thefourthvine | 200: A Single Sentence'll Sell You

The One in Which We Learn That You Can't Give the Dead Too Much Artistic License. Especially If the Dead Person's Name Is Bob Fraser. Pornography, by

china_shop. Due South, Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski.

Benton Fraser has porn. I just want to repeat that, because I think it's a brilliant concept that deserves far more attention than it is currently getting: Benton Fraser has porn. Yes, this story is just as good as it sounds like it must be.

But there is a down side to it, and it is this: after reading it, I could not stop imagining the porn collections of other fannish favorites. Rodney McKay likely has roughly a terabyte of porn, but really only uses three short clips and one still photo. He's just completist. Jim Kirk (Reboot) also has the terabyte of porn, but he's actually working his way through it - he jerks off to something new every time. It's all hot if you look at it the right way, you know? Batman's porn does not bear contemplation and is certainly not something I would ever want to see, so I am pleased and comforted to know that it is hidden somewhere no one will ever find it, and also it is designed to self-destruct if anyone besides Batman touches it. Clark Kent likes the underwear catalogs. He's never been able to bring himself to get turned on by anything more explicit; he's always afraid his mother will walk in. (Lex Luthor's porn, it goes without saying, is his extensive Clark Kent memorabilia collection.) Methos's porn is called his memory. Jack Harkness's porn is called everything in the world, because everything is hot. How can you put a plug in an outlet and not get turned on? And laundry! All those dirty clothes, shirts and pants and trousers all touching, writhing together: clearly the hottest thing ever.

Anyway. Obviously, if Fraser has porn, Kowalski has an interest. (And Thatcher has an issue. Turnbull has an issue, too, but it's with a faulty oven; I'm not entirely sure I want to contemplate Turnbull and porn. It's either going to be men dressed up like the Queen or - you know what, seriously, let's not go there.)

The One in Which We Learn That All Vulcans, Male and Female, Can Breastfeed, Which Is an Innovation I Support So Completely I Am Prepared to Do Illegal Genetic Experimentation to Make It Happen. A Beginner's Guide to Vulcan Sexual Practice, by

thingswithwings. Star Trek Reboot, Jim Kirk/Spock.

There's a whole history of how this story came to be, but I'm not going to go into it here, because you don't really need to know it. You just need to know that this story is one of the more awesome explorations of kink I have ever read. The message I take away from it is: there's nothing either kinky or vanilla, but thinking makes it so. And when Jim Kirk (Reboot) is doing the thinking, you know it's going to come out (hee!) kinky, even if he has to oppose millennia of Vulcan culture to do it.

And can I just say that I love the idea of writing endless commentaries on commentaries on a list of Things Good Vulcans Don't Do? That's the concept here, and it made me want to take it to the logical conclusion, and imagine the lecture, um, circles (pits?) on Vulcan, with horrified thirteen-year-olds who are already traumatized from learning about Pon Farr being forced to present papers on and debate about things like the No Breathplay rule.

That's actually probably where the rumor that Vulcans only do it once every seven years comes from. It has nothing to do with Pon Farr, it's just, it takes the first fifty years or so of their mature lives to get over the trauma of having had to learn all the sex rules. (Because I've been watching TOS, and it's obvious to me that Spock has sex more often than One Upon a Pon Farr. He's married to Kirk! Kirk likes the sex! QED! And, no, I won't listen to counterarguments: the crazy shippiness knows no logic.)

The One in Which Morgana Punches Arthur. I Suggest Re-Reading That Part a Lot. It Never Fails to Cheer Me Up. Reciprocation, by

astolat. Merlin, Arthur Pendragon/Merlin. (Okay, it just occurred to me - I can think of three major pairings involving a character with a single name: Kirk/Spock, Duncan/Methos, Arthur/Merlin. What's the fourth? It'd make a great recs set.)

I can tell you what I love about this story in one sentence: Arthur Pendragon is totally clueless. I mean, how could he not be? He is exactly the kind of guy who goes through life assuming that he is Just That Awesome, and yet he's decent enough to be horrified when he realizes there is a small (very small, of course, because he's Arthur Pendragon, who is, by definition, awesome) possibility he is not awesome enough.

(This is a rare intersection - stunned by own awesome x still a reasonably decent human being - and I'm not sure I can think of another character in fandom who lives there. Hell, I can only think of one person I've known in real life who does, although, sadly, I can think of many, many people who lived on just the first street. In my teen years, I slept with basically all of them, so it makes me especially happy to see one getting, you know, schooled, even in fiction.)

And Merlin - he is a reasonably decent human being who gets laid a lot, which is as he should be.

The funny thing, of course, is that Merlin could totally be Arthur times a million, because instead of princeliness, he has magic, and in other fandoms, he'd be all strutting around magicking people into worshipping his cock or whatever. (Deny it. He'd be like Jack Harkness with a magic wand - or, as I am sure Captain Harkness would insist I put it, Jack Harkness with a second magic wand.) ...And now I kind of want to read that AU, BUT. Let me soldier on with this rec.

This story is awesome, and it features these characters pretty much exactly as they are in my head, and also Merlin educating Arthur will never be less than totally appealing. Read now.

