Brief end-of-year notes

The power is back as of Wednesday night! Thank you to everyone for the well-wishes and support. <3 I have mostly just been relaxing for the last couple of days and relishing light, heat, and unlimited use of appliances.

2021 sure was a year, wasn't it? I already posted my publication roundup and plans (at least the portion of them that I make public; I have a much more detailed writing to-do list that constantly changes on the fly). 2021 was otherwise notable for me skipping through a few different fandoms before falling hard for Falcon & Winter Soldier, and developing possibly the first hardcore celebrity crush of my adult married life. This has been tremendous fun. Someday I'll catch up on the rest of the MCU I haven't gotten around to yet, but I'm happy staying here for the time being. I did some exchanges and posted my annual New Year's story (as well a lot of prompt-based fic and iddy h/c, only some of which I've been crossposting here, but it's all on my AO3 page). I'll do a roundup of the shorter promptfic soon.

It hasn't been a bad year for me personally, aside from some weird and partly self-inflicted family drama, but I know it's really sucked for a lot of people. I hope 2022 will be better for everyone. ♥

Joyeux Noël (2005)

I'll round out 2021 with a short little write-up of this sweet, occasionally funny, and often heartbreaking WWI movie - philomytha, you might want to add this to your WWI watch list, because it's very good! I watched it as part of my Watch All The Daniel Brühl Things project, but it's entirely worth watching for reasons that have nothing to do with Daniel Brühl (though he is excellent in it).

Joyeux Noël is a fictionalized retelling of the Christmas Truce of 1914. The movie follows several different characters representing three different nationalities (Scottish, French, and German). Brühl plays the Jewish-German lieutenant in charge of the German side at this particular section of the war front, and is characteristically adorable. The other primary characters are a Scottish soldier who enlisted to join his brother and then lost him to the war, writing letters home to his mother that pretend they're both still alive; a chaplain who followed his parishioners to the front; a French lieutenant deeply worried about his pregnant wife, who is in the German-occupied part of France; and a pair of separated German lovers, a drafted opera singer and his girlfriend.

The movie is brutally, unrepentantly anti-war, as it should be. It opens and closes with wartime propaganda that the other side is Just Not Like Us, while the central core of the movie is pointing out that the primary thing dividing them is an arbitrary front and their superiors' orders to kill each other. It's not an ideological war; it's a war being fought over political issues that none of these characters have anything to do with. And when that barrier is temporarily removed, they cautiously and then more genuinely get along fine, and even start to forge tentative friendships, until the war comes crashing back down on them.

Totally requesting this for Chocolate Box, because I desperately crave postwar fic that gives them all the happy ending they deserve.