Arctic Light

This month's round at collarcorner (White Collar gen prompt community) is the return of the lightning round, i.e. short prompts and short fills (though of course fills can also be long; art and other non-fic fills are entirely welcome). This was popular last year, so it's back for a second year! We are also coming up on our 50th round, so there's a discussion post for how to celebrate. At this point it looks like a fic exchange is the main idea that's been suggested.

There is also an important poll I just put up: A question about the future of the community. I'm asking for input on whether the comm should stay on LJ, move to DW, or mirror between the two. If you don't have an LJ account, you can leave your opinion in the comments.

One thing I'd be interested in finding out is whether the community might pick up new members on DW, to offset the members it's sure to lose if it moves. Right now the community is active enough to keep going (actually, it's very impressively active for a never-terribly-large gen community in a small fandom for a show that went off the air two years ago; White Collar fandom seems to have a lot of staying power) but it can't afford to lose very many people and still be large enough to support itself, and it seems likely we'll lose people no matter what we do, so I'm trying to think of ways to offset that.

The Fall Fest at collarcorner (patterned after Fandom Stocking) is done and all the gifts are revealed! You can check it out at the LJ community or the AO3 community (note: the AO3 collection doesn't have everything; most of the shorter ficlets, art, etc are at the LJ community posts only).

I wrote the following gifts:

Sweet Escape - Elizabeth takes over Neal's bakery after his "death."

Wings So Bright - Neal wingfic, also for my h/c bingo "wings" square. Neal's favorite memory from his early childhood was going flying with his mother; he didn't yet know that no one else could see her wings.

Happy Paws - Having found out that the FBI agent chasing him has a puppy, Neal can't resist trying to make friends with it.

Three Restaurants - Three times Sara and Peter had lunch or dinner together, from pre- to post-series.

Harvest Moon - Alex character study.

Untitled Peter & Neal ficlet for the prompt "near miss."


And I also have some great stuff in my treat basket - art, fics, a fic cover and more!

This month's theme at collarcorner is Stranded. If you're still into White Collar, go leave some prompts and help us find new and interesting ways to strand Peter and Neal, et al. :D

Also, this week is prompt amnesty at starwarsflashmeme - all posted prompts are available for writing. This will continue for another week; the amnesty period ends on March 12.

And back to Agent Carter: I posted some thoughts on Thompson and Sousa on Tumblr (spoilery for season two). I'm feeling lazy about cross-posting, but feel free to leave comments here if you have thoughts, since Tumblr is what it is. Also, my Miracle & Wonder fanvid is now posted on tumblr if you are interested in liking or reblogging.

(It is weird having this many fandoms going at once. Agent Carter is definitely where my mind is right now, but for so many years I really would only have those fan feelings for one thing at a time; I would pick up a new fandom and put the old one down. These days, I seem to have stopped putting them down. Help!)

Now back to inking Kismet pages ...

This month's commentfic prompt round is up at collarcorner: No theme this month; anything goes. I am planning to be a bit more involved this month, and try to write a few things! So I want some nice prompts to write! HINT HINT. :D I'm also allowing one repeat prompt per person this month, if you have a nice one from a past round that no one has picked up yet.

(Also, I DID get my Due South DVDs from my mom, so there may be rewatching in my future!)

... during my recent anchorite periods of not socializing on the Internet ...

.... is how remarkably, hilariously bitter I still am about the way White Collar ended.

( Spoilers for the end of the series; also cut so you don't have to listen to me whining about this anymore )

And so White Collar is officially over. Last episode. No more.

I figured that, since a couple people on my flist have mentioned they were on the fence about watching the last season and wanted to know what I thought of the finale, I'd give you a nonspoilery reaction under a cut, and then do the spoilery, more in-depth discussion under another cut. So, emotional reaction with no direct spoilers under the first cut, then all the spoilers under the second one.

( The non-spoilery emotional reaction )

( The spoilery reaction )

This poll is SUPER SPOILERY for the aired episodes of season six (no future spoilers), so it's under a cut!

( Pointless season six White Collar poll )

Just recently I posted a fairly extensive Peter Burke meta post to Tumblr, in response to someone else's post. aragarna suggested I should repost it here, which is a good idea. :D (I had actually kinda meant to do that while I was writing it, but then got distracted and forgot.)

