broken-nosed gods

(oh snap, I am two days late!)

Happy Magical Girl Month, everyone! And happy next-week-is-finals-week for me, oops. (Also I think it may still be Golden Week, which is a holiday I wish the US would adopt.)

I started reading Sailor Moon when the re-releases started being published, and I love it fiercely. I love that Mamoru loves helping Usagi and getting saved by her, I love that Rei and Minako don't need men, I love everyone and everything (except a few of those comments Minako made in the Sailor V manga in the weight gain chapter, ugh).

also Korra is probably a magical girl jsyk.

I've watched a few episodes of Magical Emi, and it's pretty good! Of course, it does combine two of my favorite things, stage magic and real magic, and also there are neat clothes and singing. I am resisting the urge to write a Magic Kaito crossover in which Emi mentors Kaito after his father dies.

19. Any questions from the audience?

(My standard question for these things is always "Do you like to cook/what do you cook?" But if you have any questions at all, I'd like to read and try to answer them. :D )


Someday I will make a big giant post about Nurarihyon no Mago. It's like if you put all the things I like about youkai manga and stuck them onto shounen manga and made it amazing, that is what Nurarihyon no Mago is. I think the last time I marathoned a manga like this, it was with Gokusen.

(ETA: That is to say, if I don't calm down and read something else so I can go to sleep, I will not have to worry about these period crams because I will be DEAD. Of sheer AWESOME.)

14. Did you have a gateway fandom? Still in it? Why or why not? Is there a community for it on DW?

I learned about 'fandom'—and, really, the internet—after taking some kind of kids' writing class when I was ten. This girl showed us her Harry Potter script-format fic on one of the nearby computers. It was terrible, but I loved it, and it set me on my life's path. So I suppose Harry Potter was my gateway fandom, in (possible) tandem with the Tamora Pierce books.

Yes, I'm still in HP fandom, even when I don't particularly want to be. It's a time-sucker, especially with that whole 're-re-re-reading fics I already know and love to death' thing I've got going. (Just re-read most of Secret of Slytherin. ALL THE THINGS I LIKE, it has them.) It kept me from doing all the things I really should have done—that I really wanted to do—today; cleaning, doing laundry, walking around, studying for my final that's in two days, not spending the entire day lying around in bed or sitting in a chair. But there are so, so many worthwhile things about it. Even if I kind of hate canon some of the time, I will always love at least a little teensy part of the fandom. It will never be my home fandom, but it will always be there for me.

(Incidentally, I wrote Hogwarts fic!)



My other gateway fandom was—sigh—D.N. Angel. I saw some terrible music video to it back when I was eleven or twelve, and thought it looked pretty cool (even if it was a cartoon). I have never finished the anime or the manga, and I have never actually written fic for it. It is so very terrible in so many ways, not even including the bad science. But it got me into anime and manga, and introduced me to the concept of a phantom thief. I've started (re)reading the manga for Japanese practice now, and oh the memories. (Also, I just learned how to say 'ordinary'!) It's not nearly as bad as I thought it would be, at least so long as I don't think about it too hard.

Maybe I'll write a crossover or something. It could be fun! Speaking of DNAngel crossovers, this one is fairly good, and helped me realize my love of chase scenes. From either perspective.


15. What's your current obsession? What about it captures your imagination?

SHOES. I don't know why, but I think high heels are positively gorgeous. Of course, if that was all, then I wouldn't care so much about owning and wearing them. I think I love shoes for the same reason I love jackets or dresses or skirts. They look sleek and cool or bright and flouncy, and sometimes both. I also love them the way I love nail polish and lipstick—they're very gender-coded things, and in addition to loving the way they look, I love the way they say "Look at me, I am a girl," and imply all sorts of things by that ("and fuck you," "who wants to stand taller than anyone else," "and I love these colours," among them, usually). I love the way that message can be altered by tacking other things on top of it—facial hair, butch clothes, long unfussy skirts, men's hats—even if I never do.

10. Tell me about your default icon.

Um. This is surprisingly hard! It isn't actually loaded with symbolism and meaning or anything—well, it is, but it's not really my symbolism and meaning. I love Anthy kind of a lot, and this scene is always really painful for me to watch. But really I picked it for my default because it's a very pretty icon, with the different reds and the butterfly cutout window and the dark lines and shapes of the scene, and because I wanted to continue my semi-tradition of having Utena-only default icons.

