Snagged from geekgrrllurking

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For one week recommend/share the following:

Day one: a song
Day two: a picture
Day three: a book/ebook/fanfic
Day four: a site
Day five: a youtube clip
Day six: a quote
Day seven: whatever takes your fancy

Passion and Perfection

Unless I'm buying a new book from Amazon, or a new dvd from Play, or a new desk from Argos, then most of the websites that I visit online are related to television shows that I obsess over, or films that I am not so patiently waiting to see. In every show, and a few of the films, I'm always looking for the connection between two of the female characters. Whether it be maintext (Helen/Nikki or Rachel/Luce), subtext (Xena/Gabrielle or Idgie/Ruth), or animosity that could possibly be, deep down, read between the lines, true love (Sarah/Cameron or ... nope, can't think of a film pairing to follow that up with at the moment), I'm always looking for more than what I get to see onscreen and fan fiction is the best place to find it.

Whenever I get into a new fandom, and find a new pairing, my first port of call is P&P because there's a good chance that others have seen what I have. Archived in this multi-fandom website is fan fiction, fan art, fan videos and graphics for a plethora of shows and films and theatre; ranging from Star Trek: Voyager and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit to Fried Green Tomatoes and Loving Annabelle and Wicked even has it's own section. It's also great that shows like Birds of Prey, Women's Murder Club and Nikki and Nora, axed before they had a chance, are given new life by dedicated fans who have vision and loyalty.

The website has been around for a good few years now, providing some of the best that the femslash has to offer. Ralst, webmistress extraordianaire, has built a friendly, encouraging and creative community on an international scale that I hope she can look at everyday and be extremely proud of... even when the backlog looks overwhelming and she's struggling with real life and getting those last few hundred words of her latest story ready to go.

Now, let's go see what's new on the Passion Perfect lj community...
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I love going to Sci-Fi and Fantasy memorabilia fairs. With a fistful of cash and a shopping list of needed trading cards, desired DVDs, craved after comics, obsessed about paraphernalia and the occasional wanted autograph just watch me go.

Some of my favourite moments have included meeting Carrie Fisher and Karen Allen; Harrison Ford's leading ladies for Star Wars and Indiana Jones. Catching up with Deep Space Nine's Chase Masterson, who I'd met a few years before and who threw herself across the table to hug me when she saw me. And I always enjoy being harassed by Stormtroopers from the 501st Legion, I just LOVE Stormtroopers.

There's always the chance for me to expand my collection of novelty Monopoly sets; I have a Lord of The Rings set, an Indiana Jones set, a Pirates of The Caribbean and a Las Vegas set amongst others. At each event I like to get another of the replica Harry Potter wands; to date I have Harry's, Ron's, Hermione's and Sirius wands. And then there's the impulse purchases that once you get them home you can't remember why you wanted it in the first place; what exactly am I ever going to do with those Xena and Babylon 5 collectible card games... I have no idea how you play it!

So when we found out that it was Expo 16 at the weekend, with the promise of all things film, television and game goodness, Dean, Katie and I decided to head over to Docklands and have a look. We knew that there was going to be some Anime there but panels with True Blood, Merlin and Star Trek gave us some hope that it would be a 50/50 split. Er, no. It was probably closer to 60=Anime, 30=Gaming and 10=Sci-Fi.

The smattering of sci-fi/fantasy/television/film memorabilia wasn't really worth the entry price I'd paid. But determined to get something out of the day I got autograph tickets for Terry Farrell and Nicole DeBoer, the two actresses who played the character of Dax in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Terry was the reason Katie had got out of bed that morning, and I have adored Nicole since I met her back in 1999 (at the same event where I met Chase).

After their little Q&A session on stage they got down to the signing. Well Nicole was ready, Terry was still trying to get back from the stage, but that gave me a few more minutes with Nicole. As I walked towards her she offered me a smile:

ME: Does that smile mean you vaguely remember me?
NICOLE: I signed your stomach once, of course I remember you. In fact about 20 minutes ago I was asked what was the strangest thing I'd ever signed and I remembered that.

We chatted for a little bit longer, which unearthed the memory of singing karaoke together ('Spice Up Your Life'), and then Terry arrived at the table and it was time to move on.

This was Katie's moment, so other than saying 'Hi' I let Katie do the talking and after getting her personalised autograph they had a giggle moment together.

KATIE: Thank you.
TERRY: You're welcome.
KATIE: Thank you so much.
TERRY: You're welcome so much.

