Your next femslash ship
Nov. 22nd, 2010 01:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficSo between Legend of the Seeker ending and The Hollows being... The Hollows, it seems to me we need a new femslash ship.
"Physically, you're fine."
Okay, there's that, but you can never have enough urban fantasy femslash OTPs, as I will prove if I ever get a literary agent. Anyway, let's discuss Mike Carey's Felix Castor series. It's a bit akin to Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, albeit less happy-go-lucky and more British cop show. If Butcher plays in the Spider-Man sandbox, Carey is definitely from the Vertigo side of comics. Different strokes for different folks.
Our hero, Felix Castor, is a freelance exorcist... a growth industry, ever since a statistically significant percentage of the dead stopped being dead and started coming back as ghosts, werewolves, and zombies. (Also, there's demons.) He has the genetic gift of being able to dispel spirits with music, although he's not quite sure where they go. And, these not being short stories, it's rarely that simple.
Okay, here comes the femslash. There's going to be some minor spoilers for the series, but I figure there are a lot of you who would just be interested in this for the lesbians... but if you're thinking of taking a look anyway, just to the right of the Enter key there's a cluster of buttons, one of them is Page Down, could come in handy.
The principals:
Juliet, who has a thing for skintight leather pants, stiletto heels, and eating folks' souls.
Susan, an adorable, bookish verger who happens to be gay. It comes as a bit of a surprise to her. She gets used to it.
Alright, so in the first book, the Big Bad summons a succubus from Hell to kill Castor, with sexy (also, near-death experience-y) results. He manages to unbind her, allowing her to turn the tables on her summoner.
"I was summoned for a specific task. And I can't go back home until I finish it. It never occurred to me before that failure would bring such extensive benefits."
As you might imagine, she's not too keen on going back to Hell. So, instead of eating Felix, she gets him to teach her the subtle intricacies of human interaction (like when killing is a bad thing) and help her find work as an exorcist. Since who's better suited to fight the forces of evil than someone who's on a first-name basis with the forces of evil? So you've got the looks of Angelina Jolie before she stopped eating, the "what is this feeling you call love?" of Cara Mason, and some aaaangst because she can't get busy with men without her succubus side kicking in.
If only there were some other option available...
"I like to work, Jules. [...] Because it's part of who I am. If I just made your meals and cleaned house for you and warmed your bed, then--well, I'd be a very boring person. And then you'd want to see other people, and then you'd leave me. And then I'd kill myself."
Enter Susan. She's taken classes in both "naughty librarian" and "naughty nun", and in general just likes to bake casserole while people get along. When we first meet her, she's in a bit of a pickle regarding how she's an Anglican who's in love with a demon (a girl demon), but it all works out, almost as if our two lovebirds are mature, reasonable adults.
Ahem.
So for a few books, we've got Juliet and Susan living together in a relatively angst-free relationship. Maybe it's because they're supporting characters, they can be happy. But, as Felix's unofficial partner-in-crime, Juliet gets a lot of facetime and she's committed enough to Susan (in an Ivy "best girlfriend ever" Tamworrd sort of way) to have their relationship be touched on frequently.
"I'm coming now, Castor. Succubi can sustain an orgasm for days. It's our tempers that are short. Tell me what you want."
If I've one complaint, it's that we have to get their relationship filtered through the perspective of Felix Castor. He's not that bad, but he seems to have a tendency to think he's involved in an epic love triangle with Juliet, forced to be apart from her by cruel fate!, when she doesn't seem to have given him a second thought. Dude: Not Interested In You + Involved With Someone Else + Fourth Base Is Her Eating You = MOVE ON!
But if you can get past that, they make a really cute couple. Four books in and there's no rape or deaths, that's one-up on a lot of femslash fandoms out there. (I'll get back to you if the fifth book fails on a massive scale, but these Vertigo guys, you'd think they'd be too politically correct to fall for anything like that.)
"But I've gone native. I know that. I can't help thinking of you as a friend. Or to put it less sentimentally, having to murder you would make me unhappy."
And since they're a Brittany/Santana on the screentime scale, there's lots of room for fic. There could be angst-fic about Susan coming to terms with her sexuality, declaration fic about her finding out Juliet is a demon, curtains fic since they do move in together, PWP since succubi can go for days on end (and apparently do). In general, if you like writing snarky British HBICs and the squishy intellectuals who love them... and Sherlock Holmes fandom is too penis-y for you... this could be your thing. It's like Kelly Brook dating Katie McGrath!