The original post by markcampbells is Why Peter Burke’s Endgame Was Never Going to be Section Chief (extensive season five spoilers). You should definitely read it -- lots of good insight into Peter's decision-making process and how he likely felt about the ASAC job! I was particularly intrigued by this:

Peter was offered ASAC without even being told beforehand he was in consideration, and with no option to turn it or the pending promotion to Section Chief down. This is a job he specifically said in 4x15 he didn’t want, but he wasn’t really given a choice in it in 5x01. The Section Chief offer was legitimately thrust upon him with that DC brochure in the folder. It was impressed upon him it would be career suicide to say no. I have to fault the writers on one thing—the complete lack of an explanation of what happened to Calloway or if Hughes was ever reoffered the job after his ousting was just stupid—but on the other hand, Peter being the ASAC immediately following Hughes’ ousting and Calloway’s abusing the position made sense. He hates corruption more than anything and probably just wanted to fix what was broken.

I had never really thought about the suddenness of the timing and the fact that it hit him at a time when he really wasn't in a position to make an informed, considered decision. (I also think, and thought at the time, that a craving for stability is a big part of why he took the job; it must have seemed to him that it would be a less risky position than being a field agent, and I think El said later in the season that she'd expected it would be more 9-to-5 without the late nights and physical risks. Peter must have thought so too.)

Anyway, I went on to say:

( Cut for length, season five spoilers, and to spare the non-White Collar people my natterings )

... Thoughts?

One of the reasons why I like White Collar is because it usually plays fair on the cons. Like with murder mysteries, one of my criteria for a good con/heist story is that all the clues are there on the screen, even if the viewer's eye is cleverly misdirected away from them so that you don't notice them except in retrospect.

( Spoilers for 5x13 )

The only question I didn't get to in the December posting meme (I think) was aragarna, who asked, What's special about White Collar?

... which is not entirely an easy question to answer. I don't know why, exactly, I've latched onto this show so hard. There are better shows out there; there are certainly shows whose plots make more sense. To some extent it's the same indescribable something that makes a person either fall in love with a book, or give up halfway through -- some stories and some characters you just like, and some you don't.

The closest I can come to pinning down the appeal of White Collar to me is that it gives me relationship drama without the relationships being mostly romance-focused.

I love relationship drama. I eat it up with a spoon. People fighting and angsting over their fights and making up; people learning and growing and evolving their relationships over time; people discovering a fondness for someone they never looked at twice, or having longtime relationships blow up in their face. Basically I just like relationship drama a lot. :D

But problem #1 is, I'm not especially fond of romance -- or I guess I should say, I'm not fond of the romance story, the one that's told in the vast majority of romance-focused media. (Boy meets girl; boy and girl fight; boy and girl struggle with their feelings for 60 episodes or so; boy and girl cave and admit they are Now Officially Together; the end.) There are MANY MANY other romantic stories that can be told, and I like many of them, but The Official Romance Story is boring to me, and even more, I hate the way that romance has a tendency to take over the other relationships on the show, either by sidelining them completely or by converting them into romances as well, because Romance Is The Most Important Thing and it's the story most writers want to tell.

(Which isn't bad, necessarily. It's just not for me.)

And problem #2 is that I tend to get bored and annoyed when relationship drama is the entire focus of the show. I want relationship drama ON A SPACESHIP or people having relationship drama WHILE FIGHTING CRIME!

And the thing about White Collar is that it's relationship-drama-focused in exactly the same way as most romances -- in the sense that it's all about the relationship between these two people, it's always going to be about them, and no matter how many times they break up, there is probably going to be a happy ending, after serving up bucketloads of angst first -- but it's not a boy-meets-girl romance.

And let me tell you, as someone who seeks out those kinds of stories ... that's RARE! It's not like there isn't some of it around, but mostly you get a bait-and-switch, in which the first few episodes serve up a variety of interesting, non-traditionally-romantic relationships, but ultimately it ends up being about the romance after all, and everything else tends to get shuffled out of the spotlight, ends badly, or never really gets followed up on. (LOST, Fringe, I'm looking at you.) Or else you have a lot of shows in which the central relationship(s) are more or less static (see: most buddy cop shows -- and frequently that is served up with a side order of misogyny and/or homophobia).

But at the same time, White Collar isn't myopically focused on the central relationship; it's an ensemble, and the ensemble get lots of screen time, and lots of storylines and relationship focus too. There are some romances -- which I mostly enjoy -- and there's also a fascinating constellation of very different relationships, most of which get at least some screen time on a regular basis, all of which is taking place against a backdrop of action-focused FBI/con artist heist hijinks.

So basically: White Collar gives me LOADS of relationship drama, in a show that is also charming and adorable and generally pretty respectful with the treatment of its female characters. It's not going to win any awards and it's not ~great art~, but it's charming and sweet and funny and well put together, and probably heading for a happy ending after serving up enough angst along the way to keep the sweetness from being too cloying. It's static enough that I don't expect any major shakeups (killing off half the cast, say) but it's changeable enough that things do evolve over time and the characters have ended up in a fairly different place than they started out.

Basically this show has absolutely nailed my ideal-TV-comfort-food formula.