Those few moments made the early morning, the entry fee and the endless queues worth it.

However, I still had to go to the nearest HMV and buy 'Prison Break: The Complete Series' just so I had something to play with when I got home.

(Oh... and what's with the 'Free Hugz' placards that all the Anime kids were wearing?)

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"Do you watch Xena?" The stunning brunette asked me as we sat drinking cokes in th small hours of a miserable May Bank Holiday in a rundown hotel in Blackpool.

Xena? Xena? I racked my brains for whatever the hell she was talking about. "Oh you mean that X-ner (that's how I thought you pronounced it) thing. Wouldn't catch me watching that crap. Some overgrown bird in leather who thinks she can act."

I have never been more wrong in my life and I'm glad I was. It took two months, a spinal injury, a Saturday night at home with the remote control as my only friend that I discovered Xena: Warrior Princess, Gabrielle: The Bard of Poteidaia and subtext. And by that point I couldn't remember why I had resisted the show in the first place. I was hooked.

I've always been fascinated by mythology, and though some would say that what Xena and Hercules did to mythology was plain wrong, I chose to see it as just another interpretation of the stories I had read as a child... because most of those stories had more than one interpretation to begin with. There was also action, adventure, comedy, drama, romance; sometimes all of those elements were packed into the same episode and sometimes just a couple were woven together to push the story in one direction or another. There were musicals and westerns and horrors mixed with beautiful hong kong cinema,  the occasional courtroom drama and the odd homage to Hollywood. From one week to the next you were never quite sure what you were going to get or how it would be delivered.

Beyond the butt-kicking, sword-wielding and staff twirling was the wonderful relationship between Xena and Gabrielle which was set up beautifully from the start. Whilst literally trying to bury her past Xena stumbles upon slavers raiding a village; she hides and remains uninvolved until Gabielle stands up to the leader, offering herself in place of all the others. Unable to allow the brave girl to be beaten and taken prisoner Xena intervenes and rescues the villagers, not realising that she has just earned herself a sidekick and a lifelong friend. Through the six years of the series there was much debate over the nature of the friendship/relationship that existed between the two. Everybody wanted to know if Xena and Gabrielle were just friends or more than just friends. They were soul mates, they said so themselves many times and I think that means you can see their relationship as you want to see it. What did I see? What do you think?

I have never been as obsessed with a show as I was with Xena; and I have never found so many ways to express my love for a simple television series. From writing fan fiction to organising conventions to any number of things in between.

It began, as usual, with fan fiction. The season three finale saw Gabrielle 'Sacrifice' herself for Xena. By throwing herself and her evil daughter Hope into the fires of Dahak, Gabrielle stopped The Fates from taking Xena's life if she had killed Hope herself. The cliffhanger left the door wide open for every bard to put pen to paper and share their own tale of resolution and reunion with the rest of the Xenaverse. 'Without You' was the first fan fiction that I posted to the internet. I'm still very proud of it, I still have all the emails that readers sent to me and I still have the review that Lunacy gave it:

WITHOUT YOU by Masque
A very different type of story set immediately after the events of the episode SACRIFICE II which finds Xena devastated by the loss of her partner while her friends and family desperately try to offer support. Meanwhile, in a very different place, a bard struggles to understand what has happened to her and what is about to happen as Olympus itself gets ready to pass judgment on the bard of Poteidaia - one god is given a choice she cannot refuse - and another is confronted with a truth he cannot deny. Masque weaves a very solid story here with some rather unusual but some surprisingly effective characterizations. DO NOT MISS!

Whilst we eagerly awaited the arrival of season four, myself and good friend Dean Le Gassicke came up with a little project that we called By The Gods. Remember those days before broadband and torrents when if you wanted brand spanking new episodes of your favourite television series you had to have a friend in the States who would tape it and mail it to you. When you would pack as many of your friends into your pokey little lounge, to sit around your pokey little television set and watch a slightly grainy copy of the latest episode of the previously mentioned favourite television show. What if your lounge could comfortably seat well over 100 people, who could watch direct from satelite recordings on a 5 foot screen, where the bar was always open and everybody knows your name... okay, maybe not everybody!

Welcome to By The Gods. On 11th October 1998 we opened the doors of Pages Bar to over 100 fans of Xena and Hercules. It was a place where fans could get together and get to know one another, where they could watch unaired and uncut episodes and get totally wasted while they were doing it.

