ride_4ever

Yays! Continuing my "Fannish 50 Streak" of having done fifty Fannish 50 posts per year for each year that Fannish 50 has been running, and also now completing the thematic responses to the due South 30th anniversary celebration's 30 Below Fest created by and run by flownwrong (there were seven thematic prompts of which I already did six and now here's the seventh).

That final prompt of the 30 Below Fest was called "Go Wild Week" and the meaning of that was left open to interpretation. I'm choosing to do it as reccing in two categories that I wouldn't ordinarily rec: reccing a WIP and reccing a tagged "unfinished and discontinued". (Coincidentally, both of these dS fics are science fiction AUs and are F/K.)

For one, there's the series Real Life on AO3, currently comprised of two completed parts ("Real Boys" and "Real Worlds") and with a third part ("Real Girls") that's an active WIP posting snippet-by-snippet on Dreamwidth. On AO3 the author's pseud is MSSalieri and on Dreamwidth it's troyswann (also, in some other fannish spaces, simply "salieri").

The other is The Xenobiology Service on AO3 by luzula. She is still very much active in writing fic, but has been writing in a fandom other than dS for some time now. While I'm sad that she doesn't plan to continue this fic, what there is of it I <3 so much that I've read it and reread it multiple times over the course of years.

How did I come to due South fandom? Well, to take a phrase from Ray Kowalski: "I took this bus, I drove this car, I got on this train, I walked down this street, I turned this corner, I opened this door, and I stepped into...."

The year was 2009. The setting was a Thanksgiving dinner in Chicago to which I was invited by a casual acquaintance who knew that no family member of mine would be inviting me to Thanksgiving dinner. Seated next to me at the dinner table was the MIL of my casual acquaintance, who said to me “I hear that you appreciate Shakespeare. There’s a Canadian TV show you should see -- it’s called Slings & Arrows....” And there it was, the moment that began the sealing of my fandom fate -- OH CANADA! -- I would soon be learning that “Canada is the country that is a fandom”. Slings & Arrows totally grabbed me, and my first exposure to Paul Gross was nothing short of experiencing a paradigm shift, and then I felt that I had to go in search of his other shows. So I went from Slings & Arrows in 2009 to due South in 2010 to discovering online fandom community (via stumbling onto a slash fic) in 2011.

And here's how due South led me to slash. I had finished watching the show, and having been introduced in the final episode to the notion of "the hand of Franklin, reaching for the Beaufort Sea" I did a Google search on the phrase "the hand of Franklin". Well! The top hit I got in my search did not go to a history website -- it went to a fic entitled "The Hand of Franklin" and the reference was to Sam Franklin. It was Sam Franklin/Ray Kowalski dubcon with eventual Fraser/Kowalski.

And here is the first fic I ever read, the first slash I ever encountered, the fic that pimped me into fandom community: The Hand of Franklin by akite.

I consider this a hat-trick, the general definition being "a series of three achievements"...as I wrote this fic for the dSC6D snippets comm on DW and for the story-works comm on DW and for the "30 Below" due South 30th anniversary fest. (Those DW comms are hyperlinked in the Author Notes on AO3.)

Title: Ice Queen, Dragon Lady
Author: ride_4ever
Fandom: due South
Character: Inspector Margaret Thatcher
Rating: Gen
Length: 82-word poem

Fic on AO3.

Today is March 10th, which means that tomorrow is the annual Eleventh of March due South holiday...and this year that date is also the start of the due South 30th Anniversary Fest "30 Below" being run from March 11th through April by the wonderful flownwrong.

Here is the link to flownwrong's Fest Intro post .

Here is the link to flownwrong's 30 Below Themes & Prompts post .

Here is the link to flownwrong's Fest Reminder post .