Angela Snape's Asylum

I have been away for the long weekend - not at Prophecy, but you know that by now if you read my last entry.

I have been catching up with my f-list, and was pleased to find this story over at meri_oddities' LJ, written for bethbethbeth's birthday.

( Read more... )

as seen @ the_con_cept's...

Choose twelve characters from your fandoms, then answer the questions under the cut. Do not look at the questions beforehand.

1. Severus Snape (HP)
2. Hermione Granger (HP)
3. Greg House (House, MD)
4. Temperance Brennan (Bones)
5. Angela Montenegro (Bones)
6. Charlie Eppes (NUMB3Rs)
7. Chris Stevens / Chris in the morning (Northern Exposure)
8. Hawkeye Pierce (M*A*S*H)
9. Lady Heather (CSI)
10. Warrick Brown (CSI)
11. Gil Grissom (CSI)
12. Lynette Scavo (Desparate Housewives)

( Questions Under the Cut )

If you read the last entry ... this extends from it. Look at me, writing two entries in a day, and no memes!

I've already stated that I don't "get" mpreg. I understand that wizards are magical, and I'm sure that if they really wanted to, they could have babies, but I just can't seem to turn off the biologist in my brain - I teach hormones/fertilization/pregnancy just about every semester, and I wish fic writers would just leave the baby-making to women.

Now, on that note, I do have a suggestion as to how mpreg could work, if the baby isn't carried by one of its "fathers"... the biologists in the crowd can probably relate this in some small way to the cloned sheep, Dolly.

1. Remove egg(s) from female donor.


2. Remove nucleus from donor egg.


3. Remove nuclei from sperm cells of each father. If the baby is to be a boy, make sure it is an "X" sperm from one parent and a "Y" sperm from the other, since "Y" & "Y" won't work, and "X" & "X" would result in a daughter, not that there's anything wrong with daughters.


4. Add both sperm nuclei to the enucleated egg, making it diploid - i.e. tricking it into "thinking" it's a zygote resulting from adding a sperm nucleus to an egg nucleus.


5. Implant the "fertilized" egg into a surrogate female - could be the egg donor, could be someone else.

Alternatively, one or both fathers could be cloned by adding a nucleus from a body cell (not a sperm cell) to a enucleated egg ... but you shouldn't name the clone "Dolly", in this case.

This technique could also work for producing offspring between two witches - remove the nucleus from one egg & add to the other, and then you just have to decide who gets to carry it.

This is an extension of my last entry ... while too many (IMO) glaring errors can turn me off an otherwise interesting plotline, there are certain other things that turn me off a fic, and I'd prefer to be warned about:

• non-con, rape, torture - not so much into the darker side of fic, here. The same can happen with dub con, but I'm more likely to read a story that warns for dub con than non-con


• extreme chan - I don't mind if the character, usually Harry Potter, is in his mid-late teens, but generally no younger, especially if the other partner is an adult. 14-15 seems to be a cut off point for me - maybe it's because in the fandom I primarily read - HP - the adults for the most part tend to be professors, and teacher/student is a big no-no for me in RL. I do, generally, prefer my Harry to be older.


• mpreg - I think my issue with mpreg is that I don't care if it is a magical being (i.e. a wizard) that is having the pregnancy, it's that it's a male having the pregnancy. As I explained to alisanne in one of my comments, I can't seem to turn off the biology teacher in my head to "get" mpreg.


• incest - I don't care if its twincest, twins-with-Harry, other siblings, or parent/child - this is a major squick for me.


• femmeslash - If I wanted girly-bits, I have my own and have no need to read about them.


• characters I won't read - In general, anything that portrays Dumbledore as a sexual being. Hagrid too. I don't really want to read about Percy, Ginny, or Ron Weasley (unless it's a side plotline, but even then I'd rather not), or most of the more minor characters like Neville, Dean, Seamus, Blaise, Crabbe/Goyle - I read one that referred to past Harry/Neville, and that was fine, but I'd rather not go beyond hints of Neville (or the others listed).