The One in Which We Learn That Draco Malfoy Is a Far Better Housekeeper than I Am. I Know. I May Not Recover from the Shame. Theft of Assets, Destruction of Property, by

helenish. Harry Potter, Neville Longbottom/Draco Malfoy.

You know all those charts that show the various phases of the menstrual cycle with, like, drawings of the corpus luteum and stuff? That are so traumatizing when you're twelve? They should be labeled like this:

Ow, My Side Hurts (part of one day)¹
Extremely Productive (eight days)
Days of Angst and Irritation (three days)
ALL THE CHOCOLATE IN THE WORLD (roughly four days)
For God's Sake, Let's Not Do That Again (one week)
Voluntary Total Amnesia about All This Crap (one week)
Ow, My Side Hurts (part of one day)

And so on. If they'd only posted that chart in health class, I guarantee you I would have written it in my notes, rather than the song lyrics I chose to immortalize. (I bet they were something about standing in the rain. Because of pain. I was predictable that way.)

Anyway. I try hard to save

helenish's stories for my Days of Angst and Irritation, because they so perfectly match what I crave at that point. Things start off badly! There is miscommunication! Hurtful things are said! And then everything gets cleared up and there is True Love Forever! And all of this is wrapped in a layer of awesome so thick you want to eat it with a spoon.

But this story - this story is even better than that, because it features Draco forced to marry Neville for deflowering him, which is one of those concepts that shouldn't work at all (or be a total farce), but here it so, so works, and somehow it is just the crunchy awesome center of the awesome candy. Seriously. Read this. Especially if you're in the Days of Angst and Irritation. (I am not admitting anything in a manner admissible in a court of law here, I am just saying: I read this at exactly the right time, and there might have been tears. Possibly of joy, possibly of profound feeling. Who can say? But if there were tears, they were entirely justified, is my point.)

-Footnote-

¹ Yes, I know that traditionally the first day of the cycle is the first day of your period. Of course I know that; how do you think I got the earthling? But I have considered Ow, My Side Hurts to be the start of it all since the day in my high school drama class when Mari announced she was ovulating, and all the guys reacted like she was giving birth to a tiger, and I learned that my mother had not lied: menstruation really was powerful and magical. Just, she failed to mention the magical power in question was to make boys writhe in horror.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

and just refuse to use it because you're afraid you might, I don't know, actually engage emotionally with another human being

Bwah! OTOH, if *your* first name was Fox...

You know, there was a time I could answer your porn question in detail, complete with dialogue and episode names (yes, I was one of those kinds of fans). But as the icon says, we really were *a lot* younger then.

Um... Short answer: Mulder's porn was implied to be normal on the surface but twisted underneath, much like the man himself.

Loooong answer: Early on there was one ep where Mulder was shown reading a magazine with a centerfold in it in the office -- he showed the centerfold to Scully and was excited... because the model claimed she'd been abducted by aliens. I think Scully made a crack about boobs and zero gravity.

I think there were also references to Mulder's subscription to Celebrity Skin (I have no idea -- that's a standard porn mag, right?) so he definitely read what appeared to be generic porn magazines. He also apparently called phone sex lines, where he actually used a first name. (Marty. Because that's so much better than Fox.)

But it was implied that Mulder's main source of porn was X-rated movies -- early on there were a lot of videotape sight gags. In a later ep, when Mulder was stressed because he'd switched bodies with another character (yes, XF *was* the show where fannish cliches showed up right on the screen), they showed that the only way he could fall asleep was in front of porn on a television screen.

The early eps mostly had wink/nod throwaway bits between M&S and between Mulder and Frohike (one of the Lone Gunmen), who apparently was in line to inherit Mulder's porn collection when he was inevitably disappeared by the Men in Black.

What kind of kink Mulder was feeding was never articulated, though Darin Morgan wrote jokes about Mulder's um, proclivities in 2 eps, both pretty clever, but then, that was DM. In "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose," Clyde, who was psychic, but only about how people were going to die, made a reference to Mulder and autoerotic asphyxiation. They played it so a) you weren't entirely sure he was actually talking about Mulder and b) you couldn't tell if Clyde had guessed right. The whole sequence was pretty hilarious though.

In "Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space,'" during a voiceover at the end where Jose Chung talks about how alone we all are, there was a clip of Mulder lying in bed watching television with the covers up to his chest. As the camera pans over him he puts his hand under the covers and then as the camera pans to the TV, you see it's showing footage of a Yeti sighting. Heh. (This was also the first time anyone had seen Mulder in a bed -- up to that point it appeared he slept only on his couch. In front of the television and VCR.)

I honestly don't think there was a character-driven consensus about the kind of porn Mulder got off on. They seemed to mainly use it to reinforce his isolation (and stave off any whiff that he might be omg *gay* because he didn't date or make what appeared to be any serious passes at Scully -- though he did make them, and one could argue they *were* serious but meant not to be taken seriously). Mulder changed a lot over the course of the series though, and possibly in consequence, the whole porn thing showed up much less frequently later on.

Oddly, I can't think of another television lead character who was that upfront canon-wise about being an habitual porn consumer. ~~Maybe it could only happen during the Clinton years.~~

200: A Single Sentence'll Sell You

The sad thing is, this could have been even more tl;dr