Falling Stars

I'm a sucker for secret novelist stories. (If you have any recs, let me know!) And I think it's no coincidence that all these secret stories, in the end, are love stories.

Title: Turn The Page
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Supernatural
Summary: Dean gets a new hobby after Sam leaves for Stanford.

Title: Tour de Force
Author: thehoyden
Fandom: Hockey RPF
Summary: "Write what you know" was good enough advice for Jo March, so it's good enough for Patrick Kane.

Title: Gonna Write a Classic
Author: jezziejay
Fandom: Teen Wolf
Summary: The AU where Stiles writes porn to help him through college and Derek becomes his muse.

More recs!

Fic recs

Enigma by Yahtzee
This is perhaps the fix-it to end all fix-its. Erik gets to travel back in time - to before his mother and father die. And this time he has all his powers. And he can change *everything*. Breathtaking in its scope and vision, and full of so many wonderful moments. It made me cry.

An Earlier Heaven by Regann
I never imagined that someday I would be keenly checking for updates in a soapy mpreg melodrama, but this was unbelievably addictive. After Cuba, Charles finds himself with child, and bravely resolves to raise it on his own, without getting Erik involved. Of course, it's not that easy...

Guilty by Association by Regann
An AU where Erik is a police detective investigating a murder case, and Charles is an investigative journalist researching the story. When their paths cross, Erik mistakes Charles for a hooker, and Charles decides not to correct his assumption. Cue misunderstandings, drama, angst, and hijinks. The investigative journalism aspects of this story are influenced by the British drama State of Play. (Bill Nighy as Brian Xavier!)

Still Life with Cookies by stlkrchck
An AU where Erik is an art student and Charles is a still life model. Who bakes cookies in order to woo him. Sweet and cute.

Innervation by fourfreedoms
Mansionfic. Charles can dance ballet and it is beautiful.

Game of the century by aesc
Charles pretends to like chess to please Erik. Which can only end well, of course.

Six months since the movie came out? Check. Still obsessed? Check.

Meta recs

The Autobiography of Magneto X by Erik Lensherr by Meghan O’Keefe
"I'll never forget the night when Charles begged me to join his little team. I was walking away from the CIA building. My body was enveloped in the humid night air and I could smell lilacs start to bloom. A tinny voice rang out from behind me, 'Erik! Stay! Wait! Please stay! Don't leave me alone! I need help! You're so powerful! You're so handsome! You're so Eastern European! Hold me!' Of course, Charles will try to say that I was the lonely one, but he's the one who was desperate to invite a group of scamps to live in his mansion. Mansions are large, by definition, and unless mansions are filled with people, they are filled with loneliness. I am never lonely. I am like a panda. I don’t hang around with other pandas because I like the company of pandas. I hang around with them because I'm forced to for the survival of my species." MAGNETO IS AN AWESOME BLOGGER.

X-Men: First Class asofterworld Remixes by xrai_namere
Images from the movie, remixed with asofterworld captions. Brilliant how well they fit.

Fic recs

The Winter of Banked Fires by Yahtzee
This is an epic of a story. Set after X-Men 3, it's a fix-it for the entire series of X-Men movies, with great character stuff for Charles, Erik, Marie, Logan, Hank, and Mystique.

Travel Advisory by Penknife
During the later movies, Erik and Charles find themselves stranded at the same airport in a blizzard. Verbal fencing and glimmers of camaraderie ensue.

your head caught in a waking dream by addandsubtract
An AU in which Charles is sent to a mental institution as a child, and by the time Raven breaks him out, with Eric's help, he's irreparably damaged. This story made my heart go all achey every few paragraphs. Absolutely beautiful.

You Know My Name by dvs
James Bond AU. According to the author: "This story was born from a single and incredibly daft idea. Wouldn't it be funny if Erik was Bond and Charles was a tarty little contact with a fondness for rude names?" Actually more serious and dramatic than it sounds: spies with powers trapped behind the lines of a cold war.

Triangles by zombieboyband
Eric, dealing with repressed longing and internalised homophobia and the nightmare memory of the camps, and Charles, ready to give whatever he can. Partly grim, partly exquisite, all compelling.

The welfare of a child by oddegg
Charles is transformed into a child. Everyone is impressed at how self-sufficient and non-complaining a kid he is. Sean is the only one who realises that something is wrong with that.

The Law of the Universe by kontrapunkto
Written for the prompt: "Erik is an electron and Charles is a proton, but because Charles attracts other electrons, Erik fights them off with his magnetic powers." I love fandom.

andraste writes:

"In the late nineties when I got online, there was no Xavier/Magneto fic on the entire internet. I know, because I looked really, really hard. Now I watch this trailer and I see a juggernaut of a pairing that is about to crash down on fandom. I wish I had a time machine and could go tell my seventeen-year-old self that some day she would get all the pr0n she could read *g*."

This set of recs is dedicated to old school fandom.

