Flail Snail

Title: Consequences of Falling

Fandom: Dimension 20: The Unsleeping City

Rating: Teen and Up

Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply

Pairing: Esther Sinclair/Sofia Bicicleta/Ricky Matsui

Additional Tags: Polyamory; Requited Love; Stream of Consciousness; Friends to Lovers; Very brief reference to masturbation; Slight angst but mostly unobservant pining

Summary:

"It’s a normal situation, for a bereaved woman of a certain age, to.. to start making new friends, and if some of those friends are a couple, that’s even more friends to have. And if Sofia sometimes feels like a third wheel on their dinners out and their dinners in, she can always excuse herself to start the long, crowded journey home."

Oh no, my blorbos, they have a new show!

Lyrics:

It's true, I'm flawed

It's all my fault

I made every mistake

Paper walls break

And it's all falling through

…

If it wasn't for your kindness, I think I might be dead

If it wasn't for the way you said, "Oh, stay with me instead"

No lights on the horizon, no sign of what's ahead

If it wasn't for your kindness lately, I'd never get out of bed

This has to be my favorite Q&A exchange ever

[ID an excerpt from The Magnus Archives Season 5 Q&A Part 2.

“ALEX: Ah now you’re— Nothing wrong with a good mould. You can do a lot with a good mould. Also The Corruption is a Power that you can kick. So I'm okay, I'm okay with The Corruption. Doesn't bother me.

JONNY: What do you mean “it's a Power you can kick”?

ALEX: ‘Oh no, creepy mushroom.’ Kick it.

[JONNY SPLUTTERS]

JONNY: You can't kick it! Like if the mould has buried into your flesh—

One of the big things that got me into the show (aside from the production values) was the number of characters who were lesbian, or trans, or bi, or poly, or ace. I like the way Fantasy High presents family as something that’s complicated, that can and often should be replaced with other types of intimacies.

Now don’t get me wrong, toddlers are adorable. I love the tiny chaos gremlins in my life. But when TUC2 ends with three different m/f couples having babies I can’t help but find that profoundly alienating. Was biological family and reproductive futurity the point all along? Did I miss something? Are we in a Harry Potter epilogue?

There’s nothing inherently non-queer about reproduction, and not all m/f pairings are heteronormative, but this isn’t the first time I’ve seen D20 arcs end with biological family as the Big Good Endpoint. (I’m still a little bewildered that Pirates of Leviathan had to shoehorn in Jack’s never-before-mentioned ghost parents? Like they were somehow more important to him than his often-mentioned ghost crew, or Garthy, or his new found crew/family? Anyway that’s another rant.) When so many of the pcs end up neatly paired off in baby-making twosomes, and others are already positioned in the story via magical biological family inheritance, then the transformative non-normatively of queerness kind of gets pushed to the side. There are still queer characters, but it’s not a very queer narrative.

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Dimension 20 (Web Series) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Ayda Aguefort/Figueroth Faeth Characters: Figueroth Faeth, Ayda Aguefort Additional Tags: Podfic, Podfic Length: 0-10 Minutes, Haircuts, Fluff Summary:

In Ayda’s hands the clippers seem less like a past mistake and more like a tool—something Fig can take up again now without falling back on self-destructive habits. Fig sometimes feels like everything that passes through Ayda’s hands becomes a kind of arcane focus, a repository for all of Ayda’s calm attentiveness, an effect that Fig has tried and failed several times to capture in song. A spellbook, the clippers, even Fig herself, all enchanted objects resonating with Ayda’s power. She grins to herself. Sometimes resonating three or four times a night, if she’s lucky.

'So, how about it? Gonna give me the rockstar look?'