11. What feature do you think Dreamwidth should have that it doesn't currently?

The ability to actually save drafts of entries would be super-nice for me, but that's because Google Docs is less fun to use these days and Zoho Writer has a tendency to flake out on me. A kudos button like on AO3, maybe? But really, DW has most of what I need—that's why I'm here.

So, earlier today littlebutfierce reminded me that May is MAGICAL GIRL MONTH. And since I missed it last year, I have some making up to do! Happily, I posted some squee about Lenalee in what was in some timezones May 1st, so let's see if I can keep it up.

And since we're using a broad definition of 'magical girl' here, I'm going to talk about Chrome Dokuro.

I never thought I'd turn into the kind of person who kept up with a fandom for one or two characters and ignored the rest. And I haven't! But even though I do love a lot of other things about KHR and its fandom (see: this) Chrome and Mukuro are the ones I think and write and fic about to near-exclusion. They combine a lot of things I like—reincarnation! illusion! the blurring of lies and truth! unshakable partnerships of the not-necessarily romantic variety! Gender issues! Mental health issues! Buddhism!—and stay away from a lot of the things I don't.

And I like what Reborn said about them. "Because of Chrome, Mukuro can exist. Because of Mukuro, Chrome can live." (or something like that) In my head, they're separate characters, but not entirely separate people; that's why I'm talking about both of them and not just her. Mukuro will have to break out of prison sometime, but I kind of don't want him to. I like the way that Chrome is his lifeline to the world, I like the idea that they've blurred together a little, or maybe more than a little. I like the idea that Mukuro used to be a girl like Chrome, once upon a time, and he enjoys being that again and also offering the help he didn't have when he was. I like the idea that Chrome's strength is in silence and passivity right up until she needs it to be otherwise, and I like the idea that Mukuro is a little bit the same way.

I love Bianchi and Kyoko and Haru and Hana and Adelheid and Shitt P. and Lal Mirch and Uni, but Chrome will always be my favorite of the KHR ladies. She's the kind of quiet character I don't get to write very often, the one who's polite and loyal and a little bit lonely and goes unfazed by things that would knock less-experienced people flat.

Also, I wrote Chrome fic! It's kind of unpolished, but is about Chrome thinking about how D. Spade is a LYING LIAR WHO LIES and how hard that's going to hurt him. CHROME ILU LOTS OKAY ♥ ♥ ♥

Because I was out of the house all day yesterday and typing on an iPod is no fun.

01. Why did you sign up for Dreamwidth?

A year and some change ago, copperbadge backed up all his fic over here and talked about it a little. Around the same time, I noticed that a lot of the more insightful posts linked by metafandom were posted on DW. I didn't sign up for a while, because I'm only good at focusing on a few things in my life at once -- if I focus on writing my violin-playing suffers, if I focus on knitting my reading suffers, if I focus on LJ my studies suffer. So I can only be active on two or three websites or the rest of my life disappears. And I liked the sites I was on at the time.

But then I poked around a bit and saw that the site looked pretty cool, and even though you needed an invite code they were very easy to get. And the subscription and access features were separate, which was a pretty big draw -- I could just subscribe to anyone who consistently posted stuff I liked without feeling awkward in the least. So I did just that, and here we are. (I still haven't changed my bio or interests since then, even though they could do with it. Oops?)


02. Why did you choose your journal name?

By the time I signed up for LJ I had started to really like online names that felt like names -- not ones that necessarily sounded like names people would have IRL, but something you could say out loud without feeling silly. My old username of LandUnderWave was starting to get a little bit, well, old, and I was starting to get interested in Buddhism -- not really in a religious way, just because it was interesting --so I signed up as ojuzu. (Ojuzu are those prayer strings of 108 beads.) It's a good solid name, but I never quite liked the way it looked. I like it more now than I used to, actually.

Then I read The Darkness That Comes Before and its sequels (beautiful beautiful books, read them if you can) and fell in love. Well, 'love' isn't quite the right word. One of the characters just hit me so hard, because she was me. By which I mean that I could have been her.

Things didn't turn out too well for Esmenet in the end -- well, they didn't turn out too well for anyone. But her decisions could have been made by me, and it wasn't her fault the world she lived in sucked for women like her. So this name was intended partly as a warning to myself, partly as a reminder that yes, sometimes there can be awesome women in fantasy that I identify with who stay awesome, and partly to be a name that looked nice on the page. I don't remember what site I chose it for at first, but it's turned since then into something that is not really any of those three things: it's just my name. And I like it.