King, in the process?

Or Tenpou talking philosophy and cheap opera with Combeferre and getting him accidentally stoned into the bargain?

Or Yong Ha and Simon Illyan trying to out-twisty each other on a poorly lit street in the back alleys of Joseon?

:D?

(What do you mean you have your own writing commitments? What do you mean I should write them myself? Nuts.)

OMG MINEKURA holy shipbait.

(You had better be making these two explicit in the end game because if you go this far, HOLY SDKFJ.)

Also, it's wonderful to see Kougaiji again, and he's still being an absolute noble idiot, no surprise there. I'm very curious to see how this will develop.

About meme: I am frazzled enough to play, and the results have so far been deeply amusing, so:

via

shati: I've got a list of characters from various fandoms numbered 1-15, give me scenarios/questions with combinations of characters (e.g. 1 and 5 walk into a bar, and get into a fight with 7. who wins?), hilarity ensues.

Archival footage of the April revolution, excerpted from a documentary.

Oh hell, I wish I understood Korean. I have a feeling this is going to be a theme; it's very hard to find primary sources that have been translated to English.

(LOOK THERE IS MY ENJOLRAS. I was watching carefully to see if there was any female participation, at all, and I just about fell out of my chair when I saw her, watch and you'll see why! Now, of course, I want to know all about that amazing person in real life :( You can see later, too, a woman in Yeo Kyeong-esque hanbok marching in a line of besuited students. Further on, there's a whole group of women marching, but without understanding the commentary I don't know who they are - students or workers or otherwise.

And Rhee goes to visit the wounded protestors in the hospital -- hahaha wow that would have been a tense scene.)

An article focused on Shin Kyong-Nim, about dissident poets and the impact of politics following the April revolution, including several politically-themed poems.

Attention conservation notice: this showed up on Tumblr already. Absolute and utter crack, also Hugo pastiche flash-fic. My apologies to the Quartier de Picpus, though as one folk etymology of the name is pique-puce (flea-bite) I feel octopi are an improvement.

A snippet that Hugo’s editor didn’t make him cut from the convent chapters

( Concerning the origin of the name «the Petit Picpus» )

Alternate post title: well, that made for an argumentative plane ride.

I have actually been hugely enjoying the infamous digressions, after setting aside a certain allowance for the rolling of eyes. One of the side benefits of reading La Brique electronically is that I feel blissfully at liberty to scribble mad quantities of notes and arguments in the margins. Well, the last couple of chapters I have stopped to comment on every paragraph, because these are the chapters where Hugo decides to go into great detail about how atheism destroys society.

For now I have to go be productive and stuff, so I leave you with two thoughts.

Dear Hugo,

Your "proof" of the existence of a divine essence is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the mathematical concept of infinity.

Very nettled love,
-me.
"To place the infinity here below in contact, by the medium of thought, with the infinity on high, is called praying." (Vol II, Bk 7, Ch V.)

Not so, sir! It’s called science.

(General book logging as well as a post on Waterloo: coming when things calm down a bit I swear no really)

( Flash-ficced revolutionary silliness )

So anyone who was interested in Korean genderbent Enjolrai can stop waiting on my dubious writing process because Yu Kwan-soon is ten times more amazing than any character I could invent.

( Yu Kwan-soon 유관순 )

I need a Les Miserables icon. Sadly none of the famous 1860s art features Combeferre.

(I have, however, found this screamer, courtesy Pont Au Change, which is apparently supposed to be Enjolras:
( it must be seen to be believed. ))

You guys, I have just spent 113 pages hanging out with an elderly bishop and his household, an ex-convict, and a very opinionated author, and I am having the time of my life. I love this book.

( The Bishop of Digne, it turns out, is based on a real person )

The moment when I knew I would love this book, as opposed to simply finding it highly entertaining, came when our friend the Bishop goes to visit the dying conventionary, and his priestly hackles rise like those of a much pettier man, and the tension comes to a head when the Bishop drops to a seat and demands an accounting.

( there's a bit of stuff about atheism here, but not very much, because I need to go to bed )

I'm reading Les Miserables (very slowly). I've read excerpts from it before, usually in watered-down French -- my high school French teacher was notable for migraines, scattershot lesson planning, and deep, disorganized passions for Hugo and Impressionists -- but I've never tackled the whole thing. It's great fun ~~though I haven't hit the parts with Marius yet~~. I have the itch to live-blog every other page and argue back at Hugo, which I have been heroically repressing.

Here, have a fic rec: Dolce et decorum est, featuring Les Amis in Temeraire!verse. Enjolras is captain to the dragon Patria, deadly earnest human and draconine republicanism abounds, and so does gleeful gender confusion. Clever, cracky, and fun.

