addme | (no subject)

Hello, fellow travellers! Seeing as there are so many nice new faces (*waves*) I thought I might throw in my hat. I’ve been on LJ since 2004 but left around 2012 for DW.

Name:

liriaen (she/her, they/them)
Age: well old (52)

Interests and Hobbies: Obscure festivals for extreme music, discovering Europe on foot & by public transport, sitting in the sun and watching the world go by… Reading about the European Renaissance [I have a well-documented Borgia obsession, but I can't say I'm a fan of the various TV series; history is whoa enough I think :)] ... Fandom & writing - used to be Harry Potter and Blade of the Immortal, but for the past 15 years it’s mostly Renaissance RPF… Bible slash... Extreme metal music RPF... Art history RPF (Albrecht Dürer is very slashable!) …
I love books by William Gibson, Thomas Pynchon, Hilary Mantel, Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco... and I think Michel Foucault is always right. Always. As are the First Dog on the Moon cartoons.
I love to listen to 15th/16th/17th century music (think Monteverdi, Desprez, Tallis)... music from Mali... music from the lowest pits of hell... drone, doom, black metal, a little death metal (nothing too technical; just gimme the dumb kind)... Nick Cave in his various permutations... post punk, hardcore, punk, neofolk, seriously nasty industrial, new wave, dark wave, oh and Benjamin Biolay can read the Paris phone book for me.
I post RL stuff interspersed with fic and idle musings, mostly in English, with occasional outbursts in German. I'll happily converse with you in English, German, but will also read French and Flemish. There will be copious swearing, uncouth subjects, crass humour and horrible music. So, what’s not to like?
My fics: are all here in my journal. Better and more recent ones are also at AO3 (I'm veeery slowly adding older writing there), a whole lot of antediluvian stuff in German is over at fanfiktion.de. There's also fanfiction.net which has fics even I had forgotten (with good reason, too).

Looking for: meeting open-minded people with a (dark) sense of humour and adventurous souls! If we share some interests, that would be spiffy, but no requirement. But but! Where are the history nuts? Come! PLEASE NO Trump-fans, antivaxxers, conspiracy theorists, rightwingers, neoliberals, homophobes, terfs.

Anything else? I’m not supergood at selling myself here; back in the olden days (they mumble toothlessly) we used to meet on thriving fandom or special interests comms and take it from there; now the experience is so wholly different. Therefore, if in the course of things we find that we don’t really mix, or find little common ground: no hard feelings. :)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

No, I'd never heard of the Cesare manga! That sounds amazing. I love how Cesare is truly a gift that just keeps on giving. People just can't stop writing either directly about him or stealing parts of his life to embellish their fictional characters. Just can't stop! (And they can't stop making him hot.) I mean, he's in the middle of a whole colorful cast that captures the imagination, but people really do fixate on him specifically.

Cesare might not have conquered and controlled as big of a landmass as Alexander and Napoleon, which undermines him being obsessed over by the likes of Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, but he had so much more crunchy, gritty pizazz in his neck of the woods. Especially the way things ended, at least the way the pacing of events is compressed together in hindsight on paper, his trajectory reads like a work of carefully plotted fiction/tragedy, much more than many other historical figures. That's just so neat? And cool? With enough centuries passing by, statistically you can't help eventually getting textbook tragedian Cesares (or comedic Casanovas) now and then, but it's still so unlikely that it captivates people.

~~My Cesare/Chiaro interpretation is everyone lives and nothing hurts, and more importantly Chiaro loves him back, romantically.~~ Suddenly sitting here thinking, jeez I hope it's not Cantarella that's responsible for my inability to shed my feral contentious obsession with unrequited tropes.

Thank you for sharing this - you can't imagine how much this means to me. I mean, meeting a fellow Cantarella sufferer, and discovering how important this lil manga was to you. For me as well.

And I couldn't express Cesare's attraction any better. There's animal magnetism alright. (And the fact that 515 years of maligning him couldn't blot out the fascination, the larger-than-life appeal.)

"everyone lives and nothing hurts... and Chiaro loves him back" - I could have died a happy person, had that come to pass. I shed so many tears, it's not funny anymore. I'm not sure if rereading Cantarella is a good idea, it might not have aged well, but that's no reason to disown the original experience.

Rereading older manga is almost never a good idea because many of them rely very heavily upon the popular tropes of their era to ensure their continued serialization/publication (except FMA, which is a masterpiece of both art and writing and holds up beautifully). But yeah! If it was a good time back then, that still means something.

And sometimes it's still fun to reread for that squirmy I-feel-younger feeling. :D

What I really need is like a really long solid slow-burn fixit fic, one that I give full permission to just diverge wildly from historical beats so long as the payoff is aces. I'd probably enjoy that more than rereading the manga. Just paste in some pretty images from the series in the right places and call it a day :D

<3 FMA is stellar on all counts. When we had the first lockdowns, the spouse read all 26 vol.s of FMA for the first time and was stunned - firstly, because of the unusual pacing (events unfolding slowly, almost in realtime) and secondly, because everything about it was timeless: there's little in the way of timemarkers to reveal when it was created.

That squirmy younger feeling? Oh yes. I miss that. The sudden heat under one's collar...

The very lovely

fffc comm had a fixit challenge last year that I was very seriously considering, Cantarella-wise, but then my health took a nosedive, and my concentration and writing mojo with it. Never too late, tho'!