Voluntary Madness

Hi everyone! \insert the gif of old!Rose from titanic\ It has been a while. I missed conversations in comments. :) And mood icons!

Title: Virtues and Vices
Artist: keire_ke
Author: amethystrose001
X-Men Verse: XMFC AU
Characters/Pairings: Charles/Erik, Moira
Rating: gen
Warnings/Spoilers: none

Summary: They say love knows no bounds. Soulmates are meant to be... Do all these legends also apply to immortal creatures, bred to fight against each other? What happens when lovers are bound with duties and honor? 

The leader of the Elite Seven, the highest ranking Archangel, Charles, senses a powerful Gifted on Earth, and immediately sets down to recruit her to Heaven before 'they' get a hold of her. But what happens when this seemingly simple mission brings him face to face with his old-friend-turned-nemesis, Erik, the Fallen angel, the Prince of Hell?

In which, every body is hell-bent (literally) on reuniting the unrequited lovers, the pretty little girl is not what she seems to be, and with an unsuspecting human is where it all began.

 

Thank you for this, hun, it was superfun working on the cutesy angel bits. :D 

Onward to the fic!

Art also available on Tumblr.

( onward to the art! )

Stephenie Meyer is, I think, very talented when it comes to burying her admittedly excellent ideas in sub-par prose and non-existent plot. I say this, because she frequently takes the trouble to present an alternative take on the same events which end up being more exciting and evoke more genuine emotion than the entire story. Case in point the ending of Twilight, where the antagonist reminisces about this other vampire who was in love with a human girl and, when the antagonist became too much of a threat, turned her to keep her safe (newborn vampires being stronger than older ones). All of this took place in a psychiatric hospital, where she was treated for having premonitions. The Host has much the same problem: after an hour and a half of the heroine being helpful and more human than humans and special, we get to find out that the reason the antagonist is so devout to chasing her that she starts evolving past what her species determines she should be, is that her own host is still there, still fighting, and she wants to know how to defeat her. In about five minutes of screen time there is more drama than the protagonist(s) had in the entire movie.

I'm not going to get into the whole romance, because bleh, and the movie is very painful to watch, on account of extremely horrible dialogue. Think of any scene between Anakin and Padme in Star Wars, and then multiply it by, oh, seventeen. There is also the lazy ending and drawn-out everything, but even that could be made bearable if the dialogue wasn't written for people who were going to read the script, not see the movie.

Lastly, the movie deserves an award: they managed to find pants which don't flatter Diana Krueger.

I wonder if I can make a fusion of it. :D

You know the feeling when you get a cute, funny idea for a short story which just flows, and you type it all up and finish, copy and paste into a relevant box, hit send, and watch the kudos roll in, while you cheerfully move on and start to work on all your other project and exams?

Yeah, me neither. It began with this post right here. If you frequent XMFC-related Tumblrs you've probably seen it fifty-seven times. So I had the cute idea, I typed it up in its 1.2k glory, pasted it into Tumblr reblog box, hit send, then continued typing for no apparent reason. I'm now sitting on over 6k of a depressing Beauty and the Beast retelling in which almost everything that can go wrong goes wrong, but Erik is a sad, ineffectual stalker whose addiction everyone indulges out of fondness, and its innate hilarity.

It's also threatening to become an 18th century procedural, in which the murderer stalks the halls while the heroes attempt to escape with their lives, except the more I think about it the more sympathy I have for the murderer and his tragedy, and gaaargh, why is writing so hard?

Because the 1st of November is All Hallows and we have that day free, and the next moron who tries to raise the "Help, I'm Catholic and oppressed" card they are getting bitchslapped. Among the things we did was: Skyfall and Hamlet, the latter featuring plenty of our soaps' stars. A production made all the more hilarious because my reaction to the casting of Hamlet (before I learned who it was) was "please don't let it be this guy" and of course it was. He turned out to be great, and my dislike of him is fairly irrational (he's just everywhere these days). The other reason the production was hilarious was that Claudius was vulnerable and bimboistic, while Gertrude was cut-throat and unapologetic, so the whole thing could be greatly improved by the cast being swapped there. Polonius rocked and the ambiguously gay duo, AKA Rosencratz and Guildenstern were fabulous.

Now, regarding Skyfall: I thought the issue is simple: if you're a Bond fan, you might not enjoy it a whole lot. If, however, you are meh about Bond, you will think, as I did, it was the best Bond ever. Very beautiful in terms of scenery, adorable in terms of Q (Q-tie, you can see what they did there!) and Bond flirting back at Javier Bardem - priceless. ( Spoilers to follow. )
I genuinely enjoyed the movie, as I rarely enjoyed Bond movies. And now I must go to find the adaptation of Tempest in which Helen Mirren is Prospero.

Also, on the productivity front, we cleaned the apartment. It is superclean!