Snowflake Challenge: Day 9

[lebateleur]

Challenge #9

Rec Us Your Newest Thing. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Right now, everything old is my Newest Thing again. Maybe it's because chez lebateleur has recently emerged from the bout of seasonal illness we thought we'd successfully avoided, or the recent snowfall (the most accumulation since 2016 🥳), but my recent fandom consumption is very old favorite focused.

• Dragon Prince: We're only a few eps into season 4, but damn. This show has stakes. Its characters face real dilemmas, that sometimes pit allies against each other, and while there's a bona fide villain, there are also multiple antagonists who are doing truly shitty things for flawed but (from their POV) logical reasons. I love it.


• Good Omens: Yup, my brain is still very much latched on to S2. The novel is an old favorite, and I enjoyed S1, but S2 is the season that made me get transformatively fannish about it. Just, yes.


• Imperial Radch: I got Translation State when it published but held off reading until I had the imaginative capacity to really enjoy it. And it was GOOD. Like Megan Whalen Turner and Lev Grossman, Leckie is an author who can take minor characters from a complete(d) story and spin an entire new plot out of them that's every bit as good. I didn't want it to end and I couldn't put it down, and I finished it in under 2 days and then immediately started back at Ancillary Justice. I've read it enough that my stomach doesn't do swoops anymore while reading it, but Seivarden's character arc and the Breq-Seivarden dynamic will forever be My Catnip.


• Our Flag Means Death: We were only three episodes into S2 when we heard OFMD had been cancelled, and that it ended on a cliffhanger—disheartening to say the least. I was relieved to find it's more of an open ending versus cliffhanger, and although I'm still bummed that there won't be more I will happily rewatch both seasons and plunk away at various canon divergence ideas I've been entertaining over the last several years.

Should these inclinations continue, I strongly suspect I will reread The Captive Prince vol. 3 or Katherine Addison's The Grief of Stones next.

As far as earworms go, I have been all over Pádraic Keane, Páraic Mac Donnchadha, and Macdara Ó Faoláin's live album Beo since the first time I heard it. These guys get what the tunes are about (And as one Bandcamp commentator put it, that bass drone.) It's good, good stuff.

これで以上です。

Comments

[lebateleur]

Hurray! I'm glad to meet another post-S2 obsessive! When I dipped my toe into the waters, I was surprised at how many people really did not seem to care for the season; I thought it was really well done for a years-after-the-fact, sui generis sequel. I don't suppose you have any recs for good S2 fics or such? Either way, here is hoping your writing slump is short-lived 🍀

[mxcatmoon]

I think viewers who prefer a plot-heavy show (that more follows the novel as well) are going to like the first season better. Shippers like me are in heaven with S2.

I'm not sure what type of fic you're interested in - there's so much diversity in Good Omens fandom. I will say that my current post S2 favorite is From Foxclere (with love?) - Chapter 1 - Bohemia - Good Omens (TV) [Archive of Our Own]. It's long, but it had me on the edge of my seat and has relationship as well as plot, and a happy ending, although there's angst getting there!

Then there's tales from a bookshop - Chapter 1 - Rizandace - Good Omens (TV) [Archive of Our Own] which I bookmarked with the words, "Destined to be a fandom classic." It's shorter, just 5 chapters.

Thanks! I suppose I need to buckle down and get disciplined with my writing, but there's so much going on in my life right now, I find I don't have the spoons.