Meta recs

Erik and Charles in comics canon by ishtar79
"Watching First Class only reminded me of Their Very Epic Love in the comic books, and made me want to share some evidence of it for movie fans who are not currently up to going through decades of comics backstory to get to the good stuff." A five part picspam thesis.

Enemies: A Love Story by alara_r
A Magneto/Xavier ship manifesto, covering five different canons, including the comicverse, the movieverse, and the animationverse.

X-Men: The original animated series by yahtzee63
A rediscovery of the slashiness of the animated series, complete with quiz.

Fic recs

Close Enemies by Andraste
In X-Men: The Animated Series, Charles and Erik spend Season Two running around the prehistoric Savage Land together, saving each other, fighting dinosaurs, and having sex. Well, okay, they didn't have sex in the series. (On screen, anyway.) But they do in this story.

Domestic Bliss by Andraste
In the X-Men comic book series Excalibur, Charles and Erik work together to rebuild the destroyed mutant nation of Genosha, and eat dinner together on the balcony while watching the sunset. (THIS IS CANON.) In this story, they cook pasta and discuss philosophy, and my heart melts a little.

I am not sure how this has happened. I am a long time X-Men fan. I enjoyed this movie. It turned out better than I had expected. This does not explain why I have spent the past few weeks burning through the archives reading every Charles/Erik fic there is.

Though it seems like I am far from the only one struck by sudden obsession. Even E! Online, in the article Magneto and Professor X Had Sex at the Movies This Summer - Did You See It?, notes that:

It's pretty clear that the primary story arc of the summer blockbuster is how much Erik and Charles are madly in love, and how it all goes horribly wrong due to a combination of external forces and internal character flaws.

and:

No, seriously, "playing chess" is obviously PG-13 movie code for "And then Magneto and Professor X did it... again."

Also, I love that "bromance world tour" and "beach divorce" have become part of the fandom vocabulary. Not to mention "satellite of love".

Vid rec

Rolling in the Deep by arefadedaway
I have rewatched this vid a ridiculous number of times. The vidder notes that she considered naming it "ALL THE FEELINGS", and it totally *is*. It sums up everything about Charles and Erik and the decades of their relationship, and it makes me want to point at it and say, "THIS. THIS." It's so epic it's breathtaking, and so personal it's heartbreaking, and the line "we could have had it all" is just, yes. That *is* their epic doomed love story. Which is tragic enough when you just watch First Class, but this vid goes on into the future and takes it to the end of the line. Oh, my heart.

Fic recs

From the waters and the wild by linaerys
They don't even make it off the boat before it happens. The electricity between them is just. Wow.

Not Half As Blinding by keire_ke
An AU where Charles dies, and comes back to life, and there is *angst*, because of all the months that Erik thought that Charles was dead, and that he was responsible, and did I mention the *angst*?

Charm Offensive by Andraste
The summary says it best: "Charles starts seducing Erik's recruits away from him. Literally." Hilariously funny.

The Emperor's New Clothes by ignipes
Another one where the summary says it all: "It's remarkably difficult to entice new soldiers to their just and righteous cause of mutant supremacy when the only thing the potential recruits can think throughout the course of the conversation is, 'I'm just not sure I can follow somebody who wears a silly cape - oh, shit, I hope the telepath didn't hear that.'" The Brotherhood of Mutants tries to fix Erik's sartorial choices.

First Class Facebook by casey_sms
Another great summary: "In which Magneto storms Facebook HQ and holds Mark hostage because he wants Charles's Facebook account details." My favorite line: "I can make him friend you but it would defeat the purpose of the whole idea since it's not being his friend you want but him wanting to be your friend." Aww.

But The Cat Came Back by twelve_pastels
The one where Charles is turned into a cat, and Erik takes in this stray without realising. Crossover with Sherlock.

Phoenix Wright fic rec:

Legally Blind by Alorian

Court battle! Surprising revelations! Slight slashiness. No spoilers.

Smallville vid rec:

Bad Romance by sisabet

Clark! Lex! Doomed love! Destined archrivalry! It's been years since I've watched Smallville, but oh, once it was my big massive fandom of joy. This vid is everything I loved about the show and everything I wished it could be, like watching futurefic come to life. And the incorporation of material from the comic and cartoon and movie *works*, amazingly, and makes it feel so much more epic. Because it is.

I was going to post this on Hikago Day - the 5th of May, a significant day in the Hikaru no Go universe - but I lost that post. So here we go again: my Hikaru no Go fic recs, five categories of five faves each.

Many of these stories are set after the series ends and contain spoilers. Some also feature *cough* extrapolation of canonical relationships. A few may not be worksafe. Please note the warnings within each individual story.

( Let's go! )

One of the very first entries I posted in this LJ, at the start of the year, was about mollyringwraith's condensed parody version of The Two Towers movie.

Now she's done the same for The Return of the King movie.

Way, way cool.

And you know that insanely long thread on the Straight Dope Message Board that I mentioned in the same post - the one titled If LotR Had Been Written By Someone Else!?

It's still bloody going.

Entslash. I kid you not. Fairly well-written Entslash at that.

Okaaay, I think I'm going to hell for that one.