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This is embarrassingly belated! I forgot to post my reveals for 2011, so have that as well as the belated stories for 2012.

2011

The Ballad of Natty Cooper was written for [archiveofourown.org profile] sanguinity. It's based on the (afaik) nonexistent fandom of Stephen Graham Jones' book The Bird Is Gone, but mostly on a few appendix entries. This was incredibly difficult to write, since I did that "omg what was I thinking?!" exchange thing of writing for a source I didn't sign up for! And also hadn't read prior to that! On the other hand, the appendix entries were so compelling! And I really don't regret it, since without the challenge, the book would probably still be on my tbr list. Anyway, there is some extremely thinly disguised RPF here, as well as a Neil Armstrong cameo, a lot of very unreliable narrators, a lot of very unreliable narratives, a lot of very unreliable information sources, and I have my own version of what I think happened.

whole is a teeny Hwang Jin-yi drabble for [archiveofourown.org profile] troisroyaumes. It feels a bit silly to write commentary on it, when it would probably be longer than the piece itself....

2012

Yeol, Han (열, 한) is a Capital Scandal fic written for [archiveofourown.org profile] Gramarye. It has a few spoilers up through the first five episodes or so, and it mainly focuses on Cha Song Ju and Na Yeo Kyeong. And apparently AO3 won't let me edit it for notes, so: thanks very much to [personal profile] troisroyaumes for the quick and excellent beta and for the help with the title! 열 (yeol) roughly means "heat," and 한 (han) roughly means "coldness." While I love the outfits and the ridiculous plot of Capital Scandal, I wanted to write something that acknowledged more of the realities of Japanese occupation and what it meant and cost to simply live under that, and what it meant and cost to the people who resisted it.

Searching for Scheherazade is a One Thousand and One Nights pinch hit written for [archiveofourown.org profile] fresne. Gah! What was I thinking, to pick up a pinch hit when I hadn't even started my original fic! Such are the ways of fic exchanges!

I grew up reading a translation of One Thousand and One Nights and idolized Morgiana, who pours boiling oil over the heads of thieves. But I have so many qualms about why OTON is popular in Western culture and why Wiki lists more Western adaptations of it than Arabic-source adaptations (I am hoping it is merely because Wiki people lack knowledge of a lot of the Arabic-language adaptations, but don't actually know). The translation history of OTON is also incredibly tangly and really gross at certain points, and then I kept reading that OTON is more respected in translation than in its original language, since it was seen as mere oral storytelling by Arabic literature people. I took that with many grains of salt, because hey, Wiki and Western self congratulation.

I wanted something about translations and cultural appropriation and what happens when you find out your important stories are actually betrayals fed to you by those who have sanitized them and oral traditions and how stories must and do change and unattributed female storytellers that would hopefully still read as a story and not as a credo, though of course, I am the last person who can judge if I succeeded or not.
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