And another one: With Faith Unfearful, by

carmarthen. It's not very easy to write believable ship fic for Enjolras and Grantaire and stay true to their canon dynamic, but this works beautifully well, partly by not being the sort of thing one would ordinarily call ship fic.

Something about Enjolras lends itself to genderfuck remarkably easily, and I think I know why. Enjolras is one of the Les Mis characters who's halfway to being a symbol, and symbolic embodiments of abstract virtues are female in Western thought. Think of Liberty, leading the people, and Marianne; the Virtues, the Graces. Enjolras is written to be the embodiment of the revolutionary spirit, and his appearance, his demeanor, all hark back to those feminine abstract archetypes. He was gender-bent from the beginning; no wonder he bends back so easily.

More links: today I was amused to note that as part of the New York Times' ongoing "Disunion" Civil War history project, posted today was an article about how Les Miserables, hot off the presses, was received in the US. Not much has changed: "The New York Times called the novel 'remarkable' and 'brilliant, but in the same notice labeled Hugo 'a prosy madman.'" It's fascinating to read reviews from the Southern side and see the doublethink involved, as Hugo and his messages were fairly obviously abolitionist; this is only briefly touched on in the article, and it would be interesting to read more.

So the thing about writing people who started out as Enjolras ( snip for those who aren't interested in writing blather )

...in other news. Uh. So, does anyone want to watch Sandglass with me?

This may be of interest:

Warning for annoying gender roles and the brain bending conflation of Valjean and Marius.

(two posts in as many days! My calendar for the next few months says: don't get used to it ha ha ha help brb freaking out.)

So saiyuki_manga has the translation of Ants of Heaven up. After deleting two screens full of key mashing, I can even say something sensible!

( but read the manga first! )

So this year I actually wrote something for Yuletide! I was trawling Dear Yuletide Writer letters, as I do wistfully every year with varying degrees of intent, and I came across

shati's prompt,

Farfetched, but if you offered both Capital Scandal and Sungkyunkwan Scandal and feel like writing Cha Song Joo and Gu Yong Ha hanging out and people-watching together, I would not expect you to justify the crossover at all. AT ALL.

Naturally, because I'm incapable of actually writing to prompts, I immediatedly started to wonder, how would you justify that crossover? Then Cha Song Joo and Gu Yong Ha started talking to each other, and then it was all over, and I was doomed to writing Step by step on the flowers placed before you. It also spawned a Yong Ha-and-Jae Shin coda, because I can never resist writing double-layered conversations when I get a chance to, After and Before. (Actually, this was also supposed to have a brief Cha Song Joo-and-Cho Seon coda as well, which would even make the title meaningful instead of "oh look I was pulled out of a hat at the last minute", but I completely ran out of time ~~as you can totally tell~~. Oh well!)

innerbrat was remarkably cheerful about being contacted out of the blue by a stranger on Christmas Eve to rush-beta an unfinished fic: thank you very much again!

Since I know most of the people on my flist aren't familiar with either fandom, ( I recommend them both! )

Last year I hurriedly posted some recs just before reveal and called them the brief and crazed edition. Well, this year I've read an even smaller fraction of the archive and am feeling even more crazed (I notice a trend), but three awesome stories make a post, right?

Outdwelling (Duane's Door Into aka Tale of the Five series) is about Hasai, it's from his point of view, and it moves through time and memory as freely and as changingly as sunlight through water. It's beautifully written, and makes magnificent use of the draconic sense of time.
The Young Chants (Chrestomanci) is a lovely series of character studies as Christopher grows up and adds people to his family, one at a time. The characterization is keenly and subtly observed and, as is perfectly in keeping with canon, occasionally veers into the hysterically funny. (Tell me you don't love the bit where Chrestomanci is called away complete with fussy baby, and I will refuse to believe you're completely human.)
Couldn't Drag Me Away (Sungkyunkwan Scandal) takes on Yong Ha and Jae Shin's first meeting, with an absolutely fantastic Yong Ha voice, and some brilliantly in-character cleverness.

Please tell me about your favorites!

Hi everyone!

Here a few comments about things I've been reading and watching recently.

Lizzie Bennet's Diaries: or, Pride and Prejudice as told through the video blog of Lizzie Bennet, live-at-home grad student.

Yeah, Pride and Prejudice gets adapted six ways to Sunday. What makes this adaptation so much fun is that the producers have clearly thought very carefully about how to translate the story to the modern day. They're deeply clued into the economic insecurity that underlies the Bennets' situation in the original PnP, and in the update have very wisely retained that as a driving factor entirely separate from the romance (apart from what is hinted to be some regressive attitudes on Lizzie's mother's part). The philosophical disagreement between Lizzie and Charlotte is being set up to take the form of a disagreement about taking unfulfilling or morally questionable jobs in a tough economy.

