Onwards!

I've been traveling/dealing with heavy family stuff, so I've been posting my B5 reaction posts locked to avoid having to deal with moderating outside my flist. However, I never really meant to post my whole tour de show locked, so now that things have calmed down a bit, I went back and unlocked a bunch of them tonight.

Rules of engagement on these posts:

1. Please do not spoil me for future episodes, including hinting at future developments, characterwise, relationshipwise, castwise, or otherwise. If you aren't sure, please use rot13, the html details tag, or otherwise hide it.

2. If you want to debate with me about things you think I'm misinterpreting, please wait until I've seen the whole show. Part of the fun of watching someone liveblog a first time viewing is that you know more than they do - they don't have all the context you do, and they're still figuring out how to feel about things, especially on a show this twisty where events get recontextualized a lot.

Thank you!! Meanwhile I'm up to 4x17 and having an absolutely fantastic time. I don't think I've enjoyed a show this much in AGES.

(Using this icon mainly to entertain myself by imagining the absolute horror that would be Avon the message board moderator.)

Current state of Babylon 5 fic: hilarious

WIPs crashing and burning right and left. I'm having a great time.

Typical state of most fandoms: I watch/read enough of it to feel confident enough to write canon-compatible fic, I get inspired, I write fic, I post it. Normal.

Current extant B5 fic include:

• A fixit that I wrote about 7K of in seasons 1-2 based on vaguely osmosed Bad End spoilers, just because I had been thinking about it a lot and decided to write it down, then found out the actual (considerably different) details of the aforementioned Bad End and went "hmmm" and also "well, that still works, but I have to change that" and I currently have vaguely planned out like 50K of a fixit for a show which, I cannot overstate the importance of this critical fact, I do not know how it ends.

• Two different season 5 missing scenes - please note I have not seen season 5 yet - also based on very vaguely osmosed spoilers, which were attempts to write Londo/G'Kar porn in which, it turns out, no actual porn happens. (I inflicted them on sovay, who was very kind about not revealing any of the probably 1000 ways in which these will not work when I actually get there.) I should point out that I never write canon-blind fic and I rarely write porn and I don't know what is happening here.

• A vaguely noodled-on AU in which young fighter pilot Londo crashes on the continent formerly occupied by the Shadows on Narn and meets/is captured by/almost is killed by young freedom fighter G'Kar and Stuff Happens and then they meet again years later on B5. At the very least, canon is unlikely to completely joss that one. Probably.

The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England - Brandon Sanderson

A wild book post appears! I absolutely loved this book - far more than I expected to. For one thing, it wasn't what I was expecting at all.

This book does have exactly the vibe that I thought it would when I picked it up, which is a throwback to the 1980s-era comic fantasy of the Piers Anthony/Christopher Stasheff/Alan Dean Foster variety of "schmoe from our world ends up in fantasy world, muddles through with what little modern tech he has with him and can remember how to invent." But it goes off in a very different direction than what I was expecting, and it's a lot more emotionally serious, even though it's funny.

The protagonist wakes up in a field in a medieval fantasy world with no memories and nothing except the clothes he's wearing and some pages from a book which is the titular handbook to surviving medieval fantasy England. (The excerpts from it are scattered throughout the book as he finds more of them, and are hilarious. Especially the legal disclaimers.)

It's hard to talk about what makes the book good without further spoilers, so ...

( Relatively mild spoilers )

And now the big spoilers ...

( Major spoilers )

It was just a really fun book, briskly paced and delightfully funny in places and groundingly serious in others, about being your best self - once you figure out what that is - and learning to put other people ahead of yourself for once. I really enjoyed it.

B5 4x18-4x21

Almost done with season four! What!

( Spoilers through 'Rising Star' )

We stopped here, but tomorrow we are boldly forging onward into season five!