• pairings I won't read - Weasley twins (tried it, couldn't get into it), Harry/Ginny (though I originally liked them together in canon ... that was before I discovered Snarry), Snape with a woman - though I did read a Snape/Tonks fic that was quite good - and Harry with a girl/woman. What can I say, I'm a Snarry girl at heart... ETA I'm actually starting to see the appeal of Snape/Hermione, partly, due to reading bethbethbeth's fic What Yet Remains


• crossovers - unless it is with another fandom I'm familiar with (like the Snape/Harry/Wilson I read in pimp_my_3some this week, I'm not going to read it.

In all, I don't mind het (unless it involves something from the list above), have really enjoyed some gen stories (like Dear Aunt Snape by marginaliana), but I'm finding that more and more, in HP fic, anyway, I want to read slash. My OTP is definitely SS/HP, though I've read several HP/DM fics that I've liked, and am starting to see the appeal of RL/HP. CW/HP is good, too - must be the dragons! I generally only read Snape with Harry, unless it's a threesome with Draco, and the only SS/DM I really liked actually began after Draco's death & became SS/HP by the end.

Ok, I just read a fic over at pimp_my_3some that had lots of promise, an interesting combination of characters and I almost stopped reading it several times.

Because it is a fest fic, I don't know who the author really is, and there are no betas listed, obviously, because the betas can usually give clues to the author's true identity.

But there were some glaring errors in it - spelling & grammar for the most part - and that turns me off a fic faster than canon inconsistencies or Mary Sues...

Now, I left a comment, but I didn't point out any errors - with authors I "know", I do tend to do that, but it didn't feel right picking on the SPAG errors when the story did have merits.

What would you have done? All the other commenters extolled the story's virtues & general hawt-ness, but I found it overshadowed by the errors.

So, I've been slowly making my way through the fics on snarry_games, and while I'm now where near caught up, I thought I'd recommend a few of my favourites to date:

Team Postwar:
( Click for Postwar Stories )
Team Wartime
( Click for Wartime Stories )

I have read several stories (pre-HBP, obviously) that did a good treatment of the Harry's-still-a-student storyline.

One of my favourites is meri_oddities' story Sanguis Vinculum, which in addition to being a story set while Harry is still a student, is a forced bond fic.

( click for my review and an excerpt )

After my last entry in which I extolled the virtues of Aucta Sinistra's story, Quid Pro Quo as the first Snarry I'd read, and the one that hooked me into reading Snarry... I had many, many recs for other stories that hooked other Snarry fans.

The one with the most recs was Cybele's If You Are Prepared series ... but that also came with many warnings of "stock up on tissues", and I was in the mood for something lighter.  So, instead, I went for Tira Nog's A Nick in Time and its sequel, Growing Pains:

( More, with spoilers, under the cut )

This time last year, I didn't even know what slash was, let alone reading it and even seeking it out. I'm still a fairly limited slash reader - while I've read some House, MD slash, and assorted varieties of slash based in the magical world of Harry Potter, it's a specific pairing that drew me in and hooked me.

But first, how it all began. Mid-July I was browsing one of the House Stamping communities, and did a random click on one of the users who seemed to post stamping opinions regularly. Her most recent LJ was titled "World Slash Appreciation Day" and I, being the scientifically-minded person that I am, looked it up. In the name of research. Actually, it didn't take a lot of research, because she'd listed several of her favourite slash pairings, including Ennis & Jack from Brokeback Mountain, which I'd read (before going to the movie with my GFs), but the one that made me stop and think was Snarry. Severus Snape, my favourite character, and the Boy Who Lived himself.

( click here for the story rec and an excerpt )

I highly recommend this story if you haven't already read it!

Since last summer, I've read a lot of HP fanfic. One common theme, post Half-Blood Prince, is how to explain Snape's motivation for killing Dumbledore. Was he proving his loyalty to Voldemort? Was he really acting as a double agent? Was this a move designed to put Dumbledore out of his misery, free Draco from the necessity of having to kill Dumbledore for Voldemort, and further entrench Snape as a deep-cover spy for the Order of the Phoenix?

Most of the stories I've read favour the latter scenario, but most of them have resorted to rather cliche means of exonerating Snape. Dumbledore leaves a will, or a letter, or a pensieve memory in which he exonerates Snape of his murder by showing/telling how he'd ordered Snape to kill him.
( Read More for My Rec & Excerpts )</lj-cut"