It's clever (Bingley is Bing Lee!) and funny (the actors playing Charlotte and the Bennet sisters have great chemistry and comic timing) and I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes -- not to mention how they're going to handle the rest of the adaptation! It strikes me that the video blog format is going to be more and more challenging to maintain as the story goes on.
Captain Vorpatril's Alliance

I tore through the eARC in a single day when I really should have been doing work and/or cleaning up my apartment. LMB has lost none of her unputdownability, and sets up some very funny set pieces. This is a light book, drawn along the romantic-caper-farce lines of ACC, and a gentle farewell to the Vorkosigan series. It's well-plotted and enjoyable, and it is fun following Ivan around. I liked it much better than Cryoburn, but (as expected) don't look for anything especially deep.

Now I'm going to complain about something spoilery, so here is a cut. ( CVA and broader trends in the Vorkosiverse )
Korra! Yep, I've been watching. Overall it's been a lot of fun, but suffers from a severe case of having two seasons worth of plot and only a single season to tell it. Thus the (interesting and well-rounded) characters suffer badly from having a lot of their important character moments compressed and sometimes obscured on screen. It's a lot like ATLA, only the flaws as well as the virtues have been super-condensed:

( some general comments, no finale spoilers )

Now I must pry myself off the Internet with a crowbar and get back to work.

New Saiyuki! translated by the wonderful, wonderful people over at

saiyuki_manga.

There are two chapters, the last chapter of the sky burial arc, and the first chapter of a new arc that is bringing ALL OF THE AWESOME.

( spoilers! )

In the long wait between chapters, I reread what we've got so far of Ibun, and was struck by the huge gap between the world were seeing in Ibun, and the world we see now. So Ibun is really setting up the question: what on earth happened? ( ibun spoilers )

Somehow I hadn't quite processed before what it meant that Sanzo is carrying the Maten Sutra, the one that should be held by a youkai. In a very real way, this makes him more one of the ikkou: not quite human, not quite youkai, somewhere in between. And, moreover, as it is with Gojyo and Hakkai, Sanzo's halfway status is a reflection of pain, and of things not going right, or at least, not according to plan. Which adds more dimensions to the way he resists thinking of himself as part of the ikkou for so long, or the way he keeps grumbling that he's completely human, stop lumping him in with his youkai servants -- of course, the fact that he's carrying a youkai scripture, that he is in some weird metaphysical way a halfbreed priest, is deeply reflective of what he sees as his failure, and Koumyou's.

Hi flist!

Am not dead! (only insanely head-twistingly busy offline, I'm sure you all know the drill)

Anyway I have been drifting in and out of Yuletide, and I have found three beautiful things:

A clear glass window, at a sea dawn, for Bujold's Chalion universe. This is about Umegat, and about history still trying to go right, and it is beautiful and surehanded; I cannot recommend it enough. This is a story about being middle-aged, gay, and Roknari, in a court dominated by young, straight Chalionese, and at the same time it isn't anywhere near that simple; it is about doing what is right, and it is about joy, and about faith in people as well as gods. The writing is beautiful and the characterization fantastic. Strongly recommended.

Reemergence, about Mary Innes (of Miss Pym Disposes, by Josephine Tey), dealing with her career, her knowledge, and her second-hand guilt, afterward. It's complex and painful and many-layered, and the author's portrait of both Innes and Nash is surehanded and subtle.

Five Nail Polishes. The fandom is: nail polishes. No, I don't know either, but it's well worth the click to read this set of drabbles. There's one apiece for five different colors of nail polish, and they are sharp-edged, dense, and sparkling, like tiny gems.

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28

these far and starlit shores

(adventures in abstraction and distraction)

Fic: Not a tree, and not grass either (Enjolras, Grantaire, Les Miserables, AU)

crossposting catchup: more silly flash fic (kelp fail)

crossposting: Waterloo

crossposting catchup: Brick!logging

crack crossover prompts

Saiyuki! meme!

some links about the April revolution

I should not be left alone with this book while jetlagged in hotel rooms.

Les Miserables, version brick, Installment 2: Volume 2, Book 7

This isn't here and you didn't see it.

Yu Kwan-soon

Les Miserables, version brick, installment 1: Volume 1, Books I-II

more Les Mis spam

Speaking of Korean Les Mis AUs

Ants of Heaven

Yuletide! reveal!

Yuletide recs (briefer and crazed-er edition)

Scattered thoughts on various forms of entertainment

saiyuki reload blast is reloading and blasting

Yuletide recs (the short and crazed edition)

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February 2023

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