Actually, not really, I just like that mental image.
"Physically, you're fine."
Okay, there's that, but you can never have enough urban fantasy femslash OTPs, as I will prove if I ever get a literary agent. Anyway, let's discuss Mike Carey's Felix Castor series. It's a bit akin to Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, albeit less happy-go-lucky and more British cop show. If Butcher plays in the Spider-Man sandbox, Carey is definitely from the Vertigo side of comics. Different strokes for different folks.
Our hero, Felix Castor, is a freelance exorcist... a growth industry, ever since a statistically significant percentage of the dead stopped being dead and started coming back as ghosts, werewolves, and zombies. (Also, there's demons.) He has the genetic gift of being able to dispel spirits with music, although he's not quite sure where they go. And, these not being short stories, it's rarely that simple.
Okay, here comes the femslash. There's going to be some minor spoilers for the series, but I figure there are a lot of you who would just be interested in this for the lesbians... but if you're thinking of taking a look anyway, just to the right of the Enter key there's a cluster of buttons, one of them is Page Down, could come in handy.
The principals:
Juliet, who has a thing for skintight leather pants, stiletto heels, and eating folks' souls.
Susan, an adorable, bookish verger who happens to be gay. It comes as a bit of a surprise to her. She gets used to it.
Alright, so in the first book, the Big Bad summons a succubus from Hell to kill Castor, with sexy (also, near-death experience-y) results. He manages to unbind her, allowing her to turn the tables on her summoner.
"I was summoned for a specific task. And I can't go back home until I finish it. It never occurred to me before that failure would bring such extensive benefits."
As you might imagine, she's not too keen on going back to Hell. So, instead of eating Felix, she gets him to teach her the subtle intricacies of human interaction (like when killing is a bad thing) and help her find work as an exorcist. Since who's better suited to fight the forces of evil than someone who's on a first-name basis with the forces of evil? So you've got the looks of Angelina Jolie before she stopped eating, the "what is this feeling you call love?" of Cara Mason, and some aaaangst because she can't get busy with men without her succubus side kicking in.
If only there were some other option available...
"I like to work, Jules. [...] Because it's part of who I am. If I just made your meals and cleaned house for you and warmed your bed, then--well, I'd be a very boring person. And then you'd want to see other people, and then you'd leave me. And then I'd kill myself."
Enter Susan. She's taken classes in both "naughty librarian" and "naughty nun", and in general just likes to bake casserole while people get along. When we first meet her, she's in a bit of a pickle regarding how she's an Anglican who's in love with a demon (a girl demon), but it all works out, almost as if our two lovebirds are mature, reasonable adults.
Ahem.
So for a few books, we've got Juliet and Susan living together in a relatively angst-free relationship. Maybe it's because they're supporting characters, they can be happy. But, as Felix's unofficial partner-in-crime, Juliet gets a lot of facetime and she's committed enough to Susan (in an Ivy "best girlfriend ever" Tamworrd sort of way) to have their relationship be touched on frequently.
"I'm coming now, Castor. Succubi can sustain an orgasm for days. It's our tempers that are short. Tell me what you want."
If I've one complaint, it's that we have to get their relationship filtered through the perspective of Felix Castor. He's not that bad, but he seems to have a tendency to think he's involved in an epic love triangle with Juliet, forced to be apart from her by cruel fate!, when she doesn't seem to have given him a second thought. Dude: Not Interested In You + Involved With Someone Else + Fourth Base Is Her Eating You = MOVE ON!
But if you can get past that, they make a really cute couple. Four books in and there's no rape or deaths, that's one-up on a lot of femslash fandoms out there. (I'll get back to you if the fifth book fails on a massive scale, but these Vertigo guys, you'd think they'd be too politically correct to fall for anything like that.)
"But I've gone native. I know that. I can't help thinking of you as a friend. Or to put it less sentimentally, having to murder you would make me unhappy."
And since they're a Brittany/Santana on the screentime scale, there's lots of room for fic. There could be angst-fic about Susan coming to terms with her sexuality, declaration fic about her finding out Juliet is a demon, curtains fic since they do move in together, PWP since succubi can go for days on end (and apparently do). In general, if you like writing snarky British HBICs and the squishy intellectuals who love them... and Sherlock Holmes fandom is too penis-y for you... this could be your thing. It's like Kelly Brook dating Katie McGrath!
Actually, not really, I just like that mental image.
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