We wanted to have that little something extra when you walked through the doors, something to put you in the mood, or just make you do a double take... look-alikes. Karen Parr, the 'stunning brunette' from the first paragraph, was nearly six foot tall with long dark hair, sharp blue eyes, high cheek bones and looked really good in leather; she'd been working at signings and conventions for a while and was only too happy to put in an appearance as the Warrior Princess. And as she was my girlfriend it seemed only fair that I dye my hair blonde and don a BGSB (bilious green sports bra) and take up the mantle of Gabrielle. Along for the ride was Kristin Jones as a menacing Callisto, Kirsty Burge as the annoyingly sweet Amarice, Andy Sears as the cheeky Iolaus and Dario Persechino as the dashing Autolycus.

But still we wanted something more that would set us apart from the other gatherings, something you could only get if you came to our events. That something was music videos. I'd attempted to make music videos twice before, and twice I had failed. But this time I would succeed, this time I had an audience of 100+ waiting to watch them. It took me four weeks but I finally finished my first music video and in January 1999 'Total Eclipse of The Heart' debuted at our third By The Gods evening.

We also hosted a sort of launch party for the Official Xena: Warrior Princess Magazine. I even wrote a few articles for them; The Family Way (a feature about Xena's season five pregnancy) and King Con (a review of the Creation convention in 2000) and provided the episode information for two essays entitled Necrology 101 and Eschatology 101.

And somewhere in the middle of all that we managed to organise a convention. Olympiad 2000 was only small, but it was a big deal to Dean and I. Sometimes when I'm at other Xena events I ocassionally hear people mention it; that they had a good time, that they enjoyed meeting Claire Stansfield and Danielle Cormack, that they appreciated the effort we had gone to.

I can smile at that and I can say 'I did that, I did all of that.'
...

Some of my favourites:

Fan Fiction
~Xena and Gabrielle~
Chiaroscuro: www.ausxip.com/fanfiction/c/chiaroscuro1.html
Awakenings: www.ausxip.com/fanfiction/a/awakenings.html
A Queen's Sacrifice: www.ausxip.com/fanfiction/a/awakenings.html
~Mel and Janice~
All The Colours of The World: www.ausxip.com/fanfiction/a/allthecolours.html
The Pappas Journals: www.ausxip.com/fanfic/pappas.html, www.ausxip.com/fanfiction/p/pappas1.html
~The Conqueror and The Scribe~
Resistance: www.altfic.com/subtextfic/Xena/della/resistance1.htm
Aftermath, The Tree Of Life: www.ausxip.com/fanfiction/a/aftermath-thetree1.html
~Uber~
Lucifer Rising: www.ausxip.com/fanfiction/l/lucifer.html
Accidental Love: www.blmiller.net/accidental/al1.html
Exposure: ausxip.com/exposure/index.html

Music Videos
Bring Me To Life: www.youtube.com/watch
Wherever You Will Go: www.youtube.com/watch
...

Some of my own:

Fan Fiction
Without You: www.masqueweb.net/wy_pro.htm
Another Chance: www.masqueweb.net/ac_01.htm

Music Videos
Circle In The Sand: www.youtube.com/watch
Colour Blind: www.youtube.com/watch
I'm With You: www.youtube.com/watch
Bitch: www.youtube.com/watch
Let Me Entertain You: www.youtube.com/watch
Friends and Foes: www.youtube.com/watch
...

I resisted this series for as long as I could. I was a staunch Star Trek fan, and Babylon 5 was 'the other show'; but gradually it was infiltrating the group I socialised with at Pages. One by one we all fell under the charm of it's flawed characters, the strength of the intricate storylines and the fact that as a portrayal of the future of humanity it was probably closer to the truth than anything that had come before. In 250 years humans will still be fundamentally the same as we are today, we won't magically have solved all of our problems or made ourselves a better species. We'll just have a bigger sand box.

You couldn't dive in at the halfway stage, you had to start at the beginning. There was knowledge you had to pick up as you went along; innocuous facts, throwaway lines and subtle hints were cleverly weaved into the tapestry of the story and any one of them could be what blew the plot wide open or explained everything. Things weren't neatly tied up over the course of a 42 minute episode leaving the fans discussing exactly what it was that whoever it was had said would lead to wherever it led. If you know what I mean, and very often none of us did.

"I think I loved Talia." That one sentence was all it took; one sentence and I wanted more.

