Why do I think I've read discussion about Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality? Search doesn't show me any here.

I bitched about it somewhere. Maybe Literary or Movies? I really, really adored the beginning, but returns began diminishing around Chapter 10 and I finally bailed sometime in the 40s, thoroughly annoyed with the author. It turns out, shock of shock, that taking Rowling's sprawling, messy world and carefully patching up all the plotholes, jettisoning the non-intellectual characters and retaining only such elements as can be made to square with current scientific understanding and logic theory makes for... not a lot of fun.

It's just about the only fic I've ever read that took me all the way from gleeful chortling to massive resentment at the hours I'd never get back. But YMMV, of course. I think it's a Jessica sort of "If you like this kind of thing, this is just the kind of thing you'll like," and for some people it's clearly the perfect fic and in fact their true HP canon. Just, not mine. But I only got a hundred some-odd pages into it, so who knows.

only such elements as can be made to square with current scientific understanding

Yeah, no, that doesn't work. It's magic...

You know, I would really like to post this story. However between LJ and AO3, I'm having a hell of a time.

Do not make me post this to FFN!

I think AO3 might be overloaded due to LJ. It certainly loaded slow and stuttering for me the past few days.

Done! [link]

Carpetbaggers, 120,000 words of gen Narnia story, set right at the end of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Eee! I've just finished the first chapter (trying to squeeze in a little reading at work, shame on me) and I wanted to say how much I liked it. Particularly Susan, she's always been the one I felt got the worst deal out of going to Narnia. It also made me sniffle a little in comparison to Lamp Post by thistlerose. Very short, 350 words, but it's oh so sad.

Oh, yes, I've read that one, Sail. It's lovely.

Really, dealing with Susan fairly was one of the big challenges of the story, because I want her to be entirely awesome, and yet I wanted also to be consistent with canon--if in a sympathetic way. It was tricky.

Has anyone here ever done a reversebang (art comes before the story) in any fandom? What makes a good pictorial prompt for you?

Can I answer that, even though my answer is no (in fandom, anyway)?

When we had the picture prompts in GWW, I loved looking for photos that had some kind of conflict in them. The family portrait where the mother was younger than the dad, and sour, and the kid looked confused -- that because a second marriage, etc.

I think static, *happy* pictures are harder, because every story needs conflict. (Although you can do it if you twist it -- this is the moment before it all went wrong, etc. I wrote one about a 60s girl at a bus station, very happy, waving goodbye, but from the POV of a killer who had spotted her, for instance.)

So if you're going to show two people, you want a sense of push-pull there, or you want them in a scene that looks incongruous given who they are. But other things might include someone reading a letter, or digging through a drawer, because then you want to know what the person is looking for.

Fandom has the advantage that you have an element of "why those people in that position?" even as it takes away your ability to decide for yourself who they are. But you can allude to a long history everyone shares with very little space. Symbolism takes on a whole new level.