Oh, thanks for reminding me. I need to poke my help Japan vidder.

Harry Potter fanart - very cool, kind of kirigami-esque.

Pfeh.

I spent a while this week reading this really epic AU where Harry gets sorted into Slytherin and Sirius survives the battle at the Ministry. And I wanted to like it, except the writer keeps skipping over the action scenes (seriously: she just fades to black and then recaps them later, enormously annoying), and worse, because it's Sirius/Remus and Harry/Ron, all the female characters are awful.

Harry hates Tonks and Hermione, can't be bothered with Luna, and at one point knocks Ginny out, strips her naked, and steals her underwear. To be fair, the writer acknowledges that that's a problem, but Ginny's basically a vicious little bitch, while Hermione's a relentless and insensitive know-it-all, and Tonks is predatory and inappropriate.

::sigh:: Is it absolutely necessary to do this to the female characters in order to justify your pairings? The only females in the story that come off well are OCs, in fact.

I am annoyed.

I just read a Snow Queen Dean/Castiel adaptation where the writer makes Lisa a minor baddie--the witch on his travels that enchants him for a time to stay with her and forget Castiel.

I get why staying with someone and not thinking of Castiel makes you think of Lisa, but the mind bending and manipulation and obstruction of his quest--you couldn't choose one of the plentiful evil female characters on the show? Come on, people. Soured me on the rest of the story.

Then again, I tossed aside another story from the same challenge because they discussed Sam's forehead in disparaging terms. I, just, I want love. I even want you to love the bad guys, as you write them bad.

I even want you to love the bad guys, as you write them bad.

Exactly. If I can tell that the writer really dislikes a particular character (regardless of how the source narrative conveys them), I'm generally kicked out of the story. Too much id for me.

I'm sure some people think it's love when they rehabilitate Crowley and have him in love with Bobby, but seriously, that's not loving canon Crowley, and I'm not interested. That's a slap in the face of the character *I* like, which I contend is closer to the one we've seen onscreen.

Rehabbing Ruby I'm dodgy on, because I guess some people didn't think she was evil as early as I did. I would never have written her sympathetically, unless it was to get sympathy for her plan to raise Lucifer. *Even* if she loved Sam, she was evil.

I would never have written her sympathetically, unless it was to get sympathy for her plan to raise Lucifer.

I think it's possible to write the bad guys sympathetically--or at least in a way that makes them understandable--without glossing over the fact that they're Evil. It's just hard.

It depends on the bad person. I hate Ruby, so maybe it's just me. But I'm never going to be on her side, which is what I think of when I say sympathetically. I can understand her motivations, but she's definitely adversarial through and through. She's no Snape, for instance.

I also think it reasonable to write AU where one character good or evil is fundamentally different than in canon. I don't know why I draw the line at one character but I do. One character fundamentally changed while rest are canonical can be an interesting exploration to me. Change multiple characters and I don't see the relation to the source and probably lose interest. So good!Crowley or Good!Ruby is fine as long as that is the pivot point where the AU branches. Of course in the case of Good!Ruby I think a Ruby who was genuinely on the side of team free will and more important was actually more or less on the side of good could have been genuinely interesting. Because once the apocalypse was over she would have been so screwed. Huge opportunity for tragedy and angst. But definitely not the Ruby of canon. A true AU Ruby.

When someone writes a story they don't tag AU, and make Ruby supportively and self-sacrificingly in love with Sam, or Crowley a demon that stands by his deals and that Bobby would get into a relationship with, then I think it's apologia and it doesn't sit well with me.

If the story summary says "Imagine a world in which Lisa is evil or Ruby is good or Sam goes evil", then I get it's the point, and not just a fixit or an interpretation of canon that I disagree with.

Perhaps it's two-faced of me, but I don't care if you write current Castiel as insane megalomaniac or confused tweaker-of-souls right now. We don't really know, and both are interesting. Ruby and Crowley, we know. Sam's motivation in S4, we know.