Let me explain. About nine months earlier I'd 'come out' as gay to my family, I think most of my friends already knew. And though Star Trek: The Next Generation had explained Beverly Crushers denial of her Trill lover in the body of a female as her inability to keep up with such drastic changes they were, to my mind, sweeping it under the carpet. Then Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had pushed it a little farther; two Trill's, whose symbionts had once been married, now found themselves in the bodies of two females. So it was the symbionts who were in love allowing them to once again quite neatly side step the issue of homosexuality. I was seventeen at the time, I gratefully took what I could and watched the episodes continuously.

But when Susan Ivanova confessed her secret, in a breathy whisper, there was no hiding the fact that this was a woman who was in love with another woman. I wanted to know who Talia was. I needed to know why her name made Susan so sad. Where had it started? How had it ended?

Beg. Steal. Borrow. I got the episodes and I watched the relationship unfold from the first moments of hostility, through a grudging respect, to a tentative friendship and finally the infamous scene of Talia turning over in bed and reaching out for an absent Susan. There was never a kiss, there was never an embrace, they barely ever touched each other; everything in this relationship was implied by the eyes. Whether they were checking each other out, staring each other down or letting their gazes drop to the others lips it was all there. This was the television tease at it's best; made all the better because the sexual relationship between the two was quite openly talked about by both Claudia Christian (Susan Ivanova) and Andrea Thompson (Talia Winters) and confirmed by series creator/producer j. michael straczynski.

The show lost more than Talia Winters when Andrea Thompson decided to leave the series. Talia was about to turn her back on the Psi Corps after learning the lengths they would go to and the depths they would sink to in order to make a better telepath. Given a gift by rogue telepath Jason Ironheart she had developed into a stable telekinetic, showed an ability to block more powerful telepaths from her thoughts, had attracted the interest of the Vorlons to be a major player in the Shadow War and was probably to be a key figure in the anticipated telepath war. Alas, the second season episode 'Divided Loyalties' revealed Talia to be a Psi Corps sleeper agent, implanted with an alternate personality who was gathering intelligence on the command staff of Babylon 5. When triggered by a telepathic code word the Talia we had grown to love was no more and in her place stood a cruel and callous doppleganger. It is interesting to note that despite the change in personality she still appeared to hold a strong, albeit quite predatory, attraction for Susan. With her cover blown Evil Talia was promptly dispatched back to Earth where she was either debriefed or dissected, the show was never really definitive about her fate.

Naturally the legions of Susan/Talia fans turned to the realms of fan fiction to rectify their loss, myself included... at least I tried to. I had big plans for an intense confrontation between Susan and Talia resulting in the shattering of the alternate personality but almost cost Talia her own mind. This was followed by a rogue faction of telepaths coming to the rescue, abducting Susan and stealing the data crystal with Talia's original personality imprinted upon it in a desperate bid to resurrect the Talia that represents their future. Then, finally, Talia's return to Babylon 5, her struggle to regain the trust of the command staff and prove herself to be the woman that Susan fell in love with. And yes, my Mary Sue character was the one who rescued Talia, abducted Susan and figured out how to get the contents of a data crystal back into the head of a telepath. (Her name was Quinn, she'd known Talia since she was a child, she'd been experimented on by Psi Corps, and apparently liked to eat green crayons when she was little... so Talia recalls.)

Most of those ideas never made it onto paper, they have stayed firmly locked away in my head. Instead I found another creative outlet to pay tribute to my first femslash pairing... music videos. On my first attempt I laid about 30 seconds of audio/video to tape and got bored with my lack of progress. In 2006 I revisted the series and remembered just how much I had loved Susan and Talia and found the inspiration I needed to make that elusive music video. Ten years after I first thought of the idea I finally finished it: 'When Love and Hate Collide'... it seemed appropriate.

...

And here's a few of my favourites:

Music Videos
Total Eclipse of The Heart: www.youtube.com/watch
Five Years: www.youtube.com/watch
When Love And Hate Collide: www.youtube.com/watch

Susan/Talia Fan Fiction
Gia Cogli Angeli, Ivanova?: www.altfic.com/subtextfic/Babylon5/penumbra/angeli1.htm
Oblique: www.altfic.com/subtextfic/Babylon5/penumbra/oblique1.htm
Envoi: www.altfic.com/subtextfic/Babylon5/fewthistle/envoi.htm

...
 

Some of my favourite Star Trek music videos from back in the day:

Bohemian Rhapsody: www.youtube.com/watch
I Will Survive: www.youtube.com/watch
Robin Hood: www.youtube.com/watch

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